Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics 978-1-86814-867-7

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
Foreword......Page 11
Preface......Page 15
Acknowledgements......Page 29
Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think......Page 33
Part 1: Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences......Page 67
1. Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences......Page 69
2. From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960......Page 101
3. Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought......Page 126
4. The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975......Page 144
5. The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986......Page 166
6. From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013......Page 189
7. Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency......Page 221
8. Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo......Page 254
Part 2: Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation......Page 273
9. Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions......Page 275
10. Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state......Page 295
11. Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa......Page 341
12. Renaming the state in Africa today......Page 390
13. Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’......Page 432
14. The domain of civil society and its politics......Page 479
15. The domain of traditional society and its politics......Page 505
16. Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions......Page 553
Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom......Page 564
Bibliography......Page 584
Index......Page 625

Citation preview

MICHAEL NEOCOSMOS

Thinking Freedom in Africa TOWARD A THEORY OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS

12/19/2016 4:39:28 PM

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Thinking Freedom in Africa

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Couté la libeté li palé nan cœur nou tous! [Listen to freedom; it speaks in all our hearts!] – Zamba Boukman Dutty, Bois Caïman, Saint-Domingue, 15 August 1791 It is to the mute, to the stutterer, to the stranger, that the poem must be offered, and not to the chatterbox, to the grammarian, or to the nationalist. It is to the proletarian – whom Marx defined as those who have nothing except their own body capable of work  – that we must give the entire earth, as well as all the books, and all the music, and all the paintings, and all the sciences. What is more, it is to them, to the proletarians in all their forms, that the poem of communism must be offered. – Alain Badiou, ‘Poetry and Communism’, 2014 The people and the people alone are the motive force in the making of world history ... The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge. – Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonization was not sufficient, at least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the essential elements of the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples … the problem of a … cultural renaissance is not posed nor could it be posed by the popular masses: indeed they are the bearers of their own culture, they are its source, and, at the same time, they are the only entity truly capable of preserving and creating culture – in a word, of making history. – Amílcar Cabral, ‘The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence’, 1972 (emphasis in original ) If humanity does not work toward its own deployment, toward its own invention, it has no other option but to work toward its own destruction. That which is not under the rule of the Idea will be under the rule of death. The human species cannot be animal-like innocently. Man is that species which needs the Idea in order to inhabit his own world in a reasonable manner. – Alain Badiou, La Philosophie et l’événement, 2010 (my translation)

ii

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Michael NeocosMos

Thinking Freedom in Africa toward a theory of eMaNcipatory politics

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Published in South Africa by: Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg, 2001 www.witspress.co.za

Copyright © Michael Neocosmos 2016 Published edition © Wits University Press 2016 First published 2016 978-1-86814-866-0 (print) 978-1-86814-869-1 (PDF) 978-1-86814-867-7 (EPUB - North & South America, China) 978-1-86814-868-4 (EPUB - Rest of World) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in material in this publication. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders. Please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors. Edited by Karen Press and Russell Martin Proofreader: Lisa Compton Indexer: Marlene Burger Cover design: Hothouse Typeset by Newgen Printed and bound by ABC Press

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Dedication I would like to dedicate this work to all our political ancestors on the African continent who sacrificed their personal lives for a world worthy of humanity, and particularly to the memory of Phyllis Naidoo (1928–2013). Viens, écoute ces mots qui vibrent Sur les murs du mois de mai Ils nous disent la certitude Que tout peut changer un jour – Georges Moustaki

All I want is equality For my sister, My brother, My people And me – Nina Simone

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Contents Foreword by Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba Preface

xiii

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think

1. 2. 3.

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ix xxvii 1

Part 1  Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences

Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences

37

From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960

69

Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought

94

4.

The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975 112

5.

The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986 134

6.

From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013 157

7.

Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency

189

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viii     Thinking Freedom in Africa

  8.

Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo

222

Part 2  Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation   9. 10.

11. 12.

Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions

243

Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state

263

Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa

309

Renaming the state in Africa today

358

13.  Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’

400

14.  The domain of civil society and its politics

447

15.  The domain of traditional society and its politics

473

16.

521

Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions

 Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom

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532

Bibliography

552

Index

593

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Foreword This is a very important book. It deals with a crucial issue of our times of political crisis, namely: is emancipatory politics still possible today and does it have historical references? Or put differently: can we think anew a politics of universal human emancipation? The Marxist political vision has collapsed; attempts to recalibrate it are in difficulty as they lack historical references. The recourse to neo-liberal ideology has made it difficult to even conceptualise the universality of humanity. In fact, due to deep economic crises such as the aggravation of human inequality, neo-liberalism has given rise to fascistic tendencies in thought throughout the world. Politics, when it has been thought, has failed to detach itself from the determination of locality and the identity of the subject. In addition, the fact that present dominant forms of capitalist legitimation include religious or spiritual figures (Islamic and other fundamentalisms) generates even more difficulties and uncertainties. Wars are being fought under religious flags. The Arab Spring which generated tremendous hope, as a ‘new beginning of history’, has either failed – given rise to a military dictatorship in Egypt – has run into an unfinished terrorist crisis in Libya, or has faded into a variant of Western democracy in Tunisia. The book is also a real event in the knowing and thinking of the politics of emancipation through the study of the global history of African peoples’ struggles for liberation – liberty, equality, freedom, independence and dignity – that is African peoples’ historical contribution to universal emancipatory politics. This area of study has been often marginalised if not silenced altogether, partly because thinking has often been denied to African people. And these people, due to deep alienation, have often simply adopted models thought elsewhere. This, of course, does not mean that there have been no experiences of emancipatory politics by African people. The author does bring into focus some new ways of looking at African history, no longer making colonial history the ‘pivot’ of such history and giving voice to the ‘wretched of the earth’.

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The author uses some of the most creative and inspiring ideas or categories produced in the contemporary theoretical conjuncture; those particularly found in the conceptual philosophy of Alain Badiou and the nominal anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. The idea that ‘people think and thinking is a relationship of reality’ – or put slightly differently that ‘thinking is real and all people think’ – this idea makes it possible for the thought of silenced categories of people – the damned of the world – to be studied. The concepts of ‘situation’, ‘event’, and their relationships, to mention but a few categories are very helpful in this regard. A true event emerges within a situation. It appears as something completely new in that situation; in that sense, it is an exception to the situation. Ideas of emancipatory politics arise through an emancipatory event. The elaboration of those ideas by militants of the event may give rise to new institutions sustaining the aimed for emancipation. Such creative conceptual developments which begin to constitute a theory of emancipatory politics are proposed in this book. The central focus of the theory elaborated in the book is that emancipatory politics is a politics in excess of place, of the social. It is a politics which is not closely linked or identified with locality, subject or culture, even if those elements do constitute its emerging environment. From that concept of emancipatory politics, the book examines throughout African peoples’ global contributions to world history through specific historical references. The book identifies the Mande Hunters’ Oath or Charter (1222), an idea of politics asserting the universality of humanity in the struggle to resist the rise of Arab slavery. Other historical references include: important ideas of politics of liberty, equality and independence, which arose in the slave revolutionary movement in Saint-Domingue; ideas of politics of restorative healing of society (and the family) through ‘Lembaism’ in Kongo society devastated by Portuguese colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, and the politics of the revolutionary liberation movements. Details can be found in the book. A least two considerations are left with few hints as to their solution, due to their difficulty: can an emancipatory event be prepared for or must it just be awaited? Why is it that in many instances, the elaboration of emancipatory ideas has ultimately resorted to reproducing subjectively existing structures and institutions? These have made it difficult for a concrete case of emancipatory politics to be sustained. The book comes at a time when the process of emancipation of African people is at its lowest level. People’s enthusiasm for the achieved independence or victories of the national liberation movements has faded away. Postcolonial states have become increasingly unresponsive to the demands, needs and aspirations of the large masses of people they have to serve. The celebrants of high rates of growth and the availability of natural resources sought by all kinds of transnational corporations searching for easy profits, corrupt rulers and the whole so-called ‘looting machine’ networks are not able to hide the fact that freedom and emancipation that African people struggled for are nowhere

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      Foreword     xi

manifest today. While colonialism in Africa was justified by the danger posed by the enduring slave trade and the colonial ‘civilising mission’, a new ‘scramble for Africa’, in terms of struggles over direct access to African natural resources by various powers, is today being justified by the danger posed by terrorism and the need for a ‘democratising mission’. In the remote past, local rulers under threat by colonialists, were made to sign contracts they did not read nor know the meaning of. Today, would-be rulers, through corruption, greed and threats, are also made to sign, especially in the mining sector, flagrantly unjust contracts. While a minority of people are enriching themselves by all available means, the majority of people, entertained by the lies of a coming ‘modernity’ and ‘emergence’ from stagnation, are increasingly relegated to an abject poverty. Thinking, in the absence of a real inspiring political vision, has been reduced to numerical quantification (rates of growth, levels of poverty, levels of inflation, etc.). Rambling models – socialism, democracy, Marxism, pan-Africanism, nationalism – which used to be ‘adopted’ (rather than thought through) as guides to action, are increasingly reduced to mythological status. Freedom, independence, equality even dignity have become just dreams. Is there a qualitative way out? Ideas of an ‘African Renaissance’ have been tossed about. Microstates claiming to embark on a path of African renaissance have proven to be as oppressive and corrupt as any postcolonial ones. This is the context requiring a vigorous intervention such as this and the theory produced here helps us to explain the reasons for such failures. I have known Michael Neocosmos for some years now. We have met on a number of occasions; we have had, in addition, on-going theoretical exchanges regarding many of the issues faced by the struggling people of Africa. Our exchanges have been very engaging. He is one of those committed intellectuals for whom I have enormous respect and sympathy. In this book, he is, in addition, offering us a critical and careful analysis of African peoples’ histories of struggles for independence, national liberation, freedom and equality. This is done within the current absence of historical references to such politics. It is also important to note that African history, in its global sense, including that made that made by forced migrants to the Americas, is looked into. The often silenced voices of revolutionary slave actors, the Bossales in Haiti, the Lemba militants from Congo and the most historically remote Mande hunters are now heard. We now know how, when faced with the arrival of slavery among the Mande, the hunters reacted and produced their declaration which is a strong document of universal emancipatory politics (incidentally contemporaneous to the constantly punted English Magna Carta). We also come to know how, while the Kongo Kingdom was being devastated by the Portuguese committing a crime against humanity, African people, at a distance from these remaining fragmented state structures, invented an original politics of dignity organised through the Lemba movement. These politics were aimed at healing their devastated society in order to recover the family and the desire to self-reproduce which had received a severe blow.

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Another historical reference of emancipatory politics is traced through the history made by slaves at Saint-Domingue which led to the first victorious slave revolution, the most far-reaching revolution of the 18th century. The politics of equality and independence are resurrected in this book in a manner which places them back in their proper position in history. Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba Dar es Salaam August 2016

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Preface This natural disposition to think ... is the real meaning of humanity. – Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1377 Homo cogitat – Man thinks. – Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, 1677 At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder. – Aimé Césaire, letter to Maurice Thorez, 24 October 1956 I do not identify with my origin, nor do I deny it, but my trajectory as a subject pushes me elsewhere. –  Frantz Fanon, cited by Alice Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait

How are we to begin to think human emancipation in Africa today after the collapse of the Marxist, the Third World nationalist as well as the neo-liberal visions of freedom? How are we to conceptualise an emancipatory future governed by a fidelity to the idea of a universal humanity in a context where humanity no longer features within our ambit of thought and when previous ways of thinking emancipation have become obsolete? In the formulation made famous by Frantz Fanon on the last page of The Wretched of the Earth, how are we to ‘work out new concepts’ for a new humanism? This book seeks answers to these questions in the light of what has become apparent, namely the absence of a thought of politics within all three of these conceptions of universal history today. This may seem paradoxical, but if we

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are to understand politics as a collective thought-practice – as that which constitutes human collective agency – then it should be clear that all three have substituted, in one way or another, the idea of power, that of the state, for human agency itself. The state may have been understood as the main agent of social change; however, it is not the agent of universal history. Only the people themselves can fulfil that role. These kinds of questions have become particularly urgent for the simple reason that millions of people worldwide, a large proportion of whom live on the African continent, are simply condemned to being unable to acquire the basic necessities of life, disconnected as they are from (formal) market relations, whether as buyers and consumers or as sellers of their labour power. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 75 million young people worldwide were unemployed in 2015,1 although, of course, employment in itself does not guarantee escape from poverty and is frequently overestimated in the Global South, where so-called informal economic activities are prevalent. It is important to reiterate the well-known point that, for the foreseeable future, large numbers of these young people will go through life without ever experiencing employment and will consequently have to survive the most intense economic frustrations throughout their lives. Denied the opportunity to be exploited in the labour process, they remain the mere waste of an inhumane capitalist system. Under such conditions, of course, and in the absence of an emancipatory vision for humanity, the recourse to nihilistic, self-immolating and scapegoating political practices is unfortunately predictable. The acquisition of self-worth requires, inter alia, the capacity to feel oneself capable of agency but such agency is constantly frustrated by the unforgiving, crushing weight of liberal capitalism, which produces more crises, more wars and the condemnation of greater and greater numbers to permanent exclusion. It remains not only to recognise this system for what it is, but also to begin to think ways of overcoming it in a manner appropriate to our times. Until the 1980s it had been Marxism that provided a vision of some kind of alternative to the appalling inequalities, exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism. The decline of Marxist analysis and its replacement in intellectual thinking by what has been called the ‘language turn’ in the social sciences and humanities has been intimately connected to the worldwide disintegration of Marxism’s alternative emancipatory vision, due in no small measure to its embodiment in frequently criminal states. At the same time, no political vision has been provided by its ostensible replacement other than a simple ideological return to liberal neo-colonial precepts in somewhat new forms. Moreover, postcolonial theory, which posited itself as an intellectual alternative to academic Marxism, as Hallward (2001: 64) observes, proved itself unable to provide ‘a specific political position with respect to global trends’; as a result, it has remained exclusively of academic interest. In addition, the monopoly over the vision of emancipation which neo-liberalism had subsequently been able

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      Preface     xv

to achieve in Africa after a brief period of popular upsurge in the 1980s (notably illustrated by Francis Fukuyama’s arrogant and hasty assertion of the end of history) has itself been slowly eroding in recent years, most obviously due to economic crises (particularly but not exclusively in the West), and also to a serious loss of legitimacy, as evidenced by worldwide popular revolts. These revolts have also drawn attention to the limits of an authoritarian form of liberal democracy that appears to be biased against the majority, as it regularly excludes popular voices. The most notable of these rebellions have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East and have extended to southern and other parts of Europe and the Americas, while the continuous unrest in communities throughout South Africa can also be seen to form part of this worldwide reaction. This occurs particularly as capital attempts to make ordinary people pay for its financial profligacy, while, at the same time, supposedly democratic states appear to be governed increasingly by a culture of demophobia. Since neo-liberal capitalism has obviously shown itself unable to provide an emancipatory vision for all but a small oligarchy of wealthy rulers, and its Marxist historical alternative has been tainted by its past association with authoritarian states, there seems to be little in terms of an egalitarian alternative available. Uhuru is proving elusive if not unattainable. Related points could be made in relation to the African nationalist project in its universally applied statist form. Influenced in no small measure by Marxism from the 1950s to the 1970s, by 1980 state nationalism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and external pressures; the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity by the African Union was one indication of this collapse and of its continued statism in a neo-liberal form. South Africa has been following this trend with a time lag of approximately two decades. While the ruling party and the state here have been plagued by the corrupting influences of capitalism and power, the vision of greater equality and freedom which had galvanised large numbers during the popular emancipatory upsurge of the 1980s has been heavily compromised, to the extent that ideas of the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good’ central to any notion of national freedom appear today to have vanished altogether from public discourse. A universal vision of an emancipatory future has been so eaten up by the gangrene of private accumulation through access to power that the state can no longer be said to represent the nation, the general interest. On the contrary, the fact that state power in Africa, independently of its ideological colour, has invariably been oppressive of the majority suggests that the problem resides within power itself, whether formally democratic or not. The Marikana massacre in South Africa, in which 34 miners were slaughtered by the police on a single day in August 2012, is only one powerful recent illustration of this fundamental collapse of an emancipatory vision and its replacement by the increasingly repressive practices of an ostensibly democratic state. At the same time, the simultaneous rise

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of Right-wing authoritarian nationalisms within so-called democratic societies has not bypassed Africa either. A globalised xenophobic politics is now pervasive. The dream of national liberation so prevalent in the 1960s in Africa, in spite of its brief revival in the 1980s, has thoroughly evaporated and been replaced by a vulgar simulacrum of its vision of freedom. But to assert the end of history also amounts in fact to asserting the end of thought. At best, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou would say, all that is said to remain is opinions, all of which are of more or less equal value; not truths which are of universal value. Thus, to assert the end of history is at one and the same time to assert the finitude of thought and the absence of the truly human. Yet, as philosophy frequently has insisted, thought is eternal. In the words of the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, thought is ‘in its essential nature, incapable of limitation ... [Moreover] it is in the progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude’ (cit. Diagne, 2010: 44). We must therefore not allow ourselves to succumb to the intellectual laziness of opinion, particularly today, when the temptation to provide easy answers to complex problems is increasingly prevalent. In order, then, to confront and overcome the crisis of thought, which has provided the conditions for quasi-fascist xenophobic politics to prevail from Nigeria to South Africa (not forgetting India, France, Greece, Russia, Italy and elsewhere), it is of crucial importance to develop new ideas of human emancipation, freedom and dignity; something which neo-liberal thought has abysmally failed to do, as it is obvious that it has presided over ever-widening inequalities. The core problem concerns precisely the provision of new concepts and categories that make a universal emancipatory egalitarian alternative thinkable again and understandable in what may be termed a ‘post-classist’ context. The classical Marxist view that there is a given subject of history, embodied in the social category of ‘the working class’, which will deliver humanity from capitalist oppression when its potential qualities are finally actualised, is no longer tenable. It is impossible to think universality through the simple deployment of identitarian particularities. The result of this problem has been that there is little left today in terms of a thought of emancipatory politics, with which to confront the massive increase in capitalist exploitation and oppression with its consequent economic disasters and wars resulting from unfettered plunder. These are combined with the political exclusion of greater and greater numbers of the world’s population from any ability to control, even in a minimal sense, their own lives – a fact which is itself arguably the main cause of the poverty that everyone deplores. Of course, it is only from among the politically excluded that a political subject with an emancipatory politics can see the light of day; yet, at the same time, one cannot endow a specific social category in advance with the qualities required to propel history to a given end. Even though it is only the people who make universal

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      Preface     xvii

history, who the people – more precisely, who the politically excluded – are in any specific situation differs, and they can only be recognised by what they think, say and do. The problem is fundamentally that social science today does not listen to what the excluded have to say; the knowledgeable apparently know what people think (or are supposed to think) in advance, for they speak for them, using a priori scientific categories. That large numbers of such excluded people live on the African continent is certainly not a new phenomenon, yet these people are still not being listened to, despite the historical exit of the colonial state. In fact, their numbers have been increasing under the depredations of an ever-violent and despoliating capitalism, while the fundamental features of colonialism, such as virulent racism and the view that the people constitute the enemy of reason and progress, continue to be crudely and uncritically reproduced. Today it should be clear that there is no subject of history, neither is there an end to history. This means that there is no end to human agency; there is no end to politics, for politics is irreducible to the state, and this despite the fact that the horizon of emancipation is the disappearance of the state itself, for the notion of an ‘egalitarian state’ is simply an oxymoron. In order to rethink human emancipation (another word for equality) on the African continent, this book has of necessity therefore had to be a work of theory concerned with political subjectivities as objects of investigation and with developing categories for thinking an emancipatory future. It is not a work of history, even though there is much discussion of history in it. It is, rather, a book which opens up an area for investigation – that of emancipatory political subjectivities. It insists on approaching their understanding in a rational manner ‘from within’ – in other words, using their own terms and categories – and not exclusively as reflections or representations of something external to them such as social location within a complex matrix of social relations, or ‘Man’, or history, or culture, or state policies or even discourses of power, inter alia. Emancipatory politics concern not so much power relations as a process of subjectivation. It follows that the exposition in this book is not chronological but is organised around theoretical questions: in Part 1, the question of understanding historical sequences of popular emancipation during which thought can be seen to exceed the notion, upheld by the discipline of history, of continuous objective time; and, in Part 2, the question of making sense of politics in its own terms and thus of exceeding the socially reductive analyses provided by the discipline of sociology. The absence of a chronological exposition has meant that there is some empirical toing and froing in the argument, although I have attempted to reduce this to a minimum. I thus pursue theoretical issues in depth in a rigorous manner and draw the appropriate consequences for the thinking of emancipatory politics on the continent. Although concerned with the whole of Africa, this book is more focused on South Africa than on any other African country. The easy availability of literature and data on this country,

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the sophistication of some of its political movements and my familiarity with it made this inevitable; the narrative, however, ends in early 2013, soon after the horrific episode of the Marikana massacre. Apart from Saint-Domingue/Haiti discussed in chapter 2, different parts of Africa feature as illustrations in different chapters: Congo in chapter 2, Kenya in chapter 3, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in chapter 10, the African state in general in chapters 12 and 13, Malawi in chapter 14, and other parts of the continent in chapter 15. It should go without saying that I include South Africa within Africa, which I do not consider as the (more or less exotic, more or less incapable) Other, as much of the South African literature tends to do. As a result, Africa is not considered here as a mere footnote to the South African historical experience; on the contrary, I maintain that South Africa is only understandable within an African historical and political context of colonialism and neo-colonialism. This book has its origins in comments by two close friends of mine. The first is the Nigerian intellectual Adebayo Olukoshi, who insisted to me during a conversation in Uppsala in the 1990s that those historians who simply accounted for the struggles for independence on the African continent in terms of poverty and economic deprivation were not only empirically wrong but also guilty of racism, as they denied Africans the capacity to think their dignity and agency as human beings. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this argument suggested that in order to combat racism – like any form of oppression – both in intellectual work and in political practice, it is fundamental to begin from an understanding of what people who are struggling against oppression actually say themselves, and not to assume that a recourse to scientism  – collapsing reason into power-knowledge  – can substitute for thought. The second is the Congolese scholar and activist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, who introduced me to the writings of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, with whom he had worked and who, he said, were thinking politics not as politicians but as militant activists. The result, he insisted, was that through using their work, one could begin to think new concepts and categories for a different political practice in Africa, which did not revolve around the taking of state power and the endless repetition of a politics of authoritarian statism. I have followed his advice. Given my personal experience of popular struggles for emancipation in South Africa in the 1980s and of their rapid deterioration into state politics, I was precisely in search of a way of overcoming this problem intellectually without collapsing into a crude notion of ‘betrayal of the revolution’ by a ‘petty bourgeoisie in search of state avenues for accumulation’. After all, ideas of ‘people’s power’ and ‘workers’ control’ seem to have penetrated mass popular consciousness in the 1980s in South Africa, and I was ideologically unprepared – like many others – for the rapidity with which such popular subjectivities were excluded and replaced by the crass corruption of what is sometimes known as ‘pork-barrel politics’. This book is the result of this intellectual search. Its writing has been a long process. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, it has been in the making on and off

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for just under 20 years. The title, Thinking Freedom in Africa, is purposely designed to refer to a discussion of how ‘ordinary’ Africans themselves have thought freedom along with all its contradictions, as well as of how we can begin to think freedom in Africa in the 21st century in a ‘post-classist’ period, so to speak – when even most of those who call themselves Marxists no longer see the working class as the universal subject of history anyway, but merely use the notion as an abstract justification for their statist politics of self-appointed representation. What can be called ‘classism’ is now exhausted as a way of thinking emancipatory politics, yet in the 20th century it made crucially important contributions to thinking human emancipation, as it was able to defeat capitalist power across significant portions of the globe. However, at the same time, it proved unable to construct a sustainable viable alternative. Those who are committed to an emancipatory future cannot continue as before: for ‘all repetition dis-courages ... Courage is never the courage to recommence as before’ (Badiou, 2007: 98–9). The subtitle, Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, is meant to convey the idea that the purpose of the book is not to propose a full-blown theory – not least because such a theory is largely contingent and always developed through practice  – but rather to attempt to open up conceptual space in order to contribute towards making an emancipatory future thinkable in Africa again. As the reader will soon notice, the book’s foundational axiom – following upon the seminal work of Sylvain Lazarus – is that ‘people think’. In the absence of this point of departure the academic investigator or the political activist inevitably puts himself or herself in the position of trustee, interpreter or spokesperson for others who are located within what may be called a ‘subaltern’ position in society. The powerful simply speak on behalf of the powerless; a politics of representation becomes dominant and naturalised. Yet it is imperative to do away with such a notion of politics if human emancipation is to become again the object of thought, as a politics of representation is, ultimately, simply a politics of silencing. A politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is invariably concerned with presentation rather than with representation. When the South African shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, or ‘People of the Shacks’, insist that activists and politicians speak ‘to’ them rather than ‘for’ them, they are underlining precisely such a politics of self-presentation. This book has been written from within the Marxist tradition, but, as the reader will note, it is constantly in a critical debate with Marxist orthodoxy. The fundamental problems with Marxism are not to be found, to my mind, in its political economy even though that political economy may at times be Eurocentric. After all, if, as Marx insists, the period of modern capitalism dates from the discovery and colonisation of the Americas and ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (1867: 712), then colonialism, genocide and racism must be thought of as central to capitalism itself; consequently, the production process

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and hence, to a certain extent, the industrial working class must be shifted from its often unique position of privilege in our understanding of capitalism. Forms of colonial domination are as important as forms of labour exploitation for the reproduction of the capitalist system, yet the latter forms have been seen as primary and the former as somewhat secondary in what is usually referred to as Western Marxism. As a result, politics was thought of as secondary to and derivative of economics. Beyond the West, in the colonial world, it was not quite so easy to ignore the question of politics, because colonial capitalism was so evidently contingent on the deployment of violence and the systematic dehumanisation and extermination of colonised peoples. As C.L.R. James (2001) was one of the first to note, it was in the New World that colonial capitalism acquired its clearest expression and, hence, where its political roots were most obvious. Whereas in Europe it was the industrial factory that epitomised capitalism, in colonial capitalism in the Caribbean it was the slave plantation. Given the centrality of politics in colonial capitalist development, ‘economism’ has had greater difficulty in establishing theoretical roots in Marxist thought outside the West. Nevertheless, despite their limitations, Marxist political-economic analyses remain crucially important in broad terms for an understanding of the differing forms of accumulation and exploitation in the world, including Africa today. The problems with Marxism are to be found elsewhere, in the political statism consequent upon thinking politics simply as a representation of interests made apparent precisely by political economy. The result has been that this political economy could easily remain, and did in fact become in post-independence Africa, a ‘doctrine of state’. In other words, there is nothing in political economy, whether Marxist or otherwise, which enables us to think an emancipatory political practice beyond interest; and in consequence Marxist politics have remained, along with liberal politics, overwhelmingly statist in their practice. The problems which Marxism faces are therefore not to be found so much in its structuralism, but in its failure to think of an egalitarian emancipatory political practice as an exceptional occurrence located within existing relations. A similar point could be made with regard to the discipline of history (along with other social sciences), which tends to conflate the crucial understanding that it is people who make history with an ex post facto analysis that imposes a necessary, objective, causal pattern on time. Although both political economy and history are central to understanding the social world we live in, they are currently limited by their inability to provide an understanding of the unpredictable exceptions during which political subjectivities are able to exceed a reflection or representation of the social, simply because all humans are reasoning beings. Indeed, as currently constituted, these disciplines efface an understanding of politics precisely because that excessive reason is asocial and consequently remains unthinkable. It remains unthinkable because

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it is fully understandable only as a subjective upsurge in the present and not as a structured necessity ex post facto, after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s well-known metaphor. We can no longer, to use Jacques Rancière’s (2012) terms, understand this exception – the foundation of emancipatory thought – within a logic of causal necessity, but only as an unpredictable aleatory event. According to Sylvain Lazarus (2013), such subjectivities can indeed be rationally studied, as people – anyone – can imagine alternative possibilities (he talks of ‘possibles’) when they think beyond the limits established by social place or identity. Of course, people do not always think ‘out of place’ or ‘out of order’. But when they do, they illuminate the present in a manner that cannot be thought by the categories deployed by historians and sociologists. There is no need to collapse into vulgar psychological or moralistic accounts to begin to think popular subjectivities independently of their social foundation; to do so is to naturalise them, whereas the point is to foreground the existence and necessity of political choices. The central concern, then, is to oppose a politics of activism and militancy to a politics of professional politicians and the state, a politics founded on principles to a politics founded on interests. It is only the former which can be called politics in the true sense, for it begins with an understanding of people – of all people without exception – as active thinking beings. The object of this book is thus the understanding of political agency, specifically as conceived in two areas of thought: first, in analyses of emancipatory politics in African history and, second, in recovering the thought of emancipatory politics today – in other words, in making explicit some of the political conditions and categories for thinking political agency on the continent in the 21st century. The first is a methodological and historical project, the second a conceptual and epistemic one. They are held together by the central concern to ‘bring a politics of emancipation back into thought’ in the humanities and social sciences in Africa, from which it has been displaced for a considerable length of time. I should therefore stress at this stage that, although I am studying Africa, I do not begin from ‘culture’ or ‘identity’, which I see as core components of typically state discourses. Rather than starting from what seems to distinguish Africa, its cultural uniqueness, which determined its place in the Western imaginary – a position evidently rooted in Enlightenment thought and central to colonial taxonomy – this book begins from the subversion of place, from how African people themselves thought emancipation when they rebelled, which is precisely what makes Africans fully part of humanity as a whole. All people are capable of thinking beyond their social place and immediate interests. Starting from culture merely forces a concentration on identity, ethnicity, authenticity, race, darkness, natives, ‘Africanity’, periphery, ‘coloniality’, and so on  – on difference and not on universal humanity. Ultimately, it is allocation to social place that structures such an analysis. It then becomes easy to fall into a position in which, for example, Africans

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are simply victims of a history that has been made exclusively by others, in the West. Africans, like other human beings, must be thought of as agents of their history, not as its victims. What is universal is precisely the stepping out of place, a displacement which enables one to affirm one’s humanity independently of where one is situated by the Other, be it the state, culture or the colonial oppressor. As Kristin Ross (2009: 21) puts it, if one begins from place, ‘people’s voices, their subjectivities can be nothing more than the naturalized, homogenized expressions of those spaces’. We therefore need to be able to think how people act and think their displacement themselves; it is this which makes them part of universal humanity rather than of the animal world of interests. I have put a conception of universal humanity at the forefront of my thinking here, as I believe Alain Badiou (2010b: 112) is right when he notes that ‘thought is worth nothing if it is not structured and ordered by the possibility of an emancipatory politics for the whole of humanity’. I have tried to be faithful to this idea throughout the writing of this book. It is up to the reader to decide whether this attempt has been successful. The core problem we face in thinking emancipation is that the social sciences as currently constituted unfortunately do not possess a universal conception of humanity, what Badiou (2013c: 14–21) calls a ‘generic set’; all they see are differences, not a true universality. When they do recognise universality, it is false, for it is simply generalised from the particularities of the dominant. Yet the answer to this distorted vision of universality inherent in liberalism today is not a cultural relativism, but rather the affirmation of a generic humanity, which happens to be precisely what the African slave rebels of Saint-Domingue in particular emphasised in their practice from 1791, as we shall see in some detail in chapter 2. That the social sciences regard the majority of the world’s population as living in ‘subhuman’ conditions, from which they deduce the absence of a generic humanity as an empirically verifiable fact, merely leads to the idea that poor people – or the politically excluded more generally – cannot think, as the capacity to think and reason is arguably the essence of the human, at least if we adhere to a universality from which Enlightenment thinkers regularly excluded the majority of the world’s population. For social science, the excluded are said to simply react to their social location – to their interests or identity – and therefore to be ultimately bereft of reason. The currently fashionable insistence on deconstructing social identities, even at the level of philosophy, is only the latest version of this kind of thinking. The idea of colonial ‘epistemicide’ in the Global South, popularised by de Souza-Santos (2014), is fundamentally misleading because, even though Western colonialism did indeed systematically devalue and marginalise local knowledges and cosmologies, it could not fully destroy them; people have still been able to think their condition through them, including for the purposes of rebellion against colonialism and its various neo-colonial avatars. What is in fact being pointed to is the silencing of alternatives

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from within the liberal discourse of power, especially in the academy, but this does not imply that colonised people have been victims of ‘epistemicide’. Actually, one of the major intellectual figures of the struggle for freedom on the African continent had already observed in 1970 that ‘the freedom struggle of African peoples is both the fruit and the proof of cultural vigor, opening up new prospects for the development of culture in the service of progress’ (Cabral, 1973: 49). The academic tendency to merely produce a victimology when it comes to thinking Africa is extremely prevalent today. We shall see throughout this book that African people  – much like everybody else – have refused to be victims; they have at times been quite able to draw on their heritage of knowledge to contest, often successfully, colonial domination and thereby to create new knowledge in the process. As a result of their exclusive focus on thinking divisions, interests and identities, the social sciences have only rarely engaged in thinking universal emancipation, freedom, justice and human dignity. This is indeed why Marx’s thought was so exceptional, precisely because his was a thought of the universal emancipation of humanity combined with a theory of the social. Contrary to most social science, Badiou’s philosophy is a genuine contemporary effort to conceive the universal. It shows that today the humanities are quite able to produce a more liberating orientation than the social sciences simply because they enable a concept of the universally human which is radically distinct from the liberal conception. Anyone who makes the kind of universal statements that Badiou consistently and courageously makes and is rigorously faithful to in his work – to the extent, rare in Europe, of understanding Western imperialism in its past and present manifestations – to my mind not only must be taken extremely seriously but is worthy of the utmost attention and intellectual respect. Not that this book is ‘about’ Badiou’s thought – it is not – rather, it is about Africans and the manner in which they have thought and currently think freedom. Yet, given that Badiou’s work is an attempt to rigorously theorise change through the deployment of a subjective exception, an exception both in history and in political practice, it seems to me to be an extraordinarily useful resource. That it may not refer to Africa directly is beside the point. It can be stretched or modified in order to make it more directly relevant, if necessary. But philosophers are not the only intellectuals. Ordinary people are in fact capable of thought beyond the habit of place – excessive thought – and show these capacities in often unpredictable sites. The intellectuals of Abahlali baseMjondolo, notwithstanding their recent controversial decision to vote en masse for a Right-wing party in South Africa, have also had an important influence on this book, as the reader will discover, not least because it is clear that they form part of those people who think.2 This seemed to me to be particularly evident in their notion of ‘unfreedom’, used to denote relations between state and people that are not founded on citizenship rights. Several authors associated with the Subaltern Studies Collective in India have emphasised

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similar conceptions; they have insisted on identifying multiple domains of politics, although in somewhat different ways from the manner in which I do so here. There will be much reference to French philosophy in this book, but exclusively to that philosophy which is concerned with the subversion of consensual state thinking, and which helps us to think ‘at a distance’ from the state and power. A number of thinkers will be relied on in this regard, including Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and others. These all help to provide us with the appropriate kinds of questions and perspectives, as well as with some of the concepts and categories, to begin to think human agency in its own terms rather than as reflective of social place or determined by power. As far as Badiou’s work is concerned, it is able (as with all advanced forms of thought) to incorporate previous conceptions into its system as valid in relation to specific (historically previous) conditions and not to dismiss these as false. These therefore become theoretically and historically relativised. In particular, this applies to orthodox 20th-century Marxism. The fact that such Marxism has reached its limit in thinking emancipation in world history should by now be apparent; its reliance on conceiving emancipation as an effect of attaining state power has shown itself to have failed. To continue to think in this manner, to see the state as the vehicle of emancipation, can only really be sustained today against all the evidence. The state cannot emancipate anyone. Beginning from an idea of displacement does not mean that place will be of no concern, but rather that it is from the subversion of place, from a position outside place – from a position of universal equality which subverts place as such – rather than from place itself, that place can be fully understood. At the same time, this excess over place will be marked by its place in one way or another. In particular, this book holds that the inability to subvert place – in other words, to develop and grasp categories beyond place – is the main obstacle to thinking beyond state politics, for the state is the manager of places and their relations to one another within a social hierarchy and social relations. It is the inability to grasp the subversion of place within revolts, rebellions, riots and revolutions that lies at the core of the failure to understand the politics of emancipation, a procedure typical of the sociology of social movements, for example. When the oppressed refuse and resist oppression, they regularly place themselves beyond the place of oppression both subjectively and politically, and often also physically; by doing so they make oppression visible. This placing of oneself beyond place is in essence a purely subjective gesture, the result of a decision or refusal of the extant and an affirmation of something else. An understanding of this displacement has been effaced by social science and regularly relegated to the psychological or the utopian. However, this book maintains that it is displacement in thought that constitutes the basis of agency and in particular the beginning of an emancipatory politics. But

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      Preface     xxv

an emancipatory politics consists of much more than mere displacement; it consists in fact of a whole new mode of thinking politics based among the politically excluded and emphasising egalitarian principles within a prescriptive practice. Subjective excess often searches for historically prior experiences which can help it to understand that its thinking is truly legitimate and that it possesses a long heritage of popular emancipatory antecedents. This search for such historical antecedents is also linked to what might be termed an expressive–excessive dialectic. What I mean quite simply is that whereas academics may be able to detach themselves from a political practice, activists cannot fully avoid the contradictions between subjectivities as expressions of place and their excess: their ‘expressions of place’ because all rebellion is socially located, and ‘excessive thought’ because it sometimes consciously outstrips its location. It is only through gradually resolving these contradictions on a continuous basis that a process of politicisation and emancipation can be sustained. Of course, none of this means that the state should be ignored, avoided or constantly opposed in constructing a thought of politics for the 21st century. Badiou’s is not an anarchist position: it does not suggest that power should never be taken under any circumstances; rather, it begins by thinking in such a way that the taking of state power becomes no longer central to the thought of politics but rather contingent. What this means is that the state must be rethought from within a perspective which does not privilege or even think within state categories, but which makes a conscious effort to think outside them, ‘at a subjective distance’ from them. In this manner, thought can be ordered by a fidelity to the idea of the emancipation of humanity, to which state politics cannot possibly be faithful. The insistence in this book on an analysis of singular events and processes of political subjectivation has also meant that the formation of political subjectivities can be analysed in all their complexity. In particular, what this has involved is the recognition that political excessive thought combines in contradictory ways with a thinking that is expressive of place, and, moreover, that there is not one but several distinct domains that differ fundamentally in their definition of subjectivities through which the state and people relate. This takes us to analysis beyond the limits of what is required by purely philosophical thought. Finally, I must stress that my fundamental focus is on the opening up of new ways of thinking and on arguing for a return to theory. I am not so much concerned with prescribing a particular road to emancipation, although such prescription unavoidably does occur here and there. Yet prescription cannot be undertaken in the abstract anyway; it only makes sense within a specific context and singularity. I am conscious that I may have slipped occasionally and made my personal voice more vocal than it should perhaps be. It is difficult at times to distinguish between analysis and prescription. I therefore do not so much implore the reader to ignore this kind of mishap as recognise that this is merely a mark of enthusiasm and struggle, and that in any

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case I am not avoiding a commitment to an emancipatory idea that is necessary for rethinking theory and for transforming our lives. Michael Neocosmos Grahamstown August 2015

notes   1. See http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/02/2015-human-development-report-tofocus-on-employment/, accessed 25/08/2015. At the other end of the scale, the London Guardian newspaper reported that in the same year one per cent of the world’s population owned half of its wealth. See http://www.theguardian.com/ money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report, accessed 15/10/2015.   2. The historical narrative of this book ends in 2013. The ‘controversial decision’ referred to here was Abahlali’s call, after years of insisting on not voting at elections, on their members to vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) during the May 2014 parliamentary elections in South Africa on the grounds that such a vote would help to remove the African National Congress (ANC) from municipal power. They have stressed that this decision was purely tactical. Given the democratic character of that organisation, it seems to me that their decision, whether one agrees with it or not, should be respected and that they should be allowed to make their own mistakes without being vilified by the self-appointed guardians of Left orthodoxy (see e.g. Mail & Guardian, 23–29 May 2014). See also e.g. Abahlali (2008). However this date clearly denotes the beginning a new sequence in Abahlali’s conception of politics. The use I make of Abahlali in this book is marked by their thinking prior to this date.

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Acknowledgements The thought of universal humanity, of the idea of the human as such, is not pervasively present in the academic social sciences: much as in other state institutions this simple idea has to be fought for. Over the years during which this book was written it has been quite difficult to encounter the principled foregrounding of the human in the universities with which I have been associated, for the majority of academics have been transfixed with and constantly focused upon promoting their personal interests as consumers – an orientation which is invariably accompanied and enhanced by rubbing shoulders with state power in whatever guise. At he same time, universities have become, to a great degree, obstacles to critical thought; in fact today it is practically impossible for novel thinking in universities to emerge in the absence of popular struggles beyond academia – in this sense, politics is definitely a condition of thought. As a result of intellectual inertia, the habitual simply continues and cynicism in relation to ideas prevails, particularly in a context where the commercialisation of knowledge is now endemic. The people mentioned below, on the other hand, are all exceptions to this trend; they have all shown in their thought and practice, to various extents to be sure, that there is indeed a close connection between intellectual rigour, inventive thought, political commitment to a better world and the idea of the human itself. So one can also sense in universities small shoots of a yearning for something new. Clearly the idea of the human is not forever buried. Most of this book was written under difficult conditions of intellectual isolation, given that it was always marginal to the dominant narratives on one side or the other. This constitutes an additional reason why I am so grateful to the people mentioned below, it being understood, of course, that I am solely responsible for all errors and omissions herein. I am deeply grateful to Jacques Depelchin and to Pauline Wynter for their friendship and for extremely stimulating conversations and insights around many of the issues discussed in this work over a number of years. Despite Jacques’ frequent disagreement with many of my positions, his comments on my work have always been reflective and constructive and located within this warm friendship.

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xxviii     Thinking Freedom in Africa

I also wish to thank Achille Mbembe for his intellectual generosity. He has been instrumental in the publication of this book despite my disagreements with some of his work. Achille’s enthusiasm contributed enormously to providing intellectual support over the last two years of getting the text together. I must thank Premesh Lalu and the staff and students of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape who in 2010 criticised many of my formulations and helped me sharpen my conceptions. Premesh generously hosted me at the CHR in 2010 and has been providing critical support and friendship over many years now. I am grateful to all the coffee-loving people at the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg for discussing with great openness the idea that people think. I must also thank Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson and Peter Hallward, all three of whom are major thinkers of the politics of emancipation, whose generosity in encouraging and supporting my work intellectually has been invaluable. I wish to thank Louise Balso for taking time to meet with me in Paris for stimulating conversations around the thought of politics. I am also grateful to Judith Hayem who hosted me at the Université de Lille1 in France on two occasions to lecture on various aspects of my work. Our detailed conversations on thinking politics have always been extraordinarily mutually beneficial and extremely productive. I am beholden to colleagues at UNISA, in particular to Derek Gelderblom, and subsequently to Greg Cuthbertson and Mamokgethi Pakheng who provided me with employment and support from 2011 to 2013 without which this book could never have been written … and to Peter Clayton at Rhodes University who unhesitantly provided financial support towards its publication. I am also grateful to the students at UHURU, the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, who have kept me on my intellectual toes, particularly Camalita Naicker, Fezi Mthonti, Sarah Bruchhausen, Mikaela Erskog, Jonis Alasow and Paddy O’Halloran. Together we have been able to build an intellectually stimulating and vibrant space. I also wish to thank my publishers at Wits University Press, Veronica Klipp, Roshan Cader and Andrew Joseph, for believing in this project and to Karen Press for her incisive and always pertinent comments on the manuscript. We have become great friends. I am also grateful to Russell Martin for his skills at polishing my often cumbersome use of language, One of the most important influences on this book has been the critical thought and political practice of Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba whose intellectual and political commitment to freedom in Africa has been unwavering and gone largely unrecognised. I am privileged to have had numerous conversations with him over many years. I am extremely grateful to him for taking the time to write the foreword despite his often failing eyesight.

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      Acknowledgements     xxix

I am especially thankful to my friend Richard Pithouse for his on-going support and critical engagement with my work; his comments and help have been particularly invaluable for the development of the ideas in this book. His steadfast and principled commitment to popular politics, to critical thought and to our students has been unwavering throughout. Finally I must thank Khulukazi Soldati profusely for ‘hanging in there’ during difficult times. This work would have not been possible without her extraordinarily high levels of tolerance, generosity and support. A number of the chapters of this book have been based on previously published material; in most cases the material has been systematically revised for inclusion here. The following publishers and editors are hereby gratefully acknowledged: The Nordic Africa Institute for excerpts from The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and “Accumulation from Below”: Economics and politics in the struggle for democracy, Uppsala: SIAS, 1993 and “People’s Politics to State Politics: Aspects of national liberation in South Africa” in A. Olukoshi (ed.) The Politics of Opposition in Contemporary Africa, NAI, Uppsala Sweden, 1998; The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) for “The Contradictory Position of ‘Tradition’ in African Nationalist Discourse: Some analytical reflections”, Africa Development, Special Issue on “Globalization and Citizenship in Africa” Vol. 28, Nos 1&2, 2003, pp. 17-52; “Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the political core of an emancipatory project in Africa”, Africa Development, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2007; From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Second Edition 2010; “Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa: Some critical reflections”, Africa Development, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2014; Sage Publications for “Analyzing Political Subjectivities: Naming the post-developmental state in Africa today”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5, October 2010; “The Nation and its Politics: Fanon, emancipatory nationalism and political sequences” in N. Gibson (ed.) Living Fanon, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; “Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking political subjectivity in the (neo-)colonial world and the limits of history,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 47, No. 5, October 2012. “Transition, Human Rights and Violence: Rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony”, Interface Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 359-399, November 2011; “What does Democracy Name in South African Politics?” Grace and Truth, Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2014; “Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence” in S. Moyo and Y. Mine (eds.) What Colonialism Ignored: African potentials for resolving conflicts in Southern Africa, Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa 2016; “Constructing the Domain of Freedom: Thinking politics at a distance from the state”, Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies on Politics at a Distance from the State: Radical praxis today, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2016.1236876

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Introduction Politics is thought, thought is real, people think The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary ... There is something very disturbing about ... [the] inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions. – Arundhati Roy, ‘The Trickledown Revolution’, 2010 If you are serious about victory, about succeeding to humanize the world, even a little bit, then your struggle must be a living politics. It must be owned and shaped in thought and in action by ordinary men and women. If every gogo [granny] does not understand your politics then you are on the road to another top-down system. You also run the risk of being on your own in the face of repression. – S’bu Zikode, Preface to Nigel Gibson’s Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 2011 Freedom is not identitarian; it is at the very least an inflexion of, at most a rupture with, the identitarian register, insofar as the latter is a prescription of the Other. – Alain Badiou, ‘Séminaire 2011–2012’, 18 April 2012 (my translation)

the rebirth of history in africa The end of ‘the end of history’ was finally announced on a world scale in February 2011. That announcement took place in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East. Popular upsurges of extraordinary vitality occurred, which brought back into stark relief what most seemed to have forgotten, namely that people, particularly those from the Global South, are perfectly capable of making history. The fact that this process was initiated on the African continent before it began to reverberate elsewhere is also worthy of note. The mass upsurge here was not of religious inspiration but quite secular, contrary to the thinking of the dominant perspective in the social sciences, which had been stressing the decline of secular politics in that

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2    Thinking Freedom in Africa

part of the world since the 1980s. In fact, its closest predecessor had arguably been the mass movement in South Africa of the mid-1980s and not the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1970s.1 This series of events, through their insistence on ‘popular power’ as the driver of the process, has been very much located in a mode of political thought in which both religious organisations and established political parties were initially taken totally by surprise. In this sense, these events have been illustrative of a new sequence in which struggles for freedom are taking place outside the parameters established during the 20th century, when the party was the central organiser of political thinking. It appears that now, in the 21st century, a different mode of thinking emancipatory politics – inaugurated by the South African experience of the 1980s – could be seeing the light of day: one founded within the living conditions of people themselves. While the outcome of the mass popular upsurge in North Africa seems for the moment to have run its course (and counter-revolution in Egypt notwithstanding), it is apparent that popular agency is back on the political and intellectual agendas of the African continent. A central recurring concern of intellectual thought in Africa has been the necessity precisely to conceptualise political agency and the contribution of Africans to history along with their struggles to achieve emancipation. This is not surprising given hundreds of years of slavery, racism and colonialism during which African agency was not only denied, but seemingly eliminated, to the extent that Africa was said by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hegel to have no history worth speaking of.2 The fact that racial oppression has been inherent in capitalism from its very beginning is often forgotten. This intellectual concern to reassert African agency has been active from the early days of nationalist thought right up to the near present and has informed the study of history on the continent in particular. In its initial phase it emphasised Africans’ contribution to world civilisations and to the formation of states, as state formation constituted the subjective horizon of nationalist historians.3 But the independence movements, born out of pan-Africanism, were also concerned to imagine an emancipatory politics beyond the simple fact of statehood; indeed, independence was seen as only the first step towards achieving such full emancipation. This was, however, a process that was conceived of as achievable only via the state. It was the state, its history and its subjectivities which lay at the core of intellectual endeavour in the early days of nationalism and independence, and I will argue that this has remained the case, though in a modified form and despite contestation, ever since. Gradually – among those who remained faithful to some idea of emancipation – the emphasis shifted from a sole concern with the state and the elites it represented as the makers of history to the masses and the class struggle as its driving force. After all, it was people, and not just intellectual leaders, who had played the dominant role in the struggle for independence, even though independence may have resulted from

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      Introduction     3

a negotiated process. Today this view has been in crisis for some time and has been replaced by an emphasis on parliamentary democracy as the high point of emancipation; this has been accompanied in academia by the study of political identities. Such identities, despite having been instrumental in resisting authoritarian postcolonial states, are today often seen – particularly in their religious or ethnic forms – as possible threats to democracy as well as retrogressive in their politics, rather than as the bearers of a historical telos; in fact, it is not clear whether it is parliamentary democracy or identity that is the source of the current political crisis on the continent (e.g. Sen, 2006). In any case, we can no longer see identity politics as in any way liberating or progressive. The thinking of African agency, which has always been bound up with a notion of subjecthood and emancipation, is in crisis, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Africans have remained in poverty and continue to suffer extreme forms of oppression and deprivation. Rather than attempting to contribute to the thinking of Africans as fully human subjects, intellectuality seems to have reached a dead end. At the same time, the West today simply erects barriers to African subjecthood, either physical in the form of walls against African immigration, for example, or less tangible in the form of the reiteration of the well-worn ideology according to which Africans are incapable of any progressive thought, as Africa is an incurable ‘basket case’. Africans, it seems, are still visualised as incapable of making history. These points will now be developed at some length. While the ‘modern’ colonial system enforced its ‘civilising mission’, supposedly designed to turn Africans into subjects, it had the contrary effect of denying Africans agency both politically and in thought; modernity was thus tied to colonialism, so that Africans could never contribute to it.4 Partha Chatterjee has recognised the effects of this well: because of the way in which the history of our modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse, unfettered by differences of race or nationality ... from the beginning we had a shrewd guess that ... we would forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would [we] be taken seriously as its producers ... Ours is the modernity of the once colonized (Chatterjee, 1997: 14, 20). The statist development process which followed upon independence itself mutated from an emancipatory political conception to a technical neo-colonial one of ‘modernisation’, with the result that it too became a ‘development mission’ asserted and imposed by neo-colonial forms of domination (Neocosmos, 2010b). External forms of intervention – whatever their intentions – rather than turning Africans into subjects of their own history, have over the years frustrated their agency, and have only enabled it in so far as Africans have resisted and opposed such interventions. In

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4    Thinking Freedom in Africa

the long run they have systematically transformed most Africans into victims whose main feature has been passivity, not agency. This process continues today as an effect of humanitarianism and human rights discourse (Wa Mutua, 2002; Neocosmos, 2006a; Mamdani, 2009), but it is also often prevalent among some African intellectuals themselves (e.g. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013), who, insisting on viewing African history as determined exclusively by (neo-)colonial domination, and seeing Africans as victims and not as agents of history, have difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that it is ordinary people who resisted colonialism and made history. Arguably, it is only the most excluded of the continent – the ‘damned’ of the earth, in Fanon’s original meaning – who can fundamentally transform colonial history, for they have the most to lose by its continuation in new forms. A recovery of African political agency, then, must begin from the point of the ‘zone of non-being’, as Fanon (1986: 10) calls the place of the politically (and humanly) in-existent, and from a fidelity to past events of resistance within it, to those historical singularities of emancipation by Africans, however short-lived, which proposed alternatives in practice and which affirmed the dignity (i.e. the being) of the politically excluded and humiliated. In this way, the silencing and occlusion of African historical events (Depelchin, 2005) will be overthrown, and victimhood can begin to be replaced by agency – after all, freedom cannot be separated from the struggle to attain it, for agency is at the core of existence, or, to put it another way, there can be no thought of politics in the absence of the thought of a collective subject. For this to happen, as I will argue at length in this book, political subjectivity and agency must be thought of in their own terms and not as simple reflections of objective social location, whatever this may be, including reflections of the historical marginalisation and oppression of Africans. This means always adhering to an idea of universal humanity as our guiding principle.

thinking political agency in africa The manner in which African political agency in the making of history came to be thought has followed, since the 1950s, a number of important intellectual trajectories. The first such perspective was arguably that of the Négritude cultural movement, which, in its manner of asserting African humanity, was constituted in reaction to the oppression of Africans in its ‘assimilationist’ form by French colonialism. Unsurprisingly, these ideas resonated with the situation of African Americans and within the African diaspora more generally, as the main threat to their existence was also one of assimilation, with the result that the cultural movement had intellectual influence throughout the African diaspora and in France itself. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor were its most well-known members. Négritude consisted largely of an insistence on recovering the ‘whole complex of civilized values ... which characterize ... the NegroAfrican World’ (Senghor, 1975: 83), and in postmodernist parlance it proposed an

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      Introduction     5

‘essentialist’ mirror image of the colonial one, which had stressed the emptiness, primitiveness or non-existence of Africanness. It did this, for example, in the idea of an ‘African personality’. While this movement was of great importance intellectually and culturally, and totally understandable in a context where assimilation was the main political threat to an independent human and political existence, it reverted to a psychological essence of ‘the African’ and of ‘African culture’ (defined, of course, by intellectual elites) which was unable to focus on the agency of the people of the continent. It was rightly noted by Fanon that it brought together the totally different experiences of Africans in Africa and Blacks in the diaspora under the same umbrella. It thus assumed, despite their clearly disparate experiences, that the main feature they had in common was oppression by Whites (Fanon, 1990: 173–4). Much like dependency theory, which was to appear much later in the 1960s and 1970s, it ended up seeing the core of African history as one of Western domination, to which Africans only reacted. Yet out of the African and Afro-American encounter also grew the idea of pan-Africanism, which had a much more radical history, at least initially, when it gave birth to popular African nationalisms, before it too was engulfed by the statist politics which persist to this day. It had both a more ‘conservative’ wing inclined to stress the racial or cultural similarities of Blacks, and a more ‘radical’ wing keener to emphasise class in anti-colonial struggles by Africans. The name most associated with the former would be that of Senghor, while C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah were perhaps more illustrative of the latter. Both these versions of pan-Africanism eventually saw the capturing of the state as a necessary step towards freedom and were ultimately represented in the opposition between the more ‘moderate’ Monrovia Group of states and the more ‘radical’ Casablanca Group, which eventually combined to form the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In fact, as a popular pan-Africanist subjectivity rapidly disappeared within a context in which state forms of politics asserted their hegemony, political subjectivities became much more state-focused, with the result that pan-Africanism collapsed into a multi-state conception (Mamdani, 1991b; Neocosmos, 2010b). The Africanist school of history, along with the modernisation school, which after independence was hegemonic in all of the social sciences, asserted the centrality of the state in thought. The only Africans with agency were said to be great leaders of great kingdoms and civilisations. Yet, by the 1970s, the influence of events in the Third World as a whole, in which popular struggles had prevailed over repressive states (Cuba, China, Vietnam), as well as changes in intellectual trends in post-1968 France (e.g. the work of Althusser, Poulantzas, Bettelheim, Meillassoux and others on modes of production and the state) and in the United States (e.g. in the journal Monthly Review) had initiated a shift to emphasising the class struggle as the motor of history or, in its radical form, the view that ‘it is the masses which make history’ (Althusser, 1971: 46). In other words, a sophisticated form of Marxism that stressed the centrality of

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6    Thinking Freedom in Africa

social relations in the making of history took root in opposition to the vulgar economism of the ‘development of the productive forces’ inherited from official ‘Soviet Marxism’ as well as from Western modernisation theory à la W.W. Rostow (e.g. Temu and Swai, 1981). The central concept of what became known as the ‘Dar es Salaam debate’ was thus the class struggle and the struggle against neo-colonialism; the two were in fact viewed as part of the same process in a neo-colonial country (e.g. Shivji et al., 1973; Shivji, 1976; Tandon, 1982). While this political-economic perspective – which dovetailed nicely with postcolonial notions of development – produced crucially important intellectual work, it tended to remain within a structuralist Marxism and regularly failed to appreciate the fact that in classical Marxism ‘class’ had been conceived of as both a socio-economic concept and a political category, and that the core issue of political agency concerned the connection between the two. The answer to this problem, when it was indeed addressed, was still sought in terms of a party – particularly a vanguard party (e.g. Lukas Khamisi, 1983)5 – of intellectuals which would provide mass movements of workers and peasants with a political perspective, to turn them into political classes ‘for themselves’. In other words, the idea of agency was still largely conceived of within the parameters of the dominance of intellectual possessors of knowledge; that is, within those of Leninism. Agency was then still thought of, ultimately, in statist terms, as parties were and are quite simply state organisations, central component parts of what is sometimes referred to as ‘political society’; their function, after all, is the achievement of state power. It followed, as Mahmood Mamdani was to point out soon afterwards: ‘From such a perspective, it was difficult even to glimpse the possibility of working people in Africa becoming a creative force capable of making history. Rather, history was seen as something to be made outside of this force, in lieu of this force and ultimately to be imposed on it’ (Mamdani, 1994: 255). Political thinking was thus still not taking place beyond the subjective parameters provided by the state; simultaneously, political agency was being thought of as some kind of complex reflection of the objectively social, as social relations were seen as determinant of consciousness ‘in the last instance’, to use Althusser’s well-known formulation. After all, it has been a standard view, shared by both Leninists and liberals, that political parties ‘represent’ interests (class or otherwise) in the political arena. The late 1980s and 1990s in Africa substituted ‘civil society’ for ‘the state’ (political society) at the centre of intellectual discourse. This subjective ‘transition’ occurred as an effect of two related processes. On the one hand, we witnessed increased resistance ‘from below’ by popular movements of various types (such as national, ethnic, religious, gender and youth identity movements, predominantly urban-based) to an increasingly authoritarian state in several African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Congo-Zaire and South Africa. Identity movements seemed to constitute the foundation for an emancipatory politics, as they provided part of the resistance to state

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      Introduction     7

oppression during this period (Ake, 2003). On the other hand, there was a worldwide transformation ‘from above’ as the old bipolar world of the Cold War collapsed and the new neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ put forward the watchword of ‘liberalisation’: ‘deregulation’ of the African economies and ‘multipartyism’ in African politics. The entry of the name ‘civil society’ into the debate within neo-liberal discourse seemed to presage an alternative to state authoritarianism and the possibility of the defence and extension of human rights and democracy; an optimistic mood developed as a bright future was predicted. We had now finally arrived at the neo-liberal nirvana of the end of history, so much so that this period was sometimes referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent. Intellectual work now shifted to a sustained critique of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)  – the international financial institutions (IFIs) – on African states, on the one hand, and to extensive studies of political identities and social movements, on the other. Yet neither of the two contested the existence of the capitalist system as such, and the idea of emancipation has not featured in their vocabulary.6 The neo-liberal critique of the state, which found political expression in the new ‘Washington consensus’, was dismissive of the African state as corrupt, illegitimate and unrepresentative of the general will. This was supposedly represented by civil society. This was sometimes empirically false, as often it was the state which had opposed ethnic chauvinism and communitarianism – for example, in Nigeria (Osaghae, 1995). But in this way the old authoritarian and secular nationalist state was weakened and more easily transformed into a Western-compliant authoritarian state in a democratic shell. Civil society organisations (social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) soon came to work broadly within state political subjectivities; in any case, they had to in order to survive. I shall return to a fuller discussion of civil society and the state later in this book, but at this stage it is useful to note that by the 1990s it soon transpired that the central referent in an attempt to conceptualise African emancipation could not simply be the state–civil society dichotomy. Civil society is a standard domain of neo-liberal capitalism and its politics, the existence of which only varies in intensity according to these organised interests’ ability to operate. As resistance within civil society is founded upon the existence of differences – the organised interests of the division of labour and hierarchy – it is central to modern social organisation, a fact emphasised incidentally by all the founders of Western sociology. African critical intellectuals were rightly suspicious of the term ‘civil society’, especially as it seemed to imply a Manichaean dualism within neo-liberal discourse, the dark side of which was said to be the state (Mamdani, 1995a, 1995b; Olukoshi, 1998). The postcolonial state, it was maintained, had been, despite its authoritarianism, a nationalist state, which at least had defended national sovereignty in some

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8    Thinking Freedom in Africa

important ways as well as providing social subsidies for the needy (education, health, etc.), features which were now rapidly receding into the mists of time as Western domination increased within a newly globalised world. Neo-liberal conceptions of democracy were also contested, and it was hoped that the form of democracy – the missing term of political economy – could be debated, as its meaning was being subjected to popular contestation (Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1987; Mamdani, 1987; Chole and Ibrahim, 1995; Neocosmos, 1998; Ake, 2003).7 This was not to happen, at least not in any real depth, as both movements and intellectuals finally accepted the christening of the new state form as the ‘democratic state’. The old political elites, predictably with Western support, embraced the name and were able in most cases to survive the transition to democracy with their power intact. The enthusiasm for a genuine change in which the popular masses would finally be able to be the agents of their own history gradually faded as mass poverty and political despondency increased. The disappearance of ‘meta-narratives’, we were told, was all for the better, as they were ‘essentialist’; the postmodern condition, now written without the hyphen, was fluid, classless and characterised by clashes of identity. The study of identity politics became the order of the day, as religious and ethnic identities in particular were said to be core features of the new globalised world: ‘belonging’ provided the only way of accessing increasingly scarce resources, whether material, cultural or ‘political’ (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). It is therefore not too difficult to see, given the resulting silencing of emancipatory thought, that ‘any postmodern conception is only a form of intellectual connivance with the hegemonic decadence of capitalism itself ’ (Badiou, 2011e: 15, my translation). Any Idea of emancipatory politics receded into the distance, seemingly to be replaced by atheoretical empiricism in academia and a rapid rise of fundamentalisms – contrary to the predictions of modernisation theory – in politics. It soon became clear that the terms ‘progress’ and ‘progressive’ were no longer part of political vocabulary, while it became impossible to find anyone who did not swear to being a democrat. In such conditions the term ‘democracy’ itself could only become suspect, for it no longer implied a better world for the majority, but formed the core name of a state and imperial consensus in which vast inequalities and continued oppressive relations were tolerated as largely inevitable. In fact, democracy now characterised the politics of the new form of empire (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001) as, together with humanitarianism, it was imposed on the world – through the exercise of military power if necessary. While the ‘civilising mission’ of imperialism had ended in the 1960s, we were now witnessing a new ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007), through reference to which Western power was being redeployed in the rest of the world (e.g. ex-Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Libya) as the West faced its newly perceived enemy of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In no case has it been thought necessary to think the importance of a demos or popular

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      Introduction     9

social foundation for the formation of a democratic state; formal attributes – elections, multipartyism and the ubiquitous notion of ‘good governance’ – were considered sufficient to qualify for entry into the enchanted world of state democracy and globalised neo-liberalism. During this period, the most important studies of popular political subjectivity concerned social movements and were, in the best work, given a political inflection. Social movements were seen as the expression of popular political agency, ‘the subjective factor in African development’ (Mamdani et al., 1993: 112), and regularly counterposed to NGOs, which were often visualised as the bearers of a neo-colonial culture of clientelism. Yet, in all this work, political agency was understood as a reflection of the objectively social, of the specific dimensions of the social division of labour. There was never any attempt to conceive subjectivity in terms of itself, understandably perhaps because of the assumption that this meant a collapse into (social) psychology (and hence into idealism), the only discipline understood as attempting to produce an account of the subjective – as, after all, it was psychology that was said to regulate consciousness.8 The justly famous volume on African social movements edited by Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1995) was quickly followed by various studies by Mamdani (1996a, 2001, 2009) in which the colonial state and the production of political identities were theorised in a manner that rightly detached them from political economy, but that nevertheless focused exclusively on their institutionalisation as an exclusive effect of state politics, while simultaneously assuming a clearly demarcated political realm in African peasant societies governed by tradition. Groups were said to acquire their political identities largely because they were interpellated by the state in an identitarian (or communitarian) manner; we were not told if there was any resistance to such state interpellation by alternative non-identity politics. Little or no space was devoted to analysing the political contradictions within tradition or popular culture, some sides of which may have exhibited a popular non-statist perspective. Thus the impression was given in this body of work that little or no agency had been shown by people in their process of identity formation (Neocosmos, 2003). Yet, as many studies have indeed convincingly suggested, tradition is always more or less contested from within, invented, reinvented and imagined, as it is itself the outcome of different political subjectivities that affect power relations, themselves constantly in flux (e.g. Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989). Moreover, a clear-cut domain or sphere of the political is rarely in existence within tradition, as power relations are intimately imbricated within cultural, economic and other relations of domination in African society. Mamdani’s work was concerned with thinking the political, not agency and subjectivity; in other words, not with thinking politics as such (Mamdani, 1996a, 2001, 2009).9

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10    Thinking Freedom in Africa

In Africa, then, the study of political identities largely distinguished itself from an apolitical postmodernism, but remained caught within the parameters of state-centredness, as it was the state which was seen as the prime creator of such identities through a process of institutionalisation, exclusion, co-option or whatever (Mamdani, 1996a, 2002; Habib, 2004; Ballard et al., 2006). Concurrently, it has also gradually become apparent in most African countries that democracy as a form of state was more oligarchic than democratic, as states (and powerful elites) ignored or bypassed their own democratic rules systematically, and that long-standing popular-national grievances, such as access to land or employment and housing, were not adequately addressed by the state or were addressed only in the interests of the few.10 These failures have brought forth a contradiction between human rights and national rights, as the latter are neither dealt with nor indeed are resolvable by the former, which insist on the primacy of the right to private property, while the latter require its contestation. The result has been that the issue of freedom remains on the agenda, as the excluded themselves categorically state when they are allowed to express themselves – for example, in the case of Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, who mark the official Freedom Day public holiday with gatherings to mourn the absence of freedom on what they rename as ‘UnFreedom Day’. Yet this demand to partake in the benefits of democracy and to access the benefits of freedom, much trumpeted in the case of South Africa, for example, now takes place in a situation of political disorientation where the usual ideological signposts are no longer of help, as the standard dichotomies – Left–Right, state–market,11 nationalist–socialist – have become largely meaningless, while the newly arisen contradiction between nationalism and democracy, characteristic of many countries, remains often subterranean, largely unrecognised and hence under-discussed. As a result of the absence of an emancipatory discourse in the political arena, we are today confronted with a political crisis as the masses turn on themselves in a frenzy of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence (e.g. Kenya 2007, South Africa 2008, Nigeria 2009–10, to mention the most evident episodes). We are simultaneously confronted with an intellectual crisis, as those entrusted with the task of asking critical questions and providing an alternative idea to the vacuity of the democratic consensus seem content to proliferate identity studies and to appeal to statist solutions, wringing their hands in intellectual despair. By the 1980s Mamdani, Mkandawire and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1993: 112) were noting, in their brief but important critique of the limits of (Marxist) political economy, that ‘if democratic practice and democratic theory is to be popular it must not only come to terms with the class principle ... It must also come to terms with the rights of political minorities in Africa’, whether those of ethnicities, women or youth. But the authors were correct in an empirical sense only. They overlooked the fact that the working class in the Marxist tradition was not only conceived of as a

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      Introduction     11

socio-economic category with particularistic interests beloved of sociologists; they forgot that it had also been theorised politically as a universal subject of history, that in its political form the proletariat was seen by the classics of Marxism as the only social force capable of emancipating humanity as a whole. The political struggles of the workers were thus not only deemed to be self-liberatory but also understood to provide the foundation for the liberation of the whole people – the ‘uprooting’ of the class system as such – precisely because, as Rancière (1995) has put it, the proletariat was in 19th-century Europe ‘the part of no part’, the collectivity which, because of its exclusion from politics, could only emancipate itself by destroying the whole capitalist system and hence emancipating humanity in the process.12 None of the other identities added onto that of the working class by (largely postmodernist) social analysis (e.g. women’s movements, ethnic and religious movements, youth movements and environmentalism) have ever been said to fulfil in themselves the same universal function.13 However oppressed the groups they represented may have been, and however radical their struggles, these have not generally gone beyond the right to be included in the existing ‘capitalo-parliamentary’ system, as Badiou (2009d) has termed it, the existing framework of power relations from which they had hitherto been excluded. If these identities or movements ever acquired an anti-capitalist character, it has largely been due to their incorporating more universalistic ideologies – such as nationalism or socialism, for example – external to their particular identity politics during periods of mass emancipatory upsurge, such as in urban South Africa in the 1980s. Thus, the adding of ‘new identities’ and ‘new’ social movements to ‘old’ class identities and movements could not replace the ‘classist’ politics of the Marxist tradition with any alternative emancipatory vision; it amounted to a purely additive empiricist observation bereft of any theory other than the assertion of the inclusion of all into an existing democratic state to be ‘radicalised’ by the Left (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). At best we were provided with the liberal idea according to which ‘respect for or tolerance of the Other’ within a ‘multicultural society’ (the South African version became known as the ‘rainbow nation’) could pretend to be the norm. Unfortunately, such ‘respect for the Other’, it soon became noticeable, meant tolerance only of those others who agreed with one’s own idea of tolerance, not of ‘intolerant cultures’ or those deemed to be ‘outsiders’ (Badiou, 2001). Such an incoherent idea could only provide the foundation for a hypocritical, unprincipled politics (Žižek, 1999, 2008). Yet the roots of this idea are arguably to be found, as I shall show throughout this book, in the deeply ingrained depoliticising effects of social analysis, a fact which we have great reticence in admitting or even recognising today, as we take such effects for granted.

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12    Thinking Freedom in Africa

can emancipatory politics be thought in africa today? An emancipatory political subjectivity or consciousness can only exist ‘in excess’ of social relations and of the social division of labour; otherwise, any change from the extant cannot possibly be the object of thought. Such a politics cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘expression’ of existing social groupings, their divisions and hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character which ‘interrupts’ the reproduction of the regular, the habitual, politics can only be sought within the social itself and ends up being simply conflated with ‘the political’, with the state and its ‘political society’. Badiou himself enjoins us to think politics ‘as excess over both the state and civil society’ (1985: 20), for ‘dialectical thought does not begin from the rule but from the exception’ (p. 90, my translation), from the interruption of repetition, of habit; and to understand that a truly ‘political process is not an expression, a singular expression, of the objective reality but it is in some sense separated from this reality. The political process is not a process of expression, but a process of separation’ (Badiou, 2005d: 2). Yet, Badiou argues, this process is more accurately grasped as an exception, as mere separation can be equated with an intervention from beyond the political situation (such as divine intervention, colonial domination or economic growth). ‘It is very important to distinguish separation from ... an exception. An exception remains internal to the situation (made of legal, regular and structural data). It is an immanent point of transcendence, a point which, from within a general immanence, functions as if it were exterior to the situation’ (Badiou, 2013f, 16 January 2013, my translation, emphasis in original). It is this point of exception which I have called ‘excessive’ here.14 Emancipatory politics therefore can ultimately only exist to some degree ‘in excess’ of both state and civil society, the domain of the organised form of that social division of labour, as I shall show throughout this book. Another way of making the same point is to insist that emancipatory politics are ‘dis-interested’ – in other words, that they eschew narrow interests in favour of a ‘disinterested interest’ or universal interest beyond social interests and identities – and are founded on principles that have been collectively agreed upon. In fact, a notion of excess is arguably present in Marx’s conception of the political consciousness of ‘communist proletarians’ referred to in the Communist Manifesto, as ‘they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 62). In other words, whereas Marx maintained that it was indeed ‘social being’ that determined ‘social consciousness’, this process was not mechanically or universally applicable; some were able to embody an ‘excess’ in consciousness over their social being in order to think beyond it. Such people were communists, who could imagine another world and understand the contradictions of capitalism that gave rise to it.

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      Introduction     13

Does the fact that we can no longer seriously maintain that there is a socially given subject of history of whatever kind (whether the working class, the people, the masses, the nation or the multitude) mean that all emancipatory political thought must be simply discarded? Does the extinction worldwide of the idea of an emancipatory working-class politics (in other words, of ‘classism’) mean the disappearance of emancipatory thought today? Is the view that people make history dead? These questions clearly seem to be answered in the affirmative in recent thinking about the solutions proposed to political crises on the African continent by Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe, two of Africa’s best-known radical public intellectuals, whose work emanates from quite distinct intellectual and theoretical traditions, but who, in the past, had been very much concerned with the thinking of history from the perspective of a popular political subject. In both cases the idea of popularly founded solutions, which was central to African radical thought in the second half of the 20th century, has been abandoned. The solutions proposed to us today are invariably state-focused, with no emancipatory content whatsoever. While Fanon (1990: 159), for example, stressed again and again that the people he refers to as ‘honest intellectuals’ can only come to the conclusion that ‘everything depends on [the masses]’ and that ‘the magic hands [of the demiurge] are finally only the hands of the people’, radical intellectuals today have discarded the central tenet of any emancipatory politics, which is to ‘have confidence in the masses’, in whatever way this may be understood, and replaced it by a deep-seated ‘demophobia’.15 In one of his recent books, on the Darfur crisis in the Sudan, Mamdani (2009) rightly attacks the human rights discourse and politics of Western humanitarian solutions to the African crisis as necessarily providing a neo-colonial response to Africa’s problems which hides an agenda of recolonisation. Yet his solution, although located in Africa, is to appeal to the African Union (AU), that vulgar simulacrum of pan-African unity, to resolve the problems of Sudan and, by extension, those of the continent as a whole, as it evidently has no direct interest in specific conflicts and can insist on political reconciliation. But the AU has not been able to overcome the problems of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in that it is simply a collection of states which is incapable of any real pan-African conviction, and which can only think statist solutions to continental problems. In at least one clear case, that of Somalia, it has simply followed US policy, which has been totally inimical to the interests of the people of that country (Samatar, 2007). Nowhere in his book does Mamdani attempt to move beyond thinking in terms of statist solutions to investigate the possibility that there may be alternative popular solutions to what amounts after all to a major catastrophe for the people involved. The idea is simply to turn to state power(s) in order to find solutions for problems which state politics in whatever form have themselves largely initiated. After all, it could be important to ask: how are the appropriate social forces within the country to be identified and ‘mobilised’

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14    Thinking Freedom in Africa

to sustain a reconciliation process which is brokered exclusively from the outside and to which internal forces are only marginally committed at best? Such a sustained mobilisation would imply the commitment of substantial sectors of the population to a politics of peace and hence to an alternative set of political prescriptions, which would not simply concern an ‘adequate’ management of power interests (dare one say ‘good governance’?) in the interests of a (reconstituted) oligarchy. Given the lack of legitimacy of African states among their own people, such solutions, developed among sectors of the oligarchy, will always be suspect. Mamdani’s search for solutions beyond interest leads him to look in the wrong place because of his reduction of politics to power and the state. Mamdani is primarily interested in analysing the colonial origins of the political in Africa today, the way in which the state exercises its rule, rather than in thinking politics as subjective practice.16 His concerns since the publication of Citizen and Subject (1996) have focused on (particularly ethnic) identity state politics and their institutional conditions of existence, while his normative arguments concern the imagining of a truly liberal state form. His liberal conception of the political means, however, that he cannot provide a way to thinking militancy and, in particular, a subjective politics of emancipation through which a universal politics of equality, rather than a particularistic conception of communitarianism, could be imagined. Emancipation in Africa is not a matter of tinkering with institutions of power under ‘expert’ advice, assuming this would be possible, or of waiting for a philosopher-king to achieve power or, for that matter, of relying on supra-national state institutions, for these simply reproduce the problem of state power, which is by its very nature antithetical to freedom, justice, dignity and equality. For a truly ‘democratic state’ to be established – one that is responsive to popular needs and that is thus forced to confront its own ‘oxymoronic’ character – a universal egalitarian politics must be continuously affirmed. Thus, we need to move beyond an understanding of state forms of politics, liberalism included, if we are to begin to think an emancipatory way forward. In sum, Mamdani’s concerns are with the political, the anatomy of power, so to speak, whereas what I maintain is required today, given the need to enable emancipatory thought in a post-classist period, is a concern with politics as subjectivity, as a thought-practice, more specifically a subjectivity that transcends interest. This is a distinction I maintain rigorously throughout this book: the political concerns power, it is captured and structured by interests; on the other hand, politics in its real sense – in other words, in the sense that it enables agency and emancipatory change – concerns thought, it is lived, it is affirmed. Moreover, if this is so, popular politics cannot be reduced to the ‘politics of civil society’, as this is understood as the domain where organised interests are upheld by rights-bearing citizens. Mbembe’s perspective is also problematic, for he does not seem to be concerned with an analysis of what an emancipatory subjectivity could look like, other than

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      Introduction     15

referring to the politics of civil society. Reviewing the experience of Africa after 50 years of independence, Mbembe (2010b) laments the absence of a democratic project as well as the absence of a basis for social revolution on the continent, while stressing the ‘irrepressible desire of hundreds of millions to live anywhere else but at home’ and the emergence of a ‘culture of racketeering’ (p. 3, my translation throughout). Thus bemoaning the absence of any Idea, as both people and governments seem to have been ‘de-classed’ or ‘lumpenised’, the author resurrects old names in the form of some kind of ‘New Deal’ to be ‘negotiated between African states and international powers’, in terms of which the question of democracy in Africa is to be ‘internationalised’ so that ‘rogue states’ can be ‘legitimately deposed by the use of force and the authors of these political crimes arraigned before international courts of justice’ (p. 11). For Mbembe, ‘the democratisation of Africa is indeed firstly an African question. It clearly must pass by the constitution of social forces which are capable of giving birth to it, to carry it and to defend it. But it is equally an international affair’ (Mbembe, 2010a: 28, my translation). Of course, the whole idea of solidarity in any democratic and egalitarian struggle is crucially important, yet if this solidarity is not thought independently of the state and its subjectivities, we are likely to fall back into the well-worn paternalistic theme of Africa as a ‘basket case’, which is said to be incapable of sorting out its own problems and which should therefore be recolonised in one form or another by the West.17 Given the current prevalence of colonial political subjectivities, these types of ‘solutions’, however humanitarian and democratic they may abstractly seem to be, are in essence simply neo-colonial. This became evident in Libya in 2012, when, after having supported the Libyan ruler Colonel Qaddafi for many years, the so-called international community decided to remove him from power by military means under the pretext of his authoritarianism. Moreover, international courts would have greater legitimacy if only they could also put out arrest warrants for Western leaders (such as Henry Kissinger or Tony Blair) for crimes against humanity, but this, of course, is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future (see Žižek, 2002: 265). Thus a dead end has been reached in thinking emancipation simply because the thinking of freedom is not radically divorced from that of power, of the state. Mbembe wishes for some form of Western regulation of African politics; Mamdani opposes such a position and appeals to the AU instead. Multinational state solutions – African or Western – are seen as the core prescriptions and the only way out of the crisis of African state politics, much as in the early 1960s, when Patrice Lumumba had thought that the problems of the Republic of Congo could be resolved by appealing to the United Nations (UN).18 The result of this deference to the West, reproduced to various extents by African leaders and academic discourse ever since, has been perennial crisis in the Congo, where there is still today a UN military presence. There will be no solution to the crisis of the African state unless people themselves – people

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16    Thinking Freedom in Africa

from all walks of life – are allowed and encouraged to discover the truth of their situation and not to rely on the powerful, whether local or foreign, to solve their problems on their behalf. There can be no progress unless people19 are able to become again the subjects of their own history rather than its victims. The result of the current poverty of intellectual thought is that ultimately it is the dominant powers of the world (or of the continent) that are simply allowed and encouraged to act in Africa in their own narrow interests; such interventions have a history of being, and indeed they continue to be, totally contemptuous of the working people of the continent. The outcomes of such ‘solutions’ have been there for all to see in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, yet this failure of the imagination is allowed to continue uncontested simply because popularly founded solutions are no longer considered relevant or, more accurately, do not even enter within the parameters of thought. The core problem with both Mbembe’s and Mamdani’s recent work, whatever their specific arguments and the undoubted value of their theoretical innovations, concerns the orientation of their thought. For Mbembe, intellectual thought, and therefore the thought of any emancipatory experiment, is unable to distance itself clearly from conceiving change in state terms despite its Fanonian humanist influences;20 while, for Mamdani, it is clearly focused on thinking changes to the state in Africa. In both cases we remain within the habitual account of power and hence we have difficulty in overcoming the fundamental obstacles to a new thought of emancipation. In this book I focus on explicating a politics ‘at a distance’ from the state and attempt to open a space for thinking the exceptional rather than the habitual precisely in order to make emancipation thinkable again in Africa. The predominant effect of this crisis in thought has often been the uncritical absorption of neo-liberal and historicist notions such as those of ‘civil society’, ‘human rights’, ‘(post)modernity’ and ‘identity’ into a discourse that purports to be emancipatory. Of course, this has been facilitated by what has become known as the ‘language turn’ in social thought worldwide, although it has simultaneously led to a welcome emphasis on the subjective. The idea of ‘political identities’ has been perhaps the dominant intellectual notion here. But discourses and identities are simply seen as effects of the structure of interests and power; for Foucault, they are themselves a ‘subjective structure’, so to speak, and they constitute the essence of the culture of modernity (2003a: 54). Studies of political identities have become overwhelmingly dominant within all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities today, in the Global South in general and in Africa in particular, so much so that they are consensual. Thinkers as disparate as Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah and Paul Zeleza (not to mention a myriad of feminist writers) have all, in their different ways, thought African society, state and politics in terms of identities: personal, social and political.21 One of the difficulties they have tried to confront has been termed the ‘essentialism’ of identities, which refers all

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      Introduction     17

thought to an unchanging kernel or essence of the identity in question and thereby evidently de-historicises and naturalises it. Attempts have been made to overcome this difficulty by reference to the relational side of identity – the idea that there is no ‘self ’ without the ‘other’ – but unfortunately this does not overcome the problem, for relations presuppose the existence of differences and only stress their interconnections, even though these may be given a central effectivity.22 Neither does the notion of ‘hybridity’ or the recognition of a complex multiplicity of identities get us very far in thinking a politics of emancipation.23 Africans, of course, have been overwhelmingly analysed – by outsiders as well as by themselves – in terms of their social location in Africa and in terms of Africa’s continental place: in ‘human evolution’, in (colonial) history, in the world economy, in its collective culture and identity, and even in its ‘personality’ (inter alia, its ‘darkness’ or its ‘Blackness’).24 The core of the discourse of African identity has been the African as victim. For Mbembe, ‘modern African reflection on identity is essentially a matter of liturgical construction and incantation rather than criticism’ (2001: 2); such reflection, he adds, reduces an extraordinary history to three tragic acts: ‘slavery, colonization and apartheid’ (p. 3); in other words, Africans are thereby simply reduced to victims of history. The placing of subjectivity within location was, of course, an Enlightenment conception. For Hegel (1952: 196), for example, the supposed absence of history in Africa was to be accounted for by its geographical location.25 Today the study of identities and place has simply become pan-disciplinary in Africa. Displacement – the politics of excess beyond social location and identity – has rarely provided the theoretical foundation for a history of Africans, and yet it is surely displacement that is the truly universal phenomenon of politics and hence of history.26 The once common statement that it is people who make history has largely been forgotten; it is time to revive it and to insist that people can think beyond their social place. In this context, the consequences of recent events in North Africa and the Middle East for thinking emancipatory politics need to be urgently drawn.27

transcending political identities and identity politics The dominance after the 1980s of a concept of ‘civil society’ provided a boost to the sociology of social movements as well as to a Left critique of African state parties, as various dictatorships were replaced by parliamentary democracies, partly as a result of popular protests, partly as a result of external pressure from the neo-liberal consensus. Throughout the continent, but in post-apartheid South Africa in particular, there has been a dramatic increase in the study of so-called organisations of civil society.28 Yet what is important to note as regards politics is that social movements as well as NGOs are always organised interests. In other words, as they invariably represent interests of various sorts, their politics are overwhelmingly the politics of representation, with the

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18    Thinking Freedom in Africa

result that their mere existence (however much they may ‘resist’, ‘protest’ or ‘critique’) provides us usually with little more than popular examples of state politics. This, of course, is precisely how the sociology of social movements analyses them, even in cases when movements may have been able to invent a politics of excess over their social location.29 Actually existing sociology has not been able to transcend the view of consciousness as representation. A universal politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is not given by the existence of social movements; if it is to exist, such a politics must step out from its limitations of interest, from its confines of place. Any organisation doing so ceases to be a social movement in the strict sense and transcends place while remaining localised. We can call this process a singular process, to distinguish it from the usual notion of the particular (Badiou, 2004). This collective subject now overtakes its location while its politics have the potential to become universal (to produce a ‘truth’, in Badiou’s terms); it thereby creates itself as a collective subject of politics.30 Such a process is referred to as subjectivation. Another difficulty with identity studies has been precisely their inability to conceptualise politics beyond the particular, with the consequence that a universal politics of emancipation, which people are evidently clearly crying out for, remains untheorised. Identity politics, which vary from the totally reactionary (in the case of ethnic or xenophobic politics) to the state-focused liberalism of multiculturalism, workerism and currently hegemonic liberal feminisms, are incapable of providing a basis for the thinking of a politics beyond state democracy and hence beyond current configurations of neo-liberal capitalism. As a result, one is left with a theoretical vacuum which is desperately demanding to be filled. The question crudely put is: given the demise and evident irrelevance of past theoretical perspectives for thinking emancipation today, how is emancipation to be thought – assuming that it is indeed to be thought, something which is here taken for granted? The social sciences as currently constituted, given as they are to reducing consciousness to social location or place, are subjectively constrained by their current episteme – in Foucault’s sense of the term – and are thereforce unable to theorise a necessary notion of excess over interest, such as the idea of dignity.31 The fundamental problem of identity studies from the perspective of emancipation is that political identities are necessarily derived from social location; they ‘represent’ such social location or place in what is termed ‘the political’. As a result, identities can only reproduce such places subjectively along with their accompanying hierarchy, thereby leaving a universal notion of emancipation (equality, freedom, justice, dignity) unthought and indeed unthinkable outside market-capitalist and state-democratic norms. In contrast, any ‘politics of emancipation attempts to supersede (outrepasser) questions of identity’ (Badiou, 2010b: 37). Simultaneously, the absence of a thought of politics beyond identity, the inability to think a politics of excess, has also had other problematic effects. Central to these has been the inability to break free

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      Introduction     19

from state modes of thought, from ‘seeing like a state’, as James Scott (1998) puts it. It is important to understand that, irrespective of which (class or other) interests control it, regardless of the contradictions within it and independently of the form it may take (whether authoritarian, democratic, colonial or postcolonial), the state is and remains a set of institutions that create, manage and reproduce differences and hierarchies. It not only regulates the various interests founded on a social division of labour but also manages differences, so that any given situation is reproduced. The state can be little more than a machine for creating identities, as these are simply the subjective representations of interests. State politics, then, concern the representation of interests (by parties, interest groups, social movements, NGOs, etc.) and the management of such interests, thus restricting them to controllable limits. State politics can therefore not be concerned with excess over identities, or change beyond what exists. For state politics, all historical change can only be thought of as natural and objective (as in the notions of ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘modernisation’, etc.) and obviously as linear and teleological. For emancipatory politics, change from the current situation can only be primarily subjective, as it has to overcome place on the understanding that there is no end to history or, for that matter, to difference; hence, such a politics can only be ‘indifferent to difference’ or ‘disinterested interest’ (Badiou, 2001). In the absence of concepts to enable a thinking of politics on its own terms, we are invariably drawn into the politics of the state and the tyranny of the objective, so that political choices become impossible, given that politics becomes guided, if not determined, by the objective course of history. What this argument also implies is that there can be no subject of history (the proletariat, the nation, the multitudes, etc.). There is, of course, a subject of politics which for writers like Rancière and Badiou is always collective, but this subject results from a process of conscious political self-creation or affirmation – a process of subjectivation. Therefore, there can be no way of filling a spontaneous immanent Hegelian process of ‘in itself–for itself ’ with other newly invented subjects of history, along the lines of the ‘multitudes’ proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), for example. In fact, such an immanent transfiguration denies the necessity of thinking a political process whereby people can think for themselves and collectively constitute themselves as a political subject; invariably this comes down to thinking politics in terms of representation by parties or movements and to asserting that real change is impossible, for people cannot think independently of representation. Unlike the concept of ‘the people’, which is a purely political concept, the idea of the multitudes for Rancière (2015: 92) ‘emphasizes that politics is not a separate sphere of existence but instead that which expresses the multiple as the Law of being’. Politics in this understanding simply expresses or represents the social.

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20    Thinking Freedom in Africa

Another important consequence of the argument above is that we can no longer think politics as existing exclusively within a clearly demarcated domain, that of ‘the political’, i.e. that of the state and its appendages. The political or the civic or the ‘house of power’ – to use Max Weber’s suggestive phrase (1970b: 194) – is, of course, said to be the domain within which conflicts of interest are deployed, represented and managed. Politics cannot be thought of as concerning power, for to do so is to restrict them to the state. Even more interesting perhaps for the arguments that follow is that the discourses and practices which are to be labelled ‘political’ cannot be so labelled simply because they deal explicitly with identifiable objects of state politics (states, nations, trade unions, movements, citizens, NGOs, etc.). There are two points of note here. The first is that a clearly demarcated domain of the political cannot always be assumed to exist, as in the obvious case of ‘traditional society’ in Africa; the second is that the various idioms and discourses deployed by people in affirming their politics, in presenting themselves on the ‘stage of history’, are not always evidently ‘political’, in the sense that they may invoke ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or other linguistic tropes, which do not count as ‘politics’ for the liberal (or Marxist) episteme. In other words, the idea of the political, emanating as it does from liberal roots, has a clear neo-colonial content to it. Moreover, of course, the form of the state today in Africa, as elsewhere, is one in which the liberal distinction between the public and the private has not been apparent for some time now. The national or public interest today has largely disappeared, smothered by the (over)weight of the private (Neocosmos, 2011b). The overwhelming consequence of the current phase of neo-colonialism – known as globalisation – in the sphere of politics has been the fetishisation of democracy, understood in its hegemonic liberal Western state form. Yet recent popular upsurges in North Africa have shown that the popular demand for democratisation cannot simply be equated with Westernisation. In post-apartheid South Africa the democratic fetish is so overwhelming today that it has become extremely difficult to question the equation of such state democracy with freedom itself. Yet one courageous popular organisation in particular – Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers’ movement based in Durban – has done so in practice, taking a principled stand (at least between 2005 and 2014) not to participate in elections and not to celebrate a non-existing freedom for the poor. In fact, in this country it has been popular organisations and intellectuals emanating from grassroots struggles, not the university variety, who have been at the forefront of the questioning of democracy; academics have so far been overwhelmingly mesmerised by the trappings of state ideology. It is indeed quite demoralising to see the extent to which intellectuals today are simply cut off from those sites in which ordinary people – particularly those living in informal shack settlements, the most ‘lumpen’ according to Mbembe (2010b) – are themselves attempting to find solutions because, after all, they are the first to suffer

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      Introduction     21

the consequences of the crises that intellectuals analyse from their positions of relative comfort. The work of the people of Abahlali baseMjondolo, for example, who are intellectuals in their own right, has gone in some ways much further in assessing the crisis of the African continent than that of many professional academics.32 What seems to underlie the thinking of intellectuals today in Africa is fundamentally a ‘fear of the masses’, what Rancière (2005) refers to as ‘demophobia’, which blocks any attempt at understanding the existing world through the evacuation of politics from thought, and which consequently makes it impossible to begin to think an alternative politics in the present. On the other hand, the ‘masses’ themselves are quite capable of thought. As Abahlali affirmed in response to xenophobic violence in 2008: There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves ... We hear that the political analysts are saying that the poor must be educated about xenophobia. Always the solution is to ‘educate the poor’. When we get cholera we must be educated about washing our hands when in fact we need clean water. When we get burnt we must be educated about fire when in fact we need electricity. This is just a way of blaming the poor for our suffering. We want land and housing in the cities, we want to go to university, we want water and electricity  – we don’t want to be educated to be good at surviving poverty on our own ... It is time to ask serious questions about why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation. In South Africa some of us are moved out of the cities to rural human dumping grounds called relocation sites while others are moved all the way out of the country. Some of us are taken to transit camps and some of us are taken to Lindela.33 The destinations might be different but it is the same kind of oppression. Let us all educate ourselves on these questions so that we can all take action (Abahlali, 2008). Here is a statement from poor people from the shacks which is clear in its politics of equality; the Idea of universal equality is evidently their central concern and the statement is not concerned with ‘interest’ or ‘identity’, both of which are clearly exceeded. It is apparent, as Lazarus (2013: 115, my translation) insists, that ‘the subjective power of people is a thought and not a simple reflection of their social or material conditions’. The importance of making politics thinkable, then, must be to make appropriate concepts available in order to understand people’s thought of politics and to begin to think emancipatory and exceptional political subjectivities along with them. There is unfortunately nothing in the proposals of either Mamdani

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22    Thinking Freedom in Africa

or Mbembe to cause one to question the fundamental necessity of rethinking emancipatory politics on the continent. Neither is there anything to suggest that popularly founded solutions are irrelevant simply because earlier emancipatory experiments have tragically failed (Badiou, 2009d). One needs to start by proposing the basic axiom that must form the point of departure of any such reassertion, namely that, as Abahlali show in the extract above, people are capable of thought and that therefore we need to rekindle fidelity to the old slogan of ‘confidence in the masses’, which should never be abandoned. The issue here does not concern an ‘empty signifier’ or a blind faith in whatever poor people choose to do, but a simple statement of fact. No emancipatory project founded on liberty, equality, dignity and justice for all can possibly be brought to fruition without genuine political agency by people themselves. That itself should be self-evident. Moreover, political emancipation can only be a universal project, not one restricted to certain strata, classes, races or groups, and thought and undertaken by leaders in power with or without popular support.34 Of course, this necessarily implies that the contradictions and frequent opposition between intellectual and manual labour, leaders and led, inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself, be addressed. In particular it should be stressed that, contrary to the dominant conception of theory in social and human science, people who resist oppression politically are not simply bearers of their social location (class, gender, ethnicity, nationality or whatever) or of a universal conception of ‘Man’, but reasoning beings with varying degrees of political agency who exist within specific contexts (see my discussion of the work of Ranajit Guha (1992a) in chapter 3). Rancière’s notion of ‘symbolic rupture’, ‘when people start talking about things that were not supposed to be their business’, is precisely meant to capture this point.35 In any case, people in Africa, when left to their own devices, have been quite capable historically of providing solutions to their own problems, including the thinking of a politics beyond their apparent material interests.

thinking a politics of disinterested interest It has become quite clear that there exists, at certain times in certain sites, a politics beyond interest and that this politics is the core idea behind a politics of emancipation, as emancipation is always ‘for all’ and never ‘for some’, as Badiou (2001) has put it. Such subjectivity can therefore not be understood as ‘reflective’ or ‘representative’ of any dimension of the social division of labour. It has also become clear that interest or identity politics as such are, in one way or another, always the foundation of state political subjectivity, as it is always the state that manages interests and resists emancipation precisely by denying the existence of a universal politics beyond interest. For modes of thought located within state thinking, all politics is founded on interests or identities: it is ultimately the same thing. What is required in Africa is indeed

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      Introduction     23

a universal Idea, as Mbembe recognises, but clearly such an Idea must be thought outside the constraints of the social and must simultaneously be able to ‘cut through’ the social, as, for it to have an emancipatory content, it must consist of a singular and objective ‘pure affirmation’ (Badiou, 2009c), independent of social referents and ‘in excess’ of them, much as Fanon (1990) showed ‘national consciousness’ to be in the 1950s in Algeria. This kind of singularity is central to such a politics and hence to its recognition. Finally, as will be shown in the following chapters, universal political singularities of emancipation have existed in the past in Africa at different times within specific historical sequences; such singularities may also exist in the present in some specific sites, which today can only be found not just beyond the state but also beyond civil society itself. As I have noted, in the 19th century Marx recognised that the European proletariat embodied a notion of universal emancipation. Yet that proletariat, while obviously existing as a socio-economic grouping in the guise of a working class, had to be constituted politically (i.e. subjectively): it had to unify itself around the acquisition of a common consciousness of its own objective location and universal political role in society. As Marx understood it, the process of class constitution was ultimately a political process; in other words, it concerned a specific political subjectivity, a communist subjectivity in his terms. All classes had to constitute themselves politically as such and were not simply given by production relations. This process could be one of constitution only in relation to other class forces. The European bourgeoisies, for example, constituted themselves in relation to a feudal aristocracy, in relation to the working people and eventually the working class, and in relation to one another through wars. The state, and hence state politics, was central to this process of ruling-class constitution and national unification. Indeed, Marx and Engels insisted in the German Ideology (1846: 47) that, as the bourgeoisie had to constitute itself as a class through conquering state power, so must the proletariat; but after the failure of the Paris Commune their view changed and they stressed that the existing state had first to be ‘smashed’ before an alternative could be constructed (Marx and Engels, 1872: 32). These European bourgeoisies were not simply given with an already existing national character, as the African literature often repeats in order to emphasise a contrast with the African bourgeoisies, which are said to be ‘compradorial’ in nature (i.e. linked to colonial interests). There are countless instances in European history of bourgeoisies caving in to the pressures of their foreign adversaries or of ‘calling in’ these bourgeois adversaries to help in putting down popular resistance, most notoriously in 1871 with the Paris Commune itself.36 Marx’s concept of the proletariat as a political subject follows precisely from its political constitution in Europe through the workers’ movements of the 19th century (1830, 1848 and 1871). Badiou (1985: 26–30) emphasises the fact that the singular importance of Marxism as a mode of thought does not reside in its analytical power or its

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24    Thinking Freedom in Africa

‘meta-narrative’ of history. Rather, out of all the revolutionary (i.e. emancipatory) doctrines emanating from the 19th century, Marxism was the only ideology that achieved extraordinary historical credit in the 20th; a validation which was reflected in three major areas. The first of these was the existence of a series of states which played an emblematic role as actually achieved revolutionary transformations and not simply as imagined ones. Marxism was actually lived as that subjectivity through which the oppressed (workers, peasants, national minorities, colonised, etc.) could vanquish the military might of their oppressors, if not for the first time in modern history  – that honour belongs to the slaves in Saint-Domingue, as we shall see – at least for the first time in the 20th century. This resulted not only in Marxism becoming a state ideology – and in the vanguard party becoming a state-party – but also in the creation of a beacon to which popular forces all over the world could refer and by which they could be inspired. Secondly, this credit was reflected in the struggles (and wars) of national liberation, in which the ideas of the nation and the people were often fused (as in China, Algeria and Cuba) under the direction of a party and of Marxist ideological hegemony. These national liberation struggles in turn had a major ideological impact on youth struggles elsewhere, such as during May 1968 in Europe. Finally, it was reflected within the working-class movement in the West itself, where Marxism had a major ideological effect on trade unions and parties, which became a permanent feature of state politics. These three cases proved the exceptional and successful character of Marxism as an emancipatory discourse during the previous century. The crisis of Marxism was occasioned by the gradual collapse of these three referents, while the failure of socialism as well as that of national liberation to enable popular emancipation was a failure of a politics focused entirely on the state and its capture. The state in fact cannot emancipate anyone; its fundamental reason for existence is precisely to reproduce at most a continuity with the extant; it is opposed to discontinuous (i.e. real) change as such. Yet this failure has not meant the disappearance of the need to think human emancipation nor implied the end of history. The difficulty consists in identifying precisely the source of that subjective problem and in beginning to overcome it without abandoning an emancipatory politics. The thought of emancipatory politics must thus be developed from within Marxism itself and must be a politics of activism and militancy, not one focused on state power and the problematic of state capture. In this context it is crucial to insist on the fact that political subjectivities can be analysed, explained and understood rationally as much as any objective factor can be, and that this can be done without any collapse into idealism. We must therefore have the courage to move beyond Marx’s statement in his famous 1859 Preface and to assert that the ‘ideological forms in which

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      Introduction     25

men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out’ can indeed be explained rationally without reducing them to ‘the existing conflict between social productive forces and the relations of production’ (1859: 182). In fact, Badiou shows quite clearly that subjectivity itself is part of the real, and not expressive of it in a distinct domain; it is this that allows for a rational investigation of political subjectivities. As a result, Badiou argues, the core concept in an analysis of politics must be that of ‘practice’; politics therefore must be understood as a ‘thought-practice’. 37 It is this that makes it real: I do not think it pertinent to oppose idealism to materialism on the basis of the distinction between thought and the real (primacy of the first over the second for idealism, and the opposite for materialism). Because this very common conception misunderstands the fundamental (materialist) point that thought is part of the real. To define materialism in terms of the primacy of the real over thought is already to have taken an idealist position ... Materialist, dialectical thought (dialectical materialism) itself begins with the notion of practice. What does ‘practice’ mean? For me it means that the finitude of objective conditions allows for the development of an immanent exception (Badiou, 2012c, 24 October, 14 November 2012, my translation, emphasis in original).38 For Rancière also, it is from the practical exception that one must begin if one wishes to understand political subjectivities, for it is such exceptions which show that people speak for themselves – contrary to much social science, which sees itself as speaking for people who do not speak for themselves: The normal is when people remain in their place and when it all continues as before. Nevertheless, everything of note in the history of humanity functions according to the principle that something happens, that people begin to speak ... If we are speaking of the ‘workers’ voice’, we speak from the perspective of people who speak. That seems to be a truism. Yet it is contrary to a certain scientific method which requires that when we speak of the voice of the people, we are speaking of those who do not speak ... the point essentially is to speak for those who do not speak. This is as much a strategy of top politicians as it is of historians or sociologists, to say that the voice which counts is the voice of those who do not speak (Rancière, 2012: 194, my translation).

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26    Thinking Freedom in Africa

in conclusion In sum, ‘politics is thought’, ‘thought is real’ and ‘people think’ are the three fundamental axioms of this book. Today, in the 21st century, it is apparent that emancipatory politics are not necessarily constituted around class, although they invariably are constituted around the politically ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s sense of the term (Badiou, 2011c).39 The social categories of the people, the poor, the youth (and, during certain periods, women), have equally provided the basis for the thought of emancipation; yet, however excessive that thought of politics may have been at times, in most instances emancipation has been thought in terms of access in one form or another to the state, a fact which has had the effect of reversing emancipatory gains. The reduction of emancipatory political subjectivity to class (and indeed to any other social location or identity) is today redundant because the thought of politics as expressive of social location is the foundation of state politics: it is the state which thinks location, hierarchy, interests and identities, as it must ensure their reproduction. For emancipation to be adequately thought, social reductionism must be replaced with an understanding of the politically subjective which, while in some way marked by the objectively social, recognises its excessive – and hence its irreducible – character. It is not just a matter of critiquing neo-liberalism, socialism or nationalism as such. Rather, an alternative vision of freedom must also be affirmed, and it is the old notions of emancipation and freedom that need to be critiqued. In order to do this we need new categories and concepts to propose as part of a new vision of freedom. It follows that without opening up political subjectivities – including those of freedom – to rigorous study, making them visible, recognising their existence as worthy of analysis, we will be stuck within the past ways of thinking freedom (liberalism, Marxism, nationalism), which could not move beyond state thinking. The way forward intellectually must be to think emancipatory politics, to think subjectivities as such, not simply as expressive of the social, which amounts to state thinking, but by detaching them from their current anchor in identity politics in general and from (social) psychology or morality in particular. This is a complex enterprise, but part of it must consist in a rethinking of history beyond historicism and of politics beyond the state; not as determined ‘in the last instance’ by the social (economy, state, nation, etc.), a conception which is always founded on material interests, but to refashion Althusser’s insight that history has no subject. In this manner politics can also become thinkable outside the party form, for the party represented the subject of history in radical thought, being said to represent the working class, the masses, the people or the nation in the political sphere. Subjects – which, according to Badiou (2009a), are always collective subjects in politics – can therefore be rigorously understood as produced and not as given; they can in fact be conceived as produced through a politics, as the products of subjectivities (through a process of ‘subjectivation’) and not the other way round, thus avoiding a collapse into idealism.

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      Introduction     27

As Lazarus (1996: 67ff) insists, the foundation statement for the thinking of politics today must be ‘people think’. The foundational axiom of the thought of emancipatory politics must be that people are capable of thinking a different ‘possible’ – in other words, ‘what could be’ – in the present: ‘to say “people think” is to say that they are capable, under a name, of prescribing a possible which is irreducible to the repetition or continuation of what exists’ and thus to become component parts of a collective political subject (Badiou, 1998a: 32). They are, in other words, capable of reason, of thinking beyond their social location and conditions, of thinking an excess beyond the simply given extant of the social division of labour and its corresponding social identities. Politics as thought in practice – emancipatory politics – must thus exist in excess of social relations and of social identities; otherwise, any change from the existing matrix of social relations and power cannot possibly be the object of thought, and people are not considered to be beings who reason; it cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of existing socio-economic groupings and their hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character, politics is simply conflated with ‘the political’, with party, the state and political community. This has been the core problem of previous attempts to understand emancipation in Africa and national emancipatory politics in particular. At the same time, it must be noted that excess is always excess over something, namely the extant, with the result that there is always a relationship between the thought of what is and the thought of what could be. The ‘excessive’ and the ‘expressive’ are always related in some dialectical way in political subjectivity, and it is the dialectical relation between the two which provides the thread of this book. Badiou (2016) puts it as follows: ‘you can indeed exceed the world but you can only do so from within. The procedures you invent must necessarily borrow from surrounding conceptions willingly or not.’40 Finally, it should also be stressed that the idea of ‘excess’ must not be understood in any simple ‘additive’ sense, for it may overturn the thought of the extant completely, or ‘puncture a hole in it’; yet such a politics of separation is sufficiently linked to the extant, to identities, interests and the state, for it ultimately to be, arguably, the most appropriate term available. Therefore, the objective and the subjective must not be thought of as related exclusively in an expressive manner, with the latter at most reacting back onto the former. They may be so related ‘normally’ or ‘habitually’, within what Badiou (1988) refers to as ‘the state of the situation’ and within society itself, although even in this case the expressive may take the form of specific idioms and discourses themselves not immediately reducible to social place, as we shall see in later chapters. But an emancipatory subjectivity can only find its roots within a relation of excess, wherein the expression of the objective is transcended or ‘punctured’ in many different ways, depending on circumstances. The excessive–expressive dialectic is thus what structures the thought of emancipation.

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28    Thinking Freedom in Africa

This book is concerned with opening up and discussing this excessive subjectivity – this thought in the strict sense, for expressive subjectivity is not thought, but mere expression of interest – justifying its existence, outlining some of the categories necessary for it to begin to be apprehended in thought, and identifying the way it is still marked by and linked to expression and representation. The book’s concern is to ‘bring politics back in’ – to paraphrase a hackneyed slogan – in view of the fact that politics understood as consciousness, ideologies, choices  – in other words, as subjectivities – has been systematically evacuated from thought in the social or human sciences, primarily and fundamentally because of the equation of politics with the state along with the ‘epistemic reason’ governing these forms of knowledge acquisition. As a result, to paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) famous point, ‘the subaltern cannot be heard’ from within the parameters of this scientistic epistemic discourse. This is not because of any conscious distortion, but because of the ways in which a social or human science thinks subjectivity: exclusively as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the social and, more precisely, of the entities of the social division of labour and hierarchy. As we shall see, such thinking amounts to a statist mode of thought, for it is the state which is concerned to manage and regulate such divisions, differences and identities; this mode of thought simply concerns how society is and cannot possibly think how it could be. It cannot think an alternative prescriptively, but only the extant descriptively or analytically and the tendencies derived from them. It therefore cannot think a possible future in the present, because it cannot think a universal Idea of freedom and equality as excessive, for such an Idea is purely and irreducibly subjective. This book is divided into two parts. The first is concerned with thinking the history of political subjectivities through the use of what I have referred to as historical sequences of politics. The second deals explicitly with specific categories of African politics, such as class, nation, state, civil society, culture and tradition, rethinking these from the point of people rather than from the point of the state; in other words, as both excessive and expressive subjectivities deployed in various African contexts. The first part of the book consists of a debate with the discipline of history and with historians through an attempt to show that an excessive politics can be identified in popular struggles of the past, but that this excessive subjectivity is limited in time. The second part consists of a debate with sociology and, more precisely, with a view of politics reduced to the social: here an understanding of state categories from the point of popular experience is proposed. In either part alternatives are suggested in order to overcome the conceptual and political limitations of these perspectives as currently constituted. Given that emancipatory politics are rare and limited in time, it is possible to identify them with a certain degree of precision and to elucidate their rise and fall. It is through such a methodology that Lazarus (1996) identifies sequential historical modes of politics. Such subjective sequences are discontinuous, while what usually counts as historical ‘periodisation’ refers to continuous but objectively

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      Introduction     29

distinct sequences of state politics. The first part of the book thus consists of the development of a methodology for the identification and analysis of such sequences – in particular, emancipatory ones  – in the history of Africans; the second outlines the consequences of this methodology for thinking politics today: both the socially reducible politics of the state and the identification of possible emancipatory subjectivities in the present and how they relate dialectically with the social.

notes   1. The only significant theorist to have drawn a parallel between South Africa and North Africa I know of was Mahmood Mamdani in Pambazuka News; see Mamdani (2011b).   2. This denial of history in Africa by Hegel took the following forms. After enunciating all sorts of fanciful accounts (mainly from travellers) regarding Africans, including cannibalism, Hegel maintains that the ‘Negro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state ... there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character’ (1952: 196, 197). He concludes: ‘Africa ... is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit ... What we properly understand by Africa is the unhistorical undeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which has to be presented ... only as on the threshold of the world’s history’ (p. 199). His comments are based on the crudest racist prejudices of his times (1820s–1830s). Interestingly, Hegel dismisses Africa in a section entitled ‘Geographical Basis of History’, where he sees geographical location (place) as fundamental to the growth of ‘spirit’. This argument is thus one of the most important formal assertions of the location of subjectivity in place. He maintains that Africa’s natural state is a consequence of its ‘isolated character [and] originates ... in its geographical condition’ (p. 196); he also states that native Americans ‘gradually vanished at the breath of European activity’ and were ‘passionless’ and of a ‘crouching submissiveness ... towards a European’ (p. 190), while mentioning that they were treated with violence although not by any means illegitimately, it seems. It appears that, for Hegel, the accounts by travellers he used came in handy for his exposition, as they enabled him to illustrate what his time saw as a fanciful ‘natural condition’, which was ‘one of absolute and thorough injustice’ (p. 199). It would have been extremely useful for him to show that the ‘history of spirit’ could obviously not germinate in such peoples and therefore that a ‘civilising mission’ was clearly legitimate. He notes, for example, when he refers to Egypt that ‘this part ... must be attached to Europe; the French have lately made a successful effort in this direction’ (p. 196, emphasis in original). The reference is to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt; if that part of Africa was to be beneficially colonised by Europe, how much more could this be said to apply to the rest of the continent. Hegel was not only a ‘man of his times’ but thought like the European racist state of his times. To seek in Hegel, as Buck-Morss does, a positive assessment of the struggle for freedom against

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30    Thinking Freedom in Africa

slavery in Haiti is a fanciful idea of our own times, for which the universality of humanity has been rediscovered in the form of an imperial conception of ‘human rights’, which I will assess in detail later in this book (see Buck-Morss (2000) and also Nesbitt (2008a)). For Hegel, universal freedom (which he equated with reason) was a notion which could not be applicable to ‘Negroes’, for in his eyes they did not belong to humanity, ‘for the essence of humanity is freedom’ and ‘slavery is and for itself injustice’, this being the condition of nature; yet he goes so far as to ‘conclude [that] slavery ... [was] the occasion of the increase in human feelings among the Negroes’ (p. 199, emphasis in original); in other words, European slavery and colonialism were justified by Hegel as ways of turning the inhuman and barbaric ‘Negroes’ into humans. For a good critical assessment of Buck-Morss’s argument, see Stephanson (2010); I am grateful to Peter Hallward for referring me to this last text. For those who may be tempted to believe that Hegel’s views of Africans may no longer be in vogue, I can only refer to the outrageously patronising speech which ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy of France delivered on 26 July 2007 in Dakar, Senegal, and the reactions which followed, for the details of which see Ndiaye (2008). Inter alia, he says (p. 80): ‘The drama of Africa consists in the fact that African Man did not sufficiently enter history’ (i.e. the history of humanity).   3. The seminal work of Cheikh Anta Diop (e.g. 1989, 1991) must be referred to from the outset. His genius lay in inter alia, grasping the original cultural essence of the African continent, which he saw as founded on matriarchal social systems. His work has provided the foundation for rethinking patriarchal and matriarchal subjectivities on the continent (e.g. by Ifi Amadiume (1987)) as well as for a reassessment of the origins of Western civilisation itself by Martin Bernal, who draws attention to the Afro-Asiatic influences on Ancient Greek culture; see Bernal (1987). From the perspective taken here, the limits of Diop’s analyses are the same as with all those who begin from ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’: the stress on the ‘place’ rather than on the ‘out of place’; for the distinction, see Rancière (1994).   4. In this context, it seems to me that the common reference to ‘the colonial subject’ is an oxymoron. It is largely an absurdity, as the colonial state (and indeed neo-colonialism today), to use an Althusserian expression, did not and could not ‘interpellate’ the colonised as subjects, but only as non-subjects or partial subjects (subhumans, children, victims, etc.). In the (neo-)colonial context, full subjecthood has only been acquired through opposition to such interpellation, through exceeding this subjectively, as I shall show below. More generally, as will become apparent, I follow the thinking of Badiou and Rancière in separating political subjectivity from individual consciousness.   5. Lukas Khamisi was the collective pseudonym for some participants in the Dar es Salaam debate.   6. The studies of these issues in Africa are numerous, but see, in particular, those published under the auspices of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, in the 1990s and by CODESRIA into the 21st century up to the present, which have been of high academic quality. The fact that these studies rarely questioned capitalism itself but only its neo-liberal form is probably best summed up in Mkandawire’s

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      Introduction     31

(2001) contention that Africa can indeed develop under capitalism (or South African president Thabo Mbeki’s assertion that Africa can and should appropriate modernity, presumably in the manner in which his own country has done so, with half of its population living in poverty). In so far as an alternative was proposed in this literature, it was one that argued for a state and a form of capitalism more responsive to the national interest and for a form of democracy that should be more inclusive. The problem to be noted here is not whether or not African economies can develop under capitalism – after all, the connection between capitalism and Europe has been definitely and permanently broken with the rise of China, India and Brazil as global economic powers – rather, the horizon of thought in these instances is unjustifiably restrictive, to say the least.   7. Writing in the early 1990s, Claude Ake contended that there were ‘several democracies vying for preferment in a struggle whose outcome is as yet uncertain’ (2003: 127); by the mid-1990s, the nature of democracy was no longer the object of contestation, as it had become solidified as a form of parliamentary state. See also Rudebeck (2001).   8. The discipline of anthropology was not considered in this context, being anathema to radical nationalist intellectual discourse, given its erstwhile association with colonialism, especially in Anglophone Africa.   9. Mamdani’s work has concentrated overwhelmingly on the state construction of ethnic identities, which he sees as structurally determined, while popular struggles are seen as reacting within that existing determination; see, for example, his analysis of the problems of the DRC in Pambazuka News (Mamdani, 2011a). More recently, since his return to Uganda, his writing has arguably been less overtly structuralist and seemingly more located and sensitive to the need for popular struggles which eschew the taking of state power; see Mamdani (2012), for example. 10. See Comaroff and Comaroff (2006), who mention the controlling function of bureaucracy through the medium of human rights discourse, but put this down to ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘postcoloniality’ rather than to democracy as such. 11. It is important to note that in our current world historical sequence there is no ‘relative autonomy’ to speak of between class interests and the state. The fact that banks get millions pumped into them even though they are the originators of a world crisis is one example; others are that private accumulation is said to be in the national interest, and the boundary between economic interest and state position is often impossible to ascertain within so-called democratic states in Africa and elsewhere. This point has been made by Balibar (1996) amoung others. 12. Marx puts this point as follows in his analysis of the Paris Commune: ‘The Commune ... was to serve as a lever for the uprooting of the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute’ (Marx, 1871: 72). 13. In fact, in South Africa the main reason why urban social movements are so popular on the left of the political spectrum has arguably been because they are seen as ‘working- class’

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32    Thinking Freedom in Africa

movements, an untheorised, intellectually lazy appellation which is simply equated with movements of ‘the urban poor’. In this way a vulgar form of ‘classism’ still lingers on in thought as activists and academics adhere to a crude sociological rendition of Marx’s political economy, which has been systematically emptied of any political content as a substitute for serious thought. It is also social class (with its clear ‘progressive’ ideological attributes) whose absence is invoked by Mbembe’s ubiquitous use of the term ‘lumpen’ as a descriptor to illustrate the currently ‘de-classed’ character of the African continent at all social levels (Mbembe, 2010b). 14. Rancière prefers to talk in terms of a ‘supplement’ rather than of an ‘excess’, but the basic idea is the same. For Rancière, politics only exists when such a supplement – the equality of speaking beings – is effectuated; it enables a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’, i.e. a specific way of framing a sensory space, which is radically distinct from that structured by what he calls ‘the police’ – broadly speaking, the state. See Rancière (1999), in particular. 15. See, in this context, Etienne Balibar’s La Crainte des masses (1996), which tries to deal with the insufficiencies of the Marxist theory of ideology in understanding political subjectivity in life. 16. I discuss Mahmood Mamdani’s work in some detail in chapter 12 below. 17. What is particularly disconcerting is that, even though Mbembe gestures to the centrality of local forces in democratising the continent, these are seen as currently absent or bereft of an Idea, and therefore the need to rely on Western solidarity arises (2010a: 27). At the same time, central to discussions among critical intellectuals in Europe in general and in France in particular has been precisely the crisis of political thought, the absence of an Idea and the problematic character of democracy itself in its present form. See, in particular, the collective volume on democracy (Agamben et al., 2009) to which all contributors provide a critical input; this includes not only Badiou and Rancière but also Agamben, Nancy, Žižek and many others. In current French philosophical thought, democracy in fact refers to two radically different notions: to a form of state as well as to a practice of popular affirmation of egalitarian alternatives. The latter notion is that proposed in particular by Rancière. He argues that, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a democratic state, as ‘all states are oligarchies’ by their very nature (Rancière, 2005: 79). It is the fact of not distinguishing state liberal democracy from alternative conceptions which accounts for Mbembe’s position, as he had previously very eloquently critiqued the infamous neo-colonial speech by French president Nicolas Sarkozy on his official visit to Senegal on 26 July 2007. For the controversy surrounding Sarkozy’s speech as well as Mbembe’s rightfully indignant response, see Ndiaye (2008). 18. For which he was heavily criticised by his friend Fanon; see Fanon (1967: 194–5). 19. Here I mean ‘people’ (les gens, la gente, abantu) as opposed to ‘the people’ (le peuple, el pueblo, il popolo). 20. There is evidence that recently Mbembe’s thinking on Africa has been changing, as in his recent work (e.g. Mbembe, 2013) it is African intellectuals’ mimetic relationship to the West which is criticised. His commentary on Fanon has also led him to

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      Introduction     33

stress a process of becoming and the idea of ‘indifference to difference’ particularly in relation to race and racism, although this is understood as a future ideal to be attained rather than a current practice. 21. References are too numerous to cite here. It will suffice to note the scholarly work on social movements emanating from the democratic struggles of the 1980s on the continent, such as Mamdani et al. (1995); Ake (2003); Chole and Ibrahim (1995). 22. It may be worth recalling here in the context of class identities that, considered as a political subject, the ‘other’ of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie but the state and the whole political edifice of capitalism. This was, it will be remembered, the core of Lenin’s argument in What Is to Be Done? 23. Again, the list of references is a long one, but one can refer to the works of Appiah, Mudimbe and many others. 24. The idea of ‘African personality’ has been associated with Senghor. In this regard, it is interesting to peruse the collection of nationalist writings edited in the mid1970s by Mutiso and Rohio (1975). For a sophisticated account of Senghor’s view of African art as ‘vitalist’ philosophy, see Diagne (2011). 25. See note 2. 26. One such attempt constrained by a classist framework was provided by Temu and Swai (1981). 27. This process has begun: see, especially, Badiou (2011b). 28. The extensive rise of social movements of ‘civil society’ in South Africa has, in Gillian Hart’s (2010: 90) accurate words, ‘pulled masses of researchers along in [its] wake’, much as the rise of independent trade unions in the early 1970s did to a previous generation of academics. These researchers have been concerned not with understanding people’s own political thought but with what they see a priori as people’s responses to various dimensions of their structural poverty and to neo-liberal economic policies. As people are poor, it follows for this logic that their protests must be demanding government provisioning, or ‘delivery’, in South African state parlance. For a recent example of this thinking, see Alexander (2010). 29. This was particularly the case with the student and workers’ movements of May ’68; see Ross (2002). 30. See Badiou (2009, 2011b, 2012c). 31. The notion of dignity was central to the popular upsurge in Tunisia in late 2010 (see Khiari (2011)); it is perhaps the most prevalent name for freedom today. 32. In particular, Abahlali have insisted on their thought of politics being governed by an axiom of equality; they have maintained their organisational autonomy, insisting on running their own affairs as well as founding their politics on what they call a ‘living communism’, which detaches itself from state ways of conceiving politics. See www.abahlali.org. However, by mid-2014 there were indications that this sequence may be in the process of ending as a result of repression. 33. Lindela is the detention centre outside Johannesburg where migrants to South Africa are kept before repatriation.

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34    Thinking Freedom in Africa

34. One of the few major intellectuals in Africa to retain such a confidence in the masses is Wamba-dia-Wamba; his written work has not been produced within academia and largely takes the form of political interventions in various singular contexts. 35. See his interview with Lawrence Liang in Kafila: http://kafila.org/2009/02/12/ interview-with-jacques-ranciere/. 36. It should also be recalled that, simultaneously with the Paris Commune, the people of Kabylia in Algeria rebelled against French colonialism. The Cheikh Moqrani Uprising of 1871–2 was put down with equal, if not greater, ferocity than that used against the revolutionaries in Paris, while rebels from both Paris and Kabylia were often sent on the same ships in exile to New Caledonia. In fact, the Third Republic, which followed after the defeat of the Commune, opened up a major sequence of extremely violent colonial expansion by the French state. The uprising in Kabylia has generally been occluded by the Left in France. For attempts to redress the balance, see Liauzu (2010) and Blanchard et al. (2005). 37. Not as a ‘thought in practice’, a formulation which would fall into the abstract– concrete distinction; the point being that thought and practice are inseparable in politics. Lazarus (1996: 113) formulates this point as ‘politics is a thought-relationof-the-real’, as opposed to history, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-the-state’, and philosophy, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-thought’. 38. Incidentally, if it were thought necessary, textual support for the centrality of a notion of practice can also be found in Marx’s own work. It is simply that the 1859 Preface has come to be the core ‘historical materialist’ reference for vulgar Marxism. See the following well-known statement from the third, thesis on Feuerbach for example: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice’ (Marx, 1845: 29, emphasis in original). It should be recalled further that the third, thesis is concerned with a critique of vulgar materialism, which ‘arrives at dividing society into two parts of which one is superior to the other’ (p. 28). 39. By the ‘in-existent’, Badiou means those who do not exist or who only minimally exist within a particular world – for example the proletariat for Marx in 19th-century Europe. The concept is similar to the ‘zone of non-being’ in Fanon’s work, which arguably refers to existence (‘being there’) rather than to being qua being in the ontological sense. For both, it is among these people that emancipatory politics is likely to be found when it exists. For a brief definition of this term in Badiou’s philosophy, which is not restricted to politics, see Badiou (2009a: 587). 40. My translation. The original reads: ‘Le monde vous pouvez le surpasser, mais vous le surpassez de l’intérieur de ce monde, les procédures que vous inventez empruntent nécessairement, qu’elles le veuillent ou non, au définissable ambiant.’ See Badiou (2016, 15 February 2016).

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Part 1

THINKING POLITICAL SEQUENCES: FROM AFRICAN HISTORY TO AFRICAN HISTORICAL POLITICAL SEQUENCES

Perhaps we should say today that, insofar as politics is concerned, the real will only be discovered by renouncing the historicist fiction – in other words, the fiction that History is on our side. – Alain Badiou, À la recherché du réel perdu, 2015 (my translation) An event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of myriad new possibilities, none of which is a repetition of the already known. This is why it is obscurantist to say ‘this movement demands democracy’ (meaning the kind we enjoy in the West) or ‘this movement demands social improvement’ (meaning the middle prosperity of our petty bourgeoisie). Beginning from practically nothing, resonating everywhere, this popular upsurge creates unknown possibilities for the entire world. – Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation) Does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be ... to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America were living without history or outside history at the moment when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. – Amílcar Cabral, Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure, 1966 (Unity and Struggle, 1980, emphasis in original) The people and the people alone are the makers of universal history. – Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)

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Book 1.indb 36

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Chapter 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences In so far as [politics] is a sequential subjectivity, any investigation in terms of continuity and gradual unfolding is precluded, and the relations previously proposed between history and politics, wherein it was maintained that it was through history – the bearer of a notion of continuity whether in movement or by means of a dialectic – that politics became intelligible, are now broken. – Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation) The return to a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation. – Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation)

thinking the immanent exception Africans were integrated into European ‘modernity’ through the slave trade. Yet rather than being its pathetic victims, they were able to think as human beings and to actualise that thought during particular exceptional events. It was not simply that people opposed oppression and that rebellions took place; it was also, and more importantly, that in some cases an excessive subjectivity of freedom came to dominate their thinking. The most important of these was without doubt what has become known as the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, which was an event of world significance. Its effects would have been even more far-reaching had not the modern European and North American states banded together to fight its radical humanist consequences by each and every means available to them. They continue to do so today. I begin from this event both because of its world significance and, more prosaically, in order to utilise it as a way of illustrating some of the more important theoretical categories and concepts to be encountered throughout this book. I need, however, to provide a brief introduction to some of these categories themselves which will be deployed in this

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38    Thinking Freedom in Africa

first part of the book. Two fundamental conceptual issues inform my discussion of the history of the emancipatory struggles undertaken by Africans. The first concerns the idea of the exception, what I have already referred to as the subjective ‘excess’; the second refers to the problem of rationally explaining historical time. Both, in one way or another, stem from Hegel’s philosophy. We should begin from the idea of the exception as thought by Badiou and Rancière. Rancière, as we have seen, refers to the exception as the central feature of people who speak, who move ‘out of place’.1 In fact, this exception in politics is for him identifiable ex post facto in the form of a historical event which, in addition, is the manifestation or realisation of equality (Rancière, 1995, 2012). For Badiou, on the other hand, the exception is thought of as an event in itself – although historical, the event is potentially political. The event is what creates the possibility of excessive thought; it is purely internal to the situation, for it is always located in an ‘evental site’. An exceptional event can be recognised as it occurs. As Badiou notes, it is ‘the sudden creation of a myriad new possibilities ... none of which is a repetition of the already known’ (Badiou, 2011a, my translation). In order to be able to think this exception, however, a certain theoretical orientation towards the human capacity for understanding is necessary so that it can indeed be recognised as exceptional. In particular, Badiou insists that thinking the exception must begin with a principled distancing from empiricism and its belief that the ‘limits of knowledge’ are given by experience: Today we have the triumph of empiricism ... The victory of empiricism is evidently the fact that any convincing argumentation is one which emphasises constraints. It is said that it is from these that one must begin. This is not the case for a principled activity; this does not mean that constraints must be ignored, but that the point of departure is the law that we propose concerning what we want, what we desire etc. ... The question of ‘changing the world’ is ... not fundamentally a question of analysing the world and of the alternative evaluation we may have of it. It is a question that essentially comes down to the opposition, between a form of thought that begins from principles and a perspective that begins from reality (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original). This is a fundamental point. We must indeed insist that there are always exceptions and that it is always possible to shift the limits of knowledge. The core idea that enables the thought of exceptions is, according to Badiou (2013f ), the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (to overcome, to supersede, to exceed, to sublate). If human subjective capacity were seen as limited by experience, it would follow that there must be strict limits to human understanding. These limits are here ultimately provided, not by

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     39

reason, but by the experience of what exists, to which reason is forced to comply. What this argument means is that one cannot limit thought to an empiricist position that describes and analyses the extant, without at the same time denying the possibility of exceptions to those descriptions and analyses – at least, exceptions which are immanent to the situation itself (rather than emanating from beyond its limits, from outside). What follows, according to Badiou, is that underlying all empiricist thought is a passivity that governs human subjectivity. He insists that ‘one must understand by empiricism the idea that everything must be founded on a primordial passivity amounting to cumulative external effects’ on subjectivity.2 In fact, empiricism ‘necessarily leads to a theory of the practical and cognitive limits of human capacity (the fundamental theme of the “limits of reason”)’ (2013f, my translation). Both reason and subjectivity are thus, in this perspective, constrained by experience. Exceptions are not thinkable within empiricism other than as externalities themselves. Empiricism is characterised by an essential connection regarding what is possible within the law of the world: it is the world itself that determines what is possible. On the other hand, from an emancipatory perspective, there is always a moment when one is obliged to say that a possibility results from an active confrontation between the state of the world on the one hand and principles on the other; a moment when one can declare to be possible something which the weight of the world declares to be impossible. If the expression ‘to change the world’ is to have any meaning at all, it must be that a real change resides on an impossible point, but one which becomes possible during circumstances which are always of an exceptional nature (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original). One must note the strictly conservative limits of empiricism (conservative in the etymological sense) because one cannot possibly think change within a situation or social world if one begins from description and analysis, i.e. from the demarcation of the limits of people’s lives in society, the social structures and institutions that contain and determine them, the discourses and subjectivities in which they also are forced to think by power, and so on. These are precisely the kinds of accounts that dominate in Africa today, irrespective of whether they are political-economic, structuralist or post-structuralist, postcolonial, nationalist or neo-liberal in persuasion (see Mbembe, 2013). They are the stuff of knowledge in 21st-century Africa; I have qualified them as ‘the tyranny of the objective’, for they make it impossible to think political choices, as history and society determine all thinking (Neocosmos, 2012a: 468). Knowledge, however, must be firmly distinguished from thought, which is always excessive, beyond the ‘normal’ and the ‘habitual’, oriented towards what could be rather than simply to what exists (Lazarus, 2012). The point here, it

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must be emphasised, is to make an argument not for ignoring empirical evidence, but rather for not seeing it as the ultimate limit of thought; empirical evidence must be used fundamentally as a necessary reference point for reason.3 One must therefore start with an affirmation that can be rationally maintained. The rational affirmation maintained here, as I have already stated, is that people think. For Rancière  – as indeed for Fanon, as we shall see – not only do people think, but they change themselves through thinking: The great emancipatory movements have been movements in the present, ones of increased competencies, perhaps as much as and even more than movements destined to prepare another future ... These are people who become capable of things they were previously incapable of, who accomplish a break through the wall of the possible ... people do not come together in order to realise a future equality; a certain kind of equality is realised by the act of coming together (Rancière, 2012: 207, my translation). It is this process that is referred to as ‘subjectivation’, the creation of a political subject. Given that such a process is one of exceeding identity, Rancière refers to it as a rational ‘dis-identification’: ‘Any subjectivation is a dis-identification, a tearing-away from the naturalness of place, the opening of a subject space where anyone can be counted’ (Rancière, 1995: 60, my translation). Because of ‘dis-identification’ there is always a universal aspect to emancipatory politics. Moreover, an excessive subjectivity is always connected in some way or other with a politics expressive of social place (the idea and practice of equality only exist in relation to forms of inequality), simply because excess always exceeds something and is always ‘internal’ to the situation, as Badiou (2010b: 146–7) puts it. The level of excess, of distance from the expressive (from identity) – what might be called the ‘excessive gap’ – varies in each case of subjectivation and is irretrievably marked by it, even if only in a negative way.4 The existence of excessive thought, which always includes some universal notion of human equality, along with the political principles it enunciates, defines a specific historical sequence, which, as we shall see, is not to be understood as part of a continuous unfolding over time. At the same time, it is the dialectical relation between the excessive and the expressive that regulates the ability of the excessive to sustain itself and what Lazarus (1996) calls its eventual ‘saturation’. The idea of freedom as understood by Africans within different emancipatory sequences illuminates this dialectic and in a sense helps us to understand the limits of the sequence in question. For example, the manner in which the slaves in Haiti understood freedom in 1791 differs from how they understood it after 1796 and how the ex-slaves began to think it after 1804. In the first instance it referred to legal emancipation, in the second to national state independence. The first notion was limited by the expressive

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     41

constraints of a legal conception; the second by a statist one. Similar points can be made with regard to the manner in which freedom was thought during the independence struggles in the 1950s and 1960s and also, in the South African case, in the 1980s. The expressive–excessive dialectic enables us to understand both the character of that subjectivity and its limitations; it therefore enables us to identify the limits of the historical sequence’s unfolding.

the idea, political subjectivity and the problem of objective historical time The second issue in any attempt to understand emancipatory political subjectivities concerns a discussion of historical analysis, for it is the discipline of history that is said to account for politics over time and thus to make it intelligible. This question concerns the problems inherent in any attempt to isolate different political sequences – particularly emancipatory sequences – in Africa that illustrate the making by Africans of their history as well as their contribution to world history as a whole. At the same time, it is also an attempt to think of possible new forms of periodisation that stress discontinuous sequential subjective singularities as opposed to the objective periodisations that usually highlight structural changes, such as forms of economy and capitalism or forms of state. These have included, for example, the divisions between merchant capitalism (16th–18th centuries), industrial capitalism (19th century), imperial or monopoly capitalism (end of 19th century to mid-20th century) and globalisation (1973 to the present). They have also included periodisation in terms of the distinctions between ‘traditional–modern–postmodern’ and particularly those between ‘precolonial–colonial–postcolonial’, which is the most common and seemingly the most obvious. Such periodisations stress both continuity and fundamentally objective changes; they are historicist and, as a result, force thought into specific parameters, thereby excluding different modes of thought. It can be noted, for example, that the standard procedure of demarcating African history along the precolonial–colonial–postcolonial temporal dimension has two major consequences. Firstly, it focuses on changes in state forms and privileges European domination as the norm around which history is plotted and thought; secondly, it has had the consequence of occluding what is arguably the most important event in modern African history – the slave trade – for it cannot be contained within this view of historical change. In particular, the slave trade does not feature within histories of international migration, even though it can be seen as the first instance of ‘forced migration’ on a massive scale. Historians and economists of migration regularly fall into this obvious error, only partly because they, together with demographers, tend to understand the migratory process as a voluntary one; in fact, slavery is not thought fundamentally as a political process. For example,

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Adepoju (1995) uses this threefold periodisation in his discussion of the history of migration on the continent. The Atlantic slave trade simply disappears from his vision altogether. It is not seen as precolonial, as this concerns distinct African societies untrammelled by Western domination. It is not a feature of colonialism, as this concerns the political dominance of Africa by the Western powers and the construction of colonial states, beginning in the late 19th century, when the slave trade had legally ended. The result is that it simply disappears from the horizon of his inquiry altogether. Moreover, if it is the case that African peoples were controlled, exploited and oppressed by foreign powers before the colonial period proper, which was undeniably the case, then it follows that the ‘state-colonial’ period (i.e. from the 1890s to the 1960s) is not the only time period when such foreign oppression, and hence national reaction, can be seen to have taken place. A ‘precolonial’ colonial form of domination (so to speak) also suggests a postcolonial one. It suggests that it is possible to conceive of colonialism beyond the narrow period of formal state-colonial domination; in other words, as not exclusively defined by a particular state form.5 It implies the possibility at least of various contemporary neo-colonial forms of colonial domination right into the current period of globalisation.6 The defining feature of colonialism is thus not the existence of a colonial state as such, but a set of oppressive politics enabling foreign domination, with the consequence, as I shall show in Part 2, that the people are considered by the state as its enemy. Apart from the necessity to reject its crude linearity (the teleological unfolding of an essence), to follow such a strategy of structural periodisation is to understand African history simply in terms of continuities and changes in the world economy or world configurations determined in the West, at the level of empire. Africa is consequently thought of as a victim of (or, at best, as simply reacting to) events taking place elsewhere, so that African agency disappears from thought. In this context it should be noted that historicism does not simply consist of the simple idea of linear development. Rather, linear development presupposes historical determinism, the idea that the past determines the present. A notion of causality, of necessity, is therefore at the core of historicism, as well as the view that history is reducible to time, so that, as Marx put it, ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (Marx, 1852a: 96). My aim in this book is rather to attempt to think history in a way that foregrounds the political subjectivity of African people and thereby makes it thinkable. It is an attempt at periodisation in terms of limits to thought and their overcoming. For this to be possible, the core of the organising principle of periodisation must be distinct sequences (of state or excessive subjectivities) along with the socially located experiences or singularities that gave birth to them. Emancipatory politics in particular can only be understood as a sequence limited in time or, as Badiou puts

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     43

it, only as a ‘singular trace where the truth of a collective situation sees the light of day. But there exists no principle of linkage between this trace and those which had preceded it’ (Badiou, 1992: 234, my translation). In other words, because it is concerned with imposing regularity on time (past, present and also future), history sees time as continuous and thereby conflates the subjective with the objective, with the result that it effaces the exceptional and the irregular. History is concerned with establishing a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and with affirming that the relation between the two is an objective one, understandable through the deployment of scientific protocols. It amounts in fact to a state mode of thinking, for this mode always ‘objectifies’ subjectivity; thus, in Lazarus’s formulation, ‘history is a thought-relation-of-the-state’ (1996: 17). On the other hand, different emancipatory modes of politics understood as singular subjectivities are only thinkable as discontinuous sequences. As Badiou puts it, if, as is usually the case, we consider history as continuous, ‘there is a history of states but there is no history of politics’ (1992: 234, my translation). In brief, what are usually said to be historical periods are continuous structural and expressive subjective historical sequences of state or imperial politics (the politics of power), whereas emancipatory politics are always discontinuous, singular and purely subjective affirmations that can only be understood in terms of themselves. Shifting from understanding historical continuities to understanding discontinuities is not an easy endeavour. In fact, Foucault (2003a: 55) warns us that ‘establishing discontinuities is not an easy task for history in general. And it is certainly even less so for the history of thought’7. What, then, are the difficulties? The fundamental theoretical problem here concerns that posed by Hegel, who understood history in terms of subjectivity but for whom this process amounted to the unfolding of the ethical ‘Idea’  – hence his adherence to an essence or subject of history (realised in his case in the state8). A different philosophy of the Idea is necessary and it should be apparent that an Idea only exists, is only actualised, through the actions of people who affirm it; we shall see in a later chapter that this is precisely how Frantz Fanon understands the nation, for example. Badiou argues that the Idea must be understood as ‘the affirmation that a new truth is historically possible’ (2009d: 201), while simultaneously insisting on ‘the primacy of the Idea as practice’ (2013f, 14 November 2012, p. 9, my translation). A discontinuous history of politics, therefore, must be understood in terms of changing subjectivities in order to avoid collapsing into historicism, whether of the ‘materialist’ or ‘idealist’ variety. I assess below how Lazarus tries to overcome this problem through his work on time and especially his assessment of Marc Bloch. His solution to the problem posed by Hegel is to understand the historical thought of politics as not always in existence,9 as discontinuous rather than continuous, as sequential and rare, and as composed of subjective political sequences. This follows, of course, from understanding emancipatory politics as excessive to what is considered to be normal or habitual, what

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is referred to by sociologists as ‘culture’. In particular, Lazarus identifies historical ‘modes of politics’ that are sequential, but all sequences do not necessarily point to the existence of distinct modes. While changes in objective conditions (of accumulation, for example) have produced important effects on political subjectivities, particularly as they have always been the object of state thought, these subjectivities were also influenced, arguably at times even more fundamentally, by changes in modes of thought and politics expressed in popular struggles of various kinds. Particularly important here are the effects of political ‘events’, in Badiou’s sense of the term, during which emancipatory politics of affirmation are able to see the light of day for shorter or longer periods. Badiou (2009a) outlines three distinct novel evental subjectivities which emanate from any event: fidelity, reaction and obscurity. These three subjective dispositions can also be used to understand the limits of sequences and will be referred to here in order to delineate some of the major sequences in African history that are clearly defined by emancipatory events. More minor sequences, not necessarily continental in their consequences, will only be noted in passing. That emancipatory politics are always sequential and rare (Lazarus, 1996) does not necessarily diminish their impact, the extent of which ultimately depends on asserting and maintaining a fidelity to events; it is such a fidelity, enabling what Badiou calls a maximal consequence, which creates a strong singularity or event (Badiou, 2008). In the context of African struggles for freedom, at least three different forms of historical event can be elucidated that unfolded as pure thought over limited periods: humanistic struggles such as the Saint-Domingue/Haiti Revolution in the 18th century; national liberation struggles in the 1950s–1960s, and ‘people’s struggles’ from the 1980s to the present.10 Fidelity to such events was usually overcome as subjectivities became saturated and gradually fell back in each case into new state political subjectivities, as they were transformed from pure thought and pure affirmation into social categories: the first into kingdoms, the second into nation-states, and the third into civil society. In this way, the purely subjective eventually became ‘objectified’ or ‘socialised’. Such objectification amounts to a collapse into state subjectivities and ultimately has meant the reassertion of a reactive (and obscure) subjectivity occasioned by the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics.11 This process is what is usually referred to as ‘depoliticisation’. Thus, state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories, usually in an ‘expressive’ relation, as emancipatory thought gradually fades away; this is what Lazarus (1996) refers to as a process of ‘saturation’. This insight is particularly useful and can be investigated through an analysis of the three main emancipatory political sequences in modern African history considered in this, the first part of this book. My main concern, therefore, is fundamentally a methodological one.

