Red Pepper » Patrick Bond

No better model

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:00:42 +0000

This morning, in the most important newspaper in Africa, Johannesburg’s Business Day, I come across this remark in the publisher’s weekly column: ‘The thing is that Americans, in a way none of the rest of us fully appreciate, are driven by an unshakeable conviction that if they work together they can do almost anything better than anyone else. That sort of conviction only occurs in democracies and the more pure the democracy, the stronger the consensus in society.’
Fortunately I can quickly turn to an antidote sitting on my desk, a vast tome that took more than a decade to construct, but that bullshit-detects such romanticism by revealing – better than anything else now available – Washington’s combined, uneven and fatally contradictory processes of imperialist expansion, catastrophic financialisation, excessively liberalised trade, intensifying class struggle and crisis mismanagement.
In The Making of Global Capitalism, Canadian political economists Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin provide a masterful century-long history of US corporate activity and state economic strategy. Insofar as capitalist states are where class interests are codified, their spicy reading of dry officialdom’s milquetoast narratives is absolutely vital to our knowledge about power.
Having worked with Panitch and Gindin during 2003-04, I can testify that their on-ground practices and building of a formidable community of radical scholars at York University’s political science department and in the Toronto left are exemplary, as is the Socialist Register project, which is properly catholic in treating the most crucial debates.
Grappling with the past five years of world turmoil, Panitch and Gindin were probably shaken by the recent period, for it was my experience that the very word ‘crisis’ was previously frowned upon in their Empire seminar, so convinced were they that mechanisms of accumulation and class domination were firmly in place. Financial markets did, then, appear smooth and seductive, especially to workers who shouldered unprecedented debt burdens along with widespread belief in ever-rising real estate prices. But this in turn created both a collaborative labour aristocracy steadily losing privileges, and the repo man’s knock at the door of the sub-prime house. As Panitch and Gindin explain, this was a divisive and atomising process in the US, compared say to earlier collective-action episodes such as Mexico’s 1995 ‘El Barzon’ debt rebellion or early 1990s South African ‘bond boycotts’.
It is here that Panitch and Gindin add so much to our understanding of too-clever elite displacement of persistent crisis, in my view. Still, though, they would describe the mid-1980s-2000s as an era of growth in which crisis tendencies of prior decades – born of a ‘profit-squeeze’ (i.e. worker militancy) – were actually resolved. But given those steadily rising debt ratios from the early 1980s, which can only partly be explained by technological advances in financial engineering , I still don’t buy it. My sense is that, like David Harvey’s argument in Enigma of Capital and Limits to Capital, global capitalism relied upon the spatial fix (globalisation), temporal fix (financialisation, stretching out payment times), and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (imperialism) as crisis management techniques: i.e. shifting, stalling and stealing instead of the restructuring required to restart accumulation properly.
Yet thanks to Panitch and Gindin, we know much more about how this was arranged. Writing in their Washington-centric world (so unlike Hardt and Negri’s Empire), there are two corollaries that I hope are further debated. First is their tenacious denial of ‘the collapse of investment due to general overaccumulation’, which is disputed in other recent books by John Bellamy Foster, David McNally and Alex Callinicos. We could unpack whether vast software investments during the late 1990s splurge were real or bogus from the standpoint of surplus value extraction. And then, regarding profit rates, we might strip out rentier profits earned by most of the west’s biggest ‘productive’ firms and conclude with a different interpretation of genuine corporate health, contrary to the tycoons’ botoxed, steroided appearance, disguising their muscle-bound paralysis.
Second, we need to consider the lack of inter-imperialist rivalry in this story, at a time when world–1 per cent fragmentation foils globo-governance initiatives such as renewing the World Trade Organisation Doha round, legitimising the Bretton Woods Institutions, refashioning the currently anarchic world financial ‘architecture’, subduing Latin America’s pink tide, or making the UN security council work better for imperialism.
Most valuable, though, are the ways these Canadians set out anti-capitalist principles and critiques of reformism, and defend socialist aspirations. In perhaps no other site in the English-speaking academic world are such committed, principled and generous leaders so warmly received by colleagues and students, and more importantly, by workers and communities in struggle. This means taking with utmost seriousness both their analysis and strategy, for even if they do not always jump the gap perfectly, no one I know has a better working model.

South Africa’s own goal

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:54:53 +0000

Visitors to the World Cup in South Africa this June will have to try hard not to see some shocking contrasts in wealth and poverty. On the one hand, the vast informal settlements in the Cape Flats and Soweto, where hundreds of thousands of poor black South Africans live in shacks without basic services. On the other, the new £380-million Green Point stadium in Cape Town and £300-million refurbished Soccer City in Johannesburg, which have received huge subsidies thanks to rulers from both the white liberal-dominated Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress.

Cape Town’s contrast is especially galling given that an upgrade of the Newlands cricket field (in a white suburb) or of Athlone’s stadium (in a black neighbourhood) would have been far cheaper. The latter was rejected, according to a representative of the international football federation Fifa, because ‘a billion television viewers don’t want to see shacks and poverty on this scale.’

South Africa’s second-largest city, Durban, boasts the most memorable new sports facility (£275 million worth, overrun from an original £160 million budget), as well as the country’s highest-profile municipal sleaze and chutzpah. This exudes from a city manager, Mike Sutcliffe, who tried – but failed – to gentrify a century-old Indian/African market for Fifa’s sake, and who regularly bans nonviolent demonstrations.

