Ahoy Bob
Hi All,
Firstly thanks to John Hayes for clarifying what is
involved accessing research sources (Posted under: "Nice teeth but
your leg might have to come off").
On another tack, here's an interesting angle on the political impact
of rock stars
Bob.
Monbiot's quite right, sad to say. In Geldof's case it goes right
back to Band Aid, when he and so many other "stars" mobilised mass
support to "end hunger" when they knew very well that was not an
option, or at least not via that route. Raising millions of people's
interest and hopes in this way when they were bound to be dashed, and
in such a subject, was atrocious, I thought at the time, and still
do. I had some involvement with the Band Aid people, good people they
were, but it didn't alter my opinion of Geldof et al. Ending hunger
is not a matter of charity, it's a matter of ousting the world's most
powerful vested interests in order to install a more equitable world
economic system - mass poverty and hunger are the collateral damage
of neoliberal "wealth creation" (read "wealth extraction, poverty
creation"). In other words, even then Geldof could be said to have
been shielding "the Powerful".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1510808,00.html
Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 by the Guardian/UK
Bards of the Powerful
Far from Challenging the G8's Role in Africa's Poverty, Geldof and
Bono are Giving Legitimacy to Those Responsible
by George Monbiot
<snip>
Here's some more:
http://www.fpif.org/papers/0506white.html
Foreign Policy In Focus Discussion Paper: When Wearing White is Not
Chic, and Collaboration Not Cool
FPIF Discussion Paper
June 2005
When Wearing White is Not Chic, and Collaboration Not Cool
By Patrick Bond, Dennis Brutus, and Virginia Setshedi
Patrick Bond is based at the Centre for Civil Society at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/) and
a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org);
Dennis Brutus is a poet and professor emeritus at University of
Pittsburgh, and works with Jubilee South Africa and the Centre for
Economic Justice; and Virginia Setshedi is a Soweto-based
anti-privatization activist employed at the Freedom of Expression
Institute (http://www.fxi.org.za/).
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Notwithstanding the global hype associated with reversing aid, debt,
and trade injustices during the past few days, it hasn't been an easy
time for the huge Non-Governmental Organizations at the center of the
action.
A front-page New Statesman article on May 30 revealed that Oxfam's
revolving-door relationship with chancellor Gordon Brown has neutered
the demands, strategies, and tactics of the 450-member NGO campaign,
"Make Poverty History." The website of the British magazine Red
Pepper followed up with a devastating political critique of the
campaign, including a refusal to countenance any anti-war message
that will embarrass Brown and Tony Blair.
Embarrassment of this sort seems endemic amongst the charity-minded.
The Bob Geldof superstar concert series "Live 8" correctly stood
accused of being "hideously white" (as Black Information Link put
it), since only one band from Africa was scheduled amongst dozens at
the five major performances. (A hastily arranged additional concert
in Johannesburg may lead to a kind of outsourcing for black bands.)
In any case, Sir Bob's mid-1980s Live Aid famine relief strategy is
widely understood to have flopped because it ignored the
countervailing roles of imperial power relations, capital
accumulation, unreformable global institutions, and venal local
elites-problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8.
There was another PR disaster in early June, just a month before the
Group of 8 (G8) leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland: white
wristbands favored by Blair as a mark of his commitment to Africa
were revealed as products of Chinese forced labor at a Shenzhen firm,
Tat Shing. According to the Telegraph newspaper, "Christian Aid,
which bought more than 500,000 wristbands from Tat Shing, claims that
Oxfam failed to tell other charities that it had decided to stop
ordering from the Shenzhen Company. Oxfam said it told its coalition
partners of its decision, but 'perhaps could have put it in writing'."
Do these gaffes signify something deeper? Merely careless
paternalism? Or perhaps a sense that the main outcomes of this
campaign are to be celebrated in media buzz, fashion statements,
celebrity chasing, and the NGOs' proximity to power?
NGOs or Organic Social Movements
The heart of the problem is that the large mainstream NGOs-and here
we do not mean War on Want, the World Development Movement, and
Christian Aid-are not putting serious pressure on the G-8. For
example, when anti-poverty campaigners call for "cancellation of poor
countries' unpayable debts," this leaves undefined what, exactly, is
"unpayable" and concedes that the vast populations of lower-middle
income countries will suffer under indefinite debt peonage. NGO and
rock star endorsements of the partial debt relief gimmick announced
by Gordon Brown and the G-8 finance ministers on June 11 illustrate
the confusion.
Semantic wiggling is just one of the problems associated with the
best of these initiatives, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty
(GCAP), whose International Facilitation Group was established in
Johannesburg late last year. Many excellent African organizations
have joined the campaign, but have they fully recognized the
potential costs of such campaigns, perhaps suppressing their better
social-change instincts?
