Before and After: Reflections on Regime Change and Its Aftermath (Reflection) (Report‪)‬

The quality and depth of resistance organisation, it turns out, is less important for formal regime change than might have been imagined. But this not to say that it is unimportant--on the contrary, it turns out also to be crucial for the nature and shape of the society which emerges after the government changes. This must be placed in context. The article on which I have been asked to look back was written in 1987 (Transformation 3) when, of course, the method by which apartheid might be defeated was hotly debated. (1) And it was, although it never says this explicitly, an attempt to intervene in the 'workerist-populist' debate of that period and to transport it from the workplace to the township. This debate had originally centred on the appropriate role for the union movement--'workerists' wanted to shield the labour movement from the nationalism of the ANC and its United Democratic Front ally while 'populists' saw an alliance with the nationalist movement as essential to the defeat of apartheid (Plaut 1992). 'Workerists' held this position either because nationalism was seen as a threat to socialism or because it seemed likely to compromise union organisation by imposing on it priorities which were not in its strategic interests, or both. But 'workerists' (like this one) were also likely to see the clash as one between two styles of collective action, one relying on mobilisation, the other on organisation. And so this article, as a re-reading shows, seeks to make a case for patient, strategic, organisation as a more viable method of defeating apartheid than popular mobilisation. More than two decades on, some revisions to this thesis are obviously required. Regime change, organisation and mobilisation