Class, not race, the big divide in SA
Wildcat strikes make it clear the poor no longer trust the organisations that represent them
LOT has been made of the downgrade in the investment rating determined for South Africa. It is clear the global business community has lost faith in our leadership. But there are strong voices at home to warn us against our present path.
When a patriot of the stature of Bishop Rubin Phillip says we are witnessing “the dimming of our democratic dawn” it is time to sit up and take notice.
We’ve have been moving away from our democratic commitments for some time now. Repression of grassroots movements in many parts of the country is one sign.
Then there was a whole slew of anti-democratic legislative measures. There was the Slums Act, the attempt to roll back press freedom and then the attempt to return to the apartheid model in which millions would be subjects of traditional leadership rather than citizens.
And of course the appointment of a deeply conservative and anti-intellectual judge to the head of the Constitutional Court was a major setback. This was followed up with a general attack on the judiciary.
Most middle-class activists were silent when grassroots activists were facing repression. Now that repression is coming the way of the middle-class via measures like the secrecy bill that many middle-class activists are trying to mobilise against, they are finding that they don’t enjoy the respect of grassroots.
In fact, most middle-class activists, be they nationalists, on the left or liberals, have been reduced to
Awatching popular protest unfold on their televisions.
The recent failure of attempts by middle-class activists to mobilise poor people behind their projects while self-organised poor people’s protests continue at a mass scale is revealing. We need to take this fact seriously.
We live in a very divided country. Social cohesion is a wonderful idea but it’s not a reality. And while the middle-classes natter on endlessly about race, it’s class that is the central divide in our society. Certainly race is an important issue but it’s class, and not race, that determines people’s life chances.
Billionaire
The Marikana massacre has brought this reality home to many. It has blown our political discourse apart.
How can we talk so easily about race as the central issue in our society when the mine at Marikana has made Cyril Ramaphosa a billionaire? Or when Khulubuse Zuma grows fat off the Aurora mine while workers at the mine, of all races, are starving after months without pay?
How can we talk so easily about trade unions as the defenders of the workers when workers at Marikana are just as angry with the National Union of Mineworkers as they are with the bosses? Our old certainties are breaking down.
None of us really knows what the future holds. But two things are very clear.
One is that the poor no longer trust the organisations that claim to represent them, and are now representing themselves. Wildcat strikes are spreading across our economy. And of course the rebellion of the poor has been raging in our shack settlements for many years now.
The other is that the state is responding to self-organisation with brutal repression. The Daily Maverick has reported that since the massacre at Marikana, municipalities have been trying to ban protests across the country, including here in Durban.
It seems the de facto state of emergency in Rustenburg is having echoes across the country.
These are dangerous times. If we allow new norms to take root we won’t be able to undo them. We need to remember what happened to India after the Naxalbari massacre or Zimbabwe after the massacres in Matabeleland.
It is essential that we all stand up to defend democracy. If we don’t, authoritarian norms will become set in stone. And it is not just states that find that authoritarianism is habit - forming.
Sometimes people living in an authoritarian state lose confidence in democratic institutions and turn to popular authoritarianism to make their voices heard. We have seen this in India. We are already seeing the beginnings of this in our own country. Strikes are now more or less routinely accompanied by violence.
Standing up for democracy doesn’t mean that we should rally behind NGOs running pro-democracy campaigns. It means that we should rally behind people on the ground who are facing repression.
In the 1980s middle-class activists took it for granted that supporting democracy meant supporting the rights of communities and workers to organise on the ground.
The drift into NGO politics has taken many middle-class activists, and the resources that they can sometimes access, far away from the struggles of people on the ground. We are now paying the price for this major miscalculation.
It is time to forget “civil society” and the NGOs that dominate it and to return to the people. It is here that our future will be decided.
Imraan Buccus is a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and the academic director of a study abroad programme on political transformation.