Solidarity versus Charity

Solidarity vs Charity
Started March 2008 finally published June1, 2009

{Ed. Notes: This is part of an on-going reflection. I make no apology if it seems to ramble, because the discussion is on going and will have a significant impact on how the Montreal Miller family manages to provide solidarity and reduce dependency of their relatives here in the Malawi village setting.}

When the idea of a study trip to Makupo village by Vanier students was proposed, I had one major hesitation. I was concerned that the impulse of the participants from the rich west is to think we just have to throw money or hand-me-down clothes at poor people and all the problems will be solved. The theme I set as a condition for the visit of the Vanier study team was “Solidarity not Charity”, knowing full well that people who have never been involved in the development business would have to grapple with the concepts. Sure enough, students and staff wanted to know what they could bring to help the villagers. We have so much – they have so little. Surely we can share excess stuff we do not need and make a big difference in people’s lives.

This needs some context: For years, Nellie and I have been sending home money to support mother and through her the family in the village. “Remittances” is the word favoured by the aid industry for such informal transfers and this African self-help is estimated to be greater than formal aid programmes. This kind of focused support usually was for school fees or emergencies of all sorts. Our obligation was that of the extended family so common throughout Africa. Is this solidarity or charity? Or is it family obligation that we are compelled to respect as part of our duties as children.

Distributive communalism is a concept some sociologists use in the field known as peasant studies. It’s a concept that acknowledges that we are all in the same boat. Those with something must share with those who have nothing, in order for everyone to have even a little something. It works fine in a traditional system and in times of plenty, but it becomes much more problematic when family systems have been eroded by the cash economy and the need to migrate elsewhere to work.

Makupo like many other family villages is populated by those who cannot get jobs elsewhere. Those, who have attained a level of education and have managed to find jobs in an economy which offers precious few, will continually be solicited for support by those who do not have access to the cash income but whose needs require cash on a regular basis. The worker with a job in the cash economy, and the person who travels out of country in search of greener pastures will appear in the context of a subsistence village to be very rich simply by virtue of having access to cash on a regular basis and as a result they are expected to help their less fortunate relatives at home in the villages.

Thus the money Nellie and I have sent home over the last 40 years has helped mother pay the school fees originally for Nellie’s siblings, and later for their children and still later to support mother when she could no longer work in her fields and needed money for food. And being a typical African mother, the distributive communalism principle meant that whatever little bits she received were trickled down to anyone else in the village with a need – and there are plenty – always. At one point stories came back that mother was starving because she had nothing to eat. In fact, she had fallen into a bad physical situation as her mental health slipped and the money she received from us (and other relatives) went straight away to others who were eating at her table. This included a fairly extensive part of the community. Using the principles of Canada, we assumed she was looking after herself, first and foremost, as we intended and that she was keeping her house up nicely, but in fact, her health was suffering and she invested nothing in herself and the house she lived in.

There is more and more recognition of the issues of remittances as both panaceas and problems. On the one hand our obligations can help select individuals get a leg up and lead to individual and in some cases group socioeconomic improvement. On the other hand, such support is a palliative that relieves local governments from their responsibility to their citizens. Otherwise discontent citizens are demobilized because their basic needs are met from afar rather than settled locally. A country that exemplifies this is the Philippines that actively exports its excess labour no matter how talented and well educated so that they can send remittances to support poorer unemployed family members. This, in place of a planned economy which prioritises the needs of families and the elderly.

Part 2: Charity – Cargo culture

The people of several Southern Pacific islands were solicited by both sides during the last world war. To curry their favour, the western allies would parachute goods into the isolated and difficult to reach communities and the villagers came to associate the arrival of the rich westerners with the arrival of packages of wealth. This continued and nothing changed in the villages because of the expectation that someone was going to drop in goods to satisfy their material needs. This dependency discourages internal reflection about the available resources, the knowledge and skills base existing in the community as well as the actions that could be taken to change the conditions of poverty.

