Heikki Patomäki, NIGD

In various debates a dichotomy is being posed between system-preserving NGO-reformism and radical, spontaneous grass-roots activism that aims at the replacement of capitalism with something else. This dichotomy is, in essence, a new, globalised version of the typical 20th century debate between reformist social democracy vs. radical socialism (anarchism, communism).

This dichotomy is mistaken because it assumes that there is no third alternative. There is: radical democrat reformism that aims at changing also the background contexts in terms of step-by-step reforms by means that are compatible with the ultimate aims (i.e. peace by peaceful means, democracy by democratic means etc). It is also mistaken because the positions are basically defined in terms of opposition to the contrary binary position.

The radical socialists claim that NGO-reformism merely serves to preserve the system (true), gives legitimation without any real transformation (true), and is both co-opted (all too often true) and elitist/professional without any real basis in the more popular movements or in the experience of common people (all too often true, although this point dismisses the fact that real mass movements are now much weaker and fragile than they used to be, in many places and contexts, from the 1870s to 1970s).

NGO-reformists say, however, that the radicals are utopian (true), do not let us know any realistic, criticisable model about what this utopia would concretely be (mostly true), are potentially violent in their hatred (true), do not care about the suffering of the concrete people here and now (all too often true) and, moreover, tend to reproduce rigid hierarchies even through the most transformative revolutionary moments (true).

There is a third alternative and, at least as far as I am concerned, this is, or at least should be, the vision of NIGD. From a global perspective, our radical-reformist alternative is something we have been, and are, developing in a number of our publications and drafts, and hopefully also in our practices.

For a recent explication of the difference between the third option and typical NGO-reformism, in the context of the CTT campaign, see http://www.cttcampaigns.info/Members/NIGD/kapoor.

* This writing was originally part of Heikki Patomäki´s comment to the essays of Trevor Ngwane and Andile Mngxitama

Patrick Bond in response to Heikki:

Though the contribution on radical reforms is welcome, I don't think it applies very well internationally for the main reason that the balance of forces is so adverse. In discussions since WSF in 2003 with NIGD, and with Chris Chase-Dunn and those promoting a world state through the WSF network, I've never found comrades readily addressing the central power dilemma of global-state construction and reforms, given that we'd likely have someone like Larry Summers as global finance minister if the architecture was constructed at least in our and our childrens' lifetimes. That's the main stumbling block (at least for some of us) to work with you on global public goods, Tobin Taxes, UN restructuring, and that sort of thing.

So getting these matters sorted out properly at the national level seems a much more strategic way of moving forward, I'd say, alongside a linkage of the movements - probably sector-by-sector as we see so often, but also in the WSF - as crucial for coordinated attacks on global-scale opponents.

If Heikki were to follow the situation in South Africa I think he'd see how comrades here have transcended the reformism/revolution dichotomy. In at least one obscure corner of this society, stretching from the trade unions and the SA Communist Party to the left academy and indy-left activists, some of the main influences in conversations about the character of the society and state since 1994 have been 1960s-80s Gorz/Kagarlitsky/Saul propositions regarding the *kinds* of state reforms and their impacts on the movements. On top of that, there has been a great deal of both intellectual and applied interest in the Esping-Andersen/etc 1990s typology concerning the decommodifying and destratifying character of Scandinavian-style reforms, ranging from national to municipal state interventions.

Many of the activists and strategists consider the grassroots/shopfloor struggles for free water, free electricity, free antiretroviral medicines and healthcare, free education, free housing, free land and free Basic Income to have potentially very powerful decommodifying and class destratification characteristics. Implications not only for movement-building, but for societal race relations and intergenerational, intrahousehold and gender power, are regularly debated, so that the reforms demanded are non-reformist, not reformist.

(For "academics", citations would include books and journal articles over the past decade by - in no particular order - John Saul, Ashwin Desai, Neville Alexander, Salim Vally, Meshack Khosa, Eddie Webster, Jackie Cock, Dale Mckinley, Martin Legassick, Jane Duncan, Greg Ruiters, David McDonald, Franco Barchiesi, Glenn Adler, Karl von Holdt, Sampie Terreblanche, Francie Lund, and other writers in journals such as Agenda, Transformation, Urban Forum, Social Dynamics, Politikon and plenty more. But there are plenty of other more urgent reflections of these debates in the movement's pamphlets, reports and well-read periodicals like Khanya Journal, debate (hardcopy), the SA Labour Bulletin, the African Communist, Umsebenzi and the Mail&Guardian newspaper. The ANC's own journals and reports are full of self-flattery that also address these questions, including Thabo Mbeki's extensive state-of-the-nation speech on Friday.)

There are additional arguments that flow from the feminist and ecological movements about the ways state reforms should unfold. It is wonderful to work in a society where bullshit detection against a classical exhausted-nationalist regime is so strong, both in terms of militant struggles and the quality of debates and issue-development that relate to these struggles. (Sure there are regular mainstream outbursts against 'ultraleftists' that are distracting, and yes, the failure of the indy-left groups to work with trade unions and even the Treatment Action Campaign is depressing, but I trust these are temporary problems.)

