[R-G] By Supporting NGOs, is the Left Suppressing a Radical Politics in Haiti and Elsewhere?

[Anthony Fenton]

From: Kim Ives <kives at toast.net>

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                              HAITI LIBERTE
                    "Justice. Verite. Independance."

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                         November 19-25, 2007
                                Vol. 2, No. 18

BY SUPPORTING NGOS, IS THE LEFT SUPPRESSING A RADICAL POLITICS IN  
HAITI AND ELSEWHERE?
by Richard Pithouse

By supporting NGOs, is the left suppressing a radical politics in  
Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement  
without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's  
new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti.

The inequality of class, first universalized into a global  
Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by  
gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the  
globalization of capital has always been accompanied by the violent  
division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be  
inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of  
rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match  
unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at  
building solidarity across these divisions have often been  
insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or  
too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective.

In the contemporary world the failure to attend to the objective  
difference of particular situations often results in the assumption  
that all struggles should aspire to the form that the anti- 
globalization movement has taken in the metropole. Amongst other  
problems this immediately renders the (usually) white Northern  
activist an automatic and universal expert on what a popular  
radicalism should really look like. A failure to attend to the  
subjective choices with which people confront particular situations  
often results in a reifying culturalism that sees struggle as a  
natural expression of cultural difference. It is inevitably complicit  
with some form of racism and often risks an inability to discern  
domination within a nation or movement.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher who has thought about the question of  
solidarity across the divisions that structure domination with a rare  
combination of subtlety and militancy. The themes that link his work  
on contemporary post-colonial theory, French philosophy and Haitian  
politics include a consistent stress on the fact that everyone thinks  
and that thought is the subjective confrontation with specific  
objective situations. Hallward affirms the specificity of particular  
situations and affirms the subjectivity with which they are confronted  
and thereby 'maintains the relation between subjective and objective  
(and between subjects) as a relation in the strict sense.'I

Hallward is committed to a prescriptive politics. He argues that  
genuinely political actions must elaborate universal principles  
(principles that hold for everyone), that for these principles to be  
meaningful they must be adhered to directly and immediately, that  
adhering to them is necessarily divisive and requires collective unity  
and a willingness to confront domination. In other words he proposes a  
politics of popular self-emancipation organized around popular  
intellectual work and consensual disciplined commitment. From the  
beginning his work has taken the view that, following Paulo Freire,  
'true generosity consists in fighting to destroy the causes which lead  
to false charity.'I

Damming the Flood is a richly detailed account of the popular Haitian  
movement Lavalas (the flood) in and out of power. There is a focus on  
how the movement was vilified and its president, Jean-Bertrand  
Aristide, removed from office by the American military with  
considerable support from global civil society.

Hallward's basic argument is that as Lavalas developed into a  
formidable force in the late 1980s it began to constitute a serious  
threat to the US-backed Haitian elite. They responded to the election  
of Aristide to the Presidency in December 1990 with an attempted coup  
in January 1991 and then a successful military coup in September 1991.  
It left 5000 dead. Aristide returned to office in November 2000 with  
92 percent of the vote and disbanded the army at which point the  
Haitian elite, with strong support from elites in Canada, the US and  
France, began to wage an elaborate propaganda and destabilization  
campaign against the Lavalas government. This was supported by many  
NGOs, including those on the left, and was followed by a military  
attack after which Aristide was removed from the country by the US  
military in February 2004. Lavalas supporters were then subject to  
sustained repression by occupying United Nations forces at a cost of  
several thousand more lives. Nevertheless resistance has continued.

Hallward takes the view that the objective constraints imposed on  
Aristide's administrations by imperial power were severe and that  
there was no prospect for fundamental transformation. Nevertheless  
there were important innovations by way of a higher minimum wage, a  
literacy program, a school building project, health care and so on.  
Even IMF statistics confirm clear progress in these areas. But  
Hallward's analysis breaks with the economism that typifies much  
contemporary leftism and he also takes the symbolic and political  
movement as significant. For instance he takes seriously the political  
ramifications of Aristide's choice to open up the swimming pool in the  
presidential palace to children from poor families. But the primary  
thrust of his assessment stresses that popular support for Aristide  
was never passive and was rooted in a network of grassroots  
organizations through which people could work for their own  
empowerment. Although Hallward doesn't make much of this it is  
noticeable that the practical action taken by Aristide's governments  
in support of the poor often found ways to combine material support  
with support for popular democratization. For instance housing was not  
reduced to the provision of houses but included the development of  
town squares in shack settlements.

