Category Archives: The Politics of Dignity

City-wide Summit on Land, Housing and Dignity

Friday, May 23, 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo press statement

 

City-wide Summit on Land, Housing and Dignity

 

The politic of land, housing and dignity remain a huge crisis in our country.

We are seeing a lot of lands every day of our lives but each time we ask for a

land we are told there is no land.

 

Our city mayor calls himself a communist but we ask what kind of a communist

does not believe in an equal distribution of land in the city? We ask what

kind of a communist sends the notorious Land Invasion Unit to destroy the

shacks that we call home and drive us off the land we have occupied? The very

same politicians that tell us that the problem is that land remains in the

hands of the few mostly white farmers send the blue and the red ants to

illegally destroy our homes and drive us off the land we have occupied. These

same politicians are making us landless. If it wasn't for our movement,

thousands of us would have been made homeless, landless and destitute in our

own city, in our own country.

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Attachments


ABM LAND SUMMIT

Freedom is Not Real if People Don’t Feel Free

Update: A shorter version of this article has been published in the Sunday Tribune and the Daily Maverick.

Freedom is Not Real if People Don't Feel Free

Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan*

How can you declare from above that people are free from while they themselves talk from below of feeling unfree?

It is true that freedom comes with so many responsibilities. There are responsibilities from above and from below. Freedom is not just about expressing yourself as happy or not happy. There is no real freedom without justice, equality and democracy. Justice, equality and democracy require that people respect each other's dignity and that society is organised around people's dignity. If we were really free every citizen would feel part and parcel of a country that respected their dignity. They would experience this dignity at work, at home and in all the discussions about the future of each community and the country. They would be able to organise and to express their views in safety. Continue reading →

The Witness: Tsunami of small rebellions

http://witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global[_id]=89169

John Holloway interviewed by Yves Vanderhaeghen for The Witness

DESCRIBED as a “gentle revolutionary”, John Holloway is a communist philosopher, lawyer and academic who champions the cause of the Zapatista peasants’ movement in Mexico, and whose current visit to South Africa was inspired by the urban social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. Its values of community-based organisation, grassroots action, individual responsibility and a spirit of rebellion represent what he sees as essential elements in the struggle against oppression. He is, not unexpectedly, resolutely opposed to capitalism, which he describes as a “monstrous act of aggression”, and against which he proposes a kinder, gentler communism. However, his people-first philosophy argues strongly against a politics based on the impulse to power. The struggle is lost “once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process”. Revolutionary movements fail because they assume the shape of the oppressive regimes they topple, a criticism increasingly directed against the South African government, especially after the Marikana mine massacre. To escape from this graveyard of dreams, Holloway proposes direct, daily action by ordinary people, whether shack-dwellers, miners or peasants. Continue reading →

The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing

The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing

by Roberta Feldman & Susan Stall, 2004

The Dignity of Resistance chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. This comprehensive case study explores why and how these African-American women creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, utilizing a multi-disciplinary lens, explore the complexity and resourcefulness of Wentworth women's grassroots, organizing the ways in which their identities as poor African-American women and mothers both circumscribe their lives and shape their resistance. Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Feldman and Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive, alienated victims of despair. We learn instead how women residents collectively have built a cohesive, vital community, cultivated outside technical assistance, organizational and institutional supports, and have attracted funding – all to support the local facilities, services and programs necessary for the everyday needs for survival, and ultimately to save their home from demolition.

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Interview with S’bu Zikode on ‘Against the Grain’ KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley, California

Interview with S'bu Zikode on Against the Grain KPFA 94.1 FM

http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/370/id/471215/tues-11-23-10-shack-dwellers-movement

Click here to listen to this interview in MP3.

Foreclosures and tent cities have become commonplace in the U.S. and those without domicile are often left to find individual solutions to their plight. In South Africa, the poor and the homeless have mobilized themselves and are fighting back. S'bu Zikode, the head of shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, discusses how that organization was formed and the obstacles it faces, including violent attacks by the police and those in power.

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