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By Patrick Bond
Last week a conceptual barrier carefully constructed by elites since
2015 was suddenly cracked at the University of the Witwatersrand Great
Hall, by two of South Africa’s leading economic personalities: Pravin
Gordhan, who served as a pro-business Finance Minister for seven years
until being fired in March, and super-consultant Iraj Abedian, who in
1996 had co-authored the country’s post-apartheid homegrown structural
adjustment programme. Two more solid bourgeois representatives would be
hard to find.
They both came to Wits to attack the enabling role of auditing firm KPMG
in the scandal involving the “Zupta” network, a fusion of the patronage
system within President Jacob Zuma’s government and the Gupta brothers
from India who over the past decade have successfully “state captured”
several large parastatal corporations and government ministries.
However, instead of focusing on one firm, they made an unusually
passionate case against what is sometimes termed White Monopoly Capital
(though the two obviously wouldn’t name the beast as such given its
controversial recent past). A few voices have made the same point, such
as the leading trade union federation’s policy director Neil Coleman. In
April, he asked, “Do we have to choose between a predatory elite and
white monopoly capital?”
The moniker WMC comes from old texts drafted decades ago by SA Communist
Party intellectuals, and is not related to Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s
Monthly Review version. Indeed it was only in 2016 that Zuma’s son
Duduzane – an extremely close associate of the Guptas – asked London PR
firm Bell Pottinger to find “a narrative that grabs the attention of the
grassroots population who must identify with it, connect with it and
feel united by it.” The twitter bots and other machinery Bell Pottinger
deployed did indeed popularise WMC, but then the backlash was so severe
that last month, the firm suffered a mass boycott by clients disgusted
when a hack of Gupta emails revealed the extent of the rot, and went out
of business.
full: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/corporate-state-degeneracy/
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