I think that the international dimension of the reparations issue you raise is an important one, and one largely ignored in the debate hitherto, but I can not agree with the way in which you want to approach it, and not simply because it reproduces the problematic aspects of the ways in which reparations are discussed on a national basis.
What we call economic underdevelopment are life and death issues for Africans and other peoples of the South: poverty on a scale that you can not grasp until you have seen it firsthand, famine and widespread malnutrition, all manner of chronic disease and epidemics, of which AIDS is only the most devastating, and more. The crippling of African and other southern economies by massive foreign debt is a matter for action now: that is the message and the point of Jubilee 2000, which is indeed a most worthy project. And it seems to me that the case for Jubilee 2000 is made much more easily and much more quickly by an analysis of what must be done to prevent unnecessary human suffering now and in the near future, as opposed to an exercise in historical analysis of what has happened in the past which will necessarily be heavily contested.
Take up the historical question, and you will find yourself having to deal with all sorts of issues, such as the fact the enslaved Africans taken to the Americas came overwhelmingly from West Africa, and not even the western entire coast, and insofar as East Africa faced a slave trade, it was Arab -- and not European. You will find yourself grappling with issues such as the fact that a country like Ethiopia, which did not experience the slave trade and was not even colonized, is far poorer than a Ghana or a Senegal, from which hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were taken. And insofar as there is a debt owed to Mozambique [and Angola], the example you raise, surely the most significant debtor must be the colonial power, Portugal, which is no condition to pay anyone anything. Yes, I know that one can provide explanations for all of these developments, for imperialism is a rather complex and uneven phenomenon, but why make the adoption of a positive policy dependent upon a rather complex historical argument, with all sorts of presuppositions that will must be difficult to gain general assent for, when it can be far more easily and soundly based on arguments of immediate economic necessity and moral imperative.
Talk of the long term and educational campaigns is all well and good, but it involves no reflection on why left wing educational campaigns designed to lay the basis for the great long term struggles produce so very little in the way of positive results. Election after election, we go through socialist educational campaigns, and as often as not, fewer -- rather than more -- folks end up voting socialist, and in numbers so small as to not even be statistically significant.
Why? Because socialist organizations don't seem to have learned the first thing about pedagogy, about how learning and education actually go on. Didactic presentations, be it book, lecture or audio-visual form, about the abstract truth of something, removed from all social context and live issues, most especially didactic presentations about the historical truth of something, are guaranteed nonstarters. Only the worst teachers, the teachers who know the least about their craft and practice it in the most bastardized ways, teach the way socialists do educational campaigns. All of this talk about raising reparations to make educational points in the abstract, just like the notion of running marginal candidates for offices they could not win in a thousand elections to make educational points, embodies piss poor notions of pedagogy, and educates no one.
Learning occurs through doing, through active processes of engagement with the "subject matter" being learned. This is a lesson that one finds not only in the great educators of the left, such as John Dewey, but also in such places as Gramsci [the organic intellectual is the practical organizer of social life, not the university scholar] and even in the Theses on Feuerbach. One educates not by telling and lecturing, not by drawing abstract connections, not even by showing and demonstration, but by involving the 'student' in the process of interaction with what she/he is learning.
This notion of education requires that, like a good organizer, you start were people are at, and out of successfully organizing what is now politically possible and realizable, out of building a movement, you create new possibilities. That is the whole story of the great advances of emancipatory struggles in the US for the last two centuries -- from abolitionism to women's suffrage, from the labor movement to the anti-imperialist and peace movements, from the civil rights movement to the feminist movement. It is quite contrary to the idea now current in left notions of educational campaigns that the way one shifts the terms of debate, the parameters of what is possible, is by simply raising issues outside of what is now considered possible. That does not make you cutting edge; it simply makes you irrelevant.
Rosa Luxemburg's teleology was wrong: the movement, and not the goal, is everything.
John wrote:
> Has anyone disputing Horowitz et. al. taken the time to point out that a
> major reason Africa is underdeveloped is because millions of people were
> seized and forcibly "exported" from that continent over a period of several
> hundred years?
>
> Also, shouldn't the debate on reparations for African-Americans be placed
> in the context of the worldwide legacy of imperialism? I have a hunch
> (note sarcasm: I have a good deal more than a hunch) that a lot of
> African-American radicals, including but not limited to the BRC, are doing
> exactly this, but you wouldn't know that from following the debate on this
> list.
>
> I think that this is a key point in assessing whether the fight for
> reparations is a politically efficacious tack to take. I would argue that
> it is not only politically wise, but absolutely necessary, to talk about
> reparations if we're going to address the global imbalance of power that we
> all presumably want to overturn. After all, isn't Jubilee 2000 a worthy
> enterprise? And isn't our argument just as effective -- perhaps even
> moreso -- when we start raising the question of who REALLY owes a debt to
> WHOM? Is Mozambique really "indebted" to the IFIs, or might it not be the
> case that a debt is owed to Mozambique, for the years of subversion by
> RENAMO, South Africa, the USA et. al., not to mention the hundreds of years
> of imperialism and systematic exploitation?
>
> It's inane to observe that reparations are not politically acceptable in
> the current political atmosphere of the United States. Very little that
> people on the left favor is politically feasible in the near future in the
> US, but trying to effect systemic change is never easy, right? Or am I
> just a starry-eyed youth to be dismissed by the world-wise likes of Leo
> Casey?
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010326/983d9f50/attachment.htm>