Vishwas Satgar, Antipode
journal
Gillian Hart, Rethinking
the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony,
Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013. ISBN: 978 1 86914 251 3
(paper)*
The Gramsci-inspired bibliography on South Africa is not
that large, but does include an influential and serious body work on key
conjunctural shifts and political-economic dynamics that have shaped South
Africa. In the post-apartheid context two books stand out, Hein Marais’s (2001)
South Africa - Limits to Change and
Gillian Hart’s more recent Rethinking the South African
Crisis. Hart’s text is extremely important and courageous in the
context of South Africa’s fiercely contested political discourse. Hart steps in
front to contest existing understandings of the state, racial geographies,
crisis, hegemony, and transition. Her attempt to challenge what exists is not
only an academic intervention but also grounded in deep normative concerns
about the trajectory of South African politics.
As a Gramscian feminist and geographer, Hart walks a path
with other leading theorists who have provided important ways of placing
Gramsci in contemporary social theory. Alongside Anne Showstack Sassoon,
Chantal Mouffe, Stuart Hall, Michael Burawoy, and Marcia Landy, Hart brings to
the fore three crucial analytical dimensions that mark Gramscian scholarship.
She makes a crucial contribution in terms of thinking with and yet going beyond
Gramsci with regard to [i] the spatial, [ii] nationalism, and [iii] passive
revolution.
First, building on her earlier work on Gramsci as a spatial
thinker, Hart draws on Lefebvre’s work on the production of space and
Foucault’s work on governmentality, to provide a textured understanding of how
technocratic local government has been made, and how it has managed unruly
populations in post-apartheid South Africa. She shows how the rationality of
Foucaultian governmentality has engendered techniques of rule to ensure fiscal
viability through cost recovery from South Africa’s poor. To develop this argument
Hart goes beyond broad macro analyses of the making of local governmentality in
South Africa to ground her argument in serious ethnographic work in two towns
in the hinterland of South Africa, located in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
She builds on her earlier book, Disabling
Globalisation (Hart 2002), but follows the operations
of governmentality at work in local power relations in relation to the
commodification of water and the attendant ‘water wars’. Water conflicts have
been documented previously in South Africa, including the technologies of rule.
However, Hart situates this in the context of changing, but
still racialised, local geographies, gendered class conflict, and technocratic
rule. In chapter 3, Hart provides ethnographic insights that are both riveting
and compelling. In mapping the spatial contours of water conflicts in the towns
of Ladysmith and Newcastle, she brings to the fore complex cost recovery
practices, the role of a public water corporation leading the commercialisation
of water provisioning, and the complex tapestry of local politics. Most
analysts have tended to reduce civic protest action either to the ‘rebellion of
the poor’ or ‘pop-corn protests’ that are episodic and fragmented.
However, Hart’s ethnographic lens contests these
understandings as she probes the intersections of race, class, gender,
racialised geography, and technocratic rule. The story she tells about the
Newcastle Concerned Residents Association, for instance, and its capacity for
symbolic and strategic actions while being eschewed by all political parties,
is fascinating and dramatic in its role. Moreover, this line of analysis
provides a strong basis from which to argue that the central contradictions of
post-apartheid South Africa are located at the level of local government. The
squeeze of technocratic cost recovery is central to engendering local social
conflict and a crisis for the local state.
Next, Hart provides a compelling focus on and understanding
of articulations of different forms of South African nationalism to render the
contemporary country more intelligible. In this way Hart thinks with but also
goes beyond Gramsci, by setting up an extremely novel framework to understand
the link between de-nationalising and renationalising dynamics at work in
shaping the form of hegemony prevailing in South Africa. This is very different
from other political economy analyses that have either attempted to make sense
of the unravelling of ANC hegemony through narrow policy analysis with an
emphasis on short-comings, or through a class compromise (or elite pact)
understanding of South Africa’s post-apartheid politics and transition. In
chapter 4, Hart attempts to understand how articulations of the South African
nation and hegemonic appropriations of nationalism by the African National
Congress feature prominently in the making of contemporary South Africa.
