very focused on the political tasks, democratisation, mobilisation, fighting a guerrilla struggle’ (in Gumede 2007: 84). Cronin makes a series of insightful observations on the ideological character of the SACP and the ANC on the eve of negotiations:
The 1990s for the SACP was a paradoxical moment. The ‘Soviet’ legacy we were part of collapsed. The Party was unbanned in 1990 and half of the Party Central Committee resigns … So the ANC does not [undertake] a profound reflection on the collapse of the Soviet Union and so forth, it just soldiers on … does not reflect on new global realities. And the new democracy is emerging with all kinds of economic policy mistakes and miscalculations and so forth (Cronin interview, 14 March 2016, emphasis added).
We partially share Cronin’s position that what happened was ‘understandable’, arguably a function of the balance of forces and the messy outcome characteristic of most negotiated settlements (see also chapter 4). Yet, after 1990, the ANC, seen through a balance-of-power lens, had some not inconsiderable moral and political power. At the international level, the ANC, and Mandela in particular, had virtually unqualified support from some Western governments. Bill Clinton, who was very close to Mandela, became president of the United States (US) in 1992. There was also significant support from Western civil society solidarity organisations, such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement based in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Black Caucus in the US. Locally, the ANC was unchallenged in its support through organisations such as the United Democratic Front, Cosatu and the South African National Civic Organisation, as well as the churches and other social movements. Never were South Africans more united in their stand to bring about a non-racial, non-sexist and unitary democratic South Africa. That this power was not used effectively to secure the left social democratic trajectory, which was historically embedded in the ANC, is something akin to a tragedy. This is a point that Ronnie Kasrils, too, makes powerfully (Interview, 30 March 2017).
At the same time, we do not, on the basis of our research, share the views of those who claim that the ANC leadership sold out in one form or other; we do not accept that those in positions of leadership in the ANC’s economics team set out deliberately and solely for personal benefit or glory to sell out the ANC’s historical commitment to social and economic justice; and we do not accept that the ‘sell-out’ occurred as a result of some kind of conspiracy and secret late-night meetings that involved international financial institutions and local capital.
Our research reveals many weaknesses in the ANC economics team, in its capabilities and experience, and in the processes and practices involved in the debate and negotiations around forging a post-apartheid economic strategy. It is also clear that some important progressive economic policy alternatives were ignored and then unceremoniously discarded. There are many complex and overlapping explanations for this, as we suggest in chapters 4 and 5.
We accept the existence of multiple influences – both economic and political, and both internal and external – on ANC economic thinking in the 1990s. While we point to such multiple influences and stress some that may have been underestimated or downplayed to date, we would like to emphasise upfront that it is not our intention in this book to offer any kind of mathematical or sociological ‘weighting’ of these multiple influences or indeed to ‘finger’ anyone or any group within or outside the ANC for what happened. We plan to provide the narrative of economic and social policy debates and thinking within the ANC Alliance in the 1990s as we saw it, warts and all,2 as trained social science and economic researchers, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, but also from our own perspectives as participants in some of these events.
It must also be stressed at the outset that we do not claim that we have mastered the whole story in every respect. This exercise has proven to be extremely difficult to research. Some participants in the drama of the 1990s with whom we were keen to speak were reluctant to grant us interviews; records, even those at some official archives, are still not complete or easy to access systematically; and there are likely to be records and personal recollections scattered across the nation and internationally that we were not even aware of. So all in all, if there are gaps and some misinterpretations, as there undoubtedly will be, we hope that this is understandable. Our aspiration is that we have begun to pave the way for later researchers to pick up and develop these threads more fully, until one day a more robust and sustainable record of these globally celebrated, yet complex, times is achieved.
CHAPTER
2
African Claims, the Freedom Charter and Social Democracy, 1943–1960
THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC IDEAS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM IN THE 1940S
The period between 1939 and 1945 was a significant one for the development of inclusive social policies that created the possibility of a social democratic option for a post-war, post-segregation South Africa. The war against fascism led to many white workers enlisting in the army. This meant that the United Party government under Jan Smuts was forced to depend on black economic and political support for the Allied war effort, of which South Africa was a part. The need to maintain ‘industrial peace’ in Smuts’ phrase (Hansard, vol. 43, 1942, col. 5) and fearing Japanese invasion after the collapse of Singapore in February 1942, the United Party established a series of commissions on a post-war ‘people’s charter’. This included examination of the social needs of urban Africans, who were the bedrock of industrial growth and thus the war effort. These social policy reviews in health, education and welfare represented the most extensive examination of the effects of poverty and lack of social service provision in South African history, only surpassed by the democratic government of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The reviews identified the need for direct government intervention to overcome the failure of the policy of segregation to stem the tide of black urbanisation in the 1940s, and to ameliorate the health and welfare conditions of Africans in the urban areas. They also showed that the system of capitalism neglected to remunerate African workers at a level adequate to sustain their livelihood in urban areas.
A number of detailed social development proposals consistent with a broadly social democratic impetus emerged between 1940 and 1944. They recommended a national health service under state control; the extension of state housing and welfare provision for Africans; the eradication of the pass laws, which forcibly controlled the movement of Africans; the extension of social security into a national system incorporating urban Africans; central government control of African education; and specific measures around the extension of milk provision and feeding schemes for Africans. The political circumstances of the war against fascism induced this search on the part of the Smuts government for more inclusive social policies that could relieve the poverty of urban Africans, and was led by liberal reformers in the government. The unstated ‘diswelfares’ caused by segregation and capitalism were thus not allowed to remain undealt with, but were seen by these government commissions as the responsibility of the state.
The reformist proposals emerging in South Africa were broadly comparable to the more inclusive social policy proposals in the UK in the 1940s, based on state protected social rights of citizenship that were spearheaded by the Beveridge Report. These proposals eventually led to the establishment of the welfare state following a landslide Labour Party victory in 1945. In the colonies, the strategic consequences of the ‘self-determination’ provisions of the 1941 anti-fascist Atlantic Charter were also taken up by anti-colonial radicals (United Nations 2018). For example, as early as 1942, the African-independence political activist George Padmore identified the strategic importance of the call by the Atlantic Charter to make global democratisation and extension of welfare part of the struggle against colonialism (Padmore and Cunard 1942). This position was consolidated at the 5th Pan Africanist Congress in Manchester in 1945, where the resolution of the West Indies delegation was adopted. It called
