Re: [A-List] Civil Society - Progressive or Reactionary

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Macdonald Stainsby"
> Aside from the heat being generated, Henry is closer to the mark than
> Patrick, in my opinion. I think of Oxfam, an organization that was part of
> the emergence of the NGO wing of the "anti-globalization" movement. What
> they *fought actively* to do was to get nation-states to find ways around
> neo-liberal programs

I think if you look closely, you'll also find yourself way off the mark
here, Mac. Oxfam *is* neoliberal in orientation: thoroughly committed to
saving the legitimacy of the export-led growth model and the IFIs, using a
few minor social-policy concessions to encourage its partners in the Third
World to continue 'participation' in globo-governance scams instead of
trying to shut these down. Several have argued against Oxfam very vocally
and eloquently, especially Walden Bello (as recently as last month), Vandana
Shiva and Anuradah Mittal. If you follow these debates at all closely,
you'll learn that key Oxfam staff periodically declares themselves
pro-globalization ('globophiles'), while condemning others of us as
'globophobes'. Here's an example of the debate.

Cheers,
P.

FPIF Discussion Paper
June 2005

When Wearing White is Not Chic, and Collaboration Not Cool
By Patrick Bond, Dennis Brutus, and Virginia Setshedi


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/


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 Focuswww.fpif.org