1The birth of the new South Africa was a bloody affair, and young black men in particular were at the receiving end of state violence. Nearly 20 years after South Africa buried apartheid, the face of anger and desperation is once again largely that of the black man … [H]e is a young man with no job, who lives in a shack, has little education and no marketable skills and, crucially, is excluded from the social grant system. The police target him with assault rifles … Yet all he wants is a job and a decent life. (Morudu 2013)2
Youth unemployment is one of the many shackles that restrain South African growth … They have no formal means to raise an income … or an opportunity or a platform to contribute to our society or economy … They are being moulded as a burden on our government, dependent on social grants and promises from politicians. (Parker 2012)
Introduction
Pervasive and chronic poverty, the highest levels of inequality and unemployment in any middle-income country, the stubborn persistence of racial inequality, and the widening social distance between the governors and governed account, albeit not exhaustively, for why South Africa is the ‘protest capital of the world’ (Groenewald 2012). The ‘massive rebellion of the poor’ (Alexander 2012), which now includes en masse participation by a ‘new generation of fighters’ (Alexander 2012a, 25) – school students and the unemployed youth, is unlikely to decrease (it is claimed) without successful channelling of government resources to the poor (Alexander 2012). Figure 1
Social security system in South Africa. Source: Hofmeyr 2012, 70. Note: South Africa has the ‘largest and best developed social security system in Africa’ (ODI 2011, 03), with social grants alone now reaching more than 16 m people (Minister of Finance 2012), up from 2.5 m in 1998 (National Treasury 2011, 38). The 2012 Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) forecasts that the number of beneficiaries will ‘rise to 17.3 m over the next three years, with annual growth slowing to 2% in 2015/16 (National Treasury 2012, 42) (see Figure 1). Substantial growth in social spending over the past three decades has financed a threefold increase in the number of people receiving social grants. The social assistance budget increased by an average of 11% a year since 2008/09 – in part due to the extension of the child support grant to the age of 18 (Minister of Finance 2013). In 2008/09 and 2009/10, government spent 3.2% (ODI 2011) and 3.5% (Presidency of South Africa 2011 [Human Conditions Diagnostic], 09) of the GDP on social grants (see trend line in Figure 1), which is significantly higher than the average 1.4% of GDP spent on safety nets by developing and transition countries (World Bank 2009 cited in ODI 2011, 03). The non-contributory and means-tested (except for foster care) financial transfers from the budget comprises 70% of the income of the bottom quintile, up from 15% in 1993 and 29% in 2000 (World Bank 2012, viii). If these cash transfers were removed, poverty would rise from 54% to 60% (Leibrandt et al. 2011 cited in Presidency of South Africa 2011 [Human Conditions Diagnostic], 09).
Two powerful public intellectuals, the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (COSATU's) Vavi and Moletsi Mbeki have recently – and not unjustifiably – drawn parallels between these rebellions and the ‘Tunisian-type revolution’ (Vavi 2012). Chillingly, Mbeki date-stamps South Africa's ‘Tunisia Day’ as 2020 – the year that China will conclude its present mineral-intensive industrialisation phase. This will deprive government of the requisite fund to finance social welfare programmes that ‘placate the black poor and get their votes’ (Business Day, 12 February 2012). Not very long ago, the very same mineral-financed grants were deployed by previous governors to also ‘placate’ their constituencies and to win over opponents (Devereux 2011, 415). In the 1920s, the Pact government – an alliance cementing Nationalists and the (‘socialist’) Labour Party (representing poor rural Afrikaners and white miners, respectively) – utilised grants to arrest the erosion of the ‘civilised standard of living’ of, particularly, ‘poor whites’, whose racial privileges were being undermined by economic circumstances they came to increasingly share with Africans (Ferguson 2012a, 504). Incidentally, by 1938, government budgeted 20% of total public expenditure on social welfare for whites – an amount ‘scarcely less complete than Great Britain’ (Seeking's 2008 cited in Ferguson 2012a, 504). Table 1
| Spending category | 1995* | 2000* | 2000** | 2006** |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social grants | −0.434 | −0.431 | −0.371 | −0.359 |
| Child support | −0.247 | −0.318 | ||
| Disability | −0.291 | −0.288 | ||
| Old age pension | −0.412 | −0.436 | ||
| Education | ||||
| School | −0.016 | −0.104 | −0.121 | −0.128 |
| Tertiary | 0.235 | 0.497 | 0.528 | 0.641 |
| Health | −0.045 | −0.082 | −0.118 | −0.137 |
| Public clinics | −0.103 | −0.132 | −0.177 | −0.257 |
| Public hospitals | −0.014 | −0.057 | −0.105 | −0.103 |
| Housing | −0.018 | 0.007 | 0.16 | 0.07 |
| Total across services | −0.057 | −0.12 | −0.112 | −0.152 |
Source: Hofmeyr 2011, 76.
