<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>Well, John, I will just have to get out my cane and limp through an answer to
<BR>this inquiry. {-;
<BR>
<BR>I think that the international dimension of the reparations issue you raise
<BR>is an important one, and one largely ignored in the debate hitherto, but I
<BR>can not agree with the way in which you want to approach it, and not simply
<BR>because it reproduces the problematic aspects of the ways in which
<BR>reparations are discussed on a national basis.
<BR>
<BR>What we call economic underdevelopment are life and death issues for Africans
<BR>and other peoples of the South: poverty on a scale that you can not grasp
<BR>until you have seen it firsthand, famine and widespread malnutrition, all
<BR>manner of chronic disease and epidemics, of which AIDS is only the most
<BR>devastating, and more. The crippling of African and other southern economies
<BR>by massive foreign debt is a matter for action now: that is the message and
<BR>the point of Jubilee 2000, which is indeed a most worthy project. And it
<BR>seems to me that the case for Jubilee 2000 is made much more easily and much
<BR>more quickly by an analysis of what must be done to prevent unnecessary human
<BR>suffering now and in the near future, as opposed to an exercise in historical
<BR>analysis of what has happened in the past which will necessarily be heavily
<BR>contested.
<BR>
<BR>Take up the historical question, and you will find yourself having to deal
<BR>with all sorts of issues, such as the fact the enslaved Africans taken to the
<BR>Americas came overwhelmingly from West Africa, and not even the western
<BR>entire coast, and insofar as East Africa faced a slave trade, it was Arab --
<BR>and not European. You will find yourself grappling with issues such as the
<BR>fact that a country like Ethiopia, which did not experience the slave trade
<BR>and was not even colonized, is far poorer than a Ghana or a Senegal, from
<BR>which hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were taken. And insofar as
<BR>there is a debt owed to Mozambique [and Angola], the example you raise,
<BR>surely the most significant debtor must be the colonial power, Portugal,
<BR>which is no condition to pay anyone anything. Yes, I know that one can
<BR>provide explanations for all of these developments, for imperialism is a
<BR>rather complex and uneven phenomenon, but why make the adoption of a positive
<BR>policy dependent upon a rather complex historical argument, with all sorts of
<BR>presuppositions that will must be difficult to gain general assent for, when
<BR>it can be far more easily and soundly based on arguments of immediate
<BR>economic necessity and moral imperative.
<BR>
<BR>Talk of the long term and educational campaigns is all well and good, but it
<BR>involves no reflection on why left wing educational campaigns designed to lay
<BR>the basis for the great long term struggles produce so very little in the way
<BR>of positive results. Election after election, we go through socialist
<BR>educational campaigns, and as often as not, fewer -- rather than more --
<BR>folks end up voting socialist, and in numbers so small as to not even be
<BR>statistically significant.
<BR>
<BR>Why? Because socialist organizations don't seem to have learned the first
<BR>thing about pedagogy, about how learning and education actually go on.
<BR>Didactic presentations, be it book, lecture or audio-visual form, about the
<BR>abstract truth of something, removed from all social context and live issues,
<BR>most especially didactic presentations about the historical truth of
<BR>something, are guaranteed nonstarters. Only the worst teachers, the teachers
<BR>who know the least about their craft and practice it in the most bastardized
<BR>ways, teach the way socialists do educational campaigns. All of this talk
<BR>about raising reparations to make educational points in the abstract, just
<BR>like the notion of running marginal candidates for offices they could not win
<BR>in a thousand elections to make educational points, embodies piss poor
<BR>notions of pedagogy, and educates no one.
<BR>
<BR>Learning occurs through doing, through active processes of engagement with
<BR>the "subject matter" being learned. This is a lesson that one finds not only
<BR>in the great educators of the left, such as John Dewey, but also in such
<BR>places as Gramsci [the organic intellectual is the practical organizer of
<BR>social life, not the university scholar] and even in the Theses on Feuerbach.
<BR>One educates not by telling and lecturing, not by drawing abstract
<BR>connections, not even by showing and demonstration, but by involving the
<BR>'student' in the process of interaction with what she/he is learning.
<BR>
<BR>This notion of education requires that, like a good organizer, you start were
<BR>people are at, and out of successfully organizing what is now politically
<BR>possible and realizable, out of building a movement, you create new
<BR>possibilities. That is the whole story of the great advances of emancipatory
<BR>struggles in the US for the last two centuries -- from abolitionism to
<BR>women's suffrage, from the labor movement to the anti-imperialist and peace
<BR>movements, from the civil rights movement to the feminist movement. It is
<BR>quite contrary to the idea now current in left notions of educational
<BR>campaigns that the way one shifts the terms of debate, the parameters of what
<BR>is possible, is by simply raising issues outside of what is now considered
<BR>possible. That does not make you cutting edge; it simply makes you irrelevant.
<BR>
<BR>Rosa Luxemburg's teleology was wrong: the movement, and not the goal, is
<BR>everything.
<BR>
<BR>John wrote:
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Has anyone disputing Horowitz et. al. taken the time to point out that a
<BR>major reason Africa is underdeveloped is because millions of people were
<BR>seized and forcibly "exported" from that continent over a period of several
<BR>hundred years?
<BR>
<BR>Also, shouldn't the debate on reparations for African-Americans be placed
<BR>in the context of the worldwide legacy of imperialism? I have a hunch
<BR>(note sarcasm: I have a good deal more than a hunch) that a lot of
<BR>African-American radicals, including but not limited to the BRC, are doing
<BR>exactly this, but you wouldn't know that from following the debate on this
<BR>list.
<BR>
<BR>I think that this is a key point in assessing whether the fight for
<BR>reparations is a politically efficacious tack to take. I would argue that
<BR>it is not only politically wise, but absolutely necessary, to talk about
<BR>reparations if we're going to address the global imbalance of power that we
<BR>all presumably want to overturn. After all, isn't Jubilee 2000 a worthy
<BR>enterprise? And isn't our argument just as effective -- perhaps even
<BR>moreso -- when we start raising the question of who REALLY owes a debt to
<BR>WHOM? Is Mozambique really "indebted" to the IFIs, or might it not be the
<BR>case that a debt is owed to Mozambique, for the years of subversion by
<BR>RENAMO, South Africa, the USA et. al., not to mention the hundreds of years
<BR>of imperialism and systematic exploitation?
<BR>
<BR>It's inane to observe that reparations are not politically acceptable in
<BR>the current political atmosphere of the United States. Very little that
<BR>people on the left favor is politically feasible in the near future in the
<BR>US, but trying to effect systemic change is never easy, right? Or am I
<BR>just a starry-eyed youth to be dismissed by the world-wise likes of Leo
<BR>Casey?
<BR>
<BR> John Lacny</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --</P></FONT></HTML>