10 July 1986 Marxism Today

PEOPLE AIDA new politics sweeps the land

Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques

First Band Aid. Then came Live Aid. Now we've had Sport Aid. Geldofand co have captured the imagination of the nation. A newpolitical

agenda has been forged.

Omar Khalifi, theSudanese athlete, was the

central figure in SportAid.

POLITICS IS certainly unpredictable.Who would ever have thought of BobGeldof - a Boomtown Rat who had seenbetter days - as one of the key politicalactors of Thatcherite Britain. More to thepoint, who would have guessed, in 1979,or even perhaps 1983, that the plight of theThird World would become one of thegreat popular movements of our time?

The triumph of Thatcherism repre-sented the triumph of an ideology ofselfishness and scapegoats. National fai-lure was believed to be the result ofindividual profligacy. The road to salva-tion lay through people pulling themselvesup by their bootstraps. The only accept-able motive for action was self-interest.What the unemployed needed was nothandouts but initiative. In this view of theworld, there was little sympathy for thecasualties of the crisis at home, and noconcern at all for less fortunate nations.People - and countries - were expected toput their own houses in order.

For some months now a sort of runningbattle has been going on between this creedof selfishness and the attempt to puttogether a broad, alternative vision,around the notion of a 'caring society'.Some of the recent turning-points in thefortunes of Thatcherism are related to thisstruggle to polarise the field of socialideologies. Now, with the rise of theBandAid/LiveAid/SportAid phenom-enon, the ideology of selfishness- and thusone of the main ideological underpinningsof Thatcherism - has been dealt a further,severe blow.

The erosion of Thatcherism's influenceThatcherism arose partly as a way ofthinking about recession. Its account ofrecession is, however, one-sided. Reces-sion is not only about tightening belts. It isalso about structural change and who is to

carry the costs. It is about change and itsconsequences: within industry, as betweendeclining and emergent technologies andcommunities of skill; within countries, asbetween the rise of some regions and thedecline of others; and, internationally, interms of the re-ordering of relationshipswithin and between the so-called 'threeworlds'. It is precisely these structural

the triumph of Thatcherismrepresented the triumph of an

ideology of selfishness andscapegoats

aspects of recession which have assumedincreasing political importance.

The first, structural industrial change,is a growing area of political conflict, ofwhich the miners' strike, Wapping and theshift of the tide against Thatcherism onunemployment and the unemployed are allmanifestations. The most obvious express-ion of the second is the growing divisionbetween the declining north and the moreprosperous south. So far as the third strandis concerned, though the reassertion of USpower under Reagan has stimulated aflowering of the peace movement, thequestions of Third World poverty, under-development and the vicious circle of debthave stubbornly refused to assume a popu-lar political character. However, thegroundswell of political resistance in SouthAfrica coupled with the rise of the 'faminemovement' has begun to turn the tide here,too.

Thatcherism's account of recession -and, with it, a certain Thatcherite vision ofthe world order and Britain's role in it - hastaken a drubbing. Selfishness and greedhave been, if not eclipsed, then to some

July 1986 Marxism Today 11

extent displaced by altruism and consci-ence.

BandAid/LiveAid/SpbrtAid encapsu-lates this shift more dramatically thananything else. One effect of a Thatcherite-dominated recession was to reinforce anarrow nationalism, helping to breed areactionary mood of 'Little Englandism'and to nourish the roots of popular racism.A lifting of the popular horizons beyondour own shores, beyond even the bound-aries of Europe, to Africa thus represents acrucial turning point in the erosion ofThatcherite hegemony.

Reaching the unreachedThe political significance and power of the'famine movement' was enhanced ratherthan weakened by its origin and au-thorship. It came from outside the Left,however widely you define it. Its mobilis-ing reach was quite different even fromCND's. SportAid, while resemblingCND's age profile, attracted a youth con-stituency which, for the great part, hadnever previously been on any kind ofdemonstration. It reached the previouslyunreached. The famine movement'scapacity to mobilise new forces has thushelped to shift the political centre ofgravity. In 1979, a majority of youngvoters identified with Thatcherism, saw itas a vision for the future. In 1986, there is anew mood amongst contemporary youth.A sea-change has taken place.

This capacity to mobilise new consti-tuencies is bound up with its character as amovement, the way it has evolved and,above all, its deep roots in contemporarypopular culture, especially the culture ofrock music.

