AFRICAN COMMUNIST

The poverty of pragmatism without boundaries

Cde Joel Netshitenzhe’s ‘two delinks’ is based on a misunderstanding of the 1994 democratic breakthrough, writes Cde Jeremy Cronin

Cde Joel Netshitenzhe’s (“The ‘two delinks’ and the poverty of radicalism”, (AC December 2014) engages polemically with the SACP’s discussion document Going to the root – towards a radical, second phase of the NDR. Cde Netshitenzhe’s intervention is useful for several reasons. In the first place, there is broad consensus within our movement that we are at a critical moment in our post-apartheid reality.

Robust but comradely debate is one of the key requirements if we are to rise to the challenges of our time and develop effective strategic responses. We can no longer simply rely on the recitation of platitudes, or the fudging of differences for the sake of a false unity. In the second place, there are important (if somewhat random, as I will go on to argue) points of convergence between Cde Netshitenzhe’s intervention and the SACP’s discussion document. Where these exist, they are to be welcomed.

Thirdly, however, and most importantly, Cde Netshitenzhe’s intervention exposes the underlying ideological assumptions that succeeded in being hegemonic within the ANC and ANC-led government from the mid-1990s and for the better part of a decade. For most of this period, along with former President Thabo Mbeki, Cde Netshitenzhe was arguably the leading ANC ideologist. It is important to unpack what I think are the illusions and confusions of this school of thought if we are to understand why (a now belated) second radical phase of our national democratic revolution is imperative. For this reason this engagement with Cde Netshitenzhe’s “Two De-links” intervention will necessarily range more widely than a simple rejoinder to that paper itself.

The school of thought exemplified in Cde Netshitenzhe’s ideological assumptions still has some resonance in South Africa within our movement and beyond it. The political and economic policy orientations of this school of thought have resulted in a costly loss of progressive momentum following the historic 1994 democratic breakthrough.

Before diving directly into a critique of Cde Netshitenzhe’s “Two delinks” intervention, therefore, it is important to go all the way back to the contradictory interpretations that were given to the democratic breakthrough of 1994. It was a critical moment at which previously latent divisions within the national liberation movement began to crystallise into distinct ideological tendencies.

The disputed meaning of 1994

A useful way of beginning to illustrate what these emerging tendencies were is to contrast how the respective official organs of the SACP and ANC at the time sought to characterise events. In the weeks immediately after the 1994 democratic breakthrough, symbolised at least for the SACP by millions of South Africans standing in line to vote for the first ever one-person, one-vote election in our country, the African Communist editorial acclaimed the breakthrough. At the same time, it advisedly displayed a cover with the slogan “A Luta Continua!” – The struggle continues.

The ANC’s official publication at the time, Mayibuye, which was then edited by Cde Netshitenzhe, had a very different message. Rather than featuring the mass, non-racial turnout on voting day, Mayibuye chose as its cover a photo of a fly-past of air-force jets over Union Buildings on the occasion of the May 10, 1994 presidential inauguration of President Mandela. The headline proclaimed: “FREE AT LAST!” Inside, the journal’s editorial took up the theme: “The moment has arrived. Liberation. Real change. National Democratic Revolution. Call it what you may.”

Note in passing that the editorialist was not entirely sure how to characterise “THE moment” – an early symptom of the confusions we need to explore more fully below. The editorial then proceeds, with considerable but perhaps understandable hyperbole, to portray “THE moment” as the culmination of centuries of popular struggle: “It is the moment that flashed through the minds of many a hero as they succumbed to the assassin’s bullet, the hangman’s noose and the torturer’s fatal blow…It was slow in coming. From the forbearers’ welcoming embrace many centuries ago which was returned with a suffocating grip. And the modest beginnings of mass action, armed struggle and underground work. To the wrangles in the negotiating chambers and Third Force violence. And, at the apex, the attempted sabotage of the electoral process…”

In short, the text is anointing the MOMENT (and by association the newly elected ANC-led government) with the legitimacy of centuries of struggle. But then the text does a sudden U-turn, it moves from proclaiming the arrival of REAL CHANGE, the apex moment, to characterising what has happened as just another milestone on a long march. “Yet we dare not forget in the din of the cry of success [as if the editorial were not part of making the ‘din’]…the march has been long and difficult; but we have only reached a milestone…The real battle, beyond pomp and ceremony and the symbolism of a new flag and anthem, has just begun.”

