Richard Pithouse
In the ‘70s and ‘80s the idea of praxis was often taken seriously in the
process of building the organisations, movements and unions that undertook the
work of developing the counter-power of the oppressed. Praxis was often
understood as more than just the idea that effective political work required
reflection on action, and action guided by reflection. It was also an idea with
democratic and ethical dimensions.
As a
democratic ideal praxis based conceptions of political commitment tended to
reject the idea, common to both the militarism of the armed struggle in exile,
and the fantasies of revolutionary omnipotence present in the both the
Communist Party and some small socialist sects, that effective political action
was, fundamentally, a matter of imposing the right discipline on the oppressed.
In authoritarian modes of radical politics nationalism, which can take the form
of popular and democratic politics, was often presented as a project predicated
on obedience, conformity and control. And in both Stalinist and some Trotskyist
forms of politics there was a conflation between the realm of the political as,
in Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’, and the realm of
science. When the political is misconceived in this manner authoritarianism is
inevitable. When the people come to be understood as ‘the masses’, a tool to be
appropriated and wielded by an enlightened elite, democratic forms of popular
militancy are likely to be received as a deviation from the true path.
In contrast to authoritarian modes of politics praxis based conceptions
of political militancy often took the form of some degree of an immediate
affirmation of the capacity of everyone to participate in the work of both
reflection and action. There was often a strategic dimension to this commitment
in so far as it was understood that building democratic forms of popular
politics would offer some insurance against the bureaucratisation of organised
resistance and the possibility of, as had happened everywhere from Algeria to Zimbabwe in the postcolonial world,
authoritarian forms of rule after apartheid. But there was also often an
ethical dimension to praxis based modes of politics.
In the 70s Paulo Freire was, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the
thinkers taken seriously by the new forms of militancy that emerged in the
intersection between universities and community and worker struggles and
enabled the development of both the black consciousness movement and the new
trade union movement. For Freire:
Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly. This conversion is so radical as not to allow of ambiguous behaviour. To affirm this commitment but to consider oneself the proprietor of revolutionary wisdom - which must then be given to (or imposed on) the people -- is to retain the old ways. The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived.
In Frantz Fanon, a thinker who was an important precursor to Freire’s
work, there is a similar ethical commitment to the idea that the starting point
of what Fanon, in his original formulations in French often described as
praxis, requires mutual respect. In a comment on his work as a doctor Fanon
wrote that:
Examining this seventy three year old farm woman, whose mind was never strong and who is now far gone in dementia, I am suddenly aware of the collapse of the antennae with which I touch and through which I am touched. The fact that I adopt a language suitable to dementia, to feeble-mindedness; the fact that I "talk down "to this poor woman of seventy-three; the fact that I condescend to her in my quest for a diagnosis, are the stigmata of a dereliction in my relations with other. What an idealist, people will say. Not at all: It is just that the others are scum.
State repression and the various kinds of popular violence that came to
characterise the second half of the 1980s frequently made it difficult to
sustain the slow and careful work of democratic organising. Popular politics
itself became increasingly invested in a militaristic and, at times, millennial
symbolic order. After apartheid the ANC, drawing on a repertoire of
authoritarian ideas, steadily turned the party into an effective system of top
down control. This, together with a liberal consensus that sought to reduce the
idea of democracy to various kinds of representation – voting and the
substitution of debates in a resolutely exclusionary public sphere and NGO
based civil society for popular participation – put paid to the idea that the
people would govern themselves. This was compounded by the technocratic
fantasies, also predicated on the illusion that science can replace the
political, that were attractive to both the ANC and the liberal consensus.
After apartheid donors have overwhelmingly chosen to support modes of
political engagement that are organised through NGOs in which middle class
actors assume for themselves the right to enlighten, control and direct
impoverished people. This has, with important exceptions, often taken the form
of what Freire called ‘manipulation’, ‘prescription’ and other elements of ‘the
praxis of domination’. In many instances this has been acutely racialized with
the result that putatively progressive spaces are in fact spaces of racialized
domination. These spaces have also been subject to gendered modes of domination and are, of course, always classed. In this world a person’s standing as an
activist is frequently derived from their access to donor money, their standing
in institutions and their prominence in the elite public sphere rather than any
sort of mandate from oppressed people or any sort of success in supporting or
engaging actually existing practices of the self-organisation of the oppressed.
In fact sustained ongoing failure to organise or win any kind of meaningful
popular support is often no barrier at all to organisational and personal
success.
The practices in these spaces are often systemically ineffective in
terms of their stated goals but functional for sustaining NGO power. In some
cases they are not only ineffective in terms of their stated goals but are also
seriously damaging to actually existing forms of organisation among the
oppressed. It is, for instance, entirely unhelpful when people who are not
members of a grassroots organisation are bought into NGO meetings and presented
as members of that organisation. It is also unhelpful when NGOs seek to gain
influence over popular struggles and organisations by offering employment to
individuals within those struggles and organisations. This invariably leads to
either the rapid decline of those struggles and organisations or to acute
internal conflict. It is equally unhelpful when NGOs implicitly construct
oppressed people as ignorant and seek to educate them, often in languages that
they don’t confidently possess and in spaces which they can’t easily access and
in which they don’t feel fully at home, in a manner that is not genuinely
dialogical and takes no serious account of their own lived experience of
oppression and resistance.
There have been a number of cases where NGOs, across the political
spectrum and acting in a manner that is not entirely dissimilar to that of the
ruling party and the state, have actively sought to delegitimate popular
struggles and organisations that they have not been able to control. This has
frequently taken the form of recourse to the standard set of prejudices that
fester in elite society against people who are poor and black. There have been
cases where an acutely racialized expression of the sort of inevitably toxic
recourse to conspiracy theory and character assassination typical of small
sectarian organisations has made its way into the heart of donor backed
progressive respectability.
There is an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. It
is diverse, dynamic and unstable and of course it carries within it elements
that are both potentially emancipatory and reactionary. Nonetheless this degree
of popular dissent – long organised and expressed outside of liberal frameworks
and increasingly also organised and expressed at a distance from the ruling
party – provides fertile ground for building popular organisations. But with
important exceptions the vast bulk of the money and energies channelled through
the NGO left in recent years has failed, often completely, to support any kind
of effective movement building process.
In a moment in which the state is becoming increasingly predatory, the army is back on the streets, torture and murder are being used as forms of political control, millions of people have no viable route into a dignified and fruitful life and there is an active attempt to build new ideologies to divide the oppressed and sustain consent for oppression full measure needs to be taken of what works, and what doesn’t. We know from our own history, and from the sustained mobilisations in places like Haiti, Bolivia and Venezuela in recent years, that modes of militancy that begin from the recognition of the political capacities of the oppressed, and are firmly in the hands of the oppressed, are vastly more effective than bussing people into another NGO meeting over which they have no control. Praxis, emancipatory praxis, is one of a number of useful ideas, ideas that can only be realised in practice, that can help to equip us for the challenges ahead.
A shorter version of this piece was first published by
SACSIS.
