Last post I was discussing the balance between socialist theory - how we understand the world - and activism: what we do in it.

It's a truism to say you need both. People throw around terms like "armchair socialist" on the one hand and "mindless activist" on the other. Either you read at the expense of building a movement, or you substitute activity for understanding the world (and therefore your activism isn't very useful.)


In 1917, that was a very good year...

But I'd argue this is a false separation. Theory is drawing lessons from past activism. We all do this, from the most yellow-bearded professor to the grungiest dumpster-diver. It's not just theory vs. activism, but what kind of theory. Is your theory stuck in a past revolutionary moment? Have you memorized Kim Il Sung's Collected Works but don't know where Oaxaca is?

And it's here where Richard Pithouse shines, in his article Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town. He's sick of theorists refusing to engage with the real world, and he thinks Mike Davis collapses the real struggles of the world's poor into some vast, abstract category called 'slumdweller'. (You can read the synopsis of Davis' powerful argument at New Left Review.) Pithouse doesn't dispute some of Davis' trends: the huge influx into cities of people without services or formal employment. But in his rush to form a sweeping conclusion about 1 billion people, Davis ignores realities on the ground. Slums - and the people who live in them - are different, depending where you go.


They probably don't look like this

This isn't some academic dispute: by looking only at capital and not at workers, Davis creates an apocalypic vision of the world, in which the new proletariat are passive victims of social upheaval:

as Davis wrote these words militant battles were being fought in and from shack settlements in cities like Johannesburg, Caracas, Bombay, Sao Paulo and Port-au-Prince... Davis’ pessimism derived, at least in part, from a fundamental methodological flaw. He failed to speak to the people waging these struggles, or even to read the work produced from within these resistances

In other words, he over-generalizes, writing broad historical trends over the experiences of real people. Pithouse goes on to show that some slums are democratic, and some dictatorial; some have infrastructure services and some don't; and that slums aren't solely cesspools of misery.


Life's not actually like that

That's hard to take in, particularly for leftists who believe people shouldn't live in shacks without running water. But Pithouse is actually returning to Marx, by pointing out that capitalism is contradictory. Its worst excesses - dispossession, forced migration - produce new opportunities to socialize:

even when the material horror of settlements built and then rebuilt on shit after each fire has some general truth, it isn’t all that is true. ... for many people these settlements provide a treasured node of access to the city with its prospects for work, education, cultural, religious and sporting possibilities; that they can be spaces for popular cosmopolitanism and cultural innovation and that everyday life is often characterised, more than anything else, by its ordinariness – people drinking tea, cooking supper, playing soccer, celebrating a child’s birthday, doing school homework or at choir practice.

This isn't justifying capitalism - quite the opposite. You can only be truly anti-capitalist if you have a vision of how to overcome capitalism, and that means understanding how people resist. If capitalism is simply misery piled upon horror, then we should just run to the hills. But if capitalism creates new conditions for people to organize, then the oppression is never total, and it's our job as socialists to figure out how resistance works.


... but have good hair

Pithouse himself is part of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a Durban, South Africa-based shack dwellers' movement. He knows first-hand that poor people resist, and he has nothing but contempt for "middle class 'activists'" who swarm down on a movement and try to co-opt it whenever it gets media coverage. In fact, he places academics below NGOs and the UN, because at least the latter pay attention: "Leftist theories that seek one agent of global redemption are generally less interested in the shack settlement than the NGOs, UN or US military." But when the leftists do intervene, beware: "on the safety of the elite terrain the middle class left will often openly express contempt for the people that they want to regiment."

Pithouse has obviously encountered some obnoxious activists, and I don't deny some exist. But I also think that when he argues: "A politics that cannot be understood and owned by everyone is poison", he could choose better targets: "it will always demobilise and disempower even if it knows more about the World Bank, the World Social Forum, Empire, Trotsky or some fashionable theory than the people who know about life and struggle in the settlements." The WB, WSF and, in particular, Trotsky, are important because they tell us something about how the world works. In Trotsky's case, they tell us something about how to change it.


How come no one asks me where I get these pictures from?

Pithouse would do well to stop denouncing over-eager activists and start educating them. But I take his point:

The modes, language, jargon, concerns, times and places of a genuinely radical politics must be those in which the poor are powerful and not those in which they are silenced as they are named, directed and judged from without. Anyone wanting to offer solidarity must come to the places where the poor are powerful and work in the social modes within which the poor are powerful.

History can help, because socialist history is about just that: "the places where the poor are powerful". The point is take on board the historical lessons, as Bensaid suggests, while being open to the new movements that exist, as Pithouse is.


The mullet-headed youth of today need Marxism

Socialism, I would argue, is the tension between those two points: that space where we learn and apply historical lessons, and it is those very historical lessons that teach us to be open and respectful of the present.

What might this look like in practice, particularly for those of us who have the responsibility of fighting capitalism in its heartland? Bensaid offers some clues: the collapse of Stalinism, and social democracy's hard shift to the right, have opened up new spaces for the far left. But those spaces aren't stable, and I think it's this that bedevils a lot of activists: how can there be 1000s of people on the streets 10, even 5 years ago, and sometimes only dozens today? Once again, we have to be razor-sharp in our history:

This instability stems from the fact that the social mobilisations have suffered more defeats than they have won victories and that their link to the transformation of the political landscape remains overstretched. In the absence of meaningful social victories, the hope of the ‘lesser evil’ (‘anything but Berlusconi—or Sarkozy, or Le Pen!’ [or Bush, or Harper...]) moves, for lack of real change, to the electoral terrain

The temptation to be ultra-leftist is still there. In conservative times, we may want to avoid the hard work of talking to people where they're at:

That’s why the symmetry of the happy medium, between an opportunist and a conservative danger is a false perspective: they don’t carry the same weight. We must know how to dare to take risky decisions (the most extreme example being that of the October insurrection)—but we must also know how to weigh up the risk and calculate the chances if we are to avoid pure adventurism.

Shooting a rocket into the U.S. embassy might look romantic, and I'm certainly not shedding any tears over the loss of the ambassador's bathroom. But tactically it's ludicrous. It sets us apart from the working people we're trying to mobilize, by suggesting only those brave enough to handle a rocket launcher can be revolutionaries. It provides an excuse for the state to crack down on non-violent activists - which are the majority.


But they still have way more people in uniform than we do

In these conditions, we need something to orient ourselves. We need "a common programmatic background" that allows us to:

distinguish the political base on which organising open theoretical debate makes sense. We can assess which compromises allow us to forge ahead and which pull us back. We can adjust to forms of organisational existence (whether to be a tendency in a shared party, part of a front, etc.), depending on our allies and how their dynamic fluctuates (from right to left or left to right).

This isn't easy. A firm grounding in both history and the present is beyond any one person, which is why being part of a revolutionary organization is so important - we need the perspectives and experience of other people in order to grow politically.

History can be both shackle and hammer. We need to learn about and be proud of our legacy, so that we can be open to and change our future.