At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)

AT THE EDGE
Towards 21st Century Internationalism

TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999)

Social Movements in Search of a New Politics?

In the South, socio-political movements such as those of the landless workers in Brazil and the Zapatistas in Mexico have openly challenged global capitalism at the turn of the century. Nationally-centred movements have framed their struggles in terms of international resistance, solidarity and emancipatory programmes. How optimistic can we be about the prospects for these movements? How do they cope with the failure of previous revolutionary struggles? What are their proposals to redress the socio-economic devastation left in the wake of neo-liberal policies? Which are the perspectives for international networking? These are some of the questions to be addressed by the panel. The participants, political activists and thinkers from the South represent a "new" radical Left, open to criticisms from both mainstream and progressive tendencies, and committed to the development of original political thinking capable of transcending the defeats of the 1980s, and confronting the constraints and limited visions of the 1990s.

Panel: Carlos Vilas, Melay Abao, Raymond Suttner, Francis Lee
Chairperson:
Achin Vanaik

This session is about new directions in political thinking and the complex relationship between the politics of social movements and political parties. The four panelists represent the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and each one represents a social movement, political party or both.

Melay Abao is the General Secretary of the Citizens Action Party which was founded in 1998 in the Philippines. A trade unionist in the garment and manufacturing sectors from the mid-80s, she turned to organising waste handlers on the biggest dump site in Manila in the mid-90s. Abao is also a research associate of the Institute for Popular Democracy in Manila.

Although the Citizens Action Party (Akbayan) is very new its roots date back to 1987 with the ousting of Ferdinand Marcus by Peoples Power. Today, the only thing that really remains of the peoples’ power revolution is that never again can it be said a woman may not be President of the Philippines.

In 1987 the broad left convened in what was called the Socialist Caucus. Unfortunately it never got further than being a peoples’ platform because established parties claimed there was no need to create a new political party in the Philippines.

Even if Akbayan is new, the need to take elections seriously has been there for quite some time. There were two other conditions that sustained the need for an open political party. There were some positive changes, particularly the local government code of 1991, and the law of ‘95. This meant for the first time there would be NGO and peoples’ organisations participating in local government planning, budgeting, etc, and for the first time proportional representation was allowed. Another condition was the split of the left in 1992/93 into two major groups and later into more groups. This was significant to Akbayan because the left slowly revoked and eventually rejected the idea of armed struggle as a source of power. There was now space to discuss the parliamentary arena. The split also caused some blurring of lines between leftist groups opening up the possibility of talking about other kinds of political agenda and action.

The creation of Akbayan actually took about three years since there were so many issues to be resolved, like how does one create a single structure for a pluralist organisation, how do we deal with conflicting political tendencies, and maybe even sectarian tendencies. How do we not deplete an already weak movement and how do we not compete with mass movement building? What would the party’s ideology be given the new political landscape? And we also had to consider how to avoid becoming co-opted like the traditional political parties. We tried to answer these questions at our founding congress in 1998 but today there are still some unresolved questions.

The first thing we did was decide on an individual base membership spanning different political tendencies. We structured ourselves according to mainstream political and administrative structures like towns and provinces so we could really commit ourselves to electoral and parliamentary engagement at these levels. We thought this would also represent a bottom-up approach with national leadership drawn from the ranks. All the regions and sectors would be represented in our political council, and the principle of 30% women leadership was established.

We realised there are many not-necessarily left people, mostly from the service sector, who are equally disgusted with the electoral and political system. There were also non-left politicians who were not corrupt who were open to joining Akbayan. They now make up about 30% of the party. Joining with other forces meant we were non-ideological in Marxist terms, but we do have a progressive reform agenda that spans economics, politics and culture. Akbayan can be described as being something between a mass movement and a fully fledged political party. Basically we are still evolving and won 2.6% honest votes in the 1998 elections. Since then we have been very busy building structures and mobilising the membership towards governance issues. Late next year Akbayan will hold its first regular congress to prepare for the 2001 elections. If we are successful we will really be contributing a lot to the left movement in the Philippines, the marginalised, and good governance.

