AUT: South Africa: Still in Motion

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

I am forwarding this message that I posted to the South African
"debate" discussion list. Many issues and the general polemics are
strictly related to the South African situation, but maybe there
could be some hints for recent and not-so-recent aut-op-sy
discussions.

Franco

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Dear all,

I have been in Durban for the past week, and this trip offered me
hints for some observations that belong to what the Jurassic Left,
in this list as elsewhere, would surely call "bread-and-butter-
economistic-issues-that-deviate-our-attention-from-the-Pure-
Revolutionary-Struggle-Over-Ideas". Anyway, for me these
distinctions belong to paleontology, more than to politics, and I
would not waste ten minutes of my time to address such arguments in
merely theoretical-ideological terms, if it wasn't for the
opportunity to present some "evidence".

I've been for some time in Chatsworth, and in particular in an
utterly immiserated section of this sprawling township, called
Bangladesh. There, in a context of 73% unemployment, most of it
long-term (documented by a great survey produced by the Group of
Concerned Citizens and the Institute for Black Studies at UND), about
1,000 families are going to be evicted -- in the general indifference
of the upper- and middle-class public (including the "renaissant"
one) and the usual ANC censorship -- due to their refusal to pay for
rent and fees for electricity. I got in touch with some comrades
(sociologists would say "strategic informants") there. Apparently
what "citizenship" and "better life for all" in the new SA mean in
this particular situation is that 5 to 8 members' households survive
with government subsidies of around 5-600 Rand a month, 350-400 of
which go into water and electricity payments (at market rates, of
course). The Durban Metro Council explains the situation in letters
saying more or less: "dear customer, we are sorry to do this, but as
you know our provision of electricity depends entirely on your
payment, after we have re-paid supplies from Eskom". Of course, this
is a lie: exhorbitant electricity rates in poor areas is largely
functional to providing cheap electricity for manufacturing concerns
in "world class" competitive sections of the economy, while affluent
white suburbs still pay comparatively less. But even if electricity
for bosses was a bit more expensive and rates in Bangladesh a bit
lower, the fundamental question would remain. This concerns the
inherently inhuman nature of Mbekian housing and service policy,
whose main aim is to squeeze the poor (or to "put them in the
conditions to pay") with whatever means necessary, and providing a
level of service that is utter shit -- as the collapsing
infrastructure in Bangladesh or a chat with any plumber working for
the Durban municipality would show you -- as the only way for
repaying privatised service corporations, banks and industrial
expansion for "export promotion". In a way (who said that the RDP was
abandoned?), the current government has finally achieved the old
progressive goal of "growth through redistribution", with the slight
difference that now redistribution is from the poor to the rich.

Finally, I've been to Toyota SA, pride of the Fordist working class
and undisputed  market leader in the production of cars, combis and
light comercial vehicles, with a strong export potential. Here 600
workers are going to be retrenched, after 300 more were shed last
year -- still a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of thousand of
jobs that will be lost in the area with the next wave of
"rationalization" and "right- sizing". By mere chance this happens
soon after Toyota Japan has invested in its SA partner by buying 27%
of it and introducing a massive amount of robotized new technology
(after all, the Global Shareholder must be reassured that the company
is healthy, and therefore tough in dealing with "redundancies"). By
the way, I wonder what happened to "co-determination", "intelligent
production" and "productivity pacts", as the horrendous
SocialDemocrats would theorize, in manufacturing industries around
Durban. Surely many in the unions believed to such sloganeering, and
maybe this is a reason why many of them now literally do not know
what to do, how to respond, and how to get in touch with the
grassroots again. As for the people in Bangladesh, I am not sure what
the effect could be if some sociologist goes there telling them that
if they want to enter the "win-win" world of the Renaissant South
Africa they must be more "productive" and more "flexible" to become
"employable".

Now, these two stories are strictly linked since flexibility in
employment and privatisation and higher fees for services are part of
the same process of making local areas "competitive" (i.e. attractive
for business and investors' confidence, that in SA are notoriously
considered as the only agents of History, Freedom and Development).
Now, I would like to ask a question: if one of us "Debaters" goes in
the Toyota plant and tell the workers that the age of mere workplace
struggles confined to higher wages is over -- first because it is
precisely on this terrain that the most awful trade-offs based on the
"flexibility-or- retrenchments" alternative have been imposed in the
recent past, and second because it's pointless to have a 10% ("above
inflation") wage increase if 9% will go into increased water and
electricity payments -- and that therefore they should mobilise and
fight with the people in Chatsworth/Bangladesh for an *income* that
includes not only higher wages but free water and electricity for all
(including the unwaged) to be funded, say, via taxation on capital
gains and concentrations of wealth, and that, finally, the State has
to become a direct counterpart (in what the above mentioned SocDem
academics would despisingly call "unspecified conflict") even for
the most "economistic" struggles, would all this be considered
"reformist" or "revolutionary"? Please do not take this question too
seriously, since the relevance I give to such an ideological
alternative is zero. There's, in fact, another alternative: what
about starting thinking about ways of politically expressing and
articulating these autonomous struggles (I mean really, not just
wanking on the Internet), even if this would mean *SWEEPING AWAY* the
many self-proclaimed "orthodox" vanguards of the left, their pompous
organic intellectuals and the disembodied teachers of the Revolution
(including, of course, the "National Democratic" one)?

PS: Thanks to Heinrich, Ashwin, Saranel, Pinky, Ryan and the Toyota
and SACTWU comrades, without whom this message would have been
unthinkable (as the struggle that will, hopefully, unfold).

===============================================================
| Franco Barchiesi                                            |
| Sociology of Work Unit - Dept of Sociology                  |
| University of the Witwatersrand                             |
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