http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Epc3rpwjr_8

At Rio+20: Values versus prices


On the other hand, for everyone else, the Rio+20 Earth Summit underway this week in Brazil, devoted to advancing Green Economy policies and projects, appears as an overall disaster zone for the people and planet.


Meanwhile in Mexico, the G20 meeting of the real powerbrokers this week included a Green Economy session. But more serious distractions for the elites include ongoing Southern European revulsion at harmful public policies cooked up by bankers, and potential war in the Middle East. Perhaps a few environmentally-decent projects may get needed subsidies as a result of the G20 and Rio talkshops, and we ll hear of Sustainable Development Goals to replace the fatuous UN Millennium Development Goals in 2015.


But the overarching danger is renewed official faith in market mechanisms. No surprise, following the logic of two South African precedents: the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (Rio+10) and last December s Durban COP17 climate summit. There, the chance to begin urgent environmental planning to reverse ecosystem destruction was lost, sabotaged by big- and medium-governments negotiators acting on behalf of their countries polluting and privatising corporations.


Market fixes to market failures?
It s useful to interrogate the eco-governance elites assumptions. I m here in Rio at theInternational Society for Ecological Economics conference <http://www.isee2012.org/> (ISEE) within a critical research network the Barcelona-based Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade <http://www.ejolt.org/> (EJOLT) whose leaders, Joan Martinez-Alier and Joachim Spangenberg, issued a statement appropriately cynical about the Green Economy: The promises are striking: conserving nature, overcoming poverty, providing equity and creating jobs. But the means and philosophy behind it look all too familiar.


Unfortunately, after the original 1992 Rio Earth Summit, multinational corporations increasingly dominated the emerging terrain of global environmental governance. The United Nations Environment Programme came to view the sustainability crisis as the biggest-ever market failure a dangerous distraction, according to the two political-ecologists, because Describing it this way reveals a specific kind of thinking: a market failure means that the market failed to deliver what in principle it could have delivered, and once the bug is fixed the market will solve the problem.


Martinez-Alier and Spangenberg reverse this logic:


Unsustainable development is not a market failure to be fixed but a market system failure: expecting results from the market that it cannot deliver, like long-term thinking, environmental consciousness and social responsibility.


In the same spirit, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi chastised ISEE s conventional economists in a plenary:


There are a million struggles in India against pollution that Martinez-Alier calls the environmentalism of the poor , in contrast to the Green Economy which is the environmentalism of the rich.


Narain contined,


The issue is not the price of nature, it s rights and it s the values of democracy, of governance, of society, of humanity. Let s be very clear: in today s Green Economy as it is being shaped in Rio Centro and by many economists, these principles will not help us move ahead. Let s not get lost in yet another shallow, empty concept.


It s critical to pose the Green Economy from this class-analytic and eco-centric standpoint, especially because inside the official Rio Centro, negotiations on a bland pro-market text continue through Saturday. There, progressive civil society strategies to insulate basic human and natural rights e.g. to water are being foiled by negotiators and by the host neoliberal Brazilian government which is channelling reactionary positions from Northern negotiators, especially from Washington, Ottawa, Tokyo and Tel Aviv, the main saboteur-regimes when it comes to water justice.


According to Anil Naidoo of the Ottawa-based Blue Planet Project, the new negotiating text is out and it is terrible! We expected the attacks to continue as we have made strong gains through our pressure, but clearly we must again fight for our human right to water and sanitation. In spite of excellent anti-privatisation activism by Naidoo s allies in dozens of cities across the world, water commercialisation remains a major threat, especially thanks to the World Resources Institute s mapping of scarcity on behalf of thirsty transnational corporations.


Also within the rubric of the Green Economy, corporations are seeking new technological False Solutions to the climate and other environmental crises, including dirty forms of clean energy (nuclear, so-called clean coal , fracking natural gas , hydropower, hydrogen, biofuels, biomass and biochar); dangerous Carbon Capture and Storage experiments; and other whacky geoengineering gimmicks such as Genetically Modified trees to sequester carbon, sulfates in the air to shut out the sun, iron filings in the sea to create algae blooms, and large-scale solar reflection such as industrial-scale plastic-wrap for deserts.


From African natural capital to pricing to markets
Crazy corporate tactics aside, the philosophical underpinning of the Green Economy needs wider questioning. The precise wording is terribly important, as Africans began to understand after last month s Gaborone Declaration hosted by Botswana president Ian Khama. He brought together leaders from nine other African countries Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania to quantify and integrate into development and business practice what ordinary people consider to be the innate value of nature.


But these leaders and their conference sponsor Conservation International mean something else, devoid of eco-systemic, spiritual, aesthetic, and intrinsic qualities. The Declaration insists,


Watersheds, forests, fisheries, coral reefs, soils, and all natural resources, ecosystems and biodiversity constitute our vital natural capital and are central to long-term human well-being, and therefore must be protected from overuse and degradation and, where necessary, must be restored and enhanced.


There are good sentiments as far as they go, yet by relegating our environment to mere natural capital, the next step is to convert value into price and then sell chunks of nature on the market. All manner of financialisation strategies have emerged to securitise environmental services , most obviously in carbon markets which continue failing miserably to deliver investor funds to slow climate change.


For some institutions we can term yuppie-green due to their pro-market ideology, faith continues in spite of emissions trading s descent to hell. In a joint paper published last week, the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace advocated last-gasp reforms to revitalise the European Union carbon markets. Like the Chicago exchange in 2010, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is in real danger of dying, what with last month s drop-out announcement from Munich s leading financiers, who cited a fatal degree of corruption and market oversupply.


The 2010 crash of the Chicago Climate Exchange and an ongoing civil fraud lawsuit against founder Richard Sandor is only the most obvious warning to those promoting emissions trading and voluntary offsets. In Africa, we argue based on new research for EJOLT, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) carbon-trade and offset mechanism Cannot Deliver the Money <http://cdmscannotdeliver.wordpress.com/> .


The Durban COP17 climate gamble that carbon markets could be revived as part of a renewed Kyoto Protocol mandate was lost by virtue of the negotiators failure to make post-2012 emissions-cut commitments. And the Bonn follow-up meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change last month


But the crisis facing the market crew aiming to privatise the air is also pushing environmentally-oriented bankers in all sorts of other directions. Explained City of London investor Simon Greenspan, whose firm won World Finance magazine s Western European Commodities Broker of the Year award four months ago,


At Tullett Brown we ve only ever invested in areas of the market that have truly stood the test of time, such as gold and silver and property. When our analysts were looking for the next great area of growth it was fairly obvious to them. It was the planet, it was the environment.


(Oops, just days later, British financial authorities forced Tullett Brown into provisional liquidation.)


Reacting to the Gaborone Declaration, Nnimmo Bassey from the Niger Delta NGO Environmental Rights Action and Friends of the Earth International warned, The bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for continued rape of African natural resources. Thanks to inadequate protection against market abuse, he adds, The declaration will help corporate interests in Rio while impoverishing already disadvantaged populations, exacerbate land grabs and displace the poor from their territories.


To illustrate the pernicious way markets undermine nature, Zimbabwe s president Robert Mugabe would say of the rhino and elephant 15 years ago, The species must pay to stay which in turn allowed him and (white) cronies to offer rich overseas hunters the opportunity to shoot big game for big bucks. The dilemma about hunt marketing is that it doesn t stop there: black markets in rhino horns and elephant tusks are the incentive for poachers to invade not just poorly defended game parks north of the Limpopo River, but also now in South Africa.


The alternative strategy would have been to tighten the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species restrictions against trade in ivory. But South Africa s game-farm owners and free-market proponents got too greedy, and by influencing Pretoria to press for relaxation of CITES ban, hundreds of elephant and rhino corpses denuded of horns and tusks now litter the bush.


From prices to values, and from fees to fines
At best, the Gaborone Declaration commits the ten countries to reducing poverty by transitioning agriculture, extractive industries, fisheries and other natural capital uses to practices that promote sustainable employment, food security, sustainable energy and the protection of natural capital through protected areas and other mechanisms.


How, though, is the crucial question. It is well and good to protect nature through imposing a prohibitive fine and ban on those who pollute, and it is past time for payment of the climate debt from the Global North s companies and government which take too much of the shrinking carbon space left in the environment, for instance.


As Kathy McAfee from San Francisco State University puts it,


Compensating the poor and other land users for practices that maintain healthy, service-producing ecosystems may be an important part of strategies for sustainable and equitable development. Serious problems arise, however, when such compensation schemes are framed as markets.


It is another matter, entirely, to treat nature as capital from which a fee-for-use at Rio+20, termed payment for environmental services is offered by deep-pocket polluters to continue business-as-usual.


What do we need in coming years? Valuing nature and imposing pollution-bans andprohibitive fines for ecological degradation are the conceptual approach and the strategy required. But given the power balance here, we can instead expect the Earth Summit to promote the pricing of nature based on a pollution-fee system and environmental markets, which in effect will give discredited bankers the job of regulating world ecology.


Then watch out, people and planet you will be swamped by hunger for profits.


Patrick Bond is the Director the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society <http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/>

http://www.amandla.org.za/amandla-blog/patrick-bond/1360-at-rio20-values-versus-prices-by-patrick-bond

Africa’s number one economy, for wealth evaporationPatrick Bond

Patrick BondPatrick is senior professor of development studies and directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and recently authored Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press, 2012) and edited Durban's Climate Gamble (Unisa Press, 2011). Other books include Elite Transition, Unsustainable South Africa, Looting Africa, Against Global Apartheid, Zimbabwe's Plunge and Talk Left Walk Right.

07 Apr 2014 10:42 (South Africa)

Jim O’Neill – the Goldman Sachs banker who in 2001 coined the idea of a Brazil-Russia-India-China ‘BRIC’ serving as “building bricks of the 21st century world economy” – has another bright idea. He recently announced a new fascination with the Mexico-Indonesia-Nigeria-Turkey countries, which “all have very favourable demographics for at least the next 20 years, and their economic prospects are interesting.” O’Neill is now completing a BBC series on the MINTs, and no doubt will profit handsomely from investments made in these countries’ financial assets, the way any scurrilous marketer does when, brandishing an insider-trading portfolio, he draws naïve consumers to a product with limited shelf life.

MINT economic prospects are ‘interesting’ insofar as Goldman Sachs makes enormous profits from churning investors’ funds through new markets, using whimsical rationales based upon silly acronyms. As Matt Taibbi described the firm’s philosophy in Rolling Stone five years ago, “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Goldman Sachs is a useful barometer of stupidity, since it brought the world economy to its knees in 2008 by creating infinitely-toxic financial products. For example, what was just a decade ago a supposedly glorious group of high-growth European countries led by ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland, became financially-cancerous ‘PIGS’ once Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain melted down seven years ago, in the process wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in paper assets. O’Neill has also tried out the ‘Next 11’ and ‘CIVETS’: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

The rationale behind acronym subterfuge? According to O’Neill, his customers “are still scared of these places.” That means, as the Christian Science Monitor interpreted, “financial firms use colourful nicknames to push investments,” and O’Neill is “using the power of language to try to make investors feel more comfortable about putting their money into these places.”
And now, just a year after the Durban BRICS summit, you are more likely to find Brazil, India and South Africa described as leading the “fragile five” emerging economies, and Russia now also under increasingly severe financial attack the more it attacks the border demarcations on Eastern European maps.
MINT is as silly as BRICS when it comes to genuine economic prospects. To illustrate, Nigeria has just become Africa’s biggest economy measured not only by population but by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But it is also Africa’s fastest-shrinking if measured by wealth, which I take to incorporate the depletion of oil, degeneration of land, and departure of financial flows to offshore hideaways.

Nigeria’s ThisDay newspaper acknowledges that local elites are attempting quite a scam with their GDP ‘rebasing’, a project that aligns national income account statistics to international norms: “The exercise was shelved in 2000 in order to pursue debt relief from the Paris Club [of Northern donor countries] and multilateral lenders. The thinking of the economic team then was that a revised GDP for the country would have pushed the economy into the category of the medium income economies.”

That move, according to ThisDay, “would have made the country forfeit its eligibility for access to aid and grants from international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank, as well as debt relief or forgiveness which was being considered at the time by the G8 group of industrialised nations. The strategy of delaying the rebasing worked as the Obasanjo administration’s pursuit of debt relief was successful.”

Finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who during the 2000s also served as a World Bank managing director, was so successful arranging the deal that her South African counterpart Pravin Gordhan nominated her to be Bank president two years ago (she lost to a US citizen, Jim Kim, because Washington and Brussels maintain their apparently permanent grip on the Bretton Woods Institutions).

However, the fake-GDP scam and 2005 debt relief were not viewed so flatteringly by everyone, with experts like Nigeria Jubilee leader Rev. David Ugolor complaining: “The Paris Club cannot expect Nigeria, freed from over 30 years of military rule, to muster $12.4 billion to pay off interest and penalties incurred by the military. Since the debt, by President Obasanjo’s own admission, is of dubious origin, the issues of the responsibilities of the creditors must be put on the table at the Paris Club.”

Remarked the Global AIDS Alliance, “The creditors should be ashamed of themselves if they simply take this money. These creditors often knew that the money would be siphoned off by dictators and deposited in western banks, and the resulting debt is morally illegitimate. They bear a moral obligation to think more creatively about how to use this money.”

The next step in the scam was for Obasanjo to agree to the reimposition of neoliberal economic policies. According to ActionAid’s Soren Ambrose, “The Paris Club requires that countries applying for relief be under an IMF program, but the prospect of agreeing to one is political dynamite in Nigeria. The Paris Club was however under great pressure to complete a landmark deal with Nigeria, where the legislature had threatened to simply repudiate the debts.” The IMF snuck in through the back door as part of the debt deal.

In short, the long-standing economic swindle was actually perpetrated against the Nigerian population by Washington financiers and allied local elites, especially Okonjo-Iweala. Later, in 2012, her neoliberalism catalysed a national ‘Occupy Nigeria’ strike that nearly overthrew the government because of a dubiously-formulated recall of a petrol subsidy, under direct pressure from IMF managing director Christine Lagarde.

The final stage of the rebasing scam was Sunday’s announcement that Nigeria has risen from a GDP of $262 bn in 2012 to become, after new counting techniques, the largest economy in Africa with $491 bn GDP in 2013 (compared to $384bn for SA), when in reality it is the fastest-shrinking in terms of wealth.

The term ‘wealth’ is critical to interrogate because in addition to the financial assets, productive machinery, real estate, and ‘human capital’ (educational accomplishments and skills) of a people, even the World Bank concedes that we should add ‘natural capital’, i.e. resources such as Nigeria’s untapped oil and minerals, forests and agricultural land.

Here we can spot the difference between bogus ‘Africa Rising’ rhetoric as GDP increases thanks to raw materials exports, and Africa crashing in terms of fast-shrinking wealth, especially in resource-cursed countries like Nigeria and South Africa. To fail to acknowledge the distinction is to import from malevolent Northern economists what University of Pretoria political economist Lorenzo Fioramenti calls a Gross Domestic Problem. It means ignoring women’s unpaid labour, pollution, social ills and a variety of other variables that should be measured as losses from net income. The biggest of these GDP-blind factors in Africa is the depletion of natural resources, which when mined or drilled out are only counted as GDP credits on the income accounts, but not as debits, as they should be since a source of future income is now gone.

It’s as if you have several generations’ worth of your family jewels locked away but your drunkard nephew steals the key, sells the jewels for a song, and boozes away the proceeds. Like Pretoria (or Washington for that matter), Abuja has seen lots of drunkard-nephew types exercising power, aided and abetted by multinational corporations like Shell Oil which infiltrate and underhandedly manipulate critical parts of the state

Nigeria shrinks because natural capital is being stripped out of the Niger Delta by foreign oil companies without the kind of compensating investments that resource-rich Norway, Canada and Australia can brag, because their mining and oil companies are headquartered at home there.



The Bank’s 2011 book, The Changing Wealth of Nations, provides the latest available comparative data: in the year 2005 (when oil averaged $50/barrel), the average Nigerian lost $280 – or in sum, 140 million Nigerians lost a net $39 billion – because the depletion of natural resources far outstripped the income gains from exploiting petroleum. (In 2005, each South African lost $245 of wealth on average, and four other oil-stained African countries had higher per capita – albeit lower absolute – wealth shrinkage than Nigeria: Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Chad and Mauritania.)

This was not a one-year fluke, it amplified a trend the Bank observed for at least a decade earlier: “wealth in Nigeria declined by 15 percent.” During the 14 years prior to 2008, say Changing Wealth of Nations authors, “clear trends emerge, with Adjusted Net Savings as well as per capita wealth increasing in Asia and ANS declining in Sub-Saharan Africa. In both instances, a few countries dominate the trend: the stellar performance of China and, more recently, India drives the positive trends in Asia, and the poor performance of Nigeria and a handful of other countries outweighs the positive performance of many other African countries.”

Accurate updates are not available, but as oil prices rose to $145 per barrel through mid-2008, crashed to $32 for a short while later that year, and then rose to the $80-100 range since 2010, Nigeria’s wealth shrinkage became even worse. If all other factors remained roughly constant, 175 million Nigerians would have lost around $80 billion net, last year. Rebase that, Abuja.

What can be done? There is an obvious case from the standpoint of climate change to ‘leave the oil in the soil’, so as to avoid not only the looting and all that goes with it in political, economic, ecological and public health degradation, as Saro-Wiwa’s successor Nnimmo Bassey explains in To Cook a Continent – but justice would demand that in compensation, the North pay a climate debt to ordinary Nigerians not venal politicians running the state. The superb group Environmental Rights Action makes this case.

The outflow of wealth was slowed decisively on one occasion, five years ago, when activists of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) sabotaged pipelines so often that by the end of 2008 oil production was cut to half the prior year’s level. This followed a period of turmoil after Ken Saro-Wiwa’s non-violent fight against pollution and underdevelopment a quarter century ago ended in his execution in December 1995, even though Nelson Mandela had personally intervened against the then dictator Sani Abacha.



I was asked to write the Foreword to a brilliant 2013 book about MEND, Temitope Oriola’s Criminal Resistance, which uses social psychology as well as political economy to unearth why oil generates such intense resistance. By all accounts, forces posing as MEND more recently degenerated into opportunistic activity, in contrast to the politically-‘liberatory’ kidnapping of the early years. Their former leader, Henry Okah, got a 24-year sentence from a South African judge for supporting car-bombing terrorism in 2012 and he tried to escape a Pretoria prison twice in the last two months, including last week. And although an amnesty led to substantial MEND disarmament once Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan (a Delta native) came to power, this year has witnessed a resurgence of kidnapping and sabotage, which in the last two months disabled Shell and Agip pipelines that carry more than a fifth of Nigeria’s crude to ships.

MEND and the Islamic extremist movement Boko Harem have created the most intense battlefields within the MINTs and BRICS. In contrast to Nigerian guerrilla and terrorist attacks, leftists have been active the past few weeks in Mexico, where mass anti-privatisation protests addressed energy and education. A frightened Newsweek reporter last October reported from Mexico’s ‘streets of fire’, as protests “have become more frequent, volatile and violent, analysts say, a response to major domestic policy shifts and growing alienation among the young and unemployed.”

Indonesia recently witnessed two million protesting workers demanding 50 percent wage increases, while activists in Turkey competed with Brazil for the largest take-overs of public space in major cities last year. The potential destruction of Istanbul’s Gezi Park was just as important a symbolic statement of crony-capitalist power as Sepp Blatter’s politically-destructive relationship with Brazilian Workers Party president Dilma Rousseff, herself prone to neoliberal tendencies such as raising public transport prices beyond affordability.

Russia has witnessed mass protests, many very courageous in that authoritarian context: a democracy movement in late 2011, a freedom of expression battle involving a risque rock band in 2012, gay rights in 2013 and at the Winter Olympics, and last month’s anti-war protests. Indian activists shook the power structure over corruption in 2011-12, a high-profile rape-murder in late 2012, and a municipal electoral surprise by a left-populist anti-establishment political party in late 2013. And Chinese activists protest tens of thousands of time a year, at roughly equivalent rates in urban and rural settings, especially because of pollution, such as last week’s throughout Guandong against a Paraxylene factory.

Millions hate these kind of repressive relationships in the MINTS and BRICS, exemplified by the ‘toxic collusion’ – so named by Marikana mineworker victims’ lawyer Dali Mpofu – uncovered in emails between Cyril Ramaphosa, other Lonmin bosses and South African politicians and massacre-ready police. But South Africa’s diverse protests, probably numbering far more than the 12 399 (including 1882 violent ones) that minister Nathi Methethwa counted last year alone, still fail to link up. Indeed, many have xenophobic tendencies (like yesterday’s in Maake, Limpopo), pointing out how structures of power stay in place through divide-and-conquer.

That doesn’t mean they won’t, and if Occupy Nigeria could emerge from nowhere to win a dramatic victory against petrol price hikes in early 2012, then a higher GDP figure will not distract the masses with false pride. Likewise, many increasingly radicalised South Africans will continue the long, slow struggle to replace neoliberal nationalism with something more durable, and in doing so will have to reiterate to the society why it’s not appropriate to be count the decline of natural resources as a positive contribution to GDP, when the resource curses continue. DM

Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa and is co-author of the new book South Africa – The Present as History.

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-04-07-africas-number-one-economy-for-wealth-evaporation/

From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa’s Frustrating Decade of Freedom
by Patrick Bond

Patrick Bond teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is visiting professor at York University Department of Political Science, Toronto, and is an associate of the Center for Economic Justice in Johannesburg and Washington.
The author has compiled a reading list (at the end of the essay) for those who wish to learn more about post-apartheid South Africa.
The end of the apartheid regime was a great human achievement. Yet the 1994 election of an African National Congress (ANC) majority—with Nelson Mandela as the new president—did not alter the enormous structural gap in wealth between the majority black and minority white populations. Indeed, it set in motion neoliberal policies that exacerbated class, race, and gender inequality. To promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between the racist white regime and the ANC allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions. There were only two basic paths that the ANC could follow. One was to mobilize the people and all their enthusiasm, energy, and hard work, use a larger share of the economic surplus (through state-directed investments and higher taxes), and stop the flow of capital abroad, including the repayment of illegitimate apartheid-era debt. The other was to adopt a neoliberal capitalist path, with a small reform here or there, while posturing as if social democracy was on the horizon.

A few months prior to the democratic election on April 27, 1994, a transitional South African government was formed incorporating both the ANC and the National Party, which had been in power for 45 years thanks to whites-only voting. Even as racist laws were tumbling and the dignity of the majority black population was soaring, December 1, 1993, was the point at which the struggle for socioeconomic justice in South Africa was conclusively lost, at least temporarily. The very first act of that interim government was to accept an $850 million loan from the International Monetary Fund, ostensibly for drought relief, although the searing drought had ended 18 months earlier. The loan’s secret conditions—leaked to the main business newspaper in March 1994—included the usual items from the classical structural adjustment menu: lower import tariffs, cuts in state spending, and large cuts in public sector wages. In addition, Michel Camdessus, then IMF managing director, put informal but intense pressure on incoming president Mandela to reappoint the two main stalwarts of apartheid-era neoliberalism, the finance minister and the central bank governor, both from the National Party.

Another crucial milestone was reached in June 1996, when the top echelon of ANC policymakers imposed a “nonnegotiable” wide-ranging economic strategy without bothering to consult its Alliance partners in the union movement and the South African Communist Party (SACP), much less its own constituents. The World Bank contributed two economists and its model for the exercise, known as “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” (GEAR). Introduced to promote investor confidence in the wake of a currency crash, GEAR allowed the government to distance itself psychologically from the somewhat more Keynesian “Reconstruction and Development Program,” which in 1994 had served as the ANC’s campaign platform. The promises generated by the World Bank’s econometric model were grand indeed: by 2000, the South African economy would be growing at 6 percent and creating 400,000 new jobs each year.

The Post-Apartheid Record

The transition’s flaws are excused by some ANC supporters as temporary reversals along what is a broadly progressive trajectory, unique in Africa. A recent document, “Towards a Ten-Year Review,” available on the government’s Web site, makes grandiloquent claims to support such an interpretation. The November 7, 2003 ANC Today newsletter on the ruling party’s Web site draws on the review to promote the post-apartheid economy: “Since the ANC was elected to government in 1994, South Africa has achieved a level of macroeconomic stability not seen in the country for 40 years…After the massive investment outflows of the 1980s and early 1990s, the country has had positive levels of foreign direct investment over the last ten years…Between 1995 and 2002 the number of people employed grew by around 1.6 million people.”

Most such claims are distortions or outright fibs. For the ANC to brag of a level of macroeconomic stability not seen in the country for 40 years is to ignore the easiest measure of such stability: exchange rate fluctuations. In reality, the three currency crashes witnessed over a period of a few weeks in February–March 1996, June–July 1998, and December 2001 ranged from 30 to 50 percent, and each led to massive interest rate increases that sapped growth and rewarded the speculators. These moments of macroeconomic instability were as dramatic as any other incidents during the previous two centuries, including the September 1985 financial panic that split big business from the apartheid regime and paved the way for ANC rule.

Domestic investment has been sickly (with a less than 2 percent increase per year during the GEAR era when it was meant to increase by 7 percent), and were it not for the partial privatization of the telephone company, foreign investment would not even register. Domestic private sector investment was negative for several years, as capital effectively went on strike, moving mobile resources offshore as rapidly as possible. Yet, of all GEAR’s targets, the only ones reached successfully were those most crucial to big business: inflation (down from 9 percent to 5.5 percent, instead of GEAR’s projected 7–8 percent); the current account (in surplus, not deficit as projected); and the fiscal deficit (below 2 percent of GDP, instead of the projected 3 percent).

The reality is that South Africa has witnessed the replacement of racial apartheid with what is increasingly referred to as class apartheid—systemic underdevelopment and segregation of the oppressed majority through structured economic, political, legal, and cultural practices. Although slightly more expansive fiscal policies were adopted after 2000, Pretoria’s neoliberal orientation has never been in doubt. Current president Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in May 1999, but had served as the government’s main policy architect and administrator from the start of the transition, as well as the key arbiter in the ANC’s unending internecine conflicts.

Job loss has been the most damaging aspect of South Africa’s embrace of the neoliberal economic approach. Instead of the employment growth of 3–4 percent per year promised by GEAR proponents, annual job losses of 1–4 percent characterized the late 1990s. South Africa’s official measure of unemployment rose from 16 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. Adding frustrated job-seekers to that figure brings the percentage of unemployed people to 43 percent. Meanwhile, labor productivity increased steadily and the number of days lost to strike action fell, the latter due, in part, to the ANC’s demobilization of unions and hostility to national strikes undertaken for political purposes, such as the national actions against privatization in 2001 and 2002.

White businesses wanted to escape the economic stagnation and declining profits born of a classic overaccumulation crisis. They felt besieged by international sanctions, and even more by the rise of black militancy in workplaces and communities during the 1970s and 1980s. It is here that the core concession made by the ANC during the transition deal is apparent. The deal represented simply this: black nationalists got the state, while white people and corporations could remove their capital from the country, although continuing to reside in South Africa to enjoy even greater privileges through economic liberalization. As for division of the national surplus, the pre-tax profit share soared during the late 1990s, to 1960s-era levels associated with apartheid’s heyday. Pretoria also cut primary corporate taxes dramatically (from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent in 1999) and maintained the deficit below 3 percent of GDP by restricting social spending, notwithstanding the avalanche of unemployment.