Francis Lee is the Deputy Secretary of the Peoples Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSDP) in South Korea. This is a comprehensive progressive social movement with membership running in the thousands.

This is going to be about social movements in new politics and new political parties, focusing on who are "we", the actors of change, and what alliance there can be between social movements and the formation of new politics.

What happened in South Korea in the 80s and 90s is the emergence of a nationwide alliance of democratic struggles after three decades of fascist and military rule. The alliance consisted basically of liberal and radical forces. After three decades of struggle the military government was replaced by a liberal civilian government. The most important thing is that the timing of the change to a liberal government coincides with the neo-liberal attack on South Korea, which in turn coincides with the emergence of a civil society debate. The popularity of this civil discourse is probably due to the compromise formed between the liberal and radical forces in their struggle to get rid of an authoritarian regime. The problem starts afterwards, because this discussion was riding on a wave of neo-liberal attacks, and this neo-liberalism with its emphasis on less state and more social freedom also introduced civility and barbarism, the foundations of Western modernity. So the world turns out to be divided between "civilised nations" with strong civil societies and "barbaric nations" with little or no civil society. One can therefore ask, what do I call my friends who still throw molotov cocktails and rocks - a civilised movement or uncivilised?

There is also the dichotomy of the state and society in which the state is mystified into something given and rigid while the state is also part of the wider picture. This separates the political from the social, and this brings with it the mystification of "we", the social actors. The "we" becomes non-state, social and possibly non-political. In short, the civil society discourse was used to mobilise mass populations in the South Korean struggle. Then the problem is, once liberal government brings with it a sort of discipline to the country, how do "we" extend from being a social actor to being a political actor? If politics is about power and competing hegemonies, then new politics is about defining us as both social actors and the actors of new power.

From this comes the second theme, which is re-imagining the historical bloc against capitalism. We are all very familiar with this dominant bloc globalising the world: we talk about transnational corporations, MacDonalds, neo-liberal institutions, US military hegemony, elites, etc. But then we have to ask ourselves, where is our bloc? There are three difficulties in defining our own bloc. Firstly, a new global historical bloc is blurred by a seemingly value-free self-identification of us as NGOs and non-state actors. These self-identifications are effectively self-denouncing. By calling ourselves a non-something, we cannot be the subject of change, and without political representation we can’t form political power. [From this we can deduce that an anti-bloc can be envisaged as a political formation, which properly represents those social movements working for change. This does not have to be limited to political parties alone.] Secondly, new political formations should be based on the cultural perspectives developed in the radical movements of the south. These cultural perspectives can be listed as the antithesis of the social and political, as already mentioned; the antithesis of the possessive individuality, which is the basis of an aggressive relationships between humans and nature; the obsession with development; the antithesis of the modern linear progressive notion of time; finally, the antithesis of universality, that there can be a universal model of person.

Raymond Suttner was on the central leadership bodies of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. He spent 10 years in prison for his activities in the then banned organisations. He is currently South Africa’s ambassador to Sweden. He was the ANC’s national education officer till his election to parliament in the first democratic elections in 1994.

Concerning the South African experience, there are some of us South Africans question what our identity is, whether we are part a social movement, part of a political party or both. At tripartheid meetings of the ANC, the SACP and the Congress of SA Trade Unions, people would often ask which organisation you represented. There was quite an overlap of people and functions. But it is important to ask who we were. In the unfolding of the struggle in South Africa it affects how you regard the role of the state or the dominant political organisation (the ANC) in the transformation. How you understand the relationship between the ANC and other organisations is crucial for the type and character of the transformation that unfolds in South Africa. How that relationship is resolved will affect what type of national project will evolve. We see our struggle as a national democratic revolution, but how the project unfolds is still being contested.

