The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa

Introduction

In contemporary South Africa, there is growing anxiety in elite publics about escalating popular mobilization (Hart 2013). ¹ This anxiety frequently settles on the unemployed young man, usually assumed to be in the city, as the subject that constitutes the most urgent threat to democracy (Mbembe 2011b), and the shack settlement as the most dangerous site for the expression of this threat (Pithouse 2013b). At the same time, elite opinion, across a wide spectrum of political orientation, and expressed from various kinds of institutions, is frequently hostile to any suggestion that there could be emancipatory political agency on the part of the urban poor. The degree to which liberal elites have seized on the Marxist idea of ‘the lumpen’ (Pithouse 2012a) to present all poor people’s politics as inherently and inevitably anti-social, if not a priori violent and criminal, is striking. Moreover, both the ruling African National Congress (ANC) (Gibson 2011; Selmeczi 2012b; Zikode 2006) and the official parliamentary opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA) (Sacks 2012b), as well as some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Sacks 2012a, 2012b) and some currents in the middle class Left, have tended to ascribe popular mobilization to malicious external middle class agitation, often imagined to be white (Buccus 2012), even when the most cursory examination reveals that this is plainly not the case. There have also been cases where actors within the middle class Left have mirrored the worst excesses of both liberal moral panic and state paranoia (Church Land Programme 2011).

There are a number of cases where the systemic inability of elites to comprehend the political agency of the urban poor, or the reality that it has, on occasion, taken democratic and emancipatory forms (Chance 2011; Gibson 2011; Huchzermeyer 2011; Patel 2008; Selmeczi 2012a), has been uncritically re-inscribed in the academy, rather than subjected to careful analysis grounded in a credible grasp of empirical realities. For instance, Daryl Glaser, in a piece on the xenophobic and ethnic pogroms of May 2008, which Michael Neocosmos terms ‘crass’ (2010: xii), simply asserts that ‘popular democracy in action is not a pretty sight’ and concludes that the pogroms were in fact ‘profoundly democratic, albeit in a majoritarian sense’ (Glaser 2008: 54). No mention is made of the popular organizations, in at least one case deeply democratic, that effectively opposed xenophobic and ethnic violence at the time (Gibson 2011; Kirshner 2011; Neocosmos 2010) with the result that the reader is left with the false impression that all poor people are xenophobic and violent—brutish. In an otherwise valuable article on Jacob Zuma’s rape trial, Shireen Hassim (2009: 57–77), writes that:

[t]here is also a challenge to rebuild relationships horizontally with the leadership of the social movements, who support Zuma as a ‘pro-poor’ candidate. Despite their professed commitment to poor women, the new social movements have revealed themselves as ready to ditch equality rights when ‘more important’ decisions about leadership are debated. Of the major social movements on the left, only the TAC has sided with women’s organisations. Yet it is not the only social movement that has a majority female membership—the same is true of the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Campaign [sic], and Abahlali ‘Mjondolo [sic]. These movements, dependent on women for their grassroots character, seem willing to trade away women’s rights to dignity and autonomy for short-term political gain.

This author has no inside knowledge of how the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee responded to the campaign in support of Zuma at the time. But it can be affirmed with certainty that both a number of prominent middle class Left intellectuals, including academics, did support Zuma and that neither the Anti-Eviction Campaign nor Abahlali baseMjondolo ever expressed support for Zuma in any form. In the latter case, the refusal to support Zuma cost the movement some support in some neighbourhoods, including support from women, and resulted in it being subject to serious intimidation from local party structures, as well as misrepresentation as having ‘sold out’ to its Indian and Xhosa speaking members, which eventually enabled serious state-backed violence against its leaders that was mediated through ethnic claims (Chance 2009). Hassim’s misrepresentation of the politics in the Anti-Eviction Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo at the time is not based on any attempt to make sense of empirical realities, or actually existing practices, but, like Glazer’s writing, does confirm to pejorative stereotypes about popular politics.

When there are a priori assumptions that popular politics is anti-democratic, reactionary, nothing more than a spasmodic impulse to deprivation or consequent to malicious external manipulation, and when these sorts of assumptions trump reasoned investigations of particular realities, they are often rooted in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 73) terms ‘an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants’. This ontological organization of the world, often but not always implicit, is deeply rooted in enduring ideas about race and class, but it also often has a profoundly spatial aspect.

