PETER BLUMER T HE proposed institutional reforms can only open up a broad "social consensus" and new stable forms of regulation if the political leaderships which are dominant in the liberation movement are ready to make this compromise. For, beyond the reformist will of de Klerk and the big employers, South African society remains a society of poverty and distress for millions of black people.
Racial oppression will not disappear so quickly, the question of land and the Bantustans will remain a running sore and the renewal of South African capitalism, which remains the principal objective of the regime, can only take place through the rationalization and reinforcement of the exploitation of the workers. A new period could rapidly open up in the country - but it will not mean that the consequences of apartheid will have disappeared!
On May 4 1990 the meeting at Groote Schuur between the government and the African National Congress (ANC) ended with a joint communiqué recommending the establishment of a "working group" of which "the proceedings... will be confidential". This commitment has been met until now despite some apparent tensions of short duration. Whereas constitutional negotiations in the strict sense of the term have apparently not been opened, the official meetings between the goverment and the AN have set themselves the general objective of influencing the social and political situation and maintaining the conditions for dialogue.
The ANC has had to announce the suspension of the "armed struggle", it has played a moderating and negotiating role in several social conflicts, and above all 10 it has a accepted a fundamental review of first time since 1964, the Pretoria government was present at a meeting of the International Labour Office! In one year, trade with the countries of southern Africa and with the Ivory Coast has grown by 40%; some 32% of South Africa's exports now go to the other African states.
The end of economic isolation It was disclosed fairly recently that a consortium of South African financial institutions had bought 10% of Lonhro, a British multinational which plays a considerable role in the African economies. Thus we are witnessing a revival of the old imperialist project of using the South African economy as a base for a better circulation of capital throughout the subcontinent. De Klerk appears to dominate the political landscape, giving more and more interviews and showing that he has the initiative. Such is the preliminary balance sheet that must be drawn of the new situation. How has this situation been arrived at?
The confrontations in Natal and the violence in the townships of the Transvaal have played a major role in this process. Still the situation must not be misunderstood. The media have for the main part presented this as a conflict "between blacks" or even between Xhosas and Zulus, whereas in reality many other political factors have intervened in these events. It is pertinent to recall that both sides in the fighting in Natal for the past four years have been from the Zulu population. The violence involves forces supporting on the one hand the Inkatha party of Buthelezi and on the other people sympathetic to the ANC3. It confirms moreover a tendency to chaos and social decomposition in certain townships.
The confrontations in the Transvaal in
International Viewpoint #193 • October 29, 1990
assemblies at the stadiums of Tokoza and
Soweto where the two men turned out some tens of thousand of their, respectively, Zulu and Xhosa partisans.
The stadiums were under the surveillance of the army, the police were everywhere. Thus, the plan takes shape - the ethnic question is being pushed to the forefront, right in the industrial centre of the country, at the heart of the black working class. Then, the South African government appeals to the international community to put pressure on the two parties (AN and Inkatha) to end their conflict. On
September
18 de Klerk explained: "I have been constantly involved in preparing the ground for multiparty discussions and for promoting bilateral discussions between leaders of those who are violently opposing each other"s
Mandela-de Klerk special relationship
The ANC has multiplied its political errors in responding to the situation. It entered into the negotiations with the intention of reinforcing its legitimacy as the sole representative of the oppressed. They wanted a kind of Mandela-de Klerk special relationship which would confirm the ANC in its leading role, despite the inevitable compromises.
This was evidently a sectarian operation, one largely in the tradition of this organization. But now this strategy is in an impasse. The famous Groote
Schuur communiqué commits the ANC totally to a peaceful transition. It has therefore had to recognize the legitimacy of de Klerk and make him a confidential partner. Several declarations from ANC leaders or trade unionists linked to it have presented the ANC as already coresponsibie for the affairs of the country. And Nelson Mandela's denunciation of a "third force" perpetuating the violence has allowed him to denounce a part of the state apparatus without directly accusing the government.
In this context it seems natural that the
ANC turn towards de Klerk to end the violence. Mandela "urged the government to use the full force of its security apparatus to end the violence.... Mr. Mandela said the government has a very strong, effective and well-equipped army and police force and can easily use it. If it does, the violence will be something of the past". Armed with this appeal, the government engaged in the "Iron Fist"
operation with the goal of pacifying the townships through the army.
SOUTH AFRICA
Soldiers took up position in the heart of the black cities, encircling the hostels with razor wire, strengthening their control. A curfew was established on September 25 in the townships of Transvaal, obliging those who worked at night to carry a pass from their employer and freezing a great part of the political and social life of the neighbourhoods. Some hostels — mainly those where the workers were partisans of the ANC - have been searched for arms. At the end of the
* MO
OMO
125 IWE STARVE IN RURAL AREAS day the ANC had to protest and explain that this was not the policy it proposed to stop the violence.
