Collective unfreedom in South Africa

Abstract

This article submits, with Mandela, that despite political freedom and a lauded liberal constitution, South Africa remains collectively unfree, especially if freedom is understood as power across four economic and political dimensions. Although G. A. Cohen's notion of the ‘collective unfreedom’ of the proletariat is not perfectly analogous to the situation of South Africans in general, this article maintains that it is still very useful in understanding the extent of unfreedom in South Africa. It argues that there are four main reasons for the condition of collective unfreedom in South Africa: poverty; inequality; the electoral system; and macroeconomic policy. In the end, though, the article contests Mandela's claim regarding the force of our moral duty to others to enhance their freedom; rather, it argues that it is the realization that our individual freedom depends upon the freedom of others that would motivate all citizens to secure the freedom as power of all South Africans.

Keywords:

• freedom
• power
• collective unfreedom
• poverty
• inequality
• representation
• South Africa

Notes

Before Mandela, Rousseau saw this with greatest clarity: ‘One believes himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they’ (Rousseau 1997, p. 41); see also Hegel (1977) and Marx (2002).

Sandton, one of the wealthiest suburbs in South Africa, had the most cases of house robberies in the country during 2009–2010 (The Star 2010).

 In 2009–2010 there was a slight decline in murders, hijackings and sex crimes, while house and business robberies increased again (The Star 2010).

By ‘informal’, ‘economic’ or ‘commercial’ representation I mean what Siéyès means by ‘commercial representation’, and by ‘formal’ or ‘political’ representation I mean what he meant by ‘political representation’, here representation within the political structures of South Africa's representative democracy, in particular parliament; and both can take the form of principal-agent representation, representation as trusteeship, representation as identification or aesethic representation, or any combination of all four, as discussed in Chapter 4 of Hamilton (2012).

This document was the culmination of a process that started with the ANC sending out 50,000 volunteers into townships and the countryside to collect ‘freedom demands’ from the people of South Africa.

State credibility is defined as the perceived likelihood that a current or future government will honour debt contracts (North and Weingast 1989, Stasavage 2003, p. 23).

‘A ‘veto point’ is a political institution, the holder of which, as specified by a country's constitution, has the power to block a proposed change in policy (Tsebelis 2002, Stasavage 2003).

‘Odious debts’ are debts that have been incurred by a government that was not democratically chosen, and the borrowed money may even have helped a brutal regime stay in power. Given this, considerations of situations of odious debt marshal the associated moral case for debt forgiveness, maintaining that the citizens of countries under these regimes, especially once they are no longer in power, ought not be saddled with the debt incurred by these regimes, e.g. Mobutu's regime in Congo, Pinochet's regime in Chile and that of apartheid South Africa – in other words, there exists a strong moral argument that South Africa in transition had no moral obligation to repay the debts incurred under apartheid (Adams 1991, Stiglitz 2007).

In the words of the current governor of the Reserve Bank, Gill Marcus, who as chair of Parliament's finance committee played a central role in stabilizing the NP-bequeathed debt-ridden economy and persuading her party comrades that they did not have a blank slate from which to work: if South Africa's ‘huge debt’ and ‘massive tax shortfall’ were not addressed ‘it [South Africa] was likely to land up in the hands of the IMF… [and] we certainly had not worked this hard for our liberation to hand it over to the IMF’ (Green 2009).

Thus, the Freedom Charter of 1955 is eerily prophetic (and very far form being realized) when it proclaims in its penultimate section entitled ‘There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort’ that ‘Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished’, although of course those that composed these lines had in mind those without adequate housing, etc. It is a great irony of history that now the seemingly secure and comfortable have fenced themselves in to the extent that they could be said to have ghettoized themselves. I thank James Furner for reminding me of this passage in the Charter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lawrence Hamilton

Lawrence Hamilton (MA, MPhil, PhD Cantab) is Professor of Politics at the University of Johannesburg, Affiliated Lecturer in Political Theory at Cambridge University, Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, UK and Editor-in-Chief of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. His work has been awarded the South African National Research Foundation's President's Award and a Blue Skies Award.