Litnet

Countdown to socialism by Anthea Jeffery. Available: Jonathan Ball Publishers (2023)

Countdown to socialism: The National Democratic Revolution in South Africa since 1994
Anthea Jeffery
Jonathan Ball Publishers (2023)
ISBN: 9781776192915

How to tell you the size of our dream? For centuries we waited for a Messiah to free us ...
Until we understood.
Today our revolution is an immense flower to which each day are added new petals.
The petals are the land reconquered, the people freed, schools and hospitals.
Our dream has the size of Freedom.

– Frelimo New Year’s greeting card, 1969

Dr Anthea Jeffery is head of research at the South African Institute of Race Relations, and her well-researched contention is that socialism, leading to communism – an ideology that many have thought belongs to the past – remains the ultimate ambition of the ANC, and they have already laid the table to achieve it.

The initial effect on the reader of this intriguing study on the camouflaged intentions of today’s ANC by Jeffery is therefore a kind of sleight of hand effect. One is magicked back to a semi-distant time of old-school African liberation movements, a somewhat forlorn interlude of hope, perhaps best captured by the Frelimo greeting card message above from the year 1969.

It was an era when colonial Portugal still ran the show in Angola and Mozambique, Ian Smith and John Vorster called the shots in Rhodesia and South Africa, and “Ag pleez Deddy” accompanied us to the drive-in. The Rivonia trial had come and gone; Mandela, Sisulu, Bram Fischer and the rest were languishing in prison; and Verwoerd was dead. America was fighting the Cold War in Vietnam, while the Soviet Union financed the struggle against imperialism through communist party off-shoots abroad.

In general, the white establishment still appeared comfortably in control, although Macmillan’s winds of change were by now kicking up some dust in Pretoria’s own backyard. The Bush War had begun in earnest, and very discreetly, the South African Communist Party and the ANC in exile were working together hand in glove, in shabby offices and terraced houses in London, to plan and implement an uncertain road to victory – a two-stage revolution based on Leninist theory. But the ANC “soldiers” trained in exile proved useless; they were no threat to Pretoria and were easily kept at arm’s length by the South African army. When, finally, De Klerk freed Mandela in 1990, just after the dissolution of the USSR, it was felt he’d done so because he reckoned the threat of a communist takeover of South Africa had evaporated. Oh, yes, and he’d also received a significant financial sanctions threat from the West.

So far, so good. Constitutional talks followed, elections brought the ANC to power, and President Mandela donned a green and gold rugby jersey to show, like De Gaulle in Algeria (Je vous ai compris – I understood you), that he could bring the “rainbow nation” together. Bishop Tutu made appropriate rapprochement noises, and the “new” South Africa settled down to business as usual, seemingly not too much troubled by the political earthquake it had just endured.

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To read Jeffery’s compelling exposé is to realise that, for the past 30 years, the average South African has been a victim of the greatest imaginable confidence trick. 

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But to read Jeffery’s compelling exposé is to realise that, for the past 30 years, the average South African has been a victim of the greatest imaginable confidence trick. The ANC, far from being the bumbling, incoherent movement it sometimes gives the impression of being, reassuringly corrupt in the African mould but nonetheless committed to the democratic well-being of the country, has in fact all along been hoodwinking the electorate into believing such. It actually has a sinister agenda in mind, the end result of which will be to impose a communist, totalitarian regime on South Africa and ransack the coffers of the mainly white middle classes, looting their houses and land.

A Marxist rabbit from the past has been plucked from the hat by Jeffery, and all that half-remembered and long-forgotten socialist jargon, once the bread and butter of liberation struggles everywhere, on every continent, comes creaking back. It’s the strangest feeling, like unexpectedly meeting a once close friend not seen for 40 years.

But don’t be fooled: if we are to accept what Jeffery’s academic sleuthing has uncovered, then first socialism, followed by communism, for the ANC is the future, present and past. The ANC has never veered from this ideological path, regardless of the fact that communism is no more in Russia, its principal sponsor for decades.

The National Democratic Revolution

Jeffery believes that the key to this path lies in the so-called NDR, or National Democratic Revolution, which is to be found in the South African Communist Party’s (SACP’s) 1962 Mahikeng programme, “The road to South African freedom”.