As a result, according to even the government’s statistics, average black African household income fell 19 percent from 1995–2000 (to $3,714 per year), while white household income rose 15 percent (to $22,600 per year). Not just relative but absolute poverty intensified, as the proportion of households earning less than $90 of real income increased from 20 percent of the population in 1995, to 28 percent in 2000. Across the racial divide, the poorest half of all South Africans earned just 9.7 percent of national income in 2000, down from 11.4 percent in 1995. The richest 20 percent earned 65 percent of all income. It is fair to assume that inequality continued to worsen after 2000.

Notwithstanding deeper poverty, the state raised water and electricity prices dramatically, to the point that by 2002 they consumed 30 percent of the income of those households earning less than $70 per month. An estimated 10 million people had their water cut off, according to two national government surveys, and 10 million were also victims of electricity disconnections.* Municipal statistics show that 60 percent of the disconnections were not resolved within six weeks, indicating that the blame lies with genuine poverty (not the oft-alleged “culture of nonpayment,” supposedly a hangover of anti-apartheid activism). In addition, two million people have been evicted from their homes or land since liberation in 1994. And of 13 million given access to a fixed telephone line for the first time, 10 million were disconnected because they couldn’t pay the bill, once cross-subsidies were reduced in the course of privatization.

Gender relations show some improvements, especially in reproductive rights, albeit with extremely uneven access. But contemporary South Africa retains apartheid’s patriarchal modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labor system, which is subsidized by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands. These women are not paid for their role in social reproduction, which in a normal labor market would be handled by state schooling, health insurance, and pensions. This structured superexploitation is exacerbated by an apparent increase in domestic sexual violence associated with rising male unemployment and the feminization of poverty. Women are also the main caregivers in the home, and this entails bearing the highest burden associated with degraded health.

With the public healthcare services in decline due to underfunding and the increasing penetration of private providers, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, and AIDS are rife, all far more prevalent than during apartheid. Diarrhea kills 43,000 children a year, as a result mainly of inadequate potable water provision. Most South Africans with HIV have little prospect of receiving antiretroviral medicines to extend their lives (half a million urgently require drugs at present), thanks to the “denialist” policies of Mbeki and his health minister, which senior health professionals and researchers regularly label genocide. Although a roll-out of medicines was finally promised by the Cabinet in September 2003, Mbeki immediately poured salt in the wounds by denying (in a New York Times interview) that he knew anyone who had died of AIDS or was even HIV positive.

Mbeki successfully repulsed local opposition from human rights and arms-control groups to the $6 billion purchase of sophisticated weaponry from European corporations. Africans are nervous about Pretoria’s subimperial interventions. Notwithstanding peace deals in central Africa and Liberia, concerns remain over how durable the interventions are, when they fail to grapple with underlying structural causes of failed states and interethnic conflict. One example of bully-boy diplomacy was Pretoria’s 1998 military invasion of neighboring Lesotho to prop up an unpopular government. Moreover, the widespread influence-peddling scandals associated with the arms deal—which in late 2003 threatened Deputy President Jacob Zuma (who allegedly solicited a bribe in a manner the justice minister deemed “prima facie corruption”) and forced the resignation of several leading ANC politicians and officials caught in plots with European corporations—suggest that then-president Mandela was correct when he warned that this would be a cancer in the ANC government.

Moving to the environment, it is fair to assess South African ecology today as in worse condition, in many crucial respects—water and soil resources mismanagement, South Africa’s contribution to global warming, fisheries, industrial toxics, and genetic modification—than during apartheid. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project has become the highest-profile example of third world development corruption. Africa’s biggest dam supplies water to Johannesburg from the Lesotho mountains, and further dams are being built even though government officials admit they are unnecessary, and despite destructive environmental consequences. In spite of water scarcity there is little sign that these water development schemes will help, since the extremely high costs of water transfer are deterring consumption by poor people. The wealthiest urban (mainly white) families enjoy swimming pools and English gardens, which means that in some of the most hedonistic suburbs per capita water consumption is 30 times greater each day than in low-income townships, some of whose residents do the gardening and domestic work for whites. Rural (black) women stand in line for hours at communal taps in the parched former bantustan areas. The location of natural surface and groundwater remains skewed towards white farmers due to apartheid land dispossession. With fewer than 2 percent of arable plots redistributed (as against a five-year target of 30 percent), Pretoria’s neoliberal land policy has conclusively failed to redress this problem.

Other examples of residual apartheid ecology could be cited, including numerous unresolved conflicts over natural land reserves (the displacement of indigenous people continues), the deleterious impacts of industrialization on biodiversity, insufficient protection of endangered species, and generous state policies favoring genetic modification in commercial agriculture. Marine regulatory systems are overstressed and hotly contested by European and East Asian fishing trawlers, as well as by local medium-scale commercial fishing firms fending off new waves of small-scale black rivals. Expansion of gum and pine timber plantations, largely for pulp exports to East Asia, remains extremely damaging, not only because of grassland and organic forest destruction—leading to soil adulteration and far worse flood damage downriver, as Mozambique suffered in 2000–2001—but also due to the spread of alien invasive plants into water catchments across the country. One constructive, high-profile state program has so far slowed but not reversed the advance of alien invasives.

Thanks to accommodating state policies, South African commercial agriculture remains extremely reliant upon fertilizers and pesticides, with virtually no attention given to potential organic farming markets. The government’s failure to prevent toxic dumping and incineration has led to a nascent but portentous group of mass tort (class action) lawsuits that may reach beyond asbestos victims to residents who suffer persistent pollution in several extremely toxic pockets (South Durban, Sasolburg, and Steel Valley). In these efforts, the environmental justice movement almost invariably fights both corporations and Pretoria.

Privatization Fails to Deliver

It is important to add that the government’s canard of “insufficient state capacity” to solve social and environmental problems has been matched by a willingness to turn resources over to the private sector. If outsourcing, corporatization, and privatization can work anywhere in Africa, they should in South Africa—with its large, wealthy markets, relatively competent firms and advanced infrastructure. However, contrary evidence emerges from the four major cases of commodification of state services: telecommunications, transportation, electricity, and water.

First, consider the mess created in the lucrative telecommunications sector, in which 30 percent of state-owned Telkom was sold to a Houston–Kuala Lumpur alliance. The cost of local calls skyrocketed, leading the vast majority of new lines to be disconnected. Meanwhile, 20,000 workers were fired. Attempts by the government to cap fixed-line monopoly pricing were blocked by the Texas-Malaysia joint venture with a court challenge and a serious threat to sell their Telkom shares in 2002. As a result, Telkom’s 2003 initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange raised only a disappointing $500 million. Thus, in the process an estimated $5 billion of Pretoria’s own funding of Telkom’s late 1990s capital expansion evaporated. A pact on pricing and services between the two main private cellular operators and persistent allegations of corruption combined to stymie the introduction of new cellular and fixed-line operators.

Second, in the field of transportation there have been a variety of dilemmas associated with partial privatizations. Commercialized toll roads are unaffordable for the poor. Air transport privatization led to the collapse of the first regional state-owned airline. South African Airways has been disastrously mismanaged, with huge currency-trading losses and an inexplicable $20 million payout to a short-lived U.S. manager. The privatization of the Airports Company has led to security lapses and labor conflict. Constant strife with the ANC-aligned trade union has thrown port privatization into question. The increasingly corporatized rail service shut down many feeder routes that, although unprofitable, were crucial to rural economies.

Third, the electricity sector is privatizing rapidly, with 30 percent of the parastatal Eskom (the world’s fourth largest electricity producer) to be sold in 2004, resulting in a host of problems. Thirty thousand electricity workers lost their jobs during the 1990s. Potentially unnecessary new generation capacity is being created by private suppliers. While a tiny pittance is invested in renewable energy, the state is likely to expand nuclear energy, through new pebble bed reactors in partnership with U.S. and British firms. Rates for residential customers have risen much higher as cross-subsidies came under attack during the late 1990s. As a result of increasingly unaffordable rates, Eskom slowed the extension of the rural electricity grid, while millions of people who fell into arrears on inflated bills have been disconnected—leading to massive (often successful) resistance such as illegal reconnections. With tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses reaching epidemic levels it is a cause for concern that those who do not reconnect their electricity are forced back to paraffin or coal fires for cooking, with all the hazards that entails.

Fourth, virtually all local governments turned to a 100 percent cost recovery policy during the late 1990s, at the urging of the central government and the World Bank, largely to prepare for a wave of water and waste commercialization. Attempts to recover costs from poor communities inflict hardships on the most vulnerable members of society, especially women and those with HIV positive family members susceptible to water-borne diseases and opportunistic AIDS infections. Although water and sanitation privatization applies to only 5 percent of all municipalities, the South African pilot projects run by the world’s biggest water companies (Biwater, Suez, and Saur) have resulted in services that are overpriced and a public that is underserved. Contracts have been renegotiated to raise rates because of insufficient profits; services have not been extended to most poor people; many low-income residents have been disconnected; prepaid water meters have been widely installed; and sanitation has been substandard. Across South Africa, the dogma of 100-percent-cost-recovery led to the continent’s worst-ever cholera outbreak, catalyzed by mass disconnections of rural residents in August 2000.

As a result of this consistent failure to deliver, alienation and discontent are obviously increasing. According to a late-2002 survey conducted by the liberal Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the number of black people who believe life was better under the apartheid regime is growing. Tragically, more than 60 percent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule, only one in ten people believed their elected representatives were interested in their needs, and fewer than one in three felt the current government was more trustworthy than the apartheid regime. Black people were only slightly more positive than white and mixed-race groups about the government, with 38 percent deeming it more trustworthy than before. Only 24 percent of black South Africans agreed with the proposition that the current government is less corrupt than the apartheid regime.

For the 10 percent or so wealthiest whites and a scattering of rich blacks who enjoy segregation and insulation from the vast majority, lifestyles remain at the highest level in the world. This is evident to any visitor to the slightly-integrated suburbs of South African cities. Racial apartheid was always explicitly manifested in residential segregation, and after liberation in 1994, Pretoria adopted World Bank advice that included an avoidance of public housing (virtually no new municipal or even cooperatively-owned units have been constructed), smaller housing subsidies than were necessary, and much greater reliance upon banks and commercial developers instead of state and community-driven development. The privatization of housing is, indeed, one of the most terrible ironies of post-apartheid South Africa, not least because the man taking advice from the World Bank, Joe Slovo, was chair of the SACP. (Slovo died of cancer soon thereafter and his main ANC bureaucrat, who was responsible for designing the policy, now works for a World Bank subsidiary.)

Nine years later, the provincial housing minister responsible for greater Johannesburg admitted to a mainstream newspaper that South Africa’s resulting residential class apartheid had become an embarrassment: “If we are to integrate communities both economically and racially, then there is a real need to depart from the present concept of housing delivery that is determined by stands, completed houses and budget spent.” His spokesperson added, “The view has always been that when we build low-cost houses, they should be built away from existing areas because it impacts on the price of property.” Rationalizing such policies, the head of one of Johannesburg’s largest property sales corporations, Lew Geffen Estates, insisted that “Low-cost houses should be developed in outlying areas where the property is cheaper and more quality houses could be built.”

Unfortunately it is the likes of Geffen, the commercial bankers and allied construction companies, who still drive housing creation, so it is reasonable to anticipate no change in Johannesburg’s landscape—featuring not “quality houses” but what many black residents term “kennels.” Several hundred thousand post-apartheid state-subsidized starter houses are often half as large as the 40 square meter “matchboxes” built during apartheid, and located even further away from jobs and community amenities. In addition to ongoing disconnections of water and electricity, the new slums suffer lower-quality state services ranging from rare rubbish collection to dirt roads and inadequate storm-water drainage.

Globalization Made Me Do It!

How did the degeneration of a once proud liberation movement occur so decisively, and so quickly? It is tempting to again point out that neoliberalism was dictated by the IMF in December 1993 before being codified in GEAR. But three prior decisions were also crucial: to drop “nationalization” formally from ANC rhetoric (April 1992); to repay the $25 billion of inherited apartheid-era foreign debt (October 1993); and to grant the central bank formal independence in an interim constitution (November 1993).

Various other international economic incidents should be mentioned. A few weeks after liberation in May 1994, when South Africa joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous terms, the country’s deindustrialization was guaranteed. In January 1995, privatization began in earnest. Financial liberalization in the form of exchange control abolition occurred in March 1995, ironically in the immediate wake of the Mexican capital flight that destroyed the peso’s value. South Africa’s protection was to raise interest rates to a record high (often double-digit after inflation is discounted), where they have remained ever since. Later, from 1998–2001, the ANC government granted permission to South Africa’s biggest companies to move their financial headquarters and primary stock market listings to London.

Under these circumstances, GEAR was merely a set of fantasy projections, and the failure of macroeconomic policy is even sometimes conceded in Pretoria. In an April 2002 article entitled “Great Leap into Stagnation Courtesy of World Bank,” Bloomberg News Service reported that finance minister Trevor Manuel had loyally advocated “spending cuts, the dismantling of trade barriers and fighting inflation during the past six years, all under the guidance of World Bank economists. He is still waiting for the payoff. Now, Manuel and even some World Bank officials say Africa’s largest economy has not gained as expected from the lender’s advice.” Manuel, who was chair of the Boards of Governors of the IMF and the World Bank and currently chairs the Development Committee of the joint body, admitted to Bloomberg, “We have undertaken a policy of very substantial macroeconomic reform. But the rewards are few.” More generally, he conceded, “Developing countries have undertaken many reforms, but the benefits are, in fact, very slim.”

Was Manuel pushed into such substantial “reforms,” or did he jump? As veteran Africa watcher John Saul has suggested, the tendency is to distract attention with the cry, “Globalization made me do it!” In a somewhat self-critical May 2003 speech, Manuel admitted that “economic integration must be managed because it carries the possibility to severely restrict the degree of policy choice that a country has. It is worth reminding ourselves that the degree to which a country’s choices are limited, and that country’s need for access to capital, are directly proportional. The key variables are first, the financing of the fiscal deficit and second, the dependence on external capital for financing economic expansion.”

This assertion of policy impotence in the face of global finance was sound at a superficial level, but Manuel made no attempts to remedy the power imbalance. The “informal” limitations were in part a function of currency fluctuations. As Manuel continued, “The key issue is the extent of capital mobility and a country’s demand for a portion of the free float.” And yet the crucial lever of counterpower is the application of stronger exchange controls. Consistent with his general zigzag approach to international financial management, Manuel loosened controls yet further in early 2003.

‘We will take Sandton!’

Rhetoric in South Africa can be confusing. When Mbeki visited Malaysia on the eve of the Cancun WTO summit in September 2003, he advocated that third world governments join forces with anticapitalist social movements: “They may act in ways you and I may not like—breaking windows in the street and this and that—but the message they communicate relates to us.” In reality, many possibilities for unity and cooperation were not merely ignored, but were actively sabotaged throughout the period, as Pretoria sought to impose political order on a society growing increasingly restless.

The repressive side of ANC rule was unveiled to the world during the August 2002 protests against the UN’s World Summit on Sustainable Development—the preemptive arrest of hundreds of activists from three different movements, the banning of peaceful demonstrations, and the use of stun grenades at a candlelight march of 800 people who had emerged from a conference at Johannesburg’s main university. Independent left groups then insisted they would march more than 20,000 people from impoverished Alexandra township to the site of the summit in bourgeois Sandton. A combination of militancy—represented by the widespread call, “We will take Sandton!”—and international media attention forced Pretoria to back down. But according to Yasmin Sooka of the Human Rights Foundation (formerly a Truth and Reconciliation Commission member), “Many senior police officers from the apartheid force were recalled and put in charge of security operations…It was almost unbelievable to watch the heavily armed police and soldiers lining every inch of the route with guns pointed at the marchers.” (A march by the ANC Alliance in support of the Summit covered the same route two hours later, but with fewer than a tenth as many marchers.)

Pretoria’s repressive streak continued during 2003. Leading activists in the black townships of Johannesburg and Cape Town were repeatedly harassed and detained by police—mainly illegally (resulting in high-profile acquittals)—for resisting evictions, electricity and water disconnections, and the installation of prepaid meters for services. As for the global campaign to make AIDS medicines available, Pretoria infuriated local treatment activists by withdrawing the main drug for pregnant women, Nevirapine (on grounds of irregular testing several years earlier in Uganda), just days before Mbeki’s Malaysia remarks. When reparations for apartheid-era profits were being demanded by South African activist groups in the U.S. courts in mid-2003, Mbeki and Justice Minister Penuell Maduna formally requested that the cases be thrown out, and later revealed that this was done due to the prodding of Colin Powell.

Such incidents have alienated a huge proportion of the progressive movements and the low-income population. The independent left’s main grassroots campaigns are the struggles for antiretroviral medicines to combat AIDS, free lifeline water (50 liters per person per day) and electricity (1 kilowatt hour per person per day), land reform, an end to housing evictions, a Basic Income Grant, debt repudiation and reparations for apartheid-era profits by foreign and domestic capital, and security from domestic violence. Protests are regularly mounted against high-profile neoliberal events such as the World Economic Forum. Occasionally the pressure rises to such high levels that Pretoria concedes, as with a long-delayed plan to roll out antiretroviral medicines in November 2003 that followed court battles, periodic protests against pharmaceutical corporations, and a civil disobedience campaign targeting Mbeki and his health and trade ministers. The Sowetans who illegally reconnected electricity beginning in 2000 were rewarded in April 2003 by having their accumulated debts written off, as the minister responsible for privatization unsuccessfully attempted to undercut township militancy. More recently, the government has embarked upon a systematic campaign to weaken grassroots militancy through judicial harassment and even extra-legal police repression.

Reflecting the lack of cooperation between the independent left and the ANC Alliance, the former organized intensely in 2003 against the Bush administration. Its 300-member Anti-War Coalition repeatedly drew many thousands of supporters to major demonstrations in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria—far more than attended ANC-COSATU-SACP-church-organized protests. While strident anti-imperialist rhetoric characterized ANC antiwar posturing, the Anti-War Coalition pointed out these hypocrisies: the arms agency Denel sold $250 million of high-tech munitions to Bush and Blair; warships docked at Durban on their way to the Persian Gulf; and in July 2003, Bush was received warmly by Mbeki for discussions over future military and economic cooperation. Bush responded in kind, calling Mbeki his “point man” on the Zimbabwe crisis. Bush’s Africa hand, Walter Kansteiner, termed the New Partnership for Africa’s Development “philosophically spot-on.” At the same time the Zimbabwean progressive community and their international allies (including the U.S.-based Africa Action solidarity movement) remain appalled by Mbeki’s repeated apologetics on behalf of Robert Mugabe’s oppressive rule.

