<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>John L:
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">I disagree. I think that the debt relief campaigns look like charity
<BR>operations to a lot of people in the United States, instead of what they
<BR>really are: just one small step in giving the world's poor their due. How
<BR>do you counter the idea that the Third World is poor even "after all we've
<BR>done for them"? It's true that this is a pedagogical question, and I'm not
<BR>one to propose that we agitate by approaching people and asking, "Say,
<BR>how'd you like to join the revolution?" or saying "Sign up here for the
<BR>armed struggle." So I think you're setting up an ultraleft straw man here.
<BR> It seems to me that reparations ARE a useful way to conceive of what needs
<BR>to be done. Don't progressive people in the imperialist countries need
<BR>SOME understanding of WHY the Third World is poor? I'm not saying that we
<BR>approach this in a lecture style, or that we ask people to plunk down a
<BR>buck fifty for our sectarian tabloid which explains it all in detail. But
<BR>I do think that we need to find ways to shift the debate in this direction.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>For the ovewhelming majority of Americans, these questions are not even close
<BR>to being on the agenda of issues which concern them. Mass campaigns will fall
<BR>on deaf ears. That, unfortunately, is the reality of life in the imperial
<BR>metropole: international politics and international justice become issues
<BR>when some threat or danger to the American economy or polity is perceived,
<BR>and not otherwise. Those who are concerned about these issues -- with many
<BR>more numbers among religiously oriented types [witness the entire origin of
<BR>Jubilee 2000] than progressives -- need some understanding of how the world
<BR>economy works, and what can be done to introduce some justice, but that is a
<BR>target audience which already educates itself.
<BR>
<BR>The issue here is not left sectarianism; it is the question of how one does
<BR>meaningful political education. You could do political education as poorly
<BR>with the most wimpy forms of liberalism, or with the most reactionary forms
<BR>of conservatism, as with the most sectarian forms of Trotskyism. For years,
<BR>conservative ideologues went on about the desirability of school vouchers as
<BR>an article of Friedmanite faith in the workings of laissez-faire capitalism,
<BR>and got nowhere; when they finally discovered that they could link it up to
<BR>the failures of public schools in the inner city, failures which became ever
<BR>more grievous as education became ever more economically essential, they made
<BR>incredible progress, and have put us in a very serious bind. It meant nothing
<BR>that they went outside of the existing parameters of the debate until they
<BR>found a way to link what they had to say with, and to organize around, the
<BR>very immediate and vital concerns of a significant group of people. Any
<BR>education which is focused on issues abstracted from where people now are,
<BR>and delivered in the form of pure analysis, is not, in my judgment, very
<BR>likely to have much success. This is a precept almost universally accepted
<BR>among progressive schools of pedagogy, from Dewey to Freire, but is somehow
<BR>lost on the left when we conceive of doing political education on a mass
<BR>scale.
<BR>
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> I suppose you've already anticipated my objection that the slave trade in
<BR>West Africa, what with the introduction of massive numbers of weapons and
<BR>other commodities that exacerbated the already-existing tensions between
<BR>West African peoples and so on, and made West Africa a piece of a ghastly
<BR>new international system (it's exports: human cargo), was a slave trade
<BR>(and a form of slavery) entirely unique and unprecedented in human history,
<BR>geared to capitalist imperatives and so on.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>As ghastly as the slave trade was, I think it is a mistake to understand it
<BR>as the primary reason for the current 'underdevelopment' of African
<BR>economies. For one, the period of colonization was, in many places, worse --
<BR>and far more recent. Belgium managed to wipe out half of the adult male
<BR>population of the Congo in a decade at the end of 1800s. And for another, the
<BR>problem is located in the structure of the current international economy, and
<BR>that is why an Ethiopia, which did not experience either the slave trade or
<BR>the period of colonization, is no better off than other African nations.
<BR>
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">But it seems to me that a sizable percentage of the black community in the
<BR>United States has indeed heard of the concept of reparations and is
<BR>favorable to it. Reparations have entered the political conversation to
<BR>some extent. Shouldn't organizers of whatever color find ways to engage
<BR>with this way of seeing things, rather than dismissing it out of hand?
<BR>There are a thousand different ideas about how reparations would be
<BR>"operationalized," to use the term prevalent on this list, but it seems to
<BR>me that a lot more people accept the principle than you might think, and
<BR>that it has more potential appeal than you might think.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>I am far from convinced, at least based on my experience here in NYC, that
<BR>reparations has much of a mass following in the African-American community.
<BR>Among self-conscious nationalist elements in the community, yes, but among
<BR>the broader community, no.
<BR>
<BR>Reparations has become a topic for larger public debate within the last few
<BR>weeks because the ideological and proto-racist right has seen it as a point
<BR>of vulnerability, and has headed straight for it. Horowitz didn't seize upon
<BR>it because he wants to "educate" folks about racial injustice, but because he
<BR>wants to undermine the struggle for racial justice, and to promote his own
<BR>miserable self in the process. All you need is some folks who do not
<BR>understand the absolute centrality of freedom of expression to anti-racist
<BR>and progressive struggles, whether it be naive Ivy League students or wannabe
<BR>Internet Marxist-Leninists in Proyectville who cavalierly dismiss such
<BR>freedom as a 'bourgeois' civil liberty, and you can divide the natural
<BR>constituency for racial justice to boot. There is not a broadly based
<BR>Internet list which I am on -- which include a number of labor, education,
<BR>political science and history listservs -- where this issue of reparations
<BR>has not been raised to put anti-racists and progressives on the defensive.
<BR>
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">None of this takes away from the fact that organizing is hard to do, but I
<BR>would submit that you're not the only person around who admits this, Leo.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>I would hope that I am not the only one. Because when you do it, you know how
<BR>hard it is. The point is to learn from your experiences, and to avoid
<BR>dead-end abstract and decontextualized educational campaigns that lead
<BR>nowhere.
<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>