Abstract
This article situates the Marikana massacre, in which 34 mine workers were gunned down by police in South Africa, in the context of what the South African state has become, and questions the characterisation of the post-Apartheid state as a “developmental state”. This contribution first highlights what is at stake when the post-Apartheid state is portrayed as a “developmental state” and how this misrecognition of the state is ideologically constituted. Second, it argues for an approach to understanding the post-Apartheid state by locating it within the context of the rise of transnational neoliberalism and the process of indigenising neoliberalism on the African continent. Third, it examines the actual economic practices of the state that constitute it as an Afro-neoliberal state. Such economic practices are historicised to show the convergence between the post-Apartheid state and the ideal type neoliberal state coming to the fore in the context of global neoliberal restructuring and crisis management. The article concludes by recognising that South Africa's deep globalisation and globalised state affirm a form of state practice beyond utilising market mechanisms that includes perpetrating violence to secure its existence. Marikana makes this point.
On 16 August 2012 post-Apartheid South Africa experienced what has been called the Marikana massacre. Striking mine workers were gunned down by police at the Lonmin platinum mine. Media and academic reports confirmed that most of the 34 miners were shot in the back while fleeing from the police, suggesting premeditated action. Moreover, the surviving workers were initially charged using Apartheid-era legislation and deemed to have perpetrated the murder of their fellow workers. Due to civil society outrage, this charge has been temporarily suspended, and the government has also ordered heavy police and military presence along the Platinum Belt, effectively suspending constitutional rights to protest, undermining the constitutional right of mine workers to strike, and imposing an undeclared state of emergency. Throughout this tragic saga, key government ministers, including the Minister for Minerals and Energy and the Minister for Trade and Industry, have openly attempted to assure international investors that South Africa is a safe destination for investment and that investments in mining are very secure. What does the Marikana massacre, including the assuaging of foreign investors’ concerns by ministers in the aftermath of this tragedy, mean for the character and role of the post-Apartheid state? Put differently, is the Marikana massacre simply a manifestation of what the state has become in South Africa?
The post-Apartheid state form is contested ideologically and politically in South Africa. National liberation ideology historically – particularly through the African National Congress’ (ANC) programmatic Freedom Charter – authorised state intervention as a crucial part of non-racial nation-building. At the same time, legitimate grass-roots expectations expressed the need for a “national popular” project in which the logic of state-centric development occupied a crucial place in economic transformation alongside other development logics. However, these conceptions of state-led development did not materialise with the election of the first post-Apartheid democratic government in 1994. Instead, during nearly two decades of freedom, South Africa's liberation movement internalised a neoliberal approach to economic management, and after half a decade of such economic management it declared the post-Apartheid state a “developmental state”.
This article questions the characterisation of the post-Apartheid state form as a “developmental state”. To interrogate this question, it draws on neo-Gramscian global political economy, which is well established in the discipline of international relations and has two important starting points as a critical mode of analysis: First, it recognises that the state form cannot be treated as an ontological given existing outside history. In other words, the state as a crucial social actor has to be historicised to understand the origins of its various institutional forms and how it is constituted and shaped by social forces, both domestic and international. Second, social and theoretical analysis is never neutral and is always for someone and toward some end. In this regard, neo-Gramscian global political economy has a normative underpinning in pursuit of social justice and progressive transformation.
The article begins by highlighting what is at stake by characterising the post-Apartheid state as a “developmental state” and explaining how this misrecognition is ideologically constituted. Second, the article argues for an approach to understanding the post-Apartheid state by locating it within the context of the rise of transnational neoliberalism and the process of indigenising neoliberalism on the African continent. It examines how post-Apartheid South Africa's choice to embrace global capitalist restructuring (otherwise known as “globalisation”) favoured the interests of transnational capital and created the conditions for transnationalising monopolistic relations of production beyond a nationally bounded mode of production. The embrace of neoliberalism and the deepening of South Africa's integration into global circuits of accumulation brought to an end a discourse of “South African exceptionalism”. Instead, South Africa became one of many laboratories of “Afro-neoliberalism” – that is, neoliberalism with African characteristics.
Moreover, this article examines what the actual economic practices of the state are that make it, more precisely, an Afro-neoliberal state. Such economic practices display a convergence between the actual post-Apartheid state and the ideal type neoliberal state form in the context of global neoliberal restructuring. This article identifies and shows how the various economic management practices of the state recompose it into an Afro-neoliberal state form while engendering an extroverted, competitive and enclave-based accumulation model. This contribution historicises the economic management practices of the post-Apartheid state form as part of the conjuncture of constituting the Afro-neoliberal state (1996 to the present).
The Post-Apartheid Developmental State in Question
The twentieth-century developmental state has been characterised as a state leading catch-up industrialisation, a state that uses intervention to bring about structural change and provide a basis for capital accumulation (Chang 2002). Such states have shifted from high-growth, low-tech economies to high-growth and high-tech economies. In this regard, the developmental state literature has attempted to bring the state “back in” by looking closely at how developmental states have led such processes of structural change. This literature has constituted an iconic framing of successful “Asian Tigers” such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and more recently China. While this literature has not framed developmental state models, it has pointed to crucial reforms and state practices that portend what is possible. Such experiences and literature point to various “success” or “failure” factors that could provide a basis for mimetic learning and diffusion (see Amsden 1989 and 2001; Evans 1995; Chibber 2003).
However, the experience of the developmental state is also about the relationship between visions of developmentalism, conceptions of the state and how these are articulated through nationalism. In a path-breaking text on the emergence of the developmental state and state-guided capitalist development in East Asia, Chalmers Johnson in Miti and the Japanese Miracle (1982), highlights how an effective institutional system evolved over time through a learning process and out of different crisis moments in Japanese capitalist development. While such a system was anchored in a prioritisation of developmentalism over time, it developed a repertoire of policy tools and mechanisms to actualise this. However, Johnson (1982: 307) provided a caution in 1982 still relevant today:
It may be possible to borrow Japan's priorities and institutions, but the situational nationalism of its people during the 1950s and 1960s is something another people will have to develop, not borrow.
This point about the mobilising role of nationalism to achieve national economic goals is also underlined by Woo-Cumings. She writes,
Johnson places the “binding agent” of East Asian development in both the context of “late development” and the East Asian setting of revolutionary nationalism – not a garden-variety nationalism but one that grew from war and imperialism and manifested itself variously: communism in China and North Korea, and the capitalist developmental state in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan” (Woo-Cumings 1999: 7).
Similarly, in France such a national consciousness after World War II was evoked not by appealing to “growth” or to some technical economic outcome; Loriaux (1999: 252–253) shows how “moral ambition” played a substantial role in mobilising developmental ambitions within the national consciousness. Moreover, the study of various national histories about these ambitions makes it seem as if the
developmental-state elite pursue moral goods whose definition is informed by a certain mythological construction of how the world works and what we can and should accomplish (Loriaux 1999: 253).
In the South African context, the nationalism of national liberation forged a national identity in the context of overcoming Apartheid. A new South Africanness emerged through programmatic politics grounded in the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955 at the Congress of the People. While this nationalism declared a non-racial alternative to racialised oppression it also recognised that racial inequities had to be addressed through state-led transformation. In many ways, the utopian element of a non-racial nationalism for South Africa envisaged a state-centric developmental project: either social democratic, revolutionary nationalist or Soviet socialist. The state loomed large in the imaginary of national liberation despite its various ideological inflections. However, the narrative of state-led redistribution, industrial development and transformation lost its moorings in a post-Apartheid context due to the shortcomings of the national liberation project and its neoliberalisation.
In the post-Apartheid South African context, the mobilising role of nationalism to achieve a developmental state has been confused by different visions of the state and developmentalism. In other words, the form and functions of the state are cloaked in different ideological representations of the state. In this regard, the voice of South African labour and its project for the post-Apartheid state has been central. The labour movement, particularly the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), envisioned a “democratic corporatist state” (Satgar 2008). Labour's support of a democratic corporatist state came out of intense struggles with the Apartheid regime regarding labour market reforms. Between 1990 and 1996, the labour movement advanced three crucial elements that together, it was hoped, would form the basis of a democratic corporatist state: the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) that promoted a redistributive agenda for government; the creation and formalisation of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) as a macro-bargaining space over state policy; and the Industrial Strategy Project that gave COSATU an opportunity to help shape industrial development. Like the progressive rhetoric of national liberation ideology, the progressive thrusts of these three demands coming from labour have merely obscured the actual character of the emergent post-Apartheid state. Most of these demands did not come to fruition as South Africa's transition embraced neoliberalism. Today, COSATU clings to the macro-bargaining space – NEDLAC – as the most important basis for driving state policy, while at the same time, this macro-bargaining space has been undercut by macro-economic adjustment and industrial restructuring led by the state (Buhlungu 2010).
Moreover, the general approach to the developmental state has been propagandistic and declaratory. The first articulation of the developmental state emerged in the early 2000s after an intense period of political strife in the ruling ANC-led alliance over the adoption of neoliberal macro-economic policy (Marais 2011: 338–352). After achieving a degree of stabilisation of the South African economy, but while continuing neoliberalisation, the notion of a “developmental state” entered South Africa's policy discourse. Under former President Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) – one of the key architects of South Africa's neoliberalisation – the South African state consistently declared itself a “developmental state”. Mbeki's State of the Nation addresses in parliament underlined this (cf. Buhlungu et al. 2006 and 2007). Using developmental-state rhetoric helped legitimate the state's contradictions: While many in the government claimed the state was developmental, it simultaneously pursued neoliberal policies that undermined the nation's developmental aspirations. This rhetorical move collapsed a normative ambition about what the South African state should be with the reality of the existing state. This was further reinforced at a major national conference in 2007, at which the ruling ANC firmly embraced a “hybrid developmental state” which would bring together the European welfare state and the East Asian developmental state. In his 2012 State of the Nation address (Zuma 2012), President Jacob Zuma declared,
As a developmental state that is located at the centre of a mixed economy, we see our role as being to lead and guide the economy and to intervene in the interest of the poor, given the history of our country.
Despite this declaration, the general contours of neoliberal macro-economic management have not shifted.
There have also been various declaratory voices from below claiming the South African state to be developmental: Many journalists, commentators and academics argue that any kind of state intervention is evidence that the state is developmental or leaning towards being a developmental state (Gelb 2006). Such arguments, however, ignore the fact that a great deal of state intervention focuses on creating conditions for externalised dynamics of accumulation and not the promotion of state-led industrialisation that was a hallmark of the earlier generation of developmental states. 1 Moreover, such a position inadvertently legitimates a shift in neoliberal discourse that warrants state intervention. For example, the World Bank authorises state intervention, but in a way that supports marketisation (World Bank 1997). In the case of industrial policy, “neoliberalism is not just constraining industrial policy, it is redirecting it” (Evans 2005: 203). Similarly, the current South African state supports regulatory interventionism to bolster market efficiency; the state does not retreat but is remade to buttress the rule of transnational capital and to provide conditions for its reproduction.
This is not to argue for ecologically destructive industrialisation. Rather, in the twenty-first century a more eco-centric industrialisation is necessary and possible for countries in the global periphery as part of achieving structural transformation.
In short, the forces shaping the post-Apartheid state are not pushing it toward being a developmental state, despite the state's discourse. At the same time, the declaratory developmental-state discourse has not suffused nation-building in a way that mobilises social forces around common economic goals and a shared moral ambition. South Africa does not have a shared consensus and imaginary around advancing a developmental state, let alone a twenty-first-century conception: a state that is about widening popular democracy, ensuring eco-centric production, engendering “bit-based” sources of growth and building human capabilities to support such high-tech development (Evans 2010). The practices of the state that most South Africans experience seem to undermine these pretensions. South Africa has been de-industrialising as the post-Apartheid state has driven the globalisation of the economy and as it has remade itself in this conjuncture (Marais 2011). So, if the post-Apartheid state is not developmental, then what is it? To understand the ideological character of the South African state requires placing it squarely within the process of global neoliberal restructuring.
Neoliberalisation and the End of South African Exceptionalism
The notion of “South Africa” has been inscribed with various meanings within the struggle for national liberation. In particular, mainstream liberation movement theory has consistently referenced the South African social formation as a “colonialism of a special type” – a theoretical category utilised most prominently by the South African Communist Party (SACP). Due to an institutionalised and regulated form of racism perpetrated by the Apartheid regime and white monopoly capital, South Africa occupied an exceptional place within the global consciousness. In the transition to democracy, liberal articulations of South Africa have continued to imbue it with atypical qualities. From the “rainbow nation” to the “democractic miracle”, South African exceptionalism has been consistently affirmed (see Waldmeir 1997). The much vaunted ANC-led liberation movement has also exaggerated South African exceptionalism as it has neoliberalised South Africa through its rule; it has styled itself as the harbinger of a “neoliberalism of a special type”.
