Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014
Richard Pithouse
Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential
practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective
emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It
is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to
ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it
on as an individual obligation.
An Element of the Contradiction
It is not unusual for academics in popular struggles, or
linked to popular struggles, to fail to take full measure of the political
weight of their own location. One of the common reasons for this is that
academic engagement with popular struggles is often mediated through NGOs, or
NGO like formations in the university. Contemporary liberal ideology presents
NGO based ‘civil society’ as a democratic and representative space when it is
plainly not. In fact civil society is often an acutely raced and entirely
undemocratic space that has a far less credible claim to representivity than,
say, the African National Congress which, despite all its flaws, is elected.
Nonetheless despite the often striking degree to which civil society is a space
of (often raced) elite power the ideology that presents civil society as, by
definition, enlightened and representative is often strong enough, and
sufficiently normalised, to inhibit the development of a sufficiently critical
attitude to the NGO form. Academics are also often seduced by fantasies,
sometimes acutely narcissistic and driven by a will to their own power, that
enable the academic to imagine him or herself as part of an enlightened
vanguard - be it socialist, feminist, anarchist, autonomist or nationalist -
that has an a priori right to lead, and in some instances, to dominate others
in the name of their own emancipation. When this fantasy is materially
sustained via privileged access to donor funding rather than popular consent it
frequently reinscribes what Jacques Rancière describes as the ‘stultification’
that is consequence to any situation where “one intelligence is subordinated to
another”. It can become an instance of the sort of domination that Paulo Freire
describes as “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing’, regimentation, and
prescription”. In South Africa it can take the form of a set of practices in
which, to borrow a phrase from Steve Biko, there is the sort of “stratification
that makes whites perpetual teachers and blacks perpetual pupils”.
In South Africa it has not been unusual for academics who
have allowed themselves to succumb to the fantasy that they are a uniquely
enlightened vanguard to, consciously or not, seek to delegitimate or even ruin
what they cannot rule in order to protect their own hubris against reality.
Slander and gossip, often mobilising both colonial tropes and those used by a
repressive state (and of course the two frequently intersect), have been
deployed from within the academy against both grassroots activists and organisations
as tools to police access to the political. This can be an entirely unconscious
process but it can also take the form of a deliberate exercise of power.
It is essential that, as Antonio Gramsci puts it, “the
philosopher …. not only grasps the contradictions, but posits himself (sic) as
an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of
knowledge and therefore action”.
Performance & Politics
Reflexivity is an essential precondition for political action
that is effective, and that remains effective on a sustained basis. However the
performance of reflexivity is not, on its own, the same thing as effective
political commitment in action. The performance of reflexivity can, at times,
take a narcissistic form that offers little in the way of political utility.
There are cases where the performance of reflexivity by privileged actors, like
academics, functions, consciously or not, to operate in a manner that
implicitly shows the academic, to be vastly more thoughtful, ethical and so on than
the subjects of her or his research or putative solidarity. In some cases this functions to deny what
Frantz Fanon calls “the open door of every consciousness” and reinscribes the
ontological order that sustains oppressive social relations. This is always
classed and it can also be raced and gendered. There are also ways of
performing reflexivity that, by positing the idea that different social
locations are linked to unbridgeable ontological differences, disable the
prospects for effective political action as a result of their inability to
imagine or understand what Kristin Ross, in her remarkable book on May ’68,
calls “unforeseen alliances and synchronicities between social sectors”,
encounters that can be fraught but can also be warm, respectful and joyful, and
which are so often present in both formally organised social movements and what
Raúl Zibech calls societies in movement.
The A Priori Attitude
Academics who are participants in popular struggles need to
be reflexive with regard to both their academic work and their political work.
In his first published essay, The North African Syndrome, Fanon examined how
French science, medical science, approached the North African migrant with “an
a priori attitude” that, crucially, is not derived “experimentally” but,
rather, “on the basis of an oral tradition”. He observed that: “The North
African does not come with a substratum common to his (sic) race, but on a
foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African,
spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing on the scene, enters into a
pre-existing framework”.
Today struggles organised by the urban poor, and in
particular struggles by people who have been raced, are often, via implicit
recourse to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms “an ontology, an implicit organization
of the world and its inhabitants”, subject to forms of representation, including
in the academy, that are mediated via an a priori attitude.
In contemporary South Africa the political agency of the
urban poor is frequently read in terms of external conspiracy, criminality or
some sort of intersection between ignorance and thuggery across a range of
sites of elite power. It is an undeniable fact that the left in the academy and
in NGOs has often reinscribed this. This phenomenon is not unique to South
Africa. Peter Hallward has pointed to a very similar experience in Haiti and
Raúl Zibechi has done the same with regard to Latin America.
In The Dignity of Resistance, an account of women’s
activism in public housing in Chicago, Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall offer
some useful thoughts on the politics of representation. They note that it is
widely presumed that “low-income people, and especially public housing
residents, are incapable of forming and participating in active, productive
communities”. Writing against this consensus they argue that it is particularly
important for academics to pay attention to two modes of agency: “ongoing
efforts of everyday resistance in the expanded private sphere [i.e. from home
to community] and the extension of these efforts into transgressive resistance
in the public sphere”. In other words it is necessary for the scholar to be
simultaneously attentive to both what Ranajit Guha calls the “politics of the
people”, a subaltern sphere of political thought and action, as well as to
Rancière's sustained demonstration that people move between their allocated
spaces and that moments of mass political insubordination are frequently
characterised by a disregard for allocated places, for métier.
Interdependence & Reciprocity
Feldman and Small also stress that their approach, which they
describe as feminist action research, is with and for people rather than on
people. The resonance with the Abahlali baseMjondolo slogans ‘talk to us, not
for us’ and ‘think with us, not for us’ is clear. For Feldman and Small the
critical aspect of this is what they, citing Stephen Small, describe as “the
interdependence between the researcher and those researched”. Both the process
of translating subaltern knowledge and experience into the academy and the
translation of academic knowledge into popular intellectual spaces are grounded
in this interdependence. What Gramsci called the philosophy of praxis is
complex terrain but at its heart, ethically and epistemologically, is the idea
of reciprocity – pithily summed up by Gramsci as follows: “every teacher is
always a pupil and every pupil a teacher”.
What Feldman and Small don’t discuss is the reality that the
personal outcomes from participation in this sort of interdependent
intellectual work are, in most but not all cases, very different for the person
located in the academy and the person who begins this process from within an
oppressed community. In the almost ten years since Abahlali baseMjondolo was
formed, many of the people who, in their twenties or early thirties, founded
and built the movement are dead. Others have succumbed to addiction, depression
and, as a result of sustained repression, paranoia. My involvement in the
movement has had certain costs and has subjected me to certain risks but I have
a job, a rewarding job in which I am respected, that enables me to provide for
my child’s material needs and to enjoy an openness to the future.
The ethical weight of this reality has to be taken on with
the utmost seriousness. At the heart of that seriousness has to be a
commitment, a serious commitment, a practical and effective commitment, to
justice and to the attainment of justice via a process in which the dignity and
agency of the oppressed is central. In Playing with Fire Richar Nagar adds a
crucial point, ethical rather than narrowly epistemological in its import, to
the discussion about the interdependence of some kinds of knowledge production.
She insists that: “Theory of collaboration is generated as praxis; that is,
what matters in this intellectual and political journey is not just
theory-as-product but also the activity of knowledge production, especially as
a site for negotiating difference and power”.
In my own experience it is very difficult for academics to
attain this sort of reciprocity when they engage a poor people’s movement or
struggles via an external organisation with its own agenda. This is not just
true of academic projects set up and managed outside of the control of popular
struggles. While there are some NGOs in South Africa that think deeply about
praxis, and have engaged popular struggles in a respectful and enabling manner,
as comrades rather than bosses, it is more common for NGOs to seek to
manipulate and control movements rather than to engage them on the basis of
equality. NGOs have often conflated themselves with the demos via the
profoundly undemocratic (and frequently raced) idea that conflates NGOs with
civil society and civil society with the people as a whole. In South Africa it
is also the case that would-be Leninist vanguards sometimes have a base in
donor funded NGOs. This can enable them to exercise real power over popular
movements and struggles with donor rather than popular consent. Grassroots
activists and organisations that have chosen to keep their autonomy from both
liberal and socialist NGO networks have often been subject to unconscionable
slander, sometimes acutely raced and often complicit with the discourses
mobilised by a repressive state, from within these networks.
