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Solidarity, Co-option and Assimilation: The necessity, promises and pitfalls of global linkages for South African movements by Richard Pithouse

for the person who is in the thick of the fight it is an urgent matter to decide on the means and tactics to employ: that is to say, how to conduct and organize the movement. If this coherence is not present there is only a blind voluntarism, with the terrible reactionary risk it entails.

- Frantz Fanon1

It is through the fictions and stories we tell ourselves and others that we live the life, hide from it, harmonise it, canalise it, have a relationship with it, shape it, accept it, are broken by it, redeem it, or flow with the life.

- Ben Okri2 INTRODUCTION Part 1: Permanent critique It is both a significant and a fragile achievement for there to be an established praxis of overt class and popular nationalist rebellion, and an emerging praxis of overt gender critique, so soon after the great national drama of the fall of apartheid. The courage and creativity that has generated, nurtured and protected these resistances needs to be celebrated and defended. But struggles don’t unfold like wild flowers in a rosy dawn. As Chris Harman warns:

Every successful protest goes through two phases. The first is when it bursts upon the world, taking its opponents by surprise and bringing joy to those who agree with its aims....it seems that the sheer momentum of the movement is bound to carry it forward from strength to strength. This draws its adherents together, and leads them to play down old differences of opinion and old arguments on tactics. But those against whom the protests are directed do not simply give up....At this point, arguments over tactics necessarily arise within the movement, even among people who have sworn to forget old disputes in the interests of consensus.3

Many of the movements in South Africa that seek to resist the commodification of the basic means to life, and/or to complete the nationalist project from below with regard to land ownership, appear to be at or near this point. But this does not mean that critique of critique should be delayed until some future moment when movements are stronger. This

1 Cited in revised translation in Ato Sekyi-Otu Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 108. 2 Ben Okri A Way of Being Free (Phoenix: London, 1998), 114. 3Cited in Peter Alexander, ‘Globalisation and Discontent: Project and Discourse’ African Sociological Review 2001 Vol. 5. No.1, p.66.

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would not only be a mistake in that it would reproduce the authoritarianism of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC). Without critique movements could run into dead ends. Indeed, while some South African movements are growing and developing in encouraging ways it is clearly not the case that there is anything inevitable about these trajectories. On the contrary others are in varying degrees of contraction and one key movement, which for some time was a national4 and occasionally an international inspiration, the Concerned Citizen’s Forum in Durban5, has already withered away.6 Its successor project, the eThekweni Social Forum, has ebbed and flowed but never jolled or raged. For long periods resistances in Durban have had no meaningful ability to network or to articulate themselves collectively outside of sporadic NGO and university driven projects. Across the country many movements sometimes appear ill-equipped to confront the enormous challenges of organising and disorganising on the terrain of worsening social crisis and growing state repression, co-option and willingness to extinguish rebellion with carefully calibrated and focussed strategic concessions. And there are the often consequent problems of internal sectarianism and authoritarianism that can, especially when mixed with the anti-intellectual fetish of spontaneity, result in what Fanon calls “a certain brutality of thought”7. Furthermore as South African movements have increasingly forged connections with richer Northern movements (sometimes mediated through South African NGOs) intense and damaging conflicts have arisen over resources. A range of other problems are exacerbated by the new access to money and status. These include clear failures to address racism8 and sexism9 with sufficient seriousness or to

4 See naidoo & veriava re--membering movements – the trade union movement and new social movements in neo-liberal south africa, 2004, pp. 30-33. http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 5 For an account of the rise of the Concerned Citizen’s Forum see the classic text in the literature on radical post-apartheid activism Ashwin Desai’s We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Monthly Review Press: New York, 2002) Peter Dwyer’s important work on the CCF, The Contentious Politics of the Concerned Citizens’ Forum, will soon be available in the Centre for Civil Society’s forthcoming book on social movements. Peter@aidc.org.za 6 A couple of the community organisations once associated with the CCF still use the CCF name when seeking to make statements about issues beyond their neighbourhoods or seeking to evoke wider solidarities but the CCF does not currently exist as a social movement. However the sparks in its ashes still glow and may flare. 7 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968) p.147. For insightful discussions of this see Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience and Nigel Gibson’s ‘The Pitfalls of South Africa’s “Liberation”’ New Political Science Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001, http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 8 For an argument in this regard see Andile Mngxitama’s unpublished article Race and Resistance in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Towards a Progressive Race Narrative. andile@nlc.co.za However this article does not consider black anti-black racisms which are, unsurprisingly, an insufficiently theorised problem in South Africa. 9 For an argument in this regard see Rebecca Pointer’s unpublished article Questioning the Representation of South Africa’s New Social Movements: A Case Study of Mandela Park. reb@wfeet.co.za However this article does not make sufficient sense of the ongoing support given to the male de facto leadership in Mandela Park by a largely female movement base. See also naidoo & veriava pp. 45 -47. The development of a multi-movement Women’s Activist Forum in Cape Town stands as a very encouraging development. For further information on this contact Shereen Essof at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town. sessof@humanities.uct.ac.za

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seriously consider what should be required of a radical anti-racism and anti-sexism.10 Debilitating problems are also arising in response to various forms of covert vanguardism disguised, sometimes unconsciously, by rhetoric about politics without leaders11 or stultifying organisation. While politics without democratic organisation can initially enable resistances that float like a butterfly and sting like a bee the failure to develop early successes towards mechanisms for democratisation eventually disables the development of a broad base of militants, leads to the emergence of hierarchies linked to networks of patronage (sometimes racialised or gendered) driven by the exhaustion, laziness (in the sense in which Frantz Fanon uses the term to describe the failure to engage in “socially engaged critical thinking and self-reflection”12) or simple personal ambition of certain activists (often for status rather than money). Moreover all these challenges must be faced in the social brittleness that hardens as a “long crapulent depression lays hold of society” while the “dramaturgical effects” of the bourgeois deal sink from “sparkling brilliance” 13 to the obviously empty hubris of self parody. The need for critique is not answered by importing theory abstracted from the lived experience of struggle or the tendency to seek to channel, and sometimes mutilate, the practice and representation of struggle to make it conform to theory. On the contrary theory has to be in constant conversation with the lived realities of struggle and non-struggle. We need to take seriously Slavoj Zizek’s injunction to:

bare in mind Walter Benjamin’s reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) positions itself with regard to social struggles – we should also ask how it actually functions in these very struggles.14

And the question about functionality is a question about how to enable the further growth and development of creative resistances.15

10 This is an urgent challenge as there are also instances of people misusing the liberatory language of anti-racism and anti-sexism to seek personal privilege rather than (and on occasion at the direct expense of) the growth and development of rebellion. 11 For critiques of the authoritarianism that can be produced by simultaneous ‘no leaders’ rhetoric and no democratic organisation practice see Pointer and naidoo & veriava p. 38. New social movements have generally made a decisive and very necessary break with the ANC and alliance culture of mindlessly reciting leader’s names as Catholics recite the stations of the cross. (See Bricks Mkolo’s comments in naidoo & veriava, p. 26. for a useful account of this) But it needs to be stressed that opposing the authoritarianism inherent in the fetishisation of leaders is not, in any way, in contradiction with a position for radically decentralised democratic modes of organisation. 12 Gibson., 2001. p. 375. 13 Karl Marx in the 18th Brumaire cited in Nigel Gibson Fanon, Marx and the New Reality of the Nation: Black Political Empowerment and the challenges of a new humanism in South Africa The 3rd Annual Frantz Fanon Lecture, Durban, 2004, p.23. ngibson@fas.harvard.edu 14 Slavoj Zizek Revolution at the Gates (Verso: London, 2002) p. 168. Zizek philosophises with a hammer when thinking against capitalism. But we must acknowledge that his radical energies are constrained by a crippling Eurocentricism. For critiques in this regard see Richard Pithouse ‘Conversations with Zizek’ (forthcoming Theoria 2004) and Nelson Maldonado ‘The Regressive Kernel of Orthodoxy: Slavoj Zizek’s The Puppet and the Dawf’ Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 6. No 1. 2003 pp. 59-70. 15 The critical reflections on movement praxis developed here are purposefully made at a high level of generality in order to avoid exacerbating a set of debilitating tensions but are all based on comments made at the workshops held to facilitate the writing of this issue of Development Update, interviews and

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Part 2: The real question In contemporary Southern Africa it is now very clear that demands for obedience in the name of the cult of national purity are always a disciplining and hypocritical lie. Our recent experiences allow the very stimulating and regrettably neglected South African theorist Grant Farred to write that postcolonial critique has

met with an indulgent violence. In order to protect the elite, almost always in the name of an expedient, exclusionary nationalism that masquerades as metaphoric inclusion, interrogation is denounced and those who ask questions are incarcerated, exiled or worse. With various kinds of subreptions [the suppression of truth to obtain indulgence], some more repressive than others, postcoloniality now has a history of suppression that stretches from Toussaint through Nkrumah, Edward Seaga and Nelson Mandela.16

Two hundred years after the Haitian revolution we too must confront “The waste, the waste of all this bravery, devotion and noble feeling on the corrupt and rapacious bourgeoisie.”17 Moreover postcolonial history, from Toussaint to Mandela, also shows that the two hundred year history of subreption is intimately intertwined with the fact that subaltern nationalisms have carried elites into the repressive management of economies “still locked into a subordinate position within the world market.”18 We need a politics that is self consciously for a different economy and for a real democracy. A politics that decommodifies and democratises from below in structures too multiple and too much a part of too many people’s ordinary lives to be destroyed or co-opted.19 Given this, and the perhaps more obvious urgency to refuse to allow the South African bourgeoisie, the Swazi aristocracy or the Zimbabwean dictatorship to contain and discipline in the name of the nation, while they make deals against ‘their people’ without regard to borders, the only real question to ask in an article on global and local movement linkages is this: how do we forge and negotiate solidarity with movements elsewhere and, more specifically - because they have the resources to engage with us - with those movements in the metropole that, both in and consequent to the long tradition of the West

empirically verifiable experience. Often my own praxis is directly implicated in some of the critiques offered here and so the comments are aimed at contributing to the developing although contested practice of general self-reflection. Hopefully movements will be able to move beyond the current and often deepening tensions towards an appreciation of Jonathan Neale’s point that “The way you learn what is right and wrong in any situation is by arguing it out amongst yourselves…That is why in every great political movement in history, the air has been alive with arguments on every street corner. Arguing isn’t sectarian. Sectarianism is refusing to act together because you haven’t won the argument.” Cited in Dwyer, 2004, p. 26. Unfortunately some individuals still prefer to ally themselves with reactionary forces to try and crush difference rather than to move forward in productive diversity. 16 Grant Farred ‘A Thriving Postcolonialism’ Nepantla: Views from the South Vol. 2, No2, 2001. p. 239. 17 C. L. R. James The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1989) p. 255. 18 Peter Green ‘The Passage from Imperialism to Empire’ Historical Materialism Vol. 10, No.1, 2002, 39. 19 For a fuller although brief argument in this regard see Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse ‘What Stank in the Past is the Present’s Perfume South Atlantic Quarterly (forthcoming 2004).

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seeing itself as the universal “spiritual adventure”20, are able to present themselves and be commonly accepted as global, central and leading? We know that struggles always draw on and transform ideas and resources and people with an admirable and admirably practical promiscuity. A boer was appointed a general in the Xhosa resistance when English invasion first crossed the Great Fish River.21 In the 1920s Marcus Garvey’s redemptive vision resulted in ‘AmaMelika ayeza’ (the Americans are coming) becoming a great rallying cry of African revolt from “Cape teachers to Ciskein prisoners, and from the Durban dock workers to labour tenants in the Eastern Transvaal.”22 Steve Biko drew on Frantz Fanon who drew on Aimé Césaire who was inspired by Arthur Rimbaud who grew up reading the notes his father, a colonial soldier in North Africa, wrote on the Koran. Ideas and experiences are endlessly intertwined and re-imagined across time and space. More immediately Peter Alexander’s research on the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions shows that many workers referred to the inspiration of the overthrow of Suharto in Indonesia in their explanation of their militance in the late 90s that lead to mass strikes and the creation of the initially promising Movement for Democratic Change.23 And still closer to home naidoo & veriava observe, in a discussion of the emergence of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), that in addition to all kinds of local and national experiences of struggle “Many activists also attribute special significance to the protests against the WTO, which took place in Seattle in 1999”.24 Ogoniland, Chiapas, Namada, Seattle, Cochabamba, Prague, Genoa and 15 February 2003 have each become an event of transnational significance “which brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges…a hazardous, unpredictable supplement”25. Similarly the struggles of the Piqueteros in Argentina, the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil, the Sans Papiers in Paris, the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa and many more insurgencies and defences have become part of the memory, language and mythology of a transnationally linked network of resistances to millennial capitalism.26 This fact would seem to indicate that the real heart

20 Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin: New York, 1976) p. 253. 21 Noel Mostert Frontiers (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1992) 22 Helen Bradford A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa 1924 – 1930 (Ravan, Johannesburg, 1988), 216. 23 Peter Alexander ‘Globalisation and Discontent: Project and Discourse’ African Sociological Review 2001 Vol. 5. No.1 pp. 55-73. 24 Naidoo & veriava, 2004., p. 25. See also their interview with Andile Mngxitama on the various regional and international inspirations for the Landless People’s Movement. p. 34. 25 Alain Badiou cited in Jacques Depelchin Haiti 1804 as an Event: Fidelity to Freedom Seminar Paper, Centre for Civil Society, July 2004 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 26 Jean and John Comaroff explain their use of the phrase millennial capitalism as follows: “By this we mean not just capitalism at the millennium, but capitalism invested with salvific force; with intense faith in its capacity, if rightly harnessed, wholly to transform the universe of the marginalized and disempowered. At its most extreme this faith is epitomized by forms of money magic, ranging from pyramid schemes to prosperity cults, that pledge to deliver immense, immediate wealth by largely unscrutable means; in its more mundane manifestation, it accords the market itself an almost mystical capacity to produce and deliver cash and commodities.” ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism’ South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 101, No. 4 p. 785.

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of the real question inheres in the simple strategic challenge of achieving more connection. But there are problems. We often depend, with all that that word implies, on the resources, information and experiences (very few of us can afford the range of experiences and travel open to many of them) of Northern movements. But we also know that, although there have been and continue to be important instances of genuine North/South or First World/Third World solidarity in the struggle for global justice, it is also true that in every anti-colonial struggle from the Haitian revolution onward, the bulk of the Northern left, when able to exert real power, has ultimately made deals with its own bourgeoisies to secure a better deal from global domination. The new Northern movements that seek to range themselves against global rather than national domination may make different choices27 but, at the very least, we need to seek to secure organisationally and ideologically autonomous positions in the transnational movement of movements against millennial capitalism and to push them to become more genuinely global.28 We can’t rely on the extraordinary work and charisma of people like Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sub-commandante Insurgente Marcos, Arundhati Roy, Zackie Achmat and Ashwin Desai to weave Southern struggles into the imagination and praxis of transnational resistance. We have to take on the staggering task of working for a genuinely, which is to say structurally global resistance. To fight and work for a world in which an ordinary African life in Kigali counts the same as an ordinary white life in New York we must imagine and work for (and sometimes fight for) a network of resistances in which the Coltan diggers in the Congo and the workers in the Export Processing Zones in the Philippines have as much structural access to voice and influence as Irish students and American environmentalists. IF WE ARE EVERYWHERE WHO ARE WE? Contemporary capitalism dispossesses, exploits and excludes where ever this will generate short term profit, and in what ever ways will serve this end best in particular places. This means that while its ravages are very uneven (much more so than Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, radical Eurocentricists that they are, care to acknowledge) they are also global and globally linked. The extraction of resources in Africa under regimes of primitive accumulation may fuel proletarianisation in China which may in turn fuel a 27 Although we should be mindful of the history of the various U.S. Third Worldist sects - and in particularly the Maoist sects, of the 60s, 70s and early 80s and certain forms of black nationalism - that fetishized Third World leaders and regimes rather than building solidarities with peoples’ organisations. This is predicated on a romanticised idea of the other and its inverted Manicheanism is generally at the direct expense of both the progressive project in the U.S. and actually existing people and struggles in the Third World. For an argument in this regard see Richard Pithouse ‘Revolution in the Air’ Theoria Vol. 102, December 2003. pp.149-151. We need to keep this in mind because the tendency to project liberatory fantasies on to authoritarian Third World leaders is still with us and recent statements by sections of the U.S. left indicate a naïve faith in, for example, the alliance between the governments of South Africa, Brazil and India. (Set up, we should recall, while India was groaning under the right wing Hindu nationalist BJP) 28 For a fuller argument in this regard see Richard Pithouse ‘‘‘Independent Intavenshan’ Frantz Fanon and the Dialectic of Solidarity” Radical Philosophy Review Vol. 4., No. 2., 2001, pp. 173-192.

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transition to immaterial labour in the U.S.A. But it is also true that while Vivendi might do things differently here and there they are everywhere. And, crucially, they can also call the police everywhere. Whether we seek to move through global relations of domination to a more just order, to escape it by delinking or just to refuse its barbarism and leave the question of what our refusal will generate wide open we’ll need strength in numbers. This gives a very seductive appeal to the return of the global Manicheanism of the Communist Manifesto – Workers of the world unite! And we do need a global counter project against the globalising mania of imperialism and capital. We must nurture the many genuine acts of transnational solidarity that occur and seek to generate more. But the language of global Manicheanism, now often expressed in terms of the multitude or the movement or, more promisingly, the movement of movements, carries too many dangers and masks too many things for us to accept its seductions uncritically. One obvious danger is its slippage or co-option into its well funded liberal mirror image of global civil society - widely and largely uncritically coded as ethical, democratic and progressive. Part 1: We Are Not Global Civil Society

The composition and balance of power in civil society in a given Third World country is now just as important to US and transnational interests as who controls the governments of those countries.29 - William Robinson

William Robinson makes a convincing case, substantiated with rigorous empirical evidence, that:

in US foreign policy… “democracy” is the most effective means of assuring stability... This is in contrast to prior periods in US foreign-policy history – and correlatedly, to the historic norm in centre-periphery relations predicated on coercive modes of social control, such as the colonial era – when military dictatorships or authoritarian client regimes (and before them, colonial states) were seen as the best guarantors of social control and stability. The intent behind promoting polyarchy is to relieve domestic pressure on the state from sub-ordinate classes for more fundamental change in emergent global society. Military regimes and highly unpopular dictatorships, such as Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, the Duvaliers in Haiti, and Pinochet in Chile, defended local elite interests. But they also engendered mass-based opposition movements that sought [like the Sandinistas] outcomes, beyond the mere removal of dictatorships, of popular democratization. These movements became transnational in their significance as globalization proceeded and threatened core and local elite interests. The old authoritarian arrangements were no longer guarantors of social control and stability.30

29 William Robinson Polyarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 69. 30 Ibid., pp.66 - 67. My emphasis.

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So popular resistance has

inverted the positive correlation between the investment climate and authoritarianism. Now a country’s investment climate is positively related to the maintenance of a “democratic” order, and the “imperial state” promotes polyarchy in place of authoritarianism. But this shift required a corresponding reconceptualization of the principal target in intervened countries, from political to civil society, as the site of social control.31

Robinson concludes that

US ‘democracy promotion,’ as it actually functions, sets about not just to secure and stabalize elite-based polyarchic systems but to have United States and local elites thoroughly penetrate civil society, and from therein assure control over popular mobilization and mass movements.32

Robinson goes on to provide detailed evidence to show that the South African case conforms to his general analysis. He explains that in the period after the second world war, and especially through the 60s, 70s and 80s, successive US administrations developed strategic alliances with the settler regimes in Southern Africa which included “low-key military assistance, political and diplomatic support, and intelligence information to white minority regimes.”33 The State Department labelled the liberation movements as ‘terrorist’. But he also shows that after the 1976 uprising the US and European powers began to push for some kind of transition and by the mid 1980s had shifted from supporting apartheid to ‘promoting democracy’. Millions of dollars were committed to a programme designed to support moderate black leadership and marginalise radical black leadership and, in the words of a key USAID document, “broaden understanding of the free market system and prepare black business owners, managers, and employees for success in a postapartheid South Africa.”34 Robinson summarises the goals of the various co-ordinated democracy promotion projects as follows:

1. identify and support an emergent black middle class of professionals who could be incorporated into a post-apartheid hegemonic bloc;

2. develop a nationwide network of grassroots community leaders amongst the black population that could win leadership positions in diverse organs in civil society and compete with more radical leadership;

3. cultivate a black business class among small and mid-level black-run, or mixed level or mixed enterprises that would have a stake in stable South African

31 Ibid., 68. 32 Ibid., 69. 33 Ibid., 327. 34 Ibid., 330.

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capitalism, develop economic power, and view the white transnationalized fraction of South African capital as allies and leaders.35

Hein Marais36 and Patrick Bond37 offer evidence of the similar role played by white South African capital and the World Bank. In the current global context this project is primarily led through the World Bank’s strategic moves towards becoming a ‘knowledge bank’ and to ‘harmonising’ and seeking further ‘coherence’ between its policies and those of the IMF, the WTO and donors38 which means the seduction of massive funding, scholarships, consultancies, and endless NGO organised workshops and conferences, all with the direct aim of using “the market penetration strategies of the private sector”39 to capture extant movements of the poor and create others under the guise of ‘strengthening civil society’. For example, Julie Hearn cites convincing evidence to show that in Mozambique “Aid is being deliberately directed to assist in the construction of new social groups committed to the market economy.”40 She quotes a USAID reports which openly states that, in Ghana:

[P]olitical risks include growing polarization within the Ghanaian polity and perhaps an associated risk that a legally sanctioned change of government could have totally opposing development views and reverse long-term policies. USAID assistance to civic organizations that develop and debate public policy, and US support for consultation on government policies have been useful in shaping a vision for Ghana’s future which is developing broad, bipartisan support.41

In Zimbabwe Hopewell Gumbo writes that the Movement for Democratic Change started out opposing both the Mugabe dictatorship and neo-liberalism but that “Massive funding was poured in to the civic movement, mainly from the West” with the result that

the intellectuals now largely subscribe to the neo-liberal agenda and grass roots activists, many of whom have suffered as a direct consequence of neo-liberalism, are just bought in to toyi-toyi when numbers and credibility are needed. The middle class MDC leadership, together with the labour bureaucrats and big white bosses believe that giving actual power to grass roots activists would bring ‘instability’ into the movement.42

35 Ibid., 331 36 Hein Marais South Africa Limits to Change (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2001) pp. 126 – 138. 37 Patrick Bond Elite Transition (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000). 38 See Harmonisation and Coherence: White Knights or Trojan Horses? Bretton Woods Project 39 Deepa Narayan with Raj Patel, Kai Schafft, Anne Rademacher and Sarah Koch-Schulte Voices of the Poor (New York: Oxford University Press/The World Bank, 2000), p.279. 40 ‘Foreign Aid, Democratisation and Civil Society in Africa: A Study of South Africa, Ghana and Uganda’ Institute for Development Studies, Discussion Paper 368, 2000, p. 19. http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,11,241 41 Ibid., p. 20. 42 ‘Zimbabwean Civil Society: a report from the front lines’ Special Report for the CCS Website, 2002. http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

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In South Africa the massive civil society projects of agencies like the World Bank and USAID exist along side parallel civil society projects by the ANC43. These projects take on a variety of tasks but generally function to co-opt the expression of social antagonism by encouraging various forms of (always unequal) ‘partnership’ that produce various anti-political corporatist arrangements for managing conflict (e.g. lobbying, public participation, etc.). Often there is lucrative encouragement to shift from large membership driven organisations (‘social movements’) to small, professionalised NGOs. When political issues are taken up they are rapidly technicized, often via reduction to questions of policy or via reduction to research that is dehumanizingly and alienatingly quantitative or dumbed down44 to the crudely propagandistic level of the work of World Bank and its academic entrepreneurs (many of whom prostitute themselves for private profit from a base in public institutions). But these facts do not justify the widespread tendency to assume that the capture of oppositional movements by imperialist and state directed civil society projects can be avoided by setting up a simple distinction between bad imperialist/co-opting NGOs and good rebellious social movements. On the contrary the World Bank argues that “Social movements bring about realignments of power, change social norms, and create new opportunity structures. Out of this will emerge a mindset that applies liberalization not only for the rich but also the poor.”45 In fact the term ‘social movement’ has growing currency in the copious although sterile academic literature of co-option.46 Distinctions need to be made. For a start all social movements are internally contested and understood differently from within. The latter point emerged clearly in Zane Dangor’s Summary Report on the Social Movement Workshops held to facilitate the production of this issue of Development Update. He noted, in particular, that movement intellectuals often express views about movement goals and ideology that are in direct contradiction to those of ‘ordinary participants.’47 Moreover mass movements can seek to respond to the social crisis of

43 For a brief discussion of this see Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse ‘But We Were Thousands’ Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park.’ Centre for Civil Society Research Report 9, 2003. pp. 1-30. http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 44 For a useful attack on an idea which currently has enormous currency in these circles see John Harriss’ critique of the World Bank’s purile ‘social capital’ discourse Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital (Anthem Press: London, 2002). 45 Narayan et. al. Voices of the Poor, p.281 46 The academic society The International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) and its journal Volantas produces screeds of this. Key South Africans involved in this project include Adam Habib and Kumi Naidoo. Naidoo also works with the World Bank linked civil society project CIVICUS. Habib also works with a number of projects directly linked to the imperialist civil society project described by Robinson such as the Centre for Civil Society’s State of Giving project. 47 If we measure radicalism by the degree to which it is held that direct and self-consciously oppositional social antagonism is necessary for progress then the movement intellectuals are more radical. If we measure it by the degree to which critique can be ordinary and deeply embedded in popular understandings of the world then the ‘ordinary participants’ are more radical. If, as I am arguing here, we should measure radicalism by the degree to which these two conceptions of radicalism can merge through dialogical praxis then the movements have much work to do.

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millennial capitalism by imposing popular repression in the name of deeply reactionary religious, culturalist and nationalist narratives of primordial harmony; by seeking to manage crisis by sharing resources (this is what the World Bank really like hence the endless valorisation of the Self Employed Women’s Union [SEWU] in India); by seeking to extract reforms or concessions from the state, capital and dominating groups (the World Bank can accommodate some reformist projects); by seeking to achieve some degree of autonomy from capital, states and dominating groups; or by seeking to capture the means of production or the state. Moreover mass movements can be entirely membership driven, NGO supported or NGO directed and anywhere on a continuum from fully donor funded to fully membership funded. And NGOs range from organisations like the Centre for Public Participation that are clearly implicated in the imperialist project to organisations like the Freedom of Expression Institute that are deeply supportive of overt opposition to market fundamentalism and state authoritarianism. Moreover many NGOs are sites of contestation. Consequently a false binary between social movements and NGOs is utterly unhelpful. But what is useful is a distinction between projects, however organised, that pathologize the violence on which capitalism depends while valorizing mass resistance and those that pathologize direct mass resistance while pursuing a limited reformism that effectively normalizes the bulk of capital’s violence. The movement intellectuals and militants at the workshop held to facilitate the production of this article were very aware that there is a constant danger of the co-option of both movements and networking forums for movements by the imperialist civil society project. There was particular concern about the steady but not complete penetration of the World Social Forum and the immediate penetration of the African Social Forum. There was also a clear recognition of the importance of the lessons learnt in the experiences of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, where there was a failed but still constraining attempt to work with official and institutionalised civil society as represented by SANGOCO, and the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg where there was an overt and liberating (in that it freed up space for the creative practice of resistances) antagonism towards SANGOCO.48 This awareness is very encouraging but the degree to which this knowledge and experience is shared by ordinary participants in movements is open to question. This question is particularly pressing in movements that only mobilise in response to crisis; that are formally (via NGO or professional leadership) or covertly vanguard directed (via often well intentioned but always false claims about having no leaders); and/or in movements in which intellectuals, succumbing to the strong current of the anti-intellectual Deleuzean fetish of desire in Negrian autonomism49, continue to educate themselves without seeing any need to share knowledge in political education projects.

48 For an insider account of all this see naidoo & veriava pp. 47-50. 49 Which is directly opposed to Fanon’s insistence in The Wretched of the Earth that “you’ll never overthrow the terrible enemy machine, and you won’t change human beings if you forget to raise the standard of consciousness of the rank-and-file.” (Penguin: London, 1976) p.108.

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Part 2: We Are Not The Multitude

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others. - Eduardo Galeano50

The South African Communist Party’s long standing 51authoritarianism, mechanistic economism and current willingness to work to legitimate the ANC’s project of deracialising domination52 make the party the necessary enemy of people seeking to reconstitute anti-capitalist projects in South Africa. The cultish fundamentalism of other established left sects that don’t involve themselves in mass movements renders them irrelevant. In the political space that has emerged from these realities it is perhaps not surprising that many young left intellectuals have uncritically embraced the practice of the anti-capitalist movements in the North and the ideas of their key philosopher Antonio Negri.53 Of course this mistake is not of the same order as the previous generation’s attraction to Stalinism. On the contrary the anti-capitalist movements in the North have often developed innovative forms of non-vanguardist democratic organisation that allow for internal diversity and a large degree of spontaneity. We have much to learn from them. But, nevertheless, a narrative fashionable in the metropole is again being imposed on actual histories and modes of struggle (and non-struggle) by people with privileged access to the metropole. The result of this is always to disregard the agency and experience of the dominated even in the very moment of insurgency. We need to become militant in our insistence that theory be subordinated to the lived experience of political life in the way that the tool is subordinated to the artist. 50 Eduardo Galeano Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press: New York, 1973), p.12. 51 The deliberateness of this is clearly revealed in texts written by party members. See, for example, Raymond Suttner ‘The role and character of intellectuals in the ANC-led liberation movement.’ History and African Studies Semin,r University of Natal, 2003 http://www.history.und.ac.za 52 Of course the SACP does issue moderate critiques but these critiques never seek to become a material force. Moreover, as Noam Chomsky argues, co-opted voices speaking in the language of the left “perform a very useful service by demarcating the limits of criticism – ‘you can go as far as me, and no further, and look how left wing I am.’ This is a very important function in a propaganda system, which is why they are protected.” Taking About a Revolution, Ed. South End Press Collective, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998. p.23. We should describe the South African Communist Party as Alain Badiou describes the French Communist Party – “a site of a politics which is both hesitant and brutal”. Infinite Thought (Contiuum: London, 2003). p.127. 53 My claims about Negri’s crippling Eurocentricism and other limits should not be taken as a rejection of all his and Michael Hardt’s ideas. On the contrary their work and the visionary passion that animates it richly rewards attention and there is clearly much of value in their stimulating body of work such as the thinking of immanence and transcendence, power and counter-power and, of course, revolutionary humanism. For a sympathetic engagement with these ideas see Richard Pithouse ‘That the tool never posses the man’ Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously Politikon Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003 pp 107-132.

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People before pure militants

It is only when grounded in the ubiquity of resistance that revolution becomes a possibility. - John Holloway54

The idea of the multitude has freed many from both the fetish of the proletariat as the only viable agent of challenge to capital and the fetish of the nation as defender against capital. Given the realities that most resistances in contemporary South Africa are at the point of consumption (basic services, housing, health care, education55 etc.) rather than production, and are largely community rather than union driven, as well as the complete immersion of the South African elite into the transnational elite, these are very welcome releases. Nevertheless there are many reasons why we are not the Negrian multitude. Antonio Negri believes that

the multitude is ontological power. This means that the multitude embodies a mechanism that seeks to represent desire and to transform the world - more accurately: it wishes to recreate the world in its image and likeness, which is to say to make a broad horizon of subjectivities that freely express themselves and that constitute a community of free men.56

The marginalised, exploited and dispossessed do have an ontological priority in that they incarnate the experience of domination. The authentic consciousness, Fanon argues, must recognize that “the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth.”57 And so the struggle should be “by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by the outcasts.”58 However Negri’s illusions59 about the uniform political purity of the desires of the ‘multitude’ are a contemporary avatar of a recurring and (often ontologically predatory middle class) desire to project collective redemptive fantasies onto the marginalised and exploited. Moreover this illusion fails to acknowledge that desire is hardly always for communism60 or to take into account the simple logic of Zizek’s point that desire follows

54 John Holloway Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press: London, 2002) p. 175. 55 Education is not usually included in this list but it should be. See the work done by the Education Rights Project http://www.erp.org.za and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa Newsletter: Special issue on South Africa (Ed: Pithouse, forthcoming 2004). 56 Antonio Negri Negri on Negri (Routledge, New York, 2004), 112. 57 Fanon, 1976, p. 38 58 Ibid., 165. 59 For Freud an illusion is a belief elicited and maintained by unconsciousness desires irrespective of evidential support. Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1989) Of course illusions can be enabling and constraining. Amongst the other illusions held by movement intellectuals is the idea that rebellions against particular forms of commodification (water, education, housing etc.) indicate the existence of an extant self-consciously anti-capitalist movement. 60 Consider, for example, Ralph Ginzburg’s account of the popular and festive rebellion against constituted legal authority in Georgia on 21 June 1920 that took the form of the lynching of Phillip Gathers by a white mob. ‘Huge Mob Tortures Negro to Avenge Brutal Slaying’ Cultural Resistance Reader (Verso, London 2002) p. 132 -134.

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fantasy and so it is fantasy and not desire that must, in his technical language, be traversed61. And changing fantasies, of course, requires changes in consciousness and not merely the removal of restraint. Writing against the Negrian illusion John Holloway argues that failure to acknowledge the mutual interpenetration of labour and capital, the multitude and Empire

means both to underestimate the containment of labour within capital (and hence overestimate the power of labour against capital) and to underestimate the power of labour as internal contradiction within capital (and hence overestimate the power of capital against labour). If the interpenetration of power and anti-power is ignored, then we are left with two pure subjects on either side….For over a hundred years, communism has suffered the nightmare of the Pure Subject: the Party, the working class hero, the unsullied militant. To resurrect the image of the Pure Subject, just when it seemed at last to have died the indecent death that it merited, is not just a joke, it is grotesque. We hate capitalism and fight against it, but that does not make us the embodiment of good fighting against evil. On the contrary, we hate it not just because we adopt the common condition of the multitude, but because it tears us apart, because it penetrates us, because it turns us against ourselves, because it maims us. Communism is not the struggle of the Pure Subject, but the struggle of the maimed and the schizophrenic. Unless we start from there, there is no hope.62

Of course Holloway, the philosopher in revolt against the fetish, fetishises capital and fails to acknowledge pre and extra capitalist forms of domination. But his argument is important for the problematic at stake here for many reasons. For example there is the simple fact that the cripplingly unreflective self-righteousness that accompanies the fetish of the pure subject pushes some movement intellectuals and militants into debilitating and profoundly unattractive fundamentalisms and sectarianisms63 that are more indicative of a fundamental commitment to being radically ontologically superior than a fundamental will to radically resist the brutality of millennial capitalism. It’s a curious and revealing fact that people who project fantasies of ontological purity onto the idea of multitude generally only assume the consequent lightness of being for actually existing human beings when they are part of the same or allied small, covertly vanguardist, middle class sects - the same sects that often mediate the relationships between movements. It is telling that there are certain cases where critiques of the intellectual left sub-culture have generated paranoid and hysterical responses that issue counter-attacks 61 This is usefully discussed in by Kenneth MacKendrick and Christopher Craig Brittain in ‘A Messiah for Marxism: Review of Zizek, The Fragile Absolute’, Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 6., No. 1, 2003. pp. 51 – 58. 62 John Holloway ‘Going in the Wrong Direction; Or, Mephistopheles – Not Francis of Assisi’ Historical Materialism Vol. 10. No 1. 2002, pp. 88-89. 63 Of course these behaviours have multiple causes that often do not include Negrian philosophy. But when ideas that are in the air reinforce pathologies from which we require urgent liberation those ideas must be contested.

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infused with vastly more vigour than the responses of the same people to physical and ideological attacks on actually existing poor people.64 The assumption of ontological privilege inhibits self reflective praxis and critical thought about everything aside from questions of short term strategy and repeats the ultimately disastrous “anti-intellectualism that pervaded the anti-apartheid movement…especially so for the ANC and its ally, the South African Communist Party”65 whose intellectuals “Too often celebrating the manichean certainty of the struggle…failed to see its inner contradictions and trajectories.”66 For the discussion at hand it is perhaps most crucial to note that the lack of critique extends to power relations within and between movements. (Power relations which are already masked by the discourse of the multitude – a discourse that is as ahistorical as the World Bank’s discourse about ‘the poor’.67) The power relations within movements are sometimes reinforced when they determine, who mediates between the resources of Northern movements and local communities of resistance. The problem is not just that privileged people are better able to forge international connections. Emissaries from Northern movements often find it easier to engage with people here who speak their languages and inhabit similar sub-cultural spaces and so local struggle elites become struggle tour guides. We also need to remember that there are instances in which Northern movements need the political legitimacy of connections with Southern movements and are willing to achieve this as quickly and easily as possible. Certain people here have a (often but not always unconscious) personal rather than a collectively political stake in attaching to the glamour, power and relative visibility of movements in the metropole, or in the eye of the metropole, and in making the exchanges to provide the appearance of that legitimacy. At times this can become more important for such people than the growth and development of resistance. The way to avoid this is, of course, to ensure that when these negotiations are undertaken in the name of movements they should be negotiated, in so far as it is possible, on the terrain of the movements and by a revolving set of democratically selected individuals with clear mandates and responsibilities. At the workshop held to discuss this article it emerged that the APF has developed exemplary practice in this regard. But the democratic practices developed by the APF need to become a standard criterion for the issuing and accepting of invitations to spaces where solidarities are negotiated. In other words the practice of inviting individuals rather than asking organisations to elect representatives must cease. Moreover, because the injection of

64 This is not to suggest that these attacks must not be contested. On the contrary what Fanon calls ‘the battle of ideas’ matters and matters enormously. The point is that as a new left elite solidifies, becomes professionalised and generates cultural capital through self-representation and glamorous international alliances some initiates are, or become, much more invested in the pleasures of memberships of this elite than the project that bought it into being and which legitimates its existence. This results in movements being used to legitimate the left elite rather than, as it should be, the reverse. 65 Nigel Gibson ‘The Pitfalls of South Africa’s “Liberation”’ New Political Science Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001, p. 375 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 66 Ibid., p. 384. 67 See Richard Pithouse ‘Producing the Poor: The World Bank’s New Discourse of Domination’ African Sociological Review Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003. pp. 118-148.

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resources so often lead to suspicion, resentment and division it is essential to ensure democratic accountability68 at every stage in their procurement and distribution.69 The return of manicheanism has also, in some instances, led to a spontaneously unreflective and misplaced hostility to people outside of the sect who seek to spread and/or develop rebellion. And there are cases where projects that began as a means to an end (e.g. valorising or merely speaking in the name of a certain community, struggle, organisation or even individual militant; channelling money in a certain direction etc.) have very quickly collapsed into an end in-itself. We have even seen the bizarre spectacle of a well networked person speaking with a pathological self-righteousness in the name of a dead organisation to alternatively deny and condemn the emergence of a new organisation aimed at taking the same project forward with the same people in a democratically structured way. In cases like this it is clear that attaching to the symbolic capital of the original organisation and not the rebellion has become the project for that individual. When enabling and legitimating resources and networks are at stake such failures, and their widespread appeasement, become highly political problems. But even when we act within democratic modes of organisation and in the interest of collective political projects global power relations that manifest in the invisibility of most of humanity can still lead to an internationalism that is insufficiently reflective about the negotiation of solidarities. The failures of South African movements to match their excellent record of solidarity for Palestinian resistances with equivalent support for movements battling repression in Swaziland and Zimbabwe, mass eviction in the interests of primitive accumulation in Namibia and Botswana or the catastrophic plunder in the Congo is telling.70 Opportunities for solidarities are constrained by the realities of uneven development but that does not excuse the uncritical reproduction of the hierarchies that produce and feed-off this unevenness. Of course there are also pressing material factors that severely inhibit dialogical and reflective practice. Moreover increasing state repression and the now constant consequent struggles to find bail money, together with the more longstanding fact that movements operate on a terrain of systemic and constant crisis – a mass school exclusion this morning, the aftermath of the disconnections the day before, the prospect of a community meeting tonight at which an attempt will be made to parachute in an newly manufactured ANC organisation to replace a democratic, popular and radical organisation – often inhibit opportunities for reflection and dialogue. But this is no excuse. Consider the

68 It is interesting to note that Peter Dwyer’s research has found that in the case of the CCF “debate about organisational structure is not ‘imposed’ from outside or by those with an alleged ‘political agenda’ as some city based participants complained – it emerges organically.” p. 25 Also see naidoo & veriava p.36 for an argument about the popular demand for democratic organisational structure in the APF. 69 This must also apply to negotiations regarding research projects. The resources, opportunities for networking, influence and status that accompany research projects can also have a seriously divisive impact on movements. In this regard the practice of some of the research projects funded by the Centre for Civil Society has left much to be desired. 70 It’s equally telling that South African movements have invested great energy in forming alliances with the Northern parts of the transnational anti-war movement and very little, if any, energy in support of the Iraqi resistance.

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circumstances under which Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth or Ruth First’s description of how Govan Mbeki’s writing of South Africa: The Peasant’s Revolt:

was frequently interrupted by police raids, when the sheets of paper had to be hurriedly secreted, or moved away from where the writer lived and worked, for his and their safe-keeping. A great slice of this book was written on slices of toilet paper when Mbeki served a two month spell of solitary confinement….71

Consider also, crucially, the circumstances under which

a moment of praxis was reached in the mid 70s. On the one hand, White leftists working with Black workers to form independent trade unions, on the other young Black intellectuals organizing in the townships and schools under the umbrella of Black consciousness. Both movements had significant anti-elitist and anti-Stalinist trends, as well as implicit ideas for a future society…72

Amongst the many issues which urgently requires more critical attention and dialogue within movements, and which are of direct relevance to the topic of this paper, are questions about what kinds of transnational linkages we wish to form, who in South African movements should do this work and with what obligations to the people and movements in whose names they act. Integration and assimilation

coalescing from weakness can mean absorption, betrayal - Stokley Carmichael73

The new manicheanism of Empire Vs The Multitude masks very significant power relations between and within extant movements (and between movements in their swaggering youth and movements struggling to be). This masking is nothing new. When Marx encouraged the workers of the world to unite he was not thinking about Africans and Europeans in quite the same way. Hardt and Negri argue that we are located in a movement towards something very similar to what Bill Gates calls “friction free capitalism” (which diagnoses as the “social fantasy” of an “ethereal medium of exchange” that seeks to repress the “Real of the traumatic social antagonisms” that render “the space of social exchange” pathalogical.74) in a decentred Empire with a deterritorialized apparatus of domination that has surpassed the

71 Ruth First ‘Preface’ in Govan Mbeki South Africa: The Peasant’s Revolt (International Defence and Aid Fund: London, 1984) p. 9. 72 Gibson, 2001, p. 385. 73 Stokley Carmichael, ‘Power and Racism’ in Expanding Philosophical Horizons, Edited by Max Hallman, Wadsworth, Blemost, 1995, p. 197. 74 Slavoj Zizek The Plague of Fantasies (Verso: London, 1997), p. 156.

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old division of humanity into three worlds. In their view the fact that there are glass skyscrapers in the former third world and shanty towns in the first mean that we are moving towards one global Empire. These claims collapse under their own evident theoretical contradictions – for example, if Empire is deterritoralized how can it be that migration towards its centre is posited as a cause of its future collapse? Moreover, they also labour under serious empirical inaccuracies. As Giovanni Arrighi notes, the fact that there are shanty towns in the metropole and glass skyscrapers in the periphery doesn’t change the simultaneous fact that the average per capita income in the former Third World as a percentage of that in the former First World shows “a steady decrease from 6.4 in 1960, to 6.0 in 1980 to 5.5 in 1999.”75 It is true that there are nodes that simulate the external forms of the power and privilege of First World elites in the Third World but this fact can be well understood in the old language of imperialism and resistance. Frantz Fanon argued that when settler domination is unchallenged “the indigenous population is discerned only as an indistinct mass.”76 But when revolt emerges and can not be put down the settler or colonial elite start to make their deals with the national bourgeoisie. “(T)he colonialist bourgeoisie looks feverishly for contacts with the élite …(in order) to carry out a rear-guard action with regard to culture, values, techniques and so on”.77 The colonialists dispense with their overt contempt. “Attentions and acts of courtesy come to be the rule.”78 For the nationalist parties: “The violent, total demands which lit up the sky now become modest.”79 The parties

proclaim abstract principles but refrain from issuing definite commands…a string of philosophical dissertations on the rights of people to self determination, the rights of man to freedom from hunger and human dignity…their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system…they are in fact partisans of order, the new order…to the colonialist bourgeoisie they put bluntly enough the demand which to them is the main one: give us more power.80

Colonialism realises that a policy of ‘crude violence’ is no longer viable. It’s confidence that “higher finance will soon bring the truth home”81 allows it to become more elegant. But when spontaneous violent resistance outside of the control of the anxious nationalist party continues the deal is done. Leaders are released from prison. “The time for dancing in the streets has come.”82 “In two minutes” colonialism “endows them with independence, on condition that they restore order.” 83 The colours are trooped and

75 Giovanni Arrighi ‘Lineages of Empire’ Debating Empire Edited by. Gopal Balakrishnan (London, Verso, 2003) p. 33. 76 Fanon, 1976., 34. 77 Ibid., 34. 78 Ibid., 111. 79 Ibid., 112. 80 Ibid., 46. 81 Ibid., 52. 82 Ibid., 57. 83 Ibid., 57.

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dignity is restored. “But for 95% of the population independence brings no immediate change.”84 “The warming, light-giving centre where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields does not yet exist.”85 If the clear contemporary resonance of these critiques of colonial and neo-colonial modes of simulating an autonomous modernity means that the system that we inhabit is not one of Empire and is better described by the term global coloniality used by radical Latin American thinkers to describe “an economic-military-ideological order that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world wide” via a variety of strategies that include “heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups”86 then one key consequence follows: Rebellion is only real when it prioritises the flourishing of the agency and intelligence of the dominated – the invisible becoming, in Gramscian terms, historical protagonists. This means, as Jacques Depelchin writes in an essay arguing for fidelity to the tremendous event of the Haitian revolution, “approaching politics as the realm of creativity in which all citizens, in conscience, participate, contribute their ideas from wherever they are, in order to change the situation in which we are.”87 The world historical event of the November 1999 Seattle protests are enormously encouraging and invigorating but much has to be done to bring these critical energies into relations of transformative mutuality with the struggles and failures to develop overt struggles in the dominated countries.

In the struggles against global coloniality there are a variety of reasons why our resistances should take their particular social and cultural spaces, in their extant and evolving hybridity, as primary organising principles of solidarity on the foundation of which wider alliances can be forged. The first is that particular extant culture has more accessible resources that can be used and developed to articulate and inspire resistances than abstract universal principle (or old traditions that only excite romantic and nationalist intellectuals). It puts agency and creativity within the immediate grasp of the marginalised and dominated. This is particularly well argued by Sub-commandante Insurgente Marcos and part of the project of making rebellion ordinary must be to locate it in the immediate life world of the dominated.88 Anything else quickly reduces the poor to the role of stage managed extras in their own struggles.89 Moreover moving too

84 Ibid., 59. 85 Ibid., 64. 86 Arturo Escobar ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality and anti-globalisation social movements’ Third World Quarterly Vol. 25, No1. 2004, p. 207. Global apartheid is also a useful characterisation of contemporary relationship between capitalism and imperialism. For arguments in this regard see Anthony Richmond Global Apartheid (Oxford University Press: Ontario, 1994); Patrick Bond Against Global Apartheid (University of Cape Town Press: Cape Town, 2001) and Talk Left Walk Right (Univeristy of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Pietermartizburg, 2004); and William Robinson (A Theory of Global Capitalism Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2004.) p. 153. 87 Depelchin, 2004., p. 14. 88 naidoo & veriava make brief but useful observations in this regard with reference to Gustavo Esteva. 2004. pp. 4 & 61. 89Paulo Freire’s Fanonian inspired insistence on struggle as the over coming of objectification (i.e. struggle as humanisation) needs to be revisited: “The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This is a radical requirement. They cannot enter the subject as objects in order

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quickly from local languages of struggle to allegedly ‘global’ languages can leave everyone but the militants and movement intellectuals behind.90 It is also the case that while all struggles against capital have some common concerns and aims which they are more likely to achieve if they work together the fact remains that different struggles exist in different places shaped by particular histories and occupying different positions in the global economy and thus have some particular concerns and aims. Those who face particular challenges in a particular context have a particular interest in working together to develop understanding and contestation around their problems. It’s no surprise that Aimé Césaire’s famous letter of resignation to the French Communist Party stressed “The peculiarity of our place in the world. . . The peculiarities of our problems which aren’t to be reduced to subordinate forms of any other problem.91 This is hugely important in the African context where material realities are often radically different to those assumed by ‘global’ praxis in the metropole. For example digital technologies are not equally democratic everywhere. Or, for a different kind of example, certain popular strands of autonomism assume that the problem is the control over access and management of social infrastructure and the solution is to beat the state back. This idea can quiet usefully be imported into urban areas that emerged from apartheid with basic infrastructure or into future communities based on newly won access to land. But it can’t offer much to the destitute urban poor without social infrastructure or the HIV positive for whom the creation of social resources remains an urgent necessity. And then there is the weight of history – a weight that demands reparation to balance the scales and which is, apparently, entirely disowned by the lightness of being communist in Europe and North America. If “The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution”92 is it not possible that contemporary coloniality is the economic basis of the Northern revolts against market fundamentalism? If this is so we would do well to remember both Biko’s well placed scorn for white and black liberal-pseudo

later to become human beings.” Consequently he concludes that “leaders who deny praxis [the opportunity for reflection and action] to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin: London, 1993) p. 50 & 107. If one sees the capture of state or other power as the central goal of struggle then two-stage thinking (‘obey now, critique can flourish after we have won’) makes some sense. But if we are with Fanon, or if we feel that Fanon is with us, then we do deny our praxis when we deny praxis to others. Ato Sekyi-Otu explains that for Fanon “the ultimate virtue of the revolution, the goal of historical action, is not the conquest of power but the resurrection of repressed questions and the disclosure of ‘unexpressed values.’” Fanon and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Critical Imagination Codesria Symposium on Canonical Works and Continuing Innovations in African Arts and Humanities, University of Ghana, 17-19 September, 2003 http://www.codesria.org 90 This argument for the need to root politics in the lifeworlds of the people whom it seeks to defend and enable should not be misread as an argument for not acting until a majority has been won over. On the contrary in this instance we can profit from a return to Lenin. Lenin insists that “To make such a demand… is nothing but a cover to hide one’s own flight from reality.” ‘Letter to Comrades’ Revolution at the Gates (Ed. Zizek Verso: London, 2002) p. 145. Often it is the act – smashing the meter, reconnecting the water, smuggling the medicine, invading the rent office, burning down the repossessed house, occuping the vice-chancellor’s office, marching on the ambasador’s house, etc – that opens space for new praxis. 91 Biko, 1996., p.67. 92 James, 1989. p. 47.

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opposition93 and his under-estimation of the (very few but very effective) white radicals who put their privilege in the service of the black trade union movement. At this point Biko’s critical distinction between assimilation and integration becomes important. Biko is for the integration of people who are economically, politically and culturally equal but firmly against “an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and code of behaviour set up and maintained by whites...I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil.”94 In the apartheid context a central reason for Biko’s rejection of assimilation is that it denied the opportunity to create a space autonomous of the factual distortions and pejorative projections of racism in which self-motivated and organised action could undo internalised inferiority and passivity. Moreover, because oppression operates by undermining the self respect of the oppressed real progress requires that respect to be won back in struggles by the oppressed. A further reason for the rejection of assimilation is that it increases the likelihood of the oppressed identifying with their oppressors (which includes liberals whose insincere challenge serves only to legitimate domination and their position within domination) with the consequence that critical energies would be stifled. This remains disturbingly relevant to contemporary South Africa’s position in global power structures where dominant discourses are riddled with phrases like ‘in line with international norms’, ‘international experience has shown’ and ‘international experts caution’ which are clearly a coded way of saying that ‘this is the Western way of doing things’ which is in turn a coded way of valorising capitalist modes of social organisation. And the reference to the ‘Western’ way of doing things comes with the clear implication that the information to follow is beyond question. But, as was pointed out in the workshop held to facilitate the writing of this paper, marginalised people also suppress their own agency in favour of the uncritical adoption of dominant forms of rebellion. Sometimes both sides of our drama are played out in the languages developed for someone else’s drama in another world whose wealth and status is built on the poverty and anonymity of our world. We have much to learn from other struggles, including struggles in the North. But what we learn must be taken into our struggles in accordance with our projects to take them forward more effectively and not imposed onto our struggles via the condescension of others or our own inferiority complexes - both of which can normalise the very structural inequalities against which we claim to be in revolt. It is also the case that movement intellectuals in South Africa are often attracted to fashionable postcolonial and other ostensibly radical theorists in the North - whose work often assumes a different material reality and which, in some instances, is predicated on a simple contempt for the majority of humanity - at the expense of thinking that takes our situation more seriously. Making a similar point in the South American context Hosam Aboul-Ela diagnoses:

93 Biko’s critique of white and black liberal pseudo-opposition is discussed most usefully by Lewis Gordon in his new introduction to I Write What I Like (University of Chicago Press: Chicago) 2002. pp. vii-xiii. 94 Biko, 1995. p, 24.

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a general tendency in Anglo-American postcolonialism which has come to show either disdain or disregard for paradigms from and intellectual histories of the Global South, preferring instead to understand the matter of the South via the methods of Euro-America. In this sense, postcolonialism can be said to have lapped itself by settling in to many of the practices criticized by Edward Said in his groundbreaking text Orientalism, including the adoption of what Said criticizes in eighteenth-century Orientalists as a ‘textual attitude’ and the reconfiguration of a version of the old colonialist proposition that ‘the East proposes and the West disposes.’95

The material factors that encourage uncritical assimilation to Northern discourses in no way justifies what is often, materially and psychologically, a simple case of selling out and buying in.96 All this comes down to the fact that we need to seek relationships with ‘global’ movements that are integrated and not assimilated and to invest just as much permanent care in not being the assimilators when working with movements in societies on whom our society is increasingly predatory. However we must be clear that this injunction does not condemn us to the fictions – objectifying and stultifying in equal measure - of liberal or postmodern multiculturalism or nationalist Manicheanism. People and movements move. That is the nature of being. Fanon explains that even in the extremities of the struggles against colonialism where settler and native are originally identified as motionless categories “Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation….Consciousness slowly dawns on truths that are only partial, limited or unstable”.97 In A Dying Colonialism98 Fanon presents five case studies, including the famous examples of the changing role of the veil and the radio in Algerian society, each of which shows that there can be a shift from constraining Manicheanism to dialectical99 progress with, in Gibson’s words, “its opportunity for radically new behaviour in both public and private life, a chance for cultural regeneration and creation where positive concepts of self-determination, not contingent upon the colonial status quo, are generated.”100 In the case of medicine Fanon writes that: “Introduced into Algeria at the same time as racialism and humiliation, Western medical science, being part of the oppressive system, 95 Hosam Aboul-Ela ‘Comparative Hybridites: Latin American Intellectuals and Postcolonialists’ Rethinking Marxism Vol. 16. No. 3. July 2004, p. 262. 96 Of course I am not suggesting that all ideas which originate in the North carry a genetic defect. Progressive and reactionary ideas emerge everywhere and interweave everywhere The point is that we should take on fashionable ideas from the metropole only insofar as they can be made to enable our engagement with our situation. Their currency in the academic and intellectual economy justifies nothing. 97 Fanon, 1976., p. 116. 98 Frantz Fanon A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 99 Fanon uses the term dialectic to describe synthesis that is driven by insurgencies and refusals or acts of creation and destruction that are a consequence of human choice and not some inhuman process that drives history independently of human choices. 100 Nigel Gibson ‘Radical Mutations: Fanon’s Untidy Dialectic of History’, Rethinking Fanon Gibson (ed), (New York: Humanity Books, 1999) p. 419.

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has provoked in the native an ambivalent attitude…. With medicine we come to one of the most tragic features of the colonial situation”.101 Tragic because colonial oppression alienates the colonized from the technologies deployed in its project of oppression even though they can also be employed in liberatory projects. For Fanon this disabling Manicheanism must be overcome dialectically:

The Algerian doctor, the native doctor who, as we have seen, was looked upon before the national combat as an ambassador of the occupier, was reintegrated into the group. Sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the mechtas, living the drama of the people, the Algerian doctor became a part of the Algerian body. There was no longer that reticence, so constant during the period of unchallenged oppression. He was no longer ‘the’ doctor, but ‘our’ doctor, ‘our technician’. The people henceforth demanded and practiced a technique stripped of its foreign characteristics.102

I have chosen this example from Fanon’s five case studies of dialectical movement away from Manicheanism because of its relevance to the AIDS issue, which stands, in its monumental catastrophe and well developed resistance, as a great lesson. Mandisa Mbali argues103 that Mbeki correctly identifies racist attitudes in some Western discourse around AIDS but then makes the mistake of rejecting the entire discourse as nothing but racism. We can make a similar argument with regard to Mbeki’s correct apprehension of the pharmaceutical industry’s ruthless pursuit of profit and his mistaken rejection of the technologies over which it has seized control. Moreover we can contrast Mbeki’s failure with the women that make up the backbone of the Treatment Action Campaign’s largest branch which is in Khayalitsha. They have taken on both the struggle for access to treatment that began in mostly wealthy and white gay communities in New York and San Francisco and some of the most up-to-date knowledge on anti-retoviral therapy and work closely with the progressive doctors, Western and African, of the Medecins Sans Frontieres clinic in Khayalitsha. Both the struggle and the medical knowledge needed to wage it are firmly rooted in their life-world. There are isiXhosa songs about people who have died, people who have been saved and the struggles and technologies that have saved them. Fanon concludes his article on colonialism and medicine with the comment that “The people who take their destiny into their own hands assimilate the most modern forms of technology at an extraordinary rate.”104 And here is the dialectical movement achieved by the TAC – the technologies of a capitalism that has generally objectified and impoverished Africa are absorbed into an African life-world to serve the interests of people on who’s land, labour and communities capitalism has been so violently parasitic. But the critical point about dialectical overcoming is that it must be permanently worked for in the vortex of the drama of lived experience. It is never achieved in permanence. As Raya Dunayavskaya explains in the context of Hegel’s thinking of the dialectic:

101 Fanon, 1965., p. 121 102 Ibid., p. 142. 103 Mandisa Mbali, Mbeki’s Denialism: A Critical Analysis, 2002, (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs) 104 Fanon, 1965., p. 145.

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Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape it by mere faith.105

So when solidarities, local or transnational, do achieve a useful degree of mutuality - integration in Biko’s terms - it can never be assumed that this is permanent. Mutualities - grounded in the lived experience of struggles and not the postmodern fetish of recognition - must be constantly worked for. The movement towards mutuality has to be a permanent mode of being. There is no permanent initiation into mutuality through some transcendent (due, ironically, to its pure immanence!) event106 like a jol or a clash with the police. The weight of democracy and the dance of being

Walking we ask questions.107 - Sub-Commandante Insurgente Marcos

In this final section I want to make some brief remarks about the question of who engages with resource, knowledge and cultural capital carrying ‘global’ movements, and progressive donors and their local agents, and under what responsibilities. The Manicheanism of Empire Vs The Multitude has no resources for making sense of power relations within movements. This has two common results. One is the masking of classed, raced and gendered power differences within movements that results in a failure to take these up (which exactly mirrors the liberal will to ignorance attacked by Biko), that then results in their reinforcement. The other is a self-imposed, disabling and unhelpful reluctance by more privileged people to act or an equally disabling permanent suspicion from sideways, or much less often, from below. However Fanon provides a more useful framework for thinking about this. In opposition to both the Leninist idea that a vanguard party should lead the people and the cult of

105 Cited in Nigel Gibson’s new Preface to ‘Black Consciousness 1977-1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa’ Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 18, p.4. http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs 106 Accounts of such transcendent moments in which hierarchies appear to be temporarily overcome include Pravasan Pillay & Richard Pithouse’s account of the march on the World Conferences Against Racism ‘We Makkin’ Histri’ We Are Everywhere (Verso: London, 2003), pp. 398-408 and naidoo & veriava’s accounts of the protest at the Urban Futures conference at Wits in 2000 (pp. 2-3) and the internationalism at the Independent Media Centre at the WSSD (pp.56-57). These events are important and transformative and often have positive long term consequences. But the point is that, as with any carnival, we may have learnt some things and changed in ways we haven’t properly understood and which will only reveal themselves to us in the future, but we go back to ordinary life. No experience, of collective joy or suffering, ever gives us permanent absolution from the commitment to work against all the structural inequalities (and the plural matters) within social zones that aspire to rebel. 107 Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos Our Word is Our Weapon (Seven Stories Press: New York, 2001, p. 267.) Elsewhere Marcos insists that “Speaking and listening is how true men and women learn to walk.” (Ibid: 76.)

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spontaneity he argues that radical intellectuals and militants should seek to develop a “whole universe of resistances”108 by joining

the people in the fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is here that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transformed with light.109

So for Fanon liberatory praxis is constructed in the open ended social space that Gibson describes as “the unstable, critical, and creative moment of negativity and transcendence”.110 Fanon makes two points about this unstable space that are particularly important for this discussion. The first is that the intellectual must begin from an appreciation of her estrangement. Here he echoes Antonio Gramsci’s view that:

The philosophy of praxis in consciousness full of contradictions in which the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an entire social group, not merely grasps the contradictions but posits himself as an element of the contradictions and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore action.111

But Fanon is clear that the intellectual must neither legislate for the people or be a ‘yes-man’ for the people. He is serious about mutually transformative dialogue and learning.112 We must also be clear that this insistence on dialogue and hostility to vanguardism, overt or covert, does not mean that radical intellectuals or middle class militants are unwelcome interlopers in movements. On the contrary, they often bring hugely valuable capacities with regard to knowledge, resources, networking and advocacy for movements in elite publics. This is not necessarily co-opting or predatory. In fact it can be essential and widely enabling political work. As James noted “It is on colonial peoples without means of counter-publicity that imperialism practices its basest arts.”113 In our enthusiasm to generate or defend our much delayed May ’68114 against the 108 Fanon, 1976., p. 93. 109 Ibid., 182. 110 Nigel Gibson ‘Beyond manicheanism: dialectics in the though of Frantz Fanon’ Journal of Political Ideologies Vol. 4, No. 3, 1999, p. 340. 111 Ibid., p. 359. 112 And this is no uselessly utopian fantasy. Consider, for example, the origins of the R10 Campaign discussed in Dwyer 2004, p. 13. The campaign, which began in Mpumalanga township and then became a CCF and then a national campaign, sought a R10 flat rate for basic serves. Movement intellectuals had wanted to take a position for free services but there was a popular demand for a campaign that, contrary to left orthodoxy, expressed a willingness to make some monetary contribution but insisted that the amount be viable. The R10 campaign emerged out of the consequent dialogue. The spirit of a high point of the campaign, a large and very militant march on the services payment office in Durban, is well captured in Heinrich Bohmke’s film The R10 Campaign. 113 James, 1989 p. 294.

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totalising categories of the Stalinist left we must not collapse into the counter pathology of what Sekyi-Otu calls the postmodern ‘fetish of the micro-local’. This fetish renders impossible both the translation between struggles and the work to find and communicate the universal in the particular115 and to continually renegotiate what is considered universal in dialogue with subaltern particularities.116 Ashwin Desai’s exemplary work has shown that this is a project that can fruitfully be taken on117. Without this project there is no chance of a developing a truly global movement of movements118 and so we need to take this advance seriously – We are the Poors is our intellectual ’68. Moreover while any assumption of a right to leadership – via position or charisma and from above or below - is deeply problematic, it is a long standing reality that “The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system that they are attacking.”119 The point is simply that these capacities must be deployed within and in constant dialogue with the movements that 114 Manifested on the streets in Durban outside the World Conference Against Racism and in Jo’burg outside the World Summit on Sustainable Development. 115 For example naidoo & veriava explain that “the way that the comrades arrested from the SECC for marching on Masondo became the ‘Kensington 87’ was through a conscious choice made by comrades producing the media to reappropriate the tradition which developed under apartheid to name political prisoners.” p. 36. Of course the anti-apartheid tradition of speaking in this way was taken from an English political tradition which may well have roots elsewhere. But the point is that speaking a transnational language of struggle enables the development of vital solidarities which produce things like bail funds. When this language is in dialogue with the more spontaneous and popular languages of struggle it is enabling. When it is imposed on modes of lived struggle it is always disabling in the medium term. 116 Ato Sekyi-Otu cautions, against the anti-politics of postmodernism, that “It may well be that what is ideological in our present circumstances is not at all the question of human universals but rather the idea of absolute difference according to which such discourses as those of democracy, human rights, feminism, and class struggles are so many occidental relativities masquerading as human commonalities.” Of course this does not mean an uncritical acceptance that what is presented as universal is indeed so. On the contrary: “what is our political situation? An omnivorous capital that requires repressive local political agencies to discipline their populace into acquiescing to its draconian measures; a free market of material and cultural commodities whose necessary condition of existence is the authoritarian state; the incoherent nationalism of dominant elites who are in reality transmitters and enforcers of capital’s coercive universals: this is our historic situation. Under the circumstances, we are faced not with a choice between universalism and particularism but rather with the task of wresting both an authentic democratic universalism and an equally authentic democratic nativism from the collusion of transnational capitalist dictatorship and local privilege.” Fanon and the Dialectic of Experience (Harvard University Press: Harvard, 1996), p. 20 – 21. (emphasis mine) 117 Shereen Essof and Daniel Moshenberg’s Masiphumele: Making the Ordinary Endure in the Outskirts of Cape Town (2004, unpublished sessof@humanities.uct.ac.za) is another encouraging step forward. 118 And building this is not the same as asserting it. Peter Dwyer’s (2004) sobering in-depth interview based research project on the CCF shows that while the movement’s press releases, slogans, t-shirts, banners and so on were often clearly aimed at inserting it into the international anti-capitalist movements there is “little evidence beyond the city based participants and a handful of prominent activists in affiliate groups… (that ordinary participants) clearly understand what this referred too.” p. 20. Later he adds that “save for practically all of the city based participants and some of the prominent participants from affiliate groups it would be wrong to suggest that many of the participants in the CCF strongly recognise and identify with…(the) ‘new wave’ of protests or struggles in other parts of Africa and elsewhere.” p. 28. But none of this means that political education and transformative experiences can’t develop these solidarities. On the contrary. Dwyer also cites an interviewee who “talks excitedly of how [at the WSSD] ‘I met people, comrades from Africa, DRC, Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, we share experiences.” p. 29. 119 James, Ibid.,, p. 17.

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nourish the insurgence of subaltern agency. Self-righteous agonising about privilege is self indulgent. It is the projects to which one dedicates it that matter. The second point is the necessity for political education. Fanon recommends “a subjective attitude in organized contradiction with reality”120 because this is necessary to facilitate the development of liberatory ideology in dialogue between intellectuals, militants and the broader base of social movements that can

counteract both the hollow rhetoric of both the nationalist middle class and the romanticising, and potentially retrograde, nativist ideology, with its appeal to traditions. The problem of a lack of liberatory ideology is expressed in the failure to convert the openings created by mass movements into a moment of change – a genuine revolutionary moment.121

As Gibson explains, the political education project has to battle both vanguardism and the elitism that assumes that the excluded are only capable of a counter brutality against domination. Consciousness has to be enlightened as a permanently ongoing dialogical project “that encourages the people to reflect on their own experiences, to think for themselves”.122 The Education Rights Project123 is an excellent example of a South African social movement linked project that undertakes this kind of work seriously and against the still common, although thankfully declining, fetish of pure spontaneity. The common suspicion of organisation amongst South African social movements is well understood as a positive reaction to our history of authoritarian politics and the production of co-optable leaders. And in the here and now it is still the case that our often stultifyingly formal meeting culture124 can act as a break on the will to rebel and to reflect which is unable to provide the best forum for the enabling of the articulation of experience, charisma, courage, insight, having fun125 and, above all, taking action.

120 Fanon, 1976., p. 53 121 Ibid., p. 357. 122 Ibid., p. 357. For a classic discussion of dialogical process see Freire, 1996. pp. 106-164. 123 http://www.erp.org.za It seems that the APF has done better than many other movements in this regard. See naidoo & veriava p. 36. 124 Meetings can be very alienating and can also be covertly authoritarian. We should also bear in mind that in some circumstances less structured forms of interaction can, in practice, be more democratic than meetings. For example, as Ahmed Veriava and Trevor Ngwane’s comments in this volume show, degrees of antagonism can be collectively determined in the toyi-toyi by the pace of the dance and the choice of songs. But these facts don’t absolve us of the duty to take up democratic modes of organisation as there is no other way to negotiate broader solidarities and consequent questions of strategy, representation, resource allocation and so on without collapsing into vanguardism. 125 Dwyer notes that the CCF activists he interviewed all highlighted “how being in the CCF was an enjoyable and creative experience. Several older participants contrasted the fun of involvement with the CCF with dour moments and long-winded speeches that they felt characterised their previous political experiences in the ANC, SACP and labour and student movements.” p. 26. This is a central legacy of the CCF moment which endures in the praxis of some of the community organisations that were affiliated to the CCF but not, unfortunately, in the new movement networking forum the ESF.

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Formal meetings are hardly the forum for “that reckless physical bravery the makes men follow a leader in the most forlorn causes.”126 And, as Zizek notes,

in a truly radical political act, the opposition between a ‘crazy’ destructive gesture and a strategic decision breaks down. This is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts…to…gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to risk everything for it, inclusive of our lives, but, more precisely, that only such an ‘impossible gesture’ of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of what is strategically possible within a given historical constellation.127

But none of these facts mean that it is not possible to seriously take forward political education without sub-ordinating all of political life to the meeting or commitments to a particular organisation or set of organisations. Different organisational structures are appropriate for different projects and moments in the unfolding dialectic of resistance as action and reflection. It is also true that, as emerged in Dangor’s workshop report referred to above, it is often the case that ‘ordinary’ grass roots participants in movements are far more ideologically conservative (in orthodox left terms) than militants and movement intellectuals.128 This means that a practice of mutually transformative dialogue may slow down ideologically movement. But going slower with more people is far better than rushing ahead without a base. Indeed “It is force that counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses. Always, but particularly at the moment of struggle a leader must think of his own masses. It is what they think that matters”.129 As James noted with regard to the French revolution “Without the masses the radical democrats were just voices.”130 There is no doubt that many and perhaps most radical intellectuals and middle class militants act with exemplary democratic commitments in the absence of movement structures that can produce and sustain dialogical interaction. But there are also instances in which new hierarchies emerge and there are instances in which these are directly linked to deeply problematic and sometimes racialised and gendered networks of patronage.131 (Most commonly the middle class activist channels resources to one or two 126 James, 1989, 250. 127 Slavoj Zizek Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequence (Routledge: New York, 2004), pp. 204-205. We must also remember Sun Tzu’s observation that “In general, in battles one engages with the orthodox and gains victory through the unorthodox.” Art of War (Westview Press: Boulder, 1994) p.148. 128 The will to deny this is interesting and demands serious reflection. When there was a brief clash with the police outside the World Conference Against Racism almost every one of the people who desired to fight had more than one degree. Yet written accounts almost universally ascribe this desire to ‘the Mpumalangans’ and while many revel in the panicked opposition to the will to confrontation from middle-class NGO and Trotskyite people none see fit to mention the disinterest of the LPM people seated nearby. 129 James., 286. 130 Ibid., 75. 131 Sun Tzu warns that “When the weapons have grown dull and spirits depressed, when our strength has been expended and resources consumed, then the feudal lords will take advantage of our exhaustion to

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docile grass roots activists in exchange for political credibility which in turn is exchanged for access to prestige, travel, money etc.) Moreover many movements have suffered deeply disabling splits and suspicions about the access to, and use of, various resources flowing from new opportunities emerging from Northern money and power. Many of the participants at the workshop held to discuss this paper expressed very serious concerns about these issues. The solution may well be for any access to resources, cultural capital, travel, networks etc offered in the name of movements to be determined, rigorously, in the context of democratic decision making and accountability rather than through unaccountable elite networks within uneven democratic commitments. And a permanent project of political education is necessary to expand the pool of people who are in a position to usefully attend meetings and so on. Amongst many other challenges this requires a serious facing up to the dominance of English in spaces of intellectual influence within movements.132 But, again, the need for formal structures for democratic decision making and accountability in certain key areas does not imply that all politics should be subordinated to the meeting. In our struggles for integration with transnational movements and movement forums we need, as in all our struggles, the hardness of strategy and the softness of story; the cool of reflection and the warmth of action; the drizzle of the meeting and the storm of the event. Let seeds be planted, and their coming to life be nurtured, in a thousand soils.

arise. Even though you have wise generals, they will not be able to achieve a good result.” (1994:173) Although I can cite no empirically evidence to substantiate this claim it is my feeling that it is in the periods of lull, during which cultural capital often continues to flows in as word of a movement’s previous achievements spreads out, in which there is the greatest danger of the rise of struggle entrepreneurs (trading in financial and cultural capital) who evoke the language of previous struggle while acting, via the entrenchment of ossifying and alienating hierarchies and the signs of old struggles, to contain contemporary struggles and restrict the emergence of new struggles. If this is true it may be linked in important ways to Alain Badiou’s insight that “A political situation is always singular; it is never repeated. Therefore political writings – directives or commands – are justified inasmuch as they inscribe not a repetition but, on the contrary, the unrepeatable, When the content of a political statement is a repetition the statement is rhetorical and empty. It does not form part of thinking. On this basis one can distinguish between true political activists and politicians…True political activists think a singular situation; politicians do not think.” (emphasis original) 2003, p. 82. 132 It seems that the APF has made important progress in this regard. See naidoo & veriava p. 36.