Hallward deals frankly with the problem of opportunism, a problem that  
every movement has to confront when it reaches the point of winning  
some access to or control over state resources. He also deals directly  
with the reality that any movement operating in a repressive  
environment in which its membership is generally criminalized is going  
to have to take on some of the judicial and security functions usually  
reserved for states with inevitable risks and inevitable condemnation.  
Nevertheless, he concludes that

"Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at  
the outer limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history  
sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilization can  
proceed under the pressure of exceptional powerful constraints. ii

Hallward's claims about a campaign of demonization against Lavalas are  
persuasive. It is instructive to set aside Hallward's arguments about  
this and instead apply Chomsky's propaganda model to the recent  
history of Haiti. By excluding highly disputed events and examining  
only those on which there is some agreement as to the basic facts, and  
comparing only those that can be as closely matched with others as is  
possible it quickly becomes evident that, for instance, violence  
attributed to Lavalas has been systematically treated in a very  
different way in the elite media and civil society to that of other  
actors such as the Duvalier's paramilitaries, the Haitian Military,  
the US Military, the anti-Aristide paramilitary groups, the United  
Nations and so on.

But the fetishization of leaders of popular movements has a sorry  
history and it is worrying that some of the solidarity work with Haiti  
seems to be more interested in deifying Aristide rather than  
supporting ongoing popular struggles in Haiti. Hallward describes his  
book 'as an exercise in anti-demonization, not deification.'iii This  
seems fair - especially given that he is clear that Lavalas emerged  
from discussions amongst ordinary people in the shack settlements of  
Port-au-Prince and that its continued strength after Aristide's  
kidnapping is rooted in the ongoing practice of similar discussions  
and the modes of grassroots militancy that they have engendered.

Aristide is an interesting theorist in his own right and his own  
thought provides as good a measure as any for measuring the value of  
mobilization. His political thought is rooted in liberation theology.  
For Aristide, who says that when we say God 'We mean the source of  
love; we mean the source of justice',iv liberation theology is 'the  
Christian impulse that does not separate belief from action, that  
exasperates conservatives, and annoys so many people on the left who  
dream of realizing the happiness of others ... without the others.'v  
He is clear that the political movement that twice bought him to power  
begins from and is sustained in the 'little church', or what  
liberation theology in Latin America calls 'base communities'. They  
are small groups that meet in their own neighborhoods to discuss, on  
their own time and in their own language, their ideas about politics  
and society. The fundamental principle in the little church is that  
'All persons are human beings, and to be cherished.'vi The fundamental  
political task is to 'fan the fire of hope and to turn it into a tool  
for the people.'vii This theological politics is not unwilling to take  
a side. Aristide has long been clear that the preferential option for  
the poor should be 'total, unrepentant, intransigent' viii and that  
'If they [elites] do not wish to share fraternally ... They must  
accept that it is they, not I and my colleagues, who are advocating  
war.'ix He's also made it very clear that as people assume political  
agency 'Liberation theology then gives way to a liberation of  
theology, which can also include a liberation from theology.'x Lavalas  
seems to have achieved, a form of organisation closer to that of a  
series of linked congregations rather than a party and rooted in the  
organisation of the poor by the poor in the languages that people  
speak, in the places where they live, in the modes that they choose  
and in the times when they are free to organise. This is a politics of  
popular self-emancipation.

Hallward argues that although 'NGO administrators and left-leaning  
academics are often uneasy with what they see as a merely populist  
deviation'xi this popular power is necessary for any kind of  
meaningful challenge to domination. He has a point. As C.L.R. James  
noted in his history of the Haitian Revolution 'It is force that  
counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses [.]. It is what  
they think that matters'.xii

Lavalas took state power under extremely hostile circumstances and  
sought to subordinate the state to society by demobilising the  
military while continuing to mobilize society. When Aristide was first  
elected President in 1990 he declared that 'I will not be president of  
the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the  
people, even if this means confronting the very government I am  
creating.'xiii He held to this position and ten years later wrote that  
people should 'not confuse democracy with the holding of elections.'xiv

