Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> The whole story is important beyond SA. As revolutionary movements go,
> they don't come much better than the ANC - in the real world, at
> least. Yet while the transition resulted in an end to apartheid, SA is
> in many ways a more unequal and violent place today than it was before
> 1994. Figuring out how that happened seems really important.
Let's put it in a larger context. Measured by their professed (and I think usually or always 'sincerely' professed) motives, ALL the revolutions, and in fact ALL the mass movments, of the 20th-century failed at some point in their arc. (Or push it back a decade or so and begin with the populist movment and the struggle for the 8-hour day.) The advantage of this larger context is that it heads off voluntrarrist history. That is, a focus on any one movement all too often degenerates into "criticism," i.e. into an argument that all would have gone well were it not for this or that particular mistake or 'treason' by the leadership, etc.
I have, at this point, nothing to add to this; I'm merely urging that the question not be cast in terms of correct or incorrect practice/theory.
Carrol