expectations and credulity... Patrick Bond
JOHANNESBURG Nov 22 Sapa
Answering audience questions following an address by President
Nelson Mandela at a business breakfast on Tuesday, ANC Trade and
Industry Minister Trevor Manuel said the government considered
both policies -- nationalisation
Comrades, I second Cindy on this. (Sorry, a re-intro: I'm a
social policy wonk just returned from South Africa, now based at
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.)
Interestingly, around 1990 the SA Left came up with the neat
slogan, "strong but slim state," in order to characterize a
desired
Just phoned Leach's committee, and was informed that in addition to
the pro-bailout Administration witnesses, they rapidly put a critics
panel together, including Ralph Nader (with Arthur Laffer and Brent
Scowcroft).
One out of six ain't bad.
Thanks to comrades for good feedback on privatisation in South Africa.
The public debate will heat up again within a few weeks and I'll keep the
list posted. We may see another threat of a general strike (as proved
very successful last December), or continuing sectoral actions by unions
affected.
Some South African social policy wonks are trying to think through this
approach, because it has a very real bearing on strategies and tactics in
the present period.
For example, Mzwanele Mayekiso's book Township Politics (Monthly
Review, 1996) concretises struggles for decommodified housing and
14 Aug 1996
Announcing a new journal from South Africa...
DEBATE:
VOICES FROM THE SOUTH AFRICAN LEFT
*First issue now available - subscription info below
***Lead editorial reprinted at the bottom of this message***
Ok Jim, here's one or two for you, from chilly Johannesburg.
Opened Business Day, our WSJ-equivalent, today and found a couple of
interesting items. One was a report (originally in the FT) that Haiti's
popular movement is keeping pressure on the turncoat successor to
Jean-Bertrand Aristide; as
If Berger in Norway is crude, in South Africa he's worse because he fits
neatly into the white elite's agenda of disguising their local culture of
privilege as international common-sense. When in Johannesburg he
hangs with the "Urban Foundation" crowd that Anglo American
Corporation (our
Been there done that Doug. Jonathan Feldman's book on Universities in
the Business of Repression (South End Press 1989 I think).
Walter Daum [EMAIL PROTECTED] 16/September/1996
12:23am
I should have made my intent clearer. I'm interested in finding out
whether superexploitation has been used to mean
1) paying wages below the level of subsistence, or
2) getting proportionately more surplus value out of workers in relation
Comrades, is this at all helpful?
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From: "Michael Albert" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Patrick Bond.
If you pass this comment along to others, please include an
explanation that Commentaries are a pr
From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I don't think it's worth my time forwarding the articles on Mozambican
cashews to Krugman, since he's already staked his reputation on the cashew
question in the NY TIMES and is unlikely to back down.
Joe Hanlon's the english-language guru on the
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From: "Robert Naiman" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: PEN-L and Mozambique cashew nut case
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 13:16:32 -0400
Patrick:
I'm only half-on PEN-L at the moment, but I see there's been
Does anyone have anything good, including from a feminist standpoint?
Please reply privately...
Thanks comrades!
Patrick Bond
National Institute for Economic Policy, Johannesburg
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please circulate widely...
STATEMENT BY THE
Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa
On the South African visit by
IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus
16 October 1996
As members of
Maybe this is stuff you've already covered... but anyhow,
The most vigorous debate on this, I recall, was Vicente Navarro versus
Barbara and John Ehrenreich (who argued your position), during the
1970s, and I know that Vicente continues to use the conceptual
problems involved to reflect upon the
Doug, do you have any of those debt ratios at the global scale? I recall
the Bank for International Settlements did several major papers on this
during the late 1980s, showing dramatically rising consumer, corporate
and government debt burdens. Same story here in South Africa.
By the way, global
Ok, Blair, what's your line on this then?!
Ok, if we're meant to be heard from the periphery, let's not miss this
moment of yankee silence. Patrick in Johannesburg chiming in on Doug's
puzzle:
Because of the reasons Jim's laid out, I'm less satisfied with relying upon
the search for relative and absolute surplus value as the key way of
a little while back were
sent right out to researchers who have used them in minor battles with
the establishment here. PEN-L is a terrific resource.
Ciao!
Patrick Bond
National Institute for Economic Policy
Johannesburg
Sid -- or anyone,
Is there any way to translate this shocking material into campaigns that
have a South-driven character?
I ask because there continues to rage a debate here in Johannesburg,
based especially on writings from the Third World Network in Penang,
Malaysia, about the legitimacy of
Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14/November/1996
06:16pm
It sounds simple here.
