One would think the socialist left would consider themselves well represented, but leftwingers are adrift and confused.
There’s a sense of despair among left-wing intellectuals contemplating the rearrangement of political forces in South Africa. While several parties offer openly left-wing political ideas and policy promises, they feel alone and unrepresented.
Consider professor Luke Sinwell, a professor in the sociology department at the University of Johannesburg.
In an article in the Review of African Political Economy, Sinwell considers the decline of the African National Congress (ANC), and bemoans the fact that the alternative to an alliance with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) on the left is a partnership with the Democratic Alliance (DA).
He describes the DA as ‘the historically white party’, as if it is the political heir of the old National Party (NP), even though its predecessors consistently opposed apartheid and the NP, and the actual NP eventually merged into the ANC.
Sinwell argues that a coalition with the DA ‘is perhaps the greatest threat to those who seek historical redress’, and that it ‘would crush existing hopes for redistribution of wealth and cement the misguided sense that we live in a “post-racial” world’.
‘The wounds that were inflicted by colonial-imperialist powers during colonialism and apartheid would likely be brushed aside,’ he says.
Mischaracterisation
This is a mischaracterisation, as a simple visit to the DA’s website would have clarified. Although it is committed to non-racialism, among its principles, the party says, is ‘the redress of past discrimination’.
It says: ‘Apartheid was an evil system which denied generations of South African citizens the freedom, rights and opportunities to improve their lives and fulfil their potential. … The injustices suffered by previous generations harm those who follow. The effects of the past are therefore still felt by many born after 1994; We cannot undo the past, but as a nation we have a duty to redress any disadvantages caused by our past, so that all South Africans may make equal use of their opportunities.’
These are not the words of a party that is a threat to historical redress.
In its election manifesto, it undertakes to continue redistributive policies such as paying social grants, increasing child grants to the food poverty line, and extending those grants to pregnant mothers.
It promises to improve education, lift six million out of poverty, and establish a fair society with a social market economy in which opportunities are spread ‘as broadly as possible’.
These are not the promises of a party that is a threat to historical redress.
The DA’s manifesto is clear that it is not opposed to redress in and of itself, but that it opposes ‘the national government’s politically manipulated and self-enriching “redress” policies, which deter investment, impede growth and lock the majority in poverty’.
‘The ANC’s redress policies have failed to address inequality in South Africa,’ it says, while proposing liberal economic policies that the party believes will better address the scourges of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
To denounce it as being opposed to redress and redistribution is to draw a false caricature of the DA.
Neoliberalism
Sinwell accuses the ANC of having adopted ‘neoliberal’ policies.
This isn’t entirely surprising, since academics, especially in the humanities, tend to lean strongly to the left, and the ANC’s slow progress towards socialism undoubtedly frustrates left-wing academics.
To them, the modestly market-friendly policies of the ANC in the early years after the negotiated settlement of 1994 was a betrayal of the socialist promise, and the wholesale capture of the state, combined with what can only be described as a crony-capitalist relationship between big business and the government, was a further betrayal.
Yet the ANC’s own policy documents show that it remains on ‘the journey of our country’s transition from apartheid colonialism to a national democratic society’.
That term refers to the National Democratic Revolution, to which it remains committed as ‘the most direct route to socialism’. Its legislative agenda – which includes expropriation without compensation, black economic empowerment and affirmative action, and the enactment of National Health Insurance – has all the hallmarks of the socialist revolution it seeks.
But Sinwell believes that ‘this election cements the beginning of the end of the ANC’, leaving leftists like him casting about for alternatives.
‘False messiah’
The two obvious alternatives are Jacob Zuma’s MK Party and Julius Malema’s EFF, both of which promise left-wing policies such as nationalisation, expropriation, and redistribution.
However, he concludes that Zuma is a ‘false messiah’, and says that ‘although there are certain benefits that the EFF brings to those who seek left-wing policies, Malema too is not a saviour of the working class’.
Sinwell goes on to bemoan the fact that vehicles of pro-working-class politics such as the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party and the Workers and Socialist Party failed dismally at the polls, neither having ever won any seats in the National Assembly.
‘No credible alternative to build people’s power from below, uniting trade unions and social movements to make a wide set of demands within a socialist framework existed on the ballot in this election,’ he writes. ‘This is a symptom of the independent left in South Africa which is in disarray.’
Ultimately, he hangs his hopes on the low turnout, saying that ‘the assumption that because people voted, their voices have been heard is shortsighted and dangerous terrain for those who seek fundamental change’.
Odious premises
Elsewhere, Niall Reddy, a researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, similarly examines the ‘two contending blocs’, namely ‘the liberal (DA and some smaller parties) and authoritarian-kleptocratic (EFF and MK) with the ANC split between the two and the left sadly nowhere to be seen’.
