> From: Julien Pierrehumbert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> First, be sure to check the writings of Patrick Bond. Mark posted some stuff
> from him. Look at the "ressource base" of the list. He's a contributor to LBO-
> talk, I recall.
And a lurker here. You're too kind, comrade.
Our SA-based Africa connections are still firming up (my main
affiliation is to a thinktank, the Alternative Information and
Development Centre, http://aidc.org.za ). To give a hint of these
growing relationships, I'll append below something written hurriedly
last week (with mistaken crit of Chomsky, for there's really no
niggling needed), which gives a few outlines of at least the
social-movement intelligentsia's argumentation. I spent the last week
in Harare where the Southern African Political Economic Series
(http://www.sapes.co.zw I THINK) hosted an interesting conference
bringing radical Africans from all over the place to talk about the
"region" as a unit of analysis. The really key place to find radical
African intellectuals is CODESRIA in Dakar.
There are too many critiques of African Structural Adjustment
Programmes to begin to list, but a superb book by Thandike Mkandwarie
and Charles Soludo (Our Continent, Our Future; Trenton, Africa World
Press) has a new summary; Africa World Press does lots of good poli
econ publishing aimed at discrediting the Wash Con
(http://www.africanworld.com )...
Cheers,
Patrick
***
South-South-North alliances:
With the people, not the waBenzis
It's not sacrilege to take issue with Noam Chomsky on
ZNet, is it?
Here are two sentences in the concluding paragraph of
Chomsky's September 17 ZNet Commentary (`Summits'), in
which he champions the Havana South-South Summit of
`G77' country leaders that took place in April:
African leaders pointed out that the `voices
in the street' in the West are repeating what
`the developing countries have been saying
for many years in various international fora
with little success.' Several suggested that
`an alliance was possible.'
(We must return with a mixed answer as to whether
African leaders are listening to `voices in the street
in AFRICA,' given a remarkable upsurge in activism
recently, but will wait until next month's ZNet
Commentary to do so, and today just focus on `voices'
in the form of critical analysis.)
Chomsky's not alone, drawing as he does upon
interpretations by a prominent advocacy group--Third
World Network, based in Penang, Malaysia--which builds
relations between civil society and nationalist
governments throughout the South. Likewise, a longish
list of signatories, including internationalist
organisations I admire enormously (like Ruckus and
Global Exchange from San Francisco), concluded after
the Havana meeting that left-popular alliances with
Southern rulers are possible and desirable:
With regard to the fundamental debt
cancellation and fair trade issues, the G77
summit in Havana once again confirmed the
accordance between the views of the G77 and
the new worldwide anti-globalization movement
that protested WTO/IMF/WB in Seattle and
Washington. A cooperation between the two
parties therefore would seem appropriate in
order to achieve our common goals in the most
efficient and speedy way. (Letter to Nigerian
president and G77 leader Olusegun Obasanjo,
16 June 2000,
http://www.unitedpeoples.net/engelsk/univers
iel/FRAME_break.html)
But what if cooperation is not appropriate, under
prevailing circumstances? Setting aside the
controversial Obasanjo for now, the most vociferous
anti-IMF campaigner from Third World officialdom
remains Zimbabwe's authoritarian ruler Robert Mugabe.
Earlier this month Mugabe inexplicably received
generous applause at a Harlem public meeting, and
praise on the otherwise discerning Democracy Now radio
program produced at NY's WBAI, notwithstanding the
intensifying brutality of his regime.
(An important footnote: last Friday, the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change headquarters in Harare
was raided by cops, in the wake of a grenade attack
the previous week which blew out the office windows
but fortunately injured no one. Over the weekend,
Zimbabwe police photocopied a truckload of MDC
documents and backed up the party's computer hard-
drives--i.e., its entire database--all the better to
intimidate MDC members in future. On Monday, five
Zimbabwe spies were reportedly fired because they had
not predicted the opposition's capture of nearly half
the parliamentary seats contested in the June
election. What democrat wants cooperation with
Mugabe?)
The best case for allying with Third World nationalist
rulers against global elites is probably the African
National Congress government in Pretoria. But a month
ago, in a ZNet contribution called `Can Thabo Mbeki
Change the World?,' I briefly summarised why even the
most sophisticated backroom dealmaking by South
African president Mbeki, finance minister Trevor
Manuel and trade minister Alec Erwin is already
flopping (http://www.marxmail.org/patrick_bond.htm).
