How Capitalism Pillages the Planet and Creates Chaos – Patrick Bond Pt. 1/2

Talia Baroncelli
Hi, you’re watching theAnalysis.news, and I’m Talia Baroncelli. I’ll shortly be joined by political economist Patrick Bond. We’ll be speaking about multiple crises, including the climate crisis, as well as the crisis of capitalism in general, and how BRICS countries have been positioning themselves against Donald Trump. That’s with a question mark.

If you’d like to support the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you’re on our mailing list; that way, all of our content gets sent straight to your inbox. If you’d like to watch us on YouTube, you can go to theAnalysis-news, hit the bell to get all the notifications or listen to us on podcast streaming services such as Spotify or Apple. All right, let’s get into it with Patrick Bond.

I’m very excited to be joined by Patrick Bond. He is a political economist as well as a professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg, where he directs the Center for Social Change. He’s also the author of a book called BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique, which he co-authored with Ana Garcia. It’s great to have you back, Patrick. Thank you so much.

Patrick Bond 
Thanks, Talia. It’s great to be on theAnalysis again.

Talia Baroncelli
I wanted to speak to you about the climate crisis as well as the crisis of capitalism because they’re, of course, intertwined. Capitalism is a concrete as well as a historical phenomenon. Why don’t we speak about how the climate crisis has been an essential part of capitalism? How capitalism has extracted resources and cheapened or commodified labor as well as resources in order to drive this machine of capitalism.

If you look at the current Trump administration, for example, their official policy is “drill, baby, drill,” which is a continuation of what Biden was doing previously, where he increased all sorts of permits for oil firms to continue drilling. How do you see this new aggressive change on the Trump administration’s part in terms of how they want to harness all the energy that’s available to them and wreak as much destruction as possible? Where do you see us right now on that front?

Patrick Bond 
Well, yes, there’s been a balancing between the climate denialists who want to “drill baby” and not have any accountability. That’s certainly where Trump and, in South Africa, our own mining minister, Gwede Mantashe, fits that tradition. Then you’ve got the ecological modernization wing of capitalism that wants to use markets and capitalist technology and turn a profit from addressing the climate catastrophe.

If we go way back, it’s obviously climate ignorance until the late 19th century when Swedish scientists began to pick up on the CO₂. We even had some eco-feminists picking up on it in the 1870s. I think the main moment we can say society was warned that capitalist industrialization was out of control was in 1988 when James Hansen from NASA was able to testify in Congress and created sufficient awareness that by the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, there was a sense, and the Kyoto Protocol emerging by 1997 that this was actually going to be an extremely serious problem.

One that in the 1980s, in 1987, was paralleled in Montreal by an awareness of the chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals that could make the ozone hole grow. The solution, even with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Herbert Kohl, the power centers in the U.S., Britain, and Germany, the three of the biggest ever emitters, actually agreed to block CFCs. CFCs, then, were phased out by 1996. At the moment, that solution seems to be holding as the ozone hole has stopped growing. It’s beginning to recover. It’s that huge difference between a micro problem of one chemical group, the CFCs and also HCFCs, on the one hand, but all of the greenhouse gasses that are part of daily life.

On the one hand, in Montreal, you could identify Dow Chemicals, General Electric fridges, and underarm spray sales. You could say well, we’ll put a block on that, but to actually do that for greenhouse gasses when capitalism has really used the free waste, free fossil fuels, in other words, there’s been, as Karl Marx put it, a free gift of nature. That, particularly where you’ve got huge concentrations in West Asia and the Middle East, in part, maybe the single biggest concentration in any state is Venezuela, very dirty oil there. Canada has vast amounts of tar sands. When you get that hydrocarbon concentration from the CO₂ having begun to make everyone aware that you’ve got to cut emissions, now we’ve got this geopolitical debate.

It’s lined up that after the awareness that capitalism has caused the problem and an externality that is something beyond a market mechanism. It’s just something that happens that doesn’t get priced into the goods. We don’t have a “polluter pays” way to make sure that those who have omitted will actually owe a climate debt, recognize it, and pay it. Instead, capitalism goes into different fractions of capital, and the ones that have elected Donald Trump are very carbon-intensive. The fossil fuel industry and Big Tech are using a great deal of energy, often fossil fuel-sourced energy. It’s there that we’re looking at these captured states. Certainly, the Conference of the Polluters, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Conference of the Parties every year, the COPs are basically dominated by fossil fuels and big industrialism.

