Patrick Bond, Johannesburg
On April 27, 1994, the racist apartheid system was smashed. One person, one-vote democracy and deracialisation of government was achieved as a result of the mass struggle conducted largely under the 72-year long leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).
Ten years later, however, sustained celebration at the outcome the anti-apartheid struggle is far greater in the mansions and corporate headquarters of Johannesburg, thanks to the ANC's turn to neoliberalism once Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and his liberation movement unbanned in 1990.
"The government is utterly seduced by big business, and cannot see beyond its immediate interests", remarked the editor of Business Day newspaper in June 2003.
Even Mandela's successor, President Thabo Mbeki, acknowledges the problem. Mbeki told an ANC policy conference in September 2002: "Domestic and foreign left sectarian factions... accuse our movement of having abandoned the working people, saying that we have adopted and are implementing neoliberal policies. These factions claim to be pursuing a socialist agenda. They assert that, on the contrary, we are acting as agents of the domestic and international capitalist class and such multilateral organisations as the World Bank and the IMF, against the interests of the working people."
Repeated denials by Mbeki followed. This month especially, elite awareness about the real winners of South African freedom is, necessarily, disguised. A recent 10-year review, available on the government's website and promoted in the ANC's weekly email newsletter, argues: "Since the ANC was elected to government in 1994, South Africa has achieved a level of macroeconomic stability not seen in the country for 40 years...
"After the massive investment outflows of the 1980s and early 1990s, the country has had positive levels of foreign direct investment over the last ten years... Between 1995 and 2002 the number of people employed grew by around 1.6 million people."
Big business benefits
Most such claims are distortions or outright fibs. For the ANC to brag of "a level of macroeconomic stability not seen in the country for 40 years", for example, is to ignore the easiest measure of such stability — exchange rate fluctuations.
In reality, the three currency crashes witnessed over a period of a few weeks in February-March 1996, June-July 1998 and December 2001 ranged from 30% to 50%, and each led to massive interest rate increases which sapped growth and rewarded the speculators.
These moments of macroeconomic instability were as dramatic as any other incidents during the previous two centuries, including the September 1985 financial panic that split big business from the apartheid regime and paved the way for ANC rule.
Domestic investment has been sickly, and were it not for the part-privatisation of the telephone company, foreign investment would not even register. Domestic private sector investment was negative for several years, as capital effectively went on strike, moving mobile resources offshore as rapidly as possible.
The only targets in the ANC's conservative macroeconomic strategy that were successfully reached were those most crucial to big business — inflation (down from 9% to 5.5% instead of the projected 7-8%), the current account (in surplus, not deficit as projected), and the fiscal deficit (below 2% of GDP, instead of the projected 3%).
The reality is that South Africa has witnessed the replacement of racial apartheid with what is increasingly referred to as class apartheid — systemic underdevelopment and segregation of the oppressed majority through structured economic, political, legal, and cultural practices.
South Africa's official measure of unemployment rose from 16% in 1995 to 30% in 2002. Adding frustrated job-seekers to that figure brings the percentage of unemployed people to 43%. Meanwhile, labour productivity increased steadily and the number of days lost to strike action fell, the latter in part because of ANC demobilisation of unions and hostility to national strikes undertaken for political purposes, such as the national actions against privatisation in 2001 and 2002.
It is here that the core concession made by the ANC during the transition deal is apparent, namely in the desire by white businesses to escape the economic stagnation and declining profits born of a classical overaccumulation crisis, in the context of a sanctions-induced laager, and amplified by the 1970s-1980s rise of black militancy in workplaces and communities.
The deal represented simply this — black nationalists got the state, while white people and corporations could remove their capital from the country, but also remain domiciled and enjoy yet more privileges through economic liberalisation. The pre-tax profit share soared during the late 1990s to 1960s-era levels associated with apartheid's heyday.
Blacks poorer
As a result, according to even the government's own statistics, average black South African household income fell 19% from 1995-2000 (to US$3714 per year), while white household income rose 15% (to $22,600 per year).
Notwithstanding deeper poverty, the state raised water and electricity prices dramatically, to the point that by 2002 they consumed 30% of the income of those households earning less than $70 per month. An estimated 10 million people had their water cut off, according to two national government surveys, and 10 million were also victims of electricity disconnections.
Gender relations record some improvements, especially in reproductive rights, albeit with extremely uneven access. But contemporary South Africa retains apartheid's sexist modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labour system, which is subsidised by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands. These women are not paid for their role in social reproduction, which in a normal labour market would be handled by state schooling, health insurance and pensions.
This structured superexploitation is exacerbated by an apparent increase in domestic sexual violence associated with rising male unemployment and the feminisation of poverty.
With the public healthcare services in decline due to underfunding and the increasing penetration of private providers, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, and AIDS are rife — all far more prevalent than during apartheid. Diarrhea kills 43,000 children a year, as a result mainly of inadequate potable water provision.
Most South Africans with HIV have little prospect of receiving antiretroviral medicines to extend their lives (half a million urgently require drugs at present), thanks to the "denialist" policies of Mbeki and his health minister, which senior health professionals and researchers regularly label genocide.
Although a roll-out of medicines was finally promised by the cabinet in September 2003, Mbeki immediately poured salt in the wounds by denying (in a New York Times interview) that he knew anyone who had died of AIDS or was even HIV positive.
South African ecology is today in worse condition, in many crucial respects — for example, water and soil resources mismanagement, contributions to global warming, fisheries, industrial toxics, genetic modification — than during apartheid.
And with fewer than 2% of arable plots redistributed (as against a five-year target of 30%), Pretoria's neoliberal policy has conclusively failed.
Finally, the repressive side of ANC rule was unveiled to the world during the August 2002 protests against the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development. Leading activists in the black townships of Johannesburg and Cape Town have been repeatedly harassed and detained by police — mainly illegally (resulting in high-profile acquittals) — for resisting evictions, electricity and water disconnections, and the installation of prepaid meters for services.
A March 21 demonstration at the Constitutional Court building's grand opening in central Johannesburg was banned on spurious grounds, and 51 Anti-Privatisation Forum activists arrested. AIDS Treatment Action Campaign activists were savagely beaten in early 2003 during a non-violent civil disobedience campaign to acquire medicines.
In short, the record is one of low-intensity democracy in which the ANC regularly wins elections because the labour movement is not yet ready to run pro-worker candidates. But for how long? The transition from racial to class apartheid will not go unpunished forever.
[A longer version of this article appears in the US Monthly Review magazine, at <http://www.monthlyreview.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004.
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