"The Reconstruction and Development Program and the left: how and what are we reconstructing and developing?" was the theme of a debate recently held in Johannesburg. Sponsored by Phambili Books, the city's only socialist bookshop, the meeting heard a panel consisting of DARLENE MILLER from Comrades for a Workers Government, JOHN APPOLLIS, organiser for the Chemical Workers Industrial Union and JEREMY CRONIN, SACP central committee member. The forum was chaired by LANGA ZITA, COSATU Wits regional secretary. Green Left Weekly's NORM DIXON compiled this summary.
The RDP is the program on which the African National Congress was elected to lead South Africa's Government of National Unity on April 27. Miller opened by arguing that the RDP should be rejected by revolutionaries. "The RDP tells us to submit economically and politically to the bourgeoisie," Miller charged. It emphasises the creation of a climate of political stability. Capitalist investment is defended as necessary for economic growth. It projects the rebuilding of capitalism through the "golden triangle" of capital, labour and the state. The RDP is based on "political defeatism", she said. "It tells the working class that we are not in a position to challenge capitalist social relations."
"The struggle of the 1980s was not about simple reforms. It was an anti-capitalist struggle. We didn't simply want 'community empowerment', we wanted the working class to control production. The political effect of the RDP has been to lower the expectations of the South African people; it threatens to demobilise the working class. The ANC, through the RDP, may succeed where the apartheid state failed in disciplining the working class."
Miller pointed to calls by ANC ministers for communities to end their rent, rates and mortgage boycotts and for an end to land "invasions". The RDP promotes a "passive wait and see" attitude. "The youth, the students, the workers are being told to abandon their revolutionary impatience," she said. The ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) counterpose "national interests to class interests". The RDP "avoids almost all references to classes and class struggle", she stated. The RDP will be not force the big capitalist financial institutions to invest the billions of rand they control in housing rather than gamble it on the stock exchange for more profit.
Miller predicted that, because the ANC-led government has "tied itself to a program of economic discipline along the lines imposed by the IMF and World Bank", the RDP would cause "serious divisions amongst the masses". Reforms such as housing will be so limited that major conflict may erupt over who will benefit first.
There were several "left wing confusions" about the RDP, Miller claimed. One was the view that the left should fight to claim the RDP for the working class. She ridiculed the related project of fighting for the "soul of the ANC". "Comrades, I'm afraid that soul has departed. The soul of the ANC and the RDP is not a contested terrain. The ANC-led government will say it will support the workers' right to strike but what it will do is different. It will implement the neo-liberal aspects, or what some people call the 'bad points', of the RDP. It is going to say the nice things and do the bad things."
Miller admitted "the masses do have illusions in the RDP". They have yet to see the "capitalist core" of the RDP and, for them, its promises represent their expectations of a new South Africa. Revolutionaries need to develop tactics to relate to this situation. Socialists should not boycott independent or mass-based structures that take up the RDP. "Rejection of the RDP can only happen through an active process of class struggle", she explained.
Socialists, Miller added, must intervene in mass organisations to expand the RDP's demands so that they challenge the capitalist system. They should also be actively involved in the immediate defence of the working class as they go into struggle. She called on COSATU to revive the demand for a moratorium on retrenchments and the living wage campaign; the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance should be ended: she supported the 1993 call by the metalworkers union (NUMSA) for the formation of a workers' party.
Chemical Workers Industrial Union organiser John Appollis outlined why COSATU developed the first drafts of the RDP. COSATU believed the right to vote would be meaningless without a fundamental transformation of South African society. Big business would resist any kind of restructuring of the South Africa economy in the interests of the working class. So COSATU had attempted to develop a program of reconstruction and development with the interests of the working class at its centre.
"The RDP is permeated with demands of a proletarian character," Appollis said. "The right to strike is included. It says there should be popular participation in the whole process. The organisational scope for trade unions to intervene in the restructuring of industry is broad. There are good intentions around the question of housing, education and training."
However, good intentions are not enough. If the RDP's proletarian demands are to be implemented "one must examine the economic orientation of the RDP. Quite clearly the RDP's economic program is an adaptation to the interests of the bourgeoisie in South Africa and internationally. It ignores the inherent contradictions of capitalism. It doesn't talk about the fact that the South African capitalist economy has developed on the basis of cheap labour, on the dominance of monopoly capital".
The RDP has "taken on board" the terminology and instruments of neo-liberal economics, Appollis charged. It accepted the necessity of "macroeconomic stability" and fiscal discipline. Privatisation is considered an option; nationalisation has been abandoned.
The RDP's specific goals, such as housing, are vague. "All those policy formulations put the RDP in the camp of bourgeois economic policy ... Therefore all the good intentions, all the good proletarian demands and reforms will come to nothing if it operates within that framework."
For Appollis this seemed to be the direction of the new ANC-led government, as evidenced by the recent budget. "This economic program of the RDP is a mirror image of the political program of the leading bodies of the ANC", Appollis argued. The political compromises made by the ANC during the constitutional negotiations over the previous four years were proof that "the leading bodies of our movement have crossed the class line".
Nonetheless "the masses perceive the RDP as the instrument that will deliver housing, education and all the social needs that we have struggled for". In this way, the RDP directly links the daily struggle of the masses to the programmatic questions of economic and political restructuring.
This opens up space for socialists to make the direct connection between the daily struggles of the masses and the need for socialism. Appollis said that socialists must intervene in the struggles around delivery of reforms in the RDP, whether these concern housing, education, or workers' right to put forward a "communist perspective".
"It is our task to transform the RDP into a transitional program for socialism ... We must start developing our policies around those struggles." The fight was also to ensure that "the masses are at the centre of driving the implementation of the RDP".
He proposed that "RDP Councils", which would draw together representatives of the mass movement, be formed throughout the country to drive and monitor the implementation of the RDP.
For Appollis the perspective of seeing the RDP as a terrain of struggle is linked to that of winning the ANC to socialism. "Within the ANC at the moment, we do not have a coherent programmatic position from the left. The struggle for a competing socialist platform within the ANC will give the militants within the mass movement guidance as to how to make the RDP a transitional program to socialism."
Jeremy Cronin from the South African Communist Party warned that the "prime danger" facing the left at this time was to "self-marginalise" itself. The left should not repeat the mistakes made by the PAC which, over the past four years, has "always looked as though it was a belated and reluctant partner in the struggle for basic democracy ... As a left we must be the champions, the people who believe in carrying democracy to its furthest ends".
Cronin argued that it was a victory that the mass democratic movement had thwarted the far right's aim of plunging South Africa into a civil war. A national, even an international, consensus had been built against "barbarism" in South Africa. "If you want to turn South Africa into a Rwanda or a Bosnia you can do it. It is easy enough," he said.
Those who wished to create barbarism in South Africa have been, for the moment, sidelined by the masses "through their response to the assassination of Comrade Chris Hani, their uprisings in Bophuthatswana, and above all through their massive disciplined presence in the election process".
It was also positive that the democratic movement has built "some kind of national and even international consensus around social and economic priorities". That is what the RDP represents, Cronin said. It is "a statement that we must prioritise building houses, creating jobs, providing much better education, providing as much free health care as we can possibly manage and as rapidly as possible. In other words, we must have a social and economic program that is based on the needs of people and not on profits. That is the basic philosophy of the RDP."
Moreover, the RDP's objectives "are not going to descend as the result of the charity of some government we have elected, whether we like that government or not". He said the fact there is a consensus that the RDP's priorities must be pursued "is a victory for the left just as the elections were a victory for the left".
Cronin said it was short-sighted, and would marginalise the left, to claim that the negotiations process leading to the elections and the RDP were "huge defeats" for the working class and victories for bourgeoisie. "We haven't beaten them, but we've pushed them back", he argued. The "cutting edge" of the struggle has now focused on the implementation of the RDP "because the agenda of the other side — the multinationals, the big monopolies, external forces — is to hypocritically pay lip service to the RDP while doing everything to undermine it".
Cronin said that the big construction companies and other capitalist firms hope to demobilise the mass movement with promises that the private sector can deliver the RDP's goals. Also, "they hope make profits out of our naivete. After two or three years when we have failed to make any progress in providing jobs, housing and free health care, they will turn around and say the RDP failed for its inherent weaknesses" rather than as a result of capitalist sabotage.
Despite "real weaknesses" the left must critically support the RDP, Cronin insisted. The left should ensure that the RDP remains based on peoples' needs, remains people-driven and delivers as a priority houses, education and health care.
Cronin agreed with Appollis's view that socialists needed to "struggle for the heart and soul" of the ANC. He also agreed that there were "profound tendencies" within the ANC prepared to accept economic and political orthodoxy.
The government has been skirting around the hard decisions up until now, Cronin added. "At the heart of the RDP is the redistribution of wealth in our country. Soft loans, lotteries, casinos [and other proposals to fund the RDP] are ways of avoiding those class struggle questions. We are not going to begin to build houses for the millions and millions of people who cannot pay for them unless we begin to struggle for the redistribution of wealth in our country."
The left must unleash class struggles to put the redistribution of wealth, resources and opportunities at the centre of reconstruction and development. It must support the struggles like that of the Pick 'n Pay workers to claw back some of the profits "that the Ackermans [head of Pick 'n Pay] and others have pocketed". It must demand a progressive tax system where the poor pay less and capitalist companies get taxed "a darn sight more". The left must insist that more money be spent on social needs and the military and armaments budgets be cut.