Note: Table 1 spotlights the ‘concentration ratios’ for the three largest categories of social spending in 1995, 2000 and 2006. A ‘concentration ratio' is a ‘measure of how a given income stream is distributed across the income spectrum’ with a value of (1) being ‘fully regressive’ and (−1) ‘fully progressive’. Table 1 shows that social grants have concentration ratios closest to −1 and are thus the ‘the most progressive social policies’ (Hofmeyr 2011, 75–76). The research suggests that transfers ‘provide critical resources’ for migrating (rural) women in search of work; cash transfers enhance the capacity of ‘poorest households’ to ‘better manage social risks and increase their labour market participation’; the ‘resilience of agricultural smallholders in maintaining production’ is increased; and the transfers ‘promote human development, reinforcing long-run employment impacts’ (Samson 2009, 179). Moreover, there is no solid evidence that grants act as a disincentive to work-seekers and foster dependency cultures (see Noble, Ntshongwana, and Surender 2008). A disturbing trend, however, is that the ‘progressivity for social grants’ shows no upward movement since 1995.
Mbeki is not alone in this unflattering portrayal of the purpose and aim of social grants, i.e. securing votes of the poor (see Bundy 2013, 04). Others portray grants, in the main, as placatory, palliative, and demobilising (see Hangen-Zanker, Morgan, and Meth 2011); softening the harsh and deleterious impacts of government's pro-market/pro-business policies; and significant in COSATU's general acceptance of the ANC's conservative economic policies (Scipes 2006). This may however be an overly simplistic lampooning of the socio-political aims and purposes of grants because today's rebels are both those with and without grants; with and without homes and services; with and without jobs; with and without democratic representation and citizenship; with and without viable livelihoods. At a macro-level, and not dissimilar to the contemporary urban revolts and protests around the world, they originate in an unprecedented and profound degeneration of the core ‘institutions’ of our modern societies/‘key components of our civilisation’ – representative government, the free market, the rule of law and civil society (see for example Ferguson 2012b; Harvey 2012).
The purpose of this paper is to determine why and how South Africa's unique and exceptional social security system – celebrated as path-breaking, revolutionary and offering lessons to the world – is increasingly failing to redress injustices and inequities, expand social inclusivity and citizenship, and ensure social and political stability. The answer is derived from a complex concatenation of factors and forces related mainly to continuity in apparent discontinuity; the influence and power of the middle and capitalist classes; and a development discourse and orientation that is oblivious, indifferent to, and obscures class divisions, inequality and poverty. A key theme emerging from a deconstruction of these forces and factors is the elite's unwillingness to engage with structural problems. Delving deeper, the paper reveals that these problems are not in the main structural or structurally relayed. Rather, they derive from a series of decisions related to the modalities of South Africa's integration into the world economy (a state that deploys its power to constrain its own power), financialisation and the sacrosanct right of property. These decisions, it is argued, were pivotal and integral to the reconstitution of new ruling class and the restoration of its power. The structural exclusions and violence inscribed in the development policies and programmes of this (newish) reconstituted ruling class, its forced imposition on the poor, their subsequent rejection of it, and deadly suppression of this rejection compels rethinking and reformulation in revolutionary and ‘real utopian’ schemas.
The paper commences by highlighting the intertwining of past and present; how the incoming government worked with civil society to transform and transcend history; and how new conceptions and mechanisms of society and social assistance (respectively) were incubated and nurtured. The following part spotlights the steady ‘regressivity’/diminishing ‘progressivity’ of the social grant system, zeroing in on the diluting impacts of ‘gaps’ in the system, and the confounding of collective welfare wrought by a virulent strain of a ‘new racial nationalism’ (NRN). Damning the social wage as dodging underlying structural problems, a purpose, it is averred, that it was not designed for – in spite of the rhetoric and propaganda – the paper then turns to the nature and materiality of South Africa's global integration strategies and the bio-economy it bestows. The penultimate section addresses matters of class formation and power and the collusion of elite in the super-exploitation and brutalisation of black workers. The conclusion furnishes a few resources that may galvanise efforts of the elite and broader society to replace the assault rifles trained on the poor with extant and emerging ‘real utopias’.
History, second-hand marble and the ‘new society’
There is a story that when Michelangelo sculpted his statue of David, he had to work on a ‘second-hand’ piece of marble that already had holes in it … The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. (Subcommandante Marcos 2000)
Although a handful of elders in the governing circles concede to the linked nature of the degeneration of the core ‘institutions of modern societies’ and the legitimacy of the state, the socio-economic system it manages and elite conduct (Netshitenzhe 2011, 11), there is frequently little recognition and acknowledgement of ‘the presence of history’ (Bundy 2013, 01); how history shapes the present and defines the now or that what is ‘usually described as post-apartheid on closer inspection … all have longer histories’ (Bundy 2013, 01). Bundy singles out three ‘phenomena’: the 40-year old process of social spending deracialisation; African middle class formation from 1970 to 1987; and state corporatism (centralised bargaining and labour's access to the state spanning almost a century). Similarly to the Nationalists, the ANC deploys supporters to government departments and state-owned enterprises, entrenching a ‘new loyal petite bourgeoisie’. Any critical interrogation of the ‘current moment’ is intrinsically and inherently linked to processes predating 1994 and must wrestle with the mechanics and dynamics of the formation and consolidation of a ‘black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie’ (Bundy 2013, 3–4).
