Resistance to Neoliberalism: A View from South Africa
-
Contribution to the Second
Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism
- Thematic Table 1, "Neoliberal Economics
Against Humanity. Our Lives Beyond Economics"
- Madrid (Spain) 26 July - 2 August
1997
- by
- South African Comrades for the
Encounter
Abstract
The analysis of the South African case
shows the complexity and the diversification of strategies of
translation of neoliberal policies into practice at single national
levels. At the same time this illuminates some implications for
resistance at a global level. The adoption of neoliberal orientations
by the ANC government can be considered as a response to two sets of
complementary factors: the rearticulation of popular expectations and
resistance from one side, and the crisis of traditional developmental
state projects from the other. As a result, the form taken by
neoliberalism in South Africa, that we here define as "homegrown
structural adjustment" displays peculiar and autonomous
characteristics. These are dependent on the internal relationships
between state an class composition, rather than on a supposed
"necessary" and purely economic neoliberal logic on a global scale.
The particular characteristics of neoliberalism in South Africa,
while underlining the issue of diversity of neoliberalisms worldwide,
also shows loopholes and contradictions, revealing a rich potential
articulation of resistant social subjects and practices. These, and
the materiality of needs they express, provide arguments for a left
strategy who wants to challenge the present alternative between
institutionalisation and invisibility that the South African civil
society is facing in the context of the neoliberal
hegemony.
Contents:
- 1. South Africa and the Decline of
Developmentalism
- 1.1 The Global Dimension
- 1.2 South Africa's Constraints: The
"Apartheid Debt"
- 2. Homegrown Structural Adjustment:
Neoliberalism of a Particular Kind?
- 3. Resistance to Neoliberalism: Beyond
Institutionalisation and Invisibility
- 4. Towards New Networks of
Struggle
1. South Africa and the Decline of
Developmentalism
1.1 The Global Dimension
South Africa has a rich history of political
debate and participatory democracy. This history offers a number of
possibilities for alternatives to the neoliberal paradigm. The
aspirations of the masses and the working class which primarily led
to the defeat of the oppressive apartheid regime demanded, from this
point of view, not only the abolition of institutionalised racism.
They claimed a real redistribution of resources to empower people and
communities in meeting their basic needs and in addressing the
historical imbalances created by racial capitalism. It was a demand
for a revolutionary change capable to restore the control over their
own lives for millions of people deprived of the most fundamental
social rights by the conjunction of institutionalised racism and
monopoly capitalism. This demand was expressed, at the same time,
quite concretely and materially: it was aimed at proper housing,
water and electricity services, the recognition of an adequate
education as a social right up to the tertiary level, a meaningful
land reform, the end to oppressive and discriminatory practices in
the workplaces, the implementation of world-recognised labour
standards.
The ANC-led cabinet which come out of the
1994 elections adopted a developmental approach to these demands.
This was declared as combining an active role for the state in the
redistribution of domestic resources with a policy aimed, at the same
time, at encouraging competitiveness in the promotion of manufactured
exports and at defining this country as an attractive site for
foreign investment. The inherently contradictory nature of these two
goals has become increasingly evident in the last two decades of
neoliberal hegemony on economic policies worldwide, particularly in
the so-called "developing countries". In fact, a dependent insertion
in the world economy and plummeting revenues from the sale of raw
materials were at the root of debt crises in these countries, and of
the intervention of the international financial institutions to their
"rescue". The first casualty of these interventions was the role of
the state in the economy, which had characterized the first
generation of developmental experiments in the post-colonial
world.
The conditionalities and the fiscal
austerity imposed by the IMF and the World Bank to these countries
resulted in privatisation, the cut of public spending, the reduction
of public employment, the promotion of export with low levels of
manufactured added value, the definition of extreme forms of labour
market flexibility. This devastated social security networks,
precarised employment relationships, increased unemployment levels.
The role of the state as a regulator of foreign investment flows and
as a force able to bargain to a certain degree with multinational
corporations on terms favourable to the re-investment of profits,
social and environmental responsibility and fiscal measures conducive
to redistribution, was decisively affected by such shifts.
