Re: Current implications for South Africa

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> The point about this is not that it is a conceivable future, but that it is
> our actual world, it is the present-day, it is the world in which persons in
> the Indian subcontinent consume one-eightieth of the energy of persons in
> the USA, in which more than half of humankind has never made a phone call
> and where almost a billion remain illiterate. That is still the reality; we
> are living in a world of gated communities and of elemental privation and
> darkness for the majority. The energy famine is not shrinking, it is growing
> and enveloping ever-new areas in darkness. Industrial capitalism has not
> solved even the most elementary problems of public welfare or personal
> security. The absolute numbers of people in abject poverty are increasing.
> Now, what are *you* arguing for? For people to believe that there is capital
> *over*-accumulation? You are pulling their leg.
>
> There is a powerful argument from value theory to show that there is a
> capital famine, not over-accumulation, but before bothering with all that,
> just go out into our world as it really is, and take a look around. What
> capital-shortage means in practice is a great lack of social infrastructure,
> mass poverty and squalor of a kind which would be only too familiar to any
> 19th century socialist or revolutionary whose ghost came visiting, but on a
> hitherto-unprecedented scale.
>
> And yes, the answer to this is revolutionary communism, and what we need for
> that is first off, for starters, to get our heads out of the sand and *look
> at* the world as it really as and not as we would wish it to be. And, btw,
> try not scapegoating the messenger just because you don't like the message.
> The answer to the problem is what it always has been: the overthrow of the
> capitalist state, the overthrow of imperialism, and socialism, socialism,
> socialism.
>
> Mark Jones

"UNDP Administrator Gus Speth said Friday an estimated 1.5 to 2.0
billion people, out of a total world population of 5.8 billion,
continue to live without electricity.  And about 2.0 billion people
still use fuel-wood and animal dung for their cooking" (at
<http://library.wustl.edu/~listmgr/devel-l/Mar1997/0041.html>).  "As
we enter the 21st century, over a billion people are still deprived
of basic needs.  Of the 4.8 billion people in developing countries,
nearly three fifths lack basic sanitation.  Almost a third have no
access to clean water.  A quarter do not have adequate housing and a
fifth have no access to modern health services.  In less-developed
regions, a fifth of children do not attend school to grade 5" (at
<http://www.unfpa.org/swp/1999/pressumary1.htm>).  What's
fundamentally preventing us from providing people with means to meet
their basic needs -- capitalism & imperialism or natural constraints?
If the former, socialism is the answer.  If the latter, socialism is
not only not the answer but may exacerbate the environmental problem,
in that under capitalism the poor can be simply priced out of the
market (as they have been) but under socialism all are entitled to
the satisfaction of basic needs (at the very least), the fulfillment
of which may make more demands upon natural resources (at least in
the short term) than today, even if global socialism eliminates such
sources of waste as production of weapons.

Yoshie