In August 2010, government officials began closing down clothing and textile factories in Newcastle, in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, in the face of angry protests from the workers because the owners were paying less than the statutory minimum wage of R324 a week. Dudu Mabaso, who works in one of these factories, said that as much as she wanted conditions to change at her company, closing down was not an option. ‘People will revolt against closure. It's their source of survival and working for these textile companies is the only way to survive. The wages are low at R250 per week but they are better than nothing.’ (Olifant, 2010:10). The factory owners said that they could not pay more, and survive, in the face of cheap Chinese textile imports. As Alex Liu, chairman of the Newcastle Chinese Chamber of Commerce, asserted, ‘It is impossible for us to pay the minimum wage because we are competing with imports from China and the cut, make and trim price from our customers will not sustain us if we paid the minimum wage of R324 a week’ (Khanyile, 2010a: 3).

South Africa has a sophisticated collective bargaining and dispute resolution system, and by December 2010 agreement had been reached between the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (Sactwu) and employers’ organisations that manufacturers paying less than minimum wages would have until 2012 to get their houses in order. Manufacturers were granted a further sixteen-month extension in which to resolve their noncompliant status. They would have to be at least seventy per cent compliant by the end of March 2011, with further phase-ins over the following thirteen months, culminating in full compliance by the end of April 2012 (Khanyile, 2010b:1). By the end of March 2011, fifty-nine per cent of the inspected factories were complying with the target of paying seventy per cent of the minimum wage, effective from April (Khanyile 2011).

But from the employers’ point of view this was a reluctant agreement. ‘Our view remains,’ commented Johann Baard, director of the Apparel Manufacturers’ Association (Amsa), ‘that many noncompliant factories, and currently compliant factories, cannot afford the current wage structure’ (Marais, Sunday Times, 2011). Renato Palmi, director of the Redress Consultancy, described the agreement as ‘upsetting and worrying’.

The interrelated triple threats of rising pollution, the rapid depletion of natural resources and declining biodiversity are increasingly being acknowledged as threats to the survival of the earth as we know it. There is little doubt that human intervention, in the form of industrial (or ‘fossil’) capitalism, has brought us to this point.

Despite international efforts such as the Brundtland Commission on environment and development in 1983, the Rio Summit in 1992, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (or Rio+10) in Johannesburg, among many other interventions, the process of environmental degradation in recent decades has accelerated, rather than receded. The notable exception has been the partial restoration of the ozone layer, after international efforts to ban ozonedepleting substances contained, inter alia, in aerosols and refrigerators.

As the world approaches the next round of climate change talks – known as the Conference of the Parties 17 (COP17) – in Durban in December 2011, there is scepticism that the rich countries of the world, whose corporations over the past two centuries have primarily been responsible for environmental degradation, will agree to significant action to stem the impending disaster.

Developing countries in turn have adopted the view that they cannot move off the path of rapid fossil fuel-based industrialisation to ‘catch up’ with the developed world, if the rich countries do not first commit to transforming their own economies (including, for some, the question of ‘degrowth’, or shrinkage), as well as sufficiently compensate developing countries. It is a question, it seems, of who blinks first – with only a few countries in Latin America, such as Bolivia and to an extent Ecuador, prepared to make bold moves and grant the Earth constitutional rights (meaning moving towards a more balanced, holistic, sustainable human development path). In the meantime, environmental destruction in the world, including increased carbon emissions, continues unabated, with more talk but little action.

In South Africa the minerals-energy complex, which since the discovery of minerals subordinated all economic activity to the needs of the mining and energy sectors, remains pivotal to the economy. Efforts to diversify into sustainable manufacturing have been lame.

Elections are special ‘dialogue with the people’ times for the African National Congress (ANC). Elections are the inner sanctum of re-endorsement, recognising the ‘long road we have travelled’ even if ‘we have to do more’, ‘we have to try harder’, ‘we have to do this together’ and ‘we have to realise economic liberation’. The defeat and occasional destruction of opposition parties is less the result of direct attack than ‘fall out’ suffered by opposition parties in these times of ANC reconnection with the people. The ANC's successive quests in national elections have built on its successful regeneration of the belief that the ANC is the authentic embodiment of the liberation ideals of the people, that the ANC-in-government is continuing to progress towards more complete transformation, and that opposition to the ANC largely lacks credibility and integrity – or is deficient in patriotism and revolutionary belief, aka the national democratic revolution.

Elections are pivotal to the ANC's regeneration of political power. The ANC enjoyed an uninterrupted line of commanding party political and state power courtesy of its dominance across four sets of national and provincial elections. The provincial exception of the Western Cape and modest deviations in local election 2011 delivered signs that the electoral prowess of the juggernaut was not entirely invincible, even if still massive. The ANC's electoral performances were also shadowed by internecine contests between intra-ANC factions, often with eyes cast on the next round of elections and appointments. Cracks and contradictions, both intra-ANC and inter-party, that were unlikely to go away emerged.

