Which way for Jubilee: Campaigns or Movements?
Policy or Politics?

Alejandro Bendaña
Presentation, Jubilee South Summit
November 20, 1999

Let us be clear about our fundamental assumptions: We do not believe that the market-driven politics and economics can lead toward greater equality of human opportunity. Our politics therefore, and one would assume our campaigns, cannot by definition be so inclusive as to incorporate the interests of corporate capital and other defenders of privatized market allocation of resources (and power). The argumentation is founded in history and morality, particularly a history as experienced by the oppressed and poor on the one hand (chiefly by not exclusively in the South), and the assumption of morality as an living ethos of search for and life in justice, respectful of the life in all of its manifestations.

If such an articulation is necessary, it is because it makes little sense to engage in and for social change without clarity about our starting point and our objectives. Only then can alliances and forms of engagement enter into the picture. Jubilee South along with other organizations have for this reason often insisted about political discussions and analysis preceding considerations of campaigning and advocacy. In this day and age, we cannot simply assume we all share the same departure point, and we should be honest in putting this forth. Campaigns and advocacy are not "apolitical": they presuppose political and analytical assumptions. Tactics are one thing but elevating the technical engagement to the level of programmatic engagement simply presupposes greater degree of consensus than may exist. For the sake of avoiding excessive tensions within campaigns-lest these healthy phenomena be perceived mistakenly as divisive-it is important to lay things on the table. Recognize our political differences and then explore the basis of common engagement, but not simply gloss over these pretending that "depolitization" is indeed not a form of politics itself that can work to the benefit of the very structures we wish to change. 

No where is the contradiction felt more than in the NGO world. Not only NGOs because Churches are also being called into question. And not only NGOs in the North, because many of their counterparts in the South face the same dilemma. Sometimes the pseudo abandonment of politics simply represents a failure of nerve, or a simple option for material accommodation. That is not for us to question. Our concern is when analysis begins to suffer-that is to be obviated altogether-precisely at a time when action and thought must be especially rooted to address not only the phenomena of mass poverty but mass enrichment. These are two facets of the same market-driven capitalist phenomena-term it globalization or whatever. If we do not deal with the system as a whole, then analytically and practically we miss the proverbial forest. Yes, one cannot choose to engage across the board and one must prioritize according to needs and opportunities. Debt is the issue, or part of the issue, but reducing our demands to "debt relief" or even a one-off debt cancellation, leads us astray analytically and organizationally, that is it can detract from the imperative need to build or reinforce social movements-the true engines of systemic change. Somewhat like the shoddy poor quality "relief goods" unfit for human consumption that are dumped in our countries, "debt relief packages" amount to little other than self-serving mechanisms of dumping uncollectable paper debt. In both cases, our nations are treated like pieces of legal fiction. One would expect more from those who profess to be concerned about development and relief.

Campaigns, as often initiated in rich countries by well meaning persons can fall prey to the politics of asking for too little. True, spaces for engagement in the North appear to be limited, often employing the feel good Madison Avenue techniques that pose for politics in so many countries. But there are two considerations here: first the problem of debt and impoverishment cannot seriously addressed, let alone sustainably resolved , outside the framework of principled politics. And second, history would also teach us, that power concedes nothing on its own volition but is more often than not the product of putting heat on the street. It is the people that empower the negotiators and advocates, not the other way around.

If one must deal with bureaucracy, then it must also be accepted that bureaucracies move in millimeters-the essence of system stability and adjustment for self-preservation and reproduction. Suffering demands epochal shifts. And if that suffering, pain and sense of moral outrage is not taken to the street and the negotiation table, NGOs or campaigns, like governments in the South can become, consciously or not, co-agents of system reproduction celebrating "shifts" that have little impact on the ground. 

Campaigns in this context as in others, the many Jubilee/debt Campaigns among them, become purposely short-lived, simplistic in message, seeking out the broadest alliances on the skimpiest of propositions-in a word conservative, and by self-definition highly focused and charged, designed to produce a highly visible and publicized output under a tight schedule. However while "globalization" spells greater integration of corporate-governmental thinking and action, campaign tactics tend concentrate their fire on smaller and smaller subsets of components-from debt, to child soldiers, to land mines, to small arms. . Single issue or geographically specific constituency politics can generate momentary enthusiasm and adherents. Does Jubilee 2000 dismantle itself on January 1, 2001? Do we go on to campaign on animal rights? So let us not confused campaigning with political participation. Campaigns like elections have clear ending points, not so with politics. 

