SA discussion

[Russell Grinker <grinker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A few points in response to the SA discussion:

Lou:

>It is difficult to read the mind of people like Thabo Mbeki. Although I only
met briefly with him in 1990, I was fairly sure that his goals were to
redistribute the wealth of South Africa without altering basic property
relations.

No doubt this is still his goal. One could look at him in two ways:

he's a total sell-out and turncoat or
he sees himself as a pragmatist doing his best within the constraints of current
economic policy dogma and the global environment.

I would guess the latter. The real problem was the weakness of an alternative
political outlook once the Soviet option collapsed. Here some of Patrick's
points are important. The role of the old (largely white) intellectual left was
fundamental. Bereft of Soviet support, the ANC leadership relied on these people
in their negotiations with the regime. It is in the total intellectual and moral
collapse of the left - the SA "third way" if you like - (much more than in the
ANC's "Stalinist" origins) that many of the roots of current approaches are to
be found.

We also should not under estimate the strategic intervention made by various
Western agencies - both in terms of funds and ideas - during this period. The
country was swarming with them, both via NGOs and through official channels. The
West was not about to allow the transition to happen without ensuring an
acceptable outcome. Numerous leaders were trained overseas, consultants were
everywhere. I was for example quite shocked to discover that quite radical ANC
activists from my province were off to Israel for training in the period before
the first elections. Others went to Germany, Japan, the US, the UK etc. This had
been going on for some years even before the actual public deal was made. Some
of the very institutions set up by imperialism to manage the post-war
transitions to an acceptable form of bourgeois democracy in Europe after the
Second World War were interestingly amongst the most active here.  Patrick could
e.g. say more about how quickly lefties from the radical NGOs jumped onto the
World Bank bandwagon when a few bucks were flashed at them.

Phil:

The SACP was quite substantially radicalised after Soweto, and especially in the
1980s, and there was quite a strong strand of rejecting two-stage theory.

This was particularly true in the camps among younger exiles and guerrillas.
This is probably one reason why so many of these people were kept from returning
until things had already been substantially shaped in negotiations. It was
easier to control/co-opt people under military discipline in the camps in
Africa. It must however be said that the only real political alternative to the
deal posed by the radicals was to carry on the armed struggle. This was clearly
unrealistic to most people and the radicals could thus be more easily
marginalised. No doubt there was plentiful advice on how to handle this from the
West, particularly the UK, which had done the business in its decolonisation
phase in Africa and elsewhere. There are e.g. important parallels with what
happened in Kenya. Frank Furedi wrote some very perceptive stuff on this in his
book on the Mau Mau war where he made a comparison between the so-called 
"Veranda
boys" and the young Turks in the ANC.  He also made some interesting points on
the lessons to be learned on these issues from the defeat of the radicals in the
Irish Republican Movement in the Easter Rising-Civil War period.
Lou:

>That being said, what continues to puzzle me is the utter failure of the ANC to
push for even a left social-democratic alternative to business as >usual. It had
enormous political capital internationally and a mass
>movement that would have helped it push forward legislative measures. Instead,
it has done little to redistribute South Africa's wealth.

This is a good point. Despite what Charles argues, I agree that there was lots
more room for a radical (not revolutionary) approach to transformation. The
conservatism of Mandela is probably not to be under-estimated here but I suppose
the implosion of the old politics combined with the born-again free market zeal
of the intellectuals was the main reason. We should also probably not
under-estimate the degree to which the masses had been neutralised by the state
of emergency, thus substantially reducing pressure on the leadership for radical
solutions.

>In a sense, the biggest mystery to me is not the political psychology of people
like Thabo Mbeki but rather what the masses are thinking and feeling. Weren't
there enormous expectations about a radical improvement in their material
conditions of life? Usually, when those expectations are not met, the mass
movement gathers further momentum, as was the case in 1917 when Kerensky failed
to deliver peace, land reform or freedom from
repression.

Phil's points about leadership are important. One has however to be here to
understand the thoroughgoing atmosphere of political demoralisation and
atomisation. Unless one was around in the early '90s it would be impossible to
believe that we ever had a vibrant and militant mass movement. The pace of
collapse in the early '90s was unbelievable. One day tens of thousands were
marching in the face of police guns (to explain the scale of things, I was
personally on a march of 80 000 at Bisho and this wa sby no means unique) and
the next people stood and looked on as if the minority still protesting was a
little crazy. People were exhausted and the lengthy manoeuvres and negotiations
phase just finished them off. There was also a substantial ideological PR
offensive posing alternatives to struggle in "empowerment" projects and
development. These neutralised much of the traditional radicalism and then the
slow pace of delivery merely served to deflate things further. There were of
course other options for many of the better leadership elements who were sucked
into the state bureaucracy and mostly never reappeared.
Azwell:

Russell's position is, in my view, more realistic. It is possible to argue that
a lot more space was (and continues to be) available for the ANC government to
respond to the numerous problems of its mass constituency. Russell, however,
would do us all a lot of good by continuously illustrating what this space is.

Azwell is right here. I think it is incumbent on what remains of the left to
offer alternatives which challenge the current dominance of our home-grown third
way and cannot merely be discounted by the current political establishment.
Until then we will remain marginal. A good start will be for people to accept
that the political crisis we face is in many ways as profound as that currently
experienced in the West.

Russell