Category Archives: elections

Update on AEC Arrests in Gugulethu

AEC members tear gassed, beaten and arrested; residents lay blame on ANC

Gugulethu Anti-Eviction Campaign Press Statement
Sunday 8 February, 2009

Earlier today, Gugulethu SAPS burst into an Anti-Eviction Campaign mass meeting, tear-gassed and beat residents, and then arrested two AEC leaders, Mncedisi Twalo and Mbulelo Zuba.

The background to the incident is that AEC members from Gugulethu, Nyanga, Langa and Mannenberg were holding their weekly meeting at the Gugulethu Sports Complex. The complex is a community centre and is the one place that is always open and accessible to community members. Every single Sunday at 14h00, AEC members hold mass meetings to discuss housing and other social-welfare related issues that are important to township residents.

Today, there were about 1,000 people at the meeting to discuss community issues. This was also the final day of voter registration by the IEC. According to Nomthandazo Nciyabo, a local resident, the AEC held their meeting in one hall while the IEC held their registration drive in the other hall in the complex. However, local ANC councillor Belinda Landingwe, ANC Provincial Chairperson Mcebisi Skwatsha, and about 50 ANC members were present at the Independent Electoral Commission registration. Some residents claim that the reason the ANC bigwigs were present was not only to help register potential ANC supporters, but also to prevent non-ANC voters from registering. There seems to be teeth to the claim the the IEC is controlled by the ANC.

Still, the AEC went about its mass meeting which had nothing to do with the presence of the IEC. However, at about 16h00, scores of police suddenly arrived and disrupted the AEC meeting. According to Nomthandazo, police attempted to lock residents inside the hall and then proceeded to spray tear gas at the hundreds of men, women and children who were present. Community members ran for their lives leaving behind purses, cell phones and even ID books which are now nowhere to be found. Many residents were beaten with police batons, including Nomthandazo’s 9 year old boy who now has a big lump on his back..

Residents insist that they overheard Landingwe, the ANC councillor, calling the police. This, they explain, is the reason the police came to terrorise residents and immediately arrest AEC leaders Mncedisi Twalo and Mbulelo Zuba. According to Nomthandazo, they had severely beaten Mncedisi before arresting him and Mbulelo. This is not the first time local politicians have used the police to intimidate residents. In fact, it is widely known that Landingwe has a grudge against Mncedisi and other residents for their persistent activism.

The Anti-Eviction Campaign has not heard from Mncedisi since his phone was confiscated at the Gugulethu police station. The families of both activists are extremely worried about their well-being but look forward to their court appearance tomorrow morning in Athlone to set the record straight. Residents will also be there to support their fellow comrades.

For more information about the incident, contact Nomthandazo Nciyabo at 072-3272-813 (isiXhosa only) or contact Thelma Twalo (Mncedisi’s Aunt) at 021-6372-403.

For comment on party politics, police repression and how it effects communities struggling for change, contact Ashraf Cassiem at 076-1861-408

Update:

Gugulethu AEC Press Update
Monday 9 February, 2009 – For Immediate Release

Unfortunately, we cannot quote the two activists due to the pending trial. However, as residents, we would like make clear the following facts:

For more information, contact Pule at 073 6448 919 and Lenox at 073 4684 902.

For legal comment, contact Ashraf at 076 1861 408.

Zabalaza: Passive Voting or Active Boycott? The True Question of Elections

Leave a reply

http://www.zabalaza.net/leaflets&talks/passive_voting_or_active_boycott.htm

Passive Voting or Active Boycott? The True Question of Elections

This article argues that active abstention is the only strategic and tactical approach to the 2009 South African elections which is consistent with revolutionary anti-capitalist politics. It was written for a forthcoming issue of Khanya: A Journal for Activists, which will present a range of different approaches that social movements may take in response to the 2009 elections. It has been aptly noted that, on the ground, in townships and poor communities across South Africa, people’s faith has been restored in the ‘new’ ANC, that their hope has been renewed that change can come through bourgeois parliaments and political parties, be it the ANC or Cope – or the DA, IFP, ID, UDM, ACDP or PAC. For some, the response to this is that we, the extra-Alliance left, must consolidate our forces and contest elections against these parties in order to provide an alternative to their rule. But where is the alternative in so doing?

Throughout our lives under capitalism, from the earliest age, we are disempowered; we are taught not to think or act for ourselves, not to empower ourselves. We are taught to rely and be dependent on our political and economic masters; if we have problems with crime in our communities, rather than practicing the tried and tested concept of popular justice, we are encouraged to go to the police; if we have a problem with a co-worker, rather than deal with it between ourselves, we are encouraged to go to our ‘superiors’, that they can resolve affairs on our behalf – perhaps resulting in disciplinary measures being meted out against us or our working class brother or sister; if we have complaints about service delivery we are told to appeal to our political masters. Never, but never are we encouraged to even attempt to resolve things for ourselves. For capitalism to work, for it to keep us exploited, oppressed and in subjugation, it must teach us not to believe in ourselves, neither as individuals nor as a class: the survival of capitalism depends on its breaking down of the collective self-confidence of the popular classes; on its making us dependent and unable or unwilling to think and act for ourselves. Capitalism survives by making the popular classes believe that we need it, that we rely on it for our survival; that without bosses and politicians we would not be able to survive. This is as true in the economic realm as in the political.