Consequentely, the priorities of the state in these countries tended
to become increasingly conditioned by the strategies of global
corporate powers. National developmental projects in neoliberal
contexts then lost any pretension to regulate global movements of
capital and they became instead increasingly dependent on foreign
investment or "aid" schemes. On the other hand, if this could sustain
the permanence in power of social and political elites, a generalised
decline in living standards made the control of their own people all
the more problematic. Resistance to neoliberalism from a diverse and
articulated class composition was often met in these countries by a
deepening crisis of the state in the delivery of a homogeneous
social citizenship and in organizing class integration. The way the
state usually responded to the proliferation of channels of formal
and informal resistance showed the other side of neoliberalism:
repression, combined to its "official" face, free-market and
competitiveness.
The impending decline of state sovereignity
inside developmentalist projects in the South of the world - apart
from its residual attributions in the sphere of social control,
repression, and technical implementation of IMF and World Bank's
recommendations - is now confirmed and strenghtened by new measures
sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO), such as the
Multilateral Agreement on Investments and the agreement on public
contracts. This decline parallels a shift in many countries in the
"North" away from various attempts to enforce welfare state
provisions. The transition there was from diverse forms of social
citizenship, full employment and the provision of services as
deferred income, to the reconfiguration of those states. Their main
roles have been redefined in the direction of supporting the
competitiveness of territories and/or private corporations on world
markets, and of a social and economic policy totally subordinated to
the imperatives of monetary stability imposed by transnational
institutions.
As John Holloway argued, the national states
are reduced to trying to attract and retain within their territories
a share of the global surplus value. The state becomes more reactive
as it tries to attract foreign capital and immobilize it in the form
of productive investment, and it is weakened by the fact that
capital-as-money attaches to no group of people and particular
activity. This does not exclude a very high level of government
intervention, for example, in the area of management of monetary
policy, but it decisively diminishes the role of the state in
processes of social mediation and equalisation. In short, the crisis
of the welfare state in the North and the crisis of developmentalism
in the South are part of a broader exhaustion of policy options
exclusively based on the state for the guarantee of social and
economic justice. For the left, this emphasizes the need for
strategies of resistance and contestation capable to question the
state as the only arena of political representation and progressive
change.
1.2 South Africa's Constraints: The
"Apartheid Debt"
However, South Africa is somewhat different
from both the broad scenarios outlined above. In fact, compared to
most countries of the South, South African government's foreign debt
has been minimal (only 5% of the total South African debt in 1996,
while the overwhelming majority of South African foreign debt is
held by private companies). This could have sheltered the country to
some extent from the neoliberal policy prescriptions of the
international financial institutions. However, the South African
state remains strongly indebted internally with major corporate
powers, which were those who mostly benefitted from apartheid's
cheap labour policies and public support. In 1997, only the service
of the public debt amounted to 40 billion Rands, compared to just 15
billion Rands from income tax revenue. With a staggering interest
rate at 22%, this meant that resources for redistribution were
severely constrained and that the government's social and economic
policy options were hostages to domestic monopoly capital.
Therefore, the legacy of apartheid decisively shapes economic policy
in the "new" South Africa.
Moreover, the mechanism of indebtment works
in a perverse spiral. In fact, the South African public debt is owned
by large corporate investors (eg. pension funds) which use the
government's transfers and interest payments to buy government bonds.
In this way, the taxpayers' money is used by big business to enrich
itself through the expansion of the public debt, to the detriment of
programmes for the poor and the marginalised. As a result, the power
of big business still has a decisive capacity to influence the
direction of the South African transition. However, the government
was not merely a passive hostage of this power. It rather seconded
the neoliberal orientations of big business by choosing to open to
international financial institutions while at the same time
dismantling the barriers to international competition. This process
started with an IMF-sponsored drought-relief loan of US$ 850
millions. That loan was, actually, not necessary; its rationale was
to commit South Africa with the IMF in order to facilitate a smooth
transition in the 1994 elections. Since then, new interventions by
the IMF and the WB have taken place, while the WB's director is now
going to travel to South Africa to elicit the engagement of unions
and "civil society" organisations in neoliberal policies, by
coopting them in loosely- defined structures of
"consultation".
The conclusion is that the IMF and the WB
did not act in South Africa as all-powerful and invincible forces
simply subjugating the national state to their will. Their influence
in South Africa was made possible by the continuing domination of a
domestic monopoly capital which grew under apartheid, and by the
cooperation of the new democratic state. It seems that the rationale
for such state cooperation was the aim to provide for a stable social
control and the demobilization of the most critical and militant
expressions in the South African society (at the level of townships,
workplaces, campuses and rural areas). These, in fact, retained a
massive potential to jeopardize the transition to a neoliberal form
of democracy, a point we will return on later.
2. Homegrown Structural Adjustment:
Neoliberalism of a Particular Kind?
The relevance of domestic economic and
political factors in explaining the grip of international financial
capital on South Africa has implications for our understanding of
neoliberalism in this country. Patrick Bond captured this importance
of internal factors in the phrase "homegrown structural adjustment",
as opposed to externally-imposed structural adjustment policies in
other African countries. This concept can substantially enrich and
renew our critical analysis of neoliberalism. In fact, in the logic
of the "homegrown structural adjustment" the nation state is not just
a victim of the impersonal, necessary and unquestionable dynamics of
globalised capital. Not only the national state is a crucial actor in
reproducing the worldwide hegemony of neoliberalism, but
neoliberalism itself should no longer be regarded as a purely
economic force. It is rather a political response to the struggle and
the resistance of peoples who see in the transition to democracy not
only the establishment of formal rules and procedures for elections,
but the effective delivery of social wealth in the form of land,
education, social services, transportation, electricity, water,
roads, sewerage and, more importantly, the possibility to
autonomously decide over their management and distribution in the
communities.
In other words, neoliberalism is the
response by the political and economic elites to higher and more
sophisticated levels of articulation of the class composition in a
society, and to the struggles that follow. Neoliberalism does not
encompass a set of global standards. It describes a
political-ideological discourse which is the outcome of choices that
answer to the imperatives of particular social forces and interests.
There is nothing inevitable about it. The claim by some commentators
that the ANC government had no choice other than the adoption of
"stringent market-related policies" is spurious, the kind of
historical determinism which is ridiculed and dismissed when mouthed
by leftists of the jurassic variety.
We initially mentioned the developmentalist
orientation of the ANC- led government in the context of the
transition. Now, what is left of that option in the scenario of the
"homegrown structural adjustment"? The Reconstruction and Development
Programme (RDP), as the socio-economic programme of the ANC for its
election campaign of 1994, contained some elements of an
anti-neoliberal thrust, shaped by consultations with the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist
Party (SACP). As a whole, the RDP was a piece of social-democratic
welfarism based on the ambition to redress the inequities of the past
through the provision of education, health care and social services.
However, RDP's greatest ambiguity remained its inability to provide
foundations for the kinds of productivity deals and social
citizenship arrangements (eg. full employment policies, comprehensive
land redistribution, nationalisations) which could support the fiscal
structures already necessary to the "historic" socialdemocratic
welfare states. Moreover, when the RDP was written, those same
socialdemocratic experiments were falling all over the world under
the new gospels of fiscal restraint and macroeconomic discipline.
Finally, the RDP contained strong neoliberal elements, such as an
increased outward orientation of the economy and the promotion of
foreign direct investment.
These ambiguities and weaknesses were
addressed by the ANC government through an accentuation of the
neoliberal contents of its economic policies. The July 1996 "Growth,
Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR) strategy, drafted by the
Ministry of Finance, is the most perfected elaboration so far of this
shift in terms of formal enunciations. GEAR reinforced the
government's emphasis on fiscal discipline, containment of inflation
and export promotion as ways to enhance competitiveness, which would
arguably enable public spending to rise again after that the, by now
highly unlikely, growth rate of 6.1% was to be touched in the year
2000. A decisive role was recognised to the liberalization of foreign
exchanges, export promotion, privatisation of state enterprises and
the creation of a conducive and enabling environment for foreign
investment. However, no specific measures were proposed to ensure
business meets this duty to invest.
Moreover, GEAR recommended greater labour
market flexibility, possibly via a two-tier system involving the
deregulation of certain categories of semi- and unskilled work and
the exemption for small business from provisions of the new labour
legislation. Also envisaged was a "social accord" whereby wage
restraint from organized workers would be rewarded with a commitment
to price restraint from organized business. All this in a labour
market that the International Labour Organisation itself recognised
as already extremely flexible, characterised by wide wage
fluctuations, and where even large-scale firms resort to
subcontracting, outsourcing and the use of casual labour. Finally,
the demand-driven characteristics of economic growth were
substantially emasculated by GEAR. Conversely, the RDP's residual
focus on redistribution and job- creation lost entirely its nature of
independent and priority field of government intervention and it
rather came to depend on business' international competitiveness and
the performance of domestic and foreign corporate investors.
