Random reading matters, no. 2

This week, the spotlight on a few shorter acticles, stretching several continents...

Southern Africa

Southern Africa has experienced a thirty years struggle against colonial domination and white minority rule. In the end, both apartheid and Portuguese colonialism was overthrown. However, contrary to claims and ambitions by movements who waged the anticolonial struggle, the end of colonialism and apartheid did not usher in a society of social equality, nor did it bring a democracy that went beyond the usual, once-in-4-years-you-may-elect-your-oppressors variety. Socialism was the goal of many of the participants, but that goal was not achieved, not by a long stretch. That will need another hard struggle.

This is the subject of 'The Next Liberation Struggle', a collection of essays by John Saul, a Cabnadian scholar and one who has folewd African liberation struggles closely through the years. Jeffery R. Webber has written a review article about the book: "Liberation, Then What?", published in International Viewpoint, a magizine published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, an organisation in the Trotskyist tradition. Judging from that article, which summarises Saul's arguments nicely, the book adds seriously to our insight on that region and its inspiring but as yet unfinished struggle for justice.

China

China these days is the dream country for many big entrepeneurs. Not only can they make a very andy profit there by exploiting low-wage workers - an exploitation assisted by severe government repression. "Communist" dictatorship is coming to the rescue of capitalist enterprise.

Not only that: by threatening to move their factories to low-wage China, capitalists in Western countries effectivily blackmail workers into waccepting low wages. And, by importing chep-ply-produced goods forom China, they offset the pressure to raise weges in the West: cheap comsumer goods mean that workers can buy some of them, even with their meagre wages.

Rick Wollf, in "China Shapes/ Shakes World's Economies" (MR zine) explains that this capitalist low wage/ high profit dream is threatened. Part of the reason is the rise of prices of those consumer goods from China. And part of the reason of those rising prices is the upward pressure on wages. To put it differently: workers' struggles in China are spoiling capitalism's festivities, although this is not the way Wolff puts it. He sketches the tendency towards inflation, further destabilising an already very imbalanced world economy. The mechanism he sketches is another proof that the modern economy is an interconnected whole - as is the struggle against the masters in that economy.

Steve Irwin

Finaly, a rather dissident article on the tragic end of Steve Irwin, the man whose televised adventures with dangerous animals turned him into a celebrity. The first halfof this week, media broadcasters like CNN went over the top with stories about the man, his accident, the danger stingrays pose. Not everyone, however, sees him as a heroe who has to be uncritically, if posthumously, praised. Binoy Kampmark, for instance, writes: "The story of his life(...) will conclude that he was a good conservationist, a global ambassador for ptotecting 'dangerous' animals. But can an owner or manager of a zoo ever claim such a title? Zoos: spaces cordoned of, celebrating the subjugation of nature. They demonstrate a cruel pecking order: you are on show, it tells animals, because you are in captivity, because you are not free, and yoiur ancestors were exterminated. You must sing for your supper; you must perform for the public." Of course, these days, zoos are somewhat different than just upgraded circuses that Kampmark describes, and their educational value cannot be, I think, reasonably denied. Still, Kampmark's observations seem relevant to me.

He ends his article in a provacative way: "Germaine Greer was perhaps callous to mock his death as nature' s 'revenge', but hte point was well made. It was the retaliation of a caged subject towards its captor. He may well have succumbed to his own fantasies, seeing the wild as eminently tameable. An otherwise placid stingray took issue with this approach." Not literally true, no - but in a deeper sense, a sharp and sensible observation. Read and judge for yourself: "Politics of the Zoo - the Death of Stve Irwin", in Counterpunch - and where else does one find articles like this?