<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2912" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV> 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.</DIV> <DIV>....</DIV> <DIV>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. </DIV></BODY></HTML>