working class civil society

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Sat Nov 13 19:54:59 PST 1999


Russell, this is getting silly. Of course a good deal of resistance to neoliberalism in South Africa is incoherent (all "IMF riots"--not just SA township fury over service cutoffs--have this characteristic). To get to the point, thouth, there seem to be three main lines of argument bouncing around.

One--implicit because I don't think you or Peter would make it explicit--is that you need a revolutionary political party apparatus to make sense of and coordinate the struggles. Is that where you LM folk are going? Peter, with all respect, I don't see the tiny Int'l Socialist Movement (the ISM in Peter's post, a splitoff from the main IS faction, which in turn decided a few months ago to enter the SACP) contributing a great deal, and I gather that ISM have also split into two factions? (SA trotskyism is as self-caricaturing as they get.)

Another is that nothing's going on in the way of good class/race/gender/environmental politics--or if there is anything interesting it's been poisoned by the dreaded petit-bourgeois NGOs. And so you whinge and moan, and then what, promote a bizarre libertarian LMism that has virtually no applicability or purchase in the semiperiphery? I never grasp where you okes actually want to go with the cynical critique, because it absolutely offers no new openings.

A third is that given the myriad of fragmented activity underway (surely about as impressive as anywhere at least in the english- speaking world today?), the challenge is to link the revolts to democratic organisational activity and to the more strategic bursts of opposition, and thereby mould what are sometimes called "militant particularisms" into a generalised red-green-feminist perspective, political party or not (in fact, not having such a party apparatus is no barrier now in South Africa, nor in Mexico and Korea and other sites where such strategic linkage is quite advanced).

Those real militant moments--against not just green/white papers but against their effect on the ground--offer far more potential than can be dismissed as mere NGO and radical-academic activism. This is true internationally as well. My own dumbed-down efforts to help draw the links were scheduled to go into this morning's Sunday World newspaper, along the following lines:

***

The Jubilee movement comes to town

Later this week, an exceptional group of 200 Third World activists will meet at the Jubilee South-South Summit in Midrand. These are the leading strategists of what may be the world's most important social movement at the turn of the millennium.

The accomplishments of Jubilee 2000 ("J2000") to date go far beyond minor debt-relief concessions granted by major economic powers, and beyond signing up famous supporters such as the Pope, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, and high-profile entertainers (Bono from U-2, Mohammed Ali, Netaid) who together make vocal, trendy but ultimately unsatisfying appeals to northerners' sense of charity.

Instead, J2000 branches across the Southern Hemisphere--and similar movements working on trade, investment, labour rights, human rights, environmental protection, the landmine ban and many other issues--have made a much greater contribution to social progress: innovative analysis, ideology and strategy.

They have analysed problems of debt and development from a structural perspective, not stopping with superficial explorations for debt, but looking at the entire development model associated with the discredited "Washington Consensus." The free-market "neoliberal" model still has the support of Washingtonians Bill Clinton, Lawrence Summers of the US Treasury Department, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, and of course the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

To illustrate Washington-think, when Summers was World Bank chief economist in 1991, he drafted a memo later leaked to the Economist magazine that included the single most famous sentence in development history: "I think the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste on the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."

From the early 1980s, such economic and social policy advice has disregarded local priorities and strategies in Third World countries. Critics argue that Washington's advice is both immoral--in that it typically seeks export-led growth at the expense of the poor, workers, women, children, the elderly and the environment--and incompetent.

The advice hasn't worked, because it ignores local realities, relies too much on unreliable markets, and always promises more than it can deliver. The World Bank's role in South Africa's failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy--providing a model that led to absurd predictions--is a good example of that incompetence, as is the East Asian meltdown which shamed the Washington economists.

Ideologically, as a result, the Jubilee movement has identified Washington's world- view as central to the Third World's problems. The Jubilee South groups therefore refuse to let Washington control the terms of debt relief. A common analogy is to question whether it is wise to ask the arsonist how to put out the fire!

Thus the legitimacy of Washington is a primary target. When World Bank president James Wolfensohn meets his Pretoria staff on Wednesday to decide how to deal with blatant corruption on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, protesters will carry out a mock trial of the big corporations, bureaucrats and Bank staff who have been implicated in the scandal.

Jubilee South Africa has already called for the World Bank to be defunded, through a boycott of its bonds, so as to weaken the Bank's ability to fund megaprojects like Lesotho dams whose benefits go to the rich and whose costs are overwhelmingly paid by poor people. Because of the controversial dams, Johannesburg water prices have skyrocketed by 35% in recent years, with much higher tariff increases--and cut-offs of water for those who can't pay--still ahead.

The World Bank has been reformed somewhat as a result of such campaigns, with slightly more "green," women-friendly, transparent, and participatory-oriented policies. Indeed the reformist "Post-Washington Consensus" ideology associated with the current Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, partially reflects the clout and credibility of these campaigns.

Likewise, Northern labour and environmental movements have played a role in amending international trade agreements to incorporate worker rights and ecological protection.

But are these enough? Many leading J2000 activists in the Third World are fed up with the lack of real results, and with a process that puts excessive energy into making Washington more politically-correct.

After fifteen years or so of advocacy, the result is the apparent worsening of North-South domination associated with these weak "reformist" reforms. The World Bank may have changed in some ways that are relatively marginal to its operation. But Washington's hard-core commitment to structural adjustment programmes, privatisation, cuts in state spending, high interest rates, free trade and liberalised finance remains intact.

Grassroots-oriented social movements which bear the full brunt of Washington's incompetence and hostility now argue, increasingly, for WB/IMF defunding and nation- state delinking from international finance. (This is consistent with ongoing campaigning against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, further World Trade Organisation rounds, and anti-social multinational corporate behaviour ranging from Lesotho dam bribes to Nigerian oil exploitation to Burmese sanctions-busting.)

In short, "nonreformist" reforms should promote the globalisation of people and halt the globalisation of capital.

How radical is this? Surprisingly, this was the common-sense argument that elite economist (and capitalist-reformer) John Maynard Keynes advanced in a 1933 article in Yale Review: "I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be primarily national."

Concretely, this means that social and labour movements have "technical" legitimacy when campaigning for control over capital flows, including intensified J2000 pressure to repudiate the $25 billion South Africa foreign debt inherited in 1994; intensified Cosatu pressure to impose capital/exchange controls so that wealthy white people and big corporations cannot run away with apartheid- era wealth; intensified pressure by unions and community groups to halt privatisation (especially around municipal services, where foreign water firms are already causing great damage); and intensified pressure from environmentalists, trade unionists and development activists against free-trade deals which pollute, deindustrialise and underdevelop low-income communities.

But these are defensive struggles. Beyond these are other campaigns which cut against the grain of Washington's advice: lower interest rates; a clear industrial policy; specific attention to the development needs of women, disabled people and rural areas; and concrete struggles such the demand for free, basic supplies of water and electricity, from hedonistic consumers who should pay more, to everyone else.

These are some of the directions that the J2000 movement is pushing logically towards, in part through its participation this week in an "Africa Consensus" process, alongside leading African churches, NGOs, women's groups and labour.

The Africa Consensus is still a process, requiring full elaboration based on a myriad of grassroots and national development experiences and struggles. But it clearly rejects both the Washington and Post-Washington Consensus. In particular, African civil society rejects the illegitimate loans that have maintained exploitative power relations.

As expressed in the May 1999 Lusaka Declaration of African social movements, "Debt is one of the most important instruments of Northern domination over the South, and the domination of financiers over people, production and nature everywhere. As part of our struggle to liberate ourselves from this bondage, we make demands for the cancellation of debt as part of a broader struggle to fundamentally transform the current world economic order."

Africa's greatest economist, Samir Amin, has long supported this kind of strategy, but warns that there are terribly important international implications: "The response to the challenge of our time imposes what I have suggested naming `delinking'... Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal development... Delinking implies a `popular' content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent interests."

The implication is simple: Washington must be weakened, because any single country aiming to delink will come under enormous pressure not to.

This largely explains the fear that Trevor Manuel and his Finance Department colleagues regularly express about J2000 arguments. Demands for repudiation of and reparations for apartheid-era lending might "send the wrong signals to the market," in particular to New York, London, Frankfurt and Zurich banks.

The simple lesson, therefore, is that these banks and their Washington promoters must be weakened. Here again, an undaunted J2000 and its allies are making enormous progress in expanding the scope of their analysis, ideology and strategy. This spirit, and the accompanying capacity to globalise powerful tactics, mean the J2000 South chapters are becoming a model for new kinds of social movements that think globally, act locally, and now act globally.

***

On 12 Nov 99, at 22:19, Russell Grinker wrote:

Date sent: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 22:19:55 +0200 From: Russell Grinker <grinker at mweb.co.za> Subject: Re: working class civil society To: lbo <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>,

"Mr P.A. Van Heusden" <pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk> Send reply to: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com


