Populism,+uses+and+abuses,+Nzimande,+Umsebenzi+Online

Umsebenzi Online, Vol 5 No 40, August 2nd, 2005

 * In this issue:
 * **Red Alert: The uses and abuses of ‘populism’**
 * **(Roll Back the Offensive Against the Workers and the Poor! – see separate file)**
 * **(Roll Back the Offensive Against the Workers and the Poor! – see separate file)**

=Red Alert: The uses and abuses of ‘populism’=


 * Blade Nzimande, General Secretary**

The past week in South Africa has been characterised by significant developments for our country, and especially for the workers and the poor. It was a week that saw major strikes in a number of sectors and rising worker militancy. Equally significant has been the evident public sympathy towards workers’ demands in many of these strikes.

This sympathy is directly related to a growing public groundswell of condemnation of gross senior management bonuses and so-called incentives and the thousand other ways in which the bosses in the private and public sectors appropriate the collective wealth of our country for personal gain. There is growing awareness that an arrogant bourgeoisie – white and black – is incapable of offering a strategic way forward to address the challenges of our society. The broad public can see that the selfish short-sightedness of the bosses is contributing to a deepening, dangerous and unsustainable polarisation of our society. This public groundswell is not mistaken.

In 1994 workers share of our country’s wealth was more than 50% while profits for bosses were some 27%. By 2002, workers’ share had dropped to 44%, while operating surplus for the capitalists had INCREASED to 33%. In the new South Africa, capitalists, black and white, have been doing what they always do – they have waged a bitter class struggle against working people.

And this is why the worker militancy of the last weeks must be understood to be about much more than immediate wage demands. It is raising questions about the accumulation trajectory under way in our society, about what kind of growth path is desirable and necessary. It is one thing to aim to achieve a growth of 6%, but there is no guarantee that this growth will contribute to overcoming the dualism of our economy. As the SACP we fully support these legitimate workers’ struggles. They are an important platform to build the capacity of organised workers as the leading stratum of the working class as a whole.

Last week, there were also three other important national events - the Conference of the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition, the National Land Summit and the 84th anniversary celebrations of our Party.

The Financial Sector Conference brought together representatives from communities, labour, government and business. The aim of the conference was to evaluate progress made in the transformation of the financial sector to serve the interests of the workers and the poor, and to discuss challenges that lie ahead. The conference noted some progress but concluded that we are still far from creating the kind of financial sector needed to serve the interests of the workers and the poor. For us, as the SACP, the slowness and reluctance with which progress is being made exemplifies how, over the 11 years of our democracy, the capitalist market has proved singularly incapable of addressing the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people. The progress that has been made has been wrung, bitter step by step, through intense struggle and mobilization.

Last week saw the convening of the National Land Summit. It is a summit that had been called for by the SACP and other organizations representing the landless. The holding of this summit and the resolutions adopted mark an important qualitative development for the SACP’s Red October Campaign to accelerate land and agrarian transformation. The Summit emerged with far-reaching resolutions, including the rejection of the market-based ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ principle. The Summit asked government to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new policy, which should include, where appropriate and necessary, land expropriation and the regulation of land prices as part of accelerating land and agrarian transformation. In effect, the summit was acknowledging the failure of the capitalist market to address the needs of the landless of our country.

Of course, working class and popular advances will always be met with countervailing opposition. As more and more public opinion swings behind workers, as there is a growing acceptance, across a broad front of formations, of the limitations of the capitalist market, we should not be surprised to find rear-guard resistance and ideological reaction.
 * The ideological counter-offensive

In the current situation the ideological reaction often takes the form of belittling the aspirations and demands of workers and the poor. Demands are portrayed as “unrealistic” and “ill-considered”. In this ideological counter-offensive, we find the increasing usage of the concept or, more accurately, the label “populism”.

Historically, particularly within Marxism, “populism” has been used to refer to the opportunistic exploitation of popular, sometimes demagogic, sentiments with a resonance amongst the masses, without due regard to revolutionary principles, or to sustainable organization and strategy.

Populism has taken many forms in many countries over the last two centuries – it has sometimes assumed a religious, ethnic or tribal character – typically using grievances around poverty and a sense of sectional exclusion. It is usually a process driven by elites, exploiting the problems and prejudices of the masses to advance a short-term political agenda. Populism (we see this in its various Latin American versions in the 20th century) is also often associated with a charismatic leader and a loyal band of followers committed to the person more than to an ideological cause.

In South Africa in the 1980s it was a concept, sometimes a label, used in what came to be known as the “workerist/populist” debate that raged between and within the United Democratic Front and the trade union movement. The debate reflected the two key dimensions of our liberation struggle, which is simultaneously a struggle against national oppression and class exploitation. While the labels “populism” and “workerism” were often used merely polemically and unjustly, the debate did highlight the dangers of an excessive and one-sided emphasis on either class or national mobilization and organization. In the 1980s there was, indeed, a current within the trade union movement that rejected the national struggle, seeing the UDF and the ANC as “populist” and inherently petit-bourgeois and “anti-worker”. This ideological approach was “workerist” or “syndicalist” – seeing the trade union movement as the key and often as the exclusive means for organizing workers. But there were, also, “populist” tendencies in the struggle in the 1980s – a tendency to regard townships, for instance, as undifferentiated communities without competing class interests, or a tendency to rely on sheer popular militancy and charismatic leadership figures without regard to sustainable organization.

The clandestine predecessor of this publication (Umsebenzi was re-launched in the underground in 1985) constantly called for a rejection of both populism and workerism, in favour of a working-class led, broad-based national liberation struggle. In our present situation, no doubt, there are also both workerist and populist tendencies and we need to ensure that we overcome the limitations and one-sidedness of both.

So much for the serious use of such terms, but of late we have seen a return of the now very loosely applied label of “populism”, especially in the media. In the 1990s, the media often referred to ANC leaders with a real or perceived popular appeal as “populist”. There was also the simple and confusing conflation of the label “left” and the label “populist”. Cde Chris Hani and Zeph Mothopeng of the PAC were equally and indiscriminately labeled “left-populists”.

More recently, the media have been using the term “populist” indiscriminately for those assumed to be “Jacob Zuma supporters” – it is a convenient label behind which to hide and confuse a diversity of issues (including concerns around internal organizational democracy) that emerged, for instance, at the ANC’s important National General Council.

The label is now also increasingly used in attempts to delegitimise genuine working class and popular (as opposed to populist) demands. This is done by contrasting worker and popular demands with supposedly “realistic” market-friendly policies that have a “sober appreciation of global and domestic realities”. Our campaign for an amnesty for the two million workers and poor black-listed by the credit bureaux is, of course, a prime target for this ideological counter-offensive label: “populist”. The same label is also applied to our call for a new model to finance low-cost housing.

Interestingly, three and four years ago our demand for universal access by the poor to the banking system and to affordable financial products was also castigated as “populist”. Now that we have made decisive advances in this regard, winning the Umzansi bank account, some of those who were accusing us of populism are claiming this as their initiative! (Now THAT’S populism!)

The present ideological counter-offensive also expresses itself through an attempt to project the interests of the capitalist class as “national interests”, whilst the interests of the workers are belittled as “sectionalist” and “narrow” and their energetic pursuit is said to be “populist”. These kinds of arguments lead inexorably to the conclusion that the only “realistic” way forward is to lower the cost of doing business (for business, of course), amongst other things through lowering the costs of labour (again, for business of course).

We initially floated the call for an amnesty for workers and the poor black-listed by the credit bureaux at our SACP Special National Congress in April this year. We have repeated and intensified the call to mark our 84th SACP anniversary. And we have now already achieved our first objectives in making this admittedly bold demand.
 * Why an amnesty for the black-listed?

In the last few days, the credit bureaux, which have been hiding inscrutably in the deepest of bunkers, have come stumbling out, hands in the air, crying “don’t shoot, don’t shoot – we’re just the messengers.” This is already progress. Our campaign has forced these institutions, often literally holding the power of life and death over poor households, to emerge into the light of day so that we can all see them and hear what they have to say.

What they have to say is, itself, interesting and instructive. They tell us “apartheid ended eleven years ago”, but black-listings only last 3 to 5 years. “So”, they tell us, “current black-listings have nothing to do with the apartheid past.” Obviously, the credit bureaux seem to think that the legacy of three centuries of colonial dispossession and several decades of apartheid barbarism has nothing whatsoever to do with the present plight of millions of South Africans – apartheid, after all, “is dead”.

The second thing that the credit bureaux say is that if the poor get an amnesty the “stability of the financial sector” will be affected. And here we see the old ploy of separating the stability of our economy from the interests and the needs of millions of citizens. For the credit bureaux stability means stability for financial capital, and not sustainable economic stability for the great majority of South Africans. Do the bureaux honestly imagine that having two million South Africans blacklisted is not hugely destabilizing? These are two million citizens (most with their own wider family and household responsibilities) who are excluded from access to credit, many for trivial amounts and because of exploitative interest rates. This reality is unsustainable and, if you emerge from your bunkers ladies and gentlemen, you will realize that it is profoundly destabilizing.

This crisis is what informs our call for a blacklisting amnesty. It is not a populist call. It is made in all seriousness. How do we imagine that the new Credit Bill before parliament will be able to achieve its intended regulatory impact with this huge back-log of citizens stranded in a black-listed limbo? Yes, specific black-listings might expire after some years, but the impact of a listing will often have driven households into back-door loan-shark indebtedness where interest rates are astronomical. The impact of a listing in the actual conditions of our society is, typically, not a short-term affair, it is often a life (and death) sentence.

Our amnesty call is also not informed by unrealistic expectations or promises. In our popular mobilization we are calling on poor households and communities to be disciplined and realistic. We envisage the amnesty as a one-off measure that enables working class and poor households to get back on their feet. Such an amnesty should also not be seen as an isolated silver bullet. The regulation of the credit bureaux, and of loan-sharks, the overall transformation of the financial sector, job creation, building sustainable households and communities, state-led micro-credit for small businesses, a new model for financing low cost housing, massive land reform – all of these measures need to be seen as part and parcel of an overall attempt to help working class families and communities get up onto their feet in sustainable ways.


 * From: http://www.sacp.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=264&Itemid=1