SOUTH AFRICA
A Declaration of War on the Poor
On 16 September we marched in our thousands in Ballito to oppose evictions and racism. However, the attacks on the poor are escalating and the Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association have made a public declaration of war against one of our branches.
Since the formation of the Government of National Unity there has been a huge increase in state attacks on shack settlements around Durban and elsewhere. This includes settlements in Belair and the Bluff, both formerly white suburbs, and the Lindokuhle Mnguni Occupation in Johannesburg, which is near to a middle-class area. In all these cases settlements in middle class areas are being targeted. There have also been evictions in KwaDebeka in Durban.
We have also been resisting evictions along the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal where the super-rich lived in mansions in gated communities. They employ violent and militarized security companies to police the poor. The police follow the lead of these security companies. The Hlanganani occupation in Salt rock, the Sihlalangenkani occupation in Umhlali and the Ekuphumleni occupation in Ballito are all resisting evictions. The Phola and Magebhula settlements, also on the North Coast, under the KwaDukuza Municipality, have also suffered violent evictions.
It seems clear that two things are driving this general attack on the poor. One is that the DA, which has been viciously evicting in the Western Cape, has pressured the ANC to step up its attacks on the poor. Another is that the state is cynically responding to the public outcry about the frightening levels of violence in the country, including kidnapping and extortion, with violent attacks on the poor and on migrants in the name of ‘fighting crime’. They are criminalising and abusing vulnerable people instead of dealing with the real crisis of violence.
In the case of the evictions from land near the gated communities on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal the power of property, of wealth, is being mobilised to crush grassroots urban planning and decommodification of land organised via popular democratic power.
The ANC gives special preference to the super-rich in these gated communities. They were even given an exception for loadshedding. They have told us that we are living on ‘prime land’ and must be moved away to desolate human dumping grounds far from work and schools.
In our statement issued before the march in Ballito on 16 September we said that:
“The KwaDukuza Municipality is openly working with the rich to remove poor black people in Ballito and Umhlali. The ratepayers’ association and the ANC led municipality are working together to evict poor black people, to destroy our homes and communities.
They say that our presence reduces the value of the land, as if value is just a question of the price of the land and has nothing to do with the value of land for the human beings who live on it. They say that we must be removed because we are a health hazard as we must use the bush to relieve ourselves whereas the obvious solution to the lack of sanitation is to provide sanitation. They say that we are ‘chasing tourists away’. The strong element of racism driving all this is often openly displayed on the social media used by the white residents of the gated communities. The black elites who live in the gated communities are silent about this racism.”
Now the residents of the gated communities, the super-rich, have made their racism and contempt for the poor clear. The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association have released a viciously anti-poor and racist video in which we are said to be criminal, dangerous, unhygienic and polluting. These are old colonial stereotypes about impoverished black people, stereotypes that have long been used by governments and elites to justify state violence and the destruction of homes, communities and livelihoods.
The video aggressively criminalises impoverishment declaring that we are engaged in illegal occupation, illegal trading and illegal water electricity connections and demanding that the state ‘take action’ and that ‘the law be enforced’.
When it demands the enforcement of the law it is not demanding that the limited but important rights given to the poor in the Constitution are guaranteed. This is an open demand for violence against us by private security and the state, for the destruction of our homes, our community infrastructure and our livelihoods. It is a declaration of war against the poor by the rich, a declaration of war against the black poor by the white dominated elite in the area.
It is true that we are denied access to land, water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal. The solution to this is to provide land and services, not to incite state violence against us when we make our own arrangements to build viable lives and communities.
We would like to note that not all the wealthy residents of the area are taking this hostile, anti-poor and racist position. One resident has publicly stood up to make the important point that our living conditions are due to state failure and that this is the problem that needs to be fixed. No doubt he is not alone and there are other decent people who also recognise our humanity.
The racist and anti-poor video put out by The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association must be condemned in the strongest terms. It should be investigated by the Human Rights Commission.
It is also important for us to note that according to the KwaDukuza Speaker’s office the Mayor has refused to respond to the People’s Memorandum submitted on the 16 September march. She has long been failing to engage people with respect, to take the dignity of the poor seriously and to run an efficient administration. This anti-democratic refusal to respond to the Memorandum is provoking the anger of the people.
We will continue to defend our right to live on the North Coast and to demand that our occupations be recognised and provided with all the services required for a decent and dignified life.
Our humanity is not negotiable. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, including the poor. There can be no compromise with racism. We will hold the land.
South Africa: The populist threat and the response of the left
First published at Amandla!
The need is greater than ever for a consolidated voice of the working class and the poor. On the one hand, daily community protests seem to indicate a population that is not by any means apathetic. But when it comes to elections, the majority don’t participate. No political party has been able to capture the imagination of the mass of people who experience unemployment, sewage in the street, erratic water supply, unaffordable electricity and intolerable levels of gender-based violence. Yet enough of those people are desperate and sufficiently concerned to protest.
There are a number of candidates vying to capture this imagination. The field is becoming crowded. But they are by no means genuine supporters of the interests of the working class and the poor.
The left is absent
The brutal truth is that, with very few exceptions, the right is capturing the mood of dissatisfaction much more effectively than the left. All over the world, there has been a dramatic shift to the right. What was once centre-left social democracy is now so far to the right that it is almost indistinguishable from the conservatives — equally wedded to neoliberalism, militarism, islamophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In South Africa, we have two major problems. Firstly, the key social force, organised labour, is largely absent from the scene. It should be pioneering an alternative politics to the ruling coalition, but unfortunately, it is either in bed with the majority party in government or too weak and disorganised to play this role. In the case of Cosatu, they may, every now and then, complain about the ANC. But it’s like a toxic relationship. The next night, they are in the same bed again — bickering but still together.
The alliance with the ANC in government has also created a huge divide between its leadership and members. Today, Cosatu, by virtue of its alliance with the ANC, is in effect in an alliance with the DA through the ‘Government of National Unity’.
Sure, now that the austerity ANC policy of its alliance partner is biting hard in health and education, there will be a token protest. It seems that 7 October is the day on which workers will be asked to sacrifice their salaries and stay at home. Everybody knows that this, on its own, will make no difference. But Cosatu is simply incapable of mounting a serious, sustained campaign against its alliance partner.
The other components of organised labour — Saftu, Nactu and Fedusa — are too weak, fragmented and politically incoherent to represent a viable alternative.
To defeat the strategy of austerity would require the kind of intelligent, rolling and continuous mass action that, from time to time, the French trade unions show us. The political will is simply lacking.
As for the SACP, it has lost all capacity to act as a party. It has been reduced to being nothing more than the political commission of Cosatu, ensuring Cosatu remains loyal to the ANC, regardless of its neoliberal agenda.
Populist and pseudo-left
The second problem is that the space vacated by labour has been occupied by a motley collection of political forces, which we often try to capture with the label ‘populist’. Into this bag, we can put MKP, the EFF and other off-shoots of the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ANC. Of course, the PA, Action SA and National Coloured Congress, to name a few, represent the right-wing component of the populist fringe.
Their occupation of the space is based on putting forward simplistic, opportunistic and contradictory political platforms. They believe these will appeal to those suffering from the economic and social disintegration presided over by the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance.
The challenge to the left is to popularise our message that it is not immigration (with or without documents) which is taking jobs. There is plenty of evidence that immigrants contribute to the growth of the economy—they create jobs. In fact, it is foreign and domestic capital that is taking jobs by taking their money out of the country. It is the government that is taking jobs by signing trade agreements that allow in masses of foreign goods. In fact, they have destroyed whole industries. But ‘Abahambe’ remains the intuitive response for many people.
MKP and EFF have policies in favour of nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. But nationalisation can be in the service of capitalism, as well as a challenge to it. And, as we know, it can also be a smokescreen for ‘state capture’ — in the control and for the benefit of a parasitic layer of the Black middle class.
MKP reinforces this impression with its opposition to ‘white monopoly capital’. Not, you notice, capital itself. To paraphrase a recent document from Saftu What is left? What is not left?, the Left don’t fight against capitalism so that we can replace the white capitalist class with a black capitalist class.
The EFF is, on paper, also anti-neoliberal, advocating a central role for the state in directly delivering services. They advocate the return to the public sector of outsourced service provision. Yet its leaders are happy picking the fruits available only to the privileged. And again, they are not explicitly anti-capitalist.
What is left?
To be left and anti-capitalist requires a deep commitment to democracy, to fighting patriarchy and to struggling for a feminist perspective, not just in words but in practice. It also requires confrontation with capitalism’s assault on nature, and a rejection of productivism and extractivism.
And the same is true in the struggle against imperialism. It is easy to be against western imperialism; in South Africa, we are not short of reasons. But what about similar practices from newly emerging powers like China and Russia? The politics of ‘our enemy’s enemy is our friend’ are opportunistic. They turn us against the efforts of dominated classes and nations to free themselves from national oppression and foreign domination.
Matched against these criteria, both MKP and EFF fail dismally. A party which pledges itself to prioritise traditional law cannot be regarded as feminist, let alone one which has committed itself to shipping off pregnant teenagers to Robben Island. That’s MKP.
Nor can a party that humiliated and then demoted one of its representatives (Naledi Chirwa) for missing a parliamentary session because she was looking after her sick four-month-old daughter. Or a party with a military structure in its constitution. That’s the EFF.
The danger we face and the task ahead
Our current situation is filled with danger. We have a coalition government which represents the last gasp of the non-populist, neoliberal right wing. We have said many times that neoliberalism is simply incapable of solving the most fundamental of our problems — mass unemployment, effective delivery of services etc. And the ANC-DA Alliance is more deeply committed to neoliberalism even than its predecessors.
So, by the next election in 2029, if the coalition lasts until then, the GNU will have been a failure. It is possible that capital will have disciplined it sufficiently to get the ports and trains running again. After all, they need them for their profit, hence the Vulindlela project. But there is no way that the other fundamental problems will shift significantly. We can say with confidence, if also with desperation, that there will be no significant impact on real unemployment. So unless some form of credible left movement is able to emerge from the wreckage of our popular organisations, the most attractive options are likely to be MKP, EFF and PA.
That is how vital and how urgent is the task of building an alternative.
At the last local elections, a few popular, community-based organisations set up their own political organisations so that they could obey the electoral rules and stand for election. Unlike many other organisations, the day after the election they didn’t disappear, only to reappear five years later. They were there, to try to hold their councillors to account and to continue to be the voice of the community.
It hasn’t been an easy ride. But the rooting of elected representatives in really existing popular organisations is vital. The task now is to build united, community-based organisations which take up, in a militant and focused way, the issues that concern the community. The small number of green shoots that have appeared are a hopeful sign.
Also, a possible hopeful sign is the emergence of a left in the SACP, talking about building popular organisations, based on local issues. They say that this is no time for sectarianism — the popular movement must be built, and we must work together. Political differences are secondary to the urgency of such a task.
History is not sanguine about this possibility, but the message is the right one. The left must come together around such a project and, from those hundreds of organisations all around the country, build a movement for socialism from the ground up. All who are willing to participate honestly in such a process must be welcomed. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
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