What space has been allowed to the ANC and to other organisations, during and after the apartheid years? It also depends on what resources have been available to them. In Western Europe, if you want a meeting it’s easy to arrange a hall. In South Africa it’s very difficult, you need to pay for it, while 40% of your constituents are unemployed.

The relationship between political organisations and social movements are laden with perceptions of state, of insurrection, of transition, etc, all of which were current during one phase of the struggle but have remained imprinted on our attitudes to the system. Conceptions of the state as the central actor still prevail a lot, which is a legacy of apartheid.

From the crushing of the ANC in 1963 till the late 70s, there was a rupture with the mass congress movement and a temporary rise in Black Consciousness. In the late 70s and early 80s there was a recovery in this mass tradition with the establishment of many social organisations and an increase in the armed activities of the ANC. In the second half of the 80s many of these organisations answered the ANC’s call to make apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable. Mass activities were organised by popular organisations. In some senses they conceived themselves instrumental as agents of the ANC.

After this phase of semi-insurrection, neither side was able to defeat each other and a phase of negotiations began in 1990 and the ANC was unbanned. When this happened an umbrella organisation called the United Democratic Front (UDF) dissolved itself. This was perhaps a bad decision because the assumption that the sectoral organisations had been curtain-raisers before the ANC returned to the scene, and now the "main team" was back there was no need for them any more.

The 90s were a phase of negotiation culminating in the elections in 1994. Now the situation was that the dominant liberation movement is in government. It is still in formal alliance with the SACP and COSATU.

Each of these phases had different possibilities for both political and social organisations. Some people referred somewhat critically to this as an "homogenizing" process, stressing the unity of all oppressed and democratic South Africans, stressing the unity of a new nation, restoring dignity of all South Africans after decades of denial and division, but also in various phases distinct identities have formed apart. People were organised in the 80s as women, youth, as sporting organisations, and this nation-building project still retains a place for distinct identities.

However, throughout the struggle there has been an emphasis on unity in the interests of attaining liberation. In the 80s, for instance, it was very difficult to raise awareness around women’s issues and sometimes they were even perceived to be divisive by raising such issues - there was a tension. What we’ve tried to get right is to simultaneously have unity and a celebration of distinct identity.

At present we have taken over from the insurrectionary period some of the state-centred conceptions, which inhibit the flourishing of pluralism. There is a tendency to consider that nothing should be done, like setting up new organisations that will undermine the government. Donors feed this too by saying the objectives have been met so there is no need to give financial support to various organisations any longer. These factors have led to many of the struggle organisations of the 80s collapsing.

Regarding the way forward, I see South African democracy entailing the transformation of relations within the state and in a number of terrains in society. That is an area we still have to get right. It entails activities of the state, of the ANC, but it also demands the activities of a number of popular organizations, which need to make an input into processes leading to a better life. In order to achieve this pluralism, we need to find ways of empowering them.

Carlos Vilas is a political scientist from Argentina. He was an advisor to the Sandinista government from 1980 to 1989 in the area of economic planning and development. He has written numerous books and is a frequent contributor to journals. He teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and is President of the Argentinean Institute for Economic Development.

What do we mean in Latin America when we talk of left politics, left movements, the left? To sum up I would say the real left in Latin America and the Caribbean means furthering democracy at in both representative and participatory dimensions, pushing for a peoples perspective of socio-economic, cultural, gender and ethnic issues.

According to the United Nations Development Bank (UNDP) Latin America has the deepest inequalities in the world, worse than much poorer countries in Sub Saharan Africa. Countries like Brazil, Guatemala, Chile and Panama have the worst social polarisation.

Democracy involves both the political, institutional dimension, and the economic and cultural dimension, not just democracy vis-á-vis all society, but also democracy inside left organisations.

It is very easy to criticise the tendencies of authoritaniasm in former revolutionary organisations. But it is very difficult to have a democratic organisation when you are forced by the struggle to remain underground. Now that we have a more democratic environment it is possible to advance democracy.