The discussion thus far highlights the presence of the past in the present; continuities in the tools and infrastructures of apartheid and post-apartheid rule; and the evolving and intertwined trajectories of Afrikaner and African nationalism. However, there is no reason why history should repeat itself (Cheru 2012); or, more prosaically, there is no reason why the putatively destructive histories of the past cannot be transformed into dynamic and empowering scripts of change (Rethmann 2010). Indeed, it is a tribute to the activists-turned-politicians and officials of the early 1990s state that they partnered with civil society in transcending history, inheritance and experience. While alert to historical baggage, institutional inertia, the compromises struck by the ANC and the creeping macroeconomic conservatism of government (see for example, Lund 1996; Padayachee and Sherbut 2007), those charged with transforming the old social welfare dispensation succeeded in sculpting the ‘second-hand’ piece of marble into policies and programmes that the ANC used/uses to ‘redress historical injustices and inequities’ (Devereux 2011, 415–416).
The ‘exceptional’ features of South Africa's social security policies and programmes reside not (only) in their coverage, scale, scope, generosity and efficient delivery. Of greater import is the uniqueness: ‘government-led, driven by domestic civil society rather external donors, and enforced by a justiciable ‘social contract’ (‘legislated right’). These combined features coupled to the strong political commitment underwriting the grants are globally hailed as offering useful ‘lessons’ to other countries (Devereux 2011).
If the lessons and the rising budget allocations are one part of the ‘transcending-history’ narrative, the other, inspiring, part is that South Africa, like Brazil and India, has ‘confounded’ the hegemonic neoliberal narrative via ‘morphing into various new kinds of welfare states’ (Ferguson 2013). Different from welfare states of the North, and attending to the persistently high (‘normal) unemployment, rampant informalisation, and the ‘coexistence’ of mass poverty and democracy 3, these countries are ‘laboratories for social experiments' and of ‘wider significance in the future’. They have pioneered and developed ‘new mechanisms of social assistance’ and ‘new conceptions of society’: giving money directly to the poor citizens! These non-contributory cash transfer schemes to the most vulnerable (women and children) constitute an ‘affront to the old rules of the development game’ (Ferguson 2013).
Although social grants have reduced the depth of poverty and vulnerability of beneficiaries (Hangen-Zanker, Morgan, and Meth 2011), grants are now a structural necessity and ‘politically irreversible pillars of social policy’ (Devereux and Lund 2010, 165) and not ‘stop-gap measure[s]’ (Ndletyana 2013, 52). This ‘good thing’ (Holbon 2012) cannot however ‘counterbalance’ the drivers of (increasing) inequality and ensure socio-political stability (ODI 2011). Part of the explanation is located in the ‘gaps’ of the social grant system. These include the absence of social protection for the ‘able-bodied unemployed’, those labouring outside the formal sector, and thousands who are irregularly employed (Presidency 2012, 332–333). According to the National DevelopmentPlan, these ‘gaps’ intensify poverty and inequality, and dilute the effects of other forms of social protection because the unemployed depend on grant recipients for their sustenance and survival (Presidency 2012, 333). Government's ‘exclusive’ social assistance focus on the relative neglect of social insurance and/or the evacuation of the latter from the policy agenda (Woolard, Harttgen, and Klasen 2011, 376) figure prominently in fuelling and deepening both poverty and inequality.
Poverty and inequality – rooted in unequal income and inequitable asset distributions – coupled to government-engineered structural exclusion of the poor from basic services, and disillusionment with the much vaunted ‘social wage’ (discussed shortly) further fuels social unrest and violent protest. Similar to elsewhere, government quells discontent by shredding the social contract; dampening expectations and reframing entitlements (A. Alexander 2012). This shredding assumes a particular nefarious shape and form in South Africa. Refracted through the lenses of structural violence (or inequality, see below) and structural exclusion, it is to the containers and placeholders of social and social contract shredding – writ large in the processes of systemic violence and exclusions of NRN and financialisation – that the paper now turns.
Structural violence, structural exclusion and racial nationalism
Willie Esterhuyse, a Stellenbosch philosophy professor and ‘former broeder’4, who together with Thabo Mbeki was pivotal in the framing and packaging of the (elite-pacted) transition, asserts that the South African transformation faltered in delivering ‘sustainable and visible institutional and personal images of reconciliation and peace’. More trenchantly, the delivered dispensation was, and still is, fraught with various forms of socio-economic, structural and direct violence which the ANC has failed to arrest and control (Esterhuyse 2012, 303–304).
