Many observers of South African politics are dismayed by the economic policies recently adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) government. These analysts fear that the promise of the struggle has been sacrificed to a market-oriented economic policy that is tailored to the demands of national and global capital. In other words, the ANC has been captured by capital.

Arguing in this vein, Hein Marais offers an analysis of the process of transformation in two parts. The first portion of his book outlines South Africa's social and economic structure under apartheid, and discusses the vicissitudes of the popular struggle against that system. The second portion of the book builds on this foundation to argue that the ANC's doomed strategy led the party to dispense with an emphasis on state-led growth and social expenditure that was at the core of the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). The promise of the RDP was rejected in favor of the pro-business Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program, betraying the ANC's core constituency, the working class poor.

Marais's discussion of South African political economy serves as a fairly standard "radical" analysis of the unholy alliance between South African capital and the apartheid state. Not much is new here, although it does serve as a helpful condensed summary of this approach. In contrast, Marais's interpretation of popular resistance offers a relatively new scholarly trend that might be called the "radical revisionist" history of the struggle. In this view, the ANC has consistently betrayed the black working class, its true constituency. Rather than emphasizing class-based mobilization, the ANC has relied on a nationalist approach that has relegated the labor movement to a secondary role, and encouraged a futile "insurrectionism," or what Robert Fine has called "boycottism."

The ANC certainly deserves some pointed criticism. There is no shortage of histories that "celebrate" the organization, lionize its leadership, and generally rely on sycophancy rather than historical analysis. With the benefit of hindsight, many of the ANC's tactical and strategic blunders become clear. Marais points out, for example, that resistance in the 1950s remained fragmented, and that the ANC failed to capitalize on popular militancy in this period. Marais also criticizes the ANC for its decision to embark on armed struggle in the 1960s. This position makes less sense, resting in part on the very dubious claim that the ANC might instead have moved into a Gramscian "War of Position," which would have entailed an attempt to create a proletarian mass movement. Virtually all discussions of the 1960s suggest that the state's extraordinary repression in this period squelched even hints of public dissent, so a "War of Position" was not really an option. Marais's brief discussion of the 1970s emphasizes the importance of trade unions early in the decade, and generally downplays the importance of Black Consciousness ideology.
In his account of the 1980s, Marais is most critical of the ANC and the loosely allied United Democratic Front (UDF. He argues that the ANC and the UDF failed to build on the growing strength of the labor movement in this period, relying instead on a rudderless strategy of insurrectionism that had no real hope of transforming South African society. By the late 1980s, Marais argues, the UDF/ANC alliance had achieved only a stalemate in which it was forced to broker a settlement with the National Party and white capital. Overall, this assessment reflects a trend in radical scholarship that has emerged since the 1990s that seeks to imagine an alternative past in order to create an alternative present. This view seems to suggest that if the ANC had been more committed to working class mobilization during the resistance years, it might have been possible to achieve a more sweeping transformation, even socialism, in South Africa.

This analysis sets the stage for the second portion of Marais's book, in which he discusses the formation of a "class compromise" between the ANC and capital. In this view, because the ANC had failed to build a sufficiently strong and disciplined popular movement, it was unable to wrest control of the economy from white capital. Instead, the ANC was forced to focus its efforts on control of the state and to appease capital. This balance of forces led the ANC to reject its initial strategy of "growth through redistribution" as outlined in the early versions of the RDP. Instead, the ANC bent over backwards to accommodate the demands of national and global capital. These interests forced the ANC to reject the ambitious social policies of the RDP in favor of the neo-liberal market based policies of GEAR, even though most analyses suggested that such a program would do little to improve the rampant social inequalities created by apartheid capitalism. Further, Marais argues, the GEAR policy of export-orientation is likely to fail in its own right because of South Africa's weak global economic position.

Having set out the manner in which the ANC has adopted an economic policy that shuts out the working class, Marais spends the final chapters of the book discussing how political forces might be arrayed to compel the ANC government to adopt policies that put the working class in the favored position rather than capital.

There is little doubt that the ANC has moved away from the redistributive orientation of the RDP, and even further away from the social democratic vision of the Freedom Charter. The critical question is why did it make the shift? Marais doesn't offer a complete explanation: "It is difficult to pinpoint the factors that led to the conversion of ANC economic thinking to orthodoxy" (p. 150). Yet this seems to be a critical question. Why would senior ANC leaders, most of whom have spent their entire lives fighting the social, political, and economic injustices of apartheid, turn about-face and abandon this cause? If GEAR serves the interests of capital at the expense of the working class, then why did the ANC adopt it?

Marais offers two major possible explanations, but neither seems satisfactory. In one section he describes an elaborate program of neo-liberal indoctrination mounted by South African corporate conglomerates and international actors led by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Marais explains the shift to orthodoxy as resulting from the "bewildering assortment of seminars, conferences, workshops, briefings, international 'fact-finding' trips'... financed by business and foreign development agencies" (p. 150). He also offers a related argument that leftists in the ANC could not match the technical savvy of the pro-business elements inside and outside the organization. This meant that the leftists could not defend the RDP against the blizzard of technical data, models, and forecasts offered by the advocates of neo-liberalism. A more compelling argument might simply be that the ANC leadership concluded that South Africa's serious economic problems, precarious international position, and the sometimes shrill fears expressed by domestic capital made it impossible to go ahead with the statist orientation of the RDP without raising the threat of massive capital flight and shrinking trade. Marais dismisses this view as too pat, relying on the claim that there was simply not enough technical expertise in the Department of Economic Policy to back the RDP.

The key problem with Marais's account of popular opposition is that even if the reader accepts his criticisms of the ANC during the struggle, there is no real attempt to suggest viable alternatives. If we accept, for example, the claim that the UDF and the ANC led a more or less pointless insurrectionist movement in the 1980s (and it is far from clear that such a characterization fits), one is left wondering what alternative Marais would have endorsed. A close reading of this portion of the book reveals some hint of the alternative strategy that Marais might have prescribed. He generally heaps praise on the trade union movement for its role in the resistance struggle, at times implying that it offered a model for other organizations, but he never makes it clear if this is in fact his argument, and if so, how exactly the diverse elements of popular resistance (e.g. churches, soccer clubs, student groups) might have used the model of shop-steward based trade unions while also facing the might of the apartheid security apparatus.

Marais is more concrete in his discussion of the ANC's economic policy, offering a suggestion that parts of the RDP can be used as the starting point for a new "progressive" agenda to bring the ANC back to its working-class roots. But Marais's failure to offer a satisfactory explanation of the rejection of the RDP puts this strategy in doubt. If the ANC leadership has already decided that the RDP is economically unfeasible, then it won't do much good to put it at the center of a progressive agenda. Marais does not attempt to establish whether the RDP is in fact a feasible approach for South Africa. More troubling is Marais's hint that some form of "inward-looking industrialization strategy" (p. 131) is the most viable alternative to the ANC's export-oriented policy. He never says exactly what this might look like. Nationalization of key industries? Investment in sectors that produce for a domestic market? The reader is left with only hints, such as "progressive macroeconomic and industrial policies" (p. 193). Ironically, Marais's language suggests that he would propose some variant of import-substituting-industrialization (ISI), the very policy that contributed to the chronic economic crises of the South African economy under apartheid.

Many readers will agree with the book's overall theme that the ANC should have been closer to its working class roots during the resistance years, and that since 1990 it has gone too far to accommodate capital while making only modest social investments. But readers will be frustrated by Marais's general reluctance to explicate alternative paths, either historical or contemporary. It is essential that the ANC face penetrating criticisms such as those offered by Marais, but such criticisms won't build houses, improve schools, or provide better health care in South Africa. What should South Africa do? What can South Africa do? Those are the key questions today.

Brendan Works
Political Science Department
University of California at Berkeley