I thought it was a very fine piece, Fred... but one of my trusted
comrades isn't so sure:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: What is the ANC and Where is the Left in South Africa?
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:40:13 +0200
From: Dale T McKinley <[email protected]>
A useful, summarised compendium of a range of critical analyses of the
'transition'.
However, Chris' presentation of the 'historic' character of the
ANC(Alliance) and thus explanation for what has happened since the
early-mid 1990s is somewhat shallow -- completely missing out on the
very real class formation and thus accompanying societal and
organisational politics within the ANC-Alliance ... thus leading him
to 'explain' the rise of a new party-state-corporate elite and their
accumulation path as largely an outcome of rotten 'morals', particular
leadership and specific projects.
Also, there really does need to more than the by-now somewhat
perfunctory refrain of 'where is the left in SA?' -- the question has
been posed since the early 1990s, in various forms and contexts and
the 'answers' are as varied as the ideological tendencies and groups
et al. amongst the 'SA left'. As I have argued at length for many
years now, the 'SA left' has been/is in, a state of crisis which is
not reducible to the 'left' itself (remembering that there have been
many attempts and much activism./work over the last decade and more to
try and forge 'left' alternatives, whatever 'leftists' of various
stripes think about those efforts and work) but which is bound up
in/shaped by all of the very crises - whether structural, political,
moral, organisational etc. -- that Chris (for the most part) cogently
summarises in respect of the ANC-Alliance (even if he lets the SACP
off the hook almost completely).
Onward!
Dale
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