A response to a John Saul Monthly Review article

I urge comrades to pick up a copy of the latest Monthly Review, dated January 2001, which has a lengthy critique of the ANC titled "Cry for the Beloved Country". The author John Saul has a long-time relationship with MR, which published a collection of essays titled "Essays in the Political Economy of Africa, co-edited by Saul and Giovanni Arrighi.

The front cover of the MR, leaving no doubt as to the urgency of Saul's article, quotes him "A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia." His purpose is to smash any lingering illusions in the ANC as a force for socialism, let alone progressive social and economic change.

Since the article is not on the MR website, I will only quote a single paragraph to give a flavor of his unsparing analysis

Left critics would argue that many of the ANC’s more recent claims to be powerless in the face of the marketplace have a disingenuous ring when measured against the fact that the movement itself had, early in the game, thrown away so many of the instruments that might have been useful in crafting a more assertive strategy towards capital. Instead, and ironically, the ANC has come, full circle, back to the late apartheid government’s NEM (Normative Economic Model). The central premise of South Africa’s economic policy now could scarcely be clearer ask not what capital can do for South Africa but what South Africa can do for capital. This meant an overwhelming preoccupation with foreign investment, an (at best) trickle-down approach to development more broadly conceived, and an attendant encouragement of a culture of stock markets (with even many trade unions becoming substantial players in the game through their own investment companies) and, for more marginal players, of institutionalized lotteries and other games of chance. All of this done in a context where a sophisticated case can and has been made against the continued prioritizing of supply- side economics and for an approach ("growth through redistribution"!) that highlights the far more central brake on economic growth that exists on the demand side of the equation.

(I should mention that many of the themes contained in Saul's articles appear in another of his at http//www.aidc.org.za/archives/jsaul_1.html. This website is run by the Alternative Development and Information Center, an NGO that is a haven for radical analyses of the situation in South Africa, as well as the rest of the world. The archives contain numerous offerings from two of our finer left economists, Michel Chussodovsky and Patrick Bond.)

Having said that, I believe that John Saul's article contains some weaknesses that need to be addressed in order to raise our understanding of the problems of the South African class struggle to a higher level. These including the following, which tend to overlap

1. A failure to distinguish between the agenda of the ANC and the SACP.

2. A tendency to underestimate political tasks in favor of Marxist "policy wonk" economic proposals.

3. Evasion of the question of revolution.

John Saul's fire is directly mainly at the ANC, which is faulted for having reneged on a promise to deliver socialism. Yet it seems unreasonable to put such expectations at the doorstep of the ANC, whatever pledges it made in the past on paper. The ANC was mainly about eradicating apartheid. Furthermore, it would seem to defy logic to expect such a broad-based national liberation formation to be capable of functioning as a revolutionary party.

It was widely assumed that this role would be assumed the South African Communist Party, about which Saul seems ambivalent. For example, on page 9 of the article, we discover a favorable reference to CP leader Jeremy Cronin who complains that the ANC views "mass action" in a cynical fashion, as a "tap" to be turned on and off, just as Robert Mugabe turns land seizures in neighboring Zimbabwe on and off.

In the final section of his article, where he addresses left alternatives to the ANC, he seems less enthusiastic, describing the SACP as "both mere cheerleader for and occasional left critic of the ANC". The only hope seems to be in a younger generation in the party that is "less wedded to time-honored icons and homilies". Since Saul fails to really analyze the positions of the SACP, we are at a loss to understand which homilies he is referring to. Could it possibly be something of this sort?

As Communists, our vision for economic transformation is shaped by our conviction that the capitalist system of production, based as it is on the private appropriation of the means of production and production for profit rather than social need, is ultimately incapable of meeting the needs of working people and the poor. Our commitment to a socialist vision, in which ownership and control of the means of production is placed in the hands of working people, remains unshakeable. At the same time, we recognise that we are presently in a stage of national democratic revolution. Our slogan "socialism is the future, build it now" enjoins us to struggle, within the constraints of what will inevitably remain for some time a capitalist society, for transformations that will both benefit working people and the poor here and now, and lay a basis for an eventual transition to a socialist society.

African Communist, 2nd quarter 1998, http//www.sacp.org.za/ac/ac149.html#Our Marxism

In essence the formula of a "national democratic revolution" is the same nonsense that has precluded socialist victory in every country in which pro-Moscow parties have hegemony. This document also recommends that the SACP do every thing in its power to bring the South African bourgeoisie under its sway! With such an organization to its left, why should there be any surprise that the ANC is free to use its historic program as toilet paper.

Turning to the next point, we really need to question the parameters of the discourse about "what next" for South Africa set by the ANC, the SACP *and* John Saul. Saul's article seems mainly concerned with what economic proposal can turn South Africa around. For example, he shows his disappointment at the failure of ANC Research Department to win support for radical position papers that were drafted with the aid of British Marxist economist Lawrence Harris. Granted these were rather lukewarm to start with, in Saul's words, "a kind of dirigiste neo-Keynsianism", but at least they would have been better than the naked neo-liberalism of the ANC tops, whose 'capo de capo' Thabo Mbeki declaimed in 1993 "Just call me a Thatcherite."

One can understand why MR contributors would be fixated on economic policy. The founders of the magazine were of the New Deal generation and Sweezy himself accepted the potential value of Keynesian counter-cyclical capitalist state intervention in "The Theory of Capitalist Development."

While it is understandable how men whose entire intellectual formation was wrapped up with the New Deal and CP hegemony would think this way, it is more difficult to understand why a younger MR economist such as Bill Tabb would err in this direction. In a November '99 article titled "Labor and the Imperialism of Finance," (http//www.monthlyreview.org/1099tabb.htm) he writes

"Concretely, it is possible to envision capital controls. The argument that banks and hedge funds would simply go offshore to jurisdictions where regulation is minimal is not a strong one. If the United States said that it would not accept monetary transfers into its domestic banking system from banks and other financial institutions located in jurisdictions that do not regulate capital flows in strict fashion, these havens would quickly conform, or the footloose capital would soon leave them for zones where they were allowed access to U.S. markets. If the United States were to adopt such procedures, other nations would quickly fall into line."

This, of course, is perfectly silly. The notion of such capital controls being implemented in the United States is a reformist illusion. If anything, the problem the left faces is more one of resisting direct assaults by capital, which will tend to take on a defensive character as the capitalist crisis deepens. Fiscal policy will be the last thing on our minds in this period. More likely, we will be dealing with fights to organize demonstrations legally or distribute literature.

What John Saul can not find words for in his article is the need to OVERTHROW the ANC. The ANC is the Kerensky regime of South Africa and the SACP is its "stagist" ally. For all practical purposes, the formula of a "national democratic revolution" is the same sort of Kautskyist crap that Lenin had to contend with in his April 1917 Theses.

This is what South African revolutionaries and their friends should be discussing, not what razzle-dazzle economic proposal the capitalist government of South Africa can use in the interest of "lifting all boats". The time to lift all boats is long over. It is time to ready the torpedoes.