[lbo-talk] Critique of SA NGOs

[James Heartfield]

 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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