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Ideology, Discourse, and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Postapartheid South Africa
Author(s) -
Peet Richard
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8330.00226
Subject(s) - ideology , hegemony , neoliberalism (international relations) , political science , political economy , gender studies , sociology , politics , law
The African National Congress (ANC) has long stood for a development policy committed to improving living conditions for black people in South Africa. Assuming power in 1994, the ANC adopted a leftist, basic‐needs‐oriented Reconstruction and Development Programme as the popular foundation for its economic policy. Within two years, the ANC had switched to a rightist, neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy stressing privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. This article critically examines the displacement of economic policy from socialism to neoliberalism. My thesis is that ANC policy was disciplined by a neoliberal economic discourse formulated by an academic‐institutional‐media complex with linked centers of persuasion inside and outside the country. The article combines ideas about hegemony from Gramsci with notions of discourse derived from Foucault in constructing a geographic theory of globally hegemonic discursive formations colonizing alternative, counterhegemonic discourses.