For the ovewhelming majority of Americans, these questions are not even close to being on the agenda of issues which concern them. Mass campaigns will fall on deaf ears. That, unfortunately, is the reality of life in the imperial metropole: international politics and international justice become issues when some threat or danger to the American economy or polity is perceived, and not otherwise. Those who are concerned about these issues -- with many more numbers among religiously oriented types [witness the entire origin of Jubilee 2000] than progressives -- need some understanding of how the world economy works, and what can be done to introduce some justice, but that is a target audience which already educates itself.
The issue here is not left sectarianism; it is the question of how one does meaningful political education. You could do political education as poorly with the most wimpy forms of liberalism, or with the most reactionary forms of conservatism, as with the most sectarian forms of Trotskyism. For years, conservative ideologues went on about the desirability of school vouchers as an article of Friedmanite faith in the workings of laissez-faire capitalism, and got nowhere; when they finally discovered that they could link it up to the failures of public schools in the inner city, failures which became ever more grievous as education became ever more economically essential, they made incredible progress, and have put us in a very serious bind. It meant nothing that they went outside of the existing parameters of the debate until they found a way to link what they had to say with, and to organize around, the very immediate and vital concerns of a significant group of people. Any education which is focused on issues abstracted from where people now are, and delivered in the form of pure analysis, is not, in my judgment, very likely to have much success. This is a precept almost universally accepted among progressive schools of pedagogy, from Dewey to Freire, but is somehow lost on the left when we conceive of doing political education on a mass scale.
> 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,
>
As ghastly as the slave trade was, I think it is a mistake to understand it as the primary reason for the current 'underdevelopment' of African economies. For one, the period of colonization was, in many places, worse -- and far more recent. Belgium managed to wipe out half of the adult male population of the Congo in a decade at the end of 1800s. And for another, the problem is located in the structure of the current international economy, and that is why an Ethiopia, which did not experience either the slave trade or the period of colonization, is no better off than other African nations.
> 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
>
I am far from convinced, at least based on my experience here in NYC, that reparations has much of a mass following in the African-American community. Among self-conscious nationalist elements in the community, yes, but among the broader community, no.
Reparations has become a topic for larger public debate within the last few weeks because the ideological and proto-racist right has seen it as a point of vulnerability, and has headed straight for it. Horowitz didn't seize upon it because he wants to "educate" folks about racial injustice, but because he wants to undermine the struggle for racial justice, and to promote his own miserable self in the process. All you need is some folks who do not understand the absolute centrality of freedom of expression to anti-racist and progressive struggles, whether it be naive Ivy League students or wannabe Internet Marxist-Leninists in Proyectville who cavalierly dismiss such freedom as a 'bourgeois' civil liberty, and you can divide the natural constituency for racial justice to boot. There is not a broadly based Internet list which I am on -- which include a number of labor, education, political science and history listservs -- where this issue of reparations has not been raised to put anti-racists and progressives on the defensive.
> None of this takes away from the fact that organizing is hard to do, but I
>
I would hope that I am not the only one. Because when you do it, you know how hard it is. The point is to learn from your experiences, and to avoid dead-end abstract and decontextualized educational campaigns that lead nowhere.
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/20010327/fd4fb752/attachment.htm>