'There are no shortcuts left'

So the review I did of Hein Marais' new book, South Africa: Pushed to the Limit. The Political Economy of Change (London / New York: Zed Books, 2011)–which I believe deserves a wide readership–finally appeared this Sunday in the "Book Review" pages of the South African newpaper, "The Sunday Independent."  The published article does not include paragraphs 2 and 3 as well as the first sentence of paragraph 4 which makes for jarring reading. I have copied the original below.

The publication of Hein Marais' South Africa Pushed to the Limit is a welcome addition to the growing list of titles published on the second decade of democracy  in the last few years. It is also a welcome antidote to much of the narrowly focused or sloppily researched, recent literature.

The events of the last few years— broadly South Africa’s attempt to settle into democratic rule and more specifically Thabo Mbeki’'s fall and Jacob Zuma’'s spectacular rise —have been the subject of a number of recent political books.  The most notable are the 900-page biography of Mbeki by Mark Gevisser and the memoir of former ANC Member of Parliament, Andrew Feinstein. There’'s also former "Financial Times" Johannesburg correspondent Alec Russell’'s book, Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa, conveniently published to coincide with 2010’s general elections.

All these books, however, some more successful than others, focus on particular individuals and events.  One book that has recently tried to offer a more general perspective is R W Johnson'’s Brave New World. The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid.   The main claim of the book is that South Africa’s current state is the work of the ANC’s weak and venal leadership. Whatever one makes of this claim, the book as a whole, while provocative, is unimpressive, marred by innuendo and gossip in the place of analysis.  For example, on the basis of no documented evidence, Johnson accuses the ANC of murdering Chris Hani and Robert Mugabe of having a hand in the 9/11 terror attacks and compares the ANC’s dismissal of the small, mostly white opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, to Robert Mugabe’s brutal repression of the MDC in Zimbabwe.

In contrast, Hein Marais’ attempt to cover a wide canvas—his new book comes in at 566 pages, including a 56-page bibliography—comes with rigorous fact checking, documentation, and analysis. South Africa. Limits to Change, Marais’ 1998 book charted the transition from Apartheid to liberal democracy. It became one of the few standard texts for that period among academics and researchers. After that work, Marais went back to his job as an AIDS researcher. His 2000 study of AIDS for the University of Pretoria’s Center for the Study of AIDS–—Google it–—is still one of the best accounts of government’ denialism and inaction around the pandemic in those years.

Today’s South Africa is vastly different from 1998.

Since then, the early “reconciliation” politics of the Mandela era has been replaced, first, by Thabo Mbeki’'s brand of Pan-Africanism, then by his racial class politics and brand of democratic centralism, and now for the first time since the transition a real threat to the ANC’s political cohesion.

Jacob Zuma'’s public persona ushers in a different kind of politics: popular, socially conservative, but also indecisive.  Corruption–—though the arms deal happened on Mbeki'’s watch–—is taking on problematic proportions. And in a continuation of postapartheid (and global) trends, the gap between rich and poor South Africans had become bigger and more worrying among black South Africans.

The new book wants “ to gauge where South Africa’s journey beyond apartheid is headed and why this is happening.”

Marais is a student of history and Pushed to the Limits, not surprisingly, has a long preamble.

Marais traces South Africa’s current conundrum to the nineteenth century origins of modern South Africa’s political economy in minerals and energy, colonialism, Apartheid, the impact of the political transition of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, more recently, the imposition of a locally produced structural adjustment program in 1996.  These factors along with the choices of the ANC leadership—Marais argues that the ANC were definitely active agents in developing a “neoliberal developmental path,” rather than being manipulated by external forces— have combined to determine the outlines of postapartheid politics as well as the “relative weights” of the main forces contesting the outcome of that process.

