GOOD MORNING AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY? THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY AND SOCIALLY USEFUL WORK IN SOUTH AFRICA : A PHILOSOPHICAL SHIFT? In his Left Turn column, under the title Valuable work is not the same as employment in the Cape Times daily of 8 October 2014, our Deputy Minister for Public Works, Jeremy Cronin, discusses what I would term a prefigurative example of what he categorises as socially useful, homestead work, in contrast to what he calls distant employment for someone elses profit. The example in question is that of the Siyakholwa community work programme in the Keiskammahoek area which involves 37 rural villages, a retired employee of Barlow Rand, and the governments Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP). The Siyakholwa programme employs 1500 participants for 8 days per month who are selected by village committees who identify what community work will be done where.This system of local democratic control of community work is employed to provide a wide range of socially useful services from repair of schools; tending to village food gardens, orchids, beehives; composting and soil conservation; free meals at schools and crèches and home based care; to trades and computer literacy training, and even a viable oil distillery, etc. Deputy Minister Cronin claims the following about the broader social impact of the programme: The eight days a month of paid community work provides basic income support to hundreds of households, while allowing for others to work in their own fields or pursue other activities. As participants attest, the programme has helped foster personal dignity and rebuild community cohesion. We live in a country where individualistic entrepreneurism, profit-driven production and wage labour in service of what the Minister calls distant employment for someone elses profit (i.e., exchange value) is often pontificated as the only way to generate income and wealth. Yet in that same country, initiatives such as the Siyakholwa programme, although limited to a rural economic context, demonstrates a fundamentally different, almost prefigurative organic praxis of democratic control over work, social-needs-driven production, and social labour in service of producing social use value. But what does this mean for Left theories about the perceived politically parochial limits of the local and its often undervalued potential for the wider national emancipatory agenda. At a macro-theoretical level, I agree with Noam Chomskys view on the relationship between revolutionary theory and localise praxis in an interview published in the book LIVES ON THE LEFT : A GROUP PORTRAIT [edited by Francis Mulhern. Verso. London. 2011] when he argues: We should set up the germs of new institutions where we can. We should try to make people realize what is wrong with this society and give them a conscious vision of the new society. Then we can go on to a programme of action for great masses of people. A democratic revolution would take place when it is supported by the great mass of the people, when they know what they are doing and they know why they are doing it and they know what they want to see come into existence. For the people involved in the Siyakholwa programme, it does represent the germ of a new institutional form of socio-economic and political praxis which appears to at least tick elements of Chomsky s box in respect of a conscious vision and that they know what they are doing and they know why they are doing it. Whether these elements are a sufficient condition to translate into national praxis beyond Keiskammahoek is a question for how and wether national emancipatory politics beyond it engages it to build convergent links and not vice versa. Similarly, in respect of theoretical, academic, national policy development levels; programme content and the strategic thinking that frames it, should be informed by an aggregated composite the local visions, sense-making and praxis that drive these local initiatives. This as opposed to often sterile deracinated activist and academic theorising usually hothoused elsewhere in another centre of influence or power from where it is then programmatically imposed on local vision, sense-making and locally built praxis. In other words, local praxis should frame and inform national macro-strategy and theory building and not the other way around. I think that this is a definitive element of the type of philosophical shift required that Deputy Minister for Public Works Jeremy Cronin might be alluding to in the Cape Times article. In this regard, Asef Bayat, in his book STREET POLITICS (1997), with reference to grassroots activism in Iran, offers some cautionary lessons on underrating the local in this relation to the national political agenda also relevant to our context as follows: ...for the poor, localized struggle, unlike abstract and distant revolution, was both meaningful and manageable - meaningful in that they could make sense of the purpose they have and idea about the consequence of those actions, and manageable in that they, rather than some remote national leaders, set the agenda, projected the aims and controlled the outcome. In this sense, the poor, the local was usually privileged over the global/national. In addition, the flexibility and perseverance associated with such grassroots activism enabled the poor to extend their social space to political constraints more effectively. What is significant about the Siyakholwa programme is that it addresses Bayats concern of political imbalance between the local and the national though democratic control from below (The village committees) informed by local community work needs which determine the aims and inform the outcome framed by a locally set agenda; convergently linked to the national governments Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) which provides capacity enhancing support and links it at policy level to other similar initiatives with which it has convergent relations. However, what type of non-market economy dynamic is Siyakholwa and other similar initiatives prefigurative of? How do we describe these new forms of praxis? I contend that its praxis leans more to the notion of a solidarity economy than that of the social economy. The solidarity economy notion is explained in a new South African book on the topic titled THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY INITIATIVE : Emerging Theory and Practice (edited by Vishwas Satgar. UKZN Press. Pietermaritzburg. 2014): I argue that the social economy is an attempt to ameliorate the negative social effects of market states in which states have retreated from their welfare role. In contrast with the transformative vision of the solidarity economy, which seeks to change the fundamental relations of power in a given economy and society. In short, I argue that the social economy is about social inclusion while the solidarity economy is about social transformation. The book also discusses several local and international examples of the solidarity economy in practice, but contributor Andre Bennies paper titled Linking food sovereignty and the solidarity economy in South African Townships on food production cooperatives in Ivory Park and Tsakane parallels a more urban context to that of the Siyakholwa rural example with similar praxis dynamics. Andre Bennie reminds us that : ... integral to achieving social change is the need to build on peoples consciousness and abilities to drive the collective struggle from below. This needs to be informed by a specific vision, namely to forge relations of production that are centred on meeting human needs, and based on the values and principles of solidarity, a willingness not only to challenge existing power relations at the root of inequality and food insecurity, but also to build alternative economic and social arrangements. In my opinion, such an approach would require that we move beyond the type of dogmatic politics of abstraction that theoretically separates the national or global from the local and denigrates the latter as too politically parochial and therefore reactionary or, to borrow Trotskys caustic reference - local cretinism. The Siyakholwa programme in Keiskammahoek, Hlanganani Cooperative in Tsakane township and even Abahlali Base Mjondolo in Siqalo informal settlement represents, to borrow from Deputy Minister for Public Works Jeremy Cronins contextual reference in the article - such a philosophical shift.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 04:55:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015