July 25, 2005
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has long been obsessed by the "metrics" of success
in the war in Iraq. His are, of course, the metrics from hell and they
have regularly betrayed him when it comes to measuring the signs of
victory. But measuring the immeasurable on our confusing planet is no
small task and it's not restricted to the Rumsfelds of our world
either. All of us, whether we're particularly aware of it or not, spend
more time than we might imagine looking for and trying to measure
"success."
In May 2003,
when so many had packed their bags and gone home in despair after a
vast wave of antiwar demonstrations had ended and the war in Iraq was
well underway, Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece, "Acts of Hope," for
Tomdispatch on why we should keep going even when the going looked, by
every measure, grim indeed; on why, in fact, success in the real world
could never be measured by the "metrics" of either sports or the
Pentagon. A wonderful surprise of a small book somehow burst forth from
that essay. It was called Hope in the Dark;
it focused on the ways -- when it came to success in changing the world
-- history defied measurement and regularly surprised us all. Now, two
years later, at a different grim moment, she returns to the matter of
how we consider, no less measure, success or victory by looking at the
question of debt cancellation for the poorest countries as taken up at
the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. She wants us to understand that
when it comes to change, the normal metrics don't hold; that victory,
when it finally arrives, often appears nearly unrecognizably unlike
what we've been looking for; that sometimes it even arrives in the
guise of one's opponents or enemies. In this essay too, I smell a small
future book. So take my advice and plunge with that Great Gray Whale
into the depths of reality where nothing looks quite as it should and
change seldom comes in anything but strange sizes and shapes. Tom
The Great Gray Whale
Or This Story Has No Moral
By Rebecca Solnit
While we were looking at humpbacked whales a few months ago, my
companion asked me if I ever thought about how Moby Dick's narrator,
Ishmael, survived -- by floating away from the destroyed ship Pequod
in his friend Queequeg's coffin. Whales themselves survived into the
twenty-first century in part because of petroleum, the black stuff
seeping out of the Pennsylvania earth that made the Rockefellers rich
and whale oil unnecessary for lighting lamps (and because of the first
international whaling treaty in 1949). Of course, petroleum went on to
create the climate change that threatens habitat for whales and trashes
their world in other ways. Typically, there isn't an easy moral to
this, any more than there is to Ishmael floating away safely because
his friend had terrible premonitions of death. And that's part of the
richness of Herman Melville's telling.
The world is full of tales in which morals are hard to extract from
facts. There is the delightful fact that Viagra has been good for
endangered species like elk whose antlers now are less at risk of being
ground up for Chinese aphrodisiacs, surely the greatest inadvertent
contribution of big pharmaceuticals in our time. Casinos have provided
many Native American tribes with revenue and clout, though gambling is
another kind of social problem and outside groups are the principal
profiteers from some of the casinos. McDonald's has (under intense
pressure from animal rights activists) led the way in reforming how
meat animals are raised and slaughtered. Many military sites have
become de facto
wildlife refuges, saving huge swathes of land from civilian development
(even if bombing endangered species is part of the drill).
Then there are those interesting moments when otherwise appalling
politicians do something decent for whatever reason or when the
principled and the sinister are weirdly mixed -- like anti-abortion,
pro-death-penalty Arizona Senator John McCain's passion for addressing
climate change or the recently deceased Pope John Paul II's
condemnation of neoliberalism. To say nothing of our one great
environmental president, Richard Nixon (and, yes, it wasn't out of
purity of heart that Nixon got us the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts, but
purity of water and air matter more).
Sometimes, though, I think my compatriots are looking for the real
world to provide stories as simple as Sunday school and sports, not as
complex as Moby Dick.
I would like those victories too. I would have liked it a lot if, after
returning from the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, earlier this
month, George W. Bush had -- in a live global telecast like the Oscars
-- fallen to his knees, apologized profusely to everyone for
everything, condemned capitalism, violence and himself, promised to
dismantle the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, stop the
war in Iraq immediately, and dedicate some of the billions thus
saved to African poverty. And that's just for starters. But let's look
instead at what we got.
The Baby or the Baby-killer?
Bush, as ever, refused to deal with climate change and was dragged
along only grudgingly on aid and debt-relief measures for Africa. Even
so, in the lead-up to the summit, 18 of the world's poorest nations,
including Bolivia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and Uganda,
received 100% debt cancellation -- a $40 billion write-off from the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the African
Development Bank. Nine more countries will receive debt cancellation in
the next 18 months. Of course there were strings attached --
preexisting policies obliging those nations to play by some of the
rules that made them destitute to begin with. A lot of radicals
excoriated the whole business of the G8 taking up debt relief and
African poverty. John Pilger wrote in the New Statesman:
"It is a fraud -- actually a setback to reducing
poverty in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited
economic programmes imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the
'package' will ensure that the 'chosen' countries slip deeper into
poverty. Is it any surprise that this is backed by Blair and his
treasurer, Gordon Brown, and George Bush; even the White House calls it
a 'milestone.'"
Others disagreed. Foreign Policy in Focus analyst Mark Engler wrote:
"Those progressives who have attacked the debt deal
emphasize that, even in announcing the cancellation, G8 finance
ministers explicitly reaffirm a neoliberal economic paradigm. Under the
new G8 agreement, 18 countries do receive full debt cancellation from
the IMF and World Bank, and nine other countries may be granted similar
relief at a later date."
He went on to discuss the "conditionalities," or terms, that the
countries granted debt cancellation under the Highly Indebted Poor
Countries program, or HIPC, are required to accept, including various
measures increasing privatization and corporate access to their
resources. Engler concluded:
"Obviously, this is a problem. That said, it is clearly
better for poor countries that have already suffered HIPC conditions to
receive full cancellation, rather than inadequate, partial relief.
Full, 100 percent cancellation has been one of the foundational demands
of the debt relief movement. It is something that has been resisted by
wealthy nations through years of mass protests and persistent lobbying.
By affirming the legitimacy of this long-denied demand, the G8
agreement sets a landmark precedent. This breakthrough represents a
significant victory.... In one example, some 2.2 million people in
Uganda gained access to water as a result of a post-1997 debt
cancellation."
The debate seems to be over whether this is capitulation or incremental
victory. The majority of victories we win are likely to be muddled,
compromised, incomplete, and uncredited. It is no surprise that Blair
and Bush failed to excoriate themselves or the system that creates
poverty. Of course, they avoided systemic analysis while claiming to
have always been on the side of the angels.
Radicals often want a victory that is sudden, dramatic, and full of
moral illumination, that belongs clearly to them and to them alone, the
kind where the other side loudly repents and credits you with
dramatically reversing their course, or better yet simply surrenders
and leaves the arena. This is not even victory, but vindication, since
the focus shifts from alleviating suffering to acknowledging its cause
and your virtue.
I remember when some portion of California's Headwaters Forest was
saved after a long struggle on the part of Earth First! and other
environmental radicals. That there was outrage over the inadequate
protection offered was one thing; that so many were focused on the fact
that junk-bond king Charles Hurwitz, owner of Pacific Lumber, had
profited handsomely from selling the land represented a real slip in
focus from saving trees to thwarting opponents. It would have been nice
to see Hurwitz penniless and in jail, and there were good reasons why
he should have been both -- but the forest was more important and
saving it had been the point all along.
Was the issue in Scotland then debt relief, or destruction of the
system that created that debt and dire poverty, or acknowledgment of
the evils of neoliberalism, or the capitulation of Bush and Blair? It
is easier, and in some ways more likely, to achieve something colossal
like debt cancellation that will affect millions of the planet's
poorest than to get those in power to admit that they or their system
are wrong.
Activists often have a real distaste for hailing anything that comes
from those regarded as the enemy, and the distaste is understandable;
but the refusal, or inability, to recognize the messy ways in which
change for the better comes is another thing altogether. There aren't a
lot of saints in politics, and you can wait forever for change to come
only from them. You can always argue that what we need is systemic
change and nothing less, but humanitarianism often means accepting
lesser steps along the way, and sometimes those steps lead toward
something more revolutionary. A friend pointed out to me that when your
client is facing the death penalty, you might like to abolish capital
punishment and reform the system, but your courtroom victory will
consist, first of all, of keeping him off death row.