Electoral victory and its reputation for electoral omnipotence have sustained the ANC in the face of many other weaknesses. Consistent electoral majorities of over 60 per cent were the ANC's insurance against adversarial protest and people's dissent. Elections have also been the ANC's mechanism to mobilise and unite factions cyclically ‘for another five years’. Convincing election victories anchored in deep bonds between the ANC and the people, especially black-African South Africans, have helped the ANC buy time to get governance in order.

‘The people’ of South Africa afford the ANC immense leeway for underperformance and deficits. They have a deep and forgiving bond with their ANC. They treasure the assurances of ‘power to the people’ and largely continue to see the ANC as the torchbearer for their aspirations. The bond captures both evidence of caring and delivery, and a sense of belonging and identification. It bestows immense power on the ANC. It exists on a level that opposition parties fail to penetrate and constitutes a protective cordon for the ANC. Roughly 17 years into democracy, however, the bond has started to require careful nurturing to ensure its regeneration.

The ANC successfully emerged from the people's war of the decades before the 1990s (both internal and from exile) to take control of government and state in South Africa – and to govern legitimately in the name of the people. The statement ‘the people shall govern’ in the Freedom Charter is the origin of the notion of people's power in this context. ‘The people’ denotes the totality of those who are democracy oriented and, overwhelmingly, the formerly oppressed and by now at least politically-liberated, citizens of South Africa. ‘People's power’ indicates an organic link between the ANC and its followers – a relationship that could help the ANC outlast much evidence of imperfection, leadership insincerity and failures in government. There is space for neglect, failure and slippage. The ANC is thus afforded the space to thrive in the midst of deficits.

‘Power to the people’ has nevertheless increasingly been recognised to be a relative and, except in the case of the entrepreneurial and state tender-driven middle classes, a gradual process. Throughout the process, the people have retained immense patience and trust that the ANC will indeed deliver. In cases of failure thus far, and judged by electoral outcomes, the people have generally retained the belief that the ANC is more likely than other political parties to edge them closer to the better life.

The ANC sees itself as the legitimate representative of the aspirations of the people; the truthful and rightful custodian. This ANC-people relationship prevails on two tiers – on the level of liberation struggle and liberation legacy, and in the world of electoral support and experiences of government.

The words ‘crisis’ and ‘healthcare’ follow each other in sentences so often in South Africa that most citizens have grown numb to the association. Clinicians, health managers and public health experts have been talking about a crisis in access to healthcare for more than half a century, and the advent of democracy has not alleviated the situation.

The subject of this chapter is childcare in public hospitals, where there is undoubtedly a crisis. However, in truth, there are multiple simultaneous healthcare crises – rampant diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; excessively high maternal and child mortality; poorly motivated health professionals; the shut-down of critical units in hospitals; and perennial shortages of vitally needed supplies and equipment. The illhealth of, and dismal health services offered to, children at public hospitals is but the most prominent and painful tip of a predicament that extends beyond child health to adult and geriatric medicine and pervades all levels of the health system, including primary healthcare. Patients – young and old – are dying unnecessarily because South African public hospitals are over-burdened, under-staffed, poorly managed and failing to deliver.

Decades of discriminatory apartheid policies resulted in marked racial disparity in children's health. In 1994, the new democratic government inherited a highly fragmented health service consisting of fourteen health departments (each of the ten Bantustans had its own health department) plus a private sector mainly serving a white minority and funded predominantly through medical insurance. Seventeen years of democracy have yielded varied success for child health and well-being, and the public health system, overburdened from its inception, has yet to catch up with the health needs of the country's children. Excellent child health policies now exist, but there has been less success in transforming them into measurable actions and outcomes. Nine provincial health departments, organised under a single national health department, continue to provide disparate services, with poorer, more rural provinces offering the least care to its children despite significant improvements in their budgetary allocations. Simultaneously, the devastating effects of the AIDS pandemic have rapidly eroded hard-earned child mortality gains.

Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascendance of neoliberal globalisation catalysed progressive forces around the world to re-examine their basic beliefs about whether an alternative to capitalism was possible. Many parties – such as a number in Europe and Latin America – shifted to visions of social democracy. For these parties, the focus shifted from alternatives attempting to transcend capitalism to ameliorative projects within capitalism. Out of this reflexive journey, however, at least two parties deepened their efforts to find democratic socialist alternatives. The South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) in Kerala, India spent the greater part of the early 1990s rethinking their visions of socialism around radically democratic politics. In addition to the international challenges, both the SACP and CPI(M) faced domestic challenges – of an economic and political nature – that led them down this reflexive journey of ideological renewal. I use socialist democracy to refer to this new vision in which ordinary citizens play an increasingly important role through parliamentary and participatory democratic mechanisms. While both parties envisioned alternatives, the CPI(M) has gone further in implementing its vision, while the SACP has largely failed to put into practice its new understandings of socialist democracy. Nevertheless, in this chapter I focus on their similar visions adopted in the 1990s.

