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Review Articles Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 167–236 www.brill.nl/hima Review Articles Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Patrick Bond, London: Pluto Press, 2000. Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest, Patrick Bond, Lansdowne: University of Cape Town Press, 2001. Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and Global Finance, Patrick Bond, London: Zed Books, 2004. Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Patrick Bond, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. Arise Ye Coolies: Apartheid and the Indian, 1960–1995, Ashwin Desai, Johannesburg, Impact Africa Publishing, 1996. We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Ashwin Desai, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal, Ashwin Desai, Vishnu Padayachee, Krish Reddy and Goolam Vahed, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002. Th e Post-Apartheid Critic: Reviewing works by Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai Introduction: Resistance and critique after Apartheid After the thrill of democracy has been enunciated, how can a politics of resistance be constructed within – or against – the confines of the new nomos? Will it depend on not only the memory of the defeat of Apartheid but also on the animation of a more recent political experience: the structural nonfulfillment of anti-Apartheid aspirations?1 South Africa witnessed the dismantling of legal structures of racial discrimination and ‘separate development’ by the first democratic elections, in 1994. However, the social and 1. Farred 2004, pp. 603–4. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156920608X296114 168 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 167–236 spatial inequalities as a result of colonialism, segregation, and Apartheid have proven difficult to undo. In the first decade of democracy, several important studies have reviewed the political economy of transition from Apartheid, and changes in the dynamics of power, economy, inequality and resurgent protest.2 Introducing an edition on post-Apartheid South Africa, Farred asks what exactly was secured and lost in the process of negotiated settlement with the white supremacist régime, and what emergent tactics are produced within social-justice struggles today. Farred cautions the post-Apartheid critic to be aware of the ways in which ‘struggle’ itself is fetishised by the political elite. Moreover, post-Apartheid social inequality is grounded in new legal forms and discourses of social order [nomos] emerging from but not reducible to its Apartheid predecessor. Th e post-Apartheid critic is not separable from the new nomos, which is why Farred calls attention to many forms of aspiration for resistance in a contradictory time. Certainly, some of these aspirations may be deemed illegitimate, for instance, in relation to ‘the national-democratic revolution’ or the purported imperatives of racial redress. Late 2007 witnessed the dramatic emergence of Jacob Zuma as the new President of the ANC, with strong support from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and constituencies representing the rural poor. Th e meaning of this populist upsurge is not yet clear, with its strange blend of struggle fetishism, misogyny, and anti-élitism. While there is not yet a cohesive political force unambiguously representative of the mass of South Africa’s poor, it is clear is that various forms of disaffection pervade South-African society. Th e key question posed by Farred is how this disaffection might continue to provoke leftist politics, within or outside the ruling alliance. With Farred’s problematic in mind, this essay explores divergent modes of critique in the writings of two radical intellectuals who contend quite differently with the contradictions of contemporary South Africa. Each writer provides a biting retrospection on the compromises of transition from Apartheid. Each, in different ways, projects a possible just future. Th e writers in question are Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai. While Bond is a more prolific writer of books, it is fair to say that they read like interwoven pieces and further elaborations, which makes the two bodies of writing comparable despite differences in volume. Moreover, reading these thinkers in counterpoint tells us something about the interplay of communities of resistance and their broader conditions of justification and control: of resistance and nomos. Since Bond and Desai conceive of critique through quite different realms of power and influence, they diverge in theory, rhetoric and writing style. Problems of ‘race’ and ideology and their relationship to political-economic crisis emerge as central themes in reading these writers in counterpoint. While some of the works considered here are written as activist texts with a reluctance to forbear in making claims or prescriptions, this impulse is restrained to varying effect in collaborations with other scholars. As a slice of broader debates over contemporary South Africa, Bond and Desai clarify Farred’s dual imperative for post-Apartheid critique to attend to ‘the memory of the defeat of Apartheid but also on the animation of a more recent political experience.’ 2. Th e best Gramscian overview of the political economy of transition is Marais 1998. Also important is the analysis of the ‘minerals energy complex’ in Fine and Rustomjee 1996. See also Michie and Padayachee 1997; Padayachee 2006; Hart 2002; Mamdani 1996, and the recent analysis of South Africa’s development trajectory and the socialist path not taken in Saul 2005; Legassick 2007. Review Articles / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 167–236 169 Giving the biographical due attention, it is important to note that Bond has received his training and intellectual affirmation from a Euro-American Marxist canon. Bond studied with a leading figure of Marxist geography, David Harvey, and Bond’s work is regularly cited by Harvey and others as the exemplary source on post-Apartheid South Africa. In addition to research in Zimbabwe, Bond’s work has straddled NGOs and activism in the province of Gauteng, and work for the new South-African government in the 1990s, including policy papers for the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). Ashwin Desai’s work began with activism and research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, engagement with various layers of anti-Apartheid activism in Durban in which he was a persisting critic of authoritarianism in various guises, activism for the rights of non- academic staff at the formerly black University of Durban-Westville where he held an academic position, to a continuing insider/outsider status in Durban’s academic and activist communities. Desai’s work with the Concerned Citizen’s Group in Durban parallel’s Bond’s work with the Municipal Services Project in Johannesburg, both of which have deepened their solidarities with poor people’s struggles in neoliberal South Africa. While Bond and Desai are colleagues and interlocutors, they are positioned differently today: one as, until recently, the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the other as a former research fellow without the tenured job his work quite obviously warrants. During the course of writing this essay, Desai fought a struggle to lift a ban on his appointment to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, for which he received international support, and which brought him to loggerheads with the Vice Chancellor. Finally, both have continued writing that does not find itself in this review. I begin with three of Bond’s books which, in my view, are elaborations on each other, and can therefore to be considered as a single enterprise: Elite Transition, Against Global Apartheid and Talk Left, Walk Right. Th e premise in all three is that the transition from white supremacy has been hijacked by an élite putsch within the ANC, which has insinuated ‘neoliberal ideology’ in line with wider shifts in global political economy. A collaborative venture, reviewed briefly here, applies some of these ideas to environmental questions in Unsustainable South Africa. I then turn to Ashwin Desai’s Arise Ye Coolies and We Are the Poors, in which Desai reflects from specific histories of the ‘Indian question’ on the broader material and cultural politics of post-Apartheid hegemony and nascent counter-hegemony, before turning briefly to a collaboration between Desai, Vishnu Padayachee and Goolam Vahed in Blacks in Whites. I conclude with some thoughts on post-Apartheid critique by way of work on intellectuals through the transition. Patrick Bond: Prometheus unbound Patrick Bond’s most well known book, Elite Transition, begins with a promise to deliver a radical analytic-theoretic framework and some of the most telling details that help explain the transition from a popular-nationalist anti-Apartheid project to official neoliberalism – by which is meant adherence to free market economic principles, bolstered by the narrowest practical definition of democracy (not the radical participatory project many ANC cadre had expected) – over an extremely short period of time. (p. 1.) 170 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 167–236 No small task, this. One of the first and last of its kind of Th ird-World national-liberation movements, the African National Congress had, by the late 1980s, assumed the mantle of agent of liberation through the multiple energies of working-class, youth, underground, exiled and global anti-Apartheid
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