No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way

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This text details very precisely, and in people’s own words (including linguistic idiosyncrasies, colourful slang, etc.), how a small community survived for almost two years in pavement shacks in Delft, a township of Cape Town, after having been evicted by the police from partly-completed unoccupied houses which they had been more than encouraged to occupy by the (illegal as it turned out) opportunistic actions of an unscrupulous politician. Having been evicted from these houses, hundreds of people decided to occupy the pavements on both sides of a nearby street in protest at the state’s failure to provide them with decent housing. Around 500 families joined the initial occupation and 136 held out until the end against police intimidation, promises of food, electricity and, for some, eventual access to houses, if they agreed to move to a horrific concentration camp-like site built six months into their occupation. This camp, known as a 'Temporary Relocation Area (TRA)’ by the state and, as ‘Blikkiesdorp’ [tin can town] by its inhabitants, has since become an internationally recognized scandal.
The ‘housing question’ is evidently a major political issue in South Africa where the state – particularly in its local manifestation – insists on avoiding discussion with poor people’s own organizations and continues to ignore them and, when they insist on being heard, to treat them like an enemy, much as they had been under apartheid. The complete inability of this state to involve people themselves in the construction and allocation of housing along with its insistence on authoritarian bureaucratic practices (e.g. dumping people in crime-ridden TRAs which end up being permanent rather than temporary) and public–private partnerships (where the construction business makes large profits at the expense of the taxpayer and corruption is rife) has had grave socio-economic and political consequences throughout the country. Socially it has contributed to the rise in poverty levels, whereas politically it has led to widespread protests. While these protests have been termed ‘service delivery protests’ by the press, they must be understood as concerning more political questions such as the systemic ways in which the state ignores people and treats them with bureaucratic contempt rather than merely being about technical issues of provisioning.
The book then recounts, in people’s own words and through their children’s brilliant photographic ‘eyes’ (some of the photos in the book were taken by the children), how they survived on the Symphony Way pavement for just under two years (2008–2009) and how they developed a ‘sense of community’, exposed state corruption and organized themselves collectively against attempts to remove them. Of course, the looming football World Cup meant that state municipal power wanted to ensure that unseemly ‘informal’ structures were tidied out of sight even though this required systematically smashing popular collective power rather than negotiating a common solution to the housing crisis. By July 2011, what was left of the (now forcibly removed) ‘Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign’ wrote an open letter to the Cape Town municipal authorities telling them that, in the morning of 28 July, Blikkiesdorp exploded into a full-scale drug war and that they had warned the authorities of the likelihood of this occurrence. In fact, this had been one of the reasons why they had resisted their eviction in the first place. The shacks they built themselves, they cried in dismay, ‘were better than the shacks that our city has built and dumped us in’.1 They were absolutely clear regarding the reasons for this massive insecurity in their lives: ‘We, as residents of this camp, have no control here because the City has disempowered us and stood by while drug-dealers have invaded the "temporary" relocation area’. The people then were disempowered by the democratic state and turned into victims of violence.
How are we to understand this process? In particular, how are we to think the formation of a political subject and its consequent de-politicization within democratic conditions? This book provides us with an account of one example of this commonplace process. Throughout the book it is clear that people are not only capable of thinking their own predicament and ways to organize against it themselves, but also that, in doing so, their political subjectivity develops as they confront and solve problems collectively. In other words, it may be that these people are poor, but they are also capable of thought, often beyond what middle-class leftists are capable of imagining given that they are frequently wedded to sterile vanguardist conceptions of the political that place their own agency centre stage. In many cases this kind of politics has been grossly racialized.
The core feature of this process of subjectivation was the collective forging of a tenacious solidarity which was maintained in the face of an increasingly brutal and intolerant state which insists on treating the poorest of its citizens as if they were the enemy, not people who had provided the majority of the active citizens that overthrew the apartheid regime during the 1980s. In the absence of any fundamental democratization of its structures, politics and practices, the liberal-democratic state then acts as any state, irrespective of how it may name itself and irrespective of who fills its positions. In this case the state is apparently very much operating like a colonial state simply because it chooses to see people (the majority of its population who are overwhelmingly poor) as its enemy as soon as they insist on being treated like citizens. It then becomes apparent to people that, not only is freedom not simply ‘deliverable’ by the state – either alone or in alliance with markets – but, rather, that freedom implies some ability to control individually and collectively one’s conditions of life. Of course, the possession of a home (not simply a house as such) is a sine qua non of freedom and humanity; but that home is only partly about the building and much more about the construction of community through solidarity and mutual help. That this is central to the poor’s ability to affirm their humanity has been known by the discipline of Sociology for many years, yet the individualism and commercialism which have recently become intellectually dominant has hidden it from view and even from the thought of politics. Home, then, can be on a pavement but definitely not in the tin shacks of the TRA for the simple reason that, in the former, people have a certain amount of control and in the latter none. States seem totally unable to understand this simple fact for they feel threatened by the majority being able to contest their power, which is precisely what the control over their lives unavoidably produces. In order to rule, the state must rely on orders, commands, coercion and de-politicization so as to turn people into political zombies. This is precisely how the people who had occupied Symphony Way were finally removed to Blikkiesdorp.
The fact that previously de-humanized people acquired individual and collective confidence through their subjectivation is a leit motif of the book. The pride and dignity acquired in this fashion fills all its pages. Precisely because they had been treated with contempt by power, the reacquiring of their dignity was a major achievement of the pavement-dwellers’ organization. The fact that they could stand up to state power, even at the expense of imprisonment for some, that they chose their own leaders to represent them, that they helped each other in times of need, that they overcame gender, ethnic and religious divisions in the process of constructing their political community, all prove without any doubt whatsoever that poor not-so-ordinary people are capable of extremely sophisticated forms of thought. Empowerment, then, is not something to be learnt from a non-governmental organization. It is only through the ups and downs of collective action that a political subject can be created. That this process necessarily required constant discussions and meetings, defensive actions against state forces hell-bent on its destruction (as well as against the internal undermining of that solidarity by some individuals) could be said to have the status of a general law of subjectivation. The demos only have one weapon, which is organization, so that democracy, in the real sense of the term, comes alive and acquires its full significance only under such conditions. To reduce democracy to the vote is thus to fail to understand its profound meaning. This book must be read in order to understand what that term really implies and why the acquiring of political subjectivity is central to what it means to be human.
Note 1. ‘The City of Cape Town Has Created this War in Blikkiesdorp’, Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, 29 July 2011, website of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign: http://antieviction.org. za/2011/07/29/the-city-of-cape-town-has-created-this-war-in-blikkiesdorp/

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We read of births and marriages on the pavement, of arrests and confrontations with police and cold government officials. One family describes how they occupied an N2 Gateway house after living in different backyards for 14 years - compelled to move on by close friends or relatives - and they were not the only ones. A 16 year-old girl describes her disgust at having to go to school with non-ironed clothes because of no electricity. Life on the pavement was tough but it was democratic and collective. One woman describes how her personality changed from introspective and fearful to outgoing as the result of her experiences on the pavement. What shines through is the persistence of their struggle, their self-confidence and pride as the result of the struggle. Constantly they insist on their human dignity, when treated like animals by officialdom. "We may be poor but we are not stupid" is a refrain that runs through the pages. And their desperate hope is encouraging and a sign of their collectivity - hope that they will get houses. Several children born on the pavement were named "Hope."

Let me conclude with an extract from a letter written by Bahiya Claasen to Richard Dyantyi, then Western Cape MEC for housing:

"I'm writing this letter on behalf of everyone who are staying on the pavement. Sir, we are so sick and tired of everybody who hords power in their hands, people who have deprived us of our rights. People who think they can throw us around and just walk over us. Mainly the people who sits on their high pedestals that thinks nother [nothing] of our poor Children, and they are the ones who suffer the most. Then I think to myself is this our New Generation? Or our Forgotten Generation?

"At night while your children enjoy a nice healthy meal, our children must eat sand in their food. While your children enjoy a nice hot bath we must wait for our water to boil on a fire. What I admire the most of our children is that they never complain. Our children think that life must be like this. And 1 think how wrong of you and everybody in Government to do this to our children. I'm writing this letter with tears in my eyes and a broken heart thinking what is going to happen to our NEW GENERATION Generation? Or should I say our FORGOTTON GENERATION?

"If Sir! You do not want to think of us! Then please please think of our children!!!

"Sir! My most concern is that winter is on its way. And like a lot of us, I am on the housing waiting list for more than 13 years..."

