It must have been some time in the early 1970s that Phil Bonner, a fairly recent arrival in the Wits history department, was first asked to talk to students about the history of trade unionism and worker organisation in South Africa.
 
The Nusas wages commission had been set up in 1971, and progressive students were becoming increasingly involved in efforts to strengthen worker initiatives through pamphleteering, a worker newspaper, research and representation at wage hearings.
 
A gradual rediscovery of the rich history of previous efforts to organise workers was underway; of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, in trade unionism; of strike action; and the contested terrain over the relationship between trade unionism and anti-segregationist and anti-apartheid politics.
 
Phil Bonner stepped up to help guide this new generation of students through the interstices of a labour history not easily accessible or particularly well known. Books on the subject were banned, and many of those who had been involved were in exile, imprisoned, banned or under house arrest. The past and the questions it raised, the lessons learned, felt distant and inaccessible.
 
Bonner was invited by student leaders to run a series of lunch-time talks on the ‘hidden’ history of working class organisation, from the early mine workers strikes through to Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (Cnetu), the Trade Union Council of South Africa (Tucsa) and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), part of the ANC-led alliance, and by then functioning mainly in exile. Students, many for the first time, learnt of the 1946 mineworkers strike, the Food and Canning Workers Union, debates about the relative merits of general and industrial workers union, the Congress-led stay away campaigns of the 1950s.
 
Phil was generous with his time, and particularly active in the student-organised ‘History of Resistance’ series, which laid the foundations for Nusas’s national ‘Release all political prisoners’ campaign of 1974.
 
From here, it was a small step to ask Phil to join the small band of volunteers who, together with the Wits wages commission, began setting up the Industrial Aid Society as a structure for worker organisation, worker education and – eventually – independent trade unions.
 
He was joined in these activities by his partner and wife at the time, Chris Bonner, who left her teaching post to become one of the organising pillars of the new trade union movement, notably in the chemical industry.
 
Phil’s politics was well-developed, and his commitment to working class organisation independent of compromised ‘parallel’ trade unionism, separate from the imperatives of the class alliances underpinning national liberation politics, was already established.
 
Part of this commitment was based on his research into the history of trade unionism. Bonner had become increasingly concerned that the working class focus of Sactu and its member unions had been weakened by participation in the class alliance led by the ANC. He had seen how trade unions allied to anti-colonial liberation movements had been undermined  and marginalised in the post-colonial period, as new elites evolved into a comprador bourgeoisie based on rent-seeking and access to state-held resources.
 
This took him to the core of the disputes which wracked the Industrial Aid Society in its formative days. What was the relationship between trade union organisation and the movements of national liberation? Were working class interests inevitably subsumed and weakened in multi-class political alliances? Should trade unionism steer clear of anti-apartheid politics in favour of developing working class strength on the factory and shop floor? Did this latter position imply an ‘a-political’ trade unionism, or was it a foundation for the development of a working class politics?
 
Phil struggled with these complex political, historical, strategic and tactical issues along with many others in the IAS. These were (and are) difficult questions, and the various and competing interests at play were never served well by simplistic and dogmatic contestation. That was certainly never Phil’s approach.
 
Part of Phil’s contribution to this organisational vortex lay in his early and enduring commitment to worker education as a component of building working class organisation. Advance guard workers becoming involved in representation as shop stewards, or members of factory committees and branch executives, or organisers, would be so much stronger, so better equipped to deal with the complex relationships between bread-and-butter demands and wider political issues if they understood the histories of preceding trade union and political initiatives.
 
It was this approach that found Bonner in the IAS offices weekend after weekend, in the evenings and late at night, meeting with groups of workers, developing and testing materials and manuals. Broader worker education was combined with more specific and practical organising tools. How to assess the potential of different forms of representation available – works and liaison committees, factory committees, shop steward committees? What about the different potentials and strategies implied by industrial versus general union organisation? Did a focus on industrial trade unionism detract from the development of broader, cross-sector working class interests? And always, the relationships between class-specific trade unionism and politics based on class alliances.
 
These questions stayed with Phil from those early days through to his involvement as Fosatu’s education officer, and later when he offered worker education courses in some of Cosatu’s affiliates.
 
Phil was controversial. He was strongly allied with what was sometimes referred to as the ‘workerism’ – more accurately, the independent industrial unionism – of Fosatu. He was opposed to Fosatu affiliating with multi-class formations such as the UDF, and wary of trade union alliances with ‘the community’.  He had a scathing – often bitingly humorous – critique of the posturing which sometimes accompanied excesses of populist and nationalist politics.
 
But this does not mean that he was ‘economistic’ or ‘reformist’ or ‘a-political’. He had a keen and sophisticated, but critical, politics and as an individual was often involved in initiatives supportive of a broader politics. A number of tributes make reference to his incarceration under threat of deportation. It is probable that this was in retaliation for his role in couriering messages to the International University Exchange Fund on behalf of a group concerned about the security status of police agent Craig Williamson. In much the same way, he was strongly supportive of the Detainees Parents Support Committee (DPSC), making Wits facilities available for some of the first meetings responding to the detention of a range of activists and trade unionists. His strong disagreement with the politics of many of those detained in those September 1981 raids in no way detracted from his support of the developing detainee support movement.
 
