Discussion+Doc+5,+Marxist+sustainable+livelihoods

Towards a Marxist approach to the struggle for “sustainable livelihoods”
1.1Over the last period, the SACP has begun advancing as a strategic perspective the imperative of a struggle for “sustainable livelihoods”, “sustainable households” and “sustainable communities of the working class and poor”. This strategic perspective has emerged considerably out of our own campaigns over the last four years – the financial sector campaign, the co-ops campaign, the campaign to ensure effective access to social security grants, and our campaigning focus on the most marginalized sectors of the working class, and our most recent land and agrarian reform Red October campaign.
 * 1. Introduction – the present context**

1.2 As a direct result of the SACP’s input in this regard, the ANC’s 2004 election manifesto devoted an entire subsection to “Sustainable Livelihoods” (see p23 of the Manifesto). Under this subsection, the Manifesto listed:


 * Creating 1 million job opportunities through the expanded public works programme
 * assistance to small start-up businesses, including through micro-loan financing and reform of existing financial systems and institutions
 * intensifying assistance to youth for training and employment
 * speeding up land reform, with 30% of agricultural land redistributed by 2014
 * ensuring community involvement in local economic development and encouraging emergence of coops
 * intensifying efforts at building community spirit, social activism and local level solidarity

1.3 The President also flagged the question of “sustainable livelihoods” in his May 2004 State of Nation address.

1.4 More recently, the Housing Department has taken up the concept of “sustainable human settlements” as the guiding strategic concept for an important and progressive review of our approach to housing and urban development.

1.5 The government’s interest in the idea of “sustainable livelihoods” is in large measure due to a growing concern that earlier expectations of significant “first economy” growth and job creation may now be unrealistic. The expectation had been that growth and jobs would begin to impact on the apartheid legacy of underdevelopment, diminishing the need, over time, for substantial social welfare transfers. Many things, including government’s own research informing its Towards a ten year review, and the actual election campaign on-the-ground in townships and squatter camps, have underlined the systemic persistence of poverty, unemployment and under-employment. Our election campaign has also underlined that a key reason for sustained popular support for the ANC is, precisely, the significant social resource transfers (both of basic needs like water, sanitation, housing and electricity, and of social grants) that have been delivered over the past 10 years. And yet, at the same time, there is a growing concern that “we cannot sustain” the current and burgeoning social transfers. Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel in the October Medium Term Budget Statement debate was explicit that the rate of take-up on some key social grants was unsustainable. It is this general dilemma, in particular, that underpins government’s Towards a ten year review observation that “if all indicators were to continue along the same trajectory, especially in respect of the dynamic of economic inclusion and exclusion, we could soon reach a point where the negatives start to overwhelm the positives.” (p.102).

1.6 Something “in-between”, or “complementary to” formal sector growth and jobs, on the one hand, and social transfers to the poor, on the other, is clearly needed. And while both formal sector growth and jobs and social transfers must, of course, we all agree, be pursued, a still rather vague notion of “sustainable livelihoods” is becoming increasingly attractive as a crucial complementary strategy. But, and we should all concede, it remains a vague notion, and it is subject to a range of interpretations and programmatic thrusts. It’s time to sharpen up our theorisation of the concept!


 * 2. The working class and the problem of a “full war chest”, or a “colossal reserve fund”**

2.1 How, on the terrain of capitalism in which it finds itself, does the working class build power and capacity to advance its struggle, to roll back and eventually throw-off the coercive dominance of capital? Needless to say, this has been the core strategic question preoccupying socialists over the last 150 years and more, and there are many responses and debates about organisational forms (vanguard party, mass party, trade unions, social movements), and about strategies and tactics (revolution, reform, transformation, armed struggle, parliamentary struggle, the national democratic path) etc. etc. Less explored, but absolutely central (and implicitly present in key strategic choices – eg. third world guerrilla struggles, or “socialism in one country”) is the question of how the working class will be able to escape its own enslavement to the capitalist accumulation process, of how (since every time wage-labour works within capitalism it reproduces the power of capitalism) the working class can “step outside” of the iron laws of this accumulation process.

2.2 At the beginning of her Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg cites Engels’ 1873 critique of the anarchists’ mechanical, “revolution-as-event” version of the general strike: “The general strike, in the Bakuninists’ programme, is the lever which will be used for introducing the social revolution. One fine morning all the workers in every industry in a country, or perhaps in every country will cease work, and hereby compel the ruling classes either to submit in about four weeks, or to launch an attack on the workers so that the latter will have the right to defend themselves, and may use the opportunity to overthrow the old society…but to carry [this] out it was necessary to have a perfect organisation of the working class and a full war chest. And that is the crux of the question…this ideal organisation and this colossal reserve fund. But if they had these, they would not need to make use of the roundabout way of the general strike in order to attain their object.”