Geldof's former career as a rock star wasin no way coincidental to the movement'ssuccess - his rock connections were hispolitical credentials (a guarantee to thefans that, at least from him, they wereunlikely to hear a replay of the old-stylelyrics of the professional politicians). Thefamine movement only really took off withthe coming-together of some of the biggestof the contemporary British pop stars forthe BandAid single, 'Do They Know It'sChristmas?'. Since every fan knows howmuch it costs a star to give a free perform-ance, this gesture helped to put 'caring forothers' on the map as a value that belongedto the world of rock culture.

LiveAidThis was followed in July of last year withLiveAid, the one-day, open-air pop extra-vaganza in London and Philadelphia with

Bob Geldof has become the voice of a new mood amongst theyoung.

global television coverage. The garneringof such a broad cross-section of pop starsfor such a universal cause had enormouspulling power. The rock music connectiongave the cause a national - indeed interna-tional - stage which it otherwise could notpossibly have enjoyed. The combination ofculture and politics, altruism and fun, wasirresistible. The link between rock cultureand politics is not, of course, new - it was apowerful element in the politics of the1960s, and Rock against Racism, theGLC's cultural politics and Red Wedge aremore recent examples from the Left. Butthe sheer scale and ambition of LiveAidwas unprecedented. Never before had'pop politics' created and shaped a wholesocial movement in this way.

No other cultural form could have play-ed the political role that rock did in theBandAid/LiveAid phenomenon. Its ubi-quitous presence in the lives of youngpeople gives it an unparalleled mobilisingpower. When politics makes contact withthis culture, it finds itself in touch with thecultural language which, for the majorityof young people today (and for manynot-so-young people, too), most authenti-

cally expresses how they experience theworld. The rise of Geldof as the repre-sentative figure of the movement is a goodillustration of this point. It's not just thathe is a very talented politician: he becameits cultural representative. He symbolisedthe fusion of two worlds usually keptwell-segregated.

Nothing more graphically illustratesthis than Geldof's visit to the Europeanparliament and his meeting with leadingEEC figures. His dress and appearancewas of the street not the committee room.His language was direct and uncompli-cated. His demand was uncompromising.He was the representative of somethingnew, a political movement born of a youthculture. This has enabled him to polarisethe politics of aid in a new way: directdemocracy versus bureaucracy. Thenearest parallel to this mobilisation was the60s, when the fact that youth stood somassively on the side of radicalism wasdue, above all, to a rare and powerfulcrossover between politics and culture.

Run the world - or across your roomSportAid, like LiveAid, also built on apopular cultural form. Unlike LiveAid,however, SportAid used a form whichplaced a premium, not on spectatorshipbut on participation - that is, in the doing(ie, running) as well as the giving. 'Run theWorld' was an appeal to everyone, ifsomewhat Utopian. The growing popular-ity in recent years of jogging, fun runs, 10km races, half-marathons, marathons and

a lifting of the popularhorizons beyond our own

shores. . . thus represents acrucial turning point in the

erosion of Thatcheritehegemony

what have you offered an ideal participa-tory form. It drew on one of the mostprogressive sporting and cultural tradi-tions of the last few years, and through it,also on a growing ecological-environ-mental consciousness connected to the'politics of health'.

The London marathon, for instance, isan event of the people: anyone can run (notonly the 'professionals'). It goes rightthrough the city. Communities as well asgroups of friends and individual runners ofall kinds and ages turn out for the occasion(allowing for a variety of forms of parti-

July 1986 Marxism Today 13

cipation not a feature of demonstrations,the Left's preferred mass cultural form).The emphasis in SportAid, moreover, wasno longer on a single national event, butrather on doing it where you are: 'let ahundred runs run' as it were (even if it wasonly across your own living room).

Another key feature of the BandAid/LiveAid/SportAid phenomenon has beenits capacity to transcend national frontiers.LiveAid was staged on both sides of theAtlantic: the stars belong to a highlyinternationalised market and audience: theconcerts were beamed by satellite to manycountries. By using the global networks ofrock music and television, the movementwas able to be, at once, both national andinternational. For a movement where thekey issue is about the relationship betweenthe First and the Third Worlds, this wasnot only appropriate but added significant-ly to the power of the appeal.

