[DEBATE] : Re: (Fwd) 'SA is subimperialist'

[Peter Waterman]

Patrick:

I note that the ILRIG, etc, roundtable exchange takes place entirely within 
the parameters of classical Marxism and, in particular, of its imperialism 
discourse.

In so far as we are now experiencing a different phase and type of global 
capitalism from those of Marx, Rosa, Lenin or Trotsky, and in so far as 
'critical globalisation' theories have questioned the adequacy of classical 
Marxist imperialist theory, I was wondering whether it was not either 
possible or necessary to consider South Africa's role in such terms.

This is not intended to be a loaded question. Nor do I pretend to have an 
answer to it.

Best,

Peter W.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
To: "debate: SA discussion list" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 10:26 AM
Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) 'SA is subimperialist'


| "Is South Africa anti-imperialist, subimperialist or just imperialist?"
|
| A roundtable discussion with Ilrig, AIDC and the Centre for Civil Society
|
| 23 November, 7:30-9:30pm
|
| Hosted by the International Labour Research and Information Group
|
| Community House, Salt River, Cape Town
|
| ***
|
| South African subimperial accumulation
|
| Patrick Bond
| (Full footnoted version available at pbond at mail.ngo.za)
|
| One growing concern of political economists interested in the
| accumulation of capital in Southern Africa is whether the transition
| from apartheid to democracy in South Africa fundamentally shifted
| Pretoria’s apartheid-era ‘total strategy’ for dominating regional
| geopolitics and economics. Three positions seem to be emerging:
|
| - First, Thabo Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development
| represents a genuine attempt by a ‘middle power’ with good intentions to
| uplift the continent economically and install democratic modes of
| ‘governance’.
| - Second, Mbeki’s project is outright imperialist, with continental
| ambitions that imply rivalries with competitors in the US, Europe
| (especially France) and East Asia (especially China).
| - Third, Mbeki’s project has been to situate South Africa as a
| subimperial partner to the world’s major military and economic powers,
| insofar as this entails lubricating markets and systems of accumulation
| by tying Africa into the institutional framework of global capital, and
| by assisting – as a ‘deputy sheriff’ - in implementing imperial military
| and socio-political strategies.
|
| Taking the latter position, this chapter argues that imperialism,
| subimperialism and anti-imperialism are settling into durable patterns
| and alignments in Africa – in large part because of Pretoria’s emerging
| managerial functions – and the patterns appear consistent with the way
| Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg described the relation between capital,
| society and nature. It begins with ‘primitive accumulation’ and
| continues by establishing systems of class, racial, gender and
| environmental power that facilitate accumulation, relatively unhindered
| by transitions from colonialism and apartheid.
| According to Marx,
|
| The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
| enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the
| turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black
| skins signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These
| idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On
| their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the
| globe for a theatre.
|
| By 1913, Luxemburg had developed a full-fledged theory of imperialism
| from these insights:
|
| Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any
| attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within
| this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws
| of the economic process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account
| only the former aspect: ‘the realm of peaceful competition’, the marvels
| of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from
| the other aspect: the realm of capital’s blustering violence which is
| regarded as more or less incidental to foreign policy and quite
| independent of the economic sphere of capital.
| In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic
| process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the
| organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital.
| The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking
| them together. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to
| toe’ characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress
| in the world at every step, arid thus capitalism prepares its own
| downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions…
| Militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of capital,
| accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays
| a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the
| period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of
| conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India.
| Later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the
| social organisations of primitive societies so that their means of
| production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in
| countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to
| turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages
| in the colonies. It is responsible for the creation and expansion of
| spheres of interest for European capital in non-European regions, for
| extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing
| the claims of European capital as international lender. Finally,
| militarism is a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist
| countries for areas of non-capitalist civilisation.
|
| In subsequent years, the argument that Northern accumulation occurs in
| part through the underdevelopment of Africa was advanced by African
| analysts, including Claude Ake, Samir Amin, A.M. Babu, Amilcar Cabral,
| Demba Dembele, Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Sara Longwe, Guy Mhone,
| Thandika Mkandawire, Dani Nabudere, Bade Onimode, Mohau Pheko, Walter
| Rodney, Issa Shivji, and Paul Zeleza, amongst others.