> In response to Patrick's challenge over the level of mass "civil society"
> activity in South Africa, I forced myself to chew through his lengthy list
> of "civil society struggles"...
>
> Among other things, he writes:
>
> >IMF Riots continued to
> break out in dozens of impoverished black
> townships subject to high increases in service
> charges and power/water cutoffs.
>
> Riots they were but disorganised and fragmented (or sometimes coopted by
> reactionary forces like Inkatha) - a coherent movement with some kind of
> programme - no. Nobody except Patrick to my knowledge called them IMF
> riots.
>
> >What, then, did radical civil society think
> about post-apartheid policy? Those most often
> in the firing line were the ANC economic team.
> Manuel and his bureaucrats were condemned
> by left critics
>
> Who were these critics? They certainly did not constitute a coherent
> movement.
>
>
> > Likewise, minister of trade and industry
> Alec Erwin was attacked for the deep post-
> 1994 cuts in protective tariffs leading to
> massive job loss (including a 1999 European
> Free Trade deal which would deindustrialise
> SA even further, and endorsing a controversial
> US version of the same strategy); f
>
> Attacked by a few union leaders whose organisations were losing members -
> there was no mass activity in response
>
> >or his
> weakness, as president of the UN Conference
> >on Trade and Development, in allowing the
> neoliberal agenda to prevail on issues such
> as the Multilateral Agreement on Investments
> and continuing structural adjustment
> philosophy; for giving out billions of rands in
> `supply-side' subsidies (redirected RDP funds)
> for Spatial Development Initiatives
>
> Pathetically there was no active resistance to the SDI strategy. In the
> backrooms of the Alliance people certainly kicked up a row but this never
> translated into public action. The Eastern Cape NGO Coalition and Cosatu
> produced a critique or two of government strategy but this remained strictly
> an insider discussion.
>
>
> > Land affairs and agriculture minister Derek
> Hanekom was jeered by emergent farmers
> associations and rural social movements for
> failing to redirect agricultural subsidies;
>
> A few jeers do not make a mass movement - the many millions of impoverished
> people of the rural sector remain
> (depressingly) the most unorganised - unless you're talking about white
> farmers who remain quite organised and radically reactionary. The rural
> trade unions hardly exist.
>
> >for
> allowing privatisation of marketing boards; for
> redistributing a tiny amount of land
>
> So what is the real response to the shockingly small amount of land
> redistributed? The new minister is under so little pressure that her main
> concern currently seems to be the demands of white farmers! Even her senior
> bureaucrats
> (former radical activists) are leaving in disgust or being purged for being
> too radical.
>
> > Housing minister Sankie Mthembi-
> Mahanyele (and her former Director-General
> Billy Cobbett and indeed Joe Slovo before his
> 1995 death) came under fire from the civic
> movement for lack of consultation, insufficient
> housing subsidies; for `toilets-in-the-veld'
> developments far from urban opportunities; for
> a near-complete lack of rural housing; for
> gender design insensitivity; for violating
> numerous detailed RDP housing provisions;
> and for relying upon bank-driven processes-
> -via behind-closed-door agreements that the
> banks immediately violated with impunity--
> which were extremely hostile to community
> organisations.
>
> Yes, Patrick, along with a few others, did a good job on them. But Sankie
> is
> under so little pressure that she's even dumping the minimal subsidy scheme
> that currently exists. Unfortunately, as I recall it, the crappy housing
> policy was largely invented by NGO activists anyway.
>
> > Welfare minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
> was bitterly criticised by a church, NGO and
> welfare advocacy movement for attempting to
> cut the child maintenance grant by 40 percent;
> and for failing to empower local community
> organisations and social workers.
>
> Yes Sangoco ran a good (elite) campaign on this but with no mass component.
> Similarly, campaigns around grants have mainly been run by a few effective
> NGO types, the Black Sash etc. There's no mass response but then no
> mobilisation was attempted.
>
> And so it goes on, as Patrick says, ad nauseam. Resistance to numerous
> rightward shifts by government remains confined to a small group of vocal
> and organised NGO activists and a handful of radical academics, often the
> same people "wearing different hats".
> Real organised pressure from below remains minimal. This is why so many ANC
> leaders remain so susceptible to pressure from the old business
> establishment.
>
> The real disaster area for me is the decline of the once vibrant union
> movement. Here little is left of genuine militant action, let alone
> solidarity action. Incorporation is
> the name of the game in major sectors with leadership unwilling to disrupt
> its cosy relationship with the employers in a variety of bargaining
> structures. The ongoing public sector dispute is the best recent example,
> with the minister just ignoring the machinery and imposing a settlement,
> knowing full well that the leadership didn't have the bottle to stand up to
> her and call any real action.
>
> I've studied Patrick's "21kb of lefty civil society struggles against the
> 1994-99 neolib policies and personalities of the SA state" and am the first
> to regret that they don't really warrant the name struggle. Industrial
> action is up and little explosions, sometimes very violent, break out every
> now and then. Today for instance, several hundred unemployed activists
> marched demanding that foreigners be expelled as they allegedly steal "our"
> jobs. Unfortunately "resistance" these days is more likely to be anarchic
> and directionless violence, vandalism or attacks on foreigners than the
> organised working class or "working class civil society" activity of
> Patrick's ideal and progressive world.
>
> I don't believe I'm being cynical in my observations - just realistic.
> That's always a good place to begin.
>
> Russell
>
>
>



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