Re: Re: The New ANC

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> >Perhaps Patrick Bond or others in South Africa might comment on this.
> >   Cheers, Ken Hanly
> Patrick is in NYC right now. He just gave a talk at the Brecht Forum on
> "Can Thabo Mbeki Change the World" which mentioned John Saul favorably. I
> will put Patrick's talk up on the web when he gets back to South Africa.
> Louis Proyect

John's fabulous. Check out the coming NLR for his longer rap.
Meanwhile, the short version of the Mbeki talk gives you a core
argument...

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
The Sowetan newspaper, South Africa
22 August 2000

Can Thabo Mbeki change the world?

In this excerpt from the first Frantz Fanon
Memorial Lecture, delivered August 17 at the
University of Durban-Westville School of
Governance, Patrick Bond debates Pretoria's
global strategies, tactics and alliances.

***

In a formidable speech on August 11,
President Thabo Mbeki, quoting Shakespeare,
publicly attacked not only a senior white
politician for alleged racism and arrogance
over the AIDS-treatment tragedy. He also
castigated the section of the "native petit
bourgeoisie, with the native intelligentsia
in its midst, that, in pursuit of well-being
that has no object beyond itself, commits
itself to be the foot-lickers of those that
will secure the personal well-being of its
members."
     Cynics may be tempted to view Mbeki's
own recent pronouncements on global
governance in a similar vein: the uncritical
embrace, during a May trip to the US, of
president Bill Clinton's corporate-designed
Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, of
highly-conditional debt "alleviation"--not
cancellation--by the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and of
renewed World Trade Organisation
negotiations.
     In each case, the 1960s-era radical
intellectuals whom Mbeki cited repeatedly in
his speech--Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral,
Walter Rodney, Malcolm X--would have called
for revolution against, not reform of, the
Washington-centred world economy.
     At the Havana meeting of the G-77
countries which Mbeki addressed in May, for
example, Cuban president Fidel Castro
proposed the IMF's closure, due to the
brutal effect of its policies on the
developing world.
     Yet soon thereafter, Mbeki chided
African National Congress leaders gathered
at the Port Elizabeth National General
Council meeting: "There is nobody in the
world who formed a secret committee to
conspire to impose globalization on an
unsuspecting humanity." But in the next
breath, Mbeki denounced Fifa's decision to
grant the 2006 soccer World Cup to Germany
instead of an unsuspecting SA: "As the ANC,
we therefore understand very well what is
meant by what one writer has described as
the globalization of apartheid."
     On the one hand, thus, Mbeki displaces
Third World problems from the (untouchable)
economic to the moral-political terrain,
which in turn evokes calls for revision--not
dismantling--of existing economic systems
and institutions. But on the other hand, he
maintains a relentless campaign to persuade
his constituents that "There Is No
Alternative" to globalization, and likewise
to the failed Growth, Employment and
Redistribution programme.
     Is there, however, a more nuanced
reading of the global strategy? Mbeki, after
all, was introspective in his talk last
week: "Our own intelligentsia faces the
challenge, perhaps to overcome the class
limitations which Rodney speaks of, and
ensure that it does not become an obstacle
to the further development of our own
revolution."
     There can be no doubt that the further
development of South Africa's liberation,
deep into the hostile socio-economic
territory where class apartheid has been
cemented since 1994, does and will require
global social change.
     What is the programme, then? Will it
work? Who are the friends and enemies?
     At least four strands of a strategy
have emerged from Pretoria since Mbeki's
rise to the presidency:
     * leading the launch of a new
"developmental" World Trade Organisation
round, in cooperation with four semi-
peripheral allies (Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil
and India), to contest Northern
protectionism;
     * promoting more democracy in the IMF
and World Bank (with less power in the hands
of the US);
     * rejuvenating the United Nations,
partly, it seems, through seeking a
permanent seat on the Security Council; and
     * confronting, even if tentatively,
transnational corporate prerogatives, at
least when it comes to emergencies such as
pharmaceutical drug pricing.
     In Port Elizabeth, Mbeki noted the
ANC's role as "an agent of change to end the
apartheid legacy in our own country. We also
sought to examine the question of what
contribution we could make to the struggle
to end apartheid globally." The answer, he
told the opening session of parliament this
year, is that "we have an obligation
ourselves to contribute to the construction
of a better world for all humanity. From
this, we cannot walk away."
     Mbeki may seek allies in other large
developing countries, but like South Africa
each appears ready to cut its own deals. He
may speak of an African Renaissance, but his
trade minister Alec Erwin profoundly
alienated African delegates to the World
Trade Organisation summit last December, and
the SA-European Union free trade deal is
justifiably feared in the region.
     And just after finance minister Trevor
Manuel became chair of the IMF and World
Bank board of governors late last year,
reforms went into reverse gear, witnessed by
the furious resignations of two leading
dissident Bank economists, Joseph Stiglitz
and Ravi Kanbur, and Washington's veto of an
IMF managing director who would not, to
borrow Mbeki's metaphor, lick the feet of US
treasury secretary Lawrence Summers.
     Further reason to doubt the integrity
of the strategy emerged when Mbeki sided
with global corporations, during the Durban
meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of
Government he chaired last November, against
Cosatu's attempt to impose "social clauses"
to protect labour and the environment via
trade deals. "We are pleased that the
Commonwealth Business Council has made its
own submission," Mbeki told the corporate
executives, who were also opposed to pro-
labour provisions in the World Trade
Organisation.
     Mbeki may actually have been correct,
some radical Third World economists say,
because such clauses would simply have
amplified Washington's power of
protectionism.
     Yet it is here, in the broader debate
over the merits of a strengthened global
economic order, with a world state in only
embryonic form, that Mbeki's critics are
most concerned.
     From the pan-Africanist tradition in
which Mbeki locates the present managers of
South Africa's revolution, the question
arises whether, to be blunt, a Frantz Fanon
would have joined or criticised Mbeki for
shining the chains of global apartheid--at
a time when opportunities are emerging to
break those chains.
     Mbeki, after all, came home from the G-
8 meeting in Japan last month emptyhanded on
debt relief; and Manuel returned from
Washington World Bank/IMF meetings in April
with no democratisation progress to report;
and Erwin emerged embarrassed from the
Seattle trade fiasco last December. The
reform gamble is in fact now in bankruptcy.
     The only successful component of
Pretoria's strategy--pressing US firms,
which were backed by Al Gore, to give up
their patents on life-saving HIV-AIDS drugs-
-was the result not of cozying up to the US
or other developing countries: instead,
local Treatment Action Campaign and their
activist allies in the US, by all accounts,
made the difference in changing power
relations and forcing Gore to retreat.
     But in his heart, Mbeki knows this. As
he told a group of young socialist activists
in Sweden just over a fortnight ago,
"Fundamental to the labour, social
democratic, socialist and national
liberation movements from their very
inception, is the adherence to the view that
the people must be their own liberators."
     If so, the strategy to change the world
should return to its roots. Mbeki himself
put it best, while in Stockholm: "As the
movement all of us present here represent,
surely our task must be to encourage these
masses, where they are oppressed, to
rebellion, to assert the vision fundamental
to all progressive movements that--the
people shall govern!"
     Rebellion against globalized apartheid
is, Fanon would agree, the only way to
change the world.

***

(Patrick Bond teaches at Wits and recently
authored two books: Elite Transition, from
University of Natal and Pluto Press; and
Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal, from
Africa World Press; full Fanon lecture available
by writing to pbond@xxxxxxxxxx)
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
work fax:  (2711) 484-2729
cellphone:  (27) 83-633-5548