[Marxism] Is There a Left Here Left?

[Patrick Bond]

Les Schaffer wrote:
>  South Africa (Patrick), 

Right then, here's an upcoming znet commentary:


South Africa's fight between hostile brothers

by Patrick Bond

The mid-December conference of the African National Congress is 
make-or-break for the ruling party, though probably not for the society 
as a whole. More than 4000 voting delegates to the city of Polokwane 
must decide between two presidential candidates, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

We've been waiting quite a while for the ANC's political dust to settle, 
but these last weeks have seen a stormy cloud descend on South Africa.

Mbeki is the current president of the party and the country, but cannot 
legally seek reelection as head of state in 2009. Yet the ANC's own 
constitution makes its president the ruler of the government, and no one 
doubts the ANC will again score around two thirds of the vote in that 
poll. The question is whether Mbeki can retain ANC power, now coming 
from behind in an epic battle?

Zuma is the disgraced ex-deputy president of the government, fired by 
Mbeki in mid-2005, although still the current deputy ANC leader. He was 
accused of corruption during negotiations for the government's $5 
billion arms deal (his bribery take was allegedly $80 000 from the 
French firm Thale); his closest financial confidant, Schabir Shaik, is 
presently in jail for facilitating the deal.

Zuma was later charged with raping a young (HIV+) woman - a family 
friend - and admitted to taking a shower afterwards as protection. His 
supporters burned effigies of the woman outside the court during her 
trial. Zuma declared it consensual sex, and was acquitted.

Zuma's ethnic base (Zulu) is strongly mobilised but he also enjoys 
support across the country in part because of the lower-income 
majority's disgust at how little has changed since liberation in 1994.

Both served the anti-apartheid cause for decades in exile, Zuma as a 
(relatively ineffectual) military commander and Mbeki as the leading 
diplomat. Zuma's peasant background gives him a much more sensitive ear 
to political rumblings than the elitist, alienating and often overly 
intellectual Mbeki, who trained at Sussex and the Lenin Institute in 
Moscow so is able to pepper his weekly newsletter with a quaint Marxology.

In ANC branch nominations late last month, Zuma surprised Mbeki with his 
two-to-one margin, including endorsement from the ANC Women's League. He 
should win the party election convincingly, but Mbeki – an accomplished 
Machiavellian - cannot be counted out, and in any case that would not be 
the end of the story.

After all, the socio-economic status quo is unacceptable by all 
accounts, save those of the top two ANC leaders. 'Nothing will change', 
Zuma promises international financiers who for years have panelbeat SA's 
pro-business economic policy.

In reality, expressing a variety of policy/delivery grievances, 
grassroots activists have ratcheted up protest activity to unprecedented 
levels, with more than 20 000 separate demonstrations recorded by the 
police over a 24 month period in 2005-07, after about 6000 over 12 
months in 2004-05. The rate increased further this year, thanks to the 
longest-ever public sector workers' strike.

So as the ANC conference begins, independent progressives wonder:

* can Mbeki pull out all the state's resources to win reelection to the 
party presidency (or if not, still retain maximum power ahead of the 
2009 national elections)?

* will the Mbeki-Zuma battle continue to degenerate into a full-fledged 
conflagration that splits the ruling party?

* or will the ANC 'big tent' once again open some flaps on the left and 
draw in dissidents?

* is there perhaps a genuine policy opening ahead for the centre-left 
(and even the left), as trade unionists and leading communists provide 
crucial backing for Zuma's campaign?

* or would a president Zuma clamp down hard upon taking over state power 
in early 2009, given his and some supporters' traditions of militarism, 
nationalism, patriarchy, ethnicism and (passive) neoliberalism?

* or as another option, are Zuma's many profound weaknesses to be 
welcomed by independent leftists, as the basis for a ridiculous, weak 
presidency?

* what structural power shifts might this contest signify, given both 
the profound paranoia expressed by the neoliberal bloc and the ANC's 
paralysed socio-economic imagination?

* is the corruption-ridden ruling party capable of being reformed, or is 
a new people's/worker's party inevitable?

* or should most independent activity aimed at social change continue to 
eschew electoral politics?

I don't know the answers to these questions. But two tragedies are 
unfolding: the independent left's inability to make a dent in popular 
consciousness, and the ANC's debate boiling down to a personality contest.

It didn't have to be, for class struggle over economic policy should be 
on the front burner.

As Business Day newspaper reporter Wilson Johwa put it a few weeks ago, 
'Despite Mbeki's shortcomings, prudent economic management has been one 
of his key successes, hence market jitters that a Zuma presidency would 
take a radically different course.'

That might have been grounds for optimism, but then Zuma was called in 
by both Merrill Lynch and Citibank to explain himself.

Might we imagine Zuma addressing these bastards as follows?

'You international financiers have wreaked havoc on the South for more 
than three decades:
* with your loans to dictators like the apartheid regime,
* with your Third World Debt Crisis from the early 1980s which 
completely wiped out our 1960s-70s socio-economic progress,
* with your Emerging Markets crises starting in Mexico in 1994 and 
continuing across the world, including destruction of post-apartheid 
SA's currency on four occasions, and now,
* with your Subprime Mortgage gambles which suckered African-Americans 
and other low-income people into the US real estate bubble leaving them 
to now suffer wealth shrinkage more severe than at any other time in 
modern history - at the same time threatening the safety of the world 
financial system.

'Your two institutions had to fire your CEOs Stan O'Neal and Charles 
Prince for incompetence and write off more than $20 billion in bad 
investments. And you're telling me I must dance to your tune, to calm 
your goddamn jitters? Actually, you should calm OUR jitters!'

