Pressures of globalisation

IS THE ANC’s National Democratic Revolution (NDR) speaking of a world that no longer exists?

The ANC, at every elective conference, goes out of its way to analyse global and domestic balance of forces, primarily to identify opportunities and constraints in the journey to a national democratic society.

Over the last two conferences, 2007 and 2012, including last year’s NGC (National General Council), the ANC has made similar conclusions on the state of the global balance of forces.

At the 2012 National Elective Conference, the ANC made the observation the world was on a retreat from market ideology, after two decades of dominance. The ANC said this had “reopened discourse on the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen on a global scale”.

The ANC concluded that neoliberal ideology was facing a crisis of confidence and credibility. This questions the legitimacy of market capitalism as well as that of the state and polity.

These observations, of less market capitalism and more NDR leading policies, and more of the Democratic Developmental State, even socialism itself, is seen by the ANC as an enabler to the creation of the platform to speed up programmes of social transformation and creating the national democratic society envisaged.

The ANC, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, felt there was fundamental shift in the global environment inhibiting the implementation of the NDR which it had anticipated.

This analysis may reflect a wishful bias and a limited interpretation of the perceived shifts in global polity. This is not unlike the predictions of classical Marxist socialism over the last 200 years, one prediction on the economics and the other on the morality of market capitalism.

Economically, classical Marxist socialism has argued capitalism was driven by a logic of competitive exploitation that would cause its eventual collapse; and socialism’s communal form of production, by contrast, would prove to be economically superior. Morally, it argued, capitalism was evil because of the self-interested motives of those engaged in capitalist competition and because of the exploitation and alienation that competition caused. Socialism would be based on sacrifice and communal sharing.

The initial hopes of Marxist socialists centred on capitalism’s internal economic contradictions. The contradictions, they thought, would manifest in increasing class conflict. Marxist socialism faced a set of theoretical problems:

The ANC knows this and due to being anxious to retain ”sovereignty” over South Africa, it adopted policies such as GEAR, which it saw as essential to bring down the budget deficit and avoid a debt trap which could have led to structural adjustment programmes under the International Monetary Fund or World Bank.

The ANC feels the pressures from globalisation, including the importance of export markets,more international competitiveness, and the need to attract foreign investment.

Given the persistency of market capitalism, is there hope for the full implementation of the NDR? Given some of the successes of market capitalism, on economic growth, on reducing poverty, and decreasing dependency on the state, what is the NDR’s future?

Is the market capitalism a countervailing factor that militates against the success of the NDR or does the NDR rest on false premises that have self destructed under an ANC that is multi-class, multi-ideological political formation that today prefers a mixed economy, leaning towards a more market capitalism?

The ANC must have this conversation in the next policy conference.

YONELA DIKO ANC Western Cape Spokesman