THE FARCE OF STATE CAPTURE EXPOSED

THE idea of “state capture” is an inherently incoherent philosophical misnomer.

It is a misleading word salad, but deliberately designed and used to portray the state as some neutral structure standing above society impartially managing relations between the constituent social groups and regulating its different components.

What we are required to believe is that the three arms of the state, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, all function independently of each other and in line with the equally neutral, even sacrosanct, Constitution.

It is not accidental that the post-apartheid dispensation is referred to as a “constitutional” and not a “parliamentary” democracy. The Constitution is really the usurper settler owning class’s instrument to conceal the economic dictatorship of white monopoly capital, the preservation of which was the strategic objective behind the apartheid state’s negotiated settlement.

The state is a tool for the exercise of that dictatorship. Various clauses, particularly those to do with the position of Treasury and private property ownership, require at least a two-thirds majority amendment, thus providing for a minority a veto and thereby insulated against the democratic socio-economic claims of the majority of African masses.

The reification of the Constitution is calculated to blind the masses and the perennially naive to the fact that the post-apartheid order is based on an impotent Parliament. The franchise heroically won by the African masses under the leadership of the liberation movement has been emasculated.

Historically, in the period of capital’s ascendancy, Parliament acquired a radical character, counterposed as it was to the feudal order based on the divine right of kings. The right to vote and not have a ruler imposed. It was emasculated over time and Parliament accordingly reduced to a charade voted for every four or five years with the real work being done by business lobbies and committees.

South Africa’s post-apartheid dispensation came into being in the epoch of capitalism’s historic decline. The white supremacist apartheid regime was in no mood for half measures. Thus, no chances were going to be taken with a Parliament with real powers and a vote that has any meaning.

Conversely, the mass democratic movement, led by the ANC, had a singular goal of conquest of state power through winning a majority in Parliament and raising Parliament to be the master of the government and society.

The liberation movement correctly laboured in the understanding that the state and its attendant bureaucracies were inseparable to the creation of a modern and prosperous society. The entire project of the National Democratic Revolution rests on this formulation.

The farce of “state capture” is in fact a battle about which faction of the infiltrated governing party controls the state. The asinine political project, garbed in legalism, was a utilitarian hysteria by the agents of white monopoly capital for the delegitimisation and ultimate removal of former president Jacob Zuma.

To be sure, Zuma’s administration had fatal flaws and did not pose an existential threat to white monopoly capital. The casual observer wonders then, , at the reasons for the visceral hatred towards Zuma.

The answer is infuriating and instructive. Zuma is culturally and materially alienated from the usurper owners of the wealth of our economy, and their aspirant agents.

Lungisa is a former deputy president of the ANC Youth League