Category Archives: Pambazuka

Pambazuka: Remembering Fanon: Setting afoot a new humanity

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78501

Remembering Fanon: Setting afoot a new humanity

Lewis R. Gordon

Suffering from leukemia and pneumonia, Frantz Omar Fanon lived his last day in what he called ‘a nation of lynchers.’ Bethesda, Maryland, USA, was hardly the place he expected to take his last breath. But such was the course of history. Although a dying man of only 36 years of age, he lived a life of at least 100.

Some subsequent critics wished to take him literally at his word for being a man of his times. This was a wish of his that was a paradoxical function of his unusual character. Often a messenger of bad news, this revolutionary humanist wished he was more wrong than right. We read him today because he transcended his time, but this is only so because our epoch is also his. He saw ahead of the Age of Revolution that Counter-Revolution was its evil twin. So, we witness a world in which the conditions of enslavement are valorised, where privatisation rules under the pretence of its not holding the shackles of more rigorous subjugation of humankind. Many of us forget that slavery is consistent with capitalism, and that the only impediment to this thesis is, in the end, human beings who resist the profits to be gained from their subjugation.

Across the globe, the response of many people to radicalised exploitation has been an assertion of democratic values under the rubric of ‘occupation.’ The term is appropriately Fanonian in the sense that it’s a logical consequence of privatisation gobbling up public spaces by which political life could be made manifest. If the streets, the squares, the parks, the countryside, the land, the air, the water, and so forth do not belong to the people, where, then, could there be public spaces through which to articulate political points of view? Would not, under such circumstances, politics itself become an illicit affair?

Fanon warned of this consequence of colonialism, where the human being, as a relation of each to another, is degraded into a dual system in which for one set of people there are selves and others, and for another set there is the nether-realm of non-selves and non-others. Where ethical relationships are granted to the former, it is outlawed for the others by virtue of them being reduced to beings without rights of appearance. For them, to appear is to violate the field of legitimate appearance. They become, in other words, violence.

Fanon, as his former student Alice Cherki reminds us in her recent portrait of his life and thought, detested violence. This is because he knew it intimately, what it meant to appear in the world as such. He understood, for instance, that despite the many dark bodies bloodied under the weight of colonialism and slavery, the many tortured and those who died fighting for their right to exist with dignity, no enunciation of violence would be recognised save for assaults on whites. It is what enabled many to write the history of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States and the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa as ‘nonviolent.’ Violence only existed where whites were harmed or where blacks demanded to cross borders toward the construction of an equal society. The attack dogs, the batons, the fire hoses, the cocked rifles, the lynchings, all of these things unleashed against black protestors did not register as ‘violence.’

What could blacks do when fighting back counted as violence but being attacked by whites did not? What can one do when one’s appearance is illicit? To show that one is not violent is futile. In effect, one faces the subordination of ethics to the demands of social transformation. To be ethical demands no less than changing the world, which, paradoxically, is treated under the status quo as an unethical act. This is because, in the end, those who are advantaged by the current condition consider themselves justly so.

Fanon, then, like Malcolm X, who, too, was born in 1925, continues to be a challenge to our times. Those who wish him to be passé betray a wish, also, to hide from themselves: His continued relevance is a reflection of their, and our, continued failure.

Fanon, however, was not cynical of failure. It was, for him, instructive; the message of failure is, in other words, to fail at failure, to make it that from which one not only learns but also thrives. Understanding our failure offers hope, for it would mean, in the end, that we are not crushed.

So, as this year marks two anniversaries – one of Fanon’s death, the other of the birth of his encomium to the damned of the earth – we should meditate on his ending his last work with a call for us to build new concepts and set afoot a new humanity. He did not tell us what that humanity was or ought to be. That was because he respected us enough to understand that, as with his observation about every generation having to find its mission, to fulfill it or betray it, the responsibility for that future is no other than ours.

Remembering Fanon and honouring him, then, requires going beyond him through ushering forth the best in ourselves, which for many is too much to ask, and for others, too little, but for us all it is indeed fortunate that, while so many negative forces converge in this stage of history, we may still have time to do what proverbially needs to be done.

Pambazuka: Universalism in action

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78513

Universalism in Action

Richard Pithouse

In his first book, written as a student in Lyon, Frantz Fanon recounts that as a young black man filled with a desire to attain to the source of the world the white world slashed at his joy demanding that he return to his place. He found that in a racist world when he was present, reason was absent and when reason was present, he was absent. He abandoned the futile attempt to accommodate himself to a world that didn’t recognise his humanity and committed himself to risk annihilation in the vortex of struggle to end that world in the hope that two or three truths wrought from that struggle would cast some light on the way being forged by others.

