Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance
By Patrick Bond
University of Cape Town Press/Juta, 2001
$35 (approx.)
For ordering details, email <cserv@juta.co.za> or <uctpress@hiddingh.uct.ac.za>
BY PETER McINNES
Patrick Bond should be no stranger to regular readers of Green Left Weekly, being an occasional correspondent from Johannesburg. His latest book, Against Global Apartheid, lets readers in on modern capitalism's dirty little secret: apartheid didn't really end with South Africa's 1994 elections. Political apartheid may have been defeated but separate and unequal development is still strongly in evidence in the new South Africa.
Bond argues that this is not simply a residue of the old system that will be gradually ended by the policies of the new reformist African National Congress government. The neo-liberal orientated policies of the ANC will entrench this separate and unequal development, primarily along class lines. It is the aim of reversing these policies that is behind Bond's arguments in Against Global Apartheid.
Bond utilises "apartheid" as a metaphor to highlight the impact of the formally colour-blind policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions. Bond's point is that these institutions are reproducing the same type of exclusion that was manifest in the "bad old days" of separate and massively unequal development in South Africa.
He builds his argument through demolishing the current "Washington consensus" economic orthodoxy, providing a detailed assessment of the World Bank's appalling record in Southern Africa. The range of policies offered by Washington is now so familiar and discredited that it is remarkable that South Africa's liberation movement leadership has so enthusiastically adopted their main tenets, with such unimpressive economic outcomes to date.
Bond also puts various reformist strategies to maintain global capitalist stability to the test (and finds them wanting in practice and intent), and then focuses on the various radical, people-centered approaches to taming and harnessing international financial flows.
Against Global Apartheid's argument has as its fulcrum a case study of the South African government's struggle against the scandalous profiteering by multinational pharmaceutical companies, which have attempted to maintain their monopoly pricing on AIDS drugs in the face of the unfolding tragedy in South African townships.
The struggle began in 1997, when the South African health department proposed a forward-thinking amendment to its medicines act. The amendment challenged international trade agreements by seeking to import, from Brazil and India, bargain-priced generic versions of branded AIDS drugs produced outside of the cartel of pharmaceutical companies. The cartel launched a court action to block the amendment. In the United States, corporate pressure was placed on the Democrats' aspiring presidential candidate Al Gore to force South Africa not to implement the legislation.
Bond sees this case as an example of how a combination of aggressive civil society activism and vision from national governments can win victories that many within the ANC have argued are impossible. At the time the book was written the ultimate victory over the big drug companies had not been achieved. Late last year, the pharmaceutical companies facing widespread condemnation for their shameless profiteering withdrew all legal challenges.
The victory over the pharma-giants resulted from the coordinated struggles of grassroots activists in South Africa and the United States.
Bond's more ambitious program is to fundamentally alter capitalist models of investment (or underinvestment as is currently the case). The viability of this, Bond believes, is dependent on struggles like that over the drug companies, for without demonstrable smaller victories against the agents of global capital it is hard to rebut the "TINA" [there is no alternative] claims of the ANC's leadership.
There is too little space to go into detail of Bond's proposals to introduce capital and currency controls contained in the book. Some proposals are hardly controversial. The globally coordinated Tobin Tax, which attempts to limit damaging currency speculation has even been promoted by some Washington insiders, as yet without success. His call for the destruction of the World Bank and IMF is a revolutionary reform that requires massive grassroots mobilisation and protest in both the North and the South. A prospect that until Seattle would have been unthinkable but is now within the realms of possibility.
Bond is clearly an internationalist as far as politically organising against global capital is concerned. Yet his positive program of action for the reform of international finance is local, focusing primarily on the nation-state as the site for controlling and directing investment for basic human needs.
It is in pursuit of this vision that the final part of the book sets out a detailed program of action. Bond sees global and national activism as providing the impetus to push reluctant politicians and bureaucrats towards the radical reforms needed as well as providing the democratic air to allow the reforms to survive once implementation begins.
Bond is an advocate and practitioner of the strategy of international solidarity to break the chains of global apartheid and create a new development model responsive to local needs, not those of international finance. His acknowledgments section suggest he has engaged in an exhausting dialogue with activists and intellectuals, street fighters and armchair theorists, from all over the world, which has clearly strengthened his program of action.
Last year's Tampa affair, and the riots in Woomera detention centre, give an idea of the costs of enforcing an international pass system resulting from the massive inequalities between North and South inherent in the "Washington consensus" economic model.
This review does scant justice to the depth of insight and detail contained in Against Global Apartheid's pages. It would be a very useful read for anyone interested in practical alternatives to neo-liberalism grounded in the experience of grassroots struggles to radically alter South African society to benefit the majority of people. Against Global Apartheid, reflecting Bond's optimism and convincing belief that global finance capitalism can be subdued, is a welcome addition to anti-globalisation literature written from a Third World perspective.
From Green Left Weekly, January 23, 2002.
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