NEW SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW 2
NEW PATHS, OLD COMPROMISES?
EDITED BY JOHN DANIEL, PRISHANI NAIDOO, DEVAN PILLAY AND ROGER SOUTHALL
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
Published edition © Wits University Press 2011
Compilation © Edition editors 2011
Chapters © Individual contributors 2011
First published 2011
ISBN 978-1-86814-541-6 (print)
ISBN 978-1-86814-793-9 (digital)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover image: Nikki Rixon / Africa Media Online
Project managed by Monica Seeber
Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty) Ltd.
Preface
This second volume of the New South African Review is composed of original chapters dealing with contemporary issues in South African politics, economy and society. The new series, drawing upon the tradition of critical scholarship established by its predecessor South African Review of the 1980s and 1990s, seeks to present diverse views and perspectives across a range of concerns vital to our country. The present edition brings together contributions from authors from an array of universities and civil society organisations, and while there is much that is complementary between them, there is no intention that the New South African Review should assume a particular intellectual ‘line’: rather, the idea is to promote intellectual debate and diversity.
The New South African Review is housed in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, where three of the editors earn our keep. We should like to thank our colleagues in the Department for their constant encouragement in this project, as well as administrators Ingrid Chunilall and Laura Bloem for their constant willingness to take on the various mundane tasks connected with it. We should also like to acknowledge the vital financial assistance offered by the University’s ‘SPARC’ Funds for special projects, and the support given to our application for that assistance by the Dean of Humanities, Professor Tawana Kupe. In addition, we note the enthusiastic backing and wise publishing advice extended by Veronica Klipp, director of Wits University Press, and the valuable contribution made by Monica Seeber, who served as the technical editor and, finally, we are indebted to all those anonymous referees who dispensed Olympian judgements upon the various chapters in draft form.
John Daniel (School of International Training, Durban), Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay and Roger Southall (all Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand).
Introduction
New paths, old (com)promises?
Prishani Naidoo
THE PROMISE OF LIBERATION
Of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP)’s stated aspiration to ‘fundamental transformation’ (African National Congress (ANC), 1994), an essay by the late Harold Wolpe (1995) noted that the ways in which the document ‘eradicated sources of contradiction and conflict by asserting a consensual model of society’ (Hart, 2007) meant that the very notion of fundamental transformation threatened to become a source of contestation. Seventeen years on, not only has this prediction turned out to be remarkably accurate, but politics in South Africa today seems ever more sharply polarised over the content of ‘the promise of liberation’ (Veriava, 2011).
As the ANC government has attempted to perfect and link its growth and development strategies, increasingly entrenching its neoliberal approach (from the RDP to the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (Gear) to the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa) and now the New Growth Path (NGP)), it has attempted to define the promise and the possibilities for its realisation according to the rationalities and limitations of this model. In so doing, it has come up against community and social movements that have put forward different understandings of the promise and asserted that many of the ANC’s claims to realising the promise have been compromises, aimed at ensuring the reproduction of the fragile coalition between business, labour and government that has determined the nature of the transition (Ballard et al., 2006; Gibson, 2006; McKinley and Naidoo, 2004).
While in the pre-2006 period the leadership of the ANC Alliance was at pains to silence any hint of criticism of its policies from within its ranks, by 2007 and the showdown at Polokwane, differences and conflicts between members and factions of the alliance were being played out in the media, allowing it to re-present itself as a contested space in which debate and critique are cultivated, permitting change to happen from within the alliance, a throwback to its critics who had, on the basis of the experiences of the late 1990s and early 2000s,1 declared the ANC Alliance to be a space in which dissent and disagreement is silenced and contained.2 With the triumph of the ‘Zuma-camp’ over the ‘Mbeki-camp’ at the ANC’s national congress in Polokwane, the stage was set for supporters of the alliance to argue that possibilities had opened up in this moment for more left-leaning agendas to gain voice. In this volume, Devan Pillay offers a close analysis of relations within the alliance, pre- and post-Polokwane, posing a number of questions for the future of the alliance and for left politics more generally, which will be taken up later in this introduction.
While, as Pillay argues, little has changed in the policies of the Zuma-led government or party to suggest any dramatic reversal in the macroeconomic principles they hold, President Zuma’s appointment of the former trade unionist, Ebrahim Patel, to the position of minister of Economic Development signalled for many on the left the possibility of a shift in thinking about the economy, a shift that would prioritise the interests of a working class experiencing deteriorating life conditions as a result of rising costs of living, together with rising unemployment and the introduction of more flexible forms of labour.
NEW APPROACHES TO WORK
But what is ‘new’ about the so-called New Growth Path? By its own description, its ‘newness’ lies in its development of a model for economic growth in which ‘labour absorption’ (in the form of the long-term goal of ‘decent work’) becomes central. However, as Eddie Webster points out in his chapter in this volume, decent work is a goal that predates the NGP, stretching far back in the history of the ANC Alliance and originating in the policies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the late 1990s. Hardly, then, something new. However, what is new about its prioritisation in the NGP is its linking of economic growth to job creation as a new development path and, as such, it calls, for example,