Last spring’s elections in South Africa may have marked an important turning point with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) scoring 70 percent of the vote. Now the ANC has racked up impressive majorities in all provinces, including Kwa-Zulu Natal and the Western Cape. Four years ago the ANC narrowly lost in these two provinces.
The size of the victory of the ANC-led alliance, which includes the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), speaks volumes. Support for the ANC while always high amongst the African majority has increased among all sections of the population, most notably among the Indian and the so-called colored working class and even among whites. South Africa’s national liberation movement can now speak of a countrywide mandate for accelerating the revolutionary process of eliminating apartheid and rebuilding the nation on a non-racial basis. In fact, ANC leaders are speaking of a new stage in what is called the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). In today’s circumstances, the national democratic revolution means the achievement and exercise of state and governmental power by an oppressed or colonized nation and the elimination of remnants of such oppression. In South Africa it means the defeat of apartheid racism, the empowerment of the African majority, and the overcoming of centuries-old racism.

In other countries, this revolution was accomplished some time ago. Here at home it was interrupted by slavery and the Civil War. And while arguably the territorial defines of the US nation-state were achieved in the early part of the 20th century, the national democratic revolution wasn’t complete in a political sense until the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, when winning the right to vote and the end of legal segregation were achieved. However, economically, because of institutionalized racism, it remains a hotly contested arena of continuing national democratic and class struggle. Today South Africa is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the defeat of apartheid, a decade of freedom and people’s power. However the ANC has not been able to exercise complete state power for a full 10 years. The first government led by President Nelson Mandela was a transitional coalition with several different parties sharing power. President Mbeki’s newly-elected government will only begin its second term of unfettered majority rule.

Still despite the shortness of time much has been accomplished, not the least of which was a relatively peaceful transition of power into the hands of the Black majority. This was no small achievement and speaks to the maturity, deftness, intellectual depth and skill of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and other revolutionary democrats and Communists who led the national liberation movement to victory.

It should be remembered that arrayed against the cause of South African freedom was a fascist apartheid state armed with nuclear and state-of-the-art conventional weapons. Their disarmament and the avoidance of civil war will go down in history as one of the greatest revolutionary acts of the last century.

Consolidating the national democratic victory and carrying out a transfer of power in both the government and state within the context of a policy aimed at reconciliation and national unity was a continuation of this great revolutionary achievement. Indeed without this policy, the ANC’s electoral victory would have been impossible. Truth and reconciliation has proven to be a mighty moral platform upon which to lead the nation forward.

Yet these achievements must be weighed against and seen within the context of South Africa’s ongoing class and racial stratification. This is all the more so because the working class and poor play a central role in the country’s unfolding drama. The problems faced by the new South Africa are immense, even staggering. Unemployment is over 30 percent; perhaps one in four are HIV positive; the majority of Africans live in shanties in sprawling townships across the country.

Making headway in solving the huge social, health and economic crisis facing the nation is imperative. President Mbeki appears acutely aware of this. 'We must ensure that the government implements programs that accelerate the process of making a difference in the lives of all our people, focusing on the fight against poverty and joblessness,' he wrote recently.

How to achieve this may be the chief issue before the country. In this regard, many on the left pointing to the privatization of the former aparthied state enterprises have criticized the ANC government accusing of them abandoning revolutionary tasks and following a neo-liberal economic strategy. 'Why he’s creating a Black bourgeoisie' some say as if it was curse.

But so long as South Africa remains capitalist don’t Africans have as much right to be capitalists as whites? (In fact it could be credibly argued even more so). Isn’t that at this stage a part of the fight for democracy? But so too is solving the economic crisis of the working-class majority.

Against such critiques from right and left Mbeki writes: 'The complex of ideological and political propositions and programs to oppose the NDR have, over the last decade, been forced into an uninterrupted retreat, being rebuffed by continuously increasing numbers of our people.'

Thus it seems that at issue are just what are the revolutionary tasks at this stage of the South African revolution? The ANC has defined them as the defeat of apartheid: the consolidation of the political victory along with overcoming the effects of racism and apartheid and the achievement of a better life for all. Having achieved the first, the forces of national liberation, led by the ANC, the SACP and COSATU are busily engaging the second and third.

The rate and methods for achieving these ends have been the source of ongoing tensions in the ANC-led coalition. It is hoped that the election victory will give greater impetus to unifying the forces of national liberation on a platform upon which all can agree.

One can imagine that along side this process and indeed underlying it will be a rather complex and protracted decades-long struggle. Laying the basis for a new society will require eliminating illiteracy, training a highly skilled technical and scientific workforce, rebuilding institutions of popular power, and transforming the institutions of government and the state. And all this in preparation for laying hold of the economy.

With the election victory, the ANC seems to have laid a firm basis for proceeding ahead. South Africa is in the process of becoming an advanced democratic state, and is providing vital lessons for the revolutionary movement worldwide. Kind of hard to argue with 70 percent.



--Joe Sims is editor of Political Affairs. He can be reached at joesims@politicalaffairs.net.