I can't applaud Patrick Bond's and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee's campaign for free electricity enough. And while I am sure that pointing out the disparities between white profligacy in water use has some agitational effect, isn't the laudable aim of the S.E.C.C. to promote a great increase in consumption? Doesn't that imply increased electricity production? Don't you need more dams/reactors/power stations to meet that demand?
In message <200108230538.HAA28820 at brain.sn.apc.org>, Patrick Bond
<pbond at wn.apc.org> writes
>(Back after a few weeks' away, and sorry for butting in but this is
>what we're much engaged with in Jo'burg these days.)
>
>> Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 16:07:04 +0100
>> From: James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
>> So 'externalities' are
>> generally seen as 'social costs'. But such a view assumes the reality of
>> a social order outside of capitalism that must be protected. What can
>> such an order be but an idealisation of capitalist society itself.
>> With the concept of 'externalities' market ideologists are trying to
>> integrate those costs of social stability that do not spontaneously
>> beget value.
>
>No, not necessarily, James. The project we're pursuing
>(http://www.queensu.ca/msp) of decommodifying--in part because the
>commodity form generates all sorts of externalities harmful to
>social, cultural and environmental reproduction--is "no idealisation
>of capitalist society itself" (we hope it's the opposite: the
>exploration of its limits and demand to transcend market
>determinations of distribution).
>
>As far as externalities relate to our comrades' struggle for free
>basic electricity via the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, for
>instance, the use of cost-benefit analysis by techies doing
>background research is allowing us all sorts of routes into the
>privatisation struggle. There, several million members of the
>Congress of SA Trade Unions are preparing to embark next week
>on a two-day general strike against the partial sale of several
>parastatal corporations--especially the electricity company--not
>just because of threats to jobs (they've won concessions already),
>but because privatisation evaporates the possibility of
>cross-subsidisation.
>
>Cross-subsidisation may in the narrowest sense be a crucial way to
>integrate costs of social stability not otherwise accounted for,
>by *social democratic* ideologists (certainly not neolibs, who
>HATE cross-subsidisation because it distorts the price system).
>
>But that doesn't detract from what we think is a pretty good radical
>project: namely, attempting to *delink* (not integrate) the sources
>of social stability that do not spontaneously beget value--i.e., the
>sense of community hard-won during anti-apartheid struggles which
>involved rent/services boycotts, leaving memories which are now
>very dangerous to government/ANC and have led to increasingly active
>demobilisation maneuvres--from nationalist loyalties and fealty to
>the market. If our demands for 50 litres of water and a kiloWatt hour
>of electricity per person per day are filled (we're about half way
>there on water and 1/3rd on electricity, in principle), I assume
>that serves to allow further delinkage of workers from the
>labour/cash nexus in which they're trapped. (Esping-Andersen's
>studies of decommodifying labour power in Scandinavia point in this
>direction, at least.) And sure, environmental externalities--along
>with gender equity, public health, desegregation and even economic
>multipliers of various sorts--are part of the advocacy arguments we
>have to deploy to this end.
>
>Sure, it's risky to play these "sustainable development" discourses
>with other techies, but I think it probably has to be done.
>
>> >This leads to the first question James Heartfield asked - as to whether
>> >environmentalism in inherently anti-mass and anti-worker. Obviously
>> >environmentalists operating from premises I've outlined above have good
>> >reason not to be anti-mass or anti-worker, and in fact good reason to
>> >support egalitarianism and anti-capitalism.
>> I'm sorry but this does not seem persuasive. If capitalism is wasteful,
>> and resources are limited, then the logical conclusion is not a popular
>> struggle against capitalism, but an elite campaign to restrict
>> consumerism: environmentalism.
>
>Come down this side before you write it off (but that film you helped
>out on showed me I'm several years late). About a year prior to the
>Rio+10 conference here, the fight for free electricity is one of 3
>local projects that inspire me a great deal at the moment (two others
>being the fight--nearly won now--against more Lesotho dams to supply
>Jo'burg with expensive water, and the extremely controversial attempt
>to stop a major deep-water port, smelter and Export Processing Zone
>not far down the Indian Ocean coast from comrade Russell G, who in
>this rare case, I think, will agree with the eco-social struggle
>[http://www.coega.org]). In all three cases, we do invoke
>externalities, because it's one way to slow down the maniacs of big
>capital and big government.
>
>So James, if by consumerism, you mean hedonistic water wastage by
>white Jo'burgers (double english gardens, swimming pools and
>artificial forests on the African highveld with no river for miles),
>yeah, the campaign is partly for "conservation." But it's not
>"elite," it's a class struggle. And I hope you also observe the
>attempts to reverse uneven development in the sphere of consumption
>by getting access to more water/sanitation/electricity consumables by
>the masses and workers.
>
-- James Heartfield