In addition to bond houses and shacks, “RDP houses” line the adjacent streets. He later took me to his former shack and showed me the bullet holes lining his front door. “See?” he laughed. 68 0 obj <> endobj In most cases it is not.
Real solidarity requires genuine engagement with the politics of these movements; the extolling of all poor people’s politics as “revolts” is an insult to poor people’s politics.A proper analysis needs to take stock of qualitative developments — in terms of forms of organization, class bases, shifting geographies of struggle, the emergence of new historical blocs, the formulation of programs — and must provide a realistic assessment not as a desperate search for any action whatsoever, but as a longitudinal mapping of the shifting terrain of struggle.While some analysts would tout 2011 as the year of the greatest number of per capita protests since the demise of apartheid, active organizers — those actually involved in South African social movements — cannot possibly take these claims seriously.In the wake of the virtual collapse of the Anti-Privatization Forum, the fragmentation of the Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the dissolution of the Landless Peoples Movement, the post-Mbeki left is running on fumes.Far from cause for withdrawal, such a realistic assessment will enable South African revolutionaries to take proper stock of the prevailing conditions and ready their forces for the battles to come. South Africa, despite relatively high levels of income and a state with redistributive capacity, is no exception. This cannot be denied. South Africa has achieved political liberation, a measure of democracy and significant deracialisation since 1994. Tomes are stuffed in doorways, blocking access for new ideas to flow in.The ‘left’ here simply does not seem open to the possibility that the ideas we need to win the fight are in the future (or if we allowed such a possibility, among us in the present moment) – instead I find inflexible people clinging to the ideas of dead men. �⤨@�-g$3�LAJEV���8. The neighborhood itself is located on the southern boundary of central Soweto, with proliferating shack settlements just across a dirt road from so-called “bond houses,” meaning the modest homes of those whose incomes are high enough to qualify them for a loan.In the popular imagery of many of the more militant shack residents, loan recipients stand in for the bourgeois class enemy, though these residents are “privileged” only in the sense of regular access to formal employment.
I asked him how many others had joined the DA. h�bbd```b``��� �q�d=f[�IYɢ&����dXdX��] &��eM�fF�H��@�q;X/c0����� Social movements in Africa ... 2009. But Zachary bends the stick too far, and despite the one line caveats and best intensions the article is way too dismissive of the near rolling protests that are taking place across the country since 2006 and verges on being dismissive in an ultra-left sense.
After all, the ANC and its liberation movement allies were now in political control of the state thanks to the votes of those who had, The ‘left’ here is to backward looking – referring to Lenin, or Bakunin, or such like. In this dimension, movement organizations seek both recognition of their citizenship as well as the redistribution of state resources. Since my contact was a longstanding left critic of Mnisi’s leadership, I thought he might be putting me on, but as we turned a corner, I saw an election poster plastered onto the side of a shack, complete with DA logo. Albeit I like some of those dead men’s ideas myself, I believe that if we collectively applied our minds to breaking with ‘left’ traditions, we can generate ideas for life as it is lived now.Of course there’s continuity with the past – ‘nightmares of history’ and all that – but there’s also specificities, nuances, that can be opportunities – materials – for creating new ways of life.p.s. 92 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<5C18383366E0E8AA430C77E1CEBF7FD4><34172414CAB5534292A480342EF0D937>]/Index[68 43]/Info 67 0 R/Length 114/Prev 210501/Root 69 0 R/Size 111/Type/XRef/W[1 3 1]>>stream