>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.
I disagree. I think that the debt relief campaigns look like charity operations to a lot of people in the United States, instead of what they really are: just one small step in giving the world's poor their due. How do you counter the idea that the Third World is poor even "after all we've done for them"? It's true that this is a pedagogical question, and I'm not one to propose that we agitate by approaching people and asking, "Say, how'd you like to join the revolution?" or saying "Sign up here for the armed struggle." So I think you're setting up an ultraleft straw man here. It seems to me that reparations ARE a useful way to conceive of what needs to be done. Don't progressive people in the imperialist countries need SOME understanding of WHY the Third World is poor? I'm not saying that we approach this in a lecture style, or that we ask people to plunk down a buck fifty for our sectarian tabloid which explains it all in detail. But I do think that we need to find ways to shift the debate in this direction.
>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.
I suppose you've already anticipated my objection that the slave trade in West Africa, what with the introduction of massive numbers of weapons and other commodities that exacerbated the already-existing tensions between West African peoples and so on, and made West Africa a piece of a ghastly new international system (it's exports: human cargo), was a slave trade (and a form of slavery) entirely unique and unprecedented in human history, geared to capitalist imperatives and so on.
After several other examples, you provide this caveat:
>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.
A good question indeed, though I don't think anyone is saying that a positive policy is necessarily "dependent" on the acceptance by everyone of a very complex analysis. I do think, though, that promoting a deeper structural transformation can be helped along by conceiving of things in terms of reparations or something like them, because thinking in terms of "immediate economic necessity" tends to lead to a band-aid or charity mentality (the kind of thing that leads a lot of liberals to have "second thoughts" about the bleeding-heart measures they had once proposed, because that kind of thing just doesn't lead to "self-sufficiency," blah blah blah).
>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.
But it seems to me that a sizable percentage of the black community in the United States has indeed heard of the concept of reparations and is favorable to it. Reparations have entered the political conversation to some extent. Shouldn't organizers of whatever color find ways to engage with this way of seeing things, rather than dismissing it out of hand? There are a thousand different ideas about how reparations would be "operationalized," to use the term prevalent on this list, but it seems to me that a lot more people accept the principle than you might think, and that it has more potential appeal than you might think.
None of this takes away from the fact that organizing is hard to do, but I would submit that you're not the only person around who admits this, Leo.
John Lacny