ANC Decline, Social Mobilization and Political Society: Understanding South Africa's Evolving Political Culture

Abstract

This article examines the evolving political culture in contemporary South Africa. It draws on elite culture, neo-patrimonialism, and revisionist institutionalist perspectives to understand state weaknesses and patterns of politicization confronting South Africa's developing democracy. While it accepts that the democratic political system and its constituent institutions are in place and function formally, a discourse of violence or threats of violence to rival political actors is commonplace. The article is structured as follows: the first part describes the increased social mobilization of disgruntled citizens who rely on a discourse of violence rather than articulating grievances through political structures; the second part focuses on those factors that ferment this kind of political culture. The article discusses the deepening economic inequality and its expression in class conflict under conditions of democracy. It then discusses the politics of the ANC as a dominant party, and in particular intra-elite conflict, ANC factionalization, and the consequent weakening of state institutions. These factors, the paper argues, encourage a politics in which political society, rather than civil society, becomes the main terrain for expressing conflict.

Notes

I do not want to use the concept of ‘political culture’ to refer to citizen orientations towards the political system in the manner used by Almond and Verba (1963). They define the concept as ‘the ways in which political elites make decisions, their norms and attitudes, as well as the norms and attitudes of the ordinary citizen, his relation to government and to his fellow citizens…’. When the vast Western prejudice contained in their modernisation approach is diligently scrutinized, I appreciate the usefulness of this definition in a general sense. However, for our understanding of political culture I prefer the emphasis on everyday meanings and practice in constituting citizen identity as it relates to the conflicts over power in society. Also see Weeden, 2002.

The concepts ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ are most readily associated with Hegel, and taken up by Marx. See Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Marx's On the Jewish Question and German Ideology. In both instances civil society is defined as essentially bourgeois society, the terrain of private activity and association. In the German Ideology, Marx says ‘Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of the productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage…’. He sees it as the ‘…true source and theatre of all history…’ (Marx, 1972). Arato and Cohen in their seminal work on civil society (1994) want to distinguish the concept from the sphere of state and the market, to refer to ‘…a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication’ (p. ix). Taking his inspiration from Gramsci, Chatterjee questions in specifically post-colonial situations the dominating reliance on civil society (the sphere of private associational life), because it denotes the activity of the modernising, nationalist elites and not the masses of people. For the latter he relies on the concept of political society. The relationship between the colonial and post-colonial state towards the general population was to rely less on civil society associations, but to directly target them using political mechanisms. He admits that this kind of politics is not limited to political parties, but involves a ‘site of strategic manoeuvres, resistance and appropriation by different groups and classes… not always consistent with the principles of association of civil society’ (Chatterjee, 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thiven Reddy

Department of Political Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa.