1

Fanon’s Curse:

Re-imagining Marxism in South Africa’s Age of Retreat

Kirk Helliker and Peter Vale

(Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa)

Paper presented at XII Annual Conference of the International

Association of Critical Realism

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23rd-25th July 2009

‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its

mission, fulfil it, or betray it’1

Given its growing, even dark, reputation for xenophobia, it seems

extraordinary that South Africa remains open to ideas from the

outside. Fifteen years after apartheid in South Africa ended, the

country’s great cities are branded with the same imported images

that clutter glittering malls in New York, London or Sydney. The

rapidity of this makeover from apartheid’s grey conformity is held

1 Fanon 1967, p. 166.

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to be testimony to the success of neo-liberal globalisation which

was enthusiastically embraced with apartheid’s ending.

The argument in this article is positioned at the intersection

between the source and the power of social ideas in South Africa.

To explain: located, historically, in a web of metropolitan knowing,

public policy-making in South Africa has invariably followed

imported forms of social discourse: indeed, successive national

narratives – imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and globalisation –

are the echoes of voices and ideas which have been developed

elsewhere. This, a type of cultural cringe – to use A.A. Phillips’2

term – inevitably afflicted South African society and politics, as any

casual reading of the country’s history shows. The current

narrative and practices of neo-liberalism, coming after decades of

bitter struggle against apartheid, is the primary marker of an age of

retreat in South Africa.

Although increasingly hidden by the incarnation of capital

and the national project, South Africa has a long and deep-seated

association with Marxism. This intellectual project, including the

critical moments in its rise and demise, is the central focus of this

article. The argument is simple, almost linear: South Africa’s

interest in Marxism – especially Western Marxism – was abruptly

2 Phillips 2006.

3

truncated. There has been an unravelling of interest in Marxism

since the end of apartheid: this we regard as a retreat.

The generalised condition of retreat has stunted the possibility

of an engagement with building a socialist alternative that once

appeared to be ingrained in the struggles which raged during

apartheid’s endgame. Two immediate reasons explain this

outcome. First and foremost, South Africa’s relationship with the

world and the process of its domestic transformation has been

predicated on the purported benefits to be derived from neo-liberal

globalisation. Secondly, and more importantly for our purposes,

the intellectual-activists that helped to deliver sharp blows in

apartheid’s final years have become distanced from radical forms

of praxis, including being drafted into the direct service of the new

state. In what follows, these two responses are interrogated in

some detail.

However, the article is not simply about identifying signs and

forms of retreat. It will also re-imagine – and explores the

prospects for – a post-apartheid Marxist project. In doing so, we

consider the state, civil society and universities as three possible

terrains for social transformation. We suggest that progressive

intellectuals have become imprisoned by a distorted understanding

of the sites and possibilities for deep-seated change. In particular,

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intellectuals have become transfixed and mesmerised by the state

in a manner which fails to significantly advance struggles within

and which, simultaneously, have put radical intellectualism at

universities and radical praxis within civil society on the back-foot.

The discussion proceeds as follows. As an important

backdrop to our argument, we consider the significance of radical

praxis as it emerged and became consolidated in the 1970s and

1980s amongst Marxist intellectuals in South Africa – the country’s

so-called “struggle years” – and how this was torn asunder with the

post-apartheid transition. We then look at ‘Western Marxism’ in

South Africa prior to the country’s transition – with a view both to

isolating its major trends and identifying its limitations. Since

critique is central to the task at hand, we will deconstruct the notion

of ‘Western Marxism’ – as it developed in South Africa – in order to

draw its diverse faces to the fore. We also examine the often

awkward but critical role that Marxist intellectuals played in the

liberation of their country. The abrupt demise of (a South African-

styled) Western-centred Marxism, in an age of neo-liberalism, is

then outlined schematically. Finally, on the basis of key

contemporary debates about social and political transformation,

and in drawing upon recent experiences from elsewhere, we argue

for re-imagining Marxism in contemporary South Africa.

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The rise and fall of radical praxis

Before traversing the footpaths that must run between the

sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science, we must

clear some ground. In doing so, we highlight radical praxis –

especially the links between theory and practice during the

struggles against apartheid, and explaining how it was that these

were severed under post-apartheid re-structuring.

From the late 1940s onwards, liberal interpretations of South

Africa’s deepening racial quagmire argued that continued racial

domination undermined capitalist development and stifled

economic growth – this subverted any hope of social

emancipation. This approach was represented in the two-volume

The Oxford History of South Africa edited by Monica Wilson and

Leonard Thompson.3

At about the same time, a number of scholars – including

South African exiles and émigrés4 – attacked the work of this

Liberal School. A “new school” (as the Canadian Frederick

Johnstone5 called this Western-style Marxism) argued that racial

domination was integral to the functioning of the capitalist

3 Wilson and Thompson 1969-1971. 4 They included initially Richard Atmore, Martin Legassick, Shula Marks, Stanley Trapido and Harold Wolpe. 5 Johnstone 1978.

6

economy in South Africa. The most widely cited of this work is an

early article by Harold Wolpe6 in which he argues that the

Reserves (later called the Bantustans), by preserving limited

access to agricultural land by the families of Black migrant

labourers, subsidised urban wages and therefore served as a

source of cheap Black labour for industrial and mining capital.

As the “new school” made headway, there was talk of a

Kuhnian-type scientific revolution underway in the country,7

especially at the country’s (mainly White) English-language

universities. Its flowering was certainly buoyed by the re-birth of

socialist thought in Western Europe following three closely linked

developments – the upheavals of 1968, the recovery of interest in

the Annales School and the flourishing of Marxist historiography,

especially in the United Kingdom.

The onward march of the “new school”, and the

simultaneous re-activation of work-based and community-based

organisation and mobilisation against the apartheid regime during

the 1970s, speeded the fortunes of Marxist explanations bringing

closer the link between social theory and political practice. This

was seen in the role played by White intellectuals – academics and

students, mainly – in the formation of Black trade union 6 Wolpe 1972. 7 Jubber 1983, p. 54.

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movements in the east coast industrial port of Durban and, later, in

the country’s financial capital, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the

Mother City. The epitome of this intellectual activism was the

Sorbonne-trained, Rick Turner, who was assassinated in 1978.8

Years after his tragic death, Turner’s theoretical writing returns

again and again to inform South Africa’s political debates. A

decade later, in the 1980s, the partnership between activists and

intellectuals continued and came to enhance the political work of

the mass-based United Democratic Front (UDF) in its challenge to

the legitimacy of the apartheid state.

