COLUMN ONE : ANC Crash Course in Capitalism : After years of Marxist rhetoric, the South African group faces a tricky balancing act. It must persuade white businesses to stay and blacks to join a market-driven struggle for equality.

For years, the African National Congress sent Julius Nyalunga and other budding young economists off to study Karl Marx, on distant campuses and in strange new languages, to prepare for the day when blacks would run South Africa.

But as that day approaches, the value of those degrees from Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany and the former Soviet Union has dropped as precipitously as the ruble.

And the ANC, quietly shrugging off an important part of its past, is sending many of those economists back to school here for a crash course in the onetime enemy: capitalism.

“One must understand Western economic concepts. And we’ve learned so much here,” said Nyalunga, who holds a master’s and Ph.D. in central planning from Moscow and recently completed the yearlong economic “reorientation” program at the University of Cape Town.

“When you say the state must control everything, you don’t really have the people’s interests at heart,” added Nyalunga, 39. “You can’t expect the state to run a dairy, for instance. It can never be efficient.”

For more than half a century, the ANC walked hand in hand with its allies in the Communist Party, sharing a commitment to end apartheid and enjoying substantial support from the Eastern Bloc. And for the last 36 of those years, the ANC’s economic policy has been guided by its Freedom Charter, which makes an unequivocal call to nationalize South Africa’s mines, banks and all private monopoly industries.

But now the ANC, standing among the embers of failed Communist systems worldwide, is slowly overhauling its tactics and rewriting its rhetoric.

Gone is talk of nationalization and communism as means of uplifting the millions of impoverished blacks. Instead, ANC economists speak of creating incentives for private business, reducing government spending and letting the air out of bloated state bureaucracies. Even the South African Communist Party, although it refuses to change its name, supports a mixed economy.

The Cape Town “reorientation” program, which recently began its second year, is designed to bridge the gap between East and West, to give economists trained in Communist lands the tools they will need to help guide a Western-style economy in the new South Africa.

“Our people were taught that capitalism is a bloodsucker,” said Patrick Ncube, 51, a former ANC economic planner who helped start the program. “This is perfectly OK. But I can’t take a person like that and put him in the Reserve Bank.”

The policy face lift has created a dual challenge for ANC economists. After so many years of Marxist rhetoric, they must convince white businesses of their sincerity to encourage reinvestment in the economy and stop the flight of white capital and expertise.

But they must also persuade millions of black ANC supporters, including union members, the homeless and the jobless, to abandon hope of state-ordered quick fixes and prepare instead for a long, market-driven struggle for economic equality.

“With the rank and file, there’s a helluva lot of work to be done,” Ncube said. “We must convince the black community that it will have to wait.”

And that taking from the whites to give to the blacks is not the answer. “We don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs,” he said.

Ncube believes that the new government in South Africa, which will take over after the April 27, 1994, elections, will face a difficult few years--even if, as expected, it is controlled by the ANC. South Africa’s leaders will face all the pent-up demands for housing, jobs and redistributing the wealth that still lies disproportionately in white hands.

“We won’t be able to deliver the goods in that short a time, and the hard-liners will say, ‘You’ve sold out to the Boers,’ ” Ncube said, referring to the white Afrikaners who have run the country since 1948. “That is going to be our main problem.”

For decades, South Africa’s economic debate has been clouded by politics. South African blacks have equated apartheid oppression with capitalism while the white-minority government has viewed black liberation as part of a Communist conspiracy against Pretoria.

In reality, South Africa has long had an economic system that bore more hallmarks of socialism than capitalism. The state controls prices for gasoline and most basic foods, from bread and milk to fruit juice. A vast, state-run broadcasting company dominates the nation’s airwaves.

Until the recent decision to privatize state industries, the government controlled the monopoly airline and the telephone and utility companies. And the government offers cradle-to-grave social benefits, spending much more for whites than blacks.

The inefficiency of state-run industries, as much as international sanctions, has triggered an economic recession, which in turn has resulted in three consecutive years without economic growth. “This country is a train smash because of Boer socialism,” said Peter Orgell, a former New York investment banker who teaches the economics course in Cape Town.

Yet the fear of communism, along with memories of the ANC’s old military links with Communist countries, the ANC-inspired sanctions campaign and the ANC’s now-suspended guerrilla war, runs deep among white business executives. Nearly a third of the men and women on the ANC’s national executive committee still belong to the Communist Party.

ANC leaders, including its President Nelson Mandela, have tried to reassure whites that an ANC-led government would not take away their homes, businesses or bank accounts. And he has succeeded, at least partially.

“I’ve found them (ANC economists) realistic and pragmatic, with a desire to do the right thing,” said Derek Keys, finance minister in President Frederik W. de Klerk’s white-minority government. “And I think that’s an excellent basis for future cooperation.”

But the ANC has made less progress in its efforts to mollify militant grass-roots supporters, who still use slogans such as “Kill the Boers, Kill the farmers” to whip up the masses.

And the ANC appears headed for confrontation, after next year’s elections, with the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a giant black labor coalition. The coalition, which represents hundreds of thousands of blacks working in industries from mining to auto manufacturing, wants the new government to break up the large private conglomerates that control most of the companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

To the ordinary ANC supporter, the solution seems simple: The state should take from the privileged whites and give to the impoverished blacks. They note that apartheid laws placed 85% of the country’s land in the hands of fewer than 15% of its people. More than 1.5 million blacks are homeless and millions more live in ratty township shacks, while most whites live in nice suburbs.

“On the ground, you find there is a lot of demand for redressing inequalities,” said Tito Mboweni, deputy director of the ANC’s economic planning department. “There is a huge amount of unhappiness about the concentration of economic power (in white hands). Our job is to put that into a sensible economic policy.”

Mboweni says the gap between rhetoric and reality is only natural in any political platform. “As President Clinton has discovered, what you have in your manifesto and what you can actually implement have to be reconciled,” he said.

That division between rhetoric and economic reality was even evident among the 12 ANC economists who recently completed the program on the Cape Town campus. The daylong sessions were a primer in marketplace economics, with courses in macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic history, labor economics and international trade.

The underlying principle: how the profit incentive is the driving force in keeping businesses efficient and solvent.

Although many of the students had advanced degrees in economics, their previous course work had focused on political theory in centrally planned economies, learning to guide an economy in which factories operated only for the good of the nation--and not for a profit.

From the first day of class, the students squared off in robust philosophical debates. On one side were the exiles, whose educations in Eastern Europe had, ironically, made them capitalist converts. And on the other were several students who had remained in South Africa and still held fast to the Marxist dogma.

“Sometimes I felt like a missionary, spreading the word of capitalism among the socialist heathens,” said Orgell, the American banker who taught some of the classes.

The economic evangelism seemed to work, though. After a year of “reorientation,” most of the students had abandoned thoughts of wholesale nationalization and become social democrats, favoring a free market with a human face.

Although the ANC formally shifted its economic policy only recently, changes were under way in the organization even before it was legalized in 1990, driven in large part by economists returning from their studies in Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union.

When Tseko Liphokojoe earned his master’s in economics from Sofia University in Bulgaria, he was shocked by the contrast between the economic theory he learned in the classroom and the ravages that theory had brought on Bulgaria, where he had to wait in long lines for food. As a result, Liphokojoe argued against nationalization when he returned to the ANC headquarters in Zambia in the late 1980s--and took flak from the rank and file.

“People took it for granted that once things were nationalized, there would be redistribution,” said Liphokojoe, one of the students in Cape Town’s reorientation program. “That’s not the way it works, though. You have to have something to redistribute.

“But people didn’t like those facts,” he added. “They said we were softening up. We weren’t popular among the workers.”

The teachers in Cape Town shattered plenty of misconceptions about the best way to provide housing, health care and jobs for the black majority.

“People are beginning to understand,” Ncube said. “While we have the emotional feeling that we want to have a clinic for every South African, if we did that, we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.”