Challenging Inequality in South Africa

Transitional Compasses

Michelle Williams, Vishwas Satgar, Michelle Williams, Vishwas Satgar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000194258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Challenging Inequality in South Africa: Transitional Compasses leading scholars of South Africa explore creative possibilities to challenge structures of economic, social and political power that produce inequality. Through concrete empirical examples of movements, workers' struggles, initiatives, and politics in challenging inequality, the authors illustrate 'transitional compasses' that go beyond protest politics to a 'generative' politics, a politics of building the alternatives in the interstitial spaces of capitalism. The conceptual framing is oriented around the way in which power is produced and reproduced through intricate relationships between hegemonic projects and everyday life. While power underpins all social relations, it is often taken for granted, as it is frequently hidden behind other social relations. Resistance to power emerges through engendering counter-hegemonic projects that are intertwined with alternative everyday practices. The authors highlight sources of alternative forms of power found in resistance to dominant forms of power through concrete experiences to create transformative alternatives. To concretize the conceptual framing, the authors look at the emancipatory possibilities of a universal basic income, the use of law in tackling inequality in health and education, creative initiatives to establish a people-centred food system through food sovereignty, new forms of organizing led by precarious workers, democratic possibilities in local state delivery, and attempts at reconceptualizing the good life by looking at issues of happiness and ecosocialism.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Globalizations.

Transitional compass: anti-capitalist pathways in the interstitial spaces of capitalism*

Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar

ABSTRACT

The focus of the special issue explores the forms of power used, engendered, and (re)produced to challenge structures of economic, social and political power that produce inequality as well as concrete empirical examples of movements, workers’ struggles, and initiatives in challenging inequality. The idea of ‘transitional compass’ looks beyond protest politics to what we call ‘generative’ politics that builds the alternatives in the interstitial spaces of capitalism. Resistance to power emerges through engendering counter-hegemonic projects that are intertwined with alternative everyday practices. To concretize the conceptual framing, we focus on the emancipatory possibilities of a universal basic income, the use of law in tackling inequality in health and education, creative initiatives to establish a people-centred food system, new forms of organizing by precarious workers, democratic possibilities in local state delivery, and reconceptualizing the good life by looking at issues of happiness and ecosocialism.

‘The Necessity of Utopian Thinking’

Rick Turner (1972)

Introduction

For many people, the current system of global capitalism is not only here to stay, but they might ask why would we want anything else. After all, capitalism has brought amazing advances in technology that many enjoy every day – smart phones, laptop computers, smart TVs, driverless cars, high speed trains, mega airplanes, medical technologies that save lives, and so on – and has made the world one big marketplace. Every material desire is met through the vast array of consumer goods, which are more affordable than ever. Life expectancy in many countries, especially advanced capitalist countries, has increased dramatically. Access to basic and tertiary education are hallmarks of the twentieth century with the growth in public schools and the spread of universities, funded through taxes. With so many obvious benefits to capitalism, why are we complaining?

This is one side of the story. There is another, darker, side. With the extraordinary accomplishments of advanced capitalism have also come extra-ordinary negative consequences that outweigh the positives for the vast majority of people. Poverty, environmental destruction, political instability, increasing unhappiness and loneliness, ‘surplus populations’ eking out lives on the margins, unresponsive governments, and economic uncertainty are all marked features of today’s world. Indeed, large numbers of the world’s population do not enjoy the benefits of the technological advances or have access to the many consumer goods only available to those who can afford them. Instead the world’s poorest regions and poorest peoples bear a disproportionate burden of capitalism’s negative externalities such as the destruction of their habitats and environments through extractive industries, the enclosure of public goods such as land and water through privatization, and lack of access to the essentials of life such as food, safety, and a home. The myth of twentieth century capitalism – that increasing wealth creation, spreading capitalism to all regions of the globe, and the commodification of everything would lead to rising material conditions of life for everyone – has led to perverse outcomes most vividly registered in extreme forms of inequality seen in every corner of the globe. Indeed, one of the most vexing realities of this system is the persistent inequality that it generates.

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• * The articles in this special issue are from the Transitional Compass Working Group in the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. SCIS provided funding for some of the research of each of the articles. We would like to thank SCIS for their financial and intellectual support, David Francis for the many forms of support he provided, and the Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene project at WITS for funding support that enabled a writing retreat in January 2019 to conclude this article.

Development journals, research reports and popular news media are replete with statistics showing how inequality within nations has grown dramatically over the past forty years and how world inequality now claims a staggering 0.7 Gini coefficient (based on individual incomes) (Milanovic, 2012, pp. 8–9). The top income earners have been the real winners of global capitalism: the ‘top 1% has seen its real income rise by more than 60% over those two decades [since 1988]’ (Milanovic, 2012, p. 12) whereas the position of low and medium-skilled workers has deteriorated over the same period. For example, labour’s share of income in advanced economies has declined since the 1980s and is now below the 1950s level (MGI, 2012, p. 7). Of the nearly 3 billion workers, ¹ 61% (approximately 2 billion) are in the informal economy without any forms of social protection, labour rights, or decent working conditions (ILO, 2018a). These trends reflect the shift in the global economy to high skilled work increasingly requiring fewer low and medium skilled workers (MGI, 2012, pp. 8–9).

While the majority of the world’s poor have always lived in low income countries, today we see a surprising trend that 73% of the poor live in middle income countries (World Bank, 2018). ² What this tells us is that a country’s wealth does not translate into fewer poor people. Rather there is a pronounced disconnect between a country’s wealth and its population’s income level and well-being. Indeed, as many countries register rising Gross Domestic Products (GDP) they also witness growing inequality within their borders. As a result, as capitalism develops to new heights, increasing numbers of people eke out precarious lives on the margins of capitalism – some entirely outside, without links to capitalism through wage labour. What this suggests is that the current economic system does not benefit the vast majority of the world’s people. Nevertheless, financialized global capitalism – what is often referred to as neoliberal capitalism – continues to dominate economic activity both in national and global spaces.

South Africa reflects the global trends in the extreme. According to the World Bank, in 2017 South Africa’s economy was the 29th largest economy in the world with a per capita GDP rate of US$6151.10 (current $ rate), placing it among middle income economies (World Bank, 2019a). At the same time, it registers among the highest inequality rates in the world at .63 in 2015 (World Bank, 2019b) has seen consistently high unemployment (from 22% in 2008 to 27% in 2018 and a youth unemployment rate of 55% in 2019) ( Mail and Guardian, 2014; Statistics South Africa, 2019b, 2019c), and according to Statistics South Africa approximately half the population lives below the poverty line (Statistics South Africa, 2019a). A further illustration of the failure to translate economic growth into quality of life is the growing poverty rate among children under 17 years, which grew from a staggering 63.7% in 2011 to a horrifying 66.8% in 2015 (Africa Check, 2018). This tells us that the most vulnerable in society, children, bear the largest brunt of an economic system that manifest in growing poverty and rising inequality.

It’s not only the economy that registers the concentration of power and wealth. We are living in an age in which democracy has been hollowed out by corporate capture in advanced capitalist countries such as the United States and much of Europe, as well as middle and low income countries. Corporations and their international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank increasingly have undue influence over policy and strategic decisions of these states, leaving citizens sitting on the sidelines as spectators of history. The effects of this extend far beyond the borders of the global North as corporate capture threatens the sovereignty of countries and the disenfranchisement of peoples across the globe. Indeed over the past thirty years, neoliberal capitalism has touched down in virtually every corner of the world.

This rising inequality has become one of the central concerns of scholars from across disciplines, with academic journals in economics, development, sociology, and politics awash with articles analysing the causes and consequences of inequality and how current structures of power reproduce inequality in the life cycle of people. Most of this research looks at the existing order to develop critiques of its outcomes. With the focus on causes and consequences, there is less scholarly attention to pathways out of inequality, on the need to develop realistic alternatives – what Erik Olin Wright (2010) calls ‘Real Utopias’ – and strategies on how to achieve alternative possible futures. In this special issue, we focus on pathways out of inequality, what we call ‘Transitional Compass’, that look at alternatives and how to reach them. We look at concrete empirical examples in South Africa, one of the most unequal countries in the world, with inequality indices rising over the last twenty-five years.

The basic assumption of the transitional compass is that inequality and the other negative consequences of advanced capitalism, cannot be solved within capitalism. To overcome the fundamental structural causes requires anti-capitalist politics, practices, and vision. However, to envision a post-capitalist world (that is, a democratic-ecosocialist world) requires ideas about how to get there. We argue that any anti-capitalist alternative will be built within, alongside, and beyond capitalism. Fundamental to building these alternatives is building counter-power that is able to challenge the formidable concentration of power within corporations and their states. In looking for alternatives, we appreciate the twin forces of the specific political economy of South Africa and the structural constraints imposed by the capitalist system globally.

Based on a series of case studies, the Transitional Compass research group converges around a few key areas: new organizing methods, innovative organizational forms, the importance of the state and legal framework, and the importance of utopian visions. The last of these refers to imaginings grounded in lived experience and actual struggles expressing a desire for alternative ways of sustaining life. Through these four axes, the cases seek to engender, exercise, and engage various forms of power. Together the cases provide a transitional compass(es) that highlight humanistic principles, egalitarian values, democratic practices, and a belief in human solidarity. In a world that sees so much misery, the metaphor of compass seems especially appropriate as an instrument to help us find our direction.

The transitional compass

The transitional compass idea takes as its starting point the belief that alternatives to capitalism are possible, but that these pathways have to acknowledge multiple tributaries that have to connect through webs of solidarity. There are myriad responses from communities, activists, workers’ organizations, scholars, and NGOs to the pernicious consequences of the neoliberal era in which states act on behalf of corporations. All of the responses address and challenge the shortcomings of the current system and many look for pathways to a different future. Some pose direct challenges to the current system by prefiguratively developing alternatives, while others push progressive changes within the system that fundamentally redress inequality. Drawing on six research papers in the Transitional Compass group, we highlight lessons for pathways to challenge inequality.

Finding a transitional compass requires looking at movements, initiatives, and politics that move beyond protest politics to what we call generative politics, a politics that focuses its energy on building the alternatives in the interstitial spaces in and around capitalism (Williams, 2008). For much of the twentieth century, the most efficacious political action was protest action focusing on grievances and claims-making due to the omnipotence of dominant, well-resourced states who tended to respond to demands by citizens. In this context, labour movements were the preeminent organizational form with tremendous power and efficacy to influence their states. Fin de Siecle politics, however, has seen the withering of states’ social welfare role and the increasing power of the economic elite. The state has been less responsive to pressure from organized labour to protect society from the ravages of the market, but has promoted increased market penetration (similar to Polanyi’s (1944/2001) double movement). The power of organized labour has also been systematically eroded through changes in state policies, corporations’ recalcitrance to labour’s demands, globalization in which corporations move production to cheaper regions, widespread retrenchments of the industrial working class, and internal organizational issues. Thus, increasing inequality is situated within a context of new relations between the state, civil society, and the economy, with power residing increasingly with dominant economic actors. This has also translated into less efficacious protests politics. While we see enormous numbers of protest actions in South Africa and the world, their efficacy is not clear. Do they amount to fundamental challenges that help to build a more egalitarian, more equal and just society?

These changes have forced new thinking on transformative change. Our focus is on initiatives that seek to develop alternatives that transcend the current economic and political relations. Generative politics, we suggest, shifts from the defensive (or contentious) phase, and seeks to construct and develop new institutions, organizational forms, channels for participation, and new forms of power. We contrast generative politics with protest politics, by which we mean a politics that aims to challenge or destroy an existing system through mass mobilization of thousands of people onto the streets in high profile, public displays of power. Generative politics is neither inherently contentious nor is it simply institutionalized politics (though it can have elements of both protests and institutionalized politics). Generative politics is about innovation in collective action that seeks to engender new practices, social relations, political actors, organizations, and institutions. For example, in the South African context, transformative constitutionalism and claims on progressive socio-economic rights embedded in social justice political mobilizing are key forms of generative politics as the socio-economic rights enshrined in the South African constitution provide an avenue to force the state to support people-centred development. Like contentious politics it seeks to transform the social, political, and economic arenas. But unlike contentious politics’ focus on grievances against the state and capital, generative politics primarily works through transforming the state and economy by developing new institutions, practices, and initiatives that embed the state and economy within society.

Central to this focus is the issue of power. Power is produced and reproduced through intricate relationships between hegemonic projects and everyday life. While power underpins all social relations it is often taken for granted or completely overlooked as it is often hidden behin...