Is the ANC leading a national democratic revolution, or managing capitalism?

Is the ANC leading a national democratic revolution, or managing capitalism?

Following the ANC/SACP bilateral on the 19th June, the SACP Political Bureau (meeting on the 23rd June) had the opportunity to discuss the ANC National Working Committee document that had been tabled at the bilateral. The SACP PB focused its discussion on Part 2 of the NWC submission, “Managing National Democratic Transformation. Does the alliance share common objectives?”. This second part of the NWC submission is a critique of the SACP Central Committee discussion document published in Bua Komanisi!, May 2006. What follows is a response from the SACP, based on the PB discussion.

Introduction

This is a comradely discussion. We are well aware that it is taking place not just between the national leaderships of the ANC and SACP, but also within the ranks of the Alliance, and among a broader South African public. Our respective papers have been published in official organs of our formations and their arguments have been covered (adequately or otherwise) in the public media. We welcome all of this. Integral to the renewal of our national liberation struggle is, precisely, the task of re-invigorating the culture of political study, discussion, debate, comradely criticism and, of course, self-criticism.

In the course of a robust debate about the many challenges of our country it is inevitable that we will provoke a degree of irritation amongst each other. The SACP CC document was certainly robust. We can hardly complain if the ANC NWC is equally robust in its response. There are obviously explicit and implicit matters of detail in the NWC response that we find unfortunate, some of which we will raise elsewhere and in the appropriate ways. But we do not want to become buried in mutual irritation. That will simply detract from the substantive issues that we believe we are all committed to addressing.

The ANC NWC intervention correctly notes that the SACP CC discussion document is a discussion document, and not (certainly not yet) an official programmatic position of the SACP. While taking full responsibility for our document, the fact that it is a discussion document means that the CC has deliberately experimented with ideas and concepts, posed provocative questions, and generally sought to leave matters somewhat open-ended. For the moment, this is a debate, not a hard-and-fast “line of march”.

Indeed, the CC document has already provoked interesting and often critical responses from within the SACP itself. Many SACP responses have already focused on issues subsequently raised by the NWC. It is possible, for instance, that when the SACP formally consolidates a draft “Strategy and Tactics” document ahead of our 2007 12th National Congress, the use of the concept “bonapartism” may have disappeared. The concept of “bonapartism” (itself used in a variety of contradictory ways in Marxist literature) helped to sensitise the drafting team to some key features of transitional states that emerge in the context of a complex balance of class forces. But at least some SACP comrades believe that the concept is so over-loaded with disputed history that it may now be more of a hindrance than a facilitator of the discussion we believe remains critical.

The generally welcome (but often sensationalising) attention the CC document has received, particularly in the public media, has also sensitised the Party to formulations that we had not intended to be overly personalised. Inevitably, not least within the present political context in our country, personalisation quickly happens. In the CC document, for instance, we say: “the technocratic vanguard state has tended to marginalise parliament” (p.30). We stand by that assertion. But we have read newspaper head-lines and even heard ANC comrades alleging that the SACP is arguing “the president (personally?) has suffocated parliament”. In some quarters, the CC discussion document has even been mapped into a liberal discourse, as if the Party wanted a weak state. Clearly, if the CC discussion document is even remotely open to these distortions, then we need to correct the confusion and perhaps the way in which some things have been formulated.

It was explicitly in this context that our General Secretary published a public intervention in the Business Day. Amongst other things, the intervention said of the CC discussion document:

“[it] is emphatically not arguing for a weak presidential centre, or for a weak state. Power is not a zero-sum game. But we are concerned there is a serious imbalance in the way in which power has been centralised within the presidency while parliament is relatively weak, and the popular mass movement has been considerably demobilised and fragmented. This power imbalance is liable to result not in a strong presidency, but in a power centre that is vulnerable to isolation and to undue influence by established and newly enriched capital. The national democratic objectives of our struggle are in danger of being systemically undermined by this reality. That is our central concern.”