| If contemporary imperialism necessarily combines neoliberalism and a
| permanent form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in peripheral sites
| like Africa, the next logical step is to locate South Africa’s own
| position as regional subimperial hegemon within the same matrices. That
| requires identifying areas where imperialism is facilitated in Africa by
| the Pretoria-Johannesburg state-capitalist nexus, in part through
| Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development and in part through the
| independent (though related) logic of private capital.
| Does Pretoria qualify as subimperialist? There are certainly indicators
| of naked subimperial relations with the US, such as the permission
| granted by Pretoria for three Iraq-bound warships to dock and refuel in
| Durban, and the sale by state-owned weapons manufacturer Denel of $160
| million worth of artillery propellants and 326 hand-held laser range
| finders to the British army, and 125 laser-guidance sights to the US
| Marines. George W. Bush rewarded Thabo Mbeki with an official visit just
| as the dust from the Baghdad invasion had settled, in July 2003. As
| Business Day editorialised, the ‘abiding impression’ left from Bush’s
| Pretoria stopover was ‘of a growing, if not intimate trust’.
| But there is much more to consider in the hectic activities of Mbeki and
| his two main internationally-oriented colleagues: finance minister
| Trevor Manuel (chair of the IMF/World Bank Development Committee from
| 2001-05) and trade/privatisation minister Alec Erwin. It is in their and
| their cabinet colleagues’ lubrication of neoliberalism that has most
| decisively qualified Pretoria as a subimperial power.
|
| South Africa’s subimperial functions
| During an August 2003 talk to business and social elites at Rhodes House
| in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela offered the single most chilling historical
| reference possible: ‘I am sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given
| his approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the
| early 21st century appropriate and fit for its time.’ (In the same
| spirit, Mandela took that opportunity to publicly criticise, for the
| first time and at a crucial moment, activists from the Jubilee South
| Africa anti-debt movement and apartheid-victims support groups. Their
| sin was filing lawsuits in New York demanding reparations from
| corporations for their pre-1994 South African profits, along the lines
| of the Nazi-victims ancestors’ banking and slave labour cases. Mandela
| backed Mbeki, who formally opposed the suits on grounds that Pretoria
| had its own reconciliation strategy, and that such litigation would, if
| successful, deter future foreign investors.)
| Is the Rhodes comparison apt? We do have much to learn from revisiting
| late 19th-century imperial rule in Africa, in part because no other
| buccaneer did as much damage to the possibilities for peace and
| equitable development in Africa as Cecil Rhodes. As diamond merchant,
| financier and politician (governor of the Cape Colony during the
| 1880s-90s), Rhodes received permission from Queen Victoria to plunder
| what are now called Gauteng Province (greater Johannesburg) once gold
| was discovered in 1886, and then Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi; his
| ambition was to paint the map British imperial red, stretching along the
| route from the Cape to Cairo. Rhodes’ two main vehicles were the British
| army, which invented the concentration camp and in the process killed
| 14,000 blacks and 25,000 Afrikaner women and children during the
| 1899-1902 Anglo Boer South African War, and the British South Africa
| Company (BSAC), a for-profit firm which in 1890 began systematically
| imposing settler colonialism across the region. The BSAC’s charter,
| following the notorious Rudd Concession which Rhodes obtained
| deceitfully from the Ndebele king Lobengula, represented a structural
| switch from informal control of trade, to trade with rule. British
| imperialists assumed that competition for control of Africa would
| continue beyond the 1885 Berlin conference which partitioned Africa, and
| that only BSAC-style ‘imperialism on the cheap’, as it was termed, would
| ensure geographical dominance over the interior of the continent in the
| face of hostile German, Portuguese, and Boer forces. Such a strategy was
| critical, they posited, to the protection of even the Nile Valley, which
| in turn represented the life-line to the prize of India.
