[PEN-L:11467] (Fwd) New issue of SA left journal, 'debate'

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A NOTE ABOUT THE JOURNAL debate: Voices from the South African Left
THIRD ISSUE NOW OUT

Comrades, the cost of this fine (188-page) product is just US$7.50; I
can bring some to the US/Canada in mid August and post them, if you
let me know the cheque's in the post (made out to me, so I can drop
it in my offshore account and reimburse my colleagues in the decaying
rand; my c/o address is 3419 Fiddlers Green, Falls Church, VA 22044, USA).

Thanks from your fellow-travellers in South Africa!
Patrick

EDITORIAL
Intellectuals in retreat?

To our readers,

The third issue of debate considers the position
of the South African intellectual Left, and
specifically the retreat from earlier commitments
and modes of analysis. The Johannesburg Editorial
Collective often finds ourselves bemoaning the
lack of contemporary intellectual leadership from
the previous generation, a group which had
excelled at putting varieties of Marxian theory
onto the intellectual agenda, fighting it out with
Liberal thinkers, inspiring students and workers
by clarifying power relations and the capital
accumulation process, and generally contributing
to the diversity of thought and activism which
represents the recent heritage of the South
African Left. But, save an exception here or
there, that tradition withered and died and was
replaced by the cult of the consultant, leaving us
to glumly commiserate and offer a bitter initial
explanation.

Here we refer to an extraordinary social
phenomenon, based on what seems to be ceaseless
individual meanderings -- nearly all by white
males in their 40s and 50s -- from mid-1980s
grassroots to early 1990s "class roots" politics:
the lead Marxist critic of the Anglo American
Corporation turned to advertising his consulting
services (as a trade union insider) to Anglo and
other firms; the two leading Marxist critics of
the Urban Foundation (Anglo American's social
policy think-tank) became two of its key
strategists; numerous academic Marxists did top-
secret consulting work for the Urban Foundation,
such as regarding land invasions (contemporary and
historical) at precisely the time the UF's land
speculation strategy was most threatened by the
invasion tactic; the two leading Marxist critics
of orthodox pension fund management became
important exponents and practitioners of orthodox
financial packaging through the big institutional
investment firms; an energetic Marxist-workerist
educator led a high-profile post-apartheid labour
commission that rejected a national minimum wage;
a Marxist-feminist led another commission which
recommended cutting child maintenance grants by
40%; the lead Marxist critic of export-led growth
strategy debuted in the Financial Mail by
endorsing Taiwan as a model for post-apartheid SA
and subsequently co-authored GEAR; the most
influential Marxist economist within the trade
unions turned from advocating social democracy in
the pages of the SACP's African Communist to
fiscal discipline and free trade within the
Finance and Trade/Industry Ministries; and last
and possibly least, South Africa's lead Marxist
peasant scholar, who was jailed for his SACP ties
during the 1960s and later (at the Sussex
Institute for Development Studies during the
1970s) supervised the doctoral theses of leading
South African neo-Poulantzians, eventually became
the strategist of "homegrown" African structural
adjustment at the World Bank (and presently serves
as the Bank's London representative).

In the process, it has been easy to denigrate the
scholarship and pronouncements of erstwhile
leftists, such as the Independent Group newspaper
columnist who once led the country's premier
Kapital reading circle but today probably triples
his Wits professorial salary by showing Moneybags
how to mislead workers into a flexible future.
This issue of debate is unabashedly full of
criticism of patent sell-outs. But we continue a
search for explanation -- aside from those vulgar
Marxists amongst us content to point out the rise
of the real interest rate on mortgage bonds from
1986 (-6%) to the 1990s (+10%) at precisely the
time many of our elder brothers turned 35 and
bought their first house and fast car.

After a time of decline of campus intellectual
life, and the shift from Marxian analysis and
political economy to improbable fantasies of
"post-Fordism," "co-determination" and the like,
are we as intellectuals ready to come home? The
answer probably relies most on something else that
during the last decade changed perceptibly in
South Africa's practical political life:  the
gradual ebbing of the strategic clarity of
progressive forces, as all manner of deal-making
exercises ensued. The demand upon intellectuals
for accountability to the Movement was taken less
seriously, as every passing day revealed another
profound compromise of principles and "engagement"
with the forces of reaction. Under the
circumstances, the desire for that elusive ego-
boosting quality, relevance, which always
motivates political-intellectual work, became
overwhelming.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong in
turning to public policy, to integrating issues
outside the traditional Marxian fold such as
gender and environment (which are after all
profoundly class-ridden), and to a never-ending
search for "agency," for those anti-capitalist
challenges by social movements at and beyond the
point of production that complement rather than
confuse the struggle of the working class for
socialism. The problem tended to be the older
generation's diminishing rootedness in struggle,
added to the self-flattery and opportunism
associated with the corridors of power, which
continually undermined more durable, and
politically radical, analytical approaches to
social problems. But for those ex-Marxist
intellectuals who have retained any integrity
about setting the stage for long-term
transformation in South Africa -- a possibility it
would be dogmatic to deny outright -- possibly the
most profound problem has been the attractiveness
of the hazy ground between neo-liberal dominance
and social democratic posturing, as Oupa Lehulere
pointed out in the very first issue of debate. If
we turn to Brazil -- as has Paul Cammack in the
1997 Socialist Register -- we see a similar
project, led by another ex-radical scholar,
Fernando Enrique Cardoso, going badly sour:

       It is a fundamental mistake that Cardoso
       came to power as a convinced neo-
       liberal... Cardoso came to power with the
       popular legitimacy derived from the
       success of the Plano Real, and the
       ascendancy it gave him over elites and
       the capitalist class in Brazil. In power,
       he has accommodated himself to the
       archaic state which his earlier analysis
       had consistently condemned, and it is
       that capitulation, more than anything
       else, which has stripped the social
       democratic promise from his project, and
       reduced it to a recipe for the
       consolidation of neo-liberalism in
       practice... In these circumstances,
       Cardoso's repeated and pained insistence
       that he is not a neo-liberal are bound to
       ring increasingly hollow.

Cardoso's equivalents here are Thabo Mbeki, Trevor
Manuel and Alec Erwin (and earlier, Jay Naidoo).
One gets a sense of this dilemma by considering
Erwin's hollow public analysis in, for example, a
speech to a Business Day banquet last September
published in the Third Quarter 1996 African
Communist as well as in Business Day itself:

       In 1990, this was an economy heading for
       a major train crash. It was stagnant,
       shedding employment, insular and
       characterised by conflict. Debt was
       rapidly rising as was public sector
       employment. However the economic reform
       process did not start in April 1994. It
       began inching forward from 1992,
       propelled by the civil society process
       outlined above, and when the ANC became
       virtual de facto government in the latter
       half of 1993 and the leader of the
       Government of National Unity in 1994,
       this reform intensified and gathered
       pace.

The recollection was capped with the comment that
"For me, Gramsci's `pessimism of the intellect'
allows common sense and good analysis to prevail,
but it is `the optimism of the will' that
generates noble efforts and successes." (The fact
that Business Day published Erwin's Gramsci
reference with the preface "As a Marxist..." --
the AC apparently received an edited copy from
Erwin, as opposed to Business Day's verbatim
transcript -- must have had the reassuring effect
on the assembled capitalists of denuding Marxism
of any meaning whatsoever.)

Erwin's intellect was not in the same league as
Gramsci's, and allowed the minister to
optimistically rejig reality while gratifying
corporate South Africa. For if not corporate
profitability -- which has revived nicely since
1993 -- other aspects of the South African
transition continued to suffer major train
smashes, including the currency in 1996,
employment generation (negligible during the first
two years of the upturn, and then actually
negative by 1996), housing construction, many
Reconstruction and Development Programme promises,
and the like. The economy remains stagnant (in
historical terms), with the peak annual growth
rate just above 3% before reversing this year
(with first quarter figures showing actual GDP
decline). South Africa continued to shed
employment. And if South Africa could no longer be
described as "insular," this was not a
particularly good development for tens of
thousands of retrenched manufacturing workers, or
for the balance of payments (which in turn was
responsible for the latest interest rate hikes).
Economic conflict has certainly continued -- as
witnessed not only in myriad labour and community
struggles but also by Erwin's own ultimately
unsuccessful efforts to sell the Growth,
Employment and Redistribution strategy, in the
face of good instincts on the part of Cosatu and
many SACP members, not to mention so many missed
year-end 1996 targets (GDP off the GEAR prediction
by 10%, fixed investment off 20%, the real
interest rate off 40%, the currency off 90%, and
employment off from the target of 126 000 new
jobs, to tens of thousands of lost jobs). Erwin
appears now to be living in a different South
Africa entirely.

