 Hello, everybody. Welcome to this evening's SOAS Department of Development Studies and UCL Bloomsbury in East London Doctoral Training Partnership seminar series. Sorry for that mouthful. We're really, really delighted to welcome this evening Dale McKinley, who's a writer, researcher, lecturer and political activist currently based in South Africa. He has a PhD in political economy and African studies from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And he's the author of four books and numerous book chapters, research reports, journal and magazine and press articles on South African and international political, social and economic issues and struggles. His most recent book, which you can see outside and buy a copy of, South Africa's Corporatised Liberation, a critical analysis of the ANC in power. That was published this year and is a sequel to his first book on South Africa, The ANC and the Liberation Struggle, which was published in 1997. You can get it outside for £12, which is a discount from the regular price of £15.95. We also have Dr Adam Hania from the Development Studies Department here at SOAS acting as discussant this evening. His research includes the political economy of the Middle East, labour, migration, class and state formation in the Gulf Cooperation Council. If you want to tweet this evening, the hashtags to use are SOAS, DEV, Studies and ESRC. And I'll hand over at this point to Dale if you want to kick us off. Thanks. Thanks Joanne and thanks very much for the opportunity to speak. I've been on a bit of a tour on this book in the United States and Canada and tomorrow will be in Denmark on this. So it's a bit of a whirlwind tour but it's been very, very enjoyable and I hope that our engagement this evening will be useful for you. Before I get into a little bit about the book itself, just to situate myself in the context. I am not a full-time academic although I've had a PhD for the last 27 years. And I am much more of a political activist and my writing is informed by my activism. So when I have written about the ANC and the Communist Party and the trade unions and the liberation struggle and South African politics generally speaking, it is not simply as an observer, as an analyst but as a participant. I just to give you and so all the cards on the table, I was involved from the 1980s in the ANC and the underground struggle for many years. And then in the Communist Party for 10 years before I was expelled from the Communist Party. And people ask me why and how can you be expelled from the Communist Party? I say for trying to be a communist, at least in the South African context. That was 18 years ago. And have been the co-founder of two of the larger social movements in South Africa, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, which was a collection of about 40 different community organisations. And more recently the Right to Know campaign, which is an access to information and freedom of expression movement in South Africa. I come unapologetically obviously from the left side of the political spectrum. But the arguments that I'm making in this book and what I'm going to talk about tonight, I think are quite self-evident in many cases for those that are paying attention to what's going on in South Africa and have been looking at the past 23 years since the ANC took power. So I've lived this book. It's not just a matter of just writing it. What are the key arguments in this book? What is the foundational arguments here? Basically I situate this within a historical context, which I made these arguments quite a long time ago in the first book on the ANC, which is that people have become quite disillusioned and disappointed in what's happened in South Africa. Let's be real and honest about that. There were many, many expectations that the ANC when Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa was going to be a different kind of country, a different kind of place, a very progressive and possibly more radical experiment in building a new kind of society. And unfortunately that has not really come to pass, although there obviously have been a lot of positive and good things that have happened over the last 23 years. But fundamentally the explanatory factor that I use here is basically looking at the leadership core of the ANC and essentially saying that from the beginning and all the way through its struggle, the ANC and the leadership and then included Mandela all the way back was one of class aspiration. In other words, fundamentally there was never any real intent, nor political or organizational intent, to create a revolutionary situation in South Africa that would overthrow the existing economic and social order. What it would do would be to overthrow the political order. In other words, to put it very mildly, I mean to put it very bluntly, a deracialized capitalism. And there is a great quote that I use from one of the former general secretaries of the ANC that says it much better than I can. This is from 1949. It was Dr A. B. Kluma and he was being asked what does the ANC think of capitalism in the context of a young Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in the 1940s who were coming up. And his reply was this. He said that it is of less importance to us whether capitalism is smashed or not. It is of greater importance to us while capitalism exists, we must fight and struggle to get our full share and benefit from the system. 1949. Now that does not mean that there were those that were in the liberation movement such as some communists and radical trade unionists that had different ideas about a socialist society or much more radical alternatives. But fundamentally what drove the ANC, I argue, is the politics of accession and incorporation. What do I mean by that? I mean the politics that fundamentally looks to institutional and systemic power as the goal. So therefore essentially the state is the ultimate throne of that power. You capture the state and then you use the state in order to be able to transform society. The problem with that scenario is that if you simply capture a state and you don't transform that state in any meaningful way, well then you begin to reproduce the very same oppressions, the very same practices as those that you overthrew. And I would argue that this has applicability to all sorts of liberation movements. Not just the ANC, but for Limo, the MPLA, Zanu, where I come from and was born in Zimbabwe and one can see this in many cases. The other aspect of this which has a more theoretical component to it, it was to argue, is that if you look at Marx's classic dialectic of the objective and the subjective, if you are someone who wants to change something, then you are obviously engaging your agency. If you're a subjective understanding, you see something is wrong. The apartheid system is morally indefensible. We want to change it, we want to overthrow it, fair enough. You're then faced with the objective realities of that, the apartheid state, the military, all sorts of powerful economic institutions, white monopoly capital, so forth and so on. And it's the interplay of that dialectic obviously that takes things forward in terms of a revolutionary struggle. My argument is that fundamentally the ANC privileged the objective side of that equation and essentially took the subjective for granted. What do I mean by that? I mean essentially what it did is it used the mass, it used the people to get to where it wanted to which was to access institutional power. Once it access institutional power, the people get left behind. The people no longer have their use, they have their use to get there but after that and therefore what they then say when you access power is what the ANC says to the people is we no longer need to struggle, we no longer need to change something. We have liberated you. Just like Robert Wagabi says in Zimbabwe, Zanu Pief, the party liberates you. Therefore the party and the state become the same thing, the liberation movement becomes the ANC and the people become peripheral to the possibilities of change. Also of course when the people then begin to say well hang on a second, what about the things that you promised us, what about the freedom charter, what about the people shall govern, the people shall own the resources and so forth and so on. The standard answer to that is it's not possible. Why is it not possible? Because of the balance of forces. What are the balance of forces? The objective material conditions do not allow us to do those kinds of things. So what was the standard response to what happened in the negotiations in South Africa in 1993, 1994? The standard response to us comrades, we can't do that. We can't take on capital. We can't do these things because if we do we're going to get isolated. We're going to get smashed by international capital. Essentially just bring it down. What does that mean? We don't trust you. We don't believe in the power of people to actually change something. We're privileging the objective reality and we're basically orienting towards institutional power. We're privileging the power of capital, the power of those that have. That basis I would argue explains a lot, the foundational basis explains a lot of what's happened over the last 23 years or so. And in order to explain that I use the house metaphor to try to make it very, very simple. What do I mean by the house metaphor? Picture South Africa is a house. In the 20th century the house was controlled by political landlords and economic landlords. The political landlords were the National Party, the apartheid state, the PW Boatza and Company back in those days. The economic landlords were predominantly white monopoly capital, five or six large corporations that dominated from the 1970s and 80s. Five corporations hold 80% of the value of the Januswick Stock Exchange. Very highly monopolized, racialized capital. What happens, a struggle takes place. Negotiations happen, what's the deal? The deal is that one set of political landlords marches outside the house and a new set of political landlords march into the house. The National Party marches out, the ANC marches in. The economic landlords remain. Economic landlords do not change. They sit there in the same house. What then happens? Well of course, there's some changes. The house gets a new coat of paint. New buildings, new rooms are put onto the house. There's new available rights, so there are some good things that begin to happen. But fundamentally, after some time goes by what begins to happen, the political and economic landlords begin to become really chummy and bloody again because they're ruling the house. And they begin to up the rent. They begin to put spy cameras in their hallways and put bigger walls around the property. They begin to hold all night parties. They begin to raid the pantry. You can play this metaphor out in terms of the last 23 years. But most fundamentally over the last 23 years what's happened, nobody is paying attention and nothing was mentioned in the negotiations about the foundations of the house. Nobody talks about the foundations of the house. It's simply about capturing the house, about entering into the house. Freedom is one. We have entered the house, we govern, we have the state. The foundations are rotten. The foundations of that house are rotten. And over the last 23 years the house is listing. It's beginning to list. And nobody has moved down into those foundations other than legislatively. So yes, there were new laws passed. Yes, there were a range of different positive things that were happening. But socially and economically not much was changed. Therefore what then is almost inevitable as a result of that is that things are reproduced. The inequalities are reproduced. The very same oppressions begin to be reproduced. Except this time they are deracialised. In other words they're not on the basis of racial segregation, racial identity. You cannot pat, but mostly on the basis of class. With racial overtones simply because the inherited racial inequalities are reinforced. So they follow those kinds of similar racial patterns. That's the fundamental