By Love Letters Staff Reporter
"There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality. But why does this reconception seem so difficult? Starting from an experience of free everyday life (that is, from a quest for freedom in everyday life) it is not so difficult. It seems to us that this question is quite concretely felt today among young people. And to feel it with enough urgency enables one to rediscover lost history, to salvage and rejudge it. It is not difficult for thought that concerns itself with questioning everything that exists... The specialists, whose power is geared to a society of specialization, have abandoned the critical truth of their disciplines in order to preserve the personal advantages of their function. But all real researches are converging toward a totality, just as real people are going to come together in order to try once again to escape from their prehistory."
- Internationale Situationniste #7, The Bad Days Will End
5 August, 2011
1.
My mother turned 18 on July 6, 1976. On August 23, just after she officially transformed from a girl into a woman, students at Athlone High released a statement which condemned police brutality, inferior education, segregation laws and the plight of detainees. They added “We wish the people to know that we are prepared to sacrifice everything, our carefully planned careers and aspirations, for the ensurance of a better and more just future.” According to Baruch Hirson, “The students who issued that statement might have been a bit ahead of their fellow students elsewhere, but others would come to the same position within the coming days.”
I am now the same age as my mother was in ’76, but my generation & I have almost no access to the story of our parents. From the official history it is easy to believe that the isolated fragments mentioned in the textbooks - “Soweto”, “Hector Pieterson”, “June 16”, “Afrikaans”, are all there is to it – that was certainly the impression that I got at school. Is it any surprise then, that “the youth of today” have no interest in our past? Why should we, when what is called “history” has no connection or relevance to our everyday lives?
Of the four problems the Athlone students condemned, only “segregation laws” could (arguably) said to have disappeared. We are now becoming young men and women who are going to have to take our world into our own hands. We are as desperate as our parents were, maybe more so. The reasons are the same. For most of my peers, police brutality is not an “issue”, but a fact of everyday life. More people died in police custody last year than did during the State of Emergency of ‘86. In 1986 Zwelakhe Sisulu expressed what had become a widespread view:
We are no longer demanding the same education as Whites, since this is education for domination. People's education means education at the service of the people as a whole, education that liberates, education that puts the people in command of their lives.
For most of my generation, Bantu Education is here to stay. Nothing we are taught helps us to control our own lives – in fact mostly it’s the opposite: obedience training. Our spirits are burdened by an overwhelming build up of humiliation, and from the way our elders behave it seems like there is nothing to do but get used to it. These are some of the reasons why I began to study the shadowy history of my country.
In the coming days I will publish the results of my investigation into these events as they unfolded at the Cape. As much as possible, I’ve tried to focus on the shades whose memory is erased from history – the millions of ordinary people like my mama who acted on the simple imperative of The Henry David Thoreau Volunteer Army: Enlist anywhere. Apply everywhere. Goto.
2.
Today, at 20:30, 35 years ago, anonymous arsonists burnt the law faculty of UWC to the ground. The day before, the police illegally entered the campus and attacked 800 students demonstrating in solidarity with Soweto youth. That day, students printed 50 000 copies of a pamphlet titled “UWC – Soweto”, which was distributed throughout the Cape. Wherever it went, there followed a trail of demonstrations, riots, roadblocks, boycotts & arson which engulfed all of Cape Province, from Langa to Mdantsane, Uitenhage to Stellenbosch. For the next seven months, the struggle would bubble and burst, boiling over at a new location just as it seemed to be cooling down somewhere else.
“Soweto sneezed, and then we caught the fever”, said Oom Sampie. Who were these victims of a fever for freedom – a deadly epidemic in the eyes of the rulers – these young warriors who fought shotguns with stones, who tried to block bullets with dustbin lids and died just as their ancestors did when the lead pierced through the shields?
3.
The “riots at Soweto and elsewhere” are universally recognised as the turning point in the liberation struggle of this country. From that point on kids took the lead and kept it. As a student pointed out,
"It was children who built the roadblocks, children who led the crowds to the administrative buildings, children who delegated spokespersons, and children who in 1986 told the older folk that things would be different, that people would not run away as they had in 1960."
From ’76 to ’86, Soweto to Gugulethu and beyond they were denounced as tsotsis, skollies, bergies, Commies, louts, layabouts, opportunists, adventurists – too many dirty words to list. Now, under the bright glare of “struggle heritage”, the living movement of these kids has evaporated into a haze of impressionistic evidence through which nothing is visible but the frozen statues of struggle-celebrities shining blindingly under the floodlights of ignorance and propaganda. Now more than ever, it’s obvious that “The victories of our day belong to star-specialists.”
Amabhuto: the comrades, the young lions, the sons and daughters of Soweto. Beside the blazing sun of the spectacle that “Soweto, June 16” has become, they pale into shades, shadows both blown-up to monumental proportions and blown-away onto the other side of the river Styx. In this purgatory of dismembered memory, everywhere is an “elsewhere”, and to re-member anything we have to take a walk “through the valley of the shadow of death”. As my mentor Michael Cope wrote, it is there that
the shades go,
their forms stretched long or reduced
by the sun.
B. Boredom In Our Lifetime
25 September 2011
They felt ‘savage’ because they were isolated, shut out from the main currents of thought and activity in the country. What had happened had excited them: they were beginning to feel that change was possible – and in their lifetimes.
– Gessler Nkomo, senior lecturer at Turfloop, commenting his students in 1974[1]
1
On 25 September 1974, twelve hundred students gathered at the Turfloop campus of what is now known as the University of Limpopo in order to celebrate the newly granted independence of Mozambique. In a scene familiar to citizens of both the “old” and “new” South Africa, they were then
ordered to disperse by a force of 82 policemen equipped with guns, gas pistols and police dogs. Assaults by the police and stone throwing by students, attacks on two white members of staff and two white technicians, and the arrest of two students ended the day.[2]
In the same account, the author Baruch Hirson notes how “overnight the campus walls were plastered with posters containing slogans which were a mixture of radicalism, adventurism, and student irresponsibility.”[3]
One of the offending “slogans” was reprinted in the Commission of Enquiry report titled Turmoil at Turfloop:
“Azania is bored, and from this boredom a revolution shall erupt.”
2
“Ground for a revolution is always fertile in the presence of absolute destitution.”
– Steve Biko[4]
This article aims to reclaim the most useful aspects of Steve Biko’s theory as an expression of revolutionary practice. It argues that, if it is anything, black consciousness is not a state of mind which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself, but a real social movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises currently in existence.[5]
The “Turmoil at Turfloop” was one of the first significant outbursts of this social movement, which emerged from the alienation of black proletarian children to engulf the entire country in an imaginative insurrection which threw the everyday alienation of everybody and everything into question.
The continued triumph today of that very alienation against which it rose up is evidence enough of its relevance.
3
International in scope, this movement is in no way separate from that which, all across France in 1968, threw up – together with stone barricades – the graffiti “Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.”
Boredom is caused by the subordination of human desire to the inhuman domination of capital, a domination whose unity and coherence can only exist if it separates and disarticulates all under its control. The disunity and incoherence of competing idea-less ideologies and the disorganised organisations which express them (specialists in the reproduction of boredom through dull, mechanical meetings, speeches, hierarchies & propaganda) are only a reflection of their solidarity in submission to the ruling systems of oppression even as each of them pathetically pretends that it alone can “lead the people” towards rebellion.
Black consciousness recognises the objective unity of the oppressed, whose real interests are all identical, as well as the true role of those “leaders” who function not to “represent” but to pacify and disarm the proletariat.[6] When Biko wrote that
It seeks to channel the pent-up forces of the angry black masses to meaningful and directional opposition basing its entire struggle on the realities of the situation. It wants to ensure a singularity of purpose in the minds of black people and to make possible total involvement of the masses in a struggle essentially theirs.[7]
The “it” he was describing was neither a sectarian organisation (SASCO, Fosatu, ANC, PAC, etc) nor a sectarian ideology (Nationalism, Christianity, Africanism, Marxism, etc) but the conscious movement of the oppressed towards their own liberation. The clear-sighted assertion “Black man, you are on your own” is engraved on a cold, hard coin whose flip-side is inscribed with the equally cold, hard fact: “Proletarian, you are on your own”.
