[DEBATE] : Re: US Social Forum

[Kate Griffiths]

This is a pre-event analysis, but I think it makes good points about
the significance of the location of the event.Its from Left Turn, a
magazine that is worth a look from time to time for those interested
in the US left.

--Kate Griffiths

 A Light Within (the Heart of Empire): The 2007 US Social Forum
By Max Uhlenbeck
Published on: June 04, 2007

What happens when hundreds or even thousands of small and not-so-small
organizations come together to meet, dialogue, and present their ideas
over the course of a long weekend? The World Social Forum (WSF), an
annual gathering of tens of thousands of people from over 100
countries, has provided this space for those able to travel to Brazil,
Kenya, Venezuela, and India in recent years. This summer, from June 27
to July 1, those of us who have never traveled to a WSF will have the
opportunity to experience first hand what such a gathering looks like,
when the US Social Forum (USSF) takes place in Atlanta, Georgia.

While the WSF has come under heavy criticism over recent years, due in
part to the increasingly dominant role that the political parties and
large multinational NGOs play in the shaping and framing of the event,
the USSF got off to an encouraging start when it was announced last
year that it would take place in the southern state of Georgia, and
that Project South would be one of the groups initially bottom-lining
the organizing. According to their mission statement:

      Project South is a leadership development organization based in
the US south creating spaces for movement building. We build
relationships with organizations and networks across the US and Global
South to inform our local work and to engage in bottom-up movement
building for social and economic justice.

As the South Goes…

As W.E.B. Du Bois once remarked: "As the south goes, so goes the
nation." Grassroots organizations across the southern US, having to
deal with so much in the aftermath of Katrina, are still struggling
almost two years later.In A Letter From the People of New Orleans,
printed in the last issue of Left Turn, we read:

      "While we remain in crisis, under-staffed, underfunded, and in
many cases, in desperate need of help, we have seen many promises
unfulfilled. From the perspective of the poorest and least powerful,
it appears that the work of national allies on our behalf has either
not happened or, if it has happened, it has been a failure."

New Orleans today illustrates the intense crisis that many are dealing
with, not just in the South but in cities across the country. It is a
test case—an example of what is happening in urban centers all across
the US, only sped up in hyperdrive. Here we see the reasons why, even
in the richest of the overdeveloped countries, we have to keep finding
ways of coming together to press for justice and equality.

New Orleans highlights the intersections of de-industrialization and
corporate globalization—symbolized by the moves towards privatization
and intense gentrification. It predicts what future effects the global
climate crisis will have on our most vulnerable communities. It shows
the government's increasing reliance on militarism as a means to solve
humanitarian disasters, with many noting the similarities with Iraq,
such as the combination of private mercenary forces, along with
reconstruction contracts being awarded to companies like Halliburton.
And finally, it has shown the inadequacy of the response to all of
this put forward by the so called "non-profit industrial complex" in
the wake of the vacuum left by the state.

Still, two years later, grassroots resistance in New Orleans
continues, as it has always has. New community formations,
organizations, and networks have emerged and are organizing
effectively against such great odds. Many of them are planning on
traveling to Atlanta this summer. Robert Goodman, a formerly
incarcerated activist who works with the New Orleans based
organization Safe Streets, Strong Communities, says that although "New
Orleans is still in crisis, we are clear that the only folks who will
help are others working for justice. We see the Social Forum as a
place to share our stories and connect our struggles so together we
can demand some fundamental changes in the treatment of New Orleans
and all its displaced people." USSF organizers in turn have worked
hard to highlight many of these organizations and their struggles
during the nearly week-long program.

Gettin' on the bus

Atlanta is expecting huge numbers not only from New Orleans, but
extending all across the southern states. In a recent outreach email,
the USSF national organizing committee highlighted some of the folks
traveling to Atlanta:

      *The South by Southwest Freedom Caravan—spanning more than 5
states—will bring nearly 1,000 people from New Mexico, Texas,
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

      *Several community organizations in Mississippi, including the
Mississippi Workers Center and Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance
(MIRA) are organizing more than four buses from across the state.

      *Southern Rural Black Women's Initiative is bringing more than
200 members in their Delegation from Mississippi and Alabama!

Although the left and progressive movement here in the US is still
very fractured and factionalized, many are realizing that these kinds
of gatherings are few and far between, and are finding ways to use
their trip to Atlanta to strengthen their local work, as well as to
build relationships and connect with friends and allies who will be
coming from across the country.

Larger questions

Eric Tang, in an editorial featured in Left Turn #23 ( Mexico on the
Brink ), wrote: "The USSF offers no guarantees. It will be what we
make of it. So arrive in Atlanta not only with the intention of being
convinced and inspired, but with the desire to convince and inspire
others." This leads to an important question. Are we coming to the
table with some sort of vision that aims to "convince and inspire" or
do we see this as more of an extended networking session, an
opportunity to build with individuals and organizations whom we rarely
get to see or communicate with outside of email lists and conference
calls?

Some of the past critiques of the WSF process have centered around
similar questions. They argue that perhaps what gets lost in the sea
of workshops and opening plenaries, the dinners and car rides, the
meetings and caucuses, is the question—to what end? Those of us who
are not interested in starting a political party, and have even shied
away from cadre organizing of any kind, have found it hard to
articulate what exactly it is we would want to see on the local,
regional, or even national level, much less how we might organize
towards such a goal. Perhaps we are not interested or do not have the
energy right now to grapple with the concept of building a larger,
more coordinated movement here in the US that could operate on a
national scale?

We know we are critical of the non-profit world—increasingly
integrated into the corporate model—as a major vehicle for structural
social change. We are critical of the centralized political party
structure, whether it be the neoliberal Democrats or the small leftist
"revolutionary sects" that continue to operate in near anonymity
around the country. On the other side of the spectrum, the frustrating
anti-organizational and sectarian tendencies within many of the
contemporary anarchist movements, coupled with the predominantly white
subcultures surrounding them, have left much to be desired. The
alternative for many of us has been to continue to identify with a
broad based, but still rather vague, political tendency—sometimes
described as the "anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, non-sectarian
left." This tendency has been much more clearly articulated among
social movements in Latin America, where, during the 2005 WSF, João
Pedro Stedile, coordinator of Brazil's Landless Peasants' Movement
(MST), stated, "The question of power is not resolved by taking the
government palace, which is easy and has been done many times, but
rather by the building of new social relations."

Another politics is possible

Building on this theme, and following a series of public events and
report-backs analyzing social movements in Latin America ( See Left
Turn #20 editorial Rethinking Solidarity ), a group of 20 organizers
and community activists, coming from a wide range of backgrounds,
organized a 5-part monthly political study group in a modest effort to
continue a more focused dialogue. Part of the group's initial goals
was to figure out a way to present some of these questions and ideas
in Atlanta.

One component of this is organizing a large plenary session called
"Another Politics is Possible: Living the Vision from Below and to the
Left." This session is being co-sponsored by a wide range of
organizations on both the local and the national level including; LA
Garment Workers' Center, Sista II Sista, Coalition of Immokalee
Workers, Student Farmworker Alliance, INCITE! Women of Color Against
Violence, Regeneración and Pachamama Childcare collectives, Left Turn,
Catalyst Project, and the Center for Immigrant Families. This plenary
hopes to serve as a meeting point for many groups and individuals who
are thinking about this concept of building "new social relations"
alongside their everyday base-building and political education work.

Besides the panel discussion, there is a large delegation being
organized from New York, made up of several buses, under the same
theme of "Another Politics is Possible." Tying the transportation
organizing to the larger vision, the delegation's fundraising appeal
states:

      Many times, individual paid professionals and "token" community
members represent community organizations in larger strategic
conversations, gatherings, and conferences. The USSF provides an
important opportunity to change this dynamic. Instead of choosing a
few individuals to travel by plane and rent out hotel rooms, we will
use a comparable budget to enable a large group of mothers, children,
youth, and childcare volunteers to attend the USSF. Ground
transportation will enable more participants to attend, particularly
immigrants and families with children. The journey itself will embody
our politics, fostering an intergenerational space of connection,
sharing, and caring for people from different communities in NYC. At
the USSF, we hope to both learn from others and to share our own work.

Emerging out of our study group, and preparing for the long bus rides
ahead, we still have many questions. While we do not pretend to know
the answers, we know that the USSF will provide a rare and important
space to keep pushing forward the question of political vision. We
will be missing out if we treat this moment merely as a glorified
networking opportunity, ceding the platform to the NGOs and political
parties who have become accustomed—over the course of the WSF
process—to sitting at the head of the table.

It might be time to grab the mic.

—Max Uhlenbeck

Max Uhlenbeck is a member of the Left Turn editorial collective, and a
national organizer with Students for a Democratic Society
(www.newsds.org) who works and lives in New York City.


On 7/11/07, debate-request at lists.kabissa.org
<debate-request at lists.kabissa.org> wrote:
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> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of DEBATE digest..."
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re:  A sneaky attack on prosperity (Patrick Bond)
>    2.  (Fwd) Jeff Rudin on free basic water (Patrick Bond)
>    3. RE:  A sneaky attack on prosperity (Russell Grinker)
>    4.  (Fwd) Shannon Walsh on 'Uncomfortable collobarations'
>       (movement research) (Patrick Bond)
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: debate: SA discussion list <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:55:27 +0200
> Subject: Re: [DEBATE] : A sneaky attack on prosperity
> Ok, fair enough... I read a bit too quickly.
>
> But the attack on economic growth as the primary logic of human activity
> is sound, at least for socialists, environmentalists, anti-racists,
> feminists, etc etc etc... Ben-Ami should join us.
>
> Russell Grinker wrote:
> > Ben-Ami responds to Patrick:
> >
> > Bond is of course right that you could give a long list of "negative
> > externalities" or other modifications to GDP. In my article I give pollution
> > (which, contrary to him, I do mention) as just one example.
> >
> > But I notice he fails to mention or understand the main point of the
> > article: the assault on GDP stats is in reality an attack on economic growth
> > itself. Despite appearances it's not really about the stats.
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: debate: SA discussion list <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:59:22 +0200
> Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Jeff Rudin on free basic water
>
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *From:* Jeff Rudin [mailto:jeffrey.rudin at samwu.org.za]
> > *Sent:* 10 July 2007 08:53 AM
> > **
> >
> > The attached is an article from the May issue of 'Water -- Sewage &
> > Effluent' that I was asked to write as part of a 'Debate Section'
> > being promoted by the journal.
> >
> > The article might be of some general value for the Water Caucus.
> > Please distribute, If you agree.
> >
> > Jeff
> >
> >
> >
> > Our government is proud to proclaim that 'water is life; sanitation is
> > dignity'.  Their practice, however, gives the lie to both claims.  The
> > commercialisation of water and sanitation is at the heart of our
> > government's policies.  This means a practice driven by imperatives
> > far removed from the lofty sentiments of life and dignity.
> > The 'user pays' principle in a country in which the majority are
> > officially recognised as being poor can have only one consequence:
> > water and sanitation remain unaffordable to a very large number of our
> > people.
> > Our government recognises this problem.  Their remedy in 2000 was to
> > make a basic amount of water free to everyone.  There are three
> > fundamental difficulties with what might otherwise appear to be a most
> > enlightened solution.
> > .    First, what was presented as a universal commitment to everyone
> > has over the years been increasingly restricted to 'indigents', to use
> > the highly pejorative, though official, feudal term
> > .    Second, although no accurate information is available, it is
> > clear that large numbers of poor people are still not receiving any
> > free water
> > .    Third, the government has defined the constitutional guarantee of
> > 'sufficient' water to mean 25 litres per person per day.  This is an
> > entirely arbitrary amount.  More to the point is that it bears little
> > resemblance to the actual basic needs of real people.  Allowing for an
> > occasion bath and shower -- thereby giving some meaning to the
> > constitution's guarantee of dignity -- means at least a 4-fold
> > increase in the basic amount.  And, it must be noted, this increase
> > still excludes the special water needs of the very young, the old and
> > the sick, including people with HIV/AIDS.  Also excluded from this
> > required 4-fold plus increase is water required for backyard fruit and
> > vegetable growing that could contribute to the food security that is
> > an additional constitutional guarantee.
> > These are not controversial points.  All of them are statements of
> > fact.  In countering them, Ministers and government officials would
> > instead point to practical difficulties such as cost, capacity, water
> > shortages and the need for time in which to rectify the injustices of
> > apartheid.  None of these arguments, however, is sustainable.  (Samwu
> > cannot develop these points now but would be happy to do so on another
> > occasion.)
> > These alleged practical difficulties, together with the government's
> > general policy of commercialisation of essential services, its
> > adoption of the user-pay principle and its promotion of BEE, have, in
> > a complex of interacting ways, also led the government to look at
> > fully-fledged privatisation, public private partnerships and
> > outsourcing as partial solutions to the water delivery problem.
> > In our view, these intended solutions in fact aggravate the problem.
> > Again, space does not allow for any elaboration other than one
> > consideration.  The private sector is not a charity but is driven by
> > the imperatives of profit maximisation.  This is not intended as a
> > critique but as a simple description.  Supplying water or sanitation,
> > in a country where the majority of people are poor, is therefore
> > either not a viable business proposition or, if it is, is unavoidably
> > -- and in many different ways -- made sufficiently profitable at the
> > expense of the poor.
> > Dr Jeff Rudin
> > National Research Officer
> > South African Municipal Workers' Union
> >
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Russell Grinker" <grinker at mweb.co.za>
> To: <pbond at mail.ngo.za>, "'debate: SA discussion list '" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:27:12 +0200
> Subject: RE: [DEBATE] : A sneaky attack on prosperity
> Patrick
>
> We have a fundamental disagreement on this issue. If you're not for
> reordering social relations to permit MORE for each, according to their
> needs, you reduce (limit) the 'socialist' critique to the need for
> redistribution of the crumbs from a limited cake. This puts you in the
> tradition of penny-pinching Presbyterian state socialists of the early
> Twentieth Century. Setting aside for the moment debates about the wealthier
> parts of the world, limiting growth means the perpetuation of a state of
> gross deprivation and backwardness in Africa and that includes SA. You argue
> that: "... the attack on economic growth as the primary logic of human
> activity is sound, at least for socialists, environmentalists, anti-racists,
> feminists, etc etc etc.." I think you're dead wrong here. I'd much rather go
> with the Old Man who argued rather convincingly that "Where there is
> scarcity, you get all the old crap". No amount of subjective 'socialist'
> desire can on its own entirely eliminate the material basis of racial
> oppression, oppression of women, environmental degradation etc etc etc (as
> you put it) unless Africa (and everywhere else) produces more, ideally of
> course in a planned and rational way. In the meantime I think it is
> extremely foolhardy to call for limits to growth because such growth is not
> under "our" control. The West already intends to make Africans pay the
> highest price for its new vision of a low-carbon emission slow/low growth
> world economy. Don't give them any encouragement.
>
> Russell
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
> [mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Bond
> Sent: 11 July 2007 09:55 AM
> To: debate at vmc08.mweb.co.za:SA discussion list
> Subject: Re: [DEBATE] : A sneaky attack on prosperity
>
> Ok, fair enough... I read a bit too quickly.
>
> But the attack on economic growth as the primary logic of human activity
> is sound, at least for socialists, environmentalists, anti-racists,
> feminists, etc etc etc... Ben-Ami should join us.
>
> Russell Grinker wrote:
> > Ben-Ami responds to Patrick:
> >
> > Bond is of course right that you could give a long list of "negative
> > externalities" or other modifications to GDP. In my article I give
> pollution
> > (which, contrary to him, I do mention) as just one example.
> >
> > But I notice he fails to mention or understand the main point of the
> > article: the assault on GDP stats is in reality an attack on economic
> growth
> > itself. Despite appearances it's not really about the stats.
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: debate: SA discussion list <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:59:05 +0200
> Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Shannon Walsh on 'Uncomfortable collobarations' (movement research)
> Uncomfortable Collaborations:
> Contesting constructions of the poor in South Africa
> by Shannon Walsh
>
> Presented to the SANPAD Poverty Challenge Conference
> Durban
> 27 June 2007
>
> "Academics flourish out of the despondency of the destitute. … Even
> after letters of consultation and coverage in the media, not a single
> government official has come to tell us their position. There has been
> no water in our settlement for 40 years, no toilets. Before the 1994
> elections they were promised to us but they have still not come…. We
> have lost hope."
> -Sbu Xaba, community leader from Banana City shack settlement
>
> Sbu Xaba's frustration and despair is understandable. After the end of
> apartheid there was genuine hope that the lives of the poor would
> improve. This is what the incoming ANC government had promised. But as
> more than a decade passed, hope turned to frustration, despair and
> anger. Those most effected by these broken promises, the 'poors', have
> not been silent. In 2005 alone there were 6000 protests in South Africa.
> The growing dissatisfaction was evident on February 27th, 2006, as
> Abahlali BaseMjondolo (the shack dweller's movement) with community
> movements throughout Durban organized an "UnFreedom Day" event in
> protest of the dire conditions in which so many people must live. Their
> cry resounded around the country: "No Freedom for the Poor!" As their
> voices grow in force and volume many other actors clamor on board to
> decry the injustice of their situation and to explain, report and
> comment on their struggle. Xaba identified that "academics flourish out
> of the despondency of the destitute", and he should know, with the
> shacks of Banana City sitting insecurely on the grounds of the
> University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. The university has been attempting to
> 'relocate' and evict residents of Banana City, some of whom have been
> living there for over 70 years. While Xaba identifies the academics as
> part of the community he is both a part of and that he is up against,
> there is almost no reporting or investigation into this 'flourishing'
> class. How do the dynamics of power work within the relations between
> these various actors within community movements?
>
> To discuss this idea, I have divided the paper into two parts, and in
> them I argue for an unpacking of the construction of the Poor and a
> broader understanding of the ways agency and oppression occurs with the
> uncomfortable collaborations that are forged between various actors. In
> the first section, I unpack the identity of the 'oppressed' or the Poor
> as a singular subjectivity. I argue that we need to find ethnographic
> ways of speaking truth to power (Said 1993) while simultaneously
> speaking "truth to, and with, the disempowered" (Desai 2006). How can
> Left academics and activists work to insert understandings of power into
> research and praxis to contest stereotypes that increasingly bind us to
> a dialectical 'us versus them'? How also do we break apart "the facile
> axiom that the poor somehow are an embodiment of the truth and, as long
> as they organize democratically, the line of march they take will
> advance the cause of freedom?" (2006:7)
>
> To answer these questions, I will look at three interlinking elements.
> First, I am interested in how the Poor subject is often created through
> an evocation of a politics of compassion. This subject has a fixed,
> essentialised identity which is represented as an 'embodiment of the
> truth' and who activates political agency through voicing concerns and
> demands. Second, I unpack how those who are oppressed adopt and
> challenge this construction, and thirdly, I suggest new ways of thinking
> about subjectivity that account for the frictions and desires at play
> within the social field.
>
> Given this starting point, the second half of the paper will attempt to
> broaden an understanding of uncomfortable collaborations. Once we move
> away from organizing political meaning and mobilization around
> identity-based politics, it may be possible to enter into new terrains
> of action. I'm interested in exploring how uncomfortable collaborations
> can burst open geographic and identity-based alliances,
> deterritotialising groupings around commonalities of desire, struggle
> and event. These collaborations are not mini-utopias, but sites of
> friction in which diverse power struggles and contestation at the local,
> everyday level arise. I borrow from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's definition
> of friction as a state in which "heterogeneous and unequal encounters
> can lead to new arrangements of culture and power" (Tsing 2005:5).
> Frictions are always present within collaborations of struggle,
> including the presence of the left, NGOs, academics and others with
> 'interventionist' goals who form a critical, though often invisible,
> element of many community movements. At the same time I am arguing for a
> departure from essentialised identities in order to reveal deeper
> alliances than middle-class-activist meets poor
> black-revolutionary-subject meets Northern-feminist, and instead
> signaling lines of flight, new ways of seeing, and collaborations
> towards a "liberation of political desire" (Barchiesi, et al 2006:5).
>
> I reflect on my own fieldwork within social movements in South Africa to
> uncover how constructions of an essentialised identity of the Poor is
> maintained on one hand by elites, while on the other hand used
> pro-actively by those most directly oppressed to gain power and activate
> agency. At the same time, I am interested in how middle-class activists,
> academics, aid workers and, in this case, the Poor engage in sometimes
> damaging interactions and patronages that ignore the maintenance of
> power within the Left, and glorify the Poor black subject to the point
> of a kind of reverse discrimination or negrophilia.
>
> I explore these two terrains – the construction of the Poor within elite
> spaces and the friction of uncomfortable collaborations – to re-locate
> desire into the social field and how we struggle within it. I follow the
> urging of Deleuze and Guattari (1972) that desire is the location of
> socius innately linked to economic production, recording and
> consumption. How does desire propel movement within social struggles,
> and how does this operate within the habitus (Bourdieu) and life
> strategies of the everyday (Veriava 2006; DeCerteau 1994)? Through
> re-visioning social space, a truly anti-capitalist mode of inquiry and
> action might emerge—what Foucault saw as the possibility for a
> non-fascist life (Deleuze and Guattari 1972). This is a project that is
> self-reflexive while remaining perceptive to historical processes and
> lived experience: it is an ethnography-in-motion.
>
> Who are the Poor?
>
> Who are the 'multitude', the Poor, the 'wretched'? The historical
> construction of poverty is a relatively new phenomenon linked to the
> propagation of development discourse after World War II. Development
> discourse used systems of thought and action to construct the world into
> a grid of developed or underdeveloped people and nations deeply bound to
> a capitalist, neoliberal worldview. As Arturo Escobar (1995) has
> detailed extensively, development discourse used industrialization, free
> market economics and urbanization as the primary vehicles for 'poor'
> countries to arrive at the modernization and prosperity that is enjoyed
> by members of the First World. The living conditions of the First World
> are positioned as the ultimate ends of this development journey. The
> 'underdeveloped' world, in turn, has been constructed through the
> elaborate maintenance of discourse at political, economic and cultural
> levels (Escobar 1995). In this, poverty as a discursive field became
> defined in political-economic terms. The more extensive construction of
> poverty itself as a category of analysis and intervention only became
> hegemonic in the 1970s after Robert McNamara's vociferous promotion of
> the concept in the World Bank. "Prior to this poverty, viewed simply as
> the inevitable accompaniment of failure to develop economically, was
> rarely the explicit focus of development initiatives, or of academic
> study" (Green 2006:1110).
>
> By 2001, the economic model of poverty had been revised by the Bank, in
> part through the assimilation of civil society and activist positions
> such as Escobar's. Critical development debates made some in-roads
> towards challenging the concept of an economic solution for global
> inequality. Poverty, by the 2001 version of the Bank's analysis, is "a
> state of relative powerlessness and exclusion from decision-making
> processes" (World Bank 2001:31). While this stretches notions of poverty
> out of the exclusively economic realm, the continued construction of
> poverty as an object served "to homogenize attributes of poverty and the
> situation of those categorized as poor" (Green:1111). In the Bank's
> paradigm :
> Not only is poverty ascribed agency to impact on the lives of people who
> 'fall into' it. It is represented as an evolving entity that must be
> 'attacked' rather than as a consequence of social relations. [Green
> 2006:1112]
>
> Understanding the trajectory of development reveals the friction between
> this discourse and that of the Left 's. In attempting to counter some of
> the problematics of the Bank's style of engagement the Left has at times
> homogenized and decontextualized injustice and oppression through the
> maintenance of a virtuous Poor or Grassroots subjectivity that is
> 'pure', close to the ground, and sacrosanct.
>
> Problematic in different ways than development discourse, ultimately
> this view presents stagnant, tired binaries that miss the emergence of
> new political subjectivities and possibilities, limiting creativity and
> ingenuity, but also maintaining the very power differential it is meant
> to destroy. Bertrand Russell (1984) traces the origins of the idea of a
> 'superior virtue of the oppressed' to a certain kind of paternalistic
> ideology developed by the Left during the French Revolution, remaining
> there ever since. The adulation for the oppressed, he argues, usually
> arrives via a hegemonic actor, one who may well be part of the
