South Africa’s Community Trenches: Limitations and Possibilities for Democracy from Below

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, South Africa has experienced a consistent wave of local protests rooted in impoverished residential areas. Given the centrality of ideas about community within these protests, and building on Gramsci and Katznelson, this paper characterizes low-income residential areas as the “community trenches” of contemporary working-class struggle. Drawing on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 287 interviews, I probe the meaning of community within local protests and its relationship to possibilities for building democracy from below. I argue that current manifestations of community have both benefits and limits: they help protesters to build solidarity across division and infuse their struggles with moral weight, but they also encourage localization, geographic isolation, and internal conflict. With reference to both historical and contemporary South African examples, the paper offers three possible rearticulations of community that—when woven together through interscalar connections—may facilitate democracy from below: community as participatory democracy; community as a right to the city; and community as national citizenship.