Cosatu does the right thing

Something very interesting on the sideline of the resignation of Bobby Godsell as chairman of the Eskom board and the non-resignation of Jacob Maroga as CEO.

If a situation is impossibly confusing, or your view is obscured for some reason, then look around and check where others are looking – look at the stances they adopt.

The Black Management Forum and the ANC Youth League have lined up to accuse Godsell and the Eskom board of racism; the state-owned enterprises have become a  “slaughterhouse” for black professionals bemoans the BMF.

On the other hand, and to its enormous credit, you have Cosatu (in the person of Zwelinzima Vavi) defending Godsell and the attempts (Godsell has led) to make Eskom equal to the task of providing South Africa with adequate and sustainable power.

Cosatu versus the BMF and the ANCYL? It’s not often that organisations reflect their ideology and class interests so precisely.

This situation  looks very much like the industrial working class versus crony capitalist wannabes.

Cosatu is still  controlled by the interests of workers employed in the real economy of minerals extraction, power generation and manufacturing (although these interests compete with those of public sector workers who often have different imperatives). The Black Management Forum and the ANC Youth League are political formations whose only interest is in ”leveraging’ preferential access to the state for the purpose of the advancement of its members.

Zwelinzima Vavi must be deeply concerned about economic growth – it is the imperative placed on him by the position he occupies. The imperative of the BMF (and to some degree, the ANCYL) is to maximise the advantage its their members derive from BBBEE and employment equity laws – and from their proximity to political power.

I think this fault line is fundamental to where we are heading and struggles here will constantly alter and trim our direction. I also think, in this instance, Cosatu is on the side of the angels; standing, as it often does, against the alarming spread of vampire capitalism in this country.

Julius Malema is the Coming Man

PREPARE YOURSELF

Take a deep breath, put your shoulders back and look  through the frenzy.

Reading the Democratic Alliance’s Diane Kohler Barnard pour scorn on the “rotund” and “Idi Amin-like” Julius Malema I couldn’t help but think that she is leaving herself as few choices as J.M. Coetzee leaves his fictional characters.

Julius Malema is a powerful contender for future ANC leadership – and is already a powerful politician. I think his rise to lead the ANC and possibly the country may be unstoppable. I fear that Barnard’s feisty and admirable rhetoric leaves her, and those she represents, no paths upon which she might ride her high horse back, when this is all over.

Barnard, recounting how Malema allegedly attempted to bully his way through a traffic violation with : “Don’t you know who I am?” arrogance, says:

[Julius Malema is] the man who believes there is one law for South African citizens, yet another law for him. He is the man who will slap a neighbour who has the temerity to ask that the music at his housewarming be turned down at 3 in the morning. He is the man who has turned hate-speech into an art form [...]

Barnard’s anger is palpable as she sneeringly reminds us that Malema has said he would fire Thabo Mbeki and any ANC parliamentarian “should he get the urge”

Malema’s ego and contempt for the law the rest of us must respect, is unparalleled [...] Is this, to quote the President, someone you honestly believe is a ‘leader in the making – worthy of inheriting the ANC”?

Well, is he “a leader in the making”? Is he “worthy of inheriting the ANC?”

The answer to the first question is: “yes” – more about that below.

The answer to the second question is irrelevant. Could we agree what this historical artefact: “the ANC”  is; could we agree on what its characteristics and values are? Could anyone make this judgement call?

Frankly,  history can give a fig whether you or I think Julius Malema is worthy of inheriting the ANC – or, quite frankly, whether the ANC is worthy of  inheriting Julius Malema.

This is not about what you or I think or believe or hope for; it is also not about what Diane Kohler Barnard and the Democratic Alliance and those they represent hope for and hope to accomplish.

This is not, unfortunately,  about how things aught to be, or about what is fair and just in the moral universe.

This is about how things are; this is history as a raging torrent.

A de facto leader

Assuming “leader” is neither complimentary nor derogatory  – the word can be either or neither – it is clear that Malema more than fits the common sense meaning of the term.

• Malema has been hot-housed as a boy in ANC training institutions and groomed for leadership after  joining the organisation at the point of its unbanning in about 1990;
• He has led the two key feeder organisations, the Congress of South African Students and the ANC Youth League;
• He has become the crucial port of call for politicians and individuals hoping to build support for any initiative that requires ANC support;
• He personally played an important role in the rise to dominance of the faction that backed Zuma for president;
• He is the only ANC politician – aside from Jacob Zuma – who has a significant and deliverable mass base; both numerous and militant;
• His rhetoric (in my opinion) is closer to the views of the core constituency of the ANC than the publicly expressed views of any other South African politician;
• His name/face recognition is almost unparalleled.

Julius Malema was born in the Northern Transvaal (Limpopo Province) and raised, like Jacob Zuma, by a single mother who worked as a domestic worker. This is the hard school of South African life and these kinds of  credentials are still highly valued in the ANC.

In the last few weeks Julius Malema has come over all statesmanlike:

• He acknowledged Thabo Mbeki’s key leadership role – of the ANC and the country;
• He declared the rector of the University of the Free State “one of our own” – thereby helping to defuse growing racial conflict on that campus.

This is deliberate marketing, evolving the brand [firebrand to Dollar Brand ...] while the news media, opposition politics and certain dinner table discussions remain obsessed with each new Malema gaff or his latest confrontational tirade.

It is striking how similar the Julius Malema story is to the Jacob Zuma story.

The human need is to normalise the inevitable or the inescapable present. Three years ago media and dinner table sentiment about Jacob Zuma was almost identical to the sentiment held by the same groups of people about Julius Malema today.

The central dilemma in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Is accepting – and trying to get your head around – the present and future leadership role of Julius Malema the moral equivalent of  the choices made by J.M Coetzee’s Lucy, the daughter of main character David Lurie in the 1999 novel Disgrace? Lucy (who is white) is raped and ends up seeking and receiving protection (and more) from Petrus (who is black) who is closely associated with those who raped her in the first place. Even if you have not read Disgrace I think you can understand the dilemma.

Is Julius Malema the Great Defiler – of our constitution, of the bill of rights and of our hopes for non-racialism?

No more than that previous rape accused, Jacob Zuma.

It sometimes feels that Julius Malema is deliberately teasing; upping the ante to cause his opponents to shriek ever louder and sound ever more shrill.

I have no idea whether he has the sense of humour or sense of the absurd to be deliberately inviting the kind of scorn he receives from those Dianne Kholer Barnard represents – and a smattering of those she hopes to represent.

But I have no doubt that it will be Julius Malema who laughs the longest.

Cope – going, going …..

Alan Boesak , the cleric and pardoned fraudster, resigned from Cope and the Western Cape provincial legislature today.

The once hopeful potential opposition to the ANC seems to be in a terminal state of decline, with several key leadership figures having resigned over the last few months.

Boesak was always going to be a problem for Cope and his action today proves the point of those who criticised Cope for appointing him in the first place.

It’s a pity, because the formation of Cope spurred the ANC  out of complacency in the lead up to the April election and can take some of the credit for the ANC attempting to “go back to its knitting” as far as its constituency is concerned.

This slide was part of a briefing I did for investor clients in the lead up to the general election on April 22 2009.

The Passing Flow (03 November 2009)

Under this headline I will recommend reading when there are particularly interesting titbits out there that I do not have to time to cover here. Click on the headlines for the story.

Mathews Phosa reassures the big investors in London

Mathews Phosa, ANC Treasurer, spoke at a Lonmin conference and explained that debate is fine and good, but the ANC’s policy was not to nationalise the mines – although they will explore ways of achieving a greater redistribution of wealth. He also said the main pillars of macro-economic policy would remain. Good for him.

Zuma says we shouldn’t confuse debate with policy uncertainty

Back to quite interesting “letters from the president”. An assertion by the President of the ANC (in that hat, anyway) that the ANC policy debate should be as robust as possible. But he argues that the assertion of “scary ideas” during that process should not spook the punters. He is essentially calling for us all to calm down about Cosatu and ANCYL elements (and others) – they are just blowing off steam. I think he is being too sanguine; there is a moment which lively debate becomes policy incoherence. One particularly useful reminder, though: we must wait for formal ANC conferences at which policy can be made before we worry about what the policy is or how it is shifting.

