Social Movements in South Africa- The State of Organisation
• It is Important to identify the issues correctly
While the research form UJ points out that most of the protesters were consistent in their claims that their actions were not political, it would appear as if by far the majority of these protests have been linked in one way or the other to the material conditions of the protestors. The farm workers and farm dwellers in DeDoorns were adamant that their actions were not political but their range of demands clearly focussed on the squalid conditions that characterises life on and around farms.
The events in Marikana were similarly sparked by a range of squalid living conditions together with a particular sense of betrayal felt by the mine workers. The betrayal of those who should be at the forefront of representing the interest of these workers left a bitter aftertaste and was the cause of the initial violence at the offices of the National Union of Mineworkers(NUM), when shop stewards from NUM started firing on approaching strikers.
The particularity of the betrayal aside, it was the abhorrent conditions of the miners which lay at the heart of their heroic rise against not only the power and influence of the mining houses, but also the perceived collusion of the current political structures which included NUM.
According to a report compiled by the Society, Work and Development Institute, based at the University of the Witwatersrand, entitled, Marikana and the post-apartheid workplace order, the Marikana district has over 350 000 people living in and around mine lease areas and according to Lonmin, who is quoted in the study, ”50% of the population who lived within a 15 kilometre radius from its mining operations lived in informal dwellings and lacked access to basic services. This highlights a crisis in workers living conditions of which the employer is fully aware”
Similarly, but perhaps even more brutally in terms of sheer poverty, the farm workers and dwellers face a range of oppressive conditions that characterise the uprisings of November 2012. In 2005 Nkuzi Development, a land reform NGO, compiled a survey which proposed that over a ten year period nearly two million farmworkers or dwellers were evicted from farms and nearly four million were displaced. Almost 80% of them women and children. Ronald Wesso of Surplus Peoples Project suggests that “more people were forcibly displaced from farms in the neo-liberal era than were forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act.”
The exponential growth of evictions is captured in the growing inequality of the sector. According to the World Wildlife Foundation`s study entitled Agriculture: facts and trends (South Africa), the number of farming units has dropped but Gross farm income has increased by more than 300% and Net farm income by a staggering 410%. This together with low wages, evictions, the increased seasonal nature of employment, which is further exacerbated by the proliferation of labour brokers within the sector (A study by the Centre for Rural legal studies found 192 labour brokers in one town of Grabouw), and the increased intensity (productivity) of the labour expected from farm workers, has stoked the fires of discontent and revolt.
While these may not be intentional political revolts, they are potent working class revolts around issues affecting the working classes in a particular way.
Both in Marikana and during the Farm workers strikes, a working class unity was forged within the cauldron of toyi toyi, bullets, blood, sweat and tears.
In Marikana, where traditionally local communities were hostile to migrant mineworkers, who they saw as taking jobs that should rightfully be allocated to locals, were united in their outrage at the brutal response of the state and mining houses and have since been working together in a new spirit of working class unity.
Within the farming communities, where previously the plight of the farm workers were seen to be a result of foreign labour, and where in 2009 xenophobic violence saw exploited worker pitted against exploited worker, the uprisings of 2012 saw these communities unite in ways that were never seen before. A new consciousness was born.
Broad national movements are important
Communities all over the country are starting to organise themselves into various types of adhoc structures, which are increasingly engaging the state at local level. Many of these protests, 40% according to the UJ study, turn violent. Many of the groups who lead these protests are a loose amalgamation of people, mostly unemployed and mostly women and according to the UJ study most of them do not exist for very long. After the initial spurt of energy has been released, these groups find it difficult to mobilise and organise into structures.
The adhoc nature and the increasing rate of protests might seduce some into inserting a radical nature into these protests, and certainly the growing violent nature of the protests might add gravitas to that conclusion, but the UJ study found that occasionally, but not in all cases, “defecting” to the DA, or voting for the DA, was seen as a strategy to force the ANC to accede to their demands.
The lack of organisation, or rather one should say lack of organisational form, as communities have proven that they are very capable of organising, at a local level, has direct implications on the final outcomes of the community struggles and the policy and implementation at a national level.
Where a cadre of activist had been active, the growth of organisation has indeed taken on a radical form with formation such as the Socialist Civic Movement and the Operation Khanyisa Movement emerging from these local struggles.
The ground is fertile with discontent, and opportunists of all shades and hue are clamouring to hijack the anger of communities and workers for their own political ends. The DA has clearly seen the opportunity to win some “voting fodder” and has embarked on a vigorous campaign to portray themselves as progressive and as a party with a tradition within the liberation movement. Agang and Ramphele have also noted that the discontent of the people does not seem to have an outlet and she has correctly identified the dis-connect between the DA and the working class communities, and has tried to enter the political arena with her own brand of neo-liberal “change the politics and the economics will change too” type of fallacy.
Providing communities with an alternative to the representative type of democracy, which leaves them wallowing in poverty while their representatives live the high life, has become a pressing need. Communities have been robbed of their agency. Amartya Sen identifies human agency as the “people’s ability to act on behalf of goals that matter to them” and this aspect of freedom he argues, “is a core ingredient of positive social change”.
It has become a demand which echoes in every protest, runs through every word of anger spoken by those who face the brute reality of poverty everyday and is the most visible symbol of what ails our national politic.
For community and political and social activists, the call of the people grows louder every day. The need to build strong organisational structures at the grassroots that places the power of social change in the hands of those most in need of it, has become an imperative that cannot be ignored, lest the people’s demands are hijacked into another neo liberal project.
The process of building and managing political parties and democratic processes from the top down, as proposed by Agang for example, and as is currently practised within the current political dispensation, denies communities the opportunity to participate in the very essence of democracy and feeds the anger and discontent currently being played out across the country.
Sen argues that “participation has intrinsic value for the quality of life. Indeed being able to do something, not only for oneself but also for other members of society is one of the elementary freedoms which people have reason to value.” The World Development Report of 2000/1 also argues that “those materially deprived feel acutely their lack of voice, power and independence.”
As I have argued before in http://partofnopart.blogspot.com/2013/02/from-exclusion-and-exploitation-to.html, the mobilization of communities and other organized forces such as labour has always been a potent weapon in the struggle for social and economic change, and one which has a long history within the South African context. It is this weapon that must form the backbone of our struggle to free our people from poverty and exploitation. Anything less than a truly empowered community and society will not change the structural inequality that arises within an elitist framework. Examples from across the world, and specifically in Africa, abound of popular uprisings that usher in new governments, but rarely bring about real social change. The African experiences are filled with hastily networked and expedient attempts at building new political parties, which because of their failure to ground their parties in communities through democratic processes and movements ultimately fail in bringing about a new social order.
Thus the process of building not only strong community organizations, but linking these formations within regional and national networks and movements is vitally important. As Gene Sharp argues in his book, From Dictatorship to Democracy, “isolated action, no matter how noble, is impotent.”
Sharp basis his claim on his understanding of how power is derived within Society and asserts that “One characteristic of a democratic society is that there exist independent of the state a multitude of nongovernmental groups and these include, for example, families, religious organizations, cultural associations, sports clubs, economic institutions, trade unions, student associations, political parties, villages, neighbourhood associations, gardening clubs, human rights organizations, musical groups, literary societies, and others. These bodies are important in serving their own objectives and also in helping to meet social needs. Additionally, these bodies have great political significance. They provide group and institutional bases by which people can exert influence over the direction of their society and resist other groups or the government when they are seen to impinge unjustly on their interests, activities, or purposes. Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government.”
The failure to engage in the hard work of building social movements on the ground is what ultimately prevents political parties such as the newly formed Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) from garnering real popular support. WASP for all its good intentions and revolutionary rhetoric has taken a step beyond the workers it hopes to represent. It has assumed the mantle of a working class party but has not allowed the process to unfold organically through a popular movement. Its formation, done as it was, in isolation and without broad democratic participation has immediately created division and separation within its own base of cadres, not to mention within the broader community and has relegated it to yet another opportunist intent on feeding at the trough. It does not present an alternative to the structural inequality; instead it legitimizes the current representative democracy that has alienated the people who live in poverty, from the democratic process and which has fed the growing rise of protest movements in the country.
Our challenge remains one of forging closer links and networks. The state of civil society organization and movements within and across the country is one that is made up of a small cadre of experienced social activists and a growing core of new volunteers who have been at the forefront of the protests which have taken place over the last decade. Political education of these new social activists has been sporadic, uncoordinated, and lacks not only uniformity but a depth of understanding. The task of building a cadre with a uniform understanding is critical and will form the basis of broader cooperation and unity.
The range of protests across the country remains isolated and does not present a strategic challenge to the status quo and does not in itself hold out the hope of real societal change. Real societal change will only come about through vigorous united social action where communities assert their agency and space within a democratic environment. South Africa is not at that point yet, no matter how intensely we might hope.
The lack of political content within the protests raging across the country presents the biggest challenge to grassroots activists. Part of the reason social movements have failed to coalesce around a common political programme, is precisely because of their focus on conjuring a political programme within the current hegemony of post liberation. Activists and movements, hampered by the almost universal appeal of the ANC within working class communities, have failed to correctly identify the nature of the new struggles and have thus been unable to clearly identify the “enemy”.
Sun Tsu in his Art of War contends that “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”
At local level the enemy has been identified not as a political system that is designed to keep people in poverty but as local councilors and councils who fail to deliver. This may be true, but it obscures the underlying reality that even if the council were to deliver services as it should, it will not change the fact that 70% of the township will still be unemployed. It further lends itself to these local struggles being hijacked or demobilized through temporary provision of services or infrastructure. In order to bring about real political change at a policy level communities must unite beyond the individual struggles with their councilors and engage with the state at a policy level through their united action.
Furthermore activists and movements must move beyond only reactionary programmes and develop real alternatives through which communities are able to reclaim their agency. Social movements and community organizations should seek to present communities with an alternative, which they are currently denied, the opportunity “to act on behalf of goals that matter to them” and where the situation demands it, for communities to take ownership of local service delivery and development. By empowering those who are most marginalised by society, we are able to present an alternative to the top down representative exclusionary and elitist type of democracy that condemns those on the periphery to poverty and humiliation. By building democracy from below we not only build alternative power within a state dominated by capital interests, we also build a people. We provide dignity and courage and a possibility of what can be.
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