Abstract
In 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic elections, its people were looking forward to a future of ‘a better life for all’, as promised by the African National Congress (ANC) upon assuming power in that year. ‘Now is the Time’, said the ANC, beginning the process of liberating the country from its racially divisive past, widespread poverty and inequalities, and political oppression. Have the expectations raised three decades ago been met? Only to a limited and insufficient extent, answers Marcel Paret in his book. While the majority of residents perceive an improvement in race relations since 1994, they report deteriorating employment opportunities and increasing inequalities between the rich and the poor. This is the case for shack-dwellers in particular, 60% of whom answer ‘worse’ or ‘much worse’ when asked about their situation in these respects (Table 2, p. 53).
Seen from today’s perspective, the South African transition has gone through a process of ‘racial inclusion’, with the abolition of legal and political restrictions and granting formal equal rights to all citizens. In other respects, the picture is less rosy: persistent high rates of unemployment, poor living conditions, and lack of access to basic amenities. Trust in party leaderships and state institutions, and consequent hopes for rapid improvement, declined over time, resulting in growing disillusionment with the ability of formal politics to effect change. South Africa remains the most unequal society on earth. All this fuelled a rise in protest action as the principal means to force the state to provide basic social services.
Two things stand out about post-apartheid protest, says Paret: it targets government as the agency in charge of service provision. And, it is both militant and fractured. It is militant in that it uses tactics of mass mobilisation and action that border on illegality, combined with more legitimate means: marches, road blockades, disruption of service providers, vandalising state and community property, and intimidation of non-participants. It is fractured in that it rarely extends beyond community local boundaries to unleash coordinated action across different localities, sectors, and concerns. And, it does not operate within a broad political or analytical framework to advance an overall agenda of social and economic change.
In that sense, militant protest remains within the confines of capitalist hegemony: it addresses immediate needs rather than longer term transformative goals; it seeks administrative fixes, technical solutions, that rely on the state instead of using popular mobilisation to reconstitute society and politics. Discourses of democracy, justice, redress, solidarity, and transformation are used only occasionally, on the margins, without serving to frame the struggle as they did in earlier periods. Resistance is rampant but shot through with divisions. This duality – the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of resistance, in Paret’s words – is the main topic of the book.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in townships and informal settlements in the Gauteng Province, all within 45-minute drive from Johannesburg, the biggest and wealthiest urban centre in South Africa, Paret argues that an elite-led reform of South African capitalism failed to bring about changes to the distribution of wealth and income. The limited reform process – seen as a ‘passive revolution’, a term coined by Gramsci – both animated popular frustration and sowed the seeds of division. Feelings of betrayal led to an explosion of local protests taking the form of narrow competitive struggles over access to state resources. Residents isolated themselves from each other, antagonised workers and migrants within their communities, and pursued divergent political projects, thus fragmenting resistance and demobilising popular organisations.
From a theoretical perspective, using work on postcolonial India and Africa by Chatterjee and Fanon, among others, the book focuses on growing class divisions and the ongoing legacy of nationalist struggles to explain how political elites managed to demobilise civil society and co-opt emergent middle-class forces into a project that marginalises the popular masses. This process acquired a distinct form with racial inclusion – the main achievement of the African National Congress (ANC) as the leading national liberation movement – which granted the post-apartheid regime legitimacy and helped sustain hope in state provision, despite many unfulfilled expectations. It took more than a decade after 1994 for such expectations to begin to dissipate and for a new mode of political activism to emerge, focusing on pressure from below on state agencies to deliver services.
This new mode of resistance is different from the resistance to apartheid of the 1980s, which was infused by notions and practices of people’s power, worker control, socialism, and social justice. Back then this meant building solidarity across different sectors, movements, and popular constituencies. The enemy – the white supremacist, oppressive, and exploitative apartheid regime – provided a target against which different forces united. In contrast, in the post-apartheid era, it has been the ANC in charge, presenting itself as the key vehicle of social transformation by relying on its struggle history as well as on the limited but real welfare provision it put in place. This presents oppositional forces seeking to challenge its domination with difficulties in establishing their political credentials and gaining popular following.
Perhaps the most interesting question raised in the book is why forces opposed to the ANC have not managed to consolidate into a strong opposition, despite government’s poor record in providing decent jobs, infrastructure, good quality education, and health, and a widespread perception of it being hopelessly afflicted with corruption, factionalism, and incompetence. For the last decade at least, most hopes that it would reform itself and restore good governance have been laid to rest. And yet, no serious challenge to its domination has emerged yet, either nationally or locally. Resistance is fragmented and, in most cases, focused on technical fixes for local community-based problems rather than more profound transformation. Why?
Paret attributes this failure to the passive revolution, which uses notions of community to limit protest to the local level, encourages incorporation into bureaucratic mechanisms, and generates competition between residential areas and groups with different interests (setting out South Africans against immigrants, the unemployed against the employed). In that way, solidarity within and across communities is undermined, and the state remains a focus for change. As a result, protest action has not given rise to a coherent and sustained movement for social justice and democratic participation.
The analysis is comprehensive and convincing but is it enough? We must ask, what role have discourses of identity, race, and nationhood played in framing community–state relations, in the past and today? Resistance to apartheid acquired a unified form not only due to the shared social and political conditions of the masses and their common enemy, but also due to the ability of the movement to present the struggle in universal terms of opposition to oppression, by using uplifting discourses of justice, human rights, and democracy, deeply infused with religious and moralistic overtones, not merely in terms of suffering, resentment, and victimhood. In that way, it managed to capture the imagination of local constituencies and make the South African struggle iconic, a global symbol of the human spirit defying injustice. Contemporary movements that focused on misery and retribution were less successful. Although formed within months of each other in 1983, with similar mass support initially, one movement – the United Democratic Front with its universalist discourse – quickly became far more dominant, while the other – the National Forum with its narrow-based discourse of ‘racial capitalism’ – all but vanished as an actor on the ground, reflected in the total absence of scholarly attention to it.
In its early stages at the turn of the twenty-first century, post-apartheid oppositional mobilisation saw the use of a discourse of global justice as an overall framework, but that was too remote from the concerns of local constituencies who could not relate to the concerns of leading radical intellectuals and activists affiliated with the World Social Forum. The anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Left did not capture people’s hearts and minds because it did little to address everyday experiences: it is not the profit motive of global capitalism that is the problem in their eyes but the failure of elected representatives to use state resources to meet local needs. Capitalist hegemony – an incongruous term in view of the book’s focus on government-community conflicts, moving capitalism itself to the margins – is of little concern. Rather, it is the failure of state authorities to address residents’ grievances and act in a transparent, service-oriented, efficient manner that is the crucial issue, revolving around state power rather than the mode of production.
Indeed, using the language of class, when the main actors are state officials and community residents, not involved in relations of economic production, surplus value extraction, and class exploitation, is problematic. It sits uncomfortably alongside other terms deployed in the book, such as ‘the poor’, the economically marginalised, the excluded, which may offer a more accurate description but with less analytical rigour. How to conceptualise struggle and conflict in a new language that will retain the focus on socio-economic inequalities but will stir clear from obsolete notions of production-related terminology remains a challenge. Fractured Militancy makes an essential contribution to our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa which needs to be supplemented by an equally essential innovative theoretical move.