The Limits of Black Political Empowerment: Fanon, Marx, 'the Poors' and the 'new reality of the nation' in South Africa

Abstract

In an earlier paper, written in reaction to those who argued that the African National Congress (ANC) had no alternative but to implement neoliberal economic policies in the context of the 'Washington Consensus', I discussed the strategic choices and ideological pitfalls of the 'political class' who took over state power in South Africa after the end of apartheid and implemented its own homegrown structural adjustment programme (Gibson 2001). Much of this transition has been scripted by political science 'transition literature' and much of it is proactive, mapping out what should be done to establish a 'pacteď, 'elite' democracy overseeing neoliberal economic policies (O'Donnell, Schmitter & Whitehead 1986). From another vantage point, I argued that Frantz Fanon 's The Wretched of the Earth is perhaps one of the most perceptive critiques of the transition literature available. This paper continues the discussion. At the end of the critical chapter, 'Spontaneity, its Strengths and Weaknesses', Fanon writes, 'The people find out the iniquitous fact that exploitation can wear a blackface , or an Arab one, and they raise the cry of Treason! But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national but social' (Fanon 1968: 145, my emphasis). I want to consider this 'social' treason by looking at the logic of South Africa's self-limiting political transition from apartheid in light of Fanon 's humanism, which poses not only a theoretical challenge, but also, grounded in the concrete struggle of ordinary people, offers an ideological alternative to the existing 'white' (namely, bourgeois and elite) one that has come to 'wear a black face'.