> Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:11:38 -0400
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> The expansion of mass consumption & regional linkages (in opposition
> >> to elite consumption & subordination to financial centers) under the
> >> Bond program (if ever implemented -- but who bells the cat?) can
> >> presumably overcome the tendency to overaccumulation inherent in
> >> capitalism in a fashion unlike neoliberalism, while creating the
> >> politico-economic foundation for a future socialist transformation
> >> (should an opportunity ever arise).
Actually I wouldn't be so confident. The early 1990s "Growth Through
Redistribution" argument (e.g. of Lawrence Harris when he was still a
marxist and Ben Fine) was very compelling but still didn't come to
grips with either the need for a major insurgency to dramatically
shift power relations, or the quarter-century context of overcapacity
in luxury goods and heavy industries (e.g. excess electricity
generation capacity I already mentioned) that still bugger this
economy, even 12 years after neoliberal restructuring began. A decade
ago I was sceptical of the GTR approach, which in any case morphed
into a neolib-friendly "post-Fordist" strategy of "progressive
competitiveness" (a miserable, job-killing failure brought to us by
the ex-syndicalist trade/industry minister, Alec Erwin, who was
also recently president of Unctad). Here's the relevant caveat:
Could the Growth Through Redistribution strategy work? The answer
has much to do with the *expectations* of ANC members and
supporters. Business and many liberal whites fear that poor and
working people's expectations will be out of all proportion to
the resources available. In the Zimbabwean experience, civil
society was so poorly organised that expectations and popular
demands were not taken seriously by the government after
liberation. The lack of grassroots pressure permitted economic
power to remain in the hands of a few whites, international
financiers, and a small but important black bureaucratic class...
Some members of Cosatu's Economic Trends group refer to Growth
Through Redistribution as a "second best" scenario: if socialism
is not on the agenda, it is at least a useful task for
"ex-Marxist" economists to set out how capitalism can achieve
growth and at the same time provide for more basic human needs
than before. But this pessimism is unwarranted if a different
understanding of the crisis--that is of overaccumulation--is
built into the analysis of how to restructure the economy. Such
an analysis can be empowering, not disempowering, if it rests on
real struggles of activists and a sense of the chaos that the
crisis has produced within the commanding heights... No matter how
progressive their goals and policy statements, ANC and Cosatu
economists have basically accepted the constraints of the
overaccumulation crisis as inevitable, and have tried to
construct an alternative economic strategy *around them.*.. In
these respects, a reformist post-apartheid economic programme
will leave many people from all walks of life severely
disappointed. At core, ANC and Cosatu post-apartheid economic
policy has failed to identify how the overaccumulation crisis
creates new possibilities, especially for disciplining the power
of high finance. (from Commanding Heights and Community Control,
Johannesburg, Ravan, 1991, pp.67-68.)
> My post concerns what I take to be the Bond program for the
> periphery, so I don't take credit for it.
Hey comrade Yoshie, I like what you wrote below much better. Can I
call this the Bond Programme? :-)
> Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:25:46 -0400
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Since the neoliberal solution included debt deflation &
> deindustrialization in the South & the East, naturally we want to
> reverse them, thereby stopping massive capital outflows from the
> South & the East to the North which has helped the ruling class.
Ok I'll give a taste of the ongoing Zimbabwe debate on how to take
forward Mugabe's $5 billion foreign-debt payment-standstill, towards
repudiation, in the next post...
> In the North as well, the working class need to learn to demand more of
> all goods: higher wages, more free time, more social programs, more
> environmental cleanups, etc. The job of the working class, in the
> North or South or East, in short is to demand more, not because
> doing so is a viable long-term goal under capitalism, but precisely
> because it isn't. The more the working class organize themselves to
> make demands energetically, the more likely capitalism enters into
> another serious crisis -- in other words, the working class, by
> organized demands, must create a crisis & turn it into its favor (=
> an opportunity to fight for socialism from the position of
> strength).
That's absolutely the right principle. It's happening in dribs and
drabs. But Jo'burg is a very nice site of struggle. You comrades make
sure you are scheduling Rio+10--the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (http://www.johannesburgsummit.org)--high on your protest
calendar. It's September 2002, and you'll fly into our international
airport in the morning through a soup of brown haze, where you'll
see our billboards querying, "Is it safe to drink the water"
(100,000 cholera cases thanks to neoliberal water-pricing policy
adopted by the ANC at the encouragement of the World Bank). Then
there's the fascinating geography of protest, but I'll save that for
another time. Since this coming October will be the very Last World
Bank/IMF Annual Meetings ever (given what 50 Years and other
Washington comrades are planning), the local Soweto/Alexandra
township and Jo'burg shopfloor leaders (and even some enviros and
NGOs) are already trying to figure out how Rio+10 will serve as the
last nail in neoliberalism's coffin. Join us!