South Africa’s independent left will continue growing under these conditions. Organizations that repeatedly challenge the ANC and capital include social movement and community activist coalitions such as the national Social Movements Indaba, the Johannesburg Anti-Privatization Forum, the eThekwini (Durban) Social Forum, and the Western Cape Anti-Evictions Campaign, as well as a variety of sectorally-specific groups: the Education Rights Project, the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, Jubilee SA, Keep-Left, Khulumani (apartheid victims support group), the Landless Peoples Movement, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Treatment Action Campaign, Youth for Work, and sometimes the inconsistent SA NonGovernmental Organizations Coalition. Information about their struggles is regularly found in mainstream news outlets, but the local independent left use media such as the Indymedia Web sites, the journal Debate: Voices from the South African Left and its e-mail discussion list, and Khanya Journal. Other left infrastructure includes think tanks and training institutes such as the Alternative Information and Development Centre, groundWork, the International Labour Research and Information Group, Khanya College, and the University of Natal Centre for Civil Society, most of which have useful Web sites. There are, as well, some militant sections of COSATU, especially municipal workers.

However, divisive conflicts have emerged within South African’s independent left movements, especially over how to relate to the SACP and COSATU. Opinions vary greatly on how far to attack the ANC itself, and carry into debates over whether (and when) to form a left political party, and whether to call for a boycott or a spoiled ballot in the 2004 national elections. In addition, there remain traditional South African problems with sectarianism among small political parties and factions. Another major dividing line emerged over how to articulate South African reactions to the Zimbabwe land issue and to the imperialist-aligned section of the Zimbabwe opposition. Nevertheless, my own sense is that many of these splits and conflicts will be resolved in the coming decade, when a realignment of the broad left under a broad-based workers’ party umbrella is likely.

Two remarks sum up the situation in South Africa. First, “The government is utterly seduced by big business, and cannot see beyond its immediate interests.” Second, “domestic and foreign left sectarian factions…accuse our movement of having abandoned the working people, saying that we have adopted and are implementing neoliberal policies. These factions claim to be pursuing a socialist agenda. They assert that, on the contrary, we are acting as agents of the domestic and international capitalist class and such multilateral organizations as the World Bank and the IMF, against the interests of the working people.” These quotes, respectively from the (neoliberal) editor of the newspaper Business Day in June 2003, and from Mbeki’s address to an ANC policy conference in September 2002, reveal an elite awareness that the 10th anniversary of South African freedom will not be a cause for celebration by those who had hoped for a genuine break with apartheid. Perhaps the 20th will allow us a more encouraging report.

Notes

* http://www.queensu.ca/msp. Although the water ministry has disputed the figures, they may actually be understatements.

Suggested Further Reading

For further analysis and information, I highly recommend several Web sites: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs, http://southafrica.indymedia.org, and http://www.aidc.org.za. Numerous books, written mainly by independent intellectuals and activists over the last few years, reveal the depth and breadth of the radical critique: S. Kimani, ed, The Right to Dissent (Johannesburg: Freedom of Expression Institute, 2003); F. Barchiesi & T. Bramble, eds., Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); N. Alexander, An Ordinary Country (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002); S. Jacobs & R. Calland, eds., Thabo Mbeki’s World (London: Zed Books & Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002); G. Hart, Disabling Globalization (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press & Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); A. Desai, We are the Poors (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); D. McDonald, ed., Environmental Justice in South Africa (University of Cape Town Press, 2002); D. McDonald & J. Pape, eds., Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa (London: Zed Books & Pretoria: HSRC Publications, 2002); J. Duncan, Broadcasting and the National Question (Johannesburg: Freedom of Expression Institute, 2002); T. Bell, & D. Ntsebeza, Unfinished Business (London: Verso & Cape Town: RedWorks, 2001); S. Adams, Comrade Minister (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2001); and H. Marais South Africa Limits to Change (London: Zed Books & University of Cape Town Press, 2000). My own most recent effort to document the problem of neoliberalism in South Africa is Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest (London: Merlin Press & Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002).

http://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/south-africas-frustrating-decade-of-freedom-from-racial-to-class-apartheid/

I had no idea that Bond was a Trot, izzat what's wrong with SA communism?(yeah a USAian should talk......)

The State of Revolutionary Movements and Marxism in South Africa
by Patrick Bond
This article previously appeared in Pambazuka News.

“Numsa has had to direct enormous resources into the bread-and-butter activities of member support that any force in organized labor must promote before doing serious politics.”

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik’s victory in Russia. It set the standard, at least initially (before Joseph Stalin took over in the mid-1920s), for a party of workers and other oppressed people capturing state power. At least briefly, it confirmed the potential for shop-floor and grassroots base-building even within a repressive national regime (the Czar), then a jumping of scale to participation in an intermediate semi-democratic state (the Mensheviks), and then national economic control and massive international influence.

Crucially, the 1917 events in Russia were guided at the critical moment by a revolutionary party, which reaped the whirlwind because it had a clear ideology, a vanguard of advanced cadres and steely leadership (especially Lenin and Trotsky) able to grasp the opportunities. The vast masses of unorganized peasants, the small half-hearted middle class and the army and police did not prevent the proletariat’s victory, notwithstanding being outnumbered and immature compared to the huge working classes elsewhere in Europe.

After its rapid degeneration, the Soviet Union’s errors were explained as due either to a democracy deficit and stifling bureaucracy (as a chastened former defender, SA Communist Party leader Joe Slovo argued [2] in 1990) or (as Pallo Jordan famously rebutted [3] a month later) to the “class character of the Soviet model” which crushed workers’ and society’s self-emancipation. The gaping difference in those narratives endures today.

Meanwhile, contemporary power exercised by shopfloor and grassroots activists in Africa is typically under-rated. There are various ways to measure this power, including police statistics,[2] journalistic accounts and business executive surveys. For example, the world’s protest activity is recorded in the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT [4]), initiated by George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security [5], drawing upon millions of media reports. Latest data from November 2016 (not typical because of Donald Trump’s election and India’s currency controversy) show Africa well represented: hot spots included Tunisia, Libya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and South Africa.

“Contemporary power exercised by shopfloor and grassroots activists in Africa is typically under-rated.”

Additional sources of ‘Big Data’ on social unrest include the US military’s Minerva programme, which has a project – Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Acled [6]) – tracking Africa’s violent riots and protests. Compared to 2011, when North African (‘Arab Spring’) protests reflected a dramatic increase on prior years, many more protests across Africa were recorded [6] five years later. While 2016 appeared to have slightly fewer than 2015, there is no question that in most places on the continent, the rate of protesting was far higher than at the peak of the commodity super-cycle in 2011.

Another dataset – based on subjective impressions not objective event reports – is the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual survey of 14 000 business executives in 138 countries that informs its Global Competitiveness Report.[2] One survey question relates to labour-employee relations, and whether these are “generally confrontational or generally cooperative” on a scale of 1-7. In the 2016-17 report, the WEF found [7] the most cooperative labour movements were in Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Denmark and Sweden (scoring above 6.1).

The least cooperative was, for the fourth year in a row, the South African proletariat (with 2.5). Other African countries with very militant workforces are Chad (3.5), Tunisia (3.6), Liberia (3.7), Mozambique (3.7), Morocco (3.7), Lesotho (3.7), Ethiopia (3.8), Tanzania (3.8), Algeria (3.8), Burundi (3.8), and Zimbabwe (4.0). These dozen were in the top 30 countries in terms of labour militancy. The most placid African workforces were found in Rwanda (5.3) at 18th most cooperative, Mauritius (4.8) and Uganda (4.6). In general, African workers are the least cooperative of any aggregated in the world’s continents.

At a time mainstream observers have memed, “Africa Rising!”, surely a better term is that Africans are uprising against Africa Rising mythology. This uprising is by no means a revolutionary situation, nor even a sustained rebellion. One of the main reasons is the failure of protesters to become a movement, one with a coherent ideology to face the problems of their times with the stamina and insight required.

Frantz Fanon himself complained [8] in Toward the African Revolution, “For my part the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles, the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” Amilcar Cabral agreed [9]: “The ideological deficiency within the national liberation movements, not to say the total lack of ideology – reflecting as this does an ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform – makes for one of the greatest weaknesses in our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.”

Was Numsa’s insurgency just a ‘moment’ – or a future movement?

Within South Africa, the largest union -- with 330 000 members confirmed at its December 2016 congress -- remains the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa).[3] What many observers have remarked upon – often critically (e.g. most writers in this week’s Pambazuka News) -- is Numsa’s intense rhetorical militancy, in the wake of its bruising battle with labor nationalists and Communists affiliated to the African National Congress (ANC), as well as with “Middle Class Marxists.”

To put the fierce exchanges between various fractions of the South African Marxist left into context, consider some recent history. Although there are many targets of its ire ranging from white monopoly capital to the independent left intelligentsia, Numsa’s most decisive war has been with former comrades in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and its intellectual guide, the SA Communist Party (SACP), which began in earnest during the last Numsa congress, in December 2013. My own overwhelming impression from that event was how 1400 delegates (mostly shop-stewards) drove the union rapidly leftwards, to the point of formally calling for President Jacob Zuma to resign.