I have been struck by the extraordinary resonance that
Hallward’s important account of the exercise of NGO power in Haiti has with the
South African experience. He shows that in Haiti NGO power is frequently
racialised: “the provision of white enlightened charity to destitute and allegedly
‘superstitious’ blacks is part and parcel of an all too familiar neo-colonial
pattern”. He also notes that left NGOs tend not to “organize with and among the
people …. In the places and on the terms where the people are strong” but
prefer “trivial made-for-media demonstrations …usually attend by tiny groups of
30 or 40 people”.
Importantly Hallward’s critique extends beyond NGOs and includes the
small political organisation Batay Ouvriye, a tiny political organisation that
is, “like any number of neo-Trotskyite sects …. militant and inconsequential in
equal measure”, but has nonetheless been prominent on the international left
and which produced slander against popular forms of political mobilisation in
Haiti as virulent as anything produced by the right. Again there are some
striking resonances with the South African experience.
For Fanon, the vocation of the militant intellectual is to be
present in the real movements that abolish the present state of things—to be
present in the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell”, in the
“seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge” and, there,
to “collaborate on the physical plane”. He is clear that the university-trained
intellectual must avoid both the inability to “carry on a two-sided
discussion,” to engage in genuine dialogue, and its obverse, becoming “a sort
of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the people”. Against this,
he recommends “the inclusion of the intellectual in the upward surge of the
masses” with a view toward achieving “a mutual current of enlightenment and
enrichment”.
Dogmatic ideas about politics – whatever they are, anarchism
can be every bit as disabling as Trotskyism – can also be a real barrier to
attaining ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’. Fanon warns
against the modes of militancy that aim to “erect a framework around the people
that follows an a priori schedule” and intellectuals that “come down into the
common paths of real life” with formulas that are “sterile in the extreme”.
There is a fundamental difference between engaging in
dialogue with people involved in a struggle on the basis of an investment in theoretical
abstractions developed outside of the situation inhabited by the people in that
struggle and doing so on the basis of a good understanding of that situation
and in fidelity to the actually existing people that must make their lives and struggles within that situation. Developing an adequate understanding of that situation
requires sustained presence and very careful listening. But solidarity does not
only require that, as Paulo Freire insists, “one enter into the situation of
those with whom one is in solidarity”. It also requires that situation to be
the primary site for intellectual work. It must be here, and not in the
academy, that the value of political ideas is determined in so far as they relate to that situation.
Diverse Modes of Academic Solidarity
Attempts to theorise the role of the university trained
intellectual in a popular struggle tend to assume that the work of the
university trained intellectual should be primarily intellectual and, in some
cases, largely theoretical. In fact, as most of the post-grad students that
have come to work with (or on) Abahlali baseMjondolo over the years have
discovered the work that they have been asked to do is often largely practical
– e.g. to drive to a settlement in which there is a crisis after the taxis have
stopped running, or, before smart phones became a common presence in shack
life, to take photographs – and that when it does have an intellectual
dimension, such as taking down an affidavit, providing a clear summary of a
policy document or an academic paper written on the movement, it is often not
work that requires overtly theoretical engagement. This kind of work is also not,
at all, about giving leadership to a movement. On the contrary it is generally
a mode of labour that is largely technical in character and that is carried out under
the direction of the movement's elected structures.
