GOOD AFTERNOON AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY? EXACTLY WHO OR WHAT IS THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS IN SOUTH AFRICA? A Mail and Guardian of November 8 to 14 (2013) article headlined Why it is hard to be black and middle class? by GRACE KHONOU (sociologist at the Universtity of the Witwatersrand) DETLEV KRIGE (anthropologist at Pretoria university) tried to address this question in a rather novel way for academic researchers, with the following qualification: We set out to explore what it means to be black and middle class in contemporary Gauteng, without developing a narrow and definite definition of either blackness or middle-classness. We were interested in everyday experiences over abstract categories and in subjective means rather than objective measurements. We deliberately did not define these categories upfront so as not to exclude important dynamics and processes. However, further on the authors do assert that - The very category of black middle class is conceivable only in relation to our countrys history of racialised capitalism. Within this context, the authors explain that: Those who grew up in middle class households under apartheid did not rely on debt to reach their social positions, unlike the bulk of the contemporary black middle class. When Maponya extended credit to his customers, who were also his neighbours and relatives, this was not only an economic relationship. Social ties also linked him to his clientele. Credit and debt relations today are no longer relations between people and faceless institutions. They discipline us into the anonymous structures of national capitalism and national middle classes seem to have become categories that block understanding of global capitalism. Elsewhere in another article in the same newspaper titled - Vampire Squid waxes lyrical on SA virtues - by THALIA HOMES on the Goldman and Sachs report titled - Two Decades of Freedom: What South Africa is Doing with it, and What needs to be done - the issue of growth in the middle class from 13,8 million in 2001 to 23,5 million in 2010 is highlighted, among several other macro economic indicators such as GDP growth, increases in gold and forex reserves, higher labour productivity in terms of average output per worker, lower average inflation,etc., as an indicator of general progress and prosperity. This means that the much pontificated growth of the black middle class in particular, is considered as a significant generic metric in terms of which economic prosperity is measured. The question of who or what this black middle class is, therefore requires the very objective measurements and abstract categorisation that KHONOU and KRIGE choose to steer clear of in their article, if any significance at all can be given to their growth in South Africa since 1994. Lets attempt to explore the answer to who or what the middle class was or argued to be now with reference to how they were described before by others: * Although Kark Marx did not define them ontologically, he described them as positioned between the bourgeoisie who own the means of producing goods exclusively for profit, and the proletariat who work for the former and sell their labour as wage slaves in a capitalist society. In their tract titled The Manifesto of the Communist Party (February 1848), KARL MARX and FREDERIC ENGELS criticises the middle class as follows: They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to pace themselves at that of the proletariat. * What about service providers such as public servants, doctors, lawyers, hairdressers, etc., who are not employed by the bourgeoisie a wage labour? Marx does not regard them, even including wage-earners employed in these sectors, as belonging to the working class because they do not perform productive labour in the sense of producing goods for profit as employees at production sites owned by the bourgeoisie. In his book titled the Grundrisse (1857), Karl Marx explains this as follows: The services that the capitalist purchases ... for their use-value, whether he does so voluntary or otherwise, no more become elements of capital than do the commodities that he buys for his private consumption. As a result these services are not productive labour, and their agents are not productive labourers. But how has the role of the black middle classin particular, been described in an African context after liberation from colonialism, including in the case of internal colonialism as practiced under apartheid , as was the case with Khonou and Kriges reference to racialised and post apartheid national capitalism in South Africa? * KWAME NKRUMAH, in his book titled Class Struggle in Africa (1970), contextualises class struggle in this context as follows: In the struggle for political independence, urban workers, peasants and the national bourgeoisie ally together to reject the colonial power. Class cleavages are temporarily blurred. But once independence is achieved, class conflicts come to the fore over the social and economic policies of the new government. Given this historical context, Nkrumah also refers to the role of the black middle class, which he calls the black petit bourgeoisie, as follows: It is possible for classes to combine in the post colonial situation, and the nature of the government is assessed by which particular class interests are dominant. Theorists arguing that proletariat and petty bourgeoisie should join together to win the peasantry, in order to attack the bourgeoisie, ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie will always, when it comes to the pinch, side with the bourgeoise to preserve capitalism. ... Where conflict involves both political and economic interests, the economic always prevails. * FRANTZ FANON, in his book titled The Wretched of the Earth (1961), contextualises the precarious position of the black middle class, which he refers to as the national middle class, after independence from colonial regimes as follows: The national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace. In its willful narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country. At another point in the same book FANON concludes the following about the black middle class after independence: The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of an intermediary. In conclusion, it appears that this notion of black middle class does not easily lend itself to a fixed ontological definition as an entity in a structural sense, but its position is relational between the primary classes, ie., the bourgeoisie and the proletariat whose identities are structurally constant under capitalism. However, the question still remains: how do we describe them in contemporary South Africa in the sense in which KHONOU and KRIGEs article speaks of them in case studies referred to? The book titled Development in a Divided Country, Volume 5 of a series titled Understanding the ANC Today published in conjunction with the ANC Parliamentary Political Education Committee (2011), offers some insight and caution in over-simplifying class differentiation narrowly between the two main classes, ie., the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (also called the working class). It cautions: We need to be very careful about this differentiation because the Strategy and Tactics document talks about the bourgeoisie and distinguishes different elements and strata of the bourgeoisie. We ought to talk about the middle strata. Professional people who do not own factories, do not employ lots of workers and do not extract surplus value from their workers are said to occupy an in-between position. The bourgeoisie includes the owners of the means of production, but also senior politicians, the rich, the elite, investors and people who own capital but not factories. ... We call them the bourgeoisie, not the capitalist class. I think that it is this middle strata, as opposed to the traditional idea of a middle class, that KHONOU and KRIGE are probably referring to in their article. Given this context, measuring progress by the growth of a black middle class or middle class in general, in the traditional or historic sense of the word, mitigates against the historical logic of capitalist development in SA and the very free-market myth of economic progress which claims to serve all as a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:00:14 +0000
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