Click here to read this essay in word and here to read it in pdf.

Grace, Truth and Development

From the Communist Party across to the corporate spin-doctors and
down to the Development Committees in the shack settlements,
more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of
development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard
won agreement that the realities of inequality in our society are so
cruel and perverse that any social project can only be credible if it
will ameliorate these divisions and the suffering they cause. But one
of the key problems with this consensus is that it carries a degree of
authoritarianism while lacking a clear content. The result is that it is
simultaneously difficult to be against development without seeming
anti-social and to know exactly what counts as development.
(Richard Pithouse, 2009)

According to militants of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Rural Network:

We can see the difference between liberating and oppressing
possibilities even in ideas like 'development'. In practice, because it
usually is done without truly liberating and involving the people,
development has actually become a war on the poor. Like all these
other areas we have talked about, there are these two alternatives –
and the possibilities for good are in the struggles and the thinking of
the poor.
(Living Learning, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Rural Network,
2009.)

As an NGO in the ecumenical and land sectors of our democratic South
African context, we too are part of this development discourse. In a 2007
publication (Butler at al, 2007) we tried to document and share some of
our own organisational journey in the midst of the pervasive project of
development. We noted that analysing the South African context through
the lens of the land reform programme (a government development
programme), exposed the realities that at the heart of this South African
state project, lay a capitalist project of restructuring and accumulation, as
well as the creation of a somewhat de-racialised class of 'elites'. And
further, that this inevitably implicated the state in ongoing exploitation,
domination and disempowerment of the poor. These were disturbing
conclusions to arrive at only one decade after the 'end' of apartheid. The
challenge that necessarily followed was to examine the roles and practical
effects of civil society – including ourselves – in relation to this state
project.

Certainly it was correct to expose the contradictions of the new
democracy. To uncover the huge gap between the official rhetoric of
democracy, development, and a 'better life for all', and the realities of a
hollowed-out democracy experienced by poor South Africans: a
worsening gap between rich and poor, the continuation of poverty,
disempowerment, a state anti-poor bias, landlessness, joblessness, and so
on. But the truth is, our own practice on-the-ground felt out of step with
these contextual realities. Somehow the way we were working as an NGO
seemed to be in a pattern that depoliticised our contact with the landless
poor, and stayed within the boundaries and bureaucracies of the official
controlling system under the deadening rubrik of developmentalism.

[D]evelopmentalism has become the guiding ideology of the post-
apartheid hegemony …[and] also has an international character
[that] is rooted in the rise of the United States as the hegemonic
power in the post-World War Two era. … Developmentalism
restructured global relations of production and proposed a political
model of liberal democracy plus welfare as a counter to
communism. In South Africa, post-apartheid developmentalism
serves a similar purpose: to re-orient the national economy towards
global capitalism, while simultaneously deflating rising grassroots
struggles through a combination of welfare, meeting some popular
demands, and market discipline (Greenberg and Ndlovu, 2004: 27).

In this broad effort of domination then, the conscription of civil society into
the developmentalist mode is of huge concern. In our South African
context, the consequences are real and evident everywhere in civil society
projects that “take on a variety of tasks but generally function to co-opt
the expression of social antagonism by encouraging various forms of
(always unequal) 'partnership'” (Pithouse 2004: 179).

For the terrains of 'development' (and its many many particular
specialisms pursued by 'civil society'), the situation of what is- what one
might call 'the state' – is usually called 'development'. But the truth
revealed through struggles is that 'development' is a hostile project of
capital accumulation against (most of) the people.

That project is not a narrowly economistic project but more like total war –
and it certainly dictates a politics that cannot countenance the possibility
of the people as subjects, let alone subjects who think. The state
organises that project (and especially its anti-politics) on behalf of capital,
and has its own parasitical interest in carrying out the project.
Logically, 'something new' must therefore originate outside the state – it
cannot be an outcome of the state of things as such, but only its undoing.
Issues like 'development', or 'land' or ‘food sovereignty' are best not dealt
with as objects of study, but rather as terrains of politics constituted in
and through militant struggles of the organised poor. Our argument is that
the something new is the liberatory political sequence opened in the
terrains of politics constituted in and through militant struggles of the
organised poor beyond and against the state.

Properly constituted through politics in this way, they point, in Alain
Badiou's terminology, to the void of a situation – as such they are
precisely not the knowledge of the situation but its truth. In Jaques
Ranciere's terminology, they open the possible rather than describe the
extant. Theologically, they are not conforming to, or bound by, the world
but are things made new; they are not of the order of death, but of life.
Neocosmos (2007) argues that “today we are in a situation when an
emancipatory politics must be thought as fundamentally distinct from
state politics, as the state is incapable of emancipating anybody.
…Citizenship, from an emancipatory perspective, is not about subjects
bearing rights conferred by the state, as in human rights discourse, but
rather about people who think becoming agents through their
engagement in politics as militants / activists and not politicians”.

This rebellion of the poor and oppressed against the conditions of their
poverty and oppression is connected with the unfolding of their (and our)
full human being. In this 'becoming' of true selves through struggle, is
surely also the becoming of God's promise of good news. This is a
reclamation of the scandalous truth that we are all children of God,
created equal and beautiful, created for equality and beauty, and cast out
of Eden after the corruption of truth and right relations by sin. In Fanon's
radical humanism, “the 'thing' which has been colonised becomes human
during the same process by which it frees itself” (Wretched of the Earth).
Theologically, “the ordinary struggles of ordinary people, become a
sacrament of God’s presence and proclaimation of resurrection. When the
struggles of oppressed people are understood as part of salvation history,
they become a way to overcome the sin of the world, an instrument of
God’s restoration and practical way of understanding resurrection. This is
why Marcelo Barros says that in situations of oppression ‘resurrection
means insurrection’” (Mondini, 2007).

The biblical God is Jahweh – the just one who is known in or through action
in history. The biblical God is the one revealed to sinful humanity through
incarnation in Jesus, whose story begins and ends with painstaking
attention to the details that demonstrate what a peculiar 'God' this is – a
God who renounces (indeed, denounces) the trappings and pathologies of
earthly power and is born homeless, lives poor, treasures outcasts, and
dies at the hands of the status quo's executioner – but who is reborn in
the actions of the movement of faithful disciples, and whose living body is
sustained through collective acts of practical and liturgical fidelity. If the
'way' and the 'truth' of this God is revealed in Jesus, then there is no other
'way' and 'truth' for contemporary followers of God than a sustained
fidelity to that praxis – a renunciation of pathological power and an
embrace of the least of our sisters and brothers; a turning away from lying
and hurt, and toward truth and beauty. In this way we understand Jesus'
continuity with the prophetic traditions of the Bible which always speak
against, and from outside of, the theatres of institutional power.
Existing church and civil society practice needs to shift toward a praxis
that assumes, sees, respects and encourages people making their own
history. This means that the question of agency is key and has huge
implications for method and practice. It means that our praxis needs to
put agency and creativity within the immediate grasp of the marginalised;
it needs to “make rebellion ordinary” by locating it in the immediate life-
world of those who are dominated. In such praxis, it is imperative to
sharpen the distinctions between the practices of democracy and
liberation on the one hand, and those of the state project on the other.
The shift must be a turn away from the latter as it is dominant in civil
society.

We affirm again that the paths toward freedom begin in the concrete
realities of the struggles of poor and oppressed people, and cannot be
mapped beforehand or outside of these. Furthermore, tactics for action
and change that emerge from such democratic spaces must be respected
as the principal drivers. This requires that outsiders, NGOs, churches, and
activists do not impose their projects onto people. If we are going to be a
productive part of a broader process that actually has the possibility of
transformation, freedom and humanity, then our practice as organisations
needs to nurture and learn from the difficult task of building actual
movements of actual poor people, taking self-conscious, self-defined and
self-initiated actions. Given the power imbalances between resourced
NGOs and churches, and weak, emerging movements of the poor, there
are clearly going to be difficult and subtle tensions to work with – but they
are necessary tensions to confront, and a worthwhile possibility to hope
for. Changing the world means changing the balance of power. This
means not only against more easily identified enemies – classes and elites
'out there' – but also confronting the power and domination within so-
called progressive civil society, including ourselves.

Development is now such a common place orthodoxy that it is becoming
heretical to question it. The "better future" it routinely promises is
routinely thwarted, except perhaps for elites who invariably capture and
co-opt the opportunities that development processes open up.

Furthermore, its very premise must inherently regard the nominal objects
of development (usually 'the poor') as under- or un-developed
'beneficiaries' or 'victims' who must themselves be 'developed' through
the usual prescriptions of capacity building, education, conscientisation
etc. by others who know where they must be led. This vanguardism is
ubiquitous throughout most of what is called 'civil society'. But what if we
start from a different premise – perhaps the Christian truth claim that
'Christ has risen'? Then liberation and salvation are not far off destinations
to which we lead the poor masses and victims through processes of
development – it is an immediate decision, an event, which constitutes
militants who proceed on the assumption of their completeness and
humanity.

Graham Philpott and Mark Butler,
October 2009.

Bibliography

Butler, Mark with Thulani Ndlazi, David Ntseng, Graham Philpott, and
Nomusa Sokhela, 2007. Learning to Walk – NGO Practice and the
Possibility of Freedom, Occasional Paper No.3, Church Land
Programme, Pietermartizburg, August 2007.

Greenberg, S. and Ndlovu, N., 2004. “Civil society relationships”,
Development Update, Vol 5, No. 2.

Lindela Figlan, Rev Mavuso, Busi Ngema, Zodwa Nsibande, Sihle Sibisi and
S'bu Zikode, 2009. Living Learning, Abahlali baseMjondolo and Rural
Network.

Mondini, Filippo, 2007. “Politics beyond the state”, accessed at:
http://abahlali.org//////?p=3694

Neocosmos, M., 2007. “Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the
(im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today”,
accessed at: http://abahlali.org//////?p=1429

Pithouse, Richard, 2004. “Solidarity, Co-option and Assimilation: The
necessity, promises and pitfalls of global linkages for South African movements”.

Pithouse, Richard, 2009. “We Need a Conversation about Development”,
15 June 2009, accessed at: http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/302.1.