Oscar Lewis wrote about the “Culture of Poverty” and tried to explain how the reality of poor people’s lives becomes self-perpetuating as their values and ways of life are continuously recreated and play into the conditions that are responsible for the poverty they live in. He was quite rightly criticized for a number of weaknesses in his argument, but there is no doubt some truth in the idea that the attitudes and behaviour which evolve in a poor village especially when it is riddled with defeatism and apathy can prevent people from seeing ways out of their situation.

The cargo culture takes this idea of a self-caused problem and adds to it the idea that wealth comes from far away and on high and with good luck it will fall on you rather than the next person or village. The end effect is the coming together of several forces that make charity ineffectual at best and negative at worst.

Albert Memmi says it so well in his book, Decolonization and the Decolonized, writes:
“… charity was has never solved anything. On the contrary, it simply perpetuates inequality. Waiting for salvation from a colonial power, now a former colonial power, is as illusory as it is for women to expect to attain their liberation through male goodwill. International aid is a form of disguised begging, but begging does not cure poverty; on the contrary, it simply promotes irresponsibility. Even more so since subventions manage to destroy the effects of international solidarity.”

Part 3: Solidarity
So what is this elusive solidarity. It has been a term that I have grappled with all my adult life. I gleaned a couple of definitions from a quick websearch.

“A union of interests, purposes, or sympathies among members of a group; fellowship of responsibilities and interests: ‘A downtrodden class … will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity’ (H.G. Wells).
[French solidarité, from solidaire, interdependent, from Old French, in common, from Latin solidus, solid, whole. See solid.]”
(Answers.com)

“Solidarity \Sol`i*dar"i*ty\, n. [F. solidarit['e], fr. solide.
See Solid.]
An entire union or consolidation of interests and responsibilities; fellowship; community.
Solidarity [a word which we owe to the French Communists], signifies a fellowship in gain and loss, in honor and dishonor, in victory and defeat, a being, so to speak, all in the same boat. --Trench.”
(SWOP homepage)

“Solidarity: Not to be confused with charity, solidarity is different groups of people coming together around common interests, common values and common goals. In the international context, this means that the movement here in the US for racial and gender equality and social and economic justice is inextricably linked with global movements for self-determination, control of natural resources and dignity.”
(Definition of the week: Solidarity)

The definitions are easy to dig up, but how do we articulate the coming together in solidarity of two such disparate realities – when one side is so materially rich and the other so desperately poor? Where is the equity in this relationship? How can the rich side avoid perpetuating poverty through charity?

Solidarity is a two sided coin. In his 1960s classic, The Colonizer and the Colonised, Albert Nemmi, the Tunisian born Jewish-French intellectual examines the two sides of the colonial relationship and the impediments to bridging the gap created by the structures of colonialism and imposed by military occupation. An analogous comparison would be between the ordinary people of a rich country like Canada and the ordinary rural people like the area around Makupo trying to build solidarity and bridge the structures of the world economy and politics that otherwise divide them.

Nemmi looked deep into the relationship between the French colonizers and the Algerian people in colonial times and examined how even progressive people including communists full of the principles of international solidarity faced impediments to full solidarity as long as they came from the ruling side. In the case of solidarity with the rural peasants of a place like Malawi these impediments are mostly structural. First is the world economic system underpinning and largely responsible for the dire poverty of huge numbers of peoples and nations. Second is the micro reality of life in poor circumstances.

There is the backdrop of a world system of trade and politics which has completely marginalised the African peasant as much as the workers, unemployed and marginalised peoples of the rich countries. Eric Lamoureux of the Montreal Social Justice Committee does a masterful presentation of the roots of global inequity and there are dozens of groups and websites dedicated to laying out this reality such as Make Poverty History. This powerful system affects us all and benefits some and disadvantages others but always remains to the advantage of the rich elites.

