Readers will be familiar with Michael Roberts whose economic writings we feature regularly on this blog. Below are his comments on the death of Nelson Mandela.
by Michael Roberts
The death of Nelson Mandela reminds us of the great victory that
the black masses of South Africa achieved over the vicious, cruel and
regressive apartheid system first encouraged by British imperialism and
then adopted by a reactionary and racist white South African ruling
class to preserve the privileges of a tiny few. Mandela spent 27 years
in prison and the people he represented fought a long and hard battle to
overthrow a grotesque regime, backed by the major imperialist powers,
including the US, for decades.
Despite the efforts of the British Conservatives, particularly under
Margaret Thatcher, the winer and diner-in-chief of all reactionaries
globally, and the other imperialist leaders, the South African regime
was eventually brought to its knees by the sacrifices of millions of
black South Africans: the labour forces in the mines; the children in
the schools and the people in the townships. They were backed by the
solidarity actions of workers and people in the major countries through
boycotts, strike action and political campaigning. It was a big defeat
for the forces of reaction in Britain and America.
But the timing of the end of apartheid was also due to a change of
attitude by the white ruling class in South Africa and the ruling
classes of the major capitalist states. There was a hard-headed
decision to no longer consider Mandela ‘a terrorist’ and recognise that a
black president was inevitable and even necessary. Why? South
Africa’s capitalist economy was on its knees. That was not just because
of boycotting, but because the productivity of the black labour in the
mines and factories had dropped away. The quality of investment in
industry and availability of investment from abroad had fallen sharply.
This was expressed in the profitability of capital reaching a post-war
low in the global recession of the early 1980s. And unlike other
capitalist economies, South Africa could find no way of turning that
around through the exploitation of the labour force.
The ruling class had to change strategy. The white leadership under
FW de Klerk reversed decades of previous policy and opted to release
Mandela and go for black majority government that could restore labour
discipline and revive profitability. For his deserts, De Klerk got the
Nobel Peace Prize along with Mandela, who became president at the age of
76! And profitability did indeed rise dramatically under the first
Mandela administration as the rate of exploitation of the workforce
rocketed.
The rise in profitability tapered off in the early 2000s as the
organic composition of capital rose sharply through increased
mechanisation even though that yet a further rise in the rate of
exploitation. South African industry is now in difficulty, unemployment
and crime remain at global highs and economic growth is foundering.
South Africa under Mandela and later Thabo Mbeki has seen some
improvement in the truly awful living situation of the black majority,
in sanitation, housing, electricity, education, health etc, ending the
cruel and arbitrary control of movement and the inequality of the
apartheid regime. But South Africa has the highest inequality of incomes
and wealth in the world still and inequality has never been higher as
black capitalists have joined the white ones in the economy. Despite
its professed socialist ideology, the ANC never went towards replacing
the capitalist mode of production with common ownership, not even of the
mines or resource industries.
As the OECD put it their report on inequality of income in emerging economies:
“At one extreme, strong output growth during the past decade went
hand-to-hand with declining income inequality in two countries (Brazil
and Indonesia). At the other extreme, four countries(China, India, the
Russian Federation and South Africa) recorded steep increases in
inequality levels during the same period, even though their economies
were also expanding strongly.”
The tiny mostly wealthy white minority have remained pretty much
unaffected by the ending of apartheid rule. Again, as the OECD put it: “This
is a particularly serious challenge for South Africa, where
geographical divides reflect inequality between races. Although real
incomes have been rising for all groups since the end of apartheid, many
Africans still live in poverty. At any poverty yardstick, Africans are
very much poorer than Coloureds, who are very much poorer than
Indians/Asians, themselves poorer than whites. “
And now the rich whites are joined by rich blacks who dominate
businesses and exert overwhelming influence over the black leadership of
the ruling ANC party. The ANC expresses the sharp divisions between
the majority of working class blacks and the small black ruling class
that has developed. These fissures erupt every so often as yet without a
decisive break (as we recently saw with the shooting of striking miners
by police under a black government). Mandela’s legacy was the end of
apartheid; the struggle for equality and a better life continues with
subsequent generations of his people.
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