Re: Liberation Theology in Crisis

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date:          Fri, 29 Dec 2000 11:47:11 -0500
> From:          Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
>  It is no mere coincidence that both
> secular leftists & Liberation Theologians began to speak of change in
> political paradigm & strategy: from "individual emancipation of one
> country after another from the capitalist system by taking power" to
> micro-politics of "civil society" (sometimes coupled with
> "anti-systemic movements" a la Wallerstein and/or "regionalism" a la
> Samir Amin).  What do posters think of this change?

Yoshie, are you bothered by semantic niceties adopted  by some of
our comrades, who basically share the same premises of the need for a
revolutionary socialist project, but because of the balance of forces
are compelled to tone down language? I plead guilty not to a
paradigmatic change but to working on microprojects using dressed-up
marxian (Harveyite) analysis (http://www.queensu.ca/msp ) because
that's the way we've got a tiny bit of influence over both
public-policy discourses AND movement strategy/tactics in, e.g.,
the fabulous union/community struggle against Jo'burg municipal
services privatisation.

I don't think people who use "civil society" (like the Zapatistas)
are selling out (see the argument of Petras, e.g., in Against the
Current); the Jo'burg innovation by Mzwanele Mayekiso (who's doing a
doctorate at Columbia Planning) is the prefix "working-class" so as
to keep class analysis alive (see, Township Politics, Monthly Review,
1996) (also in the 1996 Socialist Register, Mzwanele and I addressed
urban social movements from a marxian standpoint). And Amin's latest
work on regionalism is helpful, I would say (in the current issue
of Socialist Register, two SA trots and myself have a chapter on the
question of the region as a unit of analysis to be tackled by the
working class, in the context of the world's worst uneven
development). (Amin, by the way, gave a fabulous talk in Dakar a
fortnight ago at the gathering of the African social-movement
Left and Jubilee South, really setting the stage for excellent
critical analysis.) The other interesting political-strategic
arguments on regionalism that I've been picking up are coming from
Walden Bello and also Robert Biel in his excellent new Zed press
book, The New Imperialism.

In the light of adverse existing conditions in most places,
and the enormously complicated struggle associated with building
coherence and momentum in the nascent international anti-capitalist
movement, why not chill out on vocabulary, comrade, and help develop
the underlying issues associated with resistance to commodification,
stratification, and superexploitative gender and environmental
relations? The opportunity has never been better!



Patrick Bond (pbond@xxxxxxxxxx)
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone:  (2711) 614-8088
work:  University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email:  bond.p@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
work phone:  (2711) 717-3917
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* Municipal Services Project website -- http://www.queensu.ca/msp
* to order new book: Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal --
http://store.yahoo.com/africanworld/865436126.html