[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Ashwin's Wolpe lecture

[Patrick Bond]

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.



The front page of the Sunday Times, July 9 2006, records that “Black 
economic empowerment deals created most of South Africa’s 5 880 new 
dollar millionaires last year”. This figure is almost three times the 
global rate of increase. We are now fourth in producing dollar 
millionaires behind South Korea, India and Russia.

Almost all the names mentioned: Smuts Ngonyama, Mohammed Valli Moosa, 
Popo Molefe, Cheryl Carolus, Manne Dipico and Patrice Motsepe are 
politically connected to the ruling party. The speed in which they are 
making money inspires incredulity. “Mining tycoon Mzi Khumalo is one of 
those who benefited early and is said to have made R1-billion in a 
single deal as early as 2002. Motsepe, a former mining contractor, has 
made almost as much in about 10 years as Pick ‘n Pay Group chairman 
Raymond Ackerman has made in about 40 years.”

Tastes are reflected in these changes. The importer of Porsche told the 
Sunday Times that he is increasing the supply of Porches from 250 to 400 
owing mostly to black executive demand. The Aston Martin dealership has, 
since January, sold 40 cars. The prices range from R1.5 to R3.5 million. 
12 of the 40 buyers were Black.

The world of the emancipated rich is portrayed as a succession of highly 
active deal-makers, raking in money as a form of racial redress, and 
then showing off what can be consumed with the fast, imported cars this 
wealth can buy.

But it is not the driving habits, nor the vehicles of the business class 
that I am going to focus on in this paper. There are other elites who 
live in as conspicuous and parasitic a relationship to the constituency 
they represent.

The following week in the Sunday Times, the newspaper focused on 
poverty, albeit on page 5. Eleven million of the poor subsist on tiny 
social grants. The level of misery in rural and urban shacklands is 
devastating. Although the article was sympathetic to their plight, the 
poor were still portrayed as living no-hope lives, evincing no agency of 
their own. Nothing was said about how the poor are organizing, the 
demands they are making and how they are collectively confronting the 
system that humiliates and degrades them. There was, in particular, no 
mention of the various social movements that have sprung up or the sheer 
number of service delivery protests that have taken place these last few 
years; one for every new dollar millionaire. There was certainly no 
investigation into the mode of transport members of social movements used.

Perhaps that was a good thing, for I fear what might have emerged had 
the journalist looked too closely into who presumed to be driving these 
movements around, in the vans, autos and kombis I will talk about a 
little later.

In creating a capital friendly environment, the promise this government 
holds out is that business will create jobs and general prosperity. So, 
the poor are asked to suffer some short-term pain for long-term gain. 
However, notions of social citizenship predicated on access to the 
labour-market have failed miserably throughout the global South. All 
that has happened is that a small business class has accumulated 
fabulous wealth while, in a fine calculus that uses as its base the 
insignificant income transfers given to Blacks under apartheid, the 
democratic state now “progressively” rolls out slightly less trifling 
social grants that are just improvement enough to ward off mass social 
discontent.

This brings me to the subject of social movements. 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.

The epitome of this mode of thinking is the facile axiom that the poor 
somehow are an embodiment of the truth and, as long as they organise 
democratically, the line of march they take will advance the cause of 
freedom. As a corollary to this mistaken view, criticisms of existing 
social movements from outside is cast as arrogant, reckless, reactionary 
and, even, racist. In this regard, we have seen fairly gentle 
questionings around patriarchal attitudes in social movements responded 
to in near hysterical terms with labels, “white, middle-class, 
northerner” being used to put down the heresy that the poor are only 
human .

No. We do each other no favours by flattery dressed up as theory. For, 
we are all much more compromised than we like to think and we should at 
least be clear about that among ourselves. Movements are much more 
precarious and turning a blind eye to their faults is dangerous and 
patronizing all at once. I think here of the concept of recuperation. 
This, following Henri Lefebvre, is when

“an idea or a project regarded as irredeemably revolutionary or 
subversive - that is to say, on the point of introducing a discontinuity 
- is normalized, reintegrated into the existing order, and even revives 
it. Shaken for a brief moment, the social relations of production and 
reproduction - that is to say, domination - are reinforced…The fact that 
a project or concept has been ‘recuperated’ does not mean that it was 
not potentially active for a period of time. It means that ‘people’ (the 
opponents of the established order or disorder) did not know how, or 
were not able, to seize the opportunity, the favourable conjuncture, and 
carry out the project.” (2005, pp. 105-106)

Lefebvre then goes on: “First point: what can be recuperated is not, by 
the same token, recuperative. Second point, which must be stressed: 
there is nothing-no proposal, no project, no idea-which cannot be 
recuperated, that is to say, used by different social or political 
forces from those in whose name it was advanced.” (2005, 106).

So in the present conjuncture, the first thing we need to note is that 
every single existing social movement is right now, right here, 
perfectly recuperable. It is simply nonsense to talk them up as the next 
revolutionary subject. There will not even be talk of “betrayal” should 
a government minister come, with cheque-book in hand, and make an offer 
handsome enough to relocate mjondolo residents to Verulam.

The much trumpeted “right to live in the city” is no principled, 
ideological commitment. Nor does it have to be. But we have to realize 
and respect that the core demand of many social movements is indeed 
simply to be placed within “normal” relations of oppression and 
exploitation: in a normal job, in an RDP house with minimum standards of 
electricity and water. We might have reasons to tell other people 
otherwise (although, I can’t see what these reasons are) but we ought 
not to mislead ourselves. And we should not use the poor to satisfy our 
peculiar (intellectual) fetishes.

Second, there is a warning that there is no movement, no set of ideas 
that can never be recuperated, hi-jacked and made to serve the interests 
of the few, of an elite. We have seen how an increase in Black 
millionaires and the fancy cars they drive is represented as a sign of 
the success of the anti-apartheid struggle. We also have those in our 
midst who plainly want power for themselves to serve their own 
inclinations and needs. So, those of you here who have built an 
incredible movement of the Poors need to find ways in which that cannot 
happen.

This brings me to another feature of those who purport to help community 
movements. There is a tiny but impressive literature on the way in which 
social movements become dependent on funders, NGO’s, researchers, 
middle-class supporters and even legal representatives. What is almost 
never written up is the role that those who make these telling and 
necessary critiques come to play in movements precisely because of the 
trust they have purchased by denouncing others like them. It’s an old 
trick. The white person who condemns racism the loudest and with the 
greatest zealousness, often succeeds in having his or her own racism go 
unchallenged. I certainly agree that it is necessary to decry 
vanguardism but there comes a point where denouncing outside influence 
or leadership is worse than vanguardism. It is just gate-keeping: 
vanguardism without ideology, without strategy. Nietzsche said that “the 
truth is who gets there first”. It seems that the evil vanguardists are, 
by definition, those who get there second.

I make the following comments in a constructive manner. I do not mean to 
attack or chastise any particular individuals. To some extent, we are 
all guilty of elements of the conduct I am about to describe and I would 
like what I say to be seen in the light of auto-critique. However, 
having said that, the time has come to very seriously warn about the 
individual intellectual who claims membership of the movement, but still 
operates above and beyond its purview in his or her dealings with other 
intellectuals or activists. In my own experience of this position these 
intellectuals are quite vociferous about democratic practice and 
denounce all those who claim in any way to represent the movements but 
who are not integrally part of them. However, they are quite happy to 
write academic papers analyzing the movements and their leaders in great 
detail, take international speaking engagements that centre around the 
community movements, and demonstrate their dominance over fellow 
intellectuals not by means of better arguments but with reference to 
what the poor really want or what is really good for them.

Strangely, when things in democratic spaces go against them, such 
academics are not immune to composing private caucuses and having 
one-on-one, I guess they would call it, “political-education sessions” 
with key leaders. Here the prestige they enjoy as academics gives them 
an unelected power many elected leaders of the movement could never 
dream of exercising over idea production. In all of this, there is a 
vast, bad-faith tale of monumental, hat-swopping to be told. When, in 
one role, disputes erupt on the e-mail with fellow middle-class 
activists or academics, they are content to assume the role of outside 
commentators while they ascribe a range of qualities to the movements 
that have obviously been subjected to no authorization by the movements 
themselves. However, as these disputes develop, they come to claim a far 
greater affiliation with the movements. To question the position they 
put or the (exaggerated) claims they make is presented as an attack on 
the organization itself. The problem here, comrades, is grave. It verges 
on thuggery.

All the while, these academics rail against vanguardism. And so, while 
berating people about the fact that community activists have no e-mail, 
they see no reason, for instance, to share information with community 
members. Although, this last statement is not entirely accurate. They do 
share those e-mails that cast their fellow academics and activists in a 
bad light with the leaders of social movements. This style of operation 
does not protect social movements. It pimps them. It passes gossip, 
megalomania and abuse off as politics and introduces people to the most 
degraded form of intellectual engagement. I should know. I’ve done it 
myself.

