Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa

Excellent new Desai and Foster from MR 

(From the current issue of Monthly Review magazine: monthlyreview.org)

Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa

by Ashwin Desai

Ashwin Desai teaches at the Workers' College in Durban, South Africa, and is
a newspaper columnist and community activist. His most recent book is We are
the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Monthly
Review Press, 2002).

 Inside the Transition

An aspect of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa was
inadvertently captured at the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF)
meeting held at the International Convention Centre in Durban, in June 2002,
as the police arrived with a massive show of force and drove protesters away
from the building with batons and charging horses. One of the organizers of
the WEF was approached by an incredulous member of the foreign media and
asked about the right to protest in the "new South Africa." The organizer
pulled out the program and, with a wry smile, pointed to an upcoming session
entitled "Taking NEPAD to the People." He said he could not understand the
protests because the "people" have been accommodated.

The transition to democracy led by the African National Congress (ANC) was
trumped by the transition to neoliberalism. The new ruling elite and the
beneficiaries of the old apartheid regime had already made common cause
after the ANC came to power in 1994. Now they were cementing their alliance
with the corporate raiders in the advanced capitalist world.

The ongoing South African transition has wrought significant changes. The
African middle and professional classes have grown considerably, while a
small economic elite is furiously consolidating. Adam Habib and Vishnu
Padayachee have recently commented on the impact of the ANC economic
policies since 1994 on the "insiders" of the transition:

Conglomerate (white) business, the aspirant black bourgeoisie, and black
professionals have benefitted in the short term from the imposition of
neo-liberal economic policies. The conglomerates have benefitted from the
tax concessions, the lowering of inflation, and the privatization programme.
They have also benefitted from steady exchange control liberalization (which
has permitted the outward flow of increasing amounts of South African
capital abroad) and from the opening up of new export markets and some new
investment opportunities, especially in Africa and Asia. The aspirant black
bourgeoisie has benefitted from the privatization of public enterprises, the
voluntary asset swaps from domestic white companies, and from the
partnerships established with foreign investors....Black professionals have
also benefited from promotions and more open employment practices as
companies scramble to fulfill affirmative action quotas.1

Also central to the transition is the impact of the ANC's macroeconomic
strategy on the composition of the South African working class. A recent
Reserve Bank report has shown that while wages (and productivity) for
skilled workers have steadily grown, there has developed a growing gulf
between the unionized and better skilled on the one hand and the masses of
marginalized South Africans on the other.

Over the last decade, there has been an increase in "nonstandard"
(temporary, casual, contract, part-time) forms of employment that heralds
the ubiquity of a relatively unstable and nonunionized workforce. At
present, full-time occupations employ little more than 40 percent of the
economically active population; for the African population, this decreases
to approximately one-third. Studies of the retail sector indicate
significant wage and benefit differences between permanent and atypical
workers. The hourly wages of permanent workers (90 percent of whom are union
members) in the retail sector are R9.68 [one South African rand (R) equals a
little less than ten cents in U.S. currency]. This compares with the average
R6.68 paid to casual employees (37 percent of whom are unionized).2

Alongside widespread nonstandard employment is spiraling unemployment. In
2001, University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat wrote that "the job
creation performance of the formal economy has been abysmal."3 This
conclusion has been supported by later studies that have pointed to
escalating job loss and unemployment. At the end of March 2002, Statistics
SA reported that the official unemployment rate jumped three percentage
points rising from 26.4 percent to 29.5 percent. At the same time, research
on unemployment conducted by the Norwegian Development Agency put the
unemployment figure at between 32 percent and 45 percent. This research also
found that a quarter of the currently unemployed lost their last job because
of retrenchment or business closure and that half the job seekers have never
worked before.

According to the 1996 Census, the poorest 40 percent of the population got
less than 3 percent of the national income, while the richest 10 percent
enjoyed over 50 percent. The situation has worsened over the past decade for
the poorest 40 percent of African households. Twenty percent of urban
households have no electricity and a quarter have no running water, while 80
percent of rural households have neither. This led Minister of Social
Development, Zola Skweyiya, to reflect-in a rare moment of politician
straight talk after visiting a number of townships and rural areas-that
socioeconomic inequalities were getting worse: "The consequence is the rich
are getting richer and fewer whilst the poor are increasing in number and
getting even poorer." Ironically, inequality has been exacerbated by the
lack of state support. Most poor South African households, more than 13.8
million people, do not qualify for any social security transfers. This means
that the poor have had to rely largely on themselves for survival.

A Poverty and Inequality Report commissioned by the government in May 2000
reveals that 45 percent of self-employed workers earn less than the poverty
line. Seventy-six percent of these are African. Franco Barchiesi makes the
telling point that unemployment in itself is only partially accountable for
working class poverty: "[T]he existence of huge areas of working class
poverty in the South African society...indicate(s) an enduring, structural
inability of waged employment to satisfy basic necessities for life and
household reproduction." Take the recent example, a group of sixty
retrenched workers from the footwear industry in northern Kwa-ZuluNatal who
reentered the workforce by working for an entrepreneur who pays them R1 for
every shoe made. According to one of the workers, Lungile Ngubane, "What you
get paid depends on how many shoes you can make a day, but I would say on
average I make R50 a week."4

The Neoliberal Squeeze at the 'Local'