| But as today, there was also a crucial economic dynamic underway in
| Britain (and much of Europe) ─ beyond the never-ending search for gold ─
| which undergirded Rhodes’ conquests: chronic overaccumulation of
| capital, especially in the London financial markets, combined with
| social unrest. The easy availability of foreign portfolio funding for
| nascent Southern African stock markets stemmed from a lengthy
| international economic depression, chronic excess financial liquidity (a
| symptom of general overaccumulation), and the global hegemony enjoyed by
| City of London financiers. From the standpoint of British imperialism,
| the main benefit of Rhodes’ role in the region was to ameliorate the
| contradictions of global capitalism by channelling financial surpluses
| into new investments (such as the telegraph, railroad and surveying that
| tamed and commodified the land known as Rhodesia), extracting resources
| (especially gold, even if in tiny amounts compared to the Rand), and
| assuring political allegiance to South African corporate power, which
| was in harmonious unity with the evolving British-run states of the 
region.
| Can Mandela claim he is faithfully following in these footsteps? Today,
| for Victoria, substitute the White House. Instead of the old-fashioned
| power plays of the Rudd Concession and similar BSAC tricks of
| dispossession, read Nepad and its many corporate backers. Likewise, the
| SA National Defense Force stands ready to follow British army conquests,
| what with its invasion of Lesotho in September 1998, justified by
| Pretoria’s desire to protect a controversial, corrupt mega-dam from
| alleged sabotage threat. As Rhodes had his media cheerleaders from Cape
| Town to London, so too do many Western publications regularly promote
| Mandela and Mbeki as Africa’s saviours, and so too does SA Broadcasting
| Corporation screen pro-Pretoria propaganda to the continent’s luxury
| hotels and other satellite broadcast receivers.
| Mandela’s less honourable foreign policy intentions were also difficult
| to disguise. Although South Africa can claim one intervention worthy of
| its human rights rhetoric – leadership of the 1997 movement to ban
| landmines (and hence a major mine-clearing role for South African
| businesses which helped lay the mines in the first place) – the
| first-ever democratic regime in Pretoria recognised the Myanmar military
| junta as a legitimate government in 1994; gave the country’s highest
| official award to Indonesian dictator Suharto three months before his
| 1998 demise (in the process extracting $25 million in donations for the
| ANC); and sold arms to countries which practiced mass violence, such as
| Algeria, Colombia, Peru and Turkey.
| Another moment of ideological confusion was cleared up in 2004. As noted
| above, in mid-2003 the US House of Representatives extended a ban on
| military assistance to 32 countries - including South Africa - which
| agreed to cooperate in future with the International Criminal Court
| against alleged US war criminals. Nevertheless, Washington’s ambassador
| to Pretoria, Cameron Hume, quickly announced that several bilateral
| military deals would go ahead in any case. According to Peter McIntosh
| of African Armed Forces journal, the US ‘had simply re routed military
| funding for South Africa through its European Command in Stuttgart.’
| Hume reported the Pentagon’s desire ‘to train and equip two additional
| battalions to expand the number of forces the [SA National Defense
| Force] have available for peacekeeping in Africa.’ South African
| newspaper ThisDay commented, in the wake of two successful joint US/SA
| military maneuvres in 2003-04: ‘Operations such as Medflag and Flintlock
| clearly have applications other than humanitarian aid, and as the US
| interventions in Somalia and Liberia have shown, humanitarian aid often
| requires forceful protection.’
| The two countries’ military relations were fully ‘normalised’ by July
| 2004, in the words of SA deputy minister Aziz Pahad. In partnership with
| General Dynamics Land Systems, State-owned Denel immediately began
| marketing 105 mm artillery alongside a turret and light armoured vehicle
| hull, in support of innovative Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (‘a
| 3500-personnel formation that puts infantry, armour and artillery in
| different versions of the same 8x8 light armoured vehicle’). According
| to one report, ‘The turret and gun is entirely proprietary to Denel,
| using only South African technology. At sea level, it can fire
| projectiles as far as 36 km.’ This followed a period of serious problems
| for the SA arms firm and others like it (Armscor and Fuchs), which were
| also allowed full access to the US market in July 2004 after paying
| fines for apartheid-era sanctions-busting.
| Given Pretoria’s 1998 decision to invest $6 billion in mainly offensive
| weaponry such as fighter jets and submarines, there are growing fears
| that peacekeeping is a cover for a more expansive geopolitical agenda,
| and that Mbeki is tacitly permitting a far stronger US role in Africa -
| from the oil rich Gulf of Guinea and Horn of Africa, to training bases
| in the South and North - than is necessary. On the surface, Pretoria’s
| senior roles in the mediation of conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic
| Republic of the Congo (DRC) during 2003 appeared positive. However,
| closer to the ground, the agreements more closely resemble the style of
| elite deals which lock in place ‘low-intensity democracy’ and neoliberal
| economic regimes. Moreover, because some of the belligerent forces were
| explicitly left out, the subsequent weeks and months after declarations
| of peace witnessed periodic massacres of civilians in both countries and
| a near-coup in the DRC.
|
| Pretoria’s legitimation of global neoliberalism
| Once the South African government showed its willingness to put
| self-interest above principles, the international political power
| centres invested increasing trust in Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel and Erwin,
| giving them insider access to many international elite fora. As
| global-establishment institutions came under attack, they sometimes
| attempted to reinvent themselves with a dose of New South African
| legitimacy; witness Mandela’s 1998 caressing of the IMF during the East
| Asian crisis, and of Clinton during the Lewinsky sex scandal. Indeed,
| Pretoria’s lead politicians were allowed, during the late 1990s, to
| preside over the UN Security Council, the board of governors of the IMF
| and Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the
| Commonwealth, the World Commission on Dams and many other important
| global and continental bodies. Simultaneously taking Third World
| leadership, Pretoria also headed the Non-Aligned Movement, the
| Organisation of African Unity and the Southern African Development
| Community.
| But this was just the warm up period. During a frenetic four years
| beginning in September 2001, Mbeki and his colleagues hosted, led, or
| played instrumental roles at the following major international events:
| the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (September 2001); the
| launch of Nepad in Abuja, Nigeria (October 2001); the Doha, Qatar
| ministerial summit of the World Trade Organisation (November 2001); the
| UN’s Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico (March
| 2002); G8 summits in Kananaskis, Canada (June 2002), Evian, France (June
| 2003), Sea Island, Georgia (June 2004) and Gleneagles, Scotland (July
| 2005); the African Union launch in Durban (July 2002); the World Summit
| on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg (August-September
| 2002); the Davos World Economic Forum (January 2003 and occasionally
| thereafter); George W. Bush’s first trip to Africa (July 2003); the
| Cancun WTO ministerial (September 2003); World Bank/IMF annual meetings
| in Dubai (September 2003) and Washington (September 2004 and 2005); the
| UN Millennium Development Summit (September 2005); and the Hong Kong WTO
| ministerial (December 2005).
| Virtually nothing was actually accomplished through the 2001-05
| opportunities:
|
| • at the UN racism conference, Mbeki colluded with the EU to reject the
| demand of NGOs and African leaders for slavery/colonialism/apartheid
| reparations;
| • Nepad provided merely a homegrown version of the Washington Consensus;
| • at Doha, trade minister Alec Erwin split the African delegation so as
| to prevent a repeat of the denial of consensus that had foiled the
| Seattle ministerial in December 1999;
| • at Monterrey, Manuel was summit co-leader (with former IMF managing
| director Michel Camdessus and disgraced Mexican ex-president Ernesto
| Zedillo), and legitimised all ongoing IMF/Bank strategies;
| • from Kananaskis, Mbeki departed with only an additional $1 billion
| commitment for Africa (aside from funds already pledged at Monterrey),
| and none of the subsequent G8 Summits – Evian, Sea Island and Gleneagles
| – represented genuine progress;
| • the African Union supported both Nepad and the Zimbabwean regime of
| president Robert Mugabe, hence further delegitimising the self-defensive
| political project of Africa’s elite;
| • at the Johannesburg WSSD, Mbeki undermined UN democratic procedure,
| facilitated the privatisation of nature, and did nothing to address the
| plight of the world’s poor majority;
| • in Davos, global elites ignored Africa, in 2003 and subsequently;
| • for hosting a leg of Bush’s Africa trip, Mbeki merely became the US
| ‘point man’ on Zimbabwe, and he avoided any conflict over Iraq’s
| recolonisation;
| • in Cancun, the collapse of trade negotiations – again, catalysed by a
| walkout by Africans – left Erwin ‘disappointed’;
| • at World Bank and IMF annual meetings from 2001-05, with Manuel
| leading the Development Committee, there was no Bretton Woods
| democratisation, new debt relief or Post-Washington policy reform; and
| • the UN Millennium Review Summit provided Mbeki grounds for
| heart-break, leaving him to bemoan, ‘We should not be surprised when
| these billions do not acclaim us as heroes and heroines’.
