[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Grumpy Franco v SA ultras and US political scientists

[ahmed]

> Patrick, that's not at all how I read Franco's review, which is  
> neither grumpy nor vs any of the above in any generic sense. Seizing  
> on one sentence and disparaging both text and author on that basis  
> ("this distant chap" etc) doesn't do any sort of justice to the  
> review or Franco's engagements with the SA transition.

i agree with hein on this, patrick. Your comment reads like cheap shot  
'cause you sore Franco is chowing you on the 'sell out-comprador  
thesis'  - which, anyway, is too simplistic as a narrative of the  
transition. As far as i can see, nothing new here. franco has  
maintained this position for some time.

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> On 25 Oct 2008, at 9:12 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>> (Oh dear. Someone's brainwashed comrade Barchiesi, who praises SA's  
>> "market-led normalization" somehow forgetting there's a ruling  
>> party split down the middle, more protests/capita than anywhere in  
>> the world and worsening economic chaos. I think the problem is  
>> failing to give credit where it's due: Franco hails Mbeki's  
>> "skillful combination of market liberalization... state  
>> developmentalism, and moderate yet significant resource  
>> redistribution". How can this distant chap talk about "moderate"  
>> resource redistribution and "state developmentalism", when the  
>> record clearly shows *massive* redistribution from poor to rich,  
>> workers to capital, SAns to the unpatriotric bourgeoisie, etc...  
>> and this wasn't just "skillful", it was a *brilliant* deployment of  
>> state underdevelopmental policies mainly with "made in Washington"  
>> labels yet collapsed into the NDR project. Moreover, the "skillful"  
>> crashing of the currency six times under IMF pressure to liberalise  
>> exchange control deserves yet more praise, not so? Ok,  
>> notwithstanding Franco's perpetual twisting-turning efforts to  
>> distinguish himself from lefties, no matter how cringe-inducing,  
>> you can read below for a creditable crit of corporatist analysis.  
>> Thanks Franco, I hadn't come across this fellow Allen before. Quite  
>> a pricey work - nothing of it available in decommodified form?)
>>
>> Michael H. Allen. Globalization, Negotiation, and the Failure of  
>> Transformation in South Africa: Revolution at a Bargain. New York:  
>> Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 256 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN  
>> 978-1-4039-7141-8.
>>
>> Reviewed by Franco Barchiesi
>> Published on H-SAfrica (October, 2008)
>> Commissioned by Peter C. Limb
>>
>> Globalization, Negotiation, and the Failure of Transformation in  
>> South Africa
>>
>> One of the most enduring tropes employed by the South African left,  
>> in its multifarious, variously socialist-flavored versions, to  
>> explain the country’s trajectory from late 1980s expectations of  
>> social transformation to the current, market-led normalization is  
>> that of the “sell-out.” Patrick Bond’s copious production, for  
>> example, popularized the story of how a glorious revolution was  
>> hijacked on its way to socialism by the scheming plots of  
>> technocrats lurking in the shadowy corridors of the International  
>> Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, modern equivalents of the  
>> Zurich gnomes of old, and their hoodwinked stooges in Pretoria’s  
>> Treasury and Reserve Bank.[1] Such a line of thought has ascended  
>> to celebrity status in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise  
>> of Disaster Capitalism (2007), which seamlessly places post- 
>> apartheid South Africa among such prodigies of predatory, take-no- 
>> prisoners liberalization as Pinochet’s Chile and Yeltsin’s Russia.
>>
>> Works like these generally fall short of capturing the complexities  
>> of post-1994 African nationalism in power, with its skillful  
>> combination of market liberalization, deracialized corporate  
>> acquisitiveness, state developmentalism, and moderate yet  
>> significant resource redistribution. Mainstream left analyses  
>> confirm, however, a point brilliantly made by Mark Gevisser in his  
>> Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2007). The trickster and the hero,  
>> Gevisser writes, or the neoliberal turncoat and the committed  
>> socialist, the corporate opportunist and the perennial activist,  
>> remain the main characters in the theatrics of national liberation  
>> in postcolonial Africa as well as in the “rustic and close-to-the- 
>> ground” world of South African studies.[2] Tricksters and heroes,  
>> as Paul La Hausse showed in his study of the “picaresque” in  
>> nationalist politics, are, on the other hand, inextricably woven in  
>> the historical and biographical trajectories of the African  
>> National Congress (ANC), and still contribute to its headline- 
>> challenging convolutions.[3]
>>
>> The lacunae in canonical left analyses of the South African  
>> transition make the title of Michael H. Allen’s Globalization,  
>> Negotiation, and the Failure of Transformation in South Africa.  
