South Africa's Shrinking Sovereignty

These include, as noted above, daily battles over the conditions of labor's production and social reproduction. The most notorious was the August 2012 Marikana Massacre, which catalysed waves of worker anger that led to a firestorm of wildcat strikes (e.g. in the Western Cape's vineyards resulting in a doubling in the daily wage). If South African workers provide the best long-term antidote to the trends discussed above, even ANC leaders could not entirely suppress the energies of a working class often judged the world's most militant The Global Competitiveness Report 2017--2018 // World Economic Forum. Davos, 2017. URL: http://www3. weforum.org/docs/GCR2017-2018/05FullReport/The GlobalCompetitivenessReport2017%E2%80%932018.pdf (accessed: 03.02.2020)..

Fig. 5. Major protests in South Africa, 2012-2019 (monthly tally)

Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project. Brighton: University of Sussex, 2020. URL

Naturally, labor activists loyal to the ANC created divisions in major trade unions, leading to a 2013-2014 split of the largest federation into two, just as government imposed a new requirement that strikes first require a ballot, along with a subsidized sub-minimum wage for youth workers.

Also expressing disaffection -- and suffering sometimes extreme repression -- were radical social movements and prolific community protesters [Ngwane 2019]. In an earlier era of late 1990s dissent, these `service delivery protests' won a major concession: a Free Basic Services policy providing minimal supplies of water and electricity (at least 25 liters/person/day and 50 kWh/household/month). More recently, the most important commoning victories include the free tertiary education provided to 90 % of university and technical- college students following their 2015-2017 national uprisings. The victory also included the `in-sourcing' of low-paid workers, back into university employ.

But without question, South Africa's most successful commoning strategy was the early- 2000s acquisition of Anti-Retroviral medicines to combat AIDS. These are today provided free by the state, having once been the purview of global capital. They are responsible for reversing the dramatic early-2000s decline in South Africa's life expectancy, as shown in Fig. 6.

Because hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily in the struggle to gain access to AIDS medicines, this example of commoning is most spectacular. The successful campaign reflected four features that any post-neoliberal project should embrace: decommodification

(of drugs costing over 15.000 USD/year that are now free); destratification of access (now numbering over 5 mln South Africans); delinking and deglobalisation of capital (generic medicine production facilities now exist in many African cities); and global solidarities against powerful multinational forces. By jumping scale, South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign confronted global Big Pharma, the South African and US governments, and the World Trade Organization. In 2004 prior to medicines access, life expectancy was 52 years, and by 2019 it rose to 64: an extraordinary post-neoliberal victory.

Commoning is also increasingly common as a mode of day-to-day resistance. Throughout the townships of South Africa, activists interested in guaranteeing access to water and electricity have been attempting to evolve what was already a popular survival tactic at the time of apartheid: reconnecting water and electricity illegally, once it was disconnected by state officials due to nonpayment; in Soweto alone, the share of illegal electricity connections had risen to 80 % Le Cordeur M. Eskom to Waive Soweto Users' Deb -- On Condition // Fin24. May 25, 2016. URL: https://www.fin24.com/Debt/News/eskom-to-waive-soweto- users-debt-on-condition-20160525 (accessed: 07.02.2020)..

The most serious problem with informal commoning, is that once the water infrastructure is tapped by township plumbers (many working for a small fee), leaks are exacerbated and water quality is sometimes compromised. Likewise, as electricity lines are commoned using illegal connections, the capacity of the entire township system is stressed and the power supply regularly trips. Accidental electrocutions become more frequent as live wires criss-cross pedestrian pathways. The typical short-term response from a Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee activist is to embark upon technical training stressing insulation and effective pipe repair.

In short, the challenge for South Africans committed to a different society, economy and ecology is to humbly combine the limited gains that social movements have won so far (in many cases matched by regular defeats on economic terrain) with the soaring ambitions that are needed to match the scale of the systemic crisis and the current extent of social protest. There are ideological, strategic and material problems that South Africa's independent left has failed to overcome, including the division between autonomist and socialist currents, and the lack of mutual respect for various left traditions, including traditional Communism, Trotskyism, anarchism, syndicalism, Black Consciousness and feminism. A synthetic approach from the top down still appears impossible.

Single-issue and single-community struggles are important building blocks in the campaign to keep the fires of struggle and hope burning among the various sections of the working class. But the militancy of the community protesters must combine with that of organized and unorganized workers, students and unemployed youth, women fighting against rape and patriarchy. A conscious and planned build-up for an uprising can provide a basis for joint work and knitting together campaigns, with the aim of winning partial victories and strengthening bonds between the different sections of the working- class movement. An uprising will show a glimpse of what is possible when the working class movement is moving together in solidarity and action. It will liberate creative energy that will generate new ideas and methods of selforganisation and struggle. It will generate historical convulsions that can change the balance of forces, providing emerging movements with goals that can be generalized beyond the local and sectional. It will restore hope in the vision that things can be different, that a better world without oppression and exploitation is possible.

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