SportAid built on this internationaldimension in a number of different ways.It was sponsored by SportAid and Unicef.It was timed to have maximum impact onthe UN Assembly debate on Africa, whichimmediately followed it. It was precededby a week of activities across the globe, inthe West, in the East and in Africa itself.The main focus of the event was theSudanese runner, Omar Khalifi. The 10km run itself was staged at the same time inover 270 cities in 78 countries. Brisbane,Budapest, Leningrad, Paris, London,

the famine movement'scapacity to mobilise new

forces has helped to shift thepolitical centre of gravity

Ougadougou, New York, Nairobi, Romeand many more. And, like LiveAid, it wastelevised across the world. Unlike LiveAid however, which at the end of the daywas primarily focussed on London andPhiladelphia, SportAid engaged in a moredirect and active manner with the ThirdWorld, and Africa in particular. Africa wasnot just an object of a movement in thedeveloped world, it was also, at last, one ofthe subjects.

Shifting the political agendaSo what has the BandAid/LiveAid/SportAid movement achieved? Its greatestsuccess has been to change the nationaland, to a rather lesser extent, the interna-tional political agenda. The plight of theThird World has never been a national

political priority. Nothing has symbolisedthis more clearly than the low prioritywhich has always been accorded to ex-penditure on aid, the patronising andforked-tongue way in which it is usuallydiscussed. Britain's aid contribution - as aproportion of national income - has alwaysbeen miserable, especially when her pastcontribution to undeveloping the underde-veloped world is borne in mind. And whenthe era of paring down public expenditurearrived, aid was high on the list of sacrifi-cial lambs. Under Thatcher it has beenruthlessly pruned back. Now, for the firsttime, expenditure on aid is a big politicalissue.

Of course, it isn't simply a question ofaid. 'Aid', in fact, is a very inadequate wayof thinking about the relationship betweenthe developed and the under-developedworlds or the causes of world poverty andfamine. Some genuine reservations havebeen expressed about the limitations of thekind of 'famine consciousness' which hasdeveloped in the wake of LiveAid/SportAid. It certainly cannot yet be saidthat the majority of people in Britain, oreven the majority of the participants in'Run The World' have properly graspedthe dynamic relationship between 'us' and'them' across the North/South divide.

The largest chunk of 'aid' imaginable inany one year will not create the conditionsin which Africa can feed itself if worldcommodity prices, the terms of trade,interest rates and Third World indebted-ness to the international banking systemremain unchanged. No act of charity canheal the breach within poor nations whenthe superpowers are exploiting those divi-sions in the attempt to recruit them intotheir side in the cold war which is beingconducted on a worldwide scale.

However, the record of the faminemovement on this aspect is not as inadequ-ate as it is sometimes depicted and ismanifestly improving. In highlighting thecauses of African poverty, Geldof and cohave drawn attention to the underlyingeconomic relationships between the FirstWorld and the Third World, questioningnot only the levels but also the forms of aid,singling out the squeeze in which theThird World is caught by the debt prob-lem, and ridiculing the absurdity of grainand butter mountains in Europe andfamine in Africa.

It has been argued that, although thefamine movement is beginning to high-light these deeper aspects of the problem,it has, like the older aid and emergencyagencies, portrayed Africa simply as vic-

tim linked to the charity of the West inwhat is essentially a paternalistic rela-tionship. Again, there is something in this:it could hardly be otherwise, given the wayour imperial history has shaped our politic-al and cultural traditions. But the ThirdWorld as victim no longer seems thedominant image. SportAid did indeed talk

the combination of cultureand politics, altruism and fun,

was irresistible

about the responsibilities of the FirstWorld to the Third World, and Africa was,as we have seen, a participant. Aid ismoving from the realm of charity to theworld of politics. In generating a popularmovement around this, it has given inter-nationalism a new content.

It's worth adding too that, although theUN debate yielded little tangible result,international neo-liberalism was exposedto quite new pressures. Not only has theThatcherite 'put your own house in order'attitude towards the African crisis beenshaken dramatically, but it has been placedon the defensive,-internationally. Shultz'slecture to Africa on privatisation and moreinitiative by private enterprise and less bythe state was revealed for the hollow,cynical sham it certainly was, an excuse todo little or nothing.

Charity and politicsAnother achievement of the SportAidmovement is the way it has combinedcharity with politics. Again, this has been acontroversial aspect of SportAid on theLeft. The traditional Left has long re-garded charity as a sop, which eases theconscience but does not tackle the problemat the root, and which moreover makessuch matters appear to be the responsibil-ity of private individuals rather than of thestate. Of course, it is true that faminecannot be permanently averted in Africaby charity alone.

But this partly misses the point. ForThird World poverty is the responsibilityof people and governments. Politically, thestate is not likely to do much unless thepeople are pushing it. But for the people tomount an attack on the current set ofnational priorities and to engage in theenormous task of mobilising public opin-ion so as to create a new political agenda,they must find ways of identifying withand committing themselves to the cause insome public and socially validated way.

