John Saul on neoliberalism and resistance in South Africa

[Hylton White <hjwhite1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Saul writing for the Daily Mail and Guardian (www.mg.co.za), Sep. 19:

Towards the (small 'a') alliance : Who will lead the South African masses
in the new struggle against neo-liberalism?

John S. Saul

Teaching for a term in South Africa earlier this year, I attended many
political meetings. Most heat was generated when the question of the
Alliance (with a capital "A") was discussed. The most interesting
discussions (more light than heat) occurred when the issue was a concrete
one (a particular example of retrenchments; a reflection on the effect
developments in Zimababwe were having on the land-hungry in South Africa).
Comrades with heavy party-political axes to grind tended to be silent or
not to attend at all on such occasions, and a more reflective and
circumspect mood prevailed among those, often middle-level cadres from
within the unions and other such organisations, who did speak up.

Not that their inputs were any less serious than those of their more
ideologically driven comrades. Quite the contrary. I even began to think
that there might be a lesson here: perhaps the moment hadn't yet arrived
for resolving the very largest of political questions in South Africa,
perhaps something else needed doing first.

What I thought I saw in such meetings, but also heard in conversations with
numerous activists from many sectors during my stay, was that a range of
resistances to orthodoxy, specifically neo-liberal orthodoxy, and to the
bureaucratisation of the erstwhile mass democratic movement, was beginning
to spring up across the country. Such resistances were often modest, even
sometimes rather isolated, and certainly not finding very effective voice
through the party and governmental structures ostensibly available to them.
But they are no less real for all that. And they are also, potentially,
constitutive of a base for a new popular movement for progressive change in
South Africa.

Not that one should romanticise the possibilities of reconstructing such a
base. The popular forces are at a low ebb, as an article by Shamim Meer (in
Development Update) has recently reminded us: "A striking feature of the
post-election period has been the demobilisation of civil society."

How much is rebuilding an effective popular movement therefore a matter of
starting all over again, from scratch?

Not quite. Meer goes on to make the obvious point: "The poverty and
inequality associated with apartheid - and which fuelled the struggle -
remain." And to affirm that awareness of this situation is also real
enough. As Beyers Naude put it several years ago: "While Gear [growth,
employment and redistribution policy] is a 'party political issue', when it
affects the poor the church has no option but to intervene." Or, as another
church leader added: "The churches should go back to the trenches, because
it seems that is the language the government understands."

This kind of sensibility continues to percolate through church circles,
providing much of the clout for the growing strength of a local Jubilee
2000 campaign that focuses on apartheid debt, and complementing other
exemplary initiatives like the Campaign Against Neo-liberalism in South
Africa.

And what of the townships? While it is true that the South African National
Civic Organisation is among those organisations hit hardest by
post-apartheid institutional decay, circles of township militants, focused
on issues of schools, health facilities and services, remain; new voices
are beginning to be heard that ask tough questions and could give renewed
life to broader urban-based initiatives. In addition, some fledgling
reactivation of grassroots women's organisations - significantly
demobilised both by too sanguine assumptions about the extent of the
victory for feminism achieved with liberation and by the movement of many
militants into the state - has also begun to occur.

Peasant-linked NGOs like the influential National Land Committee and the
Rural Development Services Network have pushed land and water issues,
helped generate a "rural people's charter" and now taken fresh energy from
recent land-related developments in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Moreover, these
latter two organisations are among those feeding into the umbrella body,
the South Africa National Non-Governmental Organisations Coalition,that has
undertaken a number of signal initiatives, including, in the past few
years, a revealing set of nation-wide public "poverty hearings" and the
floating of the idea of an "economics commission" of its own in order to
help design a new framework for economic and social policies.

And then there are the trade unions, still very much at the centre of a
potential revival of left politics in South Africa, however harshly they
have been buffeted by the effect of neo-liberal economics (overall job
losses, privatisation, retrenchments) and by the insults hurled at them all
too frequently by the African National Congress top brass. However
compromised some may feel the Congress of South African Trade Unions
(Cosatu) leadership to be, the organisation is still able to pull out the
numbers, as it did in May when upwards of four million workers stayed home
and many hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the major cities. But where
is Cosatu most likely to find allies in seeking to push such issues more
forcefully? Perhaps not readily - and certainly not exclusively - within
the (capital "A") Alliance. Indeed, it seems that the most pressing
question facing Cosatu right now may be how to find more effective ways of
reaching downwards and outwards to those actors in other sectors of society
who also feel the pinch of neo-liberalism. And, in attempting to do so,
wouldn't it be a smart move to dust off the language, so potent in the
1980s, of "progressive/ working-class civil society" and to think in terms
of rebuilding more systematically from below a movement of mass-based
popular resistance to the strategic direction that post-apartheid South
Africa has taken?
Looking for signs that the further forging of this kind of (small "a")
alliance might actually be occurring, I took heart from a news item in the
Financial Mail that focused on the fact that "organisations aligned to the
ANC-led alliance have regrouped into a formidable lobby, which, judging by
their frustration with government policy, could develop into South Africa's
real political opposition".

This initiative was taken, it was said, in order to underscore the fact
that "the real opposition in South Africa is not to be found in Parliament,
but in extra-parliamentary politics -as was the case before the ANC's
unbanning in 1990".

What this can mean in practice remains to be seen. But I found in this
startling echoes of debates that are also taking place back in my own
country, Canada, regarding the possible rebuilding from the ground up of a
movement for progressive social change. Indeed, writings by Sam Gindin,
Canada's preeminent trade union intellectual, offered a language that
helped me make sense of my South African experience once I returned home.
Gindin recommends for Canada the building of what he calls a "structured
movement" - "something transitional that is more than a coalition and less
than a party", as he puts it. Hadn't I just been witnessing in South Africa
promising signs of just this kind of structured movement-in-the-making?

Interestingly, Gindin argues that the much-debated "party question" be
postponed for, say, five or six years in Canada, while the left
movement/alliance - without abandoning its immediate concerns regarding
self-defence and more appropriate policies - give priority to the
development of its "political capacities".

In South Africa too, much more will have to be done to build a critical
mass of such bottom-up assertions before the outlines of the organisational
structures that might best focus such assertions and carry them forward can
be identified. Perhaps a certain agnosticism is in order as to just where a
growing (small "a") alliance will eventually find its most effective
political expression. Could it be by revitalising, from within, the ANC - a
party whose leadership has for the moment taken a socio-economic path that
promises little to the vast mass of South Africans? Could it be, equally
dauntingly, through the resuscitation of the South African Communist Party,
or possibly by means of some other political organisation altogether? It
seems much too early to say.
This is merely one very modest proposal among many others that might
contribute to creating an ever more expansive sense of shared resistance on
the part of those already engaged in struggle. Any such initiatives would
be seeking further to nurture the consciousness of a growing movement,
further to structure that movement, and further to build towards the kind
of alternative politics that might hope to regain the progressive momentum
that seems, for the moment, to have been sidelined in South Africa.
Starting from scratch? Perhaps not quite, but something very much like it.
Still, South Africans have been here before: first apartheid, now
neo-liberalism. The struggle continues.

-- The Mail&Guardian, September 19, 2000.