Unemployment – there are policy choices to be made

The labour market and the apparent elevation of the narrow sectional interests of Cosatu are hurting the unemployed.

Last week Statssa released the Labour Force Survey for the third quarter. Unemployment had risen to 24.5 percent (from 23.6 in the second quarter) and, even more disturbing, the total number of employed fell 484,000 to 12.885 million.

These figures would have been even worse if an additional 510 000 people had not given up searching for employment in the period and were therefore  excluded from the figures entirely. If the figures of those who have given up searching are included in the definition of “the unemployed” the  rate is now at 34.4 percent, up from 32.5.

34.4 percent? Jobs are being shed throughout the world because of the global debt crisis and the recession but South Africa’s total figures seem way out of kilter.

The reasons we have such high (and vulnerable) unemployment rates are complex and seem to be “built in” to the structure of the South African economy.

But this does not mean the government and policy makers are powerless to influence “the carrying capacity” of  this economy.

At least some of the downward pressure on employment is associated with the legislation and practice that structure the labour market. Our labour market is hugely and inappropriately “inflexible”.

The Flexibility or otherwise of a labour market refers to how easily the market is able to adapt to the changing  needs of production.

Two basic changes to “needs of production” occur regularly with the cycles and ebbs and flows of the economy more generally:

• The need for total number of workers changes rapidly, and
• The requirement for certain skills in the labour force changes with time.

A labour market is said to be “flexible” when an employer is easily able to access the requisite skills from the labour force and is easily able to change the size of his or her labour force in response to changing needs of production.

Now labour is not like a pile of bolts sitting in the inventory store. It is made up of human beings and it is quite appropriate that there should be constraints placed on the employer to hire and fire at will in relation to his or her changing needs vis-a-vis the general ebbs and flows in whichever particular sector he or she operates.

However, and crucially, these “constraints” should always be placed on the employer with the understanding that too little constraint will injure the individual interests of workers and too much constraint will cause the employer to seek alternatives to employing.

What alternatives can an employer seek (and this is obviously important because to some difficult to determine degree the high base line level of unemployment in South Africa is a result of employers seeking such alternatives)?

• The employer can mechanise the production process;
• The employer can export the production process to environments where the labour market is less restrictive,
• The employer can break the law and participate in the thriving illegal labour market .

The complex and demanding legal framework governing the labour market has a direct impact on the total number of employed – and on “the carrying capacity” of the economy.

Government and Ruling Alliance

Which brings me to the point: we are currently seeing a deeper and more vigorous push by the Ruling Alliance to tighten the legal framework that structures the labour market.

The public face of this push is the attempt to close down the labour brokers. Labour brokers exist to serve employers’ attempt to legally circumvent the most restrictive aspects of legislation and bureaucracy that govern the labour market. It is the moral equivalent of clever lawyers working out legal ways to avoid tax.

Apartheid fell because of a simple political error by the National Party: it is impossible, in the long run, with laws and policemen and courts – and hit squads -,  to stand in the way of collective human endeavour i.e. the market. If you attempt to thwart the market it will find ways around you – possibly in a distorted form.

Imposing a labour regime on South Africa best suited to Norway or Sweden is harmful to total employment numbers in the country.

South Africa’s labour regime is responsible, to some degree, for the constant downward pressure on employment.

Cosatu appropriately attacks labour brokers – because Cosatu represents those employed in the first world conditions of the formal labour market.

But for the rest, for government and the legislature – it is crucial that they are persuaded that increased inflexibility of the labour market works diametrically opposite to the interests of the millions of unemployed people who have put their names on labour broker books in the hope of finding work – any work.

Do not imagine that in the event of labour brokers being banned employers will formally employ workers they previously accessed through the broker.

The road to hell … and all of that:

Those jobs are going boy and they aint coming back

Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown

Those aren’t Polokwane chickens!

I was dreading yesterday’s mini-budget.

Firstly the objective conditions were against us. It was clear that the Great Recession was going to squeeze revenue – and therefore the space available for the new Minister of Finance to operate in. As it turns out, lower revenue and higher than expected expenditure has pushed the estimated deficit on the consolidated budget to R184bn or 7.6% of GDP.

Now that is a significant shortfall, but not bigger – and in some cases a lot smaller – than governments around the world are operating on in these difficult times.

Secondly the long triumphalist Polokwane after-party  had led me to miscalculate. It had begun to feel as if every milestone we reached was another opportunity to celebrate the crushing of “the 1996 class project”  (read “fiscal rectitude”) and the rise to dominance of woolly thinking and left populism in an uneasy alliance with a new more voracious layer of vampire capitalist aspirants.

And here comes stout Pravin Gordhan and the new parliamentary autocue to wipe away my cynical fears. He said it loud and clear for all to hear:

Special appreciation is therefore due to Minister Manuel for his sound stewardship of our public finances.

The new Minister of Finance stood before our parliament and clearly phrased the budget in the terms of this ANC’s election manifesto (emphasising education, health, rural development/agrarian reform/land, crime/corruption and the creation of decent jobs). However he did so while clearly placing himself within the macro-economic framework of the past – including by continuing to relax exchange controls and defending inflation targeting.

I have no reason to think that Gordhan will gradually bow to pressures from any quarter before the the real budget early next year. This does not mean that we won’t have higher taxation and more poverty relief in future. In a country like South Africa these thrusts are inevitable and appropriate.

So the chickens that actually came home to roost yesterday were not born in Polokwane in December 2007. They are in fact the fruits of pro-investment policies and fiscal austerity in the mid-90’s. Those chicken were hatched as part of  the macro-economic framework developed under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki and guided by the stewardship of Trevor Manuel.

Pravin Gordhan yesterday spent some of the heritage of a sound macro-economic framework that has prevailed for the last 14 years. It is this very framework that the ANC’s left-wing and Cosatu and the SACP excoriate at every opportunity. It feels better to know that the politician dealing with these issues at the centre of the Zuma government understands perfectly well what is owed to those men and women who held the line against self-serving economic populism in the 90’s – at great cost to themselves and their future careers.

The Polokwane chickens are coming home today …

Today Pravin Gordhan presents his (and Jacob Zuma’s) first Medium Term Budget Policy Statement.

The post-Polokwane guillotine has been working overtime off late and we have seen the last remnants of the Ancien Régime flushed from the party, the state and government. The last man standing is Trevor Manuel, balancing precariously on a rapidly shrinking toe-hold.

Today we learn what Polokwane is going to mean for government plans to spend and raise money – which is often the most important thing that a government of the modern age can do.

The Great Recession combined with the extensive social commitments of Zuma’s backers means money is going to be in short supply – the Polokwane victors will have to find more (through taxation or borrowing) or they are going to have to cut their spending plans.

I think these are the questions that will reveal most about where our new government is leading us:

What level of budget deficit will Pravin Gordhan be prepared to run?

What level of tax increase does he (and our president and our president’s allies) estimate is bearable in the South African context?

Will Pravin give in to Cosatu/SACP’s plans for limitless support of loss making state enterprises?

Will Pravin Gordhan support expenditure of public-sector wage increases – to the degree that the trade union ally wants?

Will he find money for the unexpected increase in the A400M Airbus?

Will infrastructure continue to drive the economy and to what degree does the Polokwane victory for increasing the child grant to 18 year olds represent a shift in priorities?

In general, how much money can become available for social programmes?

It really is crunch time. I imagine many investors and business men and women have suspended judgement of the new management of the party and the state but have been increasingly concerned about how specific voices have come to dominate all public discourse. Let’s call these Vavi’s voice, Nzimande’s voice and  Malema’s voice.

Investors are not as easily spooked by political bombast as you may imagine. They tend to wait to see whether government puts our money where its mouth is first – remembering that this government and these politicians increasingly have a ‘potty mouth’ as Americans endearingly say.

Today financial markets will see for the first time into which mouth government will put our money. The conclusion investors in financial markets reach – which will ultimately be reflected in capital flows that aggregate their buying and selling decision – will be the Polokwane chickens coming home to roost.

