Political parties (original) (raw)

2023

This chapter appears in Rutledge Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Rutledge 2023 When the leaders of the then outlawed Solidarity movement agreed to negotiate with the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1988, they did not know that in a space of less than a year they would have to become a political party themselves. More specifically, they did not know that they would have to run in an election, compete to win it and later participate in government. Similarly, when the imprisoned leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were first invited to tea by the South African Republic’s President P.W. Botha in 1989, and later F. W. De Klerk, they did not know that in a space of four years they would be revitalizing their old party (as opposed to clandestine movement) structures, and running for and winning office. In both cases, the rulers of the communist and apartheid regimes knew more, but only just: they knew they had to negotiate and let the opposing Solidarity and ANC into power -- to gain popular legitimacy for painful economic reforms, and to end crippling economic sanctions, respectively -- and they had financial and organizational resources to act as political parties; what they did not know, or had much experience with, was seeking and gaining popular support at the polls. In each case, both sides in the negotiations operated in conditions of uncertainty, but they faced the unknown with unevenly distributed resources. As this chapter will show, the regime-contesting social movements managed their lack of knowledge, experience and resources by becoming memory activists and conjuring what I call mnemonic capital (Korycki 2019). In other words, they transformed themselves into institutional actors of democratic competition by engaging with memory activism (Gutman 2017, Wüstenberg 2018); but in the process of doing so, they changed the nature of that competition and the nature of that activism.