Damning the Flood

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DAMNING THE FLOODBy Richard Pithouse, Mute Magazine, 14 October 2008

By supporting NGOs, 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 theviolent 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.

In the contemporary world the failure to attend to the objective difference of

particular situations often results in the assumption that all struggles should aspire

to the form that the anti-globalization movement has taken in the metropole.

Amongst other problems this immediately renders the (usually) white Northern

activist an automatic and universal expert on what a popular radicalism should

really look like. A failure to attend to the subjective choices with which people

confront particular situations often results in a reifying culturalism that sees

struggle as a natural expression of cultural difference. It is inevitably complicit with

some form of racism and often risks an inability to discern domination within a

nation or movement.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher who has thought about the question of solidarity

across the divisions that structure domination with a rare combination of subtlety

and militancy. The themes that link his work on contemporary post-colonial theory,

French philosophy and Haitian politics include a consistent stress on the fact that


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everyone thinks and that thought is the subjective confrontation with specific

objective situations. Hallward affirms the specificity of particular situations and

affirms the subjectivity with which they are confronted and thereby maintains the

relation between subjective and objective (and between subjects) as a relationin the

strict sense.i

Hallward is committed to a prescriptive politics. He argues that genuinely politicalactions must elaborate universal principles (principles that hold for everyone), that

for these principles to be meaningful they must be adhered to directly and

immediately, that adhering to them is necessarily divisive and requires collective

unity and a willingness to confront domination. In other words he proposes a

politics of popular self-emancipation organised around popular intellectual work

and consensual disciplined commitment. From the beginning his work has taken the

view that, following Paulo Freire, true generosity consists in fighting to destroy thecauses which lead to false charity.i
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Damming the Floodis a richly detailed account of the popular Haitian

movement Lavalas(the flood) in and out of power. There is a focus on how the

movement was vilified and its president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, removed from

office by the American military with considerable support from global civil society.

Image: Lavalas demonstration, September 29th, 2006. 'Yesterday, in the capital,

thousands of Lavalas supporters rallied in support of the deposed Jean-Bertrand

Aristide, Haiti's former president, demanding his return from exile in South

Africa.' http://www.nickwhalen.com

Hallwards basic argument is that as Lavalasdeveloped into a formidable force in

the late 1980s it began to constitute a serious threat to the US-backed Haitian elite.

They responded to the election of Aristide to the Presidency in December 1990 with

an attempted coup in January 1991 and then a successful military coup in

September 1991. It left 5000 dead. Aristide returned to office in November 2000

with 92 percent of the vote and disbanded the army at which point the Haitian elite,with strong support from elites in Canada, the US and France, began to wage an

elaborate propaganda and destabilisation campaign against the Lavalasgovernment.

This was supported by many NGOs, including those on the left, and was followed by

a military attack after which Aristide was removed from the country by the US

military in February 2004. Lavalassupporters were then subject to sustained

repression by occupying United Nations forces at a cost of several thousand more

lives. Nevertheless resistance has continued.
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Hallward takes the view that the objective constraints imposed on Aristides

administrations by imperial power were severe and that there was no prospect for

fundamental transformation. Nevertheless there were important innovations by way

of a higher minimum wage, a literacy programme, a school building project, health

care and so on. Even IMF statistics confirm clear progress in these areas. But

Hallwards analysis breaks with the economism that typifies much contemporary

leftism and he also takes the symbolic and political movement as significant. For

instance he takes seriously the political ramifications of Aristides choice to open up

the swimming pool in the presidential palace to children from poor families. But the

primary thrust of his assessment stresses that popular support for Aristide was never

passive and was rooted in a network of grassroots organisations through which

people could work for their own empowerment. Although Hallward doesnt make

much of this it is noticeable that the practical action taken by Aristides

governments in support of the poor often found ways to combine material support

with support for popular democratisation. For instance housing was not reduced to

the provision of houses but included the development of town squares in shack

settlements.

Image: Fanmi Lavalas supporters march against the cost of living, Haiti, December

27th 2007

Hallward deals frankly with the problem of opportunism, a problem that every

movement has to confront when it reaches the point of winning some access to or


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control over state resources. He also deals directly with the reality that any

movement operating in a repressive environment in which its membership is

generally criminalised is going to have to take on some of the judicial and security

functions usually reserved for states with inevitable risks and inevitable

condemnation. Nevertheless, he concludes that:

Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the outer

limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the

ways that political mobilisation can proceed under the pressure of exceptional

powerful constraints.ii

Hallwards claims about a campaign of demonisation against Lavalasare persuasive.

It is instructive to set aside Hallwards arguments about this and instead apply

Chomskys propaganda model to the recent history of Haiti. By excluding highly

disputed events and examining only those on which there is some agreement as to

the basic facts, and comparing only those that can be as closely matched with others

as is possible it quickly becomes evident that, for instance, violence attributed

to Lavalashas been systematically treated in a very different way in the elite mediaand civil society to that of other actors such as the Duvaliers paramilitaries, the

Haitian Military, the US Military, the anti-Aristide paramilitary groups, the United

Nations and so on.

Image: Anti-Aristide protesters march in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 1st 2004
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But the fetishisation of leaders of popular movements has a sorry history and it is

worrying that some of the solidarity work with Haiti seems to be more interested in

deifying Aristide rather than supporting ongoing popular struggles in Haiti.

Hallward describes his book as an exercise in anti-demonization, not

deification.iii This seems fair especially given that he is clear that Lavalasemerged

from discussions amongst ordinary people in the shack settlements of Port-au-

Prince and that its continued strength after Aristides kidnapping is rooted in the

ongoing practice of similar discussions and the modes of grassroots militancy that

they have engendered.

Aristide is an interesting theorist in his own right and his own thought provides as

good a measure as any for measuring the value of mobilisation. His political thought

is rooted in liberation theology. For Aristide, who says that when we say God We

mean the source of love; we mean the source of justice,iv liberation theology is the

Christian impulse that does not separate belief from action, that exasperates

conservatives, and annoys so many people on the left who dream of realizing the

happiness of others ... without the others.v He is clear that the political movement

that twice bought him to power begins from and is sustained in the little church,

or what liberation theology in Latin America calls base communities. They are

small groups that meet in their own neighbourhoods to discuss, on their own time

and in their own language, their ideas about politics and society. The fundamental

principle in the little church is that All persons are human beings, and to be

cherished.viThe fundamental political task is to fan the fire of hope and to turn it

into a tool for the people.vii This theological politics is not unwilling to take a side.

Aristide has long been clear that the preferential option for the poor should be total,

unrepentant, intransigentviii and that If they [elites] do not wish to share

fraternally ... They must accept that it is they, not I and my colleagues, who are

advocating war.ix Hes also made it very clear that as people assume political

agency Liberation theology then gives way to a liberation of theology, which can

also include a liberation from theology.x Lavalas seems to have achieved, a form of

organisation closer to that of a series of linked congregations rather than a party

and rooted in the organisation of the poor by the poor in the languages that people

speak, in the places where they live, in the modes that they choose and in the times
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when they are free to organise. This is a politics of popular self-emancipation.

Image: Portrait of Aristide

Hallward argues that although NGO administrators and left-leaning academics are

often uneasy with what they see as a merely populist deviationxi this popular

power is necessary for any kind of meaningful challenge to domination. He has a

point. As C.L.R. James noted in his history of the Haitian Revolution It is force that

counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses []. It is what they think that

matters.xii

Lavalas took state power under extremely hostile circumstances and sought to

subordinate the state to society by demobilising the military while continuing to

mobilise society. When Aristide was first elected President in 1990 he declared that

I will not be president of the government, I am going to be president of the

opposition, of the people, even if this means confronting the very government I am

creating.xiii He held to this position and ten years later wrote that people should

not confuse democracy with the holding of elections.xiv
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Image: Voltaire Hector. Declaration of Jean Bertrand Aristide in South Africa April

9, 2005.2005

The often hysterical demonisation of Lavalas can easily be understood and slotted

into a familiar pattern of imperial attempts to contain oppositional movement that

includes the fate of Lumumba and Allende, the war against the Sandinistas and the

attempted coup against Chavez in 2002. William Robinson provides a useful lens

for this kind of analysis in the years after the Cold War. He argues that the US and

its allies moved away from supporting dictators and that this shift was rooted in arecognition that support for dictators like Botha in South Africa, Marcos in the

Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti had produced oppositional movements that

were not only demanding the removal of dictators but also the popular

democratisation of society. This recognition led to a shift in policy that saw the

creation of liberal democracies as a more effective way of containing popular

aspirations. There had been, Robinson argued, a reconceptualization of the

principal target in intervened countries, from political to civil society, as the site ofsocial control.xv Robinson quoted Bill Clintons Deputy Secretary of State Strobe

Talbot as observing that Even after our [military] exit [from Haiti] in February 1996

we will remain in charge by means of USAID and the private sector.xvi In South

Africa and the Philippines this worked well enough as the new regimes were

enthusiastic about demobilizing the movements that had brought them to power.

But in Haiti the Lavalas project was to subordinate the state to society via ongoing

popular democratisation. This was unacceptable. The result was a return to politicalsociety as a key target of political control a return to regime change.
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But there is another aspect to the demonisation of Lavalas which may be more

discomforting for some on the left. Hallward elaborates a consistent critique of

NGOs. His criticism of racist ideas about enlightened white charity, the role of

NGOs in promoting the agendas of foreign governments and his critique of the

limits of the human rights project all cover familiar ground. But his criticism

extends to the explicitly anti-neoliberal NGOs that position themselves on the left.

He is completely sceptical of their political effectiveness in opposing domination

arguing that:

Rather than organize with and among the people, rather than work in the places

and on the terms where the people themselves are strong...[they]... organize trivial

made-for-media demonstrations against things like the uncontroversial evils of

neo-liberalism or the high cost of living. Such protests are usually attended by tiny

groups of 30 or 40 people which is to say, by nobody outside the organizers tiny

circles.xviii

But he sees their support for regime change as a very significant in offering an

appearance of some kind of legitimacy for the coup. His explanation of why the left

NGOs would oppose a movement with tremendous popular support centres around

an interview with a womens rights activists who explains the NGO hostility to

Lavalas in terms of class rivalry. Foreign observers underestimate, she explains, the

massive gap between elite (wealthy, French-speaking, internationally orientated)

NGO professionals and grassroots (poor, Kreyol-speaking, neighbourhood-

orientated activists).xviii Aristide makes a similar point arguing that:

Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se

moun every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things

through for themselves. Those who dont accept this, when they look at the ngres

of Haiti and consciously or unconsciously, thats what they see they see people

who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see

people who need others to make their decisions for them. Its a colonial mentality,

in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. Its also a projection:

they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality

in the eyes of the master.xix
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There is a fundamental difference between forms of left politics that propose

alternative policy arrangements or ways of being without developing any capacity

to force the realisation of their goals and those that actively develop popular power

and alternative modes of community and are willing and able to confront

domination collectively and directly. The former can be called the expert left and

the latter can be called the popular left. The expert left tends to operate in the

languages of imperial power, to be dependent on state or donor funding, to require

certification from bourgeois institutions as a condition of entry, to be located on the

side of the razor wire where the police offer protection and to organise via

international travel and the internet.

Image: Massive Protest demanding Aristide's return in Haiti's second largest city.

December 16th 2004. Banner translates as: 'Operation Baghdad is a plot by Group

184 to put an end to Lavalas. They will Fail!'. Credit: Haiti Information Project

It is not unusual for the expert left to be entirely unaware of the existence of a

popular left even when it is a literal stones throw away. Discourse in the wrong

language, in the wrong place, in the wrong philosophical matrix and, most of all, in

the mouths of the wrong people is often just invisible to the expert left.xx This

lamentable fact is never innocent of class and can be deeply racialised.

If the popular left reaches the point of being able to stage some sort of major

interruption into bourgeois space it is not unusual for the elite left to be entirely


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unable to comprehend the rationality of that revolt. This is often predicated on an

inability to comprehend the existence of grassroots intellectuals or grassroots

political militants.xxi

When the expert left is confronted with the concrete reality of the popular left via a

direct demand for recognition and respect it is not unusual for the response to take

the form of denial, paranoia, criminalisation and recourse to conspiracy theory in

which the speech of grassroots militants can only be understood as manipulation by

a rival elite.xxii

In his essay on the Paris Commune Alain Badiou defines the left as the set of

parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones

equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement. Or, in

more contemporary terms, that they are the only ones able to provide social

movements with a political perspective.xxiii He concludes that the decision of the

communards to take public affairs into their own hands was a decision to break

with the left and that a political rupture, a rupture with the logic of representation,

is always a rupture with the left.xxiv

Image. Voltaire Hector. Burning the market "Tet Boeuf" an anti-government

demonstration May 31, 2005. 2005
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Badiou also agues that after Lenin concluded that the slaughter of the communards

necessitated the development of a centralised, disciplined project aimed at seizing

state power the party has been the mode by which the left has sought to organise

popular politics. But Badiou does not address the new form that the official left has

taken in most of the world the NGO. The party is not dead. On the contrary it

retains considerable power in places like India and in South Africa. And there are

countries, such as Haiti or Brazil, where the church is also a contender for influence

over popular struggles. But while there is a large critical literature on vanguardism

and clericalism the critical literature on NGOs generally criticises NGOs that work

for directly imperial agendas such as the NGOs that work with the World Bank,

USAID and so on while valorising the left NGOs that operate in spaces like the

World Social Forum. But in most of the world it is precisely the left NGOs that

assume the right to give direction to social movements and to monopolise the

resources that can mediate the development of international solidarity. Most of the

left texts that seek to offer a global picture of the contemporary moment are based

on the experience and thinking of these NGOs rather than the experience and

thinking of popular movements. Most attempts at international solidarity are

organised through these NGOs. Hallwards book breaks decisively with this

consensus and seeks direct engagement with popular politics.

