by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
Courage...is a local virtue. It partakes of the morality of the place. - Alain Badiou
There is no denying the import of the very public dramas that play
out in the sphere of elite politics. Jacob Zuma's decision on how to
respond to Thuli Madonsela's report will certainly have some consequence
in shaping the trajectory of our increasingly compromised democracy.
But politics is about force and reason and reason on its own is seldom a
sufficient check on either the construction or renegotiation of common
ground by contesting elites.
The old left delusion that a crisis of capital will automatically
open the way to some form of subordination of capital to society looks
entirely ridiculous in the wake of the financial crisis. The same elites
that caused the crisis are dictating a resolution from which they will
profit at the direct expense of society. The Greek or British poor will
pay a much higher price than any banker in London or New York.
And while a political crisis might reach the point at which a popular
refusal to accept dictatorship can have some success, even spectacular
success, there is no guarantee that the people who have deposed a
dictator will be able to build a new society in keeping with their
achievement. The Egyptian drama is not concluded but the seriousness of
the attempt to co-opt, deflect and repress popular energies is clear
enough.
A crisis, be it economic, political, or both, that arises without a
popular politics sufficiently well organised to force through a real
alternative is quite likely to strengthen the hand of the social forces
that created the crisis in the first place.
One of the respects in which our democracy deviates from the model of
donor driven parties largely competing in the realm of media spin is
that there is one component of the ruling party, COSATU, that has a
large and well organised popular base. It's possible that things could
reach a point at which COSATU could take a decisive step in response to
the degeneration of the ANC, a process that was steady under Thabo Mbeki
but has collapsed into free fall under Jacob Zuma. But there's no
guarantee that this will happen. And if it does there's no guarantee
that it will fare better than experiments in political trade unionism
elsewhere in the region.
COSATU is certainly the most ethical and progressive force in the
tripartite alliance and Zwelinzima Vavi's willingness to call things as
they are, has, despite the unedifying spectacle of the inevitable
election time flip-flops, won him a degree of admiration amongst both
the more progressive elements of the middle class and the organised
poor. It is not impossible that COSATU could emerge as a force with
sufficiently broad support to challenge the rapid decline of the ANC
under Zuma into authoritarianism and corruption.
But the fact that COSATU, at the moment, prefers to ally itself with
NGO based civil society rather than the popular struggles rooted in
communities is not a good sign. It indicates a political laziness, an
elitism and an inability to grasp the profound political significance of
the scale at which a unionised job, limited as its security and
benefits may be, remains an unrealisable aspiration for millions of
young people. And, despite COSATU's shameful role in the Zuma débâcle,
there are clear signs that the trade union federation remains more
invested in the illusory hope of the politics of the machinations within
the alliance rather than in any attempt to build popular organisation
that could link the factory floor to the community.
In the wake of both a widening appreciation of the bankruptcy of the
Zuma presidency and the crude and self interested attempts by the ANC
Youth League to politicise poverty, there have been a variety of calls
for a renegotiation of the deal on which post-apartheid society was
founded. There have, for instance, been calls for an 'economic Codesa'
and a 'land Codesa'.
Without sufficiently mass based and resolute popular organisation
around alternatives any attempt to recalibrate policy and practice will
inevitably take the form of an intra-elite negotiation conducted in the
interests of elites but in name of the poor.
In the 1980s South Africa became a site of extraordinary political
innovation. The experiments in popular democratic practices in the
United Democratic Front were, as all politics is, imperfect. But
although they were compromised by state repression and a current of
millennial fervour there was a real challenge to the elitism of standard
forms of representative politics. If the UDF had not accepted the
authority of the ANC as absolute, the transition may have played out
differently.
But our country remains highly politicised. The extraordinary wave of
popular protest that emerged at the turn of the century and gathered
real momentum from around 2004 continues. The organisational forms on
which this protest depends, and its politics, vary considerably from
place to place. But the central progressive idea that has continually
reoccurred around the country over the last ten years is an affirmation
of the humanity of ordinary people against a political and economic
system that, in practice rather than principle, routinely denies that
humanity.
It is in this ferment, diverse and contradictory as it is, that the
prospects for sustained popular organisation lie. However this politics
is often intensely local and in the eyes of many its localism doesn't
sit well with aspirations for national or international change. But
without a solid material base, aspirations for change at a higher level
are nothing but empty dreams. They are reason without force.
We should recall that for most people sociality is practised, to a
significant degree, via the local. There are certainly times when some
people are willing to struggle to realise ideas that are, initially
anyway, abstracted from their lived reality. But, along with sufficient
and sustained commitment, this requires a social structure appropriate
to the task. The commune, the Soviet, the council, the congregation and
the street committee have their place, and it is a very different place
to that of the vanguard party, in the history of popular insurgency for a
very good reason. It’s certainly possible for local councils or
committees to come together and take on a broader project beyond their
local concerns but it is not possible for this to happen when they have
not yet come into their own local existence. It’s also the case that
every movement that reaches the point of being able to constitute itself
on a national or international stage as a material force remains rooted
in some sort of local organisation be it particular factories,
campuses, prisons, communities, women's groups, party structures and so
on.
There will be no progressive resolution of the crisis into which we
have drifted without solid and committed local organisation. And this
is not solely a matter of constituting sufficient material force. We
should not forget that in politics, as in art, an intense engagement
with the particular is the route to the universal. It is at the local
where the particularities of the underside of our society are
experienced and resisted most directly and intensely.