It was an extraordinary U-turn, given Numsa’s strong support for Zuma to replace President Thabo Mbeki in 2006-08. Like many in the Cosatu-SACP circuit, the expectation was that in exchange for that support, Numsa would benefit from a radical leftward turn in macro-economic policy and much greater state subsidies to improve working people’s livelihoods.

As some of us grimly predicted [10], however, Zuma dutifully stuck with the neo-liberal project and inevitably broke working-class and Communist hearts. Inevitably, anti-Zuma grumbling reached the point of active protest. And so it is not surprising to hear Zuma’s desperation ‘talk left’ gimmicks, such as last November in Pietermaritzburg when he described the BRICS as an apparent distracting tactic: “It is a small group but very powerful. [The West] did not like BRICS. China is going to be number one economy leader… [Western countries] want to dismantle this BRICS. We have had seven votes of no confidence in South Africa. In Brazil, the president was removed.” (The following week in Parliament, Zuma was asked during the president’s Question Time by an opposition legislator: “Which Western countries were you referring to? How did they plan on dismantling BRICS? And what will the effect of their actions be on our economic diplomacy with these Western countries over the next decade?” Zuma replied, according to the Hansard, “I’ve forgotten the names of these countries. [Laughter.] How can he think I’m going to remember here? He he he he.”)

“The seeds of the current radicalization were sewn when Irvin Jim became NUMSA leader in 2008.”

My sense in December 2013 was that a key reason for Numsa’s revolt against the Alliance was the still-strong memory of the August 2012 Marikana massacre of 34 platinum mineworkers who demanded a living wage of $1520/month. Numsa delegates were literally stunned into silence when they viewed Rehad Desai’s film “Miners Shot Down,” which later won the Emmy Award for Best International Documentary.

The seeds of this radicalization were sewn when Irvin Jim became leader in 2008. Like any good union, Numsa has had to direct enormous resources into the bread-and-butter activities of member support that any force in organized labor must promote before doing serious politics. While there are always setbacks along these lines, Numsa has nevertheless made remarkable steps away from labor corporatism -- the Alliance that has served workers so poorly since 1994 – and towards independent militancy. Since 2008, Numsa leaders and cadres have:

· restored the internal Numsa left’s strength (after the union’s self-destructive Mbekite era under Silumko Nondwangu’s leadership);

· pushed forceful new arguments into the public sphere about the character of the ANC neoliberal bloc’s long-term (transMandela-Mbeki-Zuma) class betrayal;

· helped identify where SACP and Cosatu forces were most weak in defending the ANC, and thereby opened a healthy debate culminating in the 2013 Numsa special congress where the first call to toss out Zuma was made;

· survived what many feared might be a serious (and KwaZulu-Natal-centric ethnicist) challenge by former Numsa president Cedric Gina’s new metalworkers’ union;

· won a five-week national metals strike in 2014 and coped with massive deindustrialisation pressures ever since, as the prices of aluminium and steel hit rock bottom and as dumping became a fatal threat to the main smelters;

· built up membership to today’s 330 000;

· pushed the political contradictions to break-point within Cosatu by 2015, resulting in not just Numsa’s expulsion but also the firing of the extremely popular general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, who leaned too far left for other Cosatu leaders’ comfort;

· put members on the street in fairly big numbers (e.g. around 30 000 protesting corruption just over a year ago, in spite of a clumsy breakdown in alliances with other groups in the more liberal reaches of civil society);

· maintained member – and broader proletarian – discontent with the class character of specific rulers, including Zuma, Ramaphosa, Gordhan and Patel (even though the latter two were at the 2016 congress unsuccessfully attempting to sweet-talk Numsa), so as not to be co-opted into playing a role (again) in the 2017 ANC electoral congress’ internecine battles (as is Cosatu on behalf of Ramaphosa);

· knit together Cosatu dissidents into a rough bloc (at peak having nine unions) and then set up a process for the announcement (May 2016) and launch (sometime this year) of a new workers’ federation; and

· quite realistically opened the door for a new workers’ party (and this is just a partial list.)

The latter two soon-to-be accomplishments – a new federation under the leadership of Vavi and a potential workers party – are the main projects on the horizon. The United Front project rose briefly in 2013-14 and then crashed by 2016 (for important reasons that this article cannot properly integrate), alienating many logical allies and losing respected staff in the process, as well.

And although Vavi represents a broad, open-minded socialist current that spans from NDR to radical civil society, Numsa has recently emphasized a definition of its own particular ‘line’ regarding a National Democratic Revolution. That line, with its category of a “Marxist-Leninist trade union” prior to a vanguardist workers’ party, is dismissed as “rigid Marxism-Leninism!” by independent-left intellectuals, to which Numsa ideologues reply: “useless petit-bourgeois radical-chic parasites!” or words to that effect. This is the extent to which certain ships are passing in the South African night.

“We really have no way to judge ahead of 2019 given the unpredictable character of left politics in South Africa.”

But if we are frank, Numsa has a massive vessel plowing through choppy waves above deep, torturous currents in unchartered waters, and the left intelligentsia occupies a dinghy limited to well-known shallows. (The latter site is where someone like me typically splashes, as conditions haven’t matured yet in South Africa to play anything much more than what becomes a substitutionist or worse, ventriloquist function, instead of what can be termed [11] a properly “scholactivist” role.)

However, what if by the time of the 2019 election the Numsa vanguard finds a way to run alongside (parallel) or in direct coalition (or even merger) with the country’s main leftist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)? Recall that after its formation in 2013, the EFF went from 6% of the vote in the 2014 election to 8% of the vote in the municipal poll of 2016, enough to throw the ANC out of the Johannesburg and Pretoria city councils, as the EFF coalesced with the centre-right Democratic Alliance. (This unhappy marriage could result in divorce before 2019, probably amidst EFF and ANC contestation over an inevitable upturn in township ‘service delivery’ protests.)

With the ANC down from its 2004 high of 69% in a national election to its 2016 low of 54% in the municipal poll, it is quite conceivable that in narrow electoral terms, enormous potential exists for a left party to play a decisive role in national politics, as did the EFF in Johannesburg and Pretoria municipalities. However, if the self-declared Marxist-Leninist leaders of both Numsa and the EFF ever find each other in coalition, could what is termed the ‘Numsa moment’ become a Numsa-EFF movement?

This scenario is not looked on favorably by many on the independent left, because of a general concern that EFF leader Julius Malema – whose record of ANC patronage in Limpopo Province still chills leftist spines – will take the EFF’s 10+% voting share in 2019 back into the ANC in the event that (as in August 2016 in Joburg and Tshwane) he becomes a kingmaker. This scenario assumes the ANC vote falls below 50% and that all opposition parties gang up to deny the ruling party any further national spoils. Malema told an audience last year that if such an opportunity arises in 2019, he might first destroy the ANC then rebuild it in alliance with the EFF. But if it is either Cyril Ramaphosa, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Zweli Mkhize running the ANC, that hijack won’t be easy to sustain.
In such a scenario, the antidote would be a workers’ party ally or influence on the EFF, to prevent regeneration of neoliberal nationalism with new elites. This is what some in Numsa would argue is their historical role, once the petit-bourgeois radicalism of the EFF peaks and retreats into populism -- a stance for which I hope they will be proved wrong. But we really have no way to judge ahead of 2019 given the unpredictable character of left politics in South Africa. If matters were more predictable, I’ll conclude, the conditions for much stronger movement building – a “United Resistance [12]” of left forces, as it’s now being termed in the United States against Trump fascism – would have already generated a bottom-up communism, instead of the residual Capital-C Communism that still dominates in so many terrains of real politik.

The deep roots and fragile surface of South African communism

To illustrate the conundrum – and by way of further vital context – think too what it means to have fought these battles first and foremost, as did key Numsa leaders, in the Eastern Cape Communist Party tradition. Bearing that in mind, the M-L rhetoric makes sense, because it appears to be the case that:

· the SACP-within-the-ANC is in its dying days (with continual rumours of Party leaders in the Cabinet suffering a forthcoming purge, and with the youth putting walk-out pressure on the party bosses), and

· Cosatu’s failures on nearly all policy and political fronts could take several important member unions to the brink not only of demanding that Zuma be replaced as president (he probably won’t be before 2019) but also of breaking the Alliance within a year or so.

If these are the most proximate political processes looming, then the Numsa rhetoric might be seen not as M-L dogmatism, but instead as careful positioning to capture a great many cadres who are now finally giving up on the ANC. (Some Numsa shopstewards already moved into the EFF in the last election.) The Numsa political push into the hearts and minds of a prestigious liberation movement is something that in Zimbabwe was tried -- and that failed -- in the case of the Movement for Democratic Change, which also began as a workers’ party (in January 1999 at the Chitungwiza Working People’s Convention) but quickly moved to the right. To pull at the ANC from the left using its own NDR language may well be successful, as an alternative to the political alienation faced by so many working-class activists whose mass political experience is grounded in traditional loyalty to the ANC.
Numsa’s historic role, in my view, is to continually remind a huge ANC NDR-supporting constituency that there is a logical explanation for SACP-Cosatu failures within the Alliance: namely, that the Party and labor leaders became fat-cats indistinguishable from the bosses. (This is a fate some observers accuse Numsa leaders of reproducing, too, with the ‘social distance’ between leadership and workers still vast, just as is the distance between Numsa workers – many of whom have struggled hard for five-digit monthly salaries – and the poorest South Africans.) So the Numsa rhetoric is quite clear. Its simple message is that the NDR and two-stage revolution were correct as conceptualization and strategy, but that the wrong people were given the task of implementation, because the ANC, Cosatu and SACP together grew far too comfortable maintaining the neoliberal nationalist status quo.