And turning specifically to the question of parliament, the General Secretary’s intervention added:

“The weaknesses of parliament may well be because parliament is weak, and not because a presidential hand is deliberately marginalizing the institution. But the serious power imbalance between a relatively strong executive and a relatively weak legislature means that key decisions (on re-drawing provincial boundaries, for instance) are insufficiently open to extensive public scrutiny.”

We hope that we can proceed with this discussion, respecting each other’s bona fides as we move forward in a collective endeavour to analyse and clarify the many challenges we face as a movement and as a country.

The NWC document misses the central point

There are many issues, including, as we have noted above, some criticisms in the NWC document with which we agree, or around which we are prepared to concede that better formulations would be more appropriate. However, the core critique contained in the NWC argument is based on a radical misunderstanding of the fundamental strategic argument of the CC paper.

This misunderstanding is not innocent. It is a symptom of an economistic reformism (we use these words advisedly and without any intention of mere labelling) that has tended to dominate some of the strategic thinking within our movement. We will attempt to illustrate and argue these issues more fully in due course.

According to the NWC document, at the heart of the CC discussion document’s “errors” is a radical misunderstanding of:

• One, the ANC – (we are supposed to be saying that the ANC was once “socialist”, and a new crop of leadership has subjectively “sold out” on this socialism); and
• Two, the national democratic revolution (NDR) – (we are supposed to be arguing naively that in 1994 there was the possibility for a “rapid” advance to socialism in South Africa).

On the first charge, nowhere will you find the CC discussion document (or any official SACP document of which we are aware) arguing that the ANC has ever been a socialist organisation. We certainly do argue that in certain periods of its history there was a shared, but not publicly declared, consensus among a significant number (perhaps a majority) of the ANC’s senior leadership that an advance to socialism was possible and necessary for the consolidation of the national democratic revolution itself. This point is more or less conceded by the NWC document itself, when it quotes (see paragraph 28) from the ANC’s earlier March 2001 submission to an ANC/SACP bilateral (we will come back to this below). A socialist orientation is also strongly alluded to in many other ANC documents. For instance, to take one of the more obvious examples, the Freedom Charter: “The people shall share in the country’s wealth!…The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole..”, “The land shall be shared among those who work it!” . The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) made the advocacy of socialism a serious crime, so a certain degree of caution was necessary at the time. (Indeed, the Treason Trial centred around the argument that the Charter was “communist” inspired - a charge a bungling apartheid prosecution team failed to win). But socialist sentiments are glaringly present in the Charter.

It is not a question of hunting for a socialist needle in a haystack, despite the huge quantities of reformist hay that have been piled upon the Freedom Charter in the last decade or two. But, yes we agree, while socialism is alluded to in the Charter, in the Strategy and Tactics of the Morogoro Conference and elsewhere, nowhere is socialism ever formally adopted by the ANC. The ANC has never sought to make acceptance of socialism a condition for membership.

On the second charge, the NWC document at least three times (see paragraphs 25, 26 and 54) asserts that we gravely underestimate the global and national balance of forces, imagining that a “rapid” advance to socialism has been feasible in the post-1994 South African reality.

But the CC document says exactly the opposite!

On page 18 of the CC document we say:

“[In the 1990s] everyone [that includes the SACP] agreed…that the optimism of the late 1960s and 1970s no longer applied. Global, regional and even national conditions were not optimal for a rapid advance to and consolidation of socialism in South Africa.”

Why can the NWC document not hear this perfectly plain statement: “NOT OPTIMAL FOR A RAPID ADVANCE to and consolidation of socialism”? The answer to this question goes to the heart of everything else.

Uninterrupted…yes! Rapid…probably not

The core argument of the CC document is that for the SACP (and for much of the ANC leadership) in the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, a radical NDR with a socialist orientation was both possible AND necessary in the specific conditions of South Africa. These specific South African conditions were the relatively advanced level of capitalist development and the related size and maturity of the working class. In the course of the 20th century, the South African working class became numerically the largest class in our country (rather than, for instance, a peasantry as in many other African and third world societies). A relatively advanced capitalism had been consolidated through (and not despite) national oppression of the majority. In South Africa, national oppression and class exploitation were (and are) inextricably linked – along with patriarchal domination. These domestic realities coupled with a relatively favourable post-1945 global balance of forces meant that a radical NDR with a socialist-orientation was necessary and the conditions for it were relatively favourable.

The CC document (like all of the official positions of the SACP since the 1990s) continues to affirm the necessity of an NDR with a socialist-orientation if the NDR itself is to be advanced, deepened and defended. However, we concede that the balance of forces is now less favourable than they seemed to be in the 1960s and 70s. (In the last few years there have been some favourable shifts in the global balance of forces, at least compared to a decade ago. But we do not think that these shifts should be over-stated).

However favourable or unfavourable the balance of forces might be, the objective necessity in our conditions for an uninterrupted struggle for socialist values, socialist momentum, and even elements of socialism in the midst of our present reality is, as far as the SACP is concerned, as real as ever. But the prospects for a rapid advance to a relatively developed socialism may well now be less propitious than they seemed to many of us in an earlier period.

We accept that this is an SACP position. It is not an official ANC position. But then what IS the ANC’s position? Is the ANC a closet capitalist? Or a closet socialist? Or is it neither or both? And is it possible to be neither or both? We will come back to these questions later, but let’s first consider what the NWC paper expects of the SACP in the present.

“In a continuum of struggle…”

In paragraph 12 the NWC document affirms that “there is agreement that the working class forms the core and constitutes the vanguard of the NDR”.

In paragraph 28 the NWC document reminds us that in March 2001, in its submission to the ANC/SACP bilateral, the ANC (we repeat – the ANC) clarified that: “the ANC Morogoro Conference asserted that the working class is the dynamic link between national liberation and socialism. This assertion reflected both the acceptance on the part of the ANC of the legitimacy and logic of the struggle for socialism and, consequently, the extent to which progressive nationalism had permeated the ranks of the ANC.”

Towards the end of the same paragraph 28, the NWC document quotes from the same ANC 2001 submission in which the SACP was encouraged to continue to abide by its historic perspective, in which the Party, “recognising the immediacy of the national question”, nonetheless “views the NDR as the shortest route to socialism, in a continuum of struggle.”

We absolutely agree with everything said here. But then why are we now being criticised for arguing for an uninterrupted struggle for socialism? If the working class “forms the core and constitutes the vanguard of the NDR” (para 12); and if the working class is the “dynamic link” (and not a dormant link awaiting “its stage”?) “between national liberation and socialism” (para. 28); and if, as the ANC advises, the SACP should embrace the NDR as “the shortest route to socialism, in a continuum of struggle” (para. 28) – then clearly we are not talking about interrupted, water-tight “stages”. We are not talking about a self-contained first stage (a capitalist NDR), and then an equally self-contained second stage (socialism). We are talking about an uninterrupted struggle for both national liberation and socialism – which does not mean that either will necessarily be rapid, still less plain-sailing. Nor does it mean that the strategic emphasis should be equally divided between the two at any particular conjuncture. Indeed the SACP agrees that the national democratic tasks of an uninterrupted revolution need to be the overarching strategic emphasis in the present conjuncture, and this also means that the progressive camp in our present conjuncture will include forces that are not ideologically committed to socialism.

The NWC document is at once insisting that the Party should remain true to the Morogoro perspective, which recognised the “legitimacy and logic” of a dynamic link between national liberation and socialism, AND it is ridiculing us for upholding a continuum of uninterrupted struggle between national liberation and socialism.

It can only do this by pretending that the SACP believes that a rapid advance to socialism is possible in the present circumstances. It falsely attributes this perspective to the SACP. It ridicules our naiveté, and then tries to bury, under more hay, the critical point of a “continuum” (to use its own word) of struggle, by pretending that “rapid” and “uninterrupted” mean the same thing.

“What does the SACP mean by rupture?”, the NWC document asks. Well, here is the rupture. The continuum of struggle between national liberation and socialism is, at least conceptually, ridiculed. What Morogoro understood to be uninterrupted is now declared to be interrupted. The ANC has never declared itself to be a socialist organisation, we agree. It has never restricted its membership to socialists. But back in the 1960s, as the ANC formally reminded the SACP in March 2001, and as the NWC once more repeats: “the ANC Morogoro Conference asserted that the working class is the dynamic link between national liberation and socialism. This assertion reflected both the acceptance on the part of the ANC of the legitimacy and logic of the struggle for socialism and, consequently, the extent to which progressive nationalism had permeated the ranks of the ANC.”

Without becoming a leading organ of a socialist formation as such, does the NWC still accept the legitimacy and logic of the struggle for socialism? And does it still regard such an acceptance as an indicator of the “extent to which progressive nationalism has permeated the ranks of the ANC”? The SACP, for its part, expects nothing more (and, indeed, nothing less) than this from the ANC.

Leaving our “isms” at home?

NWC member, cde Joel Netshitenzhe, speaking in his capacity as head of the presidency’s policy unit, was recently quoted calling for policy debate “without the ideological bloodletting that sometimes accompanies policy making. It would be better if we could leave all our ‘isms’ at home when rethinking policy.” (Business Day, “Deepening class inequalities seen as major social challenge for SA”, June 27, 2006).

We have some sympathy for this view. There is obviously a danger that we will bury ourselves in quotes and counter-quotes from the Marxist classics, or from historic documents and resolutions of our movement…and forget about the immediate challenges confronting our society. The purpose of serious political debate is not to prove who has the most impressive war-chest of quotations. The point is to reflect critically upon our reality and our engagement with it, in order to unify ourselves around the most effective strategic and programmatic interventions.

We need to be practical, but being practical does not mean being merely pragmatic, still less anti-intellectualist. Theory does matter, and we do need to constantly re-visit our “isms”.

Part of what is impeding an effective clarification of our programmatic, practical tasks in the present is that our understanding of some of the key “isms” of our struggle (“nationalism” and “socialism” in particular) has become confused and flaccid.

Our nationalism

Consider some of the concepts the NWC paper invokes when speaking of our nationalism:

the “national question…” (para. 3)

“The ANC is by definition a liberation movement. Its core strategic task is to eliminate the national grievance” (para.15);

“the task of the NDR is to eliminate the national grievance” (para. 23, quoting from the ANC’s S&T);

“In practice, the immediacy of the national grievance means that the working class exercises its struggle…in this phase within the context of the national struggle.” (para.28, quoting from ANC 2001 bilateral submission)

“the NDR is called such, with national and democratic tasks, because it seeks to deal with the political and socio-economic manifestations of apartheid colonialism” (para. 24)

A national “question” - but not a national answer? “Eliminate a national grievance” - rather than lead a “national democratic revolution”? Deal with the “manifestations” of apartheid colonialism - but not with its underlying systemic features? It may be felt that we are nit-picking. And, indeed, you will find concepts like “national question” and “national grievance” in both the Marxist tradition and in the key strategic documents of the ANC in earlier decades. However, it is the strategic centrality that concepts like “grievance” are now beginning to occupy in official ANC positions that we find worrying. We firmly believe that the concepts we have highlighted here from the NWC document are not merely accidental . They are part and parcel of a deep-seated and problematic tendency, as we will try to show.

A National Answer

When, in 1912, the founders of the ANC launched the new formation, they were puzzling over many questions, but, above all, they were discovering a national answer. They could perhaps have had very little inkling of just how profound this national answer was to be. But already in 1912 they had a general sense that in organising on the basis of a shared sense of African-ness, transcending ethnic/tribal boundaries, building around a shared “grievance”, but also a shared sense of capacity, of numerical power, and of values of community (deriving from more solidaristic, pre-capitalist formations), they would find an answer to the oppression and marginalisation of the majority – and thereby contribute to the overall democratisation of our society.

The colonisers used to refer to the “native question”. Increasingly in ANC discussion documents the national issue is reduced to the national question (and it is treated alongside ethnicity, tribalism, and minority identities), as if it were some kind of puzzling, even embarrassing problem that has to be “resolved”. What gets completely lost in this treatment is the positive, revolutionary power of the progressive nationalism that the ANC has helped to foster, mobilise and unleash over nine decades.

Compare this current tendency within our ranks with the way in which socialist Cuba continues to mobilise its people patriotically, i.e. as a national (but also internationalist) motive force in the defence of their sovereignty and their (socialist) revolution. (This illustrates, once again, that national democratic and socialist struggles in the era of imperialism have to be dynamically linked in a continuum of struggle).

Or compare the current tendency within our movement with Amilcar Cabral’s inspiring vision of popular nationalism – “[it] is for the people an inexhaustible source of courage, of material and moral support, of physical and psychic energy which enables them to accept sacrifices – even to accomplish ‘miracles’”[1]. We know this from our own struggle. At every election campaign we return once more to replenish our energies by drawing on this motive force of popular nationalism…but in our theoretical writing we reduce it to a “question”.

A Politics of Grievance

This negative neutralising of the positive power of progressive nationalism (the better to “manage” it?) is carried further by the formulation: “The ANC is by definition a liberation movement. Its core strategic task is to eliminate the national grievance” (para.15).

Of course there are national grievances (plural - plenty of them), and of course a sense of national grievance has been (and remains) ONE important component of our national liberation struggle. But to reduce the ANC’s liberatory strategic task to a negative (and probably technocratic delivery) function of eliminating “grievance” runs many dangers.

It speaks to the black majority as aggrieved victims (which they are), but they are also heroic collective fighters, resourceful working class communities, a powerful majority, a revolutionary motive force. Surely it would be better to say that the ANC’s core strategic task is to unify and lead the black majority (and all other democratic forces in our country) in the struggle to emancipate our country and themselves?

Instead, the NWC document’s conception of the core strategic task of the ANC places us on the terrain of a politics of grievance. And this is where a serious danger arises. If you have a rather uninspiring version of nationalism and then you address your core constituency as the aggrieved whose grievances you (the ruling party) will eliminate – then you lay yourself wide open to a culture of self-righteousness and entitlement. And when you fail to eliminate every grievance under the sun you risk being outflanked by a more dynamic (if populist) nationalism that mobilises all-and-sundry on a platform of resentful grievance (any grievance will do).

Motive Forces

In the past, the ANC (and SACP) understood “motive forces” of the revolution to refer to social groups (whether national or class) that had the power and capacity to be hegemonic, to drive through a revolution (we called them “revolutionary forces”). Revolutionary motive forces build their hegemony (national or class) by drawing to their side a range of other potentially progressive forces (we called them “forces for change”). But in recent formulations in ANC strategy and tactics documents, “motive forces” are now defined as “all of those who have an objective interest” in the NDR.

There is a world of difference between these two different definitions of “motive force” – the one is about power and transformation, the other is about self-interest and allocative rights. If we are to take seriously our election slogan (“A better life for all”), then, in terms of the second definition of “motive force” (all those with an objective interest in the NDR), everyone is a motive force. This isn’t very helpful. If we define motive forces in terms of self-interest alone, then, once more we think of politics as “managing” interests, keeping a watchful eye over the pie-chart of interest and grievance, making sure everyone get a fair slice, but not more.

The relative distaste for popular progressive nationalism that seems to exist in some quarters of the ANC may in part account for the endless attempts over the last several years to re-design the ANC, to “modernise” it. This “modernising” drive also accounts for the scandalised manner in which the NWC document responds to the CC discussion document’s analysis of the social values that have informed comrade Nelson Mandela’s outstanding contribution to our revolution…

“The less said about such insults the better…”?

The CC discussion document speaks briefly (see p.20) about the “outstanding personal qualities (bravery, principle, wisdom, generosity)” of cde Mandela. It then adds that his “standing above society” in the critical transition period of the mid-1990s also “owes something to his sometimes arcane, quasi-feudal, pre-capitalist corporatist values”.

The NWC document is scandalised by this simple statement. We thought it was Marxist, but the NWC document tells us it is “colonial anthropology of the worst kind” (para. 38).

