hydrarchist submits: "Ashwin Desai
teaches at the Workers College in Durban, South Africa, and is a
newspaper columnist and community activist. His most recent book is
We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in
Post-Apartheid South Africa (Monthly Review Press, 2002)."

"Struggles Against Privatization in South Africa"

Ashwin Desai

Inside the Transition

An aspect of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa was
inadvertently captured at the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting
held at the International Convention Centre in Durban, in June 2002, as the
police arrived with a massive show of force and drove protesters away from the
building with batons and charging horses. One of the organizers of the WEF was
approached by an incredulous member of the foreign media and asked about the
right to protest in the “new South Africa.” The organizer pulled out
the program and, with a wry smile, pointed to an upcoming session entitled

“Taking NEPAD to the People.” He said he could not understand the
protests because the “people” have been accommodated.
The transition to democracy led by the African National Congress (ANC) was
trumped by the transition to neoliberalism. The new ruling elite and the
beneficiaries of the old apartheid regime had already made common cause after
the ANC came to power in 1994. Now they were cementing their alliance with the
corporate raiders in the advanced capitalist world.

The ongoing South African transition has wrought significant changes. The
African middle and professional classes have grown considerably, while a small
economic elite is furiously consolidating. Adam Habib and Vishnu Padayachee
have recently commented on the impact of the ANC economic policies since 1994
on the “insiders” of the transition:

Conglomerate (white) business, the aspirant black bourgeoisie, and
black professionals have benefitted in the short term from the imposition of
neo-liberal economic policies. The conglomerates have benefitted from the tax
concessions, the lowering of inflation, and the privatization programme. They
have also benefitted from steady exchange control liberalization (which has
permitted the outward flow of increasing amounts of South African capital
abroad) and from the opening up of new export markets and some new investment
opportunities, especially in Africa and Asia. The aspirant black bourgeoisie
has benefitted from the privatization of public enterprises, the voluntary
asset swaps from domestic white companies, and from the partnerships
established with foreign investors....Black professionals have also benefited
from promotions and more open employment practices as companies scramble to
fulfill affirmative action quotas.1

Also central to the transition is the impact of the ANC’s macroeconomic
strategy on the composition of the South African working class. A recent
Reserve Bank report has shown that while wages (and productivity) for skilled
workers have steadily grown, there has developed a growing gulf between the
unionized and better skilled on the one hand and the masses of marginalized
South Africans on the other.

Over the last decade, there has been an increase in “nonstandard”
(temporary, casual, contract, part-time) forms of employment that heralds the
ubiquity of a relatively unstable and nonunionized workforce. At present,
full-time occupations employ little more than 40 percent of the economically
active population; for the African population, this decreases to approximately
one-third. Studies of the retail sector indicate significant wage and benefit
differences between permanent and atypical workers. The hourly wages of
permanent workers (90 percent of whom are union members) in the retail sector
are R9.68 [one South African rand (R) equals a little less than ten cents in
U.S. currency]. This compares with the average R6.68 paid to casual employees
(37 percent of whom are unionized).2

Alongside widespread nonstandard employment is spiraling unemployment. In
2001, University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat wrote that “the job
creation performance of the formal economy has been abysmal.”3 This conclusion has been supported by later studies
that have pointed to escalating job loss and unemployment. At the end of March
2002, Statistics SA reported that the official unemployment rate jumped three
percentage points rising from 26.4 percent to 29.5 percent. At the same time,
research on unemployment conducted by the Norwegian Development Agency put the
unemployment figure at between 32 percent and 45 percent. This research also
found that a quarter of the currently unemployed lost their last job because of
retrenchment or business closure and that half the job seekers have never
worked before.

According to the 1996 Census, the poorest 40 percent of the population got
less than 3 percent of the national income, while the richest 10 percent
enjoyed over 50 percent. The situation has worsened over the past decade for
the poorest 40 percent of African households. Twenty percent of urban
households have no electricity and a quarter have no running water, while 80
percent of rural households have neither. This led Minister of Social
Development, Zola Skweyiya, to reflect—in a rare moment of politician
straight talk after visiting a number of townships and rural areas—that
socioeconomic inequalities were getting worse: “The consequence is the
rich are getting richer and fewer whilst the poor are increasing in number and
getting even poorer.” Ironically, inequality has been exacerbated by the
lack of state support. Most poor South African households, more than 13.8
million people, do not qualify for any social security transfers. This means
that the poor have had to rely largely on themselves for survival.

A Poverty and Inequality Report commissioned by the government in May
2000 reveals that 45 percent of self-employed workers earn less than the
poverty line. Seventy-six percent of these are African. Franco Barchiesi makes
the telling point that unemployment in itself is only partially accountable for
working class poverty: “[T]he existence of huge areas of working class
poverty in the South African society...indicate(s) an enduring, structural
inability of waged employment to satisfy basic necessities for life and
household reproduction.” Take the recent example, a group of sixty
retrenched workers from the footwear industry in northern Kwa-ZuluNatal who
reentered the workforce by working for an entrepreneur who pays them R1 for
every shoe made. According to one of the workers, Lungile Ngubane, “What
you get paid depends on how many shoes you can make a day, but I would say on
average I make R50 a week.”4

The Neoliberal Squeeze at the ‘Local’

The neoliberal transition has squeezed and spewed out the poor but
galvanized them at the same time. The “poors,” as they have come to
be known in the South African vernacular, have opposed the water and
electricity cut-offs and evictions (consequences of the privatization of public
services), and have begun making connections between their situation and that
of people, first in Soweto and Tafelsig, but then also in Bolivia, South Korea,
America’s prisons, Zimbabwe, and Chiapas. But they have done this without
any grand ideology. They are actors on a local stage, squaring off against
homegrown villains like Operation Masakhane [Let Us Build], which supposedly
aims to normalize local governance and the provision of local services by
convincing people with no money that they must pay for these
services.5

In the most comprehensive study of the ability of people to pay for basic
services, David McDonald found a serious crisis:

If for example, 18 percent of the seven million people who are
reported to have been given access to water since 1994 are unable to pay their
water bills “no matter how hard [they] try,” then 1.26 million of
these new recipients are unable to afford this water and an additional 1.2
million have to choose between paying for water and buying other essentials
like food. Similar percentages apply to the 3.5 million South Africans who have
been given access to electricity.6

As part of the process of “normalization,” the government’s
Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program aims toward “a
fundamental shift away from the ‘statist’ service delivery models of
the past where the state subsidized and delivered municipal services (albeit in
a racially-biased manner), towards a more ‘neo-liberal’ service
delivery model where the private sector (and private sector principles)
dominate. In the latter model, the state acts as a service ‘ensurer’

rather than a service ‘provider’ and municipal services are ‘run
more like a business,’ with financial cost recovery becoming the most
effective measure of performance.” These developments have seen the costs
of basic services escalate. This, in turn, has caused increasing cost-recovery
mechanisms such as disconnections of water and electricity to occupy the
attention and energy of the local state, as opposed to delivery in the first
place. Between 1999 and 2000, for example, some 75,400 water cut-offs occurred
in the Greater Cape Town area. In Soweto after the 1999 general election, some
20,000 houses had their electricity supplies disconnected every month. Brian
Johnson, the manager of Eskom, the state-owned electricity supply company,
indicated that “the aim is to disconnect at least 75 per cent of Soweto
residents.” Since 1994, some ten million South Africans have had their
water and electricity cut-off for nonpayment, while two million have been
evicted from their homes for the same reason.7

Sometimes, councils like the eThekwini Unicity—the municipal government
of the greater Durban area—have proposed moving people out of the already
deteriorating apartheid ghettoes that serve as rental accommodation for some of
the poorest of the city’s residents into a central area of

“poorhouses.” It is presumed that once relocated their water and
electricity consumption can be monitored, while the houses that they occupied
for over three decades are upgraded and sold at a profit. In Cape Town,
residents of Mandela Park in Khayelitsha took bonds from banks. An organization
called Servcon, set up jointly by the banks and government, was designed to
educate the mortgage holders on how to budget so they could meet the required
payments. Escalating unemployment and the fact that the homes were structurally
defective, forcing many residents to put their own resources into repairing
faulty wiring and cracks in walls, resulted in many residents defaulting. The
banks, with the support of both Servcon and the government, began a process of
“rightsizing,” in which defaulters were forcibly moved to
accommodations that were accurately described by the Mandela Park community as
dog kennels. The cost-recovery prerequisites of neoliberalism are creating a
new kind of apartheid.

