Shifting the Ground of Radical Reason

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.

EFF MPs embody local-level ANC culture

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

THERE’s an African idiom that warns that if you let your child be a menace to the community, one day that same child will chase you around the house with your own sjambok. The idiom warns of the stark humiliation awaiting elders who leave the disciplining of their young so late that they develop incorrigible tendencies. One could argue that ever since his expulsion in 2012, Julius Malema has been chasing the African National Congress (ANC) all about the village with its own sjambok.

The Antimonies of Democracy

A Murder in Durban, CounterPunch

by RICHARD PITHOUSE

Durban, South Africa.

In the last days of June Nkululeko Gwala was assassinated in Cato Crest – a shack settlement in Durban that is in the process of being upgraded with formal housing. Just over three months ago Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same streets. Both men had been prominent figures in the increasingly bitter struggles around housing that have convulsed Cato Crest in recent months. There have been road blockades, a land occupation – named, as they often are these days, ‘Marikana’ – and the offices of two municipal councillors have been burnt down.

Critical Studies Seminar: Richard Pithouse - Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of 'the local'

The weekly Critical Studies Seminar Series, which is held jointly by the departments of Sociology and Political Studies, is presenting the following seminar:

Topic: Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of 'the local'
Presenter: Richard Pithouse
Venue: Politics Seminar Room
Date & Time: Friday April 26th from 1 pm to 2:30 pm

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.

Territories in Resistance

“Emancipation,” argues Raúl Zibechi, “is not an objective but a way of life.” For the last half century, new and emancipatory social formations have worked to carve out their own territories in Latin America, experimenting in rural and urban settings with new forms of liberatory politics that challenge neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and the very basis of the state itself. Not limited to a single path, these “societies in movement” have adopted forms of communitarian relations that allow experimentation and innovation to flourish at a riveting pace. Blending case studies and history with social theory and analysis, Zibechi opens our eyes to the new world being born just outside our gaze. With a foreword by Dawn Paley, and an epilogue that brings Zibechi into conversation with Michael Hardt and Alvaro Reyes on the continuing revolution of everyday life in Latin America.

The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing

by Roberta Feldman & Susan Stall, 2004

The Dignity of Resistance  chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. This comprehensive case study explores why and how these African-American women creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, utilizing a multi-disciplinary lens, explore the complexity and resourcefulness of Wentworth women's grassroots, organizing the ways in which their identities as poor African-American women and mothers both circumscribe their lives and shape their resistance. 

Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Feldman and Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive, alienated victims of despair. We learn instead how women residents collectively have built a cohesive, vital community, cultivated outside technical assistance, organizational and institutional supports, and have attracted funding - all to support the local facilities, services and programs necessary for the everyday needs for survival, and ultimately to save their home from demolition.

Report on protest in the Sweet Home shack settlement in Cape Town

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

Over much of this past winter, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of South Africa's most active civil-disobedience protests since 1994.

The protests gave rise to a great deal of commentary and finger-pointing. I was disturbed by the double standard of the political rhetoric of politicians and some nongovernmental organisations in the way they expected the protesters to react in response to the violence the state and police subjects them to on a daily basis.

Barrio Women and Popular Politics in Chavez’s Venezuela

by Sujatha Fernandes, 2007

Since President Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela in 1998, ordinary women from the barrios, or shantytowns, of Caracas have become more engaged in grassroots politics; but most of the community leaders still are men. Chavez’s programs are controlled by male-dominated bureaucracies, and many women activists still look to the president himself as the main source of direction. Nevertheless, this article argues, women’s increasing local activism has created forms of popular participation that challenge gender roles, collectivize private tasks, and create alternatives to male-centric politics. Women’s experiences of shared struggle from previous decades, along with their use of democratic methods of popular control, help prevent the state from appropriating women’s labor. But these spaces coexist with more vertical, populist notions of politics characteristic of official sectors of Chavismo. Understanding such gendered dimensions of popular participation is crucial to analyzing urban social movements.

Abahlali baseMjondolo "Los que viven en chabolas".

Fault Lines: Arundhati Roy

“For sure you are going to die!”: Political participation and the comrade movement in Inanda, Kwazulu‐Natal

by David Hemson, 1996

The study of Inanda comrades is one of a movement forcibly excluded from the official society of late apartheid and from political participation in the institutions of power: as an insurrectionary grouping the movement was dedicated to initiating and expanding resistance and seizing on the national strivings for power to force an entry into the political realm. By such compelling interference in the politics of apartheid they attempted to destroy it. The movement provides an indication of political participation of an entirely different order from that of voting and conventional politics; in being prepared to sacrifice their lives, the comrades created a local political culture themselves.

On the Political Significance of the Local

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.

Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town

By Richard Pithouse, Mute Magazine

Taking up the gauntlet of pessimism thrown down by Mike Davis’ account of the global slum epidemic, Planet of Slums, Richard Pithouse draws on his involvement with the struggles of slum dwellers in Durban to offer an alternative and engaged perspective. Against Davis’ homogenisation of slum life, misrepresentation of slum politics, and ‘imperialist’ methodology, he argues for an analysis grounded in specific settlements, histories, people and struggles – a ‘politics of the poor’