The editorial collective of Mediations, the
journal of the Marxist Literary Group, is
pleased to announce issue 24.1, a dossier of new
work from South Africa. Mediations is published
twice yearly. The Fall issues are dossiers of
non-U.S. material of interest; the Spring issues
are open submission and peer reviewed.
Mediations has circulated in various forms and
formats since the early 1970s, and is now
available free on the web. Both a web edition
and a print edition, downloadable in pdf form,
can be accessed at mediationsjournal.org.
Featured authors in the current issue include
Dennis Brutus, Patrick Bond, Kelwyn Sole, Ashwin
Desai, Franco Barchiesi, Dale T. McKinley, Ulrike Kistner, and Shane Graham.
http://www.mediationsjournal.org
Volume 24, No. 1 || Dossier: South Africa
Pier Paolo Frassinelli, guest editor
CONTENTS
Editor's Note
Patrick Bond: South Africa's "Developmental State" Distraction
The idea that the South African ruling elite has
the political will to establish a ?developmental
state? project early in the 21st century is
popular, but is not borne out by evidence thus
far. Patrick Bond reviews new information about
the neoliberal project?s failures, which range
from macroeconomics to microdevelopment to
pro-corporate megaprojects, and which are
accompanied by a tokenistic welfare policy not
designed to provide sufficient sustenance or
entitlements to the society. The critique by the
independent left might be revised in the event
that the trade unions and communist influences
within the ruling Alliance strengthen, but there
is a greater likelihood that the world
capitalist crisis will have the opposite impact.
Nevertheless, widespread grassroots protests and
impressive campaigning by civil society keep
alive the hope for a post-capitalist,
post-nationalist politics, as bandaiding South
African capitalism runs into trouble.
Ashwin Desai: Productivity Pacts, the 2000 Volkswagen Strike,
and the Trajectory of COSATU in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Focusing mainly on the 2000 strike at Volkswagen
in Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, Ashwin Desai argues
that the signing of productivity pacts by the
National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) involved
the signing away of many of the shopfloor gains
made during the struggles of the 1980s. It also
meant that management was able to call upon the
union to discipline workers who challenged the
pacts. This in turn saw workers come out in a
strike that in reality was a strike against
their own union. The strike and the changing
nature of labor relations in the auto industry
prompt some conclusions about the role of the
biggest labor federation, the Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU), in the contested transition in South Africa.
Franco Barchiesi: Hybrid Social Citizenship and the Normative Centrality
of Wage Labor in Post-Apartheid South Africa
The post-1994 ANC-led government has tried to
combine institutional interventions aimed at
overcoming racialized social inequality with a
fundamental acceptance of the need to make the
economy competitive within the scenarios of
neoliberal globalization. The resulting social
policy discourse placed a priority on waged
employment and individual job-seeking
initiative, to the detriment of universal,
non-work-related social programs. The state?s
promotion of a form of social disciplining
centered on wage labor has, however, clashed
with a material reality in which waged
employment faces an enduring crisis evident in
both spiraling unemployment and the
proliferation of precarious and unprotected
occupations underscoring growing working-class
poverty. The policy discourse?s growing
inability to reflect material realities of
marginalization in relation to the crisis of
waged employment raises important questions
concerning the capacity of the new institutional dispensation to gove!
rn South Africa?s long transition.
Dale T. McKinley: The Crisis of the Left in Contemporary South Africa
The left in South Africa, fourteen years into
the post-apartheid era, needs to face harsh
realities: despite a long and often courageous
left history, there does not exist an
anti-capitalist and socialist vision that has
the potential to challenge fundamentally, and to
change, South African capitalism and to unite
left forces. The practical result is a strategic
crisis in which an unnecessary dichotomy has
been erected between anti-capitalist mass
struggle and action, and the need for a
socialist organizational form to give
politically strategic expression to such
struggles. Dale McKinley argues that it is the
left?s responsibility to work towards a
political alternative that emanates from, and is
grounded in, the ongoing and linked struggles of
the mass of organized workers and poor against
the impact and consequences of neoliberalism.
Not to undertake this task is to condemn class
struggle and left politics in South Africa to
the realm of cyclical mitigation and crisis.
Ulrike Kistner: "Africanization in Tuition": African National Education?
The current rhetoric of ?Africanization?
ostensibly refers back to pan-African or
national-liberationist ideals. However, the
?transformation agendas? of South African higher
education institutions, of which
?Africanization? forms an integral part, have
been shown to be closely linked with the
commercialization and corporatization of the
university, and with elite nationalism. Many
African academics across the continent have
articulated this development in terms of a sense
of loss. This article investigates that sense of
loss. To the extent that African intellectuals
expected their visions for political and social
transformation to be taken over by the
postcolonial developmentalist state, their hopes
were dashed by national chauvinism, by the
recession of the state and the tightening grip
of repression. Rather than revisiting
nationalism and ?indigeneity? as potentially
critical forces, this article cautions against
such reclamations, proposing a renewal of the emancipatory !
aims of higher education focused on the teaching-learning relationship.
Shane Graham: Layers of Permanence: A
Spatial-Materialist Reading of Ivan Vladislavi?s The Exploded View
Critics of Vladislavi??s fiction have tended
toward dehistoricized textual readings focusing
on the author?s clear preoccupation with words
and word games. Such readings have
often ignored or downplayed Vladislavi??s
equally clear interest in the material processes
and socio-physical spaces that shape and enable
life in the city. This essay develops a
spatial-materialist interpretation of his novel
The Exploded View, reading word games and
puzzles as part of a larger attempt to map the
labyrinthine geographies of the post-apartheid
city. Vladislavi? forges a mode of
representation that can register the continual
inscription and effacement of social relations
onto the physical urban landscape. This
narrative strategy, similar to what William
Kentridge calls an aesthetic of ?imperfect
erasure,? operates in tandem with the trope of
the ?exploded view? to dissect contemporary
Johannesburg and lay bare the social and
economic processes that create and intersect it.
Kelwyn Sole: Licking the Stage Clean or Hauling Down the Sky?:
The Profile of the Poet and the Politics of
Poetry in Contemporary South Africa
Kelwyn Sole describes some of the issues and
trends in contemporary English-language poetry
in South Africa. Focusing on the current
fashionability of poetry and the aura that
surrounds the figure of the poet in the media
and public sphere, he summarizes some of the
uses being made of poetry at the moment. On the
one hand, it is being utilized as a tool of
nation-building and an advertising medium for
big business. On the other (and usually in sharp
distinction to this) it is being mobilized by
poets as a means of social critique and an
expression of anger vis-à-vis current structures
of power. Questions are asked of the
susceptibility of lyric poetry in particular to
usage by political and business elites as a
means to assist the construction, in its
audiences, of a consumerist sense of self; as
well as to provide models of citizenship in tune
with the discursive priorities of the South
African state in its current, capitalist form.
Dennis Brutus: Africa's Struggles Today
New poems from Dennis Brutus, as well as a 2003
interview on ?Africa?s Struggles Today.? In line
with the integrated discursive, aesthetic, and
conceptual modes of Brutus?s political
engagement, the form of presentation of this
material breaks up the boundaries both between
poetry and prose, and between literature and politics.
BOOK REVIEW
Imre Szeman: Marxism after Marxism
Imre Szeman reviews Göran Therborn?s From
Marxism to Post-Marxism? The title is posed as a
question, but the book leaves little doubt about
the necessity of such a move. But would
?post-Marxism? involve the abandonment of the
insights of Marx and of the dialectic, or would
it be better thought of as the refocusing of
these very traditions on our own ?bad new days??
ISSN: 1942-2458 // © 2007-09 Mediations
_______________________________________________
CULTSTUD-L mailing list: (CULTSTUD-L /at/ lists.comm.umn.edu)
http://lists.comm.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/cultstud-l