2.3 Could it be that the kernel of Engels’ critique has validity beyond the anarchists’ simplistic version of the mass strike? In particular, how does a modern working class, more or less wholly dependent on the capitalist market for its livelihood, sustain itself for a fairly protracted struggle? It’s the problem of the “full war chest”, of the “colossal reserve fund”.

2.4 One answer, pursued in practice in the states of “actually existing” (and now largely non-existing) socialism, was the construction of working-class state power as the key power leverage for constructing an alternative society premised (at least in theory) on social needs, not private profits.

2.5 In the course of the 20th century, after 1917 (or perhaps beginning with it) revolution seemed to shift from its anticipated epicentre in Germany, eastwards and southwards. In what was to become characteristic of many revolutions that considered themselves socialist and Marxist in inspiration, the defeated Chinese working class and what survived of its communist leadership retreated out of Shanghai and Canton into the vast rural hinterland. The “colossal reserve fund” became an impoverished but relatively self-sustaining third world peasantry, in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Mozambique, in Angola, in Zimbabwe. This was the social force that concealed, fed, supplied recruits to, and fought in liberation armies led, characteristically, by urban intellectuals and working class militants inspired by Marxism. In protracted guerrilla wars, liberated zones were established and, in time, the countryside surrounded the city, finally liberating it. Often urban based mass strikes (and their inevitable crushing by colonial and/or reactionary indigenous forces) were the initial catalysers of armed struggle, and often urban uprisings were significant in the closing stages of struggle (the Tet Offensive, or, in a very displaced way, the uprising in the metropoles of Portugal by workers and especially soldiers exhausted by colonial wars, uprisings that immediately produced a liberation breakthrough in distant colonies). But the bulk of these struggles were carried not by urban masses involved in mass strikes, but by peasant guerrilla warfare.

2.6 In many (but not all) of the more advanced capitalist countries of the North, the social democratic “welfare” state, especially after 1945, provided the better organised national sectors of the working class with a “reserve fund” from which to challenge (but not usurp) the monopoly of the capitalist class.

2.7 South Africa was a bit different. Despite, on occasion, our best attempts to establish our own third world guerrilla struggle, the liberation movement in South Africa never really succeeded in this direction. By the mid-20th century, an independent, self-sustaining peasantry had all but disappeared. The 13 percent of our territory reserved for Africans was itself scattered (compared to the more compactly grouped Tribal Trust Land in Rhodesia, the next most developed society in our region, where it amounted to some 50 percent of the territory). The socio-economic terrain (as opposed to the geo-physical terrain) was simply not propitious for a peasant-based guerrilla struggle in our country.

2.8 The work of Harold Wolpe, and the important school of Marxism in our country in the 1970s and 80s, provides much of the key theoretical conceptualisation for understanding the early accumulation path of industrial capital in SA – premised on an “articulation” between a dominant capitalist mode of production and a subordinate “communal”/household subsistence mode in the reserves. From the mid-20th century this “articulation” has been in crisis because of the virtual collapse of the second, subordinate mode.

2.9 Our struggle, from the 1950s through to 1994, became increasingly township (urban and rural) based. The maximum weapon of the working class was the mass strike. Under apartheid there was a systematic dialectic of capitalist inclusion and racial exclusion of the black majority, reproducing the earlier “two-modes” articulation, but now on a transformed terrain. The mass strike in South Africa deployed along the fault-lines of this inclusion-exclusion – defiance campaigns, consumer boycotts, bus boycotts and, above all, massive worker-led “stay-aways”, in which black townships used their ghettoised residential exclusion, and the relatively few and easily identified points of township exit, to seal themselves off, withholding labour power and consumer spending for days at a time.

2.10 The impoverished township, urban and rural, with its own “informal” (i.e. non-capitalist, or sub-capitalist strategies of survival) became the “reserve fund” for the worker struggle. It was never going to be an inexhaustible fund, most stay-aways could only be sustained for days, perhaps a week. Consumer product boycotts, where there were alternative products, could be sustained for many months. But the capitalist class also could not indefinitely sustain labour and consumer abstention. Which is why our struggle culminated in a state of reciprocal class siege. Which is why it resulted in a negotiated settlement, a partial breakthrough on the terrain of a capitalist economy. Which is why, in a very real sense, our negotiated transition still continues to be negotiated and re-negotiated, day-to-day, in class struggle.


