In the run-up to the 2021 local government elections, the Makana Citizens Front challenged corruption and dysfunction in the municipality rather than try to collapse state institutions. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy/M&G
In “Makhanda the poster child for municipal collapse”, Leroy Maisiri reviews the collapse of government in the Makana municipality from an anarchist perspective. This is interesting as anarchism offers many useful insights into government failure and possible alternatives. However, where I differ from him is the view that grassroots action can replace collapsed state capacity.
To understand why, it is necessary to review the broader field of anarchist thought — an area in which I do not claim expertise but draw on the writings of Noam Chomsky who is an authority.
Anarchism comes from the same place as the roots of liberalism and libertarianism — the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, where the true nature of humanity was interrogated. Libertarianism was originally a philosophy that stressed the primacy of the individual and decried all forms of central authority. Libertarianism later split into left and right strands.
The left strand is similar to anarchism — in a general sense, since anarchism itself is very diverse — it opposes all centralisation of power, whether state or private. Left libertarianism is also similar to libertarian socialism, the opposite pole to authoritarian socialism. The right strand has become the best known version of libertarianism — the US model, in which any state power is seen as detrimental but no abuse of power by the private sector is too bad.
The problem with right-wing libertarianism is it ignores the fact that private concentrations of power — generally led by wealth concentration — can lead to an authoritarian state. Even if the initial goal of smashing state power is achieved, the resulting unfettered oligarchs can rebuild it without opposition as they can wield their financial power to recraft a powerful centrally-controlled state that functions primarily to serve their own interests.
This phenomenon has been seen in post-Soviet Russia and the Trump regime is well on the way to a similar outcome, after the so-called department of government efficiency took a chainsaw to the federal government. In both the Putin and the Trump regimes, the concentration of wealth and destruction of state capacity was followed by a resurgence of state capacity to trample on individual liberty — not necessarily remaining beneficial to the oligarchs who were in on it at the start.
So what does anarchism have to say about this?
Chomsky, in a 1996 interview published as “Anarchism, Intellectuals and the State”, argues forcefully for strengthening state institutions that serve the poor. While an anarchist may see the state as illegitimate, the short-term reality is that trashing such capacity plays to the agenda of the right. An example he uses to illustrate the point is a Communist Party slogan of the early 1930s, “the worse, the better”, which signified that fighting fascism was not a good thing, because it meant taking the side of the social democrats, who they did not see as “the good guys”. The outcome of this logic was World War II and decades of fascist rule of Spain.
So, back to Makana.
When Makana Citizens Front (MCF) contested the municipal elections in 2021, we did not do so with the aim of collapsing state institutions. Quite the opposite — we planned on challenging corruption and dysfunction.
How MCF has gone about this is to challenge dysfunction and corruption wherever we can: asking hard questions in council and portfolio committees, demanding answers from higher levels of government, using media to pressure the government and using state capacity to demand accountability. We have brought in the Special Investigating Unit to investigate numerous tenders and contracts. We have referred a case of more than R2.6 million spent on a pump that was never delivered to the police. We also invited the South African Human Rights Commission to intervene in our disastrously mismanaged water infrastructure. Others have added to our investigating unit and rights commission complaints, adding weight to them.
To be able to do all of this, we have had to work on capacitating ourselves. We needed to find out how such institutions of accountability are accessed, what pressures they respond to and how to build our own expertise on the workings of government.
None of this would be effective without a popular following. In the end, the most powerful pressure on the government is loss of popular support. That not only takes the form of loss of votes but losing the acceptance of failure as the norm.
We agree that grassroots activism by civic organisations is important; this is why we do not regard ourselves as a political party (though we had to register as one to contest elections). We take part in protests, we take empowering civic action and engage with other activists. However, protest is not enough. Nor is it realistic to propose that grassroots movements should take over all the functions of government. A water plant must be run with the correct competence and specialist expertise. The same is true of sewage works, roads and electrical infrastructure.
The key issue is that the expertise to fix failed infrastructure should be deployed with the consent and active involvement of grassroots activists. That requires a concerted effort in community education, as well as building the expertise to do the actual work within government.
Even in an idealised anarchist society, there would have to be specialists to handle specialist problems. Perhaps the way they are deployed would be different from the MCF approach; anarchism has models for such deviation from pure grassroots decision-making, such as anarcho-syndicalism.
I leave discussion of such details to actual experts on anarchism. But we will not solve our problems by collapsing the government. To do so would be to create a society in which only the well-off who can afford to buy them would have essential services.
Such collapse of government capacity is exactly what the ANC is delivering. Far from a people’s liberation movement with a socialist core, they are increasingly de facto becoming right-wing libertarians. Elon Musk must be proud.
Philip Machanick is a Makana Citizens Front proportional representation councillor in the Makana municipality in the Eastern Cape.