Debate over whether to nationalise needs airing
July 10, 2009
 By Terry Bell
THE APPARENTLY sudden rediscovery of the nationalisation proposal in the Freedom Charter by Cosatu and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), backed by the Young Communist League (YCL), should come as no surprise given the present economic and political climate.
Some union cynics have already dubbed Cosatu's support for a state takeover of the mines a desperate attempt to regain radical credibility after some serious blunders in dealing with the public sector dispute.
However, especially within the Cosatu-affiliated unions, the issue of state control has bubbled beneath the surface for more than a decade after former president Nelson Mandela ruled it out as a policy option for the ANC in government.
When he did so, the cries of betrayal tended to come only from the radical fringes of the labour movement.
Now the debate has opened up again and this should be welcomed. This is because the question of whether or not to nationalise the mines, or anything else for that matter, raises a plethora of issues that have all too often been buried beneath simplistic slogans when they have emerged at all.
This time, as the debate starts to rage, there are no clearly defined camps into which various individuals and groups can be slotted.
This week, for example, National Union of Mineworkers general secretary, Frans Baleni, a communist, came under withering attack from the YCL for questioning the viability of nationalisation.
Yet it was SACP chairman - and ANC secretary-general - Gwede Mantashe who initially shot down the nationalisation call from the ANCYL.
Mantashe has since said he welcomed debate on the issue, although ANC spokeswoman Jesse Duarte and Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan have repeated that nationalisation is "not the policy of the ANC".
However, in the time before the ANC swept into government and before hard and fast policies had been drafted, there was an assumption that the nationalisation of the mines and banks was on the ANC agenda. "Nationalisation is the policy of the ANC," said Mandela when he stepped out of prison in 1990.
However, within three years, Mandela had changed tack and ruled out nationalisation as a policy option. The interventionist macroeconomic policies drafted by the ANC's macroeconomic research group were also ditched and the ground was laid for the neo-liberal growth employment and redistribution (Gear) framework.
Over the years since then, there has been plenty of grumbling about Gear, but little mention of nationalisation. Even the interventionist "social equity and job creation" proposals adopted by the combined labour movement were quietly forgotten.
Now it seems generally agreed that Gear and the whole neo-liberal, Washington consensus, approach to the global economy have failed. It is a time of crisis and, from left, right and centre, solutions are being sought, with the question of nationalisation central to this.
Labour historians can point out that there is nothing new in this; that a perusal of similar debates over the past century and more might help to clarify matters and highlight the dangers as well as the benefits of state ownership and control.
Back in 1880, for example, Frederich Engels, a collaborator of Karl Marx and a YCL icon, highlighted one clear danger when he warned: "But the transformation - either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership - does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces."
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