Sociologist Ari Sitas, looking at the cholera epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal,
which in less than ten months starting in the second half of 2000 had resulted
in 176 deaths and 83,624 infected. He showed how “cost-recovery” cut
across the government’s challenge to the apartheid state’s medical
model:

The apartheid state, armed with a controlling ideology and a
medical model was alarmed in the 1980s that cholera researchers were declaring
the epidemic as being related to apartheid policy. For them the problem was
“water-borne”....In its controlling paradigm the state decided to
provide safer sanitation in some of the most affected areas, to stop the
contagion. The new government, being a stringent critic of the old medical
model, committed itself to preventative medicine but also, following a
neo-liberal protocol of cost recovery, turned the taps off in the very same
areas because people couldn’t pay...the latest outbreak began in the area
of Ngwelezane where the Uthunlungu Council switched their access to clean water
off.8

The Rise of Community Movements

As the ANC’s assault on the poor resulted in more and more evictions,
disconnections, and retrenchments, a variety of new community movements began
to arise. Hesitantly at first, these movements began to arise to challenge the
water and electricity cut-offs, the evictions, and lack of land redistribution.
These movements, based in particular communities and evincing particular,
mainly defensive, demands, were not merely a natural result of poverty or
marginality but a direct response to state policy.

The state’s inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public
services and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been
a spark for a plethora of community movements. While the movements mobilize
around diverse demands like land titles, water and electricity supplies, and
access to housing and health facilities, the general nature of the neoliberal
emergency concentrates and aims these demands towards the state. What was
starting to develop in a series of mobilizations was reminiscent of what Manuel
Castells, writing on Latin America, came to call “militant metropolitan
dwellers.”

What distinguishes these community movements from political parties,
pressure groups, NGOs, and the trade unions is mass mobilization as the prime
source of social sanction. The rise of community movements has seen the
emergence of the family as a fighting unit, unlike union membership, which is
based on the individual worker. In fact, many of those involved in community
movements accept the conditions of the sweatshops and low wages without much of
a fight. They attempt to top up their wages by not paying for services. They
organize militantly around this issue, and the state is directly brought into
the conflict. They act much like Hobsbawm’s “city mob,” which he
describes as “the movement of all classes of the urban poor for the
achievement of economic or political changes by direct action—that is by
riot or rebellion.”9

Alongside the development of community movements and the tactic of direct
action has also been the onset of “quiet encroachment.” This refers
to:

the silent, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people
on those who are propertied and powerful in a quest for survival and
improvement of their lives. It is characterized by quiet, largely atomized and
prolonged mobilization with episodic collective action—open and fleeting
struggles without clear leadership, ideology or structured
organization.10

These encroachments are often given tacit encouragement by community
movements or serve as a catalyst for collective organization.

These movements concentrate on fighting in their own locality and are often
animated by the immediacy of the situation. When the challenge to water
cut-offs or evictions does come, it is fought with intensity, and longstanding
animosities are often forgotten as the struggle intensifies. In Mpumalanga, I
have seen families that have lost kin in the low-intensity civil war of the
1980s and 1990s between the Inkatha Freedom Party, supported by the apartheid
state, and the United Democratic Front link up with their former enemies and
fight the imposition of water meters.

I have witnessed across Durban how the campaign to demand a ten rand flat
rate for basic services was built. Poor people with no resources went to
different areas and addressed meetings. The Chatsworth contingent was received
with skepticism and then prolonged applause in the African township of Umlazi.
In a bewildering couple of weeks, the most diverse groups came together. The
socialist students fresh from being banned at the University of
Durban-Westville were everywhere—printing pamphlets, talking to the youth,
acting as protection from the goons of the ANC Youth League.

Resistance has spread across the country. In Soweto, the Soweto Electricity
Crisis Committee (SECC) have—through Operation Khanyisa, meaning

“switch-on,”—stymied the impact of Eskom’s disconnection by
reconnecting the electricity of residents. In Cape Town, residents of Mandela
Park in the sprawling black township of Khayelitsha have put residents evicted
by banks back into their houses. They have all put direct action at the heart
of their activities, disconnecting the electricity of the mayor of
Johannesburg’s house, occupying the offices of banks in Cape Town, and
laying siege to the debt-collection building of the eThekwini Council in
Durban.