He also cannot resist a dig at the DA, accusing it of being ‘disposed to swart gevaar-tinged tales of societal collapse’ (my italics).
He acknowledges that the DA’s concerns about an ANC-MK-EFF coalition, leading it to call it a ‘doomsday coalition’ are ‘not entirely without merit, however odious their premises’, even though the odious premises are entirely dreamed up by Reddy, and the merits of warning against societal collapse are patently obvious to everyone suffering under the present government.
The DA’s objection to the doomsday coalition is to the socialist economic policies and the likelihood of corruption that come with it, and not to the colour of the socialists’ skin.
False equivalence
In his analysis of the options, Reddy fares better, cautioning against a false equivalence.
He says an alignment between the ANC and DA would result in ‘straightforward continuity’. He considers it ‘highly implausible that it will involve the repeal of any of the ANC’s big-ticket, redistributive items – the minimum wage, BEE or the NHI’.
‘In the short term continuity is not all bad [for leftists], given that, at least on certain fronts, we are currently on a trajectory of slow recovery from the depths into which Zuma plunged us,’ he writes. ‘Five years of breathing room for Ramaphosa’s plodding reforms to gain ground might allow key public institutions to exit the ICU.’
He adds: ‘In the medium and longer term, however, continuity is unequivocally bad [again, for leftists]. Many of the treatments being applied to stave off collapse will cause major complications down the line. Privatisation might get the trains back and keep the lights on in the short run. In the long term it will hand infrastructural power to big business and sap the state’s capacity to imagine and enact structural transformation and climate adaptation.’
It’s remarkable to see the cognitive dissonance of a socialist who supports state power and opposes the free market recognising that the trains are gone and the lights are off thanks to the state’s incapacity, and can be expected to return by privatisation.
Reddy says: ‘If the historical record shows anything, ongoing austerity will fail to fix the debt crisis while pushing people deeper into the arms of demagogues. Neoliberal policies are the root cause of the polarisation in the country and they won’t be its solution.’
Hindering progressive alternatives
Reddy disputes, however, that Sinwell is correct in saying this prospect is the ‘greatest threat of all to those who seek historical redress’.
He says that the EFF, despite its left-wing, Marxist policies, is really based on patronage, and it would likely ‘[concede] on most of its policy agenda in exchange for access to rents’.
MK, despite some left-wing economic policies, is ‘a brazenly right-wing, chauvinistic, ethnocentric political formation dedicated to reviving feudal authority’.
In this, he is correct. As Rebecca Davis points out, both MK and the Patriotic Alliance of Gayton McKenzie, are right-wing parties that cannot be considered ‘progressive’ or ‘left’.
Ultimately, Reddy concludes that both blocs – a DA-aligned coalition and an EFF/MK-aligned coalition – ‘will hinder progressive alternatives’, but that the threat posed by the EFF/MK is far greater.
Whither the left?
What is striking in these left-wing analyses of the looming coalition landscape is that neither considers the various crises that beset the country – from corruption and crime, to bureaucratic dysfunction and failing infrastructure, to low growth and high debt, to unemployment and poverty – to be the inevitable consequences of the progressive, left-wing, redistributive policies of the ANC.
One sometimes wonders, if left-wing professors succeed in shackling the markets and destroying capitalism, where they think the wealth they so fervently wish to redistribute (or their own remuneration) actually comes from.
For them, the ANC has not gone far enough, or was derailed by predatory private interests. The progressive policies of the left are not to be blamed.
Yet the ‘neoliberal policies’ that these left-wing academics decry have actually spurred historic growth over the last several decades. For both rich and poor countries, the more they opened up to trade and adopted fiscal discipline, the better they did.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that economic freedom – as opposed to left-wing, progressive policies – are correlated with less poverty and greater prosperity, including among the poor.
More neoliberalism
If this is indeed the beginning of the end for the ANC and its socialist National Democratic Revolution, and the intellectual left feel poorly represented by the populists of the EFF and MK, that is a good thing.
South Africa doesn’t need more socialism. It already has far too much of it. It doesn’t need workers’ parties and socialist electoral fronts.
What South Africa needs is economic growth. It needs investor-friendly policies, not only for big business, but especially for small enterprises. It needs a vibrant economy populated with thriving companies of all sizes in order to eradicate poverty and create employment.
If you want to see what works in South Africa, look to the private sector. If you want to see what doesn’t work, look to the government. This is glaringly obvious to everyone other than socialist intellectuals.
South Africa needs a lot more neoliberalism, not less of it.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: A fork in the road. Photo by Curtis Gregory Perry, used under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.