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     45

It is mainly because of the importance of thinking about politics as excessive subjectivities beyond the realm of state subjectivity, of detaching politics from the state, that Badiou’s philosophy of subjective militancy is of interest to Africa. On the African continent our manner of thinking politics has, since independence, been overwhelmingly dominated by different forms of liberalism, for all of which the state is the sole legitimate focus of politics.12 This liberal conception has revolved around the idea that all politics concerns conflicts of interest and that the state manages such conflicts in the interest of all or of a class that rules. ‘Political society’ – organised interests at the level of the state itself – is the sole legitimate arena in which the conflict of interests can play itself out. That such organised interests are also said to operate within ‘civil society’ does not alter this perspective. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is the state.13 This idea has permeated so far into African political thinking that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself. In South Africa in particular, state fetishism is so pervasive within the hegemonic political discourse that debate is structured by the apparently self-evident ‘common-sense’ notion that the post-apartheid state can ‘deliver’ everything from jobs to empowerment, from development to human rights, from peace in Africa to a cure for HIV/AIDS. As a result, not only is the state deified, but social debate is foreclosed ab initio; the idea simply becomes one of assessing policy or capacity; in other words, the focus is on management, not on politics. Badiou enables us to begin to think a way around this problem by showing that the state is always what prescribes subjectively, within a given situation, what is possible and impossible in that situation.14 He notes: ‘The state organises and maintains, often by force, the distinction between what is possible and what is not’ (Badiou, 2009d: 192, my translation). It follows, then, that an event is something that occurs which, despite being always localised, is subtracted from the power of the state, something which overturns given ‘facts’ and which thereby enables the rise of a number of possibilities and a possible universal subjectivity or ‘truth’ valid across ‘worlds’. Given that the state is what organises and manages differences, emancipatory politics must then transcend differences. For Badiou, therefore, emancipatory politics are ‘indifferent’ to identities, to difference.15 The ‘indifference to differences’ simply means that an emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to or ‘representative’ of any specific interest; it is ‘for all’, never ‘for some’. It follows that emancipatory politics do not ‘represent’ anyone: Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims ... but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves ... Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation ... it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather, it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence (Badiou, 1985: 75, 87).

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An emancipatory politics, therefore, cannot be deduced from a social category (class, nation, state, history, economics, culture or tradition); it can only be understood in terms of itself, for it exceeds the thought of the social. Moreover, the state itself is ‘indifferent’ to truths and thus also to (emancipatory) politics; the democratic state in particular is merely concerned with knowledges and opinions, which it organises into a consensus. Historically speaking, there have been some political orientations that have had or will have a connection with a truth, a truth of the collective as such. They are rare attempts and they are often brief ... These political sequences are singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental history ... from the people they engage, these orientations require nothing but their strict generic humanity (Badiou, 2003: 70, emphasis in original). Emancipatory politics, therefore, may or may not exist at any time and must be understood as pertaining exclusively to the realm of thought, for it is only thought that can effect fundamental change: ‘any politics of emancipation, or any politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act’ (p. 71). Where does all this leave the conceptualisation of contemporary politics on the African continent? The answer provided by Wamba-dia-Wamba is that one must identify modes of politics historically present in Africa, and also, and more importantly, specify the basic characteristics of possible emancipatory modes of politics on the continent today (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994). The latter project is, in his writings, highly informed by the analysis of Lazarus. Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that politics must exist ... Generally in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it [this political capacity] to the state (including the party and liberation movements functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by imposing consensual unanimity ... the thrust of progressive politics is to be separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, i.e. a state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if people only ‘think’ state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 258). In postcolonial Africa, therefore, one form or another of state fetishism has been the dominant way of conceiving the political capacity to transform reality. Nonetheless, I do attempt in this book to specify some of the features of a ‘National Liberation Struggle’ mode, which could at times enable a politics that was not

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     47

exclusively state-focused and that can be said to have existed prior to independence to various extents. However, if the problem in Africa has been state thinking, then a new way of conceiving politics must be developed ‘at a distance’ from the state. Wamba-dia-Wamba has suggested that while it is the popular masses that enable ‘events’, the masses often possess a blind faith in the state or in those individuals whom they associate with change. It is the breaking of this blind faith that constitutes the political possibility of fidelity to the event, and it is those activists that militate for such a break who today engage in emancipatory politics on the African continent.16

historical subjective modes of politics According to Lazarus (1996: 121ff), the Ancient Greeks invented politics, not just democracy; the two were in fact the same thing. This, he argues, was the condition for the invention of history as a reflection on social life – i.e. what we would today call social thought. His argument is founded on a study of the work of Moses Finley, one of the foremost authorities on Greek antiquity.17 For Finley, we can speak of the ‘invention’ of history by the Greeks,18 an invention that cannot be grasped as a passage from a mythical conception of the past to a rational conception of the past. The supposed break or rupture from mythical conceptions and turn to rational ones, which forms the basis of the positivist account, is unsustainable, for the rise of history does not supplant mythology but operates in parallel with it. Even in Herodotus (regarded as one of the first scientific historians), references to myths continue. Lazarus reads Finley as suggesting that history is a capacity, and a provisional capacity at that; a capacity that Lazarus names ‘sequential’, for it corresponds to a provisional subjective capacity which delimits a specific historical sequence. For Finley, history is not an invariant; any society or period does not necessarily have a history. There are societies which do not produce history, and not just those without states and without writing. The absence of history is not indicative of an absence of historical sources. Rather, in order for history to exist there should be a generation which has thought its own situation, its own conditions of life. The history (in this self-reflexive sense) of this generation is possible both for itself and also for future historians. There is therefore not always a capacity for history; this refers to a specific mode of thought contemporaneous with itself. Two theses follow, according to Lazarus. Firstly, there can only be history which is contemporaneous with itself, and a specific consciousness is necessary for it to exist; secondly, the existence of a contemporaneous history is not always given. Not all generations possess this capacity or consciousness. Thus, history exists only under the condition of such a consciousness: only under such conditions can statements, formulations and generalisations be constructed with regard to

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the particular situation. For Finley, the condition of this capacity of an epoch to produce a history is nothing other than the existence of politics. The invention of history for Finley is contemporaneous with the invention of the ‘polis’, and particularly with the invention of politics. History is not connected to the state as such, but to the existence of politike techne, to political agency and excessive thought. It is not possible to explain the discovery of history by the Greeks as a matter of moving from an irrational mode of thinking to a rational one, but only as one of ‘invention’. For Lazarus, politics is also an invention, irreducible to the state, to classes, to the management of the social, to power. A specific subjective invention, politics is not permanent; it is, in Lazarus’s terms, ‘sequential and rare’. History and, by inference, social sciences do not always exist as independent novel thought distinguished from myth.19 They require politics for their existence, politics as a thought of something different from what exists. Excessive politics is always inventive and, through its inventiveness, impacts on thought and transforms it after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s famous aphorism. We need therefore to say something about politics in this transformative sense, for there is a sense in which politics precedes social thought. In his discussion of Lazarus’s book Anthropologie du nom, Badiou (2005a: ch. 2) notes that there are in fact two distinct ways of dealing with Hegel’s idealist historicism of the actualisation of an absolute Idea. Either one follows Marx and the historian Marc Bloch in arguing that, however much people may be the makers of history, their ideas are reflections of the material world, in which case one replaces an idealist historicism by a materialist historicism; or one attempts to save the irreducibility of the Idea by considering it as a subjective singularity, not as a universal essence. The latter approach means abandoning notions of totality to which politics has to conform as well as the idea of time, and insisting rather on accounting for consciousness, ideologies, choices, practices – i.e. politics – as sequential subjective singularities. It is the latter path that is theorised at length by Lazarus (1996, 2013). This path is imposed on us as soon as we wish to maintain consistently that there is no telos, no end to history. History is clearly a narrative construction ‘after the fact’; there is no ‘real’ of history as such – it is purely imaginary (Badiou, 2009d: 188, 190). To put it simply, history is understood scientifically ex post facto; politics, on the other hand, is simply lived.20 For Marx, of course, the view that all history is the history of class struggles could only be derived ex post facto. In other words, it is only after politics has taken place that it becomes possible to say that it is history; historians can then argue about whether and how it was determined all along by structural developments including class struggles (or demography, climate, geography, economic interests, discourses or whatever). As it is about to take place or while it is taking place, politics is simply a number of (clearly constrained) collective decisions or choices (including choices

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Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences     49

about how to overcome or circumvent constraints) emanating from within specific subjectivities, while it attempts to make a seeming impossibility possible in emancipatory conditions; in other words, it is purely thought, purely subjective and irreducible. Class for Marx was both an objective category of political economy and history, on the one hand, and a category of politics, on the other. The distinction was not theorised by Marx, as for him there was an unfolding of history which drove necessarily towards a classless future after a transition period that he refers to as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx, 1852b). Marx sees a communist political consciousness developing among workers as a result of their common experience of oppression and collective discipline in the labour process. It is this common social experience which he sees as giving rise to a working-class politics. For Marx, it is relations of production which form the basis of a political consciousness. In other words, he sees politics as emanating from workers’ experiences at work, an emanation that is ‘spontaneous’ in Lenin’s sense. This is why he sees organisation in trade unions as a step towards class organisation, i.e. towards communist consciousness. Hence unions, he says, ought not to restrict themselves to demanding wage increases but should be ‘using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class’ (Marx, 1865b: 226). Influenced by the great working-class movements of the 19th century, Marx clearly saw the mere fact of worker combination as a political act. This was not the case for Lenin, for whom only a party could enable a proletarian political consciousness and make it possible. Class struggle as it takes place in the present, as Lenin knew full well, could not be about social structures; consequently, politics (e.g. insurrection) was for him a complex art and not a science. Class was, for Lenin, both a socio-economic category and a political category, but it is crucially important to note that, for him, a ‘proletarian politics’ could not be deduced from the objective socio-economic location of the working class. A proletarian politics was, for Lenin, ‘under condition’, to use Lazarus’s (1996) expression. The condition for such a politics was an organisation – for Lenin, the party – which had to develop positions on all important political issues of the day, something a mere ‘trade union consciousness’ could not possibly achieve. In this manner a political class of proletarians could demarcate itself in the political sphere through the medium of a party and a specific proletarian politics could be constructed. As is well known, for Lenin this politics could not be a spontaneous occurrence, as it had been for Marx, but could only result from the conscious application of theory to the political questions of the day (e.g. in Lenin’s time, the ‘agrarian question’, the ‘national question’, the ‘women’s question’, the question of the state).21 Lenin was the first to argue in the 20th century that a consciousness or ‘interest politics’ founded on a category of the social division of labour (in his case, workers’ and trade union consciousness) was not in itself emancipatory; something else was required to transform it into a universal and make it truly political.

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Lazarus argues in some detail that the idea of historical time – which, along with the idea of totality, constitutes the foundation of historicism – must be abandoned, as it co-represents the objective and the subjective, the material and the mental (e.g. in the notion of the ‘conjuncture’), and thus enables historians to assert at the same time that change is objective and also that people make history. This is the position developed at length by Marc Bloch, whose book The Historian’s Craft makes a rigorous argument in this regard. For Bloch, time is the ‘element’ of history, ‘it is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’ (Bloch, 1954: 27–8). Lazarus notes that time is a ‘circulating category’ in Bloch’s work; in other words, it enables him to move without contradiction from the objective to the subjective, ‘men in time from the material perspective and from the subjective perspective’ (Lazarus, 1996: 158, my translation), as time is objective, after all, but it is men who ‘make history’. Bloch’s is a complex attempt to analyse subjectivities in history while rejecting Durkheimian positivist conceptions of science, but there is no need to outline it in detail here.22 For Lazarus, the answer to the problem posed by Hegel’s thought is not to follow Bloch or Marx, but rather to be inspired by Foucault’s notion of the episteme23 as a discontinuous subjective historical segment and to theorise politics as singularities; in doing so, political subjectivities must be thought of internally as coherent sequences without reference to invariants external to them. While the discipline of history thinks in terms of ‘structural ensembles and conjunctures’, politics is concerned with ‘singularities’ (Lazarus, 1989: 22). When outlining this point, Lazarus develops his views in detailed analyses of the politics of Marx (Lazarus, 1996), Lenin (Lazarus, 1989, 1996, 2007), Mao Zedong (Lazarus, 1996, Anon., 2005) and Saint-Just (Lazarus, 1995, 1996). Perhaps the way to actually make this argument apparent is by clarifying his distinction between Marx’s and Lenin’s political subjectivities; in this way, the logic behind the argument for the thinking of political singularities should become apparent. Marx’s thesis may be outlined as follows: there is a structure of the real; societies do not constitute an arbitrary, chaotic, unformed and random whole and thus are not foreign to being thought. Societies are structurally organised. This structure is that of the class struggle. In order to make sense of the class struggle and of the structure of societies, Marx summons history in the sense that the class struggle is viewed as both objective and political (Lazarus, 1996: 54, my translation). Lazarus argues that, for Marx, scientific notions are simultaneously the notions of political consciousness, simply because they can be realised; emancipation is therefore not a utopian ideal but a definite possibility.

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The unique characteristic of Marx’s thought is that the prescriptive and the descriptive, in other words politics and science, are fused ... The name of this fusion is the idea of a ‘consciousness of history’; the communist proletarian is he who has a scientific and prescriptive vision of history – prescriptive because scientific. This fusion operates by itself in a spontaneous fashion because it is necessary (1996: 55, my translation). As a result, communist proletarians are a ‘spontaneous’ product from within the ranks of the proletariat, so that ‘where there are proletarians, there are communists’; the appearance of communists is thus thought of as an internal process to the existence of a working class (Lazarus, 2007: 259). The core idea of politics here, as it was throughout the 19th century, is that of ‘insurrection’; it is this conception of politics which encounters its limits (becomes ‘saturated’, in Lazarus’s language) in the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871. The main lessons which Marx and Engels drew from this failure were rather ambiguous about the nature of the state, stressing the need to smash it, on the one hand, while affirming the need for proletarian state organisation, on the other (Badiou, 2006a: 257–90). The main lesson that Lenin, in particular, was to draw from this episode was the necessity for the working class to be organised in the form of a party: this was, of course, the period when modern parties were developing throughout Europe. From this time on, the class character of political parties was to be found not so much in the social origins of their membership but in their ideological positions – their subjectivities – as they recruited their membership from throughout the population and did not restrict it to a single social group (Badiou, 2006a; Lazarus, 2007: 256). For Lazarus, Lenin breaks most clearly with Marx’s position in 1902 with his foundational text What Is to Be Done?, in which he distances himself from what he calls the politics of ‘spontaneity’. This text is foundational for Lazarus because it inaugurates the theory of modern emancipatory politics, for which the core idea will no longer be working-class insurrection but will be and remain ‘the party’ throughout the whole of the 20th century. This text is also inaugural in the precise sense that it founds a new political singularity, which Lazarus terms the Bolshevik mode of politics; this he sees as lasting from 1902 up to 1917. Lenin’s political conception is thus quite distinct from that of Marx, which Lazarus refers to as founding the classist mode. For Lenin, the appearance of social-democratic, proletarian or revolutionary consciousness is not a spontaneous phenomenon at all and requires a total break from such a view. The core of this subjectivity is ‘antagonism to the entire existing social and political order’, while the condition of existence of such a consciousness is the emergence of a social-democratic party (Lazarus, 2007: 259). This sequence was closed in October 1917, because from that time on the name ‘party’ ‘would be assigned to power, to the state’, i.e. to a totally different subjectivity. As for the Stalinist mode of politics, political thought was again different in that mode because,

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rather than being the condition for politics, the party now became the real subject of all knowledge and decision. Lazarus (1989) argues that Lenin’s texts between the two revolutions of February and October 1917 show a disjunction between his analyses of history (imperialism, war, etc.) and politics: the former can be clearly analysed and its course predicted – it is ‘clear’, in Lazarus’s term – while the latter was ‘obscure’, as the ‘future character of the revolution that had begun was undecidable’ (2007: 260). It follows for Lazarus that, for Lenin, ‘politics is charged with assuming its own thought, internal to itself. This is the condition of its existence’ (p. 260).24 This brief outline is sufficient to make the central point that political sequences can indeed be understood in their own terms without deriving them from social categories. Lazarus does this by outlining several ‘modes of politics’. These are all singularities and are sequential and limited in the sense that they rise and then pass on as the strength of the subjectivity gradually peters out or is saturated. To refer more and more to the social as the external foundation of the subjective is to gradually end the affirmation of politics by diluting the purely subjective within state thought, with the result that the mode or sequence perishes through a process of saturation. As the politics of the sequence become saturated – they gradually become unable to think the new problems posed to them independently of state thinking – the subjective excess diminishes and vanishes until its eventual possible renewal or ‘resurrection’, in Badiou’s (2006c) sense. This saturation denotes the end of the sequence; political subjectivity morphs into a state politics for which the social is always foundational; the distance between politics and state is gradually reduced and vanishes (Badiou, 2006b: 5). It is this process that is often referred to as ‘depoliticisation’.25 Central to this state politics, as I have already noted, is a conception in which politics is no longer understood in terms of itself; it is no longer an affirmation of pure subjectivity – a self-presentation – but is reduced to social categories. For Lazarus, this saturation is facilitated by the use of circulating categories, such as ‘class’, ‘people’, ‘nation’, which pertain to both the real of the purely politically subjective and to the domain of the sciences of the social. To put the same point in a slightly different way, excessive politics reach their limit when they lose their capacity to sustain their political subjectivity and revert to state expressive politics. It seems to me, however, that those historical modes of politics which Lazarus qualifies as constituted ‘in interiority’ – i.e. which think politics exclusively internally – cannot be understood as ‘pure’ subjectivities constituted totally independently of the state and of ‘external referents’, as he maintains. The political formulations of Marx, Lenin and Mao all contain references to a politics of representation of class interests, as I will show in some detail in a later chapter, and therefore do possess a certain degree of expressive content. The excessive character of the subjective modes which they outline is also combined, in various ways and to various extents, with a subjectivity expressive of the social. In a sense it is this complex dialectical feature of emancipatory politics,

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whereby excessive and expressive forms of politics are combined, that accounts for the fact of its eventual saturation when the mode is no longer able to sustain itself. For Lazarus, modes of politics are thus identifiable by their limits; they are always sequential  – they rise and then fade away. They are also located in specific sites (lieux). These sites are not necessarily physical places but can be any location where thought takes place. The disappearance of one of these sites entails the disappearance of such modes of politics. The sites of the Bolshevik mode were the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party and the soviets; with the disappearance of one of these sites – e.g. the soviets – the political mode and sequence came to an end.26 In addition to the two modes of politics already mentioned, Lazarus outlines at some length four others: the Revolutionary mode, the Dialectical mode, the Stalinist mode and the Parliamentary mode. The Revolutionary mode is associated with the experience of the French Revolution between the summer of 1792 and July 1794. Its main site was the Jacobin Convention and its main militants and theoreticians were Saint-Just and Robespierre, the co-authors of the 1793 constitution. Its conception of politics was one that proclaimed that ‘a people has only one dangerous enemy: its government’ (Saint-Just, 2004: 630, my translation) and that understood politics as a form of moral consciousness or ‘virtue’ to be combined with ‘terror’ against the revolution’s enemies (Robespierre, 2007). For Saint-Just (2004: 758, my translation), ‘it is leaders who must be disciplined because all evil results from the abuse of power’. Thus, ‘Saint-Just regularly proposes analyses and policies which, although they concern the state and the government, are thought outside of and are explicitly directed against a statist logic’ (Lazarus, 1996: 225ff, my translation). The main theoretician of the Dialectical mode is Mao Zedong. According to him, history is subordinated to the masses, as its influence disappears behind subjective notions such as an ‘enthusiasm for socialism’. ‘For Mao, the masses do not make history, they are history’ (Lazarus, 2013: 131, my translation). Political consciousness develops in leaps and bounds and ‘there exists an exclusively political knowledge because such knowledge is dialectical without being historical. Even if the party exists it does not identify the mode of politics.’ The sites of this mode are those of the revolutionary war: the party, the army, the United Front; its limits extend from 1928 to 1958 (Lazarus, 1996: 91, my translation; see also Anon., 2005). These modes of politics conceive of politics ‘internally’, in terms of their own specificity, without reference to what Lazarus calls ‘external invariants’. In fact, it was only in the Bolshevik mode that the party had a central role within subjectivity. In all cases there was a multiplicity of sites, and a political distance from the state was maintained. Any emancipatory consciousness is purely political and exists under the conditions of an excess over spontaneous forms of consciousness, which are generally expressive of existing social relations and hierarchies. In addition, two modes of politics are identified by Lazarus, each of which focuses political subjectivity on

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an ‘external invariant’, namely the state. These are the Parliamentary mode and the Stalinist mode; both of these have been dominant in 20th-century world history, according to Lazarus. For both these modes, political subjectivity is subordinated to a state subjectivity. The principle of parliamentary politics is not that ‘people think’ but rather that ‘people have opinions regarding government’ (Lazarus, 1996: 93, my translation). ‘The so-called “political” parties of the parliamentary mode, far from representing the diversity of opinions, are the subjective organisers of the fact that the only thought deemed possible is an opinion regarding the government’ (p. 93). It follows that parties are not so much political organisations as state organisations, which end up distributing state positions among members of the elite. Thus, for the Parliamentary mode there is only one recognised site of politics and that is the state. Similar functions are fulfilled in this mode by trade unions, which are also very much state organisations. The essential political act of parliamentarianism is voting, as the institutional articulation between the subjective side of opinion and the objective character of government. Voting does not so much serve to represent opinions as to produce a majority of professional politicians who are provided by parties; ‘it transforms the plural subjectivity of opinions on government into a functioning unity’ founded on consensus (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993: 117). The act of ‘voting transforms vague “programmes” or promises of parties into the authority of a consensus’ (Wambadia-Wamba, 1994: 249). In other words, voting amounts to a legitimising principle of the state consensus, and politics is ultimately reduced to a question of numbers. The Stalinist mode of politics refers to a political subjectivity that existed not just in the Soviet Union, but also throughout the communist parties linked to the Third International. Politics is confined to the party and the party is understood to be the very embodiment of that consciousness. ‘As the party is presented as the source of all political truth’, the Stalinist mode ‘requires the credibility of the party’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 250). The one-party state is the only political datum provided to subjectivity and the only practical domain of that subjectivity. The only site of politics is the state-party. The sequence of this mode begins during the early 1930s and ends with Gorbachev’s accession to power (Lazarus, 1996: 94). Of course, other modes of politics can also be elucidated, and I shall have occasion to refer to some of these in the arguments that follow throughout this book. The point to stress in this context is that modes of politics ‘in externality’, as they are modes of state politics, can quite easily be found in continuity with each other: for example, a colonial and certain postcolonial forms of politics, while possibly of a different character, may be founded on similar subjectivities in some fundamental respects. We will see in a later chapter that it is possible to characterise state politics in Africa today as neo-colonial, founded in particular on the reality that the postcolonial state today considers the majority of its people as the enemy. The continuity of such state politics is made possible precisely by the fact that all state politics have common underlying elements, most obviously politics expressive of interests.

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I will show in my discussion of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in chapter 2 that we can indeed speak of a unique mode of politics between 1791 and 1796, which is thought ‘in interiority’ and which by the latter date has become saturated. Thereafter, various forms of militarism become dominant, while subsequently ex-slaves think their freedom in terms of a politics that insists on their economic independence. A subjective as well as social distance from the state is established until its collapse through the systematic deployment of state violence in the 1960s. There is a discontinuity here between political subjectivities, whose character Lazarus’s categories can help us to elucidate in their own terms. What is clear in this particular example is the centrality of the slaves’ and subsequently the ex-slaves’ own practices and thinking – particularly of the bossales (those born in Africa) – in effectuating these subjectivities.

the event, the political subject and the process of subjectivation Let me now briefly expand on some of the categories and concepts already mentioned from Badiou’s work, which will enable me to delineate the sequences I shall be discussing in this book with greater precision. As I have noted, the core concept in Badiou’s philosophy of change is that of the ‘event’. This is what ‘brings to pass “something other” than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears’ (Badiou, 2001: 67). The event is both situated – it is the event of this or that situation – and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation ... You may then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question ... We may say that since a situation is composed of the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation. To take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ‘proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat – being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage – is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital. To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event (2001: 68–9).

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An event names the void, the absence, what is considered simply impossible, that which is not conceivable from within the knowledges of the situation. Badiou puts it in this way: ‘It is that which is not there which is important. The appearing of that which is not there; this is the origin of every real subjective power!’ (Badiou, 2006b: 3, my translation). For example, it was quite impossible for European Enlightenment thinkers to comprehend that slaves could be fully human, that they could reason, organise and be victorious over the armies of the imperial powers of the time. The slaves’ affirmation that they were human was precisely a subjective power that indicated the void of Enlightenment thought, according to which only some people were fully human. Today it is impossible to conceive an emancipatory politics from within the subjective parameters of liberalism and state democracy, a politics of ethnic equality is inconceivable from within a politics of ethnic genocide, and so on. The event is something that is both located within the extant and that points to alternatives to what exists, to the possibility of something different. It is thus a singularity before it may become a universal or eternal truth – ‘an immanent exception in the world where it arises’ (Badiou, 2013f) – with the result that ‘truth is the absolute condition of freedom’ (Badiou, 2014a).27 In Žižek’s somewhat Hegelian but easily recognisable formulation: The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes ‘for-itself ’, and is directly experienced as universal. The universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it. It perturbs and affects it from within, so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and universal aspects (Žižek, 2008: 129, emphasis in original). In politics today, and in Africa in particular, which is what concerns us here, a political event would be expected to point us  – from within the situation or world itself  – towards a different way of engaging in and thinking about politics, beyond the oneway thinking of neo-liberalism and its form of democracy. For outside hegemonic political liberalism today, all that exists is a void; in other words, alternative modes of politics are considered to be impossible, utopian, impracticable. When events happen, they force us, for a while at least, to think of the situation differently. Popular upsurges, however brief, if they are indeed powerful enough, force new issues onto the agenda; for example, they enable changes in thought in the ‘public sphere’. In Badiou’s more recent work (e.g. Badiou, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), a complex theory is developed in which the event is understood as a specific form of becoming that inaugurates real change (he calls this a ‘site’) with maximum existence (which he calls a ‘singularity’) and with maximal consequences. A singularity with non-maximal consequences he calls a ‘weak singularity’, while sites with non-maximal existence he simply calls ‘facts’. ‘Modifications’ are those forms of becoming without real change (Badiou, 2009a:

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363–80). In the same work, Badiou now speaks of ‘worlds’ rather than ‘situations’ as he did earlier: ‘There is no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou, 2009a: 376). The popular struggles in different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was optimistically referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues onto the agenda for a while, before these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (see Ake, 1996). Apart from the specific case of South Africa from 1984 to 1986, most of these changes were arguably simply facts or weak singularities, such as the ‘Marikana moment’ in South Africa in August 2012, which I discuss in detail in a later chapter.28 The other major concept of Badiou’s philosophy is the subject. For Badiou, the subject is the ‘active ... bearer of [a] dialectical overcoming ... Borne by an active intraworldly body, a subject prescribes the effects of this body and their consequences by introducing a cut and a tension into the organisation of places’ (2009a: 45). The political subject thus contests social places. A subject is not to be conflated with an individual – ‘an individual is not a subject “spontaneously” ’ (Badiou, 2011e: 12, my translation) – in politics a subject is, in fact, always collective. A political subject is thus much more than a mere bearer of agency; it is a collective body made up of individuals who have ‘decided to become part of a political truth procedure; to become in short ... militant[s] of this truth’ (Badiou, 2009c: 184, my translation). Such an individual is ‘an active part of this new subject’ (p. 185). The political subject is both active and ‘excessive’ (or ‘prescriptive’) in the sense that it exceeds in thought and practice the complexity of the given extant of social relations, ideologies, places, hierarchies, divisions of labour, etc. For example, the slaves of Saint-Domingue formed themselves into a political subject by affirming their humanity collectively. Badiou continues by arguing that a subject is formed in particular through fidelity to an event and that this fidelity gives rise to a truth which is universal (or eternal). A truth is thus produced and not discovered; a subject is also produced as a result of a process. Moreover, a truth procedure is that process which produces a real change in a particular world. It should also be noted in passing that for Badiou there are four truth procedures (politics, science, love and art), but here I am only concerned with politics. This process of political subjectivation (or subjectification or subjectivisation) must therefore be studied rationally, as its characteristics cannot be known in advance, for these are not expressive; we are no longer within the perspective of a (class, national, ethnic) consciousness produced by a party of intellectuals according to pre-given theory. Finally, a singularity that may give rise to a universal and eternal truth is always specifically located and is in excess of what exists in that location; in other words, it must cut across – interrupt in a singular manner – the specifics of a particular situation or world in order to give rise to a universal. In sum, for Badiou, subjects are not the result of state interpellations or discourses of power. It is not a Foucauldian analysis

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which is of relevance here; subjects exist only in so far as these retain a fidelity to the consequences of an event (past or present) which makes possible the excess over the extant; they become the subject of a truth of this event. It is thus the sustainment of a politics of excess which produces subjects; this cannot be thought of as an ‘automatic process’ but only as one of conscious becoming.29 Badiou has recently argued that the new subjects produced by an event in a world are of different kinds and are not limited to the faithful subject. He now recognises that an event also creates new forms of subjects through reaction and obscurantism. In so far as political subjects are concerned: The world exposes a variant of the gap between the state and the affirmative capacity of the mass of people ... A body comes to be constructed under the injunction of [the evental trace] which always takes the form of an organisation. Articulated point by point, the subjectivated body permits the production of a present which we can call, to borrow a concept from Sylvain Lazarus, a ‘historical mode of politics’. Empirically speaking this is a political sequence (73–71 BC for Spartacus, 1905–17 for Bolshevism, 1792–94 for the Jacobins, 1965–68 for the Cultural Revolution in China  ...). The reactive subject carries the reactionary inventions of the sequence (the new form of resistance to the new) into the heart of the people [le peuple] or of people in general [les gens]. For a long time this has taken the form of reaction. The names of reaction are sometimes typical of the sequence, for instance ‘Thermidorian’ for the French Revolution, or ‘Modern Revisionists’ for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The obscure subject engineers the destruction of the body: the appropriate word is fascism, but in a broader sense than the fascism of the thirties. One will speak of generic fascism to describe the destruction of the organised body through which the construction of the present (of the sequence) had previously passed (Badiou, 2009a: 72, translation modified).30 Here Badiou refers us back to Lazarus’s categories for the analysis of politics as a sequential subjectivity. In addition, in this argument, the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject are all contemporary to the excessive novelty to which they react. The roles of these three subjects may be said to be as follows: As the militant orientation of its own becoming, the faithful subject weaves the present of the body as a new time of truth. The reactive subject is all which orients the conservation of previous economic and political forms (capitalism and parliamentary democracy) in the conditions of existence of the new body ... The obscure subject wants the death of the new body (Badiou, 2009b: 107–8, 109, emphasis in original).

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Badiou develops the distinction between the reactive and obscure subjects at some length: It is crucial to gauge the gap between reactive formalism and obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls ‘modern’) ... Things stand differently for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity ... [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming (2009a: 61, cit. Power and Toscano, 2009: 29, translation modified). In addition, Badiou makes the important point that whatever the seeming victory of reaction or obscurantism, a subject can be reactivated ‘in another logic of its appearing-in-truth’; this he calls a ‘resurrection’ (2009a: 65). The example he gives is instructive. He refers to the ‘resurrection’ of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC, first by Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, who was referred to as the ‘Black Spartacus’ by General Laveaux in 1796, and second in 1919 by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who called themselves ‘Spartakists’. He concludes: ‘the subject whose name is “Spartacus” travels from world to world through the centuries. Ancient Spartacus, Black Spartacus, Red Spartacus’ (p. 65). In this way a new event, a new trace and a new body are generated, and previously occluded events are extracted from their occlusion, are remembered and recaptured politically.31 Finally, Badiou notes that ‘the turnstile of the three subjective types defines a sequence of history’ (2009b: 111), meaning that the manner in which these three subjects interrelate may enable us to delimit a sequence32 and help us to know its truth: One must start patiently from events and from the construction of the truths which follow. Then accept that reaction and its extreme forms are also novelties which are contemporary to the post-evental present which signals the existence of the subjectivatable body. And finally hold that the confused appearance of history results from the fact that the mix of subjective orientations cannot be calculated from its result. Because one will know the True only in so far as it will arrive at the eternity of which it is capable, via its successive ups and downs as it confronts reactionary and obscure novelties. Therefore, one will know it – in the sense of what is really meant by knowing – when detached from its present, and hence from the confused world which saw its birth. It is only when it is

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arranged in another world in order for it to be used to new ends of incorporation that its resurrection will deliver it as it stands. A truth is only universal in the future anterior of the bodily process which makes it appear (Badiou 2009b: 113, my translation). As I shall show in this book, reactive and obscure subjectivities do not recognise politics as an affirmation. They always reduce political subjectivity to a social foundation and thus, at best, conflate it with the political and, at worst, see within it only the pathological, so that a sequence cannot be thought at all, with the result that the period becomes illegible. Politics as affirmation, as thought, as ‘excess’, cannot be grasped as representation, as it is always (at least partly) excessive of the social; yet, in the concrete conditions of its unique singularity, it is simultaneously related to the social in some way, simply because excess is always internal to the situation of that which it exceeds.33 It is at this point that empirical investigation is important in order to elucidate the unique specifics of this relation. By recognising this complex excessive–expressive dialectic, one can begin to try to show how major transformations by Africans were affirmed so that they are just not understandable as simple expressions of the social location of their participants, either through a vulgar state perspective, or through a more sophisticated history or social science (e.g. a ‘sociology of social movements’) which has insisted on visualising the subjective as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the objectively social. Incidentally, it should be noted that it is this quality of social science which lies at the foundation of its common Eurocentrism, governed as it is by a scientistic episteme. I shall have occasion to return to this point below, but it is important to note at this stage that, given that the social sciences as presently constituted do not have the capacity to comprehend affirmative subjectivities, they are perforce not able to recognise African subjective affirmations; as a result, the Third World subaltern is unable to be heard through their medium (Saïd, 1995; Spivak, 1988; Lalu, 2009). These disciplines can only refer such affirmations to social categories that have tended to be ultimately European in their referents, or even reduce them on occasion to psychological aberrations or social pathologies, evident in colonial literature and characteristic of reactive and obscure subjectivities. The difficulties which the discipline of anthropology in particular has faced historically in this regard are well known, as are its colonial roots, yet the problem is arguably one which extends beyond anthropology and which has fundamentally epistemic roots (Foucault, 1980). It is such Eurocentrism, endemic to what might be called ‘epistemic reason’, which is arguably to be found at the core of both a reactive and an obscure state subjectivity. In order to fill the obvious lacuna created by the absence of the subjectivity of politics, the social sciences have made ubiquitous empty gestural references to the importance of considering agency, along with having recourse to (social) psychological

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accounts, all of which have had necessary depoliticising effects.34 In a very important essay, Hannah Arendt (2006) has argued that – in the Western philosophical tradition – this depoliticisation of politics, the result of equating freedom with individual will and hence of seeing it as an issue of psychology, was first put forward through the divorcing of freedom from agency and its attachment to simple consciousness. The main thinker in this regard was Saint Augustine, who substituted the Christian ‘free interiority’ of the individual for the classical Greek understanding of freedom as human agency, a view which has persisted into democratic liberalism today.35 In this view, an individual can be totally politically passive and apathetic and still be an agent exercising her ‘freedom’, as freedom is considered a matter of individual will. The similarity with the idea of ‘market freedom’, in which the subject is said to exercise her freedom by being a passive consumer, should be clear. One must therefore first detach agency from its idealist underpinnings and then follow Badiou in thinking the subject as the bearer of excess. As a result, the idea of the subject must be de-psychologised in order to provide a materialist analysis of subjectivity; this can be done, it seems to me, by adhering to both Badiou’s and Lazarus’s theoretical innovations, which see subjects as the bearers of excessive subjectivities and not as given by their simple biological existence and (social) consciousness. In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity, that it must not be conflated with the political, and that therefore, if it is to be the object of rigorous thought, it cannot be reduced to the psychology of individuals, to consciousness, to power or to the state. An emancipatory politics, in particular, consists fundamentally of an affirmative subjectivity which is both singular and universal in nature, while other qualitatively different subjectivities are usually formed in reaction to it. In outlining the categories which Lazarus and Badiou use to understand politics, my objective has been to lay the foundation for an analysis of political subjectivities deployed by Africans, particularly emancipatory politics, wherever they are to be found on the African continent. In order to do this, it should be clear that we need to be able to assess politics as pure affirmation and to demarcate it from state and (neo-) colonial subjectivities; these are always reduced to social categories with the result that politics is understood as being located within a social matrix, and political consciousness as simply epiphenomenal. In this view, politics is overwhelmingly grasped as ‘representing’ class, nation, ethnicity and any number of social entities, and in consequence all politics is seen in one way or another as identity politics. The reactive subject in Africa, founded precisely on a representative conception of subjectivity, can be most obviously recognised in the politics of the first phase of the postcolonial or nationalist state (1955–79), while the obscure subject has generally been, and is still, located within (neo-)colonial or apartheid-type political subjectivities. There are three major historical sequences which frame the discussion in Part 1. The first is the struggle for emancipation from slavery in Saint-Domingue in

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the 18th century, followed by Haiti in the 19th. This struggle was dominated by Africans (slaves born in Africa) who equated freedom not only with the legal abolition of slavery, but also with popular access to independent peasant land-parcels. The struggle itself can be divided into a number of political sequences and carries over in a different form altogether in post-independence Haiti. The second set of sequences consists of those revolving around the struggles for national liberation on the African continent broadly speaking, limited by the years 1945 and 1975. Here freedom is identified principally with the attainment of independent statehood, yet the state is also thought of as the provider of the material conditions for greater equality within the nation. The third is a new subjective political sequence inaugurated by the struggle for liberation in South Africa in the mid-1980s, in which freedom is equated subjectively with increased forms of control over daily life by people themselves; this, I argue, forms a new politics of emancipation for the 21st century. Chapter 2 is concerned to expand on the idea that people think by uncovering the political subjectivities of Africans in their struggle against slavery in SaintDomingue. I deal specifically with the political agency of Africans in making world history through their emancipatory struggles in Saint-Domingue and Haiti. These struggles are of fundamental universal significance, for they affirmed the truth of a universal humanity for the first time during the modern period, something which the French and American revolutions did not do. I suggest that, at least during the period 1791–6, a specific subjective mode of politics can be identified during these struggles, which could be named the Human Freedom mode of politics. I argue that while ‘universal human rights’ were fought for in this struggle for the first time, these cannot be equated with the contemporary use of this expression, as they were founded on a notion of ‘natural right’, which is absent today. I also show that after achieving their legal freedom, the ex-slaves fought for a prescriptive understanding of economic independence from the state, which they eventually won after Haitian independence in 1804. The formation of an egalitarian system on peasant parcels, regulated through a culture of equality derived from African precepts, lasted, broadly speaking, until the 1960s. In chapter 3, I move to an analysis of the question of a historical explanation of emancipation, in the 20th century in particular but by no means exclusively. This question is broached through an assessment of the literature on the Mau Mau (itungati) rebellion or insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s, particularly that which attempts an understanding of the subjectivity of the rebels. It expands this discussion by means of a critical engagement with the work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies School in India, which deals with the epistemological issues of attempting to understand anti-colonial subaltern political subjectivity in greater depth. I conclude that the discipline of history in its current form is limited by its epistemic reason,

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which is reflected in its inability to conceptualise adequately the thought of popular rebellions in their own terms. The result is therefore a fundamental inability to see people as rational beings. Chapter 4 introduces some of the problems associated with the understanding of freedom and emancipation through the struggle for national liberation. In particular it is concerned in the first part to understand the idea of the nation as a political affirmation and emancipatory vision, and in the second part to deal in greater depth with the subjectivity of what I term the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa between, say, 1945 and 1975. The first part looks explicitly at Fanon’s thought in his famous chapter of The Wretched of the Earth on the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’. It stresses the exceptionally inventive thinking that characterises Fanon, who sees ‘national consciousness’ as a pure affirmation, and also traces the limits of his thought in the stress he puts on the party form of organisation. The second part of the chapter extends the analysis beyond Fanon to outline the characteristics of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics more fully. This mode of politics was characterised by equating the nation with the people, while simultaneously thinking freedom in terms of a new state form. This somewhat contradictory subjectivity combined emancipatory politics at a distance from state thinking with the vision of a new state providing freedom to the people. It was meant to be embodied in a party or organised ‘national liberation movement’ which was said to represent the nation and which saw freedom as achievable primarily through military means. The argument uncovers both the excessive and the expressive sides to this mode, thus exposing its subjective limits. Chapter 5 goes on to show how the popular struggle during the 1980s in South Africa exceeded the limitations of the National Liberation Struggle mode and invented a popularly grounded way of thinking politics, whose subjectivity was founded on the daily lives of ordinary people. In this sense it constituted a radical break from the national liberation struggle way of thinking politics. This new mode of politics was not focused subjectively on attaining state power and was therefore in a position to invent new political subjectivities for a short period. These, I argue, went on to define a new mode of politics which I name the People’s Power mode of politics. It had a limited existence from September 1984 to mid-1986 and was present in a limited number of sites. The originality of this mode was the fact that it showed that political emancipation could be thought outside the party form of organisation and its guerrilla army, and through the collectively developed subjectivities of a mass movement for freedom. This mode of politics was arguably replicated in several respects in the North African rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, which is why it can be said to constitute a new 21st-century mode. However, its limits were reached by its deferring to the exiled party, the African National Congress (ANC), as the legitimate inheritor of state power.

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Chapter 6 examines the collapse of this emancipatory national vision into national chauvinism in South Africa between 1973 and 2013. It therefore takes a longer view of political subjectivity in South Africa, starting from the affirmation of anti-racialism invented by the Black Consciousness intellectual movement, of which Steve Biko was the main thinker, right up to the near present. Its objective is to outline the subjective transformation of emancipatory nationalist thought from an affirmative and thus emancipatory understanding of the people-nation into the national chauvinism prevalent today in South Africa. The process is accounted for in terms of the depoliticisation of the idea of the nation and its replacement by a state conception founded on indigeneity. The idea is to outline the reactive and obscure subjectivities present within the post-apartheid state. The changing sequences of state subjectivities after 1990 are followed up to a sequence dominated by a state subjectivity of national chauvinism and rising violence. Chapter 7 critically examines the currently dominant ways of understanding militancy or activism through the notions of civil society, parties, social movements, citizenship and human rights. It argues that these notions are in themselves inadequate for thinking a politics of emancipation, for they operate strictly within state modes of thought. Parties refer to organised interests in political society (the state itself ); NGOs and social movements refer to organised interests of citizens within a civil society that provides the domain within which such interests are deployed and which is legitimised by the state. Politics cannot be reduced to agency in social history for example. Moreover, citizens, whether passive or active, are deemed to possess rights within civil society according to neo-liberal thought, a notion that only partially conforms to reality on the continent, for many people do not have the right to rights. I conclude Part 1 with two short case studies, assessing the existence of different modes of politics in two different social movements in South Africa during the post-apartheid period: one operating within the realm of civil society and another maintaining itself firmly beyond civil society and transcending those subjective limits. I suggest that it is with respect to the latter that a fidelity to the event of 1984–6 is clearly apparent. I show that the movement operating within the confines of civil society (the Treatment Action Campaign) thinks its politics in terms of state subjectivities, while the one operating beyond the limits of civil society (Abahlali baseMjondolo) is able to think politics at a distance from the state in several respects. This analysis of different examples of popular politics in post-apartheid South Africa closes the discussion of politics in history through an argument that suggests that Abahlali baseMjondolo are currently thinking in excess of state politics, in fidelity to the event of the 1980s.

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notes 1. In other words, at a minimum, politics only exists when the oppressed move beyond ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990) and explicitly engage in a collective practice of changing the world. 2. The original says: ‘Il faut entendre par empirisme l’idée qu’on doit tout fonder sur une passivité primordiale qui est comme une cumulation des effets de l’extérieur’ (Badiou, 2013f, 14 November 2012). 3. What the French call ‘un garde fou’; in other words, in this case a limit to intellectual escapism. 4. The politics of resistance to colonialism have at times taken extreme forms of collective self-immolation. A well-known example here is the destruction of their cattle herds by the amaXhosa in 1856–7 as a result of a prophecy by a young woman, Nongqawuse. The so-called cattle-killing movement has been read as a form of resistance of a ‘millenarian’ type and hence as in some way ‘excessive’. See Peires (1989) and Bradford (1996), for example. It should be stressed that, in the manner in which I use the concept here, this episode, although extreme by any standards, cannot be understood as excessive, as it did not hold to a universal conception of equality; to use the categories of political resistance for such a self-destructive episode seems incongruous in the extreme. This is not to deny that millenarian movements could have powerful anti-colonial appeal; see Bradford (2007). Millenarian movements have, of course, been understood as socially located. 5. See, in this context, the debates in both Africa and India surrounding the limits of colonialism, in particular in Ajayi (1969) and Chatterjee (1993). I am grateful to Jeremiah Orowosegbe for reminding me of these. 6. As in the following statement: ‘The [African] continent seems to be administered more and more from outside without any of the sources of its instability such as the iniquity and violence of global relations ever being questioned’ (Le Monde diplomatique, no. 671, February 2010, p. 21, my translation). 7. ‘This profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be “explained” or even summed up in a single word. It is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge’ (Foucault, 2003a: 236). 8. ‘The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea’ (Hegel, 1952: 80). Hegel is absolutely correct to note that continuity in history can only be an indication of a state subjectivity (e.g. development, progress, modernisation, etc.). 9. Following the work of Moses Finley on Ancient Greece (e.g. 1985); see Neocosmos (2009a). 10. Of course, many other struggles, particularly anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles, have taken place; the ones which come particularly to mind are those of national (ethnic) and religious inspiration which occurred between the 1880s and 1920s in Africa, but these will not be considered here, primarily due to limits of space.

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11. James Scott’s (1990) very important book, which deals with what he calls ‘hidden’ and ‘public transcripts’ of popular politics, while drawing attention to an important feature of subaltern thinking, equates all forms of subjective resistance with politics. There is no attempt to think when resistance is political and when it is not, and he does not recognise a concept of subjective excess or one of subjectivation. Contrary to this perspective, it will be argued at length here that not all forms of resistance are political (in the sense of possessing an emancipatory content), as resistance is a constant feature of oppressive power relations and may be manifested in all sorts of political subjectivities, some of which may be precisely reactionary. 12. See Mamdani (1990). The entrance of terms such as ‘governance’, ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ unquestioningly into our daily discourse is only a small example of such ideological dominance today. 13. Wallerstein (1995), for example, shows that both conservative and socialist strategies in 19th-century Europe gradually came close, from different starting points, ‘to the liberal notion of ongoing, [state-] managed, rational normal change’ (p. 96). He also notes that between 1848 and 1914, ‘the practitioners of all three ideologies turned from a theoretical anti-state position to one of seeking to strengthen and reinforce in practice the state structures in multiple ways’. Later, conservatives were transformed into liberal-conservatives, while Leninists were transformed into liberal-socialists; he argues that the first break in the liberal consensus at the global level occurred in 1968 (pp. 97, 103). 14. Perhaps the most obvious example was Margaret Thatcher’s injunction in the 1980s that ‘There is no alternative’ to neo-liberalism, a slogan often repeated in the 1990s in South Africa by the African National Congress (ANC). 15. In his latest work, Badiou suggests that ‘in the world as it exists today there is no positive usage of identitarian categories’ (Badiou, 2014a, 6 November 2013, my translation). 16. Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (pers. comm., 22/01/2007). 17. Lazarus refers in particular to an essay called ‘Myth, Memory and History’ in Finley (1975). 18. The idea of ‘invention’ here is similar to the one used by Ranger, Vail and others in the notion of the ‘invention’ of tradition or ethnicity; i.e. it refers to a subjectivity that is being thought for the first time. The difference with Ranger’s notion consists primarily in the fact that Ranger’s understanding of ‘ethnic politics’ is a state politics, what could be named the ‘communitarian mode of politics’, which is a mode that fuses state and culture. See Ranger (1985b, 1993) and Vail (1989). For Moses Finley, the political subjectivity of the Greeks is thought separately from the state. According to Finley, it was precisely this ‘sense of community’ founded on active citizenship which was the idea at the core of Athenian democracy: ‘it was that sense of community ... fortified by the state religion, by their myths and their traditions, which was an essential element in the pragmatic success of the Athenian democracy’ (1985: 29). 19. One is tempted to see ‘the invisible hand of the market’ as one such contemporary myth.

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20. Following Lacanian categories, politics is real, history is imagined and, for Badiou, the idea of communism is the symbolic link between the two; see Badiou (2011e: 13). 21. Moreover, as I shall have occasion to note in chapter 7, for Lenin a proletariat was not simply given in early 20th-century Russia, either socio-economically or especially politically; it had to ‘demarcate’ itself from other classes. Socio-economically, in an overwhelmingly peasant country, it had to demarcate itself from classes emanating from a disintegrating peasantry; politically, it demarcated itself from other classes precisely by developing ‘its’ own political positions on the issues of the day through the medium of ‘its’ (social-democratic) party. 22. For such an outline, see Lazarus (1996: 136–52). 23. See Foucault (1968, 1980, 2003a). 24. Lenin’s writings during this period have recently been collected and edited by Slavoj Žižek; see Lenin (2002). 25. I have shown elsewhere at length how such a process of depoliticisation unfolded in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s; see Neocosmos (1998). I shall have occasion to return to this argument in later chapters. 26. For a detailed history of the soviets in Russia and their disappearance, see Anweiler (1972). 27. For Badiou, the immanent exception in politics is the ‘idea of communism’. For him, communism is a political subjectivity which always contains elements of anti-statism and egalitarianism; more broadly, it consists of a politics which is both particular and localised and is also addressed universally (Badiou, 2011e: 11). 28. An idea, such as that of the event, which denotes the always located hazardous unpredictable is not unique to Badiou; for example, the idea of the ‘clinamen’, derived from the work of the early materialists (Lucretius, Democritus, Epicurus) and discussed by Althusser in his later work on ‘Aleatory Materialism’, and to some extent Arendt’s much more theological notion of the ‘miracle’ are not altogether far removed from Badiou’s conception. However, Badiou (1988) is the only one who has theorised this concept in great detail and has located it materially in modern philosophy. As he stresses himself: ‘there is nothing theological or metaphysical in my conception of an event’ (Badiou, 2011e: 14, my translation). See Arendt (2006) and Althusser (1994). For an introduction to the idea of the event, see Žižek (2014). 29. In particular for my specific concerns, one cannot refer, for example, to a ‘colonial subject’ as produced by the colonial state but only in relation to an excessive event such as a national liberation struggle during which such a subject overcomes its colonial condition. The notion of the ‘colonial subject’ is thus an oxymoron. Whether in fact colonial domination could be seen as an event or as the simulacrum of an event for the precolonial world is another question, which can only be adequately addressed elsewhere. 30. See Badiou (2005a: ch. 9) for a discussion of his notion of ‘Thermidorian’ and Badiou (2006a: Part 3, ch. 2) for his detailed assessment of the Cultural Revolution in China. 31. It should be stressed that the core operation here concerns politics and not memory; the latter is a function of the former.

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32. I am grateful to Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba for reminding me of this point. For discussions of some important issues in Badiou’s typology of evental subjectivities, see Žižek (2007) and Power and Toscano (2009). 33. ‘The real is simultaneously in its place and in excess of this place’ (Badiou et al., 1972: 229, my translation). 34. One recent attempt to account explicitly for the manifestations or absences of political agency in terms of psychological perspectives is to be found in Cohen (2001). 35. Moses Finley cites Pericles (from Thucydides) as saying: ‘we consider anyone who does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own business but as useless’ (1985: 30), a remark which illustrates clearly the Greek conception of politics as agency. Fanon’s equivalent was: ‘every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor’ (1990: 161).

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Chapter 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960 It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man. – Toussaint Louverture, 1796 (my translation) A free man prefers poverty to humiliation. – Antoine-Louis de Saint-Just, 1791

the human freedom mode of politics, 1791–1796 Popular struggles against slavery by Africans have a long history. One of the earliest statements against slavery on the continent itself dates (as far as can be established) from 1222 and is known as The Hunters’ Oath of the Manden or the Mandé Charter.1 This affirmation is based on the oral traditions of the Mandinka hunters in the area covering parts of modern Mali, Senegal and Guinea and is said to date back to the reign of King Sunjata of the Mandinka. Statements from the charter read like an 18th-century European human rights document and are replete with the recognition of the truth of the universal nature of humanity. For example: The hunters declare that ... war will no longer destroy villages for the capture of slaves ... from now on no one will place the bit in the mouth of his fellow man in order to sell him ... The hunters declare that the essence of slavery is abolished from this day forth from one wall to the other, from one frontier to the other of the Mandé ... The hunters declare that each person is free to use his own person as he sees fit, each person is free and responsible for his own actions, each person is free to dispose of the fruits of his own labour (Cissé and Kamissoko, 1991: 39, my translation).

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Interestingly, this is not a statement emanating from a state and it seems to have inaugurated an event for a world in which slavery was then an accepted practice. The political subjectivity of this document is framed as a pure affirmation and, although firmly located within culture, its language is not that of power but operates around a central category of ‘life’. Life is universal, it maintains; all lives are of equal value. Life here is stressed in opposition to hunger and famine, which lead both to death and to the selling of people into slavery. The opposition of life and death is at the core of the idea of universal humanity proclaimed by the hunters’ oath. By 1236, another Mandinka document, much more clearly of state origin, had rubbed out all traces of human equality and freedom and replaced it with a statement regarding the hierarchical stratification of society and the rights and duties of each social group.2 It states, inter alia ‘Do not ill-treat slaves. You should allow them to rest one day per week and to end their working day at a reasonable time. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries’ (article 20). Apart from the fact that Africans had been thinking along the lines of a universal conception of humanity long before it occurred to Europeans to do so, it seems important to note that the singularity of the subjective affirmation of the Mandé Charter evidently asserted a universal and eternal truth. That this episode has been occluded in the history books does not lessen this truth. At the same time, it should be noted that the second statement amounted to a subjective reaction by power to the first, as it recognised and legitimised the practice of slavery, thus adapting and moderating the new situation arising from the effects of the universal singularity – and hence the truth – of the Mandé Charter by simply ensuring and reasserting that slavery should continue, but now in a ‘reasonable way’ for ‘reasonable’ slave-owners. We now have a new world in which the consequences of the truth of the universality of humanity are undermined and extinguished but in which the slave system is apparently ‘moderated’. Following Badiou, this constitutes a clear example of the essence of reactive reformist state subjectivity faced with the revolutionising effects of a truth. Ironically, it is this later document that is seen today as an authentic expression of African culture. The Oath of the Manden, on the other hand, being an obviously excessive affirmation, has quite simply been effaced from the history books. When the Atlantic slave trade became established as part of the West and Central African political landscape in the 17th and 18th centuries, its devastating effects were resisted. Resistance took a number of forms. One of great importance was the healing spiritual cult known as Lemba among the BaKongo in the area of Lower Congo (Bas Congo). The significance of this institution is twofold. Firstly, it constituted one of the most successful and long-lasting ‘drums of affliction’ (ngoma) on the continent, and played an important role in governing the population through controlling markets and in healing individuals, families and communities from the ravages of the slave trade in particular. The main academic study of Lemba, by John

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Janzen, speaks of it euphemistically in universalistic terms as a ‘seventeenth century “cure for capitalism” created by insightful Congo coast people who perceived that the great trade was destroying their society’ (Janzen, 1982: xiii). Secondly, as with other beliefs and secret cults, Lemba migrated to the Americas and was prevalent in SaintDomingue/Haiti during the successful fight against slavery there. African migrants (though slaves were coerced, they were still migrants) did not suddenly abandon their African cosmology when they landed in the New World. Lemba was clearly adapted to their new situation and the struggles they had to engage in to assert their humanity against overwhelming odds. Lemba is also important in that it combined political subjectivities with spiritual ones, curative beliefs with conceptions regarding the nature of society. It offers an important insight into how African cosmology could provide one of the foundations for a singularity of universal humanity. In resisting the slave trade, Lemba developed a politics at a distance from the state. According to Janzen, ‘Lemba, a major historic cult of healing, trade and marriage relations, came into being in the seventeenth century in a triangular region extending from the Atlantic coast to Malebo Pool between today’s cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and from the Congo river northward to the Kwilu-Niari river valley’ (1982: 3). ‘In effect, although couched in the mold of a drum of affliction [a healing cult], Lemba was the governing order in a region much of which had no centralized institutions’ (p. 4). Although its cultural dimensions were not limited to this area, it was here that Lemba developed to its fullest extent outside the control of centralised states, especially that of the Kongo kingdom. In fact, the Kingdom of Kongo was riven by civil wars throughout most of the 18th century, a fact which fuelled the slave trade, as kings and contenders expanded their earnings by selling prisoners in large numbers (Thornton, 1993: 184). Janzen cites the following figures: ‘By 1750 in Cabinda alone 5000 to 6000 slaves were being exported annually; by the 1780s the three ports of Malemba, Cabinda and Loango Bay were processing 15,000 slaves annually’ (1982: 34). In the regions of the Lower Congo River where there were acephalous societies, Lemba ‘adapted conventional religious symbols to its own purpose, and developed a pervasive and unique ideology of healing relating to its concept of a stateless political order’ (p. 58). It also developed, in the areas where it controlled markets and trade, a ‘unique political system’ from which ‘the notion of the sovereign was absent’ (p. 72).3 It emerged ‘in a society with a strong egalitarian ethic’ (p. 318) and was able to regulate conflicts and restore calm through its ‘laws of the market’ (p. 72). Lemba was able to keep the area peaceful (the term lemba means ‘calm’, ‘peaceful’; p. 304) and to organise society without having recourse to hierarchies and a centralised bureaucratic authority or apparatus. It did so by regulating markets (through laws) and trade routes (which it controlled), by marriage arrangements between clans, by reconstructing the idea of the family, and hence by healing both individuals and society.4 Janzen continues:

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it is significant that inhabitants of the region made a selective choice for the kind of public order that emerged, that, instead of imposing a new order to deal with the coastal trade which resembled a state, they developed a solution to the challenge of trade which emphasized the redefinition of reality in therapeutic terms ... It is important to explore ... the way a society imagined alternatives open to itself and the consequences of such alternatives if taken (1982: 324–5). It seems, then, that Lemba was able to maintain relative peace in a region disrupted by the slave trade through its activities and perhaps also to ensure that this particular area was less affected by the slave trade than that south of the river, which was subject to internecine warfare. It could achieve this through a politics which distanced itself from state politics and which had mass support among the population, combining political, administrative, economic and spiritual features. In sum, under enormous pressure from colonial forms of domination, Africans invented non-state forms of regulation that could resist slavery for a long time.5 The view that local societies simply collapsed as a result of the impact of the slave trade and the power of Europeans is therefore not quite accurate. Importantly, though, Lemba also travelled to the Americas and was prevalent in Brazil and particularly in Haiti (Janzen, 1982: ch. 8). In 1789, out of the 500,000 slaves living in Saint-Domingue, as Thornton remarks, ‘perhaps as many as twothirds ... had been born, raised and socialised in Africa’ (Thornton, 1993: 183; Fick, 1990: 25). Thornton also estimates that ‘some 62,000 Kongolese were exported during the decade 1780–1790 or somewhat more than half the total of the combined French–English Angola trade’ (1993: 184 n.12).6 He notes that ‘slaves from this region made up the majority of those imported into Saint-Domingue for the last twenty years before the revolution’ and cites evidence to the effect that BaKongo amounted to 60 per cent of the slaves in the north of the colony, where the revolution began, and a similar percentage in the south: ‘they were common enough among the rebels that Congo became a generic term for the rank and file of the slave insurgents’ (p. 185). The Saint-Domingue revolution, which began in 1791 and ended with the independence of Haiti in 1804, shook the Western world at the time and constitutes one of the three major revolutions of the 18th century. It was truly a human emancipatory event and was not simply restricted to the legal freeing of slaves. It was probably more far-reaching in its effects than either the American or French revolutions. Although its consequences have been systematically occluded and silenced in scholarship, it has recently become again an object of discussion in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek, Hallward and Nesbitt.7 According to Nesbitt, it was ‘the first world-historical event to enact such a notion of universal human freedom not as a mere idea of the Enlightenment, not as the hypocritical, cynical compromise of a “free” nation economically and socially growing rich off slave labour (France

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and the United States), but as a principled human act of universal emancipation in consonance with reason’ (Nesbitt, 2008a: 126–7). For my present purposes, its interest lies in the fact that it constitutes a truly African event8 (or series of events) in which African migrants affirmed the truth of the universality of humanity by means of a specific subjective emancipatory mode of politics, which I shall call the Human Freedom mode of politics. It is not difficult to see that the slaves deployed a specific political subjectivity particular to those conditions. Their excessive politics were singularly unique and were made possible precisely by their political exclusion from what was deemed to constitute humanity. In fact, it could even be suggested that it was precisely their position of ‘non-being’ that enabled the thought of a true human universal – a theme that was pursued particularly by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks (1986). I propose at this point to specify the dates, sites, names and subjectivity of this specific political sequence. The discussion will help me to elucidate not only the character of this particular mode but also to delimit it in time in order to distinguish it from other sequences that followed. The best and most detailed account of that epic struggle is provided by Carolyn Fick (1990). She argues that it was a revolution made primarily by the masses of slaves themselves rather than by a few well-known figures or ‘Black Jacobins’.9 Even more than by the legislative decrees of France, it was through the obtrusive intervention of their own efforts, their own popular initiative, and often spontaneously organised activities into a complex web of political and military events, that the Saint-Domingue slaves won their own freedom and finally became a politically independent state ... [Later, in 1802 after the French expeditionary force had arrived to reinstate slavery] the masses ... resisted the French from the very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership (Fick, 1990: 25, 228). The outbreak of the revolt on 21 August 1791 was highly organised and was by no means spontaneous. A number of meetings had taken place beforehand, and the conspiracy was solemnised at a famous Vodun ceremony in Bois Caïman, a wooded area in the north. There, one of the early leaders of the uprising, Boukman, is said to have made a call to arms in which he stated, ‘Couté la libeté li palé nan cœur nou tous!’ (Listen to freedom; it speaks in all our hearts!) (p. 93). The category libeté (freedom, in Creole) along with liberté générale, droit naturel and humanité (universal freedom, natural right and humanity) will be one of the recurring political categories of this mode of politics. Although there had been many rebellions and conspiracies on the island before, along with a tradition of marronage, where maroons (bands of runaway slaves) living in the hills led a semi-autonomous existence and executed guerrilla-type raids on

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plantations, the 21st August was a singular event with enormous consequences, as it set in motion a continuous series of struggles for freedom that only ended (and then only temporarily, as we shall see) with independence in 1804. It was thus truly an event in Badiou’s sense of the term; in other words, an occurrence that systematically altered subjectivities both in Haiti and throughout the Western world. In gauging the consequences of this event, it is also important to note that in rebelling against the French, the plantation slaves ‘took care to destroy ... not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation’ (Fick, 1990: 97). As Fick notes, this is an important indication of the fact that slaves were concerned to destroy not simply their legal status, but also everything linked to plantation production which they associated understandably with slave work; as a result, they made a powerful claim on the land itself (p. 180). As time passed, this was to lead to conflict between ex-slaves and their leaders, as the latter were primarily concerned with retaining the plantation system and only abolishing slave labour itself in a legal sense. The major intellectual figure of this mode of politics was undoubtedly Toussaint Louverture. In addition to being an exceptionally brilliant military commander, a result in no small measure of his having the support of the masses whom he forged into an army, Toussaint expressed clearly the political subjectivity of the majority until around 1796. Thereafter, a major division developed between him and the mass of slaves and ex-slaves, which grew eventually into a gulf leading to his demise; but before then he was able to express the main categories of the Human Freedom mode of politics in abundantly clear terms. Importantly, he always referred to a notion of universal humanity and ‘natural right’ and never asserted Black superiority in opposition to the dominant colonial racism. The limits of this sequence of the Human Freedom mode can be set between 1791 and 1796; thereafter, a new sequence – a militarist sequence – begins, which lasted from 1797 until 1804. The first sequence was punctuated by the universal abolition of slavery by the civil commissioner Sonthonax, under pressure from slave resistance in the north on 29 August 1793 and then, largely as an effect of this, in France itself on 4 February 1794, when slavery was abolished by the National Convention in all French colonies. Toussaint spoke in the following terms: For too long, gentlemen, ... we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself ... We are your equals then by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black or an advantage to be white. If the abuses of the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the fortunate

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      From Saint-Domingue to Haiti     75

revolution that has taken place in the motherland which has opened for us the road which our courage and labour will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating ... by your decrees you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for 480,000 individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess ... We present to you our demands as follows: First, general liberty for all men detained in slavery ... Here, gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die [1792] ... I have always held humanity in common to all [1794] ... I believe that this is only possible by serving the French Republic; it is under its flag that we are truly free and equal [1796] ... [Let us overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human species into a single brotherhood ... the oath that we renew [is] to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery ... We have known how to confront danger to obtain our liberty, and we will know how to confront death to preserve it. This, Citizens and Directors, is the morality of the people of Saint-Domingue, these are the principles I transmit to you on their behalf [1797] (Aristide, 2008: 6, 7, 8, 10, 19, 28, 33, 34–5, emphasis added). These extracts provide a flavour not only of Toussaint’s eloquence but of his steadfast commitment to and affirmation of universal freedom and humanity on the basis of natural right, and thus of his expression of a distinct mode of politics. Edward Saïd (1993: 280) has rightly noted that, according to C.L.R. James’s account, Toussaint ‘appropriates the principles of the Revolution not as a Black man but as a human, and he does so with a dense historical awareness of how in finding the language of Diderot, Rousseau, and Robespierre one follows predecessors creatively, using the same words, employing inflections that transformed rhetoric into actuality’. Nesbitt (2008a: 63) is therefore right to stress, following Césaire, the centrality in Toussaint’s thought of a transformation in ‘consciousness of universal freedom as a categorical imperative’ founded on natural right. It is this singular subjectivity which shows the truth during this sequence of the universality of humanity in the Human Freedom mode. Although many military campaigns were conducted and fought in order to free the slaves, the political discourse was in essence not militaristic. The sites of this subjectivity included maroons and independent bands, secret societies of plantations workers and slave armies.10 The context for the Saint-Domingue revolution was the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it took the conception of humanity of the French Revolution (often limited, particularly by the right to property) to its logical conclusion. In doing so, the slaves exceeded the limited idea of the human as defined by the Enlightenment, which saw only some privileged members of humanity as fully human (Sala-Molins, 2008).

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They thus had to think singular political subjectivities beyond the accepted idea of human nature of the time and hence to produce a universal and eternal truth which insisted that all humans, without any exception whatsoever, are capable of reason. Francine Gauthier (1992) shows that the language in which this truth was expressed was that of ‘natural right’, as it was only an adherence to this conception that saw all ‘men’ as given by nature as free subjects.11 It is to this natural right that the slaves of Saint-Domingue gave political expression when they affirmed their humanity and thus established the truth of universal humanity in practice. Yet by 1796 the Human Freedom mode seems to have achieved all it could. It had become  – in Lazarus’s formulation – ‘saturated’, a fact that became gradually apparent as a state politics of militarism came to dominate subjectivity, and a distance developed between the leadership, particularly as represented by Toussaint, and the masses of freed slaves. Nesbitt (2008a: 79) notes for example: ‘Toussaint’s actions retained a social and political core only as long as they were guided by a political principle: the universal abolition of slavery and the destruction of the plantation system that enabled it. Toussaint’s limitations arose precisely when he began to abandon that fidelity in the late 1790s.’

militarism, 1797–1804 From 1797 a militarised statist subjectivity became dominant among the ‘Black Jacobin’ leadership and for Toussaint in particular.12 However, it was arguably not the shift in Toussaint’s politics that was the cause of the ending of the mode, but rather the saturation of the Human Freedom mode that made Toussaint’s actions possible. Once slavery was abolished by decree, a fidelity to humanity would have had to take a different form in order for the mode to be sustained. The freed slaves, particularly the African-born bossales (as opposed to the créoles, who were born on the island (see Nesbitt, 2008a)), did indeed have a clear idea of the form in which universal freedom should be thought. Their unique prescription – which was an obvious impossibility for Toussaint to imagine – concerned the breaking up of the large estates into subsistence family units.13 This was not a conception shared by their leadership, with the exception of Moïse, who would consequently pay for his closeness to the masses with his life (Nesbitt, 2008b). The political sequence 1797–1804 was one characterised by the militarisation of agricultural production, the reorganisation of the estates on the basis of ‘wage slavery’ (to use one of Marx’s very apt expressions), the dictatorship of Toussaint until 1802, when he was kidnapped by the French, and the mass mobilisation of the ex-slaves with the consequent military defeat of the Napoleonic expeditionary force sent to restore slavery. The effects on politics were clear: all politics became systematically militarised until independence was achieved under the command of Dessalines. Toussaint, who eventually acquired full powers on the island, was, along with the

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civil commissioners of the French Republic, intent on keeping the plantation system intact and invited many Whites to return to manage the sugar estates. The core idea was simply that Saint-Domingue’s economic viability was only possible if based on export production to the metropole, to which Toussaint was totally committed. In the face of worker opposition, a number of work codes were instituted that inaugurated new forced-labour regimes, often under the supervision of Whites whose claim to technical expertise constituted their managerial power. Fick comments: The workers resisted Toussaint’s rural code just as they had resisted that of Polverel [one of the civil commissioners] ... They were legally, physically, and psychologically no longer slaves, and Toussaint’s system, like that of the civil commissioners before him, deprived them of any means by which to give substance and real meaning to their freedom. Freedom rather was thrown at them as an abstraction, for it was always in the name of general emancipation that Toussaint ... regimented their labour, deprived them of land, and deprived them by the constitution of the right to practice voodoo; in short, imposing upon them Western modes of thought and of organization in an attempt to bring an autonomous, and economically viable, Saint Domingue into the modern world (Fick, 1990: 208).14 In addition, Toussaint’s constitution of 1801, which banned slavery but simultaneously set him up as the unquestioned ruler of the island  – a king, in so many words  – was drafted without the participation of any ex-slave. By 1801 the rural masses had broken out in open rebellion against Toussaint’s rule; this included an organised insurrection of farm workers in the north. According to James (2001: 216), Moïse, who was Toussaint’s adopted nephew, apparently reacted very badly to Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, calling Toussaint an ‘old fool ... he thinks he is King of San Domingo!’ ‘It was Moïse ... who embodied the aspirations and needs of the rural masses. More than that he also believed in their economic and social legitimacy, and, if he did not ostensibly organise the insurrection, he nevertheless wholly supported it in opposition to Toussaint’ (Fick, 1990: 209). Toussaint had Moïse arrested and, according to James (2001: 225), ‘would not allow the military tribunal even to hear him’; not surprisingly, Moïse was executed. After 1800, Toussaint and the other generals gradually lost confidence in the masses and defected to the French; it was only under popular pressure and in the course of popular resistance against the French that some of them returned to positions of leadership. By then, it was no longer humanity and libeté that dominated the thinking of politics, but forms of militarism and monarchy, despite the fact that the leaders ostensibly remained committed to a principled notion of emancipation. Thus Toussaint declared in December 1801:

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It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man. We are free today because we are the stronger. The consul [Bonaparte] maintains slavery in Martinique and in Bourbon [Réunion]; we shall therefore be slaves when he is the stronger (cit. Césaire, 1981: 278, my translation). Independence in 1804 marked the end of the militaristic sequence begun in 1797. It was independence that in this sequence had formed the category around which politics was thought and people were mobilised, especially in 1803 under Dessalines, and organised (guerrilla) warfare was deployed to defeat the French and stop the reintroduction of slavery. Concurrently small bands of independently organised maroons and Vodun leaders were viciously eliminated, yet Barthélemy (2000: 216–18) shows that these maroons were in fact organised and led in a much more collective and less hierarchical manner. As Fick writes, ‘It was because he [Dessalines] could see no further that he resorted to a crude policy and military strategy of outright liquidation of those independent leaders refusing his authority, but yet who had initially sustained the war against Bonaparte’s army and had made his own defection [back to the side of Haiti] effectually possible and meaningful’ (Fick, 1990: 233). Perhaps Fick is mistaken here, and Dessalines realised quite clearly the threat that this alternative provided to the rule of the new Creole elite whom he represented. In fact, it was this vicious opposition of the state to popular concerns that was to characterise Haiti for many more years to come.15 What truths, then, did the two singular events of 1791 and 1804 propose? The first opened up the universality of humanity, the truth of universal freedom (as opposed to freedom for some and not for others). In politics there is no superior universal truth to this. The second proposed the universal of nationhood among African peoples (‘the national question’ or the ‘right to self-determination’, as it became known in the 20th century). This truth has been much more controversial because nationhood has tended to be equated with statehood, although the equation is invalid, as it is possible to consider a nation distinct from a state, as we shall see. In any case, ‘nation’ can denote a pure subjectivity and not only a community of citizens. Indeed, this problem came to constitute the central contradiction of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. I shall discuss some of the dimensions of this truth in Africa through the medium of Fanon’s work in the next chapter. In the meantime, we can gain insight into some of the problems arising from the notion of a politics of freedom through a brief discussion of the struggles over landownership following upon Haiti’s independence.

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rethinking freedom as rural equality, 1804–1960 Independence opened a new sequence in Haiti, that of the struggle for the formation of a peasantry through what is known in the development literature as ‘agrarian reform’. In the literature this issue is treated as a problem of political economy and the state. Here, however, it must be understood fundamentally as a question of politics. The politics of the supposed necessity of maintaining the plantation system was proposed on the basis of its technical superiority, its ‘obviousness’.16 This probably constituted the first appearance of this kind of argument, which was to become the core of a predominant statist approach to ‘development’ in post-independence countries and a constantly recurring theme in 20th-century politics. In its 19th-century version it was perhaps proposed most clearly within the Marxist tradition by Karl Kautsky in his book The Agrarian Question, in which an argument regarding the economic superiority of large-scale enterprises was made on the grounds of their technical efficiency. In the 20th century it regularly took the form of an argument for the primacy of ‘economic growth’, ‘technical progress’ or the ‘development of the productive forces’.17 Yet, central to this debate in newly independent Haiti was the actualisation of freedom and its consequent extension into equality: Permanent freedom had been won through independence. But the masses had not yet won the freedom to till their own soil. And this, perhaps more than anything else, sums up what the peasant masses expected out of freedom. A personal claim to the land upon which one laboured and from which to derive and express one’s individuality was, for the black labourers, a necessary and an essential element in their vision of freedom. For without this concrete economic and social reality, freedom for the ex-slaves was little more than a legal abstraction. To continue to be forced into labouring for others, bound by property relations that afforded few benefits and no real alternatives for themselves, meant that they were not entirely free (Fick, 1990: 249). According to Barthélemy (1990: 28), it is precisely the exceptional character of a society of freed ex-slaves that explains the ‘egalitarian system without a state’ which gradually emerged in rural Haiti. The African-born bossales managed to acquire ownership of peasant parcels and the plantation estate system was largely destroyed. The process began in 1809 and was initiated by Pétion, who ruled the south of the country while (King) Christophe ruled the north. The forced-labour system was abandoned and large private estates were broken up and leased to peasant sharecroppers (Lundhal, 1979: 262). As a result, no latifundia developed in Haiti, unlike in most of post-independence Latin America and the Caribbean. The masses of Haitians insisted on establishing a parcel-owning peasantry to anchor their political independence in economic independence – successfully as it turns

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out – so that the new bourgeoisie was deprived of direct access to surplus labour. A merchant bourgeoisie then developed that extracted surplus from beyond the peasant system, and it is on this class that the state was founded (Trouillot, 1980). Within peasant society itself, a number of methods of self-regulation – largely of African origin – enabled the restriction of differentiation and the dominance of a system of equality that remained at an objective distance from state power. These methods included unpaid collective forms of work, witchcraft and secret societies, a common religious ideology, and family socialisation (Barthélemy, 1990: 30–44). In fact Barthélemy makes the point that, from 1804 onwards, it gradually became understood by the masses of the bossales that ‘the only alternative to the colonial hierarchical system is that of equality, more so than that of liberty, as while the latter enables freedom from external oppression, it is not able to take on board the ideological content of the system. Only equality is able to put into place an anti-system’ (1990: 84, my translation). A society and nation developed which placed itself in opposition to the postcolonial state.18 Barthélemy refers to this kind of politics as a new form of ‘marronage, a counter-culture, a structural and collective reaction of escape’ (2000: 379, my translation). We can also understand it as a singular form of politics which attempted to distance its thinking from that of the state and which was simultaneously rooted in local traditions of resistance to oppression. Commonly, this subjectivity was expressed in proverbs or sayings, the most important of which was ‘Tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun’, which, loosely translated, means ‘Every person is a person even though they are not the same person’.19 Barthélemy (2000: 293–4) explains this as a statement governing the world view of the Haitian rural people, for it is more than a simple proverb and reflects a fought-for rule of social and political practice. The point is that equality cannot exist without difference and that, correspondingly, difference makes no sense without equality. ‘In order to be different, not to be memn moun, each man must begin by identifying what he has in common with others; what is the basic identity from which variations can be felt, interpreted and used’ (p. 293, my translation). While these variations obviously exist, they are restricted from becoming hierarchical through group reactions that limit the entrenchment of these forms of behaviour; these reactions include ‘the attribution to one person of various statuses in different contexts’ (p. 302, my translation). ‘A good reputation, [social] behaviour, personal relations, all contribute to balancing out the purely quantitative [differences]’, and consequently identification is sought with the ideal of a ‘middle peasant’ (moun mouayen) (p. 303, my translation). Barthélemy insists that, while Haitian rural society is generally understood as a failure, as wedded to traditions and poverty, it is in fact a highly organised social system that is self-regulating without an institutionalised state structure. In order to achieve this, it had to keep hierarchical Creole society and the formal state at a distance, to block all attempts at individual enrichment and power-seeking, and to harmonise the

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group through a kind of automatic regulation of individual behaviour; ‘all this outside any “political” dimension’ of state control’ (Barthélemy, 1990: 29, my translation). In this way the Haitian nation (if by ‘nation’ we mean the subjectively constituted unity of the people) constituted itself in a manner that distanced it from the state. Nesbitt (2008: 171) notes that this egalitarian system, ‘a legacy of the Haitian revolution, functioned in such a state of dynamic equilibrium from the late 1790s to the 1960s until the destruction of the Haitian (natural and social) environment under the regime of Papa Doc (Duvalier) undermined its viability’, through, interalia, the systematic use of terror. This suggests the existence of an egalitarian political sequence, which we can (very provisionally) date between approximately 1809 and 1960. While fidelity to the Human Freedom mode led the African bossales to establish an egalitarian rural society, and while the reactive subjectivity of the state and military leaders attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to control and limit the truth of freedom and equality post-independence, an uneasy truce was established between the two. It was, however, the obscure subjectivity born of colonial and neo-colonial power that has been able ever since to destroy and occlude the liberatory power of the politics of humanity so remarkably initiated by the slaves of Haiti. In what Peter Hallward has called ‘an endless counter-revolution’, the outside world, initially slave-owning, closed ranks and ‘locked the country in a state of economic isolation from which it has never recovered’ (2007: 12). The country was forced to pay ‘compensation’ to the French for the loss of its slave economy of 150 million francs, which it had to repay by borrowing from French banks at extortionate rates of interest; although the sum was cut eventually to 90 million francs, ‘by the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80% of the national budget. France received the last instalment in 1947’ (p. 12). The imperial ambitions of the Western states were actualised by the US invasion of Haiti in 1915, which lasted until 1934. By the time they pulled out ... US troops had gone a long way towards discouraging peasant resistance to what was only the first of such repeated doses of imported ‘modernization’, killing anything between 15,000 and 30,000 people in the process. In suggestive anticipation of their future commitments to Haitian democracy, the US validated their occupation through a plebiscite that apparently won 99.2% of the vote (2007: 14). Ever since this time, the Western powers, particularly the US, have supported criminal regimes that have gone out of their way to rule the country by terror, the most notorious of which have been those of Papa Doc Duvalier (1957–71) and his son, Baby Doc (1971–86), thus affirming the continued prevalence of a monarchical-type state in the country until 1990. In other words, the obscure subject had practically succeeded

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in obliterating all traces of the universal truth of humanity established by the African slaves of Haiti. It was only with the coming to power of Aristide in 1990 that for the first time the people of Haiti were again able to recover some say in their political affairs and the subjectivity of humanity was revived (Hallward, 2007). Similarly, in intellectual discourse, the achievements of the Africans of Haiti have been systematically occluded by what Depelchin (2005) called the ‘syndromes of discovery and abolition’: popular (emancipatory) achievements have been systematically written out of history by neo-colonial and frankly racist ‘syndromes’ whereby only certain sections of humanity arrogate to themselves the right to knowledge and to transform the world. The objectivism of the reactive and obscure subjects has been able to occlude the singularity of Haiti’s experience, under a general assertion of ‘poverty’ attributed to the incapacity and inanity of the ‘underdeveloped’ Black world as a whole, in a way that reminds one how the slave rebellion of 1791 was totally incomprehensible to intellectual thought in Europe at the time (Trouillot, 1995). Finally, it has been extremely difficult to resurrect the achievements of the Haitian people and to save them from the oblivion to which they were condemned until the election of Aristide, itself a direct result of the return of the people into the field of politics (Depelchin, n.d.). This simply reconfirms the political conditions of existence for the resurrection of the evental truth.

conclusion It must be reiterated that the discipline of history is purely imaginary, as it is only a more or less valid narrative after the fact. As Badiou puts it (2009d: 190), ‘there is no real of history’. History is therefore best understood as a ‘thought-relation-of-thestate’, as Lazarus expresses the point, as a discipline that in its fundamental modus operandi is only able to fuse the objective and the subjective. I will develop this question at length in chapter 3. What I have done in this present chapter is to introduce, with regard to the analysis of African emancipatory subjectivities in the 18th century, the methodology and theoretical justification for an analysis of sequences and of historical modes of politics limited in time and located in specific sites. In this context, I have also illustrated the point that each mode of politics must be understood internally in terms of the deployment of its own categories. No two sequences are oriented by exactly the same combination of categories of thought. What this suggests is that, in order to avoid a collapse into historicism, politics in history must be understood as discontinuous. This idea has been theorised by Lazarus, as we have seen, and I shall continue to illustrate it in following chapters in greater detail; it is also held by Badiou, who insists in his more phenomenological work that ‘the discontinuity of worlds is the law of appearance and hence that of existence’ (Badiou, 2009d: 190). If what we are faced with is the discontinuity of worlds – i.e. of situations – the apparent continuity of history can be understood as a state-inspired narrative.

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If sequences are discontinuous, then so are their categories. Some may be revived, but their emancipatory content would have to be developed at a distance from reactive and obscure subjects represented in state and colonial subjectivities. Trouillot has argued convincingly that the truth of the universality of humanity affirmed by the Haitian Revolution was simply incomprehensible at the time (it named the ‘void of the situation’, to use Badiou’s terminology) and that it challenged ‘the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment. The events that shook up SaintDomingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were “unthinkable facts” in the framework of Western thought’ (Trouillot, 1995: 82, emphasis in original). But this is arguably always the case for political truths, as they cut through existing knowledges and overthrow the intellectual theories of emancipation of the time.20 In Zibechi’s (2010: 83) very apt formulation, ‘a kind of epistemological earthquake occurs when those who have occupied the depth of society for centuries ... emerge as subjects, which calls into question the subject/object relationship, one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism’. And, of course, the systematic dehumanisation of the slave system could manage to enable and make possible, through its subversion, the construction of its opposite, a truly inspiring mode of politics founded on affirming the universality of humanity. The fact that it took a successful struggle against slavery to instil in thought the truth of the universality of humanity with no exceptions whatsoever constitutes a major gift by Africans to humanity, which should be the object of celebration. Unfortunately this has not been the case. Of course, for the dominant knowledge of the time, slaves simply could not possibly be understood to successfully affirm their freedom and humanity, for they were not (fully) human, being African; in fact, a ‘free native’ was a contradiction in terms, as Africans were by definition unfree, irrespective of whether they were slaves or not. One could not be both a ‘man’ and a ‘native’; the two were mutually exclusive. Yet for writers such as Nesbitt, Haiti was simply the culmination of the subjectivity of what he calls the ‘Radical Enlightenment’: ‘It was the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1791–1804 that carried forward the new logic of universal equality under a single imperative: no humans can be enslaved’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 97). There was for him no fundamental invention, destruction and reordering of thought; after all, the French state itself was thinking through Enlightenment categories – it was just a matter presumably of ‘radicalising’ these. To reason in this manner is not only to understate the revolutionary character and extraordinary achievements of the Saint-Domingue and Haiti events, but it also enables Nesbitt to suggest that, as human rights were pushed to their ultimate then, so they can constitute the basis of an emancipatory project today.21 He recognises the current imperial character of human rights discourse but asserts: ‘beyond any – necessary – critique of its ideological misuse in the era of the UN as an arm of empire,

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the question of human rights must be rethought from below; they are not a problem to be left to nation-states and their mouthpieces’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 101, emphasis in original). The problem here is, of course, the idea of ‘rethinking from below’ discourses and politics that are those of the state and empire, as these notions are said to have been somehow ‘misused’ and needing to be ‘rethought’. Presumably such ‘rethinking from below’ could apply to all sorts of universal categories, from the market to democracy, freedom, equality and the state, all having been radically ‘misused’ by power over the centuries. ‘Rethinking from below’, even if we were to know clearly what it means, is not a serious emancipatory conception, for it ultimately attempts to think emancipation from within state categories; one cannot think emancipation from within and from beyond state categories simultaneously: a thorough break from state subjectivity is necessary. In this context, Badiou (2012c) notes quite rightly that ‘one cannot oppose a thought perspective by sharing its axioms’. Moreover, to assert such a ‘thinking from below’ is to forget that it is no longer possible to affirm the universality of humanity through a human rights language today, as the whole idea of ‘natural right’ on which the 18th-century universal conception was founded is no longer in existence and the ‘right to property’ reigns supreme (Gauthier, 1992). The language of universal human rights of the Human Freedom mode has been fundamentally altered today into something quite different. Gauthier’s work shows how during the French Revolution an extensive struggle occurred between, on the one hand, the idea of a fundamental and overriding notion of ‘natural right’, which was seen (following Locke) to be universal (and which Toussaint stressed), and, on the other hand, the primacy of the rights of property owners – the rights of Man ‘in society’ – which subordinated rights to a given social division of labour and hierarchy and which has constituted the dominant conception of ‘universal human rights’ ever since Thermidor.22 Césaire’s comment on this understanding of human rights is still accurate today, unfortunately: ‘the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has cherished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been – and is – narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’ (1972: 15). To orient one’s politics around human rights discourse today is to think within state politics, as I shall show in detail in later chapters. In Saint-Domingue in the 18th century, human rights could develop into an emancipatory politics precisely because the political situation or world in question was a colonial one and hence was unable to sustain a universal conception of the human, however much this may have been a hegemonic state discourse in the French metropolis.23 In the 20th century, the idea of national self-determination could only be held consistently against colonial power, as we shall see; it could not be comprehended from the perspective of the colonial state or the coloniser, as a number of militant writers of national freedom made clear. In either case the Idea of universal humanity or freedom-through-the-nation could

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not be a state conception exclusively, for it was only realisable through politics at a distance from the state. Any attempt to think it exclusively through the state only became indicative of its collapse. Today, as Chatterjee (2004: 100) rightly observes, at a time when the ‘protection of human rights is a function of empire’, human rights can no longer be the basis of any emancipatory politics in the neo-colonies. Human rights discourse in Haiti in the 18th century constituted a politics at a distance from the state, and thus could be emancipatory. Today, human rights discourse orients the politics of the reactive and obscure subjects and, as a result, can only be opposed to emancipation. Finally, it should perhaps be noted that Badiou’s idea of ‘resurrection’, which one could possibly appeal to in this context, brings to light only the names of the ‘egalitarian’ or ‘communist’ invariants of every sequence, and not the names and categories through which they are acted out; these can only be the categories of specific sequences which by their very nature are singular (Badiou, 2009a: 76). APPENDIX

Mandé Charter or Oath of the Manden, 1222 Source: Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wâ Kamissoko, La Grande Geste du Mali, vol. 2, Soundjata ou la gloire du Mali, Paris: Karthala-Arsan, 1991, p. 39, my translation.   1. The hunters declare: Every (human) life is a life. It is true that a life comes into existence before another life, But no life is more ‘ancient’, more respectable than any other, In the same way no one life is superior to any other.   2. The hunters declare: As each life is a life, Any wrong done unto a life requires reparation. Consequently, No one should gratuitously attack his neighbour, No one should wrong his neighbour, No one should torment his fellow man.   3. The hunters declare: That each person should watch over their neighbour, That each person should venerate their progenitors, That each person should educate their children as it should be done, That each person should provide For the needs of their family.

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  4. The hunters declare: That each person should watch over the country of their fathers. By country, or motherland, or ‘faso’, One must understand also people; For ‘any country, any land, Which was to see people disappear, Would soon become nostalgic’.   5. The hunters declare: Hunger is not a good thing. There is nothing worse than this On this earth. As long as we hold the quiver and the bow, Hunger will no longer kill anyone in the Manden, If by chance hunger were to arrive; War will no longer destroy any village For the purpose of acquiring slaves; That is to say that no one will from now on Place the bit in the mouth of his fellow In order to sell him; Furthermore no one will be beaten, And all the more so put to death, Because he is the son of a slave.   6. The hunters declare: The essence of slavery is today extinguished ‘From one wall to the other’, from one border to the other of the Manden. Raids are banned from this day onward in the Manden. The torments born of these horrors have ended from this day onward in the Manden. What an ordeal this torment is! Especially when the oppressed has no recourse! The slave does not benefit from any consideration Anywhere in the world.   7. People from the old days tell us: ‘Man as an individual Made of flesh and bone, Of marrow and nerves, Of skin covered in hair, Eats food and drink, But his soul, his spirit lives on three things: He must see what he wishes to see,

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He must say what he wishes to say And do what he wishes to do. If one of these things were to be missing from the human soul, It would suffer and would surely become sick.’ In consequence, the hunters declare: Each person from now on is free to dispose of his or her own self, Each person is free to act in the way they wish, Each person disposes of the fruit of their labour from now on. This is the oath of the Manden For the ears of the whole world.

The Charter of Kurukan Fuga, 1236 Source: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/36/38515935.pdf (adapted).   1. The Great Mandé Society is divided into sixteen clans of quiver-carriers, five clans of marabouts, four groups of ‘nyamakalas’ and one group of slaves. Each has a specific activity and role.   2. The ‘nyamakalas’ have to devote themselves to tell the truth to the chiefs, to be their counsellors and to defend through speech the established rulers and the order upon the whole territory.   3. The five clans of marabouts are our teachers and our educators in Islam. Everyone has to hold them in respect and consideration.   4. The society is divided into age-groups. The people (men or women) who are born during a period of three years in succession belong to the some age-group. The members of the intermediary class between young and old people should be invited to take part in making important decisions concerning society.   5. Everybody has a right to life and to the preservation of its physical integrity. Accordingly, any attempt to deprive one’s fellow being of life is punished with death.   6. To win the battle of prosperity, the general system of supervision has been established in order to fight against laziness and idleness.   7. It has been established among the Mandenkas, the sanankunya (joking relationship) and the tanamannyonya (blood pact). Consequently any contention that occurs among these groups should not get out of hand, respect for one another being the rule. Between brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, between grandparents and grandchildren, tolerance should be the principle.   8. The Keïta’s family is nominated the reigning family of the empire.

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 9. The children’s education is the responsibility of the entire society. Paternal authority in consequence falls to everyone. 10. We should offer condolences mutually. 11. When your wife or your child runs away, stop running after her or him in the neighbour’s house. 12. The succession being patrilineal, never give up the power to a son when one of his fathers is still alive. Do never give up the power to a minor just because he has goods. 13. Never offend the Nyaras. 14. Never offend women, our mothers. 15. Never beat a married woman but only after her husband has interfered unsuccessfully. 16. Women, apart from their everyday occupations, should be associated with all our management. 17. Lies that have lived for 40 years should be considered as truths. 18. We should respect the law of primogeniture. 19. Any man has two parents-in-law: the parents of the girl we failed to have and the speech we deliver without any constraint. We have to hold them in respect and consideration. 20. Do not ill-treat slaves. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries. 21. Do not follow up with your constant attentions the wives of the chief, of the neighbour, of the marabout, of the priest, of the friend and of the partner. 22. Vanity is the sign of weakness and humility is the sign of nobility. 23. Never betray one another. Respect your word of honour. 24. In Mandé never wrong foreigners. 25. The ambassador does not risk anything in Mandé. 26. The bull confided to your care should not lead the cattle-pen. 27. The young lady can get married early when she is pubescent. 28. The young man can get married from 20 years old. 29. The amount of brideprice is three head of cattle: one for the girl, two for her father and mother. 30. In Mandé, divorce is tolerated for one of the following reasons: the impotence of the husband, the madness of one of the spouses, the husband’s incapability of assuming the obligations of the marriage. The divorce should occur out of the village. 31. We should help those who are in need. 32. There are five ways to acquire property: buying, donation, exchange, work and inheriting. Any other form without convincing testimony is doubtful.

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33. Any object found without a known owner becomes common property only after four years. 34. The fourth offspring of a heifer is the property of the guardian. One egg out of four is the property of the guardian of the laying hen. 35. One head of cattle should be exchanged for four sheep or four goats. 36. To satisfy one’s hunger is not robbery if you don’t take away anything in your bag or your pocket. 37. Fakombé is nominated chief of hunters. 38. Before setting fire to the bush, don’t look at the ground, raise your head in the direction of the top of the trees to see if they don’t bear fruits or flowers. 39. Domestic animals should be tied during times of cultivation and freed after the harvest. The dog, the cat, the duck and the poultry are not bound by the measure. 40. Respect kinship, marriage and the neighbourhood. 41. You can kill the enemy, but not humiliate him. 42. In big assemblies, be satisfied with your lawful representatives. 43. Balla Fasséké Kouyaté is nominated supreme chief of ceremonies and main mediator in Mandé. He is allowed to joke with all groups, first of all with the royal family. 44. All those who transgress these rules will be punished. Everyone is bound to make effective their implementation.

notes   1. See the appendix to this chapter for the full text in English. The charter was orally transmitted within the hunters’ guild. For a useful account of the transmission of knowledge by the hunters of Mali, see Sedibé (2001).   2. This second document is known as the Kurukan Fuga Charter. It has recently been revived as an authentic expression of African culture, which is said to provide the basis for locating in tradition such current concerns as conflict resolution, decentralisation, environmental sustainability, and so on, in contemporary Africa, and has been promoted by various West African states and multi-state agencies. In fact, UNESCO has inscribed it on the ‘Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. See the appendix for translations of both texts.   3. Ifi Amadiume (1995: 42) refers to West African acephalous societies as ‘anti-state decentralised political systems’, an expression which has the merit of stressing their explicit opposition to state power and not simply the absence of a state. From the evidence regarding the extent to which they went in order to secure their autonomy, it seems indeed that Amadiume’s term is applicable to these BaKongo societies.   4. ‘It is more than therapeutic techniques; it is rebuilding society to make human dignity meaningful again. Lessons drawn from this process of social healing should

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be important for any politics of peace. Lemba was conceptualized as “mukisi wa mfunisina kanda” – “a knowledge and practice of re-peopling the clan” ’ (Wambadia-Wamba, 2013: 15).   5. Janzen sees Lemba as gradually succumbing to the coastal slave trade in the late 19th century and to colonisation following on from it in the 20th century. Lemba survived for three centuries in this form, according to Janzen (1982: 6).   6. By ‘Kongolese’, Thornton means only those BaKongo who were subjects of the king of Kongo (1993: 185 n.17).   7. For Hallward (2004): ‘Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.’ See also Nesbitt (2008a, 2008b, 2009).   8. Law (2000: 131) insists: ‘In 1791, the insurrection of Haitian slaves was principally an African affair’ (my translation).   9. As in the work of C.L.R. James (2001), for example, which in this respect conforms to the conception of history of the time in which it was written. For an important discussion of James’s visions of emancipation and modernity, see Scott (2004). 10. I only managed to have access to Neil Roberts’s important text Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as my book was being prepared for publication, and thus have not been able to take account of its many useful insights here. 11. When it came to women, the evidence is less clear. In France, Olympe de Gouges had affirmed the equality of women in the Revolution (see https://chnm.gmu.edu/ revolution/d/293/); in the case of Saint-Domingue, Girard (2009) examines the role of women in the last two years of the struggle for independence. 12. Césaire (1981: 269) comments on Toussaint’s politics at this time: ‘The social situation was of concern? The economic situation serious? He believed he could solve everything by militarising everything’ (my translation). 13. Fick (2000: 83, my translation) notes: ‘if they had been allowed to define the word freedom, it would have signified the individual possession of small land parcels and subsistence agriculture along with the selling of the harvest on local markets rather than for export’. Such, in my terms, was their second prescription for freedom. 14. Toussaint’s ultimately failed opposition to the formation of a parcel-owning peasantry in Haiti is an extremely important issue, for it illustrates the political gulf which had developed between him (and the other leaders) on the one hand and the ex-slaves on the other. The latter were predominantly African-born, but this fact, along with the fact that Toussaint was a Creole, cannot account either for the insistence by the people on forming a parcel-owning peasantry or for the leaders’ resistance to it. Nesbitt (following Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint’s biographer) wants to use Toussaint’s identity to account for his politics. He asserts (p. 168) that he was not African-born and that the demand for land tenure reform was African in inspiration. First, it is important to note that the land tenure system set up in Haiti was never African; there is

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no parcel-owning peasantry in Africa, but land is held by the community and not individually owned; private ownership exists but is rare in African tenurial systems. Neither is the minifundia system in Latin America or the mir in Russia (both of which are used by Nesbitt) an adequate empirical analogy, as in either case peasants were bound to a landlord class. The parcel-owning system was a novelty invented in Haiti. Parcel-owning without overlords is a peasant political prescription, some would say utopia, for it tends to lead to inequalities developing, as some peasants accumulate at the expense of others. The Haitian land tenure system seems to have been a successful attempt to actualise such a system and to maintain a relative equality by putting cultural obstacles in the way of individual accumulation, and it was these that were inspired by African customs, according to Fick (1990: 181) and Barthélemy (1990, 2000). What was African, then, was not the land tenure system as such, but the cultural restrictions on peasant class differentiation. This suggests a strong political commitment to egalitarianism. Second, to maintain that Toussaint opposed this set-up and insisted on a plantation system because he was Creole and had not experienced Africa, ultimately depoliticises Toussaint’s decisions in favour of a psychological account of his politics and by reference to his social location, although we have been told that his principled fidelity to a politics of humanity contradicted his social location (e.g. as an ex-slave-owner himself ) (see Césaire, 1981: 243). Toussaint, we are told, was African enough to speak his father’s African language, to be a knowledgeable herbalist and to run a palaver. So why would he not be African on the question of land? The account should rather begin from his subjective politics. Toussaint was an assimilé – he could not envisage independence from France and he was enough of a modernist to be a Freemason, which suggests a fetishism of technical progress. Of course, a plantation system at the time would seem technically more ‘advanced’ than a peasant parcel. After all, this is what all states (probably without exception) have maintained ever since. And this is the point: Toussaint’s politics at this time were state politics. James (2001: 200) notes that ‘Toussaint knew the backwardness of the labourers, he made them work, but he wanted to see them civilised and advanced in culture’. Toussaint had clearly lost confidence in the masses, but it was also clear that his fidelity to morality and the law made him unable to listen to the people, let alone to be convinced by them. Given his position of power in the state and his desire to maintain an ‘efficient economy’ in the conceptions of the time, it is not surprising that he should insist on (and violently impose) his view of the superiority of the plantation system, however exploitative it may have been. This had less to do with his identity and more with the limited nature of his politics. He became hopelessly out of touch with the democratic aspirations of the masses. This is arguably a general problem with charismatic leadership, which largely conforms to a form of state leadership. As a political figure, Toussaint is very reminiscent of Mandela in many respects. 15. In so far as independent leaders who were close to the masses are concerned, of particular importance is the figure of Colonel Sans-Souci, on whom see Trouillot (1995). Trouillot notes that such rebel leaders were primarily African-born bossales

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as opposed to locally born créoles. Sans-Souci was from Congo; he was assassinated by Henri (later King) Christophe. 16. A point, incidentally, with which Césaire agreed (1981: 269ff). 17. See Kautsky (1899). This argument was vehemently opposed by Lenin in his analyses of the ‘agrarian question’ in Russia, as he argued that the large estates had to be broken up and redistributed to peasants, since the estates, if left unchecked, would reproduce the dominance of repressive – feudal-based – social relations and maintain the political power of landlords intact. He called this the ‘Junker’, ‘Prussian’ or ‘landlord’ road to capitalist development; in opposition to this, he supported the formation of a class of rich peasants from among the ranks of the peasantry to whom the large estates had been distributed, a process he referred to as the ‘peasant’ or ‘American’ road to capitalist development, as he held that this would lead to more democratic and open capitalist relations in the Russian countryside (see Lenin, 1905). I return to this point in chapter 7. In the post-independence period in Africa, the politics of ‘technical development’ and the necessity of the so-called ‘capture’ of the peasantry for ‘development’ were hotly debated in the critical literature, particularly in Tanzania; see Shivji (1985), Hyden (1983), Mamdani (1985), Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985), and Bernstein (1987). 18. The opposition between state and society seems to be the central motif of radical analyses of Haiti. Trouillot (1995) sees state and nation as opposed in Haiti, Barthélemy (1990, 2000) sees rural equality as being opposed to Creole hierarchy, and Lundhal (1979) sees the ‘government’ as exploiting the peasantry. Nesbitt (2008a: 170–6) largely follows Barthélemy’s argument. Barthélemy is himself heavily influenced by the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1974), who researched the purposeful opposition of society to the state. 19. The first part of the statement tout moun se moun was resurrected politically by Aristide as a guide to action for the Lavalas Party in the 1980s and 1990s (see Hallward, 2007). The term moun is clearly derived etymologically from the Bantu word (u) muntu for ‘a person’. It is interesting to note the origins of this prescription in African traditions, such as the idea of ubuntu, for example, although ubuntu has lost much of its egalitarian content and is considered today as a more or less lived ‘culture’ rather than a political practice (see e.g. Praeg and Magadla, 2014). Much more important as a guide to action is the related statement (in Zulu) by Abahlali baseMjondolo (2014), ‘unyawo alunampumulo’ (a person is a person wherever they may come from). 20. This point seems universally applicable, because knowledges, and particularly those of political change, could rarely foresee the forms emancipatory struggles would take. If the opposite were true, revolutions could be planned with precision or effectuated by a simple act of will. Unfortunately, this is never so. For example, few radical theoretical positions could believe in 1871 that the workers of Paris could run a state, or in 1917 that a Marxist-inspired revolution could take place in a backward agrarian country, or in the 1960s that a communist cultural revolution could take place against the Communist Party in power in China, or that the poor Vietnamese peasants could

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defeat the armies of France and the US in succession, or, in the 1980s, that apartheid could be overthrown by non-violent struggle in South Africa, and so on. 21. Following the logic of ‘radicalising (state) democracy’, as in Laclau and Mouffe (1985). 22. See also Gauthier (1998, 2004 and 2009). What should be evident is the reactive (in Badiou’s sense) character of the subjectivity prevalent within the discipline of sociology and other social sciences from their inception – emanating as these social sciences did from the ‘conservative reaction’ to the Enlightenment – in sustaining such a notion of human rights by insisting on the individual’s place ‘in society’. In addition, it should perhaps be noted that the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s insistence on the social, most notably in Edmund Burke’s criticisms of Locke’s egalitarian natural right, is at the origin of the liberal colonial conception of trusteeship, which itself is central to 19th-century liberalism and to the South African state’s justification for segregation and apartheid through the influential work of Jan Smuts. See Pitts (2005) and Losurdo (2014) on liberalism and empire, and Allsobrook (2014) on South Africa. 23. This is shown quite clearly by the simple fact that pamphlets on the rights of man and the citizen, which were obviously standard fare in the French metropolis, had to circulate clandestinely in Saint-Domingue, as they were considered subversive of the colonial system; see Fick (1990: 111 and elsewhere).

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Chapter 3

Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought Insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness ... The [peasant] rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion. – Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, 1992 (emphasis in original)

the idea of modernity and popular political subjectivity It is important to note that in the academic study of anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa, not only has political consciousness rarely been central, but when it has indeed been the object of study it has been regularly reduced to its social location as well as interpreted, ‘anthropologised’ and translated into an idiom comprehensible to liberal or Marxist post-Enlightenment historical science. Variously described as ‘religious’, ‘tribal’, ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-capitalist’ in their ideologies, such forms of consciousness have been distinguished from those of ‘modernity’ precisely by relating them to their social foundations. While so-called ‘traditional’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ expressions of resistance have been seen as typical of ‘tribal’, peasant and other primarily rural-based movements, urban ones have been seen as focused on more recognisably ‘modern’ characteristics such as those of class and nation. Until the 1980s it was rarely thought that ethnic and religious subjectivities could perfectly well be ‘modern’ expressions of resistance (contemporary to capitalism) and that ethnic and religious movements, for example, could also be nationalist idioms. The dominance of historicism in social science was evidenced, for example, by Terence Ranger’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ forms of resistance to colonialism, the former being understood as largely peasant, ethnically circumscribed and rural-based, and the latter being urban, nationalist and modern in their thinking. Closely following the arguments of social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, who distinguished between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ rebels (the former being characterised

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by a ‘pre-political’ consciousness), historians and social scientists of Africa, much like those of Haiti, have restricted their understanding of political subjectivities to their apparently recognisable Western modern forms. In this view, modernity in political subjectivity could not take other forms than those recognisably articulating issues of citizenship and democracy, organised in political parties, unions and other interest groups, and using a language of rights within a specific domain of ‘the political’. This evident Eurocentrism was unable to come to terms with the fact that supposedly ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or any ‘pre-modern’ cultural idioms could be deployed in the field of politics, not to advocate a return to a supposedly glorious past, but to affirm humanistic and popular-democratic demands for a better future.1 Such a view clearly conflated subjective politics with the objectively political and also assumed a public–private distinction, in the form of an extraction of the human from spirituality, which was largely misplaced and irrelevant to African conditions.2 The problem, however, has consisted in a failure to recognise not only that ‘religious’ idioms, for example, could be in essence political, but also that history and social science have only been able to analyse forms of consciousness by reducing them to the objectively social, thereby disabling any understanding of their possible universal emancipatory content. Moreover, the categories of the social (such as tribe, ethnicity, religion, class, nation) to which colonial people were ascribed were themselves introduced by colonial (and then postcolonial) power (Landau, 2010). These were not the categories that people used to describe themselves. Inevitably, the colonial character of modernity in Africa, as in South Asia and other postcolonial locations, led to an often unrecognisable and indecipherable fusing of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in politics, which could rarely be disentangled from within the logic of a Eurocentric scientistic discourse.

accounting for rebellious consciousness in african history: the case of the land and freedom army, or mau mau, in 1950s kenya One movement that illustrates some of these analytical difficulties is the so-called Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. ‘Mau Mau’ was the term used by the colonial state: the rebels did not use this term for themselves. They referred to themselves in Kikuyu as itungati or the ‘Land and Freedom Army’ (Lonsdale, 1994: 145). The militaristic name associated with the return of alienated land situates their subjectivity within the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics predominant at this time (it will be assessed at length in chapter 4). This uprising of peasants and workers (‘squatters’, in colonial parlance) was clearly an event for Kenyan politics because, although the movement was militarily defeated, ultimately its consequences were

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far-reaching, as a class of rich peasants was created by the colonial state by means of land redistribution through the Swynnerton Plan, and the country achieved its independence soon thereafter.3 Mamdani (1996a) has rightly rejected the debate between those who see Mau Mau as a tribal movement and those who see it as a nationalist one. It was evidently both, being overwhelmingly an organisation whose main adherents were peasants and workers of the Kikuyu nationality who demanded both ‘land and freedom’ and an ‘African government’, demands that were obviously nationalist in content and that could be supported by all the colonised (Barnett and Njama, 1966: 278 and passim). Obviously the distinction is quite impossible to make in this particular case, a fact that clearly illustrates the limits placed on understanding by historicist and positivist conceptions, governed as they are by their distinction between tradition and modernity. Yet we can also note that whether the literature stresses the socio-economic location of the participants or cultural characteristics, it is always their supposed ‘interests’, in the form of class, ‘tribe’, ethnicity, race or nation, which are seen to be the fundamental explanatory foundation of consciousness (e.g. Maughan-Brown, 1985; Throup, 1987; Furedi, 1989). The guerrilla rebels themselves are then simply depicted in historical accounts as ‘bearers’ of their socio-economic location within a structural context, not as subjects of their own history. However, there has been one attempt to paint a picture of what participants themselves may have thought and of their motivations, that provided by John Lonsdale (1992). Lonsdale criticises those accounts produced by the colonial state based on tribe, atavism and socio-pathology, by nationalists founded on state nationalism, and by Marxists based on class, and proposes a ‘many stranded narrative’ that connects some of these factors, while he grounds his own account ultimately in a set of cultural practices which he refers to as ‘moral economy’ and a sense of civic virtue and reciprocity which he refers to as ‘moral ethnicity’ (1992: 403, 405, 467). While Kikuyu nationalists did not have one voice, ‘they still argued about one ideal, the civic virtue of self-mastery, some voices were light with hope, others hoarse with despair’ (p. 402). There was simultaneously, he argues, a battle for Kikuyu authority along age and class lines for which ‘the issue was civic virtue, achieved by one party but seemingly out of the other’s reach’ (p. 403). Those for whom ‘civic virtue’ was out of reach were precisely the poor, the young, particularly men without access to land, without the exercise of economic independence and political participation, and without the ability to fulfil their moral and civic duties within their ethnic domain. In the absence of these capacities they were simply excluded and could not be full ethnic citizens, for what ‘the ancestors had taught, or were said to have taught, on the relation between labour and civilization was the only widely known measure of achievement or failure in man- or womanhood’ (p. 316). In sum, for Lonsdale, ‘Mau Mau fought as much for virtue as for freedom’ (p. 317). Asked by the colonial official, ‘Why did you join Mau Mau?’, a former guerrilla

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answered, ‘to regain the stolen lands and to become an adult’ (p. 326). In this manner, Lonsdale interprets the answer of the guerrilla to the colonial authority’s question as giving ‘Mau Mau’s open purpose and its inner meaning. His political language ... linked external power to internal virtue. His personal maturity depended on a public power to win land.’ Without ‘moral agency’ Kikuyu men could not achieve the full maturity exercised by elders (p. 326). Lonsdale thus distinguishes what he calls ‘moral ethnicity’ from ‘political tribalism’. The former ‘creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue’, the latter ‘flows down from high-political intrigue; it constitutes communities through external competition’ (p. 466). He concludes: Moral ethnicity may not be an institutionalized force; but it is the nearest Kenya has to a national memory and a watchful political culture. Because native, it is a more trenchant critic of the abuse of power than any Western political thought; it imagines freedom in laborious idioms of self-mastery which intellectuals too easily dismiss. High-political awareness of the vigilance of moral ethnicity may be, as much as canny political tribalism and a lively civil society, what keeps Kenya at peace (p. 467). The merit of Lonsdale’s argument is that it brings out quite clearly the idea that ‘ethnic identity’ is always contested, although for him it appears that the Mau Mau contestation concerned simply the position of various (age) actors within the hierarchy, though, importantly, not the character of the hierarchy itself. His distinction between an idealised moral conception of the ethnic and an authoritarian personalised and communitarian (‘tribal’) politics is welcome, as it reminds us that not all politics which use traditional and cultural idioms are of necessity communitarian. Yet, at the same time, that Lonsdale finds it necessary to explain what the response of the Mau Mau activist ‘really meant’, and thus to develop a culturalist argument that goes beyond merely pointing to the fact of cultural idioms as forms of resistance, seems to counterpose an idealised ahistorical version of ‘ethnic consciousness’ in ‘moral ethnicity’ to a despised (colonially produced) ‘tribalist’ one, while simultaneously anthropologising what could be easily read as a simple demand for dignity. The danger of Lonsdale’s argument is that it fails to completely transcend the Western colonial image of the Kikuyu as tribal or ethnic ‘subjects’, and therefore fails either to allow the militant rebel to speak for himself or herself, or to provide at least an opening for an understanding of politics as subjectivity in Africa that does not collapse into culturalism of the neo-colonial variety. I want to suggest in what follows that this problem, illustrated here by Lonsdale’s argument, is largely inherent in what, following Foucault, could be called the ‘epistemic reason’ of the human sciences as presently constituted, and is not simply the result of bias, of the limits of Lonsdale’s choice of theory, or indeed of the scientific

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method itself. In order to do this, I wish to discuss some of the debates that arose within the Indian Subaltern Studies Collective, as they constitute to my mind one of the most sophisticated ways currently available of addressing this particular question of the Eurocentrism of the human sciences and the subjectivity of the subaltern. Before this, however, a few words are required on the origins of the concept of ‘moral economy’. Fortunately there is not much to say on this score as, if we put aside the normative accounts regarding what an economy should be, the expression seems to have been first popularised by the historian E.P. Thompson (1971) to refer to the idea of social justice – the defence ‘of traditional rights and customs’ (p. 50) – among the English working class in order to counterbalance economic deterministic accounts of popular riots. It was then picked up and organised into a general principle by James Scott (1979), in his study of the ‘subsistence ethic’ of peasants in Southeast Asia, in which he argued that it was precisely the violation of this ‘moral economy’ by colonial power that had turned peasants into revolutionaries. However, the idea of ‘the moral’ in the Mau Mau case seems to be a signifier of the fact that Western categories are inapplicable (or applicable only with difficulty), rather than providing a coherent alternative conceptual proposal which would allow the consciousness of the subaltern to speak for itself in its own categories.4 There are three general points to make regarding this notion that are of importance for the present discussion. Firstly, it is applied to the situation of ‘outsiders’ or those ‘marginal’ to a capitalist market economy, who, it is said, propose a distinct social ethic in the face of expanding and encroaching capitalist relations; this ethic is to be celebrated in opposition to capitalism, as it exhibits features of a ‘non-capitalist’ economy extolled as ‘virtuous’. Of course, few seriously celebrate an ethical content of the capitalist market economy; what is more, any economy is always socially embedded and this may include various moral features. Secondly, such an alternative conception is often idealised and seen as unchanging, as ahistorical, with a consequent inability to fully investigate the contradictions within it. Thus Lonsdale takes as evident that Kikuyu ‘civic virtue’ is given in a form which leaves the location, for example, of age differences uncontested; of course, younger men want to become elders – this is why they uphold such civic virtue. Finally, of course, the subaltern does not speak here, as Spivak (1998) would say. The category of moral economy is simply invented by Western intellectuals to make sense of popular consciousness in the ‘non-modern’; it is equivalent to a concept of ‘culture’ in which the Other is located. We have little sense of what the Mau Mau rebel would say, let alone think, about his or her own conception of ‘land and freedom’; if the idea is to understand popular consciousness, then we are not much closer to doing so. The Mau Mau rebel is simply said to think as an (African) peasant; she or he is simply the bearer of that structural category and hence must think access to land in primordial ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ terms, and therefore in moral-cultural terms, which are to be celebrated or deplored depending

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on one’s political orientation. Moreover, for Lonsdale, there is no attempt to think the Kikuyu as a nationality, like the Scots or the Irish, for example; they are African, therefore they must be ethnic. There is little fundamental difference here between the prejudices of colonial and postcolonial human science. Finally, Lonsdale himself admits that he cannot speak Kikuyu and that his analysis ‘gives weight to the words of senior men’ (p. 321). He thus admits that his work ‘will not explain Mau Mau. It hopes to uncover the moral and intellectual context in which explanations may be found’ (p. 326). Of course, despite the personal diffidence and the protocols of positivist science, what Lonsdale offers is a reading of both the objective location (the Kikuyu peasantry) and the subjectivity (‘civic virtue’) of Mau Mau militants, based on his theoretical assumptions and the evidence which, as a historian, he is able and willing to muster from the archive.

subaltern consciousness and the limits of historical analysis It is at this point that some of the debates in the Subaltern Studies Collective become pertinent, for the concern of that historical school has been precisely to understand the political consciousness of the anti-colonial peasant rebel primarily in colonial India. The emphasis here is directly placed on making sense of the political subjectivities of the subaltern. In undertaking this project, Subaltern Studies has been forced to distance itself from colonial, nationalist as well as Marxist social history, with the result that the disciplinary logic of history  – what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’ – has had to be unpacked. I shall draw on their work in order to elucidate the problem of accounting for the subjectivity of popular rebels through a discussion of some aspects of the work of Ranajit Guha, the founding intellectual figure of Subaltern Studies. The whole of Guha’s intellectual enterprise, as I understand it, is to begin from the statement that if the anti-colonial peasant rebel is to be understood as the subject of his or her own history, then it is the political consciousness of the subaltern that must be the object of the discipline of history and his or her thought must be taken seriously. It is a fidelity to this axiom which, it seems to me, guides Guha’s historical work on India. This, I will argue, leads him and the Subaltern Studies project into an impasse, as the discipline of history is unable to provide the means whereby this axiom can be fully effectuated, because it comes up against the limits of its own scientism. Ultimately, Subaltern Studies is caught up in a ‘disciplinary’ or, perhaps better, an ‘epistemic’ reason which is unable to transcend a state-thought of politics from which the subjectivity of the subaltern is excluded.5 In this sense Spivak (1988) is quite right: the subaltern cannot speak from the confines of history; her voice cannot be heard without transcending the discipline of history itself, as history cannot identify political subjects, only bearers of social locations. The subaltern’s subjectivity

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is apprehended through and forced into categories (colonial, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, masculinist, etc.) that are not her own and, in any case, when she rebels she is no longer in a subaltern position, at least politically speaking.6 Guha’s starting point is that there existed, during the colonial period in India, a distinct domain of politics beyond the elite domain of state institutions, policies, laws and practices introduced by the British colonial power. This domain was an ‘autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’. The ‘principal actors’ in this realm were neither the dominant groups of indigenous society nor the authorities, ‘but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is the people’. It is within this parallel and autonomous domain that ‘the politics of the people’ could be found (Guha, 2000: 3, emphasis in original). One of the more important distinctions between the politics of the two domains, according to Guha, related to political mobilisation, for in the elite domain this ‘was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally’. In the first case this meant reliance on the ‘colonial adaptation of British parliamentary institutions and the residua of ... the political institutions of the pre-colonial period’, while the latter ‘relied on traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class associations’; the former was more ‘legalistic’, the latter more ‘violent’; the former more ‘controlled, the latter more spontaneous’ (p. 4). In his commentary on the originality of Subaltern Studies, Chakrabarty (2002: 8) emphasises that By explicitly rejecting the characterization of peasant consciousness as prepolitical, and by avoiding evolutionary models of consciousness, Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action against exploitation in colonial India was such that it effectively led to a new constellation of the political ... Guha insisted that, instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India. The peasant’s was not a backward consciousness ... Elitist histories of peasant uprisings missed the significance of this gesture by seeing it as prepolitical (emphasis in original). Of course, it is evidently not only ‘elitist histories’ that are being criticised here but also the writings of the British and other Marxist social historians. This argument is developed at length in Guha’s justly famous piece on ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’. Guha starts from the observation that ‘peasant insurrections [were not] purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs’ (1992a: 1). Given the risks faced by peasants and how much was at stake for them, it is mistaken to see peasant insurgency in any other way than as a ‘motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses’. Yet historiography has been prepared to deal with the peasant not ‘as an

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entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion’ (p. 2), but simply ‘as an empirical person or member of a class’.7 As a result, ‘insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness’ (p. 3). In other words, peasants were considered not as thinking subjects in the historical literature, but simply as bearers of a social location. Guha undertakes a detailed assessment of the discourse of this history from the colonial period to the present and concludes that, whether it is colonial history, liberal history, nationalist history or Marxist history that is produced, ‘the rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion’ (p. 27): Once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation or the people, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will (p. 38). A major consequence of this general perspective is to fail to recognise the central role played in rebellions by the spirituality of the insurgents, which modernist historiography refers to as ‘religion’. Guha uses the example of the Santal Rebellion of 1855–7 to make his point, yet in doing so he opens up a major problem for the history of political consciousness, which he is ultimately unable to resolve.8 The leading protagonists of the rebellion express themselves in a discourse that denies their own agency and rather ascribes it to their god ‘Thakur’, who is said to do the fighting himself; as a result, it is ‘not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness ... as predicated on a will other than their own’ (p. 35). As Chakrabarty (1998: 20) asks: ‘what does it then mean when we both take the subaltern’s views seriously – the subaltern ascribes the agency for their rebellion to some god – and we want to confer on the subaltern agency or subjecthood in their own history, a status the subaltern’s status denies?’ Neither Guha nor Chakrabarty is able to find an adequate solution to this conundrum, which remains aporetic, as ‘the supernatural was part of what constituted public life for the non-modern Santals of the nineteenth century’ (p. 20). Guha distances himself from those positions that see religion as an irrational (‘superstitious’) expression of the secular, yet, as Chakrabarty notes, his position ‘becomes a combination of the anthropologist’s politeness ... and a Marxist (or modern) sense of frustration with the intrusion of the supernatural into public life’ (p. 21), which he calls a ‘massive demonstration of self-estrangement’ (Guha, 1992a: 34). Although Guha understands that we are faced with a religious idiom of politics, he is unable to attempt an analysis of it in its own terms: ‘It was this consciousness, an unquestionably false consciousness if ever there was one, which also generated a

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certain kind of alienation: it made the subject look upon his destiny not as a function of his own will and action, but as that of forces outside and independent of himself ’ (Guha, 1999: 268). Yet that consciousness was never so false as not to recognise the real enemy or as to not sustain a mass popular rebellion of extreme importance against the colonial state. Unfortunately, the Santals’ statements are treated as ‘beliefs’ and anthropologised, with the consequence that ‘we cannot write history from within those beliefs. We thus produce “good”, not subversive histories’ (Chakrabarty, 1998: 22, emphasis added). Guha concludes that ‘there is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate such distortion altogether ... what it can do however is to acknowledge such distortion as parametric – as a datum which determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it’ (1992a: 33). The only way out for Guha, and indeed Chakrabarty also, is to introduce an element of ‘self-criticism’ into historical analysis so as to place the coercive content of the episteme or the discipline under scrutiny. Chakrabarty (1998: 26) thus notes that with ‘subaltern pasts ... we reach the limits of the discourse of history’, and he continues by stressing that ‘the reason for this ... is that subaltern pasts do not give the historian any principle of narration that can be rationally defended in modern public life’. He simply concludes (p. 27) that we need to take more seriously the fact that ‘other [spiritual] ways of being are not without questions of power and justice but these questions are raised ... on terms other than those of the political modern’. We are left suspended, as though we have reached the limit of what it is possible to think within the confines of history. Yet it is indeed possible to think beyond this contradiction and to give ‘non-modern’ political idioms a more important place, without abandoning rationality. In order to understand how this may be done, we need to refocus on the question of the idiom of politics. Guha (1992b) argues that in Indian history it is centrally important to distinguish analytically the history of state power from that of capital. This largely follows from his earlier argument differentiating between two domains of politics, which leads him to maintain that capitalism dominated in India but without creating a hegemonic capitalist culture; it is this that he calls ‘dominance without hegemony’ (p. 275). Chakrabarty (2002: 13) notes that ‘the history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms and irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that did not make up a logical whole’. Because of this, a theory of power independent of that of capital had to be developed. In his attempt, Guha argues that the power relation can be understood as composed of Dominance (D) and Subordination (S), each in turn being made up of a further relation: between Coercion (C) and Persuasion (P) for Dominance, and between Collaboration (C*) and Resistance (R) for Subordination (1992b: 229). Through the use of this double matrix, Guha is able to show how the

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political domain of power was structured by a number of discourses and idioms of British and Indian origin interacting to make coercion or persuasion possible. In particular, persuasion was made possible by a combination of the colonial state notion of ‘improvement’ with the Indian idea of dharma, ‘understood, broadly, as the quintessence of “virtue, the moral duty”, which implied a social duty conforming to one’s place in the caste hierarchy as well as the local power structures’ (p. 244). Here, then, we have a political idiom not too dissimilar from, though more extensive than, that of the Kikuyu ‘civic morality’ noted by Lonsdale, yet here it is not labelled as ‘ethnic’ (the analysis is by an insider), while at the same time it is said to contribute to making persuasive collaboration with colonialism possible. Evidently the British colonialists were somewhat more successful in integrating Indian idioms into their forms of rule in the 19th century than they were in Kenya in the 20th. But, overall, we have a fundamental recognition by Guha that politics can take religious and cultural forms not always evidently ‘political’ in the modern sense, yet central to elite political subjectivity. Guha analyses these idioms ‘from the inside’ – i.e. not as an anthropologist – examining their names and political effects and noting ‘that something as contemporary as nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism often made its appearance in political discourse dressed up as ancient Hindu wisdom’ (p. 245). We are probably here in the presence of a historically specific ‘mode of politics’, in Lazarus’s sense, yet Guha fails to take the same step when it comes to the political discourse of the Santal rebel. Why should a discourse of ‘social duty’ be more easily recognisable as ‘political’ than one that is ostensibly (crudely?) ‘religious’? Could it be that the idiom of dharma, despite its ancient origins, is more recognisably political, as it directly concerns a state politics whose main feature has universally been the maintenance and reproduction of difference and hierarchy? Could it be that the idiom of dharma is evaluated from within its own subjectivity, while that of the Santal is not? What distinguishes the idiom of dharma from that of the Santal cannot be that the one is ‘modern’ and the other ‘traditional’, nor can it be that one is religious and the other not; it can only be that the former is ‘evidently’ a state discourse of power while the latter is not. This, it seems to me, is the nub of the fundamental problem faced by Guha’s work, by Chakrabarty’s and indeed by Subaltern Studies as a whole. Politics is equated throughout their analyses with ‘the political’, with power, the public, the civil, the state, and, as a result, it represents the social, as indeed the intellectual represents the subaltern’s voice. Politics is not consistently understood as an affirmative collective subjectivity, with the result that it is equated with that limited consciousness effectuated within the parameters of state conceptions. In their work, the subject is not conceived as prescribing a universal but is exclusively socially located; after all, it is ‘peasant subjects’ as such – the identification of a ‘peasant consciousness’ – to which Guha in particular is wedded and which he seeks to represent. Once a peasantry has been identified by the investigator – while no question is asked

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about how such people may have identified themselves – then it automatically follows that a subjectivity is sought that conforms to or deviates from what the investigator conceives a ‘peasant consciousness’ to be. Not surprisingly, it is the core features or ‘elementary aspects’ of the class consciousness of the peasantry that are the central concern of Guha’s (1999) work on the peasantry in colonial India. Despite the enormous step forward taken by Guha in understanding that ‘the political included actions that challenged the theorist’s usual and inherited separation between politics and religion’ (Chakrabarty, 2002: 19), the ‘religious’ idiom is still understood as an analytical deviation from the ‘obviously political’; it has to be shown to be political by analysis, while presumably the ‘obviously political’ needs no such work of analytical nomination. The fallacy of this view can be seen through a contemporary example which is so common it is scarcely commented on. A commonplace account of the politics of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence today in Africa and elsewhere makes reference to the poverty of those involved. I shall have occasion to mention this below in the context of South Africa, but the point to emphasise at this stage is that, within the ‘public sphere’ as in academia, the market is ultimately held to account for the political subjectivity or consciousness of the poor. Agency here is simply foreclosed. It is assumed that perpetrators of violence who are poor are unable to think for themselves; they are said to simply (re-)act as automata to their social condition, and, as a result, their agency is denied, much as the agency of the Santal rebels has been denied by the Santals themselves as well as by their historians. What indeed is the difference between maintaining that ‘God made me do it’ and ‘Poverty made him do it’? None whatsoever as far as the denial of agency is concerned. Yet there is in fact a very important difference, in that the second statement is considered a valid account of politics in modern scientific discourse, while the former is not. Even if a survey were to be conducted showing that a majority of all adults maintained that God was the active agent in xenophobic or ethnic violence today, this would be interpreted as pathological, as an indication of a ‘moral panic’ akin to the belief in ‘supra-terrestrials’, not as a ‘fact’. Yet if the same proportion of respondents stressed the perceived threat to their rights to housing or jobs as the motivation for xenophobic violence – interpreted by scholars as resulting from poverty or unemployment – this is said to constitute a legitimate finding. The reason for this difference is that social conditions in general and economic forces in particular constitute scientifically legitimate substitutes for agency and the political subjectivities of people today, whereas ‘supernatural’ ones do not; it should be clear that such an account is objectivist and, hence, amounts to a state mode of thinking. Moreover, the emphasis placed on poverty is an inference drawn in the work of scholarly commentators, not necessarily by the perpetrators themselves, who emphasise their citizenship rights (Neocosmos, 2011b). The epistemic reason

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at work here is clearly apparent. We should also note in passing that ‘supernatural’ factors are not of the same order as ‘religious’ ones; it is quite possible today for the latter to be legitimately included in the list of ‘causes’ in scientific studies of inter-ethnic violence, for example. The most important point is that accounting for violence in terms of poverty (or inequality or even ‘relative deprivation’) is a political discourse of the state today; it is the state that systematically refuses to acknowledge the existence of political subjectivities, reducing them to the socio-economic or to psychology, thus denying agency. On the other hand, to say, as the Santal rebel did, that his god Thakur will do the fighting was a subjectivity totally beyond (external to) colonial state comprehension at the time in that situation (although not necessarily outside precolonial state subjectivity, incidentally), and, as a result, colonial state discourse had to locate it elsewhere: outside ‘the political’, in the domain of the ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’.9 What this means is, paradoxically, that the Santal’s statement can be considered as political, in Badiou’s sense of the term, in the context of 19th-century India, as it was expressive of a collective subject and existed well beyond the (scientific) parameters of state thinking, exceeding thereby the subjective configuration of the colonial world and mere agency. On the other hand, the statement about the economic account of violence today is not political, operating as it does within the ambit of state (scientific) thought and thereby simply reproducing the extant and denying subjecthood and the transcending of the extant. An internal analysis of the former in terms of its specific categories and names could possibly have elucidated the singular character of its politics; yet once it had entered the archive, such elucidation became well-nigh impossible, for it was controlled and packaged within a category of ‘atavism’ and ‘irrationality’ by the colonial discourse of power. The conclusion must then be that, whatever the idiom or discourse being investigated, its political character must be established, and it can only be established ‘from within’, as Lazarus (1996, 2001b) maintains, through an analysis of its own statements and categories. It cannot be represented from outside through a sceptical commitment by sympathetic academics. Moreover, it is not the case that just because some statements seem to belong to a realm of ‘the political’, to the ‘public sphere’, to ‘civil society’ or whatever, that because their location labels them as ‘politics’ within modernist (neo-)liberal or Marxist conceptions, they are indeed idioms of agency, whereas others that seem to occur outside such a domain – such as religion – are not to be considered as politics. The problem here is that of historicism, which, in addition to a notion of time, holds to an idea of totality (e.g. ‘society’, ‘nation’, ‘social formation’) within which political agency is confined to a specific domain of the political. A proliferation of the number of political domains does not, unfortunately, solve the problem of the social reduction of consciousness itself; it is rather the existence of sites which can ‘exist anywhere’, and which have to be ascertained through analysis, that locates politics

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(Lazarus, 1996). Politics is always singular and located in sites, but is simultaneously irreducible to a social referent. Unfortunately, Guha, Chakrabarty and Subaltern Studies as a whole, because their analyses are firmly situated within the discipline of history, have been unable to move to an irreducible analysis of the purely subjective. This is quite clear from their view of politics as socially located exclusively within two domains, that of the elite and that of the subaltern. More recently, Chatterjee (2004, 2011) has pursued this argument by noting that two domains of politics exist in contemporary India (and, by extension, in other countries of the Global South) in which the relation of people to the state differs. One, which he refers to as ‘civil society’, is ultimately determined by a relation between people and state founded on ‘sovereignty’; the other is determined by relations between state and people founded on ‘governmentality’, in Foucault’s sense of state classification for welfare and security, which he saw as ‘a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing that is actualized in habits, perceptions and subjectivity’, i.e. as a particular mode of rule as well as a way of being in society (Read, 2009: 34; Foucault, 2000: 201–22). This domain Chatterjee terms ‘political society’. In each domain, he maintains, politics differs: in the former, it is founded on rights, citizenship and administrative technical procedures; in the latter, it is popular and informal and its ‘claims are irreducibly political’ (2004).10 While he rightly recognises that politics does not only exist within the narrow confines of the state but can exist in various realms which themselves originate from the colonial encounter, it is a structural determination, namely that between people and the state established by different modes of state rule, that Chatterjee takes to be the ultimate condition of political subjectivity and that is said to account for the difference between these forms of politics. It is different modes of state rule that determine not only different connections to power but also different subjectivities so that politics are reduced to (social) agency. Popular subjectivities are given no independent effectivity; they possess little choice in effecting these connections themselves and in exceeding the social. We are thus back to considering people simply as bearers of their objective location. A proliferation of state modes of rule, therefore, does not resolve the problem posed by the social determination of subjectivity.11 Politics does not have to be located within a state domain of ‘the political’ for it to be so qualified. This failure is one that leaves no room for a subjective politics beyond the social determinations of the state. Subaltern Studies ultimately misses out on understanding (emancipatory) politics, for it is caught in, and unable to extricate itself from, a statist view of what politics in fact is. Nevertheless, Subaltern Studies is able to illustrate that there is a seemingly unavoidable limit to historical knowledge established by what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’. History, as presently constituted, is indeed a state discipline by simple virtue of the fact, as Lazarus (1996) shows, that through a concept of time it

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objectifies the subjective, thus leaving no room for an understanding of subjective affirmations internally. ‘It is always in the interests of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics, that is that the objective is taken for the subjective’ (Badiou, 1982: 44, translation modified). The current misrecognition by the most progressive Third World historians of the nature of politics is only marginally distinct from the manner in which colonialism saw the actions of the subaltern rebel, as Guha himself makes clear. Indeed, the disciplines of the human sciences as a whole do not currently recognise politics other than as ‘the political’, and control scientifically the thinking of political subjectivity by psychologising it in a similar fashion to the (‘anthropologising’) practice of colonial discourse, for they combine a knowledge system with power, governed by what Foucault called an episteme. Lalu concludes that ‘we might see subaltern studies as a limited field of critique that is aimed at forging the beginnings of a postcolonial episteme’ (2009: 255). This may be a valid way of proceeding; however, the forging of such an episteme, I maintain, would require an analysis in terms of historical sequences, which may indeed be quite discontinuous, as Foucault (1968) himself pointed out long ago, thus indicating a way around the problematic concept of continuous historical time. Indeed, Foucault notes that it is precisely ‘the episteme [which] is the “apparatus” (dispositif) which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may or may not be characterised as scientific’ (Foucault, 1980: 197). To this Spivak (1988: 298) adds that it distinguishes ‘the superstitious (ritual, etc.) from the scientific’. It is this episteme that I have referred to as ‘scientism’. On the other hand, a postcolonial episteme as proposed by Lalu would have to begin from an understanding of politics as purely subjective and hence sequential in order to fully discard the scientism and historicism inherent in holding to a correspondence between the subjective and the objective.

conclusion Where, then, does this discussion leave the subjectivity of the Mau Mau rebel in Kenya in the early 1950s? For a start, we do not have to abandon the rational or embrace a distant anthropologising of difference to make sense of this. Lonsdale is caught in the trap of the liberal historian sympathetic to the oppressed, but ultimately unable to break from the scientifically neo-colonial because of an implicit superiority, which can only locate African rebels’ consciousness within a ‘tribal’ context of ‘moral ethnicity’. That the term ‘ethnicity’ is given positive attributes while ‘tribe’ is given negative ones does not overcome the neo-colonial perspective. Such is the idealisation of ethnic life that it not only irons out power contradictions within Kikuyu society, but also fails to allow for the subaltern to speak in his or her own names and categories about what he or she thought and practised in the rebellion. Lonsdale shows very well how Kikuyu ‘moral economy’ or ‘moral ethnicity’ was founded on

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an understanding of the individual as a ‘subject’. Political agency was seen as central to adulthood in particular; Lonsdale may refer to it as ‘virtue’, but its essence can be read as fundamentally political, not moral. In other words, in the context of colonial domination and land appropriation, Mau Mau activists could only realise subjecthood and adulthood – their collective and individual being – through fighting the British for the return of their land. But given his liberal proclivities, Lonsdale feels obliged to link this to an idealisation of ethnic culture, something that it is not at all clear the participants themselves were doing. Indeed, it is not clear why Mau Mau political subjectivity could not simply be read as concerning the assertion of human dignity, the simple attainment of their humanity, as Fanon had stated; the kinds of idioms used should not affect recognition of this. We are provided by Lonsdale not so much with a view of what the collective consciousness of militants looked like, but rather with the anthropological context of a very complex subjective system from which we are supposed to deduce a subjectivity that combined the notion of the human as ‘subject’, spirituality, political affirmation and economic demand for land. What is said to hold all this together is ‘ethnicity’, a quite unhelpful notion in this case, as such a ‘holding together’ had to be achieved in actual practice, through collective struggle under conditions of crisis – as Fanon showed in the context of the nation – thus clearly redefining the ‘ethnic’ in the process. Of course, the human individual as ‘subject’ (and thereby culture and being) had to be (re-)created by Mau Mau; it had not been given by colonialism. What had been given in fact were evidently servitude, passivity, victimhood and the attempted destruction of the ‘human subject’. In re-creating their subjecthood, there is evidence that the Mau Mau may have exceeded their ethnic place within the confines of a colonially constructed ‘traditional society’. According to Furedi (1989: 18), the movement ‘put into question the existing socio-economic structures of society’.12 Evidently, Furedi comes to this conclusion from concentrating on the lower-class nature of the guerrillas. Yet we do not have to understand this subjectivity in such a socially reductionist manner; it is perfectly possible to understand Mau Mau’s social ‘radicalism’ as a subjective excess over ethnic consciousness during a limited sequence. The problem of wishing to stress the ethnic, national or class attributes of Mau Mau simply results from the insistence of analysts on noting exclusively the expressive character of their political subjectivities, to the detriment of popular reason. At the same time, the colonial obscure subject would deny the assertion of humanity by the colonised by emphasising atavism, backwardness and incomprehensible brutish behaviour on their part.13 The post-independence national leadership, which actually emanated from within the same Kikuyu nationality, chose not so much to echo the colonial view, as Berman maintains (1997), as to stress that nothing of importance had really happened and that what might have occurred was pathological and simply violent, and should therefore be forgotten as quickly as possible. Thus

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Kenyatta was to assert in 1967: ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred toward one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been [sic] eradicated, and must never be remembered again’ (cit. Furedi, 1989: 212). For this reason, Mau Mau is of more general import for understanding the obscure subjectivity of the imperial world and the reactive nature of postcolonial state subjectivities, as well as some of the African features of emancipatory political subjectivity in the sequence of national liberation. African political idioms have been systematically and necessarily misrecognised and distorted by Eurocentric scientism, particularly as these have taken the form of subjective affirmations within the idioms of ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’, because, for the scientistic colonial episteme, subjectivity is always related to the objective in the final analysis. In Depelchin’s (2005) terms, silences have been produced in African history by (epistemic) ‘syndromes’, which necessarily lead to the occlusion of African agency, not to mention subjecthood. The character of scientism has meant, as Fanon recognised, that ‘for the colonized, objectivity is always directed against him’ (1990: 61, translation modified). The human sciences in general, and history in particular, are, however, Eurocentric only in a contextual and derivative sense, for they are currently governed by an episteme that ensures that they remain disciplines of state power and not of emancipation, wherever they may be deployed. In other words, it is not the colonial condition that calls forth a specific Eurocentric episteme. Scientism is already in existence and, when deployed under colonial conditions, can only silence the colonised, as it silences all subjectivities beyond objectivism. History is unable to express the subjectivity of displacement because of its epistemic configuration. It therefore cannot express the discontinuity and excess that constitute the defining characteristics of emancipatory subjectivity, with the result that it is wedded to a continuity of time. It is therefore a history of the state. To corroborate and paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) well-known argument, the subaltern cannot be heard from within the parameters of the scientistic episteme; the only voices to be heard are the monotonous drone of the obscure neo-colonial subject and the oppressive beat of the reactive African state. What binds both today, and what blinds us to the possible political content of African idioms, are the notions of civil society, human rights and multiculturalism, for which politics is fundamentally social and cannot be understood outside of a state domain, as I shall show in later chapters. History, as it exists today, is a state discourse, as are all human sciences. To transform such disciplines means to develop new methodologies for the analysis of political subjectivities within delimited historical sequences. In this manner we can begin to develop categories for the understanding of people as reasoning beings with a will to make political choices which they and we all have to confront in thinking freedom.

