A-Infos (en) South Africa, Zabalaza* #6 April 2005 - BEE-LLIONNAIRES IN MBEKI-STAN

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FRONT PAGE (with a pic): Protests in September 2004 in the Free
State town of Harrismith over the lack of service delivery by
corrupt officials (taking their cue, perhaps from the corrupt
fat-cat Members of Parliament implicated in the R17-million
travel scandal?) saw the cops open fire on the demonstrators,
killing Teboho Mkhonza, a 17-year-old youth. This murder
sparked a series of anti-municipal riots in townships right across
the Free State, the latest being in Phomolong in early April. It
is important to note that in none of these uprisings have
the radical social movements been present as instigators,
which suggests that a new layer of the pissed-off poor is
emerging. But the social movements need to engage
with this layer to ensure coherence and continuity.
We need to assist this layer, so that it does not burn itself
out like its burning barricades, but so that we can
spread our struggles for liberation like a bush-fire
across the region. We need to build a new confidence in
horizontally-organised self-managed working class
resistance.

Page 2+

BEE-LLIONNAIRES IN MBEKI-STAN:
BEE DEBATE SHOWS NATURE OF POST-APARTHEID SA, AND LIMITS OF "LEFT" CRITIQUE

 Recent debates in the press around the issue of "Black
Economic Empowerment," or BEE, bring key features of the
post-apartheid dispensation into stark relief. They also show the
limits of much of what is considered to be "progressive" or left-
wing politics in South Africa. BEE is about creating an elite of
Black capitalists, something that underlines the class agenda
of the ANC.
    In the 1980s, the more radical
layers of the anti-apartheid move-
ment within South Africa believed
that capitalism and apartheid
were joined at the hip. Apartheid
policies provided capitalism with a
cheap, unfree, and racially struc-
tured working class; the capitalist
profits that resulted, funded the
development of a powerful and
militarised local State. Many
therefore thought that capitalism
could not survive the abolition of
apartheid.

APARTHEID AND CAPITALISM

    This view was too simplistic.
Apartheid policies benefited low-
wage and low-skill sectors like
mining and farming, but they were
not useful for advanced sections
of the manufacturing sector that
grew dramatically from the 1940s
onwards. By 1995, mining was only 10%
of overall economic activity, with agricul-
ture at 4,5%; manufacturing was nearly
40% of the whole economy.
     Large manufacturing companies that
relied on sophisticated machinery
designed for mass production situations
were constrained by the small local market
and the under-skilled workforce.
International pressures limited their ability
to expand through exports. This meant a
significant section of local capitalists
WERE interested in a post-apartheid - and
neoliberal - dispensation. Low wages
would be guaranteed through the free
market, rather than the heavy hand of the
State. This type of view was expressed in
books like The Assault on Free Enterprise:
the Freeway to Communism, by A. D.
Wassenaar, head of SANLAM.

"FRESH FIELDS FOR NON-EUROPEAN BOURGEOIS"

     This shift converged with the pro-capi-
talist policies of the main national libera-
tion movements. The ANC's Freedom
Charter of 1955 called for the nationalisa-
tion of major industries, but within a capi-
talist framework. Mandela made it clear in
1956 in Liberator the Charter aimed at
opening up "fresh fields for the develop-
ment of a prosperous non-European bour-
geois class" that will for the "first time...
have the opportunity to own in their own
name and right, mines and factories, and
trade and private enterprise will boom and
flourish as never before."
     It should be stressed that this state-
ment was issued at the very same time as
the ANC was forming an underground
alliance with the SA Communist Party.
The SACP did not object, as its strategic
position stressed the need for a two-stage
revolution in which a stage of "national
democracy," non-racial capitalism with a
"non-European bourgeois class" must pre-
cede any socialist transformation. On the
need for a "national democratic stage," the
ANC agreed - although it has no interest in
a second stage.
     The two-stage strategy is common
enough amongst Communist Parties in
the so-called "Third World," and generally
involved postponing the struggle against
capitalism in favour of a struggle for
"national" capitalism against a vague
"imperialism" by multi-class nationalist
parties. Generally it has been a disaster,
leading the left to drop its own politics. In
some cases, the left has paid in blood for
this mistake.
     The ANC's position was no passing
viewpoint: as Oliver Tambo said in 1985:
The Freedom Charter does not even pur-
port to want to destroy the capitalist sys-
tem. All that the Freedom Charter does is
to envisage a mixed economy in which
part of the economy, some of the indus-
tries would be controlled, owned by the
state (as happens in many
countries), and the rest by pri-
vate ownership- a mixed econ-
omy.
     Today the ANC has even
dropped the "mixed economy,"
for neo-liberal "free markets."

TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE

     The negotiations of the
1990s finally opened the "fresh
fields" through BEE policies.
For example:
   The Employment Equity Act
requires all companies to pro-
mote people of colour into top
positions.    Other Acts and
"charters" stipulate companies
must have BEE plans.
   In the 1950s, nationalisation
was seen as the route to BEE.
In the 1990s, privatisation
assumes that role. State cor-
porations subcontract operations to small
BEE companies - TELKOM claimed over
500 such contractors in 2004.
   The National Empowerment Fund Trust
is a State structure that receives up to 20%
of shares of State companies being priva-
tised. These are either sold to BEE ven-
tures at a discount, or sold to raise venture
capital for BEE.
   The Industrial Development Corporation
provides loans, advice and other support
to emerging businesses - if they have a
BEE component.

RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT

    BEE is fundamentally about creating
an elite of Black capitalists. It is no acci-
dental that these policies enrich a few
individuals whilst leaving ordinary
Blacks poor - that is the whole point. It
does no good to pretend that BEE could
be something else.
    If the ANC were even a mildly reformist
party of the working class, it would try and
redistribute wealth and power downwards,
to the popular classes. But because the
ANC is a capitalist party, it focuses on
promoting capitalism "as never before,"
with particular emphasis on creating the
"fresh fields" for the "non-European bour-
geois." Sometimes this clashes with ANC
neo-liberalism, leading to policy contradictions
     The class agenda has been stressed
by Mbeki, whose famous speech to the
Black business body, NAFCOC, called on
Black capitalists to enrich themselves
while "empowering" local communities.
Peter Mokaba, then head of the ANC
Youth League, was equally clear in an
internal ANC paper in 1998 that the ANC is
a "national liberation movement and not a
socialist organisation," and its goal was
never to "destroy the capitalist class and
establish socialism". Rather it is to create
a "vibrant and democratic, prosperous and
non-racial capitalism."
     Mokaba, like all other senior ANC lead-
ers, is now a prominent "national" busi-
nessman. The most prominent example
is, of course, Cyril Ramaphosa, with a
market influence of R137 billion, but he is
hardly alone. As Smuts Ngonyama -
spokesperson for Mbeki - said recently of
his role in Genesis Telecom, "I did not
struggle to be poor."

AT THE PARTY

     The Communist Party, and most
COSATU leaders, have remained blind to
what this says about the class agenda of
the ANC. BEE commentary from these
quarters remains constrained by lifelong
support for the ANC and the two-stage
perspective. This translates into an
attempt to maintain the Alliance with the
ANC while giving BEE a more "left" spin.
     In the Financial Mail, Zwelinzima Vavi
of COSATU made the illogical claim that
labour must contest the "middle class" to
ensure "black entrepreneurs" do not align
with the "capitalist class" - which boils
down to the moralistic belief that Black
capitalists can be nicer than White capital-
ists if workers appeal to their consciences.
     In a stinging reply to such views, Saki
Macazoma of the ANC NEC - who got his
start in the state-owned Transnet, where
he fired 15,000, and Wits University,
where he fired another 615 - argued it
makes no sense to expect "socialist out-
comes" from "capitalist methods." In
Umsebenzi, the SACP's Jeremy Cronin
admitted that changes in "the superficiali-
ties of pigmentation boardrooms" did not
stop capitalist actions being shaped by the
market, nor morality. But Cronin failed to
define what "transformation" actually
meant, or explain how it was linked to the
SACP's supposedly socialist programme.
In effect, he said nothing at all.
     More recently, Archbishop Despond
Tutu's      Nelson     Mandela      Lecture
described BEE as elitist, attracting a
vicious reply from Mbeki. Mbeki could not
deny the point, and so his focus was on
Tutu's personal credentials.
     Predictably, Blade Nzimande, the cen-
trist SACP boss, has tried to smooth over
the cracks raised by such exchanges,
speaking of a "BEE debate convergence"
but carefully defined the enemy as the
"white capitalist class," neatly sidestep-
ping how the SACP's struggle against "the
capitalist system itself" would impact on
Black, ANC, capitalists.

AGAINST CAPITALISM

     There has been a profound transfor-
mation of the SA economy. By 1999, the
financial sector had grown to roughly 20%
of the economy, but only employed
210,881 people - about 1% of the labour
force. This has underpinned a rapid
increase in non-productive economic
activities - share trading, currency specu-
lation, and financial services. At the same
time, the Sunday Times reports that the
number of families with more than $30
million each, had increased four times
from 150 in 1994 to 690 in 2003 - while 22
million live in poverty, with 6 million work-
ers unemployed.
     Both outcomes are a direct result of
the neo-liberal and BEE policies of the
ANC.
     However, the major working class
structures - the SACP, COSATU - remain
wedded to the ANC; the poverty of their
response to BEE shows the terrible limita-
tions of a strategy of relying on the capital-
ist ANC for socialist results.
     Fundamentally, the problem facing the
working class movement in SA is a POLIT-
ICAL problem - a problem of weak per-
spectives and confused thinking. This
blind loyalty to the ANC generates a poli-
tics of worshipping every utterance of
Mbeki while trying to "contest" the ANC
from within - a futile task.
     Until this is resolved, the working class
will remain crippled in the face of the neo-
liberal capitalist onslaught. At the end of
the day, workers get the leaders they
deserve - until ordinary workers reject this
nonsense, they will remain voting fodder
for the ANC capitalists and their BEE strategy.
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