> From: Ken Hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Perhaps Pen-L persons in South Africa might comment on this.
Actually, I was at a party last night, an SA-Cuba solidarity bash
held in the haute-bourgeois main ballroom of the old City Hall (now a
somewhat down-and-out provincial government building in a
derelict downtown Jo'burg neighbourhood), and got a rare
chance to hear, in several gossip sessions, precisely this line of
argument:
> The party will apply pressure in at least two ways. It is setting
> up a policy institute to breed ideas, stimulate debate and develop
> talent - a small step, but useful in the long term. The ANC also
> has plans to "redeploy" senior politicians, including Cabinet
> ministers, from their current positions and into local governments.
> Although touted as a means to revive the party at the grassroots,
> the move smells like a purge.
But the policy institute idea has been floating for five years, in
part because the half-dozen little vaguely progressive policy-wonk
outfits in the ANC orbit, mainly in central Jo'burg, have often
expressed excessively critical independence from Luthuli House (ANC
hq). But nothing has ever come of it. There may be an ANC school, run
by some of the more left-leaning young cadre in the ANC, but again,
it's not likely to be a truly significant initiative.
As for local government politics, ANC leaders have a very simple
problem: how to knock off 25% of their councilors (because of a
relatively neoliberal redistricting of border demarcations which
reduces the number of municipalities from 843 today to 284 in
December--largely to save budgetary resources, yet without any
realistic hope at gains in efficiency, if you ask me) (within a
couple of weeks I'll have a municipal website going if anyone likes
this stuff, at http://www.queensu.ca/msp ). The ANC leaders' very
simple solution is to claim that recent "performance audits"
(whatever they are) have indicated that 25% (nice coincidence) of
existing councilors are underperforming. My new book Cities of Gold,
Townships of Coal (Africa World Press), gives all the evidence anyone
needs to actually blame Pretoria for local government malfunctions.
That will be the irony, if national cabinet ministers are brought
into local managerial circuits, even temporarily. But the ANC
Conference also called for a "new person" who is less opportunistic,
careerist and corrupt, and this too will be the line of argument
justifying the mass sackings. You can guess, out of a given council,
which political side of the spectrum the 25% cut in councilors will
come from.
(One hint: the heroic figure of the SA left right now is Trevor
Ngwane, an extremely charismatic, rastafarian socialist-humanist in
the Subcom Marcos style, who is a Jo'burg independent councilor
because he was sacked from the ANC last September for opposing the
privatisation of Jo'burg. The hilarious cult video Two Trevors
go to Washington is about the mid-April confrontations between Trevor
N and Trevor Manuel, who in 2000 is the chair of the board of
governors of the IMF and World Bank. A US-Canada tour by Trevor N and
filmmaker Ben Cashdan, who was one of Nelson Mandela's economic
advisors and is also a PhD student of David Harvey, is being lined up
for September-October with 10 cities; let me know if you want me to
pass the name of your campus and city over to the organiser, if
you can raise roughly $500 in travel/viewing/speaking fees. I'll
try to post a tentative list of Two Trevors appearances sometime
soon.)
> President Mbeki is a pragmatist and will likely compromise under
> concentrated pressure from his own party. He might be forced to
> give up his hope for tax-free zones for foreign manufacturers, or
> at least trade it for increased social spending and job creation.
> In any event, South Africa's economic policy will shift away from
> the free market doctrine it has embraced.
The EPZ/IDZ concept is not really moving anyhow (the one really big
proposal, in Port Elizabeth, is in shambles for a long list of
reasons). I haven't heard anyone in the ANC-SACP-Cosatu Alliance
suggest this as a major faultline. Job creation remains something
that finance minister Trevor Manuel considers the state "impotent"
(his word) to do anything about, and the very few initiatives along
these lines, in public works, are systematically underfunded. The
main Alliance fault line, which continued opening up this week, is a
rollback of prgoressive provisions in 1995 labour legislation that
are alleged to make SA less "flexible" (or even, that simply give
SA the *appearance* of less flexibility, in a labour market with
40% unemployment!). There are periodic threats to the Alliance,
including the 4-mn worker stayaway on 10 May (protest against neolib
economic policies and mass private sector retrenchments), but they
simply don't faze the neolib faction in government, who on 10
August will announce a fairly sweeping new privatisation policy.
That too will generate cries of impending splits in the Alliance.
But some minor patronage will then be offered to the small and
increasingly incestuous crew of labour leaders to stop their yacking,
and they will, in time for the 1 November elections to retain the
"unity" of the Alliance. Yesterday's Mail and Guardian
(http://www.mg.co.za ) has a depressing story of how the main
organic lefty in the once formidable National Union of Metalworkers
(home of many trots) has just been drummed out of his job as nat'l
education secretary. Stalinism in the SA union movement is getting
worse and worse, I'm reliably informed.
> But a larger problem exists in the longer term. A fundamental
> division exists within the ANC between free-traders, who occupy
> many top government posts, and old socialists, who carry much
> weight with the rank-and-file. This division is deep, ideological,
> and unlikely to be bridged easily. It may be enough to split the
> ANC.
Yes this is true, but in the short term, it means that the technique
adopted is what we call "Talk Left, Act Right" (my other new book,
Elite Transition, documents this tendency within the ANC "left" in
terrible detail).
Actually, along these lines, here's what Mbeki is really worried
about--a Zambia or Zimbabwe post-nationalist political turn led by
trade union dissidents--hence his endorsement two months ago of the
election campaign of our venal northern neighbour, Robert Mugabe. I
think this is SA's future as well:
***
Radical Rhetoric and the Working Class during
Zimbabwean Nationalism's Dying Days
by Patrick Bond
Presented to the Rand Afrikaans University
Department of Sociology Zimbabwe Seminar
28 July 2000
1. Introduction: Political Turmoil Continues
Zimbabwe remains in "crisis"--a situation
whereby socio-economic equilibrating mechanisms
have broken down, and some force external to the
prevailing systematic logic must be invoked to
restore stability. We return to this definition
(from Robert Cox's Power, Production and World
Order) at the conclusion, for it suggests the
need for a much more radical process of social
change than even the country's recent upsurge of
working-class and nationalist rhetorics suggest.
For on the one hand it may be true, at the
time of writing, that political differences are
significantly less prone to displacement via
violence than was the case before the June 2000
parliamentary elections, the run-up to which saw
more than three dozen politically-motivated
murders. On the other hand, nevertheless, the
society faces profound contradictions that will
not be easily resolved over the coming months.
The contestation of political rhetoric and
reality remains profound.
At surface level, sites of crisis include a
massive fiscal deficit that emerged this year as
part of Robert Mugabe's election-patronage
strategy. The country is still hampered by
foreign exchange shortages, with the normal six
months of import cover reduced to a few days'
worth. Both city and countryside are vexed by
fuel shortages that have dragged on for months.
The army is overcommitted in a hopeless war,
faraway in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Zimbabweans grieve lost family and friends in
the midst of an horrific AIDS pandemic. The
economy suffers unprecedented price inflation
and soaring interest rates, and is losing
businesses and shedding jobs at a rapid rate.
Income inequality has risen to amongst the
world's worst levels, especially with respect to
control of good farming land. Rife with
corruption, the Zimbabwe African National Union
(ZANU) government appears to be in death-throes
stage, with internecine conflict between old-
and new-guards on the horizon for the next two
years. The country's 12 million people are
restless and often furious.
However, none of these symptoms have really
been explored, yet, in relation to the
underlying character of the struggle, confused
as it is by ideological fudging. The June
election did not clarify much, with ZANU taking
48% of 2.5 million votes, against 46% for the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC),
a difference of just 70,000. ZANU thus gained 62
of 120 contested seats, with an additional 30
appointed directly by Mugabe according to an
outmoded, unpopular constitution. Likewise, the
February 2000 referendum on a new constitution
promoted by Mugabe revealed an impressive
mobilisation of MDC supporters (who voted 55-45%
against government proposals) and an apathetic
turnout from peasants who normally champion the
ruling ZANU party, but was interpreted merely as
another "yellow card" for Mugabe. The MDC hopes
and plans on using its trademark "red card" in
the presidential election scheduled for 2002.
Mugabe, 76, has regularly hinted that he
won't stand again, but there is no obvious
successor in the wings of his fractious,
crisis-ridden party. Eddison Zvobgo, who heads
an influential faction, has announced his desire
to succeed Mugabe. Former minister of justice
Emmerson Mnangagwa, who lost his constituency
seat to the MDC, was retained as Speaker of
Parliament, and is usually mentioned as a
logical heir, as is ZANU chairperson John Nkomo.
But an additional name, Simba Makoni, a much
younger (50) technocrat-politician recently
named as finance minister, has also surfaced as
the possible successor. Regardless of which
individual is given the status of presidential
candidate (and when that might happen), the job
of controlling a fracture-ridden party--and from
there, the fortunes of the country--will still
likely be Mugabe's (as it was Nyerere's during
the 1980s after formal retirement from
government).
The most likely scenario, then, is that
Mugabe retains his office until the last minute,
dispensing patronage and probably terror in
equal measure, hoping to assure some kind of
amnesty for crimes he could be prosecuted for--
whether associated with corruption or his role
in the early-mid-1980s mass murder in
Matabeleland. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai
offered as much earlier this year, when it
appeared his party would win more convincingly;
Mugabe turned instead to a campaign of
intimidation and squeaked through the election
with a bare majority of contested seats,
although several of the parliamentary races will
likely be recounted and possibly rerun if
evidence of election malpractice continues to
mount.
Still, the momentum the MDC gained in the
June elections and the powerful, high-profile
July inauguration of its 57-strong parliamentary
delegation give the impression that even a
dynamic ZANU leader with full party support will
not prevent a transfer of executive power in
2002. Yet, cynics posit, Tsvangirai will just as
likely repeat the wretched experience of Zambia.
There, trade unionist Frederick Chiluba won the
1991 election against veteran nationalist
Kenneth Kaunda with a multiclass alliance, and
quickly applied neoliberal economic policy with
even worse results than his predecessor.
Unpacking the ideological "spaghetti" (as
Tsvangirai terms it) of MDC "social democracy"
is thus a vital ongoing exercise.
Zimbabwe's only two other significant
opposition movements lined up far right of the
MDC: a collection of octogenarian 1960s-70s
nationalists--Ndabaningi Sithole, Abel Muzorewa
and even the white Rhodesian rebel Ian Smith,
back from political retirement--and the
Democratic Party of charismatic former ZANU
activist, now self-described liberal, Margaret
Dongo. Aside from the traditional Sithole-
ZANU(Ndonga) parliamentary seat in the southeast
part of Zimbabwe, the rest of the opposition
failed to make a dent in the election.
Given that the MDC is the first political
party over the past two decades with a chance of
upsetting ZANU's hold on power, the next two
years present a crucial time for defining the
ideological struggles within the struggle. The
surface-level appearance of the 2000 campaign
had all the hallmarks of a young, fresh,
democratic, and pro-Western wind sweeping out
Zimbabwe's old-fashioned, proto-Stalinist
"socialist" rulers; for Mugabe, after all, the
MDC's dramatic rise in popularity occasioned a
renewed round of bashing a few thousand white
farmers and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). As portrayed to most of the world,
Zimbabwean nationalism was in its dying days, as
new, popular, democratic and market-oriented
politicians--led by two modern trade unionists--
prepared to sort out the mismanagement, end the
corruption and reverse ZANU's incompetent left-
wing economic policies.
But matters are certainly not that clear, and
to understand why ZANU isn't by any means the
"Left" or even "progressive" social force in
Zimbabwe, requires looking first at the post-
independence socio-economic record, and then the
contestation between leftwing and rightwing
tendencies within the trade union movement and
MDC. The logic of the argument should be clear:
the rhetoric of nationalism in disguising the
exhaustion of a capital accumulation cycle
itself becomes delegitimised, yet in this
context, as a new working-class ideology
struggles to emerge, the residual power of left
discourses within nationalist rhetoric retains
great currency. This is the source of Zimbabwe's
terrible contemporary confusion. Resolving that
confusion through renewed class struggle remains
vitally important.
(REST OF 8,000 WORD PAPER AVAILABLE
OFFLINE AT [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Patrick Bond ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
work phone: (2711) 717-3917
work fax: (2711) 484-2729
cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548
