Why South Africa Doesn’t Fall : Many Crises Are Boiling, but Not the Stuff of Revolution

With rebellion sweeping the black townships, many people assume that South Africa is confronted with an enormous political crisis, that its breakdown is imminent and ultimate downfall not far away.

Those who argue that revolution and black-majority rule cannot be long in coming are influenced by a common political wisdom that finds its theoretical foundation in the studies of revolution published in the 1960s and early 1970s by American scholars such as Chalmers Johnson, Charles Tilly and Ted Gurr.

They believe that revolution starts when the majority in a country gets more and more disgruntled. Once an existing government loses its legitimacy--general support based on consent and/or the sense of the population that the state is supplying an essential service--a vital turning point is reached. According to this view, the state cannot effectively continue to repress discontented majorities.

In a recent major study of revolutions in a world context, Theda Skocpol convincingly argues that these views are naive. In her book, “States and Social Revolution,” she notes: “The conventional wisdom is belied in the most obvious fashion by the prolonged survival of such blatantly repressive and domestically illegitimate regimes as (in South Africa).” She concludes that even after a great loss of legitimacy a state can remain quite stable--if the police and the army remain coherent and effective in controlling the population, and if the state continues to collect taxes and attract police and military recruits. The state must also be autonomous in the sense that it cannot be brought down by a colonial power (Algeria) or a neighboring patron (as Rhodesia was by South Africa in the late 1970s).

Does the South African state meet these criteria? When the South African government declared a state of emergency in July, the head of the South African police, Gen. Johan Coetzee, justified it on the ground that it is not cruel but weak governments that fall. Many would be offended by such a statement, but as a historical rule of thumb it is probably correct. And, while the Western world and many white South Africans have been repelled by the conduct of the South African security forces, the situation has not looked even once as if it were getting out of hand in the sense that the police were forced to retreat.

South Africa is experiencing no difficulty in finding police and military recruits among either the white or the black population. As South African novelist Alan Paton noted 15 years ago, “As long as the police force continues to be able to recruit black policemen, a strata that would be the first object of hate from the general population, there can be no hope of revolution.”

The same is true of the standing army--applications from both whites and blacks are several times higher than vacancies. In addition to the career army officers, young white males 18 and older are required to do two years of compulsory military service. Although there has been some resistance to the compulsory requirement recently, it is far from being significant enough to be of concern to the authorities.

Furthermore, South Africa is experiencing no problem in collecting sufficient revenue. Revenues this year are considerably higher than for the same period last year. During the last seven years the rate of growth in government expenditures is at least twice as high in South Africa as in the United States. This is generally considered very bad for the South African economy, but it is hardly an indication of a state under serious pressure to find funds.

What we have in South Africa is not a revolutionary crisis but a combination of several kinds of crises. There is political instability brought about by alienated black schoolchildren with extremely limited options. There is a diplomatic crisis--South Africa is much further along the road of international isolation. There is a serious crisis of profitability and lack of investment that is leading to spiraling black unemployment. There is a constitutional crisis, with the government’s initiatives increasingly blocked and thwarted by the black majority. And whites face a severe moral crisis in that it is ever more difficult to live in this country with clean hands and an easy conscience. But these are not the crises that bring a state down.

For blacks there is a different crisis--that of living with dashed hopes and shattered illusions. After a year of turmoil, the wrenching truth of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book, “Anatomy of Power,” must be painfully felt. “Nothing so serves the military or corporate power as the belief of its opponents that they have accomplished something by holding a meeting, giving a speech or issuing a manifesto,” Galbraith says.

Skocpol ends her book with a note of hope for those unable to stomach the idea of an unreformed but durable South African state. She writes: “A modern social revolution would probably have to flow gradually, not cataclysmically, out of a long series of non-reformist reforms, accomplished by mass-based political movements struggling to democratize every major institution from the economy to the political parties, (the) army and civil bureaucracy.”

This is a struggle in which all people can participate--white and black South Africans and those in the Western world as well. This road has been pioneered in the last decade in South Africa by brave black workers and white students in building up the highly democratic independent trade-union movement. But the very reason for their success was the realization that toppling the state is not on their agenda at this stage of South African history.