Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

to make it almost impossible to benefit
from development while being outside
the party. In a context in which the party
machinery offers the only viable route
out of impoverishment for many people,
responsibilities to family can begin to
conflict with responsibilities to neighbors
and comrades. This can result in a situation
where some members of the movement go
over to these structures. It can also result in
a situation in which party structures return,
from outside, at gunpoint.
For these reasons it is very difficult to sustain
the political autonomy of a territory once
the state has conceded its legitimacy and
brought it into the ambit of its development
program. Material success – winning
land and housing – becomes political
defeat. This has meant that while Abahlali
baseMjondolo has endured, and grown,
during a decade of struggle in which the
movement has always remained vibrant, the
sites where the struggle is waged with most
intensity have been dynamic.
A MOMENT OF POLITICAL
OPPORTUNITY
If the political form of the commune is
understood as the self-management of
a spatially delimited community under
popular democratic authority, then –
although the term commune has not
been used within the movement – it
could certainly be argued that Abahlali
baseMjondolo has been and, despite the
trauma of serious repression, remains
committed to the construction of a set of
linked communes.
However, if the commune is understood as
a form of politics with explicit commitments
to the radical traditions developed in 19th
century Europe, then things are more
complex. Although the movement’s politics
has evolved over the years it has always
been committed to some principles that
had a productive resonance with standard
European conceptions of socialism and
communism. This is true with regard to
what, using Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s
terms, can be described as both its interior
emancipatory horizon and the practical
scope of its day-to-day actions.
But dignity has consistently been a far
more central concept than socialism. The
practical scope of the movement’s work has
overwhelmingly focused on the sphere of
social reproduction rather than the sphere
of industrial production.
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In 2005 many people had thought that, via
a powerful movement, they would secure
land and housing, on their own terms, in a
couple of years. Now there is a strong sense
of the ANC as an outrightly oppressive
49
June 2016