Because of the successes of anti-apartheid struggles, it is

easy to judge these as entailing an untroubled relationship

between thought and action but, in reality, they were tied down by

complex social knots and contradictions many of which entailed

theoretical debates. So, early Marxist writing – as Martin

Legassick9 later noted in self-reflection – criticised the exiled South

African Communist Party (SACP) for stressing race over class in

the struggle against apartheid. And, later with the expansion of the

non-racial trade union movement, divides appeared between so-

called “Workerists” and “Populists”. The former were inclined to

stress the role of the unions, shop-floor politics and the inevitability 8 See Turner 1972; Fluxman and Vale 2004. 9 Legassick 2002.

8

of class conflict; the latter were drawn, rather, to the goal of mass

mobilisation and struggle, both armed and other. Sympathetic

intellectuals (most of whom were White) normally adopted the

“classist” position, and often viewed national liberation movements

(including the non-racial, exiled African National Congress (ANC))

with some suspicion for their populist leanings. But there were also

debates within (and between) the ANC and its affiliated

organisations, especially the UDF, about the importance of

working class leadership, and, at times, about “one-stage” and

“two-stage” theories of transformation.

The intensity of the interaction between social theory and

political practice (and the success of this link) was the harbinger of

a new social epoch for the country. In addition, the socialist

currents within the trade union movement and the deeply-rooted

local structures set up by the UDF promised radical change. This,

it was believed, would be followed by a strong partnership between

civil society and the state, which would build a polity whose

defining purpose would be to overcome the social and economic

injustices remaining in apartheid’s wake. With apartheid on the

verge of collapse, and following the release from prison of Nelson

Mandela, the American sociologist Michael Burawoy visited the

country and glowingly wrote that ‘everywhere there were

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sociologists [and other academics] acting as organic intellectuals

of the home-grown liberation movements’.10 The early 1990s in

South Africa seemed to be everything but on the edge of an age of

retreat.

Fifteen years after the end of apartheid however the promise

of epochal change remains in the past while the intellectual

partnership which nourished it, is no more. What happened?

Undoubtedly, the rise and force of neo-liberalism crowded out the

hopes, world-wide, for a different future. But, South Africa’s hope

for a different future was undermined by the ripping apart of the

strategic partnership between ideas and action which had once

promised so much: the result, its debris, lies scattered about this

article.

Today, the post-apartheid government (which is led by a

liberation movement and its subservient alliance partners,

including a communist party) pursue a form of politics which is

emptied of the progressive content which characterised the 1970s

and 1980s. The divide between workerists and populists is no

more, having collapsed in the face of a doxa which stresses

market-driven economics and shallow procedural-type democracy

10 Burawoy 2004a, p. 11.

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(what Unger11 calls ‘sleepy democracy’). Certainly, there are social

programmes which aim at redistribution in the country, but these

are palliative and are compliant with orthodox neo-liberal economic

policy frameworks. In the main, they are technocratically-driven

programmes within a market-driven ‘development’ paradigm and

are deprived of the support from grassroots democratic

mobilisation which was so fundamental to the struggle that ended

apartheid. As Rick Turner envisaged for a democratic South Africa,

The political party as mediator between the individual and

government tends to take on the characteristics of the system

itself, the ‘party machine’ dominates the membership and the

rank and file become increasingly divorced from policy

making. .... The political arena becomes polarised between

an atomised mass and a number of small groups trying to

manipulate the mass in order to get political jobs. The result of

this is to move the source of power in society out of the

political arena and into the control of functional power groups.

... [T]here must be other additional centres of power which can

11 Unger 2005, p. 30.

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be used by the people to exert their control over the central

body.12

The issue for the future is not whether the post-apartheid

South African government has chosen an evolutionary road to

socialism but whether it has too closely integrated the economy

within the folds of neo-liberal globalisation. The difficulty of making

a different choice – by any other path but retreat – has been

complicated by the fall-off in interaction between theory and

practice that had so intrigued Michael Burawoy.

One plausible explanation for the fall-off is the rise and

growing popularity of post-modernism with its failure to engage

persuasively with politics.13 But, as a more probable cause, the

power of Marxist analysis has all but disappeared as a distinctive

perspective within the South African academy. Three possible

reasons explain this. First, the ending of the socialist states and

the self-styled triumph of the market has compelled political and

social discourses towards market-driven interpretations compatible

with rational choice thinking. Linked to this, secondly, is the flight of

Leftist-leaning intellectuals from the academy towards policy

research, consultancy or into the institutions of the state. And, 12 Turner 1971, p. 81. 13 Booth 2007, p. 178.

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finally, there is the emergence of a crass instrumentalism which

has driven critical scholarship to the corners of the country’s

universities. The latter explains why – as elsewhere in the world –

the humanities are on the back-foot in South Africa.14

But, as we have already noted, there was a moment when

the humanities – especially Western Marxist perspectives on them

– fashioned social and political debates in South Africa, and it is to

this period, and the debates that raged two decades ago, that our

attention now falls.

Western Marxism in South Africa

At its formative moment, Western-style South African Marxism

focused on the relationship between the country’s economy and its

polity, specifically on the relationship between class and race. Two

main perspectives and one theme emerged during these early

years. The first reflected a divide within English Marxism that the

historian Perry Anderson15 had both identified and analysed. The

South African sociologist Wilmot James16 called the two sides of

14 See Vale 2008. 15 Anderson 1980. 16 James 1983.

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this particular divide ‘Social History’ and ‘Historical Sociology’. The

second, the thematic focus, was directed towards the study of

labour – here, the work of Eddie Webster17 stands out.

The social historians were associated with the work of

London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, which in

the 1970s was directed by the South African born Shula Marks.

But their form and influence are best appreciated through the

writing of the historian Charles van Onselen especially his two-

volume Studies in the Social and Economic History of the

Witwatersrand.18 This approach to understanding South Africa’s

past, its present and its future was widely disseminated throughout

the South African academy through the annual History Workshop

at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand. A close reading of

this work suggests a form of historiography that drew on the

writings of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P.

Thompson which stress the idea of history from below, and argued

that lower orders act rationally. In the context of South Africa, van

Onselen and his cohort stressed social agency over political

structure, seeking to reconstruct understandings of the country’s

17 Webster 1985. 18 Van Onselen 1982.

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history through sensitivities to the activities and practices of the

country’s popular classes.19

The other thread of Marxist thinking was ‘historical

sociology’. Here, the leading figure was the exiled Harold Wolpe

who had trained in law but, after his exile to Britain, switched to

sociology. Its members included Frederick Johnstone and Martin

Legassick – together they are called the ‘elder statesmen’.20 They

represented the structuralist tradition in sociology and, with time,

their writing was strongly influenced by Nicos Poulantzas whose

impact was especially evident in the work of a second generation

of South African writers.21 Strictly speaking, James’ divide was

helpful only from a heuristic point of view because some writers

crossed from one side of the divide to the other. For example,

notwithstanding his structuralist analysis of the South African gold

mining industry in his book, Class, Race and Gold, Johnstone22

displayed a strong affinity to E.P. Thompson’s stress on culture,

experience and consciousness. But debates across James’ divide

were not common. Influential commentators, like Belinda Bozzoli,

suggested that the structuralist stream in Western Marxism was

characterised by the negative characteristics of ‘normal science’,

19 IIiffe 1984. 20 Saunders 1988, p.169. 21 Burawoy 2004, p. 663. 22 Johnstone 1976.

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including non-creative enquiry.23 However, the most interesting

debates were amongst the historical sociologists – especially in

relation to state, class and power – where robust exchanges often

took place.24 For instance, there was an intense debate about the

causes of the form and policies of South Africa’s Pact Government

(1924-1933) which was an alliance between the National Party and

the Labour Party. Some Marxists25 prioritised conflicts between

fractions of capital over the distribution of surplus, and others

emphasised the capital accumulation process and struggles

between capital and labour.26

Generally-speaking, South African Marxists were known for

their parochialism and for treating racial domination in South

African society as ‘exceptional’.27 In a review of the literature,

Belinda Bozzoli28 raised methodological concerns about Western-

styled South African Marxism, claiming that it simply involved

importing and adopting a Northern theory, so amounting to ‘locally

received … (foreign) … orthodoxies’.29 She went on to suggest

that ‘[w]hat South African reality could demonstrate to the

intellectual world, has increasingly been pushed aside in favour of 23 Bozzoli 1981, p. 53. 24 See Helliker 1988. 25 See Davies et al. 1976; Kaplan 1979. 26 See Innes and Plaut 1978; Innes 1979. 27 Alexander 2006, p. 7. 28 Bozzoli 1981. 29 Bozzoli 1981, p. 53.

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what that world can tell us about South African reality’.30 For

Bozzoli,31 the sterility of Western-styled South African Marxism

was because ‘“real” theory’ was produced in the North and South

Africa itself was not a ‘source of theorising’. In particular, the very

specificity of apartheid society, namely the constitution of racial

subjectivities, as an epiphenomenon, was reduced to class.

Bozzoli’s own work is drawn towards E.P. Thompson’s idea on the

need to deploy theory in a flexible and contingent manner in order

to both interrogate and breathe life into historical and social

evidence. 32

This – a quandary born of the cultural cringe – was not only

confined to Marxism in South Africa. Ken Jubber traced a century

of development of the social sciences at the University of Cape

Town arguing that, in terms of what was taught, that institution was

like a ‘displaced British university’.33 But this judgement was mild

when measured against the view of Rhodes University’s Lawrence

Wright who described South Africa’s English-medium universities

as instruments for ‘transmitting metropolitical knowledge and

excitement in a colonial situation’.34

30 Bozzoli 1981, p. 54. 31 Ibid. 32 Thompson 1978. 33 Jubber 1983, p. 58. 34 Wright 2006, p. 73.

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We raise the Western roots of Marxism not to emphasise its

irrelevance or unworthiness to South African tasks, but rather to

highlight all the more remarkably how it became embedded in the

struggle for liberation during the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa.

And, it is to this task that the argument now turns.

Marxist intellectuals and South Africa’s liberation

Ari Sitas, in reflecting on “the struggle” years, speaks of an

‘indigenous hybridity’35 which marked the radical intellectual

formations of the 1970s and which deepened throughout the

1980s. He goes on to say:

What can be traced as an intellectual formation started being

developed outside and despite University ‘disciplinarities’.

What started from the early 1970s onwards through marginal

and harassed groupings of left intellectuals, white and black

was a social discourse which had a normative and political

foundation; it was such a formation that provided the culture

levers to prize open departments and disciplinary fields of

35 Sitas 1997, p. 16.

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inquiry. And such a formation, contained different narratives of

emancipation and was animated by egalitarian norms.36

The diversity within this intellectual formation included not just

White Left-inclined academics and students, but also intellectuals

linked to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) which was

founded in 1972 by the activist intellectual, Steve Biko.

Western Marxism in South Africa took root in a fluid,

contested and creative context which was to shape its form.

Commenting on this, Andrew Nash37 suggests that the type of soil

in which the seed was planted was as important as the Marxism

itself: ‘the peculiarities of this process of assimilation, rather than

the ideas which influenced specific individuals, influenced the form

of this moment of Western Marxism’.

This emerged in a 2005 study on activist-sociologists at the

University of the Witwatersrand by Shireen Ally.38 Her point of

entry was that the radical intellectual formations, while rejecting the

centralised authoritarian power of the apartheid state, did not reject

the notion of power per se. Importantly, however, Ally’s view is that

power is not a ‘thing’ wielded from above (or the centre): rather,

36 Sitas 1997, p. 13. 37 Nash 1999, p. 66-7. 38 Ally 2005.

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power is organically generated as a series of relationships infused

in social processes. So, for Ally, Western Marxism, as it was

assimilated in South Africa, was both ‘a reflection of power’ and

‘the product of a conditioning by various social and political forces

and processes that ... deeply implicate it in power’.39

More explicitly, she argues that the rise and success of Black

Consciousness, by stressing race over class in the struggle

against apartheid, effectively excluded Whites – even radical

Whites – from any meaningful role in “the struggle”. As Biko

argued:

Black consciousness is in essence the realisation by the black

man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the

cause of their subjection – the blackness of their skin – and to

operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles

that bind them to perpetual servitude. … Blacks no longer

seek to reform the system. … [They] are out to completely

transform the system and to make of it what they wish.40

Faced with this development, the appeal of Marxism for radical

Whites was not simply on the basis of any objective truth and 39 Ally 2005, pp. 2, 5. 40 Biko 1979, p. 149.

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rationality, but rather, because it provided them with ‘a comfortable

discourse’ – class over race – with which to ‘interrogate structures

of power’.41 It permitted them to remain politically relevant as

“Whites” in South Africa; it was a ‘self-preservation mechanism’, as

Ally calls it.42

The acceptability and appeal of class analysis was further

smoothed by the organisational and political space created by the

non-racial stance adopted by the emerging Black trade union

movement. During the 1970s, and well into the 1980s, most of the

senior (and relatively powerful) positions in these unions were

occupied by White Marxist intellectuals,43 notwithstanding that the

tradition of Western Marxism opposed any notion of vanguardist

leadership. This remains highly contested ground. Sakhela

Buhlungu44 contends, amongst other things, that White leadership

sidelined organic Black intellectuals within the union movement.

But others claim that White Leftists made a key contribution to

building democracy within union structures.45

Overall, the reflexive intellectual impulses on the South

African situation which emerged in the 1970s had, by the 1980s,

41 Ally 2005, p. 5. 42 Ally 2005, p. 13. 43 See Buhlungu 2006. 44 Buhlungu 2006. 45 See Maree 2006.

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morphed into a cadre of public intellectuals who were to serve the

interests of the liberation movements. It should be stressed

however that the relationship of White intellectuals to the different

organisations, both inside and outside the country, was

asymmetrical; some individuals were positioned within the various

movements on a full-time basis – this gave them various forms of

responsibility and accountability; others, who enjoyed greater

intellectual autonomy, were at a distance from this responsibility.

Given the country’s complex politics, it is not surprising that

interpretations of this involvement were contested – and strongly,

too. Nevertheless, the acceptability of radical praxis had been

firmly established.

The end of apartheid and of Marxism

While intense political struggles marked the years leading to the

end of apartheid, these were underpinned by impassioned

theoretical debates. One of these seemed to offer a return to the

liberal discourses which had marked the 1960s. This debate

suggested, despite the historical complicity of apartheid in

capitalist development, that the (economic and political)

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‘dysfunctionality’ of racial domination was an increasing possibility,

especially to monopoly capital.46 This was not a sudden about-turn

or a theoretical retreat. In part, the new questions within Western-

styled South African Marxism pointed towards deepening social

tensions arising from the emergence of workplace and community

struggles, and questioned capital’s continued reliance on the

state’s repressive might and its racially exclusionary legislation.47

The economic and political contradictions and crises being

played out during the late 1970s and early 1980s raised the

prospect of South African capital adapting itself to the de-

racialisation of society and even, perhaps, pursuing this option as

an ideological project. This was not far off the proverbial mark

because, during the years of formal transition (1989-1994), this

position was pursued in a social partnership between business and

the ANC. As this partnership deepened, a rightward ideological

move occurred (or, perhaps more aptly, intensified). For example,

‘most of the top UDF leaders welcomed the support’ of capitalist

elites and ‘shifted away from socialist rhetoric’.48 So, the depth and

intensity of the socialist tendency within the UDF and the broader

liberation movement should not be overplayed. Nevertheless, John

46 See Johnstone 1978. 47 See Fine 1990. 48 Seekings 2000, p. 298.

23

Saul, the Canadian radical, sardonically called the emerging

partnership between capital and activists, the ‘class snuggle’.49

As these processes got underway, the UDF-centred mass-

based organisations which had been at the forefront of the urban

struggles (and which had so effectively weakened apartheid) were

all but immobilised. This was not necessarily as a deliberate

strategy, but was certainly a consequence of ‘the snuggle’.

Nonetheless, increasingly from the mid-1980s, the ANC-led

Charterist movement50 (of which the UDF was part) sought to

inhibit the formation of pluralistic political and organisational

tendencies in order to consolidate and discipline “the struggle”.51 In

the end, as the liberation movement became the ruling party, “the

struggle” became absorbed into the state and dissipated as a

result. Reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s argument in The Wretched

of the Earth52 about the post-colonial state, the ANC stalwart

Raymond Suttner suggested that this was the ‘domestication’ of

popular struggle:

49 Saul 2000. 50 The Charterist Movement (led by the ANC) takes its name from the adoption of the Freedom Charter at a mass gathering in Kliptown in 1955. 51 See Friedman 1992. 52 Fanon 1967.

24

At the level of the state and top echelons of the ANC, … there

is a definite desire to trim down the mass character of the

ANC and channel mass action in general along lines that are

statised and institutionalised. ... [T]he masses are not

intended to raise the issues independently as self-acting

popular actors.53

It was not only Mandela’s ruling party which was to choose

the (by now) well-marked and well-trodden path towards

capitalism; South African Western Marxist intellectuals did

likewise. As Nash54 wryly observed, ‘the leading figures of a

generation’ (of South African Western Marxists) ‘capitulated almost

without exception to the imperatives of the market and the crudest

forms of bourgeois ideology’. Intriguingly, Saul’s appellation, ‘the

snuggle’, was in direct response to an article in the year 2000 by

Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster,55 in which the latter called

explicitly for ‘class compromise’ between capital and labour in

post-apartheid South Africa. This call aimed to resolve the tension

between deepening democracy and promoting economic growth

for ‘reconstruction’. But, in Saul’s view, this suggestion effectively

53 Suttner 2006, p. 23. 54 Nash 1999, p. 66. 55 Adler and Webster 2000.

25

sacrificed any further need for class struggle and mobilisation.

Undoubtedly, the global retreat of Marxism following the fall of the

Berlin Wall and Western triumphalism played a role in this local

intellectual unravelling. The ‘New South Africa’ and its intellectuals,

it seems, were all too readily drawn to Francis Fukuyama’s free

market mot d’ordre, the end of history.