“The Party and labor leaders became fat-cats indistinguishable from the bosses.”

Now, that line of argument may not readily appeal to most Pambazuka readers considering these sentences, fair enough. Still, bear in mind that the NDR tune remains especially appealing to those who still consider the ANC’s pre-1994 populist nationalism to be South Africa’s most prestigious political project. Even though we are nearly 23 years past ‘liberation,’ this tradition retains deep roots. And it is likely that, with its new leadership (probably either Dlamini-Zuma or Ramaphosa), the ANC can continue to maintain its 50%+ majority in the next election and beyond.
So while some readers may have big problems in principle and theory with the NDR argument and the sell-out thesis, still, it is hard to dispute in empirical terms. The ‘first stage’ – the ‘political kingdom’ – was substantively reached in 1994. A ‘second stage’ -- economic justice -- is long overdue. And the persuasiveness of the SA comprador class -- ranging across the main intra-ANC divide (i.e., from the Zuma-Gupta ‘Zupta’ patronage machine to the neoliberal Treasury bloc) -- represents the main barrier to the revolution’s second stage.
With South Africa in a profound state of crisis, it is tragic that in spite of Numsa and EFF efforts as well as SACP-Cosatu anti-capitalist rhetoric, only two narratives dominate the political space: first, Zupta and second, neoliberal good-governance. Hence, breaking through with tried and tested NDR-speak might well work, and leaders like Malema, Jim and Vavi certainly know their constituencies far better than I do.
To address the left intelligentsia, have those middle-class Marxists (like me) made profound errors that could distract Numsa from gathering its strength? Of course. Every initiative by South Africa’s far left has failed to attract working-class membership, much less leadership. Unlike the North African cases in 2011, the mix of that intelligentsia, progressive NGOs, social movements, frustrated citizens and creative labour activists in South Africa have not found anything like the mass support of EFF and Numsa.

It may not be the 2019 election, but in South Africa there will be a point when looking beyond the rhetorical battleground and the immediate cadre-gathering becomes far more important than the current conjuncture. At a time much closer to a crunch moment, when alliances are really vital to make, might the masses from Numsa workplaces take to the streets in combination -- not contradiction -- with the left movements’ regroupment trajectory?
After all, what an excellent period to be an activist (or like me, an armchair academic) promoting justice in South Africa:

· Numsa hasn’t folded to repression and divide-and-conquer and still holds up the strongest class challenge to capitalist power; the Food and Allied Workers Union walked away from Cosatu, and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union wasn’t beat back into oblivion during the 2014-16 mining crisis;

· the working class as a whole is still considered the world’s most militant at a time SA inequality has soared and the capitalist class is considered (by PricewaterhouseCoopers) to be the world’s most corrupt;

· the EFF have grown stronger and less politically erratic;

· the new terrain of Gauteng urban politics (where EFF and ANC will likely compete to support – if not catalyze – community protests) will get very interesting as contradictions continue to emerge;

· communities continue protesting at very high rates over service non-delivery or excessive pricing or politicians’ arrogance, notwithstanding the state’s ever-stronger repressive and surveillance techniques;

· although student movement momentum recently faltered after a spectacular 2015 national debut, they have lots more potential for future mobilizations and alliances; and

· social movements, the Right2Know coalition, women, LGBTI activists, Equal Education, Treatment Action Campaign and other protesters make their voices heard and often win important battles along the way.

For 2017, can the infrastructure supporting all of this (even including support structures inhabited by obscure academics and others reading this) expand at the rate needed, so as to move forward as quickly as reality will demand?

Conclusion: a whirlwind to catch

The African uprisings since 2011 have taught progressives that in the pro-democracy and social justice scenarios of mass demonstrations that made several countries so fertile for a change of state power – Gambia (2017), Burkina Faso (2014), Senegal (2012) and Tunisia (2011), for example -- the moment of change comes without warning. There is typically a build-up in social grievances and an explosion. The aftermath includes a profound threat of counter-revolution, which in Burkina Faso was repelled in 2015, but which in Egypt and Libya have been successful in suppressing democratic, progressive social movements since 2011 (in both cases with Western imperial aid and arms to the counter-revolution).

Will South Africa find itself, as Moeletsi Mbeki predicted [13], facing “Tunisia Day” – a kind of joyous (yet threatening to elites) uprising such as January 2011 -- as early as 2020? Can Africans update the threat, to encompass the extraordinary advances that have become evident in post-dictator regimes, or in sites like South Africa itself where the overthrow of (Moeletsi’s brother) Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies in 2004 raised life expectancy from 52 to 62 thanks to nearly four million people getting medicines for free?

“The only strategy it seems to me worth following is a non-dogmatic appreciation of the various forces.”

The sense of stop-start progress and regress in so many sites, including South Africa, reflects in part how poorly the working-class, poor, progressive middle class, social movements and other democrats have made alliances. The Africans uprising against the neoliberal Africa Rising strategy of export- and resource-dependency, hasn’t yet generated a firm ideology. Such an ideology was much more apparent when in the 1960s-70s the phrase “self-reliance” accompanied much leftist discourse. The Lagos Plan of Action even reflected this ideological approach.

It may be that an eco-socialism associated with Ubuntu philosophy and deglobalising economies will emerge. It may be that some uniquely South African version of the Marxist-Leninist framing will come from Numsa. Nothing can be readily predicted in the current conjuncture. The only strategy it seems to me worth following is a non-dogmatic appreciation of the various forces, so that whatever principles, analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances that do emerge on the left can be treated with both respect and comradely critique.

The debate over Numsa may not yet have arrived at that healthier stage of inquiry, but at least there is a debate and an inquiry -- the first steps to reclaiming some sort of profound ideological breakthrough so that the pessimism of the Fanon and Cabral warnings becomes a genuine Afro-optimism worthy of the ongoing struggles by so many African activists.

Patrick Bond is Professor of Political Economy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
End notes

[1] These are often unreliable, as regularly demonstrated by University of Johannesburg researchers Jane Duncan, Peter Alexander, Carin Runcimann and Trevor Ngwane.

[2] This is “the longest-running and most extensive survey of its kind, capturing the opinions of business leaders around the world on a broad range of topics for which statistics are unreliable, outdated, or non-existent for many countries.” Although Africa is the continent with least coverage, at least several dozen executives were surveyed in 34 countries, with Rwanda’s survey pool of 120 the highest in Africa (the US had 485 executives surveyed), and Gabon’s 33 was the lowest in Africa and internationally. Of interest to us, the specific question each year is “In your country, how do you characterize labor-employer relations? 1 = generally confrontational; 7 = generally cooperative.”

[3] Disclosure: I attended the Numsa congress as an occasional volunteer to the union in the “Friends of Numsa” category so the next pages are written with at least some sort of bias, albeit with no role in crafting the M-L language discussed below.

http://blackagendareport.com/state_of_revolution_in_south_africa

That shit was completely unnecessary relevant to the material, this midget is disappointed. And it strikes me that this adoption of anti-communist rhetoric is as much, maybe more, symptom rather than cause. Certainly the promise has been vastly disappointed.

But if we are frank, Numsa has a massive vessel plowing through choppy waves above deep, torturous currents in unchartered waters, and the left intelligentsia occupies a dinghy limited to well-known shallows. (The latter site is where someone like me typically splashes, as conditions haven’t matured yet in South Africa to play anything much more than what becomes a substitutionist or worse, ventriloquist function, instead of what can be termed [11] a properly “scholactivist” role.)

Aside from the gratuitous Stalin bashing, this paragraph alone is indicative of what is wrong. The purple prose is putrid and it wraps up with this bit of offal: "conditions haven’t matured yet in South Africa to play anything much more than what becomes a substitutionist or worse, ventriloquist function, instead of what can be termed [11] a properly “scholactivist” role."
"Ventriloquist?" The fuck? "Scholactivist?" Bloody fucking hell.

This sentence is, for me, the kiss of death: "Bearing that in mind, the M-L rhetoric makes sense, because it appears to be the case that: ..."

Marxism-Leninism "makes sense because it appears to be the case that"? Marxism-Leninism either "makes sense" or it doesn't. He is saying that if certain conditions were otherwise, M-L would not "make sense". Here's why he thinks M-L might make sense;
"because it appears to be the case that "the SACP-within-the-ANC is in its dying days (with continual rumours of Party leaders in the Cabinet suffering a forthcoming purge, and with the youth putting walk-out pressure on the party bosses), and Cosatu’s failures on nearly all policy and political fronts could take several important member unions to the brink not only of demanding that Zuma be replaced as president (he probably won’t be before 2019) but also of breaking the Alliance within a year or so." So this is why Marxism-Leninism might make sense.

This guy doesn't even make it to the Trot level...