And now, in part because the ANC Discussion
Document "State and Social Transformation" --
written by a group close to Mbeki and released for
discussion last November -- has been taken so
seriously by the two leading SACP thinkers (Blade
Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin), it appears that
intellectual activity may emerge as an active
discipline once again. Collected in the current
issue of the African Communist, the ANC document
and other important Alliance documents written at
the half-way point in the ANC's first term of
government mark a decisive point of debate --
spirited and quite entertaining -- which for
debate readers inside and outside the Alliance
provide an indication of how contradictions in the
trajectories of working-class and nationalist
politics could mean revitalisation, instead of a
future, all too common in post-colonial societies,
characterised by repression.

Awaiting a period of revitalised insurgent
sentiment in the factories, fields and townships
does not prevent a new generation of intellectuals
from persevering within our own old and new anti-
capitalist traditions. To do justice to even a few
of the intellectual trials that lie ahead is,
however, difficult while we retain so much
unwanted baggage from the past. So part of our
present task must be to continually exorcise the
ghosts of prior intellectual engagement who still
today haunt our and future generations.

This debate takes further the project of clearing
away underbrush left by Marxists-turned-corporate-
liberals, by exploring the overall slide into
status quo argumentation (Heinrich Bohmke and
Ashwin Desai), tracing the evolution of economic
policy (Oupa Lehulere), addressing the housing
question (Patrick Bond), considering challenges
for Pan African intellectual development (Meshack
Khosa), providing guidance for development
intellectuals (Edgar Pieterse) and comparing notes
with a similar critique of the erstwhile Latin
American left intelligentsia (James Petras).
debate #3 also includes a critique of funding cuts
in tertiary education (Noor Nieftagodien) and two
articles on rural struggle:  a survey of the
failure of land reform (Fana Sihlongonyane) and of
the institution of the chieftaincy (Andile
Mngxitama).

Many readers will know that debate comrades Ashwin
Desai, Heinrich Bohmke and Prea Banwari have been
included in the list of members of the Combined
Staff Association at the University of Durban-
Westville for which a presidential Commission of
Inquiry into recent conflicts at UDW requested
criminal prosecution. debate expresses solidarity
with these comrades, and demands the dropping of
all charges. This issue contains an assessment of
repression at UDW.

Additionally, Franco Barchiesi reports on a
discussion held at Wits University in May, hosted
by the Johannesburg Editorial Collective, in which
left voices vigorously explored the post-apartheid
state. We want to thank Jeremy Cronin, Claire
Ceruti and Noor Nieftagodien for leading the
panel, as well as Dale Mckinley and Oupa Lehulere
for their earlier contributions to a similar
forum, on the role of political parties in South
Africa today.

We also include a statement from the World Forum
for Alternatives, which aims to be a network of
research and advocacy networks fighting
globalisation. As one example, comrades in the
debate Johannesburg Collective have also been
helping to define a South African document to
submit to the "Second Intercontinental Encounter
for Humanity and against Neoliberalism," to be
held in Spain in late July, in the spirit of the
historic first encounter organised by the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas
last year (and reported upon in debate #2). And
concretely, in the sphere of thinking globally,
acting locally and acting globally, a movement to
pressure local and foreign financial institutions
-- and the Department of Finance in Pretoria -- to
erase the apartheid debt has emerged, and is
reported on by Brian Ashley. Finally, we include
a review of one of the most important of recent
global political economy books, Arrighi's The Long
Twentieth Century, by Stephen Greenberg.

We hope these continue to stimulate our readers,
many of whom are joining the debate e-mail
listserve for discussions about the journal, and
about politics, political economy and culture more
generally. The address is
majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; write "Subscribe
Debate" on the first line followed by your email
address; any correspondence to the listserve can
be sent to debate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Johannesburg Collective
July 1997

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