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notes 1. See Ranger (1968) and Hobsbawm (1974), among others. In the Congo, for example, a number of nationalist movements were expressed in religious idioms. The ‘antonian’ movement of Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) (Thornton, 1998) and the Radical Movement of Prophets (1921–51) led by Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) come particularly to mind. They were spiritual and prophetic movements as well as a nationalist movement; so was the Nyabingi movement in the Great Lakes Region (Murindwa-Rutanga, 2011). I am not counting here the Muslim theocratic states, but one very interesting resistance movement, principally because it combined Islamic fervour with popular nationalism rooted in African culture, was the Somali Dervish movement (1898–1920) (see Samatar, 1982). There are many other such examples in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. 2. I must make clear here that I am not simply referring to a distinction between the socially constituted realms of the secular and the religious à la Durkheim, but to the broader notion of separating the idea of the human being from any conception of the spiritual, a distinction that was simply non-existent in precolonial Africa; it could be argued that one of the most destructive effects of colonial domination was precisely to enforce such a separation. 3. For important introductory discussions of the land question in Kenya, see Leys (1975) and Leo (1984). 4. Lonsdale does attempt to provide an account of a debate on politics among Mau Mau activists (1994: 142–9) but feels obliged to translate this into Western idioms and hence to anthropologise Kikuyu beliefs. 5. Chakrabarty (1998: 19) rightly emphasises the fact that the original intentions of subaltern studies were both political and intellectual in a ‘modernist’ sense: ‘these original intellectual ambitions and the desire to enact them were political in that they were connected to modern understandings of democratic public life’; they did not necessarily come from the lives of the subaltern classes themselves. 6. It is worth noting that the term ‘subaltern’ itself is used inconsistently, as at some times it refers to a social category and at others to a political category in the work of these writers. This is arguably a symptom of their inability to resolve the problem of equating the subjective with the objective, politics with history. 7. We will see in a later chapter that the same problem is present in sociological accounts of the events of May 1968 in France, for example. See Ross (2002). 8. For a brief account of the rebellion, see Troisi (2000: 342–8). Santals are referred to as ‘tribals’ in the Indian literature. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the Santals and African nationalities. Troisi notes ‘that for the Santals as also for most of the tribals, land provides not only economic security but a powerful link with one’s ancestors’ (p. 346). 9. Interestingly, the current manifestation of ‘tribal’ insurgency in India is the ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’, who are addressed in the same way (militarily as well as discursively)

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by the democratic Indian state as the Santals were by the colonial state. See, in particular, Arundhati Roy’s brilliant pieces (2010a, 2010b). 10. It can be shown in fact that informality can be functional to state control; see Ananga Roy’s work on Calcutta (2003). 11. In fact, Chatterjee arguably misses out on another mode of rule (and its corresponding domain of politics), namely that prevalent in rural areas. Without my wishing to comment on India, it is apparent that the mode of rule in rural Africa differs fundamentally from those domains that Chatterjee recognises in the urban; in particular, the deployment of ‘tradition’, coercion and violence in rural areas in Africa is something which is not (yet?) so apparent in the urban. The classic text on this mode of rule is Mamdani (1996). 12. This point is also cited in Mamdani (1996: 189). 13. See, in particular, Maughan-Brown (1985) for a detailed textual analysis of fictional accounts of Mau Mau from different perspectives: colonial, liberal, nationalist and radical.

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Chapter 4

The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975 The colonized’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute. – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translation modified) The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence. – Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source, 1973

national liberation and popular emancipation The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus’s terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as

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one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral. To maintain that nationalism in Africa has failed – or, more subtly perhaps, that it has deployed disastrous state politics, which coerce particular interests, as Chipkin (2007) does, for example – in current conditions when imperial domination and its attendant ideologies are still prevalent, and when these have altered their political form to stress a ‘democratising mission’ and ‘humanitarianism’, is simply to make it impossible to think new forms of nationalism, new forms of (non-identitarian) pan-Africanism, and consequently new forms of emancipatory politics on the continent.1 It means either resignation to the propaganda of liberal democracy and to the idea of the end of history, along with the final admission that ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’, with its massive levels of poverty and oppression and its constant need for war, is the best of all possible worlds with no chance of change in sight, or a simple retreat into dogmatism which can only reduce nationalism to its statist variety. Indeed, we need to bear constantly in mind that ‘we will never understand what constrains us and tries to make us despair, if we do not constantly return to the fact that ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology’ (Badiou, 2006a: 137). For those of us who live in Africa and in the countries of the Global South there is no path to emancipation that does not confront the power of empire in its neo-colonial form, which is only another way of saying that nationalism is not an obsolete emancipatory conception – far from it. The point is to distinguish it analytically and politically from the state itself. It is in this context of popular struggles for national liberation that ‘[the term] “people” here takes on a meaning which implies the disappearance of the existing state ... What is affirmed within large popular movements is always the latent necessity of what Marx considered the supreme objective of all revolutionary politics: the withering away of the state’ (Badiou, 2013a: 16, my translation). But to affirm this is not sufficient. It is also important to analyse the character of the past sequence for which national liberation was the defining category, in order to bring out the singularity of its politics and to understand its limits and decline in terms of its own categories; to make sense of why it became saturated and therefore why the idea of freedom-in-the-nation lost its original emancipatory content. This requires more than can be done here, but what I wish to argue is that one reason for the saturation of nationalist politics in Africa was that these were not able to sustain an affirmative conception of the nation and that the nation gradually came to refer to a social category in the thought of politics as it unfolded over time. From a universal notion of national emancipation concerning all humanity, which is in Badiou’s terms ‘anobjective’, an ‘incalculable emergence rather than a describable structure’ (Badiou, 2009b: 26, 28), we gradually come to a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, according to state political criteria.

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It is through a discussion of the nation in Fanon’s work that this transformation of politics can be established at its clearest, as he was, with the possible exception of Cabral, the most accurate observer and theorist of this sequence on the African continent from within its own subjectivity. What is significant about Fanon’s three books on the Algerian national liberation struggle (1954–62) – which in the language of his time he refers to as a revolution – is that they were written from within the subjectivity of the sequence, as Fanon was a direct participant in the emancipatory struggle – a mass struggle  – and was totally immersed in it personally, intellectually and politically. Fanon writes as an activist, a militant of emancipatory struggle.2 His approach is therefore not an academic one, asking what the essence (definition) of nationalism or the nation is, but rather one that confronts the much more political question of who constitutes the nation.

fanon and ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’ Fanon’s work takes three related forms: firstly, sociological analyses of the struggle process and the transformation of popular consciousness, published in English under the inappropriate title of Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989); secondly, political analysis and journalistic work, collected posthumously under the title Toward the African Revolution (1967); and thirdly, his critical reflections on the outcome of liberation as he was dying of leukaemia in his deservedly most well-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1990).3 In all three books the dominant theme concerns the change in subjectivities among the masses of the people, the nationalist party, the state and intellectuals both in Algeria and in France. In particular, it is a popular conception of the nation, which he sees as arising when ‘ordinary’ people acquire the confidence of their power, the confidence of control over their destinies, that lies at the core of this work. It is this point that is made again and again, in remarks such as the following: ‘The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent and enlightened praxis of men and women. The collective construction of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on a historical scale’ (1990: 165, translation modified). We have here the twin ideas that the nation is produced and that it is made – ‘imagined’, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known term – from the actions of men and women, of people in general, and not by any structural developments (such as markets or print capitalism) or, for that matter, by any intellectual narratives (Chatterjee, 1986). This consciousness is therefore both one of the creation of the nation through the actions of people and its suppression by colonialism. This process, which Fanon sees as people transforming themselves as they make the nation, refers in Badiou’s terms to a ‘subjective becoming’; it is the ‘untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon, 1990: 31). It amounts to a clear excess

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over what exists, over the simply extant. As we have seen, this process in Badiou’s ontology is an event for politics simply because something appears that had not previously existed (Badiou, 2006a: 285). Subjectivity is thus transformed in hitherto unimaginable ways. What appears for Fanon is precisely the nation. For Fanon, then, the nation is constructed in practice, in political struggle by people themselves; it is a purely political notion, much as it was for Jacobin nationalism during the French Revolution. We could say that it is simply ‘presented’ as a prescriptive affirmation and that it does not ‘represent’ anything outside itself. There is no given colonial subject; subjectivation is a political process of becoming. However, the construction of this subjectivity is not a spontaneous occurrence for Fanon, but a revolution in thought. What is spontaneous is rather the Manichaean dualism of the good embodied in the native versus the evil embodied in the settler. But the nation is not in any way to be equated with a social category of the native, as it is a purely political category. In fact, many settlers ‘reveal themselves to be much, much closer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation’ (1990: 116) while many natives are to be found on the side of colonial power; ‘consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’ (p. 117). It is militants who have found themselves thrown primarily among the people of the countryside that gradually both learn from and teach the rural masses the construction of a nation in action: ‘these politics are national, revolutionary and social and these new facts which the colonized will now come to know exist only in action’ (p. 117, translation modified). In this manner the nation is constructed through agency and is not reflective of social entities such as indigeneity, ethnicity or race. It is a nation that is made up solely of those who fight for freedom; it is a uniquely political conception. Here the subject is actually created by an ‘excessive’ subjectivity, by the practice of liberation at all levels, collective, individual, social (hence Fanon’s studies of changes in the family, of the veil, of the effect of the radio, etc.). An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people. But this is all very hard ... The thesis that men change at the same time as they change the world has never been so manifest as it is now in Algeria (Fanon, 1989: 24, 30).4 Yet the role of the leader, of the ‘honest intellectual’, is not to impose a ‘party line’ or his supposedly superior knowledge, but to be faithful to a politics of ‘confidence in the masses’: To be a leader in an underdeveloped country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on raising the level of

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thought, on what is sometimes too quickly called ‘politicisation’ ... To politicise the masses ... is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to make the masses understand that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is also due to them (Fanon, 1990: 159, translation modified). When Fanon refers to ‘we Algerians’ or to ‘we Africans’, as he does on many occasions (e.g. 1967: 196; 1989: 32; 1990: 159), it is clear that he is referring to a conception of the nation that is not based on ‘nationality’ as commonly understood. We are not in the presence here of a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, nor is it one founded on ‘race’. Fanon was a foreigner and a non-Arab as well as not an African. Yet I also think it is important to point out that his biographer is quite mistaken to search for the source of this view in Sartrean existentialist theory and thus to maintain that ‘for Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms; in his view, being Algerian was a matter of willing oneself to be Algerian rather than of being born in a country called Algeria’ (Macey, 2000: 377–8). This position constitutes a misunderstanding because it fundamentally depoliticises the question by reducing it to Fanon’s psychology. This view was not simply Fanon’s; it was also that of the people involved in a struggle for national liberation in which ‘the women, the family, the children, the aged – everybody participates’, as Adolpho Gilly puts it in his introduction to Fanon (1989: 8), while continuing by noting that those who risked their lives for independence ‘were not only Frenchmen or Arabs; they were also Spaniards, Italians, Greeks – the entire Mediterranean supported an Algeria in arms’ (p. 15). This subjectivity, then, did not belong to the subject Fanon alone, but was the subjectivity of the sequence; it was that which was ‘obvious’ because its obviousness had been produced by the politics of the situation. In any case, this identity (Algerian) was not just chosen by Fanon; it also refers to how others saw him as well as the other ‘foreigners’ active in the struggle. It is in fact a purely political identity. Fanon’s conception of the nation is not a matter of a psychological act of will; it is rather a question of a subject being produced by fidelity to the collective subjective politics of the (emancipatory) situation. In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity and that it cannot therefore be reduced to the psychology of individuals. Such a politics consists fundamentally of a politics of affirmation, which is at the core of all emancipatory politics and which is both singular and universal in nature. Indeed, it is only on this subjective basis that an inclusive society can be built; only a politics of affirmation can effectuate a conception of the nation that breaks completely from notions of indigeneity. Thus: ‘we want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow ... in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian’ (Fanon, 1989: 32,

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152, emphasis in original).5 For Fanon, national liberation was a universal politics concerning humanity as a whole and not a matter of attaining independence in a particular country. Unsurprisingly, national liberation could only be non-identitarian and pan-African in its vision, and this pan-Africanism could only be popularly based: The optimism that prevails today in Africa is not an optimism born of the spectacle of the forces of nature that are at last favourable to Africans. Nor is the optimism due to the discovery in the former oppressor of a less inhuman and more kindly state of mind. Optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the masses ... The enemy of the African under French domination is not colonialism insofar as it exerts itself within the strict limits of his nation, but it is the form of colonialism, it is the manifestations of colonialism, whatever be the flag under which it asserts itself (1967: 171). In this affirmation regarding the universality of national liberation and freedom, a clear similarity can be observed with the writings of Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian struggle for freedom. This is not surprising; after all, we are, in both cases, in the presence of an excess over the extant and hence of the (re-)assertion of a universal truth. But Fanon’s thinking on the formation of the nation is not reducible to that of the formation of a state, and freedom for him is not synonymous with the simple fact of independent statehood.6 Rather, following Rousseau, the people are not considered as a simple given, as in various ‘populist’ positions, but have to first constitute themselves as a collective political subject.7 For Fanon, the core process in national construction is precisely the formation of a people and thereby the changing of social relations and of personal consciousness also, as the effectuation of a nation is premised on this process. It is this that founds the universality of the human. For Fanon, then, in Algeria as in Haiti, it was people (les gens) who constituted the nation by constituting themselves as a people (un peuple), not the state.8 And the people did so through a form of politics that, while not necessarily opposed to the state as such (but only to a particular kind of state, the colonial state), distinguished itself fundamentally from state subjectivity. It is in this sense that any emancipatory politics can be said to always exist ‘at a distance’ from the state. Moreover, the concept of ‘the people’ is understood here as a political concept, not as a social one. Yet, at the same time as affirming the political universality of the human, Fanon’s nationalism is one founded on a category of the people ultimately represented by a party. This creates a difficulty for his thought of politics, for the idea of the people is no longer exclusively self-created but also represented, which implies that it is created in a political space by a party. Along with the category of class, ‘the people’ comes to be conceived of as a ‘circulating’ category – as a sociological grouping as well as a self-created political subject – with the result that we are also confronted

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by a reductive relationship between the objectively social and the subjective. This becomes apparent when, immediately after independence, a class whom Fanon refers to as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ detaches itself from the people and becomes unable to contribute to the making of the nation, as its interests link it closely to colonial power. Indeed, the ‘national bourgeoisie’ excludes itself from the nation; it is unable ‘to rationalise popular praxis, in other words to understand its rationality’ (2002: 145, my translation), and so finally excludes itself from the people themselves, for it is only a sort of greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature ... The national bourgeoisie ... must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing (1990: 141). It should be apparent here that the national bourgeoisie refers to a social category as well as a political category. ‘It’ is a socio-economic entity that acts politically coherently; it is a political subject. It is this circulating notion of class – a category circulating between political economy, on the one hand, and the thought of politics, on the other – which enables Fanon to analyse the decline of the politics of the people-nation and their replacement by state politics, by the politics of the nation-state, for the national bourgeoisie succeeds in representing the whole nation as well as its own interests: ‘nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed’ (p. 163). It is clear, then, as Lazarus (1996: 207) makes plain, that it is not the advent of a state politics that destroys emancipatory politics but the saturation of emancipatory politics that makes statism possible, for ‘the return of a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation’ (my translation). To understand the way Fanon analyses this process, we have to look first at the role that the category of class plays in his argument and then at his understanding of the party. Both these categories clarify the limits of Fanon’s emancipatory thought and, more especially, the subjective political impasse faced by the NLS mode of politics itself. Fanon accounts for the collapse of nationalism into a statist project primarily by reference to the collapse of liberatory pan-Africanism  – ‘African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached’

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(1990: 128) – into a vulgar xenophobic chauvinism after independence: ‘we observe a permanent see-saw between African unity which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion and a heart-breaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form’ (p. 126). The reason for this is to be found, for Fanon, primarily (but not exclusively) in the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie, who wish to move into the posts and the businesses vacated by the departing Europeans. As a result, they assert a form of nationalism based on race and indigeneity in order to exclude; their concern is with access to resources, and a claim to indigeneity is, from their perspective, the only legitimate way of privately accessing such resources. Fanon notes that ‘the racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear’ (p. 131). In any case, whether the concern is accumulation or asserting a ‘narrow’ racially based nationalism (p. 131), ‘the sole slogan of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner!” ’ (p. 127). As a result: The working class of the towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen for their part line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans ... the foreigners are called to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked (1990: 125). The nation now refers to something other than a purely subjective collective affirmation; it refers to a social category founded on indigeneity. Who is and who is not an Algerian, a Ghanaian, an Ivorian, now becomes defined in terms of a state politics founded on asserting indigeneity: birth, descent, history, race or ethnicity. We should note that it is not simply a class politics that is at stake here, one representing economic interest, but more broadly a politics associated with ascribing the nation to an objective social category of the indigenous; a politics concerned with maintaining divisions, hierarchies and boundaries: in sum, a state politics. It is thus the state that defines the nation in social terms and that is unable to sustain a purely affirmative politics. The nation is now a representation, no longer a presentation. At the same time, this statist way of defining the nation is gradually naturalised in thought, as given by history and communitarian ‘belonging’ (birth, descent, etc.). Yet it should be abundantly clear not only that it is the effect of a state form of politics but that such naturalisation is made possible by its social embeddedness; for it is impossible to naturalise the purely subjective without first locating it in the social, without objectifying it. Moreover, the state also technicises as it depoliticises, something which Fanon deplores, emphasising that ‘if the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’ (1990: 162). Harsh

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words. Fanon’s difficulty consists in not being able to imagine a more appropriate political response to the technicism of the state, for when faced with the saturation of emancipatory political thought and the exclusive offer of technical solutions in the form of ‘development’, people will think it better to have a bridge than none at all. Fanon is thus fully aware of the collapse of a politics of popular affirmation into statist subjectivities, yet what he sees as the way out of this problem is limited precisely by his understanding of class politics and the representative role of parties. His difficulty is no more than that of the politics of the NLS mode. I outline some of the fundamental features of this mode of politics below; at this point it is only necessary to note that its categorial features are such as to locate it squarely within 20th-century ways of conceiving politics. Broadly speaking, this mode is one that followed the 20th-century’s conception of politics, which saw parties as the core term of such politics (in the 19th century it had been insurrection and movements). As I have already noted, the revolutionary party, though inaugurated by German social democracy and theorised by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, was seen by all shades of radical opinion throughout the century as ‘representing’ socio-economic classes and groupings in the political arena (Lazarus, 2001a, 2007). Parties were understood as the link between the social and the political domain structured around the state, and they recruited their members from throughout the population. Their class character was thus determined less by the social origins of their membership than by their ideological positions, which were said to ‘reflect’ class in political subjectivity. Mass parties of this type developed in Europe after, and often as a reaction to, the Paris Commune of 1871. For some social-democratic parties, it was a matter of organising the working class to avoid a similar disaster; for others, it was about drawing workers into their organisations so as to enable the control of bureaucracy and elites.9 Of course, the objective of the party is for its leadership to ‘capture’ state power. Radical Left-wing parties thus began with a contradictory character, one that exhibited a certain anti-state or mass revolutionary content along with an ambition to control the power of the state through which social programmes of various sorts could be technically enacted. Without exception they were founded on a politics of the representation of the social. In Africa, similar contradictions characterised the party founded upon and ultimately leading the disparate organisations of interests making up the ‘national liberation movement’. In an African context, nationalist parties were recognised as the sole ‘genuine representatives’ of the nation often long before independence itself, as colonial regimes and nationalist movements battled for legitimacy. It was through the party that freedom was to be actualised both in the form of political independence and in the form of socio-economic development, which was to provide the much needed economic independence from the West to the benefit of all in the nation. In Kwame Nkrumah’s famous biblical aphorism: ‘Seek ye first the political

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kingdom and all shall be given unto thee.’ Freedom in the NLS mode could only be attained through control of the state, as it was only the state that could drive the process of ‘catching up’ economically with the West – the only guarantee of full independence in the long term. From the nation being equated with the people, it came more or less rapidly to be equated with the state; given its social foundation, ‘national consciousness’ could therefore easily collapse from a pure affirmation into a state-legalised indigeneity. For Fanon, the party was a problematic but necessary form of organisation. Popular politics, like class politics, could only be realised through a party; the people or the class could only become a political subject through the medium of a party; and thus the nation could only become the agent of its own liberation through the state. The party of nationalism, for Fanon, exhibited highly problematic features after independence, as it had gradually evolved from an organisation that enabled popular expression into an apparatus of control: ‘The party which used to call itself the servant of the people, which used to claim that it worked for the full expression of the people’s will, as soon as the colonial power puts the country into its control hastens to send the people back to their caves’ (1990: 147).10 It ‘controls the masses, not in order to make sure that they really participate in the business of governing the nation, but in order to remind them constantly that the government expects from them obedience and discipline’ (p. 146). In addition, the party itself becomes the vehicle for private enrichment, which itself is both cause and effect of the formation of a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that chooses the option of a one-party state. Thus Fanon notes, ‘the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of the single party’ (p. 132), while ‘the party is becoming a means of private advancement’ (p. 138). The party gradually becomes a vehicle for representing the interests of this new bourgeoisie rather than those of the people. On the other hand, Fanon proclaims the necessity of the party by adhering to the view that solutions to political problems are never thought outside the party conception of politics itself. Thus ‘the party should be the direct expression of the masses ... [and] the masses should know that the government and the party are at their service’ (1990: 151, 160). To actualise this situation and to curb the power of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ it is still a party form of politics that Fanon invokes: ‘the combined effort of the masses led by a party, and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles, ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie’ (p. 140, translation modified).11 The notion of the party is at the core of the problem in Fanon’s thought, as is the notion of the masses or the people. Broadly speaking, Fanon’s politics conform to the prevalent view of the 20th century that ‘the people’ are to be understood as the subject of history and that they effectuate their agency by being represented in the political arena by a party. For him, the party in power must represent the people accurately, and after independence the

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state-party must have a humanist programme to enable a transformation of society in the people’s interests; it cannot be a simple vehicle for enrichment: ‘In fact there must be an idea of man and of the future of humanity; that is to say that no demagogic formula and no collusion with the former occupying power can take the place of a programme’ (p. 164). Nevertheless, Fanon remains well within a subjectivity of representation. Politics must accurately represent the social. The problem with Fanon’s politics is its inability to transcend subjectively the limits of the party-state, despite his extremely accurate observations about its bureaucratic and controlling functions. As Lazarus (2001a) has observed, the party has the effect of fusing popular consciousness with that of the state, as party discourse maintains that popular consciousness can only be realised in practice through the party and its control of state power. In this way the party enables the fusion of the subjectivity of politics with the subjectivity of the state. What this means is that the liberation of the people is to take place through control of a set of institutions that cannot conceive of liberation/freedom, as their existence is premised on the reproduction of hierarchies of power and the social division of labour. It is this – the ideological fusing capacity of the party – that makes possible the transition from the nation as political affirmation to the nation as social category, which, in other words, makes possible the party-state and the nation-state, the latter being nothing but the final objective form of this subjective fusion. Whether there is one party or several is of little significance; nor is the replacement of ‘party’ by ‘movement’, as in either case these are said to represent the social. Rather, what is of importance is the subjective conception that maintains that politics can only be effectuated through the (party-)state. Subjectively, then, state politics is a reaction to what Badiou (2009a) would call the ‘event’ of the popular emancipatory sequence. Fanon himself provides the best example of an individual who commits himself to forming part of a collective political subject and whose consistent fidelity to the event enables it to become a truth: ‘The true is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation’ (Fanon, 1990: 39, translation modified). On the other hand, the reactive subject embodied in the state’s political subjectivity is one which maintains that, although it enabled the formation of a newly independent state, the emancipatory sequence was little more than mindless violence. Yet this is not all. As we have seen, Badiou also refers to an ‘obscure subject’ also resulting from the same event. In the realm of politics, Badiou associates this conception with that of fascism, although in the context of neo-colonialism it more accurately refers to the neo-colonial discursive powers of occlusion: according to these, the specificity of colonised formations is said not to exist, colonialism is now over and was supposedly beneficial anyway, independence was granted by the ex-colonial power, etc. In this way the stage is set for regular antagonism between state nationalism and neo-colonial

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oppression, as well as for the contradictory character of nationalism itself, partly critic and partly adherent of colonial and neo-colonial discourses (Chatterjee, 1986). The reactive subjectivity attempts to reduce the Idea to the social and thus depoliticises, statises and socialises it so that the earlier world continues to all intents and purposes; it attempts a distortion of the Idea, often through the use of expertise in social science. The obscure subject, on the other hand, tries to delete the Idea altogether. We can see relatively clearly the reactive and obscure subjects unfolding in subjectivity in the postcolonial period. In particular, the project of ‘nation-building’ understood as a state subjectivity, constituted in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, amounts to a state reaction to the idea of the nation as subjective becoming, which Fanon outlined so clearly and which he wished to extend into a humanist project (Gibson, 2003).12 Fanon’s humanist project, which depended precisely on human agency, ends up being replaced by a ‘nation-building’ project founded on a technicist – technicist because statist – project of national development, which is unavoidably combined with patronage power relations, given the absence of an independently organised popular politics (Neocosmos, 2010b). Concurrently, the shift to xenophobic nationalism noted and deplored by Fanon is an indication of the rise of communitarian politics, as obscurity is allowed to descend on a purely political conception of the nation. Fanon is the only major theorist of African nationalism in the 20th century to develop a conception of nationalism – in his terms, ‘nationalist consciousness’ – that is non-identitarian, while all state forms of nationalism are identitarian in their essence. It is because Fanon’s conception of the nation and nationalism is non-identitarian that it forms the basis of an emancipatory politics of becoming. Such an emancipatory conception of the nation can only be understood in excess of state politics. As soon as such politics are objectified and related to social categories, we become situated within an identitarian politics that is state-focused (e.g. through the medium of a party or a movement) and that contributes to making a sequence illegible. Moreover, while in the immediate postcolonial period state politics at least had a national project, today the disappearance of any genuinely inclusive conception of the nation, even at the level of the state itself, has allowed for the development of a communitarian identity politics that feeds on the kind of free-for-all which the new forms of neo-colonial domination have enabled. Recent events in Kenya (2007), South Africa (2008 and, even more recently, 2015), Nigeria (2009 and 2010) and elsewhere illustrate this rise in communitarian politics. It is in this context that what used to be known as the ‘national question’ is crying out to be (re-)addressed; it is within this same context that nationalism today must be given new forms in order to recover the kind of subjective becoming that Fanon extolled in the Algerian people’s struggle for freedom.13 The nation today is modelled by a politics of exclusion, itself founded on social indigeneity. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, such xenophobia was limited in

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its extent by a number of intervening conceptions in state politics such as a certain (although recast) statist pan-Africanism, a statist nationalism (which did, however, suggest a certain amount of independence from neo-colonial prescriptions) and a conception of national development along with its frequent requirement for foreign migrant labour. Today, post-1980, these restraints are no longer present. The old idea of the nation has been largely undermined in a neo-liberal context where nationalism as a unifying project has been largely evacuated from thought. As a result, an obscure subject of the nation has come much more prominently to the fore in Africa, producing a simulacrum of Fanon’s national consciousness.

the national liberation struggle mode of politics in africa To think purely subjectively about an NLS mode at a Third World level, and even at an African level, in the 20th century is extremely difficult without collapsing into model-building, i.e. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no single major individual who has expressed such a politics intellectually. A situated analysis of the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well beyond the scope of this book. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode provided the parameters of political thought regarding the colonial and neo-colonial social formations of the immediate post-World War II period up to the mid-1970s. Its main figures included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-imperialism, even if only in rhetorical guise. This contrasts with the position today, when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of empire. As Chatterjee (2004: 100) has so accurately observed, today the new ‘empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella’. The underlying conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as the Global South, is to be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic empire’. We should start first by stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation from colonialism, a point we have already encountered in our discussion of Fanon. Not many European thinkers understood this. One exception was JeanPaul Sartre, who was able to show that, just as colonisation was centrally a political endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty), social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological, however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance. Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was

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a necessary outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics,14 especially of the mass politics that were in some cases unleashed in the struggles against colonialism, and evidently this required transformation in both personal and collective subjectivities. As Issa Shivji never tires of repeating, nationalism grew out of pan-Africanism and not the other way around. Pan-Africanism was founded on the demand for universal freedom, justice and equality for all African peoples and was perforce irreducible to narrow national interest. It was only a state nationalism that could eventually abandon pan-Africanism for a particular sociological conception of the national interest. At the same time, the struggle for freedom had a universal character given that humanity could not possibly be free in the presence of the colonisation of certain peoples by others. Talk of the ‘human’ and his or her rights under these conditions was totally hypocritical, as Césaire (1972) rightly noted. Politics as subjectivity was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with independence, as the ‘people-nation’ was replaced by the ‘nation-state’, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism, and as democracy was overcome by the need to solve the ‘social question’ (Arendt, 1963) or what was known in the postcolonial period as ‘development’. The excessive subjectivities of the liberation struggle were rapidly replaced by expressive ones. The absence of (emancipatory) politics on the continent in the postcolonial period has been noted by Shivji (1985). Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think through the disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacement of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all political agency to itself. The difficulty faced by the NLS mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political conception of politics, since freedom for its proponents was to be attained through the building of a new state – a contradiction in terms if there was ever one. Through the medium of the state-party, an excessive affirmative conception of politics with a universal emancipatory content was gradually replaced by a politics founded on interests (economic, power, cultural, rights and entitlements) that were to be managed by the state. This became an obvious intellectual problem for Marxist analysis after independence, as it was clearly a particular state politics that created the social in the form of a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’ class rather than the expected opposite of politics ‘reflecting’ the socio-economic category of class (Shivji, 1976). The reasons for the difficulty in thinking the emancipatory character of mid-20thcentury anti-imperialist politics are arguably related to the fact that, while ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations from an oppressive state, the NLS mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation-state. It thus combined both excessive and expressive subjectivities in a contradictory manner; it had both an anti-state and a statist aspect to it. We have already seen that this was

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a feature of Fanon’s thought; similar conceptions can be found in Cabral’s writings and in that of all major nationalist thinkers.15 In fact, Cabral (1973: 840) goes so far as to recognise quite lucidly – having had experience of many African states at first hand – the core problem posed by the nature of the postcolonial state in achieving popular emancipation. The problem of the post-independence state, he stressed, is ‘the most important problem in the liberation movement’ (emphasis in original). This fundamental contradiction was apparent in that it was always easier to be clear on what the NLS mode was against – as in ‘decolonisation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘anti-racism’– rather than what it was for. Independence easily became the lowest common denominator, although equality and justice were also present to various extents in popular practices. Indeed, it would have been impossible to sustain any mass popular mobilisation without such practices and assumptions. Cabral expresses the limit of what was thinkable within the NLS mode of politics: the problem was the kind of state built after independence – it could not be the state itself. Today we must not remain prisoners of this limit. In general, the NLS mode was predominantly a mode conceived, to use Lazarus’s term, ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, and was hegemonic in thought probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People’s Conference in Accra) and the mid-1970s.16 The NLS mode is a truly 20th-century mode,17 and its language was frequently borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode, though the term ‘class’ was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral even speaking in terms of a ‘nation-class’, to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Following Lazarus, its main external social invariants were the ‘state’ and the ‘nation’ (which was equated with the ‘people’). At the same time, mass struggle against the colonial state and its racist politics contained elements of antagonism to the state as such, particularly the subjective fusion of the nation with the people in practice through an emphasis on equality. We therefore have in this mode a fusion in thought between people, nation and state, with the first two names dominating during periods of mass struggle and the latter two dominating most obviously after independence. By 1975, the last vestiges of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South African African National Congress (ANC) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest in the next chapter that during the 1980s in South Africa a new sequence of politics was inaugurated. During 1984–6 in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed (as evidenced by, inter alia, the absence of any figure to systematise it theoretically). The nationalist form of struggle

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had organised military violence at its core. For Fanon, violence liberates both self and nation, i.e. it creatively distinguishes the nation and the people from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of violence as a counter to colonial violence with the democratic aspirations of the people is located in the people’s army, people’s war and the political practice of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas were to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla army was the people at war: ‘we are armed militants, not militarists’, Cabral proclaimed (cit. Davidson, 1981: v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics, when that existed, varied, but were likely to include the mass movement and its constituent organisations, the guerrilla army and peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation from this conception (easily fallen into, given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when technical military solutions became dominant over political ones. Given the centrality of organised military resistance, which frequently became a dogma, the dominant trend – however much this was opposed by thinkers like Cabral – was for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial politics in their subjective practice. In general, in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a ‘national politics’, of the nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions of this politics were thus: who is the nation and its people? (not, what is the nation?) and what are its politics? The answer provided – at least by the most emancipatory versions of that mode – was that the nation is constituted by those who fight consistently against colonialism and neo-colonialism – hence by a certain amount of political equality. To the extent that this was adhered to, this politics could be said to be partly structured ‘in interiority’. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender,18 it is not tradition, it is not even state, but through transcending these divisions it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins, i.e. to all people. It is a purely political subjectivity (Neocosmos, 2003). In Cabral’s terms: ‘In Guiné and Cape Verde today the people ... mean for us those who want to chase the Portuguese colonialists out of our land. They are the people, the rest are not of our land even if they were born there. They are not the people of our land; they are the population but not the people. This is what defines the people today’ (Cabral, 1980: 89). Hence the question of who was a member of the nation or the people acquired a purely political, not a social or historical, answer. As we have seen, for Fanon, the nation during the liberation struggle was also a purely political construct undetermined by any social category other than those who simply lived there (e.g. Fanon, 1989: 152). As a result, this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism, which only gave rise to a contradiction once nation was equated with state. In the meantime, national consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words: ‘if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act

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of culture ... The liberation movement must ... embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture – which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society’ (Cabral, 1973: 43–4 emphasis in original  ). Thus, in so far as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the ‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the most politically excluded (the ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s terms); they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism; only they can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and democracy. The (petty) bourgeoisie and workers, as well as the inhabitants of the towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism; they vacillate politically and are not consistently anti-colonial; their political and cultural references are to the metropolis. There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently realised during the postcolonial period (Shivji, 1985). In the final analysis, the nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom, irrespective of social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its popular-emancipatory version, in so far as this existed. Yet the constant reference to the class foundations of the politics of national emancipation throws up a contradiction expressed most clearly in Cabral’s well-known remark concerning the need for the petty bourgeoisie to ‘commit class suicide’ if it is not to betray the objectives of the struggle for national liberation: in order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become ‘bourgeois’ and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that ... the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs (Cabral, 1980: 136). The contradiction consists in the fact that, despite the insistence on the idea that politics represents class interests, it becomes apparent that if liberation/emancipation is to be achieved, especially after the moment of independence, interests must be superseded by a politics irreducible to class interest. While understanding this crucial problem, Cabral is only able to express it in moral rather than political terms, to move out of politics into psychology and the apolitical: ‘This alternative – to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class – constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle ... This shows us, to a certain extent, that if national liberation is essentially a political question, the

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conditions for its development stamp on it certain characteristics that belong to the sphere of morals’ (p. 136).19 It is arguably, therefore, the problem of political representation that lies at the core of the difficulties faced by the NLS mode. The fact that representation was mainly understood in Marxist  – or, in the case of Cabral, Leninist  – language does not constitute its main problem, for even when national liberation came to be understood in liberal terms (as in South Africa in the 1990s) the problem remained. In sum, the NLS mode was caught within its own subjective limits. However, only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not thought exclusively by means of external referents. These rare instances, in the writings of Fanon and Cabral in particular, were brief and contradictory. What is interesting to note is that both these figures were spared the status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular was excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age, while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power. Of course, it was the national movement (made up of a ‘front’ or ‘congress’ of a number of organisations) that usually embodied the organisational subjectivity of the nation, not always a party as such. However, there were differences here: parties were, for some (like Fanon), Western imports with few roots among the people; for others (like Cabral), the party represented the vanguard: ‘Why have we formed a party and others formed movements? ... We called it Party, because we understood that to lead a people to liberation and progress, the fundamental need was a vanguard, folk who show in fact that they are the best and can prove it in practice’ (1980: 85).20 The dominant tendency, of course, was for political movements to become state parties more or less rapidly as popular politics were gradually fused with the state. This subjective fusion is apparent in Cabral’s last speech before his assassination in 1973: The proclamation of the existence of our state ... will be the basis of the active existence of our nation ... legitimate representatives of our people, chosen by the populations and freely elected ... will proceed to ... declaring before the world that our African nation, forged in the struggle, is irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonialists and that from then on the executive of our state under the leadership of our Party, the PAIGC, will be the sole, true and legitimate representative of our people in all the national and international questions that concern them (Cabral, 1980: 289). Yet at the same time Cabral was aware that the character of the postcolonial state is at the source of the problem of the failure of emancipation, although he was unable to think a way out; the NLS mode had reached the limit of what could be thought within its parameters. As I have argued, this equating of the nation with the state

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was ultimately a necessary outcome of seeing politics no longer as affirmative, but as representing the social in the form of the indigenous, evidently so at independence and in many instances long before that, at which point the emancipatory character of politics had collapsed. In all cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the emancipation of the nation. Nkrumah’s aphorism – ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee’ – accurately expresses this collapse into a disastrous state politics, leading often to a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture (as in Mobutu’s notion of authenticité, for example), since the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied meant that the state was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins. Yet, in a postcolonial situation, the redress of national grievances could not avoid coming into conflict with private property itself, for the private clearly represented racial-national dispossession as well as being the foundation of capitalism. It is also for this reason that anti-colonial struggles often expressed anti-capitalist sentiments and that ‘state nationalism’ and ‘state socialism’ could easily be fused in the 1960s, when national freedom was equated with socialism, which itself was equated with social justice.

concluding remarks As I have shown, the NLS mode of politics was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination. The nation, which in the struggle for freedom was equated with the people, became gradually fused in thought with the state, evidently so at independence. It was these contradictory tendencies that assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely emancipatory content to the NLS mode, and the continuation of a colonial set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since. The neo-colonialism that ensued was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not its cause, as dependency theory maintained. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geopolitical context of the Cold War and its fetishism of state power led to its frequent ideological dependence on either the Stalinist or the Parliamentary modes, a fact that ensured its final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see, therefore, how easily a politics with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when subjectivity became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation, became party, became state. Although this movement from an excessive to an expressive mode of thinking politics was most evident at independence, for many national liberation movements the transition to proto-states or ‘states in waiting’

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was effected long before independence (e.g. PAIGC, SWAPO, ANC; see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols. 2 & 3, 1982), many being recognised by the United Nations as ‘the sole and authentic representatives’ of their nations prior to taking power. The sequence of this mode of politics in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism, is today clearly over, and has been so for about 30 years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. I now want to ask the question about the extent to which the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa of the 1980s may have broken with this NLS mode of thinking politics. I will suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.

notes 1. The South African White Left’s elitism and strident opposition to nationalism are notorious. Such opposition has been paramount among radical social historians and was evident in the 1980s at a time when mass resistance was being unleashed throughout the country and the nation was being constructed on a popular basis, as I shall show in chapter 4. For example, Pillay (2009: 244) notes the lack of engagement with Black nationalist thought among scholars of the History Workshop at Wits University in the 1970s and 1980s; he cites Worger (1991: 148–9) as remarking that two of the leading figures of the History Workshop (which, incidentally, purported to study the consciousness of the oppressed) ‘argue that white radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, feeling rejected by the black consciousness intellectuals and appalled by the “sorry record of independent Africa”, stridently opposed (African) nationalism and supported a “stark privileging of class over race” ’. The fetishism of class and the inability to take nationalism and popular politics seriously have, arguably, been two of the major political problems of the independent South African Left as a whole and the reasons for its consequent political irrelevance. 2. In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is said to write less as an activist and more as a philosopher-critic; this is apparently why this particular work is preferred by postcolonial theorists. While this book is organised around the opposition White–Black, The Wretched of the Earth is organised around the opposition coloniser–colonised. What connects them both is fundamentally an uncompromising disgust with the degradation of some humans by others. For an important introduction to Fanon’s thought, see Gordon (2015). 3. The version of The Wretched of the Earth referred to here is the 1990 Penguin edition translated by Constance Farrington. Where I have thought that the translation is not particularly accurate (as when the French word ‘colonisé ’ is regularly converted into the English word ‘native’), I have translated myself from the French edition (Fanon, 2002). In such cases my translation or modification is indicated. 4. The thesis referred to by Fanon is evidently Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, see Introduction, n. 38

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5. ‘This principle of inclusion [in the nation] had a special significance for Fanon because it was intimately linked to the idea ... that every new step towards liberation would transform whites as well as blacks, colonizers as well as colonized’ (Cherki, 2000: 106). 6. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Saïd argues that many African nationalist thinkers, including Fanon and Cabral, distinguished between independence and liberation; in other words, that they did not see an independent state as the sole objective of nationalist politics. It is difficult to disagree with this point; the problem, however, is that, although noted, the distinction is not fully theorised in Fanon’s work in particular. 7. ‘...  before considering the act by which a people submits to a king, we ought to scrutinize the act by which people become a people, for that act, being necessarily antecedent to the other, is the real foundation of society’ (Rousseau, 1979: 59). For a discussion of this point, see Balibar (1996: 101–29). See also Gordon (2014) for an important discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ in relation to Fanon’s ‘national consciousness’. 8. It should also be noted that Fanon (1989) insists that the formation of a people is also a process of self-transformation as well as one of the change of social relations in the direction of greater egalitarianism. 9. See David Beetham (1974, esp. ch. 4) on Max Weber’s conception of politics, for example. 10. In what amounts to a brilliant study of Fanon’s thought, Sekyi-Otu (1996) argues that Fanon deplores the absence of an ‘organic’ link, in the Gramscian sense, between the party and the masses characteristic of the independence struggle, as soon as postcolonial power is established. In consequence, hegemony, ‘that mode of political authority in which force is ... tamed by consent to imperfectly shared ends’ (p. 149), is absent, so that crude violence and corruption become the standard rather than the exceptional features of the rule of the postcolonial bourgeoisie. The difficulty faced by Fanon, however, is greater than that suggested by Sekyi-Otu, as Fanon is caught, in the thought of his time, within the contradiction derived from thinking the ‘national bourgeoisie’ as a circulating category: as a socio-economic entity as well as a political subject represented by a party. 11. It is important to note that Fanon insists here on a subjective political orientation, namely ‘revolutionary principles’, yet the problems in sustaining such principles within a context of state politics are not thought through. A similar problem is encountered in Cabral’s notion of the ‘class suicide’ of the petty bourgeoisie, as the subjective excess over class interest is not theorised in his work, as we shall see below. 12. Similarly, the popular pan-African affirmation of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics is gradually replaced by a reactive subjectivity of official pan-Africanism viewed as a mere agglomeration of states. 13. One attempt to warn against ignoring politically the national question has been outlined by Mamdani (2008b) with reference to Zimbabwe and gave rise to an extensive debate. Although Mamdani’s warning that ignoring national grievances over land made possible the opportunism and authoritarianism of Mugabe’s nationalism

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in Zimbabwe, since addressing this issue resonated among significant numbers of people, is fundamentally a correct one, critics largely chose to respond by emphasising the appalling human rights record of the regime. Unfortunately, Mamdani himself remains at the level of thinking a state form of nationalism exclusively, while the majority of his critics ignore the relevance of the national question in favour of liberal notions of rights. As a result, the current form of the national question in Africa still remains unaddressed, especially from the position of the majority of people. See Jacobs and Mundy (2009). 14. ‘...  we must not waste time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread in slavery’ (Fanon, 1990: 167, translation altered). 15. For a recent assessment of Cabral’s thought, see Manji and Fletcher (2013). 16. The dates of this sequence can obviously be debated. At the level of the Third World as a whole, the mode probably began as early as 1910 with the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1958), which was a systematic critique of colonial values accepted uncritically by the Indian middle class. See Hardiman (2003: 66–93). The following very important remark, which illustrates the emancipatory character of Gandhi’s thought, is taken from this text (p. 72): ‘to believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man’. 17. Although, again, its origins can be stretched as far back as the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, as we saw in chapter 1. 18. See Fanon (1989: ch. 1) on the struggle of Algerian women. 19. The fact that in the same paragraph Cabral refers positively to this formulation as being in tune with the thinking of Fidel Castro indicates the extent to which such an apolitical notion of individual ‘morality’ was dominant in the NLS mode worldwide. Elsewhere, Cabral insists that ‘a reconversion of minds – of mental set – is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion – re-Africanization, in our case – may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle’ (1973: 45). It is impossible to ascribe these intentions to a collective political subject, of course, as they are only attributable to individuals. Whatever the case may be, morality or individual commitment, the problem remains that, while he had understood the necessity for an excess over class interest in emancipatory politics, that political excess still remained untheorised by Cabral. 20. Lenin’s influence on Cabral’s thought of politics is apparent here. Given that Leninism was so central to the NLS mode and thus to the broader thought of emancipation in Africa in the 20th century, I will return to it in detail in chapter 7.

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Chapter 5

The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986 The people shall govern! – The Freedom Charter, 1955 The people have formed these area committees, so that they can try to control themselves. – An activist from the Eastern Cape, Isizwe, March 1986

rethinking the south african liberation struggle Having shown at some length the features of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics, I now wish to assess how it was transcended in South Africa in the 1980s. I will outline the new popularly based subjectivities which saw the light of day in that decade and will argue that the period 1984–6 witnessed an event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in South Africa. This event gave birth to a new mode of politics for the 21st century in Africa, which can be called the People’s Power mode of politics, one that was revived in 2011 in North Africa. I will suggest that the People’s Power mode in South Africa inaugurated a frankly new way of thinking emancipatory politics for the 21st century, which has attempted to overcome some of the limitations of the NLS mode on the continent. Throughout this chapter, the struggle for liberation in South Africa is considered within an African context, as illustrative of and not exceptional to an African experience, for it also occurred, although to a more limited extent, in Nigeria, CongoZaire and elsewhere and ultimately resulted in the formation of liberal-democratic state systems in most of the continent. This form of state became both the norm and a condition for the spread of neo-liberal capitalism in Africa. South Africa is, after all, probably the most consistently politically neo-liberal of African countries, at least in the eyes of empire, which regularly sets it up (along with Botswana and Mauritius) as

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a model for the continent. What was optimistically named the ‘second independence’ of the continent was not born exclusively of the neo-colonial imposition of neo-liberal economic policies; it was also, and primarily in South Africa, the result of mass popular movements which, for a while at least, challenged the dominance of capitalist hegemony and its attendant state modes of rule. Given that this period is occluded today, it is imperative to provide an assessment of it, especially as it produced a number of political innovations of universal significance. The standard reading of the liberation struggle in South Africa has been that this struggle – seen as a continuous process from the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 to the achievement of liberation in 1994, when the first elections by universal suffrage were held – operated very much within the theoretical confines of the NLS mode of politics. Even when the popular struggle of the 1980s is acknowledged as a specific process independent of the organisational requisites of the ANC in exile, it tends to be seen as a ‘radicalised’ variant of the NLS mode. One of the better arguments developed along these lines is made by Yunis, who suggests that the national liberation struggle in South Africa in the 1980s was radicalised as its class composition became more democratic and popular. For Yunis (2000: 33–5), the struggle for national liberation in South Africa (like that in Palestine) was radicalised as over time more popular classes became dominant: the 1910s–1940s were dominated by elites, the 1940s–1970s by a middle-class leadership, and the mid-1970s–1980s by popular classes. In this conception, the 1980s simply mark the radicalisation of an ongoing liberation struggle, unfolding on the basis of the class composition of the movement. For me, this kind of perspective disables an understanding of the truly inventive nature of the popular politics of the 1980s. It does so, not only because of its crude historicism – after all, its imputed trajectory was curtailed and thus unrealised, as the popular classes did not achieve their radical aims – but also because of its insistence on articulating politics to an external social invariant, namely class. In this manner, it does away with the singularity and specificity of these politics, and makes them unthinkable as emancipatory politics outside the parameters of a pre-given NLS mode of politics. Contrary to this view, I would maintain that there was a clear distinction, as well as a struggle, between different conceptions of politics within the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s – politics that cannot be understood simply in class terms – particularly between the democratic politics made possible by the popular movement inside the country and the party-bureaucratic politics of the NLS mode attached to the proto-state institutions of the ANC outside the country, despite their similarities in discourse. This contrast should not suggest uncontradictory politics in either of these sites.1 Rather, the main popular liberation organisation, the United Democratic Front (UDF) and its affiliates, as well as the trade unions, constituted sites which enabled the development of a political subjectivity that was centrally located in popular

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control of conditions of life, something that could not be prevalent in sites such as military camps and exile, simply because these were cut off from popular concerns and mass popular upsurge. In neither of these cases was politics reducible to sociological class categories. After all, the politics of exile were conducted within a Marxist discourse that, as numerous official documents of the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) attest, privileged (the working) class in the construction of the nation, as did the politics inside the country. Reference to class – a ‘classist’ politics – was not what distinguished them. Instead, during the years 1984–6 at least, a quite new political sequence developed in South Africa itself that deployed elements of a distinctly new (although incompletely developed) mode of politics: this broke in some crucially important respects with the fundamental tenets of the NLS mode, while resurrecting it in others.

the popular struggle against the apartheid state: an emancipatory political sequence and a new mode of politics for the 21st century During 1984–6 urban popular masses of the oppressed Black population in South Africa took an independent role in the politics of transformation and managed, for a time, to provide an inventively different content to the slogans of the old NLS mode. Moreover, the organisational expression of this movement, the UDF, was not a party organisation but a loose confederation of local political affiliates, which all adhered to some common principles and retained their organisational autonomy. For this reason, the UDF is a useful, recent non-party form of political organisation from which it is important to learn, although serious detailed research on this question has yet to be undertaken.2 The lack of organisational presence of the ANC within the country meant that the UDF had the autonomy to invent its own conception of politics. This included the need to engage in an emancipatory politics whose object was not the attainment of state power. Yet the fact that the ideological authority of the party in exile, the ANC, was recognised by the mass organisations of the UDF ultimately involved a deference to the authority of the exiled party. Excessive and expressive political subjectivities were therefore combined in contradictory ways. I will outline some of the features of this new politics as I proceed. The struggles for liberation in South Africa during the 1980s were part of a new worldwide wave of resistance, which in Africa has been referred to optimistically as ‘the second struggle for independence’. In South Africa, it emerged as the first such struggle with the result that the political reality of the situation could no longer simply be understood in the old way. Something had appeared ‘in a world which had not existed in it previously’ (Badiou, 2006b: 285).3 This new political invention can be described as an event, which Badiou insists does not amount to a ‘new reality’ as

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such but rather to ‘the creation of a myriad of new possibilities’ (Badiou, 2011c). That these possibilities only had a limited life span is explicable in terms of the excessive–expressive dialectic. In particular, these struggles denoted a fundamental break with liberalism, for which the nation is identified with the state and democracy with a form of state. In the 1980s the mass movement substituted for a while a notion of ‘people’s power’ in place of state power. For the first time national resistance politics did not take the form of a mirror image of colonial or apartheid oppression; in fact, that mimesis already existed in the politics of the exiled ANC. Instead, that resistance as well as the culture which emanated from it acquired its inspiration directly from the struggles of people in their daily lives for political control over their socio-economic environment, thus providing the ‘enabling environment’ for the unleashing of popular political initiatives and inventiveness. In this sense the experience was a truly democratic event, and fidelity to its lessons forces us to think about politics differently. I have argued elsewhere (Neocosmos, 1999b) that, rather than ‘vertical’ distinctions being considered central (e.g. the distinctions around which leaders would mobilise followers, such as the ideologies of nationalism or socialism), this mass movement – composed overwhelmingly (but certainly not uniquely) of students, youth and workers  – put the ‘horizontal’ emphasis on democratic practices firmly on the agenda, both in terms of collective and individual practices and in forms of organisation. On the other hand, the content of democracy was barely elaborated by intellectuals, who overwhelmingly thought within the categories of the older NLS mode using Marxist language. Indeed, the centrality of class politics, national politics, class leadership and representation among the categories deployed to make sense of what was happening indicates that it was an earlier subjectivity that dominated among intellectuals, despite the innovations practised by people themselves. In broad outline, the key features of the nationalist politics of the period can be sketched as follows. The most important and truly original organisational expression of popular resistance in the 1980s was the UDF. This organisation was formed in 1983 initially to mobilise opposition to the state’s constitutional proposals and other legislation (known collectively as the Koornhof Bills), including the Black Local Authorities Act, which increased the powers of the reviled township councillors. The UDF brought together under its umbrella a coalition of civic associations, student organisations and youth congresses, women’s groups, trade unions, church societies, sports clubs and a multitude of other organisations, which retained, and often increased as a result of their affiliation, their ability to organise independently. At its peak the UDF claimed to have around 700 affiliates grouped in ten regional areas and a membership amounting to over two million people (Lodge, 1991: 34). With the upsurge of unrest beginning in earnest in 1984, it was the young people of the townships who provided the main impetus behind the struggle, though this leadership passed over to the unions in 1988. In one important

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respect, at least, the UDF managed to build on the experience of township-based organisations such as civic associations, in that it successfully combined local and national grievances. Nevertheless, the history of the mass upsurge, even though it was enabled as well as expressed by the UDF, cannot be reduced to a history of the organisation.4 Frequently, contradictions existed between popular initiatives and the national organisation, and the latter often ‘trailed behind the masses’ (Seekings, 1992). The important point to understand is that, while the organisational existence of the UDF spans the years 1983–91, the political sequence of the event, along with the beginnings of a new mode of politics, can be said to have lasted between September 1984 and mid-1986. While the early political intervention under the banner of the UDF adhered to standard protest politics against the apartheid state’s introduction of a ‘tricameral parliament’,5 the mass upsurge started in earnest in September 1984 and took the form of bus and rent boycotts, housing movements, squatter revolts, labour strikes, school protests and community ‘stayaways’. This change in the mode of politics was not the result of any strategy on the part of the leadership of the UDF or of a change in policy. It was forced on the leadership from below (Swilling, 1988: 101). Indeed, by mid-1985 it was becoming clear that the UDF leadership was unable to exert effective control over developments despite its popularity: ‘The momentum for action came from the bottom levels of the organisation and from its youngest members. It was children who built the roadblocks, children who led the crowds to the administrative buildings, children who delegated spokespersons, and children who in 1984 told the older folk that things would be different, that people would not run away as they had in 1960’ (Lodge, 1991: 76). In 1986 the apartheid state instituted a massively repressive state of emergency, which covered the whole country, with the result that from late 1986 onwards UDF campaigns were more and more initiated ‘from above’, by a leadership operating exclusively at the national level. At the same time, more and more coercive measures were applied to township residents to adhere to various boycotts, a fact that showed the weakening of popular control, and that ‘the struggle’ was acquiring more of a militaristic character, while vigilante activities acquired more and more support from businesses affected by youth-directed boycotts. All in all, after that date the politics of coercion gradually took over from the politics of popular democracy as its subjectivities became saturated. What characterised this political event during the twoyear period was not simply a dominance of popular power ‘from below’, later to be replaced by an imposition of a change in politics ‘from above’; after all, this is a regular occurrence throughout history, including in contemporary Africa. Rather, the reason for considering this period as a new political sequence or an event for politics is fundamentally rooted in the emergence of new political questions and new political

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solutions. Broadly speaking, this new political conception can be sketched under five headings. All these enable a brief elucidation of a new form of popular democracy, or what Badiou (2011c) refers to as ‘movement communism’.

Politics without a party What was fundamental was that, in its essence, the politics of the political movement led by the UDF was a politics without a party. The whole idea of ‘capturing’ or ‘seizing’ state power, whether through elections or by force of arms, was absent from its thought of politics (Suttner, 2004: 695–6). Its thought of politics was therefore not conditioned by a ‘party line’. It had to be inventive as regards what it wanted to achieve and as regards the manner of achieving it. In this way it differed significantly from the perspective of the NLS mode, including that of the ANC. This was so primarily because the UDF viewed the exiled ANC as the rightful leader of the national movement and deferred to it in terms of overall political dominance. Yet, given the virtual absence of an organised ANC presence within the country, the ANC could never exercise party control, and the open structure of the UDF meant that its affiliates, themselves largely controlled by their rank and file, were primarily the ones to set out the forms of struggle. Leadership, however, not only reacted to pressure from below, but was forced to be accountable to activists. Systems of accountability were instituted largely as a result of popular power and trade union influence, which had itself developed from popular resistance through the wave of strikes in the Durban area in 1973. The main demands of the UDF concerned what one of its leaders called removing the ‘barriers to democracy’, by which was meant creating ‘the necessary conditions for the democratic process to expand’ (Morobe, 1987: 86). These included ‘the lifting of the state of emergency, the withdrawal of troops and vigilantes from townships, and the release of detainees’ as well as the unbanning of the ANC, the SACP and other organisations, the safe return of exiles and the repeal of racist legislation. These were, of course, very limited demands and implied a deference to another leadership, yet by taking over and putting into practice the demands of the Freedom Charter in particular – the political flag of the Congress alliance – the mass movement, pushed from below, constructed a politics that focused on transforming the living conditions of the masses of the people, especially in urban townships. What was meant by democracy, as well as the content given to the first demand of the Freedom Charter, ‘The people shall govern’, was turned into a directive that went far beyond anything dreamt of before or established since. This will appear clearly in what follows. Yet the advantage faced by the popular movement in the 1980s – i.e. the absence of a controlling ‘party line’ – turned out to be one of the reasons for its eventual demise, as it gave way, after being seriously weakened by state coercion, to the returning exiled party of the ANC (Neocosmos, 1998).

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Community-based organisation and popular agency The mass actions from 1984 onwards succeeded in mobilising all sectors of the township population including both youth and older residents; they involved coordinated action between trade unions and political organisations; they were called in support of demands that challenged the coercive urban and education policies of the apartheid state; and they gave rise to ungovernable areas as state authority collapsed in many townships in the wake of the resignation of mayors and councillors who had been ‘elected’ onto the new Black Local Authorities (Swilling, 1988: 102). The state declared a first state of emergency in 1985 in an attempt to control this mass upsurge and to reassert its control over ‘ungovernable areas’. Interestingly, both popular rebellion and political organisation grew during this period, which saw the setting up of ‘street committees’ in particular. These took over the functions of local government especially in ‘ungovernable’ areas, i.e. places where the state had little or no control. One local activist in the Port Elizabeth area stated: ‘We said [to our people]: In the streets where you live you must decide what issues affect your lives and bring up issues you want your organisation to take up. We are not in a position to remove debris, remove buckets, clean the streets and so on. But the organisation must deal with these matters through street committees’ (cit. Lodge, 1991: 82). The ANC view, as expressed by its spokesman Tom Sebina, was that street committees ‘grow out of the need of the people to defend themselves against state repression ... and in response to ANC calls to make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable [so as to forge them into] contingents that will be part of the process towards a total people’s war’ (Frontline, 6, 7, 1986: 13). Contrary to this view, which saw street committees as tactical adjuncts to the development of a militaristic process and as simply oppositional to the apartheid state, local activists spelt out a different assessment: The people in Lusaka [i.e. the ANC] can say what they like ... we know that the purpose is to enable people to take their lives in hand. Local government has collapsed. The state’s version of local government was corrupt and inefficient in any case, but local government is necessary for people to channel their grievances. The street committees fill the vacuum. They give people an avenue to express views and come up with solutions (p. 13). One Eastern Cape activist expressed the new situation as follows: Generally ... I can say that the community is the main source of power, because the state has really lost the control over the people. He [sic] has no power over

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the people in terms of controlling them. This is why the people have formed these area committees, so that they can try to control themselves. What has been preached in the past about the Freedom Charter, even now we are trying to do that practically (UDF, 1986: 39). These popular organisations, or ‘structures’ in the language of the time, proliferated in urban townships. Anthony Marx (1992: 167) noted that, by 1987, 43 per cent of the inhabitants of Soweto, for example, were reporting the existence of street and area committees in their neighbourhoods. In many townships, rudimentary services began to be provided by civics and youth congresses, while crime also began to be regulated through ‘people’s courts’. These developed in some areas originally to regulate disputes between neighbours (e.g. in Atteridgeville outside Pretoria) and also as attempts to control the proliferation of brutal kangaroo courts (e.g. in Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth). In Alexandra, in Johannesburg, five members of the Alexandra Action Committee were nominated in February 1986 to sit in judgment in cases of assault and theft, while street committees were empowered to settle quarrels. In Mamelodi, one of Pretoria’s townships, a number of informal systems of justice operated in the 1970s and 1980s, and there were long-term struggles over the setting up of popularly accountable courts, which were also highly influenced by traditional African custom (e.g. the importance of elders and other respected people in the community).6 Lodge concludes: ‘Of all the manifestations of people’s power ... the efforts of local groups to administer civil and criminal justice were the most challenging to the state’s moral authority. More than any other feature of the insurrectionary movement, people’s justice testified to the movement’s ideological complexity and to the extent to which it was shaped from below by popular culture’ (Lodge, 1991: 135). In addition to popular control of townships and popular justice, there was a complementary development of institutions geared towards the provision of ‘people’s education’. These included attempts to bring local schools under community control through the establishment of Parent Teacher Student Associations (PTSAs) and even to develop a new curriculum in response to Bantu Education, the central plank of the apartheid state in this sphere. The struggle for people’s education was seen as intimately linked to establishing people’s power. In the words of Zwelakhe Sisulu: The struggle for People’s Education is no longer a struggle of the students alone. It has become a struggle of the whole community with the involvement of all sections of the community. This is not something which has happened in the school sphere alone; it reflects a new level of development in the struggle as a whole ... The struggle for people’s education can only finally be won when

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we have won the struggle for people’s power ... We are no longer demanding the same education as Whites, since this is education for domination. People’s education means education at the service of the people as a whole, education that liberates, education that puts the people in command of their lives. We are not prepared to accept any ‘alternative’ to Bantu Education which is imposed on the people from above ... To be acceptable, every initiative must come from the people themselves, must be accountable to the people and must advance the broad mass of students, not just a select few (Sisulu, 1986: 106, 110). Or again: I want to emphasise here that these advances were only possible because of the development of democratic organs, or committees, of people’s power. Our people set up bodies which were controlled by, and accountable to, the masses of the people in each area. In such areas, the distinction between the people and their organisations disappeared. All the people young and old participated in committees from street level upwards (p. 104). However, at the same time as street committees were taking up local grassroots issues, they also functioned as vehicles for the direct challenge by the people to apartheid state power. A detailed assessment from 1986 makes this point forcefully. The street/area committees – the structures of an embryonic People’s Power – are not only restricted to playing this kind of [local] role, but also have a far more directly or narrowly political dimension to them. At the same time as they are taking up ... grassroots issues ... they also form the units in and through which major political issues and strategies (e.g. the consumer boycott) are discussed and organised. Thus the street committee system is beginning to form not only the avenue through which people can begin to take greater and more democratic control of the immediate conditions of their existence, but they are also emerging as the form through which direct political action against the state and the ruling bloc can be decided on and implemented (White, 1986: 92). South Africa, particularly urban South Africa, did experience, however briefly, a period when the oppressed people succeeded in controlling their own lives as well as in providing an alternative to state structures in the movement for ‘people’s power’. In practice, this mass movement gave rise to a form of mass democracy and popular power unique in South Africa (and probably also in Africa as a whole). While these forms of popular democracy were never able to establish their dominance, especially beyond 1986, they were a central feature of popular or ‘subaltern’ politics at the time.

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They have also gone largely unrecognised by most intellectuals, by the party of state nationalism, the ANC, and even by many of the popular movement’s own leaders. What especially stood out from the various experiments in ‘people’s power’ was an attempt to develop genuinely popular forms of democracy in both ideology and practice, i.e. a new excessive political subjectivity.

Direct accountability of leadership The general characterisation of the mass struggle as both national and democratic brought together nationwide as well as popular-democratic, locally focused aspects of the process. Indeed, the two were regularly combined in attempts by leading activists to theorise the process of struggle. Thus Murphy Morobe, the acting publicity secretary of the UDF, said in 1987: We in the United Democratic Front are engaged in a national democratic struggle. We say we are engaged in a national struggle for two reasons. Firstly, we are involved in political struggle on a national, as opposed to a regional or local level. The national struggle involves all sectors of our people – workers (whether in the factories, unemployed, migrants or rural poor), youth, students, women and democratic-minded professionals. We also refer to our struggle as national in the sense of seeking to create a new nation out of the historical divisions of apartheid. We also explain the democratic aspect of our struggle in two ways ... Firstly, we say that a democratic South Africa is one of the aims or goals of our struggle. This can be summed up in the principal slogan of the Freedom Charter: ‘The People Shall Govern’. In the second place, democracy is the means by which we conduct our struggle ... The creation of democratic means is for us as important as having democratic goals as our objective ... When we say that the people shall govern, we mean at all levels and in all spheres, and we demand that there be a real, effective control on a daily basis ... The key to a democratic system lies in being able to say that the people in our country can not only vote for a representative of their choice, but also feel that they have some direct control over where and how they live, eat, sleep, work, how they get to work, how they and their children are educated, what the content of that education is; and these things are not done for them by the government of the day, but [by] the people themselves ... The rudimentary organs of people’s power that have begun to emerge in South Africa (street committees, defence committees, shop-steward structures, student representative councils, parent/teacher/ student associations) represent in many ways the beginnings of the kind of democracy that we are striving for ... Without the fullest organisational democracy, we will never be able to achieve conscious, active and unified participation

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of the majority of the people, and in particular the working class, in our struggle (Morobe, 1987: 81–3, emphasis added). One can see clearly from this how a politics of representation was systematically rejected in favour of a politics of self-presentation. Two features of this democracy worth noting were a detailed system of controlling leaders to make them accountable to the rank-and-file membership, and a different way of demarcating ‘the people’ from ‘the oppressors’. Attempts at instituting internal democracy within organisations were strongly followed, although they obviously had varying degrees of success. The important point was that such a struggle for democracy existed within organisations. The various dimensions of this democracy were, according to Morobe: 1.  Elected Leadership. Leadership of our organisations must be elected (at all levels), and elections must be held at periodic intervals ... Elected leadership must also be re-callable before the end of their term of office if there is indiscipline or misconduct. 2.  Collective Leadership. We try and practice collective leadership at all levels. There must be continuous, ongoing consultation ...  3.  Mandates and Accountability. Our leaders and delegates are not free-floating individuals. They always have to operate within the delegated mandates of their positions and delegated duties ...  4.  Reporting. Reporting back to organisations, areas, units, etc. is an important dimension of democracy... We feel very strongly that information is a form of power, and that if it is not shared, it undermines the democratic process. We therefore take care to ensure that language translations occur if necessary ...  5.  Criticism and Self-criticism. We do not believe that any of our members are beyond criticism; neither are organisations and strategies beyond reproach ... (Morobe, 1987: 84–5). Similar observations regarding the popular content of struggles for democratic transformation during this period were also made about the trade unions: ‘The battle in the factories ... has also given birth to a type of politics which has rarely been seen among the powerless [in South Africa]: a grassroots politics which stresses the ability of ordinary men and women, rather than “great leaders”, to act to change their world’ (Friedman, 1987: 8–9). In other words, a genuinely emancipatory politics was developed that challenged not only state power but hierarchical power itself; the establishment of popular power meant a challenge to capitalism itself and, in particular, to its division of labour. Not surprisingly, in the face of this challenge, the apartheid state did not hesitate

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to intensify its repression. In the first six months of the state of emergency in 1986, around 25,000 people were arrested and isolated, the ability of the press (especially the vibrant ‘alternative press’) to report objectively was systematically curtailed and the townships were placed under direct military rule, while the state introduced a militarised bureaucracy (the so-called National Security Management System) to run local government and to ‘win hearts and minds’ (WHAM), following the classic counter-insurgency pattern which the Americans had perfected in Vietnam. In brief, this state offensive succeeded in undermining popular organisations considerably, and probably in eliminating popular leadership altogether. This was not because the UDF ceased its activities; on the contrary, rent, bus and consumer boycotts continued unabated at least until 1987 (Lodge, 1991: 87–100). Rather, it was the popular aspect of the struggle that was fatally wounded, as it depended for its democratic operation on consultative processes, relative freedom of movement and the ability to communicate, and there was no popular army capable of defending popular gains and structures against military onslaught.7

New conceptions of nation and leadership The manner in which the popular movement demarcated its members (‘the people’ or ‘the nation’) from the oppressive state is also worthy of note. This largely drew on the notion of ‘non-racialism’ as a way of characterising the ideology of the movement as well as on the nature of the state that was being fought for. Originally inherited from Black Consciousness discourse, ‘non-racialism’ was adapted by the UDF to include Whites who supported the struggle. This struggle was seen as uniting into a national opposition the disparate groups which the apartheid state divided; hence the main slogan of the UDF: ‘UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides!’ One important aspect of non-racialism was that, rather than distinguishing ‘the people’ or ‘the oppressors’ on racial grounds, it did so by demarcating them on political grounds: popular democrats from anti-democrats. The former were those who supported change ‘from below’, the latter those who proposed some form of ‘tinkering from above’ and who had, by this period, lost the confidence of the majority. Democrats were all those who opposed ‘minority rule’ and supported ‘majority rule’ through popular democracy. In the words of a UDF discussion document from 1986: The essential dividing line that we should promote is between supporters of minority rule and majority rule. The common ground between the Botha [sic], the PFP [Progressive Federal Party, the main White liberal opposition] leadership and big business is that they all seek solutions within the framework of adapting minority rule. Although they differ fundamentally on who to involve in negotiation and how much adaptation is necessary, these elements all agree

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that the system must be changed from the top down, with the solutions being decided over the heads of the people. All those who accept the right of the people to determine the process of change are allies of the people and part of the NDS [National Democratic Struggle] (UDF Cape Town Area Committee, 1986a: 10, emphasis in original). This meant that the conduct of the popular struggle should also be ‘non-racial’. Such a position was possible precisely because the social movement was not an elite movement and because White ‘progressives’ undertook invaluable work both in the trade unions and in the UDF, for which they won the appreciation of the people of the townships. It served to divide a minority of White democrats from White racists, while forcing the uncommitted to commit themselves, in the same way as affiliation to popular organisations divided Blacks between collaborators with the state (‘sellouts’) and the majority of the oppressed. Similar democratic practices also characterised the ‘Call for National Unity against Apartheid and the Emergency’ by the UDF in August 1986, for example. The discussion documents relating to this call stressed emphatically: ‘it is essential that the call is not simply for unity at the top. We must ensure a way to ensure contact and planning on the ground, so that membership of different organisations may grow closer together.’ At the same time, the documents noted that the timing of the call was ‘delayed to give COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions] affiliates time for thorough discussion – this is crucial, as the leadership of the call must reflect the people’s unity right from the start’.8 In fact, the danger posed to popular democracy by the movement’s lack of control over a number of charismatic leaders, who felt they had the authority to speak and act without being mandated, was one of which many were aware. Isizwe, the main journal of the UDF, made a prophetic statement in 1985: One thing that we must be careful about ... is that our organisations do not become too closely associated with individuals, that we do not allow the development of personality cults. We need to understand why we regard people as leaders and to articulate these reasons. Where people do not measure up to these standards they must be brought to heel  – no matter how ‘charismatic’ they may be. No person is a leader in a democratic struggle such as ours simply because he or she makes good speeches ... No individual may make proposals on the people’s behalf – unless mandated by them ... We need to say these things because there are some people and interests who are trying to project individuals as substitutes for political movements (UDF, 1985: 17, emphasis added). The practices of ‘mandates and report-backs’, which had been adopted largely as a result of trade union influence and which were taken particularly seriously in the

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mid-1980s, began to decline at the end of the decade. In such circumstances it was relatively easy for leaders to disband the UDF in the wake of the unbanning of the ANC, as it was felt that the ANC could now take over the organisation of popular political protest. The early 1990s witnessed the gradual depoliticisation of civics and the renegotiation of their role vis-à-vis the state. I have shown elsewhere how popular politics was gradually replaced by state politics (Neocosmos, 1998, 1999). Another important innovation within the UDF was the attempt to specify the content of the orthodox Marxist idea of ‘working-class leadership’, which was increasingly stressed as the link between ‘the working class’ and ‘the national democratic revolution’ during the period in question. The Stalinist mode of politics had hitherto basically equated such ‘leadership’ (hegemony) with that of a party, as the dominance of the Communist Party in inter-party alliances was substituted in the Stalinist mode for the ‘class leadership’ of the proletariat in class alliances. As the SACP was banned and did not constitute an independent organised force in South Africa at the time, it was not so much party alliances that were the issue (as they were in exile, of course) as class alliances, which were understood in purely political terms. In such circumstances, in any discussion of this issue a greater emphasis had to be placed on ideology and practice rather than on crude organisational control. For example, Isizwe stated: For the working class to play their full role, their leadership must be fundamentally political leadership. It must be working-class leadership of and within the national liberation front ... of the UDF itself ... The dynamic active participation, from grassroots level up, of ever increasing numbers of workers in our structures will pose fresh challenges. That is how it must be. We must be prepared for this and work to assist this process (UDF, 1987: 7–8). At the same time, both the UDF and the general secretary of COSATU added: The working class must ensure that its interests are paramount in the liberation struggle. That is why the mass democratic movement in our country has acknowledged the leading role of the working class. We believe that the only way to ensure this leadership is to build democratic organisations in the factories, shops, mines, in the townships, cities and villages where we live. Our structures are rooted in a constituency where leaders are not free-floating individuals but subject to recall at any time and are accountable to their constituencies and operating on the basis of mandates and report backs. Only such structures can claim to be democratic (Naidoo, 1987: 15). While the UDF insisted on opening its cadreship to workers, both it and the COSATU leadership insisted more and more on the building of ‘popular democratic

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structures’ as the attributes of ‘working-class politics’ and ‘workers’ control’ of unions. This idea of popular democracy as the essence of working-class politics was given its most detailed explication by Karon and Ozinsky. They arg-Zed: It is the process by which the national democratic tasks are completed that will determine the character of the society which follows ... the task of transforming society cannot be separated from the process of liberating it ... The method of [the] eradication [of minority rule], and the depth of the democracy which replaces it, is the essential class question of the national democratic struggle ... Transformation [of the state] is only possible if the liberation struggle ensures the development of direct democracy based on organs of people’s power. These are the crucial source of the power of the working class in the national democratic state, and hence the foundation of an uninterrupted transition to socialism (Karon and Ozinsky, 1986: 33, 35, 34, 36, emphases in original). In this understanding, society had to be transformed prior to  – and hence independently from – the attainment of state power and the transformation of the state. The idea of controlling the state in order to transform society was one that arose later, particularly with the return of ANC exiles in the 1990s. Thus for Joe Slovo, the general secretary of the SACP at the time, the priority was for the ANC to attain state power. Having done so would then ‘immeasurably facilitate’ the establishment of people’s power (Slovo, 1992: 36–7; see also Neocosmos, 1999b). This view, which eventually won out, contradicted fundamentally the subjectivity emanating from the popular movement. In sum, it was the experience of the South African popular movement itself that imposed itself on the understanding of ‘working-class politics’ by those intellectuals closest to this social movement. This understanding of popular democracy as ‘working-class politics’ is not deducible from a social class category. Not only is ‘the people’ not a class category, but at the time it was defined politically. It is not at all obvious that a popular conception of democracy should be in the interest of (or only of ) a working class, and not have a greater and even universal validity. So-called working-class parties, of whatever hue, have not historically been paragons of popular democracy. This conception was in fact a purely politically subjective one, but it was never systematised into a theory, and a number of questions were clearly left unanswered, such as: What is the difference, if any, between popular and working-class politics? What does the ‘depth’ of democracy actually mean? Is the reference to qualitatively or to quantitatively different forms of democracy? How does such democracy differ from more liberal conceptions? How does this conception of democracy link up with notions of rights? And, most importantly, how is a conception of ‘class leadership’ of the ‘national democratic revolution’ to be reconciled with the organisational

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‘leadership’ of the ANC in the ‘liberation movement’? The absence of clear answers to these questions was to contribute to the saturation of the People’s Power mode, with the eventual collapse of popular forms of democracy and their replacement by a state-focused politics.

Prescriptive politics at a distance from the state The argument I have stressed throughout has been that during the period 1984–6 the popular struggle brought to the fore questions of politics that had never been raised before in South Africa, or even perhaps in Africa in the postcolonial period, in such a clear fashion. At this point of the argument, the issue specifically concerns the thinking of a new form of emancipatory politics in a post-national-liberation-struggle period. In Mamdani’s terms, the whole political sequence beginning in the mid-1970s had inaugurated a ‘departure of epochal significance from the armed struggle’ and its statist perspectives, as this sequence ‘would set aside the near religious faith in exile revolutionaries and armed struggle and return to the day-to-day endeavours of working people, to take these as the raw material from which to fashion a culture of resistance adequate to its own setting’ (Mamdani, 1996a: 232). The two main questions raised by popular struggle in the 1980s, particularly in 1984–6, the core years of this sequence, were: What is popular democracy? And how should a popular democracy be achieved and consolidated? These questions differed fundamentally from what most intellectuals were debating at the time, such as the relative importance of capitalism versus socialism, the state, the nature of the economy, race and class (Neocosmos, 1999b). A number of conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. Firstly, there is no doubt that South Africa witnessed a period of mass popular upsurge, especially in urban townships, which eventually led to the collapse of the apartheid state. The mass politics of this period were founded on the daily issues of survival confronted by ordinary people. The UDF, its affiliates and activists were successful, to various extents at different periods, in enabling the mass involvement of large sections of the population in politics. Everything became political, from sport to transport, from art to schooling, from rubbish collection to public parks. In other words, true political agency was created across the board, unevenly to be sure, but nevertheless sufficiently for all sectors of the population to be involved. In this way a number of mass movements were developed (Van Kessel, 2000). The UDF, in its politics, managed to link local concerns and politics with national issues. Everything was seen as connected to the (apartheid) state. What was not understood was how to sustain (or even whether to sustain) this political agency post-apartheid; nor was it understood that the role of the state would remain central in controlling these issues, irrespective of the form that state would eventually take. The politics of

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representation ultimately held sway over the popular imagination. In the absence of a capacity to sustain independent popular politics after the apartheid state began to be transformed in the early 1990s, the dominant categories available to thought became those of human rights, civil society and citizenship, emanating mainly from international neo-liberal discourse (Neocosmos, 1999b). The growing use of the terms ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ in particular corresponded to the gradual saturation of the People’s Power mode. By the 1990s, ‘civil society’ had become the conceptual foundation of a reactive state politics, which now attempted to incorporate broad social interests within its own domain of politics. This subjective change was expressed in an extensive debate regarding ‘the role of civil society in the new state’; in other words, the debate concerned the creation of a state domain of civil society, the general features of which I shall discuss in chapters 6 and 11.9 At the core of the debate was the manner of incorporation of the civics into state politics, with one side arguing that these should constitute organs of state power as well as retain their independence (the contradiction was not clearly spelt out, let alone resolved), while the other argued that such a ‘civil society’ should be totally independent from government. Ultimately, civics and other popular organisations retained their organisational independence, but their politics were to operate within a consensual subjectivity dominated by state politics. For the most part they accepted their incorporation into corporatist structures (Neocosmos, 1999b). In sum, the independent organisations of the 1980s largely agreed to their dissolution (as in the case of the UDF) or else to their incorporation into the ruling party itself (youth and women’s organisations) or to their entering into corporatist arrangements with the state (unions and civics). They now shared the new dominant neo-liberal expressive subjectivity and contributed to the creation of a state consensus. Secondly, the politics of the event of 1984–6 were excessive, emancipatory and existed at a distance from those of the state, simply because the thinking of political activity and practice was not modelled exclusively on an attempt to enter the subjective domain of state politics. Indeed, these politics constituted an alternative to state politics and were not just oppositional, as the ANC leadership has regularly maintained ever since (e.g. Mbeki, 1996). That organisations were able to construct their own political culture, their own embryonic local state structures, their own (often highly democratic) modes of decision-making, shows that they went beyond instilling political agency among citizens, and delved into thinking new forms of politics of a fundamentally popular-democratic character. This is shown by the fact that ‘class leadership’ was theorised as democratic practice and not simply as party dominance, despite the frequent lapses into bureaucratic-statist conceptions and practices. The weakness, if not absence, of party forms of politics, and the absence of the idea of the seizure of power, constituted major influences on the formation of these politics, as did the necessity to construct majority popular support around all issues. There was

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clearly military imagery involved, but little in terms of militarist politics. The UDF as an umbrella of independent organisations and affiliates was organisationally novel. Moreover, not only was the UDF excluded, and self-excluded, from formal recognition – in fact, it operated so much beyond the limits of state politics that it was eventually banned – but the politics of the UDF were not the politics of civil society, nor were they the politics of parties, at least not fully so. Here was an organisation that did not see its purpose as achieving state power, yet it was totally political. Unlike the ANC, the UDF was not a state-party in the making and never saw itself as such. Its fundamental contribution to the thought of emancipation was to make political self-activity thinkable and possible. Furthermore, these were not the politics of human rights, requesting the state to ‘deliver’ rights or entitlements in order to include the majority within its political ambit, for the simple yet important reason that the ‘Congress tradition’ as a whole had vehemently distanced itself from the notion of being or forming a ‘civil rights movement’. Rather than demanding incorporation into an existing state, activists consciously rejected state modes of politics and made instead prescriptions on the state, most notably those of the Freedom Charter which stressed popular democracy: ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, ‘The people shall govern’, ‘The doors of learning shall be opened’, and so on, all of which had a universal character. What dominated here was a politics ‘for all’ and not a politics only ‘for some’. These politics were, for the most part, not state politics founded on interests, not a liberal politics of human rights, but operated at a subjective political distance from state thinking.10 How to put into practice the universal ideas expressed in the Freedom Charter was a regular question posed by activists, and at times these ideas were imposed violently on those who disagreed – an illustration of episodic relapses into statist modes. At the same time, such politics could not be characterised as either ‘reformist’ or ‘revolutionary’, the usual terms by which the Left has evaluated politics, because they were vehemently opposed to the existence of the apartheid state (and hence not reformist), while concurrently not wishing to achieve state power (revolution suggests the seizure of state power). Thirdly, the politics of the period in question differed fundamentally from the statist aspects of the NLS mode represented most clearly by the ANC, which was a proto-state operating within the international diplomatic arena and focused primarily on gaining power through military means (Barrell, 1991). The UDF had no branch structure, only loose affiliates; this encouraged popular involvement. The ANC, on the other hand, was highly centralist, cut off from direct contact with the mass movement, and hampered by the Stalinist mode of politics which dominated, in conjunction with the NLS mode, within its structures. It is worth stressing that the ANC’s orientation during the 1960s and 1970s had been accompanied by a militaristic perspective, which assumed that ‘armed struggle was not simply the means by

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which ultimately to contend for state power but also the principal means by which to progress in each phase of escalation to that goal’ (Barrell, 1991: 69). Howard Barrell shows that armed struggle was viewed in the 1960s as ‘the sine qua non of any form of ANC political progress’ (p. 70) and that the ANC ignored the setting up of political structures within the country. At its Morogoro conference in 1969, political forms of struggle were still considered ‘as auxiliary to military imperatives’ (p. 71), while its SACP ally during the same period resolved that ‘every political action, whether armed or not, should be regarded as part of the build-up towards a nationwide people’s armed struggle leading to the conquest of power’ (cit. p. 71). The effect of the Soweto uprising of 1976 was to push the ANC and SACP into reviewing their strategy (there had been no ANC armed activity inside the country for 13 years anyway). This review, which took place in 1978–9, emphasised the possibilities of political struggle inside the country and the construction of a popular revolutionary political base. Yet, despite what Barrell calls this ‘turn to the masses’, the overall perspective was that ‘power in South Africa would be won by revolutionary violence in a protracted armed struggle which must involve the whole people and in which partial and general mass uprisings would play a vital role’ (cit. p. 89).11 In sum, even as late as the 1980s, the strategic vision of the ANC and SACP remained one in which political organisation was ultimately seen as subject to military imperatives – ‘notwithstanding traces of ambiguity in some formulations’ (p. 89). Militaristic imagery and cultural expressions in music, dance and song still prevailed during the 1980s, even within the popular movement itself. On the other hand, the sites of the new mode of politics were clearly the UDF itself, along with various of its affiliates, the street committees and various other community organisations, the shop steward ‘locals’ and a number of churches. The ending of these sites in 1986, as a result of a combination of increased state repression and violence, centralisation of authority in the resistance and the movement’s deference to the exiled organisation, signalled the saturation and collapse of an independent politics and the end of the emancipatory sequence. Finally, there were, of course, contradictions within the popular politics of the 1980s, which appear in the extensive literature. They arose and fell along with the vagaries of the struggle and included authoritarian tendencies, sexism, urban– rural contradictions, and deference to well-known nationalist figures and to the ANC in exile, and thus to the NLS mode itself. These contradictions, most of which can be put down to a dialectic between excessive and expressive politics, along with deference to a politics of representation, contribute to explaining the ultimate inability of this mode to sustain itself subjectively. The problems illustrate the fact that these politics never fully broke from what Badiou (2005a: 68ff) terms the ‘bond’ of interests, in order that the ‘long-term durability of the event’ might be sustained (p. 72). The adherence of the mass movement to the idea of the

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coming to power of the exiled leaders of the ANC was its ‘undoing’, and by the late 1980s the national leadership of the internal movement was travelling regularly to Lusaka, from where the ANC (which had been negotiating independently with the apartheid regime) asserted its authority. The sites of embryonic people’s power never fully matured and were, instead, stillborn, as the democratic politics of the mass movement more or less rapidly collapsed into often violent authoritarianism (Cronin, 1992; Neocosmos, 1998). This enabled the returning ANC exiles to present the alternative as either uncontrolled popular violence or elections and stability (Neocosmos, 1998). Moreover, the movement of workers into positions of power was not sufficient to avoid disaster, as they were as prone to corruption as anyone else when emancipatory subjectivities were replaced by state politics. However, it is important to stress that the language of failure should be avoided here: people’s power did not fail. Rather, it is more appropriate to see it as a sequence that reached an impasse, and became saturated, so that state thinking was progressively allowed to dominate.

conclusion What is apparent is that the period 1984–6 constituted an event for politics in South Africa. A new subjectivity was able to completely reconfigure and rethink the basis of emancipatory politics in the country, and to systematically raise issues about the centrality of popular democracy in any African emancipatory transformation. To quote Murphy Morobe again (1987: 83): ‘the essence of democracy cannot be limited to debate alone. The key to a democratic system lies in being able to say that the people in our country can not only vote for a representative of their choice, but also feel that they have some direct control.’ While it is indeed common today to hear this period referred to as that of the ‘anti-apartheid struggle’, this struggle was never simply understood at the time according to what it was against, but always in terms of what it was for. What it was for, for the majority of its activists, was never simply a neo-liberal state and a government elected by universal suffrage that passes socially sensitive legislation and presides over neo-liberal policies. It would never have had the mass support it acquired had this been the case. It was always a struggle for a better world, a world where people ‘feel that they have some direct control’ over their lives – hence a struggle for a politics founded on an axiom of equality. This constitutes yet another reason why this popular struggle – much like its predecessor in Poland during the early 1980s, Solidarity – cannot be understood from within a notion of ‘civil society’. Both these movements were considered in US political science as prime examples of the neo-liberal freedom enabled by ‘civil society’ (Gibbon, 1996), but both exceeded a politics of interest. The following

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comment about Solidarity applies mutatis mutandis to the UDF in South Africa (although the occupation of factories was not central to the South African struggle): Solidarność was able to imagine another world and the end of the dominant symbolic order. It freed a veritable carnival of the imaginary. Not only did it breathe into people’s minds a belief in possibilities, in the reality of a different way of life, but it equally showed in practice – through its internal democratic organisation, the example of worker controlled factories, its courage in facing armed state functionaries – a glimpse of what this life could look like (Goldex Poldex Group, 2011: 127). Intellectually, fidelity to this event in South Africa must put this point at the centre of thinking about politics on the continent. Such fidelity would have to name the event and the political sequence or mode corresponding to it. To my mind, this event is most aptly named the sequence of ‘people’s power’, which is actually how it was named by those involved. It constitutes the inception of a People’s Power mode of politics in Africa, and it was rekindled in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, where emancipatory transformation was attempted on the basis of mass popular and secular organisation. What should be stressed, in so far as lessons for developing a more general understanding of politics are concerned, is that the politics of this mode constituted themselves subjectively outside state modes of thinking politics. This was its fundamentally innovative characteristic. Whether such subjectivity resulted in an opposition to the apartheid state, as it in fact did, is arguably of secondary importance; in other words, it was not what it was against that constituted its innovative character, but the subjective character of its politics. This non-state subjectivity constituted its novelty, simply because most revolutionary politics hitherto on the continent had been firmly situated within a state subjectivity, one that insisted on seizing power through guerrilla war. Despite its similarity with the case of Algeria, notably its popular mass character, the South African struggle in the 1980s differentiated itself from that experience in the sense that freedom was thought as achievable outside the parameters of a militaristic subjectivity. Fidelity to this event and its political inventions is certainly not guaranteed today. Yet such fidelity must be present within the politics of post-apartheid or postcolonial political organisations or social movements if a critique of and an alternative to neo-liberal democracy is to be sustained in practice – in other words, if a political truth is to stand a chance of being asserted and established beyond the parameters of state thinking. I will illustrate this point in some detail in the conclusion to Part 1 of this book. To maintain consistently a fidelity to that event means that it is no longer possible to think emancipation in a statist manner on the continent. Today,

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the thinking of emancipation through the formation of political parties as a unique form of political organisation is redundant in Africa.

notes 1. As, for example, in Good (2011), who contrasts the popular-democratic politics of the UDF with the authoritarian politics of the ANC in exile. This Manichaean opposition is said to continue unaltered up to the present day. The rebellions in exile camps by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) guerrillas are evidence of ideological contradictions within the organisation, while evidence of repression also exists within the internal movements. The point is to account for political subjectivities in all their contradictions and not to idealise one situation in opposition to another. The issue of the relations between an excessive politics of equality and one of expressive statism is central here. 2. But see Neocosmos (1998) and Van Kessel (2000), for example. 3. In his later work, Badiou outlines at length the ontological conditions of an event in terms of a detailed typology of change (2006a: 383–401). An example of his discussion of a political event can be found in English in his discussion of the Paris Commune of 1871 (Badiou, 2006b: 257–90). 4. The literature on this period tends to provide a history of the popular struggle through that of the organisation, conflating the former with the latter. The UDF as an organisation made possible an emancipatory politics, but it cannot be conflated with such politics; it was only one site of these politics among others. See, for example, Marx (1992), Houston (1999), Seekings (2000), Lodge (1991). Others attempt to focus more on the popular movement itself: for example, Swilling (1988), Sitas (1992), Bundy (1987, 1992), Van Kessel (2000). See also Murray (1987, 1994), Neocosmos (1998) and Bozzoli (2004) for contrasting analyses; and the review of much of this literature in Suttner (2004). The empirical material for this section is largely culled from Neocosmos (1998 and 1999b). 5. The so-called tricameral parliament was an attempt by the apartheid state to incorporate another two so-called racial groups, namely ‘Coloureds’ and ‘Indians’, into a legislative body dominated by Whites. 6. For greater detail, see Lodge (1991: 135–9); Seekings (1989); and UDF (1986: 35–41. 7. The activities of the military wing of the ANC, MK, were never successfully integrated into the popular struggle. This denoted a failure by the exile movement to adapt organisationally to the changed internal conditions; see Barrell (1991). 8. See UDF Cape Town Area Committee, ‘Call for National Unity’, Discussion Paper (1986b), p. 1; UDF National Office, ‘Proposed Joint Statement on “Call for National Unity against Apartheid and the Emergency” ’ (1986). 9. See, for example, Swilling (1990, 1991, 1992); Nzimande and Sikhosana (1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c); Mayekiso (1992a, 1992b, 1996). Some of these texts have been reprinted in Sachikonye (1995).

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10. I am grateful to Premesh Lalu, who reminded me that in Cape Town the slogan of the Athlone Students’ Action Committee in 1985 was ‘Workers and Students March Towards Liberation!’ On the linking ‘from below’ of the student and workers’ movements in Cape Town in 1985, see Bundy (1987, 1992). 11. For a detailed discussion, see Slovo (1976: 179–206), who was then general secretary of the SACP.

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Chapter 6

From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013 To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil.

– Alain Badiou, ‘The Courage of the Present’, 2010

the legibility of political sequences Whereas the previous three chapters have been concerned to show the excessive character of various emancipatory modes of politics and the manner in which this excess interacted with expressive political subjectivity, this chapter and the next have a more analytical purpose. More precisely, they are concerned to examine how the idea of a historical sequence may be used to analyse historical changes in political subjectivities in South Africa (in this chapter) and how popular militancy may be rethought for the 21st century in Africa (in chapter 7). There is therefore a slight shift in the argument to emphasise the analytical purpose of the arguments developed so far. This will then lead me to conclude the first part of this book through an analytical comparison of two South African social movements in order to illustrate the different political subjectivities at play in each. In order to make our period legible, it is important also to make earlier periods legible; it is this that will be attempted in the present chapter in relation to recent South African history. The sequence of national liberation struggles in Africa examined in chapter 4, which cohered around a particular set of political subjectivities emphasising freedom, justice, equality and the affirmation of a total humanity, has now ended, and consequently it has become more difficult to orient our thoughts around issues of emancipatory politics and their possible forms. The absence of emancipatory

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thinking today is having nefarious consequences, as it is currently difficult to imagine an Idea of an alternative future in which the youth in particular can identify with a more humane society in which massive poverty and powerlessness are not considered inevitable features of life on our continent. Political sequences, as we have seen, refer to (often discontinuous) historical periods understood as purely subjective. Such sequences are governed by modes of thought, discourses, names, which are dominant for a period and more or less contested. Sometimes these sequences are equivalent to and defined by specific emancipatory modes of politics constructed ‘in interiority’ beyond the state, in which case they are discontinuous; at other times, and more commonly, they are simply defined by and altered at the level of the state itself, in which case they tend to be continuous. The elucidation of this process is what historians refer to as periodisation.1 We can see, for example, that the 1950s and 1960s in Africa formed a hegemonic subjective sequence in which questions of freedom, liberation, independence, pan-Africanism and equality dominated political discourse, with categories such as nation, class and socialism orienting political thought; this sequence was not exclusively focused on the state as the core of political consciousness. From the late 1960s and during the 1970s, politics was governed by terms such as development, industrialisation, dependence, class, nation-building and neo-colonialism, while in the 1980s and 1990s the hegemonic political sequence was structured by names such as democracy, civil society, good governance, deregulation, basic needs and human rights. These two sequences were overwhelmingly statist, as we shall see in chapter 12. We should note, then, that the subjectivity of sequences is shaped by categories that are proper to it, and that these are, of course, themselves shaped by historical and social context, and by state, foreign and critical discourses of various types emanating from people themselves in society. There is nothing within a sequence that implies a coherent totality with an essence; a sequence may be contradictory, incoherent, disorienting, illegible. Each new sequence indicates within hegemonic modes of thought how political problems and solutions  – i.e. political subjectivities  – are organised in thought and deployed in practice. At times, sequences may have a sufficient depth to name a particular form of state; at other times, not. For example, the sequence covering the 1960s and 1970s in Africa was characterised by ‘the developmental state’, by virtue of the centrality of the name ‘development’ to state politics of whatever ideological persuasion. Today one can no longer qualify the state in such terms. Delineating sequences in this manner (of course, their precise dating is always open to debate) enables one to understand how thought is oriented or disoriented within a sequence. A sequence becomes legible and understandable in its own terms with the consequence that its problems and impasses can be understood from the vantage point of its own categories. In this way any political sequence need not be seen as a success or failure  – which implies a judgement from beyond its categories, the ‘verdict of

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history’  – but rather simply as exhausting itself through a process of what Lazarus (1996) calls ‘saturation’. For example, the end of the sequence 1960–75 in Africa need not be seen as one of the ‘failure of nationalism’, according to which all nationalism supposedly leads inexorably to authoritarianism, but as one of the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics, as a pure political affirmation. In particular, such saturation is reflected in the transformation of political subjectivities from an emancipatory affirmation of the nation into a statist form of politics, or, in other words, in the inability to sustain a purely political-affirmative conception of the nation. In similar ways, what Badiou (2008) has called the ‘Idea of communism’ can also be understood as traversing a number of sequences, only one of which was founded on ‘the party’ as the model for organising political activity. The exhaustion of the party form of the communist hypothesis does not imply for Badiou the exhaustion of the communist Idea as such; similarly, the collapse of the emancipatory Idea of national liberation, due to its equation with the politics of the nation-state, does not necessarily exhaust the emancipatory content of nationalism, particularly within a period of globalisation when empire has simply taken on new forms but has in no way disappeared.

thinking non-racialism and liberation in south africa, 1968–1986 South Africa acquired its liberation from apartheid (or colonialism) at a time of transition between two world sequences.2 Here it is worth referring to Badiou’s notion of ‘resurrection’, in which a subject can be reactivated ‘in another logic of its appearingin-truth’ (Badiou, 2009a: 65). The affirmative emancipatory content of the sequence of national liberation, which Hallward (2005) sees as having ended by 1973 with the assassination of Amílcar Cabral, was resurrected in 1980s South Africa during the struggle against apartheid, when a mass popular upsurge involving whole (primarily urban) communities and places of work occurred in a fashion similar to that described by Fanon for Algeria (Neocosmos, 2010a). I have already discussed this struggle at length in chapter 5, and have shown that we can indeed speak of an event and a new mode of politics during the period 1984–6, which can be named the People’s Power mode of politics. Here I am not so much concerned with the event as such, as with briefly outlining the extremely rapid transition from a politics of affirmation embodied in this event to a sequence dominated by reactive and obscure subjectivities. I shall argue that the dominance of state subjectivities has actually led to the gradual disappearance of politics from hegemonic modes of thought, to the extent that the state can be seen as an ‘anti-political apparatus’ (what in French might be referred to as un dispositif antipolitique) in South Africa today. In other words, the evacuation of the thought of politics from the state and its replacement by questions

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of administration and management, central to which is the notion of ‘delivery’, can be understood as primarily a state subjective process of change. In order to delineate the various sequences of national emancipation and reaction to them as precisely as possible, we should probably begin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is at this time that the emancipatory discourse of Black Consciousness arose among young Black intellectuals in the country, during a period when resistance in its organised form was in abeyance after the banning of the African nationalist parties. This discourse was able to express ‘the subjectivity of the oppressed, the possibility of the oppressed constituting themselves into a revolutionary force’ (Mamdani, 1994: 257). Although it developed largely among a movement of intellectuals, and was originally expressed in individualistic psychological terms, the idea of affirming such a consciousness acquired a collective body in 1976 during the Soweto student uprising, which   – along with the Durban mass strikes of 1973   – inaugurated a totally new sequence of mass opposition politics in the country, for it amounted to a clear event in Badiou’s sense of the term. This was a sequence that Mamdani has referred to as a ‘departure of epochal significance from the armed struggle’ and its statist perspectives, ‘that would set aside the near religious faith in exile revolutionaries and armed struggle and return to the day-to-day endeavours of working people, to take these as the raw material from which to fashion a culture of resistance adequate to its own setting’ (Mamdani, 1996a: 232). Central to Black Consciousness were two fundamental and novel ideas: firstly, ‘Black’ was identified in political rather than in racial terms to refer to all the oppressed, irrespective of how they were classified by the apartheid regime (Biko, 2008: 26); and secondly, an idea of ‘non-racialism’ was proposed in opposition to the exiled ANC’s conception of ‘multiracialism’. This was a conception that affirmed, in Badiou’s terms, ‘the overturning of social classification’, thereby contesting existing forms of political representation and systematically reconfiguring the social division of labour between the ‘races’ (Badiou, 2009d: 51–2). It was an affirmation that held that this overturning of social positions was necessary and indeed possible for the construction of new human relationships.3 It would be affirmed particularly against the practices of the ‘White liberal establishment’, who purported to support the struggle for liberation but who could only do so if they led it themselves. ‘Black Consciousness saw white liberalism as the primary obstacle to independent black initiative and organisation and, therefore, to black liberation’ (Ally and Ally, 2008: 173), for ‘white liberals always knew what was good for the blacks and told them so’ (Biko, 1987: 20). While not anti-White, Black Consciousness in effect asserted that genuine equality between Blacks and Whites could only be attained, and the divisions between them overcome, on the basis of affirming non-racialism. This meant that an emancipatory struggle could not be led by those who enjoyed political, economic and

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social privileges but only by the excluded  – Blacks themselves. It was this idea of ‘non-racialism’ that was to be politically actualised within the new mass politics of the UDF (Gibson, 2008). The core of this understanding was the idea that South Africa belongs to all, and that the members of the nation were not to be defined by any social category, but were comprised of all those who consistently fought for ‘the struggle’, irrespective of race, social background or even birth in South Africa. No one stopped to ask whether you were born in Lesotho or whether you were South African enough to be involved in the struggle for freedom. In particular, the setting up of the UDF as a mass-based organisation made possible, from late 1984 onwards, a popular subjective formation of the nation founded on inclusiveness and affirmative politics. This was, in the terms of its patron Allan Boesak (who was himself strongly influenced by Black Consciousness and Black Theology), a politics governed by pure affirmation and belief in ‘non-racialism’, while ‘the only real criterion’ for membership of the UDF was precisely such a belief (Boesak, 2009: 157). ‘The UDF was a truly people’s movement ... [which] gave the struggle a national [as well as] a decidedly non-racial and non-violent character’ (pp. 158, 161). What is important to understand is that ‘non-racialism’, as invented by Black Consciousness and collectively affirmed by the mass organisations of the UDF, could only be achieved in political action as an affirmative emancipatory vision. It required constant commitment and agency in order to be established; it was the statement of a universal politics. The existence of the UDF provided the conditions for the universal political practice of non-racialism to be realised, although this does not imply that such non-racialism was uniformly adhered to. Yet, as was soon to become apparent, particularly from 1990, when the new state was established, state politics simply contributed to the reproduction of racial divisions and political exclusion at all levels of society, as state policies of redress were bound to advantage some groups at the expense of others, even among those who became known as the ‘previously disadvantaged’. Non-racialism was not something that could be ‘delivered’ from above, outside political agency, for it was a political principle. It could only be achieved through political action, as it concerned the overturning of the social division of labour and hierarchy. It is in this sense that we can say that the concept of the nation during this period was purely political and not social, as it existed primarily in thought, in the ‘faith’ or ‘belief ’ of the activists engaged in such politics. The replacement of ‘non-racialism’ by ‘multiracialism’, or the ‘rainbow nation’, in the 1990s indicated the end of such a political conception of the nation and its substitution by a reactive social understanding, now propagated by the new state. The so-called rainbow nation was conceived as a mere accumulation of existing (apartheid state-defined) ethnic and racial groups, which were supposed to ‘tolerate’ each other, so that the toleration of difference replaced the formation of a non-racial nation. This new nation-state could

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now be ‘delivered’ or ‘built’. In other words, delivery implied the depoliticisation of the nation, its ‘socialisation’ or ‘objectification’, which could be empirically described, analysed and measured by the state itself.4 This process could also be called de-subjectivation, as democracy, which is a process of popular subjectivation, was now objectified in the name of a form of state (Rancière, 2005). It can also be understood as the transition from political principles to the politics of command, opportunism and corruption, what Badiou calls the general lesson of Thermidor (Badiou, 1998a). To sustain an emancipatory politics must therefore mean the sustaining of subjectivation  – of maintaining a subject, maintaining a subjective politics (and an Idea) as against its dissolution into the objectively social of state politics (the consequent distortion of the Idea). In South Africa, the rapidity of this process of transition from democracy as a form of egalitarian popular affirmation to a form of state  – which Fanon had noticed as occurring on the very day that independence was proclaimed  – was extraordinary even for experienced observers; however, that, within the new sequence, democracy (along with globalisation) was the political name for the new form of empire largely accounts for the rapidity of the process, given the saturation of its popular form. The post-apartheid South African state, which was constructed on the basis of such a process of de-subjectivation, emerged in fact in 1990, and not in 1994, because in the former year not only was the ANC unbanned but it entered the state, and no important government decision could be taken without its knowledge and involvement. Popular politics having in practice been abandoned, the idea of the nation now became fused with the state; the name of this fusion was democratic, non-racial elections, i.e. elections by universal suffrage. These only took place in 1994, which accounts for why the new state is seen in the literature as beginning then, but the fusion of the nation with the state had already been achieved by that date. Elections by universal suffrage in 1994 only legitimated the status quo compromise established over the years 1990–4 and did not inaugurate a new state form as such. In any case, the government established after 1994 was a ‘government of national unity’, which allowed for a ‘transition period’ of joint control of the state by outgoing and incoming state parties and elites. I have argued that the period 1984–6 was an event in that it was able to completely reconfigure and rethink the basis of emancipatory politics in the country, and systematically raise issues concerning the centrality of popular democracy (‘The people shall govern’) in an African emancipatory transformation. A truly ‘national consciousness’, in Fanon’s sense, developed in South Africa at this time. Yet by 1987 there was evidence that this subjectivity had become saturated and authoritarian practices were becoming dominant. The new state form clearly begins in 1990, when the ANC acceded to power and when the politics of the popular mass movement had largely been defeated. The transition to state democracy took complex forms,

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including not only a depoliticisation and subjective disarming of activists through reference to the exclusive power of the state-party returning from exile (along with the transformation of independent popular organisations into state ones), but also by the (re-)constitution of the people and its activists in dominant discourse as ‘victims of apartheid’ rather than ‘activists for a new nation’ through a liberal-Christian state process of ‘reconciliation through public confession’ known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Ultimately, a politics of affirmation was replaced by a politics of supplication. Moreover, with the entry of politically independent organisations into a state domain of politics (as ‘watchdogs’ and interest groups or as organisations of the ruling party), the sites (civics, churches, trade unions) that had contained emancipatory thought ceased to do so (Neocosmos, 1999b). At the end of this process of transition, a reactive state subjectivity became hegemonic, as the event of the 1980s was reduced simply to violence (Mangcu, 2012) or to a violent episode of ‘people’s war’ (Jeffery, 2009), or was understood as exclusively planned by the ANC in exile (Mbeki, 1996) or again as merely an opener for the ANC’s coming to power (Chikane, 2003). For this rewritten history, nothing fundamental happened in the 1980s; the Idea is simply obliterated from thought. It is this reactive subjectivity that recasts the nation as a social entity, through the state, as founded on supposedly objective ‘races’, ‘ethnicities’ and indigeneity. But in post-1980s Africa as a whole there is no longer a state project of nation-building based on development or anything else. Little or no attempt is made by state politics to construct a nation at all other than at major sporting events;5 instead, emphasis is placed more and more on so-called ‘service-delivery’ and ‘stakeholder politics’, whereby ‘civil society’ is brought within the ambit of state political subjectivity. Much like parties in the 20th century, NGOs and social movements now act as agents of subjective fusion through which popular politics are melded into state politics (Neocosmos, 2010b). ‘Service delivery’ simply refers to the state provision of infrastructural resources (housing, electricity, water, roads) to desperate communities; it is a view of the problem from the perspective of the state. Simultaneously, the poor are abandoned to the rabble-rousing demagoguery of politicians,6 while economically they are left prey to the forces of globalisation and unbridled capitalism, with the predictable effect of an increase in the poverty rate, while the rich continue to accumulate through corrupt practices. The defeat of popular politics in South Africa from the late 1980s onwards, much as Fanon (1990) had observed in immediate postcolonial Africa, has enabled the growth of a narrow xenophobic nationalism, which I will return to in chapter 13. For the present it is sufficient to note that a politics of national chauvinism has gradually become hegemonic as the post-apartheid state has introduced exclusionary legislation, politicians and the press utter xenophobic statements, and repression is deployed against those deemed to be foreign, primarily by the police and the

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Department of Home Affairs (Harris, 2001). Simultaneously, an increase in nativist ideologies and the systematic ‘othering’ of Africa and Africans has gradually replaced a human rights discourse by a communitarian one (Neocosmos, 2010a). Following precisely the trajectory outlined by Fanon, xenophobic pogroms broke out in May 2008, which left 63 dead, as those deemed to be foreign Africans were attacked by mobs of poor people clearly instigated by local traders, politicians and powerful local leaders, who saw the victims as restricting their access to jobs, housing and business opportunities. One remark is of particular significance; a local trader asserted: ‘we are the ones who fought for freedom and democracy and now these Somalis are here eating our democracy’.7 The popular struggle for democracy and freedom  – along with the universal Idea of human freedom  – had now turned into its opposite, into a simulacrum of itself, as mobs chanting ‘freedom songs’ were filmed attacking people deemed to be aliens or foreigners and burning some alive. As Fanon would have said, from a struggle for non-racialism we have arrived at the vilest apartheid-type forms of ‘ethnic cleansing’. The absence of a state-led nation-building project and its replacement by a free-for-all grabbing of resources in a period when social provisioning has become more and more difficult, together with a discourse of ‘service delivery’ in which the most powerful acquire access to the most resources, has made it possible for the crudest fascist-like forms of communitarianism to dominate popular consciousness. Some intellectuals are indeed so disoriented by this simulacrum of freedom that they even go so far as to see such xenophobic politics as authentically popular and democratic (e.g. Glaser, 2008). Of course, such subjectivities do not go uncontested, and voices of universal reason and equality are expressed; thus, Abahlali baseMjondolo  – the Durban-based shack-dwellers’ movement, or ‘People of the Shacks’  – contest the reference to migrants as ‘illegal immigrants’ by affirming that ‘a person is a person where ever they may find themselves’.8 At the same time, during the period under consideration, they distance themselves from party politics, refusing to affiliate to any party or indeed to vote. Yet the courageous politics of Abahlali are far from hegemonic and the movement is currently being persecuted by regional and local politicians. The rise of communitarianism had by 2008 pushed the discourse of human rights aside. The absence of an emancipatory alternative has simply allowed the obscure subject of apartheid to return in a new guise within a sequence of what some call the ‘post-national’ or ‘post-developmental’ state.9 In September–October 2009, Abahlali were attacked in Durban in the Kennedy Road settlement and a couple of weeks later in another poor area called Pemary Ridge. By all accounts, the violence, which left two people dead, was organised by members of the ANC at a high level in the region of KwaZulu-Natal and by the police. The state condoned the deployment of violence and murder against an organisation of the poor which has systematically engaged in peaceful protests and

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advocated peaceful alternatives to the dominant form of politics.10 This is particularly significant because Abahlali have organised in the tradition of the UDF of the 1980s by stressing an all-inclusive conception of citizenship and the nation, precisely along the lines of the Freedom Charter, which has always been said to be at the core of ANC thinking on the transformation of South African society and the state. The politics of affirmation of the Freedom Charter are now simply part of history, recalled on occasion to emphasise a glorious past when state mobilisation requires it; the state simply undermines or physically attacks all attempts to revive them. We are now living in a much more repressive political sequence than at any time since liberation in South Africa.

the state political sequences of reactive and obscure subjectivities, 1990–2013 In order to make sense of this process of transition from affirmative egalitarian nationalism to xenophobic nationalism, I want to outline some of the state political sequences through which post-emancipatory nationalist politics have travelled; being sequences of state politics, they are continuous. Broadly speaking, this process has followed very much the trajectory outlined by Fanon in the 1960s, but in a more repressive form. One of the main reasons for this is that the state subjectivity of exclusion today is not mitigated, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, by a discourse of development for which migrant labour was still one of the signifiers. Today the term ‘migrant labour’ has disappeared from the hegemonic lexicon and has been replaced by that of ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘asylum seeker’. Not only has this undermined the figure of the worker in politics (Lazarus, 2001b), and differentiated between workers, thus creating divisions and antagonism among the oppressed, but it has separated citizenship rights from place of work (despite the judgments of the Constitutional Court which have asserted everyone’s right to rights), so that migrants are no longer understood as contributing to the economy. Some have the right to rights, while others, by virtue of their exclusion from the domain of civil society, do not.11 It is possible to identify and sketch out three broad sequences of state-nationalist politics in the post-apartheid period in the country, each with its own dominant subjective orientation. The character of state politics as bureaucratic practice has largely been left uncontested. These sequences roughly cover the years 1990–6, 1996–2008 and 2008–13, when the analysis ends. The sequences are defined in terms of the dominant political subjectivities or discourses at the level of the state; they do not correspond to the period in office of particular presidents, though, given the power of presidents to determine the character of state discourse, it is clear that each specific presidential incumbent has had a dominant effect on its construction.

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The first state sequence, 1990–1996 This first sequence could be named ‘the civil society, human rights and multiculturalist sequence’. It was associated with the name Nelson Mandela, the charismatic national unifier or ‘father of the nation’, who was able to appeal to all South Africans to support the new state. It was broadly characterised by a sense of common purpose, lasting until 1996, and by the systematic introduction of neo-liberal thought and the propulsion of the country into globalised hegemonic neo-liberal economics and politics. From 1990, the year of the unbanning of nationalist political parties and the freeing of political prisoners, until 1994, the year of the first elections by universal suffrage, the process was thought of as one of the consolidation of a state that would allow for nationalist movements to operate legally and without hindrance. At the same time, the fear of violence destabilising this transition to a new state form was coupled in the statements of ANC leaders with an acknowledgement of the central role of mass struggle. By 1993, after the assassination of Chris Hani, the immensely popular leader of the SACP, the importance of consolidating a new (racially inclusive or ‘democratic’ in local parlance) state had become paramount while mass struggle was systematically ‘turned off’ (Cronin, 1992). This gradual hegemony of the thought of ‘law and order’ over popular mass politics found clear expression in the speeches of Mandela as he attempted to oppose the destabilising politics of the apartheid state. His speeches from 1991 contain statements such as ‘The ANC will flourish or fail to the extent that the exploited and the oppressed see it as their movement, championing their rights, and as the embodiment of their will’ (1993: 65), as well as contradictory statements such as ‘we will ensure that the poor and rightless will rule the land of their birth’ (p. 118) and ‘the oppressed will be and must be their own liberators’ (p. 129). By 1993, the transition to a new state, while maintaining law and order, became the prime objective, and mass rallies and demonstrations were organised by the ANC in order to ‘give people a means of expressing their frustrations without resorting to violence’ (Mandela, 1995: 730). Popular mobilisation was thus understood as a simple adjunct to state politics. It was this successful consolidation of a new democratic state form with minimal violence that provided Mandela with the consensually recognised attributes of a major world statesman. But the new state thus created and consolidated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process was founded on a subjective contradiction. Until 1996 this contradiction was one between statist nationalism, on the one hand  – a somewhat ‘natural’ subjective outcome of the previous sequence of national liberation struggle, within a Cold War developmentalist discourse, that benefited from mass popular support  – and the growing dominance of economic neo-liberalism, on the other: the ‘new South Africa’ was born at the same time as George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ was being firmly established at a world level. Since this date the

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contradiction has continued but in a more or less muted, more or less acute, form, as the embracing of the ‘new order’ has been unable to resolve national grievances and concerns among the overwhelming majority of the population. Whereas during the postcolonial sequence, newly independent African states had attempted to realise their nationalist concerns through some form of ‘socialist-oriented’ statism, this option was no longer so easily available after the collapse of the Soviet Union with its attendant attractions to Third World state nationalists. The contradiction between nationalism and liberalism was now to be resolved through what Badiou (2011c) has called a ‘desire for the West’, to which all apparently aspired. In particular, the dominance of the world market in the new ‘globalised’ world promised to resolve nationalist concerns once the ‘playing field’ had levelled apartheid ‘distortions’ and a Black middle class had been created. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (ANC, 1994), which was supposed to guide the policies of the new state, was an expression of a kind of statist developmentalist Keynesianism which the erstwhile nationalism of the Cold War period had encouraged for newly independent states. It found itself overtaken by the new global hegemonic discourse of the Washington consensus and was largely stillborn. However, these changes did not just concern ‘economic policy’; much more broadly, they signalled an adherence to the building of consensus around a democratic neo-liberal state which, it was believed, could be checked through ‘civil society’ interest representation. These civil society bodies were regarded as the organisational inheritors of the UDF political tradition, though now seen no longer as possessing a universal political function, but simply as ‘interest-bearing’ expressions of social groupings. It was felt they could perform a ‘watchdog’ role and would provide the core of a new ‘civil society’, which would act as a counterweight to state tendencies of authoritarianism.12 It was believed that especially the COSATU unions and the new South African National Civil Organisation (SANCO), which had formed two of the core affiliates of the UDF in the 1980s, could now provide such a counterweight to government, thus ensuring that popular voices would be heard. Unfortunately, although civic organisations and others insisted on asserting their independence vis-à-vis the state, that independence was understood exclusively in organisational and not in political terms. Politics came to be thought hegemonically in state-liberal terms, as a consensus was constructed and a prescriptive relation to the state was undermined and finally killed off. Civil society was understood as providing a ‘watchdog’ role because of its organisational independence (or distance) from government, not because of its ability to assert political independence or subjective distance from state thinking (Neocosmos, 1999b). Civil society so called was thus reduced to an addition of organisations that were constituted mimetically in relation to the popular organisations of the 1980s and that operated fully within the newly constructed neo-liberal state consensus.

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It is important to note that the term ‘civil society’ itself, equated with organised interests rather than with a domain of politics within which these interests operate, became hegemonic only after the consolidation of a new post-apartheid state subjectivity. During the emancipatory sequence of the 1980s, this term did not feature in public discourse; after 1990 ‘civil society’ came to refer to those organised interests legitimated by the neo-liberal democratic state as that state was formed (and not to the political domain within which they operated).13 It was this reactive politics that provided the justification for abandoning the popular politics associated with the UDF in the 1980s, which had constituted the main subjective force behind liberation. In this manner a non-racial, non-sexist (and, for some, ‘non-class’) democracy could apparently be constructed. A number of corporatist structures (the most important of which was the National Economic Development and Labour Council, NEDLAC)14 were set up, which simply integrated ‘civil society’ organisations into state politics as they themselves had wished. Broadly speaking, the organisations of civil society that began to operate during this sequence and the next (such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Treatment Action Campaign), whether NGOs or social movements, located their understanding of politics within a framework in alignment with state politics and within a problematic of delivery  – known as ‘stakeholder politics’  – as they tended to be dominated by professionals and intellectuals whose politics remained within the confines of classist and statist conceptions (Keynesian or Marxist). This sequence saw the final elimination of the remnants of the independent and principled politics previously embodied in the UDF (and previously approved by the ANC). The idea of non-racialism was replaced by ‘the rainbow nation’ (‘of God’, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s original formulation); in other words, by a form of multiculturalism of the liberal variety that eschewed a politics of national unification in favour of a simple ‘toleration’ or ‘recognition’ of existing cultural differences, which remained untransformed state-social categories and hence obstacles to the construction of national unity. At the same time, the idea of migrant labour, which at least had pointed to the association between rights and place of work, was purposely pushed aside because of its equation with apartheid and replaced by a conception of citizenship rights attainable exclusively by the indigenous. For example, Basotho migrant workers were given the option of choosing whether they would become South Africans with rights or remain citizens of Lesotho, i.e. foreigners without rights (Neocosmos, 2010a). Concurrently, the ideology of South African exceptionalism in relation to the rest of Africa, which had always been prevalent among Whites, was now extended to the population as a whole, as the ‘miracle’ of the peaceful transition and democratisation were seen as unique experiences on the African continent. Furthermore, the fundamentally racist view of Africa in the eyes of the Western press was simply imbibed uncritically: Africa was seen as a continent

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of crises, poverty and failed states, to be developed, guided and visited by tourists in search of the authentic (Mamdani, 1996a). The state contributed to this process of naturalisation of differences in its classification of the population and in its gathering of statistics, for apartheid racial categories were retained and apartheid state identities reproduced in a simplified form, namely African, White, Coloured and Indian. Moreover, these given unchanging ‘cultures’ came to provide the social foundation for ongoing racist, nativist and ethnic politics, with the result that apartheid political divisions and corresponding identities became even more entrenched. State politics can, consequently, only be thought on the basis of ethnic or ‘racial’ identity; in this manner, such identities can be understood as created by a political consensus in which state thinking is dominant. Allan Boesak was rightfully indignant and disgusted at Mandela’s insistence on recognising only the ‘Coloured politics’ of ethnic opportunism and patronage in the Western Cape, and on consequentally mortally wonding the popular-democratic principled alternatives which the UDF had managed to construct (2009: 30). A similar process occurred in KwaZulu-Natal, where the ethnic Indian politician Amichand Rajbansi, who had been virulently opposed by the UDF as a stooge of the apartheid regime, was now legitimised by the ANC as a recognised representative of the ‘Indian community’. At the same time, the TRC process gradually transformed the political agents of the 1980s into supplicants for state help and ultimately pardoned perpetrators more than it ‘empowered’ victims, while it ignored the sacrifices of the rest of Africa and especially those of the ‘frontline states’. Finally, democracy during this period became the name given to the new state and no longer to the form of politics which had been developing among the people, especially from 1984 onwards (Neocosmos, 2009b); in other words, democracy was no longer understood to refer to a form of politics but to a form of state (Rancière, 2005), characterised by such features as universal adult franchise, a constitution and a constitutional court. In sum, this sequence fundamentally concerns the depoliticisation of the people, while the state arrogates to itself the right to act on people’s behalf, thereby substituting its managerial politics for those of the popular masses.15 Krista Johnson (2002) has shown how vanguardism (with its attendant ‘democratic centralism’) and liberalism are perfectly compatible and how the ANC is perfectly at ease in both. The state-party became explicitly seen as the vanguard, the head, equipped with knowledge, while the mass organisations ‘of civil society’ (unions, civics, etc.) now constituted the body, which simply followed the lead of the head. In a text of 1996, reportedly written by Thabo Mbeki before he became president, the ANC proclaimed: ‘The issue (the role to be played by the people in a liberal-democratic state) turns on the combination of the expertise and professionalism concentrated in the democratic state and the capacity for popular mobilisation which resides with the trade unions and the genuinely representative non-governmental popular organisations’ (ANC, 1996: 6).

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In consequence, it was maintained, the conceptions of trade unions (or other civil society organisations) held the danger of being ‘subjective’ (i.e. particularistic or egotistic) and not ‘objective’ like those of the state, which had the benefit of ‘science’ and the interests of the whole nation at heart. It followed: ‘If the democratic movement allowed that the subjective approach to socio-economic development represented by “economism” should overwhelm the scientific approach of the democratic movement towards such development, it could easily create the conditions for the possible counter-revolutionary defeat of the democratic revolution’ (p. 10). What is evident in this thinking is the statism of a mode of politics, combining elements of both Stalinist and Parliamentary modes of politics. By 1996, Mandela had asserted, without any discussion within corporatist structures, that the government-adopted neo-liberal programme which replaced the RDP, known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), was suddenly ‘fundamental ANC policy’. Although frustrated by Mandela’s unilateral assertion, civil society organisations reluctantly agreed to this change. They could do so, for they had chosen to form part of state political subjectivity, to condone the provision of ‘democracy, development and empowerment’ from above within a depoliticised society. What these organisations thereby won was a spurious legitimacy to be ‘watchdogs’ over government, yet much to their annoyance they were regularly bypassed within corporatist decision-making structures (Adelzadeh and Padayachee, 1994). The nationalist grievances for which the national struggle had been fought  – including social needs such as jobs and housing and somewhat less prominent ones such as land  – were now to be addressed through the consensus of the state–civil society nexus. Convinced by the arguments of the international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) and African-American business, the dominant faction of the ANC leadership fell for the idea that the market rather than the state should be the foundation on which ‘freedom’ was to be constructed in South Africa; that state democracy rather than the state nationalism and concerns with ‘social justice’ typical of the 1960s and 1970s would form the subjective basis of politics in both state and society. The national consensus was thus constructed by the state, and supported by civil society organisations and the press, on this basis, including a formally stated adherence to a ‘regime of rights’ despite conflicts between many of its ‘stakeholders’, e.g. between government and the press. It should be stressed that the discourse of rights was a state reactive response to the popular mobilisation of the 1980s; it did not amount to a state endeavour to encourage popular forms of citizenship, as people who had already been politically active were systematically depoliticised during this period, with the state arguing, for instance, that the ‘new government should be given a chance’ to deliver on its promises to the people. Civil society was thus to be only a ‘watchdog’ on government, not a domain of independent political activity. The difficulty with the discourse of rights  – as I will argue in chapters 12 and 13 at some

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length  – is that it contributes to depoliticising the population and weakening popular agency, and thereby to undermining its own existence, for only popular politics can ultimately be relied on to defend rights. States have constantly shown themselves to be contemptuous of them (despite the sometimes valiant efforts of an independent judiciary when it exists), while foreign interests merely reproduce neo-colonial relations through their own hypocritical politics of human rights (Neocosmos, 2006). In sum, the new state was largely constructed on the basis of the old one, through a process of incorporating the previously excluded into it. There was no fundamental restructuring of the institutions of state the most important liberal feature of which was a relatively independent judiciary. As if to corroborate this fact, the end of the sequence was also marked by the coming into effect of the new constitution in 1996.

The second state sequence, 1996–2008 By the end of the second sequence, the discourse of rights had been well and truly undermined and supplanted within the public domain, and the sense of common national purpose had begun to seriously unravel. This sequence could be called that of ‘elite construction and civil society’; it was dominated by an apparently politically neutral, expert-located technical statism associated with Thabo Mbeki, in which the contradictions in state thought (especially between state nationalism and state democracy) were not always successfully papered over, let alone resolved. Yet this apparent technicism oversaw the deployment of increasingly repressive actions by the state, initially directed towards African undocumented migrants in 2000 (Neocosmos, 2010a: 87) and then extended to the national poor in the town of Bredell in 2001, when it became apparent to all that the apartheid policy of ‘forced removals’ was still continuing (Hart, 2013: 28). Thus two sets of political contradictions became somewhat more acute during this period. Firstly, a contradiction between, on the one hand, state-liberal democracy necessary for private accumulation and legitimacy in the eyes of the West and, on the other, nationalist grievances and demands (primarily access to jobs, housing and land) voiced by large numbers of the people on whose support the state-party depended. This contradiction became inherent to the constitution of the Black petty bourgeoisie itself, which combined a commitment to private accumulation with some form of adherence to ‘social justice’ and the redress of historical grievances. Secondly, there was also a growing gulf between, on the one hand, a domain of politics often founded on violence and characterised by the growth of patronage relations, in which formal state power and the constraints of liberal democracy were less and less in evidence and, on the other hand, another domain of politics, where government practices and policies were deployed by bureaucracy and more or less subject to the standard liberal constraints imposed by the mass media and the law.

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What was noticeable was that different modes of rule and different logics of power operated in each. These modes of rule continue to operate today. In the analysis of state domains of politics in chapter 13, I will characterise these two domains of state politics as ‘uncivil society’ and ‘civil society’; in the former, relations between state and people revolve around entitlements and, in the latter, around rights. This distinction was largely recognised in the idea of ‘two economies’ and ‘two democracies’ mentioned at the time (Pithouse, 2006b). Subjectively, however, although power logics in each domain differ, they operate with conceptions of rights, needs and entitlements by and for citizens exclusively and the necessity (although not always the ability) of the government to provide them through a technical process of ‘delivery’. Politics is therefore replaced by administration in state thinking. More political conceptions of self-help or ‘self-reliance’ are minority notions, primarily apparent in uncivil society. Such new forms of popular politics, and accompanying notions of communal agency to the benefit of all, are only to be found as minority or ‘subjugated’ discourses invariably confronted by patronage, corruption and violence within uncivil society. In this sequence, democracy and African state nationalism (which became more and more communitarian as indigeneity, as opposed to democratic nationalism, was stressed) came into contradiction within state subjectivity. The thinking of the state was overwhelmingly dominated by that of the president, Thabo Mbeki, as was evident in the state’s approach to such issues as the crisis in Zimbabwe, racism in the press, HIV/AIDS, the African Union (AU) and the African Renaissance, Affirmative Action and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), and the dismissal of civil society organisations as ‘ultra-Leftist’ (Jacobs and Calland, 2002). Nationalism, for Mbeki, primarily involved providing state help for elite accumulation and for elite solutions to political problems, at the national, regional and continental levels; there was never consideration of a state project of development. Rather, his vision included a deliberate project to manufacture an African elite which could hold its own on the international stage.16 There developed during this period a deep-seated denial of the growing communitarianism and xenophobic politics in the country, which were the result precisely of the emphasis on indigeneity and other forms of identity politics developing from state-sanctioned ‘nativism’, while the rest of the African continent was simply seen as a backward place to be led and acted upon, not somewhere to belong to (Neocosmos, 2010a). The new bourgeoisie which grew rapidly during this period was only interested in stressing its ‘Africanness’ in relation to Whites in South Africa, not in relation to other Africans; its investment practices in other African countries simply followed in the footsteps of and competed with neo-colonial Western capital. Moreover, there was a systematic state failure to unite the people behind the conception of a national community, let alone behind a pan-African vision (with the exception of the expression of open support for J.B. Aristide in Haiti). The pathetic and half-hearted attempts to do so through the idea of ubuntu could not be taken

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seriously. Even though ubuntu was potentially an important unifying idea, it found no real root in the popular psyche and remained an empty slogan, to be distorted by commercialism. Efforts to promote an African Renaissance were largely stillborn, simply because they amounted to an attempt to tie the continent to the neo-liberal economic ideology and liberal democracy of the new process of globalisation. The long-drawn-out effort by states on the continent to maintain some alternative nationalist conception (however weak or statist) to that of the West (e.g. in the Lagos Plan of Action or the Banjul Charter) was ultimately undermined by an acceptance of the neo-liberal order.17 This was also illustrated by the formation of the AU, which replaced the OAU with an organisation more attuned to the neo-liberal conceptions of the international financial institutions.18 The extensive role of the South African state in seeking to resolve tensions on the continent as a ‘big brother’ also contributed to a failure to ensure a common pan-African vision, which in turn contributed to the continuation of an exceptionalist ideology. Yet there was also a failure to develop within South African society an alternative popular nationalism to state nationalism, a fact that ultimately lay at the root of the inability to resolve the conflict between human rights and national rights which had developed within the state. Concurrently, civil society organisations and government were often at loggerheads on issues of rights, and at best their relationship was tense.19 A modus vivendi was set up around a stakeholder politics through which a consensus could be established beyond the state-party to include (however grudgingly) civil society organisations (Neocosmos, 2010b). At the same time, a growing rift developed within statist politics. The deployment of neo-liberal language to assert the expectation that the market would level economic differences through a ‘trickle-down’ process, with the help of affirmative action and BEE of a totally individualistic kind, was more and more contradicted by increasing evidence of corruption and speculative deals on the part of those with state connections, and also of increasing poverty, which undercut the power of civil society organisations, especially unions. The result was that the tide of resistance within the ANC itself to what were seen as the ‘pro-capital’ policies and ‘non-consultative’ personal style of Mbeki swelled to new heights, partly in response to the sacking of the deputy president, Jacob Zuma, after a court found him tainted by corruption and imprisoned his ‘financial adviser’, Schabir Shaik. This tide of resistance, which chose to see Zuma as a victim of the president’s machinations, began in 2005, built up through various trials in 2006 and finally carried Zuma to power within the ANC at the end of 2007 at the national conference of the ANC at Polokwane, where Mbeki was removed from his position as party president. Throughout his trials, Zuma used Zulu ethnic culture as part of his defence, and crowds were bused to the courts where he appeared in order to support him and to chant derogatory slogans against his opponents.20 The state vision of a ‘non-racist’, non-sexist’ democratic society, which

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had replaced the popular political vision of non-racialism, itself gradually evaporated except in its crudest formalistic sense. Indeed, during this period all state vision disappeared under a cloak of petty corruption and a scramble for resources, while the judiciary was subjected to verbal attacks of various sorts. The emphasis on nativism to allocate BEE deals to the most ‘previously disadvantaged’ was now understood in the crudest terms. The tying of a nationalist project to accumulation by a chosen few with party connections, rather than to a popular notion of accumulation (‘from below’) through small-scale enterprises, led to increasing differentiation between a rising oligarchy of connected and corrupt individuals and a mass of impoverished and continually impoverishing people. Poverty at this time was generally assumed to affect about half the population, and by 2009 South Africa had overtaken Brazil as the most unequal country in the world, with a Gini coefficient of 63.1.21 Not only did this form of accumulation provide the conditions for increased poverty, but it also enabled the rise of an impoverished communitarian nationalism, which was regularly directed against (apparent) non-nationals and which finally exploded massively in May 2008 (Neocosmos, 2010a). The xenophobic attacks of May 2008 denoted the ultimate failure of human rights discourse in South Africa. This discourse, the main organising principle of the politics of the post-apartheid state in its first sequence, now came into conflict with ‘national rights’, understood by state politics to mean access to economic resources on the basis of nativism and connections to power. The contradiction between state nationalism and state democracy born during the first sequence was resolved in this second sequence in favour of a truncated state nationalism at the expense of the politics of human rights, but without in any way resolving the national grievances of the majority, who continued to be systematically depoliticised. The result was the inability of human rights discourse to provide a counterweight to the development of a national chauvinism and a politics of fear propagated by important voices among the oligarchy (Neocosmos, 2008, 2010a). This discourse appeared to be quite clearly about the preservation of White privilege rather than in the interests of the majority of the people of the country, who were both poor and Black. May 2008, which marked the collapse of human rights discourse and the concurrent reduction of nationalism to national chauvinism, therefore constituted the beginning of a new, third sequence of state politics. At the same time, during this second sequence, the establishment of local ‘community’ power structures  – some based on those developed during the liberation struggle (e.g. street committees), others founded on the distortion of post-apartheid democratic structures (e.g. community policing forums, ward committees and branch electoral committees, which were often the same thing in practice)  – led to social relations at local level being dominated by power-brokers who required local ANC support and networks in order to ensure the reproduction of patron–client

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relations and power of both a political and economic kind. In other words, elections, NGOs, community organisations and political parties at local level often combined in various ways and to various extents to form a matrix of clientelistic power involving local councillors, police and sometimes members of provincial or national legislatures  – frequently ‘slumlords’, often in alliance with local politicians (Butler and Pithouse, 2007).22 This intricate form of clientelism became a systematic threat to the democratic expression of grievances and to popular nationalism, yet it seemed that in the eyes of the national state it was seen to be the only legitimate way of conducting local politics. Local politics were now run by local mafia-type patronage networks. As a result, serious attempts to develop a local-level politics founded on basic democratic norms constantly butted against these repressive relations with which it came into conflict (much as it had been doing in rural areas under the control of traditional authorities for many years). The most important of such alternative politics was invented by Abahlali baseMjondolo, which discovered the need to break from the politics of corruption associated with party politics.23 The revolt in the ANC that removed Mbeki from power did not alter this state of affairs; it changed the actors in leadership positions but not the modus operandi at the local level, which these top actors needed for their survival and for the maintenance of the ANC in power. In the absence of truly democratic alternatives such as those expressed by Abahlali, popular discontent with the politics that made possible both corruption and exclusion was expressed more and more in communitarian or identitarian forms of politics. This frustration at being excluded, combined with identity politics, found its expression in communitarian forms of violence, most particularly in the attacks of May 2008, in which the killing of foreigners or their expulsion from communities was carried out ostensibly for ‘economic reasons’ such as competition over jobs and housing. This sequence saw a failure in state provisioning  – quite predictably, given the inability of neo-liberalism to address the massive national demand for jobs  – as well as a failure of national politics and citizenship. This double failure was principally one of the state and particularly, but not uniquely, a failure of the ANC as the dominant state-party; yet it also denoted a failure to think alternative politics beyond the state as well as beyond the hegemony of a state consensus for which identity and interest were seen as the foundation of consciousness, and sustaining an affirmative politics was considered irrelevant, if not criminal or, at least, illegitimate. In the same way that the roots of the subjective problems of this sequence can be identified in the one that preceded it, particularly in the failure of a human rights discourse to provide the conditions for a new mode of politics beyond the limits of state subjectivity, so these problems of the second sequence can be seen not to have been resolved but only aggravated in the sequence that followed.

