working class civil society

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Sun Nov 14 20:33:58 PST 1999


On 14 Nov 99, at 8:55, Russell Grinker wrote:
> It's not just the incoherence of it - the point I was making is that you
> have the tendency to discover MOVEMENTS when there are none...

No, more precisely, the tendency is to discover militant particularisms, as Raymond Williams and David Harvey put it, and to seek movements from these, even when right now there are few or none. It's called alliance building; without it, the left is nothing.
>From here we can agree to disagree. Go on then, my comrade and
beer-drinking mate, back to your fox-hunting friends and trashing of the Narmada social movements; what alliances LM seeks is something I'll never comprehend.

This week's alliance-building in Jo'burg, by the way, is against the triple targets of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (Africa's largest public works project, corrupt, ecologically-fucked and unnecessary if we could get whitey in Jhb to stop watering gardens and swimming pools), the iGoli 2002 Jhb privatisation programme, and Third World debt. The target: the World Bank office in Pretoria...

(Comrade Ismael, now don't go telling your colleagues in advance, ok?!)



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