RICHARD PITHOUSE: Time to retire ‘civil society’ that claims to represent the oppressed

Two important anniversaries will be marked next year. On January 9, it will be 50 years since the Durban strikes that catalysed the development of the black trade union movement, which became such a powerful political force by the 1980s.

On August 20 it will be 40 years since the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) which mobilised millions into direct confrontation with the apartheid state. Both of these moments hold important but largely forgotten lessons as we confront another acute and escalating social crisis.

Millions are excluded today from employment, housing, reliable and sufficient access to water and electricity, safe and dependable transport, decent and dignified education and health care, and the assurance that there will be enough food in the days to come.

The state increasingly meets popular protest with violence, and grassroots activists are murdered at a grim rate. Anxiety, depression and self-medication with alcohol and cheap heroin are endemic.

No progress without political pressure

Now that what has long been tolerated on the periphery inexorably makes its way to the centre, the elite public sphere is finally grasping the gravity of the situation. But despite the urgency of the situation there is a striking paucity of ideas for a viable way forward. The hope that the decline of the ANC’s popular standing and, therefore, success at the hustings, offers an easy solution is entirely naive. As others have noted, it is likely that as the ANC confronts an imminent loss of power it will form an alliance of some sort with the EFF. This would inevitably strengthen the authoritarian and kleptocratic currents in government.

There is now no electoral option to the Left of the ANC. Though the ferment that has metastasised on the Right has produced the horrors of Operation Dudula, it has not yet produced a grotesque figure like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro who could storm into the Union Buildings at short notice. But there is a swirling demagoguery, almost invariably placing xenophobia at its centre.

Some have placed their hopes on advancing a project to generate comparative research on the policies and modes of governance that enable states to achieve social progress. This is often valuable work with a high degree of sophistication. But good ideas seldom become law or policy without the political force to back them, or to create the sorts of pressures that persuade governments to look for ways to effect reform.

Moreover, given that parts of the country have already succumbed to rule by forms of armed clientelism, no law or policy will on its own restore the material prospects for social hope. Along with other forms of established power predatory forms of politics will seek to capture, evade and obstruct attempts at building a kinder state. As we all know, there have been many laws and policies adopted over the last quarter of a century that, while positive in principle, have been ineffectual in practice. A key reason is that they have not been backed by sufficient political will.

A faction of the elite public sphere, with a firm presence in the media supported by specialist donor-funded media projects, sees what it calls “civil society” as both a bulwark against predatory political forces and a mechanism to move the politics of the empty platitude, as exemplified by Cyril Ramaphosa’s failed presidency, into effective action.

Civil society

The term “civil society” has had various meanings in the past. It has primarily referred to the sphere of democratic engagement beyond the state and regulated by democratic norms and institutions. More recently it has also referred to organisations that emerge from voluntary association and represent the interests or views their members, participants or constituency.

But the meaning of the term underwent a decisive change at the end of the Cold War. In Eastern Europe Western governments, along with their allied private donors, moved swiftly to establish, support and offer democratic legitimation to new NGOs of various kinds.

The description of these NGOs as “civil society” was a deft and effective sleight of hand that spun small and professionally staffed donor funded organisations with unelected leaders and no popular constituency or mandate as exemplary and representative democratic actors. It was a donor driven form of elite capture of political space.

This was rapidly expanded across the planet, taken up by more states and donors and institutionalised in international organisations such as the World Bank and UN. Of course, NGOs have a wide range of mandates, projects and modes of operation. Many do good work, and though some in SA have been intensely and at times outrageously hostile to forms of popular organisation outside their authority, others have thoughtfully undertaken work that has enabled  democratic expression or even self- organisation by the oppressed. But the vast bulk of NGOs that accept the designation of “civil society” claim a privileged democratic character to which they have no right.

Return of the repressed

Post-Cold War fantasies of the end of political contestation and its replacement with technocratic forms of rule were dashed many years ago. The fantasy that three “sectors” of society — states, business and civil society - could manage new democracies in the absence of the unruly entry of the people into decision-making ran aground as politics returned with a vengeance on both the Right and the Left.

SA has a remarkable history of popular and democratic forms of organisation in workplaces and communities. The Durban strikes began a process of building trade unions that enabled the development of democratic forms of association and counter-power within a brutally authoritarian society. The UDF, launched in Mitchells Plain 10 years later, did the same.

Of course, this was not without its contradictions. As repression worsened in the latter years of the state of emergency, which ran from 1985 till 1990, there serious abuses were committed in the name of the UDF, and then the Mass Democratic Movement, as the struggle became increasingly militarised, masculinised and juniorised. But millions of people were brought into democratic forms of self-organisation, contributed to building democratic forms of popular power and were able to imagine a future that, as UDF leader Moses Mayekiso wrote in 1987, was shaped by “direct rather than indirect participation, mass participation rather than docility”.

There will be no democratic resolution of our current crisis without democratic forms of popular organisation at significant scale and intensity. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s show us what is possible with sufficient commitment to the day-to-day work of organising. It’s time to drop the term “civil society” and call NGOs what they are - pro bono law firms, research institutes, foundations, climate lobby organisations and so on; to assess each organisation on its own record and stop assuming they all have an automatic claim to democratic representivity, one that enables NGOs to substitute themselves for the organised political presence of the oppressed.

• Pithouse, a political theorist, was editor-in-chief of New Frame.