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The third state sequence, May 2008–201324 The third sequence, which could be named the sequence of ‘systemic violence’ (or ‘proto-communitarian’ violence), was inaugurated within the country in May 2008 (before the elections of 2009, which brought Jacob Zuma to presidential power) with xenophobic pogroms against African ‘foreigners’. It continued with ‘community protests’, so-called service delivery protests, which refer to the political grievances and often parochial concerns of local-level communities. It reached its apogee with the Marikana massacre of August 2012, during which 34 protesting miners were killed by the police. Initial research shows that, while ‘service delivery protests’ are not simply about increasing the speed of state ‘delivery’ but also express the frustration of people in poor communities, who are systematically ignored by the state in terms of social provisioning and material resources, these protests are politically contradictory. On the one hand, they assert the need of the poor to be taken as serious political actors; on the other, their ideology seems to be dominated by narrow interest politics at best and by identity or communitarian and xenophobic politics at worst (Alexander, 2010; Sacks, 2010). The absence of consistent democratic politics and the dominance of fear in these forms of protest are quite palpable, while the increasing exercise of formal (police) and informal (organised, often ‘ethnic’, gang) violence by state power over poor people’s organisations apparently becomes more intense. This kind of politics was expressed with particular ferocity in the attacks against Abahlali in September–October 2009. I would like to begin the examination of this sequence by outlining briefly the fundamental causes of the 2008 pogroms as well as commenting on the dominant accounts of these attacks. What is particularly striking is the extent to which these causes correspond to Fanon’s observations, and the extent to which accounts of the events depoliticise what are clearly political subjectivities. Let me deal with the latter issue first. The various accounts of the xenophobic violence of May 2008 emphasise predominantly economic forces, in particular poverty, inequality and the forces of ‘globalisation’ (see Hassim, 2008; Neocosmos, 2010a: 123–40).25 In all these cases, the violence is accounted for in terms of forces outside popular consciousness, assuming that political subjectivity can only be explained with reference to structural factors and that fundamentally it was only the poor who were susceptible to being xenophobic. Natural metaphors such as ‘thunderstorm’, ‘tsunami’, ‘storm’ and ‘cataclysm’ used to refer to the xenophobic outburst are common in the accounts, particularly in those produced by the press, as are terms such as ‘social malaise’, ‘social pathology’ and ‘collective psychosis’. The phenomenon is thus naturalised, psychologised and allowed to remain illegible and incomprehensible. Xenophobic politics are thus depoliticised and political agency, however disastrous its parameters, remains largely beyond thought. Accounts that analyse poverty may have been able to explain the desperation of the poor, but they can in no way account for the political choices

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made  – such as the deployment of violence  – or for the targets of those choices. The fact that it was ‘foreign’ workers who in the main bore the brunt of violence exercised by ‘non-foreign’ working people was no accident, but was the predictable effect of what I have called the ‘politics of fear’ (Neocosmos, 2008), which had been allowed to permeate state politics from the early 1990s with little contestation. I have outlined the character of this state politics elsewhere in some detail (Neocosmos, 2008, 2010a); I simply need to reiterate at this point that, as Fanon observed in the 1960s, it was the transformation of an emancipatory affirmative conception of the nation into a state conception founded on assumptions of indigeneity and nativism that lay at the root of the state nationalism which developed from the early 1990s onwards. This form of politics was founded on state discourses and practices of xenophobic exclusion (in law, in the practices of the police, in the statements of politicians, in the perspective of the press), on forms of accumulation that stressed nativism, and on an exceptionalist notion of South Africa in relation to the rest of the African continent (Reitzes, 2009; Neocosmos, 2010a: 141–7).26 Yet, as I will show in chapter 13, human rights discourse, which one could have expected to temper violent xenophobic excesses, was not operative in uncivil society, within which such violence was unleashed. Overall, then, hegemonic xenophobic politics, culminating in the violence of 2008, is fundamentally a state form of politics, and those politics need to be explained. Of course, specific instances of violence as well as resistance to such violence all have to be accounted for within the conditions of the particular instances concerned, and this has been undertaken by scholars, so far with various degrees of success. What is particularly noteworthy is the extent to which local elites or political power-brokers have frequently been the instigators of violence, together with the police (see e.g. Nieftagodien, 2008; Misago, 2009). As I have already stressed, one of the few popular organisations to stand up successfully to the politics of xenophobia was Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban. Abahlali, the ‘People of the Shacks’, are quite unique in their development of nonparty, non-NGO politics at a distance from state modes of thought, founded on a universal conception of citizenship. In their conception of citizenship, it is the statement of the Freedom Charter that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, which provides the basis of an alternative, universal, truly democratic politics in fidelity to those of the event of the People’s Power mode. The name of these politics is no longer ‘non-racialism’ but is now called a ‘living politics’, though its foundation in subjectivity remains the same. The ‘living politics’ that Abahlali espouse is a purely subjective notion founded on belief and faith, and is not reducible to any social category other than ‘the poor’. Among all the organisations ‘of civil society’ that saw the light of day during the previous sequence, Abahlali is the only one to have developed such a politics of the universal and has thus positioned itself beyond the pale of civil society itself. After the initial destruction of the Abahlali organisation in Kennedy Road, the

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representatives of the provincial state asserted that it was an illegitimate organisation even though it had mass support in the community, and that only the ANC structures which the state had imposed by force were legitimate (Abahlali, 2009; Chance, 2010; Selmeczi, 2012). Clearly, this legitimacy refers to legitimacy in the eyes of the state and not in those of the people. This is precisely why Abahlali can be said to exist beyond civil society. The overall result is that the truly democratic politics of the organisation have become a threat to the patron–client relations on which local politics are founded as well as to the state–civil society consensus around which the politics of stakeholders are deployed. Abahlali have managed to provide a universal conception of citizenship and the nation, while the state has proved itself singularly incapable of doing so. The vision of another world in the ‘here and now’ proposed by Abahlali has succeeded in providing leadership, while the state has been quite unable to offer such a vision for the country.27 Not surprisingly, the state has seen Abahlali as an ideological threat in KwaZulu-Natal. The attack on Abahlali in September–October 2009 amounted to an attack on a universal democratic alternative of the kind that had mobilised the politics of liberation of the country, and precisely on the popular-democratic traditions of a UDF type which had been embraced by the ANC in the past. The attack also showed how ethnic slogans can be mobilised today for reactionary and repressive ends, justified often by chauvinistic slogans (the democratic nation and the citizen turning from a universal into its opposite, a narrow social category). An assault of this nature, directed by ANC politicians, could not have happened as easily in the previous sequence, when a discourse of rights was somewhat more prevalent and local politicians did not yet have the confidence to defy the constitution so openly. Another reason for this attack was arguably that Abahlali had taken the provincial government to the Constitutional Court (for enacting legislation which would have enabled the removal of informal settlements for redevelopment) and subsequently won their case, thereby restricting regional politicians and businessmen from making huge profits through urban speculative ventures (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2007). The attack on Abahlali in Kennedy Road affected politics generally in a reactionary direction, not simply because it threatened the form of state that calls itself a democracy, but also because it did so in a way that legitimised authoritarian communitarianism and systemic violence. It must be stressed that it was not the police who initially broke up the Kennedy Road organisation and its politics, but thugs chanting ethnic chauvinist slogans. Although Abahlali have always been a peaceful and non-violent organisation, the attack on Kennedy Road was initially repelled by the community; the police then came in and arrested those who had organised the resistance, thus allowing the attack to succeed and the homes of all Abahlali leaders to be demolished (Chance, 2010). Of course, the police have often been used as agents of the interests of local powerful figures and political ‘chiefs’, and they intervened

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after the initial attack and resistance to ensure that ‘calm returned’, in a manner that excluded Abahlali members from Kennedy Road, i.e. by allowing the ethnic thugs to continue their rampage unhindered. This attack denotes a failure of nationalism and citizenship and not only a failure of democracy. The outcomes of these changes suggest that, in this sequence, some people have the right to rights and others do not. The latter are frequently considered as the enemy and state violence is deployed systematically against them. In this sense, the democratic practice of popular politics, which has enabled, in the case of Abahlali, the formation of a politics based purely on the subjective belief that a better world is possible, and that what South Africans fought for over the years must be taken seriously, is simply sacrificed on the altar of an apparently democratic state whose modus operandi is light years removed from what South Africans did indeed fight and die for. The original idea of a non-racial, non-sexist democratic society has fizzled out, and the state, through its total monopoly of transformation, has made it impossible to involve ordinary people in such a process, even though they led the process of democratisation in the 1980s. It is this enforced exclusion by the state that arguably lies at the root of recent protests, for people had been given the impression that things would be different when a new, ‘Left-leaning’ government came to power. In this sequence in South African hegemonic politics, it became more legitimate for the state to deploy ethnic politics and systemic violence than to insist on universal conceptions of citizenship and the nation (apart from during sporting events such as the soccer World Cup).28 At the same time, what has occurred is an ever-greater fusing of the party with the state and, given that the state is equated with the nation, the party sees itself as the nation. It provides avenues of accumulation for the oligarchy and jobs for those below. Claims from those outside the party are viewed as a threat to its rule. While the exercise of state violence has been exacerbated by Jacob Zuma’s coming to power and his espousal of ethnic politics, it began independently of his rise. At the same time, there is evidence of the police engaging more and more in raiding poor communities, seemingly on the orders of local power-brokers (along with an emphasis on the militarisation of the police and on ‘shoot to kill’ policies introduced by the new Zuma government, ostensibly to combat crime). The idea is no longer that of post-apartheid ‘community policing’, but one of conceiving poor communities as enemy territory, a familiar notion under colonial forms of state. The intention of police raids seems to be to instil fear into communities. They batter down doors as if they are on enemy territory, beat up men and women, and sometimes arrest people on trumped-up charges (and often simply release them a few days later when no charges have been laid).29 There is no way that this can be justified as crime-fighting. It is an expression of a particular form of state politics akin to the politics of colonialism and apartheid, when a certain section of the community was considered as the enemy. Who is the enemy in this case? Recall that for the

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apartheid state the liberation struggle was simply criminal, something to be dealt with by means of police action. Is the enemy of the state now the urban poor? Is it the organised urban poor? The fact that the police are regularly acting on the orders of local and regional politicians suggests a disastrous move towards a form of politics similar to ‘traditional’ chiefly politics in the rural areas (but without the restraints of popular tradition). The most extreme example of this process was made evident at Marikana on 16 August 2012. I discuss this particular moment in detail in chapter 11, but it is worth noting at this stage that Marikana was the culmination of a number of violent police actions which had made it into the mass media. These include the killing by police of the local activist Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in April 2011, and the appalling incident of the death of a Mozambican taxi driver, Mido Macia, who was dragged behind a police vehicle in March 2013. In none of these cases were any of the police involved brought to book.30 In sum, the politics of human rights have gradually been displaced by a politics of violence and by the division of the South African population into two broad groups. Those who have the right to rights are attempting to construct a consensus founded on a state politics of systematic plunder of collective resources (e.g. through a scramble for posts and government tenders). Further, the same ruling oligarchy ensures the oppression of the working poor, who have to suffer not only economically but also by being deprived of the right to rights, and by being forced against their will into patronage relations. The situation is quite simply disastrous for the majority, and major incoherent political explosions are likely to occur as citizenship rights continue to be eroded, for, apart from a few organised groups, people lack the subjective capacity to express their grievances in politically coherent terms. There is little here to justify the term ‘democracy’ as applied to the new political relations of the post-apartheid state. A detailed report dating from 2010 drew the obvious parallels between increasing xenophobic violence and attacks by state repressive apparatuses on those organisations of the poor that have attempted to organise outside the consensual framework of state politics: many LPM [Landless People’s Movement] activists assert that the government will always work to undermine independent poor people’s movements. They draw parallels with the September 2009 attacks by an ANC-affiliated mob on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road in Durban as well as [with] a much less publicised attack on the same movement in Pemary Ridge by police a few weeks later. However, many landless activists go much further in their understanding of the incidents in three of their communities. They say that these attacks in eTwatwa, Protea South and the framing of the LPM chairperson in Harry Gwala has [sic] spread in a similar manner to the xenophobic pogroms in 2008. That is to say that many feel that there has been a coordinated attempt by

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high level politicians who want to destroy independent poor people’s movements such as the Landless People’s Movement and Abahlali baseMjondolo, thereby terrorising shack-dwellers to such an extent that movement organising is either ineffective or forced underground. These attacks seem to take the form of councillors or other government officials clandestinely organising police or local community members to attack the movements and sow division among community leadership structures. Whether these attacks are merely locally specific or are being deliberately coordinated at a high political level remains to be seen. Still, grassroots activists are asserting that the rise of authoritarian politics in the ANC, the rash shoot-to-kill mentality promoted by National Police Commissioner General Bheki Cele and the ethnic politics associated with the election campaign of Jacob Zuma has led to a significant rise in politically motivated and sanctioned mob attacks on community organisers (Sacks, 2010: 13, emphasis added). In concluding this discussion of the post-1990 state sequences in South Africa, one should recall the pertinent comments of Allan Boesak, for they point us in the direction of an answer to the question why an affirmative emancipatory nationalism, so evident in the 1980s, has been transformed today into an obscure national chauvinism. He says: ‘When one strays from the path of non-racialism, one inexorably moves into the camp of ethnic nationalism. Or one is pulled in ... We then begin to fear when there is nothing to fear’ (Boesak, 2009: 398). I read Boesak’s comment as saying that in the absence of fidelity to a politics of national emancipatory affirmation (such as ‘non-racialism’), which alone enables the transcending of naturalised (essentialised) difference through the becoming of a subject, one invariably collapses into a simulacrum of emancipatory politics. Xenophobic nationalism, because it is founded on naturalised identities dominant within subjectivity, is constituted by a fear of the Other. In South Africa, such subjectivity has been made possible by state politics (something Boesak does not recognise), in particular by a human rights discourse and its multiculturalist variant, which have simply naturalised such identities and taken them as given, not as categories and identities that it is possible to transcend. Human rights discourse and multiculturalism make up, in this particular context, the ‘reactive subject’ of nationalism. These subjectivities in turn have provided the conditions for the rise of an ‘obscure subjectivity’ in the form of national chauvinism and an ‘ethnic’ or identity politics of communitarianism. The state thus acts as an ‘anti-politics machine’; i.e. it is not simply apolitical but systematically anti-political, as it denies and simultaneously undermines the existence of politics properly understood (as it indeed undermines popular creativity in general). In other words, it is not only that it reduces all politics to the state, to ‘the political’, but it makes politics impossible to recognise as such, excluding it from what can be rationally thought. If, indeed, one says that nothing really happened (‘but the place’, as Badiou puts it) in

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South Africa in the 1980s, as the reactive subject maintains, then what one is saying is that there were no politics and that there never can be any.31 The prevalence of xenophobic politics and violence can thus be seen as the effect of an absence of politics, of a failure to sustain  – against the state  – a politics of fidelity to the emancipatory event (of affirmative popular nationalism); or what amounts to the same thing, it is an effect of the absence of an Idea (Badiou, 2009b, 2009d). Lazarus’s axiom is therefore quite correct for this sequence, as it was for the earlier ones: ‘The return to a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause’ (1996: 207). As Lazarus stresses, people are capable of thought, of producing truths; and, as Badiou and his colleagues proclaim in the journal La Distance politique: When all is said and done, the issue in contention concerns the freedom to think ... in electoral systems there is no freedom of thought. There is only a freedom to hold opinions. This means the freedom to support those in power (in agreement with the government) or those in the opposition (unhappy with the government) and that is all ... Politics is not an opinion or a consciousness, it is a thought which fixes new possibilities ... In politics it is better to achieve freedom through thought rather than to be constrained by opinions (2005: 3–4, my translation).

conclusions I want to conclude this chapter by briefly locating its arguments in relation to those of chapters 2, 3 and 4. There are basically four distinct historical sequences addressed in these chapters, all dealing in different ways with understanding the sequentiality of politics in the 20th century: firstly, problems concerning the understanding of the consciousness of anti-colonial subaltern rebels; secondly, the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics viewed through the lenses of Fanon’s and Cabral’s thought and the contradictory character of the National Liberation Struggle mode; thirdly, the recent alternative to the National Liberation Struggle mode provided by the People’s Power mode; and, finally, the reactive character of post-liberation state politics in South Africa, itself subdivided into three distinct sequences in this current chapter. In all four cases, the concern is with political subjectivities, but in each the issue is approached somewhat differently. The problem of thinking the agency of subaltern (or popular) rebels was brought out explicitly in the discussion of the Mau Mau in chapter 3 and particularly with reference to the work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies School in India. Here, historical analysis is shown to reach its limits precisely because it is unable to fully understand the reasoned political consciousness of peasant insurgent rebels

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in colonial India. It is unable to do so because it reduces political subjectivity to a social referent external to it  – power, the civil, the state  – and therefore attempts to represent popular subjectivities through its pre-given categories. The politics of the Santal rebels, for example, become incomprehensible as much to nationalist or Marxist historians as to the colonial authorities. All we are left with is the provision of an honest procedure of self-criticism whereby the methods of history are themselves deconstructed. Emancipatory political affirmations cannot be made visible, and consequently remain occluded within the confines of universal social categories. In a similar vein, the study of Mau Mau subjectivity remains anthropologised and unthought in its own terms. In chapter 4 the stress was laid on the purely affirmative nature of popular nationalism and its eventual saturation, so that its limits are reached through the categories of the ‘people’ and the ‘party’. The party becomes the subjective link between the people-nation and the nation-state, for it is the party that is said to represent the former in the latter. This fusion is facilitated by the formation of a guerrilla army, which inevitably ‘statises’ the party before it even comes to power. These social categories thus allow for the opening up and penetration of this mode by state-nationalist politics. This subjective transformation is understood as a subjective break in the thought of politics. From a purely subjective affirmation national consciousness morphs into state nationalism, the social embedding of consciousness. The important point here is to emphasise this break, which is illustrated by the depoliticisation of independent political activity and the concurrent dominance of state nationalism, which, through the party, is able to fuse popular politics with a discourse of power and the state by embedding political subjectivity in social place, the nation into the indigenous. This subjective break is made possible by the contradictory aspect of emancipation expressed in a subjective fusion of people, nation and, then, state. This is a point that students of nationalism in the Global South miss, for they concentrate on texts through which a seamless continuity between nationalist popular revolt and nationalist power in the state is embedded in thought (Chatterjee, 1986, 1993). Despite the social fragmentation of the nation, this continuity in nationalist thinking is established by intellectual discourse (Chatterjee, 1993); but, as Fanon shows quite clearly, the nation, for the people, is not a discourse but an ‘untidy affirmation’, a becoming in practice. It is this point that academic scholarship, despite its sophistication, sometimes forgets through its categorisation of ‘ideologies’ in the formalistic method of the ‘history of ideas’: nationalism, socialism, Marxism, postmodernism, etc. The point is that there can be no history of politics without abolishing its specificity altogether and reducing it to the state, or, as Badiou puts it, ‘there is a history of states but there is no history of politics’ (1992: 234). In chapter 5 a mode of politics was identified, the People’s Power mode, which is thought in such a way as to deepen the fusion of the people with the idea of a ‘new

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nation’. In this mode of politics organised guerrilla warfare is eschewed  – although the ANC in exile persisted with it for ‘propaganda purposes’, and militaristic language also existed within the mass movement, particularly among the ‘youth’  – and replaced by an excessive politics founded on the daily lives of people organised outside the idea of the party. A national movement to which local organisations are affiliated sees the light of day, and this movement’s politics are sustained through democratic forms of collective decision-making, although these are vulnerable to state repression, for they are not militarily defended. The lesson of the People’s Power mode is that politics without a party is perfectly possible under conditions where the repression of the state is limited by foreign pressure, foreign media and a reasonably independent judiciary. The limits of this subjective mode are reached not so much by directly equating the nation with the state, but by the idea of civil society, which suggests that organisationally independent popular activity may continue but only if it is reduced to representing social interests and abandons all excessive (i.e. in this case, national and liberatory) thought. Politics is thus reduced simply to agency and ‘active citizenship’ (bereft of subjective excess) so that the nation is now equated with the state, but indirectly, through the idea of civil society, where such agency is intended to be exercised. The existence of civil society is meant to provide the vehicle for the construction of a state consensus around neo-liberal democracy, for which organised interests are represented in both political and civil societies. Unlike liberalism, for which the state represented the general interest, neo-liberalism (at least as propounded in the 1980s and 1990s) sees the general interest as represented primarily by civil society and only secondarily by the state. Civil society is therefore required by neo-liberalism for the formation of a consensual system of state-democratic politics. It is the effects of this process of the statist ‘socialisation’ of politics that have been discussed in the present chapter. Clearly, here we are also in the presence of subjective sequences, but these are now continuous and more closely wedded to historical analysis. This is so because the objects of analysis in this chapter are state subjectivities. For that reason these follow each other in a continuous unfolding and are not discontinuous in the manner of emancipatory modes of thinking politics outlined in previous chapters. Their continuity is located in the continuity of the state and its manner of thinking politics by fusing the subjective and the social. They show in particular how the reactive state subjectivity of human rights, which was hegemonic in the immediate post-liberation period in South Africa, made possible an obscure destruction of the emancipatory politics of nationalism and their replacement by chauvinistic xenophobia. The result has been that the affirmative emancipatory politics of popular nationalism has turned today in this country into a simulacrum of itself. The fundamental condition for the existence of this kind of ‘crypto-fascist’ politics has its roots in the failure to sustain – in the saturation of  – or the failure to reinvent emancipatory politics in the new situation of liberation and freedom, which

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had been attained on the basis of state forms of thought. Defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory, so to speak. I shall have occasion to return to this important issue in chapter 12, but, before I end, it is necessary to note that this failure to sustain the idea of an emancipatory alternative is what has led to the notion of the ‘end of politics’ in the West, according to which all genuinely political issues are said to have disappeared from the state itself and state functions seem to have been largely reduced to simple managerialism. Although this process is perhaps best illustrated by the Italian state under the presidency of Berlusconi (see Žižek, 2002: 303–4), it is arguably a common feature of the current capitalist state form worldwide, which has not bypassed African states. Its name is ‘good governance’, the notion that what is absolutely central to state practice is an efficient and transparently fair bureaucratic system, not politics as such. In South Africa, the recovery of politics, it is plain, must begin from asserting a fidelity to emancipatory events in this country. One way in which this process has unfolded will be analysed in the concluding chapter to Part 1, but before that I must discuss in more general terms the categories through which activist politics are currently apprehended in dominant discourse on the continent.

notes  1. We should recall that history is state history, history written from within state thought. The subjective continuity of historicism here is enabled not only by the existence of the state itself with its bureaucratic coercive practices, but, more importantly, by the continued fusion of politics (the subjective) and the social (the objective), which is characteristic of state thought and which is underpinned by the whole ‘epistemic reason’ of the social and human sciences. It is tempting to modify Althusser’s idea of ‘interpellation’ somewhat so that it would not so much be ideology that ‘interpellates individuals as subjects’ but ‘epistemic reason which asserts history as continuity’.   2. I take for granted here the idea of apartheid as a variant of colonialism in Africa (Mamdani, 1996a). There is, however, as yet no equivalent for the term neo-colonialism, which I will continue to use, as ‘neo-apartheid’ is not in current use.   3. For an important discussion of the short-lived intellectual revival in Durban around Steve Biko and Rick Turner referred to as the ‘Durban Moment’, see Macqueen (2014).   4. The post-apartheid state gathers statistics on ‘racial groups’ in employment as a matter of course. The ‘racial’ categories are simply taken as given but have been reduced to four: Black, White, Indian and Coloured. These are considered not as subjective identities, but as somehow objective categories inherited from apartheid, as if that state’s categories were somehow universal.

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  5. In South Africa, the idea of ubuntu, which could have provided the basis for the construction of a nation founded on a community of active citizens, was only referred to in a few judgments of the Constitutional Court and then rapidly disappeared from hegemonic discourse. I return briefly to this notion in chapter 12.   6. In the case of South Africa, in chronological order: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Peter Mokaba and, more recently, Julius Malema, among others.  7. National African Chamber of Commerce (NAFCOC) leader, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, Mail & Guardian, 5–11 September 2008.   8. See Abahlali baseMjondolo (2008) and generally http://abahlali.org.   9. See Neocosmos (2010b) and the special issue of Economic and Political Weekly, 44, 7 March 2009 (p. 10), where a notion of the ‘post-national state’ is deployed. 10. On the events at Kennedy Road, see the short report by Gibson and Patel (2009), and for greater detail see Chance (2010). 11. I return to a detailed discussion of civil society as a domain of politics in chapters 6 and 11. 12. See, for example, Swilling (1990, 1991, 1992); Nzimande and Sikhosana (1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c); Mayekiso (1992a, 1992b, 1996). Some of these texts have been reprinted in Sachikonye (1995). 13. The same process could be noticed in Tunisia and Egypt after the consolidation of the new liberal-democratic state forms in 2012; during the brief sequence of emancipatory politics in those countries, it was simply ‘the people’ that was the main subjective political referent in international media broadcasts, for example, despite the fact that many popular organisations were already in existence. 14. NEDLAC brings together representatives of government, unions and some organisations of civil society to discuss the passing of legislation. Its powers are simply consultative. 15. I expand on this idea of depoliticisation concomitant with the introduction of a democratic state in Africa in chapter 9. 16. I am grateful to Richard Pithouse for reminding me of this point. 17. The texts of these various African charters, including the one for NEPAD, can be found in the Africa Institute of South Africa (2002). 18. For example, through the involvement of ‘civil society’ in African ‘governance’, which simply amounted to spreading corruption slightly wider than hitherto, to include elite NGOs. 19. For example, the ongoing conflicts between the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the government on the provision of medication for HIV/AIDS sufferers, to which I return in the conclusion to this part of the book. 20. Including crass sexist ones. In fact, the silence of the ‘feminists’ within the upper echelons of the ANC was deafening and practically total; only a very small number of lower-ranking women in the party expressed any protest, showing that whatever was left of the women’s movement in the party was not to be found at elite level.

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21. According to the Gini coefficient, 0 represents ‘perfect equality’ and 100 ‘perfect inequality’; see, for example, data from the World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SI.POV.GINI. 22. Hart (2013) has also recently argued that it is at the local level that political contradictions in South Africa are most apparent. She is also keenly aware of the problems of ‘nation-building’ in the country, which she analyses in terms of a contradiction between what she refers to as ‘denationalisation’ and ‘renationalisation’, a perspective I do not share. As I will show in chapter 10, in order to understand state power, it is more important to analyse the various modes of rule which the state deploys over various sections of its population. 23. See www.abhlali.org. 24. This discussion was planned to end in 2013. Since then, it appears that a new political sequence could be in the making; however, to delve into it here would be to go beyond the limits of what is possible in this book. 25. In addition, arguments of ‘collective social pathology’ were sometimes also in evidence, at least in academia; for example, see Harris (2001). One of the problems with arguments of social pathology is that they are tautological, given that the supposed existence of pathology is only recognisable by its symptom – xenophobia – while the symptom is supposedly accounted for in terms of the pathology. 26. Evidence suggests that most foreign African workers in South Africa consider themselves as migrants, not immigrants, as they do not come to stay permanently; see Reitzes (1997). Yet, an important signifier of these politics has been the change in the manner in which migrant workers are now named compared with how they had been named previously. As I have noted, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s such workers were referred to invariably as ‘migrant labour’, they are today known as ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘asylum seekers’ or IDPs (internally displaced persons). During the 1980s, the nationalist position, upheld by, among others, the ANC in exile, stressed quite rightly that the South African economy and industry had been built by labour from all over the Southern African region. In this case, then, Wendy Brown’s (2014) argument, which sees exclusionary walls under apartheid as basically similar to those of today, is mistaken. Under apartheid, migration policy concerned the inclusion and exclusion of labour (giving preference to certain forms of labour, classified racially, for certain occupations); today, migration policy is concerned with the various levels of exclusion of ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’ coming to South Africa from elsewhere on the African continent. 27. See the ‘All Here and Now’ of Boesak’s speech at the launch of the UDF in 1983, reproduced in Boesak (2009: 143–53). 28. See http://www.dispatch.co.za/tribalisms-rot-bared, accessed 28/10/2013. 29. For example, in the case of the Pemary Ridge police attacks, see www.abahlali.org. 30. See David Bruce, ‘The Road to Marikana: abuses of force during public order policing operations’, 12/10/2012, http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1455; Christopher McMichael, ‘The South African Police Service and the Public Order War’, 03/09/2012, http://thinkafricapress.com/south-africa/police-service-and-public-order-war-saps-marikana-lonmin;

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and Greg Nicholson, ‘South Africa, the Police State of Brutality, Humiliation, Impudence’, Daily Maverick, 02/03/2013, file:///C:/Users/user/Documents/Abahlali/Marikana/ Daily%20Maverick%20-%20South%20Africa, %20the%20police%20state%20of%20 Brutality,%20Humiliation,%20Impudence.htm. 31. It could be argued, therefore, that the deeply anti-political features of the state in general not only provide the conditions for managerialism to become the dominant ideology within the state and its various apparatuses – the so-called end of politics – but that they also ensure that true democracy can never be a state form, as Rancière (2005) has submitted; he argues, in fact, that the state by its very nature can only produce variations on oligarchic rule.

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Chapter 7

Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency Without ... freedom [to make political choices] we cannot say that people make their own history; we can merely contemplate the forms of their constraint. – Peter Hallward, ‘The Politics of Prescription’, 2005 The possibility of the impossible is the foundation of politics. – Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 1985 Dare to think, dare to speak, dare to act! – Mao Zedong, 1958

agency and the state The loss of emancipatory content in the politics associated with socialism and national liberation, as well as their subsequent collapse into state politics, is by now well known; in fact, this outcome has been so common that it seems to have the status of a ‘law of repetition’, as Achille Mbembe has put it in relation to his reading of Fanon.1 Today salvation is sometimes sought in social movements of an undifferentiated ‘multitude’ (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001; Amin and Sridhar, 2002; Bond, 2004), or in the exercise of citizenship rights by disparate sectors of the population making claims on the state for economic, social or political resources and entitlements. I debate human rights discourse at length in chapter 14 and argue there that it cannot form the basis of an emancipatory politics; here I am more concerned to address issues surrounding the notions of ‘civil society’, ‘social movement’ and ‘citizenship’, the key concepts for thinking popular politics in the current sequence, in which consensus is governed by liberal thought, and to suggest alternatives to existing forms of conceptualising political emancipation. I will argue that in thinking emancipatory

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politics, these cannot be reduced to mere agency; the point is not simply to demarcate an ‘active’ citizenship from a ‘passive’ one (although that splitting may provide in actual practice the basis for a thought of politics),2 but rather to think beyond the constraints of ‘citizenship’ itself, which denotes only one particular contemporary form of the relationship between the state and its people in Africa. Critical approaches to neo-liberalism in Africa have overwhelmingly concentrated on analysing the problems, both theoretical and empirical, of its economic arguments and policies. There are numerous texts and scholarly works criticising structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the ideology, practices and perspectives of the international financial institutions (IFIs), the disastrous effects of neo-liberal economic policies on Africa, and the inability of states to control their national economies and rethink development. Much less has been written about the politics that necessarily accompany the economics of neo-liberalism, apart from a few rare critical commentaries on the notion of ‘civil society’ and the state. This lack of attention to politics has had the unfortunate effect of restricting the development of an alternative popular-democratic and potentially emancipatory discourse. Liberal conceptions of democracy, human rights, ‘political’ parties, ‘good governance’, civil society, equating politics with the state, an unproblematic notion of ‘the rule of law’ and bureaucratic political practices have regularly been taken over uncritically in radical-Left discourse, which has simultaneously attempted to develop alternatives to economic neo-liberalism. For example, one often hears the view expressed that economic neo-liberalism may be a disaster for most of humanity, but fortunately human rights enable the mobilisation of alternative popular forces around ‘third-generation’ rights such as the ‘right to development’. The unfortunate tendency has been to proliferate the number of human rights to be included in international conventions as if somehow this would legitimise people’s struggles for an emancipatory future. An accompanying tendency has been the failure to subject state politics to a thoroughgoing critique, and hence a reversion to proposing statist politics of a social-democratic type as an alternative to neo-liberalism, simply because of familiarity with social democracy, despite its obvious inability to create the conditions for human emancipation in post-war Europe and elsewhere. Moreover, a critique is not enough; appropriate categories for the thinking of an emancipatory politics need to be developed as a matter of urgency. In the absence of an ability to think an emancipatory politics independently of state subjectivity, we necessarily revert to thinking through the prism of the state, which is the ‘default position’ of any untheorised politics. Much more work needs to be done on thinking emancipatory politics if a serious alternative to currently hegemonic neo-liberalism (what Francophones refer to as la pensée unique) is to be gradually constructed both in theory and in practice. Bearing in mind the historical sequences of emancipatory and state politics studied so far, this chapter reverts explicitly to theoretical issues. It pulls together at greater

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depth some of the concepts already encountered in order to help us think militant politics beyond state categories, an orientation to which even the best social history (for example) fails to adhere simply because it equates politics with agency. The chapter begins from the axiom that if popular politics are to exhibit an emancipatory potential in history, they must always possess an excessive character; moreover, it also maintains that different kinds of politics concern fundamentally different prescriptions. In so doing, this chapter attempts to do two things. The first is to think beyond politics as active citizenship within the existing world – in brief, beyond the extant – and in particular to contribute to the thinking of political agency on the African continent under conditions where the old emancipatory modes of politics – those associated with socialist revolutions, national liberation struggles, and developmentalism – are defunct. Today the key concept in understanding emancipatory politics in hegemonic discourse is the liberal notion of ‘civil society’; along with the idea of ‘citizenship rights’, this category is the hub around which the thought of popular politics turns. This also includes the thought of previous historical sequences, such as struggles against colonialism, which are (at least in urban areas) understood as struggles for citizenship rights (e.g. Mamdani, 1996a). As a result, this chapter will address these issues through a critique of the notion of civil society – understood today to be the apparent domain of agency – and its attendant conception of ‘social movement’. It will argue that civil society can only be coherently understood as one of several domains of state politics in Africa in which relations between state and people are structured around citizenship rights. Here organised citizens come together in what used to be called ‘interest groups’ and what are today referred to simply as ‘organised interests’. Interest or identity politics are the stuff of state subjectivity in civil society; unfortunately, though, not everyone relates to the state as a citizen in civil society – some do so from beyond its boundaries. Secondly, this chapter attempts to think the politics of what may seem to be impossible, i.e. the idea that, in addition to an analysis of the existing, of the world as it is, it is also possible, indeed imperative, to develop an understanding of an idea of excess over what exists, of understanding the thought of a different future in this existing present – of the ‘what could be’ in the ‘what is’. Given that I have argued in previous chapters that an excessive politics consists of a politics of displacement, a politics that transcends interest, it will be relatively easy to recognise such a politics in a more contemporary setting. The purpose of this chapter is thus to continue opening up conceptual space. I propose to do this by showing how currently hegemonic ways of thinking alternative politics within these terms remain limited to state conceptions, and how removing oneself from state subjectivity requires a transcendence of the concept of citizenship itself. I shall begin by outlining the kind of politics that the notions of ‘civil society’ and ‘social movement’ assume.

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on parties and social movements Given the collapse of the great emancipatory projects of the 20th century, social movements are often seen today as the hope for, if not the actual solution to, an emancipatory future.3 Yet social movements on their own have not shown themselves to be emancipatory. After all, such movements are difficult to sustain over time. Speaking more abstractly, if social movements are indeed to be understood as expressive of popular interests within the democratic form of the state – today, the typical form prevalent under capitalism – then there can be no possibility of ever overcoming capitalism itself. This is for the simple reason that, although such movements may succeed in resisting capitalist and colonial depredation or even in providing gains for the people for a more or less long period of time, reaction also more often than not succeeds in reversing these gains to a greater or lesser extent. Capitalism simply continues because struggles are inherent to its operation, whatever form they may take. Marx’s insistence that capital is a social relation is illustrative of this point. Without some conception of excess, as I have shown, it is impossible to think beyond the confines of these ever-existing conflicts. To think emancipatory politics is thus to think beyond social movements. In the recent past this excess was thought of in terms of the necessity for a party form of organisation. In fact, the problem of emancipatory struggle was understood, at least from the 20th century onwards, as concerning the linkage between a popular mass movement – especially workers’ movements and trade unions – and organised politics within a party. As can be seen historically from the formation of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Ferdinand Lassalle, and particularly since Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, when the idea of a party of professional revolutionaries was launched, this problem of the link between movement and politics was resolved through the formation of political organisations in the form of parties which were supposed to embody a universality beyond the narrow interests of a working-class movement. These parties allocated to themselves the monopoly of knowledge in political society, while movements provided the social impetus and the mass base in civil society. Irrespective of their specific ideology, political parties of intellectuals were said to be necessary in order to represent and lead the movement so as to direct it towards the desired outcome, the achievement of state power.4 Of course, as parties later melded with the state, the problem of whom the party represented – the state or the people/mass movement – arose in acute forms for those who wished to be faithful to an emancipatory conception of politics.5 Invariably, the contradiction was resolved in favour of the state. Today the party form can no longer provide the basis for thinking emancipation, as it is fundamentally statist in its essence.

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The apparent failure of social democracy in the West, like that of the developmentalist project in the South and of ‘actually existing’ socialism in the East, has forced us to rethink human emancipation. All these were state projects. Central to a new emancipatory project must be a different understanding of politics in which the state is not the source of all political wisdom and for which people are capable of exercising thought as full-blown collective subjects. Yet, whereas the splitting of active agents from passive recipients of rights is often seen in human rights literature as a necessary condition for a thriving democracy, this conception remains squarely within a politics of organised interests, and hence within a state politics. In Africa today, it is only on the basis of exceeding active citizenship – which suggests, as we have seen, the adherence to an Idea; for Badiou (2009d: 201), ‘the affirmation that a new truth is historically possible’ – that an emancipatory politics can be achieved, and that freedom – the horizon of which is the disappearance of the state itself – can be gradually constructed. In the absence of this, only the shifting of a state consensus is possible in conjunction with the majority’s indifference to and alienation from national formal state politics. This is clearly the norm today, when, in addition, parties have predominantly become vehicles for the enrichment of the oligarchy rather than links between society and state and vehicles for a new egalitarian political practice. The evidence for this disaffection with parties is overwhelming throughout the world, including Africa.6 In October 2004, the German social-democratic FriedrichEbert-Stiftung Southern Africa office organised a conference in Maputo on parties in the Southern African region. The conference document deplored the global trend of the ‘statisation’ of parties, arguing that parties worldwide have lost their anchorage in society and have concurrently strengthened their ties with the state. The document also stated that, as grassroots organisations, parties have lost much of their relevance as independent sources of new ideas, as forums for debate and deliberation, and as platforms for justifying political choices, many of these functions having been taken over by NGOs. It stressed that ideological pluralism is not compatible with current political practice, which highlights management and control. In sum, the statement deplored the absence of politics from parties, which it saw as an irreversible trend throughout the world and in the Southern African region in particular. Broadly speaking, this viewpoint illustrates the recognition of the much remarked disappearance of politics and its replacement by bureaucratic statism and professional expertise, particularly with reference to the ‘new’ social democracy (e.g. the rise at the time of ‘New Labour’ in Britain, and similar trends in European social democracy).7 In Africa as in much of the rest of the world, state politics are structured by the problematic of ‘governance’, a notion which at its core refers to little more than administrative efficiency. While in Europe this depoliticisation of politics has become evident perhaps since the crisis of social democracy,8 and has given rise to a notion of the ‘postpolitical’,

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in Africa popular disaffection with politicians and hence with parties has been long-standing.9 It is apparent on the continent that parties, rather than being links between society and the state, as liberal-democratic theory maintains, have become state agencies for placing members of dominant social groups into powerful state posts with the consequent reproduction of an extremely powerful and corrupt oligarchy that accumulates at the people’s expense through its access to state resources. Parties in Africa often end up being instruments for reproducing sectarianism at the expense of the national interest; this has been evident since the struggles of the 1980s for the so-called second liberation of Africa (Ake, 2002). In actual fact, of course, the liberal conception of parties, which sees them as links between the state and social interests, is premised on the view that the state domain is the only legitimate domain of politics. The function of parties is then visualised as one of representation in that domain of ‘political society’. Hannah Arendt made this point, namely that parties must be understood inherently as state institutions, long ago: parties, because of their monopoly of nomination, cannot be regarded as popular organs, but ... are, on the contrary, the very efficient instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled ... Hence, from the very beginning, the party as an institution presupposed either that the citizen’s participation in public affairs was guaranteed by other public organs, or that such participation was not necessary and that the newly admitted strata of the population should be content with representation, or, finally, that all political questions in the welfare state are ultimately problems of administration, to be handled and decided by experts, in which case even the representatives of the people hardly possess an authentic area of action, but are administrative officers, whose business, though in the public interest, is not essentially different from the business of private management (Arendt, 1963: 269, 272, emphasis added). This statement acquires even more relevance today, when the difference between public and private management has virtually disappeared. Moreover, the stress laid by Weber, Michels, Pareto and other early 20th-century sociologists on the fact that all parties could only be fundamentally state bureaucratic institutions, whatever the character of the universal laws they inspired (‘legal-rational’ organisations, instances of an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ or of a ‘law of the small number’), suggested that under capitalist conditions there was a congruence between state bureaucracy and the party form as such.10 Because of the hierarchical organisation of parties, it is not possible for them to provide the conditions for independent thought and excess or collective subjectivation other than as directed from ‘above’ by a more or less clear ideological ‘line’. Of course, discussions take place among the rank and file, but these are always

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directed and subsumed within this more or less acknowledged ‘line’. The result is that from within parties people cannot think beyond well-defined limits. This could be one of the reasons for the disaffection with parties worldwide and the turn to alternatives. Another could be that parties tend to encourage an ‘all-or-nothing’ subjectivity through which other parties are implicitly considered as (often class) enemies and hence have to be excluded at all costs from access to political power. The relation of parties to popular movements has overwhelmingly been characterised by a politics of incorporation into their own vision and organisation. The Organisation Politique, the political organisation founded by Badiou and Lazarus (with Natacha Michel), understood this clearly in the context of the struggle of undocumented immigrants in France (the ‘Sans-Papiers’) in the 1990s. Instead of allowing the Sans-Papiers to speak for themselves, and unify the people under the slogan ‘Regularisation pour tous!’ [Documentation for all!], political parties make the sans-papiers’ struggle into an exemplification of why their party should be elected and why the other party should not. Political parties, like the state, create internal divisions within the people and transform their unique statements into polarized and oppositional electoral decisions. When movements deploy their own statements ... they are considered [by political parties] as unusable and dangerous. [Political parties] thus liquidate the movement by putting it into service against the[ir opponents] within the parliamentary framework, that is, ultimately in the framework of an electoral relation of forces (La Distance politique, cit. Nail, 2015: 114). This arises simply because all parties (along with most NGOs) operate with an understanding of politics as representation. By the very fact that they operate within political society, they see themselves as representing the social within ‘the political’, i.e. within the state, and simply cannot conceive of popular movements as speaking for themselves. This is as true of parties on the Left as well as of those on the Right. In South Africa, popular movements like Abahlali which have struggled successfully to maintain their independence have been vilified and attacked by Left-wing organisations as much as by the state for being supposedly manipulated by outsiders and are thought incapable of making their own decisions. The idea that people think is simply inconceivable for a politics of representation. From within such a logic, state power invariably reacts to demands to be heard with the question, Who are you? In other words, power makes clear that it only recognises interlocutors who are genuine representatives in its eyes and not people who wish to represent themselves. Moreover, it is important to make the historical point that, as a result of the failure to distinguish between friends and enemies, with all other parties being reduced to

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(potential) enemies, parties with an emancipatory agenda have, during the 20th century, been extremely efficient vehicles for achieving state power, but much less useful in resolving contradictions among the people (Badiou, 2013d), a point to which I shall return in chapter 15. If it is true that the possibility of emancipatory politics has today been evacuated from parties in Africa and the state as such – and the evidence to this effect seems convincing – we need to ask the question of whether politics has now been embodied elsewhere, such as in NGOs and social movements, or whether it has disappeared altogether from social life. In other words, has the general failure of parties to embody an emancipatory project of whatever ideological persuasion – from social-democratic to nationalist to communist – been replaced in any way by organisations of civil society? In addition, given the broad trend among parties of decline and loss of legitimacy, how are we to understand the relationship between popular movements and politics, between the social movements of what Hardt and Negri (2001) call ‘multitudes’ and politics? Hardt and Negri’s idealisation of spontaneity seems to imbue the ‘multitudes’ with the same qualities of a historical subject as those with which Marx endowed the proletariat. The ‘multitudes’ or social movements are seen to be the potential saviours of humanity, a position to which Samir Amin has seemingly adhered (e.g. Amin and Sridhar, 2002).11 Apart from other reasons, this is unconvincing, simply because the politics of many ‘multitudes’ are often still laden with failed political assumptions (such as insurrectionism) and forms of politics inherited uncritically from our statist past that focused on taking over state power. The mere existence of social movements is not in itself sufficient evidence of an emancipatory alternative; apart from anything else, their politics are usually grounded in interest politics, unless consciously transcended. Their political identities, reflective of social divisions, are frequently cut off from genuine popular struggles, and in any case it is often in the character of such movements to rise and fall, as their interests become difficult to sustain when they are not as firmly located among the people as many ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-privatisation’ movements are, for example. What is required, in addition to recognising the importance of social movements, is the development, both in theory and in practice, of an emancipatory politics, something that is not simply given by capitalist society or by resistance to its various forms of oppression. That is by definition a principled politics of equality, founded not on the defence of interests but on the subjective affirmation of a universal Idea valid for all. Such a politics of equality may, however, develop within some movements over more or less long periods of time, but it is not inherent in social movements as such. South Africa is the African country where the study of social movements is the most developed today. This academic interest is not unrelated to the fact that, during the 1990s and 2000s in particular, many on the Left saw civil society as a whole as progressive, if not a site of potentially revolutionary politics. Yet, for the most part, these

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movements have been concerned above all to protest at the slow pace of state ‘delivery’ of housing, land, water, electricity and other amenities, along with the commercialisation of these resources, rather than to provide an alternative egalitarian vision of society.12 References to ‘socialism’ are still left undefined, while little attempt has been made so far to construct an alternative in practice. The argument of these movements, therefore, seems to be one which for the most part stresses the lack of fulfilment of interests, the absence of integration of communities into the capitalist system and its state, rather than an alternative to that system. At the same time, the ‘economic’ character of their demands for basic needs seems to lend these movements a ‘working-class’ character, to the delight of those wishing to see a working class everywhere with its supposed potentiality for emancipation without asking whether this class or those movements embody a universal politics or not (see e.g. Alexander, 2005). The South African literature still seems either to romanticise social movements (e.g. Desai and Pithouse, 2003) or to maintain that failure to organise a party is an indication of the lack of progress of such movements (e.g. Ballard et al., 2005). On the other hand, Barchiesi (2005: 237) notes much more accurately that traditional ‘classbased discourses and practices retain a crucial relevance for community movements that are contesting the neo-liberalisation of the South African transition’. Yet he also observes that, given the context of a collapse in wage employment,13 ‘organizations, emancipatory visions and social claims based on wage-labour are in crisis’. We should add ‘sociological theories’ to this list. Given this economic situation, and the growing cynicism regarding the incumbents of state power, ‘classism’ has lost much of its explanatory and political relevance. The difficulty is that till now there has been little political thinking to replace classism, with the result that there is a dominant tendency, at least in South Africa, to cling dogmatically to it (in academia anyway) in the face of an apolitical fascination with the ‘postmodern’. In sum, it has appeared difficult for these movements and their academic supporters to think beyond statist or classist political perspectives which are more and more at odds with social reality. Clearly, if oppression gives rise to resistance, and we follow Foucault in maintaining that power is a relation that always includes resistance, the occurrence of resistance is simply part of the oppressive system itself into which it has regularly been absorbed. It should also be recalled that, for Marx, capital was a social relation and that this relation was the essence of the capitalist mode of production; as a result, worker resistance was, for him, inherently part of the capitalist system itself and labour unions were precisely an expression of such resistance. Current popular movements are not necessarily about to break with capitalism, while capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to adapt itself to the pressures of ‘new social movements’ (women’s movements, environmentalism, etc.), in not altogether different ways from those in which it had adapted itself to the old trade unionism. In other words, there is nothing inherent in social movements themselves that necessarily bears an

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emancipatory potential, let alone a project. Indeed, when social movements are simply oppositional, simply against what exists, or when they clamour for state ‘delivery’, they are simply engaging in a state-focused politics that is reflective of interests, with the result that they can easily be demobilised and incorporated into the existing system of power. The appropriation of the discourse of popular participation by the World Bank constitutes yet further evidence of this ‘infinite flexibility’ of capital (Cooke and Kothari, 2002). From an emancipatory perspective, the point must be that movements have to propose something new, something additional, some alternative way of life, an ‘excessive’ politics. They must be ‘for’ something with a universal character (usually freedom, equality, dignity, justice) and not simply ‘against’ what exists or for a better place in the system. It is only in this way that they can hold the potential for developing an emancipatory mode of politics. As we shall see, there have been signs that some social movements have been insisting on an idea of dignity – the case of Abahlali comes to mind – but this is far from being a universal feature of social movements in South Africa. Indeed, the reference to the ‘social’ character of movements in South Africa is an indication of their political limitations, as the term itself points, quite accurately, to the divisions and interests that structure their thinking. Mass popular movements throughout the world, such as the revolutionary movements in France or Saint-Domingue in the late 18th century, or the revolutionary movements and mass struggles in Europe in the early 20th century, or the national liberation movements of the 20th century in colonised countries, including South Africa in the 1980s, were not ‘social’ movements. They all expressed an emancipatory subjectivity that exceeded the interests of a simple ‘social’ movement; they were indeed political movements. Mass movements usually have been successful in combining several social movements and in overcoming the social divisions between them. They have been characterised by, inter alia, a universal politics of equality and a concomitant anti-statism precisely because they consciously overcame capitalism’s hierarchies and social divisions of labour. Badiou (2013a: 16, my translation) emphasises that ‘these vast popular movements’ always stress ‘the latent necessity’ of the withering away of the state. Such a mass popular movement is therefore necessary for any emancipatory politics; it is, however, simply not sufficient. In addition, there must be some form of political organisation with a leadership fully accountable to the movement; this political organisation must be capable of formalising the local experiment into a universal concept of emancipation that must also have an internationalist dimension to its thinking, as this is a necessary component part of universalism. This political organisation may or may not emanate from the movement itself. As far as thinking such political organisation today is concerned, Badiou (2005c) argues that it needs to be fundamentally distinguished from state forms of

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organisation. In particular, this means rethinking political organisation beyond the party form, which cannot exit a state subjectivity simply because it is also organised around the defence of interests – in other words, around the idea of representation. It is not only that parties are bureaucratic or that the party leadership possesses the monopoly of political knowledge (the party line) and takes on the role of ‘master’. The problem is fundamentally constituted by the idea of representation itself, which does not allow for the fact that people think. Thus, in order to rethink the politics of emancipation in Africa, an understanding of political organisation needs to be developed that is not founded on representation, but that facilitates self-expression. In particular, the links between political organisation and political movement need to be fundamentally rethought; these cannot be allowed to reproduce the role of the party or state as the sole fountain of knowledge and power if an emancipatory conception of politics is to be developed. The social division between mental and manual labour, between leaders and led within organisations, must be entirely resubmitted to critical scrutiny. In this context, the notion of ‘participatory development’ commonly used in the development literature as an alternative to the state-driven, top-down process may hold the possibility of providing some insights into resolving this issue. Yet the notion is so vague that it covers an array of practices and ultimately fails to specify a new conception of the relationship between leaders and led, intellectual and manual labour. The various initiatives reviewed, for example, in the work of Wignaraja and others on India (where they seem to be furthest developed) do seem to attempt to develop a logic that is not statist and to allow community struggles to build ‘alternative grassroots processes [which] can serve to reinforce democratic and political processes, and help [build] structures with social justice built into them’ (Wignaraja, 1990: 103). Yet, at the same time, it is clear that such community initiatives are often dependent on a state which is willing to provide a ‘political space’, an ‘enabling environment’, for popular mobilisation. Both a democratic state sensitive to the development of a popularly founded active citizenship14 and an active citizenship itself are apparently needed for such ‘participatory development’ to show possibilities of survival (‘sustainability’), at least for a period. But for an alternative emancipatory conception of development to be possible, a subjectivity that transcends interest is necessary. Today this environment is often sought in a ‘human rights culture’, but this has so far had the opposite effect of reproducing a culture of ‘anti-politics’, as independent popular thought is forced into an NGO mould. The potentially tyrannical conception of ‘community participation’, which World Bank discourse has appropriated, has its roots in the common ideological weakness of popular organisations, which fail to overcome state thinking so long as they cannot overcome a politics of organised interests.

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political society (‘the political’) and civil society Whereas parties operate within ‘political society’ (or ‘the political’ or the ‘public sphere’) – the domain of the state that Max Weber (1970b) referred to suggestively as the ‘house of power’ – civil society is regularly seen as objectively distinct from the state, at least in organisational terms. For much of ‘Africanist’ political science, civil society is seen as located in opposition to the state and consequently has been idealised as forming the appropriate domain for an alternative to authoritarianism.15 Perhaps the best way to initiate a critical assessment of civil society and what it names is not so much through a return to a discussion of liberal theory as through an examination of the way in which the term is conceived today in Africa. (A discussion of the actual workings of civil society in Africa is reserved for Part 2.) What in fact does the term ‘civil society’ refer to in Africa today? I shall address this question with reference to South Africa, arguably the location of most discussion on this issue. The answer in brief is that, although the term today names organised interests beyond the boundaries of the state and the family and is usually reduced to NGOs and social movements, it is in fact best understood as a domain of politics, more specifically a particular domain of state politics within society, and not simply as those organised interest themselves. One of the fundamental features of democracy for neo-liberal theory has been its stress on a ‘vibrant’ civil society which can help to keep state democracy afloat, since political parties are no longer sufficient to the task (Gibbon, 1996). In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was trade unions organising workers at the point of production which constituted the typical organisation of civil society that could create and maintain democratic norms (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992); their incorporation into state subjectivities (inter alia, through various forms of corporatism) was necessary for the capitalist system to survive. Today it is doubtful that unions can continue to play this role, given the different forms of capital accumulation which, especially in the South, assume large numbers of unemployed, subcontracting and casualisation of labour, increased insecurity, and so on. In this sense, political organisation at the point of production, and particularly its expression by productivist theories, has gradually lost much of its earlier centrality and analytical power. In South Africa (where there is a 43–45 per cent unemployment rate), Buhlungu (2004) has suggested that the trade union movement – which during large parts of the 1980s was in the vanguard of popular struggles against the apartheid state, and which was instrumental in the winning of liberal-democratic rights – has today lost much of its ‘vibrancy’ with the depoliticisation consequent on liberal democratisation. Moreover, its location within state politics by way of various corporatist arrangements has made it unable to be the vehicle for an emancipatory alternative. Consequently, its language is either simply workerist or liberal (in both instances, statist) with little emancipatory political content. In the post-apartheid period, it is ‘new social movements’ or, more broadly, civil

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society organisations that are now seen by many as the bearers of an emancipatory future. How have these organisations fared in the post-apartheid period? This question is analysed in some detail by Adam Habib (2004). We are told that relations between state and civil society (understood as organised interests themselves) have taken three distinct forms in post-apartheid South Africa  – marginalisation, engagement and adversarialism – and that this plurality of relations is good for ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘governance’ (p. 239). Here Habib extends the liberal notion of pluralism from its usual meaning of a plurality of organisations to a plurality of relations with the state. Yet this argument fails to go beyond neo-liberal assumptions to show the possibility of alternatives. Political liberalism is the best form of democracy for Habib, precisely because of its plurality of state–civil society relations. His concern is thus to ‘celebrate’ (p. 228) pluralism, and he concentrates on this rather than on analysis. Let me briefly subject Habib’s celebration to critical scrutiny. The problems begin with the manner in which he understands civil society. This he sees as ‘the organized expression of various interests and values operating in the triangular space between the family, state and market’ (p. 228). It should be noted that, despite attempts to anchor it in classical writings, this is not a definition which corresponds to that of Hegel (or indeed any of his predecessors), to which it bears only a superficial resemblance, although it is fully in tune with current neo-liberal thinking. For Hegel and the classics of political philosophy, the term ‘civil society’ referred to the ‘triangular space’ itself, to a realm of activity (hence the term ‘society’, bürgerliche Gesellschaft or ‘bourgeois society’, for Hegel as well as Marx) in which such organisations operate, rather than to those organised interests themselves.16 This domain of activity arose historically as ‘political society’ was created – in other words, as the state became, in Marx’s words, a ‘parasitic excrescence’ (1871: 69) or, more politely, ‘an organ superimposed upon society’ (1875: 326) and thus separated itself from the economy along with the decline of the feudal state. Of course, to provide a definition that does not conform to that of the classics is not a sin, yet there is an important theoretical reason for referring to civil society as a realm or domain of social and political activity. This is simply because many organisations in society are regularly excluded or exclude themselves from it. To visualise civil society as a realm of activity enables an understanding of inclusion and exclusion, which equating civil society with organised interests themselves cannot. In our current context in Africa, those outside civil society are not seen as legitimate state interlocutors, while those within it are.17 The neo-liberal position espoused by Habib18 fails to recognise this, as it understands civil society as the organisations themselves, organisations that are legally defined as outside the institutions of both state and business.19 This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the relations between organisations of society and the state. Was the post-apartheid Boeremag – an illegal Afrikaner organisation intent on overthrowing the post-apartheid state  – part of civil society?20 Obviously not,

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because it was not a state-recognised organisation whose politics were legitimate in the eyes of the state. A more recent example is related to events that have impacted on popular politics in South Africa. As I have noted, from the end of September to early October 2009, the Durban organisation of shack-dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was systematically attacked by thugs (some advertising themselves as Zulu ‘ethnics’, others as ANC members) and the police under the direction of local and regional politicians in part of the city known as Kennedy Road.21 In an Orwellian statement, the regional ANC described the organisation, which has mass support in the settlement, as ‘illegitimate’ and the organisations imposed on the people in this violent manner as ‘legitimate’ (Abahlali, 2009). Evidently this referred to legitimacy in the eyes of the state, which thereby excluded Abahlali from civil society in this violent manner – in other words, from the category of those organisations it considered legitimate. These organisations, which the state sees as legitimate interlocutors, are known in this country and elsewhere as ‘stakeholders’. I will argue in chapter 12 that this combination of state and civil society constitutes a new form of state rule in Africa today in which a consensual state-democratic politics is pursued. In sum, the sphere of activity known as ‘civil society’ must be understood as limited by what the state sees as legitimate political activity and legitimate organising; this is its first and fundamental defining characteristic. Its second characteristic is that civil society denotes a domain of politics in which relations between the state and people are founded on relations of citizenship and rights. But, as Arendt (1973) recognised, not all people in society are linked to the state in terms of citizenship relations. This was obviously the case in apartheid and colonial societies and, I will argue in chapter 13, is still the case today in Africa. This is why for neo-liberal theory there can be no (only a very limited) civil society outside the liberal-democratic system (e.g. under authoritarian state systems such as colonialism or apartheid). Of course, no ‘revolutionary’ organisation (however understood) could possibly form part of civil society, as it would have as its political goal the overthrow of the state. In the 1980s, the ANC-aligned UDF and other organisations fighting for liberation existed outside what was then civil society, and only became part of civil society after 1990, when their legitimacy among the people was recognised by the state. Civil society therefore regularly excludes many popular organisations from its sphere of activity. Thus, if the state does not legally recognise the existence of an organisation, it cannot possibly form part of civil society. In South Africa the state-party itself, the ANC, as soon as it captured power, distinguished clearly between ‘genuinely representative organisations’ and those that were not (ANC, 1996). The latter were obviously not legitimate in its eyes. Civil society today, it seems, is simply society as viewed from the perspective of the state – those organised interests of society that it sees fit to deal with. Any organisation challenging the monopoly of state politics – state universality – is therefore bound to be excluded.

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This becomes apparent in Habib’s classification of civil society types, which is governed by their relationship to the state, from ‘accommodationist’ to ‘adversarial’. The former group, as he accurately puts it, is ‘subcontracted’ by the state to fulfil a number of the functions from which it has withdrawn. However, Habib is not sensitive to the irony of referring to such organisations as NGOs when they are not only funded by government, but operate on the basis of the same subjectivity and technicism, and in fact undertake state functions (Swilling and Russell, 2002). These so-called NGOs are more aptly termed ‘parastatals’. Of course, one is entitled to question the whole idea of an independent civil society in this instance, as the distinction between such NGOs and state institutions is simply a legal one, a state distinction. The second group, referred to as ‘adversarial’, is also conceived of in relation to the state, as its defining feature is its antagonism to the state. This group includes particularly the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), whose politics I shall discuss in the conclusion to Part 1. In fact, we are told little about the politics of such organisations and no comment is made as to why the only relations vis-à-vis the state should be either adversarial or accommodationist. If indeed this is so, it may tell us something about the character of the public sphere in South Africa, where creeping authoritarianism and intolerance of disagreement seem more and more the order of the day, such that citizens are forced either into total subservience or into opposition to the state. Nevertheless, Habib points to an important feature of the state by noting that there exists a third group, which consists of ‘survivalist responses of poor and marginalised people who have no alternative but to organise in the face of a retreating state that refuses to meet its socio-economic obligations to its citizenry’ (2004: 236–7). Yet one wonders whether these groups are not perhaps systematically excluded from civil society altogether by their very political marginalisation, and also by Habib’s own definitions, as many engage in economic activities which frequently have an ‘informal’ character. More important, however, is the foreclosure in Habib’s work of any possible alternative classification of civil society organisations – for example, one that would not use the state as its reference point. If we admit that liberal democracy is not the only form of democracy (at least in the popular rather than statist sense of the term), and that many popular organisations practise alternative popular forms of democracy, then why not classify such organisations in terms of the extent to which their vision of society, forms of operation and concrete demands may be democratic or egalitarian in ways that go beyond the limits of state democracy? A much more useful typology could have been based on a distinction between statist-managerialist organisations and egalitarian-democratic ones, as it would have enabled the recognition and analysis of popular-democratic sites of politics beyond the state. Perhaps the ruling ANC has been right in maintaining that ‘confrontational’ organisations and social movements are indeed often unrepresentative and ‘ultra-Leftist’; then

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again perhaps their politics are indeed authoritarian, but maybe they are not. If a genuine popular-democratic alternative is to be developed and the possibility of an emancipatory politics thought, it is surely here in sites of popular politics that it is likely to be found, whether in civil society or indeed outside it. These sites need to be investigated critically, but Habib’s typology disables such a possibility. After all, just because an organisation or movement is opposed to the state does not make it either democratic or potentially emancipatory (despite the possible justice of its demands). Its politics may simply be concerned with incorporation into the existing system, or with providing a simple mirror image of state politics (such as top-down authoritarianism), and not with transformation in a popular-democratic, let alone emancipatory, direction. Unfortunately, Habib’s liberalism precludes the asking of such questions; it ends up being a highly conservative perspective that evacuates politics from thought. Civil society must be understood as a realm or domain of socio-political activity – of political subjectivity – in which contestation takes place between different organised political interests (political identities), but which ultimately constitutes the limits, structured by the state and implicitly or explicitly agreed to by its participants, of a (more or less successfully achieved) consensual state domain of politics. The names around which politics is thought in this domain are ‘citizenship’ and ‘human rights’. Civil society is in fact the liberal state within society, in the sense that political relations are here founded on interests, identities and citizenship rights. Politics can and do exist beyond the limits of the domain of civil society, beyond the confines of the state consensus, as I shall show in some detail in later chapters. Broadly speaking, civil society has been introduced into our post-socialist world and emphasised by the Washington consensus as a way of increasing inclusiveness in response to rebellions against state authoritarianism in the 1980s and early 1990s on the African continent, the period of so-called second liberation. It has therefore to be understood as a reactive subjectivity, in Badiou’s sense of the term. The idea was to ensure that popular participation in politics would be broadened beyond activity in parties in political society to include organised interests, but all within the ambit of state power. Rather than referring to organised interests themselves, the term ‘civil society’ is thus more accurately understood as the political domain where citizenship rights are apparently realised through the forming of such interest groups and identities. The popular movements in Eastern Europe and in the Third World of the 1980s lie at the root of this theoretical redirection, which has expressed itself as an insistence on the need for a ‘vibrant’ civil society in Africa in order to ensure pluralism. Another effect has been the reconfiguration of the Organisation for African Unity into the African Union, the latter making provision for ‘good governance’  – usually equated with administrative efficiency combined with adherence to law and rights – and for ‘civil society participation’ in the continental body. Civil society can thus be understood

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as naming the sphere of political agency and subjectivity in society as visualised from the vantage point of the neo-liberal state (Beckman, 1992; Gibbon, 1996). It is in civil society that citizenship rights are to be realised, but in a manner which keeps them firmly away from any (emancipatory) politics that question the neo-liberal state itself. Civil society is thus the domain that defines the essence of neo-liberal democracy; it is where organised interests are said to be allowed expression and managed within a neo-liberal consensus. However, it is important to stress that civil society is not the only realm of politics outside the confines of political society; moreover, in so far as it exists, civil society in Africa today forms a realm of politics that is dominated by neo-liberal state subjectivity (in the absence of attempts to exceed this subjectivity). To repeat, the politics of civil society are predominantly state politics, for it is the state that ultimately pronounces on the legitimacy of the organisations of civil society, which need to be in accord with state political subjectivities if they are to enter the promised land or what Domenico Losurdo (2014) calls the ‘sacred space’ of liberalism. Yet, as I shall have occasion to show, the (democratic) state in Africa also relates to people under its control not as (full) citizens who bear rights, but as people with entitlements and only partial rights at best. In this case, people are not considered as full citizens but often as potential enemies with some (usually social) entitlements, much as they were under the colonial state. From the perspective of a popular-democratic emancipatory politics, the state should not be allowed to dictate whether popular organisations are legitimate or not. Neither can intellectual inquiry allow itself to narrow the concept of organised politics to adhere to state prescriptions; only people themselves should be entitled to bestow such legitimacy. In this sense South Africa had an extremely powerful and ‘vibrant’, as well as politicised, set of popular organisations in the 1980s. But these never formed a ‘civil society’, and were not described as such in South Africa at the time, because of their quasi-illegal nature and their illegitimacy in the eyes of the apartheid state.22 In fact, it was precisely the political distance of these organisations from the apartheid state, the fact that they had exited the state domain of politics and operated beyond the (obviously restricted) civil society of the time, which accounted for their ‘vibrancy’ in the South African townships of the 1980s. Conversely, the neo-liberal conception of civil society also implies recognition by civil society organisations of the legitimacy of the state and of the hegemony of its interest politics. Popular organisations that reject this kind of thinking cannot be said to be part of civil society. For such a viewpoint, therefore, these same opposition organisations in South Africa in the 1980s (the UDF, civics, youth and women’s organisations, etc.) that were fighting the apartheid state and thereby constantly testing the limits of legality could not be said to form a ‘civil society’. Indeed, they were only described in such terms in the 1990s, when the state had no option but to recognise their legitimacy in the eyes of the people. If civil society is to be more than a descriptive term referring to organised

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interests, it is only possible to understand it as a domain of politics legitimised by the state. For neo-liberalism, therefore, civil society, as a domain of politics institutionally distinct from the state or political society, exists solely under conditions of mutual recognition with the state, and only under liberal democracy, where the Parliamentary mode of politics is consensual. Thus it is this mutual recognition that defines the parameters of the state consensus and that is itself the result of struggle. Moreover, it is the state that retains the monopoly of national universality. Civil society organisations are tolerated, but only if they represent particularistic interests. Any claims to represent universality – in other words, if a popular organisation were to see itself as representing ‘the people’s interests’ or ‘the national interest’ – would make it liable to be seen by the state as a threat to its monopoly of universality. A state ‘national consensus’ is structured within a domain of politics comprising the political relations between the state and its institutions, on the one hand, and the ‘official’ or ‘formal’ civil society of rights-bearing citizens, on the other. A state political subjectivity is thus usually hegemonic within civil society. Other forms of politics are excluded because they are seen as beyond the political consensus (e.g. they are ‘ultra-Leftist’, ‘criminal’, ‘terrorist’, do not ‘follow channels’) and are thus usually delegitimised in state discourse. We can say that these organisations and politics exist outside or beyond the limits (at best, at the margins) of civil society. Because of such partiality, therefore, it is unhelpful to conflate civil society with ‘organised society’, as the term necessarily implies some form of exclusion. It is important to stress that the distinction between liberal democracy and, say, colonial or apartheid forms of authoritarianism concerns the extent and forms taken by such exclusion, not the absence of exclusion as such. Civil society is overwhelmingly dominated by NGOs. In the Global South, there has been, since the 1980s and the decline of party support, an increase in the numbers of NGOs, as the state has not only subcontracted its social work to such organisations, but also used them as forms of social control.23 Arundhati Roy has argued cogently that the rise of NGOs has accompanied the spread of neo-liberal policies and has had a systematically depoliticising effect. ‘They defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance ... It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs’ (Roy, 2004). At the same time, sociological research shows overwhelmingly that NGOs in Africa are staffed by middle-class professionals for whom they provide vehicles for employment and social entrepreneurship; they are overwhelmingly funded by the state or by (foreign) donors and also regularly provide vehicles for the formation of a clientele by political patrons (see Swilling and Russell, 2002; Kanyinga and Katumanga, 2003). Particularly when civil society is understood as reduced to NGOs (which it usually is in hegemonic

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discourse), it contributes to the formation and extension of a state domain of politics structured around technico-legal professional practices and cannot provide in itself a vehicle for politically emancipatory ones. As I shall show in the conclusion to Part 1, this comment is also applicable to social movements such as the TAC in South Africa, which was widely seen as the most ‘successful’ (and ‘vibrant’) of such movements in that it was able to force the government to rethink its policy on HIV/AIDS in the 2000s. Recent research (e.g. Vandormael, 2007a, 2007b) shows that this success has had the effect of depoliticising the debate on AIDS by forcing it squarely within the hegemonic biomedical paradigm of science, which expects people to be the passive recipients of medical technology. The TAC’s apparent success was due precisely to the congruence of its ideology with the perspective of the world medical establishment. The thrust of the TAC’s perspective brought about the incorporation of HIV/AIDS sufferers as passive citizens into an existing set of power relations (state, scientific, mass media, transnational corporations, etc.) fundamental to the interests of capital, and not in a questioning of such relations, unlike the gay movement in California in the 1980s, which had some success in confronting the medical establishment (Epstein, 1996). One result of the TAC’s success has been, paradoxically, its depoliticisation of popular struggles through the incorporation of sections of the population into liberal power relations and technical biomedical discourse. The overall effect has been a ‘liberalisation’ of struggle, a contribution to the reproduction of an interest politics (a passive or active citizenry) rather than to the thinking of an emancipatory subjectivity. Other, less fashionable social movements in South Africa, have had to struggle against dominant discursive power, not along with it, as the TAC has done, and have not been so obviously successful, thus remaining at the margins of civil society. I shall show in concluding Part 1 that success, as measured by the ability to modify state policy in its particular interests, is not the best indicator of a movement’s politics. A variety of social movements sometimes attempt to reintroduce agency but often simply provide a mirror image of state politics. For a politics to provide the basis for an emancipatory subjectivity, it has to be situated at a subjective distance from the state. Citizenship exists at the interface of state and sociality, i.e. in that fluid realm structured by the active or passive relationship between state and society – in other words, ‘civil society’. An assessment of the politics of social movements from the perspective of emancipatory politics would have to ascertain the extent to which egalitarian-democratic universality and prescriptive politics characterise them. In general, however, it is apparent that they operate within the confines of a state political subjectivity. In sum, civil society, understood as a realm of political activity, constitutes, as Gramsci understood, one of the subjective domains of state politics.24 At this stage we still need to assess a structural argument that recognises the existence of a realm of politics beyond civil society. This argument stresses a distinction between

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different domains and forms of politics, such as one dominated by the elite or ruling class who are associated with it (elite politics, state politics, dominant/hegemonic politics, etc.), and another in which forms of politics are practised by those excluded from and oppressed or coerced by this first domain (popular politics, subaltern politics, etc.). The former Partha Chatterjee calls ‘civil society’ and the latter ‘political society’. This distinction has been proposed on the basis of the social relations, cultural practices and discourses within which each exists. This view is extended by Chatterjee from an initial distinction central to subaltern studies and originally put forward by Ranajit Guha (Chatterjee and Pandey, 1992; Guha, 2000; Chatterjee, 2004, 2011). Chatterjee argues that in addition to ‘identifying the two domains in their separateness’, scholarship must also trace ‘in their mutually conditioned historicities’ the specific forms of the dominant hegemonic domain and the ‘numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 12–13). Hence, Chatterjee has recently contended that, in the ‘postcolony’, there is a truly ‘political society’ beyond the state and civil society, which is distinct from but not unconnected to the state domain and where activity is political. There are thus two sets of connections to power in the postcolonial context: the relations connecting a civil society of citizens to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty, and those linking ‘populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare’ (2004: 37). Each of these, he argues, points to a distinct domain of politics. There is no need to go into details here other than to note that he makes the point that it is not in civil society that politics is to be found, because here claims follow legal and administrative (i.e. technical) procedures whose access is limited to middle-class professionals; rather, politics is to be found in what he calls a ‘political society’ of the poor where ‘claims are irreducibly political’ (p. 60). It is therefore outside civil society that, according to him, a politics of agency exists, at least in the countries of the South. In arguing in this way, Chatterjee draws heavily on Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and governmentality to specify his two distinct domains of politics, but in their original formulation by Foucault it is their distinct characteristics as modes of state rule that is emphasised. Under sovereignty, the legitimacy of state rule is realised through a certain amount of direct participation by citizens in the affairs of state. Indeed, classical liberal theorists of the state (in particular, J.-J. Rousseau and J.S. Mill) stressed the importance of active citizenship, as did the French Revolution, of course. Under governmentality, on the other hand, it is the provision of resources to the population that becomes the dominant mode of securing state legitimacy (Foucault, 2000). For Chatterjee, this form becomes dominant in the 20th century, although Foucault stresses its appearance much earlier. Chatterjee maintains it was the emergence of ‘mass democracies’ in the 20th century in the West that produced an entirely new distinction, that between citizens and populations. While the concept

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of ‘citizen’ carries an ‘ethical connotation’ of participation in the sovereignty of the state, and hence of claiming rights from the state – a process through which the state secures legitimacy  – under ‘governmentality’ the regime of power secures its legitimacy through ‘claiming to provide for the well-being of the population. Its mode of reasoning is not deliberative openness but rather an instrumental notion of costs and benefits. Its apparatus is not the republican assembly but an elaborate network of surveillance through which information is collected on every aspect of the population that is to be looked after’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 34). Thus, Chatterjee notes, populations do not bear any inherent moral claims. Ideas of participatory citizenship fell by the wayside in the 20th century and gradually ‘the business of government has been emptied of all serious engagement with politics’ (p. 35). Of course, one can see this as central to European social-democratic norms and to the state in Africa, where governmentality pre-dated the existence of the nationstate under colonialism, along with what Cowen and Shenton (1996) have called ‘trusteeship’. This was the idea that an agency, in this case the state, saw itself as entrusted to act on behalf of others for their own benefit. We have, then, a postcolonial state born into governmentality, so to speak, so that in addition to the emphasis on notions of citizenship and nation-building, one can understand how, for example, ‘delivery’ has today become the main legitimising feature of the post-apartheid state in South Africa. Furthermore, in adopting technical strategies for modernisation and development, ‘older ethnographic concepts often entered the field of knowledge about populations  – as convenient descriptive categories for classifying groups of people into suitable targets for administrative, legal, economic or electoral policy’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 37). Hence the importance of ‘tribes’ or religious groups in most of Africa, and of ‘races’ in South Africa today, as objects of policy. Interestingly, Arendt (1963: 273) made the point in an earlier context that all political parties irrespective of political colour, whether revolutionary or not, have historically agreed ‘that the end of government was the welfare of the people, and that the substance of politics was not action but administration’. This remark obviously refers to ‘governmentality’ in Foucault’s sense, and it also stresses the point that in the conflict between political parties and popular assemblies of the social movement (during emancipatory sequences), it was invariably the former who were historically able to establish their dominance; the shift in subjectivity from an emancipatory to a statist one is therefore not new.25 This has been largely confirmed in the case of Africa, as indeed it has been in other historical experiences worldwide, yet it clearly reproduces the prejudices of 20th-century statism, according to which economic welfare is considered a prerequisite of political democracy. This view abstracts from popular politics and equates democracy with its state-liberal variant. The provision of resources to sections of the population is what ultimately gives rise to the disciplines of demography and statistics (stat(e)-istics), as the population needs to be classified,

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categorised and measured in different ways. This way of looking at the problem of social welfare is totally state-focused and ignores popular initiatives of mutual help and solidarity; in other words, it ignores precisely the possible existence of an excessive subjectivity. Governmentality as a mode of rule, it could be said, became central under colonialism in Africa, which, as Cowen and Shenton (1996) show, was dominated and justified by a notion of ‘trusteeship’. The state became a trustee of the welfare of its colonial (as well as its metropolitan) charges. From this political tradition there emanated T.H. Marshall’s (1964) three forms of citizenship rights (especially his notion of social citizenship), which provided the main theorisation for British social democracy. The social-democratic (or ‘Keynesian classist’) state secured its rule through the provision of social services, the ‘delivery’ (to use contemporary parlance) of particular social rights to the working people, on top of the civic and political rights central to all liberal-democratic states. In conditions of postcolonial Africa, this is clearly reflected in the ‘developmental state’, which secures its rule through the provision of development rights. This point will be further developed in chapter 12. As a brief digression from the main argument, it is important to note that today a systematic process of naturalisation precedes the deployment of the technical or technocratic solutions by the state. To naturalise must be understood as to depoliticise, but it is more than a mere negative process, as it enables the deployment of the technical as a universal ‘solution’ to identified problems. The deployment of the technical as a solution to social problems, for example, is founded on a process of naturalisation of these problems (e.g. poverty), though this must not be thought simply as the naturalisation of the social or the historical, as it is in Marx (and in Bourdieu’s sociology), for example. For Marx, in the famous section of Capital on the fetishism of commodities, the commodity character of the product of labour (its exchange value on the market) is the source of the fetishism of commodities as things: ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (Marx, 1976: 164). Marx’s emphasis is placed on recovering the historical social relations hidden behind such things. Today, we understand that it is not the market (and therefore not neo-liberalism) that is the sole or even the primary producer of naturalisation. Rather, the process of naturalisation is premised on a prior process of depoliticisation during which agency is socialised before being naturalised – as, for example, in the idea of the social as habitual culture. Such an idea of the social is bereft of collective agency, for even class struggle may be understood as divorced from thought-practice, given that that struggle is said to reflect interests determined elsewhere; class struggle can easily be turned into an objective social phenomenon rather than a subjective

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political practice. In other words, the social (unless it is itself understood as created and re-created through agency and struggle, i.e. by a political thought-practice) is not in and of itself indicative of agency, much like the notion of ‘culture’ as given and inherited from the past. This process of naturalisation is precisely what (social) science (i.e. episteme in Foucault’s sense) today contributes to creating. This is most obvious in economics, law, sociology, political science, history and psychology. In other words, I would wish to argue that today episteme is very much fused with techne. In fact, episteme is the technical’s condition of existence. This is probably the reason why, today, science finds it difficult to free itself from its fusion with technology. The point is to defuse them by stressing that there is no demiurge (power) that will solve problems through its mastery of techne, or rather, as Fanon puts it, that the demiurge is the people’s thought-practice itself. In sum, the current worldwide emphasis on the technocratic (including, incidentally, the recourse of governments to technocrats in order to overcome apparently intractable state-political disagreements) is not simply the effect of the fetishism of the market and innovation. More fundamentally, it constitutes the only thinkable solution left to power once political thought-practice has been naturalised on a continuous and systematic basis. Naturalisation must be fought not by emphasising the social as such, but by uncovering the importance of politics as a collective thought-practice from which the social emanates. Returning to the main argument, we can see that Chatterjee’s point reinforces the centrality of the technicisation of politics by the state through its own understanding of politics, as governmentality exerts pressures for such technicisation, so that ultimately politics becomes submerged under the sophistication of managerial calculations and ‘delivery’, the provision of entitlements, and the tendency to form more and more passive citizens who rely on professionals to represent their interests in the state. It is also evident how politics is expelled from the state by technique, especially managerial technique. Yet, in Africa, this description applies primarily to relations within civil society. Civil society is thus constituted as a domain of state politics (as Chatterjee argues), and the mutual relations between state and people within civil society have a tendency to become managerialist, technicist and legalistic as they mutually condition each other, so that a technicist (and thus fundamentally apolitical) subjectivity becomes hegemonic. Yet although an understanding of a realm beyond civil society in which politics may exist is absolutely crucial for understanding Africa today, Chatterjee’s claim that it constitutes a ‘political society’ is problematic, not only because the term is usually used to refer to the state, but, more importantly, because it works within the parameters of historicism, in that it gives the mistaken impression that politics exists exclusively within a specific realm, something that cannot be shown without reducing all political subjectivity to state

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subjectivity. I return to this point in chapter 13, where I make an argument for a realm of ‘uncivil society’ in which relations between state and people are governed by patronage relations and violence along with the subjective politics associated with them. Moreover, in all these domains the political subjectivities that govern relations between people and the state are not reducible to social categories, although they are undoubtedly related to them. Thus it is not valid to refer to civil society as an ‘elite domain’ of politics, simply because ‘elites’ and ‘middle classes’ can be found within all identifiable political domains in Africa. The same point can also be made for other domains of politics. If one is to retain some rigour in the argument, it must be said that emancipatory politics may or may not exist within various sites in any domain of politics, and the object of investigation must be to uncover the extent to which this is in fact so (Lazarus, 1996). Moreover, to anticipate an argument developed in chapter 13, in the second domain of politics, which I prefer to call ‘uncivil society’, politics is not to be understood primarily as informal relations with the state and popular assertions of entitlement, as Chatterjee seems to assert with reference to India. Rather, in Africa it takes the form of a politics of patronage and violence through which the state relates to people not as full citizens with rights, but only as partial citizens and, in South Africa more and more, as enemies. However, it is important to show that the state politics that dominate in whatever domain can be resisted and challenged in such a way that the subjectivities of the domain itself are challenged. It is this that holds the possibility of an emancipatory politics. I show in the conclusion to Part 1 that the organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo is arguably a site that shows evidence of elements of a new form of emancipatory politics. Finally, it must be emphasised, as I have already noted, that for Chatterjee it is different modes of state rule that determine different connections to power and ultimately different forms of subjectivity in different domains of politics. Thus his argument is in essence a structural statist one; popular subjectivities are given little or no effectivity in developing alternative politics. No way is provided to understand political subjectivities other than as effects of state rule.

active citizenship in civil society: the foundation of new emancipatory possibilities? As I have been at pains to argue, from an emancipatory perspective, politics is not to be understood as restricted to citizens bearing rights conferred by the state, which they can exercise to defend their interests in civil society, as in liberal human rights discourse. It is rather about whether people can think a universal Idea beyond social place through their direct engagement in politics (unrepresented by professionals within state-regulated domains) as militants or activists and not as politicians. For example, it is important not to think any popular struggle as simply directed against

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something – for instance, the building of a dam, land-grabbing, or more broadly as redressing a historical grievance – as this simply amounts to an argument for returning to the status quo ante. In addition, such struggles must also involve the thought of being for a new situation or world within which such wrongs are much less likely to occur. Indeed, it is important to understand how and to what extent such features have been apparent within popular emancipatory struggles (especially those for independence) and how they may prevail among some popular movements today. I have mentioned in a previous chapter, for example, how the national liberation struggle in Algeria exhibited such characteristics. Frantz Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989) is a detailed study of different changes in political subjectivities and social relations brought about by popular struggle, and is an important illustration of such politics in practice. He emphasises, for instance, that it is up to the people to decide to choose their citizenship, their belonging to the nation, and not the state. The point is that during the period of popular national upsurge, the politics of national liberation are a unifying, inclusive conception. No distinction is made between people on the basis of indigeneity, and unification occurs only on the basis of their politics, their commitment to the struggle for freedom. This conception of the nation alters as soon as state politics are allowed to become hegemonic, when unity comes to be understood as founded on indigeneity and other social referents. It is also important to note the similarity of this analysis with my arguments concerning the South African struggle of the 1980s. The point is not to idealise popular struggle but to note that, despite all its contradictions, it may enable the development of universal emancipatory truths and thus a different conception of the nation (for example) from that proposed by the state. There are always present in popular struggles, to a greater or lesser degree, conceptions of collective agency that insist on popular control of the conditions of life. These collective conceptions can be referred to as ‘citizenship’, though this appellation suffers from the limitation of thinking politics exclusively in relation to the state. Van Kessel (2000) refers explicitly, in one of her case studies, to the centrality of the notion of a political community of ‘active citizens’ during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, an observation that also pervades Fanon’s account of national consciousness as an affirmation. Similar notions are also prevalent in accounts of popular movements and community democratic political practices; they are present, for instance, in Wamba-dia-Wamba’s (1985) account of the Mbongi, in Amadiume’s study of women’s struggles over citizenship in Nigeria (1997) and in Sibanda’s (2002) account of a peasant organisation in Zimbabwe. The point is that in popular-democratic struggles, there develops a conception of collective agency and communal equality (‘the common’ i.e. what is common to humanity) often understood in the literature as citizenship but which is more adequately described as ‘movement communism’ (Badiou, 2011c). It refers to the mutual solidarity and overcoming of social

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divisions that arise as part of the necessary emphasis on what humanity holds in common, rather than on what divides it. This is what Breaugh (2007) has called the ‘plebeian experience’. The existence of this collective solidarity and agency, however, does not necessarily reduce belonging to indigeneity or to any other particular interest; it also distances itself from the more general state identification of political subjectivity with place. It therefore implies that a politics beyond place may exist in struggles for rights, one that lends itself to the enunciation of universal prescriptions on the state. In any case, struggles against racial, gender or religious oppression, in so far as they lay emphasis on equality, can also transcend the limitations imposed by a concept of human rights upheld by the dominant in each group. Indeed, it soon becomes apparent that if gender and racial equality, for example, are not to be subjectively restricted to the elite and ultimately thought in personal terms alone, a universal concept of equality (of ‘indifference to difference’) is required, and hence also a politics of becoming, of subjective excess.26 There can conceivably exist within thought a politics beyond rights, citizenship and civil society, an excessive politics of universal prescriptions on the state. Such prescriptions have included in the past directives along the lines of the Freedom Charter: ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, ‘The people shall govern’, and so on. These prescriptions were assertions of rights to be fought for, not pleas for human rights to be conferred or delivered by the state. During the period of their actualisation – particularly in the mid-1980s in South Africa – they enabled a politics that could not be reduced to ‘active citizenship’, because the limits of thought were no longer restricted to place but acquired a universal character. Active citizenship may therefore in certain instances enable – precisely because of the effects of practice on thought – its own transcendence, namely the second most important right after the right to life – the right to think – by suggesting the possibility of a politics beyond interest, beyond the places of hierarchies and identities. As a community activist stated in South Africa: ‘The leaders [of the country] are saying that it is them who know everything and that the majority of the people can’t think. We are saying that everyone can think’ (cit. Desai and Pithouse, 2003: 17). One of the important dimensions of struggles for national liberation had always been that, although they did contain for many an economic dimension, the demand for access to economic resources (e.g. land) was intertwined with its symbolic political value (e.g. ‘our land must be retaken from the colonialists’), which included an emancipatory component.27 Economics was always subordinated to politics in the struggle for freedom. In the process of struggle for emancipation, political agency was the manner in which economic power was to be acquired. After independence, it was access to economic resources that became central, as Fanon (1990) notes, with access to state power (at times through the exercise of agency) becoming the instrument by which such resources were to be secured at the expense of the most

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vulnerable (generally, the excluded, such as the poor or ‘foreigners’). In other words, the seizure of resources from foreigners was founded on claims of indigeneity – rights secured by the state – after independence. This illustrates an instance of state politics replacing popular politics, of the politics of place replacing a universal politics, of economics replacing politics; yet, at the same time, it was justified by a (state)-nationalist ideology. It was therefore a direct result of a process of depoliticisation whereby the state took over for itself the political agency of people. This process could easily lead to xenophobic politics among state institutions and society as a whole, as has indeed happened in South Africa and elsewhere. This example illustrates a transition common to the African continent in which popular politics were depoliticised, in which popular solidarity and creativity were replaced by a national essence founded on indigeneity and underpinned by state power. In sum, the idea of ‘active citizenship’ in itself cannot help us to understand the development of an emancipatory politics, for it is limited by the place whose identity it expresses, yet it can be seen as possibly enabling a number of alternatives to the existing situation for the simple reason that through enabling practice it may give rise to an excessive subjectivity over that of the simply given, over place. For this to happen, agency must be supplemented – however gradually – by an Idea of universality. For Badiou, this is the Idea of equality, which he names ‘the Idea of communism’ in a generic sense (2009d). However, the name used is not important; all that is required is that the Idea be extracted from the politics of the state and that it affirm a universal humanity. This excessive conception of agency can be traced throughout all popular emancipatory projects of the modern period, from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, the various socialist revolutions, and the national liberation struggles against colonialism, with the case of South Africa being one of the most recent.28 It constitutes one of the conditions for emancipatory politics.29 Popular-democratic political trends have thus regularly stressed alternative conceptions of citizenship placing emphasis on inclusiveness and agency. Indeed, it could be argued that in thinking the excess, the idea of ‘citizenship’ is in fact transcended and replaced by that of ‘people who think’, i.e. people who combine agency with an Idea, so that the reference point of such politics is no longer the state and its citizens, but an excessive politics of universal human emancipation. Yet today, as I have stressed, the statist political sequences of socialist revolutions and of national liberation through which emancipation was thought in the 20th century are historically at an end. A new alternative emancipatory political sequence must be one that, in the words of Holloway (2002), is not about achieving state power but about transforming power; it is arguably about democratising power, not about crudely replacing one oppressive politician by another. In the formulation of Lazarus (1996), its concern is with ‘prescriptions on the state’. Does this amount to a new political sequence at a world level? What are its manifestations on the African

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continent? How can popular pan-Africanism be rethought under these new conditions? To what extent are new and not-so-new popular movements able to move beyond arguing for their incorporation into the world of capital and that of the liberal state, and to what extent do they express prescriptive demands for freedom, justice, equality and dignity in new ways? In other words, in what sites can a new mode of democratic politics be found in contemporary Africa? In order to begin to think answers to such questions, we need to rethink the character of emancipatory politics itself.

agency, the ‘politics of everyday life’ and the limits of social history There is nothing in the notion of the ‘politics of everyday life’ that in itself suggests an excessive subjectivity beyond social place. Rather, the opposite is the case, which is presumably why it appeals to academia in its avatar of ‘cultural studies’. A sociology is devised in which everyday living is understood as resisting forcible incorporation into structural logics; this is termed ‘political’ because individuals attempt to minimise the effect of power on their lives through the deployment of various tactics (de Certeau, 1988). Perhaps the most sophisticated recent work in this context is that of the Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat, who uses a category he calls ‘the quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ in order to describe urban struggles in the Global South that do not exhibit grand events but rather ‘a silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives’ (1997: 57). These ‘quiet encroachments’, he says, are characterised by ‘quiet, atomised and prolonged mobilisation with episodic collective action – an open and fleeting struggle without clear leadership, ideology or structural organisation, one which makes significant gains for the actors, eventually placing them as a counterpoint vis-à-vis the state’ (p. 57). He argues that many ‘disenfranchised groups ... are driven by the force of necessity – the necessity to survive and lead a dignified life’ (p. 58). Their activities can be extremely successful over time in enabling access to ‘collective consumption (land shelter, piped water, electricity, roads), public space (street pavements, intersections, street parking places), opportunities (favourable business conditions, locations, labels, licenses), and other life chances essential for survival and acceptable standards’ (Bayat, 2013: 3). Anyone who has had the occasion to visit various African cities and their sophisticated ‘informal sectors’ would clearly recognise such descriptions. Yet one remains here within the limits of sociological thinking. These activities are undertaken by identifiable social groups – ‘informal people’ – who subsist through activities such as street vending, peddling and street services. Even though they can achieve important results in forcing the state to tolerate their activities explicitly or

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implicitly and even to retreat from its desire to exercise control over the street, there is nothing in these politics that of itself suggests an excessive political subjectivity. It is primarily a matter here of surviving and negotiating power relations, not of transforming them and certainly not of exceeding the social itself.30 As a result, political subjectivity is in this work reduced to the social (culture in particular) much as it is in the work of postcolonial theorists (Hallward, 2001) and many social historians, such as E.P. Thompson or Martin Linebaugh, whose work is also directed towards making visible the agency of the oppressed. While these historians have provided beautiful accounts of popular struggles, they have contributed to the effacing of the specificity of politics by reducing it to culture. For Thompson (1968), the most sophisticated example of this mode of thought, the English working class is distinguished and characterised by a historically determined unitary subjectivity inherent in a particular culture, which itself is the result of struggles and cultural creations over time by a whole number of agents (not all of whom are evidently ‘working class’) and through which an identity of interests is created and collectively understood. This culture (or ‘moral economy’) is in turn equated with the subjectivity and hence the politics of this given (because historically constituted) socially located class. ‘Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’ (pp. 9–10). It thereby follows that political subjectivities are derived precisely from this culture and identity: ‘Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms’ (p. 10). Class here is not understood as produced by a specific politics, as it is in Lenin’s thought, for example; rather, class is first historically produced through the demarcation of a specific social subjectivity or culture as people become aware of their common interests, and subsequently members of this class are said to act politically on this cultural foundation. Its disagreements with sociology notwithstanding,31 Thompson’s work shares with sociology the view that politics represents class; while, for Lenin, the main theorist of proletarian politics in the 20th century, politics is rather constitutive of class itself – a proletariat being constituted as a historical actor by a singular social-democratic politics. Class, with its corresponding political consciousness (identity), is thus, for Thompson, already given in society, much as it is for sociology, though for him it is historically and not structurally produced.32 In fact, social historians are intent on showing that the oppressed – usually, but not exclusively, the working class – were active agents in history because mainstream history ignores them completely. As a result, they rarely analyse or bother to elucidate the singular politics within which people’s actions unfolded; it is enough to show that people rebelled, but politics is not reducible to rebellion. When they do attempt to do so, it has tended to be within a historicist logic of ‘evolving consciousness’ from

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the ‘primitive’ or ‘pre-political’ to the ‘modern’ and ‘the political’, as in Hobsbawm’s (1974) or even Ranger’s (1968) work. This lack of concern with the specificity of politics can be seen as illustrating the limit of the thought of social history. The fascination of many social historians with the fact of proletarian or, more generally, popular agency – in particular, rebellion against the inherently oppressive relations of (nascent) capitalism – has had the effect of conflating popular agency with politics. Wishing to show that the oppressed have indeed not been passive victims but agents of their own history, this vision has by default had the unfortunate effect of restricting politics to such agency itself, with the unity of class simply taken as given. Linebaugh and Rediker’s important study is a good example of this thinking, as their concern is fundamentally to ‘recover some of the lost history of this multi-ethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern global economy’ (2002: 6–7); their concern is thus to redress ‘the historical invisibility ... [which] owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history’ (p. 7). The fact of rebellion, agency itself, is thought to be sufficient for an understanding of popular politics, which, for Linebaugh and Rediker, concerns the wish of rebels to defend or to reinstitute – in those cases where it had been destroyed – their culture of the commons. Of course, it is in the nature of oppression to produce rebellion; however, it is not the mere fact of rebellion that characterises politics but rather, as we saw with reference to Haiti, the excessive features of a politics of rebellion that are of central importance for understanding not only the possibility of emancipation but the nature of the oppressive system itself. Slavery in Haiti was resisted for many years by many rebellions (including plots to poison slave-owners), but these did not enable the thought of an emancipatory alternative or universal freedom until 1791 and the thought of national independence until 1797. Many feminist analyses have exhibited similar features to social history on this point, thus ultimately situating themselves squarely within a state conception of politics. A discussion of power or power relations in all their complex ramifications, whether influenced by Foucault (2000) or Butler (1993), is no substitute for an analysis of political subjectivities; on the contrary, the effect is for such subjectivities to be effaced. It is worth repeating that it is not simply agency that endows a politics with emancipatory potential, but rather a particular kind of collective agency, one guided by an excessive subjectivity. At the same time, it should be stressed that this feature of the thought of ‘social’ or ‘labour’ history must be understood as a limitation of the epistemic discourse itself and not in any way as an error. Today we can no longer be satisfied with the simple recognition of the agency of the oppressed; we also need to understand the character of their politics and how these vary within different subjective sequences. In sum, in social history, politics is reduced to struggle against power: politics is simply visualised as a social phenomenon and therefore it possesses no excessive character, with the result that a thought of emancipatory politics is simply effaced. I

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have insisted rather that politics strictly conceived must be understood as possessing an asocial component, and a major component at that. Politics cannot be exclusively social; otherwise, it cannot possibly possess an emancipatory potential. Indeed, it is precisely the dialectic between the social – in other words, the expressive – and the asocial – the purely subjective or excessive – that forms the possibility of an emancipatory politics. The investigation of specific politics must therefore begin from an idea of excess in order to be able to recognise and discover its singular nature; otherwise, the specificity of any potentially excessive politics disappears as it becomes diluted and finally effaced within the social.

notes 1. See Achille Mbembe’s comments, http://wiser.wits.ac.za/event/difference-andrepetition-reflections-current-south-african-moment, accessed 18/03/2013. 2. It is for this reason that Lenin and the Bolsheviks always considered trade unionism (a case of active citizenship) as a ‘school’ of politics, for example. 3. The celebration of social movements worldwide can be found in many publications, such as Manière de voir, 84, December 2005 – January 2006, published by Le Monde diplomatique. 4. For example, in what Lazarus (1996) has called the Stalinist mode of politics, the notion of ‘class leadership’ – especially the slogan of the ‘leadership of the proletariat’ – was understood as ‘the dominance of the Communist Party’, as the party substituted itself for the class which it said it represented. I have already shown that in South Africa in the 1980s this slogan was reinterpreted within the UDF to refer to popular democracy. In a similar manner, national liberation movements substituted themselves for the people and melded with the state institutionally after having fused their politics subjectively to form the state-party (or the party-state: the two are in essence politically the same). It should be stressed that such processes have historically been completely independent of the dominant political ideology. 5. Lenin was acutely aware of this problem, arguing that the party should defend the people even against their own state (Lenin, 1918d: 275; 1919c: 25). Ultimately, he was not able to find a lasting solution to the issue of which side the party should represent in the contradiction between state and people. A similar problem lies at the root of Mao’s experiment with cultural revolution; for a brilliant analysis, see Badiou (2005b). 6. The most commonly cited indication of this disaffection and passivity is the pervasive and increasingly low turnout at elections worldwide. For detailed studies on multi-party elections in Africa, see Cowen and Laakso (2002). 7. See Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (2004). For the French case, see Rancière (1995: 137), for example. 8. Of course, this crisis has since led to alternative parties arising from social movements in Europe. These parties have been concerned with social mobilisation around

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issues of popular concern, such as economic austerity. Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain are typical examples of this trend. 9. With regard to Britain, however, we need to note the very interesting comments by Moses Finley (1985: 36), who lamented the absence of political knowledge among the citizens of that country in the 1970s in relation to those of ancient Athens. He stated that ‘public apathy and political ignorance are a fundamental fact today, beyond any possible dispute; decisions are made by political leaders, not by popular vote, which at best has only an occasional veto power after the fact. The issue is whether this state of affairs is, under modern conditions, a necessary and desirable one, or whether new forms of popular participation, in the Athenian spirit ... need to be invented.’ 10. For a brilliant analysis of Weber’s cynical view of politics in this context, see Beetham (1974). 11. In a recent interview (in 2010), Samir Amin maintains that because parties and national liberation movements have lost their credibility, ‘now the social movements have to re-create adequate forms of politicisation’; he sees the main political issue confronting opponents of capitalism as the unity of disparate movements. There is no attempt to think the character of an emancipatory politics here. See http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/69276. 12. Such resources are identified as ‘human rights’ in the South African constitution, although it is quickly added that their provision is contingent on the state having the financial and administrative capacity to do so. As a result, legal arguments revolve around the ‘reasonableness’ of such provision in specific circumstances. Political issues are in this manner turned into legal ones. See Constitutional Assembly (1997). 13. Formal employment has collapsed from 69 per cent of the economically active population in 1994 to 49 per cent in 2001 (Altman, 2003: 172). The trend has not yet been reversed. 14. On the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizenship, see Balibar (1996: 101–29). 15. See, for example, the texts in Chazan et al. (1992). 16. See Hegel (1952, Third Part). Marx follows Hegel closely in noting the depoliticisation of civil society, ‘the emancipation of civil society from politics’ as the state detaches itself from society (Marx 1843: 166). 17. Rancière’s concept of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible) is useful in this context, for it concerns at the same time the existence of something held in common as well as its subdivisions that define its places and respective parts. The idea therefore refers simultaneously to the common and to its places which are reserved exclusively for some. Unlike ‘culture’, which contains an idea of the habitual, the concept of the distribution of the sensible draws attention not only to places, inclusion and exclusion, to what is visible or invisible, but also to the fact that the sharing of space, time and forms of activity is determined by politics. See Rancière (2004c). 18. The idea of ‘civil society, as referring to organised interests themselves is a recent creation contemporary with the rise of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s (such as in Poland). See Gibbon (1996).

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19. ‘Non-profit’ organisations in the case of South Africa; see Swilling and Russell (2002). 20. Or, indeed, is Boko Haram part of Nigerian civil society? The answer should be obvious. 21. See ‘for example’ www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59322/. 22. Of course, they were considered as part of civil society in global liberal discourse. 23. This point will be discussed at length in chapter 9, where I begin to assess the character of the African state today. 24. ‘State = Political Society + Civil Society’ (Gramsci, 1971: 263). 25. Although not necessarily inevitable if the party is replaced by another, less statist form of organisation. 26. For the case of gender oppression and thinking subjective excess over identity politics, an important recent resource is Menon (2012); for racial oppression, one of the classic references is Fanon (1986). In both cases it is a universal idea of humanity that is emphasised as an alternative to gender and racial oppression. 27. See, for example, the cases of Kenya or Zimbabwe, where the collective struggles for land rights were popular in inspiration. For Zimbabwe, see, in particular, the discussion in the work of Kriger (1991, 1992) and chapter 7 below. 28. As I have noted, Martin Breaugh (2007) refers to the formation of a political subject as the ‘plebeian experience’. The difficulty with all such notions is that the distinction between an expressive and an excessive politics is not rigorously maintained, as the accent is placed primarily on the passage from passivity to agency. 29. Among the oppressed, politically excluded or ‘in-existent’, such a universal conception of politics can only begin after a realisation of and resistance to such exclusion, which initially suggests an awareness of identity. This point is argued at length by Fanon with reference to the ‘Fact of Blackness’ in a White world, where ‘the white man is not only the Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary’ (1986: 138n). 30. In work emanating from Latin America, on the other hand, the social itself is often seen as transformative, as ‘communities’ are able to collectively transform their conditions of existence beyond the social relations imposed by capital. In this context, the work of Raquel Gutierrez-Aguilar (2014; see also Gutierrez-Aguilar and SalazarLohman, 2015) is particularly informative and is in many ways conceptually very close to some of the arguments developed in this book. 31. See Thompson’s Preface to his book, in which he is at pains to distinguish his conception of class from a sociological one. 32. The most empirically detailed critique of the concept of working-class identity and culture is provided in Rancière’s work (e.g. 1989, 2004b); he notes, for example, that in 19th-century France ‘working-class emancipation was not the affirmation of values specific to the world of labour. It was a rupture in the order of things that founded these “values” ... the French workers ... were claiming the status of fully speaking and thinking beings ... The demos is the collection of workers insofar as they have the time to do something other than their work and to find themselves in another place than that of its performance’ (2004b: 219, 226).

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Chapter 8

Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo We think. People must understand that we think. – Nonhlanhla Mzobe, Abahlali activist, 2005

the politics of popular movements reconsidered We now no longer live within the Cold War/Keynesian/social-democratic/developmental-state historical sequence and the subjective politics associated with it. Today, neo-liberal economics and politics have replaced state-led economic transformation with market-led growth along with massive unemployment and poverty levels, while so-called deregulation and privatisation have devastated state social-provisioning infrastructure worldwide. At the same time, the current form of colonialism is not only globalised, but has replaced its ‘civilising mission’ (and ‘development mission’) with a liberalising and ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007; Neocosmos, 2009b). Neo-liberal market capitalism and its attendant political liberal-democratic norms are everywhere hegemonic in thought, although people throughout the world have been showing disaffection with the liberal political system. In this context, the neo-liberal state in Africa has been ruling – ensuring its legitimacy – less through the operation of parties and more by institutionalising the operation of civil society organisations, in particular NGOs.1 It is in this context of the decline in legitimacy of parties that civil society organisations have been seen as a form of popular incorporation into state politics and as legitimisers of the ‘democratic consensus’. On the other hand, so-called new social movements (which, at least in Europe, have now become directly embedded in the state)2 are regularly seen as holding the key to an emancipatory future. Too often, though, such movements have shown highly contradictory features and the majority have simply been operating within an interest politics that is state-founded.

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It is in South Africa that the study of social movements is probably most developed on the continent. However, this literature remains squarely within the perspective of the Western ‘sociology of social movements’ while largely ignoring equivalent material from Asia, Latin America and Africa.3 It is not my intention to review the South African literature here, but merely to emphasise its operation within the neo-liberal framework of human rights and civil society paradigms.4 Within this perspective, the tendency is to evaluate the ‘success’ or otherwise of an organisation ‘of ’ civil society in terms of its ability to influence or lobby government in favour of the group whose interests it is said to represent. Operating within civil society is said to enable this, and to help redress the obvious imbalance against the poor, which the growing inequality accompanying the spread of liberal democratic capitalism has entrenched on the continent since the 1980s at least. The existence of such organisations, NGOs in particular, is seen as politically ‘empowering’ the poor to exercise citizenship rights within an otherwise disempowering economic context. The liberal conscience can thus be assuaged without its power or dominance being in anyway contested, let alone threatened. Within this overall perspective, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) had a place of honour during the first decade of the new century, at the height of its operation. Not only did it fight ostensibly for an impeccably moral issue  – the provision of treatment for those dying of an incurable disease, HIV/AIDS  – but it also succeeded in forcing the South African government to put in place a plan for the ‘rolling out’ (i.e. ‘delivery’) of antiretroviral drugs for AIDS sufferers, which were seen by most as considerably extending their life if not constituting a cure. Moreover, the TAC has combined legal action with what has been termed a ‘radical’ or ‘confrontational’ stance vis-à-vis the perceived lethargy of the South African government under President Thabo Mbeki on this issue, tactics derived (we are told) from the experience of the struggles of the 1980s (e.g. Robins, 2004: 666; Mbali, 2005). The TAC is therefore seen by many as the true inheritor, not to say the bearer, of the popular traditions of struggle of the 1980s, thus vindicating the idea of a ‘vibrant’ civil society as a genuine indicator of democracy and the exercise of pluralism and citizenship. The conception of politics that enables this statement is, however, one that reduces politics to ‘simple tactics’ and thus largely ignores the fact that politics is here representing sectional interests. It also ignores the prescriptions of the organisation and the manner in which decisions were made. This view in no way constitutes a conception of politics as potentially emancipatory and universal, but sees such politics as a more or less accurate representation of interests and the most effective manner of achieving them. In this context, the TAC is regarded as a model movement or NGO, with perfect ‘Left’ credentials; it has been able to touch the global liberal conscience to such a remarkable degree that it was even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003.

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I shall argue that this rosy picture does not conform to reality, but rather that the politics of the TAC operated squarely in conformity with a liberal state conception and have, in spite of appearances, disabled rather than enabled subjectivation beyond active citizenship by the poor and the thinking of an emancipatory alternative. There are several reasons for this, including the TAC’s mode of organisation and massive funding, its hierarchical structure and its middle-class leadership, its congruence with the international biomedical power system, and the fact that it reinforces the ideology of the biomedical paradigm in terms of which people are seen, at best, as able to put pressure on the state to ‘deliver’ medication and, at worst, as ‘patients’, passive recipients of medical and state ‘delivery’. HIV/AIDS sufferers were not viewed as active agents in their own cure, drawing on the help of experts, but rather agency was understood as being restricted to pressuring the state to ‘deliver’ a cure. For most Left-liberal politics today, the extension of the life of HIV/AIDS sufferers (not their cure, which is so far unavailable) is to be traded for their ultimate political passivity; life is to be extended (and death is to be postponed) at the expense of genuine political agency and the thought of emancipation.5 In order to stress this point, I shall contrast the TAC’s politics with those of a different organisation, the movement of the shack-dwellers of Durban, Abahlali baseMjondolo, during the period of the second state sequence, i.e. broadly between 2001 and 2008–9.6 In Abahlali we have not an NGO but a small movement of the poor run by the poor themselves. It has fought the local state tenaciously for the provision of decent housing for its members. Its politics have remained, however, squarely outside civil society – it has steadfastly refused to enter the realm of state and donor politics – relying rather on the commitment of a leadership drawn from its own ranks, democratic decision-making, and a rejection of state co-option and donor funding when this threatened to compromise its independence. Its politics and conceptions of itself have so far been at a distance from state politics (for which it has paid a heavy price), and its decision-making processes have been consistently democratic, constantly involving the community of its members. It has remained proudly independent, forcing the local state to listen to it and take it seriously. It has contributed systematically to the production of confidence among the communities where it has been operating and has been expanding its membership dramatically. But, crucially, it has extended its political thinking beyond the limits of representation and thus has enabled a thought of politics that transcends the limits of state subjectivity in a number of crucial respects. It is this organisation, I shall argue, that has shown, at least until now, the closest fidelity to the People’s Power mode of politics and event of 1984–6, through its democratic prescriptions on a state that has systematically fought it at every turn, using both legal and illegal means to do so.

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the treatment action campaign and the politics of civil society Analysis of the politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has been coloured by the attempt of President Thabo Mbeki’s government during the early 2000s to place a discussion of the aetiology of the disease in the public domain, contesting the mainstream medical establishment’s view of the causes of the disease, while simultaneously dragging its feet on instituting plans for providing medical care to sufferers on the grounds of the inappropriateness of Western medical solutions to African conditions. While the government rightly attempted to question whether the disease should be confronted exclusively by providing expensive and possibly inappropriate medical treatment in conditions of extreme poverty, it did so clumsily – by seeming to refuse existing treatment to sufferers – so that it alienated the national and world medical establishment, its own media, as well as middle-class AIDS patients and liberal opinion in the country. As a result, it soon found itself on the defensive, and was eventually forced into capitulation to existing biomedical paradigms. Today the public debate has ceased, and antiretroviral treatment is now provided. While the TAC was able to create the conditions for the access to treatment of greater numbers of people, it succeeded in doing so ultimately at the cost of reinforcing a culture of political entitlement rather than enabling the thought of a universal equality. Arguably, this was largely because of its insistence on operating within civil society and interest politics, i.e. within a state-legitimised domain of politics. The organisational structure of the TAC was similar to that of a trade union or party: it was composed of local branches with provincial structures and an overall national one; indeed, Friedman and Mottiar’s (2004: 17) detailed study makes much of this, stressing not only the structural similarities, but also the technical knowledge required by the leadership. Given the collapse of the labour unions from popular-driven organisations in the 1970s and 1980s into bureaucratic institutions in the 2000s, the comparison is instructive. Of course, as with all such structures, one is not surprised to hear of the centrality of the national body in decision-making and that ‘major strategic decisions are initiated by the national leadership’, with the attendant danger ‘that the concerns of the grassroots are not informing the agenda of the leadership’ (pp. 15, 9). This leadership in any case never emanated from among the poor, from whom AIDS sufferers are overwhelmingly drawn, but from a middle-class ‘Left’ at the fringes of the nationalist movement.7 Branches concerned themselves with mobilising around campaigns largely decided at the national level and also engaged in educational programmes for their members in medical matters, a process which Robins (2004: 663) refers to, rather optimistically, as ‘democratising science’. This branch structure also led to observable contradictions between leaders and members, given that the former were overwhelmingly White and educated while the latter were

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Black and poor, leading one activist to remark that ‘historically dominant voices – primarily white-left intellectuals – have been the main mediators of the identity and aspirations of the poor’ (Mngxitama, 2004, cit. Friedman and Mottiar, 2004: 36). Despite the apparent agency of TAC members, one cannot here speak of a process of subjectivation, as there was no transcendence of interest politics and mobilisation was turned on and off like a tap by the leadership. The TAC was ‘an organisation with substantial full-time staff, administration and donor funded programmes’; it employed 40 people and had a budget of R18 million in 2004, 98 per cent of its income being grants from donors (Friedman and Mottiar, 2004: 6). In the words of its leaders, the TAC was ‘neither anti-government nor anti-ANC’ (p. 7) and, according to Friedman and Mottiar, the ‘TAC has a political identity which ensures a relationship with the government and ANC unlike that of most social movements’ (p. 7). In sum, the TAC’s purpose was to ensure the delivery of treatment to all sufferers and it used the organisation, expertise (legal and medical) and tactics to do so within the parameters set out by the state for a legitimate organisation of civil society. In the words of one of its leaders, ‘we want to get medicine to people – we do not want to cause a revolution’ (p. 10). As such, the TAC operated clearly within civil society, and combined features of both a social movement and an NGO, as it provided important services to its members (p. 40). For this reason it has been described ‘as a civil society organisation which seeks to make gains by mobilising grassroots people as well as by using the constitutional system’ (p. 38). The success of the TAC has been put down precisely to these tactics of combining ‘a rights based approach as well as grassroots mobilisation’ (equated in the literature with ‘politics’) (Robins, 2004: 671). For Robins, it is the TAC’s counterposing of (working-)‘class politics’ to the politics of nationalism followed by the state that lies at the root of its success. ‘Class politics’ here seems to mean mobilisation ‘within working-class black communities and the trade union movement’ (p. 663), a very strange understanding, as if ‘ethnic’ or ‘communitarian’ politics did not also mobilise within the same social sectors. To say that the TAC’s success vis-à-vis the government can be put down to its participation ‘in a class-based politics that departed significantly from the cultural nationalist/identity politics promoted by the new ruling elite of Mbeki and Mokaba’ (p. 664) is quite simply a spurious argument, harking back to the crude ‘workerist’ versus ‘populist’ slogans of the 1980s.8 Apart from the fact that the TAC offered hope to sufferers, which the government did not, the fundamental reason for its success was arguably that it never challenged elite conceptions of politics or elite interests, and was concurrently able to exercise pressure on the ANC and government by mobilising its own (interest) constituency. In particular, the TAC had massive support from a sustained anti-government campaign in the media (especially the print media and radio) on the causes of HIV/AIDS.

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Moreover, the TAC never contradicted or opposed the world medical establishment – ‘a highly organised and connected “community” of scientists, health professionals, and civil society organisations who contested the dissident line’ upheld by the government (Robins, 2004: 657) – but rather relied on, and thus reinforced, the established positions and power of the biomedical scientific model. Whereas in the United States AIDS activists directly challenged the production of scientific knowledge on the matter (Epstein, 1996), this type of challenge was never advocated by the TAC but only by the South African government. In this respect, it was the TAC that was consistently on the side of ‘world opinion’ and power, and the government that was at odds with it (Vandormael, 2007a, 2007b). The TAC’s challenge to the drug manufacturers in court did not fundamentally impact on the ‘biomedical industrial complex’ (to paraphrase Herbert Marcuse), as the transnational corporations could not mobilise support on an issue which quite evidently put profit before people’s lives in a very public way (p. 664). Despite its numerous successes, this constituted the main problem with the TAC, namely a tragic failure to criticise the biomedical model in order to enable a genuine popular politics and self-help, beyond advocacy for the delivery of medication. There is an indication that some individuals may have understood this point: one doctor pointed out that ‘whereas anti-retroviral therapy can undoubtedly prolong lives, it can also become a conduit for the “medicalisation of poverty” and the creation of dependencies on medical experts and drugs’ (see Robins, 2004: 666, 669). Yet this issue did not seem to have influenced the workings of the organisation, nor was it the subject of systematic public debate. The constant reference by TAC activists to ‘accepted scientific expertise’ (e.g. Mbali, 2004: 326) failed to recognise, let alone contest, the political nature of the medical scientific establishment, and relied on the weight of medical authority to silence ‘dissidents’ and to argue and win its case.9 Yet surely one is entitled to look as well into alternatives and to be suspicious of Western medicine’s exclusive reliance on technology. This is even more so when HIV/AIDS treatment has to be provided to a population of poor people who often refuse to be tested for the disease, and who do not have the required levels of biomedical knowledge or, indeed, middle-class standards of life to always grasp the particularities of treatment. The South African government was not wrong to question the appropriateness of Western technology in tackling the disease, especially as the medical establishment was notorious in deploying frankly racist arguments  – for instance, regarding African male sexuality – in its accounts of the epidemic. In any case, as Fassin (2007) has shown, Mbeki’s heterodox views resonated among poor Black South Africans justly suspicious of colonial tropes.10 Unsurprisingly, serious scholarship (e.g. Sawers and Stillwagon, 2010) shows that there is no evidence to support the racist claims of the medical establishment concerning Black male sexuality.11 The political failure of the TAC was always its inability to develop a critical

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perspective towards the Western biomedical model and its uncritical valorisation of scientificity and liberalism. The problem with the state nationalism on which the government founded its discourse was its authoritarianism and arrogance, evidenced by the manner in which it went about imposing its views. The idea of insisting on the provision of vitamin cocktails was not in itself ‘quackery’ but can be sound medical practice for boosting the immune system, as was the encouragement of community vegetable gardens in poor areas to enable a healthy diet, although these are clearly not substitutes for drugs in the case of full-blown AIDS sufferers. A number of more technical issues were also involved. Taking antiretroviral drugs is not like taking aspirin, for they can only be administered at a certain level of development of the virus and they also presuppose a regular and substantial food diet which is not available to all.12 Moreover, they must be taken on a strictly observed and regular basis, which requires systematic and regular counselling. Additionally, patients cannot be put on alternative medication if they do not respond to treatment. Finally, general practitioners have to be trained to prescribe such medication and test whether the patient is responding appropriately. The consequences for popular-democratic politics of the TAC’s apparent victory over the government were arguably twofold. Firstly, the public debate was restricted to whether or not there should be provision of the drugs; in other words, the debate revolved exclusively around the provision of technology as the primary solution to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Secondly, while the possibility of a politics of agency for the people was enabled, it was restricted to an ‘active citizenship’ of ‘pressure politics’ (according to the TAC) representing the interests of sufferers and it remained squarely within the parameters of civil society – in other words, of state politics. Ultimately, only two forms of politics were thinkable from within TAC subjectivity: either passivity and reliance on experts, as people were now to wait for the ‘rolling out’ of drugs by government, or an active citizenship of ‘interest representation’ (or identity politics).13 This could not have been in greater conformity with state thinking, which fetishises expertise and scientism and thus either systematically disempowers people or restricts them to forming a single-issue ‘pressure group’. For the TAC, its fetishism of science tended to mean the marginalisation of the politics of sexuality, of control over one’s body, and of community initiatives from support groups for cooperative food cultivation, all of which could have enabled popular political self-activity, in favour of pressure and waiting for the cure to be delivered. These politics are the antithesis of the politics of the event of 1984–6 and of the People’s Power mode of politics, and are principally those of a reactive state subjectivity that is in essence simply mimetic. The politics of the TAC have been in all respects the politics of an NGO in civil society, a politics of interests, of identities, of place, not the politics of thinking the universal truth of emancipation and popular control.

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abahlali basemjondolo: exceeding the politics of civil society I have already had occasion to refer to Abahlali baseMjondolo in earlier parts of this book. This is a Durban-located movement of shack-dwellers which began in 2005 after a road blockade was organised by the local residents of Kennedy Road in response to the sale of a plot of land that had long been promised them by the local municipality for housing. The 19th March 2005 became an event when the shack-dwellers realised that if they did not take direct action, the promises of land and housing they had been given would never be fulfilled. The context in which this movement developed has been the disastrous housing policies of most South African municipal authorities, which have continued with the apartheid policy of removing the poor from inner-city areas to beyond the city and dumping them in environments where jobs, schools and amenities are scarce or non-existent. Given the high prices of central urban real estate, local municipalities are not particularly keen on upgrading the areas in which people live, and simply wish to remove the problem elsewhere. To force people to get out, the Durban municipality has cut all amenities, particularly electricity, and there are no sewerage facilities, little running water, and only about one toilet per thousand people. Yet, given the South African constitution’s mention of the right to housing and the social-democratic aspirations of many ANC politicians, it has been possible to contest this perspective, especially in Durban, with its long tradition of popular militancy.14 The following is a brief excerpt from an exchange between Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo and residents of Kennedy Road in Durban on 8 September 2005: It was put to Naidoo that this was the same as apartheid – black people were being pushed out of the city. It was put to Naidoo that this sounded like a slower and more considered version of Mugabe’s attack on the poor in Harare. Naidoo said that if people didn’t like it ‘they should go to the constitutional court’. This is, he observed, a democracy. He was told that people would rather block the roads than go to the court. Everyone knows that the courts are for the government and the rich. When the Kennedy Road 14 first appeared in court they chose to speak for themselves. Magistrate Asmal didn’t allow [them] to say one word. She just sent them back down to the cells (Khan and Pithouse, 2005: 3). Abahlali grew rapidly, and by November 2005 there were 14 settlements formally affiliated to it: ‘all of the 14 affiliated settlements were governed on a fully democratic basis, were holding weekly mass meetings and sending delegations, elected afresh each week, to weekly Abahlali meetings. Around 20,000 people had been actively mobilised by the movement in different ways and word of the movement had spread beyond the settlements in which there was regular formal participation’ (Pithouse,

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2006a: 39n). By the end of 2006 there were 34 settlements affiliated (R. Pithouse, pers. comm.). The kinds of action that Abahlali have been involved in have been innovative and have included ceremonies of ‘burying councillors’, mass demonstrations and marches, as well as the skilful use of the local media, which have been on the whole quite sympathetic. These actions have concerned the provision of housing, the upgrading of local conditions (including the provision of toilets), and protests against the contempt shown the people by local state officials and the violence of the police. In fact, Abahlali have asserted their right to think; as one of their number stressed: ‘We are not animals. We are human beings that feel and want nice things. We think. People must understand that we think’ (cit. Pithouse, 2006a: 37). The politics of Abahlali are resolutely independent of state subjectivity. This comes across clearly in Richard Pithouse’s account, which stresses that Abahlali did not simply demand ‘delivery’ by the state, but rather ‘the right to co-determine their future’ (p. 35). After intense discussions, they have decided to refrain from electoral politics in order to preserve the integrity, autonomy and reputation of their struggle [and it was] concluded that there is a difference between ‘party politics’ and ‘people’s politics’ and that the former, identified as a mechanism of elite control, will always seek to capture the latter, identified as a space for popular democracy ... The principled decision to keep a distance from what is widely seen as a mode of politics that has an inevitably corrupting influence on any attempt to keep a struggle grounded in truth, was key to the rapid building of a mass movement (Pithouse, 2006a: 32). Pithouse adds: ‘the commitment to keeping people’s politics autonomous from the corrupting influence of state power included a commitment by everyone who accepted elected office to place themselves last on the list when housing was won. This was a dramatic break with the politics of local patronage so typical of the ANC and SANCO [the South African National Civic Organisation]’ (Pithouse, 2006a: 32). In the words of S’bu Zikode, one of the leaders of the movement, ‘the struggle that started at Kennedy Road was the beginning of a new era ... This movement is a kind of social tool by which the community hopes to get quicker results. This has nothing to do with politics or parties. Our members are part of every political organisation you may think of. This is a non-[party] political movement’ (Zikode, 2006a: 3). The politics of the poor is an anti-party politics. Our politics is not to put someone in an office. Our politics is to put our people above that office. And when we have finished with one office we move on to the next office. Our politics is also not a politics of a few people who have learnt some fancy words and who expect everyone to follow them because they know these words. Our politics is

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a traditional home politics which is understood very well by all the old mamas and gogos [grannies] because it affects their lives and gives them a home. In this home everybody is important, everybody can speak and we look after each other and think about situation [sic] and plan our fight together ... the ... poor have no choice but to play a role in shaping and re-shaping this country into an anti-capitalist system. This is the task which the betrayal of our struggle and the struggles of our ancestors has given to us (Zikode, 2006b: 2–3). This politics, which Zikode and others refer to as a ‘living politics’ or a ‘living communism’, as opposed to a ‘party politics’ or ‘state politics’, is the guiding perspective of the movement (Zikode, 2009b). An axiom of equality is strictly adhered to, so that all people are treated the same: ‘There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal.’15 A person is thus a person wherever he or she may be found. Abahlali’s political independence extends to donors and NGO politics in general, with the result that the organisation survives on contributions from its members, and people work for it for nothing, as they have very little outside funding or none at all. Studies on the movement all concur that meetings are conducted democratically and that the leadership, which regularly reports back on its activities to its constituency, has the community’s full support (Bryant, 2006: 62).16 In the words of one leader, ‘When you lead people you don’t tell them what to do. You listen. The people tell you what to do’ (Zikode, cit. Pithouse, 2006a: 26). According to Pithouse (2006a: 46), the democratic nature of decision-making and accountability of leadership is not only born from ‘deeply valued ethical commitments’ but is also a necessity, as ‘there is no other way to build popular consent for a risky project amongst a hugely diverse group of vulnerable people with profound experiences of marginalisation and exploitation’. Over time Abahlali have developed a number of important political positions along with novel political categories. At the core of its politics is a principled independence from all forms of state and NGO politics, as well as an understanding of the affirmation of the universal truth of humanity. The following excerpts provide an eloquent summary of its thinking. Our politics starts by recognizing the humanity of every human being. We decided that we will no longer be good boys and girls that quietly wait for our humanity to be finally recognized one day. Voting has not worked for us. We have already taken our place on the land in the cities and we have held that ground. We have also decided to take our place in all the discussions and to take it right now. We take our place humbly because we know that we don’t have

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all the answers, that no one has all the answers. Our politics is about carefully working things out together, moving forward together. But although we take our place humbly we take it firmly. We do not allow the state to keep us quiet in the name of a future revolution that does not come. We do not allow the NGOs to keep us quiet in the name of a future socialism that they can’t build. We take our place as people who count the same as everyone else. Sometimes we take that place in the streets with teargas and the rubber bullets. Sometimes we take that place in the courts. Sometimes we take it on the radio. Tonight we take it here. Our politics starts from the places we have taken. We call it a living politics because it comes from the people and stays with the people. It is ours and it is part of our lives. We organize it in our own languages and in our own communities. It is the politics of our lives. It is made at home with what we have and it is made for us and by us. We are finished with being ladders for politicians to climb up over the people (Zikode, 2008). It was their ‘living politics’, members argue, that was the root cause of the police attack they suffered in late 2009. For it was this politics that undermined the basis of the patronage system which underpins local state politics outside civil society. The Kennedy Road settlement, like all other Abahlali baseMjondolo settlements, has embarked on living politics. This politics is living politics because it talks about the realities of our democracy – a democracy that serves the interests of a minority while the majority of our people continue to live and to die in inhuman conditions ... All of these efforts have been turned into party politics, politics from the top down, dirty politics, politics full of fear, threats, arrests and death ... The attack on our movement in Kennedy Road was planned at a very high political level. It was planned at a level that has the power to control the South African Police Services. It was planned at a level that can send warlords to destroy our movement. It was planned at a level that can use taxpayers’ money to sponsor buses to bring our attackers to court to try to render our comrades, who have been accused of murder, guilty before they go to trial, to demand that they must not be given bail and must be made to stay in Westville Prison even though no court has found them guilty of a crime. The reasons for the attack on our movement are simple. The politicians are trying to hide the truth of what has happened and what continues to happen. They are trying to blame those who were attacked (Zikode, 2009a). At the same time, they have clearly and coherently founded their politics on a fight against exclusion while simultaneously showing a sophisticated understanding of the fact that the Left, despite its much vaunted opposition to the state, ultimately deploys

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its politics within a statist practice. They also stress the continuity of their politics with the affirmations of the Freedom Charter; as a number of statements attest: Over the years it has been made clear that the cities are not for us, that the good schools are not for us and that even the most basic human needs like toilets, electricity, safety from fire and safety from crime are not to be met for us. When we ask for these things we are presented as being unreasonable, too demanding and even as a threat to society. If we were considered as people that did count, as an equal part of society, then it would be obvious that the real threat to our society is that we have to live in mud and fire without toilets, without electricity, without enough taps and without dignity ... But we have not only been sentenced to permanent physical exclusion from society and its cities, schools, electricity, refuse removal and sewerage systems. Our life sentence has also removed us from the discussions that take place in society. Everyone knows about the repression that we have faced from the state and now, also, from the ruling party. Everyone knows about the years of arrests and beatings that we suffered at the hands of the police and then the attack on our movement in the Kennedy Road settlement ... For us any leftism outside of the state that, just like the ruling party, wants followers and not comrades and which is determined to ruin any politics that it cannot rule is deeply regressive. We have always and will always resist its attempts to buy our loyalty just as we have always and will always resist all attempts by the state and the ruling party to buy our loyalty. We will also resist all attempts to intimidate us into giving up our autonomy. We will always defend our comrades when they are attacked. Our movement will always be owned by its members. We negotiate on many issues. Where we have to make compromises to go forward we sometimes do so. But on this issue there will never be any negotiation ... The movement insists that the people shall govern; this is what the famous Freedom Charter says. Abahlali holds on to that. The strength and the autonomy of the movement compels us all to strive for a just world, a world that is free, a world that is fair and a world that looks after all its creations. We remain convinced that the land and the wealth of this world must be shared fairly and equally. We remain convinced that every person in this world has the same right to contribute to all discussions and decision making about their own future. For us all to succeed we have to be humble but firm in what we believe is right. We have to resist all our jailers, be they in the state, the party or the regressive left, and to take our place as equals in all the discussions ... We hope South Africa will become one of the world’s caring countries. We hope that one day our society will be an inspiration rather than a shock to you. As Abahlali we have committed ourselves to achieving this goal. But right now we are serving a life sentence and fighting all those who

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are trying to keep us imprisoned in our poverty, all those who demand that we know our place – our place in the cities and our place in the discussions. We have recognised our own humanity and the power of our struggle to force the full recognition of our humanity. Therefore we remain determined to continue to refuse to know our place (Zikode and Nsibande, 2010). Abahlali have understood that the poor in South Africa do not have the right to rights, despite the fact that people living in poverty amount to at least half the population. Abahlali have also understood that, given their exclusion from politics, they need to think and deploy different forms of politics in order to affirm their members’ humanity. Clearly, the shack-dwellers in this movement do not want handouts or to be pushed around and patronised. They want to be listened to, to be taken seriously. They have tried to make the liberal-democratic system work, but they have been systematically betrayed and let down by their local representatives. They have therefore decided to operate beyond the state domain of politics, including its civil society, by rejecting their own councillors as well as municipal and local elections more generally, along with the state celebrations of ‘Freedom Day’, asserting that there is no freedom for the poor and thus mourning what they name ‘UnFreedom Day’ instead. In their political practice they have insisted on a steadfast principled distance from state politics, which they see as totally corrupt, and they also insist on maintaining an axiom of equality. As Selmeczi (2012) correctly points out, we have here an evident process of subjectivation – of political becoming – whereby the politics of interest are clearly transcended. Even when they set up new branches, they refuse to see themselves as substituting for popular self-activity. Zikode (2011a) is absolutely clear on this: When Abahlali launch a new branch we promote independence and empower communities. We insist that, the movement will not struggle for its members but that it will struggle with its members. Our Executive Committee or office will not do anything for communities but it will always respond to a request to struggle with them. Whether there is an eviction, threats, protest or even negotiations with the state. We are clear that the role of the movement is to support each community to struggle for itself. We are also clear that the struggle is not in our offices but in the communities. The office exists to support the communities not the other way around. That is why an individual may not cope on his or her own. Each branch and each community needs others to support their course. One depends on the other. As each grows stronger we all grow stronger. Here we say ‘talk to us and not for us’ and we say there is ‘nothing for us without us’. They affirm through their actions that they exist; it is this, more than any specific demands, that situates them within the parameters of a politics faithful to the

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emancipatory event of the mid-1980s and not within an identity politics (even though they sometimes refer to their politics as a ‘politics of the poor’). That such forceful insistence is deployed has given rise to new conceptual inventions, such as the categories of ‘living politics and ‘living communism’, which are explained as follows: A living politics is not a politics that requires a formal education – a living politics is a politics that is easily understood because it arises from our daily lives and the daily challenges we face. It is a politics that every ordinary person can understand. It is a politics that knows that we have no water but that in fact we all deserve water. It is a politics that everyone must have electricity because it is required by our lives. That understanding – that there are no toilets but that in fact there should be toilets – is a living politics. It is not complicated; it does not require big books to find the information. It doesn’t have a hidden agenda – it is a politics of living that is just founded only on the nature of living. Every person can understand these kinds of demands and every person has to recognise that these demands are legitimate ... a living communism is a living idea and a living practice of ordinary people. The idea is the full and real equality of everyone without exception (Zikode, 2009b). More recently, Zikode (speaking in public in May 2011) has explicitly stated: ‘A living politics is the movement out of the places where oppression has assigned those who do not count.’ In these kinds of statements we see precisely outlined, in a specific situation, a politics of equality which Badiou refers to as the ‘Idea of communism’. There is, of course, no guarantee that these politics will be sustained, nor indeed that the movement will be able to sustain itself in the face of the state onslaught and the offers of help and funds from the donor and NGO sector.17 We should also resist the temptation to idealise Abahlali. Yet at present this movement offers a clear indication of what fidelity to the event of 1984–6 can look like. It is therefore, in Badiou’s words, producing a truth. What this truth amounts to is that emancipatory politics can no longer be understood as state-led, despite the central presence of the state in the field of politics. In comparing the TAC and Abahlali during the first decade of the new century, we are confronted with two forms of politics, the former ‘of civil society’ and fundamentally embodied within state politics: the latter at a principled distance from the state and its politics. The former simply ‘reflects’ interest in consciousness (as in ‘identity politics’); its politics are simply expressive of place; and its relation to the politics of the 1980s is purely mimetic and illustrative of NGO politics in the country. The latter amounts to a systematic process of subjectivation, which transcends interests and exceeds place. It was as a result of engaging in state politics that the TAC was able to successfully pressure the government to set out a programme of delivering

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medication to HIV/AIDS sufferers. This success, as I have argued, flowed from the overwhelming power of the coalition of conservative forces arrayed behind the TAC as well as from its ability to mobilise large numbers of poor people desperate for treatment. Yet it has been achieved at the expense of the thought of emancipatory politics; through a ‘biopolitics’, life has been extended, with the necessary result of either an ultimate passivity in the face of power or an ‘active citizenship’ remaining within the parameters of state politics. Mass mobilisation was turned on and off tactically like a tap, much as it had been in the late 1980s after the emancipatory sequence of 1984–6 had faded through saturation, according to the dictates of a national leadership that saw itself as acting in the greater good (see Cronin, 1992; Neocosmos, 1999b). Of course, this may have provided the members of TAC with the ability to overcome their position as victims; yet it could not in itself move further beyond the state thinking of civil society and identities in order to transcend state thought and achieve a universal truth through the self-creation of a subject of politics. Only in this manner could an emancipatory thought begin to be deployed as an excess over the social divisions reproduced by state politics. An evaluation of social movements from an emancipatory perspective, then, cannot remain within the ultimately apolitical platitudes of the sociology of social movements, which concerns itself with debating ‘reformist’ versus ‘radical’, or ‘accommodationist’ versus ‘adversarial’, dichotomies. Such an evaluation should rather concern itself with whether movements are able to show an alternative future in the present, a possible in the extant, as Lazarus would say – in other words, whether the politics of interest can be superseded by a universal politics of equality. What is possible can be understood as of the order of what exists today. In this sense, Abahlali may not have yet succeeded in acquiring proper housing for all their members, but they have been successful at something arguably much more important: in asserting that the poor count and cannot be ignored, and are capable on their own of theorising the basis of an emancipatory politics independent of the state and its bureaucratic managerialism. This is an indication of political excess, i.e. of a move in thought beyond the given of social place. Theirs is not an identity politics, although it has clearly been difficult to sustain such a politics in the face of often violent opposition. They have rediscovered the truth that any politics worthy of the name is for all and not only for some. They have been able to assert, in the words of the Freedom Charter, that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’.

concluding remarks I have been concerned here to conclude my outline of the sequential methodology necessary for the understanding of emancipatory politics in Africa. In so doing, I have argued against the liberal notion of civil society as the site of an alternative politics

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and have been concerned instead to show that civil society is in actual fact today a domain of state politics. In order to recognise an emancipatory politics, if it is indeed in existence, it is not sufficient to merely reproduce the sociological methodologies of the study of social movements. These are invariably thought as reflections of interests and thus understood in terms of statist conceptions of politics. Alternative politics that hold the possibility of containing emancipatory thought have to be sought out in sites beyond civil society, at its margins or in excess of it, so to speak. The possibility of the impossible can only be sought among those who have been totally excluded from state politics – the ‘part of no part’, in Rancière’s formulation – including from civil society, as the young Marx recognised long ago when he referred to the working class in 19th-century Europe as ‘a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society’ (Marx, 1844: 186). I have also outlined in some detail the dominant feature of what I have termed the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics, which in Africa was limited by its fundamental assumption regarding the statist nature of liberation politics. This is a view we first encountered in the analysis of Fanon’s thought of national consciousness in chapter 4. The limits of that mode are constituted, on the one hand, by its conception of class or the people, from which a specific politics is said to be derived, and, on the other hand, from its insistence on the party (or national movement) as the collective political subject, the latter being seen as ‘representing’ the former. This thinking can only lead to a conception of the state as the sole domain of politics. I have shown that the sequence 1984–6 in South Africa was an event for politics on the African continent  – an event of people’s power  – as it provided a critique in consciousness and practice of the subjective limits of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics, hitherto the major point of reference for all African liberation movements, including the ANC. The ideas of the party and of the capture of state power in particular were absent from the new mode of politics that developed during this sequence; it is for this reason that this mode can be named – as it named itself – the People’s Power mode of politics. Along with others in different parts of the world (e.g. the Zapatistas in Mexico), this mode provides a new experiment in emancipatory politics for the 21st century. The reasons why the trace of this event can be transformed into a truth relate to the ability of working people to assert themselves independently on the political stage, by constituting at a distance from the state a subjective politics whose object is not the attainment of state power, but the changing of conditions of life. In this sense that event has been truly revolutionary. For this event to acquire the status of a truth, according to Badiou, fidelity to it must be sustained in the face of all opposition. It seems to me that by asserting that they count, by screaming ‘We exist! We think!’ and by steadfastly maintaining their subjective distance from all forms of state politics, Abahlali have come the closest today to an understanding of this truth and, unlike other well-known social movements in the

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country, have managed to keep their distance from the politics of civil society and its NGOs through a self-generated process of political subjectivation. In doing so, they have fully understood the oppressive character of identity politics and shown their principled fidelity in practice to the Freedom Charter: We are against all forms of discrimination. We are against discrimination by Indian people towards African people and we are against discrimination by African people towards Indian people. We are against all corruption. It makes no difference to us whether Shauwn Mpisane or Jay Singh is doing the corruption. We are against all repression. It has never made any difference to us whether the name of the person who is repressing us is Nayager or Mnganga. We are against all concentrations of land, wealth and power. It makes no difference to us whether we are struggling against Ricky Govender or Mzi Ngiba. We stand for a fair distribution of wealth, land and power. We stand for the right to the city for everyone. It makes no difference to us whether a poor person is Indian, African or any other race. A neighbour is a neighbour. A comrade is a comrade. An oppressor is an oppressor. That is our politic [sic]. The rich will always try to divide the poor to make us weak. The rich will always try to mobilise us for their own agendas. We will stand firm against the politic [sic] of division. A person is a person where ever they find themselves. South Africa belongs to all who live in it (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2014a). We now need to turn to an analysis of how the methodology employed in this first part of the book may be utilised to analyse the state itself, along with the kinds of politics which people are deploying themselves to confront state oppression in Africa today.

notes 1. Apparently USAID refers to the old South African ‘struggle NGOs’ as civil society organisation (CSOs) which it funds to ‘function as effective policy advocacy groups’ and ‘to lobby’ (Manji and O’Coill, 2002: 14). Of course, government funds its own NGOs too; see Swilling and Russell (2002). 2. At least this is true of environmentalism and feminism, along with the ‘old’ trade union movement. 3. The predominant character of Western sociology – including that of social movements – has been its systematic evacuation of political subjectivity from its accounts. This trend has not been equally predominant among the analyses emanating from the South, where social analyses have been more conditioned by popular politics. On Africa, see, for example, Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1995), Romdhane and Moyo (2002); on India, see Rao (2004) and various issues of Subaltern Studies.

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4. The main texts here are Ballard et al. (2006), Jones and Stokke (2005) and Robins (2008), as well as the various publications emanating from the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 5. See here Badiou’s discussion around the issue of euthanasia (2001), as well as his discussion of the centrality of bodies and languages in what he calls the ‘democratic materialism’ of the ‘capitalo-parliamentary’ system (Badiou, 2006a). 6. This comparison is restricted to this sequence, as the politics of both organisations arguably altered after this date. 7. This leadership emanated from the so-called Trotskyist ‘Workers Revolutionary Tendency’ of the ANC, members of whom had been expelled from the organisation in the 1980s; for a discussion, see Friedman (2012). 8. For a discussion of this debate, see chapter 8 below. 9. Slavoj Žižek has noted that in today’s world, science as an ideological institution functions to provide certainty; he cites John Gray: ‘Science alone has the power to silence heretics. Today it is the only institution that can claim authority. Like the Church in the past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalize, independent thinkers ... For us, science is a refuge from uncertainties, promising – and in some measure delivering – the miracle of freedom from thought’ (John Gray, Straw Dogs, cit. Žižek, 2008: 69). 10. An African nationalist perspective is crucially important in this respect, as Western medicine has been found wanting on numerous occasions, whether in the debate about bottle feeding or the use of thalidomide and Depo-Provera, all of which were justified with the use of scientific arguments. 11. I am grateful to Richard Pithouse for this reference. 12. During Mbeki’s second term, a debate raged among experts as to whether treatment should be provided at a CD4 count of below 200 or not. The ‘CD4 count’ measures the antibodies produced against the viral load. Even more importantly, Mbeki was convinced by the evidence of the toxic side-effects of antiretrovirals, which, while true, was in itself not sufficient to justify a total ban on their use. 13. It is the latter concept of activism around interest that is discussed in the important sociological analysis provided by Mark Hunter; see Hunter (2010: 210–18). What is interesting to note is that the rest of state health provisioning in South Africa is in a total shambles; the health sector and ‘health delivery’ in general were not improved as a result of the ‘rolling out’ of antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS sufferers. 14. There is a growing literature on Abahlali, and they have their own website: www. abahlali.org. An introduction to the history of Abahlali with very useful links concerning the movement can be found at http://www.metamute.org/en/A-ShortHistory-of-Abahlali-baseMjondolo. See also the publications of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and, in particular, their Research Reports 40–3 of 2006. I rely here particularly on the detailed arguments in the important report by Pithouse (2006a), which contains a full discussion and evaluation of the movement.

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15. All the appropriate statements (including this one, ‘Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg’, 21/05/2008) and other documents concerning Abahlali can be found on their excellent website. 16. There is evidence of strong continuity between many of the democratic practices of Abahlali and those of the People’s Power mode of politics of the 1980s, including report-backs and democratic decision-making. Pithouse notes that ‘Abahlali take the position that everyone in the settlement is from the settlement and so meetings are absolutely open to all adults independent of age, place of origin, ethnicity, degree of poverty, time spent in the settlement and gender’, although he stresses that, in practice, mothers with small children are politically disadvantaged due to the absence of crèches (Pithouse, 2006: 39n). 17. The aftermath of the events of October 2009, in which Abahlali were systematically attacked by the state and its agencies in one of its areas of mass support in Durban, shows how difficult it is to undertake a politics at a distance from the state in contemporary South Africa. The members of Abahlali were turned for a while into refugees in their own country, city and neighbourhoods, and a frankly political trial was engineered against a number of its members, the full causes of which have yet to be rigorously elucidated. The charges against its members were eventually dropped. See the various commentaries on these issues at www.abahlali.org.

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Part 2

OPENING UP THE THOUGHT OF POLITICS IN AFRICA TODAY: EXCEEDING THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGY – BEYOND REPRESENTATION

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. – Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845 (emphasis in original  ) History does not contain within itself a solution to the problems it places on the agenda. However brilliant and memorable the historical riots in the Arab World, they finally came up against universal problems of politics that had remained unresolved in the previous period ... at the core of which is ... that of organization.

– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (emphasis in original, translation modified) To say that politics is of the order of thought is an attempt to conceive of politics after the end of classism and within another space than that of the state; but first and foremost, it is to say that politics is not given in the space of an object, be it that of the ‘state’ or that of ‘revolution’ ... The enterprise of conceiving politics from elsewhere than from the state or from the economy is an enterprise of freedom and of a domain proper to decision.

– Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation) The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face.

– Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, 1987

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Chapter 9

Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions In the dominant conceptions whether liberal or influenced by Marxism (marxisante) and also fascist, politics is in fact abolished. Neither the idea of class nor that of free opinion can deal with it. The complex of the state and the economy occupies the whole of the visible.

– Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 1985 (my translation) Sociological demystification ... produces this result: it recasts the arbitrary as necessity.

– Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 2004 Any [emancipatory] politics is constructed by what it affirms and proposes and not by what it negates or rejects.

– Alain Badiou, ‘L’Impuissance contemporaine’, 2014 (my translation)

thinking beyond sociology: the dialectic of politics For the discipline of sociology, it is the social that is said to determine consciousness or subjectivity. This is manifested in culture, which is determined both internally (socialisation) and externally (social constraints). In this manner both structure and agency determine consciousness (e.g. as indicated by types of social action in the work of Max Weber). There is no freedom to think outside the social except in utopias, which are precisely disconnected from social reality. The social is thereby naturalised. As a result there is no room for thinking emancipatory politics, as there is no room for excessive thought. This way of reasoning results directly from the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, which insisted on the social (i.e. the centrality of difference and the ownership of property) as the foundation of life and human freedom (e.g. in the writings of Edmund Burke) as opposed to the idea of natural equality

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(in Locke and Rousseau), which was understood as only subsequently altered in the social. This conservative idea and its admixture with empiricism, the equally conservative nature of which I have already noted, provide the foundation of academic sociology, especially in the Anglophone world. The insistence on the social itself as the core of life implies prioritising both representation over thought and social objectivism over political choice. To think the excess in emancipatory politics is to think beyond the social; it is to tear oneself away from the habitual in order to think universal humanity. For sociology, the habitual culture  – in the sense of a socially ingrained transgenerational subjectivity that is largely unchanged in its essence – is the sole determinant of consciousness, with the result that change is only understandable as the evolution of that culture itself under its own propulsion or under external impact. This is true whether we see subjectivities as determined by social relations (Althusserian Marxism), power relations (Foucault), gender relations (some forms of feminism), identities or whatever other social relations we can think of. Thus, sociology is invariably historicist: ‘structural differentiation’ (as an effect of increasing population density) for Durkheim, ‘rationalisation’ for Weber, ‘development of the productive forces’ for economistic Marxism, unravelling of contradictions for other versions. These are not simply 19th-century notions derived from optimistic conceptions of progress and development, but are inherent in the concept of the social itself, which is antithetical to the exercise of reason or excessive thought, for it limits subjectivity exclusively to that which exists. Thus it is not only the conflation of history with time that disables all thought of emancipation; it is also a sociology that limits all thought of politics to the state which does this, for the state is the enabler and defender of that which exists – the extant. ‘Freedom of choice’, then, can only exist within the parameters already established by the social; the exceeding of these parameters can only be comprehended through external impact, not from within the social itself. The regular state reference to ‘agitators’ in order to account for the rebellion of the excluded is only the crudest expression of this form of reasoning. The structure–agency dichotomy so dear to sociology is a spurious vision because sociology is unable to think political agency outside representations of the social. Badiou is absolutely right to insist that the only things visible in the modern world are the state (hence society) and the economy. To restrict the thought of subjectivity to society is to think from within state subjectivities, even though popular agency may contribute to it in various ways. We are constantly told that we are social beings as opposed to isolated individuals – the former is endemic in Africa, given the nationalist dislike of Western individualism  – but while this is true, we cannot conflate sociality (living together) with the all-determining social as if there is no way of exceeding – either individually or collectively – this sociality (this particular form of living together). We cannot conflate living in community with unchanging place in community. Moreover, politics is not reducible to mere collective agency or simply

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to rebellion against the consensus. The point is that if we wish to consider humans as endowed with reason – as capable of thought – we must allow for thought beyond social place without collapsing into utopia. This is what emancipatory politics consists of: a collective thought-practice.1 Furthermore, as Badiou (2011e: 20) insists, ‘it is the affirmative capacity, the real construction of organised political sites which is primary, and not critique and destruction’; after all ‘critique’ may merely replace one opinion by another in the absence of the truth of universal principles. Following Lazarus, three fundamental conceptions have to be put forward at this point: firstly, there are or can be multiple sites of politics, especially subjective sites beyond the state; secondly, emancipatory politics concerns popular-democratic (egalitarian) prescriptions on the state from within such sites; and, finally, of course, an organisation of activists is required, but this cannot be a state organisation such as a party, as the state/party is not concerned with (popular) politics and it suffocates all political prescriptions. Rather, this must be a different kind of political organisation, which is consistently egalitarian in its practices and which thereby enables the development of democratic political prescriptions on the state. Prescriptions differ from demands in that they are designed to apply to all and thereby have a universal appeal, whereas demands tend to refer exclusively to a particular group and tend therefore to be tied to interest. Sites of emancipatory politics in Africa have included in the past the factory or place of work (which is not to be conceived simply as a place for producing commodities), ‘traditional’ and popular institutions such as the ‘palaver’, village assemblies, the sovereign national conferences in several Francophone African countries in the early 1990s (all mentioned in Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994), as well as educational institutions, neighbourhood groups, social movements, churches, and so on  – in sum, all collective locations in which the possibility of an emancipatory politics has arisen in people’s thought. In fact, a site can be not only any location where people affirm their humanity through becoming a collective which grasps an Idea, but also a prescriptive location. Hence, it is a singular place where a singular politics comes to exist by means of specific prescriptions – sites are therefore fundamentally subjective spaces from which political prescriptions emanate. Clearly, such sites do not always exist, as emancipatory politics are not always present in them. For example, what were known as street committees, area committees and trade union locals were all sites of emancipatory politics in the townships of South Africa of the 1980s, but this is no longer the case.2 They have either disappeared as political sites altogether or have been incorporated into the state domain of politics, which amounts to the same thing. Parties, on the other hand, incarnate a state project of one form or another, as they propose the state as the exclusive reference of political subjectivity. Currently these are not sites of emancipatory politics in Africa; this means that extending the number of parties in existence (from single to multipartyism, for example) does not,

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in itself, enable the development of emancipatory politics on the continent (Wambadia-Wamba, 1994: 258–9). While possible sites of politics can be found wherever subjectivation occurs, emancipatory politics can only begin to exist when democratic or egalitarian prescriptions on the state emanate from such sites. Democratic political prescriptions are possible only when one distances oneself politically from the state and adheres to a set of principles that make that distancing possible; after all, state politics are rarely founded on principles but overwhelmingly express interests. This idea corresponds to the possibility of a politics of excess beyond the thinking of state and civil society (or any other domain of politics) and fundamentally as a distinctly political-subjective site. It must be stressed that ‘one can prescribe to the state only on condition of being independent of it, by placing oneself precisely in a political position clearly distinct and separate from it’ (La Distance politique, 14, July 1995, p. 9, my translation). ‘Distance’ refers here to subjective political distance rather than to structural or occupational distance, although they are by no means unconnected. This signifies in particular that a democratic political practice must be clearly distinct from a state practice. Democracy here no longer refers to a set of state institutions but to a popular politics of equality (Rancière, 2005). Emancipatory politics can only be thought in their doing; they are thought in action. They are a singular practice that dies as soon as they are thought exclusively in relation to referents external to them. If this is so, then, although there is a thought of such politics, it is exclusively singular. In other words, there can be no thought of politics in general. Lazarus attempts to grasp this idea by stressing that ‘politics is an unnameable name’, i.e. that there is no politics in general (1996: 161). As soon as one tries to think of (or name) politics in general, one undermines its singularity by attaching it to external referents, so that politics is no longer thought in terms of itself exclusively and emancipation cannot be grasped in its internal uniqueness. However, Lazarus’s arguments assume that politics is either purely thought excessively or not; it is conceived in his language either ‘in interiority’ or ‘in exteriority’. I have argued throughout this book that the excessive purity of emancipatory thought is largely impossible, and it is rather an expressive–excessive dialectic that must be understood as governing the thought of emancipatory politics. This means that one can indeed discuss the thought of politics; in doing so one is thinking the thought of politics and not politics as such. The thought of the thought of politics is a philosophy, for philosophy is the thought of thought. Badiou’s thought is (among other things) a thought of the thought of politics. Because it is a theory of change that begins from an aleatory event and the subjectivities that arise as possible effects of such an event, it is a theory of subjective choices, of political choices in this instance. It helps us think politics as a series of (collective) choices. One can choose whether to show fidelity to an event or to

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allow oneself to be taken over purely by the socially given, by reactive or obscure subjectivities. It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing Badiou’s thought as concerning politics, but no philosophy can do that, for it remains at the level of thinking politics in general (thinking the thought of politics) independently of the singularity that alone gives politics its full meaning. Bosteels’s otherwise brilliant book, Badiou and Politics (2011), displays a misleading title, for it does not concern (for the most part) Badiou and politics (an analysis of political practice in Badiou’s various political engagements) but Badiou’s thought of politics. The blurb on the jacket accurately notes that the task of theory is ‘to define a conceptual space for thinking emancipatory politics in the present’. This amounts to an accurate rendition of what Badiou proposes: the ability to think the thought of politics. The point is extremely important – and Badiou himself stresses the need to distinguish philosophy from politics, one of philosophy’s conditions; otherwise, the specificity of any politics is lost and collapsed into philosophical abstractions from which it has to break free. This is the point also made emphatically by Balso (2010: 31, emphasis in original). We must, she says, identify politics as an absolutely singular thought, one wholly internal to the organized process of politics itself; abandoning the dispositif which consists in asking philosophy questions which only politics can answer; ceasing to think that it is possible to proceed from philosophy (or science) to politics. Above all ceasing to require from philosophy that it provide new foundations or a completed form for politics or that it serve as a palliative for the seeming absence or weakness of politics. The two quite distinct issues identified here concern, firstly, the question of how to know that (emancipatory) politics exists (for it doesn’t always exist), how to recognise it and evaluate it; and, secondly, the specificity of the unique concepts and categories that may be deployed in a singular politics. Philosophy can answer the first question but never the second, and this is indeed what Badiou does. As I have argued, we can maintain, following Badiou, that emancipatory politics only exist when subjectivity exceeds the social in one form or another, but this, although necessary, is not sufficient for a thought of politics. In the Lacanian perspective which Badiou (2011e: 13) follows in this regard, whereas history is imaginary, politics is real, for it is a thought-practice; it concerns the demands and actions of people in the here and now and it is not a narrative of the more or less distant past. Therefore, unlike history, which is an imaginary narrative, politics is eminently real, for it is concerned with collective decisions. Furthermore, Badiou emphasises that an emancipatory politics cannot be reduced to ‘the invariants of the communist movement’, namely egalitarianism, mass democracy, the invention of new directives, and so

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on; ‘purely political novelties, the political subject in fact, is something else altogether’ (Badiou, 2014d: 210–11, my translation). Even though this mass movement is a necessity, he continues, emancipatory politics cannot be conflated with it. Politics in this sense requires an additional element, namely ‘declarations’ concerning the new which it proposes, for ‘all [emancipatory] politics is constructed by what it affirms and proposes and not by what it negates or rejects’ (p. 216). This requires a new language to become hegemonic within popular movements, much as Marxism had been during the 20th century (p. 217). Fundamentally, it is not destructive violence that is at the core of an emancipatory politics, but rather it is an ‘affirmative capacity, the real construction of organised political sites which is primary and not critique or destruction’ (Badiou, 2011e: 20, my translation). In this way, emancipatory politics require the transformation of the impossible into the possible and thereby an access to the real, for, as I have already noted, state politics do not preclude in themselves the notion of an active citizenship (Badiou, 2015: 32). Moreover, the practice of politics ‘is a singular activity, a journey which tears you away from your place and your social determinants ... In all cases one must accept the distance from the social that the political idea imposes in its practical vigour ... Politics must remain, for everyone, a very demanding activity but nevertheless unremunerated’ (Badiou and Kakogianni, 2015: 52). In order to further analyse the dialectic of politics, it helps to refer to the lecture Badiou gave at the Théâtre de la Commune at Aubervilliers in Paris on 11 April 2016.3 Here, Badiou enunciated four distinct criteria of evaluation of all popular movements in order to elucidate the existence of politics and the extent of their sustainability. These are: (1) The extent to which such a movement is opposed to private property and, of course, the character of the alternatives proposed – the idea that it is possible to organise collective life around something other than private property. (2) The extent to which this movement addresses the oppressive features of the capitalist division of labour (in production and elsewhere) and the manner this is confronted. Of particular note here is the division between intellectual and manual labour and the manner this is confronted and overcome. The division of labour is central not only to capitalism as such but also to the thought of the social within capitalism – the idea that the labour of conceptualisation is superior to that of its execution is a pathological belief. (3) Collective life can be organised other than with reference to identitarian forms of life. Identities exist, but politics must exist transversally to these identities – identities must coexist with internationalism. (4) It is possible for the state to disappear little by little; the free association of humans must replace law and coercion.

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These four ideas, Badiou insists, are not programmatic but necessary principles of evaluation of what is occurring regarding the conditions in which movements take place and their various forms of deployment of the idea of equality. Such an evaluation can only successfully take place from within an understanding of the concepts and categories deployed by the movement. In the absence of these four principles, it is indeed difficult to maintain that a new (i.e. an emancipatory) politics is being created. Indeed, Badiou suggests that the recent ‘Occupy’ movements in the West have concentrated exclusively on the fourth criterion, thus tending to isolate themselves from the rest of society. At the same time, Lazarus (1996) stresses that the categories of ‘historical sequence’ and ‘modes of politics’ are not appropriate for making sense of political practice in the act of doing. This requires different categories capable of thinking the real of the present. While, as historians, we may only be able to analyse politics after they have been deployed, Lazarus also argues that a particular kind of anthropology may be able to provide some of the tools for an elucidation of popular subjectivities as political practice occurs. It is in fact possible to grasp the categories of politics, along with the names to which they give rise, as they are indeed taking place. In order to do that, we must place ourselves at the point where the politically excluded are obliged to make sense of their oppression – the subjective space that Fanon (1990: 183) referred to as ‘the zone of occult instability where people dwell’. In particular, this means thinking beyond representation and resisting the temptation to force people’s subjectivities into predetermined social-scientific categories. This implies both a critique of the extant and the elucidation of an alternative to state categories, as well as the ability to understand what people think when they think. In actual fact, as suggested above by Badiou’s four criteria of evaluation, ‘a new political situation can only be understood from within its process ... information and ordinary opinion are not sufficient ... political novelty which is subjective cannot be grasped from outside when it is in the process of constituting itself ’ (Badiou, 2014d: 210). Finally, we also have to identify the singular categories that politics uses in each particular instance, an action that involves a process of naming, for there can be no understanding of politics by remaining at the general level as its categories are unique to each singularity or historical mode. If we restrict ourselves to simply speaking about politics in general, we end up effacing the specificity of political categories and collapse all politics into ‘the political’; in other words, into the state. In order to elucidate those specific categories empirically, Lazarus (2001b) argues that we must utilise a particular form of anthropological investigation, a ‘nominal anthropological methodology’, as used in South Africa (for example) by Hayem (2001, 2008, 2012). This methodology operates at the level of identifying terms and names whose meanings are frequently contested (‘problematic words’, for Lazarus) but that structure what is thought by people in any particular context. Such an investigation

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enables the identification not only of what is being thought but also of how it is being thought. This process of investigation is necessary but does not always uncover excessive thought, i.e. emancipatory politics, and is not itself political. However, the identification of such politics, Lazarus argues, cannot avoid passing through such a process. The problem is that political sparks erupt spasmodically in Africa today, as anywhere else, giving rise to massive enthusiasm when they do occur (e.g. the ‘Occupy movement’ in the United States, the ‘Indignados’ in Spain, Tahrir Square in Egypt and Taqsim Square in Turkey) and then fading rapidly away. As I have noted in Part 1, in South Africa the politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo, which provided a new mode of thinking in the middle of the 2000s, have faced severe state repression, with the result that this alternative universal perspective has difficulty sustaining itself.4 At Marikana in August 2012, as I shall show in chapter 11, signs of a new political subjectivity emerged, but for a very brief period. The existence of an emancipatory thought of politics is a rare occurrence indeed. In this part of the book, given the rarity of such political thought, I will perforce be obliged to spend more time on thinking state subjectivities. This procedure of identifying and naming can initially be understood more easily at the level of naming the state and its categories, and I shall begin from there, but the popular politics of naming is ultimately what counts. In chapter 12, I make a detailed argument for naming the state in Africa a ‘neo-colonial state’ rather than a ‘democratic state’; this, however, would only become potentially political should it be prescribed as part of a collective discourse and practice.

naming the state and its modes of rule In thinking politics as subjectivity, it is probably easier to begin from the subjectivities of the state; apart from any other reason, it is these subjectivities that need to be exceeded. Whereas the state has in the past been discussed in structuralist terms, most influentially in the Poulantzian vision of its representation of various ‘fractions’ of capital, this is not the only way the state can be analysed.5 In fact, from the perspective of those who experience both the oppressive and enabling features of state power it is apparent that different forms of state practices are in simultaneous use. Beginning from the structure of power is not the most appropriate way of proceeding if what we wish to uncover is the political choices the state makes or is forced to make. For some, and particularly for many in Africa, state politics understood as subjective choices differ according to the manner in which the state rules various sections of its population. The distinction drawn by Foucault between sovereignty and governmentality, and subsequently taken up by Partha Chatterjee, is important here, but this can and must be extended beyond its original formulations.

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In order to make a case for renaming what is usually called a democratic state in Africa a neo-colonial state, I expand on the ideas first introduced in chapter 7 and derived from Chatterjee (2004). Chatterjee, as we saw, distinguishes between two domains of politics structurally determined under colonial state rule: ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’. These he sees as subjectively distinct: the relations between state and people in each domain are thought and practised differently. I do not follow Chatterjee in the names he uses, nor do I adhere to his assumption of the exclusive structural determination of these domains, but I do follow his recognition of a plurality of domains of state politics. I suggest that we can identify in Africa three distinct domains of state politics  – ‘civil society’, ‘uncivil society’, and ‘traditional society’ – where such relations are thought and deployed fundamentally differently, albeit simultaneously, as the same domains are quite distinct but interrelated in various ways. Each domain of politics is regulated first of all by a particular mode of state rule; in other words, by a particular manner of ruling people. It is the state that determines the existence of these domains by ruling in different ways. For example, within the domain of civil society, the state establishes a rule of law more or less adhered to, a number of citizenship rights again more or less adhered to, a separation of powers, a culture of constitutionalism, an independent judiciary and mass media, and so on. Within this domain, relations between state, people and various organisations are structured by such thinking, so that the thought of politics revolves around the idea of citizenship, agency (active or passive citizenship), access to rights, the deployment of state violence as a last resort, and so on. In other words, people within this domain possess the ‘right to rights’ (Arendt, 1973) and, therefore, state rule is premised on this understanding. ‘Uncivil society’ differs in that, within this particular domain, the subjectivity of state rule is not governed by an assumption that people have the right to rights. Here the relations between state and people need not be founded on a recognition of people’s rights; such rights may or may not be recognised. Rights are here sometimes seen as an obstacle to the exercise of power and state rule. As a result, we find that state rule is based on the reproduction of patronage networks and the frequent deployment of violence, as a first rather than as a last resort. The organs of state (e.g. the repressive apparatus of the police) often act illegally; sometimes they are supported by the judiciary, sometimes not. Here politics is not debated in terms of citizenship rights but often has to be organised in response to official state or ‘strongmen’ violence. In other words, the hidden or not-so-hidden laws of political action differ fundamentally from those operative in civil society. However, it may be possible for people in uncivil society to take wrongs into civil society for examination – by a higher court, for example – but for this to happen they must be represented by trustees who will speak for them.

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In ‘traditional society’ the mode of state rule differs again. Not only is there no separation of powers here – Mamdani (1996a) refers to the traditional state power as a ‘clenched fist’ over the peasantry – but power relations are regulated by a modified or even an invented culture and tradition, for which the idea of human rights does not apply. Instead, it is rights and entitlements defined by such tradition and custom that regulate such relations. The powers of the state as represented by ‘traditional authorities’ (such as the chieftaincy) have been highly repressive in predominantly patriarchal systems, but, at the same time, it would be mistaken to restrict traditional society to such modes of rule. In fact, as I shall show in chapter 15, forms of resistance can utilise ‘traditionally derived’ subjectivities in order to propose a political practice that distances itself from the state. In fact, a concept of universality can be activated politically from within traditional society, for example; universality does not necessarily presuppose a European kind of ‘modernity’. Three points are important to note at this stage. Firstly, although these domains of politics are linked to social categories (in particular, to class and to the rural– urban distinction), they are not reducible to them. Civil society, while predominantly a middle-class domain, can also be applied to others; sections of the middle class can also be ruled within uncivil society or traditional society, while the latter is not uniquely a rural phenomenon. In other words, domains of politics and modes of rule are primarily subjective; they are not structurally determined and can be exceeded in thought. Secondly, in each case excessive politics differ and may be inspired by the politics of another domain as well as by an idea of the universal. For example, the Durban shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali, respond to the politics of violence and patronage in uncivil society by referring to the rights afforded in civil society, and by being inspired by the practices of traditional society regarding landownership, and are also able to subjectively transcend all three domains of state politics by insisting that ‘every person is a person’. Thirdly, to name the state a ‘democratic state’ would be to assume that only one domain of politics – civil society – existed. Of course, under authoritarian states the domain of civil society is small and restricted, but the point is to recognise that even under so-called democratic states civil society is not the sole domain where state politics may occur, for it does not define a unique mode of rule as do the notions of ‘the political’ or ‘the public sphere’, for example. The recognition of several domains or arenas of state politics implies the existence of several ‘public spheres’ along with several modes of rule. Another name for the state in Africa today must be found; as already noted, I shall propose in what follows the category of a neo-colonial state, but without reference to the influence of foreign economic interests (the traditional way of identifying the ‘neo-colonial’); such influence may or may not exist. Both the colonial and neo-colonial state forms must be understood methodologically in political and not in economic terms.

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from state modes of rule to the politics of prescription Politics is the thought of collective practice. All militant politics go beyond demands, organisation, strategies and tactics, but include them all. If one restricts oneself to identifying demands, one invariably sees them as reflecting interest, while strategy and tactics can simply refer (in military-type language) to a technical manner of achieving these demands. If it is to be emancipatory, at least potentially, politics must necessarily be founded upon principles that are collectively devised and adhered to; if these principles are to be sustained over time, politics must be organised; moreover, the relations between the political organisation and a mass movement that give content to an egalitarian or ‘communist’ politics must be established in a manner that is not one of domination and subjection. Such principles are usually expressed in prescriptions on the state, and in directives or statements that concretise collective decisions and express them publicly in simple formulae which anyone is capable of understanding: e.g. ‘all power to the soviets’, ‘free all political prisoners’, ‘the people shall govern’, ‘land to the tiller’. These directives are, of course, unique to the singular situation, yet they may still resonate long after that singularity is obsolete and saturated. In South Africa, during the People’s Power mode, the statement ‘The people shall govern’, which had been the main prescription of the Freedom Charter of 1955, served as a guide to political action and was understood by activists at the time in those terms precisely: ‘What has been preached in the past about the Freedom Charter, even now we are trying to do that practically’ (an Eastern Cape activist, Isizwe, 1, 2, March 1986). The statement ‘The people shall govern’ was thus not an abstract slogan divorced from reality; it was a fundamental expression of the reality of the situation. In fact, its political impact is still apparent today in the thought of Abahlali precisely because it was so fundamentally rooted within popular political subjectivity. Such directives or statements are the political equivalent of rhetorical state or market slogans which exhort one to purchase products for consumption – the systematic use of marketing agencies by the state to exhort people to support its policies is notorious. However, directives begin from an understanding of people not as unthinking zombies but as reasoning beings who are capable of thought and understanding, and hence who are collectively able to commit themselves to them through self-discipline. Thus far I have only really argued that politics exists when there is subjective excess, and have only tangentially noted its specific categories and names in particular modes (e.g. in the Human Freedom, the National Liberation Struggle, and the People’s Power modes, which I have identified historically). That Badiou helps us to recognise that particular subjectivity, known as the thought of politics, is crucially important, for until his work (and that of Rancière and Lazarus) that thought was unrecognisable for what it was. This was precisely because politics was thought to be a simple or

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complex expression of the objective, so that it became reduced to the state, to power or to history. Subjectivity was always determined by something else: social location, social relations, power relations, agency or whatever. Badiou’s philosophy is the only one I know of that enables us to think coherently a ‘politics of militancy’ (or politics as activism, as we would say in the Anglophone world). Sartrean voluntarism needed to be reconciled with Althusserian structuralism, and Badiou has managed to do that in a completely original manner. Badiou’s philosophy is in this sense an apparatus (dispositif) of recognition, first and foremost; and, I should add, a necessary apparatus of recognition without which the thought of politics becomes unthinkable in itself. Politics itself, on the other hand, is for Lazarus a ‘thought-relation of the real’ (1996: 113, my translation), an acting on the real, not an imaginary relation. For him, ‘there is no possibility of thought of the real outside a ... singular protocol of identification’ (p. 111, my translation). This protocol of identification is the prescriptive; it is the prescriptive process that opens up the question of ‘the possible’ which is totally unique or, in other words, singular to any specific political situation. The singularity of politics is outlined by Badiou as follows: A political situation is always singular; it is never repeated. Therefore political writings  – directives or commands  – are justified inasmuch as they inscribe, not a repetition, but, on the contrary, the unrepeatable. When the content of a political statement is a repetition, the statement is rhetorical and empty. It does not form part of thinking. On this basis one can distinguish between true political activists and politicians. True political activists announce an unrepeatable political possibility of a situation while a politician makes speeches based on the repetition of opinions. True political activists think a singular situation; politicians do not think ... Politics as thinking has no other objective than thinking; that is, no other objective than the transformation of unrepeatable situations – for in a thinking, there is no distinction between theory and practice (Badiou, 2003: 80–1, 83, emphasis in original). As I have noted, thinking the real of politics requires its own specific concepts, one of which is the notion of ‘prescription’. To sustain a politics at a distance from the state must be understood as prescriptive and not as descriptive of the real. What does prescribing to the state actually mean in practice? It is perhaps easiest to outline this with reference to some simple examples. To argue publicly and consistently that everyone must be treated equally by state laws and practices under conditions where this is evidently not the case is to make a democratic prescription on the state, according to this perspective. This is of particular relevance to the modern state, including in Africa, because this state systematically practises various forms of political exclusion in respect of large numbers of people living within its boundaries on the basis of gender,

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ethnicity and nationality as well as social class. Such an exclusionary state is bound to create violent political tensions. For the Organisation Politique, to which both Badiou and Lazarus belonged in the 2000s, ‘Any state which is founded on ethnic or communitarian distinctions, is a state producing civil tensions and war’ (La Distance politique, 14, July 1995, p. 9, my translation). Central to this politics was the need to uphold the prescription that the country is made up of ‘people from all walks of life’ (les gens de partout), and that no single individual or group should count for more or less than any other. This would be, in Badiou’s terms, an indication of fidelity to an axiom of equality. New categories and terms can be conceived to transcend such differences.6 Furthermore, it was argued that if this view were not consistently upheld, the door would be left open to various forms of state discrimination, with disastrous results (pp. 9–10).7 To make democratic prescriptions on the state is precisely to assert such a position, for example, from a multitude of sites where it is of relevance; in addition, ‘to make democratic prescriptions on the state ... is to view the latter [the state] not only as a juridical and formal structure but also as being the object of prescriptions’ (p. 10). In other words, the understanding that the state can be prescribed to has important results for politics.8 [In politics] there always exists an ensemble of possibilities more or less open depending on the issues, but rarely completely closed. It is here that what we call ‘prescriptions on the state’ can take root. To prescribe to the state is to assert as possible a different thing from what is said and done by the state ... our idea of democracy is to sustain point by point democratic prescriptions in relation to the state (La Distance politique, 14, July 1995, pp. 10–11, my translation, emphasis in original). Clearly, Lazarus’s argument is that alternatives and choices are possible and that it is imperative to force the state, from sites within society, to treat all people living within its boundaries equally and not to discriminate against some for whatever reason. Universal principles of equality must be maintained in opposition to the opportunistic politics of interest.9 This particular prescription seems difficult to maintain in today’s world when ethno-religious and national identities are so prevalent, yet something like it is fundamental to popular politics in the 21st century. In South Africa in the 1980s, the United Democratic Front’s directive ‘Apartheid divides, UDF unites’ and the Freedom Charter’s ‘The people shall govern’ were two clear prescriptions which it was possible to maintain successfully against a repressive state, to the extent that they were embodied in popular subjectivities. Today in Africa, the main bases for state exclusion are race, nationality and ethnicity, although other social divisions based on class, gender, age, sexuality, and

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rural–urban differences are also transformed into discriminatory distinctions by state laws, practices and ideologies. A politics ‘at a distance’ from the state is not necessarily ‘anti-state’, but is a principled politics that takes an affirmative universal position in respect of state political subjectivity. Such a politics develops as part of a process of self-affirmation or subjectivation, which differs in each case. Here we can also refer to the work of Rancière (e.g. 1995, 1999), for whom a politics of excess over the social enables the thinking of a process of subjectivation, while the traditional conception of politics as representative of social interests fails to enable the rational understanding of this process. For example, ‘politics does not happen because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effect of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity’ (Rancière, 1999: 35).10 The process of subjectivation is one that declares equality among participants. Yet, at the same time, sustaining this interruption requires militants, for it is they who bear out ‘the consequences of the maxim of equality to the full extent of its possibility ... Being a militant means to take on the trajectory, to redefine the limits, to draw improbable connections’ (Badiou, 2012d: 126). All this means sustaining the seemingly impossible in the face of adversity. In his explication of the idea of prescription in Badiou’s work, Hallward (2005: 770) remains within a philosophical discourse. For him, prescription is ‘first and foremost an anticipation of its subsequent power, a commitment to its consequences, a wager on its eventual strength’. It is fundamentally the divisive application of a universal axiom or principle that serves to demarcate a partisan position, with the result that ‘politics is the aspect of public life that falls under the consequences of a prescription’ (p. 773). In Badiou’s own terms, ‘It is never “the masses” nor the “movement” that as a whole carry the principle of the engenderment of the new, but that which in them divides itself from the old’ (Badiou, 1975, cit. Bosteels, 2011: 136). However, this new divisive invention must become a process, and in order to be sustained requires some form of organisation and clear directives that capture concisely what is to be done in the moment. Although Badiou is a vehement critic of the party form of organisation, one constant of his thought is the need for organisation in order for any political process to endure beyond a mass uprising or demonstration in which ‘movement communism’ is proclaimed (Badiou, 2011c; Bosteels, 2011). In Hallward’s account, however, we still remain within the thought of the thought of politics. In short, politics is not reducible to ‘the art of the possible’ in the usual sense. It is indifferent to interests and to their compromises, as a prescription is of universal character. Prescription implies freedom to make political choices; ‘without such freedom we cannot say that people make their own history; we can merely contemplate the forms of their constraint’ (Hallward, 2005: 781)  – precisely what a politics deduced from political economy has prescribed in the second half of the 20th century in Africa. In this manner, then, the tyranny of the objective can begin

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to be overcome. But there is more to the idea of prescription than a philosophical conception. More concretely, it materialises what Lazarus refers to as thought being ‘a relation of the real’ (2013: 105). What this awkward expression refers to is that a subjectivity that breaks through what is considered impossible within a certain context or situation, and affirms a new possibility, does so through a prescription on the limits of the real. A prescription, therefore, is both subjective and real, much like the politics it sustains. As we have seen, two such prescriptions were central to the subjectivities of African slaves and ex-slaves in Saint-Domingue/Haiti at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries: ‘it is possible for us to overcome our condition of slavery and to be free’ – expressed as libeté – and, later, ‘it is possible to replace the plantation system as a whole by parcels of land in order to ensure equality on the basis of family-based agriculture’ – égalité. It is also interesting to note the extent to which people themselves invent political prescriptions, which often take the form of sayings. The content of each of these two prescriptions was thought by people themselves against the dominant political subjectivities of the time, which could simply not conceive such notions. For example, the common Haitian aphorism ‘Tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun’ has been shown to be much more than a cultural proverb; it is a political prescription (Barthélemy, 2000: 292). Literally meaning ‘each person is a person even if they are not the same person’, the statement prescribes an idea of equality, as I showed in chapter 2. Abahlali’s statement to those in power, ‘Speak to us, not for us’, can likewise be understood as a political prescription. The point of politics is to understand how to deploy such prescriptions, as they will have to be sustained against opposition. In the chapters which follow, I insist that in order to understand the state in Africa, it is not sufficient to concentrate on its ideology (neo-liberalism, nationalism, Marxism or whatever). Rather, what counts from the viewpoint of people is how they are subjectively integrated into state expressive subjectivities, such as a politics of representation through class, nation or tradition, for instance, via modes of rule that deploy specific subjectivities backed by power and that are produced through consensus as well as coercion. The state in Africa has been uniformly repressive of its people, irrespective of its ideology. In chapter 10, I first turn to a long and detailed discussion of the notion of political representation, which forms one of the core concerns of this book. Given the centrality of Marxist discourse in the thought of the National Liberation Struggle mode, and its continued prevalence as a way of thinking alternative politics in (South) Africa, I spend time analysing the different ways in which some classics of Marxism – in particular, Marx, Lenin and Mao – understood class politics, and the manner in which they went about thinking them. It is important to stress, following the work of Lazarus, that these major thinkers held different conceptions of politics, and it is therefore mistaken to use the all-embracing term ‘Marxism’ (or ‘Marxism-Leninism’)

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to refer to a unity of all three (and others), certainly at the level of the thinking of politics. While Lenin and Mao both adhered to a conception of politics as representing class, theirs were positions that were far more sophisticated than any Marxism on offer today, in South Africa at least. Theirs were complex conceptions of politics that did not see it as crudely expressive of the social. For Lenin in particular, a ‘proletarian politics’ could not be deduced from the position of the working class in the social division of labour; while, for Mao, it was a notion of the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’, who – while internally differentiated politically – were the motive force of revolutionary history. I discuss Lenin’s politics at length in relation to the so-called agrarian question, which, I argue, was conceived by him as a political issue, not as one of political economy, as has become the norm today in academic Marxism; political economy was only of use to inform party politics. I show that Lenin, in laying the foundations for the thought of 20th-century revolutionary politics, differed from Marx in that he saw a party as the condition of proletarian class politics, while Marx had seen working-class consciousness as largely developing spontaneously from within the working-class movements of the 19th century. For Mao, yet another conception of class politics was developed for which the (internally differentiated and largely peasant) masses, and not the working class as such, constituted the motor of history. This again suggests a different understanding of political representation. The argument of the chapter then shifts to the political representation of the nation through a discussion of Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The shift is seamless, as representation itself is a state thought of politics. Representing class and representing nation were simply two different statist ways of thinking emancipation in the 20th century. The argument in the case of Tanzania is that the political formation of the nation-state was based on, inter alia, the exclusion of popular subjectivities which often exceeded the social limits of the conception of the nation adhered to by a leadership bent on nation-building from above. The party (Tanganyika African National Union, or TANU), which was said to represent the nation, closed off excessive popular subjectivities. Representation was therefore achieved at the cost of political exclusion. In the case of Zimbabwe, I analyse the vagaries of the political ‘agrarian question’ in that country and show that it is impossible to understand this question there through the prism of Marxist class categories. In particular, I argue that, despite being a movement for social justice of great importance, the ‘land reform movement’ in that country was not an emancipatory movement, nor can that process be understood as a ‘national democratic revolution’ by any stretch of the imagination. Class representation (classism in fact) does not work in this instance as a framework for understanding politics. Chapter 11 consists of a detailed discussion of attempts to clarify the meaning of working-class politics in South Africa. Beginning from the ‘optimistic’ view prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, which held to a short transition to socialism in that

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country because of its apparently large working class and rapidly proletarianising peasantry, the argument suggests that the inability to conceive politics in its own terms led directly to the privileging of trade union organisation in particular (supplemented by ‘new social movements’) in the thinking of a future emancipatory vision. The statisation of labour unions, consequent upon the loss of rank-and-file power, accounts for their failure to represent even the economic interests of workers adequately. In particular, I evaluate the ‘Marikana moment’ of 2012 as an example of a time when workers rebelled against unions, against parties, as well as against their employer in order to organise themselves independently around the demand for a wage increase. Contrary to dominant accounts, I argue that this was a revolt against the state itself and not a simple reflection of the capital–labour relation, a feature that largely accounts for the extremely violent state reaction to the mineworkers’ actions. The Marikana moment challenged the very mode of representation enforced by the state and drew out, for all to see, the systemic violence underlying the politics of a state that calls itself democratic but refuses to engage in dialogue with its own people. Using the categories developed by Lazarus, I suggest that the Marikana case implies the rise of a new ‘figure of the worker’ in South Africa, a subjective figure that seeks to think a politics independent of representation, a politics of simple presentation. Chapters 12 and 13 present a detailed analysis of the African state itself from a position beyond the state. To say that the state on the continent is no longer a national state ‘of the whole people’ and simply represents a small oligarchy is becoming more and more obvious, although not particularly novel. But this observation, while valid, is certainly not sufficient. In chapter 12, I first rename the state in a more analytically and politically useful manner than the way it currently names itself. The appellation ‘democracy’ is not a valid characterisation of the new state and this is so not because it has failed to progress far enough towards the Western ideal. Neither do I think it sufficient to characterise the African state as postcolonial or post-apartheid. The chapter therefore provides a detailed discussion of the name ‘democracy’ as applied to the state in Africa. The state in Africa could also be named ‘post-developmental’ or ‘post-national’, given that it is no longer able to think national emancipation and the national interest, yet there is still more to it than this. It is the fact that the state has been so systematically disconnected from the people it is supposed to govern which provides the core problem of the contradiction between state and people on the continent. In chapter 13, I show that it is possible to elucidate three different modes of state rule in Africa, which correspond to different domains of politics in which relations between the state and people (and, of course, between people themselves) are thought in specific ways: civil society, uncivil society and traditional society. In each case, any excessive politics will differ in form. In chapter 13, only the mode of rule in uncivil society is discussed. I argue that the deployment of violence by the state in uncivil society is systemic, and consequently political violence is largely seen in this domain

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as legitimate, with the result that any attempt at excessive politics has tended to focus on the peaceful resolution of contradictions and the principled opposition to patronage relations, a theme also taken up in chapter 15. Thus such politics can only take fundamentally different forms from those attempting to exceed the thought of citizenship within civil society. Given that systemic violence is at the core of state politics and that the state considers the majority of its people to be its enemy, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the state in Africa today is a neo-colonial one. Chapters 14 and 15 end the book with a discussion of the thought of politics within the domains of civil society and traditional society. The argument is outlined in such a way as to insist that the two are not to be understood as polar opposites – either historically or theoretically speaking – but as contemporary with each other. The politics of active citizenship as a way of thinking emancipation in civil society are analysed and deconstructed through practical cases in chapter 14 in relation to the work of T.H. Marshall, in particular. The dual character of human rights, comprising both ‘agency’ and ‘trusteeship’, is uncovered and elucidated at length. The discussion of the politics of civil society ends with an assessment of an attempt to introduce a culture of rights in practice. This occurred in a ‘democratic’ Malawi and sought to create a civil society of citizens through a neo-colonial (‘state-democratic’) development project. This process simply undermined local popular-democratic initiatives in favour of neo-colonial state oppression. I show that this outcome was not accidental, but the necessary effect of a state politics of human rights in a neo-colonial context. In chapter 15, the argument shifts to analysing traditional society as a domain of subjective state politics. Here the state rules through a discourse of culture and tradition modified and even invented for the purpose. After noting the ramifications of the contradictory manner in which many African nationalist politicians treated tradition in the 1950s and 1960s  – as both authentically African and divisive of the nation – the argument evaluates in detail the work of Mahmood Mamdani on the late colonial state and its use of tradition as a mode of rule. I argue that despite Mamdani’s important insights, his argument remains within a conception of political subjectivity as simply created by state policy and legislation. For him, not only is tradition simply despotic, but it is manipulated by the state to create reactionary ethnic identities. As I shall show, Mamdani’s political perspective does not allow for thinking the possibility, let alone the creation, of an excessive politics of emancipation from within the domain of traditional society. In contrast, I show that from within traditional society it is indeed possible to think an excessive subjectivity in the form of a politics of peace at a distance from the state. I argue this with reference to popular traditions in different African settings, which exhibit excessive subjective features to varying degrees. African traditional cultures, in constant flux, may thus allow for different ways of thinking emancipation, and may enable excessive thought precisely

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because they operate at one remove from liberal state thinking; they are therefore not uniformly oppressive of popular-democratic practices. I conclude Part 2 with a discussion of different feminist political positions regarding various forms of oppressive authoritarian tradition, and argue against uniformly imposing a politics of human rights on such forms. I show, rather, that genuine democratisation and the thought of emancipation can only come about through a politics of solidarity founded on listening to and taking one’s cue from what activists operating within traditional society themselves have to say about their struggles against its oppressive forms. The continuity of political prescriptions that emphasise the truth of a universal humanity is apparent throughout African history; these prescriptions must simply be reaffirmed. In this manner the book ends where it began, with stressing the idea that people think.

notes 1. I prefer the term ‘thought-practice’ to the more usual ‘praxis’ because the latter is associated with Sartrean existentialist philosophy for which the notion is founded on a psychology of the individual subject. Throughout this book I have considered the political subject as collective, not individual, and as produced, not given. 2. Trade union locals were committees of local shop stewards based in a township. They were originally set up to coordinate strike activity but were gradually extended into political organisations of workers’ representatives. See chapter 4. 3. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlAl5C9rGUY. 4. For the deaths of Abahlali activists in 2014, see http://abahlali.org/node/14311/ and http://abahlali.org/node/14472/. Recently, in Durban Abahlali have been organising joint activities with Congolese refugees, which indicates that their politics of humanity are still alive; see http://abahlali.org/node/14454/ and Zikode (2014), all accessed 28/11/2014. 5. See, in particular, Poulantzas (1975, 1978). 6. In the past, such political categories have, in different contexts, included ‘citizen’ (French Revolution), ‘comrade’ (associated with communist parties) and ‘ndugu’ (in post-independence Tanzania). These terms no longer have the equalising quality today which they once had. 7. I have argued this point at length in Neocosmos (2010a) with respect to xenophobia in South Africa. 8. Whether any state can be prescribed to at any time is, of course, debatable. It could be that all avenues for politics at a distance from the state seem closed in particular circumstances, but it is not at all clear in Lazarus’s thought whether this is to be understood as a result of the character of the state in question or the effect of an inability to think appropriate prescriptions. 9. This why Badiou maintains that the ‘Idea of communism’ is a universal to be found in all mass revolts: ‘Our hypothesis is as follows: all the successive great mass revolts

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of the exploited classes (slaves, peasants, workers) find their ideological expression in anti-property and anti-state egalitarian formulations which constitute the lineaments of a communist programme’ (Badiou and Balmès, 1976: 148, my translation). 10. Badiou and Rancière think the process of political subjectivation in different ways. For Rancière, the collective political subject is created through a process of ‘disturbance’ in the hierarchy of the ‘count of parts’; for Badiou, a subject is created only through fidelity to a political event and hence through the collective production of a truth. Perhaps the best discussion of this difference is by Badiou himself (2009e).

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Chapter 10

Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy  – class, nation and the party-state The most serious problem when it comes to dealing with the poor from above – from government, NGOs, universities, etc. – is the perception that we cannot think for ourselves. This problem has even led some individuals and other sectors of our society to think that it is their own job, a job that they must be paid for, to think, represent, speak and decide for the poor. – S’bu Zikode, ‘The Power of Organizing the Urban Poor’, 2013 [During May 1968] militant experiments ... in their will to leap over and circumvent systems of representation that produced or defined images of the worker for the middle class, show an acute awareness of the domain of representation as one of the determining factors of inequality. – Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 2002 In truth, the question of politics boils down to this: how to escape from representation. – Alain Badiou, Sarkozy, 2012 (my translation)

the ‘politics of political economy’ and the ‘agrarian question’ What has become known as the ‘agrarian question’ was a central concern for Marxism in thinking emancipation in the 20th century, because the relatively small proletariat, which was meant to be the subject of history in overwhelmingly rural countries such as Russia, China, Vietnam or Cuba, of necessity had to convince the masses of the rural poor in the countryside that ‘its’ revolutionary politics were also in the interest of the peasantry. The proletariat was thus seen by theory as ‘leading’ politically (i.e.

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subjectively) a much broader coalition of social forces than itself. Political activists and militants had therefore to understand the oppression of the peasantry as well as its reactions to such oppression. Other than the ‘national question’, which was directly concerned with the liberation of peoples (including minority nationalities) from colonial oppression, it was the ‘correct resolution’ of the ‘agrarian question’ that held the key to a successful ‘transition to socialism’; in fact, both the national and agrarian questions were often thought simultaneously in the context of what was eventually known as the Third World and its ‘development’. In Africa, that question was to be resolved through ‘rural development’ everywhere – in other words, by state action. With the possible exception of the Chinese experience, where mass political mobilisation was a central feature of agrarian change, the agrarian question was overwhelmingly thought as a question for state policy, not so much a question for politics. Given that this issue was treated in relation to an analysis of political economy – especially in Lenin’s work – it also influenced the Western academic study of rural relations in the discipline of development studies, because of the growing influence of Marxist political economy on radical alternative Western academic concerns from the 1970s onwards. It is in Lenin’s work that one finds the most detailed treatment of this question. Although not so fashionable today, given the dogmatic use which has been made of it, it is still of relevance if read critically. Lenin was the first Marxist theorist to develop systematically a theory of politics. He did this through a detailed critique of and unrelenting polemics against what he called ‘economism’, a theoretical position with political consequences. This position in general reduced politics to political-economic structures and, in particular, deduced political thought from the experience of workers in production. For Lenin, however, the thought of politics in the struggle against Russian autocracy had to revolve around the idea of creating the conditions for the deepest and most widespread forms of democracy in both state and society that would enable the clearest demarcation of a distinctive and unique ‘proletarian’ political position. Given that all other parties, which represented different bourgeois classes, had a tendency to compromise on democracy, thus allowing for the survival of remnants of the Tsarist system founded on feudal relations, Lenin argued that, as representatives of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks had to push democracy to its utmost limits. The greater and more extensive the democratic change, the better this would be for the proletariat and its emancipatory politics. Thus democracy was understood by him not simply as a form of state but also as reflected in particular policies. In developing the policies of the Russian Social Democrats in relation to the peasantry, Lenin was concerned to enunciate a specifically ‘proletarian’ perspective on their objective position in Russia and to found a party politics on it. In particular, he had to distinguish such a politics from all the other positions on offer at the time. I will argue here that the central arguments of Lenin’s work were not principally

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concerned to combat the politics of ‘populism’, as is often thought,1 but rather to critique the economic reductionist conceptions of vulgar Marxism by arguing that politics must be understood as subjectively excessive over the place of the working class in the social division of labour. This vulgar economistic Marxism still predominates on the Left in South Africa today. In order to rethink the relationship between political economy and politics, which has since Lenin provided the theoretical core of Marxism, I propose to use Lenin’s arguments on the agrarian question as a way of identifying the limits of what can be termed ‘the politics of political economy’. I will argue that in developing an understanding of politics in Africa today, we need to foreground a theory of politics and not derive politics from political economy. Even though Lenin’s thought of politics has been historically transcended, he did provide the most detailed theorisation of modern radical representative politics of the 20th century as well as the theoretical foundation for thinking the agrarian question in academic Marxism. As we have seen, the influence of his thought of politics extends to the manner in which freedom was understood from within the National Liberation Struggle mode itself in Africa. For Lenin, politics is not to be understood as a simple reflection of class position or experience; his is a much more complex view of representation, which in an important sense can be said to foreground the thinking of politics as such. In any case, it is policies founded on a political economic analysis of the ‘problem’ that enable the answering or solving of questions (agrarian or otherwise). This chapter therefore will begin by introducing the problem inherent in understanding politics as a simple reflection of political-economic processes in the context of Southern Africa. It will then move to an analysis of the way politics was thought from Marx to Mao, concentrating especially on Lenin’s conceptions. It is worth emphasising at this early stage of the argument that, according to Lenin, a proletariat, understood as a politically constituted subject (on which the successful achievement of its ‘historical mission’ depended), was certainly not given by capitalist relations, but rather had to be produced by a specific politics. Indeed, it was the working class that was given as a social grouping, while a proletariat had to be created as a political actor through the medium of a party. Political practice, then, was not simply deducible from the social location of the working class but, rather, consisted of a specific politics made possible by the existence of a party which would enable the very transformation of a working class into a class-conscious proletariat. The party is thus understood as a kind of catalyst – not as the source of all politics, as with Stalin – whose embodiment of theory allows for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class in relation to the state. In a peasant-dominated country such as Russia in the early 20th century, such politics had to centre primarily on a ‘correct solution’ to the political problem posed by the oppression and resistance of the peasantry – i.e. the ‘agrarian question’ – and consequently the political existence of the proletariat

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was contingent on addressing the ‘peasant problem’ ‘correctly’; in other words, in terms of a policy that was in the interest of both classes. Yet Lenin’s politics towards the peasantry were fundamentally conceived as state policies; as a result, politics was fused with policy and social class categories were fused with political categories. This difficulty came to the fore after the attainment of state power, when emancipatory politics were gradually replaced by state politics. As a contrast to Lenin’s thinking, I will briefly look at Mao Zedong’s conceptions of class representation. For Mao, socialism and communism were driven primarily by poor peasants, and so the peasantry was not a ‘problem’ as such; neither could politics be simply fused with the social, as the poor peasantry was not a proletariat. Mass mobilisation under the direction of the Communist Party would enable the poor peasants to stand up for themselves – to fanshen – and constitute themselves as a political force. Yet Mao’s thinking still ultimately remained within a conception of politics as representing the social. In brief, the idea of this chapter is not to provide a detailed account of either Lenin’s or Mao’s politics, but rather to try to show how they understood the idea of representation, for in neither case was this understood as unproblematically reflective of the social; moreover, for Mao, as we know from Althusser (1969), subjectivity could indeed react back dialectically onto material conditions of life and thus ‘overdetermine’ the objective. The dominance of state politics in thinking the agrarian question was also apparent in postcolonial Africa, where the ‘problem’ posed by peasants was thought of as a way not of constituting a proletariat politically but of forming a new nation. Creative politics after independence was a state politics but, in creating a nation, it ran roughshod over popular alternatives that, by insisting on equality within the nation, exceeded the idea of the nation held by the dominant national liberation party, which reduced this idea simply to that of an independent state. Thus the problem of political representation also concerned the social category of ‘nation’ and not only that of ‘class’. Whether the postcolonial state was of a non-settler form, as in the case of Tanzania in the late 1960s, or a state of settler-colonial origin, as in the case of Zimbabwe in the 1980s–2000s, the agrarian question remained a central state question for development in Africa, although it was addressed in different ways. The agrarian question was largely the core issue in respect of the formation of the nation (of the ‘national question’) from the state’s perspective, for the state could not pretend to be national without representing the majority of its rural population. National representation was thus contingent on resolving what was seen as a problem of ‘rural development’. Political inclusion and exclusion were at the core of nation-building and post-independence state politics. Nation-building on the continent had to overcome what the state considered to be the ‘centrifugal pull’ of ethnic politics, which were combined with the effects of land dispossession in the case of ex-settler colonies. What has been universally absent from the postcolonial nation-building project is a popular emancipatory

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perspective on rural livelihoods, although the case of Zimbabwe does bring to the fore some of the contradictions of popular politics regarding the redress of the historical grievance of land alienation in a post-settler colonial context. Yet elements of such emancipatory thinking did exist in both Tanzania and Zimbabwe, as we shall see.

reading off politics from political economy in southern africa The relationship between workers and political subjectivity, which used to be referred to as ‘class consciousness’, has had a clear if convoluted history in the thought of politics in South Africa during what was known as the liberation struggle. It was never workers as such who were said to possess any subjectivity, but a supposedly coherent social and political entity given by theory – ‘the working class’. The category of the working class has had a pervasive role in South African political thought as far back as the early 20th century. In the more recent past, it was at the core of intellectual debates on the proletarianisation of the Southern African peasantry and migrant labour in the 1970s and 1980s as well as debates on the character of emancipatory politics. Thinking in terms of a general class entity such as ‘the working class’ automatically derived a singular context from a general theory. The supposed predominance of a class led, in thought, to the theoretically prescribed politics of this class. Historically speaking, given the effects of a settler-dominated colonial economy, the expropriation of land from the peasantry had been much more extensive in Southern Africa than in the non-settler colonial economies further north. The understanding of the agrarian question in Southern Africa thus became directly related to understanding emancipation, for it was thought that the greater the level of proletarianisation (i.e. the greater the destruction of peasant production), the more rapid the transition to socialism. Land dispossession was seen in a positive light, whereas today, after independence and national liberation, the continued alienation of land is seen as a failure of the nationalist project, which is to be reversed by returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. It is theory that has failed in Southern Africa and not politics that has failed to conform to theory. As evidence of the failure of theory, a socialist future has proven to be a chimera, despite the numerical preponderance of workers as a result of land alienation in settler economies. Political economy has quite simply failed to predict political outcomes. The latter can no longer be understood simply to reflect the former. Quite astonishingly in hindsight, the supposedly rapid historical proletarianisation of an African peasantry in the Southern African region as a whole2 (along with the growth of radical trade unions in the early 1970s) was seen as sufficient reason to assume a rapid political transition to a socialist future with the end of the apartheid state (or a rapid collapse of capitalism itself in those cases where race and class were

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equated). An imputed socio-historical trajectory was simply transposed into a political one. Thus, Arrighi and Saul (1973), two of the more important Left intellectuals at the time, derived two conclusions from their argument that the peasantry had been effectively proletarianised in South Africa and colonial Rhodesia. Firstly, there was ‘little, if any, room for a neo-colonial solution’ in these countries (p. 87). Secondly, ‘the revolution in South Africa and Rhodesia, if it is to come, can only be a proletarian and a socialist revolution’ (p. 65). These views were not restricted to academics but had the force of consensus at the time. For both the SACP and the ANC, for example, the working class was conceived as having a project to ensure that ‘genuine and lasting emancipation’ (understood primarily in economic terms) was brought to the people of South Africa.3 ‘This perspective of a speedy progression from formal to genuine and lasting emancipation is made more real by the existence in our country of a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complements national consciousness. Its political organisations and the trade unions have played a fundamental role in shaping and advancing our revolutionary cause’ (ANC, 1969: 33–4). This statement, written for the Strategy and Tactics document of the ANC at the 1969 Morogoro conference, has the character of wishful thinking, as so-called working-class organisations were banned at the time and only re-emerged in 1973. But it was clear that in ANC–SACP official thinking, the sheer weight of numbers of workers in South Africa provided in and of itself a guarantee that liberation would not be blocked at the ‘national-democratic stage’. The sociological existence of workers was largely conflated with the existence of a working-class subject with a political project. Again, in the words of the 1969 ANC document, it followed: In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation (pp. 32–3). Indeed, what was inconceivable in 1969 became not only conceivable but also reality from 1990, and this despite the fact that so-called working-class organisations (i.e. the trade union confederation COSATU in particular) were now immeasurably more powerful. The existence of a powerfully organised trade union movement was therefore not a sufficient condition for ‘liberation to have meaning’; what was also required was a theory of politics, which was missing. A crude reduction of politics to a simple representation of socio-economic class formation, along with an equivalent uniform conception of nationalism, arguably contributed to this reality in the South

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African case. The understanding of politics as a representation of class position was most clearly expressed in the debate between ‘workerists’ and ‘populists’ at the height of the popular struggle for liberation in the 1980s. This debate was at its core about the character of ‘working-class politics’. Both sides agreed that the issue in contention concerned the nature of the link between social class and politics, between the objective and the subjective. I discuss this debate in the next chapter at some length. As a result of seeing class as social first and political second, so that consciousness is always understood as ‘consciousness of  ...’, the problem of thinking political subjectivity becomes one of matching the politics (the subjective) to the social (the objective), so that the party that represents the working class is tasked (or its intellectuals are tasked) with ensuring that this match is a perfect fit, or as perfect as possible in the circumstances. Because what people do in their practice no longer features in thought, what ultimately counts is exclusively party or state ‘politics’. This follows necessarily from a concept of the working class for which no practice is necessary to constitute it; thus, the working class does not require a concept of politics in order to exist. Whatever notion of practice is referred to is ultimately external to and not constitutive of class: socio-economic class exists first as a structural totality or unity and only then may it be deemed to have a politics. Such views were at the core of the perspective that led to the statist smothering of independent popular thought in post-apartheid South Africa. They are still very much in evidence today. They leave little room for an investigation of what workers themselves may be thinking, as workers are deemed to be mere bearers of their structural position in a capitalist system dominated by neo-liberalism – no more, no less.4

representing class from marx to mao It is important to assess, however briefly, the political thinking of some of the classics of Marxist thought, for the basic reason that political emancipation in Africa in the subjective sequence of the 20th century – most evidently in the case studies I examine below – was thought very much from within a Marxist discourse. It is not simply that one or other version of Marxism, within a specific liberatory context, was the most influential political vision of the time, but fundamentally that a form of Marxist discourse was largely taken for granted in thinking national freedom in the 20th century, both by those who were to capture state power and by those leaders who saw themselves as oppositional to the dominant perspective. African nationalist discourse itself was thought from within at least some Marxist categories, as is apparent in the writings of most African nationalist thinkers.5 Moreover, the different ways in which classical Marxists understood political representation were substantial and were also far more theoretically sophisticated than anything the South African Left in particular has been able to conceive recently.

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As is well known, Marx theorises wage labour as the antithesis of capital within the specific production relations characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, wage labour and capital are structural categories that are only manifested in concrete conditions by the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. While the whole edifice of capitalism in general is seen as founded on the antagonism between capital and wage labour, the argument is principally structural and its empirical manifestations, both objective and especially subjective, are more or less directly deducible from the structure. Hence the famous ‘base–superstructure’ dialectic and the notion popularised by Althusser of ‘determination in the last instance’ by the socio-economic level.6 As I have already noted, Marx understood the rise of a working-class political subjectivity or consciousness as originating from within the social production process itself, where workers’ collective experience of oppression would translate into collective organisation and resistance. His conception of politics can thus be called ‘productivist’. This is why he saw the formation of trade unions in Britain in the 19th century as a political process in itself. Yet he was also clearly aware that trade union consciousness could be very limited. The difficulty inherent in Marx’s thought of political excess is founded on his theorising of classes as socio-economic places and not as political agents (Neocosmos, 1986), most obviously in Capital, where he says: ‘the principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage labourer, are ... merely embodiments, personifications of capital and wage labour; definite characteristics stamped upon individuals by the process of social production’ (Marx, 1865a: 879). It followed that politics, if simply derived from political economy, could only be thought in terms of the representation of class interests. The result is that when Marx insists that trade unions ought not to restrict themselves to demanding wage increases but should be ‘using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class’ (Marx, 1865b: 226), he is unable to indicate clearly why they regularly fail to do so. After all, if workers are simply personifications of wage labour, then it follows that they can only think politics in terms of relations in the labour process (the place of exploitation through the extraction of surplus value), as he himself notes, and not in terms of the destruction of capitalism as such. Beyond the ‘productive worker’, for example, among the ‘reserve army of labour’ of the unemployed, political subjectivity is considered as more indeterminate and fluid precisely because the working people and the unemployed do not possess that crucial direct collective experience of oppression and discipline (occasioned by exploitation in production) to which they can react collectively.7 Proletarian political subjectivity is thus thought by Marx and Engels principally as expressive of objective social location in production, but manifested in society. It is ‘their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, 1859: 181). Yet, at the same time, Marx and Engels insist that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves’ (Marx and Engels, 1879: 307). If we wish to be faithful to this last statement, we must face

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the consequences of the fact that today – at least in Africa – we no longer witness the greater and greater concentration of workers in huge factories; productive workers are a minority among working people on the continent today. Emancipatory politics must thus be thought differently. At the same time, as we shall see in the next chapter, far from being solely a site of production governed by time, as it was for Marx,8 the factory can instead be itself a site of politics where workers may decide for themselves how to confront oppression. Marx’s understanding of political subjectivity led him to a limited notion of political excess, which he conceived of as embodied exclusively in communists, who arose spontaneously as a component part of the working-class movements of the 19th century and who, according to him, possessed an understanding beyond that of ordinary workers; their consciousness therefore was excessive of their social location (but not as a result of familiarity with his writings!). For Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, ‘Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties’, but ‘they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (1848: 46). For Marx, there was a crucial idea of universality inherent in the objective position in the production process of the proletariat itself (and manifested subjectively in communists): its insurrectionary movements would speed up the objective course of history itself towards the abolition of the class system. Communism was therefore not a future utopia but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx and Engels, 1846: 49, emphasis in original). This political subjectivity reached its limit – became evidently saturated, to use Lazarus’s formulation – with the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. From this, first Kautsky in Germany and subsequently Lenin drew the conclusion that a political party of the working class was necessary to avoid the defeat of a future proletarian revolution.9 After 1871 there was a major shift within emancipatory thought from (workers’) movements to (proletarian) party, although the idea of an insurrectionary seizure of power remained common to both until the time of Mao and the Chinese Revolution. As far as political subjectivity was concerned, what was apparent was discontinuity in thought, and not continuity, as later assumed by the terms ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxism-Leninism’ (the latter being Stalin’s invention) (Lazarus, 2013: 70).

Lenin and the thought of a ‘proletarian politics’ The place to begin a discussion of the problem of representation and of 20th-century politics as an expression of the social is undoubtedly in the work of Lenin. This is not because of some desire to stress a return to dogmatism, but because Lenin’s thought of politics consists of a sophisticated argument regarding the connection between the social

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and emancipatory political subjectivity, which has basic commonalities with all modern conceptions of politics in the 20th century, irrespective of ideological persuasion. It should be recalled that, in general, the thought of emancipatory politics is marked both by location (place) and by its transcendence of this location; in other words, simply put, subjective political excess is always an excess over something extant. For example, one can see from previous chapters that the idea of freedom held by the African slaves of Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 was one marked by the fact of slavery; the very alternatives in which freedom was thought were marked by their prior location within a relation of slavery. The ideas of freedom expressed by workers in the 19th century in Europe and those of the African colonised in the 20th, despite each containing a universal idea of equality, were also informed by the structural locations of those who developed them: workers and colonised. As I have shown in Part 1, there exists a dialectic of knowledge and thought contained within the very notion of subjective ‘excess’ itself, as this is always an ‘excess over something’, that ‘something’ being the situation – itself a combination of structures and knowledges (hegemonic, subjugated or anything in between) – within which emancipatory political thinking sees the light of day. Of course, if resistance to oppression remains within the confines of interests and identities, there is, strictly speaking, no thought present, only a more or less accurate knowledge of the situation; there is no real politics, only the defence of those interests and the expression of those identities. As Lazarus points out, thought is clearly oriented towards the ‘as yet unknown’; this is what distinguishes it from knowledge.10 This dialectic of knowledge and thought can also be understood as a dialectic of identity representation and excess or universality. In other words, the singularity of any excessive politics exceeds but carries with it the marks of its location. This contradiction or dialectic can be noted both in theory and in historical processes. It is particularly clear in the distinction between movement politics (‘trade union politics’) and party politics (‘social-democratic politics’), as theorised by Lenin. For example, ‘Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working-class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich’ (1902: 57). Lenin distinguishes between a ‘trade union consciousness’, which takes the form of union organising and developing a politics from inside the factory experience,11 and ‘socialdemocratic consciousness’, which concerns politics as such. In other words, for him, resistance to all manner of state oppression, not only within the arena of work, is the basis of forming a political (social-democratic) consciousness. As with many of Lenin’s other concerns, his arguments in What Is to Be Done? (1902) are directed against a reduction of politics to socio-economic experience, a perspective he refers to as ‘economism’.12 A ‘political consciousness’ therefore cannot be produced among the working class without addressing issues beyond the factory gates: ‘Working-class

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consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a SocialDemocratic point of view and no other’ (p. 69, emphasis in original). For Lenin, trade union (and, by extension, social movement) politics are restricted to representing a particular interest in the division of labour (i.e. an identity, as we would say today), while social-democratic politics confront the state and thereby have a universal appeal. The ‘excess’ (over identity), for Lenin, consists in this excess over the particular interest; hence the party, which is national (in the first instance, and then international), enables a politics of excess over the particularity of workers’ identitarian interests and consequently the proletarian ‘leadership’ of the people as a whole. Workers are socially located; the proletariat is a political subject with a universal subjectivity. Constituting the proletariat as a subject is a political project that can only be undertaken by a party opposed to the whole existing order; such subjectivity cannot be ‘spontaneous’ in Lenin’s terms. The party is founded on a sophisticated division of labour and made up of professionals (professional revolutionaries), not amateur part-time craftsmen of politics; it enables the fusion of the workers’ movement with socialist ideology. Following Karl Kautsky, Lenin thinks of politics as brought from the outside into the workers’ movement (Lenin, 1902: 78–9). ‘Trade unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class’ (p. 83, emphasis in original) – today we would say a form of state politics – because of the fact that they are limited by a spontaneous representation of the particularities of the division of labour – i.e. identities, in today’s parlance. The political subject – i.e. the proletariat, which equals workers imbued with a universal social-democratic consciousness – is produced for Lenin only by means of a party.13 The party is the condition for this subjectivation; it both represents class interests and also transforms the objective class into a subjective political agent. There is no Hegelian ‘class in itself/ class for itself ’ formulation here. Such a party can only be a political vanguard and lead ‘the assault on the government in the name of the entire people’ (p. 89, emphasis added) if it develops independent positions on all the issues of the day. In this way a clear ‘proletarian’ class politics can be demarcated from the politics of all other classes, and such politics can provide ‘leadership’ to the whole people against oppression.14 The social-democratic organiser should not emulate a ‘trade-union secretary but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression’ (p. 80).15 We can retain from this argument the particularistic character of social movements and the identity politics derived from it. Movements normally – unless they are able in rare instances to exceed their own interests – engage in identity politics. There is no excess over interest or place in an identity politics expressing the social division of labour. Emancipatory politics of necessity must transcend identity politics

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for it to acquire an emancipatory, i.e. universal, quality. Parties, of course, are about attaining state power; but that excess over identity which they propose does not consist of an excess over state politics and thought, for they too represent interests – in the case of the Russian Social Democrats, those of the proletariat, according to Lenin. For Lenin, then, trade union politics are expressive of workers’ interests in ‘civil society’, where particularisms dominate, while party politics represent class interests in ‘political society’ (‘the political’). He makes this point in the following series of representations: ‘It is common knowledge that the masses are divided into classes ... that as a rule and in most cases ... classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by leaders. All this is elementary’ (Lenin, 1920a: 41). It follows, for Lenin, that ‘politics is a concentrated expression of economics’ and, moreover, that ‘politics must take precedence over economics, to argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism’ (Lenin, 1921: 83). Of course, politics here refers to policies and party positions as well as to militant tactics on the ground, i.e. fundamentally to state politics devised by leaders on the basis of their scientific knowledge of Marxism; Lenin’s point was made after the seizure of power and is quite categorical. Ultimately people are not endowed with independent thought, as leaders represent people and decide on their behalf how best to express their interests. But emancipatory politics today cannot be thought within the limits of state politics. Politics must be thought beyond both movement and party-state politics. For the moment, though, we need to notice in Lenin’s thought of politics that the excess constructed by the party is unable to successfully transcend the politics of representation. In order to show how this idea of politics as expressive of class operates in more detail, we need to look explicitly at some of the contemporary issues Lenin addresses in order to develop specific party positions and policies on them. These take the form of issues or questions of the day. The most detailed analyses are provided for two major problems: the ‘agrarian question’ in the period up to 1916 and the ‘national question’ thereafter, when Lenin’s analyses of imperialism were developed. Both are also central to state politics in Africa after independence, and so they require some detailed treatment; I shall concentrate on the former.

The Bolshevik mode of politics and the vagaries of the ‘agrarian question’ As I have already noted, the central political problem faced by Lenin as he went about devising the political formation or ‘demarcation’ of the proletariat concerned the most numerous class in the country, namely the peasantry. Russia was not an advanced industrial economy and had only a small working class, so that any emancipatory national political project had to devise a clear and concise policy towards peasants. By the early 1900s these peasants were already rebelling against the semi-feudal landlord class, which was the main pillar of autocracy, and socialist political organisers among

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the peasantry at the time extolled the (incipiently socialist) virtues of ‘traditional’ peasant forms of organisation (the village commune, obschina or mir) as the foundation of an alternative, communitarian form of social organisation. It was the struggles by peasants themselves that thus put the agrarian question on the political agenda. For Lenin, the agrarian question was a political problem posed by the ‘backward’ yet transforming social relations in the Russian countryside, the ‘correct’ solution to which would contribute to the political constitution of the proletariat as a class subject – to its political ‘demarcation’ from other classes. Lenin’s early ideological struggles with these pro-peasant activists, Populists or Narodniks as they were known, along with his study of The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)  – which consisted of a detailed critical socio-economic analysis of agrarian (zemstvo) statistics – laid bare the development of capitalist relations among peasant producers and the consequent trend towards the socio-economic class differentiation of such producers. Against the Narodniks’ insistence on the purely urban and landlord character of Russian capitalism, and on the incipient socialist character of peasant relations, Lenin argued that the peasant economy contained within it the seeds of capitalism and the class struggle. This was manifested by the differentiation of the peasantry into a minority of rich and a majority of poor peasants, while the middle peasantry was disappearing.16 ‘Peasant farming also evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The better the conditions of the “village commune” and the greater the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process of differentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic classes of capitalist agriculture’ (Lenin, 1907a: 241–2, emphases in original). By 1905 Lenin had entered into an ideological and political struggle with the political line, propounded by the Mensheviks within the Russian Social Democrats, that argued for support of the liberal bourgeoisie’s struggle against reaction. While his disagreements with the populists concerned political economy, his disagreements with Menshevik economism were political; whereas Lenin actually took over the agrarian programme of the Narodniks, which he saw as representing peasant interests (in spite of the errors of political economy on which it was founded), he adamantly rejected the politics of the Mensheviks despite their valid economic arguments. The Mensheviks advocated (on Marxist grounds) the economic modernisation of the large estates (latifundia) because they were more likely to develop the ‘productive forces’ under capitalism.17 This in fact was Karl Kautsky’s argument in his book The Agrarian Question.18 Lenin maintained that this view assumed the necessity for ‘bourgeois leadership’ of the democratic revolution on the (economistic) assumption that, because the capitalist evolution of the large latifundia was economically modernising, it would inevitably lead to progressive political changes. Politics was being read off from political-economic trends. To this, Lenin retorted that these forms of capital accumulation, and consequently of bourgeois democracy, were not the only forms

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in existence in Russia. To such forms, which amounted to transformations under the control of capitalising landowners and their state, should be opposed the existence of forms of accumulation and democracy ‘from below’. The former had their origins in the gradual transformation of landlord economy and left the ‘political superstructure’ of that economy (autocracy) in large measure intact; the latter had their basis in the capitalist transformation of peasant economy and amounted to a clear sweeping away (in a ‘Jacobin or plebeian way’, he said) of the remnants of serfdom and of Tsarist autocracy. These latter forms, he argued, amounted to a deeper and more extensive kind of democracy and to a clearer demarcation of classes in the economic, political and ideological senses. It is these forms of capitalist development and democracy, ‘from below’, based on the transformation of peasant production, that the proletariat and its party should be supporting and even leading. Central to Lenin’s conception of the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ are therefore two internally related conceptions. Firstly, a number of forms or paths of economic development are possible under capitalist conditions, and a number of forms of state and democracy are consequently also possible under the same conditions. Secondly, the character of these economic paths and political forms is largely determined by the class that leads and ‘stamps its character’ on the process of revolutionary change; in other words, by specific (class) politics. A bourgeois democratic revolution, being in the interests of a number of classes – bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry and proletariat, i.e. ‘the people’ – need not necessarily be led by the bourgeoisie (Lenin, 1905: 50). To assume this, as the Mensheviks did, was to adhere to an economistic position which simply derived a political position from evidence of technical economic development.19 Does not the very concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ imply that it can be accomplished only by the bourgeoisie? The Mensheviks often fall into this error, although as a viewpoint it is a caricature of Marxism. A liberation movement that is bourgeois in social and economic content is not such because of its motive forces. The motive force may be, not the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat and the peasantry. Why is this possible? Because the proletariat and the peasantry suffer even more than the bourgeoisie from the survivals of serfdom, because they are in greater need of freedom and the abolition of landlord oppression (1907d: 335). Yet, different forms of the democratic revolution were possible, depending on the ‘class forces’ ‘leading’ that revolution – in other words, on their subjective political dominance, inter alia: ‘He would be a fine Marxist, indeed, who in a period of democratic revolution failed to see this difference between the degrees of democratisation and the difference between its forms and confined himself to “clever” remarks to the effect that,

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after all, this is a “bourgeois revolution”, the fruit of “bourgeois revolution” ’ (1905: 52). Moreover, ‘the very position the bourgeoisie holds as a class in capitalist society inevitably leads to its inconsistency in a democratic revolution. The very position the proletariat holds as a class compels it to be consistently democratic’ (1905: 51). What is clearly noticeable here is that, even though politics is understood in terms of representation, such politics are not for Lenin simply deducible from class identity, which for the working class is produced in the domain of work. Rather, a ‘proletarian politics’ is made possible by thinking an excess over identity, and it is the party that enables such an excessive thinking, as it possesses the knowledge of Marxist theory. In Russia around 1905, the democratic revolution centred on struggles over the latifundia and landlordism, which provided the economic basis of the political autocracy. The peasant revolts against large landed property were the foundation of the democratic revolution. Given its tendency to compromise with reaction, ‘to spare the “venerable” institutions of the serf-owning system (such as the monarchy) as much as possible’ (1905: 91), and thus to restrict democratic changes, the bourgeoisie would ultimately sacrifice the peasants to oppressive landlord-controlled change in agriculture. In the end, the oppressed people (mainly the peasantry and the proletariat) as a whole would be betrayed to an ugly compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat should therefore support (and even ‘lead’) the peasantry as a whole, who were consistently democratic in their struggle against large landed property: ‘The only force capable of gaining “a decisive victory over tsarism”, is the people, i.e. the proletariat and the peasantry, if we take the main, big forces, and distribute the rural and urban petty-bourgeoisie (also part of “the people”) between the two. “The revolution’s decisive victory over tsarism” means the establishment of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ (1905: 56, emphases in original). The forms of democracy to which the revolution would give rise, if led by the people, would be much more extensive, more ‘popular’ in content and less restrictive and compromising with reaction than any form of democracy instituted ‘from above’ by the compromising bourgeoisie. The two political forms of bourgeois democracy identified by Lenin corresponded in his view to two antagonistic forms of capitalist development in agriculture coexisting in Russia: One alternative is evolution of the Prussian type  – the serf-owning landlord becomes a Junker; the landlords’ power in the state is consolidated for a decade; monarchy; ‘military despotism, embodied in parliamentary forms’ instead of democracy; the greatest inequality among the rural and non-rural population. The second alternative is evolution of the American type – the abolition of landlord farming; the peasant becomes a free farmer; popular government; the bourgeois democratic political system; the greatest equality among the rural

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population as the starting point of, and a condition for, free capitalism (1907a: 356). In view of the debates on land reform in Southern Africa, one should stress that despite the demand by peasants for land which was being monopolised by the latifundia, for Lenin the transfer of property in land was not the sole issue. It was not just a question of providing land to the peasants but, through the provision of land, of destroying the politically repressive relations of landlordism. Lenin makes clear that providing land to the peasants through colonisation would not solve the agrarian question, as it would leave the latifundia and political oppression intact (1907a: 250). From Lenin’s perspective, the demand for land was inseparable from a democratisation of social relations. It was a ‘proletarian politics’, said to be in the interest of the people as a whole, that provided the guide for policy, while small-scale enterprises and their consequent accumulation ‘from below’ were only important in so far as they undermined the repressive feudal and semi-feudal relations inherited from the past. For Lenin, the ‘agrarian question’ in Russia referred to the political oppression and economic exploitation of all peasant classes – of the peasantry as a whole – as the Narodniks recognised, although it affected these peasant classes in different ways. It was for this reason that the proletariat had to ally with the peasantry as a whole, and not because the peasantry was somehow homogeneous. Contrary to what is sometimes thought, for Lenin the Narodniks may have failed to recognise the development of capitalism in the countryside and romantically extolled the virtues of the mir, but their agrarian programme was largely correct, as the breaking up of the large estates and redistribution of land to peasants was politically democratic; on the other hand, the political platform of the Mensheviks was reactionary, as it left the social foundation of autocracy intact and undermined democracy.20 Yet this alliance with the peasantry, as advocated by Lenin – in the absence of independent organisation of the poor and middle peasants, whom Lenin often refers to as ‘useless lumber’21  – would have the effect of encouraging rich peasant accumulation and hence the development of a class later seen as opposed to collectivisation, because the petty commodity-producing peasantry contained a tendency to divide along social class lines. Thus Lenin understood ‘the peasant road’ as a ‘rich peasant road’. The blanket oppression of these rural producers did not abolish the tendency to socio-economic differentiation; it merely rendered it less noticeable and less clear. For Lenin, state political oppression restricts the development of class demarcation and class struggle, while democracy enables it. Indeed, Lenin does not stop at stressing the effects of ‘bourgeois democracy’ on class demarcation. He also maintains that ‘the greater and more extensive’ the form of that democracy and its effects on society – including a process of rich peasant accumulation ‘from below’ within the ‘peasant

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road’ – the ‘clearer’ the demarcation between classes and the easier the transition to socialism. Under such conditions, ‘the contradictions of capitalist society – and the most important of them is the contradictions between wage-labour and capital – will not only remain, but become even more acute and profound, developing in a more extensive and purer form’ (Lenin, 1907e: 457). When it comes to Lenin’s writings from 1916 onwards, a similar logic is in evidence, although now the emphasis switches to understanding the phenomenon of imperialism and its concomitant national oppression. As is well known, for Lenin imperialism was a particular stage (the ‘highest’) or form of the capitalist mode of production in which monopoly capitalism dominates. What is perhaps less frequently discussed is that, for Lenin, even though imperialism was in many ways economically progressive, politically it was highly reactionary: ‘democracy corresponds to free competition. Political reaction corresponds to monopoly ... imperialism is indisputably the “negation” of democracy in general, of all democracy’ (1916b: 43, emphases in original). In addition, imperialism develops unevenly and, among other consequences, restricts growth and class differentiation within agriculture. For Lenin, democratic issues arose in the novel form of capitalism represented by imperialism, but these issues acquired a new importance, for they were now products not of an age on the way out, such as feudalism, but of the highest stage of capitalism itself. Such struggles became urgent, as the alternative seemed to be a collapse into barbarism and world wars – the possible collapse of human civilisation itself. While in his political analyses from around 1914 imperialism largely plays a similar role to that of reactionary landlordism in earlier work, the ‘leadership of the proletariat’ now becomes imperative in the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ in order to push it to its socialist conclusion and avoid barbarism. Related to this is the view, even more insistently stressed at this stage, that there is little meaning in ‘bourgeois democratic’ change in itself, and that it only makes any sense in relation to a future socialist advance. The two ‘stages’ of the revolution feed into each other. ‘All “democracy” consists in the proclamation and realisation of “rights” which under capitalism are realisable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible’ (1916b: 74, emphasis in original). Only in the colonial and semi-colonial countries (of the East) was it still possible for the bourgeoisie to play any kind of progressive role; in most other countries the bourgeoisie was hopelessly allied to imperialist reaction. Most of Lenin’s writings on the question of democracy after 1915–16 tend to be concerned with the national question rather than with the agrarian question, although he does return to the latter on several occasions, mainly in documents for party or Communist International congresses. These basically insist that the analyses of the agrarian question in 1903,

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1905 and 1907 were still valid (1919a), although there is greater disparity between agriculture and industry (1917a: 208), and he urges that state coercion should not be applied to middle peasants (e.g. 1919b). There is no space here to discuss Lenin on the national question in any detail; nevertheless, a few remarks may be pertinent, given the close link in postcolonial Africa between the agrarian and national questions (or ‘rural development’ and ‘nation-building’, to use late 20th-century language). Lenin again argued against a form of economism (‘imperialist economism’) which maintained that, as one economic trend of capitalism was to form large empires, national self-determination (secession) was either impossible or reactionary, and would encourage national chauvinism in the colonised country, as Rosa Luxemburg in particular had argued. For Lenin, the right of oppressed nations to self-determination was fundamentally a political question and not an economic one – a question of democratic rights for which it was important to struggle in order to politically demarcate a proletariat and increase democratic norms. It was also fundamentally important because only if this right were guaranteed would nations unite on the basis of free choice and not compulsion (1916b: 67). Adherence to such democratic rights obliged any revolutionary party in power not to coerce nations into uniting but, if it was in favour of such unity, to undertake political work among the people to convince them of the benefits of unity (1919a: 119–20). The parallels here with the right to strike and the independence of popular organisations in general should be obvious. Lenin understood clearly that economic control or ‘annexation’ was possible under conditions of state political independence (1916b: 44). The point about supporting the rights of oppressed nations and the struggle of democratic movements for national liberation was that this was the only consistently democratic and anti-imperialist position to take. Moreover, as imperialism was a form of capitalism, such struggles would weaken capitalism itself. Democratic struggles under imperialist conditions always have a certain anti-capitalist content. Nevertheless, this should not be taken to mean that monopoly capitalism could exist independently of free competition, that it could be equated with capitalism tout court, that the only form of capitalist accumulation under imperialism was monopoly accumulation or that there was such a thing as ‘integral imperialism’. Nowhere in the world has monopoly capitalism existed in a whole series of branches without free competition, nor will it exist. To write of such a system is to write of a system which is false and removed from reality. If Marx said of manufacture that it was a superstructure on mass small production, imperialism and finance capitalism are a superstructure on the old capitalism. If its top is destroyed, the old capitalism is exposed. To maintain that there is such a

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thing as integral imperialism without the old capitalism is merely making the wish the father to the thought (1919a: 114–15). Interestingly, Lenin makes this remark in order to show that peasant production, accumulation and differentiation were still taking place in Russia after the revolutionary measures of 1917–18. The destruction of monopoly oppression only reveals and encourages what was taking place all along: accumulation ‘from below’. In the imperialist epoch, the forms of development or accumulation associated with monopoly control, unequal exchange and extra-economic coercion are not the exclusive forms of development. Others are also in existence. The free development of these other forms of capitalism also required, for Lenin, a different form of state and a ‘destruction of the bureaucratic-military state machine’ (1918a: 265). Thus he notes: ‘Agrarian reforms, by and large, can be successful and durable only provided the whole state is democratised, i.e. provided, on the one hand, the police, the standing army, and the privileged bureaucracy are abolished, and provided, on the other hand, there exists a system of broad local self-government completely free from supervision and tutelage from above’ (1917a: 103). The agrarian question for Lenin is thus a political question that imposes itself on the political agenda; it can only be illuminated but not replaced by political economy. One can see from this account that Lenin develops a thought of politics that is not simply deduced from political economy. Whether he is talking of the agrarian question or the national question, both of which were political issues that presented themselves to analysis, placed as they were on the political agenda by peasant rebellions, or the struggles for national freedom, Lenin devises perspectives for a party that attempt to ‘demarcate’ a specific ‘proletarian politics’. These politics stress the democratisation of social relations, which he sees as resulting very much from liberal-democratic state forms. ‘Democracy’, for Lenin, refers to the greater facility with which the people as a whole are able to organise economically and politically. The ‘freer’ the people’s ability to exist, the clearer the various class forces and their politics will appear within society as a whole. Perhaps Lenin’s training as a lawyer influenced his thought more than commentators have noted, as it should be clearer today that the democratisation of the state and the enactment of progressive policies in no way translate automatically into changes in society. This problem is one faced by all new states, including the post-independence and post-apartheid states on the African continent. What was missing totally from Lenin’s thought was an understanding of party politics as reproducing state power. Lenin’s thought reached its limit (its saturation point) in his inability to find a solution to the problem of the party occupying state power and simultaneously being the defender of the people’s interests against the state. Various methods were tried, such as the famous Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspections, which were meant to reduce

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the levels of state coercion, yet they did not succeed.22 Lenin’s thought is unable to think the idea of independent popular organisations and their relations with a party in a manner that enhances popular initiative rather than destroys it. He comes close to understanding the problem himself in some of his reflections on the absence of a Bolshevik presence in the countryside: After the October Revolution we finished off the landowner and took away his land. That, however, did not end the rural struggle. Gaining the land, like every other worker’s gain, can only be secure when it is based on the independent action of the working people themselves, on their own organisation, on their endurance and revolutionary determination. Did the peasants have this organisation? Unfortunately not. And that is the trouble, the reason why the struggle is so difficult (1918b: 172).23 But it was not simply the urban character of Bolshevism that was at issue. Although the agrarian question was, for Lenin, a purely political question, it is nevertheless a state political question, for even though Lenin understands the need for popular mobilisation, that political practice is not conceptualised. The thinking of the agrarian question as a problem resolvable through an exclusive analysis of political economy (even though not in a crude reductionist manner) – without, in other words, an understanding of the political subjectivities of peasants themselves (and these may have exceeded what the new state was expecting them to think) – provided the conditions for this question to become, once state power had been achieved, a simple problem of economic growth, one of historical necessity.24 A clear example of this was the notion of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, developed at length by Preobrazhensky, supported by Trotsky and later taken over by Stalin as he enforced the state collectivisation of the peasantry in the 1930s through coercive and administrative means. Apart from Bukharin, who advocated the enrichment of peasant producers, the main Bolshevik figures all favoured the systematic plunder of peasant production in order to provide funds for industrialisation.25 Whatever the position taken, the underlying common perspective was statist, a necessary effect of a politics of representation. Although political economy is crucially important in understanding the world, it cannot help us to make sense of, to think, a politics of emancipation. As a result, Badiou insists that ‘today it is a question of ending the representative vision of politics’ (1985: 85, my translation).

Mao Zedong and the limits of class representation The thought of politics developed in particular by Mao Zedong from the 1920s onwards, as China was shaken by mass peasant rebellions, is of a fundamentally different kind. Lazarus (1996) refers to it as the ‘Dialectical mode of politics’. Here I

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want to stress that this politics was made possible by a close link with peasant movements in a way Lenin could not conceive; for Mao, the worst possible error was for the party to be divorced from the masses. In particular, it is significant that while the founding text of the politics of the agrarian question for the Bolshevik mode consisted of Lenin’s socio-economic analysis of agrarian statistics, from which he derived evidence of political-economic trends in Russian rural society (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899), the founding text of Mao’s agrarian politics was an analysis of a peasant movement in Mao’s home province of Hunan. Lenin began with political economy, Mao with political rebellion. Mao’s famous text (‘Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan’, 1927) begins as follows: All the wrong measures taken by the revolutionary authorities concerning the peasant movement must be speedily changed. Only thus can the future of the revolution be benefited. For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly. What is important to note in commenting on Mao’s thought of politics is that it is never a question of party policy enabling the formation of a proletariat. Moreover, it is not simply the party that has a representative function; the army during an extended ‘protracted civil war’ period also plays a political role in politicising, in mass mobilisation, in organising peasants and in enacting party directives, for ‘the revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them’ (Mao, 1934: 147). There is little mention in Mao’s work of an ‘agrarian question’ or ‘peasant problem’;26 peasants are not a problem but the solution to a problem, such as the war of resistance against Japan (1937–46) or the (third civil) war against the Guomindang forces (1946–9). Again, Mao’s assessment is founded on a political-economic characterisation of Chinese society as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal one for which the main class supports are the landlords, the compradors, the warlords and the bureaucrats (Mao, 1926), as opposed to the potentially revolutionary oppressed people, who always include the small proletariat and poor peasants, the middle peasants

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and sometimes even the rich peasants. In other words, not only are peasants clearly differentiated economically into classes, but these classes are said to have different political perspectives on different issues in different contexts (Mao, 1933). Here, Mao moves beyond Lenin’s political-economic analysis to ascribe a specific political subjectivity to each peasant class. In different contexts, the role of the party is to ‘rely on’, ‘ally with’ or ‘oppose’ different classes of peasants, so that the correct classes are mobilised to achieve the appropriate objectives. For example, after 1946, when the main political objective was land reform to eliminate the feudal system through mass campaigns, Our policy is to rely on the poor peasants and unite solidly with the middle peasants to abolish the feudal and semi-feudal system of exploitation by the landlord class and by the old-type rich peasants ... First the demands of the poor peasants and farm labourers must be satisfied; this is the most fundamental task in the land reform. Second there must be firm unity with the middle peasants, and their interests must not be damaged ... in accordance with the outline land law, rich peasants should generally be treated differently from landlords ... in carrying out equal distribution of land in different places, it is necessary to listen to the opinions of the middle peasants and make concessions to them if they object (Mao, 1947: 164–5). Throughout the elaboration of these politics, Mao always insisted that whatever benefits were to be acquired by the peasants should not be bestowed as a favour by power ‘from above’ but had to be acquired as a result of mass struggle. Thus, during the war of resistance against Japan, when the main agrarian policy was restricted to ‘rent reduction’ in order to ally with landlords in a national war, he noted: As rent reduction is a mass struggle by the peasants, party directives and government decrees (in the liberated areas) should guide and help it instead of trying to bestow favours on the masses. To bestow rent reduction as a favour instead of arousing the masses to achieve it by their own action is wrong, and the results will not be solid. Peasant organizations should be formed or reconstituted in the struggle for rent reduction (Mao, 1934: 131). Mao held consistently to this view right up to the Cultural Revolution (1967–76) and it remained one of the distinguishing features of his politics. Clearly, his was a politics that sharply differed from the Bolshevik as well as from the Stalinist modes of politics, as he noted himself in his comments on Russian textbooks: On page 339 [of the Soviet textbook Political Economy] it says that the land taken from the rich peasants and given to the poor and middle peasants was land the government had expropriated and then parcelled out. This looks at

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the matter as a grant by royal favour ... To regard the mass struggle as “one important factor” [in socialist construction] flies in the face of the principle that the masses are the creators of history. Under no circumstances can history be regarded as something that the planners rather than the masses create ... Stalin’s book from first to last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people ... The basic error is mistrust of the peasants (Mao, 1977: 44, 79, 135, emphasis added). Mao was faithful all his life to the principle that it is the masses who make history.27 Yet, at the same time, he was insistent that the masses are socially divided into classes. As a result of understanding political subjectivities as reflections of economic interests – even though Mao goes the furthest of classical Marxists in thinking politics – such politics were ultimately reduced to class position. A number of studies by Western scholars sympathetic to the Chinese struggle have recorded in vivid detail the mass mobilisation process in various villages during the land reform period. They all show that poor peasants who had been downtrodden and oppressed for centuries acquired through these mass struggles the confidence to speak and to act, to stand up for their rights and thus exceed their allotted social position in feudal relations. In some cases this process even went (for a period) as far as being able to criticise party cadres.28 For example, during the land reform campaign of 1947 it was noted that villages should ‘not be passive or undisciplined. There must be no coercion or authoritarianism, no dictating or taking over other people’s tasks’ (Crook and Crook, 1979: 22). Moreover, it was stressed by a party cadre: We must urge the people to speak with complete freedom about the party members and cadres. But the reason for doing it is to discover problems, not to develop antagonism towards the cadres. We must make it clear that our policy towards the cadres is different from the position we took against the landlords. The party members, including the cadres, must be given a chance to reform themselves and reorganise their ranks (p. 34). Of course, this kind of process concerned the overcoming of the contradictions between intellectual and manual labour, which was to have repercussions as far away as France during May 1968 (Ross, 2002). Yet the problem remained, as William Hinton observed at the time, Could the political attitude and role of every individual [peasant] in fact be determined by an analysis of the main source of his or her income? Of course not. There were too many well-known cases of poor peasants who were counter-revolutionary and of landlords who were revolutionary for anyone to expect such

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a thing. No line, however accurate, could hope to separate people according to their subjective position with 100 percent accuracy. All that was claimed for the dividing line is that it was the most rational and practical basis for dividing the people from their enemies and it would prove valid for the vast majority (Hinton, 1968: 405). With Mao, politics becomes thought ‘for itself ’, and yet the subjectivity that saw politics as simply expressive of the social remained and often led to extreme oppression, as during the Cultural Revolution when the sons and daughters of ex-landlords and ex-bureaucrats were persecuted for their social origins (although not with Mao’s approval). Arguably, Mao’s ‘dialectical’ mode of politics reached the limits of what it is possible to think without exceeding Marxism itself and Marxism’s conception of political subjectivity as representing objective class position. Even in Mao’s writings it often becomes impossible to distinguish state politics from emancipatory politics. As I have argued throughout this book, for political subjectivity to retain its emancipatory content, it must be thought beyond the social and beyond the state.

A digressive note on Saïd, Lukács and Fanon According to Edward Saïd (1999: 270), there is a close affinity between Fanon’s and Lukács’s thinking of consciousness, and not only because they both read Hegel; rather, it is a matter of theory ‘travelling’ from one to the other, as Saïd speculates that Fanon must have read Lukács. Even though a comparison between these two thinkers is warranted, Saïd misses the point. For Lukács, the main effects of capitalist relations were alienation and reification, so that subjective consciousness became detached from the world of objects under capitalism. The subjective–objective dichotomy is seen as an effect of capitalism itself. This can only be overcome, Lukács stresses, by the proletariat acting on its consciousness of this separation and consciously becoming an object-subject itself through politics, and thus reuniting the subjective with the objective. He says: As long as Man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable ‘pernicious chasm’ of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth ... But it must never be forgotten: only the political class consciousness of the proletariat possesses this ability to transform things (Lukács, 1971: 204–5, emphases in original).

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More explicitly, following Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach, which maintained that the objective can only be apprehended in practice, Lukács refers to ‘the making of the proletariat into a class: the process by which its class consciousness becomes real in practice’ (pp. 198–9). And he continues: ‘This gives a more concrete form to the proposition that the proletariat is the identical subject-object of the historical process, i.e. the first subject in history that is (objectively) capable of an adequate social consciousness ... Whether an action is functionally right or wrong is decided ultimately by the evolution of proletarian class consciousness.’ Given that this collective consciousness is embedded only in the party (p. 330), as the proletariat has no alternative voice, it is clear how a Stalinist mode of politics can easily arise in his thinking, particularly as, for Lukács, subjectivation is objectively determined.29 This result is an effect of seeing class as, first, social and, second, ideological, so that consciousness is always a ‘consciousness of ...’ The problem becomes matching the politics (the subjective) to the social (the objective), and it is one the party is tasked with ensuring. From the party being a condition for a politics of emancipation in Lenin’s thought, we have arrived at the party being the unique source of politics, as the party is the consciousness of the proletariat – whether the party defines itself as communist or otherwise (e.g. as Trotskyist or socialist) is neither here nor there. The problem is that of representation of ‘the social’ in ‘the political’ without a way of providing people with avenues to express their thought independently of the party, resulting in an ultimate ‘fear of the masses’. Of course, the proletariat for Lukács is the subject of history and is represented by a party; nevertheless, what we can retain from his argument, it seems, is the view of a collective subject that creates itself by affirming its becoming. Class and nation, when they are politically self-affirmed, simultaneously affirm their becoming. If class (or nation) is to exist politically, it can only exist as such a becoming. Otherwise, we remain within a mere sociological (state) appellation: the nation founded on indigeneity and the working class founded on its divorce from the means of production. Whatever organisational form can mediate such a becoming is a matter for historical specifics; what is certain today, as I have already argued, is that it can no longer be the party form. Lukács was a participant in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and wrote from this viewpoint. Saïd is therefore somewhat off the point to argue that Lukács influenced Fanon. Whether he did or not does not matter, and it is not texts as such that are of relevance here but political subjectivities. The point, rather, is that both Lukács and Fanon are direct participants in a mass popular upsurge and experience it as a process of becoming – of affirmation, as Badiou puts it – Lukács of class, Fanon of nation. Their similar emphases on a process of becoming arguably result from similar experiences that bring forth and make visible the purely subjective rather than the social – this is the real point. That Lukács talks in terms of ‘class

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consciousness’ and Fanon in terms of ‘national consciousness’30 simply points to different variants of a process of becoming, which they interpret in terms of the differing categories of their times. It is not so much a question of ‘travelling theory’ – for Saïd, it is the subject–object dialectic that is the same in Lukács and Fanon. Instead, the issue is best understood as one of the ‘resurrection’ (to use Badiou’s term) of an emancipatory subjectivity within a different political singularity. Theory cannot travel from Lukács to Fanon, because the singularity of Algeria in the 1950s was quite distinct from that of Hungary in 1919. It is rather a ‘reinvention’ of popular becoming that is at stake.

the ‘agrarian question’ and the african nation-state: tanzania and zimbabwe By the time the state politics of the agrarian question travelled from the Soviet Union to Africa, it had become well and truly integrated into modernisation theory, from which all popular agency is absented. Peasants had to be ‘captured’, in the formulation made famous by Göran Hyden (1983), by the dominant economy in order for a ‘surplus’ to be provided for industrial development. Peasants were now seen as a problem for national development, not for the constitution of a class subject. Of course, this ‘surplus’ was never a surplus for peasants, with the result that peasant exploitation became institutionalised, although this time the exploitation was not the product of landlord activities, as in Russia and China, but the result of state policies themselves. A solution to the ‘agrarian question’ was now inextricably tied to national freedom achieved through development or ‘nation-building’. Unlike in Algeria and South Africa, in most of Africa liberation from colonial oppression was not achieved through the upsurge of a mass national popular movement. More frequently, disparate and often unconnected struggles of labour unions, ethnic nationalities, cooperative organisations, women’s organisations, urban-based intellectuals, youth movements and religious movements engaged in struggle against the colonial state in a manner that often combined local and national grievances. In other cases, guerrilla armies were mobilised by nationalist movements (not infrequently ethnically circumscribed), usually among land-hungry peasants, to engage in guerrilla warfare against the colonial state. Each of these cases had a similar outcome in that the state came into existence at independence before the nation had done so. It then became incumbent upon the state to ‘create’ or ‘build’ a nation from the disparate social movements, on the one hand, and from the ethnic administrative divisions left over by the colonial state from its divide-and-rule policies (‘indirect rule’), on the other. What was relied upon to create the nation was ‘development’, the new name for the ‘social question’. Unsurprisingly, given that most people in Africa were

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rural-based, it was rural development in particular – in other words, the ‘agrarian question’ – that was to be the core concern of the new states. The party, which saw itself as the representative of the nation, envisaged its role as enforcing national unity against the ‘parochialism’ of ethnic politics. The main obstacle to national unity was thus believed to be the proliferation of ethnic identities largely created or given prominence by colonialism as part of its divide-and-rule strategy; as a result, state politics led to the coercion of difference. While much ink has been spilt to show how minority nationalities and their ethnic interests were subsumed under the nation, and subsequently excluded or bypassed, by a national secular state (itself often drawn exclusively from some ethnic groups), much less has been said regarding how various local popular movements were ‘incorporated’ into a nationwide politics. The statements and demands of these local movements often exceeded the lowest common denominator of political independence. This should not be surprising, as all struggles for freedom invariably contain demands for greater equality. So the formation of unified states in Africa not only had to overcome the centrifugal pulls of ‘ethnic politics’, which threatened their national status, but it also had to exclude ‘excessively’ democratic demands in the process of asserting the state’s power and authority, demands considered incompatible with national unity between classes, ethnic groups, genders, religions, and so on. Demands for greater equality and what became known as ‘social justice’ were often sacrificed on the altar of national unity, even when those states advertised themselves as ideologically radical and therefore ‘socially conscious’. Two cases will briefly detain us here: Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Tanzania and the forging of national unity Tanzania after independence is a particularly important case, as it achieved its independence in 1961, when ‘Third Worldism’ as an alternative to the Cold War was at its height and rural cooperativism was ‘in line’ with Maoist thinking. Much of the opposition to colonialism in that country expressed, as always, a subjective component of equality, but, understandably, given the predominance of peasant production, this took the form of peasant egalitarian thinking. Cooperative production and marketing was one version of this form of thinking; another was collective mutual help and self-reliance. At the same time, egalitarian subjectivities were prevalent; thus one war veteran exclaimed: ‘we do not want foreigners to rule Tanganyika ... We are human beings and Europeans are human beings ... no man is superior to another here on earth’ (cit. Iliffe, 1979: 536). In other words, equality arose concretely as an issue in relation to European domination but was considered universal. Gibbon (1994) mentions a number of locally based struggles in the late 1950s and early 1960s which exhibited a more egalitarian-democratic character than the national liberation organisation (Tanganyika African National Union, or TANU) was prepared

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to accept. Consequently, they were systematically marginalised under the argument of ensuring national unity in the face of ‘parochial concerns’. Moreover, TANU was able to acquire a nationwide political monopoly at the expense of the labour unions and the rural cooperative movement, which both had a nationwide presence (p. 21). Within TANU itself and Tanganyikan society more generally [TANU’s political monopoly] implied a (re)assertion of the domination of a distinct layer of territory-wide authority over the ‘local’. The ‘local’ was of course the level where the contradictions of the indirect rule system and popular struggles against it were concentrated. Hence ... the bureaucratisation/statisation of TANU was accompanied by efforts to marginalise, dampen down and suppress these popular struggles (p. 22). In other words, the systematic creation of national unity by the state-party was not simply directed against ethnic centrifugal pulls, ‘tribal ideologies’ and the powers of the local chieftaincy, as is usually maintained,31 but also against democratic and egalitarian concerns, as the latter were subsumed under the former by virtue of their location. These included struggles against colonial regulations that affected peasants, struggles regarding chiefly legitimacy; and struggles against the inclusion of Europeans in Native Councils (Gibbon, 1994), as well as attempts to lift the excessive controls of the local colonial state and frequent demands for greater measures of autonomy for peasant production. In other words, the thinking of politics in ‘national’ state terms, the achievement of a nationwide monopoly of nationalist politics and the reduction of all concerns to national liberation regularly sidelined more popular-democratic demands, which, because of their independence, constituted an obstacle to thinking freedom in other than centralised statist terms. Consequently, potentially excessive political subjectivity, the thinking of alternative possibilities, was ultimately shut down with the deployment of state coercion and violence right up to the programme of enforced villagisation in the first half of the 1970s. Tanzania is a particularly interesting case, as its radical ideology of ‘African socialism’ has often been referred to as one clear example of an attempted agrarian-based emancipatory politics on the continent, while Julius Nyerere has been repositioned as one of the ‘great leaders’ of African nationalism. Its radicalism was, however, exclusively statist, and evidence suggests that local egalitarian initiatives were seen as a threat to centralised authority. Nyerere’s state radicalism did not allow for the independent development of local initiatives and creativity. In view of the massive popularity of socialist egalitarianism among the people at the time, along with the formation of numerous popular organisations in the run-up to independence, the decision was taken by Nyerere himself to institute socialism ‘from above’ in 1967. This was the famous Arusha Declaration, whose first statement read: ‘the policy of TANU is to

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build a socialist state’ (Nyerere, 1968: 13).32 Interestingly, socialism and democracy were both understood by Nyerere as subjectivities: ‘socialism – like democracy – is an attitude of mind’ (p. 1). Yet these subjectivities are grasped as psychological attributes inherent in the family in African society;33 the kinds of politics that are thought to enable them were not popular collective ones, but ones to be promoted by leaders in power (p. 17), as they were seen as attributes of culture. As I shall argue in chapter 13, such a form of centralised progressive state can only make sense as an emancipatory possibility if it allows for the independent development of popular organised initiatives. The Tanzanian form of ‘state socialism’, as it soon became apparent, did not allow for the independent political thinking of local initiatives, although it had initially encouraged the setting up of so-called Ujamaa villages, founded on voluntary cooperative principles. The Ruvuma Development Association, for example, which ended up being one of the most ‘successful’ Ujamaa villages in that it was both economically efficient and founded on ideological unity, was systematically undermined by the central state when its collectivist ethos was no longer deemed to be official policy (Coulson, 1982: 263–71). Coulson notes: The Ruvuma Development Association was the model for much of Nyerere’s writing in the 1960s. Most of what was recommended in Education for SelfReliance had been pioneered in the primary school at Litowa, and the description of small villages of politicized farmers given in Freedom and Development could apply to most of the RDA’s 17 villages, with an average of about thirty farmers in each. Yet in September 1969 it was declared a prohibited organization. Its abolition was announced to the nation with the headline ‘TANU to run all ujamaa villages’ (p. 262). Gradually, people were settled coercively into villages by decree and all collectivist ideology was dropped in favour of administrative efficiency. The state argued, much as the colonial state had done, that development could only be successfully delivered if people lived in villages. By 1977, Coulson insists, 79 per cent of the mainland population lived in villages; thousands had been resettled, all local resistance undermined and national unity achieved. Despite the support among many in Tanzania for more collective forms of rural economy, rural development ‘required villagisation’ in order to ensure nationwide state control; the problem of peasant production was ultimately to be ‘resolved’ through coercive state interventions, much like everywhere else on the continent. Yet, for Mamdani (2013a: 108, 122), ‘Nyerere’s concern with social justice needs to be understood in the context of his overriding commitment to build a nation state ... forced villagization turned out to be integral to the trajectory of nation building in Tanzania’.

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Although Mamdani acknowledges the coercive and violent nature of villagisation, he sees this as ultimately beneficial, as Nyerere was able to unify mainland Tanzania by overcoming colonially inherited divisions, whereas the rest of the region was ‘marked by ethnic cleansing and extreme violence’ (p. 125). Indeed, when it came to forms of state, Nyerere’s was perhaps the lesser evil, yet the complete absence of any discussion of alternative political thinking in Mamdani’s work makes it impossible to move subjectively beyond the limits of statism. Perhaps Nyerere’s thought was indeed at the limit of what was thinkable within the state after independence had been achieved in Africa. Yet, as we have seen, popular alternatives were not given a chance to develop possibilities for a different politics; national subjectivities that exceeded the representation of the nation enunciated by TANU were simply silenced.34 Mamdani’s perspective does not help us to expand our thinking beyond this statist limit today, when conditions have completely altered.

Confronting the ‘land question’ in Zimbabwe The struggle revolving around the control and form of local politics also comes out quite clearly in the literature on Zimbabwe, especially that surrounding the independence war. Unlike Tanzania, Zimbabwe was a settler-colonial economy and society where the nationalist demand for land concerned the redress of colonially created grievances. Here the ‘land question’ and the ‘national question’ were intimately linked. Just as in Tanzania, there was no mass independent peasant movement in Zimbabwe to which the nationalist leadership could attach itself, although there had been a major rebellion against the British in 1896–7 and ongoing small-scale resistance since then. Instead, the nationalist movements, led by middle-class intellectuals, set up guerrilla armies and recruited peasants as foot soldiers. The liberation war of the 1970s was fought largely around the issue of the return to the people of the land alienated to settlers during the colonial period. This was the core mobilising factor among the peasantry, who provided the rank and file of the two guerrilla armies of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) (mainly Shona-speaking) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) (mainly in Matabeleland) (Ranger, 1985a). In conformity with the social existence of the peasantry, the two armies were organised along ethnic lines and structured around distinct nationalist organisations. Work by Norma Kriger (1991) has emphasised the importance of recognising social divisions among the peasantry for understanding popular reaction to ZANU guerrillas during the liberation war. Her work operates at different levels, showing not only that rural people were capable of making their own histories under extreme conditions but that they did so through attempts to transform their own social relations as well as the powers of the local state. This work largely debunks the state-nationalist myth of a homogeneous peasantry willingly assisting their guerrilla liberators from

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ZANU. The people did not just ‘help’ the guerrillas, but took advantage of the political process in the countryside to address their own grievances, which did not always fit within the guerrillas’ state-nationalist conceptions. Without denying that peasants had common grievances against the central colonial state, Kriger shows that struggles within peasant communities played a crucial mobilising role in the independence war. As with all mass struggles, egalitarian politics were present, especially among the most excluded. She looks at generational, class and gender struggles, as well as conflicts between dominant and dominated lineages or ethnic minorities. At the level of generational relations, Kriger shows how unmarried youth over 15 years of age (overwhelmingly male) were organised separately and were gradually constituted (and constituted themselves) into a distinct grouping of ‘youth’. They challenged the control that elders had over their daily lives: this was one of the reasons motivating them to participate in the war. In addition, having no cattle or land, the youth were among the poorer strata of the peasantry (Kriger, 1991: 126–33). These poor peasants also acted independently, defying guerrilla instructions to raid only White farmers for cattle and attacking rich peasants, even though such measures may have been individualistic, unorganised and undisciplined. As with the generational conflicts, these attacks on the wealthier occurred largely independently of formal organisation, but they did suggest a struggle towards some form of equalisation of wealth and power within the community (pp. 133–6). Kriger makes similar points about why other politically excluded groups within peasant society participated in the war, namely women and dominated lineages or strangers. The former attempted to improve their domestic lives, and for a brief period wives were able to democratise household relations somewhat. The latter attempted to democratise village politics by taking over the chiefs’ powers to judge court cases and allocate land (pp. 137–45). The revolutionary initiative to reconstitute local politics in a more democratic way came from rural people themselves. The guerrillas opposed ‘traditional’ rulers [i.e. primarily chiefs but not spirit mediums] because of their involvement with government, but never challenged the institution of hereditary offices. When they killed incumbent rulers or encouraged committee members to take power from them or share power with them, the intent was to punish individual ‘traditional’ rulers for collaborating with the government and give some status and power to the new committees. The guerrillas’ agenda never included eliminating the lineage-based, hereditary pre-colonial political system and broadening the basis for political competition for local power (Kriger, 1991: 145). ZANU was concerned with securing a military victory over the colonial state, and its politics were directed at achieving unity around that objective. Like other nationalist organisations in Africa, there was little interest in a democratisation of social relations

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within peasant society, which could only have been put on the agenda either by an independent peasant movement or by an organisation with deep roots among the peasantry. Neither ZAPU nor ZANU possessed such roots; yet, in order to be successful in their venture, they needed the support, enthusiasm, hard work (and even the numerical dominance) of the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the rural population, because the economically better off and politically more powerful were politically unreliable. They were unreliable supporters of the nationalist movement because they had achieved their relative wealth and power within a colonial context, and were therefore (more or less) compromised in the eyes of the nationalist movement and, more importantly, in those of the people. The representation of national interest in proto-state political thinking effaced that political thought which did not correspond to a statist conception of national social justice. Various groupings of rural society, organising locally, of course, although in favour of independence and the ‘return of the land to its rightful owner’, supported such demands for ultimately different reasons and not just because of an overall peasant or national or even ethnic consciousness. In fact, much peasant action was directed against both the colonial state (nationalism) and the local state (the chiefs), while operating within the limits of an ethnic Shona culture. In brief, peasants in the Shona-speaking areas of Zimbabwe attempted to democratise rural social relations during the independence war. In particular, the collapse in authority of chiefs through their association with the colonial state meant that it was the peasants themselves who withdrew state powers from them and bestowed these on others, including both spirit mediums and guerrillas. The former would be entrusted with land allocation, for example, while the latter would engage in arbitrating and adjudicating disputes (Lan, 1985: esp. ch. 8; Ranger, 1985a). The whole process was at the same time a ‘struggle over tradition’, an attempt at reintroducing more egalitarian cultural values within a cultural framework that the chiefs were seen to have betrayed as a result of their accepting colonial domination in order to keep their positions and enhance their powers over the people.35 Until writers such as Kriger initiated a redress of the balance, nationalist historians of this period of Zimbabwean history had downplayed both the social contradictions among the peasant movement and their attempts to exceed the social in thought. In Mamdani’s expression, the nationalist historian tried to play down whatever features may detract from the national character of a social movement so as to emphasize its nationalist credentials, to remove the notes which could not easily be harmonized within a single national chorus, s/he also ended up obscuring local issues so as to cast in bold the one single national demand: self-government or independence! To use a somewhat modern metaphor, what was really a ‘rainbow coalition’ was painted in a single grey! (Mamdani, 1991b: 54).

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But the question concerns more than a matter of nationalism ignoring or ‘obscuring’ local issues; the more important point is that local political subjectivities often exceeded the limits imposed by the objectively social, whether in its ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ forms. Even under colonial conditions, traditional culture could still be flexible enough to allow for a democratic resolution to the problem of how to deal with strangers, and it is largely false to assume that ethnic citizenship in Africa is conferred once and for all and exclusively by birth, as Mamdani (1998a) does. The colonial state was never totally successful in rigidifying tradition, for the simple reason that culture was contested by the marginalised within it. Thus, in Zimbabwe during the struggle for independence, spirit mediums were not only instrumental in ‘delivering’ peasant support to guerrillas, but also in redefining conceptions of community to include the guerrillas (who always originated from areas other than their field of operations). Lan explains this as follows: The factor that persuaded the majority of the mediums to convert their symbolic resistance into practice was the undertaking given by the guerrillas that if their efforts should succeed they would reverse all the legislation that limited the development and freedom of the peasantry. Of all the promised reforms the most important for forging unity between guerrillas and mediums was the undertaking to free the land from the grasp of the whites, to return it to the peasants who had barely enough to keep their families alive ... the guerrillas were ‘strangers’. In other words, they were not descendants of the royal ancestors who ‘owned’ the land, either as members of the royal lineage itself or of any of the commoner lineages which held rights in land but whose members could not succeed to the chieftaincy. Therefore ... the guerrillas held no political authority at all ... But despite their lack of political authority, the guerrillas claimed the land ... all the land in the whole territory of Zimbabwe ... [through their alliance with mediums] by observing the ancestral prohibitions the guerrillas were transformed from ‘strangers’ into ‘royals’, from members of lineages resident in other parts of Zimbabwe, into descendants of the local mhondoro [royal ancestor] with rights to land. They had become ‘at home’ in the [local community] (Lan, 1985: 148, 164). In other words, even traditional culture and custom, which always traces community membership through descent and through descent alone, can be flexible enough to include under specific conditions erstwhile strangers and outsiders in community, to broaden ethnic citizenship, so to speak. In the Zimbabwean independence war, this was achieved by those who spoke for tradition and the nation or community, through giving symbolic rights to land to the guerrillas. It seems clear, therefore, that even under apparently rigid pre-capitalist conceptions of community membership,

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traditional entitlements can be conferred on foreigners, the concept of community can be democratised, and this can occur under colonial conditions during which the ‘customary’ had been rigidified by law. In sum, the struggle for independence in rural Shona-speaking Zimbabwe can be seen as subsuming a complex and disparate set of excessive subjectivities that attempted to democratise the local state and local social relations (within the Shona nationality). These subjectivities were clearly simultaneously products of ethnicity and in excess of culture. The result was that the popular upsurge that was thereby enabled remained in conformity with the ethnic existence of the peasantry in Southern Africa; a national peasantry was not in existence at this time.36 What this example also establishes is that cultures of whatever hue, but particularly ethnic ones, are very much the object of contestation and struggle; in other words, it is possible to exceed the ethnic subjectivities imposed by both the colonial state and the dominant groups within a community. It is largely a myth of colonial anthropology that cultures and traditions are given and unquestioningly acceptable to all in their given state. As the prevalent culture and tradition is that of a dominant group, the establishment of cultural hegemony is not unproblematic. The state, which is embodied in the chieftaincy, has a primary role to play in ensuring this hegemony through both coercion and indoctrination, but it is rarely uncontested. The failure of the postcolonial state to address seriously the ‘land question’, as evidenced in land hunger on the part of small peasants in Communal Areas (the renamed colonial Tribal Trust Lands), because of its attempt to placate the White settlers and White capital more broadly, gradually came to a head in the second half of the 1990s. The land question did not disappear as an issue from politics, not only because the state refused to do anything about it, but also because it remained an unresolved political question for the population and increased in political importance with the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies. Despite the fact that the issue was ignored by the state, it remained subjectively present, especially as most White commercial farmers did not show full commitment to the new state, to becoming Zimbabweans, and largely wished to continue with all their privileges. The ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ policy agreed at independence by the incoming state and the departing British, and backed by the World Bank, made no dent in the racial distribution of land and could not have made any. Two main factors, one objective and the other subjective, came together to reinsert the demand for land into the political domain. The first was the increasing impoverishment of the population as a result of the introduction of an enhanced structural adjustment programme (known as ESAP) in the early 1990s, as the government caved in to neo-colonial pressure; the second was the successful political organisation of liberation-war veterans, who demanded during the same period that the land occupied by White settlers be returned to the people.

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Moyo and Yeros (2005: 176) are right to note that ‘structural adjustment had a devastating effect on Zimbabwe, economically and politically’. They continue by stressing that ‘the country entered into rapid de-industrialization while the post-independence social gains in the fields of health and education began to be reversed ... The burden of adjustment was carried by the peasant-worker household, and particularly women ...’ While the population became impoverished and a pattern of migration, to South Africa in particular, set in, many veterans of the national liberation war began to mobilise around issues of unpaid pensions and eventually for a fulfilment of the promises to redistribute land to the African landless. They did not simply demand the return of the land, but organised systematic land occupations to put their demands into practice and forced the state to accept these occupations as a fait accompli (Sadomba, 2011). By 2003 it seems that 11 million hectares had been redistributed and 147,000 farm units created (Murisa, 2011: 115–16). While structural adjustment liberalised the economy, with disastrous economic consequences, it simultaneously transformed Western political discourse from one of state-led development into one focusing on human rights and multipartyism.37 It was not only that the Washington consensus imposed strict political conditionalities on the African state – in this case, in Zimbabwe – but, much more centrally, that the whole state political discourse was pressured into change with the proliferation of Western-funded human rights NGOs concerning themselves with ‘governance’, gender, civil society and democracy (i.e. multi-party issues) in particular. In chapter 12, I detail these changes at the level of state politics within the continent as a whole, but it is important to note here that the transition to neo-liberal economics and politics was experienced more clearly as a neo-colonial intervention in Zimbabwe than it was in South Africa, the other main ‘settler colony’ in the region. The reason was the centrality of land in Zimbabwe in both the economic reproduction of the majority and in their national consciousness: the aphorism that ‘land is the economy and the economy is the land’ was a common assumption. For example, the coupling of a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ neo-liberal land economic policy to a human rights discourse (through the imperative not to challenge the right to property) made this discourse appear more obviously as a neo-colonial imposition. The question became: how is it possible to make a case for human rights when one of these rights (the right to property) is so obviously an obstacle to the realisation of deeply felt popular historical issues of social justice and, indeed, an obstacle to the possibility of survival? It was this political contradiction that divided the country between two distinct forms of politics that were largely irreconcilable: one revolving around human rights discourse and a Western-inspired politics of state democracy, with all its subjective appendages (like good governance, multipartyism, civil society), and another, state-nationalist in inspiration, which emphasised the right to the land as the central concern of a movement for

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social justice. The state, under both Western pressure and pressure exerted by organised movements from below, initially vacillated between the two, became more repressive and eventually came down in favour of the latter; subsequently, after land was forcibly redistributed, it rebuilt its links with the former (Moyo and Yeros, 2005; Murisa, 2011; Sadomba, 2011).38 These two major political subjectivities were irreducible to social class positions or, for that matter, to a simple contradiction between the rural and the urban, making them extremely difficult to understand in traditional Marxist sociological terms. For example, the so-called working class, if we were to follow the political choices of its standard representatives in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), came down on the side of White settlers and Western neo-colonial interests, civil society and NGOs (eventually forming a new party, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC).39 On the other hand, the main thrust for redistribution of White settler-owned land did not emanate from a landless peasantry but from war veterans (ex-guerrillas), people from adjoining Communal Areas and landless urban dwellers in particular, in desperate need of means of subsistence after the depredations of the ESAP had made themselves felt. The failure of the standard theory of representation of class interests to adequately account for these politics is evidenced by the reference by some analysts to ‘two Lefts’ in the country (see Moyo and Yeros, 2007). The proliferation of ‘Lefts’ suggests that the Left–Right distinction is no longer able to adequately orient political thought in these circumstances. Hence, an important effect of the theory of expressive politics in Zimbabwe has been precisely political disorientation, as the classic standard parameters for distinguishing between political positions have vanished, and a fundamental antagonism between human rights and social justice has been solidified instead. The dominant political contradiction in that country, forming the parameters limiting political subjectivity, has remained that between state nationalism and state neo-liberalism, but it has not been explicable in class terms. Indeed, there has been a failure to prescribe an alternative to state politics, so that interests have been politically pursued strictly within these statist parameters, which are frequently expressed in a Marxist discourse. It is this political disorientation that is ultimately responsible for the inability to think an alternative political position with emancipatory possibilities (from intellectuals in particular but also in public life in general), distinct from the two statist perspectives of the state-nationalist politics of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government and the land occupation movement (however legitimate its demands), on the one hand, and the state liberal-democratic and neo-colonial perspectives of the NGOs, the ZCTU and Western interests, on the other. This does not mean that an excessive politics has not existed here and there, but it is difficult to tell, as there are few studies that investigate ‘the motivations of land occupiers’ (Murisa, 2011: 123). Moreover, the predominance of militaristic

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subjectivities among the war veterans, and the government’s eventual intervention to take control of the process by legislating a ‘Fast Track’ land reform and by nationalising all agricultural land in the country in 2005, meant that the political subjectivity of the land reform movement remained overwhelmingly within the limits of state politics. In addition, it seems that ‘a highly individualised approach to the organization of production’ was dominant among those resettled (Murisa, 2011: 141), while chiefs have also extended their control to geographically adjoining ‘Fast Track’ areas. The deployment of traditional Marxist categories to describe the political process appears as strangely incongruous. For example, the description of the land reform programme as a ‘national democratic revolution’ (Moyo and Yeros, 2005; Sadomba, 2011) seems particularly inapplicable, as the squatter land movement led by the war veterans was not a rebellion against the state. It was not a revolution in any Marxist sense, as there was no replacement of one state form by another. Moreover, the term ‘national’ here refers only to the redress of the historical social injustices suffered by the racial (mainly Mashona) majority; minority (non-White) members of the nation were not included, and the implicit contradiction between the demand for rural land rights and rights for those landless Zimbabweans in urban areas does not seem to have been addressed. As a result of the land reform process, there has been an economic and political shift from the dominance of White capital to that of Black capital, and not only in agriculture. The shift is being thought subjectively as one of ‘indigenisation’ guided by state policies to that effect (see Sadomba, 2011: 225).40 We should recall, however, what Fanon (1990) observed about African countries as they indigenised their economies. Such state politics are likely to lead to the political exclusion of ethnic minorities, as national issues are addressed in terms of a nativist ideology. The resolution of the ‘national question’ in this manner thus provides the conditions for inter-ethnic tensions, as it militates against pan-Africanism by stressing indigeneity. So much, then, for ‘national democratic revolution’; this episode does not constitute an adequate popular-democratic answer to the national question. The recent struggle for land in Zimbabwe must be grasped as constituting at its core a successful attack on colonial capital  – large agricultural colonial capital, in particular  – and therefore, fundamentally, a movement for social justice of great importance. But it has not exhibited a universal significance, for it has remained totally within the limits of ‘interest group politics’, i.e. within the parameters of a social movement. Its politics combined civil society conceptions of interest group politics with a certain amount of traditional subjectivity, particularly when it came to claiming the land and administering claims (Murisa, 2011). There was no political differentiation along clear-cut class lines, for among the landless were rural and urban dwellers of various social class backgrounds. There was no ‘worker–peasant alliance’, but rather demarcation in terms of political positions irreducible to class. It was not

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a class struggle in the countryside but more a national or, perhaps, racial struggle over the redress of historical grievances. The outcome has been state nation-building within a capitalist economy, founded more and more on a national bourgeoisie in Fanon’s terms. It has had little effect on the authoritarianism of the ZANU-PF state, and even the beneficiaries of land redistribution have been ignored both by the government and by the NGOs, from whom socio-economic help has not been forthcoming (Murisa, 2011: 114, 139, 144). From the perspective of political emancipation, one can see that the case of Zimbabwe illustrates the point that the question of social justice is not in and of itself emancipatory; its emancipatory possibilities ultimately depend on the manner in which social justice is achieved and the politics deployed in order to do so, for emancipation is in large part asocial. If it is governed by a universal politics of equality, it is no longer accurately described as ‘social’. Indeed, all things considered, the notion of ‘social justice’ is an oxymoron. In so far as it is social, there can be no justice for all, only for some; in so far as there is universal justice, it is no longer social – i.e. not ‘state-delivered’ – because it is founded on a politics of universal equality and not on a spurious notion of ‘equality before the law’. It should be clear that my argument is closely related to the idea of ‘natural right’ emphasised by Gauthier (1992), which formed the foundation of the radical thought of the French Revolution.

political economy and the thought of revolution today What is striking in retrospect is how totally off the mark were the political predictions of Arrighi and Saul and other Left academics in the 1970s. Not only was there no socialist revolution in Zimbabwe, but a mass movement of re-peasantisation has been successfully concluded. The reason for this total misreading is simply that politics were read off from socio-economic trends, and not that the socio-economic trends themselves had been mistakenly analysed, as I myself previously argued (see Neocosmos, 1993). Socio-economic class differentiation does not of itself lead to political demarcation along class lines. Politics has to be understood in its own terms and not as a representation of the social. The perspective that sees politics as a simple reflection of class interest and social location is still evident today in Left academia, including in studies of the agrarian question in Southern Africa; the result is simply that all politics are understood as state politics.41 However, I wish to conclude this discussion of the limits of political economy by noting a small number of examples that illustrate the political failures of political-economic thought beyond debates on the agrarian question. At the end of David Harvey’s recent text Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Harvey, 2014), there is an epilogue entitled ‘Ideas for Political Praxis’ (pp.

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294–7) in which the famous Marxist political economist lists a number of issues that should be fought for in any struggle against capitalism. He enumerates them as follows: We should strive for a better world in which: 1. The direct provision of adequate use values for all (housing, education, food security, etc.) takes precedence over their provision through a profit-maximising market system that concentrates exchange values in a few private hands and allocates goods on the basis of ability to pay. 2. A means of exchange is created ... that limits or excludes the capacity of private individuals to make money ...  3. The opposition between private property and state power is displaced as far as possible by common rights regimes ...  4. The appropriation of social power by private persons is not only inhibited by economic and social barriers but becomes universally frowned upon as a pathological deviancy. [the list continues] All these demands are, of course, laudable and not many people on the Left would disagree, yet Harvey tells us absolutely nothing regarding the politics which may be required in order to achieve them; he is totally silent on how to achieve these aims, a rather extraordinary fact, for that presumably is what a discussion of ‘political praxis’ would entail. This is the real issue at stake today, and Harvey’s list simply shows the political inadequacies of a political economy that is unable to provide any guidance for practice other than a series of demands. In his 2012 text, Rebel Cities, on the other hand, Harvey does give us some indication of his political thinking. Here he is interested in stressing the apparently revolutionary location that cities constitute today. In order to achieve this, he is intent on showing that a working class can no longer be seen as uniquely located in the production process (the ‘workshop and the factory’), but that it can also be seen as economically formed in cities because ‘the dynamics of class exploitation are not confined to the workplace’ (p. 129). He seems desperate to show that urban working people are as ‘working class’ as the direct producers in factories, because it is only on this social basis that a revolutionary politics can become a possibility; no ‘working class’, no revolution (i.e. emancipation). This point follows simply because it is social location in the manner proposed by classism and not political exclusion of people (however we may wish to refer to them) which, for Harvey – as for all Marxist political economy – provides the founding principle for emancipatory politics. This point is illustrated by his discussion of the Paris Commune, in which he insists that, even though many writers (such as Manuel Castells) have said ‘that ... it was not a proletarian uprising or class-based movement

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at all, but an urban social movement that was reclaiming citizenship rights and the right to the city’, he sees ‘no reason why it should not be construed as both a class struggle and a struggle for citizenship rights in the place where working people lived’ (p. 128). What Harvey does here is to reduce one of the most important emancipatory political events in world history to a mere social movement which demanded rights based on the class interests of its membership. The only available perspectives for understanding the Paris Commune seem to him to be either a struggle for human rights or a class struggle, or both. Political emancipation does not enter the picture; indeed, no excessive politics can enter the picture. Harvey shows little or no understanding of the extraordinarily emancipatory character of the Paris Commune’s politics, which, as Marx had stressed, insisted on creating a new form of state which was simultaneously not a state (the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, according to Engels), owing in no small measure to the election of all civil servants, to the possibility of their recall at any time, and to the creation of a people’s militia rather than a standing army. This amounted to a direct confrontation (‘smashing’, in Marx’s language) of the bourgeois state bureaucracy, to bringing the state under popular control, and to transforming the division between mental and manual labour. It was primarily these political measures, and not just the enactment of social measures (such as the abolition of night work in bakeries and a moratorium on rents, as mentioned by Harvey), that showed the emancipatory character of the Commune’s politics. And it was these specific features that were taken up by those revolutionaries whom the Commune influenced politically – for example, the Shanghai Commune of 1966 discussed at length by Jiang (2010). For Harvey, ‘politics’ is simply to be read off from class identities and political economy or, in other words, from place; he provides no means for thinking emancipatory politics at all. Nevertheless, this should be seen not as an individual failure on Harvey’s part but as a consequence of the fact that there can be no thought of politics while remaining within the subjective straitjacket of political economy. The exclusive focus on identifying interest to the detriment of disinterest means that political economy invariably cannot recognise politics, particularly that which has an emancipatory content. It therefore simply contributes (‘critically’, of course) to the reproduction of capitalism. Political economy reaches its limits as soon as it attempts to exceed its own objective domain; it should remain there. The socially reductionist understanding of politics exhibited by political economy is also evident in another important recent text, Gilbert Achcar’s (2013) book on the so-called Arab Spring, which, in Tunisia and Egypt at least, showed some fundamental similarities to the South African popular struggle of the 1980s. Here again, the emphasis is on an attempt to explain emancipatory political subjectivities (‘revolution’) through structural/objective social location: unemployment, problems of investment, the ‘rentier’ and ‘patrimonial’ character of the state, the ‘oil curse’,

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and so on. Even though this book is entitled The People Want, there is scant attention paid to a discussion of popular voice: ultimately, explanation for these ‘revolutions’ is sought in the ‘objective contradiction’ between production relations and productive forces and in the Althusserian notion of ‘overdetermination’. Political decisions apparently played no role whatsoever, as these events were determined by objective conditions. Noting Sadri Khiari’s prescient forecast, with regard to Tunisia in 2003, that ‘this unexpected event could come from the street. For there is an element of the aleatory in every popular movement’ (Khiari, 2003: 195, cit. Achcar 2013: 147), Achcar finds no way of internalising that statement and thinking the subjectivities of the uprisings. His account is unreservedly focused on structures, and thus quite unable to think subjectivities, even along the lines of other sophisticated structuralists (in Lévi-Strauss’s or Guha’s work, for example). Achcar remains squarely within the confines of representation by sociological categories. Marxist political economy and sociology are unable to think politics, because they speak for people whom they assume to be silent; they do not have the capacity to think politics, because they do not hold to the axiom that people think, with the result that politics expressed in popular voices is regularly effaced by popular subjectivities being collapsed into pre-existing categories imported from sociological narratives. I shall expand on this point at length in the next chapter, through an assessment of the thought of worker subjectivities in South Africa.

notes 1. On the issue of ‘populism’, see the recent debates on the agrarian question in Marxist academia – for example, in the writings of Terry Byres (1991), Henry Bernstein (2003, 2005, 2007), and, in South Africa, Fred Hendricks (2014) and Ben Cousins (2007) which despite the disagreements between them are all concerned to insist on the fact of socio-economic class differentiation as a way of countering ‘populist’ perspectives. Throughout these works, politics is reduced implicitly or explicitly to the state, as politics are simply seen as representing class interests; on this issue they thus remain on the same statist terrain as the ‘neo-classical populism’ they criticise. 2. This rapid proletarianisation or ‘linear proletarianisation’ thesis was a consensual position on the Marxist Left in Southern Africa and is reflected in the work of people like Mike Morris (1982), Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe (1976), Colin Bundy (1979), Giovanni Arrighi (1973), Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul (1973), and a host of other writers at the time. I outlined a critique of the linear proletarianisation thesis (Neocosmos, 1993). In that text I concentrated exclusively on the limitations of the political-economic analysis, which I argued was empirically questionable and therefore politically far too optimistic; I did not engage with the class-reductionist conception of politics that characterised that consensus, as I largely shared it at the time.

