The Antidote

‘A universe we choose’ – Part 3 June 21, 2007

‘A universe we choose’ – The Fight against Corporate Globalisation: A South African perspective (Part 3)

(Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here)

by Sam Wilson and Andreas Späth

The female face of global resistance
(I guess this was going to be a sidebar to the main story, but here it is anyway, for completeness sake) .

Arundhati Roy
The daughter of a Syrian Christian mother, a divorcee who managed a tea plantation (much like the character of Ammu in Roy’s Booker prize winning novel, The God of Small Things), 43-year-old Arundhati Roy did not attend school until she was 10, being schooled instead by her mother.

After boarding at a school in Southern India, and training at Dehli’s School of Planning and Architecture, Roy supported herself as an aerobics instructor before becoming one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. She has since used her public profile to voice many of the tenets of the global resistance movement, and her political journalism is every bit as lyrical and hard-hitting as her much fêted prose.

By characterizing corporate globalisation as no more than the new face of imperialism, Roy exhorts us to follow our hearts and relearn the art of civil disobedience.

In her own words? ‘We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar…. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.’

Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international bestseller No Logo, described as ‘ a movement handbook’ by the New York Times. She comes from strong activist stock, her mother Bonnie Klein is a leading Canadian feminist while her grandfather, an American Marxist, was a Disney animator fired and blacklisted for organizing the company’s first strike. Her parents moved to Canada in protest over the Vietnam War.

Where Roy enchants with her prose, Klein follows in the more traditional journalistic steps of feminists such as Susan Faludi, gathering and presenting the facts which then speak for themselves. She sees herself as ‘an activist journalist’, rather than an activist as she ‘hates crowds – I know, great irony’ and is ‘physically incapable of chanting’.

From exposés of sweatshop workers in the Philippines who have to urinate into plastic bags under their desks, as they are not allowed to leave their Gap/ Liz Claiborne sewing long enough to go to the toilet, to detailing the nefarious corporate strategies of companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks, Klein has, nevertheless, given the global resistance movement a lot to chant about.

For nearly a decade, Klein has been traveling through Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism.

‘When people say the movement lacks vision, what they are really saying is that it is a completely new kind of movement – just as the Internet is a completely new kind of medium… the movement should be in no hurry to define itself,’ says Klein. ‘Before they sign on to anyone’s 10-point plan, they deserve the chance to see if, out of the movement’s chaotic, decentralized, multi-headed webs, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge.’

‘A universe we choose’ – Part 2 June 18, 2007

‘A universe we choose’ – The Fight against Corporate Globalisation: A South African perspective (Part 2)

(Part 1 is here)

by Sam Wilson and Andreas Späth

The impact of neoliberalism in SA

Post-apartheid South Africa took to neoliberal policies like a stock market raider to a currency-market loophole.

First, there was our apartheid debt. In 1994, SA owed nearly $20 billion in foreign debt, advanced by global financial institutions to a corrupt, illegitimate government. To cement our commitment to the neoliberal paradigm, and so as not to raise eyebrows at the World Bank or IMF, we simply paid this staggering sum back. Without a fuss.

Then with the creation of the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution program (GEAR), we are probably the only developing nation to pen its very own neoliberal economic strategy (with some help from World Bank and IMF advisers). Other developing countries, often highly indebted and dependant on the 1^st World, have tended to adopt neoliberal policies (such as the IMF’s notorious structural adjustment programs) under some duress.

And the truth is, ten years into our fêted welcome into the global economy, it isn’t looking so good.

The great divide

SA is Africa’s richest country. We are also one of the world’s most unequal, with 40% of the poorest household’s garnering only 3.3% of the country’s income. And this divide is getting worse… not better.

Unemployment and the rise of the ‘McJob’

Unemployment has been spiraling. In the last 10 years we have lost over half a million jobs (some peg that figure at closer to one million). Equally frightening, only some 40% of South Africans with jobs have permanent positions – the other 60% are forced to settle for contract, part time or casual work, with reduced or non existent benefits, no security, yet often, exactly the same job description as their permanent counterparts.

Cutting lifelines

Despite repeated promises of free lifeline basic services and the much-touted rollouts by the likes of Eskom and Telkom, the increasing insistence on total cost-recovery for such services has resulted in tens of thousands of households affected by water, electricity and telephone cut-offs and evictions. Ashwin Desai suggests that “the cost-recovery prerequisites of neoliberalism are creating a new kind of apartheid”.

Lowering of import taxes

The drastic lowering of import taxes has been disastrous to sectors of the local manufacturing industry such as the clothing and textile branches.

The global resistance movement…

The good news is that we are still South Africans, and many of us still put our money where our mouths are when we are gatvol.

Over the years, a growing number of grassroots organizations have started to question and oppose some of the neoliberal policies that affect their lives at the local level throughout South Africa.

The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign has been fighting house evictions in the townships around Cape Town, while the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee has illegally reconnected power to thousands of homes. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has doggedly challenged the governments AIDS policy, Jubilee South Africa has highlighted the injustice of apartheid debt repayments and the need for reparations, the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) has demonstrated against the painfully slow rate of land redistribution, and green groups such as Earthlife Africa and Groundwork have tackled a range of environmental concerns.

Slowly, these groups have made the connections between their local problems and those of other organizations around the country and gradually also with similar communities throughout the world. This process of networking has been going on globally for years and has resulted in the world-wide web that is the anti-globalisation movement, which has demonstrated against the IMF, World Bank and WTO, as well as a wide range of issues from the wars in the Middle East to the introduction of genetically-modified crops.

Frequently misrepresented by the mainstream media and maligned by some opponents as leaderless and aimless, this is not a rigid political organization in the old-fashioned mould. Rather it is a diverse, somewhat anarchic and voluntary association of equals who share common views on numerous issues.

Characterised by its savvy use of the Internet, a widespread rejection of hierarchical organizational practices, a stress on creativity and spontaneity, and a preference for direct participatory democratic process, it has confounded many a critic by its longevity. Although the movement has no individual leaders as such, it has also provided a platform for a number of intellectuals, among whom the strong female voices of Canadian Naomi Klein and Indian Arundhati Roy are particularly notable.

After the 2000 annual IMF/World Bank meetings in Prague were cut short by demonstrations, Trevor Manuel (chairperson of the IMF/World Bank board of governors at the time) remarked: “I know what the protesters are against, but I don’t know what they are for!” Given a chance to reply, the demonstrators. whose most often repeated slogan insists that “another world is possible”, may have answered that what one is for is often implicit in what one is against.

Just as 10 years ago, being against apartheid implied being for democracy and non-racialism, being against economic globalisation and neoliberalism is being for human rights over corporate profits.

It is about being for a world which is not specifically GEARed towards widening the gap between rich and poor. It is about being for a world where ordinary citizens do not have to risk life-threatening disease because their inability to participate in the global economy makes them worth less than cows.

It is about having the courage to believe in people over profits, and then to act on that belief. It is about the courage to believe that another world is indeed possible.

‘A universe we choose’ – Part 1 June 14, 2007

Sam and I wrote this about a year or two ago, but then didn’t manage to sell it to anyone. So now I’m inflicting it on you (in three parts nogal). It’s still relevant, I reckon.

‘A universe we choose’ – The Fight against Corporate Globalisation: A South African perspective (Part 1)

by Sam Wilson and Andreas Späth

In 2000, a cholera outbreak around Ngwelezane in rural KZN killed nearly 200 people and infected more than 80 000 others. Why the outbreak? The government had recently terminated a 17-year-long, apartheid-era supply of free water. Those too poor to buy their water found themselves forced to gather it from wherever they could find it, storm drains, dirty rivers, stagnant pools…. hence the cholera.

For millions, our whole conception of ‘a new South African identity’ is inextricably tied to the pride we have in the democratic principles enshrined in our Constitution. Drenched in ubuntu and patriotism, our constitution specifically promises, among other basic human rights, access to adequate housing, food and water.

So what happened here? Did our government really put its profit margin above the lives of these people? Could our national priorities have shifted that much in less than a decade?

(Then) Wits academic Patrick Bond is just one of the critics blaming our government for adopting neoliberal economic policies that put profit before people. Government is turning basic services like water and electricity into commodities, and then selling them off to the highest bidder. From there, it’s a quick step to insist upon a 100% cost recovery model from ‘customers’, regardless of how poor these individuals may be. No money, no water.

What prompted our government to take such a step? For a lot of reasons, but not least of which the fact that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have made no bones about the fact that they will be plenty cheesed off if SA doesn’t go this route. In the words of writer-activist Ashwin Desai, ‘our transition to democracy… was trumped by the transition to neoliberalism’.

What is neoliberalism?

For the last quarter of a century, neoliberalism (sometimes also referred to as the Washington Consensus) has been the economic theory that has allowed the astonishing success of corporate globalisation.

Initiated by University of Chicago economist Friedrich von Hayek and a group of his students including Milton Friedman, it is a theory that has been aggressively pursued by large governments, the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO). Margaret Thatcher was a particularly zealous neoliberalist.

Basically, neoliberalism is designed to maximize profits and efficiency by making the movement of goods, resources and finances (but not people) between nations freer and easier. How is this achieved?

· Strict insistence on free market principles.

· Severe cuts in public expenditure for social services (Remember the school lunch furore in the UK: ‘Maggie Thatcher stole my milk money?’).

· ‘Flexible’ labour relations, with reduced wages and an emphasis on part-time, contract and casual labour (derisively christened the ‘McJob’ by critics).

· Privatisation of state-owned assets and services.

· Removal of tariffs and regulations that act as barriers to international trade and investment.

It isn’t that simple though, as neoliberalism comes with a built-in side order of hypocrisy. While countries in the North insist that we in the South offer up complete financial and trade transparency, they are at the same time rigorously protecting their own sensitive markets. Sparkling wine, anyone?

So, who benefits? Let’s look at it this way. In 1999, the total sales of each of the five biggest companies (General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, Daimler Chrysler) exceeded South Africa’s GDP. That’s a lot of sales.

We hear the term corporate globalisation bandied about a lot… and it is just these kinds of figures which underpin the concept. Simply put, as new markets are ‘encouraged’ by the WTO and IMF to open their trade doors as wide as possible, so the supercompanies come storming in… with corporate machinery that can dominate commerce, production, finance and culture faster than you can say ‘Happy Meal’.

And the statistics are truly mind-boggling: more than half of the world’s biggest economies are not countries, but corporations, the vast majority of which are based in North America, Western Europe and Japan – hence the old East/West divide has given way to North/South in politico-speak.

While a few Northern supercompanies may have amassed untold wealth and power under neoliberalism, critics argue that inequalities between the rich and poor have increased in virtually all countries as a result of it. The world’s top 200 corporations’ combined sales were 18 times the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people living in “severe” poverty.

The wealth gap between the rich countries of the North and the nations of the third world has grown steadily. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano uses this example: ‘Western Governments pay their farmers a subsidy each year for every cow they rear. Halve that subsidy. You are looking at about the annual salary of a peasant in a poor country. Basically, applying free market principles and thinking globally, the average impoverished third world peasant is worth about half a cow’.