They Die Out There: It Matters Not Where, Nor How

Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On Monday morning there was a protest, in the form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the ‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days of protest.

The Marikana Land Occupation, Cato Crest, 22 June 2014 - eviction, road blockade, rebuilding

The pedagogy of road blockades

Anne Harley, Interface

Road blockades have long since been a tool of struggle, and in recent months have featured in protests in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria,  Palestine, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, Turkey, and probably in  most other countries in the world. Whilst some road blockades might be considered spontaneous eruptions of anger, with little reflective thought  involved, others are clearly part of conscious praxis, a tactic reflecting Gramsci’s ‘war of manoeuvre’. However, I argue, road blockades are also used as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical tool in a ‘war of position’, as one of the associated pedagogies within the “multi-faceted praxis and political strategy” of Subaltern Social Movements (Kapoor, 2011). The article uses two such movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the piqueteros in Argentina, to explore this claim.

Road Blockade, South Africa, 2012

Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of ‘the local’

Richard Pithouse, Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa. 

Abstract

Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles.

The Neighborhood is the New Factory

by Liz Mason-Deese, Viewpoint Magazine

In 2001, Argentina suffered an economic crisis, similar to the one that much of the world is experiencing today. After more than a decade of IMF-mandated structural adjustment, which only deepened poverty and unemployment, the government was forced to default on over $100 billion of public debt and declared a state of emergency in an attempt to calm public unrest. Despite a military-imposed curfew, thousands of people rushed to the streets and forced the president and other politicians out of office with the chant “que se vayan todos/ni se quede uno solo” (they all must go/not one can stay).

On the Politics of Protest in Cape Town

by Jared Sacks, The Amandla Blog (There is now a shorter version of this article on the Mail & Guardian site)

A few weeks ago the City of Cape Town was rocked by a spate of road blockades and other significant protests. Certain liberal NGOs have joined the DA in condemning the protests claiming that they are violent and motivated by political party agendas.

To be sure, this is nothing new. Protests in the form of marches, the burning of tyres, and road blockades, have been happening every week throughout the City for years. The significant majority go completely unreported in the mainstream media and unnoticed by government officials.

On Violence

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

The fear of violence, like the fear of monsters, is primal and universal. But the sensitive middle class soul who professes a deep revulsion at all forms of violence is quite likely to call the police or a private security company if he wakes to the sound of breaking glass. Violence is seldom renounced in the absolute. It is more usually outsourced.

The Rebellion of the Poor Comes to Grahamstown: A photographic essay on the UPM by Tim Gabb

A protester salutes the cause with a fist in the air.

The Rebellion of the Poor Comes to Grahamstown

Press Statement by the Unemployed People’s Movement, Grahamstown
Sunday 13 February 2011

The Rebellion of the Poor Comes to Grahamstown

The rebellion of the poor has been spreading from town to town, from squatter camp to squatter camp, since 2004. Last week it arrived in Grahamstown.

The Enduring Rationality of Revolt

by Richard Pithouse, People of Color Organize

In recent weeks the centre of the unstable and diverse social ferment that has been bubbling and boiling at the base of South African society since at least 2004 has shifted to Cape Town. People have often remarked that the conflict on the slopes of the Sentinel in Hout Bay, in which four people lost their eyes to rubber bullets fired by the police, has evoked the past.