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3. This kind of perspective was dominant among all national liberation movements at the time; see, for example, de Bragança and Wallerstein (1982). It was part of a world historical sequence dominant in the 20th century for which emancipation was understood in statist terms. I have debated the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in chapter 3. 4. There are few analyses of production relations today in South Africa, where presumably a working class would at least partly be located; what dominates is structural analyses of poverty. The absurdity of referring to a ‘working class’ as an incipient political unity today in South Africa is apparent in the fact that some of its imputed members see other members of the same class as a threat to their existence and hence engage in (xenophobic) violence in order to resolve their problem. The prevalence of xenophobic politics among the ‘working class’ can only be understood politically and, unfortunately, not in terms of poverty, inequality or, indeed, a ‘false consciousness’ (Neocosmos, 2008, 2010a). 5. For a very interesting sample of such nationalist writings, see Mutiso and Rohio (1975). 6. See Althusser (1969), for example. 7. This largely explains Marx and Engels’s disparaging remarks towards the ‘lumpen proletariat’, ‘whose conditions of life ... prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 44). 8. It was the relationship between necessary and surplus labour time which ultimately governed the rate of exploitation for Marx; hence his concepts of absolute and relative surplus value in Capital (Marx, 1867: Part 5). 9. For Marx and Engels (1872: 32), ‘One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” ’. 10. For Lazarus (2012: 74, my translation, emphasis in original), ‘contrary to knowledge, thought is deployed in relation to the as yet unknown’. 11. The expression Lenin is constantly attacking in his book is ‘lending “the economic struggle itself a political character” ’ – in other words, the idea that a politics can be derived from trade unionism, i.e. an identity politics. This was and still is the position advocated by ‘workerism’ in South Africa, as we shall see in chapter 8. 12. See Lih (2008) for a very important discussion of Lenin’s text. 13. For Lazarus, the party for Lenin is itself ‘under the condition’ of a subjective politics: i.e. in order to create a revolutionary party, there must be people who are aware of the centrality of antagonism, who are clear that such a party is needed in order to destroy the existing order along with the state, which is its concentrated expression; see Lazarus (2013: 81–4). Lazarus (1996, 2013) insists that Lenin was the first to think politics in its own terms and not as expressive of the social. 14. It should be clear, then, that, for Lenin, the point of proletarian politics is not for the party of the proletariat to isolate itself from the people in general in order to maintain its supposed ideological purity. This argument is rather the one associated with the position Lenin criticised (‘Menshevik economism’) and has been adopted       

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by various ‘workerist’ positions in contemporary South Africa, as we shall see in the following chapter. 15. Lenin’s suspicion of ‘spontaneity’ extended to the popular councils or soviets of workers, soldiers and peasant deputies themselves. Whereas the soviets of 1905 had been autonomous of parties, those of 1917 were characterised by ongoing conflicts between party representatives. Lenin’s directive of ‘all power to the soviets’ was, according to Anweiler, not to be read as support for independent popular power, as his idea was for Bolshevik leadership and control of these organs. See Anweiler (1972: 93, 103, 180–260). 16. Lenin’s arguments regarding the changing political economy of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his views on the class differentiation, are well known and have been debated at length in the sociological literature; see, in particular, Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985) and Bernstein (1987). 17. It is perhaps also important to note that this same economistic position was upheld by Rosa Luxemburg in her review and critique of the Bolshevik agrarian reform (Luxemburg, 1961: 41–6). For Lenin’s own position on large estates, see, in particular, his references to the communist parties’ attitude to large estates in Western Europe (Lenin, 1920b: 159–61). 18. See Kautsky (1889). 19. Much as the revolutionary leaders of the ex-slaves had assumed in independent Haiti, as we saw in chapter 2. 20. Moreover, in 1917 Lenin made it plain that it was politics – specifically, the popular rebellion of the peasantry – which, inter alia, obligated the Bolsheviks to take state power: ‘to miss such a moment and to “wait” for the Congress of Soviets ... would be sheer treachery to the peasants. To allow the peasant revolt to be supressed when we control the Soviets of both capitals would be to lose, and justly lose, every ounce of the peasants’ confidence’ (Lenin, 2002: 139 emphasis original  ). 21. As, for example, in Lenin (1907b: 279). 22. It is important to note that this particular issue of the need for the party to struggle for the independence of popular organisations from the state (even their ‘own’ state) is one to which Lenin returned insistently after October 1917 but with little success; see, for example, Lenin (1918d: 275; 1919c: 25). The other well-known attempt to exercise popular control over socialist state bureaucracy was the Cultural Revolution in China. This major event requires serious analysis, which is only just beginning, but see Jiang (2010). 23. Unfortunately, this lack of party presence in the countryside was partly Lenin’s own fault, as in 1901 he had argued against calling ‘active revolutionary forces from the towns to the villages. Such a thing is out of the question,’ he stressed (1901: 427). For Lenin, the peasantry as a whole was seen as represented politically by the Narodniks (and Socialist Revolutionaries); the peasantry formed part of the petty bourgeoisie, which he saw as a class historically overtaken by events, being divided up between bourgeoisie and proletariat. In fact, not only Lenin but Luxemburg also maintained that intermediate classes between the two opposing forces were

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ineluctably being superseded; see, for example, Lukács’s (1971) comments on this. In 1918, the Bolsheviks made an attempt to ally primarily with the poor peasants, rather than with the peasantry as a whole. This change of strategy failed, according to Bettelheim (1976: 223–4), because of the absence of party organisation in the rural areas, and the revitalisation of the mir due to the role it played in the land redistribution process. This led to a consolidation of village unity which benefited the rich and middle peasants. See also Linehart (1976: esp. pp. 42–5) for one of the most useful commentaries on Lenin’s thoughts on this issue. He argues that this poor peasant movement was an artificial construction ‘from above’ and not a creation of the people themselves. 24. This historicist and hence statist perspective is dominant in academic Marxism also. It is there in Henry Bernstein’s work, in which what he calls the ‘classical agrarian question’ (Bernstein, 2003) ‘as theorised by Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin and others’ is reduced to a structural issue of political economy (class struggle + transformation of relations of production and development of the productive forces in capitalist transitions + the extraction of surplus for industrialisation). See Bernstein (2003: 203; 2007: 30), for example. Politics is at best simply reduced to the class struggle and hence remains totally unthought and unthinkable except as a reflection of political-economic relations of power. This leads to problems when the agrarian question as posed by politics does not directly concern political economy as such – as, for example, in the case of Zimbabwe, where the land question, as we shall see, does not at all conform to the principles of economic ‘transition’ (Bernstein, 2005). In Southern Africa, given the settler nature of colonialism, the agrarian question has taken the form of a redressing of historical political grievances regarding the racial dispossession of land and not of capitalist accumulation and development as such. This question may not seem to conform to the exigencies of political economy, but it is the manner in which the issue has been posed politically and therefore the way it must be confronted; otherwise, one easily falls into a sterile dogmatism. Bernstein (2007) is clearly aware of some of the problems of ‘non-correspondence’ between political economy and politics, yet is at a loss to find a solution, because he sees all politics as derived from the capital–labour relation: in his terms, the ‘agrarian question of capital and the agrarian question of labour’. 25. The notion of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ seems to have prevailed among Bolsheviks during the 1920s. Apart from Preobrazhensky (1926), see Bukharin (1920: 111), along with Lenin’s (dismissive) marginal comments included in the 1971 edition of Bukharin’s text. 26. In addition, Mao was fully aware of the problems of the exploitation of agriculture by industry through the extraction of a so-called surplus, as under Stalin; his insistence on equality between the two was encapsulated in the idea of ‘walking on two legs’. See, for example, Mao’s well-known article ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’ (1956). 27. The accuracy of the representative function of the party was to be established by what was known as the ‘mass line’; ‘take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated

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and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own’ (Mao, 1943: 119). 28. Unfortunately this didn’t last and, particularly after the mid-1960s, party cadres began to lord it over peasants, a process which was accelerated after the defeat of the Cultural Revolution and which was rediscovered recently; see Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (2006). See also Hinton (1990). 29. See the discussion in Sartre (2014). 30. And one could presumably add Steve Biko’s (1987) reference to ‘Black consciousness’. 31. Or, in other words, against the administrative controls of the colonial system, as Mamdani (2013a) puts it. Mamdani’s point conforms in all major respects to the state-nationalist argument, which has always seen ethnic divisions as threats to the nation-state in Africa. Nyerere’s success in establishing national unity is extolled in this work. Of course, in other African countries the establishment of national unity by the state failed lamentably. There is no attempt in Mamdani’s work, though, to think through the possibility of an alternative popular-democratic politics and its enabling of national unity without coercion. Whereas it could presumably be argued that such an alternative was never on the agenda, the limits of the nationalist thought of the time are not elucidated. 32. For a detailed review and discussion by Tanzanians themselves of the Arusha Declaration and socialism in Tanzania 20 years later, see Hartmann (1991). 33. Ujamaa means ‘familyhood’ in Kiswahili. For detailed analyses of the experience of some Ujamaa villages, see Von Freyhold (1979), Cliffe (1975) and particularly Ibbott (2014). 34. Ibbott (2014: 304–7) argues that Nyerere himself was always supportive of the Ruvuma Development Association but found himself in a minority of three during the crucial TANU National Executive Committee meeting in 1969 which decided to ban the RDA. 35. Especially the link between the present and the ancestors, which the chiefs had broken and which the spirit mediums in particular expressed. See Lan (1985). 36. Ranger is largely mistaken to see this movement in nationwide terms; to speak of a ‘Zimbabwean peasantry’ seems largely nationalist wishful thinking (Ranger, 1985a). Apart from the divisions between ZAPU and ZANU and their enforced ‘unity from above’, the fact that this was not so was shown in the post-independence period (1982–7), when a peasant/guerrilla rebellion in Matabeleland was put down by force of arms. 37. See, in particular, a number of the research reports emanating from the research project on the effects of structural adjustment conducted at the Nordic Africa Institute in the 1990s. 38. Limitations of space preclude an outline of the events surrounding the struggle over land reform in Zimbabwe. Arguably, the best short account is to be found in Murisa (2011). On NGOs, see Moyo et al. (2000). On the ZCTU, see the work of Sachikonye (1986). For a serious attempt at analysis, see Mamdani (2008b); see also the various reactions (liberal in the main) to Mamdani’s intervention in Jacobs and Mundy (2009). 39. Arguably, the politics of the ZCTU emanate from a growing distance from its membership, its increased reliance on Western funders and its struggle for multipartyism

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against the ZANU-PF attempt to construct a one-party state in the 1990s. See Moyo and Yeros (2005: 180–1). 40. According to some commentators, the 2013 national elections, which ZANU-PF won easily, were fought partly on the issue of indigenisation. Apparently, the state is now using this notion as a justification for transferring small-scale enterprises to national ownership while not having the power to nationalise the big mining and financial houses. See http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013–11-26-zimbabwe-goes-after-the-littleguys-in-latest-indigenisation-drive/#.UpQ13_VBsuo. 41. See the references in notes 1 and 27.

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Chapter 11

Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa It is bad enough that identity is present without it also being enforced – no more a working-class identity than any other. – Alain Badiou, Seminar, 18 April 2012 (my translation) We are human beings and we demand to be treated as such. I know that the world sees us as boys when it suits them and as savage men when we stand up for our rights. We are human beings. We are fathers. We are men. – A worker from Marikana, South Africa, 2012 We decided to do this ourselves instead of always relying on the union who never gives any form of report so we decided to do this ourselves this time around, we were tired of not getting any answers. – A worker from Marikana, South Africa, 2012

the problem of classism My concern throughout this book continues to be the carving out of theoretical space for the thinking of politics in its own terms in Africa. The central issue of intellectual and political concern to be explicitly addressed in this chapter is the problem inherent in what may be called the perspective of ‘classism’. By ‘classism’ I mean, following Lazarus (1996), a thought perspective that sees emancipatory politics as founded on the belief in an already socially constituted working class or proletariat as simultaneously a subject of history and a subject of politics. The fusion of social location or place (identified by the social sciences), political subjectivity (identified and represented by intellectuals in a party) and the process of history (which unfolds itself to a given telos)

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is intellectually unsustainable today, and has been historically transcended, for it is ultimately incapable of thinking an emancipatory future. In its current vulgar form in South Africa, classism amounts to an identity politics and exhibits no universal content. Of course, many still prefer to cling to this dogma, but, given the extensive critiques of economic reductionism and of teleological conceptions of history, and the renewed weight ascribed to the subjective in the theoretical discourses of the past 50 years worldwide, along with the collapse of ‘actually existing’ alternatives to capitalism into frankly criminal states and their eventual disappearance, adherence to dogmas (both liberal and Marxist) has lost intellectual foundation. Neither an abstract philosophical humanism (in Althusser’s sense) with its idealist essence of ‘Man’, nor a materialist reference to objective class interests determined by a social division of labour, is able to provide the foundations for an adequate thinking of emancipatory political subjectivities. If social science is unable to theorise a simple term like ‘dignity’ and its absence, which by most accounts given by people themselves regularly constitutes the fundamental reason for rebellion, then social science is failing. Yet, at the same time, it is genuinely difficult to orient thought around an alternative way of conceiving popular emancipation. If we except from the present discussion those who juggle with the sociological term ‘working class’ in order to avoid thinking about the theoretical and political effects of real internal contradictions and changes in its composition, we are left with the fact that Marx’s ‘productive worker’ has diminished into insignificance, to be replaced by the ‘new poor’, who are unable to serve as a reserve army and who face a life of economic exclusion both as producers and as consumers (Bauman, 1987). Even more importantly, the independent political presence of a working class has also disappeared. Whereas this realisation has not been a new one in Africa generally, it has been hard to swallow in South Africa, given the exceptionalism prevalent in that country, which has commonly insisted on its relatively high levels of proletarianisation and industrialisation, these having been seen as crudely determinant of political consciousness. However, given the simultaneous increase in social movements of the poor, of shack-dwellers and the urban landless, at the margins of the political sphere from the 1980s and particularly from the late 1990s onwards, it has become more and more difficult to adhere uncritically to crude productivist dogmas. Yet, as I showed in the previous chapter, the mere extension of the term ‘working class’ to new social locations in cities, or to the poor more broadly,1 does not resolve the problem, for it merely extends or modifies existing analyses of the socially extant; this is, by itself, an inadequate procedure in the absence of a thought of the subjectively excessive. The defining characteristic of classism is the expressive relation of representation maintained between socio-economic location and political subjectivity; it is this that enables its collapse into an identitarian politics. It is therefore important to begin by recalling the optimistic theorising of the 1970s and 1980s in Southern Africa, for this

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brings to the fore, and helps to introduce, the core classist problem in Left-leaning analyses of politics. The problem in this particular case hinges on the conception of the prevalence of a ‘working class’ as a given socio-economic entity – or one in the process of formation, depending on the level of capitalist development – from which was deduced, more or less automatically, the existence of a particular kind of politics, namely a possible ‘transition to socialism’. For some, such a transition was made possible by the organisation of workers in trade unions; for others, it required a political party; and, for yet others, a preliminary ‘national democratic stage’ was envisaged. What united them all was a political vision that deduced a specific politics from the apparent socio-economic existence of a working class. In this way, ‘the working class’, given as a socio-economic entity, was also potentially a political entity, because it was already collectively constituted and it could also thereby be conceived as a subject of history, as class struggle expressed in politics was, according to Marx, the motor of history.2 This subjectivity was held by all Left parties (from the ANC to Trotskyist groups) throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly after 1973, when mass strikes in the Durban area inaugurated the modern independent mass trade-union movement led by workers themselves. Its assumptions governed the anti-apartheid discourse and were taken for granted by most popular organisations, particularly during the period of mass upsurge in the 1980s. What this logic did was to posit a relationship of representation between the thought of political economy and the thought of politics, between science (as represented particularly by history and Marxist political economy, i.e. ‘historical materialism’) and the categories through which politics was being thought. It should be recalled not only that the category of ‘the working class’, particularly ‘the black working class’, was a common referent for political thought in the popular South African struggle of the time, but also that a much more interesting notion of ‘workers’ control’ saw the light of day, particularly within the trade union movement, during the same period. Workers’ control referred to rank-and-file control of trade unions. The difference between the two names is significant: whereas the former (the ‘black working class’) emanated from academic discourse and from the leaderships of anti-apartheid organisations, the latter (‘workers’ control’) originated in the mass upsurge itself, where it was combined with the use of ‘people’s power’ to refer to the popular democracy being developed in practice during that period. The term ‘working class’, because of the potential political unity it presupposed, meant a putative, ready-made collective subject of history, whereas ‘workers’ control’ was simply the direct democratic accountability of unions to their rank-and-file members. The latter affirmed the political presence of workers, represented by no one but themselves, who exercised direct control over their organisations and, it was hoped, eventually over all aspects of society. The debate around the meaning of ‘working-class politics’ that developed in the mid-1980s between so-called ‘workerists’ and

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‘populists’ seemed to suggest that the mere existence of a sociologically identified working class did not automatically imply a particular politics or ideology. Although the content of ‘working-class politics’ was subjected to debate, it eventually came to refer to popular-democratic forms of organisation and decision-making, as the alliance between workers and township residents developed into a mass movement. Intellectual leaders battled over how to make sense of terms like ‘working-class politics’, ‘the leadership of the working class’ and ‘workers’ control’, not least because the political innovations within the mass movement were not easily or adequately grasped and named through the use and deployment of classist concepts and categories that had evolved out of earlier emancipatory experiences. Thus there was often a disjunction between the view held by intellectuals and leaders that expected ‘the working class’, and popular subjectivities more broadly, to conform to preordained abstractions, and what people were actually doing in their daily political activities. The party that eventually achieved state power as well as those who considered its actions as a ‘betrayal of the revolution’ paid little heed to innovations in grassroots theory and practice but continued, and have done so ever since, to interpret events through their preconceived and now stultified dogmas.3

the category of ‘the working class’ in the south african ‘transition’ As workers formed their independent unions themselves in the early 1970s in South Africa, academic research followed close behind and led to the creation of a specifically South African discipline of ‘the sociology of work’. Then, as unions gradually became depoliticised throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they entered into corporatist arrangements with the state, the same discipline concentrated its gaze on the structural constraints on workers’ lives to the exclusion of their own political subjectivities. It generally saw little need to investigate what workers themselves thought, as their identity was assumed to be determined by wage labour. With the decline of the importance of the ‘classic’ form of wage labour in post-apartheid South Africa, recent attempts at thinking the subjective have emerged that challenge the dominance of structural studies of the labour process, changing legislation, corporatist institutions and the altered character of unions. Notable among them have been the work of Franco Barchiesi and of Judith Hayem (to which I shall return towards the end of this chapter). Both make a concerted attempt to take seriously what workers themselves actually have to say. Barchiesi has recently argued that work became the ‘normative premise of virtuous citizenship’ during the post-apartheid period. He points out that, in the narratives of workers he interviewed, ‘images of decent work ... are deeply linked with ideas of family respectability, strict gendered division of household tasks, masculine power

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and national purity, where “disrespectful”, crime-prone youth are kept out of the streets and under control, women are confined to domesticity, reproductive care, and migrants don’t “steal” national jobs’ (Barchiesi, 2011a). Barchiesi notes that wage work is not for workers in post-apartheid South Africa the central feature of their identity, many preferring to see themselves in different terms. He also comments that ‘subaltern demands for decommodification, or dignified lives independent from employment status and market relations, were ... marginalized’, so that in what he calls the state ‘politics of melancholia ... expectations of an ideal order centered on respectable work question the current social status of employment’, which in its formal state is seemingly less and less relevant to life (Barchiesi, 2011b: 231, 255). Of course, with the collapse of formal employment as ‘post-Fordist’ forms of ‘flexible accumulation’ entered neo-liberal South Africa with their emphasis on subcontracting from ‘labour brokers’ and on increased precariousness and informality, massive poverty ensued, reaching half of the population, while unemployment hovered around the 20–30 per cent level, depending on how it was calculated. In such conditions, traditional productivist theories lose much of their relevance, and it is no longer ‘subjectivity at the point of production’ that is politically determinant, as Marx had shown for the 19th century and as social democracy stressed during the 20th. In South Africa, government discourse adamantly holds the false assumption that unemployment is the main source of poverty, despite the obvious fact that large numbers of employed people are also poor (p. 255). While the imagination of the welfare state contained a certain glorified idea of work as creating citizens ... South Africa’s precarious liberation, instead, emphasizes work as the tool individuals wield in their daily battle against a naturalized vulnerability. The experiment is, however, constantly unstable; precarious employment and commodified reproduction reinforce each other in making jobs intolerable by exposing them not just to the violence of the workplace, but to the urgency of social necessities (p. 211). For Barchiesi, then, the identity of workers, rather than revolving around the centrality of wage labour, is now much more amorphous and obviously more typical of a postmodern world. Although not necessarily a full proponent of Hardt and Negri’s idea of the ‘multitudes’ as the new subject of history, Franco Barchiesi’s arguments unfold very much within a neo-Foucauldian perspective.4 Workers have identities that reflect their objective location in South Africa’s postmodern society and express political frustrations in response to them. Their frustrations are termed ‘political’ because they concern power or the lack of it. This perspective ultimately fails to consider that workers can actually think beyond the limits of their complex social locations. Whether in favour of ‘formal’ wage labour or of ‘informal’ ‘income-generating activities’, there is

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little difference in the manner in which consciousness is conceived; the determinant of political subjectivity, for Barchiesi, is ultimately only structurally social. Similar problems are apparent in the manner in which the ‘transition’ to state democracy has been approached in the literature in South Africa from a Left perspective. The writers concerned invariably privilege an account founded on the economic interests of various dominant groups (particularly Western transnationals and ‘globalisation’), the ‘abandonment’ by the ANC (supposedly because of its fundamentally ‘nationalist’ character) of its ‘erstwhile social-democratic conscience’ (expressed in the RDP) in 1996 with the introduction of the frankly neo-liberal economic GEAR policy, and the creation of a global environment friendly to foreign direct investment (FDI) and to the ‘freeing of the market’ (e.g. Saul, 1994, 2011; Bond, 2000; Marais, 2001). Indeed, as early as 1994, Adelzadeh and Padayachee (1994: 15) had outlined the distance between the original RDP ‘base document’ and the state legislature’s RDP White Paper,5 pointing out the lack of continuity between the two. The latter was uniformly governed by the ‘logic of the market’, so that ‘while some of the individual principles, policies and commitments are sound, reconstruction, development, growth and redistribution ... has been significantly changed. The current White Paper is incoherent and fragmented. The possibility of retrieving the earlier vision is eroded daily in the cut and thrust of reconciliation and of compromise-making politics within the GNU (Government of National Unity).’ Thus bemoaning the gradual defeat of the Left-statist project associated with the original RDP, the authors, like so many others, failed to analyse the reasons for the defeat and merely restricted themselves to measuring the distance between the two ‘visions’ of growth. Some explanation was surely required for the rapidity of the replacement of the initial state developmentalist ‘vision’ of the ANC and its supporters on the Left by a kind of structural adjustment package clearly expressed in the 1996 GEAR document. Such an explanation would have needed to provide an examination of the fundamental similarities and continuities between the two sides of the ‘state versus market debate’, which Adelzadeh and Padayachee ignored. The most significant of these was that, in the debate at the time between state and market, between ‘state developmentalism’ and ‘market-led growth’, the most important factor, namely ‘the people’, was left out. For neither position gave the working people – who were deemed by both positions to be the main beneficiaries of growth and development – an independent role to play either in development or in the wider political processes which make it possible. Instead, the idea was to incorporate popular organisations into the state itself, so that by the mid-1990s it was noted that ‘there is a strong danger that the incorporation of “community groups” into Nedlac or other forums will serve not to empower civil society but to bureaucratise it’ (Friedman and Reitzes, 1996: 66). While, for both ‘development visions’, it was the possibility of accumulation among ordinary working people that was ostensibly the principal concern of development,

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the people only featured in so far as they were told that ‘communities’ should ‘identify their needs’ to government through their representatives in local state structures (‘development forums’, ‘local councils’, ‘traditional authorities’, ‘civics’ or unelected NGOs), and the government or the private sector would then ‘deliver’ roads, electricity, water or whatever other infrastructure was deemed necessary. The issue was never seen as one of investment in popular initiative, nor about creating the conditions for the people themselves to mobilise openly and freely around development issues. Whether it was the government or the market that was supposed to ‘deliver’, the common approach was ultimately statist and founded on spurious notions of political representation. It was an approach that demobilised and disempowered people, as it ultimately treated them as passive recipients of state largesse, whereas people had long shown their ability to think and organise for themselves, as the 1980s had confirmed.6 The simultaneous process of ‘bureaucratisation’ and ‘professionalisation’ of unions, which resulted directly from a process of corporatisation (Neocosmos, 1998), has been analysed at length, and the fusion of union leaders, politicians and businessmen into one new oligarchy deplored (Buhlungu, 2010). In no case have the political subjectivities that made this ‘transition’ and ‘betrayal’ possible been examined, while the voices raised against the corporatisation of ‘civil society’ (including unions) were frankly rare, if not totally inaudible, as academics, politicians and analysts all stressed the importance of unions having a say in the drafting and enacting of social policy on the ground that – as Joe Slovo in particular had forcefully argued – the ANC possessed an ideological ‘working-class bias’. That this ‘bias’ rapidly switched towards capital, most obviously in 1996, took everyone on the Left by surprise, especially as no discussion was allowed by President Mandela on the change to a neo-liberal economic policy. Nevertheless, that the state could systematically alter its subjective colours was rarely related in intellectual thought to its complete detachment from popular subjectivities and practice. References were made to the interests of capital, to Western pressures, to the rapid accumulation among a new petty bourgeoisie, and so on, but not to political subjectivities, as these were assumed to be reflective of socio-economic forces. As a result, South Africa joined the long list of African countries which had supposedly ‘betrayed the revolution’ or fallen prey to an all-encompassing Western imperialism, now rebaptised ‘globalisation’.7 Unfortunately, the problem does not lie with a failure of history to conform to theory, or even with the failure of the petty bourgeoisie to commit class suicide (pace Amílcar Cabral), but with a subjective failure in the thought of politics, including the absence of an analysis of the state and its specific politics. The failure ultimately resides in an ingrained demophobia from both those in power and those to their political Left.

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rethinking workers’ political subjectivation in south africa beyond representation Up to this point I have laid out the problems associated with thinking politics as representing the social, as expressive of location or place, irrespective of whether this place concerns class or nation, or any other identity or culture, for that matter. The problems all concern the fact that a politics of representation is a state politics and, hence, not only cannot think emancipation but also silences emancipatory alternatives. I wish now to try to recognise and outline such an alternative. To do so, I will first look at a debate that occurred exclusively among trade union leaders and intellectuals during the mass anti-apartheid mobilisation of the 1980s. This particular debate illustrates the limits of the emancipatory subjectivity of that sequence, as it concerned disagreements precisely over the character of ‘class politics’. I shall then introduce a new non-expressive category proposed by Sylvain Lazarus – the ‘figure of the worker’ – and, finally, I shall comment on worker subjectivities during what can be called the ‘Marikana moment’ in South Africa in August 2012, showing that a new figure of the worker (a new subjectivity) briefly saw the light of day in that moment. This was a subjectivity that expressed not so much the social class location of workers as their revolt against the politics of representation as such; in other words, their rebellion against the state. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons for the extremely brutal state reaction, which resulted in 34 deaths among the miners on a single day and numerous injuries, as well as the subsequent torture of those arrested while in police custody. Although the development of specifically political categories is still in its infancy, these categories have to be able to take into account what people themselves think and say and not simply make objective scientistic statements regarding people’s identities, for there is a need to be consistent with the axiom that people think. If a politics of excess over the social is to be understood in its own terms, there must be some sensitivity to the idea of subjectivation as self-becoming, precisely so as not to reduce politics to a reflection of the social. The process of the subjectivation of workers, as of anyone else, is thus a singularity that is not reducible a priori to the capital–labour relation.

The debate between ‘workerists’ and ‘populists’ The trajectory of the modern trade union movement in South Africa was not so different from that of other popular organisations. The main difference lay in the fact that trade unions were able to organise a constituency that could effectively challenge more than the structure of apartheid local government. The challenge to South African business interests undertaken by a relatively powerful and disciplined trade union movement was instrumental in pressurising big business to push towards a negotiated transition to democracy. The unions were much less successful

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in organising workers in small businesses, women, rural labour and the unemployed, while eventually they even lost support among migrant workers, as they concentrated most of their work among the fully urbanised. Their broad political trajectory was also one of politicisation ‘at a distance from the state’, followed by a process of ‘statisation’ of their subjectivities, which simply confirmed the ending of the people’s power sequence in the late 1980s. As is well known, the history of the modern union movement largely originates in 1973, when 100,000 workers went on strike in the Durban area. These largely spontaneous mass strikes revitalised trade union activity, which had been dormant during the ‘decade of peace’ after the banning of the ANC, the SACP and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), as well as the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), which was largely an organ of the ANC. The unions that developed as a result of the Durban strikes saw it as crucially important to maintain their independence from nationalist organisations in order to avoid the same fate as SACTU; in other words, they adamantly refused to affiliate to any organisation which they saw as ‘nationalist’. Instead, they concentrated on developing strong shop-floor structures and a system of worker representation based on shop stewards. Apart from being intrinsically democratic, such a system, it was argued, would enable a small union organisation to better withstand state repression (Webster, 1987; Lambert and Webster, 1988). This fiercely independent stance became the dominant position in the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), which was launched in 1979. Theorised by the intellectual high priests of the ‘White Left’, who had been instrumental in servicing the development of the new unions, the position was adhered to rigidly like an article of faith until the formation of COSATU in November 1985. Basically, the view was that ‘working-class politics’ should grow out of shop-floor struggles; this was sometimes premised on an understanding of ‘workers’ control’ of their unions as a step towards their exercising wider control in society.8 Unions should not identify with any nationalist political organisation as union members belonged to different organisations, and also because it would mean accepting the dominance of a petty bourgeoisie, who were thought to dominate the nationalist township-based organisations such as the UDF. With the increasing development of popular struggles in the townships (in which trade unionists lived, after all), a question arose that would occupy the centre of the intellectual stage on the Left in South Africa, namely the relationship, if any, between trade union struggles and township struggles, or between workers’ organisations and nationalist politics. This single question has given rise to a large volume of debate not only covering the issues already mentioned, but also ranging more broadly to include the question of class alliances, the ‘road to socialism’, the nature of the Freedom Charter, and the character of ‘working-class politics’. The language of the time combined elements of nationalist and Marxist discourse.

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The FOSATU ‘political line’, which came to be known as ‘workerism’, was first formulated by Joe Foster, the FOSATU general secretary, and adopted as policy in 1982. Foster emphasised the need for a ‘working-class politics’ that was independent of and distinct from nationalism, and argued that trade unions should provide the vehicle for the development of such a politics.9 Although there were a number of versions of the ‘workerist’ argument, they all held in common the view that trade unions were the site of working-class politics, or that a distinct working-class politics could develop from trade unions because they had been formed collectively by workers. Such a politics would concern itself directly and primarily with ‘class’ concerns and would be a ‘socialist’ politics, as socialism was the politics of the working class. It argued that popular (e.g. civic, youth) organisations, especially as they developed after the formation of the UDF, were led by the petty bourgeoisie whose nationalist concerns were inimical to those of the working class. Consequently, in the more ‘fundamentalist’ version of this argument, ‘the working class’ should steer clear of alliances with nationalist organisations, which were said to be ‘populist’ rather than democratic in their style of work; while, in the more ‘moderate’ version, alliances could only be contemplated on an issue-by-issue basis.10 In the words of Alec Erwin, at the time one of the more sophisticated advocates of ‘workerism’, ‘unity with the purpose of undercutting the legitimacy of the regime has to suppress and subsume more complex interests be they class, regional, religious or tribal’ under the imperative of (short-term) nationalism. ‘The suppression of class interests for the sake of wider unity also militates against debates and practices related to the transformation of the economy and society’ (Erwin, 1985: 55). For ‘workerism’, therefore, political interests were largely given once and for all, and by abstract economic interests. The former were simple expressions of the latter. To this was added the notion that the working class was a collectivity already given, solely by virtue of the existence of workers and of their organisation into trade unions. While economic interests represented the objective aspects of this class, union organisation expressed its subjective dimension. As with many forms of trade unionist thinking, the formation of unions was seen as a sufficient indication of subjectivation; thus, for example, It is accepted that unions can hardly be equated with the working class movement as they represent one section of the working class. But it can also be argued that the unions are the working class movement’s most powerful weapon. This is ... because: (i) workers have an objective interest in the dismantling of racial capitalism, and (ii) of the strategic role they play in production and the power that they have to withdraw their labour (Two Trade Unionists, 1987: 73, emphasis in original). The main theorists of workerism were White intellectuals who had been instrumental in developing the shop-floor radicalism and democratic trade union structures

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in the period after 1973 (Mamdani, 1996a: ch. 7; Buhlungu, 2006). The importance of workerism was very much this understanding of the need to develop strong workplace democracy. Indeed, workerism was a theorisation of this experience of the development of strong democratic shop-floor structures. Yet it remained stuck in what Lenin had called ‘economism’ – i.e. identity politics – because it could not understand political excess over its location in the labour process. In addition, when a politics outside the workplace was introduced, this took the form of an ‘objective interest’ proposed by theory and not by workers themselves. What was missing was any understanding of politics outside a crude representation of objective class position proposed by intellectuals and trade union leaders. All that seemed to matter for many of the writers in the workerist tradition was class understood simply in its sociological sense, whereas non-class divisions and identities were seen as simply expressions of a ‘false consciousness’.11 There followed an inability to recognise the possibility that nationalism could take various forms – in particular, popular-democratic or statist ones – and that subjective rebellion against a colonial-type state, such as the apartheid state, was bound to have a nationalist core and could emanate from any social category among the politically excluded.12 Contrary to these arguments, the ‘populists’, as they were referred to by their opponents, argued that trade unions represented only a section of the working class and, what is more, a section of the interests ranged against apartheid that had, because of the dominance of the national struggle, subsumed a number of class interests (see e.g. UDF, 1986: 27–34). Moreover, they held that ‘Even from a “pure” working class and economic position, it is completely wrong to limit workers to factory based issues. The question of politics, of who holds state power, of who makes the laws, of who controls the police, the courts, the army, prisons and administration cannot be ignored. Without addressing these questions the factory-based gains made by the workers will always be in danger of being wiped out’ (Isizwe Collective, 1987a: 56). Echoes of Lenin can be heard in this statement. But the critique of ‘workerism’ was partly misplaced as, at least in its more sophisticated versions, workerism did not so much argue that workers should desist from politics outside the factory as that they should not let themselves be subsumed under nationalist politics, as a class politics must emanate from the factory experience. Unfortunately for the workerists, though, by the mid-1980s there was no road to freedom other than through popular nationalism, and they failed to spell out their alternative clearly. In the words of Karl von Holdt, by then a major advocate of the ‘populist’ position: ‘in general national liberation politics has become increasingly hegemonic through the manifest ability of the UDF and its affiliates to challenge state initiatives in the political arena – particularly the Tricameral Parliament, the Black Local Authority System and Apartheid education’ (Von Holdt, 1987: 96).

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The success of UDF-affiliated organisations in challenging the state at both the local and national levels, the spread of shop-steward councils (‘locals’), which combined shop stewards from different unions in a township-based organisation, their gradual involvement in township struggles, and the genuine democratic power of shop stewards over the FOSATU-affiliated unions, all led to the ‘FOSATU line’ coming more and more into conflict with its own shop stewards. What had been a very correct tactic in the early 1980s had become by the middle of the decade a sterile dogma, as the objective situation had fundamentally changed. One shop steward from the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union (MAWU) argued: The situation of the worker in South Africa is that they are oppressed and exploited. The struggle goes beyond the factory gates. Workers must address themselves to the problems of rents, shacks, electricity tariffs, schools, recreation, etc. In FOSATU and MAWU workers have been openly discouraged from taking up these issues and political organisations have been openly criticised. We recognise that the trade unions are not political organisations. But for them (MAWU) to say no politics in trade unions is nothing else but to keep their politics of reformism inside the trade unions (cit. Swilling, 1984: 119). It was this pressure from below that ultimately led to the formalisation of what Eddie Webster (1987) called ‘social movement unionism’. This formulation gave awkward expression to the attempt by unions to move beyond interest politics to one that confronted the state; yet the problem with the ubiquitous category of ‘social movement’ was that it only indicated what the movement was against – the apartheid state – and rarely what it was for, with the result that popular political subjectivities were not outlined in detail, as they were not investigated. This political trend was finally expressed in the formation of a new giant union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in 1985. Unlike its predecessor, COSATU encouraged the politicisation of trade union activity and collaboration between unions and the UDF, even adopting the Freedom Charter as a guiding principle. COSATU became involved in building ‘workers’ control’ (the equivalent of democratic ‘people’s power’) in the factories and unions and insisted on contributing to the ‘working-class leadership’ of the ‘national democratic struggle’, although what precisely was meant by such leadership was not always clarified. The dominant formulations were now much more ‘Leninist’ in inspiration, although the ‘objective political interests of the working class’ still guided thought. Thus Jay Naidoo, then general secretary of COSATU, said: Non-political unionism is not only undesirable but impossible in South Africa. Therefore we believe that though COSATU is not a political party COSATU

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has a responsibility to voice the political interests and aspirations of organised workers and also more broadly the working class. To do this we have to look at how WE BUILD WORKERS [POWER] and how do we locate workers as the leading force in our struggle for national liberations [sic] ... The key element in the building of the labour movement was, and still remains, the democratic principles of worker control ... In real terms it means that the members of the trade union must have absolute control over all decision-making in the organisation ... COSATU has high regard for those communities and organisations that are building strong grassroots organisation in the form of area and street committees. We encourage this and see it as COSATU’s policy for members and local structures of COSATU to play an active role in building such structures (Naidoo, 1986: 3, 4, 8, emphasis in original).13 In this way, COSATU entered the wider arena of national politics, and its national campaigns made a conscious attempt to address issues pertinent to the interests of the poor and unorganised in general and not simply to those of the organised workers (the most famous being the Living Wage Campaign). Gradually, the issue became not so much what the distinct politics of the trade unions should look like and whether they should be allied with civics and youth organisations, but what the contribution of ‘the working class’ should be to the national democratic struggle. This change in perspective was partly a result of the openly pro-nationalist politics followed by COSATU, and also because it was becoming clear that a large, if not overwhelming, majority of township dwellers could be classified as sociologically belonging to the working class anyway (see e.g. Hindson, 1987). It was even suggested by some that the majority of UDF activists were ‘working class’ (Swilling, 1988). But even though workerism had often conflated classes with organisations – seeing trade unions as ‘working class’ and civics as ‘petty bourgeois’ (a perspective also evident among exile organisations, incidentally: the SACP substituted itself for the working class, the ANC for the liberation movement and the people)  – the issue remained: was there such a thing as a specifically ‘working-class politics’ and, if so, what should such a politics look like? The question was posed abstractly, but political activists were sufficiently close to popular struggles to be influenced by solutions proposed by the actions of workers themselves. The answer  – even though never adequately theorised – boiled down to suggesting that the specific contribution of workers to the broader struggle for freedom was to be popular democracy, as they had been the initiators of the notion through ‘workers’ control’ of trade unions. If such ‘workers’ control’ was defeated in any way, the whole understanding of an alternative to state democracy would disappear along with it. Unfortunately, the content of a ‘working-class politics’ was never clearly elucidated and contrasted to other forms of politics. In addition, the debate was conducted in

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such a way as to limit itself to the question of the ‘independence’ of ‘the working class’ (equated with the organisational independence of the trade unions) and to ignore that of its becoming, which might have initiated more debate on the character of democracy. While, for most workerists, the question never really progressed beyond repeating that ‘working-class politics’ were abstractly ‘socialist’ and thereby threatened in any process of alliance, they did insist that the issue of the content of that politics be debated – a positive feature in itself. It is this concern that underlies the distinction drawn by Alec Erwin between ‘liberation politics’ (i.e. the politics of nationalism) and ‘transformation politics’ (the politics of the ‘transition to socialism’) equated with ‘working-class politics’ (Erwin, 1985; Cronin, 1986; Karon and Ozinsky, 1986; Innes, 1987a, 1987b). Unfortunately, the precise content of ‘transformation politics’ was not specified by Erwin other than through insistence that such politics had at its centre economic transformation of some kind, involving a change in the mode of production; in other words, what ultimately differentiated ‘working-class politics’ were principally economic changes and not so much political ones. The false dichotomy between class and nation – false, because both were understood as political identities – compounded the problems of this subjectivity. In addition, although the internal social movement was, at least in the mid-1980s, subject to popular control through various mechanisms, the political party of nationalism (the ANC), although the object of overwhelming support among the oppressed majority, was directly accountable to no one. The effects of this state of affairs on the future of popular democracy and ‘working-class leadership’ were never explicated in detail. With the gradual attainment of ideological domination by the party of state nationalism, along with the collapse of the People’s Power mode, a form of statism with a populist gloss began to dominate in the nationalist movement. This ideological position became more and more entrenched in the 1990s as political activists deserted grassroots organisations in order to enter state employment, where they were offered much higher salaries than they could ever have earned before – all justified now by a state-nationalist discourse. The position propounded by workerists merely stressed the ‘independence’ of trade unions, organisationally and ideologically, from the nationalist movement. Nevertheless, in the absence of any concrete specification of an alternative politics for the unions, the point amounted to one of stressing organisational independence alone, to which COSATU adhered without any difficulty. In sum, the opposition between ‘populists’ and ‘workerists’ began to reduce itself more and more to one between orthodox statism and state liberal pluralism; in other words, this was a purely intellectual debate that failed abysmally to inquire about what workers themselves might think. The outcome was a kind of ‘subjective compromise’, whereby unions and other erstwhile politically independent organisations would enter state subjectivity as component parts of a state-legitimised ‘civil society’. The subjective

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transition from ‘people’s organisations’ to ‘civil society’ was easy to make, for, in both cases, organisations were simply understood as representing interests; there was no conceptualisation of excess other than in a party form, such as in the notion (shared by Trotskyists and the SACP alike) of a ‘party of the working class’. There was no possibility of thinking independent politics beyond civil society; the politics of the People’s Power mode had become truly saturated. This was possible because, for both ‘populists’ and ‘workerists’, the term ‘working class’ was a circulating category between the thought of the social and the thought of politics, making it impossible to think political subjectivity in its own terms independently of social interest and, therefore, ultimately collapsing into a statist discourse.

Unions in the 1990s and beyond The unstated assumption in the South African literature on trade unions always seems to have been that unions took up political positions in the 1980s because all political parties were banned, and that as soon as political parties with support among the oppressed majority were able to operate openly, unions would then ‘withdraw’ to their ‘natural domain’ in civil society, ascribed to them by their interests in the division of labour. The underlying assumption was thus that unions were not meant to be political in their essence, but were only forced to be so temporarily because they filled a political vacuum. In other words, a politics of excess over interest was conceived a priori as limited in time and ultimately unsustainable, as the capitalist social division of labour was implicitly understood to be immutable. An expressive statist politics was always present. This understanding was, of course, flawed, as workers invented their own politics without reference to political parties (Von Holdt, 2003), yet the 1990s was a period of intense depoliticisation and of the rapid growth (and imposition) of state politics among people themselves as well as among the forming oligarchy. It is to this that the term ‘transition’ ultimately refers, including the restriction of thinking politics to professional politicians and bureaucrats; only some workers could join them by rising up within union structures. During the political transition of the early 1990s, COSATU actually attempted, but failed, to get a place at the negotiating table, where only political parties and state agencies (e.g. Bantustan governments) were represented. The National Party government absolutely refused to accept COSATU’s presence, and the ANC did not pursue the issue with much vigour anyway, as the division of labour between political and civil society had to be maintained in terms of its political vision. Nor did the COSATU leadership pursue the matter, it seems, as it was agreed that its interests would be represented by the ANC and SACP delegations to the talks.14 Eventually a number of COSATU figures joined state institutions, ostensibly in order to represent ‘workers’ interests’; that they thereby became accountable to ANC party structures

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and the state did not seem to have been explicitly considered in the euphoria of liberation. Indeed, COSATU had by the 1990s geared its main efforts towards having an input into all aspects of state policy as these affected workers, and this extended more and more into a dominant corporatist trend.15 As one observer accurately put it at the time: ‘the trend is towards corporatism – whether it is expressed through a social contract, reconstruction accord or socio-economic pact. While there remain different expectations of the scope, form and duration of such an arrangement, these are basically differences of emphasis. The end point is the same, and the NEF (National Economic Forum), NMC (National Manpower Commission) and NTB (National Training Board) are first steps in this direction’ (Baskin, 1993: 2). A survey of trade unionists conducted by the South African Labour Bulletin in 1992 (see Keet, 1992; Pityana and Orkin, 1992) found a general trend of weakening of worker control, with one national leader remarking that ‘workers are losing and losing workers’ control and it is in danger of becoming just a slogan’ (cit. Keet, 1992: 29). This was manifested in the fact that few shop stewards now turned up to meetings of shop-steward ‘locals’ (Collins, 1994: 35), and there was also evidence of ‘COSATU office bearers [being] less subject to the direct workers’ control that shop stewards can exercise within their own affiliates’ (p. 35); furthermore, ‘bureaucratic tendencies have become evident both at COSATU and affiliate level. These tendencies are not restricted to officials, but extend to worker leaders as well’ (p. 39). The reviewer concluded: To abandon worker control is to abandon union democracy, and to accept that ... formal democracy empty of any ongoing, direct control by members is the best that the trade union movement can do, given the conditions in South Africa in the 1990s ... Workers’ control of unions was seen as a means to worker control of production and society as a whole. It is a significant irony that in the 1990s, the unions are struggling to return to worker control of their own organisations, with control of production and society an ever receding possibility (p. 40). The weakening of rank-and-file control over the unions and the unions’ entry into corporatist arrangements happened simultaneously, and were an indication of a shift in subjectivity towards unequivocal statism. As I have shown in chapter 5, there was already an indication by the late 1980s that the People’s Power mode of politics had become saturated. Corporatism clearly illustrates objectively the subjective ‘statisation’ of popular organisations; in other words, their adoption of a state subjectivity and their abandonment of any political distance from the state. This ‘politicisation from above’ in no way required a surrendering of organisational independence; it only required the absence of political independence. Organisational independence

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was fully compatible with incorporation within state subjectivities; after all, this is typical of classical social democracy, where social-democratic parties have ‘their’ trade unions in the same way as communist parties had ‘theirs’. The dominant political trend in South Africa became fundamentally about the statisation of former independent movements and the formation of a civil society. As Mbhazima Shilowa, then general secretary of COSATU, argued, a new form of statism dominated in post-apartheid South Africa: ‘South Africa’s tradition of a strong and vibrant civil society needs to be reasserted. We must not replace apartheid statism, and top-down rule, with a new form of statism’ (Shilowa, 1995: 27). And yet this plea had more the status of a cry of impotence, for to assert the ‘vibrancy’ of civil society was itself fully compatible with statism. What was arguably incompatible with statism, and what did characterise South African popular movements in the 1980s, was not simply their ‘vibrancy’ but their democratic, popularly based politicisation at a political distance from the state. By the 1990s the subservience of former popular organisations to state politics had become complete:16 both ex-workerists and ex-populists agreed that trade unions were best restricted to ‘worker issues’, and individuals from both sides joined state structures as ministers and MPs. Clearly, the tendency to workerism in the unions had now been confirmed, and their politics had taken an overwhelmingly corporatist character. The popular-democratic experiment of the 1980s had by then been soundly defeated. Lively intellectual debates ceased. Yet, arguably, this defeat was inherent in the political practices of the unions themselves, as reflected in the debate between workerists and populists. This debate concerned the nature of politics, more specifically which kind of representative politics was most in the interests of the ‘working class’: whether alliances for the attainment of state power or the development of a ‘pure’ working-class politics from within the trade union movement itself. Both positions were concerned with state politics; in neither case was there an attempt to think beyond representation, nor did the debate extend beyond leaders to involve workers themselves. The state that eventually arose in South Africa in the 1990s did not in any way reflect popular practices or politics; it relegated such practices to a domain institutionally beyond the state, that of ‘civil society’, while simultaneously ensuring the development of a consensual state politics to which the organisations of civil society, including unions, adhered and conformed. In this manner it excluded popular inventiveness and initiatives from state-building, which was restricted to experts (lawyers in the main) and to bureaucratic norms. This largely resulted from the thinking that what was required was building the state-party (ANC) rather than a popular state form that could free up popular inventiveness. In the debate on politics and civil society at the time, which concerned the relationship between social movements and the new state, one side argued that civil society should retain its political independence from the state and the ANC (Swilling, 1990, 1991, 1992; Mayekiso, 1992a, 1992b,

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1996), while the other maintained that it should not, as this would undermine ‘revolutionary’ changes which only the state could undertake (Nzimande and Sikhosana, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c). In neither case were the politics of representation ever questioned; instead, the debate was couched in terms of liberalism versus authoritarianism. As it happened, the state eventually exhibited aspects of both, for the politics of representation – whether in civil or in political society – only concern state political subjectivities. In the new century, the bureaucratisation and full statisation of the trade unions gathered apace. Not only did union leaders enter politics, but they also entered business after leaving their unions (Buhlungu, 2010: 121, 161). They began to earn huge salaries by sitting on the boards of companies, and eventually it was revealed that a number of them, particularly in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), were being paid salaries by the mining houses themselves. Under such circumstances, with no control exercised by union members over their leaders, corruption was inevitable.17 Not only were major union leaders involved, but it was clear that elected worker representatives – the shop stewards – who had been at the forefront of ‘workers’ control’ in the 1980s, were also being paid salaries by their employers. In 2013 an online newspaper revealed: mining houses [were] footing the bill for top National Union of Mineworkers office bearers’ salaries. The hard-to-believe arrangement started in the late eighties as the means of protecting union leaders from the corporations, but it was retained over the years, creating a severe of conflict of interest ... Despite the pitfalls of conflicted interests, NUM pushed the mines to pay unionists’ salaries. At the lower end, full-time shaft or shop stewards received a few thousand rands extra per month to bring them to ... roughly R12,000 to R14,000 a month. In addition they received a company petrol card, company cell phone and a company vehicle. Then there were the other perks  – bosberaads or company get-togethers, international excursions, etc. Obviously, these unionists did not do another underground shift; they were freed from the arduous labour and conditions that had encouraged them to join the union in the first place.18 In June 2012 the general secretary of the NUM was said to be paid a R1.4 million annual salary (Mail & Guardian, 1–7 June 2012). It was the adoption by unions, most noticeably COSATU, of a state subjectivity, illustrated by uncontrolled corporatism in particular, that made possible these corrupt practices. The influence of workerism is still prevalent in South Africa. There is a widespread view that the adoption of (nationalist) politics explains why union leaders have distanced themselves from the interests of workers. This view is apparent even among more sophisticated analysts such as Buhlungu (2010: 160–1). Buhlungu speaks of

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a ‘paradox of victory’  – paradox in the sense that, although it had been ‘through conscious mobilisation and the building of organisational power that unions came to achieve victory and exercise influence’ (p. 160) and ‘the unions provided the backbone of the resistance movement as it readied itself for taking over state power’ (p. 161), ‘as the influence of COSATU grew, its organizational power began to decline’ (p. 162). Here it appears as if it is state politics as such (what Buhlungu refers to as their ‘increase in political influence’), rather than nationalist politics per se, that account for the deviation of unions from their true representative course.19 But the paradox turns out to be no paradox at all, as soon as one understands that underlying it is a theoretical problem. That theoretical problem consists in the inability to distinguish between forms of politics. In the mid-1990s I already distinguished between ‘people’s politics’ and ‘state politics’ (Neocosmos, 1998), but it is much more accurate, because less socially reductionist, to distinguish between, on the one hand, a subjective politics of excess beyond interest – which is what workers were engaged in in the 1980s when, through their unions, they took up political issues on the basis of mass mobilisation and democratic practice (the term ‘social movement unionism’ expressed in a cumbersome way this politics of excess)  – and, on the other hand, a state-focused interest politics, which union leaders overwhelmingly engaged in from 1990 onwards, quite independently of the rank-and-file membership. It is this state politics, accentuating the distance (soon turning in some cases into a yawning chasm) between workers and union leaders, that accounts for the decline in ‘organizational power’: ‘at the level of union members on the shop floor ... demobilisation ... is a result of a deep sense of cynicism ... symptomatic of the gradual but inexorable erosion of forms of solidarity built during the era of resistance’ (Buhlungu, 2010: 170). The core theoretical problem which gives rise to the paradox is the assumed continuity between modes of politics, simply because what is being investigated is unions over time. The concept of ‘transition’ regularly deployed to account for change in South Africa is an objectivist one that does not recognise such a fundamental subjective change; it emphasises institutional continuity rather than subjective discontinuity, despite all the empirical evidence adduced to the contrary (Von Holdt, 2003; Buhlungu, 2010). Politics is simply seen as politics, irrespective of its totally distinct subjective content in different contexts.20 The obvious changes in political behaviour are then commonly put down to individual or group psychology: ‘betrayal’, personal ‘greed’, professional advancement, class formation  – in other words, to apolitical objective factors.

the ‘figure of the worker’ and the ‘marikana moment’ In what follows I want to move beyond the idea of ‘working-class politics’ by transcending the problematic of representation itself. If workers’ subjectivities are not

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simply expressive of their objective conditions, then a new methodology is evidently required in order to identify them and understand them. These subjectivities may or may not be political (i.e. excessive). To do this, we cannot assume that workers are given by capitalism as a collective; but, rather, they may simply constitute themselves as such politically. Most often they do not, yet it is still important to be able to understand worker subjectivities so that when such a political subjectivation does indeed take place, it can itself be comprehended. To achieve this understanding, it is particularly useful to begin from Lazarus’s category of the ‘figure of the worker’ in the factory, as it points to worker subjectivities without assuming that they form a class a priori and also because it locates that subjectivity in the factory, which itself can develop into a site of politics but which may not be recognised as such in the absence of an understanding of excess over class interest.

The ‘figure of the worker’ Lazarus begins from the twin axioms that ‘people think’ and that ‘thought is a relation of the real’. The latter expression – though awkward, something he admits himself (Lazarus, 2013: 105) – is meant to suggest that there is no objective–subjective dialectic; in other words, there is no assumption that the subjective expresses the objective and then reacts back onto it. It means rather that a prescriptive relationship to the real is necessary in order to locate thought within the materiality of the real through practice, if it is to be truly political. I have also chosen to read his point as emphasising that, even though subjectivity may exceed objective place, it is still in a way marked by it. In sum, rather than describing workers’ subjectivities by how accurately or inaccurately these reflect their objective class location, as indicated by Marxist or Weberian sociology, the idea is to identify and decipher workers’ subjectivities directly, as it is these that ultimately provide the parameters of their agency. Moreover, given that subjectivities always begin at the local level whether they develop a universal content or not, the methods of investigation are bound to be more anthropological than sociological in character. Sociology is the main culprit in deducing specific subjectivities from the general character of society, however that may be understood. In his work, Lazarus (2001b) uses the notion of prescription to distinguish the understanding resulting from the thought of people from that developed by a scientistic approach. All social science comes down in one way or another to a matter of definition in order to resolve what he calls the ‘polysemic’ contradictions between meanings attributed to words in life. Contrary to this, Lazarus insists that this discursive polysemy is a reflection of different prescriptions attached to the word in question, some of which may contest what exists (the extant) in terms of possible alternatives. ‘It is through prescriptions – for there is not only one – that the word is submitted to something other than a definition’ (Lazarus, 2001b: 393, my translation). An approach

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made through the objective evaluation of things can end up with predictions, scenarios, tendencies or determinations. It is not in this way that the possible must be understood, Lazarus maintains. ‘For the first approach, the objective of thought is to isolate the logic of the real. For the second, the objective is not to articulate theses on what exists. The field of intellectuality presents itself differently: the question regarding what exists is only given in relation to what could be’ (pp. 393–4, my translation). A definition, Lazarus argues, is scientistic and only proposes a unique conception of the real. As a result, it ends up forcing the thought of people into one unique category devised by science. On the other hand, because there are a number of prescriptions on the meaning of words, the possibility exists of conflicts between prescriptions, each one sustaining a distinct order of the real. Because of this confrontation between prescriptions amounting to conflicts between different theses on the real, ‘knowledge is confronted by a choice which is not that between the true and the false, the imaginary and the rational, but that between different orders of the real’ (p. 394, my translation). For example, if an interlocutor says: ‘At the factory they call me a worker; outside they call me an immigrant because they have forgotten that I am a worker’, then the figure of the worker is maintained in the context of the factory and denied in society. There are here two distinct subjective orders of the real founded on two prescriptions, one for which the figure of the worker is asserted and another for which it has disappeared. ‘It can thus be seen how prescriptions resolve the polysemic multiplicity in a manner which is in no way definitional’ (p. 394, my translation). As a result, a number of political possibilities become apparent. In sum, it is the question of what is possible that specifies people’s thought for Lazarus. That a situation can be apprehended by ‘possibles’ is an overturning of historicist and scientistic thought, for which understanding involves a precise investigation of what exists in terms of determinations, causes and laws; these then permit an answer to the question of what may come: The ‘possible’ here [in scientism] is totally subordinated to the extant. In people’s thought [on the other hand], the real is identified through the possible. The investigation of what exists is also involved, but is subordinated to the investigation of what could be. The investigation differs according to whether it relates to the category of the ‘possible’ or to that of the ‘extant’ ... We are confronted with two different modes of thought: the first is analytical and descriptive, it asks questions regarding what exists; irrespective of the eventual complexity of its research protocols and discoveries, it proposes the scientific character of sites [lieux]. The second is prescriptive and has as its principal point of entry the question of the possible (p. 395, my translation). While the former perspective proposes to apprehend reality as extant, the latter maintains that in order to access what exists now, the ‘now’ can only be grasped as a

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conjunction of different ‘possibles’. ‘Knowledge of a situation is grasped by people in terms of the identification of its possibles. The possible is not of the order of what is to come but of the order of what exists now’ (p. 395, my translation). An investigation utilising categories such as ‘present’ and ‘possible’ ‘works through words ... on the thought of people which is outlined in singular intellectualities, to which one can accede from the words used and the singular theses which they constitute’ (p. 396, my translation). Lazarus develops a new theory and a detailed methodology for understanding the possible in the extant, the ‘what could be’ in the ‘what is’. There is no space to present all the details of this theory here, but enough has been said to suggest the originality and inventiveness of the whole perspective, which opens up an entirely new manner of investigating (the possibility of ) politics, precisely because this is about conceiving a situation other than that which exists. An analysis of the thought of people, of workers in this case, is not a substitute for an objective analysis, but more a complement to it, which shows that worker subjectivities are equally part of the real (Lazarus, 2001b: 399). These workers’ subjectivities regarding precisely what they think of the idea of ‘the worker’ are described as ‘the figure of the worker’. Lazarus uses this expression to refer to a worker subjectivity that broke with the objective–subjective dialectic from the late 1960s in factories in different parts of the world: in particular in Shanghai in 1966–8, in Italy in 1968–70, in France in 1968–75 and in Poland in 1980 and 1981. What all these worker rebellions had in common, he argues, is that they conceived of the factory as a site (lieu) of politics. They did this by breaking subjectively with the idea of the working class as a collective identity produced by capital and state, organised by unions and party, and by positing workers as independent agents in a place that was turned for a limited sequence into a site of (emancipatory) politics (Lazarus, 1996: 233–49; 2013: 245–87). It was these historical experiences that gave rise to what Lazarus calls a ‘worker anthropology’ (anthropologie ouvrière), which has as its object the study of workers’ subjectivities (whether political or not), particularly in relation to their location in factories, as opposed to their place in society as a whole (Lazarus, 2001b). This work on the ‘figure of the worker’ has been continued and expanded by Lazarus’s students in different parts of the world, including by Judith Hayem in South Africa. Let me now briefly examine the work undertaken by Hayem (2001, 2008, 2012) for what it has to say regarding the ‘figure of the worker’ in South Africa. Hayem’s fieldwork was undertaken in two different factories, one in Durban in 1997 and one in Port Elizabeth in 1999, soon after the liberation of the country, towards the end of what I have called the state’s ‘civil society, human rights and multiculturalist’ sequence in chapter 6. What can be said about the figure of the worker in South Africa at this time? Hayem insists, methodologically, that the research she conducted was concerned not with uncovering social or political representation, but with not

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only ‘collecting during interviews what workers say and think, but moreover with identifying what is actually thought at that moment so as not ... to constitute the voice of workers as an illustration of the thought of the investigator’ (2008: 160, my translation, emphasis added). The idea behind this kind of investigation is not to force the thinking of respondents into the categories of the investigator. What transpired from the investigations was not particularly earth-shattering, but seemingly rather mundane, especially as the investigations (particularly the first in 1997) took place at a time of political optimism in the country. Nevertheless, they do provide a clear indication of the idioms, categories and parameters through which workers were thinking their own position in their factory at the time, while struggling to improve their condition visà-vis managerial control and oppression, as policy changes were being introduced by the state in the immediate post-apartheid period. What is particularly noteworthy is that none of the workers Hayem interviewed used the term ‘working class’ in their responses to describe themselves or their ideas, despite its constant use in civil society by unions, political parties and social movements (2008: 240 n.3). Their preferred discourse was not simply reflective of their social position as workers in a factory; there was more to it. Hayem identified a number of words and expressions structuring workers’ discourse. Initially, what was apparent were feelings of euphoria and enthusiasm following the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s president. During this sequence, workers insisted that they were the nation’s producers, working for its development, while their statements illustrated their hopes in their workplace – for example, their wish to establish communication between workers and bosses and their desire to introduce work relations where all were ‘happy’ at work (Hayem, 2012). Having been opposed to apartheid because its job-reservation policies did not give everyone an equal chance, workers affirmed that they were apprehensive that the ‘affirmative action’ policies during this sequence, while enabling those who did not have a chance before, would create divisions between them that had not been there previously.21 At the Star plant in Durban, workers’ insistence on ‘building the nation’ was particularly noteworthy, as today this enthusiasm has by all accounts vanished. Yet it illustrates the massive degree of goodwill towards the new government and the widespread national fervour that existed at the time. The contrast with the situation today, when workers are disillusioned with both state and unions, could not be greater. What Hayem’s investigations bring out is that the discourses of the workers are not precisely the same as those of the state or of organisations of civil society. Workers developed their own unique set of categories and concepts to make sense of their environment; these included expressions and terms like ‘to have a fair chance’, ‘people must be happy’, ‘leader’, ‘company’, ‘communicate to understand each other’, and ‘communicate to produce better’ (Hayem, 2008: 347).

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Interestingly, Hayem argues that the term ‘worker’ itself remains linked to the factory or to the work associated with it. Even though her interlocutors regularly expressed themselves on events outside the factory, ‘worker’ remained a category restricted to the factory, not to society. Given the weight of COSATU in national politics, Hayem warns of the great temptation to view workers through the lens of unions alone, assuming that, because of their representative function, the unions speak for the workers, with the result that only the former need to be studied in order to understand the latter (p. 348). The occurrence of ‘wildcat strikes’, which increased in the 2000s, shows that this point is indubitably correct (p. 348). Finally, she stresses that the thought of workers is clearly not reducible to objective conditions of work or of life, of culture, language or colour (p. 349). It is founded rather on a number of shared assumptions and principles which may provide the parameters for self-organisation. This was particularly evident during the ‘voucher strike’ at the Autofirst plant in December 1998, which was guided by the workers’ own conceptions of what was necessary in order to ‘be happy’ at work (Hayem, 2012). Of course the subjectivity of these workers and their unique thinking was located well within the social, even though it was not crudely expressive, for it deployed unique categories. However, it was not excessive either and thus was not in itself indicative of a political subjectivity. For Hayem, as for Lazarus, the possibility of politics can only be ascertained through the identification of people’s own vocabulary, their own idioms in the first instance. A concrete and detailed investigation of popular intellectuality is therefore required before pronouncing the existence of (emancipatory) politics.

The ‘Marikana moment’ I turn now to a discussion of a recent dramatic episode in South Africa in which 34 miners were massacred by the police on 16 August 2012 during a strike at the Marikana platinum mine. This has given rise to a number of public questions about the character of the police force and of the representative nature of the unions involved, as well as the actions of the miners themselves. The episode has been the object of a full judicial inquiry known as the Farlam Commission.22 I shall refer to this episode as ‘the Marikana moment’ in order to stress the extremely compressed political nature of the episode that occurred. I am concerned at this stage to elucidate the subjectivities of the workers involved, rather than to provide a total explanation. The reader will have to wait for later chapters for an explanation of the state’s actions and thus for a fuller account of this episode. Here, what is important is the perspective of workers, which, I argue, constituted a rebellion against the politics of representation – the concern of this chapter. Of significance is the combination of socially expressive subjectivities with excessive politics, producing a specifically new figure of the worker in the current sequence

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of state violence. I wish to argue that the Marikana moment cannot be understood as an expression of the capital–wage labour relation in South Africa – the dominant academic account. Instead, it has to be comprehended as a short-lived but full-scale rebellion by migrant mineworkers (not by the working class) against the state’s mode of political representation and, hence, its mode of rule – a demand for dignity and not only for higher wages – which partly accounts for the state’s extremely violent response. The Marikana moment was therefore a rebellion by workers against the state itself, even though it took the form of a strike for higher wages. At the same time, one cannot account for the vicious response by the state and its repressive apparatuses simply on the ground that the state in general represents the interests of capital, which it undoubtedly does. Much more is required in order to make sense of the state’s particular response in this case, and I shall turn to that question in chapter 13. The mine in question, owned by Lonmin, an offshoot of the old ‘unbundled’ Lonrho (the colonial London and Rhodesian Mining Company), has continued to employ migrant workers in the post-apartheid era, although these are now recruited overwhelmingly from the Eastern Cape. Although migrant workers had been at the forefront of resistance to apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s, after 1973 permanently urbanised workers gradually became predominant within the union movement. During the 1980s, the mass struggle, in which workers and youth predominated, was overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon, while migrant labour was marginalised. As a result, many, at least the Zulu speakers among them, were recruited by the ethnic Inkatha Freedom Party (Mamdani, 1996a: 277). In addition, the dominant perspective in the incoming ANC and its close ally the NUM was an ingrained opposition to migrant labour: this was seen as the foundation of the apartheid system itself, which was based on the recruitment of super-exploited labour enabled by migrancy.23 (I have discussed this point at length elsewhere (Neocosmos, 2010a: 66–71).) It is worth stressing that regionally recruited labour was replaced after 1994 by nationally recruited labour, but not by fully urbanised labour. ‘Family housing’ was not constructed for miners, but a cash allowance was provided by employers to those miners wishing to opt out of single-sex hostels. Along with a general trend in the country, many miners were recruited by ‘labour brokers’; in other words, they were subcontracted and formed a category of worker not covered by the labour legislation, as they were not legally ‘employees’ of the mine (Hartford, 2012).24 The neglect of migrant labour by the post-apartheid state and the unions alike, while the mining industry continued to rely on it, resulted in a deterioration in both the living and working conditions of these workers.25 At the same time, the cheap labour policy of the mines has continued, leading one observer to remark: ‘The hard reality is that the pattern of migrant labour exploitation ... has remained unaltered in the 18 years of democracy. There has been no attempt to find new ways to effect a

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more humane ... system of migrancy’ (Hartford, 2012: 14). We can therefore speak of continuity in the core structural and subjective features of power in the migrant labour system in so far as they affect workers. Whereas the system of labour control through the ‘induna system’ has been scrapped, the mining industry still remains very much a colonial-type enterprise where racial divisions are still prevalent.26 The loss of control by the rank and file over the leadership of the union and the gradual movement of leaders, including shop stewards, into professional positions has occurred concurrently with the forging of closer ties between the leadership of the union and that of the ANC, along with the move of ANC leaders into big business, including the mining industry. In the words of one commentator, the mining business has ‘captured the state’: ‘the whole thing of Lonmin and Cyril Ramaphosa ... is right in the middle of fireworks here [Marikana]. At Aquarius mine, the Sisulus and the Mandelas are right in the middle of the thing; Anglo Platinum it’s Valli Moosa. They have captured the state effectively, captured the ruling party, the mining companies’ (Van Wyk, 2012). At the same time, mineworkers are fully aware that the NUM not only serves the employers’ interests but also insists on monopolising access to the employer (‘gatekeeping’). One worker from Marikana insists: ‘It [the NUM] does what it is told to do ... they side with the employer more than with the worker’ (Alexander et al., 2013: 117). Another continues: ‘NUM ... truly sides with the employer and not the workers ... [if ] someone dies underground ... NUM and the employer agree that they should hide that person ... When a person gets hurt here underground the employer and NUM change the story ... and we have been trying to fight that thing here and we do not have the power’ (p. 137). These kinds of remarks, indicating worker frustration with the lack of representation by the union, occur again and again in interviews with the miners at Marikana. They show that the union had morphed into an organisation of monopoly control over workers  – replacing the ethnic control system of old that had been imposed through ‘indunas’ – so that worker grievances could only be channelled through the NUM, and not directly: ‘They [NUM] tell themselves that they are the only ones who have rights to go talk with the employer and they are the only ones that can take our grievances to the employer, but otherwise they cannot talk with us, and when we want a meeting with them, they don’t want to organise a meeting with us so that we will be able to talk about our issues’ (p. 137). These, briefly, were some of the more important objective and subjective conditions in which the strike at Marikana unfolded in August 2012. The chronology of events is quite straightforward, but the dominant academic account is predictably located within a crude classism which sees workers’ self-organisation as somehow novel and indicative of ‘class power’.27 For example:

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The formation of a workers’ committee is an act of power by the working class. It has shaken capital by advancing far beyond trade union bureaucracy. The workers’ committee in Lonmin had only been in existence for a week when the Marikana massacre took place on the 16 August 2012, killing 34 workers. The committee became so powerful in this short space of time that the ANC’s national security applied its full force and told police to kill the workers if necessary so that they would end their strike. The employers, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the ANC could not cope with the fact that workers at the third largest platinum mine in the world were refusing to go underground to extract resources for the bosses (Sinwell and Lekgowa, 2012: 24). Of course, the class struggle between capital and wage labour is central to all forms of society founded on capitalism, and it is manifested in all sorts of arenas; it would be strange if it were absent in the workplace, and that is precisely what the collective bargaining system attempts to keep within manageable limits. But class struggle is not the most identifiable or indeed the most significant feature of the Marikana moment. In any case, the colonial character of mining practices in South Africa, most notoriously its employment of super-exploited migrant labour,28 has not responded favourably to social-democratic corporatist thinking. As with many labour protests, this strike began on 9 August 2012 because of growing dissatisfaction with pay and conditions both in and out of work. The majority of the 3,000 strikers were rock drill operators (RDOs) from the Eastern Cape, who drill holes in the rock face for explosives to be inserted. One RDO was interviewed as follows: To me this work is like some form of torture. You always think, ‘Am I going to come out alive, am I going to die?’ If the rocks fall on you, you will be seriously injured or killed. It’s very dangerous because in most cases we get to the working point and discover it’s not safe, but we are told to work. We are afraid because it’s not safe and anything could happen at any time. [When the men are drilling, he continued, they are inside a crevice 1.5 metres high so cannot stand upright. They must get on their knees or squat.] The challenge is that once you start drilling you have to balance the machine. It is shaking and taking energy from you. The other problem is smoke that comes out of the machine. You can’t put on a nose mask because it easily gets wet. So you just have to breathe the smoke. There are also difficulties when it gets too hot, like you are losing breath. When you ask the bosses for permission to go outside for fresh air, they say no, so you can hardly breathe. [Last November, he recalled, his worst fears were realised when a colleague working close to him was] totally

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buried by rocks. [He survived but is confined to a wheelchair.] To this day, [Mokwane said bitterly], he has not been compensated for his injuries.29 But it is not just working conditions that are appalling; the treatment of the workers like animals is what leads them to fight for dignity: It hurts you know. Really it hurts. It is like they think we have no ambitions – that we accept and deserve to live like dogs ... or maybe they think we do not notice or mind the fact that we live in shacks. That is not true  – we have needs like any other human. We want a better life for our children. We want to live a decent life of our own. We want toilets with doors, access to water and housing ... Here it seems that human rights do not apply ... we took it for a long time but the anger was building and building inside us. That is why the strikes happened. We are still angry and we will never accept this treatment again. It is the workers who will stand up for their own rights now through our autonomous structures. We are human beings and we demand to be treated as such. I know that the world sees us as boys when it suits them and as savage men when we stand up for our rights. We are human beings. We are fathers. We are men.30 The link made here between achieving dignity and organising ‘structures’ independent of unions and parties is a leitmotif that occurs throughout miners’ statements, not only from Marikana but also during the strikes in the platinum belt that followed. The idea of manhood having been degraded was also a common statement during revolts throughout the colonial period in Africa, not least during the Mau Mau rebellion (discussed in chapter 3). The attempt by people to establish their humanity, dignity and agency in relation to oppression by power is certainly not restricted to workers; neither is the response in terms of self-organisation and subjectivation which it suggests. The Marikana miner’s statement that human rights do not apply to the areas where miners work and live is also a crucially important one, to which I shall have occasion to return in the next chapter, for one cannot speak here either of citizenship rights and their concomitant relations with the state or, indeed, of a domain of civil society within which these kinds of relations would condition the thought of politics. What is apparent is ongoing violence between police and residents/workers, as the same speaker describes it: ‘This is an ongoing war on the people of Marikana – to weaken their resolve. It is terrifying ... We are living as if we are back in the days of apartheid – constant fear.’31 After being asked by management to make their case first to the NUM, in order to follow procedure, the workers decided to go en masse to the NUM offices (situated in the same building as the ANC offices), where they were shot at by NUM officials and two workers were seriously wounded. Jared Sacks, who researched the

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issue, noted soon after the massacre: ‘Every person I spoke to, without fail, blamed NUM for starting the violence and reneging on their responsibility of representing the workers. This was the case even if some [of those] interviewed expressed dislike for the strikers and their own subsequent acts of brutality. Almost everyone felt more hatred towards NUM than they did towards Lonmin, the police or even Jacob Zuma’s government.’32 After this point, the process deteriorated rapidly. The workers armed themselves with ‘traditional’ weapons (knobkieries, machetes, assegais, sticks and knives), they were turned away from their meeting place at the stadium, a short confrontation with police resulted in four deaths, and the strikers retreated to the top of a hill off mine property and remained there while they discussed collectively what to do next. It is this koppie, referred to in the literature as ‘the mountain’, which provides one of the enduring images of the struggle. The majority of accounts concur that up to this point there was no alternative union involved; workers had organised themselves. A protracted negotiation followed. Having been rejected by the union, the workers insisted that they wanted to speak to their employer directly, a demand that was consistently rebuffed and denied. The president of the NUM himself visited the site in a police armoured vehicle and told them to return to work; the police told them to disperse; church negotiators and the leader of an alternative union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), attempted to negotiate for them to leave; and a senior traditional leader from the Eastern Cape was sent to tell them to disarm. The workers insisted that they wished to see their employer and remained on the hill, which is situated on communal land beyond company control.33 Eventually, on 16 August they were driven into a trap and massacred by police forces using automatic weapons and shooting from helicopters as well as driving over the wounded with their armoured personnel carriers (known as Hippos and Nyalas). The outcome was 34 miners dead and 76 critically injured, while those who could not escape were arrested and subsequently tortured while in police custody (Alexander et al., 2012: 33–41). Systematic police repression was unleashed within the local community and a curfew was imposed, much like under war conditions, described by one miner as a ‘state of emergency’ (Mail & Guardian, 21–27 September 2012). By 18 September, after agreeing to negotiate, the company increased wages, which Leftist commentators saw as a major victory, and strikes erupted at other platinum mines. Violence between competing unions has been a feature of the industry ever since. The justification for the police brutality at Marikana was not only that the strike was ‘illegal’34 and that the miners had committed violent crimes, including the killing of two policemen, but that they were armed and dangerous and refused to disarm. Failure to disarm was one of the main reasons given for the deployment of police violence, yet the evidence is overwhelming that the police shot people who were running away or were surrendering.35 In any case, there could be no equivalence

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between knives used for defence and automatic weapons. The reasons for the massacre are much deeper. At this stage I wish to elucidate the subjectivities of the miners; in a later chapter I will make sense of the motivations of the state. The reaction of the media to Marikana was to account for the problem in terms of inter-union rivalry, to blame the miners themselves for the massacre, and to state that the police were simply defending themselves; the component organisations of the Tripartite Alliance (the ANC, SACP and COSATU) referred to the miners as ‘enemies of the struggle’ and to the NUM as the victim of ‘attack from counter-revolutionaries’.36 The National Prosecuting Authority decided to charge the miners themselves for murder, using the apartheid-era ‘common purpose’ doctrine, although the outcry this produced led to a major division within the ruling party, which threatened its unity in the run-up to its national conference in Mangaung later that year, so that the idea was eventually dropped.37 Politicians, the AMCU and Trotskyist organisations all vied for the miners’ attention as they saw an opening for their political agendas. More critical commentators referred to the evident failure of the institutions of collective bargaining – in other words, of the corporatist arrangements between government, employers and unions set up in the 1990s – and of the governing ANC itself.38 The Marxist political Left in the country – overwhelmingly Trotskyist in persuasion, given the institutionalisation of orthodox Marxist discourse after the SACP joined the ANC in power – insisted on seeing the outcome of increased wages won in September as a major ‘victory for the working class’, and the conflict as an expression of the contemporary neo-liberal crisis of capitalism at a global level.39 Some went so far as to celebrate it as an indication of the long-awaited rise of ‘working-class consciousness’, for too long under the influence of reactionary nationalism.40 The solution was invariably seen as the formation of a ‘working-class party’ in order that the class interests of ‘the working class’ could be adequately represented.41 In all cases, representation forms the foundation for thinking the Marikana moment: union and party are the main institutions concerned, while the failure of collective bargaining is put down to complacency and cosy relations between union leaders, employers and the ANC (Hartford, 2012). Moreover, the particular events in question are seen as representing the general capitalist contradiction between capital and labour, where workers strike for more pay and the police represent the interests of the bosses; there is nothing more to say, apparently. And yet the simple fact that workers themselves constantly rejected both union and party mediation, and that the state chose to deploy ‘maximum force’ against striking workers, cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the capital–wage labour relation and the regular struggle for pay increases. We need to go much deeper into both worker and state subjectivities in order to provide a coherent account of the Marikana moment. If what characterises this moment is fundamentally that the workers  – as they themselves insist  – decided to act on their own and bypass the

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union in embarking on their struggle to have their demands met,42 then the moment can be said to begin on 11 August 2013. It was on this date that, following management’s instructions, the rock drill operators went to talk to the NUM and were repulsed with gunfire. After this day the workers did not want any unions in their negotiations with the employer (Alexander et al., 2012: 33, 85, 109, 117, 137, 145, 153, 161). Yet this way of thinking ended when the time came to negotiate their pay increase, which was the reason for workers holding out on the ‘mountain’ even after the slaughter. After detailing the difficulties in arriving at a solution, an article in the Mail & Guardian (21–27 September 2012) noted: ‘Improbably, those representing the workers who refused to be represented turned to those very unions for help and the unions agreed. In a caucus that excluded AMCU, the established unions tried to explain how easily those involved in an unprotected strike could be dismissed, how badly Lonmin was faring, how a higher settlement would mean job losses and how salary structures worked. This it seems was the crucial breakthrough.’ In other words, by 18 September worker subjectivity had re-entered the process of ‘collective bargaining’ around wage negotiations, and workers were forced, however reluctantly, to rely on unions to represent them in the negotiation process. The article also noted that in order to convince the miners to accept a lower wage offer, there was ‘a tacit agreement between all involved to allow the workers to believe that a minimum gross entry wage of R12,500 would be implemented within two years’. This manoeuvre was described as ‘dishonest’ by the reporter and as a ‘sleight of hand’ by one of the participants. So it turns out that the workers were deceived into agreeing to a settlement below what they wanted. Be that as it may, it is clear that 18 September marks the end of the subjective moment characterised by the rejection of representation. From 18 September onwards, the thinking of workers had returned to the dominant state subjectivity. Clearly, the Marikana moment can be dated with some precision as lasting from 11 August to 18 September 2012. During this brief moment the workers at Marikana deployed a completely new political figure of the worker, one in excess of interests as defined by the social division of labour, which subsequently would be picked up by other miners in the platinum belt.43 Or to make the same point slightly differently: during this brief period, the workers of Marikana constituted themselves into a political subject  – political, because their collective subjectivity exceeded state identity politics. For this reason Marikana can be said to have been about much more than wages. As a negotiator had begun to conceive the issue: ‘When I came down from the mountain ... I realised that this was not a labour dispute. It was manifesting as a labour dispute, but it was about frustration with living conditions, inequality, poverty’ (Mail & Guardian, 21–27 September 2012). There were thus two sides to the workers’ subjectivity at Marikana, the excessive and the expressive. The excessive subjectivity is what defined the moment. It concerned the insistence that the Marikana workers could come together as workers

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and make their demands felt by themselves. They could simply present themselves politically and achieve something without having to be represented. This was not a simple ‘wildcat strike’ and it would be misleading to attempt to understand it in this manner. It was a revolt against representation as such: against unions, against parties as well as against the employer. It was in fact a brief action against the state, a rebellion, precisely because it stood against everything the state expects of politics within state subjectivity: representation through appropriate channels and following the laws, rules and procedures that the state itself has established. The workers quite clearly refused to do this.44 It is therefore fairly apparent why the state’s actions should be governed by fear. The rebellious moment constituted one of the reasons why the state reacted with such extreme violence. What is striking about the events as they unfolded is that the employer was very much out of the picture and left all action to the state. It is here that the role of Cyril Ramaphosa in the massacre becomes notorious. At the Farlam Commission it was revealed that Ramaphosa, who was part-owner of Lonmin and consequently on the board of directors as well as being the founding general secretary of the NUM and a long-standing ANC notable, had emailed ministers and senior management at Lonmin on 15 August (the day before the massacre), stating that the ‘terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labour dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and call for concomitant action.’ In another message he stressed that ‘we are essentially dealing with a criminal act’ and that he had informed the minister of safety and security accordingly (Mail & Guardian, 18–24 January 2013).45 The central point is not that Ramaphosa as a representative of big capital could influence government decisions at the highest level; this is totally unexceptional. What this does suggest, rather, is that it was Ramaphosa’s interventions which ultimately account for the company’s refusal to negotiate,46 and which therefore also partly account for the deployment of such extreme violence in this instance. The criminalisation of the strike as a whole was what justified police terror, something that could easily have been avoided. We should also note that, given the extremely close connection between the ANC leadership and that of the NUM, what was perceived as a criminal attack on the latter could easily be construed as an attack on the former. Ramaphosa – currently deputy president of the ANC – largely confirmed this view at his May Day speech in Rustenburg in 2013.47 According to David Bruce (2012), the minister of safety and security had, at least since July 2011, promoted a ‘doctrine’ according to which police should use ‘maximum force’ against criminals.48 A worker rebellion is clearly a criminal act against the state. Marikana workers were not slaughtered because they went on strike. They were massacred arguably because they were a threat to the state idea of corporatist political representation and, specifically, a threat to the state-party and a state union – to the ANC and the NUM.

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The expressive side of the Marikana workers’ subjectivity helps to account both for the limited nature of the moment itself and for several of its features, from the carrying of traditional weapons to the meetings on the mountain. Clearly, the limits of workers’ subjectivity are provided by the exclusive insistence on a wage increase. Given the oppressive conditions at work, miners did not demand that these be improved, neither did they decide to occupy the mine and run it themselves; instead, there were threats to burn down the mine and even to kill managers.49 This viewpoint is not exceptional for migrant workers, who remain at the mine on sufferance and evidently do not consider their work as affirming their skills and humanity. Work on the mines is always understood by migrants as a temporary necessity, a cross to bear. A mineworker from Lesotho interviewed in the 1990s probably expressed this in the clearest way: ‘Life in South Africa is garbage ... working here is like going to the cattle post where you take your livestock in summer and bring them back in winter’ (cit. Neocosmos, 1999a: 315). Sentiments expressed more recently suggest the superior conditions of the migrants’ home area – in the Marikana case, the Eastern Cape: ‘here is a place I work in and I live in a shack, so everything I do that is nice is back home. So a lot of money I get I send it back home, and that will make sure that when I get home I will have a better life ... not here in Marikana’ (Alexander et al., 2013: 83). Given the temporary nature of employment on mines, it is understandable that the appalling working and living conditions are tolerated and dignity sacrificed so long as a ‘decent’ or ‘living’ wage can be earned. But the insistence on a wage increase was not the only example of the migrants’ expressive subjectivity. The use of ‘traditional weapons’ and ‘traditional medicine’, much insisted on in the press in order to show the supposed ‘backwardness’ of migrants from rural areas, was also in evidence.50 Yet there is another feature which does not seem to have been noticed, namely the effect of what the South African literature refers to as the Pondoland Rebellion of 1960. This was a major event for people from the Lusikisiki and Mbizana areas in Mpondoland, from which a large number of migrants to Marikana came. That event has remained ingrained in popular consciousness over several generations, as it marked a core moment of resistance against the forms of representation enforced by the apartheid state.51 This movement organised by people themselves was also led by migrant workers, although it took place at the rural end of the migration process, so that participants were said to be ‘peasants’ (Mbeki, 1984). It was known by the people themselves as Intaba, the Mountain Movement. That the workers at Marikana had this experience in mind is evidenced by their singing of songs of rebellion from the period, as they moved down from ‘the mountain’ to confront the police.52 The gathering of mineworkers on the hill or ‘mountain’ was thus not accidental; neither was it merely in order to have a good view of the surrounding area from which attackers could come. There was more to it. The mountain or hill was seen in Mpondoland as

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a place of equality where people could deliberate and discuss collectively and openly, far from the controlling reach of chiefs, in particular, and the state, in general. Traditionally people always regarded a place like a hill as important to them. In the olden days, and even now, when there is drought, people go up the hill and pray for rain. Traditionally they always go up the hill where they think their ancestors are supposed to dwell ... the hill was and still is regarded as a place where you can discuss your things peacefully and without being interfered with. People always feel that if you discuss your things on the hill then the almighty will bless you (Leonard Mdingi, participant in the Mountain Movement, cit. Beinart, 2011: 103). Unsurprisingly, ‘because they met on mountains, their movement became known as the mountain and its committees as mountain or hill committees’ (p. 103). The people of Mpondoland, whose (expressive) subjectivity is referred to in the literature as a ‘peasant’ (not ‘worker’) subjectivity, despite their dual character as migrants, also organised themselves into democratic committees: ‘once the revolt was launched in Bizana [Mbizana], it rapidly developed a hierarchical structure that organized well attended clandestine meetings and coordinated a range of activities across the district’ (Drew, 2011: 76). Contrary to Alexander and colleagues (2013: 31), there is therefore nothing particularly exceptional or indicative of a modern ‘working-class consciousness’ about organising a strike committee at Marikana. There has been a long tradition of popular self-organisation in South Africa. Moreover, the Mountain Movement was a rebellion against a form of political representation enforced by the (apartheid) state, which people rejected. Bantu Authorities, as this form of representation was known, was an attempt to massively increase the powers of the chieftaincy in a situation where the corruption of power was rampant and to entrench the chieftaincy as the sole representative institution for ‘natives’ (Lodge, 1983: 282). Although the forms of state representation were primarily understood as designed for ‘rural dwellers’, the Mountain Movement itself was, similarly to the Marikana moment, a rational popular rejection of state forms of representation, although within a different social and historical context. The Mountain Movement of 1960 was organised by people themselves, although many commentators at the time, within both the apartheid state and the ANC, attempted to assert that people were led by ‘Congress’ (or ‘Congo’, as it was known locally). The parallels with Marikana today are uncanny; one of the participants in the Mountain Movement noted: ‘we started these things on our own. Others came with their own views and called it Congo for Congress. These people wanted to say that the whole movement derived from Congress. That is not true at all. We started it as AmaQaba [comrades]’ (cit. Wylie, 2011: 204). The parallels

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do not even end there, for ‘On 6 June [1960] government forces attacked a mass meeting at Ngquza Hill, near Flagstaff ... The official death toll was eleven; other accounts suggest that up to thirty people were killed and sixty seriously injured. At the inquest which followed the massacre, the magistrate condemned the police force as “unjustified and excessive, even reckless”, but there were no prosecutions’ (Drew, 2011: 77). There have been many attempts by commentators to find comparable episodes to the Marikana massacre. These have been chosen, it seems, solely on the basis of the scale of the slaughter. The media have referred to Sharpeville in 1960, while Alexander and colleagues (2012: 16) refer to the Bisho and Boipatong massacres of 1992.53 None of these are relevant examples and, in any case, state massacres have not been uncommon in South African history. Fundamentally, the question does not concern the number of dead, or whether the government was elected by universal suffrage or not;54 electoral legitimacy can never justify such extreme repressive state actions against people. Rather, the fundamental question concerns the nature of the state and its relations with its people. The most adequate comparison is therefore with the massacre at Ngquza Hill in the Transkei on 6 June 1960. This is because in both cases (Marikana and Ngquza Hill), a rebellion was organised by migrant workers from Mpondoland themselves, although in each case the state (like all states) stressed manipulation by outsiders (‘troublemakers’, ‘third force’, ‘agitators’).55 In both cases migrant workers met on mountains. In each case there was a revolt against the state system of political representation itself, which was rejected by the migrant workers. In each case the state reacted with a massacre and slaughtered comparable numbers, so that the nature of the state became apparent for all to see. In Badiou’s words: ‘ “Where there is oppression, there is revolt.” But it is the revolt that, in its own time, passes judgement on the fate of the oppression, not the other way around’ (Badiou, 2012: 172). Whether state oppression in South Africa will now be subjected to critical scrutiny remains to be seen. What should be clear is that the democratic pretensions of the state are rapidly evaporating, as the state has felt threatened. Much as Marx eloquently put it after the massacres of Communard workers in Paris in 1871: ‘the civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise up against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge’ (Marx, 1871: 90). As we shall see in chapter 13, the state has so far been able to contain its violent outbursts within a specific domain of politics – uncivil society – where, as a mineworker said, ‘human rights do not apply’, and which is quite insulated from the domain of civil society, where a discourse of rights prevails and where state action is somewhat bound by legality. Here, in uncivil society, the state can quite literally ‘get away with murder’, as there is no rule of law, or at least

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the rule of law is heavily attenuated. It is simply not sufficient to maintain, as does Peter Alexander, that at Marikana police ‘slaughtered people in the interest of profits’;56 the deadly deployment of state power obeys its own logic, which at its core is a political one. Yet the question still remains as to why the refusal of representation is seen as such a threat to a democratic state that it elicits an extremely violent response. A fuller answer will have to be provided in chapter 13, but even at this stage it can be suggested that the politics of representation are central to any state’s view of what politics should consist of. But for a newly ‘democratic state’, where the government sees itself as legitimate because it has been elected by the majority, a subjectivity of representation is paramount. People cannot be allowed to represent themselves, as this could be construed as questioning that the state itself is representative, i.e. the democratic legitimacy of the state itself. Hence the regular question posed by state officials to those it does not recognise: who are you? Hence also the refusal by state officials to meet the ‘whole community’, and the notion of the ‘stakeholder’, which refers to a state-approved interlocutor.57 Hence also the insistence by power on ‘appropriate channels’ for communication, particularly if those wishing to talk to it have grievances. The state in Africa is particularly susceptible to challenges to these bureaucratic procedures, given its very recent and, therefore, insecure democratic credentials and hence its lack of confidence. Incidentally, this feature is somewhat less central to authoritarian states, for which any grievance, whether represented or not, is considered a threat. To insist on the ‘working-class’ character of Marikana and to restrict one’s thinking to the class struggle over a wage increase, as the Left in South Africa has done unanimously,58 is, at best, only to recognise the expressive side of worker subjectivity – which conforms to the theoretical pattern outlined by workerism – and to miss out on its excessive side. It has also led to the frankly inane view that Marikana constituted a major ‘victory’ for the ‘working class’ despite the slaughter, the increase in suicides among workers and the increased repression and state violence – including inter-union violence – up to this day.59 This kind of perspective, which is unable to understand politics in its own terms, has led to the irrelevance of the Left in South Africa and its alienation from the oppressed majority. In this chapter I have argued that the root of the problem is the failure to listen to what workers themselves say and therefore to think beyond the limits of a state politics of representation. In broader terms, if we take the social as given by structural relations – e.g. those of class – we are led inexorably to restricting politics to the state through an idea of representation. In order to overcome this problem we need to overcome representation, and to think the social as produced by the practice and politics of a collective agent, which itself affirms its existence.

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conclusion: workerism today and the limits of social science In whichever situation I have examined in this chapter and the last, the dominant manner of conceiving political subjectivities has invariably been expressive of social location. The South African Left, the Tanzanian nationalists and the Zimbabwean landless have all fundamentally understood subjectivity as identity politics: class identity, national identity or whatever. Lenin’s and Mao’s attempts to overcome a crude expressive conception of political subjectivity were limited in different ways. Whether we are considering political actors or texts of a more or less academic nature, the assumption is identical. Little room is left for understanding political excess over social location and place. Yet, at the same time, popular struggles can indeed take the singular form of an excessive politics. It follows, as Badiou has noted: ‘In order to treat a local situation in its political terms, that is, in its subjective terms, something more is needed than an understanding of the local derived from the general analysis. The subjectivization of a singular situation cannot be reduced to the idea that this situation is expressive of the totality’ (Badiou, 2004: 121). I have shown how this exceptional excessive subjectivity occurred at Marikana, although only for a very limited period. This singular excess had subjective effects, as its core idea was taken up by other miners in the country, but what it showed was fundamentally that people – in this case, workers – are capable of thinking beyond the limits of state subjectivities and, when these limits are transcended, the exceptional and unpredictable occurs. Only from the perspective of such an excessive politics can we begin to think an emancipatory alternative. I began this chapter by noting that the vulgar classism prevalent on the Left in South Africa systematically disables any attempt at thinking popular emancipation, by adhering to a simple identity politics. I also showed that this form of classism was called ‘workerism’ during the struggles of the 1980s and bore scant resemblance to the theorisation of the Marxist classics. Workerism today has become entrenched in Left opposition thinking. It is this perspective that dominates the accounts of the Marikana moment. Today, given the institutionalisation of the SACP and its consequent abandonment of popular politics, the most vocal Left oppositional perspective on the post-apartheid state and its new oligarchy of politician-capitalists, especially in the domain of civil society, is provided by different variants of Trotskyism, some home-grown, others imported from Britain.60 These all rely on a sociological conception of class and understand politics as representation, so they fit neatly into academic narratives. Trotskyism in South Africa consists of an identitarian millenarian politics. It is both identitarian and workerist, with an additional millenarian twist in that it sees the future ideal in an unspecified ‘socialism’, a form of state ‘in the interests of the working class’. The ‘working class’ is simply defined sociologically, so

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that ‘class’ and ‘people’ or ‘masses’ are regularly conflated (e.g. Alexander et al., 2013); the future socialist state (or society) is left largely unspecified and untheorised. This argument is the direct descendant of the Menshevik economism against which Lenin fulminated in 1902. As I have already noted, the sociological notion of ‘the working class’ already presupposes a given social collectivity, making it easy to slide into a political collectivity without having to think a process of collective subjectivation other than of the Hegelian ‘in itself/for itself ’ variety, repeated ad nauseam in introductory sociology textbooks. The term ‘working class’ as used in this perspective is, therefore, a circulating category between social science and the thought of politics. Each of these facets of the term can be called upon at any point in an argument. Moreover, the working class, especially as represented by unions, is said to have a collective identity with no universal content, as there is no universal excess above interest required (to define its politics), let alone one theorised; there is no thought of emancipatory politics present at all. The result can only be that politics is exclusively thought as a state politics of interest or identity representation. This contemporary Trotskyism exhibits the same features as social-democratic or official trade unionism, because working-class interests, as understood here, are all that exist in thought; there is nothing else – it is only a matter of stating that it is in the abstract interests of ‘the working class’ to overthrow capitalism and the dominance of the bourgeoisie (for some, by the state ‘nationalising the commanding heights of the economy’). Working-class interests or politics (i.e. socialism) must retain their ‘purity’, unsullied by entry into any nationalist (or other) ‘united front’ alliance, where their interests would be diluted by middle-class interests and ‘the revolution’ consequently betrayed. Trotskyist workerism is an identity politics, a state politics like any other, which bears only superficial resemblance to the politics of Marx, or even to those of Lenin, for whom the proletariat and communism had a universal significance. The usual name of this identity politics, which has achieved predominance over the years, is ‘socialism’, understood as an end state to be achieved and fought for, whereas for Marx, Lenin and Mao in particular, it was not ‘socialism’ but the ‘real movement’ of communism that fundamentally organised their thought. At most, ‘socialism’ was conceived by them as a transitional state (or society) between capitalism and communism, not as an end in itself. If we are to remain faithful to this conception, we must begin to think socialism not as something to be achieved for itself but as a state to be exceeded or transcended in its very existence. It is for this reason that Badiou insists on thinking the ‘communist hypothesis’ today (see e.g. Badiou, 2009d). I will briefly discuss this question in relation to democracy in the next chapter. In South Africa after 1990, this identitarian socialist perspective was simply transferred to the ideology of most social movements, which, like the NGOs with which

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they were often enmeshed, remained well ensconced within civil society, the domain of identity politics. The main political difference between trade unionism and Trotskyism is simply that, for the former, unions are the end of political representation, while, for the latter, that end is ‘a (mass) party of the working class’, more often than not founded on trade union organisation or (to be) created by union leaders themselves or by other intellectuals. While, for the former, working-class interests remain within civil society, for the latter they must be represented in political society, i.e. within the state itself. It follows that the political thinking of workers themselves is effaced unless it fits into a pre-given model; there is no room for it in Trotskyist statements, as there is no room for it in thought. That model is simply the labour–capital relation expressed in thought. Workers are simply there to be acted upon, conscientised and organised, certainly not to be listened to, as they are not supposed to think outside such a pre-given theory, deviation from which is taken as a sign of insufficient understanding. There is therefore no need to listen to what people themselves may have to say; at best, one only listens to their leaders, who themselves have to be taught ‘the basics of Marxism’. In this respect Trotskyism is simply reflective of vulgar sociology in general. Nordmann’s (2006: 137) comments on Rancière’s conclusion to his critique of Bourdieu’s sociology are worth citing here: ‘sociology can only exist as a science on condition that it postulates the ignorance of the subjects it studies’. The sociology of identities, of whichever variety, is currently incapable of understanding the reality of politics, for it is incapable of understanding that people think. Interestingly, Gramsci, like all those immersed in popular politics, understood this identitarian vulgarisation of Marxism, and his reaction is worthy of note: In its widespread form as economistic superstition, the philosophy of praxis loses a great part of its capacity for cultural expansion among the top layer of intellectuals, however much it may gain among the popular masses and the second-rate intellectuals, who do not intend to overtax their brains but still wish to appear to know everything ... many people find it very convenient that they can have the whole of history and all political and philosophical wisdom in their pockets at little cost and no trouble, concentrated into a few short formulae ... they form the habit of considering politics ... as ... a competition in conjuring and sleight of hand. ‘Critical’ activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures ... Furthermore, another proposition of the philosophy of praxis is also forgotten: that ‘popular beliefs’ and similar ideas are themselves material forces ... It is therefore necessary to combat economism not only in the theory of historiography, but also and especially in the theory and practice of politics (Gramsci, 1971: 164–5).

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It is only through exceeding identitarian politics that a politics of universal emancipation can become imaginable. Fortunately, such identitarian politics in South Africa are being challenged by the voice of Abahlali baseMjondolo, who are able to think coherently a politics of excess beyond identity and therefore one not explicable by reference to their objective social location alone. That they have rejected attempts by Left organisations to control them and have successfully maintained their political independence is undoubtedly the reason for the constant vilification of Abahlali by the Trotskyist Left in South Africa.61 Rancière (2012: 194, my translation) insists quite rightly that ‘it is a strategy shared by top politicians, as well as by historians and sociologists, to say that the speech that counts is that of those who do not speak’. Of course, it is the politicians, historians and sociologists who interpret and represent that speech for us, who tell us what those who do not speak are actually saying. This methodology is at the core of scientism. That is why the social sciences themselves are in need of drastic transformation. While representation is central to the way state politics is thought from within the state itself, it is also currently the exclusive way of thinking political subjectivity in the social sciences. The thought of political economy, for example, however critical it may be, is like that of sociology, a thought of state politics, of what exists, not of what could be. In other words, the subjectivities derived from that way of thinking are state subjectivities; this is the same for history and all other social science knowledges. Badiou makes the point as follows: ‘ordinary history, the history of individual lives, is held within the state. The history of a life is, in itself, ordinarily bereft of decision or choice; it is a part of the history of the state of which the classical mediations are the family, work, the motherland, property, religion, customs’ (Badiou, 2009d: 199, my translation). To live within the state – i.e. within state subjectivities without the Idea – is, for Badiou, to live like a zombie – the living dead – as no choice founded on thought, the foundation of life, is made. The problem with political economy is that, while it may enable a sophisticated understanding of social relations and the state in their structural dimensions, it systematically disables an understanding of emancipatory politics. Or, better perhaps, even the best political economy can only grasp politics as state politics, as does all social science, because it reduces the subjectivity of politics to power. It cannot think subjectivity other than as born by (as reflective of ) social relations or social categories: Man, ethnicity, class, state, and so on. Similar points can be made in relation to postcolonial or post-structural perspectives that follow Foucault and see the (individual) subject as a product of socially produced subjectivities. The result is that it becomes impossible to understand political choices, excessive ones in particular, in their own terms. Politics is ultimately evacuated from thought, and the situation appears to be apolitical or ‘normal’ because the distance between what

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people are saying and what those who claim they represent them say they say is not made visible. Rancière puts this point as follows: The normal is when people remain in their place and when it all continues as before. Nevertheless everything of note in the history of humanity functions according to the principle that something happens, that people begin to speak ... If we are speaking of the ‘workers’ voice’, we speak from the point of people who speak. That seems to be a truism. Yet it is contrary to a certain scientific method which requires that when we speak of the voice of the people, we are speaking of those who do not speak ... the point being essentially to speak for those who do not speak (Rancière, 2012: 194, my translation). It is clear that political economy cannot think emancipatory politics, as it takes the social as given. It can account for the changing forms of accumulation and oppression in concrete conditions, but it can tell us little concerning that collective subjectivity beyond place and those politics which, because they are exceptional, are always tied into the particular and the singular. These are in effect irreducible if they are excessive. Moreover, the insistence on deducing a politics from political economy, from an analysis of the capital–labour relation, i.e. from the structure of domination, ends up being both general and statist, as it focuses both on the transformation of power and on universal theory. So long as the social sciences and history restrict themselves to studying the regular, the habitual, the normal, the expressive and representational, change will not be thinkable and such social science will remain a prisoner of power and of state subjectivity. If, on the other hand, the social sciences are able to bring themselves to understand the exceptional event and its relations with the habitual, to prise open the distance between the two and thus make it visible, then alternatives will become thinkable again, for it is the exceptional that illustrates the excess beyond regularity and may ‘tip the balance’ out of the regularity of the extant towards an alternative in practice. But, for this to occur we need to start from, and remain faithful to, the axiom that people think. Because they have concerned decisions and are unpredictable and exceptional by nature, all emancipatory events and projects have in some way or other subverted existing theory, including most often the prevalent theory of emancipatory politics; they have been purely inventive. This was true of the Haitian Revolution (only Whites/free men/propertied men are human and hence subjects), of the Paris Commune (workers cannot run a state), of October 1917 (there can be no proletarian revolution in an economically backward agrarian country), of May 1968 (there can be no emancipatory politics outside the Communist Party), of the Cultural Revolution in China (there are no revolutions after the revolution), and of people’s power in South Africa (the victorious anti-colonial struggle can only be a guerrilla war). In all these emancipatory

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struggles, it was the subjective inventiveness of the popular masses that was decisive, and this inventiveness was always located and singular, never general or abstract. This singularity was then transformed into a general theory ex post facto by intellectuals. Finally, without an understanding of the exceptional, the regular and habitual itself cannot be properly understood, as it is the exceptional event or revolt that makes the oppressive character of the habitual visible for all to see, if only they choose to look. Another problem, clearly illustrated in South Africa, has been that, over the 20th century, Marxism – which had provided the intellectual foundation from which emancipation was thought – was gradually reduced to a sociology, to a (critical) thought of the extant. By ‘politics’ was simply meant the state, which expresses dominant interests and which regulates and controls all other interests in terms of those of the dominant class (or fractions) of capital. Marxism became an academic discipline, a process that reached its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s when its scientificity was theorised by Althusser, in his later texts in particular, despite the central place accorded in such Marxist analysis to the class struggle in opposition to ‘the development of the productive forces’. The transition to agency, which this theoretical shift suggested, was not after all effected, and Marxism remained within an analysis of structure. In this it was left open to criticism from perspectives labelled ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘postmodern’. The singularity of Marx’s thought of politics – of political agency – was not analysed with sufficient clarity until Lazarus’s work. If this singularity can be understood, and its inventiveness and limits located with precision within a specific historical sequence, then it becomes possible to grasp the specificity of the thought of other modes of politics within the Marxist tradition, and a methodology for so doing can be developed. The reduction of Marx’s work to a political economy undermines the idea of politics in favour of a science; the two must be torn asunder. Althusser himself seemed to have an inkling of this towards the very end of his life in his understanding of ‘aleatory materialism’, when he noted the absence of a theory of political practice in Marxism: neither Marx nor Engels ever came close to developing a theory of history, in the sense of an unpredictable historical event, unique and aleatory, nor indeed to developing a theory of political practice. I refer here to the politico-ideologico-social practice of political activism, of mass movements and of their eventual organisations, for which we possess no concepts and even less a coherent theory, in order for it to be apprehended in thought. Lenin, Gramsci and Mao were only able to partially think such a practice. The only theorist to think the political history of political practice in the present, was Machiavelli. There is here another huge deficit to overcome, the importance of which is decisive, and which, once again, sends us back to philosophy (Althusser, 1994: 48, my translation). I have shown in this chapter that the expressive and excessive sides of political subjectivity interact dialectically. They do so simply because it is not possible to overcome social

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location completely, however much one might be inventive and excessive in politics, for the simple reason that excess is always located in and marked to various degrees by the extant which it exceeds; in Badiou’s words, it is both ‘immanent’ in its location and ‘exceptional’ simultaneously. The limits to the politics of the Marikana moment were provided by the centrality of the wage demand, so that the excess over representation rapidly reached its limits as soon as the issue turned around a wage negotiation. The Marikana moment did suggest a new figure of the worker for a short period, which reverberated in other similar locations. Yet the state subjectivities that led to the massacre at Marikana still require further elucidation. In order to do so, we must now move to a more detailed discussion of postcolonial state politics towards people in Africa.

notes 1. This academic argument has been associated also with the rediscovery of the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991). 2. None of this implies any criticism of Marx’s political economy as such. The problem concerns the fusion of social science with historical teleology and with a thought of politics. 3. The ANC and SACP today still insist on utilising a discourse of ‘national democratic revolution’, which has become totally meaningless, as they speak from a location within state power fused with capital, while the Trotskyist Left still sees the current problems in South Africa as the result of the ‘betrayal of the working class’ by nationalism and ‘united front’ tactics. 4. Neo-Foucauldian positions are associated with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and Agamben in particular; they all fail to displace politics from its location in the social and discourses of power. As a result, politics is regularly reduced to the state and to social identities. 5. It was reported in 1994 that the Green Paper on the RDP had already contained ‘an important ideological shift in government economic thinking’, as it stressed the ‘pivotal role’ of ‘private investment rather than the state in setting the economic agenda’. See Sunday Times, 4 September 1994. It is therefore something of a myth to see the introduction of neo-liberalism as an unforeseen event occurring suddenly in 1996 with the introduction of GEAR. 6. This is fundamentally why Naomi Klein’s (2007: 194–217) argument about the ‘shock doctrine’ and the overwhelming transnational power of the West is flawed. If South African leaders from Mandela onwards had trusted their own people to defend them in the event of pressure being exerted by neo-colonial forces, they would arguably have done so, as they were prepared to die for their leaders at the time. In similar circumstances, the Venezuelan people defended Hugo Chávez when he was ousted by a US-inspired coup in April 2002, and he was brought back into power as a result of popular action (see e.g. Gott, 2005). The ultimate problem in South Africa was arguably an ingrained distrust of the masses among the leadership of the ANC.

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7. The writings of John Saul are probably the most illustrative of this mode of thinking; see the Bibliography for references. 8. It is also important to stress that this period of mass upsurge gave rise to popular artistic forms, not least among workers. Worker poetry, theatre and writing all developed during this period. One catalytic figure in this process was the sociologist Ari Sitas, himself a poet. For an important sample of this cultural activity, see the special issue of Staffrider magazine on worker culture, 8, 3 & 4, 1989. 9. See the speech by Joe Foster, FOSATU general secretary, reprinted in Review of African Political Economy, 24, May–August 1982. 10. I use the terms ‘workerism’ and ‘populism’ to denote the two positions as they were known at the time. Neither of the two sides accepted the designation for themselves, although they were consistently referred to in these terms by each other. 11. Particularly illustrative here were the writings of Neville Alexander, and especially his comments on ethnicity. Although they often held to extreme positions – for example, any mention of ethnic groups was said to be simply evidence of enslavement to the oppressor’s ideology – these views were not untypical in softer variants. See, for example, Alexander (1983). Interestingly, both Alexander and Slovo, although writing from opposing Marxist traditions, were in overall agreement with the view that ethnic movements were necessarily reactionary and that, in Africa in the post-independence period, they had been the simple effects of ‘imperialist manipulations’. As a result, nation-building from above, the fundamental feature of authoritarian statism in Africa in the post-independence period, was seen by both as progressive. See Slovo (1988); Alexander (1993). 12. There were at the time a number of openly anti-nationalist arguments developed by workerist intellectuals. These basically stressed the primacy of class in relation to nationalism. Such arguments consistently failed to confront the popular content of national consciousness. Criticism of the SACP and its support for nationalism usually took this form; see Freund (1986) and Hudson (1986). 13. It is noteworthy that Naidoo’s speech was subtitled ‘a working class perspective’; the ideology of representation was prevalent among all senior activists at the time. 14. The issue was the subject of a brief debate in Work in Progress, 80, January–February 1982, p. 10. 15. For some of the more useful discussions of corporatism in South Africa, see Schreiner (1994), Bird and Schreiner (1992) and Maree (1993). For a more propagandistic approach, see Baskin (1993) along with debates in the South African Labour Bulletin during 1992 and 1993. 16. As far as the youth movement was concerned, this process was illustrated in the following front-page report which appeared in the Sunday Times, 3 December 1995, with evident glee: ‘In [an] action to rid the organisation of “ill-disciplined elements”, Mr Mandela is said to have taken drastic action against the ANC’s militant Youth League. Mr Mandela is believed to have issued instructions to the ANC’s treasury to stop all cheques destined for the league, effectively scuttling its congress planned for next month. This follows a statement by the league’s leader, Lulu Johnson, criticising

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Mr Mandela’s call for the Springbok to be retained as the rugby emblem, and other statements critical of the government.’ 17. This is a common procedure throughout the world, including European countries. Recently, the French daily Le Monde (Friday, 8 October 2013) reported on a court case involving officials of the employers’ organisation in the metal industry. It was stated that over a long period of time, the chief accountant of the organisation would make weekly trips to the bank from which withdrawals of between 30,000 and 200,000 euros would be made, placed in various envelopes and delivered discreetly to trade union leaders in order to encourage the ‘reformists’ and to make ‘social relations more fluid’ in ‘a general climate of class struggle’. Such payments were justified by an ex-president of the organisation in terms of the fact that ‘unions are not our enemy and it is useful that links exist in order for a social dialogue to occur’. Between 2000 and 2007, 16 million euros were withdrawn in cash in this manner. 18. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013–04-24-conflict-of-interest-incmining-unions-leaders-were-representing-their-members-while-in-corporations-pay/, accessed 25/04/2013. 19. Of course, Buhlungu himself understandably supports African nationalism, as is evident throughout his text, so that it is not nationalism as such that is for him the problem. On the other hand, for the Trotskyist Left, which is predominantly White and therefore inclined to prioritise ‘class’ over ‘race’, there is little doubt that it is nationalism (in their terms, ‘united front’ politics) that is at the root of the problem; see, for example, Jane Duncan, http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1478. 20. Identical arguments are deployed in relation to the ANC before it entered the state and after, so that changes in political subjectivities are effaced. I discuss the notion of ‘transition’ in detail in chapter 10. 21. Between workers of African and Indian origin at the Star plant in Durban; see Hayem (2008: 176–84). 22. The report is now in the public domain. For the full text of the commission report, see http://107.6.66.171/Full%20Report%20of%20the%20Marikana%20 Commision%20of%20Inquiry.pdf, accessed 20/07/2015. 23. The basis of apartheid in the migrant labour system was also a consensual view on the Marxist Left; it was argued that it was apartheid that held up the full proletarianisation of the South African peasantry by artificially reproducing pre-capitalist modes of production in the rural ‘Bantustans’ because it was in the interests of South African capital to do so, as it thereby had access to cheap wage labour. This argument was made most forcefully by Harold Wolpe (1972). Guy Mhone, the South African labour department’s chief director of market policy in the immediate post-apartheid period, declared: ‘More generally, the suggestion is that the migrant labour system needs to be phased out because of its negative economic and social consequences’ (Business Day, 24 December 1996). 24. It was revealed in August 2012 that ‘a company with links to the Zuma family provides contract labour to the platinum sector and other mines’. See http://m.br.co.za/ article/view/e/1.1369721, accessed 27/08/2012.

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25. For a detailed study of miners’ living conditions at Marikana, see Bench Marks Foundation (2012). The living conditions of workers are appalling; for example, there is no water and no electricity for use by workers although they are available for use by the mine (http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-10-in-marikanalocal-governments-failures-in-plain-sight); there has developed a culture of violence on the mines post-apartheid; and the problems of family reproduction at the mine account for the involvement of wives of miners in the Marikana protest. 26. Although the use of Fanagalo, the invented apartheid language of control, is frowned upon by the NUM, which prefers English, workers use it to communicate among themselves, and it seems it may now have been transformed from a language of oppression into a language of resistance. 27. The chronology of events leading up to the massacre and the subsequent events can be found in Alexander et al. (2012: 21–41). Incidentally, workers’ committees have a long history in South Africa and are anything but exceptional; see Stewart (2016) for the case of rock drill operators in the platinum mines, for example. 28. ‘Super-exploitation’ – in other words, the buying of labour power well below its value – is one of the features of a colonial economy in Marxist political economy, and was emphasised in the work of Harold Wolpe in the 1980s as the main reason for the migrant labour system and the main condition for the apartheid state. See Wolpe (1972). 29. http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/26/south-african-goldmines-simmeringresentment?cat=world&type=, accessed 27/09/2012. 30. http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1479 (emphases added  ). It should also be noted that women also demonstrated in support of the mineworkers and highlighted the appalling living conditions in the area. See Bench Marks Foundation (2011) and http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-10-in-marikana-local-governmentsfailures-in-plain-sight. The work of Camalita Naicker (2014, 2015, 2016) draws attention to the community character of the struggles in Marikana and points to the forms of oppression experienced by workers and their families beyond the workplace, and thus also to the broader reasons for popular resistance. Her work suggests that the idea of community in this case should not be understood sociologically but rather as produced by an act of will, while its politics are specifically located within a ‘subaltern domain’ that is essentially democratically organised and influenced by historically informed culture. 31. http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1479. 32. http://dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2012–10-12-marikana-prequel-num-and-themurders-that-started-it-all. Interestingly, Sacks had called the draft of his article ‘The Politics of Representation: the NUM and the beginning of the Marikana murders’, a more suggestive title than the one under which the piece was eventually published. 33. The land which the company occupies is a concession owned by the Royal Bafokeng ethnic company; the community all live on land under traditional land tenure earmarked according to ‘custom’ for the Bafokeng nationality. The Bafokeng leaders were conspicuous by their silence throughout these events.

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34. In South Africa, strikes are said to be ‘illegal’ when they are simply ‘unprocedural’; the right to strike is guaranteed by the constitution. I am grateful to Judith Hayem for reminding me of this point. 35. See, for example http://africasacountry.com/2013/01/28/british-tv-airs-footagerefuting-south-african-police-claims-about-murdered-marikana-miners-wherewas-the-south-african-media/; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/06/ marikana-cover-up-south-africa; http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/09/ 20129993748641196.html; http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-06-marikana-eyewitness-he-raised-his-hands-they-shoot-him-in-the-head; http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–08-30-the-murder-fields-of-marikana-the-cold-murderfields-of-marikana, all accessed 29/01/2013. All the evidence has been collected and presented by Greg Marinovich in his recent book (2016). 36. See http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-18-cosatu-congress-allies-talk-aboutmarikana-and-the-enemies-of-the-struggle; http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012– 09-18-cosatu-on-marikana-10-it-was-brute-force-cosatu-on-marikana-20-it-wasnot-brute-force; http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-18-cosatu-congressallies-talk-about-marikana-and-the-enemies-of-the-struggle, all accessed 09/12/2012. 37. See http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1574; Pretoria News, 1 September 2012; Mail & Guardian, 7–13 September 2012; City Press, 2 September 2012. There were also 94 cases of assault lodged by miners with the Independent Police Investigative Directorate. Apparently, such torture while in police custody was meant to elicit statements that the Marikana revolt had been orchestrated by the maverick politician Julius Malema. David Bruce argues that the police are being used systematically for political purposes by a dominant faction within the party-state. See http://sacsis. org.za/site/article/1471. 38. See, for example, Mail & Guardian, 28 September–4 October 2012; Pretoria News Weekend, 25 August 2012; http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–09-17-in-thewake-of-marikana-anc-pushing-a-self-destruct-button. Others still insisted on the failure by government ‘to advance an inclusive democracy’, as if the liberal democratic state were ever inclusive; see http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2013/03/06/ state-suppression-of-popular-dissent-should-concern-us-all. 39. See, for example, Satgar (2012); Duncan (http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1395). 40. It was emphasised that Neville Alexander had already insisted as early as 13 May 2010: ‘The working and unemployed masses are voting with their feet ... They are saying very clearly and very loudly that the appeal to nationalist, blood and soil rhetoric has lost its power and that we are standing on the threshold of a politics that will be shaped by a heightened sense of class struggle.’ See www.democraticleft. za.net, accessed 30/08/2012. Statements such as these seemed to assume that the xenophobic politics of the poor had suddenly vanished. 41. For Martin Legassick, ‘Were COSATU to split, were AMCU and other dissident unions to link up with this split, favourable conditions would be created for the launching of a mass workers’ party on a left-wing programme that could challenge the ANC for power’ (Facts for Working People, http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/, accessed 27/08/2012). For

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Jane Duncan, see http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1478; see also http://dailymaverick. co.za/article/2012–10-04-wildcat-strike-movement-may-birth-new-political-party. 42. ‘We decided to do this ourselves instead of always relying on the union who never gives any form of report so we decided to do this ourselves this time around, we were tired of not getting any answers’ (Alexander et al., 2012: 161). For a detailed analysis of the miners’ subjectivities expressed in their own words, see Hayem (2016). 43. For example, a strike committee leader at Anglo Platinum Mines (Amplats) stated: ‘Lonmin are starting to bring in political parties; they are starting to bring in chiefs ... Here we don’t want any political parties. We want this thing between us and management’ (Mail & Guardian, 14–20 September 2012). See also http://mg.co.za/ print/2012–10-05–00-frustrated-miners-drive-onslaught. 44. The Mail & Guardian, 7–13 November 2014, reports Valli Moosa, senior communist, ex-minister and Anglo American Platinum chairperson, as admitting with respect to the Marikana moment in October of the same year: ‘What we witnessed was a major social uprising and a revolt.’ 45. On 24 October, the London Guardian reported as follows on a statement by Advocate Dali Mpofu representing miners’ families at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry: ‘It is clear Ramaphosa was directly involved by advising what was to be done to address these “dastardly criminal actions”, which he says must be characterised as such and dealt with effectively.’ The emails showed a direct ‘toxic collusion’ between Ramaphosa, Lonmin, mineral resources minister Susan Shabangu’s department, the police ministry and state security agencies, he added, describing the shootings as ‘premeditated murder of defenceless people’. Ramaphosa warned the police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, to come down hard on the strikers, and was lobbied by Lonmin management to ‘influence’ Shabangu and advised her that ‘silence and inaction’ was ‘bad for her and government’, it was claimed. An email from Ramaphosa with the subject heading ‘Security Situation’ reads: ‘You are absolutely correct in insisting that the minister [Shabangu] and indeed all government officials need to understand that we are essentially dealing with a criminal act. I have said as much to the minister of safety and security’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/24/ lonmin-emails-anc-elder-baron, accessed 25/10/2012). 46. After all, mining companies had negotiated with unrepresented striking miners on other occasions; see, for example, http://mg.co.za/article/2012–11-14-amplatsmakes-new-pay-offer. 47. See http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013–05-13-num-fighting-fire-withfire/#.UZKQEKIsCSo, accessed 14/05/2012. 48. See the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) submission to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (http://www.casac.org.za/) and Bruce, 2012. 49. See http://mg.co.za/article/2012–09-05-miners-threaten-to-kill-lonmin-management. 50. There were reports of the use of ‘medicine’ from a traditional doctor from Mbizana to make miners invulnerable to bullets. See City Press, 30 September 2012.

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51. See, for example, Sitas (2011), and also Lindela Figlan’s biography at http://www. abahlali.org/node/9214. 52. Personal communication. For a discussion of the Mountain Movement or Pondoland Rebellion, see, in particular, Mbeki (1984), Lodge (1983) and, most importantly, Kepe and Ntsebeza (2011), from which all the extracts cited here are taken. 53. See also Patrick Bond’s contribution at http://pambazuka.org/en/category/ features/84956. 54. See the City Press editorial of 19 August 2012, which makes the point that, unlike Sharpeville, the Marikana slaughter was not a massacre, because South Africa is a democratic state and the miners ‘were armed to the teeth’. 55. For the Marikana case, see Pithouse (http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1456). 56. See http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Marikana-inquiry-not-neutralauthor-20121206. 57. For example, the mayor of Cape Town has refused to meet Abahlali of the Western Cape on a regular basis in this manner. See Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape (2012). 58. For Alexander, ‘the strike at Lonmin symbolised ... raw working class power ... clearly pay was the central issue’ (Alexander et al., 2012: 9, 190); and even further into flights of fancy: ‘We cannot afford to sleep through the revolution. Soon it will be in the townships and suburbs ... no one will control it once it goes there’; see http://www. news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Marikana-inquiry-not-neutral-author-20121206, accessed 06/12/2012. 59. See Alexander et al. (2012: 41, 191, 195 and passim). For the current inter-union violence in the mining sector and especially platinum, see, among many such reports, http://mg.co. za/article/2012–11-22-mining-union-rivalry-two-shot-dead, accessed 22/11/2012. For suicidesamongminers,seehttp://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013–05-08-marikanacommission-the-death-toll-mounts/#.VdiEUbyqqko. 60. Mainly from the British Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), which is notorious for applying the term ‘working class’ in a particularly loose way to refer to the people or the masses as a whole, with the consequent inability to understand internal contradictions among the people, as none are thinkable within a working class that is by definition already constituted as a unity. These political tendencies generally associated with Trotskyism are ensconced within different academic institutions and NGOs in South Africa. It should also be noted that Trotskyists do not refer to themselves as such; rather they call themselves Marxists. Similar points can be made with reference to Stalinists, who call themselves Communists, and to Maoists, who call themselves Marxist-Leninists. 61. Much as with state logic, the Left in South Africa is not able to understand that Abahlali think for themselves and often accuses them of being manipulated by academic outsiders, something I have already alluded to in the Preface to this book. For a recent response by Abahlali to such vilification and defamation, see the Mail & Guardian, 14–20 August 2015.

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Chapter 12

Renaming the state in Africa today We as mineworkers are excluded from this democracy. – A worker from Marikana, South Africa, 2012 It has been stressed profusely that the state was the real oppressor, but in a more fundamental way, the state is what distributes the idea of what is possible and what is impossible. The event, on the other hand, transforms that which has been declared impossible into a possibility; the possible will be torn away from the impossible. – Alain Badiou, La Philosophie et l’événement, 2010 (my translation)

‘democracy’: what’s in a name? Even if we were to critique the African state in terms of its interest representation (it always represents the dominant interests anyway), its cultural phenomenology of representations of power,1 or its reflections of a social essence (‘neo-patrimonial’, ‘belly politics’, etc.),2 or in terms of identifying institutionally its mode of rule through its creation of ethnic identities,3 all of which may be said to describe and analyse some important aspects of state power, this would not be sufficient. The fact remains that our main project cannot be reduced to a deconstruction or critique of objective power and its subjective representations. Rather, we also need to comment on the state’s own subjective character, in particular on the manner in which it names itself and especially on how it goes about ruling the population under its control and creating a consensus around its name. We also need to begin to develop concepts that help us to think alternatives, if the state’s subjective hegemony is to be challenged from the perspective of emancipation. This chapter argues that the main problems concerning the thinking of state power in Africa concern not only the deconstruction of the discourse of power but also the manner in which that power is deployed. We must insist on understanding state

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politics outside statist categories, on the need to think social provisioning, social security, welfare and a bureaucracy responsible to the people, and on the need to understand the character of a national politics today, given the increasing loss of popular sovereignty experienced worldwide. Since we cannot simply assume that, because the excluded may be suddenly represented within the state, the state will automatically eschew its oppressive character, what needs to be stressed in particular is the need to develop categories that help us to understand the features of a state that would work for the people, that would enable independent popular activity, even though this can mean that the state may no longer be a state in the strict sense of the term. What follows is the importance of redefining democracy less as a form of state and more as a manner of making collective decisions, which would itself enable the independent organisation of people (and thus the emergence of a new political subject) and, hence, some direct popular control over power. As Marx put it many years ago, the ultimate point in thinking the state must concern the reversal of the dominant relations between state and society: ‘Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it ... the state has need ... of a very stern education by the people’ (Marx, 1875: 326, 329). It was precisely this reversal that Marx saw as the main lesson of the Paris Commune, for, as he puts it in one of his drafts for The Civil War in France, the state was a ‘parasitic [excrescence upon] civil society, pretending to be its ideal counterpart’ (Marx, 1871: 163). This ‘centralised state machinery’, he adds, ‘with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (inmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor’ (p. 162). ‘All previous revolutions’, he continues, ‘considered the occupancy (control) (seizure) and the direction of this immense machinery of government as the main booty of the victor’ (p. 164); it was only the Commune which was a ‘Revolution not against this or that ... form of State Power’, but ‘a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’ (p. 166, emphasis in original). The Commune – the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression  – the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organised against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things (p. 168). In other words, thinking the state from a subjective position beyond the state concerns thinking freedom; today, this means thinking outside the dichotomy between

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democracy and authoritarianism while retaining the idea of ‘prescribing to the state’. Our analysis of the state must begin by analysing it in a novel manner, starting from how the state in Africa relates to people. This chapter attempts this by making a subjective distinction between a national developmental state form, which dominated in the post-independence period, say up to 1980, and a new state with ‘post-developmental’ and ‘post-national’ characteristics in Africa after that date; in other words, the argument is concerned with elucidating the name of the state in Africa up to c.1980 and with showing that this name is no longer appropriate. Furthermore, the name the state uses for itself today, ‘democracy’, is also inappropriate and it should be thoroughly renamed. Let me begin by outlining some typical state practices in ‘democratic’ Africa before commenting on the term ‘democracy’ and what it names in Africa today.

Indiscipline rocks primary school The Head of Tshwaane Primary School, Ms Martha Visagie, says she is disappointed at the disrespect teachers were subjected to by pupils in the school ... she said graffiti, bearing vulgar language on the walls of the pit latrine, illustrated the degree of insubordination ... The PTA and Headman Othusitse Sengawana had ordered that the culprits be flogged and five of them aged 16 were subsequently lashed ... [The] PTA chairman ... and his secretary ... said they would not tolerate lawlessness and pledged their support for teachers ... Ms Visagie explained that some of the boys were too big to be in primary school but they got a ‘waiver because they are Basarwa’ ... She said one of the causes was the Sesarwa culture ... She complained that ‘Basarwa don’t yet appreciate the importance of education’. Tshwaane is a Basarwa settlement 53 kilometres away from Motokwe in the Letlhakeng sub-district. The school has 156 pupils and eight teachers (Botswana Daily News, 213, 12 November 1999). Among the early well-functioning parts of the new [FRELIMO] government [in Mozambique] was the protocol, the offices created to handle the formalities of all meetings, movements or contacts of the state leadership. Protocol development was in part a self-sustained process, reaching sometimes awkward [sic] levels such as in Beira around 1980 where, whenever a motorised high level delegation was passing, all traffic on the streets was halted and pedestrians made to stand to attention. Only the then resident minister in Beira had the power to revoke this rule (Egerö, 1990: 190–1). Anyone familiar with the arrogant discourse of power so typical of the colonial state would recognise the character of the statements cited here. In the first, the state power is seen to be attempting to civilise the colonised, whose refusal to accept the

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authoritarianism of civilisation is expressed through acts of resistance. This resistance is met in turn by the deployment of physical violence combined with the patronising condescension of the supposedly educated powerful towards those they conceive inferior. The events take place in a school, but the local ‘traditional’ state representative, the village ‘headman’, orders that the rebellious 16-year-olds be flogged  – a typically colonial form of punishment. Those who are being flogged are not just rebellious children: they happen to be members of a minority ethnic group who have been enserfed and systematically oppressed in Botswana for many generations. Their servile status was confirmed under colonial state rule, although today they are presumed to be citizens of the state. They are the San speakers known variously as ‘Bushmen’, ‘San’, ‘Khoisan’ or ‘Basarwa’ in the literature. In some parts of Botswana, the last term seems to be applied equally to all marginalised groups irrespective of ethnicity, denoting in practice a subjective equation of ethnicity, poverty and political exclusion (Wilmsen and Vossen, 1984). Additionally, the details of this event are circulated through the medium of a freely distributed government newspaper to the widest possible audience and with all the legitimate authority and power of state-underlined truth, as if to warn similarly inclined rebels of the foolhardiness and futility of protest. That this event took place not in colonial but in postcolonial Africa, and in what is usually seen as the oldest and most successful liberal democracy on the African continent, says something both about a form of state rule common to the continent, and about the inheritance of colonial practices by the postcolonial democratic state. For this kind of event is a regular occurrence and is anything but exceptional.4 If practices such as these are common in Botswana, a supposedly democratic state, then we need not be too surprised about similar occurrences in Cameroon, Kenya, Gabon, Congo or Liberia, for example (see Mbembe, 1992). In the second statement cited above, it is the arrogance of those in power, in this case the functionaries of a state that saw itself as representing the popular masses, which is revealed in all its nakedness. This institutional arrogance (massively amplified through the megaphone of cultural representation) we have learned to accept as a common occurrence in Africa, irrespective of the ideological colour of the regime in power. The first state named itself a ‘democracy’, the second called itself a ‘people’s state’; in neither case did their practices towards people conform to the state’s view of itself. In sum, the arbitrary and routine nature of everyday intimidation and violence so typical of state practices towards the people of Africa should not be hidden behind an acceptance of the state’s view of itself or the view from the summit of global empire. Instead, the state should be named in a manner that conforms to its practices towards people, for it is they who ultimately pass judgement on it. Since the dominant state form in Africa today calls itself a democracy, we need to begin by examining this term for what it reveals and for what it hides. A critique of democracy is a rare process

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because democracy is a consensual fetish, as Badiou tells us: ‘We are constantly being reminded of the cynicism of stock markets, the devastation of the planet, the famine in Africa, and so on ... By contrast, no one is ready to criticise democracy. This is a real taboo, a genuine consensual fetish. Everywhere in the world, democracy is the true subjective principle – the rallying point – of liberal capitalism’ (Badiou, 2004: 127). It is thus important to attempt to think the state outside its own names and categories, particularly when these are consensual. Clearly, the dominant state form in Africa today sees itself as a ‘democratic state’ and is so named by global power as long as it conforms to the prescriptions of the West. Two points are important in this context. Firstly, like all states, this state secures its rule through a combination of persuasion, including ideological interpellation, and coercion, including the deployment of violence, which may be more or less legitimate in the eyes of its own people or in those of neo-colonial power. Moreover, in Wamba-dia-Wamba’s (1994) appropriate analogy, the postcolonial state in Africa is not rooted in popular culture and practices but has been ‘grafted’ onto a largely untransformed colonial state. It is quite unexceptional to remark that people in Africa do not identify with the state; they do not see it as belonging to them but regard it as fundamentally a foreign imposition, both literally (imposed by foreigners) and in the sense of an importation. In this sense, the state is clearly postcolonial in Africa, as it simply reproduces and often extends colonial state practices. From the perspective of emancipatory politics, the current appellation, ‘democratic’, is clearly inadequate. To qualify as ‘democratic’, the state should not be judged according to a Western checklist, but according to whether it provides the conditions for the existence of politically independent forms of popular organisation and is fully open to control by the demos, rooted in its sociality so that the people can be shown to truly govern. Secondly, if we are to abandon historicism, we should no longer think in terms of the ‘authoritarian–democratic’ distinction and think the movement to emancipation in terms of a linear or ‘stageist’ conception of ‘transition’ from authoritarian to liberal-democratic to popular-democratic, as in the past (authoritarianism → liberal democracy → socialism). In this new manner of thinking, no linear conception of politics or progress is implied, and no return to historicism is proposed. Emancipation cannot result from and cannot be thought of as a ‘radicalising’ of state subjectivities, of state politics.5 Any state prescribes what it deems to be politically possible and impossible in any given situation. To do so, it dishes out ‘facts’;6 but what was a fact yesterday is not necessarily a fact today, and will not necessarily be a fact tomorrow. Development was a fact of politics in the immediate post-independence period in Africa, but it is no longer one today, at least not in any comparable manner. We know from the early 20th-century studies of the ‘elite theorists’ (Pareto’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ or Michels’s ‘law of the small number’), or from Weber’s notion of ‘legal-rational’ action, that hierarchical bureaucracies are the standard form of

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organisation within modern state institutions of whatever type; consequently, neither parties nor states are democratic institutions.7 We also know from Foucault (1978: 221) that with the rise of what he calls ‘governmentality’, state administrations in 18th-century Europe were patterned on the organisational structure of the military; these forms were then transmitted to Africa through colonialism as populations needed to be systematically regulated and controlled. Rancière (2015: 61) tells us that ‘the ultimate ground on which rulers govern is that there is no good reason as to why some men should rule others. Ultimately the practice of ruling rests on its own absence of reason.’ Rancière is quite right to stress that ‘strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of state ... Each and every state is oligarchic’ (Rancière, 2005: 79, my translation). The democratic restrictions on such oligarchic rule (e.g. universal suffrage, rule of law, human rights) were always, he maintains, the result of popular struggles of one form or another. He shows that democracy in its original meaning never meant ‘representative democracy’. Indeed, ‘ “representative democracy” may seem today to be a pleonasm, but it was first an oxymoron’ (2005: 61, my translation). Democracy is not that form of government which allows an oligarchy to rule in the name of the people, nor is it that form of society which is ruled by the power of the market. Rather it is the action which without interruption removes from oligarchic government the monopoly of public life, and from wealth its overriding power over life. It is the power which today more than ever must fight against the fusion of these powers in a single law of domination. To recover the singularity of democracy is to also acquire a consciousness of its solitude (p. 105, my translation). All states in Africa are oligarchic systems of rule; it is just that some of these require universal suffrage or even the rule of law (or some laws) and a certain degree of constitutionalism for oligarchic rule to function (owing to a certain amount of popular sovereignty), while others do not, and there are a whole number of variations in between. The difference between oligarchies in Africa and those in other countries is simply that in Africa they are primarily politically oriented towards the West; they must of necessity have the support of the West in order to be able to rule. The support of the people is quite secondary to their existence; hence, the relative weakness of the universal franchise system and other liberal institutions. ‘The greatest wish of the oligarchy’, says Rancière, ‘is to rule without the people, that is to say ... without politics’ (p. 88), a point that accounts to a large extent for the idea of the ‘ending of politics’ in many European countries8 and its simple replacement by management and administration (‘governance’). This replacement of politics by management is also a characteristic of what may be called the ‘post-national’ state in Africa, where access to power has often revolved around personalities and where politics has been

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largely absent. Today, the insistence by the West on ‘good governance’ as a more or less formal conditionality for economic aid strengthens this form of rule. The reintroduction of politics (bringing politics ‘back in’, to use a hackneyed phrase) requires thinking the name of the state in a different manner in order to remove ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’ from the centre of thought. If the term ‘democracy’ refers to the way the state names itself, and given the inadequacy of this appellation from an emancipatory perspective, how are we to begin to rename the state in Africa today? In an interesting series of articles in the pages of Economic and Political Weekly of India, a number of young intellectuals from India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have proposed the idea of the ‘post-national state’ to refer to the current state form in their part of the world. They do this on the basis of arguing that the state can no longer be considered the foundation of an emancipatory politics, that the emancipatory possibilities of state politics have been lost; in their terms, ‘the emancipatory potential once embodied in the nation state as a political community of citizens is no longer all that evident’ (De Alwis et al., 2009: 35). It is not clear from their work whether they consider this loss to be a permanent state of affairs and whether it is only localised, but their argument at least has the merit of putting a finger on the core problem of thinking emancipation outside the state in the South. I have argued throughout this book that the absence of emancipatory thought within the state is an ontological feature of the state itself, irrespective of its form or historical character.9 This does not suggest in any way a monolithic state structure; intra-state conflicts are perfectly possible and indeed are a regular feature of state politics, as subjective distinctions remain within the parameters of interest representation. I shall return to re-examine the consequences of this view for thinking a new democratic state from the viewpoint of the people, but for the present I wish to concentrate on the naming of the current form of state on the African continent.

democracy in south africa: what does the term name? Friday 26 April 2013

Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA Press Statement: UnFreedom Day in Durban Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA, a democratic and membership based organization, has held its UnFreedom Day event in Durban every year since 2006. This year UnFreedom Day will be held in Durban and in Cape Town. UnFreedom Day will be mourned at the eThekwini College, Springfield (adjacent to the Kennedy Road shack settlement) in Durban on 28 April

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2013 and at the Sweet Home Farm Community Hall in Philippi in Cape Town on 27 April 2013. The event will begin at 09:00 in the morning in both cities. We wish to acknowledge all the sacrifices made by many South Africans in the name of freedom and all of the gains that have been won. We also wish to salute all the international communities who fought hard with us to defeat apartheid. But we are sure that this is not the real freedom that so many people struggled and had suffered for. We do not want in any way to undermine the struggles of the past or the real gains that have been won. But who can say that they are really free when they must live without land, without homes, without jobs and without dignity? Who can say that they are really free when they do not have the right to organise freely and safely? Who can say that they are really free when women are not safe? Who can say that they are really free when they are being forced out of the city and taken to human dumping grounds in the middle of nowhere? We cannot fool ourselves and pretend as if we are free. We decided long ago that we are no longer going to escort those few rich individuals who are tenderpreneurs, politicians and business people into the stadiums as if they are heroes so that they can sit on stages and tell us to celebrate our freedom. It just makes no sense for us to let these rich people tell us that we are free while we live, suffer, burn and die in the shacks without enough water, without electricity, without road access, without refuse collection, without land and housing and, of course, without dignity ...  The eThekwini [Durban] Municipality claims to be building sixteen thousand houses per year and we discovered that they have only built less than four thousand houses in the last financial year. The city’s backlog of almost half a million houses remains unshaken. And the houses that they do build are tiny, so badly made that they are falling apart before they are even occupied, given only to party members or sold off corruptly and usually built far outside the city. This Municipality evicts us illegally, tries to ban our protests, protects the gangster politicians, supports repression against our movement, ignores court orders, refuses to act against corruption, forces us into transit camps and leaves us to rot in the shacks. We would be bluffing the nation if we agreed to go to the stadiums and say that we are free while we suffer police and politician brutality. Why are we told and even educated about our freedom? There are campaigns and expensive adverts on televisions and radios about how free we are. Real freedom would not come only once a year and we will not have to be told about it. Real freedom will be something we feel from inside our hearts each second, each minute, each hour and each day.