4
Biko's analysis and black consciousness as a whole is not the product of "student intellectuals", but of the class struggle on all its levels under apartheid. "The concept of class struggle constituted the first concrete, tactical marshalling of the shocks and injuries which people live individually; it was born in the whirlpool of suffering which the reduction of human relations to mechanisms of exploitation created everywhere in industrial societies. It issued from a will to transform the world and change life." (Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life) Black consciousness is an expression of the struggle of the black proletariat to execute this total transformation. It was elaborated by "student intellectuals" only because revolutionaries coming from the intelligentsia were able to elaborate it, but it was the product of the people’s struggle as a whole.[8]
The fact that the formal aspects of Biko’s work were most popular among university & high-school students in no way implies that it was at all substantially separate from those labourers who practically realised its best principles during their workplace struggles. Similarly, the fact that radical action was, whether in ‘76 or ‘84, most often initiated and advanced by youth does not signify any material disunity between them and their elders.
The movement of living struggle of which black consciousness is one expression sweeps away every level of apartheid (literally: “separation”) starting with that between leader and follower, organiser and organised –
By mid-1985 it was becoming clear that the UDF leadership was unable to exert effective control over developments despite its popularity. The momentum for action came from the bottom levels of the organisation and from its youngest members. [9]
– and continuing on to the division between order-giver and order-taker, spectacle and spectator, work and play, use and exchange value, etc, etc. The unity so created is best understood in terms of the direct attack on the boredom of daily life launched by worker and student alike.
Workers, through the use of sabotage & counter-planning, liberate themselves to the extent that they destroy their own position as workers[10] and by so doing “demonstrate an existing animosity toward the practice of constantly postponing all of one's desires and inclinations so the rational process of production can go on uninterrupted.“[11]
Only by immediately taking their destiny into their own hands can the oppressed achieve freedom. This is the legacy of the social movement which has at times been called black consciousness.
The turning of the working day into an enjoyable activity becomes more of a necessary event as the loneliness and hardship of constant and rapid production becomes more oppressive. Part of the reality of concrete labour is that it is less and less able to see itself as merely an abstract means to some end, and more and more inclined to see its working day as a time in which the interaction of men should be an interesting and enjoyable thing. Whether they should work together at full steam or with intermittent periods of diversity - or even cease working altogether - comes to be more and more a matter for their own decision.[12]
The theory of black consciousness has moved students to attempt the same thing, and by so doing destroy their own role as students[13]. This constitutes a radical a shift in action, from defending the particular interests of a fraction of the class (as students, as Coloureds & Indians, Xhosas & Zulus – ethnic identities fostered by Vorster and fought by black consciousness), to struggling in the interests of the class as a whole as revolutionary subjects. This is the significance of the slogan of ’76 “The school for the oppressed is a revolution”. In this formulation black consciousness = class consciousness.
When Okgopotse Tiro, whose expulsion kicked off the first major student action at Turfloop and elsewhere, asserted in 1972 that “if your education is not linked to the struggle as a whole it is meaningless” [14] he was expressing in embryonic form the principle of “People’s Education for People’s Power” which was developed practically ten years later in the streets, homes and schools of black people across the country and elaborated most lucidly by Zwelakhe Sisulu in an article of the same name:
The struggle for People's Education is no longer a struggle of the students alone. It has become a struggle of the whole community with the involvement of all sections of the community. This is not something which has happened in the school sphere alone; it reflects a new level of development in the struggle as a whole.
The struggle for people's education can only finally be won when we have won the struggle for people's power… I want to emphasise here that these advances were only possible because of the development of democratic organs, or committees, of people's power. Our people set up bodies which were controlled by, and accountable to, the masses of the people in each area. In such areas, the distinction between the people and their organisations disappeared.[15]
For various reasons which have never been adequately analysed, the struggle described was never advanced to its completion. The failure of the South African revolution was a function of the failure of people to truly break the separation between themselves and the organisation of their lives. Today, it is clear that both unity of practice and primacy of consciousness are essential to any revolutionary transformation of society. The fight against psychological inferiority waged by the black consciousness movement must be taken up by the whole of the proletariat, as neither white-collar salaries nor white skins allow anyone to escape from the baaskap whose forms of humiliation have only become more effective. Simone Weil, a white intellectual, worked in the factories of France for a number of years as a manual labourer. In a letter to a friend she wrote
“I worked until 4 o’clock and I felt I was working hard. The foreman came and said that if I didn’t work twice as hard he would get rid of me. ‘If you do double tomorrow, perhaps I’ll consent to keep you.’ They make a favour, you see, of allowing us to kill ourselves, and we have to say thank you.”
Today this crushing process of rationalised exploitation is extending into more and more forms of intellectual and service work, such as the cyber-assembly line drudgery done for a living by the author of this article. Those not yet subject to such blatant degradation are still force-fed a daily diet of insults and condescension from superiors, customers, and even colleagues, which the workplace hierarchy requires them to swallow with a smile. Today, every proletarian has their own version of “Ja baas”. There are those who are not content to sit and take this shit for the rest of their lives. They are the inheritors of that underground current whose periodic eruptions turn valleys into peaks and mountains into craters. The immediate need to seize control of the whole of their existence (thereby dissolving the multiple forms of apartheid and alienation colonizing the landscape of human life) practically realised by masses of ordinary people across the country (“Everything was staked on the activity of the masses at the level of their everyday life.”[16])was one such eruption, forming the fullest flowering of that movement whose legacy today is rooted in the living example of all those who embark on the joyful journey from boredom to freedom in our lifetime.
C. Leaving the 21st Century
25 January 2012
A radical transformation in South Africa will depend more on how the past is remembered than on how the future is plotted.
– Jacques Depelchin
1
This research was conducted for a specific, immediately practical purpose. I am neither a journalist nor an historian. My only interest in history lies in what it can tell me about the struggle my own generation is now joyfully, now desperately waging to leave the present state of things, with all its chains, behind.
The past has been violently dismembered. Its mummified corpse weighs like a nightmare on the bodies and souls of the living. The force of its dead-weight grinds us down day by day until we ourselves come to act and feel like zombies and our own era begins to resemble one drawn-out “night of the living dead”.
We are separated from what we love and chained to what we hate. Since I began working on this project, my understanding of how this system of apartheid works has changed, which has led the project itself to change. Although I remain convinced that the re-invention of the present requires the remembrance of the past, I no longer believe this can be done by persons working in isolation.
“Popular memory”, unless directly connected to people’s everyday struggles, is not popular; whatever it ends up producing – books, articles, radio programmes, documentaries, institutions – will remain isolated in an academic or cultural ghetto where it will fail to have any meaning to anyone (besides meaning a salary to the intellectual specialists and a profit to the bosses). If it fails in its popular pretensions, neither can it find consolation in “memory”, since it is not memorable. Even on its own terms it is a complete failure. I began my research, in fact, due to the lack of useful information available regarding the struggle for liberation in this country. For a nation so profoundly obsessed with – firmly stuck in – its past, the poverty of the available historical material regarding even the most recent history is a scandal. After taking into account the practically inaccessible and the blatantly falsified, what it all amounts to is simply a case of collective amnesia.
The actual chronology of the events leading up to and proceeding the eruption of 16 June 1976 demonstrates the severity of the problem as well as any.[*] The march which triggered the events of that day was neither a result of any pre-existing political racket. The ANC & PAC were not even on the map. Niether was student resistance being channeled through the Black Consciousness organisations. In fact, the students of SASO, the university organisation, nor of SASM, the high-school organisation, were even affected by the Afrikaans-language policy, which was only being implemented in two junior-secondary classes (14 & 15 year-old students) at the time. It was from these classes that the revolt blossomed from a series of boycotts and go-slows beginning in March, to the nationwide uprising beginning in June and continuing into the first months of 1978.
The most tenacious of the initial boycotts was carried out by the students of Phefeni Junior Secondary School. Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, a 14-year old pupil at PJSS in 1976, was so disgusted by the blatant falsification of the events he and his comrades lived through that he was moved to write, in the late 1990s, a book – The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-memories – focused on setting the record straight. He recounts how both the initial boycotts as well as the march of 16 June were a result of the autonomous activity of the kids themselves. Neither the political nor the student rackets of the time played any part whatsoever in the practical organisation of everyday resistance. They had no presence in the daily discussions of kids who had occupied classrooms for certain periods of the school day (since both space and time have been colonised, they both need to be reclaimed). As Paul Ndaba, a fellow pupil at PJSS recalls
“We did not know the history of the ANC or the PAC, we just knew that these organisations were somewhere in Zambia and we did not know what they where doing there... The BCM [Black Consciousnessness Movement] was not there as well, the whole initiative was taken by students, especially those at PJSS.”
Njabulo Nkonyane, another interviewee of Ndlovu and a fellow member of the class of ’76 (though from a different school) provides a perfectly straightforward description of the process of amnesia which has eradicated the experiences of participants and erected an entirely falsified spectacle in its place.
“A whole lot of people who were involved, who actually lived during the era are around. And I mean it is actually not so long that people do not remember... I think it is a common thread in people's history that after a while, people make claims and after a while these claims become a reality and everybody accepts that as a truth. Even people who knew what really happened, they just accept it. They would not take the time to argue the thing. They would accept that [myth] either as a non-issue or even they would start to repeat the thing...”
The failure of memory in this society stems from the failure of the experience being remembered to change society according to its desires. There is an inversely proportional relation between authentic experience (and its memory) and the health of this unhealthy society. Such experience cannot thrive as long as the society survives. Memory finds its realisation when it is used to consciously change life, at which point it ceases to be merely memory, entering into the field of immediately lived experience as a fully-equal participant. When Oupa Mthimkulu wrote
We need you no more
You lost the battle
You were not revolutionary
Enough
We do not boast about you
Year of fire, year of ash.
He might have been speaking of any other historical “turning point where South Africa did not turn”, the supreme example being the elections of 1994. The spectacle is in a position to “boast about” such events only because each of them failed to overturn society, even as the boasts themselves pretend that they succeeded. Such pretensions imply that further revolt is neither possible nor desirable (is in fact “counter-revolutionary”) since revolution has already successfully transformed society. Since all personal experience of life points to the patent bullshit of such claims, the spectacle must suppress not only history but what is really lived by each individual in order to make one more falsification.
The success of revolution (nationalist, democratic, Islamic, socialist, etc) is represented as an accomplished fact. Thus, if any person (and this is of course the case for every person) fails to enjoy the glorious fruits of social progress, the reason must be due to the failure of the person rather than the failure of the revolution. As Martin Woollacott wrote in South Africa's Crisis of Conscience, “suppressions of the details of the fate of individuals are the groundwork upon which larger falsifications of history are erected. “
To be fair to my compatriots, this tendency is not at all limited to South Africa; it is actually one of the most essential functions of what Guy Debord and his comrades called The Society of the Spectacle. In his book of the same name, he wrote
The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history... what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.
“What is really lived” is never really lost, only – deliberately – misplaced. I no longer have any hope of aiding in its recovery as a specialist of any kind. It is in the dark because there is an invisible hand – capitalism and its spectacle – that keeps it there, where it is starved and molested with impunity. Only by literally biting the hand that beats it will I or anyone else be able to bring it to light. The hand is big. Many mouths are needed to chew it up.
When beginning this research, I had always known that the reinvention of the present would need to be collective. What I’ve come to understand now is that the remembrance of the past must be equally collective if it is to help humanity leave this miserable 21st century behind.