Manuel, who is chair of the World Bank/IMF board of
governors, is giving the opening speech at the
organisations' annual meetings in Prague next week,
and will join a debating panel with the superb
Filippino political-economist Walden Bello, Bank
president James Wolfensohn, and host Vaclav Havel.
Erwin is busy trying to put a `G5' of leaders from
Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil and India, to restart the WTO
negotiations that were derailed in Seattle.
The three South Africans are big guys, with a big
agenda--but they are fundamentally misguided and they
will fail. The reform project suffers from inaccurate
analysis (e.g., attributing globalization mainly to
technology), insufficient strategies (minor reforms of
the Bretton Woods Institutions and WTO), incompetent
tactics (generally reduced to begging and scraping),
and inappropriate alliances (e.g., SA's coddling of
bad Southern leaders like Indonesia's Suharto until
the moment he fell and the Burmese junta still today,
and occasionally even US multinational corporations,
while for all practical purposes dissing the social
movements).
I want to explore this position further, by asserting
the exhaustion of the Third World nationalist, `talk-
left, act-right' project represented by the likes of
Mbeki, Mugabe or Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad (also
a brutal anti-democrat, even if his anti-IMF stance
and imposition of capital controls attract our
admiration). Thus, I'll argue, the real allies of
Chomsky, Third World Network, Ruckus and GX, Harlem
African-Americans and any other progressives looking
for a global critique are not to be found in Pretoria,
Harare or Kuala Lumpur state houses, in G77 meetings,
or in any finance ministries I am familiar with. They
are, instead, in the poverty-stricken communities,
streets, factories, mines, fields, churches, hospices,
clinics, creches, schools and homes.
This, to be fair, Chomsky explicitly confirms in
closing his article, by observing that South-South
alliances worth supporting have indeed `been taking
shape at the grassroots level, an impressive
development, rich in opportunity and promise, and
surely causing no little concern in high places.'
Across Africa, there's plenty going on to distinguish
genuine grassroots allies from the comprador `waBenzi'
(named after their favourite auto) now ruling all
Africa's four-dozen nation-states. (And if I knew more
about the rest of the world I would generalise this
beyond Africa.)
For by looking more closely, it quickly emerges that
what `the developing countries have been saying for
many years in various international fora with little
success' is actually in contradiction to the messages
from Seattle and DC, not to mention many of the best
grassroots programs in the South. Third World
nationalist rulers generally want IN to the global
capitalist economy, on better terms, particularly
through reforms of the Bank/IMF/WTO. Like Erwin, many
use neoliberal rhetoric to this end, citing
protectionist barriers in the north as evidence of
hypocrisy, while demanding (as does Erwin) the
extinction of `dinosaur industries' like Northern
agriculture and even manufacturing.
Increasingly, in contrast, the protesting masses are
fed up with reforms and are trying to shut the
institutions down, in part so as to one day allow more
space for protecting potentially radical socio-
economic programs from the vagaries, volatilities,
vulnerabilities and hostilities of world markets. The
strategic differences between the two camps are
enormous--and make alliance-building foolhardy and
potentially fatal at this juncture.
Some examples document the need for putting the people
first, and only later giving credence to nationalist
rulers, once grassroots power is more firmly
established. Consider the `Lusaka Declaration' signed
in May 1999 by the leading African social movement and
church organisations working on debt,(from Burkina
Faso, Lesotho, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria,
Cameroon, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, South
Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe).
The Lusaka Declaration captures the suspicion that
many activists feel about their nationalist leaders,
for they view the demand for
the cancellation of debt as part of a broader
struggle to fundamentally transform the
current world economic order and transfer
power from the political leadership of the
rich countries and the economic power of
Transnational Corporations an international
financiers, and their instruments, notably
the International Monetary Fund, World Bank
and World Trade Organisation. Likewise, these
forces have instruments in the South, namely
some of our own technocratic, political and
commercial elite who are in the tiny minority
of Africans who continue to promote the
Washington Consensus.
Lusaka built upon similar regional meetings in Accra,
Lome and Gauteng in 1998-99, and led to the launching
of a mass-popular `Africa People's Consensus' drafting
process to transcend the development orthodoxy of the
Washington Consensus and the slightly reformed--but
now collapsed--Post-Washington Consensus.
A similar initiative in West Africa is known as the
`Dakar 2000' Coordinating Committee, which is
supported by groups like the Association des Femmes
Africaines pour la Recherche et le D�veloppement as
well as numerous West and Central African social
movements and NGOs (and on the Northern end of
solidarity, by the excellent Paris-based Association
pour la Taxation des Transactions financiFres pour
l'Aide aux Cityens, and the ComitQ pour l'Annulation
de la Dette du Tiers Monde in Brussels). Dakar 2000
took on more momentum in a Yaound� conference in
January this year, and by May the Dakar Committee
condemned the existing debt `relief' schemes: `Like
all previous gestures, the initiatives taken in
Cologne [G8 reforms in June 1999] and in Cairo
[African and EU elites in April 2000] do not offer any
actual solution.'
The need to stop coddling nationalists was also
explicitly recognised last month in Namibia, when
cross-border radical activists and strategists
condemned the failure of the `old boys' club' in
Southern African Development Community countries
(SADC). While SADC elites met and slapped each others'
backs in Windhoek, a declaration was drafted by the
Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network, which
includes the Alternative Information and Development
Center, Associacao para Desenvolvimento Rural de
Angola, Council of Churches/Ecumenical Institute
(Namibia), Ecumencial Support Services (ESS-Zimbabwe),
Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU-South Africa),
Gender and Trade Network (Southern Africa), Jubilee
2000 (chapters from Angola, Malawi, South Africa,
Zambia), Ledikasyon pu Travayer (Workers Education-
Mauritius), Mineworkers Development Agency (Lesotho),
Mwelekeo wa NGO (Southern Africa), Namibian Food and
Allied Workers Union, South African NGO Coalition,
Swaziland Youth Congress and the Zimbabwe Coalition on
Debt and Development. Their `Declaration to the
Governmental Summit of the Southern African
Development Community' resolved that
the governments of our countries
* have for long mainly engaged in rhetorical
declarations about national development, and
development cooperation and regional
integration, with few effective achievements;
* are mainly concerned with preserving and
promoting their own individual and group
status, power and privileges, and their
personal and aspirant-class appropriation of
our nations' resources; and, for these
reasons, are frequently engaged in divisive
competition and even dangerous conflicts
amongst themselves at the expense of the
interests of the people at national and
regional levels;
* are, at the same time, committed to
supporting and defending each other whenever
the interests and power of the ruling elites
come into conflict with the human rights, and
the democratic and development aspirations of
their own populations; and are using SADC as
a self-serving `old boys' club' for such
mutual support; and
* are increasingly responsive and subordinate
to external inducements and pressures from
governmental agencies in the richest
industrialised countries, and their global
corporations, banks and other financial
organisations, and the `multilateral'
institutions dominated and used by them.
The Network went on to demand that the elites
desist from their collaboration and collusion
with national and international political and
economic forces and neo-liberal agencies,
particularly the IMF and World Bank, to turn
SADC into an `open region' of free trade,
free capital movements and investment rights,
to the benefit of international traders,
transnational corporations and financial
speculators--this runs counter to the
potential for full and effective,
internally-generated and rooted national and
regional development... Whether or not our
governments accept and act on the above
vitally important demands, we as members of
people's organisations from the whole of
Southern Africa will continue to pursue these
aims and deepen our work in and with existing
and emerging mass movements to challenge and
change our governments' policies and
strategies; and--if that fails--to change our
governments. (http://www.aidc.org.za--also,
don't miss the Jubilee South site hosted by
my AIDC friends.)
Dear ZNet readers, these are the declarations and
summits which deserve a bit more publicity and
consideration--at the very least, prior to fragile
alliance bids with the G77, G24, NonAligned Movement,
G5 and whatever other configuration of Southern elites
comes together in Prague next week to talk-left/act-
right.
(Next month I'll look beyond Seattle, Washington,
London, Melbourne and Prague, to the dozens of other
sites of anti-neoliberal rebellion, to show that Our
Team is not merely doing armchair resolution-writing,
but is hitting the streets with more people and more
militancy than you may have guessed.)
Patrick Bond ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
work phone: (2711) 717-3917
work fax: (2711) 484-2729
cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548
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