Category Archives: Z-Net

Kennedy Road 12 Freed on Mandela Day: Spurious Charges Seen as Politically Motivated

by Nigel Gibson

Abahlali baseMjondolo is the largest poor people’s movement to have emerged in post-apartheid South Africa. The movement has confronted considerable repression at the hands of the state since its formation in 2005. This repression came to a head on the night of September 27th 2009 when an armed mob, self-identifying as ANC supporters many of who were intoxicated, massed in the Kennedy Road settlement, launching an assault on its inhabitants. They framed their attack in ethnic terms, declaring Abahlali, a multi-racial and multi-ethnic organisation, to be a ‘Pondo organisation’.

The mob descended on the Community Hall where Abahlali youth were holding an all-night camp. And later the mob attacked individual homes looking for Abahlali members and saying openly that they were going to deal with the movement’s president and vice-president. The police were called; but they did nothing, turning a blind eye. The violence continued into the next day leaving two people dead. Up to a thousand people were driven out of the settlement. Clearly the police had their orders. At the provincial level the criminalization of Abahlali was already occurring and it seemed far from coincidental that the coup at Kennedy had been planned and went to the top of the provincial government as retaliation for the movement’s successful challenge to the province’s Slums Act; a challenge that was won in the constitutional court just a few days after the attack. [i] At the local level, Abahlali was violently purged from Kennedy Road. Democracy was replaced by ANC patronage; staying in the settlement required publicly demonstrating allegiance to the ANC. For months after the attack the homes of Abahlali members were brazenly looted and destroyed.

Abahlali, with the support of many others, called for an independent commission of inquiry that would examine all aspects of the violence. But the ANC instead set up a ‘task team’ that treated Abahlali as an illegitimate and criminal organisation and the police arrested 12 of its members on a range of charges relating to the attack including murder.

Almost two years later the magistrate, Sharon Marks, threw out the whole case saying that the charges against the 12 were baseless. She described the state’s witnesses as ‘dishonest’, but it was on their apparent evidence that five of the 12 accused had been denied bail for a year and suffered in the notoriously brutal Westville prison. Abahlali knew they had been set up and they knew the twelve were innocent; but a politically motivated campaign aided by paid and unpaid hacks for the provincial state and its political patronage machine launched a major disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting Abahlali.

Most of the time the left in South Africa does very little to effect change or promote the rights of those living in astounding poverty, seventeen years after Nelson Mandela’s historic election. But what is shocking is when leftists who are supposed to have a theoretical understanding of politics, uncritically support the state’s criminalization of a grassroots political movement of poor people, and give credence to the lies perpetuated by local political entrepreneurs and the police. When the Bishop of KwaZulu-Natal, Rubin Philip and the distinguished historian Jeff Guy, among others, called for an independent inquiry into what had happened at Kennedy Road, they were accused in the Durban press of supporting the murder of innocents. It meant that a real investigation into the violent attack on Abahlali could be brushed aside while the perpetrators of the violence went free and the real circumstances of the deaths of the two men went unexamined.

While the authoritarian edge of the left had sentenced Abahlali in the court of public opinion, the state was not able to present any credible evidence against any of the accused at the trail. The state could not find a single reliable witness to testify against the accused. And Witness X, who had pointed out the accused in an identity parade, said in court that she was only pointing out people who had been part of an imfeme dance group and that three statements written down at the police station against the accused were false. She added that she had actually seen three other men involved in the stabbings and would be prepared to testify against them if they were charged.[ii]

The magistrate concluded that the witnesses against the 12 were belligerent and contradictory, and she voiced concern that they had been coached. So the Kennedy Road 12 were freed, but they had been robbed of two years of their lives, as well as their homes and livelihoods. It is clear that we need an independent enquiry to uncover the truth of what happened.

Much of the time, criminal acts against the poor are not even prosecuted or at the very least is delayed. And on the other hand, the time and money needed to prove means that often the courts are stacked against poor people. In the case of the Kennedy 12, without the support of Church organizations, human rights and other grass roots organizations as well as academics around the world, justice would have been denied. The Kennedy 12 were represented in court by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) whose executive director, Jackie Dugard, said after the verdict that ‘It has been clear for some time that the Kennedy Road accused were charged not because they had done anything wrong, but because they were associated with Abahlali’. She went on to say that the verdict was not only ‘a complete vindication of Abahlali’ but ‘raises worrying questions about police complicity in attempts to repress Abahlali’s legitimate and lawful activities on behalf of poor and vulnerable people living in informal settlements across South Africa’.

The case was thrown out on Mandela day 2011. The day commemorates Mandela’s sacrifice and struggle and what he called his ‘long walk for freedom’. But in post-Apartheid South Africa, political repression continues. ‘We will be celebrating our daily Mandela day,’ said Abahlali who don’t need to be taught about the class nature of the state: ‘This is what the state can do. It can take you out of your home, away from your work and lock you up in a place … where you are regularly beaten. It can do this to you with no evidence against you and with no apology … we don’t enjoy the so-called “freedom” that we are always being told to celebrate’. This, Abahlali continued is ‘the lie of our democracy, the democracy that serves the interest of the few, while the majority of us live in deep poverty.’

Conditions at Kennedy Road have deteriorated and the ANC promises about ‘development’ remain unmet. Against the attacks on those who resist repression Abahlali remains defiant, ‘we will beat you in the streets and in the courts.’ Reminiscent of the wonderful poem by Shelley, ‘the mask of anarchy’, they conclude, ‘we are many and have proven to the world that we have the courage to stand together and to face repression and lies … our Movement will move forward without any fear of any thuggery from any politician. We will continue to be together and to find courage in our unity’.

Nigel C. Gibson is a visiting research fellow at the School of Development Studies, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa and author of Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo.

[i] . See Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel, “Democracy’s everyday death: South Africa’s quiet coup,” http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59322

[ii] A full transcript of the trial is available at http://www.seri-sa.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=85:state-v-limpaphi-and-11-others-kennedy-12&catid=19&Itemid=41

Electricty in South Africa

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http://www.zcommunications.org/subsidies-for-the-rich-cut-offs-for-the-poor-by-shawn-hattingh

by Shawn Hatting, Z-Net

Subsidies for the Rich, Cut-offs for the Poor

The sight of people, mostly women or children, walking kilometres over dusty roads to haul wood back to their homes for cooking, heat and light is not uncommon in South Africa’s rural areas. Likewise, every winter, fires rampage through the thousands of shanty towns that dot the urban landscape because people are forced to use dangerous sources of energy like coal and paraffin. Sadly the lack of electricity, due to unaffordability, has caused the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people. Occasionally, when these shack fires are devastating enough, the country’s politicians roll out their BMWs, Mercedes Benzs and sinister black clad bodyguards and visit these areas to lament the suffering and to promise change. Each one in turn vows that if the victims vote for their party a new era of prosperity will dawn, but in the end nothing ever changes. Indeed, the web of lies that the politicians of every hue spin has no end.

The reason why nothing changes is because no matter what party these politicians are from, they are part and parcel of the leadership of a system – in the form of the state and capitalism – that is designed to wage war on the working class, to increase the wealth of the rich and to protect their interests. Time after time these politicians along with the rich have unleashed repeated attacks on the working class. The latest of these attacks recently took place when the government and the state-owned electricity provider, Eskom, announced that the price of electricity for households would be increasing by over 100% in the next three years. In fact, in 2010 alone electricity prices are set to soar by 24% for the working class . The consequences of these astronomical increases are going to be devastating, but also glaringly familiar: electricity cuts offs will increase; evictions related to Eskom’s cost recovery will soar; millions more people will have to use dangerous energy sources like paraffin; and the number of shack fires and associated deaths will escalate. The state, politicians, the rich and Eskom, however, don’t really care about this despite what they claim when disasters like shack fires occur. All they actually care about is squeezing more and more money out of workers and the poor.

