Current implications for South Africa

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To extract from Patrick Bond's long post of 20th June:



>      One work from the left ANC tradition (which
> I had the privilege to edit), Mzwanele Mayekiso's
> Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New
> South Africa (New York, Monthly Review, 1996),
> makes a plausible case that many more insurgent
> moments and a deeper transformation were
> feasible, still within the scope of the ANC/SACP
> National Democratic Revolution.


To what extent is there still relevance in the ANC/SACP concept of the
National Democratic Revolution?


Is there indeed scope for radical democratic initiatives that take the
National Democratic Revolution forward and have a socialist content or
prepare the ground for socialism?



>      Briefly, if we seek to understand why the
> condition for political reform was not capitalist
> growth, but rather stagnation (and hence the need
> for capitalists to explore a new export-oriented
> route to accumulation), a classical Marxist
> approach to cycles of capital accumulation may be
> more helpful. Cycles of accumulation are the
> waves of investment and growth which are
> invariably followed by periods of excess capacity
> and stagnation, often referred to as
> "overaccumulation crisis." (South Africa
> experienced such cycles throughout its modern
> history, and has suffered persistent, worsening
> symptoms of overaccumulation since the late
> 1960s.)
>      Under such conditions, crisis displacement
> occurs to a large degree through intensified
> uneven development. This is because
> overaccumulated capital in its most liquid form,
> finance, flows easily across space in search of
> more profitable outlets. The advent of
> overaccumulation crisis across the world in the
> early 1970s was, not uncoincidentally, the same
> point at which the Bretton Woods institutions (the
> World Bank and IMF) assumed added global
> economic management power. Conditions of
> uneven development already underway between
> different regions of the world economy rapidly
> sharpened under the dominance of neo-liberal
> policy, in a process not restricted to any particular
> national balance of forces. Instead, there is a
> deeper underlying meaning. In his authoritative
> study of the topic, Neil Smith concludes that
> while uneven development dates to the time of
> "primitive accumulation and the opposition of
> capital against pre-capitalist societies," modern-
> day global capitalism retains a "dichotomous
> form. But today it is less an issue of the
> `articulation of different modes of production,'
> more an issue of development at one pole and
> development of underdevelopment at the other"
> (Smith, 1990, Uneven Development, Oxford, Basil
> Blackwell).
>      While we keep our eyes on the perpetually
> evolving form of crisis-ridden capitalism in South
> Africa, particularly the very slight modification to
> its racial configurations, the lesson I learn from
> these prefacatory surveys of Marxist political-
> economic studies is that neo-Marxian fads come
> and go, but that it is from more durable and
> universal critiques of the accumulation process,
> especially uneven development, that we must
> continue to learn from, and contribute to.


If uneven development on a world scale and within a country like South
Africa, runs into crises of accumulation and if these tendencies have
intensified with the international dominance of neo-liberalism, does it not
suggest that there is a democratic agenda at a global level as well as at
the level of individual countries?



Critical though South African radicals may be about how former
anti-apartheid leaders have been bought off, this is also a reflection of
the material reality of the balance of forces and the shift of the struggle
to one of revolutionary reforms versus reformist reforms.

What reforms are most relevant now for South Africa, domestically, *and*
internationally?

Or should left wingers just rally under the abstract red flag of socialism,
and hope others will join them?

Chris Burford

London