Politics & Power Quote by Joe Slovo

The hard edge of Slovo's sentence is in its ordering: "primarily" tells you what he is trying to discipline, not just what he wants to inspire. This is a movement memo disguised as principle. In a liberation struggle famous for its moral urgency and tactical pluralism, Slovo is drawing a boundary around the romance of the gun and the impatience of the vanguard. The real battlefield, he insists, is politics at scale: organized people, organized demands, organized power.

"Political mass struggle" is doing double duty. It signals legitimacy to a wider public and international allies while also issuing an internal directive to cadres who might equate revolution with military action or clandestine heroism. The phrase "revolutionary goals" then keeps the promise radical: mass politics is not a plea for reformist access to apartheid's institutions but a vehicle to replace the underlying order. It's a reminder that numbers alone aren't the point; numbers disciplined toward systemic change are.

Context matters because Slovo was not an armchair theorist. As a senior South African Communist Party figure and a leader within the ANC's armed wing, he carried credibility in both the political and military lanes. That makes the emphasis on mass struggle a strategic recalibration rather than a pacifist retreat: armed action can exist, but it cannot substitute for building a majority project capable of governing. Subtext: revolutions fail when they win battles but lose the country. Slovo is arguing that the revolution's engine has to be collective, visible, and politically literate enough to survive victory.