We have in the matter of a few sentences switched from celebrating “THE moment”, “REAL change”, to an effective denial of these very claims. We are now merely at the beginning. Was all that happened in THE moment little more than “din”, “pomp and ceremony”, and the “symbolism” of a new flag and anthem?

What the editorial might have said is that the April 1994 democratic elections and the May 1994 inauguration of a new president marked moments in an important breakthrough in an on-going national democratic revolutionary struggle. But it doesn’t. It veers from one extreme to the other, over-selling and then promptly under-selling the significance of the 1994 democratic breakthrough. Why?

There is a political agenda nestled within this U-turn which soon becomes evident as we proceed with the Mayibuye editorial: “Now, ordinary people will rejoice only at the sight of the foundation of the first of the million houses that have to be built over the next five years…Now is the time to make good the election pledge. In this regard, the words of a writer on the French Revolution [the reference is to Tocqueville] are instructive: ‘Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.’ In June, allocations from the budget will be decided upon. A modest beginning can then be made…”

We have moved from REAL CHANGE to small change, from the heroic to the bureaucratic. The quote from Tocqueville gives the game away the newly installed political elite will now have to do everything to manage down rising popular expectations. The concern of the editorial is not to mobilise the millions who came out loyally to vote ANC to advance, deepen and defend, as their own self-emancipators, the democratic breakthrough. Its concern is to put the genie of popular activism back into the bottle. If 1994 marks a juridicalpolitical break with apartheid it must also, so the editorial implicitly argues, mark a break with a previous era of popular struggle – a luta dis-continua.

Invoking the Tocqueville quotation, the editorial now suggests that prior to 1994 popular forces in South Africa “patiently endured” their grievances, which is contradicted both by historical reality as well as the editorial’s own immediately preceding claims of centuries of struggle against injustice (although note how in the paragraph quoted above liberation fighters are all portrayed only as “victims” and not also as liberators).

After 1994, “ordinary people” cease to become activists and turn into spectators (“Now ordinary people will rejoice only at the SIGHT of the foundation of the first of the million houses that have to be built over the next five years…”). From now on it is a question of a delivery-state implementing its technical managerial responsibilities – in short, the text has shifted the domain of the political from a national liberation struggle combining newly won state power with popular power to an inventory of state bureaucratic tasks.

A misreading of the early 1990s becomes a misreading of the present

I have devoted some time to this 1994 Mayibuye editorial because it provides a window onto the fundamental political posture and assumptions that continue to inform Cde Netshitenzhe’s understanding of the present conjuncture and our tasks within it. That posture is informed by a misreading of what was at stake in the negotiations period of the early 1990s, and the application of this misreading to our present situation.

We bump into evidence of this in his “Two delinks” intervention.

Cde Netshitenzhe then proceeds: “And so, in situations where there is a debilitating stalemate and the contending forces are unable to defeat each other, it becomes critical to make a choice about pursuing a scorched earth policy or negotiating to identify common interests for mutual benefit. South Africa’s political settlement of the 1990s was precisely a product of this realisation, because the regime had come to accept that it could not stop the popular march of the people.” (p.48)

Let’s take the passage quoted above carefully, because it goes to the heart of many things.

Was the South African political and economic conjuncture in the early 1990s a “debilitating stalemate” in which the contending classes faced “common ruin”? There is, of course, a partial truth in this. The rising waves of semi-insurrectionary popular struggle from the mid-1970s, through the 1980s and into the early 90s had proved to be unstoppable, but also incapable of the armed overthrow of the regime.

This latter fact was the case for a variety of objective reasons – notably the imbalance of armed capacity between the popular forces and the apartheid regime, and the relatively strong white racial cohesion of the apartheid regime’s police and army command structures. The strategic decision by the liberation movement to embark on negotiations for a constitutional political settlement in this context was correct.

But notice how the quote from the Communist Manifesto, upon which Cde Netshitenzhe is relying for ideological cover at this point, speaks of “contending CLASSES”, whereas Cde Netshitenzhe speaks of “contending FORCES”. The ANC-led liberation movement and the apartheid regime were certainly the main contending forces at the multi-party negotiations in the early 1990s, but they were not, in themselves, the main “contending classes” – the ANC was not “the proletariat”, and the apartheid regime, conversely, was not “the bourgeoisie”.

If we are to understand what was at stake in the early 1990s constitutional negotiations, then we also need to cut behind the ANC versus apartheid state line-up and understand the strategic class agendas at play – in particular, those of South African monopoly capital and its imperialist backers. As the Going to the root discussion document argues, monopoly capital in South Africa did not emerge organically out of local productive activity, rather it was transplanted into our country at a relatively advanced imperialist stage from the late-19th century. National monopoly capital, working closely with imperialist capital, emerged in the course of the 20th century under the protection of successive white minority regimes.

However, by the late-1980s the apartheid white minority regime had become increasingly dysfunctional for South African monopoly capital, and increasingly replaceable for imperialism. For the latter, the end of proxy-Cold War regional wars (not least those in Southern Africa) meant that the strategic advantage for imperialism of an embarrassing but useful sub-imperialist gendarme state in Pretoria was outweighed by many other considerations. For South African monopoly capital, growing international isolation with economic, financial and oil sanctions, the fiscal cost of increasing security expenditures, and the apartheid regime’s economic defensive measures (tough  exchange controls, the financial rand, etc.) hit profits seriously.

Apartheid South Africa’s increasing isolation also meant that it was difficult for South African monopoly capital to follow its international peers in taking the on-ramp to the globalisation freeway. Remember, it was precisely in the 1980s that national capitals in the advanced capitalist economies in particular began to globalise very aggressively to overcome stagnating growth at home and in pursuit of newly opened, low-wage economies like China.

For these reasons, both the key imperialist centres and local monopoly capital applied significant pressure on the apartheid regime to enter into negotiations with the ANC to “normalise” and “democratise” South Africa. It was a risk for monopoly capital, but a necessary risk. The strategic agenda was not to create a substantive democracy, or commit seriously to a patriotic process of reconstruction and development, still less to advance national sovereignty based on a democratic electoral mandate. Monopoly capital’s strategic agenda was to lock the ANC into an elite-pacting, low-intensity democracy that would enable South African monopoly capital to rapidly trans-nationalise under the cover of a globally iconic Mandela government.

I don’t belong to the school of thought that argues the negotiations and the resulting constitutional and political settlement were a “sell-out”. As the SACP’s Going to the root discussion document argues, they marked a significant breakthrough and a potential platform from which to decisively further advance, deepen and defend a national democratic revolution.

But the 1994 democratic breakthrough was also a potential platform for a very different class strategic agenda, that of imperialism and South African monopoly capital. Two decades later, while it would be wrong to argue that the national democratic revolution has been defeated, or that there have not been important advances for the majority of South Africans, it is South African monopoly capital that has been most able to advance its strategic agenda. It has been the principal beneficiary of our democratic breakthrough.

This is why Cde Netshitenzhe’s implicit view is wrong that our current South African conjuncture is similar to the one that prevailed in the early 1990s – a situation, in his words: “…where there is a debilitating stalemate and the contending forces are unable to defeat each other, [and it therefore] becomes critical to make a choice about pursuing a scorched earth policy or negotiating to identify common interests for mutual benefit.”

Apart from too starkly presenting alternatives as either “scorched earth” or “negotiations”, this is a major misreading of our reality. In 2015, South African (or rather considerably trans-nationalised, ex-South African) monopoly capital does not regard itself as being caught in a debilitating stalemate. It is actively pursuing its profit maximising agenda through capital flight (by way of tax havens, dual listings, transfer pricing, etc.) and, at home, oligopolistic collusion, an investment strike, and the aggressive restructuring of the working class through retrenchments, casualisation, informalisation and labour brokering. Inserting its DNA into government, the ruling party and even the trade union movement – through investment arms, corruption and tenderpreneuring is also part of the considerably successful strategic agenda of monopoly capital.

