ARTICLE SOUTH AFRICA IN THE 1990s: THE LOGIC OF FRAGMENTATION AND RECONSTRUCTION

Any intellectual worth any salt in the South Africa of the 1990s is caught between Utopian and dystopian forms of thinking: the openness of the transition and the new dynamics it has unleashed invites the formulation of concrete alternatives; at the same time patterns of behaviour within the 'status scripts' (see below) of a new black middle-class and the responses of an older white one, invite pessimistic scenarios. Dystopian thinking has both an analytical and a moral core (Kumar, 1987). It, on the one hand, magnifies social trends and tendencies and, on the other, warns of anti-social outcomes; Utopian thinking by contrast willfully ignores such trends and attempts to lift us over the hill to gaze how the possible could become real. For us, caught up in the initiatives of creating a South Africa without exploitation, racism and other forms of oppression, such thinking, attempts to preserve a logic of emancipation intact, but in the same instance, it also magnifies the threats to the project and the disintegration of the movements that have nurtured it. There are serious threats to the democratic and socialist vision of the liberation movement in South Africa and there is a marked disintegration of the movement itself (Sitas, 1995:Marks, 1996). It is not only that we are making the mistake of substituting the 'political movement ' and later, the 'political party ' for the social movements that underpinned them, as Mahmood Mamdani (1992:193) warned from his work on Africa's post-colonial experience, but that also, the transition itself has its own logic1 of fragmentation and dis-empowerment. In this paper, I will attempt to provide an overview of some significant trends that are a result of the democratisation and globalisation of our society; I will then use a few examples from the area I know most: the trade union movement and hope to illuminate the challenges facing those whose democratic vision has remained intact despite the pressures