[lbo-talk] Critique of SA NGOs

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Aug 1 06:37:34 PDT 2006


Vans, Autos, Kombis and the Drivers of Social Movements

by Ashwin Desai

Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture

Centre for Civil Society

International Convention Centre, Durban, Hall 1B

Friday 28 July, 5:45-7pm

This paper is a contribution in an on-going debate in Durban concerning

the nature of left, radical politics in this city and the orientation of

but the latest crop of social movements that has, since 1998, taken root

here. It happens in the context of wall-to-wall (and somewhat dubious)

coverage of these social movements in the academic literature and fairly

intense debate and even contestation within an activist and social

movement leadership community about the political meanings to be

attached to particular social movements. Specifically, the modus

operandi of those most responsible for shaping the representations and

receptions of these movements within a broader South African activist

community and in the wider academic literature is analysed. However, the

critique put forward is deliberately general, to enable both a

constructive and non-defensive debate on these issues, as well as to

describe a general phenomenon that plays itself out all over this

country and, I would venture, in many other parts of the world too.

While I urge a complete rethink in the way left academics presently

relate to - and sometimes impose themselves on - grass-roots

organisations, I write this paper much more in a spirit of

self-criticism than as polemic against them. .... Much of this mass

social discontent, potentially on a revolutionary line of flight pointed

beyond this political economy, is mobilized by the many community

organizations we have seen being born. Scattered, slightly dislocated

and with varying understandings of the reasons they are still

marginalised after uhuru, these social movements are nevertheless

extremely militant and well rooted within poor communities.

Ironically, the most visible of these movements are known not because of

their militant interventions but because they have attracted to them

supporters from a largely middle-class background who have broadly

left-wing political commitments. In a phrase, they have attracted

'activists' who seek to come in from the bitter cold of the

post-apartheid struggle landscape to the new fires that are burning in

communities. These activists bring a range of important skills,

perspectives and, most of all, resources to assist in the development,

representation and generalization of these struggles. Celebratory

academic papers are produced, books and newspaper articles are written,

court cases fought, money for busses, meetings, rallies and T-shirts

raised.

Unfortunately, these activists also bring with them certain infectious

political diseases. Sometimes they are out to recruit members for their

ultra-left sect or political party. Other times, as NGO workers who need

to justify their existence, they insert themselves into struggles that

may be written up in the next funding proposal. Still other times, one

finds ambitious academics keen to distinguish themselves by getting the

inside research track on some or other exotic rebellion, whose nuances

they are best placed to enlighten there fellows in the academy about,

while ratcheting up publication kudos. And, then lastly, one has the

somewhat dated, free-floating, professional revolutionaries who

genuinely believe they have something to add to these struggles or, more

accurately, that these struggles have something to add to the course of

the battles they are already fighting. You see them attending marches,

doing political education, writing letters and articles in the press or

providing strategic advice to movements that often need assistance on

the legal, logistical or financial fronts.

It is hard to think of any social movement that has lasted longer than

six-months in South Africa that does not have quite an impressive

support crew made up of the kinds of people I have just described. It is

quite startling, then, that while social movements have been studied to

death, those outsiders who play such a powerful role have largely

escaped serious scrutiny. But, before we look more closely at the role

of these struggle-magi who come from outside affected communities

bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, let us first consider why indeed

they are thought of as being on the outside in the first place.

Unlike the anti-apartheid struggle to which people from varying

backgrounds became committed as much for ideological reasons as for

reasons rooted in their own experiences of oppression, most members of

social movements are said to be mobilized predominantly by their

experiences of deprivation. Yes, ideology is wrapped up in taking on

struggles for everyday survival. And yes, ideology certainly breeds and

develops as these struggles unfold. However, even after months of

collective struggle, the over-arching qualification for comradeship

based on a commitment to a set of society-wide ideas (such as

non-racialism, democracy or revolution) is not the glue that sticks one

comrade to another in social movements. It is rather a commitment to a

set of particular demands and a commitment to an organizational identity

created to achieve them. Legitimate, public and democratic interactions

between all of us in social movements, certainly in Durban in my

experience, centre around the achievement of these demands and the

building of the organizations and leaders deemed necessary to do so.

Put differently, the basis for our communion is to demand delivery or

oppose policy. In this process, a comrade is a comrade mainly because he

or she is a fellow "resident" who shares our immediate goals and

inhabits our organisation. However, we lack a latter day substitute for

the term "revolutionary" to describe affinities and principles of desire

and consciousness that go beyond these horizons and attach to people and

groups with whom we share capacities for subversion not defined by a

reaction to specific government policies. Until we find such a language

and such a politics, those people who are not directly affected by water

cut-offs or slum-clearance for instance (or indeed our water cut-offs

and our slum-clearances) - are by the very constitution and imagination

of social movements - necessarily, outsiders.