How to account for the ANC's failure to address structural violence (inequality)? A very compelling set of explanatory reasons derives from the conceptual premises of the NRN, which recalling Bundy (2013) (wrestling the ‘current moment’) – is connected to the influence wielded by the black middle and capitalist class. This ‘sociologically novel’ strain of racial nationalism is premised on (1) a ‘group-based theory of moral agency, personality and standing’ (racialised moralism); (2) a ‘race-based, unitary and purposive conception of peoplehood’ (teleological group essentialism); (3) an ‘over-applied microcosmic theory of racial representation’ (racial hyper-proportionalism); (4) the ‘prioritisation of deontological racial justice in the assignment of persons to producer places over consequentialist social-welfare considerations regarding the provision of goods' (racial producerism); and (5) a crude ‘postcolonial theory of knowledge and power’ (vulgar postcolonialism) (Glaser 2011, 68) The maladies of the disfigured moralism, essentialism, proportionalism, producerism and postcolonialism manifest as follows:
First, there is an ‘indifference towards poverty and inequality’ (Glaser 2011, 88). In their negotiation of the numerous tensions between ‘historical redress, and national identity and state capacity’ (Habib 2012, 25), the ANC privileges the latter – with devastating consequences for social justice, welfare and service delivery. The prioritisation of (elite) deracialisation over (socio-economic) desegregation trumps ‘distributive justice’ (Glaser 2011, 88) and substantive redistribution. In this context, preference of the elite to effect redistribution through the social wage channel rather than changing primary income distribution is perfectly logical (explained shortly). Second, the conceptual premises of NRN deliver a ‘racially divisive politics’, which – broader than whites against blacks – frustrates efforts to build viable growth and development coalitions, and inclusive citizenship. If the new nationalists can demonstrate that group-based politics can overcome colonial and apartheid-spawned development imbalances, a case could be mounted of the costs as acceptable and justifiable. Third, the indifference and divisiveness is woven together by an incipient authoritarianism evidenced in police remilitarisation and the official ‘shoot-to-kill’ directive/command, mass media suppression, victimisation of the poor, criminalisation of squatting and the squatter in urban areas, evictions without court orders, and the manipulation of and naked interference in judicial processes and personnel (Mbeki 2012; Pithouse 2012). Whether this authoritarianism can stem the tide of daily rebellions and protests is debatable, as they emanate not just in and from poor service delivery, councillor unresponsiveness, and democratic deficits. Recent research attributes rebellions (and the decline in ANC support) to the education system and labour market failure, i.e. ‘still too few have the necessary education, skills and opportunities to take part in and benefit from the economy’ (Holbon 2012). Aggravating this alienation is the radical and violent community contestation of the content, packaging, ‘regressivity’5 and mode/method of delivery of the social wage.
At the base of the contestation is the disillusionment and disenchantment of the constricting and constraining limits of the ruling elite's development agenda, imagery and horizon for and imposed on the poor, and the associated ascription of second-class citizenship (Khan 2010). Both are related to the supply-side orientation of state programmes and interventions. Indeed, numerous government interventions are founded on baseless theories, policies and technical solutions that bear little resemblance to real-world living conditions (Franks in Editorial 2004). This is aggravated by budget-induced institutional deficiencies. Crowning of this are processes and cycles of state-engineered ‘structural exclusion’, which routinely determine and entrench the social fault lines of second-class citizenship:
The operations of the state privilege the insiders relative to the outsiders … The inequality is structural because each act of exclusion further confirms the insiders in their views and mechanisms, leading to a trap – for the outsiders and for society at large – that gets increasingly difficult to break out of. (Kanbur 2011, 02)
This type of inequality (re)generation potentially exacerbates other inequalities – individual human and physical capital, for example – with a large role for ‘race, caste, religion and gender’, and spatial and locational inequalities (Kanbur 2011).
The limits of the imposed development agenda, the baselessness of policies and frameworks, and the institutional deficiencies (un/wittingly) replicate interrelated cycles and processes of structural inequalities and violence. The ‘highly uneven’ distributive pattern of South Africa's growth path – its perpetuation of inequality and exclusion (World Bank 2012, viii) – contributes additional exclusionary dynamics. Not oblivious of and awake to connections between the skewed distribution of income, ‘high unemployment’, the ‘unusually inequitable wage scale’, and the ‘impact of mineral rents’ (Business Report, 29 November 2011) – why does the elite invest more faith in wealth redistribution via the social wage? – that a senior and distinguished ANC MP claims ‘cannot properly be measured’ (Turok 2012, 05)? Paraphrasing President Zuma:
[T]here were two ways of achieving this [redistribution]: by improving the primary distribution of income; and by redistributing wealth, through social grants and taxation, municipal services and housing provision. He suggested that the latter was a more effective tool for achieving greater distributive equity. (Business Day, 29 November 2011)
It comes as no surprise then when Glaser (2011) asserts: the ‘new racial nationalism threatens a policy irrationalism’ (90).
Using the social wage to effect redistribution rather than improving income distribution is perhaps irrational and can justifiably be ‘critiqued as government's way of avoiding underlying structural problems’ (Devereux and Lund 2010, 167). On the other hand, it is rational if acknowledged as the elite's indifference towards poverty and inequality, the trumping of elite deracialisation over desegregation, and racial producerism.
NRN partially illuminates the rationale for the elevation of the social wage over income redistribution. However, the avoidance of structural problems – arguably sidestepped by social wage privileging – has more recalcitrant roots, especially because altering income distribution is a domestic or internal matter, outside the purview and influence of international forces, rules and regimes. The clues to this conundrum – the elite's unwillingness to tackle structural problems – may lie in the nature of the governing elite's relationship to powerful forces, domestic and abroad, which is the outcome of decisions made and compromises struck, i.e. not structurally relayed. A stalwart of the struggle commenting on the ANC's ‘Faustian pact with power that sold out the poorest’, recently wrote: ‘[W]e believed, wrongly, that there was no other option; that we had to be cautious … To lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable … [W]e chickened out’ (Kasrils 2013).
Financialisation and the perverse bio-economy/biocapitalism
South Africa's integration into the global economy comprises a complex intertwining of state-orchestrated ‘outside in’ and state-facilitated conglomerate ‘inside out’ globalisation. The former refers to a ‘hyper-liberal’ state-driven economic globalisation strategy coalescing around tight fiscal and monetary policy and accelerated trade liberalisation, i.e. ‘industrialisation by invitation’ as opposed to internal resource mobilisation and redistribution. This ‘outside in’ globalisation, which predated GEAR – and thereafter accelerated – created the space and opportunity for the restructuring and internationalisation of South African conglomerates ‘substantially beyond’ the economic structure built around a minerals–energy complex. As a result, the conglomerates dominating the economy are now ‘absorbed into the broader transnational capitalist class project where global financial capital, given its greater fungibility and mobility, and hence structural power, sets the agenda' (Khan 2010, summarising the insights of various authors).
The state this bred is one ‘embedded or institutionalised on global forces’ and negatively autonomous from domestic social forces. Consequently, the state, reflecting the demands and priorities of transnational capitalism, liberalises the economy to maintain international investor confidence and harnesses the intervention – the rightsizing impulses of elusive ‘global market forces’ – to discipline productive capital and labour (versus disciplining them under its own steam/strength to achieve transformative developmental goals). In this way, the state, ironically and wittingly, deploys its own power to constrain its power. As the state globalises, the success of government's development strategy hinges on the whims and fancies of private sector actions and investment, whose operations are thoroughly integrated into hyper-mobile, globalised financial circuits (Khan 2010).
At the micro- and mesa-economic levels, financial globalisation perversely impacts economy and society, affecting micro-level corporate governance, corporate finance and income distribution (Singh 2012, 135–136). These in turn influence human development policy agendas and their content. Worded differently, financialisation – which is a great deal more than ‘a simple associate of neo-liberalism but as its underlying aspect’ (Fine 2013, np) – reaches way beyond financial markets. The responses to financialisation are critical in setting frameworks and conditions to which social policy responds. In the main, though, empirical evidence gathered over the last three decades reveals frequent crises and welfare decline in many countries adopting financial liberalisation policies and programmes (Singh 2012, 136).
In thinking through the morphology of financialisation, one cannot but marvel at its complexity. Running parallel to the downsizing of the redistributive role of the social state, financial capitalism is aided by ‘privatisation of deficit spending à la Keynes’ or credit/debt-financed demand and consumption (Marazzi 2010, 34); ‘liberal communism’ (Žižek 2008)/‘communism of capitalism’ (see Beverungen, Murtola, and Schwartz 2011)/‘ersatz capitalism’/‘corporate welfarism’ (socialisation of ‘losses’ and risks, ‘while leaving profits in the private sector’ [Stiglitz 2009, 288]); and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2012). Financialisation, the ‘other side of the post-Fordist capitalism coin’; its ‘“perverse” form’ (Marazzi 2010, 106), produces
… a common (goods) that it then divides and privatizes through the expulsion of the ‘inhabitants of the common’ by means of the artificial creation of scarcity of all kinds – scarcity of financial means, liquidity, rights, desire and power. (Marazzi 2010, 41–42)
In its distributive guise, this hybrid autonomises capital from any collective interests, most notably wage and occupational stability; and collapses retirement rents and savings into a hodgepodge of (often) toxic financial instruments beyond the control of the owners. The insatiable appetite of financialisation for valorisation, particularly in developing countries, provokes and accelerates hyper-exploitation, the decimation of assets and resources of local economies, and erodes and undermines social cohesion.