Damming the Floodis rich with empirical detail and nuanced insight. Its author has

paid close attention to the realities of the situation confronted by grassroots

militancy in Haiti as well as to the key choices made within that militancy. One of

the clearest contributions of the book is the concrete development of Hallwards

early theoretical work on the question of solidarity. An aspect of this that is

developed with particular force can be formulated in terms of a choice confronting

anyone wanting to develop solidarity across the brutal divisions of human existence:

will that solidarity be with the expert left or the popular left?xxvi

Richard Pithouse lives in Durban where he has studiedand taught philosophy. He has been part of Abahlali baseMjondolo since themovement's inception.


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InfoPeter Hallward, Damming the Flood, London: Verso, 2007

Footnotesi Peter Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the Singular and the

Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press,, 2001, p. 330.

ii Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial, p. 335.

iii Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics

ofContainmentLondon: Verso, 2007, Damming the Flood, p.314.

iv Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.Xxxv.

v Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the HeartMonroe: Common Courage Press, 2000,

p.63.

vi Jean Bertrand Aristide Dignity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996,

p. 103.

vii Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, New York:

Orbis, 1990, p. 57.

viii Aristide, Dignity, p.49.

ix Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, p.18.

x Aristide In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, p.17.Damming the Flood,

xi Hallward Damming the Flood Haiti, p.318.

xii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.137.

xiii C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 286.

xiv William Robinson Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.

291

xv Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, p.36.

xvi Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 68.

xvii Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 311.

xviii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p. 181-182.

xix Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.184.

xx Cited in Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.342. This kind of situation is not at all

unique to Haiti. See, for instance, the comments on NGOs from The National

Convention Against Displacement & SEZs held at Bhubaneswa in India in 2007
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at http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-

declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/ In South Africa there has been an

extraordinarily hysterical, vicious and entirely dishonest set of responses from

within the NGO left to the polite rejection of their authority by the popular left. The

paranoia and ruthlessness of the NGO left in the face of autonomous popular

mobilisation has rivalled that of the state. For an early comment on this see the

statement by the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

at http://abahlali.org/node/3032

xxi Consider, for example, the inability of the letter campaigns in support of Amina

Lawal in 2003 to comprehend that there was a project to defend Lawal within

Nigeria and within Islam. See the statement against the letter campaigns

at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-18546

xxii Emilio Quadrelli developed an excellent analysis of this in an essay on the 2005

revolt in the Paris banlieaus. Quadrellis intervention simply contrasted interviews

with grassroots militants with the pronouncements of the elite left who could see

nothing but an inarticulate cry for help by the socially excluded. See Grassroots

Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics Mute, 30 May

2007http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-

and-politics

xxiii This is typical of all of the various forms of discourse by which a faction of the

academic and NGO left in South Africa have tried to render explicit and constant

rejection of their authority from popular movements as speech that does not count.

xxiv Alain Badiou The Paris Commune: A political declaration on politics

in Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p. 272.

xxv Badiou, The Paris Commune, p. 289.

xxvi This is not to suggest that NGOs and academics are necessarily separate from

and opposed to popular mobilisation. On the contrary these relations are a matter of

choice and it is in principle perfectly possible for the NGO and the academic to

work to support the popular left from within its practices, spaces, languages and

structures. But when this is achieved the resulting project remains an instance of

the popular rather than the expert left. Similarly an NGO that secures a

constituency (or the appearance thereof) for itsprojects via some form of patronage

and clientalism remains an instance of the expert left.
http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/http://abahlali.org/node/3032http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote21anchttp://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-18546http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote22anchttp://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politicshttp://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politicshttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote23anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote24anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote25anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote25symhttp://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/http://abahlali.org/node/3032http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote21anchttp://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-18546http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote22anchttp://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politicshttp://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politicshttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote23anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote24anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote25anchttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/damning-flood#sdendnote25sym

Damning the Flood

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