The neoliberal transition has squeezed and spewed out the poor but
galvanized them at the same time. The "poors," as they have come to be known
in the South African vernacular, have opposed the water and electricity
cut-offs and evictions (consequences of the privatization of public
services), and have begun making connections between their situation and
that of people, first in Soweto and Tafelsig, but then also in Bolivia,
South Korea, America's prisons, Zimbabwe, and Chiapas. But they have done
this without any grand ideology. They are actors on a local stage, squaring
off against homegrown villains like Operation Masakhane [Let Us Build],
which supposedly aims to normalize local governance and the provision of
local services by convincing people with no money that they must pay for
these services.5

In the most comprehensive study of the ability of people to pay for basic
services, David McDonald found a serious crisis:

If for example, 18 percent of the seven million people who are reported to
have been given access to water since 1994 are unable to pay their water
bills "no matter how hard [they] try," then 1.26 million of these new
recipients are unable to afford this water and an additional 1.2 million
have to choose between paying for water and buying other essentials like
food. Similar percentages apply to the 3.5 million South Africans who have
been given access to electricity.6

As part of the process of "normalization," the government's Growth,
Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program aims toward "a fundamental
shift away from the 'statist' service delivery models of the past where the
state subsidized and delivered municipal services (albeit in a
racially-biased manner), towards a more 'neo-liberal' service delivery model
where the private sector (and private sector principles) dominate. In the
latter model, the state acts as a service 'ensurer' rather than a service
'provider' and municipal services are 'run more like a business,' with
financial cost recovery becoming the most effective measure of performance."
These developments have seen the costs of basic services escalate. This, in
turn, has caused increasing cost-recovery mechanisms such as disconnections
of water and electricity to occupy the attention and energy of the local
state, as opposed to delivery in the first place. Between 1999 and 2000, for
example, some 75,400 water cut-offs occurred in the Greater Cape Town area.
In Soweto after the 1999 general election, some 20,000 houses had their
electricity supplies disconnected every month. Brian Johnson, the manager of
Eskom, the state-owned electricity supply company, indicated that "the aim
is to disconnect at least 75 per cent of Soweto residents." Since 1994, some
ten million South Africans have had their water and electricity cut-off for
nonpayment, while two million have been evicted from their homes for the
same reason.7

Sometimes, councils like the eThekwini Unicity-the municipal government of
the greater Durban area-have proposed moving people out of the already
deteriorating apartheid ghettoes that serve as rental accommodation for some
of the poorest of the city's residents into a central area of "poorhouses."
It is presumed that once relocated their water and electricity consumption
can be monitored, while the houses that they occupied for over three decades
are upgraded and sold at a profit. In Cape Town, residents of Mandela Park
in Khayelitsha took bonds from banks. An organization called Servcon, set up
jointly by the banks and government, was designed to educate the mortgage
holders on how to budget so they could meet the required payments.
Escalating unemployment and the fact that the homes were structurally
defective, forcing many residents to put their own resources into repairing
faulty wiring and cracks in walls, resulted in many residents defaulting.
The banks, with the support of both Servcon and the government, began a
process of "rightsizing," in which defaulters were forcibly moved to
accommodations that were accurately described by the Mandela Park community
as dog kennels. The cost-recovery prerequisites of neoliberalism are
creating a new kind of apartheid.

Sociologist Ari Sitas, looking at the cholera epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal,
which in less than ten months starting in the second half of 2000 had
resulted in 176 deaths and 83,624 infected. He showed how "cost-recovery"
cut across the government's challenge to the apartheid state's medical
model:

The apartheid state, armed with a controlling ideology and a medical model
was alarmed in the 1980s that cholera researchers were declaring the
epidemic as being related to apartheid policy. For them the problem was
"water-borne"....In its controlling paradigm the state decided to provide
safer sanitation in some of the most affected areas, to stop the contagion.
The new government, being a stringent critic of the old medical model,
committed itself to preventative medicine but also, following a neo-liberal
protocol of cost recovery, turned the taps off in the very same areas
because people couldn't pay...the latest outbreak began in the area of
Ngwelezane where the Uthunlungu Council switched their access to clean water
off.8
The Rise of Community Movements

As the ANC's assault on the poor resulted in more and more evictions,
disconnections, and retrenchments, a variety of new community movements
began to arise. Hesitantly at first, these movements began to arise to
challenge the water and electricity cut-offs, the evictions, and lack of
land redistribution. These movements, based in particular communities and
evincing particular, mainly defensive, demands, were not merely a natural
result of poverty or marginality but a direct response to state policy.

The state's inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public services
and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been a
spark for a plethora of community movements. While the movements mobilize
around diverse demands like land titles, water and electricity supplies, and
access to housing and health facilities, the general nature of the
neoliberal emergency concentrates and aims these demands towards the state.
What was starting to develop in a series of mobilizations was reminiscent of
what Manuel Castells, writing on Latin America, came to call "militant
metropolitan dwellers."

What distinguishes these community movements from political parties,
pressure groups, NGOs, and the trade unions is mass mobilization as the
prime source of social sanction. The rise of community movements has seen
the emergence of the family as a fighting unit, unlike union membership,
which is based on the individual worker. In fact, many of those involved in
community movements accept the conditions of the sweatshops and low wages
without much of a fight. They attempt to top up their wages by not paying
for services. They organize militantly around this issue, and the state is
directly brought into the conflict. They act much like Hobsbawm's "city
 mob," which he describes as "the movement of all classes of the urban poor
for the achievement of economic or political changes by direct action-that
is by riot or rebellion."9

Alongside the development of community movements and the tactic of direct
action has also been the onset of "quiet encroachment." This refers to:

the silent, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on those
who are propertied and powerful in a quest for survival and improvement of
their lives. It is characterized by quiet, largely atomized and prolonged
mobilization with episodic collective action-open and fleeting struggles
without clear leadership, ideology or structured organization.10
These encroachments are often given tacit encouragement by community
movements or serve as a catalyst for collective organization.