As a consequence of the way social movements are imagined, we have not

developed a grammar of power that those outside social movements can use

to talk to those within. Nor do those inside have a way of coming to

grips with the ways of outside activists or with other social movements

beyond them. Indeed, the crudeness of the distinction between "insiders"

and "outsiders" is created by the absence of words and ideas describing

levels of action, experience and thought where insiders and outsiders

act as one, or where the roles are reversed. We end up using then a

rough sign language to communicate what we expect the other wants to see

in us. Outsiders are cooperative, sympathetic and resourceful. Insiders,

charismatic, wise and strong. Leaders from other communities are

respectful, friendly and efficient at bringing a kombi or two of

support. This has been a very useful vocabulary up until now. But, for

either outsiders or insiders to understand, evaluate, debate and

generate ideas or meanings beyond the tactical exigencies of the moment

is rare in this language.

There are those who say that this is as it should be. I agree with them

to the extent that the imposition of tired left dogmas and

understandings of power are no good. But, there is a distinct difference

between mobilizing against the state according to stale, pre-determined

programs and the task of provoking, contesting, enabling and generating

a collective, universalising ideology of community that increasingly

separates itself from the logic and reach of the state. I think here of

the difference between movements that are able to make "stealing" water

or "invading" land part of their everyday praxis or discourses as

opposed to decrying lack of delivery.

This is not to say that ideological ascriptions and strategic programs

do not attach themselves to social movements. They do. But it is very

seldom a self - or - collectively fashioned event. Perhaps by the

default of the insiders, this task of fashioning political meanings that

flow from struggles has largely been taken up by the outsiders. It is

this "outsider" grouping, who most furiously contest what particular

social movements mean ideologically, technically, even cynically, among

themselves. These battles sometimes play themselves out on the bodies

and campaigns of social movements as various academics try to position

social movements to best achieve their vision. At the same time, social

movements are incessantly studied and analysed so that factual support

for particular theoretical claims academics have made about them can,

like any easy victory, be piously claimed.

This can become ethically quite complex and, in certain extreme cases,

treacherous. At this very conference, we have had papers presented where

the statements of named comrades made in the privileged environment of

recent social movement caucuses have been deconstructed as signifying

this or that new turn in their politics. I have my doubts about the

substance of this reasoning but, even were it to be valid and

interesting, there is something galling about information garnered by an

academic while posing as a comrade being used to demonstrate a point in

an abstruse sociology paper about the level of development of his fellow

activists. Please understand, this is not a quibble of sociological

ethics but one of political morality and comradeship. It is a random

crowd at a conference that is being taken into such a researcher's

confidence about what he really thinks about the politics and ideas of

people who are under the impression that he is their comrade, when they

themselves are simply not treated with the same level of sincerity or

depth of engagement.

The time has now come to ask. While we outside academics are researching

the practices and analyzing the politics of the poor, who is researching

us, the researchers? Surely, we must continue to develop our ideas about

society and struggle but why always circulate these ideas in a separate

world from those who inspire us and about whom we write. This behaviour

is expected from those who claim only to be researchers and nothing

else, who are up-front with their questionnaires. But it rankles when

more grandiose claims of membership of these movements are made.

And what exactly is it okay to write about? Is it not patronizing to

presume to label the politics of those we consort with in struggle in

academic texts but not to engage them in an exchange of ideas over these

same issues? What are our rules of engagement with communities who some

of us are quite literally feeding off, in a world undeclared to them? I

do not mean to single out a particular example of this practice unfairly

by asking this question, because this mode of conduct is widespread and

few academics are exempt from criticism. But, what it does reveal is a

general truism that is alarming. The actual constituency to which even

the most radical academics are beholden are not the poors. Nor is it the

singular middle-class. Rather it is the mass of them gathered in

conferences, journals, e-mail lists, universities and other sites of the

production of bourgeois knowledge.

And since there can be very little benefit to community movements to be

gleaned from such detailed and personal disclosures when weighed against

the existential bad-faith of this gesture and the embarrassment it could

occasion, one has to start thinking about setting some boundaries for

the permanent scrutiny of one class of comrades by another caste of

them. This constant note-taking and reflection on those one joins in

struggle cannot be healthy. It is one thing telling truth to power,

colleagues. It is another thing altogether letting out secrets and

trespassing on the dignity of those who let you into their space as a

fellow traveller, not biographer. I am sorry to say this but this mode

of knowledge production from private, semi-clandestine and comradely

spaces, for no agreed nor identifiable benefit to social movements, is

only a few notches better than spying.

But the most alarming feature of the current, general academic mode of

reporting on social movements is that it is often so overblown,

romanticized and, in many cases, just plain made up. It is actually

difficult to read what is said about certain social movements with a

straight face and one sometimes gets the impression that they are

written up especially to serve as substantiation for discombobulated

chunks of whichever new theorist it is chic to corroborate. We all

inflate numbers to tell the press about the size of our marches. But

when we begin believing our own propaganda, a dangerous precipice

awaits. It is a cliff over which many greater revolutionary subjects

than social movements have lurched. At the bottom of this cliff lie the

battered bodies of organizations and individuals who simply could not

live up to the promises made on their behalf.

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