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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