The People Shall Govern - Build People`s Power

The advance, deepening and defence of our democratic breakthrough
requires, as a crucial component of this process, a national democratic developmental
state that fosters and embodies people`s power.  In line with the RDP base document
and other strategic documents of our liberation movement, the SACP believes that
representative democracy needs to be complemented with diverse forms of popular direct and
participatory democracy.

To play its developmental role the state needs to be an active
catalyser and key strategic co-ordinator of the nation-building, democratic, and economic
and social development objectives of our NDR.  We need an active democratic state to
mobilise the resources of our society, including the energies, organisational capacity and
expectations of the historically oppressed

majority, and indeed of the totality of our population.

But, we also need an active society, in order to transform and
empower the very state that has to carry out this developmental role.  We need the
state to transform society, and society to transform the state.  It is this
essentially dialectical interaction between the state and popular forces in society that
lies at the heart of our concept of a national democratic,

developmental state.

What "model" of state?

In the course of the 20th century, no society has emerged with relative success from
war-time ruin, civil strife, colonial underdevelopment, or capitalist structural crisis
without some kind of economically and socially active state that is capable of setting a
national, developmental agenda.

In South Africa we are having to cope, in our own way, with a legacy
that has been produced by a combination of regional war, civil strife, colonial
underdevelopment and capitalist structural crisis.  The need for an active
developmental state is overwhelming.

But this requirement, born of necessity, is also a matter of
principle - a national democratic, developmental state is in line with our strategic
commitment to the Freedom Charter vision that the people shall govern, it is in line with
our call for people`s power, and it is line with the RDP approach to political
transformation.

However, we have neither the possibility nor the wish to simply
replicate a model of the state from other societies.

The developmental path taken by the former Soviet bloc societies was
not without many important successes.  But it was based on a substantial de-linking
from the capitalist world which is not an available option in current global conditions,
not least for a relatively small, and dependent economy like our own.  The Soviet
"model" involved a highly centralised, administrative command, top-down
bureaucratic state, and it has proved to be both undesirable and unsustainable.

The welfare state, that developed in some of the advanced capitalist
world, particularly in the two and half decades after 1945, did so in a particular set of
national and international circumstances.  It was based on a class compromise, and on
capitalist restructuring that required state led redistribution into infrastructural
development, the process was actively encouraged by the Bretton Woods intra-capitalist
consensus at the end of World War II.  Drawing lessons from post-Word War I
intra-capitalist instability, the strategic objective was to ensure relative stability
(and prosperity) in all of the advanced capitalist countries, thereby avoiding an
inexorable slide into a Third World War.  The welfare state`s developmental thrust
was based on demand-led growth, and its infrastructural investments (into housing, public
transport, public health, etc.) enabled two decades of sustained rises in productivity in
many of these societies.

There are, no doubt, important positive lessons that may be derived
for South Africa from the welfare state experience.  However, it is important to
understand that the welfare state only really functioned in the advanced capitalist
world.  The redistributive, demand-led growth path was, in part, dependent for the
resources underpinning it, on a global imperialist division of power and wealth.  It
also depended, for its more progressive class compromises, on an international balance of
class forces that was more favourable than is now the case.  Domestic national
capital in many developed capitalist countries was more vulnerable in the immediate
post-war situation, and more susceptible to social accord redistributive measures.

In South Africa in the late 1990s, we find ourselves in an
essentially Third World country where redistributive measures alone will not sustain
growth and development.  The resource base simply does not exist in our country to
ensure this.  Nor, in the very different world of the late 1990s, are we about to
become the recipients of a major inflow of Marshall Aid-type

investments.  While redistribution and the development of a much more comprehensive
social security net are important aspects of our transformation agenda, a welfare-state
model is not a viable option in our circumstances.

The East Asian NICs provide examples of state-led development paths
in which basically Third World societies overcame some of their structural
underdevelopment.  Again, there are some lessons to be learnt from the way in which
major state-led land reform programmes, infrastructural investment, and, above all,
coordinated industrial policy, drove growth and

development.  In the process, national capital was an important beneficiary, but only
on the condition that it was disciplined component of the overall growth and development
strategy.  It was the state that deliberately engineered and even manipulated
macro-economic policy, for instance, to suit the requirements of industrial policy, and
not the immediate expectations of

domestic or foreign investors.

