Managing+Capitalism,+Market+Fundamentalism,+YCL+Bottom+Line

Bottom Line, YCLSA, Issue 3, Vol 12: 4 September 2006



 * Buti Manamela, National Secretary, YCLSA**

=Managing Capitalism to defeat Market Fundamentalism=

Some few weeks back the President of the country made a historic lecture as part of the series of the Nelson Mandela Annual Lectures, the fourth since its inception. In that lecture, the President relayed a number of issues which have become synonymous to some of the policy and ideological articulations in the African National Congress senior leadership, or what the SACP discussion document refers to as the ‘1996 Dominant Class Project’.

These were eminent in the ANC response (the official document and the onslaught series in //ANC Today//) to the South African Communist Party Discussion Document. The suggestion that is raised in these documents, subtle as it may, is that from the goodwill of the wealthy we shall end rampant capitalism, the desire to be rich and the divide between the rich and the poor. The platforms raised above further suggest that the problem is not capitalism, because it should be managed, but rather the problem is market fundamentalism, and that if we defeat this phenomenon, we will be able to ‘manage capitalism” and ensure that it provides for the entire needs of the population.

To quote directly from the ANC Response, the authors wrote that:

"It is against this background that the ANC Morogoro Conference asserted that the working class is the dynamic link between national liberation and socialism. This assertion reflected both the acceptance on the part of the ANC of the legitimacy and logic of the struggle for socialism and, consequently, the extent to which progressive nationalism had permeated the ranks of the ANC.

"Does it therefore mean that the ANC had adopted or could and should adopt socialism as its ultimate objective? The answer is, no! The ANC was and remains the embodiment of the collective of organised forces that seek to resolve the //national// //contradictions// [our emphases] within South African society, at the same time as it tackles relevant socio-economic relations...

“The ANC is by definition a //liberation movement//. Its core strategic task is to eliminate the //national grievance//. In the context of the post-1994 period, it uses various terrains of struggle - //mass organisation and mobilisation, state power, the economic centre, ideological struggle and international work// - to unite the motive forces in action to achieve this strategic objective.

“Yet the ANC does recognise that the //interests of the motive forces may at times be in conflict//. While //leaning// towards the working class and the poor, //the ANC seeks to unite all the motive forces//; and it does not pursue the narrow interests of a particular class or stratum. It is the understanding of the ANC that working class leadership means pursuit of the class' own short-, medium- and long-term interests and at the same time defining a common platform for all the forces interested in democratic transformation.”

The above seeks to illustrate the extent within which the ANC defines its role as a “//national liberation movement”// with its core task being to eliminate the //“national grievance”//. It is an embodiment of the organized forces seeking to //resolve the national contradiction//. The working class is not defined as the //main motive force// but as a force which the ANC is //leaning// towards whilst uniting all the motive forces behind the task of resolving the //national grievance. // In subsequent paragraphs, the role of the ANC is defined as that of //managing the irreconcilable contradictions// between the motive forces, particularly the working class and the bourgeoisie, and that its role is //not// to resolve these contradictions. The Document goes further to suggest that the ANC should manage capitalism, and that its role is not to defeat this economic system and replace it with socialism, as the ANC is //not// a //socialist party.//

The problem with this approach is that it sees the role of a //national liberation movement// as being to merely resolve the //national grievance//, and that through this, its role will be completed. This approach goes further to illustrate that the resolve of the national grievance will ultimately, or should ultimately, lead to an end to the misery of what today characterize the socio-economic problems that South Africa faces. South Africa remains one of the most economically divided society, with the coexistence of opulence and poverty parallel to each other. These are not as a result of merely some //national grievance//, but due to the continuing class dominance of the bourgeoisie and the class exploitation of the working class and the poor.

The approach that in order to end these socio-economic miseries of the majority can be wiped out by some anti neo-liberal capitalism, and appeals to the bourgeoisie to end their desire to accumulate as much wealth as possible is equal to utopian capitalism. This approach stems from suggesting that in order to build a racially united, democratic and equitable gender relation society is solely based on a commitment to manage capitalism and its inherent contradictions.

The ANC and the SACP, and later on COSATU, came to appreciate the fact that apartheid social relations are not merely based on national oppression, but also on class and gender oppression. All the organizations recognized that these contradictions and struggles made Apartheid profitable for many years of exploitation and exclusion through nationally oppressive laws, the apartheid capitalist regime was sustained through cheaply available labour power, underdevelopment and non-investment in socio-economic activities of the black majority.