>> Revolution at a Bargain? all the more alluring. The book’s aim is  
>> to examine the political economy of South Africa in transition to  
>> democracy, as the autarchic, inward-looking apartheid model of  
>> growth and governance collapsed and the country entered a “post- 
>> Westphalian” world, where sovereignty is no longer contained in  
>> nation-states but operates through networks of negotiating  
>> relations involving domestic political and economic actors and  
>> international organizations.
>>
>> To Allen’s credit, this book does not indulge in a facile  
>> demonology of the “sellout,” nor does it uncritically celebrate the  
>> marriage of political liberation and economic liberalization. His  
>> sophisticated methodological framework combines an international  
>> political economy approach with a theory of transformation  
>> paradigm. It simultaneously attempts to capture both the structural  
>> forces and power relations shaping the South African economy, and  
>> the role of agency in terms of strategic outlooks, tactical  
>> choices, analyses of problems, and cognitive and normative  
>> adjustments by actors involved. Globalization is the protagonist of  
>> the book. In the early 1990s globalization implied a drastic change  
>> in the rules of the post-apartheid transition game, to which all  
>> the players involved, especially the ANC and the outgoing National  
>> Party (NP) government, had to adapt. Allen refers to a “global mode  
>> of production” imposing fresh constraints on the country’s existing  
>> economic structures that had been previously articulated into a  
>> national-industrial production buttressed by apartheid and mainly  
>> intended to benefit whites, and with informal and rural-subsistence  
>> sectors reproducing black marginality and cheap labor.
>>
>> The first part of the book--particularly chapters 3 and 4, which  
>> are also the most persuasively argued and theoretically grounded-- 
>> discusses the impact of international and local financial  
>> conditions on the ways in which negotiations between the NP and the  
>> ANC unfolded in the first half of the 1990s. The financialization  
>> of the South African economy during apartheid’s last decades made  
>> local capitalists sensitive to the disruptions caused by widespread  
>> popular insurgency. Capital longed for the kind of political  
>> stability that, upon restoring the confidence of foreign investors  
>> and international lenders in the country, would favorably place  
>> South African business in global financial markets. Allen’s  
>> discussion of the interrelations between, on the one hand, the  
>> onset of political negotiations and on the other hand, the  
>> financial dealings that occurred out of the spotlight between  
>> firstly the NP, and later the ANC, and technocrats and foreign  
>> banks, is quite instructive and original. In the end, he  
>> persuasively continues, the ANC’s ascendancy in the post-1990  
>> negotiations, and its anointment as the government in waiting, had  
>> much to do with the fact that the ANC and the NP had come to  
>> recognize the country’s economic predicament in similar terms. The  
>> ANC, however, offered the best guarantees of political stability  
>> and fiscal discipline required by domestic and international  
>> capital for their continued presence in the country. Social and  
>> political normalization was the terrain of encounter on which the  
>> transition to representative democracy was possible, and for the  
>> ANC it implied acceptance of the need to contain popular militancy  
>> and reduce the impact of future developmentalist policies (p. 57).  
>> It also involved “the practical empowerment yet ideological taming  
>> of the working class and its formal radical organizations” (p.  
>> 126), as witnessed in the vicissitudes and ideological acrobatics  
>> of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), torn between  
>> revolutionary jargon, promises of socioeconomic delivery, and  
>> reassurances to rescue a badly tattered capitalist economy and the  
>> underlying investor confidence.
>>
>> The tone of the book drastically changes, however, as it discusses  
>> the period after negotiations had started. Chapter 6 discusses  
>> CODESA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa, not Conference  
>> for Democracy in South Africa as stated in the book) and the  
>> subsequent multiparty negotiating process. A narrative, even  
>> descriptive style now takes the upper hand. The argument is less  
>> rigorously connected to the theoretical framework and the reader’s  
>> expectation of fulfillment of what the title promises--a discussion  
>> of the “failure of transformation”--is repeatedly delayed and  
>> ultimately frustrated. The book’s main problem is that it does not  
>> clearly define what it means by “transformation,” and its criteria  
>> to judge successes and failures thereof. Allen is quite precise in  
>> characterizing transition as a process of institutional change  
>> involving a shift from coercion to bargaining embodied in organs of  
>> representative democracy and corporatist negotiations with the  
>> participation of big business, big labor, and the state. He defines  
>> success in this regard essentially as stability under a legitimate  
>> ANC government remaining in control of basic assets that can “help  
>> to counterbalance the anarchical tendencies of bottom-up  
>> democracy” (p. 94).