The SACP, already well established before the Second World War, was very influential in getting rid of old-guard ANC veterans of the struggle like AB Xuma, and installing a new generation of leaders in the ANC, which the communists urged should become multiracial. Walter Sisulu, Bram Fischer and a host of other SACP members encouraged the close partnership between the trade unions, the SACP and the ANC which endures to this day. The SACP is the think tank of the modern ANC in the same way, say, that the Institute of Race Relations is the think tank of what remains of liberal South Africa.

Before diving into the entrails of Countdown to socialism, readers would be wise first to peruse Jeffery’s earlier book, entitled The people’s war: New light on the struggle for South Africa (2019). Both books are excellent, but to understand the landscape of the argument fully, it is worth reading Jeffery’s account of a Russian-organised pilgrimage made by the president of the ANC in exile, Oliver Tambo, accompanied by a cohort of senior ANC officers – Thabo Mbeki included – to Vietnam, in order to meet the Vietnamese leadership and study the lessons of their victory over the Americans. The relationship between Vietnam and the ANC endures – the Vietnamese ambassador to Pretoria only recently highlighted their long history, from the meeting between the representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the ANC in 1955 on the occasion of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, to the milestone visit to Vietnam by Tambo in 1978.

The lessons the ANC learned from the Vietnamese came down to making the country ungovernable, dealing with collaborators harshly and seizing the high ground in peace negotiations. This was exactly the policy the SACP and the ANC initiated. Jeffery sheds new light on much of what we knew of as the “unofficial war”, which was also the title of Matthew Kentridge’s (1) excellent account of the struggle for territorial sovereignty between the United Democratic Front (UDF) and Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal between 1987 and 1990, which saw thousands killed and which was mirrored elsewhere in South Africa. This was essentially the people’s war that delivered state power to the ANC, and opened the way to the second phase of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the core subject of Countdown to socialism.

What Jeffery reveals in her book is the depth of sophisticated planning by the SACP/ANC political architects that has gone into transforming the “old machinery of the State”, and how crucial it has been to the success of the NDR since 1990. According to the 1962 SACP document, this would put the “motive forces of the revolution at the helm of the state and ensure that it was these classes and strata which wielded real power”. The ANC would also need to take control of all important “levers of power”, the Mahikeng document (1962) emphasised. These levers extended far beyond the civil service and the security forces (the police, defence force and intelligence agencies) to include “the judiciary, the public broadcaster, the media, the private sector, the universities” and all other centres capable of influencing the battle of ideas. Ensuring adequate control would require the development of a “cadre policy” to “ensure that the ANC played the leading role in all centres of power”. Only in this way could the organisation “widen and deepen” its hold on power and “ensure that the agenda in the battle of ideas was not set by counter-revolution”.

The influence of Gramsci

Anyone with an interest in Marxism-Leninism will immediately recognise the hand of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who died in Mussolini’s prison, at work here. Unlike with traditional Marxist thought, which primarily focused on economic structures and class struggle, Gramsci recognised that power was not solely derived from coercion or economic control. Instead, he argued that ruling elites established and maintained their authority by shaping the cultural and ideological landscape of society.

He argued that the ruling classes, the capitalist bourgeois classes in his day, maintained dominance by spreading their specific values, norms and beliefs throughout society. He called this a process of cultural hegemony, which required control of all institutions which shaped the way people thought and perceived the world, like religious institutions, the media and all institutions of formal education. Effectively, the cultural hegemony was a form of propaganda which led to the consent of the working classes to their own subjugation.

Reading Jeffery, the analogy with Gramsci is striking. At every level since coming to power, the ANC has faithfully followed the 1962 SACP script, laying the foundation for political transformation through socioeconomic policies.

Towards this end, as Jeffery says, the SACP script mandates that the ANC should focus on meeting social needs by expanding and “restructuring” social grants, building more free houses for low-income households and “intensifying” the land reform programme. It should also make primary healthcare “the main plank” of state provision, seek to “reduce the cost of medicines”, ensure “the redistribution of educational resources” and pursue “the transformation of higher education”. These interventions would initially have only a limited impact in advancing the NDR. However, as the SACP was later to stress, they would underscore the vital role of the state, rather than the private sector, in meeting people’s essential needs – and help pave the way for the “de-commodification” of healthcare, education, social security and other goods and services in due course.

Jeffery describes how this incremental approach to socioeconomic issues was also what the global balance of forces required. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had ushered in a different global environment, in which (as the ANC warned at its Stellenbosch national conference in 2002) “a simplistic and dramatic abolition of the capitalist market, with the state seizing the means of production” would have been “a sure recipe for the defeat of the NDR”. In this changed world, the ANC could at best proceed by small steps – and generally under the rubric of redress for apartheid’s manifold injustices – towards its revolutionary goals.

She adds that by the time of the Polokwane national conference in December 2007, memories of Soviet failures had faded, while the developing global economic crisis was easily portrayed as proof of capitalism’s intrinsic flaws. The ANC had also consolidated its hold on key levers of state power and successfully weakened various constitutional constraints on the NDR. In addition, President Thabo Mbeki, whom the SACP and Cosatu had increasingly condemned for the supposed “neoliberalism” of his economic policies, had been ousted and replaced as ANC president by Jacob Zuma – who was expected (as Cosatu put it) to “nationalise exactly what the Freedom Charter said: the mining industry, the banks, the leading monopolies”.

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From the outset, the moment they gained power, the ANC began to pack every branch of government with its own people, in order to disseminate its values and norms. This is today known as cadre deployment, and Jeffery anatomises the process forensically.

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From the outset, the moment they gained power, the ANC began to pack every branch of government with its own people, in order to disseminate its values and norms. This is today known as cadre deployment, and Jeffery anatomises the process forensically, dealing with those agencies in charge of the constitution, the judiciary, water, mining, land, education, healthcare, social security, public finance, the police forces, demographic representativity and others. ANC loyalists swamped these agencies, and a chapter is devoted to each. I found these chapters very valuable, inasmuch as they offer an alternative prism through which to understand the underlying significance of government departmental policy pronouncements, and to recognise to what extent these align with the NDR.

Achieving the goals of the NDR is not going to happen overnight, though. The ANC, which doesn’t want to scare away the whites by taking precipitate action, asserts no less a figure than Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, who is quoted by Jeffery as saying in an interview some years ago: “The ANC [has a] 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it will be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.” This has been taken to mean that the ANC will pass laws transferring wealth, land and economic power from whites to blacks slowly and incrementally.

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

In common with trends abroad, very discernible now in the US and the UK, CRT is being introduced as a means of achieving a shift away from the current “bias towards liberal thought” and allowing more space for “other traditions, including African nationalism, black consciousness, and Marxism/socialism”. Says Jeffery, CRT rejects the colour-blind ideal, the principle of equality before the law, the importance of incremental reform, and the existence of objective truth, all of which it sees as self-serving constructs developed by whites to conceal their oppression and help keep blacks down. It regards racism and capitalism as equivalent and intertwined evils, and seeks to end both through ever more intrusive interventions aimed at achieving equality of outcomes in every sphere. Its final goal, in keeping with standard Marxist ideology, is to strip away the false consciousness of the victims and overthrow the oppressors, thereby ending exploitation and suffering.

Jeffery adds that it also opens the door to an attack on liberalism, the main features of which are “an obsession with ‘growth’”, an emphasis on voluntary exchange via free markets, a focus on individuals rather than classes, and “a discourse of checks-and-balances”, which seeks to limit state power and uphold private property rights. These concepts, says the SACP, must be replaced by ideas that promote the NDR and acquire a “hegemonic influence”. Pure Gramsci.

Jeffery’s argument is that to prevent the moderate majority of all races from uniting around these classically liberal ideas, the ANC seeks to polarise the country along racial lines. To this end, it exaggerates the extent and impact of white racism and denies any positive white contribution to the country. It also seeks to whip up black anger over alleged white “theft”, exploitation and “profiteering”, so as to justify “particularly damaging” NDR interventions, such as expropriation without compensation and the National Health Insurance scheme.

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Has the dream of a multiracial and fully integrated South Africa, as espoused by Mandela, really been jettisoned as part and parcel of the NDR tactics, one must ask oneself. If so, the future for ethnic minorities is bleak.

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Has the dream of a multiracial and fully integrated South Africa, as espoused by Mandela, really been jettisoned as part and parcel of the NDR tactics, one must ask oneself. If so, the future for ethnic minorities is bleak.

Jeffery makes a very interesting point about law and order in the country, arguing that as the police become increasingly ineffective against crime and violence, this further advances the NDR by damaging business confidence, limiting growth, adding to unemployment, and encouraging violent protest and social instability. In time, there may also be advantage in helping to trigger widespread riots that underscore the fragility of the established order, add to the suffering of the destitute, and facilitate SACP mobilisation among impoverished working class and “proletarian” communities to choke off investment and further hobble the capitalist economy.

Jeffery says that law-abiding people feel vulnerable and know the police are unlikely to protect them. Those intent on wrongdoing for criminal or ideological reasons are also well aware that little can or will be done to halt their depredations. Though general habits of lawfulness will help sustain the social contract for a period, these patterns are likely to break down as fear and rapaciousness increase. She quotes the academic Gareth van Onselen as saying: “The social contract relies on trust as much as it does on tangible evidence of it. It is no more than an idea. It can be reinforced by good governance or destroyed by neglect and failure. When its foundations are eroded away, it is simply not strong enough to hold.”

And so it goes, chapter after chapter, investigating the NDR’s links to a myriad ANC initiatives. What I found especially interesting were those aspects which referenced the ANC Freedom Charter of 1955, which seems to have been deliberately watered down at the time so as not to emulate SACP policy slavishly, given that the Communist Party had just been banned. Says Jeffery, the NDR aim is partially evident in the Freedom Charter of 1955, which calls for “the mineral wealth beneath the soil ... to be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”. The SACP’s 1962 programme, “The road to South African freedom” goes much further, “demanding the nationalisation of the mining industry” so as to give the “national democratic state” control over a vital sector of the economy and “lay the foundations for the advance to socialism. … [T]he expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to give effect to land reform and redistribution.” This goal was reaffirmed both at the SACP’s 15th national congress in July 2022 and at the ANC’s national conference in December 2022.

The future

The ANC refuses to see itself as an ordinary political party, bound by the ordinary rules of the political game, pace Jeffery. Instead, it continues to regard itself as a national liberation movement with a historic mission to fulfil – an incremental transition to socialism and then communism. In its view, this as yet incomplete mission gives it a unique entitlement to rule and to keep representing the supposedly monolithic views of the black majority. The ANC regards opposition parties as illegitimate and unnecessary. By the time the voters turn against the ANC, a new “class” will have been established in the upper echelons of the state, whose privilege, position and immunity from prosecution will be dependent on the ruling party remaining in power, says Jefferys.

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The ANC regards opposition parties as illegitimate and unnecessary. By the time the voters turn against the ANC, a new “class” will have been established in the upper echelons of the state, whose privilege, position and immunity from prosecution will be dependent on the ruling party remaining in power, says Jefferys.

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The million dollar question one is left with then, at the end of this insightful book, is whether the ANC would ever permit itself to be voted out of power or be unseated by smaller parties in a coalition. Only the future can tell, but Jeffery is nothing if not a realist on this score.

South Africa has finally reached the point where the ANC could be voted out at the 2024 election, she says. Already, however, it has deployed armies of cadres in various spheres who are mobilising to defeat this threat to the NDR and to their own self-interest.

Is South Africa likely to become the first country outside the former USSR to elect a communist government by democratic means? Next year’s 2024 elections will no doubt provide some straws in the wind in this regard. But if Jeffery is correct in her analysis, then South Africa is set to become a bigger version of Zimbabwe, sharing the same ideology, a strange synthesis of market mechanisms and Leninist power, a bit like China, and could end up being usurped as a leading African economy by booming capitalist democracies like Kenya and Nigeria.

Note: unless otherwise indicated, quotes and source material are from Anthea Jeffery’s book.

(1) An unofficial war: Inside the conflict in Pietermaritzburg. Matthew Kentridge, 1990, David Phillip.