South African intellectuals increasingly displayed a syndrome

of pessimism and disillusionment that John Holloway56 identifies

with post-modernism, arguing that the ‘bitterness of history

teaches us that it is now ridiculous to maintain the grand narrative

of human emancipation’ and that this disillusionment ‘seeps into

the core of the way we think, into the categories we use, the

theories we espouse’.57 Initially this leads to theoretical re-working

and, then, to retreat. Ari Sitas, one of the country’s most respected

radical thinkers, is a major example of this loss of moorings. Only

three years after the election of the ANC government, Sitas

declared that the powers of sociology, so admired by Burawoy,

were ‘beginning to wane’58 noting that ‘we have lost the capacity to

respond creatively’ and are ‘conceptually threadbare’.59 Seven

56 Holloway 2002. 57 Holloway 2002, p. 154. 58 Sitas 1997, p. 12. 59 Sitas 1997, p. 17.

26

years later he60 admitted that ‘we are growing our very own

psychological blockages’ and, further, that there is a ‘collapse in

our broader social-ethical commitments’. Sitas61 had seemingly

turned his back on the emancipatory power of Marxism and

focuses on – with great passion and significance, to be sure –

indigenising social theory.

Just as the rise of Western Marxism in South Africa had

localised causes, so did its collapse. The latter entailed both the

undermining of Marxist scholarship within academia (or Marxism

as an intellectual project) and the tearing apart of radical praxis.

These relate to the different worlds in which radical intellectuals

work: academia, civil society and – now under post-apartheid

conditions – the state.

The demobilisation of “the struggle” has been of great

significance in South Africa. Intellectuals have grappled to find “a

home” in post-apartheid civil society and have not engaged in any

sustained, meaningful and fruitful radical praxis. There is certainly

a substantially altered civil society – unlike its recent apartheid

past, it seeks not ongoing confrontation with the state but rather

engages and collaborates with the state, often in a dependent and

docile manner. Further, civil society is in large part devoid of social 60 Sitas 2004, p. 19. 61 Sitas 2004, and 2006.

27

movements. In this regard, Mngxitama62 speaks about the

‘NGOisation of resistance’ over the past fifteen years, which

implies forms of organisation (NGOs) that operate in large part

within the confines of the neo-liberal international development

paradigm.

There are also growing contradictions between the technical-

managerial needs of the state and the free-thinking intellectual

goals of academia. For the state, ‘this is not the time for theorising’

(certainly not for critical imagination) ‘but for devising policy for

“delivery”’ of development, conceived a-politically.63 Of particular

concern is a pronounced drift towards rational choice-based public

policy-making and the corporatisation of higher education – this

has forced theorising towards conformity rather than critique. To

quote Eddie Webster: ‘The advent of democracy has ... shifted the

centre stage away from the social movements that led to the

democratisation process, toward the new state whose demands

are for more technical policy-oriented research’.64

Two examples of this compliance are illustrative. First, the

restructuring of higher education has tended to commodify

academic life and has produced, in its wake, a near national

62 Mngxitama 2006, p. 63. 63 Neocosmos 2004, p. 1. 64 Webster 1997, p. 280.

28

obsession with quantified research outputs and external

benchmarking. And, secondly, there has been a marked migration

of Marxist intellectuals towards problem-solving research in the

state-sponsored Human Sciences Research Council; others have

become state functionaries.65 This migration reflects Michael

Burawoy’s warning on the ‘instrumentalisation’ of intellectual

knowledge: what he calls the ‘turning … away from an

interrogation of ends to an obsession with means’. So, for

Burawoy, the post-apartheid state sees ‘sociology as an

instrument in plans for national reconstruction. It has little patience

for public and critical sociologies that articulate the disparate

interests to be found in society’.66

What is to be done?

Lenin’s legendary question on the strategic problem of securing

socialism is, perhaps, one of the key recurring themes in politics,

and provides South African intellectuals with a double-bind. For

them, both epistemology and political action demand an answer –

to pursue one without the other is to retreat along with the state 65 See Uys 2005. 66 Burawoy 2004a, p. 25.

29

and its paraphernalia in the face of neo-liberal pressure. In the age

of retreat, then, Marxism as both a theoretical project and as a

political practice need to be simultaneously re-imagined and re-

invigorated.

In his challenging book on Change the World without Taking

Power,67 John Holloway suggests that Lenin’s famous question is

miscued. More precisely, he argues that the question, “what’s to

be done”, presupposes a fixed and teleological end to social

change into which a rational strategy can neatly and tightly fit. In

Holloway’s view, historical change is open-ended and not

controlled; it is an ambivalent and a contingent process which

cannot be contained as Lenin’s famous question assumes. We use

Holloway’s perspective as an angle to re-imagine Marxism during

post-apartheid South Africa’s age of retreat.

Based on his historical reflections on past revolutionary

movements and in the light of the Zapatista movement, Holloway

nevertheless does make a universal claim about “what’s not to be

done” – social transformation is not possible by taking or seizing

state power. This is an argument for a society-centred theory of

change in which social power develops autonomously of state

power without necessarily opposing or replacing the latter. Other

67 Holloway 2003.

30

writers have called these ideas the ‘self-limiting’ or ‘anti-politics’

revolution.68

Holloway69 argues that the state in capitalist society, arising

from the separation of economy and polity, is an inherently alien,

distorting and distant force that effectively represents what he calls

‘power-over’ subservient classes. As he says in a Porto Alegre

discussion paper, the state has excluded

Us from the social determination of our own lives. The state

seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from

society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in

the name of. ... The drive towards self-determination moves in

one direction, the attempt to win state power moves in the

opposite direction. The former starts to knit a self-determining

community, the latter unravels the knitting.70

Clearly, to fix ‘capturing’ the state as a basis for social

transformation is problematic, whether this is to be accomplished

by evolutionary means through the electoral process, or by

revolutionary means through a militant vanguard workers’ party.

68 See Baker 2002. 69 Holloway 2003. 70 Holloway n.d., p. 5, emphasis in original.

31

Accessing the state simply entails gaining control of central

institutional mechanisms for oppression – this is what Holloway

calls ‘power-over’ – so it reproduces the conditions sustaining

capitalism. For Holloway, real, un-alienated, liberative power –

what he terms ‘power-to’ – lays deep in the bowels of engaged civil

society. As a result, true transformation involves exploring and

activating latent potentialities as a means to social empowerment,

without necessarily being directly and openly anti-hegemonic vis-à-

vis the ruling bloc as understood in the Gramscian sense. Plainly,

this is a far cry from the state-driven processes of political change

which, as we have noted, mark South Africa’s transformation.