Recognising the place of nationalism in ANC discursive practices (e.g. on the
national question and National Democratic Revolution) Hart shows how forms of
nationalism are made and articulated as part of de-nationalising and
re-nationalising processes.
De-nationationalisation refers to the processes and
practices that globalise and restructure South Africa’s domestic political
economy, centred on the minerals-energy complex. Re-nationalisation refers to
discursive practices and projects shaping articulations of nationalism. Hart
brings into the remit of re-nationalisation the various articulations of the
‘rainbow nation’, the ANC government’s punitive immigration practices,
grassroots xenophobic attacks, and battles in the ANC-led Alliance about the
meanings of the National Democratic Revolution. It is through the prism of
denationalising and re-nationalising that South Africa’s crisis is given a much
more complex analytical framing, while attempting to appreciate the country’s
crisis as the unravelling of ANC hegemonic rule as well. All of this connects
chapter 2 of the book, which deals with grassroots struggles and containment
responses, and chapter 5, which lays bare the degeneration of ANC politics and
the rampant populism coming to the fore.
As Hart astutely points out, this can go in any direction.
It also portends a possible roll back of democratic achievements in South
Africa. Hart compels us to ask: is South Africa heading for a new form of
fascism, with the emergence of racist and populist young politicians like
Julius Malema, a product of ANC authoritarian nationalism? Finally, chapter 6
illustrates a further engagement and disengagement with Gramsci in thinking
about the analytical value and strength of a passive revolution understanding
of post-apartheid South Africa. Hart is alive to the challenge of translation
of Gransci’s categories in different contexts. Moreover, Hart brings to the
fore a crucial link between Gramsci and Fanon to explicate the category of
passive revolution as it relates to the racialised dynamics and specificities
of race in post-apartheid South Africa.
Mobilising Gramsci and Fanon, Hart explores three dimensions
of passive revolution: [i] the spatio-historical; [ii] dialectics; and [iii]
humanism. This is the most difficult chapter to situate in Hart’s sophisticated
understanding of South Africa. A meta-reading of the chapter might suggest
there is a dialectical connection between unravelling ANC hegemony and now a
shift into a passive revolution given the degeneration of ANC nationalism. Are
we now witnessing a dialectical historical sequence at work? Despite the
difficult fit, the chapter is a crucial theoretical addition.
While Hart makes a major contribution to both analysing and
theorising the South African crisis there are two crucial challenges
confronting her work. The first relates to spatial reductionism or the idea
that the local state is the major site of contradictions and crisis. In this
regard Hart has to respond to two criticisms. First, and as she understands,
the Gramscian conception of the state in the Prison
Notebooks is that of an ‘integral’ state and at the same time a
‘relational’ state. The integral conception of the state is an expanded one
which includes civil and political society (‘state=civil society+political
society’) at a national scale. Gramsci observed such a change in the late 1800s
in the Western context as part of thinking through the specificity of
state-civil society relations.
Gramsci’s relational conception of the state recognises that
it is also shaped by a historical bloc of social forces. The notion of the
historical bloc brings together structures and superstructures; it steers clear
of both economic reductionism and idealistic distortions. At a less abstract
level of analysis, the leading or hegemonic social force in such a historical
bloc is able to define the form, role, and functions of the state. In Gramscian
scholarship the ‘integral state’, the ‘relational state’, and the relationship
between the two has engendered its own interpretive controversies about the
relationship between hegemony, civil society, and the state. However, for the
sake of this argument, recognising that there is a specific conception of the
state at work within Gramsci’s thought makes it difficult to merely think about
crisis as simply engulfing the local state.
What about the state in crisis in its integral sense and at
the national scale? What about the crisis of the historical bloc of forces
making up the ruling forces prevailing over the state in its totality? Second,
and flowing from the idea of a crisis of the integral state, is a recognition
that cost recovery and technocratic forms of rule have diffused into various
levels of the state. The state, in asserting a financialised rationality in its
provisioning of public goods, at the same time faces various challenges from
myriad social forces, on different terrains.
