Shadow of Liberation: Contestation and Compromise in the Economic and Social Policy of the African National Congress, 1943-1996

SHADOW OF LIBERATION

SHADOW OF LIBERATION

Contestation and Compromise in the Economic and Social Policy of the African National Congress, 1943–1996

Vishnu Padayachee and Robert van Niekerk

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Copyright © Vishnu Padayachee and Robert van Niekerk 2019

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First published 2019

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CONTENTS

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1:The Context of Economic and Social Policy-Making in the ANC

CHAPTER 2:African Claims, the Freedom Charter and Social Democracy, 1943–1960

CHAPTER 3:Incarceration, Exile and Homecoming, c.1960–c.1991

CHAPTER 4:Economic Policy Debates during a Decade of Liberation, 1985–1993

CHAPTER 5:On the Way to GEAR, 1994–1996

CHAPTER 6:Making Sense of the Economic Policy Debates

CHAPTER 7:South African Reserve Bank Independence

CHAPTER 8:The Politics of Health Policy-Making in the Transition Era, 1990–1996

CHAPTER 9:Interpretation and Conclusion

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

In the pall of a destructive preceding political era under Jacob Zuma, characterised by corruption of the body politic and the institutions of our democracy and by poor economic performance, the president of the African National Congress, Cyril Ramaphosa, has promised a ‘new dawn’ for South Africa. He advocates that ‘… we put behind us the era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in leaders. We should put all the negativity that has dogged our country behind us, because a new dawn, inspired by our collective memory of Nelson Mandela and the changes that are unfolding, is upon us’ (Vuk’unzenzele 2018). We must ask what lessons have been learnt though from the political circumstances and policy choices made since democracy in 1994 in South Africa that require the arising of such a new dawn.

In contributing an answer, we feel an honest and forthright reflection is required of our recent economic and social policy-making history, in particular in the era of the democratic political transition between 1990 and 1996. Our book is therefore centred on the primary question that, given its historical state-led anti-inequality stance, how did the ANC in the 1990s come to do such a dramatic volte-face on economic and social policy and advocate for an essentially market-driven or neo-liberal approach. How did this U-turn happen? What were the forces that led the market-friendly charge? Indeed, as many have asked, did the ANC willingly go that way or was it pushed into such compromises?

We show here that the economic policy choices of the ANC leadership were based on a judgement that there was no alternative to the neo-liberalism that had dominated global policy debate since the early 1980s. Ironically, this approach, also referred to as the Washington Consensus, was slowly losing credibility following the publication of the Japanese-sponsored World Bank’s The East Asian Miracle report (1993c). That report was highly critical of the core economic and social policy positions that emerged out of the Washington Consensus. This rethinking globally on failed macroeconomic policy in the early to mid-1990s was happening at precisely the time when the ANC was entering negotiations with the apartheid regime over a democratic constitution and the accompanying institutions of a post-apartheid state. The ANC, however, entered this global arena of fierce contestation over macroeconomic policy strategies and ideas unevenly schooled in economic policy debates and in economic theorising about their history.

In contrast to the ANC, the apartheid state was able to turn to its well-resourced economic institutions and supportive state agencies, such as the National Treasury, South African Reserve Bank, the Central Economic Advisory Services, the Development Bank, the Land Bank and other state institutions, to confound the ANC with powerful, albeit flawed, neo-liberal ideas and policy proposals, which they had begun earnestly to espouse and implement from the late 1970s. In that exercise of persuasion and power play, the apartheid state had the implicit backing of Western governments and global financial institutions, as well as that of a still powerful local capitalist class.

Apart from ‘there was no alternative’, at least two other arguments are raised in defence of the ANC leadership’s neo-liberal choices. The first is that the state was in a fiscal crisis, so no alternative policy strategy could be entertained or financed based on a state-driven investment programme. The second was based on the view that implementing any state-led investment and redistributive social policy delivery programme would have relied on a largely untransformed apartheid state bureaucracy and would have been undermined by that old guard.