metaphor that I use in the book now. If you look at that metaphor transposing it onto a critical look into the realities of the last 20 or so years in South Africa. What this confirms is one thing beyond doubt. Is that liberation, the liberation that has been achieved has been truncated. I call it a corporatised liberation. I'll explain why I used that term in particular. But a very truncated liberation. And why is that the case? Is simply because there can be no meaningful liberation in South Africa or anywhere else for the majority. Without a simultaneous assault on and struggle against the architecture that constitutes the foundational root of South Africa's problems. What is that root? Plain and simple? It is a capitalist system. One can never understand the apartheid system without understanding the development of capitalism in modern day South Africa in the 20th and 19th century. You cannot separate the two. You can't understand those two things. So simply in rational terms you cannot have a liberation that separates the two either. You can't have a liberation that sort of says, no wait, hang on a second. We've liberated you. We've gotten rid of the apartheid system. Capitalism has always been there. It doesn't matter. It's okay. That thing is going to exist. What we're going to do is we're going to try to basically, like it everybody else in the capitalist world, we're going to try to be basically pallid. We're going to put band-aids on the system. We're going to try to have a little bit of redistribution here and there. And as we'll see this exactly what has happened in the last 23 years. So the plain and simple is the capitalist system overlaid by historical racialized construction and division of the apartheid system itself. Whose core being and practical purposes are the pursuit of, and this is a universal critique. It isn't specific to South Africa, a troika, a three-sided pursuit of profit, accumulation and enabling power. In other words, through the state in this particular case. The human and natural costs are only relevant to the extent that they threaten that troika. So it's amazing that we can have a situation where the very same people who sacrificed a great deal and who spoke in the name of the people and had its incredible moral authority today turn around and tell poor people, the 40%, 45% of South Africans who cannot even get a job, structurally unemployed, which would create a revolution in most of the countries. If that was the case, you had 40, almost half your population had no job and tell them, sorry, there's nothing we can do about that. It's simply the structural realities of the economic system. We live in a capitalist world. It's tough. We're trying our best. If there's no better confirmation than essentially the betrayal of the agency, the promise of the possibilities that were offered in the liberation system, which were used. So liberation influenced or driven by whatever historically informed demographic or culturally specific factors, in other words, whether it's in Zimbabwe or otherwise, turns out to be little more than a political and racially framed shifting of the capitalist balcony chairs without a corresponding transformation of the socioeconomic foundations. This is surely the most fundamental lesson of post-apartheid South Africa. It logically follows then that whatever else is transpired in a liberated post-apartheid South Africa, the way in which the agency is approached, institutionalized and exercised that power in a phrase, it's post-1994 strategy and tactics, is at the heart of understanding what has happened in South Africa over the last 23 years. As is the case historically, this ultimately subjective or human realm cannot be fully grasped without linking to the complementary objective conditions within which those strategy and tactics have been pursued. And this is what I do in the book. So let's me just go through some of the key arguments in the book because we don't have time here to go in depth into each of these. But what I do in the book is each chapter is framed around that house metaphor. So the first chapter is getting into the house. What happened during negotiations? What was negotiated away? What was the deal? Then guarding the house. In other words, dividing and ruling the house, managing the house, democracy, internal dissent, how people respond to critique. South Africa, as everybody knows, is considered to be the protest capital of the world where people are constantly engaging in class struggle and other kinds of racialized struggle. Inequality, corruption, democrat popular power, so forth. What kind of house is the ANC built? And then how can we move beyond that? That's how I deal with it in the book. Let me just take some of the key arguments that come out of this book based upon that framing foundational frame that I just outlaid. Which is this? There are several of them. Despite the adoption of a socially progressive constitution, something that liberal scholars love to celebrate in South Africa. We've got the best constitution in the world. South Africa is the only country in the world where you cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. It's good, it's great, it's excellent that we've got that. But the reality on the ground is something very different. I was a board member of the lesbian and gay equality project for 10 years, which was one of the key organizations fighting for lesbian and gay rights in South Africa. I can tell you that for black lesbians in the township, that constitution means very little. In terms of their experiences at the hands of misogynist homophobes, a corrective rape that was a crisis many years ago and still remains so, but is very underreported, everything else. So, yes, despite the adoption of progressive social constitution, which guarantees all sorts of social economic rights, water, electricity, housing, so forth and so on, these are positive things and they should be celebrated to a certain extent. But any institutional legislative framework for democratic governance, so there have been a lot of advances. We've got very good labour laws in South Africa. We've got a whole range of good access to information laws, for example. We're the only country in the world, or one of the only countries in the world, where you can guarantee by law that you can access, you have the right to access information from both the public and private sector. According to the law, you can approach a corporation and ask for information and you're supposed to get it. Unfortunately, once again, the reality is something very different because when you base transformation on a legal system that is inherited and untransformed, that legal system then wraps you up in the process of lawsuits and court processes that poor people cannot engage. So, the vast majority of people then have to basically, there's also a question of just getting lawyers and you ask a corporation, for example, whether they've been poisoning the groundwater of mine in a community and you want to know exactly what their environmental impact assessment said. They say, no, that's confidential information. The law basically says, well, you go to court to get it. Well, the court community can't go to court because they can't afford and there's very few lawyers that will do pro bono. That's just one example. Despite all of these things, there's simply no denying that under the ANC's rule, power has not only remained in the hands of a small minority, but has increasingly been exercised in service to capital. Just different kinds of capital, different fractions of capital, different racialized components of capital. Some old white, some new black, some Chinese capital, some transnational capital, whatever. But it's capital nonetheless. And it's in service to that. So, when you hear debates about decolonization in South Africa and white monopoly capital, what you don't hear from those same people is where the black capitalists who've gotten in bed with those white capitalists, essentially, they're saying, well, no, it's the white capital that we have to blame when we have to get, but you don't ask the question about Patrice Mwtsepe, who, for example, is the richest billionaire in South Africa, who made his billions through the ANC, Syrran Posa, who might become the next president of the country who spent 18 million around on buying a buffalo stuff for his buffalo farm. He might become the next president of the country. How did he make his money through white capital itself? He might become the next president of the US, because so you cannot understand one without understanding the other is the point here. Both in party, the ANC has become the key political vehicle, both in party and state form of corporate capital. Again, both domestic and international, both black and white, both local and national, and constitutive of a range of different fractions of capital. That's one of the key arguments that I make in this and show how that has happened. That point, over the last 20 or so years, it has been the fight on and over this terrain with some against, some in the middle, some for. This has principally defined the journey of the ANC and the state since 1994. Central elements of this have taken place within the ANC as anybody who's paying attention to contemporary South Africa can note, I was just talking earlier on, that over the last 18 months, 45 local councillors have been assassinated. By ANC people. ANC is killing itself. It's fighting over positions of power. It's eating itself alive. These are the natural outcomes of this kind of politics. One faction is going after the other faction. Zuma, our president, is at the heart of that battle, as are many others. The central elements of this have taken place within the ANC, the alliance itself. I talk about the Communist Party, the role of the Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which we don't have time to go into, but suffice to say that they have played factional roles for themselves that have covered. One of the reasons why I was expelled from the SACP is that they basically said to their leadership you're a bunch of hypocrites. You sit on platforms, you talk about the working class, and you make radical rhetoric, and then you occupy ministerial positions and you privatize basic services. Well, of course, there's nothing communist or socialist about that, but in South Africa we live in total contradiction to these things. And of course, when you raise these things, and as also, even as a white person, well then you're shut up because your voice does not matter because you don't speak on behalf of the majority. And that is another problem, is that, as we've seen in Zimbabwe, is that you shut down debate and dissent based upon this is the ultimate irony, is that the ANC's anti-party struggle was supposed to be a non-racial struggle. It was supposed to be one that combined that allowed Indians, coloreds, whites, blacks to come together in a national liberation struggle and to stop defining people according to purely their race under the old apartheid categories. And yet, when you go into South Africa and any identification system, the very first thing that asks you is, are you Indian, are you colored, are you white, are you exactly the same apartheid racial categories? Exactly the same definitions. The ANC in Quasunatal, Zoomer's home province, just a few weeks ago, issued a proclamation blaming Indians for the problems in Quasunatal. That the Indians were the problems, re-racialising the entire sort of, excuse me, political scene in that province. So we see this again and again, playing itself out. Third point, like the journey of Kaplan itself over the last few centuries, this fight between the factions and representing capital, representing the ANC itself, has produced different fractions or more accurately political terms factions, as I've said within the ANC. Examples would be a potentially modernising capitalist faction, so our opposer represents this, which is sort of like, look, we want to embrace a social democratic capital. We want a more caring, humane face of capitalism. We want a redistributive component. We