National Democratic Revolution, Part 9a
Transformation, Not a Balancing Act
The main text of this part is still Joe Slovo’s “The SA
Working Class and the NDR”. The supporting texts begin with “We Need
Transformation, Not a Balancing Act” (attached), published nine years after
Slovo’s pamphlet, in 1997, the year following the beginning of what has since
become known as the “1996 Class Project”, of which this document is an initial
critique.
In the mean time, the SACP and the ANC had been legalised in
1990, the UDF had been disbanded, the CODESA talks had taken place, SACP
General Secretary Chris Hani had been assassinated, the ANC had been elected to
government in 1994, and Joe Slovo had passed away, on 6 January 1995.
All of this triumph and tragedy, and a lot more, constituted
part of the National Democratic Revolution, not least the building of the ANC
and the SACP as legal, open, organised structures around this large country
with its population of approximately 40 million in the mid-1990s (now nearly 50
million).
This SACP
document looked at a number of other documents published at that time,
including from the ANC Youth League, from COSATU, and from the SACP itself, but
in particular from the ANC in the form of a November, 1996 document called “The State and Social
Transformation” (note that the Young Communist League was not
re-established until 2003).
Nzimande
and Cronin were saying that the ANC document stood out from the others in terms
of its class-neutral “balancing act” approach. They conclude that the document
should rather have been called “The State and Social Accommodation”.
Another way
of putting this would be to say that the ANC document in question was selling
class collaboration and not class alliance. “The State and Social
Transformation” was selling the end of class struggle instead of the
prosecution of the class struggle by alliance with favourable forces, and
against unfavourable forces.
There is a
difficulty in Nzimande’s and Cronin’s document. On the third page, under
“Dealing with capital”, two conceptions of capital are described: “factors of
production” and “capital meaning capitalists”. The authors say that in the ANC
document these two conceptions are elided or confused, giving the impression
that factors of production can only come attached to capitalists, which is not
so.
What is mainly
absent is the understanding of capital as a dynamic relationship, and the
“accumulation” of capital as being the reproduction of that relationship and of
all of the support to that relationship, including the grooming of the working
class and the dominance of banks and markets.
Even in
terms of pure money, what the capitalist essentially does with it is to throw
it into circulation, not hoard it. Unlike the accumulated wealth of the miser,
which is not capital, though it may be money.
The
circulation of money as capital proceeds via the purchase of labour-power and
the extraction of surplus-value. Therefore, we do not escape the reproduction
of capital by making the state the owner of the capital.
The
revolutionary escape from capital is achieved by accumulating the prerequisites
of socialism, which mainly consist of the ever-increasing ability of masses of
people to resolve and act together, consciously, and scientifically. This is
the “Democratic” part of the National Democratic Revolution.
Nzimande’s
and Cronin’s document does arrive at this point. It does, at the end, confirm
that the free-willing collective Subject is both the maker and the product of
revolution.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Transformation
not a balancing act, 1997, Nzimande and Cronin.
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