14 July 1986 Marxism Today

Personal giving is one important way ofrelating to an issue, though it may not beenough to constitute a whole politics. Butit implies commitment. We must notunderestimate the role of movements,which have their base within civil society,in creating a current or movement ofopinion which has a shift in state policy asone of its ultimate objectives.

SportAid was essentially a civil societymovement, arising outside the state andformal politics. That was a major part of itsattraction. It was therefore participatory inits whole thrust - getting ordinary peopleto do something, to give directly, them-selves. But, in addition to raising a greatdeal of money, it also placed new and quitedramatic pressures on the government totake the aid question seriously and to act.Far from being simply a sop, charity in thiscontext has become a powerful politicalweapon. It seems unlikely that a broad-based, anti-Thatcherite popular politicscan be built without politicising the charit-able impulse.

In this context, it is worth noting thestory of the government's attitude towardsGeldof and the famine movement. At thetime of LiveAid, the government simplyignored it. But such has been the success ofthe famine movement, and the changedpopular mood, that when it came toSportAid, the Tories were no longer ableto remain so aloof. Now, grudgingly, aknighthood has been found. Meanwhile,the hectic search is on for a mega-star of thepop world more politically acceptable,more amenable to The Leader's whim -and preferably, no doubt, English ratherthan Irish. Richard Branson of the Virginrecord and travel empire and 'LitterAid',is the latest candidate for this role.

Abstentee LeftThis brings us, finally, to the attitude ofthe Left. Sadly, the Left's attitude has

been, at best, praise from the sidelines;more usually, grudging support, with agood supply of sectarian sniping. By andlarge the organised Left has been almosttotally absent from the whole movementand process. The Left has sought nopopular points of entry into it. To cite justtwo examples of what might have been.Following LiveAid, there was a series ofinitiatives such as FashionAid, FoodAidand ArtAid. But no UnionAid. A popularinitiative from the unions last year withLiveAid el al could have raised large sumsof money from within the unions, in-creased awareness amongst union mem-bers about Third World issues, created

the organised Left has beenalmost totally absent from the

whole movement

new links between popular cultural figuresand the unions, enhanced their publicimage, and enabled new forms of mobilisa-tion and creativity within the unions them-selves. And when it comes to SportAid,everybody seemed to be falling over them-selves to join it except the labour move-ment. True, Denis Healey was seen on thetv screens in his 'I Ran the World' teeshirt,limbering up on the House of Commonsgrass with other MPs. But where was theLabour party NEC or the TUC generalcouncil?

This absence is not accidental. Thecontinuing suspicion about 'charity' andabout youth culture amongst sections ofthe Left is no doubt one reason. Another isreservations about the way Africa is por-trayed. But the most important reason issurely a profound cultural sectarianismwhich still pervades the Left. The realreason, one suspects, why there has beenno relationship with BandAid/LiveAid/SportAid is because the initiative came

from outside the Left. It was not 'ours'. If ithad been Nicaragua, Chile or South Afri-ca, it would not doubt have been different.But here was an initiative which came fromquite new quarters and on an issue onwhich the Left has traditionally had pre-cious little to say beyond slogans.

Yet the capacity of the Left to act as anational force cannot only be about its owncreations, its own capacity to initiate. Itmust also be about its ability to relatepositively to others, and the initiatives ofother forces. That is what hegemony isabout. Otherwise our model of society isthat the only things worth getting involvedin are our own things; others are notcapable of creating movements and cur-rents which deserve our support, enthu-siasm and intervention. This is a verypatronising view of the world.

By absenting itself from a popular move-ment like SportAid, the Left thereby alsolargely deprived itself of a voice in thedirection of that movement and of thedebate which has inevitably followed, andthus once again isolated itself from themainstream of national-popular life which,on this occasion, seems - like the greatswarm of anonymous runners - to havepassed us by somewhere along the way.

This is inexcusable for another reason.The famine movement has asserted at apopular level the need for a new rela-tionship between Britain and the ThirdWorld. The peace movement of the 80s hasbeen more internationalist and less paroc-hial than that of the 60s. Taken togetherwith the reassertion of a more traditionalstrength of the Left - solidarity move-ments with Third World struggles, nowdramatically expressed in the context ofSouth Africa - we can now detect theemergence of something new, a number ofparallel popular movements all of whichare about a different post-imperial role forBritain. •