It’s been impossible to do something that was hoped for in the early ’90s, Rio, and then was planned for with the Kyoto Protocol. The dilemma is also that ecological modernizationists thought that if they could sell the right to pollute, maybe I’ll even call this the privatization of the air, then they could set up markets in the most advanced cities in Europe—the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. The thought was that would then be, first, you give out some free permits, but then you would start pricing, and ever higher prices would limit the emissions.

That is just beginning to kick in because only in 2018 did the price get up to the levels in the $40-50 range. In fact, in 2023, the high point was about $115 per ton on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, but then it crashed by 50%. What we were really looking at is one of the great dilemmas of all time, which is if you’ve got a crisis as serious as the climate catastrophe that goes right at the heart of capitalist energy, then would you give that crisis to the bankers in these emissions trading schemes, carbon offsets, or other voluntary systems of trying to price carbon? Would you give that responsibility to the bankers? That’s been a disaster.

The real price that we should be aiming for, according to even the World Economic Forum in Davos and to economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a conservative institution in the U.S., is actually $1,056 a ton. Carbon taxation has already found resistance by, for example, French farmers. There’s part of the Yellow Vests Movement who were protesting in 2019, the Ecuadorian people who protested in 2019 and 2020, and the Nigerians who protested when the prices of their petrol went up because the subsidies were removed.

We’ve already seen unjust ways of bringing the price of pollution into line with what people do when they consume. Of course, it’s really about 100 of the major fossil fuel companies that we can hold responsible. We call it the Scope 3 emissions. They’ve been supplying us and brainwashing us to think that there’s no problem with burning those fossil fuels. All in all, it’s a mess that, within capitalism, appears impossible to sort out. We really should be talking everywhere about an eco-socialist plan and a just way to move towards some reconciliation of all the contradictions associated with the climate crisis.

Talia Baroncelli
You mentioned resource nationalism, and we’ll definitely get into that, but I just wanted to pick up on something you mentioned about COP 29. At the COP 29 meeting, a lot of the poorer and smaller nations that were in attendance were calling upon richer countries to pay a total of 1.3 trillion in climate financing. What was agreed upon was actually slightly different. They agreed to 1.3 trillion by 2035, and this climate financing would be financed by private investors. I’m wondering, does that mean that companies or private asset managers such as BlackRock are going to be the main drivers of this climate financing? What does that actually mean for climate solutions?

Patrick Bond 
Now, climate finance can mean lots of things. When it’s a blended fund, you can throw in some subsidies and toss in some private-sector financing, whether it’s these private funds or even commercial banks. They make loans, they get high interest rates from poorer countries, which are risky, and then the subsidies typically go to backup, to give guarantees to those banks. I’m thinking specifically of a just energy transition. A partnership, which in 2021 was launched in Glasgow and codified South Africa being the pilot for it, with Senegal and a few other countries now joining that. It’s the Western government knowing that there’s going to be this cry for financing but still wanting to make money.

How do they make money? Well, first, they don’t lend in local currency, which would be appropriate because most of our climate-related costs are to make our cities adapt, resilient, and to be climate proofed, to pay for the loss and damage, or to mitigate and to try to, in South Africa’s case, decarbonize our huge coal-fired power plant input. About 85% of the electricity I’m using in my laptop now comes from coal. To, in a sense, bribe countries to get off coal. It’s actually very attractive, and it coincides with a climate justice principle that if you’re a poorer country, the West, the historic emitters, and I would now add many of the BRICS, should actually be paying you to leave your fossil fuels underground.

The jet fee has an element, but of course, it’s a carrot, but it turns out to be a rotten carrot. That rotten carrot means it’s not based on grants; it’s based on loans. It’s not in local currency to pay our workers to rejig or to find other lines of work instead of coal mining or coal-fired power plant operation to help communities in those areas. Instead, it’s in hard currency. That means you have to export more in order to raise the forex to repay those loans. The deals are being done with what we’re jokingly now calling not public-private partnerships but public-private laundering because there are so many corrupt elements associated with this.

The carbon market takes this very seriously. You find all kinds of scams that go with promoting just energy transition or other, let’s say, forms of mitigation. I still think that what we saw in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November was something more profound. It was poorer countries. It was the small island developing states, SIDS, and the LDCs, the lesser developed countries. One of the leaders was Malawian. His role was to basically say, “You’re not giving this up.” On the table was just 250 billion up until the middle of November, just before the COP closed. It was a very brutal COP because it was run by the Azerbaijan dictatorship. It’s an oil company character who’s been the president of that, just like the year before in Dubai, where it was COP 28 with the United Arab Emirates, a huge emitter.

When you get those sorts of power configurations, at some point, you either play ball and do what they want, or you get angry and you walk out. That was what the LDCs and SIDS did.

Really, I think the first such major effort to delegitimize COP 29 from within– there was a similar process in 2009 in Barcelona, just in the run-up to the Copenhagen COP, but this is quite a strong statement. The African group of negotiators had an extremely weak leader, Ali Mohamed, who just this last week was made the head of the African Union. That was one of these tragedies where you didn’t really see the forces of civil society holding the African group of negotiators to account.

The major problem in Africa was the South African Environment Minister Dion George, a white man who proudly on his CV notes that he did national service, which during the 1980s meant being in the South African Army— the White Apartheid Army. Then, he became the representative for the center-right Democratic Alliance Party, representing the financial districts. Now, he’s the Government of National Unity Environment Minister, and he’s been actually co-chairing the Mitigation Committee, even though when he went to COP, he admitted to journalists he didn’t even know what COP stood for. He never heard of it. He came in right at the very top level as a co-chair of the Mitigation Committee. Now, that just gives you a quick sense of how we’ve been very weak, particularly from South Africa, with white South Africans, especially as a technocrat in the Department of Environment and Forestry and Fisheries. That layer of, let me call them, comfortable white bureaucrats, a comfortable white minister, has been a disaster for the African continent.

We see all these tensions, and they come to a head here in Johannesburg the G20 is unfolding, which will leave out the concerns of the masses, even though the African Union is now a member of the G20. You see this complex set of processes. Add to that the most important elephant in the room that everybody knew when they were meeting in Baku, which was Donald Trump was coming to power. He’d already pledged, and back in 2017, had already done so, dropping out of the UNFCCC. At that point, no accountability, no punishment, no sanctions. That’s what people, I think, are interested in talking about now since Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” added massively in the period ahead to emissions and wrecking any attempt to get international coordination on cutting emissions and also paying that climate debt.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, speaking about emissions, there is obviously a huge discrepancy when it comes to which countries are the largest emitters. There is some research done recently which shows that North America as well as Europe have contributed to half of the world’s entire emissions. This is on a global scale. This is historic. When you take that into account and then look at ways to combat that, some people might speak about resource nationalism as a way, as a solution to ensure that the resources that they have control over are actually going towards their own population. You take issue with this concept, and you did write an article recently called The Pitfalls of Resource National Consciousness. You also brought in the work of Frantz Fanon to explain what’s at stake here. What’s the issue with resource nationalism?

Patrick Bond 
Well, before we tackle that, the dilemma that you said is a historic Western debt of about nearly 50% of emissions with less than 15% of the world’s population. You want to do that historically year by year, and then you divide that per capita, and you find that the single largest emitter than China falls further down that. There are within the BRICS, I must say, very high levels of historic emissions. If you just want to take countries without per capita and history– and the other big factor is outsourcing. That is my laptop here; my phone is actually made in China. Much of the emissions associated with the things that I use are actually accredited to China, and that’s unjust. In other words, the outsourcing of emissions from me to China should be compensated for.

Even if you do that, you would still find the BRICS united with the West. Before I think about resource nationalism, I think about the power of relations. That’s, in a way, the ideological cover for the BRICS hiding behind the poor. That’s a term that a great Indian activist, Praful Bidwai, came up with to explain not just Modi but the prior Congress government who would try to allow huge emissions, a massive power plant, coal-fired power plant construction on the ground that per person, India wasn’t so high. But in fact, the emissions are accredited if you do an internal analysis of who’s winning and losing to just a few of the top elites.

In South Africa, for example, just 27 companies produce 42% of the emissions. They even have a lobbying name. It’s the Energy Intensive Users Group, and they hire only 4% of South Africa’s workers. That gives you a little bit of a sense of the extreme differentiation in who is emitting within countries.

Now, that brings us to those advocating resource nationalism, especially Talia, with the boom in fossil fuel discoveries. Here in South Africa, there are lots of discoveries of oil and gas offshore. Since late 2021, we’ve had a couple of hundred protests by communities, artisanal fisherfolk, eco-tourists, surfers, a few from the Trade Union Movement, as well as climate activists, marine biologists, and a whole variety of people come together, mostly against Total, the French company Shell from London, the Hague, and also their local allies. We’re now going to see Petrobras, a Brazilian state-owned oil company, joining Total on the West Coast of South Africa for that oil and gas exploration.

What we’re looking at is a very important moment because we’ve got lots of coal. There’s a squeezing of coal to make petrol. There’s a real need to address the enormous emissions. The number one point source of emission in the world is about two hours from here, a place called Secunda, with a company called Sasol that uses the old Nazi method of the Fischer–Tropsch. They use both coal and gas to create these few drops of liquid petroleum that we should be importing so we don’t have these high emissions.

Now, it’s in that terrain that we host the G20 here in Johannesburg this year. The Head of State Summit is in November, and we can hear the drumbeat, which is going in a couple of directions. The one drumbeat is to have, as you say, “drill, baby, drill,” resource nationalism. That concept, our energy minister, and certainly our minerals minister, are all for. So, indeed is the president to some extent, although he’s a little bit more modern. That would mean South Africa actually joining Trump in ditching obligations. In fact, only 10 countries, one of which, ironically, was the U.S., out of over 180, filed their commitments just last week as they were obligated to. I think the UNFCCCs realized, well, this is a tough time for us, and so they’ve given them a bit longer.

What that means is we’re just nowhere near getting to the emissions cut required to keep to that 1.5. Many scientists will say, “Well, it’s too late for that.” Now, what that means for us in Johannesburg is fighting on the streets and on the beaches. They’re all over the place to stop the fossil fuel industry. We just had the African mining in Dubai, this big continent-wide meeting of mining houses. So, yes, I brought you the alternative mining in Dubai critique of the way we count, that is, the depletion of our minerals. We don’t take into account that it’s not part of gross domestic product, nor do we add the GGE, greenhouse gas emissions. That is when you’ve got some raw minerals, and you need to process them, smelt them, and turn them into metals. Then you’ve got enormous amounts of electricity, again, coal-fired. We’ve got local pollution. Then the other big factor in most of Africa is social reproduction. That is women who are playing an unpaid role in getting the workers, usually in a migrant labor situation for many of the mining and fossil fuel projects.

You put those together, and my sense is that our friends who do resource nationalism work, I particularly in my paper, which is published on the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt website, CADTM, but I particularly pick on Canadians because the Canadians really are some of the most brutal mining houses, and their researchers are a bit slack. They basically don’t count these factors that I’ve just mentioned. The one that I’ve talked about for many years, that is, let’s count not just income from mining. Right below me in Johannesburg was the richest store of minerals ever, gold, half the world’s supply, but we only count income. We forget that there’s depletion of that enormous wealth as well.

Talia Baroncelli
I do want to turn to someone who comes from your neck of the woods, Elon Musk. There’s so much to say about Elon Musk, but he’s obviously taken advantage of system failure in the United States because in the U.S., you do have, especially on the electoral side, you have essentially legalized corruption that has been enabled by Citizens United. So massive campaign donations to Super PACS, and Elon Musk donated $280 million USD. He wasn’t the only one to donate a lot of money, obviously, Miriam Adelson. On the Democratic side, you had people like Michael Bloomberg donate $49 million to the Democrats. Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn donated $34 million. Obviously, this problem of money in politics has been around for a while now, and Elon Musk isn’t the first person to donate a lot of money, but the amount that he’s donated is just on a different level, a completely different proportion. How do you contextualize the rise of Elon Musk? Do you see him coming out of this tradition of the Washington consensus of neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation, or do you see him more as a robber baron type who’s actually enabling fascism?

Patrick Bond 
Yes, it’s a combination. I always apologize, Talia, that here in Johannesburg– I’ve lived here since 1990, most of the time– we’ve given you a few nice outputs like Trevor Noah, the great young singer Tyla, or Charlize Theron, but we also created for you a monster. I just took a group of visiting students from the U.S. around to the high school, Bryanston High, this week, where he was trained, but actually trained in bullying and the training of young little white boys in the 1980s to run the Apartheid system, on the one hand, or to run corporate Johannesburg, considered even by PWC to be the most corrupt economic center in the world in their biannual economic crime and fraud survey. That training or social reproduction of little white boys here also generated a few others. You may know the name Peter Thiel, who’s the financial backer of JD Vance, the Vice President, or Pik Botha, the former Apartheid Foreign Minister’s grandson, Roelof. There’s another man…

Talia Baroncelli
Did they all go to Bryanston, the elite school?

Patrick Bond 
No, but they’ve come from that milieu. Even QAnon is repeatedly traced to a Johannesburg suburb. What we’re getting from our dear city is the number one site of inequality in the world, this city, in the most unequal country in the world, but also a reproduction system in which the elites here have systems to train their children. In some ways, if you want to psychologize, it helps to, as Simon Kuper did in a Financial Times piece, and Amy Goodman, that Democracy Now has picked up this theme that there’s something here in the water that makes our beautiful little white brilliant kids turn out to be some of the world’s worst monsters.

I can’t tell you exactly how because I lost track of him when he went to Canada. Then he turned up at the same university where I did two years of study, at the Wharton School of Finance, where Musk got the end of his undergrad, as did Donald Trump. The same school. Also he took the end of his undergrad education there. There, I can tell you from my own experience in the period ’83 to ’85 that they teach you the worst rules of the game of financial capitalism.

Now, that brings us to where Trump and Musk have ideological overlap, certainly with an anarchistic casino-type capitalism. Of course, Musk has organized exceptionally impressive engineering feats. Really, the art he’s played is gambling, investing, and betting. The bet he made on x.com, which we thought was a great disaster. Forty-four billion he spent, but he’s made it back in the influencing that he’s been able to do. I find Trump at his core and with the MAGA, Make America Great Again constituency, more in Steve Bannon’s ideological home, that is, let’s call it paleo-conservatism, as they sometimes do. Paleo, Stone Age, in all fashion, xenophobic, isolationist, racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, and homophobic. All that old-fashioned, just white boy attitude is what certainly comes forward from that combination. Then you’ve got the neoconservatives and the new foreign minister who was supposed to come here this week to Johannesburg, Marco Rubio, who would traditionally come from that hawk warmongering tradition. George W. Bush, and especially Dick Cheney, had made that very important. Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t really do very much to change the sense of the neocons, especially the likes of Victoria Nuland or Antony Blinken himself. These are the sorts of characters you get with the blob in the State Department of the Pentagon.

Then you got this third group within the traditions, especially from the early 1990s with Bill Clinton, of a progressive neoliberalism, as Nancy Fraser puts it, that is a woke form of financializing everything and allowing women to break the glass ceiling or lean into feminism.

In this country, Black economic empowerment that creates our present billionaire and his brother-in-law, the multibillionaire Patrice Motsepe; these are the sorts of, let’s call them, woke versions of neoliberalism. That’s being driven out by the more anarchistic capitalism of Musk. He’s happy to play, especially in South Africa, where he’s made a big mess the last couple of weeks by amplifying the worst crude lies about this country and its alleged land reform.

One of the rationales for Elon Musk is he’s got his own satellite system, Starlink, which would be a much faster version of Internet uploading because it’s orbiting much closer to the Earth. It’s a very attractive system, except that it’s Elon Musk running it. The President, Cyril Ramaphosa, himself made hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars by being a Black economic empowerment beneficiary, meaning he gets a little piece of these big deals as part of the affirmative action for corporate Apartheid legacies. That means Elon Musk would have to share 30% of the equity of the ownership of Starlink South Africa with a Black owner. He simply is reverting, I think. That’s the core racist message I get. Of course, it’s played up as Afrikaners farmers under attack, which Trump said at one point; he got some rumors of white genocide going on in South Africa in 2018 when he was first termed as president. It was just so absurd and ridiculous.

This is the logic that feeds even to someone like Marco Rubio, who should know much better because his job, inheriting the G20 next year and managing geopolitical conflicts, should not be just to alienate the host. They’ve decided to do that, and they’ve decided to put not just the 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum that they did a week ago but in addition to sending any aid to South Africa.

Very quickly, what that means is about 17% of the people living with HIV that get government support, such as free antiretroviral medicines, counseling, and prevention, all the systems that have lowered our HIV rates and indeed raised life expectancy from 52 in the early 2000s up to 65 just before COVID. Really great success story, especially getting about 7 million of our 62 million people these AIDS medicines through the public sector, and they’re generic, not branded. This is a great success. So, 17% of it comes from something called PEPFAR, which is the USAID donation that goes into especially NGOs, but also the state. Now, coming up this Wednesday, the 19 of February, we’re going to see if the Treasury, our finance minister, has got some money, that’s 17%, about 440 million U.S. dollars worth, to cover for USAID pulling out. There are a lot of other things when USAID pulls out. Though, we can celebrate some of them because they are full of neoliberal ideology and all sorts of manipulative activities that we’ve always [inaudible 00:30:55]. 

Talia Baroncelli
Well, I wanted to interrupt you there and just say that the USAID thing is quite complicated because a lot of these programs project American soft power. Oftentimes, funding or certain grants to foreign countries are conditioned on how they vote in the General Assembly, for example. I think some of the funding that was given to Haiti was conditioned on the fact that Haiti would then have to vote in a certain way together with the U.S., France, and other countries on Cuba. There are a lot of problems there, but I think aside from USAID, I did want to ask you about the land reforms, though. Could you explain what those particular land reforms are that Trump is so opposed to? I mean, this is land that has been, I guess, as you said, used by Afrikaners but now is being appropriated to redistribute for public purposes or to give to Black Africans?

Patrick Bond 
Well, that would be the ideal that you would get some mix of publicly owned, but locally farmed, perhaps co-op-farmed system that would be competitive with the commercial agricultural systems. By the way, their USAID is also promoting a willing seller, willing buyer, neoliberal agenda. They do lots of policy investment. We’ve seen that, especially in urban housing and lots of urban land activities. You’re absolutely right, by the way, before we talk about rural land, to mention that USAID generally has this CIA 2.0 reputation because CIA 1.0 was busted. It was revealed again and again that its investments, even in cultural work and in democracy movements as they call them, all of these were with the U.S. foreign policy agenda firmly in mind.

Even though Samantha Power had been running USAID for the last four years, her responsibility to protect was so biased. She had nothing to say about U.S. support for the genocide of Palestinians. We began to talk about the need for R2PWW, a responsibility to protect without Washington. That’s the reactions we’ve seen. I only do worry that people living with HIV, people who needed emergency humanitarian support, including food aid, emergency food aid in Sudan, for example, just stopped. Some very good journalists who, for one reason or another, were in the National Endowment for Democracy, a funding circuit for various journalistic activities. Did you know they weren’t U.S. tools, they were just getting some of the funding? They’re all going to be hurt, my only-

Talia Baroncelli
Although, sorry. On that front, though, Stefania Maurizi has reported on this together with Ryan Grim, that basically a lot of the funding sources that were funding the OCCRP, this journalistic outfit, a lot of that funding actually came from USAID, but it wasn’t really that transparent. I think there are some conditions tied to that funding, which means that maybe these journalists have free reign to explore corruption worldwide but that they wouldn’t really focus on U.S.-based corruption or anything that would expose corruption within the U.S. and their allies. Again, there are always certain ethical issues that are at stake when it comes to funding that comes from USAID and how that, again, projects American power worldwide.

Patrick Bond 
Oh, absolutely right. I think, Talia, that’s exactly where we need that fingerprint analysis of who’s got what prints on what parts of, for example, color revolution. Some of them were utterly needed, valid, and reflections of anger from society, but then when you get Victoria Nuland parachuting into the Maidan in Ukraine in 2014 and say, “Hey, we got $5 billion. We invested in our guys. What happened?” So these are the nuances that we need. Then I think I’ve worked in Haiti a little bit for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and looking at the way USAID took the space and even funded Left-wing institutions in that country because they just had so much money.

Forty-four billion dollars in the last fiscal year, but if we move from that to the– by the way, I should say I find them most obnoxious in this ideological orientation that free market and free politics go together when we know so many times debt crises or neo-liberalization and privatization actually create the riots that then the repression is required to implement. That’s the stuff that we’d steam with the Arab Spring, the North African uprisings, and so many other protests that USAID couldn’t get its head around because it had an ideology, a neoliberal ideology. If it is actually closed down and that part of it is reduced, we’ll all breathe a certain sigh of relief because it can lead to maybe a cleaner way of doing politics.

The politics of land reform in this country started out, again, with a strong freedom charter, 1955 mandates here by the Black majority to redistribute land to those who would work the land, to not have idle land. But capitalist farming markets leave lots of lands idle and also have all sorts of distortions, kinds of subsidies like water systems put by the state for crony white Afrikaner farmers that were then stopped as neoliberalism was applied in the mid-’90s. We haven’t had successful land reform because it was “willing seller, willing buyer,” and support mechanisms like marketing co-ops became privatized marketing schemes, really for the white.

They retained Apartheid in all sorts of ways in the countryside, leading up to, instead of having 30% land reform in the first five years, this was mandated because about 5% of the land turns over each year in the market and should have been able to take away subsidies and do so in a way that allowed blacks to take that land and farm it profitably. But instead, we’ve only got about 10% after 31 years of freedom in this country. That’s because a “willing seller, willing buyer” was actually cooked up in the World Bank with the NGOs that were colluding with them. The land reform ministers haven’t done anything to change that. We even have one now from the Pan-Africanist Congress. 

The expropriation bill had been demanded to give the state more power to go in and take land like you would with the rights of eminent domain. If you wanted to put a railroad line or a telegraph pole as what happens in the U.S., well, there are rights of eminent domain, and that’s really all this expropriation bill amounts to. There’s been absolutely no expropriation of rural land of white farmers on record. Even the agricultural societies will say so. Ironically, one of the main victims of the end of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act that we anticipate– that’s the trade deal that lowers the tariffs a bit for goods from Africa. The main beneficiaries are big steel, aluminum, car companies, petrochemical vineyards, and some citrus and other agricultural goods, but those agricultural goods would also probably be cut.

So the large number of farm workers from these white-owned farms. What’s the solution? Definitely to do the kind of land reform– we don’t look at Zimbabwe as a success so much because there was so much cronyism and elite stealing of white rich people’s farms by Black rich politicians. There’s not been a great success, except about 200,000 people have been resettled because there was a lot of other land that they could take. It hasn’t been all that productive, but at least the levels of maize grown locally have returned to the pre-land reform days before about the year 2000, when the Jumbanja, the chaotic land, reformed again.

I do think that this is the terrain where we absolutely need to see a rural social movement organizing. There is one network I’m always impressed with, the Rural Women’s Assembly, who’ve always said and done. I mean, the big protest wave in 2014, ’15, on our vineyards and our farms led by women to get farm workers basically a doubling of their minimum wage would be the example we’d hope of that rural mobilization. Donald Trump can’t stand that, but I think he’s really being fed misinformation. There’s a small group of Afrikaner farmers who go to the U.S. and they connect to Tucker Carlson and they connect into certainly Elon Musk, who amplifies these fibs about massive land reform or white farmer genocide and so forth.

All of these, to me, represent ways the Trump regime is telling the G20 host this year, South Africa, that it is breaking everything, including the legitimacy of a multilateralism that the U.S. has always controlled, or if not at least managed the G20 going to Trump to Marco Rubio, the Foreign Minister next year. But now we’re talking this country. Well, we need to boycott divestment sanctions against Trump. That’s from the second biggest Trade Union Federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions. There’s even suggestions maybe that this week, Thursday, Friday, when the foreign ministers meet, they should discuss changing the name of this G20 to the G19. 

The reason that Marco Rubia said, “Well, I’m not coming is because of the three themes that Cyril Ramaphosa,” the president here, had suggested: he’s very good at talking Left, working Right. The three themes are solidarity, equality, and sustainability. You think of three themes that would absolutely turn off the Trump regime, and indeed, on the, I think it was the 5th of February, that’s exactly what Marco Rubio said. He said, “This is DEI and climate change.” He said, “You’re doing terrible things in South Africa. I’m not coming.

If he’s not coming, well, maybe the G19 can move faster if it actually wants to move in any of these directions. It certainly should contemplate throwing out the United States, at least this year, and then moving the G20 to another country next year. Then maybe questioning should the United Nations even be in the United States, in Manhattan. Maybe we should propose Nairobi, which, like Geneva and Vienna, has a certain UN secondary city status to host the General Assembly and do away with that United Nations Security Council. There must be some moment where we isolate those three forces, paleo-conservatism, neoconservatism, and neoliberalism, which is the toxic Washington brand right now, and say, “Well, maybe there would be Europeans.”

We know the Irish, the Spanish, and the Norwegians have somewhat better positions on Israel and its genocide. We know that there are lots of groups, the Hague Group, which came together on January 31, South Africa leading, but also Malaysia and Colombia. Our neighbors here, Namibia, Cuba, and a few other countries to say to the International Criminal Court, “We’ll back you if the U.S. puts sanctions on you. We think it’s important in the Hague Group to be able to defend at least some semblance of an international rules-based order that is actually rules-based for societies and for justice, not just for multinational corporates.”

Talia Baroncelli
Thanks for watching part one of my conversation with political economist Patrick Bond. Make sure you keep your eye out for part two. See you next time.