Struggles Around Commodification at Daily life in South Africa.

Post-apartheid South Africa has seen the emergence of new social and community movements making demands on the African National Congress government to deliver on its promise of 'a better life for all'. In these struggles, the identity of 'the poor ' has been increasingly mobilised, both by movements reminding the state of its obligations to its people, and in official policy discourse seeking to introduce neoliberal macro-economic changes. This paper explores how the category of 'the poor' is mobilised in struggles for basic services in urban areas in south Africa, and in state policy that seeks to draw poor people into agreements to pays for services. In doing this, it explores the possibilities inherent in capitalist society for change and the building of relations that challenge or subvert the dominant logic of commodification and, in turn, of capital. 'We are not Indians, we are poors' (Girlie Amod); 'We are not African, we are the Poors' (Bongiwe Mangele): both at a demonstration in 1999 (quoted in Desai, 2002;44). At today's meeting in Kepton Park, the South African Local Government Association Consultative Assembly agreed to a campaign to register the poor throughout our country in the war against poverty. The aim of the campaign is to ensure that the most marginalized of our people - the poorest of the poor - receive a subsidy from their municipalities for basic services. This will go a long way to ensure service delivery to the poor, who are deprived of a basic amount of water, sanitation services and electricity because they are too poor to pay for these services rather than unwillingness to pay for services (Media Statement, Father Slmangaliso Mkatshwa, 16 June 2004). Reflected in these quotes are two distinct angles on 'the poor' in neoliberalising South Africa. In the first, activists mobilise 'the poors' as a political bloc in defiance of ethnic classification; whilst in the second, the poor are to be 'registered', captured and contained to evade their potential for subversion. The struggles which are here expressed in mobilisation of 'the poors' focus on the commodification f the necessities of life in urban areas in South Africa. These are struggles that pit a determining 'logic of capital' against the 'life processes' that lie outside of capital but are crucial to its reproduction (see debate in Chakrabarty, 2000:16-18). This paper explores campaigns for free basic services in South Africa post-1994, with a constant tug-of-war between poor communities and local municipalities as the logic of commodification comes to define service delivery. It exposes how the state has responded to the struggles and, in turn, how the identity of the poor has been employed in policy discourse and state strategies for enforcing the logic of commodification in the lives of the poor.