91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳

Why the South African revolution stalled

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Review by Norm Dixon

This book is essential reading for anybody wishing to understand political developments in South Africa since 1994. It critically examines the politics and practice of the African National Congress, from its formation in 1912 to the negotiations that ushered in South Africa's first democratic elections.

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The ANC's post-apartheid accommodation with the country's capitalist power structure, Dale McKinley shows, is a continuation of an 80-year trajectory, not a change.

McKinley is a respected young socialist. His views are representative of an important — small, but growing — tendency within the South African left that is prepared to challenge the dominant politics and ideology of the ANC, and seeking to influence the direction of the trade unions and the South African Communist Party.

While in Johannesburg to report on South Africa's first democratic election for 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, I discovered that one of the indispensable places to find out what was happening on the left was Phambili ("Forward") Books.

The bookshop was never empty. It buzzed as township activists, ANC officials, trade unionists, SACP members, academics, Trotskyists of various shades and socialists and radicals visiting from overseas thumbed the pages of the newest left books and magazines and debated politics.

Phambili was the place to find out when and where meetings, conferences and demonstrations were taking place, what debates were raging on the left and in the liberation movement, and who had what "line".

The person to ask was McKinley, who managed this subversive centre. Being at the centre of this political meeting place, there was little McKinley did not know about South African left politics.

Born in Zimbabwe, he spent several years in the United States, where he was active in the anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity movements. Returning to southern Africa after the unbanning of the ANC, SACP and other liberation movements in 1990, he became an active member of the ANC. Though critical of the SACP's politics, he joined the party.

McKinley is presently a leader of the Gauteng provincial SACP and a member of the party's national political education department. Considering that many of McKinley's "ultra-left" positions would make some SACP leaders gag, the fact that he works out of the party's head office is evidence that an atmosphere of open and free debate prevails in the party.

"This work is grounded firmly within a classical Marxist-Leninist framework", McKinley explains in the preface to The ANC and the Liberation Struggle. "There can be no meaningful national liberation without a simultaneous struggle against what lies at the root of national oppression — capitalism and imperialism. In short, national liberation can be little more than a political shift of the ruling class without a corresponding transformation in social relations, that is without a class revolution."

McKinley argues that from the ANC's formation to the present, such a simultaneous struggle has not been the goal of the majority of its leaders. Instead, they have sought to persuade, and later, in the face of the National Party's brutal intransigence, to force South Africa's ruling class to permit "civilised" blacks to take their place in the existing institutions of the state and economy.

The political and ideological struggles that have erupted within the leadership of the ANC — like the rise of the young Africanist current led by Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu in the late 1940s — have not been over the necessity for working-class revolution but over whether the black petty-bourgeoisie's "place at the table" could be won through polite appeals or had to be taken by more forceful means.

McKinley argues that because the ANC leadership's dominant perspective has been to share control of the existing state, rather than overthrow it, the socioeconomic interests of workers, peasants and unemployed have never been allowed to take centre stage in the organisation or the struggle. Instead, the leadership has limited the mass struggles and organisation of the people to being a means to apply pressure on South Africa's rulers to reform.

The often repeated mantra of the post-1990 ANC that a more radical outcome of the anti-apartheid struggle has been precluded by the "balance of forces", McKinley suggests, is little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy:

"The practical politics of the ANC served seriously to undermine the possibilities of people's victories which might have propelled the dialectic in a radically different direction ... Looking at the broader historical framework of the ANC's liberation struggle ... it becomes clear why a gradual disempowerment of the masses emerged and ultimately an increasingly truncated liberation."

The major weakness of the book is its failure to analyse adequately the SACP separately from the dominant ANC leadership and to explain the party's failure to challenge, in the past and the present, the ANC leadership's reformist orientation.

Nor does McKinley address the most pressing debate on the South African left today: how should socialists relate politically and tactically to an organisation that still commands the support of hundreds of thousands of militants, while at the same time heading a government that presides over a neo-liberal offensive and is actively fostering a new black capitalist elite to share economic power with the apartheid-era captains of industry?