A short review cannot do justice to the book. Read it for yourselves - and learn.

Martin Legassick
Amandla Magazine, South Africa
1 June 2011

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One by one members of the community rose to speak at one of the launches of the book in Cape Town, on 5 May 2011:

`We want you to live with us and be part of people who live in shacks.'
`We not stupid, we people of principles, we can speak on our own behalfs ... it was our social problems that put us where we are now.'
`We need to stand up against our government, not left to be rotten ...'
`There is a time for bad things, there is a time for good things.'

It was clear at the launch - where the well-heeled brushed shoulders with the less well-heeled in a warm and well-lit room - that, as one speaker put it, `in this country we have two countries'. Despite the lack of structured speaking, salient dates emerged and some statistics - with a backlog of 400 000 houses in the Western Cape alone, none of the community members present was likely to be getting a house in the near future. Some people had already been waiting over 26 years. It was claimed that only 2 percent of the national budget is allocated to housing whereas in other countries it is closer to 5 percent.

That the divide in the country is not a racial issue needed to be said and was, in fact, debated in terms that led all the way back to Van Riebeeck and other white `visitors'. One of the most passionate speakers at the launch claimed that you could `count the coloured people [in the New Gateway houses adjacent to Symphony Way] on the fingers of one hand'. This aspect of the story, which is told in detail in the book, relates to the origin of the pavement dwellers' occupation of Symphony Way.

A DA councillor (unnamed at the launch but very much a presence in the book) invited backyard dwellers from Delft to occupy newly built Gateway houses adjacent to Symphony Way, which were being re-allocated to the largely black former occupants of the burned down shacks of Cape Town's Joe Slovo settlement. He made it a racial issue and had said something like: `If you want houses, go and kick doors.'

Many people did just that. The law was quick to come down on them and, despite an initial stay of eviction, removed them with brutal force from these houses on 19 February 2008. It is a story that can, and did, bring tears to one's eyes. In this and subsequent developments, no political party is exempt from guilt. ANC as well as DA councillors and other executives are equally involved.

The people's solution, as witnessed by the title of the book, is not to vote and, further, to spoil ballots. A march on parliament took place on 16 May, when another book launch was held in Cape Town.

Ultimately, the people who blockaded a stretch of Symphony Way for a year and a half - the longest civic protest in the history of the country - are intent on telling their story. And on telling it themselves. Their blockade ended in mid 2009, prior to the World Cup, when they were forced to move to Blikkiesdorp, one of Cape Town's infamous TRAs (Temporary Relocation Areas).
Among the ironies that emerge from their book is that they managed to form a community at Symphony Way that should serve as a model in the current housing crisis in this country. `We staying like a family on that road,' one of the members said, `and after that people decided to tell their stories.' When one of the community was arrested and spent three months in prison for standing up to aggressive law enforcement, he said that all he could think of in prison was Symphony Way. And he was sure that he was being thought of by all in Symphony Way.

Blikkiesdorp is not a community. It is described by the pavement dwellers as `for pigs', a place where rapists live around the corner and drug dealing is rife. In appearance it is like a concentration camp and facilities are poor, with four families to one toilet and tin walls that let in both heat and cold.

No Land, No House, No Vote is the story of the poor, a book all South Africans should read. It has two well-written introductions: one by internationally known writer and activist Raj Patel, author of the New York Times best-seller The Value of Nothing, and the other by Miloon Kothari, former Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, UN Human Rights Council. That it was successfully assembled and has found its way into the public arena is not least the work of a middle-class activist who prefers to be unnamed. Without people like him, the poor would have even less of a voice.

The publisher also deserves credit. Pambazuka Press ([...]) is a small non-profit Pan African publisher, with offices in Cape Town, Oxford, Dakar and Nairobi. Its books are written primarily by well-known African academics and activists and are intended `to stimulate discussion, analysis and engagement'. The heartbreak of many of the Symphony Way stories and the style of their authorship carries this mission even further.

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This is Tin Can Town, or Blikkiesdorp, described by the mayor of Cape Town as a "temporary relocation area" (TRA), but by its residents as a concentration camp. Many say they were forcibly evicted from their former homes and moved here against their will. And for this they blame one thing: the football World Cup.