A second radical phase of the NDR

The second radical phase of the NDR (that the ANC and its alliance partners have now agreed is absolutely imperative) is, in fact, a phase that should have been embarked upon immediately from the bridgehead of the 1994 democratic breakthrough. Clearly, the editor of Mayibuye back in 1994 had no such intentions.

It was a moment in which South African monopoly capital was relatively off-balance, having taken the risk of losing the protective shield of white minority rule, and having not yet effectively insinuated itself to the present degree into the liberation movement and key components of the new political elite.

Of course, we must be careful not to over-state the possibilities open to the liberation movement in April 1994. Given the global and national reality of our situation both in 1994 and in 2015, a second radical phase could not be, and still cannot be, a fool-hardy “great leap forward”, a “scorched earth policy”, a frontal insurrectionary assault on imperialism and monopoly capital. This is the straw man that Cde Netshitenzhe and his school of thought still like to tilt at with sarcastic little barbs.

A second radical phase of the NDR has to be a “war of position” (to evoke Gramsci’s concept). It is a struggle across all of the trenches of the state and society for transformative revolutionary-reforms (to evoke a wide range of contemporary radical writers) – but not “reformism” (not improvements that reinforce rather than transform the systemic features of our political  economy which, in turn, lock us into our problematic path dependency).

Path dependency

Speaking of “path dependency”, Cde Netshitenzhe appears to agree with the SACP’s “Second Radical Phase of the NDR” discussion paper that the current “path dependency” of South Africa’s political economy needs to be transformed. But nowhere in this or his other interventions is he able to provide a clear analysis of the systemic features of this path dependency. In the SACP’s discussion paper it was precisely the systemic inter-linkages between a variety of challenges (from our largely untransformed socio-economic spatial realities, for instance, to our persisting patterns of racialised inequality, to our “low savings” ratios, to high levels of monopoly concentration) that were underlined.

The central thesis of the SACP discussion paper is that these and other chronic symptoms of the South African reality are part of a systemic whole, directly related to South Africa’s historic positioning as a semi-periphery within a global imperialist system as a primary commodity exporter based on “cheap” (racially, gendered and spatially oppressed and reproduced) labour.

This is, of course, not a new perspective. It is to be found in a formative way in the 1929 Black Republic resolutions of the Communist Part of South Africa, which were elaborated further in the 1962 SACP’s programmatic perspective of colonialism of a special type. From at least 1969 and the Morogoro Conference, the ANC shared the same strategic analysis of the South African reality.

It underpinned the commitment to a NDR that was (and that had to be) simultaneously a struggle against the systemically linked internal colonialism within South Africa (“apartheid”), and against imperialist rent extraction and even the threat of imperialist military destabilisation from without. The ANC’s 1969 Morogoro strategy and tactics noted that: “the major imperialist powers such as Britain, West Germany, France, US and Japan who have an enormous stake in the economy of our country constitute a formidable support for the Apartheid regime...In a situation of crisis they may pass over from support to active intervention to save the racist regime.”

Before 1994 both the SACP and the ANC understood that the NDR was critically about the inter-linked tasks of democratic popular sovereignty (the people shall govern) and democratic national sovereignty (the right to national self-determination, to determine our own developmental path based on a popular democratic mandate, and as free as possible from the bullying of the IMF, the World Bank, the ratings agencies, and the imperialist core countries).

The disappearance of imperialism

It is against this background that the SACP’s Going to the root discussion document notes with concern that: “The concept of ‘imperialism’ disappeared from official ANC programmatic documents in the 1990s and early 2000s. Linked to this vanishing act was the exaggerated ‘exceptionalism’ attributed to apartheid and the related view that apartheid was essentially all about ‘racism’ – which it partly was, of course, but with ‘racism’ becoming de-linked from any objective systemic socio-economic realities.” (AC, p.13)

This passage is arguing three interrelated things:

The concept of “imperialism” disappeared from ANC programmatic documents in the 1990s and early 2000s. (And, we should stress, we mean the concept of imperialism, not the mere demagogic use of the word. By the concept of imperialism, we mean, briefly, an understanding of how the defining feature of capitalism over the past 140 years has been the global process of combined and uneven development, of development and simultaneous under-development, characterised by the extraction of vast amounts of surplus from the periphery by an imperialist core).