But we should not romanticize the lives of the poor. Life is “nasty,
brutish and short.” In fact, very short. Life expectancy has tumbled by
some two decades. And when the community movements fail to stop the eviction of
the old, they often die miserable deaths, cut off from familiar surroundings.
Take the case of a pensioner, Mr. Mcondobi, who was evicted in February 2002 in
perfect health from 23554 Mandela Park. The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign
reported on June 30, 2002:

He was rightsized to a dog kennel style house at 56938 Thubelitsha,
and seems to have contacted pneumonia as the winter set in....Other evicted
pensioners testified that the kennels to which they have been rightsized are
bitterly cold, have no plastering on the inside walls, are leaking through the
roof and have no bath or shower.

Or consider unemployed mother, Thulisile Manqele, who failed in her bid in
the Durban High Court to turn her water on. She returned to Chatsworth, and the
still-standing stream filled with fecal contamination. Cholera stalks those
without water. But even the provision of taps comes with a price. You need to
have a card charged with money to access the water. Public standpipes lie
rusting as people without cash make their way to the river. Government
functionaries and intellectuals talk about changing people’s culture
towards payment. The very same words were used when the natives would not pay
the Hut Tax. Anthropology is back in fashion.

The poor are not passive victims of social policy, however. The metropolitan
militant who does not pay for water or electricity, who squats and occupies and
tries his luck, often succeeds in snatching income from the state and protects
this income in collective struggle when the state or (parastatals) attempts to
reclaim it. In certain rural areas, stock theft, squatting and slow, semilegal
land occupations under the guise of land-tenancy, perform the same function.

What about the organized working class? The transition to democracy was
underpinned by corporatism. This involved big unions, big business, and the
state. Conflict was to be institutionalized. The political had to be controlled
by the ANC or its allies in the Tripartite Alliance—the Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South African Communist Party (SACP).
The rightward shift of the ANC, however, has from time to time been challenged
by the leading trade union federation, COSATU, working within the rubric of the
Alliance. However, the latter’s attempts to advance its interests is so
highly ritualized, domesticated within the ANC Alliance and otherwise
institutionalized, that COSATU shows little inclination to act outside and
against the major policy decisions of the ANC. Crucially, COSATU sees its
alliance with the ANC as the bulwark against job losses by tempering the worst
excesses of neoliberalism. Conflict is channeled through tripartite (business,
labor, and state) corporatist structures.

Dale McKinley has likened the leadership of the SACP and COSATU to

a rabbit whose eyes are transfixed by the oncoming headlights of a
fast moving vehicle, numbed by the sheer intensity of what appear to be the
unshakable “headlights” of the “liberation movement.” All
the while, however, the ANC leadership has proceeded apace, to further entrench
(deracialised) capitalist relations of production and distribution. In the
process, and with the assistance of the leadership of the SACP and COSATU, they
have actively attacked any concomitant critical questioning and engagement with
the substance behind such rhetoric.11

COSATU did take principled positions against Mbeki’s genocidal AIDS
denial and on issues like the oppressive Swazi monarchy and the Mugabe
dictatorship. But when it comes to opposition to the neoliberal nature of the
transition, COSATU acts to contain and domesticate dissent. The editor of
the Sunday Independent and Mbeki insider, John Battersby, commented at
the time of the SACP 2002 Congress:

When the chips are down, the SACP does not represent the landless
and the homeless masses anymore than the ANC or COSATU represents the
unemployed masses, whatever the rhetoric might say about the “poorest of
the poor”...the alliance represents an elite and emerging middle
class.12

The recent South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) strike does,
however, indicate a fertile ground for a linkup between community movements and
the organized working class. Many SAMWU shop stewards, especially in the
Western Cape, are integrally involved in community movements. The privatization
of services means SAMWU workers face the spectre of both job losses and
increases in charges for basic services, merging in their immediate identities
as municipal employees and township residents. It is also significant that the
strike took place against the local state, which also is the target of the
community movements. The strike brought to public attention the growing gap
between municipal managers and workers. In Durban, the newly appointed
Municipal Manager and former ANC Member of Provincial Parliament, Mike
Sutcliffe, has an annual salary package of R800,000 and a performance bonus of
R500,000.13

At the same time, the local governments were refusing to take the minimum
wage from R1900 to R2200 per month. If one considers the salary of a worker at
R2000 a month, it would take a worker some forty years to earn what Sutcliffe
would earn in a year. If one takes into consideration that the average life
expectancy of a person born in South Africa has tumbled from sixty-four years
in 1996 to fifty-three years in 1998, and one takes an average starting age of
eighteen for a municipal worker, then the worker would not earn in a whole
lifetime what Sutcliffe earns in one year!

