What is change and where do we start?
WHAT does it mean to be “radical” in South Africa today? What does it entail to go to “the root” of change?
In the current distemper and democratic struggles – for land, free quality education for the poor, food security, decent accommodation, drinkable water, living wage, employment, health and well-being, affordable and reliable public transport, safety and security – is it in any way meaningful to invoke “radical social and economic transformation” ideas that lay behind the historic struggle for freedom and justice?
Whose responsibility is it to bring about the desired change? The state, the private sector, global aid networks, the people themselves?
Agenda agency and radical transformation has various claims within the general programme of freedom and justice in South Africa. It includes not only socioeconomic rights, but the rights that are aimed mainly at the sovereignty and agency of the people.
Both these features figure in its programme, but the sovereignty and agency aspect is beginning to receive more earnest attention. In recent years, the objective has evolved and broadened from empowerment focus to incorporate – and emphasise – the active role of people’s agency.
No longer the passive recipients of equity-enhancing interventions by the state, the people increasingly see themselves as active agents of fundamental change: the dynamic force that can substantially alter their lives.
But who are “the people”? In a real sense, “the people” are identified and defined in terms of “social demands”.
How do these demands emerge, and how are they articulated? Think of a large mass of the landless, homeless, hungry and unemployable, and as a distinct group they demand some kind of solution from government.
If the situation remains unchanged for some time, there is an accumulation of unfulfilled demands and an increasing inability of the state to absorb them in a differentiated way, leaving them isolated from others, as well as an equivalential relation established between them, leading to the formulation of a broad-based force for justice and a widening chasm separating them from public institutions.
Consequently, we have the formation of a hostile internal frontier, an alienation of millions through the emergence of a chain of unsatisfied demands.
This is not a mere lumpen proletariat configuration, but a serious antagonistic frontier separating the motive forces from the ruling elites, and the unifying of various democratic struggles into a stable locus of real power and of an irreducible tension.
The nature of the shift in concentration and emphasis from empowerment to agency is sometimes missed because of the overlap between the two approaches. The active agency of “the people” cannot, in a serious sense, ignore the urgency of the state’s obligation “to heal the injustices and divisions of the past”.
How should we define fundamental change? A good start would be the land question Otherwise, politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business and public policy will be geared to the interest of the elite.
But to shift the balance in the right direction is a major task – in part because of the ways in which fundamental change is being subverted by profit-driven forces.
Nkondo is a member of the Council of the University of South Africa and chairperson of the Collins Chabane Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.