Y'know, a funny thing happened with global HIV/AIDS/tuberculosis/malaria treatment. The developed world making a commitment to drop patents and provide the funds for treatment for those in the developing world became an almost apolitical, non-partisan issue. On the one hand, this is an issue that does not leverage power itself away from global capital in much of any sense (except on an ethical plane). On the other, achieving a baseline of treatment that must happen for the holocaust of our time addresses more human misery, by any metric than any explicitly left successful campaign has in recent years. (Even the charnel house of occupied Iraq (and all the imperial evil bruted by its execution) accounts for vastly less suffering than lack of access to HIV treatment does in a single region of southern africa.) The manifestation of this in the US has been that republican evangelicals are far more motivated and active on global AIDS than the radical left, and the politics of treatment funding have become much less partisan, and more politically murky. In repositioning in this way, domestic advocates of global HIV/AIDS treatment have avoided stapling their cause to the radical left, which has proved itself as a 100% proven loser in the United States, on every and all issues of the past two-three decades.
I'm not interested in wasting breath defending (or indicting) a pop star with humanitarian pretensions. Maybe its the punk in me that feels no crestfallen tragic disillusionment when the save the world rock singer turns out to be as personally empty of principle as the pretend liberal politician (please do tell me that at least Angelina cares about the refugee babies, or that Kucinich really does care about the ufo threat (roswell was an inside job!!1!)).
But if he reflects a broader manuevering on issues of global funding for pandemic issues by advocates of a a-ideological (and successful) 'reduce misery' platform, it strikes me that breaking bread with the vilest of the vile is part and parcel of the whole. I remember being very, very skeptical when my comrades from the global aids movement would describe the (almost touching, to them) irony of clearly out gay activists being listened to with great seriousness by fundie christian politicians who in another bill rider would be their vilest most hated enemy. Then, couple years of social filtering and trickling down later on, the next generation of megachurch leaders wants to get into global AIDS and climate change as well as stopping the baby killing. We all celebrate this movement inside mainstream american christianity, but would we rather not know about the ugly beginnings of a sea change? We'd have a better case if we had made any sea changes of our own, with our left principles intact, in the past couple decades.
So what do you think? Would he have been better off writing an essay in new left review, or monthly review, or leftisan imaginary movement review? And then going home to a life of middle class professionals creature comforts, putting his feet up to enjoy his principles, and shrugging as his issues loses and the death toll continues its ascent?
Losing has become very comfortable for our side. It has its rewards, its comforts. So does self-riteous pop-stardom, and NGO staff-dom, and so on. Untreated AIDS has few rewards for its folks, though. Our vision of socialism has not yet made medication for all a condition of the achieved paradise of worldwide from-each-to-their-needs, to-each-according-to-their abilities. It probably won't in the time time span before everyone who has HIV today and goes untreated dies.
Bono, Tina Rosenberg, oxfam, doctors without borders, ACT-UP--- all, clearly, vile running dog tools of the enemy, with their cunning masquerade of calling for a-political reforms that reduce suffering and fail to acknowledge the need for an international spartacist transitional platform for insurrectionary revolution towards spontaneous stateless interplanetary socialism.