Category Archives: Church Land Programme

Padkos: Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis requires not only a confrontation with forces and ideologies of the right, but also with those elements in leftist traditions that re-inscribe authoritarian dogmatism, hierarchical power, political exclusion, and contemptuous vanguardism. No ideological orientation guarantees that we're safeguarded against these tendencies – but humanist, autonomist, and anarchist traditions of the left become important resources since they explicitly critique them and, perhaps more importantly, explore practical ways of doing politics against them.

In this edition of Padkos we're sharing a short note on “Christianity and Anarchism” that Mark Butler and Graham Philpott (CLP) recently wrote for our friends at the Anabaptist Network of South Africa (ANISA). We point out that the “anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian” characteristics of Jesus' politics signals “important parallels and resonances” with anarchism.

Continue reading →

Attachments


Butler & Philpott: Christianity & Anarchism
Graeber: The New Anarchists

Church Land Programme: Living Democracy

Living democracy

Church Land Programme, May 2014.

For good reason, practical questions of grassroots democracy and autonomy remain central in CLP's work and reflection during this period. It's clear that emancipatory politics starts in political events of complete rupture with what exists. It's also clear that the subsequent work taking forward that politics, in struggle/s and in organisation, can only be faithful to itself if it never compromises the principled basis of that politics. That fidelity requires always matching the modes of struggle and the forms of organising with a thoughtful and practical praxis that expresses those axioms and principles. In practice, such fidelity cannot be assumed or taken for granted and nor are there any ready­made recipes for ensuring it, except perhaps the refusal to ever surrender principle to tactics.

Continue reading →

Attachments


Participatory Democracy in Action Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra
Educate in resistance: the autonomous Zapatista schools
EZLN: AutonomousResistance

Padkos: Twenty Years of Democracy: “the call of a world that does not yet exist”

The state and corporate media in South Africa won't let us forget that 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of representative democracy. But the thinking of people's organisations, and the conditions against which they rebel and organise, remind us just how utterly disappointing and hollow that project of state democracy actually is. For those who respect and hear the Truth of autonomous grassroots thought and action, it is patently obvious that the state can no longer be seriously imagined as a vehicle for emancipatory politics. Furthermore, making the terrain of state politics the primary concern or target of popular protest and power tends inevitably to distort and finally defeat its original emancipatory impulse.

Continue reading →

Attachments


Zapatismo Urbano
Zapatismo History
A brief history of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation 2014

CLP: What CLP Believes

http://www.churchland.org.za/?page_id=3019

PADKOS NO 45

In civil society organisations, the overwhelming tendency is to speak – and the unerring consequence is to reinforce the silencing of the people. In fact much civil society practice and thinking proceeds really on the assumption that speech is not a capacity of the people. The Church Land Programme (CLP) has explored an alternative path. A central idea that emerged was that “our voice is our praxis” – or indeed, “our praxis is our voice” – and that the discipline of that principled praxis requires of the organisation much more listening than speaking.

On the other hand it has been important at various moments to be able to collectively and clearly articulate the principled basis of that praxis. Over the past years there continue to be moments of collective discussion and clarification that we’ve captured in short sets of notes. Attached are edited extracts from three such notes from the past three years:

  • A CLP confession of faith (2011);
  • A CLP statement on the land question (2012); &
  • A CLP Summation of our principles and politics (2013).

 

Attachments


What CLP Believes

Statement of Solidarity from Bishop Rubin Phillip & the KwaZulu Natal Church Leaders’ Group

Destroying our lives – in Cato Crest

Today, we found ourselves where we have been too often before – at the Durban court awaiting a decision on bail for another shack dweller charged with public violence.  Again – bail denied; on what grounds it is not clear.

Why another bail hearing? What has led to us as clergy being here again this day?

Over the past few months and weeks we have heard:

·         of illegal evictions and demolition of homes in Cato Crest by the Land Invasion Unit;

·         of alleged fraudulent selling and allocation of houses in Cato Crest by local political leadership;

·         of several court interdicts secured by Abahlali protecting their homes, and the same interdicts despised and ignored by city officials and political leadership;

·         of intimidation by local ANC leadership and members in Cato Crest, of the legal teams that were attempting to give effect to the court's orders of restraining the city from demolishing people’s houses, and restraining them from further evictions, and instructing the city to rebuild people’s houses that were demolished;

·         of the shooting by the Land Invasion Unit and the SAPS of protesters asserting their rights – shot with rubber bullets and live ammunition.  We visited today Nkosinathi Mngomezulu and Luleka Makhwenkwana who are still in hospital recovering from their wounds.

Continue reading →