Anthea Jeffery has spent much of her career warning that South Africa is on a covert march to socialism. Her vehicle of choice is the so-called National Democratic Revolution — a theoretical construct she treats as hard evidence of an unfolding Marxist programme hidden inside government policy. The ANC’s reform proposals, however diluted, are presented as proof of a long-haul conspiracy to unravel capitalism, property rights, and democracy. This isn’t analysis. It’s ideological warfare crafted for a constituency anxious about redistribution.

The National Democratic Revolution in its original conception was a phase-based process towards liberation: political rights first, economic reorganisation later. But what Jeffery refuses to acknowledge is that the ANC never implemented its second phase. The so-called revolution halted at the moment of elite pacting. The language remained. The politics shifted. The ANC’s alignment with the SACP and COSATU allowed it to maintain liberation credentials, while its actual policies became increasingly orthodox. By the mid-1990s, the alliance had internalised market logic. Redistribution gave way to stabilisation. GEAR formalised this. Privatisation followed. State entities were corporatised. Public services were costed and commodified.

Jeffery omits this history. Or she wilfully misrepresents it. She uses the NDR as a container for all post-apartheid policy that inconveniences capital. Land reform, healthcare expansion, employment equity — these are treated as dangerous incursions into free enterprise. She isolates phrases from ANC conferences or SACP newsletters and holds them up as definitive proof of a creeping totalitarian project, while ignoring the decades-long collapse of anything resembling a radical economic agenda.

Her institutional base — the Institute of Race Relations — supports this position through a stream of publications designed to conflate moderate state intervention with revolutionary intent. It claims to stand for classical liberalism. In practice, it operates as a cultural and economic firewall for the beneficiaries of apartheid’s economic structure. Its function is not to analyse power, but to secure it.

Jeffery’s periodic references to 1976 are calculated. She acknowledges the significance of the uprising, but removes it from the insurgent currents that animated it. The student protests were not simply a spontaneous reaction to Afrikaans in schools. They were a political rupture. They revived Black Consciousness, anti-capitalist critique, and a pan-African worldview. Many students were detained, tortured, or killed. Others went into exile and carried their radicalism with them. Some joined the ANC. Others looked elsewhere — to the PAC, to newer formations, or to community organising beyond party structures.

The UDF, which emerged in the 1980s, institutionalised much of this activism. But its formation marked a shift away from the militancy of 1976. It embraced the Freedom Charter and sought to build broad-based alliances under its framework. It functioned as a civic force rather than a revolutionary front. COSATU, too, while initially militant in worker organising, had by the mid-1980s begun engaging foreign donors and adopting development project language. USAID funding flowed into union education and policy platforms. The edges of resistance were being managed. The revolutionary demands were being absorbed into programmes.

The SACP followed a similar trajectory. From its exile-era anti-capitalist declarations to its post-1994 parliamentary positions, the shift was clear. It offered ideological cover to the ANC’s pragmatic manoeuvring, describing every compromise as a tactical delay. But the delays became permanent. The economic structure of apartheid remained intact, with new faces at the table.

Jeffery does not mention these shifts, because her narrative relies on exaggeration. She needs the ANC to be a radical actor so she can frame even the mildest policy adjustment as evidence of Marxist capture. Her entire thesis depends on mischaracterisation. Redistribution becomes dispossession. Affirmative action becomes racial engineering. Healthcare equity becomes state control. She constructs an ANC that no longer exists and warns against an agenda that has already been abandoned.

Her real objective is to delegitimise any challenge to racialised wealth. She is not defending democratic values. She is defending historical advantage. This is evident in the way she treats land. Expropriation without compensation, a policy with strict constitutional limits and very narrow application, is presented as the first step toward Zimbabwe-style collapse. This ignores decades of failed restitution, government inertia, and the market-driven nature of land policy since 1994. The threat, for Jeffery, lies not in the reality of land injustice, but in the idea that it might one day be resolved.

AfriForum echoes this approach. Its spokespeople describe land reform as an attack on white farmers and frame any social policy as a threat to white survival. Their version is more racialised, more openly defensive, but the logic is aligned. Both formations reject historical responsibility. Both see equity as a threat. Both amplify fear to protect capital.

Other institutions mirror these concerns in more bureaucratic language. Security think tanks publish briefings about instability. Business forums call for restraint. Liberal columnists urge balance. The message is consistent: do nothing that might disrupt the ownership patterns of the last century.

Jeffery’s argument about the NDR gives this position an intellectual cover. By citing speeches, strategy documents, and ideological jargon, she creates the appearance of serious critique. But it is a formula. She substitutes policy analysis with ideological projection. She avoids the fact that economic transformation has not taken place. She avoids the structural continuity between apartheid and post-apartheid capital. She avoids the reality that Black suffering in South Africa today is largely the result of state capitulation to business interests — interests that she and her institutional network continue to defend.

There is no NDR in motion. There is a collapsed developmental state, a political class aligned with private capital, and a society in which poverty and violence have become structural conditions. The state has outsourced its duty to govern. The mines still poison water. The banks foreclose on homes built on land stolen a century ago. And the IRR tells us to be afraid of communism.

The youth of 1976 would not recognise this landscape. They would not recognise the bureaucratised opposition that now speaks in their name. Their courage did not come with conditions. Their rejection of the apartheid order was rooted in the knowledge that legal inclusion without material justice is a performance. Their politics, forged in struggle and sharpened by violence, called for redistribution, for accountability, for dignity grounded in structural change.

Jeffery does not engage this legacy. She instrumentalises it. She cites it when useful, silences it when it exposes her distortions. Her entire body of work is premised on protecting a system that never addressed the foundational crimes of this country.

To suggest that the ANC, in its current form, represents a threat to private capital is absurd. It has managed capital’s interests with discipline. It has sacrificed its own popular base to maintain investor credibility. Its ministers tour the world reassuring markets. Its budgets mirror austerity regimes elsewhere. It has enacted neoliberalism while speaking of revolution.

The NDR functions now only as a symbolic reference. It is evoked at party conferences, in commemorative speeches, in SACP resolutions that never materialise. On the ground, it has no programme. What exists is a vacuum — filled by private sector partnerships, donor-driven governance, and a mass population structurally locked out.

Jeffery chooses to see danger in the symbolism. She ignores the vacuum. She warns of an ideology whose time has passed, while legitimising the system that replaced it. Her contribution is not neutral. It fortifies the walls around wealth. It tells those who suffer to be patient — or to be silent.

History did not vindicate the ANC. Nor did it vindicate the defenders of capital. It left the struggle incomplete. The question remains open — who will finish it, and how? Jeffery offers no answer. She only repeats the warnings of old men who saw equality as chaos.

* Gillian Schutte is a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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