- Original Message -
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
NY Times, Nov. 13, 2002
Rarity of Black-Run Businesses Worries South Africa's Leaders
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
In 1998, nearly 35 black-controlled companies were listed on South
Africa's
stock exchange, accounting for about 7 percent of the market
capitalization. This year, 23 black companies account for about 2.2
percent
of the market capitalization, a decline attributed to a stock market
slump,
spiraling debt and poor management.
Why doesn't she blame capitalism? Her counterparts here do...
Excerpt from ELITE TRANSITION: FROM APARTHEID TO NEOLIBERALISM IN SOUTH
AFRICA
by Patrick Bond
Pluto Press, London and University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, SA
Box 1.4: Black economic disempowerment
There is a tendency in South African political discourse to blame the
victims, and failed black entrepreneurs--an easy target for leftists--are no
exception (ANC MP Ben Turok, for example, was amongst the most regular and
belligerent of white petit-bourgeois critics of an aspirant black
bourgeoisie). At one level, such disdain has been provoked, for the
neuveau-riche character of Black Economic Empowerment (`BEE') means that the
objective sometimes degenerates--as in a 1996 endorsement by then-deputy
trade and industry minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (a former trade
unionist)--into becoming, quite simply, `filthy rich.'(52)
But matters are always more complicated in South Africa--letting the cat
out of the bag, one Star Business Report journalist observed, `The white
establishment use black faces to gain access to the new government and often
pay the blacks in the form of shares in their companies. So at the end of
the day, it is a handful of black people that are being enriched.' The
actual number? Controversial hawker-entreprenuer Lawrence Mavundla counted
300 people in Mlambo-Ngcuka's `filthy rich' camp (not much of a new `class'
there)--whom he reckoned were already very well off--and argued that BEE as
it was already understood by late 1996 was a `sham.'(53)
Instead of disdain or envy, a more appropriate sentiment might be pity, for
if ever there was a case that white South African elites laid a neoliberal
ambush for their successors, BEE is it. The trajectory was hinted at by
political scientist Sam Nolutshungu during the early 1980s, when he
described `the inability of the system of dominance to provide terms of
black submission to the social order that collaborating black classes could
themselves uphold, and, in their turn, purvey to others persuasively.' Thus,
he continued, `It is in recognition of this fact that the regime now seeks
to incorporate the black elites, a measure which, at this late hour, and in
the manner of its conception and execution, more resembles a strategy of
counter-insurgency than a commitment to fundamental reform.'(54) At a
political level, the mass democratic organisations prevented Pretoria's
co-option strategy from proceeding very far, and in any event collaborating
classes were given few real opportunities for accumulation aside from
homeland patronage until later in the 1980s.
At that point in late-apartheid's mutation, the most aggressive of BEE
hucksters took over: white free-market propagandists, desperate for allies.
Billboard images erected during the 1980s by the public-private Small
Business Development Corporation depicted 70,000 kombi-taxi drivers as the
economic motors of the New South Africa. `Free Enterprise is Working!,' the
billboards shouted. The Johannesburg Star newspaper was an important site of
liberal ideological signposting, with journalist Patrick Laurence waxing
eloquent in 1989 that, `The robust, competitive taxi drivers can be seen as
evidence that capitalism is alive and well, and that even within apartheid
South Africa, where for decades Black business was shackled, the capitalist
ethos is strong and growing.' Likewise John Kane-Berman, a director of the
SA Institute of Race Relations (which was in the process of transforming
from a liberal to neoliberal institution, in a manner that later
characterised the Democratic Party), would in 1990 describe the black
kombi-taxi industry as `the most dramatic black success story so
far'--though three years later, after a taxi flareup in Johannesburg's
central business district that left four people dead and terrified the
occupants of downtown financial institutions and mining houses, he admitted
that the industry was better termed a `debacle.' Indeed after that incident,
Financial Mail editorialists finally voiced concern that, `It will be tragic
if many black small businessmen [kombi owners] burn their fingers on their
first encounter with capitalism.'(55)
The sad reality was that the first organic encounters that many South
Africans had with petty capital accumulation--the sale of goods and services
in township and rural spheres previously unexplored, prohibited or severely
distorted by large-scale capitalists--were of severe
