We are building a new way of organising

"This is our Common, not yours" - member of Friends of Rondebosch Common

The Take Back the Commons Movement, which organised last week's march and attempted occupation of iconic Rondebosch Common, has been vilified by many.

Rate payers feared the possible introduction of poor black shackdwellers to their neighbourhood. Friends of Rondebosch Common feared the destruction of their open space and their fynbos. Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille feared the transformation of the DA's discourse on service delivery into a more challenging and authentic conversation about racism, inequality and segregation.

While asserting that those who participated in the actions were dividing and destroying everything she has been working for, de Lille was really asserting a politics of anti-commons. Like the member of Friends of Rondebosch Common, de Lille was fighting for injustice in the name of peace, for inequality in the name of progress, and for a Common that is its opposite.

Yet despite the fact that the People's Land, Housing and Jobs Summit never materialised - prevented by the actions of the police in who disrupted and violently arrested marchers en route - communities and activists have managed to alter the way we think about the commons in our city. We have asserted a politics of decolonisation and immediate equality.

What is a politics of the commons? Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean, in a influential Occupy article defined it as such: "A politics of the commons acknowledges division in that it begins from the shocking recognition that the commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and 'accumulation by dispossession...the idea of the commons asserts the primacy of collectivity and the general interest".

Looking inward

Still, we cannot call for a politics of the commons, of equality, of anti-racism and of anti-patriarchy, without looking within at ourselves and at one another within our movement.

Take Back the Commons began with its own challenges. Many of us have been in the struggle for decades and while this experience is important to the movement, it also forces us into older and often more stagnant and hierarchical ways of organising.

In particular, here in South Africa, we have a culture of hero-worship. From Mandela to Tutu to Zille, there is an expectation that those within an organisation must unquestioningly defend not only the person but also the role of the leader.

And because our movement is a reflection of society at large, many of us remain stuck in that same mindset. Even though we recently, as a movement, adopted a set of guiding principles which claims, for instance, that "we are all leaders", we have sometimes allowed individuals to push forward and claim central roles and responsibilities. Thus, even as we work day in and day out towards building a non-hierarchial decision-making structure within our movement, it is often the most charismatic and articulate person that people gravitate towards - he or she provides a safe space where members don't need to think critically and take responsibility.

This has been exacerbated by the media and by the mayor herself who have placed Mario Wanza as the central figure in our movement even though we have no elected leadership and decisions are made collectively in our meetings, Mr Wanza has been called our 'chairperson' and our 'spokesperson' by newspapers and radio stations. This has left him extremely vulnerable to attacks on his character and is arguably the reason he was specifically targeted by police halfway through our 20km march to the Common.

Attempted hijacking

This has also left the movement vulnerable to being hijacked by other groups and political parties.

For instance, because some of our perceived leaders have a political history and even an ongoing relationship with the ANC, we have been labelled as a pro-ANC movement. Confusion over what our principled "we are non-party political" stance means in practice, has also led individual members to invite party-oriented groups and people to come and support the movement.

Tony Ehrenreich, leader of COSATU in the Western Cape and the ANC in Cape Town, was invited by a member to support us after 42 of our protesting activists were arrested. However, when he arrived, he unilaterally took control of our meeting and attempted to change the direction of our actions and guide us towards a COSATU controlled occupation the following week.

As a result, we went back and resolved in our general meeting to distance ourselves from Mr Ehrenreirch and make very clear that he is not welcome as a member of the ANC or COSATU but may participate in our movement only as an individual without the special treatment that his role often engenders for him.

Elite paranoia

So what led to the overblown response by Patricia de Lille and the City of Cape Town against our attempt to hold a People's Summit on Rondebosch Common?

While we were expecting at least a thousand people to march to the Common, we had clearly stated our intention to not build shacks on the land, to be non-violent, to protecting the environment - it was, after all, the police casspirs that crushed indigenous plants and bird's nests while roaming the area), and to be engaged in constructive rather than destructive behaviour.

Yet, on the orders of the mayor, the City deployed hundreds of police throughout the Cape Flats and on the Common itself. Even while the summit was called off, a dozen police remained the entire weekend 'guarding' the Common.

It seems the paranoia came from elsewhere:

• The fear that a rogue community leader would use the event to deliver our communities into the hands of the ANC.
• The fear that putting racism, inequality and segregation on the political agenda would refute the DA's so-called "Open Opportunity Society for All".
• The fear that we would become another Occupy movement challenging the legitimacy of the government with regards to their ability to divide, manage and control people and space.

The Democratic Alliance's ability to govern the City of Cape Town is contingent upon these three key points without which they are nothing. The pervasive violence by police last Friday and the baseless arrest of 42 peaceful demonstrators therefore were part of de Lille's plan of vilifying the movement through the person whom she appointed as it's leader. What she did not expect, however, was that her public relations exercise would backfire and the DA's violence and authoritarianism would be exposed.

Unity in division

We would be lying to ourselves and to others if we claimed that our movement speaks with one voice, that we all agree on everything and that there are not internal conflicts. However, as with the Occupy movement and other new movements that organise horizontally without a leadership clique, confusion, divisions and disagreements are part of the process of building consensus.

As Deseriis and Dean have written, "rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end."

While we as a young movement try to build radically new forms of direct democracy within by challenging the old guard, we will also be able to strengthen accountability and the authority of the decisions we make as a collective. We say "we are all leaders" and thus we cannot allow what feminist Jo Freeman has called a 'tyranny of structurelessness', a situation where an aversion to structure altogether results in abuse by the most assertive personalities.

Jared Sacks is an activist with the Take Back the Commons Movement and works at the Children of South Africa. He writes only in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the movement. This article was first published in the Cape Argus.

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