Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
than a racist refusal to employ them.
The black underclass will benefit
The Employment Equity Act is further premised on the assumption that it will bring substantial and lasting benefits to a poor black underclass. The initial explanatory memorandum accompanying the EE Bill thus emphasised the plight of the poor and held out the implicit promise that the statute would play an important part in their upliftment.
However, experience in other countries has repeatedly shown that the poor gain little from affirmative action. In India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the United States, affirmative action has benefited a relative elite within the disadvantaged group – what India calls ‘the creamy layer’ – while the truly marginalised have derived little or no help from it.21 The same is true in South Africa, where millions of unemployed and unskilled people have little prospect of ever attaining management jobs or benefiting in other ways from empowerment laws.
Race must be used to get beyond race
The Employment Equity Act is also based on the assumption that ‘in order to get beyond racism, we must first take race into account’.22 The statute assumes that classifying people by race, counting them by race, and giving preferences to those identified as ‘black’ provides the best means of ending racial discrimination and overcoming the persistent effects of previous racial prejudice. However, such policies risk entrenching racial consciousness. The declared intent might be to end racial prejudice, but the actual effect of any race-based law may be to promote it instead.
The ANC government has often sought to justify its racial rules on the basis that colour-blind requirements would ignore black poverty and protect white privilege.23 However, this is a red herring. Policies to liberate the poor and reduce inequality could easily be directed at those who fall below a certain income level, most of whom would in any event be black.
The real rationale for racial laws
The reasons put forward by the ANC for employment equity and other racial laws are not the true rationale for these measures. A large part of the explanation lies rather in the ruling party’s long-standing commitment to the national democratic revolution (NDR) it has been pursuing since the early 1960s. This national democratic revolution is aimed at giving the ANC a hegemonic control over all ‘levers of power’ – including the judiciary, the press and civil society – while ushering in a form of ‘economic emancipation’ inconsistent with free markets and private sector-led growth.
Though the concept of the national democratic revolution was developed and refined by Soviet strategists in the late 1950s, the idea can be traced back to the theory of imperialism developed by Lenin in 1917. According to Lenin, the living standards of the working classes in industrialised Europe were then improving rather than deteriorating (contrary to what Karl Marx had predicted) solely because the imperial powers were able ruthlessly to exploit the brown and black masses in their colonies.24
This theory won wide acceptance among nationalist movements in many parts of the African continent, but was difficult to apply to South Africa because the country had gained independence from Britain as early as 1910 and so ceased to be a colony. However, in 1950 the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) found a way around this obstacle by stating that South Africa had ‘the characteristics of both an imperialist state and a colony within a single, indivisible, geographical, political and economic entity’. In this ‘colonialism of a special type’, white South Africa was effectively an ‘imperialist state’ and black South Africa was its ‘colony’. This implied that the wealth of white South Africans had nothing to do with enterprise, skill, or technological advantage but derived solely from the exploitation and impoverishment of black South Africans.25
In the 1950s, as the process of decolonisation in Asia and Africa began to accelerate, the Soviet Union started to examine how the concept of ‘national democratic revolution’ could be used to draw newly liberated states into Moscow’s orbit. Later that decade, the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formed a special group of advisers to work on this issue. According to this special group, the defining features of national democratic revolutions are that ‘they lead to the elimination of colonial … oppression and are also latent with anti-capitalist tendency … paving the way for transition to socialist reconstruction’.26
According to these Soviet theorists, South Africa had particular potential to ‘shorten the stage of the national democratic revolution’ and move swiftly to socialism. This was largely because of its developed economy, which meant it had an industrialised labour force that could be drawn towards the South African Communist Party (SACP), the underground successor to the CPSA. Even in South Africa, however, a transitional period, in which a national democratic revolution would be necessary, was not ruled out.27
In 1962 the thinking of these Soviet theorists was clearly evident in the SACP’s new programme, entitled The Road to South African Freedom. This document began by identifying South Africa as a ‘colony of a special type’ in which the white minority had gained its wealth solely through the ruthless dispossession and exploitation of the black majority over centuries of colonial rule. This meant that the ‘colonial state of white supremacy’ would have to be overthrown and ‘an independent state of national democracy’ established in its place. Towards this end, the existing state machinery would have to be destroyed. Hence, all public institutions, including the civil service, the judiciary, the police, and the army would have to be re-staffed with black people and made ‘fully representative of the population of South Africa’. Once the state had been ‘democratised’ in this way, its main task would be to suppress the former ruling classes and further transform society. Since resistance was to be expected, ‘the utmost vigilance would have to be exercised against those who would seek to organise counter-revolutionary plots … or restore white colonialism’.28
The theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ and its corollary – the need for a national democratic revolution to overturn its consequences – was accepted and formally endorsed by the ANC at its national policy conference in Morogoro (Tanzania) in 1969. The Strategy and Tactics document adopted at this conference echoed the SACP’s perspective in stating: ‘The material well-being of the white group and its political, social, and economic privileges are, we know, rooted in its racial domination of the indigenous majority.’ The document also committed the ANC to a national democratic revolution that would counter ‘the historical injustices perpetrated against the indigenous majority’ by destroying existing economic and social relationships. This would give rise to a new society based on the core provisions of the Freedom Charter.
The Freedom Charter had been adopted at Kliptown (Soweto) in June 1955 and was supposed to have been spontaneously drawn up by the dispossessed black masses. However, its wording was greatly influenced by the SACP and often seemed to reflect a Marxist view. The charter thus called for the land to be ‘re-divided among those who work it’, for the ‘national wealth’ of the country to be restored to the people, and for ‘the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks, and monopoly industry’ to be transferred to ‘the ownership of the people as a whole’. The charter was endorsed by the ANC as its official programme in 1956, despite objections from a number of nationalists that this would give communists too powerful an influence over the ANC. So great was their concern about communist domination that many of these nationalists broke away from the ANC in 1959 to form the Pan-Africanist Congress.29
In the six decades since the document was adopted, socialist policies have visibly failed in many countries, including Russia itself. Despite this, the Freedom Charter remains the lodestar of ANC policy. So too does the concept of the national democratic revolution, even though this idea was repudiated by Russian intellectuals after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Instead of updating its ideas, the ANC remains committed to pushing ahead with the national democratic revolution in South Africa – though it does acknowledge that the collapse of communism has made this goal more difficult to achieve.
Why the ANC remains caught in this time warp is not altogether clear. However, the SACP has dominated the ANC for many years, while both organisations were staunch allies of Moscow for more than six decades. During this period, both became steeped in Soviet ideology. In addition, in the ten years before 1994, the ANC