"It's a dumping place," said Jane Roberts, who lives in the sparsely furnished structure known as M49. "They took people from the streets because they don't want them in the city for the World Cup. Now we are living in a concentration camp."

Roberts, 54, added: "It's like the devil runs this place. We have no freedom. The police come at night and beat adults and children. South Africa isn't showing the world what it's doing to its people. It only shows the World Cup."

President Jacob Zuma's government insists that sport's biggest showpiece is already benefiting the whole nation, creating jobs, improving infrastructure and transforming its image abroad. It has lavished some R13bn (£1.15bn) on world-class venues, with none more breathtaking than the Cape Town Stadium that will host England in June.

Yet a short drive from the city's expensively upgraded airport, a drive few tourists are likely to make, boys kick up dust and stones in Blikkiesdorp because the spending spree failed to provide them with a park.

Campaigners argue that this bleak place in Delft township shows that Africa's first World Cup has become a tool to impress wealthy foreigners at the expense of its own impoverished people. Residents say it is worse than the townships created by the white minority government before the end of racial apartheid in 1994.

In view of cloud-capped mountains, Blikkiesdorp was built in 2008 for an estimated R32m (£2.9m) to provide "emergency housing" for about 650 people who had been illegally occupying buildings. To visitors, the column after column of one-room shacks, each spraypainted with a designated code number, are disturbingly reminiscent of District 9, last year's hit science fiction film about space aliens forced to live in an informal Johannesburg settlement. Residents said this week there were about 15,000 people struggling to live in about 3,000 of the wood and iron structures, with more arriving all the time. City officials claimed these figures were inaccurate but said the site was designed to cater for 1,667 families in total.

In some cases families of six or seven people are crammed into living spaces of three by six metres. They complain that the corrugated walls swelter in summer temperatures of 40C and offer little protection from the cold in winter. Tuberculosis and HIV are rife. Babies have been born at Blikkiesdorp and, still unknown to the state, officially do not exist.
Brutality

The shacks are laid out in strict lines with little room for individual homemaking, though some residents have tried to build extensions, gardens and informal convenience stores, often protected by barbed wire. Above them loom poles with lighting and power cables that give the residents electricity. But between the shacks there is no paving, only roaming dogs, scraps of rubbish and grey sand that swirls in the wind.

There are no shower facilities and the standpipe taps lack bowls, so water tends to leak into the ground and under people's homes. Toilets are found inside grim concrete cubicles so small the locked door presses against the user's knees. Many have leaking roofs and are broken despite repeated promises to fix them.

Sandy Rossouw says she was among 366 people evicted from the Spes Bona Hostel in the district of Athlone three months ago because a stadium there is to be used for training by some of football's biggest stars. She is now one of five family members who squeeze into one bed in her shack at Blikkiesdorp.

"We were forced out of our hostel because of the World Cup," Rossouw said. "The hostel is on the main road to the stadium, only about 200 yards away. We didn't want to move because we're used to it and it's close to everything. But they said if we didn't get out, they would move us out with law enforcement.

"Here the whole place is under starvation. We can't even afford to make a pot of soup for our children. We send them to school without bread. People sell everything to get food and walk three hours to Athlone just to get a loaf of bread. When you do eat, there is sand in your food – you can feel it on your teeth.

"We were promised in January the toilets would be repaired but they're not. You've got eight families to a toilet and it's unhygienic."

Rossouw, 42, is among several residents who accuse the police of brutality. "It's like a jail, like a concentration camp," she continued. "If you're not inside at night, the police beat you. A few weeks ago they pointed an R5 rifle as if they were going to shoot people. They swore at us: 'This isn't fucking Athlone. You should go back to your place.'"

She argues that the fanfare around a month-long football tournament is hypocritical when people are going hungry. "I think they must cancel the World Cup because people are starving. They are renovating buildings in Cape Town for half a billion rand; why can't they spend that money here? It breaks my heart.

"When rich people come to the World Cup they must come to Blikkiesdorp first to see for themselves how people are living. It's worse than apartheid."

Among those suffering is Fatima Booysen, 40, who has lived in shack J22 with her husband, Abraham, and two daughters for more than a year. She said: "I can't shop, the rain is coming in, the child is sick. A lot of people have got TB now.

"It's very cold in winter. When you stand up in the morning you feel frozen, you can't feel your hands or feet.