Some (more) light weekend contempt

On the drift to the left in South African policy making:

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

- P. J. O’Rourke

On certain young leaders in South African politics:

Fame is but the breath of the people, that is often unwholesome.

- Thomas Fuller 1732

On the much revered family of North American mythology – and a metaphor for the Ruling Alliance:

Sacred family! …. The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

- August Strindberg 1886

On love – and the current state of the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance:

The voyage of love is all the sweeter for an outside stateroom and a seat at the Captain’s table.

- Henry Haskins 1940

On the global debt crisis and the Great Recession?

What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?

- Bertolt Brecht 1928

or:

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

- Robert Frost

Hellen Zille?:

A woman can look both moral and exciting – if she looks as if it were quite a struggle.

- Edna Ferber 1954

Blade Nzimande:

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.

- H.L. Mencken 1956

German footballers in bullet-proof vests

Well, here it comes.

The waves of terror and paranoia about deepest, darkest Africa are about to break on our shores.

And not just any kind of fear – more the  scaremongered kind generated by those whose job it is to sell protection.

Last night the global sporting media (BBC, SPC and AP) were awash with the following quote from Gunter Schnelle talking about 2010 in South Africa. Gunter is an operations director of BaySecur, the security company responsible for players and fans of the German Football Federation (DFB) for away games:

The possibility of the players going off-camp should be kept to an absolute minimum. In that case they should take the precaution of taking armed protection and wearing bullet-proof vests.

Hmm, perhaps the DFB can investigate technology for tainting the flesh and bones of German fans and players to make them less appetising to the lions and hyenas – to say nothing of the feral bands of cannibal children.

One shouldn’t sneer, but I cannot get down to my local supermarket without wading through throngs of delightful and happy Germans – and I have never seen one being gnawed on by the cannibals.

Jokes aside, South Africa’s crime rate – all kinds of crime, but especially crimes that entail significant violence – is the highest, or close to the highest,  in the world.

South Africa does not have the immediate terrorist threats that have done so much harm to international cricket in India and Pakistan, but being “the crime capital of the world”  we stand out in ways we wish we didn’t.

All this means is that those who sell protection and crime intelligence have a licence to print money when they are selling to foreigners who must travel to South Africa. It also means that those companies and “experts” are going to do everything they can to talk “up” the problem – because their bread and butter is linked to the punters being fearful.

I suppose the point is that the reality makes the security expert’s scaremongering an easy exercise.

Joel Netshitenzhe’s resignation: trying to read the signposts

We are all looking for signposts as to where Zuma’s government is going and where we will end up.

Joel Netshitenzhe’s resignation is an important signpost, but it is, perhaps, too early to make out which direction it is pointing in.

Here are some extracts of what the Young Communist League in Gauteng had to say (I picked up the press statement on the blog of my old friend, Ray Hartley, editor of The Times

The Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA) in Gauteng notes and welcomes the resignation of Joel Netshitenzhe as Director-General of the Policy Co-ordination and Advisory Services (Picas) in the Presidency. His departure signals an important moment within our society’s shift from the disastrous, failed neoliberal policies – such as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy …

… Netshitenzhe was a central player within the 1996 Class Project that advanced these policies to appease both domestic and foreign capital, especially financiers … Netshitenzhe’s departure provides the ANC and its Alliance partners a strategic opportunity to champion a revolutionary agenda that transfers the wealth of our country to the people as a whole ….

The YCL goes on to lay the blame for service delivery protests at capitalism’s and Netshitenzhe’s door(s):

The ongoing service delivery protests, massive retrenchments in major industries, still-excessive interest rates, escalating food prices, skyrocketing unemployment rate, deepening inequalities and mass poverty will be seen as the legacy of policies championed by Netshitenzhe. In fact Netshitenzhe is a personification of the co-option of our cadres by capital. His 1996 Class Project watered-down the National Democratic Revolution, and prevented many of the advances we could have made after the 1994 democratic breakthrough.

President Zuma talked extensively and positively today about the role Joel has played in government, so the YCL in Gauteng should not be seen as having the last word on the meaning of the resignation of “Peter Mayibuye” (his nom de plume from the glory days). But it is important to keep an eye on what the youth wings of both the SACP and the ANC are saying – their views are often indicative – and a test – of where things are heading.