Phil was amongst those who initiated and taught the marvellous multi-disciplinary Development Studies honours course at Wits in 1976. Together with academics like Sheldon Leader, Eddie Webster, Jeremy Keenan and Alf Stadler, Phil’s history block in ‘Dev Studs’ helped lay the intellectual foundations for the course’s first students who went on to start Work In Progress, the South African Review, and Development Studies Information series, which endured for well over a decade.
 
Phil showed a loyalty to individuals, even when he differed with them. When a senior academic attempted to mislead the Wits higher degree committee to the effect that I was delaying submission of my Master’s thesis to avoid military service, Phil was quick to argue that there was nothing wrong with that if it was true, but then pointed out that the allegation failed the evidence test: I was well within time frames, and was in fact medically exempt from military service. And although we ended up on different sides of the corrosive IAS dispute, he declined to join the chorus of personal vitriol which accompanied that dispute.
 
Intertwined with this trade union and political narrative are a range of personal memories from that earlier period of Phil’s multiple contributions. As a supervisor of my Master’s thesis, he left a draft of my offering in a cave in the Drakensberg, while on an overnight camping trip with John Wright. I have often wondered what the baboons and subsequent human travellers made of my writings. He took my children on their first visit to the diggings at Cradle of Mankind. We travelled together on a few occasions to the Drakensberg, once being forced to share a room because the other members of the group claimed – incorrectly, I am sure -  that we both snored loudly after a long mountain climb and copious quantities of red wine.
 
I have a vivid memory of bumping into Phil one evening on the Wits campus, just outside of the office he occupied in the Central Block. It must have been winter, in the early 1980s, because it was dark already, and Bonner seemed down. Almost without prompting, he started talking about his concern about the way ‘race’ might be mobilised in any post-apartheid dispensation. He drew on his extensive knowledge of elite behaviour in post-colonial Africa to warn of the dangers of new elites mobilising race and nationalism as a protective cloak for the looting of the state, as a way of deflecting criticism of the emerging petty and comprador bourgeoisie. I’d not thought of this much  – indeed, few of us were, at that stage, even contemplating the possibility of living to see a post-apartheid order, never mind the dangers it would face.
 
And then Phil shook himself out of his gloom, and proposed a visit to the Post-Graduate Club for a drink.
 
It was the mid-1970s when I first visited his and Chris’s house in Dunbar Street, Bellevue, just down the road from my tiny flat in the same area. The IAS dispute was at it height, and many a late night was spent, over much drink and little food, discussing plans and strategies and alliances. Phil and Chris had a beloved house cat, a very furry one, which shed its hair wherever it roamed – including Phil’s lap. And Phil’s name for the cat, Ragna Hairybreeks, named perhaps for Ragnarök (a series of future events, including a great battle in Nordic mythology) and, of course, its own furry legs and propensity to shed its hair. ‘Rags’ brought out Phil’s gentle side.
 
We have lost one of the very best of a generation that turned the world on its head, that asked new questions and hence found different answers – intellectually, academically and politically. Phil was never boring, always controversial, usually steely in his principles – and a character of massive and endearing proportions.
 
In the late 1970s, Phil and I sometimes ended up in different political ‘camps’ but were able to retain a friendship, and an engagement, albeit occasionally tense. He and Sally travelled to Cape Town to join Georgina’s family ‘millenium’ party, and we were together, looking over False Bay, as Y2K announced itself. Phil was an honoured guest and active dancer at my last three ‘birthday decade’ celebrations.
 
I am gutted that I will not again see him pulling his beard, jutting out his chin to disagree, or startling those present with an insight or perspective which truly changes the way we think and see the world.

Thomas Johnson has raised some important issues about use of potable water in Cape Town, and whether residential (largely suburban) households are responsible for the bulk of water consumed in the city (‘On Cape Town’s Water Crisis’, Politicsweb, 29 January 2017).
 
The difficulty in establishing this with accuracy is two-fold. There is, without doubt, a major crisis surrounding water resources and their use, and any questioning of the basis of restrictions imposed should not be viewed as underestimating this. Reduction of water consumption is clearly a priority as the dams supplying Cape Town drop to lower and lower levels.
 
The second problem relates to the way the City of Cape Town has communicated information and messages which appear to be based on data which is neither coherent nor transparent.
 
This may be a consequence of reliance on speechwriters, spokespeople, media and communication officials and ‘spin doctors’. Their mandate may be to convince the people of Cape Town to save more water, but if this is done on the basis of shaky data, and contradictory information and messaging, any trust relationship between those in government and citizens is eroded and compromised.
 
At a time when ‘alternative facts’, ‘post-truth’ and repetition of inaccuracy and falsehood have become the ‘new normal’ in politics, it is essential to question the factual basis of bold claims and assertions. The City of Cape Town’s communications on the consumption of water seem to fall into the murky terrains of ‘alternative fact’ and ‘post-truth’, as representatives and officials – perhaps with the best of intentions – attempt to manage and reduce water consumption.
 
On 19 January 2017, a statement issued by the City asserted that ‘’We must remember that formal residential consumers are by far the biggest users of potable water in the municipality, consuming approximately 70% of total water supplied".
 
If this is the case, then it is clear that the bulk of savings (reduction in use) need to be effected in residential households, predominantly in the suburbs.
 
However, as I wrote (without response) to my local councillor, and the member of the mayoral committee for water, waste services and energy, with a copy to the City’s ‘media.account’, “the 70% estimation of water use as private suburban residential is surprising: shopping malls, airports, hospitals, building and construction, parks, sports fields, gyms, schools, businesses, factories, shops and office, public swimming pools, leakage, fire fighting and related services, informal settlements, indigent water allocation, breweries – can they really account for only 30% of water used?”
 