Consciously utilizing the panic of the population and its weariness, de Klerk has made the army appear as a lesser evil, indeed as a welcome protection. The youth expected a reaction from the ANC - they wished to see the men of Umkhonto, its armed wing, at last play a role. But nothing came. Mandela in the course of large public meetings threatened the government with arming the population but confirmed straight afterwards to the press that it was necessary to preserve the conditions of dialogue and negotiation. In the present conditions, the two things can only exclude each other.
In another context, without doubt, the
ANC could have imposed on the government the maintenance of the negotiations at the same time as the entry on the scene of armed militias in charge of the protection of the workers in the stations and the black quarters. But the negotiations were undertaken from the beginning in a wholly different spirit - the ANC has accepted the negotiations as an end in themselves and not as a tactical means of allowing the mass movement to regather its strength. Because of this, de
Klerk can manoeuvre frecly.
The goal of the strategy of tension organized in the Transvaal is to increase the weariness of the population and thus reduce their readiness for spontaneous resistance to the compromise underway.
The government is well aware that, although the ANC is a very centralized political force at the top, at the base it is on the contrary an extremely loose social movement. It has now been confirmed that it is having a great deal of trouble in constituting and stabilizing its local branches?
. The government had to act rapidly to prevent the popular enthusiasm for the
ANC taking on a more militant and structured form. In other words it was necessary to ensure that the legalization of the ANC and Communist Party for the purpose of negotiations, would not lead to the appearance of a vast political movement.
New forces to join negotiations
For the moment, this tactic is working. Worse, the ANC is itself little by little seeing deprived of its monopoly in the negotiations. The regime is putting pressure on the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to join in also, but above all the "black on black" violence opens the door of the constitutional debates to all the ethnically based political entities spawned by apartheid — the "governments" of the Bantustans and diverse districts. And "Zulu chief" Buthelezi is at the centre of these.
Under the force of national and international pressure, the ANC finally recognized the necessity of a meeting between
Mandela and the different heads of the
5. The Argus, Johannesburg, September 19, 1990.
6. The Star, Johannesburg, September 12, 1990. On
September 11 the ANC demanded that the government take all power in Natal. It proposed moreover a committee of liaison between the armed forces and the
ANC to deal with all problems of violence in the province. The Citizen, September 12, 1990.
7. Set their of optember 21, 199g. the Johanesburg 11
Weekly Mail of September 21, 1990.
SOUTH AFRICA
Bantustans (among them Buthelezi, for Kwazulu). This new compromise which confirmed, at the expense of the ANC and in a reactionary manner, the political and ethnic plurality of the negotiations process, was not enough - Buthelezi refused to attend the meeting and claimed that he wished to meet Mandela face to face as representative of the Inkatha party as the equal of the ANC.
Thus the final result of the violence, openly used and nourished by the regime, was to make the AN an important partner in the negotiations.... but a partner amongst others.
The violence in the Transvaal in no way augured a turnabout on the part of the regime. It did not mean a return to the massive repression of the past. It does not represent resistance to the reforms, even if certain fascist sectors may be involved and may even be acting on their own account. On the contrary, the more the ruling class commits itself to the reforms the more it has need of a little finishing touch of this type to weaken the ANC and bring it to the negotiating table on its knees. The radical reformist strategy of de Klerk necessitates this portion of violence.
All this influences the basic orientation of the ANC. For it is impossible to understand the way things have developed without reference to the debates inside this organization. We have already in preceding articles shown that the programme of reference was no longer the Freedom Charter but a much diluted position combining the Constitutional Guidelines drawn up in 1989 and the so-called Harare declaration adopted by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in August 1989 on the proposal of the ANC.
### Questioning of social radicalism
This shift implicitly opened a debate on the more radical clauses of the Freedom Charter, beginning with the question of nationalizations and the mechanisms for the reduction of social inequalities. The question of the revision of the programme imposed itself in any case from the time when negotiations with de Klerk brutally substituted themselves for the notion of the seizure of ferred to admit that their movement has in reality no settled economic programme®.
Very recently an official document of the movement abandoned the principle of nationalization in the name of a vague reference to the "mixed economy"g . The modesty of the project speaks volumes on the situation the ANC leadership finds itself in — on the question of the mining companies the document proposes a "state minerals marketing authority" and demands that the financial market is "more ordered and orientated towards meeting broader development objectives" . None of this is contradictory with the plans of the South African employers themselves.
The ANC leadership has to explain these changes to militants whilst maintaining the idea that the government is negotiating under constraint. It is a difficult exercise which requires for the moment a double language, on the one hand for the needs of the meetings in the townships and on the other for the mass media. This contradiction cannot last very long. It will be necessary when the time comes to revise the analysis of the negotiations and put forward a new political project.
