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John Bellamy Foster |
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BOOKS RELATING f e a t u r e d »
The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy in Southern Africa RECENT ESSAYS ON:
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Essays on Africa |
Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for
Africa In his 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush finally put into words what all previous presidents could not bring themselves to utter in public: addiction. The United States, he conceded, is “addicted” to oil—which is to say addicted to the car—and as a consequence unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers. What he neglected to mention was that the post-Second World War U.S. global oil acquisition strategy—a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their “special relationship” aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep within the U.S. imperial fold. September 2006 A Warning to Africa:
The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil. June 2006 Struggle Is a
School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers’ Movement in Durban, South
Africa On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as “a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates.” It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as “indecent” and announced that … February 2006 Labor, the
State, and the Struggle for a Democratic Zimbabwe When Zimbabwe attained its first independent government in 1980, led by President Robert Mugabe and liberation fighters of the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), there were reasons to hope for a bright future. The new country inherited significant infrastructure from the prior Rhodesian settler regime, including relatively modern transportation and communications systems and an impressive set of import substitution industries. The economy had been built with extensive state support and planning (along with capital controls) to evade UN sanctions. By way of reconciliation, Mugabe sought good relations with local and regional capital, while establishing economic ties to China and East Bloc countries that had supported the liberation struggle. Roughly 100,000 white settlers remained in the country, operating the commanding heights of commerce, finance, industry, mining, and large-scale agriculture, as well as domestic small businesses. The 1980s witnessed rapid growth at first, then droughts, with 5 percent GDP growth when rainy seasons were average or better. Thanks to the construction of thousands of new clinics and schools, indices of health and education showed marked improvement. December 2005 From Racial to Class
Apartheid: South Africa’s Frustrating Decade of Freedom The end of the apartheid regime was a great human achievement. Yet the 1994 election of an African National Congress (ANC) majority—with Nelson Mandela as the new president—did not alter the enormous structural gap in wealth between the majority black and minority white populations. Indeed, it set in motion neoliberal policies that exacerbated class, race, and gender inequality. To promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between the racist white regime and the ANC allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions. There were only two basic paths that the ANC could follow. One was to mobilize the people and all their enthusiasm, energy, and hard work, use a larger share of the economic surplus (through state-directed investments and higher taxes), and stop the flow of capital abroad, including the repayment of illegitimate apartheid-era debt. The other was to adopt a neoliberal capitalist path, with a small reform here or there, while posturing as if social democracy was on the horizon. March 2004 Neoliberalism and
Resistance 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. January 2003 Zimbabwe, South
Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy Since February 2000, when President Robert Mugabe suffered his first-ever national electoral defeat-over a proposed new constitution-Zimbabwe has witnessed confusing debilitating political turmoil. A decade of economic decline, characteristic of the imposition of structural adjustment across Africa, preceded the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew-or priced at prohibitive levels-many social services, and the economy deindustrialized. State and private sector corruption were rife. May 2002 The Public Sector
Strikes in South Africa The restructuring of the public sector has been at the center of a heated debate inside the ruling Alliance led by the African National Congress, in coalition with the 1.8 million-strong union federation (COSATU), and the South African Communist Party. Two issues in particular have polarized opinion on the future of public employees: the reduction in personnel employed in social services and state-owned enterprises, and the constraints imposed by the government on wage increases for public servants. October 1999 |
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Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continent's southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production. Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it. This is the fundamental truth from which any honest analysis must begin. This is what explains why sub-Saharan Africa, with some 650 million people, over 10 percent of the world's population, has just 3 percent of its trade and only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product; and why income per head—averaging 460 dollars in 1994—has steadily fallen, relative to the industrialized world, and is now less than a fiftieth of what it is in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.* It also explains why sub-Saharan Africa's economies have responded worse than others to the market-oriented development policies urged on it by the World Bank and other outside agencies since the 1980s. Now the aid flow is declining, while population growth is still racing towards a barely imaginable 1 to 1.2 billion in the year 2020.** July/August 1999 |
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Political Reawakening in Zimbabwe Central to the social critique emerging now is the fallout from the touted 1990s Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP), overlaid with demands for good government. Designed in 1990, in large part by the World Bank, ESAP was supposed to quickly deregulate and indebt an economy seen as overprotected and inefficient. Economic disaster has characterized most of the period since 1991, as all ESAP's targets for growth and development were missed by huge margins, in spite of ZANU's adherence to the program. The failure of export-led growth and liberalization, according to the Washington Consensus, was reflected in Zimbabwe's mid-1997 debut in the Swiss-based World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report at fifty-second out of fifty-five countries. April 1999 |
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Mandela’s Democracy It appears both to those who praise Mandela as a realist, and those who denounce him as a traitor, that he had abandoned all he had stood for before. But there is no betrayal in his record. He has simply remained true to the underlying premise which had animated his economic thought all along: the need for the leader to make use of his prestige to put forward as the tribal consensus the position which was most capable of avoiding overt division. Once it became apparent that "the hostility and concern of businessmen towards nationalization" was more than even the prestige of Mandela could alter, his prestige had to be used for the cause of privatization. The capitalist market had become the meeting place of the global tribe! Even then, Mandela would continue to claim impartiality in the conflict of ideologies, holding in a lecture delivered in Singapore in March 1997 that South Africa was "neither socialist nor capitalist, but was driven rather by the desire to uplift its people." For him, the character of the economy, and through it the movement of history, is defined on the basis of the consensus which the leader can interpret at a given moment. A hidden consistency in his political thought holds together a dual commitment to democracy and capitalism, and legitimates a capitalist onslaught on the mass of South Africans, who sustained the struggle for democracy for decades. April 1999 |
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