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Our movement stands for the full restoration of the dignity of all people who live in South Africa. The poor have been left out of this new South Africa. We are a movement of the poor, by the poor and for the poor. The time has come for us to organize to take our place in this country. We are working, from below, towards the realization of a free society in a country where there is Peace, Justice and Equality. It is clear that in order to achieve Peace, Justice and Equality we will have to make sure that Land, Wealth and Power are shared fairly and equally and that no one is allowed to operate as if they are above the law of the land and no one is treated as if they are beneath the law of the land. It is an urgent priority that all evictions must stop, that people must be allowed to occupy unused land and that the government must act to put the social value of land before its commercial value. We will not see progress in this country until we, as the poor, are able to build our political power. We will not be able to build our political power if our struggles are constantly repressed. It is therefore an urgent priority that we must be allowed to organize freely and that repression of our struggles and organizations must stop. No land, no house, no jobs, no dignity = no real freedom.10 I will begin by discussing the term ‘democracy’ as deployed in public discourse in South Africa. My discussion is founded on and inspired by the ways in which Abahlali baseMjondolo have questioned the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ as applied to the South African state. This questioning has not been picked up and debated by commentators, academic or otherwise. Remarks by Abahlali have included at various times: ‘democracy is for the rich not the poor’, ‘we do not count’ (i.e. we are excluded from democracy) and ‘elections are only for politicians’, as well as the idea of ‘unfreedom’ (there is no freedom for the poor) and of ‘dignity for all’. These are important innovations in political thinking in a context where democracy has become a fetish that is never questioned, and therefore they must be taken seriously. ‘Seriously’ here means thinking about them both theoretically and politically. Let me begin by examining the term ‘democracy’. Steven Friedman (2009: 1) has defined democracy as a (state) political system in which ‘each adult human being has a right to an equal say in the decisions taken by the political community of which they are a part ... a democracy ought to be a society in which each of us has an equal say in the decisions which affect us. No society has ever achieved this goal, but it is the standard to which any democracy ought to aspire.’ Following in the footsteps of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), he calls this ‘radical democracy’, as opposed to ‘liberal democracy’.11 This manner of looking at democracy is not particularly helpful, because Friedman’s definition is normative. It concerns what he would like to see, not democracy as it actually exists. In trying

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to understand democracy in South Africa today, we must begin from what exists and not from what we would like to see. As it exists today, the term ‘democracy’ names two completely distinct phenomena. Firstly, it names a form of state with certain well-known characteristics (e.g. regular elections by universal suffrage, division of powers, constitution and constitutionalism, independent judiciary). This state is more accurately referred to as parliamentarianism. Politics here – at the level of the state – is based on the power to manage differences and interests, so that the system of power holds together in the interest of the dominant capitalist system. Democracy helps to balance such differences: parliamentarianism avoids all-out war between powerful interests (different sections of the ruling oligarchy). Elections do not concern any form of popular political existence, but are simply a way of determining which section of the oligarchy (organising its interests in a party) controls the government. Abahlali are clear on this point; hence they do not (usually) participate in elections. This form of democracy, usually referred to as ‘liberal democracy’, is a state democracy.12 Secondly, democracy names a form of politics or political practice deployed by people in organising themselves in making decisions. It is a means ‘of promoting an active popular presence in the field of politics’ (Badiou, 2011d: 43, my translation). Politics is here founded on principles of equality established collectively, not on balancing interests, and democracy does not define a form of state but a form of popular practice, which may be said to activate a principle of equality. The two uses of the term ‘democracy’ as well as the politics they refer to are completely distinct, and it is their conflation as different forms of the same thing that lies at the heart of confusion in analysis and politics. Democracy as a form of state is concerned to manage interests and hierarchy; democracy as a form of popular politics is concerned to manage equality. What Friedman defines as democracy – political equality – has been referred to by different names, including ‘communism’ and ‘egalitarianism’, either as a future form of social organisation to be fought for or as a political practice in the here and now;13 but it does not, and I would argue cannot, exist as a form of state, for it implies the non-existence, or at least the decline, of the state in its current form. As all states are oligarchic, they reproduce inequality and hierarchy in the interests of a small group of the dominant. This is the character of all states without exception. Of course, there are differences between types of state, and the democratic state is not of the same order as an authoritarian one (e.g. conflicts of interest are not resolved in the same way), but they are both states and, as a result, they both give rise to an oligarchy because the manner in which they think politics is fundamentally similar. There are three fundamental and related characteristics of the way politics is thought by any state, irrespective of its form:

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1. Orders and command. Given the hierarchy of power and interests which it is the state’s function to reproduce and manage – the maintenance of order – the state can think only orders and command. Law is about effecting orders and the police force is about ensuring compliance. This does not preclude consent in any way, as command is regularly seen as legitimate; neither does it suggest that the state does not have an enabling function as well. State coercion is always present as a last or not-so-last resort.14 The military term ‘command and control’ neatly summarises the subjectivity of the state, even when it is enabling. Related to this well-known feature is the subjective effect of state thinking, which defines what it is possible and not possible to think and do politically. ‘It has been stressed profusely that the state was the real oppressor, but in a more fundamental way, the state is what distributes the idea of what is possible and what is impossible’ (Badiou, 2010b: 21, my translation). 2. Administration on the basis of a hierarchical system, what Max Weber referred to as bureaucratic ‘rational action’, but which is better seen as ‘managerial action’. This follows from a subjectivity of ‘command and control’. The state always thinks politics as management or, rather, politics is always collapsed into management; moreover, there is no distinction drawn today between public and private management and administration, for the former has simply been eliminated. I have already noted how Foucault shows empirically that the military was explicitly taken as the model of organisation for all state administrative institutions in Europe. Given these features, Lazarus (2003) argues that there is always a contradiction between state ‘politics’ and universal principles. For Badiou (1985), the state is fundamentally apolitical, as all real politics is founded on principles. 3. Finally, the state is quite simply a machine for creating identities based on interests, for its core function is to regulate them.15 For example, the state controls and regulates interests, ensuring that conflicts between them are contained within limits which secure its rule, and that there is no excess over those identities it recognises. It thereby attempts to ensure that political subjectivation does not take place; it ‘induces, consolidates and stabilises’ social divisions and can only do so by presenting itself as above them (Badiou, 2014a, 9 October 2013). This is what Rancière refers to when he notes that all states are ‘police states’: ‘it is in the very nature of the state to be a police state, an institution which fixes and controls identities, places and movements, an institution in permanent struggle against any excess over its account of identities; that is to say also against that excess over identitarian logic which constitutes the action of political subjects’ (Rancière, 2010, translation modified). This is because the state manages and thus reproduces differences. Elections are about getting politicians into power to defend their particular interests without threatening the

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general or national interest. Conflicts between such elite interests are regulated relatively peacefully in parliament in the case of ‘democratic states’, less peacefully by ‘authoritarian states’. In South Africa, if one wishes to be listened to by the state, one has to accept ‘stakeholder politics’; in other words, one has to ‘enter’ its mode of thinking through interest representation. Because Abahlali have refused to accept the role of stakeholder, they have been consistently ignored by power, excluded from official meetings with state representatives, hindered from exercising their constitutional rights and subjected to arbitrary violence on a regular basis. At a subjective level, the state distinguishes clearly between what is possible and what is impossible in politics. This distinction is systematically enforced both through coercion and through the dominant subjectivities that prevail in society. Gramsci (1971) was right to understand the state as composed of both political and civil societies and to see the acquisition of (bourgeois) hegemony as a subjective process attained through both. In the 21st century in the African postcolonial context, civil society is not the only domain of politics in which the state exercises its mode of rule. Indeed, the configuration and character of the three features of the state already noted differ within the three domains of state politics – ‘civil society’, ‘uncivil society’ and ‘traditional society’ – which are each characterised by a distinct mode of state rule.16 If we turn to look at popularly practised democracy, here it is always principles that constitute the foundation of emancipatory politics. The only weapon people have in their politics is organisation (discipline), and the only way of achieving a consistently common voice and making common decisions is by allowing every individual in the organisation a say – hence democratic politics, where all can speak. Democratic politics are always subordinated to a number of principles held in common by the members of the organisation. These principles often take the form of prescriptions on the state. For example, ‘The people shall govern’ was a principle as well as a prescription on the apartheid state in the 1980s, derived from the Freedom Charter. Parties and NGOs also produce a common voice, but this is overwhelmingly achieved internally through hierarchy and command; they are therefore not usually democratic but are simply institutions that operate within the parameters of state politics, for they understand politics as management and command, like all state institutions. It should be clear that state democracy and popularly practised democracy are not at all of the same order. Popularly practised democracy is politics founded on principles, and is anti-identitarian in so far as it is meant for all (men and women, young and old, rich and poor), irrespective of social divisions in society. If it is to be sustained, popular democracy cannot afford to deviate from such universal principles. On the other hand, state democracy is not founded on principles; it is obviously only for some: the rich, the wealthy, the powerful and their clients, the oligarchy.

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Popularly practised democracy, as Rancière insists, is founded on a principle of equality which becomes activated as people come together; it is not a form of organisation of the state or society; it is a rare occurrence, as it takes place only in particular forms, during specific situations and sequences, which Badiou calls historical events. This idea of democracy has been referred to as ‘popular democracy’ or ‘radical democracy’, but these are somewhat misleading appellations, for they suggest a continuity with the state form (‘popular democracy’ versus ‘bourgeois democracy’, for example). Yet egalitarian practice cannot form the basis of a state politics, for it is only possible within a politics that does not operate within the limits of state thought – there can be no ‘egalitarian state’ – and only within thought that exists ‘at a distance’ from a state subjectivity. This is why it does not exist all the time. This does not mean that it doesn’t ‘engage’ the state, but merely that it does not think within a state logic, for it concerns the activation of equality. In other words, there can be no simple transition from popularly practised democracy into a state; any attempt to do so transforms principles into interests, and equality into hierarchy and command, in sum principled politics into what is usually referred to as political ‘opportunism’.17 This distance between practised democracy and the state is a gulf which cannot be easily bridged without major transformation. As already noted, egalitarian principles and command are incompatible perspectives; the idea of an egalitarian state is an impossible oxymoron. Indeed, a state based on popular democracy presupposes a state that is also not a state – a state in transition to total equality or communism, a process Marx referred to as the ‘withering away’ of the state. This process means that the whole idea of hierarchy, expertise, professionalism and command is undermined within the state itself. However, the notion of a state that oversees its own disappearance has not worked in past experiments at emancipation, arguably because emancipation was understood as a state-led process. This process of ‘withering away’ Marx saw as a result of what he called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, itself understood as a form of state by the Bolsheviks in particular.18 Historically, therefore, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ turned into its opposite, into the dictatorship of the state over the people, as command, bureaucracy and the politics of interest were not undermined but collapsed into criminal violence, in particular in the Soviet Union under Stalin (Badiou, 1985, 2013d). To suggest continuity between popular or radical democracy and liberal democracy is to gloss over the fundamental distinction between state politics and a politics which proposes or anticipates a future in the present; between a subjectivity founded on interests and one founded on principles; between a politics that thinks within state categories and assumptions and a politics that absents the state from thought. That there was no continuity between the politics of ‘people’s power’, a form of popularly practised democracy in 1980s South Africa, and the liberal democracy of the

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post-apartheid state is therefore not accidental. This discontinuity now becomes comprehensible. It can also be understood as discontinuity in the subjective understanding of the ‘nation’: whereas in the 1980s the nation was totally identified with the people, after 1990 the idea of the nation became fused with that of the state (the ‘nation-state’). This process of transformation in the idea of the nation presupposed a systematic depoliticisation of popular practices, a move from the thought of principles to the thought of interests. Abahlali take the Freedom Charter’s prescription that ‘The people shall govern’ seriously, much as activists had done in the 1980s. Abahlali are, therefore, faithful to the politics of the 1980s, but today these politics can only operate ‘at a distance’ from those of the post-apartheid state, much as they did in their original form: beyond the politics of command, administration and the representation of interests. The reason is that such politics are not state politics; they are actually opposed to the manner the state thinks its politics and they subvert it, something that accounts for the state’s systematic antagonism. Abahlali’s democratic politics are today a unique form of politics; they are a form of popularly practised democracy.19 In a recent lecture, Badiou (2012b: 6–7) argues that – in order to overcome the pure mirror image of a negation, and contrary to Hegelian logic and to classical Marxism (‘the negation of the negation’) – we can think of four consecutive dialectically related notions of democracy as purely affirmative notions; in other words, where none is a negation of the previous one. In this manner the continuity of emancipatory politics can be thought of as a series of affirmations: So we have three terms in appearance: democracy as a form of state (first affirmation), democracy as a mass democracy (second affirmation), and after that we have collective action, the determination of the consequences of the Event as the emergence of a new political subject. But in fact we have four terms finally, because after the classical representative democracy, which is a form of state power; after mass democracy, which is of historical nature; after democracy as a political subject; we have as in Hegel the process of all that returning to the first term – returning to the state. What is the democratic process when it is returning to the first term? It is necessarily the possibility of declining the state itself [sic], as in Marx. It’s the possibility – the horizon – of the progressive [disappearance] of the state as the central necessity, as a form of power. So the fourth term is the first three terms when they return to the first (to the state) in the Communist vision of the vanishing of the state, the historical process of the progressive [disappearance] of the first term. This account is straightforward. For Badiou, in order to overcome the problems associated with the idea of negation, which ends up providing the subjective conditions

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for an alternative politics to produce a simple mirror image of the state form it critiques, we need to think four affirmative notions of democracy: the first is the state liberal-democratic notion; the second is the historical event founded on equality and discussed by Rancière; the third refers to the process whereby the possibilities opened up by the historical event are sustained so that a democratic collective subject is constituted; and the fourth concerns the ‘withering away’ of the state itself. In each case, the idea of democracy is affirmative. In the example of South Africa, Badiou’s second affirmation conforms to the event of the 1980s, which I termed the People’s Power mode of politics, while it could be argued that Abahlali’s politics is an attempt to construct a collective political subject on the basis of a fidelity to the possibilities opened up by that event. We need now to turn to the question of how we can name the state today, in Africa in general and South Africa in particular, if we are to abandon the unhelpful appellation which it uses for itself, namely ‘democracy’.

naming the state in africa As I have noted throughout this work, the thinking of an emancipatory politics can today no longer be constructed from the perspective of the state; it can only begin from a subjectivity that breaks fundamentally from state thinking. Today, such a politics of emancipation can only be thought ‘at a distance’ from state subjectivities, for these cannot have an emancipatory character, as they lack the capacity to assert something different from what exists, to wager on a future possible within the present which state thinking deems to be impossible. To think a politics of emancipation is thus to theorise the freedom to make political choices. The stress on structural constraints – the tyranny of the objective – has been at the core of a politics derived from political economy throughout the second half of the 20th century in Africa. This politics was always, and continues to be, a state-focused politics, which includes a problematic of the ‘capture’ of state posts or the ‘seizure’ of state power itself. Yet this was not always so. I have noted in chapter 4 that the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics in Africa was contradictory as far as the focus on attaining state power was concerned, but, more importantly, the People’s Power mode of politics, which developed in South Africa in the 1980s, actualised a subjective shift from the NLS mode. Relatively rapidly, however, the popular politics of national liberation became ‘statised’, as the state came to be viewed as the unique site of its existence, particularly as the nation became less and less identified with the people and more and more with the state. After independence and liberation, a state political subjectivity became hegemonic and consensual. In Africa in the 1960s, central to this state political subjectivity was the idea of development as a national state-led project, an idea that facilitated the subjective change from people-nation to nation-state in particular, as the state was seen as

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freeing the nation from its economic fetters through development. This form of state politics, or political sequence, which lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s, has been named the ‘developmental state’. It no longer exists and has been replaced by another which exhibits a ‘post-developmental’ character for reasons which I make clear below. This replacement of state forms was occasioned by changes in political subjectivities at various levels, particularly during the 1980s and the 1990s, and in a number of sites that later came to be named ‘of civil society’. In some instances such sites exhibited emancipatory alternatives for short periods and developed a prescriptive politics. Today, the enlarged domain of state politics includes civil society within its ambit. As I have already noted, the work of naming a political sequence comes down to isolating its singular characteristics and, thus, distinguishing it from other political singularities as well as from its conception of itself. For example, ‘democratic state’ is the name that the current state in many African countries uses to describe itself, yet it tells us little to nothing about the character of state politics; with equal justification it could be called, say, a ‘money state’, given that its politics seem to be dominated by moneymaking as a world view. At best, the ‘democratic’ characterisation simply expresses the idea of certain limits to such politics through the holding of regular elections by universal suffrage, individual freedoms and a division of powers – limits that state power constantly attempts to bypass and reduce to simple techniques, as it sees them as restrictive of its politics. Indeed, it ignores these limits extensively when it comes to dealing with the politically excluded sections of society. The technical nature of these features demonstrates that the state’s organising principles are fundamentally other than those it extols itself, and it is therefore through naming these politics with precision that an alternative can begin to be thought and constructed. In this manner, I propose to think the state as the site of a political subjectivity that constitutes its essential features. Development will provide the point of entry into the discussion, as it has constituted the central focus for completely disparate forms of political subjectivity on the African continent during the postcolonial period, and has simultaneously named a specific state form itself. Today, it is not at all clear what development names in Africa, particularly given the absence of an idea of rural development, which was the core of the original conception of ‘development as progress’ (Cowen and Shenton, 1996). This was not always so. During the national liberation struggles, and immediately after independence  – during the late 1960s and early 1970s  – development was the name of a national liberation project led by the state. Later, development became the centrepiece of the construction of the nation, which was to be achieved through giving the rural poor majority (in particular) access to the benefits of modernity and industrialisation. Even though it named a statist project, it probably constituted the main distinctive feature of the post-independence state compared with the colonial state in that it had a national character, and as such it would become the main plank

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of what was to be known as ‘nation-building’. This was also probably true in the sense that the states which were mere extensions of imperialism from an early stage (e.g. Zaire, Gabon) were never developmental. As state politics gradually emerged as hegemonic within the nation and popular politics were delegitimised, development became more and more a state and neo-colonial project in which the national politics of development were eventually replaced by ‘compradorial’ politics, i.e. by political subservience to former colonial interests in their new guises. It was for this reason that the state was said to be postcolonial, precisely in order to denote a certain continuity with its earlier incarnation. By the 1980s, the collapse of the old neo-colonial statist form of development meant the collapse of the developmental state on the continent. In brief, ‘development’ named three distinct (but frequently overlapping) political processes and subjectivities that followed each other reasonably chronologically: (1) development as state-led emancipation; (2) development as nation-state building; and (3) development as neo-colonial project. Each reflected the ascendancy of a specific politics. In all cases development was tied to the state so directly that the state secured its reproduction as well as its legitimacy through development. Development was therefore not solely – or, arguably, even primarily, given its failure to improve the well-being of the population  – a socio-economic phenomenon, an issue, say, of deficient or distorted capital accumulation, but fundamentally a political question. Moreover, development originally possessed an emancipatory character, which it is important to attempt to recapture and rethink. The state form that arose in the immediate post-independence period did so with an ‘emancipatory mandate’ from the people, so to speak. That it ‘betrayed’ that mandate does not diminish its significance or deny that it had to adjust many of its politics accordingly. Today, not only does development no longer name a state project, but its status within society is unclear and is often equated with large building projects. At best, it seems to refer to something to be undertaken by small-scale communities or private business rather than nations, and has largely disappeared from national discourse. Its central location in this discourse was replaced by ‘human rights’ and ‘good governance’ from the 1980s onwards, although today, in the second decade of the 21st century, those names have also become marginalised. Given this decline of development within hegemonic political discourse, should NGOs and social movements today – organisations based in (civil) society among the people – be considered the (possibly unique) bearers of a politics of (emancipatory) development? Is this politics to be conceived in partnership with the state? Can the political universality so central to development be recaptured, or is development to be thought within a renewed community (if not communitarian) politics? Is it possible today to rethink a ‘democratic developmental state’ which would overcome the problems of its undemocratic predecessor  – the developmental state  – by being more inclusive? Is it possible to

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recapture the original emancipatory content of development? I will argue that development can only be rethought as an emancipatory question if it is subtracted from the thought of state politics. This is not to say that the state has no function to fulfil in this regard, but rather that just as the state has to be rethought from a subjective location outside it, so has development. In what follows I shall first outline the characteristics of the developmental state as a variant of the ‘party-state’, as theorised by Lazarus (2001a). Central to the subjectivity of this state form was the ideological role of the national liberation movement or party, which fused national and state political subjectivities together, thereby excluding and eventually proscribing alternative popular politics. I then move to an analysis of the post-developmental character of the state, characterised this time by different political subjectivities, where it is no longer the party that alone subjectively mobilises the nation, but where a liberal consensus is constructed between state or political society and civil society organisations. Sites of emancipatory politics are to be sought, and are often to be found, beyond these domains. How are we to conceptualise the developmental state? This is a crucial question today, as there is an intellectual effort to conceive a ‘democratic developmental state’ in Africa (e.g. Adesina, 2007). In the literature, whether Western or African in origin, whether Marxist, liberal or nationalist in persuasion, understanding of the developmental state is firmly located within the parameters of political economy – in terms of the classes and interests it is said to represent, in terms of state socio-economic policy and administrative capacity, in terms of success as measured by socio-economic indicators (Evans, 1989; Leftwich, 1994, 1998; Mkandawire, 2001; Edigheji, 2005, 2007). Despite their differences, most authors operate within a conception of politics that is overwhelmingly statist, for political economy is unable to think politics as practice beyond the state, as it lacks the appropriate conceptual apparatus to do so. In the perspective taken here, the idea is to move beyond the confines of political economy and instead to identify the core subjectivity of post-independence state politics and how this was transformed towards the end of the 20th century into a new political subjectivity. In this way, it becomes possible to assess the state’s politics specifically, rather than the character and success of its management or its interest representation. As I have consistently argued, the politics of the state, like politics in general understood as subjectivity, as capacity, as agency, as choices, cannot be deduced from the classes or interests these are said to represent, whichever they may be. For the study of political subjectivities to advance in order to enable an understanding of political choice, it has to distance itself from the analysis of interests, for these ultimately propose little more than an objectivist determinism. Moreover, such a thought of politics can help to illuminate the critical disjunction between the currently dominant state form and that which until recently preceded it in Africa, a disjunction which both

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political economy and its postmodernist critique have generally glossed over, given their inability to analyse politics in its own terms. Finally, in this manner we can perhaps begin to understand a state form (or political sequence) as politically constructed. The idea is to attempt a shift from structuralist perspectives to emphasising political subjectivities. I propose to think the current dominant state form on the African continent as a political specificity that is post-developmental and, consequently, in the absence of any attempt at constructing a ‘national interest’ in any other manner, also post-national in form. It is ‘post-developmental’ in at least two senses. Firstly, and most obviously, this current form of state arose chronologically to replace the developmental state and, indeed, the whole idea (of the possibility) of consciously planned development itself. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the state today denies its role as the central agent of national development. Today, that process is to be driven by markets. Indeed, the current state differentiates itself from its predecessor on the grounds that the latter failed precisely because of its attempt to supplant market rationality, thus stifling popular civil-society entrepreneurial initiatives (e.g. Chazan et al., 1992). In the postcolonial period, African countries were first called ‘underdeveloped’ countries, then ‘developing’ (or ‘Third World’) or countries of ‘the South’, and now are known as ‘emerging markets’. The transition from national development to market rationality has been clear. In South Africa, any serious conception of national development would have to face squarely the problem of racialised property ownership. Here, the combination of state, market and human rights discourse has had the effect of avoiding a solution to the ‘social question’, which state-led development attempted to address. As far as Africa as a whole is concerned, social welfare indicators are today eminently worse than they were in the 1970s (Adesina, 2007). Politically as well as socio-economically, the majority of people are arguably more excluded today than at any time since independence. This social exclusion can be understood as a function of greater political exclusion. Given the chronic failure of state politics to think beyond the extant, the main idea behind my argument is to prioritise an analysis from the viewpoint of the excluded rather than from the state itself.

The developmental-state form The crucial point is to understand the developmental state as a singular regime of the 20th century which is now redundant. It is a state form similar to others of that century and overwhelmingly embodies a ‘reactive subjectivity’, in Badiou’s sense. Lazarus (2001a) identifies three dominant regimes of 20th-century Europe: the parliamentary state, the Stalinist state and the Nazi state. All three, he argues, were party-states, a state form that was not in existence in the 19th century and that no longer exists today. The party acted as a subjective agent for the organisation of worker politics

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in relation to the state. In the first two instances, the parliamentary and Stalinist states, it mobilised such politics and incorporated them into state politics. In the case of the parliamentary state, this happened in 1914 with the agreement of the social-democratic parties throughout Europe to support their state’s involvement in the First (imperialist) World War; in the case of the Stalinist state, it happened soon after 1917, as the party fused with the state. Indeed, in the case of the revolutions of the same century, as Arendt noted, it was the party which enabled the ultimate dominance of the ‘social question’ (the need to provide food, housing, education to the masses) over the ‘political question’ of consolidating the democratic rule of popular assemblies (Arendt, 1963). In Africa, the ‘social question’ became known as ‘development’ from the 1950s onwards. The developmental state in Africa can also be understood as a party-state, different from its colonial-state predecessor in some important respects, as well as from the European social-democratic states on which it regularly modelled itself. This state form and the reactive political subjectivity that characterised it are now largely redundant; there is no longer a developmental state in the 21st century. Attempts to revive a social-democratic past today are largely governed by political disorientation (if not by nostalgia) as a result of the gradual disappearance of the familiar dichotomies around which our understanding of politics was constructed (e.g. Right versus Left, nationalist versus socialist, state versus market, in particular). As there is no Left social-democratic project any longer – there is no longer any possibility of a state emancipatory project  – and as the political distinctions already noted have blurred, the familiar political signposts and points of reference no longer exist. Popular pan-Africanism, the ‘Idea of communism’ (Badiou, 2008), and the idea of a state held accountable to people all have to be completely reinvented today as part of the construction of an emancipatory politics. New content must be provided to these old names and new names must be thought. The developmental state of the 20th century has been fundamentally and irretrievably transformed along with the collapse of development as a state project in Africa, under the twin pressures of hegemonic globalised neo-liberalism and the popular struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. These struggles gave rise to ‘civil society’ as a new datum of thought and a new concept in the intellectual armoury of neo-liberalism. The politics of liberation were founded on the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics, which at times, and in a number of sites, had a strong emancipatory content, stressing freedom, justice, equality and dignity for all. They were the products of a pan-Africanism which radiated a universal appeal. As such, they were able to draw support among all those – in Africa and abroad – who worked for a better world, much as other causes with universal appeal had always done historically. Yet that universal core also contained a narrower nationalist ethos. Political independence was said to be the first step to total independence/freedom/emancipation, the second step

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being economic independence and freedom from the West, which would be established through development and the state. The state was thus understood to be the emancipator of the nation, as Nkrumah’s aphorism indicates: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee.’ Relatively rapidly, the politics of the national liberation struggle, founded on the attainment of a pan-African vision of universals such as freedom, liberty, equality and justice, was replaced, as Fanon (1990: 125–32) accurately observed, by a disastrous politics founded on interests (economic, power or cultural interests, rights and entitlements); a politics of affirmation – an emancipatory politics – was followed by one founded on social categories – a politics associated with the state.20 At independence, the politics of the nation became fused with the state in Africa; there was to be no politics outside the state. This outcome was facilitated by the discourses of political economy and development, which did not leave much room for the discussion of politics in general and democracy in particular. All politics was, for these discourses, to be reduced to power, to the state. This had not always been so during the national liberation struggle, as an emancipatory politics at times existed beyond the party or state (in waiting), often developing within independent social movements, cultural organisations, religious movements, trade unions and other sites. Despite the passing of the NLS mode of politics, the state’s hegemonic subjectivity still attempted to legitimise its new politics in terms of an NLS political discourse – which was thus largely rhetorical – through regular references to revolution, transformation, freedom, democracy, pan-Africanism, and so on.21 At the same time, the political disorientation resulting from the gradual decline of the NLS mode through its saturation and subversion by state politics, as well as from the difficulties in consolidating truly independent nationalist politics in the context of the Cold War, became the main conditions for the ultimate rise of Western human rights discourse to a position of dominance by the 1980s. Moreover, from the mid-1970s, as a result of such factors as the subversion of popular agency by the state and the state’s subservience to the West, there was a systematic change in the way in which Africans were viewed in Europe (and sometimes in the way they viewed themselves): from political agents during the struggles for liberation to victims of famine, war and disease.22 By the late 1980s, the European youthful militants of anti-imperialism and ‘Third Worldism’ had transformed themselves (most evidently in France) from political activists into advocates of human rights discourse and humanitarian interventions. As a result, a whole world disappears – the war in Vietnam, the iconography of Che, Mao and Ho Chi Minh ... – which is to say a militant or combative third world, so that another can be ‘heroically’ discovered years later: the third world as figured in the Human Rights discourse ... Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ as the name for an emergent political agency has been essentially re-invented: the new third world is

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still wretched, but its agency has disappeared, leaving only the misery of a collective victim of famine, flood, or authoritarian state apparatuses (Ross, 2002: 156–7). For Mamdani (1991a), the dominance of human rights discourse in Africa was the effect of an explicit US ideological offensive in the second half of the 1970s, after the independence of the ex-Portuguese colonies. In South Africa, a similar process of ‘victimisation’ occurred, but only in the 1990s and then directly as an effect of the TRC process, during which former political agents were interpellated as victims seeking redress from state institutions. The rise and hegemony of human rights discourse has ultimately sealed the fate of emancipatory thought in Africa, whether popular or statist, and freedom as a notion has been displaced by mere physical survival (so-called biopolitics). Being an imposition on the people because it was structurally grafted onto an untransformed colonial state, the postcolonial state focused on maintaining its power through links with neo-colonial interests. In most cases, development came to provide the name of this link as well as the name of a continuation with the period of the national liberation struggle, as did the term ‘revolution’.23 Both names provided a reference to an earlier mode of politics independent of the state, which had now ceased to exist. Development was able to become a neo-colonial process because its connection with popular politics was abandoned, as the nation became the state and fused with the state itself through its representation, the national liberation movement or party. Development became the state project on which the reproduction of the postcolonial state form ultimately depended; nation-building became state-building. With the concurrent collapse of development into an economic process of industrialisation came the technicisation of politics (e.g. through the centrality of the plan) as well as the increasing dominance of the Bretton Woods institutions in the politics of the state. Those rare cases that attempted to keep imperialism at bay (e.g. Tanzania) still ended up – through a gradual emphasis on the technical – largely dependent on foreign economic aid and enmeshed within Western discourses. In this manner, the developmental state fused in dominant subjectivity with both party and nation and became fundamentally authoritarian. It was the party that created the postcolonial state in this form, as any politics independent of the state-party were abandoned and eventually proscribed. The political movement or party saw itself as the nation and attempted to turn the state from a (necessarily particularistic) colonial state to a (universal) national state, but in most cases ended up doing the opposite, as the party leadership was often dominated by specific ethnic interests. The organiser of this subjective as well as structural fusion was thus the party, the national liberation movement/party, which mobilised the population around the national social project of development. The party became the state and the state became the party. This fusion was thus the result of the party mobilising the nation and fusing it

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with the state (the ‘nation-state’), in which the state became dominant. As a result, there was a collapse of party into state (the ‘state-party’). The state called itself a ‘state of the whole people’, and the party became the unique representative of the nation. Under such conditions, state nationalism could only take an authoritarian character. This ideological fusion was primarily a political process, so that the people no longer constituted the nation; popular politics were excluded from the state, and large sections of society were excluded from the nation (e.g. the poor, women, workers, peasants) (Mamdani, 1991b). At election time the people were mobilised, often through ‘traditional’ institutions, by the party to redistribute elites within state positions. The developmental state was predominantly a one-party state. Popular politics were replaced by state politics; democratic issues were said to be an ‘unaffordable luxury’ which would have to wait until later (Ake, 1981; Shivji, 1985). The reproduction of state politics was contingent on securing development for all, for the nation. Development became not only statist (a state universal project) but fundamentally a neo-colonial programme, as the idea of development emptied of politics was simply reduced to an apparently apolitical technical or economic process (e.g. ‘development of the productive forces’, ‘technological progress’, ‘economic growth’, ‘industrialisation’). The West, or indeed the East, could then offer their technical expertise to ‘help’ implement state policy in the context of the Cold War, when both sides battled for spheres of influence. The transition from political process to technical process is perhaps best illustrated in Tanzania by the transition from Ujamaa to ‘villagisation’ in the late 1960s and 1970s. Here, the politics of development moved from a situation in which the state provided some of the conditions for independent popular political activity around cooperatives and Ujamaa villages, to one where the state controlled and enforced the whole development process, understood exclusively as technique (villagisation) (Coulson, 1982; Havnevik, 1993). One needs to make the point that in trying to understand the state and development politically, the adequacy or capacity of the civil service and state management (the technical ‘capacity building’ beloved of donors) does not constitute the main issue, as it denies the political character of technique. For instance, in Kamuzu Banda’s post-independence Malawi there was a professional civil service, as there was in Idi Amin’s Uganda, but this did not lead to development. Instead, it is imperative to think beyond technical capacity when thinking the state and development. The effective deployment of state capacity (however limited it may be) in the interest of the majority is an effect of political choices. The case of public health in Cuba – with all its contradictions – is probably the best example of this in the world. As a result of the centrality of development in state politics, the state’s legitimacy was founded on the apparent ‘success’ or otherwise of development (‘delivery’, as we say today). It was, arguably, this form of legitimacy that gave the developmental state its name, rather than its structural features and capacities – or its similarity or

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otherwise to the so-called Asian Tigers. By the 1980s, the failure of development for all (in that development benefited only a few) meant the collapse of this state form, since the developmental state lost legitimacy among its own people, as African peasants asked themselves, ‘When will independence end?’ (Mustapha, 1996) and urban movements contested the authoritarian state. As a result, the developmental state was easily undermined by the new Washington consensus. At the same time, the failure of development was rarely apprehended politically as a failure of Western solutions and of imperialism more generally (Ake, 1996). Yet, despite its ‘compradorisation’, development discourse still contained some elements of anti-imperialism and popular agency, as in the notion of ‘self-reliance’. At the intellectual level such anti-imperialism was manifested in dependency theory. However, dependency theory could itself only propose a statist politics founded on political economy. It had no way of thinking a popular-democratic politics. Thus the developmental state was unable to resolve the contradiction between its putative nationalism and its compradorial politics, because of its exclusion and eschewing of popular-democratic politics. This contradiction eventually led to its collapse. Having lost the support of its own people because of its authoritarian and coercive nature (Mustapha, 1996), it was not able to resist the pressures for reform from the West when these manifested themselves from the mid-1970s onwards. Thus, the political collapse of the developmental state was not simply due to the exclusion of certain sectors (even the majority) by development. Because of its still colonial features, it was exploitative of the apparently included. Indeed, a distinction must be made between socio-economic and political inclusion or exclusion. Even though the peasantry, for example, was economically included, as it had long been ‘captured’ by the state (Mamdani, 1985), it was politically excluded. As a result of economic exploitation and political exclusion, popular rebellions occurred against this form of rule, which was thus not uniquely undermined by Western pressure and the building of the new Washington consensus. In fact, World Bank populism (based, for example, on Michael Lipton’s notion of ‘urban bias’) made good use of the radical literature on the political exclusion of the peasantry to its own advantage in undermining the national state (World Bank, 1989). The failure of development to encompass or construct the nation politically thus led to the collapse of this state form by the 1980s. The Bretton Woods twins blamed the failure of development on the ‘interventionist’ policies of the developmental state, even though such ‘interventionism’ conformed to their previous policies. Their new prescriptions of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), broadly covered by the term ‘deregulation’, were not only economically neo-liberal in their effects, producing ongoing crises of social reproduction. They also helped to transform developmental states into democratic states under the slogan of ‘democratisation’ with the help of political ‘conditionalities’. The Washington consensus used popular protest to its

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advantage in order to transform the developmental state into its current democratic form. In the 1980s and 1990s, popular struggles were outmanoeuvred by neo-colonial interests – for example, in the failure of the Assemblées Nationales Souveraines or Sovereign National Assemblies (e.g. in Zaire: ‘Mobutu règne mais ne gouverne pas’).24 It was the very term ‘democracy’, seen as applicable to both the people and the state, that was one of the subjective conditions for this outcome. Indeed, the organisations ‘of civil society’ in the 1990s, as well as experimental Sovereign National Assemblies in some countries – not political parties – were the main sites from which an alternative politics to those of the developmental state arose. These organisations provided the sites from which a political subjectivity critical of the state was constructed. The subjectivity they proposed revolved around the name ‘democracy’. While NGOs and social movements of all types provided such opposition throughout the continent during this period (Ake, 1996), it was in South Africa in the 1980s that the clearest political alternatives were formulated from within what came to be named ‘civil society’. Here, urban popular movements, organised as affiliates of the United Democratic Front or as ‘social movement unions’, constructed a prescriptive politics ‘at a distance from the state’, and a form of democracy that emphasised popular control. As I have shown in chapter 5, that dominant nationalist subjectivity did not emphasise the capture of state power – that was left to the exiled liberation party – but instead the transformation of society itself along popular-democratic lines. Ultimately, the Sovereign National Assemblies failed to impose the popular will on the state, while popular organisations in South Africa and elsewhere soon became part of a new state politics, as they entered into more or less formal corporatist contracts, and democracy was reduced to its liberal statist variety, as we have seen. These state politics even came to constitute ‘civil society’ itself, as civil society, from comprising a domain of politics in which organisations of all sorts operated, was reduced to only some of those organisations (predominantly NGOs) within hegemonic state-propagated neo-liberal discourse. The reasons for this conceptual shift were many, but a crucial factor was that popular organisations failed to sustain a politics independent of the state. In the process, the names ‘development’ and ‘nation’ fell by the wayside and were replaced by ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ as the organising substantives of politics. A new political sequence had arrived. Some, rather enthusiastically, referred to it as the ‘second liberation’ of Africa, a cruel joke, as it soon turned out.

The post-developmental and post-national character of the state today The political character of the new state form on the continent today is distinct from that of its predecessor. There is no continuity in so far as political subjectivity is concerned, but a fundamental break with the previous regime. We face today a

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completely new political sequence at the level of power. Development – addressing the ‘social question’ – is no longer a state project. Inter alia, the state has largely abandoned its function of universal social provisioning as well as the politics of planning congruent with it. Development is no longer ‘planned’, it is ‘managed’; state politics is still technicist but differently so; development is now undertaken ‘in partnership’ with private capital. Moreover, there has been an overwhelming trend towards the privatisation of many state functions (e.g. security, health, education, welfare) and the privatisation of state bureaucracy, such as the centrality of ‘private’ rather than ‘public’ management in government administration, often justified as a necessity of globalisation. Today the African state’s subservience to neo-colonialism is (with some exceptions) virtually total and firmly established, but in new political ways. At the present time the state rules and development occurs in ‘partnership’ with the NGOs of civil society (which largely undertake state functions), with communities (which are expected to be self-provisioning) and with business (so-called private–public partnerships). In the first case, NGOs are best considered as the new parastatals.25 In the last case, capital is said to have ‘social responsibilities’, and therefore should contribute to ‘upliftment’ and ‘empowerment’, without sacrificing its interests in any real way, of course.26 In the case of communities, they are meant to meet the costs of their own social reproduction (e.g. as in ‘home-based care’ for TB and AIDS sufferers or in ‘food for work programmes’, which provide cheap labour for public works). In this context, the slogan governing (post-developmental) state development interventions in South Africa is ‘cost recovery’. There can be no meaningful development for the majority under such conditions. Communities, businesses and NGOs are collectively known as ‘stakeholders’ and are said to constitute civil society. Stakeholders are the organisations which the state sees as legitimate interlocutors. Being a stakeholder means accepting and operating within the new mode of state politics. In South Africa, ‘stakeholder politics’ is the state’s way of stressing inclusivity; it means that interest groups can have meetings and cooperate with state institutions (with all the attendant benefits like funding, jobs and foreign travel), although the prevalence of ‘consultation’ is often more rhetorical than real. Genuine political independence from the state is impossible under such conditions, as these politics amount to a form of corporatism. Those who feel excluded by the new alliance between state and organised interests, such as many social movements, wish to be included as stakeholders: hence their state-focused politics. Contrary to much Left opinion, there is no major political distinction between NGOs and social movements simply because they all represent interests or identities exercising their citizenship rights. Rather, such civil society organisations generally operate politically within the limits of practice and thought largely set out by the state or ‘in dialogue’ with the state – in other words, within the globally hegemonic discourse of good governance, human rights, democracy, and so on). As a result,

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excessive modes of politics with a potential for emancipatory practices are today more likely to exist outside or, at best, at the margins of civil society, and are excluded from any ‘public sphere’. An emancipatory politics today can only be found in sites where excess is possible beyond the various domains of politics regulated by the state. It is policy (i.e. law, rights) that is said to provide (i.e. ‘deliver’) development. This is encapsulated in the term ‘good governance’. So-called governance (good or bad) is the name of the politics of the new state. It combines notions of administrative efficiency with those of law and rights. But this does not work for the majority of the people, especially the poor, as the issue for them is one of asserting their political agency, not the victimhood associated with human rights discourse. Their concerns, which are manifested when they organise themselves collectively, are to enable a popular-democratic politics – the dominant way in which their voices can be heard – which can make the state accountable to society, and not always with law and rights as such. As I have noted, these are precisely the practices that govern the politics of Abahlali. Today, Abahlali constitute the most important site in South Africa from which the new politics of the state are being systematically contested and rejected (Zikode, 2005; Pithouse, 2007). In particular, Abahlali explicitly reject ‘stakeholder politics’ – which they see as part of an order that functions to exclude and silence – in order to maintain their political independence, insisting that government, local authorities, NGOs and other institutions of power ‘talk to us and not for us’. They are not averse to talking at all, but will only do so on equal terms, maintaining their political independence jealously. So far, local state structures and most NGOs have found this impossible to do, as they clearly see themselves as trustees with appropriate knowledge, status and power. Abahlali have also insisted that all inhabitants of shacks must be treated equally by all in their political activities, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, religion or nationality. During the xenophobic pogroms in South Africa in May 2008, the areas in which Abahlali had a presence showed no evidence of xenophobic attacks (Neocosmos, 2010a). The statement they released on these events was the most progressive in the country. It stressed, as we have seen: There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves. If you live in a settlement you are from that settlement and you are a neighbour and a comrade in that settlement (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2008).27 Apparent ‘foreigners’ should not be treated differently from anyone else, as people have been living side by side for years and face the same problems; only in this way can a nation of human beings be conceived. We have here a complete rethinking of

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rights as applicable to all and not only to some, to formal citizens. Abahlali attempt to maintain in their politics the axiom which Badiou (2008) has consistently stressed: ‘There is one world only.’ In this manner they are rethinking, and providing new political content to, both democracy and nation. Until about 2006–7 the state consensus in South Africa was constructed around human rights discourse, although there has been a radical shift away from this discourse since 2008. Broadly speaking, human rights replaced development as the hegemonic political discourse in Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While development still retained some element of political agency and choice (e.g. as manifested in the notion of ‘self-reliance’), human rights no longer does in any real sense, as it is overwhelmingly constituted by a discourse of victimhood of people and trusteeship of power. As a result, active citizenship was largely replaced by passivity and agency by victimhood,28 until the turn of the new century, when popular protests gradually re-emerged, though with little evidence of political coherence. Agency from within human rights discourse consists in petitioning the state, not in prescribing to it; hence the usual shift in its use from the political to the juridical, away from political practice and towards legal claims on entitlements. Indeed, the implicit neo-liberal ‘social contract’ involves a trade-off between the promise of the provision of state-guaranteed (i.e. institutionalised) rights and entitlements, on the one hand, and the abandonment of any real form of self-controlled political agency and choice, on the other. A refusal of this contract has led to a contestation of the neo-liberal consensus itself. This is what Abahlali are doing, as they redefine in their practice citizenship, democracy and nation. Today, there is no state national social project, only ‘good governance’ in formal subservience to the West. The politics of the new state regime are said to be governed by the ‘right to rights’, but this is only true of the domain of civil society. Some have the right to exercise their rights (e.g. the middle classes, the formally employed), others (foreigners, the poor, shack-dwellers) do not. For example, the local state systematically violates human rights, often with impunity, when dealing with shack-dwellers and the poor more generally in Durban (Pithouse, 2008). Given the absence in public discourse of any name (or given the vacuity of existing names) that may suggest change, vision or movement to something better (e.g. development, revolution, transformation, freedom, equality), the only thing that remains is formal democracy and human rights subsumed under ‘good governance’. There is nothing else provided to thought, not even a glimmer of a better future. Hence, what is crucial for these politics is the ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007) of the West (following upon its earlier ‘enslaving’, ‘civilising’ and ‘development’ missions) as the core ideological feature of the new imperialism. Interestingly, in the same way as development was reduced to technique in the developmental-state form, so democracy today is reduced to technique under the

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regime of the post-national state form (through multipartyism, elections, constitution). In no case is the idea to construct a political community and root a state within it. Rather, the idea is simply to import techniques from abroad and impose them on the population with the help of sections of the oligarchy.29 Some of the institutions thus created may be very progressive, but, given their lack of roots within popular culture and their unaccountability to popular needs, their functions remain unfulfilled; it is in that sense that the state can truly be said to be ‘post-national’. Not surprisingly, liberal democracy today is an ‘imperial democracy’ and has lost much of the progressive content it once had. There is nothing else on offer in dominant discourse; democracy understood as technique is supposedly good in and of itself. This can be seen in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States and its allies, and in the idea of a war for democracy against evil, crime or terror. Of course, evil or crime is what rights, law and good governance are meant to oppose. Evil, crime or terror in this sense is used to refer to any politics that opposes neo-liberal politics, irrespective of its content. If you do not support liberal democracy, you are very likely to be labelled a terrorist by power.30 Liberal democracy is said to be the only defence against such evil or crime, whereas it is a state politics founded on passivity and on fear of the Other, and leads directly to a sense of impotence in the face of power (Neocosmos, 2006a). Democracy is the only slogan on offer. Of course, the regular imposition of this form of ‘democracy’ systematically undermines and destroys any attempts by the poor and oppressed to establish genuine democratic norms and politics that are truly in their interests (e.g. Englund, 2006; Hallward, 2007; Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007). These comments apply mutatis mutandis to the discourse of human rights, which is part and parcel of the new imperial democracy (Chatterjee, 2004). For example, the popular sovereignty necessary to hold the people of the South’s own leaders to account for their misdeeds and build a culture of public accountability is being systematically undermined by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and its various avatars, precisely through the use of a human rights discourse. Both the idea of arraigning state leaders before this kind of court for gross human rights violations (the most important so far have been Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević and Charles Taylor) and so-called humanitarian interventions by the superpower and its allies have combined to subvert national sovereignty. Such processes have been applied with a partiality that has reinforced Western dominance. Interestingly Milošević was posthumously exonerated by the International Court of Justice, while the United Nations has been criticised for undermining local efforts in Liberia to bring Charles Taylor to justice earlier (Laughland, 2007; Pailey, 2007). In the 1970s and 1980s, so-called humanitarian NGOs had already begun to justify their direct interventions in foreign countries, bypassing national states on the ground that they evidenced an absence of human rights. As a result, rights began to overtake development in international NGO concerns and discourse. Gradually,

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this rationale was claimed by Western states also, which came to view themselves as the defenders of human rights and democracy worldwide (Albala, 2005). Since then, various US administrations have expanded the ‘responsibility to protect’31 outside the law, citing the absence of human rights as the justification for intervention. ‘As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the “war on terror” ’ (Mamdani, 2008a). This is why one can argue that human rights discourse is at the core of the new imperialism. Globalisation – the name of the new imperialism – goes about systematically undermining democracy through its ostensible mission to democratise the world (Chatterjee, 2004). Today, this apparent paradox can no longer be countered by pleading relativism (e.g. Africa is not ready for democracy, or democracy is against African values) – we know that this only opens the door to authoritarianism – but only by arguing that Western democracy does not, in the present context on our continent, amount to democracy at all.32 In Africa today, democracy is the name of a state political subjectivity that is oppressive of the majority of the population; that even in South Africa, the epitome of successful democracy on the continent, around half of the population live in poverty should be sufficient proof of this, although in the dominant discourse poverty is abstracted from politics and associated with apparently politically neutral economic forces which are to be managed exclusively by state policy. Indeed, such state democracy should be understood as a variant of the historical mode of politics that Lazarus (1996) calls the ‘parliamentary mode’. Here, political consciousness is subordinated to a consciousness of the state; ‘political society’, for this mode, is the state and only the state. If we are to give adequate political content to the term ‘democracy’ so that it genuinely comes to reflect the general will, we must develop both in theory and in practice a different mode of politics founded on the subjectivities emanating from sites where popular experiences and struggles for equality are constructing alternatives to what exists. Western interests and donors and, more broadly, the new form of imperialism also operate through funding and expanding civil society and ‘empowering victims’ (‘victimology’) of all kinds in Africa, a process said to be participatory, empowering and democratising, and central to the politics of ‘good governance’. Yet Arundhati Roy has argued cogently not only that the rise of NGOs has accompanied the spread of neo-liberalism but that it has had a systematically depoliticising effect, as ‘they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance ... It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs’ (Roy, 2004: 6).

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Partha Chatterjee (2004) has stressed the role of international NGOs in spreading human rights discourse, which, he argues, forms one of the main pillars of imperialism today. In the new form of imperialism – which does not have a clear centre – it is not simply that the power of governments to make decisions on their own economies is undermined, but, even more importantly, national sovereignty is being undermined by human rights discourse.33 This takes a number of forms, including the trial of gross violators by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the propagation by international NGOs of Western conceptions of human rights. The connection between imperialism and human rights is explained by Chatterjee as follows: Liberals are now saying that ... international law and human rights must be established all over the world. Where these are violated, the guilty must be punished, without undue regard for the privileges of national sovereignty. If the leaders of states themselves have little concern for the law, if they themselves ride roughshod over the human rights of people, then why should the excuse of national sovereignty be allowed to come to their rescue? In that case human rights would never be established. What is needed, therefore, is the drafting of a global code of state practice and the creation of international institutions to monitor and implement this code ... The liberal democratic countries must come forward to accept their responsibility in creating the institutional space for the operation of an ideal global sovereignty. The name for this sovereign sphere ... is empire (Chatterjee, 2004: 98). Of course, if the responsibility of ‘Western democracies’ extends to ensuring that democracy and the rule of human rights are to be accepted throughout the world, should there be any (obviously misguided) resistance to such acceptance democracy and human rights must be imposed, by force if necessary. Chatterjee (2004: 100) continues: The theorists of the new empire have talked of still more wonderful things. This empire is democratic. It is an empire without an emperor. The people are sovereign here, as it should be in a democracy. That is precisely why this empire has no geographical limits. This is not like the empires of old where territories have to be conquered by war to add to the size of the empire. Now empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and for the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella. Thus empire does not conquer territory or destroy property; rather, it encompasses new countries within its web of power, makes room for them in its network. The key to empire is not force but control. There is always a limit to force; there is no limit to control. Hence empire’s vision is a global democracy.

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This is not all. While supra-national courts such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague  – which undermine the ability of nations to construct a culture of accountability of politicians to the people – are set up by agreement between states in multinational forums such as the UN, there is also another, much more subversive and insidious aspect to the establishment of the hegemony of human rights discourse worldwide, and this concerns the operations of ‘international civil society’. As Chatterjee argues: If the protection of human rights is a function of empire, then that task is being carried out not simply by the international courts. It is being done daily, and diligently, by numerous such international NGOs as Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, or Oxfam, whose able and committed activists probably have never suspected that they are, like little squirrels, carrying the sand and pebbles that go into the building of the great bridgehead of empire. But that is where the ideological foundations of empire are being laid (2004: 100–1). The politics of the new African state together with the new form of imperialism refer to a mode of politics that binds the state and a civil society of citizens together, and both of these to empire, through a human rights discourse more or less adhered to on either side. In order to understand the political content of human rights discourse, Wa Mutua employs what he calls a ‘savage, victim, saviour’ metaphor. As he explains, ‘although the human rights movement arose in Europe, with the express purpose of containing European savagery, it is today a civilizing crusade aimed primarily at the Third World ... Rarely is the victim conceived as white’ (2002: 19, 30). Indeed, Wa Mutua shows that the victims of the savagery of the African state (and of African culture, as the state, being ‘neo-patrimonial’, is a product of such culture) need their ‘saviours’ from the West, while Badiou concludes directly: ‘The refrain of “human rights” is nothing other than the ideology of modern capitalism: we won’t massacre you, we won’t torture you in caves, so keep quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don’t want to worship it, or who don’t believe in our superiority, there is always the American army and its European minions to make them be quiet’ (Badiou, 2001–2: 2–3). In an important sense, then, the new form of state in Africa ‘corresponds’ to the new form of globalised empire. There can no longer be a state-driven national emancipatory project.34 States have failed in their emancipatory endeavours and have allowed themselves to become neo-colonial agents of empire. Such a project today can only emanate from beyond the realms governed by state politics, including that of civil society. Professional NGOs are the inheritors of those European intellectuals Saïd referred to as ‘humanist imperialists’ (Biko called them ‘White liberals’), who could attack the excesses of imperialism but would never question the need for imperialism itself, i.e.

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the European trusteeship over the Other: ‘The pattern is alas always the same: critics of colonialism like Gide and Tocqueville attack abuses in places and by powers that do not greatly touch them and either condone abuses of power in French territories they care about or, failing to make a general case against all repression or imperial hegemony, say nothing’ (Saïd, 1993: 207). The same is true of other European humanists. Examples of the imperial politics of NGOs are legion. In 2007 a French NGO was accused of kidnapping children in Chad to ‘resell’ to French families. This was justified in terms of ‘saving’ the children from the terrible conditions of Darfur and the war in Sudan. There were big protest demonstrations in Chad at the time, which rightly compared this activity to the slave trade. Another instance is the Amnesty International call on the Arusha Tribunal not to send suspects of genocide to be tried in Rwanda, on the grounds that Rwandan legal institutions do not measure up to European standards.35 Both of these are examples of ongoing colonial political subjectivities involving NGOs in Africa, and similar political practices are the norm rather than the exception in the NGO world. More often than not, professionals in local NGOs are linked into this neo-colonial system unless they consciously fight against it, which would tend to limit their access to jobs and to funds from donors. Radical NGOs in Africa today play a similar role to that which Left political parties played in the developmental state within the first phase of the postcolonial state. They serve to mobilise and channel popular politics into a state domain of politics – a civil society – which is also neo-colonial in character. Hearn (2007) has rightly stressed the ‘compradorial’ character of the politics of local NGOs in Africa.36 None of this means that, in specific circumstances, civil society organisations cannot resist the state through the use of human rights discourse. What it does mean is that an emancipatory politics cannot be thought from within this discourse and that ultimately some form of accommodation with the state and its politics is more than likely. The move of many ‘civil society activists’ into state employment is quite predictable. As we have seen, one important example of the ‘compradorisation’ of politics from within civil society is the case of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. Moreover, as development has gradually declined in importance in global hegemonic discourse and humanitarianism has taken its place, the substitution by international NGOs of ‘the fight against poverty’ for active development has also enabled the replacement of political subjects by victims, and of collective struggle by the pathological, in the same discourse. Poverty is now understood as a sickness like HIV/AIDS or TB, to be combated by NGOs with or without state help. International NGOs see themselves as having a right to bypass issues of sovereignty, particularly when their interventions are said to be ‘humanitarian’. Given the obvious oppression and injustice inherent in contemporary global capitalism, imperial politics are being quietly hidden behind the distress of victimhood; life is reduced to simple survival and all agency disappears; what

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matters is simply the provision of ‘basic needs’ for subsistence. In such circumstances, an active citizenship, not to mention excessive politics, is systematically removed from global political hegemonic discourse and from international NGO discourse in particular. Within such parameters, it can no longer be the object of thought; it can only survive as an empty signifier. The issue of the reproduction of state power today no longer revolves exclusively around the fusing of state and party. Parties today are still state institutions, but they are, in most cases, incapable of mobilising the nation, as they have become crude vehicles for circulating elite access to the ‘pork barrel’. They restrict themselves to circulating members of the political class in government posts. They no longer represent or express a socio-political project. The prominent idea of the 20th century, that parties represent social classes, can no longer be sustained in the 21st. Moreover, parties no longer mobilise the people or the nation around a social project, as such a project no longer exists, despite the many references to ‘fighting poverty’. Indeed, the category of ‘the people’ itself has largely disappeared from political discourse and has been replaced by that of ‘communities’. Citizenship ties to the state have also been loosened in those cases where a postcolonial welfare state had existed and was later dismantled as an effect of structural adjustment (e.g. as in Zimbabwe). As a result of the statisation and consequent decline of parties, the organised interests of civil society are relied on increasingly today to be the representatives and mobilisers of the nation; hence the perceived necessity for such interests to be institutionalised (e.g. as ‘stakeholders’, as members of corporatist institutions, as members of the African Union) and for the politics of civil society to be identical to state politics and compradorial politics. State politics have become hegemonic within the realm of civil society, and, correspondingly, the dominant mode of political subjectivity is to think within parameters structured by the state. In this new way the nation also becomes the state, and a political consensus is constructed around a Parliamentary mode of politics. Thus, state political hegemony is today secured also, if not always primarily, through civil society organisations and not only through parties. The notion of the emancipatory content of civil society, widespread in the 1990s and 2000s, is now false. Today, emancipation must begin from a subjective distancing from civil society as well as from the state.

conclusion The term ‘postcolonial’, used to refer to the state and its discourses in Africa, is clearly no longer sufficient. It must be supplemented by a term derived from an analysis of its various forms. My argument has been that at least two radically different and chronologically successive political sequences can be identified through an analysis of their political subjectivities: the developmental state and a new state form that

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exhibits both a post-development and post-national character. The only alternative to this argument is to succumb to naming these two state forms ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’. This amounts to reducing their features to the absence or presence of formal techniques such as multipartyism and universal suffrage. In neither case have we witnessed the rule of a demos, nor have the poor majority consistently experienced the rule of law. It is clear that the authoritarian–democratic dichotomy is seriously flawed, as well as totally inappropriate for the orientation of political thought, particularly for an understanding of the conditions for an emancipatory politics on the African continent. It simply forces us to remain within the subjective limits of what Badiou has called ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’ (e.g. Badiou, 2006a). Yet, in Africa, this ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’ as Badiou calls it, is fused with neo-colonial power, a situation that further undermines popular sovereignty. Using the language of sovereignty, we can in fact conclude that as governments hand over more and more power to non-accountable bodies (such as the World Trade Organization, the IMF, the World Bank, the G8, human rights courts) the gap between state sovereignty and popular sovereignty widens. States do not so much give up their own sovereignty as that of their people, who are left with less and less control over their worlds (Albala, 2005). In particular, it is the politics of the African state that make it subservient to the World Bank and the whole retinue of financial institutions and funders which follow in its wake, and not the other way round. Asserting a popular nationalist and pan-African position requires a total rethinking beyond present subjective parameters. What this means is a reaffirmation of popular politics in society; but this cannot be effected from a political position within civil society, which largely contributes to the reproduction of state power. The parameters of civil society politics need to be exceeded. Despite an oft-repeated Left mantra, just because new players may have appeared on the scene in the form of NGOs and social movements does not of itself imply the existence of a popular politics independent of the state in its thought and practice. On the contrary, despite their frequent Left credentials these organisations on the African continent today operate overwhelmingly within a domain of state politics delimited by civil society and human rights discourse and, therefore, by the stress on interests. It is not so much that the state has been supplemented as a site of debate and political action by independent organisations of civil society. It is rather that state and civil society organisations – both in conflict and in cooperation – combine to delimit and impose a conception of politics that becomes truly hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense), particularly among the middle class, through its deployment in the arena of civil society. This process gives rise to a national political consensus which excludes emancipatory alternatives in favour of capitalism and its ‘interest-bearing subjects’. Another way of understanding NGOs is by recalling Althusser’s (1971) argument and seeing them as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ through which people

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are interpellated as subjects (Neocosmos, 2016). As I have noted, it is not by defending their interests that people become subjects but by exceeding them. As a result of being subjectively ‘interest-bearing’, NGOs contribute towards the state exclusion of emancipatory thought. In the past few years, probably since the beginning of the second decade of the new century, as empire has exported and enforced its securitised modus operandi worldwide, human rights discourse has gradually been replaced by a fear of the supposedly ‘terrorist’ Other. This fear among the comfortable middle classes everywhere has provided support for the new securitisation and militarisation of states worldwide. These new politics of militarism and securitisation have resulted directly from the depoliticisation occasioned by human rights discourse and multiculturalism (Goldberg, 2016). Militarisation has been the crude technical and, thus, apolitical response to the perceived threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. Seemingly unable to resist this militaristic trend through enabling new liberatory politics with mass appeal, the global world moves apparently inexorably towards the reappearance of various forms of ethno-fascism (in Europe and in India most obviously, but also in Africa). In this context, the African state becomes imbricated in a complex web of imperial networks (security, financial, extractive), while at the same time weak states are finding it difficult to resist Balkanisation or simple destruction. Libya, Mali, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo either have already been broken up or are being threatened by Balkanisation. This inability to resist the new imperialism is occasioned arguably by the fact that differences within the state are simply crudely subservient to foreign financial and economic interests, for no conception of the national interest or public good remains. In sum, the idea of the ‘post-national state’ suggests a systematic change in state political subjectivity since 1980 in Africa, to the extent that the state today can be said to represent the nation less and less in favour of particularistic interests. Moreover, this change is apparent in the abandonment of the state project of nation-building and national construction prevalent in the immediate post-independence era, which was organised around development and the state provision of basic welfare needs.37 This state project had served, to a considerable extent, to unify people under one overarching mode of rule, at least in urban settings, although the rural–urban contradiction was not overcome. The state in Africa no longer thinks in terms of a national project of development, let alone any other form of national emancipation. Hegemonic discourse maintains that the oligarchy and their hangers-on apparently fulfil the national interest by enriching themselves through access to the neo-liberal state and capital (the two being increasingly indistinguishable), while the poor are unable to attain what they consider to be their national entitlements, given an increasingly corrupt civil service and their relegation to an ‘uncivil society’ where patronage relations reproduce a crude politics of power. In this context, nationalism

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can easily collapse into chauvinism, as entitlements are seen, in desperate socio-economic conditions, to depend on indigeneity. On the other hand, a process of national renewal is precisely what the citizens of Egypt and Tunisia attempted through their mass movements in early 2011. In addition, it should be noted that in the case of democratic states, the middle classes are being co-opted through access to citizenship rights in civil society, which they sometimes seek to defend against state intervention through the deployment of human rights discourse. This is very obvious in South Africa, which has a relatively large and rights-conscious petty bourgeoisie. Yet, given the mass poverty and the (partial or complete) exclusion of large sections of the population from the rights of citizenship, the ‘national question’ has remained unresolved. This is particularly obvious in some Southern African ex-settler colonies such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, where land, jobs and housing, which were fought for as rights for all during liberation struggles, are only very partially accessible to the citizenry. The failure of the state imagination is so extreme in South Africa that the current president could only think of a major sporting event like the football World Cup to provide a modicum of subjective ‘nation-building’.38 In Zimbabwe, there had to be massive pressure ‘from below’ for land redistribution to take place, yet it is still unclear whether the national question has been satisfactorily resolved. Any conception of emancipatory politics has today largely been evacuated from thought, following its evacuation from within the thinking of the post-developmental or post-national state. In the 21st century, it has become apparent that the state–civil society dialectic (i.e. citizenship) is no longer the relation around which emancipatory politics can be thought on the African continent. The construction and reproduction of civil society has overwhelmingly reproduced the hegemony of state subjectivities, politics and knowledge in society itself within the parameters of the overall dominant subjectivity. Hence, the possibility of an emancipatory politics today can only arise as a result of critique and of exceeding such hegemonic politics, including a precise elucidation of their names. What this means is that this possibility can only develop in sites beyond the subjectivities of state and empire, and also beyond those of civil society itself. At the intellectual level, this requires the development of theoretical categories outside the limits of neo-liberal political thought, or the provision of new content to existing categories. Difficult struggles have to be conducted to contest the dominant consensus and to propose alternative modes of politics, alternative political subjectivities. In doing so, we should learn from the new politics developing in sites where such alternatives are being constructed. These are not to be found in the largely middle-class domain of civil society but, rather, outside its narrow confines. The re-politicisation of thought requires a subjective move outside that domain, where fear of the loss of privilege dominates. Whereas insecurity seems to prevail everywhere, it is outside civil

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society that a collective response to it has emerged, simply because individualism is not so prevalent there. Within Abahlali, the main site of alternative politics to the state in South Africa today, both democracy and the nation are being redefined. This is not simply because both names are used more inclusively than hitherto. It is, rather, because democracy is being rethought in a manner that insists on the organisational and political independence of popular organisations of the poor vis-à-vis the state, and because there is a growing understanding that a nation worthy of the name – a truly political community – can only be imagined and constructed on the basis of respect for the other; that social justice cannot be bought at the expense of the oppression of others (whether foreigners, ethnic groups, women or children). This constitutes the beginnings of a new conception of politics. Though there is no guarantee that such a politics will be sustained over time, it does, for the moment, enable us to think a way forward. If the state is indeed accurately described as post-national, if it is no longer identifiable with the nation which it seems unable or unwilling to construct, it must be neo-colonial  – there is no other possibility in conditions, such as those in Africa, where the state is not rooted among the people. Yet it remains to be shown in some detail precisely how this neo-colonial state is configured. In the next chapter I will expand on the idea that the state in Africa must be understood fundamentally as a neo-colonial state.

notes 1. As in the work of Achille Mbembe (1992), for example. 2. As in Africanist social science; for example, Bayart (1993). 3. As in the work of Mahmood Mamdani (1996a), for example. 4. The many romantic fans of Botswana’s liberal democracy omit to mention that the poor are regularly flogged (until very recently publicly) in a ‘customary court’ (kgotla) system for ‘crimes’ as derisory as shoplifting a pork pie or a packet of stewing beef from the local store – all this justified by reference to ‘traditional custom and practice’. While observations regarding the extraordinary extent of poverty in the country are often made by critical commentators such as Good (1993, 1999), the extreme extent of state (and social) repression prevalent in the same country is rarely if ever commented upon in the literature. Criminal laws in Botswana are notoriously repressive of the poor: for example, in 2003 a newly appointed judge was driven to remark that a minimum jail sentence of ten years for the theft of 192 pula (R300 at the time) by two under-age boys was ‘harsh and cruel’, as the perpetrators were minors at the time the offence was committed (Mmegi, 3 October 2003). The newspaper report did not make any comment on the severity of the penalty even for non-minors, and neither, it seems, did the judge. It reports the fact that the police released the perpetrators at the time of the offence because they were minors and came to rearrest them on the same charge as soon as they had turned 18. At the time

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of their appearance before the judge, they had already served three years and nine months in prison. One can safely assume that such laws will remain on the statute book, as they (like flogging) were simply taken over unquestioningly from the colonial state. The absence of a mass democratic anti-colonial struggle in that country, and the retention of chiefly powers after independence, are some of the reasons for these extremely repressive forms of state control, despite the holding of regular elections, which have always returned the same party to power since independence. When laws are so obviously repressive and class-biased, the notion of the ‘rule of law’ is exposed for the sham it is. 5. As in Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) notion of ‘radical democracy’, for example. 6. ‘...  “facts” [are] the consequences of the existence of the state’ (Badiou, 2009d: 192). 7. See Beetham (1974), especially ch. 4. 8. Most obviously in Italy under the recent presidency of Silvio Berlusconi. 9. This is why Badiou (1988) refers to it as ‘the state of the situation’. 10. Available at http://www.abahlali.org/node/9563. 11. Freedom for this way of thinking is understood as the extension of democratic rights and possibilities. For Badiou (2014b: 173, my translation), this is not the case: ‘Freedom is not the accomplishing of a possibility, but the creation of a possibility previously thought to be impossible.’ 12. In fact, it is extraordinary that the state in South Africa, which is presiding over a level of absolute poverty affecting well over 50 per cent of the population (53.8% of the population, or over 26 million people, to be exact), can be labelled democratic. See http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/does-malema-have-his-facts-straight-1986265, accessed 20/02/2016. 13. Hence we can speak with Abahlali of ‘living politics’ or ‘living communism’; see Zikode (2009b). 14. Badiou insists even further that ‘any state has an intrinsically criminal dimension. Because any state is a mixture of violence and conservative inertia’ (Badiou and Gauchet, 2014: 51, my translation, emphasis in original). 15. See Badiou (2011c: 109–23) as well as Badiou (2012c, 18 April), for example. 16. It should be apparent that I am leaving out a discussion of relations within state institutions themselves, i.e. so-called political society, because these have been discussed in the political science literature, which has expanded at length on bureaucratic as well as ‘prebendal’ power relations in Africa. In any case, such analyses do not move beyond power relations, which are in principle no different from those in any institution. I am interested here in conceiving politics outside a notion of power in order to understand the possibility of excessive politics. Any possibility of excess in bureaucracies has historically been brought from beyond those institutions. See, for example, the literature on the Paris Commune and, more recently, Jiang (2010) on the Shanghai Commune. 17. I do not wish to deny that it may be possible in certain circumstances to pursue a principled politics from within the state. It may indeed be possible, but such a politics would have to be supported from beyond the state, as it would threaten the existence of the state itself.

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18. The classic Marxist texts on this are Marx (1852b) and Lenin (1918a). 19. However, it should also perhaps be stressed at this point that democratic politics cannot be equated with ‘the politics of the poor’, as Abahlali sometimes do. To do so is to reduce a universal politics to a social referent. Rather, as Rancière (2004a: 304) has put it: ‘democracy is not the power of the poor. It is the power of those who have no qualification for exercising power.’ The political subject is, for him, ‘the part of no part’, not a social category as such. 20. As I have already insisted, we must abandon an analysis of this history which reads it a posteriori as certain class forces losing out in favour of others. For an example of such an analysis of the transition to independence in Africa based on classes and social movements, see Mamdani (1991b). 21. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a reactive subjectivity in the thinking of the postcolonial state was the identification of pan-Africanism with a multinational organisation of states (the OAU, eventually followed by the AU), whereas at its inception pan-Africanism had been a popular subjectivity, as we saw Fanon make clear in chapter 3. 22. Liauzu (1982) argues that by 1975 there no longer existed in France an anti-imperialist political movement, as this was gradually replaced by a form of humanitarianism and the view of Africans as victims rather than as agents of their own history. See also Liauzu (2010) and Ross (2002: 158–69) for the rise of frankly neo-colonial conceptions during this period in France. 23. For example, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the name of the state-party in Tanzania, means ‘Party of the Revolution’ in Kiswahili; the ANC today still refers to the ‘national democratic revolution’ as its guiding principle; in Zimbabwe the ruling ZANU-PF refers to the Third Chimurenga (independence struggle). 24. ‘Mobutu rules but does not govern’, a slogan which was punted by the United States in Zaire as a compromise solution in order to maintain Mobutu in power and subvert popular-democratic demands being debated within the Sovereign National Assembly (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993). 25. It should be apparent that in most cases an NGO is a business venture (even if legally a non-profit organisation), much as development was and continues to be. Like any business, NGOs are staffed by professionals. The names ‘feminist’ and ‘activist’, for example, both tend to name professionals today, the former usually being an expert in ‘gender mainstreaming’. Along with ‘governance experts’ and ‘project managers’, these are commonly held positions in the NGO and donor community, with the rising importance of ‘social entrepreneurs’ and ‘advocacy work’. 26. For a detailed study of this process, see Rajak (2011). 27. Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2008, ‘Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg’, 21/05/2008. See http://abahlali.org/node/3582. 28. In South Africa, one of the absurd indicators of this change and its accompanying political disorientation has been the attempt by an NGO, the Foundation for Human Rights, to develop a ‘Victim’s Charter’, an evident oxymoron. The absurdity consists in the fact that the idea of a charter is exclusively focused on the Freedom

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Charter, which has constituted since 1955 the core expression of popular nationalist agency (see Suttner and Cronin, 1986). Victims, of course, have little or no agency by definition. 29. In one way or another, all state politics are ultimately reduced to technique. The state tends to systematically technicise politics simply because state politics takes bureaucratic-administrative forms, which can only stifle emancipatory prescriptions. Once democracy has been technicised, it can easily be measured; hence the proliferation today of ‘governance indicators’ or ‘democracy indicators’ and of NGOs specialising in the construction, measurement and training in the use of such indicators. ‘High scores’ can then easily be used to justify donor conditionalities, as they are deemed to be scientifically objective. As with development indicators, so with democracy indicators; the logic remains the same. Once removed from politics, it simply becomes a matter of applying a technical recipe to achieve the formal results required. 30. In the international media, the term ‘militant’, which suggests active commitment to a cause, is now used as a synonym for ‘terrorist’, which suggests random destruction and mayhem. 31. The French neo-colonial notion of Le droit d’ingérence means literally ‘the right to intervene’, which at least is more honest than the paternalistic ‘responsibility to protect’, according to which Africans are still seen as children. For Badiou (2001: 13), ‘every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims’ (emphasis in original). 32. The imperial character of current democracy has led to a contradiction between it and state nationalism in some countries, such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Iran. These states have been oppressive of their populations while simultaneously attempting to assert their national independence from the new form of ‘democratic empire’. 33. I cannot deal here with the new ‘economic’ forms of imperialism, which include the carving up of strategic enclaves in Africa through the formation of quasi-states within states (e.g. in Eastern Congo) and land-grabbing by all-powerful countries (including China and India) either directly or through proxies, in order to extract raw materials as well as agricultural and mineral resources (oil, gas, rare minerals) needed for current economic expansion. Badiou refers to this as ‘zoning’. The analogy is with ‘export processing zones’, or EPZs. See Badiou and Gauchet (2014: 101–10). 34. This same point can also be argued structurally: the developmental state required a Fordist regime of accumulation, which was accompanied by mass production and mass consumption and which made possible an interventionist state founded on a ‘historic corporatist compromise’ between capital and organised labour. Under ‘flexible’ accumulation regimes that dominate today, a welfare state along the lines of the social-democratic ones of the 20th century is no longer possible (Neocosmos, 2006a). Welfarism and indeed democracy require, for social-democratic arguments, high levels of material wealth. It is to a version of this argument that Ulrich Beck refers when he asserts that ‘the simple truth is that without material security there is

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no political freedom and no democracy, only a threat to everyone from new and old totalitarian regimes and ideologies’ (2000: 62–3). This ‘simple truth’ is, of course, totally Eurocentric; it is to condemn the majority of the world’s people to ‘totalitarianism’. The point, rather, is that throughout the world at different times, people have been able to fight successfully for rights under conditions of extreme poverty created more often than not precisely by the Western desire for material security. 35. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7074494.stm; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/7067374.stm; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7063324.stm; all accessed 28/12/2013. 36. See also Manji and O’Coill (2002). 37. Today, the expression ‘nation-building’ has been dropped as a public signifier, in South Africa at least, in favour of an emphasis on ‘social cohesion’, with all its conservative and functionalist assumptions associated with vulgar pre-1968 US sociology. Unlike ‘nation-building’, which suggested some form of popular agency, ‘social cohesion’ is merely a state ‘law and order’ concern and suggests a fear of social unrest. 38. See Mail & Guardian online, http://mg.co.za/article/2010–07-06-world-cup-investment-paid-off-says-zuma, accessed 10/07/2010.

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Chapter 13

Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’ This attack is an attempt to suppress the voice that has emerged from the dark corners of our country. That voice is the voice of ordinary poor people. This attack is an attempt to terrorise that voice back into the dark corners. It is an attempt to turn the frustration and anger of the poor onto the poor so that we will miss the real enemy ... Our crime is a simple one. We are guilty of giving the poor the courage to organise the poor. We are guilty of trying to give ourselves human values. We are guilty of expressing our views. Those in power are determined not to take instruction from the poor. They are determined that the people shall not govern. What prospects are there for the rest of the country if the invasion of Kennedy Road is overlooked? ... Our message to the movements, the academics, the churches and the human rights groups is this: We are calling for close and careful scrutiny into the nature of democracy in South Africa. – S’bu Zikode, 2009 When politics loses itself in identities, it is finished. This situation only gives rise to wars, civil wars and horrors. – Alain Badiou, ‘Que signifie changer le monde?’, 2010 (my translation)

state modes of rule and the people In order to make an argument for an appropriate name for the state in Africa, one needs to establish precisely how the state currently rules the people,1 particularly given the absence of a national state project of development, which constituted its main way of ruling during the immediate post-independence period. This investigation will be the object of this chapter. It will show that the state’s ways of ruling today (its modes of rule) are varied, and produce distinct ways of subjectively apprehending political agency. We shall see that the identification of a multiplicity of modes of rule by the African state – of which there are basically three kinds – helps to demarcate

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distinct domains of state politics, which are not simply reducible to the social location of the ruled. These modes of rule are partly inherited and adapted from colonial discourse and practice, and partly invented. The ruled themselves contribute to the reproduction of these modes of rule by participating and struggling within them. They will be discussed at greater length in the following two chapters. Finally, thinking a truly democratic state form means developing the capacity to imagine a state that enables the independent organisation of the masses of the people – in other words, a state that to a considerable degree provides the conditions for undermining its own existence and its oppressive modes of rule in favour of the enabling of popular inventiveness and collective democratic practice; a state that is not a state in the full sense of the term, but a process that Marx referred to as the ‘withering away’ of the state.2 If the possibility of thinking in this way exists, how is it then to be done? I will conclude by providing some pointers towards an answer to this question. I propose to initiate a discussion of modes of state rule through an assessment of the notion of ‘transition’. This is because the idea of ‘transition’ has provided the foundation for thinking the current state as a democratic state on the continent. It is ‘transition’ from an authoritarian past that has set the parameters for naming the current state as a democracy or a democracy-in-the-making. As no one can possibly support authoritarianism, everyone can only be in favour of democracy. The idea of ‘transition’ must therefore be thoroughly unpacked; this is made easier by examining briefly how the idea of transition was deployed in reaction to what has become known as the Arab Spring in North Africa in 2010–11. I will then outline the dominant characteristics of the current form of state in Africa.

thinking the concept of ‘transition’ in africa and understanding violence The courage, inventiveness and organisation of the people of North Africa in Tunisia and Egypt, as the new year of 2011 was turning, have evidently disproved (if refutation were needed) the Fukuyama thesis of ‘the end of history’.3 In doing so, they have provided renewed enthusiasm for ‘people power’ and a popularly driven process of mass mobilisation (which has reverberated worldwide) in which people can not only force the resignation of dictators and seemingly the (partial or full) collapse of Westernsupported (i.e. frankly neo-colonial) authoritarian states, but, crucially, also demand a greater say in the running of their own lives. In standing up against oppression in this manner, people have asserted that they are no longer victims but full-blown political subjects.4 Yet one could not assume that the appearance of the masses on such a broad scale on the political scene for the first time since independence meant that they would remain there, and not only because coercive military power has yet to be transformed. Since this process was generally understood as one of ‘democratisation’

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and ‘Westernisation’, it became systematically accompanied by an invasion of experts on ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’, ‘empowerment’, ‘civil society’ and ‘transitional justice’. All these experts purported to provide advice to the struggling people on how to come to terms with past atrocities in order to consolidate their hard-won gains, through a transitional judicial process of reconciliation between former enemies, so as to produce a functioning democracy.5 As Rosemary Nagy puts it: ‘The question today is not whether something should be done after atrocity but how it should be done. And a professional body of international donors, practitioners and researchers assists or directs in figuring this out and implementing it’ (Nagy, 2008: 275). In an interview in early April 2011, one such practitioner, the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), David Tolbert, noted: Obviously we’re living through a truly extraordinary moment in the Middle East. It’s not something most experts would have predicted two or three months ago, and it opens enormous opportunities in terms of transitions. That’s true in Tunisia and Egypt, and hopefully across the Middle East and North Africa more generally. We’ve sent missions to Tunisia and to Egypt, and we’re gearing up to work in both of those countries.6 In particular, these experts intend to pursue such ‘opportunities’ because they and their funders are ostensibly concerned with the plight of victims of violence.7 But they rarely conceive of people from the Global South as rational, knowledgeable subjects of their own history; rather, they see them as sad pathetic victims in need of ‘empowerment’, who require the benevolent support of the West, a support upheld since the 18th century by an ideology of ‘trusteeship’ (Cowen and Shenton, 1996; Pitts, 2005). Since experts from Western governments, multinational agencies and international NGOs (the ‘international community’) have descended from on high like clouds of locusts, voraciously eating up the new shoots of people power, it may be important to rethink some of the assumptions upon which such theories of transition from one state form to another – perhaps most explicitly outlined in the notion of ‘transitional justice’  – are founded.8 These are so common, and so pervasive in their apparent ethical ‘goodness’, that they rarely elicit criticism. By rethinking these assumptions, we can also begin to rethink violence and the manner in which it has been conceptualised in hegemonic thought. Fundamental to this thinking is the assumption that ‘democracy’ – understood here as a form of state, not as a popular practice – must be accompanied by a ‘culture of rights’, which itself is seen as inimical to the deployment of violence and as enabling of (multicultural) tolerance. The reason for this is the belief that democracy implies an acceptance by all contenders for power of ‘the rules of the game’, and that a consensual value system based on mutual respect for each other’s rights (and

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identities) and the rule of law excludes violence as a way of resolving differences. A further reason is that commitment to such a consensus, built during a period of transition through the judging of past abuses (‘gross violations’) of human rights according to legitimate legal procedures, can lead to (elite) political reconciliation and, consequently, to (popular) social peace. The core assumption is that ‘transition’ is to be understood as a process of change from a state of authoritarianism and violence to a state of democracy and peace, the idea being that violence should decline as a ‘transition to democracy’ and a ‘culture of rights’ are gradually realised. A number of characteristics of this form of reasoning are evident even at this stage of the argument. It is manifestly a variant of the old historicist notion of change from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ made (in)famous by the hegemony of modernisation theory in the immediate postcolonial period, in Africa in particular. What appears to be ‘the past’, seen as an undifferentiated whole, is simply defined negatively in relation to an idealised (future) state of affairs. Much like the term ‘traditional’, the predicate ‘authoritarian’ refers here to any form of state – irrespective of its historical location – that deviates from the Western liberal-democratic model, now global in its scope. It includes most obviously the past ‘Communist’ states in Eastern Europe, the old militaristic states in Latin America as well as African postcolonial states whose secular nationalism diverged from the neo-liberal ideal until around the late 1980s, when formal universal suffrage was adopted by elites worried by the prospect of losing their power under democratising pressures from above (by the Washington consensus) and from below (by the popular masses). At this time, African states in particular were seen as having embarked on a ‘transitional’ process of ‘democratisation’ as ‘multiparty elections’, ‘good governance’, ‘civil societies’ and ‘human rights’ were promoted through the imposition of ‘political conditionalities’ by the Washington consensus as part of their incorporation into the globalised New World Order of neo-liberal capitalism and democracy. When ‘political conditionalities’ proved insufficient, it was (and still is) always possible to (threaten to) enforce such democracy, human rights and incorporation into the global order through the deployment of military might, more or less justified by notions of ‘humanitarian’ intervention. This may simply lengthen the process of ‘transition’ but is never meant to alter its final outcome. Indeed, the ‘transition’ is apparently a never-ending one, as the ideal of the West is rarely attained. The present is turned into an ongoing ‘transition’ to an always receding future, all along guaranteeing careers in the business of ‘good governance’. Moreover, the theoretical foundation of human rights discourse, on which this whole reasoning is constructed, is that people are seen only as victims, especially as victims of oppressive regimes, and not as collective subjects of their own liberation. Their saviour is understood to be the law, along with its trustees (governments, transnational and national NGOs, multinational agencies).9 The neo-colonial relationship here should be apparent, not

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because human rights discourse is in itself inherently colonial, but because it is a form of state politics applied to neo-colonial conditions with all the zeal of a ‘democratising mission’.10 It is these conditions that require elucidation and analysis. The construction of indices as measures of democracy, and the training by Western NGOs of experts from Africa in the use of these, much as indices were constructed in the past to measure development, shows how politics has been reduced to a technical process, for only a technique can be quantitatively measured.11 As a result, democratisation – which ultimately has its roots in the struggles of people from all walks of life for greater control over their daily lives and, hence, in the self-constitution of a demos – becomes transformed into a technical process removed from popular control and placed in the hands of experts, such as ‘human rights lawyers’, ‘social entrepreneurs’, ‘governance professionals’ and ‘gender mainstreamers’; together, they staff an industry whose tentacles hold up the liberal global hydra of the new imperial ‘democratising mission’ on the continent. Rather than being a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, what occurred on the African continent during the 1990s can more profitably be understood as a process of systematic depoliticisation, a process of political exclusion. If we agree with Jacques Rancière that ‘politics begins exactly when those who “cannot” do something show that in fact they can’ (2003: 202), when those who have hitherto been excluded affirm their inclusion, then it is not too difficult to visualise ‘depoliticisation’ as a reversal of this process. More specifically, this reversal consists of a political process whereby those same people are to be convinced – through the deployment of national legal strategies – that they really are victims of violence, that they therefore could not have undertaken anything significant, new or different after all, despite what they may or may not have thought, as it would have all happened anyway, and that in any case their suffering is now (largely) over.12 Everyone should return to their allotted place in the social structure and vacate the field of politics, leaving it to those who know how to follow unquestioningly the rules of the game (of the state): the trustees of the excluded. Indeed, if historicist categories are preferred, this process could be described as a never-ending ‘transition’ from the inventive politics of popular agency to the oppressive technicism of state and imperial power. In South Africa, a core feature of this process has been the emphatic and open construction of people as victims rather than political subjects, through an emphasis on legal procedures that apparently only recognise juridical agency and not political agency (Neocosmos, 2006a). Being a victim, one can lay claim to state largesse. At the root of what may be called this ‘politics of depoliticisation’ is a technical statist understanding of transition inspired by a legal notion of change from injustice to justice, founded on a liberal notion of development from the inhuman to the human, as reflected in legal rights. Together, the technicism of state politics and the idea that the law is in a position to change society for the common good set out the parameters of

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a transition to renewed political exclusion – a return to socially allocated places and identities within the hierarchy of power. The relative success of this process has in the past relied on people’s lassitude with the experience of violence and demands for justice, which they have so long been denied, on the physical and emotional exhaustion of daily militancy, and on the fetishism of power. The last promises a world in which the difficult questions and problems of ‘decision-making’ can and should be left to eminently qualified professionals. Yet what this largely technical process gives rise to is political exclusion, which is not overcome by the creation of a ‘vibrant’ civil society of ‘stakeholders’, for their politics are in harmony with those of the state, given that such politics are founded on place, interest and identity. The result is that violence does not necessarily disappear along with the construction of a democratic state. A new oligarchy is formed (or the old one is reconstituted) precisely as a result of the depoliticisation of the masses of the people and their political exclusion, so that the authoritarianism against which the people had rebelled in the first place is re-created, although now within the context of a somewhat different mode of rule and different forms of political exclusion. In practice this depoliticisation is simply replicated within, as well as enabled by, thought and subjectivities, as analysis becomes focused on visualising the world through state categories. Such categories (governance, civil society, power, interests, democracy, law, reparations, etc.) objectify politics by ‘representing’ the social and thereby stress the immutability of given social places, cultures, identities and hierarchies to such an extent that state thinking becomes constructed as natural and the immutability of place becomes an incontrovertible fact, evident to all. The inevitable conclusion is that there can be no alternative to the politics of the state. Contrary to this reasoning, we must think beyond place; we must attempt to think what I refer to as excess over the categories of existing divisions and identities. I shall be concerned in what follows to show how the neo-colonial state in Africa exhibits characteristics which, in addition to its neo-liberal features much emphasised in the current sequence by political economy,13 give rise to a fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, human rights, multiculturalism and the rule of law and, on the other, state nationalism and the current concerns of a national subjectivity or consciousness – in some cases founded on state-propagated notions of the (newly acquired) rights of the indigenous. In other words, the character of the neo-colonial state is not reducible to its location within current global capitalist political economy. While democracy is said by the state to be its guiding principle, nationalism is partially collapsed into vulgar nativism14 and corrupt practices – from which is derived the oligarchy’s ‘right to steal’, justified in terms of the national interest (private accumulation is in the public interest). But it is also manifest in popular struggles against such practices, most clearly in North Africa (and in other parts of the world) in a recent sequence. This overall contradiction is manifested in different

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ways in different cases, but it appears to be a universal feature of the state in Africa in the current period of globalised neo-liberal politics.15 A product of state politics in the neo-colony, it is largely insoluble through elite consensus, partly because national grievances are irresolvable through the medium of human rights discourse, and partly because the oligarchy is provided with legitimised forms of enrichment at the expense of the nation. It thus regularly finds expression in forms of violence, which seem largely incontestable within the framework of the neo-colonial state without the deployment of more state (or multi-state) repressive violence. These violent contradictions currently include the repressive violence of the state in Zimbabwe, where the state sees human rights as little more than an imperial conspiracy; the 2011 conflict between presidents in Côte d’Ivoire (where one relied on international support for his legitimacy and the other denounced foreign intervention); and (until recently) the state reactions to the popular upsurge against the compromised nationalism of the North African secular and militaristic authoritarianisms. They also include the case of xenophobic violence in South Africa – itself the archetype of a successful transition to democracy – which erupted in the public sphere in all its chauvinistic starkness most clearly in May 2008 and later in 2015. Despite its popular character, this xenophobia was founded on a state politics of fear.16 As I have shown in chapter 5, South Africa had experienced a mass popular uprising against an authoritarian regime in the 1980s, which was also referred to as ‘people’s power’. From 1990, this was followed by an explicit and extensive ‘transition’, which systematically depoliticised and closed down popular political agency in favour of state politics, by, inter alia, transforming political agents into victims of human rights abuses through the TRC process. In this case, human rights discourse arguably provided one of the conditions of existence for xenophobic violence, as human rights discourse is simultaneously opposed to a resolution of the national question and inimical to the self-empowerment of the politically excluded. Fundamentally, this is because human rights discourse is concerned not so much with the inclusion of the excluded in the field of politics as with legal redress; concerned not so much with encouraging militancy as with producing the political passivity of victims. It thus privileges state solutions and, through prioritising the law, reduces all political thought to state subjectivity. In this manner, people become transformed from subjects of history to victims of power, and subjected to oppression, until they rediscover their political agency with a renewed Idea of freedom in a later sequence. It follows that to attempt to understand political change in Africa through the medium of a transition from authoritarianism to democracy privileges the thinking of state politics. As a result, such a perspective can only fail to make sense of the increase in certain pervasive forms of violence in neo-colonial (post-democratic) African states. Such forms of violence are not necessarily an indication of regression

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to an authoritarian state, or of loss of momentum in an ongoing democratic transition, or even of a (supposedly ‘pre-democratic’) ‘culture of violence’; neither is this violence pathological. Rather, they are a necessary outcome of the combination of neo-liberal capitalism and state democracy in a context of neo-colonialism wherein a dominant form of oppression and, indeed, of resistance can only be national in content.17 Neo-colonialism today must therefore be understood differently from in the past. It is not simply a matter of the state’s subservience to the West, although that subservience is present in any case. More fundamentally, the issue concerns the question of considering the people as the state’s enemy and the consequent dehumanising politics of power. It should also be noted that, unlike in 19th-century Europe, the enemy of the state is here not reducible to the working class; rather, it is the people ruled in the domain of uncivil society who overwhelmingly seem to constitute the enemy of the state. It is this fundamental feature that gives the state its neo-colonial character (the class composition of the people having to be established empirically for each case). My critique of the neo-liberal relationship between democracy and violence, along with its view of ‘transition’, thus extends well beyond the usual radical-Left critique, which consists in stressing that human rights and transitional justice fail to acknowledge the issues of structural violence, social justice and redistribution in favour of the historically dispossessed.18 This perspective ultimately boils down to extending the neo-liberal conception of rights to include social, economic or cultural rights, much along the lines proposed by T.H. Marshall in the 1960s.19 Such a radical nationalist critique is thus limited and fundamentally statist, because founded on notions of legal redress, so that it remains well within the terrain of a depoliticised technical process. At best, it may advocate a modification of the state and a form of justice that is not founded on the power of victors but that would ensure greater social inclusion in the interest of all survivors.20 However, social justice issues constitute only part of a much broader national political question, which is systematically reproduced in a neo-colonial context by the politics of state and empire, and which is thus irresolvable through the deployment of more state-nationalist thinking. Given the disastrous politics of both state nationalism and state democracy in Africa, which are both founded on the immutability of place, the solution to this question can only begin to be constructed by bringing the politics of affirmation back into thought, in order to repoliticise what has become a fundamentally depoliticised subjectivity. In this manner, politics can be (re-)apprehended as subjective thought detached from social location and, hence, as capable of transformation, rather than as the objectively immutable ‘truth’ of power and institutions. In other words, the lessons of popular mass politics in North Africa must be allowed to percolate into the domain of the subjective so that a politics beyond the state can become the object of thought.

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transition, human rights discourse, violence How, then, are we to think around the issues of ‘transition’ in a context in which violence has been deployed according to political subjectivities that are state-founded, not in the sense of what the social location of the perpetrators may be, but in terms of who the originator of the ideology deployed by the perpetrator is. It should be noted, first of all, that the question is not asked in this manner by transitional justice theory. For this theory, the issue is thought in terms of a number of social ‘actors’, which include victims, perpetrators, saviours and the state itself. The state can be both a perpetrator and a saviour; NGOs and Western powers are usually seen as saviours; some collective organisations (e.g. gangs, armies, ethnic organisations) are seen as (savage) perpetrators; and the majority of the population are seen as victims. The fundamental idea is to enable, by means of the law (i.e. the state), some kind of ‘consensus-building’ in order to reconstruct state institutions of a non-particularistic character and to found them on shared liberal-democratic values and the rule of law. There is little space here for thinking political subjects. People only enter the domain of political ‘transition’ as represented by their trustees (states, NGOs, multinational agencies); they do not exist as independent actors within this domain of thought except as victims, who are ‘passive actors’, if such a thing is indeed possible. The core conception of trusteeship is that of the state, whether in the form of the law, legal systems, the rule of law, electoral systems, political actors or even history. As Teitel (2000: 5) puts it, ‘the problem of transitional justice arises within a bounded period, spanning two regimes’. The former is ‘evil’ or ‘illiberal’ (p. 3), the latter is liberal, democratic and good; the former is characterised by violence, the latter by the rule of law. The core concept of the transition between the two is the legal idea of ‘justice’, which ‘is alternately constituted by and constitutive of, the transition’ (p. 6). The ‘role of law in periods of political change’ affects and is affected by change through its various forms, such as ‘punishment, historical inquiry, reparations, purges and constitution making’ (p. 6). Central to this discourse and reasoning is a linear change from one idealised state form to another. It is this that defines a ‘transition’. ‘Transnational histories generally imply a displacement of one interpretive account or truth regime by another, even as the political regimes change, while preserving the narrative thread of the state’ (p. 115, emphasis added). Rituals of history-making are part of what constructs the transition; they divide political time, creating a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. ‘How the history is told over time is a delicate matter. The historical narrative constructs the state’s understanding of its political order. Transitional historical justice is linked up to the preservation of a state’s political identity over time’ (p. 117). History in transitional justice theory aids the law to transform society so that transitional ‘justice’ becomes a technique of change: ‘TJ [transitional justice] is an instrument of broad

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social transformation, and rests on the assumption that societies [i.e. states] need to confront past abuses in order to come to terms with their past and move on’ (Andrieu, 2010: 2, emphasis added). Transitional justice is seen as a political intervention to construct a new state, but it is a technical intervention by the state itself (along with empire), often explicitly directed against the popular or ‘informal’ structures of power set up by the people themselves during their emancipatory struggles. It thus amounts to a self-transformation process undertaken by the state, which is primarily concerned to assert its dominance and sovereignty. Interestingly, the state itself is not subjected to any analysis whatsoever within transitional justice theory; it is simply taken as given. Moreover, whether and how this ‘transition’ in fact ‘impacts’ on society will largely be the result of a distinct process altogether, one that cannot be derived automatically from such changes at the level of the state. This is especially so if people do not or cannot constitute themselves as a people in society, which they are usually prevented from doing. But this is to think well beyond the limits of transitional justice theory, for which the terms ‘democratic state’ and ‘society’ tend to be used interchangeably, so that experts speak of ‘societies in transition’. To sum up, although transitional justice theory is primarily concerned with legal changes, it sees the goals of transitional justice as ‘nothing less than the transformation, or the regeneration, of a whole society. It involves political, economic, cultural, sociological and psychological actions: prosecutions, truth and reconciliation commissions, lustration, public access to police and government records, public apology, public memorials, reburial of victims, compensations, reparations, literary and historical writings, and blanket or individual amnesty’ (Teitel, 2000: 3). Clearly, then, the state, along with various other self-appointed trustees of the people’s welfare, is always and without exception the prime mover of the process of transition, and the outcome, whether achieved by state actors or NGO activists, is always said to be a democratic state. As the ICTJ puts it, in the 1980s and 1990s ‘activists and others wanted to address the systematic abuses by former regimes but without endangering the political transformations underway. Since these changes were popularly called “transitions to democracy”, people began calling this new field “transitional justice”.’21 At the same time, the law is the primary mechanism of transformation, i.e. of the creation of a democratic state. This is made clear by Richard Wilson in the case of South Africa in the 1990s. Wilson notes that the TRC ‘was part of a general and long term orientation within state institutions which asserted the state’s ability to rein in and control the informal adjudicative and policing structures in civil society’ (2001: 21). In addition to enforcing state sovereignty (over informal justice) and hence the continuity of ‘the rule of law’,22 the TRC could only operate within a discourse of human rights. Apart from anything else, human rights discourse thus came in handy as a consensual bridge between the reformed colonial racist traditions of the outgoing

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White nationalist elite and the reformed African nationalism of the incoming one. Human rights discourse ‘was indeterminate enough to suit the programs of both the NP (Nationalist Party) and the ANC (African National Congress), who came together to form a power sharing arrangement. The ascendancy of human rights talk thus resulted from its inherent ambiguity, which allowed it to weld together diverse political constituencies. Constitutionalism became the compromise arrangement upon which the ANC and the NP could agree a “sufficient consensus” ’ (p. 6). Robert Meister shows very well how human rights discourse lets beneficiaries, and not only perpetrators, off the hook, and why this is so in a post-Cold War era. He states: ‘social melodramas allow the continuing beneficiaries of injustice to pity victims without fearing them because the victim’s grief is disconnected from a sense of grievance’ (Meister, 2002b: 123). Disconnecting grief from grievance is what the TRC in South Africa achieved, although, for Meister, this is an effect of human rights discourse in general and not of its particular application to a specific context. The idea of building a consensual state was founded on the notion that the evil of apartheid was now over, and its continuing effects into the present need not be delved into: ‘the cost of achieving a moral consensus that the past was evil is to reach a political consensus that the evil is past’ (Meister, 2002a: 96).23 At the same time, the TRC process served to promote a ‘human rights culture’, which would militate against the deployment of violence in society and advocate its (legitimate) restriction to the state, which itself would be bound by the rule of law. Violence is understood here as the antithesis of democracy; when it does unfortunately exist, it is seen as a leftover from authoritarianism, or as an effect of transition, or else as simply pathological, not as a product of the democratic state itself. This logic can be seen in the assumption of the supposed change in South Africa from ‘political’ violence in the 1980s and 1990s to ‘criminal’ violence post-apartheid. This invocation of an increase in criminality explains little to nothing, as it is equated with pathological conditions regularly asserted by the state, while the empirical (let alone the theoretical) distinction between political and criminal violence is quite tenuous, to say the least (Harris, 2006: 10ff). Interestingly, although Bronwyn Harris, in her detailed review of the connections between violence, transition and democracy in South Africa, rightly notes that this equation of the violence of the past with political violence and that of the present with criminal violence ‘has the consequence of minimising or downplaying the criminal nature of early violence’, she strangely omits the obverse conclusion, namely that this dichotomy also has the effect of downplaying the political nature of present-day violence (Harris, 2006: 11–12). Concurrently, by reducing all violence to crime, the state is able to criminalise popular social movements that often contest the state’s modus operandi, and is thus able to legitimise both their exclusion from the field of politics and the exercise of police (or para-state) violence against them. The strange equation of democracy in (South) Africa with

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the absence of political violence is a myth, which is sustained by the neat separation between different modes of rule deployed by the democratic state. As I shall show, the democratic state rules by means of distinct modes of rule within different political domains, so that different mechanisms of enforcing and responding to power are consequently deployed in various socio-political locations. For one of these modes of rule, namely that which I have called ‘uncivil society’ – deployed primarily over the working people – the exercise of (often illegal) state violence is central.

the character and contradictions of the neo-colonial state in africa It is quite apparent that the shift in economic thinking to a neo-liberal dogma, along with its application throughout the world from the mid-1970s onwards, has led to a specific form of state and state thinking which is hegemonic throughout the newly globalised world. This combination of neo-liberal capitalism and liberal democracy has not bypassed Africa, and the character of the state in Africa has been radically transformed. This suggests that the manner in which the state functions and rules today is radically different from the way it functioned in the immediate postcolonial period. In addition to the post-national character of the state already discussed, there are three major distinct characteristics of the new state form that are worth sketching here.24

The neo-liberal features of the state The first of these concerns what Harvey has called a ‘neo-liberal state’, evidently influenced by the neo-liberal character of the economy. One of the core features of this state is not the ‘withdrawal’ of the state from the market, or its privatisation of national social assets and its introduction of structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, or the reduction of its functions to ones of policing an increasingly poor population. More fundamentally, what has become apparent does not concern policy but the structural change that has wiped away the former distinction between public and private interests (or public and private administration, for that matter). As Harvey (2005b: 76–7) puts it, ‘business and corporations not only collaborate intimately with state actors but even acquire a strong role in writing legislation, determining public policies, and setting regulatory frameworks (which are mainly advantageous to themselves)’. Unlike in the 1970s, one can no longer speak in terms of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the state from the interests of (finance) capital. African authoritarian states with a veneer of democracy have been extremely adept at instituting neo-liberal economic policies. Abu Atris noted with reference to the 2011 popular protests against corruption in Egypt:

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To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state (Atris, 2011, emphasis added). It is this collapse of the distinction between the general or national interest (i.e. the common interest), on the one hand, and the private interest, on the other – or between state and capital, which amounts to the same thing – that has developed into one of the dominant features of the state in Africa (and, indeed, elsewhere). This diminishing distinction is the foundation of corruption and the looting of treasuries and constitutes a systemic feature of the state in its neo-liberal form, precisely because it facilitates the corruption inherent in capitalism itself. It is totally corrupting of the edifice of the state, which as a result can no longer be said to represent the national or general interest and the ‘public good’. In South Africa, it is reflected in major donations by business people to the ruling party – the ANC – in return for the award of lucrative contracts through an apparently neutral tender process. (The provision of gifts to individual politicians for favours is against the law; providing donations to parties is not.) It is also reflected in individual corruption, as those connected to the state can enter into Black empowerment deals with White capital, buy shares of privatised companies cheaply, and make huge fortunes from one day to the next.25 The end result is that South Africa has a large number of new millionaires and has, since the introduction of democracy, overtaken Brazil as the most unequal society in the world, while at least half of its population of 48 million are said to live below the poverty line.26 Yet, if one wishes to analyse the state in Africa, one cannot restrict oneself to the idea of the ‘neo-liberal state’; neither is it enough to refer to ‘loss of national sovereignty’ in thinking the neo-colonial character of the state. To do so is simply to remain within a state perspective. The neo-liberal character is insufficient as a descriptor of the state in Africa because it refers to state characteristics apparent throughout the globalised world, and it would be economically reductionist to end there.27 State politics cannot be reduced to an expression of the interests of capital; they are much

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more than that. One must also consider the political location of the state within the global system as well as the ways in which it rules its population.

The West’s democratising mission Another fundamental feature of the state in Africa derives from what Ernest Wambadia-Wamba has rightly called the ‘democratising mission’ of the West. After the colonial ‘civilising mission’ and its postcolonial ‘developmental mission’, the West has since the mid- to late 1970s insisted on ‘democratising’ the state in Africa in its own image. This process, largely achieved through the medium of political conditionalities, has focused on the trappings of the democratic state: elections of the executive through universal suffrage, constitutions, the advocacy of multipartyism and the funding of civil society organisations. The drivers of this process have been Western states, multinational agencies and international NGOs.28 This has been accompanied by the deployment of a human rights discourse and ‘humanitarian interventions’ by both states (or their proxies) and NGOs. It is this process that has made plain the new features of the current democratic imperial system. John Laughland (2008: 257) goes even further by noting that ‘today’s human rights activists ... are inspired by a punishment ethic ... which often prefers war over peace in the name of “justice” ’. We should never forget that, since the state in Africa acquires its legitimacy primarily from the West and only very much secondarily from its people, violent conflict is more often than not restricted to an opposition between the whole panoply of neo-colonial politics (including human rights discourse) and authoritarian state nationalism. This has meant that, in Zimbabwe in particular, it has proven difficult to construct a popular politics independent of both, while the discourse of (especially urban) popular opposition has been squarely located within a human rights framework and connections with multinational NGOs. Clearly, the African state – which has been singularly unable to genuinely represent the nation since independence – owes its survival primarily to whether it conforms to Western precepts. Today this means whether it is labelled ‘democratic’ or not by the West, i.e. whether it fulfils a number of measurable criteria, and not whether democracy is rooted among the people. After all, during the Cold War period, democracy, with its attendant notion of human rights, was never the main criterion for judging African states; arguably, human rights became central in the assessment of African states only after 1975. According to Mamdani (1991a), this emphasis was the result of an explicit strategy by the United States in response to the Soviet Union’s popularity on the continent. Yet it only became dominant after the end of Third Worldism in Europe; i.e. after the end of the view of Africans as agents of their own liberation and, hence, the apparent end of their contribution to forging alternatives in world history. As ex-student-radicals in particular became disillusioned with the postcolonial state

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and Third Worldism, the idea of Africans as subjects of history was replaced by the notion of Africans as victims of history, incapable of exercising agency: victims of natural disasters, of pandemics, of oppressive states, and, ultimately, of their own supposedly authoritarian cultures. Wa Mutua’s (2002: 19) metaphor of Western human rights discourse as a ‘civilising crusade’ is particularly apt. A formalistic conception of democracy, disconnected from any popular roots in African culture and simply grafted onto a largely untransformed colonial state, is at the heart of the West’s current relations with Africa and Africans, in the same way as the ‘development mission’ had been at the core of these relations post-independence. Badiou also insists that ‘the reign of “ethics” coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today’s sordid self-satisfaction in the “West”, with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity  – in short of its subhumanity’ (Badiou, 2001: 13, emphasis in original). This racist notion has been swallowed by African states and the oligarchies that run them: their relation to the West is fundamentally mimetic, while they only show contempt towards the plight of their people. The imposition of ‘state democracy’ from above has had the effect of further weakening popular control over the state through depoliticisation and the strengthening of narrow oligarchic domination, which is subservient to empire. As a result, Western imperial interests have recently been able to destroy whole states in Africa as well as in the Middle East. Libya, Somalia and Mali come particularly to mind, while there is a strong push to dismember the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by encouraging the Rwandan state to plunder the DRC’s resources through the use of ethnic proxies. While the plunder of Africa’s raw materials continues unabated through land-grabbing in particular, the West is no longer alone in such ventures, having now been joined by China and India. African states have largely failed to defend their national interests under such external pressures. Militarisation and a culture of violence have become more prevalent, but, so far, political domains where violence is more prevalent have been successfully isolated from the privileged domain of civil society.

Domains of state politics and modes of state rule The third important feature of the African state today thus concerns the different modes of rule that the state deploys in its various political domains. It is important to understand that the state does not exercise its rule in a uniform manner throughout society; its subjective politics differ and, consequently, violence is not uniformly deployed according to the same logic everywhere. The state’s way of ruling, of controlling the population and managing difference and hierarchy, varies most noticeably in Africa between urban and rural settings, but it also differs within urban areas. These spatial distinctions are simply illustrative; modes of rule are not reducible

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to socio-spatial location, so that even rule through ‘tradition’, for example, can be deployed in urban areas.29 While the rural–urban distinction has been theorised by Mahmood Mamdani and will be discussed in a later chapter, the different modes of rule within the urban domain, which are my main concern at this point, have been most clearly outlined by Partha Chatterjee, developing the early work of the Subaltern Studies Collective in India and particularly that of Ranajit Guha.30 Central to Chatterjee’s argument is a distinction between modes of ruling citizens and populations. Following the work of Michel Foucault on ‘governmentality’, which he saw as a particular mode of rule as well as a way of being in society, Chatterjee (2004: 36) argues: the classical idea of popular sovereignty, expressed in the legal-political facts of equal citizenship, produced the homogeneous construct of the nation, whereas the activities of governmentality required multiple, cross-cutting and shifting classifications of the population as the targets of multiple policies, producing a necessarily heterogeneous construct of the social. Here, then, we have the antinomy between the lofty political imaginary of popular sovereignty and the mundane administrative reality of governmentality: it is the antinomy between the homogeneous national and the heterogeneous social. This antinomy found its way into the colonial state, which exercised its ‘governmentality’ while ignoring sovereignty; after independence, the nationalist conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty ‘were overtaken by the developmental state which promised to end poverty and backwardness by adopting appropriate policies of economic growth and social reform ... The postcolonial states deployed the latest governmental technologies to promote the well-being of their populations, often prompted and aided by international and nongovernmental organizations’ (p. 37). The first conception led to a domain of politics that emphasised the law and citizenship; ‘civil society’ was the name given to this formal and largely middle-class legal domain of contestation. The second refers to a domain of politics where rules are bent, political relations are often informal (if not downright illegal) and the majority are only tenuously rights-bearing citizens: they are not excluded from the domain of politics altogether, but only from the domain of civil society, which forms the core of the liberal-democratic – rights-based – relationship to the state. Chatterjee (2004, 2011) refers to this second mode of rule and state–society relations as ‘political society’, although I prefer the term ‘uncivil society’, because politics is not to be located a priori in one domain exclusively.31 It is ‘uncivil’ not in any moral or normative sense, but because citizenship is here not the primary manner of relating to the state; indeed, the majority of the population in this domain do not arguably possess a (full, unquestioned) right to rights, and normality does not consist of the ‘rule of law’.

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Here, so-called biopolitical techniques of control are deployed by the state and the state deals with people as numbers in a population and not as citizens with agency; here, too, resistance to such state politics is always in existence and may subjectively exceed the subjectivities produced by ‘governmentality’.32 Interestingly, Chatterjee points to a conceptual distinction between rights and entitlements: ‘rights belong to those who have proper legal title ... those who do not have rights may nevertheless have entitlements; they deserve not compensation but assistance in rebuilding a home or finding a new livelihood’ (2004: 69). The idea is a distinction between the rights of property owners and the entitlements of the poor, which the state recognises for whatever reason, even if it is not able to provide, say, housing for all because of financial constraints. The former suggests a core commitment to legal processes by both the state and the people (the rule of law); the latter does not.33 In civil society, consensus is relatively easy to establish, as people have access to rights; here, politics is thought in terms of the distinction between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ citizenship along with the presence or absence of ‘human rights’ structured by the rule of law.34 But the distinction between passivity and agency is not an indication of the absence of (progressive or potentially emancipatory) politics in the first and of its existence in the second. Mere agency does not necessarily imply politics (xenophobic or ethnic pogroms being the obvious example), while even passivity can suggest some form of political thought, as in the tactic of the boycott or the stayaway in South Africa during the 1980s. In South Africa at least, people in uncivil society are also cognisant of their entitlement to the delivery of services by the state and protest, often violently, when these are not satisfied.35 The promise to satisfy these entitlements is also what enables the powerful (local politicians and power-brokers) to set up patronage relations within uncivil society. In this domain the rule of law is largely absent, and ethnic politics, patronage relations and violence can develop as part of everyday life, while people are supposed to bear this oppression and coercion in silence. Here, what Agamben calls ‘biopolitics’ and the ‘permanent state of exception’ are usually deployed (Agamben, 1998, 2005). It is within this domain that a ‘culture of violence’ can be most easily established, although to call it a ‘culture’ can suggest an ingrained transgenerational subjectivity that is largely unchangeable in its essence – a flawed assumption, as this culture is systematically produced and can be restricted through struggle. At times violence spills over into civil society itself, and only then is it noticed (by the mass media, for example); otherwise, the state ensures that it remains contained and beyond civil experience. The origins of uncivil society are clearly colonial, as Chatterjee recognises, but in neo-colonial society such a mode of rule is not specific to ethnicity, race, nationality or even class; although its essence is still colonially derived, it is irreducible to socio-economic characteristics or location, and is not simply historically determined. Yet, at the same time, although distinct to such an extent

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that they can be said to constitute unique subjective ‘worlds’, in Badiou’s sense, these two domains of state politics and their defining modes of rule are interconnected, as it is on politics in uncivil society that the pyramidal edifice of the political oligarchy is ultimately founded, a feature that illustrates the neo-colonial character of African states. These two modes of rule cannot be grasped as simply ‘inherited’ from the past; they have previously existed as tendencies only and were even superseded, to a certain extent and for a limited time, during periods of mass upsurge, such as in the 1980s in South Africa. What is important to note is that these distinctive ways of thinking politics, which are mostly incomprehensible to each other, can be transcended and unified, but only through struggle, of course. The main point at this stage of the argument remains that we can establish in Africa the existence of at least two forms of state–society relations that define distinct domains – ‘civil society’ and ‘uncivil society’ – in which politics are conceived according to distinct subjectivities. Indeed, we can also speak in terms of a third domain of ‘traditional society’ in Africa, which will be discussed at length in chapter 15. Each of these domains is fundamentally characterised by different subjective modes of state rule, which allocate people to their socio-political places. As a result, the kind of politics deemed to be possible and impossible in each case also differs. People whose primary relation to the state is found within uncivil society are subjected to dehumanising practices, indignity and ‘unfreedom’; they face extraordinary obstacles when they wish to assert their rights directly as citizens or attempt a movement beyond their political place, for their political existence is outside the domain of rights that is civil society. The mode of rule itself in uncivil society functions in such a way as to enable the distortion or diminution, if not the extinction, of the meaning of citizenship itself, given that people in this domain do not have automatic access to the right to rights.36 As one miner interviewed in the context of the Marikana massacre put it: ‘We as mineworkers are excluded from this democracy’ (Alexander et al., 2013: 116). If people in uncivil society wish to be heard as citizens, they are commonly forced to accept the mediation of trustees (usually NGOs but also trade unions) who would speak for them in civil society, for it is only there that the rule of law operates reasonably consistently. Yet, as with any form of state politics, these obstacles can be successfully overcome by the affirmation of a politics beyond place and the reassertion of the rights of citizenship; as these rights are largely denied, such a politics can end up contesting the character of state politics itself. It is imperative to stress this last point, for, in the absence of an affirmative politics, repressive violence, indeed a ‘culture of violence’, is simply allowed to fester and its prevalence is misunderstood as a natural effect of poverty. Yet, in uncivil society this organised dissent and resistance, which bravely attempts to confront the networks of patronage relations, ethnic power and local corruption through democratic collective action, is often unashamedly criminalised by the state,

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simply because people are expected to suffer in silence. It is also regularly subjected to state violence, which is itself, more often than not, criminal in nature. A growing body of literature is gradually uncovering the functioning of state– society relations within uncivil society, especially within those countries subjected to liberal-democratic systems of ‘governance’. In South Africa, where this literature is burgeoning, one author had the following to say about the huge apartheid-created township of Soweto: ‘The relatively short history of Soweto has been marked by a progressive collapse of state authority; an often violent struggle against representatives of the state waged in the name of liberation; a breakdown of paternal authority within families; the establishment and eventual collapse of alternative political structures within local neighbourhoods; and a general rise in crime and insecurity’ (Chabedi, 2003: 357). Post-apartheid-generated inequalities have ensured that The expected benefits of democracy failed to materialise for the majority of the population ... For every person who ‘progresses’, there are many who are left behind. Yet counterposed to the new dynamics of progress and social mobility is what might be called a moral centre of gravity wherein poverty and greater need result in claims upon public resources and notions of entitlement to state assistance. To be poor, then, is to be more deserving, yet to be rich is to be envied. To be envied is to be exposed, for from the envious can come all the malignant forces of witchcraft and sorcery, not to mention more mundane forms of violence (p. 366, emphasis added). In exhibiting these characteristics, Soweto is no different from most other urban townships in the country, while state social provisioning, in the form of social grants and housing, continues. In the absence of any organised democratic resistance, such conditions constitute a perfect enabling environment for the development of patron– client relations and the politics of ‘strongmen’. Whereas human rights discourse is helpful for organising in civil society, as it creates legal space for NGOs and social movements, in uncivil society human rights are frequently blamed for the collapse of parental authority, for the apparent sexual freedom of women and for the perceived threats by outsiders or foreigners to community entitlements.37 There is also increasing evidence that the police themselves act more as the personal agents of municipal councillors – people with power in the local community – than as upholders of the law, and that their preferred modus operandi is one of terrorising the poor while avoiding any open confrontation with organised criminal gangs. In their 2007 report on local politics in the Durban area, Mark Butler and Richard Pithouse note: ‘The evidence permits only one interpretation: the local state acts in a systematically criminal manner towards its poorest residents on the assumption that this behaviour is within the norms of a shared social consensus amongst the social forces and institutions that

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count. That elite consensus is that rights formally guaranteed in abstract principle should not, in concrete practice, apply to the poor’ (Butler and Pithouse, 2007). More recently, in 2013, the deployment of violence has accompanied the idea of the ‘delivery’ of municipal resources and social provisioning more generally, as these enable both the rapid enrichment of a small number of political strongmen and the reliance by the party in power on patronage and fear. Pithouse has recently stressed: A few years ago state violence at the hands of the police and private security companies was most often driven by attempts to beat back popular opposition to evictions. Today demands for housing or services like sanitation and electricity can still result in conflict. But now that the Municipality’s attempt to re-segregate large swathes of the city on the basis of class by removing shack settlements from middle class suburbs has been thoroughly defeated, it is the arrival of ‘delivery’ that most often tends to result in protest and violence at the hands of the police or party thugs ... The realities of public housing as it is actually built and allocated are so far from the technocratic fantasies laid out in policy documents, and from how the law is supposed to work, that new forms of power are being developed from above and below to deal with the situation. Councillors, often accompanied by bodyguards bristling with guns and menace, are sometimes little more than gangsters, their authority sustained by intimidation and patronage. The violence required to defend the development model is still sometimes exercised by the police and private security but it is increasingly being taken over or outsourced to freelance thugs by local party structures. Activists report that it’s not unusual for people who have been in and out of jail to be given key roles in directing housing projects. Appeals to the Municipality to act against gangster councillors – whether expressed via fax, protest or the occupation of the City Hall – are invariably ignored (Pithouse, 2013). At election time in many poor communities, ‘opposition politics is not tolerated at all and communities are run as “vote banks”. It is not unusual for this intolerance to be backed up with armed force on the part of local party leaders or for them to receive the active support of the police. The chronic nature of political authoritarianism at the base of our society invariably becomes acute around elections’ (Pithouse, 2009). Many of the poor are aware of this issue: as we are [moving] towards local government election the politicians are busy telling people to go in their numbers to voting stations to vote for people who will not even listen to the people who have put them into power. The people on the grassroots are people who don’t count in this society except when it is time to vote. The politicians are making all kinds of promises when they want

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our votes. But when we ask them to keep those promises they tell the police to arrest us, beat us and shoot us.38 It is not surprising that, under these conditions, the primary political act of state democracy – the vote – is rejected by popular organisations such as Abahlali baseMjondolo. Violence lies at the core of the state’s mode of rule in uncivil society, while this violence is further enabled by the systematic production of ‘political illiteracy’.39 Such observations are common to various extents throughout the continent and are by no means unique to South Africa. What is perhaps more prevalent today in South Africa than in the rest of Africa (excepting the recent North African experiments in popular power) is the existence of a number of important attempts to affirm an alternative politics of dignity and equality. These have been met by the state with varying degrees of violence detached from legal procedures. In the forefront of the struggle to affirm such a politics is the shack-dwellers’ movement from Durban, Abahlali, which we have already encountered in earlier chapters. Abahlali have developed an alternative politics outside both the ‘political society’ of the state and its parties and the ‘civil society’ of NGOs. They have placed themselves outside civil society by stressing their self-organisation, internal democracy and an axiom of equality. They are not averse to utilising the legal system when tactics demand it and they won a celebrated victory against the province of KwaZulu-Natal’s attempt to introduce legislation, known as the Slums Act, to clear informal settlements from the prime land they occupy in the city of eThekwini (Durban).40 As a result of their alternative politics, Abahlali have been subjected to ongoing police brutality and a campaign of vilification and attack by the local state. As we have seen, this culminated in an attack in September 2009 by organised informal para-state forces and by police.41 In a truly Orwellian statement, the regional ANC described Abahlali, with their mass support in the settlement, as ‘illegitimate’, and the organisations imposed on the people in this violent manner as ‘legitimate’.42 This referred to legitimacy in the eyes of the state, which excluded Abahlali from civil society in this violent manner. Abahlali were clearly aware of the fundamental political reasons for the attack: The reason why our movement was attacked in Kennedy Road in September 2009 ... is well known. We were attacked because we were exposing corrupt councillors, organising the unorganised and running our own projects such as crèches, clinics, feeding schemes, community gardens. We were attacked because we were creating job opportunities for the unemployed. We were attacked because we were fighting nepotism, comradism [sic], and the politicization of service delivery. We were attacked because we organised ourselves outside of the control of the party and its councillors. We were attacked because we thought that urban planning should be a bottom up and not a top down

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project. And, yes, we were attacked because we challenged the constitutionality of the then Slums Act which humiliated the Provincial Legislature. We were attacked because we took this democracy seriously. We were attacked because we believed that we had the same right as any other person to think and speak and act for ourselves in this democracy and because we acted on that belief day after day and year after year ... The only way to be poor and to remain safe in this country is to limit your participation in this democracy to voting in elections. The day that you decide to organise yourself and to express yourself outside of party structures and elections is the day that you must give up your safety.43 The point is that a genuinely democratic politics that attempts to contest the patronage relations prevalent within uncivil society, and thus claim the same rights as those within civil society, can lead to systematic (democratic) state violence against the people, for such politics threaten the mode of rule and the vested interests of the local oligarchy. Indeed, a politics that takes democracy seriously threatens the basis of uncivil society itself and, with it, the political ‘place’ to which the working people have been allocated.44 Nevertheless, such genuine democratic politics are rare; more often than not, popular rebellions take place within the limits of state political subjectivities, as was evident in the xenophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008. The absence of a national project of development and its replacement by human rights discourse in civil society has led to a notion of ‘national entitlements’ within uncivil society, for which human rights are often seen as obstacles and ‘national entitlements’ as the entitlements of the indigenous only (Hayem, 2013). Unfortunately, in South Africa the idea of the nation has been reduced to one of indigeneity, for various attempts at nation-building have failed dismally to grab the popular imagination. This is not surprising, given the level of corruption and self-enrichment among members of the new oligarchy. Indeed, this form of accumulation is ideologically founded on notions of liberal human rights and inviolable access to property. In this sense the new oligarchy simply joins its counterparts from other countries around the world in living the ‘good life’ of the wealthy. In other words, while human rights provide the ideological foundation for accumulation and access to resources by the oligarchy, along with the legal space to organise in civil society, they do not enable the entitlements of the mass of the population in uncivil society to be satisfied, as these are dependent on state largesse, not on rights as such. While the new Black elite stress their indigeneity and nativism in order to justify access to rights and resources, the poor follow suit by stressing nativism, too, in order to acquire what they see as their own entitlements. But, unlike the oligarchy and the middle class, the poor are dependent solely on discretionarily deployed state largesse in order to acquire their entitlements, with the result that, for them, indigeneity ends up being their only asset and the sole ideological justification for such entitlements.

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A complex contradiction therefore develops between a discourse of rights and one of national entitlement. The failure to find a political alternative to the post-independence idea of development on the African continent has meant the absence of any national state project, and the total subservience to empire through the emphasis on ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ as state slogans. At the same time, these names have proven unable to provide a collective conception of the nation other than one founded on a crude nativism and chauvinism, so that the poor are forced to rely on nativism in order to acquire their entitlements. This failure seems irresolvable other than by recourse to violence, as it is founded on political exclusion from the domain of rights, i.e. from the dominant field of politics. It is thus in relation to the idea of the nation and its people – around an analysis of the specific politics with which people are confronted and how they react to them, rather than of poverty as such – that any conceptions of ‘transition’ and a culture of systemic violence have to be understood in the neo-colony. In order to develop an understanding of these processes, they must be firmly located within the political subjectivities that directly concern the nation, for it is the equation of citizenship rights with the entitlements of the indigenous that shapes them. I want to end by illustrating this point through a discussion of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa.

systemic violence: the case of south africa The truly extraordinary event of 2011 in North Africa and elsewhere has shown that secular nationalism as a vehicle of emancipatory politics is not dead. It was precisely the national consciousness of the youth and young workers of these countries that constituted the core political content of those movements. Such nationalism was affirmed in opposition to the pseudo-nationalism of the state, which was seen to have betrayed its own people. In Africa, then, emancipatory nationalism must be reaffirmed against both those who see it as necessarily oppressive of difference and those who distort it into a statist conception by systematically depoliticising it, as Fanon clearly saw. In order to think the possibility of this reaffirmation, politics needs to become again the object of thought, and chauvinistic nationalism founded on regressive identity politics needs to be distinguished from an emancipatory national consciousness.

Xenophobic violence One of the crucial questions of politics in South Africa concerns the provision of a rigorous account of the transformation of national consciousness from an emancipatory inclusive discourse in the 1980s, to one of exclusion and chauvinism, manifested in xenophobic violence, particularly in May 2008.45 To ask this question is to jettison

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the notion that nationalism is necessarily oppressive of divergent views and authoritarian by nature. It is crucial in this respect to distinguish between state nationalism and a popular nationalism with an emancipatory content – ‘national consciousness’, in Fanon’s terms – from which internationalism can emanate, as it is fundamentally egalitarian and anti-colonial in its essence. Such popular nationalism is purely politically affirmative; state nationalism is founded on naturalised socio-historical notions of indigeneity; the former’s politics tend to be inclusive, the latter’s exclusive. The most sophisticated thinker of this distinction on the African continent was Frantz Fanon. As I have shown in chapter 4, in his work one finds not only a recognition of this distinction, but also an account of the transition from the first form of national political subjectivity to the second, along with the achievement of state power. A similar process took place in South Africa from 1990 onwards, which eventually culminated in massive pogroms against African ‘foreigners’ in May 2008, when 62 people were killed and thousands were displaced and herded into refugee camps. But unlike what had happened in the Africa of the early 1960s, the South African nation came into being within a new world political sequence. As I have already noted, this new state has modified the conditions of production of xenophobic politics and the collapse of nationalism into chauvinism. These conditions, which include the promotion of human rights discourse, have produced a politics of victimhood and fear that has also contributed to the rise of xenophobia. Arguably, xenophobic politics in South Africa have resulted from the identity politics encouraged by state democracy after 1990 in a context where an emancipatory politics of universal humanity was defeated and has consequently been largely absent (Neocosmos, 2010a). From 1990 onwards, the transitional justice industry in general, and the TRC process in South Africa in particular, went about producing victims. As Madlingozi has rightly pointed out, ‘whether it is through “fact finding” reports, conference papers, academic journal articles, “field notes”, or more egregiously, funding proposals, the core task of a transitional justice entrepreneur is to speak about or for victims’ (Madlingozi, 2010: 210). While the TRC did provide a platform for victims of ‘gross human rights violations’ to tell their stories, they had first to agree to their victimhood. The TRC in fact compiled a register of such victims; victims were thus constructed, not simply given. Being interpellated (in the Althusserian sense) by the state power as a victim, one acquires a victim’s identity unless one consciously resists it;46 and only a minority are able to do so. ‘They just want us to be victims and tell our stories so they can help us. I am sick of telling my story. It makes them feel good to show that they are helping us. They don’t really want to change things and what good does telling our stories over and over do? They are just white professionals who want to keep their jobs.’47 Such comments are rare, at least in public. Yet in South Africa, as previously in Algeria, the people constituted themselves into a nation through an affirmative politics

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that stressed national unity and a firm opposition to the apartheid state, which was founded on enforced separation; it also had a ‘truly extraordinary moment’. How can we then account for the trajectory of South African nationalism from an emancipatory (non-identitarian) conception founded on popular agency in the 1980s to a chauvinistic one based on victimhood in the 2000s? There is little doubt that this political change resulted from the hegemony of state politics from 1990 onwards, very much along the lines outlined by Fanon for an earlier period.48 Yet, although necessary, this argument does not constitute a sufficient explanation, for the democratic South African state was born during a new political sequence; moreover, this only accounts for xenophobic politics as such, and not for the violent form it took. Given the dominance of human rights discourse, one could have expected a reduction in violence, which is what neo-liberal theory and transitional justice theory assumed. In order to provide a fuller answer, our account must follow the features of the African state as outlined above. Clearly, the South African state and its TRC process have become paradigmatic for the whole transitional justice industry and for the West’s ‘democratising mission’. Not only does this process seem to have avoided the collapse of the country into internecine violence, but it now provides a model for similar situations throughout the world. Indeed, it is one of transitional justice’s ‘success stories’. Yet the situation is not so rosy. There has been no fundamental reconciliation between ‘racial groups’ in South Africa; the Western notion of multiculturalism – the local version being the ‘rainbow nation’  – has not led to any form of creolisation. The new African bourgeoisie has allowed itself to simply parrot White norms and values, including an adherence to South African exceptionalism, which fetishes commercialisation and an arrogant superiority of South Africans towards the rest of the African continent.49 Moreover, the TRC has been criticised for having mainly benefited perpetrators rather than victims. This comes across quite clearly from the experience of an NGO, Khulumani, which was set up to defend the rights of victims and thus found itself in the invidious position of accepting the appellation: Khulumani was created in order to enable victims and survivors to access the TRC and to make sure that their rights in terms of the TRC Act were protected. Throughout the TRC process Khulumani helped victims obtain and fill out applications and appeals, coordinated meetings with TRC officials, and provided individual and group counselling for victims as they delivered their testimonies. The organization hoped that the official process of truth telling would help them reclaim their dignity. However, for a variety of reasons, the TRC process has left a bitter taste in the mouths of Khulumani members. Khulumani members repeatedly point out that the TRC was a ‘perpetrator-friendly’ process; it betrayed victims in that the promises regarding reparations and truth

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recovery were never met; and they felt that they were forced to forgive perpetrators while perpetrators and beneficiaries of the apartheid system did not show any remorse (Madlingozi, 2010: 214–15).50 As Madlingozi shows, being a victim does not enable one to access one’s rights; only political organisation can begin to achieve this. Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau (2003) also show that the TRC process failed to transform what they call the ‘habits’ (i.e. state practices) of the past: the contempt with which power treated the powerless during the process itself was an evident continuity from the past if there ever was one. They also note that having the experiences of victims officially recognised was a major achievement for the commission, but these experiences were apprehended ultimately as excesses by individual perpetrators rather than as the necessary outcome of oppressive state structures and subjectivities, so that ‘undoubtedly, the TRC failed to adequately situate the gross human rights violations that it addressed in the wider context of apartheid’ (p. 90). ‘Those who came to the TRC were not organised political activists ... but were most often very poor township residents swept up in the conflicts’ (p. 90); they got little or nothing from the process, either in terms of compensation or, more importantly, of a (small) victory over power. They were simply recognised for a while and then cynically discarded. According to Fullard and Rousseau (2003: 90), it has been ‘a government choice to keep the TRC on the backburner’. Indeed, the legitimacy of the apartheid state was never challenged by the new state after 1990, and a congruence of interests emerged between apartheid and post-apartheid elites in the maintenance of the system of power as they combined into a new oligarchy. This failure could have something to do with ‘a more general muting of ... transformative impulses’ (p. 97). It is difficult to be surprised at the failure of the TRC to cater for the interests of victims; the production of victims by the state politics of the TRC could not have been done independently of its liberal intentions, for this would have required a different kind of political thinking. Thus was popular affirmation replaced by a politics of supplication. As victims of past apartheid abuses, including those victims organised by NGOs, are overwhelmingly poor, they find themselves in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis human rights discourse. On the one hand, human rights discourse insists on some idea of reparation; on the other, victims are at the mercy of power (the state, the law) in acquiring such reparations. That these reparations do not materialise, or else do so minimally, only confirms the contempt of the state for victims (Chapman and Van der Merwe, 2008: 285–6). They do not materialise, partly because the victims find themselves within uncivil society in their relations to the state, so that they have to be represented by trustees, who speak for them within the domain of rights, i.e. civil society. In the absence of trustees, they have to struggle simply to be taken seriously by power, whose primary way of relating to them is conditioned by their place

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outside the domain of rights. The fundamental issue, then, does not concern the provision of reparations, but a completely different way of thinking politics so that people can recover their agency directly and relate to the state as collective subjects, not as dependent victims who must be represented. The evidence for the absence of the rule of law in uncivil society is overwhelming. In a recent article, Steven Friedman, one of South Africa’s more observant commentators, summed up the distinction between different forms of state rule very well: In the areas where most of the poor live, local power holders – such as party bosses or municipal councillors  – do not like being challenged by citizens demanding a say in how their neighbourhoods are governed. And often they enjoy links with the police, which ensure that life can be made very difficult for those who stand up to them ... For suburbanites, the problem [of policing] is that [the] police do not do enough – it is assumed that if they did more, they would protect lives and properties. For people at the grassroots it is often that they do too much, because they are seen not as protectors but as predators.51 The difficulty with Friedman’s view is that if people are denied their rights on a systematic basis, it is problematic to refer to them as citizens, at least in the full sense of the term (despite the fact that they may possess state documents to prove their citizenship); this appellation has to be modified, and we cannot assume, as he does, that they relate to the state in a domain of civil society.52 The character of the mode of rule in uncivil society can also be illustrated in the context of the rise of xenophobic chauvinism in South Africa. Some brief illustrations will have to suffice. One concerns an incident in Zandspruit, an informal settlement outside Johannesburg, in October 2000.53 A short while after the United Nations Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia had been held in South Africa, Zandspruit erupted in an orgy of looting and destruction that miraculously had no fatalities; a thousand Zimbabweans were made destitute and residents torched more than 100 shacks belonging to them.54 Local residents had accused Zimbabweans of being involved in crime and taking their jobs. According to the City of Johannesburg, Zandspruit is an extremely poor area , where 1,600 families reside in overcrowded conditions with only basic infrastructure.55 The news media all moralised on the appalling acts of xenophobia, but few went beyond platitudes. It soon emerged that the Department of Home Affairs had been aware of the tensions in the settlement for several weeks. One of their spokesmen, Leslie Mashokwe, stated that residents had asked the police to take steps against Zimbabweans, whom they had accused of stealing their jobs and killing residents.56 A number of committees were formed in the community in order to deal with trauma, the rehousing of residents and general complaints. In response to the Zandspruit residents’ complaints three weeks previously, Mashokwe was quoted as

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saying that ‘officials from the departments of home affairs and labour launched a joint operation called Operation Clean Up with the local people and moved into the area to root out the illegal immigrants’. Reportedly, between 600 and 700 ‘illegal immigrants’ were rounded up and deported to neighbouring countries, including Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But a few days later residents noticed that the ‘illegals’ had returned; they rushed to the police station to report the matter, and on the way back they decided to ‘handle it on their own’. They called a community meeting in which they gave ‘foreigners’ ten days to leave or ‘face the music’. The foreigners did not leave, so residents burnt them out. A number of perpetrators were then arrested and taken to court, but the important aspect of the story was that state officials from two government departments had been directly involved in xenophobic raids aided by the local population. Only one article made the connection between these events and clauses of the current Draft Bill on Immigration, which emphasised ‘enforcement at community level’ of the ‘detection, apprehension and deportation’ of undocumented migrants.57 Mashokwe was later reported to have said that his department condemned the attacks, as did the cabinet, the SACP and COSATU, while the ANC did so in ANC Today, its online mouthpiece; coming so soon after the United Nations Conference Against Racism, this was predictable.58 To my knowledge, no South African state institution or representative has been taken to court for incitement to commit a crime, and yet it seems abundantly apparent that there was a case to answer against the departments of home affairs and of labour in the Zandspruit incident. This should have been the logical outcome of a consistent ‘culture of rights’. The Draft Bill on Immigration was the brainchild of the minister of home affairs, Mangosuthu Buthelezi; its provisions designed to enable ‘community enforcement’ of the law by ‘good patriots’, who would ‘root out’ ‘illegal foreigners’, were later excised from the final Immigration Act. Yet this helped to create an alliance of state institutions such as the police with local community leaders, so that community policing forums (CPFs) ended up being controlled by ‘strongmen’ who could then whip up anti-immigrant hysteria. It seems that in many cases CPFs were expected to act as vigilantes to ‘root out’ supposed ‘illegal immigrants’. In fact, in May 2008 the pogroms in Alexandra township outside Johannesburg started at a CPF meeting, after which residents as well as hostel-dwellers decided to take the law into their own hands. ‘Community policing’ had been thought up in the 1990s as a way of building trust between communities and the police in fighting crime, after the apartheid period during which relations between urban communities and police had totally broken down. Yet, given the frequent commonality of attitudes (as well as of interests) between community leaders and police in combating the crime of ‘illegal immigration’, the supposed neutrality of the police towards all community members was easily compromised.59 ‘Community leaders’ have power not only over other community members but also, it seems, over the police, whom they can order to take part in various

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activities in their interests. It is common practice for councillors, for example, to order police to engage in coercive actions, particularly against the poor, just as it is common for members of parliament to order councillors around.60 Indeed, research on the xenophobic violence of May 2008 for the International Organization for Migration showed that it was the politics of leaders at community level that often determined whether community members engaged in xenophobic violence or resisted it.61 The post-national character of the South African state has been apparent in the little effort made to construct a nation (other than the weak attempts at stressing an ethnophilosophy of ubuntu) after the rejection of the social-democratic-type state project of post-apartheid development known as the RDP. After its replacement in 1996 by the purely neo-liberal economic programme of GEAR, the final nail was put into the coffin of nation-building. From that moment, the only conception of the nation was indigeneity, and no form of state emancipatory project became the object of thought. As the new bourgeoisie scrambled to acquire capital through the state, such access was provided primarily by means of linkages to White capital through state-brokered deals known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and through the awarding of government tenders, rather than the privatisation of state assets per se. However, debate regarding access to such opportunities has revolved around who is the ‘most native’: indigeneity becomes the way to claim resources, jobs and all other perceived entitlements. This has led to an argument about who is more indigenous, and hence to nativism, the view that there is an essence of ‘South Africanness’, which is to be found in ‘natives’. What follows from this conception is a stress on the ‘native’, which itself leads to privileging the twin ideas of birth and phenotype (‘race’) as the essence of the indigenous and, thus, as the basis for personal accumulation and legitimate private acquisition ‘in the general interest’.62 While an adherence to neo-liberalism and human rights discourse conforms to the need of the new Black bourgeoisie to form a joint oligarchy with their White counterparts within civil society, in the absence of any alternative popular nationalism the rhetoric of nativism also provides the legitimate basis for claims to entitlements in uncivil society. Since private accumulation, more and more noticeable in the corrupt activities of politicians, shows that the state no longer represents the nation but only the interests of a small oligarchy, it is understandable that people with entitlements in uncivil society may redefine a national subjectivity in their own interests (Hayem, 2013). At the same time, along with the stress on indigeneity, the idea of the migrant has been subjectively uncoupled from that of labour. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s the idea of ‘migrant labour’ was the central way of conceiving migrants, today they are thought of as ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘asylum seekers’. In the 1970s and 1980s, the apartheid system was understood as founded upon cheap migrant labour; consequently, at liberation, one of the dominant pressures was to sedentarise labour (Neocosmos, 2010a: 66–77). As a result African, migrant labour was discouraged,

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if not systematically stopped. The separation of migrancy from labour provision has also meant its separation from the economy and, hence, from a contribution to the economic development of the nation. Today, migrants are seen as coming to steal (jobs, housing, etc.) and not as providing anything to the country. Together with a South African exceptionalism held by people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, according to which South Africa is superior to the rest of the African continent because of its levels of industrialisation, its democracy and its ‘miraculous’ transition, this discourse constructs Africans as the Others of post-apartheid South Africa; it sees itself as having the ‘right to exclude’. The deployment of violence then becomes understood as a legitimate right exercised to defend the coincidence of national and personal economic interests. The combination of all these factors has made it possible to construct a politics of fear of Africans, or Afrikagevaar in Afrikaans.63 The ‘right to exclude’ easily translates into the ‘right to kill foreigners’ in order to defend the nation and ‘freedom’, which the government  – because of its adherence to human rights discourse  – is either unwilling or unable to do. Thus: ‘We are the ones who fought for freedom and democracy and now these Somalis are here eating our democracy’;64 or again: ‘The government is now pampering them and taking care of them nicely; as long as the foreigners are here we will always have unemployment and poverty here in South Africa ... there is too much of them now, if the government does not do something people will see what to do to solve the problem because it means it is not the government problem, it is our problem’ (cit. Misago et al., 2009: 28). The origins of this politics of fear are, clearly, the state politics applied in South Africa from the early 1990s onwards. Its three main components are systematic state xenophobic discourse and practice, nativist ideology and a hegemonic conception of South African exceptionalism (Neocosmos, 2008; 2010a: 141–7). None of these has been affected by neo-liberal notions of human rights and their centrality in the South African constitution and legal system more generally. Instead, because human rights discourse (along with its attendant multiculturalism) is inimical to the construction of political subjects and cannot think beyond legal subjects and interest-bearing citizens, it has contributed to the systematic depoliticisation of the people. As a result, within uncivil society, the dominant political subjectivity remains precisely a state politics of patronage, violence, fear and xenophobia. The politics of xenophobia – for it is a political choice we are talking about – is one determined (in the strong sense) by the structure of the state and the antinomy between civil and uncivil society. It is only an alternative politics, such as that affirmed by Abahlali – which emphasises that ‘An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves’65 – that has the capacity to shift subjectivity, but at the extreme cost of being subjected to state violence. In 2008 there was no xenophobic violence in the areas of Durban where Abahlali had a strong presence. Indeed, Abahlali currently

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affirm the only subjectivity in South Africa that has the capacity to authorise a mode of politics beyond both state nationalism, founded on indigeneity, and state democracy, founded on the victimhood of human rights discourse. The xenophobic politics that dominate in many African countries (as indeed elsewhere in the world)66 are an obvious indication that we have yet to achieve our freedom. The French revolutionary Saint-Just put it clearly in 1793: ‘the homeland of a free people is open to all men of the world’ (Saint-Just, 2004: 551, my translation). We have yet to think through the kind of politics that will enable us to achieve that conception of freedom in today’s world.

