The exercise of true power is much more about the redistribution of influence and the ability to change the way people think., writes Muxe Nkondo.
Johannesburg - Does radical economic transformation have a future in South Africa, given the government’s incremental policy style, the domination of neo-liberal values, and the conditionality of socio economic rights?
Since 1994, decision-makers have been following a process of building out gradually from the prevailing situation.
Decisions arrived at are therefore only marginally different from those in place. The changes in the status quo are incremental. As a result, radical transformation faces intractable structural and cultural difficulties.
The incremental model views decision-making as a practical exercise concerned with solving problems at hand rather than achieving radical or lofty goals.
In this mode, the instruments chosen for solving problems are discovered through trial and error rather than through the comprehensive evaluation and overhaul of all possible instruments.
An important element of the Liberation Movement, led by the ANC, was that it was driven, like most revolutions, by an apocalyptic vision of the future.
It was more than a political programme, more than a passionate struggle to reform apartheid colonialism. It represented a belief in an end-time, a conviction that our history was moving to a final denouement. The vision, however, was a secular one: a final era of freedom and justice.
The legal system is under pressure to achieve radical economic transformation. This demand is putting tremendous strain on legal institutions, values, and concepts.
The crisis is viewed as a challenge to some principles of legality, such as the conditionality of socio-economic rights. The pressure is to move away from certain liberal variants of legality that have prevailed in liberal democracies.
The transformation that is being sought is viewed not as a resolution of the tension between legal science and legal practice, but rather as a response to the pressure of social and economic forces.
There is a tension between the ideals of the Liberation Movement and the realities of the constitutional order, between the dynamic qualities and the need for stability, between the transcendence and the immanence of the liberal legal system.
This has led increasingly to violent protests and conflict.
The answer to the question regarding the future of radical economic transformation depends on the definition chosen. If radical economic transformation means the violent seizure of state power through class revolts from below, then the answer to whether it can be achieved is: “highly unlikely”.
The class model has been so discredited it is difficult to see how anyone could revive it.
Certainly, other variants of the Liberation Movement may emerge to attempt to solve the challenges of poverty, unemployment, and socio-economic inequality. But it is unlikely they will have the kind of utopian vision that the anti-apartheid movement relied on for its legitimacy.
The collapse of colonialism marked the end of class-based revolutions as a historical form.
Prospects look very different from the perspective of a definition that stresses changes in social categories as well as political and economic assumptions.
As so many social scientists have argued, the protests and upheavals of the past 22 years have challenged the apartheid ascriptive hierarchies of race, class and gender.
The relations between whites and blacks, developed and underdeveloped, male and female have been similarly deconstructed. Everywhere domination is on the run in the face of an emerging discourse on socio-economic rights.
If the contradiction between neo-liberal capitalism and the spirit of the democratic surge of recent years deepens, it is possible it will be resolved by radical, revolutionary transformation.
This does not suggest that a radical, revolutionary transformation will necessarily be violent, based on countrywide class struggles, or involve the seizure of state power, although any or all of these things could occur.
It could well be, on the other hand, that a deepening of the currents of political and socio-economic rights, the increasing assertiveness of the historically suppressed race, class, and gender groups, and the rise of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movement may bring society to a kind of revolutionary transformation in consciousness, lived social experience, and power relations seen in the apartheid system.
If this occurs, the social, and economic institutional arrangements would change to reflect the changes in consciousness, sensibility, and lived experience.
New revolutionary movements have questioned the classic revolutionary modality, reflecting their understanding of the workings of political power, and the possibilities of radical change, in conditions of neo-liberal globalisation.
This is the understanding that creating a democracy for public reasoning and the deliberation of economic alternatives to neo-liberalism is a more suitable goal for revolutionary movements than the direct seizure of state power.
It is also the realisation that linking the national struggle for radical transformation to local needs and global concerns may be the most effective - if more daunting - coalition-building project for radical economic transformation.
There is a strong conviction in the Liberation Movement that we can live in a better South Africa. That it’s high time for leaders and opinion-makers in various domains and disciplines interested in achieving the full meaning of liberation, to devote more energy to achieving this.
Why the optimism?
First, the world economy isn’t working. It will get worse, not better. Second, people resist neo-liberal domination and exploitation.
We will learn from the past, from our successes and failures. Finally, the Liberation Movement will find a way to go through the eye of a needle into a more just society. This is as much a proposition of faith as it is analysis, and rooted as much in analysis as in faith.
The idea of radical economic transformation raises complex questions about feminism.
What should we think of the feminist critique of liberal democracy, when social and cultural identities are called into question?
What are the uses - and limits - of a feminist critique of social and cultural identity for poverty, unemployment, and economic injustice?
The movement for radical economic transformation must grasp the idea that the exercise of power is not necessarily the overthrow of institutions or the state.
The exercise of true power is much more about the redistribution of influence and the ability to change the way people think.
Then, given appropriate leadership and an enabling political culture, it is possible institutions can be changed too.
* Nkondo is a member of the Freedom Park council. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent