Which Way to Freedom? by Neville Alexander, Walnut Publishing, available from Liberation!, £7.99 inc. P&P.
Reviewed by Paul Clarke THE RECENT elections in South Africa have led to extraordinary confusion on the left internationally about the nature of the new government and about what to expect in the post-Apartheid situation.
Often discussion about the different political forces in the country lacks basic information about their history, programme and real activities.
Neville Alexander's new book is therefore highly welcome as a primer and source of basic explanation and analyses of the political process now underway.
Although all the essays included were of course written before the elections, they are informed by the obvious drift of the CODESA negotiations process - towards the formation of a bourgeois coalition government including the ANC and the National Party -which is exactly what has come to pass.
Particularly valuable is the essay Negotiations and the Struggle for Socialism in South Africa which charts the history of the ANC, the origins of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the story of the Black Consciousness movement.
A bourgeois coalition government is not a workers' or socialist government. Sections of the international left write about South Africa as if it were a new version of the Nicaraguan revolution.
This is absurd. The FSLN did not include representatives of big capital as vice-president and finance minister!
Hopes raised
Enormous hopes have been vested in the new government by the black masses. In particular their hopes lie in the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), from which they expect jobs, homes, land and basics social security and health rights. What are the chances of these hopes being fulfilled?
Neville Alexander is absolutely right to foresee a new stage of struggle unfolding after elections. Against the hopes of the masses in the RDP are ranged the forces of domestic and internaAFRICA: