meetings, reliably showing up for marches,
and enthusiastically partaking in debates.
As Steven Friedman once admitted about
“struggle” politics before 1994:
Democratic politics was difficult:
despite romantic myths about
mass politics under apartheid,
the links between activists and
the people were often weak.
When an activist said they had
consulted “the people”, they
meant the layer of activists
below them.And this is basically how things have
continued until today – the assumption
that there are some multitudes
somewhere, waiting only to be mobilised.
The effect of the myth
today
As a result, we avoid any serious
questions on how we organise and on
what programme, when we think about
strategy. This does not happen consciously.
It happens because we have inherited a
political culture which generally has failed
in the task of seriously trying to win people
over. They are already assumed to be on
our side, and in need only of a nudge.
Even when we contemplate the
daunting question of how to unseat the
ANC from its command at the polls, we
buy into the over-simplified story told
about who continues to support it. In this
story, the ANC is the party of liberation
and weaponises that legacy to sustain
loyalty. Thus, we conclude, it is the ANC’s
national liberation hegemony which makes
it resilient. Therefore it is this ideology
that we must tap into (I have been guilty
of making something of this argument as
well, elsewhere).
And again, this falls into the
vanguardist trap (in the very broad way I
am conceiving of it). It assumes that the
masses lie in wait. All we need is just the
right campaign, or the right formation at
the helm, or the right charismatic leader
at the forefront, or the right general strike
called at the right time, or the right time to
raise a flag, etc etc.
And again, this is a mode that
emerges from a context where it wasn’t
as necessary for political forces to
organise. Ending apartheid was no easy
victory, but apartheid was easy to oppose.
In other words, its moral and political
reprehensibility was not a difficult case tomake for the majority. What was required
was the work of mobilisation, coordinating
protest and resistance, to destabilise the
system.Reality today
Our situation is different. Apartheid
made inequality so apparently unjust by
explicitly racialising it. That inequality now
appears naturalised under an economic
system which supposedly gives everybody
equal opportunity. And it reproduces itself
through the “dull compulsion of economic
relations” – the imperative to work and
survive. Most are resigned to their position
in the class structure because they see no
other option.
The work of organising is to persuade
that there are other options. To do this,
we must fully shed the baggage of the
anti-apartheid template. We need a
new emancipatory horizon. Yet this is
something we cannot conjure in the
abstract. It requires making the right start,
and earnestly going to the people.Will Shoki is the deputy editor of
Af rica Is A Country and a member of
the Amandla! editorial collective.In South Africa, vanguardism
is associated with the Stalinist
tendencies of the Alliance
Left and its bureaucratic-
authoritarian styles of
governance... But this has been
the default mode of organising
for all stripes of the South
African Left.Perspectives for the left