We are Poor, not Stupid: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South AfricaSubmitted by Abahlali_3 on Tue, 2013-05-28 10:20. Anne Harley <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/3910> | Jacques Rancière<http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/3397> | Living Learning <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/2294> | Paulo Freire<http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/2295>
https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1468-learning-and-education-for-a-better-world.pdf *We are Poor, not Stupid: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa* by Anne Harley During the course of 2008, six militants from two South African social movements met every month to reflect on what they were learning through the struggle they were engaged in as social movement actors, and what they were learning as participants in a Certificate-level course at the local university. They called these sessions Living learning. Their reflections were written up after each session, and published in late 2009 as Living Learning (Figlan et al., 2009). Living learning was intended partly as a space to reflect on what and how to take back the things that the militants, mandated by their movements to attend the course, had learned in the classrooms of the academy: *For a living learning, the critical question was always how best to take back to our communities whatever we might gain?; how best can our communities benefit from the few of us who are lucky to have access to the course?; how will we utilise the academic skills we can gain?; how do we take this information back? It has always been the task of a synthesis and a breaking down of the University theory so that we can work out properly what we can learn from it and so we can understand for ourselves in what way it is different from the daily learning of struggle and life emijondolo [in the shacks] or eplasini [on the farms] (Figlan et al., 2009, p. 7).* But, significantly, Living learning was also about how to combine the university of struggle and the academic university, and indeed disrupt the academic university. AttachmentSizeWe are Poor, not Stupid: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa<http://abahlali.org/files/learning-and-education-for-a-better-world.pdf>1.6 MB » add new comment <http://abahlali.org/comment/reply/9752#comment_form> --------------------- http://www.marxist.com/17-million-hours-of-wild-cat-strikes-in-2012.htm South Africa: 17 million hours of Wild Cat Strikes in 2012<http://www.marxist.com/17-million-hours-of-wild-cat-strikes-in-2012.htm> Written by Vernie MorkenThursday, 30 May 2013 [image: Print]<http://www.marxist.com/17-million-hours-of-wild-cat-strikes-in-2012/print.htm>[image: E-mail]<http://www.marxist.com/component/option,com_mailto/link,86f8caaa14580a64fc944af914701cc098059a0d/tmpl,component/> - - - According to the Minister of Labour Mildred Oliphant, a total of 17,290,552 working hours were lost in 2012 due to "unprotected" or "un-procedural" strikes. [image: miners]<http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/south_africa/miners.jpg>Replying in a written statement to parliament on Tuesday 28 May, Oliphant said that the department recorded 99 strikes in 2012. Out of these, 45 (almost half) were "unprotected". An unprotected strike is one which falls outside the Labour Relations Act of 1995. The calculation was done using the International Labour Organization guidelines of multiplying the number of employees involved in each stoppage by the number of hours it lasted. The strikes took place in all industries, except for the financial industry. They were also spread across the country, except for the Free State Province. In total, 118,215 workers were involved. Of these, 100,847 came from the mining and quarrying sector. Commenting on the figures, the minister said, "South Africa's law provides a space for protected, peaceful strikes, which should obviate the need for illegal strikes accompanied by violence." Why is it then, that such a large number of workers decided, that they had no option but to embark on wild cat strikes? Since the act came into being in 1995, wages as a share of national income dropped from 56% to 51% (1995 to 2008) and the Gini coefficient of inequality increased from 0.64 to 0.68 from 1995 to 2009, according to figures provided by the Metalworkers union NUMSA. Workers became poorer and inequality shot up. Together with deteriorating living standards came deteriorating representation by some unions, especially the National Union of Mineworkers. In the mining industry we see, in a concentrated form, the expression of all the contradictions of the negotiated settlement which brought formal democracy. Former mineworkers leaders are now mining businessmen, while the majority of workers still live in similar conditions to the ones they had under apartheid. All of this came to a head in August 2012 with the massacre at Marikana when the police shot dead 34 mineworkers, graphically showing who is responsible for the violence. So, while the petty bourgeois leadership of the national liberation movement celebrates 19 years of democracy as the final thing to be said of the South African revolution, the workers, which make up the overwhelming majority of the ranks of the