Absorbed in Struggle: South Africa’s Passive Revolution From Below

Abstract

If South Africa appeared to be on the verge of socialist revolution in the mid-1980s, a decade later the country’s ruling party was presiding over a regime of privatization and the removal of capital controls. At the center of this process was the abolition of apartheid and the rise to power of the African National Congress (ANC). Previous scholarship appropriately characterizes South Africa’s democratic transition as what Gramsci called a ‘passive revolution’ – a strategy of ruling-class self-preservation that leaves the fundamental social structure untouched – but it focuses too heavily on elite maneuvers, including especially the ANC’s bait-and-switch in the final years of apartheid. These maneuvers, we argue, are the tail end of a process that fundamentally revolves around absorption. Central to this earlier moment in South Africa was an umbrella grouping of anti-apartheid forces called the United Democratic Front (UDF). We argue that the UDF represented a linchpin of the passive revolution in South Africa, serving as an organ of absorption, a means of incorporating the increasingly radicalized masses into a reformist political project. Rather than counterposing this ‘from below’ narrative to a passive revolution implemented ‘from above’, however, our account illustrates how passive revolution unfolds through a dialectic between both of these moments, above and below.