We need a conversation about development

[From the introduction] From the Communist Party across to the corporate spin-doctors and down to the Development Committees in the shack settlements, more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard won agreement that the realities of inequality in our society are so cruel and perverse that any social project can only be credible if it will ameliorate these divisions and the suffering they cause

Political agency in South African shack settlements

(From the introduction) In 2004 Mike Davis asked whether or not what he called 'the informal proletariat' could attain historical agency. The question posed by Davis sparked a largely speculative discussion in the radical edge of the metropolitan academy that often paid scant regard to the many careful studies dealing with the political agency of shack dwellers. The debate about the political capacities of the urban poor stretches back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose views on the matter are well known, and Mikhail Bakunin who sustained their objectification but inverted 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”. In Africa the rational discussion of this question begins with Frantz Fanon who,dying of leukaemia and dictating his words from a mattress on the floor of a flat in Tunis in 1961, insisted that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” One of the many ways in which he stretched the Marxism in the air at the time was to take the view that the lumpen-proletariat, as a sociological category, had no fixed political meaning. People who had been 'circling the cities' hoping, he said, 'to be let in', had sometimes offered their services to colonial oppression and had sometimes joined the revolution against colonialism. Moreover he argued that in the colonial context the urban poor, living outside of the “world of compartments”, did not only become a “gangrene eating into the heart of colonial domination” as an unintended consequence of a desire to survive, of a “biological decision to invade the enemy citadels”, but that some amongst these people would assume explicit political agency and that it is: “in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpen-proletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead.” In reaching this conclusion, and in insisting on this particular stretching of the dominant currents of the Marxism of the time, Fanon was sustaining a fidelity both to the actually existing politics that he had witnessed in various African countries as well as to his founding ethical axiom - to recognise “the open door of every consciousness.

We are all the public

[from introduction]: Across the country the most vulnerable people in our society are being subject to brazenly unlawful and often violent action at the hands of the state. Homeless people, refugees, sex workers, street traders and shack dwellers are all being taught, in the most literal sense of the term, to know their place. But state illegality is not only aimed at the segregation of physical space. It is also about ensuring that the people on the margins of society know their political place

Elections: a dangerous time for poor people's movements in South Africa

[From introduction]: History groans with the suffering caused by authoritarian individuals and regimes that were elected to power. For this reason the only useful measure of the commitment of any political project to democracy is to see how it responds to challenges to its own position and ideas

Hold the prawns

[From introduction]: In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of 'world class cities' – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination

Land occupation and the limits of party politics

In the recent election the DA, together with COPE, made much of their intention to defend the rule of the law. But while the dust thrown up in that election is still settling, the City of Cape Town is already engaged in violent and unlawful behaviour towards its most vulnerable citizens

Politics in the slum: a view from South Africa

[From introduction]The modern state, and its civil society, have always been comfortable with workers in their allotted place – be it formed around the immediate needs of industrial production, like the migrant workers hostels in apartheid South Africa or contemporary Dubai, or an attempt at creating a haven, like the suburban home which has its roots in the gendered and raced class compromise reached in North America after the Second World War. When there has been a part of the population rendered or considered superfluous to the immediate needs of production there has been a degree of comfort with the inevitably bounded spaces into which these people have been abandoned or contained – prisons, ghettos, Bantustans etc. But both the modern state and civil society have always been acutely uncomfortable with that part of the ‘dangerous class’ - vagabonds or squatters - that are, by virtue of their occupation of space outside of state regulation, by definition out of place and threatening to domination constructed, along with other lines of force, on the ordering of space

Thought amidst waste : conjunctural notes on the Democratic Project in South Africa

(from the introduction} In a recent essay Achille Mbembe argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means 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”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.

The devastation of Haiti

[From introduction] The devastation of Haiti is not a simple matter of bad luck. Earthquakes, like storms and epidemics, hit the poor with vastly more force than the rich. Much of the press coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has wilfully disregarded the history of how Haiti was made poor and kept poor by, above all, the same American elites that are now dispensing charity, soldiers and advice. Racism has often been close to the surface or even grinning hideously far above i

Hard choices ahead

preprintFrom Introduction: In recent weeks people have been willing to risk arrest, violence and in some cases death at the hands of our habitually brutal police force to assert a whole range of demands. These demands have included an insistence on the right to the cities, the right to an income, the right to a decent education and the right to a living wage