Pambazuka and the ‘yes and no’ of Solidarity

Being invited to contribute to the 400th issue of Pambazuka News is like receiving a tremendously prestigious award. This weekly forum is in a remarkable way of illustrating and living the meaning of solidarity since the beginning of this century in the wider African, if not global, context. Hence I have decided to offer a few thoughts on the notion of solidarity.

‘Solidarity’ is a rather traditional term that is applicable in many different ways, and has by definition nothing inherently revolutionary. It is practiced not only by those marginalised or oppressed in their fight against the injustices under which they are suffering. Solidarity as a form of collective identification with and action for particular interests and in pursuance of certain common goals is as often (and effectively) implemented by the ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots’, if only to protect their own interests. Parts of the bourgeoisie often acted in solidarity to meet the solidarity among the labour movement of the working class. Hence an ‘act of solidarity’ might sound like something good, but does not yet indicate or pre-determine in any way for which values it stands and in whose interests it is practiced. We can be in solidarity with many different things and for very different reasons.

Even among those who assume or want to believe that they are birds of the same feather a decision of taking sides as an act of solidarity can lead to different results. There were demonstrations at the World Social Forum in Nairobi in late January 2007 condemning the attacks on Somalia as US-imperialist warfare in its fanatic ‘war against terror.’ But there were also the demonstrations celebrating the intervention for the defeat of what was considered a repressive, reactionary institutionalised system. The same events motivated fundamentally different, irreconcilable expressions of solidarity.

Solidarity can also change. The international solidarity movement supported the anti-colonial liberation movements and cheered Robert Mugabe while he was campaigning in exile for the independence of Zimbabwe. It is more than dubious (to put it mildly) if he deserves any form of solidarity these days for what he stands for, though some die-hards would continue to claim so. But solidarity as a notion relates to basic values and norms more so than any form of personalised loyalties. It is not cast in stone when it comes to the actors who qualify for solidarity. Solidarity can cease if those who deserve it abandon or betray the shared basis and common bonds created by an ethical framework and a morally binding understanding over the common purpose for actions pursued. Once victims turn into perpetrators and oppressed into oppressors, solidarity needs to re-position.

Solidarity, in this sense, is more a process with shifting consequences, while the goalposts should remain the same. It is not a fixed state of mind or an achievement once and for all. It has to be debated and even fought over, in an ongoing effort to investigate and define common ground and goals, or to hammer out possible forms of joint action. In this way, solidarity as a process resembles in many ways what could be said about civil society: such a process may well be conceptualised as being predicated on a field of debate and struggle over societal goals and priorities, and epitomised specifically by civil society on various scales, including the international or global scale. At the same time, this constitutes one more pointer to the problems of the content of such solidarity. This may imply widely diverse priorities and goals, depending not only on different perceptions of problems but also, more fundamentally, on different concerns.

Solidarity in the context of Pambazuka News has obviously never been cast in stone by means of a strict and rigorous definition. But it is practiced in an ongoing consequent way, which gives it a certain meaning (notwithstanding differences at least in nuances, if not even in more principled matters). It relates to identification with ‘the Wretched of the Earth’, in both the sense of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. It entails compassion and political commitment on the side of the oppressed. But again, even this is not enough as a common denominator while we are operating on shifting grounds. Since Pambazuka News became a reality eight years ago, political and social realities have produced major changes on a global scale. The classical North-South dichotomy is increasingly replaced by a divide between the global South and a privileged elite in islands all over the planet. The acronym BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) symbolises newly emerging global players (not including continental ones like South Africa). The struggles within the struggle have become more challenging due to a new complexity. The enemy’s enemy has never been automatically or by definition one’s friend, not even an ally. The issues, which require we take a position, include the effects of global warming and environmental change (not least control over water, air and other public goods), the all-encompassing WTO claims for property rights as well as issues related to gender and sexuality, to mention only few of the most obvious challenges. While hardly ever noted anymore, class structures, interests and agencies remain a substantive factor impacting on the living conditions on the earth, not only for human beings but all forms of life. For some this latter, all embracing qualification might sound ‘esoteric.’ It is not.

Claiming the need for a spiritual dimension of solidarity, John Sanbonmatsu in his study The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject bemoans the reluctance of the Left to consider itself as a moral movement, seeking to establish an ethics of its own. As he insists: ‘socialism cannot give us our ethics; our ethics gives us our socialism. That is, because our foundational moral beliefs and commitments define our perceptual objects for us, they play a crucial role in shaping the specific forms of action that we end up with.’ Based on this understanding, the personal exposure to forms of oppression and experience of exploitation, or acquaintance with forms of un-freedom, provides an indirect causal relationship at best between one’s ability to understand and act and one’s own social position. In accordance with feminist and critical race theories, neither one’s ‘objective’ position within a social hierarchy nor one’s personal experience of oppression is in itself a sufficient condition for political awareness and action.

As Sanbonmatsu argues further: ‘[o]ne’s location in a subordinate position is in fact not even a necessary condition for critical insight; because solidarity, the phenomenological “glue” that holds together every movement, is constituted not only through “first order” experiences of power, but also through “second order” experiences – viz., through empathy for those who suffer.’ Empathy, therefore, is a constitutive factor in political identity. While empathy does not automatically translate into solidarity (nor into ethical behaviour), it can serve as a compass: ‘When we wilfully deny empathy as a mode of access to human experience, we also blind ourselves to the outcomes and catastrophes of our own political judgements.’ Given the diversity of movements in the global coalitions of today, such empathy is also a prerequisite for the ability to listen to one another and for permissiveness and openness towards ‘otherness.’ Suffering in its variety of forms requires empathy and solidarity by all and transcends a politically correct ideology. An empathic response as a moral force contributes to political alliances on a global scale among a coalition of the concerned and aware, no matter where and how they live, as long as they are able to turn their empathy into practical action.

On the other hand, actors within the global social movement can experience and testify that a politically ‘correct’ radical movement still holds out no guarantee of sensitive anti-racist or anti-sexist practices, to mention just two particular important elements among a whole array of vital postulates. Instead, this movement remains vulnerable to patterns of internal domination, if not discrimination. Kala Subbuswamy and Raj Patel, two activists who base their critical account on own experiences, point in their essay on ‘Cultures of domination: Race and gender in radical movements’ to the fact that, ‘capitalism itself is just one system of domination among many; it is insufficient simply to oppose capitalism whilst remaining silent over the domination that has underwritten, and continues to underwrite, other social systems.’ (1)

Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary convictions were not least a result of the humiliation and alienation he was exposed to when studying in France during the late 1940s. He summarised his rude awakening to the realities of being black in a white dominated society in Black Skin, White Masks. In this challenge of white dominance he stated more than half a century ago ‘that man is a yes… Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.’ (2)

Pambazuka News is practicing both the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’, sometimes under painful circumstances, where choices of solidarity are a reflection of sobering insights requiring consequences to be drawn and to part from what had been believed to be established common ground. Former liberation movements now executing political power and control as governments are a point in case. By doing so, this forum contributes through all those, who use it as their platform, to the humanity we are striving for. A humanity as a form of human solidarity, which embraces and reflects more than intellectual honesty, analytical rigor and political commitment. A humanity, which only through our empathy becomes truly human. An empathy, without which we would not be able to act in true solidarity. Pambazuka News will change over time and with circumstances, to stand firmly in solidarity with those, who fight for more equality, justice and human dignity.

Footnotes
(1) Kala Subbuswamy and Raj Patel, ‘Cultures of domination’, p.537.
(2) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.222.

References

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press 1968.

Reinhart Kößler/Henning Melber, ‘International civil society and the challenge for global solidarity’. In: Global civil society – More or less democracy?, Development Dialogue, no. 49, November 2007, pp.29-39.

John Sanbonmatsu, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject, New York: Monthly Review Press 2004.

Kala Subbuswamy and Raj Patel, ‘Cultures of domination: Race and gender in radical movements’. In Kolya Abramsky (ed), Restructuring and Resistance: Diverse voices of struggle in Western Europe, (no place, no publisher) 2001, pp.535-545.

* Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden.

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