Some balls are in play, Dominic: overspending on the World Cup™; FIFA's
corruption of the economy, sovereignty and SA elites; the death of the
'capacity constraints' excuse for non-delivery in the townships;
worsening inequality and urban poverty; etc etc.
Play these balls. Unless you've lost sight of them, you needn't attack
the player. I won't, except to provide factual corrections.
Cheerio,
Patrick
Dominic.Tweedie wrote:
As far as I know from occasionally reading Blatchford over many years,
he is a committed comrade even if not a regular member of any
structure. Blatchford is honest to himself and honest as a
professional academic.
Patrick Bond, who now wants to whisper poison in your ears about
Blatchford, without addressing the substantive matter of Moeletsi
Mbeki's and Rossouw's article, is not nearly so honest as Blatchford
is, I am afraid.
Bond, like Moeletsi Mbeki, and like the DA, constantly projects a view
that "The ANC is corrupt", full stop. Bond has his own cute made-up
word for this: "ANCorruption". Just like the DA, whenever Bond finds
out about somebody being corrupt, he wants to persecute the ANC for
it, far more than he wants to deal with the actual corruption. Just
like the DA, Bond has no plans to deal with corruption, as such.
Even in this small attack on Blatchford, Bond contrives to stick all
South Africa’s problems on the ANC, and to take the pressure off the
class enemy.
I have also been reading Bond for many years. It is clear to me that
in defending Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw from the accurate
criticisms of Matthew Blatchford, Bond is trying to defend himself,
because in this respect Bond is not different from the guilty two.
When I posted the original article of Moeletsi Mbeki’s and Johann
Rossouw’s, last week, I made a comment to say that it is up to the YCL
comrades as much as anybody else to go up against such articles in the
mass media.
We did have some good debate about it here on the forum, but I would
still want to urge comrades to get into print, and not to leave public
debate in the hands of professional pundits.
Do you know how to get into print? Or do you think that the Bonds and
the Blatchfords have some special magic?
What you have to do is to write quickly, and then send what you have
written to the newspaper.
I hope comrades have read about what Frederick Engels, at the age of
21, was doing in this regard, in my CU post of yesterday called
“Philosophers”. You don’t have to be old, and you don’t have to be an
academic. You just have to do it.
VC
On 2010/06/27 10:54 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Warning, comrades: while he may accidentally make a good point or
two, this lad Blatchford often makes elementary mistakes, e.g.:
"South Africa's infrastructure, designed to serve the white minority,
is inadequate to serve the majority, and there was neither the time
nor the money to build a new one."
Hmmm, there was time (5 years) and money (R25 bn) to build/rehab the
world's greatest collection of ten stadia, not to mention white
elephants like Pebble Bed nuke subsidies, Coega's ghost on the coast,
the Shilowa-express Gautrain, mega-dams for mining houses, mega
powerplants now under construction (to give BHP Billiton and Anglo
the world's cheapest electricity) and other reflections of corporate
need/greed; more than R1 trillion as advertised.
"This system has helped blacks in South Africa to avoid the national
surge in inequality."
Nonsense. The most recent reliable survey is this one:
TRENDS IN SOUTH AFRICAN INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND POVERTY SINCE THE
FALL OF APARTHEID
Murray Leibbrandt, Ingrid Woolard, Arden Finn and Jonathan Argent
Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, School of
Economics, University of Cape Town
Three excerpts:
* Van der Berg and Louw (2004) summarise this corpus as follows:
"Rising black per capita incomes over the past three decades have
narrowed the interracial income gap, although increasing inequality
within the black population seems to
have prevented a significant decline in aggregate inequality" …. (p.
568-9).
* ... the greatest inequality is within the African population and
lowest within the White population.
* ... the country’s Gini coefficient increased by four percentage
points, from 0.66 to 0.70, between 1993 and 2008. The Gini
coefficient for the African population has risen most sharply.
A much deeper struggle than mere increase in (inadequate) welfare
grants is obviously needed to reverse the racial-apartheid and
class-apartheid trends.
Cheers,
Patrick
Dominic.Tweedie wrote:
*Nonsense which will bring disaster to SA*
/Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw have tried to 'erase apartheid'/
*Matthew Blatchford, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 27 June 2010*
South Africa faces a serious political crisis: the government
appears unable to lead effectively or pursue consistent policies
with integrity; and its internal left-wing opposition, which spent
15 years complaining that it was being marginalised, turns out to
have neither the taste nor the capacity for exercising power.
With the country facing grave threats (including the worst economic
depression in 70 years), this lack of leadership is crippling.
Because the corrupt leaders have established authoritarian control
over the ANC, meeting dissent with repression, there seems to be no
democratic way of resolving the problem.
So it is tempting to abandon faith in democracy - and particularly
tempting for those who never supported democracy in the first place.
Unfortunately, South Africa has a history of being undemocratic,
rooted in the white supremacism which fostered colonialism and then
apartheid. And this is what Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw appeal
to in their article "Many nationalisms still cripple SA".
Despite the title, the article is not about the crippling effects of
nationalism. It is an attack on the ANC, not merely for bad
leadership, but for the entire anti-apartheid struggle. Drawing
heavily on the reactionary analysis of the likes of Hermann Giliomee
and John Kane-Berman, Mbeki and Rossouw insist that 21st-century
South African politics are all about racial nationalisms.
Undeniably, both colonialism and apartheid were driven by white
racial nationalism. But the ANC was always driven by a desire to
resist the oppressive consequences of white racism.
Conspicuously, anti-white political organisations, like the Pan
Africanist Congress and the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo),
never gained a mass following.
This spurious racialisation of South African political history seems
intended to erase the crimes of colonialism and apartheid - by
pretending that racist tyranny and the struggle against racist
tyranny were equivalent. Once the anti-apartheid struggle is
discredited, Mbeki and Rossouw can claim, baselessly, that the chief
force for the ending of apartheid was the white business community
in South Africa.
Then Mbeki and Rossouw announce that blacks have misruled South
Africa ever since taking over. Supposedly, the ANC has destroyed
South Africa's social and physical infrastructure. The party, Mbeki
and Rossouw hint, were only able to do this because they were allied
with the English - echoing the Afrikaner ethnic psychoses of those
such as Dan Roodt.
What has happened, in fact, is that South Africa's infrastructure,
designed to serve the white minority, is inadequate to serve the
majority, and there was neither the time nor the money to build a
new one.
Mbeki and Rossouw can only get away with their lie by erasing
apartheid, which refused to provide adequate infrastructure for the
black population.
Why should they want to do this? This is where the abandonment of
faith in democracy comes in, entwined here with a deep-seated
racism. According to Mbeki and Rossouw, blacks are unruly and need
to be controlled. Since black politicians are incompetent to control
them, whites must do so.
They specifically mention the Democratic Alliance, the National
Taxpayers' Union and the Solidarity trade union, which are all
white-run organisations. Mbeki and Rossouw hope that the ANC's
alliance will break up, the party will split and white political
organisations will seize power. This, say Mbeki and Rossouw, will
enable white business to run the country efficiently.
But this is not a solution to the crisis, which is one of poverty
and unemployment, undeniably exacerbated by the corruption and
inefficacy of the ANC. Appealing to all those devoted to fighting
for white interests against black interests means the "saviours"
endorsed by Mbeki and Rossouw are guaranteed to make the situation
worse.
Likewise, the appeal to the business community is mistaken. Mbeki
and Rossouw jeer at the social grants system, the largest and most
effective system of wealth redistribution in Africa. This system has
helped blacks in South Africa to avoid the national surge in
inequality. In contrast, the white and coloured communities have
both become vastly less equal since 1994. In these communities, such
a surge cannot be driven by the government, but instead is owed to
the ruling class and the business community, which is largely white.
Since the white business community refuses to look after its own
(and even Mbeki and Rossouw acknowledge a surge in white poverty)
they cannot possibly be trusted to run the country. Most of the
million workers fired in 2009 were dismissed by white bosses.
Precisely because the ruling business class is not nationalist, but
is devoted to short-term private economic gain, it is not
intellectually or morally equipped to serve the people of this country.
Mbeki and Rossouw poison the whole debate with their racist vitriol
to no purpose at all.
One can understand Rossouw's agenda as an Afrikaner nationalist, but
why is Mbeki lending his name to this racist, plutocratic claptrap?
Remember that, while Mbeki's brother Thabo took part in the
anti-apartheid struggle and became president as a result, Moeletsi
sat on the sidelines, sniping ineffectually. Now he hopes to see the
black South Africans who ignored him humbled by white supremacists,
and thus see the triumphs of his great brother erased.
We need not blame him for his neurosis. But we must not listen to
him. Mbeki and Rossouw are talking dangerous nonsense which will
bring disaster to the nation.
* Blatchford is a lecturer in English at the University of Fort Hare
*From:
http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/columnists/article520721.ece/Nonsense-which-will-bring-disaster-to-SA*
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