Now we admit that all of this runs the risk of becoming excessively personal, and this is exactly what CC document immediately goes on to say (“But while acknowledging the special personal qualities of Mandela, it would be wrong to ignore the ways in which the particular balance of class forces nationally actively helped to construct Mandela-ism.”)

However, what interests us here is the scandalised outrage the NWC document expresses at this point. Let’s turn to what cde Nelson Mandela himself has to say about the sources of inspiration for his leadership style:

“The power and influence of chieftaincy pervaded every aspect of our lives in Mqhekezweni…My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court. I watched and learned from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Place…Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among speakers, but everyone was heard: chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and labourer…(Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens.)…At first, I was astonished by the vehemence – and candour – with which people criticised the regent. He was not above criticism – in fact, he was often the principal target of it. But no matter how serious the charge, the regent simply listened, not defending himself, showing no emotion at all. The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached. They ended in unanimity or not at all. Unanimity, however, might be an agreement to disagree, to wait for a more propitious time to propose a solution…Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority.” (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, pp.19-20)

We assume that the NWC document does not regard this moving passage as “colonial anthropology”? In our often soulless world, dominated by a dog-eats-dog capitalism, passages like these remind us of just how important for the present is the recovery of the values of earlier, more communalist, more solidaristic societies that were, yes, “pre-capitalist”, “corporatist” and “quasi-feudal”.

The Sermon on the Mount is pre-capitalist. The saying “through the eye of the needle”, much quoted recently in our ranks, is pre-capitalist. The inspiration for many modern socialist values is pre-capitalist. And the idea of a “renaissance” (whether in Europe or Africa) also invokes the hope of recovering something valuable from a pre-capitalist past.

We are not arguing that cde Mandela is a “mediaeval man” (as one comrade recently alleged). Comrade Mandela is obviously thoroughly modern and entirely relevant to the new millennium – but part of his relevance is precisely that he is the bearer (like our movement) of some progressive, humane, pre-capitalist values.

We are not arguing for an uncritical and romantic return to some mythical African identity, of the kind sometimes advocated by, for instance, certain currents of negritude.

Again Cabral is a useful guide in these matters. In the very same passage (quoted above) in which he affirms national culture as an “inexhaustible source of courage” for an oppressed people, Cabral also warns:

“But equally, in some respects, culture is very much a source of obstacles and difficulties, of erroneous conceptions about reality, of deviation in carrying out duty, and of limitations on the tempo and efficiency of a struggle that is confronted with the political, technical and scientific requirements of a war”. (Cabral, p.53)

It is this thoroughly dialectical approach to the past, present and future that the NWC document cannot grasp. It cannot allow for a continuum of struggle between the NDR and socialism, and it cannot fully grasp the continuum of struggle between a pre-capitalist past and the present.

Our national democratic struggle runs the risk of being reduced to a westernising modernisation in which we become embarrassed about our nationalism and our socialism…awkward secrets best left at home.

The so-called “Second Economy” – Capitalist Modernisation?

This tendency towards reducing the NDR to a capitalist modernisation programme is particularly apparent in the way the NWC document deals with the CC document’s views on transforming the pole of underdevelopment within our society and economy.

In the CC document we argue dialectically that the relative marginalisation of much of the “informal” sector “from the dominant capitalist economy” is both “a problem” and “potentially a revolutionary asset.” (CC p.27)

The NWC document calls this “romanticism” and claims that the CC document is suggesting that “no efforts should be made to lift marginalized people into the mainstream.” (NWC, para.46).

“should [we] abandon the struggle to bridge the gap and to encourage sustainable livelihoods (for e.g. leave the minibus taxi industry as it is as a revolutionary base!)?” (NWC, para. 45.1)

As the authors of the NWC document know perfectly well, the CC document is emphatically NOT arguing that we should leave millions of people locked into a crisis of underdevelopment. What we ARE arguing (and this is what the NWC authors cannot hear) is that there are basically two views on how to overcome the crisis of underdevelopment:

• a capitalist-oriented strategy which endeavours to “lift marginalized people into the mainstream” under the hegemony of the capitalist market;
• or a socialist-oriented strategy that endeavours to overcome the underdevelopment crisis through active interventions of the democratic state buttressed by (under the hegemony of) popular power.
  (If sensitivities are offended, then we can leave our traditional “isms” at home, and reformulate these two different paths as a “modernisation” path, and a “people-centred/people-driven path.”)

