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New South African Review 3
The Second Phase â" Tragedy or Farce?
By John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall Wits University Press
Copyright © 2013 Wits University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86814-795-3
CHAPTER 1
The power elite in democratic South Africa: Race and class in a fractured society
Roger Southall
The major debate that took place from the 1970s between liberal historians and their Marxist-revisionist opponents revolved around whether there was a functional relationship between the policies pursued by successive South African governments and the interests of capital. On the one hand, the liberal historians argued that there was considerable contestation between political and economic power holders; on the other, the Marxian-revisionists proposed that the relationships between them were broadly compatible, with changing political policies reflecting the changing interests of dominant elements of capital across different eras. Inevitably, the debate was inconclusive but there was nonetheless to be a considerable convergence around the idea that, from the mid-1970s, the mounting costs of the National Party's rigid adherence to key tenets of apartheid were increasingly costly to large-scale capital, which, during the 1980s, came to exert significant pressure upon the government to enter into negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC).
From this broad agreement have flowed two assertions. The first is that the sustainability of South African capitalism requires the overall compatibility of what Sampie Terreblanche refers to as the systems of political legitimation and economic accumulation. From this perspective, the economic strains brought about by political crisis required the transition from white minority rule to a 'liberal capitalist version of democratic capitalism' (Terreblanche 2002: 456). The second assertion is that the transition to democracy was brought about by an 'elite compromise' structured around the concession of political democracy to the incoming ANC in return for its acceptance of the existing contours of capitalism. Although allowing for the expropriation of property by the state subject to market-value compensation and due process, the post-apartheid constitutions entrenched the rights of private property. This signalled that any government seeking to address the highly unequal, racially structured ownership patterns of the pre-democratic era whereby whites dominated the economy, would do so incrementally. The ANC was soon to find it appropriate to quietly discard (or at least to postpone to an unspecified distant future) commitments to socialism, and to abandon nationalisation in favour of market-driven policies. The move from the social democratically-inclined Redistribution and Development Programme (RDP) to the pro-market Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy in 1996 is but the most widely acknowledged marker of the conversion of ANC policy makers to capitalist economics.
The notion of elite compromise suggests an identifiable level of overall interest between South Africa's incoming political and established economic elites. When Tom Lodge sought to divine 'Who rules South Africa?' his answer was unremittingly political: 'A political movement governs, and has real power ... to reshape political and economic life', yet he managed to conclude that the ANC government was probably better for business than any of its immediate successors (Lodge 2002: 19-31). Similarly, accounts of business-state relations under the ANC have tended to depict contested, yet overall collaborative, relationships which have ensured that the economy has been kept on a relatively even keel (Taylor 2007). Similarly, Bill Freund (2006), when discussing how the ANC has used state power to promote black entry into the bastions of white capital, talks of 'the emergence of a new power elite' as if there is a relatively unproblematic convergence of political and economic power.
Whether or not they are compatible, none of these approaches is wrong. They all seek to illuminate how power is distributed and exercised in democratic South Africa. Interestingly, however, they remind us that the large body of work discussing post-apartheid political economy has been overwhelmingly empirical, and – as if the work of the neo-Marxists in the 1970s has been largely forgotten (or simply pigeonholed as referring to the pre-1994 era) – there has been remarkably little theorising about the nature of the state in democratic South Africa. Perhaps to some considerable extent this reflects the limited applicability to South Africa of much theorising about the post-colonial state constructed, as the latter heavily is, around the unequal relationships between foreign capital (which usually retains its local predominance) and those who have inherited political power. Although, as we shall see, it is arguable that large-scale capital has sought to create a 'subaltern class' in South Africa, the latter's political economy still differs fundamentally from those of most post-colonial societies (certainly in Africa) by the existence of a long-established, locally based and powerful private sector dominated by massive corporations. This, in turn, is why most analysis of power in the post-1994 South African political economy has been versed in terms of 'elites' rather than of 'class', with the implication being that elites can be identified by the role they play in heading political and economic institutions. Even so, for all the many references to elite domination in post-apartheid South Africa, and for all the widespread generalisations about 'elite compromise', there has been no concerted attempt to explore whether South Africa has a 'power elite', and if so from where it draws its power, how it exercises it, and whether it can be said to constitute a 'ruling class'. What follows is merely a preliminary attempt to address such issues by drawing from elite theory, driven by the view that our greater understanding of how power is exercised and distributed has major implications for the nature and quality of South African democracy.
ELITES AND DEMOCRACY
The relationship between rulers and the ruled under democracy is always problematic. In the well-known words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address, democracy is the rule of the people, by the people, for the people. However, this skips over the difficulty of how people are to rule over themselves in large-scale societies, where face-to-face democratic decision making by citizens is impossible. Democracy's answer has been that the people should have periodic opportunities to choose and replace their leaders, and if elected leaders are perceived as failing to rule on behalf of the people, then the people can respond by throwing the rascals out. However, the apparent simplicity of this argument merely raises a whole host of difficult questions that have kept political philosophers busy across the generations. What methods of selection or election of leaders are most democratic? What prevents elites, once elected, from changing the rules to ensure that they can hang on to power? How can elites be rendered accountable between elections? How can the people choose sensibly between competing elites, all of which disclaim self-interest, in an age when selling politics appropriates the techniques for selling soap?
These and many other questions crowd in on attempts to decipher the relationships between ruling and ruled. Broadly, the diverse answers that are given fall into two broad traditions (with considerable crossover between them).
