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 PEN-Lers know, there's been good resistance to World Bank and USAID privatisation demands. Bourgeois spin control reads as follows: "Some Haitian legislators, reflecting popular sentiment, have described the proposals as `anti-national and anti-popular.' One said they were intended to `enrich the rich and impoverish the poor and could lead to civil war.' But opposition to privatisation is also based on the wide use of state-owned companies for dispensing patronage and providing opportunities for corruption." Instead, the Haitian popular movement, supported openly by Aristide, attacks the sell-off of cement, flour, electricity and telecommunications firms as preventing the expansion of social services. This is the main basis that the debate is being taken forward by the trade unions in South Africa too (the crucial negotiations period begins in late September), and what's needed from PEN-L comrades is any accounting of how joint ventures or sell-offs have led to diminished public services and have prevented internal cross-subsidisation (a key redistributive demand). Telecommunications, electricity and transport are the most critical sectors. You can let me know privately if you have any material, and I'll put you in touch with the Cosatu negotiating leaders. Second, then, is today's contribution from John Roemer, as the main op-ed. Roemer was here recently, hosted by leftists from the main SA university's industrial sociology group. He's peddling coupon socialism in a big way, but although a "Future of Socialism" seminar a couple of weeks ago attended by the lead labour strategists appreciated his critique of corporate capitalism (on equity and efficiency grounds), Roemer's failure to incorporate any discussion of alienation and economic crisis meant that the proposals didn't much resonate with traditions of struggle here. Lo and behold he's taken the argument to the pages of Business Day. And it really comes off as a thin-end-of-wedge into union arguments against privatisation (or in the rewording Roemer favours, "denationalisation"). First he argues for making parastatals more "efficient and profitable" through restructuring, and then suggests sales of shares not to other corporations but instead to a combination of "state, institutions such as worker pension funds, and citizens." I recall some degree of PEN-L concern about No-Bullshit Marxism's conceptual frame, but has anyone put together a reply to the coupon socialism argument? Ciao comrades!