When we speak of the rank-and-file or the people we are addressing in our speeches, who are we actually addressing? Traditionally we referred to the workers, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry. Certainly, the peasantry is there and they are one of the most active strategic actors in Brazilian politics, the landless peasant movement, for example. What happened though to the Latin American working class? What happened after 20 years of systematic de-industrialisation in countries such as Mexico and Argentina? What should be the social basis of the new left of Latin America?

The second challenge is how to articulate social participation and mobilisation with political institutional involvement, namely electorate politics. Up to now there have been two well known temptations. One of them is to reduce the level of confrontational dimensions of left-wing proposals. The more we think we are closer to institutional political power, the more we lower our demands. Another is the rejection of politics, a sort of "grassrootism" approach. We reject politics because politics means corruption, authoritarianism, a state bias approach. That was the original theme of Mexico’s Zapitistas. They rejected politics, putting every political expression into the same bag. Many of us expected an obvious link between the Zapitistas and Mexico’s Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD), but this didn’t happen for a few years. Right now we have this Indian peasant movement confined to the deep south Mexican state with their tremendous moral appeal but with very little perspective of political efficacy, even from their own sectoral perspectives. After five years we have this guerrilla who no longer fights. So it’s just a moral presence, which is very important as a kind of ideological accumulation of forces. At one time you had to have political efficacy to translate this moral message into practical acts, be they multi-cultural organisations, Indian rights, etc. The question should be how to articulate these ethnic, social, gender forces coming from below, into a political-institutional environment whose main reference is electoral politics.

This move from guerrilla organisation to political party has also proven very difficult in Central America in the past. You need time to learn how to behave in the electoral system. This needs resources, it needs training, and it means time. But you don’t have time because you have to compete every two years, sometimes every one year, against traditional political parties who are electoral machines. They have the cars, they have the money, they have the experience.

Thirdly, how do you articulate short-term success with long-term proposals. It’s very important to achieve success at the local level, even on bread-and-butter issues, because they show people that the effort is productive. But that’s not enough, because you also have to learn how to deal with foreign debt, how to deal with global inequality, with the environment, with democracy and human rights. It’s not just a question of sewage. Moreover, how do you translate bread-and-butter short-term issues into a global political design. Experience shows these local grassroots efforts will be swallowed by the neo-liberal agenda. Look at how Salinas built upon a large number of local efforts with his famous [Pronasol] anti-poverty programme. These were articulated into reactionary programmes. So unless we have an alternative, these efforts may end up reinforcing the fragmentation of our basis, the rank-and-file.

Up to about 15 years ago we could still say we had some kind of alternative in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba. The USSR is gone, and China and Cuba are moving peacefully towards capitalism. What then is our idea of an alternative? We have to try and devise a point of reference on the basis of social justice, participation, representation, etc. Unless we have some kind of draft vision of how the world should be we will not know what road will lead to it.

You have to move from the local level to the regional, then to the national, because environmental issues, debt issues, gender and ethnic inequality are not a local matter. You have to mobilise national, and institutional state resources (e.g. police), even if we in the left hate the state.

The need for a new internationalism: There are now a broad range of problems that cannot be served from a local or national perspective. Rule of law, human rights, environmental issues, capital regulation, social justice and peace, among others. These are the real challenges for a real, existing left in Latin America.

Discussion

The audience was asked to make comments and ask questions, which the panelists would react to in the form of conclusion.

Q (specifically to Raymond Suttner): On the question of nation-building, isn’t it the case that in a weird sort of way the left in South Africa, the liberation forces, have some points of coincidence with the racial agenda? There seems to be no strategic answer (by the SACP and ANC) to this problem.

Q: What difference does it make to the building of a progressive project in the world if the left is still dominated by men?