It was on that basis that I requested some detail about the data used to compile this figure of 70%. My concerns about its accuracy seemed to be reinforced when the mayoral committee member for water and waste services and energy stated in a subsequent statement that residential properties used 65%, rather than the previously stated 70%, of the city's water supply (James de Villiers, ‘Dam levels effectively at 29.2% - City of Cape Town’, News 24, 30 January 2017).
 
Confusingly, Mayor Patricia de Lille had provided different information on ‘water wasters’ and water use a few days before. “The City has identified 20 000 water wasters mostly from informal settlements … As it stands”, said the mayor, “dams are 40% full. Thirty percent is for irrigation on agricultural farms” (Cape Times, ‘Informal settlements are the main culprits’. Water restrictions tightened, Cape Times, 27 January 2017, my emphasis).
 
If 30% of water is used for irrigation, then it cannot be right that the remaining 70% (or 65% on the City’s other version) is used by private formal households. That would mean that no water is used by commerce and industry, state institutions, the local authority, schools, hospitals …
 
The City then seemed to backtrack on its claim that the majority of ‘water wasters’ were to be found in informal settlements. In a statement released on 30 January, water and waste services and energy MMC Xanthea Limberg said high water usage areas included Athlone, Newlands, Newfields, Manenberg, Constantia, Lansdowne, Somerset West and Kraaifontein. But this too seems unlikely if it relates exclusively to residential users. Many of the areas identified have houses on small plots, with limited or non-existent gardens. However, without an indication of the data the City is using, how it is gathered and the methodologies involved in collation and analysis, it is difficult to assess the claim.
 
Reduction of water usage across Cape Town as a whole is clearly a priority. However, if the City wants to motivate all users – including residents, and those running businesses, factories, retail outlets, institutions, hotels and guest houses, sports facilities, schools and universities – it needs to build trust and transparency in its messaging. It also needs to make available and explain the data it compiles to analyse consumption patterns by area type, use and activity.
 
In the absence of this, statements will lack credibility and their messages consigned to the dustbin of ‘alternative fact’ and  ‘post-truth’. Good governance, after all, is based on more than delivery and efficiency. It also requires policy and decision-making based on verifiable data, collected and analysed according to acceptable and transparent statistical standards.


Glenn Moss
​3 February 2017

What we often call ‘common sense’ is not always as obvious or even sensible as it might seem at first glance.  This is particularly so in the use of untested assertions about the place of race two decades into South Africa's post-apartheid dispensation. For what some see as obvious assumptions about race sometimes mask changing material realities, resulting in an inadequate understanding of change, and misdirected efforts to  interpret the power and policies of new elites.

Milford Bateman has raised some important issues about the consequences of micro-lending to financially stressed South Africans (‘Microcredit: a principle cause of poverty in SA’, M&G, 29 December 2015, initially published as part of The Conversation Africa). He has also sought to identify who has benefitted and who has lost in the development of this system of micro-credit extention.
 
Bateman argues that the microcredit movement in South Africa expanded partly as a result of ‘policy responses of the first democratically elected government’, followed a ‘debilitating trajectory’, and that the model is ‘a fundamental block on sustainable development and growth at the local level’.
 
Professor Batemen has written an influential and generally well-received book on this subject (Why Doesn't Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism), although at least one reviewer accused the writer of ‘sloppy thinking’, ‘dramatic conspiracy claims’, being loose in reasoning and careless in use of evidence. He has also undertaken major case studies on micro-lending which range, according to the book’s publishers, from India to Cambodia, Bolivia to Uganda, Serbia to Mexico.
 
These credentials notwithstanding, I have some concerns about Professor Bateman’s use and mobilisation of ‘race’ as an explanatory tool in his discussion about micro-lending:
 
'The microcredit movement thus helped plunge large numbers of black South African’s into deeper over-indebtedness, poverty and insecurity. At the same time, not coincidentally, a tiny white elite became extremely rich by supplying large amounts of microcredit to black South Africans.

'Not surprisingly, many in South Africa say that microcredit brought about the country’s own sub-prime-style financial crisis. It had its own local flavour, generating even more disturbing race-based exploitation overtones than even in the US.'

It may be that the vast majority of micro-lenders who took advantage of the policy choices made by South Africa’s first democratically-elected government were from what Professor Bateman terms a ‘white’ elite – although I have some recollection of micro-lenders linked to trade unions in the troubled Marikana area. Equally, in the early years of the new government, when I worked as a long-term consultant to a national department, I remember the micro-lenders who were decimating  the monthly salaries of many of the staff I supervised being set up and run – at least in Pretoria – by small scale black owned financial institutions which were opening and closing at a rapid rate in the centre of the city.

I also recall then Finance Minister Tevor Manuel, who was political head of the Department I consulted to, publically expressing concern about the consequences of micro-lending and the repayment systems – including garnishee orders – which left some public service staff with a take home salary at month end inadequate  even for food. This suggests that government was not unaware of the consequences of its new policy choices encouraging micro-loans.

I am inclined to query the professor’s  unsubstantiated comments about the relationship between micro-lending and a ‘tiny white elite’ which became ‘extremely rich’ through micro-lending to black South Africans, and the ‘race-based exploitation overtones’ which this implied.

