This book aims to fill some gaps in the literature on the democratization of South Africa in the late twentieth century. However, what is becoming increasingly universal in the progressive literature on South Africa (not just books but the many discussion papers, academic papers and popular articles) is the concern about the new government's departure from the liberation movement's mandate. International comparisons are certainly relevant, and I try to extract some of the most obvious ones in the conclusion.
To go back to basics, capital accumulation refers to the generation of wealth in the form of "capital". It is true that there are opposing tendencies in this process, such as an increase in the turnaround time of capital, automation and acceleration of work, as well as expansion of the credit system.
Power and Economic Discourses
Neoliberal Economic
Constraints on Liberation
In addition, the growth rate of the share of undeclared wages increased by more than 50 percent during this period (from 11 percent to 17 percent of the total mass of wages).9. 18 percent of the country's total, thanks to billions of rand in government subsidies (half of decentralized operations were unprofitable without government support).17. To illustrate the scale of the contrast, South Africa was second in the world (after the United States) in terms of the percentage of bank assets in the form of residential mortgage loans (39 percent in 1990).32 Yet the R50 billion in loans on the banks' books in the early 1990s was only R8 billion (16 percent) invested in the urban market (home to two out of five South Africans).
The predictable result was a catastrophic fall in the value of the financial rand, from 3.9 Finnish rand to the dollar in August to 5.1 in November. Some of the sicker banks merged with each other (in the case of Volkskas and Bankorp in the ABSA group).
Social Contract Scenarios
But this worst possible outcome was not only a function of unfavorable power relations in the wake of the RDP's universal approval by the main partners of the Government of National Unity in May 1994. As it was, in the second half of 1993, that one of the world's most militant trade union bodies, Cosatu, endorsed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade at the Tripartite National Economic Forum. Why did 'pacts', 'compacts', 'agreements', 'social contracts' and the like take up so much of the energy of the Democratic Movement in the early 1990s.
In both forms they were a pale reflection of the elite pacts that defined the relationship between big capital, big labor and big government in the postwar industrialized West. Were such exercises merely attempts to discern the class interest of the more enlightened (or more exposed) firms, as they first appeared. In her assessment of the first Nedcor/Old Mutual scenarios, University of Cape Town economist Nicoli Nattrass was caustic: “The plan lacks integrity in presentation.
Instead, the implications of the ISP research were only revealed by an incident in September 1994. Shortly after that compromise was reached, Vella Pillay of the ANC/Democratic Movement's 'MacroEconomic Research Group' arrived. As Finance Week commented at the time: "On the conclusions of the Stellenbosch Bureau of Economic Research, neither the model's nor the IMF's scenario has any hope of being achieved."
The Stellenbosch economists “effectively threw the model out the window” arguing that the NEM GDP growth rate of 3.6% in the 1990s (3.2% IMF forecast) was too optimistic by a factor of 70%. Gear indicated that the government would push for a "national social agreement" after the currency crash, which. The scenario after the currency crash of 1996 was not rosy for big companies.
The Ascendancy of
Neoliberal Social Policy
Rumours, Dreams and Promises
Based on the program contained in the book Reconstruction and Development, we emerged as the majority party. In the aftermath of the election, the National Party's aggressive Western Cape Prime Minister, former Law and Order Minister Hernus Kriel, and KwaZulu-Natal Inkatha Prime Minister Frank Mdlalose both endorsed the RDP. In short, conservative principles prevailed in the drafting of the RDP in key areas of economic management.
The RDP's talk of a bourgeois democracy in which a semi-representative parliamentary system speaks (and acts and controls) on behalf of the people has faded. The policy competition in these three cases reflected some of the most important debates about the nature of the rural development agenda. The conservatives answered yes to such questions, although they would have a long and tiring argument with the RDP advocates from the left.
Was the role of the POP ministry intrinsically flawed given the lack of control over resources. And the decline of development was confirmed not only by the variety of neoliberal policy documents subsequently produced, but also by the sudden, ill-considered and uncontroversial closure of the RDP ministry in the President's Office in March 1996 (and the reshuffle of Naidoo to what some trade unionists describe as a political Siberia: forced to sell postal and telecommunications personnel with the idea of privatization). Moreover, while citing only those aspects of the right-wing RDP that the government implemented, he claimed the moral high ground at the trial.
But Jay tried to coordinate all the activities of the cabinet for the RDP. But it was not only in its role as a unifying emblem of the conflicting socio-economic agenda of the liberation movement that the RDP would remain a useful discursive tool. But later, in the early twenty-first century, the same social forces could potentially be drawn into a much more productive campaign to defend and strengthen the RDP of the left.
The Housing Question
By the time the ANC came to power, there was a bizarre consensus in place in the housing policy-making field that recognized all players – regardless of their track record, their intentions or their relationship to the democratic forces – as equally viable, credible and recognized. essential components of the great treaty. In generating these policies, UF strategists were inspired by the World Bank, particularly during the late 1980s/early 1990s drafting of the UF Urban Futurespolicy series. In a 1986 article characteristic of the earlier spirit, for example, McCarthy (and his much more reliable co-author Michele Friedman) condemned his future employer the UF.
Bigger problems - the biased structure of the economy, the worst unemployment rate in the industrialized world, the low incomes of black workers, the rural crisis, etc. In August 1992, as chaos erupted in the political landscape in the aftermath of the Codesa negotiations crash, the National Housing Forum was established with much fanfare. It was at this stage that the collapse of the progressive agenda in the concrete housing policy negotiations was perhaps most decisive.
But the legacy of NP politics and the influence of the NHF proved surprisingly enduring. The Accord's problem statement thus differed greatly from the RDP, which referred to "the housing problems caused by apartheid and by the narrow reach of capitalist housing markets". We are committed to developing viable alternatives to the site and service approach of the past.
But because of the firm commitment of Cobbett, his consultants and the much stronger interests they were. In light of banks' 1 percent (and greater) rebates to many higher-income borrowers, this represented a significant way of redistributing income from the poor to the rich. Furthermore, the government failed to promulgate legislation or policies aimed at reforming the financial sector (in particular prohibition of discrimination) required by the RDP.
International Lessons
The World Bank as
Knowledge Bank’ (sic)
As the Third World debt crisis intensified in the early 1980s, the Bank and the IMF stepped in to "manage" the external debts—and government policies—of countries in southern Africa, as they did elsewhere in the world. And the Bank had to bend twice as far as anywhere else in the world to even stand a chance against the mass movements in South Africa. At the same time, a right-wing populist resurgence in the United States increased the Bank's sense of vulnerability, especially as future "recapitalization" (new infusions of funding) became contingent on the approval of proto-fascist Senator Jesse Helms. (Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations following the 1994 Republican congressional victory).
As shown in Chapter 6, he would also be instrumental, along with senior vice president and chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, in the task of reorienting the bank's image to something more separate from—and indeed occasionally critical of—the IMF. Following their colleagues' lead, the bank's South African team also began to suffer self-inflicted wounds in the early 1990s. Instead of the nation-state attracting all the attention of neoliberal institutions – although still crucial, as the primary borrowing agent – the megacity emerged more and more as a unit of analysis, control and implementation aimed at imposing more effective structural.
As we argue in the next chapter, such revolts have not yet reflected – or even encouraged – the existence of more visionary, creative and powerful urban social movements. Johnson laid much of the blame for the "no foreign loans" clause on "the power of the SA Communist Party within the ANC and the tendency of many in the ANC to see the Bank and the IMF as part of a global capitalist conspiracy". On the fringes, Robert van Tonder - the laconic, racist boss of the Boerestaat party - likened the joy at South Africa's re-access to IMF loans to "joying one's own death".
Chairman of the South African operations of the Bank in the initial stages was Isaac Sam, an American citizen originally from Ghana. In early 1995 Sam was charged with the rape of an office cleaner (reported on the front page of the Sunday Times to the Bank's dismay) although the police reportedly 'lost' the critical evidence so the case was dropped. Cansa noted that 51 percent of its African projects were deemed failures by the Bank's own internal evaluations.
