Reflections on writing for/about charity, day 26

"She would deny the workers their cappuccino!" Such was the reaction to Gayatri Spivak as she pointed out the connection between western consumer culture and 'third world' production. How can one escape this trap? By purchasing coffee off the Zapatistas? Does that not just slip into a form of enlightened do-goodery which sets itself apart from regular charity by being somehow less ignorant of the situation, finding another gap in the market of conscientious western liberals? Or does it actively participate in an alternative relation which evades exploitation? Does it express solidarity? 

'Solidarity', a keyword form the dissenter's dictionary, seems to be opposed to the word 'support', which is more at home in the handbook of Aid. The former suggests equivalence, shared visions and the dismantling of hierarchies; the latter dependency, distance, a token or a gesture. Solidarity evokes The Internationale, support evokes LiveAid. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says solidarity is "the recognition of other people's misery and suffering as one's own responsibility, and the alleviation and eventually the removal of misery as one's own task." Costas Douzinas says this implies that human rights are based on the always already existing pain and suffering of the Other. Our obligation is thus to make this suffering our own. 'Support' on the other hand seems to suggest the managing of such misery, but not a path out of it. This path out of it would involve the two parties finding common direction, making their hierarchal relationship obsolete, to envisage a globalised world in which economics no longer determines global relations of production. Do we cappuccino drinkers 'support' those who produce coffee when we give to charity or buy Fair Trade, or are we 'in solidarity' with them? Might solidarity risk denying ourselves our cappuccinos? Surely, to make suffering our own sounds inadvisable to he who prefers not to suffer, and risking the comforts of western culture in a gesture of solidarity to those who have been producing the things we consume sounds equally dangerous. Maybe this is why we prefer to support them.

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