Farewell to Peter Mayibuye*

Joel Netshitenzhe has resigned as Director General in Trevor Manuel’s National Planning Commission in the presidency.

This comes a day after President Zuma reshuffled and attempted to explain the various roles to be played by the various ministers who fall into the economics cluster. The Business Day article suggested that Zuma had caved in to Cosatu’s concerns.

This ‘explanation and reshuffle’ comes, in turn, after weeks of bitter criticism, particularly from Cosatu, about the apparent sidelining of ‘their’ Minister Ebrahim Patel of Economic Development.

Now there might be a thousand different things going on, but Joel Netshitenzhe is a crucial ANC intellectual who has played a leading role in crafting the delicate balance the organisation has struck between global capital markets/foreign investors on the one hand and Cosatu/the SACP and the  ANC’s left wing on the other.

The ideological and policy stance of government and the ruling alliance – and particularly the role of “the left” and the silo of  issues and policy drives traditionally associated with the left – are currently being fiercely contested.

The concern – transient perhaps, and associated with the news flow – is that Joel was pushed or that he found the drift untenable.

*”Peter Mayibuye” was Joel’s nom de plume from the mid 80’s in exile when he edited the ANC’s journal Mayibuye as well as headed the ANC Department of  Information and Propaganda (yes,  they actually called it that) and served on the ANC’s Political Military Committee.

Signs of light as new old guard curbs Polokwane ideological excess

It is a small sign, but hopeful and interesting.

In the last week:

• Billy Masetlha has drawn on deep ANC traditions to argue that the role Cosatu and the SACP are playing threatens the ANC’s ability to lead all classes and groups in South Africa. He has restated a clear premise of traditional ANC thinking: the organisation can never be socialist in its policy and orientation.
• Joel Netshitenzhe is quoted in several newspapers this morning calling for the ANC not to attempt to micro-manage government and the state – and urging respect for the constitution.

Why is this important?

It’s important because :

1. at Polokwane in 2007 resolutions were passed (and a general ethos prevailed) that would paralyse government by forcing it to wait for a mandate from an ill-defined “ruling alliance” before it could do anything – including make key appointments to parastatals;
2. weakness at the ANC centre meant “the left” (and many other players) came away from Polokwane with the confusing notion that “the left”, including Cosatu and the SACP, were the cornerstone of the new management and the new atmosphere of “ultra-democracy” meant that their policies must be the policies of government.

Thabo Mbeki dealt with the same issues.

Mbeki on socialism? The much reviled “1996 class project” refers to the macro-economic policy developed by the then ANC government under Mbeki which was market friendly and compliant to global capital markets. Mbeki’s theory was South Africa needed foreign investment and the only way we would get it was to guarantee private property and the relatively free movement of capital. “The left” hated the thrust and the details of the policy.

Mbeki on government being micromanaged? Post the infamous Growth, Employment and Redistribution macro-economic policy,  Mbeki set in motion a process of moving power – in the form of day-to-day decision making as well as policy formulation – away from the ANC and towards government. Because of his predisposition and because his policies were under attack from “the left” he centralised power further, into the presidency and his own office.

There is no question that Polokwane was mostly a good thing – Mbeki’s centralisation had made the ANC and government an intellectual wasteland and a rubber stamp for decisions he himself was taking – decisions that both at the time and certainly in retrospect seem barely competent.

But Polokwane went way too far. The snap-back effect from Mbeki’s deathly centralism was ultra-democracy and a set of policies that are potentially deeply hostile to the private sector. You can’t play honest broker if you are specifically cheering for one side – which is what Cosatu and the SACP are, on a very wide scale, vociferously calling for the ANC to do vis-a-vis the private sector – especially with regards to the labour market.

Joel Netshitenzhe and Billy Masetlha have both, at one time, been confidants of Thabo Mbeki. But their credentials as deeply committed democrats who have given much of their lives (they are both in their mid-50’s) to the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa is beyond question. Both Cosatu and the SACP have already launched counter-attacks against Billy. I have no doubt that they will see Joel as a more complex and subtle – but potentially more powerful – threat to their narrow agenda.