2
“The alternative, the direction of our struggle, will come out of the thinking that we do in our communities. We are doing this thinking all the time in our communities. Tonight we can use this opportunity to do it here. Let us start with some questions. I will ask these questions now and then we can turn this lecture into a meeting. The world is full of lectures. Lectures usually come to us as one more way of making us sit quietly while rich people think for us. In our struggle we need meetings where everyone can speak and think together.”
Our world is in a state of constant transformation, the chief agent of which is the transfer of information, which at every level takes the form of a monologue. The one-way nature of this communication reflects the social relations: those who have no control over their world are also given no say in its daily operation. Naturally, people are not so easily reduced to passive spectators of their own lives. The spectacle involves many ways of “making us sit quietly”. Basically though, spectators are given, as compensation for being robbed of the freedom to change their world and their life, the freedom to change compensations. [+]
The spectacle abhors a vacuum. The absence of dialogue and the absence of participation are filled with pseudo-dialogue and pseudo-participation. Spectators are encouraged not only to collaborate in, but to actually covet and celebrate their own slavery. They are herded to trade-union, SRC, and government elections to vote for new rulers who act, think and talk the same as the old ones. To add insult to injury, they are told to love and cherish this miracle of democracy as if it were baby Moses among the reeds of the river Nile! During the intervening time they are invited to attend “public participation” scams where unelected bureaucrats will ignore what they have to say and continue to do exactly what was originally planned. They are allowed to dance at music concerts and in clubs, and decorate the shelters in which they are made to dwell according to their means, tastes and inclinations. They are encouraged to talk to their boss and shop-steward, organise co-operatives, and participate in the "flexibilisation" of the work-place so as to maximise the efficiency of their own exploitation.
They are encouraged to join community policing forums so as to fine-tune the tools of governmental oppression. They are allowed to control their own character in video games, although they have no control over their own character in real life. They are invited to take an infinite number of opinion polls whose outcomes have no practical impact whatsoever. They are invited to write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, and to call in on radio shows to express their inconsequential opinions.
They are given the chance to vote for which idiot they want to win the latest “reality-TV” show. This may be the most significant of all, as TV has replaced the monotheistic deity as the one reality more real than all others. As the tool that projects culture – that commodity which sells all others – into every home, it is the needle through which the opium of the people is injected. To TV we owe the mantra of the spectacle: “Why change your life when you can change the channel?”
They are allowed to ask questions after or (if the speaker is very liberal) during lectures, school lessons, or poetry recitals. None of this, as S’bu points out, changes the one-way nature of the communication or in any way challenges the hierarchy between spectator and spectacle. But the passivity of everyday activity under the society of the spectacle can be challenged and even transformed into its opposite. Such transformation has to do with nothing other than the transformation of life as a whole, and involves the skilful subversion of situations so as to break-down habitual ways of thought, relation and action. What comrade Zikode did during the lecture quoted above was an example of this. Another was when Guy Debord sent a pre-recorded speech on a tape-player to an academic conference to which he was invited (transcript titled Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life).
The actions of both comrades grew out of a particular tendency in the international revolutionary movement which consistently seeks to break down the all the interconnected separations of society – including those separations which develop within people’s everyday struggles themselves. It was succinctly summed up in Debord’s For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art:
Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.
The connection between Zikode and Debord can be traced back through the historical movement of international capitalism and its discontents during the 20th century. The route is somewhat labyrinthine, but it is directly tied to my decision to change the direction of this “popular memory” project. Ironically, in retracing the path from Debord to Zikode to me, I will actually be realising the project’s original goal of documenting certain aspects of our currently misplaced history.
3.
“… Most of the intellectual resources available to the University are not written, and take the form of popular memory of struggles from the Bhambatha rebellion to the Industrial & Commercial Workers' Union in the 20's and 30's, the Cato Manor Women's Riot in 1959, the Phondo revolt the following year, the trade union struggles from '73 and the struggles of civics in the cities and against the chiefs in the rural areas from the 80s… and most of all (by a very clear distance), ongoing collective reflection on the contemporary experience of life and struggle.”