want clean governance. We're not corrupt, so forth and so on. But we don't want to fundamentally change anything in terms of the economic and social side of things. Excuse me. A technocratic faction, in other words, similar, that looks simply at the finances, that we will do a better job. And what I call the gangster fashion or traditional nationalist faction, which is essentially about looting the state, which is unfortunately seems to be the preoccupation of our president at this particular stage in his faction. And who basically wants to use the state to accumulate their own wealth and that of their faction. Fourthly, at the heart of the ANC's strategy and tactics is the underestimation, and this is crucial, of the revolutionary potential and liberatory ethos of popular democratic power, which was what drove the anti-apartate movement in the first place. Let us be under no illusions about who freed South Africa, the people freed South Africa. The ANC did not free South Africa. Nelson Mandela did not free South Africa, even himself, as he was a fairly humble man, and he pointed out himself, don't make me a saint. Don't make me, it's the people that did these things. As I was pointing out in a conversation earlier on and I do in the book, at the same time that the ANC in 1985 was issuing the call to the civic groups, the women's groups, the youth groups in South Africa and the country and governable to go out on the streets and fight the apartheid state, which they did, Tombow and Becky and his technocratic faction within the ANC were meeting with the IMF and the World Bank, cutting deals already in 1984-85 of a post-apartate situation, which was what? Don't touch the economy. Don't touch capitalism. We understand. So capital itself, Gavin O'Reilly, the CEO of Anglo-American, the oldest capitalist formations in South Africa, went and met with the ANC in 1985-86, and when he came back he was asked, well, what do you think about the ANC? He goes, I think they're eminently reasonable men and they understand that they do not want to throw the baby of capitalism out with the bathwater apartheid. And this was 1986. He understood very quickly that the deal that was going to be cut was going to be won, which kept that economy intact and basically allowed for a political change to happen. So how is that allowed? It's not just inevitability, which oftentimes a lot of analysts argue, and I take this argument on. Many people that have written about South Africa in the last 20 years want to make an argument is the balance of forces. It was never possible. How could you actually even have a revolutionary potential if you did there was going to be a civil war in South Africa? The right wing. This was played out and I can tell you from being involved myself in the early 1990s and self-defense units, which were the ANC units, ANC-aligned units in the townships which were fighting many of the covert apartheid hit squads and others and they caught the line, which was another party that you know. There was no such thing, by the way, as a peaceful transition in South Africa. From 1990 to 1993, 30,000 people died. 30,000. That's more than the many wars. Small wars, about 20 times more than I've ever died in Northern Ireland over a 40-year period. This was in three years. No such thing as a peaceful transition. There was an underground war going on. In the context of that, there was a great deal of silence from the ANC and people were asking and saying, we can move things. We can struggle. We can have a more radical outcome. ANC's answer was no, we can't because if you do, the right wing is going to create a coup here. The military will come back and have a civil war. This is the answer that was given to everyone. When Chris Honey was assassinated, Mandela got on national television and appealed to everybody for calm and said, don't please, youth, go back to your homes. Don't come out into the streets. Please don't fight to do this. We will take care of it. We will deliver your freedom. A few weeks later, a deal was cut with FW and Clark. Nobody knew what was going to place behind closed doors. Nobody knew what the terms of that agreement was. The youth and everybody were left out of the equation because the thing was, don't the people, you'll cause too much trouble. It's out of our control. The revolution is too messy and the right wing will come and it will defeat us and then we'll be back to a war. Well, the point about any revolutionary struggle is if you tell the people what they can and cannot do and you speak on their behalf all the time, then you're never going to know what the potential outcomes of any revolutionary struggle are. I was going to have a managed process, one that is an elite led process and this is what I would argue has definitely happened and that makes the liberatory potential ethos of popular democratic power and how that can be harnessed and exercised to lay down an institutional policy foundation for systemic change. It was never really given an opportunity. Never. You cannot potentially even win a battle unless you win aspects of battle if you don't engage it. As James Baldwin, a famous African American poet once wrote, not everything can be faced, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced. So you've got to, that's the thing, you've got to allow for these things to begin and people themselves to take it in a way as opposed to determining what is and is not possible prior to the possibilities of that struggle. The ANC and the state, as a result, the ANC and the state that is politically controlled for the last 23 years have become corporatized in both form and content as a result. What do I mean by corporatized? I mean essentially that the state and the party have taken on the corporate form. What is the fundamental purpose of a corporation? Power and money. Institutional power and money. Capital, accumulation of those two things. And as a result, things become society, your politics becomes commodified. So what do we see in South Africa? This is amazing parallels and many people don't know these things. The very first PR agency that the ANC engaged for the 1994 elections. Does anybody know who they engaged? Stanley Greenberg, does that name ring a bell? Stanley Greenberg was Bill Clinton's PR farm in the United States. And then engaged him. And basically of course what they do was is you're going to have a media driven, leadership driven, leave the people out of the equation, that's what you're going to have. And you're going to sell this and your politics becomes one of appearance. And you commodify this about how much money. You go after corporations, you get donations. The ANC to this day refuses to tell South Africans where it gets its money from. Well, I tell you in the book where it's got some of its money from. Let me give you two examples. And this will, it's amazing, it's just really sometimes you want to just go, wow, is this really true? This is at the same time, so Mandela himself was giving a speech in the late 1990s when he was president. And it was in honor of the King of Saudi Arabia, the Saud family. Those were now Democrats. Who just love the people, especially women, and their rights. And the Saudis had given the ANC 10 million US dollars, which at the time was a fortune to run its electoral campaign. You know who else gave the ANC money? Suharto from Indonesia, another renowned Democrat who massacred Communists. Baba Ginda, Ibrahim Baba Ginda, dictator in Nigeria giving the ANC massive amounts of money. The song of Morocco, another renowned Democrat, a human rights defender. The list goes on. These are the people, and I wouldn't even get into the Israeli connection. While the ANC was talking about the Palestinian struggle, at the same time it was dealing underhandedly with Israelis on the nuclear front. And the rich plutonium and so forth, which is a continuation of the apartheid relationship. These are examples of how on text the ANC has in many ways become corporatized. Because to be corporatized in that sense, you really don't really care so much about the people only when it's election time. That's when you care about the people. So of course you go out into the neighborhoods, you do everything, you start spending money, you build new roads and infrastructure, you do these kinds of things as soon as elections are over and you're re-elected, well then you forget about it. And the people then go back into the background. And they go back in time. Well of course it shifts the balance of forces even further away from the mass, from the workers and the poor, which are the majority. Therefore it becomes a fair complete. Your analysis becomes a fair complete, which is, well comrades we can't do that because the balance of forces are against us. Well of course they are. Because you've helped shift them even further to that side. You've actually taken the power away from the possibilities of that change and that's realistic that you can actually change anything. So the alternative, there is no alternative. We cannot do these things. All of this gets pumped time and time and time again, which is fundamentally as I write here that's what I call the neoliberal trick. What is the neoliberal trick? To convince all of us that there cannot be an ideational alternative. There is no, it's Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. There is no struggle anymore. All the struggle is is to make capitalism better and to find little niches within the system. That's it. That's what we can do. That's what lefties and progressives and other people can do. This is only 23 years after a struggle in South Africa. It's instructive. The other instructive point is electoral politics itself. If electoral politics is the be all and end all of democratic representation, which we're told by liberals that it is, the democratic politics, well then let's look at the electoral terrain. 23 years after people got the right to vote for the first time in their lives. The majority, otherwise in other words, outside of white population, the black population got to vote for the first time. Do you know what the turnout in the elections were, the last national elections were? 52%. The turnout in the last local government elections were below 50%. That means over half the eligible population doesn't even think that electoral politics makes any difference anymore for whatever reasons they might have. It's not apathy, by the way. It's a convenient explanation. People are apathetic. No, they're not. Not voting is just as much a political act as voting is in many cases. People do not see what the possibilities of the ANC or any other. They won't want to vote for the right wing parties or any others. In the electoral context it doesn't tell a very pretty picture either on that case in terms of the balance of forces moving away. And what does that do? The ANC then claims and this is repeated by academics and analysts and newspapers. The ANC received an overwhelming majority in the last elections. The ANC is the most popular party. Well, yes, of what? Break it down. Which I did in doing this book. So what do we see? What are we told? The picture that we're told is the ANC got 64% of the vote. Pretty good, nice majority, right? 