South African Public Policy amplifies the world’s worst inequality

• Autores: Patrick Bond
• Localización: Políticas públicas para la equidad social: (volumen I) / coord. por Pablo Rivera Vargas, Judith Muñoz Saavedra, Rommy Morales Olivares, Stefanie Butendieck Hijerra, Vol. 1, 2018, ISBN 978-84-17591-01-4, págs. 215-235
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • La política pública sudafricana: la exacerbación de la peor desigualdad en el mundo
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The South African state reformed during the 1990s into a neoliberal democracy, from an apartheid regime based upon racial inequality. That itself was a function of the interplay between mining industry profitability (and class oppression), the social reproduction of migrant labour by super-exploited women, and political constructs that left the black majority artificially impoverished. But with political freedom came new forms of inequality, especially those generated by neoliberal macro-economic policies. Notwithstanding some offsetting budgetary commitments to social grants, these fiscal, monetary and financial, and international economic policies exacerbated existing inequalities. Partly they did so base on new modes of geographic, financialised and ecological manipulation by capital, including denationalisation of major corporations, higher levels of local and sovereign indebtedness, world-record speculative markets (real estate and stock market shares), and more rapid resource extraction. Partly there was a class-forming process that worsened inequality, through the venality of corruption, carried out by both old and new elites, and forcing down wages relative to profits. Nevertheless, there have been inspiring pockets of resistance, especially in the ‘commoning’ of AIDS medicines, uneven municipal services and tertiary education thanks to militant social struggles. However, the potential for pulling together the fragments of opposition into a larger political project remains on the horizon.