Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired
I read an article earlier
this week about South Africa. It was in the Financial Times and it’s
interesting to study it a little. Many financial journals carried
the news including Bloomberg.
The article began with a
mention of the celebrations across the country after the SA rugby team beat
England and won the World Cup. It then went on to point out some other
celebrations but this time in the financial markets. The investors, traders,
moneylenders and other social parasites were happy because an institution based
in the United States “elected not to
downgrade the country’s debt to junk.” The institution was
Moody’s, one of the big three credit rating organizations.
This decision by Moody’s has
a huge impact on the lives of millions of people. By not downgrading the
country’s sovereign debt and keeping it in what they call investment grade
territory, institutional investors will be able to “buy” that debt. In plain language South Africa will be able to
borrow money in order to function as a country. Immediately, South Africa’s
currency against the US dollar and the price of insuring the country’s debt
against default got less expensive. Amazing.
Not so fast though. Moody’s
also said it was cutting the outlook
for the debt of Africa’s second largest economy form “stable” to “negative”. What
this message conveys is that there is still a chance that the government of
South Africa will, as the FT put it, “repair
its finances”. It’s a small dose of
economic terrorism. What “repair”
means is that the global institutions of capitalism dominated by the US, will
expect the South African government to impose the necessary austerity measures
on the South African working class in order to maintain debt payments to international
bankers and to privatize public services and institutions.
Stay of Execution
The South African government has three months to get its act together. What is happening is the South African government will be placed in this vice between international capital on the one hand and the possibility of social upheaval on the other as the working class pushes back. The institutions of global capitalism, dominated by US capitalism, will not only demand that any resistance from the South African working class, mostly black Africans as they historically did most of the work, be crushed, and that leaders of it and any other influential supporters be killed if need be. The institutions of international capital will as we have just witnessed in Bolivia, install a government that will carry out these policies if the existing one refuses to do so. It’s not unlike the heads of national unions that replace leaders of union locals that refuse to cooperate with the employers by forcing concessionary contracts on their members, with leaders that will.
The South African government has three months to get its act together. What is happening is the South African government will be placed in this vice between international capital on the one hand and the possibility of social upheaval on the other as the working class pushes back. The institutions of global capitalism, dominated by US capitalism, will not only demand that any resistance from the South African working class, mostly black Africans as they historically did most of the work, be crushed, and that leaders of it and any other influential supporters be killed if need be. The institutions of international capital will as we have just witnessed in Bolivia, install a government that will carry out these policies if the existing one refuses to do so. It’s not unlike the heads of national unions that replace leaders of union locals that refuse to cooperate with the employers by forcing concessionary contracts on their members, with leaders that will.
This decision by a privately
US owned credit rating company prevents an “automatic
expulsion” from the FTSE World Government Bond Index, which would mean that
investors would sell their South African sovereign debt and once again, make it
difficult or more expensive for the South African government to borrow money.
Making borrowing more expensive would mean increased attacks on the workers of
South Africa who are expected to hand over the pounds of flesh to the
moneylenders. Naturally, they will resist. The FTSE is owned by the Financial
Times and the London Stock exchange and is the UK’s equivalent of the Dow
Jones. It’s almost impossible to name these owners although we can be sure they
are basically a small group of global capitalists who are interlinked.
Like home owners, farmers,
students (or their parents) in the US, and in particular American workers and
the middle class indebted due to health needs in a country with a barbaric
health care system, South Africa like many nations, is teetering on the edge of
chaos day in and day out. This is despite having some of the worlds most
precious metals beneath its soil. The same is true of the Congo, Bolivia,
Australia, Brazil and other countries with huge wealth in the form of natural
resources. Next time someone tries to tell you that South Africa is in the
crisis it is because blacks don’t know how to govern, consider some of this
information here and do some checking of your own with regards to the Structural
Adjustment Programs forced on countries by the IMF and the World Bank. What
would be useful as well is to know how much wealth has been extracted from
South Africa’s mines and where it went.
The same lies about black
workers in South Africa, are spread about all workers. We’re lazy, living beyond our means, not
willing to sacrifice and so on.
“The consequences of not acting now would be grave for
South Africa. Over time, the country would likely face mounting debt service
costs and higher interest rates and may enter a debt trap.”, warns the former governor of the South African Central
Bank. The pressure is now on the SA government led by Cyril Ramaphosa the
former socialist leader of the National Union of Mine Workers (NUM). Ramaphosa is worth close to $1 billion and
also sits on the board of the British mining company, Lonmin, that, along with
the ANC, and allegedly leaders of the NUM, massacred platinum miners in what is
known as the Marikana Massacre, (See
Miners Shot Down an excellent documentary about this tragedy ,
Ramaphosa has been completely coopted by international capital and we must recognize, that despite his courage and dedication Nelson Mandela helped set the stage for much of this with his embracing of neo-liberal policies and deals with South African capitalism. It is his political orientation, not a lack of personal courage that is at the root of this decision. There’s a decent article on this issue here and more here
Ramaphosa has been completely coopted by international capital and we must recognize, that despite his courage and dedication Nelson Mandela helped set the stage for much of this with his embracing of neo-liberal policies and deals with South African capitalism. It is his political orientation, not a lack of personal courage that is at the root of this decision. There’s a decent article on this issue here and more here
The IMF, World Bank and those
behind these global capitalist institutions are hoping the former socialist and
union leader Ramaphosa can help force concessions on the South African working
class and keep resistance to them down to a minimum. The pressure is on him to
restructure debt and privatize public entities particularly the country’s
electric company Escom. We see this happening everywhere but it is pretty
common in many former colonial countries that the only half decent form of
employment is the state.
If the South African
government or a utility like Escom can’t borrow, and it can’t keep up with debt
payments at the present, the country won’t be able to “keep the lights on”. Financial experts are pushing Ramaphosa to do
his job which means finance capitalism’s bidding. Naturally, any resistance is
being referred to as him being “held
hostage” by the unions that have threatened direct action in the streets
and workplaces if any attempt is made to privatize the electricity utility.
It is staggering when one
thinks of it. People die of starvation, disease, lack of shelter, medical care,
water the basic necessities of life, not because society is incapable of
providing them or that the resources are not there, but because the owners of
capital actually go on strike---a strike of capital----refusing to allocate
this crucial aspect of production unless they make profits and can accumulate
vast wealth doing so. We must remind ourselves that capital is the product of
collective labor power yet privately owned. We can never end poverty, hunger or environmental destruction without controlling the economy without taking capital and the global financial industry out of private hands.
When nurses, teachers, any
workers, are forced to withhold our labor power because we cannot live a decent
or secure existence with what we are presently paid for it; we are attacked as
being obsessed with greed, selfish, anti-social. We can be labeled unpatriotic
or even worse-----communists. When we
have to go further and take to the streets as we have in Lebanon, Chile,
Ecuador, Iraq, because we can no longer live under regimes forced on us by the
very same forces that are demanding further depravation in South Africa, then
these forces move from political and social pressure to violence.
Here in the US, we are in the
belly of the capitalist beast; we are under the watch of the guy with the big
stick. We have never had a national party of the working class here in the USA.
Workers in other advanced capitalist economies have had their own parties at
one time or another, labor parties, social democratic parties, communist and
socialists. In these countries there has been public dialogue about the nature
of capitalism and of socialism as an alternative. This has given workers a
clearer understanding of how the world works and the nature of class society.
In the last analysis, ideas
or consciousness are rooted in material conditions, but the subject factor,
trade union leaders political parties etc. have a huge influence. We have
lacked this here in the US.
This will change as time
moves on and is indeed changing as we have seen with the growth and popularity
of socialist ideas and even the using of the term. This is positive regardless
of how confusing and varied the people’s understanding of what the term
actually means.
The forces that drove the
workers at GM out on strike are the very same forces that are driving the
protests in Lebanon, Iraq, Chile and that have driven Morales in Bolivia from
office. Class-consciousness in the US is low and the trade union hierarchy is
greatly responsible for this. But this will change. We must strive to see ourselves
as a class and a class unto ourselves with our own interests and our own
understanding of what we want to world to be and become.
Seeing ourselves more as a
distinctly separate class with our own economic interests as opposed to the
bosses and their political representatives will grow as the assault on the US
working class by US capitalism continues. But we have some work to do. We have
to recognize that religious, racial, gender, color differences between us are
an obstacle and we must overcome them if we are to survive. Michelle Obama
doesn’t call George W, Bush her “friend”
and “partner in crime” because she
likes hanging out with him. They are class allies, they know how important
class solidarity is and so should we.
We cannot provide a future
for our grandchildren or avert environmental catastrophe that will end life as
we know it on this planet without seeing national pride and nationalism for
what it is, a trick, a con game. Our allies are the workers around the world
that are fighting against the same capitalist forces that are destroying our
security, our lands. Our enemies are our own capitalists who refer to
themselves as “Americans” and imply
we all have the same interests. Our allies are the immigrants, workers and the
poor driven North in to Europe and North in to North America because of
imperialist plunder by the advanced capitalist economies.
A tiny Island that contains the economic unit we call the United Kingdom got rich and acquired great global power through plunder and robbery including in South Africa. It was economic, political and historical events that caused this nothing else.
A tiny Island that contains the economic unit we call the United Kingdom got rich and acquired great global power through plunder and robbery including in South Africa. It was economic, political and historical events that caused this nothing else.
Internationalism and
international class solidarity is imperative for our future, not because it’s
morally right, because it is the only way out of this madness. As James
Connolly once stated, "Capitalism
teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the
strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and
women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets
the most swill."
Today in California another
two youths died as a student shot up his school. The cause of this madness is
not the prevalence of guns although any normal person realizes we need sensible
laws around gun ownership. The problem is the system in which we live. Global
capitalism is the problem. Global socialism and working class internationalism is
the answer.
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