First, there is a large body of 'elite theory' which argues that 'the history of politics is the history of elites' (Prewitt and Stone 1973: 4). Societal goals are established by the elite and accomplished under their direction. This does not mean that societies do not change, only that most change comes about as a result of changes in the composition of the elite. History is thus the interminable struggle among elites to control society, resulting in a circulation of elites, with established elites giving way to new ideas and interests. The relationship between elites and the masses thus remains one of domination. Elites and counter-elites may mobilise support from the masses, but ultimately the latter are largely pawns used in elite interests or observers of elite behaviour. Certainly, in democracies, under conditions of universal suffrage and competitive elections, the people have the opportunity to choose between elites, but after elections elite domination will reassert itself, not least because the elite is organised and the masses are not. Even in democratic political parties, elites will rise to the top. Elites will therefore retain their advantages despite advances in democratic thinking and techniques.
In contrast to this gloomy view, a more optimistic 'pluralist tradition' proposes that elites within democracy are seriously constrained. Elites fight among themselves, thereby imparting very considerable power to the people as to who should rule, and how. Political parties and 'pressure groups' impinge on the autonomy of elites to shape society, and as they compete among themselves they are compelled to take mass desires and wants into consideration, knowing that if they don't their chances of being elected to power, or keeping it, will be severely limited. Further, even though political parties and pressure groups will develop their own elites, the latter will themselves be subject to popular constraints within their sphere of action. Thus, rather than there being a simple division between elites and the mass, society is ordered into a hierarchy of elites, blurring distinctions between elites and people. Finally, elites are constrained by constitutions, which insist that societies are ruled by laws as well as by men, and that elites remain ultimately accountable.
It is important to recall that elite theory is not the exclusive property of conservative theorists. For instance, it is central to Leninist thought that only a political vanguard can make a political revolution. Nor does elite theory prescribe that the powers of elites will be unchanging. As noted by C Wright Mills (1956:20), one of the foremost elite theorists of modern times, any attempt to insist that a ruling class or elite is omnipotent across all epochs of history and across all nations will end up in tautology, and the extent to which rulers have power is subject to considerable historical variation. In other words, the extent to which societies are dominated by elites is subject to empirical verification. This should remind us that elite theory is not normative theory (telling us how society 'should be' governed), but it does raise hugely important questions about the kind of society we want. In short, if it is true that there is a tendency for democracy to transform into elite rule, how should we attempt to counter it?
An important further consideration is that it is necessary to take both elite theory and pluralism beyond the political, for modern democracy operates within the context of advanced capitalism. Mills (1956: 23) argued that the development of capitalism had seen a progressive enlargement and centralisation of the means of oppression and exploitation, of violence and destruction, as well as the means of production and reproduction. This had led to the rise in power in the US of the 1950s not only of corporate elites, presiding over historically unrivalled productive power, but also of military elites, who wielded greater destructive power than their counterparts in any previous era. The 'corporate chieftains' and 'warlords' had joined together with a 'political directorate' which was increasingly detached from the formal constraints of democracy to form a power elite whose occupation of the 'command posts' of society enabled them to make (or not make) decisions that affected the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. This did not mean that the power elite constituted a ruling class in the Marxist sense, for the political and military holders of power possessed considerable autonomy from the economic domain. It did, however, mean that 'the power elite today involve[d] the uneasy coincidence of economic, military and political power' (Mills 1956: 276), a convergence later to be elaborated on by Dwight Eisenhower who, when he stood down from the US presidency, warned of the dangers of the rise of a 'military-industrial complex'.
Famously, Mills argued that the application of pluralist theory to US society described only a 'middle level of power' featuring a world of congressional and state politics and of small firms that romanticised comfortable notions of how power had been distributed in earlier centuries. Undue attention to middle levels of power obscured the new structures of power brought about by the processes of centralisation and bureaucratisation wedded to increased technological capacity. The reality was that the middle levels of power – those, for instance, of small property, state and city politics, labour unions, consumers, and white-collar groups – were increasingly dominated from above, whereas at the bottom of the heap the diversity of publics beloved by pluralist commentators had been reduced to a 'mass society' that was very largely the recipient of information from above, with little capacity to answer back and little autonomy from major institutions dominated by the power elite.
The relevance of these various considerations to contemporary South Africa is that, for many observers, the country's move from apartheid to democracy was an 'elite transition', brought about by a compromise deal between the established white elites (capitalist and National Party) with an incoming ANC liberation elite (for example, Bond 2000). For Terreblanche (2002), the outcome was a 'democratic capitalism' from whose benefits the large majority of black South Africans was excluded: apartheid has gone, but the new democratic forms merely obscure a circulation of elites.
Today's South Africa may be distant in time and space from 1950s America, but the value of returning to Mills lies in the simultaneous simplicity and directness of the questions he posed about the US of his time. Is it meaningful to describe South Africa as having a 'power elite'? If so, what is its shape, and what are the bases of its power? What are its interests and commonalities, and does it constitute a coherent 'ruling class'? Finally, what does its existence and mode of rule imply for South African democracy? What follows is a preliminary stab at answering such questions in the hope that it may provoke more detailed research.
ANALYSING SOUTH AFRICA'S POWER ELITE
Underlying the notions of South Africa's 'elite transition' is the implication that the pre-1994 power elite was fractured along political and economic lines. Notwithstanding tensions between conservative and reformist elements within the political elite revolving around security issues, large-scale capital was broadly united behind FW de Klerk's efforts to forge a deal with the ANC. The arrival of democracy introduced a circulation of the political elite, with the ANC assuming the dominant position in the initial post-1994 political coalition, enabling it to extend its control over the levers of political power at different levels (national, provincial and local). Meanwhile, notwithstanding important efforts by large corporations to protect their interests by drawing key individuals from the ANC into the corporate elite, the democratic settlement was based simultaneously upon the confirmation of the capitalist basis of accumulation and the consolidation of corporate power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New South African Review 3 by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall. Copyright © 2013 Wits University Press. Excerpted by permission of Wits University Press.
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