David Slater makes the point that “the territorial state, in global
times, tends to rest on an increasingly fragile and precarious ground, with
pressures from below often opening up fissures in its territorial control,
whilst the globalisation of financial, economic and cultural power increasingly
impinges on the nation-state from above.”14

The state in South Africa has less vulnerability because of the ANC’s
image as a liberator. This is aided by the fact that it makes grand statements
around the free delivery of services.

The local state, though, is vulnerable. It is the entity that advances the
water and electricity disconnections, evictions, and the loss of jobs through
privatization. A majority of the councillors are elected through wards, making
them both accessible to communities and open to direct attack. It is not
surprising that it is at this level that the poor have challenged the
neoliberal transition.

In attempting to make sense of the transition it is useful to think of the
idea of politics and the political. As David Slater writes:

Politics has its own public space; it is the field of exchanges
between political parties, of parliamentary and governmental affairs, of
elections and representation and in general of the type of activity, practices
and procedures that take place in the institutional arena of the political
system. The political...can be more effectively regarded as a type of
relationship that can develop in any area of the social, irrespective of
whether or not it remains within the institutional enclosure of
“politics.” The political then is the living movement, the kind of
“magma of conflicting wills,” or antagonisms; it is mobile and
ubiquitous, going beyond but also subverting the institutional settings and
moorings of politics.15

These movements have created a political scandal by deliberately engaging in
actions that create instability and disorder. The “poors,” or what
others have variously called the “multitude,” “the
unwaged,” “slaves-in-waiting,” the “metropolitan
militant,”“the mob,” and “the wretched of the earth,”

have come to constitute the most relevant post-1994 social force from the point
of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community
movements have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while after
the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as “politics.”
In the month of July 2002, for example, residents of an informal settlement in
Lenasia protesting their forced removal, cheered while burning an election
poster bearing Mbeki’s face; the Landless People’s Movement occupied
Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa’s office amid an angry protest over land;
and rent defaulters on the Cape Flats stoned a truck involved in evictions, and
tried to necklace a driver.16

They have also added to the cast many new actors associated with the play of
politics in South Africa. The poor are not just involved in recognition, or the
discovery of the right policies, or the creation of the right administrative
framework, or even the goodwill of power holders. They are challenging the very
distribution of power in society and are doing so in ways that do not stick to
the gradualist, corporatist, and nation-building script.

Un-Civil Society

Most importantly, community movements have subverted “the traditionally
given of the political system—state power, political parties, formal
institutions—by contesting the legitimacy and the apparently normal and
natural functioning of their effects within society.”17 They are a source of tremendous potential
counter-power, if not counter-politics.

In 1993, a scenario planning exercise commissioned by the giant insurance
company Sanlam, entitled Platform for Investment held that “it is
not the downtrodden, starving ‘down and outers’—the worms that
turn—who start revolutions, but people who await a better life but then
suddenly find their aspirations frustrated. Most unemployed people have
depressed aspirations.” As Patrick Bond laconically commented, what the
Platform was signaling was that the unemployed should be ignored for
they do not pose a threat to the system.18

It was advice that the ANC appeared to believe. But the unemployed would not
be ignored. They have built strong community movements, joining with the lower
working class in challenging the very structure of the “political.”

The irony is that these movements have fought bloody battles to hang on to the
satanic ghettoes that apartheid bequeathed.

If community movements are to grow and spread and build a culture of
revolutionary confrontation, they have serious challenges to confront in the
immediate future. They face an ANC which, sensing the growing combativeness of
the poor, has begun to try and head off challenges emanating from outside
corporatist structures. For example, some parts of the ANC have started to take
to the streets. The ANC Youth League marched on June 16, 2002 demanding jobs
and “entrepreneurial” skills. In Durban, a city the ANC controls, the
organization has taken to the streets calling for free water, blaming water
disconnections on white conservative bureaucrats! Given the resources the ANC
has and the continuing mystique of freedom fighters, their intervention in a
territory over which the community movements were starting to hold exclusive
sway poses a real challenge.