While movements are not incompatible with campaigns, we must insist on having campaigns as a function of movement building, as opposed to campaigns that substitute movement, and indeed weaken understandings and struggles for integral change. The classic example was the anti-apartheid movement, where demand for partial changes ("constructive engagement") could undercut the anti-apartheid struggle at its core. 

The struggle against apartheid, as the struggle against indebtedness, is seen therefore in its comprehensive moral and historical framework. It admits no compromise, but can be open to a number of forms of engagement within the overall framework and responsive to the particularities of different national situations. It may well be that in countries in the North, lobbying campaigns can effect some change. This is to be welcomed and one can even visualize a division of labor with the often more confrontation politics in the South; which is not to dismiss the efforts of those in the North who have taken their anger and solidarity to the streets in the form of civil disobedience and direct non-violent action. What cannot be countenanced, however, is the implicit assumption-and sometimes funding conditionality-that policy reform also become uppermost in the South as an appendix of the strategy conceived, organized and led by Northern groups-some of which are objectively working more closely with government policy circles that with the movements they allege to speak for. Here we encounter the abusive notion that the voiceless poor in the South somehow must and will always have need a ventriloquist in the North (or South NGO/Church). Yesterday this was argued in the name of Western Civilization or Christianity; today the notion of global campaigns often reflects the same presumption of superiority and the same unequal distribution of power, not simply between exploiter and exploited, but also between exploited and their purported spokespersons in the North yet also often including their governments in the South.

What are some of the dangers of Campaign-dynamics taking precedence over Popular Movement Building?

First, the logical emergence of much confusion and diffusion around the fundamental question of power. We engage in pure lobbying tactics demanding policy adjustment, we become part of the policy establishment. Jubilee campaigns are to be commended for focusing on the G-7. It is positive to underscore the political governmental responsibility for the prevailing state of unsustainable affairs, including the responsibility that governments could or should have over corporate investment flows and prevailing structural adjustment prescription orthodoxy. All this in our opinion brings us closer to the reality of power, considerably more educational than campaigns that will focus on the IMF, the World Bank, WTO etc. often downplaying the fact that the latter are but civil servants and instruments for the application of power. However the G-7 is no club of equals, morally or militarily. 

In the final analysis, the multilateral institutions and even the G-7 are instruments of the United States. Why the reluctance to name the USA or to use the term imperialism? Is it that in the name of influencing the chief policy-makers we must also exercise self-censorship in regard to power realities. Who benefits? Who continues to suffer? And what happens when, on account of asking for too little, the US and the G-7 responds spectacularly turning Jubilee on its head, as during the Cologne Summit, experiencing a spin-doctored produced governmental public relations success? Campaigns will claim to share in such "success"; movements cannot-in fact we must ask, as we do in Jubilee South, whether greater harm is done by a public in the North that is unaware of the weight of debt, than by the same public that now believes the weight has been lifted by magnanimous generosity of their governments?


Analysis

If we fail at this fundamental level of power analysis, then little wonder there is so much distance in regard to the place of debt in the analysis, and therefore, what should be the shape of anti-debt strategies. If we are clear about power, and its social underpinning, then it would be impossible for us to say, as some of the debt campaigners have in the North, that for example the Cologne initiative is a "step forward" We do not want to belittle the importance of the J2000 mobilization in the North but mobilization without proper analysis is not only wasteful but dangerous, because it can lead to confusion or worse outright demobilization and depolitization.

Which is why, on occasion of the Cologne Summit, many of us in Jubilee South argued this was no "step forward" but precisely the opposite. First, the IMF comes out stronger with an enhanced mandate to impose its policies now in the name of poverty reduction (as defined by the IMF). And second, what we characterized as a "cruel hoax" now evidenced in the fact that the G-7 could not even cough up the money for so called HIPC debt relief, let alone break the ideological and programmatic linkage with Structural Adjustment packages. Absent serious education and analysis in and around some of the North campaigns, the rich countries got a public relations boost, and the debt impoverished people suffered a tremendous hoax.