For the moment, things are being done slowly. Thus in New Era, a journal edited in the Cape and apparently controlled by Communist Party supporters, Tony Karon writes that "the immediate phase of our own struggle is not for a national democratic state. It is for the creation of democratic conditions in which the political contest can continue "10
• Too weak to overthrow racist power
In the same article, Albie Sachs, prominent in the development of the ANC's thinking on constitutional reform explains "we have to negotiate because we're just not strong enough to overthrow racist power — they've still got too power.
This has become all the more true now that several leaders of the
ANC, rather than pointlessly maintaining illusions on the project of nationalization of the monopolies envisaged
12
• by the Charter, have pre-
International Viewpoint #193 • October 29, 1990 many guns. And possibly the very process of destroying racist power could be so calamitous for this country that all we could be inheriting would be a pile of ruins...So I think that if we (..) can develop a strategy that could save us years of uncertainty, sabotage, destabilization, and physical attacks, that's in the interest of the masses... The painful lesson learned by the Angolans is that a sharp, decisive and total victory (of which many of us have been dreaming for a long time might solve some immediate problems, but gives rise to other problems that can be really terrible"""1
When the degree of confidence and self-satisfaction that until recently permeated the press of the AN is recalled, the importance of such changes can be grasped. This new realism is taking root under the joint pressure of the turn in the world situation and the political impasse on the ground. Faced with real difficul ties, a solution is being sought in abandoning former radical positions and not in the establishment of a more long term revolutionary project.
### Trade unionists join
Communist Party
All this would not imply in itself a qualitative change in the relationship of forces if there still existed mass sectors capable of resisting this political and strategic turn of the ANC leadership. Although it is still too soon to know what will happen tomorrow in the CP and in certain sectors of the ANC, the evolution underway in the trade union movement augurs very badly for the future. The leadership of COSATU is now totally linked in with the strategy of the ANC. It is strongly controlled by the CP and has pursued an increasingly undemocratic internal regime. Political purges have started in the trade unions and in the regional structures — a climate of intolerance is taking hold'2
The most striking feature of the situation here is the passage to the CP and the ANC of a whole generation of leaders who through the 1980s had symbolized the socialist trade union left. Around the leadership of the metalworkers' union (NUMSA) there was a whole network of anti-Stalinist trade union militants and socialist intellectuals. A good part of lectuals. A good part of these people have now rallied to the majority current in the course of the last few months. Indeed this is symptomatic of the pressures felt today by the militant sectors in South Africa. These people did not join the CP or ANC in 1985 or
SOUTH AFRICA
Shadows over the ANC
SEVERAL affairs have recently tarnished the
ANC's Image, First, there has been the decision to prosecute Winnie Mandela for her alleged participation in the abduction of a youth subsequently killed by her bodyguards, the Mandela Football Club (see /V 159). This affair is obviously being used by the regime to put pressure on Nelson Mandela. Nonetheless, even Inside the ANC, very many now make no secret of their hatred for Winnie Mandela.
There followed revelations of torture and execution in ANC disciplinary camps In Angola in 1984, following mutinies by members of its armed wing. The mutineers had refused to fight against Unita in Angola, and were demanding instead to be sent to fight in South Africa — they also called for greater democracy inside their movement. This at least is their story, published in London last July in the revue Searchlight South Africa. The ANC has given its version of the facts, without denying that the mutinies had happened (see the article of Shauna Westcott in New Era, Cape
Town, Winter 1990), This affair sheds some light on the debate on the armed struggle which began from 1985 onwards in the ANC press, and the growth of doubts as to the real capacity of the ANC to successfully conduct a
But it has been made perfectly plain by the leadership of the latter that the strategic line will remain that of the democratic revolution and that the right of tendency will not be possiblel4. The abandonment of the struggle for socialism is justified by the use of some old reformist arguments, for example by the use of formulae borrowed from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci to evoke a necessary "war of position" faced with a state like that of South Africa. '5 Finally this theory of "partial conquests", • far from being a tactical position of withdrawal, will lead to the integration of these trade union leaderships inside the establishment by way of negotiations. And the state knows now that it can gain from a rapid bureaucratization of COSATU.
cy towards it.
The trade union left slid little by little towards political inconsistency for want of constituting itself as a coherent political force?; the small socialist and independent political organizations were late to seize the opportunity which was open to them at least up until 1985-86. The convergence never really happened and the price to pay for this is now much higher.
On September 19 AZAPO18 called a meeting to discuss a united response to the violence of the preceding days, which clearly added up to more than a conflict with Inkatha. All the progressive movement was invited. But the ANC did not come and organizations like the PAC and AZAPO itself demonstrated their current disorientation. The PAC was in the throes of internal debates on whether or not to open discussions with the government. AZAPO debated whether it was necessary to meet Buthelezi to stop the interblack violence20
•
A good opportunity was thus lost to at last establish a united front of all the liberation movement, supported by the trade union movement (COSATU and NACTU). What rules out the calling of unitary trade union meetings, with which each political force can declare itself in solidarity21? In this situation sectarianism and guerilla war. * 1986, when the mobilizations reached their high point and when the ANC reinforced its positions in the movements of real struggle. At this time these militants explained how suspicious they remained of the CP's positions, its strategy of democratic and national revolution and its sectarian methods. This earned them in return some bitter polemics from the CP and the ANC. However, they have not now joined the CP maintaining their former democratic socialist positions -these have been totally abandoned. This has an obvious effect on the highest levels of the workers' movement and the entire socialist left. Alec Erwin of the NUMSA leadership, amongst the principal ideologues of this current, has passed in a few months from the position of supporting a mixed economy combined with some elements of workers' control to openly Keynesian positions of co-management and reinforcement of the industrial efficiency of the country13.
All this is accompanied by a debate on the Soviet experience, the defeat of the "command economy" and the impossibility of the revolutionary project, and so on. People who have been aware for some years that it was wrong to confuse socialism and Stalinism have suddenly drawn the lessons of the USSR in a way which omits to treat the bureaucratic phenomenon as a subject in itself.
The entry into the CP is being done under the pretext that it is a "broad party"
It is a grave defeat for the South African left, for this generation of trade division constitute a deadly poison for the mass movement. Political disorientation unionists originally had the means to give the working class an overall socialist perspectivel . The great tragedy of the South African left has been that in the course of the 1980s these trade union leaders had a mass influence but no precise organizational political project, whereas on the other hand the independent political groups, who might have associated themselves in a fraternal way from the beginning with this mass trade union experience, took some years to understand that it was necessary to turn themselves towards the real mass movement and implement a united front poli8. Thabo Mbeki in London, The Citizen, September 21, 1990. 9. Sechaba, October 90. See recent interview with Mandela in the Financial Mail, October 1990. 10. Tony Karon, New Era, Cape Town, Winter 1990. Tony Karon became well known some years ago through a defence of the Freedom Charter as an instrument of the struggle for socialism. See Work in Progress, no. 42, May 1986, and our article on the debate on the Charter in /V 111, December 22, 1986. 11. New Era, ibid. 12. On the exclusions in the food trade union (FAWU) see the debate in South African Labour Bulletin, Johannesburg, vol. 15, numbers 2 and 3. 13. A. Erwin, Weekly Mail, March 30, 1990; New Era, Winter 1990. 14. COSATU leader Chris Diamini, a member of the CP, explains in Work in Progress no. 68, "So we could see a situation in which workers in state controlled industries go on strike after apartheid. But they would not be striking politically against a democratically elected goverment. They'd be striking against an employer". See also Jeremy Cronin, another member of the CP, in South African Labour Bulletin, September 1990.
reigns increasingly in the militant sectors, whilst the regime manoeuvres as it likes.
Specific weighting for white electorate
In such a context the government will attempt to obtain a constitutional reform by stages with a two chamber system which will preserve a specific weighting for white electors22. It will seek to electorally minimize the ANC through progressively integrating into the new political system the ethnic representatives of the various Bantustans. The path to such a 15. Karl Von Holdt, South African Labour Bulletin, September 1990. 16. This trade union left constituted itself notably around the old federation FOSATU, before forming the heart of the unitary federation COSATU in 1985. 17. Before 1985 the model of the Brazilian Workers Party had been sometimes evoked as a long term perspective. 18. Azanian People's Organization. Organization linked to the Black Consciousness current. It characterizes itself as socialist. 19. The economic positions of the PAC have remained extremely confused and their references to socialism very formal. See "An Africanist's view of economic emancipation", Sipho Shabalala, Skotaville Publishers, 1990. 20. Cape Times, September 18, 1990. 21. The only organization which has defended a line of unity and independence of the liberation movement has been WOSA, the Workers' Organization for Socialist Action. 22. A new plan for schools would allow some to remain "white", or otherwise, through a referendum of
13 the parents. The Star, September 11, 1990.
SOUTH AFRICA / BULGARIA conclusion remains narrow and precarious because South Africa remains an apartheid society — if for the moment popular revolution is not on the agenda, there is the other possibility of chaos through the operations of the extreme fascist right and the simmering ofethnic prejudices. De Klerk knows very well that he must play it carefully. The editorial of Business Day of September 17 summed his situation up; "He will do these things or some reasonable variant of these things, or he will be thrown out of office. He must govern or abdicate"
What is going to happen then in the SACP and the ANC? The world situation and the internal situation both weigh heavily on the debates underway. In June, in the course of a conference for trades unionists, Jeremy Cronin, a member of the CP leadership, explained that there were two possibilities.
Either the ANC would move to the right under the pressure of nonproletarian classes and in this case it would be necessary to reinforce the strength of the party representing the