A social pact for serious transformation...or back to a golden triangle?

The Marikana tragedy, the series of wild-cat mining sector strikes that have followed it, South Africa's downgrading by two ratings agencies, and a persisting global capitalist crisis - these and other factors have provoked widespread calls in our country for a "social pact", for the forging of a national consensus on the way forward. We should certainly seek to mobilise a national response to our country's challenges, a response that is as broad and unified as possible.

But around what strategic agenda?

Late last week former President Thabo Mbeki delivered an "OR Tambo memorial speech" at the University of Fort Hare. The speech was a sustained lamentation on the alleged "lack of leadership" in the present ANC and ANC-led government. It received, of course, head-line treatment in the commercial media. Mbeki has every right to engage critically with the ANC and government and it would be surprising if he was not nursing grievances.

Significantly, in the week of Mbeki's speech, heartening statistics were released showing a very dramatic improvement in South Africa's life expectancy and infantile mortality figures - a tribute to those (in the face of being labelled "agents of imperialism", "ultra-leftists", "populists" and the like), who waged a bitter battle against the disastrous AIDS-denialism that was such a tragic feature of Mbeki's presidency.

I do not want to tangle here with the detail of Mbeki's speech - other than to note that he offers no constructive strategic perspective. His lamentations, if over-cooked, raise issues that no-one is denying - that there are serious challenges within our movement and government. Among these are factionalism and corruption.

Let's however return to the question of building a broad national unity, a "social pact" (if you like). What was the strategic perspective of the Mbeki inner-circle back in the mid-1990s on this matter? In 1996 the ANC produced a "discussion document" entitled "The state and social transformation". Its principal author was Mbeki, the ANC deputy president of the time.

The document describes the role of the new state as essentially "regulatory" (the word is evoked a great deal). The state is seen as a mediator, especially between "capital" and "labour".

We "must seek to forge", the document argues, "a democratic and equitable partnership...between labour and capital in the interest of social stability, economic progress, reconstruction and development." It then adds a bizarre but revealing twist: "In the context of the South African situation, the tension between labour and capital demands special attention by the democratic state because it can easily be confused with...the national question." [!!]

"The national question" (a polite phrase for the persisting legacy of racialised poverty, inequality and unemployment in our country), on the one hand, and the "tension" (a polite word for class exploitation) between capital and labour, on the other, might be conceptually different things, but in the South African reality they remain deeply interconnected.

As the SACP wrote at the time, "Is the [ANC] document seriously asking us not to be 'confused' by the suspicion that the present powers of capitalists in our country have something to do with massive colonial land dispossession, the imposition of pass laws on African workers, the outlawing of non-racial trade unions, or the racist expropriation of African, Coloured and Indian small businesses?" ("We need transformation not a balancing act", The African Communist, 1st quarter, 1997).

These were issues the Mbeki-ites did not want raised. The ANC discussion document was advancing a project of a "neutral", stabilising, technicist state, at the apex of a triangle, and supposedly equidistant from capital and labour. "The working class together with the democratic state and capital", it proclaimed, "complete the proverbial golden triangle necessary for the development and transformation of society."

But there was something more at play. In effect, the separation of the class struggle from the "national question" was an attempt to displace the resolution of the legacy of racial oppression in our country into another agenda and into another conversation. This was to be the agenda of supposedly "de-racialising" capitalism in SA through the promotion of a new BEE capitalist stratum.

That conversation, of course, was to be one between the new governing elite and established monopoly capital. And the script for the new governing elite in that particular discussion with monopoly capital is transparent enough in the 1996 ANC discussion document. It goes something like this: "Give us shares in your companies or those noisy trade unionists and communists will start to blame racial inequalities in SA on capitalism."

Re-visiting this Mbeki-ite 1996 document reminds us that the 1996 class project actually envisaged two "social compacts" - the one a balancing act between capital and labour overseen by a "neutral" state; and the other a deal between established capitalists and aspirant capitalists leveraged by an extremely interventionist state. This latter "pact" spurred a parasitic process of state sponsored primitive accumulation for a favoured BEE few.

Those hand-picked from within the inner Mbeki circle were not embarrassed to say things like "I didn't struggle to be poor", or "Get filthy rich". This has had a great deal do with the moral decline that Mbeki now loftily laments. Neither compact envisaged an active transformation of the internal colonial features of SA's problematic growth path.

Against this background it is useful to contrast the package announced last week by the Presidential High Level Dialogue on the economy. Although it was not presented as a "social pact", most of the media referred to it as such. The package emerged from meetings between government, organised business and labour, and the community constituency.

The 13-page executive summary of agreed measures (the "package") marks a significant departure from the 1996 class project's "golden triangle" assumptions. The package effectively locates our national response to present challenges within the strategic perspective of the New Growth Path - it's not about a balancing act, still less primitive accumulation for an elite few.

It's about using the economic crisis as an opportunity to actively transform the structural features of SA's economic growth path that have given rise to Marikana, and to the crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality. In the words of the official media release: "The parties agree that a package of economic and socio-economic measures is necessary to address underlying social pressures and to act as a stimulus to pressures on the local economy as a result of slowing global growth.

To this end, they have developed measures dealing with: accelerated infrastructure, youth employment, the living conditions of mining communities, workers and companies affected by the economic slowdown, public sector work programmes, reckless lending, implementation of accords and social security and health reform."

This quote highlights a second a key feature of the package - unlike in many other parts of the world, the ANC-led government is beginning to build a national consensus that our response to the global economic crisis should NOT be narrow austerity measures, but rather an acceleration of the state-led infrastructure programme, public works programmes, and other public-sector led economic and social interventions.

It locates these programmes within the context of strengthening (not diluting) our labour relations dispensation, and within the context of upholding our progressive Constitution and Bill of Rights. In so doing it implicitly debunks those (like the FW De Klerk Foundation) who are trying to suggest that the call for a more radical second phase of the NDR is an attack on the Constitution.

On the contrary, a more radical implementation of the NDR represents an alignment with the requirements of the Constitution. Likewise, the October "package" serves to block the DA's Thatcherite attempt to build a DA/big business axis by using the current challenges to dilute our labour relations system and weaken organised labour. It is a line of attack whose dangers for the economy are now all too apparent, not least to the mining houses themselves.

These are just some of the key features of the Presidential High Level package towards a more comprehensive "social pact". Unfortunately, however, anyone relying upon the mainstream media for an inkling of any of this would have been left largely in the dark. The "public broadcaster", the SABC, was particularly pathetic. For the better part of the day following the announcement of the package, every hourly SABC news broadcast featured as its first or second item a single reference to the summit's package of agreements. This single reference was to the myopic opinion of one of the SABC's dial-a-quote "economists".

Azar Jammine had not been present at the summit, and he clearly hadn't bothered to read the summary text on the recommendations of the package. He focused on a few lines in a 13-page document which made a call on CEOs and executive directors in the private sector and senior executives in the public sector to agree to a freeze on increases in salaries and bonuses over the next 12 months, "as a strong signal of a commitment to build an equitable economy."

According to Jammine, an opinion faithfully repeated over and over by the SABC, the whole package of proposals was pointless because, he claimed, an executive salary and bonus freeze would mean "government would lose some R4billion in taxes." He would say that, wouldn't he? How smug, how dismissive, how lacking in any alternative suggestion around achieving a more equitable society.

A salary and bonus freeze MIGHT have tax implications and we should have an intelligent debate about it. But what inspires the public broadcaster to dumb down a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder policy framework for a national response to our grave country challenges to this insensitive, knee-jerk, I'm-alright-Jack crassness?

Asikhulume!!

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

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