It is difficult to understand why the new post-apartheid government, elected by a majority of South African voters (by far the largest number being black) would introduce policies intended to benefit a ‘tiny white elite’. It is more credible that many new policy initiatives were aimed at facilitating and encouraging the development of a black middle class with a loyalty to the new poltical order, and an interest in its stability. This is a far more compelling explanation of developing financial, economic and political policy following the 1994 elections than the priorisation of a ‘tiny white elite’. If existing economic interests from the older order benefitted from this, it was more likely an unforeseen consequence of ‘black economic empowerment’ than a policy choice by the new government.

If Professor Bateman wants to ague that the the system of microcredit benefitted a ‘tiny white elite’, helping to make it ‘extremely wealthy’, then he needs to establish this through reference to research and credible data – not just by assertion.
This principle is even more important when assessing Professor Bateman’s assertion that the system of microcredit developed post-apartheid generated very disturbing ‘race-based exploitation overtones’. This may be so. Alternatively, it may rather be that the exploitative nature of post-apartheid micro-lending has benefitted an emerging entrepreneurial and rent-seeking class which defines itself in racial terms (‘black’ economic empowerment) but is better denominated by the nature of its economic activity than any assumed ‘racial’ identity.

That is why an agenda for substantial socio-economic change – transformation, if you will – cannot be developed solely on the basis of assertions about race and assumed ‘racial’ interests. This cannot explain developments or change in society, nor be the basis for challenging power relations and the elite interests they advance.

Glenn Moss

Glenn Moss’s The New Radicals, compared with 1970s young activists in the US

26 December 2014

For Christmas Marie gave me Glenn-Moss’s The New Radicals, which Peter Vale had recommended after my lecture at Gordon Institute for Business Science and dialogue with Xolela Mangcu in July. I read it yesterday. It helped me to see what was missing from my talk, and also the potential for fertile, cross-country intellectual and practical dialogue between South African and American interested in deep, democratizing changes.

Moss shows that white radicals did not simply ignore the BC challenge to whites “to go back to their own communities to organize,” when SASOS broke away from NUSAS. What I had argued at GIBS was that the problem was simply avoidance of home communities, which others had also argued. Thus, Martin Legassick had proposed that “Since radical white students regarded with contempt…the idea of engaging with racist whites…they turned to the black working class as an alternative.”

This is too simplistic, as Moss shows both through his personal experiences and accounts of the theoretical debates of the time.

Young white radicals were searching for a positive philosophy which addressed a real weakness they saw in BC – its inattention to questions of class. Key figures Moss, Steven Friedman, Barbara Hogan and many others supported the BC critique of liberalism and multiracialism, and BC’s claim to black leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle, but they sought to ground the larger social change project in a humanized Marxism or socialism which made class central. It is important to note that there is another dimension of BC which Moss neglects - its epistemological critique of Enlightenment rationality and triumphalist science, a critique which shaped the thinking of intellectuals such as Mahmood Mamdani, Xolela Mangcu, Enver Motata, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni and others.

A telling debate took place among white radicals in December 1973, at the semi-annual theoretical workshop of NUSAS, the student union. While Geoff Budlender argued the BC position, Eddie Webster, a young sociologist at Natal, part of a key group of new left intellectuals which included Rick Turner, countered that the BC, while correctly insisting on black leadership of the struggle and strategies for the psychological liberation for blacks, had an insufficient analysis of class and also the crucial role of intellectuals in consciousness-raising. This consciousness-raising role had been stressed by Gramsci, and also African revolutionaries such as Fanon and Cabral.

An action programme took shape out of Webster’s position which promoted work on campuses in research, documentation of injustices, in large campaigns to raise student awareness of the oppression of blacks, and also in support efforts for workers. Steven Friedman and the Wages Commissions played critical roles. As this programme developed it included worker education efforts and various roles in supporting and organizing workers, especially in ways that integrated politics with union organizing and crossed divides of industries and community. I should note a personal parallel here — my formative experience as a young man in the civil rights movement was organizing student support for the maids and janitors union campaign at Duke University.

There are many other parallels, as well as differences with my own radical generation in the US, in the same time period. In the early 1970s in the US, young activists sensed that the tide of social change was dramatically ebbing, especially in the aftermath of Nixon’s overwhelming victory in the 1972 presidential election. But there continued to be ferment all around the world. Building on the spirit and theme of “participatory democracy” from the 1960s New Left, a group of us founded the New American Movement, a participatory socialist effort to “bring the new left back home” in both theoretical and practical terms. We saw NAM as an alternative both to Black Power and its offspring, who were arguing white irrelevance; and to the Stalinist and state-centered social democratic old left. By the mid-1970s, some of us had begun to argue for the merger of NAM and Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a breakaway from the old Socialist Party, to produce something in the vein of Moss’s “Movement for Social Democracy,” even with questions about the state-centered politics of DSOC’s social democratic approach. This transpired in 1980 in the Democratic Socialists of America, which Cornel West continues to head.

But another development in America, the growth of large scale community organizing, also  began to shift the debate and attention (community organizing has no large scale counterpart in South Africa, though there are powerful examples such as Ishmael Mkhabela’s Interfaith Center for Community Development in Soweto, or the Abhalali movement among shack dwellers).

Associated with the growth of community organizations and drawing on leading intellectuals in the civil rights movement like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, some public figures – the community organizing leader Geno Baroni, the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, Senators Fred Harris and Barbara Mikulski among others –were calling for a “new populism.” I had first argued for socialists in NAM/DSOC to merge in order to take leadership in the “new populist movement” but as the decade progressed I began to argue that populism is its own, distinctive political tradition which can be distinguished from left and right. It differs from socialist politics not only on the grounds of socialism’s statist bent but also because of socialism’s fiercely modernist, anti-traditionalist biases, which create marked hostility toward settled institutions like churches, ethnic groups, local community organizations, etc. Populism’s vision of cooperation and “the commonwealth” also mark it as different from market-oriented politics, what today has become varieties of “neo-liberalism”. Populism, in this account, not only infused the 1880s-90s farmers’ movement but also the 1930s union and cooperative and rural movements.

Eric Foner in a famous Radical History Workshop essay, answering Sombert’s question, ”Why Is There No Socialism in America” made a parallel case, arguing that it wasn’t the absence of radical sensibilities but rather the presence of an alternative radical sensibility, grounded in small property and civic autonomy. Gerald Taylor, the community organizer and public intellectual with a civil rights movement background, has subsequently developed this line of argument, pointing to its translation into professions as a source of power in the black freedom movement after the failure of the Populist Party. African American historian Frederick Harris has similarly argued the centrality of autonomous “free spaces” to the black freedom movement. Political theorist Thomas-Spragens, in Getting the Left Right, traced the shift in progressive American politics from a populist faith in workers and common people, with an emphasis on popular agency in the New Deal, to pity for the dispossessed and distributive justice delivered through the state in modern liberal and left politics. Populism has the sensibility of the best of the Popular Front of the 1930s – rather than being a polarizing politics, it seeks to win over the broad “middle” of the society. Seeing every cultural group – like every person – as immensely complex and contradictory, it is attentive to the democratic currents and potentials in different communities and anchoring institutions like congregations, union locals, local businesses, ethnic groups and informal settings.

In addition to arguing for populism as a distinctive politics (especially in “Populism versus the Left,” in Sheldon Wolin’s short-lived but influential magazine democracy ) I worked with feminist pioneer and women’s historian Sara Evans to develop these arguments about populism through the concept of “free spaces,” which we argued can be found at the heart of every democratic movement. Free spaces create sustainable sites for transformative democratic politics different than either the state or mass movements, in settings like religious congregations, schools, clubs, reading groups, local unions, settlement houses, sometimes colleges. They can also be seen as “mediating institutions” with particular qualities, including space for self-organizing, democratic intellectual life and cultivation of democratic skills. I should note that such spaces are almost entirely invisible in most treatments of the anti-apartheid movement, as Paul Weinberg (head archivist at UCT) and I discussed last August.

Meanwhile, other young intellectuals were also making their own contributions to a “new populist” politics, sometimes using the term populism and sometimes not. These included Benjamin Barber with Strong Democracy, Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversarial Democracy, Craig Calhoun with his work on “the radicalism of tradition” and also later on Habermas and the public sphere (Calhoun introduced Habermas to American audiences with his edited collection, Habermas and the Public Sphere, to which I contributed), Derek Shearer and Martin Canoy, Economic Democracy, and Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet. Young populists and radical democrats found allies among an older generation such as Christopher Lasch, Lawrence Goodwyn, Sheldon Wolin and others. Eventually, through the auspices of the Good Society journal, an intellectual home for engaged political theorists, we connected with the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on governance of common pool resources (for which Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics). We also connected to the work of Esther Thelen and her students like John Spencer who were developing an agency based science of infant development, integrating complexity science. This partnership eventually led to “civic science,”   ethinking the role of science in democratic terms, the topic of a National Science Foundation workshop last-October. Peter Levine and others in the civic studies field have also made considerable contributions to concepts of populist politics, public work and an epistemology of civic agency.

I described populism’s real world expressions in citizen groups in my first book The Backyard Revolution, published in 1980  (new community and neighborhood organization, the Ralph Nader networks, consumer politics and environmentalism, the enormously influential Midwest-Academy founded by Heather Booth). Shortly after, populism took shape in a Congressional Populist Caucus. A new unionism represented by Teamsters for a Democratic Union,  eventually, SEIU, were in this tradition, as well as mayors like De Blasio in New York. It is noteworthy but rarely noticed that both Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama drew on populist themes of agency in their presidential campaigns.

It is important to note that this populist history has been “uncovered” by conservatives like National-Review reporter Stanley Kurtz,-whose best-selling “expose” of the supposedly secret influences on Obama in his Radical in Chief, has been a best seller on the right. All conservative historical treatments stop in the early 1980s, before populism became clearly established as a different politics.

There is another chapter to the story.  Populists like Christopher Lasch and Sheldon Wolin (and his students especially –Andrew Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State), as well as historians like Thomas Bender, Intellectuals and Public Life, John Jordan, Machine Age Ideology, and Ellen Langemann, The Politics of Knowledge,  described the hollowing out of institutions and civic life (and thus the shrinking of free spaces, though they didn’t necessarily use the term) by the spread of technocratic modes of thought and organization, “the gospel of efficiency,” and—in Bender’s terms – the transformation from “civic” to “disciplinary” professionalism. In my writings on populism, I also tied these dynamics to an epistemological argument, the overwhelming primacy which thinkers descended from Enlightenment modes of thought have given to scientific rationality, the resultant devaluation of relational and cultural ways of knowing, and the erosion of free spaces. This argument, made in the CommonWealth book (1989), called for action in response, exploring how what Xolela Mangcu calls “technocratic creep” might be reversed.

