Developing Resistance and Resisting 'Development': Reflections from the South African Struggle

Abstract

South Africa's most compelling lessons for the international left are, we believe, about building and maintaining a class-conscious civil society in oppressed communities, in the spheres of both production and reproduction, and more generally against the activities of the market-oriented 'development' industry (which we contrast with 'people-centred development' for purposes of semantic clarity). In reviewing some of these throughout the following pages, particularly with respect to the township-based 'civic associations' with which we are most familiar, it is important for us to highlight the organisational instruments of poor and working people. These we term 'working-class civil society' in order to distinguish them from bourgeois non-governmental institutions (as well as from government and firms) and hence from pervasive depoliticized notions of 'civil society' (the real goal of which boils down to reducing the scope of social services provided by Third World states).