My Thoughts on The South African Emacipatory Project:

There can be very little doubt that the ideas of the Left wing political discourse in South Africa have been dealt a comprehensive blow and like a punch drunk boxer , the left within the National Liberation Movement, continues to clutch at straws in the vain hope of some crumbs from the masters table .
The National Democratic Revolution had held out the hope that an invigorated emacipatory dialogue, if not action, would unfold from the seizure of State power. The unromantic and brutally honest reality has been the unrestrained collaboration between the Liberation Movement and the Forces of Capital that has resulted in the subjugation of any type of Socialist Cultural Hegemony in favour of the narrow pursuit of wealth at a State and economic Level, thus consolidating the Capitalist Cultural Hegemony.
The crass discourse at a national level, in which personal agendas in pursuit of power and wealth, have formed the basis of the South African Left`s engagement with the state, has been amply exposed by the inclusion of the SACP executives at a cabinet Level and the subsequent failure of the left, despite its hope that the capitalist forces would “throw the left a bone”, to engineer a “Socialist Budget”, all the while conceding more and more ground to the Capitalist Hegemony.
The task of the Left is made ever more challenging, given the very populist nature of a vocal African Nationalist contingent within the National Liberation Movement.
In this David and I agree. Where we our thought processes depart, however, is how to interpret the current juncture of the South African emancipatory project, through the prism of historical and dialectical materialism.
It would be worthwhile at this stage to reflect on the past and to identify the mission with which we set out to emancipate the oppressed and exploited from the chains of the white capital in particular but capital in general.
Nelson Mandela encapsulated the communist perspective very well when he pointed out in his speech at the Rivonia trial in 1964, “As far as the SACP is concerned, and if I understand its policy correctly, it stands for the establishment of a State based on the principles of Marxism. Although it is prepared to work for the Freedom Charter, it regards the Freedom Charter as the beginning, and not the end.”
The Freedom Charter remains a significant and useful document against which to measure the progress of the emancipatory Project within the South African Context.
Part of the dilemma of the left I believe is that we have applied a capitalist cultural paradigm to the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter continues to offer a radical challenge to the capitalist cultural hegemony, but has somehow been transformed into a convenient stick with which even the bourgeoisie can beat the drum of popular discontent for their own narrow agenda.
I cannot agree with David more that the failure of the left to radicalise the Freedom Charter and to hold the Charter up as the minimum programme has been an important failure.
Within the Freedom Charter lie the very seeds of an equalitarian and emacipatory Project and offers the South African left an opportunity to engage in a range of social struggles while uniting these separate struggles to the emacipatory project of the Freedom Charter.
I will not at this stage attempt to unravel the very radical nature of the Freedom Charter and hope that this might constitute a more in-depth discussion at a later stage.
THE STATE.
It would be important for any discussion of the left to consider the role of the State and the relationship of the political left to this state.
The South African Liberation movement led by the ANC, made a historical mistake when between 1989 and 1994 it made an unofficial alliance with capital and agreed to the supremacy of the markets in the development of the South African Economy.
When, in 1994 ,it took the reins of the state, it started a process of compromise, conceding ever more ground to the “markets” culminating in the infamous GEAR programme.
This programme more than any other intervention accelerated the growing inequality within the nation and has provided capital with a free reign within which organised labour has consistently been isolated within the paradigm of job protection or as Gramsci would suggest, “vulgar economism”,while the emancipatory dialogue of the previously revolutionary cadres, has been relegated to the plush homes of the leftist ideologues over a glass of wine.
All the while capital has been engaging susceptible leaders around glasses of expensive whiskey and Cuban cigars, further cementing the “unholy alliance’ between the state and capital.
If Karl Marx is to be believed then the state is but the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisies. In The South African context the State would still have us believe that it remains pro- poor even though it’s continued embrace of free market reforms are a clear indicator to the contrary. The embrace by orgainsed labour of this “vulgar economism” has partly enchouraged the state but has also played into the hands of capital.
Gramsci points out that “under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere”. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in 'passive revolution' by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change.
Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek neo-Marxist theorist argued that capitalist states do not always act on behalf of the ruling class, and when they do, it is not necessarily the case because state officials consciously strive to do so, but because the 'structural' position of the state is configured in such a way to ensure that the long-term interests of capital are always dominant.
So the State as the “executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” and organised labour or the Liberation Movement in General has agreed to a period of “vulgar economic nationalism” in which the hegemony of capital has been “passively revolutionised “ by opening up access to wealth and wealth accumulation for the excluded middle class and political elite so that they may form a sufficiently acceptable mask for, and indeed participate in, the continued exclusion and exploitation of the proletariat.
The participation by the National Liberation Movement (NLM)( or those within the ANC who hold an emancipatory view of the world,as well as Cosatu and the SACP), within the State must be seriously reconsidered in light of this analysis and would suggest that if the current trend of economic inequality and exclusion continues, the NLM will make itself guilty of the conscious exploitation and exclusion of the South African Poor.

So what is to be done?
The idea of a two stage revolution as propagated in the “Path to Power” has presented the left with an all too simplistic, and dare I say anti –dialectical, answer to an increasingly complex dialectic.
The idea of an “October Coup” as Lenin called it the first editions of Lenin's complete works, is a discredited and anti class struggle, political intervention, that replaces one state for another
Emancipatory change can only come about by the means of “class struggle” and as David correctly points out “Once they are conceptualised, fought for and implemented as ‘achievements on their own’ they become nothing but reformist.”
So too has our struggle for a National Democratic Revolution “become nothing but reformist” by its very nature. Thus the forces for emancipatory change are once again being called to the trenches. Whether the current NLM has the will to untangle themselves from the “Pigs Trough”, is at the heart of the challenge facing the left.
Thus it is this anti-dialectical “two stage” revolutionary paradigm that has paralysed the left into virtual defeat. The true emacipatory revolution is a continuous revolution that withers away the state by historically and in true dialectical fashion contradicting the status quo.
It would then follow that if the emancipatory revolution renews itself in a dialectical fashion then a dictatorship of the proletariat becomes anti revolutionary and anti dialectical.
Karl Marx best summed up the dialectical nature of emacipatory revolution when he wrote in Das Kapital thus: “In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”
If the emancipatory project is to remain true to the ideals of emancipation, then the “path to revolution” as opposed to the “path to power” is clear.
The State has become anti revolutionary in its nature and needs to be isolated and exposed, in the cauldron of true working class struggle, in which the Socialist Cultural hegemony is propogated in contradiction to the capitalist social hegemony , re-appropriating the ideals of the Freedom Charter as a minimum programme, and reinvigorating its fundamentally radical nature.

And in conclusion may the words of Karl Marx ring in our ears:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.