This means there are multiple spatial choke points to both
contest the state and engender fiscal crisis; the geographies of resistance are
more than just water wars. For example, attempts at imposing a toll road system
in Gauteng province, the heartland of South Africa, has met with stiff
resistance from unions, commuters, and citizens. This has placed the
multi-billion rand project in crisis and the gridlock has even affected South
Africa’s standing with credit rating agencies. Similarly, billions spent on
building coalfired power stations (in Medupi and Kusile, for example) have
stalled on numerous occasions, around workers demanding higher pay and improved
working conditions. At the same time, consumers have been fighting against
electricity price hikes that are meant to assist Eskom (South Africa’s
electricity parastatal) pay back billions in World Bank finance for these
projects. All of these spatial choke points have also added to the total crisis
of the integral state and the ANC-led historical bloc of class and social
forces prevailing over the state.
A final challenge to Hart’s intervention relates to her
eschewing a role for a sophisticated political economy analysis that places
neoliberalism at the centre of understanding post-apartheid South Africa. By
dismissing such forms of analysis as ‘not having traction’, we are left with an
analysis centred mainly on the unravelling of ANC hegemony devoid of any
understanding of how ANC hegemonic nationalism and neoliberalism articulate, on
the one side, and on the other, how social struggles and left alignments are
forming in response to this. The Marikana massacre that Hart correctly
identifies as important, has not only contributed to a rupture in the ANC-led
historical bloc of class forces, but has also been a spur to major class realignments
and detachments from the ANC-led Alliance. Besides the decline of the National
Union of Mineworkers (NUM), once upon a time the largest union in South Africa
and a staunch ally of the ANC, the Marikana conjuncture has ruptured the
working class support base of the ANC-led bloc of forces in the direction of
left re-alignment. In this regard, the decision by the National Union of
Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA; currently the largest union in South
Africa with over 300,000 workers) to withdraw from the ANC-Led Alliance, to
declare it is not supporting any party in the forthcoming national elections(it
is withdrawing its awesome organisational machinery from actively campaigning
for the ANC), and to initiate a process of left convergence with social
movements and other progressive forces to form a united front and explore the
possibility of a worker’s party, is extremely significant. It is even more
significant because the entire discourse of the NUMSA is about the defeat of
the working class because of 20 years of post-apartheid neoliberalisation.
Furthermore the NUMSA evokes a form of nationalism other than the one Hart
discusses: it points to a betrayal of the Freedom Charter, the cornerstone
programmatic commitment and revolutionary nationalist basis of the ANC-led
Alliance.
Further evidence of this betrayal for the NUMSA is the
state-led massacre of 36 mineworkers on 16 August 2012 in Marikana.
Unfortunately, Hart’s analysis will have difficulties making sense of this
rupture given that it articulates a strong critique of the ANC’s commitment to
neoliberalism, particularly the recently adopted National Development Plan. The
NUMSA’s organic intellectuals have a lived experience of neoliberalisation as
thousands of jobs have been lost in South Africa’s liberalised manufacturing
sector. They are certainly not spinning their wheels as Hein Marais suggests in
his endorsement of Hart’s text.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Hart’s contribution is a
welcome addition to the ongoing challenge to make sense of the complicated
field of South African politics.
Endnote *There is a new edition of
the book (including a note on South Africa after Mandela) forthcoming in the
University of Georgia’s ‘Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation’ book
series - Hart G (2014) Rethinking the South African
Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (new
edn). Athens: University of Georgia Press.
References Hart G
(2002) Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in
Post-Apartheid South Africa.
Berkeley: University of California Press Marais H (2001) South
Africa - Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (2nd
edn). London: Zed
Vishwas Satgar Department of International Relations
University of the Witwatersrand vishwas.satgar@wits.ac.za March 2014
***
April 5,
2014
Response to
Vishwas Satgar’s review of Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism,
Populism, Hegemony by Gillian Hart
First off
I’d like to express my gratitude to Vish Satgar for his generous,
comprehensive, and careful review of my book – and to recognize as well his own
important contributions to a Gramscian understanding of the present conjuncture
in South Africa.
