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Volume 2, Number 2-c, 1996
Toward the Integration of
Urban Social Movements
at the World Scale
Dialogue with W. Warren Wagar's
"Toward a Praxis of World Integration"
By Patrick Bond and Mzwanele Mayekiso
contact:
Patrick Bond
10 First Avenue National Institute for Economic Policy
Westdene 2092 * Johannesburg P.O. Box 32848 * Braamfontein 2017
Phone: 2711-673-7872 Phone: 2711-403-3009 * Fax: 2711-339-6395
e-mail: PBOND@WN.APC.ORG
Mzwanele Mayekiso
sancodri@wn.apc.org
(Bond studied geography at Johns Hopkins and is based at the
National Institute for Economic Policy in Johannesburg, and
Mayekiso is international representative of South Africa's urban
social movement, the SA National Civic Organisation. We expand
on these arguments and locate their SA roots in the forthcoming
Socialist Register 1996, London: Merlin and New York: Monthly
Review, as well as in Mayekiso's new book, _Township Politics:
Civic Struggles for a New South Africa_, New York: Monthly
Review.)
Copyright 1996 by Patrick Bond and Mzwanele Mayekiso.
[Page 1]
Wagar is correct to heap scorn on the notion that "any movement in any degree of opposition to the capitalist world-system and/or its colluding dominant national states is somehow, almost mystically, a comrade-movement of all the others... The great question... is whether antisystemic movements are really antisystemic." That is indeed a great question, which we want to address [Page 1] forthrightly by describing ways the urban component of South Africa's semi-victorious liberation movement might resonate with what's happening elsewhere. That way, we confront Wagar's charge that too many protest movements, even those based in Third World mega-cities, represent little more than a "slender and wobbly reed, at all odds little inclined to collaborate." What nuances would we insist upon, initially? We find, from years of sometimes inspiring, more often bitter experiences struggling with the meaning of "development" -- the discursive terrain in which these movements must usually operate -- that distinctions between and within social movements, CBOs (community-based organisations) and both indigenous and international NGOs (non- governmental organisations) of various ideological predispositions are now becoming as crucial as the practical and political distinction between market-oriented development and "people-centred development." The latter -- which the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO, made up of township civic associations or "civics") took as a motto at its 1992 launch, and lobbied for during the subsequent era -- is, no doubt, vulnerable to manipulation by neoliberals and populist demagogues alike. But in its strongest, most organic form, the struggle for people-centred development [Page 2]
highlights basic needs as _entitlements_, financed and delivered
in a non-commodified form, through a "strong but slim" state (the
phrase that has emerged here) capable of capturing and
redistributing the social surplus, complemented with additional
resources for building the organisational capacity of popular,
non-profit, community-controlled institutions.
Another of Wagar's "half measures and red herrings"? This is,
perhaps, as close as an urban social movement will get to
advocating an explicitly socialist ideology -- and such movements
will certainly not, given the international balance of forces at
[Page 2] Journal of World-Systems Research
present, give priority to "the building of socialist world
government" out of that motley, incompetent but formidable
collection of imperial institutions (IMF, IBRD, IDA, IFC, WTO,
UN, BIS, etc) now amassed against them. Yet struggles for people-
centred development will take them far in the anti-capitalist
struggle, particularly given the conditions thrown up by the
market, namely combined and uneven development.
Few analysts have discussed the combination of contradictions in
the realms of production and reproduction with as much commitment
as James Petras and Morris Morley:
The power of these new social movements comes from the
fact that they draw on the vast heterogeneous labour
force that populates the main thoroughfares and the
alleyways; the marketplaces and street corners; the
interstices of the economy and the nerve centres of
production; the exchange and finance centres; the
university plazas, railway stations and the wharves --
all are brought together in complex localized
structures which feed into tumultuous homogenizing
[Page 3]
national movements. (_US Hegemony Under Siege: Class,
Politics and Development in Latin America_, London:
Verso, 1990, p.53.)
The main structural factor forging the unity of the urban poor
and the formal working-class, Petras and Morley continue, is
capitalist crisis. "The great flows of capital disintegrate the
immobile isolated household units, driving millions into the
vortex of production and circulation of commodities; this moment
of wrenching dislocation and relocation is silently, individually
experienced by the mass of people, who struggle to find their
place, disciplined by the struggle for basic needs and by the
absolute reign of ascending capital." Under such conditions, the
social base for urban movements is continually recreated at the
[Page 3]
point that the limits to both commodity production and
consumption become evident.
Why _urban_ movements, though? Because surviving capitalist
urbanisation is becoming increasingly difficult for people of
Third World cities as a result of what seems to be a shift in the
scalar strategy of international capital and aid agencies. In
contrast to the traditional modernisationist fixation with the
nation-state as the prime unit of the polity, it appears now that
the mega-city is becoming the preferred unit of analysis, control
and implementation for the purpose of more efficiently imposing
structural adjustment policies (especially in the wake of the
destruction of many nation-state capacities).
To illustrate, one senior advisor to the United Nations
Conference on Human Settlements, Shlomo Angel, argues (in the UN
journal _Countdown to Instanbul_, 1, 1995) that the 1996 Habitat
conference should be about "creating a level playing field for
[Page 4]
competition among cities, particularly across national borders; on understanding how cities get ahead in this competition; on global capital transfers, the new economic order and the weakening of the nation-state..." This is only one of the more vulgar articulations of an increasingly familiar theme (as expressed again by Angel): "The city is not a community, but a conglomerate of firms, institutions, organisations and individuals with contractual agreements among them." From such principles an entire neoliberal edifice can be constructed. The focus here is not merely on limiting public financing of social services to those deemed to add value (though this is one of the more obvious effects of structural adjustment, and the catalyst for many an IMF riot). Just as importantly, the World Bank's "New Urban Management Programme" also highlights the _productivity_ of urban capital as it flows through urban land markets (now enhanced by titles and registration), through [Page 4] Journal of World-Systems Research housing finance systems (featuring solely private sector delivery and an end to state subsidies), through the much-celebrated (but extremely exploitative) informal economy, through (often newly- privatised) urban services such as transport, sewage, water and even primary health care services (via intensified cost- recovery), and the like. Come visit Johannesburg (and Alexandra township) and you'll quickly get the point. And we are now coming to the larger point. Wagar worries that "the initial response of the disempowered and the marginalized to our crisis everywhere has been flight." True? If you have already fled the rural crisis to confront urban degradation, another option emerges: organisation. In this, we exercise the same sort of caution as many classical Marxists when the phrase "civil society" is raised. Again, it is of crucial importance to [Page 5]
highlight the organisational instruments of poor and working people. These we term "working-class civil society" in order to distinguish them from bourgeois non-governmental institutions (as well as from government and firms) and hence from pervasive depoliticized notions of "civil society" (the real goal of which boils down to reducing the scope of social services provided by states). And as Wagar would point out, there are plenty of urban development organisations which do accept the neoliberal premise that the citizenry must not make demands for state services as entitlements. Across the world, pliant NGOs are now considered to be an integral component of the modernisation process by virtue of their efficiency and flexibility, corresponding with the desire of the international agencies to shrink Third World states as part of the overall effort to lower the social wage. Even indigenous NGOs and some CBOs have been drawn into the process, which highlights long-standing distinctions between technicist, apolitical development interventions and the people- centred strategies (and militant tactics) of either small-scale [Page 5] CBOs or mass-based social movements of the oppressed. In South Africa and everywhere else, it is now crucial to recognise the ideological lacunae and diversions represented within the many new development organisations that have emerged in response to the broader failure of capitalist modernisation and of the state. In dozens of wretched Third World cities (including Los Angeles) where organisation and democratic traditions of struggle are simply lacking, matters quickly degenerate into desperate IMF riots. In many other situations, the opposite -- petty-bourgeois professionalisation -- has taken hold. Given the class groundings, the often patriarchal form and [Page 6]
the occasionally imperialist sponsorship of some Third World (and many First World) organisations engaged in development work, it should not be surprising that upon closer examination their progressive rhetoric is merely rhetoric and their practices quite consistent with neoliberalism. Drawing out their relationships to establishment actors (foundations, aid agencies, development banks, consultants and lawyers, construction and civil engineering capital, etc) becomes more and more important at levels of both micro-implementation and macro-policy advocacy. Recognising this helps us move beyond "reconciling the members of our squabbling so-called family of antisystemic movements" and into more durable alliances. What about "the third path of partnership, of mutualist multiculturalism"? Wagar rejects this outright, but we feel it worthwhile to bring aboard the concerns of Arturo Escobar and his allies -- such as Vandana Shiva, Ashish Nandy, Shiv Visvanathan, Gustavo Esteva, and the journals _David y Goliath_ and _Neueva Sociedad_ -- who stress common _anti-modern_ themes in exploring (generally rural-situated) social movements which resist development, in part because their "processes of identity construction were more flexible, modest, and mobile [than those of previous political strategies], relying on tactical [Page 6] Journal of World-Systems Research articulations arising out of the conditions and practices of daily life. To this extent, these struggles were fundamentally cultural." (Here, some echoes of Frank and Fuentes in _Transforming the Revolution_.) And as for alternatives, "Out of hybrid or minority cultural situations might emerge other ways of building economies, of dealing with basic needs, of coming together into social groups" (Escobar, _Encountering Development_, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp.216,225). The operative word, of course, is "might," and we [Page 7]
do not believe that "modernity" is the fundamental problem. Yet
so much damage has been done by pseudo-modernising,
populist-developmental states run by nationalist political
parties, sometimes even in the name of a "Marxist-Leninist"
tradition (we simply look north and east, to Zimbabwe and
Mozambique), that it is incumbent upon us to conceptualise the
struggle differently, beyond the goal of state "power," more
directly with respect to the self-actualisation of poor and
working-class people.