These movements concentrate on fighting in their own locality and are often
animated by the immediacy of the situation. When the challenge to water
cut-offs or evictions does come, it is fought with intensity, and
longstanding animosities are often forgotten as the struggle intensifies. In
Mpumalanga, I have seen families that have lost kin in the low-intensity
civil war of the 1980s and 1990s between the Inkatha Freedom Party,
supported by the apartheid state, and the United Democratic Front link up
with their former enemies and fight the imposition of water meters.

I have witnessed across Durban how the campaign to demand a ten rand flat
rate for basic services was built. Poor people with no resources went to
different areas and addressed meetings. The Chatsworth contingent was
received with skepticism and then prolonged applause in the African township
of Umlazi. In a bewildering couple of weeks, the most diverse groups came
together. The socialist students fresh from being banned at the University
of Durban-Westville were everywhere-printing pamphlets, talking to the
youth, acting as protection from the goons of the ANC Youth League.

Resistance has spread across the country. In Soweto, the Soweto Electricity
Crisis Committee (SECC) have-through Operation Khanyisa, meaning
 "switch-on,"-stymied the impact of Eskom's disconnection by reconnecting
the electricity of residents. In Cape Town, residents of Mandela Park in the
sprawling black township of Khayelitsha have put residents evicted by banks
back into their houses. They have all put direct action at the heart of
their activities, disconnecting the electricity of the mayor of Johannesburg
's house, occupying the offices of banks in Cape Town, and laying siege to
the debt-collection building of the eThekwini Council in Durban.

But we should not romanticize the lives of the poor. Life is "nasty, brutish
and short." In fact, very short. Life expectancy has tumbled by some two
decades. And when the community movements fail to stop the eviction of the
old, they often die miserable deaths, cut off from familiar surroundings.
Take the case of a pensioner, Mr. Mcondobi, who was evicted in February 2002
in perfect health from 23554 Mandela Park. The Western Cape Anti-Eviction
Campaign reported on June 30, 2002:

He was rightsized to a dog kennel style house at 56938 Thubelitsha, and
seems to have contacted pneumonia as the winter set in....Other evicted
pensioners testified that the kennels to which they have been rightsized are
bitterly cold, have no plastering on the inside walls, are leaking through
the roof and have no bath or shower.

Or consider unemployed mother, Thulisile Manqele, who failed in her bid in
the Durban High Court to turn her water on. She returned to Chatsworth, and
the still-standing stream filled with fecal contamination. Cholera stalks
those without water. But even the provision of taps comes with a price. You
need to have a card charged with money to access the water. Public
standpipes lie rusting as people without cash make their way to the river.
Government functionaries and intellectuals talk about changing people's
culture towards payment. The very same words were used when the natives
would not pay the Hut Tax. Anthropology is back in fashion.

The poor are not passive victims of social policy, however. The metropolitan
militant who does not pay for water or electricity, who squats and occupies
and tries his luck, often succeeds in snatching income from the state and
protects this income in collective struggle when the state or (parastatals)
attempts to reclaim it. In certain rural areas, stock theft, squatting and
slow, semilegal land occupations under the guise of land-tenancy, perform
the same function.

What about the organized working class? The transition to democracy was
underpinned by corporatism. This involved big unions, big business, and the
state. Conflict was to be institutionalized. The political had to be
controlled by the ANC or its allies in the Tripartite Alliance-the Congress
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South African Communist
Party (SACP). The rightward shift of the ANC, however, has from time to time
been challenged by the leading trade union federation, COSATU, working
within the rubric of the Alliance. However, the latter's attempts to advance
its interests is so highly ritualized, domesticated within the ANC Alliance
and otherwise institutionalized, that COSATU shows little inclination to act
outside and against the major policy decisions of the ANC. Crucially, COSATU
sees its alliance with the ANC as the bulwark against job losses by
tempering the worst excesses of neoliberalism. Conflict is channeled through
tripartite (business, labor, and state) corporatist structures.

Dale McKinley has likened the leadership of the SACP and COSATU to

a rabbit whose eyes are transfixed by the oncoming headlights of a fast
moving vehicle, numbed by the sheer intensity of what appear to be the
unshakable "headlights" of the "liberation movement." All the while,
however, the ANC leadership has proceeded apace, to further entrench
(deracialised) capitalist relations of production and distribution. In the
process, and with the assistance of the leadership of the SACP and COSATU,
they have actively attacked any concomitant critical questioning and
engagement with the substance behind such rhetoric.11

COSATU did take principled positions against Mbeki's genocidal AIDS denial
and on issues like the oppressive Swazi monarchy and the Mugabe
dictatorship. But when it comes to opposition to the neoliberal nature of
the transition, COSATU acts to contain and domesticate dissent. The editor
of the Sunday Independent and Mbeki insider, John Battersby, commented at
the time of the SACP 2002 Congress:

When the chips are down, the SACP does not represent the landless and the
homeless masses anymore than the ANC or COSATU represents the unemployed
masses, whatever the rhetoric might say about the "poorest of the poor"
...the alliance represents an elite and emerging middle class.12