The revolutionary maxim is just the opposite. It is the nurturing of our confidence in ourselves as a class, in our ability to think and act for ourselves, as a class, to resolve our own problems and organise to meet our needs, desires and inclinations without relying on or delegating to leaders and masters. Anything that detracts from this task, that holds the popular classes back from attaining the necessary confidence to be able to overthrow capitalism is, at best, disingenuous; at worst, counter-revolutionary.

Hence, in calling for active abstention, we in the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) declare that voting, or registering, or spoiling the ballot, is not, from the point of view of the working class, active at all. It is acceptance of the bourgeois illusion of perpetual inactivity, of the need to trust in leaders. The activity of the working class is on the street, on the shop floor, in fighting for our immediate needs, and for our ultimate great need for freedom and communism. It is outside and against the institutions of capital, outside and against political parties, outside and against the state. This is the way to victory for the working class, as history has shown, from the fight for the eight-hour day to the fight against electricity cut-offs, from the Paris Commune to the Zapatistas, from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish. This is the experience of the social movements in South Africa today: the power of mass struggle, of direct action, of reconnections and house occupations.

This does not mean that we advise comrades never to vote in elections – any more than we advise them never to go to the cops. If you are under threat from some gang of thugs, and aren’t in a position to organise community justice, and the cops are able to help rather than make things worse as they so often do, go to the cops by all means. Similarly, for instance, if fascists or similar thugs threaten to take power, and there is some less dangerous alternative, and a vote for the less dangerous alternative offers some hope for stopping the fascists, it may be worth voting. But these are special cases, and no supporter of electoral politics in the current debate has made any argument that such a special case applies; rather, they maintain that voting is a usual and logical part of revolutionary struggle. This is what we deny. We say: the only possibly revolutionary response when it comes to elections is that which seeks to destroy any hopes that people might have in the established order and the institutions of bourgeois rule; to dispel the illusions that change can come through anything other than the popular mass movements of the exploited and oppressed; to encourage and extend the autonomous self-organisation of the popular classes, independent from the political parties which – no matter what their stripe – wish to impose their leadership on the movements and struggles of the poor and working poor.

As Dale McKinley has rightly noted, the “history of ‘socialist’ participation in national elections confirms the huge gap between intent and practical outcome” and, while the intentions of some of the less disingenuous proponents of an electoral front might be noble, it is, for anarchists, fundamentally incompatible with revolutionary politics. Contrary to dispelling the illusions so many people still hold in parliament and party politics, it nourishes them, reaffirms the false notion that the workers and poor have anything to gain from participating in the electoral circus and, worse than that, does so while parading itself as an alternative to party political rule.

Workers’ International Vanguard League (WIVL), indeed, takes what appears to be a more principled position, explicitly rejecting all hopes in parliament. It stands in contrast to the manifesto of the Socialist-Green Coalition (SGC), a bizarre mish-mash of proposals achievable and unachievable, of calls fitted to the immediate needs of the working class and vague proposals to reform the structure of governance, of support for grassroots democracy and reliance on the top-down structure of the state. WIVL’s election document,1 at least, rejects reformism and presents demands based on the needs of the class – mostly demands with which the ZACF could agree. But still they want to put up candidates in the election. Why? So they can “expose parliament”! Have they not read history? Do they not know how many socialist parties have gone into parliament to expose parliament, and ended up spouting the same kind of reformist twaddle as the SGC – or completely betraying the working class, joining the repressive structures of the state, reconciling with capital?2

In any case, WIVL does not explain why a revolutionary MP making noise should achieve any better results in exposing capital and the state than the daily struggles of workers, peasants and the poor, or our political discussions among ourselves. Their position rests on a dogmatic faith – a Leninist faith – that true understanding can come only on the top, from the leaders. They are far clearer in their ideas than most left electoralists, and can thus make a strong case that what they are doing is what Lenin would want. But we say – so much the worse for Lenin. It was precisely Lenin’s insistence on leadership from the top that doomed the Russian Revolution.3

WIVL says: “The NGO’s want the struggle to be restricted around the fight for toilets.” If any NGO or anyone else wants such a restriction, we condemn this. But where is the restriction? Does WIVL scorn the fight for toilets? We believe that the fight for toilets, for houses, for water and electricity, for higher wages and shorter hours, for better working conditions, all the daily struggles of our class, is the beginning of the revolutionary struggle. It will advance not by the word of leaders, but by the experience and reflections of the class in struggle. Reliance on top-down leadership, on elections, on the state, will not assist this growth of struggle but undermine it.

John Appolis shows in detail how the Operation Khanyisa Movement – a name drawn from direct action but expropriated for elections! – has undermined the APF. We cannot believe that any dismissal of his argument can come from anything other than ignorance or opportunism. Comrade Appolis has made the case, and the results are there for all to see. He, and others, make it clear exactly why putting up candidates for parliament would be a disaster for the social movements. And it is certain that their alternative – a spoilt ballot campaign – would not be such a disaster, would not thus undermine and divide the movements, would leave far more space for continuing grassroots struggle. If the choice was simply between putting up candidates and spoiling ballots, the ZACF would say spoil ballots.

But in truth, we do not understand the spoilt ballot proposal. We believe it still embodies the very principle we are fighting against: the principle that elections are what matters, that participating in the processes of the state somehow advances the cause of the working class. While the threat of electoralism to the social movements discussed by Appolis and others is specific to the present time, the principle of the danger of elections is universal. In calling for active abstention, we highlight this principle, and combat the illusion of elections directly. In particular, we combat the illusion that the strength of our movements is to be measured by how many register, how many vote, how many spoil – how many play some part given to us in the game of the class enemy. We call for measuring our strength through the battles we fight and win on the ground, our ability to act in the streets, the gains we make in our daily life, the growth of our understanding.

The ZACF indulges in no fantasies that revolution is around the corner. We know that soviets cannot be wished into existence, nor can any other victories – and nor can ideological unity of the class. None of this can come from above; it must be won in hard struggles from below. We do not wait for the right moment to make some grand revolutionary move, but build revolutionary struggle and revolutionary ideas today, one brick at a time. We know full well that no boycott call while instantly revive the revolutionary insurrection of the 1980s. But neither will a spoilt ballot campaign, nor putting up candidates, nor anything else that is immediately within the power of our movements. Why then dismiss active abstention? Why pass up a chance to make revolutionary principles clear?

We cannot leap to revolution, nor can we conjure up ideological unity. But the social movements can step up and co-ordinate their existing grassroots struggles, and develop a public statement of the demands and the political positions we all have in common. These are small steps – but still real steps, directly rooted in struggle, in a way that “actions” or “statements” made at the ballot box are not. Proposals for these small steps are on the table in the social movements, and have the ZACF’s support.

Anyone with a bit of common sense and a vague idea of the social and political forces in South Africa will know that the electoral front stands absolutely no chance of gaining any amount of influence in parliament and that, between the ANC and Cope, it matters little who wins or loses, as they both represent the same capitalist class project. What is important for anarchists, then, is the building and strengthening of the extra-parliamentary social movements which, once they are strong enough, would, through mass struggle, be able to force the government of either party to concede, perhaps bit by bit, to our demands. In so doing the popular classes would become more confident in their ability to wrest more and more from the ruling class, each time thus pushing their demands further and further, to the point where we feel confident enough to launch a full-scale offensive against capitalism and the state.

The idea of turning away from the ballot box and taking our fight to the streets is nothing new in today’s South African social movements. Many of our movements have done so already, under such banners as “No land, no vote”. Concerns might be raised about slogans. But if they are raised collectively, they are worthy of support. For as long as capital and the state exist, there will always be those who lack land, or houses, or toilets, or healthcare, or a living wage. And those who are thus deprived will not win their needs by voting, but by struggle; not by putting up candidates to do their work for them, but by “militant mass struggle, organising, mobilising and educating on the ground”; not by passive casting of ballots, but by active abstention.

1. See WIVL’s election document here

2. See “Don’t Vote, Organise”, anarchist pamphlet, here

3. See e.g. “The Russian Revolution Destroyed”, anarchist pamphlet, here

Rethinking Public Participation from Below

Leave a reply

Rethinking Public Participation from Below
Published in Critical Dialogue (2006)

by Richard Pithouse

Download full version with footnotes in pdf here

The invitation from Imran Buccus at the Centre for Public Participation to attempt some reflections on public participation in the light of recent experiences is appreciated. It may be useful to begin by noting that much of the power of concepts like public participation, civil society, democratic consolidation, social capital and others inheres in the fact that they have donor money behind them. Attaching oneself to these concepts can produce jobs, contracts, legitimation and acceptance into local, national and transnational networks. Often the spaces and projects created by the donor money invested in these concepts are uncritically assumed to be the incubators of values and even practices that will be able to generate some kind of challenge to technocratic managerial despotism. This is a mistake. It is true that resistance often forces imperial power to make certain concessions to legitimate its domination. And these concessions often take the form of appropriating some of the discourses produced within resistances. At times this results in the creation of institutions that have some potential to be used for critical thinking and action in the service of constituent power. But the actualisation of this potential is far from inevitable and in many instances will only be possible when work is done covertly.