The alternative position is caught well by a story I heard fifteen
years ago from an activist just out of jail. She had been convicted for
destroying nuclear missile guidance systems. She related a parable
about a group of washerwomen on a riverbank who see a baby floating by,
rescue it, and then find themselves plunging into the river regularly
to grab babies. Finally one washerwoman walks away. Her comrades ask
her if she doesn't care about babies. She replies, "I'm going to go
upstream to find the guy who's throwing them in." She is the
revolutionary ideologue who will take on the system, but in the
meantime there's something to be said for pulling out the babies who
will drown before -- in the case of debt relief -- the end of
neoliberalism. Both positions are needed and they can be symbiotic
rather than competitive. There are a lot of babies at stake. And a lot
of slimy politicians kissing babies and then throwing them in the
river.
Full-fledged debt cancellation, rather than, say, debt restructuring,
may be an ideological change that acknowledges the profound suffering
indebtedness creates and the failure of the system that created it.
(After all, those loans were officially supposed to fund prosperity.)
It seems to open the door for further transformations -- and the
stubborn Jubilee activists who have been working on the issue for a
decade have not gone home and not been satisfied. In June, the
organization declared:
"The announcement that a deal to cancel the debts of
some of the world's poorest countries had been reached at Saturday's G7
Finance Ministers' meeting must be welcomed as the first step on the
road towards writing off the debt burdens that are preventing
developing countries from attaining their Millennium Development Goals.
Nonetheless it remains a wholly inadequate response to the demands made
by NGOs and civil society debt campaigners for a total cancellation of
unsustainable debt at the G8 Summit in July. It has been clear for 20
years that many indebted countries were effectively insolvent and
required their debts to be written off, and that the debt problem
itself was part of a systemic failure of the present economic system.
Until a fundamental reform of international finance and trade is
undertaken, debt cancellation -- though necessary in the short term --
can only address the symptoms and not the cause of chronic poverty in
the developing world. In the absence of such comprehensive changes, the
high hopes of debt campaigners will ultimately be disappointed."
The question then is whether the measures taken this summer are steps along the way to more substantive change.
In honor of Tony Blair, I have revised Gandhi's famous dictum to read:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,
then they co-opt your issue and pretend it was always theirs, and then
if you don't get all muddled, you still might win." But here's the
catch: it won't look like victory. It won't satisfy the way victory is
supposed to satisfy. It will come in dribbles rather than in a glorious
burst; it will arrive in the hands of those you loathe; it will appear
in some unanticipated form hard to recognize. Changes come sneakily,
like the thieves they are, stealing the familiar world. By the time you
win, your victory no longer belongs to you; it belongs first to the
annoying former adversaries who have taken it up and now espouse it as
though it had always been their own, and then it belongs to history.
Maybe we have team sports so that every once in a blue moon
something will look like victory. And every once in a while the real
world has its watersheds -- Mandela's inauguration, say -- rather than
just its trickles. (In Mexico, the seventy-year dictatorship of the PRI
ended not with a Mandela, but with that ex-Coca-Cola executive Vicente
Fox assuming the presidency -- though this may yet open the way for
left-wing Mexico City Mayor Lopez Obrador to become that country's
president next year in what would be, twenty years on from the first
loosening of the PRI's stranglehold, a real watershed victory after
muddled, incremental changes that may have made it possible.)
The real debate is over perception: Radicals fear that the acceptance
of limited changes undermines the profound change they seek, and the
less radical are indeed often willing to accept palliative measures
instead. But limited change undermines that larger goal only if it is
perceived as final and adequate; perhaps what is needed from all of us
is an ability to hail achievements without regarding them as occasions
to quit and to recognize that change will shuffle more often than leap.
Of course when it comes to who demands what and who decides what comes
next, it's more complicated; and limited changes can be how politicians
disarm popular outcry rather than truly address what's at stake.