Q: It seems we have to distinguish between the role of the state and representative organisations, and networks. It seems the principle of movement increasingly lies with the network form. Which state is it that strengthens civil society and social movements? What sections of capital do that?

Q: The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank, are all claiming to favour the expansion of the role of civil society.

Q: (specifically to Raymond Suttner)When interviewed, a senior financial figure said something very striking: South Africa has a choice between two S’s. The one is Singapore, which has become a case of successful capitalism. We don’t care about civil liberties, democratic rights, human rights and so on. Or you choose Somalia. It would seem this choice is still very much on the agenda of the ANC. To what extent can the SACP influence the ANC in a more radical direction in political and economic policy?

Q: Are there enough progressive political parties entering the electoral arena and seriously grappling with the dilemma identified by Carlos of the closer-you-get-to-power-to-closer-you-get to a neo-liberal programme?

Q: From the experience of rebuilding a party (in this case the PT - Workers Party of Brazil) and a new perspective in Brazil, we are confronted with what should be the nature of this party. While being quite successful in building a base, the most crucial part of the success is building a base within the party, which is independent of what happens from above. This makes the Workers Party very strong.

Responses and summing up by the panelists:

Francis Lee: I think there is common interest in the expansion of civil society among many political forces. Our task is to analyse and demystify, look at what the common interests are and which are not. There is clearly a compromise between the liberal forces and the anti-authoritarian ones about civil society. But, after the neo-liberal wave and the alliance between domestic liberals and global liberals, the discourse on civil society becomes a discipline and we should reject that.

Raymond Suttner: Concerning male domination, the South African liberation movement has an ambiguous attitude. On the one hand there is still male domination in the leadership but some quite significant steps have been taken to empower women. An example is that since 1994 one third of the ANC’s MPs have to be women. In the trade unions and the SACP there are resolutions saying specific steps have to be taken to empower women. A number of institutions and machineries have been created since 1994 to deal with gender questions.

Melay Abao: In our party there is a 30% quota for women. This was the biggest controversy. In the Philippines this is a very basic question. How do we really promote the position of women in politics when the electoral system is so violent? The left movement has been traditionally very male and traditionally the leadership of the women’s movement has been very middle class. In this the left faces a big challenge.

Carlos Vilas: In relation to the Brazilian PT and the Uruguayan it is social democracy in its entirety, not radical democracy. The Guatemalan [Frontera Revolutionaria Montego], which is doing a bad job of electoral politics but is trying to build articulation between the political party and the social movement, particularly the Indian social movement. That was the most promising alternative.

A lot has been written about how the left has tried to overcome gender discrimination in Central and South America. We have to see this in historical perspective. A lot has happened over the past twenty years and that follows us: we don’t go backwards. There’s therefore no reason to doubt that left men and women will be more successful in overcoming inequalities, not just in public political life, but also in everyday life.

Francis Lee: There are three debates relevant to the formation of the Democratic Labour Party in Korea. One is whether it should be a Labour Party or a Progressive Party. Secondly, to what extent should civil society organisations be part of the base of the party. And thirdly, economic policy. The slogan of this party was to go beyond capitalism and socialism. Within the real situation in Korea the outcome will probably be social democratic.

The new government headed by [Kim de Jung] purports to promote participatory democracy. However, under this government, more labour and civil activists have been arrested than under previous governments. Kim is also pushing energetically for the privatisation scheme of the IMF, but as a liberal leader he’s not pushing these schemes by market principles but by using his authoritarian state power.

Raymond Suttner: In the case of South Africa the democratic national project, a multi-class project, can go along two trajectories. It can be a modernising project which the bourgeoisie agrees with, absorbing sections of the black middle class, and attempting to absorb sections of the working class. This is what one could call a 30/70% solution. Those who are getting interest in the survival of a project that basically excludes a large section of the population, are now perceived as obstacles rather than allies. The other version can be seen as reconstruction as driven by an empowerment of the working class. If socialism is to become a project in South Africa, then it must be a fully democratic process. One of the problems of a national project is the unifying project, which tends to try and build consensus and to conceal within it recognised platforms and sectors, and you have to struggle to conceal the radicalness of this all the time.

