On 16 August 2012, 34 Lonmin miners, on an unprotected strike for a living wage, were killed by the South African Police Service. The Marikana Massacre was not sanctioned by a despotic dictator or a totalitarian regime. This brutal tragedy occurred in a liberal democracy, under the watch of a government constitutionally mandated to protect the rights of workers and uphold the value of human life. Yet the government chose to wield the power of the state to prioritise the financial interests of a private company over those of its own citizens.
Horrific as Marikana was, it is not an anomaly or isolated incident. Liberal theories of governance do not recognise class relations within capitalism. But contrary to those theories, power in society is not widely distributed among various groups or ‘stakeholders’. And the state is not a politically neutral entity merely attempting to balance competing interests or manage conflict between different groups.
Class and the state
Since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy and the evolution of capitalism into its neoliberal form, the state has continually displayed a strong, almost unyielding bias towards satisfying the interests of the country’s ruling class—the capitalist class. This is evident not only in the state’s use of coercive force (suppressing protests and strikes) but also in the implementation of policy and legislation. Regardless of public outcries, the National Treasury continues to produce national budgets completely unsuited to curtailing unemployment. Instead, it chooses to provide tax breaks to corporations and to enforce monetary policy that enriches creditors at the expense of efforts to mitigate poverty. History has proved the disastrous pitfalls of the privatisation or commercialisation of public services. But the government marches on with unbundling Eskom and paving the way for profiteering in network industries.
The state can be defined as an organised political community possessing the following:
- a population
- a territory with known and recognised boundaries
- sovereignty to exercise supreme and absolute power within its own territory
- a system of government with the authority to implement policy and enforce law
- a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within its territory.
The state’s power to govern is exercised through formal structures such as the police, parliament, courts, central banks, public enterprises and government agencies or departments. These structures are what have come to be known as the organs of the state.
So if the state wields all this power, why does it govern in favour of the rich, even at the expense of electoral popularity? What are the pressures placed on government, and the incentives provided to them, by the capitalist ruling class?
We cannot oversimplify and say that the state is just a tool of corporate capital, or that the ruling parties in government are simply lackeys of the private sector. Socialists seek to challenge and eventually overcome capitalist rule and use the power of the state to profoundly democratise economic production. So we must understand the structural relationship between the political power held by elected representatives and the economic power wielded by the ownership class.
The roots of class bias within the state
We can identify three fundamental sources of the state’s class bias:
- Inter-personal cultural conditioning
- Institutional ties between state managers and capitalists
- The structural relationship between the state and capitalism.
Firstly, the class background of state managers (politicians and the executive bureaucracy) produces individuals who have been culturally conditioned to adopt the moral frameworks and political perspectives of the capitalist class. In many countries across the world, especially in developed nations in the Global North, state managers often come directly from the capitalist class. They receive an education at elite institutions and exist in the same social networks as bankers, industrialists or corporate investors. So future state managers end up absorbing the viewpoints of those who privately own the means of production, and they advance their interests in governance.
Since democracy, South Africa’s state managers have increasingly come from an ambitious, upwardly mobile and politically connected middle class, Black economic elite. They may not directly emerge from the capitalist class, but their millionaire income and the lifestyle this wealth gives them make them inclined to be profoundly insensitive to the needs of the working class and poor. And they are incredibly sensitive to the interests of the ruling class.
The second source of class bias comes from the influence that politically conscious capitalists have on state managers, in particular legislators and policy-makers. Capitalists can deploy their immense financial resources to shape the direction of governance through lobbying and interpersonal networking. This leverage is exercised through lawyers, think-tanks, policy advocacy through corporate-sponsored media houses, or through industry associations (e.g. Business Unity South Africa or Minerals Council South Africa).
The ANC’s adoption of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy was partly informed by corporations. They conducted conferences, studies, seminars, scenario-planning workshops, and policy exercises with the incoming government throughout the early 1990s. We can see this process of business-backed policy-making in Operation Vulindlela. Here, the government is cooperating with organisations such as Business Leadership South Africa and has a partnership with 130 CEOs of major businesses in the private sector.
Now that political parties are required to disclose donations, we can see that capitalists such as Patrice Motsepe, Martin Moshal and the Oppenheimer Family have poured tens of millions into funding parties in cabinet and the opposition. Election campaigns are expensive. So it is not difficult to understand how capitalist influence is compounded by the massive financial donations provided by the rich. Grassroots movements and labour formations often lack the resources to acquire such institutional influence on state managers. So their voices are soft, against the loud boom of billionaire funding.
The ruling class does not rule
But an important question remains. Staunchly leftist governments are sometimes elected. Their members come from the working class and are elected on a pro-labour, pro-poor agenda. So why do they still capitulate to the interests of capitalists, or drastically dilute their radical agenda when steering the power of the state? The answer to this question points us to a dilemma faced by leftist governments.
State governance requires a stable flow of revenue to provide basic services, maintain infrastructure, implement policy, enforce the law and pay the bureaucracy. The major sources of revenue come from taxation (personal income tax and corporate income tax), and these sources of income are produced by corporate profits and workers’ wages.
The private ownership of capital goods (the means of production) and the appropriation of the surplus resulting from economic production (through the exploitation of workers) places capitalists in a position of dominance over society. They wield power not only over workers and the workplace or the process of production, but over the flow of investment itself. This flow of investment determines the scale and depth of economic activity and, by extension, levels of employment and standards of living.
But the inescapable objective of all companies under capitalism is to endlessly make a profit and accumulate more capital. Therefore, if investors believe that a government will enact policies or legislative reforms that seriously undermine a profitable business climate suitable for profit-making and capital accumulation, they can withhold their investment. They may also take it beyond the borders of the state.
If capitalists withhold their investment because they believe there are low prospects for profitability, then economic growth slows, and employment is reduced. The resulting shrinking of revenue streams for the state makes governance and even its basic functioning incredibly difficult.
This poses a second problem for leftist or socialist governments within electoral democracies. A severe downturn in economic activity and employment renders millions poor or dangerously precarious. And, as the quality of livelihoods sharply declines, citizens demand accountability. Seeking change, they punish ruling parties in elections. Governments are then confronted with a perilous choice: challenge the dominance of capital and risk undermining the state’s functioning and government’s capacity to rule, or capitulate and create a hospitable business environment, at the expense of those who elected you into power.
So capitalism creates societies which are held hostage by the whims and wishes of corporate investors, while trapping the state into a structural dependence on capital. The ANC’s egalitarian economic vision weakened during the negotiated transition to democracy. This was largely a tragic consequence of this structural dilemma that all states confront under capitalist rule.
But this does not mean that states are forever destined to be structurally subservient to economic elites.
There was a strategic and principled choice that the ANC avoided: to agitate, mobilise and organise for the intensification of militant class struggle that would have deepened the cost for capitalists of refusing to make concessions to an egalitarian economic programme. In the absence of class struggle that challenges economic exploitation and private property relations, the state will continue to be systemically biased to the ownership class.
Andile Zulu is a member of the Amandla Editorial Collective and the Energy Democracy Officer at the Alternative Information and Development Centre.
