shape of 'post
NUMSA demonstration: their union leaders are central to political debate In his first speech after his release, Nelson Mandela defended the notion of nationalisation as an important tool of economic policy of a post-apartheid government. The response of the South African Stock Exchange was to drop sharply.
Since that time the idea has been knocked back and forth in vague formulations at press conferences or during rallies. No clear line has emerged. Yet, paradoxically, negotiations have begun between the ANC and the government.
However what has surfaced, most notably in a discussion in the Weekly Mail newspaper, has been a discussion about the mixed economy. This conception has also been at the centre of discussions between the leadership of the largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and the South African Communist Party-
Alec Erwin and some other NUMSA leaders have tried to formulate an economic choice for a "post apartheid' society or state.
There is a major problem with these terms. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-Auqust 1990
FEATURES apartheid' South Africa By Peter Blumer The South African ruling class has decided that it wants to get rid of apartheid (which doesn't mean that it wants to get rid of racial capitalism, or that it can do so). But the state cannot be defined socially solely in terms of the dominant economic policy; it is defined by the social relations of production and thus by the class which rules. This may appear elementary, but this type of conceptual sliding has already led to some European economists of the so-called 'regulation school' to reduce the characterisation of the state to the dominant mode of regulation.
Thus for them the state is no longer capitalist or bourgeois state, but a Fordian or post-Fordian state. Apartheid is today the specific form of regulating capitalist development in South Africa and consequently terms such as "apartheid state" and post-apartheid state" are used. The problem is that the whole class character of the state is left aside in this type of analysis. So the problem is posed: what is the social nature of a state which could totally eradicate racial discrimination in the country?
The South African Communist Party has specialised for decades in going round this
issue and giving no clear answer. However the problem is that now trade union leaders like Alec Erwin are now passing increasingly over to the method of CP leader Joe Slovo, and saying nothing on the class character of the 'post-apartheid state". At the same time, NUMSA also maintains - as we do - the idea of workers" control and planning as a general formula. But a number of problems arise from this.
Workers' control is first and foremost an expression of workers' struggles in a phase of revolutionary uptum. Workers can impose their veto over the bosses on a whole series of questions. In certain cases they can run factories under their control and thus begin to demonstrate that the working class can reorganise production. Such a movement can spark off an insurrectional general strike, as part of the first phase of the seizure of power. Unfortunately this is not on the agenda today.
Later, workers' control can take the form of workers" management of production. In this case it is laying the foundations of workers" self-management in a society that has begun its revolution. The capitalist state has been broken and a socially new state has been built on its ruins. Within this framework workers" self-management leads to national democratic planning.
But is this what is going to come out of the negotiations? Obviously not!
This leads to a central confusion, as when Bernie Fanaroff, another NUMSA leader, maintains that because 'the old commandist system of state planning has failed', a new decentralised form of state planning has to be established: *workers in the factories and businesses, for example, can push their bosses to give subsidies and grants to improve the housing and education system. They can also
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push the businessmen to put pressure on the state to spend more resources in this area! (Weekly Mail, 9 March) Here we can see theoretical confusion. Emptying the marxist theory of the state of its substance leads some comrades to think in terms of the organic mutation of the state rather than in terms of a social rupture. For Joe Slovo this type of mutation is clear. Thus in Marxism Today he states: * The question is real- ly whether the private sector of international capital is allowed to be- the dominating come society force guiding towards the future, or whether the dominating force is the state structure and an economy which is moving towards greater egalitarianism.* But which state? Ob viously there are two pos- interpretations: a sible radical interpretion for those in the trade union movement who are still committed to planning and workers' control; and a left social democratic, neo-Keynesian interpre- tion with state interven- tion and regulation by ... IDAF the capitalist state. Another error which is made in the discussion is to use the term "mixed economy interchangeably when referring to such contexts as different as Nicaragua (where the Sandistas termed their economy as being "mixed" under state majority control, linked to agrarian reform and a state monopoly of foreign trade in the middle of a full scale revolution) and South Africa, a capitalist country in which the revolutionary seizure of power is not immediately posed. Some trade union leaders are justifying their rapprochement with the SACP by using the examples of the Soviet economic reforms. In the March 30 Weekly Mail, Alec Erwin writes: "command planning can achieve structural change, but causes stagnation in productivity and living standards; the market imposes an efficiency discipline on producers and in- variety and quality if carefully creases managed." Paqe 26
FEATURES Workers defy state of emergency in Cape Town, September 1989 "variety' and 'quality" but again an important in a 'post-apartheid society". important section of production - once one The social function of commodities, their use into account the basic needs of human society. therefore market production is organised first expected profits.
SAMWU
Erwin does not clarify the notions of difference has to be established between those who foresee the introduction of market laws in an economy such as that of the USSR - where there are presently no capitalists, still less a arrogantly. capital market - and those who, imitating the Soviet discussion, propose to use market laws
Next it has to be remembered that "quality" and 'variety" are not abstract values - for an begins to discuss society's basic social needs. value, is not determined by the market taking
deeds not words. The market tests production a posteriori, and of all around exchange values in relation to
The very soft intervention proposed by
Alec Erwin will not stop enterprises making form windsurfing boards rather than school desks if the possible profits from the former are big- ger than for the latter. The altemative to this posi- tion is not socialism tomorrow morning'. What we are talking about is the transition to socialism and about what state will lead this transition: not a state without social content, not a "democratic" state, but a state dominated by the working class. All these discussions are at the centre of the political rap prochement between certain members of the traditional trade union left and the SACP. It has been said that the SACPs has broken with Stalinism, expressed in particular in Joe Slovo's Socialism pamphlet Has Failed?. This is not our inter- pretation. In the first place the pamphlet (see Socialist Outlook No 24) is only a very limited and partial break with the SACP's traditions. But we also have to look at the evolution of the trade union left wing. From the evidence that we have seen, this trade union left is starting to develop a classical economistic" perspective, that is cut off from a real analysis of class contradic- tions: a kind of new utopia based on self-intoxication engendered by the process begun with the negotiations. So who is moving to who? The question is important be- cause the movement towards the SACP is also justified in terms of building a mass workers" party. It is one of the ironies of this situation that when the question of the workers' party was raised by some of the NUMSA leaders in the past, the SACP replied very brutally and Now the question has arisen again with the public launching of the SACP in South Africa. In order to have a serious discussion it is necessary to be very wary. Will this party be a bureaucratically controlled? Will it have a so- cial democratic type of political orientation? What will its united front policy be with other parties and trade union organisations? These questions have to be clarified in For our part, the starting point in all these discussions must be the independence of the working class and its trade unions in the political developments taking place. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-August 1990