Sure. And thanks for coming back and for some of the challenges under the Gore thread title, which help to sharpen up the debate. I think there, as Gary suggested, both points of view are right.
I suggest what is happening is that we are hovering on the verge of what the internet can really do. Every single post is going to be one sided. But until we can find ways of linking through the network - not each one of us personally because it would kill us - serious theoretically informed analysis with serious political practice, it remains one sided, and these lists may be trapped in cynicism or a sort of identity group exploration.
I am sure I disagree with Max about a number of things, and there is a problem about the meaning of the word "liberal" in a US political context, and the meaning of "liberal" in terms of global economics, but I found his sketch of different figures in the US Democratic Party useful background material.
Especially when there is also the post forwarded from TradeWatch (with subscription details) under the thread title "Liar, liar, IMF" about how Congress representatives are indeed approving the printing of money on a global level to be dispensed by the IMF while expecting the rest of the world to dance to the US tune, of belt-tightening for all except the US, the "consumer of last resort" as the Financial Times so constructively put it.
This is a (relevant) preamble to your specific post giving further detail about South Africa. We need to know the fine footwork between individuals as well as the global strategic picture.
As the SouthScan article went on to say:
>But, unlike Mbeki, he seemed to hold open the possibility of interim
>measures being adopted by national states. In a radio interview,
>however, Erwin refused to elaborate, saying the matter rested with SA
>Finance Minister Trevor Manuel.
What I am assuming is happening here is that Erwin must be careful not to embarrass Mbeki in public, particularly after Mbeki's confrontation with the South African Communist Party, of which of course Erwin is a member, if he is going to retain the possibility of amiably embarrassing Mbeki in private discussions about the way ahead. He must say nothing in public but if a source, related to a source, related to another source, allows someone in the media to comment that Erwin and Mbeki have slightly different views on the question, this allows the debate to be opened up.
Patrick:
>Mbeki and Erwin are going to be unbelievably
>coy about regulation because SA has just gone through the wringer. We
>heard a fair bit of rhetoric at the NAM conference the past few days
>-- Castro was terrific today at the Hector Peterson memorial (the
>first youngster killed in the Soweto 1976 uprising) -- but with worries
>about the 1999 election already emerging (the ANC hoping to win 67%
>to have constitutional rewrite power), I bet you the A team won't do
>anything cheeky to upset the financiers. SA will soon lead -- or already
>is leading -- Unctad, NAM, the Commonwealth, the Organisation of
>African Unity and the Commonwealth, and has a revolving director's
>seat at the IMF/WB plus a possible UN Security Council seat. It will
>be a really crucial year for this society to get its geopolitical
>priorities straight, after messing up badly all over the place since
>1994. Civil society keeps a wary eye, and more folk -- including the
>big social forces like Cosatu and the SA Communist Party -- are
>speaking up on the global issues.
Very interesting. I would only differ in emphasis that in view of the picture you paint, the coyness is not surprising. I take the point about SA going through the ringer. Because of its economic policies it has done so with less publicity than the Asian economies. We need to be looking for any seeds of resistance to the neo-liberal agenda, from frankly whatever motivation.
Really South Africa is increasingly perceived as the most authoritative sub-Saharan African power. There is a strong contradiction within that. There are tendencies for it becoming a sub-imperialist power with sharply growing tensions within SADCC. There is also the possibility, faint too often, of it being a progressive force in the world.
If the agenda is to get onto the Security Council, and to win some leadership of the third world countries away from India for example, then it must not rock the boat too much. So it seems to me a great achievement if Mbeki and Erwin have pushed at the NAM the question of "raising the costs of currency trading".
It is the job of the politically conscious and progressive within the country concerned to pay attention to the class issues, and political issues, but perspectives from the outside on a global scale may be different. If Mbeki gets South Africa onto the Security Council, I am not going to spend time criticising him. That is your job.
Internationalism does require a careful sense of the different ways we cooperate in debate, according to whether we are in the country or not.
So I valued the info from the conference in Durban.
>Anyhow, below you'll find a statement from a conference in Durban
>today where at least some leftists got to confront the bureaucrats
>head-on a bit on these matters... Perhaps LBOites can help answer the
>questions posed at the end?
It is a good title: "Apartheid Debt" presumably the point was made that it is scandalous that the countries of Southern African should be in debt when it is the imperialist countries that owe them a massive moral and financial debt to repair the costs of apartheid. The reconstruction costs of the apartheid wars have been calculated at over 50 billion dollars. Great that Diana won publicity for a ban on landmines. Who is going to pay for their removal? (Seriously has anyone put in a bid to the Diana memorial fund more for the political than the financial gains?)