The left must "vigorously campaign to roll back the frontiers of the market", Cronin continued. "Recently, a property consultant was quoted in the Star saying, 'I support the RDP of course. We must build houses but the RDP has wildly exaggerated the number of houses needed. We must distinguish between effective demand and mere need'. Translated that means that on the so-called free market there are a few hundred thousand people who, with some subsidy from the state, might be able to pay for houses to make enough profits for building societies and the rest, the 'mere needs', can be ignored. That's precisely what the left must challenge. Houses are houses and the right to shelter is a fundamental human right ... If the market can't provide those houses then to hell with the market."
He pointed to the policy adopted by housing minister Joe Slovo as one way to "transform the power relations inside the market". The housing department favours awarding the standard R12,500 subsidy to poor families organised into co-ops in townships. "The point behind it, and it's a socialist point, is that the power on the market of a co-op with a thousand families multiplied by R12,500 begins to equal out a little bit more their power versus the building societies and developers." Similar goals could be achieved through the formation of community banks and the mobilisation of trade union pension funds.
In the spirited discussion that followed a number of points were disputed and clarified. Miller took issue with Cronin's view that a redistribution of wealth is at the heart of the RDP. She repeated Appollis' earlier point that the RDP document is vague on the concrete mechanisms required to redistribute wealth effectively. She also pointed out the government's first budget actually reduced income tax on companies from 40% to 35%.
Miller said that a program to "control the commanding heights of society" needs to be put forward if the problems of the poor and working class are to be really solved. "If you really want houses for all, you take control of what the R19 billion Life Officers Association [a major insurance company] has. We are saying go for the jugular."
Cronin, in response, conceded there had not been "much progress on the RDP front". But it was unfair to present the budget as the first lost battle over the political and economic direction of the post-apartheid era. "That budget was written by the old regime and we had to cobble what we could out of it. The next budget is crucially important and that's the first big massive budgetary battle."
There had been some progress, Cronin insisted. "We have implemented free health care to children under six and pregnant mothers. And our opponents are trying to sow demoralisation and confusion about this. The front page of the Star two weeks ago blared: 'Hospitals in total confusion' and claimed this was a result of the RDP. It neglected to say that hospitals were already in total crisis." The SACP leader called for caution when criticising the RDP as this could unintentionally "feed into the agenda of the other side" to sow demoralisation and confusion about the real gains being made.
Cronin repeated that the process which led to the massive April 27 election victory of the ANC, while not perfect, was a breakthrough by the masses towards democracy. "That's what we must proclaim. Then we must look at the shortcomings. Voices of despair and confusion only demobilise us rather than equipping us to go further."
The militant masses, Cronin emphasised, remain "the majority force inside of the broad liberation movement and that's what we must remind Madiba [Nelson Mandela] and others up there. We are the majority, we voted you there, not Ackerman, not Taiwan, not Japanese soft loans. So we have to be much more confident and aggressive."
Appollis called for a "serious balance sheet" of the national consensus, which, he said was a consensus around the economic and political program of the ruling class as underlined by the ANC-led government's first budget.
He argued that, even if "as communists, we tactically adapt ourselves to the RDP, to the interim constitution, and the political compromises because the balance of forces means we tactically cannot act in other ways, we must [still] expose their limitations". He said he differed with Cronin, who, "seemed to move the other way ... The tactical adaptation to the economic neo-liberal program of the RDP and also the political compromises subsume his whole orientation as a communist to these particular programs of the ruling class and also of the right wing which is dominant within the ANC".
Extracting the class character of South Africa's political developments and the RDP was necessary "to arm our militants politically to respond to the attacks of the bourgeoisie and also to challenge the problems within our movement", he said.
Responding to a rhetorical question about when the "second stage" of the South African revolution was due to begin, Cronin stated bluntly that "I'm not waiting for a second stage. We must get on with the class struggle. The workers are getting on with the struggle and we need to support them. The only way we are going to unite our country, to democratise our country beyond the ability to place a vote in a ballot box once every five years, is by leading a class struggle. It needs to be a struggle in which we advance and propagate socialist ideas and there I agree with the other comrades on the panel. It's the only clear way forward."
Cronin urged the meeting not to treat the RDP as a "biblical scholar" would, "poring over it and quibbling about which direction it is going and whether it says this or that ... Let's take note of our debate. I think that beneath our tactical and strategic differences, — and they are important — there are very many points of agreement. Whether we agree or not with the RDP, whether we agree with the SACP or ANC, our task as a left is to articulate loud and clear our opposition to structural adjustment, against neo-liberalism, for a people-driven process, for a process of transformation based on houses that are not commodities but a human right. That's how we will rebuild and consolidate the left."