However, the approach to South Africa and the post-Apartheid state in this contribution locates it within a global process of capitalist restructuring. According to Gill (1994: 170), this is a process shaped by a dialectic of disintegration/reintegration in what he describes as “patterned disorder”. This means social, economic and political structures of the world order are being transformed or are breaking down but the new structures are only just beginning to become identifiable. In this context, placing in perspective the rise of transnational neoliberalism is crucial to understanding how transnational capital has been constituted, state forms remade and global processes of accumulation restructured. Transnational neoliberalism has three important aspects: First, it is an accumulation strategy, or growth model, which attempts to reproduce transnational relations of production. Underpinning this is a policy agenda that favours marketisation and financialisation through privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation and monetarist macro-economic policy consistent with adjusting national markets to “get prices right” and meet the imperatives of transnational capital.
Second, transnational neoliberalism is the ideology of transnational capital, a worldview attempting to realise a global “market civilisation” (Gill 2003). Such a “market civilisation” is premised on a possessive individualism and competition. As a class ideology it is also a material force that operationalises itself through its own mechanisms of discipline and control informed by specific class objectives within social relations of production. It also has material effects on social structures and practices. In this sense, it is implicated in class struggles and is constituted by transnationalising class forces. In short, transnational neoliberalism is a historical structure shaping the current world order through a US-led bloc of transnational class and social forces. Third, transnational neoliberalism has been referred to as a form of “governmentality”, “governance” and even class rule. However, underpinning these various conceptual approaches is the recognition that the contemporary state form is remade by transnational neoliberalism not to serve the political subjectivity of citizens but to ensure that the sovereignty of capital is protected from risk.
Transnational neoliberalism did not invent the global expansion of capital but has been articulated to it as part of capital's response to the accumulation crisis of the early 1970s. Over the past three decades, the process of global neoliberal restructuring has engendered four major structural shifts in the global political economy: 2 First, through liberalising financial markets, the structural power of finance capital has been enhanced. A global offshore financial market has been constituted, which allows for high-speed speculative flows in variable directions. Second, a post-Fordist global production structure has emerged and has reconfigured the spatial division of labour across and between national boundaries. Third, the past three decades have witnessed a rise of transnational firms, which have become the backbone of the global political economy. These firms provide the material and objective basis for the existence of a transnational capitalist class. Finally, global convergence around the neoliberal state form has also been a major structural shift – in the literature sometimes referred to as the “competition state” or “internationalised state”. 3 Such a conception of the state has changed in its role and functions to the extent that the state does not engage in strategic intervention in the economy. Instead, the state regulates economic processes such that market efficiencies can be enhanced. More specifically, the mode of state regulation is such that the state does not pursue outcomes but rather ensures that rules are established and enforced to create a “balanced playing field” for market forces (Soederberg et al. 2005: 17).
In this regard, there is an important global political economy literature that captures these trends. See, for instance, Strange (1994), Cox (1994), Gill (2003) and Sakamoto (1994).
The conception of a neoliberal/Afro-neoliberal state form draws on two important literatures: One deals with the conceptual and empirical aspects of an internationalised state in the global political economy. See Held and Mcgrew (1994), Hitti (1994) and Kamo (1994), for example. The other literature deals with the concept and theory of the “competition state”, in particular its theoretical pedigree, assumptions and empirical features. See Palan et al. (1999) and Soederberg et al. (2005).
Drawing on the “internationalised state” and the “competition state” literature, it would seem the neoliberal ideal type state has taken on four key characteristics in practice:
It is internationalised in the sense that it is locked into global market structures that impact the national through multilateral processes, institutions and ideological structures shaped by a US-led transnational historical bloc of social forces.
It emphasises the use of monetary policy (supply-side economics) to manage inflation and to ensure fiscal and non-fiscal resources are allocated according to global market signals.
It dismantles self sufficiency in “ring-fenced” or strategic sectors and shifts toward organising state responses based on competitive advantage.
It promotes a culture of capitalist accumulation on the terms of transnational capital and through private enterprise, individual initiative and a philosophy of enrichment.
It would also seem that from the viewpoint of the neoliberal ideal type state that Africa has been deemed to have the most number of “failed states”. In the wider context of Africa, the idea of a failed state has various meanings and implications. In particular, it reinforces certain racialised stereotypes about African rule and is often associated with imperial representations of the postcolonial state within Western social science (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 55–80), thus justifying various forms of paternalistic intervention, from military incursions to aid and relief work. Furthermore, the notion of failed states has tended to flatten out the African reality and to conflate diverse experiences. Mkandawire (2001) points to an analytical literature in the 1980s and 1990s that claimed that African developmental states were not possible. However, he argues against this by historicising diverse postcolonial experiences and shows that many African countries from independence up until the mid 1970s displayed a developmental orientation. This was lost in the context of the “great transformation” of neoliberalisation.
The extent to which the post-Apartheid state has taken on the characteristics of the neoliberal ideal type will be empirically highlighted to substantiate the conjuncture of the Afro-neoliberal state form since 1996. In this sense, South African exceptionalism has ended. While this perspective overlaps in some ways with the work of other critical political economists, it is distinctive. Fine (2010), for example, while noting the constraints of macro-economic policy on the realisation of a South African developmental state, as well as the inherent limits of the developmental state paradigm, concentrates his critique on the absence of the conditions necessary to realise a developmental state: institutional capacity and strategic state/capital engagements. His approach is grounded in an understanding of the Minerals Energy Complex (MEC) – which is about a symbiotic relationship between state and capital and core activities related to mining and energy such as minerals extraction, heavy metals, heavy chemicals and fossil-fuel-generated electricity – and from this perspective recommends policy alternatives. This contribution highlights the limits of realising a developmental state in South Africa by trying to make intelligible what the state is and how it works in the context of global neoliberal restructuring. This relates directly to the next point about the end of South African exceptionalism.
More specifically, South African exceptionalism has ended in terms of how it indigenises transnational neoliberalism as the basis for an accumulation model. The end of South African exceptionalism began with the Apartheid regime in the 1980s adopting firm monetary policy directed at curtailing inflation, liberalising exchange controls for a brief moment and attempting to restructure bloated and inefficient state parastatals. In the midst of this, the globalisation of the South African economy through financial capital (internal and external) also became discernible. “Capital flight” out of the economy together with the outward movement by finance capital in the late 1980s and early 1990s were the first signs of internally driven globalisation (Allen 2006: 49). South African monopoly capital increasingly began displaying signs of having transcended national capitalism. This trend became more sharply defined in the post-Apartheid context. With the ANC government taking on the debt obligations of the Apartheid regime, macro-economic management was locked into a neoliberal trajectory. 4 After accepting a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the first post-Apartheid “democracy budget” (1994/1995) echoed the IMF's language of “macro-economic stability”.
Allen (2006: 31–68) highlights how the moratorium on 13.62 billion USD owed to 233 banks reached a firm resolution in only 1993, when the ANC was drawn into the final phase of these negotiations in which it accepted responsibility for the remaining debt obligations of the Apartheid regime.
By 1996, the neoliberal accumulation trajectory was further entrenched with the adoption of a monetarist macro-economic policy. The Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macro-economic policy framework was initially defended by ANC ideologues and ministers as a “home-grown approach” to restructuring and adjustment. It was even suggested that GEAR was necessary to stabilise South Africa's macro-economy. Ironically, an earlier, self-induced move by the ANC government created the conditions for instability. An attempted reform of exchange controls prompted a run on and massive devaluation of the South African rand, providing the ideal opportunity to impose GEAR. GEAR not only conformed to key prescriptions of transnational neoliberalism but also resonated with ideas put forward by monopoly capital. 5 This conservative macro-economic framework was more than a stabilisation package. It provided the most important and unambiguous signal to monopoly and transnational capital about the direction in which the new ANC government was taking the South African economy, further confirming the ANC government's commitment to globalising the economy from within.
In the Department of Finance Summary Document (1996), there were 11 key elements in the proposed package, including a commitment to privatisation tariff reductions, inflation-driven monetary policy, and so on. Also see Bond (2000) and Satgar (2008) in which the class dynamics of this ideological shift are further elaborated.
South Africa's choice of a neoliberal development path was not inevitable or necessary. In reality it is the outcome of class and social struggles in which an Afro-neoliberal state has been engendered. 6 Such an Afro-neoliberal state has been both cause and effect of the externalisation and restructuring of South Africa's political economy into an enclave-based accumulation model. Post-Apartheid capitalism has emulated and innovated as it has encountered and internalised neoliberalism. In this process, national liberation ideology, as an articulation of ruling-party ideology, has been responsible for indigenising and giving an African voice to neoliberalism. This is not exceptional but merely an expression of a trend affecting every corner of the global political economy. In the African context, a nationally articulated variant of neoliberalism placed post-Apartheid South Africa in a race to ideologically “catch up” with a neoliberalising Africa, tragically caught in the grip of “Afro-neoliberalism”. 7
This article does not foreground these struggles from below given the focus on the ideological representation and constitutive economic practices of the state from above. See Bond (2000) and Satgar (2008).
This neoliberal “catch up” argument is different from Bond's (2004), as he argues that South African sub-imperialism was the harbinger of neoliberalisation on the African continent. On the contrary, Africa has been a laboratory for transnational neoliberalism since 1980. Also see Ferguson (2006), Satgar (2009) and Harrison (2010). Harrison's book looks at neoliberalism as a form of social engineering on an African and global scale.
South Africa's neoliberalisation expresses this continental trend and is a version of continental “Afro-neoliberalism”, a neoliberalism with African characteristics. This kind of specificity helps bring into view the role of national class and social forces within neoliberalisation. It closes the gap where everything was blamed on the “Washington Consensus” and prompts us to look more holistically to also identify who domestically has gone to bed with transnational capital. According to a growing body of academic work, the neoliberalisation of the world has prompted a conclusion regarding the end of national capitalisms (Soederberg et al. 2005). It is argued that we are witnessing the emergence of transnational neoliberal capitalism but with national and even regional varieties. National accumulation processes are being transnationalised such that monopoly capitalism is being reconstituted as transnational capitalism (Palan et al. 1999: 19). Hence, a neoliberalised post-Apartheid South Africa is not exceptional but rather has brought the universal into the specific and the specific into the universal. It has been one of many national laboratories for neoliberalisation, which reproduces the rule of transnational capital such that it displays a historical specificity not outside of, but within a neoliberal global capitalist economy.
The Conjuncture of the Afro-neoliberal State
The remaking of South Africa's state as an Afro-neoliberal state form since 1996 has fundamentally changed the relationship between the “political” and the “economic”. The “mode of authority” of the Afro-neoliberal state has been remade as it has retreated from and has re-regulated various aspects of state–market relations. In this process, the Afro-neoliberal state has remade national capitalism into a transnational capitalism. South Africa's mode of production is now driven by an externalised logic. The global market mechanism has become crucial for organising production, financing and consumption such that even in the state, “commercialisation” and “commodification” of public services have become standard. In the South African con- text, competitive restructuring has subsumed the state by way of a disembedded and deterritorialised market. The state has become one of many actors within the market.
The Afro-neoliberal state chose not to go down a path in which a national popular project could exist driven by statist, capitalist and socialist logics (Amin 2009). Instead, the transnational fraction of South Africa's ruling class (including the ruling ANC-led alliance) constructed a state geared toward facilitating and managing a transnational capitalist mode of production. This has solicited praise from the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Economic Forum (WEF); most importantly, such praise has emerged from within the ranks of transnational capital. However, more than asserting that the post-Apartheid state is Afro-neoliberal, it is necessary to show how it is constituted. More precisely, what are the practices of such an Afro-neoliberal state? What are the determining functions of the state that constitute it as an Afro-neoliberal form?
To answer these questions, we need to bring into view how state practice is structurally implicated in changing the underlying conditions of accumulation, which in turn shape and remake the state form. We need to show how the post-Apartheid state is locked into the macro-restructuring and management of the economy in a manner that eclipses strategic developmental state interventionism – that is, it is necessary to examine what the main characteristics of the state are as an Afro-neoliberal state and as it has overseen a shift to a globalised, competitive and export-led growth model with trickle-down effects. Such a state is not developmental through its embrace of deep integration into global markets and a logic of global accumulation.
What follows traces how, since 1994 – but mainly with the adoption and deepening of a neoliberal macro-economic framework in 1996 – the post-Apartheid state form and its practices are constituted through the restructuring of the Afro-neoliberal accumulation model: the dialectics of integration/disintegration, external/internal globalisation, and national/transnational capitalism are highlighted. This conjunctural historicising highlights a state form that was constituted in post-Apartheid South Africa in the main during Mandela's and Mbeki's governments. While there are strong continuities with Zuma's government it is still too early to conclude that this 18–year trajectory will change, despite the Zuma-led government's “developmental-state” rhetoric.
The Internationalised Dimensions
To understand the shift to a Afro-neoliberal state, we must look at the “internationalised dimension”. This relates mainly to key apparatuses, public and private, within the US-led transnational historical bloc managing the consensus around transnational neoliberalism and its mechanisms of discipline and control. The Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the IMF), the WTO and the WEF developed an important presence in post-Apartheid South Africa. In turn, South Africa also developed a presence in these institutions. Together, these institutions set parameters for South Africa's growth model. For example, in 1993 the IMF intervened in public debate through its report Economic Policies for A New South Africa in which it argued for a “trickle-down growth model”, which resonated with various sections of South African business. At the same time, it provided an 850 million USD Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility (CFF) to the Transitional Executive Council, conditional upon further liberalisation of the economy (Padayachee 1994: 589). The first “democracy budget” of 1994/1995 showed clear signs that macro-economic stability was not being interpreted based on the RDP, but rather in line with IMF imperatives, despite the rhetoric from the Government of National Unity (Padayachee 1994: 591–594).
At the same time, the World Bank engaged civil society and drew left intellectuals into various projects. The Bank also became the training ground for cadres from the liberation movement (Marais 2001: 128). In the WTO multilateral process, South Africa attained credentials as a firm proponent of tariff liberalisation and industrial adjustment based on “competitive advantage”. This was articulated in the GEAR policy, which promoted the restructuring of the accumulation model toward a competitive economy. Thus, trade liberalisation meant South Africa was leaving behind an era of racialised import-substitution industrialisation and instead was choosing a growth path driven by foreign direct investment (FDI) and competitive advantage. Consistent with GEAR's targets for tariff reform, and the WTO's liberalisation commitments, South Africa's average tariff declined from 6.1 per cent in 1997 to 4.9 per cent in 2004 (Cassim and Zarenda 2004: 106–107). Import duties also declined for consumption of intermediate and capital goods, further confirming an emphasis on promoting domestic manufacturing through adjustment to global market pressures and ultimately competitive advantage.
Trade liberalisation triggered a major structural shift in the South African economy. Firms, industries and sectors began responding to market pressures through processes of “right sizing”, “business re-engineering” and “downsizing” (Buhlungu 2010; Buhlungu and Webster 2006). According to Nattrass (2003: 141–157), this process has not led to labour absorption as claimed by the state, but instead has shed jobs as part of increasing labour productivity. 8 Moreover, while labour-intensive import-substitution industries have been hardest hit, export industries have also not created jobs, but have become more capital-intensive in order to remain competitive. Due to rising imports and penetration by transnational capital in some sectors, local producers have been displaced in the production of capital goods, consumer equipment, dairy, pharmaceuticals and clothing (Makgetla 2004: 273–276). At the same time as many sectors of the economy have been decimated, the state has continued to trumpet export successes such as the motor industry. However, as Makgetla (2004: 276) points out, while the motor industry has had some successes in attracting FDI and increasing exports dramatically over the past few years, it is still almost wholly owned by foreign transnationals and linked into a global commodity chain. It also has had substantial tariff incentives through the Motor Industry Development Programme. The actual effect of the motor industry's success must be further questioned as many domestic component manufacturers have been displaced (Carmody 2002: 267). Similarly, foreign clothing firms are leading exports in the clothing and textile industry and financial market entrants have connected businesses in South Africa to global financial networks (Gelb and Black 2004: 18–25). Taken together, the state's actions have not been those of a developmental state; rather, liberalisation and restructuring have produced an export-led enclave around which a structurally fragmented and disarticulated economy has had to adjust.
South Africa's unemployment rate has been over 20 per cent since the advent of demoracy in 1994. In the context of the global economic crisis, this job-shedding trend has deepened. It is estimated that the secondary effects of the global economic crisis, since 2008 have led to the loss of over one million jobs.
The South African state has actively participated in these state-centred global institutions and has argued that it is transforming these institutions from within (Bond 2001). The Minister of Trade and Industry and the Minister of Finance come across as champions of a new global reform agenda, which is beneficial to South Africa. However, the empirical reality is that the “reform from within” strategy has not worked, as South Africa has engaged through the internalisation of transnational neoliberalism, rather than through a development strategy grounded in a national consensus. South Africa is locked into these global relations and has not manoeuvred to secure space for a genuine national development project. For example, South Africa's membership in the G20 group of countries, which emerged from the G7 post-1999, has reinforced its commitment to the controls of the IMF, WTO, and World Bank. As Soederberg (2004: 81) suggests:
Taken together, the constitution of the G20 demonstrates renewed attempts at core-periphery coercion by inviting these countries into the highly exclusive G7/G8, or, put more bluntly, by co-opting them into the rules and standards of the core-alliance coercion by ensuring official, and thus more tightly integrated relations with the IMF and World Bank.
In short, South Africa's “reforms from within” have ensured it a place within the process of managing a new international financial architecture for the world. It is one of the many poster nations playing a role in managing a complex and volatile global financial system in the interests of transnational capital, especially finance capital. Since the 2008 global economic crisis, South Africa has been increasingly drawn into global management of this crisis and has had to ensure its own macro-economic adjustments are in step with the global consensus it is part of.
The other important aspect of South Africa's international relations is the WEF, as it is one of the most important transnational private institutions in the world and, like other multilateral apparatuses, it organises and expresses the structural power of transnational capital. Since its formation over 30 years ago, the WEF has played a crucial role in ensuring the rise and articulation of transnational neoliberalism as a dominant ideology in the global political economy. The WEF is an agenda-setting institution for transnational capital (as it is comprised of the top 1,000 corporations in the world) and it is crucial to extending the reach, networks and links between a transnational business community and national classes. In a classical Gramscian sense, we can refer to the WEF as the “modern prince” of global capital.
