their debts. Latin America was first in this process, followed by sub-Saharan Africa and, after 1991, the Eastern European countries and the former USSR. in Japan, this by T he ecological conséquences of this dramatic shift to City. export-oriented agriculture and raw materials production are Obvious. The destruction of area. the rainforests of Latin America and South East Asia to provide timber and clear land for crops is only the clearest example.
In retrospect, the most surprising ining a Doll zIne amount recent rise in oil prices is that is has taken so long to arrive and that it is still so limited. This is a testimony to the integration of the rulers of major the Middle Fast into an imperialist framework. Europe, However, the limited rise in the price of oil, partly stimulated by the slightly more Venezuela, enough and policy makers. recently observed, the rise 1n prices enough on its own resistance will be less." то сасе п тесесsion.
But if it reduces confidence ulation in the increasingly shaky US stock market, then its impact would be dramatic. Given this it is clear how deep a change would be reauired if global commodity use were to approach ecological sustainability. borne The second example of the impact of globalisation on the environment, also apparent in the recent fuel crisis, is the rise of 'just-in-time production' - originally in the car industry, but now across large parts of the economy in the USA, Europe and Japan.
The move towards carrying low stocks necessitates regular deliveries of goods to factories and shops. Originally Toyota managed grouping suppliers around the assembling factwo decades. tory, in the so-called "Toyota But gradually this raised costs, both wages and rental values, in the surrounding Increasingly, then, damaging firms have started to organise Just-in-ume production on a widely dispersed geo- be less. graphical basis.
This can only be done effectively through a massive of transportation, leakages and it is no accident that the Carbide plant. rise of such production techniques over the 1980s and 90s went hand in hand with a programme of road building, particularly across ment HICIL and a dramatic world, China. growth of lorry transport. In 1997 This both encouraged and was encouraged by the deregof road haulage. Again, the ecological consequences of this change in the nature of production have been severe, leading to congestion, air pollution and the loss of countryside to tarmac. some 36 Such costs have not been by the companies using these techniques, but the country's rivers, have been passed on to soci- and coastal seas. ety as a whole (particularly equivalent to the working class, who are lanct ahle to male to grand River. with low transport densities) Four-fifths and to future generations.
The third example unfit for drinking and their of the impact of fish unfit to eat. Since the on 1980s the environment hectares of farmland have comes been polluted by rural industhe massive expansion of for- trialisation, causing losses of eign investment over the last crops some $2.7 bn.
Not only has this increased During 1992 and 1993 more the pace of the extraction of than 100,000 Chinese were primary commodities des- poisoned by pesticides and cribed above, it has also led fertilisers. More than 14,000 to the export of ecologically of them died. Polluted air production and respiratory countries where it has been now the leading cause of thought that resistance will death in urban China.
A famous example in the In China's ten biggest cities 1980s was the Bhopal disas- some 3,000 tons of plastic ter in India as a result of toxic wastes are produced every from day. The government estiTo take just mates that environmental one case in recent years, it is losses total some $12 billion worth looking at the country annually. which is the single largest The import of cheap comrecipient of direct invest- modities, the rise of just-inthe developing time production expansion of foreign investRichard Smith ment 9 Te not published a detailed account aspects of contemporary capof the impact of economic italism. They are central to the whole process of the neo-liberal offensive. questions are central to them. These depend on the process outlined earlier, where the taken into private ownership and the costs of ecological destruction are not borne by those conditions in China on the who receive profits but are environment, in New Left transferred to workers and to Review, largely using official future generations. Chinese government figures. Any struggle against globHis findings are devastating. alisation has to make ecologEach year China discharges ical considerations equally billion LOTS of central to its theory and its untreated industrial waste practice, and to build on the water and raw sewage into insights of Marx and Engels lakes in a contemporary setting. This is We need to build a movethe entire ment which makes the analyannual flow of the Yellow sis of the impact of capital1cm on the environment a of China's crucial part of the struggle rivers and lakes are seriously against the system. polluted, with their water Charlie van Gelderen THE ANNUAL congress of the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which has just ended in Johannesburg, while reaffirming its support for the ANC-led government, nevertheless expressed strong criticism of aspects of the government's policies. It went so far as to threaten a general strike if the government goes ahead with key changes to labour million laws wnicn, It says, would undermine workers' gains since apartheid ended in 1994. and animals worth "We are saying to government and business, if they violate our rights, we will do to them what we've done to the apartheid regime", COSATU president, Willie Madisha, told more than disease is 2,000 delegates in his closWing address. areas of COSATU says that the labour law amendments would allow the labour minister to vary core labour agreements, thus removing the basic shop floor rights of workers, undermine collective bargaining and result in increasea lay-ons. The federation and the South African Communist and the Party, the third leg of the alliance which helped the ANC to power, also differ marginal with the ruling party over the government's marketfriendly macro-economic and to policy and its stance over And ecological strategies commodification environment HIV/AIDS.
The congress also saw a renewed stirring towards a workers-based political party, delinked from the ruling ANC. This would be in line with a previous COSATU agreement to host conference of the Left before the end of the year.
Even the traditional resolutions of support for the ANC in the forthcoming municipal elections and in participation in the tripartite alliance met with a great deal of hostility. The National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) pressed hard to make union support of the ANC - if support there had to be - strongly critical. The platform had to work hard behind the scenes to prevent these sentiments being translated into resolutions.
The congress made its almost obleatory lame commitment to socialism in "reconstructed form", by which it means a more radical version of German social democracy, arguing for a mixed economy with stakes for both the private sector and the state.
COSATU set itself two goals after the 2000 congress: to intervene at government level to translate its mass power into policy victories and to support members in industries and companies that are undergoing restructuring. Honeymoon over; the right wing policies of Mbeki's ANC government are leading towards a split with the trade unions
Outlook to make yet another 'confi-