Lou says:
>People who read Utne Reader, wore Birkenstocks and took
>vacations in Costa Rica versus people who concluded from an undialectical
>reading of Karl Marx that the inexorable process of capitalist
>industrialization paves the way for socialism. In fact the inexorable
>process of capitalist industrialization paves the way to ruin and nothing
>else.
Rural electrification & free electricity for the South African
masses, however, is a pressing political demand today.
>(Sunday Independent, 27 July 1999)
>Power to the powerful:
>Ideology of apartheid energy still distorts electricity sector
>
>by Patrick Bond
<snip>
> The 1995 energy policy also argued that `Fuelwood
>is likely to remain the primary source of energy in
>the rural areas.' As if on cue, Eskom began to wind
>down its rural electrification programme and does not
>envisage electrifying the nation's far-flung schools.
>Notwithstanding Eskom's commercialisation fetish, its
>economists had badly miscalculated rural
>affordability. Paying as much as R0,48 per hour
>(compared to a corporate average of R0,06 and bigger
>discounts for the Alusaf), rural women use up their
>pre-paid metre cards within a week and can't afford
>to buy another until the next pension payout.
> But in pricing power out of reach of the poor,
>the well-paid economists from Eskom, the World Bank
>and government refused to incorporate `multiplier
>effects' that would benefit broader society, were
>people granted a small free lifeline electricity
>supply: better public health, a cleaner environment,
>more SMMEs, infrastructure construction jobs and more
>equal relations between men and women.
> If Mlambo-Ngcuka cares about such `public goods'
>as much as `getting the prices right' (for
>privatisation?), she now has a chance to transform
>neoliberal electricity policy, muffling that
>suspicious echo of apartheid-era power.
We have to put a stop to indulging in useless alarmist speculations
that fossil fuels are soon running out & alternative energy sources
are impossible to find on PEN-l (which thankfully only Mark seems to
entertain & you don't after all); & get on with present-day struggles
for electricity for those still without it, against the privatization
of public utilities, for thorough environmental clean-ups, for
enforcement of worker & consumer safety standards, etc. Such
struggles are important in themselves and at the same time promise to
make it more difficult for capital to externalize the costs of
accumulation.
Yoshie
