[Debate] Bond, Desai & Ngwane on uneven/combined Marxism

[Patrick Bond]

(Another contribution to the debate about what's wrong with those pesky 
urb soc mvts: /We agree with Andrew Nash that the answers to these 
questions will not come through the elaboration of a new, 'proper' 
Marxist line by mainly university-based, white intellectuals, and that 
the great task of a renewal of South African Marxism will depend on the 
elaboration of a new stratum of organic intellectuals from the movements 
(though not necessarily bypassing the universities) who can, perhaps, 
move among them in ways that enable them to abstract from the local 
without abandoning the reality of it. Being able to do this partly 
depends on the ability of South African movements to look beyond 
themselves, to a world increasingly resistant to neoliberalism and to 
contribute to, and take from, a growing global movement./)

*Uneven and combined Marxism within South Africa's urban social movements*

Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane

*I. Introduction*

The political dynamics of contemporary South Africa are rife with 
contradiction. On one hand, it is among the most consistently 
contentious places on earth, with insurgent communities capable of 
mounting disruptive protest on a nearly constant basis, rooted in the 
poor areas of the half-dozen major cities as well as neglected and 
multiply-oppressed black residential areas of declining towns. On the 
other hand, even the best-known contemporary South African social 
movements, for all their sound, lack a certain measure of fury.

In the face of the government's embrace of neoliberal social policies 
since shortly after the fall of Apartheid, what are often called 
'service delivery protests' occurring many thousands of times a year 
according to police statistics,[1] <#_ftn1>are at once the site of poor 
people's demands for greater responsiveness to human needs in general, 
but are also intensely localized and self-limited in their politics. The 
upsurge of protest since the late 1990s invariably invokes images of the 
anti-Apartheid struggle and thus focuses analysis on continuities and 
breaks between the old anti-Apartheid mass action and the new mass 
action in post-apartheid society.[2] <#_ftn2> And yet, the majority of 
community protesters operate in close interconnection with parts of the 
Tripartite Alliance, composed of the African National Congress (ANC), 
the trade union movement represented by the Congress of South African 
Trades Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), and 
so the line between insurgencies and governing organizations is not 
always clear. Yet their geographic and political isolation from each 
other have contributed to their having little leverage over the 
Alliance, which notwithstanding some resistance by unions and 
communists, embraced neoliberal policies in the transition from 
anti-apartheid resistance to class-apartheid government in 1994.

But beyond the community protests, in many respects, the problems that 
have faced more traditional radical social movements in South Africa are 
familiar to students of social movements elsewhere: of moving from 
movement to governing; of cooptation and shifting roles vis-à-vis the 
state; of the limits of localism; and of the joining of community- and 
workplace-based organizing to forge a strong working-class politics. 
These are all the subject of considerable scholarship, both within and 
outside of the Marxist tradition, and within and outside of South 
Africa.[3] <#_ftn3> We argue here, however, that in the South African 
context, these can be more clearly seen as symptomatic questions of a 
larger problematic, what we term, following Trotsky, the problem of 
'uneven and combined Marxism.'

For Trotsky, 'uneven and combined development' was a fundamentally 
dialectical framework through which he sought first to theorize the 
relations among Russia's nascent industrial base (and hence, too, 
Russia's urban proletariat), and its backward, semi-feudal rural 
relations, and second, following this, the revolutionary potentials for 
Russia at the time of the Revolution. For Trotsky, this implied 
understanding the relationship among forms of capital both within Russia 
and across borders. Uneven development means that extremely different 
relations of production coexist within and across territory, while 
combined development suggests not that the 'less developed' are archaic 
and simply bound, at some point to 'catch up' with the more advanced, 
perhaps going through the same 'stages' of development. (The South 
African modernization narrative since the early 2000s, shared by former 
president Thabo Mbeki and current president Jacob Zuma, is that the 'two 
economies' are 'structurally disconnected'.)[4] <#_ftn4>

Instead, it means that in order to understand the revolutionary 
possibilities of a given moment, it is important to understand how more 
and less advanced relations of production are related, how they often 
reinforce each other, and how their contradictions may lead to 
revolutionary advances in developmentally 'less-advanced' contexts. 
'Uneven and combined /Marxism/' implies a way of considering the 
difficulties of constructing independent left politics in the 
conjuncture of a long-term capitalist stagnation in a 21^st century 
South Africa in which some sectors of the economy -- construction, 
finance and commerce -- have been booming while many other former 
labour-intensive sectors of manufacturing were deindustrialised (or 
shifted from general production for a local mass market to niche 
production for a global upper-class market, such as luxury autos and 
garments), and in which large sections of society are still peripheral 
-- aside from serving as a reserve army of unneeded surplus labour = to 
the interests of capital, domestic and global. The unevenness is also 
geographical, with small areas of South Africa operating within a 
circuit of luxury consumption and new technologies, but others such as 
ex-Bantustan rural areas continuing their decline. The unevenness of 
sector and space is no surprise, of course, since capital has always 
flowed to sites of higher profitability not to establish equilibrating 
trends, but on the contrary to exacerbate differentials and enhance 
inequalities. The word 'combined' is important in South Africa because 
of the ways capital interacts with the non-capitalist sectors and 
spaces, including women's reproductive sites and mutual aid systems, 
spaces of community commons, state services, and nature.

Unevenness is obvious across the cities and townships (and towns and 
dorpies or villages) where battles rage, among the sectors of capital, 
and across scales of struggle. The 'combined' part of anti-capitalism is 
an area we are yet to see fully invoked (in the spirit of, for example 
the Latin American mobilizations which foreground indigenous movements' 
struggles), because of the complexities of organizing the unorganized -- 
especially women --in shack settlements and rural areas where the act of 
daily survival in the interstices of capitalist/non-capitalist 
articulations generates far more collisions of political self-interest 
than standard Marxist urban theory so far elucidates.

To speak of uneven and combined Marxism, therefore, is to invoke a 
political project on the South African left that /cannot but /begin with 
the contradictory totality of the country's social relations, both 
internal and external, at multiple geographic scales and at vastly 
different levels of development. And yet, the beginning cannot also be 
the end; the challenge for South African left politics is to create a 
hegemonic formation from this unevenness that is capable of moving 
toward fulfilling the global left's hopes in the anti-Apartheid 
struggle, which was, at the same time, in many respects, an 
anti-capitalist struggle as well. But to articulate a left politics on 
this uneven ground is also to enrich the typically imported Marxist 
analysis, in the sense that the South African experience heightens and 
encapsulates several otherwise familiar tensions -- -- urban/rural; 
worker/poor; local/national/global; society/nature; gender; etc. -- -- 
and can therefore show, perhaps more clearly than can other contexts, 
the essential relations among them.

In what follows, we begin by describing the contemporary contours of 
protest in South Africa, and then return to the problem of the hegemony 
of the Tripartite Alliance and its embrace of neoliberal policies, even 
if this has itself been somewhat uneven and the source of some tension 
among Alliance members. We then discuss the development of a strategic 
impasse among South African social movements, and present and critique 
several theoretically informed alternative routes out of or around the 
apparent cul-de-sac. We conclude by rearticulating more precisely the 
stakes in proposing an uneven and combined Marxism; and rather than 
proposing solutions, we draw upon it to pose the strategic questions for 
an agency-centred South African left more sharply.

*II. Contemporary South African protest *

Writing five years after the end of Apartheid, Andrew Nash observed:

The struggle against Apartheid became at times a focus of the hopes of 
the revolutionary left around the world. It represents a missed 
opportunity for the left not only in the more obvious sense that it did 
not result in a real challenge to the power of global capitalism. It was 
also an opportunity to transform the historical relationship of Marxist 
theory and working class politics, and overcome the division which 
allows a dialectical Marxism to flourish in the universities and 
journals, while working class politics are dominated by the 
managerialism of Soviet Marxism or social-democracy.[5] <#_ftn5>

This sense of a lost opportunity persists in South African politics 
today. It is found in the widespread discontent in townships and 
shack-dweller communities on the urban periphery over the rising cost of 
living and of previously state-provided services such as water and 
electricity; it is found in the militant protests among the poor for 
redistricting so that poor areas and rich areas are not administratively 
separated, thereby hampering the poor's ability to gain access to 
resources and public services (as in the towns of Khutsong and Balfour); 
it is seen in the divisions within the ANC, SACP and COSATU; and it is 
seen in the Treatment Action Campaign's successful and well-known battle 
against Thabo Mbeki's AIDS denialism and against Big Pharma's 
price-gouging of antiretroviral medicines. And yet, in many of the 
successful instances of protest -- e.g., the reconnection of water and 
electricity,[6] <#_ftn6> the rolling-back of privatization schemes,[7] 
<#_ftn7> and the reduction in the price of antiretrovirals from $15,000 
per person to zero[8] <#_ftn8> -- revolutionary Marxists played 
important leadership roles, suggesting, perhaps, that Nash bends the 
stick a bit too far.

Nevertheless, the question of how far to bend the stick remains. There 
is no question that anti-racial Apartheid also had within it the seeds 
of anti-class Apartheid. This can be seen in the Treatment Action 
Campaign's successful attack, not just on price-gouging by Big Pharma, 
but also on /intellectual property rights/, which were curtailed by the 
2001 Doha exemption for medical emergencies. It can be seen in the 
Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee's work since 2000 not only to fight 
against the electricity company's privatization, rate changes, and 
electricity cut-offs, but also to teach people how to illegally 
reconnect themselves to the grid. These are only part of what Peter 
Alexander calls a 'rebellion of the poor'. In the wake of the 
introduction of the 'Growth, Employment and Redistribution' strategy or 
'GEAR' that marked the Alliance's definitive turn toward neoliberal 
macroeconomic policy, the most militant communities that took to the 
streets in protest and which formed the new urban social movements were 
relatively privileged. They already had houses, but were now fighting a 
defensive battle just to stay on in the urban ghettoes. Those who clung 
on to spaces in the city in shacks appeared to be more patient. The 
Alliance's promises to the poor included gaining access to the formal 
ghetto, while at the same time, its municipal officials were evicting 
others for non-payment as employment became increasingly precarious and 
unemployment increased to more than forty percent of the workforce. For 
a while, the enormous legitimacy of the ANC explained this patience.

But from the late 1990s, ongoing waves of protests broke across the 
country's formal townships and shack settlements and the 'new urban 
social movements' formed in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town from 
1999. Though the first waves ebbed after a national protest at the World 
Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, more surges were noticed from 
mid-2004 in Zevenfontein north of Johannesburg and in Harrismith in the 
Free State (where repression was marked by shooting and death), and in 
Durban's Kennedy Road beginning in early 2005, shack-dweller protest 
coalesced into the Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack-dweller's movement).

Yet, in many cases what started out as insurgencies outside the control 
of the Alliance were siphoned off into calls for participation, legal 
challenges, and 'voice'. Furthermore, one of the striking elements of 
South African protest is its failure to 'scale up,' or join together 
either geographically or politically. With some few exceptions, the 
recent upsuge of service-delivery protests have taken the form of 
'popcorn protests', that is, movements that fly high, move according to 
where the wind blows -- even in xenophobic directions at times -- and 
then fall to rest quite quickly.[9] <#_ftn9>There have been several 
attempts at coordination in the mid-2000s: Johannesburg's 
Anti-Privatization Forum brought together service-delivery protest 
groups, students, left political activists (including, at first, some in 
the municipal workers' union and the SACP), and independent-left trade 
unions; the Social Movements Indaba which from 2002-08 combined 
community struggles; and since 2011, the Democratic Left Front has taken 
a similar initiative. Despite these efforts, and in part because of 
continual splintering of independent left forces and a failure to make 
common cause with the left of the labour movement, there have developed 
no common programmes and no bridging organizational strategies that can 
challenge neoliberalism on a national level. Three elements of this 
failure -- reflecting the uneven and combined nature of anti-capitalism 
in South Africa today -- are worth noting here: the importance of 
access, localism, and leadership.

/Access/

Social movements often organize around sets of demands on the state that 
are, at least in principle, winnable. Service-delivery protests 
targeting the privatization of water supply or high charges for water 
use by the local water authority, the regressive kilowatt-per-hour 
charge on electricity, or the eviction of shack-dwellers from squatted 
land all imply the possibility of success. In Durban's rebellious 
Chatsworth community,[10] <#_ftn10> for example, in order to achieve /de 
facto/ recognition and therefore the delivery of services that would 
keep the movement constituency close to its leadership, movement 
activists increasingly joined with the city council in various 
committees to administer and monitor the movement's success. A decade 
after the initial 1999 uprising, political work mainly involved 
technical issues and oversight over upgrading, liaison with welfare 
departments and a range of other interventions which pressed less for 
radical policy change but focused instead on merely getting existing 
policy implemented.[11] <#_ftn11> This also inevitably brought the 
movement into close working relationships with ANC local councilors and 
limited the autonomy of the movement, and ultimately led to enormous 
disappointments in Chatsworth when official promises were broken and 
municipal contractors engaged in fraud.

Likewise, in Durban's shack-lands, in order to get recognition from the 
local council, shack-dweller activists had to ensure that no more shacks 
were built. Activists had to also ward off competitors. This was 
especially so if an organization defined its role as ensuring delivery. 
It was paradoxical but increasingly common that movements took political 
positions sharply critical of neoliberal policies on the one hand, while 
negotiating for better delivery within those policy frameworks on the other.

