exercised against those who would seek to organise counter-revolutionary plots … or restore white colonialism’.28
The theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ and its corollary – the need for a national democratic revolution to overturn its consequences – was accepted and formally endorsed by the ANC at its national policy conference in Morogoro (Tanzania) in 1969. The Strategy and Tactics document adopted at this conference echoed the SACP’s perspective in stating: ‘The material well-being of the white group and its political, social, and economic privileges are, we know, rooted in its racial domination of the indigenous majority.’ The document also committed the ANC to a national democratic revolution that would counter ‘the historical injustices perpetrated against the indigenous majority’ by destroying existing economic and social relationships. This would give rise to a new society based on the core provisions of the Freedom Charter.
The Freedom Charter had been adopted at Kliptown (Soweto) in June 1955 and was supposed to have been spontaneously drawn up by the dispossessed black masses. However, its wording was greatly influenced by the SACP and often seemed to reflect a Marxist view. The charter thus called for the land to be ‘re-divided among those who work it’, for the ‘national wealth’ of the country to be restored to the people, and for ‘the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks, and monopoly industry’ to be transferred to ‘the ownership of the people as a whole’. The charter was endorsed by the ANC as its official programme in 1956, despite objections from a number of nationalists that this would give communists too powerful an influence over the ANC. So great was their concern about communist domination that many of these nationalists broke away from the ANC in 1959 to form the Pan-Africanist Congress.29
In the six decades since the document was adopted, socialist policies have visibly failed in many countries, including Russia itself. Despite this, the Freedom Charter remains the lodestar of ANC policy. So too does the concept of the national democratic revolution, even though this idea was repudiated by Russian intellectuals after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Instead of updating its ideas, the ANC remains committed to pushing ahead with the national democratic revolution in South Africa – though it does acknowledge that the collapse of communism has made this goal more difficult to achieve.
Why the ANC remains caught in this time warp is not altogether clear. However, the SACP has dominated the ANC for many years, while both organisations were staunch allies of Moscow for more than six decades. During this period, both became steeped in Soviet ideology. In addition, in the ten years before 1994, the ANC became deeply indebted to Moscow strategists who helped it implement a ‘people’s war’, which weakened or destroyed its black rivals and gave it significant dominance over the new South Africa. It is because of deep ties of this kind, says Irina Filatova, a Moscow-born historian who has written extensively on the long-standing links between the Soviet Union and South Africa, that the Soviet NDR theory ‘still constitutes an integral part of the vision and the programmes of both the ANC and the SACP … and impacts strongly on ANC policies’ in South Africa today.30
The national democratic revolution and ‘transformation’ policies
While the Freedom Charter outlines the overall objectives to be attained, the ANC’s five-yearly Strategy and Tactics documents identify key goals for the next five-year period and sketch the means whereby these aims are to be attained. The Strategy and Tactics documents adopted by the ANC at its national conferences since 1994 identify the over-arching objective of the national democratic revolution as ‘the liberation of Africans in particular and black people in general from political and economic bondage’. According to the ANC, it is only once this degree of emancipation has been achieved that South Africa will become a full democracy.31
Why bringing an end to ‘political … bondage’ should be necessary when the country has already moved from white minority rule to control by the black majority is not explained. However, Marxist theory holds that no society can be a true democracy unless it has become a ‘people’s democracy’ or socialist state. In addition, freedom from ‘economic bondage’ requires, in ANC thinking, the full ‘economic emancipation’ of the country. As Filatova notes, anyone familiar with Marxist terminology knows that ‘economic emancipation’ can never be achieved under capitalism.32 Though the Strategy and Tactics documents shy away from spelling this out, the implication is that the core goals of the national democratic revolution cannot be attained under a multiparty system of liberal democracy, or while free markets and private ownership remain widespread.
The ANC’s commitment to a continuing revolution aimed at socialist outcomes has enormous ramifications for the country. However, neither the goals of the national democratic revolution nor the thinking that underpins it have ever been given much attention by the media. The topic seems to be off-limits to the press, which generally ignored the first stage of the revolution – the people’s war which brought the ANC to power – and now largely overlooks the national democratic revolution and its ramifications.
Also generally ignored is the ANC’s perspective that the national democratic revolution effectively exempts it from having to comply in full with the country’s Constitution (or with any other agreement the organisation has previously endorsed). In the ANC’s view, ordinary political parties may commit themselves to binding outcomes that cannot be altered save by mutual consent, but a national democratic movement with a historic mission cannot be deflected from its long-term objectives by the tactical concessions it might be compelled to make along the way. Such an organisation may find it expedient at various times to enter into compromise agreements that will help to strengthen its position. But, once the balance of forces has shifted in its favour, it will have no hesitation in disregarding or circumventing the compromises earlier made.33
The practical implications of this stance for the constitutional settlement concluded between 1993 and 1996 are profound, but remain generally unexplored. Most of the political parties involved in the talks at that time believed they were negotiating in good faith for a constitutional settlement that would be accepted by all as a binding pact. For the ANC, however, the political transition in April 1994 was merely an important milestone on the road to the full implementation of the national democratic revolution. In 1995 Mbeki told an ANC conference that the negotiations for an interim constitution were ‘contrived elements of a transition’ necessary to end white domination. At no time did the ANC consider them as ‘elements of permanence’, he said. However, the fact the ANC has never regarded the constitutional settlement as binding on it has been overlooked by most commentators on the country’s ‘miracle’ transition.34
From the ANC’s perspective, the Constitution contains many provisions – including guaranteed and justiciable socio-economic rights of access to housing, health care, social security, and the like – which are useful in building the power of the state and advancing the national democratic revolution. However, the Constitution also has other provisions – particularly its guarantees of property rights, multiparty democracy, and fundamental civil liberties – which inhibit the fulfilment of its revolutionary goals.
This did not matter so much in the first 15 years after 1994, for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had ushered in a very 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’.35 In this changed world, the ANC could at best make small and incremental steps – often under the rubric of affirmative action and BEE – towards its revolutionary goals. Since 2008, however, the economic crisis in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere has been widely hailed as evidence of the collapse of the capitalist model. Many in the ANC and the SACP are thus impatient to speed up the pace of the national democratic revolution – but know that aspects of the Constitution could hinder this process.
The ANC’s disdain for constitutional constraints has thus become more evident in recent years. In September 2011, for instance, the then
