Don't know about the US, but I'd argue 'forward to decommodification and deglobalisation of capital' from this side (as in this concluding section to a forthcoming article from Development Dialogue):
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If as argued above, neoliberalism may have another breath of life, with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation applied from above by Barak Obama or the International Monetary Fund, much stronger pressure is needed from below to resist. Some forms have been well tested in social struggle, including four ‘pilot projects’ in genuine post-neoliberalism: defending against financial degradation; restoring national power without the distraction of global governance; providing serious leadership to combat climate crisis; and reestablishing anti-imperialism so as to take advantage of unprecedented United States weakness.
First, facing myriad forms of financial crisis, we might consider quite recent examples of community and citizens’ groups generating impressive defense against financial degradation. Consider two micro examples -- the 1990s housing ‘bonds boycotts’ in South Africa’s black townships and Mexico’s mid-1990s ‘El Barzon’ (the yoke) movement against banks – as well as a stronger form of IMF Riot than is normal: the Argentine revolt against malgovernance and international debt/banking control in 2001-02 that led to a debt default of $140 billion.
South Africa’s bond boycotts began in the wake of the 200,000 mortgages granted in townships during the late 1980s. The long 1989-93 recession left 500,000 freshly unemployed workers and their families unable to pay for housing. This in turn helped generate a collective refusal to repay housing bonds until certain conditions were met. The tactic moved from the site of the Uitenhage Volkswagen auto strike in the Eastern Cape to the Johannesburg area in 1990, as a consequence of two factors: shoddy housing construction (for which the homebuyers had no other means of recourse than boycotting the housing bond) and the rise in interest rates from 12.5 percent (-6 percent in real terms) in 1988 to 21 percent (+7 percent in real terms) in late 1989, which in most cases doubled monthly bond repayments.
As a result of the resistance, township housing foreclosures which could not be consummated due to refusal of the defaulting borrowers (supported by the community) to vacate their houses, and the leading financier’s $700 million black housing bond exposure in September 1992 was the reason that its holding company (Nedcor) lost 20 percent of its Johannesburg Stock Exchange share value (in excess of $150 million lost) in a single week following a threat of a national bond boycott from the national civic organization. Locally, if a bank did bring in a sheriff to foreclose and evict defaulters, it was not uncommon for a street committee of activists to burn the house down prior to new owners consummating purchase and occupation. Such power, in turn, allowed both the national and local civics to negotiate concessions from the banks.
Similarly, a much larger movement – probably one million formal members at peak – joined ‘El Barzon’ in 1995-96. Mexican presidents Carlos Salina and Ernesto Zedillo maintained neoliberal economic policies which led to a crash in December 1994. By mid-1995, not long after Zedillo’s inauguration, two million workers had lost their jobs and much of Mexico’s middle class sunk directly into poverty. The currency fell by 65 percent, the stock market crashed, and interest rates soared from 14 percent to more than 100 percent. As 200 000 small businesses were declared bankrupt, a million Mexicans joined a bond boycott of consumer, farmer and petty-bourgeois debtors who collectively refused to honour loans that had become unrepayable. Their slogan was ‘I don’t deny I owe -- but I’ll pay what is just!’ In many cases, the El Barzon strategy and solidarity foiled foreclosure proceedings, and generated major concessions from the creditors.
In Argentina, 2001-02 protests by ‘piqueteros’ against the government’s year-long freeze of bank accounts initially took the form of the ‘cacerolazo’ (banging of pots and pans in the cities’ main squares) and then massive street demonstrations. During December 2001, one of the four presidents who lost their job due to the intensity of demonstrations, Rodríguez Saá, defaulted on $132 billion in foreign debts. Although disputes remain about whether the subsequent government of Nestor Kirchner could have done more to press home the advantage (Jubilee South’s Argentina chapter remains furious about payment of illegitimate debt), in 2003, Kirchner at least showed Argentina’s capacity to operate in the world economy even after spurning Washington. According to a surprised Economist (2003) magazeine, ‘After missing a $2.9 billion payment to the International Monetary Fund on September 9th, it distinguished itself with the single largest non-payment of a loan in the Fund’s history. The next day, it clinched a deal that may be the speediest and kindest the IMF has ever agreed to.’ Private creditors were forced to take a 70 percent ‘haircut’ on Argentine bonds.
The same approach to unrepayable debt – national default – was advocated by then leading UN economic adviser Jeffrey Sachs. He told heads of state at a July 2004 African Union meeting in Addis Ababa, ‘African countries should refuse to repay their foreign debts’ and instead use the funds to invest in health and education. (At the time, the IMF was controversially prohibiting expenditure of health funds donated to Africa, especially for HIV/AIDS mitigation, on grounds that civil service pay would rise to above 7 percent of GDP.)