So, to deliver transformative change, Marxist theory and

practice in South Africa needs to be re-imagined in a manner that

incorporates Holloway’s deep-seated sources of social power. At

the same time, we recognise that Holloway’s conceptual advance

is a highly disputed claim which has been roundly condemned for

its one-sidedness – particularly, for negating transformation in (and

through) the state.71 Over thirty years ago, Holloway was heavily

responsible for introducing the German State Derivationist School

to the English-speaking academic world.72 This school stressed

the idea of form analysis: the state in capitalist society was a 71 See Bensaid 2005; Dinerstein 2005; McNaughton 2008. 72 Holloway and Picciotto 1978.

32

specific ‘social form’ that reflected and refracted the contradictory

social relations that animate capitalism. This was similar to

Poulantzas’73 notion of the state as the material condensation or

crystallisation of contradictory relations.

Built into the very state form therefore are contradictions,

conflicts, tensions and ambiguities. This suggests, then, that the

state is not all-powerful and does not exercise ‘power-over’ without

generating tension. Indeed, the state is a place of contestation and

struggle and this makes it a site for transformation. In this regard,

we suggest that the case of Venezuela under the presidency of

Hugo Chavez offers a useful counter-weight to Holloway’s position.

This is because the state in Venezuela provides a basis for

progressive social transformation.74 For the purposes of our

argument, this entails recognising the legitimacy, and the

complementary nature, of state- and society-centred notions of

power and change and promoting the role that socialist

intellectuals can play in both sites of social transformation. Indeed,

Venezuela’s ‘Chavista’ movement involves a strong ‘statist’

moment but also significant mobilisation of social power.

73 Poulantzas 1973, and 1978. 74 See Ellner 2008.

33

Lebowitz75 identifies a ‘dialectic between leadership and the

movement of masses’, in which the government pushes for radical

measures notwithstanding initiatives that resist transformation from

within Venezuelan society. Ciccariello-Maher76 highlights the same

by pointing out how ‘sectors of the state are working actively to

dismantle and dissolve the old state apparatus by devolving power

to local organs capable of constituting a dual power’. The

formation of parallel structures is certainly not what Holloway had

in mind, and there is always the concomitant danger that the state

will simply flood the space occupied by civil society, leading to

what Issa Shivji77 has called the ‘statisation of civil society’.

Nevertheless, developments in Venezuela indicate that change is

not simply state-centred – first opposing, then taking power; the

case in South Africa – but entails transforming power. At the same

time, as Holloway stresses, the autonomy of active society must

be ensured in relation to the dictates of the state. From the

perspective of this argument, successful change must be

supported by Left-leaning intellectuals both inside and outside

state organs.

75 Lebowitz 2007, p. 52. 76 Ciccariello-Maher 2007, p. 42. 77 Shivji 2004, p. 8.

34

The role of both civil society and the state in socialist

transformations has been the centre of enumerable debates on the

Left, and South Africa has not been immune from these. Andrew

Nash78 has claimed in the South African context that a key lesson

to be learnt from the fall of Western Marxism is that the

philosophical divide between Soviet and Western Marxism has not

disappeared – rather, they remain as two ‘fundamentally different

philosophies’. This perspective however dichotomises and

homogenises important theoretical nuances which suggest that

divides run in all directions, too – so, there are serious divisions

within Western Marxism itself. For instance, the influential work

Empire by Hardt and Negri79 has been subjected to wide-ranging

critiques by many commentators.80 Indeed, Meiksins Woods81

labels it as ‘a manifesto on behalf of global capital’ because in the

end it is ‘an argument for the futility of oppositional politics’. Key

notions contained in Empire, such as ‘multitude’ – which fails to

address the class structure underlying global capitalism – certainly

reveal that Western Marxism has many diverging streams.82

78 Nash 1999, p. 79. 79 Hardt and Negri 2000. 80 See Balakrishnan (ed.) 2003. 81 Meiksins Woods 2003, p. 63. 82 See Kellner 2005.

35

Understanding this enables a far more nuanced appreciation

of what is at stake. Western Marxism in South Africa was

developed as a reaction to dogmatic or ‘Neanderthal’ Marxism (to

use a term from Frederick Johnstone),83 which was associated

with the worst practices of Soviet-style Marxism. However, recent

experience has shown that Western Marxism can also be toxic if it

is applied without careful thought. So, variants of Western Marxism

have led to a proliferation of catch-phrases and distinctive

practices such as Euro-communism, the Third Way and Radical

Democracy that do not effectively push back the frontier of control

of capital. Trends within Western Marxism are not themselves

untouched by the anti-statism associated with neo-liberal thought –

for example, the concept of ‘market socialism’ is only suggestively

(and so problematically) theorised as an anti-capitalist

alternative.84 Further, through the use of the market, the state has

been the target of Neo-liberals; likewise, the Left has sometimes

used the idea of civil society – as supposedly representing the

universal interest – to undermine the idea of the state. Some

contemporary Marxists – James Petras85 in the case of Latin

83 Johnstone 1978, p. 108. 84 See Sayer 1995. 85 Petras 2005.

36

America and John Saul86 in the case of Southern Africa – would

consider much of Western Marxist thought as a centrist-deviation

that has reached a tryst with capitalism in order to discipline

Marxism. In rightfully rejecting Soviet-style Marxism, significant

trends within Western Marxism have regrettably turned their back

on “the” socialist project and the necessary statist moment.

If transformation is to be true, it has to be both state-centred

and society-centred; hence, neither state-centred nor society-

centred intellectual engagement can be ruled out a priori; likewise,

neither can be justified on any grounds, nor under any conditions.

Certainly, the form they take, their significance and their features

will vary with time. Drawing on the insights offered by Zygmunt

Bauman, Michael Burawoy87 distinguishes between two species of

public intellectual – legislators and interpreters – which he links to

the successive periods of liberation and reconstruction. As a rule,

the first – the intellectual-as-legislator – engages with the priorities

of the Party during liberation or with the successor state during

reconstruction; given this, it is not surprising, these intellectuals

enjoy limited autonomy, relatively speaking. The second species –

the intellectual-as-interpreter – are invariably concerned with

visualising a new moral and political order, and are routinely 86 Saul 2004. 87 Burawoy 2004.

