I've been reluctant to get into the umpteenth semantic debate with cde Doug over whether being impressed with technical monetary trickery translates into endorsement of the Rhodesian project or of nationalism in general. Sometimes your head is just too thick, comrade.
And of COURSE we want left governments to unite in regional blocs that would be big enough to survive imperialist economic attack... and great hopes have been invested in the idea of a self-sufficient Southern Africa, to this end. But realistically this HAS to be a bottom-up regionalism (see the current Socialist Register for a long argument some SA comrades and I make to this effect), precisely because Bad Nationalism (neoliberalism in the region, subimperialism in Pretoria) gives absolutely no opening to do anything really counterhegemonic in alliance with current state elites. Mbeki's New African Initiative (which was the subtext of his sellout at the World Conference Against Racism at 4AM on Saturday) is emblematic of this problem.
When Samir Amin and Mark Weisbrot and I had lunch on Thursday in Pretoria, this was pretty much the characterisation of the problem that we came up with. Samir is testifying to parliament in Cape Town on Thursday on what's wrong with SA's neolib industrial policy. But within a couple of weeks, we (several internationalist organisations led by Jubilee) hope to put the exchange control and debt-default issue squarely back on the agenda. A central plank is the call for reparations from banks like Citi (26/9 protest at their Africa hq) and the WB (27-30 events here in solidarity with you comrades on PA Ave).
In all of these processes, we'd love to use the regional scale, but it's not feasible given power relations and uneven development of our struggles across Southern Africa. So, just like Doug's last chapter in *Wall Street*, we're still making the nation-state the main focus for demands and establishing alternatives. These range from Soweto comrades demanding free electricity and water, to Cosatu saying privatisation must stop, to Jubilee fighting the repayment of apartheid debt, to various critiques of SA leaders' persistent tendency to shine not break the chains of global apartheid (in Durban, DC, Doha and Davos in coming months).
Join us comrade Doug, and cut out this willful misreading of the techie argumentation. If you disagree with the idea, for example, that hedonistic rich white South Africans who accumulated millions thanks to apartheid should be hit with exchange controls and prescribed assets, so that the state deficit can rise, so that electricity lines can go to impoverished rural women, then you've got some explaining to do...
Cheers, P.
----- Original Message ----- From: Seth Ackerman <sackerman at FAIR.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 8:13 PM Subject: RE: Bond against _Empire_
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > >Is autarky necessarily the same as nationalism? Do, say, controls on
> > foreign
> > >exchange holdings necessarily lead to exclusionary politics? Why
exactly
> > >can't you have exchange controls *and* internationalism?
> >
> > Maybe you could, but the examples Patrick and others point to were
> > nationalist.
> >
> > What small to medium sized poor country could really make a go of it
> > on its own for any length of time? Maybe a big one with some
> > technological resources, like Brazil or India, could for a while, but
> > Zambia or Argentina? Cuba got by only because it was subsidized and
> > defended for 30 years by the USSR. But now? At minimum, you'd need a
> > bunch of countries to ally, take a common stance with their
> > creditors, make some serious attempt at developing serious economic
> > and social links, and arrange some sort of trading system with a
> > division of labor.
> .
> I agree with all of this. But I'm a little confused: I thought you
regarded
> regional groupings of poor countries as a mask for local hegemony.
>
> And what would Hardt & Negri say about this, given their belief that "the
> autonomy of the political" is a mere illusion?
>
> Seth
>
>
>