/ 12 March 2010

Begin at the bottom left

One man won't change society. The masses must return to the battlefield to secure a socialist alternative.

For someone like me, nearly a year of a Jacob Zuma presidency would be an easy, triumphant moment to ask the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Cosatu whether the Zuma path to power was worth it. But this would amount to cheap politicking and lead nowhere.

But there is an important lesson: change cannot ever be the outcome of the big man. Fundamentally it is a product of the way in which power is configured in a society.

The Zuma path was not about the reconfiguration of capitalist power or a break with ex-president Thabo Mbeki’s neoliberal and technicist approach.

In pursuing the Zuma path both the SACP and Cosatu had a blind spot: they ignored a basic issue concerning the conditions under which political elites in capitalist societies have been forced to advance developmental programmes. The removal of Mbeki has not changed the framing pre-1994 property relations.

Change in personnel at the top is useless in dealing with class power that is rooted in the monopoly ownership of the economy, the power of financial capital, the exploitation of cheap black labour and a permissive state. As Adam Habib put it to Amandla: “Individuals, wherever they are, simply reflect the institutional constraints of the balance of power within — society”.

Indeed, the removal of Mbeki could have opened up a space to create the political conditions conducive to thoroughgoing change if a mass movement built around basic demands and transformative policies had accompanied it.

Even going forward, the SACP-Cosatu focus remains on “keeping our man” in the job. Still absent in their strategy is a willingness to consider a political project outside the ANC.

The past 11 or so months of a Zuma presidency have shown us a government that is not about to challenge the inordinate power of capital. This can be seen on so many fronts: a commitment to two-tier labour-market policies; a lack of responsiveness to the needs of local communities; a foreign policy aligned to global corporate interests, such as at the Copenhagen climate change negotiations; and in the countryside entrenching the power of undemocratic tribal authorities at the expense of the rights of modern citizenship and, particularly, the rights of women.

Within a neoliberal framework, the global crisis has also cut Zuma’s space to manoeuvre.

But that cannot be an excuse as Mbeki faced similar pressures, and the discrediting of neoliberalism offers space for alternative policies.

This past year has also shown us a besieged, unstrategic and unstable ANC-SACP-Cosatu alliance leadership. Even in subjective terms, the negative psychology of such an encircled political leadership reinforces its lack of political will and incapacity to build popular power, undo the neoliberal economic policies of the Mbeki era and energetically drive a genuinely transformative agenda.

Meanwhile, capital has not rested — it has continued to act on and through the state to block any post-Polokwane transformational momentum that may have been flickering. As part of its strategy, capital can actually afford to have an SACP and Cosatu blowing hot and cold — in reality they are co-opted into what remains a neoliberal government. To illustrate this: the potentially transformative National Health Insurance proposal is now tilted towards becoming an accumulation site that could address the profit crisis facing private hospitals and medical aid schemes instead of delivering a universal, decommodified and quality public health system.

Another glaring example concerns the continued power of the coal industry to determine our energy policy. Such a subversion is possible largely because, at critical times in the post-Polokwane period, key moments and platforms in which to mobilise and harness the voices, interests and power of the popular forces were lost. In addition the space has increased for the political elite to ride shamelessly on mass support to open the doors of wealth accumulation wider — as can be seen in the defence of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema as a deserving black businessman.

The Zuma path represents a serious strategic shortcoming on the part of both the SACP and Cosatu. Objectively, the trajectory of the Zuma path has fashioned the political role of the ANC to be about managing a more legitimate capitalist society and state, while keeping the SACP and Cosatu onside.

A populist ANC in rhetoric and yet conservative in its economic policies is consistent with this objective. This is an ANC that will rant and rave rather than unlock a radical programme of redistribution.

This critique is not to deny the ANC-led alliance’s potential still to advance its social delivery programme, which would improve the dire conditions of the people. Although such a legitimate programme is important and should be supported, it would still fall far short of the very necessary anti-systemic transformation of the social, economic and political foundations of this society.

Outside the ANC-led alliance, the post-Polokwane scenario has also underlined the broader weakness of the left and the mass movement. Mass protests largely amount to winning piecemeal concessions from the state rather than creating political conditions conducive to thoroughgoing change. There is still no other left-wing political pole that could contribute to the building of a mass movement that would challenge crisis-ridden capitalism and struggle for a feasible, socialist alternative.

In the face of all this, it is not left-wing infantility to underline the need for a serious class project that would begin at the bottom and be a vehicle to meet immediate demands and build a mass movement for transformative policies.

No matter what the balance of forces is inside the ANC-led alliance, without such a project there will be no social force with the weight and voice to block compromises with capital and secure radical changes in favour of the working class. As any trade unionist knows: “What you have not won on the battle­field, you are unlikely to win at the negotiating table.”

If anything, this is the language that the SACP and Cosatu should have no difficulty recalling and heeding. The future demands a course of struggle that goes beyond the limitations of the Zuma path.

Mazibuko K Jara was recently expelled from the SACP and is part of the conveners of the Conference of the Left