democracy.
While the reasons for a fully fledged social democratic tradition of socialist thought not flourishing are complex, it is our view that the polarisation of intellectual life in South Africa within the left performed a seminal role in preventing social democratic ideas from developing in the country, within which the various positions of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) (and then the SACP after 1950) was most significant. The CPSA/SACP drew on a Stalinist interpretation of social democracy in the 1930s that bizarrely equated ‘social democracy’ to fascism in its corporatist underpinnings (described as ‘social fascism’). This interpretation prevented the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was the orthodox communist movement’s favoured political strategy to achieve class power. This hostile ideological attitude to social democracy historically informed the political approach of orthodox communist parties, including the SACP, to ‘non-communist’ varieties of socialist thought. It is worth noting that celebrated Marxist theoretician Leon Trotsky did not share this orthodox view and argued for an anti-fascist front, including social democrats who would ‘March separately, but strike together!’ against fascism (Trotsky 1931: n.p.).
THE ANC AND THE POST-APARTHEID ALTERNATIVE
Most accounts suggest that the ANC paid little or no attention to economic (or social) policy during much of its history, including in the exile years. Its overall approach to politics could be described as ‘liberal reformist’. This is best captured in its 1923 African Bill of Rights document, which demanded civil liberties for blacks equal to those enjoyed by whites under the 1910 Union Constitution. As Pallo Jordan has observed, ‘as for the idea of radically restructuring the economy, that was not even a part of their political vocabulary’ (1988: 149). Even though, under the presidency of Josiah Gumede, the ANC’s political strategy was briefly radicalised, democratised and internationalised, Gumede’s radicalism cost him the presidency. An old-guard leadership under Pixley ka Isaka Seme and Zacharias Richard Mahabane not only ousted Gumede, but drove out his working-class supporters in what Jordan (1988: 149) has described as a kind of McCarthy-style witch-hunt.
Attention to economic and social policy remained absent until Xuma’s African Claims in South Africa was adopted (ANC 1943). African Claims was a document with a recognisably social democratic impetus in the proposals it put forward for a post-segregation society. It argued for state intervention to secure social rights to systems of health, education and welfare for all on the basis of universal political and social citizenship. While this social democratic impetus was sustained in the Freedom Charter of 1955, the banning of the ANC in 1961 led to the subsuming, if not near abandonment, of economic and social policy theorising in favour of a primary imperative to secure a unitary, non-racial, democratic state established on the basis of a universal franchise (Van Niekerk 2013; 2017).
But it is also undeniable, as Laurence Hamilton puts it, that
if not always completely worked out, its focus on freedom from alien rule, colonialism and apartheid consistently involved a sense of what might be necessary for the real, concrete, everyday freedom of all South Africans within a democratic South Africa. This is evident in nearly every strategy and policy document or publication ever since its founding in 1912 and in particular: the 1943 African Claims in South Africa document: the 1955 Freedom Charter … and the Reconstruction and Development Programme (2014: 17, emphasis added).
Though African Claims was lacking in specific substance and detail, we would agree that the ANC was therefore the carrier of important values and principles about the kind of post-apartheid society that was needed. We describe those values as being broadly ‘social democratic’ even though the movement rarely used this concept, which was traditionally associated with European left politics.
What needs to be borne in mind was that the ANC since its formation was faced with a well-resourced, Western-backed and brutally repressive regime, which consumed its attention and resources, in particular in establishing the conditions for a democratic society through revolutionary armed struggle. As late as 1987, the venerated leader of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, declared in a speech to international business that ‘the African National Congress is committed to bringing about fundamental change to the entire socio-economic and political formation which constitutes the South Africa of today’ (Tambo 1987: n.p.).
Tambo went further to say that on questions of relevance to economic policy the ANC ‘has its perspectives, deriving from the people, which are embodied in the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 … In the context of its parameters, we believe that the issues as to how the wealth of our country is redistributed for the benefit of all our people, how the economy of our country is remoulded in order that all South Africans may thrive and prosper, are of prime importance and should find their solutions in the context of democracy’ (1987: n.p., emphasis added).
He then concluded his speech by saying that the primacy of establishing a non-racial democracy meant that ‘the preoccupation of the African National Congress is, and should be, the relentless prosecution of the all-round struggle to achieve freedom and democracy in our country’ (Tambo 1987: n.p., emphasis added).
In such a context, in which the ANC was fully preoccupied with establishing a non-racial democracy under severe conditions of political repression, the postponement of developing economic policy alternatives until democracy was achieved is understandable. Yet, from Tambo, it is also clear that when that time for economic and social policy development arrived, those policies had to be determined under the ideological umbrella of the Freedom Charter. Laurence Harris, the left-wing British economist and one of the ANC’s foremost thinkers on economic matters in the 1980s and 1990s, concedes the point about the ANC’s underdeveloped thinking on economic policy: ‘[T]he ANC did not give a high priority to research on economic policy’ (1990: 25).1 At the same time, this void in economic and social policy thinking was to impact negatively on the organisation’s ability to think about economic and social policy at the time negotiations for democracy and freedom arrived in 1990.
Jeremy Cronin, then SACP deputy general secretary, has conceded that ‘we were not well positioned, intellectually, theoretically in terms of policy formation, in terms of socio-economic transformation. It was understandable. We had been very focused on the political tasks, democratisation, mobilisation, fighting a guerrilla struggle’ (in Gumede 2007: 84). Cronin makes a series of insightful observations on the ideological character of the SACP and the ANC on the eve of negotiations:
The 1990s for the SACP was a paradoxical moment. The ‘Soviet’ legacy we were part of collapsed. The Party was unbanned in 1990 and half of the Party Central Committee resigns … So the ANC does not [undertake] a profound reflection on the collapse of the Soviet Union and so forth, it just soldiers on … does not reflect on new global realities. And the new democracy is emerging with all kinds of economic policy mistakes and miscalculations and so forth (Cronin interview, 14 March 2016, emphasis added).
We partially share Cronin’s position that what happened was ‘understandable’, arguably a function of the balance of forces and the messy outcome characteristic of most negotiated settlements (see also chapter 4). Yet, after 1990, the ANC, seen through a balance-of-power lens, had some not inconsiderable moral and political power. At the international level, the ANC, and Mandela in particular, had virtually unqualified support from some Western governments. Bill Clinton, who was very close to Mandela, became president of the United States (US) in 1992. There was also significant support from Western civil society solidarity organisations, such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement based in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Black Caucus in the US. Locally, the ANC was unchallenged in its support through organisations such as the United Democratic Front, Cosatu and the South African National Civic Organisation, as well as the churches and other social movements. Never were South Africans more united in their stand to bring about a non-racial, non-sexist and unitary democratic South Africa. That this power was not used effectively to secure the left social democratic trajectory, which was historically embedded in the ANC, is something akin to a tragedy. This is a point that Ronnie Kasrils, too, makes powerfully (Interview, 30 March 2017).
At the same time, we do not, on the basis of our research, share the views of those