The extraction of value in the reproductive and distributive spheres spreads beyond the factory gates. Dubbed ‘externalisation’, it facilitates (in)direct wage compression and labour precarisation, i.e. processes of proletarianisation, which under the pressure of unemployment, lowers wages, intensifies exploitation, and exacerbates insecurity. Collectively, the quantity of surplus value generated by these processes, and the appropriation of both open and disguised unpaid labour, leads to decreases in the profit reinvested in the production sphere. In these instances, increased profits support neither stable employment growth nor wage increases (Marazzi 2010, 43–44, 52–53).
South African rationalities of accumulation and social regulation resonate with the above value extraction processes. The processes are dispersed and spatially unanchored in and across the multiple spheres of reproduction, consumption, life styles, and individual and collective imagination. This reworking/recalibration of the endowments and circuitry of liquidity, rights, desires and powers instantiates new(ish) imageries of ‘bio-economy or biocapitalism’. Biocapitalism produces and extracts value from the body as both the physical instrument of work and as a ‘whole’. Consequently, crises and devalorisations – ‘destruction of capital’ – under financial capitalism ‘strikes the totality of human beings, their emotions, feelings, affects, which is to say the “resources” put to work by capital’ (Marazzi 2010, 47, 74).
The question before us then is: for how long can the South African elite continue nourishing a bioeconomy that divides and privatises, dispossesses and externalises? How much longer can the elite keep a lid on the rebellion and revolt this bioeconomy produces? The events of 16 August 2012 – Bloody Thursday – when the police, at the behest of and acting on instructions of London and South African mining magnates ‘massacred’ (Kasrils 2013) striking miners – bears testimony to the elite's loss of control, power and authority over those who are the ‘mainstay of COSATU and the ruling Alliance’ (Weekend Argus, 15 June 2013).
Rule of property or rule of and by the poor
The term ‘democracy’ is formed by joining two words, demos and kratos. Demos means ‘people’; kratos means ‘power’. The original Greek meaning of democracy was ‘rule by the people’ or, more specifically, ‘rule by the poor’ (Patriquin 2011, 86).
The next decade will see increasing conflict between … the rule of property and the rule of the poor. Since the ANC came to power … the democratic government has failed to honour fully the expectation of a life outside the law of the market and the right of property (Membe in Mail & Guardian, June 15 to 21 2012).
Addressing the ANC parliamentary caucus on matters of nation and class, Pallo Jordan, MP and member of the ANC's National Executive Committee, presented two contrasting views of the Freedom Charter (1955). The first view, expressed by Nelson Mandela in 1956 (cited in Jordan 2012) envisaged the emergence of a ‘non-European bourgeoisie’ following the dismantling of the white monopoly over productive resources. The other view, expounded by Oliver Tambo in 1983 (cited in Jordan 2012), envisaged an end to the ‘exploitative system on which apartheid is based’. The question posed by Jordan is whether these ‘different agendas and objectives’ are ‘necessarily contradictory’ (Jordan 2012, 11–12).
This question strikes at the heart of post-apartheid (and postcolonial) reconstruction and transformation agenda(s), namely, radical overhaul of the racial and/or capitalist system or the ‘fine-tuning of racist and capitalist logics’ (Saul 2011, 05). For those in the so-called progressive camp – aligned to radical overhaul – the prevailing view, recently reinforced by Ronnie Kasrils (2013), is that the ANC in the early 1990s was strategically outmanoeuvred, strategically blundered, and (un)wittingly squandered opportunities to restructure and transform its political economy in both democratic and developmental formats (see Khan 2010). The theme of ‘betrayal’ of the democratic aspirations of the majority looms large in ‘progressive’ narratives. For those in the so-called conservative camp, and significant components of the ANC and Tripartite Alliance – the vagaries and vicissitudes of post-Cold War statecraft (associated with neoliberal ‘globalisation’); the weight of history and legacy; the internal balance of social forces, and the absence of a cognitive map and compass to guide post-apartheid statecraft (amongst others) – ‘preclude[d] more radical pursuits of nationalisation and redistribution if economic collapse [was] to be avoided’ (Andreasson 2006, 305). Suspending debate around the loud silences and glaring omissions of the (de)merits of this simplified presentation of the transition, the ANC steered away from ‘confronting class … head-on’, focusing instead on ‘ending past forms of racial and horizontal inequalities without transforming the old order’ (Cheru 2012, 272).
The legitimation of this governing and governance orientation, embedded in the reconciliation ethic, is ‘ideomorphic’ in that it ‘navigates dispositions and practices despite dominant constellations of power’ (Sitas 2011, 572). Moored in the ‘blind spot of the dialectic’ – defined as regret and forgiveness about the dehumanising and savage historical entanglements of the past – this ethic allowed the oppressor back into the fold of history through the extension of ‘amnesty’ rather than ‘endless processes of revenge’, which Mandela and associates opined would destabilise and destroy South Africa and the making and shaping of a ‘common destiny’ (Derrida 1998, 02–3).
The reconciliation ethic came to socialise a non-conflictual view of society. Within the Reconstruction and Development Programme (ANC 1994), for instance, ‘no essentialist identities, no oppositional identities’ (Leroke 1996, 244) appear and/or are invoked. Potential tensions, conflicts and disagreements around the notions of ‘fundamental transformation’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘restructuring’ are eliminated by ideological fiat, i.e., tensions around societal transformation ‘are immediately offset by dissolving the differences into the goals’ (Wolpe 1995, 97).
The deliberate exclusion of identities and the dissolution of differences, the emasculation of civil society (evidenced in the decapitation/strategic incapacitation of its leadership); the imposition of Stalinist-style centralised top-down rule (dominated by exiles); and the herding of (disruptive) social elements into (neo)corporatist institutional arrangements are related. Taken together, these discursive and non-discursive dispositifs served to, first, re-establish the authority of (old and new) private and public sector elites over society (Khan 2010). Second, it served the reconstituted elite most admirably in ramrodding down society's throat the ‘self-imposed structural adjustment programme’ (Netshitenze cited in Mail & Guardian, 12 December 2003)6 of the mid 1990s – and subsequent modifications over the years. The restoration of the authority and power of the reconstituted elite is the foundation stone of the super-exploitation and brutalisation of black workers at rates far exceeding apartheid. Moreover, the dominant finance stream feeding investment levels (albeit depressed) is not corporate and profit-reinvestment but wages and salaries (Malikane 2007, 67–68). The elite feeding off the battered and broken bodies of the poor in the today's mines, factories and farms is thus no mystery, premised as it is on the reproduction and intensification of the ugly aspects of the ‘apartheid legacy’ and the bio-economy of accelerating financialisation.
For some time now, the architecture and propaganda of the ruling multiclass alliance7 concealed and drew attention away from the elite's strong pro-business (‘rule of property’) development agenda. But this is no longer viable as the rebels and rebellions of the poor increasingly associate the denial of their constitutional rights to basic services – the elite-dubbed and maligned ‘culture of entitlement’ – with the culture of enrichment and the consumptive avarice of the elite. In the streets and shantytowns, they are slowly and gradually piecing together the huge and small ceramic tiles of the social inclusion–exclusion mosaic: the stubborn and persistent growth of the precariat (Standing 2011) alongside the growth of millionaires and billionaires; the immiseration and indebtedness of the poor to the hoarding and monopolisation of financial resources and credit by the wealthy; and the meagre ‘hand-outs’ to the poor (social welfarism) to the extravagant ‘hand-ups’ to wealthy and powerful (corporate welfarism) (see Harrison 2011; Harriss 2007; Mosse 2010 for discussions of relational approaches to poverty). Also not lost to the social movements battling unemployment, hyper-exploitation, casualisation and slave wages is the separation of destitution and impoverishment from rampant accumulation by dispossession and super-exploitation; the over-accumulation of capital and the investment strike from capital flight (Ashman, Fine, and Newman 2011) and state-facilitated private sector disinvestment; and, the misallocation of capital evidenced in the underproduction of cheap basic goods and services from the persistent overcapacity and overproduction of luxury manufactured goods (and the expanding army of unemployed workers).
Conclusion: defending society through revolution
What of the future? Is there a possibility of the democratic government honouring the expectations of a life not solely and exclusively defined and confined by law of the market? The prospects are slim but not impossible. There are four (re)sources that offer hope:
First, capital ‘does not have an inherent logic, or autonomous and independent laws … It needs to be constantly instituted’ (Lazzarato 2009, 113). Particularly pertinent are the larger effects of social assistance on both poverty and inequality in Brazil than South Africa. Improved outcomes in Brazil underscore the need for social assistance to be ‘accompanied by, and embedded in, inclusive growth and employment policies’ (Barrientos et al. 2013, 66), i.e. macro- and micro-economic interventions that alter the distribution of incomes and assets.