 * 3.Sustainability, breaking the “silent seal of economic compulsion”**

3.1 In an early draft of the Communist Manifesto, which Engels wrote as a catechism style question and answer text (it was provisionally titled, Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith), the question was posed: “What will be your first measure once you have established [a socialist] democracy?” The answer was: “guaranteeing the subsistence of the proletariat…”. Michael Lebowitz (from whom this quotation is derived) comments on this passage: “The rapid development of the productive forces under state ownership would deprive capital of its greatest weapon – the dependence of wage-labourers upon it for employment and for the ability to satisfy their requirements. By thus breaking the `silent seal of economic compulsion’, the workers’ state would be an essential weapon for carrying out the struggle against capital.” (Beyond Capital, 2nd ed., 2003, p.192)

3.2 Lebowitz (and, no doubt, Engels) link independent working class “subsistence” to the existence of a workers’ state, a public and parastatal sector under working class hegemony. This is surely right - but do we want to limit the means for a relatively independent working class “subsistence” to the state? Can we not link a progressive state to working class household and community “subsistence” activities, and ascribe to them both, jointly, the strategic task of breaking the “silent seal of economic compulsion” through fostering working class sustainability, independent of the M-C-M1 accumulation trajectory of capital?


 * 4.Relative de-linking of working class households and communities from capitalist accumulation**

4.1 Approaching matters from this angle helps us to better conceptualise the actuality (or perhaps rather the strategic potentiality) of the so-called “second economy”. It helps us to better define the potential characteristics of this “pole of under-development”, defining it positively, and less in terms of what it is not.

4.2 In public discourse the “second economy” is variously defined (largely in loose descriptive terms) as a “marginalized” (i.e. NOT the mainstream) sector, as the “informal” (i.e. NOT the formal) sector, as small and micro-enterprises (i.e. NOT yet “fully grown-up” capitalist enterprises), as “under-capitalised” (i.e. needing capitalist capitalisation), as unsuitably skilled (i.e. not possessing the skills that would be useful to a Raymond Ackerman or Bobby Godsell), etc. etc. We should not mythologise the “second economy” - but nor should we mechanically hold up the capitalist-dominated “first” economy as the model to be emulated.

4.3 Clearly, affirming the potentially POSITIVE and inherently DIFFERENT trajectory of the “second” economy, then relates directly to our strategic positioning in regard to the “two economies debate” and what is to be done in regard to the crisis of underdevelopment. The above points help to underline why we have argued against the simple notion of “promoting” the “second” into the “first”, of finding the “stair-way” up.

4.4 In our own attempts to characterise this underdeveloped pole, we have sometimes suggested that it might be considered (at least in part) as the sphere of working class reproduction. But this characterisation (which begins to be more scientific) is still approaching this reality from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production – i.e. we are conceptualising activities here as socially necessary work for the reproduction of wage-labour for capital. But from the perspective of the working class these activities might be seen less as re-production, and more as production of use-values for working class consumption.

4.5 In other words, it is necessary to look at things from the perspective of the political economy of the working class. From a proletarian class perspective we are dealing with productive labour for the worker. We are dealing with a pole of the economy in which it is possible (but not a given) that production for social need can be hegemonic over production for private profit.

4.6 So long as capitalism is dominant, nationally and internationally, the relative independence of productive labour for the worker will always be relative. The capacity to create an economy premised on social need and not on private profit will be a relative capacity – whether we are looking at the progressive state and parastatal sector, or at worker household and community economies. Transnet, the community coop, or the family subsistence farm may achieve significant degrees of independence from capitalist markets, but they are unlikely entirely to escape their influence in the present realities.

4.7 However, this relative potential for de-linking is absolutely critical. It provides the working class with the potential for some leverage, with a “reserve fund”, breathing space, quasi-liberated zones.

4.8 All of these considerations become especially important in our national and global conjuncture. The pre-dominant, “post-Fordist” trajectory of globalising capitalism over the last 25 years has seen the rapid destruction of subsistence rural economies, mass urbanisation of populations AND (paradoxically) structural adjustment inspired de-industrialisation, growing un- and under-employment. While capitalism, uniquely as a mode of production, has never offered full employment (relying on a reserve army of labour), the present restructuring of work forces (especially in the Third World) is unprecedented in scale and character. The one-third of the world’s urban population (itself now one-half of all the world’s population) living in vast slums throughout the Third World defies (as Mike Davis notes) in both its scale and in its nature the older 19th century terms of “labour reserve army”, or “lumpen proletariat”.

4.9 We are dealing with a strategic challenge in South Africa that is not unique to our society, and which, in its global and systemic character, cannot simply be characterised as an “apartheid legacy”.


 * 5. Towards giving practical content to “sustainable households, communities, livelihoods” – some notes**

5.1 We are dealing with a considerably urban and peri-urban reality, the consequence of the collapse of third world rural economies (itself the result of ecological disaster, war, plunging global commodity prices, and agricultural subsidies in the North). However, it would be wrong to assume that the scale and speed of urban migration in our societies is simply inevitable. The struggle for sustainable livelihoods in South Africa needs also to be linked to an appropriate rural strategy – massive land reform (that is primarily about an economy for meeting social needs, sustainability, and not about creating a new black strata of capitalist farmers), coops, infrastructure and extension programmes. It also needs to be linked to strategies to achieve effective balances between urban and rural areas in the provision of social infrastructure.

5.2 The dense and intricate layer of township and squatter camp activities – spaza shops, shebeens, stokvels, minibus associations, church volunteerism, neighbourhood watches, sports clubs, choirs, etc., etc – were in many respects the “social capital” that supported our liberation struggle. They were our equivalent of the scattered peasantry of the Sierra Maestra, or Yunan, or the hamlets of South East Asia. They continue to be an absolutely critical working class “reserve fund”, shock absorbers, breathing space, insurance against retrenchments, casualisations, fluctuations in the Rand/Dollar exchange rate, etc.

5.3 It was this critical network that was misunderstood by the “workerists” of the 1980s, and it was mythologised by the “populists”. It is important that we neither neglect nor mythologise this reality in the present. It has immense possibilities, but it is not some uncomplicated zone of spontaneous socialist solidarity. There are hybrid values that inform it, and apart from strong solidaristic traditions, there are also oppressive patriarchal customs (the exploitation of women and children in household and small enterprise activities), shack-lordism, gatekeeping, criminal networks and petty corruption. The struggle to build progressive sustainable households, communities and livelihoods is also a micro-level struggle against these currents.

5.4 This strategic approach to sustainability is NOT an alternative to our struggle for a strategic, active developmental state of national democracy. State power, not least, local state power (including key realities like ward committees and local Integrated Development Plans) are absolutely central to fostering sustainability. Conversely, popular mobilisation around developmental, redistributive and consumer issues is central to the construction of an effective developmental state. 5.5 Likewise, this strategic emphasis on building sustainable households and communities should NOT be seen as an alternative to the struggle for worker rights, worker organisation and greater worker hegemony in the “first” economy. We must robustly dismiss attempts to play-off squatter camp inhabitants, or the informal sector against supposed “labour aristocrats” employed in the “formal” economy (whether in the private or public sectors). Indeed, the whole thrust of our strategic approach is to underline the deep interconnection between the struggle to transform the capitalist economy at the point of (capitalist) production, and the struggle to greatly strengthen the relatively de-linked sustainable livelihoods production of use-values for the working class itself.

5.6 Indeed, the key to consolidating our conception of sustainable livelihoods lies in the active and integrated deployment of a range of existing interventions that often lack a sustainable coherence themselves, including


 * Endeavouring to create the conditions in which social grant transfers are not merely consumed, or spent immediately back in the capitalist dominated sector, but help to trigger local-level social entrepreneurship;
 * Much greater sensitivity to ensuring that social infrastructure transfers (eg. housing) create viable communities and not dormitory townships, both in the planning, location, character and construction of these settlements – i.e. better location, more viable mixed use communities, and construction to be much more people-driven (housing brigades)
 * Establishing more dynamic synergies between household subsistence programmes (eg. encouraging food gardens, or baking coops) and other state interventions (eg. school feeding programmes) - once again, building local economy networks, so that resources circulate within the community rather than simply being consumed in the community while benefiting Pick n Pay;
 * Ensuring that Expanded Public Works Programmes are much better integrated into overall community perspectives, rather than being once-off “job opportunities” – eg. using poor rural households (earmarked as future beneficiaries of land reform) to be the actual public works programme participants in constructing small dams, irrigation systems etc. – so that the land reform is sustainable, and so that there is localised ownership and maintenance skills of infrastructure.
 * Fostering Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) that are attuned not just to the skills needs of the capitalist sector, but also to the needs of the working class political economy.