For GCAP, "A single global title for the mobilization is needed to
provide focus, cohesion, and to maximize impact of activity The aim
of "White Band Day" will be to get everyone around the world that
wants to end poverty to wear a white band on those days."
There is a genuine need for focus and cohesion. But if it is
addressed in the manner conceived by GCAP's strategists, it could
have the reverse effect: organizational demobilization accompanied by
lowest-common-denominator analyses and demands.
To illustrate, GCAP's first newsletter, issued on June 14, is a
3600-word report-back on campaigning across the world. Yet it
contains no reference to organic anti-poverty activism in the Global
South, such as-in no particular order-labor strikes, popular
mobilizations for AIDS-treatment and other health services,
reconnections of water/electricity, land and housing occupations,
anti-GMO and pro-food security campaigns, women's organizing,
municipal budget campaigns, student and youth movements, community
resistance to displacements caused by dam construction and the like,
anti-debt and reparations movements, environmental justice struggles,
immigrants' rights campaigns, political movements to take state
power, etc. No mention of Bolivia, Venezuela, Palestine, or Iraq.
GCAP has superb member organizations across the Third World, to be
sure, but as a network it just seems to float in the air,
disconnected from the reality of anti-poverty protest. It's as if the
formidable recent upsurge of unrest-1980s-90s IMF Riots, high-profile
indigenous people's protests since Zapatismo in 1994, global justice
activism since Seattle in 1999, the Social Forum movement since 2001,
anti-war demos since 2001, autonomist protests and the Latin American
left's revival-never happened, don't exist, and aren't worthy of
acknowledgment much less integration and amplification.
Worse, GCAP's promotion of the already watered-down UN Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) could draw activist energy and resources
away from organic struggles and organizational imperatives in many
Third World countries. If GCAP is successful, we foresee a tsunami of
distraction, flooding out the diverse local struggles that could
instead-if nurtured carefully-support a genuinely bottom-up,
internationally-linked, networked fight against injustice.
In contrast to the GCAP rhetoric, albeit sometimes off the beaten
path, serious activists are crossing borders, races, classes, and
political traditions in sector after sector: land (Via Campesina),
healthcare (International Peoples Health Council), free schooling
(Global Campaign for Education), water (the People's World Water
Forum), energy/climate change (the Durban Declaration), debt (Jubilee
South), democratic development finance (IFIs-Out! and World Bank
Bonds Boycott), trade (Our World is Not for Sale), and so on.
Of course, it is not at all easy to interlock the already overlapping
grassroots and shop-floor justice campaigns. South Africans now
campaigning for an overall program of "decommodification" and
socio-economic rights know this, thanks to the various movements'
political splits (mainly over the merits of alignment to the
corruption-ridden, neoliberal ruling party of Thabo Mbeki).
To be sure, there is broad unity in the South Africans'
objectives-free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS; at least 50
liters of free water and 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each
individual every day; extensive land reform; prohibitions on service
disconnections and evictions; free education; the right to
employment; and even a monthly "Basic Income Grant"-but very hard
work lies ahead to connect the concrete struggles.
Globophiles, Globophobes
Still, without coherence emerging from organic struggles fought by
mass democratic movements across the Global South (including in
Northern ghettoes), the construction of a top-down campaign against
poverty is both unrealistic and subject to early cooption. According
to Catherine Quarmby in the New Statesman last month, "Some of the
most intriguing criticism of the softly-softly approach has come from
within the government itself. One senior government source suggests
that Oxfam has failed to learn one of the essential techniques of
negotiation-if you agree on the basics too early you forfeit real
influence."
Unfortunately this is no aberration, but part of a pattern dating at
least to 1995, when Oxfam International broke from the 50 Years is
Enough protests against the World Bank, endorsing a large inflow of
taxpayer funding at the very peak of the Washington Consensus
mentality.
By 2002, Oxfam's leading policy analyst, quoted in the Washington
Post, happily revealed an agenda of divide-and-conquer, between
"globophobes" (the global justice movement protesting the
WTO/IMF/World Bank) and "globophiles" (Oxfam): "Breaking with some of
its anti-globalization allies, the aid agency Oxfam International
issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a
potentially enormous boon to the world's poor " "The extreme element
of the anti-globalization movement is wrong," said Kevin Watkins, a
senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. "Trade
can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief."
As then-director of Food First, Anuradha Mittal, complained, "We are
disappointed that Oxfam, one of the NGO leaders on food security, has
chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks
in the South such as Via Campesina, Movement of Landless Workers
(Brazil), Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa
Trade Network which have demanded that governments must uphold the
rights of all people to food sovereignty and the right to food rather
than industry-led export-oriented production Oxfam undermines the
demands of social movements and think tanks in the South."
Proximity to Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue has unfortunately
become a good proxy for political common sense, or lack thereof. For
instance, Mohammad Akhter, chief executive officer of Interaction,
the 160-member NGO coalition many of whose members are considered de
facto subsidiaries of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
met new World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz late last month and
publicly pronounced: "The World Bank is in good hands."
A few days earlier, Interaction and Oxfam had thrown a grateful
going-away bash for James Wolfensohn, even though on three
high-profile occasions-the World Commission on Dams, Structural
Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative, and Extractive Industries
Review-he seduced NGOs into multi-stakeholder reviews, and then broke
their hearts by allying instead with corporate and state suitors.
As a result of these sorts of influences, there appears little
benefit-and great risk-for African NGOs to adopt as a high priority
top-down Make Poverty History and even GCAP campaigns which endorse
MDG end-goals dreamt up in the backrooms of the UN, where Bush
administration ideologues breathe down bureaucrats' necks to reduce
funding obligations, impose patriarchal and Christian-fundamentalist
values, remove the word "rights" from (already fatuous) official
rhetoric, and denude the few progressive UN agencies of any clout.
Even Johannesburg-based Civicus International staff have informally
relabeled their objective the "Minimalist Development Goals."
Why, then, do those white bands grace some African NGO wrists and
heads, from Civicus' chief executive officer at the last World
Economic Forum in Davos, to a few brave pro-MDG NGOers at the Africa
Social Forum? When Civicus staff brought two huge bags of the
headbands to Lusaka and made a pitch for the campaign, it was so
controversial-alongside a futile appeal to endorse a "Joint
Facilitation Committee" with the hated World Bank-that the bags were
left closed.
South Africa's Whiteband ("Witdoeke") Problem
If we flash back 19 years, to mid-1986, we get a better perspective
on why wearing white headbands is so distasteful for the South
African left. At the time, Cape Town's African township Crossroads
had a population of 100 000+ and a high profile in anti-apartheid
protest in part because of its location near the airport. Over a
fortnight's time, violence erupted, leaving 60 people dead and
approximately 60,000 people homeless as a reactionary paramilitary
gang swept through, known as the "witdoeke," whose leader was
specifically mandated by the apartheid regime to terrorize
anti-apartheid activists.
According to a reliable history of the area, "The person selected for
this in Crossroads was Johnson Ngxobongwana. Ngxobongwana had evolved
from being a local warlord to a strong political voice in Crossroads.
As chairman of the ward committee he had built up a popular
following, and acquired a retinue of local thugs, known as witdoeke
(white-cloths) for the white headbands they wore for identification.
Unbeknownst to most people he also had 'unofficial' sponsorship from
South Africa's apartheid government and its security forces.
Ngxobongwana was able to use these resources to eliminate rivals in
the area, as well as marginalize women's groups and youth groups."
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Crossroads' fate to be
comparable with techniques used in Johannesburg, Durban, and other
sites where violence emanating from the witdoeke-style Inkatha
movement killed tens of thousands of people: " In the South African
context, contra-mobilization was used to organize and support
'moderate blacks' to oppose the revolutionary movements. Of
necessity, it was a covert strategy-concealing the hand of the state
as provider of logistical, political, and financial support-and
making use of "surrogate" forces. Hence, the state would not be seen
to be involved in the conflict and violence between groupings and the
resistance organizations."
No one is suggesting that putting on a white headband or wristband
makes you a collaborator with neoliberalism, dividing-and-conquering
the oppressed forces, and supporting "moderate" NGOs so that they
gain Bantustan-style rewards from the global apartheid establishment.
Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the resistance organizations, it
is overdue that we collectively consider our fundamental visions, and
in particular whether the much welcomed globalization of people-and
of culture, ideas, hospitality, travel, and political solidarity-can
be accompanied by what we'd argue is just as desperately needed: the
deglobalization of capital.
For or Against Market Tyranny?
After all, the danger of NGO-lubricated ideological alignment with
the neoliberal project is serious. At a time when men like Jeffrey
Sachs are celebrated as saviors of the world's poor-for example, in a
Bono song dedication at last month's big New York City concert-a
deeper critique of markets and the NGOs which legitimate them is
desperately needed.
Bono in particular has been obsequious. At the last New Labor party
convention, Bono labeled Blair/Brown the "Lennon and McCartney of
poverty reduction." According to Quarmby, "some groups involved in
Make Poverty History were horrified. John Hilary, director of
campaigns and policy at War on Want, was in the audience. 'When Bono
said that, many NGO leaders who were there put their heads in their
hands and groaned It's a killer blow for us. To see the smiles on
the faces of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair! This is exactly what they
want-they want people to believe that this is their crusade,
without actually changing their policy'."
Are the Make Poverty History campaign objectives for
Gleneagles-greater Third World exposure to market mechanisms, a few
crumbs of debt relief, and a doubling of (neoliberally-conditioned)
aid-actually worth endorsing as a reformist step forward, or should
they be condemned as more of the same? In his book Deglobalization,
Walden Bello has convincingly set out the justice movement's case for
disempowering and defunding the global-scale institutions that push
capitalism down Third World throats.
So when Sachs, Oxfam, Mbeki, and others continue to insist that the
way to cure poverty is to expand the world market and reverse
Africa's alleged "marginalization," they elide the reality that
Africa's trade/GDP ratio has for many years topped the world charts,
and the reality that ever-greater reliance upon exporting cash-crops
and minerals-most of which have suffered huge declines in price due
to gluts-is a recipe for underdevelopment.
When debt relief comes with more Western neoliberal conditionality,
as HIPC shows, the reality is that people often end up in worse shape
after relief than before.
And when G-8 "phantom aid" continues to foster Northern interests
above those of the Third World's people, it should be rethought
entirely. In late May, Christian Aid's brilliant Ghanaian
researcher/campaigner Charles Abugre declared-personally, not
organizationally-to a Globalize Resistance conference in London:
"Stop the aid! It's done too much damage!"
What to Wear, for Fun in the Sun?
What, then, should be done in coming weeks, especially on July 2 in
Edinburgh? As Naomi Klein suggested at a University of KwaZulu-Natal
anti-corporate conference on June 10, "A million people are going to
Edinburgh and joining hands, wearing white, in a circle around the
entire city, and it's going to be one big, giant bracelet. Everyone
will wear bracelets, and then they'll be a bracelet. Are you excited
about this? I always had concerns that some of these big corporate
NGOs were less interested in contesting power than acting as
accessories to power. But being a giant bracelet for the G-8 takes
this a little too far."
Instead, suggested Klein, "Encircle the G8! But instead of declaring
themselves a piece of jewelry, they should say, we are a noose, we
are putting pressure and we are squeezing these neoliberal policies
that are taking lives around the world. Just like the noose that
killed Ken Saro-Wiwa ten years ago this November."
That is indeed the choice: to be a bauble for-or a noose
against-neoliberalism. By joining those active across the Third World
in concrete struggles (who in our experience are not wasting time
with GCAPs and MDGs), Northern readers can offer real, lasting
solidarity.
In making the choice, especially in Britain, consider whether the
symbolism of the color white is appropriate. Are NGOs and their
friends painting themselves as virgins at an altar, on the verge of
marrying G-8 leaders like Bush, Berlusconi, Chirac, and Blair?
Alternatively, will the NGO-led masses be waving white flags of
surrender on July 2 in Edinburgh, with these headbands and wristbands?
It's rather hard to tell. According to Make Poverty History's Bruce
Whitehead, "It's not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but
more of a walk. It is going to be very much a family affair. The
emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G-8
leaders to Scotland and to ask them to deliver trade justice, debt
cancellation, and increased aid to developing countries."
Perhaps Whitehead and Make Poverty History need a change of both
attitude and attire. After all, "white" armies have traditionally
fought "red" armies. Fortunately, unlike Russia in the late 1910s or
Crossroads in the mid-1980s, today's armies of NGOs and social
movements are not carrying weapons of physical destruction, only
ideas, energy, and a few material resources.
Still, we can't help but conclude that, in contrast to the red social
movement struggles for dignity and justice, those wearing white and
adopting the NGOs' weak program may appear as well, if not explicit
agents of the G-8, then at minimum their decorations.
Hence when protesting against Wolfowitz on his mid-June Africa trip,
against the Gleneagles meeting of the world's rulers in early July,
and against the World Bank and IMF annual meetings during the late
September days of anti-war action in Washington, DC, we'll encourage
our comrades to wear something more colorful, with politics to match.
For More Information:
Stuart Hodkinson, " Make Poverty History in Turmoil over New
Wristband Scandal," Red Pepper (June 10, 2005)
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/
Katharine Quarmby, "Why Oxfam Is Failing Africa," New Statesman (May 30, 2005)
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Christian Aid
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/
Global Call to Action to End Poverty
http://www.whiteband.org/
Global Campaign for Education
http://www.campaignforeducation.org/
International Peoples Health Council
http://www.iphcglobal.org
Jubilee South
http://www.jubileesouth.org/
Live 8
http://www.live8live.com/
Make Poverty History
http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/
Our World Is Not for Sale
http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/
Via Campesina
http://www.viacampesina.org/
War on Want
www.waronwant.org
World Bank Bonds Boycott
http://econjustice.net/wbbb/
World Development Movement
www.wdm.org.uk
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