As Marx explains in the context of the Paris Commune (from which,
incidentally, South Africa's mid-1980s urban "ungovernability"
and "dual power" campaigns drew direct inspiration, and invited
comparisons), it was the _process_ of self-emancipation from the
dictates of capital, not the outcome, that was most important.
The working class did not expect miracles from the
Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce
_par decret du peuple_. They know that in order to
work out their own emancipation, and along with it
that higher form to which present society is
irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies,
they will have to pass through long struggles, through
a series of historic processes, transforming
circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise,
but to set free the elements of the new society with
[Page 7]
which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is
pregnant. (_The Civil War in France_)
Again, skepticism from Wagar that we might ever realise anything
more than the Commune in One City: "Antisystemic movements must
work together, forging alliances and resisting processes that
[Page 8]
lead to their ghettoization. Perhaps. Yet is there really any hope that this can happen?" From the South African experience, we do believe that social movements are capable of being tightly networked, and that their immediate territorial base can be expanded regionally, nationally or even internationally. As this happens, movements cement their common norms, practices and collective strategies and tactics, in order to advance both local agendas and larger political campaigns. This experience is still ahead, of course, but not too far off if institutions such as the World Bank remain such inviting targets. (In this, the international anti-apartheid movement provides inspiration, but also important lessons about the dangers of demobilisation.) A brief elaboration may be in order. Efforts are underway among diverse progressive forces to link up and amplify existing grassroots social movement challenges to GATT and the Bank. In the latter struggle, an important obstacle has emerged in the form of surprisingly resilient reformist (as opposed to non- reformist) reformism within the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. This class (to which we also belong) has more than its share of dilettantes, is sometimes politically capricious, and often wavers at key conjunctures which can be crucial for progress towards a broader internationalism. One significant result is that for reasons relating largely to its own "insider" technocratic positionality, many intellectual and strategic campaigners within these international movements argue for reform, not defunding, of the World Bank. (Oxfam has been particularly disappointing of late.) In contrast, increasing numbers of other organisations are coming to the conclusion that [Page 8] Journal of World-Systems Research a vigorous and potentially decisive campaign to shut down the Bank -- for example, through divestment (of Bank securities purchased by government, pension and university funds) in the [Page 9]
North and popular boycotts in the South -- is eminently feasible
(Global Exchange in San Francisco is leading the way here:
globalexch@igc.apc.org).
It remains to be seen whether in coming months and years, the "50
Years Is Enough" network comprising Northern groups and dozens
of excellent grassroots social movements which have fought and
sometimes won struggles against the Bank -- from Costa Rica,
Haiti, India, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, and the
Philippines, to name a few sites of intense recent activism --
can reach a consensus and cohere as an international movement.
If this does occur -- if, in other words, those local and
national social movements with a more explicitly anti-capitalist
development ideology do begin thinking globally and acting
locally _and_ globally -- then there is a real opportunity for
"popular movements [to] join forces across borders (and
continents) to have their respective state officials abrogate
those relations of the interstate system through which the
pressure is conveyed," as suggested so eloquently by Arrighi,
Hopkins and Wallerstein (_Anti-Systemic Movements_, London,
Verso, 1989, p.74).
For we may ultimately agree with Vicente Navarro that "The mass
struggle carried out in its many different forms needs to be
carried out in the area of representative politics as well as by
instruments such as political parties which need to present and
articulate the demands made by these movements" ("The Nature of
Democracy in the Core Capitalist Countries: Meanings and
Implications for Class Struggle," _The Insurgent Sociologist_,
10, 1, 1980, p.12). But until the terrain is better prepared for
representative politics to emerge at the world scale, or until
[Page 9]
[Page 10]
wider cracks open in the present hegemony that neoliberal institutions maintain over nation-states, it is our sense that broad-based social movement activism grounded in struggles against both capitalist production and reproduction is where the most portentous political challenges to the international system lie. It is hence our personal hope and expectation that comrades around the world will gain most inspiration from the South African struggle, and will most effectively contribute to its deepening over the coming difficult period, by recognising the parallels through which urban (and so many other) social movements have contested uneven capitalist development. So far as we can see, Wagar makes just one concession to our vision of globally-cohesive working-class civil society (a rather different "community of communities" than that which the communitarian Etzioni imagines): "An obvious shortcoming of this [Short History of the Future] scenario is that I say nothing about sister movements that might have aided the work of the World Party." We would put the challenge the other way 'round, and are grateful for the opportunity to open up dialogue about why, and perhaps how. *** [Page 11] |
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