64% of what? 64% of what? 64% of those who actually voted. Break it down. Let me just give you a quick picture. There's about 37 million people eligible voters in South Africa. In other words, over 18 people eligible to vote. There are around 33 to 34 million of those who are registered. So there's your electorate. Out of that of those registered voters in the last national elections about 18 million voted. The ANC got 64% of 18 million which is what? Around 12 to 13 million of a registered population of 33 million. That's less than a third. Now you say, well that's just electoral politics. But if we accept that that's just what we have to deal with. We've got to accept it. Then what we're basically saying is well, there was no need for this struggle in the first place. What was the whole purpose of trying to revolutionize the system? It was just a pipe dream anyway. So we just have to deal with this and you just have to vote in every five years person and then they forget about you and that's the nature of our representative system. The whole point of the South African possibility we want something different, something else. Participatory, properly driven democracy. Not representational, sterile democracy. Which then allows people and the representatives pretty much to do whatever they want. Serial lasts and you'll give me an indication of when I've got a couple of five minutes left. So extended to a societal wide level and under the overall theoretical and conceptual framework of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution which I deal with here which we don't have necessarily time to go into but I'm sure some of you familiar with this basic theory that came out of the Communist Party, the two stage theory of revolution which was you concentrate on the national democratic stage first. In other words, one person, one vote overthrowing the party system. Once you access power then you can at some point proceed to a second stage which is the socialist stage. It's a theoretical absurdity and an intellectual absurdity because what it assumes is that in doing this, in getting into power and accessing, you still remain the same. That when you walk into that house and you start co-governing that house with economic landlords you don't pay any attention to their practices you don't affect it by any of the system you still have your same principles and in a few years down the road you pop them out of the bag and you say socialism is here and we're going to implement it now nothing could be further from the truth just think of your own personal experiences you could start going and living in Chelsea and you go and live there for ten years and you go to private school to the Larny schools and to the real and you hang out with those people eventually you're going to start being just like those people you're going to start doing exactly the same thing unless you're a really, really dedicated Trotskyist and an entryist in that with all due respect I have many, many comrades who are in the Trotskyist movement but the point is that it's a theoretical absurdity in the context if you can't just spring this somehow down and you're unaffected by this possibility and of course in reality this is exactly what's happened is that those who entered this and who made these deals have themselves changed they've become the new bourgeoisie they've become the new capitalist class they're saying exactly the same things they're doing exactly the same, why is it how can we explain that the ANC refuses to change certain pieces of apartheid legislation to give you one example amongst many you think not only security legislation by the way intelligence legislation which is exactly the same as it was in many cases 30 years ago and so someone like myself, others the snooping, the spying you're a traitor, you're a counterrevolutionary you're an ultra leftist it's the same language, it's just in different times the same people many whistleblowers in the province of Empumolanga which is in the northeast part of South Africa there have been over 20 whistleblowers who have been assassinated taken out what were they whistleblowing on amongst other things, the massive corruption around the 2010 soccer world cup stadiums there's a huge massive corruption involving numerous ANC politicians and when the speaker of the legislator Jim Ullala who was a personal friend of mine was about to testify in front of a committee he was gunned down on his front steps two bullets in the back of his head nobody to this day has been convicted of that that's one example so similar kinds of things it's the most amazing to me is the drugs and drug trafficking act of 1982 it's still a piece of legislation in South Africa ANC refuses to change it there's a court case right now in the court system it's about to go to the constitutional court challenging this act it's a racist colonial act cannabis, marijuana gaffa as we call it in South Africa one of the largest cash crops illegal who's it grown by? poor black women in the rural areas it's the backbone of the rural economies a cosiwn talwm eastern Cape it was legalized and revolutionized the economy of South Africa it's being opposed by the ANC on what basis? on the basis that it is morally indefensible to smoke this is a Calvinist old Christian racist colonial law that they refuse and who are the ones arguing beside them in court? doctors for life a right wing Christian evangelical group of individuals arguing with the ANC against changing the law and other things have come to in this context the ironies are just sometimes too incredible to even contemplate in order to politically cover for this the ANC presents itself though it's got to defend itself it's basically got to say to others no no no Dale as Proving Gordon those of you who know are ex-minister of finance who's been affected as the saviour and the person who's the anti-corruption crusader in our country and I challenged him in a public talk the other about three months ago at Vitz University and he came after me and said you're just a radical you don't understand power you don't understand how difficult it is to do these kinds of things it's always the same answer it's always about you won't know and let us take care of it so the ANC is like that so what do they have to declare themselves and those that are in power as the self-declared soul representative of the will and interpreter of the people's will we know what's better for you it's a very patronising political kind of politics we know what's good for you and we will tell you of the nation indeed of the entire struggle for liberation if we want to see where South Africa is going along these political lines look at Zimbabwe to where if you say anything about Mugabe you're a traitor you're a racist you are an imperialist you are anything else do you know here's the ultimate here's the General Secretary of the Communist Party who just got fired by Zuma two weeks ago he's come up in but about four years ago what did he say? he wanted to pass a law that made it a crime to criticize the president General Secretary of the Communist Party publicly came out and said if you criticize the president you go to jail that gives you an indication of where that kind of politics goes to itself and of course when you fuse the party the nation, the state and the liberation struggle everybody else is the enemy everybody else gets painted with a broad brush and so you frame the political terrain it's like going back so it's not only rich rich white people and some new very rich black people now living in enclosed not called medieval almost medieval types of estates where they're keeping the barbarians at bay come to South Africa any of those you know in Johannesburg where I live it's high wall security, barbed wire it's keeping all the people because you've got to keep them at bay and you keep them out there's entire cities the largest private sector investment in the southern hemisphere is going on right now just outside of Johannesburg it's called Stain City by cap it's called Dau Stain we've got him with Mandela right from the beginning and the ANC became very close buddies with the ANC leadership he's building a city named after himself which is all inclusive it's got it's own schools, it's own shopping center it's own transportation system, it's own sanitation system it's own everything and it's walled off you know what's right next door? it's a place called Diebsloot which is home to about half a million squatters and people who are living in halls where there's open sanitation running in the street that's South Africa, that's 23 years after there's a representation, symbolism of what I'm talking about okay, there are many other points that are made in this book but to prayer phrase Forrest Campbell who wrote an excellent book many years ago called The Failure of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation and he was talking about Zimbabwe and he was arguing how the Zimbabwe liberation has been privatized in the form of Mugabe and his family my argument is simply that what has happened South Africa is the corporatisation of liberation so it's not a family dynasty it's what I've talked about these factions the party has become the friend of capital is exercising in that service so in the 20 so years now since the ANC has been in power this is allowed for the generalized political and economic commodification of South African society and its development with all the attendant impacts on governance the exercise of power the understanding and practice of democracy and the larger societal wide political economic and social relations I haven't even begun to mention what has been happening within the society so for example South Africa as what you would think that on the basic fronts at least we would have some of the basics taken care of no housing we could go into that we could go into the provision of sanitation now if you're an ANC apologist they'll try that and say 1994 only 45% of people had access to sanitation up to water now 85% have sanitation but what they don't tell you is what's access need so what have they done they put in prepaid water meters prepaid water meters means if you're poor you can only access the water after you pay you're rich you can access as much as you want you pay afterwards that's what the reality is so instead of basically taking these things that face value if we go underneath and we dig up we'll see that this the picture is not a very pretty one however this is not all doom and gloom it's not because I'm a strong believer and I think most people are in South Africa that you have to as I say you have to face things you have to look at them in the face and see if you have illusions you will be disillusion you will be disillusion it's no good being disillusion because then you become ineffective you sit around and just complain and moat all the time how to change things and how are your things too powerful if you look at something and look at it for what it is then you possibly can begin to start trying to find ways to change it and in South Africa the great thing is is that a lot of people are waking up to this and have been alive to it particularly those that have very little they've been out there struggling every day making demands asking questions struggling to arrange for this community organizations and other kinds of things and so people are not staying still they're not remaining silent they're not beginning to bubble to the surface yes it is messy but then again popular power in democracy is always messy it doesn't follow some neat solution that everybody that leaders could tell us so in that case it's the embracing of the radical possibilities are there and people are are moving forward and let me just to finish off right at the end when I talk about moving beyond the ANC and this corporatized frame without providing any a lot of believer I've been part I've learned I think all of us hopefully we learn from our experiences I've learned from being part of a vanguard I was part of a vanguard for a long time I believe that if it was just a bunch of committed individuals that had the answer and had the theory we could trust it in there and basically convince everybody else but the problem with that is that you've already got it all worked out for everybody else you've already got it all worked out it's just a matter of persuading people to say it in particularly ordinary folks who know much better often times than the intellectuals and those who have the theory so the struggle to move beyond the ANC and the corporate framework is effectively a struggle to stop believing that capitalism can be reformed to benefit everybody that the national state and national politics are the primary vehicles for systemic change I haven't even gotten to the discussion of nationalism and the narrow nationalism have come where you have an ANC leaders who base their moral authority on acceptance of everybody and are breaking down national borders who are now talking about the interlopers from Zimbabwe Africans