Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Abahlali baseMjondolo
is a movement largely based in shantytowns
built on land occupations in and around the
South African city of Durban. Since 2005 it
has sought to build popular counter-power
through the construction of self-managed
and democratically organized communities
engaged in a collective struggle.
While the movement has not used the
term “commune”, it has, on occasion,
been described by left theorists as seeking
to constitute itself as a set of linked
communes. This assessment has been
based on the movement’s organizational
form. But this struggle, while often
strikingly similar to Raúl Zibechi’s account
of territories in resistance in Latin America,
is very different from how Marx and
Bakunin imagined the struggles of the
future in their reflections on the Paris
Commune. It is primarily framed in terms
of dignity, fundamentally grounded in
the bonds within families and between
neighbors, and often largely waged by
women from and for bits of land in the
interstices of the city.
If Abahlali baseMjondolo (the term
means “residents of the shacks”) is to be
productively connected to the idea of the
commune in terms of a set of political
commitments, it would require – as George
Ciccariello-Maher has argued with regard
to Venezuela – a detachment of the concept
from “a narrow sectarianism” with the
intention to “craft a communism on local
conditions that looks critically, in parallax,
back at the European tradition.”
THE LAND OCCUPATION
In Durban, as in much of the world,
one starting point for this work is that
the passage from the rural to the urban
seldom takes the form of passage, via
expropriation, from the commons to the
factory, from the life of a peasant to the
life of a proletarian. And for many people
born into working-class families long
resident in the city, work – as their parents
and grandparents knew it – is no longer
available.
When urban life is wageless, or when access
to the wage occurs outside of the official
rules governing the wage relation, the land
occupation can enable popular access to
land outside of the state and capital. And
land, even a sliver of land on a steep hill,
between two roads, along a river bank, or
adjacent to a dump, can – along with the
mud, fire and men with guns that come
with shack life – enable spatial proximity to
possibilities for livelihood, education, health
care, recreation and so on.
43
June 2016