Marcel Paret’s new book, Fractured Militancy, illuminates connections between processes of formal racial inclusion and the popular resistance that emerges in its wake – from South Africa to the United States, from service delivery protests to Black Lives Matter. Paret introduces an extract from his book for roape.net.
By Marcel Paret
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, shortly after the transition from apartheid to democracy, rosy images of South Africa as a progressive beacon and a harmonious “rainbow nation” predominated. Nearly three decades after the democratic transition, however, such optimistic descriptions are long out of favor. Extreme and racialized inequality, rampant unemployment and poverty, reoccurring xenophobic attacks against foreign-born residents, government corruption scandals, and rolling electricity blackouts tarnish the country’s image.
Two alternative narratives of South Africa have emerged. One narrative portrays the democratic transition as a failure, reflecting how the post-apartheid state caters to the narrow interests of either capital or political elites. A second narrative highlights the political agency of the Black poor and working class, finding hope in widespread protest and resistance.
In Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022), I affirm these alternative narratives while seeking to move beyond an opposition between flawed elites and a virtuous Black working class. I do so by showing how the logics and practices of the former infiltrate the latter. Rather than glorify struggles from below, I aim to demonstrate their political complexity as well as their limitations.
My account draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, including 287 interviews with activists and ordinary residents. Focusing on precisely those areas where so-called “service delivery protests” were taking place, I found that resistance was rampant but also shot through with divisions. Local organizing reinforced cleavages based on wealth, urban geography, nationality, employment, and political views. I refer to this duality – the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of resistance – as fractured militancy.
To explain the simultaneous reemergence of popular mobilization and its fragmentation, I emphasize the dynamic interaction between class struggles from above and class struggles from below within the process of formal racial inclusion. My central argument is that the elite-led reorganization of South African capitalism, secured through racial inclusion and the transition from apartheid to democracy, both animated popular frustration and sowed the seeds of division. The reorganization failed to bring about fundamental changes to the distribution of wealth and income. For most Black residents, economic insecurity persisted, and feelings of betrayal provided a common foundation for the explosion of local protests. At the same time, though, the politics of capitalist reorganization encouraged narrow and competitive struggles over access to state resources. Residents isolated themselves from each other, antagonized workers and migrants within their own neighborhoods, and pursued divergent political projects.
In developing this argument, I draw on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution, which refers to an elite-led reorganization of society that preserves the existing order through demobilization and limited reform. In South Africa, passive revolution took place through the process of racial inclusion. Racial inclusion facilitated passive revolution, encouraged strong feelings of betrayal, and ultimately helped to both generate and fragment popular resistance.
Scholars have increasingly deployed the concept of passive revolution to understand how elites absorb and thwart radical challenges. Rather than focus primarily on elites, however, I show how passive revolution represented both an elite response to popular mobilization under apartheid, and a source of fractured militancy in the post-apartheid period. On the one hand, passive revolution produced resistance by dangling the possibility of deeper change and then preserving economic inequality and insecurity. On the other hand, passive revolution fragmented resistance by demobilizing popular organizations and redirecting popular aspirations toward the government delivery of public resources.
Emphasizing a view from below, this is a story about precarious resistance, which has a double meaning. Against pessimistic accounts, I show that economically insecure groups do have the capacity for autonomous collective action. Their struggles, however, are often weak, localized, or fragmented, and they may waver between inclusionary and exclusionary positions. In short, if agency may emerge from precarious living conditions, that agency itself often remains precarious.
In the following passage from the “Preface” of the book for roape.net, I draw a parallel between racial dynamics in South Africa and the United States. In both places, formal racial inclusion brought continued economic insecurity and Black resistance. In the Conclusion of the book (not shown here), I argue that the “passive revolution through racial inclusion” took different forms in the two places and, in turn, produced divergent movements. Indeed, the persistent, localized, and fragmented community protests in South Africa look very different from the national Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd.
