I think the ending of the cold war had a lot to do with the kind of deal that the ANC was able to negotiate. With the passing of the Soviet Union, the ANC was under much greater pressure from the US and EU to bow to the neoliberal consensus, which as it so happened would leave the South African economy in the hands of the same people who owned and ran things under the apartheid regime.
Also, we should remember that at the time that negotiations began between the ANC and the apartheid regime, people from both camps were estimating that if a fulls scale civil war were to have broken out, up to a million people could have been killed. Most of those deaths would have come from South African blacks.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] FYI & Comment if you Wish Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:14:39 -0500
On Mar 10, 2010, at 10:44 AM, Ismail Lagardien wrote:
> Would people on these two lists care to give me their views on the
> blog post. I am not doing this for publicity - hell no.
> But I kinda respect people on these two lists... You can comment on
> the page, or on this forum.
What you say looks hard to argue with.
The whole story is important beyond SA. As revolutionary movements go, they don't come much better than the ANC - in the real world, at least. Yet while the transition resulted in an end to apartheid, SA is in many ways a more unequal and violent place today than it was before 1994. Figuring out how that happened seems really important.
Doug ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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