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A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia and, even if not so immediately searing of the spirit, it is perhaps a more revealing one. For in the teeth of high expectations arising from the successful struggle against a malignant apartheid state, a very large percentage of the population -among them many of the most desperately poor in the world -are being sacrificed on the altar of the neoliberal logic of global capitalism. Moreover, as I had occasion to remark during a recent stint spent teaching in that country, the most striking thing I personally discovered about the New South Africa is just how easy it has now become to find oneself considered an ultra-leftist! For to talk with opinion leaders or to read their public statements was to be drowned in a sea of smug: this is the way the world works; competitiveness is good; get with the program; get real. One does not know whether to laugh or cry at this kind of realism -'magical market realism', as I have termed it elsewhere. 1 For there is absolutely no reason to assume that the vast majority of people in South Africa will find their lives improved by the policies that are being adopted in their name by the present African National Congress (ANC) government. Indeed, something quite the reverse is the far more likely outcome. * This essay is reprinted with the kind permission of both the author and Monthly Review. We hope that it is the first of what will become a regular series of lengthier contributions which aim to give a wider perspective of key aspects of the African political economy.empowerment. Another ANC activist, Raymond Suttner, had a similar sense of the direction in which things were going: JS (foe Slovo) is absolutely right to underline the massive victory we have scored at the negotiations. He fails, however, to mention that the past three years have also seen the transformation of our organizations, particularly the ANC. This transformation could have a serious, long-term impact. In particular, the negotiations have had a dissolving effect on mass organization, a tendency for our constituency to become spectators. If we conduct the coming election campaign in a narrow electoralist manner, the dissolution could be deepened. Whatever the victory, we should not underrate the strong sense of demoralization in our organizations. 5

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This article accompanies an essay reviewing recent literature on ‘transitions to democracy’, which we publish in our next issue. There Saul contrasts two approaches to the understanding of democratisation. Both see transition as part of a larger political and economic process; for one this limits the possible scope and sustainability of democratisation, while for the other it threatens but also enhances its scope and strength. The latter approach, older and currently less fashionable, sees democratisation (and its analysis) as rooted in processes of imperialism, class struggle and state‐society relations. This ‘political economy of democratisation’ approach, characteristic of the work of Shivji and Saul, contrasts with a larger, more pessimistic body of work, which Saul labels the ‘political science of democratisation’. While sometimes used in suggestive ways, it can narrow debate disastrously when detached from any self‐conscious mooring in the critical traditions of political economy. This literature stresses the necessity of democratic institutions and values, but argues that only highly attenuated versions are currently feasible: ‘if reform is to be adopted without provoking a crisis’, then it must be reform consistent with the demands of capital and the neo‐liberalism of the IFIs. This companion article analyses two highly significant cases of transition in southern Africa; each seems to epitomise the ‘political science’ approach, yet to contain the longer term possibility of ‘popular democracy’. Thus in South Africa the left accepted the necessity of a carefully negotiated transition to obviate the risk of civil war. However, the ANC, to retain the ‘confidence’ of local and external capital and of foreign governments, has had to demobilise its (non‐electoral) popular support, and to abandon a social redistributive strategy in favour of a one dominated by neo‐liberal ‘market solutions’. What keeps a progressive agenda alive in these conditions are the pressures from trade unions, civics, women's organisations etc, where there are growing signs, at least at grassroots level, of resistance to the ANC's new project. In Mozambique, the transition has been less euphoric, more perhaps a matter of transition from authoritarian rule and from war than to a democratic regime. As in South Africa, the transition would seem to disempower popular forces ‐ but outside the electoral arena, there are instances of resistance and struggle within civil society, which may carry with them the longer‐term potential for the growth of popular democracy.

It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the post‐colonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world, scale’ within the colonial social formation. The post‐colonial state, while prone toplay a similar role tothat played by its predecessor, is something more of an unpredictable quantity in this regard. Unpredictable, because of the greater scope for expression given to indigenous elements who now find in the ‘independent’ state a much more apt target for their activities and a potential instrument for the advancement of their own interests and concerns. In theory, such unpredictability might hold the threat of challenges to the structures of continuing imperial domination arising either from the left (socialism) or from the right (a burgeoning and competitive locally‐based capitalism), with indigenous classes attempting to use the state in order to realize independent national projects of their own. However, under African conditions, these have been much less prominent than a third, more ironic, kind of ‘threat’ to imperial interests: the crystallization in many African settings of a state too weak and too internally compromised to stabilize society and economy and thereby effectively guarantee the on‐going generation of surplus and accumulation of capital. Such weakness, when it evidences itself, certainly reflects economic contradictions as well as specific attributes of the class forces at play in contemporary Africa. Nonetheless, it is a brand of weakness which finds its primary expression in the political sphere and, as we shall see, only a proper understanding of that sphere can shed real light on the problems involved. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that neither bourgeois political science (as exemplified in the work of countless ‘Africanists') nor the work of those few Marxists who have undertaken analyses of African politics, have yet taken us very far towards such an understanding. Uganda provides an example of these several points and will be explored in this article in order to illustrate them. Here is the ‘unsteady state’ par excellence—a dependent social formation which has not given rise to a revolution, but which has nevertheless failed to produce a state adequate to the task of guaranteeing the stable environment necessary for on‐going imperialist exploitation.At its most extreme, this has meant ‘Aminism’, a state ‘unhinged’, representing a situation so unpredictable that it has led, at least in the short‐run, to a particularly dramatic disruption of the production process‐a situation very far, it would seem, from servicing imperialism's most basic interests. At the same time, it must be emphasized that this bizarre denouement of Uganda's development is consistent with problems and possibilities present within Uganda from a much earlier period, problems which haunted General Amin's predecessor, Milton Obote, and problems which will not necessarily disappear with the passing of Amin himself. Nor has the nature of such problems been well understood. Not, certainly, by those racists of all colours who either parody or praise Amin with little genuine concern for the havoc he has wreaked—most notably among his own African brothers and sisters. Not by President Nyerere and his advisors, whose ill‐fated support for Obote's post‐coup adventures served only to set back the emergence of a genuine resistance movement in Uganda. Not by the many western scholars interested in Uganda, even though they have provided a wealth of data on the various permutations and combinations of factional politics there. And not by Mahmood Mamdani; even though his recent pioneering work (both in a recent article in the Review of African Political Economy(No. 4) and in his soon‐to‐be‐published book‐length manuscript) does represent an important contribution to the Marxist study of Uganda‐and of Africa. In short, much remains to be learned—not least by Marxists—about the nature of African politics. What follows is intended, therefore, to suggest some possible directions which further discussion might take.