Weekly Worker 567 Thursday March 10 2005

SWP tails red nose establishment

Left buys into charity-mongering

Red Nose Day is with us again. On March 11 the usual list of fading and wearisome celebrities will badger us to “cast inhibitions aside, put on a red nose, and do something a little bit silly to raise money” for an occasion that “unites the entire nation in trying to make a difference to the lives of thousands of individuals facing terrible injustice or living in abject poverty” (www.rednose-day.com).

First staged in 1985 by Comic Relief to help “alleviate” famine in Africa, this charity-mongering extravaganza, or offensive, has raised some £250 million from eight Red Nose Days and is now firmly part of the British cultural-political landscape. Indeed, RND has become so institutionalised that it is only a matter of time before refusal to participate in the jollities will become a criminal offence - or at the very least made punishable by compulsory attendance at a ‘fun awareness’ course.

So naturally then, RND is aggressively promoted - though in an entirely ‘fun’ way, of course - by everyone from your caring boss to those deeply humanitarian government ministers, not to mention the BBC and tender-hearted newspaper editors and proprietors. Obviously, just as an expropriated anti-racism is now an integral element of mainstream bourgeois ideology, so making loud noises about “fighting poverty” and the wonderful, if not heroic, role played by charities/non-governmental organisations is also part of the bourgeois liberal package.

Now that the gloss of capitalist triumphalism has worn off, the bourgeois establishment rarely misses an opportunity to display its new-found compassion (and sparkling sense of humour). As for businesses, they line up in full televisual glare to present their cheques to the wigged-up RNDers. Predictably, the Comic Relief website has extensive links to the ghastly Make Poverty History campaign, which has the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof stomping round the world in their favoured role of messiahs to the world’s poor and destitute.

In reality of course, MPH ‘campaign’ consists of liberalistic pleading to the imperialists and bankers to throw a few more crumbs in the direction of the impoverished masses, while leaving control of the bakery itself strictly off limits. According to MPH, “debt cancellation is the unfinished business of the 20th century”; and it waxes lyrical about how ‘people’s power’ has “led the UK government to cancel 100% of the debt owed directly to it by many of the world’s poorest countries, and to put in funding to allow multilateral creditors to cancel some of their poor country debt.” However, despite these initiatives, “in country after country governments are spending more on repaying debts than they are on health or education. Rich countries continue to pursue unjust claims on the budgets of poor nations, with devastating effects for the world’s poor” (www.makepover-tyhistory.org.uk).

But MPH does not even attempt to get to the roots of global inequality and poverty - the small matter of capital accumulation and imperialist exploitation. Calling for ‘trade justice’, ‘drop the debt’, ‘more and better aid’, and so on, is to actively sow dangerous illusions in the capitalist system as a whole, no matter what the subjective good intentions of some of those who issue such calls.

Of course communists, like the agonised liberals, find the system of debt and debt repayment to be thoroughly obscene. But what we should be fighting for is the repudiation of all these debts from below, looking to the example of the Bolsheviks in October 1917 - but we will not be hearing that from our RND comics on Friday night, not even if former ‘Marxist-Leninist’ comedian Alexei Sayle turns up.

Without thorough-going democracy and working class self-empowerment, demands such as those highlighted by MPH only reinforce the conviction that capitalism, in some benign and mysterious way, can bring about the end of global poverty. Yet the plain fact of the matter is that trade and aid under capitalism can only act to exacerbate uneven development and, consequently, ‘dropping the debt’ from above - in what would essentially be a lavish ‘windfall’ - will only supply the various elites in the so-called ‘third world’ with even more opportunities to add to their corrupt fortunes.

However, this year, RND has not been without controversy. Unseemly though it will seem to many, a Birmingham primary head teacher has branded RND collections as an “insidious attempt” to provide cash for organisations involved in “a moral evil”. Why? For the same reason that three catholic-run schools in the Welsh diocese of Menevia have banned RND activities in their schools - on the very upright, religious grounds that some of the proceeds would end up in the coffers of charities which are involved in the provision of abortion services in the underdeveloped world. God does not approve of African women having control of their own bodies. Acting as a spokesperson for the diocese, father Michael Burke claimed that Comic Relief “could not give us” the “assurance” needed on this matter, and, since “the catholic faith holds all life as sacred”, he recommended that catholic schools in the UK should raise money instead for the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (Cafod).

Cafod informs us that it “shares the catholic church’s tasks of proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of god” and sees its central mission as being one “to promote human development and social justice in witness to christian faith and gospel values” (www.cafod.org.uk). Stung into a response, Comic Relief issued a statement saying: “We do not fund and have never funded abortion services or the promotion of abortions”.