This took shape in the work of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and our partners over the years, translating the populist politics of broad-based community organizing ( which we called “citizen politics”) into institutional change efforts in schools, a Catholic woman’s college, cooperative extension, a nursing home, and nonprofits. All pushed back against technocratic creep.

Part of the work also included meetings, in Minneapolis and Washington, bringing together reflective practitioners and community organizers with intellectuals --Benjamin Barber, David Mathews, Ernie Cortes, Gerald Taylor, Bob Woodson, Jane Mansbridge, EJ Dionne, Robert Bellah, Frankie Moore-Lappe, Heather Booth, Will Marshall, William Schambra, William Doherty, and many others. On the ground organizing and intellectual discussion about the need for “a different kind of politics” formed the foundation for the “New Citizenship” initiative with the White House Domestic Policy Council for the first two years of the Clinton administration.

Over time the concepts of “public work” and “civic agency” emerged out of such organizing and discussions, complementing “free spaces” and “populism.” Public work highlights the crucial importance of rethinking work itself as a civic and democratic organizing site (crucial, we realized, for the creation or revitalization of free spaces). Civic agency, developed through public work -- collective capacities, or power, to act across differences to meet challenges and negotiate a democratic way of life -- helps to concretize a vision of an empowering democratic society.

The work also merged into higher education change efforts, especially the project of revitalizing the democratic narrative of higher education.  Civic science, expressed in “citizen professional” practice, pioneered by Bill Doherty and his colleagues at the UMN Citizen Professional Center an also the political theorist Albert Dzur, is key to this effort. I think of civic science as potentially a democratizing civic solvent not only in higher education but across technocratic systems generally.

Along the way Scott Peters, a former colleague at the CDC and partner in civic science, Tim Eatman, Julie Ellison, David Mathews, and others have unearthed rich histories of the “democracy” traditions of higher education. We have seen and, to varying extents, participated in large change processes at several colleges and universities, including the College of St. Catherin, the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College, Northern Arizona University,  Syracuse University, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Lonestar Community College.

We have found that higher education change is difficult, but possible. It is also upstream, since experiences in higher education shape the career identities and conceptual frameworks of almost all leaders in modern “knowledge societies.” Democratization of higher education is central to the survival and deepening of democratic societies as a whole. The new collection, Democracy’s Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities helps to make the case. Some of the intellectual journey described on the American side here is in the book.

Harry Boyte is a long-time public intellectual and activist. He is Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at Augsburg College title, and has recently edited Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities.


 

Many of the political generation who embraced a sort of independent radicalism in the 1970s found it difficult to decide which party to support in Wednesday’s national and provincial elections.

Of course we celebrated the right of all South Africans to vote. Forty years ago, we doubted we would live to see a universal franchise and that, by itself, was a reason to vote with enthusiasm on 7 May.  

I had carefully considered the call by a group of reputable elders to vote ‘No’ to the ANC. The ‘Sidikiwe! Vukani!’ campaign suggested that those who might have historically voted ANC, but rejected the way the party has developed and performed in the last years, needed to indicate this clearly in their voting choices. They needed to send a clear message about the nature of the ANC’s current leadership, the corruption and cronyism endemic throughout state institutions, and the racial and ethnic mobilisation that has again entered our politics. Saying ‘no’ to this, argued the campaigners, required a strategic use of the vote – spoiling one’s ballot rather than voting for the ANC, or voting strategically for one of the smaller parties.

Still undecided by the time I entered the polling booth, I took a plunge and entered my crosses on the ballot papers without feeling particularly comfortable about my choices.   Watching results flow in, I had a sense of unease, uncertain that this election will herald any changes of significance in the way government, or the formal representative politics on which it is based, will function. 

Thinking back to the past, I remembered the conundrum which some of the ‘new radicals’ faced in the 1970s. It was 1974, exactly forty years ago. A general election – only, of course, for white voters – had been called. The Progressive Party had a reasonable chance of adding to its representation in parliament (only Helen Suzman),  especially in Johannesburg and Cape Town. How, we pondered, should student organisations like the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) advise white students on its affiliated campuses to use their vote?

An extract from The New Radicals, my book due for release in the next few days, recalls the debates. A whites-only general election

'created the opportunity to examine the policies, practices and interests of the parliamentary opposition parties. Although there was some support for the tiny Progressive Party on the Nusas campuses, white parliamentary politics were severely compromised and none of the opposition parties could claim to represent the aspirations and interests of anything more than a small minority of South Africans.

Gordon Waddell, one of the senior Anglo American executives who had met with students during our occupation of the company’s head office in 1973, was running as a Progressive Party candidate in Johannesburg. He asked me if the SRC would support his campaign ... This engagement compelled me to think more carefully about how students would respond to the forthcoming election, and I proposed to the Nusas National Council that we issue a communiqué on student participation in the electoral process. This would not advise them how or if to vote, but raise questions about the nature of parliamentary opposition and whites-only elections.

The proposal stirred up considerable controversy among the members of National Council. Some of the presidents of affiliated SRCs had links with the Progressive Party, and Nusas regularly invited Helen Suzman to speak at student gatherings, to assist in liaison with government, and to take up the cases of student leaders denied passports, arrested or detained. Suzman had been an honorary vice-president of Nusas and was unwavering in her defence of human rights. Despite differences in approach, she often supported Nusas in times of sustained attack by the government and its security forces.

