Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:43:06 -0500 From: christopher chase-dunn Subject: [Fwd: [Fwd: Recent South Africa events]] To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Reply-to: chriscd@jhu.edu This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------6EBBDF60C081F20ABB22D15E --------------6EBBDF60C081F20ABB22D15E (original mail from casabaltimor@igc.org) for chriscd@jhu.edu; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:32:56 -0400 (EDT) Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:32:23 -0400 (EDT) 12 Nov 1998 00:31:29 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:31:39 -0500 From: Barbara Larcom Subject: [Fwd: Recent South Africa events] To: Chris CD , Carl , Peter , Howard , Denis This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --Boundary_(ID_q8Oa8YmcY/cOroYHXu7zRQ) --Boundary_(ID_q8Oa8YmcY/cOroYHXu7zRQ) 11 Nov 1998 20:59:56 -0800 (PST) 12 Nov 1998 07:01:58 +0200 (GMT+0200) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 07:00:45 +0000 From: "Patrick Bond" Subject: Recent South Africa events In-reply-to: <2.2.16.19981111150507.521f251e@pop.igc.org> Sender: owner-50-years@igc.apc.org To: 50-years@igc.org, inkworks@igc.org, brutusd@FPC.edu, peace.freedom@wilpf.org, Njoki Njoroge Njehu Reply-to: pbond@wn.apc.org Just to let friends/colleagues/comrades know of exciting developments in South Africa... Last Thursday-Saturday, the Jubilee 2000 launch occurred in Cape Town, and Njoki has already provided you evidence of excellent news coverage. One of the country's lead papers ran a half-page colour photo of Archbishop Ndungane and 50 Years stalwart Dennis Brutus wrapped in chains, symbolising Dennis' time on Robbin Island (where he broke stones with Mandela) and the fact that even with apartheid formally gone, the country remains chained. The event was extraordinarily upbeat, and a sense of a more rapid, durable reconstitution of progressive processes and ideology is now palpable. On Monday, the top finance department bureaucrat felt sufficiently threatened by all of this activity to release a statement and generate media publicity around the specious argument that SA's foreign debt (now about $25 billion for private and public sector combined) is not a problem; our dispute with her is intensifying about whether we consider loans from NY/London/German/Swiss banks to SA banks and firms prior to the 1994 elections -- loans which were effectively guaranteed by the then apartheid government, which gained access to the hard currency associated with those loans -- as part of the apartheid debt that we consider "odious". More campaigning handles around this issue are being developed with German colleagues in the days ahead, so let me or Brian Ashley (J2000 organising secretary) (aidc@iafrica.com, http:\\www.aidc.org.za) or George Dor (J2000 publicity secretary) (george@wn.apc.org) know if you have any ideas or solidarity for us. On Tuesday the Jubilee 2000 Johannesburg branch -- with 30 serious activists, led by Rev Molefe Tsele, who is chair of SA's J2000 -- began planning the March 1999 South-South workshop. Much more information about that is on the way. Yesterday Samir Amin, the Dakar-based coordinator of Forum for World Alternatives (a network of networks of progressive social movements and intellectuals, he calls it) gave two talks in Johannesburg to activists and academics that drew nearly packed houses; his arguments about the global overproduction and financial speculation crises were very well received, and it seems that confidence is growing amongst the key democratic movement strategists to challenge the country's demonstrably ineffectual economic policies. Later today I'll post a recent ANC/SACP/union analysis of the global crisis. It is surprisingly radical -- like Amin, stressing the ingrained *capitalist* character of the overproduction/speculation phenomenon. However, macroeconomic policy remains overwhelmingly the stuff of the Washington Consensus. era. Several of us -- inspired by Ben Fine of the University of London -- are quite concerned about the drift towards an unthinking endorsement of post-WC without clarifying lines of argument and dispute. Is this a scenario others are facing in different settings? I'll also post some thoughts on this matter that I have, assuming I have your tolerance! Yours, P. --Boundary_(ID_q8Oa8YmcY/cOroYHXu7zRQ)-- --------------6EBBDF60C081F20ABB22D15E--