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L'Afrique du Sud face au néoliberalisme: le travail et les racines de la revolution passive
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Satgar, Vishwas |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | South Africa’s struggle for national liberation and democracy was driven internally by a strong tradition of mass-led politics that shaped various ideological currents within the national liberation tradition, with echoes of ‘people’s power’ and ‘worker control’. After 1994, this was supplanted by an elitist, technocratic and top-down politics that minimized the influence of mass-based movements while the country undertook neoliberal restructuring. The article locates the roots of South Africa’s neoliberalization within the context of a ‘passive revolution’, a process of democratic change in which mass based initiatives for change, largely led by the trade union movement and expressed through its democratic corporatist state project, were eclipsed. This took place as part of a larger structural shift in South African society ushered in by a new type of transnationalized capitalism, inaugurated by the apartheid regime and based on an externally oriented mode of accumulation. The article argues that post-apartheid South Africa was not transformed in the interest of the historically oppressed, but instead restored the rule of capital by transnationalizing monopoly capital. In this sense, South Africa has experienced a passive revolution – a ‘revolution without revolution’. Introduction Post-apartheid South Africa’s neoliberalization was not inevitable. The project of national liberation led by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies (including the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and other mass organizations) held out to South Africans and the world the possibility of fundamental change. The visions of a post-apartheid South Africa articulated by this national liberation movement were generally framed by Left discourses ranging from revolutionary nationalism, left social democracy and a Sovietised scientific socialism. However, 40 with the first democratic elections in 1994 the direction of change in South Africa veered to the right. The historical achievement of electoral and procedural democracy and the end of formal apartheid has not produced a radically transformed society. Instead, South Africa has experienced more than fourteen years of neoliberalization. In many instances the prestige of the ANC led liberation movement, the ‘Mandela factor’ and the disingenuous marrying of transnational neoliberalism with national liberation discourse has generally obscured attempts to understand what happened in post-apartheid South Africa. This contribution attempts to find the origins of the rightwing shift in post-apartheid South Africa, and to look for its roots. This takes us to an earlier reception of neoliberalism in South Africa during the apartheid era when the initial moment of neoliberalization was part of a response to a deep organic and conjunctural crisis. In this historical moment the restructuring of South Africa’s accumulation path in accordance with the requirements of transnational neoliberalism inaugurated the beginning of a structural shift: a transition from monopoly capitalism to a transnationalized domestic capitalism. Such a form of capitalism is different from the inward looking industrialization South Africa experienced for the greater part of the 20 century and was linked to its minerals-energy complex. Instead a new transnationalizing capitalism is grounded in transnationalized relations of production and an externally orientated accumulation model. At the same time the response of the labour movement, led by COSATU, a consistently left-wing trade union movement with a militant commitment to socialism proves to be inadequate. Its agenda of a ‘democratic corporatist state’ is eclipsed by a deepening of neoliberal restructuring. This article attempts to explain labour’s failure by locating South Africa’s home grown neoliberalization in the context of a ‘passive revolution’. The concept of ‘passive revolution’ is taken from the work of Antonio Gramsci and refers to a historical possibility during times of hegemonic crisis. It refers to a non-hegemonic form of class rule, in which leadership of society is not based on consent and the moral, intellectual and strategic character of leadership. In the South African context it points to a form of politics in which mass initiative is contained from above such that struggle around the post-apartheid state form, the globalization of a deracializing import-substitution model, the unraveling of African |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://lcs-tcs.com/PDFs/41_2/Satgar.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
