http://www.metamute.org/en/content/damning_the_flood
Damning the Flood
By supporting NGOs instead of popular movements, 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 universalised into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalisation 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.
