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BACKGROUND
The Political Scene: The Landscape Changes
Next year the ANC heads into an election. It faces an array of small parties whose support in terms of numbers is politically insignificant. Therefore it is assured of an electoral victory. The only unknown is the size of this victory. It has no opposition parties to its left. All left entities in South Africa of any political significance are in an alliance with the ANC. The PAC and AZAPO which are black nationalist parties commited to a nationalist form of socialism, are politically minuscule. The main national trade union federation, COSATU, sits with the ANC, as does the South African Communist Party (SACP), which is the "think-tank" of the state-socialist left.
The other parties to the right of the ANC are limited to provincial ethnic fiefdoms, the IFP in Kwazulu-Natal, the UDM to the Eastern Cape and Northwest Province; or to the small population of white people. The chief "thatcherite" party is the DP which has always been supported by the English-speaking white, intensely anglophile, conglomerates of white capital. This support is shifting to the ANC, because that is where the power now is, and because of the ANC's stance, as detailed below. The UDM is lead by a former homeland dictator, who switched the the ANC, and has since defected to form the UDM with Roelf Meyer, a former senior politician under the old regime.
The party of the former regime, the National Party, is slowly withering away to nothing. The same applies to the former Afrikaner right wing parties.These are not insignificant, they are non-entities on the political landscape.
The Economic Landscape: More of the Same plus Globalisation
The South African economy was hammered last month by the flight from emerging markets by international capital. South East Asia's debacle affected South Africa severely. Her currency dropped by one-third from R 4.95 to the US Dollar to R6.61 to the US Dollar. This is coupled with the fact that the unemployment rate set officially at 36% is rising as time marches on. Tens of thousands are being laid off as South Africa comes under the lash of global markets. Growth has been sluggish at between 1 and 2 per cent per annum for the last ten years. Under the previous regime in the late 80's it was even negative ! South Africa needs a growth rate of 6 % to succeed. Commodity prices have dropped forcing "rationalisation" in South Africa's mining sector, the biggest employer in the country together with agriculture.
The ANC has adopted a programme called GEAR which is a neo-liberal macro-economic programme. This is the core of its financial and monetary policy. Interest rates are now well over 20% per annum, and a tight hold is kept on money supply.
The RDP which is its social upliftment programme has largely been left on the back-burner, although to be fair, I have heard that South Africa has built more low-cost or free housing than any other country in so short a time. Now that an election is in the offing, the RDP is being dusted off to demonstrate "delivery" by the government. The education policy of the government is a shambles, and I have heard from those involved with this area, that the anger in the townships is simmering to a dangerous boil over this.
Old Loyalties and New Constituencies
The ANC is the most powerful political party in South Africa. It is a "broad church" holding within its ranks capitalists, africanists, workerists, state-socialists, traditionalists, social democrats, liberals and others. This was the "national-democratic" front that confronted the old regime and moved into power in 1994.
The ANC had a long history of fraternal ties to the state socialist regimes of Cuba, the former USSR, and Former SovBloc states. Its intellectual engine was the SACP, its troops were the rank-and-file of the mass union movement, and to a lesser extent the civic's movement. Its armed struggle was never more than armed propaganda, and in my view, caused more harm than what good it achieved. The ANC won its political victory through economic coercion with sanctions and union mass direct action. This is critical to understand the bulk of my analysis. COSATU was always the political workshop of the ANC, and the ANC relied/relies on the grassroot canvassing of the union movement for its political votes. As a result, the ANC tended to be quite "socialist" in its outlook and policies, until it became the government.
Hence the alliance. This echoes Gramsci's war of position. The state socialists saw the revolution as a two-stage process. First the national-democratic struggle to create an ANC state, and then a socialist transformation, with the leadership of the black working class as the vanguard. They realised they would need the ANC to complete the first stage. However, by now they are symbiotically entwined with the ANC and find it difficult to persuade it to abandon GEAR.
At it's national conference this year, the ANC confirmed that GEAR was the cornerstone of government policy. At the COSATU conference, Mandela re-iterated this fact, despite strong disagreement from the unions. At the SACP conference Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, the president-in-waiting, lashed the SACP and COSATU in a way that has South Africa's capitalist media gasping with delight. They stated that GEAR was non-negotiable. Black state socialists and Black capitalists have crossed swords in the media.
South Africa as a nation finds itself at the mercy of international capital and globalisation. The ANC has also changed its constituency. It now represents, for the main part, the newly rising Black comprador class of capitalists. Its central economic policy is neo-liberal. The fact is, that with a few minor exceptions, it now no longer represents the Black working class or unemployed. It represents African Capital, and Capital in general, although it tends to take the side of African Black Capital against traditional White Capital in any fight.
Despite this reality, the union bureacracy in COSATU and the members of the SACP continue to defend the alliance, and stick to it more firmly, despite what has happened. With the ANC they have a direct line to government, and many appear convinced that they can convince the ANC to "mend its ways". It then becomes an open question whether the union federation or the SACP, themselves, still represent the interests of the working class.
The reality is that South Africa could never adopt any form of state socialism without getting crushed by world capital. The most South Africans could hope for is an advanced social democratic regime like Sweden's. But even this would be extraordinarily difficult in today's neo-liberal world order, an order based on the economic equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
The ANC, its demi-gods like Winnie Mandela, and its officials enjoy the patronage of the state and capital. The new Black capitalist class has the tightest ties with this political order, and is building itself as an Africanist Capitalist Class, and leaving behind the rest. Mbeki's personal staff is filled with members of this new class. Loyalty to the party, for many others, means never having to say you are sorry for looting the national and provincial coffers. The ANC regularly lets its corrupt and incompetent officials off the hook with a mild slap on the