Of course, this is a common feature of social movements, and of poor 
people's movements beyond the South African context. There is a 
recurring question of how to consolidate a movement's 'victories' 
without demobilizing it, and how to move beyond the initial 'winnable' 
demands to more radical ones that cannot be so easily administered. In 
the South African context, however, this problem is deepened by the 
sheer weight and presence of the ANC. Though there is a significant 
variety of political positions taken by local ANC branches and 
officials, larger matters of policy and financing are settled at the 
centre, while implementation -- and enforcement -- depend greatly on the 
local level. Reaching the centre, therefore, is fundamentally difficult 
given the fact that the service-delivery protests tend to limit their 
demands to locally constituted authorities, with the possible exception 
of Eskom, the utility providing ninety-five percent of South Africa's 
electricity (Eskom sells energy both to municipalities as well as to 
four million individual households -- mainly in black townships and 
rural areas -- who were retail customers dating to the apartheid era). 
Access problems therefore imply a need for protesters to 'jump scale' 
from local to national, and sometimes also to global, for the World Bank 
has been known to give 'instrumental' advice on matters such as water 
pricing.[12] <#_ftn12>

/Localism and the geographic scales of protest organization/

Marxist urban theorists, following the geographer Henri Lefebvre, speak 
of social relations unfolding on multiple geographic scales. Scales 
combine aspects of people's own construction of the extent of their 
social relations, and boundaries of the arenas in which they exist. They 
thus, depend, too on historically accreted understandings of the spatial 
limitations exerted on these relations, and on the physical properties 
that may inscribe them. As Marston writes, they 'are the outcome of, 
both everyday life and macro-level social structures.'[13] <#_ftn13> 
Finally, the framings of scale -- framings that can have both rhetorical 
and material consequences --are often contradictory and contested and 
are not necessarily enduring. To say, therefore, that contemporary South 
African protest -- with several exceptions such as the Treatment Action 
Campaign and for a time, the Jubilee SA network, as well as some of the 
more innovative community groups in the major cities -- is 
characteristically /local/ in orientation is to make an observation 
about the scale of the protests.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the localist orientation of 
protest. To the extent that participants stop evictions that affect 
them; to the extent that they force local authorities to increase the 
free allowance of electricity and water and lower fees for anything 
above the survival allowance; to the extent that a 'residue' of protest 
emerges as some local institutional safeguards against further abuse; to 
this extent, they are better off for having protested. From a Marxist 
perspective, however, limiting protest to the local scale both narrows 
the immediate transformative potential of social movements and in the 
longer term, disadvantages both the movements and the people who compose 
them. The same can be said about sectoral-narrowness, in which the 
'water sector', economic reform advocacy, gender, energy justice, 
climate activism, access to education, healthcare advocacy, and myriad 
more specific struggles fail to connect the dots between each other, 
both in South Africa and across the world (notwithstanding a World 
Social Forum movement meant -- but apparently unable -- to solve this 
problem).[14] <#_ftn14>

What does going beyond localism mean? To ask the question begs, first of 
all, a more precise definition of what constitutes the 'local' in the 
present case. Here, we propose that 'local' in South African protest 
denotes a focus on administrative and jurisdictional boundaries on one 
hand, and on the site of social reproduction, on the other. The 
extremely vigorous protest movements in the country focus most of their 
attention on the failings of local councils and governments which are 
themselves both the local enforcers of ANC policies formulated on the 
national scale -- often influenced by the demands of global brokers of 
capital (the SA Treasury places great stock in its international credit 
ratings) -- and often, political machines in which allegiance to the ANC 
line at the time is paramount for gaining access to decision-making 
processes. They are also focused on the circumstances of life in 
communities in which many people share abysmal living conditions.

As people active in these struggles, we can confirm that these were not 
originally meant to be narrow and localized. We initially shared the 
hope that struggles at the community level -- at what provisionally 
could be called the point of reproduction -- would have a quality and 
depth to them that would enable radical social antagonisms to flourish 
in ways that were unthinkable in the world of regular wage-work, at the 
'point of production'. As an idea, it makes sense. People live in 
communities 24 hours a day. With a huge mass of unemployed people stuck 
in these ghettos, many with experience in previous struggles, including 
that against Apartheid, it would be easy for demands made from these 
sites to be backed up with the force of mass organizations. All that was 
needed was a focus on bread-and-butter township or shack issues and then 
an ideological extrapolation to broader political questions. Or so our 
thinking went, along with that of various segments of the independent -- 
non-ANC, non-SACP -- left.

Focusing on the site of reproduction made sense in another way. In fact, 
the townships, shack-dweller communities, flat-dweller communities, and 
dorpies of South Africa contain a vast amount of economic activity, and 
the unemployed are as often as not also the marginally employed, the 
unofficially employed, and the precariously employed, which means, as 
well, that they play no role in the preeminent labour organization in 
the country, COSATU, which has its base in the country's heavy and 
extractive industries and public sector. Only the narrowest view of the 
working class would ignore this group.

And yet, the local community as a site of post-Apartheid resistance to 
neoliberalism has been much more difficult to sustain. Partly it is 
because of an assumption, seldom made by those actually living in 
townships, that there exists substantial ground for unity flowing from 
merely living under the same conditions. One version of this assumption, 
as articulated in Latin American cities by James Petras and Morris 
Morley, is that:

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 national 
movements.[15] <#_ftn15>

But in the South African context, while localism produced militancy, it 
did not necessarily produce solidarity with any regularity. Indeed, 
shack-dwellers often face the ire of those with a tighter, but still 
tenuous, hold on stable tenure in the townships. Township residents can 
be mobilized for violence against shack-dwellers and immigrants as much 
as they can be mobilized for solidarity.

Another source of optimism for the fusing of proletarian and precariat 
identities is alluded to by John Saul, recalling arguments made nearly 
four decades ago:

In a capitalism in crisis the 'classic strengths of the urban working 
class' could become 'more evident,' with the 'the upper stratum of the 
workers [then] most likely to identify downward [to become] a leading 
force within a revolutionary alliance of exploited elements in the 
society.'[16] <#_ftn16>

In the South African context, therefore, the mobilization of communities 
could, in theory, join up with the existing organization of workers 
through COSATU, provided the latter could peel itself away from 
allegiance to the ANC and the Alliance's embrace of neoliberalism, 
especially in the light of clearly deteriorating conditions.

But beyond the disappointments generated by a COSATU much changed by its 
entry into the Alliance and the decline of the shop-steward leadership 
that had provided much of its strength during the anti-Apartheid 
struggle, local communities were themselves difficult to coalesce around 
consistent analyses of the problems that led to their oppression, and 
abstraction from the local to /multiple/ scales proved difficult once 
the problem of evictions, electricity, sewerage, and potable water were 
addressed.