I just read John H's contribution to the Porto Alegre debate (I wasn't there), and the following (especially footnote 2) struck me as entirely appropriate to the way the more radical activists, in "Social Movements Indaba" for instance, treat their engagements with the state. Zapatista liberation of electricity running near the liberated municipalities is one comparison point, perhaps. But with 60 or more electrocution deaths each year in SA when this is done informally, it was clear by around 2001 that a more systematic approach to getting free electricity had to be won, including write-offs of low-income people's arrears.

Thus I think the rising impatience with a purist autonomism in many local circuits (see forthcoming article by Desai and Richard Pithouse in Journal of Asian and African Studies, or Ngwane's interview in the NLR, July-August 2003) reflects the need to get on with strategising surgical requests from the state that don't bog the movement down but yet deliver the kinds of durable social-wage provisions that so many activists genuinely expect from their state, and that are periodically promised by the neoliberal government. It's probably not unlike Brazil, though the movement's sensibilities took five years to really emerge here, in the Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town townships, the way they did so quickly after Lula's sell-out. There is great sensitivity to the *way* that this happens, especially in a place like Durban which saw a dramatic rise in "We are the Poors!" protests from 1999-2002, followed by just as dramatic a decline... and then in the last few months, an inspiring resurgence of red-green community struggles. Managing the ebb and flow of these fights requires - I'm told - much more attention to accountability, democratic process and constructive leadership development, than had emerged in the first wave of anti-neoliberal backlashes (really, rather similar to IMF Riots).

My sense is that the struggle for self-determination, as John H. puts it, will bring us much more in the way of concrete reforms, but that the most serious activists are going to have to keep upping the ante, making Transitional Demands if you know what I mean, so that the reforms aren't reformist, but instead are radical and profoundly non-reformist. I can illustrate, if anyone wants, with the tragic story of the free-water and free-electricity struggles, which I am most aware of. The antiretroviral drugs campaign is most urgent in some ways, with perhaps five million people HIV+ and half a million needing medicines now, but there are excellent movement cadres at work on this (amidst the legions of lawyers), and I think that though they've taken some strange strategic-political turns, the trajectory of their struggle - including up-continent - remains impressive.

Additional note to Holloway:
Does this mean that we should have no contact at all with the state? Does it in certain circumstance make sense to say: "we are building forms of self-determination and we know that the state is a process of negating self-determination, but in spite of that, we think that, in this particular situation, struggling through the state can give us a way of strengthening or protecting our struggle for self-determination"? This is a question that is, initially at least, quite distinct from the question of taking state power. There are many people who quite clearly reject the notion of taking state power but nevertheless see it as important for their struggle to influence or gain control of parts of the state apparatus. This is a difficult question. Most of us cannot avoid contact with the state. We have, as it were, a "situational" contact with the state: our situation, our condition in life brings us into contact with the state, we are forced to engage with the state in some way. This may be because of our employment, or because we depend on state unemployment subsidies or because we use public transport, or whatever. The question is how we deal with this contact and the contradictions that are inseparable from it. I work as a professor in a state institution: this channels my activity into forms which promote the reproduction of capital: authoritarian forms of teaching and grading, for example. By working in the state (or in any other employment) I am actively involved in the reproduction of capital, but, inspite of that I try to struggle against the state form to strengthen the drive towards self-determination. Living in capital means that we live in the midst of contradiction. It is important to recognise these contradictions rather than to brush them under the carpet with a "but also". It is important to understand our engagement with the state in such situations as a movement in-and-against the state, as a movement in-against-and-beyond the forms of social relations which the existence of the state implies.Can we extend this argument to extra-situational, chosen contact ith the state? Can we say, for example: "we, in this social centre, are truggling for the development of a self-determining society; we know that he state is a capitalist state and therefore a form opposed to elf-determination; nevertheless, in spite of this, we think that, by controlling our local council, we can strengthen our movement against capitalism"?

[1] This is essentially the argument made by certain social centres in Italy and by movements in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere. Probably the validity of such arguments for a voluntary, chosen contact with the state will always depend on the particular conditions: there is no golden rule, no purity to be sought. Thus, for example, the Zapatistas in Chiapas make an important principle of not accepting any support from the state, whereas many urban pro-zapatista groups in different parts of the world accept that they cannot survive without some form of state support (be it in the form of unemployment assistance or student grants or - in some cases - legal recognition of their right to occupy a social centre). The important thing, perhaps, is not to paint over the contradictions, not to hide the antagonistic nature of the undertaking with phrases such as "participatory democracy", not to convert the but in spite of into a but also.

[2] It is precisely because of the practical difficulty of such situations that it is important to emphasise that the state is a specifically capitalist form of social relations. This can be too easily lost in analyses that point to the contradictory nature of the state: see Mabel Thwaites Rey. The fact that the state (like any phenomenon in an antagonistic society) is contradictory does not mean that it (like capital, like value, like money) is not a specifically capitalist form of social relations, a form of organisation that impedes the drive towards social self-determination.