Tripping up Trumpism through a global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign

Making the process as democratic as possible is vital. In 2006, 170 Palestinian civil society groups initiated BDS, insisting on three unifying demands: the retraction of illegal Israeli settlements (a demand won in the Gaza Strip) and the end of the West Bank Occupation and Gaza siege; cessation of racially-discriminatory policies towards the million and a half Palestinians living within Israel; and a recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to residences dating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing when the Israeli state was established. One result has been an attempt by Zionists – including in powerful US state agencies – to stigmatize those who advocate BDS (e.g. as ‘anti-Semitic’), an indication of how great a threat BDS may become to an unjust order known by its critics as ‘Israeli apartheid.’  Against this, says BDS-Israel co-founder Omar Barghouti, “Boycott remains the most morally sound, non-violent form of struggle that can rid the oppressor of his oppression, thereby allowing true coexistence, equality, justice and sustainable peace to prevail. South Africa attests to the potency and potential of this type of civil resistance.” In South Africa, the crime against humanity known as apartheid was a form of fascism in which state power, corporate profitability and the racist, patriarchal and ecologically destructive cultural elite within white society exercised power, refusing the masses’ demands for “one person, one vote in a unitary state.” BDS was one part of the resistance. According to Ronnie Kasrils – a leader of the underground movement and from 2004-08 the South African Minister of Intelligence – “BDS made apartheid’s beneficiaries feel the pinch in their pocket and their polecat status whether in the diplomatic arena, on the sporting fields, at academic or business conventions, in the world of theatre and the arts, in the area of commerce and trade and so on. Arms sanctions weakened the efficiency of the SA Defence Force; disinvestment by trade unions and churches affected the economy as did the termination of banking ties by the likes of Chase Manhattan and Barclays banks; boycott of products from fruit to wine saw a downturn in trade; the disruption of sports events was a huge psychological blow; dockworkers refusing to handle ship’s cargoes disrupted trade links.” Internally, protests in townships and trade unions catalyzed global support for intensified financial sanctions in 1985. They peaked when at the Durban City Hall on August 15 that year, apartheid boss PW Botha addressed his National Party and an internationally televised audience of 200 million with his belligerent “Rubicon Speech.” He refused to budget on demands to end apartheid. Realizing the Trumpian character of Botha, Pretoria’s frightened international creditors – subject to intense activist pressure – began calling in loans early. Facing a run on the SA Reserve Bank’s hard currency, Botha defaulted on $13 billion of debt payments coming due, shut the stock market and imposed exchange controls. Within days, leading English-speaking businessmen Gavin Relly, Zac de Beer and Tony Bloom began dismantling their decades-old de facto alliance with the Pretoria regime, met African National Congress (ANC) leaders in Lusaka, and helped engineer a transition that would free South Africa of racial (albeit not class) apartheid less than nine years later. Botha was gone by 1989 but civil society ratcheted up anti-apartheid BDS even when his successor FW De Klerk offered reforms in February 1990, such as freeing Nelson Mandela and unbanning political parties. Proposed international bank loans to Pretoria for ostensibly ‘developmental’ purposes were rejected by activists, and threats were made: a future ANC government would default. It was only by fusing bottom-up pressure with top-down international delegitimization of white rule that the final barriers were cleared for the first free vote, in April 1994. South Africa sanctions worked in part because they were initially conceptualized by Albert Luthuli in 1959: “The economic boycott of South Africa will entail undoubted hardship for Africans. We do not doubt that. But if it is a method which shortens the day of bloodshed, the suffering to us will be a price we are willing to pay.” They developed through alliances of South African leaders like Luthuli and Mandela, with British supporters and US civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King. By 1962, the first of many UN resolutions called for sanctions against apartheid.  The ANC-influenced Congress of South African Trade Unions endorsed BDS as “an essential and effective form of pressure” even though in the short term it would cost them jobs. The main opposition to BDS from black South Africans was from Bantustan collaborators, who promoted their own much narrower reform strategy for multinational corporations active in South Africa (the “Sullivan Principles” from which even Leon Sulllivan retreated in 1987 due to Botha’s intransigence).  The main point to reflect on is the strategic wedge driven between white (‘english-speaking’) Johannesburg capitalists and racist (‘Afrikaner’) Pretoria regime. As internal protest surged, it was the 1985 foreign debt crisis caused in part by BDS which broke the capital-state alliance and compelled South Africa’s nine-year transition to democracy. With Trumpism such a logical target of BDS-USA, international solidarity to weaken that power requires a boycott of both high-profile state functionaries and key corporations in order to attack the legitimacy of profits made within a neo-fascist, climate-denialist USA. As Public Citizen’s Rob Weissman warns, the US faces “a government literally of the Exxons, by the Goldman Sachses and for the Kochs.” Several dozen leading US activist groups have offered much-needed mutual solidarity as ‘United Resistance,’ which perhaps will soon add an international component to its armory. Trump and his cronies are rapidly taking power in Washington, and in doing so they are currently battling Washington’s ‘Deep State’ over his pro-Russian perspective, as well as all Democratic elites and many from the Republican Party. He or at least the Koch/Cheney faction of Trumpism will likely win. At that point, when their threats to the climate and US oppressed people’s human rights become undeniable, can they then be challenged by the US and world progressive movements?  Certainly one way to test how powerful Trumpism may become, is to tackle it where its Achilles Heel stands out most – climate change – and with a well-tested strategy and tactics: BDS USA. Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at Wits University in Johannesburg. A version of this article first appeared at The Conversation.