Finally, it must be said that from a strategic point of view, there is 
some value in being able to organize at a scale commensurate with that 
of one's adversary's organization. The ANC is organized at the national 
level and it staffs its organization by positioning cadre in local 
areas. This means that it centralizes power and is able to exert 
significant -- though far from total -- control over local cadre. Thus, 
although some local councilors, for example, are more 'trigger happy' 
when it comes to repressing service-delivery and shack-dweller protests 
(and there have been more than a dozen deaths of protesters at the hands 
of police and non-official enforcers), the ANC's centralized 
organization, which is extremely averse to criticism, has set a policy 
of repression while also trying to channel protest into the least 
threatening, least direct forms, such as marches, as opposed to land 
occupations. The ANC's factional violence against its own cadres is 
notorious, such as in Durban where in mid-2011 the party's leader was 
assassinated. But by December 2011 the ANC city manager and political 
elites were sufficiently united to unleash thugs on Democratic Left 
Front activists who staged a march of more than 5000 against the United 
Nations climate summit and who put up signs a few days later in City 
Hall during a visit by Zuma.

//

/Leadership/

//

Another set of problems that arises from contemporary South African 
protest is also familiar to students of social movements and 
revolutionary politics, namely, the problem of leadership, and 
particularly, the role of intellectuals in the movement. Antonio 
Gramsci's analysis of intellectuals is apposite here. Gramsci argues, in 
essence, that intellectuals are those who give shape, through mental 
labour, to specific sets and sites of social relations. Those he calls 
'traditional' intellectuals are those whose roles as intellectuals were 
formed in earlier periods, and thus appear as separate from, and above, 
contemporary class relations and antagonisms, such as clergy and the 
professional scholars and teachers. 'Organic' intellectuals, by 
contrast, are those whose intellectual labours shape the projects of 
entire groups of people, such as industrialists and union militants. 
Traditional intellectuals can, by virtue of their social position, make 
claims about universals, whereas organic intellectuals allegedly 
articulate particularities. But as Gramsci makes clear, traditional 
intellectuals are just as moored to class as are organic ones, and that 
in fact newly dominant groups work not only through their own organic 
intellectuals, such as managers and consultants, but also through 
traditional intellectuals.[17] <#_ftn17>In South Africa, many organic 
intellectuals arose out of the anti-Apartheid struggle. Many were linked 
to the trade union movement, others to the ANC, still others to the 
SACP, and others to the Trotskyist and other independent left wing 
formations. Even since the Apartheid period, the boundary between 
organizations of traditional intellectuals -- e.g., the universities and 
NGOs -- and the organizations that produced and were produced by organic 
intellectuals in and of social movements has been porous. Student 
militants were enormously important to the anti-Apartheid struggle, and 
post-Apartheid South African universities have been home to some 
academics who have aligned themselves closely with, and worked within, 
the social movements. The question this has raised within social 
movements, however, is that of vanguardism.

In some social movement efforts, significant participation by 
university-based and foundation-funded scholar-activists and NGOs seemed 
to other participants to reproduce inequalities. Accusations of 
'ventriloquism' and 'substitutionism' by academics within movements have 
been traded.[18] <#_ftn18> Some university-based intellectuals have 
argued that since 'the poor are the embodiment of the truth', that the 
role of traditional intellectuals is to reflect their positions to the 
world and simply act in concert with the poor.[19] <#_ftn19> This kind 
of analysis sometimes results in the romanticization of urban social 
movements, and also denies the complex articulations of movements and 
the education of their leaders. There is no doubt about the dangers of 
vanguardism. The question is whether a populism that homogenizes 'the 
poor' is capable of building the necessary coalitions to bring protest 
up to a regularly coordinated non-local scale.

//The question of leadership has led, as well, to the involution of 
protest, especially divisions within social movements and their networks 
including the Anti-Privatisation Forum, Soweto Electricity Crisis 
Committee, Western Cape Anti-Evictions Campaign, Landless People's 
Movement, Jubilee South Africa and Social Movements Indaba. These 
divisions are, however, more a symptom than a cause of the strategic 
impasse faced by South African urban movements today. Scholars of 
movements have noted that internal tensions often come to the fore when 
the there is no clear way forward for externally oriented action.[20] 
<#_ftn20>

Together, the contradictory tendencies of access, localism, and 
leadership have produced a movement sector that is at once 
extraordinarily militant in its actions and profoundly moderate in its 
politics. The increasing turn away from electoral politics in poor areas 
in favor of protest politics signals a strong disenchantment with the 
apparatus of representative government and with the actual governance of 
the (mostly) ANC officers. On the other hand, in spite of this 
disenchantment, South African movements are nowhere close to 
articulating alternatives, and doing so would require movement leaders 
to engage in the sustained dialogue necessary to abstract from local 
concerns to national, and even international ones. The potential is 
there: the Treatment Action Campaign's successful demand for 
decommodified and locally-made (generic) AIDS medicines, and the 
Campaign against Water Privatization's fight against Johannesburg 
Water's management outsourcing to Suez, took activism in these sectors 
out of tired social policy or NGO-delivery debates, and set them at the 
cutting edge of the world's anti-neoliberal backlash.

*III. Tripartite Alliance hegemony*

Another inescapable feature of South Africa's contemporary politics is 
the continued -- though increasingly fragile -- hegemony of the ANC. The 
ANC enjoys an enormous amount of legitimacy and ongoing prestige, in 
spite of the fact that nearly twenty years of ANC rule has resulted in 
deepening poverty and inequality, and in spite of the visible divisions 
within the ANC, as for example, in the clashes between President Jacob 
Zuma and his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, and between Zuma and the ANC 
Youth League leader, Julius Malema. The ANC was the main organization of 
the international anti-Apartheid struggle, and even though it was banned 
within South Africa from 1963 to 1990, quickly reasserted itself as the 
largest, best-organized group capable of taking the reins of power 
during the early 1990s transition. In establishing its hegemony at the 
local level, it supplanted already-existing organizations with its own 
(e.g., women's organizations, youth groups), and has dominated electoral 
politics since the first post-Apartheid elections in 1994.

The Tripartite Alliance is dominated by the ANC, which, under Mandela, 
began to separate the ideological strands that had undergirded the most 
militant elements of the anti-Apartheid movement, both in South Africa 
and abroad. Capital flight increased after the democratic elections of 
1994, and in reaction, in early 1995 the ANC government relaxed exchange 
controls to prove its new loyalty to the Washington Consensus. By the 
mid-1990s, indeed, ANC leaders had distanced the party from the 
interventionist currents in the movement. In his first interview after 
winning the presidency in 1994, Mandela stated: 'In our economic 
policies...there is not a single reference to nationalization, and this 
is not accidental. There is not a single slogan that will connect us 
with any Marxist ideology.' Although he inexplicably missed the 
nationalization mandate he was given in the 1994 /Reconstruction and 
Development Programme /(page 80), Mandela's specific reference to 
Marxist ideology in many senses reflects the strong strand of 
anti-capitalist thinking that linked into resurgent struggles against 
Apartheid from the early 1970s. Through its policy and slogan of Black 
Economic Empowerment (BEE), moreover, the ANC deracialised capitalism -- 
albeit for a very few billionaires -- and separated the profitability 
dynamic of South African capitalism from racial domination. The latter 
has remained strong, of course, but more notable is the rise of class 
apartheid techniques.[21] <#_ftn21>

Mandela's avowed anti-Marxism did not, however, so alienate the SACP and 
COSATU that they abandoned the coalition. To the contrary, the initial 
redistributive promises in the ANC platform -- eclipsed by GEAR in 1996 
as well as by numerous White Papers//starting in mid-1994 -- gave the 
SACP and COSATU power in administering what might, in other 
circumstances, have been the development of a managerialist, 
social-democratic welfare state. The SACP chairman, after all, was Joe 
Slovo (prior to his death in early 1995), and his 1994 U-turn towards a 
fully neoliberal housing policy[22] <#_ftn22>, as the World Bank 
explicitly recommended, was the main signal that the /Reconstruction and 
Development Programme /was finished before it had even begun. Slovo 
reversed nearly every major mandate he was provided.

Though centralized, corporatist bargaining was not part even of the 
initial coalition deal, COSATU had a prominent place at the table to 
represent the concerns of the organized working class. It did so with 
enough friction with the ANC that it could boast of putting up a fight, 
even while lauding the not-really-corporatist arrangements of the 
Alliance /as/ corporatist, suggesting that it in fact had 
codetermination powers (in sites like the National Economic Development 
and Labour Council), and that the working class was more institutionally 
powerful than it patently was. After all, in the post-apartheid era the 
share of profits to wages shifted to the favour of capital by nine 
percentage points. And the SACP gained some power over the state's 
redistributionist functions, with the Mandela era witnessing central 
committee members in positions that included the ministers or deputy 
ministers of trade and industry, public works, housing, transport, 
public services and even defense. At once, this meant that the SACP had 
something to lose from challenging the ANC within the coalition too 
strongly, and it was consistent with the party's longstanding line that 
racial democracy had to precede the larger economic project of 
socialism. It also meant that the party would be at the front lines of 
managing a rapidly changing urban landscape as the lifting of residency 
laws under Apartheid resulted in the vast growth of shack communities 
both on the urban periphery and in already urbanized township areas. 
That the party endorsed GEAR and the neoliberal Africa strategy (the New 
Partnership for Africa's Development) and supported a platform that put 
private investment at the center of its housing strategy -- in a period 
characterized by capital flight -- suggests that it was a comfortable 
member of the publicly anti-Marxist ANC-led Coalition, and that its 
constant support for the Coalition's neoliberal macroeconomic 
initiatives at multiple scales in 1996, 2001 and 2010 should not 
surprise.[23] <#_ftn23>

Nevertheless, the Alliance's cohesion and hegemony has not been 
rock-solid. There have, from the start, been tensions both between 
COSATU and the ANC and within COSATU /about /the ANC and the union 
federation's role in the Alliance and what it gets out of it. These 
tensions extend backwards in time to before COSATU's founding in 1985 
and speak both to the shop-floor militancy of 1970s unionism in South 
Africa and to the tensions around the integration of the union movement 
into the nationalist project. But these tensions were raised with GEAR's 
introduction by the ruling party's neoliberal bloc, and ultimately 
resulted in COSATU's support for Jacob Zuma's successful bid for ANC 
leadership against Thabo Mbeki in the 2007 ANC National Conference, and 
Mbeki's humiliating firing by the ANC as president in September 2008.

And yet Zuma's government has done little better than Mbeki's, and has 
not changed the country's neoliberal macroeconomic course.[24] <#_ftn24> 
A three-week strike of public-sector workers in 2010, most of whom were 
members of COSATU, and which both imposed real hardship and threatened 
to spread to other sectors of the economy signaled the ripening of the 
contradictions of COSATU's continued alliance with the ANC. COSATU's 
membership has become older and more skilled as neoliberalism has 
resulted in segmented labour markets and the proliferation of informal 
work, and a growing proportion of its members are employees of the 
state. For this -- and for the access to a different lifestyle for 
leaders who move into government positions -- COSATU depends on the 
ANC-dominated state. On the other hand, continued austerity and attempts 
to squeeze public workers -- visible from Johannesburg to Wisconsin, 
from Durban to Athens -- in the face of already desperately inadequate 
services and a massive and visible gap between rich and poor (even among 
Africans), has led at least one COSATU leader to criticize Zuma's 
government as becoming a 'predator state.'[25] <#_ftn25>

The fraying hegemony of the ANC with respect to its Alliance partners, 
and the simple refusal of many township and shack-dweller communities to 
engage any more in the formal political process, signify South Africa's 
deep crisis. Nevertheless, the protests raise the questions of whether 
dissent is solely about the delivery of services, or whether it 
signifies a bigger dissatisfaction with the social order as such? Do 
protesters see continuity between the anti-Apartheid struggle and the 
struggle today? Even in extreme cases of struggle (such as the disputes 
over district boundaries in Khutsong), the lead activists retained 
connections to the Alliance that through its legitimacy from the 
anti-Apartheid struggle and its patronage networks, were more durable 
than the centrifugal pressure to disconnect. And if a crisis consists in 
the fact that 'the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born'[26] 
<#_ftn26>, it begs the question of what 'the new' is and what its 
birthing process could look like.

*IV. Theorizing the strategic impasse*

The question of how to move out of the crisis to a renewed revolutionary 
politics that separates the nationalist project from the politics of 
neoliberal development has garnered several answers. Each is partial, 
and each, as we will argue, is inadequate to the task. In this section 
of the chapter, we will examine three that have particular currency: the 
expansion of rights through litigation; the claim for 'the right to the 
city', which is distinct from juridical rights-talk; and the creation of 
spaces for 'participation'. In the following section, we will revisit 
the question of the impasse with reference to a reformulated Marxist 
account of uneven and combined development.

/Rights/

Community-based social movements have repeatedly gone to court to 
enforce their rights. And actual 'victory' in court is beyond our 
quibbling, and indeed some offensive victories (nevirapine to halt HIV 
transmission during birth) and defensive successes (halting evictions) 
are occasionally recorded. Nevertheless, we consider insidious the 
constitutionalist discourse that envelops individual cases in an overall 
strategy: the idea that 'the turn to law' is a good or beneficial thing 
to do with the energies, affinities, possibilities and power of a movement.

The 'turn to law' discourse bears the unmistakable scent of reform 
without a strategic sense of how to make more fundamental demands that 
bring into question barriers as large as property relations. The result 
is the kind of 'reformist-reform' (as Gorz put it)[27] <#_ftn27>that 
entrenches the /status quo/. (In contrast, nonreformist reforms work 
/against /the internal logic of the dominant system, and strengthen 
rather than coopt the counterhegemonic challengers.) In this sense, the 
illegal occupation of land is far more powerful than a court's ultimate 
granting of tenure to the occupiers. The turn to constitutionalism also 
has consequences for movement leadership; it is based on the conception 
that a certain professional legal caste among us can secure in the 
constitutional court meaningful precedents (and consequent compliance by 
the executive) that advance the struggle of the poor in a fundamental way..

To be clear, we are not opposed to going to court. This may be useful 
from time to time. But as a strategy -- rather than as a tactic -- it is 
limited, and unable to compensate for weaknesses in protest organization 
and militancy. For example, the Treatment Action Campaign's victory 
against Mbeki in late 2003 was spurred, to some extent, by a mid-2001 
Constitutional ruling that compelled his government to provide 
nevirapine to HIV+ pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child 
transmission. In general, it is fair to say that the rights narrative 
was important to reducing stigmatization and providing 'dignity' to 
those claiming their health rights. Also successful in the 
Constitutional Court was Durban's Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers 
movement, which in 2009 won a major victory against a provincial housing 
ordinance justifying forced removals. Such removals continue unhindered, 
unfortunately, and at nearly the same moment that Abahlali baseMjondolo 
won the court victory they were violently uprooted from their base in 
Kennedy Road.//

//Thus, as Rosenberg indicates, writing in the critical legal studies 
tradition, rights depend on their enforcement, and courts cannot compel 
this.[28] <#_ftn28> Further, court judgments can be reversed: a crucial 
rights narrative test came in the struggle to expand water provision to 
low-income Sowetans. A victory had been claimed by the 
Anti-Privatisation Forum in 2006 because after community struggles, 
water in Johannesburg is now produced and distributed by public agencies 
(the multinational firm with Soweto's water contract Suez was sent back 
to Paris after its controversial 2001-06 protest-ridden management of 
municipal water). In April 2008, a major constitutional lawsuit in the 
High Court resulted in a doubling of free water to 50 litres per person 
per day and the prohibition of pre-payment water meters.[29] <#_ftn29> 
But the Constitutional Court reversed this decision in October 2009 on 
grounds that judges should not make such detailed policy, and that the 
prevailing amounts of water and the self-disconnection delivery system 
were perfectly reasonable within the ambit of the South African Bill of 
Rights. Once again, this meant that activists were thrown back to 
understanding the limits of constitutionalism: they recommitted to 
illegal reconnections if required.[30] <#_ftn30>//

We therefore object simply to the subordination of a political discourse 
to a legal discourse -- even if superficially an empowering one, in 
terms of 'rights' narratives -- and therefore to the subordination of a 
radical discourse to a liberal one. As Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham argue, 
discourse 'structures the possibility of what gets included and excluded 
and what gets done and what remains undone. Discourses authorize some to 
speak, some views to be taken seriously, while others are marginalized, 
derided, excluded and even prohibited.'[31] <#_ftn31> By flirting with 
legalism and the rights discourse, movements have seen their demands 
watered down into court pleadings. Heartfelt pleas are offered but for 
the observance of the purely procedural: consult us before you evict us. 
Demands for housing that could be generalized and spread, become demands 
for 'in situ upgrading' and 'reasonable government action' and hence 
feed the politics of local solutions to the exclusion of demands that 
can be 'scaled up'.

//

/Right to the city

/

An alternative formulation of 'rights' is given by Henri Lefebvre and 
David Harvey's 'right to the city' argument. Harvey is clear that the 
'right to the city' is a /collective /right, rather than a 
liberal-individualist one, and is based on the idea that 'the freedom to 
make and remake our cities and ourselves is...the most precious yet most 
neglected of our human rights.' Because Harvey links urbanization, and 
therefore, the way of life of an increasing majority of humanity, to the 
absorption of capitalist surplus, the 'right to the city' implies 
empowering the mass of people to take the power from capitalists to 
produce their way of life and learn to wield it themselves. The current 
crisis of global capital has led to some of the uneven developments to 
which we have already referred in South Africa. The explosive price of 
real estate (nearly 400 percent from 1997 through to a 2007 peak) was 
facilitated by not only local overaccumulation but by the inflows of 
surplus global capital, thus contributing to the boom-bust dynamic in 
the construction trades even as the rest of the economy stagnates or 
worse. 'The results,' Harvey writes, 'are indelibly etched on the 
spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified 
fragments, gated communities, and privatized public spaces kept under 
constant surveillance.' He continues, quoting Marcello Balbo:

[The city] is splitting into different separated parts, with the 
apparent formation of many 'microstates'. Wealthy neighbourhoods 
provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf 
courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the 
clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only 
at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated 
by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and 
where house-sharing is the norm...

Harvey sees the 'right to the city' as a 'both a working slogan and 
political ideal' to democratize the 'necessary connection between 
urbanization and surplus production and use.'[32] <#_ftn32> However, in 
the South African context, the slogan has been taken up both by 
proponents of legalistic means of struggle and by the more 
autonomist-oriented shack-dweller campaigns, and so the 'right to the 
city' can be seen as a kind of ambiguous hinge that joins quite 
different political orientations. For example, Marie Huchzermeyer argues 
that the South African Constitution mandates ''an equal right to the 
city,'' and that this requires movements to pursue marginal gains 
through the courts: 'Urban Reform in this sense is a pragmatic 
commitment to gradual but radical change towards grassroots autonomy as 
a basis for equal rights.' After all, she argues, 'three components of 
the right to the city -- equal participation in decision-making, equal 
access to and use of the city and equal access to basic services -- have 
all been brought before the Constitutional Court through a coalition 
between grassroots social movements and a sympathetic middle class 
network'. Nevertheless, she also argues that human-rights 'language is 
fast being usurped by the mainstream within the UN, UN-Habitat, NGOs, 
think tanks, consultants etc., in something of an empty buzz word, where 
the concept of grassroots autonomy and meaningful convergence is 
completely forgotten'.[33] <#_ftn33>

Unfortunately, given the power imbalances, Huchzermeyer and others who 
make the 'right to the city' claim run the risk of merely extending a 
slogan, rather than a strategic vision, to the question of the current 
impasse in South African social movements. The danger here is 
particularly felt in the ways in which 'the city' can be taken to mean 
'particular cities' (which, on one level, they must) and therefore to 
privilege local politics and local solutions, without a larger-scale 
analysis that could provide a kind of standard by which locally 
generated choices and strategies could be subjected to criticism. One 
result is that like groups often accept each other's political stances 
while discounting the possibilities of coalition across types of 
community: hence, for example, 'Abahlalism' -- 'shack-dwellerism' -- 
arises as a kind of autonomistic-populist practice in which the deep 
suspicion of /non-/shack-dwellers, even if sometimes merited, finds its 
mirror image in the idea that political ideas are invalidated or 
validated simply by virtue of their issuing from 'the poor.'[34] <#_ftn34>