Weeks earlier, a Cape Town meeting of Jubilee Africa members from Angola, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, the DRC, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, and partners from Brazil, Argentina and the Philippines working on a comprehensive Illegitimate Debt Audit demanded that their national governments pursue this post-neoliberal agenda:
• full unconditional cancellation of Africa’s total debt; • reparations for damage caused by debt devastation; • immediate halt to the Highly Indebted Poor Country initiative and Poverty Reducation Strategy Papers and the disguised structural adjustment program through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and any other agreements that do not address the fundamental interests of the impoverished majority and the building of a sustainable and sovereign Africa; and • a comprehensive audit to determine the full extent and real nature of Africa’s illegitimate debt, the total payments made to date and the amount owed to Africa.
Such national-scale challenges to global financial power are the only ways forward given the adverse global-scale power relations. From a national power base, several other financial sector reforms can be pursued: imposition of exchange controls (such as were applied by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003), financial nationalization (as have some European countries egged), and fiscal stimulation (as national states are generally being encouraged to do at present, in order to avoid global depression).
In his famous article on national self-sufficiency, John Maynard Keynes (1933) cautioned against nationalistic ‘silliness, haste and intolerance’, yet argued forcefully for the national not global scale of economic revival:
I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, 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… [O]ver an increasingly wide range of industrial products, and perhaps of agricultural products also, I have become doubtful whether the economic loss of national self-sufficiency is great enough to outweigh the other advantages of gradually bringing the product and the consumer within the ambit of the same national, economic, and financial organization. Experience accumulates to prove that most modem processes of mass production can be performed in most countries and climates with almost equal efficiency. Moreover, with greater wealth, both primary and manufactured products play a smaller relative part in the national economy compared with houses, personal services, and local amenities, which are not equally available for international exchange; with the result that a moderate increase in the real cost of primary and manufactured products consequent on greater national self-sufficiency may cease to be of serious consequence when weighed in the balance against advantages of a different kind. National self-sufficiency, in short, though it costs something, may be becoming a luxury which we can afford, if we happen to want it… The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous--and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it.
The contemporary form of this approach takes shape in the deglobalisation and decommodification strategies for basic needs goods, as exemplified in South Africa by the national Treatment Action Campaign and Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum which have won, respectively, antiretroviral medicines needed to fight AIDS and publicly-provided water (Bond 2006, 2008). The drugs are now made locally in Africa – in Johannesburg, Kampala, Harare, etc – and on a generic not branded basis, and generally provided free of charge, a great advance upon the $15,000/patient/year cost of branded AIDS medicines a decade earlier (in South Africa, half a million people receive them). The water in Johannesburg is now produced and distributed by public agencies (Suez was sent back to Paris after its controversial 2001-06 protest-ridden management of municipal water); and in April 2008 a major constitutional lawsuit in the High Court resulted in a doubling of free water to 50 liters/person/day and the prohibition of pre-payment water meters (Bond and Dugard 2008).
Similarly, a deglobalised, decommodified alternative is needed to oft-feted micro-credit schemes financed by international financiers and foundations at the expense of local impoverished women who are expected to pay exorbitant interest rates. For anyone believing that micro-credit is a post-neoliberal project, consider the extremist viewpoint of Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus (1998, 214): ‘I believe that “government,” as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector,” a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions’ (see Bond 2007 for a full critique).
In contrast, the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez has begun providing large grants to 3500 ‘communal banks’ (Pearson 2008):
Communal banks are social organizations that administer the financial and non-financial resources of the communal councils, the organizing mechanism of communities. Through the communal banks, organized communities can finance social projects, assist members in cases of emergency, and make social investments. In the 2009 budget, Chavez explained, BsF 3.4 billion (US$ 1.6 billion) has been assigned to the communal banks. That is, almost three times the amount for 2008. Chavez noted the irony that while large, small and medium sized banks are collapsing around the world as a result of the financial crisis, Venezuela is ‘giving birth to thousands of banks that are banks of the people, the communal banks, the banks for popular power... and [this] popular power is vital for the future of the revolution... so this ...can’t fail.’… Chavez is also encouraging the communal councils and the national government bodies to create networks of social distribution of the products that are made in the socialist companies and collectives. The idea of such a network would be to counteract the capitalist networks of production, which have been generating speculation in the price of products.
To join Venezuela in genuine post-neoliberal financial reform, the crucial ingredient for Africa is heightened pressure from below. This means the strengthening, coordination and increased militancy of two kinds of civil society: those forces devoted to the debt relief cause, which have often come from what might be termed an excessively polite, civilized society based in internationally-linked NGOs which rarely if ever used ‘tree shaking’ in order to do ‘jam making’; and those forces which react via short-term ‘IMF Riots’ against the system, in a manner best understood as uncivilized society. The IMF Riots that shook African countries during the 1980s-90s often, unfortunately, rose up in fury and even shook loose some governments’ hold on power. When these, however, contributed to the fall of Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (one of many examples), the man who replaced him as president in 1991, former trade unionist Frederick Chiluba, imposed even more decisive IMF policies. Most anti-IMF protest simply could not be sustained (Seddon 2002).
In contrast, the former organizations are increasingly networked, especially in the wake of 2005 activities associated with the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), which generated (failed) strategies to support the Millennium Developmental Goals partly through white-headband consciousness raising, through appealing to national African elites and through joining a naïve appeal to the G8 Gleneagles meeting (Bond 2006). Since then, networks tightened and became more substantive through two Nairobi events: the January 2007 World Social Forum and August 2008 launch of Jubilee South’s Africa network. Moreover, Jubilee Africa also added ecological debt to its agenda, insisting that the free environmental space that African rainforests provide the North for acting as a carbon sink be compensated in future financial and aid negotiations. Such calculations, as done for example by Joan Martinez-Alier (2002), would show that the North owes the South, not the other way around.
There are two examples of legal strategies with this aim, currently in the US courts:
• Reparations lawsuits are now being heard in New York by victims of apartheid who are collectively requesting $400 billion in damages from three dozen US corporations who profited from South African operations during the same period. Supreme Court justices had so many investments in these companies that in May 2008, they had to bounce the case back to a lower New York court to decide, effectively throwing out an earlier judgment against the plaintiffs: the Jubilee anti-debt movement, the Khulumani Support Group for apartheid victicms, and 17 000 other black South Africans.
• In October 2008, a San Francisco court began considering a similar reparations lawsuit – under the Alien Tort Claims Act - filed by the Ilaje people of the Niger Delta against Chevron for 1998 murders similar to those that took the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa on November 10, 1995.
What to do, then, about the climate challenge? The Climate Justice Now! network manifesto’s suggestions correspond to what Andre Gorz would have called ‘non-reformist reforms’ because they work against the system’s internal logic and strengthen opponents. The first is ‘leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing instead in appropriate energy- efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy’. The network is joined by other transnational activist communities such as Rising Tide and OilWatch to promote slogans like ‘Keep the oil in the soil!’ and ‘Leave the coal in the hole!’ Direct actions are increasing: environmentalists in dinghies harassing vast coal ships in Newcastle, Australia; blockaded British power plants; activism against the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada; and Greenpeace campaigning against E.ON coal at Rotterdam, the Kingsnorth power plant in Britain, Sardinia, and Antwerp. This is a crucial step in Northern environmentalism, as even Al Gore remarked in August 2007: ‘I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants’ (cited by Kristoff 2007).
Extraordinary leadership is coming from indigenous people and environmental and community activists in the Niger Delta and Ecuadoran Amazon. Accion Ecologia helped persuade Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa to consider an oil-in-the-soil plan to prevent drilling in the Yasuni National Park (although who bears the cost of $12 billion in foregone revenues remains to be fought over). Environmental Rights Action in Port Harcourt, Nigeria insist on an end to extraction and exploration. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta continues to kidnap foreign oil workers, now demanding they vacate the Delta for good. Thanks in part to organising by environmental justice activists in the Ogoni Solidarity Forum, Shell Oil was kicked out of Ogoniland in June 2008, 13 years after the company arranged for Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution. Chevron was responsible for two other murders ten years ago when the Ilaje people protested eco-social destruction, and 19 survivors took the oil firm to the San Francisco courts in October 2008, using the Alien Tort Claims Act to demand environmental reparations. In South Africa, the Pietermaritzburg NGO groundwork and OilWatch linked several dozen anti-oil activists’ groups from across the continent at a September 2008 conference. A month later, citing climate concerns, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance began a legal appeal to the national government, aiming to reverse a $5 billion Durban-Johannesburg pipeline investment which would double oil refining in the polluted community. These are the only serious strategies in place to halt climate change at the supply side, and will go much further than Obama’s market gimmicks to save the planet.
Finally and regrettably, a necessary prerequisite to make all the above strategies more feasible is the re-delegitimisation of US power. Most obviously, a world addicted to the US dollar as the reserve currency will be at the mercy of the US state, as one example. The insane mutually-assured-destructive system of T-bill purchases by East Asian investors - so as to ensure a market for their consumer goods - began running into the contradiction of huge declines in Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean dollar reserves wealth, as the US currency fell substantially in recent years. A multi-currency exchange system is inevitable, and to the extent it is conjoined with national exchange controls and hence less extreme volatility in financial trading, will be advantageous for economic development, compared to the current currency anarchy. Ideally something like Keynes’ International Currency Union – which would penalise balance of trade surpluses – would be ideal, but given the neoliberal and neoconservative forces in multilateral institutions, is probably out of the question in our lifetimes.
The big problem remains the US state, because to counteract US economic and cultural decline, two strategies are now in play: political revitalisation via Barack Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a non-imperialist politician with roots in African-American, Kenyan and even Indonesian traditions; and the activism anticipated through his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, a strong supporter of the US war against Iraq. But in reaction to peace-baiting during the election campaign, Obama himself once uttered that the ‘surge’ of US troops there in 2007-08 ‘succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.’ Responded former CIA agent Ray McGovern (2008):
Succeeded? You betcha - the surge was a great success in terms of the administration’s overriding objective. The aim was to stave off definitive defeat in Iraq until President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney could swagger from the West Wing into the western sunset on Jan. 20, 2009.
Obama may not run as extreme a militarist regime as Bush/Cheney or as McCain/Palin would have. Yet as Jeremy Scahill (2008) points out, there is an awful precedent from Washington’s imperialist habits during Bill Clinton’s administration:
The prospect of Obama’s foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama’s transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them: -- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan; -- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future; -- His labeling of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a ‘terrorist organization’; -- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend US interests; -- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem ‘must remain undivided’ -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe; -- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor US counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America; -- His refusal to ‘rule out’ using Blackwater and other armed private forces in US war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under US law.
In addition to Hillary Clinton, Scahill (2008) warns of the following imperialist influences: vice president Joe Biden, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, former defense secretary William Perry, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and other key Clinton-era figures (Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Anthony Lake, Lee Hamilton, Susan Rice, John Brennan, Jami Miscik, John Kerry, Bill Richardson, Robert Gates, Ivo H. Daalder, Sarah Sewall, Michele Flournoy, Wendy Sherman, Tom Donilon, Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert. As Scahill concludes,
Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. ‘I don’t want to just end the war,’ he said early this year. ‘I want to end the mindset that got us into war.’ That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.
What is most crucial, then, for a realistic post-neoliberal project, is ongoing delegitimisation of the US in its political and military modes. One danger zone is Africa, where the Bush/Cheney/Gates geopolitical and military machinery ground to a halt in the form of the Africa Command. No state aside from Liberia would entertain the idea of hosting the headquarters (which remained in Stuttgard), notwithstanding an endorsement of Africom from even Obama’s main Africa advisor, Witney Schneidman.
More importantly, even if Obama restores a degree of US credibility at the level of international politics, US military decline will continue to be hastened by failed Pentagon strategies against urban Islamist guerilla movements in Baghdad, rural Islamist fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the belligerent nuclear-toting state of North Korea. None of these forces represent social progress, of course, but they probably are responsible for such despondency in Washington that other targets of US imperial hostility, such as the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, remain safe from blatant overthrow in the near term.
In turn, those four Latin American countries have the best opportunity in the world, today, to build post-neoliberal economic, social and environmental projects. The latter eco-socialist project is vitally important, because to counter the objectionable idea of ‘petro-socialism’, as practiced in Venezuela, there are some inspiring examples in Cuba’s post-carbon innovations, in Bolivia’s indigenous people’s power and in Ecuador’s official commitment – no matter how it wavers in practice - to a ‘keep the oil in the soil’ policy in the Yasuni National Park. The social and economic advances in post-neoliberal Venezuela are important, as are Keynesian strategies being implemented in China (the world’s most expansive public works projects – with ecological disasters ) and Argentina, as key examples.
From South Africa, our window on this new world shows quite clear dangers of both Pretoria government officials and NGOs (e.g. Civicus and ActionAid, both headquartered in Johannesburg) being coopted into renewed neoliberal (and even neoconservative) US imperial projects, especially if Obama draws upon his African roots for socio-political power. Antidotes remain, of course, and are expressed through anti-imperialist sentiments emerging in both the centre-left political actors (the trade unions and SA Communist Party) and the independent left social movements (especially those acting in solidarity with Zimbabweans, Swazis, Palestinians and Burmese) (Bond and Desai, 2009).
But the most powerful South African example is not the negation of neoliberalism and imperialism, but rather the grassroots activist initiatives – such as acquiring generic AIDS medicines and free public water supplies – against the forces of micro-commodification and macro-neoliberalism. These are indeed the most useful signals that another world – realistically post-neoliberal – is not only possible, but is being constructed even now.