Now We Know What Doesn’t Work : South Africa: The exposure of the crumbling economies of Eastern Europe is affecting black liberation movements that assumed socialism was the way of the future.

Only months ago, the nationalization of South Africa’s major industries was assumed to be a consequence of black majority rule, whenever that might occur.

The debate among black activists and in the townships was on the process rather than the need for nationalization. Because of capitalism’s failure to show a human face and its robust health under apartheid, most blacks worshiped the socialist economic system.

Socialist writers had a ready and growing market in the black townships, even though their writings were banned. Children were frequently named after Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin.

But events in Eastern Europe have thrown the region’s crumbling state-controlled economies into the world spotlight, with repercussions for South Africa’s liberation theorists. Many are now asking if the future socialist society on which they built their hopes and sacrifices is a realistic alternative to the apartheid society they are dismantling.

When the economies of socialist countries were first exposed to be faltering, black activists rejected the reports, calling them another manifestation of the ages-old campaign against “our socialist brothers.” However, the penny has at last dropped and it is now accepted that East Bloc socialist governments have failed to give their citizens a better life.

Stories of housing shortages and long lines for basic necessities are now reluctantly believed. We have seen Poles asking the much-hated capitalists of the West to invest in their country. South Africa’s neighbor, Mozambique, has abandoned Marxism-Leninism as the guiding philosophy for that troubled country. Julius Nyerere’s African Socialism experiment in Tanzania was a dismal failure.

A prominent entrepreneur in Soweto says that only a fully free economy, with the market as sole arbiter, will work. “Look at what is happening in communist countries,” he said. “They are now begging the West for investments and technology.”

South Africa’s major liberation movement, the African National Congress, now promulgates a mixed economy. The Pan Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness movement are still officially committed to a socialist Azania, the name for a liberated South Africa.

With time, the latter two are likely to change their tunes, for it is increasingly difficult to argue for state-controlled socialism when the world’s communist countries have admitted the system’s serious political, social and economic shortcomings.

There are other, seemingly insurmountable, hurdles to a socialist economy in South Africa. The country’s white business community, which controls 90% of the wealth and is here to stay, will resist socialism to the bitter end. The present captains of industry, robbed of their companies and lives of luxury, would do all in their power to ensure the demise of a socialist economy. This is the catch that has trapped Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Added to this is the lack of a corps of black technocrats, even from the ANC and PAC, to ensure that government strategies in a planned economy are carried out.

While socialism may no longer be a path for the future, the case for pure capitalism is no better, as capitalism shares the blame for South Africa’s present ills. Capitalism and apartheid are two sides of the same coin; if capitalist structures had the welfare of the blacks at heart, they would not have pursued labor policies that destroyed black family life and turned townships like Soweto into mere reservoirs of workers.

South Africa’s future economy must address the present disparities, the most obvious being that blacks are the country’s workers and consumers, but not its producers and employers. If one person, one vote were to come to this country tomorrow, today’s have-nots would still be in the economic underclass. This is not liberation.

Second, an economy that guarantees the freedom of man, his markets and their growth is the only base on which to build. The shortcomings of state socialism and capitalism have prompted blacks to look at the welfare economies in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden. The shopping, however, continues.

While South Africa’s blacks are still the only ones on the continent who have not attained their liberation from white oppressors, the blessing may be that this has placed them in a better position to judge and learn from the shortcomings of the Soviets, Chinese, British and Americans. They will then come up with a system that will serve their national interests, and not just one with appealing rhetoric.