Introduction
A wide body of scholarly literature on social movements on an international level emphatically, but uncritically, declares that ‘another world is possible’. Particularly since the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, left-wing authors have simplistically defined neoliberalism as the problem, and grassroots resistance, especially in the form of direct action, as the solution (see, for example, Solnit [2004]). These struggles represent, as one author claims,
the real movements of resistance, the heroic struggles for global justice, which take place every day across this planet. (McNally 2006, p. 2)
Indeed, within this body of literature, the well-known and oft-cited Zapatista movement in Mexico and others like the Landless People's Movement in Brazil (the Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra, popularly known as the MST) are viewed as exemplary movements in the anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation struggle. It becomes problematic when movements all over the world are lumped into one. Take, for example, the following passage:
Hope rises with each revolt of the downtrodden: the 40,000 indigenous peoples who revolted against the government in Quito, Ecuador (January 15–22, 2000); the hundreds of thousands who joined the general strike against electricity privatization in Puerto Rico during the same month; the workers and indigenous peoples whose revolt overturned water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia (April 2000); the one million South African workers who held a one-day strike against poverty (May 11 2000) … the millions of Indian workers who struck against ‘globalization, privatization and liberalization’ (April 2001) … the one million courageous workers who took strike action in Columbia during the same month to protest the ‘neoliberal model’ imposed by the IMF. (McNally 2006, pp. 2–3)
This paper investigates this trend and its implications in post-apartheid South Africa, where social movements have emerged primarily in order to access basic services from the state. In particular, it highlights the critical role that the state and poor people's immediate basic needs play in shaping the very possibilities for movements to contribute towards transformative outcomes. As Thompson and Tapscott indicate, ‘the struggles of communities through collective action in the South are … more likely to relate to issues of basic socio-economic entitlements which are no longer in question in more developed states’ (2010, p. 21). Paying particular attention to poor people's struggles and needs, the paper argues that there is a sharp disjuncture between ideologies manufactured by intellectuals and the worldviews that the working class and poor possess. Drawing from the academic literature in post-apartheid South Africa, participant observation in movements, and in-depth interviews with dozens of activists in various movements across Gauteng, it further questions the extent to which political struggles, praxis, will necessarily lead to the formation of class consciousness. Focusing in particular on the case of activists affiliated to the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) in Alexandra, who have sought to obtain housing opportunities in the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), it highlights the limitations of the strategic direction of even the most militant movements in the country, given the fact that they do not necessarily challenge the state per se, but rather seek to gain a piece of the pie on offer.
While referring to other important sites across the country, this article draws primarily from nearly five years of ethnographic research in Alexandra, one of the most politically tense, poor, and diverse townships in the country, in order to understand the way in which popular resistance relates to development in the post-apartheid period. Alexandra is a black township 13 kilometres northeast of Johannesburg, and fits into a small, severely overcrowded block of only four square kilometres. It is surrounded by white middle-class residential and business areas including Sandton, one of the wealthiest suburbs in Africa. People have been living in Alexandra since 1904, and it was one of the few townships in which black people could actually own property during apartheid. Previous attempts by the apartheid government to renew Alexandra had been made without consulting residents, and these failed to improve the lives of the majority, but the African National Congress (ANC) government signified a completely different approach to renewal. It was committed to people-driven development, at least rhetorically, and there was great political support and vast resources which would be funnelled into Alexandra. Alexandra has been the beneficiary of the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP) – funded with a grant of R1.3 billion by the ANC government and easily one of the country's most ambitious flagship projects ever undertaken by the South African government.
With such political and financial commitments behind the project, people's expectations of the ARP to deliver were therefore high, but many were soon disappointed. This has led to a situation in which the residents compete with each other over limited resources, through the use of courts, negotiations and direct action. This case provides insight into how scholars thus far have understood social movements in the post-apartheid context. The article argues that social protests have been simplistically and romantically analysed and understood, paying little attention to the latter's limitations. Before doing this, the following section contextualises new social movements in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle and the consolidation of ANC hegemony in post-apartheid South Africa.
From people's power to ANC hegemony
South Africa has a strong history of militant and powerful community-based movements. By the mid-1980s, black township activists from across South Africa had risen up in an unprecedented manner to delegitimise and challenge the apartheid state. The apartheid state's Black Local Authorities (BLAs) failed to enable black citizens to take part in developing their townships, and many BLAs became so unpopular in communities that they were forced to resign. Some activists and intellectuals indicated at this time that because capitalism and apartheid reinforced each other, the post-apartheid struggle needed also to be directed against capitalism.
Particularly in the late 70s and into the early 80s, these movements employed a wide range of tactics to delegitimise the local government, including electoral boycotts, and the burning of councillors' homes to get them to resign. However, prior to the establishment of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, civic organisations largely operated in isolation from each other on single-issue campaigns. The UDF became the main umbrella organisation that brought together civic organisations from across the country and laid the foundations for the demise of apartheid. In 1984, in a further attempt to unite movements across the country, ANC stalwart Oliver Tambo called upon civics in each community to create a situation of ungovernability. His call declared:
We must destroy the enemy organs of government. We must render them ineffective and inoperative. Indeed, why should we continue to co-operate with organs of government that we have correctly denounced as institutions imposed upon us to perpetuate our own oppression … It makes no sense that we co-operate with Bantustans and community councils … We have raised the level of political consciousness among ourselves to the point where we can and must in practice refuse to submit to the dictates of the Pretoria regime. In every locality, and in all parts of our country, we must fight to ensure that we remove the enemy's organs of government, using all means available to us. (Quoted in Mayekiso 1996)
When the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) was launched in 1992, it brought together under a single national umbrella many of the most important civic organisations that had played a pivotal role in the anti-apartheid struggle. In the early 1990s, these civics were also in the forefront of struggles and negotiations to reconfigure local municipalities to reflect the power and interests of working-class communities. During its early stages, SANCO played a significant role in shaping the Local Government Transition Act. Also, according to Heller and Ntlokonkulu: ‘Through Planact, SANCO had a role in shaping the RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme] chapter on housing. And the RDP as a whole assigned a direct and critical role for the civics in the transformation process’ (2001, p. 13).
In the early 1990s, SANCO articulated a radical and transformative development programme which rested on the two crucial pillars of popular participation and eliminating poverty. SANCO's vision was that civics were intended to be rooted within the community and to secure the participation of marginal groups, or what Mzwanele Mayekiso called the interests of the ‘working class’ (Mayekiso 1992). SANCO evolved out of the tradition of resistance against apartheid. In other words, it was premised upon the centrality of the interests of the working class and therefore the need for a radical project that could overthrow capitalism so that the majority's needs could be met. Mzwanele Mayekiso, then organising secretary of the Alexandra Civic Organisation (ACO, which later became SANCO), came to symbolise to some activists the desire to connect Marxist thinking to civic practice. In 1992, just prior to the launch of SANCO, he argued that ‘if the movement within the ANC towards meeting basic needs begins to fail, it is logical to expect that working-class organs will continue to press for programmes that meet those needs’ (ibid., p. 38). Civil society was intended not as a support network for the ANC state's development trajectory, but rather as a means by which to bring about a significant redistribution of wealth to the working class. Mayekiso confirmed that the essence of working class civil society is ‘to empower class-conscious communities whose good relations with a progressive democratic state will permit a redistribution of wealth that also leads to new social relations’ (ibid., p. 40).
With the ANC's rise to power, however, the role of SANCO changed dramatically. SANCO was no longer viewed as an organisation that could challenge state power, but instead largely became a vehicle through which the ANC could implement development. As Heller and Ntlokonkulu explain, SANCO ceded its power to the ANC:
In the euphoric aftermath of South Africa's first democratic elections – quickly followed up by local government elections – the extraordinary mass legitimacy enjoyed by the new representative government all but eclipsed the more direct and participatory forms of democracy championed by the civics. In its efforts to secure its position in the alliance, SANCO all but ruled out protest actions, depriving the movement of a key mobilisational tool and source of strategic leverage. (2001, p. 14)
The ANC's reputation as the main organisation that liberated the oppressed majority from the apartheid government's rule has led to a situation in which the ANC has been able to maintain legitimacy in terms of its transformation agenda, regardless of whether or not citizens have determined this agenda. After the local government elections of 1995 and 1996, civics ‘were called upon to play a leading role in building ANC branches. Grassroots activism thus shifted from building community structures to building party structures’ (Heller and Ntlokonkulu 2001).
