Thursday 17 February 2005

I come from South Africa, where for many years we were engaged in a struggle of refusal - many ‘no’s’ against the brutal and cruel system of apartheid, a system designed to benefit the white minority through the systematised exploitation of the Black majority. In this fight our language became one of ‘ungovernability’. Through armed struggle, mass action in the form of rent and service boycotts, industrial strikes, consumer boycotts, and so on, we spoke a new language of ‘people’s power’ and ‘self reliance’. From the Freedom Charter, which proclaimed ‘the people shall govern’, to the slogan ‘Amandla Awethu’ (‘All Power To the People’), this spirit of resistance and refusal allowed for the elaboration of certain life strategies under apartheid that allowed for people’s survival in this system e.g. the rent and service boycotts of the 1980s. These were collective approaches to gaining access to basic services that developed through collectives that came to be known as ‘organs of people’s power’ e.g. local civics, youth organisations, women’s organisations. These struggles created a form of ‘social common’ that was continuously reproduced in and through struggle of people refusing to pay for basic services. Unlike most northern countries, where a strong welfare state came to protect the rights of its citizens to such basic services, in South Africa access to basic services was secured only through struggle against the apartheid state, a struggle of refusal.

This struggle was not good for the apartheid state and economy. Resistance, together with the effects of the global economic crisis, saw the apartheid state implementing several reforms from the 1980s onwards that sought to address these problems through a two-pronged strategy of ‘total onslaught’ and ‘inclusion’ - complete repression of Black resistance as well as the gradual inclusion of parts of Black communities in aspects of governance, and the improvement of services to certain parts of Black communities in an attempt to pacify resistance (e.g. the electrification of parts of Soweto in the early 1980s). With the apartheid state’s strategy extending to the liberation movement, by the early 1990s, with the release of political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela), and the unbanning of political organisations, the road to change became that of a negotiated settlement between the liberation movement (in particular the ANC) and the apartheid state, and we began to see the language of ‘people’s power’ disappearing or being harnessed towards the ends of assuming state power in a neoliberal world order. When the African National Congress (ANC) ‘came to power’ through electoral democracy in 1994, it continued on the neoliberal trajectory begun by that the apartheid state in the early 1980s. From this point on, we see the ANC speaking the language of ‘people’s power’ and promising change in the form of free basic services, and the protection of the common struggled for under apartheid, through the state and through neoliberal means.

From the 1990s already, the ANC had begun to speak this new language of power. One of its earliest campaigns was the ‘Masakhane’ campaign (‘We are building’), through which communities were actively encouraged to start paying for basic services as ‘responsible citizens’ contributing to the ‘good governance’ of ‘our coming democracy’. Resistance in these times came to be portrayed as the persistence of ‘a culture of non-payment’, a far cry from the language of ungovernability in the fight for free basic services for all. More recently, the language of ‘privatisation’ and ‘cost recovery’ have come to characterise the ANC government’s approach to the delivery of basic services. Under the regime of neoliberalism, the social common fought for under apartheid has slowly begun to be eroded as water and electricity cut-offs and evictions have functioned as attacks on those life strategies that emerged under apartheid to hold the common in and through struggle. In these new times, the responsibility to ensuring access to basic services has shifted from the state to the individual, and governance has taken on a strikingly individual character.

It is in the struggles of people against these attacks on life, that our movements, such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Anti-Eviction Campaign, have emerged. One of our key strategies in these struggles has been that of reclaiming our common - re-connecting water and electricity that has been disconnected, and putting people back into the homes from which they have been evicted, denying the commodification of resources that are basic necessities for life and insisting on their common ownership by us all. Against the language of ‘responsibility to pay’, campaigns such as ‘Operation Khanyisa’ (‘Operation Switch On/Light Up’) and ‘Operation Vula ‘manzi’ (‘Operation Open The Water’) have allowed for people to come together again in refusal of a logic that speaks against life and the common, and to institute in the immediate an alternative to this logic - freely connected water and electricity. The state and private interests have responded by criminalising our struggles, arresting us for ‘illegal reconnections’ and other protest actions against commodification. And, by offering us certain ‘concessions’, such as the scrapping of the collective electricity debt of R14 million in Soweto and the provision of a guaranteed 6 000 litres of free water to every South African household per month. While many people have seen these as ‘gains’ or ‘victories’ won as a result of struggle, it is also important to note that these measures are but partial solutions to problems that persist, replicate, and change their form, within an unchallenged overall framework of neoliberalism.

The introduction of the prepaid meter in the regulation of water and electricity consumption, is a clear example of this. Unlike with cut-offs, where one is punished for non-payment after receiving a service, with the prepaid meter, you have to pay before you receive a service - you are cut off until you can pay. The prepaid meter also removes any responsibility for delivery from the state and the private service provider, making the responsibility for gaining access to basic services the individual’s. In a context of high unemployment and low household incomes, the life strategies developed under the logic of cut-offs - reconnections - has come under attack, with prepaid technology developing ways of preventing any collective acts of resistance to the system of commodification and completely individualising the relationship of people to the resources necessary for life. In Soweto, the fight against prepaid electricity continues, with members of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) actively connecting residents to electricity without metering, and meter boxes are regularly removed, collected and delivered to local police stations in a collective show of community refusal of the commodification and individualisation of electricity provision. The introduction of prepaid water meters has proven a little more difficult for resistance, as the technology developed has been difficult to bypass. Resistance to the prepaid system has also meant complete disconnection from any water supply for households, including the free basic water ensured by the state. Destroying the meter has not meant enjoying free water. Instead, people have remained disconnected unless buying into the logic of water as a commodity to be purchased by paying individuals. And people are learning to live as ‘responsible individuals’ within the limits of the capitalist system, recycling water and reducing the number of tasks performed that require the use of water. The state and private companies teach this new way of life through encouraging ‘proper budgeting’, ‘household planning’, ‘efficient use of water’, and so on, that deny any prospect of water being a collectively owned and shared resource beyond the logic of profit. In this way, the logic of individualism and profit take root in all aspects of life - with the commodification of water has come the erosion of cultural practices that require large amounts of water for communal interaction and activity e.g. weddings and funerals; the erosion of communal relations at a community and neighbourhood level with neighbours no longer able to share water or even coming to steal water from the other; and the increasing inability for people to imagine the common.

Today, then, our struggle is to destroy the meter - not just the machine, but the relations that it creates. Our challenge is to generalise this act of destruction in the minds and actions of people, in how we reclaim the common, now outside of the state, that has already spoken in support of the private interests that erode this common. But this is a difficult task in movements that have grown out of a liberation movement that began to seek change from apartheid through a ‘democratic state’. This has meant that most of us have had to learn (and are still learning) from the failed and difficult experiences of engaging with state power in the old ways. And we have little to guide us or inspire us in these new struggles. That is why such spaces and possibilities for interaction with activists from different but similar experiences of fighting capitalism is important as we can learn from being here of struggles imagined and fought against the same enemy, differently. It is in and through such spaces that power itself is imagined and exercised differently - power in action, power in creation, life.

 http://spip.red.m2014.net/spip.php?article137