S’bu Zikode is a member of the Kwazulu-Natal branch of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack-dwellers movement. He is one of billions around the world who are trying to make a home in the city. The town has changed the country, and made people move from rural to urban areas. This movement has itself changed the nature of the town. It is a revolutionary movement. Later I will have to outline the role this has played in the history of this country. In this outline I will have to focus on the city today and our place in it. It has already been shown how prophetic the situationists of 1965 were about the "new oppressors" and their confiscation of the "victorious" liberation struggle. It is these new amabhunu amnyama (black boers) who attacked Abahlali in Kennedy Road in 2009, part of a general assault on the proletariat of South Africa which continues as you read and I write, an assault as callous, vicious and cant-ridden as that of the Afrikaners. What needs to be said now, however, is that, as has been emphasised above, the documentation of these historical moments, movements and experiences cannot be separated from a practical engagement with one's own life as it is lived here and now.
For me, this practice is primarily concerned with the creation of subversive situations involving young proletarians like myself. The most exciting aspects of my current work, as yet only in the preliminary stages, has to do with these kids, particularly the delinquents, dropouts, louts and layabouts who in my mother’s time shaped the history of our country with nothing but their hearts quivering in their throats, their brains spiralling in their guts, and their bare hands plunged deep in the spirit of their age.
It is these kids who are today, around the world, expressing in practical terms the dissatisfaction felt by all the others. If they are to realise themselves (and freedom is nothing but the process of self-realisation); it seems to me essential for these kids realise that – as Paul Romano, a young American factory worker, wished to express to his comrades – "sometimes when their conditions seem everlasting and hopeless, they are in actuality revealing, by their every-day reactions and expressions, that they are on the road to a far-reaching change." It is not up to me or anyone else to show this to them, but we may be able to put together, by whatever means necessary, certain situations capable of moving them towards realising such things for themselves. If they begin to move towards a more effective revolt that is able to draw in the rest of their peers, there is no doubt that the passionate contestation of young proletarians will begin to draw in the proletariat as a whole, as has repeatedly happened before.
The appropriate deployment of language is always a crucial element in the construction of subversive situations. This is why, in these initial stages of this project, I am conducting research into the exact use of words necessary for the task at hand. The vocabulary of those specialists working with young proletarians, especially ones identified as “problem children”, must be thoroughly subverted, both for practical purposes – disguising one’s intentions from the authorities – and for the sake of theoretical self-clarity.
If, taking the example of the 1980s where the term “problem children” was redefined as amabhuto, I propose the following redefinitions for immediate and future application:
“youth/social-work” = infiltration; “rehabilitation” = radicalisation; “problem solving” = subversion; “job skills” = sabotage; “conflict resolution” = class struggle
Clearly such improvements will never be able to be applied by professional youth/social-workers, but then professionals have rarely been able to applying anything useful to any situation whatsoever – that’s simply not what they are trained for. Those not resigned to a lifetime of employment as specialists of incompetence will have to do some training of their own.
As a former volunteer teacher of English to French-speaking migrant workers, the possibility of subverting a conversation-class, for example, presents itself to me: turning it toward a discussion of the workplace problems of students, methods of direct action they and other proletarians throughout history have developed, and what possibilities their might be for applying some of these actions to resolving their problems. The lessons learned from such classes will serve anyone well when it comes to approaching students and other young proletarians.
Again, as a former facilitator of Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, there seem to be a number of techniques particularly well suited to improving the effectiveness of rebellious kids. And so on. The possibilities are as varied as the life experiences, abilities and interests of revolutionaries. As their revolt creates more and more situations inclusive of more and more people, youngsters will begin to reawaken the misplaced memories of their elders, enabling both them and their parents to reappropriate whatever past experiences can presently be put to good use. This will involve not the production of "cultural documents" separated from the struggles of everyday life, but the fashioning of weapons for the struggle against the separations of everyday life. The process has been wonderfully described by Ken Knabb in The Joy of Revolution
A radical situation is a collective awakening. At one extreme it may involve a few dozen people in a neighborhood or workplace; at the other it shades into a full-fledged revolutionary situation involving millions of people. It’s not a matter of numbers, but of open-ended public dialogue and participation… In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. Every day some people go through experiences that lead them to question the meaning of their lives; but during a radical situation practically everyone does so all at once. Separations are broken down. Personal problems are transformed into public issues; public issues that seemed distant and abstract become immediate practical matters. The old order is analyzed, criticized, satirized. People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” Long repressed experiences are revived. [17]
What is truly lived is never really lost. If it is currently deliberately misplaced by the machinations of the spectacle,
it is rediscovered in the living struggle against the spectacle. This struggle is at once unitary, attacking every relation of passivity and separation at every level of society – including the revolutionary movement itself – and international, reflecting the international nature of capitalism. A group of kids in Cape Town may be able to make better use of the history of Prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s childhood experiences in the military academy of Imperial Russia in the 1850s than they would of the history of the wildcat stevedore strikes which rocked the docks of their hometown’s harbour in the 1970s. The intricate interlinking of these various strands and their intersection with my own practical projects are dealt with more fully in Reports on Several Experimental Adventures Along the Southernmost Populous Peninsular of the African Continent. The results of these particular experiments are still up in the air. If all goes well, by the time they return to earth we will have gotten ourselves out of this 21st century nowhere.
[2] Baruch Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash - The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution?, 1979, p. 90
[6] The working class (see footnote 10). Proletarians are workers, unemployed, homemakers, pensioners, students, hawkers, etc
[8] Cf Jean Barrot, “Leninism and the Ultra Left” in Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, 1997
[9] Michael Neocosmos, From people's politics to state politics aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984—1994, 1998
[10] Where “work” is defined as “alienated labour” (i.e. why, how, when, and what labour is done gets decided by a power outside of the workers themselves) and “worker” is defined as someone who performs work.
[11] Bill Watson, "Counter-planning on the Shop Floor", in Radical America, vol.3, no.3, May-June 1971 (Available in the excellent compilation Sabotage in the Workplace). Also see Michael Seidman's Workers Against Work
[13] Where “student” is defined as “a provisional role, a rehearsal for his ultimate role as a conservative element in the functioning of the commodity system.” (Situationist International, On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, With a Modest Proposal for Doing Away with It, 1966)
[16] Selby Semela et al, Reflections on the Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Revolution, 1979
[17] Knabb’s Footnote: “I am flabbergasted at the memory people retain of their own revolutionary past. Present events have shaken that memory. Dates never learned at school, songs never sung openly, are recalled in their totality. . . . The noise, the noise, the noise is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after forty-eight years of repression. In that single day everything was replaced in perspective. Nothing was god-given, all was man-made. People could see their misery and their problems in a historical setting. . . . A week has passed, although it already feels like many months. Every hour has been lived to the full. It is already difficult to remember what the papers looked like before, or what people had then said. Hadn’t there always been a revolution?” (Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?)
[+] The replacement of the “dop system” provides a clear example of the united poverty of all compensations: before the 1990s workers on South African wine-farms were partially paid in cheap wine (“dop”). When this practice was eradicated, and they were given regulation-style compensation in the form of money, they just spent their wages on alcohol anyway. The work of slaves was compensated for by the fact that their masters paid for their upkeep; modern workers use their wages to pay for their own upkeep. From dop-system to wage-system; chattel-slavery to wage-slavery, the change of compensation does nothing to fundamentally change life.
[*] As Helena Pohlandt-McCormick points out in her very well written work I Saw a Nightmare… Doing Violence to Memory (2010), only one book-length treatment of the events has been written since the late 1970s. “Since then, despite the historical prominence allocated it in terms of the trajectory of resistance that formally ended with the formation of the new predominantly black government under African National Congress leadership, and despite the fact that memories of the uprising loom large in people's consciousness, little that is comprehensive or analytical has been written about it.”