Eskom helps the rich by waging a war on the poor

In truth, Eskom has become one of the major sites through which the state and rich wage a war on the poor. Under apartheid Eskom was established to provide cheap electricity at no profit to the richest white capitalists in the country in the form of mining houses. In the late 1980s the state-owned Eskom eventually stopped running on a non-profit basis and it was commercialised. This meant that it started to sell electricity as a product in order to make money. The focus of this profit making, however, was not corporations; it was rather the working class. As such, since the 1980s the price that the working class has to pay for electricity has risen sharply. The consequences of this have been devastating as since 1994 Eskom has cut off the electricity of as many as 10 million people because they could not pay. To add insult to injury, it was also the state-owned corporation, Servcon, which evicted many of these people from their homes for non-payment. Linked to this process of commercialisation, the state and Eskom’s bosses also attacked the company’s workers. To reduce costs they fired 40 000 of Eskom’s 85 000 workers during the 1990s. Today there are just over 30 000 workers left at Eskom. The aim of all of these mass retrenchments has been to intensify the exploitation of the remaining workers. Indeed, it has been workers and the poor that have been forced to bear the brunt of Eskom’s commercialisation: the new round of price increases are simply part of this longstanding process.

Despite its drive to maximise the profit it derives from supplying electricity to the working class, Eskom continues to charge the biggest corporations in the country the lowest rates for electricity probably anywhere in the world. The extent of this was revealed when it was made public, by groups like Earthlife Africa, that Eskom has secret special pricing agreements with 138 corporations in southern Africa. Under these agreements, which were endorsed by the post-apartheid state, these corporations have been receiving electricity below the average cost of production. It has also been pointed out that this means that these corporations are receiving electricity between 9 and 35 cents per Kilowatt /Hour; while households pay around 80 cents per Kiliowatt\Hour. This translates into a situation in which some of these companies are receiving electricity at a price that is 500% less than what the average working class customer is being forced to pay. To make matters worse, many of these corporations will also be exempt from the price increases that have recently been announced. This means that the poor are being made, by Eskom and the state, to subsidise the rich.

The company which the state and Eskom have perhaps provided the biggest support to has been BHP Billiton. BHP Billiton started its life out as an Afrikaner empowerment company, Gencor, which was established during the apartheid era. In the mid-1990s the first finance minister of the post-apartheid government, Derek Keys, gave Gencor permission to move billions of rands offshore to buy a resource company called Billiton and become one of the largest corporations in the world. As part of this, Gencor then legally transferred the ownership of its most profitable sections to its newly acquired subsidiary Billiton and took its name. Soon afterwards Keys left the state to become head of Billiton. He then received permission from the state to move its headquarters to London and Melbourne, which meant the company could repatriate all of the profits it made in South Africa out of the country. The assistance that the state has given to BHP Billiton did not end there. Since 1997 the South African state has ensured that Eskom provided three of BHP Billiton’s smelters in southern Africa with arguably the cheapest electricity on Earth, which often has worked out to be well below the cost of production. Such deals with corporations have been directly linked to Eskom recording a loss of R 9.5 billion in 2009. In fact, it has been calculated that in 2009 alone BHP Billiton made R 1.3 billion out of its deals with Eskom. To put the scale of this into context, R 1.3 billion could have provided over 280 000 poor households with 200 free Kilowatts/Hour of electricity per month for a year. It was the public pressure that such deals created, which led Eskom to recently announce that it would be renegotiating its deals with BHP Billiton. At the same time, however, it was announced that these renegotiated deals would also be secret, which means that there is a very real prospect that little will actually change.

The 138 companies that Eskom and the South African state provide extremely cheap electricity to also account for over 40% of the electricity generated in the country. This along with the mothballing of power stations that accompanied Eskom’s commercialisation has led to a colossal energy crisis. Yet, it has been the working class that has been forced to bear the burden of the crisis in terms of blackouts and increasing costs. In addition to this, the South African state has also recently secured a World Bank loan for Eskom to expand its capacity, for which the public will ultimately have to pay. It is planned that this loan will be used in building two coal fired power stations whose main beneficiaries will be major corporations. These two new coal fired power stations will be adding to the already vast amounts of pollution that corporations, including Eskom, generate in South Africa. Indeed, since its inception Eskom has been externalising the real costs of its pollution onto communities through the market.

One of the main beneficiaries of the World Bank loan and the construction of the new power stations is the corporate giant Hitachi . The South African leg of Hitachi happens to be partly owned by the ANC’s investment company, Chancellor House. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that the deal between Eskom and Hitachi was brokered by ANC heavyweight Valli Moosa who is also the Chair of Eskom. As a direct result of the contract, the ANC has been accused of possibly standing to make over R 50 million from the deal through Chancellor House. The prospect of this raised the anger of many people. Under pressure from the public, Chancellor House and Hitachi eventually announced that this money would not be going to the ANC, as it was a conflict of interest, but rather private individuals linked to Chancellor House. Who these ‘private’ individuals are, however, Hitachi and Chancellor House are not willing to say. This once again highlights how corruption is intrinsically part of the capitalist economy and how the interests of capitalists, states, politicians and political parties are intimately intertwined.

The current energy crisis and the World Bank loan have also raised the prospect of further rounds of privatisation of sections of Eskom. It was recently announced that sections of Eskom’s generation capacity are set to be privatised. The companies that are advising Eskom on the privatisation schemes are none other than the corrupt corporate giants Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan – who themselves only exist due to massive bailouts from the US state. No doubt these two companies are raking in massive fees from their advisory role. As part of the privatisation process it is also anticipated that thousands of workers could be retrenched, while others will be essentially sold off to which ever companies take over sections of Eskom’s generation capacity. Considering the history of privatisation in South Africa and across the world, it is highly likely that this new round of privatisation will also lead to higher prices and more cut-offs in the future.

Of course, Eskom has already had a long history of being involved in numerous public private partnerships along with outsourcing certain of its functions. On the whole outsourcing has been used as a form of corporate welfarism that has been aimed at boosting the profit margins of the large companies that take over these functions. Many of the companies that have received outsourcing contracts have had links to leading figures in the ANC, and the practice of outsourcing by parastatals has often had the goal of benefiting a tiny number of black capitalists through Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) . For instance, in the case of Eskom a R300 million contract to manage certain of the company‘s facilities was handed to a corporation – Drake & Scull – when Valli Moosa was Eskom Chair. It should come as no surprise that Valli Moosa is also part owner of Drake & Scull. In fact, he bought a share in the company literally months before awarding it the Eskom contract. While Moosa and Drake & Scull have made vast amounts of money out of the deal, the workers involved had to stomach the consequences. They were told to either move to Drake & Scull, with the loss of many of the benefits that they had, or to accept being retrenched. This situation, however, is not unusual, around the world outsourcing and privatisation of service has been shown to undermine the working conditions of employees, while at the same time increasing the costs of services to the public.

The state bureaucrats that have been linked to Eskom have been rewarded handsomely for providing cheap electricity to corporations and handing outsourcing contracts to the rich. For example, former Eskom CEO Jacob Moraga received a salary of almost R 5 million in 2009 alone . When he recently left Eskom he also demanded and sued for an additional R 85 million as a severance package. Likewise, during the apartheid era the former Eskom CFO, Mick Davis, was rewarded so handsomely that he used this, along with the connections he had created, as a foundation to eventually establish one of the largest resource corporations in the world, Xstrata . As such, state linked officials have become as well paid as there capitalist counterparts for helping the rich and attacking the poor. Indeed, a revolving door exists between the state and large corporations in South Africa.

Eskom is part of the state’s project of corporate welfarism

The major assistance that the state provides to corporations, through Eskom, is not an isolated incident. The government through its numerous state-owned corporations has literally provided billions of rands in subsidies to corporations. Even during the period of neo-liberalism, huge amounts of money have been spent by the state on projects like Coega and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project for the benefit of corporations. In the case of Coega, it was designed amongst other things to offer giant corporations an opportunity to establish further smelters at very low costs; while the Lesotho Highlands Water Project had the goal of diverting water from a neighbouring county to corporations in Gauteng at exceptionally low prices. Massive construction companies, like Murray and Roberts, also made a fortune out of the government contracts that accompanied these projects. Likewise, the state-owned Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) has provided corporations with billions in terms of loans, financial assistance and bailouts. In 2010 alone it spent R 11 billion promoting the interests of corporations and capitalism in the country.

Under bureaucrats like Alec Erwin the state has also been involved in ensuring that giant corporations like ArcelorMittal were supplied with exceptionally cheap raw materials to encourage them to invest in South Africa and to boost their profits. The state ensured that when ArcelorMittal bought the privatised steel producer Iscor it would receive iron ore at cost plus 3%. The state then, in turn, allowed ArcelorMittal to sell its steel at import parity prices . This has meant that with the help of the state, ArcelorMittal’s South African operations have become one of its most profitable anywhere in the world.

Within the last few years, the state has also spent massive amounts of money on the Gautrain. Again the beneficiaries of the project were construction companies and the rich. So while the Metrorail system – used by the workers and the poor – is on the verge of collapse due the state cutting funds; wealthy businesspeople will be able to shuttle back and forth to Sandton at 160 km\h aboard plush trains courtesy of the state. In addition, the public private partnerships and outsourcing that accompanied the Gautrain Project were also wracked by kick-backs, crooked tenders and profits for the rich who had political connections.

Another instance of the South African state embarking on corporate welfare has been the money that it has spent on the World Cup. The main beneficiaries of the state’s spending spree on stadiums, and other infrastructure, has been construction companies, FIFA and corporate sponsors. It has, in fact, been calculated that the money spent by the state on stadiums could have built over 450 000 houses for the homeless. To make matters worse, in some places like Mpumulanga, two schools were demolished to make way for the stadium; while hundreds of thousands of poor people have been evicted from city centres as part of the gentrification process. To add insult to injury many of the stadiums have been privatised. In Cape Town, the running of the stadium has been handed over to a private company, Stad de France / SAIL. As part of this, the City of Cape Town guaranteed Stad de France / SAIL a profit even if the stadium is never full again after the World Cup.

Despite what neo-liberal ideologues may claim, therefore, the state in South Africa has been propping up corporations and assisting the rich. The state and Eskom’s subsidisation of the largest 138 companies, via providing electricity at below the average production cost, is simply part of this pattern. The recent price increases for the working class are also part of this subsidisation for the rich. Indeed, throughout the history of capitalism the state has played a central role in protecting the interests of the rich.

The struggle for free electricity and beyond

It is clear that the type of corporate welfarism that is practiced in South Africa has had a devastating impact on workers and the poor. The fact that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world attests to that. The recent electricity price hikes, which are part of the corporate welfare practised by the South African state, are going to intensify the suffering that many workers and the poor are being subjected to. For this reason it is quite likely that the spate of community protests that have occurred in South Africa are going to continue and perhaps even intensify.

In the process of these struggles, however, workers and the poor should not look to the state as some kind of neutral entity or even ally. The fact that the state protects the interests of the rich and ruling few against workers and the poor means that it can never be this. Without pressure from below by the working class the state would also never even consider stopping the electricity price hikes or rolling out free electricity to the poor. Voting for politicians or having faith in parliaments is also not going to bring the things that people need. Politicians of every kind are part and parcel of the elite and play the role of protectors of the capitalist system. Likewise trusting in experts and officials, along with putting faith in social dialogue with government and the rich – who are the enemy – is also not going to roll back the recent price hikes or bring the poor electricity. All the experts and officials have done has been to raise prices for the poor, while giving the rich and corporations cheap electricity.

Rather, the most effective way for workers and the poor to win gains like free electricity is through direct action. It was community struggles such as Operation Khanyisa – which involved activists undertaking direct actions like reconnecting people’s electricity who had been cut off – that eventually forced the state to implement a lifeline of electricity however small. What was important about struggles like Operation Khanyisa was that they were also directed by the workers and the poor themselves. Indeed, if electricity prices are to be rolled back for the poor, then actions like this are perhaps going to have to be undertaken across the country. Only direct action, including militant strikes, by the working class itself will pressurise the state to reverse price hikes. As part of this struggle, the working class could also use direct action to try and ensure that the rich and corporations pay more for electricity so that the poor get it for free. Of course, such struggles for immediate gains can also be used to build the confidence, organisation and power of the working class, which would be vital for the larger struggle of social transformation .

The reality that the privatisation and commercialisation of Eskom has led to increased prices for the poor means that as part of any struggle this process needs to be resisted. Privatisation in South Africa has caused massive job losses, skyrocketing prices and cut-offs, which have had a devastating impact on the working class. The fact that the rich get cheap electricity whereas the poor get cut-off also happens because a small group of people – private employers and the state – control the means of production and have most of the wealth; while the rest of the population own hardly anything and are forced to work for the rich for a pittance to survive. As such privatisation and capitalism need to be fought against as part of the struggle for immediate gains. In doing so, however, it should perhaps also be reflected upon that state ownership is not the solution and will not bring freedom to workers and the poor. As such, government ownership does not equate to socialism. State ownership is quite compatible with capitalism and some of the most anti-worker and anti-poor companies in history have been state-owned.

This means that struggles for immediate gains, like electricity, should perhaps also be informed by the goal of ultimately replacing the state and capitalism with a new system that serves and is run by the worker class themselves. Perhaps, therefore, the type of world we should be fighting for is a world where there are no bosses; where hierarchies of any form don’t exist; where workers manage themselves; where the economy is democratically planned through community and worker assemblies and councils, where society is democratically run from the bottom up using a system of assemblies and recallable delegates; where all wealth is socialised; where the environment is not raped; and where the goal is to meet peoples’ needs and not make profits. In other words a world based on anarchist-communist principles where everyone is truly free.

To get such a world, however, would need a strong movement which would also have to be radically democratic and self-managed. A movement that is not democratic, or in which bureaucrats and intellectuals are in control, or in which leaders make the decisions and instruct followers what to do, is not going to be able to create such a world. The only thing it can do is put a new elite at the head of society. As such, struggles and movements for a better world need to be pre-figurative; if we want a truly democratic, participatory and self-managed society in the future; then our methods and movements should also be radically democratic, participatory and self-managed. Indeed, it has long been pointed out that the emancipation of workers and the poor must be accomplished by, and in the hands of, the workers and the poor themselves; anything less cannot be true freedom.

Z-Net: Participatory Society: Urban Space & Freedom

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http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21529

Participatory Society: Urban Space & Freedom

May 29, 2009

By Chris Spannos

[A variation of this talk was delivered today, Friday, May 29th at the B-Fest in Athens, Greece. The gathering is an international anti-authoritarian festival hosted by the Babylonia newspaper, at the University of Fine Arts in Athens, from May 27-31. The purpose of the gathering is to explore vision and strategy after last December’s social uprising there.]

Hello, today’s track is called “Land & Freedom” and I’ve been asked to talk on the subject of Participatory Society: Urban Space and Freedom.