> subjugation of the very 'oppressed' he so admires.
>
> The fixing of the virtue of the oppressed becomes patronizing to the
> point of domination. If we truly hope to investigate and create
> oppositions to the encroachment of neoliberalism, the Left might start
> by examining the ideologies and discourses already present, within and
> without, that limit those possibilities. Russell is scathing in his
> analysis of how idealizing the oppressed is useful to the hegemonic
> classes, both to assuage guilt, but also to refuse the oppressed real
> power since it is their very subjection that makes them virtuous. Yet
> when power is finally equalized "it becomes apparent to everybody that
> all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense, and that it was quite
> unnecessary as a basis for the claim to equality" (Russell 1984).
>
> While the Left banters around the virtue of the oppressed, some of these
> discourses have also enveloped the imaginations and strategies of the
> oppressed, though in a much different way. Those who are materially
> oppressed are adopting and co-opting the identities they are given, both
> by the Left and by the state, to search out and enact new agencies,
> asserting membership within various constructions (from Poor, to HIV+
> etc.) in attempts to mobilize resources, status, health care and other
> services, enacting what some have called a therapeutic citizenship
> (Ngyuen 2004). In this case, perhaps even virtue can be set alight in
> the service of social and material leverage. This is one encounter of
> the friction within what I call uncomfortable collaborations.
>
> Leaving out the messy bits
>
> In asking who the Poor are, we must also ask who are the elites, the
> middle-class activists and Left academics that are a primary audience
> for this paper. While the activists I reflect on here, and consider
> myself a part of, contribute significantly to the maintenance and
> sustenance of many community movements at various economic, political
> and social levels, we often escape internal or external scrutiny. This
> may be due to the fact that we are the same people who are narrating
> community movements to the public. This group tends to write the
> academic papers, books and news reports that define movements, yet it is
> rare that they situate themselves within its narratives or work with
> those movements on a daily basis. While applauding the many
> contributions that City People bring to community struggles, Ashwin
> Desai laments how many also bring "infectious political diseases" based
> on their particular histories and political desires which seep into
> social movements (Desai 2006). I agree with Desai that it is
> disingenuous to exclude the interactions and interrelationships between
> these players that come to mark almost every social movement in South
> Africa.
>
> It is this group of elites that should be seen as a counterfoil for my
> interrogations of Poor subjectivities. I take up Laura Nader's warning
> that "everything you say against [the poor and powerless] will be used
> against them" to examine how this operates at the local level and how we
> might begin to unpack the ways we interact, write, work and think about
> poverty and the Poor (Farmer 2003:26). Interrogating those
> relationships, with an eye to improving our ability to work together
> more productively and equitably, will likely entail an encounter with
> some messy bits that we often like to ignore.
>
> An example of narrating out the messy bits is illustrated in an
> experience I recount below. The discomfort and embarrassment of being
> lauded with unwanted status within disadvantaged communities based on
> class and racial hegemonies, while not uncommon, is often excluded from
> reports about community movements where class, gender and race
> differentials exist. How do we deal with these uncomfortable moments as
> sites of friction and struggle? These experiences, and the realities
> they reveal, are difficult to contend with, much less to write about.
>
> After working for a number of months in Durban I was heading back to
> Canada. At the last minute I was invited to a farewell party, thrown for
> two other activists and myself whom had all been working in the
> community. A beautiful spread was prepared for us in one of the shack
> settlements, a tent rented, chairs set up, a video projector organized,
> and food and drink procured. It was a beautiful gathering of around a
> hundred people. The City People were seated at a large table at the
> front of the tent. Each community leader came forward during the
> ceremony to speak illustriously on our behalf, praising each of us in
> turn. Gifts were given. It was pointed out that in Zulu culture praise
> is not normally bestowed on the living, and we should be duly honored to
> receive such praise in our lifetimes.
>
> During the ceremony a million thoughts ran through my head. Of course,
> it was deeply touching to be thanked in such a heartfelt way, to be
> given so much from those who have so little, and it could be said that
> there were few elites who had ventured into the jondolos (shacks) and
> who actively supported the struggles of the people there, but still, it
> was an uncomfortable encounter. Others in the community worked so hard,
> thanklessly. Why was I being honored? Of course in part it was because
> of the work I had done with them, but it was at least also in part
> garnered from my whiteness and foreignness. My discomfort was visceral,
> even though I was touched by the kindness and sincerity of my hosts. An
> uneven balance had been struck between us that this moment laid bare,
> and no matter what I might do, I would always be seen as an outsider in
> this way, always praised more than a black woman who came from the
> shacks who did more work under worse conditions. Not to mention the
> immeasurable things I was gaining from my interactions with these
> communities, not the least of which might be first-hand perspectives
> that would feed into my own academic writing, as they are right now. How
> could I challenge this praise, while also not offending my hosts? I
> tried to say something to this effect when asked to speak but it was
> ineffective.
>
> The fact that I found it difficult to adequately challenge this moment
> is an important part of the story. It was only with those few
> individuals who lived in the shacks that I had developed deep and honest
> relationships with – that I could argue with, laugh with and challenge –
> that a partial unveiling of these binaries could occur. With those whom
> I shared a similar trajectory of political desire. The friction in this
> encounter reveals why these collaborations are uncomfortable. Clearly
> elites or middle-class activists are often not seen as equals in poor
> communities in which they work. Our farce of solidarity, if it does not
> factor in the power dynamics at play, suits our own desire to be seen as
> righteous, good, well-meaning, guilt-less. Simultaneously, our silence
> around these tensions and inequalities factors out our own desires; the
> how and why we come to these spaces. I agree with Desai that to truly
> move forward we must recognize how we have been shaped and influenced by
> our interactions with each other, and "to blink or fixate on our own
> supposed 'purity' right now will be tragic" (Desai 2006:12). By
> recognizing these interactions and frictions we can begin to unravel the
> uncomfortable collaborations in action.
>
> These collaborations are not only theoretical, but arise because of the
> material conditions that dominate the realities of people's lives and
> which cannot be ideologically swept under the carpet. Theory is too
> often constructed out of the limbs and lives out of the most oppressed.
>
> Uncomfortable Collaborations
>
> To give a cursory look at one site in which uncomfortable collaborations
> are being created I turn to Kennedy Road, a shack settlement I've worked
> in (and briefly lived in) that is the centre of the Abahlali
> baseMjondolo (shack dweller's movement). Kennedy Road is a shack
> settlement comprising of approximately 7,000 residents situated in Clare
> Estate, Durban. The community movement Abahlali baseMjondolo formed
> there in November 2005 after a tire-burning road blockade to protest
> "the sale, to a local industrialist, of a piece of nearby land long
> promised by the local municipal councillor to shack dwellers for
> housing" (Abahlali 2006). This genesis narrative is the one primarily
> given by university-based academics that have been involved in the
> movement since early in its inception, weaned from community members
> through interviews and first-hand experience (Bryant 2006; Pithouse 2005).
>
> Abahlali have been the source of a great deal of academic and activist
> writing since this beginning, cropping up in the New York Times, the
> Mail and Guardian, the Economist, Isolezwe (isiZulu paper), and almost
> all of the other South African papers including most radio and
> television stations in the country. The extensive writing on the
> movement has quickly turned it into a cause célèbre within the South
> African Left gaining the movement significant notice by city officials
> (as well as sometimes negative repercussions of this publicity from
> employers).
>
> I focus on this site in particular to draw attention to why an
> investigation into the specificities of friction and uncomfortable
> collaboration as encounters of power are so critical. A sweeping
> valorization of the inherent truth in the isolated and fragmented
> identities of the Poor is not only misleading, but it is potentially
> damaging to community movements. A theoretical binary ignores forces of
> power and contestation, both within these sites and across them in their
> varied and contradictory forms, and instead creates a 'holy good' in
> opposition to a 'rotten evil', which infiltrates into the way struggles