His last book, largely dictated in Tunis in a rush against approaching death, was composed on the eve of Algerian Independence and on the tide of a great international movement against racism and imperialism. He had recently met Malcom X and had been invited to work in Cuba by Che Guevara – people thrown up by this movement and as intensely alive as he was. But Patrice Lumumba, to whom Fanon had been close, was already dead as was Fanon’s closest comrade in the Algerian movement, Abane Ramdane. Lumumba had been killed by imperialism but Ramdane was killed by the militarists in the Algerian liberation movement.

For a dying man who had lived his life in a creative and militant commitment to the demand that the world recognise the open door of every consciousness this was a moment where dawn seemed coloured by dusk. It was clear that political and military victories against direct colonial occupation carried no guarantee against new forms of defeat.

Fifty years later, after so many disasters, so many long years in the tunnel of structural adjustment policed with despotic rule, we find ourselves amidst a new sequence of rebellion. A spark, lit in Sidi Bouzid and fanned into leaping flame in Tunis, has spiralled out through Cairo, Damascus, Athens, Madrid and New York. The fact that there is a real movement and that history has not been slammed shut cannot be denied. But how far this movement will go towards abolishing the present state of things is altogether more uncertain.

For many of us the great crowds swirling through the tear gas in Tahrir Square may seem entirely distant from our more prosaic realities. But while the scale and commitment of that sort of mobilisation may be very distant, there are always more local and limited forms of rupture in which there are real possibilities for political openings. Whether we engage them or spurn them is a matter of political choice rather than any function of brute systemic objectivity.

Amongst university-trained intellectuals it is often assumed, perhaps in a neo-Platonic way, that an abstract concept or principle is more universal, truer and perhaps also more beautiful than the necessarily messier engagement with situated reality. But this fundamentally misunderstands the production of the universal.

In politics, as in art, the particular is the route to the universal. A political truth emerges from a confrontation with a particular situation. Any denial of the particularity from which a political truth must emerge is, ultimately, a denial of the fullness of the human experience. Any presentation of human being abstracted from context runs a clear risk of illegitimately universalising dominant particularities.
At the same time the presentation of any human experience as singular and contained rather than specific but nonetheless communicable, a fallacy that is endemic to both colonial and postcolonial thought, but less so to anti-colonial thought, consigns that experience to a sealed existence. We should not forget that the truths that Fanon found in the battles in the back streets of Algiers and the mountains in rural Algeria cast their brilliance from Tehran, to Durban and Chicago.

If we accept some version of Alain Badiou’s idea that, along with the constant flux of bodies and languages, the human world is also constituted by truths, murmurs of the indiscernible that, via subjective affiliation, via embodied fidelity, attain sufficient force to alter the way in which the elements of a situation are normally counted, then we must ask where such ideas come from. The temptation to assume that spaces of metropolitan power, or spaces networked through metropolitan power, have privileged access to insight is widespread. This is often racialised and for many university-trained intellectuals it is mediated through academic and civil society networks that are, despite the language of justice, often frankly neocolonial and bereft of any real prospect to unite force and reason against oppression.

In the post-colony it is still often assumed, as Fanon said of Martinique 60 years ago, that the metropole is sacred ground on which one can be sanctified. But while political innovation may certainly be found in New York or London, or in a salon in Johannesburg or Sao Paulo, it is not necessarily to be found there. There’s also the square in Cairo, the backstreets of Port-au-Prince and the shacks in the hills of La Plaz. Badiou is entirely correct to insist that ‘Every world is capable of producing its own truth within itself’. Any assumption that all people do not have the same capacity to think and to be ethical, or that all places do not have the same capacity to be sites for thought and political action, is complicit with domination.

Theoretical insights worked out in particular situations can be used to illuminate, and sometimes with extraordinary power – as with Gramsci’s afterlife in India, other situations across space and time. But when these insights are reified and applied in a dogmatic manner they are far more likely to blind us to the novelties, subtleties and possibilities of the new than to offer any illumination.

Forms of leftism that reify past struggles, deify individuals and canonise texts as scriptural authority will always be with us. The spirit of the school master, the didactic patronage of well-wishing (bourgeois and non-bourgeois) doctrinaires and activists wishing to impose the dead hand of a pre-existing schema on living struggles will always be with us.

