When capitalism is defended with legitimate violence

It has been a long fort­night for South Africa, which has unmis­tak­ably shown all the flaws and fal­la­cies of its post-​apartheid ‘rain­bow nation’, along with the weak­nesses of a non-​racialist soci­ety deeply riddled with eco­nomic and social asym­met­ries. More import­antly, it has shown that cap­it­al­ism can­not con­clude com­prom­ises with the excluded and exploited, and that investors have a strong ally. The armed inter­ven­tions to stop the protests dir­ec­ted against the actions of private enter­prises and private cap­ital demon­strate, in fact, the func­tional role that legitimate(d) viol­ence plays in sup­port­ing and defend­ing private accu­mu­la­tion, even if that means that the state is shoot­ing its own citizens.

In the case of the Lonmin’s mine, rather than hear­ing the des­per­ate requests of work­ers who in some cases are paid less than 400 euro per month, and rather than impos­ing its author­ity over the third biggest plat­inum pro­du­cer in the world, with an annual rev­enue in 2011 of 1,992 mil­lion U.S. dol­lars, the gov­ern­ment has charged its rifles with live ammuni­tions, and clearly demon­strated what hier­archy it is keen to fol­low. But this time bul­lets could not be enough to silence the anger of the people.

While civil soci­ety has mobil­ized (as always) with some protests and mani­fest­a­tions in the major centres of South Africa, the viol­ence of the state’s action seems to have triggered the des­per­a­tion and dis­sat­is­fac­tion of the people, start­ing from the poorest of the poorest. In the last week, in fact, more and more miners all over the coun­try have aban­doned the dark­ness of the under­ground tun­nels to express their dis­sent against unbear­able work con­di­tions and exploit­at­ive salary, and the centre of Pre­toria, the admin­is­trat­ive cap­ital, has been trans­formed in an urban battle ground. Here, almost one thou­sand protest­ors have been ral­ly­ing in the streets of the Cent­ral Busi­ness Dis­trict ask­ing for the recog­ni­tion of the right to con­tinue the daily activ­ity that provides them with a liv­ing, and not to be sub­jec­ted to expens­ive reg­u­la­tions. As a response, the city centre has been imme­di­ately shut down, the city almost para­lyzed, and police­men deployed on the ground. Once again, rifles and bul­lets (although still in their rub­ber ver­sion) have been deployed in the name of legality.

The cir­cum­stances under­ly­ing the new con­flict are emblem­atic in their sim­pli­city, and rein­force the argu­ment about the power rela­tion­ship between state, mar­ket and soci­ety. In the last months, the local muni­cip­al­ity of Thswane (Pre­toria) has decided to clear the streets of any vendor without an offi­cial licence, and to clean up the com­mer­cial areas of Mara­bastad and Belle Ombré Plaza so to favour its eco­nomic growth by means of regis­tra­tion, form­al­iz­a­tion and rigid reg­u­la­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, vendors have been required to buy monthly trad­ing licences for R 150 (15 euro), limit their oper­a­tion to office hours, and to trade only in designed areas. What appears as an attempt to organ­ize muni­cipal com­merce, clearly has a dire impact on people who are often liv­ing with few euro per day, whose only income derives from their street busi­ness, and who, in many cases, have trav­elled to the city in order to sus­tain their fam­ily out­side. The pas­sage from inform­al­ity to form­al­ity, which is affirmed in a way which evokes De Soto and his phant­as­mic mys­tery, will clearly leave many behind, and exclude even more people who are already alienated.

While the vic­tims of the forced clos­ures, evic­tions and destruc­tion of goods had been suf­fer­ing without major protests, the recent events out­side the Lonmin’s mine appear to have regen­er­ated people’s con­scious­ness about the role that they occupy in the government’s eco­nomic and social policies. The people are start­ing real­iz­ing that they have no place in the eco­nomic path that cap­it­al­ism and private invest­ments have traced for their coun­try since many years before 1994. And, more import­antly, those who did not pos­sess the means to jump on the cap­it­al­ist wagon and have been left behind, are now facing the truth that the gov­ern­ment is not there to help them, but to drive the con­voy even faster.

Rather than a case of racial dis­crim­in­a­tion or of pseudo-​apartheid viol­ence, in fact, the two cases demon­strate that the offi­cial end of apartheid has had no real impact on the eco­nomic choices of South Africa, and that the exploit­a­tion of people and nat­ural resources, as much as the pro­mo­tion of exclu­sion­ary private invest­ments, can only be guar­an­teed with the deploy­ment of legit­im­ate viol­ence. Listen­ing to the people, the prom­ises of black empower­ment, of a bottom-​up renais­sance of South Africa and of a post-​apartheid coun­try where every­one would have obtained equal oppor­tun­it­ies, appear like a broken dream, and the state is per­ceived as too com­prom­ised with private interests, too scared of the macro-​economic con­sequences, and too entrapped in the glit­ter­ing paradigm of mod­ern­ity to take any altern­at­ive step.

In con­clu­sion, there are at least three reas­ons why we should look at the cur­rent situ­ation in South Africa with con­cern and, in some sense, as a labor­at­ory for future struggle against the inequal­ity of cap­it­al­ism. First of all, it provides a clear evid­ence of the cent­ral role that state sov­er­eignty plays in the con­sol­id­a­tion of cap­it­al­ism and in the repro­duc­tion of a sys­tem based on exploit­a­tion and exclu­sion. Legit­im­ate viol­ence is exer­cised whenever the people are rebelling to improve their life con­di­tions or to main­tain the min­imum that they have, because share­hold­ers and future investors can­not accept to share the pie. Secondly, the riots and protests are mak­ing evid­ent that the racial dis­crim­in­a­tion was closely linked to the cre­ation of a sys­tem of eco­nomic segreg­a­tion which is far from being over­turned. In par­tic­u­lar, if we look at who is protest­ing, we real­ize that the 1994 has not rep­res­en­ted a move for­ward for the South African black com­munity, which is still eco­nom­ic­ally segreg­ated and sub­or­din­ated to the interests of the cap­ital, this lat­ter being con­sti­tuted, as dur­ing apartheid, by the mainly non-​black.

Thirdly, and more import­antly, the fact that the cur­rent protest are no more dir­ec­ted only toward the investors, but against the exec­ut­ive power in its qual­ity as rep­res­ent­at­ive of the com­munity, could finally bring back on the table the respons­ib­il­ity of the state as pro­tector of its cit­izens and, in par­tic­u­lar, of the most vul­ner­able. The moment has arrived, I claim, to real­ize the fun­da­mental role that sov­er­eignty is play­ing in guar­an­tee­ing private exploit­a­tion and accu­mu­la­tion, not only in deploy­ing legit­im­ate viol­ence as in the two cases under ana­lysis, but also by adapt­ing national legal orders to the needs of the few and to the det­ri­ment of the many. The moment has come for the 99% of the global pop­u­la­tion to real­ize that there can­not be private abuses without pub­lic con­niv­ance, and to reclaim the use of sov­er­eignty to cre­ate a sys­tem of leg­al­ity which involves people rather than let­ting police­men shoot­ing on them.

This entry was posted on 2 September 2012 at 4:08 am and is filed under Human Rights, Race, Radical Politics, The Political. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.