RE: [Marxism] South Africa and Bolivia

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis, continuing the campaign against illusions against what I guess
should be called indigeno-reformism, sends to the list the following
from mrzine by one Stan Winer: 

"It's odd that Bolivian president elect Evo Morales should have chosen
South Africa as his first port of call in drumming up international
support ahead of his January 22 presidential inauguration.  In a
televised speech during his recent visit to South Africa, Morales said
he wanted to 'learn from South Africa's experience of nation-building.'
But herein lies a gross contradiction.  Whereas Morales has already
announced his government's plans to nationalize Bolivia's vast gas
reserves, the post-apartheid South African government has by contrast
performed a radical turnabout on nationalization and persists in
slavishly following a 'market-driven' capitalist path in a bid to make
itself 'globally competitive.'"

What's odd to me is that Louis would send to our list an article
critical of Morales by someone who gets even the most pedestrian of
facts wrong in his very first sentence. Winer says South Africa was
Morales's first "port of call," yet anyone who has taken the slightest
interest in this knows Morales's REAL first "port of call" was
revolutionary Cuba, and his second revolutionary Venezuela, where his
statements weren't limited to vague diplomatic mouthings about wanting
to 'learn from South Africa's experience of nation-building.'

It's also odd that this article, which is just a critique of the South
African government, has been pegged on Morales's visit, and on some
diplomatic nicety he said on that occasion, a phrase that, anyways, even
if taken not as diplomacy but as a sincere expression of Morales's
intentions, there is absolutely nothing wrong with. If Morales had held
up South Africa as a model to emulate or an example of what a revolution
can do or as leader of the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples,
then perhaps there would be grounds for someone to note his mistake. But
although Evo Morales does know how to do that --see his statements in
Cuba and Venezuela-- his quoted supposedly inculpatory statements about
South Africa are not of that type.

As for the rest of Stan Winer's critique of South Africa, I don't know
and don't pretend to know. There are a lot of people on the Left who
feel that way about the ANC today. Yet there is also on the left a
different point of view, for example, expressed in an article in a May
13, 2004, article on Znet that reads eerily as if it had been an answer
to this one, although nearly two years old:

"Freedom of expression in post-apartheid South Africa is one of the
things that thousands fought, died, or otherwise made sacrifices for
during the liberation struggle. These days, most people in South Africa
can say whatever they like --- now that it's safe to do so. It's ironic,
however, that certain individuals who were conspicuously silent during
the struggle, are today using their freedom of expression to lash out at
the very same people who made such freedom possible. 

"In their determination to be miserable, and in their choice of safe
targets, some academic and other critics of the SA Government have
developed a curious capacity to wallow in the bad news while ignoring
today's better tidings. South African political discourse is thus
reduced to a series of mantras, all of them immune to evidence. The
favourite mantra seems to be the government's 'failure to deliver', a
lament that plays directly into the hands of rightwingers. It takes no
account of the million-and-a-half families moved from huts and shacks to
better housing, or of free medical care and primary education to
children, or of the rising child grants, or the equalisation of
pensions, or of the provision of clean water, some of it free, or of
other kinds of help to the poor, which undreamed of during the dark
years of apartheid fascism. 

"Still, there continues to be much theoretical bickering and criticism
of the ANC in some academic and civil society circles determined to
construct an edifice of misery on a foundation of the government's
'neo-liberal' policies. What the prophets of doom are saying, in effect,
is distinctly racist in character. They are saying African voters are so
stupid and backward that they've deliberately voted for an inept
government that will not act in their best interests."
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5515>

The author of this article is listed by Znet as being --did you guess?--
Stan Winer.

Joaquín


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