As a result, instead of understanding and locating “apartheid” within a wider family of imperialist forms of domination (colonialism, neo-colonialism, semi-colonialism, and combined and uneven development in general) it came to be treated as universally “exceptional”, a global “outlier”, an “anomaly” in an otherwise “normal” world. It was no longer seen as the specific juridical-political form in which South Africa’s capitalist political economy was linked into the imperialist system for much of the second half of the 20th century.

Which, in turn, resulted in apartheid tending to be reduced to racism (it certainly WAS racist), but without understanding its role (and that of white minority rule in general) in reproducing South Africa’s semi-peripheral capitalist political economy within imperialist surplus extraction.

How does Cde Netshitenzhe respond to this? Well, as if to confirm the very argument he believes he is defeating, he makes imperialism disappear once again. “Is it true”, he asks rhetorically, “that there has been a ‘vanishing act’ in ANC programmatic documents with regard to class analysis…?” (p.43). He goes on to quote from the ANC’s 2007 Strategy and Tactics document: “Our definition of Colonialism of a Special Type identifies three interrelated antagonistic contradictions: class, race and patriarchal oppression…”

But it is one thing to evoke “three interrelated antagonistic contradictions” in South Africa and another thing to understand how class, race and patriarchal oppression in South Africa locked (and in many respects still locks) our economy into a global imperialist system of surplus extraction.

This is not a semantic point. There was an influential, if implicit assumption in much of the ANC after 1990 that the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the two-bloc, Cold War global reality somehow also meant that imperialism had disappeared. Perhaps the most egregious example of this illusion was provided by former President Thabo Mbeki who, on returning from a 2002 G8 Summit, hailed its outcome as the “birth of a more equitable system of international relations. In historical terms, it signifies the end of the epoch of colonialism and neo-colonialism.” (Sunday Times, 30 June 2002)

In Cde Netshitenzhe’s intervention the continued vanishing act of imperialism is a critical aspect of his inability to “get to the root”, to provide a systemic analysis of South Africa’s economy “path dependency”, and therefore chart a strategic way forward.

A “broad front” social compact?

In his “Two Delinks” intervention Cde Netshitenzhe claims that the SACP’s Going to the root discussion document “rubbishes the call for social compacting in South Africa”, and he goes on to argue: “However, if sufficient attention had been paid to the arguments about a social compact in the National Development Plan…it would have become patently clear that this draws inspiration from the theory of broad fronts, the concept of developmental states, and the appreciation of strategy and tactics within the given balance of forces.” (p.48)

He is wrong to say that the SACP’s discussion document rubbishes the idea of social compacts in general. Our concern is with the particular version of a social compact advocated by Cde Netshitenzhe. It is the same version of a social compact elaborated upon in the final chapter of the National Development Plan – a chapter to which, one suspects, Cde Netshitenzhe, in his capacity as a national planning commissioner, made a major contribution. So let’s take his advice and pay “sufficient attention…to the arguments about a social compact in the National Development Plan”.

Social compacts and the NDP

The NDP, in fact, has a very garbled approach to social contracts/ compacts (it uses the words interchangeably, pp.475-7). The NDP first defines social contracts in general: “a social contract…at the core is an agreement among individual people in society or between the people and their government that outlines the rights and duties of each party while building national solidarity.” (p.475 – my emphases)

The status of the conjunction “or” is unclear – are these essentially the same kind of compact, or are they two different kinds of compact? They surely are different. However, the NDP shows no hint of an awareness of this difference. But it quickly becomes even more unclear when it begins to elaborate on the kind of social contract/compact it aspires to be. Having told us that social contracts are at core “among individuals” (Version One) and/or “between the people and government” (Version Two) – it then begins to advance itself more or less explicitly as the basis for a third version of a social contract – a stakeholder contract. This third version is what the NDP describes as “a social compact… [in which] all stakeholders buy into a clearly articulated vision” (p.475). But, as we turn to page 476 we discover that “ALL stakeholders” are just three stakeholders business, labour and government.

The NDP is proposing itself as the basis for this kind of tripartite compact. As the text makes clear, it is essentially a deal between labour and business mediated by government. Labour agrees “to accept lower wage increases than their productivity gains would dictate” and “in return, business agrees that the resulting increase in profits would not be taken out of the country or consumed in the form of higher executive remuneration or luxuries, but rather reinvested in ways that generate employment as well as growth.” (p.476). The role of government is to monitor compliance on the deal and to act as a mediator, and to smooth the way for a continued buy-in from labour and business, by lowering the cost of living for workers through “implementing a social wage” and by reducing the cost of doing business for business.

But the unannounced slippage between Versions One and Two, and then the further slippage between these two and a tripartite stakeholder Version Three social contract has the practical impact of disguising the effective exclusion from this proposed deal of millions of South Africans who are not “government” nor “business” or “labour”. The excluded in this tripartite contract would, in the first place, be the 37% of South Africans of working age who are unemployed, many of whom are quasi-citizens still living as subjects under customary law in former bantustans. Also effectively excluded would be a mass of middle strata. But even within the categories of “business” and “labour” who would represent the respective “stakeholder constituencies” in signing off on the social contract?

We are, of course, treated to a daily media bombardment reminding us that trade unions do not represent all of labour. This is, indeed, the case above all because of aggressive restructuring of production and the labour market through retrenchments, casualisation, labour brokering, informalisation by one of the proposed “partners” “business”. Despite an array of progressive labour laws enacted since 1994, the levels of unionisation in the private sector have declined dramatically. In 1997, 36% of workers in the private sector were unionised. In 2013, this had dropped to 24%. (The trend has been in the opposite direction in the public sector. In 1997, 55% of workers in the public sector were unionised. By 2013 this had climbed to nearly 70%.)

And what about “business”? Is there a univocal policy package that represents “business” interests? Do all sectors of capital share the same macro-economic policy agenda? Or is what passes for the “business” macro-economic agenda, for instance, not actually the agenda of financialised, multi-national monopoly capital? The macroeconomic views of South Africa’s Manufacturing Circle for instance, however cautiously expressed, sometimes differ from this assumed “business” consensus see for instance an intervention by the Manufacturing Circle’s executive director, Coenraad Bezuidenhout “Look beyond the rand for a route to economic recovery”, Business Day, 26 June 2013. Nor is the Manufacturing Circle itself united – the strategic interests of some of its members, like Arcelor Mittal for instance, have little if anything to do with the patriotic development of South Africa, and everything do with the interests of foreign share-holders. For others within the Manufacturing Circle, not to mention thousands of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, their profitmaximising agendas are objectively (and not sentimentally) more bound to the fortunes of a South African developmental trajectory. From a progressive perspective, do we want to “unite” all of business behind a single “voice” (which given its power would inevitably be the voice of transnationalised monopoly capital necessarily pursuing the “maximising” of largely foreign “share-holder value”) to secure a tripartite social compact? Or do we want to disarticulate the different and conflicting interests of different sectors and strata of capital, the better to be able to drive a patriotic, national democratic growth and development agenda?

The 1994/6 negotiated compacts and the present

At the heart of the NDP’s confusion here (and it is perhaps a central confusion) is the mistaken assumption that the “social contract(s)” (to use the term provisionally) of 1994-96 can be replicated now to address our persisting socio-economic crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality. The NDP is arguably correct to observe that:

“The settlement that was produced through the negotiations in the 1990s and the Constitution…were effectively national compacts.” (p.475) (Note, in passing, the wobble between the singular noun “settlement”, which is the subject of the sentence, and the plural verb “were” – a symptom perhaps of the confusion as to whether Versions 1 and 2 of a social compact are the same thing, or two different things?)

The elections of 1994 might be seen as an implicit Version One compact – an overwhelming majority of individual adult South Africans, black and white, participating in a one-person one-vote election constituted themselves as a “people”, as a new non-racial “we” – regardless of how they/we actually voted. And the 1996 adoption of the Constitution through an elected Constituent Assembly (the product of 1994) might be seen as a Version Two social compact, an agreement on the rights and obligations of government and the newly constituted we-the-people South African citizens.

But we need to understand the very different character of a democratic, constitutional settlement and a strategy of action to overcome the crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality embedded in a reproduced legacy of socio-economic under-development. In the early 1990s, as we have argued above, the balance of forces in South Africa (and internationally) was propitious for fostering a very broad-based national South African consensus on a non-racial constitutional democracy. The objective conditions for replicating the SAME broadbased national consensus to address our systemic crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality do not exist.

The compact on a constitutional democracy and a plan of action to address socio-economic injustices are not the same thing. The latter will require the construction of a different patriotic, or national democratic, bloc of forces. This was a point implicitly appreciated (or rather feared) by Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert when, writing in 1992 from a typical elite-pacting liberal perspective, he warned “one of the most daunting challenges facing [a future government] is to protect the new political space created by negotiations from being used to contest the historical imbalances that precipitated negotiation in the first place…”

But from a progressive perspective the whole point of the “new political space” was (and is) to use the democratic power of majority-rule to address the (largely socio-economic) “imbalances”. Unless these “imbalances” are addressed, it is the “new political space” itself, our constitutional democracy that will be (and is being) eroded. It is not a question now (as some have suggested) of abandoning the constitutional social compact – but rather of constituting within that broader compact a new popular bloc, a majoritarian but pluralistic bloc of progressive, patriotic forces, including, for instance, where possible and on a tactical basis, productive capital in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, to drive systemic social and economic transformation.

This agenda will need to oppose powerful opponents, notably the still hegemonic neo-liberal, globalised monopoly capital sector within and beyond South Africa and the related, Van Zyl Slabbert-type political agenda, seeking to reduce democratic politics (as the DA does) to “rules of the game”, “good governance” and “efficiency” – but not serious transformation.

South Africa – a Nordic Tiger of the South?

In the SACP’s Going to the root discussion document, it is argued that, whatever the historic merits of West European post-1945 social compacts might have been, by the early 1990s these compacts had long been eroded in the heartlands of social democracy by the abandonment of Keynesian demand-side macro-economics, an assault on trade unions, and the related processes of accelerated globalisation and financialisation.

The SACP document further argued that these social democratic projects were basically confined to parts of the advanced capitalist world, and in the particular context of “patriotic” capitalist reconstruction and development programmes to rebuild war-torn economies. A further context is that, at the global level, capitalism was now challenged by a vastly expanded socialist bloc in Eastern Europe making important advances in terms of full employment and extensive social security. The hey-day of these social democratic projects mainly in Western Europe lasted until the mid-1970s. In South Africa in 1994 we were neither living in the North nor in the period 1945-75. We were, and are, living in a society suffering serious colonially-related structural under-development and in a very different stage of global capitalism.

Cde Netshitenzhe does not address any of these arguments at all. His response consists in simply asserting that the version of social compacting he favours does not only draw on the West European social democratic tradition but also on the East Asian developmental state experience. He writes: “In brief, social compacting is not merely a post-World War 2 European phenomenon. And in the South African case, the ANC has argued [and he quotes from an ANC Strategy and Tactics document passage that he drafted]: ‘In terms of current political discourse, what [the ANC] seeks to put in place approximates , in many respects, a combination of the best elements of a developmental state and social democracy.’” (p.49)

It would be foolish to argue that there is absolutely nothing that can be learnt from these different examples. Indeed, at the time of a full flight into neo-liberalism with the Bretton Woods institutions and leading ANC politicians arguing for a down-sized, lean state, it was useful to cite the counter-examples of state-driven development in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. However, Cde Netshitenzhe’s belief that South Africa can become a hybrid, Nordic Asian Tiger of the South is misguided, and it is based on a serious misunderstanding not just of the conditions under which social democracy enjoyed its heyday after 1945 in some privileged parts of the capitalist world, but also on a serious misunderstanding of the Asian Tigers.

This is what Cde Netshitenzhe has to say about “the developmental states in Southeast Asia”: “There are many negative things from the early history of such states as South Korea, Malaysia and Japan, including, in most cases, the absence of democracy, the security imperative that was informed by anti-communism, and subordination to the dictates of the United States and other Western powers. Yet their achievements, in hindsight, stand as a monument to human achievement.” (pp.48-9)

Cde Netshitenzhe presents the “many negative things from the early history” of these states as if they were more or less unfortunate, external incidentals. But they were the critical ingredients underpinning South Korea’s relatively unique transition from underdevelopment to a path of capitalist development; a defeated Japan’s reintegration into the dominant imperialist core (along with the US and Europe); and, on a much more limited scale, some uneven capitalist development in Malaysia.

