Amandla! Issue NO.84 13 OCTOBER 2022Similar dynamics played out elsewhere
in society. While seeking to envelop them
deeper within its own ranks, the ANC
demobilised the neighbourhood-based
networks that had been so effective
in rendering the apartheid system
ungovernable.
Then for a period it looked like the
contempt the ANC elite showed to its own
supporters might blow up in its face. The
late 1990s saw the rapid rise of so-called
new social movements (NSMs), which
took up a vigorous fight against the
neoliberalisation of social policy. These
became the focal point of a broader
“independent Left” forming outside the
Tripartite Alliance and attracted huge
excitement from activists and movement
scholars around the world. But by the late
noughties they were a spent force, virtually
all ceasing to exist or becoming NGOified.
Their failure again shows the limits
of mobilising divorced from organising.
With one very important exception, none
of the NSMs gave any adequate attention
to developing strong, constituency-
based structures led by organic leaders.
Their focus was on high visibility
demonstrations: “numbers over strength”,
quantity over quality of support. The tens
of thousands turned out to protest at the
Durban World Summit on Sustainable
Development in 2002 are often celebrated
as the apogee of the NSM era. But this time
the “Durban moment” changed nothing
whatsoever.
The reality was that deep organising
was made incredibly difficult by the
pervading hegemony of the ANC
Alliance. Most of the organic leaders in
the constituencies in which NSMs had
a presence already had a political home
in the ANC. They could be convinced to
engage in protests around service delivery
because such actions were and are seen
as an entirely legitimate means of putting
pressure within the “broad church” of the
Congress movement. But to convince them
to switch ultimate allegiance was another
matter. Pressing the point, and making
campaigns too overtly anti-ANC, riskedalienating supporters. Movements were
forced to fudge the politics while elevating
the issues, and this foreclosed strategies
focused on cadre building.
Moreover, the same factors that made
organising hard, made mobilising easier.
NSMs were able to call forth impressively
sized demonstrations without the prior
investment in deep organising, in large
part because organisational infrastructures
already existed. Civil society was still
relatively dense at the time NSMs got going,
a legacy of the scale of popular mobilisation
during apartheid’s end phase.A new vision
This experience – of large-scale mobilising
without organising – has entrenched an
analytic orientation on the Left which only
deepened the hyperfocus on mobilising. I’m
speaking here of a widespread, if generally
unspoken, belief that deep organising is
not necessary because it has already been
done. Owing to their heroic vanquishing of
apartheid, the South African masses are
politicised and radical.
In this context, the primary task ofthe Left is not to slowly expand its ranks by
reaching new people and patiently showing
them the value of collective action. It’s to
win the hearts and minds of the existing
radical populace, whose efforts to affect
change are straightjacketed by the illusions
they continue to harbour in the ANC.
For that objective, mobilising seems
more promising than organising. The latter
may bring to our banner a new workplace
or a new community here or there. But a
well-placed campaign - perhaps a national
shutdown - with the right
message at the right time,
might carve through the ANC’s
ideological defences and win us
an army.
Sadly, this view is
simply mistaken about the
political temperament of
the South African working
class. Undoubtedly, there are
strong cultures of resistance,
stemming from the liberation
struggle, that remain alive in
working class communities,
providing a rich vein into which
radicals might tap. And there
is tremendous discontent in
the population, bred by the
liberal order’s failure to change
material realities. But without
organisation these things
count for little. And the sad fact
is that left wing organisation
has been in continuous decline
for the last two decades. It’s the
populists and the pseudo-Left
that are capitalising most effectively on
social discontent.
The effects of the mobilising
approach have mirrored those in the US.
Activity on the Left gets confined to an
ever-shrinking pool of hardcore activists
and their dedicated supporters, who turn
up to protest after protest, rally after rally,
with no lasting gains ever achieved.
To break out of this cycle we need
to change tack and make constituency-
based organising once again the bedrock
of our power strategy. Instead of devoting
all our energies to wildly overambitious
demonstrations that threaten no one and
only reveal our own weaknesses, we need
a strategy for reconstructing movements
from the ground up. Protests, strikes,
even the occasional shutdown, will still
play an integral part in this. But they
need to be woven into a vision of building
strength through deep support in core
constituencies.Niall Reddy is is a PhD candidate at
NYU Sociology.13The tens of thousands turned out to protest at the Durban
World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 are
often celebrated as the apogee of the NSM era. But this time
the “Durban moment” changed nothing whatsoever.Amandla! Issue NO.84 OCTOBER 2022Perspectives for the left