The system is based on divide and rule because it is much easier to exploit people who do not work collectively to protect their interests. As a veteran unionist, I can attest to how hard it can be to bring people to work together even when it is for their own obvious self-interest. It is even more difficult when it is for some less immediate and clearly understood cause that requires that they put out for no apparent return or is as abstract as solidarity with a downtrodden person in a far away place.

On the other hand, the daily micro-reality of life in a poor community is one of knowing you have almost no future; that to be born a poor African girl means you will most likely die as a poor African woman. It entails a fatalism brought on by no apparent end to the list of ills and no apparent way to solve the problem or change the dynamic. There is a total lack of control over one’s life. Poverty, poor health and a lack of education block any vision of a way out.

Solidarity is not really possible simply by bringing people from a rich western country. The contact between the abjectly poor and someone from a place which is rich enough to have options and choices is by definition not based on equity.

There may be a great deal of nuance to explore in such sweeping statements. One can think of the liberation movements and the freedom struggles of Latin America where the education and commitment of the fighters meant that they understood the nature of their oppression and their contact with solidarity groups and support was based on an equity that was not influenced by material circumstance. Some union to union solidarity can be very much like this.

However, that dynamic falls apart the instant a westerner walks into a poor Malawian village. There is no understanding on the one side of the root causes of their oppression and poverty that one finds in liberation movements and unions. The visitor arriving with charitable impulses fulfills Nemmi’s prediction of simply reinforcing the begging complex. The visitors coming with a commitment to solidarity are also frustrated. They are continually solicited by both the poorest beggars and street urchins as well as by the stylish and well dressed.

The elites of Malawi have little time for solidarity since their place in the system is based firmly on their total implication in the world system. The tobacco they sell, and the land they develop is all based on the exploitation of the cheap labour of their poorer fellow citizens. Most of them do not feel any solidarity with the poor and downtrodden living just outside the walls of their gated communities. They can often be heard to justify their privilege and wealth by reference to the inherent laziness or ignorance of villagers.

Just like Canada, any organizing to redistribute wealth, demand equity or even to gain access to political power is criminalized. Cooperatives, unions, peasant movements, land redistribution, etc… are actively discouraged often by following the most democratic of procedures through acts of parliament and the rule of law. This same law allows people to go hungry and large landowners to hold tenants as semi-feudal serfs while the elites argue over clauses of the constitution. In parliament, there has been almost no discussion and even less action over the situation of what Malawians know as the thangata system of tenancy. For the elites, working class solidarity is a threat to their positions of wealth.

In addition, the Malawian elites are very sensitive about being looked down upon or patronised. They know the circumstances of poverty facing the country and know that they are as talented as anyone in the rich world, but are saddled with the frustration of how the world structures prevent them from materially advancing. They have seen missionaries and charitable types come and go and these days we see backpackers up and down the lakeshore enjoying the climate and cheap cost of living without contributing much to the economy. The Malawian is always here while the foreigners come and go so there is not much point in investing time and energy in a relationship.

So how can Canadians committed to solidarity deal with this relationship? The answer is at home in Canada or whatever western country. Solidarity trips, exposure tours, ethical tourism are useful to document the systemic effects of structural imperialism. Even here there is a danger that the relationship of wealth to poverty can pervert what should be based on equity. So the real answer is to attack the root causes of structural poverty inherent in the world economic system and its promoters and institutions.

There are many ways to do this and this can include a wide variety of strategies. There are the ultras in the anarchist and radical left who doggedly attach themselves to the cause of the downtrodden at home often with deleterious impact. They often appear to be quite peripheral as they marginalize themselves by offending the very classes and groups they purport to represent.

Then there are the activists who challenge the system at every turn and who use every leverage to challenge injustice and break down institutional racism, poverty and discrimination in every form. Dexter X is a passive activist who teaches others how to stand up to the system and take action. His goal is to involve as many people as possible in his actions.

Life style change is also important. People must refute consumer culture and focus on change in their daily lives – change that is aimed at frustrating the structures that impose the conditions of marginalisation on us all. Self-education and action on the structures causing global poverty in the rich countries are essential.