When Cosatu and the SACP have to rely on the police and their stun grenades, rubber bullets and, by some accounts, live ammunition to force their way into a stadium against the opposition of striking workers, it is clear that their assumption of a permanent right to leadership is facing a serious challenge from below.

It's also equally clear that the ruling party and its allies intend to force obedience rather than to seek to renegotiate support or enable democratic engagement, that the police aren't even making pretence of being loyal to the law rather than the ruling party, and that this is the way Blade Nzimande likes it.

The misuse of the police to defend the authority of the ruling party in Rustenburg is no exception to a broadly democratic consensus. In fact, it has become a routine feature of political life.

 At the same time as the drama was unfolding in Rustenburg on Saturday, a meeting with technical experts to discuss a plan to upgrade the Harry Gwala shack settlement on the East Rand was summarily banned by the police on the grounds that it was a "security t threat".

The settlement is in urgent need of services as basic as water and refuse removal, but millions have been spent on a pavilion in memory of Oliver Tambo next to the settlement. As the ANC's role in the struggle against apartheid is memorialised, that memory is simultaneously desecrated as it is mobilised to legitimise the increasingly violent containment of popular dissent.

The collapse of the ruling t party's hegemony on the mines in Rustenburg is not the first time the ANC has lost control of a territory where it once took its right to rule for granted.

 In early 2006, the ANC was, despite a large police presence and a large contingent of supporters bussed in from elsewhere, unable to go ahead with a rally to be addressed by S'bu Ndebele, the then premier of KwaZulu Natal, in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban.

Some years later, the ANC eventually took that space back with the open use of violence organised through party structures with the support of the police. But despite the announcement by a senior SACP member that the state had decided to "disband" the movement that had won popular support in Kennedy Road, and despite tremendous intimidation and the gross misuse of the police and the criminal justice system to try to effect this ban, that movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, endures.

The rupture in Rustenburg may also cohere into an enduring force. And there will be more ruptures to come.

There are several important respects in which the politics developed in and around Marikana is very different from that developed in and around Kennedy Road seven years earlier.

But one of the things that these two points of rupture have in common is a firm insistence on the right of people in struggle, people who have decided to take their future into their own hands, to speak for themselves.

This shared suspicion of authorised forms of local representation, and the consequent desire of people to represent themselves where they live and work, could, with other points of connection - ranging from familial links to a shared experience of repression - provide common ground for linking struggles in urban shack settlements and on the mines.

It has, in itself, no predetermined political character, but, among other potentials, some of which could well be marked by a dangerous counter-brutality, the rejection of the ruling party's local mechanisms for sustaining political control does carry the possibility for a renewal of democratic possibility.

The path that winds from Polokwane to Kennedy Road, and on to Marikana and Nkandla, and then up, past the reach of our gaze and over the horizon, is not taking us towards anything like the kinds of societies imagined in the Freedom Charter or the constitution.

Transition

The only visible transition on offer is one in which liberal democracy is increasingly replaced by a system in which the political class is treated as if it were above the law. In such a system, the state is openly used as an instrument for the political class to accumulate, rather than redistribute, wealth and power, and people engaged in certain kinds of popular dissent are treated as if they were beneath the law. Police violence, including torture and murder, as well as state sanction of political violence by ANC supporters and political assassination, have all become familiar features of our political life.

And powerful figures and forces in the ruling alliance from Jacob Zuma to Sidumo Dlamini, the SACP, MK veterans, Sadtu and others - are openly speaking the language of war. They may say the war is on the enemy within, enemy agents, neoliberals, imperialists, criminals, enemies of the National Democratic Revolution and counter-revolutionaries, but what they really mean is that they do not intend to accept popular dissent as legitimate, or to engage with it through democratic institutions.

Instead, it is proposed that dissent be dealt with by the police and, on occasion, the army, as well as by counter-mobilisation that aims to destroy rather than engage, and which is already often armed.

Such a strategy is generally not the war of open manoeuvre we saw in Marikana, and which we've seen - although with nothing like the same degree of murderous intent - in shack settlements across the country in recent years. Instead, it is the scattered, often secretive and frequently highly territorialised violence of a low-intensity war of counter-insurgency.

The figures in the ANC who talk of a return to principled leadership have no material base from which they could make a serious attempt to challenge the capture of the party, and thereby the state, by factions that are both predatory and authoritarian. For this reason, their discourse functions, irrespective of their intentions, to legitimise the party, rather than to organise or represent a last-ditch attempt to save it.

And, with the exception of the metalworkers' union, Marikana has marked the end of Cosatu's claim to democratic credibility and moral authority.

If there is to be a renewal of democratic possibilities, it will have to be undertaken against the ruling party and its allies.

Popular struggle against a postcolonial state is a very different thing from a national liberation struggle against an internationally discredited form of domination. But the time has come when, like the generations that confronted the end of the illusions in postcolonial states elsewhere, we have to face a future in which the defeat of democratic and progressive aspirations is the most likely outcome of the ruthless intersection between elite nationalism and capitalism.

 It is clear that the only viable resolution is one that includes the majority of us. This could take the form of an authoritarian and even quasi-fascist response to the crisis. But it could also take the form of a democratic project that seeks to move beyond the liberal consensus that has reduced democracy to voting, court action and NGO campaigns, and aims to build the political power of the dispossessed from the ground up.

But if an insurgent project of this nature is to have any enduring success, it will have to understand that the line dividing the political from the economic has been drawn so as to sustain both privilege and exclusion, and that wealth, power and the structures that sustain them need to be subjected to serious critique.

If political empowerment doesn't translate into material empowerment into land, housing, decent incomes and decent education - it will be little more than a detour on the road that has already taken us from Polokwane to Nkandla, with our journey marked out in a steadily accumulating record of intimidation and blood.

The challenges that confront us are tremendous. But when war is announced there are only two real choices - to resist or to submit. The urgent questions that we have to confront are these: what will be the nature of our resistance, and how will we carry it forward?

• Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This is article was published on Daily News.