Category Archives: South Africa

Vivir Bien: Why Trees Have Standing

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There’s a moment in one of the videos from the early days of OWS that stayed with me after we saw it again last month. Chris, a long-time occupier and Direct Action mainstay, leans into the park from the stairs and says

This is the epicenter of a global revolution!

Massive cheers. It would have been more accurate perhaps to say: “this is the node of the planetary fightback at the epicenter of global media.” Less thrilling, though. Watching Thomas Sankara speak in the videos from 1987, you see a confidence in the forward march of history that now seems so long ago and far away. But his agenda of sustainable, regional and peaceful economies is still a viable alternative. You can see emerging a triangulation of how it might–might–be possible to triangulate it into being.

Node one: Africa

Sankara’s claim that Africa could be the center of an alternative economy seems far-fetched in the era of the Troika consensus. But the rebellion by South Africa’s majority is ongoing, not just in the mining industry but also in trucking and now municipal workers. Unemployment continues to rise and South Africa’s credit rating was just downgraded.  And most of the country’s trade is with Europe, so things are going to get worse. The question is whether calls for land redistribution and the nationalization of the mines might lead to a rethinking of what the economy is intended to do. If, as the strikers hope, its primary purpose is to support the living standards of the majority, then everything would have to change.

Node two: Bolivia

In a classic legal essay from 1972, Christopher Stone asked

Should trees have standing?

Meaning can non-human entities have legal rights? As Stone pointed out, corporations do. And each time an extension of rights occurs, it had previously been “unthinkable” to do so.  Stone proposed that “natural objects,” such as forests, rivers and oceans should have rights. Since then, such basic ideas have come to be enshrined in law but always fiercely opposed by the neo-liberals. For it creates a stalemate between the “rights” of the corporation and those of the natural object.

How can such issues be resolved? In Bolivia, a new proposal for legal rights to the planet that would give a clear direction:

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developing policies that promote sustainability and control industry.

This principle is known as Vivir bien, or “Living Well.” The proposed law defines it as follows:

Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.

Bolivia does not have the luxury of considering climate change to be something you can ignore in two Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates (unless you count Romney’s “I Like Coal” sloganeering for West Virginia’s benefit). As the climate changes, Bolivia is running short of drinking water and is also, ironically, at risk of flooding from melting glaciers. Vivir bien is exactly what would motivate the South African grass-roots activism and why should it not?

Node Three: Texas (yes Texas)

While such ideas have routinely been dismissed as “tree-hugging” in the United States, the term is no longer just rhetoric. In East Texas, eco-activists have occupied the trees that have to be cut down for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

There’s plenty of hostility in Texas as you might imagine. Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson marvelously argues that the pipeline to bring Canadian bitumen to the Gulf:

will create thousands of jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Perhaps Canadians aren’t foreign? But what about that nasty socialized medicine they have? Sarcasm aside, it’s direct action in defense of vivir bien that might open a space in which the new legal doctrine of planetary non-human rights could take effect. To the immense benefit of humans–well, most of them. Say 99%?

 

Mining The Future

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One way of thinking about debt is spending the future: a debt incurred today must be repaid with future earnings. In planetary terms, mining places us all in biosphere debt. To open a mine is to guarantee further primary extraction, incurring high energy use, new carbon emissions, destruction of the local environment, atmospheric and water pollution. It further sets in motion the commodity production process because new minerals will become new cars or girders or an iPhone. In short, any chance at moving away from neo-liberalism would have to begin with a slowdown or even cessation of mining. At present mining companies are all trying to expand, while also reducing still further their labor costs. It will take a co-ordinated global movement to push back.

Last week the transnational steel giant ArcelorMittal finally closed its Florange steel furnaces in France, having waited out the French elections and the Olympics (where ArcelorMittal was a major sponsor). 700 jobs were lost with the usual knock-on effects that such retrenchment entails. As in 1981, the Socialist administration is discovering that its room for maneuver is far more limited than they expected.

