Re: SA's "revolution" Re: Dialogue from Black-Left

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx> 03/04/00 10:55PM >>>
Date sent:        Sat, 04 Mar 2000 11:33:21 -0500
From:             "Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

CB: Material conditions of Russians dropped immediately after 1917
revolution too, because of invasion. Most of the socialist revolutions
-Cuba, Korea, Mozambique, Angola, Soviets in WWII - have had periods
of poor material conditions following revolution.

PB: Ah, but in those cases the material conditions of the oppressors
also dropped immediately--ideally, to 0. Here they rose dramatically
(see inequality article below, which doesn't even take into account
the dramatic rise in rand-value of offshore investments made by
apartheid beneficiaries, since the ANC government dropped the main
exchange controls in 1995 and 1996).

**************

CB: At any rate , it does not make it not a revolution to shift from apartheid 
with an
explicitly racist regime, wherein Africans cannot vote, etc., to one wherein 
they can.
Of course , the other thing is that in all the above revolutions, imperialism 
forced
the populations to pay an enormous price in mass deaths for lowering the living
standards of the oppressors. The ANC leaders may have looked at this history , 
and
said they did not want Black S. Africa to go through a holocaust as other 
revolution
populations have.

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CB: Hard to believe there has been an actual step BACK in material
conditions. Little progress is plausible. You make the Apartheid
regime sound good.

PB: The point is to unveil neoliberalism's damage; and yes, in areas
ranging from per capita income to water access to housing to jobs to
transport to education (also public health but this is more
complicated given a policy of free PHC for pregnant women and
children plus reproductive rights, traded off against the collapse of
many public hospitals that treat black patients), I'd argue that the
1994-99 period was one of fairly rapid decay in material conditions
for the majority. The point is also to show that it didn't have to be
like this, and to explain how SA's "elite transition" was the outcome
of a series of explicit steps reflecting difficult conditions of both
structure and struggle.

**************

CB: You haven't proven that it didn't have to be like this , or worse as in the 
other
situations listed above wherein imperialism visite horrific wars on the 
revolutions
that expropriated the expropriators, and those were in situations where a 
socialist
military bloc still existed and could give military aid.

*************

CB: Surely you are not saying that apartheid was not a colonialist
regime ?

PB: Yes, that's the argument: apartheid was not primarily a form of
"colonialism" (even "internal" colonialism). It was primarily a form
of extremely "uneven"/combined capitalist development, indeed
in its crucial gestation period, an articulation of two modes of
production that allowed the core process of accumulation to proceed
not merely along superexploitative racial lines, but--integral to
racial oppression and geographical control--also because it
drew rural women into super-cheap reproduction of labour power
(given their uncompensated role in childrearing/education and taking
care of sick and elderly migrant workers, which state systems,
medical schemes and pensions would have done in an ordinary
20th century industrial-capitalist system), and inflicted ecological
degradation upon overcrowded bantustans where 1/2 the black
population were forced to live. This is beyond semantics, it
obviously has implications for whether the "National Democratic
Revolution" (as the ANC/SACP left describe the project) is
"two-stage" and who/how the left forces make alliances with. How to
characterise SA's social relations--e.g., as "colonialism of a
special type" (early 1960s), "articulations of modes of production"
(early 1970s), the outcome of "fractions of capital" conflict
(mid-1970s), "racial capitalism" (early 1980s), "racial fordism"
(late-1980s), or as a "Minerals-Energy Complex" (mid-1990s)--has been
the subject of long, spicy academic and socialist-movement debates.
Debates that are still not over, if we're lucky.

*****************

CB: Surely, at one time S. Africa was colonialism. When did it make a 
transition ?
Extremely uneven combined capitalist development is colonialism. Where would 
there be
this in the extreme without colonialism ? South African whites are the remains 
of a
colonial settler population. Seems extraordinary to deny this. They had the 
gaul up
until the last ten years not to let Africans vote in Africa. That's more than 
combined
and uneven development. That is colonialism, external and internal.

There are definitely two elements to the radical change there. As to whether 
they can
occur simultaneously depended on concrete circumstances. Russia was especially
fortunate to be able to go through two aspects ALMOST at once, but even there 
it was
not exactly simultaneous. Lenin formulated the immediate task of the Russian
revolution from around 1903 as overthrowing Czarist reaction. That was the 
immediate
task. Not overthrowing Czarist reaction and socialist rev. But , it is too his
everlasting credit that he helped lead the socialist aspect (even in the face 
of many
saying Russia was not ripe for socialist rev.) when the opportunity showed 
itself. In
no other rev that I can think of has this happened, except in a certain sense 
in the
overthrow of fascism and move to socialism in Eastern European countries.  South
Africa's time of ending apartheid was less propitious than Russia's in terms of
international developments

**********


CB: Surely you are not saying that the ANC government is a
colonialist regime ?

PB: The term neo-colonial gets thrown around a lot, but doesn't
really capture the scope of the comprador problem. There's one bit of
important countervailing evidence which I've worked on here (and
have published an academic article about, in the current issue of
Vicente Navarro's journal): the ANC government's courageous refusal
to be bullied into dropping a 1997 law that would allow for parallel
imports, generic production and discounted pricing of pharmaceutical
products like AZT. But as an exception that proves the rule, the flip
side of this issue is that Thabo Mbeki and the Department of Health
are involved, as we speak, in a bizarre denial game associated with
not wanting to spend $15 mn per year on giving pregnant, HIV-positive
women AZT (due to "budgetary constraints") so as to save the lives of
35,000 children each year (who will be orphans and a further drain on
state coffers during a future of perpetual mass unemployment), and so
are engaged in extremely dubious efforts to dispute whether HIV and
AIDS are even related! On the global front, trade/industry minister
Alec Erwin's attempts to revive the WTO and finance minister Trevor
Manuel's current chairing of the IMF/WB board of governors are just
the latest reflections of a government whose leaders view themselves
not as colonial/neocolonial subjects but rather as active shapers of
neoliberal globalisation.

***************

CB: In neo-colonialism , it is imperialist countries that are the colonialists 
with
compradors locally. However, compradors are usually pretty fascistic, unlike 
the ANC.
It is just that in S. Africa the paleo-colonialist regime ended so late. It was 
about
the last one. Maybe Hong Kong is later.
********





CB: Surely you are not saying that Marxists require that a revolution
be not by election , but must be violent . Where in history,
anywhere, would you say there has been an example of a revolution as
you define it ?  Is it your position that the world has seen no
revolutions or socialist revolutions ? If not, please give an
example, so we can compare them with South Africa.

PB: My views comparing SA with other revolutions/transitions are
ill-informed and not worth sharing.

************

CB: But how can you say this when we are debating the definition of 
"revolution". It
is like saying your whole argument is "ill-informed and not worth sharing. "

***************





Except: I have a book out on
Zimbabwe which says pretty much the same thing about the segueway
from nationalism to neoliberalism, including a chapter on why ZANU's
"socialism" was entirely a charade. There were insurgent moments in
SA, sure, the last being a potential mass strike in August-September
1992 which Nelson Mandela and other elites laboured hard to
demobilise. A book I did for Monthly Review (Township Politics, 1996)
with the community activist (now Columbia student) Mzwanele Mayekiso
lays out the dual power ("township soviet") strategies that were
especially popular during the mid-1980s revolts. But you'd want to
look at Neville Alexander's web page (which I haven't yet, but would
highly recommend anyhow) that Jim put up to see if there's any
further thinking about revolutionary potential.

Comrade Charles, let's not forget that there are plenty of white
liberal capitalists who opposed apartheid--once it became too
expensive for them for a variety of reasons--and who have taken far
greater advantage of its demise than can ordinary black workers and
the unemployed.

**************

CB: Right. Zimbabwe and S. Africa present especially untractable problems in 
ridding
the countries completely of PALEO-colonialism, because you have residue settler
populations hanging on and actually living right there owning stuff. The 
lingering
paleo-colonialism combines ( and develops) in especially egregious was with the 
newly
forming neo-colonialism.  The problems with those revolutions seem in the first 
place
to be caused by the fact that settler populations remain settled there.

**************

CB




************

CB: Thrown out as the only ones who could vote or hold government
office. Did the rich white people take their money out ?

PB: Rich white people don't NEED government office if again
and again and again, they get the ANC to do their bidding, only
rarely (e.g. crime) and in essentially symbolic ways (e.g.
culture struggles over "racism in the media," the current
brouhaha) having to suffer the "indignity" of living in a black-ruled
society.

**********