/'Participation'/

//

A clause in the Constitution as well as various laws compel 
municipalities to involve residents in 'community participation' 
processes to enable people to directly influence decisions that affect 
them. John Williams, reporting on research in the Western Cape finds 
that 'Most community participation exercises in post-Apartheid South 
Africa are largely spectator politics, where ordinary people have mostly 
become endorsees of pre-designed planning programmes, [and] are often 
the objects of administrative manipulation.' As a result, formal 
municipal governance processes are 'a limited form of democracy [that] 
give[s] rise to an administered society rather than a democratic 
society' since there is no real debate of policy or of social programmes 
by the working class electorate and government officials.[35] <#_ftn35> 
In Durban, a study of community participation in local economic 
development processes by Richard Ballard and his colleagues reveals that 
such processes allow ordinary people 'to demand accountability' from 
'elected representatives and sometimes quite senior officials.' However, 
they are 'consultative rather than participatory' and 'invariably become 
conspicuous for the issues they leave out, and for the voices they did 
not hear.'[36] <#_ftn36>

This was particularly apparent in the way that the Durban 'Citizen's 
Voice' process was handled by the city and the main water NGO (Mvula 
Trust), invoking participation by what might be termed 'civilised 
society' as a way of encouraging poor communities /to consume less water 
/just after the municipal prices had doubled in real terms over a period 
of six years/./[37] <#_ftn37>//

In a different vein, David Hemson concludes that 'community 
participation in South Africa is informed by the memory of community 
struggle -- a radical form of participation -- against the racist 
Apartheid State' and that this must be harnessed. 'It is precisely this 
repertoire of radical strategies that can and should be revisited and 
adapted, to advance the interests of the materially marginalized 
communities at the local level.'[38] <#_ftn38> Luke Sinwell applies a 
theoretical approach first developed in the South African context by 
Faranak Miraftab,[39] <#_ftn39>based on a distinction between 'invited' 
versus 'invented' spaces of popular participation. The ward committees, 
/imbizos /(government-initiated public forums) and integrated 
development plans of invited participation contrast with invented spaces 
through 'self-activity' such as community self-organization, direct 
action and other non-official mechanisms of exerting pressure. Based on 
extensive research conducted in Alexandra, one of the country's oldest 
and poorest black working class townships, he concludes that progressive 
change is more likely to emanate from the use of invented rather than 
invited spaces. However, Sinwell laments that community activism in the 
invented spaces also fails to question power relations and social 
structures in a fundamental way. Community organisations tend to work 
within budgetary constraints set by the state and as a result community 
groups end up competing among themselves for limited resources rather 
than questioning the neoliberal framework and its ideological 
underpinnings.[40] <#_ftn40>

*V. Combined and uneven development, combined and uneven Marxism*

The importance of Marxist criticism is to uncover, in particular 
situations, what is 'systematic' and what is 'conjunctural', as Gramsci 
put it.[41] <#_ftn41> This, in turn, helps to distinguish -- and 
therefore, to both facilitate and structure discussion about -- short- 
and longer-term demands. The 'pure militancy' of an immediate politics 
of the poor does not do this easily. It is rather through dialogue, not 
just among 'the poor' but among the several sectors of society caught at 
various points in the contradictions of neoliberalism that a larger 
political formation capable of a sustained revolt against capital, and 
the creation of a new order, can be built.

Here, Trotsky's understanding of 'combined and uneven development' is 
useful. Though it can be read somewhat more broadly, most 
interpretations of Trotsky understand him to have meant 'combined' 
development to refer to the relations among different levels of 
development /within/ a given nation.[42] <#_ftn42> In South Africa, the 
logical corollary is to 'articulations of modes of production,' a 
concept promoted by Harold Wolpe to explain race-class politics linking 
sites of surplus value extraction to bantustans (where impoverished 
women provided cheap-labour's reproduction at a vast distance), but 
which is even more relevant in post-apartheid South Africa given 
enhanced migrancy, xenophobia and adverse gender power relations.[43] 
<#_ftn43> Geographers such as David Harvey and Neil Smith have 
emphasized that even within nations, the combined unevenness of 
development is given spatial expression. Apartheid was, in its nature, 
both a racial order and a spatial one, and it enforced uneven /and 
/combined development in almost caricatured forms. The systematic 
separation of racial groups, the profound underdevelopment of black 
areas, and the racial segmentation of labour markets suggested to many 
on the left (including us), as we noted earlier, that the fight against 
Apartheid was coterminous with the fight against capitalism. Though we 
were correct that capitalism and racism were mutually reinforcing during 
the 20^th century, the conventional mistake by radicals was in thinking 
that the defeat of one durable but ultimately conjunctural manifestation 
of racism, Apartheid, would bring the capitalist system to its knees.

Accordingly, we found that Apartheid was conjunctural, but uneven and 
combined development is systematic.[44] <#_ftn44> The particular spatial 
manifestations of uneven and combined development are also conjunctural, 
though, again, they can be extremely durable. Hence, fights against 
eviction or for clean and affordable water, even while encountering the 
severe power of state coercion, and sometimes taking years to resolve, 
do little to change the systematic dynamics of uneven and combined 
development that are deepened in new ways in neoliberal South Africa.

Trotsky also marshaled the theory of uneven and combined development to 
argue against 'stageism' or the idea that revolutionary politics 
depended on a given country's going through the specific, drawn-out 
processes of capitalist development found in other countries. What this 
meant, however, was that coalitions among workers across space /and/ 
across situations in the process of capital accumulation (e.g., 
industrial workers, peasants) were central to revolutionary potentials, 
but that these potentials were /realizable, /even if with difficulty. 
The contemporary conjuncture in South Africa, beset by entrenched 
neoliberalism imposed by a weakening-but-still-present ruling Alliance 
dominated by the ANC, has seen the accumulation of protests by township 
residents over services, shack-dwellers over evictions and services, and 
the relatively 'privileged' public-sector workers over pay and the 
quality of services they provide. Though the public workers' strike was 
suspended without winning the union's key demands, it came close to 
bringing out private-sector workers -- all in the formal sector -- as well.

The question for an 'uneven, combined Marxism' is how to /take advantage 
/of the unevenness and particular conjunctural combinations of social 
relations in South Africa and beyond. The present period in South Africa 
exemplifies the dynamics of uneven and combined development and its 
spatial and social consequences. Within South Africa, it is important to 
think about how, for example, shack-dwellers' struggles and public 
workers' struggles could be linked up, even as the latter's relative 
privilege and operation in the formal labour market may make them wary 
of such an alliance, and as the former's distrust of cooptation creates 
an equal hesitancy. The Durban climate summit --the Conference of the 
Parties 17 -- illustrated how very difficult it is to conjoin labour, 
community and environmental considerations, especially in the context of 
a set-piece 'Global Day of Action' march (3 December 2012) when 
distances between constituencies, political traditions and issue areas 
remain debilitating.[45] <#_ftn45>

How could a joined-up movement respond to the conjunctural pressures 
upon it, such as the apparent /advantages/ to the unemployed of 
labour-market flexibilization schemes or to the quality of life of 
township residents of evicting shack-dweller settlements? What kind of 
ways can -- or should -- Marxists talk about taking on the systemic 
problems of uneven and combined development with people who are located 
in different, and even sometimes opposed, areas of this combination? 
What organizational forms might be applied to start this conversation 
and yet keep it focused on the systematic elements of the present? How 
do we move beyond the concern for access, the localism, the 
constitutionalism, and the anti-political populism of contemporary 
protest -- even as these sometimes yield concrete results -- while also 
moving beyond the ambiguity of a simple slogan? To us, the protests 
represent a profound critique of neoliberalism by working class 
communities. But are protesters aware of the greater significance of 
their protests? And to what extent do protesters' demands require 
solutions that challenge neoliberal policy and even entail a challenge 
to the capitalist mode of production? Or is it the case that the 
overarching neoliberal economic framework constrains the realization of 
not only the people's aspirations, but their ability to think beyond 
capitalism?

We agree with Andrew Nash that the answers to these questions will not 
come through the elaboration of a new, 'proper' Marxist line by mainly 
university-based, white intellectuals, and that the great task of a 
renewal of South African Marxism will depend on the elaboration of a new 
stratum of organic intellectuals from the movements (though not 
necessarily bypassing the universities) who can, perhaps, move among 
them in ways that enable them to abstract from the local without 
abandoning the reality of it. Being able to do this partly depends on 
the ability of South African movements to look beyond themselves, to a 
world increasingly resistant to neoliberalism and to contribute to, and 
take from, a growing global movement. The successes of the Treatment 
Action Campaign were one such contribution, although this movement also 
teaches the dangers of self-liquidation into state-conjoined 
service-delivery and narrow sectoral politics as well as a seeming 
over-reliance on foreign funding.

In encountering similar-but-different movements and contexts, movement 
intellectuals gain new perspectives on the possibilities of coalitions 
and on the similar-but-different permutations of combined and uneven 
development elsewhere; these can enhance their capacity to reinterpret 
local conditions by denaturalizing existing political categories and 
divisions. Indeed, in calling for a 'combined and uneven Marxism', we 
intend to suggest that the way forward cannot lie in the search for the 
pure revolutionary subject, whether the worker, the township 'poors', 
the shack-dweller, the organic feminist, the red-green social 
environmentalist, or anyone else; and it cannot lie in the search for 
the perfect location, whether the household, community, farm, benefits 
office, oil refinery or factory. Combined and uneven development makes 
clear that if the Marxist view that people are a 'nexus of social 
relations' holds, a combined and uneven Marxism must draw on the 
interdependence of locations in these relations in order to reinforce 
our interdependence rather than accept the capitalist combination of 
unevenness and mutual social antagonisms among those from whom capital 
is extracted. Of course this is to state a problem rather than to 
proclaim a new strategy. However, consistent with the argument above 
that it is the development of organic intellectuals from within the 
movements, and their discussions and alliances with one another as well 
as with 'traditional' Marxist intellectuals, it is only here that a way 
forward will be found.

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[1] <#_ftnref1>Mottiar and Bond 2011, Duncan and Vally 2008.

[2] <#_ftnref2>For a sample of the debates on the independent left see 
Alexander 2010, Ballard et al, 2006, Bond 2006, Desai 2002, Duncan and 
Vally 2008, Maharaj, Desai and Bond 2011, Runciman 2011, Sinwell 2011, 
Williams 2006.

[3] <#_ftnref3>E.g., DeFilippis, Fisher and Schragge 2010, Piven and 
Cloward 1979; Katznelson 1981.

[4] <#_ftnref4>Bond and Desai 2006, Maharaj, Desai and Bond 2011.

[5] <#_ftnref5>Nash 1999, p. 79.

[6] <#_ftnref6>Bond, 2011.

[7] <#_ftnref7>Bond 2006.

[8] <#_ftnref8>Geffen 2010.

[9] <#_ftnref9>Petras and Morley 1990, p.53.

[10] <#_ftnref10>Desai 2002.

[11] <#_ftnref11>Hinely 2009.

[12] <#_ftnref12>Bond 2000, 2002.

[13] <#_ftnref13>Marston 2000, p.221.

[14] <#_ftnref14>Bond 2005.

[15] <#_ftnref15>Petras and Morley 1990, p.53.

[16] <#_ftnref16>.

[17] <#_ftnref17>See Gramsci 1971, pp. 4-23.

[18] <#_ftnref18>See, e.g., debates initiated by Bohmke 2009a, 2009b, 
2010a, 2010b and reactions in /PoliticsWeb/ and /Pambazuka./

[19] <#_ftnref19>See critical discussion initiated by Walsh 2008.

[20] <#_ftnref20>See Polletta 2005.

[21] <#_ftnref21>Bond 2005.

[22] <#_ftnref22>Bond 2000, Republic of South Africa 1994.

[23] <#_ftnref23>Bond 2000.

[24] <#_ftnref24>Maharaj, Desai and Bond 2011.

[25] <#_ftnref25>Vavi 2011.

[26] <#_ftnref26>Gramsci 1971, p. 276.

[27] <#_ftnref27>Gorz 1967.

[28] <#_ftnref28>Rosenberg 1993.

[29] <#_ftnref29>Bond and Dugard 2008.

[30] <#_ftnref30>Bond 2011a.

[31] <#_ftnref31>Hunt and Wickam 1994, pp.8-9.

[32] <#_ftnref32>Harvey 2008.

[33] <#_ftnref33>Huchzermeyer 2009, pp.3-4,

[34] <#_ftnref34>Desai, 2006.

[35] <#_ftnref35>Williams, 2006.

[36] <#_ftnref36>Ballard et al, 2006, p4.

[37] <#_ftnref37>Bond 2011b.

[38] <#_ftnref38>Hemson 2004.

[39] <#_ftnref39>Sinwell 2009, p.31.

[40] <#_ftnref40>Miraftab 2004.

[41] <#_ftnref41>Gramsci 1971, p. 177.

[42] <#_ftnref42>Barker 2006, Trotsky 1962.

[43] <#_ftnref43>Wolpe 1980.

[44] <#_ftnref44>Maharaj, Desai and Bond 2011, Bond 2005.

[45] <#_ftnref45>Bond 2011c.

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