who are coming and taking on jobs just like here same thing, xenophobia all those kinds of things cannot be that the ANC itself can be saved and can be refashioned as a people's champion I would argue that that is past we need to move beyond that in this respect the struggles that are going on are clearly not on the side of the majority but they are incipient and they are pregnant with possibilities so rather than having easy answers and easy solutions from those that are on top a bottom up approach of that objective reality is needs to embrace a willingness to rethink politics to develop a militant sense of hope in embracing and empowering solidarity and think outside of established political orthodoxies along with healthy doses of humility readiness to listen and to learn the courage to confront as well as to act and fearlessly engage in difficult, patient and consistently principled struggle we can plant the seeds that will grow the self belief in the individual and collective ability to change things to be part of forging a bottom up interlinked alternative to be part of a new revolution thank you thank you so much Dale I want to thank Dale for his wonderful presentation I met Dale earlier this year in South Africa and we had a number of conversations and I think you can get a sense from his presentation how much he has been involved in kind of some of the more recent struggles and I want to come back to this but I do want to encourage people to purchase Dale's book it's a really superb account of the ANC and what happened post 1994 it's written in a very engaging and interesting style and it contains a lot of facts that you just can't know I think if you're not there and you don't have that kind of engagement in the movement that Dale has so I would really encourage people to pick up a copy of the book so I had four questions if you like or four things that I would like Dale to expand upon and one was or to begin with I think some of the theoretical points that you touched around on the relationship and how the ANC and also the SACP conceived the relationship between the class struggle racial struggle and the national struggle because you mentioned the two stage approach and the national democratic revolution and I was wondering given these debates that were at that moment in the earlier part very heated debates I imagine within the movement and notions such as the colonialism of a special type these kinds of discussions looking back at those debates now to what degree did you think that there was an alternative put forward or a real debate of a different kind of perspective and to what degree are those debates a reference point for activists today in South Africa in the sense of some of the movements you mentioned around perhaps the decolonising movements and so forth these debates about what is the relationship between race class and the national struggle and how is it best seen the second question I had because reading a lot of reading this book and looking at the evolution of the ANC I was very much struck by the parallels with Palestine and the Palestinian case and the PLO in particular and I was particularly struck in the book you discussed I think in one of the chapters of the relationship between the inside and the outside movements and the grassroots movements that emerged in South Africa that were outside of the purview of the ANC and the ANC moved quite quickly to subordinate them and stamp their authority over them and this was very similar to the case in Palestine and you also mentioned in the book the SACP and there was an interesting paragraph where you talk about the SACP actually putting forward an alternative strategy based upon mass action and popular popular uprising and so forth counterposed to what the ANC was putting forward at the time I think this was in 89 I think or the late 80s and then very quickly there's a convergence between the ANC and the SACP reading these kinds of accounts of the political dynamics the question that remains and it's a question I have also in the case of Palestine is why were they able to do this was it just the fact what gave them the power where were the alternative debates the alternative political polls or political positions or just kind of hegemony of the movement to be set by organisations like the ANC and particularly in the case of the SACP I mean surely there must have been in the SACP a different perspective a different outlook that was it did they just lose the debate or what was it the other thing two other short points that I would love to hear you to say more about I wouldn't really discuss in your talk what you do in the book the kind of shift in the nature of capitalism in South Africa post 1994 a shift away from what's being called the minerals energy complex to a much more financialised kind of capitalism which relies upon listing on international stock markets and these kinds of still the same groups are there but they're much more internationalised I'm wondering to what degree does that shift in the nature of South African capitalism connect to kind of the political trends that you've outlined how does it affect the way the ANC operates and the way that people like Zuma see themselves then finally picking up on the last point that you you raised around hope for the future and kind of new movements I wonder if you could talk specifically about three movements the Noomsa and the new trade union or the split of Noomsa from Kasatu and the new attempt to build an alternative trade union federation outside of Kasatu and their attempt also to make this wider than just the labour or the organised labour movement and build the United Front so some kind of assessment of that project I think would be really interesting to hear the second one is the economic freedom fighters the EFF which seems to have become a major political voice setting themselves on one hand as an opposition to the ANC but on the other hand working with the DA and other parties to the right and seeming to have some very problematic parts the politics as well so again if you could give us an assessment of the EFF from your perspective then finally the fees must fall movement the student movement that emerged in different forms I think in the most recent period do you see that movement as offering some kind of potential for a new political opposition to emerge so both your assessment of these kinds of political oppositions but also how they potentially may or may not work together is there a potential for them to come together Thank you Shall we give you a few minutes to respond to those and then open out to the floor Yes and let me preface this by saying my responses are going to be inadequate because there's no way that I can respond to all of those questions in a really comprehensive way I'll try my best they're very good questions and require I think in depth answers in a short period of time I'll try to highlight some of the key points I think Let me start at the last and then we'll move forward to the first ones What do I think of the fees of the fees must fall? First of all it's great that this has happened I think it's many of us when we started and founded the anti-privatisation form it was students, it was union members and it was community organisations coming together to oppose privatisation and outsourcing and corporatisation corporatisation of the university of the city and of basic services and since then that was in the early 2000s, mid 2000s there's been a real quiescence in the student movement up until recently so it's really good to see the students mobilising themselves becoming much more political and raising the fundamental challenge of the student movement reflects the fundamental challenges of South Africa which are fundamentally that they need to break out of the silos that often times civil society or whatever we call it non-state actors find themselves in so where the weaknesses of the fees must fall is they have in many cases failed to relate to community organisations to the poor, to the working class beyond their own demands on campus and as a result many of the community organisations have seen it as a somewhat elitist struggle that is going on at universities that is contested at the university and the fees must fall level and I think that it is not inevitability as we've begun to see just this week where the students have come back now again and I think that they need to go beyond the fees must fall they've raised a range of questions but for example to go to the heart of some of which is about the budget, about power about the way in which any is being spent and talking to the extent of how can you for example fund free higher education at the same time as you can fund free primary education because the reality is in South Africa is that even though in legislative terms primary education is supposed to be free most of the decent schools are fee paying schools so it's back door privatisation the students haven't addressed these kinds of issues so I think that it's incipient it's good, it's positive and just like students if they relate and they pull they basically begin to relate outside then you can get past having been and for those of you who are students and having been a student actor myself the biggest limitation of students politics is it's ephemeral nature you're only a student for three or four years and then you move and then there's another one and so often times it's cyclical and the way to go beyond that and for students to become a real societal force is to reach out and I think that's the main challenge but there's a lot of possibilities there the EFF I don't think a great deal of the EFF personally because I know all the EFF leaders personally and I know I can tell you right now there are some good people in the EFF who have joined the EFF out of frustration and understanding and they speak a radical rhetoric but to me the EFF represents this sort of youthful version of what the ANC used to represent which is talk left walk right in other words saying all the right things to the people but a very myopic understanding of what transformation means so instead of basically saying yes we still have colonization we must have economic freedom but their answer is nationalize everything and so if you look at the manifesto of the EFF we nationalize the minds nationalize the land nationalize everything but they don't address the nature of the state in any meaningful way so it becomes privatization of another sort a new state bureaucracy a new state capitalist class and when Julius Malema it's hard to take Julius Malema seriously when he was wearing a half a million ran watch and building a 25 million ran home at the same time when he was talking about the poor and the working class the FPD and who I taught in a master's seminar at Wits University walked into my class in the first day and I calculated that what he was wearing cost about, I don't know, about 200,000 rand he was wearing Breitling watches and so if you're going to walk the talk walk it if you're going to be people that if you want poor and working class people to take you seriously then you need to do so and unfortunately right now the EFF I don't think is doing that it will get saturated they'll come up to maybe they got 6% in the last national elections they may go 8, 7, 8, 9, 10% possibly they'll become a significant minority player but I don't think they can move beyond that because they fundamentally don't have I don't think a relationship with where the mass really is that's my own personal experience and opinion Numsa it's hugely one of those hugely disappointing things where the possibilities were a mess I wrote about that many of us who have been involved had a lot of hopes for Numsa and the new federation and it's United Front precisely because what was being said was we're going to build a united front of forces that include people from everywhere, from poor communities women's groups, youth groups, civic groups and including the unions, get beyond the union get beyond the bureaucracy of the unions and actually build a political force unfortunately Numsa then basically in doing so