I gave a lift to a few community activists recently and asked them what 
they thought about the recent SACP critique of the ANC. They had never 
been given any information on this but were incredibly excited. It is a 
trend. I asked them (all in leadership) whether anyone in the academy 
had circulated the texts that inform the way they are written up by 
these academics, such as Biko’s “I Write What I Like”. This had not 
occurred. I find this strange. While the politics of the poor are 
celebrated as enunciating features of this great book, it seems that as 
far as the poor themselves go, for the academics it is a question of, 
“They will Read what I like”.

It is not as if these academics cannot muster intellectual support for 
their style of operation. One can find a verse in the Bible for 
anything. And their Bibles, command that the Poor embody the truth. 
Therefore the Poor must be kept in some kind of quarantine. Adorno’s 
admonition comes to mind: “In the end glorification of splendid 
underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system 
that makes them so”. As I have said above, this view occasions a massive 
romanticisation of the condition of wretchedness; not the economic 
position, but the existential one it supposedly produces. Reading over 
some of the newspaper writing on social movements that has recently been 
produced, I was struck by the lurid, almost loving evocation of the 
condition of wretchedness. It is impossible to miss the obvious pity 
that is openly evoked. And I began thinking about an interview with 
Faizal Devji, author of the Landscape of the Jihad, which, despite its 
faults, makes an interesting point about activists driven more by pity 
than political conviction or ambition:

“Pity can be dangerous, precisely because one is not personally involved 
in the suffering. One is acting, apparently, on behalf of others. You 
see this among leftist groups today, as well. It's vicarious, it's 
luxurious in a way, and luxuriant; it is also narcissistic. It is a very 
dangerous and bitter passion.”

Devji was criticizing suicide bombers, perhaps a bit unfairly, because 
at least they lay down their life in pity. But when one’s lavish praxis 
of pity advances your career, puts your name up in lights while you live 
and thrive, I lose all respect for this bitter, calculated passion.

The last aspect of the way in which these intellectuals operate that I 
am going to look at tonight is the way they ensure dominance through 
cultivating a couple of leaders. A subtle kind of patronage emerges in 
this relationship. A dependence. This relationship, of course, helps the 
leaders because they are then the conduits of transport, t-shirts and 
access to outside events. In this transaction it is never in the 
interests of the academics to universalize the crisis or have too wide 
dealings with other intellectuals for that might mean losing their 
‘control’ over their fiefdoms. And so, when tentacles of outside help 
and solidarity are put out by other formations, it is resented and 
slandered by them, and if it were up to these intellectuals, such 
contact would be cut-off. A consistent theme of their politics is to 
seek various justifications to keep the gates to their desperate Eden 
locked shut.

For years, I have been quoting Said, that the craft of the intellectual 
is critique. To talk truth to power. I am afraid, it is no longer enough 
to talk truth to power. One must also talk truth within the 
disempowered. There is simply too much at stake to do otherwise. 
Ironically, these intellectuals who have made a name for themselves in 
the academy from their articles on your movements are involved in an 
anti-intellectualism for they keep saying that the poor are only 
interested in their immediate interests. So, the poor must not worry 
themselves about broader issues. Vanguardism is married to a narrow form 
of autonomism, minus politics. I think Zizek was on to something when he 
held that those who refuse to universalize a particular experience or 
political argument, ultimately is involved in a “conservative political 
gesture: ultimately everyone can evoke his unique experience in order to 
justify his reprehensible acts.”

And so this idea for intellectuals from the academy to be so organically 
involved, while lauded in some quarters (often by themselves) I think 
requires much greater scrutiny. And I would really like to encourage you 
to debate this within your ranks just as I think, all of us, the 
so-called academics or city-people, should have a proper debate about 
the way we have related to you. You are more than welcome, if it were up 
to me, to participate in this debate. Come and research us. Come and 
observe how we operate on our terrain.

Some of the things we need to consider are structural. What role do the 
so-called city-people play? Is it not time that, to foster some 
accountabilities, we ourselves form a grouping? If not, what is our role 
in social movements while we pursue our plainly, self-interested 
academic careers that often have the ladder to success composed of your 
limbs. Should we compose an activist forum with explicit political ideas 
to which anyone, including those in community movements, can be joined 
if they like? Or, do we withdraw into a proper respectful, arm’s length 
resource and research role? What is this SMI that we are now supposedly 
all part of? If a KZN branch exists, is it open to participation only to 
those who have a mass behind them or is it a cty-wide co-ordinating 
committee? What is the status of political parties? And do we make 
certain strategic moves in reaching out to social forces such as Cosatu 
and the SACP that seem similarly discontent with neo-liberal rule? A lot 
of questions that we need to take seriously if our partnership is going 
to last.

To link up with the title of this paper, how do we keep from having our 
vans driven for us by vanguardists? How do we universalize our 
particular experiences without having our auto’s sabotaged from ever 
leaving our areas by some autonomists? And, how do we avoid our 
movements becoming populist kombi’s where anyone can jump in no matter 
their politics, for us to be taken as a passive mass to the next march? 
In other words, how do we find a vehicle which is responsive to our 
collective, principled, radical direction?

For, while I might have sounded critical of the movements of the poors 
that have arisen and skeptical of the motives and methods of those who 
have helped build them, I do recognize the enormous, potent energies 
sizzling within social movements and I tip my hat to those who have done 
the grinding, punishing work to get where we are. The movements of the 
poor in South Africa are indeed to be celebrated and praised. Not for 
being what they are not: embodiments of theoretical abstractions and 
fine-sounding phrases in sociological literature. No, the movements of 
the poor must be celebrated for being what they are: relatively small 
groupings of awakening antagonism in a sea of political apathy, 
nationalist ignorance and informal repression. Groupings that are 
imperfectly but honestly grappling with the difficulties of campaigning 
against the policies of an ANC run state. Led by people who must hold 
down poorly-paying jobs, or look after children, or care for those dying 
of Aids by day and, at night, feel their way through political 
minefields in meetings held in dangerous places, with insufficient 
information, all the while giving heart to others who secretly sometimes 
feel as vulnerable and unsure as they do. And this is not to speak of 
the lure of taking office or giving up, the stress of criticism and the 
risk of alienating those they need to keep on board the broader struggle.

The fact that you have built these durable, potent and inspiring 
organizations that everyone - from academics, to the readers of You and 
Drum magazines, to activists in other cities and countries, even to the 
Minister of Intelligence - is talking about is breathtaking. And the 
fact that this has been achieved even while you are not pure and have 
made mistakes and found your feet, makes your achievement all the more 
heroic than if you were somehow programmed by your class position to 
turn out good. Despite the misbehaviour, from time to time, of the 
activist set, you have also been incredibly generous in your dealings 
with us.

It works both ways and out of our interactions a new idea of a political 
community is emerging that has the capacity to do dramatic things in the 
present South African ideological landscape. In fact, the landless, the 
‘squatters’, those without basic services are potentially the thick end 
of the wedge that is being driven in our society at this moment by 
crime, riot and the Zuma Affair. To perhaps move to another stage, we 
must recognize that we have all been profoundly shaped by our 
interactions with each other and with activists and fellow comrades who 
have joined along the way and to blink or fixate on our own supposed 
“purity” right now will be tragic.

I believe we make quite a team, despite the problems that are emerging 
and must be dealt with now. Yes, there are many pitfalls to dodge and 
disagreements still to settle. And we must constantly re-evaluate the 
basis of our contact with each other. But, I don’t think anyone will 
disagree that the movements of the poor here in Durban and all those who 
have built them have quite literally shown the way.

Hopefully, those middle-class women and men who have troubled you so can 
meet the challenge of how to support movements of the Poor without 
becoming gatekeepers, vanguardists, losing the ability to be critical 
and using movements to advance our academic careers. We also need to 
understand how it is that, like it or not, we are a community. We need 
to find ways to engage with and communicate to you what we believe in 
our heart of hearts. This is that some of us consider ourselves part of 
another community that already involves you and which allows us to 
approach you as comrades not because we are mere helpers or resource 
people or because we feel sorry for you but because we desire you to win 
your demands as part of a broader fight for freedom. We need to tell you 
what we are about and where we think you are located in this fight. We 
have to give you the option to chase us away if you don’t identify with 
our world-view, with our agenda. We need to start respecting you in your 
you-ness enough to be us in our us-ness. But all of this can only occur, 
once we start dealing candidly with each other.

To those who may feel angry or wounded by this paper, I am sorry. But 
ideas and frustrations and angers like this have been brewing for a long 
time. The only responsible thing to do is to lance the boil, so that 
wounded relationships can be rebuilt on a healthy, principled basis. It 
is perhaps appropriate that I end with a quote from the oft-abused 
Frantz Fanon: “tradition demands that our quarrels which occur in a 
village be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism … with a 
note of humor, because everyone is relaxed, and because in the last 
resort we all want the same things”. Or do we?


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