New South African Review 1 - Anthony Butler

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C (2010) Transnet may be disrupted but performance is robust and finances sound. Sunday Independent, 21 February.

      PART 1

      ECONOMY, ECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABILITY

      INTRODUCTION

      South Africa and the eco-logic of the global capitalist crisis

      Devan Pillay

      South Africa has been severely affected by the global financial crisis. Despite a return to growth in 2010, the crisis will come back as long as its fundamental roots are not addressed. Indeed, we need to ask whether the crisis is a purely ‘financial’ one, or multidimensional. Is it of recent origin, or something that began with the market liberalisation of the late 1970s – or does it go right back to the origins of capitalism as a world system, of which South Africa is a microcosm?

      Despite the fact that SA’s financial sector was much better regulated than at the centres of the global system, the financial crisis has deepened an already severe socio-economic crisis. As the chapters that follow show, it accelerated declining manufacturing output or the deindustri-alisation of the economy, partly because of a decline in global demand and partly because of the rand’s rise against the British pound and US dollar. Most severely, up to one million jobs were lost in 2009, in a context of massive unemployment (unofficially close to 40 per cent of economically active citizens), rising social inequality and persistent poverty. To take two telling indices: over one-third of the population is food insecure, and a quarter of children under six years of age is malnourished (Human Sciences Research Council, cited in Andrews 2008).

      At a fundamental level, there are increasing indications that the country’s growth trajectory faces a crisis of ‘sustainability’ in both senses of the word – sustainable growth that creates decent jobs and rising living standards for all, as well as sustainable growth that protects the natural environment and leaves the earth with sufficient resources for future generations. This crisis is rooted in the structure of the South African economy, which was inherited from the colonial past.

      In South Africa, racial capitalism emerged as a result of a minerals-energy complex (Fine and Rustomjee 1996) – a synergy between the mining industry and fossil energy systems that sustain it, as well as a financial sector that grew out of it. This minerals-energy-financial complex remains central to South African capitalism, subordinating all other economic activities, including manufacturing. It rests on the exploitation of fossil fuels and risky mining operations that have seen the death of tens of thousands of people over the last century. A slowly dera-cialising minority experiences the only tangible benefits, whilst the (mainly black) majority live in conditions of underdevelopment in the predominantly rural former homelands, or in polluted slums and townships in the urban areas.

      Efforts to move out of this dependence have been half-hearted. The only strategy the state has so far embarked on is a combination of limited redistribution (mainly poverty alleviation through grants), an incoherent land redistribution programme, short-term public works programmes, repeated attempts at an industrial policy and a gradually visible but hitherto lame ‘sustainable development’ effort. These are undermined by a logic of accumulation that maintains at its centre the minerals-energy-financial complex – as well as a culture of consumerism that rests on ever-expanding, unsustainable wants, fuelled by a sales effort (the advertising/media industry) that is essential to the production/accumulation process.

      This logic of uneven (or enclave) capitalist development is, in many ways, a microcosmic expression of global capitalist development. The crisis of sustainability is integrally linked to the global economic/ecological crisis, and can only be fully understood in relation to the global context. This contribution discusses the dimensions of the poly-crisis in historical perspective, and asks whether capitalism has reached both its natural and its social limits. Is the answer a ‘green capitalism’ (or for some a ‘green new deal’) or does capitalism need to be completely transcended (a form of ‘eco-socialism’)? It ends with a consideration of South African responses to the crisis, as discussed in the chapters that follow, as well as other responses within government and civil society.

      THE GLOBAL POLY-CRISIS

      The notion of ‘crisis’ can take on different meanings, depending on which discipline one is located in. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with a commonplace definition. According to the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1999), a crisis is either, on the one hand, a time of ‘difficulty or stress’ (or an ‘emergency’); or, on the other, a ‘turning point’ (a crucial or ‘decisive’ moment). In the first sense, a crisis can come and go, leaving the system largely intact. In the second sense, a crisis can dramatically alter, even overthrow, the system, bringing forth a fundamentally altered state of being. In either case a crisis can be short-term and dramatic, or long-term and gradual, with dramatic eruptions from time to time.

      A crisis is usually deemed a crisis by those in the midst of it, experiencing its effects. The poor, hungry and exploited majority of the world’s (and South Africa’s) population, it could be argued, have been in crisis for much of the twentieth century – stripped of their land and means of subsistence, and forced to sell their labour (if they are lucky) or beg and steal to eke out an existence, often in health-threatening working and living environments deliberately placed close to the polluting waste of industry. From an ecological perspective, the natural world or ecosystem (including other living creatures) has been in various stages of crises as industrial development crowds out non-human animals, forcing them into fenced-off parks and zoos, hunted and sought for trophies, while the destruction of forests, pollution and emissions threaten the very existence of earth as we know it. The latter has only become a concern for the privileged and powerful when it threatened their own system of production and consumption – but only grudgingly, and partially. Many are still in denial.

      However, when there is a crisis of profitability, such that the wealth of the rich and powerful is directly threatened, only then is a ‘crisis’ truly proclaimed. This is even more so when the rich and powerful at the centre of global capitalism – in North America and Western Europe – are affected, which is the case today.

      The financial crisis has had a direct impact on the real economy, with low consumer demand leading to a crisis in manufacturing, and millions of job losses throughout the world. This crisis, which began in 2007 and has grabbed the headlines since then, rapidly displaced the ecological crisis gripping the world a few months previously (particularly when oil prices began to approach the US$200 a barrel level). The run-up to, and aftermath of, the December 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change temporarily put the natural limits to growth back on the global agenda, but with relatively low oil prices (around US$70 a barrel), the minds of the world’s governments were insufficiently focussed to produce a binding commitment to lowering carbon emissions and move decisively towards a non-nuclear renewable energy regime.

      High oil prices, the threat of depleted fossil fuels (particularly oil) to run the modern economy, oil spills, the destruction of rain forests, the displacement of millions of rural dwellers for the building of dams to supply industry, the rapid decline of biodiversity, rampant carbon emissions and pollution such as acid rain and acid mine drainage (which endanger the health of both humans and the eco-system) and natural disasters caused by climate change – all of these and many other ecological disasters are rarely or weakly linked to the economic/financial crisis, and the socio-political consequences of both.

      In other words, when we speak of a ‘global crisis’, it is necessary to conceptualise the interconnected economic, ecological and socio-political crises, as well as a looming food crisis that arises out of them (Roberts 2008). Indeed, as Foster (1999: 195) observes, the word ‘ecology’, coined by Ernst Haeckel

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