Post-apartheid South Africa: A Neoliberal Disaster Made and in the Making

In absolute terms, and relative to both hopes and potential, post-apartheid economic and social reproduction has been a disaster. A key element in explaining this is to situate it within an extraordinarily rapid and full adjustment, albeit with peculiar South African features in light of the heritage of apartheid, to neoliberal imperatives, properly understood. These do not involve the withdrawal of the State, as suggested by neoliberal ideology, but do include extensive State intervention to bring about globalization of production (and commodity relations more generally) and, in particular, the financialization of the economy. In a South African context, this has been associated with the unbundling of its (Mineral–Energy Complex) conglomerates, their integration with global capital, extensive expansion of the financial sector (together with capital flight, much of it illegal), the formation of new black elites, and State capture and centralized control for these purposes at the cost of economic and social functioning for the vast majority of those sections of the population already extremely disadvantaged under the apartheid system. The result more broadly has been to deliver what we term the five lows (of investment, productivity, wages, employment and provision of social and economic infrastructure). These evolving conditions, across their various aspects, and their association with the unravelling of effective progressive opposition for alternatives, are documented.