Nelson Mandela and other ANC members argued that civil society must move away from resistance politics and that it must now act as service-delivery agents for the state's development trajectory. This had the effect of co-opting civil society into state-designed service-delivery projects. Civil-society organisations, though key in the ending of apartheid, would move from protest politics to the politics of development. Gumede explains that the ANC supported this position:
The one thing the ANC knew was that it did not want radical civil society groups acting as watchdogs over the government, as they had under apartheid. At the party's national conference in 1997, Mandela lambasted organizations and activists, such as SANCO's Mzwanele Mayekiso … for believing that civil society organizations should indeed play such a role and serve as channels for grassroots communities to voice their grievances and expectations. (Gumede 2005, p. 284)
The re-emergence of community-based movements
More than 15 years into democracy, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and the majority remains poor. In this context, left-wing intellectuals have been quick to point out that the time for Mandela-mania has long passed (Desai 2002). With the transition from apartheid to democracy, many activists hoped that civic organisations would provide the building blocks to deliver to the previously excluded black majority, but instead mechanisms for participation in post-apartheid have largely been used to co-opt the masses. Within this paradigm, the role of the black masses in post-apartheid South Africa is to sit back quietly for their turn to receive state-defined services from the government. The ANC reinforces this stance by suppressing dissent and labelling it counter-revolutionary, ultra-Left and anti-development (McKinley 2006). Perhaps predictably then, the ANC views ward committees and development forums, its primary mechanisms of participation, as the arms and feet of state-defined services which are to be delivered within the fiscal restraints of a neoliberal framework (Sinwell 2010).
In response, movements have drawn upon key traditions of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as protest and resistance, in order to have their demands met (Gibson 2006). Though protest and resistance have been given serious attention in the literature in post-apartheid South Africa, it has been limited and superficial, labelling the voice of the poor as a virtuous one that needs no outside political strategy. Alternatively, the Left has tended to assume that movements like the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), which will be explained in more depth below, automatically challenge neoliberalism, simply because the face of the Forum's leadership is anti-neoliberal. The recent militancy of protests in townships around the country, which have seen local councillors being forcibly removed from places like Standerton and Balfour, are often misconstrued as a challenge to neoliberalism. For example, the APF political and organisational report for 2010 states that ‘these latest rounds of community uprisings are a direct challenge to the neoliberal policies of the [Jacob] Zuma presidency’ (APF 2010). Although these movements may represent a new level of radical militancy, they do not necessarily reflect a new kind of politics, or at least not one that the Left hopes that they will offer. Analysts have not gone so far as to examine the internal dynamics of local affiliates and other community-based movements which, in most instances, actually buy into ANC policies.
Theorists have also not paid adequate attention to the potential for movements to challenge the ideologically dominant ANC. From this perspective, academics of the Left and other activists critique the policies and ideology of the ANC in power, but the masses are left to their own devices. Gramsci's notion of hegemony is useful here. Gramsci understands hegemony to be when a political group is ideologically dominant. This means that the direction of society that is envisioned goes largely unchallenged and is considered to be ‘legitimate’ even by those who do not necessarily benefit materially from it. The masses maintain this hegemony by adopting the cultural beliefs of the hegemons, thereby giving their active ‘consent’ to those in power. Gramsci therefore argues that:
a class is dominant in two ways, i.e. ‘leading’ and ‘dominant’. It leads the classes which are its allies, and dominates those which are its enemies. Therefore, even before attaining power a class can (and must) ‘lead’; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but continues to ‘lead’ as well … one should not count solely on the power and material force which such a position gives in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony. (Gramsci 1971, p. 57)
For Gramsci, intellectuals play a critical role in both maintaining and, possibly also, contesting hegemony. Gramsci argues that ‘all men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 9). While hegemony is maintained by intellectuals who seek to maintain the dominant social order in favour of their economic interests, counterhegemony occurs when the hegemon's system of beliefs begins to be questioned by what he terms ‘organic intellectuals’. These intellectuals provide an alternative value system on which to base the future development of society. Invoking Gramsci, I suggest that participatory spaces may be restrained by hegemonic ideologies that have been infused in people's minds. Poor communities across the country place hope that the new populist president, Jacob Zuma, will listen to their demands and deliver socio-economic services to them, when in fact he has committed to the same old failing neoliberal policies which neglect poor communities. The ANC remains hegemonic as the masses, and indeed the government, seek to achieve people's demands at the local level within the same political framework.
Perhaps because of the hope that the Left placed in their potential to challenge the onslaught of neoliberal policies and in the idea that ‘another world is possible’, many academic analysts initially treated these movements in a celebratory manner – paying little or no attention to their weaknesses (see Bond 2000, Desai 2002, McKinley 2006). Recently, however, scholars have criticised these approaches and thereby sought to uncover both the potentials and limitations of these movements (see Ballard et al. 2006, Desai 2006, Madlingozi 2007, Walsh 2008).
Oldfield and Stokke (2007) have attempted to address this issue by breaking with the binary between ‘liberal’ thinkers who emphasise that civil society must work with the state (Parnell et al. 2002), and ‘radical “anti-neoliberal” critics’ (Oldfield and Stokke 2007, p. 1) which create sharp distinctions between civil society opposition and the neoliberal state (see, for example, Bond 2000). Drawing from the organisational background and tactics of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC), Oldfield and Stokke argue that: ‘The multiple positions and strategic engagements adopted by urban community-based movements, combined with the complex character of neoliberal policies, produce often contradictory and uneven politics that at times resonate with critiques of neoliberalism, but also articulate as locally specific issues’ (Oldfield and Stokke 2007, p. 2). In a collection edited by Gibson (2006), the authors have gone so far as to suggest that new movements in post-apartheid South Africa:
are not only challenging neoliberal capitalist globalization, but also attempting to articulate alternatives and raise the question of what it means to be human. Whether reconnecting electricity, or struggling for housing or for HIV/AIDS anti-virals, these social movements are a challenge, in the most human of ways, to the mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalist globalization. (Gibson 2006, back cover)
we have to realise and respect that the core demand of many social movements is indeed simply to be placed within ‘normal’ relations of oppression and exploitation: in a normal job, in an RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme] house with minimum standard of electricity and water. We might have reasons to tell other people otherwise (although, I can't see what these reasons are) but we ought not to mislead ourselves. And we should not use the poor to satisfy our particular (intellectual) fetishes. (Desai 2006, p. 6)
Drawing lessons from the history of recent militant communities provides critical insight into militant community organisations which have challenged government decisions in post-apartheid South Africa. While at face value there have been important challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, many movements die out at the faintest sign of a state concession – and this where the power of the ANC, and indeed token welfare neoliberalism, lies. The case in Khutsong (township on West Rand) throws this into sharp relief. Khutsong was one of the most militant communities in the post-apartheid period particularly between 2005 and 2006. It refused to vote in the 2006 elections and achieved its demand of being incorporated into the Gauteng province and is now, as one leader celebrates, ‘100% ANC’ (see Kirshner and Phokela 2009). Winning this kind of concession is important in its own terms for the lives of poor people in Khutsong and, indeed, for our faith in the power of human beings to resist the implementation of top-down development plans. But it must not be viewed as a sign that the neoliberal onslaught is under threat or that real resistance to neoliberalism is mounting.
Like the recent militant, and sometimes violent, service-delivery protests in Balfour, Piet Retief, and Standerton, the case in Khutsong is not connected to a critique of the ANC itself, nor do any of these communities seriously seek to pressurise the government beyond their own communities. As indicated in a report completed last year on four key service-delivery hotspots, the protests do not challenge the ANC's national policy framework (see Sinwell et al., 2009).1 Abahlali is another case in point. One of the most celebrated movements in post-apartheid South Africa, Abahlali is often described as an ideal example of a bottom-up community-based organisation that genuinely represents the interests of the poor. It claims to be able to speak for itself and on behalf of poor people living in shacks (Pithouse 2008). Despite the position of the leadership of Abahlali, the majority of the people in the shack settlement at Kennedy Road vote the ANC into power (Bryant 2008). Even Abahlali's slogan, ‘No House, No Vote’, militant as it may be, suggests, like the case of Khutsong (and maybe also Balfour), that if the ANC arrives with its state concessions, often a few poorly constructed RDP houses and toilets, residents will then vote for the ANC. Though these claims clearly reflect the community's immediate needs, they may in fact mean very little for the enemy, neoliberalism, that so much of the Left claims to be fighting against. The danger is that the Left may describe these movements as revolutionary or liberatory, as holding realistic possibilities for creating another world, when in fact they buy into the ANC and, to a significant extent, legitimise it.
The following section provides a critical analysis of the politics of local affiliates to the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), a social movement that draws from ‘class-based ideologies’ such as ‘anti-capital, anti-GEAR, anti-globalisation, anti-market, socialist, and Trotskyist’ (Ballard et al. 2006, p. 400). The APF presents itself as part of a wider radical political project that is intended to transform the existing power relations embedded in the neoliberal policies of the ANC, which it claims put the rich before the poor, thereby limiting the latter's ability to meet their basic needs. For example, Trevor Ngwane, a prominent leader of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC, an affiliate of the APF) insists that the poor in South Africa are objects of the ANC's capitalist trajectory. ‘The ANC’, he argues, ‘serves the interests of the black and white capitalist bosses. It does not serve the working class and the poor’ (APF 2006). The APF seeks to embark on a radical project with an active notion of citizenship that can define the underlying process of social change from the perspective of the working class so that they can liberate themselves from the neoliberal system of oppression that has been adopted by the ANC.
On the one hand, activists within the APF are adamant that ‘the test of an authentic movement … is whether it holds a vision for a socialist alternative or at least opposes the state's neoliberal growth path’ (Ballard et al. 2006, p. 401). On the other hand, Mark Heywood of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a social movement that demands anti-retrovirals for all, has suggested that ‘revolutionary social movements as defined by the left were a figment of their imagination’ (ibid., p. 402). Ballard et al. therefore suggest that ‘while it might be possible to say that community struggles are – by default – anti-neoliberal, it does not follow that they set out with this ideology in mind’ (ibid.). Given the indication that there may be a disjuncture between the APF's class ideology as a movement and the masses who actually protest on the ground, this paper provides insight into the politics of two key community movements in Alexandra township – the Wynberg Concerned Residents (WCR) and the Alexandra Vukuzenzele Crisis Committee (AVCC) – which are local affiliates of the APF. While much is known about the APF's goals as an organisation (Buhlungu 2006), far less is known about the politics of its local affiliates. While the APF presents itself as an anti-systemic class movement, the next section of this paper draws from in-depth interviews and participant observation in order to understand how its local APF affiliates present their own struggle. These methods provided critical insight into what these leaders do and the meanings they ascribe to their actions and the practical implications that social movements, like those above, have when they do not challenge the ANC's development path directly. It then questions what this means, not for poor people at the forefront of the action who understandably vie for limited housing opportunities in their own communities, but for the system called Neoliberalism which the Left claims to fight against.
Problematising protest in the Alexandra Renewal Project
The AVCC and the WCR are particularly critical because they operate in the context of the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), a R1.3-billion flagship project with financial support from the ANC at the national, provincial and local government level. As indicated earlier, the ARP is nine years into its life span (completed in 2010), and yet Alexandra still has the face of the congested ghetto that it was during apartheid. Although the ARP has witnessed a decline in crime rates and some minor improvements in access to water and electricity, the majority of the population remains without access to adequate housing opportunities. Julian Baskin, the director of the ARP, has suggested that the development of Alexandra will ‘take a lifetime’ (Interview, J. Baskin, Director of the ARP, Wynberg, 9 October 2007), but the inception of the ARP gave residents high hopes and the expectation that they would not need to wait that long for delivery. While the ARP aimed to deliver 22,250 new houses in seven years, by August 2007, the ARP website noted that there were only 2727 completed housing units (including 2000 in Bramfisherville), and more than 7000 under construction (ARP 2007). Even if people had been able to immediately occupy the other 7000 houses that were under construction, the number of families or individuals receiving houses would have been 9727. While this seems substantial at first glance, it is less so given the fact that there is a housing backlog of approximately 40,000 in Alexandra (Community Agency for Social Enquiry 2005, p. 123). In this context, local affiliates of the APF have focused on the politics of housing in Alexandra and these conditions might have provided them with a starting point from which to present a class critique of the ARP's housing policies.
The ARP works closely with the Alexandra Development Forum (ADF) which represents approximately 20 organisations in Alexandra and is intended to be the mouthpiece of the community. Together, they have come to a consensus with regard to housing policy and allocations. Due to limited resources, however, this consensus has the effect of prioritising some poor residents at the expense of others. In this context, a wide array of civic organisations in Alexandra have vied for housing opportunities. For example, The Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association (ALPOA) seeks to de-densify Alexandra so that owners' property values go up. However, these plans would undermine the interests of shack dwellers who want to remain in Alexandra. In fact, those living in shacks along the Iphuteng school cluster were part of the victory in 2005 that now enables them to be provided with houses in Extension 7, just along the borders of Alexandra, instead of being removed to periphery areas such as Diepsloot and Bramfisherville. There are also the residents who lived in S'swetla, an informal settlement in Alexandra until they were moved to a transit camp (a temporary government-designed shack settlement) so that a bridge could be built that would connect old and new Alexandra. These residents are now putting pressure on the government so that they can move into the houses that the ARP promised them. The Umpakathi Development Forum (UDF), the Marlboro Concerned Residents (MCR), and the Alexandra Concerned Residents (ACR) are the names of other civic organisations which have emerged to demand access to housing over the past several years.
The constituency of the AVCC and the WCR are microcosms of the working class make-up of Alexandra as a whole. The Wynberg residents included 293 households (96 headed by women), 11 elderly (over 60 years old), 252 children (under 18 years old), 22 disabled, 95 unemployed, and 201 chronically poverty-stricken (monthly income R800 or less). The Wynberg area consisted of a set of partitioned small rooms which are linked to each other in a confined area (Chauke 2005, p. 3). The threats of evictions of the people of Wynberg by the private developers of the Alexandra Plaza and the subsequent court case, which attached local government officials and the ARP as second and third respondents to the case, was publicised in the media between 2005 and 2006 (Indymedia South Africa 2005, Cherney 2006, Lange 2006). But, the politics and implications of the WCR's struggle for housing has not been adequately explained. Journalists arrived on 31 March 2005 when the developers of Alexandra Plaza attempted forcibly to remove the residents of Wynberg. They recorded that more than 60 security guards and police officers arrived in Wynberg to effect the evictions. IndyMedia South Africa explains the process through which the WCR expressed their power through direct action:
Hundreds of people came down into the streets where they began demonstrating against the police and lighting tires on fire. Due to the massive outpouring of resistance, the police were unable to enter the factories. (Indymedia South Africa 2005, p. 2)
It's not only us. All Alexandrans are suffering … There are houses that are built but they are not given to Alexandrians, only 2 or 3 who are Alexandrians. The others are from somewhere else. They are giving money to the authorities so we really don't know what is happening. (Interview, E. Chauke, Chairperson of the WCR, Wynberg, 8 May 2006)
[T]here were R1.3 billion that was given to people of Alexandra to build those houses. So our question is where are those houses and how many houses have they built so far? And who has a right to go to the resources? And who is in those houses? Are they Alexandrans or people from outside? Because the R1.3 billion was including us … we are included in the R1.3 billion so someone should think and say, where is that money? What have they built so far? (Interview, D. Mekgoe, Secretary of the WCR, Wynberg, 8 May 2006)
Like several other community organisations in Alexandra, the AVCC has also stressed that there is an unfair allocation of houses. Fredah Dlamini, Chairperson of AVCC, observed that ‘we need more houses because the houses that are available are given to people who don't deserve them. People who bribe councillors get them’ (cited in Tshabalala 2007). Reaffirming this viewpoint, Dlamini states that the ‘processes of houses is not going in the right way. We need to influence how houses are going, to the poor, and not through corruption’ (Interview, F. Dlamini, Chairperson of AVCC, East Bank, 4 September 2007).
Perhaps the key demand of the AVCC is to achieve ‘a transparent process for the allocation of houses in Extension 7’ (APF 2008). This demand, though important on its own, seems to assume that if houses were allocated in a ‘transparent’ manner in which the AVCC could have some direct influence, their problems would be solved within the framework of the ARP.
It seems that the central objective of the APF critique in Alexandra is to claim that the ARP is corrupt and needs to reprioritise housing opportunities. Similarly to the other protests described across the country, this resonates with people's broad frustrations with the ARP, but it is not meant, nor does it necessarily fundamentally challenge the premise of the ARP. This means that they have not offered an alternative to development, but rather, have claimed a piece of the housing pie offered by the ANC through the ARP. This analysis does not intend to undermine the potential problems that exist with corruption at the local level in relation to housing allocations. Any organisation, including the APF and the ANC, can challenge corrupt development practices in the ARP. This is because it does not offer an alternative to existing policies, but assumes that if management is effective and efficient, development will be legitimate. The APF in Alexandra, despite how leaders of the APF write about their actions, engage only with what Hickey and Mohan (2004) have termed the imminent processes of social change – that is, specific interventions. Because they do not engage directly with immanent development – that is, the underlying processes of social change known as neoliberalism that one would expect the APF to lay sharp critiques against – the AVCC and WCR arguably lack a transformative agenda through which to enable marginalised groups to claim access to a greater stake of national resources.
This is extremely problematic in a practical way for other poor people in Alexandra, who vie for limited resources. In November 2007, while the people being displaced from the Iphuteng School Cluster were preparing to move from their shacks to Extension 7 RDP houses, the AVCC took the opportunity to occupy those houses. While the AVCC did not know whom these houses were for, they were in effect taking away the housing opportunities from those living in the Iphuteng School Cluster. Julian Baskin, the director of the ARP, commented that once ‘you invade a house, you are basically stealing it from somebody else who has already been allocated a house’ (Interview, J. Baskin, Director of the ARP, Wynberg, 9 October 2007). He further explains how this occupation could lead to conflict with other new residents:
And unless we go and deal with it … the guys in Iphuteng were mobilising to go there and whop these guys out, because those were their houses. They would have gone in there and killed these guys, literally, had it not been for our intervention with the police. (Interview, J. Baskin, Director of the ARP, Wynberg, 9 October 2007)
I think the government is dealing with that. Yes, if you move to the house illegally, then the law must take its course. I mean we can't support that. I mean you can't jump the queue. (Interview, A. Rasetelo, leader in S'swetla, Wynberg, 6 June 2008)
That is why I say there are so many people and there are so many projects happening. So, at the moment, we don't know which group is moving out. We are still waiting. There are so many groups, organisations just like us, who are waiting to move to the houses. So, we really don't know. Even these shacks here, S'swetla village, they have to be moved. But we really don't know that, are they going to be the first one or we are going to be the first one. So that is why it takes such a long time. (Interview, E. Chauke, Chairperson of the WCR, Marlboro, 6 February 2008)
Despite a massive scale of popular protest which has resulted in a substantial degree of community control over development priorities, the project will be competed in 2010, arguably without improving the lives of the majority of residents who still live in abject poverty: the 350,000 residents remain densely packed into 74,000 shacks in four square kilometres of land. Academics would like to believe that all of these acts of resistance in places like Alexandra, when added up, will somehow miraculously challenge neoliberalism. Without questioning the framework in which development can occur in Alexandra and elsewhere, communities struggling for housing end up fighting against each other for limited resources, rather than constituting ‘another world’ or a challenge to the systemic enemy called neoliberalism.
Conclusion
The romanticisation of social movements only takes us so far if we seriously seek to understand whether the strategies and tactics employed by movements have the potential to challenge state power. In fact, there is also no a priori reason to believe that these militant movements will necessarily evolve into class-conscious movements. Praxis, struggle, does not have to equal the development of class consciousness. This is, in part, evidenced by the fact that even militant movements may remain tied to the ANC after they win struggles. Battles, and particularly where state concessions have been given by the ANC, may lead to further support of the ANC without actually developing a movement against neoliberalism. The slogan, ‘no land – no house – no vote’ illustrates this clearly, as it suggests that after movements have got what they want, they will vote for the ANC. The desperation which exists in poor communities understandably creates a condition in which many poor people would rather receive a house with water and electricity than fight against the neoliberal system that mostly middle-class left-wing people identify as the problem.
Being militant and challenging top-down practices of officials is not problematic in itself. It becomes problematic, however, when the Left assumes that these kinds of protest actions across the country, which for now have largely been framed at a local level, somehow challenge the class-based project called neoliberalism. Like the people in Khutsong, the case of the AVCC and WCR highlights the fragmented nature of social movements which make claims on behalf of their own community, without adequately connecting them to broader struggles. The power of state concessions means that even militant communities like Khutsong can be easily located within the neoliberal ANC. The situation of the WCR and the AVCC in Alexandra illustrates the problem associated with this. Because these movements claim resources within the ARP's confines, other poor people in Alexandra are excluded from their development agenda.
However, the potential that social movements in Alexandra and beyond have for achieving transformation is something that has, and will continue to, evolve over time as power relations are reshaped in unpredictable ways in post-apartheid South Africa. Those engaging in direct action in order to meet their demands on their own terms may help guide the South African masses on the path towards achieving the kind of transformative project that was undertaken during apartheid under the notion of ‘ungovernability’, which arguably prompted the apartheid government to negotiate itself out of power. The militancy across the country, particularly in places like Balfour and Standerton, suggests that unifying the power of these movements, which have tended to exert their power independently from each other, could lead towards more transformative results. While organic intellectuals have, in the main, not emerged to contest the nature of the political economy in post-apartheid South Africa, they have refused to sit back and wait for the government to deliver. In so doing, they have begun to contest the legitimacy of the ANC government and showed other communities across the country that it can be forced to concede to poor people's demands.
This indicates that the Left's hope for ‘another world’ does lie in the power of poor, desperate, sometimes angry communities to control development trajectories on their own terms. However, this article has illustrated that movements need political and strategic direction in order to create ‘another world’ which could be favourable to all poor communities instead of only individual ones. The time has come to go beyond romanticisation in order to show the conditions under which acts of resistance, subtle or not, might be able to challenge neoliberalism. The question is whether or not intellectuals will begin to debate these issues and engage in praxis, or whether our own ideology, anti-capitalism, will remain closed off from the poor. Will academics continue to ignore the limitations of movements while simultaneously speaking past and without the poor at obscure international conferences while the enemy, neoliberalism, remains intact? Indeed, rather than speaking truth to power, the time has come to ‘speak truth within the disempowered’ (Desai 2006). If we do acknowledge the limitations and real potential of movements and firmly believe that ‘Another World is Possible’, then academics may need to consider how to capture the imagination of the masses to move beyond meeting their own immediate needs, thereby extending and strengthening, rather than deferring, a broader liberation struggle.
Note on contributor
Luke Sinwell received a BA in Anthropology from Hartwick College, New York, and his MA and PhD from Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. His research interests include the politics and conceptualisation of participatory development and governance, social movements and housing struggles, non-violent direct action as a method to transform power relations, ethnographic research methods and action research.