Blunting the Swords Small Bodies Are Impaled On
I was in England and Scotland in late May and early June, and it was
like entering a parallel universe. The proliferation of fear mongering
and fast-food outlets was as familiar as the ubiquitous preoccupation
with climate change and African poverty was not. (Of course, the latter
issue was dominated by wizened rock stars with Lady Bountiful politics
and a nauseating enthusiasm for giving absolution to heads of state.)
Tony Blair had taken up these two causes in what appeared to be a
blatant bait-and-switch on the war in Iraq he had gotten his country
into, and it had worked -- that war was a minor news story by
comparison and a relatively minor issue in the G8 protests. (This was,
of course, before the London bombings brought the question of Iraq back
onto the front pages.)
A searching national conversation on the real causes of African poverty
was going on -- with various conclusions. To explain that disaster
spread over most of a continent, some pointed to a half-millennium of
European colonization and genocide and its political and psychological
aftermath; some to widespread support for corrupt and undemocratic
regimes that milk their countries dry; others to the role pillaging
multinational corporations play in draining Africa of its natural
wealth. All are causes, of course, as are the policies of the IMF and
the World Bank. But the question that fascinated me was: What had
caused African poverty to move to the center of British national
consciousness and G8 negotiations?
Seven years earlier, I had been at the demonstrations against the
1998 G8 Summit in Birmingham, England. This was 17 months before the
epochal shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle fittingly
exiled the unloved leaders of the more or less free world to meeting in
self-created super-militarized zones. (Security for this summit in
rural Scotland cost hundreds of millions of pounds. One Scottish local
commented that they should have met on an aircraft carrier in the
middle of the ocean -- in the cheaper and more honest armed isolation
that would best represent their relationship to the public. Certainly,
the extraordinary sums spent on security could have done a lot for
Africa's destitute.)
In '98, I had gone to Birmingham to hang out with Reclaim the
Streets (RTS), the raucous, wildly creative British movement that
shifted the tone and tactics of direct action in many parts of the
world and demonstrated early the power of the Internet for creating
simultaneous demonstrations in many countries. At the same moment,
Jubilee 2000 (now Jubilee Research) formed a vast human chain around
the G8 and much of central Birmingham. RTS condemned the G8's very
existence; Jubilee 2000 asked it for something specific. At the time, I
have to admit, the jubilee group made little impression on me, and
their "Cancel the Debt" message seemed hopeful but remote.
Remote then, it has arrived now, as both a transnational awareness of
the causes and costs of the loans forced on poor nations and as the
recent debt cancellations. It is impressive to measure the migration of
the idea of debt cancellation (and so, of the rich world's role in
creating poverty) as it traveled from outside the walls of Birmingham
into Gleneagles to become the
unavoidable topic. No less impressive is the way the early champions of
debt relief took up such a complex, unglamorous idea and stuck with it
for so long -- long enough to matter, long enough to change the world.
For debt relief exemplifies the often murky issues of much contemporary
activism. Everyone agrees that children shouldn't be murdered, but it's
hard to show people how arcane and intricate international financial
rules can become the swords upon which small bodies are impaled. Zambia
has already announced that cancellation of its debt will immediately
translate into anti-retrovirals for some of its 100,000 AIDS sufferers
(which exemplifies, as well, how debt translates into death; think of
all those people who have not been getting medication).
Win or lose, the question of what was achieved begs a larger
question: Is it useful to hail less-than-perfect, less-than-complete
achievements? There is a real danger of complacency if the assessment
is simplified into "we won," since winning in this culture is usually
followed by going home, as if life on earth was a game that ended when
your team had the higher score. But there is also danger in never
acknowledging our role in the murky victories that do occur on this
strange planet. For then you leave bystanders, newcomers, sometimes
even old-timers with the impression that we never win, that nothing we
do works, that we have no effect.
Toughness, critique, dissatisfaction always have an important place in
reminding people that the game isn't up and suffering continues; so
does recognizing that real change is possible and that activists have
real power. It's not black or white, not cause for resting on laurels
or for despair, just for continuing on with the endless project of a
better world. Moby Dick was white; the humpback whales I saw spouting
and leaping in the Pacific were nearly black; but truth and history are
larger, and grayer.
Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco, where she writes Tomdispatches and books. Her newest book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Copyright 2005 Rebecca Solnit
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