But a living struggle, a genuine mass struggle, always thinks a time and place. It is always what S’bu Zikode calls a living politics – a home-made politics in the hands of ordinary women and men posing their humanity against oppression. To affirm this is is to affirm the need to think each situation in its particularity, for new generations to think their own politics and for actually existing struggles to be the primary space for this work. Fifty years on, Fanon remains an extraordinary example of an intellectual willing to commit to a living politics waged with and not for the damned of this earth.

Three months after his death Francis Jeanson wrote that: ‘This Martinican, who was turned by his transition through French culture into an Algerian revolutionary, will remain for us a very living example of universalism in action.’ Indeed.

Pambazuka: Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78506

Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt

What better way to celebrate, commemorate and critically reflect on the fiftieth year of Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’[1] than with a new North African syndrome: revolution – or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order – often against the odds – willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968:35). In a period of radical chance such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of January 25th: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[2]

And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new repression and counter-revolution, elite compromises and imperial manoeuvrings, Fanonian questions – echoed across the postcolonial world – become more and more timely. How can the revolution hold onto its epistemological moment, the rationality of revolt? And yet this is exactly what happened on 20 November 2011 as thousands of Egyptians responded to the violent eviction of demonstrators from Tahrir Square by taking it back, vowing to stay until the military left politics and opening up a second act of the Egyptian revolution: ‘We want freedom,’ they said. ‘We will not allow the military to hijack the revolution.’

FANONIAN TIME AND DEEPENING CYCLES

What is Fanonian practice? In a word, revolvolution (using Aimé Césaire’s neologism) or a cycle of cycles. On one hand, it is constant return. ‘Black Skin White Masks’ (published in 1952) expresses this as a frustration, a cry of weeping and petrification. The dialectic is blocked and there seems to be no way out. But Fanon begins the conclusion with a quote from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that the new revolution – the decolonial revolution – will have to leave Europe to let the dead bury the dead.

In ‘Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution’ published in 1959[3] the anticolonial revolution, specifically the Algerian – to which Fanon had committed – holds an answer. Fanon writes about a radical change in consciousness that individuals undergo as they use all their collective resources to transform society and themselves. Yet ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (published in 1961) tells another story. In contrast to the opening up of space detailed in ‘Year 5’, the dialectic of ‘The Wretched’ details the suffocation of politics. Reminding us of the spatial experiences of oppression in ‘Black Skin’, now, after independence, the spaces for politics are quickly closed down. The cycle continues.

If the insurrectionary mobilisations of the rural and urban ‘damned of the earth’ become the epistemological dividing line on which ‘The Wretched’ is grounded, the second dividing line is described by Fanon as a time lag between the leaders of the nationalist party and the mass of the people (1968:107). This time lag is in effect an epistemological division between what Fanon calls the ‘rationality of revolt’ (1968:146) and the (lazy) instrumental or simply cunning rationalism of the nationalist leaders and intellectuals.

It turns out that the maturity of the decolonising political struggle is in stark contrast to the immaturity and premature senility of the national bourgeoisie. The masses begin to ask ‘was independence worth fighting for’ (1968:75) and the leaders, who simply appear at election times to wave struggle flags, are truly surprised that the people are so discontented. Fanon argues that the lack of practical links (1968:46), the distance – temporal and especially spatial (and also in mindsets) – between them and the mass of people means that they have no idea of what the people think or feel. But the nationalist leaders and national bourgeoisie who are often seduced by a ‘cosmopolitan’ mentality (1968:149) do not adjust their thinking. Substituting themselves for the nation, nationalism becomes defined by exclusion, often taking a xenophobic, religious, or ethnic form, and by socially conservative notions of culture – often heralding patriarchies and women’s submission -as political means to control dissent. While the cynics and opportunists see the neo-colonial state as a personal money bag, even the honest politician still believes what the colonial system has ingrained into their heads, that the mass of poor people are backward and need ‘enlightened’ dictatorship. The party simply creates a screen reinforcing its centralised hierarchical and authoritarian form and practices, which Fanon argues creates a type of dictatorship, often in military fatigues. It is the perfect form for an arrogant and unscrupulous bourgeoisie (1968:165), Fanon says, which sees the state as simply the prize to be taken and its oppressive apparatus to be wielded against anyone who challenges it. The party aided by the police becomes the means to hem in and immobilise the people. This is the story of Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’, repeated across the African continent.

And yet the struggle continues. The masses implicitly understand what has happened because it is their daily reality.

