Delegitimising Social Struggles

Withdrawing into trenches hinders progress


      Mazibuko Jara | South Africa

      20 February 2003 08:24


Two weeks ago the Mail & Guardian chose the lazy and unhelpful "ultra-left"
label to obscure the issues in understanding the new post-1994 social
movements ("Social movements: 'ultra-left' or 'global citizens'?", January
31). The M&G used the label without pausing to provide a serious analysis or
substantive definition of social movements and "ultra-leftism".

This has the effect of delegitimising social struggles, and of profiling
small and loud-mouthed sectarians. This was a disservice to much-needed
analysis of the totality of social movements and community-based
organisations involved in hundreds of struggles in all parts of this
country.

For example, the South African Communist Party-led financial sector campaign
has opened a bridgehead into a range of struggles for sustainable
livelihoods, for example, burial societies, stokvels, spazas, hawkers,
cooperatives, and so on. These are unique and diverse social movements,
which have the potential to be engines of transformation.

The key point is to understand social movements, their origins, their
contributions to transformation and their relationship with political
parties and, importantly, with the government.

So what is ultra-leftism? The defining feature of ultra-leftism is an
excessive exaggeration of subjective factors. The subjective feelings of
militancy of a small group of revolutionaries; or the anger and impatience
felt by masses of workers and the poor; or the attractiveness of an
immediate advance to socialism - important, understandable and, in many
cases, even admirable subjective feelings of this kind are assumed to mean
that the desirable is also, more or less, immediately possible.

The excessive subjectivism of the ultra-left also expresses itself in the
ways in which it tends to explain away reverses or difficulties. These, too,
are excessively subjectivised - leaders are "sell-outs" and "traitors", the
masses are "misled", or suffering from a "false consciousness". These
accusations may or may not have some relevance, but ultra-leftism tends to
default to them all too hastily.

The flip side of this subjectivism is that ultra-leftism tends to underrate
or even ignore the objective factors within a given situation. The real and
potential impediments to a rapid advance are discounted. The strength of
opposition forces and the dangers of counter-revolution are neglected. The
objective weaknesses of progressive classes and strata are also
characteristically ignored.

The conflation of what is desirable with what is possible results in
adventurism, a tendency to reckless voluntarism, the advocacy of reckless
leaps forward, based on sheer will-power, that can result in serious defeat
and disaster for a progressive agenda.

As a consequence of this, ultra-leftism tends not to understand the struggle
as process. Everything is immediate, all-or-nothing, victory or sell-out.
This, in turn, results in many of the zigzags that are often a feature of
ultra-leftism: bouts of optimism followed by depression and the accusations
of betrayal and sell-out.

Because of its exaggeration of the immediate, ultra-leftism tends to
exaggerate tactics over strategies. Tactics become strategies, and even
principles. For instance, ultra-leftism often rejects compromises on
principle.

Participation in parliamentary democracy is sometimes rejected and the
tactics of a general strike or an insurrectionary seizure of power are
simply counterposed to any other approach and turned into timeless
strategies, if not principles.

The ultra-left approach is also often characterised by tactics of negation.
We see signs of this in our current reality (anti-globalisation, anti-New
Partnership for Africa's Development, anti-African National Congress
government).

All of these characteristics result in a general inability to appreciate or
participate in the often long haul of organisation-building and the
concomitant need to work patiently and manage the complexity of mass
movements, alliances and fronts.

As a result, the organisational practices of ultra-leftism are characterised
by factionalism and the propensity to splitting and fragmentation. Other
related features of ultra-leftism's approach to organisation are a
pro-pensity to boycott institutions or campaigns regardless of
circumstances; or to enter into a parasitic relationship with established
organisations, institutions and campaigns, using the tactics of entryism.

Organisationally, ultra-leftism has defined itself outside of and in
opposition to the ANC and the alliance. Much energy has been devoted to
breaking our alliance, to "weaning" workers away from the "nationalist" ANC,
the "Stalinist" SACP or from the "reactionary" leadership of the Congress of
South African Trade Unions.

This is the kind of sect that the M&G profiled at the expense of real
analysis. Certainly, the Treatment Action Campaign, National Association of
People Living with Aids, the Landless People's Movement and most of the
organisations the M&G focused on do not fit the above characterisation.

Many of these social movements are constituted by an important layer of the
working class, which is largely outside of workers organised in unions - the
unemployed, the landless and the youth. From an SACP perspective, this is
important in building their organisational and political capacity and the
unity of broad sections of our people behind a progressive agenda.

To optimally harness these social movements towards a mass movement for
socio-economic transformation requires tactical flexibility from both the
government and mass movements in a relationship of unity and struggle
without submerging the autonomy, independence, militancy and traditions of
social movements. A withdrawal into "anti-government" and "anti-ultra-left"
trenches hinders this dialectical possibility.

Mazibuko Jara is the national spokesperson for the SACP