None of this is unique to South Africa. On the contrary it is, across time and space, common to encounter an ontological division of the world that maps on to the intersection of class, race, caste and spatial divisions with the result that the urban poor are effectively expelled from the political. For instance, in India, Partha Chatterjee (2004: 47) argues that there is also widespread anxiety in middle class circles about ‘lumpen-culture’, about politics having been taken over by ‘mobs and criminals’. He shows that although civil society is ‘restricted to a small section of culturally equipped citizens’, and is, therefore, a mode of engagement premised on exclusion, it is taken to represent ‘the high ground of modernity’ (ibid.: 41). This, he argues, has led to an approach in which elites have responded to the enduring presence of popular politics, conducted outside of civil society, by ‘walling in the protected zones of bourgeois civil society’ (ibid.: 49). This is exactly what a figure like Alistair Sparks (2012: n/p) a leading liberal journalist in South Africa, is calling for when he argues, with reference to Marx, that ‘lumpen-radicalism…will continue to endanger our future until some new leader has the gumption and the guts to tackle it head on’.

As I have noted elsewhere (Pithouse 2014) the political Left, across space and time, has often uncritically repeated the idea that the politics of the urban poor are, a priori, anti-social. In 1976 Janice Perlman (1976: 102) argued that the myth of the marginality, of the moral degradation of shack dwellers in Rio, was produced by the ‘constant attempt of those in power to blame the poor for their position because of deviant attitudes, masking the unwillingness of the powerful to share their privilege’. She noted that ‘the political left is also influenced to some extent by the myths of marginality’ (ibid.: 250) and concluded, presciently, that the myth was ‘anchored in people’s minds by roots that will remain unshaken by any theoretical criticism’ (ibid.: 242). Almost 40 years later, Raúl Zibechi (2012: 197) reported that: ‘[t]he Latin American left regard the poor peripheries as pockets of crime, drug trafficking and violence; spaces where chaos and the law of the jungle reign. Distrust takes the place of understanding. There is not the slightest difference in perspective between left and right on this issue.’ The language that is used by the Left is sometimes extraordinary. In an interview in New Left Review on the 2011 mass revolt in Egypt, Hazim Kandil (2011: n/p) when asked about the ‘sub-proletariat of the slums in Cairo’, replied that ‘fortunately, this menacing human mass was entirely absent from the revolt, which probably contributed to its civilized and peaceful character’. Selwa Ismail (2006) has provided a very different, and carefully researched, account of political life in Cairo’s popular quarters, and Asef Bayat (2011a) contests the claim that residents of the ashwai’yyat were not present in Tahir Square.

The ‘Lumpen Proletariat’

We have to ask why it is that liberal elites, in India and South Africa, have enthusiastically taken up the Marxist idea of the urban poor as ‘lumpen’, as an automatic social and political threat. Marx’s critique of civil society, for instance, has no similar resonance. The fact that Marx, for a period of his life, shared the liberal assumption that modernity would ultimately redeem its rendering of some people as waste, could be one salient factor. After all, this enables a progressive gloss to be given to attempts to police access to the agora in the name of modernity and, indeed, a conception of democracy that is clearly inadequate to the realities of the situation in the cities of what Chatterjee calls ‘most of the world’.

The idea that progress requires that some people should be rendered as waste has been central to influential currents of modern political thought. John Locke took the view that, lands, anywhere in the world, that were still governed under an idea of a right to the commons rather than as private property mediated by money were ‘waste’— ‘waste’ that can and should be redeemed by expropriation (Caffentzis 2008; Locke 1986: 45). One consequence of this, as Gidwani and Reddy note (2011), is that for Locke, ‘waste’ lies outside of the ethical ambit of civil society.

There is also an implicit idea of waste as a by-product of modernity in the work of Georg Hegel who described the urban poor as the ‘rabble’ (Hegel 1821; Ruda 2011). And there were moments in his life when Marx took the view that colonialism would, via the violent introduction of capitalism, be an ultimately redemptive force, thereby implicitly rendering the majority of actually existing people and economies as waste in the name of a shared future to come. Of course he did shift his position on this question (Anderson 2010; Mukherjee 2010), but the idea that dispossession and proletarianization are, ultimately, steps on the road to a progressive future continues to inflect some forms of Marxism. In these cases Marxism can, like liberalism, cast certain economies, modes of habitation, forms of politics and, ultimately, people as out of time and as disposable in the interests of a redemptive conception of the future. As Chatterjee argues with regard to the political logic of capitalism, ‘Within its domain, capital allows for no resistance to its free movement. When it encounters an impediment, it thinks it has encountered another time—something out of pre-capital, something that belongs to the pre-modern’ (2004: 5).

