The State is never neutral. Development is class struggle. Chipkin Redacted A short version, with additional links, of Ivor Chipkin's working paper "The State, Capture and Revolution in Contemporary South Africa", written in July, 2016. Chipkin's full text can be downloaded by clicking here <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/State%2C%20Capture%20and%20Revo lution%20in%20SA%2C%20Chipkin%2C%202016.pdf> . Introductory parts It is difficult to gauge accurately the scale of corruption in South Africa. It is likely that the problem is smaller than often reported. However, the discourse on corruption betrays a real concern about the loss of autonomy of public administrations. The "struggle against corruption" in South Africa is really a struggle about the form of the state. Contemporary definitions of the term "corruption" are a late eighteenth century innovation associated with specific activities that threatened to subvert the integrity of public office. Edmund Burke's campaign against the corruption of the East India Company in the late eighteenth century [is] the foundation of British, nineteenth century liberal ideas of government. Redactor's note: The campaign of Burke against Warren Hastings, and Macaulay's writing about it) is quoted prominently in the conclusion of Kwame Nkrumah's "Neo-Colonialism, Last Stage of Imperialism", where Nkrumah cites the whole affair as a demonstration of the continuing gross hypocrisy of the British Empire. (click here to download appropriate excerpts of Nkrumah <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/20101a%2C%20Kwame%20Nkrumah%2C% 20Neo-Colonialism%2C%20the%20Last%20Stage%20of%20Imperialism%2C%20excerpts%2 C%201965.pdf> 's work) The World Bank, then under the leadership of James Wolfensohn, put the issue of corruption on the agenda in 1996 as part of a broader focus on 'good governance'. The focus on corruption from the 1990s is the handmaiden of a liberal politics of rolling back the State. This was the intention of structural adjustment exercises undertaken by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in many African countries going back even further, to the 1980s (and to the beginnings, in the 1970s, of the "neo-liberal" and "Washington Consensus" policies as we know them - see Colin Leys, "Underdevelopment in Kenya", CU's extracts - click here to download <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/13073%2C%20Leys%2C%20Underdevel opment%20in%20Kenya%2C%201975%2C%20C8%2C%20Contradictions%20of%20Neo-colonia lism.pdf> ) Chipkin says: "corrupt practices are also discursive practices, that is, that they express political-ideological commitments." By saying so, and in what follows, Chipkin is equally, or more so, pointing to the "discursive" nature of anti-corruption. The anti-corruption campaign is not at all a matter of received, universal moral values, but instead it is intended to justify a hard, deliberate and inescapable enforcement of Imperial power upon South Africa. Neutrality Whereas the state is never neutral, yet the bourgeois state requires a credible pretence at neutrality, and it requires the full subordination of the instruments of state power. The bourgeois state worries about the "treason of the clerks" whereby they would not so much steal a proportion of assets, but would fully redirect the state's energies towards non-ruling-class interests. Chipkin says: What we call bureaucracy today can be understood as a set of techniques of government to reduce the opportunities for officials to pursue their own interests. They substituted for practices that were based on biopower. In the Ottoman Empire, that is, civil servants were often European slaves, captured in war. Their lack of pedigree in Ottoman society made it near impossible for them to pursue wealth and status by marriage. [other examples are given] Therein lies the 'secret' of meritocratic recruitment (and other bureaucratic measures). It goes some way to attract smart and qualified officials for their posts in government, but that is not its primary function. Its purpose is to create the conditions for a neutral civil service. It is not about efficiency and effectiveness, but it is about creating a civil service that is not allowed to express or exert an interest of its own. Yet this civil service is in large measure identical to the political middle class upon which the bourgeois state, from another point of view, wishes to rest its political and electoral power. Impossibility of Neutrality Quoting Erik-Olin Wright, Chipkin says: Should the state be considered an essentially neutral apparatus that merely needs to be 'captured' by a working-class socialist political party for it to serve the interests of the working class, or is the apparatus of the state in a capitalist society a distinctively capitalist apparatus that cannot possibly be 'used' by the working class, and as a result, must be destroyed and replaced by a radically different form of the state? (Wright, 1983, p. 195). Lenin provided an emphatic answer. The state must be smashed and new kind of apparatus built Middle passages Chipkin discusses the movements to and fro between the intentions and the actions of the ANC governments since 1994, in which it can be seen that results were not as intended. As much as the aim appeared to be the forging of a partisan instrument, yet the actual result was greater autonomy of the civil servants. Neoliberalism and neutrality This part of Chipkin's paper is very surprising. It tells us about the "Senior Management Service". I quote (redacted): Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), was for what it called a 'Professional Management Corps" The DPSA acted quickly to implement the recommendation. It established the Baskin commission in 2000 to determine what it might involve and then in 2001 launched the Senior Management Service (SMS) - its name for the 'professional management corps'. It is necessary to say that this has its origin in the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite (Tony Blair's Third-way) critique of the welfare state. By the time of South Africa's transition to democracy a cluster of metaphors had come to dominate in the field of public administration. Bureaucracies are now said to be wasteful and inefficient. Ultimately, they are 'out-of-date' - a term used frequently in the academic and policy literature at the time as well. In contrast, 'public managers' are freed-up from 'red tape'. They are innovative and enterprising. They are focused on outputs and outcomes, rather than on following rules. In summary, public management is 'modern' (Fraser-Moleketi: 2006). Ultimately, the creation of the Senior Management Service was associated with a host of measures to dis-embed senior officials from routine and rule-based practices and to give them discretion over as wide-ranging a set of activities as strategising how best to discharge the department's function (in South African parlance, the design of the 'service delivery model'), determining the structure of their own departments and financial management. The Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), passed in 1999 to regulate financial affairs in the national government and in provincial governments, for example, wanted to 'let managers manage' by giving heads of departments wide discretion over spending (PFMA: Chapter 5, S36(a), S38). Senior Managers were also to be highly paid. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund reports that today South African public servants are amongst the best remunerated in the developing world (IMF, p.76). Yet the crucial element in this mix, recruitment of staff, remained a political prerogative creating, as we have heard above, conflict in the 'political-administrative' interface. It is not hard to see why the idea of a Senior Management Service was approved quickly in cabinet. It was an attractive vehicle through which the ANC government could drive political control of the administration. What is more, it resonated with international 'best practice'. Political control, in other words, did not have to come at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness. So it seemed, anyway. Originally intended to have no more than 3000 members, the Senior Management Service already had 7 283 people by 2005, most of them in national departments (DPSA: 2006, p.37). Decentralisation This part of Chipkin's paper is equally surprising. It describes an enormous change in the South African civil service that is hardly understood in journalistic or in political (e.g. SACP) circles. I quote (redacted): The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) has done the leading work on procurement in South Africa. The lead researcher in this study was Ryan Brunette. Historically, PARI notes, the system of procurement in South Africa was highly centralized. Prior to 1994 various South African governments followed the international norm in establishing and running a State Tender Board. In addition the then four provinces had their own provincial tender boards. The process of decentralisation would proceed in earnest after 2003. The various tender boards were abolished and a Framework for Supply Chain Management, was published as part of the regulations for the PFMA. Responsibility for procurement was devolved down to departmental level. We have already seen that in terms of the PFMA departmental heads became 'accounting officers' with wide financial discretion, including responsibility for the procurement of goods and services. The implementation of the new system has been associated with two major developments: Firstly," notes the PARI report, "procurement has become one of the largest tasks, arguably the single largest function, of government departments" (PARI, p.34). Today the estimated expenditure by government departments on goods and services is about R500 billion ($34 billion), more than half of national expenditure (after debt repayments). In other words, the lion's share of government's day-to-day responsibilities are outsourced to third-party service providers, usually private companies. Secondly, "the procurement of goods and services takes place through a system that is highly fragmented and decentralised. In some cases, the very outsourcing function is itself outsourced" (Ibid, p.34). The result is that in South Africa today "there are literally tens of thousands of sites and locations where tenders are issued and awarded and where contracts are managed for the performance of all manner of services and functions" (Ibid., p.34). The extent of decentralisation is extraordinary relative to South Africa's past. Furthermore, the procurement system is widely believed to be responsible for massive unevenness in the performance of government units - so much depends on how well departments can select and manage contractors - and for corruption in government. Conclusions Chipkin notes that for the ANC, the solution to corruption lies in internal organisational renewal: to reinforce the organisation's own culture and to attract members invested in the broader vision of the organisation. But he says: In having displaced responsibility for discipline officials from the public service to the ANC itself, the organisation has lost control of the process. I quote: The definition of corruption in South African law and as well as that used by most international bodies, from Transparency International to the World Bank rests, this paper has argued, on a liberal conception of the State, distinguishing sharply between private interests and the public good. On these terms state power is an 'empty place' that is temporarily filled when a political party wins an election and forms a government to give expression to its idea of the public good. The role of the civil service is to implement the government of the day's policies faithfully and not to develop its own interests. To secure such neutrality a variety of techniques have been developed - from meritocratic recruitment, to rule-based routines. These techniques are what Weber called bureaucracy. Corruption happens, on these terms, when civil servants depart from these administrative standards and rules to pursue actions that benefit themselves personally, their families and/or the private associations and/or political parties that they support. In South Africa since 1994, however, we have seen that this conception of the state has been explicitly rejected in favour of another. The ANC has long believed that as the authentic representative of the 'people' it has a privileged right to define the public good (Chipkin: 2007, 2015). This is why concrete steps have been taken to reduce the autonomy of public administrations in relation to executive authority. When officials break the law or violate departmental rules in response to a political commandment, we have, not so much a moral or ethical failure as an act of political discipline. Hence, what is corruption on liberal terms is public virtue on the ANC's. CU Conclusion Chipkin thinks that "the system would potentially work if the ANC was able to hold its officials to account and to discipline them." This is a hollow claim. The history of all hitherto-existing societies is a history of class struggle. So let's finish with the short passage from Marx's 18th Brumaire, quoted by Colin Leys in the above-referenced work, concerning the hopeless, doomed vanity of class forces which considered themselves, in 1849, to be the embodiment of the people: "The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people's rights; what interests them is the people's interest. Accordingly, when a struggle is im-pending, they do not have to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not have to weigh their own resources too critically . ." [The Eighteenth Brumaire, op. cit. 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