|
| Elsewhere I have recounted these consistent defeats for African
| interests, with attention to South Africa’s own complicity. Further
| failures can be reasonably anticipated in 2006 when Pretoria hosts the
| ‘Progressive Governance Summit’ (with very unprogressive leaders such as
| Tony Blair and Meles Zenawi) and the G77 group of Third World countries.
| Notwithstanding periodic ‘talk left’ gripes such as Mbeki’s in New York,
| Pretoria’s failures left it slotted into place as a subimperial partner
| of Washington and the European Union. Although such a relationship dates
| to the apartheid and colonial eras, the ongoing conquest of Africa – in
| political, military and ideological terms - and the reproduction of
| neoliberalism together require a coherent new strategy: Nepad.
|
| Staking claims through Nepad
| The origins of the Nepad plan are revealing. Mbeki had embarked upon a
| late 1990s’ ‘African Renaissance’ branding exercise, which he endowed
| with poignant poetics but not much else. The contentless form was
| somewhat remedied in a powerpoint skeleton unveiled during 2000 during
| Mbeki’s meetings with Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 meeting in July,
| the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union
| gathering in Portugal. The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000
| with the assistance of several economists and was immediately ratified
| during a special South African visit by World Bank president James
| Wolfensohn ‘at an undisclosed location,’ due to fears of the disruptive
| protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by IMF managing director
| Horst Koehler a few months earlier. By this stage, Mbeki managed to sign
| on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial North and West of
| the continent: Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Nigeria’s Olusegun
| Obasanjo. Both suffered regular mass protests and various civil,
| military, religious and ethnic disturbances at home.
| By early 2001, in Davos, Mbeki made clear whose interests Nepad would
| serve: ‘It is significant that in a sense the first formal briefing on
| the progress in developing this programme is taking place at the World
| Economic Forum meeting. The success of its implementation would require
| the buy in from members of this exciting and vibrant forum!’
| International capital would benefit from large infrastructure
| construction opportunities on the public-private partnership model,
| privatised state services, ongoing structural adjustment, intensified
| rule of international property law and various of Nepad’s sectoral
| plans, all coordinated from a South African office staffed with
| neoliberals and open to economic and geopolitical gatekeeping.
| The African left has expressed deep scepticism over Nepad’s main
| strategies. A succinct critique emerged from a conference of the Council
| for Development and Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) and
| Third World Network-Africa in April 2002. According to the meeting’s
| resolution:
|
| The most fundamental flaws of Nepad, which reproduce the central
| elements of the World Bank’s Can Africa Claim the Twenty-first Century?
| and the UN Economic Commission on Africa’s Compact for African Recovery,
| include:
| (a) the neoliberal economic policy framework at the heart of the plan,
| and which repeats the structural adjustment policy packages of the
| preceding two decades and overlooks the disastrous effects of those
| policies;
| (b) the fact that in spite of its proclaimed recognition of the central
| role of the African people to the plan, the African people have not
| played any part in the conception, design and formulation of the Nepad;
| (c) notwithstanding its stated concerns for social and gender equity, it
| adopts the social and economic measures that have contributed to the
| marginalisation of women;
| (d) that in spite of claims of African origins, its main targets are
| foreign donors, particularly in the G8;
| (e) its vision of democracy is defined by the needs of creating a
| functional market;
| (f) it under-emphasises the external conditions fundamental to Africa’s
| developmental crisis, and thereby does not promote any meaningful
| measure to manage and restrict the effects of this environment on Africa
| development efforts. On the contrary, the engagement that is seeks with
| institutions and processes like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the
| United States Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the Cotonou Agreement,
| will further lock Africa’s economies disadvantageously into this
| environment;
| (g) the means for mobilisation of resources will further the
| disintegration of African economies that we have witnessed at the hands
| of structural adjustment and WTO rules.
