Resist despair: learn from struggles in the global South

I COULD allow myself to be consumed by a righteous rage for so many reasons.The re-election of the tinpot despot Donald Trump in the US, the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, the way that black lives simply don’t matter and the way that men try to control the reproductive rights of women.Nobody reading this will need reminding that the US, a country built on genocide, enslavement and racism, does not see any of the thousand and one cruelties and deficiencies of Trump as any kind of deal-breaker for their vote. In fact, many appear to positively celebrate it!Sadly, it wasn’t even just white people who had no problem voting for Trump.There are so many things that could easily leave me just wanting to pull the sheets back over my head every morning in the hope that they will all go away.But I can’t help but wonder how surprised people will be when the Tories are elected at the next general election on the same basis as Trump — with the Democrats over the pond and Labour here having offered nothing to change the material conditions facing many millions of people.The liberals will engage in their usual hand-wringing and blame everybody else but themselves for the calamity.The problem is we just don’t have the luxury of waiting around for disappointment to materialise at election time.Indeed, the reduction of elections — as in the US — to a showbusiness extravaganza proves that politics must be engaged all year round and not just when votes to administer the capitalist system better than the last lot are at stake.One thing is for sure, though, is that we must double down on organising and presenting the case for socialism and communism.We can’t give up in despair.There is just too much at stake, and in any case I feel certain that my ancestors would soon appear demanding to know where I had got the gall to give up after all they went through to allow me to be a descendant of those who survived.The great James Baldwin said: “I never have been in despair about the world. Enraged. I’ve been enraged by the world but never despair. I cannot afford despair ... you can’t tell the children that there is no hope.”The fact is, the empire needs us to give up. It relies on our fatigue, our apathy and ultimately our acquiescence.But I’m also reminded of the words of one of the great writers, Arundhati Roy: “The strategy should be not only to confront the empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories.”I would also add to this the most potent weapon we have at our disposal as exploited people — our ability to organise.Laying siege to the empire demands a strategy for change, or it becomes just some directionless luxury. That’s why we need to have a clear organising strategy.Not though the guru-fixated US type of organising that seems to be all the rage in Britain, because, as they say, that went well.We need to look further afield and find new ways of confronting the evil empire.Fortunately, there are — if many bothered to take off their Eurocentric or North American lenses — plenty of examples across the rest of the world where working-class and peasant communities have managed to throw off the shackles of despotic rule and tried to build a new order.We can’t just carry on doing the same responses to the evil empire and expect different results. We have to find new or at least different methods of confrontation and resistance.Maybe we can learn from the communists who were a key part of the biggest strike in history when around 100 million Indian farmers took action and defeated the fascist government of Narendra Modi by winning their demands.Across the Third World, the people have been rising up to oust despots who have spent decades exploiting their labour while enriching themselves to unidentified but no doubt unimaginable levels.Instead of relying on trendy organising strategies that have been proven to have, at best, minimal success rates, we should learn from the popular uprisings of the Sahel region of Africa.It’s about understanding the material circumstances that force these sorts of changes to take place and attract some level of popularity.These uprisings can be conveniently described as military coups. But we could also see them for what they are — uprisings led by young military officers with massive support from the population.Maybe we can learn from the Palestinians who did not just begin their resistance to the Israeli apartheid regime last October. Their defiance is much more than the armed resistance we are now witnessing.Similarly, the defeat of the racist South African regime was much more multi-layered than it is credited. That, too, is easily reduced to being an armed struggle when, in fact, the people developed forms of resistance that required daily collective action in workplaces and communities.Perhaps we can learn from the tribes in the Amazon organising to protect their (and our) environment than we ever thought was possible — because we’ve never really looked.I believe the Russian Revolution still has something to teach us about how you organise and direct a popular uprising to bring about fundamental change in favour of working-class and peasant communities.We now have the opportunity to learn across borders through the use of new communications systems in a way that would have required some serious money back in the day.We need to get used to thinking more widely about where we are prepared to search for our wells of hope from which to draw our inspiration.If we keep looking towards the decaying woods of the so-called “new world” we run the risk of missing the proverbial trees.Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying for a moment that everything in the Third World garden is rosy. Far from it. That’s actually my point!People have risen up in circumstances that, in many cases, could easily cost them their lives.As more and more governments in the global North become controlled by the far right, as in the US, perhaps the way to turn the tide is to look outside the empire towards those that are already waging or have already waged their fights against despotic rule.The wonderful Toni Morrison perhaps describes it best: “If you want to fly, you have to give up the shit that weighs you down.”I think we need to give up the all too heavily held belief in the North that there are only marginal lessons to be learned from global South organising.As the title of my comrade Nigel Flanagan’s book implores us: Go South. Global SouthDonald TrumpUnited States Features ROGER McKENZIE argues that facing Trump’s victory and global crises requires looking beyond failed Western organising models to successful resistance movements in the developing worldArticle Is old Alternative byline Roger McKenzie Issue Thursday, November 14, 2024 Embedded media node 8 - Ajay Pal Singh Farmers'_Protest_at_Singhu_Border_9_January_2021_-_3 Rating: No ratingRequires subscription: News grade NormalPaywall exclude: 0Article footer image: