Several responses are standard to criticism of ideologically bankrupt
and morally two-faced initiatives like the UK's Make Poverty History
campaign. One is to rail at the impudence of calling into question the
campaign organizers sincerity and good intentions. Another is to pout,
"well, what alternative do YOU offer...?" Or, more disingenuously,
critics will be accused of sneering at the genuine heartfelt desire
among the millions of people who contribute hard-earned money to
projects and programmes meant to alleviate world poverty's
all-too-numerous symptoms.
At the global elite's Davos summit in the last few days, leading
representatives of corporate capitalism have made superficially
impressive commitments to fund health and other programmes in less
developed countries. A phrase that comes to mind is one used in Latin
America in work with women in abusive relationships - no mas confites
en el infierno, no more chocolates in hell. When people ask why so many
tens of millions of people lack decent health care and education, one
answer is clear. For over two decades the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund and the governments that control those institutions have
consistently told weak national governments in less developed countries
to reduce public social spending.
Blind faith-based economic policies of privatization of state
resources, reduction in public spending and deregulation in general
have created a laissez-faire hell for the huge impoverished global
majority. Occasionally, as Bill Gates did last week with his declared
initiative against TB, corporate multi-millionaires offer to use some
of their wealth to alleviate some of the suffering. But had their
corporations been subject to equitable taxation and regulation and the
resulting revenues been applied to social spending on health and
education, much untold suffering might have been avoided in the first
place.
One might also note that individual corporate initiatives backed by
warmongers like George Bush, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown can be regarded
legitimately as public relations stunts that do nothing to change the
fundamental causes of poverty. Iraq has been plunged into inconceivable
suffering and deprivation as a result of a criminally aggressive war.
The same people who are responsible for that unconscionable crime
suggest they are concerned about global poverty. No amount of
sophisticated public relations and commonplace mainstream media
collusion can cover up that grotesque contradiction and the moral fraud
it ultimately represents.
In any case, the United Nations, in its efforts to create consensus
around the Right to Development, has already worked out a legitimate
framework for a sustainable and feasible response to global problems of
poverty and social justice. That initiative has consistently been
thwarted by the United States and many of its allies. Rich countries
resist moves to create an international structure obliging them to
promote equitable development based on a legally binding framework for
the redistribution of wealth. They detest the rights-based philosophy
of such structures and their linkage between the principle of
self-determination and the obligation to cooperate for global
development.
It is reasonable to reckon such a structure might finally lead towards
an end to global poverty. The chances of corporate capitalist policies
achieving that objective are nil. Self-evidently, since equitable
redistribution of wealth is anathema to the proponents of those
policies. Corporate capitalism is based on the principle of
laissez-faire with all that implies. The evidence of its utter failure
as a framework for rational and equitable human development is
abundantly available around the world.
So when a huge public relations based campaign like Make Poverty
History comes along and one sees that it is organized by people wholly
committed to collaborating with the structures of aggressive
international corporate capitalism and with leading individuals who
promote that system, scepticism is a prerequisite. Like the large aid
and development NGOs and the humanitarian relief organizations who
support it, the Make Poverty History campaign channels genuine longing
on the part of ordinary people for a better world into activities that
seek to legtimize a fundamentally illegitimate status quo.
Make Poverty History is a massive humanitarian effort. But its
campaigners resist facing contradictions thrown up by efforts in their
consumer capitalist societies to address economic injustice caused by
the imperialist policies of their countries' governments. Essentially,
they seek to provide the world's poor majority with neo-colonial
confites en el infierno, sweeties in hell, unsustainable palliatives
that leave the status quo unchanged.
An obvious example of this is that such campaigns resolutely avoid the
matter of solidarity with legitimate resistance movements in
occupìed countries like Iraq, Palestine or Haiti. But the
fundamental demand in those countries is the very equity and justice
for impoverished and oppressed peoples that Make Poverty History
campaigners say is their goal. Those campaigners want the more awkward
and embarrassing politics to go away while they engage in a technical
focus on trade, aid and debt and rake in the funding. But where did
those problems come from if not as a result of unjust imperialist
domination and oppression?
To effect real change, the widespread goodwill apparent among so many
people at grass roots in the world's rich countries would be better
channelled into direct practical solidarity. Donating small change to
an intermediary class of functionaries in development and aid NGOs
changes nothing. Countries in Central America for example have received
billions of dollars of governmental and non-governmental aid over the
last twenty years. Apart from Costa Rica, they all still rank dozens of
places below Cuba in the UN Human Development Index while Cuba has
suffered forty five years of criminal economic blockade.
The experience of a country like Nicaragua through its revolution and
afterwards, demonstrates that surprisingly large numbers of people at
grass roots are prepared to act in really practical solidarity. Through
the 1980s right up to the present, thousands of people have changed
their own lives, made contact at grass roots and cut out the parasitic
development managerial class represented by functionaries in the aid
and development NGOs. That move makes it possible to nurture direct
relationships with people in less developed countries who are trying to
build a better world for themselves and the rest of us
If anything is going to change the current racist imperialist status
quo it is a combination of international grass roots solidarity and
global normative structures obliging equitable redistribution of the
world's resources. For the moment, as the history of the UN Right to
Development shows, powerful laissez-faire capitalist gangsters are in a
position to obstruct agreement on such policies. Paul Wolfowitz at the
World Bank, Pascal Lamy at the World Trade Organization and Rodrigo
Rato at the International Monetary Fund are the current figureheads for
that ideologically driven class. But in some countries those ideologues
are being passed by and rendered irrelevant.
In Latin America, for example, the next few years will see a decisive
competition between global corporate capitalism and continuing efforts
towards economic justice by the peoples and governments of Cuba,
Venezuela and perhaps Bolivia and other countries, inspired by
socialism. In that competition grass roots solidarity between peoples,
public policies committed to equitable redistribution of resources and
regulation of corporate big business will be central motifs. In
comparison with the systematic determination of those peoples and
governments to address their problems of poverty and social justice,
rich country consumerist humanitarian initiatives that ignore
imperialist aggression, like the UK Make Poverty History campaign, look
self-serving and blinkered.