BY DALE McKINLEY
JOHANNESBURG — In the words of South African President Thabo Mbeki, "the question cannot be avoided for too long", especially in light of the recently concluded 51st national congress of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). It is a simple and straight-forward question: whose interests does the ANC serve?
A related question arose during the political battle late last year waged between the ANC leadership and the so-called "ultra-left". Fed-up with the increasingly strident and confident left-wing critiques and public actions aimed at Mbeki and the ANC government he heads, Mbeki asked: "Whose interests do they [the 'ultra-left'] serve?"
The question — and "answer" — had already been provided by an earlier ANC Political Education Unit paper that claimed the "ultras" were "waging a counter-revolutionary struggle against the ANC [by] siding with the bourgeoisie and its supporters ... to confront the ANC and our democratic government".
With that understanding of who the real enemy of the "revolution" is, Mbeki and the ANC leadership marched into the organisation's national congress, held in Stellenbosch beginning December 16.
Using language more akin to that of a proto-fascist than the spokesperson of the "people's party", Smuts Ngonyama captured the task at hand: "We will deal with any attempts and tendencies to hurt the ANC and each of its alliance partners... We are in the process of cleansing each of the alliance partners of these tendencies".
Once the congress was underway, it soon became clear what the ANC leadership meant by such "cleansing". Despite the opportunistic mea culpa politics of leaders of the ANC's supposedly "critical" alliance partners — the Congress of South African Trade Unions and, especially, the South African Communist Party — and their behind-the-scenes efforts to ensure sizeable "left" representation on the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC), they were relegated to the political wilderness.
The newly elected NEC is a who's who of Mbeki acolytes, most being members of an emergent black bourgeoisie far removed from the working-class interests of those they claim to serve. There was no room for any genuine working-class leaders, all having been thoroughly "cleansed" from the ANC over the last few years.
'Deracialisation'
As to the outcome of the much-publicised political and ideological "debates" at the congress, they further confirmed the ANC's complete abandonment of the interests of the majority of South Africans.
For example, the answer to the question of who the ANC considers the main "motive force" of the ANC's so-called "National Democratic Revolution" is to be found, not in its pious rhetoric about the poor and working class, but in its approach to overcoming the most fundamental obstacles to socioeconomic justice and equality in South Africa: apartheid-capitalist property relations.
The ANC congress's answer was that "deracialisation of ownership and control of wealth" is the key to addressing this. It fits in nicely with the building and consolidation of a black bourgeoisie as the engine of change in the "new" South Africa.
It will not be the interests of South Africa's poor and working-class people that will be served by a process of "deracialisation" of South African capitalism. After all, since when has an emergent capitalist class made common cause with the poor and working class to commit class suicide?
On the role of the state in effecting meaningful social and economic change within South African society, the ANC congress provided further clarity as to the interests that the ANC seeks to truly serve.
The core approach to the "restructuring of state assets" will remain, as the relevant congress resolution so clearly states, one of ensuring "the transfer of assets to the private sector". No mention here of the specific interests of the poor and working class, simply a naive addendum that the approach should "strengthen our developmental agenda". Since the "developmental agenda" is driven by a "deracialisation" that predominately empowers a new black bourgeoisie, it should not be difficult to figure out whose class interests this will serve.
Even the seemingly, ideologically innocuous matter of a basic income grant to the poor, provided by the state, could not be endorsed by the congress after Mbeki made it clear in his presidential report that the ANC should not be party to giving "handouts to the poor". However, not a voice was raised during the congress when it came to the state's continuing, and intensifying, provision of public resource handouts, through neo-liberal fiscal and monetary policies, to the emergent bourgeoisie and corporate capital.
Such reverse "Robin Hoodism" is obviously central to the "developmental agenda" of the ANC. No doubt, the corporate representatives who dished out R140,000 to "develop and build relationships with the ANC" at the congress were well pleased.
When it came to addressing other key components of the ANC's stated programmatic commitments to serve the interests of the majority of South Africans (affordable and efficient provision of basic needs and services such as water, housing, health and education) all that the congress could be muster were vague promises and calls to "accelerate and strengthen" existing approaches.
Seldom has there been a better example of vacuous political-speak than that contained in the congress resolution on basic services, which "urged the government to make a deliberate effort to accelerate the social transformation program through visible and purposeful funding mechanisms aimed at meeting the basic needs of all people with a sense of urgency".
'New morality?'
Given the fact that a record number of South Africans now find themselves in greater poverty, and ever-increasing numbers are unable to afford and/or access such basic needs, despite the ANC's populist claims to the contrary, the ANC's status quo ante approach only further institutionalises the class divide and privileges inherited from apartheid and protects the interests of the old, and new, elites.
In his presidential report to the 51st congress, Mbeki, in an apparent attempt to underline the ANC's claims to be acting in the interests of the downtrodden, made an impassioned plea for the ANC to adopt a "new morality" which he euphemistically captured by reference to an "RDP of the soul".
Since it has been clear for many years now that the Reconstruction and Development Program — the ANC's 1994 election manifesto — resides in the same subterranean policy depths as the free lunch program for poor schoolchildren, it is hard to imagine the real content of the morality to which Mbeki refers.
Mbeki and the ANC need to be asked what kind of morality is it that encourages and celebrates the enrichment of a few at the expense of the majority and that defends such as a "right". Mbeki needs to be asked why his government in effect imposes a death sentence on the millions of poor afflicted with HIV-AIDS while calling for a "better life for all". The ANC must answer why it facilitates the eviction of thousands of families from their homes in the middle of winter in the name of "cost-recovery".
Try as it might, and it tried very hard at its 51st congress, the ANC can no longer assume the mantle of the political, organisational and ideological champion of the majority of working-class and poor South Africans on the basis of its proclamations and appearance.
While it might continue to get some serious mileage from its (relatively) recent past as a liberation movement, the contemporary absence of any major political competition and its ever-expanding network of patronage, the ANC will soon have to face up to its own "objective and subjective" realities.
Those realities combine to show that the ANC is not, as it so proudly claims in its congress documents, a "disciplined force of the left organised to conduct consistent struggle in pursuit of the interests of the poor". Rather, the ANC has become an organisation fully committed to serving the interests of an emergent domestic bourgeoisie as well as both domestic and international corporate capital.
The ANC can throw around as many labels and nasty epitaphs as it likes at those who are willing to face up to such realities, but this will not make them go away. The ANC has made its political and ideological choices and now it must live with them.
[Dale McKinley is a former chairperson of the Johannesburg Central branch of the South African Communist Party. He is a leading activist in the Anti-Privatisation Forum. Visit the APF web site at <http://www.apf.org.za>.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 15, 2003.
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