forgot the very basis of the united front and essentially tried to tell everybody what they were going to do which was we're going to build a movement for socialism that is going to be a vanguard of the working class which is going to replace the SACP which has betrayed us and Irwin Jim wants to be the new general secretary of the SACP of a new refashion communist party unfortunately and I've known Irwin since he was a shop steward in Numsa he's speaking very well but the practice of these things and Numsa is divided it's becoming very divided amongst itself some of the most radical elements of Numsa have already been purged there are allegations that Numsa itself has been captured by other private interests and that Numsa's investment company is wholly compromised by investments in the very kinds of people that they're supposedly opposing as a movement for socialism so there's a whole range of contradictions that unfortunately have made the united front fairly stillborn and that does not really exist in any meaningful way in South Africa right now as far as the Numsa front is concerned the new federation I think has some possibilities because it's wider than that Numsa is the largest union but I'm afraid that fundamentally the unions in South Africa still have not gotten out of the old way of doing things which is still to believe that the way in which you build alternatives is through a working class which has fundamentally changed in the last 25 years and so they're going to unionized workers, employed workers that's a small minority of the working class in South Africa the real working class is unemployed, casualized labour contract labour and they're not speaking to them and they say they're going to speak to them but I haven't really done much but it's early days so I think SOFTU should be given the SOFTU which is the South African Federation of Trade Unions which should be given the benefit of the doubt and see where it goes and that old union model of doing things and also their gender politics which I haven't even talked about which tends to be a very patriarchal politics in the unions a very male dominated patriarchal politics that is not speaking to women workers and not speaking to women who reproduce labour constantly in other words domestic workers it's like they're not real workers you have to be an industrial worker this old line of the industrial workers still and yet the industrial worker is not at the forefront of the struggles at the moment that are taking place on the ground in many cases they're simply trying to protect their job so there's a lot of challenges there shift in the nature of capitalism financialization to what degree does this connect to the ANSI's politics in Tazuma I think that where it connects fundamentally is that it's and this is presented in South Africa as a sort of like anti imperialism you know we're getting away from the west and bricks and we're moving towards the developing countries and everything to me it's basically just a shift the shift in the balcony chairs on the capitalist deck basically so the financialization does explain quite a lot because it's financialization of different fractions of capital from different places it might seem as though there's some fundamental changes in that context but it's not really the case I would argue and it's the Chinese for example have come in very big the Russians of course as you know went to come in with the nuclear deal but in terms of the old white predominantly white capital and financialization what it represents is new forms of accumulation for the new black bureaucratic and political elite I made an argument that this is exactly why South Africa never sided with the people of Zimbabwe against Mugabe why South Africa for 20 years supported Mugabe was it because there was as many analysts have argued there was old liberation context no if anybody knows anything about the history of Zimbabwe they know that the ANC had close relations with Zipra and Zapu not with Zanu, Zanu was Chinese Zanu went with the other directions the ANC was never close to Mugabe in fact they were on opposite sides but now why are they supporting him my argument is because of the economic avenues it opens up Zimbabwe economy implodes it provides new avenues of accumulation for South African particularly mining and extractive capital as does the DRC as does Zambia so the financialization also begins to provide the necessary capital in order to create what I call a sub-imperialist role for South Africa and Zoom and them have got their piece of the pie in that so it does there's a certain explanation there inside outside movement what was why did the hegemony of the ANC why did the ANC win out why were there these other alternatives I would argue that the reason why is because one of two things the ANC had unparalleled moral authority we cannot underestimate the impact of Mandela Mandela and I can say this again from personal experience in the early 1990s when all the negotiations are going on I was a member of the ANC Yoval branch and anybody in Joberg Yoval branch all these other heavyweight ANC people were all members of the same branch Joe Slobo there's SACP types and when Mandela walked into a room and he came there everybody kept quiet it was like going back to the old chief the chief speaks nobody says anything you can't criticize Mandela you can't say anything bad about Mandela Mandela puts his sample of approval on something if you do it's political suicide you go against him it was the same in the 1980s anybody will tell you who was a member of the beast black consciousness movement ANC members attacked other liberation movement people who were against the ANC because if you were against Mandela you were against liberation you were against the people and in that case what I'm trying to say is the hegemony of the ANC was the ANC's ability through Mandela to capture the majority of people to believe that there was no other alternative other than the ANC so even if there were people in the SACP that said we want to get back to a mass oriented or we want to go outside it was no this is the way Mandela and the comrades here they've sacrificed everything they've told us that this is the way this is what we must follow their loyalty goes very very deep there's no other explanation for why people 23 years later still vote for the ANC or still some people still support the ANC it's like the Trump phenomenon white working class people who are getting screwed by Trump vote for Trump and you can't explain that simply by sorry, yeah you can't explain that simply by looking at the bigger picture I think it has to go to that loyalty finally the class racial national CST the theory what degree of relevance does it have today it has a lot of relevance today but my fundamental answer to that is it's basically the class racial and national component is a very shallow understanding at the moment it goes only to the extent of identity politics that doesn't go to the structural politics of each of those things so our debate is not happening at a structural level and therefore the theory can't be applied in its real relevance which is essentially that if you want to uproot that foundation we need to go down and we need to talk about how we go to those foundations it's not about how many people quotas it's not about racial quotas it's not about how many C like the ANC says transformation is how many black CEOs do we have in the private sector no that's not transformation that's again shifting of the capitalist chairs so the theory remains irrelevant but only to the extent that it can go down to a structural level thank you sorry excellent well thank you let's open up to the floor at this point if you want to put your hand up and then we can circulate the mics thank you for that you touched on the ANC being talking about non-racialism as their primary goal initially and that was the narrative that they were perpetuating and you spoke particularly about the racial politics and the identity politics in South Africa and then you also touched on being a white person and having dissenting views when bringing up issues that are going on in South Africa and the House and the Barthet House of South Africans or the ANC just moving into the House and then because I'm a South African as you can probably tell the Rosmas Fall movement which morphed into the Feasmas Fall movement Rosmas Fall initially started out of some racial politics that were happening at GCT and Cape Town and South Africa at large about whiteness and what it means in white culture and what that means and the perpetuation of whiteness in universities which morphed into a capitalist idea on Feasmas Fall a corporatisation and privatisation of education but you were you were silent about the role of like those histories right about the House and kind of I think you were kind of neglecting the ideas on white monopoly capital and centralising the ANC as having inherited this and retaining that which we don't deny particularly as students we are very clear on the ANC and its role in retaining that but also I think there was a silence about race and still its issues that are in South Africa can you just touch on that for instance with the Feasmas Fall movement at Wirt last year when students and workers decided to down tools there were still white students at Wirt who were like no we need to go back to school because our capital is being compromised so we talk about a non-racial South Africa and a non-racial building the ANC was talking about 1994 but still the silence around the racial tensions that exist and the white students still not wanting to participate so at which point do we intersect those ideas on identity politics and structures when we have people who are still retaining those ideas but still retaining the voice of the ANC as the sole bearers of the South African burden okay great thank you and there was a question over here if you want to keep your questions comments as succinct as you can so we can be a bit more bring as many people in as possible I'll try to be very brief I think I'm more interested first on the analogy that you used of a house on what would be according to the analysis that you gave of how the ANC has failed to transform the economy from 1990 what would be your strategies that could have been taken at the time when Mandela goes out of prison it says two things he says firstly we had to reconcile ourselves with two possibilities said number one was we go into straight civil war to fight for our economy and our country in which case the country will be streamed by bloods for many generations to come and secondly he says we go into negotiations which means to compromise and we start a process of building a new society and based on that I believe that it was it was more on they believe that through political power because Mandela's vision was one man one vote through political power they'll be able to shape and change the economic landscape and then secondly I'm more interested in the electoral systems and the role that they have in deepening our democracy the proportional representation system that was used in 1990 was critical and very important in transcending from an upper-dead regime into a constitutional democracy now we've been 23 years into democracy and we have a lot of problems we see the mass killings in Guazulunatal state looting how can we reimagine our politics in as far as the electoral systems are concerned okay thank you there was a hand behind you so if you just pass it back and then we'll do we'll let Dale answer and do more questions don't worry just also to say autobiographically I was an anti-apartate activist here in Britain so I'm not from South Africa but I followed the struggle for about 40 or so years and I do think I like the book very much and I like the analogy of foundation but I think there's something missing in your analysis of what the foundation is which is this colonial aspect I mean white monopoly capital has been distorted into an empty phrase but actually it's a living reality still in terms of the privilege of white people in South Africa the struggle against the heritage of roads both symbolically and in reality I mean white monopoly capital is related also to us here in Britain so I mean that's the angle that I'm coming in from if you look at the economy if you look at mining look at London look at Anglo-American etc I mean so your politics I'm very sympathetic to but I mean the political economy and the structural point which you end on also should inform the politics I mean the race question is not over in South Africa as far as I can see right it's a neocolony I mean your analysis sort of focuses on the neoliberal aspect but what about the neocolonial aspect of it one of the frustrations obviously of giving a talk where you allowed 15 minutes as you can't cover all of these things in the context and leaving some of this out I want to actually I want to get to the point of two of the questions because this notion that as I said from the beginning I don't believe of course I said very clearly that race and class are still very very much intertwined in the South African reality and I don't think you want to understand that one from the other where I think the weakness of the present debate is it's falsely separates one from the other either one either you get everything just simply talking about class or you simply talking about race as if you can deal with the racial fund without dealing with foundational issues for example ownership have racialized patterns to them but also have particular class patterns to them so as I've debated with many of the students at Vitz and others I said you know and many of Zimbabwean students will tell you that you know when they began to learn the intersection of race and class which was you know there wasn't simply about returning the land to the people everything it was about who owns the land so if you have one capitalist who replaces another capitalist who owns that land and they just have a different skin color but they exactly the same kind of system well then the racial aspect of it still remains but it takes on a different kind of class basis. Let me give you my analysis of the continuities of power and colonization and decolonization. I'm just going to take a little extract from my book because I think it says it much better than I can extemporaneously is that the generalized triumph of the colonial lineage lineage of not just the A and C but I would argue all national liberation movements has produced a situation in which all those national liberals have become the main vehicles for exercising a refashioned political power that reproduces the economic and social power of the colonial past rather than acting as a political vehicle for transforming and then transcending that colonial power instead politically legitimized and reinforced it. Given that those national liberation movements including the A and C accessed power in a continental and global context of highly unequal power relations with corporate capital what this has done is that these acts of political legitimization of the colonial past have legitimized the acceptance of a second class rentier status for South Africa Namibia Zimbabwe Angola such status is encompasses the crucial point I want to make the social, psychological and cultural realms as well as the economic realm What do I mean by that? Barring from Ashish Nandi for those of you who might know the Indian political psychologist and sociologist the acceptance of the colonial status of this notion of being under colonial identities and other things is directly derived as he quotes, a colonialism which survives the demise of empires which enables the psychological and social hierarchies that enable the west to harness its own productive capacities to be reimposed on the colony this time entirely in the service of domination and denial. So when those hierarchies become superimposed on the political rule of the new post-colonial state post-colonial state the A and C's role as the new political landlords therefore becomes symbiotically tied to the acceptance and inculcation of the role of the old colonial economic landlords they become one and the same thing is what happens whose baggage is also loaded with all those psychological and social hierarchies so put another way the corporatisation of power frames and catalyzes the parallel corporatisation of the mind and body this is so because the essence of corporatisation is to be found in the essence of colonialism what is that? an oligarchy in this case a racialized a class oligarchy in which power is understood and exercised according to a hierarchy of socio-economic position and racialized location inclusive of class race, gender and sexuality and if we isolate one from the other we cannot decolonize so you can say we're going to decolonize according to race but then LGBTI people have no basis in this because we have an African nationalism that doesn't accept the new sexual identities which is a problem with this university in which LGBTIQ students were pushed aside by those who were arguing for a much more militant racial identification of a nationalist politics and a decolonization or one can then look at these in many different ways so what I'm trying to argue is is the struggle to decolonize does not simply have to do with a deracialization and overcoming the historically oppressive role of constructed racial identities division and inequality it has to do with that too but also it has to do just as much with the conceptualization conscientization and practice of power that is realized through economic, racial ethnic, religious, coercive institutional, political, sexured or gendered roles if we separate one out of the other what we get is case at end we get a case at end where the ANC and those who claim that they're trying to deracialize and decolonize blame Indians for being the oppressive force and therefore re-ethnicize the politics or where they claim that other people are doing a certain thing so that's the point I'm trying to make I'm not trying to delegitimize the racial component or leave it out I'm trying to say that the foundation is multifaceted and what the ANC has failed to do and I think what the fees must follow comrades are beginning to try to do is to understand colonization in its panopoli, in its full panopoli the colonization wasn't simply about just racial domination it was about gender domination it was about sexual domination it was about a whole range of kinds of domination that have been reimposed on a new political order so in that context I hope maybe in some ways of address that issue and whiteness in that context is a very real thing but then so too is the issue of white monopoly capital for example this is the issue white monopoly capital let's take South African breweries as an example let's take South African breweries one of the most successful white monopoly capitalist forms in South Africa the financialization of SAB meant that as soon as the neoliberal recipe was adopted, i.e. tariff regulations and exchange controls in the early 1990s mid 1990s were lessened what did South African breweries do? It went on a buying spree internationally it bought up the second largest brewer in the United States Miller beer so it became SAB Miller it bought up Czech breweries, Chinese breweries, everything else it became the second largest brewer in the world it was no longer white monopoly capital it was Chinese capital, it was American capital it was all sorts of other capital in fact it was in some cases African capital itself as well was part of SAB now SAB is bought out by Anheiser Bush the largest brewer in the world and it still dominates the Joe Bergstock exchange so you can't when you say white monopoly capital yes its origins were there but in order to deal with the capital and to use that capital for the people's purposes you have to go beyond simply the question of race you can't just look at that and say it's white monopoly capital it has become multinational capital it has become global capital it has become a whole range of other kinds of capital the different fractions of capital and if we only isolate one fraction of the capital we're only going to be dealing with one part of the problem that was my argument in this case so I hope that that this debate and engagement could go on for quite some time and it should and it's a very important one but what I find sometimes very very frustrating and this is again having been involved right from the beginning with some of the VIT students and Fesinless Fall and everything else is when those students refused to go to class it wasn't just white students there were a large amount of black students who refused, who wanted to go back to class as well it wasn't just a racial issue it was a class issue as well there were many black students who said having interviewed many of them myself for a project who said at UCT in particular they said yes we agree with all of these things but we come from a situation where if we miss class for another two months we're going to have massive debts our parents are going to have to pull this out of university we're not going to be able to complete our university situation and ironically it was the wealthier kids and the middle and upper middle class kids were left class for much longer than the poor so it's becoming it's not just a racial issue, it's also a class issue okay great, there was a question here yep okay it's on so the other day I sat with my grandpa who is a very staunch ANC activist man and he was talking to me about how the ANC is going to make major changes now to radical economic transformation and I sat with him and I was like what's radical economic transformation and he was like yeah you know that thing that the ANC says and it was for me that was a huge turning point and it's one of the reasons why I'd like to do my thesis in terms of looking at what is radical economic transformation for South Africa and will that change anything and at least in my own politics and how I align and don't align it's very obvious that and I think this is something that Robinson proves in his book of why nations fail that the institutions that are still kept in place will mean that even if we've got great economic policies that are really great in theory the practical implementation of them won't amount to anything and the ANC is talking about this concept of radical economic transformation but I think my concerns are that it's now become a popularist word to a lot of poor people and it's one that they'll continue to use especially in our elections are coming and the sad thing is that and I asked my grandpa, I said to him do you really think things will change if now we have a racialized economy and the ANC is still able to retain so much money and so much power at the expense of poor people and then you expect that your economic policy will empower poor people but surely our government is still a very extractive one so does their nature change? I think my question to you is what is your understanding of radical economic transformation and will that result in any change especially for the poorest in South Africa considering that in the last two years poverty has increased by 3 million people so my question as much as it's in relation to students to speak about how the roads must fall movement I feel like captured both the colonization side and then the fees must fall movement looked at the economic side and I am not an ANC member like I'll criticize ANC to the greatest extent but I think the reason why I can support someone like the EFF is in the sense yes the issue of land is important you know in all its assets because land can mean dignity can mean power can mean money so many things but fundamentally what I think the EFF has done in the last five years is this idea that we completely reject the way this term South Africa and you South Africa has not been experienced I think if I were to go back and be sitting at the negotiation table I would definitely would have resulted to a revolution I think the problem now is that we never had one we have 23 years of we have one of the highest inequalities in the world and it's because we do this thing where to some degree I