Patrick Bond

Global Governance Campaigning and MDGs: from top-down to bottom-up anti-poverty work

Abstract What should be the foundational campaigning demands for those attempting to eradicate Third World poverty? The Millennium Development Goals are popular, serving in 2005 to motivate the British Make Poverty History movement, the Live8 consciousness-raising rock concerts and the Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty. Yet, upon closer inspection, the implementation processes associated with the mdgs have serious weaknesses. They were generated non-transparently by the United Nations, itself moving since the early 2000s to embrace the Washington Consensus and co-operate with the World Bank, to ‘bluewash’ the worlds largest corporations with its Global Compact, to endorse ‘Type 2’ public–private partnership privatisation strategies, to condone US militarism, and to reject even elementary democratic reform. The main decisions at the Monterrey and Doha finance and trade summits were biased against poor people, workers, women and the environment. Aspirational targets like the mdgs are, in any case, far less important than the actual social struggles underway across the world for basic needs and democracy. As shown in the 2005 campaigns, work on mdgs distracts us from solidarity with the real agents of progressive social and environmental history, in progressive civil society.

Basic Infrastructure for Socio-Economic Development, Environmental Protection and Geographical Desegregation: South Africa's Unmet Challenge

Abstract How much basic infrastructure investment – water and sanitation systems, new electricity lines, roads, stormwater drainage, and other services provided at municipal level – can South African society afford? What levels and types of subsidies for recurrent operating and maintenance costs assure that low-income people can meet their basic infrastructural service needs? These questions continue to bedevil policy makers. One reason is their failure to integrate into investment decision-making some basic aspects of socio-economic cost–benefit analysis, covering a variety of direct, indirect, developmental, ecological and geographical factors. The direct economic benefits of infrastructure for low-income people have long been recognised, and include construction jobs, improvements in work productivity; and the growth of small enterprises. Indirect benefits include more time and resources for women; dramatic environmental benefits, public health benefits (which require infrastructure of a sufficient quality so as to enhance rather than endanger health), and the desegregation of urban society (with respect to enhanced employment, educational and cultural opportunities). While there are often costs associated with large, new basic-infrastructure programmes, the benefits justify increased investment. If subsidies and tariffs are restructured to assure entitlement (“lifeline”) provision to all South Africans, plus rising block tariffs for higher use of resources, it appears possible to significantly augment what the government is presently suggesting as a minimum set of investment and service provision in its Municipal Infrastructure Investment Framework.

Globalization, pharmaceutical pricing, and South African health policy: managing confrontation with U.S. firms and politicians.

Brewing since the advent of South African democracy in 1994 and promises of health sector transformation, an extraordinary drug war between President Nelson Mandelas African National Congress government and U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers took on global proportions in 1998–1999. Within months of the passage of South African legislation aimed at lowering drug prices, the U.S. government quickly applied powerful pressure points to repeal a clause allowing potential importation of generic substitutes and imposition of compulsory licensing. At stake were not only local interpretations of patent law and World Trade Organization rules on Trade in Intellectual Property, but international power relations between developing countries and the pharmaceutical industry. In reviewing the ongoing debate, this article considers post-apartheid public health policy, U.S. government pressure to change the law, and pharmaceutical industry interests and links to the U.S. government, and evaluates various kinds of resistance to U.S. corporate and government behavior. The case thus raises—not for the first time—concerns about contemporary imperialism (“globalization”), the role of the profit motive as an incentive in vital pharmaceutical products, and indeed the depth of “democracy” in a country where high-bidding international drug firms have sufficient clout to embarrass Vice President Al Gore by pitting him against the life-and-death interests of millions of consumers of essential drugs in South Africa and other developing countries.

From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa's Frustrating Decade of Freedom

The end of the apartheid regime was a great human achievement. Yet the 1994 election of an African National Congress (ANC) majority—with Nelson Mandela as the new president—did not alter the enormous structural gap in wealth between the majority black and minority white populations. Indeed, it set in motion neoliberal policies that exacerbated class, race, and gender inequality. To promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between the racist white regime and the ANC allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions. There were only two basic paths that the ANC could follow. One was to mobilize the people and all their enthusiasm, energy, and hard work, use a larger share of the economic surplus (through state-directed investments and higher taxes), and stop the flow of capital abroad, including the repayment of illegitimate apartheid-era debt. The other was to adopt a neoliberal capitalist path, with a small reform here or there, while posturing as if social democracy was on the horizon.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Debt, Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

Abstract The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.

