Protesting against a capitalist reformer

[Rooster]

So, there's this guy who won the nobel peace price and he's doing a talk at some university. We're planning on doing a poster campaign and I'm having a hard time coming up with stuff. I was going to do a picture of a dead horse with the words "Reforming capitalism is like reforming a dead horse".

Anyway, here's the guy's bio from his site:


Muhammad Yunus’s vision is the total eradication of poverty from the world. 'Grameen', he claims, 'is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long'. This work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that 'this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity'.
Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why Muhammad Yunus believes that the right to credit should be recognized as a fundamental human right. It is this struggle and the unique and extraordinary methods he invented to combat human despair that Muhammad Yunus recounts here with humility and conviction. It is also the view of a man familiar with both Eastern and Western cultures — on the failures and potential for good of industrial countries. It is an appeal for action: we must concentrate on promoting the will to survive and the courage to build in the first and most essential element of the economic cycle — Man.

http://www.muhammadyunus.org

Can you fucking believe he won a nobel peace prize? How can he win one when I can't?!

[l'Enfermé]

Always like the opening paragraph of Lenin's Marxism and Reformism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/12b.htm). Last sentence of the first paragraph
"Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital."

[TheGodlessUtopian]

He is a class collaborationist... so of course he won the Nobel prize.I mean, Obama won the peace prize and the only thing he did was bomb the fuck out of other nations.

For your campaign I would take excerpts from his bio and ass in slogans... such as...

'this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity'. The only business solution to poverty is genocide.

And so forth. Whatever he says which you think people will latch onto you simply counter with a sharp retort.

[Rooster]

I'm forming some stuff based off his bio about credit and connecting it with the current crisis. I don't want to make it too marxist heavy, to be honest. I'm going to get something catchy and then provide a couple of links at the bottom. Maybe revleft? :laugh: Fuck sake, I still can't get over that he said that the way to reduce poverty is to provide credit, as a human right no less! It's just such a fucking stupid thing to say, even from a bourgeois economist point of view.

[NewLeft]

OH HIM. yes, I'm trying to refute microcredit, I'll be back with info.

[Rooster]

If there are any comrades in the west of scotland that will be able to help me out then please drop me a PM. There's two entrances to the campus and I can only cover one of them.

[Sam_b]

I take it this is at UWS right? If it was in Glasgow i'd try to help but mega busy with our own uni campaign right now.

[MarxSchmarx]

This the microfinance guy?

First, you guys need to educate yourselves, particularly from a leftist perspective, on how this movement failed spectacularly. A useful place to start is:

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/microfinance_misses_its_mark

I can't come up with catchy slogans now but I think if you guys apprecaite the limitations and sit around for about a day you'd be able to make something up.

More importantly, link up with groups particularly in south asia who have video interviews of people who were screwed by microfinance. Produce a simple pamphlet that outlines maybe 5 reasons why microfinance fails that you can give to passerbys. On the pamphlet have a QR code to your website, where you feature video interviews by people who microfinance failed.

Perhaps one tactic might be to suggest that western governments want to put their own citizens on microfinance routines as a way to reduce their burden of providing for the welfare of their people. I believe there are already examples of this in Slovakia. As you are in the UK, I suspect that message can go quite far. Maybe sell baskets to demonstrate the absurdity of a microfinance based tuition scheme?