South Africa has been a consistent participant in the WEF's Davos meetings since Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk and Mangosuthu Buthelezi made a joint appearance in 1992. Subsequently, South Africa has hosted the WEF's Africa Forum since 1999. There have been 18 Africa Forum meetings so far. Zuma, like Mbeki, has ensured that his cabinet members continue to be diligent hosts of the WEF in Africa. Similar to its Davos Forum, which brings the top transnational business leaders together with world political leaders, the Africa Forum targets leading figures on the continent such as business leaders, political leaders, academics, journalists and other prominent personalities. These forums are extremely influential as they generate knowledge and serve as platforms to champion a brand of “structural neoliberalism”. In short, the WEF's vision of removing the obstacles to global competitiveness is pursued through these forums. The vital role it plays in coordinating a particular class project cannot be underestimated. It is not coincidental that its emphasis on competitiveness and its problem-solving methodology to unblock obstacles for markets resonates with Afro-neoliberalism.
In a similar vein, the South African state has created the President's International Investment Council, which brings together representatives of transnational capital and canvasses support for government reforms and policies (BuaNews 2008). In this context, South Africa has won praise from the IMF and World Bank and has also earned a prestigious place in the WTO as an ardent supporter of trade liberalisation. Similarly, the WEF has increased its approval ratings of South Africa's global competitiveness. For example, using its competitive index (one of its main disciplinary and surveillance tools), the WEF declared that South Africa had moved up in the global competitiveness rankings from forty-sixth to forty-fourth, which won the state further praise in the ranks of transnational capital (WEF 2006). While these approvals help cement the link between transnational and domestic capital, this does not mean that South Africa's Afro-neoliberal state is a success in development terms. Instead, it means the state is locked into managing an elite economic consensus rather than discharging a democratic mandate from its citizens to ensure economic transformation and self-determination. These institutions, together with other presidential working groups, have become the main macro-agenda-setting institutions in South Africa. Further, it is out of this nexus of relations that South Africa has put its weight behind the African Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) agenda for continental Afro-neoliberal restructuring.
The Primacy of Monetary Policy
The second dimension of South Africa's Afro-neoliberal state relates to how it has managed market perceptions through monetary policy and through inducing financial allocations consistent with the interests of transnational capital. To understand South Africa's monetary policy orientation it is necessary to begin with the insulation of the South African Reserve Bank from undue political pressure. The story begins with the constitutional autonomy given to the South African Reserve Bank in the new democracy. This has bolstered its conservative role and shift to neoliberal monetarism, which privileges capital mobility and low inflation (by controlling the money supply). Zuma's finance minister has continued this approach.
Tight monetary policy has not fostered employment creation but has traded this off by trying to attract capital inflows. This is reflected in exchange control liberalisation and inflation targeting. The former has happened incrementally with capital account liberalisation in 1995, which included the removal of the two-tier currency system, the removal of restrictions on foreign owners of capital, and deregulation to permit foreign banks to enter the economy. By 1998 most exchange control regulations on domestic investors were eliminated. The Reserve Bank's prioritisation of managing inflation was reflected in the formalisation of inflation-targeting in February 2000. Inflation targets are set by the Minister of Finance, and the Reserve Bank attempts to realise this target through interest-rate adjustments. All of this has helped in terms of good governance surveillance by credit-rating agencies and has led to improved ratings, affirming South Africa's consistency in embracing the global consensus around neoliberal economic management.
Fiscal policy has also been aligned around tight management so as not to “crowd out” financial flows, particularly investors. GEAR's deficit-reduction targets have ensured a decline in deficit spending and since 1999 this has been kept below 3 per cent of GDP (Gelb 2005: 374). Complementing this effort to bring in investment is the creation of numerous investment-promotion agencies and initiatives in national, provincial and local government, all declaring that “South Africa is open for business”. Gelb and Black (2004: 8) suggest there are more than 35 incentive schemes for investors and commitments to treat all investors the same in South Africa regarding foreign exchange for import, export and access (based on commitments made by South Africa under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures – TRIMS), and that there are over 30 bilateral investment treaties, most with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. In addition, South Africa's Afro-neoliberal state has actively promoted “development corridors” and “industrial development zones” as a basis to attract FDI flows. In this regard, the lengths gone to provide “sweeteners” to FDI are rather telling. Hallowes (2011: 231–234) reveals the hefty energy and tax subsidy advanced to win the deal with Rio Tinto Alcan and secure their commitment to the Coega Industrial Development Zone. To sweeten the deal, the government had already spent 20 billion ZAR on Coega, which included 6.4 billion ZAR in high-voltage transmission infrastructure to supply power to the smelter and provided a 1.93 billion ZAR tax incentive. Hallowes points out this deal would have created only 1,000 jobs at a cost of 5 million ZAR each, with at least 300 being available only to highly skilled professionals. After a decade, Alcan pulled out of the deal, claiming the government could not guarantee the power supply. The attempt to attract Rio Tinto Alcan into the Coega Industrial Development Zone is symptomatic of the state's desire to reproduce the “competitive advantage” of cheap electricity that underpins South Africa's minerals–energy complex, and in the process the state is decrying South African commitments to address climate change, including the broader macro-challenge of eco-centric production and an ecological transition of the economy.
Ultimately, the Afro-neoliberal approach to macro-economic management has been dismal in terms of attracting FDI in comparative terms and as a share of global flows (Gelb and Black 2004: 9–10; Mohammed 2010). However, this does not detract from the fact that South Africa has had various global corporations already within its economy, even prior to the democratic transition. Despite sanctions and disinvestment, at the time of the unbanning of political movements there were more than 450 firms within South Africa – 85 per cent from Europe and 13 per cent from North America – with FDI liabilities at 8 billion USD (Gelb and Black 2004: 8). This points further to South Africa being caught in globalising tides, from the outside coming in, as part of a process of transnational neoliberal restructuring emanating from capitalist centres of the 1970s. The Afro-neoliberal loosening and opening up from within gave further impetus to the transnationalisation of South Africa's economy.
