RE: Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Patrick Bond:

Mark Jones wrote:
> > Do you even acknowledge as a problem, the global endemic energy
> > scarcity which has seen per capita energy consumption stagnant
> since 1973
> > and which is a very real problem precisely in those newly neoliberalised
> > zones (S America, E Europe, S Africa) which now suffer chronic energy
> > shortages (gasoline famines, brownouts etc) and which cannot
> hope to find
> > the capital to invest in new infrastructure?
>
> Minor correction from sooty Jo'burg, comrade, where there's still
> a quarter excess electricity generating capacity, even on a cold
> winter day like today...
>

Thanks, and no doubt I was too telegraphic, but in context, "S America, E
Europe, S Africa" clearly refers to regions, not individual states. Actually
I was guided by your own articles:

>>Zimbabwe is down but not out.
  Periodic shortages--including essential drugs
  and California-style electricity load-
  shedding--contribute to the misery of daily
  life.<<

and elsewhere where you talk at length about gasoline lines in Zim,
electricity privatisation in South Africa (the state) and the fact that many
rural poor are not connected to the grid.

The fact that South Africa (the state) has depended on Sasol and coal-fired
electricity because of the historical accident of isolation, actually only
points to the dual truth that (a) South Africa is the exception to the
general rule of deepening energy deficits in the peripheries, and not such
an exception either, come to that and (b) South African energy
'independence' is radically unsustainable in both value and ecological
terms, which is also true, and for similar reasons, of other coal-fuelled
regions like large parts of Asia. This means that chronic energy crisis is
certain to mutate into energy famine, cruelly frustrating any residual hopes
entertained by the South African masses.

The problem of debt, which you raise about Zim, is simply a red-herring. In
context, debt, though not trivial, is symptomatic rather than causal. Your
hopes about renewables are equally illusory.

Are you now supporting the MDC? Well, yes, you obviously are. Is that not
actually supporting a neoliberal solution in Zim? What do you think,
realistically, will happen when and if MDC come to power?

Finally, the global problem capitalism faces is not over-accumulation, but a
capital shortage, desperate and bordering on famine. I shall be posting
about this. Those who prefer to stick their heads in the sand about energy
and resource constraints, and who sustain a blind and irratonal faith in
'human ingenuity' and whose politics remain in general wilfully optimistic,
no doubt believe that the problem is over-accumulation in the same way some
people once believed, for reasons of state of private convenience, that the
sun orbited the earth. But it is not so.

Mark Jones