Before I begin, however, I would like to thank you for inviting me here today and for hosting this conference. This is the first time I’ve been to Greece and it is an honor to be here under such circumstances.

Greece knows all too well the barbarism of U.S. imperialism and as Greeks struggle to change their society today so too do we struggle in the U.S. against oppressive forces there. We in the U.S. need to catch up in our political consciousness, organization, and concern for vision. This conference is exemplary in its mission to look at the past and present to strategize for the future. While here I hope to learn from you to see what I can take back home. The overarching goal that should unite everyone everywhere, ultimately, is a hope and effort to overcome today’s systemic problems while developing shared vision of a fundamentally new society and the struggle for its realization. That is what we are working towards here today.

Today’s cities are far from offering equitable conditions and opportunities to their inhabitants. The majority of the urban population is deprived or limited – in virtue of their economic, social, cultural, ethnic, gender or age characteristics – in the satisfaction of their most elemental needs and rights. Public policies that contribute to this by ignoring the contributions of the popular inhabiting processes to the construction of the city and citizenship, are only detrimental to urban life. The grave consequences of this situation include massive evictions, segregation, and resulting deterioration of social coexistence.

– World Charter for the Right to the City

Over the last few days here in Greece I’ve been told that almost half the population live here in Athens and also that more than half are located in urban areas throughout the country. So, you may be interested to hear that today, for the first time in history, 3.3 billion people around the globe, half of humanity, live in cities. Over one third of this population does not share in the benefits that cities have to offer. It is estimated that within two decades 60 percent of the earth’s population will live in urban areas and, if we continue on the current trajectory, by 2050 the urban population of the developing world will be 5.3 billion (UN projections), primarily in Asia and Africa. Because of these trends this century has been called the “Century of the City” (State of the Worlds Cities 2008 / 2009, UN Habitat).

This rapid urbanization has happened on a pace and scale unprecedented and has set in motion long-term and in some cases irreversible, social, material, and environmental damage. Migration to and between urban centers, natural growth (births outpacing deaths), urban sprawl, increasing fuel and food prices, the need for work, mass use of private transportation, and the convenience of urban lifestyles all contribute to consumption of large amounts of energy and production of excessive amounts of waste. These patterns make today’s cities primary sources of pollution. Increasing growth of urban areas means increasing risk of climate change where the underprivileged and disempowered suffer most.

Between and within cities high concentrations of wealth, power, and privilege make spatial and social disparities more, not less, pronounced. Urban inequality directly impacts all aspects of societal life, including health, nutrition, gender and race equality, education, and mortality. Everywhere where this spatial, social, and material inequality reins lack of popular decision-making control reduces people’s participation and integration into society.

Based on the above I recognize three major problems:

(1) Rapid Urbanization is assisted by lack of popular decision-making control over society’s institutions and our very own lives, making cities locations where obscene concentrations of wealth and power coexist with mass dispossession of at least half the earth’s population with trends forecasting more into the near future.

(2) The logic of city planning and urban development is driven by the interests of capital and top-down decision making by local, regional, and national governments where the objectives of the rulers over the ruled are contrary to the interests of the rest of us. The system of capitalism, a system defined by private ownership of productive assets, markets with roles for buyers and sellers, and corporate divisions of labor in workplaces has contributed to the misinformed use of human and natural resources where the benefits of city life are made available only for the few while the high costs of urban growth and convenience are socialized for the many.

(3) UN Habitat reports that in the decade between 1990 and 2000 urbanization in developing regions was characterized by the entry of new cities that did not exist as such in 1990. The report states, “This constellation of 694 new cities started out as rural towns and became urban areas by virtue of changes in their administrative status, natural growth or in-migration.” (PDF) The problem is not the number of cities but rather the structures within and between them, and also possibly their size and current rate of growth. But where did they come from? These cities did not appear magically, nor were they the product of divine intervention or an evolutionary outcome hardwired into history. Rather, they are human-made creations. Similarly, so are the vast disparities of wealth and power that exist within and between these cities. The maintenance of urban inequality is made possible through human-made hierarchical institutions that serve elite interests. Therefore, our hope lies in the self-conscious ability of people to carry out their own social and material objectives for the improvement of their own lives and their ability to exercise decision-making control over their own destinies. To accomplish this, and successfully overthrow counter-revolutionary forces (outlined below), we will need shared vision of a society organized around an institutional framework that delivers self-management, classlessness, solidarity, and diversity.

The society I advocate is called a Participatory Society and has consequences for how we orient ourselves to the problems mentioned above. I will now focus on these consequences and along the way outline a new institutional vision as a proposed solution.

Urban Crisis & Social Control

The urban center is not only defined by relations to rural or suburban peripheries—by space, place, territory or geography—but also by a set of social and material relations that embody all societies. Every society has defining institutions which embody interpersonal roles and relations, as well as generalized patterns of behavior and outcomes consistent with our expectations that those institutions will produce and re-produce. These outcomes can be more or less desirable. They can be more or less classist; more or less racist; more or less sexist; and allow more or less control over our daily lives.

Societies where people have very little decision-making capacity, where people have little or no say over when and where they work or live, how they work or live, or what they produce or consume, suffer alienation and isolation that hides shared social and material relations, causing people in the same workplace, neighborhood, or city, to be socially and culturally separated from one another and to not interact. All this can lead to mass anti-social behavior such as loneliness, drug and alcohol abuse, crime and violence, abuse of public property, and affect many social indicators such as stress, mental and physical health, education, and mortality. Empathy for the repercussions of anti-social outcomes is minimized while attitudes of disinterest and disaffection, and even cynicism towards human suffering, are elevated. These patterns warp and accumulate as they embed themselves into the very fabric of the everyday roles and relationships defining our lives. They oppressively pressure every moment.

Today’s urban centers are home to extreme disparities where dense concentrations of wealth and power live side by side with squalor and desperation. One of the most forceful proposals I can think of to curb this pattern and its negative consequences is for people to assume self-managed decision-making control over their lives.

The principle of self-management includes, but is not limited to, human rights and access to society’s material resources and social space. However, access and rights to the city are not the same as self-administration and autonomous control of society’s institutions. Self-management goes beyond those who think they are free from false consciousness and believe they know what is in the people’s best interest and so seek to exercise decision-making power on behalf of everyone else. It means simply that people make decisions themselves, to the degree that they and others are affected, about how to administer their own lives and society’s institutions. They become arbiters of their own destinies.

For everyone everywhere to wield this kind of self-managed control over their lives society’s institutions will need to be fundamentally transformed, in every sphere of life, enabling decision-making control in proportion to how one is affected. This kind of society is called a Participatory Society—it is a self-managing society, a classless society, a solidarity society, a sustainable society, and a diverse society.

In the construction of a new participatory society:

– Class hierarchies will be abolished for new classless divisions of labor, remuneration of work for onerousness and intensity will be the norm, and decentralized producer and consumer controlled councils will negotiate allocation of the material means of life.

– Racial and community hierarchies will be un-done for full racial diversity and ethnic equality.

– Gender and sex hierarchies will be overturned to harvest non-sexist socialization and care-giving.

– Political authoritarianism will be made null for new participatory forms of nested council self-governance.

A participatory society, where people have self-managed decision-making say over the things that affect them, will require new consciousness, skills, and capacities for everyone. Society’s participatory institutions will convey compassion, understanding, and solidarity; equal opportunity to realize our own material fates with classless outcomes; and diverse lifestyles choices and living arrangements for all to choose from.

Better urban or town planning by leaders over the led will generate outcomes consistent with hierarchical institutions and relations—a society for them rather than for the rest of us. A democratically planned city is, of course, likely to be more livable than one that is developed by random greed while placing decision-making control in people’s hands will help face both the institutional damages already done and those ahead in the coming century.