At home in Europe, Marx, in the first half of his life, spoke of the ‘lumpen-proletariat’, the urban poor living outside of wage labour, with astonishing vitriol. Marx first coined the term in The German Ideology— a text written in 1846 amidst crop failure, escalating urbanization and the first stirrings of political ferment that would soon explode into the European spring of 1848. It, tellingly, moves from the assumption that it is the capacity for production, rather than, say, as Aristotle would have it, the capacity for speech, that distinguishes the human from the animal. The term ‘lumpen-proletariat’ is usually translated as the ‘ragged proletariat’, but the word ‘lumpen’ meant both ragged and knave, and it has been suggested that Marx had the second use of the word in mind (Thorburn 2003: 440). In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, he wrote with Friedrich Engels of ‘[t]he “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society’ (1985: 92). Four years later, in The 18th Brumaire, he railed against the ‘scum, offal, refuse of all classes’ (1852: n/p).

Ernesto Laclau shows that, at this point in Marx’s work, the proletariat is strictly delimited from the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ in order to affirm its position within capitalist development, with the result that the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ is given the status of the pure outside and its ‘expulsion from the field of historicity is the very condition of a pure interiority’ (2005: 114). But in Capital, published 15 years after The 18th Brumaire, Marx (1976: 782) took a less hostile view, writing that:

it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.

He also presents the ‘combination between the employed and unemployed’ (1976: 793–94) as both a way for workers to combat the rendering of their own place within capitalist production as precarious and as a real threat to the logic of capitalist production that, via the logic of supply and demand, relies on the existence of a large group of people without an independent livelihood, or a wage, to drive wages down. Here Marx’s political imagination can see a positive role for the urban poor, although, he still thinks of urban labour solely in terms of work performed by men in the factory. But despite Marx’s shift towards imagining a positive political role for the urban poor, albeit in a manner predetermined by his own theory, Marxism, as both doctrine and political culture, often (although, certainly not always) retains a deep current of hostility to the urban poor, and often sustains a fetish of the industrial working class, often imagined as male, as the only subject capable of emancipatory political action.

Colonial discourses about race and the urban poor were enmeshed from the early 1800s. In this regard, Friedrich Engels followed the bourgeois thought of the day, declaring the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ to be a ‘race… robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality’ (1845: 326). At one point, Engels repeats one of the key tropes that, in a racialized form, also became central to colonial ideology, that is, those ‘who do not wish to work’ (apud Thoburn 2003: 443). Nicholas Thorburn (2003: 443) concludes that ‘Marx and Engels’ most vehement assaults are saved for those who seem to revel in surviving outside productive relations’.

This is also apparent in more democratic currents of Marxism than those that descend from Vladimir Lenin. For instance, Rosa Luxemburg (1918) presents the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ under the heading of ‘corruption’, and with reference to terms like ‘degeneration’ and ‘sickness’, as a ‘problem to be reckoned with’, an ‘enemy and instrument of counter-revolution’ requiring the ‘healing’ and ‘purifying’ rays of a revolutionary sun. In The Mass Strike she wrote that

[a]narchism has become in the Russian Revolution, not the theory of the struggling proletariat, but the ideological signboard of the counter revolutionary lumpen-proletariat, who, like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution. And there with the historical career of anarchism is well-nigh ended. (Luxemburg 1906: n/p)

But anarchism mirrored rather than opposed the objectification of the urban poor surviving outside of formal employment. Thorburn (2003: 445) shows that while Marx saw proletarianization as enabling revolutionary agency, Mikhail Bakunin saw it as destroying revolutionary agency, which for him was rooted in the peasant commune and its insurrectionary traditions and various groups in the cities that had not been subordinated to the discipline of work. Bakunin (1873) sustained Marx and Engel’s objectification of the urban poor while inverting its logic to conclude that ‘in them and only in them [the lumpen-proletariat], and not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallized the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution. A popular insurrection, by its very nature, is instinctive, chaotic, and destructive’. As Thorburn notes, Bakunin, ‘in a fashion not so different from Marx’s account of “lumpen” “spontaneity”’, assumes that the lumpenproletariat carries a ‘transhistorical instinctual rage’ (2002: 445).

As I have noted elsewhere (Pithouse 2013a), the Paris Commune was a decisive event for the development of the modern left, and the thought of both Marx and Bakunin. Marx took the view that, against both the ‘stultification by rule of the priest’ (2010: 255) and the state as a ‘parasitical excrescence’ (ibid.: 247) on society, the Commune was ‘a revolution against the state itself’ (ibid.: 249) and ‘the whole sham of state mysteries and state pretensions’ (ibid.: 251). And he was absolutely correct to conclude that, despite the fate of the Commune in Paris, ‘it will make its way around the world’ (ibid.: 249). But he also took the view that its goal was the emancipation of labour, and that, while paying tribute to the ‘heroic women of Paris’ (ibid.: 268), it was, above all else, a government of ‘working men’ and their redemptive ‘manly aspirations’ (ibid.: 249).

Careful empirical work shows that the Commune was, in fact, a case of besieged city dwellers, primarily and explicitly organized in neighbourhoods, in revolt against the French state rather than a case of workers in revolt against capitalism. Marx was, it seems, too quick to read events in the light of his own theory rather than on their own terms. And, as Castells (1983) pointed out, Marx took a statement by a socialist minority within the Commune as the position of the Commune as a whole. Nonetheless, Marx’s reading meant that, as Kristin Ross (2008) has shown, the Commune became a decisive moment in the political investment in the idea of the good worker, a man, by the modern Left.

In 1965, Henri Lefebvre (1996) was the first to read the Commune as an urban insurrection. Later Manuel Castells (1983: 20) offered empirical evidence in support of Lefebvre’s argument and also noted that it was ‘primarily a municipal revolution’, while Roger Gould (1995: 140) described the political agitation during the siege as an ‘intense neighbourhood localism’ and concluded that it was primarily a demand for local autonomy. Castells (1983: 18) also stressed that ‘the Commune was decisively an action by women’. This point was, in a perverse way, recognized by the elites at the time who, along with the usual claims of criminals and foreign agents being behind the agitation, also pointed, amidst a full-scale moral panic, to the radically gendered image of the woman Communard as the ‘petroleuse’—a ‘bloodthirsty, slothful, drunken prostitute’ (Ross 2008: 16).

Ross suggests that it was largely in response to these sorts of highly gendered right-wing diatribes, that presented the politicized urban poor in monstrous terms, that, Marx and others chose to present the rebellion as a project of ‘manly’ workers. For Ross, it was the breakdown in the idea that certain people should occupy certain stations in politics, as in work, that was central to the Commune. She cites Arthur Rimbaud declaring that ‘[b]osses and workers all of them common. I have a horror of all métiers’ (2008: 19). She also notes that the construction of the barricades was directed by Napoléon Gaillard, a shoemaker, and that ‘a full half of the shoemakers in Paris were missing—massacred, arrested, in exile’ (Ross 2008: 17).

For Plato, ‘[i]t is right for the shoemaker by nature to make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else, for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and similarly all others’ (Rancière 2003: 25). We still live with the enduring legacy of the Platonic conception of the city, rooted, as it is, in the idea of métier, the desire for people to be ontologically contained, named and instructed to remain in their places (Rancière 2003: 3–29). But the role of shoemakers in the Commune was far from being some sort of aberration. Hobsbawn and Scott (1998: 24) begin their essay on political shoemakers by noting that ‘[t]he political radicalism of the nineteenth-century shoemakers is proverbial’. Their influence continued to be felt at the heart of political events of major international significance as late as the early 1970s, when Salvador Allende’s political experiment was crushed in Chile—Allende ascribed the broadening of his political horizons to his relationship, as a boy, with an anarchist Italian shoemaker, Juan De Marchi (Winn 2005). However, the Platonic hostility to the shoemaker as intellectual and activist also has a consistent history. Ross (2008: 14) cites a French intellectual, writing in mid nineteenth-century, who insists that shoemaker intellectuals are ‘thieves, imposters, and forgers’, which is more or less exactly what some middle class (and usually although, not uniformly white) Left intellectuals say about independently organized grassroots (black) activist intellectuals in contemporary South Africa (Majavu 2012). Middle class Left intellectuals have often worked within an essentially Platonic framework in which social progress requires people to keep to their places rather than to undo the notion of place. As Ross (2008: 17) notes: ‘[i]n Jacques Rancière’s reading of Marx, the Platonic myth of the artisan as he who can do nothing other than his métier is displaced, but essentially operative, in the Marx of “mature” scientific socialism’ (cf. Rancière 2003). Elsewhere she observes that ‘a Leninist party is in essence a radical intelligentsia that says we have the right to rule’ (2002: 75).

The Human as Waste in the (Post)Colony

The fetish of the male industrial worker as the only political subject capable of emancipatory action produced other silences at the origins of the modern Left. For Walter Benjamin (1999), the wreckage upon wreckage that undergirds the ‘storm’ of modern progress erected the Parisian arcades on the foundation of a permanent state of emergency. But while crude material need was systemically unmet, the working class in Germany could still assume that being swept into the factory was, nonetheless, a movement with the current of history, with the ‘fall of the stream’, in which it would soon take its rightful place (ibid.: 245–55).

But in the colonial world, people were not only expropriated and proletarianized. People were also turned into members of races in a world that was, Fanon (1976: 29–30) wrote, ‘cut in two’, divided into ‘compartments…inhabited by different species’. In the settler colony, the production of race was highly spatialized and the production of space highly racialized. David Goldberg (1993: 185) makes this point, albeit in a broader context, succinctly: ‘[r]acisms become institutionally normalized in and through spatial configuration, just as social space is made to seem natural, a given, by being conceived and defined in racial terms’. For Fanon, in a profoundly spatial reading of anti-colonial insurgency, the event that inaugurates the end of the colonial world of compartments occurs when the violence used to police the dividing line is ‘taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters’ (Fanon 1976: 31). He also provided a spatial metric for marking the passage from the colonial to the post-colonial and argued that the ordering of the colonial world, its geographic layout, must be examined in order to ‘reveal the lines of force it implies [which] will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized’ (1976: 29).

Aimé Césaire (2000: 43) insists that in the colony ‘the storm’ is more about what has been trampled, confiscated, wiped out and brought into new regimes of abuse in ‘a circuit of mutual services and complicity’, than any sense of hard won but ultimately redemptive universal progress. Here, neither the living nor the dead can be redeemed by a modernity in which capital makes concessions to society in a double movement, or a revolutionary proletariat seizes the engines of progress for itself, until racism is abolished and humanity known under a generic appellation. But the sorry state of the post-colony makes it clear that while the former is a necessary condition for the achievement of the latter, it is not, on its own, sufficient.

There is a rich body of literature, beginning with Fanon that, like the work of the subaltern studies project in India, shows that in the post-colony social divisions continue and that they continue to be read in ontological terms, terms that frequently carry strong echoes of the language of race. There is also a body of work that shows that both social divisions—economic and political—and the ontological divisions that are imagined to lie at their foundation are often acutely spatialized. Chatterjee (2004: 66) argues that:

the language of modernity, of civic consciousness and public health space and interests, an order of aesthetics from which the ideals of public health and hygiene cannot be separated… is the language of modern governments, both colonial and postcolonial, and for that reason, it is the language, not only of imperialist officials, but of modern nationalists at well.

In Michel Foucault’s (2003: 54–55) famous theorization of how ‘the biological came under State control’, of the shift from state actions on the body to life, biopolitical interventions are aimed at state mechanisms that can ‘optimize a state of life’. When Foucault (2003: 56) considers instances in which political systems centred in biopower also exercise the right to deny life, he concludes that ‘it is at this point that racism intervenes’. He defines racism as being ‘primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what lives and what must die’; and argues that ‘the first function of racism (is) to fragment, to create ceasuras within the biological community addressed by biopower’ (Foucault 2003: 57–58).

When the post-colonial state refuses to provide lifesaving basic services to the shack settlement, takes no measure to ameliorate the risk of flood and fire, or seeks to mobilize violence in order to ‘eradicate’ it altogether, we are not dealing with racism in the colonial sense but we are certainly dealing with that Foucault calls ‘ceasuras within the biological community’, or what Fanon calls the divisions of the world ‘into compartments’, inhabited by ‘different species’.

