Changing Concepts of Articulation: Political States in South Africa .

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 Laclay 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. The race-class debate in South Africa refuses to go away, Neville Alexander noted in his 2002 book An Ordinary Country. Since then race-class debates have amplified dramatically, along with intensified struggles over the meaning of the 'national democratic revolution' (NDR). Key contours of these debates find clear expression in a special edition of Bua Komanisi! issued by the Central Committee of the south African Communist Party (SACP) in May 2006 (SACPa, 2006), and the furious response on 19 June from the African National Congress (ANC, 2006). In a rejoinder entitled 'Is the ANC leading a national democratic revolution or managing capitalism?', the SACP reiterates its accusation that the ANC has come to be dominated by 'the narrow self-interest of an emerging black capitalist stratum with close connections to established capital and to our movement,' that acts' not in order to advance the NDR, but for personal self-accumulation purposes' (SACPb, 2006 ). For any on the left, the hijacking of the NDR by a bourgeois class project is scarcely surprising. The very notion of the NDR derives, Alexander points out, from the dual-economy,, liberal-pluralist notion of 'colonialism of a special type', which was supposed to be the paradigm within which the SACP analyzed South African society but which, in reality, simply abdicated any pretensions to political leadership of the mass movement and permitted the... aspiring black middle class leadership of the ANC to lead the mass struggle (Alexander, 2005:25). And lead they did, he went on to the, 'with single-minded clarity to the ends of the African nationalist struggle'; More generally, two-stage theory has long been the focus of intense critique in the context of South African race-class debates.