Chris wrote:
>To extract from Patrick Bond's long post of 20th June:
>
>>One work from the left ANC tradition (which
>>I had the privilege to edit), Mzwanele Mayekiso's
>>Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New
>>South Africa (New York, Monthly Review, 1996),
>>makes a plausible case that many more insurgent
>>moments and a deeper transformation were
>>feasible, still within the scope of the ANC/SACP
>>National Democratic Revolution.
>
>To what extent is there still relevance in the ANC/SACP concept of
>the National Democratic Revolution?
>
>Is there indeed scope for radical democratic initiatives that take
>the National Democratic Revolution forward and have a socialist
>content or prepare the ground for socialism?
Pat Bond's work suggests a pretty coherent political program
(populist-Keynesian + good & clean government): decommodify goods for
basic needs (food, water, shelter, health, education, etc.); create
the home market based on mass consumption & aim for
domestically-fueled development, rather than export-led development;
de-link from external financial domination, which leads to
speculative activities (stocks, real estate, etc.) & drains capital
away from productive domestic investment to financial centers; deepen
cross-border links among social movements, so as to work out a
framework for resolutions of problems that straddle national borders
(e.g., water use rights, industrial pollution, etc.) & to form
regional trade & industrial linkages; build a slim but strong state,
rooting out corruption & diminishing ethnic rivalry for patronage
jobs; and so on. It's a political program still in search of
politically unified agents to carry it out.
The main reason the Bond program won't work in the existing ANC/SACP
framework is that the transition to what may be called the second
wave of neoliberalism has been effected by the ANC/SACP's
post-apartheid transition to formal democracy. Transition to formal
democracy became a vehicle for second-wave neoliberalism in many
other cases -- the end of dictatorships & civil wars in Latin America
(with a few exceptions like Columbia); the end of one-party rule in
the East (the USSR, Eastern Europe, & the Balkans); the ouster of
Marcos in the Philippines; etc. -- though the first wave of
neoliberalism was often implemented by dictatorships & one-party
states (e.g., Chile). Pat says such political transitions were
rooted in the overaccumulation crisis developing in the late 60s:
Pat Bond wrote:
>>Briefly, if we seek to understand why the
>>condition for political reform was not capitalist
>>growth, but rather stagnation (and hence the need
>>for capitalists to explore a new export-oriented
>>route to accumulation), a classical Marxist
>>approach to cycles of capital accumulation may be
>>more helpful. Cycles of accumulation are the
>>waves of investment and growth which are
>>invariably followed by periods of excess capacity
>>and stagnation, often referred to as
>>"overaccumulation crisis." (South Africa
>>experienced such cycles throughout its modern
>>history, and has suffered persistent, worsening
>>symptoms of overaccumulation since the late
>>1960s.)
The expansion of mass consumption & regional linkages (in opposition
to elite consumption & subordination to financial centers) under the
Bond program (if ever implemented -- but who bells the cat?) can
presumably overcome the tendency to overaccumulation inherent in
capitalism in a fashion unlike neoliberalism, while creating the
politico-economic foundation for a future socialist transformation
(should an opportunity ever arise).
Pat has yet to solve one of the first practical subjective problems:
political agents in favor of a populist program (e.g., land-hungry
rural masses) may not be the same as those who yearn for good & clean
government (e.g., liberal petty-bourgeoisie & unionized urban civil
servants). Cf. Zimbabwe.
Yoshie
