I was glad to see Mokhiber/Weissman writing
for ZNet last week on the durability of the anti-neoliberal movement.
Here in Johannesburg, September 11 came and went, with linkages made between
the Left peace movement's urgent agenda--anti-war demonstrations against
US consulates in several South African cities--and the broader problem
of imperialism's new form.
I don't call it 'Empire,' as do some trendy intellectual friends, but
I do recognise that the imperialist project is about more than a superpower
bully acting on homegrown corporate interests.
Imperialism today entails the penetration of neoliberal-capitalist ideology
everywhere, as part and parcel of expanding the material terrain of commodification.
Fortunately, a great many of our local struggles for social justice here
in Southern Africa now recognise the general character of this new terrain
quite explicitly.
An important protest for the Left was against the World Trade Organisation's
Doha meeting last month, which gave South Africa's trade minister Alec
Erwin another platform for the neoliberal Southern strategy, requiring
him to split the regional delegation away from the rest of the African
trade ministers.
(Incongruously, Erwin remains a member of the SA Communist Party, though
relations frayed noticeably when he firmly backed privatisation while
the SACP supported the union movement's national strike in late August.)
Lessons keep emerging about building the anti-neoliberal, pro-people project,
which we are learning in praxis in this part of the world, as well as
from keeping an eye on international developments.
South Africa's visionary progressive leaders--like Trevor Ngwane in Soweto,
Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane in Cape Town, Fatima Meer in Durban and
Dennis Brutus (all over the world!)--all pursue global-local linkages:
drawing attention to the relationships between pharmacorp monopoly patents
and the inaccessibility of Aids drugs, between home-grown structural adjustment
and housing evictions, between the crashing value of the currency (55%
down over two years) and the need for apartheid-era financing reparations
from foreign banks, between global arms trade and local violence, and
many others.
For example, Ngwane's work with the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee
involves reconnecting thousands of households (illegally) in the wake
of cut-offs by the rapidly-privatising state electricity company Eskom.
The struggle was featured last month on the front page of the Washington
Post, on CNN and in all the local media.
Minister of public enterprises Jeff Radebe--also a senior SACP leader--labeled
Ngwane and his merry band of Operation Khanyisa ('Light Up') amateur-electricians
'criminals' and 'thugs' last week, and a tough crack-down is anticipated.
Ngwane is in and out of court every few days for disconnecting local ANC
city councillors, a tactic the Sowetans resorted to when all non-violence
civil disobedience protests failed, and he invariably brings along hundreds
of others who in solidarity demand that they be arrested too.
(An academic analysis of the 'Soweto Electricity Crisis' that my Municipal
Services Project colleagues have developed, working alongside the SECC,
is at http://www.queensu.ca/msp
)
Another telling incident last week was the state's announcement that it
would take on a new World Bank loan--only the second since 1994 thanks
to widespread opposition--which will bring technical and financial "expertise"
from the Bank into Johannesburg and other municipalities.
Such expertise has already led to water privatisation, as I wrote about
here last April, and indirectly caused the death of hundreds of people
during the 2000-01 cholera outbreak. The cholera epicentre was the main
site where water was disconnected because impoverished women-headed households
couldn't pay the full operating cost, as the Bank had insisted in a pricing
policy whose impact on South African water minister Kader Asmal was 'instrumental,'
the Bank later bragged.
Partly because this city hosts the World Summit on Sustainable Development
in September 2002 ("Rio+10"), the elaboration and generalisation
of global-local linkages appears terribly important, in the run-up to
the Porto Alegre World Social Forum next month.
I was delighted when comrades in various Washington thinktanks began identifying
the 'micro-neoliberal' processes associated with the Bretton Woods Institutions,
and then campaigned successfully last year to prevent the World Bank from
imposing cost-recovery and user-fee provisions in health and education
programmes.
As a step along the way to shutting down the Bank and IMF, this is great
work. Its strategic merits were confirmed during an intense workshop last
week on the steamy shores of Lake Malawi: the excellent Southern African
People's Solidarity Network (http://aidc.org.za) called for the 'dismantling'
of the Bank and IMF, hand-in-hand with demilitarising this region, long
a playground for Cold Warriors, arms-traders, gun-toting mining corporations,
mercenaries, and other motley imperialists.