These shifts were already noticeable in
immediate post-RDP economic policy documents. These redefined the
RDP's emphasis on "meeting basic needs" as a strategy played at a
rhetorical level to generate consent and contain some social
consequences of poverty without eliminating the structural causes of
poverty. GEAR was then not a rejection of the RDP, but the
confirmation with a remarkable consistency of a neoliberal
orientation already present, albeit in a more nuanced way, inside
the RDP.
As ANC's Rob Davies, former chair of the
parliamentary Finance Committee, recognized, there was no guarantee
that the implementation of all the prescriptions of GEAR would lead
to the desired macroeconomic outcomes. The whole process rather
depended on the capacity of GEAR's measures to generate "confidence"
among domestic and foreign private investors. In other words, private
corporate profitability was recognised as the main vehicle through
which some sort of social delivery would take place, sooner or later,
without even indicating how this was expected to happen. The results
are telling indeed: more than 100.000 jobs lost during GEAR's first
year (GEAR promised 126.000 jobs gained), Gross Domestic Product dips
to -0.8 percent in the first quarter of 1997, inflation teeters at
9,9 percent, and new inequalities have enlarged with the enrichment
of a tiny layer of black corporate business. The only visible
"social" dimension of GEAR, and one of its main legitimizing motifs,
was job creation. However, the director-general of the Ministry of
Finance has recently come out with the astonishing remark that more
research is required into the link between economic growth and job
creation... But, it is worth stressing, GEAR is not an aberration: it
is rather a distillation of ideological predispositions that
gradually took hold within the ANC during the 1990s. If this strategy
will not be contested, business will get from GEAR's failure the
lesson that more fiscal discipline, more privatisations, more cuts on
public spending are required, and the real danger exists that they
will find increasingly receptive ears in the government.
All the social indicators have been
adversely affected by the performance of neoliberalism South
African-style. Provision of housing remains dependent on the
competitive advantages required by corporate developers, state
subsidies for the purchase of housing are available only for the most
marginal sectors of the market, and they remain largely inadequate.
Notably absent are schemes for public housing construction, or for
subsidized rent, while the government does not oppose the developers'
"redlining" policies in many areas. Conversely, the issue was
addressed through very superficial forms of upliftment of urban areas
("pit latrines policies"), and through efforts to stop long-lasting
rent and tariff boycotts which subordinated urban redistribution to
largely ideological and rhetorical patriotist devices (the "Masakhane
campaign").
Processes of restitution and redistribution
of state-owned land do not affect the fundamentally "willing
seller-willing buyer" basis of the agrarian reform. Moreover, the
existing processes through which rural communities arbitrarily
dispossessed during apartheid can claim their land back do not
provide for any really empowering mechanism at the local, grassroots
level. As a result, the clientelist power of "chiefs" and traditional
authorities in claiming the land for their communities has often
increased.
Struggles for the transformation of tertiary
education have clashed with lack of funding and the impending cuts to
public subsidies due to the reduction of state involvement in the
sector. These arguments are used by old-style university
administrations to resist change in the composition of the student
body to make it more representative of the South African population,
redressing the plights of the formerly excluded. Moreover, this
obstacles workers and students' demands for a real change in working
conditions and study curricula. Rather, the position of the
privatisers of the university is reinforced; struggles against
privatisation, downsizing and retrenchments have been matched by high
degrees of repression as in the recent case of the COMSA trade union
at the University of Durban-Westville.
Recent changes to industrial relations
legislation explicitly posit a direct link between the end of
conflict and adversarialism at the workplace level and the
strenghtening of South African competitiveness in world markets and
in the global scramble for foreign investment. To this end,
flexibility, co-determination and worker participation are
encouraged. However this is pursued through a separation of
collective bargaining over wages and working conditions, which is
limited to the centralised level, and issues of productivity and
restructuring, delegated to supposedly "conflict-free" forums at the
workplace level. While no statutory duty to bargain exists in South
Africa, this separation fundamentally disarticulates the bargaining
power of workers on the shopfloor, and it weakens the union
leadership vis-a-vis business and government. A demonstration of this
was the discussions on the amendment to the legislation on basic
employment standards, whereby capital, supported by the government,
rejected union demands for a 40-hours working week and six months
maternity leave. This sparked a massive wave of protest culminated in
the 2 June general strike, and it led COSATU to question the
viability of tripartite centralised bargaining, without, however, an
alternative strategy clearly emerging.
Pressures on organized labour have recently
intensified. A 1996 ANC discussion document on "The State and Social
Transformation", produced inside circles close to the vice-President
and likely future President, Thabo Mbeki, warns the labour movement
to give up its "economistic" demands, reminding the relatively
"privileged" status of the waged workers and their obligations to the
developmental effort. At the same time, no similar obligations are
imposed upon capital; instead foreign investment is recognized as a
priority leverage for the development effort itself. As a matter of
fact, average manufacturing wages in South Africa are already at the
level of the low-income Asian economies. Finally, the allegedly
"privileged" position of the formal working class is questioned by
the existence of networks of income through which waged workers
support the huge pool of unemployed relatives condemned to
marginalisation or the precariousness of the informal economy.
This situation is particularly dramatic for
women. From one side, neoliberalism and globalization encourage their
access to the labour market on the basis of their cheapness - given
their continuing links with the household - and their adaptability,
due to the desire of emancipation from the oppressive structures of
patriarchy. From the other hand their position remains of
second-class citizenship, confined to the jobs with worst wages and
working conditions, which are proliferating as a result of
market-led processes of casualization, decentralization, homework.
Moreover, neoliberal policies which cut public spending and basic
services shift most of the burden of reproduction on women, thus
reinforcing their subordinate position and hampering in a
contradictory way their entrance in the labour market.
The promotion of centralised bargaining and
corporatist policy making between capital, labour and government
ultimately does not restore at the central level the power the
workers lose at the grassroots. In fact, capital and the ANC are
rather prone to bargain bilaterally the forms of restructuring which
might be more unpopular for the workers. This often places the unions
in front of the "fait accompli". Moreover, the power of capital in
these deals is enormously increased by the government self-imposed
constraints in the name of fiscal discipline (eg. a 3% deficit-to-GNP
ratio by the year 2000). This, by preventing prospects for a
demand-driven growth along Keynesian lines, annihilates the welfarist
ambitions of South African corporatist decision-making. Moreover,
even an expansionary policy based on purely monetarist devices and
the reduction of the interest rate is questioned, given that this can
lead to a further crisis for the unstable Rand and for a Balance of
Payments already under strain.
In this scenario, the only chances left for
macroeconomic growth are confined to foreign investment; to this end
the government is currently engaged in a massive wave of
privatisation of basic services (transport, telecommunications,
water). This completes a general framework which makes a mockery of
the South African ambitions for a corporatist welfare state. The
convergence between local oligopolies and foreign corporate
investors, even if not without contradictions is, as we mentioned, an
integral component of the homegrown structural adjustment.
Furthermore, this same framework is elaborated and refined in the
form of "macroeconomic constraints for the process of change" by a
whole legion of academics, technocrats, consultants and research
units. These people, mostly coming from a radical and militant past
in the anti-apartheid struggle are now engaged in reminding the
public during the day of the same "objective" limitations to radical
change that they themselves elaborate at night for Anglo-American or
the Department of Finance. It is in the name of these limitations
that these "experts" recommend the workers to moderate their wage
demands, and to link them to productivity, flexibility and company
performance. And it is in the name of these limitations that they
endorse the repression of students and workers protesting on
campuses, and that their newspapers and publications ignore the
enduring struggles of the rural poor and the township squatters. The
state, rather then being a passive victim of this mechanism, is a
structure that must be hegemonised by forces reproducing the
neoliberal paradigm through measures of deregulation, liberalisation
and privatisation. But the roots of this hegemony are to be found in
the crisis of welfare-developmental state options in the face of the
globalisation of capitalist command. This ultimately questions the
nature of the state itself as the primary focus of progressive
struggles for change.
3. Resistance to Neoliberalism: Beyond
Institutionalisation and Invisibility
The neoliberal hegemony over social and
economic policy making, and the failure of socialdemocracy to present
itself as a real way out, confront the people's desire for real
change with a harsh alternative. From one side, the "civil society"
is required to orderly accept its institutionalisation inside the
neoliberal "macroeconomic constraints" and inside social-democratic
structures of social control, corporatism, co- determination and
pacification which are showing their failure both in their
redistributive capacity and in their representiveness. On the other
hand, those who do not want to accommodate in this process of
institutionalisation are simply relegated to invisibility. However
today, more than three years after the first appearance of the RDP,
the masses still await some delivery. This demands a challenge to the
current alternative between INVISIBILITY and
neoliberal-socialdemocratic INSTITUTIONALISATION. The symbolic power
that the RDP still holds for the South African class composition may
still indicate the existence of an intermediate space between those
two opposites. In fact, it shows the persistence of a vision of
change as based on reappropriation of basic needs and on circuits of
solidarity impermeable to the market hegemony.
This seems able to sustain, at least to a
certain extent, the tradition of self-empowerment and
self-organisation at the level of workplaces and communities that was
crucial in the defeat of apartheid, and which remains on the agenda
of an anti-neoliberal left. It also creates contradictions for
capitalist restructuring which diminish its prospects for stability.
The promotion of flexibility and worker participation often has the
unintended effect of making workers autonomously realize the
importance of their social cooperation and communication. This
clashes with a management style characterised by a permanent racism,
authoritarian innovation, unregulated resort to downsizing,
outsourcing and retrenchments. This trend, far from disappearing, is
reinforced by the search for new competitive positions for South
African manufacturing in world markets. This contradiction, while
challenging unions' strategies, led in the past workers in many
sectors (from automobile to paper) to reject co-determination and
participation.
Land struggles and occupations in areas such
as Mpumalanga and the Northern Province have at the same time
demonstrated the extent of the popular demand for a genuine land
redistribution, of a widespread dissatisfaction with market-driven
approaches and of the contestation of the role of "traditional"
authorities. Struggles over land are affecting a whole range of
issues linked to capitalist depletion of resources. People in Kyalami
(Thembisa) massively rejected "development" in the form of a R 10
million construction of toxic waste dump, which eventually closed
down. The Difateng community resisted pre-paid meter electricity
installation, to which the electric company Eskom retaliated with a
switch-off punishment. These kinds of struggles are however the most
likely to fall into invisibility and oblivion given the silence of
those whom SACP's Tebogo Phadu calls "deprofessionalised
intellectuals".
The tradition of mass formations of struggle
embodied in the "civics" at the level of black working-class
townships, expressed in the 1980s in the forms of widespread
anti-institutionality, boycotts of rent payments and campaigns
against undemocratic local authorities, entrenched a deep popular
support for grassroots direct democracy. However, this was partially
countered by authoritarian and personalised styles of local
leadership. From the second half of the 1980s, the articulation of
civil society was increasingly overtaken by an ANC hegemony over the
movement that did not deepen practices of grassroots democracy,
while preparing the ground for demobilisation and
institutionalisation in the 1990s. In the post- apartheid era, the
ANC-led government's response to broad social demands has not
provided for an increase in welfare and services expenditure and the
rejection of the debt inherited from apartheid.
Democratisation was rather reduced to mere
electoral and procedural politics, with no ambition to interfere with
capital's prerogatives in the economic domain and no response to the
process of demobilisation and institutionalisation of grassroots
struggles. In the long run, the choice for the government was either
empowering mass organisations and their individual members or relying
on the expertise of the bureaucrats who had run the apartheid machine
for decades. Clearly an alternative to neoliberalism would have
necessitated opting for the empowerment of mass organisation.
Nationally organised in SANCO (South African National Civic
Organisation), the civic movement has recently pushed for
redistribution and community control of resources. This tries to
receive and organise a plight from the grassroots, and it confirms
the continuing relevance for South Africa of a history of resistance
characterised, unlike other African countries, by mass-based
organisations that posited alternatives to neoliberalism, translated
to some extent at policy level, and which are still relevant to
overcome the alternative between invisibility and subaltern
institutionaisation.
The current choice for neoliberalism in
South Africa does not necessarily imply the rejection of alternatives
allegedly with no concrete expressions on the ground. The struggle to
overthrow apartheid involved millions of ordinary people in
structures that were organised along the principle of participatory
democracy. Today, the source for us to start thinking again about
alternatives is still the same: mass movements and mass organization.
However, we must face a reality whereby existing mass organizations
have been significantly demobilised and disoriented after the
institutionalisation of labour and the civil society, particularly
after 1994. Major leaders of nearly all unions and civics have gone
into government. Moreover, political pressure from the ANC and
financial carrots from business have led to generalised shifts from
previous anti-capitalist positions.
4. Towards New Networks of Struggle
An alternative to neoliberalism will in the
long run depend on alternative forms of organisation and networks of
struggle capable to root the desire for change arising from the whole
articulation of the South African class composition. This desire is
currently excluded and not represented by the alternative between
invisibility and institutionalization imposed by neoliberalism to the
South African people. Making these networks and structures visible
again is a major challenge from this point of view.
Important short-term steps must be taken as
well. It is in particular imperative for a broad social left to break
with the self-reassuring developmental rhetoric of the present
government. This will imply, for example, that a clear-cut
alternative to neoliberalism will be more likely to emerge if COSATU
as a federation severs its formal political allegiance to the ANC and
focuses more radically on working class issues. Challenging
neoliberalism will ultimately require creativity and inventiveness in
the redefinition of grassroots self-organized forms of resistance
capable to link the struggle of the factory working class with the
multiplicity of demands at the level of communities. The terrain of
basic needs can provide one foundation for this political and
organisational synthesis. Those same needs that are now denied by
neoliberal commodification and marketization of life are nonetheless
the material bases for ordinary people's distance from and resistance
to neoliberalism.
The social cooperation and knowledge that
people have to articulate in response to the capitalist colonization
of their whole lifetime - be it in the form of worker response to
flexibility, or as informal circuits of income generation and
distribution outside the reach of capital and the state at the level
of communities - represent an opportunity and a challenge for any
form of organisation engaged against neoliberalism. As an
opportunity, it stresses the existence of a whole social composition
not reconciled with capitalist global imperatives. As a challenge, it
requires rethinking the whole issue of organization, away from easy
slogans and shortcuts and attentive to the need to combine at the
same time the connection and circulation of struggles with the
respect of their inner diversity and reciprocal autonomy.
Moreover, if new networks of struggle will
question the viability of strategies focused on the influence on, or
the conquest of, state power, they cannot be read as expressions of
an undifferentiated "civil society" as simply absence of the state,
which will have a neoliberal flavour. In fact, what the working class
and the popular movements conquered through struggle, as social
rights and outcome of progressive social policies, will have to find
a place in networks of resistance against the restructuring of that
same state in the direction of liberalisation and
privatisation.
As this Encounter indicates, the analysis
must be able to read how the different progressive formations,
however structured, "organise, struggle and resist against
neo-liberalism for humanity". This ultimately requires for our
approach to current South African struggles against neoliberalism to
be understood in the broader, worldwide struggle for anti-neoliberal
resistance. Contrasting of neoliberalism on a mass scale may require
a long-lasting process of reconstruction of resistance. But given the
tradition of grassroots democracy and popular mobilisation in South
Africa, the neoliberal paradigm can encounter here a degree of
resistance with a meaningful impact on globalized processes of
opposition. If this materializes, like its apartheid predecessors
neo-liberalism will be swept away by mass organisations and movements
who hopefully this time will be prepared to make sure their own
agendas rule the day.
The comrades who met to discuss this
document are: Franco Barchiesi, Patrick Bond, Rehad Desai, George
Dor, Hein Marais, Lucky Mphafudi, Nape Nchabeleng, John Pape,
Roseline Nyman. Other comrades participated in a process of
collective editing via E-Mail.
This participation to the Encounter is
supported by the Editorial Collectives of "DEBATE - Voices from the
South African Left".
Given that this document is mainly intended
as a discussion paper, a bibliography has been omitted. However,
invaluable, albeit indirect and even unintended, inputs to this
document in the form of writings or speeches have been given by the
following comrades: Brian Ashley, Heinrich Bohmke, Ashwin Desai, Oupa
Lehulere, Andile Mngxitama, Melanie Samson.
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