Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment
Democracy and violence have a complex and shifting relationship with each other.
The crucial element in the popular resistance to apartheid was the building of popular democratic organisations, such as trade unions and residents’ associations. This was an innovation, the possibility of which was considered by neither [Frantz] Fanon nor [Pierre] Bourdieu in their analysis of the Algerian revolution, and it constituted a form of empowerment on the part of the colonised very different to the strategies of violence advocated by Fanon. Indeed, it provided a durable structure of empowerment through which subalterns could challenge not only the apartheid regime but also their own leaders over questions of strategy and tactics, and it would be sustained into the post-apartheid period.
Although popular democratic organisation enabled workers and residents to negotiate with the authorities, it did not eliminate violence: the context for building this type of organisation was intrinsically violent, characterised by street battles, the destruction of property, massacres, assaults and detentions, judicial repression and guerrilla operations.
Under such conditions, democratic organisation also entailed a coercive element. My research into the internal dynamics of trade union organisation during the 1980s at Highveld Steel provided insight into the relationship among democracy, coercive violence and power.
As union militancy at Highveld Steel increased, the shop steward committee, directly elected by union members in each department of the steelworks, designated a number of militant and active members who were not shop stewards to form a “strike committee”, with the informal understanding that this would mobilise workers, identify strikebreakers and apply “punishment” to the latter, usually beatings with a sjambok. This was understood as a way of teaching and enforcing the “union law” regarding solidarity.
Although the shop stewards committee expected the strike committee to be subordinate to its overall direction, a struggle for power rapidly developed between the two committees, as the strike committee came to believe that the compromises entailed by negotiating with management were a sign that shop stewards were selling out. Violence escalated, strikes were accompanied by more and more widespread and serious assaults, and eventually the union split into two.
Underlying this split was the way internal organisational democracy and the complex procedures governing relations between the union and management empowered workers differentially: the more articulate, educated and skilled residents of the township proved to be highly effective shop stewards, in contrast to the illiterate and less educated rural migrant workers in the hostels, and so it was the former who tended to be elected and re-elected. This led to bitterness among the hostel dwellers, particularly as they had initially established the union.
Democracy disempowered them. The violence of the strike committee was a way of taking the union back. For the strike committee and its constituents, it was the sjambok that had built the union. For the shop stewards and their constituencies, it was democracy that had built the union and the sjambok that was destroying it.
Both sides mobilised symbolic power in the struggle over the meaning, practices and leadership of the organisation. When the union split, it was into the union of the hostels and the union of the township. Although the two were eventually reunited into one union, deep fissures, buttressed by memories of violence, continued to surface at times of stress.
As this study showed, democracy does not do away with all violence: every democracy has its “law” and every law has its coercive dimension. Furthermore, democracy, even within subaltern organisations, does not empower everyone equally, but itself constitutes a structure of differential power. For those who are marginalised and disempowered, violence provides an alternative strategy for reconfiguring the structures of power.
However, violence also proves to be profoundly corrosive within subaltern organisation, undermining democracy, producing a climate of fear and the withdrawal of members, division and splits. Violent repertoires have a long life, reproducing themselves within organisational structures and cultures, where they are always available as a resource in future conflict. Democratic leadership stands revealed as an extremely complex and demanding practice.
These dynamics, explored in a small case study of democracy from below, are repeated within large-scale democratic political systems, such as South Africa’s after apartheid. Strike violence, for example, persists. Partly this is an enduring repertoire from the anti-apartheid period: as one worker put it: “Since I was born, I have seen all strikes are violent. There are no such strikes as peaceful strikes.”
Partly, though, there is a deep sense that South African democracy masks great inequalities and that workers have not experienced the promises of liberation. Workers, in other words, are acutely aware of the structural violence that continues to oppress them.