In addition
to Satgar, other South African activists and scholars have called me to account
for the stance I take in the book on “neoliberalism”. Accordingly, I see the
invitation by the Antipode editors to respond to Satgar as an opportunity to
engage an important set of debates in South Africa and beyond. Satgar maintains
that by failing to place neoliberalism at the center of understanding
post-apartheid South Africa, I eschew a sophisticated political economy
analysis of unfolding forces – including a hugely significant recent shift in
the South African political terrain when, in late December 2013, the largest
and most influential union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
(NUMSA), withdrew its support for the African National Congress (ANC), and is
moving to forge a united front of progressive movements. Satgar argues that
“Hart’s analysis will have difficulties making sense of this rupture given that
it articulates a strong critique of the ANC’s commitment to neoliberalism,
particularly the recently adopted National Development Plan” (2014: 7). He also
questions what he calls the spatial reductionism of my argument that local
government has become the key site of contradictions.
The
challenge, it seems to me, is not only to explain the NUMSA split, but also
whether (and if so how) the sort of argument I make in the book might
contribute to efforts
to
constitute political forces to the left of the ANC. Since the political stakes
are high, I feel it important to try to clarify my argument.
Let me start
with multiple meanings of “neoliberalism” variously defined as an economic
program; a class project; a historical variant of capitalism; a doctrine or a
“thought collective”; a rationality of rule to produce governable subjects; and
a seductive cultural project. Neoliberalism also of course functions as a
popular category to condense popular opposition.2 In post-apartheid South
Africa neoliberalism very quickly became equated with GEAR (an acronym for
Growth, Employment and Redistribution), the extremely conservative package of
neoliberal macro-economic policies that the ANC government unilaterally imposed
in 1996 – at the same time elbowing aside the neo- Keynesian Reconstruction and
Development Programme (RDP). For many on the left within and beyond the ANC
alliance, the shift from RDP to GEAR inaugurated what came to be called the
ANC’s 1996 class project, and signaled a shift from racial to class apartheid.
Starting in the late 1990s and gathering force in the early 2000s,
neoliberalism in the form of GEAR came to operate as a hugely important popular
category for crystalizing and condensing multiple expressions of discontent. It
also functioned as a term of abuse, especially in relation to Thabo Mbeki. His
identification with GEAR played powerfully into his deep and growing
unpopularity with a large segment of the population.
Since the
ousting of Mbeki in 2008, the Zuma administration has rhetorically distanced
itself from neoliberalism and GEAR – even though it was Mbeki who initially
drove significantly increased government spending and a series of other
interventionist (including ostensibly “pro-poor”) initiatives after 2003/4, in
important part as a strategy of containment (Hart 2006). As a consequence,
“neoliberalism” as an oppositional category has lost much of the political
traction it once had. Indeed, for many on the liberal right, the economy is
being strangled by over-regulation, militant unions ramping up wages, and excessive
spending on welfare that is bleeding “responsible” (read white) taxpayers dry.
2 As I will
suggest in a forthcoming essay, we in South Africa have a great deal to learn
from recent Latin American experiences and debates about the uses and limits of
neoliberalism as both an analytical and popular category.
3 This
rhetoric further bolsters ANC claims that “we are not neoliberals”, and that
the global economy is fully to blame for economic woes and the terrifying
escalation of unemployment. I agree with Hein Marais (2011: 137) who argues
that “Paradoxically, in singling out and demonising GEAR as the grand moment of
rupture and betrayal, the left helped government and corporate South Africa
script their claims of a qualitative break”.
Without
question the Zuma administration’s National Development Plan (NDP) to which
Satgar makes reference caters first and foremost to corporate capital, and can
be seen as a continuation of a neoliberal class project. Yet the chances it
will have anything like the traction that GEAR did in concentrating broadly
based political opposition seem small.
One
prominent set of efforts to reassert that the ANC is indeed neoliberal invokes
a sort of hydraulic model in which “top-down” neoliberalism is seen as calling
forth “bottom up” resistance – albeit in the form of low-grade “popcorn
protests” – with ongoing protests taken as proof that neoliberalism is alive
and well. Nationalism (or “neoliberal nationalism”) features in these analyses
only to reassure us that it is exhausted, helping to pave the way for
oppositional movements to cohere as neoliberalism intensifies. This is
emblematic of a more general tendency on the left either to ignore nationalism
or treat it as an unfortunate manifestation of false consciousness.
My book is
in part a critique of this sort of approach, and an effort to suggest an
alternative to debates over whether or not the ANC is neoliberal. Its starting
point is the imperative to take very seriously the multiple, proliferating
expressions of popular anger and discontent that I call “movement beyond
movements”, which exploded over the decade of the 2000s following the implosion
of the first round of anti-neoliberal “new social movements”. Undoubtedly such
anger is driven in part by often appalling material conditions that can be
linked to neoliberal economic policies and neoliberal forms of capitalism more
generally (more on this below). Yet precisely because the anger of the poor can
go in many directions as S’bu Zikode puts it, politics cannot be read directly
off material conditions – and what needs to be understood and explained is the
ramping up of populist politics and their entanglements with multiple
expressions of nationalism.
Also in need
of explanation is how this roiling popular anger has gone hand in hand with
increasingly anxious interventionism by the ANC government. On one level, these
interventionist moves can be seen as a (somewhat belated) version of what has
variously been called roll-out neoliberalism or revisionist neoliberalism –
i.e. the process through which the market orthodoxy that seemed so firmly
entrenched in the early 1990s in many regions of the world gave way through
that decade to overtly interventionist moves to contain the disruptive
tendencies unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The key point, though, is how
spectacularly unsuccessful these moves have been in South Africa, and how they
have been accompanied by growing police brutality.
A key tenet
of revisionist neoliberalism is a focus on “the local” as a primary site of
efficiency, democracy, social capital, good governance, participation, and so
forth. For many who subscribe to ideas of neoliberal governmentality, “the
local” is also an important locus for the production of neoliberal subjects who
will govern themselves.3 What we see in South Africa – and this is one of the
key arguments of the book – is how local government has become the key site of
contradictions.
Satgar takes
me to task on this point, arguing that a properly Gramscian analysis of the
integral state “makes it difficult to merely think about crisis as simply
engulfing the local state”; and that cost recovery and technocratic forms of
rule have diffused to various levels of the state, producing what he calls
“multiple spatial choke points” such as toll roads in Gauteng and massive state
spending on environmentally devastating coal-fired power stations, both of
which have generated powerful opposition. He asserts, in other words, that I am
according excessive privilege to local government.
I maintain
that local government is in fact qualitatively different from other sites of
technocratic governance. Most immediately local government constitutes the key
site for the management of indigence. It is also a vitally important arena of
accumulation, as local councilors are transformed into a petty bourgeoisie on
the road to class power (as Ari Sitas puts it) through struggles over access to
the growing resources flowing into local government coffers. Rather than a
“spatial choke point” or simply the locus of struggles Satgar interprets my
work as drawing on a Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Actually I find
neo-Foucauldian analyses of neoliberal governmentality quite limited (Hart
2008). Instead I draw on Gramsci’s analysis of how passive revolution increasingly
came to entail bureaucratic elaboration and consolidation through which the
ruling class and its intellectuals transformed political debates into narrowly
bureaucratic or technical questions.
5 over
specific resources (water, housing, etc.), local government is where
technocratic forms of government come into relation with contestation and
acquiescence in the multiple arenas of everyday life. A reflection of its
importance is that each of the expressions of popular anger that I call
“movement beyond movements” – including Marikana – has an irreducibly local
dimension.
Let me be
clear that in positing the importance of local government I am emphatically not
in any way suggesting or implying that “crisis is simply engulfing the local
state”. That would amount to the sort of impact model that I vigorously opposed
in Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa
(2002), drawing on a relational conception of the production of space that
informs this book as well. Rather than any sort of “engulfment”, my argument is
that the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today is
partly produced through power-laden practices, conflicts, struggles – as well
as compliance and acquiescence – in the multiple arenas of everyday life; and
that historically grounded ethnographic studies can potentially illuminate
these processes of production. At the same time, conceiving “the local” not as
bounded units but as nodal points of connection in socially produced space
means that locally specific dynamics both feed into and are shaped by wider
processes – they are, in other words, dialectically connected with forces at
play elsewhere.
