Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

sustained its autonomy from political parties
and, later on, NGOs. In both cases the
response from constituted authority was to
resort to colonial tropes and present the
movement as criminals under the control of
malicious external white authority.
While the movement always understood that
its original and fundamental power lay in
self-organized communities, the capacity
to occupy and hold land and the use of
disruption via road blockades, it was never
solely concerned with this sphere of action.
Alliances were also sought with actors
outside the settlements, like journalists,
lawyers, academics and religious leaders.
There were regular interventions in the
wider public sphere, via lawful forms of
mass protest as well as the media, and an
often very effective use of the courts to, in
particular, take contestation over land off
the terrain of violence.
Autonomy was taken seriously within the
movement, but it wasn’t imagined as an
exodus from sites of constituted power. It
was imagined more like Antonio Gramsci’s
idea of the neighborhood council as a
political commitment that would enable
effective collective engagement on other
terrains. People spoke, by way of analogy,
of occupying space in sites of constituted
power, like the media or the university.
THE LONG SHADOW OF THE STATE
The organizational form developed by
Abahlali baseMjondolo enabled a political
space in which the oppressed, albeit it in
this case self-identified as the poor rather
than the working class, could, as Marx said
of the Paris Commune, work out their own
emancipation.
Although this process has, at points, had
to grapple with internal difficulties and
frustrations – such as new entrants bringing
in contradictory projects, families seeking
to turn the risk and commitment of a child
or sibling into a reward, or distortions
consequent to repression – it has often been
undertaken with a strong sense of collective
excitement.
But any affirmation of the commune as a
political strategy rather than a description of
an organizational form has to take careful
account of the fact that, since 1871 and
continuing with more recent experiences in,
say, Oaxaca and Oakland, the declaration
of a commune has seldom resulted in a
sustainable political project. States rarely
tolerate the emergence of even modest
instances of dual power. In Durban the
intersection of the ruling party, which
employs technocratic, Stalinist and ethnic
language to legitimate the centralization of
authority, has used two primary strategies
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June 2016