It is often asked whether a deeper coherence and more rigorous set of
'alternatives' can indeed emerge from the cacophony of anti-neoliberal
protest, including at Rio+10.
One paternalistic and uncomprehending critic, Belgian prime minister and
European Union president Guy Verhofstadt, argued recently that 'Protesters
ask right questions, yet they lack the right answers' for the Financial
Times (26 September).
In a more serious vein, the Financial Times reporter James Harding ('Clamour
against capitalism stilled,' 10 October) anticipated that in the wake
of September 11, global justice movements would be 'derailed.'
One spurious reason was 'the absence of both leadership and a cogent philosophy
to inspire fellowship.' The counterpoint is obvious: hierarchical leadership
is not necessarily a positive attribute for the kind of broad-based opposition
that is required, and that is bubbling up from all corners of the world.
Still, a cogent approach to replacing monolithic Washington-centred neoliberalism
with far different philosophical and practical arrangements is desirable,
as the international movements mature. I am not in any position to propose
such an approach, but can report on some of the embryonic principles and
strategies that have emerged here.
A series of strategic principles of social justice are beginning--it appears--to
take the following forms in Southern Africa:
--decommodifying access to the basic goods and services that we all need
to survive;
--'deglobalisation of capital' and decommissioning of the multilateral
agencies that work most aggressively on behalf of transnational capital;
--delinking from those circuits of finance, commerce and direct investment
that actively underdevelop Africa; and
--denuding South Africa of its explicitly subimperialist role in the region
and denying Pretoria the pretention that by joining the neoliberal project,
on terms largely dictated by Washington and the world's financial markets,
Africa as a continent will progress (my ZNet column on November 18 provided
details about this problem).
The first task I will try to report on regularly next year across various
sectors. In addition to access to Aids drugs, the most compelling struggles
may be around water (see, e.g., my and Karen Bakker's ZNet column last
July on the Blue Planet Project).
Last week in Bonn, the world's leading radical water activists--from environmental
groups, municipal labour, community organisations and think-tanks--condemned
government bureaucrats who gathered for their Rio+10 preparatory work.
They ultimately only modified slightly the pro-commodification posture
of the World Bank and ghastly UN Development Programme's World Water Forum.
The second task is being pursued through,
--first, conscientising the public in this region that corporate globalisation
is harmful and must be rolled back;
--second, putting human bodies in the way of the elites so the latter
encounter difficulty both retaining legitimacy and getting into their
meetings (such as the World Economic Forum in New York in late January,
and very likely at Rio+10 next September); and
--third, working hard to deny the main front-line institution of underdevelopment
the money it needed to keep its project going, via a World Bank Bonds
Boycott (http://www.worldbankboycott.org/).
The third task encompasses interlocking and overlapping strategies of
diverse Southern African movements which--alongside crucial international
allies--campaign for their governments to,
--repudiate Third World debt and to take on no new foreign debt for basic-needs
development;
--reject intellectual patents and property rights on HIV-Aids drugs so
as to save millions of lives; and
--renounce both imports and exports of arms.
Can people in this part of the world count on international movements
for support? The death-knell of the Northern anti-capitalist movement
was sounded by Harding:
It is riddled with egotism and petty politics. Its actions are sometimes
misinformed, sometimes misjudged. It has an inflated sense of its own
importance. Its targets keep changing and growing. And it has been robbed
of its momentum.
Counter-capitalism was not just a movement, it was a mood. Its main platform--the
street--is not as open as it was. Its message, always complicated, is
now much more loaded. Its audience--politicians, the press and the public--are
seriously distracted. And its funding base, already tiny, threatens to
shrivel as charitable foundations and philanthropists see their fortunes
shrink with the stock market.
All of these complaints have a grain of truth. But if activists have been
slowed and distracted the past few weeks, subsequent months and years
will see our revitalisation, I'm convinced, for one simple reason: the
problems we are identifying are only becoming worse with no prospects
for meaningful reform on offer from the international ruling class.
The same goes for Southern Africa's ruling elites, as regrettably we will
see in my next column, which considers the case of the upcoming Zimbabwe
presidential election.
(Bond's new book, Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World
Bank, IMF and International Finance, was published by University of Cape
Town Press; ordering info at pbond@wn.apc.org)