Sides? (was Re: the terrorist bombings in London

[jbor at bigpond.com]

>> 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.

And I guess this is the point I've been making all along, challenging 
the facile notion that there are "sides". Not everyone who supports 
debt relief and aid to Africa is a minion of the evil robber barons. 
And not all the multinationals and Western political leaders are 
without a moral conscience or a real commitment to improving the lot of 
the world's poor and oppressed.

Too often for the anti-capitalist lobby this sense of outrage at one's 
own leaders seems to have become an end in itself, a polemical game, to 
the point where the realities of terrorism and despotism and Third 
World poverty are ignored, or even condoned. And in fact it's the 
anti-capitalist lobby, soi-disant, which carves up the world into these 
two monolithic "sides", a division which bears no relation to the way 
people actually think and act in the world -- what they haven't 
realised is that not only are they alienating a huge chunk of the 
populace in the West, they're out of touch with what the people in 
Africa and elsewhere want and need. And it's not as though debt relief 
and targeted aid programs for sustainable development are some new idea 
from out of left field -- the models are already there and working 
pretty darn well, in Tanzania for example.

The anti-capitalistas don't have a mortgage on outrage and moral 
concern. For the great majority of people it's not some 
politico-economic abstraction or vain daydream of revolution which 
generates these feelings, it's a realisation of the impoverishment and 
suffering of fellow human beings. And this is precisely where Bob 
Geldof has hit the nail on the head.

best