> are waged and politics enacted.
>
> Within the context of globalization and the multiple forces,
> trajectories and power struggles operating at various scales, this kind
> of simplistic view of encounters has little hold. Further, as James
> Ferguson contends, the process of globalization, for Africa at least, is
> not one of 'flows of capital' but one of disconnection and separation,
> of capital hopping, of enclaves, borders, divisions and alternative
> geographies. Africa may be presenting us with an example of what the
> future may look like: pockets of wealth, hierarchies of power, spatially
> linked through capital and often within volatile, unstable states set
> against tracts of poverty, where large NGOs, corporations and
> 'grassroots' actors overlap and assume functions of the state,
> horizontally creating new intersections of power. We must trash notions
> of what he calls vertical topographies of power, which juxtapose state,
> civil society and other players in a complex hierarchy, to look more
> closely at modes of operating within social movements and state
> structures that overlap, re-inscribe and reconfigure relationships of
> power and governance.
>
> Through problematizing these vertical topographies of power we can
> investigate and contribute to actualizing points of departure towards a
> radical politics, while also being able to better see what is actually
> happening within and across uncomfortable collaborations. Within these
> intersections the complexities that make static, one-dimensional
> identity politics useless in understanding global and local convergences
> of power. As Anna Tsing points out, "the effects of encounters across
> difference can be compromising or empowering. Friction is not a synonym
> for resistance. Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction"
> (Tsing:6).
>
> Sites of friction
>
> We have seen and we have noted that some of the academics, who can not
> be mentioned, have begun to play a major role. So comrades, we believe
> that the civil society academics, intellectuals, have a role to play
> within Abahlali. The very same people will make us very strong, because
> we may be strong in toyi-toying but not strong in strategizing, so our
> cleverness is that; that we provide a platform for the clever people to
> utilize.
> -S'bu Zikode, elected president of Abahlali BaseMjondolo, 2006
>
> I highlight a handful of actors in the Abahlali BaseMjondolo (ABM) story
> to give a glimpse of its (often neglected) complexity. This narration is
> built around actors, rather than events or spaces, as an alternate way
> to see the frictions of power and the forces of different agents that
> influence the movement's development.
>
> The sheer number of actors in the telling of this story is itself
> significant, even given the fact that this narration excludes the
> historical forces of apartheid, and its meaning upon the spaces and
> geographies upon which these actors interact. All these encounters,
> dynamics, power struggles and contestations – all these frictions – have
> a great deal to teach us about how gains are won and lost, how power is
> wielded and withheld. My point is not that we must always tell the whole
> story, but that it is important not to position ABM members as Poor
> subjects apart from the apparatus of power that surrounds them and
> within which they engage, challenge, contest and collaborate. To
> construct the singularity of the experience of any one of its members
> without reference to the multiplicity of experiences of power on various
> scales and geographies – in short to create a 'pure' Poor subject out of
> this dynamic mix of forces would be a massive oversight. So who are the
> players at work in this particular space?
>
> If we trace the movement's history back only a decade the Urban
> Foundation NGO stands out as a significant precursor to the development
> of ABM. The Urban Foundation built the community hall and a few other
> amenities in the settlement soon after the ANC came to power. The
> significance of the community hall can't be underestimated. It was
> crucial in the formation of a movement at Kennedy Road, providing
> meeting space, an office and a crèche. Other NGOs come in and out of the
> lives of many of the organizers of ABM as they 'hunt' for the Poor as
> recipients of their programs and projects. Hope World Wide is one such
> NGO that impacts and interacts with residents. As Zandile writes,
>
> I'm working as a support group co-ordinator for Clare Estate Drop-In
> Centre working in collaboration with Hope World Wide. The support group
> is for the infected and affected. We are making beadwork, crocheting and
> I'm giving Peer Education to the members. We are staring from 10 a.m.
> every day. The lunch is at 13h and provided by Hope. The Clare Estate
> Drop In Centre is buying the beadwork material. The time of departure is
> 15h. Hope World Wide is giving food parcels to the support group
> members. It is very interesting to be in this support group. [Zandile 2006]
>
> Zandile's dedication as a volunteer with these groups for years
> eventually paid off when she got a paid job doing research on HIV and
> AIDS. Hope World Wide might or might not be aware of Zandile's role as
> an activist within ABM. A progressive NGO, the Church Land Program, has
> also supported ABM's work on a day-to-day level as have a handful of
> others. Within the category of NGOs we might also include the various
> organizations that people within the settlement use to secure their
> health and economic well-being in the absence of state services. Here
> I'm thinking of places like AIDS clinics and volunteer organizations
> that might be attractive in providing work experience, meals,
> transportation money and something to do.
>
> Recently ABM have been vocally critical of what they see as the
> co-option of their struggle by NGOs, though simultaneously working with
> other NGOs they see as being in solidarity with their cause (such as
> COHRE, the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), and Khanya College).
> Some activists publicly wonder if Abahlali's critique of NGOs "is
> dependent on the contingent value of NGOs to the specific interests of
> the ABM" (Naidoo 2006). The category of "NGO" itself is too wide and far
> ranging to be ultimately useful for in-depth analysis (Fisher 1997), but
> even given the varied nature of these institutions and their mandates on
> both ends of the political spectrum, their importance can't be
> understated. The fact that ABM themselves categorize NGOs differently
> based on the kind of international, local or supportive work they are
> doing means the way they interact with them is also extremely varied.
>
> NGOs are just one of the various actors that effects and intersects with
> ABM as a movement. The table below attempts to sketch a picture in broad
> strokes of some of the various actors at play around this one movement.
> Frictions and collaborative relationships at work around Abahlali
> BaseMjondolo (ABM)
>
>
> Actors Impacts, Sites and Scales
> Urban Activists Providing resources to hold city-wide meetings,
> arranging transportation, raising funds for food and drinks, driving
> cars and providing other support for emergencies such as fires or
> illnesses, giving legal advice and support, raising money for events and
> rallies, doing critical outreach to press including writing articles,
> press releases etc.
> Academics In Durban academics and urban activists often overlap. Someone
> who appears to be part of the movement as a participant might suddenly
> come out with an academic paper (as I am doing here). As in many other
> As in many other countries in the South, prominent international radical
> intellectuals have also made trips to Kennedy Road, such as Naomi Klein
> and Arundhati Roy. There are also university-based academics who write
> about the movement, or who invite members of ABM to speak on panels or
> at events who were not present for the daily struggles, encounters, or
> crises.
> NGOs As discussed above, NGOs and CBOs have had, and continue to have, a
> great deal of interaction with the movement itself and its membership,
> both in ways that are celebrated and contested.
> The State
> Executive Local area councilors, pivotal to the demands for land and
> housing and the focus of much campaigning; the police, often racist and
> classist, who treat members of the movement as though they were animals,
> beat and arrest them and try to stop them from mobilizing marches;
> Judicial The judges at the municipal level (who deal with charges levied
> against members during protests and actions) and at the High Court level
> (who hear cases seeking interdict for evictions, demolitions, freedom to
> protest, etc) as well as advocates and attorneys, acting on behalf of
> the state and those sympathetic to the cause.
> Legislative From Thabo Mbeki and a neoliberal ANC, to city mayor Obed
> Mlaba and city manager Mike Sutcliff, both key players in creating
> legislation around 'slum clearance' projects and their 'plans for the
> poor';
> Minister of Housing, Mike Mabuyakhulu, recently reported to the Sunday
> Tribune that new legislation would give municipalities powers to deal
> with the "scourge of land invasion" and "stop the proliferation of slums".
> Community movements i.e. South Durban Community Environmental Alliance
> (SDCEA) or the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) who have overlapping and
> conflicting interests and experiences but who often join in alliances of
> solidarity with each others' struggles.
> Petty capitalists Small and medium scale capitalists, who depend on the
> cheap labour of residents of the settlements including domestic workers,
> construction workers and security guards.
> Land owners & Big capital i.e. Moreland, a wealthy company who own land
> the shack dwellers could move to. Much of the sugar farmland owned by