>>
>> But what about transformation? To the extent that this might well  
>> involve fundamental social change, the redress of past  
>> socioeconomic oppression, and resource redistribution to benefit  
>> the large majority of poor, overwhelmingly black, South Africans,  
>> it does not seem to mean the same thing as transition as defined  
>> above. Indeed it might be argued that Allen’s idea of transition,  
>> with its focus on reassuring capital, deferring expectations, and  
>> enforcing law and order, may well stand as an impediment to actual  
>> transformation. Despite Allen’s professed sympathy for the plight  
>> of the poor and the downtrodden, and his ostensibly social  
>> democratic criticism of unfettered neoliberalism, he leaves this  
>> tension unresolved. Perhaps it would have helped Allen to have  
>> discussed socioeconomic oppression and injustice in the post- 
>> apartheid context, or actual policies in spheres such as social  
>> security, housing, healthcare, welfare, and municipal utilities.  
>> These themes are, however, largely absent from the book, apart from  
>> a perfunctory discharge of the “neoliberal” Growth, Employment, and  
>> Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. A very brief four-page (pp.147-151)  
>> description of the gap between promises of delivery and their real  
>> outcome is tucked away in chapter 7, which deals with gender  
>> inequalities and problems confronting women and which is the only  
>> substantial, in-depth analysis of post-apartheid social issues in  
>> the book.
>>
>> There is another realm of social concern from which a definition of  
>> Allen’s meaning of transformation can be inferred. In his words:  
>> “Change in the economic context comes from education, investment,  
>> employment, and a sense of hope and attachment to community. Yet  
>> the violence that grows out of economic marginality also deters the  
>> investments required to reduce that marginality” (p.159). So could  
>> this be the failure of transformation--the fact that, despite all  
>> its corporatist mechanisms for social normalization and the  
>> resumption of productivity, political change still excludes too  
>> many lumpens, riff-raffs, and maladjusted youth who cling to  
>> violence, do not appreciate the virtues of bargaining, and have no  
>> hopes of becoming “stakeholders” in the “global mode of  
>> production”? Is “transformation,” then, mainly a matter of rule and  
>> social control over this surplus of “bare life,” to recall Georgio  
>> Agamben’s felicitous expression or Thabo Mbeki’s idea of the  
>> “second economy”?[4] Will it be accomplished with the development  
>> of adequate Foucauldian governmentality, a sagacious mix of  
>> persuasion, education, and repression to turn the disorderly  
>> unemployed masses into productive, patient, patriotic workers-in- 
>> waiting?
>>
>> For Allen, the ANC deserves most of the blame for what went wrong  
>> socially. Soon after the 1994 elections, he writes, in a context of  
>> weakening economy, capital flight, and investors’ suspicion, the  
>> ANC’s approach to globalization preferred to assuage financial  
>> capital’s nervousness rather than spur job-creating production. As  
>> a result the policy of GEAR led to confrontation with the unions,  
>> which strained the democratic corporatist culture of bargaining,  
>> and led to a situation Allen deprecates, where “the main threat to  
>> South African democracy in the early years of the twenty-first  
>> century is from class conflict that is no longer being adequately  
>> channeled through the established bargaining frameworks” (p. 177).  
>> Incidentally, these words and themes can be found almost verbatim  
>> in the work of Professor Nic Wiehahn, the apartheid-age architect  
>> of late 1970s labor reforms, talking of an epoch-making post- 
>> apartheid break from coercion to bargaining.
>>
>> A striking aspect of this book is, in the end, that despite its  
>> goal of explaining the recursive interactions of agency and  
>> structure, it recognizes no agency of the poor. For them, the face  
>> of post-Westphalian sovereignty does not seem indeed different from  
>> the stern, reproaching glance of the Westphalian nation-state.  
>> Unless the poor find a seat at institutional bargaining tables,  
>> they are in Allen’s book mostly a social problem, an object of  
>> policy intervention, an anarchical subjectivity mechanically  
>> responding with escalating crime (a social concern to which Allen  
>> devotes much attention) to impulses of joblessness and decay, as  
>> shown in the portrait of the township of Umlazi and its ineluctable  
>> cycle of low investment, very high unemployment, desperation,  
>> crime, and minimal investment.
>>
>> Allen firmly bestows this solution on political modernization,  
>> which to him is capable of alleviating (with the consensus of  
>> established shareholders) the ravages of globalization. The book’s  
>> recommendations refer to the enabling, empowering, and  
>> participative role of civil society in terms that closely mirror  
>> the standard parlance of post-Washington Consensus governance.  
>> Social conflicts appear not as a legitimate area of inquiry and  
>> expression of antagonisms, but mostly as a bleak, unspecified,  
>> threatening shadow, and the political dynamics of poverty are  
>> reduced to their institutionalized manifestations. South Africa,  
>> however, has also provided the stage for significant, organized,  
>> and widely documented social movements in low-income communities.  
>> Through sustained mobilization against the social consequences of  
>> free-market policies--such as the lack of access to land, the  
>> corporatization of municipal utilities, and housing evictions-- 
>> social movement politics has challenged a characterization of the  
>> poor’s agency as either victimhood or disorderly spontaneity. At  
>> the same time, community movements have resisted their subaltern  
>> assimilation in liberal or corporatist institutionality, while  
>> reclaiming the role of conflict as a vehicle for political proposal  
>> and change. In response, their desire for transformation has often  
>> felt the weight of the transition and its associated stability in  
>> the form of judiciary prosecutions, police beatings, arbitrary  
>> incarcerations, and the demolition of “informal” dwellings.
>>
>> Part of the problem in Allen’s book is that its theoretical  
>> framework is mainly geared to explaining institutional change as an  
>> elite-driven process of pact-making. In accordance with political  
>> science transition theory, in Allen’s post-Westphalian world,  
>> authority is “shared among a wider network of elites” (p. 184)  
>> involving big business, big labor, local banks, and international  
>> institutions, but elites nonetheless. This approach may carry the  
>> book’s argument until 1994, as elite-pacting claimed center stage  
>> and even perhaps had an advantage in deferring desires from those  
>> waiting for the advent of the ANC as a messianic force for change.  
>> After the first democratic elections, however, this perspective  
>> loses steam. Bargaining between state, capital, and labor surely  
>> goes on, but it is increasingly inadequate to represent or explain  
>> conflicts internal to the ANC and between the ANC and its allied  
>> left organizations, as they deal with largely un-institutionalized  
>> dynamics of grassroots contestation, the collapse of waged  
>> employment, and new social antagonism towards privatization. Allen  
>> does not say much about intra-ANC dynamics. The party is presented  
>> as a rather coherent organization, bent on destroying capitalism  
>> until 1990 and then converted to neoliberal globalization as the  
>> new rule of the game in its 1991 Manifesto. As much recent research  
>> has shown (and here I refer again to Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki  
>> as an example), the pattern of relations between liberalism,  
>> socialism, and nationalism has been far more nuanced and intricate  
>> throughout the ANC’s highly contested history. In these crepuscular  
>> times--after the fall of the Mbeki administration and the rise of a  
>> new leadership that, in nebulous, still ill-defined, vaguely  
>> unsettling ways, is trying to connect to rank-and-file resentment  
>> at the ANC’s past record of economic liberalization--we still have  
>> to fully appreciate how straight, direct, and crowded the exit road  
>> from Westphalia actually is.
>>
>> Notes
>>
>> [1]. See for example, Patrick Bond, Against Global Apartheid: South  
>> Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF, and International Finance  
>> (London: Zed Books, 2003).
>>
>> [2]. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and  
>> the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University  
>> Press, 1999), 30.
>>
>> [3]. Paul La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism,  
>> Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” in Apartheid’s Genesis,  
>> 1935-1962, ed. Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel  
>> (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993), 195-228.
>>
>> [4]. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life  
>> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
>>
>> Citation: Franco Barchiesi. Review of Allen, Michael H.,  
>> Globalization, Negotiation, and the Failure of Transformation in  
>> South Africa: Revolution at a Bargain. H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews.  
>> October, 2008.
>> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22865
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