37

positioned at a critical distance from any Party or organisation or

state. Using this bifocal, Burawoy argues that rather than

encouraging critical reflection in the post-apartheid period, the

South African government believes that ‘intellectuals had played

an effective interpreter role in the trenches of civil society during

liberation, but now they must return to the barracks to be

legislators – focusing on training and policy research’.88

This outcome presents proponents of state-centred change

and political transformation with an uncomfortable paradox. For

Holloway,89 no political organisation or entity – say, ‘The Party’ –

can rightfully claim a monopoly on what constitutes a just

economic and social order. Therefore intellectuals – as

autonomous reflexive professionals – can never be reduced to

investigating means to predetermined ends. To do so (or to be

compelled to do so) is to be compromised both intellectually and

ethically. Burawoy90 notes this dilemma in relation to the late

Harold Wolpe, the South African intellectual-activist: ‘Like [Louis]

Althusser, Wolpe wanted to create a space for independent

theorising within the framework of liberation’, so as not to become

simply a party functionary. In post-apartheid South Africa, Wolpe –

88 Burawoy 2004, pp. 672-3. 89 Holloway 2003. 90 Burawoy 2004, p. 659.

38

both patriot and Party-loyalist – criticised the ANC-led government,

questioning its very goals and priorities with an eye to stimulating

broader debate about the possibilities of deeper forms of

transformation.

This example raises serious challenges for Left-leaning

intellectuals working as functionaries within the post-apartheid

state, or providing policy inputs as researchers to state-sponsored

bodies and think-tanks. Their capacity to make a “real difference”

in the lives of the people they have chosen to serve remains, in

many cases, an desire rather than a reality. In some instances,

they have contributed, often in immeasurable ways, to the

enactment of progressive policy initiatives – for example, with

regard to the protection and rights of workers in the face of threats

from labour market ‘de-regulation’. However, these initiatives

remain subservient to the tenets of the government’s macro-

economic paradigm. And this is why it is important to note that

fifteen years after the ending of apartheid, South Africa’s ANC-led

government is the poster-child of the ‘good Left’ – compliant and

disciplined, it shows no signs of shifting beyond the limits imposed

by neo-liberal ideology. This differs sharply with the ten-year old

39

Chavez government which is often called the ‘bad Left’ because it

has drifted leftwards.91

For reasons which remain unclear, Left-inclined intellectuals

in South Africa are engrossed and enthralled with the state, in

what Neocosmos labels as ‘state fetishism’92 or ‘intellectual praise-

singing of state power’.93 Although we disagree with Neocosmos’

seemingly outright dismissal of state power in processes of social

transformation, he rightly argues that – currently – the South

African state is not the basis for an emancipatory project, which

must involve an ‘independent popular … politics’:94 ‘The basis for

a democratic politics must be the recovery of politics within society,

in other words, the creation of a fully active and politicised

citizenry’, without the state dictating ‘whether popular organisations

are democratic or not’.95

However, seeking to advance struggles from the platform

offered by the South African state is an uncertain proposition under

the present balance of forces. Moreover, seeking to do so under

the current de-activated condition of civil society appears highly

misplaced. For instance, despite the dire need for land reform in

91 Lebowitz 2007, pp. 38-40. 92 Neocosmos 2006a, p. 59. 93 Neocosmos 2006, p. 357. 94 Neocosmos 2006, p. 363. 95 Neocosmos 2006a, p. 65.

40

order to address the gnawing issue of rural poverty, land reform

remains market-based. At present, there is no significant land

movement which is building local community capacity with an eye

to autonomous self-activity or to pressuring the state. The lesson is

clear: Left intellectuals need to escape their ‘statist’ mind-set on

post-apartheid transformation, and re-visit the sites and

significance of social power in civil society.

The term “civil society” though is a notoriously slippery term.

Unlike Neocosmos,96 we prefer not to use it as conceptualised in

contemporary Liberal thinking. He argues that civil society is

inherently framed and defined by the state, such that any practices

deemed illegitimate by the state fall outside the boundaries of civil

society; what he labels as ‘a consensual state domain of politics’97

as opposed to politics beyond civil society or a popular domain of

politics. This subjectivist (indeed, cleansed) determination of civil

society goes contrary to the Gramscian notion, in which civil

society is a site of both domination and contestation.

Nevertheless, the state does seek to incorporate and

institutionalise civil society within its life. In this regard, NGOs (as

the ‘civil’ end of civil society) tend to work within the confines of the

liberal paradigm. For instance, they regularly ‘pursue clinical land 96 See Neocosmos 2006a, and 2008. 97 Neocosmos 2004, p. 11.

41

reforms under neoliberal structures and policies’ and conform to

‘the “proper” [civil] procedure and content of “oppositional” politics

in accordance with the liberal formula’.98 In doing so, they may go

contrary to and even undermine more radical – called ‘uncivil’ in

Neocosmos’ framework – initiatives undertaken by popular

organisations.99

Under neo-liberalism there has been a marked ‘shrinking of

“civilised” political space’100 as articulated by the civilising mission

of global capital. Previously, civil politics embodied mainly

property-friendly politics but now it also includes market-friendly

politics.101 Popular initiatives undercut this global project and

challenge liberal notions of civility. In Ghana, for example, the

establishment of forest reserves and modern agribusinesses for

export-oriented activities has increasingly commoditised land and

led to land expropriation; as their ‘moral right’,102 peasants have

sought to repossess this land through (amongst other acts) the

destruction of timber saplings and informal timber marketing

activities. Kanyongolo (in a study of Malawi) shows how land

occupations go contrary to market-driven land reforms and are

98 Moyo 2004, p. 11. 99 See Petras 1997. 100 Moyo and Yeros 2005, p. 39. 101 See Yeros 2002. 102 Amanor 2005, p. 114.

42

effectively de-legitimised by the state’s legal and judiciary regimes,

but land-short farmers consider occupations as a ‘legitimate

democratic strategy for redressing injustice’.103

Popular and indigenous notions of civility question the

imposition of globalised and statist notions of acceptable forms of

politics and civilisation.104 Indeed, Partha Chatterjee has

consistently argued that the ‘squalor, ugliness and violence of

popular life’ cannot be imprisoned ‘within the sanitised fortress of

civil society’105 as this has been imagined, constructed and

defended by the post-colonial state. In this regard, Yeros raises

serious doubts about the prospects of ‘civil solutions to neo-

colonialism’ and claims that the ‘civil domain, by definition, cannot

be broadened by civil society’ (as this is understood in its liberal

setting). ‘The onus lies on progressive uncivil politics in the

periphery’106 to wedge open and deepen the potentialities for social

transformation.

