Mondli+Hlatshwayo,+Outgoing+Secretarial+Report+to+SMI,+excerpt

=5th Annual National Meeting of the Social Movements Indaba (SMI)=

Mondli Hlatshwayo’s Outgoing Secretarial Report (excerpt)
We understand that the strategic tasks cannot be resolved in the immediate future. But they are important as part of ideological clarification in the movement building process. It is the multifaceted combination of our struggles around our platform, on-going political work, our recognition and understanding of our struggle heritage, the current debates and engagements around the political direction of social movements that can help us in answering these strategic tasks.
 * What are the strategic tasks facing our movements?**

1. We have to understand the manner in which the ruling class rules. It is not enough to say that the working class and the poor are under attack. We need have a concrete understanding of how the capitalist class reproduces itself ideologically and politically. How do the capitalist class and the state manufacture consent as part of its hegemonic project? We also have to understand and appreciate the fact that ruling class hegemony also expresses itself within some sections of the working class. In other words, we also have devise strategies for confronting the ideology of the ruling class even within our movement as broadly defined. 2. We also have to understand the character of the state. It has never been enough to argue that the state is an instrument of class domination. As people who are confronting the state on daily basis, we have to take a clear attitude towards the state. Some social movements think that the state is not a problem but the issue is a particular minister. Some think that we can work with the state in ensuring that there is delivery. Is that an attitude we should take? The question of participation in elections and state institution is another question that requires answers from the movements. 3. Another important strategic task is the question of transforming ourselves from a movement of grievances to a movement of power. Our understanding of the ruling class and its relationship to the state is one of the important steps in dealing with this question. Marx referred to this as the progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself" (a position in the social structure) to being one "for itself" (an active and conscious force that can change the world). How do we transform and generalise our movements form a movement of protest to force that can change the world?

The questions of platform and plan of action for the SMI compels us to revisit the existing platform of the SMI. Again, the platform of the SMI did not emerge in some obscure laboratory but it came out of concrete experiences of struggle and ideological contestation between the SMI and those who wanted to collaborate with the ANC government during the WSSD. The platform was written in the streets of Johannesburg and its surrounding townships.
 * What should our platform of unity and action be?**

A number of community meetings, workshops, demonstrations, and seminars were held as a build-up for the mobilization against the WSSD. Besides the educational work that happened in these spaces, people began to examine issues that can act as a glue that could bind social movements. The orientation at that time was to use the WSSD platform for unmasking the shameful role played by the ANC-led government in South Africa and the African continent. The SMI platform launched an obdurate attack on NEPAD, a programme that seeks to serve the interests of South African capital, WTO, World Bank, IMF and governments of the North. It also noted that the conditions of the working classes and the poor were getting worse. The lack of service delivery, the prevalence of HIV/Aids, wars and environmental degradation were cited as problems facing ordinary people. The platform noted that mass mobilization and people’s action is the only road to resolving these problems.

In the 2005 national meeting, comrades reaffirmed the platform but argued that there were issues that needed to be added to it, namely housing, the oppression in Zimbabwe and wars in Africa. Since then the platform has been updated and all the issues are captured succinctly. We all know that platforms are not hermetically sealed. New conditions may bring up new issues. In other words, the national meeting can suggest new issues that can be added to the platform.

The question that the SMI and its component parts must answer is a crisp one, - how do we ensure that the platform becomes hegemonic? Of course, the question is not about ensuring that people are able to regurgitate the platform word for word or full stop for full stop. The answer to the question lies in mobilization. The biggest task for the annual meeting is to examine strategies and methods that can help in ensuring that sustained struggles around issues that are captured by the platform are generalized.

The immediate tasks are the challenges that need to be confronted in the short-term period. These are the tasks that help us in answering the long-term strategic questions.
 * The immediate task for social movements**

1. **Political education** will be a stepping stone towards resolving the long-term tasks, namely understanding the nature of class rule in South Africa, the function of the capitalist economy, the nature of the state, strategies for building social movements and transforming ourselves from a movement of grievances to a movement of power. 2. It has been stated a number of times that **women** have not been given a space to play a meaningful role in leading and directing social movements. This is one of the questions that require an immediate attention. In order to achieve this immediate task, we will have to ask socialist feminist comrades, structures such as the RRA and other progressive formations to assist us in tacking this question. 3. We have to use the platform of the SMI as a tool for co-ordinating and building **resistance and campaigns** (housing, water, electricity, HIV/Aids, etc.). We have to pay attention to the struggles because they provide us with new energy and forces that can confront the neo-liberal project. We need to discuss strategies and tactics for advancing our struggles and campaigns, state repression, use of campaigns for building a mass movement, partial victories for the working class and the nature of our demands. 4. **International solidarity and our struggle against xenophobia** is critical is one of the important components of our struggle. The masses of Zimbabwe supported us during our liberation struggle. The principle of solidarity compels us to be part of the struggle of the masses of Zimbabwe. One of the important contributions we can make to the struggles of the masses of Zimbabwe is to intensify our local struggles. We cannot ignore struggles of the peoples of Palestine, Iraq, Ogoni Land, Congo and Sudan. We have to devise means that would assist us in tabling these struggles in the platforms of the SASF, ASF and the WSF. Xenophobia undermines solidarity. We have to tackle it by building sustainable campaigns. 5. We also have to resolve the **structure and the functioning of the SMI**. This must not be an administrative dictatorship. The structure has to facilitate struggles, as well as the carry out of the immediate and long-term tasks.

The views and positions taken in this paper are not cast in stone but they are meant to facilitate a structured discussion on the role and the future of the SMI. We are looking forward to a constructive and robust debate on these questions. Other comrades are encouraged to also write responses to the paper so that we can have a systematic debate. Organisations are also requested to read and comment on the paper. We have to let a hundred flowers bloom.
 * Conclusion**

We have to thank all the comrades who contributed to the formation of the SMI. It was the comrades who did detailed work before the WSSD who paved the way for the formation of the SMI. Sometimes the work that was done by comrades who sat in meetings and workshops of the SMI predecessor, the Civil Society Indaba, has not been seen as a catalytic in the formation of the SMI.

A number of comrades and organisations played an important role in organizing the national meetings of the SMI since 2003. If it were not for these comrades the SMI would have collapsed. We have to thank the comrades in Cape Town who organized this national meeting. The team with the assistance and guidance of Johannesburg comrades worked hard in ensuring the decentralization of the SMI.

The SMI is as strong or weak as it components parts. In the post WSSD era most social movements that were part of the WSSD mobilization faced organizational and political problems. This registered in the SMI. We can only say for now that the coming of new organisations and the national meeting provides us with a golden opportunity to revive the SMI. We hope that the annual national meeting will be used not as a space for intense factional disputes but as a platform for rebuilding the SMI. Those who have been mandated by their organizations to take part in the SMI annual national meeting have a big political and organizational responsibility. Comrade delegates cannot afford to fail those left behind in the South African townships and rural areas.

It would be a grave slip for us to end the report without quoting from our heritage as a social justice movement. Marx, one of the outstanding products of our early movements, in one of his seminal works entitled, //The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte//, cautioned,

//“Men and women// [our addition] //make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”//

With those words we have to remember that the conditions that are transmitted from the past are such that our movement, which was combative in the 1980s, has been defeated. It is now upon us to use the limited democratic spaces and other avenues in order to rebuild resistance for a new phase of struggle. As we gather in Cape Town we are making history.

Build working class resistance!

Long live the struggles of the toiling masses of the world!


 * Mondli Hlatshwayo**
 * Outgoing SMI secretary**
 * December 2007**

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