If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
Thats a nice device you have for predicting alternate histories you have there.
Nothing is certain.
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.