Capitalism 11

I was focusing on the politics—mass action, going to Bisho [site of a definitive showdown between demonstrators and police] (…) But that was not the real struggle—the real struggle was over economics. And I am disappointed in myself for being so naive.

Interview with Naomi Klein (2007: 205).

William Gumede is a journalist and professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a former ANC activist and leader of the student movement during apartheid.

According to Gumede, during the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, everyone looked to the political negotiations as a guarantee of political freedom for the non-white South African population as a whole. Economic regulations did not receive much attention from ANC fighters. This enabled the white South African elite to secure economic power and therefore their wealth. The ANC government was disempowered in terms of economic policy, it could neither distribute land or water for free because these had been privatised, nor raise the minimum wage because of an agreement with the IMF (Klein 2010: 283, German edition).

*William Gumede (2005): Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Cape Town: Zebra Press. *Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

2005