Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane
Second Look
A groundswell movement for people-centred social justice is generating a momentum that amounts to the left’s best hope for 30 years. It is a reinvention of the left that involves new formations in place of traditional communist parties and left-wing governments.
And it draws on a network of strategic affiliations among a wide range of new social forces and subcultural activities including environmental groups, lesbian and gay activists, feminists, community- based organisations, anti- nuclear groups, non-mainstream media and alternative education. From November 1999 in Seattle to Davos, Bangkok, Cochabamba, Washington, Chiang Mai, Bombay, Buenos Aires, London, Istanbul, Lagos, Windsor, Johannesburg and Nice, powerful anti-globalisation demonstrations have targeted the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation. And more are planned, looking ahead to the Washington summit of the World Bank in October 2001. But what is “the left”? As a socialist project deriving from 19th- century Europe, the left’s raison d’etre was to realise the fullest potential of human beings, argues Eddie Webster, professor of sociology at Wits University.
The 20th century saw this project taking form in three traditions: the communist, the social democratic and national liberation (as well as anti-colonial) struggles. “All three,” says Webster, “have run their course now.” The new left activism includes historically oppressed racial groups, women, the self- employed and the informal sector five-sixths of the world that traditional left projects in effect excluded. These voices are now stronger than ever, and “the new left must take them as a starting point”, suggests Webster. There is a global crisis of social disintegration, an increasing divide between rich and poor, rampant unemployment, environmental devastation and a lack of health care for the world’s majority. All these result from what poet and activist Denis Brutus has described as “systematic ‘neo-liberal’ injustice: market imperatives ruining ordinary people’s lives”.
The reinvented left is mounting a revolution against the neo-liberal dogma of governments, big business and mainstream media, which preach that there is no alternative to the supremacy of market forces. If we accept the orthodox version of reality, then the march of globalisation seems to be inevitable. We will also believe that widespread poverty, disease and unemployment can at best be alleviated, never eliminated. In other words, we will opt for fixing, not nixing, the system, or for reform rather than revolution. But the “nixers”, such as Brutus and other activists worldwide and in South Africa, are both calling for and coordinating new confrontations.
These confrontations are challenging “large corporations, commodification of daily life, commercialisation of culture, destruction of indigenous livelihoods, intensification of patriarchy, fouling of the environment, and the construction of undemocratic, world-state institutions in Washington and Geneva”, says Patrick Bond, professor at Wits School of Public and Development Management.
One strategy in this revolution is to hit the World Bank where it hurts most the finances at its disposal. Eighty percent of these come from bonds it issues in return for funds invested in the bank. So: refuse to invest in the World Bank. Defund it, and so close it down. Nix it, don’t fix it. Sounds idealistic? Yet the city of San Francisco the United States’s second financial capital after New York has kick-started a boycott of World Bank bonds. The city councils of Oakland and Berkeley have followed suit. This powerful start draws in a growing consensus of churches, unions, NGOs, munici- palities and 40 US universities. One of South Africa’s premier universities, Wits University, now finds itself under pressure from within to join this boycott. A committee was established this month to convene a colloquium to debate the issue.
For the past three decades commitments to a human rights culture have been diluted through a neo-liberal surrender to the belief that charity hand-outs constitute humanity’s grandest strategy for dealing with poverty and other human suffering.
The reinvented left looks to diverse ways of realising human potential. Where earlier left traditions asserted the ownership of the factory or the state as the ultimate fulfillment, the new left promotes wider individual possibilities, for instance expressing your sexuality, your language or your “disability”. Recent South African politicians have sung the global neo-liberal tune. President Thabo Mbeki often talks left but acts right; Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Irwin don’t even bother to talk left anymore. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was originally based on human rights demands (the same way the Freedom Charter was) but has been completely trashed in favour of the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy, with full World Bank and IMF approval. Gear in practice also involves the privati- sation of water. About 50000 people in KwaZulu-Natal have been infected with cholera and more than 100 have died. This has followed Mbeki’s reversal, following World Bank advice, of his promise of 6000 litres of free water a month a household. Privatisation kills. “New and intensified ideological attacks on the working class are the tear gas and Casspirs of today,” says South African Communist Party secretary general Blade Nzimande. “Neo-liberalism’s battering” results in “the job-loss bloodbath, outsourcing … privatisation, and the rolling-back of the public sector”, he says. Trevor Ngwane, independent candidate in Pimville in December’s municipal elections and head of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (formed last year), says: “I believe there is a revival of the left because of the dissatisfaction that is going on in the country, with the African National Congress having dumped the RDP, which was based on people’s demands, to opt for the right-wing Gear policies, which were written up behind closed doors with the World Bank.” Despite standing as an independent, without party support structures, Ngwane still polled one- third of the votes in his district.
Central to the new left is a renewed fight for women’s rights. “About three years ago in the Western Cape, the new women’s movement was organised, and around the country discussions and meetings are taking place exploring how to reignite the women’s movement in South Africa,” says Lisa Vetten, head of the gender research unit at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
She points to initiatives in Latin America, such as feminist radio stations, newspapers and publishing presses. Attempts are also being made across Africa to link up activities and organisations around women’s rights. Amani-tare, for example, is an African partnership of organisations working in the area of women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health rights, as is Gender Links in Southern Africa. “Within developing countries generally, femi-nist thinking and action are also taking place in response to globalisation and its impact on gender relations, work, poverty and wealth,” Vetten says. Labour, too, is contributing to the reinvention of the left. The Congress of South African Trade Unions’s secretary general, Zwelinzima Vavi, says unions have to engage beyond narrow worker interests and have a voice in education, the homeless, environmental issues, the Aids crisis and women’s issues to survive the new order. “We may not have a second chance for survival. We have to have alliances locally and internationally and this is what’s beginning to happen. Unions around the world are in the mood to confront neo-liberalism, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO.” Vavi says in the south a coordinated strategy has begun with the establishment of the South Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights, driven by the Congress of South African Trade Unions and Australian, Brazilian and South Korean unions.
Just 15 years ago it was standard for the mainstream to refer to South African liberation activists as terrorists; now it’s inconceivable that anyone would do so. Equally, current anti-globalisation activists who are demonised variously as anarchists, lunatics or pipe-dream idealists who “don’t know what they’re talking about” (according to Irwin) are humanity’s best chance of surviving and creating a better world.