The Collapse of the Communist-Anticommunist Condominium: The Repercussions for SouthAfrica ROB NIXON Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. C.P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians" The demise of communism and the Soviet Union has extraordinary reper- cussions for the transformation of South Africa. South Africans are hav- ing to adjust to the simultaneous collapse of a principal paradigm for rationalizing apartheid and a principal paradigm for opposing it. The attempts to dismantle apartheid have been substantially complicated by the depth of the unexpected, simultaneous discrediting of communism and anti-communism. Although only a minority among the anti-apartheid forces are card-carrying communists, the fall of Soviet communism has weakened the appeal of revolutionary Marxism and even to some extent of socialism, ideologies which have inspired the resistance to apartheid for more than four decades. Indeed, socialism and revolution became so wedded to the idea of the anti-apartheid struggle that South Africa emerged as a cause celebre of the left, a central exhibit in the broader arguments and campaigns for socialism. The populist insurrections of 1976-77 and of 1984-86 and the upsurge of radical trade unionism since the late 1970s seemed to turn South Africa into a uniquely promising scenario for revolutionary triumph. Thus, as recently as 1986, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff could project a vision of South Africa as "the only country with a well-developed, modern capitalist structure which is not only 'objectively' ripe for revolution but has actually entered a stage of overt and seemingly irreversible revolutionary struggle."' From such a vantage point, the current negotiations in South Africa are both a success and a failure. The revolutionary impetus did prove irrevers- ible in so far as it rendered the country unmanageable, fulfilling the 235