This is
where the simultaneous spatio-historical processes I am calling
denationalization and re-nationalization enter the picture. At the moment when
the ANC and other political parties were unbanned in 1990, the South African
“nation” did not exist: it had to be produced through practices and processes
of re-nationalization that encompass multiple articulations of nationalism.
De-nationalization refers to how, simultaneously, powerful South African
conglomerates were straining to break away from the confines of the national
economy and to reconnect with the increasingly financialized global economy from
which they had been partially excluded during the 1980s by sanctions, exchange
controls, and the heightening crisis of the apartheid state.
De-nationalization
shines the spotlight on the specific but changing character of South African
capital and its relations with the post-apartheid state in the context of the rise
of new forms of finance capital since the 1970s.4 It encompasses GEAR, but
instead of seeing 1996 as the primary moment of rupture it compels attention to
the crucial and ongoing role of corporate capital in the transition from
apartheid since the second half of the 1980s – including what we now know are a
set of secret negotiations over economic policy in 1993. It focuses as well on
practices and processes that exceed GEAR – including massive and escalating
capital flight in which the Zuma administration has been fully complicit; how
corporations have restructured their operations to enable continuing
disinvestment from the national economy; their ongoing influence over ANC
government policy; and how these forces continue to play into and intensify
brutally racialized inequalities and the degradation of livelihoods of a large
proportion of the South African population. Far from eschewing a political
economy analysis, I see neoliberal forms of financialized capitalism as central
to these processes – but they have to be understood in terms of their concrete
spatio-historical specificities and transnational connections.
De-nationalization
also needs to be understood in relation to processes and practices of
re-nationalization.5 Most important among those I identify in the postapartheid
era are articulations of South African nationalism that conjure up histories,
memories, and meanings of racial oppression, racialized dispossession, and
struggles against colonialism and apartheid. They co-exist with “non-racial”
articulations of the Rainbow nation, and with efforts to bound “the nation” in
harsh new ways that fuel xenophobia – and all three are in tension with one
another.
Inextricably
linked with the contradictions erupting at the level of local government,
de-nationalization and re-nationalization are playing out in relation to one
another in increasingly conflictual ways – and their dialectical
interconnections are what drive my analysis of the unraveling of ANC hegemony
and the forces propelling the proliferation of populist politics. Since Satgar
challenges my analysis of hegemony for The most lucid account of the neoliberal
counter-revolution in my view is by Peter Gowan (1999; 2009), who traces the
shift from what he calls the Bretton Woods Regime of relatively fixed exchange
rates and capital controls to the Dollar Wall Street Regime and the emergence
of new forms of finance capital.
Elsewhere
(Hart 2006) I have suggested the salience of Gowan’s analysis to South African
debates. For a useful recent account of neoliberalism as financialization, see
Fine (2012).
5 As I have
argued elsewhere, identifiably neoliberal projects and projects play out on
terrains that always exceed them (Hart 2008).
7 neglecting
neoliberalism, I’d be interested in his alternative analysis of “how ANC
hegemonic nationalism and neoliberalism articulate”.
Let me now
try to respond to Satgar’s question about “the state in crisis in its integral
sense and at the national scale” and a related question about “the crisis of
the historical bloc of forces making up the ruling forces prevailing over the
state in its totality”. Since Satgar and I have different readings of Gramsci’s
concepts of the integral state and historical bloc, I’ll answer with reference
to the section of the Prison Notebooks that I draw on most directly: his
analysis of crisis in “Analysis of Situations. Relations of Force” (Gramsci
1971:175-185; Q13§17) in which he argues that “The specific question of
economic hardship or well-being as a cause of new historical realities is a
partial aspect of the relations of force, at the various levels”. Of direct
relevance as well is the concept of passive revolution.
If one
understands the transition from apartheid through the frame of passive
revolution, it was centrally about re-establishing the conditions for
accumulation on a more stable basis, as well as enabling corporate capital to
reconnect with the global economy.
Yet this
effort to resolve the prolonged crisis of the apartheid state has generated new
instabilities, contradictions, and conditions of crisis in a Gramscian sense.
In a nutshell, capital needs the ANC to manage the fallout from its
accumulation strategies and keep the lid on things, which the ANC tries to do
with articulations of nationalism that are part of re-nationalization – but
processes of de-nationalization are rendering this hegemonic project
increasingly impossible. In other words, rather than just the charges of greed,
corruption and incompetence commonly leveled against the ANC, there are far
more deepseated (or “organic” in Gramsci’s sense) processes through which ANC
hegemony has been unraveling over the post-apartheid era.
What appear
to be driving Satgar’s question over the crisis of the historical bloc (I would
use the term social bloc in this context) are doubts about whether my analysis
is capable of explaining NUMSA’s splitting from the ANC, which happened over
four months after the book was published in South Africa. Actually I would
argue that what needs to be explained is why it has taken so bloody long for at
least some segment of the working class movement to split from the ANC given
the relentless assault on the livelihoods of working (and increasingly
unemployed) people, only very partially alleviated by social grants, in the
face of obscene and escalating inequality. While we probably agree that the
Marikana massacre was a decisive moment of rupture, the question is why did it
take so horrendous an event for NUMSA eventually to disengage? The answer, I
suggest, lies in understanding ANC hegemony as well as the processes through
which it has been eroding – which is precisely what the book is about.
Finally
there is Satgar’s critique that “NUMSA evokes a form of nationalism other than
the one Hart discusses: it points to a betrayal of the Freedom Charter, the
cornerstone programmatic commitment and revolutionary nationalist basis of the
ANC-led Alliance”. It is indeed the case that in mid-2013 when I finished the
book, I failed to predict both the NUMSA split and the specific articulation of
nationalism that it is invoking.6 Yet I most certainly do recognize the Freedom
Charter as a key element in articulations of South African nationalism, and
conclude the book with a discussion of how Govan Mbeki participated in the
formation of the Freedom Charter in Ladysmith in the mid-1950s. That NUMSA is
invoking the Freedom Charter as a way of trumping the ANC alliance’s notion of
the National Democratic Revolution is not surprising, and is in fact totally
consistent with the argument of the book about how articulations of the nation
and liberation are crucial to hegemonic politics. What is ironic is that
NUMSA’s predecessor MAWU (the Metal and Allied Workers Union) was deeply suspicious
of Charterist politics.
This leads
me to a concluding point about how my analysis speaks to some of the challenges
that NUMSA is currently confronting in its strategy of constituting a united
front – which turn around the simultaneous imperatives and dangers of
articulations of the nation and liberation. As I write in early April 2014, a
month before the incredibly important May 7 election, we are witnessing an
extraordinary confluence of forces. On the one hand the combination of
Mandela’s death and Zuma’s Nkandla scandal have eroded the ethico-political
traction of the ANC’s articulations of the nation and liberation just at the
moment when they are most needed. Yet my analysis suggests that it is premature
and dangerous to declare that ANC nationalism is exhausted as some on the left
are doing – The 2014 US edition of the book contains a note entitled “South
Africa after Mandela” in which I do discuss the NUMSA split.
and to imply
that nationalism can therefore safely be set aside. Indeed, the Economic
Freedom Fighters are vigorously re-articulating nationalism in terms of race
and nature – the theft by white colonizers of the land and rich mineral
resources of South Africa – while also dismissing the Freedom Charter on the
grounds that it “sold the birthright of Africans, precisely because of that
clause: Africa belongs to all of those who live in it, both black and white”.7
At the same time they are invoking Badiou and Žižek to position Malema as a
bizarre combination of Mao and a Maggie Thatcher of the left.8 NUMSA may not
now be spinning its wheels, as Hein Marais remarked of the South African left
in general in his endorsement of my book written in mid-2013. Yet they confront
a formidable set of challenges, as well as opportunities – which is why the
political stakes in how we understand the present conjuncture are so high.
References
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7
http://www.theconmag.co.za/2013/10/11/malema-decimates-the-left-an-interview-with-andilemngxitama/.
8
http://mg.co.za/article/2014-03-13-soap-box-how-malema-became-maolema.