Based on materials from archival fieldwork in both Kerala and South Africa between 2001 and 2005, I examine the efforts by the SACP and CPI(M) to rethink the content of their socialist visions. During the 1990s both parties held numerous congresses, workshops and conferences, and also produced a plethora of documents in which they worked through their evolving theoretical positions. This chapter is based on a perusal of this material. I argue that the SACP's and CPI(M)'s reflexive journeys provide important insight into democratic alternatives grounded in local conditions.

Introduction

At low tide from the beach at Porbandar in Gujarat, one can just glimpse the tip of a shipwreck. Originally the SS Khedive, this vessel is the subject of a double legend. The first is that it carried Mohandas Gandhi on one of his voyages between Bombay and Durban; the second is that the ship sank with Gandhi's printing press on board.

This is not the only report of a phantom printing press associated with Gandhi. More than a century earlier another account had emerged, this time on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban. Towards the end of 1896 Gandhi was headed for this port on his way back from Bombay. Angry white mobs awaited his arrival, claiming he was organising an ‘Asiatic Invasion’. Rumours circulated that Gandhi had a printing press and 30 compositors on board. According to the Natal media, the lynch mob intended first to attack Gandhi and then the printing press (Natal Witness, 11 January 1897).

In part, this phenomenon of the phantom printing press can be easily explained. In the Durban case, it had been well known for some years that Gandhi wished to acquire such a press in order to start a newspaper that could speak for the interests of Indian merchants in Natal (Pyarelal, 1986:63–65). The alarm that much of white Natal society felt at this idea expressed itself in the rumour of the imaginary press. White artisans were equally perturbed at the prospect of cheap compositors coming to undercut the market.

A few years later, in 1898, Gandhi did indeed play a part in purchasing a press that was to print his newspaper, Indian Opinion, which became pivotal in his satyagraha campaigns. When Gandhi returned to India in 1914, newspapers continued to be a key component of his non-cooperation movements. Gandhi, the newspaper and the printing press were closely associated, and hence the memory of his printing press persisting in legend is understandable. Indeed, Gandhi's press has become something of a minor icon in his life story. A chapter of his autobiography discusses his printing press in South Africa (Gandhi, M., 1957:302–4), while the presses he used feature in exhibitions and museums (Satyagraha, n.d.).

Introduction

India and South Africa are arguably the most successful cases of democratic consolidation in the developing world. With the exception of a brief authoritarian interlude – the emergency of 1975–77 in India – neither country has experienced a serious challenge to democratic rule since transition, and the likelihood of democratic reversal or even destabilisation, especially when compared to Latin America, East Asia and the rest of Africa, is remote. Democracy, as in Linz and Stepan's (1996) famous definition of democratic consolidation, has become the only game in town. Moreover, democracy has made a real difference. In India, it has helped forge a nation from the most heterogeneous social fabric in the world. In South Africa, democratic politics and constitutional rule have managed a transition from white minority to black majority rule with minimal conflict. That this has been achieved against a social backdrop of extreme social exclusions (the caste system in India) and the worst maldistribution of wealth in the world (South Africa) only underscores the achievements at hand.

But if both have fared well in consolidating democratic institutions, including the rule of law, democratic deepening has proven much more elusive. Thus, even as formal constitutional democracy has been consolidated, there is little evidence of an increased capacity of subordinate groups to have an effective role in shaping public policy. More specifically, both the depth of social actors who enjoy effective political power and the range of issues over which democratic power extends have not expanded, despite both countries’ formal commitments to promoting social rights. In many respects, of course, this simply reflects the classic dilemma of capitalist democracy: most investment decisions are made by private property holders and the power of the market simply trumps the power of the ballot box. But this argument is too facile and in any event fails to account for another, and in many ways more fundamental, problem, namely deficits in the democratic process itself.

Since the 1990s the local level has become an important arena of development of democracy in most countries of the world – in a move sometimes described as part of ‘the third wave of democratization’ (Huntington, 1992), paradoxically encouraged by both progressive movements seeking a form of grass-roots democracy and by the World Bank as a new form of governance. India and South Africa are no exception, and both countries implemented reforms of local government in the mid-1990s with the objective of broadening and deepening democracy.