And in the post-colony, the hostility that is frequently directed at the urban poor often exceeds the idea that they are insufficiently productive—an idea that is always rooted in the failure to recognize certain forms of labour. ² Anxieties about certain forms of urban presence in the post-colony can be compounded by the way in which the some forms of urban life are sometimes imagined to lie between the past and the fully modern future still to come. V. Y. Mudimbe (1988: 5) notes that anxieties about the African presence in the modern world have often been particularly concerned with the urban African: ‘[m]arginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism. It is apparently an urbanized space.’ Moreover, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism have often shared a view of the subaltern, as Partha Chatterjee (1993: 159) writes of the peasantry in India, ‘as an object of their strategies, to be acted upon, controlled, and appropriated within their respective structures of state power’. Chatterjee (1986: 68) also notes that elite nationalist thought has often excluded the subaltern from the domain of reason and argues that ‘[n]owhere in the world has nationalism qua nationalism challenged the legitimacy of the marriage between Reason and capital’.

In his first published essay, ‘The North African Syndrome’, Fanon (1967: 7) sets out to examine how French science, medical science, approaches the North African migrant with ‘an a priori attitude’. He observes that: ‘[t]he North African does not come with a substratum common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African, spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing on the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework’ (ibid.: 7). For Fanon, the solution to this problem is to ‘reclaim the human’, and this, he insists, in his first book, published in the same year as this essay, requires that we recognize ‘the open door of every consciousness’ (1967a: 232, cf. Pithouse 2013a). The idea of reclaiming the human is also central to Achille Mbembe’s work on the rendering of the human as waste in the post-colony. He argues that ‘the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa’ and that ‘for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and “the human” from a history of waste’ (Mbembe 2011a: n/p, italics in original). For Mbembe, this would require that ‘[t]echno-managerial reason will have to be supplanted by the rehabilitation of the political itself’ (2011b: 9).

The rehabilitation of the political in a manner that can retrieve the human from waste, from the ceasura of the biological, must require a conception of the political that is open to all. Liberalism may offer this in principle, but is seldom able to do so in practice. In their meditation on monstrosity, Lewis and Jane Gordon (2009: 42) argue that in anti-black societies, black people are rendered monstrous ‘when they attempt to live and participate in the wider civil society and engage in processes of governing among whites…Their presence in society generally constitutes crime’. Lewis Gordon often uses the term ‘illicit appearance’ to describe this phenomenon in his work. He also argues that when people’s humanity has been denied, the simple assertion of their humanity will result in them being read as ‘troublemakers to be forced back into “their place”’ (Gordon 2006: 23). In contemporary South Africa, popular struggle, particularly when it occurs outside of authorized spaces and institutions, is often read in very similar terms by elites in various institutional locations and across the political spectrum.

The Marikana Land Occupation

The contestation that is occurring over an urban land occupation in Durban at the time of writing provides a useful example to illuminate how popular politics is often excluded from the political. The land occupation in question, named, like others elsewhere in country, ‘Marikana’ after the 2012 mineworker’s strike, and consequent massacre of striking mineworkers at the hands of the state, in August that year, has, thus far, been destroyed by the City on nine separate occasions. These evictions have been in violation of the law, as well as court orders secured by the residents that have interdicted the municipality from evicting them. Two activists have been assassinated by men widely believed to be in the pay of local political elites, one shot and seriously wounded by the municipality’s Land Invasions Unit, and two shot by the police, from the back, one fatally.

As I have noted elsewhere (Pithouse 2014) the media coverage of these events has, from the outset, repeatedly presented the occupiers as violent and as a threat to broader society, even though there has been no claim that anyone has been killed or injured by participants in the land occupation. In March 2013, The Daily News, a prominent local newspaper, ran an article with the headline ‘Shack dwellers invade Durban’ (Rondganger and Nene 2013). It described the shack dwellers as an armed ‘mob’ and ‘invaders’ and quotes interviewees describing a ‘mad racket’ and speaking of the occupation as a ‘tragedy’. The occupation had, in fact, been organized by long standing residents of the city who had previously been illegally evicted from their homes on a nearby piece of land by the municipality. It was hardly an invasion of the city. The ‘weapons’ with which people were supposedly armed were in fact tools used for cutting away vegetation to clear space to build. In the article, the evictions by the state, an act of illegal and armed state violence, are not presented as dangerous or anti-social.

At the same time statements from the police have often displayed a clear disregard for both the law and the humanity of occupiers, as well as their right to dissent. KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Mmamonnye Ngobeni justified the police shooting of Nqobile Nzuza, a 17-year-old girl shot in the back of the head by the police during a protest in terms of ‘a constitutional mandate to maintain law and order’ (Pithouse 2013b: n/p). She warned the public that the police ‘will use necessary force to execute this constitutional mandate’ (ibid.). She said nothing at all about the failure of the police to act against the unconstitutional evictions in the area, or the equally unconstitutional violence by the state, death threats against activists from local party leaders and the murders at the hands of shadowy assassins. Ngobeni implicitly defined a whole group of people as outside of the law. The result of this is that violence against these people is made to appear legitimate to the point of not even requiring comment, while their protest against gross, unlawful and at times murderous oppression is made to appear inherently criminal and anti-social.

