'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Apartheid's 'Total Strategy', contd.

About a month ago, JWN regular Dominic and I were doing some online work together looking at potential areas for comparison between the "total strategy" adopted by the SA apartheid regime in the 1970s and the "Global War on Terrorism" launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.

We're still really only at the beginning of this work. But if you go to this early-April post you can see some of the exchanges we had-- plus some helpful comments from JWN readers, too.

Okay, here's a bit of an update. First, I have finally managed to scan an excerpt of the text of the TS, as compiled in "South African government documents on the ‘Total strategy’, 1980 and 1977", in eds. M. Hough and M. Van der Merwe, Selected official South African Strategic Perceptions, 1976-1987 (Pretoria: Institute for Strategic Studies, Univ. of Pretoria, May 1988). There are five pages total there, scanned into a Word document, so you just need to keep scrolling down...

It gives a little more text than we had before, though not a whole lot.

Secondly, I got a very helpful email from Prof. Alan Emery of Cal. State University, Fullerton, in response to an enquiry I'd sent him.

Here's what he wrote (reproduced by permission):

[Alan Emery email:]

Hi Helena:

I've been meaning to resond to your nice email.

Regarding the substance of the comparison....there are some interesting similarities, as we both know. But there are important differences.

While I am no expert on the formation of the NSS, my sense is that it was drawn up from a mishmash of Bush speeches, which were probably drafted by key white house staff....This is very different from how total strategy was formulated in SA. It really was a much more systematic affair, involving the input of various state commissions that solicited input from various white elites and sectors, and even from more conservatives and pliant blacks. The primary goal of TS was to prevent the revolutionary overthrow of the state, and in this it was successful. Many scholars argue that it prevented revolution in impact as well as preventing overthrow of the state. I don't accept that. I think that the white state was successful in winning the military battles, but lost the PRIMARY political war, the struggle to maintain racial domination. So there has been a (partial) revolution in race relations in SOuth Africa, the impacts of that revolution are still unfolding in the country today, and are visible in the (partial) deracialization of the state and society.

In your studies of state and movement strategies, I'd strongly recommend factoring in the role of ideology in framing strategy. Ideologies seem to play decisive roles in shaping how states and movements think about strategies. For example, in the case of total strategy in SA, the white state was not willing to envisage racial inclusion...this was not negotiable, and so it sought to find ways to make racial domination more functional. As part of this, they were willing to make some important class concessions to the black population, and this is seen most clearly in the policy on black unionization. It would be going too far to say they were happy about black unionization, but it was also the case that they helped facilitate it, with the goal of stabilizing labor relations and increasing profitability and growth. To do this, they formed a commissions (Riekert and Wiehahn) and sought the counsel of many leading capitalists, intellectuals, and so on. In this, they were guided by a very important insight: that making concessions to workers coopts their unions and brings them into the system of collective bargaining....preventing them from becoming revolutionary. This has been the case in every other state that has institionalized collective bargaining for unions. The outcome of this important concession by the state has been the legitmation of capitalist relations in SOuth Africa, the accelerating the formation of a black capitalist and middle classes, and the protecting of white economic priviledge. If the white state had resisted black unionization as many authoritarian states do, it is very likely that workers would have joined in the goal of overthrowing capitalism alongslide overthrowing of racial domination (they did the latter, not the former).

WHat is interesting about this process wrt to understanding NSS is that the Nats were quite pragmatic in their economic doctrines, but the NSS is just the opposite, advocating doctrinaire neoliberalism. If the empire is to have any success, its going to need to increase its social bases of support, and garner additional legitimacy. But the combination of militarism alongside neoliberalism just isolates the empire from potential economic clients, and undermines prospects for growth and labor stability worldwide. Perhaps this kind of doctrinaire economic thinking would not be prevalent if the American state were to consult among its various clients in the way that the SA state did formulting TS. THe opposition to neoliberalism and militarism is alienating the American state globally, and this can be seen in multiple fronts, like for example in how the Europeans are increasingly saying they need to militarize to combat American unilateralism to how the Global SOuth is unifying at the World Social Forums. And then, of course, we should not forget the almost complete illegitimacy of the American Empire in the Middle East Arab populations. If you are interested in following up on this line of inquiry vis the US, I'd suggest looking into Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire, which shows how the US's doctrinaire economic and military strategies are isolating it globally.

If you would like to know more about the TS in SA, I can send you a copy of a chapter from my dissertation about it...and I'd also recommend Chris Alden's Apartheid's Last Stand, both of which might provide some overviews of how it was formulated, and more importantly, for your textual analysis, a list of references that you can refer to.

I've read some of the comments on your blogsite, but not your articles....Perhaps you could send some to me--I'd like to read them.


All best,
alan

I'd better take Alan up, sometime soon, on the offer of the dissertation chapter... Not to mention get hold of Chris Alden's book.

However, I am racing against time on my own book on violence in Africa these days. (Personal deadline: May 18th. Likelihood of meeting it? 60%?) So I'm afraid that further work from me on this other little sub-project will have to wait.

Meantime, Dominic or anyone else, do please keep the discussion here rolling along.