All hands out for state capture

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IN RECENT months, state-market society relations have been the fastest growing focus area of political debate in South Africa. The focus emerged to both better understand state-capture processes and to bring scientific knowledge to bear on these processes, partly with reference to the Guptas.

Critical questions debated include: How can state-marketsociety relations be regulated such that they advance the public interest? What accounts for the collusion between political elites and captains of industry? How are neoliberal capitalist hegemonic constellations constituted and sustained? How can we expose, in our analysis, state capturers?

There is a way in which we can examine the ideological origins and manifestations of state capture since 1994. Adopting a neoGramscian lens, we can look at the making and evolution of neoliberal capitalism across a range of state institutions.

Among the issues to be explored are national and international connections, the forging of neoliberal economic policies, the impact of neoliberal think-tanks and policy networks in key sectors, the operations of neoliberal national and international hegemonic constellations, the influence of neoliberal ideas on education and culture, and the subtle ways in which neoliberal forces have subverted the sovereignty of the people, succeeding in establishing patterns of order and disorder that create tensions and social conflict leading to a decline in the sense of the public interest.

Education

What will emerge, hopefully, will be a deeper appreciation of the sources and context of state capture, and a clearer understanding of how far it has penetrated into the business of the state.

It is precisely through such a critical analysis of neoliberal capitalism that our understanding of state capture must be based.

We need sophisticated analysis that pushes forward our understanding of how statemarket-society relations are organised, why they are developing in particular directions, and how globalisation across a range of social and economic relations is promoting and reinforcing state capture.

This exercise would fit in with the campaign for broader political education because it would subject state capture processes to rigorous critical analysis.

In the process, it would situate the analysis within and between the leading analytical frameworks currently on offer, namely those which privilege, in different ways, the emergent transnational capitalist class and private authority in all their forms.

That would serve to deepen understanding, not only of the Guptas, but also of the dynamics and contours of the national and international economic order.

This would also shed light on a wide range of actors, networks, associations, organisations, and groupings, as well as on policy arenas and discourse fields.

Of particular interest would be the various ways in which political and economic structures, institutions and interests are connected to social relations in the realm of knowledge, discourse, and interpretation.

Over and above this, the exercise would deepen understanding of the role and conduct of the media in conditions of state capture. Like attorneys, journalists and broadcasters straddle the line between the public and private domains, becoming, in the process, virtual market traders.

They pursue political goals and intervene, in one way or another, in political debates. It is through them that the neoliberal capitalist class communicates with the public, and so shapes public perceptions of political issues and public figures.

This dualism – straddling the marketplace and the public domain – goes back a long way. In neoliberal capitalist economies, the media tend to play an ambivalent role, one eye on the market domain, and at the same time playing a civic role.

Since scandals about the high and mighty sell newspapers and raise ratings, market forces ensure that scandal mongering becomes a political force to be reckoned with.

The conclusion is stark: neoliberal capitalism provides a fertile political, economic and ethical environment for state capture.

It fosters a supermarket conception of politics, with political leaders as policy salesmen and saleswomen, breeding a climate for the corrosion of national character.

The solution is to reassert the sovereignty of the people through sustained inclusive deliberation and public reasoning.

Taken together, the policy and institutional changes suggested here will amount to a new political dispensation. Such a dispensation could be procured deliberately, one step at a time, in pragmatic and incremental fashion.

The past 22 years have shown that the neoliberal capitalist regime is not working, and has left behind a vacuum of understanding, which is the chief begetter of neoliberal hegemony.

The “miracle” of neoliberal capitalism has been shattered by the crises of deepening poverty, widening unemployment, and enduring socio-economic injustice. Mobilising the masses: EFF supporters gather to hear their leader,Julius Malema, speak at Church Square following the high court ruling that the public protector must release the state capture report.

Since 1994, we can trace the development of a neoliberal disposition within a distinct national and global field of elite consensus formation.

Set in motion with the “political settlement”, its austere state capture orientation gained a distinct voice in decision structures and processes – a strategy which questioned the power of the people to govern themselves even if they had the right to do so.

Lending sanction to the distinctly neoliberal capitalist regime of accumulation and state capture that was taking place were the policy imperatives of privatisation, trade liberalisation, deregulation, the introduction of “best practices and benchmarking” into the public sector – a grouping of corrosive capitalist practices and interactions.

Integral to the political and social reproduction of the neoliberal capitalist order is a synthesis of public and private elements from the state and civil society.

These groups share three critical attributes. Each inhabits a space within civil society as embedded elements of a social network, within which state capture takes shape and form.

They act as vehicles of national and international elite integration, linking neoliberal capitalists to a political-social-cultural community where class distinctions are mediated and collective will is consolidated.

Finally, all endeavour to translate class interests into state actions by defining and promoting policy directions and national development plans that ensure the stability and reproduction of a system shaped by neoliberal capitalist relations.

Consequently, the public service, where the frontiers of the public domain were to have been most fiercely guarded, and in which its values should have been most thoroughly internalised, has been forced, as far as possible, into a market mould.

Twenty-two years of a meanspirited consumerist culture and its accompanying measures have eroded the public sense.

The growing interpenetration of politics, administration and business; the sleaze which has accompanied it; the dumbingdown of state-owned entities; the diversion of knowledge institutions from the pursuit of knowledge for the public good to a scramble for market advantage; the global integration of the national economy; the mobility of capital and the global reach of accumulation circuits all tell the same story.

They show that the democratic values and practices the liberation movement fought for and developed to protect the public good are being breached at point after point.

It’s time to retrieve, or perhaps reinvent, the state as the domain of the public good. But that can’t be done unless the ideological origins of state capture are understood and the lessons learned.

The narrowing of focus, preoccupation with the moral psychology of Zuma and the Guptas, important though that is, amounts to an oversimplification and possible distortion of the political economy of state capture.

• Prof Nkondo is a policy analyst and member of the Freedom Park Council and Unisa council. He writes in his personal capacity.