Classically speaking there is one capitalist economy, says ANC secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe. But in practice, a large section of the population of the country is marginalised. Speaking of two economies is merely a tool to help analyse this fact and decide on interventions.
You have a first world in South Africa and a third world. Sometimes our comrades in the (South African Communist) Party say that the capitalist system is one and therefore you can’t speak of two economies.
But when you apply tools of Marxism dialectically you find answers to these questions. In the Communist Manifesto, Engels and Marx say: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” You will understand and take that sentence and then apply it to current day society and realise that we are in a capitalist society where there are class struggles.
Everywhere I drive I see development taking place. They are not just single rooms. They are estates that cost even more money. They leave out the majority of our people completely. When I was growing up, our people never used to go out for a job. The neighbours would tell you that there is a job somewhere, working people would collect you and you would have a job. Those days are gone.
If you are a painter you will never find a job as a painter unless you organise yourself into a team of 3-4 and you organise a ladder, a roller, brushes and so on and you go out and quote and say, ‘we will paint this building of yours and it will cost you so much if you provide the paint.’
That’s how things are organised now – that’s how production is organised. There is very little opportunity for people who want jobs as individuals. In fact they look at you with suspicion.
Rustenburg is the fastest growing city in the country today because of platinum. You see phenomenal development and yet in the same town you find able-bodied people, four to five sitting on the corner. When a bakkie stops they just jump on to the back, they don’t ask what kind of skills do you need, what is in it for them, what tasks they would have to perform, they will hear that once they get there – that is the level of desperation.
If you go to Soweto , or any township, the people there buy everything from town.
We are saying we want to intervene deliberately to change that setting in the township. If there is a plumber there, he must be assisted to run a viable business making sure that there is a market.
Soweto is bigger than the cities in terms of population – there are 3m people there. And yet there is no local economy.
If we are to intervene there, how do we characterize that? That’s where the notion of the two economies comes from. We understand there is no confusion about one economy but we are saying we need to characterize the marginal aspect of this economy such that it enables us and drives us to intervene there deliberately.
But of course if we want to stay classical, it leads to confusion because classically there is one economy and that is a capitalist economy. If you say it that way you will ask impertinent questions. You will say, ‘what is the objective – do you want the second economy to graduate to the first economy? Does this mean you don’t recognize positive elements that are there on the marginal side of the second economy or does it mean that you are saying the thriving side is working fairly well?’
There is no confusion, we understand that there is one economy, but we say we want to be deliberate and use the instruments of abstraction – this first economy is the goose that lays the golden egg.Kgalema Motlanthe, was speaking to Karl Cloete and Mdu Ntuli earlier in 2005