Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First Century South Africa - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745332730 ISBN 13: 9780745332734

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2012

Synopsis

Contesting Transformation is a sober and critical reflection on the wave of social movement struggles which have taken place in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Moving beyond a social movement scholarship that has tended to romanticise emergent movements, this collection takes stock of the contradiction and complexity that is necessarily entangled in all forms of popular resistance. Through an exploration of labour strikes, legal organisations, community protest and local government elections, the contributors consider how different movements conceive of transformation and assess the extent to which these understandings challenge the narrative of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

An empirically grounded analysis from a coterie of leading researchers and analysts, Contesting Transformation is the definitive critical survey of the state of popular struggle in South Africa today.

About this title

About the Authors

Marcelle C. Dawson is a senior researcher in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. She serves on the board of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee. She is co-editor of Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First Century South Africa (Pluto, 2014) and Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa (2010). Her work has been published in Citizenship Studies, Journal of Higher Education in Africa and Social Movement Studies.

Luke Sinwell is a Senior Researcher at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-author of The Spirit of Marikana (Pluto, 2016) and Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Jacana, 2013), co-editor of Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First-Century South Africa (Pluto, 2014). He is the General Secretary of the South African Sociological Association (SASA).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Contesting Transformation

Popular Resistance in Twenty-First-Century South Africa

By Marcelle C. Dawson, Luke Sinwell

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2012 Marcelle C. Dawson and Luke Sinwell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3273-4

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgements, 
Abbreviations, 
1 Transforming Scholarship: Soberly Reflecting on the Politics of Resistance Marcelle C. Dawson and Luke Sinwell, 
2 The Crisis of the Left in Contemporary South Africa Dale T. McKinley, 
3 Voice, Political Mobilisation and Repression under Jacob Zuma Jane Duncan, 
4 Barricades, Ballots and Experimentation: Making Sense of the 2011 Local Government Elections with a Social Movement Lens Peter Alexander, 
5 Insurgent Citizenship, Class Formation and the Dual Nature of a Community Protest: A Case Study of 'Kungcatsha' Malose Langa and Karl von Holdt, 
6 Unfolding Contradictions in the 'Zuma Movement': The Alliance in the Public Sector Strikes of 2007 and 2010 Claire Ceruti, 
7 Labour Strikes and Community Protests: Is There a Basis for Unity in Post-Apartheid South Africa? Trevor Ngwane, 
8 Agents of Change? Reflecting on the Impact of Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa Fiona Anciano, 
9 Resisting Privatisation: Exploring Contradictory Consciousness and Activism in the Anti-Privatisation Forum Carin Runciman, 
10 The Challenge of Ecological Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Re-emergence of an Environmental Justice Movement Jacklyn Cock, 
11 'Tacticians in the Struggle for Change'? Exploring the Dynamics between Legal Organisations and Social Movements Engaged in Rights-Based Struggles in South Africa Kate Tissington, 
12 How the Law Shapes and Structures Post-Apartheid Social Movements: Case Study of the Khulumani Support Group Tshepo Madlingozi, 
13 Managing Crisis and Desire in South Africa Shannon Walsh, 
14 Transforming Contestation: Some Closing Words Luke Sinwell and Marcelle C. Dawson, 
Bibliography, 
About the Authors and Editors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Transforming Scholarship: Soberly Reflecting on the Politics of Resistance

Marcelle C. Dawson and Luke Sinwell

THE GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT: A LENS THROUGH WHICH TO ASSESS RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS IN AFRICA

On a summer day in Durban, South Africa, on 3 December 2011, a global day of action against the crisis of climate change was held at COP 17, the meeting at which elites and other world leaders came together to discuss how to combat climate change. In contrast to their suggestion that carbon trading is the solution, many of the thousands of protesters held the view that this would only benefit the richest countries and would leave the crisis intact. In an attempt to have their concerns addressed through non-institutionalised means, they refused to be silenced, renaming COP 17 'The Conference of the Polluters'. Some of the more striking slogans were displayed by the Democratic Left Front (DLF), a new umbrella social movement intent on unifying the left in post-apartheid South Africa. Some 500 DLF protesters marched forcefully, wearing T-shirts reading 'Africa is Burning, Transform the System' and 'Listen to the People', thereby pointing to what they saw as the root cause of the problem: the pursuit of profit by the few at the expense of the many in Africa and the rest of the global South.

Resistance efforts such as the global day of action against COP 17 arguably form part of developments from the late 1990s onwards that constitute the Global Justice Movement (GJM). 'The Battle of Seattle' – the mass protests that successfully shut down World Trade Organisation conference proceedings in that city – marked the beginning of a new era of resistance to neoliberalism. Slogans such as 'Our World is not for Sale' and 'People before Profit' became commonplace in the spate of protests that have spread across the globe since 1999. The World Social Forum (WSF), which is defined as 'an event and an open space for debate and discussion', is widely regarded by some as the organised and sustained form of these struggles.

The GJM and WSF have been celebrated and lauded globally in academic and activist circles. As embodied in the WSF's slogan, 'Another World is Possible', these initiatives provided a sense of hope that neoliberal globalisation could be contested from below through mass action. As quickly as these protests were unfolding, a body of scholarship emerged to capture what was happening on the ground. Initial accounts of the GJM were written in a way that arguably inspired more people to become part of the larger struggle against capitalism. These texts proved useful in publicising the work of the different movements and garnering sympathy for them. However, many authors – particularly those rooted in the academy – failed to interrogate, from the viewpoint of movement activists, what an 'alternative' or 'transformative politics' actually entailed. From scholarly writings, it was clear that an alternative was desirable; some authors suggested that the alternative was decidedly anti-capitalist. But it was not clear whether the millions that made up the movements desired the same and, if so, how they sought to achieve this or a different outcome. Internal documents drawn up by activists themselves may have been clearer about movement ideals, objectives, strategies and tactics, but these were not always reflected in scholarly writing. Relying largely on definitions of transformation that were imposed from the outside rather than those that were generated by activists themselves, scholarship was out of tune with the reality on the ground. However, alongside these overly sanguine texts, some scholars began to reflect on the shortcomings of the GJM and it was not long before its ability to provide a concrete alternative to neoliberal globalisation began to be questioned by activists and sympathetic scholars alike. Spaces like the WSF were criticised as being very expensive talk shops with no direction, no clear strategies on how to stop neoliberal globalisation and no viable alternatives to capitalism.

Similar realities are reflected on the ground and on paper in the South African context. In this book, we assess the state of social movements in post-apartheid South Africa and the attendant scholarship after more or less a decade of dissent. In the South African context, the term 'social movement' has largely excluded trade unions, whereas elsewhere, in North American and European literature for example, organised labour is theorised as part of the social movement milieu. As some of the chapters indicate (see Ngwane and Ceruti in particular) this narrow definition of social movements has precluded any significant engagement between community-based and workplace struggles.

South Africa is an interesting context in which to contest transformation and problematise resistance, since it is one of the most unequal countries in the world and has recently been dubbed 'the protest capital of the world'. While some scholars suggest that protest sits comfortably alongside a dominant ruling party that has been in power for nearly two decades and that unfaltering party loyalty is one of the biggest resources of the African National Congress (ANC), others (notably Alexander, this volume) suggest that ANC hegemony is beginning to crumble.

From the late 1990s social movements such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC), the Landless People's Movement (LPM) and Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) forged alliances with community-based organisations in poor communities in order to provide a non-institutional space in which activists could contest the legitimacy of the ANC and fight against the effects of neoliberalism. In addition, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) put pressure on the ANC to provide anti-retrovirals to people living with HIV/AIDS. Despite having achieved some concessions from the state and capital, many of these movements have waned over the years; for example, the TAC is now regarded by some as a well-funded non-governmental organisation than a grassroots social movement, the APF has lost the public face it once had, and several scholars have criticised AbM for failing to live up to the grandiose expectations of transformation, formulated largely by the scholar-activists who were involved in the movement. In this collection, we offer a sober reflection on the politics of a wide array of social movements such as these about ten years after their emergence on the post-apartheid political landscape.

Although the collection focuses on resistance efforts in South Africa, useful comparisons can be made with other countries, both globally and especially on the African continent. Indeed, the ongoing work of scholars like David Seddon, Leo Zeilig, Peter Dwyer and Miles Larmer continues to contribute to a growing body of research on past and present popular resistance on the African continent. Although these authors reject the 'Afro-pessimism' of the 1990s, their Marxist analysis offers a considered reflection on popular protest and working-class struggle in Africa. While Seddon and Zeilig acknowledge that the chief motivation behind the resistance efforts in Africa, Asia and Latin America is still 'the establishment of more-representative governments', they astutely point out that

there is now emerging a cluster of movements and groupings which are explicitly – ideologically and politically – linked to similar movements of protest elsewhere in the world and which draw strength and vitality from international links to form the beginnings of a truly global movement of dissent against the dominant form of global capitalism – specifically US and more generally 'Western' imperialism.

Like scholarship on the GJM, the writings of these authors in the early 2000s reflected a fair amount of optimism about a 'global integration of anti-capitalism', but from the mid 2000s onwards their work acknowledges the limitations of popular resistance amid a context of continuing 'liberalisation and privatisation ... as part of the globalisation project'. Nonetheless, they suggest that 'there are signs of new forms of struggle emerging'. As we outline below, this pattern of 'hope–celebration–critical reflection' – although not in linear sequence – is embedded in the activist and scholarly writing on South African resistance movements in post-apartheid South Africa. This book reflects the third aspect of this pattern. Although it is not the first comprehensive text to provide a critical appraisal of resistance efforts in this context, it is not limited to an analysis of what was termed South Africa's 'new social movements'.

In their assessment of the extent to which 'Northern' scholarship on social movements is useful for understanding these movements in Africa, Habib and Opoku-Mensah draw our attention to some important shortcomings in existing Northern debates, particularly those emanating from Europe. The American tradition of social movement scholarship centred initially on collective behaviour theories. Later, in response to the limitations of these approaches, which regarded activists and their actions as deviant and disorganised, intellectual endeavours began to focus on resource mobilisation and political processes as important aspects of working-class or nationalist movements. European scholars turned their attention to what they called 'new social movements' (NSMs), choosing to emphasise middle-class activism that centred on 'quality of life and life-style concerns', as opposed to economic redistribution. However, in light of the emergence of the GJM, even NSM scholars could not deny that global protest had entered a new phase in which the insidious consequences of privatisation, commodification, and capitalist greed were being felt and vehemently challenged by the working class and that this emerging movement had significant middle-class support. Commenting on the trajectory of Northern social movement scholarship, Ellis and van Kessel note that authors of NSM theory 'also perceive new patterns of collective action that are significantly different from the familiar characteristics of largely middle-class-based movements. Working-class action, they observe, seems to be back with a vengeance.'

Commenting on these shifts in Northern debates, Habib and Opoku-Mensah point out that on the African continent there was never a moment in which labour struggles faded into obscurity. They challenge the idea that 'the fulcrum of mobilization and anti-hegemonic political activity is shifting from the realm of production to that of consumption' by arguing that trade unions play an indispensible role in social movement activism, despite the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (COSATU's) alliance with the ANC, and they claim that 'COSATU may not phrase its agenda and activities in counter-hegemonic terms but this has not completely disarmed the federation'. Ceruti's work in this volume underscores this point, and this book as a whole makes a concerted effort to locate industrial action more firmly within the social movement lexicon in South Africa, paying particular attention to instances of both cooperation and contestation between unions and movements. As such, we agree with the assertion that 'movements in the arena of production not only continue to retain vibrancy, but also are crucial to the sustainability of struggles of consumption' and vice versa. Habib and Opoku-Mensah develop a critique of the work of South African academics and activists whom they claim have bought into the idea that resistance occurs mainly at the point of consumption rather than production. The trouble with their assertion is that they have selectively chosen to cite works that reflect an earlier phase of social movement scholarship in South Africa, which – whether rightly or wrongly – as we suggest below, was written in an over-celebratory tenor. Moreover, the scholars whom they criticise were writing at a time when trade union activity in South Africa was ebbing, while their own writing was able to reflect the resurgence of industrial action. Like others, Habib and Opoku-Mensah have failed to engage with literature that reflects how, over time, authors – including the very same activist-intellectuals with whom they find fault – reconsidered material that was produced through the optimist lens. As a result, they brand certain South African literature on social movements, as well as the authors who produced it, as 'extreme' and do not pick up on the contestations and nuances within the literature.

The second limitation that Habib and Opoku-Mensah identify in early NSM literature is its tendency to focus on identity issues or recognition struggles as the key driving force within movements. Based on their assessment of the nature of a range of movements in post-apartheid South Africa and other African countries, they conclude that material concerns remain central to movements in Africa and that 'distributional issues need to be an explicit component of the theory-building agenda of social-movement scholars'. Indeed, most of the chapters in this volume offer grounded analyses of popular protest and resistance movements in South Africa that highlight the salience and continued significance of theoretical explanations that grant primacy to the issue of economic redistribution. Their interest in redistribution, as opposed to recognition, places many of the movements in a relationship with the state and political parties; they are not anarchic and many of them seek to engage with the state (and state institutions) to win incremental gains. Some movements might still harbour hopes of overthrowing the state and replacing it with a more equitable, democratic socialist regime, but to do this, movements must interact with, and arguably also accept concessions from, the state.

Narrowing the lens even further, the next section evaluates the non-linear and uneven shifts in social movement scholarship in South Africa. We argue for the need to move into a phase of critical reflection, allowing scholars to take stock of what has been written about the 'new social movements' and what it means for transformation and democracy.

TOWARDS A CRITICAL SYMPATHETIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

To grasp more adequately how social movement scholarship in post-apartheid South Africa has evolved over time, as well as its implications for transformation, we identify three approaches to thinking about and studying transformation (in Africa and perhaps even globally). These approaches are not necessarily separate and distinct, but rather reflect specific ways of understanding social movements, especially scholars' understanding of their relationship to the state and capital. The approaches are also significantly dependent on the individual scholar's perception of the limitations and potential of social movements and popular resistance to challenge or transform the status quo. In contrast to conventional approaches to social science that view scholars as objective observers of social phenomena, a non-neutral and reflexive approach to social science enables one to see that scholars' understanding of the politics of social movements may change over a period of time, even though the fundamental nature and make-up of movements may remain relatively constant. Attempting to understand the worldviews of both scholars and activists provides novel and important insights into readers' understanding of popular resistance in post-apartheid South Africa and beyond.

The first of the three approaches taken by scholars is to largely ignore the question of popular resistance and instead focus on an analysis of structural problems. In the South African context, this scholarship has taken on the form of a radical critique of the political economy of the transition to democracy. The primary focus of the investigation in this type of approach lies in a critique of oppressive structures and social problems rather than of social movements themselves, but, nevertheless, resistance is given secondary attention. This body of work was enormously valuable in that it scrutinised the underlying structural factors and criticised dubious policy choices that continue to marginalise the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population. It provided plausible explanations for the emergence of resistance movements and the outbreak of community unrest.

In Africa more broadly, Harrison notes a 'striking decline in academic attention paid to struggle'. His book offers a 'different "angle" on the political analysis of a continent which is principally represented as a place of repression, authoritarianism and generalized decline'. His starting point is that much of the available scholarship on the African continent is 'misleading because it ignores the capacity of African societies and social groups to innovate, resist, challenge and elaborate new ideals of liberation in the face of the dire forces that produce the orthodox images of Africa'. However, as the discussion above shows, contemporary analyses of popular resistance have become a more central part of stories of transformation on the continent.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Contesting Transformation by Marcelle C. Dawson, Luke Sinwell. Copyright © 2012 Marcelle C. Dawson and Luke Sinwell. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745332730
• ISBN 13: 9780745332734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Dawson Marcelle C., Sinwell Luke