September 1, 2022 • 12 mins
Like the Apartheid of South Africa, the international system divides humanity to ‘Bantustans’ of the nation-states, while the global market allows the world’s elite to exploit the majority. The alternative is Global democracy.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
In recent years more and more academics and activists
have been using the term ‘global apartheid’,
drawing an analogy between the infamoussystem of white minority rule in South Africa,
and the international order that we live in today.
To many, this analogy can soundshocking and outlandish,
(00:29):
but in this short video I will point to a few major similarities
that not only challenge to story that we are being told about the world,
but point also to the type of systemic change that we need.
The essence of the argument, is that the same formula
that underlined the Apartheid system in South Africa,
(00:51):
of economic integration of the population and political segregation,
characterizes also the existing world order, where humanity as a whole
is economically integrated, by the global market,
but politically and legally divided and segregated.
To understand the analogy and the similarities,
(01:14):
let me start with a quick review of howthis formula was applied in South Africa.
There, the economic integration meant that whites and blacksplayed different roles, but in the same economy.
The whites were the owners and managers of the businesses,
while the blacks had to do all the dirty hard work for a lousy payment,
(01:36):
but as part of the same business or corporation.
The gap in their status and their different roles in that integrated economy,
resulted from the second part of the apartheid formula,
which was their political segregation into separate legal systems.
White people, only, were counted as citizens of South Africa,
(02:01):
whose rights were protected by the rule of lawand could participate democratically in the national decision making.
The blacks were politically excluded,but the way they were excluded is of particular importance.
The white government declared ten remote areasas ‘states’ of the blacks,each supposedly ‘belonging’ to a different tribe.
(02:25):
Each black person in South Africa, regardless of where they actually lived,
was no longer a citizen of South Africabut of one of those new fictitious ‘homelands’.
Thus, the blacks of South Africa suddenly found themselves
in the status of foreigners in their own country,
with no citizen rights
(02:46):
and under a strict regime of movement control, surveillance, and constant risk of deportation.
The white government tried to tell the world that these so-called‘black homelands’ were self-governed and autonomous nation-states.
They even tried to brand them as ‘Bantu-states’,
(03:06):
where the word ‘bantu’ means ‘people’ in some of the local African languages.
But everyone knew that these were nothing but puppet states,
whose corrupt black leadership had to obeythe white government,or be removed and punished.
Cynically, people started calling them ‘Bantu-stans’.
(03:27):
The word ‘stan’ means ‘state’ or ‘land’ in many Asian languages,
and just as everyone knew at the time of the Cold War,
that Kazakh-stan or Uzbeki-stan were not controlledby the Kazakh people or the Uzbek people. but by the Soviet Union,
so it was clear that the Bantu “states”, or the Bantu-stans,
(03:49):
were engineered and controlled by the whites.
But ridiculous as these Bantustans were,they were extremely efficient in fulfilling their true purpose,
which was to legally divide and rule the black population.
This way the white minority enjoyed the best of both worlds.
(04:09):
By integrating with the blacks only economically,
the whites made sure that they wouldn’t haveto do all the hard work in the mines and the fields
or even clean their own homes.
And by excluding the blacks politically,
the whites got to have a democracy just for themselves.
Now, when we zoom out to the global level what do we see?
(04:33):
We have huge economic global integration,
in the sense that the economic activitiesof multinational corporations span the entire earth, right?
Almost every single product that we wear, that we eat, that we use,
relies on this global economic integration.
And, like in South Africa,people around the world play very different roles
(04:57):
and get very different compensation,in that economically integrated system.
And what determines for most of themtheir place on the ladder, to a great degree,
is not their personal talent or diligence,
but what is their nationality,and on which side of the border they happen to stand.
(05:18):
If they are citizens of some western country (which is just a nicer way for saying ‘mostly white country’)
most chances, statistically, are that they standmuch higher on the global social-economic ladder
than most of the citizens of the non-European, non-white countries.
It is true that there are many exceptions,
(05:39):
but on average and in comparison to the majority of the world
white people enjoy much better education,health services and public infrastructures;
Their environment is much less pollutedand their working conditions are by far superior.
Take, just for example, the border betweenthe state of California in the USA, and Mexico.
(06:02):
On the Californian side of the fence,it is not legal to pay a worker less than $13 an hour.
That is the minimum legal wage.
On the Mexican side,the minimum wage equals just one US dollar per hour.
What a gap!
It means that even for doing exactly the same work,just by being on Californian soil
(06:26):
a worker will get a salary that is 13 times biggerthan his fellow worker that stands on Mexican soil.
So despite the huge economic integration of the world,
and despite the ecological unity of the Earth,
national borders legally divide humanityto some 200 separate jurisdictions,
(06:48):
where the rights and liberties of the people who work for us,
in the same business or the same corporation,
can be of entirely different order.
In other words, under the inter-national system,what determines your place on the ladder, at least formally,
is not the colour of your skinor the shape of your eyes or nose (no-no!)
(07:11):
but the colour of the passport that you have,or the colours of the flag under which you happen to be born.
And this point raises two important questions.
First, if we think today that racism is inherently wrong,that it is a bad thing to treat a person differently
just on the account of somethingas literally superficial as the colour of their skin,
(07:36):
that tells you nothing about the inner worth of that person,
then how can it be right to treat people differently,just on the account of the nationality that is written on their papers?
Isn’t that even more superficial?
Can that field in the identity card,or the colour of a person’s passport,
tell you anything about the inner worth of that person?
(07:58):
I don’t see how it could.
Or can the soil that the person is standing on,on either side of the fence,
can it justify treating that person with such a different set of laws?
Again, I don’t see how it could.
There were some dark times in the 19th and the 20th centuries,
(08:18):
at the peak of European colonialism and imperialism eras
that many in the global white elite of the day,thought that the nonsense of racism and white superiority
were backed up by serious good science, of biology.
A time will come, and I hope sooner rather than later, that nationalism,
the idea that it’s OK to treat people with entirelydifferent sets of laws and rights just according to their ‘nation’,
(08:46):
whatever that word means,
that it will be as discredited and delegitimized as racism is nowadays.
The second question, that risesfrom the evident political segregation of humanity,
is how come that even though ‘race’is no longer the official criterion for segregation,
(09:06):
how come that so many of the world’s elite are white?
Surely, this is not just a coincidence.
It is, rather, another good reason to use the term ‘global apartheid’,
because the current world order is still, fundamentally, a racist one.
Only that, unlike the racism of the colonial age,that was direct and blunt and official,
(09:30):
the new racism that governs the world today is hidden
by the seemingly innocent division of humanityinto supposedly sovereign nation states.
It is hidden also by the fact that within the white states,non-white minorities, have, at least legally, the same rights.
And the fact that a few of them are doing really well.
(09:52):
But when we zoom out to the global level,we see that, just as the creation of the ‘Bantu-States’ in South Africa
did not really liberate the blacks there,but deepened their oppression;
Just as it did not really give them an equal standing to that of the whites,
but rather entrenched the segregation that kept them under,
(10:14):
so on the global level, the creation of the nation-statesacross the whole world, in the stead of colonialist empires,
did not end the rule of the white minority over Earthbut enabled it to continue.
It did not mend the racial segregation of humanity, but allowed it to persist.
(10:35):
It is the same old racist hierarchy but under different cover;that is just slightly more sophisticated,
but not less cruel, oppressive, or unjust.
It's high time we realized thatthe nation states are our global Bantustans,
whose supreme purpose is to isolatethe democracies of the global white elite
(10:58):
from the ‘threat’ of the participation of the non-whitemajority of the world’s people, the world’s ‘demos’,
the main victims of this senseless and heartless system.
And one last thing.
The ruling elite will always try to defend and justify their grab on power,
by saying that the opposite of the rule of their minorityis the dictatorship of the majority.
(11:23):
These are such nonsense!
The answer to global apartheid is global democracy,
a federal level of government of humanity, by humanity, for humanity.
It means closing the great gap betweenthe global economic integration that we have
(11:44):
and the global political integration that we need,
between the West and the rest,
the privileged white Europeans and humans,as equal citizens of this Earthly home that we live on together.
It’s about time, don’t you think?
In recent years more and more academics and activists
have been using the term ‘global apartheid’,
drawing an analogy between the infamoussystem of white minority rule in South Africa,
and the international order that we live in today.
To many, this analogy can soundshocking and outlandish,
(00:29):
but in this short video I will point to a few major similarities
that not only challenge to story that we are being told about the world,
but point also to the type of systemic change that we need.
The essence of the argument, is that the same formula
that underlined the Apartheid system in South Africa,
(00:51):
of economic integration of the population and political segregation,
characterizes also the existing world order, where humanity as a whole
is economically integrated, by the global market,
but politically and legally divided and segregated.
To understand the analogy and the similarities,
(01:14):
let me start with a quick review of howthis formula was applied in South Africa.
There, the economic integration meant that whites and blacksplayed different roles, but in the same economy.
The whites were the owners and managers of the businesses,
while the blacks had to do all the dirty hard work for a lousy payment,
(01:36):
but as part of the same business or corporation.
The gap in their status and their different roles in that integrated economy,
resulted from the second part of the apartheid formula,
which was their political segregation into separate legal systems.
White people, only, were counted as citizens of South Africa,
(02:01):
whose rights were protected by the rule of lawand could participate democratically in the national decision making.
The blacks were politically excluded,but the way they were excluded is of particular importance.
The white government declared ten remote areasas ‘states’ of the blacks,each supposedly ‘belonging’ to a different tribe.
(02:25):
Each black person in South Africa, regardless of where they actually lived,
was no longer a citizen of South Africabut of one of those new fictitious ‘homelands’.
Thus, the blacks of South Africa suddenly found themselves
in the status of foreigners in their own country,
with no citizen rights
(02:46):
and under a strict regime of movement control, surveillance, and constant risk of deportation.
The white government tried to tell the world that these so-called‘black homelands’ were self-governed and autonomous nation-states.
They even tried to brand them as ‘Bantu-states’,
(03:06):
where the word ‘bantu’ means ‘people’ in some of the local African languages.
But everyone knew that these were nothing but puppet states,
whose corrupt black leadership had to obeythe white government,or be removed and punished.
Cynically, people started calling them ‘Bantu-stans’.
(03:27):
The word ‘stan’ means ‘state’ or ‘land’ in many Asian languages,
and just as everyone knew at the time of the Cold War,
that Kazakh-stan or Uzbeki-stan were not controlledby the Kazakh people or the Uzbek people. but by the Soviet Union,
so it was clear that the Bantu “states”, or the Bantu-stans,
(03:49):
were engineered and controlled by the whites.
But ridiculous as these Bantustans were,they were extremely efficient in fulfilling their true purpose,
which was to legally divide and rule the black population.
This way the white minority enjoyed the best of both worlds.
(04:09):
By integrating with the blacks only economically,
the whites made sure that they wouldn’t haveto do all the hard work in the mines and the fields
or even clean their own homes.
And by excluding the blacks politically,
the whites got to have a democracy just for themselves.
Now, when we zoom out to the global level what do we see?
(04:33):
We have huge economic global integration,
in the sense that the economic activitiesof multinational corporations span the entire earth, right?
Almost every single product that we wear, that we eat, that we use,
relies on this global economic integration.
And, like in South Africa,people around the world play very different roles
(04:57):
and get very different compensation,in that economically integrated system.
And what determines for most of themtheir place on the ladder, to a great degree,
is not their personal talent or diligence,
but what is their nationality,and on which side of the border they happen to stand.
(05:18):
If they are citizens of some western country (which is just a nicer way for saying ‘mostly white country’)
most chances, statistically, are that they standmuch higher on the global social-economic ladder
than most of the citizens of the non-European, non-white countries.
It is true that there are many exceptions,
(05:39):
but on average and in comparison to the majority of the world
white people enjoy much better education,health services and public infrastructures;
Their environment is much less pollutedand their working conditions are by far superior.
Take, just for example, the border betweenthe state of California in the USA, and Mexico.
(06:02):
On the Californian side of the fence,it is not legal to pay a worker less than $13 an hour.
That is the minimum legal wage.
On the Mexican side,the minimum wage equals just one US dollar per hour.
What a gap!
It means that even for doing exactly the same work,just by being on Californian soil
(06:26):
a worker will get a salary that is 13 times biggerthan his fellow worker that stands on Mexican soil.
So despite the huge economic integration of the world,
and despite the ecological unity of the Earth,
national borders legally divide humanityto some 200 separate jurisdictions,
(06:48):
where the rights and liberties of the people who work for us,
in the same business or the same corporation,
can be of entirely different order.
In other words, under the inter-national system,what determines your place on the ladder, at least formally,
is not the colour of your skinor the shape of your eyes or nose (no-no!)
(07:11):
but the colour of the passport that you have,or the colours of the flag under which you happen to be born.
And this point raises two important questions.
First, if we think today that racism is inherently wrong,that it is a bad thing to treat a person differently
just on the account of somethingas literally superficial as the colour of their skin,
(07:36):
that tells you nothing about the inner worth of that person,
then how can it be right to treat people differently,just on the account of the nationality that is written on their papers?
Isn’t that even more superficial?
Can that field in the identity card,or the colour of a person’s passport,
tell you anything about the inner worth of that person?
(07:58):
I don’t see how it could.
Or can the soil that the person is standing on,on either side of the fence,
can it justify treating that person with such a different set of laws?
Again, I don’t see how it could.
There were some dark times in the 19th and the 20th centuries,
(08:18):
at the peak of European colonialism and imperialism eras
that many in the global white elite of the day,thought that the nonsense of racism and white superiority
were backed up by serious good science, of biology.
A time will come, and I hope sooner rather than later, that nationalism,
the idea that it’s OK to treat people with entirelydifferent sets of laws and rights just according to their ‘nation’,
(08:46):
whatever that word means,
that it will be as discredited and delegitimized as racism is nowadays.
The second question, that risesfrom the evident political segregation of humanity,
is how come that even though ‘race’is no longer the official criterion for segregation,
(09:06):
how come that so many of the world’s elite are white?
Surely, this is not just a coincidence.
It is, rather, another good reason to use the term ‘global apartheid’,
because the current world order is still, fundamentally, a racist one.
Only that, unlike the racism of the colonial age,that was direct and blunt and official,
(09:30):
the new racism that governs the world today is hidden
by the seemingly innocent division of humanityinto supposedly sovereign nation states.
It is hidden also by the fact that within the white states,non-white minorities, have, at least legally, the same rights.
And the fact that a few of them are doing really well.
(09:52):
But when we zoom out to the global level,we see that, just as the creation of the ‘Bantu-States’ in South Africa
did not really liberate the blacks there,but deepened their oppression;
Just as it did not really give them an equal standing to that of the whites,
but rather entrenched the segregation that kept them under,
(10:14):
so on the global level, the creation of the nation-statesacross the whole world, in the stead of colonialist empires,
did not end the rule of the white minority over Earthbut enabled it to continue.
It did not mend the racial segregation of humanity, but allowed it to persist.
(10:35):
It is the same old racist hierarchy but under different cover;that is just slightly more sophisticated,
but not less cruel, oppressive, or unjust.
It's high time we realized thatthe nation states are our global Bantustans,
whose supreme purpose is to isolatethe democracies of the global white elite
(10:58):
from the ‘threat’ of the participation of the non-whitemajority of the world’s people, the world’s ‘demos’,
the main victims of this senseless and heartless system.
And one last thing.
The ruling elite will always try to defend and justify their grab on power,
by saying that the opposite of the rule of their minorityis the dictatorship of the majority.
(11:23):
These are such nonsense!
The answer to global apartheid is global democracy,
a federal level of government of humanity, by humanity, for humanity.
It means closing the great gap betweenthe global economic integration that we have
(11:44):
and the global political integration that we need,
between the West and the rest,
the privileged white Europeans and humans,as equal citizens of this Earthly home that we live on together.
It’s about time, don’t you think?
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