Marais is pessimistic about the ANC’s ability to solve South Africa’s “national question.” The reasons: a mix of history, specific policy choices, malfunctioning public systems, misjudgments, and shoddy management or, what he terms, “sheer bad luck.” He gives the new government credit for its numerous social protection and public works programs in the face of mass unemployment. However, he argues these “safety nets” operate in a framework that expresses basic neoliberal “rationalities.” So the social grants get stigmatized as handouts and get slowly privatized. He also discusses the nature of work in South Africa (temporary, informal, and often paying less than a subsistence wage), arguing that such arrangements do not add up to a viable path “to social inclusion and well-being.”   (The sociologist Franco Barchiesi makes an argument along the same lines in his new book.)

Some readers might recognize the arguments of his first book in the first four chapters of Pushed to the Limits.  They should head straight for the second half of the book, which contains chapters outlining what Marais thinks are the key factors influencing South Africa’s immediate and medium-term future, including the AIDS and Tuberculosis epidemics, the ANC’s excessively business-friendly economic policies, and corruption.

Marais argues that while South Africa’s leaders now congratulate themselves for “the largest public health intervention in the world regarding AIDS,” in fact government’s response amounts to “a long fiasco.” Worse, AIDS coupled with growing inequality, imprisons large numbers of South Africans in “a kind of eternal now” and may have corroded their “ability and perhaps the desire to imagine a different world.”

Mandela'’s decision to jettison the RDP for GEAR in 1996—against the wishes of its trade union and communist allies (and ANC voters’ mandate)—is a second key development. Its main outcome, in Marais’ judgment, was to enable South Africa’s largest corporations to “restructure, consolidate and globalize” their operations. They—not Julius Malema or his tenderpreneurs—are the major beneficiaries of the new South Africa. (For example, the old South African Breweries—–now known as SABMiller –has within two decades morphed into the world’s second largest beer brewery and a full-fledged multinational.) Moreover within the ANC the position of conservatives have been strengthened, while the deficiencies of what he calls the “organized left” have been exposed.  The ANC now presides over a “provisional and wavering hegemonic project,” its political character “increasingly indeterminate” and ideologically indistinct.

A third development is the arms deal that he traces to “a handful of top and, and for the most part, trusted politicians.” The deal, worth about US$10 billion, led to Zuma’s firing as deputy president of the ANC, split the ANC, led to Mbeki’s forced resignation (Marais compares Mbeki at the time to Richard Nixon), and in Marais’ terms, dragged key state institutions into the muck and polluted the state.  While “there is no evidence that Mbeki benefited personally” from the arms deal, there is evidence that large bribes were paid. As for Zuma, “South Africa’s Ronald Reagan” (a phrase first used by Alec Russell), Marais, in a welcome move towards substantive debate about issues currently couched in fear and caricature, writes:  “The Zuma phenomenon became a stage for asserting a variety of authenticities—about the meaning of being a Zulu man, a Zulu, a man, an ‘African,’ a ‘South African.’ This is a Pandora’s box the Zuma campaign dared to nudge open. South Africa will find it difficult to replace the lid.” Zuma also wrought kingmaker Julius Malema—“skilled at the flamboyant smear and troglodyte slur and keyed into the normative grammar of lumpen radicalism.”  For Marais, Malema’s brand of populism may become the norm in South Africa where “barefaced accumulation [is combined] with radical posturing and populist savvy.”

The final chapter assesses the outlook for progressive politics. Marais, not surprisingly, concludes the majority of South Africans still identify with the ANC. On the other hand, he is surprisingly pessimistic about the national ambitions of progressive, popular movements both inside and outside the ANC.  COSATU, despite being at the heart of Mbeki’s defeat at Polokwane, has a “surprisingly light organizational weight inside the ANC.” The trade union federation’s main problem is that South Africa lacks “the corporatist foundation for a managed class compromise and it doesn’t have much to show for its attempts thus far to institutionalize such a compromise.”  The outlook for trade union-driven politics is thus bleak.  Reports of the reach of new social movements are romanticized, “overcooked” and the result of “agitprop” by academics and leftwing activists. However, in the book’s last sentence Marais leaves it open: for protest movements, both inside and outside the ANC, “there is a long process of experimenting, building and adapting ahead. There are no shortcuts left.”