Huh? No, it was certainly a crisis, we're all agreed. But the crisis was not a function of excess 'demand' in the way James was positing, as if 'underaccumulation' is a concept useful to analysing crisis dynamics in SA energy supply. Aside from the commodity price spike, representing artificial not durable demand, the major catalyst for the load-shedding was wet coal in early 2008, i.e. a supply-side constraint.
> So are you arguing that everything is fine WRT investment in
> infrastructure in this country
>
Huh? Do you know anyone who argues the opposite, with more head-against-the-wall frustration than me, Russell?
> and the only problem (e.g electricity shortages) was distortions in
> demand caused by a commodities bubble? You can't be
> serious. undoubted ESKOM obfuscation aside, do you really think we now
> have enough affordable electricity to drive a modern economy?
>
Huh? Of COURSE we do! The damn problem is the affordable electricity is going to BHP Billiton, Arecelor Mittal, Anglo American and the like, not to everyone else. Those big users chow about 40%, and the cross-subsidy they enjoy thanks to multi-decade late-apartheid deals is obscene.
> Or for that matter that decrepit and indequate roads, rail, ports
>
Hey, I live a few kms east of Africa's biggest port and container terminal. I agree, there are big problems. But there's also an insane overinvestment, with the Durban harbour's mouth doubling in width and the depth going down to post-Panamax heights (20 meters) recently, so as to compete with your new E.Cape Coega deep water port. All wasted (I hope - I don't want to take more than 20 minutes to get my boy to school in the morning in these traffic jams, competing with the container-carrying megatrucks).
> and utilities are all sufficient to meet the needs of the mass of
> South Africans?
>
Huh? Of COURSE the mass of SAns are pissed off, that's why they are protesting at the fastest rate in the world. Who watches this process more carefully than me, comrade? (Evidence is our Social Protest Observatory: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,27,3,1858)
> Look at the pathetic apology we have for an internet service due to
> lack of proper investment in undersea cables.
>
Agreed. My clicks are 10kb/second right now, for a US$100/month service. Argh. For those of you who put html links into posts instead of cut/pasting the article, damn you. :-)
> As for R&D and modernisation of production, the bourgeoisie have put
> their money into speculation not the development of new capacity.
>
Agreed. First analysis of this phenomenon in Elite Transition: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/Bond%20Elite%20Transition%202ndEdn.pdf - and latest analysis will be posted here tomorrow: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?11,65,3,1944
> A consequence is that - impact of the crisis aside -
> de-industrialisation is happening fast. If the Eastern Cape loses
> autos we may as well pack up shop. And we're sadly not alone in this.
> There seems no doubt at all that there has been gross under-investment
>
No, you're facing the same chronological problems as James. The SA overaccumulation crisis included extreme overinvestment in the built environment, with waves of both state capital and speculative capital going into white elephants such as Coega (notwithstanding your own heroic bureaucratic maneuvres). So perhaps offlist we might unpack which sectoral/infrastructural 'underinvestment' you mean, and how it relates to systemic crisis. Autos is an excellent example of a sector long facing durable overaccumulation *and* rising organic composition of capital, *and* falling profits. No wonder a peripheral site like the Eastern Cape lost about a quarter of production within a few weeks, a year ago, and probably won't recover more than half of that in an eventual upturn.
> in all these things to an extent where the foundations of a modern
> industrial economy are imperiled. We pretty much have no railways in
> the Eastern Cape any longer - one passenger train runs a month to Joburg!
>
True, migrant labour patterns have switched eh, so the Zimbabwe-Joburg buses and far cheaper labour than Xhosa men (and their superexploited women) are part of post-1994 class apartheid labour relations.
> Railway stations are in ruins while the harbour here is used by nobody
> apart from Mercedes Benz who have a direct link to the pier and even
> they are unhappy with the service. Transnet admit that they have no
> intention of investing anything further here. Industry now sends
> products and imports raw materials via roads that are mostly unfit for
> the job too, while water and sanitation are hazardous due to failure
> to upgrade for years. In Queenstown there is a real threat that water
> will be cut off entirely at night. Planes no longer fly from East
> London to PE. What industry can survive that? Of course there are
> specifically home grown reasons for much of this - bureaucrats who
> think building an economy is about clipping coupons and signing
> empowerment deals rather than implementing an industrial policy that
> has remained on paper for so long. The lack of seriousness with which
> the National Framework Agreement on fighting the crisis has been
> implemented betrays the absolute lack of undnerstanding of what it
> takes to keep a modern economy going. Of the R2.something billion
> promised for training schemes, a paltry R10m has so far been allocated
> and virtually none paid out. Of course at the root of all of this it
> was capitalists who took their money and ran off with it to invest
> elsewhere despite their claimed faith in the Rainbow Nation.
>
All of what you say is terribly important; hopefully it forms the basis for radical social mobilisations, not just intra-ANC party politics of the sort Polokwane represented in another way. It was your region that in the late 1970s led the community-labour mobilisations as well as ideological radicalisation (Black Consciousness); what will come next from the E.Cape? A rewrite of Das Kapital?
(If anyone's interested, our Centre for Civil Society is about to launch - probably 20 Feb - an 80-person reading group of Das Kapital with lots of breakout groups to consider detailed local applications, based on the film at http://www.davidharvey.org... contact me if you want to get involved.)