Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

4. Revisiting the Transition: De-Nationalisation and Re-Nationalisation

155 Revisiting the Transition 155 4 Revisiting the Transition De-Nationalisation and Re-Nationalisation LET ME START this chapter with a passage from my book Disabling Globalization. Writing in 2001, I was trying to reconcile the ANC’s hegemonic power and popular appeal with its embrace of neoliberal economic policies that, by the late 1990s, were hitting the working classes very hard: [T]he post-apartheid state coalition has not only constructed a populist unity, articulating ‘the people’ into a political subject . . . with – not against – the power bloc; it has also accomplished this apparent unity in the face of escalating material inequality and poverty, and economic policies that are patently unpopular with a large segment of its support base. In the mid-1990s discourses of non-racial national unity were ascendant, exemplified in the language of the ‘rainbow nation’, and the towering moral authority of Nelson Mandela. Since the late 1990s the picture has become far more complex, as the power bloc led by Thabo Mbeki has shifted images from rainbows to the African Renaissance, positioning the ANC at the forefront of battles against racism. These and other discourses not only resonate with everyday experiences of racism by large numbers of black South Africans; they have also called forth overtly racist responses from the white liberal opposition that validate charges against them, and consolidate anew the ANC’s populist unity. Through all of this, the power bloc centered around Thabo Mbeki consistently invokes ‘globalization’ to circumvent any questioning of neoliberal nostrums and policies, or of their alignment with capital . . . Shot through with contradictions, this 156 Rethinking the South African Crisis apparent populist unity co-exists with powerful currents of discontent and critique from within the alliance; from segments of the NGO community; and, most importantly, from the interstices of everyday life where large numbers of South Africans navigate between the emancipatory promises of official discourses and the glamour of the mass consumption economy on the one hand, and harsh material deprivation on the other (Hart 2002a: 32–3). In retrospect, as argued throughout the present book, I have come to see 2001 as a key turning point, unleashing the dialectics of protests and containment outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 that demand a new set of analytical lenses. In this chapter I want to elaborate on the argument that, in order to comprehend the mounting crisis in South Africa since the early 2000s, we need to go back and rethink the transition from apartheid. Rather than just an elite pact – although it was in part that – the transition is more usefully understood in terms of simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation that have been playing out in relation to one another in increasingly conflictual ways. Instead of focusing primarily on the ANC’s adoption of conservative neoliberal macro-economic policies in 1996, I am using the term de-nationalisation to encompass the terms on which heavily concentrated corporate capital re-engaged with the increasingly financialised global economy starting in the early 1990s, and the ways in which these forces are driving increasing inequality and the generation of surplus populations. While successive ANC administrations have moved in more interventionist directions since the early 2000s and now declare themselves strongly anti-neoliberal and passionately pro-poor, the ravages wrought by processes of denationalisation continue apace. Re-nationalisation engages what is most obviously missing from my earlier analysis – namely crucial questions about how the postapartheid ‘nation’ came to be produced, as well as the ongoing 157 Revisiting the Transition importance of articulations of the ‘nation’ to the ANC’s hegemonic project. Despite focusing on race, racism and histories of racialised dispossession in my earlier work, I was inattentive to the ‘national question’ – a profoundly evocative term that for many South Africans conjures up struggles against colonialism and imperialism, the indignities and violence of racial injustice and dispossession, the sacrifices and suffering embodied in movements for national liberation, and the visions of social and economic justice for which many fought and died. I also failed to take seriously a key phrase of the ANC Alliance – the NDR – the meanings and ownership of which, as we shall see, have become an increasingly contentious site of struggle within the ANC Alliance over the decade of the 2000s. In the first part of this chapter I lay out the main contours of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation. Then I revisit the first phase...