IT HAS ALL GONE like clockwork, hitting the schedule decided by de Klerk and Mandela - elections before the end of April 1994 - almost to the minute. With the ANC getting 62.5 per cent of the vote, the final destruction of apartheid has been confirmed.
The black masses have a sense of enormous victory. Certainly the election result, with the ANC getting more than six times the vote of Inkatha (and that on an Inkatha vote in KwaZulu that was almost certainly fiddled), reveals the real relationship of forces in the country.
The elections produced an enormous polarisation, with the votes of most minor parties collapsing either into the ANC or the National Party. Many of the votes of the Cape-based Democrats, long-time party of liberal English-speaking whites, went in both directions - the more radical to the ANC, the more conservative to the National Party (NP). movement - the Pan Africanist Congress, black consciousness and leftwing organisations, saw their votes flee to the ANC as the black masses cast a 'useful' vote to ensure the crushing victory of the main liberavoted for the extreme right wing, most preferring a 'realistic' vote for the National Party, in an attempt to De Klerk's NP did a clever job of reinventing itself as a 'non-racial' party, exploiting fears among the coloured population in the Western Cape that an ANC victory would threaten the minor privileges they see themselves as having. But even this clever NP Houdini act couldn't prevent an ANC landslide.
Is this really an enormous victory for black South Africans? And what will happen now? At the immediate level of the destruction of old-style apartheid, then of course the election represents a tremendous victory, the culmination of decades of struggle.
Ungovernable
If the transition to the post-apartheid order has been finally sanctioned by the South African bourgeoisie and international capital, its origins lie in the fact that since the 1976 Soweto uprising, South Africa has been made ungovernable by the most heroic mass struggle, costing many thousands of lives.
In a declining economy in the middie of a world recession, the maintenance of the old system was impossible. However at the level of the immediate needs and aspirations of the black masses, then a decisive victory will be much more difficult to Reformists: Nelson Mandela with former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock in Stockholm achieve.
For the many millions of black workers, unemployed and rural labourers who ensured the ANC walkover need not just the right to travel on the same buses as white people, or - if they can afford it - live in the same areas as white people. jobs, homes, education and an end to the mass unemployment and squalor which is the lot of many millions. Can the government of national unity enSouth Africa is an enormously wealthy country. But it is a dependent capitalist country, with vast disparities of wealth, more or less overlapTo ensure jobs and houses it needs a reconstruction programme prepared to break with the prerogatives of capital - to bring key sectors of industry under social control to ensure genuine national planning, to redistribute wealth, to generate a massive literacy, job-creation and "The new government is a bourgeois government, preparing to administer a capitalist economy, and with which international capital will be happy to do business. In no sense is it a workers' or socialist government."
There must be grave scepticism about whether the government of national unity can deliver these things -and for obvious reasons.
The destruction of old-style apartheid cannot blind us to class categories and class realities. The new government is a bourgeois government, preparing to administer a capitalist economy - in no sense is it a workers' or socialist government.
It is a government in which control of the key finance ministry will be in the hands of the NP, and which has already pledged to the IMF and World Bank that it will be a paragon ..of financial orthodoxy and rectitude. It is a government with which international capital will be happy to do business.
Enormous pressure will now be put on the trade union movement to accept a social pact for reconstruction. Hundreds of 'advisors' from the international trade union bureaucracy have descended on South Africa, precisely to help ensure trade union co-operation with the reconstruction programme.
The lessons of the transition to black majority rule in 1980 in Zimbabwe have to be learned. There an armed guerrilla movement, Robert Mugabe's ZANU, took power without the impediment of a coalition with a party based on whites.
Immediately after the election victory in early 1980, an enormous strike movement rose up to press the demands of black workers. It was repressed and defeated. A capitalist government subordinate to international imperialism was consolidated. This is what the South African bourgeoisie and international imperialism have in mind for South Africa.
As the article in this issue by Mark Shotter shows, the expectations of the black masses are enormous. They are certain to mobilise for their own demands, and this will inevitably bring them into conflict with the new government. In this situation there will be enormous conflicts and debates in the base of the ANC and in A big question mark now hangs over the future of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Its historic leader, Joe Slovo, is a key archipower-sharing government. The controlling leadership group is heading towards social democracy at a rate of knots, leading to major debates in the SACP ranks, with sections of the base demanding a tougher anti-capitalist line.
A lot will depend on the political struggle in the unions. What is desperately needed is a fight for class independence - an absolute refusal to sign any pact with the power-sharing Popular mandate In the short term the government has an enormous legitimacy and popular mandate which it will not be possible to challenge. But the mass movement needs to develop its own organisations and demands. It needs popular mobilisation to demand the jobs and houses which the black masses want. The independence of the mass movement must be topped off by building a mass workers party.
In the end, the struggle in South Africa has combined a struggle against two deeply-interconnected, but not identical, oppressions. These are the formal structures of apartheid, with its legal exclusions of the non-white masses from whole areas of life, but also the deep structures of racial capitalism.
Those structures, with their de facto exclusion of the non-white masses from real social power and wealth, are deeply inter-twined with class oppression, and they survive after the ANC's electoral victory.
For those who doubt this analysis, there will be, in the coming months and years, precise tests: whether or not the basic social needs of millions of non-whites are met, and whether "reconstruction' really aids the poor and the oppressed.
Those who put uncritical faith in Mandela, who represents the most conservative trends in the liberation movement, are due for a rude awakening.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.62, May 14 1994, Page 4