Liberalizing Currents: Electricity, Market Reforms, and Crisis After Apartheid

Why has the optimism of South Africa's "miraculous" transition from apartheid to democracy turned into a disappointing post-apartheid present defined by economic stagnation, trenchant inequality, and increasing political instability? This dissertation examines that question through the lens of the country's collapsing electricity system. In the first chapter, I outline the overarching argument of the dissertation, suggesting the crisis in South Africa is a product of the contradictions produced by the ANC's efforts to use market reforms to facilitate the deracialization of South African society. In making this argument, I intervene in debates on the contemporary crisis of the global liberal order, suggesting that it resulted from the contradictions between the political processes necessary to stabilize social and political life and the destabilizing and anti-democratic dynamics of market reforms in practice.  

In Chapter 2, I analyze the politics of anti-apartheid resistance. I draw on Gramsci’s passive revolution to understand how anti-apartheid politics ultimately facilitated a period of capitalist development. I critically engage Chatterjee’s account of decolonialization as a passive revolution. Where he situates the failure of anticolonial nationalists to root themselves in and radicalize the popular struggle as a product of the contradictions of Enlightenment thought, I focus attention on what Stuart Hall calls the “formative actions” of the colonial state and white business elites. I show how these actors’ initial efforts to disorganize anti-apartheid resistance failed, leading sections of the capitalist elite to begin an alternative strategy, laying the foundations for a negotiated transition for apartheid that made it unnecessary for the ANC to radicalize the popular struggle toward more transformative ends.

In Chapter 3, I ask why the ANC embraced market reforms. I argue that existing accounts of market reforms within and beyond South Africa cannot account for the ANC’s uptake of an ideology of market developmentalism. Accounts focused on the coercive power of capital fail to explain why the party embraced the logics and practices of market reforms as their own, while ideational analyses struggle to account for the process of persuasion itself. Instead, drawing on a broadly Gramscian theory of ideology, I develop an account of persuasion founded on the transformation of actors’ subjectivities. I argue that ANC elites were interpellated into an ideology of market developmentalism through the subjectivity of technocratic policymakers. They came to see market reforms as not only an inevitable reaction to objective global conditions, but the best possible instruments with which to pursue their efforts to overcome apartheid’s racial inequities.

In Chapter 4, I turn to the contradictions of the passive revolution in everyday life. Drawing on participant observation in Soweto, I use a protest against a months-long disconnection to chart the history of popular demands for access to electricity. I argue that popular anger is rooted in the feeling of powerlessness, as people not only cannot afford electricity and thus are literally left without power, but also feel that the marketized electricity system has been imposed upon them without their consent or support. This anger animates a politics of claims-making that under Jacob Zuma allowed communities to access electricity even when they could not afford to pay. Under Ramaphosa, however, their demands have gone unanswered, leaving communities in the dark for months or even years at a time. The chapter directly connects these coercive practices to Ramaphosa’s efforts to finally implement market reforms in the electricity sector. However, disconnections only foster a turn away from the ANC, weakening his support base and thus the political foundations of market reforms. The policies necessary to attract investment thus foster the politics that undermine it.

The conclusion summarizes the arguments of this dissertation.