How, for instance, do we begin to address the crisis of underdevelopment as it manifests itself in regard to desperate land-hunger, and precarious rural and peri-urban household food security? A state-led but capitalist-oriented strategy of “lifting” marginalized people into “the mainstream” through a willing-seller willing-buyer market mechanisms has generally failed dismally. But it is not just in the acquisition of land that the “mainstream” market is inadequate for any effective transformation of the lives of millions of rural and peri-urban poor. Decisive “social” economy measures are required to ensure any kind of sustainability for communities benefiting from land reform and/or restitution – including active public sector provision of training and extension programmes, support for marketing co-ops, purchasing co-ops, public works programmes to build appropriate agrarian infrastructure (irrigation dams, access roads, terracing, alien-plant clearing), etc. There is a rich and successful experience of measures of these kinds from Cuba to Kerala. Providing land and then abandoning rural communities to the mercies of the “mainstream” economy invariably results in failure and the reproduction of underdevelopment.

Similar choices confront us in attempting to transform the minibus sector. We can endeavour to provide a “re-capitalisation” programme that seeks to “modernise” the fleet and thereby “mainstream” the sector. However, without substantial revision, this programme will enrich the major vehicle manufacturers, lock the sector into indebtedness with the major financial institutions, and benefit a small stratum (often taxi war-lords) within the industry who would be among the few able to “mainstream” under these conditions. The majority of small owner-operators would be eliminated.

Approaching the transformation of the taxi sector as a “modernisation” exercise fails to analyse the real obstacles to providing effective public transport in our towns and cities. While the entrepreneurship of the minibus sector obviously deserves some admiration, it should also be remembered that many of the leading war-lords received considerable support from apartheid-era officials, policemen, traffic departments, and Bantustan functionaries (all of whom were often themselves active participants in the sector). Municipal bus services in many of our cities were once able to run relatively effective and profitable operations, returning a percentage of their revenues to the municipalities.

Today we are spending more than R2 billion on operating subsidies for bus-services (most of them now privately-owned), and the level of service has declined seriously. A key reason for the non-profitability of our bus services is that they have been eroded by the irrational, economically unsustainable and unregulated, strong-arm methods of the minibus sector – capturing routes, running the same vehicle three or four times at rush-hour, when once would be safe operationally. Because the war-lords controlling many of the associations make their money through rent extracted from small operators, they have been inclined to encourage over-trading on the routes they control. In other words, the minibus sector needs recapitalisation (not so much because of an apartheid legacy) but because its operating methods are uneconomical and unsustainable. Most (but not all) of the sector cannot re-capitalise from revenues from their own operations. A once-off re-capitalisation on its own will not change any of this, and may well make matters worse. Unless the re-capitalisation process is integrated into an overall, multi-modal public transport process, the real problems will not be eliminated.

But to achieve this, the public sector – especially at the municipal/metro level – working closely with mobilised communities, needs to reclaim ownership of roads, routes, side-walks and even terminuses. It needs to effect substantive planning of public transport, and it needs to play a leading role in a regulated process of integrating modes into single public (usually municipally-based) transport systems. Mixed ownership is also an obvious way to go – grouping a publicly-owned Metrorail, private and municipally-owned buses, and private, or perhaps cooperatively owned minibuses – into single, locally-based publicly transport consortia. There are important and successful Latin American examples of this, where internecine small bus violence has also been an historic problem. There are also interesting African examples of successful transformations of the minibus sector – eg. in Kenya where the new government, riding on the Rainbow Coalition’s popular anti-corruption mobilisation, won commuter support for driving through tough safety regulations on minibuses – and without spending R7,7 billion on recapitalisation.