The Pakistani parents worry that they will suffer if their children
can't work. They are probably correct -- in a sense. So the rug
industry can exploit their sentiments.
Global competition then creates a race
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 21/November/1996 06:28pm
David Harvey's book on postmodernism argues (to summarize in
more than desperate brevity) that the rise of postmodern theory
is a reflection of the rise of postmodern capitalism, i.e.,
increased flexibility, decentralization, etc., etc. He's no
This and the previous post on Southern Africa are interesting. Thanks.
Finally, here in Jo'burg, there appears to be some movement from the
NGO sector -- 3 000 organisations in a national coalition -- combined with
earlier pronouncements by a few left trade unionists and small political
parties,
Hey we struggle with that question constantly here in South Africa.
Probably the best recent citation is the Epstein/Crotty article on capital
controls in the 1996 Socialist Register (editor is Leo Panitch, publishers
Merlin and Monthly Review).
Our Reserve Bank governor hiked interest rates
The notorious comment, in an internal December 1991 memo by Summers
-- then a World Bank vice president and chief economist -- was, "I think
the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage
country is impeccable and we should face up to that... Underpopulated
countries in
Tom Walker [EMAIL PROTECTED] 28/November/1996
09:33am
Introductory remarks: Strike breaking and union busting in the
1990s: What can we learn from the past to combat it?
... "what strategies might the labour movement adopt to try to eliminate
that substantial surplus of labour?"... What I'm
Bill Cochrane [EMAIL PROTECTED] 22/November/1996
11:54pm
Patrick Bond writes
"The rise of pomo-K"? I understand it differently: the crisis of modern-K
(which Harvey unfortunately describes in that work as fordism).
While there is little doubt that the use of the term fordism is
p
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 27/November/1996 03:32am
The basic idea makes sense, however. Given the underlying
tendency toward instability and crisis of the laws of motion of
capital, one can posit certain institutional forms that stabilize
the system, explaining the so-called "Golden Age" of the
The South Africa government made it possible in mid-1994, after the
election of the ANC, to explore secret securiity files kept on
anti-apartheid dissidents. The main progressive newspaper, the Mail and
Guardian (many times censored by the regime) put in a request, and
found that the files had
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 13/January/1997 08:52pm
At 10:13 AM 1/13/97, DICKENS, EDWIN (201)-408-3024 wrote:
I'm skeptical, but open to
anyone who wants to try and resolve the issue by constructing
an index of the relative strengths of financial and
industrial capital.
While I'd never go
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 18/January/1997 02:28am
It's not so much that industry is shifting its surplus funds to finance...
Doug I thought we'd been discussing this on the M-I list last month with
the common assumption that many big US firms did indeed beef up their
treasury operations
Paul Altesman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 18/January/1997 01:08am
Hilferding's analysis (Banks structure Industry) may well have well
been true in Germany *of his time*...
Not so, in that he overestimated the power of finance capital and not its
vulnerability to speculative crashes. At one point
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 13/January/1997 08:52pm
At 10:13 AM 1/13/97, DICKENS, EDWIN (201)-408-3024 wrote:
I'm skeptical, but open to
anyone who wants to try and resolve the issue by constructing
an index of the relative strengths of financial and
industrial capital.
While I'd never go
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/April/1997 03:54pm
What exactly is the role of South Africa? Is it simply a site for
negotiations or does Thabo Mbeki have a stake in a "democratically
elected" government in Zaire rather than one that comes to power
through armed struggle. Wouldn't a
Michael I doubt that James Wolfensohn would have been as crudely
honest as your source suggests. He's slick as they come.
But on low-paid jobs, he did muddle into a little controversy when the
Bank's mid-1995 World Development Report on labour markets came
under intense criticism from trade
On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
In that capacity, the nonprofit sector has nothing to do with the role of
civil society envisioned by deTocqueville (and later Gramsci). The
former
is merely an ancilliary mechanism of manufacturing public goods, the
latter
-- the mechanism
And of course the big auto companies provided products used to
oppress folk here in South Africa for many decades. An issue of the SA
Labour Bulletin in the late 1970s was entitled "Working for Ford" and
included shopfloor as well as ethical critiques. I was rooming at college
then with the son
From South Africa, same answer as Colin's in reference to etymology.
On David's query...
How is this paen to market
solutions different from what we have been referring to as the
'conservative' laissez-faire perspective?
To crudely personify, I think the key difference, at least in the context
Comrade Jim D, it's not that Roemer retreats from descriptive or policy
poli-econ, but that when he comes into it the traces of his neverland
distract us from actually existing K. I think I mentioned on PEN-L that he
paid a vist to Jo'burg about eight months ago and confounded worker
audiences
won hearts and minds entirely)
and as international fashions (even po-mo) have drained good minds into
spurious pursuits.
Ciao!
Patrick Bond
National Institute for Economic Policy
Johannesburg
Anyone see the AFP report about how "the worlds' financial system
was seriously at risk from structural faults in the offshore banking
system" according to a leaked BIS document? 141 offshore banking
centres are either inadequately regulated or not at all.
Can't put new SSA meat on those
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14/February/1997
06:16pm
He was succeeded by Lewis Preston, who has since died, and
then by James Wolfensohn, who is very much alive, and a walking
example of
the bourgeoisie at its cleverest.
Wolfie was banqueting in Cape Town last Friday and Maputo on
Saturday.
During the late 1980s (when I last checked in on this), the US labor
movement began making a stink about the termination of overfunded
pension plans and the transfer of surpluses (morally the property of
workers) to employers, often for the express purpose of paying off debt
on LBOs. It was an
Doug, from Johannesburg, Rifkin was on the radio here a few months
ago, but ironically notwithstanding SA's present jobless growth situation
(3.1% GDP increase in 1996, and tens of thousands of net jobs lost in
the private sector) there's been no effort to draw the End of Work
arguments in either
Vis-a-vis Bill's comments on New Zealand and settler colonialism, here's
the big thinker of Southern Africa, Cecil Rhodes, as cited in an 1895
newspaper in the wake of a trip he'd taken to the east end of London
observe the degraded condition of the proletariat:
"In order to save the 40,000,000
I've seen a couple of longer things Marty has done that spell out
the argument. One is a superb new book on Japan/East Asia with Paul
Burkett (St Martin's Press), whose last chapter blew me away, as it
really tackles the problematic of progressive social/labour-movement
organising against
ng to add something else to it," Rep.
Archer said. Last year a similar bill died when senators
protecting textile interests attached measures to weaken textile provisions.
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
work: Unive
Yes, drawing a bit on Gramsci, Mzwanele Mayekiso did a 1996 Monthly
Review book, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South
Africa. The book explains why the phrase "working-class civil
society" became popular here so as to explicitly contrast the
political project of mass democratic
y,
anti-capitalist analysis, demands and organising.
(Citation: forthcoming, in "The Political Economy of Dam
Building and Household Water Supply in South Africa:
Contesting the Effects of the Lesotho Highlands Water
Project on Johannesburg Township Residents," in D.McDonald
(Ed), Environmen
From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Of course Johannesburg is the metropolis of one of the most polarized
countries on earth, on the most ravaged continent on earth. Johannesburg as
we know it is a product of an abominable set of social relations, so I
don't know how you can make a
o the self-flattery and opportunism
associated with the corridors of power, which continually
undermined more durable, and politically radical, analytical
approaches to social problems.
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensin
eagre standards of living? How
resilient are the political systems and institutions in these
countries in the face of steadily worsening conditions? I don't
have the answers to these important questions."
AW Clausen, World Bank President, in an address to his Board
of Directors, 1983
Patrick
Has anyone seen the January 1998 paper by Joe Stiglitz upending the
Washington Consensus? (The speech in Finland that, tellingly, isn't on
the World Bank homepage.)
In South Africa, the WB mission maintains a hard neo-lib edge. Several
of us here are wondering whether the merits of his modified
MORE INSTRUMENTS AND BROADER GOALS:
Moving Toward the Post-Washington
Consensus
Joseph Stiglitz, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist
The World Bank
January 7, 1998
The 1998 WIDER Annual Lecture (Helsinki, Finland)
Today I would like to discuss improvements in our understanding
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Financial Reform
The importance of building robust financial systems goes beyond simply
averting economic crises. I have sometimes likened the financial
system to the "brain" of the economy. It plays an important role in
collecting and aggravating
Colin was hypothesizing about Stiglitz simply playing good cop to IMF
bad cop. Yes, but they also have ways of dealing with rogue Keynesians in
the Bank.
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
FINANCE: World Bank Chief Economist ''Disappears''
We're training emerging petty-bourgeois bureaucrats here in
Johannesburg (at the main university) and to do so, hire lots of guest
lecturers at US$70/hr for 40 hour courses plus preparation/marking.
Colin, we don't actually -- contrary to the impression I may have
left -- teach these poor
They have no shame...
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 17:51:16 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Robert Weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: MAI in IMF
http://www.imf.org/external/np/cm/1998/041698a.htm
Communique,
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Government as a Complement to Markets
So far I have been discussing the ways in which the Washington
Consensus on the issues of macroeconomic stabilization, financial
reform, liberalized trade, and privatization, was insufficient. It
contained
ct the
spoils of debt peonage. And to ensure Citi makes amends.
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South A
legitimation), and
into the realm of challenging capitalism itself...
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050
From: "Mathew Forstater" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Has anyone heard that Angola and South Africa were nominating Stanley
Fischer to head the IMF??? (I hadn't known that he was born in "Northern
Rhodesia.") Ouch.
Hey, it's deeply embarrassing. All we can say from Jo'burg today is
that it
Best lines on South Africa's political economy I've seen
recently are from Jeremy Cronin (SA Communist Party deputy
secretary general) in today's New Nation newspaper:
On the day of the announcement of the National Party pull-
out from government, FW de Klerk made an astonishing
comment.
From Jo'burg it was good to see Sid's post on this issue.
Just spent yesterday in our new Constitutional Court trying to help write
out corporate fundamental rights from the Bill of Rights; Ralph Nader has
been exceptionally helpful in putting this onto the agenda here, pointing
out the many
And another site with lots of topical material:
Alternative Information and Development Centre (Cape Town):
http:\\aidc.org.za
***
Patrick Bond
51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094
Johannesburg, South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
email: [EMAIL
upturn...
***
Patrick Bond
51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094
Johannesburg, South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
office: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050
Comrade, they're doing it to us as well in South Africa. Will send
you off-list some of the issues that the social movements here are
raising as an effort to counter the commodification logic, to halt
the mass cut-offs of water supplies in townships (affecting
households and entire
This article, by George Dor of the Alternative Information and
Development Centre (http:\\www.aidc.org.za) and Mercia Andrews, vice
president of the SA NGO Coalition, is being published in various
outlets including International Viewpoint (April '99)...
Unemployed can't bank on Stiglitz:
More
quot;operating
and maintenance costs."
Water wars will predominate across the world in the next century. Our
supplies are due to run out in 2030. As ever, SA is likely to remain
at the cutting edge of inequality and violent social resistance.
***
From: Peter Dorman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
... The economics, as they say, is impeccable. The utility initially
owns the water. They establish a marginal cost pricing rule (or
something similar incorporating externalities etc.) and make everyone
pay. So that the poor can have a basic
of decentralized poverty."
For Yugoslavia and other countries facing regional
and ethnic strife, decentralized poverty is not the only
outcome. Chronic violence appears to include three
ingredients: increasing regional decentralization of
political power; a dire but unmet need for regional
Comrades, some of us are on Third World phone systems with really
poor connectivity to the web and dodgy software. Strike a blow
against property rights and attach the entire text would you please?!
P.
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
51 Somerset Road
Most importantly, in relation to Fed-banking relations, the Fed is a
really good example of the captive regulator.
I did two years time in the Philadelphia Fed after college and was
continually impressed by the backhanders regularly given to local
speculators, some of whom represented Old
Louis, your correspondent writes:
From: Mark Coats [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L:10711] Microcredit
...
I invite you to educate yourself further on microcredit. Please examine
the success of the Grameen Bank, ACCION International, and FINCA. It
really does have the potential to greatly
Has a volte-face truly occurred at the World Bank ... ?
Here's a bit of a critique that has been circulating in some
Bank-watchdog circuits...
From: Bretton Woods Project [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: WDR UPDATED BRIEFING
Dear Friends,
Attached is a briefing I have put
esian
sovereignty over East Timor and has sponsored talks
between Portugal and Indonesia in a bid to find a settlement.
Sapa-AP/je 07/30/97 09-5140 --
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 21:37:36 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: "Patrick Bond&quo
. If
you are interested I would very much appreciate your sending your
c.v. (brief version but detailed on I.O. work) to me privately, at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thanks very much indeed!
Patrick Bond
Sid, yes it seemed like that to us at the time...
But the old man sometimes pull surprises out of the hat. Apparently
he met with one of the long-term jailed leaders during the visit last
week, and yesterday he had a session with the president of Portugal
where they publicly demanded amnesty
, organic composition of K,
and overaccumulation plus financial bubbles. Thanks Louis for putting
it up.
Ciao!
Patrick Bond
HOME:WORK:
51 Somerset Road University of the Witwatersrand
Kensington 2094
Rosenberg, Bill wrote:
Mind you, despite all this, Michel Chossudovsky has written some
outstanding analyses - I can think of a couple on Africa and
Yugoslavia. So I'm not conceding that Choss is a Lobachevsky
by any means (unless it was the real Lobachevsky).
Hear hear. In a land of 30%
Come to Johannesburg and learn some tactics of resistance to debt.
There's something here called a "bond boycott" (bond = mortgage in our
adopted Brit parlance), which entails groups of often hundreds of
township residents collectively telling the bank that they won't pay the
approx. $15,000
I know what you mean, sitting in Johannesburg and glancing at a
recent African Development Bank investment report. These chaps expect
returns on their equity stake in an infrastructure privatization fund run by a
commercial bank here, along the following lines: 40% of projects at
35%
ross space and across time
(through credit), and to determine the stage at which the capacity to
displace crisis wanes.
(Final point: Christian Suter's 1992 _Debt Cycles in the World
Economy_, from Westview I think, is the kind of reference Trond may
be looking for...)
Ciao!
Patrick Bond, Johns Hopkins
economists explored these relationships in the US?
But if you do have cause and effect backwards, Trond, does that
matter for your broader argument about polarization? Probably not...
Patrick Bond
Johns Hopkins
Oh, also, on the debt forgiveness/default issue, I've just returned
from a two day Friends of the Earth seminar on the IMF, which
included a long discussion of how NGOs could engage in high-level
debates over managing the debt crisis in this mutual fund era.
There were some interesting papers
conference, with a campaign to force default on the $20 bn
apartheid foreign debt...
Patrick Bond, Johns Hopkins
for capitalism
with `a human face' when the going gets interesting...
Born in Belfast and therefore instinctively an atheist,
Patrick Bond
ances into alignment.
To close, I'll be cheekier yet: I know there're at least two PEN-L
comrades lurking at National Community Reinvestment Coalition and
National Low Income Housing Coalition who probably have some ideas on
intellectual strategy and tactics which I'm anxious to learn of...
Patrick Bond
Interestingly, the Left within South Africa's trade unions tried to
push the "wealth tax" idea to fund reconstruction and development,
but were quickly shot down; instead an additional 5% income tax was
imposed as a once-off in 1994, with other minor adjustments this year
to what is becoming the
On this matter of contradictory tendencies, there is a broad theory
of uneven development (see, eg, Neil Smith's 1984/1990 Blackwell book
of the same name) which incorporates the problem within Marxist
theory. There's a debate, I recall, about whether you locate this -
and disproportionality more
How about this for a country cousin to Tom W.'s suggestion for
socializing the gains, not just the losses, caused by intervention of
- not the state in this case - the collective will.
The limited equity housing cooperative movement (also variously known
and tied to community land trusts, mutual
Sorry, that last line in the preceeding advert should have read
`social relations of consumption' not production. Though usually the
sweat equity component of the rehab work is also socialized (and is
gender and generationally sensitive too)...
If anyone's interested I recently penned an article for African
Agenda, a progressive new magazine out of Accra/Jo'burg, on how US
Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are viewing the aid cuts. I
don't actually know Food First's latest position, but there are
certainly many good folk in outfits
n trainers are
available. Transport, lodging and board can be arranged on a
case-by-case basis.
If anyone has interest or knows anyone appropriate, please be in
touch with me ***before November 1*** at [EMAIL PROTECTED], or
phone 1-410-614-2279.
Ciao!
Patrick Bond
Johns Hopkins University
Paul Altesman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 18/January/1997 01:08am
Hilferding's analysis (Banks structure Industry) may well have well
been true in Germany *of his time*...
Not so, in that he overestimated the power of finance capital and not its
vulnerability to speculative crashes. At one point
that
bears watching and solidarity.
Patrick Bond
HOME:WORK:
51 Somerset Road University of the Witwatersrand
Kensington 2094 Graduate School of Public and
Johannesburg, South Africa Development
It looks like two people sent me private messages today but cc-ed
them to the whole list accidentally.
Ben Cashdan is a Harvey PhD student who agrees to some extent with
Louis. Like me he works hard on understanding the details of the
sell-out underway now in South Africa, hence the obscure
If in Washington Thursday, this Washington protest video is not to be
missed!
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From: "Michael Albert" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: ZNet Commentary / May 29 / Patrick Bond / South Africa
Film
I
From: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This may have made them boring, sort of, much of
the time, but I think they were worthy of respect anyway.
Hear hear, re FM Scherer.
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