SA needs an egalitarian economy
The question is: who will be brave enough to usher in a system that works for the common good, not a few?
WE ARE hearing the term “radical economic transformation” a lot nowadays. Every time I turn on the news, there it is – those three words that contain so much of the people’s hopes and dreams.
“Radical economic transformation” – isn’t this what was promised to the masses in 1994 when they voted the ANC into power? Was it not that vote that contained within it the expectation that those disadvantaged and oppressed by centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid would be delivered from this usurpation?
Were they not promised a life that offered the restoration of dignity, economic security, free housing, free education and a return of the land through redistribution of wealth? Instead what was delivered was a neo-liberal economy.
Many ANC politicians are pushing this progressive-sounding rhetoric without an ounce of self-consciousness about the fact that under a right-wing economic model, radical transformation is a farce, if not a downright lie. What they rely on to peddle this false hope to their constituency is that the majority of people in the world don’t really understand what neo-liberalism is and how it impacts on their lives.
Don’t get me wrong. People are hyperaware that food prices just keep rising, that services have become hellishly expensive, that social security nets have fast disappeared and that life has got exponentially harder for them over the years.
The middle classes have to keep tightening their belts while they become more indebted, and the poor get poorer, unable even to gain access to proper nutrition anymore. And while the government is not blameless, this ineffectiveness in terms of delivering on its promises to its citizens has to be understood in the context of the globalisation phenomenon.
In South Africa-speak it was globalisation that ushered in the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa), which favoured monopoly capital, and replaced the Freedom Charter, which favoured the people.
Noam Chomsky describes globalisation as “the result of powerful governments, especially that of the US, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations”.
In this system, the state is at the disposal of the free-market economy and monopoly capital, which makes it a subordinate and ties up its ability to deliver that which serves the common good.
To ensure the complicity and complacency of the government and union officials, they are invited to become shareholders in the corporations and industries that are controlled by global monopoly capital, which turns them into self-serving oligarchs rather than administrators in service to the people.
Capture the entire government and all the major unions in this way and you have a situation where this echelon is more about protecting their own business interests rather than protecting the people.
It is out of this reality that a Marikana occurred – a tragedy that should have been a collective wake-up call revealing the horrible truth that neo-liberalism renders workers disposable and turns citizens into zombies. Some argue that neo-liberalism is a noble system as it has its roots in liberalism, which was birthed from the philosophy of enlightenment.
This, they argue, is democracy in its finest form as liberalism encompassed both the political and the economic strata and played a gatekeeping and watchdog role over the state to safeguard the liberties that form the basis for Western democracies. Out of this the free market and capitalism were born.
In classical economic theory, capitalism, with people’s rights intact, made for a fairly decent system where workers were respected and business and profits were regulated by government policies.
But it is this form of central regulation that began to mess with the profits of the very wealthy – thus the neo-liberal drive to decentralise the government and render business self-regulating.
Progressive economist George Monbiot writes that: “Neo-liberalism is a self-serv- ing racket that exempts billionaires and large corporations from the constraints of democracy, from paying their taxes, from not polluting, from having to pay fair wages, from not exploiting their workers.”
Neo-liberalism is essentially capitalism without full democratic rights, as state and citizen have increasingly become subsidiary to the marketplace.
Intellectuals such as Chomsky and Manuela Cadelli argue that neo-liberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also “every aspect of our thought”.
Cadelli argues that neo-liberalism takes on the form of nihilism, which “erases the ideals of universalism and humanistic values such as solidarity, fraternity, integration, respect for all and for differences”.
Workers are stripped of worker security and forced into casual labour while education, healthcare and social services are privatised and commodified.
And all of this is so that the top 10% can wring profits out of the rest of us. Even human misery is profitable.
But these are empty promises disguised in radical terminology or wrapped in reason to fool us into consent.
This is the “rhetoric trick” that President Jacob Zuma and politicians such as Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa are using to pull the wool over the voting constituency’s eyes as their promise of radical economic transformation creates the suggestion that they will be the ones to finally usher in the guarantees made in the Freedom Charter.
Thus far the only politician in the presidential race who is not using this opportunistic rhetoric is Lindiwe Sisulu – which is another point in her favour from my perspective.
Instead she has questioned what people mean when they use the term “radical economic transformation”, and has spoken out about how this process has to begin with transformation that impacts the poor by bringing them into the economy.
Surely what South Africa needs is to begin to extricate itself from neo-liberal policies and begin to work towards an egalitarian and sovereign economy?
The question remains – who will be brave enough to usher in a system that works for the common good rather than for a few?