The central point (and here we agree with Neocosmos) is

this: in moving beyond a statist notion of transformation, Leftist

intellectuals must recognise the legitimacy, viability and

103 Kanyongolo 2005, p. 118. 104 See Kaviraj 2001. 105 Chatterjee 2002, p. 70. 106 Yeros 2002, pp. 61, 249.

43

significance of sites outside the state that involve popular-radical

struggles challenging the basis and form of state power.

In general though, the possibility of work within post-

apartheid civil society presents enormous hurdles. The levels of

organisation and activism in this direction compared to the

“struggle days” are miniscule. While the trade union movement

continues to have a strong shop-floor presence, neo-liberal

restructuring has given rise to a number of serious challenges,

including the decline in membership in the manufacturing and

mining sectors and the need to organise ‘atypical’, casualised

workers.107 In addition, the country’s main federation, COSATU,

continues in alliance with the ruling ANC and this inhibits its

autonomy and militancy.

Besides the union movement, post-apartheid society is

marked by a broad range of social movements. These movements

generally ‘operate within the parameters of the new [post-

apartheid] status quo’,108 and they have a fluctuating and uneven

organisational and political presence. They have tackled issues

such as land reform, HIV/AIDS, housing, and the privatisation of

electricity and water services. The more radically-inclined

movements have Leftist and even Marxist tendencies, where the 107 See Naidoo 2003. 108 Ballard et al 2005, p. 630.

44

influence of the anti-statist works of Tony Negri, John Holloway

and Frantz Fanon are recognisable.109 A diversity of strategies

exists and at times intense internal – and factional – debates take

place. For instance, the question of forming alliances with

COSATU (given the latter’s alliance with the ANC) has been a

contentious point.110 To remain independent of party politics forms

part of the wider framework of ‘autonomism’ implicit in Holloway’s

position; and it raises the need for ideological and organisational

terrain free from the oppressive effects of Holloway’s ‘power-over’.

In this regard, creative work (influenced by Left-leaning

intellectuals with acute Fanon-like suspicion of the post-apartheid

state) has taken place amongst the shack-dwellers of Durban.111

Not all NGOs are tame; many are progressive. For example,

in the Eastern Cape Province, the country’s poorest province, a

range of progressive NGOs are working on land and agrarian

reform. They are organising farm workers into committee

structures, given the failure of the trade union movement to have a

significant rural reach. They also propose agricultural programmes

that are fully consistent with the food sovereignty model of the

global small-scale farmer organisation, called Via La Campensina,

109 See Gibson 2006. 110 See the articles by Ashwin Desai and Oupa Lehulere in Khanya: a Journal for Activists. No.11. December 2005. 111 See Pithouse 2006.

45

and act contrary to the ‘green revolution’ model which is currently

being vigorously pursued by the Eastern Cape Department of

Agriculture. They readily interact with university-based,

progressive intellectuals.

Leftist intellectuals, in re-focusing and collapsing their

struggle into the state under post-apartheid conditions, abandoned

the trenches of civil society. However, civil society (particularly

sites of popular struggle) animate and breathe life into intellectual

work; and currently the scope for anti-hegemonic work for socialist

intellectuals is more likely within civil society than within the state.

In addition, though, any prospects for radical praxis (whether in the

state or civil society) depends fundamentally on re-engaging with

Marxism as an intellectual project, and this entails vigorous and

arduous work at sites of higher education in South Africa. Over the

past decade, universities have been stripped bare of robust and

reflective intellectual agendas because of the rampaging

instrumentalism.112 Recovering the critical life of the universities

will not be easy. Amongst other things, this will require strategies

to prevent the flight of key scholars into consultancy work or

management at the expense of critical teaching and research

activities in academic departments. Without these steps, Webster

112 See Vale 2008.

46

argues, ‘there will be no sociology [or Humanities] of any type,

whether it is critical, policy or public’.113

Conclusion

One of the great hallmarks of ‘Western Marxism’ in all its variants

and forms is its humanism: certainly, this is the quality that marks it

off dramatically from the ravages of neo-liberalism and Stalinism.

Hardt and Negri114 distinguish between a transcendental

humanism – an anti-humanism based on an all-knowing Subject –

and an immanent humanism that arises from the local everyday

experiences and struggles of specific and diverse groups of

people.

Using this particular optic, Richard Pithouse115 argues that

the ANC government represents transcendental humanism while

the localised post-apartheid struggles – shack-dweller

organisations and other grassroots groups – entail immanent

humanism. In one interpretation, the Hardt and Negri distinction

tends to be antagonistic to statism, almost implying that

113 Webster 2004, p. 40. 114 Hardt and Negri 2000. 115 Pithouse 2008.

47

revolutionary parties – once in power – become corrupt shells of

their former selves. This, of course, is consistent with Holloway’s

general argument about ‘power-over’. But, the dialectic quality of

the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela suggests that a

revolutionary party, on achieving electoral success, can be a

presence – a life force for immanent humanism – in the daily lives

of its citizens. Statism alone, as exists in post-apartheid South

Africa, without an active civil society, is not a force for

transformation.

Much of what is taking place in Venezuela parallels what the

slain Rick Turner imagined as a future democratic socialist South

African society: Turner116 argued that to change the world, we

must imagine another. This cannot be achieved within the halls of

government. South Africa’s sorry experience with true

transformation has surely demonstrated this to a generation of

Marxist intellectuals who enjoyed a rich intellectual heritage that, in

many ways, surpassed all others.

Metaphorically, South African Marxism was given birth in

academic environments in which critical thought could flower and

blossom; it was nurtured and nourished by the intense struggles of

the workplaces and communities. It grew old and died however in

116 Turner 1972.

48

the piled carpeted offices and in glittering city malls. What South

African Marxist intellectuals must learn is that their on-going

infatuation with the state and state power prevents them, the

generation that helped to free their country, from fulfilling the

mission to which they were so nobly called.

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