Sometimes it is useful to have people around who count for
more than others in the economy - classed, raced, gendered and increasingly
ethnicised too - of how people are valued in South Africa. In Durban it might
be useful, for instance, to have a white or Indian voice phone the fire brigade
if there is a shack fire. Sometimes it is useful to have someone around who is
an outsider not implicated in dynamics internal to a movement – visiting
students and academics have often been asked to count the votes in elections
held within Abahlali baseMjondolo. It might also be useful to have someone with
an American accent phone a police station and say that they are from a
university in the US and are concerned about the well-being of a person being
detained in the police station. Of course it might be equally useful, or
considerably more useful, to have a member of the movement who works as a
cleaner in that police station give regular reports on what is happening inside
the station and, perhaps, to carry information to and from someone in the holding cells.
Discussion of issues of importance within a movement does not
necessarily require the kind of learning that one gains from a university. None
of the key political concepts that emerged in Abahlali baseMjondolo – ‘a
politics of the poor’, ‘living politics’, ‘shack intellectuals’, ‘the
University of Abahlali baseMjondolo’ etc. were developed by a university
trained intellectual. Moreover people in a movement like Abahlali baseMjondolo draw on a rich array of sometimes intersecting experiences - churches, trade unions, the anti-apartheid struggle, associational life in rural communities etc - to frame and structure discussions. For instance the camps, all night meetings, that the movement has used as a space for discussing matters of importance in the context of embodied forms of solidarity are drawn from the churches. But there certainly have been many instances where
university trained intellectuals have made important contributions to various
kinds of discussions within the movement. However it is important to stress
that they have done so in the movement’s own spaces, spaces where it is strong,
and on its terms and at its invitation. Busing grassroots activists into a
university for ‘political education’, a common and inevitably dismal practice in
South Africa, creates a fundamentally different pedagogical and political
context to the mode of engagement that Abahlali baseMjondolo has always
insisted on, a situation where university trained intellectuals participate in
the movement’s own spaces, at its invitation and, although sometimes via
translation, in the languages best understood by its members.
The White Agitator
My historical research on the enduring presence of the urban
land occupation as a site of politics, and the occupier as a subject of politics,
in Durban has allowed me to understand that from the 1870s to the current
moment there has been a constant and overwhelming tendency for various elites
to ascribe the struggles for access to urban space and power by black people to
white agency. This trope that ascribes black dissent to white agency spanned
the whole colonial world - Trouillot gives a good account of its ideological
function in the context of the Haitian Revolution. Recent comments about the
role of ‘outside agitators’ in the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri and the
fascination with the ‘white widow’ on the part of the British media indicates
that it is not only in South Africa that this colonial trope endures into the
present.
In South Africa this ideology has retained its power to silence
and denigrate popular black political agency through the colonial and apartheid
periods, and it is actively exploited in the current conjuncture by actors
ranging from the state to the authoritarian left (nationalist and socialist)
that has long operated in the nexus between the academy and NGOs and, now has a
presence in parliamentary politics too. It is usually presented in terms of the
malevolence of the imagined white agitator but it can also be presented in
terms of the perceived moral nobility of the actually existing white activist.
In both cases this takes the form of a fantasy that functions to deny the
agency, and capacity for an ethical orientation towards the world, of people
who are poor and black.
I have always thought it important to acknowledge that I am a
participant rather than just an observer in Abahlali baseMjondolo. But I have
generally avoided foregrounding my own participation in Abahlali baseMjondolo,
or other popular organisations and moments of struggle – even in the face of
considerable provocation from various sources. I have, for instance, been
subject to all kinds of slander including being identified as an agent of a
foreign power by the state. A range of actors have ascribed all kinds of
decisions taken and positions adopted by various grassroots militants and
organisations to myself when in fact I have had no role at all in taking these
decisions and adopting these positions. In some cases I have supported these
decisions and positions, in others I have not.
When I have made interventions in the academy or in the elite
public sphere I have generally preferred to try and write (or speak) in a way
that seeks to illuminate the agency of people who are not assumed to have a
right to presence in the agora, people whose appearance in the agora is read
as, to borrow a useful phrase from Lewis Gordon, fundamentally illicit.
Moreover I have generally preferred not to perform my own reflexivity about my
own praxis in a context in which there is a systemic a priori denial in a range
of elite publics with regard to the capacity of people who are poor and black
to engage in careful ethical reflection.