The issue of the generous sunset pensions for the white civil servants is a hot internal matter, and no bad thing if people agitate about it, but it is not really relevant to the central contradiction here between the people of South Africa and international capital led by the imperialist powers.
On this, I would say the summary of the conference adds weight to pressure for "raising the costs of currency transactions" and if this was in the form of revenue for the reparation and reconstruction of Southern Africa, who could object to that?? I would have thought a hard push on this front would not lose SA's seat at the Security Council and would extract concessions. It would be cheaper than writing off the whole capital debt. By lowering the volatility of short term currency trading it should help with debt servicing by slightly reducing the interest rate (yes/no?) so this is a cheap answer as far as international monopoly capitalist companies are concerned and not against their fundamental interests, but it does get the question of global finance on some sort of democratic agenda. Can SA not use its leadership of all these non-aligned bodies to ensure that discussion of such issues are no longer to be inhibited by the Jessie Helms censorship of global taxation?
I would have thought the points reported here, do add further weight to some sort of local controls over short term currency. I accept that currency boards, even when not run directly by imperialists and colonialists, are dire, but so is having a currency at the mercy of the whims of the movements of over one trillion dollars a day. And suppose, suppose, for greater leverage in international affairs, it was linked to the Euro rather than the dollar, as the rouble may be...
About debt, this is part of the idolatry of capitalism. Every society has to reproduce and decide which of its past labours have to be written off, and which renewed. The actions of the IMF are making it quite clear they will write off the debts of scoundrels if they can twist the arms of the next person, even someone like Chernomyrdin whose credentials as a serious economist are highly debatable from the right as well as the left.
Anyway, even countries like Britain conspicuously cancel the debts of the poorest and most abject indebted countries, like Mozambique, just to make the point.
In Britain the issue of debt is being taken up by the churces and progressive organisations so there are possibilities of alliance. As you no doubt know, the recent Church of England international synod had a session on this addressed by the IMF.
The Guardian newspaper website when I last looked was running a cyber petition for the cancellation of debt. My purist soul hesitated at one phrase about letting byegones be byegones (if I remember rightly) but it had the merit of not only calling for the cancellation of debt, but the causes of the debt. The scope of that is of course as large as we or anyone else can make it.
This is all about dead labour. We must of course persevere in pushing the real economy: living labour. One of the most concrete issues is whether a vulnerable economy can deploy its resources in something like building 100,000 houses (or 500,000) which will provide basic use-values (wealth) for the people, and put purchasing power into local pockets, or whether it is going to go into an aluminium smelter employing 1000, to help the balance of payments with raw materials being shipped in and the product being shipped out.
I am naive enough to think that if we plug away at the logic that an economy has got to be more robust in terms of international competition if 90 percent of its workforce are working than if they are not some of the logic will get through. It is capitalism that is in the realm of illusion, not us.
A modern semi-conductor factory has just closed in Tony Blair's constituency, which makes him "deeply saddened". (Speculative high tech Japanese capital). Almost 600 jobs have been lost. No doubt Alec Erwin would like tactfully to express condolences to his British opposite number. But he would also be entitled to a slight irony. The investment was 340 million pounds. By my calculation that is over half a million pounds for each job. It is not clear where our New Labour government is going to money at that rate, but if they do, perhaps they can explain in briefings to their colleagues in South Africa, how much they think the Pretoria government should spend on creating each job. Would a million pounds be wiser, to be sure of being absolutely competitive in the bracing world of global capitalism?
At the same time the news from Britain was that some 1000 jobs were being created in "call centres" in Glasgow and the North East of England. This as I understand it, essentially uses modern technology, and a reasonably educated work force, to handle the simple service job of connecting human beings to each other. These are middle level skills. But house building is not for idiots either, but for intelligent people who can cooperate with one another to produce use-values. Is there some sort of latent racism here, that we cannot see the courage, resilience, and the intelligence of people who will stand for hours in Johannesburg trying to sell a few slices of melon, or people in Russia who keep the life process of society going by using potatoes as a form of money when it is the international financial system that has collapsed, not them?
So when Tony Blair makes his public apology for apartheid on behalf of Britain, instead of just cancelling South Africa's debt, would he not like to put a positive spin on it for the new millenium? The equivalent sum of money, to regenerate the economies, and the lives of the people of Southern Africa? That would be the modern human message, and the dreary double entry bookkeeping can be left to the specialists. Get Mandelson over for a conference and chat him up. If there is a clever way to deliver it, particularly if he can come up with some of the suggestions, it is probably deliverable. Sorry to be provocative!
In sum I think South Africa has a much stronger case than at first appears. It will be strengthened by critical analysis and action from within its borders.
Chris Burford
London.