The power of the cooking pot: fed up with the ANC's free-market policies that deliver nothing, marginalized South Africans—'the poors'—are taking politics into their own hands. Activist Ashwin Desai talks to Holly Wren Spaulding - Ideology Vs. Necessity - Interview

New Internationalist, Sept, 2003 by Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly Wren Spaulding: What are the new tools of liberation?

Ashwin Desai: Simply, we are rebuilding community structures. There is nothing more revolutionary than doing what is necessary for millions of people in my province to live a humble and decent life. This involves very basic things: love, respect, consideration, freedom to move around your neighbourhood. These are seemingly very minor events--manifest over a communal cooking pot for example--but they are infused with a lot of politics, a lot of feeling.

Many people on the Left are very cynical about community movements because their militancy is not palpable--they're not storming the barricades, they're not building the Paris Commune, they do not know the exact difference between the IMF and World Bank and don't particularly care to know either. But I think what we are doing is building a sense of neighbourhood, a sense of community which is as effectively anti-World Bank as any demonstration or resolution coming out of an NGO workshop.

In Chatsworth in Durban, Mr Mhlongo was what they call a 'bush mechanic' in the area. He looked after people's cars and they looked after him, through bartering almost. When council security guards and the police turned up to evict his family, over 150 people, mainly women, drove them away. They blockaded the stairs that led to his flat. There were gunshots and teargas and at least six casualties, but the residents had vowed to prevent the evictions from taking place. It was not just a battle for Mhlongo but for their collective dignity as humans.

So people have just had to gel and that's the beauty of this idea of neighbourhoods, this idea of sharing with and defending each other. They may disagree about eight out of ten things--there are Catholics there, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus, Muslims and atheists there, and sure, they fight and quarrel--but they defend their turf and it works.

How does this translate into bigger things? I don't have the answer to that, but I know there is something beautiful and precious being born.

The new politics is driven by families participating as households. The community movements that are forming in some parts of South Africa are not made up of those working in factories. Rather we have the "lumpen', the rabble, the single mother, the proto-gangster, the young children and the aunties--the unorganizable--and nobody is out of the loop.

There is a re evaluation of what has come to be seen as resistance from the Bolshevik Revolution, and the idea that change in society is about organizing the working class, the central committee, the political party; big figures who emerge in a struggle who are very knowledgeable and then direct the masses; the vanguard party. It would be incorrect to say that those ideas about organization are still being challenged in Durban. They have been debunked because they are simply irrelevant and impossible.

HWS: In terms of those social movements, are youth involved, or are they creating their own movements?

AD: From the beginning, all over the country, community movements were almost 80-per cent women--most of them older women--simply because they were the first ones affected by the ravages of neoliberalism. Child maintenance grants were slashed and women were the first expelled from factory jobs when tariffs on sweatshop imports were abandoned. Those who found work again are now in sweatshops. Working Monday to Sunday, they earn R500 or R600 per month ($65-80). Basic upkeep for a single woman with one child is about R1,700 ($225), which is just really basic poverty. So they became part of the movement to boycott paying for services. They are very docile in the workplace toward the boss; they want that R500. But they are militant in the community by not paying for water and electricity. They are effectively creating a social wage through their actions, saying: 'This state wants to allow people to pay us R500 ($65), but they want us to pay R800 ($105) in rent, so we are going to take that R300 ($40) from the state by not paying.'

At the level of lived experience translating into activism, women are the real power. Of course young people are fascinated by the local drug lord, the gangster, the rap artist and so on; they are finding a sense of meaning through these things rather than through boring old struggle again. And many of us have come to hate that word 'struggle'; a struggle that is epitomized by speechifying, hardly any vibrant discussion and arcane meeting procedure. People are ready for activism. Delivering free basic services by reconnecting water and electricity. Building structures of feeling by sharing resources. A dressmaker exchanging a set of school clothes with an unemployed man running a childcare centre. There's a lot of joy. It's a movement. It's life.

If a house goes empty it's not the local councillor who decides who goes in there, it's the community. They take someone off the street and they give them a roof. We really are creating liberated zones. People confront their own misery by taking over local fields and doing market gardening.