File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-03-10.164, message 73


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


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