Skip to main content

Local Democracy and LED

Development, Part 9a


Local Democracy and LED

From 15-18 July 2010 the South African Communist Party staged a national Conference of Commissars in Johannesburg, with emphasis on the localisation of politics and on the politics of development at local level.

In this second post of the ninth and penultimate part of our course on “Development”, we take two of the commission report-backs of that Commissars’ Conference, downloadable via the main links below.

In the next post we will foreground COSATU’s Growth Path Document, fully titled “A Growth Path Towards Full Employment”, which was published today, and which is now also linked for download below under “Further Reading”.

We must hope that the ANC will fully deliberate upon these matters of “growth path” at its National General Council from 20-24 September 2010, so that we will be able to update this course with that material before our ten parts are fully run.

Otherwise, the final part will be dedicated to material on the local organisation of the SACP, of SADTU, and of the ANC.

The first of today’s two main linked documents is on the Local Government Turnaround Strategy (LGTAS), but ranges on to electoral tactics and what is called the “deepening” of Local Government.

The second of today’s main linked documents is on Local Economic Development (LED) and on the creation of sustainable livelihoods, including through Co-operatives.

Both of these documents, being unedited commission report-backs, are compiled of dozens of listed points, separated into rudimentary categories. This makes them difficult to summarise.

What one might say is this: That whereas on the face of it the local level is where individuals and small groups of individuals have their best opportunity of taking initiatives, exercising agency, and becoming free subjects within the democracy, yet it is also at local level that the same individuals encounter the most formidable barrage of controls, restrictions, bureaucracy and corruption.

A conclusion from this would be that a great effort now has to be made to educate, organise and mobilise people democratically at the scale of the smallest demarcations, so that democratic interventions at the national level do not translate into bullying, anti-democratic dictatorship and consequent stagnation of the communities at the base of the national pyramid.

The cartoon image is designed to suggest that the negotiation of competing interests is as difficult at the local and the individual level of society as it is at any other level, whereas the education and the expertise to overcome the managerial difficulties is scarcer at that local level. The absent expertise can only be replaced with democratisation, in line with the National Democratic Revolution.

Please download and read these two documents:
1309a Local Government Turnaround Strategy, Commission Draft (1071 words)
1309b Local Economic Development (1088 words)

Further reading:
1309 Expanding Democratic Public Control over the Mining Sector (11348 words)
1309c COSATU Growth Path Document, September 2010 (824 KB PDF; 120 pages)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A warm welcome

. Why blog on ARS NOTORIA? I have set up this website,  ARS NOTORIA ,  (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog. . ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer. Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post. Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequently, or as seldom, as we like. You will be able to moderate and delete any of the comments made on 
6 comments
Read more

Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in tr
21 comments
Read more

Our Collective Caliban

At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me. According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read. I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you
14 comments
Read more