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The essence of BEE should be about the workers and the poor
By Blade Nzimande, SACP General
Secretary
The renewed public discussion on the nature of black economic empowerment
requires strategic input from the perspective of poor and working people. In
our last edition of Umsebenzi Online we highlighted a few of the more recent
BEE developments, typifying the deepening class contestation of South Africa’s
democracy. But what has been happening more generally over the last ten years
in terms of BEE?
What has passed for “black economic empowerment” over
the last decade has been essentially the accommodation of an elite. There
has been nothing broad-based about it. And there has been little that is
transformational about it. It has been about changing some of the leading
agents of the existing system, leaving intact the entire system itself, a
system that generates and reproduces inequality in our country. Racialised
capitalism persists.
It is important, however, that the assessment of BEE and
of those behind it, and of those benefiting from it, is not confined to moral
outrage. The SACP is, of course, fundamentally opposed to capitalism, it
is an inherently exploitative system. But we are not utopian dreamers, we
recognize that we have to advance, deepen and defend our democracy in conditions
not of our own choosing. What is more, Marxism has, from the outset, always
recognized that capitalism has a positive, revolutionising side. Despite
itself, in the midst of pursuing profits, historically, and even in the present,
capitalism sometimes revolutionizes the forces of production – expanding science, technology, the skills
of the working class. Of course, profits always rule supreme under capitalism,
capitalist corporations will suppress technologies, shut down perfectly workable
factories, and retrench highly skilled workers when these things are “necessary” from
the perspective of the oligarchs.
The SACP is not remotely convinced that the huge challenges of our society
(and our world) can be effectively addressed within the closed parameters of
capitalism. But even within capitalism a lot can be done. Take the challenges
of our own economy. The current accumulation path is continuing to reproduce,
even exacerbate racialised poverty and inequality. Our economy is excessively
export-oriented and import-dependent; it is capital-intensive and growth tends
to be job-shedding; the national market remains narrow; there is very little
robust entrepreneurship; there are high levels of liquidity and a serious lack
of fixed capital investment; while some progress is being made, the skilling
of workers lags; and the role of our corporations in our region and continent
is mostly predatory rather than developmental.
Even within the confines of capitalism, and even from positions of privilege
within the corporate board-rooms something can begin to be done about the skewed
character of our economy which threatens the medium-term sustainability of
our democracy (capitalist or otherwise).
The question is: Have ten years of increasingly frenetic, head-line hitting
BEE deals remotely contributed to addressing any of these systemic challenges?
With some few arguable exceptions, we believe that most of the celebrated BEE
deals have had a neutral, and probably a negative impact on addressing the
real transformational challenges of our economy.
The dominant approach is to implement a narrow BEE, focusing on the advancement
of a black minority through equity acquisitions and individual promotion into
the senior management ranks. Apart from the narrowness of this approach, the
equity acquisitions and similar financing arrangements in most of these deals
amount, in practice, to diverting surplus into debt, instead of investing it
productively, let alone developmentally. Our white captains of industry and
finance much prefer the short-termism of lending an aspirant upwardly mobile
elite the membership fees to the country club and the keys to the Porsche,
than taking on the more challenging tasks of labour-intensive investment, or
skills development, or ensuring that poor communities enjoy banking facilities.
In this way they hope to advertise their rainbow credentials and keep in with
the dominant political party, and maybe, who knows, pick the next president.
The arguments for and against narrow BEE have tended to
be moralizing and individualistic. Arguing for it have been the upwardly
mobile aspirants, and the arguments have been about getting their “fair share”, with “equity” in
the broad sense quickly becoming “equity” in the narrow JSE sense.
Empowerment starts to be reduced to quotas.
However, the arguments against narrow BEE have also sometimes simply focused
on the country club, the Porsche, and all the other perks. The test of BEE,
narrow and broad, must be about development and transformation. It is only
by doing this that narrow BEE can be assessed for whether it is contributing
to broader empowerment or not.
It is possible, but not given, that black board-members or senior managers
will be more sensitive to the developmental challenges of the great majority
of workers and the poor in our country. It is possible, but not given, that
new mining magnates operating the marginal mines (that the established corporations
were happy to let go) may save jobs and even create more.
The SACP believes that the kind of elite BEE we have seen over the last years
can be considered if (and only if) it can really be shown to contribute to
the development of the forces of production, and to transformation that benefits
the great majority. The case cannot for it cannot be made abstractly, arithmetically,
or on the simple basis of quotas.
BEE must principally be about addressing the needs of the
overwhelming majority of our people, black workers and the poor – i.e. the basic economic empowerment
to millions of our people through access to jobs and through the provision
of affordable and reliable electricity, housing, transport, telecommunications
and so on. It should also be about transforming the current accumulation path
in our country. The question of transaction shareholding should be subjected
to these objectives, rather than what is happening now – big transaction
deals for a few completely disconnected from, and sometimes directly undermining,
these objectives. Approached in this way, then BEE becomes what it should be – broad-based.
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