Changing Concepts of Articulation: Political Stakes in South Africa Today

Abstract

Intense struggles are currently underway within and between the African National Congress and its Alliance partners. In an effort to make sense of these struggles, this essay revisits earlier South African debates over race, class, and the national democratic revolution. Its focus is on multiple and changing concepts of articulation and their political stakes. The first part of the essay traces important shifts in the concept in Harold Wolpe's work, relating these shifts to struggles and conditions at the time, as well as to conceptual developments by Stuart Hall in a broader debate with Laclau's work on populism, and with Laclau and Mouffe who take the concept in a problematic post-marxist direction. I then put a specifically Gramscian concept of articulation to work to explore how the ruling bloc in the ANC has articulated shared meanings and memories of struggles for national liberation to its hegemonic project – and how a popular sense of betrayal is playing into support for Jacob Zuma.

Notes

1. The NDR refers to the first stage in a two-stage theory of revolution adopted by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962 and subsequently by the ANC, in which the overthrow of the apartheid state would inaugurate a phase of national democracy that would pave the way for the second-stage socialist revolution.

2. This point became clear at the launch of the SACP's Discussion Document at Universityof KwaZulu-Natal, 30 June 2006.

3. Foster-Carter (1978) notes that neither Althusser nor Balibar use the term ‘articulation of modes of production’, and claims it was Pierre-Philippe Rey who introduced it in a widely-distributed mimeographed paper entitled ‘Sur l’articulation des modes du production’ (1969).

4. ‘[W]hat is absolutely clear in the contemporary period is that no section of the national liberation movement is committed to or struggles for, what may be termed a bourgeois national democratic revolution. Even the conception of the “left/workerist” contention that the national liberation movement is bourgeois in character, has nothing in common with the vision of corporate capital or, say, the bantustan sections of the black petite-bourgeoisie for a de-racialised capitalist South Africa. The two-stage revolution does not envisage a transformation based merely on a degree of redistribution of wealth and political power in favour of black people; it envisages the first stage as merely a stage in which the conditions are established which will permit the inauguration of a process of further social transformation’ (Wolpe, 1988:33-34).

5. ‘Against both boycott and reform he defends the ongoing struggle for “people's education” – a schooling that would eliminate ignorance and illiteracy, cultivate an understanding of apartheid and all its oppression and inequalities, that would counter competitive individualism with collective organization, that would equip people with the capacity to realize their potential’ (Burawoy, 2006:17).

6. This piece has been republished in radically shortened form in Essed and Goldberg (2002). What is lost in this shortened version, though, is much of the engagement with South African debates which is, in my view, precisely what makes this intervention so compelling.

7. He also acknowledges his close relationship with Wolpe: ‘I met Harold Wolpe shortly after his sensational escape from prison and we used to talk long into the night about South African affairs, about the ANC, about the work which Harold was doing around education and so on.’

8. In a subsequent piece Hall (1985) further distinguishes his position from that of Althusser, as well as from the post-structuralists – those like Foucault who broke with structuralist theory by insisting on radical contingency, while retaining elements of structuralism.

9. Although Hall makes no mention of Fanon, the parallels between this reading of Gramsci and Fanon are very close.

10. His larger project in this piece is transcend the structuralist/culturalist division to combine ‘the best elements in structuralist and culturalist enterprises, by way of Gramsci's work’, going on to note that they pose, together, ‘the problems consequent on trying to think both the specificity of different practices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute’ (Hall, 1980b:72).

11. Wendy Brown makes a related point: ‘It is interesting … that the optimism of radical (social) democratic vision is fueled by that dimension of liberalism which presumes social and political forms to have relative autonomy from economic ones to be that which can be tinkered with independently of developments in the forces of capitalism. Indeed, it is here that the radical democrats become vulnerable to the charge of “idealism“, where idealism marks the promulgation of select political ideals de-linked from historical configurations of social powers and institutions …’ (Brown, 1995:12).

12. For example Braun and Disch (2002) and Fischman and McLaren (2005).

13. My research in the 1990s in two areas of northwestern KwaZulu-Natal provide strong support for this argument (Hart, 2002).

14. See Bond (2000) for an argument about how the RDP White Paper effectively evacuated the progressive elements in the original framing of the RDP.

15. GEAR is an acronym for Growth, Employment and Redistribution, an extremely conservative package of macro-economic policies that the ANC government presented to the South African public as a fait accompli in June 1996.

16. Elsewhere (Hart, 2007) I discuss more fully the uses and limits of the concept of governmentality.

17. Johnson (2003) argues that Mbeki and his followers have found the reorganisation of the state along conventional (neo)liberal lines quite compatible with their Leninist understanding of the primacy of vanguard party leadership over mass action.

18. The ‘land question’ – along with histories, memories, and meanings of racialised dispossession and the imperatives of redress – are also part of this complex (Hart, 2002; 2006a; 2006c).

19. In September 2002, the Political Education Unit of the ANC issued a revealing document entitled ‘Contribution to the NEC/NWC Response to the “Cronin Interviews“ on the Issueof Neoliberalism’; see also Makhaye (2002) and Moleketi and Jele (2002) along with the sharp response by Masondo (2002).

20. Article in City Press, 29 September 2002, p. 8 entitled ‘Ultra-left transposes DA agenda on the ANC’.

21. http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2003/03080511461001.htm; accessed 30 June 2004.

22. For documentation, see the references provided by the South African Regional Poverty Network: http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000830/index.php; accessed 30 June 2004.

23. http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2004/text/at47.txt; accessed 19 December 2004.

24. These figures are contained in an article entitled ‘66 cops injured in illegal service delivery protests’, Cape Argus, 13 October 2005.

25. I develop this and related arguments more fully in Hart (2006c).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gillian Hart

Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography at University of California at Berkeley and Honorary Research Professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is the authorof Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002) published jointly by University of California Press and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press; email: [email protected].