Of course my own agency must be as liable to critical
scrutiny as that of any other actor. I am not averse to publicly discussing my
own praxis, and reflecting critically on it. But I do not wish to do so in a
way that foregrounds my own agency, and capacity for strategic and ethical
reflexivity, in a manner that, implicitly or explicitly, functions to
reinscribe the systemic denial of the agency and capacities of others. With
that caveat I would like to respond more concretely to the invitation to make
some comments about my own praxis.
Remarks on Praxis
The three university trained intellectuals who first engaged
Abahlali baseMjondolo, myself, then Fazel Khan and Raj Patel, and then a little
later on David Ntseng and Richard Ballard, were all clear that we would work in
such a way that the movement could, at any point, choose not to work with us.
In fact where possible we actively worked to make ourselves redundant. With the
exception of a couple of unfortunate but always brief encounters with activists
who arrived in Durban assuming, quite possibly on the back of a long history of
colonial ideas about Africa, that their role would be to lead and educate most
of the university trained intellectuals that have engaged the movement since
then done have done so on a similar basis.
The first point that I wish to make about my own choices is
that, for many years now - and predating my engagement with the struggle out of which Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged, I have not, as a matter of conscious choice,
participated in any formal or informal attempts to exercise power over movements that are constituted outside of a movement’s own structures. In other
words the movement’s own meetings, and processes, are the only site in which I participate
in any attempt to make decisions about or related to the movement. This means
that I do not engage movements from within any location in an NGO, the sort of
academic project that takes on some of the features of an NGO, or another
political organisation or informally constituted network. It also means that I never act for a
movement, or in relation to a movement, outside of its structures without a
clear mandate from it. This includes requests to participate in discussions
like this one.
I have also ensured that, contrary to the usual arrangements,
I play no role in mediating access to money. It is common practice for donors
to relate to popular organisations via a middle class intermediary – and this
is often acutely racialised. Such people, whether operating independently or
via a position in an NGO or academic project, often have considerable control
over financial resources and are therefore able to access forms of power that
are not democratic. I refuse to play this role. Abahlali baseMjondolo (which
has always had far less money than is widely assumed) raises its own money,
makes its own decisions about how to use its money and makes its own annual
reports to its funders. I do not participate in these activities. When
requested to do so I have been willing to make introductions but once these are
made I step aside.
The movement has always sought to be honest in both its
internal and external communications. But this does not mean that it is not
sometimes necessary to think carefully about how to best communicate a complex
and dynamic context that may not be familiar to external allies of the
movement. For instance the risk of political violence at the hands of a local
party structure may be perfectly obvious to the movement’s members. But it may
be far from obvious for someone in, say, a legal NGO in Johannesburg or a
church in Berlin. When asked to do so I have, particularly in moments of
crisis, been willing to participating in strategizing within the movement about
how to best communicate with its allies but not in a way that positions myself
in a mediating role.
I have also been happy to make introductions to people like
lawyers, journalists and so on but I do not mediate these relationships in
order to ensure that there is no dependency. Once the connection is made I step
aside. When approached by NGOs, journalists, churches or other middle class
activists who want to engage the movement in some way I will always refer them
to the relevant structure in the organisation. Where ever possible I refer
invitations to myself to participate in the elite public sphere to elected or
otherwise mandated representatives of the movement. Where this is not possible
I do not accept such invitations without a mandate from the movement. In most
cases that mandate would include some discussion about what needs to be
achieved from the engagement. Depending on the circumstances this can range
from a long and careful discussion at a general meeting of the movement to a
phone call with one of its (elected) leaders.
It has been important for the university trained
intellectuals that have worked with the movement to ensure that, while
technical support has been offered with regard to some of the means of
communication (i.e. a website and email list), and while university trained
intellectuals have often (although not always) participated in the processes by
which the movement develops its press statements and other accounts of its
positions, the movement itself always retains full control over the production
and distribution of these statements. When there has been participation in
these processes by university trained intellectuals it has always been at the
invitation of the movement.
