ARS NOTORIA

Development, Part 3b A bridge for the poor? “Barking dogs and building bridges” is Lauren Royston’s subtle and patient demolition of the simplistic bourgeois platitudes of Hernando de Soto. De Soto is a Peruvian and the author of a book called “The Mystery of Capital” published in 2000. He later visited South Africa. He was broadly advocating globalised capitalism, and claimed to have found a way of incorporating the poorest of the poor within a regulated, universal framework of property and economic practice. Royston does not take a heavy axe to de Soto but recognises that he had achieved a remarkable propaganda success (by now, in 2010, largely forgotten) in a field where academics like herself and the advocacy groups “Leap” and “Afra”, among many others, had found themselves being ignored for years, or decades. Though they may have hated de Soto’s ideology, yet they were in some measure happy that de Soto had secured wide publicity for the “extra-legal” (i.e. outside the l...

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 9, No. 15, 4 August 2010 In this Issue:   Do we need an independent media tribunal?   Red Alert: Do we need an independent media tribunal?           By Jeremy Cronin It is generally considered unwise for a politician to debate critically with the media through the media about the media. You don't exactly enjoy home-ground advantage. This has been obvious in recent weeks with the re-surfacing of the debate around the ANC's 2007 national conference resolution on an independent media tribunal. There has been a back-lash barrage of negative editorial comment directed against the three or four ANC and Alliance comrades who have had the temerity to raise the tribunal proposal again. Yet beneath the negative barrage some interesting issues have emerged. In the first place, notice how senior journalists are divided on whether to respond positively to ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe's invitation to have an open and fr...

Development, Part 3 a Housing by People Housing by People  (click this link, or the link below,  for an MS-Word download, which includes diagrams that do not come through on the web page), by John Charlewood Turner, is a discussion of housing from a well-educated point of view, of where decisive power should lie, who should act, and how these responsibilities should be divided up. Turner’s book can serve us as a small link to the great, beautiful and necessary field of study called urbanism, of which very little emerges into the general public realm. Urbanism is a site of ideological struggle. It is also a labyrinth, in which it is easy to get lost. Turner, as you will see, refers to “ the mirage of development ”; meaning the illusion of development. Turner’s focus in the two chapters that are given here is on autonomy versus heteronomy, and on proscription versus prescription. In short, he is in favour of Power to the People. Turner is undoubtedly a partisan of the po...

Development, Part 3 Lo cal Class Alliance The politics of class alliance are well understood and well executed at national level in South Africa in terms of the  National Democratic Revolution  (NDR) policy developed during the last nine decades, which led to the democratic breakthrough of 1994. The NDR remains the dominant framework of South African politics, having been refreshed at Polokwane in 2007. At national level, the interests of the working class continue to be well articulated through the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the trade union movement whose largest centre is COSATU. The petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has no dedicated political expression at national level, and nor has the peasantry. In spite of the large size of these segments of the population in South Africa, they are compelled to rely on others, at national level. This is a consequence of the “sack-of-potatoes” nature of both of these two classes, the rural petty-bou...