A Moment of Decision for the Left
There can be no equivocation on xenophobia
There are moments in politics in which it is analytically necessary to complicate the ways in which things are generally understood. It is often necessary to critique both terms of a binary by introducing a third term, or by rejecting the entire framework within which a problem is posed. There are also moments in which it is necessary to draw clear lines, and sometimes to affirm one term in a binary.
Political practice requires the same capacity for discernment. There are moments in which contending positions should be reconciled and common ground sought. There are also moments in which lines of division must be clearly drawn and firmly held. As Alain Badiou shows, there are moments in which it is necessary to affirm division against attempts to claim or build unity in a manner that masks or sustains what must be seen clearly and overcome. ‘Contradiction’, he writes, ‘has no other mode of existence but scission … it is thus indispensable to announce that there is only one law of the dialectic: One divides into two.’
The attempt by the South African Communist Party (SACP) to bring the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) into its Conference of the Left while the party is on the streets with xenophobic mobs must mark a clear line of division, a moment of scission.
An axiomatic commitment to universal equality
The left has not always held to its own principles but the essence of those principles is clear: it is a project of planetary and universal emancipation. The first axiomatic commitment of the left is to universal equality – to the recognition of the full and equal humanity of all.
After the ‘spectre of communism’ the best known phrase in the Communist Manifesto is probably its closing declaration: ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ – better translated as ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’. In a more philosophical mood Karl Marx described communism as ‘completed humanism’. Aimé Césaire, writing as a communist working to bring the communist project closer to its core principle – to bring its practice closer to its idea - insisted on ‘a true humanism - a humanism made to the measure of the world.’ Badiou has concentrated this in axiomatic form as ‘there is only one world’ - a single world of human persons – from which a secondary axiom for praxis can be derived: ‘work to consolidate what is universal in identities’ while welcoming ‘the infinite play of identities and differences’.
If any category of oppressed, exploited, abandoned or stigmatised people is denied welcome into a project that claims to be of the left the problem is with the claim and not the people it excludes.
Among the reasons why fascism is the historical enemy of the modern left – whether in Europe’s colonies, after its return to Europe, or in post-colonial societies – is that it fabricates race or distorts nation, religion or ethnicity to expel some people from the full count of the human and from the equal right to participate in the flow of life lived in common.
The idea that any category of people who have been subject to oppression acquire a permanent political innocence, an inability to become perpetrators or oppressors themselves, is always a dangerous fiction. Ideas and behaviours – such as gross racialised xenophobia – cannot be an outrage in Europe or the United States but acceptable in our own country. We must take full measure of the fact that fascism, which does not always appear in the form that it took in Europe in the 1930s, is the dominant political logic in India and Israel. In 1961 Frantz Fanon warned that in some postcolonial African countries a predatory national bourgeoisie would, ‘in order to throw itself into the enjoyment of its wealth’, choose ‘a dictatorship of the national-socialist type’.
It is essential to keep in mind that, as with fascism, what Achille Mbembe calls the wider ‘capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’, along with the processes by which societies ‘dream up bad objects … and then seek violently to rid themselves of them’, are not only produced through the state. They are also, as any Gramscian would understand, produced through intellectual and cultural life, through the media, and through both electoral politics and forms of mass politics and popular mobilisation, including what Elias Canetti called ‘persecuting crowds’ organised around collective libidinal ‘discharge’ through the pursuit of a target. Today that pursuit takes place online as well as on the streets.
Although some people would prefer not to discuss this we cannot overlook iSilo samaZulu, Misuzulu kaZwelithini, who, speaking at the site of the Battle of Isandlwana, said that all migrants should leave South Africa. He added that ‘even if my nephew’s father is a kwerekwere, the kwerekwere must leave, only the child will remain’. His father’s description of migrants as ‘lice’ and ‘criminals’ and his insistence that they should ‘go back to their countries’ is widely understood to have aggravated the xenophobic violence in 2015.
It is equally essential to understand that the forms of far-right politics that we see across much of the world do not have to be fully developed fascist projects to have fascist elements, resonances and potentials that are usefully understood or illuminated to varying degrees via anti-fascist thought. This is true, in varying degrees, of the forms of politics that have cohered around figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
March and March is a well-funded, astroturfed operation with a slick marketing strategy. It presents itself as a popular uprising, but it is better understood as what Alberto Toscano calls a ‘pseudo-insurgency’: a simulated revolt that draws on real experiences of crisis and abandonment while redirecting anger away from entrenched power and towards vulnerable people.
It uses elements of the language and practices of fascism – such as ‘cleaning’ city centres and calling for mass deportations - as do Operation Dudula and figures like Gayton McKenzie and Herman Mashaba. None of these organisations and people have the intellectual or organisational depth of full-blown fascism but we must, nonetheless, be mindful of the lessons of fascism.
As March and March, openly backed by the MKP, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and ActionSA, moves its ethnically and racially inflected xenophobic street thuggery against African and Asian migrants out of Durban and onto the national stage, we are witnessing the return of the moral and political degradation described by Frantz Fanon in one of his most heartbroken critiques of the postcolony: ‘From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.’
March and March and its supporters and enablers – of which the most powerful and dangerous is the MKP - must be opposed because all forms of public expression of gross prejudice must be opposed. They must be opposed because all forms of public intimidation, cruelty and incitement to violence against vulnerable minorities must be opposed. They must be opposed because all mobs that hand people over to the police because they deem their mere identity to be contagion or invasion must be opposed. They must be opposed because all attempts to take on policing roles against vulnerable and stigmatised people, and to break the law in the name of the law, must be opposed. They must be opposed because it is fundamentally immoral to try and deny a child access to school or an unwell person access to a hospital. They must be opposed because no category of people has any right to disparage, intimidate and beat a less powerful category of people in the streets, or to set the stage for the murders that will come if this continues. They must be opposed because all attempts to cultivate a politics of collective sadism organised around horizontal antagonism rather than a politics of collective emancipation must be opposed.
W.E.B. du Bois famously observed that in the South after emancipation it was ‘tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of (the) police’. The xenophobic project in South Africa must also be opposed because it wants to degrade those of us whose belonging is not in doubt by making us all, in the widest sense of the term, cops rather than people among other people.
We are in a situation in which analytical, ethical and political clarity is essential. In ethical and political terms there can be no equivocation or obfuscation: March and March, and the parties, public figures and media that support or legitimate it, must be opposed clearly and without compromise. It is particularly important to oppose the MKP given both the evident willingness and capacity to use violence that characterise the project organised around Zuma, and because, after the local government elections in November, it may govern Durban and many smaller towns across KwaZulu-Natal. It could also, at any time, take control of the provincial government through shifts in coalition arrangements.
We do not need to return the slogans of the past, but we should be able to find some way to say they shall not pass, to say it with clarity and force, to move against the tide of opinion in much of the media, and elsewhere, and to be willing to take on confrontation – including on the streets when necessary.
An axiomatic commitment to reason
The second axiomatic commitment of the left is to reason, to a rational apprehension of the world. For Karl Marx, the critique of ideology is the recognition that social reality presents itself in inverted and mystified forms, and that these forms must be grasped against their own immediate appearance if the relations that produce them are to be understood.
The forms of leftism that assume that university-trained or otherwise authorised intellectuals should do the thinking for ‘the masses’ – an inherently objectifying term – are distortions of the idea of the left, including in its communist form, distortions that are in the class interests – materially and psychically - of credentialled intellectuals.
As Marx insisted it ‘is essential to educate the educator himself’. For any credible left project the work of reason is a collective and democratic project undertaken in struggle, as praxis, and not as a ‘trickle-down’ project. When Fanon wrote that ‘a prospect … is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein’ he was providing an axiom for praxis, for an ethic of the encounter, as well as an aspiration for the future.
Emancipatory reason is not a matter of mobilising the pre-given thought of opposing social blocs against each other. Antonio Gramsci shows that what is taken as ‘common sense’ is an inherited and contradictory field of ideas, and that political work requires its transformation into ‘good sense’ – a more coherent understanding capable of organising effective collective action. Fanon shows that while struggle may begin as a mirror image of what it opposes, with a ‘brutality of thought and a mistrust of subtlety’, the process of struggle is not just a material confrontation. It is also an ‘arduous path toward rational knowledge’, a path enabled by processes of ‘enlightenment and enrichment’ within struggle.
Inspired by Fanon’s commitment to mutuality and to affirming the intellectual capacities of all, Paulo Freire insists that mutually transformative dialogue is ‘an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing.’ Sylvia Wynter, also inspired by Fanon, argues that university-trained intellectuals must learn to ‘marry our thought’ to the suffering and struggles of people rendered disposable by the existing order, including those who do not fit the canonical expectations of the left and are no longer recognised as potential agents of historical transformation within the framework of thought developed under the circumstances of the past.
The political meeting is one site for the development of collective reason. Properly constituted meetings are, Fanon writes, ‘privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak. At each meeting, the brain increases its means of participation and the eye discovers a landscape more and more in keeping with human dignity’. For Badiou, ‘That the central activity of politics is the meeting is a local metonymy of its intrinsically collective, and therefore principally universal, being’. This is, of course, directly opposed to all forms of politics that summon the people into relations of obedience and command, operate via the cult of the leader and elicit sadistic impulses.
Along with democratically constituted meetings any serious left project is also centred around political education, which, properly undertaken, is an opportunity for the development and democratisation of reason.
From the night schools organised by the Communist Party of South Africa from the 1920s into the 1940s, which offered people excluded from formal education, including domestic workers, access to literacy, political debate and historical study; to the working-class institutions that supported cultures of reading, discussion and self-education in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain described by Jonathan Rose; to the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes, the political school of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – the Landless Workers’ Movement – in Brazil, which has trained militants from around the world; genuinely radical political education proceeds from the principle that intellectual life is available to all.
There are cases in which the commitment to reason requires mobilising what the dominant order affirms as reason against evident unreason. When, almost thirty years ago now, we were told that people were dying from anti-retroviral medication rather than the human immunodeficiency virus it was necessary to, using democratic forms of speech and dialogue, assert scientific fact against paranoid hallucination.
But, as Sylvia Wynter shows, much of what the dominant order claims as reason has been structured around a conception of the human that casts most of humanity as inferior, irrational or outside the full count of the human. Similarly, Pumla Dineo Gqola recognises that ‘violent systems of knowledge’ are often taken as credible reason by systems of domination.
The process of rendering the reach and power of reason more genuinely universal, requires an ongoing critique of dominant forms of unreason masquerading as universal reason. A commitment to genuine reason must always be on high alert, and ready for a fight, whenever a claim to reason assumes that the humanity of some is diminished, or that certain categories of people do not need to be included in the collective exercise of reason.
In her essay written in the aftermath of the uprising in South Central Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, Wynter examines the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ – ‘No Humans Involved’ – used by sections of the Los Angeles police and judicial system to refer to incidents of violence, including murder, against impoverished young Black men. She asks how this classification could have been ‘actively held and deployed’ not only by police officers but also by judicial officials – ‘the brightest and the best’ graduates of the American university system. The problem, she concludes, is not that of unschooled ignorance opposed to education, but a dominant order of knowledge shaped by a racialised conception of the human and reproduced through elite institutions.
It is essential to be clear that xenophobia is not the unreason of the ‘rabble’. It is a form of unreason that, drawing on colonial ways of categorising the world, pervades society. In South Africa it is reproduced in government, most political parties, by a set of celebrities and across much of the media, including the public broadcaster. One of the most noxious pieces of xenophobic writing ever to have appeared in our media was written by Phindile Ntliziywana, an advocate of the High Court with a PhD, and recently published in, and then retracted from, the Mail & Guardian. While xenophobia certainly festers among the common people it is also cultivated and normalised by powerful forces in society. To reject xenophobia is to affirm a principle and not, as right-wing intellectuals around the world like to claim, to take a position against ‘ordinary people’.
For Badiou, opinion is what circulates within the existing order – the officially sanctioned realm of consensus, media circulation and established assumptions. Thought begins when people refuse conformity to opinion and commit themselves to a ‘truth’ that breaks with what is already accepted as ‘self-evident’, truths such as the axiomatic commitment to the equal humanity of all people. Fidelity to these kinds of truths, he stresses, requires sustained courage. Conforming to the dominant ‘opinion’ of Twitter, the media and party politics is what Fanon called ‘common opportunism’
March and March and its backers, enablers and supporters must also be opposed because their claims about migration, and the account of the crisis they present to the public, are fundamentally irrational and fundamentally wrong, and because their modes of speaking and organising militate against the cultivation of the popular exercise of reason.
There is no ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, ‘infestation’ or ‘invasion’ of migrants. The best available statistics that we have are that just under 4% of us – whether documented or not - were born in other countries.
Migration is not new. It has always been part of South African society. This predates colonial industrialisation, much of which was powered by migrant labour. As the historian Paul Landau shows in his study of popular politics from 1400 to 1948, the people of South Africa were:
historically well equipped to embrace and absorb strangers. Hybridity lay at the core of their subcontinental political traditions. Nineteenth-century European newcomers were different and attempted to repudiate mixing, politically and otherwise, albeit with only partial success.
The one point on which the xenophobes and their opponents on the left agree is that for most of us South Africa is, in Fanon’s words, ‘a non-viable society’. Millions of people have been forced to make their lives amid what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘organised abandonment’. Outside the zones of gated privilege, the majority of us inhabit a country wounded by mass impoverishment, unemployment, a housing crisis, abysmal school education, extremely high rates of violence – including rape – a heroin epidemic, the growing brazenness of organised crime and extortion rackets, general lawlessness, endemic corruption, and the collapse in state institutions and services.
But it is our own elites, old and new, and not migrants, who have abandoned the majority of our people. None of our structural crises have been caused by 4% of the population, most of whom live alongside other impoverished people. It is not migrants who have robbed citizenship of substantive meaning for the majority, and citizenship will not acquire substantive meaning by turning on migrants. Driving out an academic from Zimbabwe, a shopkeeper from Ethiopia or a street trader from Mozambique is not going to help to ameliorate any of our intersecting social crises for people born in South Africa.
There are 12.4 million people out of work. This is, as the General Secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) Zwelinzima Vavi has stressed, not the fault of the 2.4 million people who were born in other countries, many of whom are self-employed. On the contrary a number of studies have found that migration is good for the economy, with a number of studies finding that migration creates jobs.
Nobody found a job after Ernesto Nhamuave, a Mozambican migrant who was making a living from precarious casual labour in Johannesburg was set alight and killed in the Ramaphosa settlement on the East Rand during the xenophobic violence in 2008. Nobody was employed after Emmanuel Sithole, a Mozambican migrant living in Alexandra, Johannesburg, where he survived through selling cigarettes and snacks on the pavement, was stabbed to death during the xenophobic violence in 2015. Subjecting these men to horrific deaths did nothing but further brutalise our society.
It is true that some migrants participate in unlawful and anti-social behaviour. It is also true that some of us do the same, and that we are, by far, by very far, the majority. The problem is not certain categories of people, it is certain behaviours. We have been told on SAFM that 60% of the people in our prisons are migrants. This is wholly untrue. The truth is that migrants face systemic discrimination, abuse and extortion by the police, and are frequently and easily arrested for being or suspected of being undocumented, and yet the vast majority of the people in our prisons were born in South Africa.
By scapegoating 4% of the population for our severe, intersecting and escalating crises, xenophobic politics actively manufactures what Stanley Cohen called a ‘moral panic’, turning often vulnerable people into ‘folk devils’ while directing anger away from the real structures of power and accumulation that sustain mass suffering. But xenophobia is not only a misdirected expression of pain and anger. It also poses direct risks to people born in South Africa. It returns us to the tragic moment in which, as Aimé Césaire, wrote ‘We shall be the prey and the vulture’.
Xenophobic mobilisation legitimates the idea that the response to social suffering should be to exclude other suffering people rather than to work, together, to oppose the forces and structures that generate and sustain that suffering. This does not only pose a risk to migrants.
We should not forget that 21 of the 62 people whose lives were lost in the xenophobic violence in 2008 were South African citizens, mostly people from what are, where they were living, ethnic minorities. It has long been common for politicians in Durban to ascribe issues such as the housing crisis to ‘people from the Eastern Cape’, and to tell people to ‘go back to Lusikisiki’. Even in largely ethnically homogenous communities, it is not uncommon to hear demands for the exclusion of ‘newcomers’, who could, for instance, be people who fled political violence in the 1980s.
In recent weeks South African-born people have been insulted, threatened or beaten by the mobs that March and March have bought onto the streets. South African languages and ethnicities have been disparaged and deemed ‘foreign’. The word ‘Shangaan’ is now used as a routine form of public abuse on the streets of Durban. People from Limpopo and the Eastern Cape have had their belonging publicly called into question.
The cult of the ‘native’ and the idea that rights to political participation and wider forms of belonging are tied to origin and place was fundamental to colonial forms of governance. As Mahmood Mamdani has shown under colonialism ‘Participation in public affairs was no longer the right of all those who lived on the land; instead, it became the exclusive preserve of natives said to belong to the homeland.’ He has also shown that sustaining this colonial idea into the present has been a central reason for some of the failures of postcolonial African societies. When we build a politics around it we damage ourselves.
When xenophobes claimed that ‘foreigners’ were ‘poisoning our children’, but the reality was that our children were dying because the state had failed to ban terbufos, an extremely dangerous pesticide used to deal with rat infestations resulting from the state’s failure to collect refuse, migrants were being scapegoated for a real problem masking its actual causes.
When people selling food on the pavement or running small grocery stores are vilified and attacked while nothing is said about the white-owned supermarkets that control so much of the distribution side of the food system in a country where around 60% of households do not have enough food and more than 10 000 children die of starvation each year, we are fundamentally failing to understand the realities of our situation.
When we blame the sorry state of many of our hospitals and clinics on migrants rather than on years of austerity, mismanagement and corruption – some of it organised through politically connected criminal networks – we deflect attention from the real causes of the crisis. When we exclude people deemed to be ‘foreign’ from the public health care system we don’t just risk ruining their health. We also risk our own health because contagious diseases are not treated.
The academy is an inherently global project and when we hound academics from other African countries we can only weaken our academy.
South Africa has taken a principled position against the genocidal Israeli state, a principled position of world historical importance. This has produced a significant backlash from the United States, a backlash that could have serious consequences. No state that takes on such powerful forces can afford to be weak at home, and a state in which armed thugs beat people on the streets is a weak state, a state that squanders its claim to moral credibility with every blow. A number of African governments have, correctly, raised serious concerns about xenophobia in South Africa. This can only weaken South Africa’s standing in Africa, and elsewhere, at a time when it needs to win support.
Another reason why fascism is the historical enemy of the modern left is that it is an organised assault on reason. Fascism begins in the colony, where the European powers fabricated the hallucination of race, what Fanon would later call a form of ‘delirium’. After fascism returned to Europe, Wilhelm Reich traced its capacity to organise fear, resentment and irrational desire into mass politics, while Theodor Adorno identified the central role of paranoia, projection and conspiratorial fantasy in authoritarian politics. Richard Seymour shows that today’s fascisms offer the pleasures of sadism, scapegoating and destruction, while Toscano shows how fascism evades rational explanations of social crisis through paranoid myths of invasion, replacement and contamination, with the figure of the migrant at its centre. All of this appears within contemporary far-right discourses, including in South Africa where it is sometimes poorly masked with some of the symbolism and language of the national liberation struggle.
Du Bois demonstrated how white supremacy induced poor whites to embrace the ‘psychological wage’ of racial domination against their own material interests. Today, across much of the world, nationalism constituted against the ‘foreigner’ often functions in much the same way. People are offered the compensation of participating in an exclusionary form of national identity, one which offers a sense of superiority and authorises sadism against vulnerable people, in exchange for an ongoing decline in their material and social circumstances. Once the ‘foreigner’ is scapegoated for the social and political crisis the pain of having been abandoned by national elites, of having to witness and endure the moral rot of much of the political class and of being excluded from any social concept of citizenship can be cauterised.
In conditions of social and economic crisis, fascism offers a resolution that serves elite interests by redirecting popular anger away from entrenched power and towards vulnerable people cast as internal enemies. Its function is to break possibilities for solidarity among ordinary people by cultivating fear, resentment and suspicion and offering authorised forms of sadism as compensation for economic exclusion and social dishonour, all in the service of protecting existing structures of wealth and power. Fascism never summons people into collective processes of inquiry, deliberation and shared reasoning. It organises people through command, spectacle, paranoia, myth and obedience, frequently calling people into persecutory mobs often shaped to some degree by militarised forms of symbolism.
The politics of the left invites people into a meeting, and then, from there, the wider agora. Fascism invites people into a persecutory mob, whether online or on the streets. We need to work to defend and enrich reason, to cultivate public reason, to affirm its openness to all, and to reject, without compromise, all attempts to debase it.
An axiomatic commitment to popular democratic power
The left is not just a mode of critique; it is, fundamentally, a mode of politics. Communism, Marx insists, is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. For Badiou, the idea that collective life can be organised on egalitarian foundations is central to what he calls the ‘communist invariant’ – the recurring appearance across history of similar emancipatory ideas and practices. Across the long sweep of history, emancipatory movements have repeatedly built forms of popular power through which ordinary people sought to collectively govern social life in the common interest.
Modern communism has orbited around the central event of the Paris Commune, famously described by Marx as ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour’. We should not forget that the Paris Commune included migrants as participants and leaders, or that the insurgent commune is neither a uniquely modern nor European form.
In the sixteenth century, radical currents in the German Peasants’ Revolt sought to overturn feudal hierarchy and establish egalitarian forms of collective life. In seventeenth-century England, the Diggers attempted to establish rural communes on common land organised around shared labour and collective access to the earth, which their leader Gerrard Winstanley described as ‘a common treasury for all’. In the eighteenth century, pirate ships sailing under elected captains sometimes became armed experiments in collective organisation, drawing together sailors, escaped slaves and other people ripped from the commons by empire and capital in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Across the Americas, maroon communities and quilombos were established by people escaping slavery who built self-sustaining and autonomous forms of collective self-government. In Haiti, after the revolution, ordinary people resisted elite attempts to restore plantation labour and built autonomous forms of collective life around small scale agriculture.
Along with the Paris Commune this aspect of the ‘communist invariant’ reappeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the soviets of the Russian Revolution and workers’ councils and factory occupations in many countries. During the Spanish Revolution, collectivised farms, workplaces and neighbourhood structures were built in parts of Catalonia. In the anti-colonial struggles in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, liberated zones organised by the Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) built new forms of popular power rooted in collective agriculture, political education, healthcare and participatory village structures. Amílcar Cabral understood these experiments not simply as military struggles against colonialism but as processes through which ordinary people could collectively govern social life.
In South Africa, the trade union movement that emerged from the Durban strikes in 1973 built democratic organisation rooted in the shop floor and commitments to workers’ power and workers’ control. In the 1980s, the United Democratic Front (UDF) advanced the idea and practice of ‘people’s power’ through civic organisation, street committees, popular education and others forms of democratic self-organisation from below.
Today, in Brazil the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the rural movement of the landless, occupies land and builds rural communes organised around collective agriculture, cooperatives, political education and participatory forms of decision-making. The movement understands land reform as the creation of new forms of collective and democratic life as well as the redistribution of land.
Urbanisation without industrialisation has meant that, across the planet, vast numbers of people live a wageless life. While trade unions and workplace organising remain critically important, parts of the left have fetishised the workplace as the central site and the organised worker as the central subject of emancipatory politics, failing to grasp the importance of struggles by impoverished urban people primarily grounded in community and place rather than work.
Yet across much of the world, forms of urban habitation built on land occupied outside the law – shanty towns, favelas, barrios, bidonvilles, gecekondus and ashwa’iyyat – have become decisive political terrains. Around one in seven people globally, and one in four urban residents, now live in these kinds of spaces. In many countries they have become central to electoral politics, mass mobilisation and everyday struggles over land, housing, food, water, transport and dignity.
In Brazil the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), the Homeless Workers’ Movement, builds urban communes rooted in collective kitchens, shared childcare, political education and collective forms of care in the midst of the fragmentation and isolation of urban capitalism.
Guilherme Boulos, the philosopher and psychoanalyst who became the movement’s national co-ordinator, recalls hearing again and again how communal life in the occupations enabled people to recover forms of dignity, solidarity and psychological life shattered by poverty, humiliation and isolation. One woman told him that before joining an occupation she had been diagnosed with severe depression, could not get out of bed and depended on psychiatric medication. But in the occupation, she said, ‘I threw the medicines away because I didn’t need them anymore.’ Boulos writes of the occupations as spaces ‘for sharing, for coexistence, for taking root’, spaces in which people ‘talked, recounted their cases, their stories, explained how they had ended up there’. He came to understand that, ‘commitment and collective projects are good for people on a psychological level’ and ‘coexistence, bonds of community, can help rebuild subjectivities that have been ravaged by barbarism’.
This is in striking contrast to Seymour’s description of exclusionary and authoritarian nationalism functioning as ‘a modern self-esteem movement’ – a socially toxic cure for depression, humiliation and social collapse, temporarily alleviating suffering through paranoia, scapegoating and hatred rather than solidarity and collective care.
Beginning in the late 2000s the urban commune also became a significant form of political and social organisation in Venezuela. George Ciccariello-Maher describes these experiments as attempts to build forms of democracy that are ‘local, participatory, direct, and communal’, rooted in ‘direct discussion, debate, and management of our own lives’.
The commune has also become the leading form of urban struggle in South Africa. Abahlali baseMjondolo – a movement of impoverished people with more than 180 000 members across four provinces – has made significant progress in developing some occupations into communes organised around collective decision-making, grassroots urban planning predicated on the refusal to commodify the allocation of land, political education, food production and more.
The zones of social abandonment and militarised policing in cities around the world are spaces in which insurgent forms of collective and democratic life can be built. Well run communes do not only function in the interests of their residents. They can also become sites for wider political encounters and projects, and an important base for the left. But these zones are also vulnerable to forms of control organised via clientelism and gangsterism, along with overtly reactionary forms of politics including ethnic or religious mobilisation. They can be sites of fascist as well as emancipatory politics. Building durable democratic forms of organisation in these zones is one of the central political tasks of our time.
To be left and to participate in the struggle of the left one must affirm and work to build what García Linera, one of the most significant contemporary communist thinkers, calls ‘modes of collective action with social protagonism, that is, with the direct participation of broad popular social sectors … in the collective deliberation of their problems.’
From the Paris Commune to the communes built by Abahlali baseMjondolo the commune form has organised its residents on the basis that if you live here you are from here. Abahlali baseMjondolo welcomes migrants into its occupations and communes, and also welcomes migrants into leadership positions, just as the trade union movement in South Africa has for more than a century.
If organised xenophobia were to attain a critical mass, or win more active state support from the local state, as it may well do at the local level after MKP takes control of municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, it would move against the work to build solidarity with a push towards division, ethnic as well as national. In the days after MKP won the highest number of votes in KwaZulu-Natal in the May 2024 elections local party members in Durban approached people from the Eastern Cape and told them that they had a month to destroy their shacks and ‘go home’. There is no reason to think that this was a result of centrally organised direction, but it does reveal an important aspect of how some of the party’s members understand its politics.
Moreover, the ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ project which is entangled with Zuma as a personality is not only indirectly predatory on society via the state. It is also directly predatory on society. When Thabo Mbeki was president shack settlements in KwaZulu-Natal faced demolition, and their residents faced being left homeless or forcibly relocated out of the cities, as a result of a classic modernist project of ‘slum eradication’. After Zuma became president local party structures were far more interested in capturing settlements in order to rent or sell land and shacks, or to profit from their development. It was also during this period that there began to be regular assassinations of grassroots activists. The motivation for these murders often included a desire to crush political autonomy but was largely driven by the aim of turning settlements into sites of extraction. In 2022 three leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s eKhenana Commune were assassinated.
Fascist movements weaken the worst off by building a politics of horizontal antagonism rather than solidarity and, where required, vertical antagonism. They have repeatedly cultivated organised street violence carried out in the name of the nation. From the Blackshirts in Italy and the Brownshirts in Germany to Golden Dawn in Greece and the Shiv Sena in India, organised thuggery has been used to intimidate opponents, fracture working-class solidarity, normalise brutality in the streets, degrade public life, and create the impression that democratic legality has collapsed and that only force can restore order. This form of politics frequently relies on the language of dehumanisation including animalisation, contamination and forms of speech that render people as waste or filth.
By building and normalising a capacity for street violence, March and March is setting the stage for the future use of ethnically organised violence by the MKP or actors and forces linked to it. Organised street violence normalises fear, weakens democratic institutions and establishes the material and symbolic conditions for coercive power in everyday life. We must ask who this capacity for violence will be mobilised against in the future, and recognise that grassroots activists will be at grave risk, especially when they challenge the commodification of land and build multi-ethnic forms of autonomous and democratic popular organisation open to all, including migrants. There is every reason to think that if the MKP governs Durban after municipal elections on 4 November, especially with the IFP as a minority coalition partner, it will become very difficult to sustain independent forms of progressive grassroots politics.
Fascism and other forms of far-right politics also strike at the very possibility of a radical imagination grounded in solidarity. Fascism is, in Nicos Poulantzas’ words, ‘a corrupted ideological recuperation of deep-seated popular aspirations’. As Linera puts it, fascism doesn’t just defeat the working class on the terrain of pure force it ‘culturally defeats the organised labour movement’ by developing ‘a new predictive horizon for society, when the old liberal order has collapsed’. March and March, the MKP, and the forms of extortion to which both are linked, do not just pose a threat to the future of progressive popular politics. Enabled by much of the media, they are also an immediate threat to the very idea of a political imagination organised around solidarity rather than exclusion.
The SACP’s Conference of the Left
In a moment in which silence appears as complicity the websites of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the SACP show no sign of having issued a statement against March and March and the recent escalation of xenophobic rhetoric - often including classic fascist tropes - and street thuggery.
For some time now Julius Malema and the EFF have been consistently clear and principled on the question of xenophobia. In the trade unions Vavi has, as noted, been taking consistently principled positions, often confronting xenophobic paranoia and fabrication with facts. Some of the unions affiliated to Saftu, such as the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (Giwusa), have been equally unequivocal.
Abahlali baseMjondolo has clearly and consistently opposed xenophobia since it first formed its position on the issue in May 2008. Its membership, and leadership, are open to all regardless of country of birth and it makes sure to include migrants as speakers at its major public events.
In July last year it directly confronted and humiliated Operation Dudula in Johannesburg. The fact that Abahlali baseMjondolo, which represents people from the constituency most often presumed to be the natural base for xenophobic politics, has been able to do this means that it is an objective fact rather than a moral claim to insist that there is no excuse for any other organisation to be complicit with xenophobia.
If the EFF, Saftu, unions like Giwusa, and Abahlali baseMjondolo can all take principled positions on xenophobia, there is no kind of credible excuse available to the organisations that remain silent, are directly complicit, or choose to be actively xenophobic. But, despite this evident fact, the SACP has chosen to invite the MKP to its ‘Conference of the Left’. Its current programme for the conference does not list any migrant organisations or a discussion on xenophobia. There is no condition that explicit opposition to xenophobia, and the organisations inciting and organising it, is a precondition for participation.
The initial idea for a conference of this sort was floated by Irvin Jim, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). At the end of last year he told the union’s central committee that Numsa should engage with Cosatu as part of a broader effort aimed at achieving the ‘unity of the working class’, overcoming the ‘fragmentation’ of working-class formations and building ‘a revolutionary agenda’. Jim also proposed a political colloquium, co-hosted with the NGO Pan Africa Today, that would bring together formations including the MKP, the EFF, Floyd Shivambu’s Mayibuye Movement and Abahlali baseMjondolo, alongside unions aligned to both Saftu and Cosatu. The stated aim would be to construct ‘a revolutionary minimum program’ capable of helping ‘unite organized working class to fight against their oppression and exploitation’.
Jim had been moving towards ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ politics for some time so his move to include MKP in his planned symposium was not wholly out of character. Nonetheless his proposal to effectively take the union movement back into the ANC shocked many people in Numsa and escalated already serious divisions. Jim has, for a variety of reasons, including those outlined by Ruth Ntolokotsi in her explosive and widely circulated letter to Jim in February, suffered a dramatic collapse in his credibility and power within the union.
Following his declaration of intent with regard to ‘uniting the working class’ Jim has also taken some openly xenophobic positions, presumably assuming that migrants are not part of the working class that requires unification. In January he tweeted a slick conspiratorial video attacking the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (Seri) after it successfully acted against Operation Dudula’s street fascism in the Gauteng High Court. More recently in widely circulated messages to the former leaders of the now functionally defunct SRWP he claimed, falsely of course, that there was ‘a wave, a deluge of immigration’.
On the first day of the Numsa special Central Committee meeting held in April Jim’s attempt to present a political report was refused. He later walked out of the meeting, which continued in his absence. No apology was tendered. Now a slate circulating for the election at the union’s congress at the end of this year does not include Jim. While Jim may be able to lend the name of Numsa to a project to realign South African politics in the interests of the ANC he cannot, in any meaningful sense, hand the union over to it, let alone its members.
It is now the SACP that is taking this project forward, with the MKP still listed as a participant. The SACP made the most significant error in its recent history by backing Zuma during his rape trial and into his presidency. The party came to regret this and in 2021 Blade Nzimande, then its general secretary, effectively described the Zuma political project as a dangerous, organised criminal-political network funded through corruption that had ‘vulgarised’ radical economic transformation and sought to ‘hijack’ the liberation movement through ‘criminals and demagogues’. He insisted that there ‘was no serious political programme … beyond the threadbare, ritualised incantation of unprocessed, empty and demagogic slogans’. The kindest understanding of the party’s first mistake with Zuma was that it was tragedy. This time around the only credible understanding is that it is farce.
Clear and firm opposition to xenophobia as an attitude and practice is not the only principle and practice by which to take measure of a left project. There are many others. You cannot, for instance, be left without also being feminist. To insist that, in a moment in which a dangerously reactionary political project is being built around xenophobia, a line must be marked out and held against any complicity with xenophobia is not to deny that there are many other lines that also need to be drawn. A principled and credible left would also refuse to welcome the MKP into a process aimed at unifying the left for many other reasons, including its authoritarian, predatory, patriarchal and ethnic character, the whole sordid story of Zuma’s record in office, and much more.
All of the people and organisations listed on the programme for the SACP Conference of the Left must, if they do in fact plan to participate, insist that their participation is conditional on:
1. The exclusion of the MKP.
2. An explicit and constitutive commitment to opposing xenophobia and the organisations – which must be named – attempting to build a political project around xenophobia.
3. The inclusion of migrant groups in the conference as participants and speakers.
4. The organisation of a strong plenary session on xenophobia that includes an examination of the political character of the wider phenomenon.
In the absence of these commitments organisations and people seriously committed to the values and project of the left should take a principled stance against participation in the conference.
Fanon provides a useful riposte to those who claim that we must be realistic and accommodate ourselves – whether in the media, the academy, politics or any other sphere - to organised xenophobic street thuggery carried out with fascist language: ‘What an idealist, people will say. Not at all: It is just that the others are scum.’
Nairobi, 11 May 2026
Books and other texts mentioned
Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019)
Aimé Césaire – Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000)
Aimé Césaire – The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire: Bilingual Edition (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)
Alain Badiou – Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2001)
Alain Badiou – Metapolitics (Verso, 2005)
Alain Badiou – The Communist Hypothesis (Verso, 2010)
Alain Badiou – Theory of the Subject (Continuum, 2009)
Alberto Toscano – Late Fascism (Verso, 2023)
Álvaro García Linera – Communism and Society (Seagull Books, 2018)
Álvaro García Linera – Politics, State and Democracy: Reconfiguring the Territory of the Left (Haymarket Books, 2020)
Amílcar Cabral – Unity and Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 1979)
Antonio Gramsci – Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971)
Elias Canetti – Crowds and Power (Continuum, 1981)
Frantz Fanon – A Dying Colonialism (Grove Press, 1965)
Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1967)
Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1976)
George Ciccariello-Maher – Building the Commune (Verso, 2016)
Guilherme Boulos – ‘Struggles of the Roofless’ (New Left Review, 2021)
Jonathan Rose – The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press, 2001)
Karl Marx – Early Writings (Penguin, 1992)
Karl Marx – The German Ideology (Prometheus Books, 1998)
Karl Marx – Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto (Penguin, 2002)
Mahmood Mamdani – Define and Rule (Harvard University Press, 2012)
Nicos Poulantzas – Fascism and Dictatorship (Verso, 2019)
Paul Landau – Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin, 1996)
Pumla Dineo Gqola – Reflecting Rogue (MFBooks Joburg, 2024)
Richard Seymour – Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (Verso, 2024)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore – Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022)
Stanley Cohen – Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Routledge, 2002)
Sylvia Wynter – ‘No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues’ (Forum N.H.I., 1994)
Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford – The Authoritarian Personality (Verso, 2019)
W.E.B. Du Bois – Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 - 1880 (Free Press, 1998)
W.E.B. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Wilhelm Reich – The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)