I have also avoided any situation in which I would be paid to
do political work. I have sought to have an income that is not dependent on my
political work. Of course my political work has fundamentally shaped both my
approach to teaching and research in the academy but my position in the academy
is not dependent on my political work. I have always made sure that I stay up
to date in at least one field that is independent of my political work so that
my livelihood in the academy is not dependent on that work.
I have also refused to mediate my political work through the
‘community engagement’ programme at the university where I work. This means
that I am solely accountable for my political actions to the political
organisations with which I work and that if these organisations were to choose
not to work with me my obligations to my own family would not tempt me to contest
this. It also means that I can withdraw from involvement in an organisation, or
engagement with a political organisation, if I feel that its politics have
become problematic.
I only attend meetings when invited to do so, always listen
far more than I speak and generally don’t speak unless I am asked to do so. I
have contributed to all kinds of practical work undertaken within Abahlali
baseMjondolo and I have participated in its own intellectual practices. There
have been instances, and many of them over the last nine years, where my
academic access to information and ideas has been useful for the movement. But
it is also the case that my own ethical and intellectual orientation to the
world has been profoundly shaped by my participation in popular struggles. When
people note points of congruence between my own thinking and some of the ideas
developed in Abahlali baseMjondolo, and some of the positions taken by the
movement, and assume that this indicates that I am giving direction to the
movement they fail to understand that I, like many other participants in the
movement, have been transformed in many ways by the experience.
I would like to conclude by giving one concrete example of
how this mutual transformation can operate. In late 2012 a legal NGO approached
Abahlali baseMjondolo wanting to run a workshop. There is always a flurry of
NGOs wanting to run workshops as the end of the year approaches. They have
budgets to spend and workshops seem the easiest way to spend money and to get a
result that can be reported to a funder. Sometimes they are useful and
sometimes they are not. Abahlali baseMjondolo has never accepted the usual
paternalism that goes with these relationships and has always maintained the
right to reject invitations to NGO workshops (which it often does) and to
negotiate with NGOs on the content of workshops. The movement also often
negotiates with NGOs to have one day with a programme set by the NGO and a
second day with a programme set and managed by the movement and both days funded
by the NGO.
I was asked, by the movement, to present at this workshop in
late 2012. The request came out of a discussion at a meeting about what people
would like to have discussed on the second day which was to be managed by the movement. I was asked to facilitate a
conversation on Marxism, socialism and communism. I agreed and, at the movement's request, the NGO flew me
to Durban from Grahamstown where I teach. In order to prepare carefully I asked
to be briefed on the nature of the interest that had been expressed on this
theme. The answer was very interesting. I was told that the idea had first been
proposed by Mariet Kikine, a women in her late fifties who has been waging a
long battle against both the threat of eviction and her exclusion from local
housing projects. In 2007 she was shot in the back with six rubber bullets at
close range by the police. Her concern, shared by enough other people to be
chosen as the topic of discussion for the day, was that whenever people like
themselves asserted themselves as political actors they were disciplined, not
just by the simple exercise of violence, but also by a set of ideas that were
presented to them as being ‘real politics’ understood by ‘political experts’
and which always presented ‘the living politics’ of the movement, as it was
termed in Abahlali baseMjondolo, as objectively reactionary or misguided.
Marxism and communism were central to this discursive policing by the ruling
party and the state and Marxism and socialism were equally central to the
discursive policing by the left in the NGOs and universities.
My presentation followed the logic of Alain Badiou’s idea of
the communist invariant – anticipated by Gramsci’s, unfortunately gendered,
assertion that:
Thus do ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty frequent among men, among those strata of mankind who do not see themselves as equals nor as brothers or other men, nor as free in relation to them. Thus it has come about that in every radical stirring of the multitude, in one way or another, with particular forms and ideologies, these demands have always been raised.
I argued that communist ideas appear across time and space
and have to be rethought in each time and space. I argued that Marx did not
invent the communist aspiration and that it had existed before him – this point
was made via Gerrard Winstanley given the sometimes astonishing resonance of
some of his ideas with some of those produced in the movement. I then argued
that Marx’s great contribution had been to try and think communism for the time
of the factory (in Europe) and showed how others had tried to extend that
vision, to include women, the colonised etc. I noted that the idea that the
oppressed should liberate themselves was central to this vision, and to every
great mobilisation. I also noted that, in the political language of the
movement, when ideas that emerged from a ‘living politics’ were fixed and
turned into dogma, into the property of experts, they could be misused to
contain rather than enable popular initiative. I argued that the task of the
movement today was twofold – (1) to rethink the communist aspiration for the
time of the shack settlement and a widespread absence of formal employment and
(2) to ensure that this process was always kept open and open to all. We
dedicated the rest of the time to discussing this. This analysis was received,
with some excitement, as enabling rather than constraining. It is precisely
because of this experience that I have grappled with these ideas in my recent
academic work. In May this year this academic work was presented back to the
movement, via an oral presentation to more than two hundred people (it is also
available to anyone who wishes to read it in the movement’s library). The point
of this anecdote is to show that one of the questions that has recently
occupied me as an academic comes directly from the movement, and my attempts to
think it through, rooted in a considerable degree in my participation in the
movement, have been formally returned to the movement.
There are, of course, serious challenges to sustaining good
praxis when movements begin to develop their own bureaucracies; when people
become habituated to the brutality with which the state and private actors
sustain an exclusionary urban order; when people are exhausted; when activists
confront personal crises; when they come under intense pressure from their
families to translate their political commitment into a livelihood; when
movements have to operate on a terrain of more or less constant crisis; and, in
particular, when they confront serious repression. The paranoia that can
accompany the experience of repression is particularly damaging.
Just as there are examples of positive and sometimes
extraordinarily thoughtful and democratic praxis in Abahlali baseMjondolo there
are also numerous examples of possibilities that have not been realised, or
compromises that have been made. This is often, although not always,
exacerbated in moments of crisis. I have been as complicit as anyone else in
these moments. Sometimes circumstances are such that it seems much better to
act in a way that doesn’t accord with the best praxis that has been attained in
the movement rather than not to not act at all.
There have, for instance, been periods, and in particular the
period following the repression in 2009, when the intellectual work that has
been done in the movement is simply repeated rather than renewed to the point
where it is in danger of becoming a fixed dogma rather than a living practice.
There have been times when twenty people have participated in the drafting of a
press statement and, in recent years, times when, consequent to various
pressures, as well as bureaucratisation, only two or three people have directly
contributed to this work (but generally a statement will still come out of a
meeting called for the purpose of drafting it which could include ten or more
people). There have been moments when bureaucratic processes rooted more in
representative than direct democracy have displaced some processes from control
via direct democracy in open assembly. But while this should be noted so to
should the practical difficulties in sustaining directly democratic practices
beyond both a certain scale of organisation and a certain degree of political
intensity.
But Abahlali baseMjondolo has, despite the severe repression
it had to face in 2013 and in 2009, and the internal lines of fracture that
emerged after both periods of repression, retained real, and, in fact, growing
popular support and a remarkable capacity to hold regular open and democratic
meetings, sometimes including hundreds of people, in which ideas are freely and
thoughtfully debated. It remains a space that is more conducive to thinking
critically and, crucially, to thinking in community and from within the
situation inhabited by the oppressed, than the university. It remains the
primary ground for my own intellectual work in and out of the academy. It
remains the primary space in which I try to take measure of the value of
political ideas.
Popular movements more or less invariably collapse or
degenerate after some time. An enduring commitment to people and to principles should not be confused with the reification of a particular organisation. If the experience of other movements in
post-apartheid South Africa is anything to go by Abahlali baseMjondolo is
already living on borrowed time. Whether or not it will be able to endure
through the years to come, and to sustain the best of what it has achieved, in
the face of violent repression at the hands of the state and the ruling party,
various kinds of hostile external machinations, including scurrilous behaviour
from the authoritarian left, and the intolerable circumstances through which
its members must make their lives, is an open question. But it is just one wave
on an incoming tide of struggle. If it is destroyed, or if it becomes something
quite different to what it has been at its best, it will, like the struggles
before it, leave plenty of what Rosa Luxemburg called “mental sediment” for new
struggles to draw on.