Dilbert is always there first

Now what does this situation remind me of?

Thanks for that Jenny B

The People’s Flag is … a sort of murky grey

I have been trying to figure out whether Billy Masetlha’s criticism assertion that there appears to be an attempted communist take-over of the ANC is accurate or relevant.

During this endeavour I came across an interesting passage from ANC Today, September 2007 (the lead-up to Polokwane). It quotes Joe Slovo:

“But, despite the fact that the ANC has an understandable bias towards the working class it does not, and clearly should not, adopt a socialist platform which the so-called Marxist Workers’ Tendency (expelled from the ANC) would like it to do. If it adopted such a platform it would destroy its character as the prime representative of all the classes among the oppressed black majority…”

The Marxist Workers Tendency. Goodness, that takes me back.

Recruitment into to the ANC underground for some of us at largely white, largely English speaking campuses in the late 70’s and 80’s entailed a healthy dose of sentimental Marxist Leninism (if there can be such a thing).

I still find myself singing under my breath, as I am getting ready to do something that requires my spirits to be roused:

The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood drenched its ev’ry fold

Our ’socialism’ somehow balanced our dual adherence to the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

We could explain how Marx had turned Hegel on his head and we could talk (well briefly, in a learned parrot fashion anyway) about the dialectical movement between theory and practice by way of historical materialism.

Concepts and words like “The Labour Theory of Value” and the “dipolar articulation of class forces in the conjuncture” could burble from our lips.

But boy, the thing we really understood was left deviation.

The Workerists, Partyites and gaggle of Trotskyites that emerged from the ‘Coloured’ community in the Western Cape were terrifyingly articulate and hated us ANC and SACP types. They believed the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party supported a politics that would lead to the emergence of a comprador bourgeoisie and a derailment of the path to socialism. I clearly remember then ‘ultra-leftist’  – in our terms – Ebrahim Patel (EP), wild haired and eyed, deeply frustrated by Congress dominance at UCT. Hmm, kyk hoe lyk hy nou!?

Anyway, there were uglier manifestations of our rigid adherence to the ANC/SACP version of Marxist/Leninism. We knew about the Marxist Workers Tendency who had been suspended from the ANC in 1979 and later expelled in 1985. We used to come across their lurid publication Inqaba Ya Basebenzi - and we made sure ‘the young people’ in our organisations were not reading that rubbish!

Billy Masetlha, ironically – given the fact that he was shafted by Thabo Mbeki himself – is leading the charge against the new “left deviation”.

He said, amongst other things in the Mail and Guardian (I can’t find the original story, but it is quoted here) (these quotes are all pulled together – they did not appear like this in the original M&G version:

“… I will have a problem with someone wanting to faceless individuals (want to) impose a communist manifesto on the ANC … We fired a lot of [comrades] in the past who wanted to do the same thing … The day the ANC sings to the socialist agenda, it would be signing its death warrant … If we have not pronounced our position on these new tendencies it does not mean we are fools …The ANC was not founded on a socialist agenda. Socialism has no space in the ANC.”

Unsurprisingly the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu have rounded on him soundly – all with separate statements worth reading for their take on “The Alliance”.

My own feeling is that Billy is living in the past. He was trained in a milieu (as was I – although he significantly pre-dates me – I think) that consisted of significant threats of “left deviation” and high levels of ideological contestation. He believes that ideology is actually important in the construction of the ruling alliance.

My own feeling is the glue that binds the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance is not primarily ideological as I argue here.

If this was me talking in the old days – when I was one of those who felt so powerful and clear that I could dismiss complex historical phenomena with casual ideological name calling – I probably would have characterised the new management of the ANC and the country as:

an unholy alliance between syndicalist trade unions and the most retrograde elements of the comprador bourgeoisie – those elements who fell foul of the law and of party discipline under Mbeki.

It’s probably more complicated than that …but I (almost) miss my youthful certainty – for all its (bombastic) shallowness and (pompous) sentimentality.

SA Politics in Slides

I will occasionally post a slide from recent presentations. This is the first:

A recent presentation slide - showing a degree of schizophrenia (mine, probably)