In February, South Africa participated in joint military exercises with Russia and China. Taking place for 10 days just off the stretch of Indian coastline between the country\u2019s largest port cities, Durban and Richards Bay, the timing was provocative: the navy drills overlapped with the one-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naledi Pandor, South Africa\u2019s foreign minister, defended the initiative, claiming it formed part of the \u2018natural course of relations\u2019 and added that the United States, France and Germany had all recently featured in exercises with South Africa. Try as it might to insist otherwise through feigned stances of neutrality, the South African government has pivoted to the East, consolidating closer ties with Russia and China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The South African Question<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union resolved its stance on the \u2018South African Question\u2019 and the role of nationalism in the class struggle. This took the form of a two-stage revolutionary programme, which came to be known as \u2018The Black Republic Thesis’. It consisted first of a national bourgeoisie struggling for national self-determination, followed by a socialist struggle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Penned by James Arnold \u2018Jimmy\u2019 La Guma \u2013 who was then on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of South Africa, as well as serving as secretary for the African National Congress (ANC) in the Western Cape \u2013 its draft was supervised by none other than Nikolai Bukharin. The great South African intellectual and anti-apartheid leader Neville Alexander, writing pseudonymously in 1979, summarised its legacy as leaving \u2018a definite mark on the subsequent development of the liberation struggle in South Africa. For it made it possible for caste organisation, and for strategies based on the assumption of the permanency of caste, to find support among members of the Communist Party in subsequent years’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1978, one year prior to Alexander\u2019s publication of No Sizwe<\/em>, Alex La Guma \u2013 Jimmy\u2019s son \u2013 published A Soviet Journey,<\/em> a travelogue based largely on a six-week trip he took to the Soviet Union in 1975. In one of the longest accounts of the Soviet Union by an African writer, La Guma praised it for resolving the national question, \u2018one of the greatest achievements in socialism, (with) immense international impact’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But rather than receiving a definitive answer, the question was indefinitely suspended. On 24 August 1991, the Soviet Union\u2019s largest constituent republic declared independence. Thirty years later, Russia invaded Ukraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Putin\u2019s speech defining his view of the conflict (given on the eve of invasion, on 21 February 2022) places significant blame on the Bolsheviks, who needlessly tried to \u2018satisfy the endlessly increasing nationalist ambitions of different parts of the former [Russian] empire’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At first glance, Putin\u2019s antipathy towards the Bolsheviks and their supposed anti-Russian enmity should have complicated the ANC\u2019s narrative of support for Russia as repaying a historical debt. Not only is the modern Russian state fundamentally discontinuous with the Soviet Union, but Ukraine itself formed part of the Soviet Union and was the most instrumental constituent republic as far as hosting and supporting ANC exiles. For the ANC, this distinction is immaterial. The terms on which the invasion is being justified draw on a model of self-determination, which is familiar and purpose-giving to an otherwise directionless and illegitimate political party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018Native Republic Thesis\u2019 eventually evolved into the \u2018National Democratic Revolution\u2019 (NDR) \u2013 the framework through which the ANC conceptualised its historical task. The ANC acted as the leader of a multi-class, anti-colonial political formation fighting for national sovereignty. Only once this was achieved could the struggle for socialism be waged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To date, the ANC still considers itself a vital force spearheading the NDR. At its 55th Conference in late 2022, it affirmed that: \u2018Despite challenges, the ANC remains the leading force for change in the country and carries the hopes and aspirations of our people to realise the objectives of the National Democratic Revolution.\u2019 The conference resolutions also conceive of the Ukraine war as driven by Western containment. The party added: \u2018The ANC has been part of the non-aligned movement. We are also part of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial forces.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after colonialism has ended, at least in the form that existed when the ANC\u2019s mission was first conceived, Africa\u2019s oldest liberation movement continues to define itself ideologically and politically as contributing to anti-colonial struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Formed in September of 1961 in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, the Non-Aligned Movement was the formal culmination of a longer process of Third World interest formation, including a multitude of conferences and meetings, like the All African People\u2019s Conference in Ghana in 1958, Bandung in 1955, and the meetings of the Pan-African Congress, which started in Paris in 1919. The ANC government sees BRICS as extending this process, \u2018a continuation of the tradition that was firmly established 57 years ago, in April 1955, when countries of Asia and Africa met at the historic Bandung Conference to galvanise their collective muscle in the context of the Cold War and assert themselves in the international system’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-alignment in the age of alienation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is easy to read the ANC\u2019s strategy of non-alignment as merely appropriating Cold War slogans and imaginaries to justify an advance of its own self-interest. According to Atlantic Council Fellow Tim Sahay, countries like South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and India are pursuing this strategy as an exercise in pragmatism, believing that \u2018their bargaining power in the new Cold War will result in sweeter trade, technology, and weapons deals from the West’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the available evidence yields very little indication that South Africa stands to gain much materially from pivoting East. In fact, it has a lot to lose. Combined, South Africa\u2019s trade with the European Union and the United States outpaces its trade with China and Russia. Crackling with indignation at Africa\u2019s most industrialised power cosying up to the East, the US Congress has even tabled a resolution calling for President Joe Biden to \u2018review\u2019 relations with South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ANC\u2019s psychological attachments to modern Russia aren\u2019t easily explained by reference to the Soviet Union\u2019s support for the anti-apartheid struggle either. The modest point is this: even though the ANC itself cites the historical relationship between South Africa and the Soviet Union, its positive identification is with the contemporary Russian state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Support for Russia is the outcome of the ANC\u2019s commitment to a narrow version of non-alignment informed by its own, internal conception of global power relations, one that fixes the United States and the West into a trans-historical adversary of liberation. This follows on from the original non-alignment world view, which accurately conceived of an international power structure that was first and foremost ethno-racialised, and divided into a dominant white world and subordinate black world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The primary problem of the twenty-first century is not, as W. E. B. Du Bois originally figured, that of the colour line. However, the idea of a global racial hierarchy endures in the language of \u2018ways of life’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This agenda is effectively the NDR scaled up for the international arena. Lacking domestic political legitimacy, the ANC has found a new lease of life by fashioning an external adversary to explain the mission of the party. And so, unlike the vision of anti-colonial world-making that underpinned non-alignment in its halcyon days in Bandung and Belgrade \u2013 which sought to remake the post-1945 international order across egalitarian lines \u2013 the international democratic revolution is primarily an assertion of national sovereignty that makes allusions to the transformation of the nation-state, but which in practice, is concerned with securing the relative autonomy of national elites in the international state system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A question arises here: how does non-alignment today become so disjointed from its conception in the mid twentieth century? Although non-alignment, at its best, aspired to world-making, it also expressed more conservative ambitions shaped by global circumstances. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, by 1967, non-aligned states already \u2018wanted entry into the world community as equals but did not seek to transform the nature of this world’. Non-alignment encompassed a heady mix of competing ideas of postcolonial modernisation and development. As historian Frank Gerits explains in his new book The Ideological Scramble for Africa<\/em>,\u2018 The wide range of ideological options also made diplomacy within the Global South more convoluted.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-aligned internationalism could never crystallise into a fully coherent programme because it lacked a mass character. It was coordinated by esteemed statesmen like Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor and Nasser, but as a politics lacked expression in durable working-class institutions and labour movements. However, working-class institutions were underdeveloped in the first place because the sociological conditions for mass society and associational life \u2013 industrialisation and collective provision through a strong state \u2013 never came to pass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The aporia of non-aligned internationalism is, thus, that states were mainly fighting for more equitable conditions abroad to pursue development at home, but it is development which could have helped furnish the base to make non-alignment more robust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, the vision of non-alignment offered a reservoir of hope and the sense of an emancipatory horizon. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that has disappeared from view. For the ANC, the commitment to non-alignment may reflect less nostalgia, and more saudade<\/em> (in Portuguese, a bittersweet yearning) for a simpler time. By the time the ANC was governing South Africa, the USSR had collapsed, and history had ended. Rather than a world animated by a spirit of possibility, as in the first wave of decolonisation, the ANC entered a world resigned, leaving it with the unbecoming task of presiding over neoliberal immiseration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To be sure, the material basis for a non-alignment movement today is borne from the constraints imposed on the developing world by American economic primacy manifested through dollar hegemony. Counterbalancing Western encirclement is a goal few on the left would disagree with. But whether a pivot East along the lines that the ANC is chasing would be advantageous is doubtful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-alignment at the level of state diplomacy that is not subject to bottom-up pressure from popular forces is bound to project only the interests of the domestic bourgeoisie. In South Africa, the ANC\u2019s post-apartheid development model has been premised on propping up the local black elite, an effort to complete the first stage of the national democratic revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The war in Ukraine and the battle for South Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The war in Ukraine, then, expresses a conflict between two competing factions of capital in South Africa. One side, loosely classified as advocating for \u2018Radical Economic Transformation\u2019 (RET), seeks to transform capital by transforming the economy so that wealth is less concentrated in the hands of white and foreign capital, by transferring ownership of the commanding heights of the economy to politically connected black elites. RET\u2019s record in power was connected to what is called state capture: the transferral of sovereign decision-making power over public policy to private interests \u2013 most infamously, the exiled Indian business clan, the Gupta family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n During his tenure, the poster boy for RET, former president Jacob Zuma, came close to covertly concluding a $76-billion deal with the Russian state energy corporation Rosatom to build a nuclear power plant in South Africa. The ANC has also been the beneficiary of a nearly $1million donation from a company linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch in the third quarter of the 2022-23 financial year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n