Self-evidently, it is incumbent upon communists and socialists to expose the real role that charities play in capitalist society - or at least, it should be. However, rather than telling the truth to the working class, we see revolutionaries prostrate themselves before the sanctified MPH, painfully contorting themselves in a bid to constitute themselves as the left wing of liberal charity-mongering - and henceforth, or so the theory goes, open the ‘party’ floodgates to streams of raw recruits. This opportunist refusal to counter liberal opinion is most manifest in Respect and its core backer, the Socialist Workers Party.

Respect says MPH is something we should all support. It is particularly commended for wanting to “pressurise the British government in its role as chair of the G8 and (later in the year) chair of the EU to take a lead role in debt abolition” and for raising the demand to “raise aid levels to the UN-specified 0.7% of national income in the developed countries” (Respect website).

More tellingly still, we are told: “MPH are urging local groups to be set up across the country, an initiative Respect fully supports. They are also proposing a week of action from April 11-16. In Preston, Respect councillor Michael Lavalette is central to organising a week of action to Make Poverty History, using the networks that supported his very successful initiative in support of the victims of the tsunami disaster”.

Comrade Lavalette’s “successful initiative”, of course, was penning a pathetically anodyne motion to a council meeting which absolutely nobody could object to - Tories and Liberal Democrats included. Who would not want to give aid to the tsunami victims? Typically, neither democracy, class struggle, capitalism nor socialism was mentioned anywhere in this motion - though the UN, that den of robbers and butchers, was held up as some sort of model.

In the latest issue of Socialist Worker we have yet another manifestation of rampant liberalism. We discover a relatively substantial article by Mike Gidney of the Traidcraft campaigning group - naturally, there is not a single word of comment or criticism from our SWP comrades. Gidney writes that MPH is a “massive, concerted effort to end world poverty in a year when extraordinary and radical progress is finally possible”. He attacks the “new free trade agreements” being “negotiated right now between the European Union (EU) and 77 former colonies” of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP), which pose a “real threat to the future of millions of people across the world”.

Brother Gidney concludes with a plea for protectionism - only tilted in the ACP’s favour: “The ACP group includes some of the poorest countries in the world, where more than half the total population lives in poverty. Under previous trade agreements, ACP countries had special access to sell certain products in European markets. The EU now wants to change this trade relationship and has proposed EPAs [economic partnership agreements] instead. We at Traidcraft are deeply concerned about what are essentially free trade agreements …” (March 12).

Though Socialist Worker readers are not explicitly told this, Traidcraft is in fact an avowedly christian organisation which sees its task as one of piously lecturing capitalists about how they “should work in the interests of all stakeholders” and “in particular” be “accountable for their impact on the poor”. As is always the case with such groups, Traidcraft makes utopian, neo-Proudhonian appeals to the capitalists to embark upon the saintly course of “fair trade” and for “changes in trade rules to make them work in the interests of the poor” (www.traidcr-aft.co.uk). Is this our SWP comrades’ idea of ‘making a difference’?

Having said that, it would be uncharitable (pun intended) for communists to single out the SWP for blame. We see almost exactly the same softness towards the charity-mongering industry in the pages of Solidarity, the ‘fortnightly’ publication of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. In its February 17 edition, Solidarity had an uncritical plug for the Traidcraft ‘comrades’, supporting their campaign to boycott the ‘official’ MPH plastic wristbands, as they are produced under sweatshop conditions in China. We are asked instead to buy Traidcraft’s own version, presumably made by workers paid a ‘fair day’s wage’.

Now, in the latest edition of Solidarity (March 3), our AWL comrades are busily promoting Fairtrade Fortnight and the Fairtrade Foundation. The latter is an umbrella group which includes Traidcraft, Oxfam, Christian Aid, the Methodist Relief and Development Fund, the National Federation of Women’s Institute of England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man, and … the abortion-hating Cafod. The Fairtrade Foundation boasts about the “hundreds of fundraising events” and how “there are loads of potential venues to use, including: school classroom or assembly, council/village/town hall, youth meetings such as the Brownies/Guides/Cubs/Scouts/Woodcraft Folk, Chamber of Commerce, faith group …” (www.fairtra-de.org.uk). Perhaps our AWL comrades would like to explain how such activities will lead to the revolutionary transformation of the existing social conditions?

Ironically, it was Tony Blair, rather than Socialist Worker or Solidarity, who let slip the truth. After telling the Sunday Mail that he did not rule out slapping control orders (tagging, curfews, house arrest) on protesters out to “wreck” the G8 summit this July at Gleneagles, he went on to say: “It would be very odd if people came to protest against this G8, as we’re focusing on poverty in Africa and climate change. I don’t quite know what they’ll be protesting against.”

But he added that he would welcome “peaceful protesters” who want to press world leaders, including George Bush, to “help” ‘third world’ countries - particularly those who will be taking part in the July 2 demonstration in Edinburgh: “There will be people who come out on the street in favour of the Make Poverty History campaign and that’s a good thing.”

So Tony Blair does have something in common with Respect, the AWL and SWP then - an appreciation of the sterling efforts of MPH in propping up capitalism and imperialism.
Eddie Ford

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