From: "FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 11:21:16 GMT + 2:00 Subject: Outline of article for "Boundary 2" on South Africa Dear comrades, What follows is a message I've just posted to Frank Wilderson, guest editor for a forthcoming issue of "Boundary 2" that will be devoted to South Africa. I've been asked to contribute to this issue with an article and this is the outline of my article. I thought it could be interesting to post it to this list both for what it contains on the situation in SA and for its more general considerations. Hasta siempre. Franco ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- X-cs: From: Self <COSMOS/029FRB> To: piff-AT-aol.com Subject: TO FRANK - BOUNDARY 2 ABSTRACT Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 11:16:36 Dear Frank, What follows is the abstract for my "Boundary 2" article. Well, more than an abstract is just a scheme of ideas, and it's definitely too long. Please let me know the next steps. I'll also forward you my CV. All the best. Franco. This article will explain recent developments in South Africa's organized labor on the basis of the changing nature of South African class composition. However, given that this particular perspective has been consistently neglected in analyses of South African trade unions by the mainstream intellectual left, and given that further research is therefore required into some of the hypotheses of this paper, this should be mainly considered as an agenda for future enquiry. By class composition I not only mean the relationships between various class forces in the South African society as determined by capitalist development and the globalization of the economy, but also the conditions and the processes under which antagonism and resistance is generated in response to those same processes. In other words, class composition does not only include the position objectively defined for the working class as a moment of the inner dialectics of capital in relation with the social means of production (as formally subordinated inside the capitalist workplace and as really subordinated inside the broader social factory). It also includes the ways in which this position is subjectively articulated by the class in the diversity and plurality of its expressions when it has to confront the total functionalization of its time and space to the imperatives of value- creation. The role of South African organized labor has been analyzed so far in the mainstream left-wing perspective from a point of view that is proving increasingly untenable. This, in particular, emphasized the contribution of the trade unions as totally internal to the project of "national liberation". In particular, the progressive realignment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions with the ANC from the second half of the 1980s was paralleled by a semantical and discursive shift which, by allegedly building on the autonomous dynamics that had brought to the fore the mass industrial proletariat as a crucial actor of liberation in SA, defined a new concept of "social movement unionism". However the broad connotations of the "social" lexia in this definition facilitated the gradual narrowing, at an analytical and political level, of the unions' role itself. With the demise of apartheid, "social" increasingly came to mean, >from the popular claim for autonomously organized social- political spaces of action, no more than a moment of the Mass Democratic Movement's global strategy: the moment in which the plight of the working class as a specific social constituency, and no longer as a composition carrying an alternative project for the whole society, was construed in such a way as to be accommodated as a particular component inside the MDM's inter-class strategy for the political transition. In this way, not only the *social* became nothing but a moment of the *political*, with its internal compatibilities structured by the political itself. In fact, with the rise of the ANC as *the* political expression of the MDM in negotiations (to which negotiations were indeed functional), the "social" pretension of organized labor became the justification for the total abdication and delegation to the ANC of the political expression of the class composition. With the gradual, marked adoption of a neo-liberalist approach by the ANC during the transition, the notion of "social movement unionism" had to face these unsurpassable and contradictions and, instead of abandoning this concept altogether, the mainstream left tried to resurrect it and to rehabilitate the de facto sterility and impotence of organized labor during the transition by prefiguring new future tasks for the labor movement as a vehicle of the class composition. This went under a host of expressions: strategic unionism, the shift from resistance to reconstruction, the new unions' role in industrial policy, and labor responsibility towards the country's competitive success; and it was marketed by a series of sources, from rightwingers a-la Duncan Innes, to the Industrial Strategy Project and SWOP think-tanks, to the new neo-lib/soc-dem academic convergence represented by Steven Gelb, Nikki Nattrass, Doug Hindson, Vishnu Padayachee, Mike Morris, etc., etc. This article argues that the neoliberal shift in the ANC's policy options responded to the goal to enable the organization to bargain with corporate capital and apparatuses of the apartheid bureaucracy a role for itself as representative of emerging strata inside the South African class structure (see Motlana's MetLife, Ramaphosa's NAIL and its neo-ethnic rhetoric of "empowerment", the Johnnic deal and the Golding-Copelyn connection, all taken not only as the emergence of a new black capitalist layer, but as an alliance with the old afrikaner financial capital in its "democratic" refashioning, that of Investec, for example). Not only, ANC neo-liberal shift responded to the objective to guarantee at the same time the stability of the predominant role of the ANC in managing the transition as based on a unique combination of two components. The first is the mass support enjoyed by the ANC as a vehicle for shifting the legitimation paradigm of the South African capitalist state. This can be achieved by re-coding the inclusive, inter-class, redistributive discourse of the liberation movement into the language of competitive success, meritocractic reward, pseudo- equal opportunities provided by the free market. A symptom of that is the profound semantic change in the concept of "empowerment", shifted from communitarian self- realization based on a transformation of socio-economic structures, to a rhetoric of private/group achievement whose "trickled down" beneficial effects for the whole public is allegedly