At the same time, many in the student leadership were deeply critical of the Progressives’ market-driven economic policy, the proposal for a qualified franchise, and the party’s relationship to monopoly capital (especially Anglo American). The development of the Wages Commissions, which were challenging wage levels and policies on trade unionism, was throwing relations between Nusas and the Progs into even sharper relief.

After a tense debate at National Council, Nusas issued a carefully worded communiqué expressing ‘grave reservations about the electoral and parliamentary process’. It noted that ‘Less than one quarter of the population was entitled to cast a vote, that democracy could only begin to function on the basis of a universal franchise and that no white political party could claim to represent the true interest of black South Africans’. Labelling the politics of the major political parties contesting the election as ‘white supremacist’, Nusas encouraged students ‘to decide whether to vote in terms of what they ascertained from questioning candidates and from studying the policies of the parties’.

It was a compromise statement, reflecting efforts to straddle political differences within Nusas. Some representatives on National Council had wanted to call on white students to boycott the election, and attack the Progressive Party’s economic policies and links to white capitalism. Others argued that we should draw attention to banned organisations with historical legitimacy in representing the disenfranchised. This would have further challenged political parties claiming the mantle of opposition to apartheid. The eventual statement was relatively mild. Students were being advised to inform themselves, ask questions, think about the issues, and then decide how or if to vote.

The reactions from established liberalism were disproportionate, if predictable. The editor of The Star newspaper suggested that Nusas had a ‘death wish’. Helen Suzman flew into a fury, and two senior Nusas office-bearers went to see her at home, taking a bouquet of flowers as a peace offering. Suzman – quite rightly in my view – threw them and their flowers out. They had no mandate to see her and apologise, and the issues in dispute involved deep differences in political interests and strategies. Bunches of flowers would not change this.'

- An extract from The New Radicals. A Generational Memoir of the 1970s (forthcoming), Jacana Media.

The parallels with Wednesday’s election are few and far between. In 1974, only a very small minority of South Africa’s citizens were entitled to vote. The organisations which represented the interests and aspirations of the majority were outlawed, their leadership exiled and imprisoned. The ruling party seemed all-powerful. The Broederbond, secretive and largely unaccountable to party membership or the electorate, enabled a self-perpetuating elite within the National Party to caucus and advance their interests. The party had a strong alliance with unionised labour, which secured the votes of white workers. It was difficult to see any impetus for change.

The established political system created few opportunities for serious challenge, and the majority of the electorate supported the party in power, no matter how problematic the priorities and conduct of its leadership. It seemed unlikely that any challenge to what existed would come about as a result of existing political parties contesting elections.

I saw few parallels between Wednesday’s poll and the campaigns which led up to it, and the election it was separated from by four decades and a tumultuous history. Yet I still found it difficult to see the contending parties confronting the central issues of our society – poverty, inequality, unemployment and job creation, corruption and rapacious accumulation, a disparity in wealth and living conditions that shocks.

I again doubted the capacity of the contending parties and their leaders to move beyond narrow or sectional interests, where they seek their votes and deliver their patronage. I was reminded of the petty posturing and point scoring so evident in local councils, provincial legislatures and the national parliament which rarely prioritise the interests of ordinary South Africans, regardless of what these public representatives claim in their speeches and statements.  

In some ways, this was the difficulty we faced, as radical student leaders, in 1974. How could we advise our constituency on the Nusas-affiliated campuses to vote, or even whether to vote? It was highly unlikely that any major impetus for progressive change would emerge as a result of the electoral system and the political parties which contested those elections. The Progressive Party presented a limited form of opposition to National Party rule – certainly far more than the official opposition United Party. Yet its support of free market economics, monopoly capitalism and a qualified franchise made it extremely difficult for any of the ‘new radicals’ to vote for it, even on a strategic basis.

We were both right and wrong. The dynamics of change in the 1970s and 1980s were the consequence of a wide range of intersecting, mutually reinforcing and sometimes contradictory influences and causes. Electoral politics was one very minor element in that complex mix.

That may be one of the lessons of Wednesday’s elections. The major drivers of progress are unlikely to come from within the system of political party representation and contestation, at least in the short to medium term. Rather, we are going to have to look to other initiatives, including the activities of civil society and community organisations challenging the way resources are allocated, services delivered and priorities established.

The political parties, at best, may be influenced by these pressures and developments. Strategic electoral politics – especially in the next local authority elections scheduled for  2016 – may attempt to identify parties which are more likely to respond to pressure and demands from civil society, communities and elsewhere in society. But the political parties in their current forms are unlikely to initiate or lead the processes of progressive change.

Glenn Moss

8 May 2014

African National Congress veterans have recently spoken out against developments in the organisation over the past few years, and particularly in the post-Mbeki era. Some of these stalwarts spent long periods in exile as senior members of the national liberation movement and the South African Communist Party, returning home after February 1990 to play influential roles in the country’s political transition from apartheid.

For respected elders like Ronnie Kasrils and Ben Turok, the ANC has been at the centre of their political commitment for their whole adult lives. Being critical of it is akin to challenging the family and community they have been part of, which they have formed and been formed by, for fifty years and more.

That is one of the reasons why their comments and concerns should be treated with respect, regardless of whether one agrees with them. The vitriolic response of some ANC and SACP leadership to, for example, the ‘Sidikiwe! Vukani! Vote NO’ campaign, announced by Kasrils, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and others who have long and credible associations with the ANC, is an indication of how narrow the once ‘broad church’ has become in its transformation from national liberation movement to ruling political party.

As I have argued in my soon-to-be-released book, The New Radicals, many of my generation learnt their politics in the relatively independent environment of internal activity in the 1970s and 1980s. They had their organisational allegiances and ideological affiliations, and contestations between these sometimes became brutal. But these rarely assumed the extent to which commitment to the ANC-in-exile (or its alliance partners, the SACP and Sactu) defined individual existence and identity.

That may explain why so many from the union movement, the United Democratic Front  and its thousand  affiliates, and progressive intellectuals and activists from the 1970s and 1980s, find it easier to be critical, to stand back, to distance from a politics which they believe has lost its core. They do not necessarily feel that a break with the ANC in power undermines everything that they have ever held as important or valuable. They are more accustomed to being independent, being on the outside, or challenging powerful organisational structures.

At a Cape Town launch of his latest book, Head above the Parapet, Ben Turok was challenged by a member of the audience. What had he done or said to confront the ANC as its core values disintegrated? Where had Ben been during the arms deal, AIDS denialism, nepotism, cronyism, self-enrichment and corruption n the awarding of state tenders?

Similar questions have been asked of Ronnie Kasrils and others who served as cabinet ministers at a time when the ANC’s commitment to democracy, non-racialism and the values enshrined in the constitution became increasingly questionable.

Ben’s answer was as honest as it was revealing. In a system of representation based on party lists, challenging the organisation which has deployed you to parliament is effectively a resignation. At no time did he feel that exile from the ANC was a sound political option. He tried to challenge where he could, on the issues he could: in the parliamentary caucus, in MP’s study groups, in submissions on the direction of economic policy. And, of course, he famously avoided voting on the Protection of State Information Bill by absenting himself from parliament.

Turok arguably has a history which displays greater independence than Ronnie Kasrils’ past reveals. He fell out with the Communist Party – and especially Joe Slovo – in London, and was expelled. In the 1970s, at a time when the ANC was deeply suspicious of the development of Black Consciousness within South Africa, he argued that it could not be dismissed as ‘false consciousness’, and required understanding and engagement.

Ben Turok is clear that, as an MP, more public and sustained challenges would have led to his expulsion from both parliament and the party. But he does not believe that the ANC has diverged so far from its earlier principles, policies and practices that he should end his sixty-year involvement with the organisation. He still believes the ANC has an ‘historical mission’ to liberate the poor and the oppressed from the enduring yokes of colonialism, racism and apartheid.

That puts the recent actions of the group associated with Ronnie Kasrils in the Sidikwe! Vukani! initiative into some perspective. They may have made some errors in the way they presented alternatives for those who had voted for the ANC in past elections. Certainly the proposal that spoiling a ballot was a better option than voting for the ANC opened the door for political party spin doctors (and others) to avoid engagement with the core of their message. This was a call to vote ‘NO’ to the ANC with its current leadership and trajectory, and to do this in a politically strategic manner.

The United Democratic Movement’s Bantu Holomisa seemed to understand this message better than some in the ‘commentariat’. In response to a question at the Wits ‘Great Election Debate’ screened by eNCA on 24 April, he declined to ‘waste time’ discussing the call to concerned ANC members to spoil their votes, choosing rather to focus on what it means to vote strategically on 7 May.   

Despite some legitimate criticism of the way they crafted their message, the Sidikwe! Vukani! group displayed enormous political courage, putting themselves outside of the organisation which had been their home and family, their identity and very reason for existence, for decades. That’s no easy decision, as Ben Turok can tell you.

Ben and Ronnie share some historical similarities. Both were members of the Communist Party from an early age. Both were amongst the first MK saboteurs. Both were in exile for decades. Ben served hard jail time, Ronnie served hard time as an instructor in MK’s Angola camps, and underground in South Africa. However, despite these similarities in background and history, there is a chasm between their respective assessments of the state of the ANC.  

Ben believes the ANC can be rescued, that its ‘historical mission’ still exists, can be recovered and revived. Ronnie, it would seem, does not. He cannot vote for the ANC, at least in its current form, and under its current leadership.

That is what lies behind the differences between these veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle. It is not about being an apologist (which is what some accuse Ben of). It is not about being an opportunist, bitter at marginalization after the fall of Thabo Mbeki at Polokwane, and who did not speak out when he was a cabinet minister – the accusation sometimes flung at Kasrils. It is not about courage or its absence.

The difference is between those who believe the ANC still has – or can recover – an ‘historical mission’ to liberate the oppressed from the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, and those who believe it has diverged so far from this path that it can no longer claim that role.

Neither group deserves to be ridiculed or insulted in the way that, for example, some in the ANC and SACP have responded to the Sidikwe! Vukani! initiative. That is poverty-stricken politics at its crudest. It strengthens the view that, while the current leadership and its supporters control the ANC (and SACP), there is little chance for organisational regeneration.

However, simply asserting that something is, or is not, the case, does little to prove its veracity. Repeating this over and over again does even less. That is why Ben Turok and those who support his argument need to demonstrate why the ANC can still advance its ‘historical mission’ of liberation, despite everything that has happened in its 20 years in power. In the same way, those who see the ANC as so thoroughly compromised that it is systemically incapable of addressing enduring poverty and inequality need to explain why they believe this to be the case. 

Exploring these questions, rather than engaging in cheap and posturing politics without concern for its consequences, provides a better basis for developing a strategic response to the ANC and the government it controls nationally, and in all but one province.

Glenn Moss