Making sense of South Africa
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Which Way to Freedom? by Neville Alexander, Walnut Publishing, available from Liberation!, £7.99 inc. P&P.
THE RECENT elections in South Africa have led to extraordinary confusion on the left internationally about the nature of the new government and about what to expect in the post-Apartheid situation.
Often discussion about the different political forces in the country lacks basic information about their history, programme and real activities.
Neville Alexander's new book is therefore highly welcome as a primer and source of basic explanation and analyses of the political process now underway.
Although all the essays included were of course written before the elections, they are informed by the obvious drift of the CODESA negotiations process – towards the formation of a bourgeois coalition government including the ANC and the National Party – which is exactly what has come to pass.
Particularly valuable is the essay Negotiations and the Struggle for Socialism in South Africa which charts the history of the ANC, the origins of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the story of the Black Consciousness movement.
A bourgeois coalition government is not a workers' or socialist government. Sections of the international left write about South Africa as if it were a new version of the Nicaraguan revolution.
This is absurd. The FSLN did not include representatives of big capital as vice-president and finance minister!
Hopes raised
Enormous hopes have been vested in the new government by the black masses. In particular their hopes lie in the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), from which they expect jobs, homes, land and basics social security and health rights. What are the chances of these hopes being fulfilled?
Neville Alexander is absolutely right to foresee a new stage of struggle unfolding after elections. Against the hopes of the masses in the RDP are ranged the forces of domestic and international capital, as well as the World Bank and the IMF.
We can therefore expect the focus of the struggle to be the implementation of the RDP. Jobs and houses for the black masses mean encroaching, as Alexander points out, on the interests of capital.
Nothing is more illusory than the delusion that big capital is going to jointly ensure the needs of the masses are met.
That has enormous strategic implications for the left in South Africa, inside and outside of the broad Congress movement.
It means that they trade union movement has to maintain an attitude of political independence, of class independence, from the government and big business.
Although it cannot be launched on the basis of tiny forces, the strategic goal must be to build a mass workers' party which crystallises the fight for an independent political alternative to those leaders who bow before the diktats of capital.
Right wing
Not only is the present government a bourgeois coalition government, but the ANC forces in it, Mandela in particular, represent the most "moderate" right-wing of that movement.
Thus, while for the moment the government will undergo a euphoric "honeymoon" period, it is a government whose project of reconciling the needs of the masses and those of capital will inevitably unravel.
As the Guardian so succinctly put it, you can't satisfy De Beers and Alexandria township at the same time. Those who think you can have forgotten the ABC of class analysis and descended into vulgar tail-ending of the right-wing of the ANC.
SEND ORDERS, £7.99 inc. P&P, to Liberation, PO Box 1104, London N4 2UU. Make cheques out to "Liberation Publishing Association".