feel like Dale you've done is that you've captured an element of the problem criticizing the ANC a neoliberal party in the sense that they leave out the majority which is the poor but but I could never blame I find it difficult to blame a system on I find it difficult to blame the ANC in the sense that I'm thinking of just the systemic power of just white supremacy in the entire world like I think if South Africa were to try again or start again we must completely eradicate everything and start from the bottom and the reason why white people in South Africa can say things like no, Zuma must fall the ANC must fall is because it becomes a very personal thing when your house in Campsbury or your house in Clifton is affected by the ANC but the moment a black person criticizes the ANC or lets say supports a party like the EFF the idea is that we're too radical or we're too revolutionary and we want South Africa to fail but there's no meaning for me if the economy does not serve the majority if the economy it means nothing for me if the economy is going to change for a certain few but for majority it means nothing OK, great Hi My question is very linked to the democratic and economic reconstruction so you talked about when I hear you I feel that you have a real anarchist perspective of the state and the power I'm not a very communist or trust case one so my question is how do people can you elaborate on how people organize at a real bottom level and is there a difference between black organization for example or white organization underground another one there I'm going to do a couple more just because we've got finishing time and then I'll just give you a look around Thank you I think my question is sort of similar to what you say because you talked about this I mean you painted it in a very gloomy way but then you did say then there is hope and then you also alluded to the fact that there is this like struggle hold or choke hold that the ANC possesses it has this moral authority it has it has reproduced its power so then how do you build unity I mean there has been episodic moments where there has been public manifestations of anger towards the ANC but it has largely amounted to nothing and it still amounts to nothing like generally the ANC still has that big authority if morally or legitimately it has a lot of history to that so how do you because I think it's sort of like similar like thinking about supporting a different party that's not the ANC it's still very difficult for people who are not white generally so then how do you build that sort of unity that will be sustainable to be able to like I don't know revolutions are really like the right way but like get that South Africa that everybody thinks we should have got in 1984 versus what we currently seeing which is just like a substitution Thank you just very quickly also to follow up on the previous questions on the alternative considering the situation in 1944 1994 sorry the role of the United States were very significant and their concerns for the future of South Africa was huge and they send a lot of people to South Africa to work with the ANC and to infiltrate and to manipulate and so on and they were probably also ready to go into a large scale destabilisation of South Africa what would the alternative have been for if you were in that situation of the ANC at the time when they had to make these decisions and how to move forward Thank you There's a common theme which I apologize for the initial answer that didn't address that so now we're coming back to it in terms of the negotiations and what was the alternative because I was just meeting this afternoon with Pluto Press which published I deal with this in the first book at length because the first book is about the ANC and the Liberation Struggle from 1912 to 1994 for the entire time and it talks about what was possible in the late 80s and early 90s here's what was possible what was possible was actually locating the politics with where the people were in other words where was the locus of power that fundamentally shifted the balance of forces in the 1980s it was with people's organisations it was with the UDF with students with people on the ground it wasn't yes the banks called in some of the loans there was financial pressures there was economic but as a result of some of the anti-apartheid movement and so forth and so on but it wasn't because of the armed struggle every MK cater including Chris Hani who I was when I joined the SACP I joined because of Chris and Chris Hani who was the commander of MK will tell you that there was no way that MK was ever going to militarily overthrow the apartheid state there was no way that they could ever take them on militarily and march into Victoria with military triumph it was a sabotage campaign it was trying to basically encourage people to show that there was there was armed sabotage, armed struggle in that context so the locus of power was with people it wasn't with Oliver Tombo and Tabor and Becky sitting in Lusaka and people that were there so when the negotiations started and yes there was no in other words there was no when you talk about revolution it wasn't going to be an armed revolution where people were going to march into Victoria but there could have been armed insurrection what was necessary for armed insurrection was as the SACP at one point including Mzala if you read Mzala Mzala was a young intellectual in the communist party in the 1970s and 80s who wrote a lot of good stuff that was ignored by the leadership and what he basically says if we want to succeed in creating a revolutionary situation we've got to combine MK with people's units on the ground underground with armed struggle we've got to arm people and on the ground and we basically make them there and that would never happen Operation Vula began to start addressing it in 1989 when they started sending underground operatives to try to start arming but it fundamentally the idea was MK will come and save us Mandela will come and save us as ANC will come and save us and as a result when negotiations started where did the locus of power shift to the leadership the leadership then cut deals completely above the heads of the people I can tell you again because we were in the ANC we were asking questions within the ANC branches what is going on in the negotiations we understand, we've heard that you're basically agreeing to issues about land ownership and putting in the constitution sanctity of private property is that true comrades this is not something we need to discuss this is something that is negotiations and in other words the alternative was to locate things with the people themselves so that people can inform the organizations that drove the struggle can inform, not experts, not the leadership not Joe Slovo coming with the first post apartheid housing policy why we got a housing crisis in South Africa it wasn't inevitable it was because the very first housing policy which was made by Joe in his study on his own pieces of paper when he wrote was to bring the banks in to basically fund the RDP housing policy nobody had any discussion there was no debate there was no popular input so just like the students today are making demands that democratize the university the demand was democratize the negotiations democratize the struggle that was where the alternative was without having all the solutions that were going to be there coming from the experts or the people who knew that's what I'm talking about popular participatory democracy which is the the thread that runs through this whole story which was if you want a real revolution right it's not about storming the Bastille with a few trained comrades it's about organizing mobilizing people themselves to take that power in the way that they see not in the way that the party sees why is it that communist parties you say anarchism I don't believe in labels anarchist, socialist whatever it is the point is the people themselves have to be at the heart of everything if it's the party that's the heart of everything why are we then surprised that every party that is called itself communist reproduces the same oppressions why is it that if it's called the socialist party why is it that they because inevitably if that party leaves the people behind they will then relate to that power as it is they will relate to the class power in the sense that I was talking about earlier so the alternative is not something that is written down on a piece of paper this is what I'm trying to argue about the left has been in my estimation very myopic and one of the reasons why a lot of left and progressive forces today are being left behind and people we don't have mass left parties and mass progressive movements much anymore is because the left is not speaking to the people itself it speaks amongst itself and it comes up with manifestos and programs and says comrades here's the manifesto come here's our paper here believe in this join our party you join our party we'll get power we'll change the world that's the opposite that's a top down approach as opposed to a bottom bottom up approach so revolution is about centering the people that's what it's about for me it's not about an event it's not about a process it's not about a manifesto and it's not about a party and I think that if one reads Marx and one reads the fundamental philosophical foundations of communism communism is not the soviet union in the context of Stalin and a vanguard party read the economic and philosophical manuscripts of Marx which is the very first thing he wrote as a 20-something year old and you get the heart of what I would argue Marxism, Communism is about which is putting the people first not the party, not the vanguard, not the program and then you go from there it is intellectually unsatisfying to a lot of people because you want the answer you got it here in front of you we can read it we got the theory we can just apply it but if there's any lesson of history in South Africa is that if we do that we will continue to repeat the same mistakes I'm just about there what is radical economic transformation what is it, will it change anything yes if it's taken seriously in what it's supposed to mean but not in the form that it's taking now because what basically radical economic transformation means is shifting the deck chairs in other words white capital give it to black capital so white capital becomes black capital what does black capital do? black capital become black capital but it'll just do exactly the same thing it'll do exactly racial solidarity goes out the window when profit comes to the party racial solidarity goes ask the rest of the African continent in the last 40 years what's happened to racial solidarity when black people took control of all and nationalized the industries and everything else and took control of these things it wasn't racial solidarity gets shifted it's a worker-boss relationship in that context so radical economic transformation radical in the sense if ownership is driven so what it mean by land ownership not about nationalization of the land it's about for example that community taking control of that land and then the state providing necessary inputs and support for people to begin to own the land and produce on that land for their own needs not for some state controlled entity to say we're taking the land on the basis of everybody else and by the way we're going to tell you what you can grow when you can grow it and how much you need to grow otherwise we're going to reproduce exactly the problems of centralized planning which again is a top-down approach and leaves the people out of the equation excellent, I know there was a lot more to discuss there so we'd like to invite you all to join us for some drinks and some food in the senior common room upstairs please feel free to join us and continue the discussion the next seminar in the series will be on the 14th of November where Sarah Farris from Goldsmiths University will talk about Islamophobia in the name of women's rights which is her new book and I'd like to ask you all to join me in thanking our speaker and discussant