Sub-imperialism as Lubricant of Neoliberalism: South African ‘deputy sheriff’ duty within brics

Abstract South Africa’s role in global economy and geopolitics was, during the apartheid era, explicitly sub-imperialist, as the West’s ‘deputy sheriff’ in a tough neighbourhood But, with democracy in 1994, there arose a debate surrounding the difference between the liberation government’s (leftist) foreign policy rhetoric and its practice. Defining the sub-imperial standpoint at this stage is important in because of the extreme economic, social and environmental contradictions that have worsened within South Africa, for which anti-imperialist rhetoric is sometimes a salve. However, the explicit strategies for global engagement chosen by Pretoria, including joining the Brazil–Russia–India–China (bric) alliance in early 2012, have not proven effective in reforming world power relations. The degree to which brics has recently accommodated imperialism—especially in matters related to economic and ecological crises—suggests that critics should more forcefully confront the general problem of sub-imperial re-legitimation of neoliberalism. That problem requires a theory of sub-imperialism sufficiently robust to cut through the domestic and foreign policy claims made by the brics regimes, of which South Africa’s are among the most compelling given the ruling elite’s ubiquitous ‘talk left, walk right’ tendency and the extremely high levels of social struggles against injustice that result.

Movements, protests and a massacre in South Africa

Abstract The Marikana Massacre of August 2012 exposed the most unstable configuration of forces in post-apartheid South Africa, forged through entrenched social and economic inequalities, ecological degradation, indebtedness and corruption. Dissent against prevailing power relations had arisen over many years, with impoverished communities registering thousands of ‘service delivery protests’, seemingly without either resolution or maturation into durable social movements. However, the critical missing linkages between trade unions and urban communities were finally found in Rustenberg, 100 km west of Johannesburg, in a strike which fused labour, social, gendered, environmental and other interests. In the months following the Marikana, it became apparent that some sought to weave a genuine national revolt of the sort witnessed in 2011 across North Africa. However, this challenge to the elite political economy faced extreme difficulties, with fragments of populist, post-nationalist and working-class politics remaining isolated from the largest trade union, Communist Party and nationalist forces within the working- and middle classes.

Water commodification and decommodification narratives: pricing and policy debates from Johannesburg to Kyoto to Cancun and back

The Economist magazine’s influential mid-2003 survey on water declared the central dilemma: “Throughout history, and especially over the past century, [water] has been ill-governed and, above all, colossally underpriced.” Identifying the problem this way, naturally begets this solution: “The best way to deal with water is to price it more sensibly,” for “although water is special, both its provision and its use will respond to market signals.” In particular, “Charges should be set, as far as possible, to cover full costs, including environmental ones,” and in rural areas where there is competition among farmers for irrigation water, “The best solution is water trading.” As for the problem of delivering water to the poor, “The best way of solving it is to treat water pretty much as a business like any other.” South Africa was cited as a site of particularly impressive water-pricing pilot projects.

Xenophobia and Civil Society: Durban's Structured Social Divisions

Xenophobia in Durban was of a lower intensity than in South Africas other two main metropolises, Johannesburg and Cape Town, in the 2008–10 period, and yet was just as durable, with incidents continuing to reflect underlying social antagonism. The roots of the conflict are, we argue, to be found in the material processes of ‘uneven and combined development’ that are too rarely tackled in the public or policy spheres. These processes have been difficult for researchers and critical civil society forces to comprehend and counteract because they are structural in form. In the context of an overall economic crisis and rising inequality and urban poverty, these processes include a glutted labour market, housing shortages, township retail competition, highly gendered cultural differences, and apparently intractable regional geopolitical tensions. These root-cause pressures continue—as will xenophobia—because short of a national political shift in power and interests, they are extremely difficult to resolve. As a result, civil society will continue band-aiding the problems when they surface as social crises, or be compelled to generate much more explicit politics of regional solidarity, including in Durban, whose port and traditions of community politics already offer examples of the kinds of alliances required in future.

Water, Health, and the Commodification Debate

Conflicts in the water sector are now well-known, and also increasingly researched by economists, particularly in relation to major ideological differences over state-run versus privatized municipal systems. A major dividing line is over how to access and sustain the financing required to expand and maintain municipal grids. In the context especially of third world urban processes, a crucial determinant is whether market-based pricing of water can generate health benefits to justify new capital investments. Such benefits have typically required strong public systems that offer adequate water supply (with sufficient proximity to source) at an affordable price. A variety of financial and fiscal pressures emerged since the 1980s, leaving full cost recovery as the core practice required by international aid agencies, multilateral financiers, and multinational corporations. Those firms were attracted by high potential profits which, ultimately, could not be realized (in part because of currency deterioration and profit repatriation problems), and hence systems were not maintained or expanded, and health benefits not realized. As commodification of water spread during the era of globalization, so too did an international civil society network demanding—and often winning— decommodification of water and deglobalization of water-capital, returning service delivery to local public institutions, often on grounds of improved public health. JEL classification:D63, H44, L95, Q25