Dismantling Self-Sufficiency in Strategic Sectors
The third dimension of South Africa's Afro-neoliberal state relates to the dismantling of self-sufficiency and further configuring state responses based on competitive advantage. The first aspect of this relates to the restructuring of state assets. The Apartheid regime built up a racialised import-substitution-industrialisation-accumulation model, supported by the export of minerals, but with a strong parastatal sector to buttress it. This form of state intervention affected the underlying cost structure of the South African economy, in terms of energy, transport, communications, fuel and other inputs for production. With the ANC's RDP envisaging massive public sector investment and the further development of the internal market as a platform from which to develop an external orientation, the role of reconfiguring South Africa's parastatals to support an endogenous-driven growth and development strategy was seen as crucial. In other words, such a parastatal sector was crucial in finding the right balance between import-substitution and export-led accumulation. The restructuring of state assets in post-Apartheid South Africa through the Afro-neoliberal agenda was not guided by this imperative. Instead it was informed by the imperative of raising fiscal resources by selling of state assets (Fine 1995).
In this process it is estimated that at least 18 non-core assets have been sold off, including Sun Air, Transnet's Production House, Chemical Services, and Transmed Administrator (Cassim 2006: 73). However, this process is now left with core parastatal enterprises: Eskom, South African Airways, Telkom, Transnet and Denel. Various Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) deals, through strategic equity partners, are changing the ownership patterns of these core parastatals and their assets. Increasingly, these enterprises are operating as quasi-private enterprises rather than state institutions guided by national development objectives. Moreover, the commercialising and competitive logic of restructuring has not seen a cut in costs from ESKOM, the main electricity provider. Instead, electricity price increases are firmly on the agenda. In the case of ESKOM as it is cut loose from sourcing capital expenditure from the national fiscus it has to pass on the costs of capital financing to its consumers. In short, South Africa's parastatals are not operating in accordance with national priorities and a coordinated development strategy.
A similar trend has emerged in agriculture. Historically, South Africa developed a highly commercialised and mechanised, though racialised and fossil-fuel-driven, agricultural system. This agro-food economy was central in ensuring food security. Through “big bang” Afro-neoliberal restructuring, agriculture has been deregulated through the removal of all state-run marketing boards; farm subsidies have been cut; agriculture cooperatives have been forced into a process of conversion into equity-based companies; and land reform has been anchored within a “willing seller, willing buyer” model. The state justified these moves by arguing that regulation both raised the price of food and undermined efficiency (Makgetla 2004: 273). In fact, the opposite has been witnessed, with ownership patterns concentrating in the context of liberalised agriculture and with food prices constantly increasing. In the case of bread, a staple for most working-class South Africans, four major milling and bread-producing companies have consistently colluded to push up the price of bread (Cock 2006). In 2008 South Africa was a net importer of farm products like wheat and more recently even maize, as commodity speculation has had its impacts.
In general terms, the withdrawal and reinvention of state–market relations have permitted the state to promote prestige and mega-development projects while trying to ameliorate the deepening inequalities and precariousness gripping South African society. A mix of “games and crumbs” has come to the fore as the basis of state intervention. On the one side, the World Cup (estimated 30 billion ZAR), the high-speed Gautrain (estimated 30 billion ZAR) and South Africa's arms deal (estimated 70 billion ZAR) have all cost the South African taxpayer excessive amounts of money while being presented as crucial drivers of growth and job creation. 9 Despite the official rhetoric and expenditure, South Africa's growth rates were in a negative range by 2009, with modest improvements and reaching approximately 2 per cent in 2012. In general terms, and given South Africa's link with the global economy, a period of stagnation is more the appropriate scenario. The room for counter-cyclical fiscal policy has been exhausted (unless the state wants to increase its debt-to-GDP ratio and its sovereign debt like Greece); FDI inflows have been dismal; there is growing tax fatigue amongst citizens; and domestic capital is not investing. Moreover, official unemployment has remained at approximately 25 per cent, with one million jobs having been lost with the onset of the global crisis in 2008/2009 (Makgetla 2010).
It is estimated that the costs of the World Cup have generally been underestimated. Cornellisen (2010) shows that official projected expenditure on stadiums and infrastructure upgrades alone stood at 33 billion ZAR and projected income at 19 billion ZAR in 2008. Moreover, in the public discourse it has been suggested that South Africa allowed FIFA to take a larger share than any other host country ever had of income from the World Cup for spectator fees, food, media contracts and paraphernalia.
On the other side, the state has brought close to 14 million people onto the social grant system, provided indigent support for poor households at the municipal level, and built a million houses to address housing backlogs. In terms of the social grant system (child and elderly grants), this is a crucial buffer for households at the epicentre of the crisis of social reproduction; however, currently between 8 and 10 million people are not receiving any grants, wages or remittances in South Africa (Terreblanche 2012: 101). Indigent-support policies in municipal governments, like that of Johannesburg, are a response to grass-roots struggles; as Prishani Naidoo (2010: 186) points out, in practice “[these policies] move away from creating universal forms of access to decommodified services towards more targeted interventions that provide such access incrementally according to an individual's ability to pay” and that “while [such policies are] portrayed as ‘pro-poor’, [they] actually work towards moulding the behaviours of that population group in ways that further entrench inequality and differentiated standards of living”. While the state trumpets its building of over a million houses since 1994, the failure to provide jobs where people live has led to an increase in migration to urban areas. Housing demand and backlogs in this urban context have ballooned recently, with the state far from delivering what is really required. Currently, it is estimated the state needs to build another 2.1 million houses to address the needs of 12 million South Africans, a quarter of the population.
Underpinning this reality is a state incapable of stemming the tide towards deepening inequality. According to Terreblanche (2012) this is a trend consisent with comparative international experience of neoliberal forms of state rule; in South Africa, given inherited legacies, income inequality has become grotesque. He points out that
over the past 18 years the Gini coefficient increased from 0.66 to 0.70. The richest 10 million South Africans received almost 75 per cent of total income in 2008, while the poorest 25 million received less than 8 per cent (Terreblance 2012: 110).
In short, despite the ameliorative social protection provided by the state, this is premised on the deepening of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The state essentially prevails over an unviable society as it has remade strategic state intervention into pro-market efficiency practice.
Fostering a Culture of Capitalist Accumulation on the Terms of Transnational Capital
The final dimension and crucial legitimating practice of South Africa's Afro-neoliberal state relates to promoting a culture of capitalist accumulation on the terms of transnational capital. Former President Thabo Mbeki's characterisation of South Africa as being composed of “two economies” helped to engender this culture of accumulation. The “first economy” is relatively well developed and competitive, while the “second economy” is backward, underdeveloped and survivalist. The crucial challenge in the “two-economies discourse” is to deracialise the first economy while also creating a pathway or ladder from the second economy into the first economy. This discourse of two economies did not question South Africa's historically monopolised mode of production, but instead focused on the need to deracialise and broaden the first economy or transnationalised mode of production. All South Africans were meant to aspire to be part of transnational capitalism. The state effectively became a crucial enabler in this process.
Since 1996 government intervention has been informed by this characterisation of the economy in various ways (Hirsh 2005: 193–256). First, the state has promoted small and medium enterprises as a way to unleash latent entrepreneurs into the first economy. In March 1995 the President's Conference on Small Business led to a white paper, a new small business law, and five new major institutions: the Centre for Small Business Promotion (policy unit in the Department of Trade and Industry – DTI), the Centre for Small Business Promotion (a policy unit in the DTI), the Ntsika Enterprise Promotion Agency (to provide non-financial assistance to small entrepreneurs), Khula Enterprise Finance Ltd. (to provide loan funds and loan guarantees) and the National Small Business Council. Alternative forms of enterprises such as cooperatives have been collapsed into this framework and are seen as stepping stones to becoming just another business form in the transnationalised “first economy” (Satgar and Williams 2011).
Second, the state recognised that the first economy needed to be linked to the second economy through micro-reform interventions. The state's answer to this was the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), which aims to achieve an annual average growth rate of 6 per cent between 2010 and 2014. 10 The crux of ASGISA is to bring down the “costs of doing business in South Africa” by highlighting conditions for the first economy to be globally competitive particularly through state-led infrastructure spending. 11 In addition, the New Industrial Policy Framework adds the need for various measures such as public works, small and medium enterprises, procurement policy, and so on, to provide a ladder from the first to the second economy for the poor, excluded and marginalised. Under the Zuma government, this direction of industrial policy has not changed.
Contained in Background Document – A Catalyst for Accelerated and Shared Growth-South Africa (ASGISA), media briefing by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, 6 February 2006.
In his 2012 State of the Nation address, President Zuma announced a 300 billion ZAR capital expenditure plan led by Transnet, South Africa's commercial rail parastatal, to build transport infrastructure to bring down costs of doing business, online: www.info.gov.za/speech/DynamicAction?pageid=461&sid=24980&tid=55960 (21 February 2012).
Finally, the culture of accumulation is linked to attempts to deracialise monopoly capitalism through BEE (Rumney 2005). BEE gained impetus starting in the early 1990s as major South African conglomerates began unbundling and deconcentrating the ownership structure of the South African economy. The BEE process has gone through various phases: In the mid-1990s the private sector attempted to cut debt-financed ownership deals. By 1998, with over 230 such deals on the JSE valued in aggregate at 37 billion ZAR, the stock market crashed, bringing most BEE ventures down with it. A second phase, spearheaded by black business associations and the government, began in 1999. This initiative led to the establishment of a non-statutory Black Economic Commission and a strategy. A third phase established BEE charters – the first was put in place in the liquid fuels industry – and the subsequent promulgation of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (2004).
This policy and process of BEE envisages various forms of empowerment including: direct ownership and control of enterprises and assets, deracialising management at senior levels, human resource development and employment equity, and indirect empowerment through procurement. By all accounts this process is not happening smoothly, with uneven deracialisation across sectors and in a context in which historically white monopoly capital has been moving offshore since the early 1990s (Carmody 2002: 262; Daniel et al. 2003). Despite its challenges, the state has used these various mechanisms to develop a culture of accumulation which has also served to undermine the state. The rampant corruption engendered through BEE has led to the capture of the state bureaucracy in many instances by parasitic interests.
Corruption in the South African state has become endemic and reaches into the highest echelons (Sole 2005 and Southall 2007). In many ways, BEE has provided a licence to loot state resources, with officials in government tied in with politicians and aspirant elites outside the state. In the province of Kwazulu-Natal alone, one billion ZAR has been lost to corruption. Most government departments have achieved qualified audits in terms of the Public Finance Management Act and according to the Auditor-General. This further confirms the abuse and misuse of fiscal resources. Over the past few years, South Africa's media outlets have blown the whistle on the “looting of the Land Bank”; an arms deal involving South Africa's sitting president, Jacob Zuma; “oil-gate”, which involved ANC front companies and the illegal purchase of oil from Saddam Hussein's Iraq; “travel-gate”, which involved ANC parliamentarians and travel agencies, as well as some of the most high-profile BEE-related corruption scandals. Several national cabinet ministers, provincial ministers and municipal councils have also been fingered in BEE-related corruption. The recent World Cup has also not escaped this dominant trend. Corruption has been exposed related to stadium-building and ostensibly linked to the murder of eight politicians in the province of Mpumalanga. In most instances, criminal prosecution has been avoided and the Department of Finance has not blacklisted any BEE companies on its register for corruption. Instead of an overarching national vision and a clear directing role for the state, BEE accumulation is not about structural transformation but rather about facilitating parasitic class formation. More specifically, BEE policy is a crucial part of a trade-off with white monopoly capital to facilitate the globalisaton of South Africa from within.
Conclusion
Post-Apartheid South Africa resolved its globalisation dilemma by embracing the restructuring of global capitalism. This choice engendered an Afro-neoliberal state from above that undermines state capacity for strategic intervention and an endogenous accumulation path driven by various logics and a practice of embedded autonomy. Instead, the Afro-neoliberal state locks South Africa into economic management practices to ensure that the country is integrated into global financial, production and trade structures on the terms of transnational capital, including a transnational fraction of South African capital championing BEE. It constrains and closes off areas of autonomous economic policymaking.
In concrete terms, the South African economy has been structurally transformed into an extroverted and enclave-based accumulation model. Afro-neoliberal state practices have been the cause and effect of this. These features of the post-Apartheid political economy confirm the end of South African exceptionalism and reduce South Africa to being just another of many neoliberal experiments on the African continent and in the global political economy. Despite the rhetoric and declarations about being a developmental state, South Africa does not have such a state, even given the rise to power of Jacob Zuma – the “champion of the working class”, according to the ANC left. Instead, national liberation and post-Apartheid development is about reproducing the rule of transnational capital, free markets and possessive individualism. The Marikana massacre affirms this reality and the willingness of ruling elites to go beyond market mechanisms to the point that state violence is utilised to maintain and manage a deeply globalised economy. This does not bode well for the future of South African democracy.