Nah, it's simply inconceivable.

On the one hand, a bourgeois organic intellectual like William Cline of 
the Peterson Institute for International Economics offered this quote 
recently: 'You’ve basically got capital market jitters about the United 
States.'

On the other, Zuma would be crucified by the mainstream media and the 
markets if he made such an obvious point about Merrill and Citi.

Zuma visited Houston late last month, hosted by spooky Stratfor, a 
CIA-related thinktank. As our Centre for Civil Society founder Adam 
Habib put it, 'Zuma should explain the US visit, which placed him on the 
platform of an institution that may violate the very principles of the ANC'.

(In contrast, Habib, a prolific, well-respected scholar and leading 
political commentator - and by coincidence a Muslim filmed addressing an 
anti-war rally in 2003 at a US consular office here in Durban - was last 
year banned from entering the US by the proto-fascist Homeland Security 
gatekeepers, so it is important for you readers to sign his ACLU 
petition at 
http://www.fxi.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=153&Itemid= 
).

What Stratfor and the others confirmed is that Zuma is an Mbeki mini-me 
on neoliberalism. But is conventional wisdom correct, that Mbeki's 
strength is economic stewardship? Specifically, as finance minister 
Trevor Manuel bragged this week, does SA enjoy 'a level of macroeconomic 
stability not seen in the economy in decades'?

* Stability, ahem. The value of the Rand in fact crashed by more than a 
quarter in 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2006, the worst record of any major 
currency, which in turn reflects how vulnerable SA has become to 
whimsical international financial markets thanks to steady exchange 
control liberalisation starting in 1995.

* SA has witnessed GDP 'growth' since 1999, but this does not take into 
account the depletion of non-renewable resources; if this factor plus 
pollution were considered, SA would have a net *negative* per person 
rate of national wealth accumulation, according to even the World Bank.

* SA's economy has become much more oriented to profit-taking from 
financial markets than production of real products, in part because of 
'sado-monetarism'. From March 1995 (when the finrand exchange control 
was relaxed), the after-inflation interest rate rose to a record high 
for a decade's experience in SA economic history, often reaching double 
digits. After a recent 3.5% spike, consumer and housing credit markets 
are badly strained by serious arrears and defaults.

* The two most successful major sectors from 1994-2004 were 
communications (12.2% growth per year) and finance (7.6%) while 
labour-intensive sectors such as textiles, footwear and gold mining 
shrunk by 1-5% per year, and overall, manufacturing as a percentage of 
GDP also declined.

* Government admits that overall employment growth was -0.2% per year 
from 1994-2004 - but -0.2% is a vast underestimate of the problem, given 
that the official definition of employment includes such work as 
'begging' and 'hunting wild animals for food' and 'growing own food'.

* The problem of excessive capital intensity in production - too many 
machines per worker - will probably get worse. SA's Industrial 
Development Corporation (a state agency) forecasts that the sector with 
the most investment in the period 2006-2010 will be iron and steel, with 
a massive 24% rise in fixed investment per year. But iron/steel is also 
one of the leading sectors for job-shedding, with employment expected to 
fall 1.3% per year, in spite of – or indeed because of - all the new 
investment.

* Overall, the problem of 'capital strike' – the big business failure to 
invest - continues, as gross fixed capital formation hovered between 
15-17% from 1994-2004, hardly enough to cover wear-and-tear on equipment.

* Where did businesses invest if not in SA? Dating from the time of 
political and economic liberalisation, most of the largest Joburg Stock 
Exchange firms - Anglo American, DeBeers, Old Mutual, SA Breweries, 
Liberty Life, Gencor (now the core of BHP Billiton), Didata, Mondi and 
others - shifted their funding flows and even their primary share 
listings to overseas stock markets.

* The outflow of profits and dividends due these firms is one of two 
crucial reasons SA's 'current account deficit' has soared to amongst the 
highest in the world – at 8.1% of GDP this quarter - and is hence a 
major danger in the event of currency instability, as was Thailand's 
(around 5%) in mid-1997.

* The other cause of the current account deficit is the negative trade 
balance. Blame this on a vast inflow of imports after trade 
liberalisation, which export growth cannot keep up with.

* Another reason for capital strike is SA's sustained overproduction 
problem in existing (highly-monopolised) industry. Manufacturing 
capacity utilisation fell substantially from the mid 80s% range during 
the 1970s, to the high 70s% range during the early 2000s.

* So where did corporate profits go, if not into overaccumulated plant, 
equipment and factories? The answer is obvious: speculative real estate 
and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. There was a 50% increase in share 
prices during the first half of the 2000s. The property boom began in 
1999 and by 2004 house prices had risen by 300%, in comparison to just 
60% in the US market prior to the burst bubble, according to the 
International Monetary Fund.

In sum, is this 'macroeconomic stability'? Or instead, a parasitical, 
slow-growth, high-poverty, unemployment-ridden, ever more unequal, 
capital-flight-prone, volatile, vulnerable, elite-oriented economic 
machine plowing over poor people, whose gains appear only as temporarily 
restored profitability for big capital and a conspicuous consumption 
binge for a credit-saturated petit-bourgeoisie?

If so, isn't it convenient that the problems above are largely off the 
public agenda, and hence like the US, we're witnessing a contest between 
capitalist tweedledum and tweedledee?

***

Patrick directs the Centre for Civil Society, which next Wednesday 
convenes an e-debate on the implications of Polokwane for the 
independent left – to join us see http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs