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Abstract
This article deconstructs the problematic way the ‘Poor’ are represented by the intellectual ‘Left’ as a fixed, virtuous subject. Even while this fixed identity is actively mobilised by people themselves to gain symbolic and real power, I argue that the philosopher's fixation on the singular subjectivity of the oppressed confines the ‘Poor’ to their very subjugation. Instead, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how agency and oppression occur within the ‘uncomfortable collaborations' that are forged between various actors. My argument is grounded in experiences with the shack dwellers movement in Durban (Abahlali baseMjondolo, ABM), and young AIDS activists in Khayelitsha and Atlantis, South Africa.
Notes
1. My field notes from the Informal Settlements Management and Clearance briefing, July 2006, hosted by the Centre for Public Participation.
2. I use Ashwin Desai's term ‘Poors' to designate a heterogeneous group of South Africans who are actively resisting and fighting for their rights to life, as well as being the most hard hit by neo‐liberal state policies, subject to eviction, water cut‐offs, electricity cut offs etc. Elsewhere I use the term the ‘Poor’ to indicate the fixed subjectivity of wretchedness that I am critiquing here.
3. Banana City has been part of the university community for over 50 years. UKZN's Vicechancellor Prof. M.W. Makgoba has been trying to evict families off this land throughout the last year.
4. By ‘activist’ here I mean what is often referred to as middle class activist or City People within social movements in Durban. This group are involved in political struggle for their own diverse set of reasons, which deserves a paper in itself. I use the terms City People, urban activist, and middleclass activist interchangeably.
5. In other locations and moments the oppressed subjectivity might be organised around other dimensions, such as statelessness, HIV status or other health related groupings, indigenous identity, etc. For my purposes here, the category of the ‘Poor’ actually cuts across many of these other identities and has been unproblematically taken up as an identity both by Left activists and academics as well as by local community movements.
6. Negrophilia has been used to describe the obsessive fascination by whites with ‘negro’ culture, music and artistic production in America. I use it here to capture the neurotic exotification of the black subject, in this case the ‘Poor’ black subject, that is in itself a kind of racism. I think here of Said's ideas around Orientalism.
7. While I don't have the space here to adequately discuss how the World Bank and other so‐called anti‐poverty agencies construct technologies and discourses of poverty to the exclusion of the very bodies and realities of those they study, and the historic forces that create them, an understanding of how ‘poverty’ has been politically constructed is an important backdrop to this study of subjectivities.
8. The ‘Left’ are also not an essentialized group. This term should also be problematized and unpacked. At the same time, in attempting to reveal ways that these concepts fuel a problematic politics, I use the term willingly. The notion of the South African ‘Left’ is still widely used and accepted by those inside and outside that definition, expanding only enough at times to make space for the noxious ‘ultra‐Left’.
9. Of course this is a generalisation. Ashwin Desai, for one, situates himself at points during the Chatsworth struggles in We are the Poors (2003), and I'm sure there might be other examples.
10. Field notes.
11. This inability to speak freely has not always been the case, and most certainly was not in the history of South African Left. One wonders if it is the post‐apartheid era, where the stakes are not as high (you may get tear gassed but are less likely to be shot) that has allowed the entrance of so many reformist political figures from the middle classes to stagnate real engagement? Perhaps we have not yet emerged from the climate in which Steve Biko found himself during the SASO days; a climate in which a multi‐racialism that includes whites and elites cannot happen yet, unless it is duly acknowledged, exposed and continually challenged. Most certainly narratives that exclude the role of whites and elites in community struggles do not help advance the consciousness and causes of those they hope to support.
12. This quote was taken from the transcripts of the video recording of Zikode's speech.
13. Unfortunately I don't have room within this paper to tackle all the intricacies at play across the various sites and between and among the various actors in the story constructed around Abahlali baseMjondolo and within the specific site of Kennedy Road, to illustrate friction at work in a particular space. In a longer version of this article I set out the various players in detail: activists, NGOs, academics, the State (executive, judicial, legislative), community movements, petty capitalists, land owners and big capital, local home owners, shack dwellers outside the movement, geographic spaces and IFIs. This overview still misses the historic forces of apartheid and class divisions within the movement itself, but begins to tease out the complexity of the forces and frictions at play.
14. Elsewhere these people might be called ‘allies’, but there is a tendency around Abahlali for the academic/activists to position themselves as 'support workers’. I have myself worked with Abahlali in this way, so this should be seen as an auto‐critique.
15. The Common Ground Collective is a ‘community‐initiated volunteer organisation offering assistance, mutual aid and support’ who work with communities to provide for 'their immediate needs’. They ‘emphasises people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways' and were largely responsible for aiding disenfranchised people in New Orleans after the hurricane.
16. In her study of how Ukrainians medicalise their lives in a post‐Chernobyl context, Adriana Petryna (Citation2002) also looks at how individuals enact agency even within grim social and biological realities. Here, being a sufferer is financially rewarded by the state, thus positioning health in a political terrain. In this case, the construction of collective and individual responses, contestations and interactions with the system is what Petryna calls biological citizenship. Biological citizens tool themselves with knowledge of medicine, science, technology, and bribery, to negotiate with the state for their very existence.
1. With acknowledgement to Ranciere, J (2003) The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. Drury, J., Oster, C and Parker, A., Duke University Press, Durham.