>Since the overwhelming April ANC election victory, government ministers
>have spoken with increasing confidence about the importance of an active
>and strategic public sector. The incoming Minister of Public Enterprises,
>cde Alec Erwin, for instance, has said categorically there will be no
>whole-sale privatisation of strategic public entities like Transnet, Eskom
>or Denel in the next five years.
>These policy indicators were given a more general ideological underpinning
>by President Mbeki when he spoke in the parliamentary debate on the
>Presidency's budget vote. Cde Mbeki's views were entirely reasonable and
>pertinent, articulating a set of broad left social values.
This is interesting. I remember hearing quite a different story from Patrick Bond when he gave a lecture here in Ottawa in the winter. From what I remember, he really raked Mbeki over the coals (think the book he was using for the info, his own, was called, "Talk Left, Walk Right" or something like that).
This report leaves me feeling a bit disquieted. It does mention the difficulty of trying to operate within the matrix of global capitalism, but it seems so "quiet" about liberal bourgeois economics after going on about the liberal SA constitution. And that constitution hardly seems terribly radical, a fart's worth in a windstorm. No talk about bourgeois rights vs. proletarian rights. Just looks uncomfortably as though they're fronting for a somewhat left-liberal, maybe soc-dem (but hardly radical) Mbeki.
Sure wish I could hear Patrick respond to this.
Todd
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