Urban vs. Rural Space

Growth in urban space causes cities to expand outward and upward placing new demands on infrastructure, resources, and transportation. Escaping the city for life closer to nature in the suburbs, where these suburbs are often highly developed themselves, means further transportation and infrastructure demands to and from the suburban periphery and urban center. Other possibilities consist of connecting smaller cities that encircle larger ones while connecting all centers to one another using shared resource and transportation planning. In discussing these problems of urban space and development I would like to propose that our vision of a participatory society suggests a new orientation for how we approach the balance between urban and rural development and the issue of size, scale and relations of our societal endeavors.

There are two notable classical Left approaches to these issues.

In 1887, Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Bellamy imagined a socialist Boston city (U.S.) in the year 2000 which was technologically advanced and where consumer goods were in abundance:

“At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined by fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side.”

In oppositional response to the large scale urban vision offered by Bellamy, 19th Century British socialist, romantic, and architect William Morris wrote his classic text News From Nowhere. This book envisioned a city that abandon urban and large scale industrialization in favor of a smaller, village level, scale and design. Morris imagined an existence where the division between art, life, and work had been abolished. He proposed that artistic and handicraft design be incorporated into our built environment:

I lingered a little behind the others to have a stare at this house, which, as I have told you, stood on the site of my old dwelling.

It was a longish building with its gable ends turned away from the road, and long traceried windows coming rather low down set in the wall that faced us. It was very handsomely built of red brick with a lead roof; and high up above the windows there ran a frieze of figure subjects in baked clay, very well executed, and designed with a force and directness which I had never noticed in modern work before. The subjects I recognized at once, and indeed was very particularly familiar with them.

However, all this I took in in a minute; for we were presently within doors, and standing in a hall with a floor of marble mosaic and an open timber roof. There were no windows on the side opposite to the river, but arches below leading into chambers, one of which showed a glimpse of a garden beyond, and above them a long space of wall gaily painted (in fresco, I thought) with similar subjects to those of the frieze outside; everything about the place was handsome and generously solid as to material; and though it was not very large (…), one felt in it that exhilarating sense of space and freedom which satisfactory architecture always gives…

These two classic examples provide contrasting visions of the balance between urban and rural development, the scale or our productive endeavors, what buildings may look like, or even as Morris does, after the transformation of an old society into a new, which formerly elite spaces we may use to store manure in.

The vision of a participatory society does not have any preconceived assumptions about which of the above is more desirable than the other in size or scale but instead provides an institutional context that enables those most affected by these decisions to decide what is best for themselves in a self-managing and classless way.

A participatory society’s economic relations deliver classlessness through balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, nested worker and consumer councils, and decentralized participatory planning and so, consequentially, regardless of whether someone lives in an urban or rural area, or a society is smaller or larger, everyone will have comparably empowering circumstances and the same classless position. Extreme disparities in wealth and power will be a thing of the past.

When it comes to what daily life details in this urban or rural vision may actually look like, I hope it will suffice to say that people will be able to negotiate the re-organization of social space to meet their everyday lifestyle needs and choices. In Redesigning the American Dream (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002) Feminist, and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism Dolores Hayden explores the Feminist critique of single family homes as “enclosures” on women’s lives. In a participatory society one can imagine much of the heavy burden of “women’s work” and “household labor,” being lifted by classlessness, but still, change to avoid male privilege will be needed as well. After revolutionizing gender relations—in child-rearing, socialization, and care-giving—people may even also decide to re-organize the distance between work and home or choose from among various possibilities for their mutual integration. For example, the socialization of care-giving might mean the placement of daycare centers and elderly homes into communities and workplaces. Or, shared communal eating and cleaning spaces might also emerge as possible solutions to lessen the workload of individual families. Likewise we can envision how accommodation and reproduction of diverse cultural and community relations in the economy may also take shape. However, trying to imagine in detail today the distance between work and daycare (or the aesthetics) of society’s institutions tomorrow is placing the “buggy before the horse.” Just as with the balance between urban and rural space a participatory society should provide an institutional context allowing populations to choose whatever details they prefer consistent with self-management and classlessness. Then we can all see those details when the future arrives.

The Sustainable City & The Class Connection

In response to the problem of cities being major sources of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change some suggest we need societies not so large, affluent, or convenient. The proposed solution would be to cut-back on consumption and production, move away from non-renewable resources, private transportation, and recycle more, all in an effort to downsize our ecological footprint. Others suggest that the problem is not even cities, per say, that are responsible for the output of greenhouse gasses but, rather, per capita consumption patterns—that is, the amount of consumption per head for those that live in cities (State of the Worlds Cities 2008 / 2009, UN Habitat). Some cities have even tried to reduce their per capita energy consumption through more efficient use of transportation and infrastructure.

However, the real source of the problem is the lack of popular decision-making control over what is consumed, how it is produced, and the volume of both. Inputs for production and consumption should be guided by concern for the social costs and benefits of their use, and what is socially valuable, rather than by elite planning and mismanagement guided by random greed. These are problems that the economy of a participatory society (parecon) addresses by providing institutional solutions via classless and self-managed worker and consumer councils.

In every society that hosts disparities in wealth, power, and privilege so too are there disparities in affluence, comfort, and convenience. In societies such as the U.S., where the top 10 percent collectively enjoy almost as much wealth as the bottom 150 million (half the population), asking those of us in the bottom 60-70 percent to cut back on the comfort and convenience that we already have very little of is tantamount to asking people to give up even more control over what little we have left to enjoy of our dispossessed lives.

The question is not if we should cut-back on overall affluence and reduce our collective environmental footprint, as most would agree, but how we can redistribute decision-making power and control so that those currently at the top have the same consumption ceiling as the rest of us. Decisions about who should cut-back on their consumption levels today and how to reduce carbon levels for an environmentally sustainable future tomorrow should be made by all according to how they are affected—self-management.

The overall purpose, however, should be how to reorient life, cities, and social relations, so that great social and material benefits accrue from less, and even more to the point, less ecologically destructive production and consumption. For example, we need to replace many private goods, such as cars for transportation, with far more efficient public forms—in a myriad of ways.

Sustainability & The Need for Revolution

Some have argued that “We need to stop consuming fossil fuels and defeat global warming over the next twenty to thirty years,” and they are right. However, not only will doing so take at least as much coordination of energy and resources as transforming society’s defining institutions, specifically, moving toward a post-capitalist economy, but as long as capitalism’s defining features of private ownership of productive assets, markets, and corporate hierarchies exist, any progress made towards “greening society” will always be threatened by market pressures pushing for production and consumption of private goods and services over public ones, hiding the true social and material costs of economic activity, and using resources where the guiding ruling class interests are profits and power over people and the environment. Consequentially, our efforts for a sustainable society will be rolled back and undercut if we don’t address the roots of the problem, and aim for their transformation.

Strategies for Self-Management: 3 Orientations

We have, I think, a real need right now to democratize decisions as to how a city shall be and what it should be about, so that we can actually have, if you like, a collective project about reshaping urban—the urban world. I mean, here in this city [New York], effectively, the right to the city has been held by the mayor and the Development Office and the developers and the financiers. Most of us don’t really have a very strong say. I mean, there are kind of community organizations and so on. So I think the democratization of the city, of city decision-making, is crucial. And I think we want to reclaim the right to the city for all of us, so that we can all actually not only have access to what exists in the city, but also be able to reshape the city in a different image, in a different way, which is more socially just, more environmentally sustainable and so on.
– David Harvey

Today there are urban and rural movements on every continent seeking access and rights to resources and social space. These and other movements could be building blocks towards a participatory society where people exercise self-managed decision-making control over their lives and over society’s institutions. I want to highlight three strategic orientations, the problems we face, and institutional forces working against us. I believe all three orientations are necessary and interdependent for the final goal of realizing a new society.

Orientation 1: Reforms

The first orientation I want to discuss is reforms. Reforms are a way to improve poor social and material conditions today in the hope that things will be better tomorrow. Today, on all continents, there are many groups working to improve the conditions that dispossess them.

For example, in South Africa, the Shack dweller’s movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo, “ABM”), Landless People’s Movement, the Rural Network, and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, are all part of a Poor People’s Alliance for radical social justice. In Kwazulu-Natal the Shack dweller’s (ABM) have been engaged in a fight against the province’s “Slums Act” by using both legal means and direct action. It has been estimated that 10 percent of South Africans “still live in shanty-style developments, which were first set up on the outskirts of major towns and cities during white minority rule.” (BBC / ABM site) The South African government plans on displacing thousands of shack dweller’s to make room for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. “The government has made plans to develop ‘World Class Cities’ by eliminating the ‘slums’ which are home to millions” says ABM partner organization War on Want. The Act is expected to lead to the eviction of large numbers of shack dwellers from their homes and into temporary housing in so-called “transit camps” that are often located far from vital services and job opportunities and lack decent water and sanitation facilities. As of today ABM and others are still trying to contest the constitutionality of the Slums Act and ensure a place for shack dwellers in the city and with dignity.

Similarly, in Brazil there is the exemplary Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), the largest social movement of its kind. In a 25 year period the MST has taken over 35 million acres from large land owners, an amount “larger than the country of Uruguay” (Stedile). The MST has settled thousands of families and built hundreds of schools and homes. This strategy obviously aims, and has succeeded to a large extent, in the redistribution of rural land. In Brazil’s urban centers, another movement—Movimiento de los Trabajadores Sin Techo (MTST) has emerged in the past years. Taking on MST’s tactics, they occupy urban spaces for living areas.

Where I am from, in the U.S., regionally and across major cities nationally, there is a Right to the City movement. Its overview page states:

Right to the City was born out of desire and need by organizers and allies around the country to have a stronger movement for urban justice. But it was also born out of the power of an idea of a new kind of urban politics that asserts that everyone, particularly the disenfranchised, not only has a right to the city, but as inhabitants, have a right to shape it, design it, and operationalize an urban human rights agenda.

The Right to the City Alliance was established in 2007 and includes more than 40 member organizations spanning 7 states and more than a dozen local jurisdictions. Regional networks include Boston / Providence, DC / North Virginia, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco / Oakland. The movement engages in campaigns for civic engagement, public and subsidized housing, tenant’s rights, and provides resource, technical, and legal support and advocacy services.

In Boston, the city I live closest to, City Life/Vida Urbana is a member organization of the Right to the City Alliance. In 2008 alone there have been over 1200 home foreclosures, and about 2400 threatened evictions, affecting perhaps 4-5000 people. City Life has stopped or delayed more than 300 evictions.

While the above examples are all exemplary movements, one can see that the South African and Brazilian examples, representing millions of members, are much further ahead in their organizing engagements than those of us in the U.S. However, our movements can humorously boast that we have more websites than many of our organizations have members!

Orientation 2: Revolt

Following shortly on the heels of your own uprising last December, and consistent with some of the tactics I read about taking place here, students at the New School University in New York occupied some of their own faculty buildings. This was sparked by a vote of no confidence in the university’s President and Vice President and because they were acting out of interests contradictory to the interests of students, staff, and faculty. The students used occupation as tactic to raise demands and get them met. Some of their demands were:

– resignation of the NewSchool president, and others on the Board of Trustees

– abolition of the grading system

– student and faculty cooperatively plan curriculum

– have the administration be elected and recallable by students, staff, and faculty

– to have social justice curriculum

– have the university serve community interests and needs

– disclosure of university investments to ensure the university is not funding war, torture, labor, social, or environmental injustice.

– implementation of a socially responsible investment committee (comprised of students, staff, and faculty).

There were many other demands, and they have won some, and they are still fighting for others. However, this occupation was a tactic employed around part of a much larger long-term vision of broader society, as exemplified by one of their slogans, “Occupy Everything!” As New School Radical Student Union organizer Meaghan Linick-Loughley said, “All this is trying to push the university into the direction of a self-managed university, even though these are only small steps.” (See video interview)

Other examples of occupation tactics in the U.S. include the sit-down strikes in the auto industry of the 1930’s Depression-era where workers used occupations to get demands met, however did not try to run the factories themselves as newly re-organized workplaces. More recently, last December 5th the famous Chicago Republic Windows and Doors factory gained international attention when 260 workers occupied their plant for 6 days. Workers there used factory occupation as their tactic of choice bringing back Depression-era tactics in the U.S. Weeks after taking $25 billion dollars in public bailout money Bank of America cut off its line of credit to the factory causing the company to halt operations and terminate its workers with only three days notice and without severance packages. Adopting the slogan “You got bailed out, we got sold out!” the workers occupation struggle earned them a victory settlement totaling $1.75 million dollars covering eight weeks of pay, two months of continued health coverage, and pay for all accrued and unused vacation. United Electrical Director of Organization Bob Kingsley described the outcome as “an historic victory for America’s labor movement.” Today the plant is re-opening under new ownership with all the workers hired back at their old wages. This was an inspiring example of occupation as a reform tactic to improve the conditions of workers today.

The most recent example of the occupation tactic being employed in the U.S., also in Chicago and paralleling the Windows and Doors story, is the worker’s struggle at the 122 year-old Hartmarx business suit factory. This is the company that outfitted now U.S. President Barack Obama in the navy blue suit he wore on his inauguration night.

Hartmarx is in bankruptcy and its biggest creditor is Wells Fargo which, like Bank of America, also received $25 billion dollars public bailout money. There are offers to buy the company but Wells Fargo wants to liquidate it. On Monday, May 11, 650 workers voted to occupy their factory if the bank decides to liquidate. The struggle of the Hartmarx worker’s is still unfolding.

There are of course excellent examples of occupations and takeovers around the world, where many lessons can be learned, from France, the U.K., Canada, and even your own country. However, one significant example outside the U.S. that you may be aware of is Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Argentine workers have adopted the MST strategy of “Occupy, Resist, Produce” to take over and administer their own factories. These takeovers erupted during and after Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis and social rebellion with wide spread occupations of work places and community spaces for autonomous organizing and implementation of self-managed social relations.

In the student and worker examples above, the lesson I draw from occupation as a tactic, and I hope to hear and learn more about yours here—as I understand that you have a very deliberate occupations’ movement that has been organizing for years—is the difference between occupations as a tactic to get demands met, or occupations as social centers for activism and organizing—which are both very positive and exemplary things—and the use of occupations consistent with our ultimate objectives of redefining social and material relations away from oppressive and hierarchical ones, and towards classless and self-managing ones—for the administration of all society’s institutions by ourselves and for ourselves. This should include all economic institutions for the production, consumption, and allocation of the material means of life, political institutions for adjudication, legislation, and for the creation of self-governing law, as well as all media, educational and cultural apparatus’—culminating in the total self-management of society.

Orientation 3: Revolution

I want to propose that orientations toward reform (improving our lives today), and revolt (uprising and rebellion) should lead, ultimately, to the conscious transformation of society’s defining institutions and the totality of social and material relations—Revolution. We do this with a grander vision in mind and to always do so in such a way that leaves us more empowered, more in control, and closer to winning the new society. If we pursue reform or revolt for their own sake, without our eyes on the prize of winning society wide revolution, we will always run the risk of having society’s institutions roll back our struggles for the forward looking change we hoped for.

This entails orienting our reform and uprising strategies towards a final conclusion: the reorganization of society’s institutions for egalitarian relations between sexes; balanced divisions of economic labor for classlessness; for decentralized and participatory self-managed decision-making; for cultural fairness and diversity; and for environmental stability.

Ultimately, we seek to win a participatory society and the empowerment of all to have decision-making say over their own social and material lives.

Problems for all 3 Orientations: The (Counter) Revolution of Everyday Life

However, the orientations above are not without their problems. History has ample evidence showing that when Left movements unite and become a force to be reckoned with—meaning we threaten the balance of power that favors the rulers over the ruled—elites respond with counter-revolutionary subversion and brutality in defense of their interests. However, and I say this as a non-pacifist, history also has examples of societies transforming peacefully and non-violently when the majority of the population is organized and conscious about its desires for a new society. These examples show that in the contestation for a new society the real problem is not between state violence vs. an armed resistance. To paraphrase last century’s anarcho-syndicalist theoretician Rudolph Rocker, “The state has a monopoly on violence,” meaning that when it comes to guns, torture, tanks, planes, and bombs, the odds for the state’s brutal and successful suppression of an armed resistance are in the state’s favor.

However, when the majority of people rise up against elements of the population and the institutions that elevate them, those defined as the ruling class over the rest of us, as in the aftermath of the Argentine financial crisis of 2001, where people shouted “¡Que se vayan todos!,” or “Away with them all!” and ousted successive presidents in a matter of days; and again in April 2002 when Venezuelans peacefully rose up against the U.S. backed coup attempt to overthrow president Hugo Chavez, rolling back U.S. imperial aggression and achieving Chavez’ reinstatement; it demonstrates that it is possible for governments and imperialist aggression to be checked by popular power. The lesson here is that when enough people are organized—even if it takes decades—once a critical mass is reached, elites can be toppled instantly.

These examples point to an obstacle to overcome in societies where the balance of forces are not being contested or have recently stabilized. The goal then should be to organize as much as possible those receptive sectors of the population—working people, women, minorities and everyone else who wishes real self-management for all.

But more, another deeper problem exists. Whether in our patient day to day organizing efforts or in those moments where popular rebellion erupts and societal transformation begins to take root, there are more subtle counter-revolutionary forces at work than the state, elite, or media—even though these are very important. Whether in Paris ’68, Argentina 2001, or December in Greece there are pressures to “return to normal” and in every society something similar is at work attempting to rollback each new uprising. Every rebellion is challenged by not having sufficient institutional backing and shared strategic vision capable of carrying forward the momentum and objectives of the uprising towards transformation of society.

Counter-revolutionary forces are embedded in the very fabric of our struggle and these same forces emanate from society’s defining and oppressive institutions. Pre-existing social behaviors and material outcomes, such as mass apathy and self-interest, generated by the market, state, and old corporate divisions of labor (and sexism and racism) work against our desired changes and which we must constantly seek to not replicate ourselves.

In other words, remnants of the old society are so prevalent during times of upheaval, and for long afterward too, that they work to exhaust, restrain, and eventually roll back our efforts for the new society. These forces can often cause us to do more damage to ourselves and others in our movements than the state or any elite. So I think that, to the extent that our own movement organizations and institutions replicate pre-existing and dominant institutions, it makes it all the harder to escape the old society. That goes without saying for mainstream party’s or organizations, but I believe this is also the case for hierarchically organized Left parties, trade unions, or media and cultural groups, whose internal structures and roles are compatible with the dominant oppressive ones.

The solution to this problem is, I believe,—in addition and in complement to organizing a sympathetic populace—widely shared consciousness about the kind of society we want. This does not mean general proclamations or simply spouting values. It means understanding and sharing a belief in the benefits of classless divisions of labor and remuneration, along with self-managed workers’ and consumers’ councils over other hierarchical, centralized, or otherwise vague proposals. We should be clear in our desire for a society which is organized around institutions that can deliver solidarity, self-management, classlessness, and diversity, and we should know what those institutions look like. We need this not only to build a mass movement among ourselves allied around a vision that includes all aspects of society. But also to provide hope for all others who wish to control their own social and material fates. Our efforts wont’ be perfect but having a shared and conscious understanding means that together we can evaluate mistakes made and obstacles to overcome and plot our course closer towards the final victory.

[I want to thank Michael Albert, Andy Dunn, Mandisi Majavu, Steve Shalom, Marie Trigona, and Cynthia Peters for their input and suggestions on the presentation above. They are responsible for adding much strength and only I am responsible for any weakness.]

Some Introductory Remarks About a New City for a New Society

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http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/souzacity.htm

Z Magazine / ZNet and Porto Alegre 3 present

Life After Capitalism Essays

Marcelo Lopes de Souza

We were asked for two tasks by the organisers[1]: First, we should present a vision about a just city of the future, that is a city in which social justice would reign (which presupposes another society, a post-capitalist society); secondly, we should develop a strategy in order to achieve this just city.

Well, we need a vision, but we must avoid the temptation to develop a normative model. A normative model is a rationalistic exercise; its premise is that we are able to anticipate details about future urban forms and/or that we are able to prescribe how the future city form should be. I think this approach is both intellectually and politically wrong. A genuinely alternative city of the future should be planned and managed by concrete free men and women, not “socialist” gurus, technocrats and party officials acting in the name of the people (or in the name of the “working class” or whatever); history itself and not theory must determine the concrete spatiality of the future. However, we can and should discuss criteria and parameters, with which help we can talk about the question to which extent and under which circumstances spatial organisation can fit to alternative social relations.

A just city needs a just society, but new social relations also need a new spatiality. It is wrong to think that new spatial forms alone can determine social relations (in the sense, say, of Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse), but it would also be wrong to ignore that spatial forms can influence social relations. Capitalist urban forms, capitalist spatial organisation and capitalist territorial division of labour were produced by capitalist social relations in order to serve capitalist interests. A new society needs a new spatiality, but this new spatiality will not fall from heaven: It must be built and conquered on the basis of very much struggle and in the framework of changing social relations.

What is a just society? A just society must be a society which provides equal chances of participation in political processes for all of its members. I mean not only formal or legal equality, but real equality, which presupposes economic and political institutions which must be very different from those existing under capitalism and representative “democracy”. That is, a just society is not characterised by private property of means of production, and it is also not characterised by a structural separation between those who govern and those who are governed.[2]

Political processes in such a society will probably happen on the basis of some kind of direct democracy; urban planning and management will be radically participatory. Even if this alternative city has hundreds of thousands or even millions of inhabitants, it is possible and necessary to adjust it in order to make the practice of direct democracy possible. There are four basic tasks in order to transform this vision into a reality[3]:

1) Delegation must be introduced and expanded. Delegation is very different of representation in spirit: A delegate is only a spokesman or spokeswoman of a social basis, of a social group, and he or she has an imperative mandate, while a representative has the power to decide in the name of other people.

2) Territorial decentralisation must be achieved as much as possible. The only way to manage and govern cities with hundreds of thousands or even millions of people is to decentralise its administration radically on the basis of communes, very much in the sense of Murray Bookchin’s ideas about this question.

3) New technologies of communication and information must be employed. These new technologies have been developed by capitalist interests and not for libertarian purposes, but it is possible and necessary to adjust them to serve human freedom instead of human alienation. From Cornelius Castoriadis to Pierre Lévy, many thinkers have paid attention to the libertarian potentialities of these new technologies.

4) New spatial forms must be produced. The modern equivalents of the Greek agora (a mixture of market and political assembly place) and the Greek ecclesiasterion (a building built as a place for political meetings of citizens) must be conceived and built.

Another important question is that of the regional context in which the city is located. We must overcome the opposition between city and countryside, which is typical of capitalism, as well as the opposition between intellectual and manual work. We can overcome this contradiction by means of two kinds of measures: First, “greening” the city, that is, trying to make it less artificial, less unhealthy, less polluted; secondly, it is necessary to disperse infrastructure and cultural and economic opportunities in space, in order to make the places outside our large cities of today more attractive to people. Many thinkers of the past dedicated themselves to reflect about this question – people such as Friedrich Engels, Piotr Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard -, but contemporary left-oriented authors have paid much less attention to this problem, or to spatiality in general. In the former Soviet Union there was an attempt in the 1920s to rethink space and spatial organisation in new terms, mostly under inspiration of Engels’ remarks about the subject in some of his works (such as The Housing Question); the so-called “desurbanists” tried to develop a new spatial model radically alternative to the capitalist one. However, Stalinist pragmatism reduced these efforts to ashes, and the so-called “real socialism” was much more concerned with surpassing capitalism to a large extent in its own terms than with overcoming capitalist productive forces (including spatiality).

Of course, only on the basis of new social relations it will be possible to change spatiality radically. However, we should not wait a glorious revolution to begin to change things; in fact, we need not only strategic competence, but also tactical abilities. It is tactically necessary to value positively some instruments and mechanisms which can be implemented here and now, even in the general framework of a heteronomous status quo under capitalism and representative “democracy”. These instruments and mechanisms of participatory planning and management, such as Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting as well as those instruments developed or adopted in the context of the Brazilian urban development strategy known as “urban reform”[4], can help us to prepare a new social order.

References

Souza, M. L. de (2000): Urban Development on the Basis of Autonomy: a Politico-Philosophical and Ethical Framework for Urban Planning and Management. Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 3, n.° 2, 187-201.

———- (2001): The Brazilian Way of Conquering the “Right to the City”: Successes and Obstacles in the Long Stride towards an “Urban Reform”. DISP, n.° 147, 25-31.

———- (2002): Mudar a cidade. Uma introdução crítica ao planejamento e à gestão urbanos. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.

Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. E-mail: nuped001@marlin.com.br

[1] This text was presented on the 25th of January in the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre) in the framework of the event “Life after Capitalism” (panel “The City”).

[2] A politico-philosophical framework for radical urban planning and management was developed by me in a number of works, largely under inspiration of Cornelius Castoriadis’ ideas about individual and collective autonomy (the so-called “project of autonomy”). See, for instance, Souza (2000) and Souza (2002).

[3] More about these four tasks can be found in my last book (Souza 2002).

[4] See, about these mechanisms and instruments, Souza (2000, 2001, 2002).

Solidarity with Zimbabwe: Another side to the xenophobia story

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=13524

The dominant story in the mainstream press these days is that the South African poor act out of desperation when migrants and refugees are violently attacked. That the ‘problem’ is competition for scarce resources and that SA must first get its house in order, and solve the poverty crisis, and then desperate South Africans will stop lashing out at desperate asylum seekers.

This story of displaced frustration and resentment does not fairly represent the range of opinions, and even more importantly, organized actions of the poor and working class in South Africa who invest precious resources in directly supporting refugees and migrants, especially in the case of Zimbabweans right now.

In fact, new research is showing that while xenophobia is rampant and often played out amongst the poor in South Africa, it is also precisely some of the poorest South Africans living in shack and townships who have been the most sympathetic to the struggles of Zimbabweans worst effected by the current crisis.

South African movements of the working class have mobilized around the politics playing out in Zimbabwe right now. In fact, the issue of Zimbabwe has captured the attention and has been prioritized by grassroots activists in South Africa. These are groups of people many of whom are unemployed and cannot often find taxi fare to meet, and struggle with the challenge of solidarity within the same neighborhoods and same city to fight for basic survival like water, housing, electricity, and health care. Yet, they are taking a stand on Zimbabwe. Why?

This support is not only forthcoming out of sympathy for the hardships inflicted by the power wars of Mugabe and the like, but rooted in the believe that like during repression of activism during the liberation struggle in South Africa, international solidarity is decisive right now for Zimbabweans who are resisting an ‘elite transition’ which will not change the structures of inequality in any meaningful way for the poor. At the recent Towards an Africa Without Borders Conference in Durban, one Bulawayo debt cancellation activist argued for solidarity between the poor in South Africa and in Zimbabwe because our interests are in the same pot.

South African activists at the conference likewise argued that “we see our problem as rooted in poverty and elite deal making, which sees no international boundaries.” In this view, President Mbeki and his SADC counterparts will not act against the Mugabe regime in defense of the Zimbabwean people- rather, they are angling for an ‘elite transition’ similar to the ones in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where those who have the backing of the rich and powerful, work out among themselves how to divide the power and money. From this perspective, the majority of the people are excluded from the process and inevitably the resulting system leaves them at the mercy of the oppressors and exploiters and trapped in the associated poverty and social crises.

With this motivation to mobilize, over 2,500 people come out in protest in Durban to criticize the Mugabe regime. Abahlali baseMjondolo has hosted members of the Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA) in shack settlements, worked with the Zimbabwe Crisis Coalition, and written comparisons of Murambatsvina and shack demolitions in South Africa. In Cape Town, People Against Suppression and Oppression of People (PASSOP) have held regular pickets. The TAC and the Social Movements Indaba have appointed Africa desks to better address the issues. These movements have an impressively clearly defined ‘enemy’ so to speak- and it is not displaced Zimbabweans crossing the border in search of survival.

In Cape Town for example, women from a range of grassroots organizations from seasonal women farm workers, to refugee women, to anti-eviction activists, to unionists, to wellness centers organizers came together after the March 11th violent attacks on women activists in Zimbabwe to analyze the relationship between state and domestic violence and speak out on the way elite politics were being played out across women’s bodies.

They argued that: “We see no distinction between domestic and state violence, or between Zimbabwe and South Africa when it comes to responding to the attack on our sisters… the violent the victimisation of everyday women through demolition of houses and businesses in Operation Murambatsvina, and as political and feminist activists has a specific dynamic where women are hardest hit, and attacked on multiple levels at once.” They collectively wrote a solidarity statement and in April held a picket on the days the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) convened a stay away. “We write this statement to acknowledge and listen to the pain of Zimbabwean women and to support their quest to become full citizens which we in South Africa are also fighting for. We recognise that in the context of poverty, displacement, violence, and exclusion state oppression adds another unbearable layer to women’s oppression which we are determined to fight together…We in South Africa know too well the gap between the hard earned theories set out in law, and the reality of women’s access to justice in practice”.

Most interestingly these women welcomed Zimbabweans into South Africa, arguing: “We recognise the national boundary between us and Zimbabwe as a colonial creation and just as we were welcomed into Zimbabwe during our struggle, we welcome Zimbabweans fighting for a free Zimbabwe into South Africa.”

These organisations of the working class who maybe small and weak but they are adamant to support Zimbabweans worst affected by the ongoing power struggles above. Their perspectives and actions are being overlooked in official talk about Zimbabwean refugees ‘flooding’ across the border and the rhetorical questions of how South Africa can possibly help because of poverty issues ‘at home’. In fact, South African poor are arguing that the melt down in Zimbabwe shares its roots with the same forces rapidly entrenching poverty across the region. It is precisely this support by struggling South Africans for Zimbabweans who are attempting to organise for an alternative Zimbabwe that is being ignored in the press and falling further and further off the radar of the South African imagination of the poor who are continually painted as inherently xenophobic.

Koni Benson is a researcher at the International Labour Research and Information Group in Cape Town.