South Africa's Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects

7. What is to be done?

201 7 What is to be done? The title of this chapter, essentially that of Vladimir Lenin’s (1902) famous essay, may seem pretentious but it is merely meant to indicate that the analysis of the preceding pages need not discourage leaders and activists from working towards the construction of a better society. This chapter defines the contours of an alternative progressive political agenda that recognises and flows from an understanding of the balance of power, without compromising the goals of democratisation, empowerment and inclusive development. This agenda involves two distinct tasks: (i) conditioning political elites to become more accountable and responsive to the concerns of citizens; and (ii) fulfilling the overall objectives of the Constitution when the provisions of different clauses come into conflict with each other. The lack of accountability among the political elites towards citizens (or their greater responsiveness to stakeholders who hold more leverage than ordinary voters) has been identified as a problem in several chapters of this book. In Chapter Two, I engaged with the accountability deficit to explain not only the aloofness of the state and its adoption of policies that do not speak to the interests of ordinary citizens, but also the service-delivery problems that continue to plague all tiers of government. Similarly, in Chapter Three, the conservative macro-economic policy of the Mandela and Mbeki eras, and the continued resonance of this perspective in some quarters within the ruling party and the state, was shown to derive from the leverage of domestic and foreign businesses with their command over investment resources. In Chapter Four, I showed that the balance of power in favour of the business community explains 202 South Africa’s Suspended Revolution the failure of the social pact of the 1990s. Attempts afoot in 2012 and 2013 to establish a similar pact are likely to come to naught unless political elites develop the will to challenge elite aspirations as much as they challenge those of ordinary citizens. And in Chapter Five, I explained that the evolution of civil society in the post-apartheid era can be seen as a response to consequences of the state’s adoption of policies that reflect the inequitable balance of power. The analysis in the preceding chapters also identified policies and political choices as having compromised the substantive fulfilment of the Constitution because of trade-offs made when different constitutional priorities came into conflict with one another. Three such trade-offs were explicitly identified. The first (discussed in Chapter Two) involved the implementation of equity policy and related legislation which reflect the trade-offs made by the ruling party in managing the tension between the goals of historical redress and national unity. The second trade-off (discussed in Chapters Three and Four) is implicit in the economic policies of the post-apartheid era, which reflect the tension between the constitutional objectives of economic growth and prosperity versus inclusive development. Finally, the political choices made in the implementation of South Africa’s foreign policy (discussed in Chapter Six) has tended to prioritise systemic reform and historical redress over the rights of citizens, both of which are equally relevant and important objectives in the Constitution. Thus, in attempting to identify the contours of an alternative progressive political agenda in this chapter, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to consider how to engage with an unfavourable and inequitable balance of power, with a view to enhancing the accountability of the political elite to ordinary citizens, thereby making progressive outcomes more feasible. The second is to investigate what policies and political choices have the potential to enable the simultaneous pursuit of contesting constitutional goals, rather than requiring trade-offs that favour one over another. Before 203 What is to be done? discussing these issues, however, it is necessary to identify the philosophical impulses that underlie such an agenda. Reform or transformation A long tradition permeates progressive socialist thinking about how to advance the interests of the workers and the poor in nonrevolutionary contexts. Theorists and scholars associated with this tradition have essentially been bedevilled by the relationship between reform and revolution. In the early part of the twentieth century even the grand old masters confronted this dilemma. Rosa Luxemburg’s essay, Social Reform or Revolution (1900), was about her intellectual battle (with Eduard Bernstein) to ensure that reforms were not divorced from revolution, but rather conceived as part of a continuum of...