richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

44 Gramsci is Deadthe African National Congress (ANC) in 1994, 85 per cent of theland remains in the hands of the White minority. Although thereare vestiges of marxist social democracy in some policies, all levelsof government are following the neoliberal agenda in the hope ofsecuring a better place in the global order, and this is leading tofrustration with, and cynicism about, formal political organizations.As Stephen Greenberg puts it, ‘political democratization has openedup spaces for organization, but has also institutionalized struggles’(2004: 27). Frustrated by the repeated failure of locally-based actionsto achieve meaningful reforms in land tenure over the 1990s, anumber of grass-roots groups came together in 2001 to form theLandless Peoples Movement (LPM). LPM describes itself as a ‘nationalmovement’, supported by a network of NGOs organized as theNational Land Committee. The LPM, however, is striving to maintainitself as a ‘completely independent grassroots structure of landlesspeople. It is not an affiliate of the NLC’ (LPM 2001). LPM activistshave supported ‘informal settlements’, or occupation of unused land,but tend to see this as a tactic oriented to forcing the state to live up toits promises, rather than as prefiguration of autonomous alternatives(Greenberg 2004: 29–30). In a recent election boycott campaign,however, there is evidence of an increasing disenchantment withreform-oriented strategies and tactics:We are sick and tired of being used as pawns by political elites who only‘care’ about us at election time, then expect us to suffer our poverty anddispossession in silence for the next five years. We do not believe that goingto the polls will do anything to change our lives. Only direct, organized actionby the united masses of poor and landless people across South Africa cansolve the land crisis that has made us slaves in the country of our birth.(LPM 2004)In the past two years the South African state—as well as some ANCmembers—has responded by arresting large numbers of LPM activistsunder dubious circumstances, in one case charging them with murder.It remains to be seen whether the LPM will be further radicalized bythis response or be swept back into the NGO/state-corporate nexusthat dominates the South African political landscape.BEYOND REFORM, THIS SIDE OF REVOLUTIONRTS, IMC, neighbourhood assembly, Social Centre, Food Not Bombs,land and factory occupation—all of these tactics consciously defy