As regards whether this becoming a neo-liberal project and not being able to deliver, I think the quality of peoples’ lives because of the ANC being in power has changed substantially. For example, many black rural areas have electricity for the first time since 1995.

There does need to be a new theory of power. In South Africa we came with a seizure-of-power model as if it is a "thing" as opposed to a number of relationships that need to be transformed to a number of areas of society. There is still a lot of debate in South Africa, but with the ANC in power there is a pressure for people to contain the debate a bit.

Melay Abao: When you get closer to power, we are very aware of causes getting diluted and moderated. Already there is a cleavage between those with a radical streak and those who are not. The radicals say we are dealing with conflicting ideas while the left, the social movements, have very defined constituencies. We are happy with that confusion because what we actually need is a new ideology in terms of what is your analysis, your strategy, what organisations should you include, the relationship between social movements and political parties, etc. We would like a definitive class analysis. The classes are so different now. Labour is flexible and mobile, there are those without land, and capitalism seems to be changing every day. We don’t have a blueprint, but getting there should also be participatory.

Carlos Vilas: Party politics are becoming very expensive. If you don’t show up on TV you do not exist. This poses a heavy problem for independent or social movement candidates. After elections you have to pay the bill either in money or public policies.

We should not fool ourselves with the public speeches from political or social leaders. Politics always has a
conspiratorial ingredient. You have to work out what to say, how to say it, to whom you are saying it, and when to say it. Politics always has an element of administering what to say.

Concluding contribution from Achin Vanaik, Chairperson: In many ways the basic political problem that comes to all countries is: how do we combine the politics of universalism with the politics of particularism? Each of us has our own needs above the universal ones. Historically there have only been three kinds of universalist politics. Fascism, democracy and socialism, either separately or in some combination. Historically, political parties are supposed to stand for a politics of universalism, as social movements are supposed to stand for sectoral politics. What’s actually happened is that things got a lot more mixed up. For example, many political parties that could emerge in South Africa certainly happened in England. Having achieved national liberation and the institutionalisation of bourgeois democracy, they lose the capacity to pursue a politics of universal appeal, and become a mechanism for the pursuit of a coalition of different sectoral appeals. We are in a situation in which it is not clear how to bring these two kinds of politics together - the politics of universalism and the politics of particularism. All we can say, we have to be flexible and creative. We should be aware of both. We also very much need a politics of progressive nationalism. Globalisation should not be misconstrued to mean that we give up the politics of fighting for that national space, because that is one framework in which people do feel in power.

Personally, I am rather suspicious and cautious about this business of radical democracy, and interpreting socialism as some kind of a sub-set. Socialism certainly has to be about democracy, if nothing else. The danger of reducing it to some kind of sub-set of democracy is to suggest that our only goal is only to try and extend that democracy and forget that we should not want to extend the existing democracy, rather fundamentally transform it. If you diminish the significance of the centrality of capitalism, then you have the danger of diminishing the significance of socialism.

What has not emerged in this discussion is that no matter how much you talk about social movements, there is the labour movement. And associated with that, there is the class politics. The labour movement is not like any other movement, because it is the only movement which is strategically placed to confront capitalism like no other movement can. Although we now realise in order to pursue an emancipatory class politics, we have to pursue more than simply class politics in the old way. That doesn’t alter the fact that the labour movement is central to everything else.

This brings us to the question of socialism and, in particular, of Marxism, which nobody has really touched upon. There has to be "A" central place, not de-central place for Marxism within the socialist agenda, for three reasons. Firstly, there is still no alternative framework of thinking that helps us understand reality better. Secondly, the
intransigence of its opposition to capitalism, if nothing else. Thirdly, it at least specifies that one agent is a-central and remains a-central, and that is the labour movement.