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“Preface” from Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022)
By Marcel Paret
Black liberation implies a world where Black people can live in peace, without the constant threat of the social, economic, and political woes of a society that places almost no value on the vast majority of Black lives. —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
So you’ve come to see our horrible lives. This horrible place. This dirty place. It’s a pigsty. — Passerby in Motsoaledi informal shack settlement, Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2013
South Africa is a hotbed of protest. In April 2013, residents of the Elias Motsoaledi informal shack settlement—situated in the heart of Soweto, a previous epicenter of antiapartheid resistance—took to the streets. They demanded the provision of a formal housing development, which government officials had promised but failed to deliver. Later that year, residents of Bekkersdal, a township on the West Rand, followed with their own protests. Here the upsurge was a response to various grievances, including high grave tariffs, poor sewer infrastructure, and infrequent waste collection. The following April, residents of Tsakane Extension 10 (Tsakane10)—an informal shack settlement located on the East Rand—protested as well. They wanted the government to develop the area, and especially to relieve severe overcrowding. Three months later, back in the south of Johannesburg not far from Motsoaledi, residents of the Thembelihle informal shack settlement barricaded roads after the state removed their illegal electricity connections, which they relied on to cook, watch television, and light their shacks.
All four episodes took place along the historic Witwatersrand, a fifty-six-kilometer rock scarp where prospectors discovered gold in the late nineteenth century. The gold mining industry laid the foundation for what eventually became a massive metropolitan area of more than eight million residents, including the city of Johannesburg.[1] Stemming from the colonial and apartheid legacy, extreme and racialized inequality define the area. It is marked by a contrast between rapidly diversifying affluent neighborhoods on the one hand and almost exclusively Black poor neighborhoods on the other.[2] Each of the episodes described above revolved around slightly different specific grievances, but they shared one fundamental similarity: they all emanated from predominantly Black urban residential areas ravaged by poverty and unemployment.
Far from aberrations, the protests reflected a much broader surge of popular resistance throughout South Africa. Local protests accelerated dramatically in the wake of the 2008–2009 global economic recession. Media outlets reported an average of close to one local protest per day, and police incident reports suggest that the true numbers were much higher.[3] The dramatic increase in South African protest resembled the rise in protest globally between 2009 and 2014. Following the Arab Spring, which included revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and uprisings through-out the Middle East and North Africa, the global protest wave spawned anti-austerity protests in Greece, Spain, and Portugal; the Occupy movement in the United States; and popular revolts in Ukraine, Brazil, and Turkey. Some scholars likened the global protest wave to previous surges in 1848, 1905, and 1968.[4] In 2011, Time magazine declared “The Protester” its Person of the Year.
There were important parallels between South Africa’s protests and those taking place elsewhere.[5] Unemployment and economic insecurity loomed large, as did frustration with government institutions that protected elites at the expense of ordinary people. Further, in South Africa as elsewhere, traditional organizational vehicles, such as trade unions and political parties, often played only peripheral roles. Beyond these similarities, however, a comparison is more of a stretch. One clear difference was their class basis. Scholars often traced the global protest wave to the declining fortunes and frustrations of middle classes and educated youth. Conversely, in South Africa the protesters were more economically insecure. They often scraped by through survivalist activities, small government cash transfers, and sharing through kinship networks. In South Africa, as well, the historical legacy of apartheid and national liberation shaped protests in a way that did not have a clear parallel in the iconic examples of the new global protests.[6]
Protests by Black residents in Ferguson and Baltimore, which shook the United States in 2014–2015, represented a closer parallel to South Africa’s local protests. Police killings of Black men—Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore—provided the immediate triggers for resistance. The killings activated long-standing resentment, frustration, and anger. Like local protests in South Africa, the Ferguson and Baltimore protests emanated from Black residential areas marked by concentrated poverty and disproportionate levels of unemployment. The Ferguson and Baltimore protests also reflected a parallel history of racial inclusion, marked by the abolition of legalized and state-sanctioned racial exclusion. The shared images and memes that circulated through the networks of Egyptian revolutionaries, Spanish indignados, and American Occupy protesters hardly penetrated the townships and informal shack settlements surrounding Johannesburg. Neither were they major reference points in Ferguson and Baltimore. What mattered more in Johannesburg, Ferguson, and Baltimore was the failure of racial inclusion to deliver liberation.
Scholars have long emphasized parallels between the United States and South Africa with respect to racial domination and resistance.[7] In both places, the state implemented explicit and overt systems of legalized racial exclusion in the twentieth century, which in turn spawned vibrant Black movements for racial inclusion. In the United States, the civil rights movement challenged the legalized racism of Jim Crow, while in South Africa popular struggles challenged the racist apartheid state. The civil rights and anti-apartheid movements were, of course, very different, as were their targets and their eventual consequences. In South Africa, where Black residents represent approximately 80 percent of the total population, racial inclusion led to a major racial transformation of the state. The predominantly Black African National Congress (ANC) assumed power in 1994 and remains in power today. Conversely, Black residents in the United States, who only account for about 13 percent of the total population, never achieved the same measure of political power. Despite these contrasts, however, the parallels are instructive.
During the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King famously dreamed of liberation from racial oppression in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC. Half a century later, in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore, the daily realities of unemployment, economic insecurity, police surveillance, and mass incarceration demonstrated the gap between the ideal of liberation and the realities of everyday life. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it, “The young people of Ferguson had great reverence and respect for the memory of the civil rights movement, but the reality is that its legacy meant little in their everyday lives.”[8] In his classic poem “Harlem,” published in 1951, Langston Hughes famously posed the question: “What happens to the dream deferred?” In Ferguson and Baltimore, the deferred dream of liberation exploded in protest, as Hughes prophetically anticipates: “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load? Or does it explode?” [9]
In South Africa, the transition from apartheid to democracy brought a new constitution that abolished legalized racism and treated Black residents as full citizens with equal rights. On top of these legal changes, the ANC’s promise to provide a “better life for all” encapsulated the dream of Black liberation. As inequality and economic insecurity deepened, however, the better life proved elusive for many Black residents. With apartheid-era restrictions on movement lifted, the Black poor increasingly concentrated in peripheral urban areas where unemployment, poverty, informal housing, and limited access to water and electricity marked everyday life. For these residents, racial inclusion had severe limits. In the South African case, deferred liberation proved even more explosive. Widespread local protests became a staple of the post-apartheid landscape, and they show little sign of disappearing. The struggle for liberation continues, just as it did in Ferguson and Baltimore.
A further parallel revolves around the role of previous movement heroes. In the Ferguson protests, and later in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that they helped to spawn, young Black activists sometimes clashed with such established Black American leaders as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus. Some BLM activists felt that the older generation had sold them out and had little understanding of their everyday struggles. This dynamic loomed even larger in South Africa, where former heroes of the anti-apartheid movement led the government. A deep sense of betrayal permeated the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements. Many resented that politicians appeared to pursue their own narrow interests, while the Black poor continued to await the promised better life. In South Africa, feelings of betrayal and resentment underpinned the consistent surge of local protests.
Police surveillance and mass incarceration did not define life in South Africa’s impoverished Black urban areas in the same way that they did in the United States. Issues of police brutality certainly arose in South Africa’s local protests, most often in response to police repression, but they were less central. Whereas the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore emerged through opposition to state violence, local protests in South Africa called on the state to provide resources, such as housing and electricity—what residents called “service delivery.” Race represented another crucial difference. Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore thrust racial disparity to the forefront. They highlighted how law enforcement disproportionately targeted and attacked Black residents and communities. Race did not figure as prominently in South Africa’s local protests, even if it always lurked just beneath the surface. Protesters referenced class identities as often as racial ones. References to “the poor” were prominent.[10] To be sure, racial inequality remains extreme in democratic South Africa. The urban poor are well aware that poverty remains concentrated among Black residents. In a situation, however, where Black politicians dominate the state, and where the Black middle class outnumbers the white middle class, race does not illuminate the challenge at hand in quite the same way.
The differences between the struggles for Black liberation in the two places came into focus in 2020, as the coronavirus crisis swept across the globe. In the United States, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis reignited the BLM movement. Following the local uprising in Minneapolis, in which protesters burned down a police station, protests quickly spread across the country. Marking possibly the greatest mobilization in US history to date, the BLM protests of summer 2020 were remarkable for the wide geographic scope, the extension of protests beyond major cities and into small conservative towns, the widespread participation of fifteen to twenty-six million people, and the racial diversity among protesters.[11] Indeed, white participation in the protests surpassed what it had been during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Each protest had its own inflections, and specific demands varied. Still, the resistance suggested a shared national opposition to police killings of Black residents and to what those killings implied about the unfinished character of Black liberation in the United States.
Meanwhile, in South Africa, local protests continued to proliferate. By one estimate, there were more than six hundred local protests in 2020.[12] In contrast to the American case, however, they remained highly localized and isolated from each other. There was no evidence of converging national resistance around a project of Black liberation. The following chapters attempt to explain the fragmentation of resistance in South Africa and, in turn, the lack of a broader social movement to address unfinished Black liberation. In South Africa, where the transition from apartheid to democracy was so dramatic and where economic inequality is so extreme, it is impossible to understand popular struggles separately from capitalism and the legacy of struggles for national liberation. My account emphasizes the importance of capitalism and its articulations, or entanglements, with the politics of national liberation and racial inclusion. I place specific emphasis on political dimensions of class struggle, from the compromises and maneuvers of elites to the collective formations of the economically marginalized. Three decades into the democratic period, these class struggles have continued to operate on the terrain of racial inclusion.
This book is about the ongoing quest for liberation, after racial inclusion. The quest for Black liberation in South Africa began long before apartheid and continued in its wake. Local protests for service delivery carry on the legacy of Black liberation struggle by asserting that Black lives matter and have value, even if protesters do not frame their struggles in racial terms. I tell this story through the lens of the four residential areas that feature in the opening paragraph—Motsoaledi, Bekkersdal, Tsakane10, and Thembelihle. My account is not celebratory. It is as much about the challenges that confront Black movements in South Africa as it is about their valiant resistance. History is crucial. The ways in which South Africa resolved—only partially—the contradictions of apartheid capitalism help us to understand why current struggles remain so fragmented. I draw a comparison to the United States not to suggest South Africa’s essential similarity. My aim, rather, is to highlight the historical dimension of racial inclusion. The advances and limits associated with racial inclusion shape Black movements today, from Ferguson to Johannesburg. They often do so in contradictory, and not necessarily fruitful, ways. Nonetheless, the struggle for liberation persists, seeking to realize dreams deferred.
Marcel Paret is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah and Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-editor of Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective and Building Citizenship from Below.
Featured Photograph: Housing Protest in Cape Town (19 September, 2012).
Notes
[1] This includes the Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni (East Rand), and West Rand municipalities.
[2] Owen Crankshaw, “Race, Space and the Post-Fordist Spatial Order of Johannes-burg,” Urban Studies 45, no. 8 (2008): 1692–1711.
[3] Peter Alexander, Carin Runciman, Trevor Ngwane, Boikanyo Moloto, Kgo-thatso Mokgele, and Nicole van Staden, “Frequency and Turmoil: South Africa’s Com-munity Protests 2005–2017,” South Africa Crime Quarterly 63 (2018): 35
[4] Mike Davis, “Spring Confronts Winter,” New Left Review 72 (2011): 5–15.
[5] For a comparison of South African and global protest, see Marcel Paret, Carin Run-ciman, and Luke Sinwell, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective: The Politics of Protest in South Africa’s Contentious Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2017); Marcel Paret and Carin Runciman, “The 2009+ South African Protest Wave,” Journal of Labor and Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 301–319.
[6] For more on the contrast, see Marcel Paret, “The Politics of Local Resistance in Urban South Africa: Evidence from Three Informal Settlements,”International Sociology 33, no. 3 (2018): 337–356.
[7] George Reid Andrews, “Comparing the Comparers: White Supremacy in the United States and South Africa,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3 (1987): 585–599; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
[8] Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 161.
[9] Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (1951), accessed September 13, 2018, original emphasis.
[10] Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review, 2002); Prishani Naidoo, “Struggles around the Com-modification of Daily Life in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 34, no. 111 (2007): 57–66.
[11] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020; Douglas McAdam, “We’ve Never Seen Protests like These Before,” Jacobin, June 20, 2020.
[12] This estimate refers to the number of protests by “residents,” as calculated by Kate Alexander and Lefa Lenka using the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) database and provided via personal communication. See figure 1 in the introduction for further details.
