Red Alert: Just how civil is civil society?

Last month, Mark Heywood posted an intriguing intervention on the Daily Maverick web-site ("The state we're in: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly"). Notwithstanding a nasty gibe at the SACP - Heywood's intervention deserves a constructive and, hopefully, comradely response.

Heywood is currently executive director of the social justice NGO, Section 27. He is best known, however, as a leader, spokesperson and activist in the Treatment Action Campaign. The TAC played an exemplary role in mobilising ordinary South Africans in opposition to the appalling AIDS-denialism of the Mbeki administration.

The TAC was not alone in this campaign. There was strong, if largely below-the-radar, support from some within government - at least two ANC premiers quietly defied the dominant denialist line in their respective provinces by rolling out anti-retrovirals. SACP leaders were castigated by President Mbeki for publicly attacking his denialist perspective. COSATU and its affiliates were especially outspoken. However, it's important to salute the leading public role that the TAC often played in what was one of the most important post-1994 mass struggles.

Since the 2009 elections, under the direction of a capable ANC minister of health, the focus of the TAC campaign for the roll-out of comprehensive ARV treatment has been largely won. There has been a dramatic improvement in SA's life-expectancy statistics, and in the reduction of mother-to-child infections. With the key objective of the treatment campaign largely accomplished, several leading TAC activists have branched out, seeking to replicate the NGO-led, rights-based campaigning model of the TAC in other sectors. What has been the track-record of this branching out?

"It is regrettable that civil society activism has had to focus on bad government", Heywood tells us in his Daily Maverick intervention. "We readily admit that this may have led to a distorted picture of who and what corrupts our society... unfortunately - because civil society is forced to focus on bad government - corporate criminals, environmental polluters, tax evaders, labour robbers have a diversion that allows them to get away scot-free. They must laugh all the way to their Swiss banks."

This is a welcome admission. However, instead of thinking through the implications of this realisation, Heywood takes an easy route out. Yes, all these corporate criminals have benefited from "civil society's" narrow anti-government campaigning focus - but, he writes, "that's not our fault". "We HAD to focus" on bad government, "civil society IS FORCED to focus on bad government".

Why? What compels progressive formations like Section 27 to focus exclusively on "bad government"? Is it because government is especially bad? Not so, Heywood assures us. "Bad business is certainly as malign as bad government...bad business is as organised and conspiratorial as bad government."

So why the one-sidedness? No doubt it's partly because at least government has constitutionally mandated public responsibilities to its citizens and, therefore, NGO formations like Section27 have campaigning leverage by resorting to the Constitution and the courts. That's fair enough, but is it good enough?

Certainly one wishes all power to campaigners who expose wrong-doing in government, including by resorting to the courts. But we cannot radically deal with public sector wrong-doing without understanding the inter-face between the state apparatus and class forces at work within so-called "civil society". Let's remember that all of those "corporate criminals, environmental polluters, tax evaders, [and] labour robbers" cited by Heywood, along with private sector funders of NGOs, are themselves part of "civil society".

It would be entirely unfair to suggest that "civil society" funding of NGOs is the reason why Heywood's "civil society" activism is "forced" to focus on government. What is certainly true, however, is that the evasions in Heywood's intervention have much to do with the self-attributed notion of NGOs like Section27 belonging to this indiscriminate notion of a "civil society".

Back in October 2010, when the SACP raised concerns around the COSATU-convened "Civil Society Conference", these concerns were misunderstood by some, and deliberately distorted by others. We welcomed (I repeat, WELCOMED) COSATU's initiative in reaching out to a range of progressive social movements and NGOs (including Section27 and TAC) to plan mobilisation around the scourge of corruption, amongst other things.

We were, however, mildly surprised that COSATU had excluded its alliance partners (the ANC and SACP) from this conference - particularly as the SACP had already been actively campaigning (with COSATU) in a Red Card anti-corruption campaign. That was a mild irritation, we were more puzzled, however, with the explanation provided by a COSATU leader who told the Sunday Times: "We kept the gathering CLEAN and did not involve political parties." (31 October 2010).

This was an unfortunate metaphor that, in our view, reflected the embedded assumption of an innocent zone of "freely contracting individuals" ("civil society") versus "the necessary evil" of government/politicians, inherently predatory and always on the brink of being corrupted absolutely.

In his intervention Heywood conceded that "in the corridors of government, the boardrooms of business, the halls where trade unionists meet" there are both good and bad people. This is, at least, a partial step forward. "Clean" and "dirty" are not neatly compartmentalised into "civil society", on the one hand, and the "state", on the other. But if this concession marks some progress, it is progress into banality.

An approach that sets itself up on the basis of "good and bad people in all walks of life" really doesn't get us very far. Was the Limpopo text-book fiasco just a question of bad apples? Or is there something wrong with the barrel itself? Was the textbook saga a passing episode? Or is it embedded in systemic features of our post-1994 society? For instance, what has been the impact of the incorporation in 1994 of nearly 650,000 former Bantustan functionaries into our civil service?

How has this largely unremarked "sunset clause" legacy (concealed behind the legitimate objective of fairer demographic representivity) intersected with the ill-advised neo-liberal corporatisation, de-professionalising, fragmentation and tenderisation of the public sector? How have "black economic empowerment" policies been cynically appropriated by incumbent white (and not a few foreign) capitalists in order to ensure privileged channels of access into the new political reality? And how have the same BEE policies legitimised the parasitic predation of public resources for the purposes of personal primitive accumulation by aspirant black capitalists?

These are the kinds of issues that the SACP would like to take forward both in comradely discussion and in active struggle with our allies and with progressive social formations, NGOs, and local communities.

I don't want the insistence on understanding the systemic features of our challenges to be misunderstood. Individual morality matters. Personal responsibility for what we do, or fail to do, is crucial. Systemic realities are not an excuse for bad individual behaviour. Chronically under-performing politicians should be fired. Corrupt public officials and their corrupters should be exposed and criminally charged. Faction-ridden provincial or youth leadership structures may need to be disbanded. Remove the bad apples from the barrel, by all means. But if we don't, at the same time, address the systemic realities that underpin corruption (for instance), then firing, disciplining, disbanding, and repeated bouts of political education will prove to be endlessly recycled, but ultimately futile, cleansing rituals.

Jeremy Cronin is First Deputy General Secretary of the SACP. This article first appeared in the Party's online journal Umsebenzi Online.

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