James Scott's Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance has informed much scholarly work on peasant and, more broadly, subaltern resistance since it was first published more than 25 years ago. His main concern was to re-evaluate what constitutes resistance in a context where
a great deal of the recent work on the peasantry – my own as well as that of others – concerns rebellions and revolutions … much attention has been devoted to organized, large-scale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily, to pose a threat to the state. (Scott 1985, p. xv)
Aiming to challenge my own interpretations of resistance in post-apartheid South Africa, Carin Runciman builds on Scott's analysis in order to argue that ‘our conceptualization and understanding of resistance is often isolated from the understanding and interpretations which activists themselves hold’ (Runciman 2012, p. 607). In so doing, she problematises the imposition of scholars' own values onto subaltern movements – something which I admittedly did in my article that she critiques. Paying particular attention to the organisational forms of the anti-capitalist umbrella body of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), Runciman suggests that my own work was not ethnographic enough (ibid., p. 613) since it does not consider ‘the messy and often contradictory realities of social movement activism’ as well as the limited resources that the poor have at their disposal.
Scott's emphasis was on class domination and class struggle by poor peasants in opposition to the rich. Runciman applies this theoretical framework produced out of poor peasants' struggles with the rich to largely urban struggles for service delivery in post-apartheid South Africa, which, I argued (Sinwell 2011a) are not in most instances about class struggle. Furthermore, as we are aware from various newspaper articles of frontline protests as well as scholarly reports (Von Holdt et al. 2011, Sinwell et al. 2009), open and collective protest, although it is far more rare than regularly weekly meetings for example, is in fact quite common in the post-apartheid context. The so-called ‘weapons of the weak’ that these movements employ are indeed collective and public and this is in stark contrast to the context in which Scott was writing.
While Runciman is correct to point out that we do indeed need to pay close attention to the realities and perceptions of activists in struggle, and that the APF did indeed contribute towards democratic alternatives in struggle, I was in fact taking this point very seriously in my own article by highlighting an instance where there was a disconnection between the political education and consciousness raising that happens within the APF umbrella and the practical programme that APF community-based affiliates struggle for on the ground. Underpinning the points I put across below is the idea that academics must not surrender the craft of critique, since this, when done in conversation with movements, can enable them to further their own objectives. The ‘weapons of the weak’ employed by the APF and its affiliates as well as other struggles across the country could be sharpened by linking socialist education programmes more sufficiently to actual local struggles – praxis. Acknowledging that these struggles in fact emerge from crises within capitalism is insufficient for advancing an anti-capitalist struggle since it does not provide a political and tactical alternative. We must uncover why it is that despite meaningful socialist education being undertaken by the umbrella APF with its affiliates, resistance may nevertheless take the form of competition amongst the poor rather than against the elite or power holders.
Disaggregating the APF umbrella and its affiliates
The main point of departure here, which Runciman does not sufficiently explain, is that her focus is on the organisational form of the APF, whereas I focus on where people are actually struggling to access power, in most cases from the state. As early as 2008, Marcelle Dawson's D.Phil. thesis from Oxford University had already provided us with an in-depth analysis of the APF's organisational form at the centre and its contribution to local community-based struggles. Dawson argued, with specific reference to water struggles in the APF, that ‘social movements have the potential to play an important role in strengthening democracy’ (2008, p. 10) and that we needed to politicise an understanding of social movements if we were to grasp their emancipatory potential.
What Runciman calls ‘the backstage’ is precisely what she neglects to problematise given her heavy reliance on information from Dale McKinley, who happens not to be from any of the community-based affiliates – but from the centre of the APF itself. Indeed, McKinley holds a doctorate and is a co-founder of the APF and has been its treasurer as well as its public relations officer. Using McKinley as the main source of data in her article leads to a one-sided analysis which is unable to explain the contradictions between community-based affiliates and the APF as a mother-body, let alone intra-community conflict, which is what I sought to explain briefly in my own article. These struggles are neglected by Runciman given the heavy focus that she places on the APF organisational form. Furthermore, this leads to the, I think unfortunate, situation in which she is unable to utter even one critical word about resistance in the APF. Yes, resistance is taking place in the backstage. Yes, we must pay attention to the meanings activists ascribe to their activism, and, yes, education can contribute to building counter-hegemony, but one might ask Runciman, where does this take us?
My article was not solely about the APF (Runciman's main focus), but also unpacked the politics of movements, particularly those which employed direct action in order to meet their immediate basic needs – what Harvey calls ‘militant particularisms’ (in Williams 1989) – and to analyse the potential for moving these beyond mere local struggles. In doing so, I moved from the very specific to the general. I linked the APF in Alexandra, to the APF as an umbrella body, to the South African service delivery protests in general, and to the application of direct action by marginalised groups across the world. My starting point, as I noted throughout, was that movements had been romanticised and that we needed to pay close attention to the politics and internal dynamics if we were to have any chance of understanding their transformative potential. The article, as I pointed out, was in fact based on dozens of interviews throughout South Africa, and the argument emerged out of my PhD work in Alexandra.
Like Runciman, however, I initially thought that movements, such as those in Alexandra, should be celebrated and lauded. Part of my analysis, as I note directly below, was misplaced. A brief note on my fieldwork may be useful here in explaining the process through which I came to terms with the limitations of community-based movements. In March 2006, after telephoning leaders of the Wynberg Concerned Residents (WCR) whose numbers I had obtained from the APF, I walked into their home, actually an abandoned factory, and introduced myself. After some time, the activists began to open up and tell me about their struggle. A certain sense of confidence in their work as activists exuded from their voices and expressions. The initial response of most researchers who come to speak to community organisations across South Africa is understandably one of excitement and a booming hope in the power of agency.
This was my reaction on that day as the case in front of me seemed to be a classic one of the poor fighting for their right not to be evicted in the name of Alexandra Plaza, a shopping mall which was intended to benefit Alexandra's residents, but would in reality produce more profit for the corporate world. I sat and watched pensioner Ellen Chauke, chairperson of the WCR, sew scarves that she would later sell for ZAR30 each to primary schools so that kids could stay warm on their way to school. I sat eagerly for some time, but eventually I no longer had to ask open questions to get them started and they told stories about their recent struggles. My faith in the struggles of the APF and its assistance to poor communities was given further reinforcement when Dunia Mekgoe, secretary of the WCR, explained during an hour-and-a-half-long interview that:
APF really gave us strength because we didn't have any. In December we were hopeless … mainly we were depending on discussions. That if we discuss with them maybe they are going to think that and do this. Then APF said no, this is a struggle guys…. Whoever comes near you, you must try and fight yourself [to prevent the evictions]. Show these people that you are [strong], start protesting from there … that is the only language that they can understand. You protest. They are going to understand. Whoever is the enemy will just back off. Because they can see that you have … built an iron fist…. APF is there, it's really there with us.… If we do have a problem we go to them and they do advise us how to handle [it] in a political way…. Because if we are doing it lawfully, we could have been moved long ago. So politically we cannot be moved. We have to fight so that these people must never remove us, we have to resist. (Sinwell 2009, pp. 268–326)
While Runciman suggests that analysts, including myself, ‘merge the identities of the APF and its many different affiliates without reference to the political independence and autonomy of affiliates’ (2012, pp. 608–609), it is in fact the APF centre itself, the front-stage media outlet that problematically merges the APF's mission of anti-capitalism with its local affiliates. Referring to the housing situation in Alexandra, the APF released the following in a press statement:
The construction of low-cost housing is not changing the lives of the poor in the country because the delivery of basic services is still class skewed. The rich minority are enjoying the fruits of the neo-liberal policies of the ANC-led government while the poor majority are being screwed by the non-delivery of basic services and the repeated promise of a better life for all. The situation of communities taking over housing projects in Alexandra and in many other communities across our country is a situation brought about by the implementation of neo-liberal policies in a country that is divided right down the middle between the rich and the poor. (APF 2008)
Occupying or placing oneself in the housing queue becomes equivalent to taking another poor peasant's rice (to refer back to the context in which Scott was writing) and eating it yourself – this is clearly not revolutionary or counter-hegemonic. It is qualitatively different to stealing rice from the rich and, I would suggest, is more like stealing resources from one's own class – in this case, other poor people in the housing queue. The organisation of education workshops by the APF which promote local democracy and socialist principles are clearly important for the development of class-conscious activists. However, I have tried to demonstrate the real dangers of not adequately connecting these education programmes to a broader practical socialist programme. The dangers are not merely ideological but have real implications for people struggling on the ground.
The equivalent is teaching a socialist programme to students at the university and then supporting direct action that enables students to access a limited set of scholarships and to push themselves further in the queue: this is not wrong on its own, but one can see that it does little to advance a socialist programme, or to change the underlying structural factors that have enabled so few scholarships to be available in the first place. Without a collective decision-making process, and arguably without a political programme that challenges neoliberalism, struggles with the primary goal of accessing resources from the state do not lead to inter-class warfare. Instead, such struggles put members of the working class against each other – and here we must carefully investigate the evidence of xenophobia in movements, which at times has been linked to the question of service delivery (see Von Holdt 2011, Sinwell 2011b for an analysis of the APF and xenophobia in Alexandra).
Elsewhere (Sinwell 2011b), I have argued that the leaders of Alexandra, including those affiliated to the APF, contribute to a condition in which the poor battle each other for limited resources – including those which foreigners possess. There is a growing tendency for community activists to seek power by accessing state resources, rather than by demanding the redistribution of wealth. In part, what I have illustrated is the danger of a social movement like the APF as an open space for autonomous community based organising – the potential pitfalls of education for critical consciousness, for uncritically supporting grassroots organisations that seek to access state power, without an adequate consideration of what this means for broader relations of power.
One of the underlying arguments put forth by Scott (1985) was that subaltern groups need not use the power of the state in order to transform politics and society. In contrast, the APF's affiliates and other movements in South Africa tend to seek to access decision-making processes within the state – it is not sabotage or theft, but a demand to sit with those local state officials in power who, to a significant extent, control development processes in poor communities.
Countering the African National Congress (ANC)'s carrot and stick strategy
As Runciman points out, political independence and autonomy are important in any umbrella movement. What I was suggesting is that this independence and autonomy is actually undermining the potential to provide a counter-hegemonic alternative – and so we must carefully investigate the politics of local affiliates. In a recent paper entitled ‘Uneven and combined Marxism within South Africa's urban social movements’, Bond et al. incisively pointed out that
the APF does not carry its anti-capitalist critique forward in a coherent, systematic manner and to its logical political conclusion, and that it has not significantly developed a strategy for contesting state power beyond exposing the neoliberal nature of the state. (Bond et al. 2011, p. 17)
The inability of any local or umbrella movements to form a systemic and coherent strategy to contest state power as well as their limited strength in numbers and resources has contributed to a situation in which civics primarily remain localised – disconnected from each other. The argument that a thousand small punches (by civics) all over one's body (the ANC being the body) is more powerful than one mighty and carefully directed punch does not hold sway here. Instead, the small blows, from one area to another, are fairly easily blocked by the ANC through a carrot and stick strategy. The stick is the use of police repression, in particular the arrests and shootings (usually with rubber bullets) of leaders and other people who are identified as being associated with the protests. The carrot is promises which are intended to indicate to communities that their demands are legitimate and that they will soon receive some form of service delivery.
The level of dissatisfaction and the ability of activists to organise in poor communities has created a situation in which the government has had to respond to service delivery protests in one way or another. The protests have inspired us to see that change from below is possible. But, at the same time, they do not in themselves constitute a force that is capable of challenging the divide between the rich and the poor, and in many instances these protests involve the poor battling with each other over the limited resources provided by the ANC. This is not only the fault of movements, but it is the precondition of neoliberalism that creates few resources: for example, housing and jobs. While the APF, and more recently the Democratic Left Front (DLF), acknowledges that the enemy is neoliberalism, they must pay more attention to the fact that the solution is coordinated and strategic mass action on a national scale that can force those in power, and the state, to concede to socialist demands that place people before profit. This will not be achieved through clever press statements or pamphlets which describe neoliberalism as the enemy.
In the end, my article was not merely concerned with new kinds of research but also interested in inspiring critically engaged researchers who are committed to constructing a counter-hegemonic alternative outside of the academy. Ivory-tower intellectuals who criticise neoliberalism at international and other conferences without undertaking movement-building themselves that engages with the strategies and tactics employed by the masses, provide little hope for constructing a radical socialist agenda at this, or any other, juncture.
Scholars would do well to indicate how their own praxis, given that this is an academic journal read by scholars, could assist in building social movements. Without challenging, or building on, the existing struggles of social movements, the researcher risks forfeiting the creative element of critique that academics have at their disposal and which can be used if needs be, to redirect, strengthen and sharpen the ‘weapons of the weak’ so that they work more effectively.
Note on contributor
Luke Sinwell obtained his PhD from Witwatersrand University and is currently a Senior Researcher with the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-editor of Contesting transformation: popular resistance in twenty-first century South Africa (2012, forthcoming), and also co-editor of Marikana: a view from the mountain (2012, forthcoming).