The analysis that the task of the ANC is to resolve the //national grievance// excludes the fact that the interrelated struggles that the black working class and women faced was that of gender and class oppression. Thus, this whole argument of the resolve of a national grievance has been appropriated to opportunistically justify massive and costly Black Economic Empowerment deals, through ensuring that there is black participation in the mainstream economy whilst not addressing the actual crises of continued unemployment, widening wealth gap and continued marginalization and exploitation of women.

It is the same analysis that leads to gains in post 1994 being defined on the basis of a sustained annual real GDP growth of 6% or more (which remains meaningless to the unemployed by beneficial to the bourgeoisie), increased investment, especially **[|Foreign Direct Investment]** (which has been hard to get hold of), reduce the fiscal deficit, which had reached over 9% of GDP during the 1993/4 fiscal year. This, we should emphasize, has meant nothing to the majority who remains in the periphery of the mainstream economy.

Although there is an appreciation of ANC earlier policy (including the Reconstruction and Development Programme of 1994) because of the analysis that the role of the ANC is to resolve the national grievance, attempts were made to argue that Gear was in fact a policy meant to “mobilize resource for the implementation of the RDP”. It was further argued that it sought to “centralize the means of production and ensure that there is socialization of labour” supposedly in order to advance socialism.

For instance, the ANC response indicates that:

“The mandate and programme of government are premised on the Reconstruction and Development Programme. This programme argued for sustainable macro-economic balances which GEAR sought to achieve. The ANC's view is that GEAR, for all its other weaknesses, achieved this objective. As a result, since 1999, we have had dramatic improvements in public expenditure; with massive increases in social and economic expenditure.” (ANC Response to SACP Discussion Document: June 2006)

This line of argument was further eminent in the President’s address to the Nelson Mandela 4th Annual Lecture, which is what we will refer to here as utopian capitalism.

Here, the President argued that the main challenge that we are confronted with is the “defeat of market fundamentalism” and an appeal to the rich not to display their wealth and to also commit themselves into fighting poverty. His eulogy, stretching from biblical writings, Shakespeare, Marx, Engels and Descartes is of course an important literary work, but falls short of declaring that the only way in order to ensure that we end capitalist romanticism is to intensify the class struggle and advance it through the state machinery.

The President declares in that speech that:

“And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to //escape from poverty// is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse sides are written the words at all costs, get rich!

“In these circumstances //personal wealth// and the public communication of the message that we are //people of wealth//, becomes at the same time the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community, the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa.

“In these circumstances, the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep and what we do as part of that company.

“In the event that what I have said has come across as a meaningless ramble, let me state what I have been saying more directly.

“What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is socially correct is not the proverbial expression - "manners market the man" but the notion that each one of us is as excellent a human being as our demonstrated wealth suggests!”

The essence of this long quote meant to illustrate how some South Africans, or most, have come to define the virtue of liberty as the desire not only to escape from poverty, but also to accumulate as much wealth as possible. The president looks not further than Smuts Ngonyama, the ANC Spokesperson, when he says that “this peculiar striving produces the particular result that //manifestations of wealth//, defined in specific ways, determine the individuality of each one of us who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfillment, given the liberty that the revolution of 1994 brought to all of us.”

This correctly poses a challenge to the essence that ‘I did not struggle to be poor” and “1994 has broken the chains of poverty for me” as unjustifiable and requiring interruption.

The fact of the matter is that 1994 did break the chains of poverty, but not for all. We need not quote the overstated statistics in order to illustrate this, but to show that what 1994 has inevitably done was to, in a skewed manner, redistribute wealth. Or put inversely, for some, 1994 intensified poverty. Such is the manner and character of capitalism.

The President makes the point much clearly that it is in the nature of capitalism, when he suggests that “…it is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them personal success and fulfillment means personal enrichment at all costs and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth…”

But the problem Mr. President is, what kind of capitalists do we want to create in South Africa? What kind of a capitalist market have we created, or do we seek to create and manage, in our country? Most in the aftermath of this literary work, such as his lackeys Kader Asmal and Ben Turok, hailed the President as an ‘intellectual’, and for my part, I subscribe to that matrix. The main thrust of capitalism is competition, accumulation of wealth and monopolization of capital in order to ensure the success of the capitalist system. This has been acknowledged by both capitalist and anti-capitalist ideologues.