If we intend to engage in critical praxis we need to subject the power of ideas that come to us via funding from alliances between imperialism and local elites, and which sometimes even become part of our unreflective common sense, to rigorous historical and sociological analysis. This work needs to take seriously the often open connections between the coercive and persuasive aspects of imperialism. William Robinson has done particularly important work in this regard. Robinson makes a convincing case, substantiated with rigorous empirical evidence, that in the dominated countries civil society, rather than state power, became the key focus of American imperial strategies to secure consent for policies in the interests of transnational capital from the late 1970s. Robinson shows that US policy making elites recognised that the strategy of supporting dictatorial regimes, especially in Southern Africa, Haiti and South America, was resulting in the development of mass oppositional movements seeking fundamental social transformation. They concluded that liberal parliamentary democracies with a technocratic orientation to policy making would be a more effective bulwark against popular demands for social transformation. In the early 70s one of the earliest theorists of a shift from supporting dictators to civil society in liberal democracies, William Douglas, argued that:

“in regard to keeping order, what is involved is basically effective police work, and there is no reason why democratic regimes cannot have well-trained riot squads…However…the real key is to find just the right balance between carrot and stick…Democracy can provide a sufficient degree of regimentation, if it can build up the mass organizations needed to reach the bulk of the people on a daily basis. Dictatorship has no monopoly on the tutelage principle.” (Cited in Robinson 1996:84)

Douglas went on to become a key consultant to various US ‘democracy promotion’ projects. Donor aid, usually channelled to NGOs, became the key tool and the key strategy was to use money to separate leaders from potentially threatening mass movements and to co-opt them towards the thinking of the transnational elite. So, for example, in South Africa the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA) was a central project of ‘democracy promotion’ work. In post-apartheid South Africa this work continued and was, for example, the basis of USAID support for both the Centre for Civil Society and the Centre for Public Participation in Durban. USAID was particularly interested in projects that spoke the language of democratic consolidation but in fact propagated the view that mass democratic popular action, the mode of resistance in which real counter-power can be built, should be replaced with a technocratic engagement with state power on the terms of state power. Instead of using modes of popular politics to force concessions from the state, or to extend and defend political spaces outside of the logic of state power, technocratic procedures should be used to make appeals to the state on its terms. Clearly this way of working will marginalise most people from engagement, transform popular militancy into drawn out technocratic procedures and allow the state to decide what it will and won’t accept as reasonable demands for change.

These kinds of imperial interventions depend on well meaning local NGO leftists to deliver popular organisations into a pedagogy of domination that teaches people that ‘doing things properly’ requires transformation into a ‘civil society organisation’ aimed at professionalized engagement in official opportunities for public participation. Hence the emergence of a set of strange alliances between USAID, a project of the US state department and an infamous tool of US imperialism, and local leftists.

The public participation model that emerged from local elites’ acceptance of imperial interventions has worked very well for its designers and funders. Despite moments of rupture there has been no sustained threat to the technocratic authoritarianism that has implemented economic policies that have allowed a predatory elite to flourish as the poor slip deeper into crisis. But this model has certainly not worked well for many of the people and organisations who naively took it up in good faith. Defenders of the status quo will point to small shifts consequent to lobbying or advocacy in various forms but there have been no fundamental shifts in policy due to engagement in official public participation processes. Indeed the fact that fundamental policy directions are not open to debate has hardly been kept secret. GEAR was famously introduced with an explicit statement to this effect and this authoritarianism is invariably repeated on the rare occasions when organisations of the poor are able to force meetings with government officials.

USAID have now shifted much of their resources to Iraq but The People Shall Govern, a recent research report by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and Action for Conflict Transformation (ACTION), clearly indicates that there is ongoing donor support for public participation as a mode of social control. Interestingly this report was funded by the European Union and the South African National Treasury. It is no longer necessary for imperial forces to take sole responsibility for legitimating local relations of domination. There is now a real partnership in this regard. The report begins by claiming that it is concerned with the problem of ‘violent’ ‘service delivery protests’. The structural violence of massive inequality and poverty is not presented as violent and neither is the armed and often violent force with which the state enforces evictions, disconnections, exclusions and forced removals. It is, the report assumes, popular public protest that is violence. However it never details instances of this violence and appears to assume that “rioting and the destruction of property” (2006:17) are violent. The report clearly assumes that all social conflict is necessarily a bad thing. It fails to understand the basic point that civil society is, by definition, a terrain on which competing interests struggle for influence and insists that “civil society organisations should pursue their missions in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation” (2006:24) and “speak with a united voice” (2006:42). There is a profound authoritarianism under this liberal gloss. After all how can a ratepayer’s organisation wanting squatters evicted and a shack dwellers’ organisation wanting the right to live in the city not be expected to be in conflict? To demand one voice is, implicitly, to take the side of those with the easiest access to voice.

The CSVR and ACTION report understands violence (popular protest) as consequent to the fact that “civil society groups have limited capacity to influence government’s policy decisions…This, in turn, affects the ability of researchers, think-tanks and policy specialists to make informed, and potentially valuable, input into public policy making”. (2006:4) The casual assumption that a technocratic NGO and academic elite will act in the name of ‘civil society’ is premised on highly prejudicial assumptions about the inability of the poor to, in Fanon’s phrase, “introduce a decisive irruption into the national struggle” (2004:17). It is, unfortunately, necessary to note that these prejudicial assumptions are not a pathology particular to neo-liberal NGOs. Left NGOs often hold onto the same prejudices with an astonishing degree of fanaticism. It is not uncommon for these prejudices to be distinctly racialised. But of course even a cursory reading of the history of any society would indicate that the policy making elites are only able to respond to pressures from above and are therefore only able to introduce progressive innovation when the forces above them require it to stave off popular pressure from below. In fact in most instances neither NGOs nor academic research institutes should, strictly speaking, be considered as part of civil society. This is because they tend to be professionalised projects of states or corporate donors and civil society is most often defined as popular association independent of the market and the state. The fact that NGOs so often assume that they, and they alone, are civil society is consequent to the social relations that mean that the ruling ideas are so often those of the ruling class. It has no intellectual credibility or political integrity and must be militantly opposed.

In the technocratic public participation model in the CSVR and ACTION report there is no space for ordinary people to act in their own interests. However in its case study on the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign the authors inadvertently undermine the logic of their whole project by noting, in passing, that “the government’s active involvement and offer to settle the situation happened only after the residents of Mandela Park resorted to violence protests and riots that damaged public and private properties” (2006:17). In other words they concede that what they are against, popular political action, did in fact win the results that they claim to be in favour of – meaningful public participation.

The deep suspicion of popular people’s power that permeates the report even leads to uncritical repetition of highly prejudicial and clearly bizarre views on shack dwellers and social movements by government officials. For instances the view that “shack dwellers purposively stay in dangerous areas, in the hope that they would be prioritised for housing is the event of a disaster, such as a flood or fire…(and) deliberately set shacks on fire to obtain government’s emergency assistance” (2006:18) is not challenged. Similarly ludicrous claims that there was a political conspiracy between foreign forces and local white reactionaries behind popular protest (2006:23) in Mandela Park are not challenged.

But there are other models of public participation than those that came to us via American imperialism and which are now official state policy. In an important and generally well researched and argued 2001 article Patrick Heller reports on a comparative study between the Indian state of Kerala, the Brazilian municipality of Porto Alegre and South Africa. He shows that officially endorsed forms of public participation have largely failed to enable meaningful popular participation in South Africa but that they have had important successes in Kerala and Porto Alegre. Given that in all three instances external pressures towards marketisation under technocratic managerialism are the same the South African failure cannot be explained solely by external forces. Heller concludes that in South Africa a vanguardist movement has taken state power, incorporated or marginalized social movements and retained its “instrumentalist understanding of state power…(and) insulationist and oligarchical tendencies” (2001:134). However in Kerala and Porto Alegre “social movements that have retained their autonomy from the state have provided much of the ideological and institutional repertoire of democratic decentralization” (2001:134).

Keller’s research shows that technocratic policy making “has deeply depoliticizing and autocratic impulses” (2001:135). He argues that:

Where the technocratic vision is lacking is in its impulse to sanitize decentralization of everything political. For starters, any effort to move the state requires redistributing political power. Democratic decentralization is a political project. (2001:136)

This has been achieved to a meaningful degree in Kerala and Porto Alegre where “The traditional Left goal of capturing state power has given way to a strategy of devolving state power and reinvigorating civil society” (2001:150). Keller adds that

“In contrast to the technocratic view that sees state reform as a technical proposition that can be handled through appropriate institutional redesign, decentralization in both these cases has been messy, nonlinear, and driven by distinctly conflictual processes.” (2001:157)

We have, he concludes, “the irony of an increasingly Lenninist party defending neoliberal economic orthodoxy in South Africa, and in Kerala and Brazil of two de-Leninizing parties defending people’s planning” (2001:159). He could have added that in South Africa we have a double irony of ‘left’ NGOs driven by an uncritical reproduction of the vanguardism of the ANC seeking to use donor funding to capture popular organisations and to re-organise them on more hierarchical lines in order to exploit them to legitimate their claims as a counter elite.

If Heller is right, and the broad thrust of his argument is persuasive, then the route to more effective opportunities for public participation in South Africa will come from popular struggles for democratisation waged outside of direct control of the party and state. But if this is what needs to be done there is no easy road ahead.

The recent (1 March 2006) local government elections provide a useful case study. Despite an elite consensus to the contrary the fact is that the elections were not free, fair or peaceful in Durban. There had been two primary challenges to the ANC from within the poor and working class African constituencies that it claims as its own. In the shack settlements nestled into the valleys in the suburbs of Clare Estate and Reservoir Hills longstanding ANC supporters were unhappy with their councillors, the worsening material conditions in the settlements, threats of forced removal and the complete failure of a decade of engagement in official public participation processes. Organised together as Abahlali baseMjondolo they decided to boycott the election under the slogan ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’. Across town in the E-section of Umlazi, a group of longstanding ANC and SACP activists were unhappy with their councillor, Bhekisasa Xulu, and claimed that he had withheld ANC membership cards to engineer his re-nomination despite widespread unhappiness with his conduct. They decided to put up an independent candidate, Zamani Mthethwa, to oppose Xulu. In both instances the response to these expressions of open dissent was swift, brutal and clearly illegal.

Abahlali were effectively banned from undertaking any meaningful political activity outside of the settlements in the lead up to the election. City Manager Mike Sutcliffe first banned an Abahlali march on 14 November 2005 and while he continued to ban marches Abahlali were subject to various incidents of illegal police assault and detention. There were more than a hundred arrests, all on entirely spurious charges, and the police were even used to physically prevent Abahlali from taking up an invitation to appear on the SABC talk show Asikhulume. There was no scandal about this. On the contrary Mawethu Mosery, Chief Electoral Officer in KwaZulu-Natal, went so far as to laud the Asikhulume show as proof of the free political climate. There appears to be a telling elite consensus that sees illegal repression of basic political rights by the state as unimportant when the victim is not a political party. Abahlali were finally able to garner the resources to take Sutcliffe to the High Court on 27 February 2005. The Freedom of Expression Institute had repeatedly described Sutcliffe’s march bans as ‘illegal and unconstitutional’ and the judge quickly issued an interdict against the City and the police preventing them from interfering with the shack dwellers’ right to march. After their dramatic court victory, thousands of waiting shack dwellers left their settlements, into which they had been barricaded by a massive militarised police operation, and marched into the city in triumph and presented a memorandum to the office of the MEC for Housing, Mike Mabuyakulu.

In Umlazi supporters of the Mthethwa campaign claimed that there was widespread intimidation in the lead up to the election including death threats, assaults and whippings. They also alleged that there had been blatant fraud during the election.

On the day after the election they staged a small protest against the alleged electoral fraud. The Public Order Policing Unit shot dead a young woman, Monica Ngcobo, near the protest and shot and seriously wounded S’busiso Mthethwa in his home. The police claimed that Ngcobo had been shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet. The media reported this uncritically. The autopsy later showed that she had been shot in the back with live ammunition.

An organisation called Women of Umlazi (which had some roots in the great women’s mobilisation in Cato Manor in the 1950s) was formed in response and organised a large march on 31 March in protest at these police shootings. Two former SACP activists who had worked closely with the Mthethwa campaign and the organisers of the march, Komi Zulu and Sinethembe Myeni, were later assassinated in separate carefully planned attacks. Others survived assassination attempts. An associate of Xulu, Bheki Magubane, was later killed in a fight that developed from an argument in a tavern. MEC for Safety and Security, Bheki Cele, insisted that aside from the police shooting of Ngcobo none of the attacks were in any way political. Mayor Obed Mlaba, who lives in Umlazi, said nothing at all. Women of Umlazi responded by organising weekly mass meetings attended by hundreds of residents to which the Umlazi SAPS were invited. On 1 June, the Umlazi SAPS entered Councillor Xulu’s fortified house and arrested two of Xulu’s employees for the murder of Komi Zulu. Thousands of residents of E-Section are now organising to ensure that there is a fair trail and to push for the arrest and prosecution for Xulu.

The police beatings of the shack dwellers, and the drama of their court victory over Sutcliffe and triumphant march into the city, received considerable local, national and international press coverage for a couple of days. This was probably because the drama began in an elite Indian suburb, moved to the High Court and ended with the striking image of a sea of red shirts outside the City Hall. But there was no sustained reflection on what this blatant suppression of basic constitutional rights means for democracy. There has been no action against Sutcliffe or the police.

The shootings and murders in Umlazi happened in a working class African township far from elite eyes and have received very little media attention. No newspaper has seen fit to seriously investigate the story or run an angry editorial. No Human Rights NGO has issued a statement. None of the academic experts who trade in pithy soundbites or self validating moralism have bothered to go and spend some time in Umlazi. Aside from Bheki Cele’s now infamous comment, there has, at the time of writing, been no statement on the Umlazi shootings from any politician. The scandal is that there is no scandal. In Durban democracy is clearly in profound crisis at the level of local government.

The immediate problem here is not neo-liberalism or any particular policies. The immediate problem is the willingness of the political elite to openly ignore the laws and policies that do exist to crush opposition. This is a political problem which requires a political solution. Academic and NGO research is overwhelmingly directed by the imperial power of donors and generally has little to offer our thinking about this political problem. But the intellectual work done in some popular organisations is a lot more useful. In Durban the reflection on the experience of struggle in Abahlali baseMjondolo has produced a theory of a politics of the poor that, although we must always assert the situatedness of all effective political thinking against the ever present risk of collapse into the dogmatism of universal political formula, may throw some wider light on what will is required to struggle for popular democratisation from below. The first lesson is that the will to risk open resistance against an authoritarian local state has no necessary connection to the degree of material deprivation or material threat from state power. It is always a cultural and intellectual rather than a biological phenomenon. It therefore requires cultural and intellectual work to be produced and sustained. Spaces and practices in which the courage and resilience to stay committed to this work can be nurtured are essential. The music and meals and prayers and stories and funerals and meetings that weave a togetherness are essential to sustain a will to fight, the commitment to the principles that make that fight worth while and the ongoing collective reflection on experience that produce the development of a movement’s ideas.

Abahlali have also found that even if there is a growing will to fight no collective militancy is possible when communities are not run democratically and autonomously. If they are dominated by local business interests, or, as is more typical in Durban, authoritarian party loyalists seeking to brutally restrict dissent in a settlement in order to produce an external simulacrum of loyalty that can be exchanged for personal favour, then this will have to be challenged. Often lives will be at risk. The power of local tyrants, which is often an armed power, simply has to be broken by a few courageous people who risk issuing a demand for democracy without any guarantee that on the day this demand will in fact attract the security of a critical mass. If the people who break the power of the local tyrants immediately act to make open and democratic meetings the real (rather than performed) space of politics then a genuinely popular politics becomes possible. Part of making a meeting democratic is declaring its resolute autonomy from the state, party and NGOs. Then and only then is it fully accountable to the people in whose name it is constituted.

People fight constituted power to gain their share and to constitute counter power. Choices have to be made and adhered to. Any conception of popular politics that sees the mere fact of insurgency into bourgeois space or against bourgeois discipline as necessarily progressive in and by itself risks complicity with micro-local relations of domination and, because local despotisms so often become aligned to larger forces of domination, complicities with larger relations of domination. The fact of mere movement driven by mere desire for material advance is not sufficient for a genuinely democratising politics. A democratising politics can only be built around an explicit thought out commitment to community constructed around a political and material commons. The fundamental political principle must be that everybody matters. Each person counts for one. To concretise this it must be agreed that there will be no individual profiting from struggle. What is won must be won in common. Equality must be asserted as a founding axiom not, as it is with vanguardist projects in the state or left NGOs, a goal that lies over some never reached horizon but which serves to legitimate the power to order the line of march now.

After a movement has become able to put tens of thousands on the streets, brought the state to heel and made it into the New York Times, swarms of middle class ‘activists’ will descend in the name of left solidarity. Some will be sincere and alliances across class will be important for enabling access to certain kinds of resources, skills and networks. Sincere middle class solidarity will scrupulously subordinate itself to democratic processes and always work to put the benefits of its privilege in common. But, as Fanon warned, most of these ‘activists’ will “try to regiment the masses according to a predetermined schema” (2005:27). Usually they will try to deliver the movement’s mass to some other political project in which their careers or identities have an investment. This can be at the level of theory in which case lies will be told in order that the movement can be claimed to confirm some theory with currency in the metropole. It can also be at the level of more material representation in which case the movement’s numbers will be claimed for some political project that has donor funding, or the approval of the metropolitan left so attractive to local and visiting elites, but no mass support. Tellingly these kinds of machinations tend to remain entirely uninterested in what ordinary people in the movement actually think, make no attempt to engage with the movement as a movement, or even the media in its lifeworld, but instead seek to deploy donor funding to separate off and co-opt a couple of leaders to create an illusion of mass support in media (digital media, elite English language newspapers and so on) entirely outside of the lifeworld of the movement – to turn genuine mass democratic movements into more easily malleable simulations of their formerly autonomous and insubordinate selves. On the elite terrain the middle class left will, at times, openly express contempt for the people that they want to regiment. In most instances this will be quite obviously racialised but this is not inevitable. Equally base prejudices organised purely through the projection of objectifying fantasies onto the poor can, on their own, do the work of legitimating the donor derived power of self selected vanguards.

People on the middle class left that do find casual contempt for the underclass to be problematic, or who refuse (even silently) to allow themselves to be used as bridges for attempts at co-option, will be excoriated on that terrain as divisive trouble makers. Race and class prejudices will ensure that every time an actually existing mass movement of the poor challenges the power of the vanguards, no matter how politely and constructively, this will be assumed to be a plot by the same ‘divisive trouble makers’. In some instances all of this will degenerate into hysterical personal public slander, threats of various kinds and direct and enthusiastic collaboration with the repressive apparatus of the state. However people under this kind of virulent attack will, as Fanon wrote, find “a mantle of unimagined tenderness and vitality” (2005:27) in the communities where politics is a serious project – where, in Alain Badiou’s words, “meetings, or proceedings, have as their natural content protocols of delegation and inquest whose discussion is no more convivial or superegotistical than that of two scientists involved in debating a very complex question” (2005:76).

The tendency of some left NGOs to assume a right to lead usually expresses itself in overt and covert attempts to shift power away from the spaces in which the poor are strong. However the people that constitute the movement will in fact know what the most pressing issues are, where resistance can press most effectively and how best to mobilise. A politics that cannot be understood and owned by everyone is poison – it will always demobilise and disempower even if it knows more about the World Bank, the World Social Forum, Empire, Trotsky or some fashionable theory than the people who know about life and struggle in poor and working class communities.

The modes, language, jargon, concerns, times and places of a genuinely democratic and democratising politics must be those in which the poor are powerful and not those in which they are silenced as they are named and directed from without. Anyone wanting to offer solidarity must come to the places where the poor are powerful and work in the social modes within which the poor are powerful. Respect on this terrain must be earned via sustained commitment and not bought. All resources and networks and skills brought here must be placed in common. There must be no personalised branding or appropriation of work done. The Post-Seattle struggle tourists from North America, often one more species of the plague of new missionaries, must be dealt with firmly when they call the inevitable general disinterest in their assumed right to lead ‘silencing’. Local socialists and radical nationalists must be dealt with equally firmly when they call people ‘ignorant’ for wanting to focus their struggle on the relations of domination that most immediately restrict their aspirations and which are within reach of their ability to begin or sustain an effective mass fight back. Democratic popular struggle is a school and will develop its range and reach as it progresses. A permanently ongoing collective reflection on the lived experience of struggle is necessary for resistances to be able to be able to sustain their mass character as they grow and to develop. It is necessary to create opportunities for as many people as possible to keep talking and thinking in a set of linked intellectual spaces within the settlements. Progress comes from the quality of the work done in these spaces – not from a few people learning some of the jargon of the middle class left via NGO workshops held on the other side of the razor wire. When it is (by accident consequent to the prejudices that produce a failure to plan workshops in collaboration with movements or on principle) generally disinterested in the local relations of domination, relations that usually present a movement with both its most immediate threats and opportunities for an effective fight back, this jargon will often be fundamentally disempowering for the movement. Moreover blindness to local relations of domination and how these connect to broader forces will also seriously compromise the political accuracy and usefulness of political analysis for NGOs – that is if we assume that they actually do want to support mass popular struggle rather than just to network in its name. In some cases there is a good faith confusion of the two but there also instances when exploitation is clearly deliberate. But it must be noted that it is another thing entirely when NGOs work with movements to provide movements with practical skills to prosecute their actually existing struggles more effectively.

People who represent the movement to the media, in negotiations and various forums, must be elected, mandated, accountable and rotated. There must be no professionalisation of the struggle as this produces a vulnerability to co-option from above. The state, parties, NGOs and the middle class left must be confronted with a hydra not a head. There needs to be a self conscious development of what S’bu Zikode, chair of Abahlali baseMjondolo, calls ‘a homemade politics that everyone, every old gogo, can understand and find a home in’.

Some will say that none of this means that the power of global capital is at risk. This is not entirely true – stronger popular organisations inevitably mean weaker relations of local and global domination. Given that states are largely subordinate to shifting alliances between imperialism and local elites, confrontation with the state is inevitable and necessary. Because some of the things that the poor need can only be provided by the state the struggle can not just be to drive the coercive aspects of the state away. There also has to be a fight to subordinate the social aspects of state to society beginning with its most local manifestations and moving on from there. And most often the fight begins with these toilets, this land, this eviction, this fire, these taps, this armed party enforcer, this politician, this broken promise, this developer, this school, this crèche, these police officers, this murder. Because the fight begins from a militant engagement with the local its thinking immediately pits material force against material force – bodies and songs and stones against bullets. It is real from the beginning. It is not about abstract rights. And if it remains a mass democratic project permanently open to innovation from below it will stay real. This is what the Abahlali call ‘the politics of the strong poor’. It is this politics which can, if it can survive state repression, leftist vanguardism and NGO co-option, democratise society from below.

Despite the huge scale and media impact of the Abahlali march on the offices of the Housing MEC on 27 February 2006 a meeting with the office of the MEC was only granted on 20 July 2006 after sustained further pressure from Abahlali. At this meeting the Abahlali were told that the slum clearance policy was not negotiable and that criticising the policy as oppressive was ‘out of order’. (Interestingly this was exactly the same phrase that had been deployed against them when they had politely proposed that NGO activists allow actually existing social movements some input into the running of the Social Movements’ Indaba in Johannesburg the previous year.) They were also accused of being used by a white man who was described as an agent working for the intelligence agency of an unnamed foreign government ‘hell bent on destabilizing the ANC’ and threatened with arrest. They stood their ground and the sole concession made by the office of the MEC was that they could attend meetings at which they could be informed about housing policy if they joined Slum Dwellers International (SDI) – (SDI is an international NGO that presents itself as a social movement and is widely criticised as functioning as a sweet heart ‘partner’ to governments in place of actually existing shack dwellers’ movements). After leaving that meeting some of the Abahlali delegation went straight to the Joe Slovo settlement adjacent to Chatsworth where Abahlali women have been subject to severe harassment by local elites for standing up against corruption and ethnic chauvinism. The Chatsworth police had been refusing to take statements from the Joe Slovo women. But after a meeting in Joe Slovo Abahlali occupied the police station and, after a tense stand off, eventually forced the police officers to take the statements from the Joe Slovo women. This kind of direct popular confrontation with official power is where we should invest our hopes for democratisation.

In Abahlali the phrase ‘out of order’ has come to be used, usually in a delighted tone, as an exclamation of approval for actions of the militant poor in and out of the movement with explicit reference to both state and left NGO vanguardism. It is, indeed, good to be out of some kinds of orders.

References

Ameck, Gillian; Christensen, Colin; Shilaho, Westen; Smith, Richard; Tadesse, Ephrem; Masiko, Pamela and Matlhakola, M’pho The People Shall Govern: A reach report on public participation in policy processes Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation & Action for Conflict Transformation, Johannesburg 2006
Badiou, Alain Metapolitics Verso, London 2005
Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth Grove Press, New York 2005
Heller, Patrick ‘Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralisation in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre’ Politics and Society 29 (1) 131-163.
Robinson, William Polyarchy Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996
Zikode, S’bu Personal Communication, 7 July 2006