Xenophobia : social movement organisations

Investigation into how three social movement organisations responded to the xenophobia violence that broke out in South Africa in May 2008, reveals that participation in such organisations by ordinary working class people makes them to be less xenophobic and even likely to help the victims of xenophobia, rather than join in the attacks. Members of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and the Anti-Privatisation Forum were positioned by their organisations prior to the xenophobia attacks to respond in a progressive way to these attacks. These two organisations were also central in the formation of the Coalition Against Xenophobia that publicly united different civil society organisations against xenophobia.
Political understanding provides the ideological framework within which individuals evaluate the world and respond to its challenges. Revolutionary Pan-Africanism or democratic socialism, tends to provide individual social actors with an ideological foundation for opposing attacks against African immigrants in a country like South Africa. Alternatively, an undeveloped political understanding or consciousness opens a person to being swayed by the self-serving and circular arguments of the xenophobes.