"The children don't want to go to school. I've got a one-year-old grandchild who's sick today and has gone to hospital."

Residents say that unemployment is high and a lack of postal deliveries or official addresses makes it hard to find work. They also criticise their remote location, which requires them to pay for minibus taxis to the city, and say that children have been killed in accidents on Blikkiesdorp's thoroughfares and when crossing a nearby motorway. Crime is said to be high, with drug gangs moving into unused shacks, but the police offer little relief.
Court action

Badronessa Morris, 47, complained: "The police treat us like animals. They swear at us, pepper spray us, search us in public, even children. At 10 o'clock you must be inside: the police come and tell you to go into your place and turn down the music. In my old home we used to sit outside all night with the fire."

Morris was among families evicted from an informal settlement on the Symphony Way road. "We were one happy family on Symphony Way. Now we've moved to Blikkiesdorp it's like we're in chains, fighting each other, putting each other in jail.

"I know we were moved because of the World Cup. They don't want people to see shacks on the road in South Africa. They want everything perfect for the World Cup."

Other people have gone to court to resist a possible move to Blikkiesdorp. Last December five families living near the Athlone stadium were told their homes would be demolished to make way for a car park.

Llewellyn Wilters, 52, who has lived in his house for seven years, said: "I took a drive to Blikkiesdorp to check it out and don't think it's going to work. How are we going to take the kids to school and get to work?"

He added: "We were born in this area, we went to school here, we know the area and know all the people here. Why must we move out?"

Shack dwellers have mobilised against evictions in well-organised protests that make powerful use of new media. Pamela Beukes, 29, secretary of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, condemned the rise of Blikkiesdorp: "They're creating a tin city. They're doing worse things than the apartheid regime did to the people. Under apartheid they gave us a brick house.

"The World Cup was supposed to bring a higher standard of living. But it's making it lower. People are saying, 'I don't want to watch soccer because it's the reason I was evicted.' It's as if we're lesser beings."

The city of Cape Town denies the accusation that it is dumping people in Blikkiesdorp because of the World Cup. Kylie Hatton, a spokeswoman, said in an email: "It is not true that the City of Cape Town is moving or displacing residents in informal areas in the runup to the 2010 Fifa World Cup.

"It is important to note that the TRA has been constructed for emergency accommodation needs and is provided by the city, and exceeds national housing requirements."

She added: "We have significant challenges regarding vandalism in the area, and in some cases our contractors have had to return to the site over four times to repair broken toilets, taps and electricity cables. This often then has an impact on services in the settlement."

But Blikkiesdorp is only one manifestation of a deeper disquiet in South Africa about the benefits, or otherwise, of hosting football's biggest festival. In Durban there are further demonstrations over evictions and reports that street children are forcibly being removed from the city centre to "safe areas" far away.

Tens of thousands of informal traders complain that they will lose income because of Fifa-imposed "exclusion zones" around stadiums which permit only approved businesses. Regina Twala, who has been selling cooked meals and snacks for 35 years, told South Africa's Sunday Independent that she and fellow workers had been ordered to vacate their premises outside Ellis Park stadium.
Unemployment

The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign said: "The lives of small businesses and informal traders in South Africa have been destroyed by this World Cup. If we are not allowed to trade near stadiums, fan parks and other tourist areas, how can we benefit from tourism?"

The new stadiums heralded a construction boom, but many of the workers who built them have already been laid off and are without work.

Caroline Elliot, international programmes officer for the anti-poverty group War on Want, said: "Behind the spectacle, the World Cup is exacerbating the struggle of poor South Africans who are facing evictions, lack of public services and unemployment. The South African government needs to tackle these problems as an urgent priority."

Andile Mngxitama, a political commentator and columnist, is about to publish a pamphlet entitled "Fuck the World Cup".

He said: "We never needed the World Cup. It is a jamboree by the politicians to focus attention away from the 16 years of democracy that have not delivered for the majority of black people in this country. We'll be trapped with white elephant stadiums."

He added: "The World Cup is not about football or so-called tourism. It's about politicians hoping it keeps us busy for a month and making enormous amounts of money for themselves and their friends."