> Moreland was gained through colonial conquest and was the site of
> indentured labour during apartheid. The 'Moreland project', a promise of
> land for new houses, has been announced but the city has given no
> details to the shack residents about the specific plan for what will
> happen with that land, who will be able to move there, or when.
> Local home owners Middle-class Indian home-owners in Clare Estate, some
> of whom are internationally known environmental activists for their
> fight to try and shut down the land fill site, would like to see the
> destruction of the shack settlement, and come into conflict with shack
> dwellers on occasion.
> Shack dwellers outside the movement Those, for example, who hold ANC
> alliances they feel are betrayed by marching on the councilors. Some of
> these tensions occasionally erupt in heated confrontations. While there
> are a number of women active in Abahlali, women who are partners or care
> givers for members of Abahlali may also be counted in this category,
> often not seen or heard from in the public space of the movement as they
> maintain life-worlds at home.
> Geographic spaces Rural spaces still play a major part in the imaginary
> and real spaces of people living in shacks, perhaps giving a sense of
> land 'out there' that makes the absence of land in the city more
> palatable. In Kennedy Road, another space-as-character is the Bisara
> Land fill site, a large municipal dump beside the Kennedy Road
> settlement, which provides building materials and other useful scraps
> for residents, as well as a large number of jobs. Bisara land fill is
> also the site of a World Bank / UN project to turn methane into gas
> which had promised shack residents jobs (which appears to have been a lie).
> IFIs International Actors include most insidiously the World Bank
> (mentioned above); the World Cup 2010 organizers and planners who will
> 'clear the slums' by 2010; the IMF and the effects of its policies on
> the whole of South Africa, and others.
>
> This surface analysis of the characters in this struggle, while far from
> exhaustive, gives some indication of the multiple sites of friction and
> tension operating around the ABM.
> It is interesting that the majority of these figures, most significantly
> the activist/academic class, do not usually appear in any of the writing
> about the movement. References to certain actors: (the police, the City,
> the councilors, the Minister of Housing, the middle-class Indian
> neighbours, Moreland) do make their way into the writing about the
> movement, while others (the urban activists, academics, (most) NGOs,
> residents not part of the movement, rural families, and capitalists) are
> not mentioned. This is a certain kind of storytelling, to be sure. Of
> course every story has a narrator and every story must leave some things
> out in lieu of others.
>
> Yet the importance of activist academics is not lost on the leadership
> of the movement as evidenced in the quote from S'bu Zikode, the elected
> president of ABM, at the beginning of this section. Recently though,
> debate has grown vociferous around the role of middle-class activists in
> community movements. While the ABM has spoken out angrily about the loss
> of some academic activists and resources to their movement due to
> shuffling at a university institution (the Centre for Civil Society),
> others have decried what they see as "the tragic manner in which the ABM
> has become a pawn in the hands of certain 'academic activists' whose
> actions - in academic spaces - have resulted in isolation for them as
> individuals" (Naidoo 2006) and who have hid behind the ABM to wage their
> own battles for institutional space.
>
> Social Movements Indaba
>
> A recent explosion around some of these frictions happened at the Social
> Movements Indaba (SMI) held in Durban in December 2006. The AMB, after
> having been part of the organizing team leading up to the SMI for many
> months, boycotted the event and then disrupted it by storming the
> meeting and holding the floor for three-hours to voice their concerns
> and criticisms of the event, NGOs, academics as well as their material
> concerns about land and housing. The SMI was a meeting of over 30
> community movements, NGOs, middle-class activists and academics meant to
> build solidarity between movements at a national level in South Africa.
>
> Friction here happened at multiple, almost mind-boggling, levels.
> Middle-class activists and NGOs were criticized by the ABM for writing
> about the movement without having a direct relationship with the ABM
> itself. They also criticized the CCS for what they saw as a wrongful
> dismissal of four academics who had been funneling CCS resources into
> the movement. Sides were taken. Many members of community movements had
> tirelessly worked to put together the SMI and were deeply offended by
> the co-opting of their space by what they saw as a chauvinist flaunting
> over power by ABM. They were also dismayed by issues raised by the ABM
> around what appeared to revolve around internal tiffs with an academic
> institution (the CCS) which was not directly linked to the SMI meeting.
> Other activists smelled a rat, and opted that ABM was being 'used' by
> these same disgruntled academics to wage battles on their behalf.
>
> At the same time as the SMI meeting was underway, ABM was participating
> in a weekend workshop on housing held by COHRE, an NGO, on housing
> issues. There was evidently confusion from ABM on what the SMI was,
> based on the fact that they made demands meant for government officials
> around land and housing to the SMI, while in fact the SMI was a
> collection of comrades and fellow community movements from across the
> country, not government officials. This embarrassing mistake further
> emphasized a sense that the demarcations between various roles,
> solidarities and antagonisms are in no way clear.
>
> Activists quickly came out vocally around the occupation of the SMI and
> began to articulate their own understandings of the frictions at work in
> community struggle. Prishani Naidoo, an activist who has worked
> extensively with the Anti-Privitization Forum (APF) in Johannesburg,
> wrote the following on a national activist message board in relation to
> the SMI debate,
>
> I have never presumed to 'speak on behalf' of those who know the
> material conditions being fought better than I do, but I have not
> surrendered my own voice either (a voice that is itself a product of
> personal and collective struggle). While I have certainly listened and
> been directed in struggle by those directly affected, I have also shared
> with them my own ideas and experiences, and often disagreed with them
> about strategies and tactics. This I have done as an equal in a
> community of people in struggle, but recognising that I do not
> participate in this particular struggle from the same position.
>
> Naidoo criticized other activists (such as Anna Weekes to whom her
> retort was directed) who valorize the 'authentic' voice of the Poor and
> who act as 'self-appointed guardians' of that voice. Internal fighting
> amongst the academic / activist left ensued, finding some vent in the
> most widely circulated weekly paper in South Africa, the Mail & Guardian.
>
> While criticizing NGOs and some academics they feel are not sympathetic,
> ABM are also deeply involved with 'chosen' academics and NGOs. A kind of
> black-and-white politics is enacted – you are with us or against us –
> that has more to do with favoring some people over other people than an
> ideological fall out with institutions and organizations. Some of the
> favored academics position themselves as 'support workers' for ABM
> rather than visible allies in the struggle. This curious positioning is
> an attempt, they say, to allow 'grassroots movements' to lead
> themselves, and therefore they "perform a balancing act of sorts,
> offering their assistance without taking over the movement."(Harris:25)
> Yet, as I am arguing here, uncomfortable collaborations and frictions
> are always at work, whether middle-class activists have the best
> intentions to remain 'pure' or not.
>
> This can be evidenced at a discursive level. Early on in ABM's struggle
> the main issues were identified as land and housing. Recently, gaining
> 'voice' has become a larger preoccupation, due in part perhaps because
> the core cadre of activists have seen a fair amount of media coverage
> garnered in part by the influence of academics and middle-class
> activists using media savvy and connections.
>
> As Harris writes, "when asked what [Abahlali's] biggest accomplishment
> as a movement has been, most members did not hesitate to answer that it
> was winning the right to speak for themselves" (Harris:25) The genealogy
> of this conceptual shift would be necessary to trace in detail, but even
> at a surface reading it can be seen as an example of how frictions
> between NGO/academic discourse and this particular social movement have
> played out. For example Richard Pithouse, one of the most prominent
> commentators and an 'honorary' member and organizer with Abahlali
> recently described "Abahlali's founding protest not as a service
> delivery protest, but as a bid to be heard, to be given a voice…Abahlali
> don't want to be represented by elites. They want to have their own
> voice. They want a say in government." (Harris:25)
>
> Yet in early accounts of Abahlali's mandates, the idea of 'voice' was
> rarely mentioned. In transcribed interviews land, housing and the
> frustration of waiting too long for service delivery were consistently
> given as the reason the communities had mobilized (Bryant 2005; Purcell
> 2006). There has been an evident evolution of how the movement is
> conceptualized internally, which has in no small part been effected by
> the way ABM has intersected with other activists, the city, the law, and
> other factions.
>
> It is interesting that while so much has been made of 'voice', a truly
> amazing amount of discourse has emerged in recent interviews and writing
> in which Abahlali members articulate their 'democratic' role to speak
> for those who have no voice (Harris 2006:25). In one turn ABM claim that
> the most central gain of their movement has been to be able to 'speak
> for themselves', while at the same time, several activists feel that
> though they do not have the resources to mobilize beyond Durban,
> "Abahlali is already a national movement" that speaks on behalf of all
> shack dwellers (Harris 2006:40). While a key slogan is "speak to us not
> for us", in a short period of time they have begun articulate a right to
> speak on behalf of other poor people living in shacks. I would argue
> this is in part due to the unchallenged role of power within the various
> trajectories of the movement. The contradiction between 'speaking for
> themselves' and 'speaking on behalf of other poor people', as long as it
> is done by poor people themselves, is uncritically accepted by the Left
> and those writing about the movement. The trickling in of the "Speaking
> for Ourselves" discourse and its embrace to such a degree that now other
> Poors are now being spoken for is a very curious example of friction at
> work. It is perhaps no wonder that an author of the World Bank's 2001
> "Voices of the Poor" report has been one of the key academic activists
> working with ABM. Even the best liberal intentions of supporting "the
> poor to organize for themselves" often ignores the intersections, power
> plays and frictions that emerge, even within the disempowered.
>
> This cursory synopsis of frictions at work in spaces of supposed
> solidarity points to the need to take seriously an analysis of struggle
> and of subjective positioning that includes how antagonisms and
> uncomfortable collaborations operate. It also highlights how these
> uncomfortable collaborations can disrupt the possibility of imagining
> new modes of struggle necessary to confront neoliberalism.
>
> Towards the Broken (or Unfixing the Fixed)
>
> While the World Bank creates a homogenous Poor subject, the Left at
> times also envisions an oppressed agent that is sacrosanct in its
> wretchedness. Ultimately this creates a politics of piety that relies on
> the benevolence of the big-hearted who hear the lamentful cries of the
> Poor and spring into action to 'help'. A politics of piety has no
> recourse to power for the disempowered, and sets up a sticky terrain
> difficult to exit from. Miriam Ticktin (2006) has shown how dangerous,
> and binding, this style of politics can be. She traces how a politics of
> compassion abstracts political reality, reducing claims for justice to
> that of 'bare life'. The politics of compassion, while being usefully
> exploited for claims of residency and citizenship by migrants in France,
> is ultimately deeply problematic in the way it conflates social and
> economic well-being with biological illness or health. The move away
> from a discussion of rights and justice to humanitarianism as exception
> that relies on the compassion of individuals, NGOs and the state creates
> an even more arbitrary, unfair system of power.
>
> The Northern imposition of a therapeutic model of self-improvement
> through institutions, aid workers and humanitarian organizations, also
> feeds into a politics of compassion in which populations are encouraged
> to lower their expectations and aspirations (Pupavac 2004). Material
> complaints are de-politicized as onus is placed on the individual and
> community to undergo emotional and psychological development in order to
> improve their lives. This politics of piety has no room within social
> movements that seek to address material grievances. The slogan
> "Solidarity Not Charity!" mobilized frequently by the
> community-initiated Common Ground Collective is an apt reminder of the
> trouble with a charity model.
>
> Refiguring political understandings of justice and equality towards a
> therapeutic and compassion-based model loses sight of the concrete
> everyday economic and structural needs of the various groups under
> investigation (refugees, migrants, sans-papiers, post-war populations
> and the Poor). They disrupt and contest discourses of empowerment and
> intervention that ironically deny agency to those already lacking
> political power. At the same time they point out how these subjects
> still activate political action even within this degraded terrain. In
> addition, the valorization of the Poor as the 'embodiment of Truth'
> creates a category of people (the oppressed) that are deemed unworthy of
> honest debate, discussion and engagement through placing them on a
> pedestal of wretchedness.
>
> Can we learn to conceive, theoretically and politically, of a
> 'grassroots' that would be not local, communal, and authentic, but
> worldy, well connected, and opportunistic? Are we ready for social
> movements that fight not 'from below' but 'across', using their 'foreign
> policy' to fight struggles not against 'the state' but against that
> hydra-headed transnational apparatus of banks, international agencies,
> and market institutions through with contemporary capitalist domination
> functions? [Ferguson 2006:107]
>
> A re-examination of constructions of the Poor is not just a discursive
> exercise but is also a reassessment of the political situation in Africa
> beyond simplistic dynamics of the state versus civil society. This
> assessment should take seriously the political processes that are
> occurring within grassroots social movements as legitimate political
> alternatives and rethinking "received ideas of 'community', 'grassroots'
> and 'the local', laden as they are with nostalgia and the aura of a
> 'grounded' authenticity" (Ferguson 2006).
>
> To do this, we need to reach beyond two-dimensional identity politics
> that traps each actor in a fixed position on a grid of power and
> meaning. Rather we must delve into the friction and lines of flight that
> reveal how power is shifting in multiple, overlapping directions,
> creating new alternatives and possibilities. The uncomfortable
> collaborations between Left and community movements in South Africa are
> a prime space to grapple with this friction.
>
> By valorizing the very condition of being-Poor, the poor themselves are
> immobilized. Their fight against poverty conflicts with the only way
> they are mobilized to access power: through valorizing their bare life
> (Agamben 2005). The Poor are thrust between a rock and a hard place. To
> have legitimacy, gain power and voice within spaces of the Left, NGO
> programs, workshops, and international programs, means to stake a claim
> on an identity as the virtuous Poor, yet to be Poor means to have no
> power. Ultimately, this faulty, circular reasoning leads to a conclusion
> that "if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people
> virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their
> virtue" (Russell 1984). Rather than this colonial and patronizing view
> of struggle and those who are fighting against subjugation, we should
> rather follow Ferguson's urgings to,
>
> rethink our ideas of popular struggle and to prepare ourselves to learn
> from Third World transnational 'hackers' with a sense of media politics,
> as well as a sense of humor – and from movements that offer us no a pure
> and centered subject of resistance but, like the sub-commander [posing
> for a Benetton ad], a quite different figure: masked, ambivalent,
> impure, and canny. [Ferguson 2006:108]
>
> To insist upon a sacred space of oppression as the only one from which
> struggle can occur means that there is no genuine political will towards
> liberation. If our struggle is broader than winning small concessions
> here and there to improve material conditions within capitalism, we must
> jettison a mode of struggle that is so politically short-sighted.
>
> Rethinking Subjectivity
>
> To understand what we are leaving out in a static view of identity, we
> must explore more fully what new models of subjectivity might look like.
> This is perhaps what Heinrich Böhmke was recommending when he wrote that
> "the notion of 'subjectivity' is [a theoretical] tool…we all start
> grappling with. Whatever the case, a radical rethinking of actually
> existing social-movements as the agent, vehicle, promise and pretence of
> revolutionary struggle in South Africa is called for" (Böhmke 64:2006).
>
> In an attempt to honestly evaluate the potential of new subjectivities I
> want to draw on a few examples from my own fieldwork, as well as drawing
> on proposals for understandings agency advanced by contemporary
> anthropologists.
>
> Over a number of years I have been doing research with a group of young
> people around HIV prevention in Khayelitsha and Atlantis, South Africa.
> At the point that I describe, we had been working together for five
> years. I had watched these young people grow into adults, leave high
> school and enter the world of jobs, university and for some, poverty. As
> my work with them deepened I began to notice how they had activated
> their involvement in our project over the years as well as their own
> status (as HIV+, as peer educators, and activists) to make gains and
> secure footing for their own social, economic and physical well-being.
> In a sense they mobilized a therapeutic citizenship as a part of their
> identities (Nguyen 2005). There is a growing body of work in
> anthropology that examines biological and therapeutic citizenship as a
> site for political agency across global terrains (Petryna 2002; Nguyen
> 2005; Ong 2006). Vinh-Kim Nguyen argues that the international AIDS
> industry functions in a dialectic with local political bargaining to
> create therapeutic citizens, who use their health status to mobilize
> resources and stake claims for treatment and care within global moral
> economies in which treatment is very inaccessible. He documents the
> irresponsibility of the global AIDS industry in adequately dealing with
> the pandemic, in fact even worsening the situation through ill-conceived
> projects, yet opening a space for therapeutic citizenship, in which what
> is at stake is life itself, to create political movement that itself has
> become a force within biopolitics and 'bio-capital'.
>
> In our study, one participant used status gained from being a published
> author within the project as a means of activating status in her
> community as a go-to person for advice, care and support; a young man
> used various elements of his participation within the project to find
> ways to travel abroad, speak on panels and at conferences and get paid
> work as an educator; another young woman publicized her HIV status,
> activating her potential to get treatment within health networks she
> might not otherwise have accessed; yet another young woman used her
> experiences to gain some notoriety in her community (appearing on the
> radio for example) which eventually helped her find a job as a social
> worker with young sex workers in her community. There are many other
> examples that show how collaborations with an HIV prevention project
> were transformed, utilized and mobilized to access material and
> psychological gains, however small. In this case, the association with
> the virus, not only their particular status, and their active engagement
> as young people became a means to find alternative strategies of the
> everyday, at least for a while. Five years after our first encounters,
> they told new, surprising narratives around how participation in the
> project influenced their practical lives in terms of trips, jobs, school
> opportunities and other social and economic benefits.
>
> Some ways of naming AIDS in isiZulu and Xhosa, for example, can also
> denote a sense of agency within a biological claim. Ufuna ukuba famous,
> (she wants to be famous) or Ufuna imali kahulumeni (he wants money from
> the government) can both be used to describe someone with HIV or AIDS
> (Dowling 2006). While these expressions have negative connotations, they
> also indicate the possibility of status and economic gain. While I am
> not implying that people are abusing or misusing the system, I am trying
> to draw attention to the fact that people are negotiating a system that
> is for the most part not providing for them. They are active in this
> negotiation, finding loop-holes here, potential benefits there, in a
> context where very little opportunity is available to them. In this way,
> we can see subjectivities that are active, desiring and mobile.
> Biological citizens and therapeutic citizens both challenge
> neoliberalism through an agency that is continually shifting between
> identities, operating in and through joints of power and state structures.
>
> While biological status might be mobilized in the face of grim realities
> to gain some compensation or recognition from the state, it could also
> be the groundwork new strategies of engaging with one another and with
> 'oppression', ultimately leading to ways out of the dangerous lifestyles
> that young people in disadvantaged communities can find themselves
> involved in. In this story written Thembi, a young man in our research
> group, describes how his life is transformed by his friend's HIV
> disclosure.
> I grew up in the township called Gugulethu in the 1980s. That time was
> during the Apartheid era, and there was a lot of criminal activity in my
> life. We used to vandalize property, hit trucks, do highjackings. The
> police sometimes chased us. We used to carry tools to defend ourselves.
> I've done these things and played my role with gangsters. I didn't stop
> my criminal activities when we moved away from Gugs and went to
> Khayelitsha.
> Then something happened to change my life completely. My best friend
> told me that she was HIV positive. I didn't believe her at first,
> because we used to joke around a lot of time, doing crazy stuff
> together. We were both in school. We spent our time studying, having
> fun, sharing ideas. We always joked a lot and made up stories, so it
> took me a whole year to believe her. But it was difficult for her to
> cope, and even though at that time I knew nothing about HIV and AIDS the
> one thing I knew was to give her the support she needed.
> It was a time of change, and something changed about me. She made me
> understand life and about HIV and AIDS, and other issues. I quit a lot
> of things. I took a big step in my life and quit being in a gang. She
> and I started an Action Committee at school. The whole school supported
> us. We did a lot of campaigning at school and around using condoms,
> awareness about HIV and AIDS.
> Since that day I never looked back again. I'm still supporting her all
> the way through, giving her love, care, understanding, openness,
> acceptance. I dream of making this world a better place for all of us,
> one in which we have peace, respect, and openness about our health
> conditions so that we can save a lot of people living with HIV and AIDS
> by providing them with treatment and prevention earlier. [Schuster 2003: 63]
>
> In Thembi's story his enacted agency fed into the HIV prevention
> programs around him. His life experience and his desire motivated his
> engagement and his transformation. In this space he enacts various
> levels of agency, from becoming a peer educator, to a campaigner, and a
> support worker for his friend. From his own subject-position he
> interacted with systems of organizations, school and government around
> him through lines opened up through his care and desire for a friend. At
> the same time as valuing the ways these lines open up, it should not be
> seen in the conservative and increasingly mainstream notion of a
> grassroots agency that presents activism as an interior transformation
> aimed at changing behaviours and lifestyles. Desire is not pure.
>
> Conclusion
>
> I've provided these examples as points of entry into alternative visions
> of identity, subjectivity and community. Ultimately, I suggest not a
> return to a universalizing humanism where power relations are obscured,
> nor an identity politics on which stakes are claimed by subject
> positions in a vertical topography of power, but something beyond both
> where we can reconstruct agencies on various intersecting and
> conflicting scales, activating in some spaces what is oppressive in
> others, and finally, mobilizing that which bursts forth from desire as
> much as from materiality.
>
> Materialist understandings of identity miss the intricacies of how one
> exists in the world, the ontological realities that are linked to
> oppression, power, desire and inequality. Materiality has a hand in
> creating subjectivities, but to accept that those subjectivities are not
> derived from other forces as well confines us in a capitalist conception
> of the Poor. We know this not to be the case from our lived experiences,
> personal connections and intimate relationships within and between
> class, race and gendered identities. Perhaps what we need to realize is
> that all knowledge born out of 'uncomfortable collaborations' is
> situational and linked to a specific context in dialogue, where any
> number of subjectivities (such as the subaltern and the academic)
> exchange their partiality. In the end, knowledge will be produced by
> this exchange and transformed by the interaction, in ways that may be
> critical, enriching, invisible, or exploitatively -- ultimately
> qualitatively different than the ways in which each subject entered the
> terrain. Yet the recognition of how we are changed by these interactions
> is not, in itself, enough. Recognition of how these desiring
> subjectivities interact must cause us to challenge the very assumption
> of an authentic position, understanding how both sides in any encounter
> emerge transformed, and how this process is constantly occurring. Rather
> than slipping into a sea of post-modern subjectivities, it should cause
> us to grapple more clearly with power and positioning by revealing more
> concretely the way our interactions support, collaborate and hinder us.
> It should also allow us to better identify unity and purpose within,
> against and beyond capital's rigid class contours.
>
> We must start to recognize desiring subjectivities that actively
> subvert, contest and collaborate with the system to stake claims for
> better lives. It is critical to not get caught up in stagnant identity
> politics and dialectical constructions of 'us versus them' in order not
> to miss the agency that is happening horizontally between and across the
> apparent passivity of "delivery syndrome", rights-based and legal
> demands, and other more obvious forms of resistance that haunt so many
> community movements.
>
> It is through analyzing lines of flight and spaces of habitus that we
> might be able to creatively contest and invent together. Uncomfortable
> collaborations are one such space to see power at work in the everyday.
> To transform our notions of the Poor to active, desiring subjectivities
> means first to destroy the discourse that has been spun around them, yet
> also to acknowledge that without announcing it, many choose to mobilize
> these identities to stake claims for material, social and political gain
> from the state. This is part of how the friction between various forces
> can often open up the most unlikely spaces for change.
>
> ****
>
> The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
> the point, however, is to change it.
> - Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach"
>
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>
>
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>


-- 
Kate Griffiths
Doctoral Student
Ph.D. Program in Anthropology
The Graduate Center
City University of New York (CUNY)
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Cell: 718-781-5596