Alongside this, there has been increased repression. The Regulation of
Public Gatherings Act of 1993 gives police and civic authorities far-reaching
powers in preventing and even banning mass demonstrations. The recent arrest of
National Land Committee and Landless People’s Movement members in Ermelo
is a particularly graphic example of the repressive use of this act. So too is
the purported banning of at least two Anti-Privatization Forum marches and the
breaking up of the peaceful assembly during the World Economic Forum meeting
held in Durban in June 2002. When members of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction
Campaign held a protest outside the provincial parliament on June 27, 2002, the
police fired tear gas into the crowds, arrested forty-four members, and charged
them with trespassing. Fifty SECC members face charges of public violence and
trespassing. Eight residents from Wentworth face charges relating to a march on
the local police station. These actions led Ebrahim Harvey to comment that
“[T]he black ruling elite has not hesitated to act against protesters with
the jackboot that we are so familiar with under apartheid.”19

Beyond the immediate challenges, there are serious questions facing the new
movements, which strike at the heart of their longer-term project. How do they
link up with the militant unions like SAMWU? How do they broaden their movement
into rural areas that are either marked by an absence of basic services or,
when they do arrive, are commodified in a manner putting them out of reach of
the intended consumers? Why have the urban poor not linked in an organic way
with the Landless People’s Movement? Is land not a basic service and is
not the fight against banks and against the selling of council housing, like
land invasions, a direct attack on the edifice of private property? If this is
the case, why are the links not being made? What is to be their relation to the
formal institutional sphere of “politics”? In particular, should they
contest elections at least at a local level? How are connections to be made
with similar struggles in Zimbabwe, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Indonesia, and
with those movements directly taking on the IMF and the World Bank on the
streets of Seattle and Genoa? How do the poor turn what have been defensive
actions (fighting bloody battles to stay in the apartheid ghettoes) into
demands that take the offensive against the neoliberal state? One of the
dangers is that the very success of campaigns like Operation Khanyisa will lead
to demobilization, because once people have their lights switched on, they do
not see the need for the collective. It also serves the purpose of reducing
anger because people now have lights and water. This is the danger of remaining
localized, particularistic, and single-issue focused. The state, faced with
collective resistance and exposed at a public level, simply retreats from the
more militant areas and moves to areas less organized.

These questions should not detract from the challenge the community
movements have made to the ANC government. They have fought off the
state’s hired guns to prevent evictions and disconnections. In Cape Town,
Durban, and Johannesburg, the reconnection of water and electricity by
community movements has reached “epidemic” proportions,
reappropriating basic needs and creating no-go zones of decommodification. They
have put 20,000 on the streets at the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
This is a struggle that already has heroes, legends, and martyrs.

Notes

1. Adam Habib and Vishnu Padayachee, “Economic Policy and Power relations
   in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy,” World Development
   28 (2000), 25.
2. Haroon Bhorat, “Explaining Employment Trends in South Africa:
   1993–1998,” New Agenda, Fourth Quarter, Cape Town, 2000: 23.
   


3. Mail and Guardian, 28 March 2002.


4. F. Barchesi, “Social Citizenship, the State and the Changing
   Constitution of Wage Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Paper
   presented at the 2002 Annual Congress of the South African Sociological
   Association, East London, June 30 to July 2, 2002, pp. 7, 8.
5. See A. Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid
   South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).


6. D. McDonald, “The Bell Tolls for Thee: Cost Recovery, Cut Offs, and
   the Affordability of Municipal Services in South Africa,” Special Report,
   2000: 9.


7. D. McDonald, “The Bell Tolls for Thee,” D. McDonald and L. Smith,
   “Privatizing Cape Town,” Municipal Services project paper, 2002.
8. A. Sitas, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Paper presented at the
   2002 Annual Congress of the South African Sociological Association, London,
   June 30–July 2, 2002: 5.


9. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, England: Manchester
   University Press, 1963), 110–111.


10. A. Bayet, Social Movements, Activism and Social Development in the
    Middle East (New York: United Nations Research Institute for Social
    Development, 2000), 24.
11. D. McKinley, “‘The End of Innocence’: The Alliance and the
    Left,” South African Labour Bulletin 24 (2000): 57.


12. Sunday Independent, 28 July 2002.


13. Sunday Tribune, 7 July 2002.


14. D. Slater, “Spatial Politics/Social Movements,” in W. Bright and
    S. Harding, eds., State Building and Social Movements (London and New
    York: Routledge, 1997), 261.
15. Ibid., 266.


16. Sunday Independent, 28 July 2002.


17. Slater, Spatial, 263.


18. P. Bond, Elite Transition (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 64.


19. E. Harvey, “A Taste of the Jackboot of the New Ruling Elite,”

    South African Labor Bulletin 26 (2001)