guaranteed by the "correct" functioning of *the same socio-economic structures*. Secondly, we have that the same ANC's mass support, as politically fetishized in "The Alliance", can be used to impose on the waged labour, and on the large sections of the socialized proletariat depending upon it, the new rhetoric of competitive success *as a political programme in the general interest*. Another semantical shift occurs at this level, concerning the concept of "national democratic revolution". If before and during the transition it used to imply the preparatory stage to "socialism", now, and *without any narrative change at all*, it is used to habituate the masses to the idea of the unviability in the immediate of any socialist-like opposition to the existing order. Here are the problems more relevant for this essay. The un- replaceable role played by the ANC in the transition consists in the fact that it is the only political force capable to enunciate the political strategy of capital as a political programme for the general interest. From another side, capital is not betting on one horse only, and it has indeed recently discovered a high degree of political autonomy, transversally lobbying through any existing party and imposing its orientations (SAF Report, labour market flexibility, etc.) not as a particular pressure on a particular configurations of forces, but as the "horizon of reality" for *all* the political forces. No wonder that those in power will be more sensitive to this appeal: as you know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now, the problem is: what about of labor? How does the role of organized labor change in this scenario? This question should be divided into three sub-questions: a) How can COSATU's pretension to adequately represent something like the "movement of the working class" inside the current institutional arrangements be analyzed in the context of the hegemony of the neoliberal-developmentalist discourse? b) How has the capacity of COSATU to represent the South African class composition in its technical and political meaning changed? This not only in relation to the narrowing of COSATU's institutional discourse, but also in relation to dynamics of capitalist unilateral redefinition of the technical composition of the class that COSATU can grasp only with great difficulties, to say the least. In fact, flexibilization, decentralization of production, downsizing and subcontracting, managerial attacks to centralized bargaining, management-initiated worker participation schemes are, from one side, disintegrating the social and symbolical cohesiveness of COSATU's constituency. From the other side, they relate with processes of reconstruction of worker subjectivity and opposition requiring new interpretative tools, which must be able to capture their diversity of expressions and their commonality of purposes: namely, the purposes of finding a response to a capitalist domination able to extend exploitation from the factory to the territory, and from working-time to life-time. Here the old imperative of worker control over production becomes that of the control by the socialized proletariat over the use-value of everyday life, of social cooperation and communication, to take it away from the total functionalization of these aspects of life to the logic of capital. Here, the struggle for control of production is not only "allied" to the struggle for basic needs, as in the old rhetoric of the "social movement unionism". The struggle over production and the struggle over needs *become, literally, the same thing*. Worker capacity to impose rigidities to capitalist restructuring of the factory and of the factory-territory relationships becomes an aspect of the fight to appropriate income as a resource to self-manage popular needs. The striking news here is that the trade union movement is no longer capable to guarantee any mediation between these two sides of the struggle, and their *immediate relationship* leads me to the next point of my article: c) How alternative paths for the political expression of the class composition can be envisaged? This question is not about imposing a particular fantasy over the future character of the "working class organization" over the ugly reality. It is rather based on an attempt to prefigure, through a method of enquiry into the new proletarian subjectivities in South Africa, what are the possible trends arising >from the discursive and material practices through which a plurality of class languages are originated as a response to neoliberal developmentalism. Two ancillary questions need to be posed here. First: once I have defined the ANC's re-codification of its national liberation discourse in terms of incorporation of conflict inside technocratic institutionality, what is left of the viability of an antagonist social identity as part of a "national liberation" discourse (and here, Frank, I will explicitly link with your comparison between post-1994 South Africa and post-1954 Algeria)? And what is the place of the "national" in an age of crisis of the state as a site of progressive social compacts? Finally, the ANC's discourse on "nation building" and "national democratic revolution" deprives the concept of "transition" of any meaning in terms of a movement towards some visible destination it makes instead of "transition" a self-fulfilling prophecy, the illusory exaltation of the "new", a process whose achievement is, by definition, contained in its mere becoming (a "finality without a goal", as Adorno would say). Then, how can we interpellate the subjectivities of the social proletariat in a way that gets rid of the damn "transition" altogether, anticipating instead for the class a new self-realization based on the link between alternative forms of sociality and liberated spaces *in the immediate* and the achievement of the disarticulation of the neoliberal paradigm *as a project*? These questions are all the more relevant because, as the failure of Masakhane, or the police massacre at Eldorado Park against people practising self-reduction of electricity show, these alternative forms are already existing, even if scarcely interpellated by the official left and the SA clerics of Tony Cliff. OK Frank, it's line 180: just tell me what you think. Hasta siempre Franco Franco Barchiesi Sociology of Work Unit Dept of Sociology Private Bag 3 University of the Witwatersrand PO Wits 2050 Johannesburg South Africa Tel. (++27 11) 716.3290 Fax (++27 11) 716.3781 E-Mail 029frb-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm Home: 98 6th Avenue Melville 2092 Johannesburg South Africa Tel. (++27 11) 482.5011 --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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