Sadly there are no lessons learned, simply lessons spurned. Last September the IMF announced a "successor" to the ESAF programs, the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility. Potentially. Some NGOs in the North quickly said this was a positive step and a sharp break with the past. So now the IMF follows the lead of the World Bank in developing participatory exercise to draw up a national poverty reduction strategy as preconditions for new PRGF loans.

The danger in all is that NGOs and campaigners come to exaggerate the degree of positive change, if any. Over and above the institutional preservation need to claim some success, we must ask very critically just what constitutes success. A favorable opinion piece in the Financial Times or Washington Post, an approving condescending remark by a Parliamentarian or Congressman here or there, cameo appearances by Rock stars? Visibility is not an end in itself. We need to remember the human indicators. Never stop asking what Jubilee or debt relief can mean in the everyday life of the poor? Certainly more than uplifting hopes that then come to nothing (in which case movements on the ground are left to deal with the cynicism over politics and desperation so inimical to progressive political change). Very little has changed, at least from the standpoint of the village woman in Latin America, Asia or Africa. Movements must take the challenge and develop their positions and struggles on a global terrain as well as national and local ones. 

Ending or Reforming the Neoliberal Paradigm?

Many NGOs applauded when HIPC was launched. And HIPC was a tremendous success: successful in dividing and confusing the anti-debt movement. How? Because many campaigns bought into the trap of putting numbers and conditions on the countries eligible for debt cancellation. Many fell into the numbers game: not 40 but 50 countries, not 6 years waiting but 3, only the poorest countries but not the middle income ones, etc. 

There was much applause heard from NGOS for Bretton Woods new consultation and participation processes open to civil society. Greater insistence on good governance and transparency, along with the introduction of buzz words of dialogue and partnership with something called civil society. However, many failed to notice that this was simply an add-on to the traditional conditionality. The so called dialogues, like debt-relief itself, began from a starting position that the Bretton Woods institutions were right about all policy advice. There was no admission of the possibility of different development models. And therefore, many of us asked, what is the point of dialogue?

Some of the G-7 are now making noises of linking debt relief with human rights and other matters. And again they are drawing on NGOs and Churches, principally North but also South, to help legitimize these interventionist stands. The idea is that the so-called donors "forgive debt and grant further credits to countries that increase spending on education and health for their people and reduce spending on weapons and the military." At least some of the Churches in welcoming considerations of human rights in debtor countries, but point to a bitter irony if structural adjustment conditions remain in place. 

Can the people that brought you the debt crisis and impoverishment now offer you the manual to end it? Can they effectively self-regulate themselves? Or coming back to the question of power, will the US, G-7 and others effectively transfer power to new independent and democratic regulatory institutions? It is not enough to say the system needs correction or new regulation. The question is 'who sets the rules, in whose interests, and do they apply equally to everyone?' Or does regulation simply become yet another means-such for example as with the demand for a one sided transparency or selective interpretation of corruption-that entails new levels of intervention in the livelihoods of nations and peoples?

Conditionality

The problem with our friends is the problem of good intentions without the corresponding social consciousness and historical grasp of the problem. Without such a framework, our friends become prone to blackmail and prisoners of the policy establishment framework. What is worse, they fall into the traps laid by the corporate rulers.

For example, let us look at the question of conditionality. Debt campaigners feel extremely vulnerable to the argument, made in the North and South, that demands guarantees that the money freed up from debt cancellation will help the poor. Having accepted the logic of "debt relief"-as largely defined by the North-our liberal friends then go about to defend the imposition of what they call "positive conditionality". And in the process they do us more harm than good substituting condescending reasoning for hard political analysis. 

For example, instead of addressing debt cancellation as a matter of justice-of historical debt of the North to the South-it is made a matter of self-serving charity. And a charity with strings attached. Rather like the welfare argument of give them a job instead of a handout, proponents go on to set conditions on the "hand outs", in this case debt relief. to make matters worse, proponents feel that there is no inconsistency between such positions and actual democratic empowerment. Here the notion of "giving" takes precedence over the notion of "restitution" underscored in the Jubilee message. How convenient to escape
remorse or reparations on account of the fundamental wrongs of colonization, slavery and neo-colonization. This is not ancient history but present circumstances. There are no time prescriptions in questions of injustice-if cancellation and reparations are a moral and ethical imperative (if not a juridical one) then there is no replication to the position that is simply must be done. One cannot set conditions on the return of what is rightfully owned to others. It is the South that must condition the flow of restitution to the North-demanding that atonement and public apology accompany the historical reversal of the flow of wealth. That would be Jubilee. 

Now of course comes the question of how do "we insure" that what belongs to the poor actually gets there. Well the poor have not asked NGOs and Churches in the North, let alone the IMF, to become God's Terrible Avenging Angel. The only ones entitled to set conditions are the victims themselves. And it is for them, and not their self-appointed lawyers and guardians to address the how to organize to insure that restitution reaches its true entitlement-holders. Giving North governments and IFIs yet another tool with which they can extract conditions from South Governments-i.e., HIPC debt relief schemes-is something that our friends in the North and South must roundly denounce and stop. 


The Defense of Sovereignty 

The so called Washington consensus or neoliberal framework-or modern capitalism, to call a spade a spade-carries over into the "opposition" by way of "critics" that will accept the assumption "there is no alternative" to globalization (HIPC the only game in town). (Governments in the South tend to fall in). So why conceive of self-determination or of a sovereignty that is no longer attainable (or even desirable, say some). According to these critics, it is "global" civil society that must now lead the drive for globalization with a human heart-and by "global" we mean the societies of the South mobilized behind the campaigners of the North. 

The defense of conditionality, in this context, even in its so called positive modality, represents yet one more undercutting of the notion of sovereignty and national democracy already undercut by the negative conditionality and enforced liberalization. If our campaigning friends looked closely around them they will no doubt find and hear resistance to the ever dwindling scope for local political decision-making. And while many will talk about community self-determination, there is no getting around the fact that there that local democracy entails strong sovereignty capable of defending local spaces against encroaching upward devolution of power in its political, economic and cultural manifestations ("globalization"). 

If we believe in democracy, then we must also believe in the sovereign right of peoples to use any freed up resources in ways that they-and not outsiders-freely determine. This is as much a notion of genuine development as of the defense of identity, and therefore, the diversity that is central to global environmental survival. Crusaders and doctors, heal thyself!

Northern Civilization

The North knows best. OK, so the IFIs and the G-7 have made a mess of it. Where is the answer? Give them another chance, this time under the guidance of its liberal critics. The gentler, kinder conditionality still suggests a relationship between North and South characterized by the presumption of false superiority. So if the Northern governments brought you the problems, the Northern NGOs can give you the fix-it manual. After all they are the "experts", the professional "researchers" and the "capacity-builders". We are the information providers that must leave the systematization to the "professionals" amidst our own assimilation of the latest Northern capacities.

The issues at the heart of economic justice campaigns, including Jubilee, are issues of power. The campaigns themselves must also deal with the questions of power as questions also internal to the campaigns, nationally and internationally (if the pretense is made to speak for all). This presupposes a capacity to listen to "partners" and what they are saying. No one is asking for a mechanical alignment of Northern or Southern liberal NGOs, et al with South movement positions. The terrains are different, but instances such as Jubilee South come into being because the voices demand to be heard, if not respected and taking into account. Nothing about us without us, for there is nothing "disabled" about South capacities to think and act on questions of debt, in all of its manifestations. 

Jubilee South contends that debt cancellation of the North to the South is stated as a means of restitution and redistribution of wealth. But this is no simple transaction matter-it is a political one too as it demands a redistribution of power without which the roots of economic injustice will continue to sprout new manifestations of oppression, including new debt. 

Turn over the power. Set the world right sight up. The challenge is on both sides. For the would be power recipients we would first ask whether we have not ourselves practiced abuse of power in gender, generational and consumption abuses. Whether indeed we have tolerated such. Where do we change? This is perhaps the very first and enduring question for the new millennium.