In South Africa yesterday, the Anglo-American Platinum corporation resolved a three-week strike by firing 12,000 workers. The standard pattern sees the company then hire back a fraction of its former staff and reduce output. At present, world platinum prices have recovered from their low-point of August, to 2011 trading highs of about $1700 an ounce, still far below 2008 levels of $2200. More than enough to pay the salary being demanded by the miners which, at 15,000 Rand is ironically about $1700, the price of a single ounce of platinum. Too much for Anglo-American. In a country where people are desperate for work, firing workers that have become militant and replacing them with a totally different workforce is an acceptable option.

Xstrata mining in Australia

Xstrata, the world’s largest extractor of thermal coal, is still trying to merge with a financial company called Glencore in a $32 billion deal. The Glencore-Xstrata merger is unusual in that it brings together financial capital with primary extraction in the same company:

Xstrata is very good at operating mines efficiently and at low cost, without upsetting local communities. Glencore is not.

But it does boast a global network of commodities traders who possess unrivalled intelligence on global demand trends that theoretically allows them to make money at any stage of the commodity cycle.

This will create what corporate-speak calls a “vertically-integrated” company. In fact, it will amount to a dramatic change in philosophy. Xstrata is a greedy, play-it-safe company that works cosy, inside deals in countries that are considered “safe,” meaning pliant to neo-liberal market world views. Glencore, according to business journalist Nils Prately, are altogether more aggressive:

The Glencore thesis is that the best returns come from extending so-called brownfield sites and that the political risk that goes with investing in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo is tolerable.

Translated into English, this means that expansion in under-regulated, low-wage regions is considered worth the risk of political upheaval. This is not to say that Xstrata are not in favor of biosphere devastation.

McArthur River zine mine, Australia

This August they won approval from the Australian government to convert an underground zinc mine into a massive open-cut operation in Northern Territory (above). It’s just that they like governments who can be relied on to jump to the precise height required with no foreseeable risk of change.

Ironically, it’s being held up not by concerns about the disastrous biosphere impact but about the egregious payday (even by Wall Street standards) that Xstrata management lined up for themselves. Merger and retention bonuses (cash for showing up on Monday to do the job you had on Friday) would amount to a whopping $233 million. Shareholders are now getting to vote on the compensation deal but the big investors like Qatar’s sovereign fund are now behind it.

So we can see that neither shareholder activism, as in the Glencore-Xstrata merger, or strikes by workers as in France and South Africa, have been able to restrain multi-national mining.

In Texas beginning on September 24, a group of activists have taken to the trees to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from being completed. This pipeline is being built to bring the “carbon-bomb” of Alberta’s tarsands oil to the Gulf coast. If you look at the clear-cutting and construction going on, it’s hard to imagine that a “decision” seriously remains to be made after this kind of expenditure. After November, whoever wins the elections, this pipeline will be authorized. The Texas activists, like their predecessors in the logging struggles in Washington State, have taken to the trees.

So confident of their future are Big Oil, energy and mining that they’re not even giving that much money to Mitt Romney (relatively speaking). They rank only number nine, way behind the Wall Street firms and banks who have decided that the current docile administration is still far too hostile to them.
Nonetheless, there’s a palpable chance they have overplayed their hand. All the minerals were being mined for China, whose economy appears to be slowing down drastically. There are ongoing strikes in the diamond, iron, chrome, platinum and gold sectors of South Africa’s mining industry. They can’t replace all these people.. By placing their bodies in the way of the neo-liberal machine,  the tree-sitters have made the issues visible. If we want things to change, we have to make a similar effort.

Arrest Yourself: Neocolonial Stalinism

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Police at Marikana

In South Africa, the mining crisis unfolds. What happened at Marikana, where 34 miners died at the hands of police? Prosecutors today charged all the miners arrested that day with causing their own killings, using an archaic piece of Dutch law often used under apartheid. Even the government Justice minister was taken aback and has demanded an explanation. Now the police say to us: “you have arrested yourself for failing not to see that there is nothing to see here.” It’s that absurd and authoritarian at once. Call it neocolonial Stalinism.

