Living well is not living better at the expense of others. We need to build a communitarian socialism in harmony with Mother Earth.
What this actually means in practice is a work in progress, a feeling-around for policies and practices that build social solidarity in harmony with nature. It includes, at minimum, the extension of the commons, or public social goods, including basic services such as water, electricity, education, health, communication and transportation as human rights, not commodities to be bought and sold (Morales 2009). It means using renewable forms of energy that preserves the earth for future generations, based on the principle of sufficiency (Kovel 2002) and not endless growth pivoted on endless wants.
There is an emphasis on local and regional economies to, amongst other things, maximise democratic participation, and minimise carbon footprints caused by long-distance trade, particularly in fresh produce (or what some term ‘food miles’). For example, Cuba has achieved universally recognised success in getting local communities to produce organic fruit and vegetables in urban food gardens, for consumption by local communities themselves (Barclay 2003). The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), which brings together a range of Latin American countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, offers a radical reconceptualisation of trade relations based on fair trade, social solidarity and meeting human needs – as opposed to the cut-throat competition embedded in ‘free’ trade (Hattingh 2008). In the longer-term, an eco-socialist vision means shorter working time (which can substantially address the problem of unemployment, provided that it rests on a substantial social wage in the form of free or heavily subsidised public services, funded by, for example, global taxation), and more leisure time to pursue creative and socially useful activities. Frigga Haug (in Bullard 2009), drawing on Marx’s vision of communism, offers the fourfold challenge:
Four hours on wage labour (production)
Four hours on reproductive work (cooking, cleaning, gardening, caring for families)
Four hours on creative work (music, art, poetry, sport)
Four hours on political work (community organising).
Whether one adopts a green ‘new deal’ perspective, or a more radical eco-socialist perspective,3 both pose fundamental challenges to capitalism’s growth-at-all-costs tendencies. As the chapters in this section suggest, South Africa, like most countries in the world, has to deal with powerful vested interests if it wants to wean itself off the minerals-energy-financial complex, which is central to the accumulation-production-consumption treadmill that perpetuates massive social inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.
SOUTH AFRICA’S RESPONSES
I have argued that the current crisis cannot be separated from a broader crisis of capitalist growth that many argue is rooted in a manufacturing crisis of profitability, the enduring social crisis experienced by the majority of the world’s (and South Africa’s) population, as well as an ecological crisis of multiple dimensions (including resource depletion, pollution of various kinds and climate change) that threatens the very existence of the earth as we know it.
As indicated at the outset, South Africa is in many ways a microcosm of the world crisis, given its history of plunder, exploitation and enclave (or bifurcated) development. The wealth of the few is dialectically interlinked with the poverty of the many – a notion that sits uncomfortably with those who dominate the ideological discourse in the country and the world. Instead of the dominant view that separates the ‘alleviation of poverty’ of the majority from the ‘accumulation of wealth’ of the few, or the ‘economic’ from the ‘social’ and ‘ecological’, it is necessary to take a more holistic view of the poly-crisis at the global level, in order to understand its impact at the national or local levels. In this sense, the ‘alleviation of wealth’ becomes a central pre-condition to the eradication of poverty (Sachs 2001).
Articles in this section address aspects of this crisis as it affects South Africa. Seeraj Mohamed and Neva Makgetla directly address the impact of the financial crisis on South Africa’s economy. Mohamed shows how South Africa’s immersion in the global economy after 1994, and its adoption of neoliberal macroeconomic policies, accelerated the financialisation of capital with devastating consequences for industrial development and employment creation. He underlines the view that South Africa was in crisis long before the recent financial crisis, through rising unemployment, deindustrialisation, debt-driven consumption, and the outsourcing and informalisation of labour. These features of the country’s higher growth path, which was also driven by the growth in private security services (as the upper and middle class enclaves shield themselves from rising crime arising out of increased social dislocation) may very well have been the ‘wrong’ kind of growth.
Mohamed shows how the corporate sector speculated in financial markets more than in fixed investment, further weakening the country’s fragile industrial base, and entrenching its reliance on the mineral-energy complex. The post-apartheid period was characterised by massive capital flight, and a rash of mergers and acquisitions, which served to further stifle diversification of the economy. Economic liberalisation, low inflation and high interest rates, in keeping with global practice, was explicitly designed to attract foreign investment – but what South Africa attracted in the main was increased speculation and ‘hot’ money. The heightened role of services in the economy is not a sign of maturation, but ‘is due to the withdrawal of capital from the economy and the misallocation of capital towards financial speculation, housing price booms and exuberant consumption instead of productive investment’ (p60 in this volume).
Neva Makgetla continues this line of argument with a focus on the impact of the recent financial crisis on employment in the country. South Africa’s already high unemployment (officially at 26 per cent but unofficially up to 40 per cent of economically active citizens) worsened significantly during 2009. She shows a loss of almost a million jobs, at a far higher rate than the drop in GDP. Makgetla, however, acknowledges that government’s short-term countercyclical fiscal policy response and substantial industrial investment, unlike in the late 1990s downturn, seem to have moderated the impact of declining growth, investment and jobs. While revenues dropped by 9 per cent in 2009, Treasury maintained expenditure growth at 9 per cent, increasing the budget deficit to almost 8 per cent of GDP. On the other hand, microeconomic responses were too little too late, she argues, and the rapid appreciation of the rand has slowed the recovery significantly.
Along with Mohamed, Makgetla argues that the recent crisis underlines the need for a rethink of traditional approaches to industrial policy, which is still oriented towards exports, to the neglect of domestic and regional demand and the creation of employment, while also increasing living standards.
Scarlett Cornelissen unpacks the economic costs and benefits of hosting the football world cup. As she shows, South Africa’s headlong rush into hosting this spectacle, to showcase the country as a desirable tourist and investment destination, may cost the country dearly. Inflated job and incomes projections belie the real costs of building stadiums that will probably end up as white elephants. While the country may benefit in terms of increased national unity, and by showing the world that we can be as capable of hosting a multi-billion dollar event as any developed country, it is becoming clearer that instead of addressing our problems of underdevelopment and inequality, the event might in fact worsen them.
For many the World Cup, like the recent Miss