Once again, however, we need to understand that many of the features
of the early NIC developmental state, are neither feasible nor desirable in our own
circumstances.  The NIC developmental state flourished essentially in
"front-line" capitalist societies at the height of the Cold War.  In the
early take-off phase of these societies, the major imperialist powers permitted these
states much slack - in terms of high tariff protective measures, for instance. The NIC
societies also pursued export-led growth at a time when most other developing countries
were focused upon internal, infrastructural-led growth.  Nowadays very developing
country in the world is being encouraged to compete against every other country for
export-led growth. The relative advantages enjoyed by the NICs simply no longer exist,
either for them, or for the rest of the Third World.

Apart from very changed international circumstances, the NIC state
was essentially hegemonised by the national bourgeoisie working through a bureaucratic
(often military) elite.  These states were characteristically highly authoritarian,
and in the more recent period, the close interconnection between bureaucratic elites and
national bourgeoisies has produced high levels

of nepotism and corruption.

Whatever the limitations of all of these "models", it is
important to grasp that the lesson of our century is that it is only an active state,
strategically directed at some form of development that is capable of empowering societies
to overcome serious structural crises.

The argument might be that global conditions have now changed so
radically that the national state is "no longer relevant".  The national
state is, indeed, challenged by many realities, including the sheer size and speed of
international trade, the emergence of global governance structures (like the World Trade
Organisation), and regional economic power blocs (EU, NAFTA, etc), and also the
reconfiguration of local power relations, and their direct integration into global
economic realities, and the emergence of organised crime syndicates.  The sovereign
capacities of the nation state are also ideologically challenged by the dominant
neo-liberal ideology.

However, it is crucial to understand that nation states remain
powerful actors.  Neo-liberalism does not seek to abolish the nation state as is
commonly argued, rather it seeks to reconfigure its role, so that the nation state plays
an active economic role in creating the right conditions for private sector investment and
disinvestment.  Far from abolishing the nation state, neo-liberalism seeks to
transform it into a "lean and mean" apparatus capable of imposing austerity
measures on society, and capable of repressing the inevitable social upheavals that
follow.

Critical to meeting all of these challenges is the construction of
powerful South African national democratic, development state.  However, in so doing
we cannot simply import "models" from elsewhere - this is neither feasible nor
desirable.

 

The national democratic, development state

The national democratic, development state that we are seeking to build, occurs in a
transforming global situation, but also in relatively unique national circumstances. 
The national democratic, development state, needs to be, fundamentally, the state of a
popular bloc of forces, aligned to the historically oppressed majority, around an ongoing
national democratic transformation agenda.  But we are seeking to build this state in
the immediate aftermath not of the overthrow of the old order, but of a negotiated
settlement.  The legacy of the past remains deeply entrenched within our society, and
that legacy is actively defended by minority forces with the powers and resources that
they have accumulated historically.  These forces are present and active in the state
and its institutions as well as in broader society.

For both principled and practical reasons

• given our principled commitment to the thorough-going democratisation
  of power relations in our society,
• and given the practical reality of state institutions, policies,
  personnel and practices that have a contradictory character

our task is not one of simply occupying positions of state power, or
simply "managing"

transformation from such positions, or of simply "deracialising" or
"gendering" otherwise

untransformed power relations, institutions and regulations.

The state requires ongoing transformation.  For such
transformation to occur, we must

self-consciously empower popular forces capable of propelling this transformation. 
The

transformation of the state into a developmental state needs itself to be people-driven.

In the short space of four years, since April 1994, we have already
assembled considerable

experience in this regard.  To illustrate with three examples:

 

• In the area of resolving the crime problem, for instance, it is
  obvious to everyone that the active support of communties is essential.  Indeed, such
  community support is not just about informing on criminal activity, it is about an active
  engagement with the state`s criminal justice system at the ground-level in order to compel
  it to become more user-friendly, more transparent, more aligned with the transformation
  agenda.  Active popular involvement in the criminal justice system helps, also, to
  address the problem of limited budgetary resources.

• In the area of pensions and other social grants, we have been able
  through progressive dominance of the ministry and of the National Assembly, to institute
  many transformational policy and legislative measures, to deracialise social grants, and
  to more effectively target the most vulnerable sectors of our society.  However, on
  the ground, the actual delivery of such grants by an unwieldy bureaucracy and by some
  lower-level officials who are actively hostile to transformation, often leaves much to be
  desired.  What is more, the most vulnerable sectors of our society are precisely
  those that are often unaware of their new rights.  There is an increasing awareness
  that the effective implementation of new policy requires popular mobilisation, and the
  active organisational involvement of our political and mass democratic formations.

• The occupancy rights of black farm-workers on largely white-owned
  farms have now been entrenched in law, but, again, in practice these rights are often
  flouted.  Once again, the state and popular mobilisation on the ground need to be
  combined to ensure that progressive transformation is realised in practice.

In housing delivery, in the transformation of the labour market, in
education, in health-care, in every aspect of our society, popular power must be built,
and popular forces must engage actively with the new institutions - local development
forums, the peoples housing programme, work-place forums, school governance structures,
hospital boards, community policing forums,

and so on.

But for the state to increasingly play its developmental role other
features must be fostered:



Defending and extending the public sector - It is in the context of ensuring that the
state is able to set an active social and economic agenda that the SACP opposes all
ideologically driven attempts to privatise public sector enterprises and resources. 
The private sector is not, by definition, "more efficient" - and especially not
in meeting basic social needs.  Nor must "privatisation" be invoked in the
name of "black economic empowerment".  Black economic empowerment is about
the effective empowerment of the poor and working class majority.  Public resources
must not be sold off simply to foster a new black elite.  The public resources within
the public sector must be used actively for development.  As the National Framework
Agreement on the restructuring of the public sector recognises, where the injection of
extra capital, or of technology is required, then partnerships, joint ventures, or partial
equity sales might be justified, but these must always be subordinated to the logic of
developmental transformation. The SACP does not believe that movement towards socialism is
simply the consequence of the passive, or bureaucratic occupation of economic commanding
heights by the state.  But we do believe that a dynamic and developmental public
sector is crucial.  For us, the critical question is the strategic use of public
resources for ongoing transformation of power relations.

 

The struggle against the neo-liberal "new public management" dogma -We
need also to foster new values and a new culture in the institutions of the public
sector.  Apart from the obvious need to eliminate racist and sexist values and
practices, we need also to guard against narrow managerialist and technicist approaches to
governance.  In tandem with the global ideological dominance of neo-liberalism, the
dogmatic assumptions of "new public management" have become fashionable and
pervasive.  Among the by now familiar assumptions of this school of management theory
are:

• the belief that, from the standpoint of management, there is very
  little difference between the public and private sectors;
• the need to shift emphasis from rules and standards to accountability
  for outcomes;
• a preference for private ownership, for contracting out, and
  competitive tendering;
• the disaggregation of public sector structures into quasi-autonomous
  agencies, in particular the separation of commercial from non-commercial functions, and
  policy from delivery and regulatory functions;
• a focus on monetary incentives in the public sector, rather than on
  other incentives (social values, pride in good public service, professionalism, etc);
• a stress on cost-cutting, credit control, efficiency and "value
  for taxpayers money".

As a growing number of international theorists, think tanks,
development agencies and others are now beginning to say, there are many problematic myths
in this approach.  The public and private sectors are not the same.  The former
has to be driven by strategic social values, any neglect of this critical difference
quickly undermines the developmental role that the public sector must play in our society
(and indeed in all societies).  The trend to disaggregate public sector bureaucracies
into quasi-autonomous agencies may, at times be justified, but it often undermines the
coherence of what is required, and it ghettoises "non-commercial" functions
directed towards the poor, from other functions.  The new public management approach
often reproduces inequalities in other ways as well.  It compels front-line managers
and workers (for instance in poor local councils) to meet performance targets that have
been set by senior management, rather than allowing them the space to respond to and
negotiate the actual needs of each local context.  The reduction of public managers
to narrowly focused agents of specified "delivery outcomes", makes this approach
incapable of building up a public service that can respond to the great challenges of our
country and world.  Public sector managers and workers need to be leaders of a
transformation process, who understand their task as more than just "service
delivery".  Above all, the whole approach undermines the ability to sustain a
unifying political vision and agenda, the public sector starts to be driven not by
political transformational values, but by fiscal targets.  Political vision is
displaced by macro-economics, and cadres by accountants.

Sometimes accepted unquestioningly as
"neutral" techniques of "international best practice", the "new
public management" assumptions have already begun to have serious consequences in the
post-April 1994 South Africa.  Some of these consequences are evident in the
dangerous divide that has sometimes opened up between local councils dominated by our
ANC-led alliance and ANC-supporting communities, or between key ministries and social
movements and progressive

trade unions operating in the relevant sector.

The SACP is not arguing against the need for fiscal
discipline, for effective public sector management, or for transforming bloated
bureaucracies.  The critical question is what political agenda drives such concerns -
fiscal discipline is not an end in itself.  We also do not believe that there is some
alternative, quick-fix management blue-print.  We are, however, deeply concerned at
the dangers of the uncritical and dogmatic application of neo-liberal management practices
and values within our transforming public sector.  These practices and values are
particularly insidious because they present themselves as implacable opponents of
old-style apartheid bureaucracy, and as an "inevitable international modern
trend".