At a seminar that I attended on Fanon with members of the shack dwellers organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo and the rural network in Pietmaritzburg, South Africa in May 2011, Ntombifuthi Shandu from the latter organisation wondered whether ‘we are led by people who were damaged by the struggle during apartheid’; that is by brutalised people who act brutally against the people. I found this comment particularly insightful. Concerned about brutality and the building up of another system of exploitation at the very moment when we destroy the old one, Fanon’s case notes in ‘The Wretched’ focussed on the traumas and stresses on the psyche that the struggle for liberation creates. Indeed, at one level the corruption and crude materialism can be understood as a reaction formation to the internalisation of this brutality often reduced to the standpoint of the gun. Shandu’s point was also concrete and specific, perhaps referring to the violence in the rural areas of Natal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was reminiscent of Fanon’s thesis that hatred, resentment and revenge, feelings often encouraged during the struggle to create action, cannot sustain liberation. In contrast, he insists that the work of the rebellion is to uncover its own thinking and reason in defiance of the brutality that is manifested by those ‘who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute danger’. Indeed he suggests that the logic of the militant’s voluntarism to get thing done, to take short cuts and to force action, is shockingly ‘inhuman and in the long run sterile’ (199). In contrast, Fanon argues that the search for truth in the locale is the responsibility of the conscious and coordinated praxis of the local community.

Fanon warns in ‘The Wretched’ that all progressive organisations, parties and social movements can degenerate. Just as organisations of national liberation can become chauvinistic, democratic movements can become professionalised and authoritarian. The transformation into its opposite is, however, neither an iron law nor simply the result of external pressure. In fact, inasmuch as Fanon believes that it is the subjective powers – namely, the hands and brains – of Africans that will create new beginnings on the continent, Fanon’s politics insists on absolute vigilance and checking practice by principle. The achievements of liberation movements become part of the struggle’s history; they are never lost, even if the movements later degenerate.

Vigilance is made more difficult, Fanon argues, because there is no independently truthful behaviour. Instead there is a veracity produced by the situation: the poor, the unemployed, the excluded, in short the damned of the earth, are ‘the truth’ (1968: 49-50) because they express the truth of the ‘national cause’, namely promised land, promised bread and promised freedom. This claim has been a cause of some concern among some critics, dismissed as essentialist. Yet the problem is that moving from substantive truth is never guaranteed and requires human action. When Fanon adds, ‘we have every right to ask ourselves whether this truth is reality’ (1968: 225), he demands political commitment.

Rather than as a directive, truth is a collective and open political endeavour and like Fanon’s concept of political education, it emerges with political subjectivity through careful relationships, trials, and mishaps, aware as Marx put it in the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ of the ‘inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts’.

Fanon, the revolutionary, looks to continuing the work, the deepening cycle – wary of the blind alleys, the intellectual laziness and arrogance, and ideological failings of the first iterations; regional and local threats, not only that politics and political organisation be decentralised, but that radically different notions of time be developed; time to deepen, democratise and make clear the relationships between militants and the mass movements; time to discuss with the people, who have long been told to be silent, as they become the decision makers. Without that fundamental temporal change, ‘development’, whether called capitalist or socialist, is just technical and hierarchical. The necessity to decentralise politics, to encourage grassroots democracy and to make discussion and decision making absolutely open is the task of being a protagonist and the intellectual can only do so through a fundamental shift in hearing inside the ‘school of the people’.

Thus when Fanon calls on those ‘comrades’ who have embraced decolonisation to ‘work out new concepts’ (1968: 316) and take the ‘rationality of revolt’ (1968: 146) as the point of departure, a wholly different attitude to praxis is required, one that begins from a new conception of time: time is the yardstick, the space of human development. Time must be found to explain and struggle against the spirit of discouragement and against an uncritical developmentalism; he insists that the time supposedly lost treating a worker like a human being will be gained by rethinking everything from the ground up.

UNFREEDOM IN THE FACE OF FREEDOM

My focus on ‘Fanonian Practices’ in South Africa begins with Biko’s engagement with Fanon. It is an engagement made possible by the two-way road of revolutionary ideas between Black USA and the imminent Black Consciousness movement in South Africa at a moment (1968) when ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ had become the ‘bible of the Black revolution’ (and gestures to the importance of American Black struggle to Fanon’s afterlife since it was through the Black Freedom movements in the United States, not through France or Algeria, that Fanon’s stature as a revolutionary thinker became internationally recognised[4]). James Cone’s Black theology provided the first point of contact around the same time that George Jackson was shot and killed in the hellhole of San Quentin maximum security prison in California. In George Jackson, Fanon found a militant intellectual. In Fanon, Jackson found a source of revolutionary hope for ‘a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old’.[5]

New forms of political activity are becoming more apparent and concrete expressions of the idea of freedom (just as we witness, the self-organisation of Tahrir Square). And so too with the struggles against unfreedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Fanon argues in ‘The Wretched’ that at a certain moment the people realise that the new nation has not brought freedom at all. Their lives have not improved, land has not been redistributed, work has not become humanised, cities have not become open to all and the despotism in the rural areas has not ended. And they begin to understand the social treason of the huckster politicians. Fanon provides the method to subject post-apartheid South Africa to a test. One Fanonian praxis is the thinking of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which puts South Africa’s ‘Freedom Day’ (April 27) on trial by organising ‘Unfreedom Day’, asking the concrete and philosophical question, ‘Are we free?’ and adding, in contrast to the flattening discourse of ‘service delivery’, that ‘delivering houses will do away with the lack of houses but it won’t make us free’.

‘Fanon believed that everyone could think,’ S’bu Zikode, the former president of Abahlali, wrote in his foreword to ‘Fanonian Practices’.[6] ‘He believed that the role of the university-trained intellectual was to be inside the struggles of the people and to be inside the discussions inside the struggles of the people.’ Abahlali did not know of Fanon when they first organised, and why should they? The question was: how would Fanon speak to their struggle? In ‘Fanonian Practices’ Zikode replies, ‘There is no doubt that Fanon would have recognised the shack intellectuals in our movement. He would have discussed and debated with us as equals. Fanon believed that democracy was the rule of the people and not the rule of experts. He did not think that democracy was just about voting every five years. He saw it as a daily practice of the people.’

What is interesting about Abahlali now, six years after its self-organisation, is its thinking born of experience and discussion. They call it living learning. Press statements are written collectively; quite in contrast to technical education, learning is a collective and living thing that always needs to be nurtured. Their idea of ‘citizenship’ (including all who live in the shacks in democratic decision making regardless of ancestry, ethnicity, gender, age etc.) connects with Fanon’s political notion of citizenship formed in the social struggle (of everyone who wants to play a part in the creation of the new nation, as he puts it in ‘Year 5’), in which he includes himself in that ‘we’ construction: ‘We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow.[7] The shack dwellers, in other words, have given meaning and a new concreteness to Fanon’s critique of national consciousness that remains important today, arguing that it is either deepened into a humanism – a consciousness of political and social awareness (from the needs of the people from the ground up) – or it degenerates into a narrow nationalism based on claims of indigeneity and chauvinism. The former is based on a politics structured by the rationality of revolt, while the latter is encouraged by colonialism and remains one of its enduring and destructive legacies.

REFERENCES:

[1] In text citations are based on the 1968 Black Cat repagination of the Grove Press Constance Farrington translation.
[2] See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/egypt-north-africa-revolution
[3] A Dying Colonialism in English
[4] Banned in France, Les damnés de la terre only sold a few thousand copies. Published in the U.S. in 1965 it underwent three printings in a year with a mass market edition appearing in 1968.
[5] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye Black Classic Press p.27
[6] S’bu Zikode, foreword to Nigel C. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa Pietermaritzburg:UKZN Press, 2011 pp.vi-vii.
[7] Fanon, A Dying Colonialism New York: Grove Press, p.32

CounterPunch: From Wall Street to South Africa

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/14/the-rebellion-of-the-poor/

From Wall Street to South Africa

by RICHARD PITHOUSE

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together….”

That wondering is a red thread woven through American history with the promise of a way out of what Martin Luther King called “life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign”. In recent years a lot of Americans who have not been born to life in that desolate corridor have been forced in to it. The time when each generation could expect to live better than their parents has passed. Poverty is rushing into the suburbs. Young people live with their parents into their thirties. Most can not afford university. Most of the rest leave it with an intolerable debt burden. It’s the same in Spain, Greece and Ireland. England is looking pretty grim too. The borders that surround the enclaves of global privilege are shrinking in from the nation state to surround private wealth.

If the problem was that there just wasn’t enough money to go around, people would have to accept the situation. But when there is plenty of money, when there is, in fact, an incredible abundance of money but its being held by a tiny minority, its perfectly logical to start wondering along Tom Joad’s lines.

The financial elite who had, for so long, successfully presented themselves as the high priests of the arcane arts of economic divination on whom our collective well being was dependent caused the financial crisis of 2008. The problem was not a miscalculation in some algorithm. It was the greed of a caste that had been allowed to set itself up above everyone else. As a character in a Bruce Springsteen song about the deindustrialisation of America observes “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”. This caste has developed so much power over the media and politicians that it has been allowed to dictate the resolution of the crisis. Their plan, of course, comes down to the proposal that they should continue to profit while the shortfall is recovered from society. That means more people losing their homes, no longer able to afford health care or child care, dropping out of university, sliding deeper into debt and working two or three crappy jobs just to keep going.

There was resistance from the start. But for a long time it looked like right wing populism would be the dominant popular response in America. But with the occupation of Wall Street inciting occupations and planned occupations in cities throughout the United States, and as far away as Hong Kong and South Africa, it seems that a response that targets the real source of the problem is gaining more traction.

The choice of Wall Street as the target for the occupation is, in itself, a perfectly eloquent statement. And slogans like “We’re young; we’re poor; we’re not going to take it any more” are incisive enough. But if the occupation of sites of symbolic power in cities across North America is to win concrete rather than moral victories, and to make a decisive intervention against the hold that finance capital has taken over so much of political and social life, it will have to do two things. It will need, without giving up its autonomy, to build links with organisations, like churches, trade unions and students groups, that are rooted in everyday life and can support this struggle over the long haul. It will also need to find ways to build its own power and to exercise it with sufficient impact to force real change.

Wall Street is usually a world away from Main Street and bringing it under control is no easy task. But its encouraging that what links Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza, the protests in Athens and Madrid and the movements that have emerged in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince, La Plaz, Caracas and Durban, is a concern with democracy. In Tahrir Square the primary point was to unseat a dictatorship but elsewhere there is a global sense that the standard model of parliamentary democracy is just not democratic enough. This is a crucial realisation because, in many countries, America being one of them, you just can’t vote for an alternative to the subordination of society to capital. But a serious commitment to dispersing power by sustained organising from below can shift power relations. It is the only realistic route to achieving any sort of meaningful subordination of capital to society.

The idea of an occupation as a way to force an exit from the long and desolate corridor to which more and more Americans are being condemned is not new. Martin Luther King dedicated the last years of his life to the Poor People’s Campaign. In 1968 he travelled the country aiming to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor”, “a new and unsettling force” that would occupy Washington until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights providing decent housing and work or a guaranteed income for all. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection”. King was assassinated on the 4th of April 1968 but the march went ahead on the 12th of May 1968. Up to 50 000 people marched on Washington and occupied Capitol Hill. Thousands built a shanty town known as Resurrection City and held it for six weeks, in which it seemed to rain incessantly, before it was bulldozed.

In that same year there was mass protest, sometimes verging on insurrection, from Prague to Berlin, Paris and Mexico City. Much of it was inspired by the war in Vietnam and much of it took the form, against both the state and the authoritarian left, of direct democracy and collective self-organisation. In 1968 armed third world peasants became the most compelling image of a revolt that, while not global, was certainly international. With the defeat of these struggles the human rights industry was able to recast the third world poor as passive victims requiring charity and guidance from the North.

Debt, often mediated through dictatorship, became a key instrument through which the domination of the North was reasserted over the South. Debtors don’t just have to wring every cent that they can from life. They are also without autonomy. But the servitude of the debtor is increasingly also the condition of home-owners, students and others in the North who are paying for much of the financial crisis.

When some people are living like pigs and others have land lying fallow its easy enough to see what must be done. But when some people are stuck in a desolate corridor with no exit signs and others have billions in hedge funds, derivatives and all the rest it can seem a lot more complicated. And of course it is more complicated in the sense that you can’t occupy a hedge fund in the same way that you can occupy the fallow land of a billionaire.

But the point about finance capital is that it is the collective wealth of humanity. The money controlled by Wall Street was not generated by the unique brilliance, commitment to labour and willingness to assume risk on the part of the financial elite. It was generated by the wars in the Congo and Iraq. It comes from the mines in Johannesburg, the long labour of the men who worked those mines and the equally long labour of the women that kept the homes of the miners in the villages of the Eastern Cape. It comes from the dispossession, exploitation, work and creativity of people around the world. That wealth, which has been captured and made private, needs to be made public. Appropriated or properly taxed under democratic authority it could fund things like housing, health care, education, a guaranteed income and productive investment.

When a new politics, a new willingness to resist, emerges from the chrysalis of obedience, it will, blinking in the sun, confront the world with no guarantees. But we need to get together and commit what we can to try and ensure that 2011 turns out differently to 1968 or, for that matter, 1989. Here in South Africa the immediate task for the young people inspired by the occupations that have spread from Cairo to New York via Madrid and Athens is to make common cause with the rebellion of the poor.

Pambazuka: Why a universal income grant makes sense

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/76500

Why a universal income grant makes sense

1. EARNING A DECENT SECURE WAGE IS NOT A PROSPECT FOR MILLIONS OF SOUTH AFRICANS

While the rewards of South Africa’s modest economic growth are cornered in small sections of society, close to half the population lives in poverty, and income inequality is wider than ever before.

The average unemployment rate for middle-income countries is in the 5-10 per cent range; in South Africa, it’s about 25 per cent. Add workers who have given up looking for jobs, and the actual rate sits around the 35 per cent mark.

Job creation improved modestly as economic growth accelerated in the 2000s, with about 3 million ‘employment opportunities’ created in 2002-08. The semantics are important. Very many of those ‘opportunities’ did not merit being called ‘jobs’. They divided roughly equally between the formal and informal sectors, and occurred mainly via business services, the wholesale and retail trade sectors, and public works programmes. A lot of them were crummy, fleeting and poorly paid.

When recession hit, a million jobs were vaporised. Since then, the private sector has been shedding jobs, and the public sector’s been trying to add new ones. It’s an endless game of catch-up. For many millions, not being able to find a job is a fact of life.

2. HAVING A JOB DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY PREVENT POVERTY

Having waged work is the single-most important factor deciding whether or not a household will be poor. But earning a wage does not guarantee that you won’t be poor.

Vast numbers of workers earn wages so low and on such poor terms that their jobs don’t shield them against poverty. Increasingly that applies also to formal sector jobs. Almost one fifth (some 1.4 million) of formal sector workers earned less than R1,000 (US$125) a month in the mid-2000s, according to Statistics SA data.

Two factors drive these trends: The shift towards the use of casual and outsourced labour, and the related decline in real wages for low-skilled workers.

The average real wage is being propped up by the improved fortunes of comparatively small numbers of high-skilled, high-wage workers. Workers without tertiary qualifications lost about 20 per cent of their average real wage. And women in the formal sector earned less in real and relative terms in 2005, compared with 1995.
From the late-1970s into the 1990s, South African companies tried to compete and maintain profit levels by upgrading machinery and introducing new technologies to achieve higher productivity and reduce reliance on militant, organised workers.
Eventually the dividends dwindled, and currency crashes since the mid-1990s inflated the cost of imported technology.

The hunt for profit required another squeeze, and it was applied to the wages and terms of employment of workers who are not shielded sufficiently by labour laws and shopfloor organising.

Company profits as a share of national income rose from 26 per cent in 1993 to 31 per cent in 2004, while workers’ wages fell from 57 per cent to 52 per cent.

Companies now rely on a shrinking core of skilled, full-time workers and a larger stock of less-skilled and badly paid casual or out-sourced labour. By 2008, according to the Labour Ministry, about half the workforce was in casual and temporary jobs.

Job creation is vital. But it’s not a match-winner anymore – not in the kind of economy and labour market that defines South Africa. The quest for more – and better jobs – has to occur as part of the wider realisation of social rights.

3. SOCIAL GRANTS SEPARATE MILLIONS FROM DESTITUTION BUT IT IS ILL-SUITED TO TODAY’S REALITIES

The impact of the social grant system is beyond dispute. According to Statistics SA, the increase in incomes among the poorest 30 per cent of South Africans after 2001 was mainly due to social grants (especially the child support grant). They’re the best poverty-alleviating tool South Africa has at the moment.

Beneficiaries rose radically since 2000. The 2.6 million recipients of pensions and social grants increased to about 14 million in 2010. About 43 per cent of households in 2007 received at least one social grant; in half of them, pensions or grants were the main sources of income.

A large proportion of low-income households would probably be unviable without these grants.

The current social protection system hinges on the fiction that every worker, sooner or later, will find a decent job.

Thus the grants were designed to assist people who, due to age or disability, cannot reasonably be expected to fend for themselves by selling their labour. Meanwhile, the employed have access to employer- and worker-subsidised protection (all tied to employment status).

But large numbers of vulnerable workers are not eligible for these state grants, and do not benefit from employment-based provisions.

5. TARGETED AND MEANS-TESTED SOCIAL PROTECTION IS BURDENSOME, COSTLY AND HUMILIATING

Most states prefer to ration cash grants by targeting and tying them to certain conditions. South Africa is no different (though only the child support grant is nominally conditional at this point).

This is administratively expensive, difficult, and unfair.

It creates arbitrary divides between those who quality for social grants and those who do not – but who are equally in need.

Most means-tested social grants also involve burdensome and humiliating interactions with the state that involve ‘proving’ to a stranger that you’re poor and unable to fend for yourself and your family. Which is why huge stigma and shame tends to attach to them.

Instead, a universal income grant would form a cornerstone of a broader social protection system. It would be available to all adult citizens, and would be neither conditional, nor targeted or means-tested. The tax system would be used to retrieve (and help finance) the grants from individuals who don’t need them because their incomes are high enough.

6. A UNIVERSAL INCOME IS DEVELOPMENTAL AND WOULD BOOST WELLBEING

Cash grants bring powerful anti-poverty, developmental and economic benefits. The observed effects include reduced stunting in children and better nutrition levels, and higher school enrolment.

In a localised, universal income pilot project in Namibia, child malnutrition declined and school attendance increased significantly within six months. Recipients also became more active in income-generating activities.

They can also help drive more inclusive patterns of growth. Brazil’s expansion of social transfers (especially via the bolsa familia, a conditional grant), along with the extension of the minimum wage, has boosted internal demand for local products and services, and aided the growth of formal jobs, as Janine Berg shows in a recent paper.[1]

Financial simulations have shown that a universal grant as small as R100 per month could close South Africa’s poverty gap by 74 per cent,[2] and lift about six million people above a poverty line of R400 (US$50) per month.

7. A UNIVERSAL INCOME CAN BE A POWERFUL EMANCIPATORY TOOL, ESPECIALLY FOR WORKERS

But the impact potentially reaches much farther than gains in social justice. The key is to uncouple grants from the labour market, which a universal income grant can achieve.

This becomes a radical turn that confronts the ‘double separation’ that is imposed on workers: Separation from the means of production and the means of subsistence.

The most subversive effect is to equip people with the freedom not to sell their labour and to withdraw, at least sporadically, from the ‘race to the bottom’ between low-skilled workers in high unemployment settings.

If the bare necessities of life can be secured elsewhere, demeaning and hyper-exploitative wage labour is no longer the ‘only option’. Thus a universal income can endow the weakest with bargaining power.

Linked with other efforts to strengthen wellbeing, it can contribute toward significant redistribution of power, time and liberty.

8. A UNIVERSAL INCOME TREATS WOMEN AS CITIZENS, NOT MERELY AS CAREGIVERS AND BEARERS OF CHILDREN

Millions of women in SA have entered the labour market since 1980s, despite their exceptionally poor job and wage prospects. Three quarters (75 per cent) of African women younger than 30 years are unemployed. Most of the few who do find employment, work part-time, for low wages and in highly exploitative conditions.

Yet women also bear the bulk of responsibility for social reproduction. Overall, the sexual division of labour in both the domestic sphere and labour market remains structured in ways that enable men to monopolise full-time and better-paying jobs, while women perform most of the household labour.

Men, whether employed or not, continue to ‘free ride’ on women’s work – paid or not.

A guaranteed universal income would challenge these arrangements, by helping provide economic independence, and by strengthening the negotiating position of women who do enter the labour market.

The most optimistic prospect on the cards for South Africa is an official (narrow) unemployment rate of about 15 per cent in 2020.

More jobs are vital. But on current trends, job creation will not provide a sufficient basis for social inclusion and wellbeing.

A universal income grant would be a powerful intervention that can radically reduce the depth and scale of impoverishment, and help emancipate millions.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in the South African newspaper, City Press in August 2011.
* Writer and journalist Hein Marais is the author of the new book ‘South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change’, published by UCT Press and Zed Books. It is available online and at good bookstores.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] Changes in labour market and social policies boosted consumption and economic growth in rural and poor areas, and created a steady demand for small retailers and service providers. That boost in demand also affected other parts of the value chain, including formal manufacturing and distribution (Berg, 2010). See Berg, J. (2010). “Laws or luck? Understanding rising formality in Brazil in the 2000s”. Working Paper no. 5. ILO Office in Brazil. ILO.
[2] The poverty gap refers to the total income shortfall of households living below the poverty line. A narrower poverty gap means more households would edge closer to, or above the poverty line.