[DEBATE] : Re: SA social movement crisis?

[Dominic Tweedie]

All right, Patrick, thanks for that.

I suppose there are "short and unsustained protests that (do) not lead to
mass democractic organisation", and that one can tag these as "IMF riots"
for convenience' sake. Fine.

But if that is all that is going on then it is not enormously useful.

Because what one is looking for is a tactical way of combining, at local
level, the very diverse and somewhat short-lived (but not completely
ephemeral) mass defensive structures, on the one hand, with the solid ranks
of the organised working class on the other.

I think one can be sure that there are no human populations that are bereft
of organisation and that organic intellectual leadership in the Gramscian
sense is pervasive. The problem is the great difference between these
variegated background forms of organisation, as opposed to the modern,
socialised, relatively uniform and stable, class-conscious structures of the
working class.

One could design pro-forma structures in the imagination but in practice
each locality would and does require, more necessarily and more critically,
tactical attention to individual personalities and to historic
specificities. The strategic goal is easy to see, but the tactical detail is
both complex and voluminous and presently rather inscrutable.

The accurate construction of a dynamic record of these organic-intellectual
agencies and local historic specificities across the country looks like an
enormous work. Yet it is easily within the collaborative capabilities of the
Internet.

Best wishes,

Dominic.


-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org]On Behalf Of Patrick Bond
Sent: 31 December 2006 09:43 AM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: SA social movement crisis?

Dominic Tweedie wrote:
> You know that SANCO is in dire straights.
I think the definitive critique is by Elke Zuern, on the CCS website.
But I dropped out of Sanco in 1997 (after working in the president's