movement, are forced to continue to fight for their emancipation. The attainment of capitalist democracy is not an end in itself. Democracy within the limits of the capitalist system does not address the fundamental problems of housing, jobs, education, working and living conditions of the masses of working people. At best, the democratic rights won are a means to an end - the total socialist transformation of society. Vernie Morken, SACP and ANC activist, Northern Cape 30 May 2013 -------------------------------- http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672 The Racist Underside of Guptagate By Richard Pithouse <http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iUser=20> · 28 May 2013 <http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#>21<http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#> [image: Email this page] <http://sacsis.org.za/s/email.php?s=1672> A+ <http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#here> A=<http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#here> A- <http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#here> [image: Print this page] <http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672/print> [image: 3 comments] 3 <http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1672#comments> <http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iCategory=12> [image: Picture credit: President Jacob Zuma and Atul Gupta at a breakfast event in Port Elizabeth courtesy GovernmentZA/Flickr.]<http://sacsis.org.za/s/story.php?s=1672> Picture credit: President Jacob Zuma and Atul Gupta at a breakfast event in Port Elizabeth courtesy GovernmentZA/Flickr. The *City Press* made an astonishing error of judgement in deciding to publish Phumlani Mfeka's more or less fascist rant<http://www.citypress.co.za/columnists/city-press-debate-are-we-strangers-in-a-strange-land-phumlani-m>on Sunday. Presenting this extraordinarily crass form of ethnic chauvinism under-girded by a clear threat of violence as if it were a legitimate contribution to the national debate only compounded the newspaper's disgraceful editorial decision. But while Mfeka's anti-Indian diatribe is certainly the most extreme instance of an increasingly dubious set of responses to Guptagate it is not uniquely problematic. Let's be clear: the Guptas are vile. But there are some serious problems with the way that their position at the apex of the increasingly corrosive intersection between business and politics is being discussed. For a start its sometimes implied, in a manner that draws directly from colonial stereotypes, that Zuma is the naïve but well-meaning victim of their cunning machinations. This is nonsense. Its perfectly clear that Zuma, perhaps well named as Gedleyihlekisa, is as cunning as anyone. And while national sentiment may make it attractive to blame the overweening power that the Guptas have assumed on the intrusion of an alien evil this is nothing but the empty comfort of a narcissistic fantasy. Corruption in the interests of a predatory elite, and as a form of social control, is rampant, Zuma's record in this regard is abysmal and while the Gupta's have adeptly exploited this situation they didn't create it. On the contrary the Guptas are a symptom, a particularly acute symptom to be sure, of a problem that is entirely ours. There has been a striking difference in the way the Guptas, recent immigrants from India, have been received in our national conversation with, say, the fact, that the equally odious Gaston Savoi<http://mg.co.za/tag/gaston-savoi> came to South Africa from Uruguay. And when the Guptas are mentioned, as they often are, in the same breath as Schabir Shaik and Vivien Reddy the racism animating the reception of Guptagate is no longer bothering to disguise itself. Why, for instance, is Brett Kebble not on this list? And why is it that S'bu and Shauwn Mpisane are left out? And if our concern is with the conflation between business and politics in the personal interests of a predatory class then why are we not also talking about Kenny Kunene and Julius Malema? Or Khulubuse Zuma? The racialised reading of Guptagate is itself symptomatic of a deeper social failure. Various forms of anti-racist or non-racial politics were developed in the struggles against apartheid. From the black consciousness movement, to the trade union movement and, in at least some parts of the country, the United Democratic Front, forms of political identity were forged that were not rooted in narrow conceptions of race or ethnicity. But these forms of political identity are whithering away. One reason for their decline was the multi-racialism, a racialising discourse, that the ANC brought into the country after 1990. Another is the pseduo-liberal multi-culturalism, another racialising discourse, to which many white institutions turned to legitimate themselves without having to give up on their investment in whiteness. And with none of the major political parties taking a credibly pro-poor position the promise of democracy hasn't been realised in the manner that many people had hoped. The DA <http://www.abahlali.org/taxonomy/> and the ANC<http://www.abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/3434> are both able to engage in systemic, illegal and violent denial of people's basic rights without consequence. The ANC failed to develop an inclusive emancipatory vision after apartheid and has degenerated to the point where it is dominated by a predatory class that mobilises nationalism to present its ruthless drive to accumulate wealth and power as a noble patriotic endeavour. While there have been some innovative and courageous attempts to achieve an emancipatory vision from within society, some of which have attained real local significance, none have attained the critical mass of popular support required to make a significant national intervention. Outside of party politics the hegemony of human rights discourse, with its fantasy that rights and ideals recorded on paper would somehow trickle down into reality, has also been part of the problem. With some exceptions the human rights project generally takes the form of a fundamentally elitist conception of politics in which NGOs and the state contest on the legal and media terrains. These are both terrains on which elites are much stronger than most of us and for this reason elites will always be the most effective actors within the human rights paradigm. There was never an effective reckoning with white racism after apartheid. It has festered in the white family and, often legitimating itself in the name of fantasies about 'world class standards' or even human rights, it continues to reproduce itself in some institutions too. But in the absence of mass mobilisation and an emancipatory vision this fact has not sustained the black solidarity that was, albeit imperfectly, forged in struggle. And growing cynicism about the political class and the direction of society creates fertile ground for the temptation to mobilise political support on an ethnic or racial basis. Future historians will remember 2008 as the year when any remaining innocence about time being on the side of our hopes for the new South Africa turned into culpably naivety. This was the year that the campaign in support of Zuma took on an overtly ethnic aspect that, in Durban, often took an openly anti-Indian and anti-Xhosa form on the ground. It was also the year of the xenophobic pogroms. Five years later various forms of coloured identity politics, some of them that go so far as to refer to Xhosa people as 'settlers' and to deny Xhosa people the right to participate in meetings, are gaining ground in Cape Town. And in the wake of Jimmy Manyi's open expression of neo-Verwoedian racial fantasies its hard to see how the ANC could recover the broad credibility it was once able to reach towards in that city. In Durban you can encounter the casual performance of Indian racism on any given day and read about Indian nostalgia for apartheid in *The Post*<http://www.thepost.co.za/we-are-under-siege-durban-residents-1.1376493> . Even if you avoid spaces grounded in an assumption of white normativity you can't read an online newspaper without having to endure the most sickening forms of white racism in the comments section. And xenophobia is rearing its demonic head in Sebokeng and Orange Farm. Of course every ethnic entrepreneur emerging from this mess will say that their politics is motivated by nothing but a profound concern for the poor. But the reality is that, as we can see so clearly in India or Kenya, when politics becomes a primarily communal or ethnic matter the issue is simply who has power rather than any meaningful discussion about the nature or function of power. Ethnic politics is often an intra-elite battle waged in the name of the poor that functions to destroy any prospect of effective political solidarities amongst the poor. If we go down this route we can forget any hopes for a progressive resolution of our social and political crisis. The Guptas, like Kebble or the Mpisanes, are vile. But, as a Syrian by the name of Matthew asked a long time ago: How can you say to your brother, Let me take the speck out of your eye, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? *Pithouse* teaches politics at Rhodes University. Read more articles by Richard Pithouse<http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iUser=20> . This SACSIS article is licensed under a Creative Commons License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/za/>. You are welcome to republish this article as long as it is attributed to The South African Civil Society Information Service (www.sacsis.org.za). For more information about reprinting rights, please see our Copyright Policy <http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iCategory=12>. To receive an email notification when a new SACSIS article is published on this website, please click here <http://sacsis.org.za/s/mailing.php>. For regular and timely updates of new SACSIS articles, you can also follow us on Twitter @SACSIS_News <http://twitter.com/#!/SACSIS_News> and/or become a SACSIS fan on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-South-African-Civil-Society-Information-Service-SACSIS/175189055829577> . Read more articles filed under Democracy & Governance<http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iCategory=1> . Read more articles tagged with: guptagate<http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iKeyword=772> , Jacob Zuma <http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iKeyword=168>. 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