Executives of Zurich-based Fifa, especially Fifa president Sepp Blatter, blithely ignore the havoc this extravaganza is creating. To illustrate, expensive imported German marquee tents apparently require erection by a German construction company. And Fifa gets sole occupation of Durban’s Moses Mabhida stadium – including retail space and a controversial, oft-broken Sky Car up the iconic 108 meter high arch – for nearly a month, even on the 75 per cent of days soccer won’t be played, keeping the facility off-limits to visitors.

Recent national laws provide Blatter guarantees in terms of ‘ambush marketing’, logistical support, access control and protection for Fifa’s corporate partners (Adidas, Sony, Visa, Emirates, Coca Cola, Hyundai-Kia, McDonalds, local phone giants Telkom and MTN, First National Bank, Continental Tyres, Castrol, McDonalds, and Indian IT company Satyam). Only Fifa-endorsed items can be advertised within a one-kilometre radius of the stadium and along major roads. All profits go to Fifa, whose 2010 take is estimated at £2.2 billion.

Shunted off

Little will trickle down. Aside from ear-splitting vuvuzela plastic trumpets, the much-vaunted ‘African’ feel to the World Cup will be muted. Even the women who typically sell pap (corn meal) and vleis (inexpensive meat) just outside soccer stadiums will be shunted off at least a kilometre away. According to leading researcher Udesh Pillay of the South African Human Sciences Research Council, in 2005 one in three South Africans hoped to personally benefit from the World Cup, but this fell to one in five in 2009, and one in 100 today.

Danny Jordaan, CEO of the World Cup Local Organising Committee, predicted in 2005 that the games would be worth as much as £3.9 billion profit to South Africa, even after 2010-related infrastructure expenses. An estimated 400,000 people would visit the country and 160,000 jobs would be created. But current estimates have more than halved those figures. The hospitality industry is shattered after a third of rooms initially booked by Fifa’s Match agency were recently cancelled.

Benefits have shrunk but costs have soared. South Africa’s 2003 Bid Book estimate of between £100 million and £750 million rose in October 2006 to a final projected £900 million. Since then, escalations have been prolific, and now £3.6 billion is typically cited as the 2010 cost (above and beyond standard infrastructure maintenance and upgrading) – as against £1.2 billion in tourist income (an overestimate since many non-soccer tourists are staying away due to fears of overcrowding).

Some expenses, such as a new fast train from Johannesburg’s refurbished airport to the Sandton financial district, will receive partial payback from future customers, but many such projects were break-even at best without the momentary 2010 inflow. The Congress of South African Trade Unions argued in early 2009 that ‘the billions being spent on this prestige project for a rich minority of commuters should rather be spent on upgrading the existing public transport system, which is used by the poor majority.’

Mood of protest

The mood of poor and working people remains feisty, with several dozen protests each day according to police statistics, most over ‘service delivery’ shortcomings. A University of Cape Town research team reported in early 2010 that the underlying causes of discontent will continue long after the final goal. Principal among these are worsening urban poverty and rising income differentials (along both class and race lines) in what is already the most unequal major society in the world.

At least two political assassinations allegedly associated with 2010 profiteering have occurred in Mpumalanga Province’s host city, Mbombela (formerly Nelspruit). More than a thousand pupils demonstrated against Mbombela stadium when schools displaced in the construction process were not rebuilt. Mpumalanga also witnessed a recent return of apparent xenophobia, which after the World Cup may well worsen, with desperately poor South Africans turning from attacks against municipal facilities to loot retail traders from Pakistan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Other World Cup-related protests have been held by informal traders in Durban and Cape Town; against Johannesburg officials by Soccer City neighbours in impoverished Riverlea township; against construction companies by workers; and against national officials by four towns’ activists attempting to relocate the provincial borders to shift their municipalities to a wealthier province. Just a month before the first ball was to be kicked in the tournament, strikes were threatened, raging or had just been settled over national electricity price increases, transport sector wages and municipal worker grievances.

Nor will the masses have much to cheer on the field, as the national soccer team, appropriately named Bafana Bafana (‘boys, boys’), has fallen in the global rankings from 81st to 90th this year. Global soccer apartheid means that the best African players are sucked up into European clubs with little opportunity to prepare for such events.

Trevor Phillips, former director of the South African Premier Soccer League, asks: ‘What the hell are we going to do with a 70,000-seater football stadium in Durban once the World Cup is over? Durban has two football teams, which attract crowds of only a few thousand. It would have been more sensible to have built smaller stadiums nearer the football-loving heartlands and used the surplus funds to have constructed training facilities in the townships.’

The local winners in the process are not footballers or even rugby teams that municipal officials fruitlessly hope will one day fill the white-elephant stadia. They are the large corporations and politically-connected black ‘tenderpreneurs’ (who win state tenders thanks to affirmative action, if linked to established white firms), especially in the construction sector.

This process reflects post-apartheid accumulation, according to Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of former president Thabo: ‘Black economic empowerment was created by the ultra-wealthy white business community in this country, who were involved in mining and financing and other big business, as a method of countering a programme of nationalisation. It was a matter of co-option, to co-opt the African nationalist leaders by enriching them privately.’

But with all the problems thus created, co-option is not on the cards this year. As the hype fades and protests become more insistent, the local elites’ mistake in hosting these games will be glaring. Global business and the genuine joy associated with the world’s most loved sport are mutually incompatible.

Ashwin Desai recently edited The Race to Transform: sport in post-apartheid South Africa. Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal