distinguishable from the ANCs, the PACs, the APLAs and UDMs of the past?  The peoples power it then can marshall will not be revolutionary.
14.	The LPM has exploded since its founding a year ago.  Originally a purely rural movement, it has had impressive success in organising Gauteng’s urban landless.  Often criticised as without politics, it has grown because it combines a focus on an immediate, tangible issue with a powerful revolutionary flavour and a sense of action.  Nonetheless, it remains dependent on an ambivalent NGO for funding and much of its direction.  Moreover, it has attempted to organise all of the landless into a single, centralised, uniform organisation.
15.	During the week of the landless, in which members rejected any association with political parties or leadership by NGOs, the tension of containing a multitude within a mass split the movement.  After extended battle between political personalities, many of the more conservative, rural elements, uncomfortable with being forced into action behind the banner of the radical urban youth, went home before the march.
16.	If the LPM is to avoid splitting and political domination from the top, it will have to find ways of extending its rejection of politicians and NGOs to include centralised control in general.  Communities must retain power in their hands, at a local level; otherwise middle-class leadership and political manoeuvring will continue.
17.	Altogether, we recognise that our crying need as a movement is effective organisation of people into power over their lives.  For that we need to build structures to which all kinds of people contribute.  We must share the skills and resources of organising among as many as possible.  We must learn to provide free healthy food for ourselves, so that we have energy to pamphlet and toyi-toyi.  We must communicate between communities, rather from the centre to the ground.  We must build collectives that facilitate the peoples’ seizure of their own power, rather than doing it for them.  We must share experiences of how to pressure the government, how to build noncapitalist economies, how to organise ourselves for liberation.  The people, united, have been betrayed and defeated.  This time, we will root our power and our liberation so deeply that no betrayal is possible!

Nonhlanhla Bambatha Blacke
Anti Privatisation Forum People’s Action Faction
Landless People’s Movement Secret Caucus for Liberation
crimethinc. corps diplomatique
DRAFT: What is to be done?
“Anarchy must be avoided at all costs.”  
-- South African security
Amandla awethu!
1.	We will not be herded like cattle, lead as a passive mass from action to action or campaign to campaign by all-knowing “fathers” to whom we are dependents.  We are strong, intelligent, filled with the wisdom and complexity of lives lived in direct conflict with oppression.  We will decide for ourselves how to organise and to act, how to struggle for the better life that, as slogan, leaders have used to misdirect us but which, as reality, we taste in the moments of our direct collective power.
2.	We will not be blinded by the lustre of wealth and whiteness.  We do not share the bourgeois values of the current system.  We do not despise the creativity, courage, and self-organisation of the squatter camps and townships.  Our goals are not the luxury, waste and endless struggle for individual success embodied by the lifestyles, politics, and prejudices of the middle class.  And we will not allow our movements to become vehicles for such aspirations by anyone, especially ourselves.  To do so will destroy us.
3.	We will instead organise ourselves in ways that allow our own values to grow: values of collective decision and collective benefit, values of education and discussion, values of respect for the experience of our comrades even if we do not immediately understand or agree.  And our deepest value: our rejection of the system of race and class and patriarchal oppression that now consumes the world, and our commitment to building new, liberating forms of political, economic, and social organisation.  Here and now, we will build our movements in the forms of the revolution we desire.
4.	So we will not allow the bourgeois prestige of fluent English, “revolutionary” rhetoric, presumptuous white confidence, or the resources to travel anywhere anytime, to allow middle-class activists to dominate the decisions and activities of our movements.  We will focus on minimising the need for an income, basing ourselves in local communities with locally controlled resources, not hamstrung by the need for centralised decisions by a few overworked leaders, but building ways for as many activists as possible to live and eat and travel as humbly as necessary to do the work for which we give our lives.  Everyone will participate in decisions that affect them.  It will be impossible for anyone to benefit individually from our work: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
5.	We will focus on translating our work not only between Zulu and seSotho, but between communist and africanist, between rasta and christian, between artist and electrician.  Our struggle is rooted in we as people, our lives in all their complexity, not simply the “political” moments: we will find ways to connect our immediate struggles for dignity, food, meaning, shelter, hope, and love, to our broader struggles to transform the world.  These will not be through participation in a single massive organisation with centrally-decided direction, to whom we pledge allegiance, but instead through growing the skills of communication, coordination, and interaction between many different communities of struggle.
6.	All this because we recognise that our primary work as revolutionaries is to facilitate people’s power, which practically means to grow the social relations that allow the people, the working (and unworking) class, to seize the means of (re)production.  Far more than simply running a factory, that means we need to develop structures and skill, organisations and consciousness, relationships and education, so that we can build the whole world into anticapitalist societies because we have been doing so all along, amongst ourselves.  Yes, we must force the government to deliver services, but we must also seize control of our labour and, as possible, the resources that are ours by right.  Thus for example we seize land and grow food, not so much for market as for the builders of new houses and the bakers of their bricks, and the poets of people’s power who all work for revolution, not for the capitalists’ spare change. To be communists after the revolution, we must be communists now, not simply in our words but in our actions, in our relations, in our lives.
7.	So we work with people where they are, regardless of whatever corruption, unevenness, immaturity, or domineering tendencies we see in individuals or organisations.  If our ideas mean anything and our approach is liberating, we will be useful to the people and disruptive to the (potential) careerists.  If not, we will learn, and do better.
   
8.	Now, we face a moment of real opportunity, and real danger.  Our mobilisation against the W$$D has catapulted us into the national limelight, embarrassing the government and creating the momentum for rapid growth.  On the other hand, we may easily fall by default into the pitfalls of our last, treacherous revolutionary movement, limiting our growth and truly revolutionary potential.  The key will be the question, not of ideological line or constitutional form, but of organisational structure.  Are we building the power of people to understand and change the conditions of their lives, now and in the long-term?  Are we building that power into the way we operate as a movement?
9.	The ANC failed its revolutionary promise not simply because the leaders were capitalists in disguise or because the ideology they chose was insufficient, but because the masses had faith in leadership.  Without that faith, the leaders and their broken ideologies would have been cast aside long ago.  Now, that faith is betrayed, and will not easily be rebuilt in favour of any competing leadership, no matter how correct or attractive.  Good!  Because now, when it is clear that people desire action and organisation, any defiance of political parties and politicians will fuel a search for new and more empowering forms of struggle that don’t transfer the people’s power into the hands of an elite.
10.	When was the struggle most revolutionary?  When isolated communities linked only through the grapevine made apartheid unworkable on the ground, through direct action and organisation.  When was the struggle most weakened?  During Codesa, and the secret negotiations that preceded it.  What allowed the one to be derailed by the other?  Confusion sown by Leftist ideology, pressure to maintain organisational unity, and disciplined submission to internal authority.  We as people must learn always to measure ideas and leaders by our own experiences of struggle, not vice versa.
11.	The APF has in three years grown from a small coalition of activists into the most prominently active, explicitly anticapitalist movement in the country.  The communities it networks have grown in strength and confidence through their interconnection.  At the same time, the APF central committees (largely populated by a middle-class elite), and prominent individual activists, have grown increasingly dominant over the APF’s resources, direction, and activities.  However innocently, this now forces a dilemma.
12.	The APF faces two paths, between which it must soon choose.  It can reinforce its original organising principle, as a council to network and coordinate among community struggles.  Or it can become a mass-based organisation (or party) with a central committee to provide direction, and community branches to recruit members, deepen their allegiance, and develop layers of cadre.
13.	If it chooses the latter, actively or by default, the APF will entrench the current leadership, will grow based on the charisma and promises of its leadership, and will attract careerists and opportunists.  The more power is centralised, and the more influential the movement becomes, the more it will be seen as a vehicle for individuals’ gain.  How will it then be