The recent South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) strike does,
however, indicate a fertile ground for a linkup between community movements
and the organized working class. Many SAMWU shop stewards, especially in the
Western Cape, are integrally involved in community movements. The
privatization of services means SAMWU workers face the spectre of both job
losses and increases in charges for basic services, merging in their
immediate identities as municipal employees and township residents. It is
also significant that the strike took place against the local state, which
also is the target of the community movements. The strike brought to public
attention the growing gap between municipal managers and workers. In Durban,
the newly appointed Municipal Manager and former ANC Member of Provincial
Parliament, Mike Sutcliffe, has an annual salary package of R800,000 and a
performance bonus of R500,000.13

At the same time, the local governments were refusing to take the minimum
wage from R1900 to R2200 per month. If one considers the salary of a worker
at R2000 a month, it would take a worker some forty years to earn what
Sutcliffe would earn in a year. If one takes into consideration that the
average life expectancy of a person born in South Africa has tumbled from
sixty-four years in 1996 to fifty-three years in 1998, and one takes an
average starting age of eighteen for a municipal worker, then the worker
would not earn in a whole lifetime what Sutcliffe earns in one year!

David Slater makes the point that "the territorial state, in global times,
tends to rest on an increasingly fragile and precarious ground, with pressur
es from below often opening up fissures in its territorial control, whilst
the globalisation of financial, economic and cultural power increasingly
impinges on the nation-state from above."14

The state in South Africa has less vulnerability because of the ANC's image
as a liberator. This is aided by the fact that it makes grand statements
around the free delivery of services.

The local state, though, is vulnerable. It is the entity that advances the
water and electricity disconnections, evictions, and the loss of jobs
through privatization. A majority of the councillors are elected through
wards, making them both accessible to communities and open to direct attack.
It is not surprising that it is at this level that the poor have challenged
the neoliberal transition.

In attempting to make sense of the transition it is useful to think of the
idea of politics and the political. As David Slater writes:

Politics has its own public space; it is the field of exchanges between
political parties, of parliamentary and governmental affairs, of elections
and representation and in general of the type of activity, practices and
procedures that take place in the institutional arena of the political
system. The political...can be more effectively regarded as a type of
relationship that can develop in any area of the social, irrespective of
whether or not it remains within the institutional enclosure of "politics."
The political then is the living movement, the kind of "magma of conflicting
wills," or antagonisms; it is mobile and ubiquitous, going beyond but also
subverting the institutional settings and moorings of politics.15

These movements have created a political scandal by deliberately engaging in
actions that create instability and disorder. The "poors," or what others
have variously called the "multitude," "the unwaged," "slaves-in-waiting,"
the "metropolitan militant,""the mob," and "the wretched of the earth," have
come to constitute the most relevant post-1994 social force from the point
of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community
movements have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while
after the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as "politics."
In the month of July 2002, for example, residents of an informal settlement
in Lenasia protesting their forced removal, cheered while burning an
election poster bearing Mbeki's face; the Landless People's Movement
occupied Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa's office amid an angry protest
over land; and rent defaulters on the Cape Flats stoned a truck involved in
evictions, and tried to necklace a driver.16

They have also added to the cast many new actors associated with the play of
politics in South Africa. The poor are not just involved in recognition, or
the discovery of the right policies, or the creation of the right
administrative framework, or even the goodwill of power holders. They are
challenging the very distribution of power in society and are doing so in
ways that do not stick to the gradualist, corporatist, and nation-building
script.

Un-Civil Society

Most importantly, community movements have subverted "the traditionally
given of the political system-state power, political parties, formal
institutions-by contesting the legitimacy and the apparently normal and
natural functioning of their effects within society."17 They are a source of
tremendous potential counter-power, if not counter-politics.

In 1993, a scenario planning exercise commissioned by the giant insurance
company Sanlam, entitled Platform for Investment held that "it is not the
downtrodden, starving 'down and outers'-the worms that turn-who start
revolutions, but people who await a better life but then suddenly find their
aspirations frustrated. Most unemployed people have depressed aspirations."
As Patrick Bond laconically commented, what the Platform was signaling was
that the unemployed should be ignored for they do not pose a threat to the
system.18

It was advice that the ANC appeared to believe. But the unemployed would not
be ignored. They have built strong community movements, joining with the
lower working class in challenging the very structure of the "political."
The irony is that these movements have fought bloody battles to hang on to
the satanic ghettoes that apartheid bequeathed.

If community movements are to grow and spread and build a culture of
revolutionary confrontation, they have serious challenges to confront in the
immediate future. They face an ANC which, sensing the growing combativeness
of the poor, has begun to try and head off challenges emanating from outside
corporatist structures. For example, some parts of the ANC have started to
take to the streets. The ANC Youth League marched on June 16, 2002 demanding
jobs and "entrepreneurial" skills. In Durban, a city the ANC controls, the
organization has taken to the streets calling for free water, blaming water
disconnections on white conservative bureaucrats! Given the resources the
ANC has and the continuing mystique of freedom fighters, their intervention
in a territory over which the community movements were starting to hold
exclusive sway poses a real challenge.

Alongside this, there has been increased repression. The Regulation of
Public Gatherings Act of 1993 gives police and civic authorities
far-reaching powers in preventing and even banning mass demonstrations. The
recent arrest of National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement
members in Ermelo is a particularly graphic example of the repressive use of
this act. So too is the purported banning of at least two Anti-Privatization
Forum marches and the breaking up of the peaceful assembly during the World
Economic Forum meeting held in Durban in June 2002. When members of the
Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign held a protest outside the provincial
parliament on June 27, 2002, the police fired tear gas into the crowds,
arrested forty-four members, and charged them with trespassing. Fifty SECC
members face charges of public violence and trespassing. Eight residents
from Wentworth face charges relating to a march on the local police station.
These actions led Ebrahim Harvey to comment that "[T]he black ruling elite
has not hesitated to act against protesters with the jackboot that we are so
familiar with under apartheid."19

Beyond the immediate challenges, there are serious questions facing the new
movements, which strike at the heart of their longer-term project. How do
they link up with the militant unions like SAMWU? How do they broaden their
movement into rural areas that are either marked by an absence of basic
services or, when they do arrive, are commodified in a manner putting them
out of reach of the intended consumers? Why have the urban poor not linked
in an organic way with the Landless People's Movement? Is land not a basic
service and is not the fight against banks and against the selling of
council housing, like land invasions, a direct attack on the edifice of
private property? If this is the case, why are the links not being made?
What is to be their relation to the formal institutional sphere of
 "politics"? In particular, should they contest elections at least at a
local level? How are connections to be made with similar struggles in
Zimbabwe, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Indonesia, and with those movements
directly taking on the IMF and the World Bank on the streets of Seattle and
Genoa? How do the poor turn what have been defensive actions (fighting
bloody battles to stay in the apartheid ghettoes) into demands that take the
offensive against the neoliberal state? One of the dangers is that the very
success of campaigns like Operation Khanyisa will lead to demobilization,
because once people have their lights switched on, they do not see the need
for the collective. It also serves the purpose of reducing anger because
people now have lights and water. This is the danger of remaining localized,
particularistic, and single-issue focused. The state, faced with collective
resistance and exposed at a public level, simply retreats from the more
militant areas and moves to areas less organized.

These questions should not detract from the challenge the community
movements have made to the ANC government. They have fought off the state's
hired guns to prevent evictions and disconnections. In Cape Town, Durban,
and Johannesburg, the reconnection of water and electricity by community
movements has reached "epidemic" proportions, reappropriating basic needs
and creating no-go zones of decommodification. They have put 20,000 on the
streets at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. This is a struggle
that already has heroes, legends, and martyrs.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Notes

1 Adam Habib and Vishnu Padayachee, "Economic Policy and Power relations in
South Africa's Transition to Democracy," World Development 28 (2000), 25.

2 Haroon Bhorat, "Explaining Employment Trends in South Africa: 1993-1998,"
New Agenda, Fourth Quarter, Cape Town, 2000: 23.

3 Mail and Guardian, 28 March 2002.

4 F. Barchesi, "Social Citizenship, the State and the Changing Constitution
of Wage Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa," Paper presented at the 2002
Annual Congress of the South African Sociological Association, East London,
June 30 to July 2, 2002, pp. 7, 8.

5 See A. Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid
South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).
6 D. McDonald, "The Bell Tolls for Thee: Cost Recovery, Cut Offs, and the
Affordability of Municipal Services in South Africa," Special Report, 2000:
9.

7 D. McDonald, "The Bell Tolls for Thee," D. McDonald and L. Smith,
"Privatizing Cape Town," Municipal Services project paper, 2002.

8 A. Sitas, "Love in the Time of Cholera," Paper presented at the 2002
Annual Congress of the South African Sociological Association, London, June
30-July 2, 2002: 5.

9 E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, England: Manchester
University Press, 1963), 110-111.

10 A. Bayet, Social Movements, Activism and Social Development in the Middle
 East (New York: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development,
2000), 24.

11 D. McKinley, "'The End of Innocence': The Alliance and the Left," South
African Labour Bulletin 24 (2000): 57.

12 Sunday Independent, 28 July 2002.

13 Sunday Tribune, 7 July 2002.

14 D. Slater, "Spatial Politics/Social Movements," in W. Bright and S.
Harding, eds., State Building and Social Movements (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997), 261.

15 Ibid., 266.

16 Sunday Independent, 28 July 2002.

17 Slater, Spatial, 263.

18 P. Bond, Elite Transition (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 64.

19 E. Harvey, "A Taste of the Jackboot of the New Ruling Elite," South
African Labor Bulletin 26 (2001)



***

A Planetary Defeat: The Failure
of Global Environmental Reform
by John Bellamy Foster

  This article is reconstructed from the notes for several talks delivered
in Johannesburg, South Africa during events leading up to the World Summit
on Sustainable Development, August-September 2002.-J.B.F.

The first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 generated hopes
that the world would at long last address its global ecological problems and
introduce a process of sustainable development. Now, with a second summit
being held ten years later in Johannesburg, that dream has to a large extent
faded. Even the principal supporters of this process have made it clear that
they do not expect much to be achieved as a result of the Johannesburg
summit, which is likely to go down in history as an absolute failure. We
need to ask ourselves why.

The first reason is perhaps the most obvious, at least to environmentalists.
The decade between Rio and Johannesburg has seen the almost complete failure
of the Rio Earth Summit and its Agenda 21 to produce meaningful results.
This has highlighted the weaknesses of global environmental summitry.

Second, the U.S. refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and the Convention on
Biological Diversity-the two main conventions evolving out of Rio-has raised
questions about the capacity of capitalism to address the world
environmental crisis. The United States, as the hegemonic power of the
capitalist system, further signaled its rejection of global environmental
reform by announcing that President Bush would not be attending the
Johannesburg summit.

Third, both the rapid globalization of the neoliberal agenda in the 1990s
and the emergence of a massive antiglobalization movement in Seattle in
November 1999 have highlighted the system's antagonism toward all attempts
to promote economic and environmental justice.

Fourth, the World Summit on Sustainable Development is occurring in a period
of economic and financial crisis that bodes ill for those concerned with the
issues of the environment and third world development. The capitalist world
economy as a whole is experiencing global recession. Hardest hit are the
countries of the global South, which-thanks to neoliberal globalization-are
caught in worsening economic crises over which they have less and less
control.

Fifth, we are witnessing the growth of a new virulent wave of imperialism as
the United States has begun a world war on terrorism in response to the
events of September 11, 2001. This is taking the form of U.S. military
interventions not only in Afghanistan but also potentially against Iraq,
along with stepped-up U.S. military activities in locations throughout the
third world. Under these circumstances, war is likely to trump the
environment.

Sixth, South Africa, which nearly ten years ago became a symbol of human
freedom with the overthrow of apartheid, was chosen mainly for that reason
as the site of the second earth summit. It has now come to symbolize for
many something quite different: the rapacious growth of neoliberalism and
the refusal to address major environmental and social crises.

The Undermining of Rio

The inability of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to set in motion processes that
would lead to genuine sustainable development has negatively affected
perceptions of what is possible as a result of the Johannesburg summit. In
the words of the sixteen environmentalists who contributed to The Jo'burg
Memo, written for the World Summit on Sustainable Development and edited by
Wolfgang Sachs:

Rio 1992 reveals itself a vain promise. While governments at the Earth
Summit had committed themselves in front of the eyes and ears of the world
to curb environmental decline and social impoverishment, no reversal of
these trends can be seen a decade down the line. On the contrary the world
is sinking deeper into poverty and ecological decline, notwithstanding the
increase of wealth in specific places....Fifty years from now, when the
Earth is likely to be hotter in temperature, poorer in diversity of living
beings, and less hospitable to many people, Rio might be seen as the last
exit missed on the road to decline.*
How can it be that the Rio Earth Summit, which ten years ago was thought to
mark a decisive change in the human relation to the environment, has come to
be seen as such a colossal failure? The answer is that it was undermined by
global capital both from within and without.

A close examination of the Rio summit reveals that it was far from the
earth-friendly phenomenon that it professed to be. The Convention on
Biological Diversity was much more about deciding who was to have the right
to exploit living nature than protecting the earth's biodiversity. (The
Convention was nonetheless opposed by the United States because it supported
the South's rights to its genetic resources over the demands of the U.S.
biotechnology industry.) The UN Framework for Climate Change, which later
became the Kyoto Protocol, was resisted by the United States and other
countries because of its attacks on the auto-petroleum economy. The
Agreement on Forest Principles, which emerged out of Rio, never even
mentioned the problem of deforestation in its "forest principles," but was
concerned much more with the sovereign right of each country to use/exploit
its forests as it pleased. The forty chapters of Agenda 21 presented
economic growth under free market principles as the primary objective,
within which a commitment to the environment was to be situated. "The market
economy of the world" was seen as the place in which all environmental
problems would be addressed. As Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger
observed in The Earth Brokers, the leading critique of the Rio Earth Summit,
"The only mention of corporations in Agenda 21 was to promote their role in
sustainable development. No mention was made of corporations' role in the
pollution of the planet" (p. 116).

These results stemmed in part from direct pressure exerted by capital.
Important lobbying came from the Business Council for Sustainable
Development, led by Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny. Membership on
the Business Council included top officers of leading multinational
corporations: Chevron Oil, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Nippon Steel,
S.C. Johnson and Son, Dow Chemical, Browning-Ferris Industries, ALCOA,
Dupont, Royal/Dutch Shell, and others. Schmidheiny's 1992 book Changing
Course, which was written to influence the Rio summit, promoted a view that
the market mechanism if allowed to operate freely was the only conceivable
means of achieving sustainable development. The primary agents of such a
transition to a more sustainable world were to be multinational
corporations, which would supposedly extend principles of total quality
management and full cost pricing to encompass environmental concerns. The
Business Council for Sustainable Development played a role, through the
corporations associated with it, in financing the 1992 Earth Summit, and was
brought directly into the core planning of the summit.

If the Rio summit was transformed from within into a vehicle that mainly
served the interests of capital, processes were going on outside Rio that
further weakened any attempts at global environmental reform. Even while the
Rio summit was taking place, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations was proceeding. With the establishment
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, the leading capitalist states
had created an international structure to promote neoliberal free market
principles while making environmental reforms in individual countries much
more difficult. Globalization of capitalism was to supplant local control,
countries were to be encouraged to exploit their natural resources to the
fullest, public goods were to be opened up to relentless privatization, and
environmental regulations were to be geared to the lowest common denominator
in order to not interfere with free trade. The WTO was meant to mark the
total triumph of capitalism, limiting environment and development policies
in the third world to those acceptable to the ruling interests of the
wealthy capitalist states.

It was the promise of development in the periphery of the capitalist world
economy that was invariably used as the justification for watering down and
effectively eliminating meaningful global environmental change. As conceived
by the centers of world capital, development could only be sustained by
pursuing the neoliberal agenda of opening up whole countries and every
single sphere of economic activity to market forces. Far from developing the
global South, this strategy, however, only served to deepen the economic
stagnation or decline of most third world countries and to reinforce a
growing gap between rich and poor countries-along with accelerated
destruction of the environment. Still, insofar as it served the economic
interests of the rich countries, it was treated by the dominant powers as an
unmitigated success.

A quick look at global trends in relation to the environment and development
shows how disastrous this period of unfettered global capitalism over the
last ten years has proven to be. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are
at their highest in the last 420,000 years. CO2 emissions (excluding other
greenhouse gases) increased 9 percent globally between 1990 and 2000 and in
the United States by double that rate. The fourteen warmest years recorded
since measurements began in 1866 have all been since 1980, with the decade
of the 1990s the hottest on record. Global consumption of water is doubling
every twenty years, much faster than population growth. By the mid-1990s
about 40 percent of world population in some eighty countries were suffering
from serious water shortages. The United Nations has projected that by 2025
two-thirds of the world population may be suffering from water stress. Water
tables are falling under large expanses of agricultural land in China,
India, and the United States due to the overpumping of ground water for
irrigation. The overall species extinction rate is now at least a thousand
times (and maybe as much as ten thousand times) faster than the normal or
background rate of extinction. Habitat destruction, particularly of tropical
forests, threatens as many as half of the world's species over the course of
this century. Coral reefs, second only to forests in biological wealth, are
being degraded at an alarming rate. Over a quarter of coral reefs have now
been lost, up from 10 percent in 1992, and the share to be lost is expected
to rise to 40 percent by 2010. Genetically modified crops pose once again
the issue of the sorcerer's apprentice, as agribusiness continues to alter
the bases of life and our food supply in ways radically at variance with
evolutionary processes. Commercial technologies are altering the genetic and
chemical composition of what we eat, with very little consideration of
consequences beyond questions of profitability.*

Where development itself is concerned, there have been no appreciable gains
in the relative position of the global South, which, taken as a whole, is
falling further behind the rich countries. Income inequality has been
rapidly increasing both within countries and between countries over the last
two decades. Fifty-two countries experienced negative growth over the 1990s.
Between 1975 and 2000 per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa (in purchasing
power parity terms) dropped from one-sixth to only one-fourteenth of that of
the rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development. The income of the richest 10 percent of the U.S. population
(around 25 million people) now equals that of the poorest 43 percent of
world population or some 2 billion people (United Nations, Human Development
Report 2002, pp. 17-19).

The Johannesburg Summit: Grasping at Straws

Given this generally dismal picture of past accomplishments, there is reason
to question what can be accomplished as a result of the Johannesburg summit.
What might lead us to believe that the record ten years from now will not be
far worse than what confronts us today a decade after Rio? Even amongst
those environmentalists who are sharply critical of global neoliberalism,
multinational corporations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, there is a
tendency to seek out some sort of compromise in the face of defeat.
Environmentalists have been driven to such a state that they frequently seek
salvation in the very institutions to which they attribute the present
evils.

One example of this is The Jo'burg Memo. The environmentalist authors of
this memo are on the left in the sense of identifying with the
antiglobalization movement. They argue that neoliberalism and particularly
the WTO crushed the global environmental reform program introduced at Rio.
They believe that the world needs to put the environment and social justice
first. But their solutions for the World Summit on Sustainable Development
sound like an attempt to find a middle ground with current economic
policies, without challenging the fundamentals of the neoliberal project,
much less the logic of capital accumulation itself.

What crushed the hopes engendered by Rio, according to The Jo'burg Memo, was
"a fateful style of economics." What is needed therefore is a new style of
economics, less opposed to sustainability. What would this new style of
economics involve? Their more general proposals in this respect are derived
from the work of U.S. environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, a
contributor to the memo, who has argued in favor of what he calls "natural
capitalism"-or capitalism that fully incorporates nature into its system of
value (Mother Jones, April 1997). As stated in The Jo'burg Memo, "as long as
corporations' short and long term interests diverge from the public
interest, no tinkering, reforms, regulations, or World Summits will change
the status quo." The problem then becomes one of ensuring that corporations
conform to the public interest with respect to the environment. This can be
achieved by turning environmental amenities, which have no value from the
standpoint of the market, into goods that have market value. An economic
system is not fully "capitalist," we are informed, unless
everything-including nature-is treated as capital. Moreover, the potential
for "radical resource productivity"-the more efficient utilization of energy
and materials through new technology-means there is no incompatibility
between rapid and unlimited capitalist economic growth and environmental
sustainability. Environmental reform must therefore tap into the "unrivaled
effectiveness" of markets.

At an international level, according to The Jo'burg Memo, what is needed is
a "global deal," particularly between the global North and the global South,
that would make development sustainable, while at the same time enhancing
the developmental opportunities of the South.* Among the proposals is the
notion that it is necessary to "frame the WTO sustainably." Thus the WTO,
which up to now has been concerned solely with the penetration of capital
into every nook and cranny of the globe, must be converted into a much
broader institution concerned also with environmental sustainability. This
is to be accomplished by launching, through the WTO, a "Multilateral
Agreement on Sustainable Investment," which would establish verifiable
guidelines for the foreign direct investment of multinational corporations.
Nor do the reform plans stop with the WTO. "Both the IMF and the World
 Bank," the memo states, "need to be re-directed, democratized and
re-structured" to take into account environmental needs. The IMF should
abandon its structural adjustment programs. Furthermore, a "balance of
 power" needs to be established between Bretton Woods institutions, namely,
the IMF, the World Bank and GATT, and the UN system. This would make
possible an equilibrium between financial goals and more universal goals,
such as those of the environment and social justice. One major step forward,
it is suggested, would be the creation of a World Environment Organization
within the UN system. Another key proposal of The Jo'burg Memo is to
establish a convention on corporate accountability that will allow for legal
redress in the face of corporate wrongdoing.

Similar proposals for change have been introduced by the International Forum
on Globalization, a leading antiglobalization organization based in San
Francisco and headed by John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander. In its Intrinsic
Consequences of Economic Globalization on the Environment, prepared for the
Johannesburg summit, the International Forum on Globalization recommends
"reigning in corporate power." In addition to the creation of an
Organization for Corporate Accountability, which would monitor corporations
and provide information on their business practices, they propose cutting
the staffs of the IMF and the World Bank and creating a separate
International Finance Organization under the UN system. The main fault of
the present world economy, we are told, is its emphasis on the globalization
of economic relations. Instead, a principle of localization should be
applied wherever possible in order to promote ecological well-being and
sustainable development.

There is no doubt that the intention of these proposed reforms is to promote
social and environmental justice. Yet, such proposals seek to strike an
accord with neoliberal institutions while leaving the underlying logic of
the system intact. One thing should be clear to those who do not simply deny
the harsh reality of twenty-first century capitalism: that the WTO and its
sister institutions cannot promote sustainability since this would
contradict their whole reason for existence. Their role is to facilitate the
accumulation of global capital and protect the big banks and financial
centers up North. A "balance of power" strategy that sets UN system
institutions against Bretton Woods institutions will inevitably come up
short, since it is predicated on the vain illusion that real power is based
in these institutions rather than in the vested interests they serve.

The main lesson to be derived from the failure of global environmental
reform associated with the Rio summit is that there is no possibility for an
effective movement for social justice and sustainability separate from the
struggle to create an alternative society. An approach that acknowledges the
failure of global ecological reform, and at the same time adopts the
position made famous by Margaret Thatcher, that "There is No Alternative" to
the present market-driven order, has little to offer in the way of real
change. Its initiatives are limited to a few alterations or additions to
international organizations, the mythical conversion of corporations into
"public citizens," or the illusion that the earth's salvation lies in
treating nature (and thus everything in existence) as capital.

The Real Struggle

The truth is that no "global deal" will be arrived at as a result of the
Johannesburg summit. The leading capitalist powers are not prepared to
strike a deal that would interfere with opportunities to make more and more
profits. The main issue supposedly on the table is that of free trade and
development. The countries of the South are demanding that the North abide
by its own principles by removing tariff and non-tariff barriers that
protect Northern industry, in precisely the same fashion as the North
demands that protectionist measures be removed in the South. Yet, neither
genuine free trade nor environmental sustainability will be advanced by the
summit talks. The rich countries at the center of the capitalist world
system are not about to apply to themselves the same rules they impose on
poor states in the periphery. Their goal is to continue to extract surplus
from the periphery. Fiddling with their own trade barriers is not a means
for achieving that end.

What we will see, as always, are further promises on the part of the wealthy
capitalist states to provide capital in the form of loans, needed
technological assistance, and some debt relief to the very poorest countries
(those that are completely unable to pay). In return the rich countries will
insist on the elimination of all barriers to capital erected in third world
states, including such things as food subsidies to the poor, which are seen
as distorting markets. Privatization of water and food are perceived as
solutions, not as problems.

The way that the global struggle over sustainable development is now being
played out can be seen quite clearly in the case of South Africa, which
during the preparations for the Johannesburg summit had vowed to make it a
true summit of the South. Tragically, the South African state has come more
and more to symbolize the present period of global neoliberalism and
imperial expansion. It is currently in a battle with its population over the
privatization of water and basic services such as electricity. This is in
sharp contrast to what was imagined only a decade ago when the overthrow of
apartheid made South Africa one of the foremost symbols of the advance of
human freedom. Today South Africa is the principal, subimperialist force
behind the neoliberal penetration of the African continent through the New
Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). It is with this subimperialist
South Africa that the United States is increasingly willing to deal, since
its goals are not incompatible with those of the American Empire. None of
this, however, has anything to do with genuine sustainable development.

But there is also another South Africa. In the last few years a militant
mass movement has risen up in South Africa against neoliberalism and
NEPAD-one that has its roots in the same townships that led the way in the
fight against apartheid. This new anti-neoliberal, antiglobalization
struggle is animated by a spirit of socialism and environmental justice in a
way that belies the view that there is no alternative. If the second earth
summit, despite everything, still offers a rational basis for hope, this has
less to do with the summit process itself than with the mass social action
taking place in the streets of Johannesburg, Durban, and throughout the
world. In the end there is only one absolute certainty in our uncertain
future-that the global struggle for a just and sustainable future will
continue.


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Notes

* In addition to Sachs, such well-known environmentalists as Hilary French,
Paul Hawken, Hazel Henderson, and Anita Roddick (of The Body Shop) were
among the sixteen contributors to The Jo'burg Memo. The memo is available at
www.joburgmemo.org.

* United Nations Environment Programme, Global Outlook 3 (Sterling, VA:
Earthscan, 2002), pp. 150-52; Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2002
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 5-12; International Forum on
Globalization, Intrinsic Consequences of Economic Globalization on the
Environment: Interim Report (San Francisco: IFG, 2002), pp. 101, 146; Lester
R. Brown, Eco-Economy (New York: W .W. Norton, 2001), pp. 9, 27, 71.

* The Worldwatch Institute also argues for a "global fair deal" in its
report prepared for the Johannesburg summit. In Worldwatch's case this means
new "partnerships" between multinational corporations, NGOs, governments.
and international organizations. See Worldwatch, State of the World 2002,
pp. 183, 198.