A response to Irvin Jim

I welcome cde Irvin Jim's polemical response to my Umsebenzi Online piece published two weeks ago ("The e-Tolls, strange bedfellows and ideological confusion"). It is important that the socialist left in South Africa sustains (or is it a question of reviving?) the traditions of vibrant left debate. In so doing, hopefully we will help to shift the centre of gravity of public discourse and debates, and we will help each other to sharpen and develop a socialist agenda for our country - however much we might differ along the way.

First, let me state up-front, for those who may have missed the original article, that the SACP's position (and indeed my own) is that the R20bn spent on Phase A1 of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) was a serious strategic mistake. Adding extra lanes and other improvements to 180kms of freeways used predominantly (but NOT exclusively) by the middle classes, in a province in which some 60% of households have no access to a car whatsoever, was (and is) emphatically not a working class or pro-poor priority.

Moreover, the project is unlikely to achieve its own limited principal objective. In the "feasibility" study done by the UCT Graduate School of Business, relieving congestion was seen as the main strategic objective of this multi-billion rand project. Yes, there are serious congestion challenges in Gauteng and in some other metropolitan areas. But international evidence is overwhelming that expanding freeway systems (even with tolling) seldom relieves congestion beyond a short window period of a few years at most.

More freeway space induces more traffic and also spurs property speculators to drive greater urban sprawl with more outlying golf-estates, shopping malls, and corporate office blocks of the kind that have spread like the plague across the Midrand and all those other car-commuting middle class localities.

The way in which to resolve congestion and (especially in the South African case) to democratize and deracialise our cities is to prioritise public transport; to shift much more freight off the roads and on to rail; to ensure mixed-use and mixed-income spatial development, with higher levels of settlement density; to construct good corridor development along public transport routes; and generally to reassert democratic, participatory public control over land-use planning and infrastructure priorities.

These have been the consistent grounds upon which the SACP (often alone -until the recent e-toll crisis) has criticized the strategic wisdom of the whole GFIP proposal. Whatever the merits of cde Jim's critique of GFIP, he fails to locate the e-toll debate within a wider class, national democratic and, indeed, socialist strategic context. The DA's Jack Bloom, along with the big car-hire corporations like Avis and Budget are saying: "We don't want to pay e-tolls. We have already paid for this infrastructure out of our taxes." (As if it were only companies and the DA's constituency that paid tax).

Cde Jim's position is that the expanded and enhanced freeway system in Gauteng should be paid for by a more progressive taxation system. I don't disagree with cde Jim that our tax system could be considerably more progressive. But notice how, while cde Jim's position is somewhat more progressive than that of Jack Bloom or Avis, he is not fundamentally challenging the paradigm itself.

Nowhere does he challenge the wisdom of focusing on a multi-billion rand public expenditure on a freeway expansion in the richest province in our country. Nowhere does he ask serious questions about making a revolutionary impact on the mobility and access challenges facing the South African working class and popular strata.

If we DID have a more progressive taxation system, would he want to saddle it with this R20bn rand price tag? Would he want to proceed with the remaining 400-odd kilometres in the planned GFIP programme? 

I will come back to these matters shortly. But first let me respond briefly to a sampling of the arguments leveled against me by cde Jim.

Item number one - defining a "public good". Cde Jim begins by getting into a tangle over the definition of a "public good". Roads are (or should be) a public good, he says. I agree. But, he adds, household electricity is a "social necessity", not a public good. The basis for this distinction, according to Cde Jim, is that household electricity is consumed "privately", while "a public good is non-rival and non-exclusive, i.e. its use by one person does not exclude others from using it."

Cde Jim may well be right that this is how a "public good" is defined in conservative, first-year university economic text-books, but it is a definition that can easily obscure many critical things. For instance, a free-way that is not tolled might very well offer theoretical free access to all. The use of it by one car doesn't exclude another car. But this is vulgar economics. Freeways by design exclude many categories of users - pedestrians, donkey carts and cyclists. Dozens of coal trucks operating daily on a rural road quickly destroy the road surface and therefore deny this resource to others in the short to medium term.

Road design is always about rivalries and exclusions, and these always ultimately have a class dimension. On the N2 in Cape Town, for instance, there is an exclusive public transport lane for the morning peak period from which private cars are excluded. This has been of great benefit to workers from Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain commuting to work in minibuses and buses, lessening travel times by as much as 25 minutes. BUT, on the homeward bound trip in the evening there is NO dedicated public transport lane. Why? Getting workers to work on time is of shared interest to workers and bosses alike. But getting home to a distant dormitory township to be with your family, or to attend a civic meeting, or a school governing body - well, that's no longer the boss's time.

Without getting more tangled in definitional niceties, as far as the SACP is concerned the struggle for socialism is the struggle to decommodify all socially necessary and useful goods and services by affirming them as public resources. How these resources are consumed - whether out in public (as a park, or a beach, or a road) or in a household (water, electricity) is irrelevant to the basic socialist principle of socializing and (where necessary) rationing public resources and services in favour of the working class and popular strata. Cde Jim's distinction based on the manner of consumption fails to break with the classic liberal public vs. private paradigm.

Which brings me to the next confusion.

Item number two - "users shouldn't pay/users should pay". I invite readers to scan carefully, in slow motion replay, the heart of cde Jim's argument which is contained in the following sentences:

"COSATU's view is that the user pay principle should not be used on public goods and essential goods that are produced by the public sector." 
The next sentence goes on: "This does not at all mean that ‘users must not pay', that would be ridiculous."

But hang on, what exactly is being said here? Is he saying: A. That users shouldn't pay; or B. That users should pay? Could it be that what he is saying is that direct users shouldn't have to pay for public and essential goods produced by the public sector, and that these should be paid through a progressive taxation regime? (As we will see in a moment, this isn't what cde Jim is consistently saying. But perhaps he is happy for us to get the impression that this is what he is saying, when in fact he is saying something else.)

He goes on: "What it means is that the manner in which pricing should occur [i.e. we are no longer speaking just about funding out of the general fiscus] should be redistributive, being sensitive to the deep inequalities that are embedded in our society. In other words, the pricing of such items [i.e. "public goods" and "essential goods"] should shift resources from the upper classes to the lower classes."

I agree 100 percent with these last two sentences (apart from the rather Victorian notion of "upper" and "lower" classes). These last sentences are, indeed, a neat summary of the core of my argument in my intervention last week. I agree that in principle public goods like roads should be funded primarily and overwhelmingly out of the general fiscus, resourced by progressive taxation.

But I also agree that for progressive rationing purposes, charging users for access to public goods can also be considered. Particularly in a class society, and particularly in SA, not all users are equal, and there should be positive class discrimination applied in pricing. What I was arguing last week was that getting certain categories of users to pay for a public good like a road CAN be a means for a progressive class redistribution of what should be a public resource.

There are some elements of this in the current GFIP toll proposals - the complete exemption of buses and minibuses, for instance. But overwhelmingly (with or without tolls) the GFIP process represents an anti-working class biased allocation of R20bn for infrastructure that caters largely (although not exclusively) for the needs of the relatively wealthy. For instance, a recent vehicle count on the road network that is about to be tolled revealed that buses and minibuses only constitute a paltry 2% of the traffic!

This whole critical section of cde Jim's intervention amounts to an obfuscation. He is basically saying "we reject the user-pay principle" but "we accept user-pay in practice" - provided the practice is appropriate (and that last part was exactly my argument).

Item number three - my so-called "degraded un-Marxist view of value-as-weight, the heavier a vehicle the more it should pay." - I wasn't arguing that the heavier a loaded vehicle is, the more valuable it is. I was saying that a single axle of a loaded large truck, regardless of whether it is transporting horse manure or platinum, causes approximately 40,000 times more wear and tear to a road surface than a car. And this is why it is legitimate in a tolling situation to charge large trucks more than cars for the use of a public road (although no-one is suggesting that the charges should be tens of thousands times more). Public roads are paid for and maintained at public expense.

Why should we be massively subsidizing private truck operators (a sector dominated by major corporations)? This has particular relevance given the necessity of shifting much more freight off our roads and onto rail. One of the reasons why our PUBLICLY-owned Transnet Freight Rail has become uncompetitive against private road freight is that TFR has to pay for its own infrastructure and its maintenance.

Shifting freight onto rail has several important economic and social objectives - making our roads safer, preserving our roads better, cutting down on economically wasteful road congestion, and switching to a more energy efficient and less polluting mode. Positively discriminatory user-charges in this case can therefore help to achieve progressive objectives. None of this has anything to do with a weight = value argument!

Item number four (and perhaps the most ludicrous of cde Jim's arguments) - I wrote last week that a progressive version of e-tolling is to be found in many cities with good public transport networks applying "congestion charging" - basically tolls to discourage private cars and commercial vehicles from entering CBDs. I mentioned London (I could have cited many other cities) as one excellent example of how congestion charging has liberated public spaces for pedestrians, young children and the elderly, and for public transport modes, while transforming what were once congested, polluted, and unfriendly places.

Cde Jim's response to this argument is that the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron has announced an intention to privatize public roads! Go figure! That's a bit like arguing that the German Karl Marx was wrong because look what the German Angela Merkel has been saying lately.

Congestion charging and other socially transformative measures were introduced into London, as it happens, by the independent socialist mayor, Ken Livingstone, with strong support from the trade unions and progressive social movements and in the teeth of opposition from property speculators, the Conservative Party and, indeed, many of Livingstone's former colleagues in the reformist Labour Party.

But enough of detailed rebuttals. Cde Jim has been in the forefront of a campaign to discredit the participation of leading SACP comrades in government. I don't believe that this particular anti-participation argument has been used in his current polemic with me - or if so, only subliminally. But in other cases cde Jim has often explicitly said that participation in government by SACP leaders invariably leads to selling-out on socialism and the working class.

I don't have a problem with comrades being vigilant about the danger of governmental co-option - which, of course, exists as a danger. Vigilance in this regard is critical, provided the vigilance is not factional or populist. However, it is not just positions of authority in government that can lead to cooption and opportunism. In the course of the mining debate, many comrades in the National Mineworkers' Union wondered why the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers' was so vociferous in support of nationalizing the mines and so silent about nationalizing other monopoly sectors of the economy (the auto sector for instance).

By the way I think that calling for the nationalization of the auto sector wouldn't be a very viable idea in the present, and I have never for one moment imagined that cde Jim's positioning in this regard was as a result of cooption by Volkswagen, BMW or GM. Nor do I imagine that the considerable overlap in his views on e-tolling with those adopted by Avis, Budget Car Hire or the Automobile Association has anything remotely to do with the same kind of auto sector cooption.

But let's agree that we all need to be vigilant about the possible limitations of perspective that our various positions of authority are liable to foster. I hope that cde Jim will carry his justifiable dissatisfaction with the GFIP project beyond mere oppositionism and beyond the important but limited question of how we should pay for the Phase A1 R20bn public debt that we now have. The broad public dissatisfaction with the project creates space to provide concrete leadership on a much wider set of strategic issues. What are the key working class and democratic infrastructure priorities in our country?

How do we de-racialise and democratize our towns and cities - whose spatial arrangements continue to impose a huge (non-electronic) toll on the lives of working class and popular strata? How do we move from simple oppositionism to asserting, through state and popular power, a working class hegemony over town planning, land-use management, and the provision and pricing of transport and transport infrastructure?

Proletarian communities continue to be stranded in distant dormitory townships and informal settlements, and condemned to daily migrancy, travelling over long distances to work and basic amenities. The original sin in the GFIP project was not the decision to toll, but the decision to proceed with a multi-billion rand infrastructure project that will reproduce and entrench the many racial and class spatial inequalities and economic inefficiencies that afflict the Gauteng province and, indeed, the rest of South Africa.

Jeremy Cronin is SACP deputy general secretary. This article first appeared in the Party's online journal Umsebenzi Online.

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