Politics & Power Quote by Joe Slovo

Revolutionary movements love the romance of unity; Slovo is talking about the messy, paranoid reality of actually running one. The line reads like a dispatch from inside a liberation organization stretched across borders, underground cells, and competing chains of command. Its blunt premise is organizational: if every small operation needs clearance from “the leading body,” you don’t have a movement, you have a bottleneck. In a stage of “struggle,” speed and compartmentalization are survival tactics, not ideological luxuries.

The subtext is darker. Slovo is also admitting the terror of decentralization: once you let local actors move without permission, you lose certainty over authorship. The most chilling clause isn’t about authority; it’s about identity: “we don’t even know… whether they are in fact our people.” That’s the language of infiltration, false-flag attacks, informers, and security forces trying to stain a movement’s legitimacy by attaching it to violence it didn’t sanction. It also hints at internal fragmentation: factions acting independently can be politically indistinguishable from enemies.

Context matters because Slovo wasn’t a commentator; he was a senior ANC/SACP figure tied to an armed struggle operating under intense state surveillance and disruption. The sentence’s awkwardness is revealing: it has the breathless, procedural cadence of someone speaking to comrades who want moral clarity, while he offers administrative realism. The intent is to recalibrate expectations: stop demanding centralized approval as proof of purity; start building structures that can act decisively while managing the reputational risk of actions you can’t fully control.