Fwd: Sides? (was Re: the terrorist bombings in London

[Sean Mannion]

>If the aim of the anti-capitalist lobby is to educate the public and 
>strengthen popular support for >the economic and social reforms they 
>advocate then they need to think very carefully about the >way their cause 
>is portrayed. Whether the public face of the lobby (i.e. the violent brick 
>throwers) >are infiltrators from outside, whether they are only a "violent 
>minority", or whether their violence is >actually endorsed as "necessary 
>political protest" by the lobby, which seems to be the case, then I >don't 
>believe they're doing the cause any good at all. I think it's a lesson the 
>IRA learnt quite a >few years ago now.

Again I would have to stress (though fairly obviously) in reply to this that 
my own understanding of the anti-capitalist movement is that the very label 
of it as a 'movement' covers over far more ideological differences than 
similarities; from the Anarchists and Syndico-Anarchists, to the Marxist 
groups, to democractic Socialists, Libertarians, to more mainstream 
dispositions. As such I think there is no real multi-directional unity, and 
certainly no wide-ranging consensus, and since the only thing that links 
such a movement (outside relative ideological similarities - and  it's the 
differences that count for more here) is the sense of outrage at its core, 
it will resonate at that personal/ethical core rather than at the level of 
representational politics.

>Bob Geldof and the Live-8 campaign are largely responsible: by raising 
>public awareness and >garnering popular support through non-violent means 
>they managed to put the issue of African >poverty firmly back on top of the 
>political agenda. While the naysayers sit around mouthing >empty slogans 
>and fantasising about the dictatorship of the proletariat, Geldof and his 
>Live-8 >movement actually managed to get something done.

I think the naysayers did slightly more here than you're suggesting. To look 
firstly at the Live8/Make Poverty History campaign, we did see the 
generation of an awareness, however predicated on turning this awareness 
into spectacle - boosting many a music industry stock portfolio - that 
presented many concert goers with the end of a campaign, and inevitably for 
most, the end of  concentrated attention on the issue, while the turmoil of 
another continent rools on, flagshipped by a sister-campaign that used 
sweatshop labour to produce awareness-rasing accesories protesting, you 
guessed it, 'poverty'. Awareness of a crisis is a necessary conduit for its 
change, but it will never be a political threat to leadership while its an 
awareness of another nation's plight that doesn't threaten borders. For 
there was never any real pressure upon any of the leaders of G8 nations or 
Live8 to ask for a higher sum than the one it achieved (it was a moral not a 
political aim) which is so far away from that actual total owed that it 
presents itself as an extremely low standard for the eight richest nations 
on Earth, if it was to be presented as a serious move towards dismantling 
poverty. Contrary to Geldof's self-aggandizing statement, the people of 
Africa did not wake up on any morning in the last several months to find 
themselves significantly better-off as a result of the Live8 campaign. Not 
now and not for years to come -- the terms and conditions for the 
economic/political rebirth of the African Continent are outlined and 
analysed by George Monbiot here: 
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/07/09/africas-new-best-friends/

Furthermore, I don't see it as the role of the 'naysayer' to provide 
solutions, the 'naysayer' role in this whole process has not only been to 
highlight the inadequency of what is being done in the name of aid and 
cancellation, but also to stop us all falling down the rabbit-hole of 
self-congratulation that Geldof and the G8 Governments seem to want us to 
abesail down with them, while forgetting that half of that party have played 
a bigger hand in the African Problem than they like us to pretend. It also 
serves as a reminder that not every spectator's conscience will be healed 
over by being content enough to think we played a part 'taking the right 
step foward' or 'giving a good start'. Often, though, when I hear the word 
'awareness' used, I can't help but be reminded of what the otherwise odious 
PJ O'Rourke mean when he wrote that

"Some writers, the young and the dim ones, think being near something 
important makes them important so they should act and sound important which 
will, somehow, make their audience important, too. Then, as soon as 
everybody is filled with a sufficient sense of importance, Something Will Be 
Done. It's not the truth. Thirty years of acting and sounding important 
about the Holocaust did nothing to prevent Cambodia."

>I don't see your comments around the dismantling of the British Welfare 
>State (Thatcher more >than Blair, I would have thought), or the 
>over-representation of African-American men in prison in >the US (gross 
>numbers rather than % comparison to South Africa under apartheid, I'd 
>suggest) as >valid counter-arguments at all; and I sincerely hope you're 
>not trying to claim the (very arguable) >accusations of genocide against 
>Churchill or Clinton/Bush as exoneration of those perpetrating >genocide 
>and mass murder in the Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Burundi et 
>al. today.

Sorry to have been unclear about this part; I intended to use these 
instances to highlight the fact that we shouldn't be over-confident in 
praising our own mastering of equality and justice enough to think that we 
provide the best (or a better than current) model for export to other 
nations (especially on the conditionality of aid to African states 
predicated on the movement of those states towards democratic models. 
Thatcher was inhuman, but I don't see New Labour in a much better light 
(privatisation of public services, the illegality of the Iraq war, cuts in 
disability benefits, stealth taxes, etc, etc.). On the prisons stats, 
there's a better outline here:  
http://www.prisonactivist.org/pipermail/prisonact-list/2002-June/005419.html 
(further to this, the barring of regular constitutional rights from 
rehabilitated felons, i.e. voting) - add Britian to this also, in 1998-9 
black individuals were six time more liable to be stopped and searched than 
whites.

As a final point, the ocassions of genocide on perpetrated by both sides of  
developed and third-world divide do provide an interesting comparison, and 
that's that while the genocides on the third-world side of the divide took 
place between ethnic groups and national neighbors in close proximity, those 
of developed nations (and in the specific examples cited) did not; excepting 
of course those that occur within national borders - in which case we 
generally don't have a towering example to set to developing nations in 
terms of moral courageousness either.

Sorry to be so long-winded on this one, glad to be joining in though.
Cheers,

Sean