Issues have emerged in Durban that will not be stopped by logical debate
Comment
Margaret Legum
The NGO gathering at the United Nations’s World Conference against Racism was a good place to test the future in terms of ideas that will not go away.
Such ideas represent movements of people that have a universal moral dimension and so inspire people not directly affected. They carry a weight of history. They are ideas whose time has come, having the capacity to sweep before them the resisters as well as the proponents.
It is irrelevant whether the arguments advanced by the proponents or resisters of these ideas are logically impeccable, whether we approve their methods and allies. They are easily mocked. But like a huge wave that starts way out in the ocean and gathers momentum from resistance, these movements change the course of history.
They end only with a massive switch in power relations with an event or events that were unthinkable before they began. They contradict all former concepts of what is possible in the face of the current distribution of power.
With hindsight we can all recognise such movements. The international anti-apartheid movement was one. When it took off it seemed hopeless in the face of white military and political power, and the support of the major Western powers. It did not matter that the movement got some of its facts wrong, quarrelled internally, had some unattractive allies, seemed rabble-like, disorganised. It ended with the unthinkable universal franchise.
Other movements were resistance to the Vietnam war, the collapse of communism, the impossible survival of Cuba, the ending of political colonialism through national liberation movements. Only 50 years ago Winston Churchill famously and foolishly declaimed he would “not preside over the dismantling of His Majesty’s empire”. Poor Canute.
In Durban three such ideas became obvious: the Palestinian push for statehood; opposition to the globalised market in capital and goods; and the search for a mechanism for compensating the world’s black people for historic injustice. All are rooted in a profound sense of injustice, which sweeps into its orbit even people not directly affected by the issue.
This “righteous” anger is the unstoppable force, because it is fuelled, not halted, by opposition and martyrdom; it is not interested in argument over detail, only in effecting a change in power. In that sense it is irrational, infuriating, ruthless.
In Durban the highly principled Jewish anti-racist organisations, fine people with fine records, were swept aside by the scarf-waving, overwhelmingly noisy, sloganeering Palestinian supporters who frequently and illegitimately elided the policies of the Israel government, Zionism, the existence of Israel and the condition of being Jewish. Maddening to people Jewish or not who know these are separate issues.
But the physical treatment of Palestinians on the ground has produced such rage at the popular level that making such distinctions looks like nit-picking on a level with who started it all in 1947.
The fact is that these arguments will come to seem like hot air because the issue will not go away until the “defendants” Israel and its allies, especially in the United States who now hold the formal power can somehow think the unthinkable. I do not pretend to know what that is. It will certainly involve an involuntary shift in power.
The “globalisation” debate had the same flavour. Hardly a single session, whatever its formal subject, avoided finding roots somewhere in the hegemony of the global market in capital and trade. “Globalisation” was redefined as economic imperialism, regulated by agents of rich (mostly white) people in rich countries. The great majority of the casualties are black, both within countries and between them.
The owners of capital are seen to have given themselves the power to determine how all economies are run, and to pass judgement and mete out punishment on all governments’ policies. When they say that this global market will some day work for everyone they come up against the experience and the fury of people working on the ground whether they are personally poor or not.
This groundswell of anger will be felt most powerfully by democratically elected governments, especially those who have been put there by broadly left-wing movements responding to poor people. As well as most European governments, including Britain, that includes our own. Though the president was cheered at the conference, his government was consistently and bitterly condemned for its neo-liberal economics policies.
Try explaining why the African National Congress has fallen in with the Washington Consensus let alone justify it and you are regarded as getting in the way of a very simple message: our government has sold the pass, and they are getting close to being the enemy.
That message, worldwide, is another unbuckable trend. It will not be defeated or suborned or satisfied with argument. Indeed it will not argue: it will take to the streets. It will create solutions that do not depend on the vote. It will make policing and military solutions inevitable. In the end the power will have to shift back to the local from the global.
The demand for some kind of restitution for historic black deprivation at the hands of white powers and principalities is less obvious. But my hunch is that it carries the same powerful sense of righteous anger: and it resonates with black people, and their allies, globally. Like the other two issues, it will not be stopped by logical debate about who should get what from whom.
At this stage it is a unifying expression, a way of finding the common denominator between people everywhere whose skin colour has determined their inferior access to the world’s resources. It will end only when the power changes when equal access has been achieved and then superseded by equality of outcome between black and white people everywhere. That is a long road.
How long is illustrated perhaps by another newly arrived issue. More than 60 years ago India formally outlawed “untouchability”. Today the Dalits a coalition of “untouchables” comprising 11-million people have made it to the world stage to illustrate to an incredulous audience that virtually nothing has changed for them. No law supports their subjugation, but they are oppressed in every aspect of their lives.
Perhaps it will go a little faster in South Africa for the simple reason that black people, unlike the Dalits, are in the majority here.
Margaret Legum is a writer and consultant on equality and board member of the SA New Economics Foundation