Some have questioned the degree and depth of the fiscal crisis in historical and comparative context (see Michie and Padayachee 1997, 1998; Fine and Padayachee 2000). By examining alternative, yet fiscally responsible, policy frameworks, such as the ANC’s own (later disowned) macroeconomic policy framework (MERG) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) led Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), we show that the first view was fatally flawed. There were credible and imaginative policy alternatives, but they were not only eschewed, but imperiously discarded without deliberative debate within the ANC or its alliance partners. While we do not deal extensively with the second point referred to above, it is clear that this argument is something of a feeble cop-out. Surely, to be consistent with the culture of democratic accountability forged in the mass democratic movement, the right strategy was to agree, through democratic debate, on an appropriate, progressive policy framework, and then consider the kind of state capability needed to give effect to it? The outcome by now, 25 years later, we maintain, would have resulted in far more genuinely emancipatory outcomes for the majority of our people. That approach is what the Afrikaner nationalists did in the lead-up to their own racist version of freedom in 1948 and thereafter (see, for example, Freund 2019). After 1959, Fidel Castro’s Cuba did not throw up its arms in despair after inheriting Fulgencio Batista’s bureaucracy, but set about radically and purposefully transforming the civil service to give effect to their revolutionary goals. The South West Africa People’s Organisation was able to do this, too, in Namibia in anticipation of taking over government.

The example of Ethiopia’s recent development experience may be useful in setting the MERG state-led investment programme in some comparative perspective. Ethiopia’s impressive growth rates, which averaged 10 per cent per annum over the past decade after the global crisis of 2008, was driven by substantial public sector infrastructural investment. Ken Coutts and Christina Laskaridis (2019) show that contrary to the concern that high public sector investment would crowd out private sector investment, the latter kept pace with public investment, being lower than public investment (as a percentage of the GDP) in the first phase and appreciably higher in the second. The only concern raised by analysts was the risk of exposure to spiralling external debt, calling for careful management of the currency and reserves and policies aimed at increasing output and exports of both agriculture and industry (Coutts and Laskaridis 2019).

Over 30 years ago, the ‘largely and dangerously’¹ ignored post-Keynesian scholar Hyman Minsky wrote: ‘Economic issues must become a serious public matter and the subject of debate if new directions are to be undertaken. Meaningful reforms cannot be put over by an advisory and administrative elite that is itself the architect of the existing situation’ (in Rapley 2017: 416).

This book eschews both singular and conspiratorial narratives about why certain economic and social policies were decided upon and adopted in this period. Instead, we favour an in-depth and ‘no-holds-barred’ account that contrasts and reflects on the ideologically varying vantage points of all the key protagonists in South Africa’s transition to democracy until approximately 1996 with the introduction of the market-friendly Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy framework. Without sacrificing our own voice, we have tried to give voice deliberately and fairly to all sides involved in the debates. But to understand the 1990s shifts, we felt the need to take a longer, historically grounded approach.

The book, therefore, locates the period of ANC economic and social policy-making in the post-1990 era against a wider historically contextualised canvas of ANC policy-making since the 1940s – commencing with African Claims of 1943 through the Freedom Charter of 1955, the 1992 Ready to Govern policy document, the RDP Base Document and MERG’s macroeconomic policy framework of the 1990s. This detailed contextual framework allows us to argue unequivocally that the historical policy orientation of ANC economic and social policy-making was firmly social democratic in character (even though, and with the possible exception of Albert Luthuli, not conceptualised in such specifically ideological terms).

Social democracy as applied here by us is located within a broad tradition of socialist thought characterised historically by the state-led universalised provision of public goods to all citizens and across social strata (such as a single state-run national health service provided free at the point of delivery), based on principles of social solidarity and inclusive social citizenship and with accompanying redistributive macroeconomic policies. In the indigenised social democratic policy strategy reflected in ANC policy thinking, historically the democratic state would play a critical and leading role in the reconstruction and development of South Africa.

It is instructive to acknowledge at this point that very shortly after its unbanning in 1990, the ANC was fully open to such bold, nuanced and imaginative social democratic thinking on policy alternatives, but that this impetus was rapidly eclipsed by an emerging residualist, market-friendly policy discourse that was eventually consolidated in the Growth, Employment and Re-distribution (GEAR) strategy of 1996. The openness to redistributive, social democratic policy thinking at this stage was represented by no less a commanding figure than Nelson Mandela in a seminal keynote address to the Consultative Business Movement on 23 May 1990 early after his release from incarceration (Mandela 1990). Here, in contrast to the tone and content of what was soon to follow from the ANC, is an open and flexible approach to economic policy options, albeit firmly anchored in the specificities of South Africa’s own history and legacy. Apart from the focus on education, housing, skills and social policy interventions, Mandela’s economic policy ideas as reflected in this 1990 speech are significant. He speaks of the need for a ‘macroeconomic indicative national plan’; the recognition of gross inequalities arising out of imbalances in concentrations of corporate power and land distribution; a proposal for strengthening economic democracy through, for example, state representation on private boards; a focus on employment and centralised bargaining; the need for anti-trust legislation and a more progressive tax policy; the importance of successfully competing in global markets; the imperative to build a small and medium business sector; a focus on investment, industrial policy and a living wage; registering opposition to the late apartheid era government’s policy of privatisation, and his concern about capital flight. He does not fail to recognise fiscal realities in his speech, though he clearly does not labour over or fetishise them at this stage. Most significantly, the ideas raised here by Mandela are all key elements of a redistributive, social democratic economic and social policy framework, closer, we argue, both to the original social democratic and emancipatory vision of the ANC as contained in its African Claims policy document of 1943 and the Freedom Charter of 1955, and to the vision articulated later in the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) and Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1993.

Its historical alliance with the vocal and Marxist-Leninist-inspired South African Communist Party gave the appearance, however, that the ANC was ideologically more to the left of this position. The book describes how and why these social democratic policy alternatives were summarily abandoned through the new centralised and elitist leadership politics that gripped the ANC in the transition era, displacing the mass-based, democratic politics of accountability of the anti-apartheid era. Indeed, the consequences of this market-value-informed political elitism that took root in the mid-1990s was most eloquently expressed by iconic anti-apartheid liberation fighter and United Democratic Front (UDF) founder member, the late Johnny Issel:

Our public appearances are carefully choreographed. These are the requirements of the market. It demands that we present ourselves as saleable commodities. As functionaries we are required to possess a certain measure of exchange value, like any other commodity for sale. Such are the dictates of the ‘market’. And more better if it is ‘packaged’ in an Italian-designed suit and driven in a German-produced automobile. And if so, the exchange value increases and the market rewards a higher premium. But on the market not all goods up for sale are sought. Similarly, some of us discover that we are not appropriately packaged. And we begin to doubt our own worth, our own self-worth. Others seem to find somewhat more expedient ways, albeit criminal ways, to appropriate what the market has to offer (South African History Online 2011).

While the ANC clearly and correctly triumphed on the political front in securing a globally celebrated constitutional democracy, the egregious lack of attention to economic theory for most of its history, the lack of economic capacity within its ranks in contrast to the late apartheid state’s capacity and skills, the almost criminal neglect of its mass democratic base, and the summary rejection of the recommendations of its own progressive think tanks, including MERG and the RDP Base Document, all combined to cripple the ANC’s stance on economic and social policy from about mid-1993 and into the early democratic era.

We do not characterise these compromises by Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership as some kind of ‘betrayal’ or ‘selling out’, as has become popular in some circles today. Yes, in our judgement there were many things the ANC could have done better, especially in respect of the way it cut itself off from its greatest strength, that is the mass democratic movement. But we accept that those comrades in leadership who took these policy decisions were genuinely convinced it offered the best hope for our people. In this respect, we cannot conclude on the basis of the evidence that there was a conscious and intentional ‘sell-out’ of the decades-long struggle to achieve an emancipated society in South Africa. Neither is there any conclusive evidence, apart from some speculation, of secret late night meetings involving the ANC, Western governments, the Bretton Woods institutions and local capital, which persuaded the ANC to adopt market-friendly economic and social policies. For us, the jury is still out on this point. The extensive available evidence we have reviewed could not substantiate such claims, yet we do not deny this possibility. Further research is needed before anyone can come to a definitive conclusion and it is our hope that our book will act as a spur to such research by interested scholars.

What is unassailable in our view, though, is that the values and principles of democratic debate, accountability and accompanying political selflessness, all key features of the progressive mass democratic movement in the struggle against apartheid, were near abandoned in the economic policy-making process of the transition era. This commitment, indeed insistence, on the need to deliberate and reach consensus on policy alternatives through our mass democratic political culture is reflected most tellingly in the views of Alec Erwin, then education officer of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), expressed at an Indaba with the ANC in Paris in 1989. Erwin said that ‘central to our thinking is the development of a democratic political process that will entrench mass participation and involvement in the formulation and implementation of economic policy’ (Erwin 1990: 206). We hold that there was a subsequent ‘sell-out’ of this commitment to a grassroots, mass democratic political culture informing the policy-making process. Apart from the impact on policy process and content itself, this shift has had devastating consequences for accountability, eroding the fabric of progressive South African political life and contributing substantively to the corrosion of the progressive body politic. The roots of this phenomenon, we argue, are to be found in the era of the political transition since 1990 and the early period of democracy following the 1994 elections, and then finally cohered and consolidated in the ruinous Zuma era.

In respect of economic and social policy and in the context of a ‘negotiated revolution’, the ANC was outgunned and outwitted by the far more powerful economic machinery of the late apartheid state and of local (white) capital. In our view, the role of the ‘international economic community’ in the form of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in explaining the ‘shift’ has been exaggerated, as has been conclusively demonstrated in a recent paper by Padayachee and Fine (2018). An elitist team was assembled and entrusted by the ANC leadership with creating the policy and institutional foundations for realising the Freedom Charter, the ANC’s long-term emancipatory vision for a South African good society. Through missteps and arrogance, that foundation could not be laid. We now live with the consequences.

Now, as we conclude our work in a post-Zuma South Africa, and with a new dawn based on a ‘New Deal’ being evoked by President Ramaphosa and his followers, there are worrying signs that none of the lessons of theory or history, or the lessons drawn from the vast post-2008 crisis literature, appear to have been learnt. It looks like ‘business as usual’ after the obscenely corrupt ten years of Zuma’s administration brought post-apartheid South Africa virtually to its knees (Van Niekerk and Fine 2019).

We wish to conclude though, again, with the observation of Issel, who after forcefully rejecting all the trappings of political elitism in the ANC in the final years of his life, had these words to say in his poignant and final public speech: ‘What spurred us on then – the need and urge for freedom – still burns within us and I think it will burn within us for a long time to come. And I want you to be strong comrades and don’t be distracted by anything … Let us continue moving on and finally I believe we shall see what we had fought for’ (YouTube 2011).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many individuals and institutions contributed their time, energy and ideas towards the finalisation of this book. We thank especially the staff of the many archives we searched: particular thanks are owed to Vuyolwethu Feni-Fete, senior archivist at the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Fort Hare (Alice); Gabriele Mohale, head archivist at the William Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg); and Huibre Lombard and her dedicated staff at the Archive of Contemporary History at the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein). Dr Abel Gwaindepi (Rhodes and Stellenbosch University) assisted with our archival work at the National Heritage Archives in Alice. Lee Smith and Robert Jacot-Guillarmod are acknowledged for their assistance in the editing of the volume.

Special thanks are due to those (all busy people) who allowed us to interview them. Their names and affiliations are recorded in the bibliography. This book would not have been possible without their contribution.

We also thank the following colleagues who provide us with leads and shared their ideas and reflections on the period of South Africa’s transition and who supported us in many ways as we worked towards completion of the manuscript. They include, in no particular order, Ronnie Kasrils, Saleem Badat, Bradley Bordiss, Bill Freund, Jannie Rossouw, Jonathan Leape, Tulo Makwati, Imraan Valodia, Lumkile Mondi, Keith Breckenridge, Deenan Pillay, Anand Pillay, Patsy Pillay, Jonathan Klaaren, Yusuf Sayed, Ben Turok, Shepi Mati, Greg Ruiters, Verne Harris and Keith Hart. Ben Fine and John Sender gave hugely of their time and their powerful memories of key aspects of the economics of the transition, in which they were both deeply involved. Apart from being interviewed by us, they always responded timeously and enthusiastically to our email queries and questions.

We are immensely indebted to Karen Pampallis and Sally Hines for their thorough editing work and for turning our scrabbled thoughts into elegant text. We are also grateful to our project manager, Alison Paulin, for her painstaking and meticulous efforts in finalising the book with us, carried out with good humour, patience and wonderful consideration for what we were trying to achieve.

We thank our respective families in Durban and Makhanda (Grahamstown). Vishnu Padayachee thanks Nishi, Sonali, Dhirren and his mother for being supportive and for allowing him the dedicated space and time to work uninterruptedly at his study in Durban. Vishnu would also like to acknowledge with deep gratitude four generations of the Padayachee and Naidoo families, whose powerful contribution and selfless service to the educational, cultural and economic life of Umkomaas left an indelible mark on his world view and values.

Robert van Niekerk thanks Orla, Nia and Oisin for their patience and support while he completed this book over four years of research and writing. Robert would also like to thank his comrades and friends in the Lansdowne Youth Movement and the Cape Youth Congress where his political understanding of the African National Congress as an historical movement of emancipation was first shaped. In particular he remembers Robbie Waterwitch, a cherished friend, and Coline Williams, who both died very unexpectedly but bravely as young MK guerrilla fighters in 1989. Their sacrifice is not forgotten.

For a lifetime of dedication and sacrifice to the struggle for democracy in South Africa and for his courage, integrity and vision, we are honoured to dedicate this book to Tata Andrew Mlangeni.

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Permission to publish extracts and information taken from the following journal articles is gratefully acknowledged:

Vishnu Padayachee & John Sender. 2018. Vella Pillay: Revolutionary Activism and Economic Policy Analysis. Journal of Southern African Studies 44(1): 149-165. DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2018.1405644. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.

Vishnu Padayachee & Ben Fine. 2018. The role and influence of the IMF on economic policy in South Africa’s transition to democracy: The 1993 Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility revisited. Review of African Political Economy DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2018.1484352 Reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com.

Vishnu Padayachee (2015) Central Bank Independence: The debate revisited. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 89: 1–25. Reprinted by permission of the editor, Transformation.

CHAPTER

1

The Context of Economic and Social Policy-Making in the ANC

Talks about the transition to democracy in South Africa began fitfully and largely in secret in the mid-1980s. But President FW de Klerk’s announcement on 2 February 1990 that the apartheid regime was unbanning the African National Congress (ANC) and other liberation movements, and the release of Nelson Mandela nine days later, took the transition onto a much higher plane and at a rapid rate. That South Africa remained the only fully capitalist economy on the continent at that time is not in doubt. While we do not subscribe to the notion of ‘South African exceptionalism’, we maintain that its capitalism was an extreme, stunted and distorted one. All of these characteristics, in different ways, had a bearing on the very nature of the transition, including on economic and social policy options and choices. Two such features are worth noting here. Firstly, South African capital represented by white-owned conglomerates such as Anglo American Corporation and Sanlam, both established around the end of the Second World War, remained powerful, globally connected and influential as the twentieth century wound to a close. Secondly, the apartheid regime’s economic institutions remained well-resourced and internationally connected, despite decades of sanctions and the crisis of the apartheid state. These state institutions included the Ministry of Finance, the South African Reserve Bank, the Central Economic Advisory Services, a number of regional, national and provincial development finance institutions, and the national statistics agency (Central Statistical Services).

The real power among the constituencies engaged in negotiations lay in the hands of white business and in the institutions of the late apartheid state, as journalist and author Martin Plaut argues: ‘The men who had run South Africa for decades also embarked on a process designed to incorporate senior members of the ANC. Radical economic policies were dropped in favour of more conventional macro-economic prescriptions’ (2012: 31). As Plaut suggests, this was no accident; it had been thought through by the old regime and it was to prove decisive in many economic policy battles, including, as we show, the crucial issue of the independence of the South African Reserve Bank (see chapter 6).

Against these factors, most components of the liberation movement, including the Tripartite Alliance consisting of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), were fragmented, under-resourced and under-capacitated. But its moral and political standing among its own people and in the international community was never higher than it was around 1990 when formal negotiations were poised to begin. These were undoubtedly major assets that ultimately enabled the ANC to prevail at the formal negotiations for a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and unitary South Africa. As we will attempt to show in our discussion of the economic and social policy debate inside and outside formal constitutional negotiations, it is precisely this goodwill and trust that the ANC rapidly threw away in the search to win the support of international finance capital. This perceived necessity was based on the view that foreign investors would come to support the post-apartheid economy provided that the country played by the rules of the international game.

Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee have characterised South African capital in the following way:

The durable features of South African capitalism since its modern inception are mining, racial domination, and an uneven relationship between the state, finance and industry. Although the national economy went through long swings between an external and internal orientation, each of the main periods we have highlighted (1870s–1914, 1914–45, 1945–79, 1980s–2008) was marked by both. South African capitalism has a markedly ‘neo-feudal’ character, distinguished by a cult of alpha-male leadership, cronyism between firms, banks and government, a relative absence of competition, weak democracy in the workplace, [an absence] of a flourishing culture of small and medium enterprises; in other words, a tendency towards absolute rather than relative surplus value … which has its roots in British colonialism, rural Afrikanerdom and a history of racial oppression by a small white minority (2013a: 80).

Hart and Padayachee question the extent to which any of this has changed since the advent of democracy. Of course, 25 years into South Africa’s democracy, few can deny that notable progress has been made in addressing some of the economic and social legacies of the apartheid regime. Yet, progress has not been as widespread, rapid or sustainable as may have been hoped for. The ‘triple challenge’ of unemployment, inequality and poverty, as the ANC government of today defines it, as well as the challenges related to economic growth itself, remain stubbornly intractable. At the time of writing, the economy has slipped into a recession, the second in ten years, the country’s investment grade has been reduced to junk by two international credit-rating agencies, and, despite attempts at their restructuring in this yet early stage of the post-Zuma era, the governance of state-owned enterprises still remains nothing short of shambolic. The much-anticipated inflows of capital, which the ANC bent over backwards to achieve have not materialised; instead both legal and illegal capital outflows have reached obscene proportions.

Together with a serious crisis of service delivery (water, sanitation, electrification, health) in many parts of the country and a concomitant rise in service delivery protests and labour action, as well as weak performance by firms, both big and small, a double whammy of macroeconomic disequilibria and microeconomic stagnation faces the country today. Corruption, personal accumulation projects and governance challenges add to the woes of the still relatively new democracy. A serious, sober and critically reflective analysis of how South Africa has reached this point is necessary and perhaps overdue.

Part (and we stress part) of the explanation for the current malaise, we maintain, may lie in the historic neglect of economic and social policy thinking in ANC political strategy since its formation in 1912 and the relative weakness and lack of creativity of its economic capabilities and thinking in the 1990s, which impacted negatively on the quality and creativity of its policy formulation in the crucial years of the transition to democracy and beyond. In our view, the decisions taken in that period of the transition (c.1990–1996) continue to constrain the scope to rethink and reimagine an economic and social dispensation of the kind that is needed to escape the current economic and social impasse. The question of how this came to pass lies at the heart of this book.

Our title comes from the ANC’s ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document adopted at a landmark strategic conference in Morogoro, Tanzania, in 1969: ‘To allow existing economic forces to retain their interests intact, is to feed the root of racial supremacy, and does not represent even the shadow of liberation. Our drive towards national emancipation is, therefore, in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation’ (ANC 1997: 391–392, emphasis added).

The important point made here is about the imperative that political freedom is accompanied by an appropriate set of economic and social policies that would serve fundamentally to transform the lives of the people whom the liberation movement represented. Anything short of such a fundamental economic emancipation would, therefore, represent a ‘shadow of liberation’.

This book represents an attempt to critically assess the economic and social policy theorising, thinking and choices made by the ANC – in alliance with the SACP and its various trade union partners – in the transition era to democracy (c.1990–1996). However, it is consciously located in a longer historical context – a periodisation we have chosen to start with is the African Claims document produced under the leadership of ANC President AB Xuma in 1943, and which ends in the publication of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution document produced by the ANC-led government of Nelson Mandela in 1996.

In elucidating our arguments on the character of the ANC and its foundational policy orientation, we refer extensively to a fully recognisable ‘social democratic’ basis to the policies advocated by the modern ANC (from 1940 on). While we locate social democracy as a strand of socialist thought (a ‘variety of socialism’ if you will), our reference to social democracy is not meant in its strictly ideological sense of a commitment to a parliamentary road to achieving socialism on the basis of working-class participation through political parties in a constitutional democracy. Rather, what is meant by social democracy is in terms of its substantive economic and social content: the provision of universally provided public goods (such as health, education and welfare services) by the state as an entitlement of social citizenship with a commitment to achieving equity (as opposed to merely ameliorating poverty). This would be achieved through redistributive economic policies that enable social solidarity among all citizens across social strata and thereby ensure a common sharing of the social heritage by all citizens collectively. Additionally, this would be best achieved through deliberative, democratic practices in the context of a constitutional democracy.

While the reasons for a fully fledged social democratic tradition of socialist thought not flourishing are complex, it is our view that the polarisation of intellectual life in South Africa within the left performed a seminal role in preventing social democratic ideas from developing in the country, within which the various positions of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) (and then the SACP after 1950) was most significant. The CPSA/SACP drew on a Stalinist interpretation of social democracy in the 1930s that bizarrely equated ‘social democracy’ to fascism in its corporatist underpinnings (described as ‘social fascism’). This interpretation prevented the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was the orthodox communist movement’s favoured political strategy to achieve class power. This hostile ideological attitude to social democracy historically informed the political approach of orthodox communist parties, including the SACP, to ‘non-communist’ varieties of socialist thought. It is worth noting that celebrated Marxist theoretician Leon Trotsky did not share this orthodox view and argued for an anti-fascist front, including social democrats who would ‘March separately, but strike together!’ against fascism (Trotsky 1931: n.p.).

THE ANC AND THE POST-APARTHEID ALTERNATIVE

Most accounts suggest that the ANC paid little or no attention to economic (or social) policy during much of its history, including in the exile years. Its overall approach to politics could be described as ‘liberal reformist’. This is