As the decade draws to a close, the African National Congress (ANC) promises a new dawn in the 2020s. But how is the party perceived, and how does it see itself?
From about 2009, the ANC’s biggest problem came to be the growing suspicion that ‘C’ in ‘ANC’ stood for ‘Corruption’. But what does the ‘C’ stand for today, under President Ramaphosa?
One may think ‘C’ stands for ‘Collapse’, since Ramaphosa’s ANC has underperformed Jacob Zuma’s on almost every count. In 2019, less than 28% of eligible voters cast ballots in favour of the ANC, compared to 43% in 2009 and 37% in 2014.
According to Ipsos’s polls, support for the ANC among the population at large (including non-voters) has declined more sharply under Ramaphosa than under Zuma, from a high of 61% in November 2018 to 55% in November 2019 and, down again, to 50% in September 2020.
This is largely a result of the fact that since Ramaphosa’s election, South Africa suffered two recessions, before the Covid-19 lockdown.
In 2020 things only got worse. The National Coronavirus Command Council imposed the world’s longest – and arguably most irrational – lockdown, while police were accused of infamous killings. Despite costing two million jobs, the lockdown failed to stop the virus; Covid-19 may have spread here at world-record speeds.
Nor is the future outlook much better. Treasury forecasts that ‘the economy will only return to 2019 levels in 2024’. To be more precise, on current Treasury forecasts, GDP in constant rand prices will return to Q1 2019 levels only in 2025.
Even this conceals the full extent of shrinkage. Consider GDP in constant dollars and you notice the South African economy has been receding since 2013, a peak point to which we will only return, if one extends Treasury’s forecast growth, in the 2030s. GDP in constant dollars is already half what it would have been had we continued on the mid-2000s path of real growth.
It is against the backdrop of this collapse that the ANC developed a 200-page discussion document for its forthcoming (lockdown-delayed) National General Council (NGC). It shed some light on defining the ‘C’ in ANC.
Lumpen
According to the recently released ANC ‘Umrabulo NGC 2020’ document, many of the country’s problems are rooted in ‘lumpen elements’, particularly in the ‘bourgeoisie’. The word ‘lumpen’ is used 22 times in the document.
For those in want of brushing up on communist terminology, the ‘lumpenproletariat’ was a term used by Karl Marx to categorise workers who put their own individual interests before class solidarity, are ‘devoid of class consciousness’ and thus tear into the fabric of society. ‘Lumpen’ means ragged in German.
The ‘lumpen elements’ that most concern the ANC are, however, in the middle and upper classes, namely the ‘parasitic lumpen bourgeoisie’, and ‘the parasitic comprador bourgeoisie’.
In South Africa’s context ‘comprador lumpens’ means, to use the ANC document’s own language, ‘peers among the emergent black middle and upper strata’ who find ‘common cause’ with ‘the white middle strata’, ‘monopoly capital’ and ‘the erstwhile colonial bourgeoisie’.
The ANC document calls for ‘the elimination of compradorist, parasitic, corporate-capture of the state and the movement and other corrupt tendencies’.
What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with the state of the nation, or the state of the ANC? Everything.
Simple, and potent
At the heart of the Umrabulo document lies a simple, and potent, view about what ‘crime’ is in general and what ‘corruption’ is in particular. According to Marx, ‘crime’ equals ‘capitalism’ and ‘capitalism’ equals ‘corruption’. When lumpens rob, by hijacking or ‘state capture’ or by coercing kickbacks, they are engaging in a ‘systemically capitalist’ activity.
This view is familiar to Ramaphosa and the ANC. For example, the Final Report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, which called for expropriation without compensation, described ‘bribery’ by government officials as an example of ‘pure market opportunism’, in other words ‘capitalist’.
The contrary view is that ‘bribery’ is a form of coercion, like hijacking, and so must be stopped by the government’s enforcement of property rights. On this view, ‘corruption’ and ‘capitalist’ are opposites, but to communists they are one and the same thing.
But, rather than distinguish between crime and capitalism, the ANC’s Umrabulo document quotes Thabo Mbeki at length, saying the following:
The new order born of the victory in 1994 inherited a well-entrenched [capitalist] value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of the value system of our society as a whole. Society assumed a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property. This phenomenon which we considered as particularly South African, was in fact symptomatic of the capitalist system in all countries.
The ANC document supports this, quoting Marx and the Marxist sociologist Willem Adriaan Bonger, who said that ‘because of selfishness and the destruction of human sentiment all members of capitalist society are crime prone’.
In short, the ANC lump‘crime’ and ‘capitalism’ together as two sides of the same ‘lumpen element’ which is characterized by both ‘illegal self-enrichment’ (crime) and ‘illegitimate’ values (capitalism). If the problem is corruption, but corruption is capitalist, then the solution to corruption is to eradicate capitalism in South Africa.
‘Revolutionary character’
To do this requires internal and international support. The Umrabulo chapter on international relations says the ANC has ‘a duty to strengthen our revolutionary character and posture’ in order to realise the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (NDR) under the express influence of ‘pan-African, socialist, communist, rights-and-freedoms internationalism’.
In the chapter subtitled ‘Choosing the best cadres to lead transformation’, the ANC complains that the South African Communist Party (SACP) suffered ‘diminishing’ influence in cadre deployment and ideological respect during the Zuma era.
This ‘diminishing’ influence, the document claims, came ‘to cripple the ANC, organisationally, politically and ideologically, thus denuding it of its leadership role’ and opening the door for ‘lumpens’ that are capitalist-cum-corrupt to steal for themselves rather than seize wealth for ‘blacks in general and Africans in particular’.
In practical terms, the NDR demands, according to Umrabulo, that ‘straightforward compulsion and even expropriation to the extent it is necessary…should be considered’ to achieve ‘private-public participation arrangements’.
In the section on how, or whether, to reform state-owned enterprises, the ANC document has the following to say:
We will never achieve broad national democratic mobilisation…if, as the liberation movement, we are unclear ourselves as to what the R in the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is all about. One thing it is certainly not about is veering into a path of reformism. What it stands for, as we pronounce it in the full text of the NDR, is REVOLUTION. [capitals in original]
‘Reformism’ in the section above refers to privatisation, retrenchment of redundant staff, and financial rationalisation, otherwise known as ‘free market’ or ‘capitalist’ reforms. But the ‘R’ in ‘NDR’ stands for ‘state-led revolution’, not ‘reformism’ of this kind, according to the ANC.
Just as the ‘R’ stands for ‘REVOLUTION’, the ‘C’ in ‘ANC’ must go from ‘Corruption’ to ‘Communism’ in order to achieve the NDR.
‘The ANC remains, by definition, the vanguard of the National Democratic Revolution’, it asserts, and Ramaphosa is its leader.
Its latest revolutionary template points out that democracies can be ‘eaten out from within, as the larvae of some wasps eat out host spiders’. The picture is repulsive: it makes you want to look away. But, do not look away.
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