To suggest that for us to, through our macro-economic policy (Gear) and its sidekick (Asgisa) we would be able to build capitalists with a human heart is of utmost impossibility. The failures and successes of the economy of our country are based on the capitalist system we sought to build post – Apartheid. Both these and many other economic policies have intensified rampant capitalism and rubbished on the hopes of the black and poor working class majority.

The whole memorial lecture is littered with such utopia, seeking to illustrate that the end of poverty (or capitalism) shall be brought by the change of heart and the goodness of the wealthy. It further seeks to suggest that an end to crass materialism will necessitate an end to capitalist exploitation (although this is correct, this alone is not the constitution of capitalism but its symptom). It further suggests that alternatively, there is a need to appeal to idealism in order to end the wrath of capitalist exploitation with a mild but magical wand.

If we live in a world of capitalism, and we seek to appeal to the capitalists to end their greed and desire for wealth, we therefore suggest that capitalism is in itself capable of achieving general equality (that is, capitalism with a human heart). Besides the long quotations from both Marx and Engels in that speech, there is general avoidance of scientific conclusion that the misery of the poor, their (un)freedom, is as a result of the freedom and exploitation of the others (the bourgeoisie).

The idea that we can build such capitalism, manage it, where the capitalists do not desire personal wealth and are not ambitious to get rich is utopian and not excusable. In fact, such analysis is more dangerous to the working class than the bourgeoisie itself as it hypnotizes the working class to believe that out of the goodness of the bourgeoisie (and not from working class struggles) their socio-economic location shall change.

Frederich Engels devoted some time in his book, //Socialism: Utopian or Scientific// in analyzing the French Socialist of the time, declaring that:

“One thing is common to all three (that is **[|Saint-Simon]**, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; **[|Fourier]** and **[|Owen]**, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism).

“Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.

“For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them.

“What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He (with due respect to the President of the ANC and company) might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.”

In the same vein that Engels wrote of the utopian socialists, so does the “1996 Dominant Class Project” which “do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once.” They do this with the wish that they can “bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice” in a class polarized society and in the midst of a class struggle.

The shaping of an ANC that is characterized on the bases of a neither for this nor for that class, that seeks to manage the inherent contradictions under capitalism and become the home for all, disputes the maxim that the “history of all hitherto is the history of class struggles” (Karl Marx and Frederich Engels: //Communist Manifesto,// 1848).

It fails to grasp the accepted injunction contained in the Communist Manifesto that “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.

It is filled with empty hope of that social harmony can be brought about by the voluminous pleas presented to the capitalists, and that the catastrophe the capitalist social relations have brought to the world for millions of years is nothing but an act of ‘rogue capitalist’ who are doing great disservice to this economic system.

The capitalist economy inherently reproduces unequal social relations, and any other form of capitalism that fails to do so is either socialism or failed capitalism. And as Christopher Claudwell points out in his remarkable //Concept of Freedom// (1938) that:

“There is, however, one vital difference. Bourgeois social relations, generating the liberty of the bourgeois and the non-liberty of the proletarian, depend on the existence of both freedom and unfreedom for their continuance. The bourgeois would not enjoy his idleness without the labour of the worker, nor the worker remains in a bourgeois relationship without the coercive guidance and leadership of the bourgeois. Thus the liberty of the few is, in bourgeois social relations, built on the unfreedom of the many.”

The conception of freedom, as the President puts it, for some, is “defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep and what we do as part of that company”

This conception does not apply and will not apply to all and sundry under capitalist social relations. It would definitely only apply in an ideal world, a utopian world, where we can all afford the luxuries of “designer labels” and “the spaciousness of our houses”. It is only in that ideal or utopian world where the freedom of some is not dependent on the unfreedom (exploitation) of all.

This conception leads to an illusion that capitalism can be managed, and that we can further manage the irreconcilable class antagonisms in society without necessarily doing away with them, for that role is solely the competence of a Communist Party. It is the very same conception that fills the emptiness of working class and the poor with the “Age of Hope”, with the insistence that their time will come only if they can exercise some form of patience.

In his elaborate piece on the role of the developmental state, presented at the COSATU Political School and published in //Umrabulo no. 25// Joel Netshitshenshe, a member of the National Working Committee of the ANC, argues that “it is therefore unavoidable that the ANC and the state it has spawned have to manage the class contradictions thrown up by the realities of the capitalist system.”

He further goes on to say that:

“On the one hand, this requires pursuit of the people's contract and social compact referred to above - in other words identifying the common interest and winning over all the players to pursue these.

“On the other hand, specific circumstances may call upon the ANC and the state to act in a kind of "collectivist, revolutionary Bonapartist manner" (as distinct from interpretations that attach Bonapartism to individuals).

“In other words, the state led by the ANC would from time to time be called upon to abandon the trench of immediate class identity and act in the collective interest - which interest, it can be argued, should be to the long-term advantage of the working class and the poor.”

This argument has been made and defeated a thousand years ago. The state cannot act in a Bonapartist fashion, and even so, Bonaparte himself could not act in a collectivist, revolutionary manner of taking away from all class forces and giving equally to them. The State, in whatever doctored fashion, remains an element of class rule. There is no such thing as a State that “abandons the trench of immediate class identity and act in the collectivist interest”.

“And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

Marx proceeds to write that:

“Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. just as it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France because he gave all his estates to his followers, with feudal obligations to him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and turn all the property and all the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal all of France in order to make a present of it to France; or rather in order to buy France anew with French money, for as the Chief of the Society of December 10 he must buy what ought to belong to him”

The association of any form of state to a Bonapartist state, with the intention to suggest that this is a neutral state, is flawed.

All factors of a capitalist state (the South African state is capitalist) collectively act in defense of capitalism. The law, public service, the army, police, parliament are all a collective of administration for the capitalists. To make this injunction is not to suggest that the post 1994 state is not any better than the Apartheid state. It is also not to suggest that there are NO opportunities for progressive left forces to emerge and smash this capitalist state, but it is for purposes of rightly identifying what kind of a state we have created and make issues clear.

The acceptance of this defeated neo-liberal presentation of the state may only lead us to another catastrophic (for the working class and the poor) solution, the route that suggests that all of us can be billionaires. It can also lead us to believing that the current state should be the totality of the kind of society we seek to build, and that the state is for all of us and against none of us. It is a harmonizing state!

The fall of capitalism will not only be a resultant of capitalists being “their own grave diggers”, but will also be a “result from the growth of the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” Appealing for bourgeoisie sympathy will only demobilize the working class.

Many of business (especially black business) have dismissed the theory of the President presented at the Lecture, insisting it is not the business of business to save the working class from its misery, but the business of government. Some of the neo-liberal reporters further buried the argument that the demolition of Apartheid social relations meant that we all should have choices, including the choice to wear “designer labels, drive luxury cars, own spacious houses and yards, their geographic location, the company we keep and what we do as part of that company.”

What is clear is that, the call by the bourgeoisie for government to ensure that there are conducive conditions to do business, to protect private property and to regulate the labour market is made in the national interest. This national interest is usually referred to as maintaining peace and stability, reducing crime and ensuring that those who are not co-opted into the bourgeoisie class are being catered for by government through social grants etc. For the bourgeoisie, the failure of government to provide all of these amounts to a failure in protecting their right to private property and removing the conditions for investments.

The tasks that we face as the Young Communist League, with our slogan “Ubudlela ndawonye esikhathini sethu” (Socialism in our Lifetime), is to ensure that we do the following:


 * 1) in the context of the SACP Medium Term Vision we help define the role of the working class youth under the current conditions of capitalist legality;
 * 2) we intensify the class struggle through highlighting the injustices of capitalist accumulation;
 * 3) we deepen the National Democratic Revolution as a radical agenda with the Freedom Charter as its radical programme and the RPD as an Alliance developmental plan in order to attain the minimum demands for a socialist dispensation, and
 * 4) we intensify working class consciousness to ensure that the struggle for socialism is realized. This includes the need for a more open Marxism which even questions the SACP’s own legacy, theory and strategy, in particular the NDR. As the YCL we have a critical role to play here.

When all is said and done, the hopes and aspirations of the president and many others are admirable, but remain impracticable in real life.

That’s the Bottomline, cos the YCL said so! BUTI MANAMELA NATIONAL SECRETARY** // Next Bottomline: The Neo – Liberal Wolf under the Utopian Capitalist Sheep skin!// From: [|http://www.sacp.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1584&Itemid=93]**

4292 words