SHORTER: 2020, "Understanding South Africa's Incomplete Liberation: A Anarchist/Syndicalist Analysis" (original) (raw)

2020, ASR/ Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

The 1994 transition to a democratic parliamentary state was a major advance for South Africans, including the black working class and poor. For the first time, there was a constitution with guaranteed rights, universal suffrage, and a formal commitment to equality. The openly racist practices of the old government were now illegal; instead of an authoritarian state, the country now had free, fair elections. The state welfare system was deracialized, schools and universities were desegregated, as were residential areas and state services, and the homeland or Bantustan system was formally abolished as efforts were made to create a single, unified people. These are not small achievements: 350 years of authoritarian state rule based on white supremacy had ended. At the same time, the transition failed to fundamentally eradicate inequality or exploitation in South Africa. For most of the black working class and poor, the past (in the form of the apartheid legacy) and the present (in the form of an ongoing cheap black labor system) remain daily reality. This can be seen in terms of the perpetuation of the township system in the towns, with its wretched schools and living conditions, housing shortages, poverty, overcrowding, mass unemployment and crime; of white-dominated capitalist agriculture and massively unequal land ownership in much of the countryside; and of chiefly/royal rule and grim underdevelopment in the old homeland areas. A large social welfare system blunts the edges, but excludes the unemployed and pays pittances; the state services on which most people rely are run-down and inadequate. The simple reality is that the transition in South Africa retained the major structures that enabled the centralization of major social resources in the hands of a few: a small ruling class still dominates and exploits the majority of our people, the working class and poor. These structures are capitalism and the state. This was not an accident or a product of bad leaders, of an unholy compromise, or a "sell-out." The nationalist politicians who won control of the national liberation struggle in South Africa never intended to get rid of these structures. They wanted to capture them instead. These politicians played a progressive role in the fight against apartheid, but their political project was fundamentally incapable of creating a society that would provide complete liberation for the mass of the people. It was not inevitable that the nationalists would capture the struggle, but their victory ensured that the mass of the people only got an incomplete liberation and that, in power, the nationalist politicians would become part of an oppressive, exploitative ruling class.