Dissent in a disaster area
I wrote this shortly after the disaster, but didn’t finish it. It’s now February 2005 (despite what the date on the post says), and I doubt I will finish this, but I’m putting it up in its current form because I don’t want to just delete it.
Should there be an anti-capitalist response to the devestation caused by the tsunami in Asia? There are certainly many things we could be saying about it from an anti-capitalist perspective. Natural disasters, after all, are not wholly natural, but affect people the way they do because of the human structures on which the natural forces act: from the distribution of population and the structures of buildings to the details of the relief effort, all these affect the consequences of the disaster, and are all man-made and so political. The last one is of particular importance to other-globalists, because the current crisis allows the institutions of globalisation to be seen in another light, one which may make it harder to make our arguments against them. It’s easier to attack the G8 as the coordinators of global capitalism than as coordinators of a global relief effort, even though we know that the latter is in fact simply one element of the former.
Even so, there’s an obvious resistance to approaching this from a political direction, a worry that we would be putting our own political concerns ahead of the terrible suffering of the victims of the disaster. But I think that’s a mistake, not just because, as k-punk says, the idea that suffering is non-political is precisely the politics of our opponents, but because the idea that _our_ politics is something we can put aside reveals a significant weakness in our movements.
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