Middle-class South Africans reached for their fanciest gins during the mini-budget recently, gobsmacked yet luxuriating in the rare glow of fiscal recognition from Enoch Godongwana. Like a frayed parent, he had asked (presumably of his ANC comrades): “What’s the point of taking billions more in medical-tax credits from the middle class, who pay the bulk of personal income tax?” It was a good question, and the finance minister knew it: an ideological improvised explosive device camouflaged as a rhetorical no-brainer teaser.
We learn at the feet of the master, as Godongwana continued. “It’s the same group you want to take medical credits away from. It’s actually an attack on the middle class!” Forthwith, as per a revised national democratic revolution user manual, the middle class is to be spared the hassle and argy-bargy of class struggle. And why not? We’ll be funding it, after all.
Could it be that the long-ignored and much-maligned middle class is at last getting recognition for its contribution to society and the economy? Or was the minister just freeing up income for us to pay more municipal rates and “cleaning levies”, solar-panel and gambling taxes, and maybe for new number plates and an impost on your cellphone to keep the SABC in style? Possibly, but the middle class is also an important voting constituency and is all that stands between the ANC’s confinement to the sticks if the cities turn their back on the party at local government elections in a year’s time.
Suddenly, it’s cool to be middle class in South Africa. We’ve come in from the revolutionary shade. According to some estimates there’s just more than 4-million members of the middle class, others say seven and the African Development Bank reckons 43% of us in South Africa are middle class. The black share of the middle class rose from about 10% in 1993 to more than 40% in 2012, and rising, which is substantial but still just a fraction of the total African population, the masses left out.
A political strategy that relies over-heavily on the middle class is a gamble
Given that most South Africans are nowhere near middle class in income and education, a political strategy that relies over-heavily on the middle class is a gamble, even if most political systems are deliberately open to middle class and elite media manipulation.
Nestling uneasily somewhere between Boxer and Woolworths, between Haval and second-hand BMW, the middle class is rightly anxious about its future amid radical rhetoric, violent crime and rising bills.
This is as opposed to anxiety of a different sort for the class above, the super elite, one of whose number occupies the presidency. By the plunder and manipulation of tenders that the use of racial criteria tends to encourage, an ultra-upper class of spectacular and often unexplained wealth has emerged behind high walls. This is an upper class that couldn’t locate the on-switch on any of the means of production, but surrounds itself with the baubles of luxury consumption. Its untrustworthiness as a class extends beyond politics.
And for the workers? Sermon on the Mount, Communist Manifesto, Public Service Disciplinary Code … where’s the beef the proletariat were once offered? And the gravy?
Yet never has a class thrived so little with so much state help behind it. Cosatu’s website quotes Karl Marx with approval, in his puffed-up dismissal of the middle class as politically “untrustworthy”. Only the proletariat can make the revolution a reality. In our case, though, the proletariat ain’t what it used to be, and workers are as much stuck in a stagnant economy as the rest of us, their jobs ostensibly secured by legislation but not by the iron law of supply and demand. Millions walk the streets under the ANC government, while social grants presume to maintain a beholden voting constituency.
Long live the working class, the better part of me says. I have to confess that though I aspire to solidarity with my labouring brothers and sisters, and thereby pay obeisance to my unheralded line of blacksmith and bog-cutting ancestors, my heart is with the middle class. And when I say heart, I mean bank balance. And as Marx taught us in his timeless study of keeping up with the Joneses — the grandly titled Das Kapital — class is about following the money. And the tax breaks. And dressing the part.
Socialism was always doomed because it demands that we constantly improve ourselves, and put others first, though it is a matter for archaeology to determine whether such humans ever existed. Capitalism, or what the Pope and others sniffily refer to as soulless consumerism, on the other hand, asks the bare minimum of human generosity, and is unsurprisingly the default policy option around the world. Under capitalism, we are encouraged to be, um, ourselves.
So, it’s the middle class for me, as I do my patriotic duty spending and working, consuming and voting occasionally. Bella ciao, comrades! Tax me if you can!