In a similarly cavalier fashion, police spokesperson Solomon Makgale removed the protest during which Nzuza was shot, from the political sphere and placed it in the criminal sphere. ‘I don’t think we can call it a protest. It stops being a protest when a crime is committed—then it is a crime. The police restrained themselves’ (Pithouse 2013b: n/p). For Jay Naicker, also a police spokesperson, there was ‘some sinister motive’ behind the protest: ‘[t]he allegations [sic] that they were protesting at four o’clock in the morning in winter, in a dark corner, when everyone is sleeping; this can’t be protest action’ (ibid.). Road blockades often aim to disrupt rush hour traffic and so usually do begin early in the morning. Here an act of civil disobedience is presented as sinister rather than political.

At times the police have spoken in a way that clearly assumes that the citizens they are supposed to be protecting are middle class. Naicker claimed that ‘Law-abiding ratepayers from various communities in the province are also up in arms as these criminals are blocking roads to their neighbourhoods, damaging property and [ratepayers] are requesting police to deal decisively with these violent criminals’ (Pithouse 2013b). Again no concern at all was expressed for illegal and violent state action against shack dwellers including evictions, beatings, shootings and murder, or the assassinations of activists widely believed to have been organized by local party structures. The property damage that Naicker referred to is that done to roads when tyres are burnt during road blockades.

Newspapers have frequently reported police accounts of their own violence as if they are fact. On 4 October, ENCA, a television news channel, published an article on its website (ENCA 2014: n/p) on the murder of Nzuzu that declared that: ‘[o]n Monday a 17-year-old girl was shot and killed as two police officers, whose vehicle had been surrounded by protesters, fired live rounds to escape’. The article not only reported uncritically the police statement on this killing as fact, but it also ignored a press statement from Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dweller’s organization, issued on 3 October, in which it was reported that witnesses have an entirely different understanding of how Nzuza came to be shot in the back of the head. In a television report on the day on which Nzuza was shot, the channel showed pictures of the police attacking fleeing protesters while a journalist described protesters as ‘running amok’.

Statements from senior politicians have also sought to remove the struggle to hold the occupied land from the sphere of legitimate political disputation. At a press conference addressed by the Mayor of Durban, James Nxumalo, and the head of housing in the Municipality, Nigel Gumede, the media were informed that Abahlali baseMjondolo was ‘a third force’ (Memela 2013)—this is a term that was used during apartheid to describe state agents seeking to instigate and support popular violence against anti-apartheid forces. In the post-apartheid context, the term implies that either forces wishing to return the country to apartheid, or foreign forces aimed as ‘regime change’, are secretly driving protest action. It casts popular organization and mobilizations undertaken outside of the control of the ruling party as treasonous, and sets the stage for repressive violence to be socially sanctioned.

The example of the Marikana land occupation in Durban shows the salience of Jacques Rancière’s insistence that, from the ancient world until today, ‘[t]he war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics. The dispute over the count of the poor as people, and of the people as the community, is a dispute about the existence of politics through which politics occurs’ (1999: 14).

Following recent interventions by Chatterjee, there has been considerable interest in the legal aspects of the situation inhabited by shack dwellers and how this affects their access to and position in civil society. In Chatterjee’s estimation, shack dwellers living outside of the law are not just subject to stigmatization but are also structurally excluded from the agora. They are, he argues, ‘only tenuously, and then even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution. They are not, therefore, proper members of civil society and are not regarded as such by the state’ (Chatterjee 2004: 38).

But he argues that it makes better sense to see the zone in which people do engage as ‘political society’, a space in which people may ‘transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work’, but are, nonetheless, engaged in real forms of politics, some of which can enable ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of people’. Aditya Nigam (2008), who is not uncritical of Chatterjee, has written that Chatterjee’s ‘notion of “political society” has provided an unprecedented opening, a possibility—that of thinking the “unthinkable”’. Reading Chatterjee in South Africa, one encounters an immediate shock of recognition. In South Africa, civil society is certainly ‘demographically limited’ as ‘an actually existing form’ (Chatterjee 2004: 39), although, this is not widely recognized by liberal opinion. There is often a striking split between the domains and forms of elite and subaltern politics with elites, liberal and, in some cases Marxist too, frequently misreading the latter as prepolitical or criminal.

As the example of the Marikana land occupation in Durban shows, the expulsion of the urban poor from the agora, and the presentation of their political engagements in terms of criminality and conspiracy, cannot be reduced to the strict letter of the law. In this case, the actions of the state constitute far more serious violations of the law than those of the people that organized the land occupation. The construction of the occupiers as inherently criminal, and the state as inherently lawful, may present itself in legal terms but, given that it operates independently of any actual relation to the law, is clearly ontological. And as Trioullot (1995: 73) argues it is, precisely, ‘an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants’ that renders political initiative by certain people ‘unthinkable’.

Conclusion

Chatterjee’s notion of political society is rooted in a conception of a particular situation, rather than a particular ontology, and enables politics to be recognized beyond the limits of civil society. Although, Chatterjee is seeking to develop a conceptual apparatus that allows politics to be recognized beyond the limits of liberalism his concept of political society can also enable the recognition of politics beyond the limits of narrow, dogmatic and elitist forms of Marxism. Once the existence of subaltern modes of urban politics is established an examination of what Ananya Roy (2011: 224) calls ‘subaltern urbanism’ is possible, that is, an examination of the shack settlement as ‘a terrain of habitation, livelihood and politics’ that focuses on both the actuality of a particular situation and the practices undertaken within that situation.

For Roy (2011: 224), subaltern urbanism is ‘an important paradigm for it seeks to confer recognition on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory’. It also, she argues, ‘recuperates the figure of the slum dweller as a subject of history’ (Roy 2011: 228). However, she wishes to look beyond what she terms itineraries of recognition, vital as they are, in order to make a decisive break with both topological and ontological conceptions of subalternity. In this regard, she offers four concepts—periphery, urban informality, zones of exception and grey spaces—each of which is an attempt to understand better the situation inhabited by the subaltern, rather than to understand the subaltern as such—a project that always risks collapsing back into ontology.

But to make a decisive break with ontological readings of the shack settlement, it must be understood that it does not constitute an absolutely fixed situation. Insurgent engagement on the terrain of civil society can also be possible, especially when there is sustained organization. For instance, in South Africa, as in Brazil (Holston 2008), it is notable that one of the primary continuities between every major upsurge of successful organization by shack dwellers in South Africa has been an enthusiastic embrace of the courts as a platform from which to engage both the state and private interests. It was true of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the 1920s and 1930s, the Johannesburg squatter movements of the 1940s and the squatter’s organizations linked to the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s, and it remains true of the movements that developed after apartheid, despite a range of quite different approaches to the courts. The ICU’s victories attained via the courts included the lifting of the curfew on African people, ending the power of the police to make arbitrary arrests of African people, and, most famously, ending the system by which African people were dipped, like cattle, in tanks of disinfectant, on arrival in Durban (Hemson 1979: 200). All accounts of the movement stress that legal victories were central to the development of its huge popular support. Similarly, access to lawyers and victories in courts were central to the prestige of the squatter movements of the 1940s, and they all retained their own lawyers, with the bigger movements having dozens of lawyers. James Mpanza, leader of the largest of these movements, declared ‘I love the law’, and Phil Bonner (1990: 101) concludes that this ‘was a sentiment in which all of his squatter colleagues would have concurred’.

In the case of the Marikana land occupation in contemporary Durban, a series of victories in court did not translate into victories on the ground. However, the victories in court did play a decisive role in shifting the way in which the occupation, and the violent and unlawful response to it on the part of the state, was represented in the media. It also enabled progressively wider access to the media by participants in the occupation and the broader shack dwellers’ movement which they had joined. S’bu Zikode, the chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo, was, via a connection to the Mexican philosopher John Holloway, able to write about these events in The Guardian (Zikode 2013). On the day that the article was published, there was a marked shift on the part of the local state towards negotiation and away from repression.

An adequate recognition of political agency in the shack settlement requires the scholar to be simultaneously attentive to both what Ranajit Guha (1997: xiv) calls the ‘politics of the people’, a subaltern sphere of political thought and action, as well as to Jacques Rancière’s (1991, cf. Ross 2002, 2008) sustained demonstration that people move between their allocated spaces and that moments of political insubordination are frequently characterized by a disregard for allocated places.