From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at sn.apc.org> To: <debate at sunsite.wits.ac.za>
After the March on the Left by Franco Barchiesi . Saturday August 31, 2002 at 07:01 PM <f_barchiesi at yahoo.com>
Critical comments on today's march
AFTER THE MARCH ON THE LEFT Franco Barchiesi
We at Indymedia South Africa had announced in a previous comment that today' s march on the WSSD would have been also a "march on the left". With that expression we meant that it was time for the new social movements to express the qualitatively new "biopolitical" nature of their struggle in terms of refusal not only of the identity and mystique of "national liberation", but also of the leadership practices of a left that has historically tended to reproduce subordination and discursive expropriation of the movements' grassroots subjectivity.
There was a glimpse, a sudden and volatile moment in today's march when I thought we were close to our objective of "marching on the left". We were already in Sandton, and the Convention Centre was in sight. At a certain point I saw the Leaders of the movement quickly jump off the truck from where they had until then directed the operations and disciplined the demonstration. They ran on top of the march and at the same time Anna Weekes made me notice that there was a frantic run in the same direction by a group of young comrades. Shouts of "down with the marshals" were heard. Anna and I had the same thought: "Fuck! They want to break the cops' line".
It was just a moment, then order and discipline were restored, but when the march was concluded by the Leaders' final speeches many of us retained the ominous thought that the Leaders' main concern at that point was that some could have funny ideas about breaking the "Red Zone". That can explain why many of their speeches replicated the very emptiness, rhetorical ritualism and mechanical repetitiveness that we have so often denounced as one of the most insidious disempowering devices that the Left has always used vis-à-vis its own grassroots. The best definition of the demonstration based on its conclusion was provided by an American comrade: "domesticated".
The ritualism and conventionality of the Leaders' speeches (together with the banality of the slogans suggested from the bloody truck) is what has ultimately produced the political outcome of the demonstrations in terms that can unequivocally be defined as an appalling failure. And this time not even media coverage rescues us. Of course the political failure contrasted with the success of the march in terms of numerical turnout, which was indeed quite significant. But precisely in this contradiction between numerical success and political failure lies the biggest problem emphasised by the march. Numbers in demos like this can mean two rather different things. They can indicate a mass, made of distinct individual or group identities whose unity is artificially produced through the mediation of a specialised leadership that is the repository of a general ideological discourse as the lowest common denominator. Or it can indicate a multitude, where the distinctiveness of autonomous singularities is engaged in trying to identify a commonality of themes and aims from below, without this leading to a higher form of political synthesis that obliterates singularities themselves.
The political outcome of today's demo goes towards the first of the two directions outlined here. And it is a very problematic outcome inasmuch it reiterates the self-construction and self-representation of the current movement's leadership as a separate political apparatus located in the control of organisational dynamics. This separation of the apparatus was particularly evident when the ANC tried its incredible provocation of sending Essop Pahad (one of the most sinister faces of the Mbeki regime, the former Stalinist chief eliminator of any form of dissent to the ANC during "the struggle") on the stage. I doubt that there was no one who wanted to jump on the stage at that time to kick that asshole down. Whatever the peoples' feelings might have been, however, it was Virginia Setshedi's kind invitation to "comrade Pahad" to step down that prevented more dramatic outcomes. And down he stepped, maintaining the affable and deriding smile that he has kept on his face for the whole duration of the appearance. Power always recognises itself, and it was precisely the self-recognition of Power on the two sides of the barricade, and the liturgical mediation thereof, that made such a humiliation of the movement possible.
I have already mentioned the trite rhetoric in the leaders' speeches. True, that rhetoric has not prevented them to denounce the "Mbeki regime" and the "ANC government", themes that, however, for long have not been taboos at the grassroots. However, the forms in which that denunciation was made sounded terribly empty, and were usually played on Power's discursive field, in terms of Power's own contradictions ("remember why we have voted you", "go back to the Freedom Charter", and so on). In no ways those interventions were able to grasp the quite radical interrogation and critique of power that comes from the movements' own daily practices. These practices are based on forms of community self-management, construction of grassroots discourse, direct action in ways that are so rich, plural and diversified to be totally at odds with the hierarchical organisational practices of the traditional Left from which the Leaders come. And, in fact, it is not by chance that the APF represents de facto only a minority of urban social movements in South Africa today, mainly around Jo'burg (in spite of their boasting fictitious "affiliations" in Durban and Cape Town).
What is completely missed at the leadership level is that the critique of Power that the new social movements in South Africa represent is radically different from what the post-colonial state form has experienced so far, where such a critique has usually been expressed as a rejection of the 'inter-class' or 'non-class' content of national liberation. What is going on here and now is rather a constituent process of grassroots subjectivities that question the very validity of unifying identities (be they called "class", "party", "union") as the form of expression of common desires. This is simply because these forms of representation and delegation, quite effective when the stake of conflict is State Power, simply no longer work when the stake becomes immediate reappropriation of life, which is as radical and subversive as the constraints imposed by the market and the commodity form are tight and is, especially, unavailable to mediate, to be channelled, represented, predictable.
This is not just a matter of theorising. The current separation of the Leadership and its ghostly ideological discourse from the multifarious processes of subjectivity construction in today's movements in South Africa creates a void in the definition of the movements' discourse. And unless that is filled by interventions aimed at defining a commonality of themes around a prospect of anti-capitalist liberation, the void becomes a space where any sort of exclusivist, sectarian, reactionary closed identities flourish. An urgent problem from this point of view is, for example, the proliferation of Islamic fundamentalists at our marches, an issue that was already contentious last year in Durban and became quite visible today as well. While the entrenchment of such reactionary crap is a problem from the point of view of defining a multitude's commonality, it is not a problem for a leadership for which 3.000 islamists, independently from the contents they bring, are still valuable to swell numbers and add to the higher glory of the Leaders.
Last year in Durban these problems were dealt with also in the form of a direct contestation of the Leaders of the Left (the silencing of Sangoco, the dreadful Trotskyite marshals sent with their butts on the ground). It was especially for this reason that many of use have thought of the Durban demo as a "constituent moment" for the movements' subjectivity. Today we have made a step back from that moment, maybe the problem is with big marches, which cannot replace a necessary daily work of, as we have written on our IMC T-shirts, "DISOBEDIENCE, DEFECTION, BETRAYAL".