This chapter aims at comparing the political and academic debates that took place in South Africa and India concerning decentralisation and, more broadly, local democracy in an urban context. We believe, with Hantrais (2009:72), that ‘the definition and understanding of concepts and the relationship between concepts and contexts are of critical concern in comparative research that crosses national, societal, cultural and linguistic boundaries’. Through a literature review and a contextualisation of local democracy's history, institutions and practices, this joint chapter aims at identifying the commonalities and differences in the political and social stakes contained in the debates on ‘local democracy’.

We define local democracy here as a set of democratic institutions and practices that are focussed on the local level (from the metropolitan level downwards to the ward and neighbourhood levels, for instance), and that can take two broad directions: decentralisation (local government authorities allow local votes to matter more than at a state/provincial or a national level, possibly leading to more accountability and a better adaptation to local needs by local politicians and officials); and participation (i.e. mechanisms for citizens to address the state between elections). These two dimensions do not necessarily coexist, even though, according to the World Bank, ‘[p]articipation and decentralization have a symbiotic relationship … participation [can be] a means to successful decentralization [or] … a goal of decentralization’. Our assumption is not that local governments and participation are inherently more ‘democratic’ (as justly pointed out by Purcell, 2006), but that they offer a potential for increased accountability and responsiveness by local politicians and officials to local citizens.

Migrant labour, or, more specifically, the migrant labour system, has been identified by a broad spectrum of liberal and radical social scientists as the core institution of South Africa's 20th-century political economy. It has been credited with underpinning white prosperity and white supremacy alike: white prosperity in the sense that the ultra-cheap ‘bachelor’ wages that could be paid to oscillating African labour migrants who left their families behind in the African reserves guaranteed impressive profits for both gold mining and later other industries, which were, by various mechanisms, spread across most sectors of white society; white supremacy because migrancy prevented Africans from settling in the bastions of white power in the towns and allowed the denial of political rights to virtually all Africans outside the reserves. In the majority of these accounts labour migrancy has been pictured as being either constrained or coerced. Land alienation, finally ratified by the 1913 Land Act, confined Africans to 8.7 per cent of South Africa's land, thereby precluding or inhibiting the independent reproduction of families in the reserves. The poll tax, which eventually climbed to £1, 10 shillings a year in 1925 and could be paid only in cash, forced Africans on the migrant labour market to earn wages, and a host of mechanisms such as the recruiting monopoly instituted by the Chamber of Mines in the early 20th century; the maximum average wage system by which members of the Chamber of Mines agreed to place a ceiling on the aggregate African wage bill; the labour contract system, which imposed criminal sanctions for breaches of it; single-sex compounds to accommodate migrants; and passes capped migrant earnings and prevented them from creeping up over time (Wolpe, 1972; Johnstone, 1976; Legassick, 1977). As a result, as Francis Wilson (1972:46) famously observed, African gold miners’ wages remained static in real terms between the early 1900s and the late 1960s.

This somewhat stark and instrumental view of the role of migrant labour in South Africa's political economy has been given greater nuance in important respects in the last twenty or so years.

In late 1942 a young Bengali man called Syed Ali from Kalijuri in the Sylhet district decided to go to sea. In Calcutta, he found work in the engine room on the British merchant marine steamship SS McLeith, which was sailing for Cape Town (Choudhury, 1995:94). It was a dangerous time to sail the southern Indian Ocean. The Japanese navy had launched a significant submarine offensive against Allied shipping in the seas north-east of the Natal coast and German submarines were also occasionally striking off South Africa. The bodies of dead sailors were washing up on the Durban beachfront (Keane, 1995). But with war raging in nearby Burma, staying at home could not have been a very attractive option either. From the beginning of the voyage Syed Ali was bullied by the serang (boatswain or supervisor) of the stokehold, a man called Attik, from Ishkapur. In Cape Town, the ship docked for a short stay and the crew were given shore leave. To escape his persecutor, Syed Ali deliberately overstayed his leave and the ship sailed without him. The port police directed the young man to a seamen's boarding house and he was told by an official that he should remain there. There were several other Sylhetis in the boarding house, and one of them, a serang from Dinapur, turned out to be a friend of Syed Ali's uncle. This serang promised to find a berth for the lad when he next got a ship, and soon they sailed off together on the SS McNeill for Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

Syed Ali remained on this ship for a long period, plying the route back and forth between Colombo and Cape Town. Eventually paid off at Colombo, the now experienced seaman returned to Calcutta and spent a month visiting his family. He needed to get work again and back in Calcutta was offered a job on the SS Murdoch. But his papers had a ‘black mark’ because of his desertion of his ship on his first voyage, and this was an obstacle to getting employed. He went to see two local men who had connections with the seamen's union led by the powerful organiser Aftab Ali. These two worthies used their influence to solve the problem.