|
| Given Nepad’s purely destructive role in Zimbabwe, Mbeki and Obasanjo
| apparently did not even take good governance seriously beyond platitudes
| designed for G8 governments. Those governments need Nepad, as Camdessus’
| comment indicates, partly because it reinforces their capacity to
| manipulate African countries through the aid mechanism; Nepad helps sell
| their own taxpayers on the myth that Africa is ‘reforming’.
| There was, nevertheless, hope that the good-governance rhetoric in the
| Nepad base document might do some good: ‘With Nepad, Africa undertakes
| to respect the global standards of democracy, which core components
| include … fair, open, free and democratic elections periodically
| organised to enable the populace choose their leaders freely.’ South
| Africa under Mbeki’s rule permits free and fair elections (after all,
| the ANC wins easily, with 70 percent of the vote in the 2004 elections,
| due to the lack of a credible alternative), but Obasanjo does not,
| judging by an April 2003 ‘victory’ which strained democratic
| credibility, notwithstanding Mbeki’s strong endorsement.
|
| Johannesburg business interests
| What of the subimperial part of the equation? The most important new
| factor in that incorporation is the exploitative role of Johannesburg
| business. For example, in 2002, the UN Security Council accused a dozen
| South African companies of illegally ‘looting’ the DRC during late 1990s
| turmoil which left an estimated three million citizens dead, a problem
| that went unpunished by Pretoria. Other SA companies had collaborated
| with the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in looting then-Zaire.
| But such roles did not stop officials from Pretoria, Kinshasa and the
| IMF from arranging, in mid-2002, what the South African cabinet
| described as ‘a bridge loan to the DRC of Special Drawing Rights (SDR)
| 75 million (about R760 million). This will help clear the DRC’s overdue
| obligations with the IMF and allow that country to draw resources under
| the IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility.’ What this represented
| was a shocking display of financial power, with the earlier generation
| of IMF loans to Mobutu now codified by South Africa, which under
| apartheid maintained a strong alliance with the then Zaire.
| Moreover, IMF staff would be allowed back into Kinshasa with their own
| new loans, and with neoliberal conditionalities (disguised by ‘poverty
| reduction’ rhetoric) again applied to the old victims of Mobuto’s fierce
| rule. In the same statement, the South African Cabinet recorded its
| payment to the World Bank of R83 million for replenishment of its
| African loan fund, to ‘benefit our private sector, which would be
| eligible to bid for contracts financed from these resources.’ Within
| eighteen months, Mbeki won $10 billion in promised DRC trade and
| investment deals, and gained access to $4 billion worth of World Bank
| tenders for South African companies.
| The relationship between Pretoria, Johannesburg capital, Kinshasa and
| the IMF was merely an extreme case of a typical situation, in which
| state power is required to lubricate otherwise difficult markets. South
| African capital was already advancing rapidly into the region during the
| late 1990s, supported by special exchange control exemptions. By 2001, a
| researcher of the SA Institute of International Affairs warned that then
| trade minister Alec Erwin’s self-serving trade strategy ‘might signify
| to the Africa group of countries that South Africa, a prominent leader
| of the continent, does not have their best interests at heart.’ In 2003,
| a colleague issued a technical report on trade which conceded that
| African governments viewed Erwin ‘with some degree of suspicion’ because
| of his promotion of the WTO, which in Seattle and Cancun put Erwin in
| direct opposition to the bulk of the lowest-income countries, whose
| beleaguered trade ministers were responsible for derailing both summits.
| On the one hand, officials in Pretoria regularly claimed to be advancing
| regional projects in part so as to steer the investment path of (and
| also regulate) Johannesburg capital, with Nepad the main example.
| Capital was not so malleable, however, and (pro-Nepad) Business Day
| newspaper admitted in mid-2004 that, ‘The private sector’s reluctance to
| get involved threatens to derail Nepad’s ambitions.’ Hence the prospect
| that Johannesburg-based corporations will be ‘new imperialists’ was of
| ‘great concern,’ according to Pretoria’s then public enterprises
| minister Jeff Radebe in early 2004: ‘There are strong perceptions that
| many South African companies working elsewhere in Africa come across as
| arrogant, disrespectful, aloof and careless in their attitude towards
| local business communities, work seekers and even governments.’
| But Radebe could also have been describing his Cabinet colleagues Erwin
| and Mbeki. In August 2003, the Sunday Times remarked on Southern African
| Development Community delegates’ sentiments at a Dar es Salaam regional
| summit: ‘Pretoria was “too defensive and protective” in trade
| negotiations [and] is being accused of offering too much support for
| domestic production “such as duty rebates on exports” which is killing
| off other economies in the region.’ More generally, the same paper
| reported from the AU meeting in Maputo the previous month, Mbeki is
|
| viewed by other African leaders as too powerful, and they privately
| accuse him of wanting to impose his will on others. In the corridors
| they call him the George Bush of Africa, leading the most powerful
| nation in the neighbourhood and using his financial and military muscle
| to further his own agenda.
|
| Indeed, the pumping up of Pretoria’s post-apartheid military muscle has
| been rather revealing. Thanks especially to former international banker
| Terry Crawford-Brown of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction, much more
| is known about the invidious ways that French, German and British
| governments (as well as even Swedish trade unions) corrupted African
| National Congress leaders through a multibillion dollar arms deal.
|
| Conclusion: The resistance continues
| Given South Africa’s subimperial posture, it is fitting that some of the
| most exciting anti-imperial initiatives being advanced in the
| contemporary world are emanating from the most proletarianised and
| arguably organised country in Africa, South Africa. Critique and
| practical opposition to neoliberalism in South Africa are stronger than
| in any other African country, perhaps with the exception of Ghana.
| (Indeed, in 2005 the long-standing Campaign Against Privatisation in
| Ghana sent staff to South Africa’s major cities to meet water activists,
| as Johannesburg’s Rand Water won a commercialisation joint venture
| concession for Accra’s water arranged by the World Bank. Rand moved into
| Accra under the rhetorical cover of Nepad and the Millennium Development
| Goals, sparking strong critical reactions by the Anti-Privatisation
| Forum in Johannesburg.)
| To do South Africa’s grassroots protest movement justice, a full-length
| work on its internationalist orientation awaits publication. From the
| World Conference Against Racism to the World Summit on Sustainable
| Development to the Iraq War and on various other occasions, South
| Africa’s independent, progressive movement has successfully contested
| Pretoria. The highest-profile social and political struggles in South
| Africa against talking left while walking right on the international
| stage remain the anti-war movement, the campaign for access to generic
| medicines, solidarity struggles (e.g. with Palestine, Burma, Zimbabwe
| and Swaziland), advocacy for reparations and debt-cancellation, anti-WTO
| and unfair trade activism, the anti-privatisation movement, and various
| environmental battles.
| As noted at the outset, the context remains the failure of any of
| Mbeki’s main initiatives to bear fruit. As noted, Mbeki and some
| colleagues have begun to express reservations about sites of struggle
| including the UN, WTO and Bretton Woods Institutions. They still haven’t
| reached the point of realigning political relationships so as to build –
| instead of destroy – fledgling progressive projects of the independent
| left. With internecine squabbling added to the mix, the initiatives
| noted just above are only in their formative stages. But they have much
| better prospects for long-term success, so long as the more reformist
| international NGO projects – such as Make Poverty History and even the
| Global Call for Action Against Poverty in 2005 – don’t prove too
| distracting in coming months and years.
| In addition to building the popular movement at home in a more general
| way, intense challenges remain in the linkage of issues between often
| fractious movements across the sectors and transnationally, in venues
| such as the African Social Forum and its affiliates. Notwithstanding the
| steep climb ahead, in all these cases, it is evident where the antidote
| to imperialism and subimperialism is to be found. It is because of these
| activists’ work that society and the environment have a chance of
| survival, and we must be especially grateful that they are beginning to
| undo the damage done so consistently by the ruling crew in Pretoria.
|
|


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
DEBATE mailing list
DEBATE at lists.kabissa.org
http://lists.kabissa.org/mailman/listinfo/debate


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am using the free version of SPAMfighter for private users.
It has removed 431 spam emails to date.
Paying users do not have this message in their emails.
Try SPAMfighter for free now!