Second, the social is a ‘construction, a political representation and a reified substance all at the same time’ (Latour 2005 cited in Veldman 2007, 603). The prevailing imposed liberal social policy isolates ‘vulnerability’ from broader cumulatively causative systemic processes that create what is to be treated. Based on ‘Poor Law’ norms of the 1800s – historically a response to privatisation and enclosure of the commons – this liberal dualistic policy allocates ‘good’ and ‘bad’ risks to the market and public realm/domain (respectively). The demonstrated alternative – developmental welfarism – embraces social protection and transformation of social relations (Adesina 2011, 465–466). Centrally implicated is a fundamental reframing of the definition, agenda and shape of ‘social’, development agendas and institutional reform. The post-crisis reinvention of planning in bold political economy frames (Todes 2011); the ‘solid commitment to un-neoliberal principles, such as “universal access to basic services”’ (Parnell and Robinson 2012 cited in Ballard 2013, 03); and the numerous interventions in the aftermath of the crisis to bolster social protection (Brazil and India), extend unemployment benefits (Japan, United States), protect the minimum wage and subsidise short-term employment (Torres 2010, 231) are resources to be tapped to defend society, their hard-won entitlements and the broader social contract.
Third, there is globally a paradigm shift – ‘a development revolution from the South’, ‘an elegant southern alternative’, which the international aid industry initially resisted but now, not ungrudgingly, accepts: ‘The basic idea sounds so simple and easy that a preschool child could think of it: Why are people poor? Because they have no money. So let's give them money and they won't be poor anymore’ (Ghosh 2011, 851). From Argentina to Brazil to China to India to Mexico to South Africa8, the twenty-first century social emancipation imaginary is being manufactured in the ‘subaltern world’ (Munck 2010, 242).
Finally, not so long ago, Left and Right whispered alternatives to capitalism and the possibilities of other worlds (Wright 2008). The (immediate) response to the financial crisis in the West – a shift to the ‘re-regulation’ and ‘de-financialisation’ of capital’, ‘hyper-deleveraging’, ‘re-nationalization’, ‘managed capitalism’, and ‘state authority’ (Gills 2010, 519) – shouts alternatives and/or potentially heralds the arrival of real alternatives.
Taken together, the development revolution in the North and the development revolution in the South reawaken senses to and rebuild sensibilities of the possibility and reality of emancipatory social change. Bridging ‘dreams and possibilities’, are ‘real Utopias’: ‘ideals grounded in the real potentials of humanity’, ‘destinations that have accessible waystations’, and ‘designs of institutions’ informing ‘our practical tasks of muddling through a world of imperfect conditions of social change’ (Wright 2008, 04).
By way of a synthesis: social movements routinely champion three basic state guarantees – education, health and life-long revenue flows (Wallerstein 2009, 20). An ‘unconditional basic income’ – covering basic living costs – accompanied by universal education and health programmes would eliminate the need for other redistributive measures and furnish society with the necessary basic state guarantees. Constituting a ‘fundamental redesign of the system of income redistribution’, the basic income harbours the potential to transform capitalism in democratic and egalitarian formats:
[P]overty is eliminated; the labour contract becomes more nearly voluntary since everyone has the option of exit; the power relations between workers and capitalist become less unequal … ; the possibility for people forming cooperative associations to produce goods and services to serve human needs outside of the market increases … There are … good reasons to believe that it would work and that it could constitute one of the cornerstones of another possible world. (Wright 2008, 03–4)
COSATU in 1998 (see Coleman 2003 for full discussion) and later the government-appointed Taylor Commission (2002) demonstrated very convincingly the viability, feasibility and necessity of a Basic Income Grant. The ANC ‘dismissed it in favour of an Extended Public Works Program’, because of its universality and insufficient ‘leverage’ (Hart 2008, 685) to instil appropriate behaviour, i.e., personal autonomy, self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, self-responsibilisation, workfarism, etc. (see Barchiesi 2007; Khan 2010; Roy 2006).
With grants having transcended their purpose and function – as a ‘stop-gap measure to mitigate the impact of poverty’ (Ndletyana 2013, 52) – and recording limited success in fostering enabling conditions for people to lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps suggests real limits to the elite maintaining social and political control via both infrastructural and despotic power. In this context, it is only a matter of time when the poor will reject the ballot box and lose their fear of death by beatings and bullets. It is only a matter of time when the poor complete their short walks on the rocky, gravel and tarred highways and side-roads linking Marikana and Tunisia. The year 2020 – South Africa's predicted Tunisia Day – may perhaps be too rosy a narrative and prediction of revolution!
Indeed, the writing may already be on the wall! With the rebellion fast reaching insurrectionary proportions, led by those with nothing but their shackles to lose, the elite will be compelled to abandon their assault rifles and embrace the ‘real utopias’ of yesterday and today.
ANC voters have become unhappy with their lives and have lost hope that tomorrow will be better than today … [P]eople are losing patience … South Africa's body politic is again bubbling, and while the ANC leaders and delegates congratulate themselves and one another on securing a place in the ruling party for another five years [9], the things that gave rise to Marikana, De Doorns and the easy success of Julius Malema in whipping up the temperatures of the marginalised, have not gone away (Paton 2012).10
The state and ANC elite could do well to heed these signs or risk the barrage of bricks and stones and Molotov cocktails that now rock the other revolutionary path-breaker, its poster-child and favoured development model, Brazil.