Is there collusion between political elites and captains of industry amid state capture, asks Muxe Nkondo.
In recent months, state-market society relations have been the fastest growing focus area in political debates in South Africa. The focus emerged to both better understand state-capture processes and to bring scientific knowledge to bear on these processes, partly with reference to the Guptas.
Critical questions debated include: how can state-market-society relations be regulated such that they advance the public interest? What accounts for the collusion between political elites and captains of industry?
How are neo-liberal capitalist hegemonic constellations constituted and sustained? How can we expose, in our analysis, state capturers who call state-capturers state captures?
There is a way in which we can examine the ideological origins and manifestations of state capture since 1994.
Adopting a neo-Gramscian lens, we can look at the making and evolution of neo-liberal capitalism across a range of state institutions.
Among the issues to be explored are national and international connections, the forging of neo-liberal economic policies, the impact of neo-liberal think tanks and policy networks in key sectors, the operations of neo-liberal national and international hegemonic constellations, the influence of neo-liberal ideas on education and culture, and the subtle ways in which neo-liberal forces have subverted the sovereignty of the people, succeeding in establishing patterns of order and disorder that create tensions and social conflict leading to a decline in the sense of the public interest.
What will emerge; hopefully, will be a deeper appreciation of the sources and context of state capture, and a clearer understanding of how far it has penetrated into the business of the state.
It is precisely through such a critical analysis of neo-liberal capitalism that our understanding of state capture must be based.
We should sophisticate analysis that pushes forward our understanding of how state-market- society relations are organised, why they are developing in particular directions, and how globalisation across a range of social and economic relations is promoting and reinforcing state capture.
This exercise would fit in with the campaign for broader political education because it would subject state capture processes to rigorous critical analysis.
In the process, it would situate the analysis within and between the leading analytical frameworks on offer, namely those which privilege, in different ways, the emergent transnational capitalist class and private authority in all their forms.
That would serve to deepen understanding, not only of the Guptas, but also of the dynamics and contours of the national and international economic order.
This would also shed light on a wide range of actors, networks, associations, organisations, and groupings, as well as on policy arenas and discourse fields.
Of particular interest would be the various ways in which political and economic structures, institutions and interests are connected to social relations in the realm of knowledge, discourse, and interpretation.
This dualism - straddling the marketplace and the public domain - goes back a long way.
In neo-liberal capitalist economies, the media tend to play an ambivalent role, one eye on the market domain, and at the same time playing a civic role.
The conclusion is stark: neo-liberal capitalism provides a fertile political, economic, and ethical environment for state capture.
It fosters a supermarket conception of politics, with political leaders as policy salesmen and saleswomen, breeding a climate for the corrosion of national character.
The solution is to reassert the sovereignty of the people through sustained inclusive deliberation and public reasoning.
Taken together, the policy and institutional changes suggested here will amount to a new political dispensation.
The “miracle” of neo-liberal capitalism has been shattered by the crises of deepening poverty, widening unemployment, and enduring socio-economic injustice.
Since 1994, we can trace the development of a neo-liberal disposition within a distinct national and global field of elite consensus formation.
Set in motion with the “political settlement”, its austere state capture orientation gained a distinct voice in decision structures and processes - a strategy which questioned the power of the people to govern themselves even if they had the right to do so.
Lending sanction to the distinctly neo-liberal capitalist regime of accumulation and state capture that was taking place, were the policy imperatives of privatisation, trade liberalisation, deregulation, the introduction of “best practices and benchmarking” into the public sector - a grouping of corrosive capitalist practices and interactions. Integral to the political and social reproduction of the neo-liberal capitalist order, is a synthesis of public and private elements from the state and civil society.
These groups share three critical attributes. Each inhabits a space within civil society as embedded elements of a social network, within which state capture takes shape and form. They act as vehicles of national and international elite integration, linking neo-liberal capitalists to a political-social-cultural community where class distinctions are mediated and collective will is consolidated. Finally, all endeavour to translate class interests into state actions by defining and promoting policy directions and national development plans that ensure the stability and reproduction of a system shaped by neo-liberal capitalist relations.
Twenty-two years of a mean-spirited consumerist culture and its accompanying measures have eroded the public sense.
The growing interpenetration of politics, administration, and business; the sleaze which has accompanied it; the dumbing-down of state-owned entities; the diversion of knowledge institutions from the pursuit of knowledge for the public good to a scramble for market advantage; the global integration of the national economy; the mobility of capital and the global reach of accumulation circuits - all tell the same story. It is time to retrieve, or perhaps to reinvent the state as the domain of the public good.
However, that will not be done unless the ideological origins of state capture are understood, and the lessons learned.
Narrowing of focus, preo-ccupation with the moral psychology of President Zuma and the Guptas, important though that is, amounts to an oversimplification and possible distortion of the political economy of state capture.
* Nkondo is a policy analyst. He is also a member of Freedom Park Council and Council of the Unisa. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent