The recent and newly found zealousness by President Zuma to pursue radical economic transformation is nothing but a ruse. The fact of the matter is that we have been here before and we have seen nothing that resembles anything radical in the economic policies implemented since president Zuma became president. But what is different this time around is that president Zuma is going to use the call for radical economic transformation as a pretense decisively to implement the agenda of the State Capturers.
Considering the time left for him both as ANC and state president, he is under enormous pressure to implement this agenda before he leaves office. The Russians want to start building the nuclear stations they were possibly promised and want to do so before president Zuma leaves office.
The Chinese want to give us the loan so that their companies can build us the uMzimvubu Dam as possibly agreed between them and president Zuma. The Gupta’s are ready to have the entire state machinery on their beck and call as a final push towards complete capture of the state. The president is also desperate to evade prosecution after he leaves office.
Accordingly, it is precisely this understanding that has had some of us confounded by the ANC’s response to the State of the Nation Address by president Zuma. The ANC Secretary General came out owning up to the president’s call for radical economic transformation as if it reflected ANC agreed positions. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What president Zuma presented to the nation in this regard were his plans to salvage himself from prosecution and the commitments he possibly made to the above mentioned interests. Otherwise how come there is no detailed, branch-informed ANC programme on the radical economic transformation as propounded by the president?
Frankly the ANC - in its current organizational form and its prevailing ideological hotchpotch - cannot go beyond the economic reforms it has already put in place. It is neither ideologically nor politically strong to pursue a thoroughgoing and radical economic transformation on its own. Without a strictly defined ideological posture, accompanied by a detailed and radical programme for economic transformation, talk of radical economic transformation is just that, talk.
The ANC has become so disintegrated and ideologically confused that its main political enemy has in recent times been defined exclusively as monopoly capital. In this regard, we seem to have abandoned all the rational early theories about the nature and character of the South African political struggle.
Consequently, the theory of the relationship between the national, class and gender questions of the South African political contradictions has been pushed aside to pursue purist notions of dangerous economism such as the current obsession to dismantle monopoly capitalism at all costs. All this is done without due regard to the earlier point made regarding the organizational and ideological deficiencies of the ANC to embark on such an expensive and costly political adventure.
In our view, in its current form and within the South African conditions transmitted to us by history, the ANC can only be able to foster any meaningful economic transformation through a multi-stakeholder social pact that puts inequality at the center of its trade-off agreements on economic transformation. The argument that the ANC can use the sole leverage of its political power to foster radical economic transformation is misplaced. This approach ignores the mutually dialectical influence between the economic base and the superstructure.
Karl Marx’s Economic Determinism teaches us that the political superstructure, which includes the state, cannot be immune from the prevailing economic production system, and vice versa. In this sense and mindful of the relative autonomy of our democratic state, any approach that treats political power exclusively from the economic power is theoretically flawed. It is in fact a recipe for political populism to which we have now become accustomed; a naked form of populism that delivers a lot of slogans that signify nothing.
To further elucidate the point, it is common cause that our political leadership is so enmeshed into the economic structure that it has become difficult to distinguish whether their actions are informed by political or personal economic considerations. State decisions are highly contested among and between the political leadership factions precisely because many of the ANC leaders have vested economic interests as directors in multiple boards of private companies.
In this regard, it is easy to conclude that the struggle against monopoly capital is a struggle amongst capitalist sponsored proxies that contest the policy direction of the state and its tenders. In the final analysis this becomes a struggle between individual capitalists and monopolies. Accordingly, this struggle sees nothing wrong with capitalism as a system per se, but concerns itself with the form of capitalism that is acceptable to the proxies and their sponsors.
As we should be aware, monopolies are a highest stage of capitalism as a system. In this connection, the capitalist system naturally mutates into something more complex due to the development of the relations of production. As it does this, this system unwittingly makes itself more vulnerable to the working class struggle as it will result in more workers organized easily to belong to few big unions.
In this way the power and unity of the workers can be easily achieved to ensure a decisive pursuit of the class struggle for workers as a class. How monopoly capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction is a subject that needs a more careful study by the working class itself.
In conclusion, the ANC has an historic responsibility and duty to tell the people of South Africa the truth about what it is that it can do for them. The ANC must tell the people the truth about the enormous challenges we face as a country and the role the people can play in this regard.
It is high time that a conscious programme is devised by the ANC to empower citizens through correct and accurate information about the state of our nation to ensure their meaningful contribution. The ANC should not hide or obfuscate its short-comings so as to score cheap political gains through misinformation and lies. We need more hands on deck to ensure that we discharge our historic responsibility to lead and govern better.
Mzukisi Makatse is a member of the ANC. He writes in his personal capacity.