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"The Symphony Way pavement dwellers are the voices of struggle from below – of the landless, homeless and shelterless. The book is a compelling testimony to the ingenuity of the people to organise themselves and invent ever-newer forms of struggle. In their summation of 'No land! No home! No vote!' the pavement dwellers are denying what is an oppressive state, despite its democratic pretensions, the means to legitimise itself – the vote.
Issa Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of Pan African Studies, University of Dar es Salaam


"I put the telephone off and went to the local park to read the manuscript this afternoon. It was an extraordinary experience. This book really does capture something of the texture of an actually existing popular struggle."
Richard Pithouse, Department of Politics and International Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa



"The Symphony Way occupation was a real attempt at an insurgent and tenacious solidarity against increasingly exclusionary and brutal society. It was an experiment at the outer limits of the often innovative and courageous grassroots militancies that have emerged in South Africa in recent years. This book is an experiment at the outer limits of radical publishing. It gives invaluable and often moving insight into the lived experience of the occupation. All the tenacity, beauty, pain, desperation and contradictions that breathe their life into any popular struggle haunt the pages of this searing book that must, if we are to do it justice, inspire rebellion against the social logic that dismisses some of us as less than others."
Richard Pithouse, Department of Politics and International Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa


"There are moments of excitement when one recognises transformational action is already ongoing and moments of recognition that new ways of knowing are being produced. This is one of those moments. An extraordinary collection of writings from the spirit of resilience and strength of the collective which lay bare the betrayal of the people in post-apartheid South Africa."
Sokari Ekine, author and award-winning blogger


“This book carries not only the suffering of the Symphony Way communities but of the millions of poor people of the world. I, in my capacity as a leader of South Africa's Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement, commend this work of political empowerment of the poor by the poor. We all know that when the poor gain their power through mass mobilisation, it is often violently resisted by elites and that any social progress will be hard won and at considerable personal cost. It is through this courage that we can all hope for the real struggle that intends to put human beings at the centre of our society."
S'bu Zikode, a leader of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement, South Africa


“A magnificent and moving account of a long and hard fought struggle over not simply the space of the pavement and for social justice in the post-apartheid city No Land, No House, No Vote is a clarion call for basic of human rights and for human dignity. A powerful insider's view into the landscape of poverty in neoliberal South Africa.”
Professor Michael Watts, Class of 63 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, author of Curse of the Black Gold.


“Voices from Symphony Way evinces a world-weary longing that stretches back through the history of class struggle and should evoke a storm of protest worldwide. These powerful and poignant testimonies that have emerged from the blockade of Symphony Way are voices ensepulchered by the South African state yet they refuse to be silenced, voices that are struggling against great odds for a future of human dignity, voices that cannot be stopped by razor wire or police vans, or choked into submission by pepper spray or batons. In attempting to sweep away the detritus of apartheid, the South African government is merely echoing the brutality of its former colonisers. This is a story of horror conjugated with hope, compellingly told with a brutal directness and an eloquence that often springs up from the abysms of despair.”
Professor Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution




It is hard to be heard above the din of mainstream debate in contemporary South Africa, with its heavy doses of elite squabbling, white middle class angst, and celebrations of consumerism. But of course the reality is that the majority of the people in the country of my birth live on a planet far removed from the one reflected in most of our public discourse, a planet where they struggle to maintain even very basic lives. This book – unmediated, raw, written in the voices of ordinary, marginal people rebuilding communities and reclaiming democracy in small ways – points to the hard, cold struggle South Africans still face to achieve full citizenship in their own country.”
Sean Jacobs, born on the Cape Flats, teaches international affairs at The New School in Manhattan


“To read this book is to be humbled by the crassness of our presumption as middle-class African journalists and activists to know the best interests of those deliberately excluded from 'Mandela's Miracle', the poorest amongst us. We thought we were telling their tale of painful transition fairly, but here we are surpassed, and now the people themselves speak truth to power – including our own. In this, the world’s most unequal society, it is a direct, revolutionary challenge to hear the voices of the poor on their own terms – not mangled by the way we would prefer them to speak, but unfiltered. Their truths, spoken with their hearts on their sleeves and in their sharp vernacular tongue, fly straight to the heart of the matter: the betrayal of hope by the shadowy forces behind a false dawn of 'liberation’; and the transcending belief in the popular classes’ common destiny as the lever that can – and will – shift the burden of our history to create a more equal society.”
Michael Schmidt, journalist and co-author of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism