That whole Invisible Children/Kony 2012 campaign is the worst case of “what these people need is a honky” style of activism. It’s overtly simplistic, revolves more about the activists’ egos than about the supposed cause they’re supporting and it all looks a lot like a scam to get money out of idealistic but gullible people. That the director of the video is an Evangelical Christian fits with the m.o.; Evangelical Christians are masters of the fake charity.
Activism
If the ballot can’t change anything all that remains is the bullet
Even the arch-technocratic Crooked Timber is a bit distraught at the European Central Bank’s policies:
I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.
This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.
The people at the ECB may very well be smart — or at least middleclass and polite– but you will never convince them of any facts their paychecks depend on denying. They cannot be reasoned with, they can only be forced to abandon their neoliberal economic orthodoxies and since they cannot be forced through the ballot, it will have to be by the bullet. The radical austerity policies the ECB, IMF, EU and all the other parts of the alphabet soup are enforcing on Europe are pushed through not to benefit the voters, but the banks. Simplistic? Yes, but closer through the truth than what you read in respectable newspapers or hear explained on the news.
Politics and the mainstream media together form a closed system, where only limited deviancy from the orthodoxy is accepted and which has been carefully designed to give the impression of democratic control while making sure to limit any influence ordinary voters might have. Anybody who paid attention could see this in the runup to the War on Iraq: on a single day two million people marched in London alone, millions more across the world but it didn’t stop the war, didn’t even slow it down. It wasn’t an election year and therefore it was easy to ignore the voters: let them march, let them write letter to the editor that won’t be published, let them vent their outrage on Question Time or Any Questions, the smart people know it won’t matter. Give it a month or a year and the smart people can all pretend everybody was in favour of the war; well everybody who counted anyway.
Yeah, sure, Blair had to give up being prime minister a couple of years later, when the smart money was already shifting towards the Tories anyway, but he’s got millions in the banks thanks to cushy jobs given to him by his grateful friends in the private sector and all the respectable newspapers and televion newsshows still take him seriously as peace envoy to the Middle East. Some people might spit on him in the streets, but when was the last time Tony walked anywhere anyway?
Democracy has been made safe for capitalism again; voting won’t change anything important. And if voting doesn’t work, if the ballot is powerless, then the bullet remains…
layaway
Via Metafiler comes a story that restores some of your faith in humanity. In America there’s a tradition of layaways, setting aside something you want to buy but don’t have the money for just yet and pay for it in installments, after which you can pick it up. It’s old enough that the Isley Brothers could make it into a metaphor for delayed love and thanks to the crisis it’s gotten a new lease on life. Layaways are popular, especially this time of year, to pay for Christmas presents.
But of course, if you’re poor enough to need to pay for Christmas this way, you may end up never quite getting all the money you need to pay off your layaways. Which is where an army of secrets santas has come in, as all over America anonymous people have paid off layaway tabs for complete strangers:
— Indiana. “An anonymous woman made a special trip to the Indianapolis Super Kmart and paid off the outstanding layaway balances of several customers, according to ABC affiliate station WRTV-TV6.”
— South Carolina. ” ‘Probably two weeks ago, we started seeing people coming in asking to randomly pay off strangers’ layaways,’ Terry Northcutt, manager of the Mount Pleasant Kmart, told Mount Pleasant Patch. It adds that “so far, eight shoppers have come in to pay off stranger’s layaways, and as similar stories across the country are reported, Northcutt expects to see more.”
— Nebraska. “Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was at work when a Kmart employee called to tell her that someone had paid off the $70 balance of her layaway account, which held nearly $200 in toys for her 4-year-old son,” the AP says. “I was speechless,” Bremser told the wire service. “It made me believe in Christmas again.”
What makes this so good is not so much that this solves anybody’s problems, as that it brings some cheer to people who can use it the most. I’ve never been really poor myself, though I’ve been skint sometimes, but I imagine that one of the most awful bits of being poor is having that feeling that you’re not allowed to have nice things, a feeling that must be even worse at Christmas time. Having some stranger pay for your presents this way, without expecting anything in return or wanting publicity for it, in short without having any of the trappings of charity.
It was seventyfive years ago yesterday
On the fourth of October, 1936, a coalition of Jews, unionists, Labour Party members and communists of various kinds, not to mention ordinary stopped the fascists under Oswald Mosley marching through the East End of London. In the Battle of Cable Street they stopped him and his blackshirts cold, despite a heavy police presence there to protect the fascists. It was a huge victory, hugely symbolic in that it was the victims who stood up to the fascists and their police escort; it would inspire antifascists decades later, even though there are always some who’d belittle these achievements.
See also: seventy years after Cable Street: nothing changes.
Why we need populist anger
Amongst the best example of trolling your own blog I’ve ever seen, Dsquared does make one point that, if not convincing, does deserve some consideration:
However, of course, there were plenty of people who didn’t own houses in the 90s and 00s, and who thus didn’t benefit from the boom, who are suffering as a result of the recession, including the benefit claimants from whose mouths I was accused of taking the bread. Even in this case, though, I think that making a big deal about “the bankers caused this crisis/stole from us/etc” is a big mistake.
And that’s basically for the simple reason that there is no hope for egalitarian politics if you are going to build it on such weak grounds. This was the lasting contribution of Jerry Cohen’s criticism of Marx. The demands of egalitarian justice are not based in some convoluted proof that the rich have in some way stolen from the poor. The case for redistributive taxation does not rest on bankers’ bonuses being stolen goods, or even on them being undeserved. If you try to agitate for egalitarian policies based on this kind of argument, you are never going to make a strong case, because in the first place, “bankers” didn’t actually steal that money, for the most part, and secondly, if you are giving all the agency to “bankers” then you are accepting the first premis of the “wealth creators” rhetoric, and this is going to destroy you, politically, across the business cycle.
…even if it does feel like special pleading. Moreover, it sounds like exactly the sort of claptrap centrist Democrats put out whenever the hoi polloi get too uppity, that emotions and populist anger have no place in grownup politics. It’s trying to discredit genuine feelings of anger by throwing up procedural objections. It’s wrong too. Sure, populist anger at the bankers and their crimes isn’t enough to drive change, but it is necessary. If left to the financial sector and the politicians nothing will change, reasoned argument won’t work, only fear and anger will.
Because we’ve seen what happens when the financial world thinks it’s business at usual again. Only moments after they were bailed out and rescued from their own follies and criminality the banks started to complain about how they couldn’t possible be expected to pay more taxes on their unearned bonuses or actually adhere to rules that would stop another crisis. They hadn’t learned a thing from the economic meltdown because they hadn’t suffered enough. They still had their money, their power, their freedom, but for the incidental scapegoat. That obviously needs to change.