*Capitalism will grow*
/"Seek ye first the political kingdom" /-- Kwame Nkrumah
*Dominic Tweedie, Johannesburg, 22**December 2012*
Pallo Jordan concluded an article published in the Business Day on 19
December 2012, thus:
/"Does the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as deputy president of the
ANC signal the arrival of the post-1994 African capitalist classes?/
/"Ramaphosa brings talents and skills acquired in a working life
that includes legal practice, leadership of a union, negotiating our
democratic constitution and being a business leader. Having seized
the opportunities that came with democracy, we expect Ramaphosa to
lead the charge in defining a more positive role for black
capitalists. Instead of being passive earners of dividends, they
must be pressed into tackling the challenges facing our democracy./
/"It required the social and political shake-up of China to
galvanise and release the latent energies of the Chinese capitalist
classes that have made China the world's second-largest economy. The
emergent African capitalists should address the social deficits
inherited from the past. Is it asking too much to hope that, having
been afforded this opportunity, Ramaphosa will make yet another
sterling contribution to the development of South Africa by leading
them in making such a commitment?"/
South Africa is in a similar position to China, and to
post-revolutionary Russia in the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP),
insofar as production is mediated by capitalist relations, even though
the working proletariat commands great power, and its party, the
communist party, is unmatched in the country as a revolutionary vanguard.
But Jordan's opposition of "passive earners of dividends", as against
"tackling the challenges facing our democracy", is a dichotomy that is
false.
Jordan imagines that the "propertied African elite" that he describes in
his preceding passages is a patrician class and is not primarily defined
as a capitalist class. The new "propertied African elite" is similar to
Afrikaner, and before that English-speaking, "elites" that preceded it,
according to Jordan. And all are, or were, free agents who could be
trained by leaders to one destiny, or another. This is a world outlook
that does not, in general, differ much from that of Jan Smuts, or that
of Winston Churchill.
In contrast to such a view, Karl Marx's book, "Capital", tells us one
thing above all others about capital: That it is not a thing, but is a
relation between employer and employed, that results in the
expropriation of surplus labour, value and profit by the employer. These
are the facts of political life.
*_Who is to be master_?*
Jordan is correct to cite the Chinese example, but he fails to notice
that while the capitalist class in China is producing growth, it is not
fully a ruling class, if at all.
South Africa can do without snobbish wealthy rulers who think they have
a God-given right to rule because of any distinguishing external
characteristic, including Africanity. There is nothing inevitable or
even historical about successive dynastic elites ruling the country. The
real history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class
struggle.
But what South Africa cannot do without in the present moment, and for
an indefinite period into the future, is capitalist relations of
production, because we have as yet no other viable kind. Hence South
Africa cannot do without capitalists, and consequently a class of
capitalists, even if, as in China, the capitalist class is not going to
be a completely ruling class.
This would be the case, whether the ruling class was the romantic
"propertied African elite" that Pallo Jordan imagines as coming into its
own and reclaiming its political patrimony; Or whether the leading class
in South Africa is effectively the working class, hegemonic "in all key
sites of power", that the SACP imagines, and advocates.
It is idle to demand increased levels of employment without
understanding that more employment is bound to generate more capital,
and so, also, is bound to generate more and bigger capitalists.
Left-populists will never admit this, but communists cannot deny it. It
is written in the Marxist classics.
If this comes as an unpleasant surprise to some of us revolutionaries,
then it is high time we faced up to it and got used to it. In our
circumstances, it is absurd to call for more jobs and less capitalism at
the same time.
Because the capitalist class is here to stay, at least until the day
when new relations of production are invented, or are wrestled into
existence in class struggle. The new, post-capitalist relations of
production are over the horizon; or, if such relations do exist in the
present, they are for political purposes, so far, invisible and inoperable.
*_Capitalism must grow_*
Not only is the capitalist class here to stay, but it is here to grow,
perhaps dramatically. The capitalist class will have to grow a lot, if
South Africa is going to increase the number of employed people and
reach full employment.
So the question about Cyril Ramaphosa is not whether he will charm the
African elite, who may be bureaucrats and rentiers, but who are
conspicuously lacking in the urge to extract surplus labour from workers
at the point of production. Cde Cyril must foster the necessary growth
of a capitalist class that is prepared to employ people in production.
If there is a question, it will be about how this can be done without
the capitalist class becoming ambitious, overbearing, and destructive to
itself and to others, in the manner that we can see prefigured in the
bourgeois media in recent months.
In other words, the proper question is: How much political power will
the capitalists have?
The unpleasant surprise that lies in wait for Jordan and others like him
is that the capitalists that we need may well have to be found outside
the "propertied African elite". Even if the capitalists are African,
they may well not be socially compatible with patricians like Jordan.
But it is much more likely that the new capitalists will be drawn from
the same well as the old capitalists were drawn. They may well be
disproportionately white and foreign. So the question of how much power
the capitalist class will have, is also a question about national
sovereignty.
Does it matter if capitalists are white, or foreign? Not very much,
provided that the capitalist class is, as in China, far enough away from
being a fully ruling class. To some extent it does matter that existing
BEE laws, for other reasons, favour the promotion of black people into
authority over productive enterprises. Whereas these are not actual
capitalists, but are in effect merely financiers. They have a passive
claim on value, but they do not themselves extract the value. It is not
really that they could be bad capitalists, but rather, it is that they
are not capitalists, but they are rentiers.
Beyond this point one would have to look at the division of the product
of surplus labour. This is developed by Karl Marx in Volume 2, and more
especially Volume 3 of his great work. Then one would want look at the
same phenomenon from an international perspective.
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