The often hysterical demonization of Lavalas can easily be understood  
and slotted into a familiar pattern of imperial attempts to contain  
oppositional movement that includes the fate of Lumumba and Allende,  
the war against the Sandinistas and the attempted coup against Chavez  
in 2002. William Robinson provides a useful lens for this kind of  
analysis in the years after the Cold War. He argues that the US and  
its allies moved away from supporting dictators and that this shift  
was rooted in a recognition that support for dictators like Botha in  
South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti had  
produced oppositional movements that were not only demanding the  
removal of dictators but also the popular democratisation of society.  
This recognition led to a shift in policy that saw the creation of  
liberal democracies as a more effective way of containing popular  
aspirations. There had been, Robinson argued, 'a reconceptualization  
of the principal target in intervened countries, from political to  
civil society, as the site of social control.'xv Robinson quoted Bill  
Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot as observing that  
'Even after our [military] exit [from Haiti] in February 1996 we will  
remain in charge by means of USAID and the private sector.'xvi In  
South Africa and the Philippines this worked well enough as the new  
regimes were enthusiastic about demobilizing the movements that had  
brought them to power. But in Haiti the Lavalas project was to  
subordinate the state to society via ongoing popular democratization.  
This was unacceptable. The result was a return to political society as  
a key target of political control - a return to regime change.

But there is another aspect to the demonization of Lavalas which may  
be more discomforting for some on the left. Hallward elaborates a  
consistent critique of NGOs. His criticism of racist ideas about  
enlightened white charity, the role of NGOs in promoting the agendas  
of foreign governments and his critique of the limits of the human  
rights project all cover familiar ground. But his criticism extends to  
the explicitly anti-neoliberal NGOs that position themselves on the  
left. He is completely skeptical of their political effectiveness in  
opposing domination arguing that:

Rather than organize with and among the people, rather than work in  
the places and on the terms where the people themselves are strong... 
[they]... organize trivial made-for-media demonstrations against  
things like the uncontroversial evils of neo-liberalism or the high  
cost of living. Such protests are usually attended by tiny groups of  
30 or 40 people - which is to say, by nobody outside the organizers'  
tiny circles.xviii

But he sees their support for regime change as a very significant in  
offering an appearance of some kind of legitimacy for the coup. His  
explanation of why the left NGOs would oppose a movement with  
tremendous popular support centres around an interview with a women's  
rights activists who explains the NGO hostility to Lavalas in terms of  
class rivalry. 'Foreign observers underestimate,' she explains, 'the  
massive gap between elite (wealthy, French-speaking, internationally  
orientated) NGO professionals and grassroots (poor, Kreyol-speaking,  
neighbourhood-orientated activists).'xviii Aristide makes a similar  
point arguing that:

Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout  
moun se moun - every person is indeed a person, every person is  
capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don't  
accept this, when they look at the n gres of Haiti - and consciously  
or unconsciously, that's what they see - they see people who are too  
poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see  
people who need others to make their decisions for them. It's a  
colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our  
political class. It's also a projection: they project onto the people  
a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of  
the master.xix

There is a fundamental difference between forms of left politics that  
propose alternative policy arrangements or ways of being without  
developing any capacity to force the realisation of their goals and  
those that actively develop popular power and alternative modes of  
community and are willing and able to confront domination collectively  
and directly. The former can be called the expert left and the latter  
can be called the popular left. The expert left tends to operate in  
the languages of imperial power, to be dependent on state or donor  
funding, to require certification from bourgeois institutions as a  
condition of entry, to be located on the side of the razor wire where  
the police offer protection and to organise via international travel  
and the internet.

It is not unusual for the expert left to be entirely unaware of the  
existence of a popular left even when it is a literal stone's throw  
away. Discourse in the wrong language, in the wrong place, in the  
wrong philosophical matrix and, most of all, in the mouths of the  
wrong people is often just invisible to the expert left.xx This  
lamentable fact is never innocent of class and can be deeply racialized.

If the popular left reaches the point of being able to stage some sort  
of major interruption into bourgeois space it is not unusual for the  
elite left to be entirely unable to comprehend the rationality of that  
revolt. This is often predicated on an inability to comprehend the  
existence of grassroots intellectuals or grassroots political  
militants.xxi

When the expert left is confronted with the concrete reality of the  
popular left via a direct demand for recognition and respect it is not  
unusual for the response to take the form of denial, paranoia,  
criminalisation and recourse to conspiracy theory in which the speech  
of grassroots militants can only be understood as manipulation by a  
rival elite.xxii

In his essay on the Paris Commune Alain Badiou defines the left as  
'the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they  
are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a  
singular political movement. Or, in more contemporary terms, that they  
are the only ones able to provide "social movements" with a "political  
perspective".'xxiii He concludes that the decision of the communards  
to take public affairs into their own hands was a decision to break  
with the left and that a political rupture, a rupture with the logic  
of representation, 'is always a rupture with the left.'xxiv