It’s becoming clear that controlling this narrative is about far more than the already-serious specific situation. This is about who tells the story of “globalization.” Is it about “wealth” or “life”? And whose wealth and whose lives count.

Announcing the extraordinary decision to prosecute all the miners, Frank Lesenyego, spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority, said:

It’s the police who were shooting, but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders.

The astonishing accusation is based on the charge of “common purpose,” a device of authority to reduce individuals to a mass. It explains why the NPA has kept the miners in jail for over two weeks without charge, against South African law. It’s sad to see the postcolonial government act so directly in the interest of the transnational mining company–and perhaps also its own client trade unions.

All of this bolsters the now-established media narrative that the miners charged police and it was in the ensuing chaos that people died. The South African government argues that the police acted in self defense, despite the fact that no police officer was injured on that day. It has also been argued that the miners were trying to evade tear gas and live ammunition fire.

Crucially, however, only ten of the 34 deaths occurred in this direct conflict. Where were the others? South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reports:

Some of the miners killed in the August 16 massacre at Marikana appear to have been shot at close range or crushed by police vehicles. They were not caught in a fusillade of gunfire from police defending themselves, as the official account would have it.

The analysis is based on a reconstruction of the scene at a location out of view of press cameras on the day of the massacre, using forensic analysis and interviews conducted by University of Johannesburg researchers. At least 14 death sites have been identified here, and witnesses talk of armored vehicles driving over people as they lay on the ground. It is impossible, then, to sustain an accusation of common purpose that retains any logical sense.

Greg Marinovich concludes at the end of his long article that what happened was

summary and entirely arbitrary execution at the hands of a paramilitary police unit.

Why use such force? The situation in South Africa, and indeed the global South, is at the brink. Even Zwelinzima Vavi, the head of COSATU, the official trade union group that has been seen as hostile to the radical miners’ breakaway union, pointd out

We have been warning about a ticking time bomb for years, saying that if we don’t address the current levels of unemployment, poverty and inequalities at some point, the poor and those who are feeling the pinch will march to our own boardrooms to demand that we do something about their circumstances.

Yesterday, Julius Malema spoke to miners at a gold mine, partly owned by President Zuma, who have not been paid for over two years:

Our leaders have lost their way and have been co-opted by mine owners and fed profits. They don’t care about you.

His stump speech now dwells on the disappointment felt by rank-and-file ANC members and black South Africans about the lack of progress since 1994. He calls for nationalizing the mines and the establishment of a living wage for all at R12,500, about $4000. The messenger may not be well liked but the message is powerful. At the Gold Fields Mine, the world’s fourth largest, a quarter of the miners are on wildcat strike as of today. All the Gold Standard discussion so common among monetary geeks forgets the appalling labor of colonial gold mines from the Spanish empire in the “New World,” via Africa’s so-called Gold Coast to present-day “neo-colonial” transnational mining.

US readers: remember that Ohio coal miners were not only required to attend a Mitt Romney rally, they had to lose a day’s pay to do so. Going for Obama then? As Republicans sing the praises of coal, Democrats drill for oil. Ken Salazar yesterday gave Shell the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic even though its own safety vessel isn’t finished. What could go wrong with that idea?

The so-called globalization of the past thirty years has allowed the global one per cent to treat the finite human and non-human resources of the planet as its own expense account. Can a decolonial, life-first counterimaginary be created? Doing so would mean not nationalizing mines but closing them and providing a living wage for all nonetheless.

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

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From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

Undermining Neoliberalism

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It’s been one of the surprises of this project to see how often the subject of mining recurs. Miners have, of course, long been key figures in progressive and labor movements, but all that was supposed to be “old” capitalism. Today’s immaterial labor was not supposed to be affected by such issues. Only we’ve seen steel and coal strikes worldwide in the past year, from India to France, Spain and now South Africa. Given that the neoliberal solution to extracting primary resources has been to outsource them to developing nations, perhaps it is now caught in its own trap.

As you will know, striking miners at the Marikana mine owned by Lonmin in South Africa were fired on by police, leading to 44 deaths, 250 or more in hospital, and a further 259 under arrest. The issue here is that

rock drillers affiliated to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) demanded their monthly salary of R4 000 be increased to R12 500.

The rock drillers currently get paid a little over $300 a month for 12 hour days in which you are soaked by water from the drill heads. Other miners estimate that you can do this work for no longer than five years before your body gives out. By way of comparison, a US miner gets about $14.99 minimum for such work per hour, equivalent to $2500 a month, ranging up to $23 per hour, or about $3800 a month.

However, the South African National Union of Mineworkers, the official trade union, has not sanctioned the strike by the drillers. A new more radical union has arisen–the AMCU. The official union was at first even willing to endorse the company’s threat to the strikers that they must return to work by Tuesday morning or face dismissal. Now, following government intervention, dismissal has been taken off the table for the moment.

Julius Malema (left) at Marikana. Credit: Mail and Guardian.

What happens next? Given the militancy displayed in recent days, it’s hard to see how people just go back to work. At a meeting yesterday Julius Malema, a former ANC activist now expelled from the party, called for the mine to be nationalized and for a change of national president. Mourners wearing “Fuck Capitalism” T-shirts clearly agreed. A man using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation told South Africa’s Mail and Guardian:

It’s better to die than to work for that shit. People are coming back here tomorrow [Monday]. I am not going to stop striking.

Further confrontation is surely inevitable.

Once again, London-based capital is behind all this. The anonymous sounding Lonmin company is in fact the notorious Lonhro company, standing for “London and Rhodesian Mining,” under a new name. Once run by the appalling Tiny Rowland, even a Conservative British prime minister designated the racist and exploitative company “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.”

The new company has done very well out of the post-apartheid state, as its own website acknowledges:

Our operations, consisting of eleven shafts and inclines, are situated in the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, a country which hosts nearly 80% of global PGM resources. We have been granted a New Order Mining Licence by the South African government for our core operations, which runs to 2037 and is renewable to 2067. We have resources of 175 million troy ounces of PGMs and 43 million ounces of reserves.

Platinum sells for about $1400 an ounce, so it’s not surprising that Lonmin made $148 million profit in the second half of 2011. Six men died underground during this period, named

Thamage Kgwatlha, Modisaotsile Edward Setlhare, Alfiado Maziwe, Hermanus Potgieter, Rafael Macamo and Alpheus Mokgano Moerane.

Mining remains what it has always been: dirty, dangerous, exploitative, destructive to the environment and highly profitable. Ironically, one of the most significant uses of platinum is in catalytic converters for vehicles, designed to reduce pollution and carbon emissions.

When the video footage of the shootings came out, all the comparisons were to apartheid-era policing. Certainly, like police forces from New York to Athens, overreaction appears to be the policy of choice here. What is being defended, however, is not the local racialized privilege that ruled in Southern Africa for centuries but the neo-liberal formula of low local wages for high global profit. Of course, the workers still tend to be people of color and those profiting tend to call themselves “white.”

The question now is whether the miners’ action sets off a wider discontent with the post-apartheid settlement, as Julius Malema is arguing it should. Too little benefit has accrued to the majority population in the past decade. A new elite cadre class is doing very well at the behest of traditional interests.

There’s just the chance that neo-liberalism has undermined itself. The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland resulted from one day of violence, as did the militant stage of the anti-apartheid struggle. It’s too soon to tell if the Marikana mine massacre will be the new Bloody Sunday or Sharpeville. But if not here, soon. And not before time.