Unless social movements — like the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) — can translate their actions, energies and commitment to a changed and better world into viable organisational vehicles that can contend for political power, their energies will dissipate and the potential to become a powerful force will be wasted.
The most powerful struggles on the streets cannot be sustained for long and will eventually fade without disciplined organisation, of which only a party is capable.
The APF is the most well-known and militant of social movements in South Africa. It assembles community-based organisations that are fiercely opposed to all forms of privatisation and believe that water, sanitation and electricity should be provided freely by the state — not contracted out to private companies that place profit before meeting basic needs.
Consisting of workers, the unemployed, students, unionists and intellectuals, the APF is trying to forge a collective leadership with an emphasis on the needs and interests of the same class the African National Congress has claimed as its own, but which many believe it has betrayed: black workers.
Its activists are rooted in the townships and active in municipalities, the politically strategic interface between local communities and the government. It is here where seething dissatisfaction with the government is most palpable and potentially explosive, and where the APF could rapidly become a force to be reckoned with.
Within the context of rising unemployment and dissatisfaction with services, cut-offs, evictions and the attachment of poor people’s homes and their meagre belongings for unpaid debt, as well as an insensitive, unhelpful and incompetent local government bureaucracy, it cannot be hard to imagine a situation more fertile to recruit, mobilise and organise affected people. Such is the situation in Johannesburg, the nerve centre of the economy and home of the APF.
Except for electioneering vote-catching there is no party that has been strongly involved in the crucial municipal services sector and in opposing the commercialisation of basic services. The APF has sought to cultivate a mass base where there has largely been a political vacuum and where the harmful effects of neo-liberalism are most harshly evident.
However, let there be no doubt that despite their weaknesses the APF represents the best potential to build powerful mass opposition to the ANC government. No organisation or group outside the ANC alliance is more confident that there is an alternative both to capitalism and the ANC, and is busy building it.
For this purpose the APF should form a party and set its sights on the 2005 local government elections and the 2009 national elections. This is the key challenge it faces over the next few years. There is, for the foreseeable future, no other road to power.