----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ... But I'm still not clear on what you're > advocating as an alternative. 100% autarchy is impossible. But 50%? > 25%?
Give me a case and I'll think about it. Here in Johannesburg, I'd say 100% delinking from hot money by imposing tight exchange controls. Our currency has fluctuated from R6/$ in January 2000 to R13.8/$ two years later and it's now strengthened to R7.8/$ today. I could go on about all the fallout, but you can imagine. So to hell with portfolio capital flows. To hell with all international trade in luxury consumption goods, too, because it exacerbates the wealth skew in the economy. A 100% luxury goods tarriff would help. These kinds of policies have actually been applied at various times and are not utopian or based upon revolutionary power changes. Then I'd say, be more ambitious and price in eco damage done by minerals and beneficiation processes, that make SA *twenty times* worse in greenhouse gas emissions per person corrected for GDP, than even the US. That should limit the need for huge post-panamax port designs (vast state subsidies are being prepared for yet another, at a place called Coega) that accommodate the export of aluminium, steel and other base metals. Then a clever industrial policy would start a new round of ISI, but this time based on consumer goods for the masses and mid-range capital goods, not the kind of luxury goods ISI that were typical during the 1950s-60s. I could go on, but the deglobalisation capacity is enormous -- probably in excess of 50% -- and the scope for a set of bottom-up Local Economic Development options are just as promising, given the backlog in delivery of simple (non-import-intensive) infrastructure and basic needs. (A version of the argument, in its most mild-mannered policy-friendly style, is in Occasional Paper #6 at http://www.queensu.ca/msp) > You could never have any delinking if there weren't substantial > solidarity among poorer countries - some kind of trading, financial, > and technological links. It all depends on appropriate scale economies and resources, right? It would be great if oil flowed from Angola on rail lines to Gabarone, Jo'burg and Harare -- not to New Jersey. The idea of the Southern African Development Community was precisely to make these kinds of linkages. Didn't work for all sorts of reasons, but it's not impossible. > As soon as I say that though, I wonder - > what common interests are there between Brazil and Zimbabwe? Unfortunately, capitalists from the two subimperialist powers of the south Atlantic -- Brazil and SA -- have begun the early stages of a fight over how best to loot Angola, and Lula has even made noises about his firms investing much more in Mozambique. Language ties make these penetrations -- best considered as 'accumulation by dispossession' -- attractive, but not necessarily inevitable. Keeping SA capital out of the region where it plays a particularly pernicious role -- banking, breweries, minerals and energy privatisation -- will be an increasingly tough job for anti-imperialists here. But the struggles have begun, with regional groups (mainly Jubilee) finding many opportunities for unity, e.g. in a demo against the World Economic Forum southern Africa meeting a fortnight ago, and regularly against the New Partnership for Africa's Development. Zed is coming out with my update on this theme -- *Against Global Apartheid* -- in September... > Doug