Badiou also agues that after Lenin concluded that the slaughter of the  
communards necessitated the development of a centralised, disciplined  
project aimed at seizing state power the party has been the mode by  
which the left has sought to organise popular politics. But Badiou  
does not address the new form that the official left has taken in most  
of the world - the NGO. The party is not dead. On the contrary it  
retains considerable power in places like India and in South Africa.  
And there are countries, such as Haiti or Brazil, where the church is  
also a contender for influence over popular struggles. But while there  
is a large critical literature on vanguardism and clericalism the  
critical literature on NGOs generally criticises NGOs that work for  
directly imperial agendas - such as the NGOs that work with the World  
Bank, USAID and so on - while valorising the left NGOs that operate in  
spaces like the World Social Forum. But in most of the world it is  
precisely the left NGOs that assume the right to give direction to  
social movements and to monopolise the resources that can mediate the  
development of international solidarity. Most of the left texts that  
seek to offer a global picture of the contemporary moment are based on  
the experience and thinking of these NGOs rather than the experience  
and thinking of popular movements. Most attempts at international  
solidarity are organised through these NGOs. Hallward's book breaks  
decisively with this consensus and seeks direct engagement with  
popular politics.

Damming the Flood is rich with empirical detail and nuanced insight.  
Its author has paid close attention to the realities of the situation  
confronted by grassroots militancy in Haiti as well as to the key  
choices made within that militancy. One of the clearest contributions  
of the book is the concrete development of Hallward's early  
theoretical work on the question of solidarity. An aspect of this that  
is developed with particular force can be formulated in terms of a  
choice confronting anyone wanting to develop solidarity across the  
brutal divisions of human existence: will that solidarity be with the  
expert left or the popular left?xxvi

Richard Pithouse lives in Durban where he has studied and taught  
philosophy. He has been part of Abahlali baseMjondolo since the  
movement's inception

Originally published in "Mute."

FOOTNOTES

i Peter Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the  
Singular and the Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press,,  
2001, p. 330.

ii Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial, p. 335.

iii Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the  
Politics of Containment London: Verso, 2007, Damming the Flood, p.314.

iv Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.Xxxv.

v Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart Monroe: Common Courage  
Press, 2000, p.63.

vi Jean Bertrand Aristide Dignity, Charlottesville: University of  
Virginia Press, 1996, p. 103.

vii Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from  
Haiti, New York: Orbis, 1990, p. 57.

viii Aristide, Dignity, p.49.

ix Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, p.18.

x Aristide In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, p.17.

xi Hallward Damming the Flood Haiti, p.318.

xii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.137.

xiii C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 286.

xiv William Robinson Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  
1996, p. 291

xv Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, p.36.

xvi Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 68.

xvii Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 311.

xviii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p. 181-182.

xix Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.184

xx Cited in Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.342. This kind of situation  
is not at all unique to Haiti. See, for instance, the comments on NGOs  
from The National Convention Against Displacement & SEZs held at  
Bhubaneswa in India in 2007 at http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/ 
  In South Africa there has been an extraordinarily hysterical,  
vicious and entirely dishonest set of responses from within the NGO  
left to the polite rejection of their authority by the popular left.  
The paranoia and ruthlessness of the NGO left in the face of  
autonomous popular mobilisation has rivalled that of the state. For an  
early comment on this see the statement by the Western Cape Anti- 
Eviction Campaign at http://abahlali.org/node/3032

xxi Consider, for example, the inability of the letter campaigns in  
support of Amina Lawal in 2003 to comprehend that there was a project  
to defend Lawal within Nigeria and within Islam. See the statement  
against the letter campaigns at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd 
[157]=x-157-18546

xxii Emilio Quadrelli developed an excellent analysis of this in an  
essay on the 2005 revolt in the Paris banlieaus. Quadrelli's  
intervention simply contrasted interviews with grassroots militants  
with the pronouncements of the elite left who could see nothing but an  
inarticulate cry for help by the 'socially excluded'. See 'Grassroots  
Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics' Mute, 30 May 2007 http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politics

xxiii This is typical of all of the various forms of discourse by  
which a faction of the academic and NGO left in South Africa have  
tried to render explicit and constant rejection of their authority  
from popular movements as speech that does not count.

xxiv Alain Badiou 'The Paris Commune: A political declaration on  
politics' in Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p. 272.

xxv Badiou, The Paris Commune, p. 289.

xxvi This is not to suggest that NGOs and academics are necessarily  
separate from and opposed to popular mobilisation. On the contrary  
these relations are a matter of choice and it is in principle  
perfectly possible for the NGO and the academic to work to support the  
popular left from within its practices, spaces, languages and  
structures. But when this is achieved the resulting project remains an  
instance of the popular rather than the expert left. Similarly an NGO  
that secures a constituency (or the appearance thereof) for its  
projects via some form of patronage and clientalism remains an  
instance of the expert left.

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