In the late 1940s and/or 1950s all three were under imperialist military occupation – Japan and South Korea were basically under US military occupation. In Malaysia British-led colonial troops waged a brutal anti-insurgency war during the socalled Malayan Emergency that lasted from 1948 to 1960. It targeted the patriotic forces under the leadership of the Malaya Communist Party that had led the armed, national liberation struggle against Japanese occupation during World War 2. The “absence of democracy” and the so-called “security imperative” were not merely momentary wobbles due to anti-communist sentiment.

Just as it is impossible to understand US imperialism’s massive investments and support for Western Europe after 1945 without factoring in the vastly expanded Soviet bloc reaching westwards to the river Elbe, so it is impossible to understand Japan’s recovery, and the economic advances made by South Korea and Taiwan (an Asian Tiger interestingly omitted in Cde Netshitenzhe’s list) without appreciating the impact of the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Imperialism’s front-line states in Southeast Asia, and their fiercely anti-democratic, anti-labour regimes, enjoyed investments, favourable trade agreements that were never accorded to Latin American or African societies at this time.

In Southern Africa, imperialist powers in this period were happy to let their interests be defended by Portuguese colonial regimes in Mozambique and Angola, an assortment of British colonial administrations, and the apartheid state in South Africa (and Namibia). If the Red Army’s post-World War 2 liberation of countries from foreign occupation had extended to the Zambezi, or if the Chinese Revolution had happened in the Congo, there might well have been a very different second-half 20th century trajectory for South Africa. Either, an advance to socialism as in Indo-China, or a massive imperialistdriven counter-offensive that would have decimated the ANC and SACP and constructed in South Africa, for a brief period, some kind of hybrid industrialising Nordic Tiger of the South, perhaps under the dictatorship of Gatsha Buthelezi. But that, of course, is all entirely speculative.

Despite his endless evocation of the “balance of forces”, Cde Netshitenzhe simply fails to understand the dominant trajectories of our epoch. For worse or, probably, for better South Africa in 2015 is not and could not become a Nordic Tiger of the South – which is why Cde Netshitenzhe’s “broad frontism”, amongst other things, is such a problematic aspiration.

Broad frontism a politics without boundaries

Cde Netshitenzhe presents his social compacting vision for South Africa as something that “rhymes with the theory and praxis of broad fronts; which have been the mainstay of progressive left politics over the centuries.” (p.49) It is true that progressive left forces, not least those associated with Communist Parties, have developed a range of front formations in different historical conjunctures. The call for a “united front” strategy, for instance, was advanced by the executive committee of the Communist International in December 1921. It was a call for the “greatest possible unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the united capitalists.” The context for this call was a slackening in the revolutionary tide in Europe. The call was designed to unite workers divided into communist and reformist (social democratic) formations.

In 1935, under the general secretary-ship of Georgi Dmitrov, the Communist International, in the context of a rising tide of fascism, moved beyond a class-on-class strategy, and called for national popular fronts – broadening the scope of fronts to include all democratic, anti-fascist forces. In China, during the period of Japanese occupation, what was called a United Front strategy was pursued, involving a troubled partnership between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang.

There are a host of other historical examples of broad front strategies from Chile to Vietnam, some successful others less so, pursued by progressive left forces. In South Africa, our shared national democratic strategy, our commitment to a broad national liberation movement, and our tripartite alliance have also all been an important contribution to the theory and practice of progressive front strategies.

But ALL of these fronts were against one or another class or social force – the bourgeoisie, imperialism, foreign military occupation, fascism, colonialism, etc. So what is Cde Netshitenzhe’s broad front against? His answer, I assume, is that it is a front against poverty or unemployment or inequality. These are the new “enemies” – as if there was no class-based system, as if there were no class interests, locally and globally, that perpetuated the reproduction of these crises within our society.