What would we have done differently?

The NWC document very usefully summarises our joint-1998 Alliance Summit paper, The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation as an understanding that:

“access to state power should be utilised to deracialise patterns of ownership and control of wealth; reconfigure the distribution of national resources in favour of the poor; and utilise the government budget, the economic power of State Owned enterprises and capital in the hands of working people to change the structure of the economy.” (NWC, para. 6.1)

The fundamental thesis of the CC document is that since 1994, the first two tasks have been given priority, namely:

• deracialising patterns of ownership and control of wealth; and
• reconfiguring the distribution of national resources in favour of the poor.

These two tasks have, in good faith, been further subordinated to an overarching economic objective – namely, to stabilise the capitalist system and to restore it to profitability.

The SACP accepts that even socialist governments have to deal with the reality of a globally dominant capitalist system and with, at the very least, incipient forms of capitalism within their domestic economies – in Cuba and in the PRC, in differing ways, they are having to “manage” this challenge. But neither Cuba nor the PRC conceptualise their core strategic economic task as being to “manage capitalism”. And we certainly do not accept that the limit on our ANC-led government’s economic ambitions should be the successful “management” of the capitalist economy we have inherited.

The relative stabilisation of our capitalist economy has, indeed, been achieved, and capitalist growth restored since 1994. The deracialisation of ownership and control has happened unevenly, and there has been a significant reconfiguration of distribution (social grants, low cost housing, health and education spending, etc).

So what would we have done differently?

The common allegation is that the SACP is calling for less cautious macro-economic measures and more redistributive spending. We are labelled macro-populists, and we are told that we cannot spend above our means as a country.

But all of this, once more, completely misses the mark.

The SACP agrees (and we have consistently agreed since the unveiling of GEAR in 1996) that sound macro-economic management is essential – the key point is not whether we should have sound or unsound macro-economic management, but what is the strategic objective of macro-economic management? Macro policy, yes, but for what?

For the SACP macro policy (sound macro policy) needs to be subordinated to a sustainable, state-led industrial policy strategy, and to the third and key objective outlined in the 1998 alliance summit paper: “changing the structure of the economy”.

We do not think that the NDR should be reduced to a programme of redistribution. (This, in our view, is one of the lessons of Zimbabwe – where there were some bold and often progressive attempts at pro-poor redistribution in the first decade and a half after liberation, but a failure to change the fundamental structures of the productive economy).

As we have just said, it is not particularly the austerity of economic policy choices about which we are concerned. In fact, it is often the very opposite.

We are deeply concerned that there has been serious wastage of public resources (as in the messy attempts to privatise and restructure Telkom) or lavish public spending on mega-projects – the arms procurement package, Coega, Gautrain, taxi recapitalisation (and with the Dube Trade Port and, if not checked, 2010 may also fall into this pattern if measures are not taken to ensure the poor become its prime beneficiaries). Projects like these benefit multi-nationals and large local manufacturing and construction firms, and offer primitive accumulation possibilities for a small, but politically influential, black capitalist sector. These projects do create jobs, typically during a construction phase, but they do NOT change the structure of the economy, they typically perpetuate it, deepening regional underdevelopment patterns, and leaving behind an unsustainable legacy.

What is driving these policy choices? Why has a government that has correctly emphasised “good economic governance” fallen prey to these anomalies? In the view of the CC discussion document it is the combination of three factors:

• the power of established capital – both international and local.
• the narrow self-interest of an emerging black capitalist stratum with close connections to established capital, and to our movement. This stratum plays an active role in promoting privatisation and/or major public spending initiatives – not in order to advance the NDR, but for personal self-accumulation purposes; and
• the genuine (but in our view mistaken) view among key leading comrades in government that any kind of growth of around 6% is the key to securing the conditions for advancing (through job creation and redistributive measures) the goals of the NDR. We accept the bona fides of this view, but we think it is mistaken.

We are keen to engage constructively with this last-mentioned view and with these comrades and in particular to pursue the third objective in the 1998 alliance summit paper – what do we mean by “changing the structure of the economy”?