The state politics of exclusion The thinking of politics as subjectivity is not an easy matter, as one must attempt an analysis from the point of the ‘in-existent’ rather than the ‘existent’, to use Badiou’s language.67 This thinking must be in excess of the given categories of social divisions, including identities. The ‘in-existent’ here are, of course, the politically excluded of uncivil society, those who do not count, or, in Rancière’s terminology, ‘the part of no part’ (Rancière, 1999: 9). I have attempted to make sense of the effects on subjectivity of a process of depoliticisation of thought (of the depoliticising or technicisation of politics) as a product of human rights discourse, transitional justice and attendant neo-liberal conceptions and practice. In particular, if we wish to understand violence in the neo-colony, we need to start by understanding the state politics of exclusion. The political exclusion of those deemed to be foreigners occurs as a result of subjective exclusion founded on a notion of the rights of the indigenous, which are defined by the state as founded on a social category.68 But this right is itself made possible by a systematic process of depoliticisation – through the replacement of political agency by juridical agency – in which people gradually become incapable of thinking for themselves and simply follow state ideologies like zombies. As a result, it is not just ‘foreigners’ who are excluded from rights; large sections of the population in what I have called uncivil society are also subjected to political exclusion and deprived of the right to rights; they are in fact ‘in-existent’ in the domain of civil society where citizenship rights prevail. More than this, the state deploys violence in uncivil society as a standard mode of rule. It thereby considers the majority of the population, to all intents and purposes, rightless, as if they are the enemy, and the poor in particular as the potential object of war. There is no other name to designate a state that is both post-national and that treats the majority of the people as a (potential) enemy than a ‘neo-colonial state’.69 Subjective exclusion is backed up by the deployment of state violence, particularly in the domain of uncivil society, but such violence is also deployed by those who are unable or unwilling to think beyond state subjectivities. This form of exclusionary

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violence is systemic in the sense that it is a direct effect of state politics. In South Africa, the currently dominant form of violence (post-1994) can be referred to as ‘systemic violence’ in order to distinguish it from other forms of violence in Africa, such as riots or revolutionary violence (e.g. in Egypt, Tunisia and Burkina Faso in recent times), the carving out of imperial and local fiefdoms (e.g. in DRC, Somalia and Libya), or inter-party or ethnic violence (e.g. in Kenya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan). Unlike the idea of structural violence, the idea of systemic violence, as used here, involves identifiable perpetrators. Most analyses equate structural and systemic violence (e.g. Žižek, 2008); I am concerned, rather, to distinguish the two because systemic violence, while not enacted by exceptional ‘evil individuals’, is at the same time not a simple effect of structure. Political choices do exist. Systemic violence in South Africa in the present sequence is primarily deployed against the politically excluded or political minorities: the poor, women, children or infants, and African outsiders or foreigners, i.e. broadly speaking, the working people. Hence it is political exclusion – i.e. exclusion from politics – and not social exclusion and the identitarian development of social boundaries, that must feature at the core of any analysis.70 To avoid misunderstanding, I should also emphasise that by ‘political inclusion’ I am not referring to variants of corporatism where inclusion takes place under statist conditions. A genuinely democratic state can only be one that enables the inclusion, in the field of politics, of politically independent popular organisations. The idea of ‘political exclusion’, as used here, is not that dissimilar to that of ‘political minority/majority’ as distinct from ‘numerical minority/majority’. Political presence is clearly distinct from numerical size or social presence. The point is to emphasise not so much the social location of the excluded as their political location, i.e. their incapacity to have their voices heard within the formal political sphere, which in this (state-democratic) instance is the domain of civil society. It is thus political exclusion/ inclusion that is theoretically prior to social exclusion/inclusion and that is a central condition of the latter’s existence; and it is this that ultimately explains the collapse of emancipatory nationalism into a xenophobic simulacrum of itself. To say that violence is systemic is not to make a sociological observation; perpetrators, as I have emphasised, are not exclusively state agents. Systemic violence often takes place among the poor themselves (e.g. xenophobic violence, gender violence). However, it is political exclusion, i.e. exclusion from politics, rather than (transition to) democracy, that must be seen as the ‘independent variable’, so to speak, in any understanding of the deployment of violence; this is because, given such exclusion, an affirmative politics is not being heard. This is precisely what is happening to the politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo, which all trustees (including state agencies and NGOs) are desperately trying to silence, so that the movement does not feature in the national political process. All evidence points to the fact that such systemic violence is on the rise.71 Clearly, this phenomenon is not to be viewed simply as an

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effect of increases in levels of poverty, which themselves are dire. At the same time, violent riots and protests also occur in South Africa and throughout the continent, but these are arguably reactive to systemic violence, while being regularly portrayed by the state as pathological or simply as a demand for services gone out of control because of the involvement of agitators. Thinking beyond the confines of transition theory is imperative in any attempt to move beyond the subjective limits of neo-liberal capitalism and liberal democracy, beyond those of state democracy and state nationalism. This is necessary if we are to derive from the inclusive affirmative politics of the North African events the kind of thinking required to understand changing political subjectivities. Emancipation from neo-liberal capitalism in Africa must still begin from affirming the secular nation, although in different ways from the manner in which it was conceived in the 1960s. But if it is valid to characterise the African state as post-national in form, then it follows that state political subjectivities are unable to help us think an emancipatory politics. If no emancipatory politics can emanate from thinking within the parameters of the state, such political subjectivities must be sought elsewhere, within what people think and do when they rebel against oppression. This is the main lesson of Egypt and Tunisia for today.

The deployment of systemic violence at Marikana We are now in a position to return to the issue discussed towards the end of chapter 11, namely the South African state’s violent response to the rebellion of miners at Marikana in August 2012. The Marikana massacre was not simply the result of the state acting on behalf of capital and finally showing its true colours under pressure from a rebellious proletariat; it was also the effect of a state subjective logic inherent in the manner in which the South African state thinks politics, namely its relations with people. Within the context of the centrality of violence in the neo-colonial state’s relations with people in the domain of uncivil society – particularly since 2008 – the massacre at Marikana becomes clearly comprehensible and far from exceptional. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest the adoption of specific state policies that emphasise greater reliance on the deployment of police violence against people in uncivil society. This in turn is reflected in a number of notorious events that have been reported in the mass media, so that knowledge of police violence becomes apparent to more than its victims. The only problem is that such occurrences appear as exceptional to those ruled within civil society, especially as the media images, however dramatic they may be, do not encourage any critical thinking but only simple affects (horror, disgust, anger) which quickly fade away or which, at best, find an outlet in temporary protests or what is known as ‘advocacy work’. The Marikana massacre’s supposedly exceptional

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character was made particularly apparent by its becoming the subject of a commission of inquiry within the legal framework typical of state–people relations within civil society. Of course, the false idea of the violent exception merely serves to deflect attention from the reasons for the regular deployment of systemic violence in uncivil society. A number of analysts have argued that the deployment of police violence at Marikana on 16 August 2012 against striking miners was the outcome of a deliberate policy that had been in operation since 2011. The Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution said in its submission to the commission of inquiry: the police operation at Marikana was in line with a policy that had the backing of senior officials of the South African government, that involved the deliberate intensification of violence against people involved in public protests. The units that were deployed at Marikana were units that fell under a division of the South African Police Service [SAPS] (the Operational Response Services Division) that was specifically created for the purpose of advancing this policy. Though in the aftermath of the public outcry that followed the killing of Andries Tatane by police in Ficksburg in April 2011, government signalled that it had abandoned this policy, effectively it merely remained dormant and was re-introduced at Marikana and has subsequently continued to be pursued. The South African government and SAPS have therefore deliberately and consciously violated the rights to freedom of assembly, demonstration, picket and petition provided under Section 17 of the Constitution (CASAC, 2013: 8, par. 8).72 David Bruce, one of the main researchers of this issue, notes that, while there had been few people killed by police in demonstrations after 1994, ‘during a period of less than five months, from the middle of February 2011 to the beginning of June [2012] eleven people were killed in demonstrations’; nine of these deaths ‘appear to have been a direct consequence of the adoption by the SAPS of brutal new methods for dealing with public protests’ (Bruce, 2012). For Christopher McMichael, the change in policy within SAPS dates from its militarisation in early 2010. After that date: SAPS has become more associated with a war on the wider public. The Independent Police Investigative Directorate has seen a substantial increase of deaths in police custody and reports of abuse and torture by officers ... the killing of protester Andries Tatane brought national attention to the increased lethality of police crowd control tactics. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal this year alone, there has already been

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the trial of the Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit for extrajudicial killings and the shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Umlazi (McMichael, 2012). He continues: ‘This violence against political dissent can be considered as a front in what many independent social movements are calling the “war on the poor” in which the police, often aided by South Africa’s sprawling private security sector, “are here to drive the poor out of the cities, contain us in the human dumping grounds and repress our struggles”.’ And he concludes: ‘The militarisation of police therefore is not about mobilising to win a protracted war against a specific enemy but is reflective of transnationally-floating concepts of “asymmetric war” in which state forces engage in “low-intensity” (but still very violent) conflicts with a range of non-state actors from “terrorists” and armed gangs to “insurgent” publics.’ There is little doubt that the police see themselves as conducting a war on criminals, and the doctrine of ‘maximum force’ has been promoted by a number of politicians (CASA, 2013: 10–14). Yet the core issue is that those who protest are considered as criminals and therefore liable to suffer the consequences of violence; the fundamental problem is the criminalisation of protest, which is what happened in the Marikana case. The wider issue consists of the state considering the majority of the people of the country as its enemy.73 It is for this reason that greater police violence was deployed against the Marikana miners, who were considered enemies of the state. The regular deployment of systemic violence is reflected not only in the militarisation of the police, but also in its politicisation and the increased numbers of deaths in police custody, themselves reflecting an increasing use of torture.74 There would surely be different ways of confronting popular protest and contradictions within uncivil society if people were not assumed to be the enemy. The murders of demonstrators and the deaths in police custody contribute to the general increase in police violence in uncivil society as the neo-colonial state loses control over the people. That perpetrators of violence in the police force are rarely successfully prosecuted simply adds to the problem of state repression by contributing to the creation of a culture of state impunity. Fundamentally, it is the creation by the state of distinct domains of politics governed by distinct modes of rule and thereby dominated by distinct political subjectivities – distinct ways of posing problems and thinking solutions – that allows uncivil society to remain invisible and incomprehensible to those in civil society. Much as in colonial conditions, the violence and slaughter take place in another world – mediated and thus vulgarised and misrepresented by occasional media images – where the usual tenets of democracy and citizenship do not apply, or apply insignificantly. In this way, the ingrained authoritarianism of the neo-colonial state can be hidden under its democratic self-appellation.

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conclusion: thinking a new state form or snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? Thousands of new possibilities arise in connection with these contradictions at every moment, to which the state – any state – is utterly blind. We see young female doctors from the provinces care for the wounded, sleeping among a circle of fierce young men; and they are calmer than they ever were, knowing that no one will harm a hair of their head. We also see an organization of engineers addressing youth from the ghettoes, begging them to hold the square, to protect the movement through their fighting energy. We further see a row of Christians on lookout, standing guard over Muslims bent in prayer. We see shopkeepers feeding the unemployed and the poor. We see everyone talking to neighbours they do not know. We read a thousand placards where each person’s life joins in the History of all, without a hiatus. The totality of these situations, these inventions, constitutes movement communism. For two centuries now the sole political problem has been this: how to ensure that the inventions of movement communism endure (Badiou, 2011c: 159–60, translation modified). Badiou’s account of the alternative practices and political inventions that exceeded interests and identities during the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo in February 2012 is followed by the very question which I wish to broach in concluding this chapter on the state in Africa. The problem is put by him precisely: how are we to think the endurance of these inventions, for, when the freedom movement decides to enter the state or to ‘capture’ power, excessive subjectivities are rapidly transformed into the expressive subjectivities of interests, hierarchies and identities? The result is that defeat is achieved as a consequence of ‘victory’, so that ‘victory’ appears to be ‘paradoxically’ undermining popular initiative.75 To think our way round this issue and come to grips with some of the problems involved, it is useful to return to the comment by Marx in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, namely that ‘Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it ... the state has need ... of a very stern education by the people’ (Marx, 1875: 326, 329). I suspect that we can make much more of this particular formulation than of the ‘withering away of the state’, as it makes the point that people need in some way to ‘subordinate’ the state to their will and ‘educate’ it, whereas the idea of ‘withering away’ like a leaf on a tree does not provide us with any indication of the agents of this transformation. If I could be allowed an ungrammatical turn of phrase, thinking should pursue the idea that the state must ‘be withered away’ as the result of an affirmative politics. The idea would be not only to attempt to think the state from a point outside the state, but also to try to capture intellectually the subjection of the state to organised

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politics with its roots in society, so that a true conception and practice of democracy can begin to see the light of day. We need to distance our thinking from the conception of ‘questions’ posed as problems for the state to resolve and visualise these more in terms of a relationship between state and people to be changed. The ‘land problem’, the ‘agrarian question’, the ‘housing question’, the ‘woman question’, the ‘national question’ and the ‘problem of development’ were all in the classical Marxist literature variants of a ‘social question’, which was seen as resolvable uniquely by state power. For Arendt, the ‘social question’ was the one issue on which all revolutions foundered and which finally forced them to abandon their romantic conceptions of popular power embedded in ‘communal councils’: ‘freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself ’ (Arendt, 1963: 60). The result was greater and greater reliance on bureaucracy and coercive methods in order to solve the ‘social question’. This argument should be recognised as a clear example of a state conception of the impossible. While it may indeed have been imperative to deliver food to starving peasants in revolutionary France or Russia, it was also the case that popular initiatives to do so have been either ignored in the literature or undermined by state practice or both.76 If we are to think of this process as one of fundamental democratic transformation, and not so much focused on a process of coercion and violence  – as in the idea of a class ‘dictatorship’ – precisely because we are attempting to avoid identity representation, what manner of raw material is available to us? The issue then concerns the relationship between the state and popular organisations in society. If an emancipatory politics is founded on a politics of equality, we are not talking simply of economic equality, but rather of equality as a political affirmation and as a practice. The politics of emancipation cannot therefore be the politics of the poor or of any other social grouping; they must be a politics for everyone. In this sense, the thought of politics emanating from Abahlali will be limited by identity if these politics are to be understood solely as the ‘politics of the poor’.77 Although it is necessary for an emancipatory politics to originate among the politically excluded (the ‘in-existent’, according to Badiou), if it is to retain its emancipatory character it cannot simply remain the politics of a particular social group. For a politics of excess to develop beyond interest, beyond identity, it would need to develop against identity and therefore attempt to sustain its excessive subjectivity over the social division of labour and hierarchy. So long as politics remain locked within identity – even progressive popular identities – it becomes difficult to sustain a process towards emancipatory political thought. It follows that a state which purports to enable emancipation must be one that provides the conditions for independent popular organisation and the development of a politics at a distance from its own thinking – quite a contradiction, for the state would have to provide the conditions for its supersession by society itself – but what

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it clearly means is that the oligarchy is no longer ruling. This requires strong enough popular power to prescribe to the state without fear of repression. Africans have two advantages in this regard. Firstly, given the neo-colonial character of the current African state, an emancipatory politics can only begin through a popular nationalism and pan-Africanism, along the lines discussed by Fanon, for example, so it cannot be thought as unique to any one class or social grouping but already possesses a universal character ‘potentially’, so to speak. Secondly, ‘tradition’ in Africa is still constantly lived and invented and, therefore, contradictory in nature and not automatically regressive or ‘obscure’ (in Badiou’s sense of the term), as it tends to be in Europe. ‘Traditional political subjectivities’ in Africa, which are modern political inventions rooted in the past, may contain both reactionary and progressive politics; they may indeed enable a politics ‘at a distance’ from parliamentary state politics precisely because that subjective distance is potentially already present within a ‘traditional’ domain of politics. Such subjectivities may be open to use in a popular subjectivation process, as we shall see in chapter 15. What this means is that it becomes perfectly possible to think and practise a ‘protracted’ politics of the ‘peaceful resolution of contradictions among the people’, which is to be located within ‘tradition’.78 Without beginning to think a kind of alternative along these lines, it will be extremely difficult to confront systemic violence in a satisfactory manner, i.e. in a manner rooted in popular-democratic practices of equality. In terms of the relationship between a progressive state form and popular organisations, it may be useful to review some examples from Latin America, especially the case of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. The value of the literature here is rather limited, as it restricts itself to thinking the relations between the (more or less ‘neo-liberal’) state and ‘independent’ social movements and political identities. Yet even this provides some pointers that are worth noting. In Zibechi’s work, for example (2010, 2012), the emphasis is on ‘anti-state’ social movements, which show that ‘the marginalized can be considered political subjects’ (2012: 190). In Latin America, even in those states considered progressive (e.g. Brazil), states combine ‘social plans’ with militarisation to control the ‘dangerous classes’ that proliferate in the urban metropolis, which they see as a threat to stability. The state violence thus deployed has led to a situation of ‘low-intensity’ or ‘legal’ civil war through the establishment of a ‘permanent state of exception’, along the lines theorised by Agamben (2005). This situation has led to rebellions, and which Zibechi and others are intent on understanding. It is worthy of note that Zibechi recognises some of the limitations of the sociology of social movements, arguing that, rather than being expressions of social place, ‘societal movements’ are constituted by ‘moving away from their original and inherited place (in society)’ (2012: 209). Yet he is too wedded to a geographical notion of territorial space, so that ultimately his conception of popular politics remains expressive of social relations, with the result that excessive subjectivities are not analysed.

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Zibechi’s urban social movements form popular neighbourhoods which survive outside the control of state regulation and the market in autonomous spaces. ‘In this new kind of movement, self-construction and self-determination take the place of demands and representation.’ Although ‘this change is still very much in its infancy ... it parallels what we have seen in indigenous movements since the eighties’. In particular, such movements place territory at the centre of their activities, along with notions of autonomy and self-government (p. 214). What Zibechi seems to do is to extol an anarchist vision of popular autonomy from both state and market regulation; there is little conception of transforming the relations between state and people, because an analysis of popular excessive subjectivity is lacking. In themselves, ‘autonomous organisations’ do not necessarily imply an excessive subjectivity beyond identity and state politics. To establish this would have required a different form of investigation, for to distance oneself from the state must be primarily understood not in territorial or social terms, but fundamentally in subjective political terms. One noteworthy episode in Zibechi’s account concerns the experience of a popular organisation in Santiago de Chile in which women were central, and which the dictatorship of Pinochet was not able to defeat, but which eventually collapsed during the democratisation of the state, as it allowed itself to be incorporated into a Left civil society of NGOs and political parties (Zibechi, 2012: 229–31). This illustrates quite clearly that continuity in what Badiou calls ‘movement communism’ requires not so much spatial distance as enduring subjective distance from state politics. When it comes to Venezuela, Zibechi notes that there are today ‘six thousand urban land committees and two thousand technical water boards through which millions of people are taking control of their own lives’ (pp. 242–3). Although such organisations expanded under Chávez’s presidency, their origins pre-date him, and it was the popular mobilisation in which they and others engaged in 1989 that both enabled his coming to power as the traditional political system collapsed and defended his regime from a coup in 2002 and its aftermath (p. 244). The rule of the state was therefore dependent on and engaged in policies that favoured the urban and rural poor, including land reform and the provision of subsidised social services. It seems, therefore, that Arendt is quite mistaken; the ‘social question’ and popular organised power are not necessarily mutually contradictory. Yet the impression we get from the literature is that social movements in Caracas remain simply social movements, even though their identities become ‘radicalised’ and their relations with the state transformed. In both Bolivia under Morales and Venezuela under Chávez, the state has been transformed somewhat, so that the literature refers to a ‘post-neo-liberal’ state or to a ‘hybrid state’, which has provided conditions for new organisational forms of resistance against capitalism.79 Yet, at the same time as popular politics were enabled, ‘under Chavez, the links between state and society were reconfigured, as the state

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once more took on the role of benefactor and protector, particularly to the urban poor’ (Fernandes, 2010: 82). After 2004, as a new state orthodoxy was consolidated, A range of intermediaries has been involved in this task of political incorporation. Chavista political parties made a greater effort to penetrate and manipulate mass organizations in order to impose a leadership hierarchy and party line over these movements ... Cultural institutions have sponsored local cultural initiatives as a way of reconsolidating a patronage system ... alongside renewed corporatist linkages between state and society, neoliberal logics have persisted in certain demarcated areas (p. 85). There has been a massive explosion of community media in Caracas, especially the radio in poor communities, facilitated by state legislation, as well as the development of new identities, as the youth in particular take pride in their African and indigenous identity. Overall, then, the lessons from Latin America are mixed, at least as they are expressed by some of the available literature. In the absence of analyses of excessive subjectivities, this literature simply provides us with contradictory images of a ‘hybrid state’ which combines neo-liberal and national-populist forms along with a ‘civil society’ of social movements that must navigate these state contradictions in order to assert their ‘interests’. Apparently a state logic is still hegemonic in Venezuela and it has been difficult to overcome corporatist subjectivities. However, it also seems that a different relationship between state and society is not impossible a priori, so that a state form of rule which provides the conditions for the overcoming of the state’s own dominance over people can be thought, if not immediately secured. For this to become the object of thought, we also need to come to grips with the subjectivities of both ‘human rights’ and ‘tradition’. These have traditionally been conceived as polar opposites in post-Enlightenment thought, yet people often live within both simultaneously, so that locating them in opposition to each other in our thinking is quite inadequate.

notes 1. As I have already stressed, the idea of ‘the people’ refers to a political category (either of state or of emancipatory politics) rather than to a sociological category. Who the people are in terms of their social locations differs in any particular context and was traditionally established analytically by Marxist political activists. Two classical ways of doing so can be found in Cabral (1980: 75–9) and Mao (1933, 1957). For important recent discussions, see Badiou (2013a) and Rancière (2015: 92–8).

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2. It should be clear that referring to the ‘withering away of the state’ does not amount to a political prescription, but is simply an attempt to bear in mind the ultimate horizon of all human emancipation; see Badiou (2010b: 62–4; 2013a: 16). 3. Or Lyotard’s (1984) idea of the ‘end of meta-narratives’, which amounts to the same thing. 4. During the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo in February 2011, the TV channel Al Jazeera referred to the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as ‘people power’ on numerous occasions. 5. See, for example, Sadiki (2011) and also Khiari (2011). 6. See http://ictj.org/en/news/features/4540.html. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is an international NGO based in New York City and founded by the South African liberal TRC vice-chair, Alex Boraine. It was reported in early 2011 that president-in-waiting Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire had pledged to set up a truth and reconciliation commission, presumably as soon as he consolidated his power by force of arms; see http://af.reuters.com/article/ivoryCoastNews/ idAFLDE7371YH20110408, accessed 13/04/2011. 7. ‘Opportunity’ to spread the gospel of transitional justice? For pursuing careers or to spread the faith? The language used is extremely revealing in itself. See Madlingozi (2010: 208–28). 8. The seminal text here is Teitel (2000); but see also Wilson (2001) and, more recently, Chapman and Van der Merwe (2008). There is an extensive bibliography on this topic. 9. See Wa Mutua (2001, 2002), Chatterjee (2002) and Neocosmos (2006a). 10. See Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/40306. 11. The German NGO Inwent, for example, has specialised in constructing and training in the use of such indices. 12. This political subjectivity is an example of what Badiou refers to as a ‘reactive’ subjectivity: for example, ‘the reactive subject is all which orients the conservation of previous economic and political forms ... in the conditions of existence of the new body’ (Badiou, 2009c: 108). I have given examples of this subjectivity in chapter 5. 13. See Harvey (2005b: ch. 3) and also Atris (2011). 14. Nativism is particularly appealing to the new young Black middle class in South Africa and is combined with a fetishism of the market and the West. One of its neo-colonially derived tenets is the view that popular movements of the poor are manipulated by outsiders, invariably Whites; as a result, poor people are denied the capacity to think for themselves. 15. It is significant that the ubiquitous signifier at the protests of Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 was the Egyptian flag, which made the evident point that the protesters were affirming a new nation, which the regime no longer represented. For a detailed attempt to think the end of the end of history illustrated by these events, see Badiou (2011a, 2011c). For a more conventional Marxist analysis, see Achcar (2013). 16. See Neocosmos (2008, 2010a) and, of course, the classical analysis in Fanon (1990).

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17. This does not preclude the existence of other forms of violence, nor does it assume that liberal-democratic states do not exercise violence on certain of their citizens; however, the fact remains that the extreme violence and mass slaughters of the Western (neo-)liberal state take place beyond its borders and are well hidden from its own populations, apart from in controlled images. 18. Including the more sophisticated versions, such as Robert Meister’s and Mahmood Mamdani’s. See Meister (2002a, 2002b); Mamdani (1996a, 1998b); and also Nagy (2008). 19. See Marshall (1964); I return to a discussion of Marshall’s work in chapter 11. 20. In a lecture at the University of the Western Cape in 2011, Mahmood Mamdani advocated a notion of ‘survivor’s justice’ as opposed to the ‘victor’s justice’ derived from the Nuremberg model. The former is necessitated by the fact that victims and beneficiaries have to live together. The idea is important, but it is not at all clear which social force(s) would have an interest in upholding such a notion and what kind of political practice would enable it. Indeed, this idea seems to suggest the existence of a politics beyond interest (i.e. beyond social location), which is what I am arguing for here. 21. See International Center for Transitional Justice (2011). 22. I emphasise ‘continuity of the rule of law’ as, despite the fact that the laws of the apartheid state were racially discriminatory, the legitimacy of that state and its laws were never questioned by the incoming ANC and the new democratic state. See Mamdani (2000b). 23. Meister (2011) addresses the contradictory character of human rights discourse in detail. 24. The following can only be a brief sketch. The state in Africa is in need of serious detailed analysis beyond the vulgar essentialisms of Africanist prejudices: ‘politics of the belly’, ‘neo-patrimonialism’, ‘parasitism’, etc. 25. The president of South Africa has been sucked into this process through the payment by the state of the cost of massive refurbishments to his private residence, to the value of more than R200 million. On the so-called Nkandlagate scandal, see, for example, Mail & Guardian, 5–11 July 2013. 26. For details, see the UN Human Development Reports. 27. As does Satgar (2012), for example, who sees the nature of the South African state as simply expressive of a worldwide process of ‘capitalist restructuring’. 28. One of the most important works on the role of international and local NGOs in structuring the contemporary form of neo-colonialism is to be found in Peter Hallward’s brilliant detailed analysis of the NGO undermining of the Haitian people’s attempt at political independence under Aristide; see Hallward (2007: esp. ch. 8). 29. For example, in Botswana, where an invented ‘tradition’ is used to regulate the urban poor; see note 33. 30. See Mamdani (1996), Chatterjee (2004, 2011) and also Guha (2000). 31. The term ‘uncivil society’ is also used by Bayat (1997).

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32. See Selmeczi (2012) for the use of the category of ‘biopolitics’ with reference to control in South African cities. 33. In some African countries, uncivil society is regulated by completely different sets of laws from those of civil society. In Botswana, a state-reconstructed national ‘customary law’ is deployed exclusively for control of the working people in urban as well as in rural areas. There is even a specific force to police such law. It is easy for accounts of Botswana’s liberal democracy to overlook this core feature of the state, for, as with all liberal accounts, research remains exclusively within the domain of civil society. Of course, this ‘bifurcated’ mode of rule was central to the colonial and apartheid state; see Mamdani (1996a). The point which the case of Botswana illustrates is that distinctions between forms of rule are not restricted or reducible to the urban–rural divide. 34. The conflation of popular politics with mere agency is what makes possible the conflation of civil society with organised interests; I return to this point in the next chapter. 35. According to a Wikipedia entry on protests in South Africa, ‘South Africa ... has one of the highest rates of public protest in the world. During the 2004/05 financial year about 6,000 protests were officially recorded ... and about 1,000 protests were illegally banned. This meant that at least 15 protests were taking place each day in South Africa at this time ... the number of protests has escalated dramatically since then and [it was reported] that “2009 and 2010 together account for about two-thirds of all protests since 2004” ... the number of protests was ten times higher in 2009 than in 2004 and even higher in 2010. Just under 40% of all protests take place in shack settlements.’ See also Alexander (2010); for this author, the ‘underlying causes’ of these protests are economic, and he provides no discussion of agency. Generally, the politics of these protests stress community interests (rights and ‘service delivery’) and many are led by ANC members, so that they rarely show evidence of an excessive politics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Protest_in_South_Africa, accessed 24/04/2011). For more up-to-date figures, see http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014–02-05analysis-bonfires-of-discontent-in-horrifying-numbers/#.UvNOgmKSyzN, accessed 06/02/2014. It was reported by the police that in Gauteng province alone (the richest province in the country) 569 protests had taken place over three months (November 2013 – January 2014), of which 122 had ‘turned violent’. 36. On ‘the right to have rights’, see Hannah Arendt (1973). Arendt understood that the state could exclude people from rights within its borders. See also Rancière (2004). 37. Municipal councillors and ward committees together often operate like traditional chiefs and their henchmen in their control over local communities. They are the ones who most frequently seem to see human rights discourse as an obstacle to their powers; hence their recourse to violence. See Sacks (2010) and Piper and Deacon (2008). 38. Abahlali baseMjondolo press statement, 21 April 2011, www.abahlali.org. 39. For a detailed analysis of the creation of political illiteracy by the South African state and popular responses to it deploying precisely a sophisticated politics, see Selmeczi (2012).

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40. For the documents relating to the Slums Act as well as the South African Constitutional Court judgment, see http://abahlali.org/node/1629. 41. The detailed events of the attacks can be found in Chance (2010). 42. Abahlali press release, 15 October 2009, http://abahlali.org. 43. Abahlali press statement, 9 March 2011, http://abahlali.org. One example of the way in which councillors exercise their power over residents of poor communities is that they are often in charge of nominating those who receive employment. This happens in situations when construction companies set up their sites, as they are obliged by legislation to employ a percentage of members from the local community. Councillors are usually entrusted with selecting potential workers. They stipulate that only card-carrying members of the appropriate party will be chosen. Abahlali have been resisting this in areas where they have some influence, by nominating people through drawing lots in order to ensure fairness. Councillors and party members have reacted by violently attacking Abahlali. This is one example of what Abahlali refer to as ‘the politicisation of service delivery’ and is one of the reasons behind attacks on the organisation. 44. It is particularly noteworthy that the attackers of Abahlali formulated what they saw as the issue in ethnic terms. Thus their slogans concerned ‘recapturing’ the community for ‘Zulus’ from the ‘Pondos’ who had supposedly taken it over. The use of ethnic slogans clearly attempted to re-establish the identities of place and the power of ethnic interests which Abahlali have been so successful at overcoming. See Chance (2010). 45. The dominant accounts of the May 2008 pogroms insist in the main on the centrality of socio-structural objective factors (poverty, inequality) in accounting for xenophobic violence. They are hence simply deterministic, denying agency to perpetrators. The problem is that xenophobic violence in South Africa has no social foundation as such, other than ‘the nation’ (Hayem, 2013). The arguments that follow are taken from Neocosmos (2010a), especially from the epilogue, pp. 117–49. 46. See Althusser (1971); even an academic discipline of ‘victimology’ was created. 47. Western Cape Khulumani member, cited in Madlingozi (2010: 213). 48. The new state in South Africa dates from 1990 and not from 1994; 1990 is the date of the entry of the ANC formally into the state; 1994 is simply that of the first elections by universal franchise. 49. See, for example, Neocosmos (2006b). 50. Khulumani has a membership of 55,000, all victims of human rights abuses under apartheid; the overwhelming majority are poor. 51. See Steven Friedman in Business Day, http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/ Content.aspx?id=140782, accessed 20/04/2011. A recent report on violence in South Africa states: ‘The police are ... critically important protagonists in collective violence, both when they are absent from scenes of mass violence, and when they themselves engage in collective violence against protesting communities’; see Von Holdt et al. (2011: 3).

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52. Franco Barchiesi has argued that work became the ‘normative premise of virtuous citizenship’ during the post-apartheid period, thereby presumably leaving those without work outside civil society in the eyes of the state. See Barchiesi (2011a, 2011b). 53. For details, see Neocosmos (2010a: 87–8). 54. See Mail & Guardian, 23 October 2000. 55. See http://www.vukaplan.co.za/project2.html. 56. The following account is taken from the Mail & Guardian, 29 October 2000. 57. See Business Day, 29 October 2000. The Draft Bill on Immigration has helped to create and legitimise a culture of xenophobia in uncivil society. 58. See http://mail.unwembi.co.za/pipermail/anctoday/2001/00020.html. 59. The police have an interest in arresting as many people as possible, as they are promoted on the basis of the number of arrests made and not on the number of convictions. See Neocosmos (2010: 125–7). 60. On ‘community policing’ in South Africa, see Hornberger (2008). It is also common for police to illegally destroy the informal shelters of shack-dwellers and to participate in illegal ‘forced removals’. Examples abound. 61. See Misago et al. (2009) and also the commentary in Neocosmos (2010a: 130–3). 62. See Neocosmos (2010a: 143–4). 63. State politics in South Africa have been focused on fear since the 1970s, although at the time what was stressed was the fear of Blacks and Reds (i.e. Communists). The appropriate terms were then swartgevaar and rooigevaar. That the state is still able to whip up hysteria in order to assert its rule speaks volumes about the continuity in state politics from apartheid days. See Neocosmos (2008; 2010a: 141–7). 64. NAFCOC leader, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, Mail & Guardian, 5–11 September 2008. 65. Abahlali baseMjondolo, ‘Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg’, 21 May 2008, for example, http://abahlali.org/node/3582. 66. See, for example, Žižek (2008: 35, 87). 67. For example: ‘There exists in any world in-existent multiples on which the world confers a minimal intensity of existence. But any creative affirmation is rooted in the identification of these in-existents of the world. Fundamentally, what counts in any real process of creation, irrespective of its domain, is not so much that which exists as that which in-exists. One must learn from the in-existent’ (Badiou 2011b, 6 April 2011, my translation). 68. I have argued at length elsewhere that indigeneity (autochthony) is not a question of history, parenthood, race or descent, let alone ‘blood’; it is not natural; it is simply defined and constructed by state power, and (unless resisted) actualised in subjectivity. It can be redefined according to circumstances. See Neocosmos (2010a: 144). 69. The Mail & Guardian of 12–18 September 2014 sported a front-page headline which stated: ‘SA spooks fixed Guinea poll’. The article referred to claims that had been put forward in a New York court of law, according to which ‘South African business and intelligence interests rigged elections in Guinea’ in 2010. Irrespective of the veracity of the report, that this kind of practice actually enters the thinking of

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the South African state is simply indicative of the depth of neo-colonial depravity to which the post-apartheid state has sunk. 70. A report on in-depth empirical research on violence in seven South African townships has noted: ‘It seems political entrepreneurs thrive in conditions where people are feeling excluded from mainstream political processes’ (Von Holdt et al., 2011: 68). It is precisely these so-called political entrepreneurs, those I have referred to as ‘power-brokers’, with access to state resources, who are able to mobilise people for collective violence. 71. Systemic violence is arguably at its most extreme in rural areas, but that is where it is the least visible. A particular mode of rule based on ‘tradition’ operates in that context; see Mamdani (1996a). I discuss ‘traditional society’ as a domain of politics governed by a specific mode of rule, and thereby its own subjectivities, in chapter 12. 72. Andries Tatane was a community organiser shot to death by police during a demonstration; the incident was caught on television cameras. An editorial in the Mail & Guardian, 5–11 April 2013, reported that during that week ‘the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) went to great lengths to explain why the case against the police officers who killed protestor Andries Tatane in 2011 had fallen apart and the seven accused were acquitted’. What seemed to be an open-and-shut case, the paper comments, was bungled by an unprepared prosecuting authority. It is suggested by some that the NPA has in general not been acting impartially but has been politically biased in favour of a powerful group of politicians. See http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1455. 73. It was reported by the BBC that ‘evidence leaders’ – the lawyers working alongside Judge Ian Farlam on the Marikana Commission of Inquiry – had stated ‘this was a paramilitary operation, with the aim of annihilating those who were perceived as the enemy’. See http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30002242, accessed 14/12/2014. The notion of war on an ‘internal enemy’ is also central to the manner in which states in Latin America relate to the urban poor, according to Zibechi (2012: 191ff). 74. For deaths in police custody, see http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012–08-28marikana-police-torture-takes-central-stage; and see also http://allafrica.com/stories/ 201109300055.html and http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013–03-01-southafrica-the-police-state-of-brutality-humiliation-impudence/#.Ud7oT9JBOSo for the story of the Mozambican who died in police custody after being dragged behind a police vehicle. For the increasing use of torture, see Mail & Guardian, 1–7 February 2013, where it is noted that during 2011/12 the Independent Police Investigative Directorate ‘received 488 complaints of deaths as a result of police action’; this excluded Marikana. ‘In more than half of the cases, a suspect was killed during an arrest. During the same period there were 720 reports of deaths in police custody.’ See also Mail & Guardian, 21 January – 6 February 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014– 01-30-apartheid-culture-of-police-brutality-still-alive-today, where it is shown that ‘a culture of impunity characterises the abuses of detainees in the police and prison services’. 75. As argued in Buhlungu (2010). 76. For the case of France during the revolution, see, in particular, Gross (2002).

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77. This is the position taken by Abahlali themselves. 78. ‘Protracted politics’ here follows Mao’s notion of ‘protracted war’ (Mao, 1938), where the central concern is the provision of unity and hence in a sense the ‘correct handling of contradictions among the people’, so that unity may be achieved and maintained through discussion and debate and coercive measures minimised. For the importance of this argument, see Badiou (2013d). 79. For the case of Bolivia, see, for example, García Linera (2006), and for useful critical commentaries, for example, on García Linera’s political writings, see Webber (2015) and Zibechi (2010). In Bolivia the state considers itself to be a ‘social movement state’, which illustrates the limited nature of social movements discussed in chapter 6. For a much more sophisticated analysis of popular struggles in Bolivia, see Gutierrez-Aguilar (2014).

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Chapter 14

The domain of civil society and its politics At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world. – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1972 One must be neither on one side nor on the other; that is the difficulty. The whole problem is to refuse to accept the choice that is imposed upon us: either tradition or modernity, either tradition or the market. A situation must be created which escapes from these alternatives. Even if things in the world conform to it, we must not allow ourselves to be regulated by this antagonism. The crisis of emancipatory politics, the crisis of the Idea, consists precisely in being captive to this opposition and to believe that there is no alternative between an apologia of the contemporary democratic world and the identitarian tension of tradition. – Alain Badiou, La Philosophie et l’événement, 2010 (my translation)

human rights and tradition in africa The core argument of this chapter and the next is that human rights discourse and traditional discourse, or what Mamdani (2000) calls ‘culture talk’, are expressions of two different modes of rule which operate within (and largely structure) two distinct domains of state politics: the first within a domain of civil society and the second within a domain of traditional society. In each specific domain expressive state politics differ, requiring somewhat different modes of thought in order to enable an alternative excessive politics. The argument deployed here is a conscious attempt to move away from considering tradition and modernity, citizenship rights and traditional entitlements, as in opposition to each other. Both suggest a distinct ‘culture’ in which political idioms are expressed as well as regulating and constraining the development of excessive thought, but in fundamentally different ways. Neither is more ‘democratic’ than the other, if by ‘democratic’ we mean its popular rather than its state manifestation.

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Throughout this chapter, human rights discourse is considered as a mode of thought that demarcates a civil society of citizens; it is precisely through a discourse of human rights that the state can exercise its hegemony and hence its rule in civil society, with only marginal recourse to coercion. It is not my intention to dismiss in any way the struggles for rights – most struggles begin by fighting for rights in any event – or their existence as irrelevant. My intention is rather to elucidate the characteristics of the state discourse and the politics that it enables and inhibits, particularly so in relation to some of the cherished concerns of social democracy. Similar points will be made in the next chapter with regard to a discourse of culture and tradition, so that ‘tradition’ is also to be understood primarily as a set of subjectivities that govern a specific domain of politics in which a state mode of rule, enacted through ‘traditional practices’ embedded in the ‘customary’ or in ‘culture’, is subjectively dominant. Throughout this book, ‘tradition’ is considered as contemporary to modernity and not as a simple leftover from the past; it is created, produced and reproduced, and not simply inherited from history. As I have already established, human rights discourse concerns a state-focused politics. These politics are supposed to be geared towards transforming the state itself by holding it accountable to its own laws; they are concerned with changes in subjectivity within the politics of the state, so that the state is pressured to adhere to its own democratic rhetoric. They are not concerned with transforming the practice of state politics as such. Human rights discourse is ‘at best’ concerned with the inclusion of all within civil society, with the collapse of uncivil and traditional societies into it. If freedom is a distancing from the state or the absenting of the state in thought, it cannot be thought, through a discourse of rights that are won from the state and that the state subsequently grants to people. The problem at this point consists in thinking the politics of civil society in a different manner. A critique of civil society and human rights discourse has already been outlined in earlier chapters, but the question with which I shall be concerned here is: how do the subjectivities that predominate within civil society force us to orient our thought in relation to politics, to emancipatory politics in particular? Central to the thought of politics within civil society is the notion of citizenship. The issue around which active politics is thought within civil society and human rights discourse is the distinction between passive and active citizenship, while a notion of ‘social citizenship’ that attempts to include social justice within the politics of civil society is sometimes also addressed.1 The citizen – either individual or collective – is the bearer of rights; whether she chooses to exercise them actively or not is left to her. If she does not, it is either because she is ignorant or lazy, but she remains a ‘passive agent’. Thus political passivity is the ‘default position’ in civil society, because rights are primarily realised within the juridical process; political agency is more rare, as an effort has to be made to organise collectively, with the result that this rarity itself

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gives the impression that if agency were to exist, then emancipation would follow (sooner or later). This is precisely the idea behind the oft-repeated statement that human rights are ‘empowering’, and it illuminates why human rights activists insist on the ‘vibrancy’ of civil society. At best, therefore, the existence of human rights may enable the organised expression of identities and interests. Of itself, it can only enable the thought of an expressive state politics, but certainly not freedom. It should be clear that political agency is not necessarily emancipatory despite the insistence of liberalism. As I have insisted, an emancipatory politics is contingent on excessive thought. If agency remains purely expressive, at most the result is only the reproduction of liberal democracy and its underlying capitalist relations. The state simply has to manage more (or different) organised interests. Capitalism has always been adept at incorporating resistance to power so long as such resistance does not contest the social division of labour and hierarchy. This is precisely what human rights discourse does not do. It has the specific effect of undermining any independent thought of politics with excessive potential, of depoliticising excess, so that all subjectivity is brought back within the ambit of state politics. In Africa, human rights discourse reproduces the neo-colonial state and neo-colonial capitalism. It does this through a process of depoliticisation and reinforcement of state power. This becomes particularly apparent in those cases where a domain of civil society is created practically ex nihilo, so to speak, through foreign ‘development assistance’, as the absence of an already existing civil society makes the process more visible. This was true in Malawi, a case Harri Englund (2006) has studied in depth. Through reference to this case study, it will be shown precisely how human rights discourse creates and reproduces a state politics that corresponds to the prescriptions of the neo-colonial ‘democratising mission’. As I have already engaged in a detailed critique of human rights discourse in earlier chapters, it is not my intention to repeat it here. Neither shall I be making a case for social or economic rights as against political and civil rights, for example, or for a concept of social justice; nor shall I be insisting that human rights discourse is individualistic while African conceptions are more communitarian. These arguments have been rehashed in the literature ad nauseam. Yet, at the same time, thinking politics in terms of rights has a number of effects – deleterious subjective effects – which it is important to outline in some detail; these tell us much about the manner in which state politics are deployed as forms of representation and as a way of undermining popular independent thinking. In this particular way of thinking, representation is mainly to be undertaken by NGOs rather than parties, for the latter are not dominant in civil society within the neo-liberal conception of democracy. My predominant concern is limited to arguing for a discursive move beyond the language of rights, citizenship and identity, and towards a universal language and politics of human emancipation and equality now, in current practice and not as a future goal. This is why I insist

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that the politics of human rights are state politics, and not because rights should be dismissed as irrelevant. Rights included in a ‘bill of rights’ or written in international conventions are not irrelevant; they simply do not enable an emancipatory politics to become the object of thought, but rather attempt to hold the state accountable to such documents, and thus ensure that human rights govern the relations between state and people within the domain of civil society. Human rights do not produce freedom; that requires the absence of the state, or at least the ‘distancing’ from state categories. To enable an emancipatory politics, what is required is a politics of subjective excess over rights, citizenship and identity. Within the domain of civil society governed by citizenship rights, an excessive politics was most obviously apparent in the experience of May 1968 in France, where the new political subjectivities which developed in that location contested the division of labour and hierarchy, and threatened to undermine what, for Durkheim, held modern capitalist society together.2

the politics of human rights demarcate a civil society of citizens Whoever is engaged in popular struggles for democratic emancipation in Africa today is confronted with an immediate problem concerning human rights. While a discourse of rights is seemingly necessary for thinking democratisation, given that the state regularly flouts these rights, human rights seem to refer to a discourse mainly propounded by neo-liberal interests, whether local or foreign. Several repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere (such as Zimbabwe, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Iran) invoke, or have recently invoked, a discourse of nationalism in opposition to one of human rights. As an activist, one finds oneself in a seemingly irresolvable discursive contradiction between human (predominantly individual) rights and national (or group or identity) rights. At times this contradiction is central to government itself. For example, during the second state sequence in South Africa of 1996–2008, a central contradiction appeared in the form of a state commitment to neo-liberal conceptions of rights that went hand in hand with a sensitivity to national and racial oppression in Africa. This was reflected in the government’s contradictory reactions to a number of different issues, including authoritarianism in Zimbabwe and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Indeed, this contradiction is arguably still constitutive of the subjectivity of the new South African bourgeoisie itself. On the one hand, their private accumulation is based on an adherence to neo-liberal precepts premised on human rights; on the other, a sensitivity to racism and, to a lesser extent, to Western hegemony in African affairs leads to a stress on their ‘Africanness’ in relation to their White compatriots. The manner in which the vagaries of this contradiction were navigated explains much about the contradictions of the Mbeki presidency (Neocosmos, 2002).

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But this contradiction is not one that an emancipatory vision should accept, in South Africa, Zimbabwe or anywhere else. I will argue that this contradiction emanates fundamentally from within state ways of thinking politics, and that to transcend it one should situate oneself outside state thinking. Both sides of this debate deploy forms of politics that are ultimately depoliticising of the majority. As we have seen, in neo-colonial states the right to rights is only available to certain groups of the population; others – usually the weakest and poorest – do not possess this right to rights and are regularly subjected to state violence. As Rancière (2005) insists, the idea of a ‘democratic state’ is an oxymoron. All states can only be oligarchic. It is just that some states are forced to adhere to the rule of law and to respect rights to a greater or lesser extent as a result of a history of popular struggles and continuing popular pressures. The point must be to think popular politics as human emancipation, not to be limited by a subjectivity that focuses on adhering to a supposed Western ideal. We should never forget that in Africa, where the state acquires its legitimacy primarily from the West and only secondarily from its people, the conflicts that result in people experiencing the destruction of their livelihoods and increased repression are at bottom structured by relations and subjectivities central to state and empire. This should be apparent from the fact that the African state – which has been singularly unable to genuinely represent the nation since independence  – owes its survival primarily to whether it conforms to Western precepts. Today this means whether it is labelled ‘democratic’ or not by the West, i.e. whether it fulfils a number of measurable criteria defined by global hegemony and not by whether democracy is rooted among its people. Especially after Thermidor in 1794 and the defeat of the notion of ‘natural right’, human rights discourse in Europe became concerned with placing limits on the state control of private property, on the freedom of ‘commerce and enterprise’. Subsequently, as labour organised itself, the rights to work, assemble, organise, strike, participate in politics and criticise power were fought for, producing an ongoing struggle for democracy as the state resisted or attempted to limit such popular gains. These victories were never seen by emancipatory thought in its ‘classist’ forms (particularly Marxism) as being sufficient for fundamental change in society, although their incremental adoption and the addition of socio-economic rights after World War II provided the foundation for a social-democratic conception of emancipation. For Marxism, it was clear not only that equal rights in an unequal society were impossible, but also that they were a product of the ideological mystification of bourgeois individualism. In any case, the state could not defend rights, as it was liable to systematically undermine liberty: ‘the right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life [i.e. with the state], whereas in theory political life is the only guarantee of human rights’ (Marx, 1844: 165). This

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statement expressed clearly the inescapable contradiction of relying exclusively on the state as the defender of rights and freedom. Today, in the 21st century, when classist conceptions of emancipation have largely become politically redundant, human rights discourse is not simply said to be about limiting state control over society (‘civil society’, the ‘market’ or whatever), but its importance is extended to refer to the enabling of popular struggle – to be ‘empowering’. Writing about rights and development in South Africa, Jones and Stokke (2005: 2) assert that, given the obvious depoliticisation of development as much of its rhetoric has lost its radical edge, ‘we need to encourage a democratic politics of rights’. What this means, they suggest, is not only that states should protect and promote rights, but that ‘citizens, and their organizational representatives, be considered legitimate participants and active agents in the process’. The point then ‘is not only that formal rights are guaranteed and institutionalised ... but that a politics of acquiring and transforming such rights are enabled’. Such a politics is equated here with an ‘active citizenship’ in civil society. They continue: ‘the missing link for this transformative potential for human rights is not so much about asserting legal claims’ as about enabling political struggles in which human rights ‘crystallize the moral imagination and provide power in the political struggles’. Whatever ‘crystallizing the moral imagination’ may mean politically in practical terms, the authors provide little evidence that human rights discourse can enable even political agency and active citizenship; this is simply taken for granted. It may in fact primarily enable legalistic agency. In any case, we have seen that active citizenship is not in itself emancipatory. Indeed, the whole tenor of human rights discourse is to disable political thought, as it remains squarely within what might be called a ‘descriptive’ – because fundamentally technicist – way of conceiving politics. All politics, if it is to attempt to be emancipatory, must rather start from an excessive political perspective, one that opens new political possibilities by ‘prescribing’ actions to the state. Human rights discourse cannot enable such an excessive and prescriptive politics, which falls well outside its ambit of thought. The active citizen is, in Badiou’s words, ‘a living pillar of the established order’ (Badiou, 2014a, 9 October 2013, my translation). Human rights discourse becomes subjectively hegemonic during the absence or weakness of popular struggles, and not during their presence; the absence of popular discourses and practices of democracy, and their replacement by the platitudes of the state liberal version, make it possible for human rights discourse to be seen as the only intellectual reference for a Left politics, a politics that cannot ultimately be enabling of excessive thought. The supposed liberatory potential of human rights discourse must be vigorously contested, for it is fundamentally moral rather than political, conservative rather than transformative, legal rather than political. For it is the same conception of human rights that provides the justification for the intervention of power on behalf of victims; victims who, because of their lack of agency, must be politically represented by

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local or international NGOs, states or transnational institutions, and finally by empire itself. It is these two sides of human rights discourse – the side of agency and the side of representation and trusteeship, neither of which can exist without the other – that provide the dominant framework for thinking emancipation today – a framework that is not developed ‘at a distance’ from state thinking. It is within the interstices of this antinomy that the law exists, as human rights discourse is unavoidably caught within the contradiction that it is state power, with its legal and other institutions, which is capable of emancipating humanity. Only institutionalised power, according to this mode of thought, can bring about freedom, justice and equality. Today, the so-called Left politics of human rights is also the politics of ‘multiculturalism’ and the much vaunted respect for the culture of the Other in the globalised order, except, of course, when this Other has the temerity to be really different (Badiou, 2001). Indeed, the dominant notion that all cultures must be respected and tolerated ceases to apply when such cultures are themselves intolerant. The genealogy of this general viewpoint, which continues to guide Western notions of ‘humanitarianism’, can be traced directly to the British colonial ‘repugnancy clause’, which was regularly inserted into legislation on the African continent. British colonial power was prepared to tolerate the existence of African cultures without interference so long as their practices were not ‘repugnant’ to ‘morality’ or ‘good conscience’; in other words, to liberal sensitivities, justified by reference to liberal ‘humanitarianism’ (Mamdani, 1996a: 115). Mamdani (1996a: 116) comments that the ‘repugnancy clause’ was ultimately concerned with the exigencies of defending power. Of course, when cultural practices were considered ‘repugnant’ in the eyes of liberal colonialists – when they were seen as a possible threat to power – they did not hesitate to outlaw or transform them (see e.g. Schmidt, 1990). The nature of emancipatory politics cannot be thought under conditions where human rights discourse is hegemonic; such politics then end up being replaced by a vacuous conservatism. In order to deconstruct these arguments in greater detail, this chapter will first address the historical origins of social rights and the question of citizenship in the work of T.H. Marshall, and then assess the contradiction between agency and victimhood that underpins human rights discourse today. Finally, it will give an example of how, in practice, human rights discourse, while ostensibly promoting citizenship and freedom, produced the exact opposite in a neo-colonial context.

The state construction of the social: social democracy, social citizenship, social rights, social cohesion and social justice It is useful to start with the dilemma central to classical sociological thought, namely that the fundamental problem of the maintenance of any society was to combine state authority with a moral community of citizens. While political theory was concerned

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with the management of social change by the state in order to maintain stability (Cowen and Shenton, 1996), classical sociology was concerned with the existence of a ‘collective consciousness’ (in Durkheim’s sense in his Division of Labour in Society) which would set the commonly agreed parameters of social life in the nation. It was in society and not in the state that the basis for social integration and cohesion was to be found, because society was founded on a social division of labour, which by its very existence created interdependence. While in turn-of-the-20th-century sociology the notion was accompanied by a heavy dose of social pathological and religious ideologies, this does not diminish the argument’s significance for the contemporary world. For example, it is this ‘moral community’ that can provide the conditions for a consensus in the public sphere, according to which recourse to violence will be excluded from the public arena. This idea of ‘being together’ (le vouloir vivre ensemble) finds resonance today in contemporary Africa. It refers to consensual politics, and is central, for example, to the liberal political philosophy of Hannah Arendt (e.g. Arendt, 1982). It should be noted in passing that this notion of ‘living together’ is not without its own problems, as it can be founded on the exclusion of whole sectors of the population, as with consensual racism, which can be ingrained within society as a whole. Consensus can indeed be very repressive. What is important for our present purposes is that, for classical sociology, the development of such a moral community could not be a simple state imposition, but had to be constructed in a dialogue between state policy and a number of class interests so as to embed consensus within the whole fabric of capitalist industrial society. In this manner a kind of ‘social contract’ (the term itself is highly indicative of market relations) could be created that would restrict social conflict to its bare minimum, most evidently in post-World War II European social democracy. This required a certain amount of ‘give and take’ so that capital and labour could agree to manage their differences for the common good. The achievement of this form of ‘social-democratic corporatism’ required a conception of social rights applicable in theory to all citizens of the state as well as a historicist notion of the progress of humanity towards a gradually equalising telos driven by technological progress. This perspective is quite contrary to today’s neo-liberal discourse, which assumes that a moral community can be built through constitutionalism, the rule of law and the overall legitimacy of the state. These features of liberal democracy simply amount to restrictions on state politics at the level of the state itself; wider society is excluded from holding the state directly to account except through organised interests in civil society, something that does not necessarily imply consensus. Ultimately, the whole of society can only have a say at election time about which members of the oligarchy are in power, but not about the character of the state as such. The African experience from the colonial period onwards has been one of state coercion, little legitimate authority and an attempt to build a moral community through state ideology of one

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form or another, but most often revolving around the idea of development. There was very little effort made to ground this ideology in the lived relations of ordinary people. Such a process was illustrated particularly clearly in Mobutu’s Zaire, where an attempt to forge a cultural consensus took the extreme form of a simulacrum of pan-Africanism in the notion of ‘authenticité  ’, which evidently bore a purely formal resemblance to popular tradition. The only conception that comes close to measuring up to a moral community today is no longer sought within African popular culture, but within what is sometimes termed a universalised ‘human rights culture’ imported from the West. This idea seems to be on the way to becoming some kind of new ‘civil religion’, in the sense outlined by Rousseau in the Social Contract (Wa Mutua, 2002). The referent is usually to some form of social-democratic rights culture which, on the Left of the political spectrum, is also associated at times with ‘social justice’. At this stage of the argument, it is useful to briefly discuss a major theorist of post-war European social democracy in order to elucidate the details of the argument that links social rights to moral community and capitalism itself. T.H. Marshall’s work provides an interesting solution to the problem of the creation of a social consensus. T.H. Marshall was unique in laying out the link between human rights and development within what was the dominant paradigm of social democracy in Britain in the post-World War II period. What is interesting about Marshall’s writings is not only his serious commitment to a genuinely social democracy, in which the negative effects of market capitalism on the ‘working classes’ could be fundamentally countered by state social spending, but also his belief in a notion of progress as leading to equality, an equality that he saw as embodied in citizenship. Of course, this was supposed to be a political and not an economic equality, i.e. an equality of citizens in relation to the state, itself constructed by the state. This was a double dream in capitalist conditions; yet in conditions of post-war economic boom and of full employment it made sense, especially in the context of the statist social optimism of the period. This optimism saw an end in sight to the seemingly linear succession of civil, political and social rights, this end being largely equated with ‘the more equal society of the future’ (Marshall, 1964: 346). Such a future was being realised in post-war Western Europe with the setting up of ‘welfare states’. ‘Social rights’, which these states were meant to deliver, were ‘the rights to an acceptable standard of economic welfare, to health and ... to education’ (1964: 290). Although these rights would not lead to a totally egalitarian society  – after all, inequality was required in order to spur the working classes to work harder – the idea was to produce a ‘free and independent working class, protected and sustained by their basic rights as citizens’ (p. 287). The aim was to create an inclusive society, in which everyone would benefit from citizenship rights and thus ‘be accepted as full members of the society’ (p. 78). In this way, ‘the inequality of the social class system may be acceptable provided the equality of citizenship is recognized’ (p. 78). ‘Citizenship

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has itself become, in certain respects, the architect of legitimate social inequality’ (p. 77, emphasis added). What should be noted here is not so much the obvious attempt to legitimise class oppression – an oppression evidently sustained by the state – but rather the double conception of the importance of state legitimacy, a notion itself central to classical sociology: firstly, the subtle understanding of the necessity for a moral order, in order to generate a necessary commitment to the system, so that the poorer sections of the national community can develop a stake in it; and, secondly, the location of this stake in the rights of citizenship. This method of resolving the contradiction, which I identified earlier, between state power and a societal moral order was addressed in a specific way by European social democracy. It was made possible partly by the manner in which Fordist capitalism combined accumulation, exploitation, consumption and full employment policies, with the role of the state as a virtual monopoly source of welfarism in the economic boom of the post-war period. As with all social-democratic conceptions, rights – in this case, citizenship rights – could only be effective in the absence of scarcity. Moreover, the whole argument was founded on historicism; in other words, the belief that history was on the side of progress and universal equality. At least four distinct silences permeate Marshall’s discourse, silences that enable his statist solution to the contradiction between state power and social citizenship. The first and perhaps most obvious silence is the absence of reference to trade union and other working-class struggles in Britain, which were largely the reason for the political influence of socialism (and its insistence on some form of social justice), including the presence of a Labour Party within the state. The ‘Left turn’ of most of the peoples of Western Europe after World War II did not exclude Britain, and at the time the prestige of the Soviet Union among the working people was high. The human rights that Marshall proposes are all granted by state legislation, not won by any popular struggles. Briefly then, Marshall’s transition to social rights was not characterised as depending in any way on popular struggles, but only on ‘the march of civilization’ and the ‘spread in all classes of a more humane and realistic sense of social equality’ (p. 98). Social democracy was thus the outcome of ‘historical progress’. In this way, the provision of social rights and the eventual achievement of social justice could be seen as the results of the unfolding of a state logic of rationality expressed predominantly in inclusive social legislation. Secondly, in the light of this state-historicist logic, the rights of political minorities such as women and immigrant workers from (ex-)colonies were not mentioned. Obviously the ‘social rights’ granted by the state in the 1940s and 1950s were the result of a powerful union movement and social compact during the war years, which did not represent other sectors of the working population. It expressed the incorporation of the dominant leadership of the trade union movement into the state.3 (The

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exclusion of women and ethnic minorities or ex-colonial subjects would come to the fore in the 1970s.) The third silence is the obvious ignorance of the declining British Empire: the empire still provided surplus profits to British companies, which in turn enabled the provision of social welfare to the British people. Whatever the details, the access to cheap raw materials from the colonies of the African continent and elsewhere assisted the expansion of the British economy of the time. This was a colonial social democracy, one that has been analysed at length by Cowen and Shenton (1996). The final silence concerns the paternalistic coercive character of the state in the absence of independent popular organisations, and the consequent predominantly passive citizenship. Evidently, these social rights were bestowed by the state, which now included within its institutions ostensible workers’ organisations in the form of the Trades Union Congress. Social democracy was thus a ‘civilised socialism’ which saw itself as representing popular interests for which it was the ‘trustee’, within the context of a historicist vision. Politically, it required a passive populace on which such rights could be bestowed by the state, so that when the state decided to ‘liberalise’ and thus curtail them from the mid-1970s onwards, those left to defend them were in a state of extreme political weakness. Finally, the granting of social citizenship rights was contingent on economic growth, which was itself dependent on market competition. This is why class inequality was not only unavoidable but seen to be necessary; for social democracy, economics always took precedence over political freedom. Wealth was seen as a necessary prerequisite for democracy, never the other way round. The corollary was that the poor, or ‘the indigent’, could never be politically free. It was this point that was to resonate among the nationalist elite in postcolonial Africa. However, the point to stress for our present purposes is that the solution to the contradiction between state power and moral citizenship within the social-democratic emancipatory project of state political equality was arrived at on the basis of a passive citizenship, which presupposed equality of human rights bestowed by the state and a belief in trusteeship and political representation which tied all politics to the state. It was the state that pursued this emancipatory project, for it was representative of the national or common interest. Passive citizenship founded in human rights discourse was thus a necessary political condition for the existence of social democracy as a whole, and it led directly to a statist resolution of the contradiction. The state was to be the primary provider and defender of social rights and the creator of social justice. Today, those who advocate the expansion of social rights to include the ‘right to development’ (e.g. Sen, 1999), explicitly or implicitly, are obliged to assume a similar resolution to the contradiction between state and ‘moral order’ in Africa; this is why the adherence of states to human rights conventions is at the core of their thinking. In the ‘moral community’ of active citizens, no citizen moves out of

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place, because it is allocated rights. There is no incentive to think excess, and politics becomes concerned with asserting rights, i.e. a relation to the state based on citizenship that explicitly or implicitly accepts the division of labour and hierarchy as given. This is in fact, in T.H. Marshall’s own terms, what was to make inequality, hierarchy and power acceptable to the working class. We can understand how Marshall could think that social citizenship was the solution to the problem of reconciling state legitimacy with a community of organised (working-class) citizens. So long as one thinks within a human rights discourse, there is no way to transcend the idea of citizenship as a relation between state and people; even the introduction of a civil society of rights-bearing NGOs post-1980 in Africa has not altered this. Yet today it is much more difficult to put economic provisioning before popular politics, because we live at a time of economic crisis, which has overtaken the conceptions of full employment, mass consumption and welfare provisioning that characterised Fordist-cum-social-democratic forms of accumulation, as well as the Third World developmental state, in the post-war period. Mass unemployment and mass poverty are seen today as unavoidable features of contemporary capitalism. A return to classical social democracy is unlikely, if not impossible, within the current global socio-economic context because it presupposed a large economic surplus, while in any case social democracy seems to have exhausted its emancipatory appeal among the masses of the excluded, at least in Africa, who – if South Africa with its ‘social grants’ is anything to go by – see whatever state provisioning remains as simply useful for survival. The working people of the world cannot be so easily convinced to defer or abandon their thought of emancipation through the provision of economic welfare, state social infrastructure and high standards of living; these are simply absent for the majority in conditions of hegemonic market subjectivity. Fundamentally, the provision of citizenship rights can no longer legitimise inequality, because the state has abandoned any notion of the common good. Its understanding of provisioning framed in terms of the need for ‘social cohesion’ are evidently instrumentalist. Moreover, citizenship rights can today be easily manipulated into entitlements so as to exclude those deemed to be non-citizens, with the result that, rather than creating equality, citizenship can lead directly to exclusion. In addition, the discourse of social rights in ex-settler colonies (Zimbabwe, South Africa) is dominated by the idea of the redistribution of property rights, which are racially skewed, not by any contestation of property rights as such. This is how one must understand the idea of ‘social justice’, which refers to the redressing of historical grievances in respect of the racial division of private property. By virtue of being ‘social’, such justice cannot be universal. In any case, if we are to remain faithful to an emancipatory vision, this can no longer be conceived as state-driven, as the state cannot emancipate anybody; so much should be clear from the failure of the emancipatory projects of the 20th century. Today, if emancipation is to have any meaning,

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social citizenship must be exceeded in political thought, for it can no longer constitute a universalistic conception. From the trajectories of the struggles for independence in Africa, we can note what also happened throughout the world at different periods. This can be understood as a shift from an inclusive struggle for freedom, when the nation is being constructed and is equated with the people, to an exclusive ‘essentialised’ community after independence, when the nation is equated with the state. This can be seen in one of the first struggles for independence in Africa and in one of the last, Algeria and South Africa. In Algeria, Fanon’s (1989, 1990) analyses portray a clear distinction between a period of popular upsurge against colonialism, when people combined to produce a collective subject of politics, taking their own destiny in hand, and a post-independence period, when people became passive citizens of the state, implicitly or explicitly approving of the chauvinism that systematically excluded foreigners. Fanon saw this as a transition from pan-Africanism to narrow chauvinism. I have outlined very similar processes in the South African case, with the difference that the insistence on a civil society of NGOs today is singularly appropriate to the current world (neo-liberal) sequence. In both instances, we can see a transition from an emancipatory political subjectivity to a state-imposed conception of citizenship as indigeneity, which is exclusive of a growing number of Others. The fundamental reason for the change, in either case, is the collapse or defeat of an independent popular emancipatory politics. Understanding the transition in this way displaces human rights discourse from its position of uniqueness, to being only one particular (statist) conception of politics among many; it contributes to a necessary critique of neo-liberalism and parliamentarianism today. If, in wishing to understand the transition from colonialism and apartheid, we remain at the level of the state, party or organisation, the shift is invisible, which is precisely what the rewriting of history by the state post-liberation attempts to achieve in order to show a linear continuity. A human rights culture – i.e. the hegemony of human rights discourse – can thus be understood as part of the process of production and reproduction of what Badiou calls the ‘capitalo-parliamentary system’, i.e. the combination of capitalism and its liberal state, which simply manages the interests of capital. In those countries where the struggle for rights is resisted by the state, human rights discourse often provides ideological support for an oppositional perspective; in this way, authoritarian systems provide a main source of sustenance for liberal democracy so long as democratisation is equated with Westernisation. Citizenship concerns given subjects bearing rights that are conferred by the state. On the other hand, emancipatory politics are, rather, about people who think excess over place, becoming constituent parts of a collective subject through their militant engagement as activists, and not as politicians. Today, a discourse of human rights and democracy has become hegemonic within development thinking – within neo-colonial

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relations. The language is pervasive also in the societies of the South and seems the only way in which human emancipation can be conceived, simply because human rights discourse is seen to provide the parameters within which people in communities resist oppression and assert their rights against the depredations of authoritarian states and capitalist interests. Yet, at the same time, human rights discourse is also the language of the new form of imperialism, the justification, inter alia, for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the slaughter of countless civilians in the process, so that it is always in danger of giving way to much more repressive – because imperialist and racist – politics. The language of human rights and popular participation is also central to the World Bank and is in danger of becoming, in the formulation of one recent publication, ‘the new tyranny’ in development (Cooke and Kothari, 2002). How are we to make sense of this contradiction? How are human rights to be thought politically as opposed to morally? I address these questions in the remainder of this chapter.

The dual character of human rights discourse One can suggest that there are two clear sides to human rights discourse, to a discourse of institutionalised rights. The first is the obvious insistence that agency is enabled by states committing themselves to human rights legislation. That people are interpellated by this state discourse as political subjects (Althusser, 1971; Neocosmos, 2015) does not mean that they are indeed so. This ideology can easily be seen to be false; moreover, that people may be represented by NGOs or by those with knowledge within many ‘social’ movements obviously does not overcome the state conception of politics as representation. The other side of human rights discourse is that of trusteeship, understood as the unique (state) legitimate form of political engagement. Here, people are interpellated by power primarily as victims, not as agents at all, and it is power that acts, as a trustee of their interests, on their behalf. This power may be an NGO, a party, any national state structure, the United States as world policeman (the ‘international community’s right to protect’) or any number of institutions. The outcome of the combination of these two sides of the discourse, the ‘agency’ side and the side of ‘trusteeship’, is the reproduction of a state politics that presupposes depoliticisation. More precisely, even though ‘rights discourses can both facilitate transformative processes and insulate and legitimise power’ (Krenshaw, 2000: 63), the politics of human rights is, at best, a state-focused politics and is predominantly reduced to a technicised process, limited to a demand for inclusion into an existing state domain of politics. A struggle for rights, if it is not transcended, can only end up producing the outcome of a fundamentally depoliticised politics. Indeed, it could be asserted abstractly that, while in pre-liberal writings and practice the state expressed the will of God, in liberal writings and practice the state expresses the will of (Godchosen) Man; freedom simply consists in obeying that will (Althusser, 1971).

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Whereas for classical liberalism, citizenship rights were to be realised within political society – as the concept of sovereignty suggested a participatory component – for neo-liberalism today, citizenship rights are to be realised in civil society (largely equated with NGOs), in a manner that keeps them firmly away from any politics which would question the democratic character of the state itself, because they take place within a framework of mutual legitimation. Civil society under neo-liberal democracy exists solely under conditions of mutual recognition between it and the state. It is this mutual recognition that defines the parameters of the state consensus and is itself the result of struggle. Moreover, the state always retains the monopoly of national universality, while civil society organisations can be legitimate only if they represent particularistic interests. Any claims to such universality – if a popular organisation purports to represent ‘the people’s interests’ or ‘the national interest’, for example – would mean that such an organisation is liable to be seen by the state as a threat to its monopoly of universality. One can begin to understand, therefore, the potential threats to state democracy and the possibility of the sidelining of human rights discourse when the state evidently fails to represent the national interest and the common good, as with the neo-colonial state. For in this case, collective popular political subjectivities may begin to represent the national interest more accurately, with the result that they are likely to be considered as a possible threat to power itself. The deployment of systemic violence and the formal decline into authoritarianism then become more likely. This is arguably what is occurring in South Africa today, as human rights discourse has been sidelined (particularly from 2008) and replaced by the greater deployment of systemic violence in uncivil society.4 On the other hand, a state national consensus is structured primarily within the civil society of citizens. Other forms of politics in uncivil society or traditional society are seen as beyond the consensus, and can thus be delegitimised in state discourse. These politics and the organisations that embody them operate outside or beyond the limits of civil society. The distinction between state democracy and, say, colonial or apartheid forms of authoritarianism can be said to concern the extent and forms taken by such exclusion. That state (or other) power, because of its representative function, is expected to decide on one’s behalf, and that this is systematically internalised in the process of identity formation, is arguably what lies at the root of issues of powerlessness as disparate as those of HIV/AIDS, the alienation of youth from society, the absence of people-centred development and poverty. Conversely, the ‘common-sense’ ‘obviousness’ of the immutable absence of a capacity to make such decisions means that an even weaker Other can always be found to provide a simple and obvious answer to one’s powerlessness in those cases where the intervention of power, in whatever form (state institutions, market, NGOs, family, etc.), fails to live up to expectations that it has itself cultivated. Xenophobic violence, as well as violence against women, children, babies, the elderly (the weakest sectors of society), is closely linked to powerlessness.5

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Having systematically depoliticised the population and disabled their engagement in active politics, state agencies and politicians can regularly emphasise the ‘irresponsibility’ of allowing too much free expression and organisation, as this would lead to support for demagogic politics, for capital punishment, xenophobia, racism, and so on. In other words, having produced political illiteracy and ignorance, these are then used as justifications for placing further restrictions on democracy and agency by calling on ‘enlightened despotism’ from those in power – much as under apartheid and colonialism, state-induced ignorance among the oppressed was used as a justification for the maintenance of colonial power. In sum, liberalism and human rights discourse in postcolonial Africa systematically militate against the formation of a political community, properly understood. In the absence of informed political agency and the consequent difficulty in thinking beyond interest, political choices cannot be made by the overwhelming majority, and political morality disappears; these are the necessary conditions for political exclusion and violence. The miserable moralism of human rights discourse is fundamentally part of these conditions. Human rights subjectivity is an obstacle to the formation of collective political subjectivity, with the sole exception of the provision of juridical rights; human rights are and can only be understood as institutionalised rights. In this way we can begin to understand that the process of formation of a human rights culture is one for which the role of the state is central; by accepting human rights as the parameters of political thought, we agree to alienate to the state our right to decide for us what and who is human. The process of institutionalising rights is a process of depoliticising popular struggles and replacing them by state-centred subjectivities. States in Africa have easily been able to get away with this, not only because of ideological confusion and the weakness of alternative centres of power, but because of the immense levels of goodwill and trust with which they were imbued in the immediate post-independence period. Throughout Africa, the technicisation of politics, the evacuation of politics from the state and society, and its replacement by managerialist and commercial ideology have meant the exclusion of the majority from the right to think and the structuring of an elite consensus around political illiteracy and passivity, especially as the state concurrently naturalises its dominance and technicism. In the immediate postcolonial period, the state – quite unsuccessfully – attempted to construct a nation on its own terms, while the people developed little commitment to a state they could never see as being truly theirs. The introduction of multipartyism and elections has not resolved this fundamental problem, and could not possibly have done so, for the people have always wanted a truly popularly accountable democracy (Ake, 2003). Today we are told that there is no alternative to what exists, for this is natural and in conformity with the consensus of the scientificity of state activity. Moreover, civil society in Africa, the realm of rights, has become, sociologically speaking, a middle-class phenomenon, which provides employment and opportunities for social entrepreneurship to

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professionals and members of the elite; as a result, they are the only ones to acquire the full benefits of citizenship within civil society (e.g. Kanyinga and Katumanga, 2003). Finally, the evident connection between human rights discourse and that of market freedom should be recalled. The ‘freeing’ of both markets and apparent subjects coincides; capitalism and state democracy reinforce each other. In case anyone should doubt this last point, it is important to recall how those in power in South Africa so easily swallowed the hegemonic refrain that equated human rights with market freedoms  – the minister of trade and industry once stressed that ‘the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa was substantially advanced by the successful campaign to link trade and human rights’ (Erwin, 1998: 57). Clearly, from a position of power in a ‘post-authoritarian’ state, it may seem that human rights do ‘substantially advance’ or ‘immeasurably increase’ freedom, yet it soon becomes apparent that this ‘freedom’ is nothing like universal, nor indeed democratic, for it excludes the overwhelming majority both from the market and from meaningful political choices. Even the recent human-rights-related ideology of ‘multiculturalism’ espoused within plural societies can be seen fundamentally as a disguised form of racism corresponding to new ‘softer’ and ‘more democratic’ imperial relations. Slavoj Žižek (1999: 216) makes the following comment about multiculturalism and its affinity with the current form of imperialism (usually referred to by the more benign term ‘globalisation’): the form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people – as natives whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’ ... just as global capitalism involves the paradox of colonisation without the colonising nation-state metropolis, multiculturalism involves a patronising Eurocentric distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture ... multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ – it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his/her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content. Just as there is no obvious centre for capital today – capital is literally global – there is no centre for ‘multiculturalist’ racism and no centre for human rights discourse. Human rights discourse is the equivalent of multiculturalism in the legal/NGO realm of civil society: the ideological vanguard of the new form of empire and its neo-colonial state. It has been rediscovered and repackaged by international NGOs, so that popular struggles for rights and entitlements are ultimately transformed into demands for human rights to be delivered and protected by power, and not by

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people themselves. That is why it is so easy to be convinced by the apparently liberatory character of liberalism, for it seems to provide a vision and theory of freedom. However, it is becoming more apparent that just behind the benign and smiling faces of international NGOs or the humanitarianism of the UN lies the hideous grimace of all-out war, militarism, securitisation, and the destructive and systematically anti-human power of the United States, the only superpower and world policeman (Harvey, 2005a). In sum, the politics of the new imperialism today are founded on the discourses of liberal democracy and human rights. This is why it is fundamentally flawed to think that a discourse of human rights has an emancipatory content.6 In case activists should start to feel uneasy, I must reiterate that I am not dismissing struggles for rights; what I have been concerned to argue is for a clear distinction between the struggle for universal freedom and equality by people, and the requests for human rights made to states, NGOs and multinational institutions. It is the latter practice that is dehumanising, as it removes agency from people: various state institutions decide the content of humanity, which they simply reduce to politically passive individuals. Human rights discourse is thus the antithesis of true humanity, as it systematically undermines human agency; it makes bodies sacred, not people with agency, and consequently it ultimately extols the suffering body and not the ability of people to fight back (Badiou, 2001). There can be no emancipatory politics founded on human rights discourse, and proliferating the number of recognised rights in international conventions does not constitute the way forward to an emancipatory future. In this context, to argue for the recognition of a ‘right to development’ or to equate human rights with development (Sen, 1999) is simply to remain within the parameters of liberalism and human rights discourse. Given that such a right can only be secured by political agency, it seems strange to restrict politics to forcing states to recognise it. Whether they do so or not, the development literature seems to agree that the ‘success’ of development initiatives ultimately depends on popular organisation itself. Thus, to argue for development as a human right is simply to put one’s faith in state politics and liberalism. Is active citizenship more prevalent under a regime of human rights? The answer to this question is certainly not affirmative. The relationship between liberal democracy and the ability to fight for rights, especially if such struggles have a universal character, is at best fortuitous. Certainly, just because such struggles may not be obviously apparent under a human rights regime does not mean that people’s rights are not trampled upon by power. Thus, to maintain that ‘development advances freedom’ is to remain within the confines of social-democratic (state) thinking, for it makes freedom contingent on the absence of scarcity. Rather, the opposite slogan is more accurate: development depends on freedom, for without absenting the state there can be no equality. Moreover, such freedom must include the right to think and organise independently of the state and parastatal institutions,

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in order to think emancipation from the depredations of capital, made possible by political liberalism. The liberal state does not grant such rights; indeed, they have to be fought for. Sen (1999: 147) poses the opposition between economics and politics in a statist fashion: ‘what should come first – removing poverty and misery, or guaranteeing political liberty and civil rights ... ?’ His answer is to argue for the primacy of ‘political rights and freedoms’, but he does so in a liberal way, so that it should be the state that grants these rights and ‘freedoms’. Seeing that the state in general will only ‘grant’ or guarantee such ‘freedoms’ if forced to by people themselves, one is entitled to ask how this is to happen in the absence of independent popular politics – a political subjectivity independent, that is, from state subjectivity. The issue then becomes the ability to sustain such political independence in the face of statist political demobilisation after human rights have indeed been ‘granted’. The two distinct sides to human rights discourse are apparent in this discussion: the constant emphasis on agency, which the upholding of such rights by states is said to enable, and an underlying notion of representation and trusteeship, as the state – and power, more generally – sees itself as a trustee of popular agency, given that people are seen as victims – or, at best, as passive bodies – and, therefore, as unable or unwilling to secure those rights themselves. The legal discourse on human rights is situated at the core of this contradiction. So-called democratic states regard that trust as legitimate, as they have been elected by universal suffrage; other states justify that trusteeship in other ways. It is this latter notion of power as trustee that thoroughly permeates the whole discourse of human rights, and that overwhelms popular agency – itself systematically reduced to a ‘passive agency’ – to the point of fundamentally disabling it. If one wishes to find a way around the contradiction between the oppressive state and the necessity to construct a political community in Africa, the arguments of social democracy and of human rights discourse are no longer helpful. They deny the importance of (an emancipatory) politics in favour of the economy and the state, while simultaneously remaining silent about the neo-colonial edifice at the global level, thus reproducing, within the context of empire, the eternal and abstract danse macabre between state and market. Both of these have to be made accountable to the popular will – hence the centrality of politics. While the state is an important component of the field of politics, politics can no longer be reduced to the state. A fundamental rethinking is required, one that places the conditions for political prescriptions on the state at the foundation of a new politics. It is more important than ever that this thinking distance itself from the vulgar money-spinning and miserable moralism of a human rights discourse, which forces people into victimhood, as it has come to constitute a humanism without a project that has discarded human agency in favour of appeals to the state. In the absence of such a critique, the language of ‘decency’ and ‘fairness’ (Rawls) and that of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ (Sen) will

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remain the empty verbiage it now appears to be in Africa, despite the valiant efforts of such thinkers to save it from total corruption.

citizenship rights in action: creating civil society in malawi It is important to reflect on the effects of the introduction of human rights discourse by Western and local NGOs into a setting where they had not previously existed. Post-independence Malawi, ruled with an iron fist by Kamuzu Banda from 1964 to 1994, was suddenly exposed to the democratisation process of the ‘second liberation’ and its attendant neo-liberal discourse of human rights, civil society and liberalisation. In the absence of any ‘rights culture’ among the population, ‘freedom’ – understood as human rights – had not only to be introduced, but the people had to be educated into its meaning and use. In other words, a (more or less active) citizenry had to be created almost from scratch as a new democratic state was constructed, on the ashes of the old autocratic one, by donor agencies and Western interests more generally, through the medium of NGOs, both foreign and local. Central here was a nationwide project of ‘civic education’. Civic education is concerned with (technical) ‘training for citizenship’, and thus is fundamentally about the creation of a domain of civil society where, as we know, state rule takes place through a discourse of rights. Harri Englund’s detailed anthropological study brings out very clearly how such a project operated, and its effects on the poor majority in Malawi. In Englund’s own terms, ‘the paramount tasks of organizations providing civic education was to carve out a space where the substance and implications of human rights could be debated’ (2006: 96). Known as NICE (National Initiative in Civic Education), the project was funded by the European Union and GTZ, the German state’s technical assistance agency. The Malawi democratic state, now under President Bakili Muluzi, had to go along with this and other Western prescriptions in order to benefit from Western political support and funding; yet, under the new democratic regime, ‘dissent, officially more welcome than ever before, must take a prescribed form before it is recognized’ (p. 4). Colonial paternalism has persisted well into the postcolonial period in Malawi, reaching ‘unprecedented depths of cynicism under Muluzi’s democratic regime’, whose ‘blatant abuse of personal and public resources for buying support’ continued a well-established tradition inaugurated under Banda (pp. 17, 45). Englund notes that the incidence of poverty by headcount was 60 per cent of the population in 1992 and had reached 65 per cent by the end of the 1990s, after democracy had been introduced (p. 17). He continues: ‘Poverty is not simply a threat to democracy in Malawi; it is the surest sign of democracy’s limited success. A concept of democracy that does not extend beyond political and civil freedoms provides few tools to address inequalities underlying poverty. The contribution of human rights NGOs

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and projects to entrenched inequalities reveals that genuine democratization did not commence in Malawi during the first decade of liberal democracy’ (p. 18). We now know that this pertinent critique of neo-liberal democracy is limited, for it simply counterposes a ‘genuine democracy’ to the neo-liberal variety. The ‘genuine’ variety is meant to include socio-economic rights in order to address deep-seated inequalities. Yet, as I have argued, the real problem is that democracy is here thought of exclusively as a form of state. It may therefore be pertinent not to ask what benefits citizenship rights offer people (and then to criticise their limited impact), but rather to go beyond the self-definition of democracy universalised by the West and to ask what benefits citizenship rights offer the state. The answer must be that such citizenship rights enable the formation – at least formally, if not always substantially – of a domain of civil society that contributes (along with multipartyism, constitutionalism, etc.) to qualifying a state as a democracy in the eyes of Western donors and neo-colonial interests. Although Englund does not pose the question in this way, he provides plenty of evidence to corroborate its asking, for his discussion shows that whoever benefits from such human rights interventions of a neo-colonial kind is already connected with power. For a start, ‘The European Union-funded project on civic education, with its incomparably extensive reach and resources, was an example of a quite deliberate silencing of those interests that might have revealed the threat that a different sense of human rights might have posed to neoliberalism’ (p. 41). Englund continues by showing that ‘Civic education during Malawi’s first decade of democracy targeted ordinary people as citizens whose awareness of human rights was deemed to be deficient ... Despite its promises of dialogue and empowerment, civic education on human rights in Malawi contributed to making distinctions between the grassroots and those who were privileged enough to spread the message ... [the] civic education project marginalised people’s own insights into their life situations’ (pp. 70, 71). The educators who worked for the project included both full-time employees (at the top of the hierarchy) and volunteers (at the bottom); all considered themselves superior to the people (the ‘grassroots’), who were believed to be ignorant, and that division was studiously maintained, with project employees expecting to be fed by local people during their visits, much like any state dignitary  – a practice in conformity with rural ‘tradition’ in Africa. The maintenance of hierarchies and status distinctions in meetings and workshops, the avoidance of party ‘politics’ and the entrenchment of ‘interest politics’, the supremacy of the English language, the view of ‘communities’ as politically homogeneous, all combined to reproduce power relations, to issue orders and commands, and to configure a hierarchy that ensured the reproduction and maintenance of people ‘in their place’. What really interested people was studiously avoided and ignored; when people themselves defined democracy as ‘talking without fear’, ‘living freely’, ‘free schools’, ‘change in politics’, ‘deterioration in security’ and ‘inflation’, they were corrected and told that ‘democracy means

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a government which is run by the people’ (pp. 106–7). Given that in many rural areas people had been conditioned into voting for the ruling party in exchange for development ‘goodies’ such as clean water and schools, the dominance of patronage relations that characterised the rule of the democratic state in rural areas belied the idea of ‘rule by the people’. Despite acknowledging the history of forced labour in Malawi (both under colonialism and in the ‘one-party era’), civic education officers still insisted that the provision of free labour for development in ‘communities’ was in their interest (p. 110). Colonial habits of the deployment of power take a long time to die in the absence of popular-democratic struggles. As a result, political passivity was produced and reproduced: ‘Although participatory citizenship is promised in rhetoric, the contempt for the situation of human rights keeps it below the horizon. The actual citizenship offered is one-dimensional in its scope ... and even then the object of constant concern is that subjects submit to the right attitudes and values’ (p. 118). Rather than providing ‘freedoms’, the introduction of human rights in Malawi under NGO guidance created ‘unfreedoms’, in the sense used by Abahlali baseMjondolo. Of course, little else should be expected. The features of state politics discussed in chapters 12 and 13 constitute precisely the parameters within which the civic education project NICE operated. Orders, commands and control, the reproduction of administrative hierarchies and social place to which people are restricted, all simply undermine any local democratic initiatives and reproduce the oppressive neo-colonial state. Given the dominance of patronage relations and the violence accompanying them, it seems unlikely that a civil society of active citizens can be created ‘from above’, particularly within a neo-colonial context. It is much more accurate to state that NICE failed even in its own terms, for it ended up creating a domain of politics much closer in its political subjectivities to an uncivil society, as I have conceived it in previous chapters.7 On the other hand, an existing civil society of citizens in South Africa, for example, cannot overcome racism against the new Black petty bourgeoisie. The reason is that the new members of civil society are simply to be assimilated in Whiteness. For after all, what does citizenship mean in such conditions other than the extolling of liberal freedoms? This state of affairs can only serve to reproduce the contradiction I have already noted between human rights discourse and nationalism.

conclusion: a theoretical restatement Following Rancière’s formulations, Žižek notes that ‘political conflict designates the tension between the structured social body in which each part has its place, and “the part of no part” which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality’ (1999: 188). Žižek continues:

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This identification of the non-part with the Whole, of the part of society with no properly defined place within it ... with the Universal, is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernible in all great democratic events ... In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of anti-democratic politics always and by definition is and was de-politicization – that is, the unconditional demand that ‘things should go back to normal’. We are now in a better position to distinguish a truly political struggle (for rights) from an appeal for human rights. A prescriptive demand for rights only becomes emancipatory when, in addition to being fought for by active citizens, it makes a universal appeal and is therefore excessive over identity. Badiou puts it as follows: ‘The theme of equal rights is really progressive and really political, that is, emancipatory, only if it finds its arguments in a space open to everyone, a space of universality. If not, despite all the apparent radicalism a community puts into its system of demands, we have a profound submission to the figure of the state’ (Badiou, 1994: 9). For Badiou, politics begins when people (anyone) are militantly faithful to the kinds of events mentioned by Žižek. It goes without saying that such events include popular upsurges throughout the world and, in our context, the popular struggles for national liberation. Being faithful to such events means not giving up on the new, apparently impossible world that such events foretell (Badiou, 2001; Hallward, 2004). What such events mean is that possibilities now appear, whereas before they could not even be conceived. Who would have thought, before the Haitian Revolution in 1804, that slaves could not only rebel but could defeat both French and British armies to acquire control over their own nation? Who would have thought that Mexican peasants could have fought for a better world in 1910? Or who would have thought that the people of South Africa would have overthrown the oppressive apartheid regime themselves as a result of their own political endeavours? In all these cases and in many others, an egalitarian emancipatory vision was crucial to success. In this way, politics becomes ‘the art of the impossible’, of making possible what appears as impossible or in-existent within current knowledge. ‘Another world’ is indeed possible, but it can only be so on the basis of the reinvention of an emancipatory politics appropriate to our conditions. Of all the rights ascribed to humanity, one of the most important is systematically denied by human rights discourse – the right to think – by denying the possibility of anything different from the consensus around one way of thinking (la pensée unique), of anything excessive to what exists. As a community activist recently stated in South Africa: ‘the leaders [of the country] are saying that it is them who know everything and that the majority of the people can’t think. We are saying that everyone can think’ (cit. Desai and Pithouse, 2003: 17). This must be the starting point of a different conception of politics. To reiterate Lazarus (1996), who founds a whole theory

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of political practice on this axiomatic principle, people are capable of thought. As Badiou and his colleagues state: When all is said and done, the issue in contention concerns the freedom to think; ... in electoral systems there is no freedom of thought. There is only a freedom to hold opinions. This means the freedom to support those in power (in agreement with the government) or those in the opposition (unhappy with the government) and that is all ... Politics is not an opinion or a consciousness, it is a thought which fixes new possibilities ... In politics it is better to achieve freedom through thought rather than to be constrained by opinions (La Distance politique, 2005: 3–4, my translation). In Africa, the struggle for freedom today is not about joining ‘the community of civilised nations’ or ‘advanced democracies’, nor is it about ‘good governance’; these names simply restrict thought to the consensus of the new empire. Rather, this struggle is about reclaiming the right to think, to think at a distance from the state. Arguably, the most striking reclamation of the right to think within the domain of civil society occurred in France during the period usually covered by the name ‘May ’68’. Badiou (2009d) has revisited the politics of this period, which he sees as extending until 1978. What he emphasises as central to the political subjectivity of this period is an understanding that if a new emancipatory politics were possible, it would turn social classifications upside down. It would not consist in organizing everyone in their allocated places, but in lightning displacements, both material and mental ... all those experiments were testimony to the fact that the apparently impossible upheaval was politically possible, thanks to a new kind of subjectivity and to the tentative search for forms of organization adequate to the novelty of the event (pp. 51, 52, translation modified). Political thought within civil society concerns the subjective overcoming of hierarchy and social place, so that the state-induced ‘collective consciousness’, which Durkheim declared to be at the core of social reproduction, is contested and alternatives proposed. We shall see in the next chapter that within ‘traditional society’, too, thought involves such an overcoming, although clearly it works within a different context, which directly impacts on its practices.

notes 1. It is worth pointing out that Gramsci’s distinguishing of ‘passive revolution’ from its more ‘active’ variant is closely related at the level of theory to the distinction between

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passive and active citizenship. For Gramsci, ‘passive revolution’ is a concept devised to interpret ‘every epoch characterised by complex historical upheavals’ (Gramsci, 1971: 114) but which are not characterised by mass popular upsurge; i.e. passive revolution refers to far-reaching changes in state forms that are not combined with popular insurrection. In Gramsci’s terms, passive revolution ‘can simply create a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions’ (p. 184). Structural alterations at the level of the state then impact on ways of thinking – i.e. on political subjectivities. That social scientists have been seduced by this notion should not lead us to overlook that it is state subjectivities which are the focus of concern here. Implicitly, the ‘passivity’ of revolution is linked to the absence of agency, of political activity among the masses. The passive–active dichotomy fails to elucidate what was central to the emancipatory content of the idea of revolution in the 20th century, namely an excessive (because emancipatory) subjectivity. For an example of the deployment of the notion of passive revolution in relation to South Africa, see Hart (2014) and my critical comments in Neocosmos (2015). 2. It should be recalled that, for Marx and Engels (1846: 77–8), it was precisely this division of labour which needed abolishing: ‘the transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relations) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting those material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour’. 3. Although large parts of it remained excluded, as became apparent during the ‘shop steward movement’ of the 1960s. See Huw Beynon’s sociological classic, Working for Ford (1973). 4. There is evidence that state violence is gradually creeping into the domain of civil society itself in South Africa. See, for example, the report in the Mail & Guardian (17–23 July 2015), which indicated that a White middle-class critic of the South African president and campaigner for police professionalism was raided by the police, who ‘smashed through doors inside his property’; the police later apologised (evidently because property is still sacrosanct in civil society). This kind of police behaviour is standard practice in the homes of shack-dwellers and no apology is issued. 5. Although shortage of space precludes a full discussion, human rights discourse has also contributed nefariously to social science research in Africa, as the investigation of causal relationships is no longer seen to be of importance, given that access to human rights provides a simple cure for all social ills, from HIV/AIDS to xenophobia to poverty. The agencies with the power to effect the cure are already given in NGOs. As a result, research, which always has an intellectual theoretical component, has been devalued in favour of mere ‘information gathering’, which requires no intellectual input but the simple application of packaged techniques. 6. This is one reason why it is impossible for John Rawls to think an emancipatory politics, as he notes: ‘The long-term goal of (relatively) well-ordered societies should be to bring burdened societies, like outlaw states, into the Society of well-ordered

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Peoples. Well-ordered peoples have a duty to assist burdened societies’, (2003: 106). For ‘well-ordered’, read ‘the West’; for ‘burdened societies’ read ‘the rest’. Rawls’s work seems yet another attempt to return to Kant in order to save the declining fortunes of liberalism; in doing’; so, he provides a renewed justification for neo-colonial interventions, as the ‘well-ordered’ have the duty to assist the ‘burdened’. For a critique of Arendt’s (1982) earlier attempt, see Badiou (1998a). 7. In Malawi, violence has been enforced by the thugs of the ‘youth wings’ of parties, including the extraordinarily named ‘young democrats’ (Englund, 2006).

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Chapter 15

The domain of traditional society and its politics The crux of the palaver is at the end, when the ‘guilty party’ is rehabilitated as a member of the community. In fact, there is not one ‘guilty party’, but several. All the members of the community feel guilty for not having succeeded in preventing conflict from taking root in their midst. The palaver rises above the law of retaliation, above justice as such ... Naturally the colonizers succeeded in playing down the political role of the palaver. They simply ignored it and, what is worse, concealed it, for they knew how powerful and especially how significant it was. – K. Diong, ‘The Palaver in Zaire’, 1979 (emphasis added) There is no Hutu, no Tutsi. We are all simply human beings. – Statement by Muslims against the genocide in Rwanda in 1994

traditional society as a domain of state politics While in civil society state politics are thought around the concepts of citizenship and human rights, in traditional society it is culture and custom that are the operative terms for thinking politics. Both ‘rights’ and ‘culture’ are, of course, objects of struggle and are never simply given. Tradition here will be understood primarily as a produced subjectivity of state-power relations that demarcate a traditional society. Traditional society is predominantly characterised by a mode of rule that revolves principally around the institution of the chieftaincy, which itself embodies (although not necessarily exclusively) the powers of custom and tradition. In this particular domain of politics, the relations between state and people are thus thought differently from the way they are thought in both civil and uncivil societies. Here it is a certain connection with the past that governs such relations and provides the parameters within which political subjectivity is deployed, although it must be plain that these relations are contemporary with modernity, produced and reproduced to suit contemporary conditions. Because they refer to the past, it is a supposedly unchanging

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inherited culture – ‘the customary’ – that provides the dominant reference for politics in traditional society and not rights as such. Such relations and subjectivities are, of course, always contested and generally ‘invented’ or, perhaps better, ‘remoulded’ to suit the interests of power (Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989). Most of the literature concentrates on the institutional, oppressive, coercive and generally state aspects of politics in traditional society, which is regularly equated with ‘tribalism’, though it is understood that tradition was a colonial creation (Ranger, 1985b; Vail, 1989; Mamdani, 1996a, 2001). At the same time, popular struggles regularly draw on past traditions, particularly those which emphatically involve aspects of the common and the popular-democratic. An important feature of traditional society is that the state power is not clearly demarcated from the rest of society, so that culture and power are intertwined. This is apparent in the fact that the chieftaincy is both an institution of power and one of cultural authority. An attempt to distinguish the two is also apparent in the distinction between the terms ‘tribalism’ and ‘ethnicity’, the former more ‘power-oriented’, the latter more ‘culture-oriented’. I have noted in chapter 3 that, in order to point to this contradictory character of power and culture, some authors distinguish between a (colonially created) ‘political tribalism’ and a (somewhat ahistorical) ‘moral ethnicity’ (e.g. Lonsdale, 1992). I shall argue here that, precisely because traditional relations to power are contested from within culture itself, there may also exist at times excessive potentials within tradition, particularly those associated with a politics of equality and peace. Feminist writers such as Amadiume (1987, 1995, 1997) have stressed this feature of African tradition. Cultural practices that have embodied these politics to a greater or lesser extent still exist in different parts of the continent. Here it will be suggested that there does exist in traditional society the possibility of thinking a resolution of contradictions within community in a non-violent manner, precisely because African tradition does provide resources for thinking politics at a distance from the neo-colonial state. One example in which tradition was exceeded but nevertheless remained recognisable, so that it can be seen to combine both expressive and excessive forms of politics, is provided by the transformation of power relations by the Mountain Movement in Mpondoland in 1960, when the traditional powers of the chieftaincy were for a time transferred to a committee of elected activists and elders (Lodge, 1983; Neocosmos, 1995; Kepe and Ntsebeza, 2011). In ending Part 2, after this chapter, I will develop a brief discussion of how relations between human rights and tradition have generally been conceived politically; this understanding, in substance, has been dominated by colonial conceptions, and has been upheld as well as contested in feminist literature from the Global South. I will argue for foregrounding and thinking a politics of solidarity that transcends the subjectivities of both civil and traditional society. We must begin the discussion of traditional society from the central premise that tradition is lived in Africa and is not just a state conception, as in most of Europe,

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where it has been most obviously identified with identitarian state nationalism and fascism. In other words, by virtue of the fact that people live within traditional society, there is, in Africa, a popular-democratic content to tradition; consequently, not all politics founded on ethnic culture or popular cosmologies are communitarian and obscure. I have already noted in chapter 3 how the epistemic reason of history and social science closes off an understanding of African political idioms as a result of its scientism, which acquires a colonial form when it leaves Western liberal shores precisely because it visualises subjectivity as a reflection of place, which it thus predetermines. Scientism therefore delegitimises tradition a priori. African state nationalism was also contemptuous of tradition de facto, not only because it saw it as facilitating colonial divide-and-rule politics, but also because it had itself absorbed European understandings of scientificity, of which liberal conceptions of the nation-state were key elements. The core intention of this chapter, after the discussion in chapter 14 concerning the political domain of civil society and the contradictions inherent in its culture of rights, is to look at the domain of traditional society in terms of a culture of tradition that governs the thought of politics. In this manner it will be seen that the opposition between liberal rights and tradition can be transcended in thought, along with the dichotomy opposing tradition and modernity. We now know that tradition is contemporary with modernity, but it does not follow that the term itself should be discarded. I wish to insist on its usefulness as a category, as it can be shown to denote a specific domain of politics where subjectivity is distinct from, although interrelated with, that of both civil and uncivil societies. If one opposes liberal rights (progressive) to tradition (backward and obscure), one ends up in a neo-colonial position. This is the case to a great extent in South Africa at the present moment, when, for example, human rights propounded by liberal feminists constitute the dominant opposition to traditional rights to land, which are understood to exclude women. Liberal rights are also opposed to Islamic Sharia law on the African continent, as well as to the contentious issue of female circumcision. The politics of tradition need to be transformed from within the domain of tradition itself, and not from outside in such a neo-colonial manner. There are also extremely progressive subjectivities that can be unearthed from within tradition, particularly because a belief in continuity with the past – through the line of the ancestors, for example – can suggest a particular continuity with past egalitarian systems. More specifically, I am thinking here of ways of resolving contradictions among the people that exceed liberal notions of ‘conflict resolution’. These raw materials can be drawn upon to begin to think a politics of peace, as I shall show. The political subjectivity of each domain of politics must be grasped ‘from within’ – en interiorité, to use Lazarus’s expression. But conceiving a ‘politics of peace’ rooted within traditional subjectivities may be expanded to a more general politics. As it exists in traditional society, that politics currently makes it possible to extract

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excessive thought from the expressive politics characteristic of that domain. This is fundamentally because African cosmologies and modes of thought have always been founded on an idea of universal humanity. The difficulty consists in the fact that each domain of state politics constitutes a unique world, with the result that it is quite difficult for subjectivities to move between them. But there is no ultimate necessity for an idea of the universal to remain permanently confined within tradition (or within either of the other two domains, for that matter); if its excessive character in relation to civil society is foregrounded, it may be possible to oppose a politics of peace to a politics of war in civil and uncivil societies alike. I propose to begin with a discussion of the conception of tradition to which African nationalist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s adhered; they had a completely contradictory assessment of it, understanding it both as an essence of Africanness and as a divisive subjectivity. I shall then discuss at length the predominant view today that sees the discourse of tradition as overwhelmingly despotic and manipulated by colonialism in order to resolve the ‘native question’ and secure its power. I shall argue, through a detailed discussion of the seminal work of Mahmood Mamdani, that such a perspective is one-sided, for it relies for its understanding of politics on a privileging of the formation of identities by the state; it also applies liberal criteria regarding the independence of state power vis-à-vis society to a domain of politics in which power and culture are fused. The result is that popular subjectivities are not provided with any effectivity; they are seen as simply derived from state interpellation. In a final section I shall show that it is indeed possible to recognise within traditional society the possibility of an excessive politics. This, I suggest, consists of a politics of social healing that contains possibilities for resolving contradictions among the people in a non-violent manner, thus providing the possibility for thinking alternatives to currently dominant state politics on the continent.

african nationalisms and african traditions Given that the state in Africa was formed alongside a process of national construction or ‘nation-building’, which the state itself led, a re-evaluation of nationalism cannot help being an attempt to distance oneself from state nationalism. With the continued and expanded oppressive character of world capitalism in the form of globalisation, the oppression of peoples and nations (not to be equated with states) has expanded, not declined. This has occurred within a militaristic-liberal set of practices whereby liberalism is globally enforced through the deployment of military might. What this has meant is not only that popular nationalism is still of relevance as a form of resistance under neo-liberal capitalism, but also that it must be thought in new forms. In order to be on the side of life today, it seems that we need to be on the side of human emancipation. If we are to adhere to this consistently, it is imperative not to provide a

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mere mirror image of the practices of the oppressors but to attempt to think an alternative popular-democratic nationalism with an emancipatory content. I therefore begin from the double assumption that the crisis in Africa is the crisis of the state, and that it is necessary today to expand and formalise a popular-democratic-nationalist perspective, as well as to demarcate this perspective from state nationalism and from Western hegemonic (neo-)liberalism. The reasons for this last assumption should be apparent. The discourses of state nationalism and liberalism have dominated thinking on the issues affecting the continent since independence, and have failed dismally to show a path towards popular emancipation while entrenching authoritarian, statist modes of thought. New forms of imperialism and neo-colonialism (economic, political, cultural) are still virulent and operate today under the name of ‘globalisation’; they include not only economic but also political and cultural processes of disempowerment, which pose a renewed threat to independence on the African continent (Ibrahim, 2002). What used to be called within Marxist discourse ‘the national question’ has clearly not yet been resolved in Africa, as the state on the continent largely continues to reflect the culture and concerns of Western dominance. Indeed, I have already shown that the reduction of the nation to the state has been an obstacle to the resolution of national liberation; consequently there is a renewed interest today in pan-Africanism of a popular-democratic kind. This popular aspiration – national liberation – is confronted by a hegemonic neo-colonial liberalism that puts state politics at the core of a discourse on transformation. This focus on liberalism was shared by the nationalisms of the 1950s and especially by the state nationalisms of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the current hegemony of economic and political neo-liberalism throughout the world has meant that Western cultural domination continues today in more sophisticated forms, from which it follows that a theoretical alternative has to begin by distancing itself from liberalism in all its forms, in particular the erroneous view that a state politics is at the core of all politics. Unlike in the case of Indian nationalism, for example, there was a total abandonment of democratic traditional practice by those African nationalist politicians who inherited the colonial state power in the late 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the postcolonial period, ‘tradition’ held contradictory meanings for African nationalism, in particular for what emerged as a state-nationalist discourse. Tradition was viewed at times as the basis of an authentic indigenous culture, to be celebrated as a liberatory alternative to a hegemonic Western (globalised) culture. At the same time, it was seen as a backward formation created and manipulated by Western (neo-)colonialism to divide and rule and, thus, as inimical to modern nation-state formation.1 Of course, this perspective was a direct effect of equating freedom with the capturing of state power, an equation that dominated the thinking of the new national bourgeoisie, as Fanon noted. Of course, in the thinking

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of this ‘national’ bourgeoisie, the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics was principally concerned with achieving state power. An idealised tradition thus came to hold a contradictory location within state-nationalist discourse, as exhibiting both potentially liberatory and repressive features simultaneously. As I have had occasion to note, different aspects of this idealised ‘tradition’ were drawn upon by different independence leaders at different ends of the political spectrum in their attempts at nation-building and in order to legitimise different forms of authoritarian developmentalism and a forced entry into modernity. Some were evidently more successful than others, but such attempts bore witness to the continued and unwavering legitimacy of tradition among the populations of the continent. There is no evidence that this legitimacy has declined today, despite the evident failure of state nationalism. The contradictory character of tradition in Africa can also be seen today in the views of various African scholars. For example, some intellectuals stress that tradition forms the basis of a ‘decentralised despotism’ inherited from the colonial period (Mamdani, 1996a), while others suggest that it forms the site of a ‘convivial’ alternative to Western individualism and globalising culture (Nyamnjoh, 2002). Moreover, tradition often finds itself at the receiving end of a powerful critique by human rights discourse, supported by liberal feminism. I will return to discussing aspects of feminism in the next chapter, but here I wish to address this central issue of the contradictory character of tradition and will attempt to shed some light on the possible place of tradition within an alternative popular-nationalist discourse on the continent. I suggest that the leading trend within the nationalist discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, from which emerged the dominant state-nationalist perspective of the postcolonial period, operated very much within the context of a hegemonic and fundamentally liberal modernist conception of politics and state formation, and, because of this, was unable to overcome this contradiction. I argue for the necessity of a democratic struggle within tradition itself (as well as within rights) and against both the uncritical celebration of tradition as an essentially authentic culture and its subversion from beyond its boundaries by human rights discourse. An alternative look at tradition in Africa requires that it be understood from within the perspective of an altogether new way of thinking about politics in particular, in which democracy is not equated with human rights. A critical engagement with tradition must form part of the interrogation of human rights discourse from the perspective of the oppressed majority in Africa. Any genuinely emancipatory nationalist position today must distance itself from the tired and oppressive state nationalism left over from the authoritarian developmental-state model of the 1960s and 1970s (and exemplified most typically in Zimbabwe today). That this state nationalism may still resonate among the people is an indication of the failure to develop sufficiently a genuinely popular-democratic form of nationalism; it is an indication of the absence of popular politics, not of their presence. This alternative will have to confront the character  – democratic,

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undemocratic or something in between – of African traditional customs and practices, as the majority of the people of Africa (who are rural-based) arguably live within a traditional culture within traditional society, and not within a discourse of rights within civil society. The colonial conception of ‘tribalism’ was a negative reference to African tradition. At the same time, it was expressive of both an authentic Africanness and a ‘backward’ cultural feature, and infused the writings of nationalist politicians in the 1960s. Speaking of mainland Tanzania, Julius Nyerere noted: It has been said – and this is quite right – that Tanganyika is tribal, and we realise that we need to break up this tribal consciousness among the people and to build up a national consciousness ... I have set up this new ministry to help us regain our pride in our own culture. I want it to seek out the best of the traditions and customs of all our tribes and make them a part of our national culture (Nyerere, 1966, cit. Southall, 1997: 40). Most nationalist politicians of the period believed that through their control of an all-powerful state, customs could be engineered and transformed from above. This belief in the unlimited possibilities of state power arguably lies at the root of the failure of state nationalism to enable the development of a genuine popular-democratic national culture. Only a minority of nationalist thinkers understood that social engineering of the modern state was bound to essentialise and vulgarise whatever genuine cultural complexities were produced by popular culture. According to Fanon (1990: 180), for example: Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence, it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or to bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. When a people undertakes ... a political struggle against ... colonialism, the significance of tradition changes. Cabral (1980: 149) also pointed out that ‘culture  – a creation of society and a synthesis of the checks and balances society devises to resolve the conflicts that characterise it at each stage of history – is a social reality independent of men’s will, the colour of their skin, or the shape of their eyes’. But such views never became hegemonic, as they implied a critique of the centrality of state social engineering and theoretical essentialism. Instead, an essentialist conception of African culture came to prevail in postcolonial times, which was a simple mirror image of the stereotypes of colonial ideology.

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As we know, the modernism and liberalism of nationalist thinking in the 1960s occurred within the modernisation paradigm which African leaders had embraced, as it offered them a theoretical justification for economic development. ‘Economic independence’ was to follow ‘political independence’. The tribe and the ethnic consciousness that accompanied it were simply seen as obstacles to state formation, created by colonialism to divide and rule – i.e. to destroy the nation. As the All-African People’s Conference of 1958 put it: ‘Those African traditional institutions whether political, social, or economic which have clearly shown their reactionary character and their sordid support for colonialism [should] be condemned’ (Mutiso and Rohio, 1975: 365–7); while, simultaneously, the national boundaries that divided ethnicities were first ‘denounced’ and then defended at all costs. The modern nation therefore existed outside tradition, beyond tribe: the birth of the former required the death of the latter. As Samora Machel (1980: 77) famously stated, ‘we killed the tribe to give birth to the nation’. Thus a common conception held almost universally by nationalist politician-intellectuals was to view ethnicity as constructed by colonial interests in order to undermine the formation of the nation; the construction of a modern state required the death of tradition. Among intellectuals as well as leaders, ethnicity – referred to dismissively as ‘tribalism’ – was seen as universally negative and an obstacle to national emancipation. Emancipation was thus seen as the formation of a nation-state. It followed that tradition must be overcome for people to be free, with the result that political minorities with distinct cultures were systematically oppressed. As I noted in chapter 12, this occurred even in apparently democratic Botswana, where the postcolonial state followed the colonial state in enforcing a uniform Tswana tradition, culture and language as part of the nation-building process. Of course, there was an element of truth in this conception: colonialism had indeed used indirect rule to exercise its dominance, and there had been attempts at secession supported by the West in the immediate post-independence period (e.g. in the Republic of Congo). However, this view was one-sided, as it failed to recognise, in the period of state coercive consolidation, that the oppression of various nationalities was a real issue and keenly felt by large sectors of the population; indeed, one could not prevent political secession by attacking culture – the two were completely intertwined. Ethnic identities had in fact been kindled and rekindled precisely by oppressive state practices during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In other words, it was coercive forms of rule that had largely given rise to ethnic grievances against the state and to resulting rebellions, which colonial interests could then manipulate. This view was central to progressive intellectual thought in the postcolonial period right up to the struggles opposing the UDF–ANC and the Inkatha movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s in South Africa. Only post-1980s has progressive opinion on the continent in general taken a somewhat different view of ethnic identities, as these expressed their grievances more openly during that period.

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As far as state thinking was concerned, the stress was on discovering an authentic African personality, an essence of Africanness. The idealised African and ‘his’ customs and culture, personality and achievements were counterposed to essentialised Western colonial notions of backwardness, atavism and absence of culture: ‘Blackness’ (Black Africa) as opposed to ‘darkness’ (the Dark Continent); idealisation as opposed to contempt; and the emphasis on African empires, civilisations and powerful states in history as opposed to the colonial picture of an Africa without history. All these assertions are understandable in hindsight, and may even have been necessary in the immediate aftermath of the national struggle for independence, yet they only amounted to a mirror image of the colonial stereotype. They could not provide the basis for an understanding of the contradictory character of African society and culture and its contributions to a truly human culture. A parallel could be found in the nationalist deployment of violence, which also was a mirror image of colonial violence; it could not elicit an understanding of the complexities of difference and tended to reduce these to a Manichaean dualism. Such essentialised identities always serve the interests of those in power, not solely because they promote the immutable character of some supposed African essence, but also because the physiognomy of the continent thus presented is invariably structured in the interests of the dominant groups, not of the oppressed. One reason for the hegemonic dominance of an African nationalist essentialism is, arguably, the absence of a sufficiently robust theoretico-political alternative, which would have as its object the elucidation of excessive subjectivities among the people. Recent work and changes in modes of thought have made it possible to begin to fill this absence. The core features of the African nationalism that came to dominate in the 1960s should not be sought primarily in its modernism but rather in its statism, whether liberal or Marxist in inflection. The important point is not to distinguish nation from tradition – something this state nationalism focused on – nor to stress a postmodern alternative to nation and, with it, a linear conception of change, but rather to emphasise that the African nationalism that came to power in the 1960s had a particular conception of politics and the state, which excluded popular-democratic self-activity. The writings and, even more so, the actions of nationalist leaders reflected an understanding of the state as the sole domain of politics, despite the fact that the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics was also open to liberatory subjectivities. This is evident in the extract from Nyerere’s writings cited above, and even cruder statements are available. Another liberal assumption not usually mentioned is that the state is said to fuse territory and culture, a perspective that enabled a conflation of culture and administrative territory that had not been formalised in the precolonial period. African territories were carved out by colonial conquest first, and then the cultures identified (and often constructed) as dominant within them were ascribed to discrete territories through the

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creation of administrative districts. Throughout the colonial period, cultures were identified with territories, even though state borders ignored cultural differences. Minorities within boundaries allocated to majorities were not meant to possess distinct cultures. In sum, the process of state formation or nation-building on the continent was clearly shaped by a notion of modernity inherited from colonialism. The omnipotence of power manifested in bureaucratic control and decision-making, and a conception that territorialised culture within clear-cut administrative boundaries, were some of the characteristics of this modernity. However, this was a modernity for which liberalism provided the centre of gravity of contending social-engineering discourses. Not only was each nation or state to have ‘its’ culture (rather than several), but the state itself was to manage ‘orderly progress’ in the interests of all (Cowen and Shenton, 1996). Analysing this liberal conception of the state, Immanuel Wallerstein (1995: 96) shows in his account of the development of political thought in Europe that both conservative and socialist strategies in the 19th century gradually came close, from different starting points, ‘to the liberal notion of ongoing, [state-]managed, rational normal change’. He notes that between 1848 and 1914 ‘the practitioners of all three ideologies turned from a theoretical anti-state position to one of seeking to strengthen and reinforce in practice the state structures in multiple ways’. Later, conservatives were transformed into liberal conservatives, while Leninists were transformed into liberal socialists.2 This overarching liberalism advocated imperialism as a ‘civilising mission’ (Pitts, 2005; Losurdo, 2014) and was imported into Africa during the colonial period, where it structured the thinking of the postcolonial nationalist leaders who inherited state power on the continent. Yet, in Africa, liberal assumptions of political society dominated by state institutions, of the omnipotence of state management in social change, of a conflation of citizenship with indigeneity, and of an identification of territoriality with culture broke fundamentally with popular traditions for which politics, society and culture were deeply intertwined and which allowed for a high degree of flexibility and negotiation over norms, rules and boundaries. Politics was the prerogative of the community (variously defined), and not of professional politicians. In most cases, the postcolonial statist recourse to tradition, when it did occur, failed to elicit a coherent hegemonic national culture and an alternative to Western liberalism, because it combined cultural prescriptions with authoritarianism. The result was the dominance of particularisms over a universalistic conception of the nation, precisely because the democratic debate and the flexibility necessary for the development of such a universalistic conception were missing. In the absence of genuine participatory democracy, a voluntary, negotiated settlement of differences in the interest of a general or national will was impossible. The political will to live together was rarely tested democratically, but rather was imposed by the state, which purported to be the founder of the nation. As I have noted, the state’s main proposal for emancipation from want, as

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well as the foundation of the postcolonial social contract, was ‘national development’. The state’s legitimacy thus hinged on the success of this political project. Without successful economic development and its relatively equal distribution to all sectors of the population, the nation could only be built through state coercion, and the social contract could easily be broken. This authoritarianism set up during the colonial period and carried on in the postcolonial period was not only required for a solution to the ‘native question’ (Mamdani, 1996a), but was also a necessary effect of the combination of culture with politics within the conditions of the formalisation of rule (the rule of rules). In other words, it was this very normalisation of rules, which genuinely developed in Europe as part of a democratic response to the arbitrariness of aristocratic rulers and which thereby implied a distancing of politics from society into a specific realm of its own, that actually undermined the flexibility that had made democratic participation possible in precolonial Africa. A liberal conception of the state, and therefore eventually of democracy, was imposed, through the use of the same state power to control conquered populations (who were assumed to have only just reached a stage when democracy could be usefully applied or understood), thus resulting in the undermining of the democracy – limited and contradictory in many ways to be sure, but of necessity popularly rooted – that had existed to various extents and in various forms in African communities themselves. To make the same point slightly differently: the imposition of a liberal state in Africa necessarily led to a conception of democracy for which that state and the domain of politics it controlled directly (i.e. civil society) were separated from traditional society, in which the majority lived and which the colonial state controlled through ‘indirect rule’. Rather than leading to a process of democratisation, this division between domains of state politics amounted to the disempowerment of communities, as it withdrew decision-making from its cultural context – although never totally so, especially as communities were often left to their own devices when the writ of the colonial state was weak, and as ‘indirect rule’ provided the conditions for a reproduction of tradition in a weakened and distorted form. As a result, while authoritarianism was reproduced at the top of the neo-colonial state structure, in many cases elements of democratic decision-making survived and even developed at the bottom, so that resistance to oppression could grow on fertile ground. In the 1950s and 1960s, the writings of African nationalists stressed two different conceptions of nationalism: as an anti-colonial notion, and a territorial or statist understanding. The latter was dominant because neo-colonialism, although regularly criticised, was accepted in practice – much as globalisation is today. The West was the main interlocutor of what developed into state nationalism in the post-independence period, not the people. Also, the nation-state was founded on the exclusion of certain nationalities from politics on the grounds that they were ‘foreign’ (originating from

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beyond colonial boundaries), because of an absence of authenticity or because they were seen to pose a threat to national unity. Indigeneity was defined, in colonial terms, as being based on territory and paternal descent within that territory; and citizenship was defined on the basis of indigeneity. Tribal loyalties were seen as a risk to the party, state and nation. At the time, a political analyst operating very much from within a modernisation framework noted: While political leaders emphasize traditionalism in certain contexts, they are intensely anti-tribal. Tribalism is, of course, an outmoded form of social cohesion, but it remains an important attachment for large numbers of rural Africans unaccustomed to pluralism. Because attachments to traditional institutions impede the attachment of individuals to the new nation-state (via the party), modern political leaders are almost invariably hostile to tribalism. The consequence of their anti-tribalism is to make individuals increasingly dependent upon the single, central focal institution (the political party) and to undermine the integrity of competing institutions (Friedland, 1964: 29). So, while this comment sees ‘anti-tribal’ views as a threat to pluralism, what it fails to notice is that the ‘anti-tribalism’ of nationalist politicians was a necessary outcome of a liberal conception of the state and politics for which the latter is reduced exclusively to the former, and in which the conflation of state, culture and territory made it impossible for a nation to be constructed on a genuinely democratic basis. Clearly, therefore, the theoretical issue at stake does not concern the backwardness of tribe but the liberal conception of the state and the reduction of freedom to the control of state power. Africans knew much about pluralism within tradition, but understandably little about the formalism of liberal-democratic pluralism, which coerced minorities into submission. The equation between nation and culture, which colonialism had begun in the identification in subjectivity of tribe and ethnicity, was continued in the postcolonial period in a manner which assumed the assimilation of minority cultures under colonialism. This is perhaps why such political minorities regularly resisted the authoritarianism of the central state and could be so easily mobilised through ethnic rhetoric by unscrupulous elites. This in turn led to greater insecurity for those in power. The destruction of the tribe so as to give birth to the nation also stressed the systematic undermining of the customary, within which the majority of the population lived, in both its democratic/popular and despotic/oligarchic aspects. The lengthy debate over whether Mau Mau was a tribal (traditional, backward-looking, atavistic) movement or a nationalist (modern) one shows the inability of thinking to grasp popular struggle and ethnicity. Mau Mau was simultaneously traditional and nationalist, particularly because it was a struggle over the return of land to the dispossessed – an issue central

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to both. Mau Mau used the vehicle of traditional discourse to express popular nationalist sentiments, as we have seen (Berman and Lonsdale, 1992). The kind of tradition favoured by the postcolonial oligarchy from within the confines of state-nationalist discourse was not only one in its economic class interests, but it also apprehended tradition in essentialist terms (as given, uncontradictory and unchanging) and as largely innocuous to modern state power (even when deployed by competing elites). Given the absence or weakness of a distinctive popular urban culture, which could have provided the basis of a national culture, such a destruction of tradition ultimately meant the systematic oppression of popular culture; it meant not so much the destruction of tradition and culture but rather the systematic and more or less successful oppression of the popular side of tradition, its democratic character. Tradition was used (and feared) in crude instrumentalist ways; however, ordinary people regularly ignored state boundaries and fought for the maintenance of their traditions (e.g. Amadiume, 1997). Rights and tradition, nation and tribe, can no longer be seen as polar opposites in an alternative emancipatory discourse. This polarity was born of the liberal view that the state had to overcome the ‘state of nature’ through managed progress. Given that the postcolonial state was fundamentally built on undemocratic colonial foundations, and given its Western and imposed character, it could not reach into popular culture – the only genuine source of a national culture on the continent – to find the raw material for the imagining of a national subjectivity with which all could identify. Unlike Europe, where national culture was and is systematically manufactured by the state, African states during the postcolonial period failed to create a nation, as in most cases the state only represented itself and a minuscule oligarchy. The foundation of a national culture after 40 years of independence still remains the people. Concurrently, the people have been interpellated (and even systematically divided) by colonial and neo-colonial states into various identities (ethnic, religious, regional, indigenous), in regular conflict over resources. As a direct result of state politics, existing (and often benign) social differences have been systematically deepened and entrenched, rather than eliminated by power relations in different ways, thus continuing under different conditions a process initiated under colonialism. This has been one of the main features of state power in its relations with its citizens on the continent, namely the arbitrary imposition of power and the entrenchment of cultural difference as part of one and the same process often masquerading as ‘nation-building’. The state has failed lamentably to provide the conditions for the development of a democratic national culture. During the period of the National Liberation Struggle mode, as we have seen, the dominant form of nationalism was substantially popular in content (in most cases nationalist movements had a mass base), as well as pan-Africanist in orientation, as the struggle for the liberation of peoples concerned the whole of Africa; this was of central concern to Fanon. I have already noted how national consciousness

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was transformed into state nationalism through adhering to liberal conceptions; however, it took some time for pan-Africanism to be understood in organisational terms as a mere addition of states rather than a unity of peoples. The democratic aspirations of popular pan-Africanism foundered on state nationalism, as a pan-Africanism of states was a contradiction in terms, the borders of those states having been colonial creations. As with most processes of popular transformation, independence struggles often included an important international dimension, which led to the provision of citizenship rights to all supporters of the revolutionary process. Such provisions were made after Ghana’s independence with respect to all Africans, who were seen as citizens of all African countries. But this noble idea was unable to withstand the tension between a desire to unify people across artificial boundaries and an obsession with preserving the powers and borders of the state inherited from colonialism.3 PanAfricanism could not, therefore, survive a liberal conception of politics and degenerated into the OAU, whose main preoccupation seemed to be the maintenance of the sanctity of colonial boundaries. This focus of the OAU was not surprising, as it was an organisation of African states whose leaders were schooled in liberal conceptions. The recent formation of the AU has done little to alter this. Conceptions of African nationalism, particularly among intellectuals, have changed as a critique of the state from a more pluralistic perspective developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Intellectuals no longer seek an African essence;4 rather, they stress the plurality of African identities. Identities are now considered ‘complex and multiple and [they] grow out of a history of changing responses to economic, political, and cultural forces’ that develop ‘in opposition to other identities’ and thus ‘have to be fought for and rethought’ (Appiah, 1992: 177–8). This shift in perspective has made it more possible to start to pose the question of the contradictory character of tradition itself, yet this question still remains within the limits of identity and, thus, of state politics. While it challenges an uncritically celebratory conception of authenticity that vulgarises culture, packages it for Western tourists and destroys genuinely nationalist aspirations, it fails to notice the importance of an excessive subjectivity beyond interests and identities. Clearly, Africanness cannot be reduced to an essential ‘Blackness’, as it is constantly changing and transforming in practice, given that Africa includes diverse nationalities within its boundaries. While the trend is largely away from the search for racial or ethnic essences, African intellectuals remain largely prisoners of subjective identities. There are also some who ‘see a future with less rigid notions of identity, and with people sharing diversity in conviviality’ (Nyamnjoh, 2002: 21), but this sounds much like romantic wishful thinking in the absence of an alternative subjectivity that is able to transcend the limits of thinking identity. While some elements of the ever-developing African traditions are oppressive – such as various forms of patriarchal control

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or authoritarian state structure – others are more inflected towards popular democracy – such as communal access to land and practices of ‘social healing’. There is no overriding reason why the latter elements should automatically come to dominate the former. The resolution of the conflict between these elements is dependent on political processes themselves regulated by changing subjectivities. It would be both premature and politically mistaken to speculate on these issues, rather than to think about the conditions that could make popular-democratic outcomes more likely, particularly as some of these conditions are theoretical and political in nature. The main causes of the transition from an essentialist conception of tradition in the 1960s and 1970s to the more nuanced and contradictory one that has emerged since the 1980s should probably include the development of a critical intelligentsia that distanced itself from state power; the democratic effects of various popular struggles, including the democratic impact of feminism; the increasing importance of the debate on democracy, which in the 1980s in Africa had major popular features; and people’s continued dissatisfaction with the vulgarity of neo-liberal globalisation. The most important of these influences was probably feminism, which challenged the authoritarian aspects of tradition while attacking the African state’s ‘modern’ authoritarian undermining of rights, although its political influence is now waning. Feminism straddled both rights discourse and the discourse of tradition. If we do not view tradition in an essentialist manner, we need to recognise the existence of regular (political and often democratic) struggles within the realm of tradition and the customary, particularly of political minorities like women, youth, the poor and ethnic minorities. African feminist discourses have stressed the contradictory nature of tradition in Africa: for example, Amadiume’s (1997) work on matriarchal traditions in Africa and El Saadawi’s (1997) work on democratising Islam. The contradictions in nationalism and feminism have been debated at length, but ethnicity has proven similarly contradictory with its patriarchal oppression and simultaneous openness to women’s entitlements. In South Africa, liberal feminism has attempted to democratise tradition from above, through direct legislative interventions, thus increasing the dominance of liberal thinking. Whereas civil society legitimates itself in terms of its objective distance from the state – in other words, fundamentally in terms of its ‘modernity’ – traditional society legitimates itself in relation to a past when there was little or no separation between state power and society, when power was more socially located and therefore more responsive to the people  – as in the saying common in Southern Africa, ‘A chief is a chief by his people’. Whereas in civil society political subjectivities are overwhelmingly thought in terms of human rights and citizenship, and in uncivil society predominantly in terms of patronage and violence, in traditional society they are thought mainly in terms of culture, custom and community. ‘Community’ tends to be seen as a homogeneous, undifferentiated entity by the modern state power in the same way as all social locations – such as nation, class, gender – in all three domains

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of politics. Within community itself, on the other hand, kinship, age, ethnicity and gender differences are also understood to play a differentiating role. When differences are recognised within community by the modern state, these tend to be restricted to interests, which are then seen as manifested subjectively in political identities.

traditional society and identity politics Some theorists view tradition as a political identity formed mainly by the state’s conception of individuals as ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’. Foremost among these is Mahmood Mamdani, whose work, because of its sophisticated ability to lay bare the anatomy of the state in Africa, requires extensive treatment. It is precisely the formation of political identities that Mamdani elucidates in his work. Unsurprisingly, he sees these as formed by state politics, in particular by colonial state politics. Mamdani helpfully identifies for us the state mode of rule in traditional society, which was constructed during the colonial period. Yet even when social movements are recognised as collective agents in such a process of identity formation and resistance to colonial rule, their subjectivities are seen by him as exclusively reflective of their social location and of their interpellation by the state; there is no recognition of possible subjective excess in his work. Political subjectivities are invariably understood as state subjectivities. For Mamdani, tradition, as developed by the indirect rule structures of the colonial state and carried into the postcolonial period, is the foundation for the exploitation by ‘decentralised despotism’ of the free peasantry, as each ethnicity excludes others because scarce resources such as land are allocated by power according to ethnic affiliation. Mamdani argues that, since colonialism, tradition has lost its democratic and inclusive character. Yet he underplays the connection between the realms of power and culture, and thus underestimates the potency of opening tradition to popular perspectives. If political subjectivities are mediated by culture and not just imposed by the state, if culture is contradictory and able to provide alternative points of view, then such subjectivities need not simply be reflections of state perspectives. Mamdani is the most prominent theorist of traditional society understood as a domain of state politics, writing from an African perspective. In his seminal text Citizen and Subject (1996a), Mamdani seeks the nature of the state in postcolonial Africa through an analysis of its politics. In other words, he is concerned with laying bare the anatomy of power on the African continent and accounting for the authoritarian nature of the state in a historical account of ethnic political identities. In Mamdani’s terms, his is an analysis of the ‘mode of rule’, not of the mode of production.5 For Mamdani, this mode of colonial state rule is embodied in state institutions (at the core of which is the chieftaincy) and in the law, reflecting distinctions made by social engineers between ‘settlers’ and ‘natives’, and between ‘native’ tribes. He also rejects an

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exceptionalist view of South African history, arguing quite rightly that an analysis of state politics in South Africa shows such a position to be completely unsustainable, since the idea of apartheid was inspired by indirect rule, which it pushed to an extreme form. It is the colonial creation of two distinct modes of ruling, one for settlers in urban areas and one for so-called natives in rural areas, that continues largely unmodified in the postcolonial period. He argues that to understand state politics in Africa, one must eschew an analysis of the state in terms of a hitherto prevalent political economy, with its reductionist economic implications, in favour of an analysis of state rule that, he suggests, while influenced by objective constraints (i.e. the non-commodity form of landownership), was ultimately designed to resolve a problem of political control of subject populations: the ‘native problem’. He thus argues that the state that developed during the colonial period as an answer to the ‘native problem’ was a ‘bifurcated state’. In the manner in which this state evolved, especially after the 1920s: ‘Direct rule was the form of urban civil power. It was about the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society. Indirect rule, however, signified a rural tribal authority. It was about incorporating natives into a state-enforced customary order ... Direct and indirect rule are better understood as variants of despotism: the former centralized, the latter decentralized’ (1996a: 18). The important point argued by Mamdani is that the mode of rule of the colonial state differed between the urban and the rural. While in the former the state ruled citizens and excluded natives from citizenship, in the latter subjects were ruled through state-transformed ‘tradition’. Rural Africans (the overwhelming majority) were ruled by means of a tradition modified or created for the purpose, and able and willing to accommodate extra-economic coercion in the form of forced labour, forced commodities, forced removals, forced monetary levies, and so on. The chiefly powers, which under precolonial tradition had always involved an element of popular control, were administratively distorted (tradition was set in stone and its flexible nature undermined) so that tribute labour was now forcibly extracted for colonial purposes and legitimised by tradition. Mamdani’s account of such extra-economic coercion is extremely detailed (see his 1996a: ch. 5). I have also insisted on the stark political character of labour extraction and cash exactions in my work on Swaziland – where I referred to this process as ‘institutionalized plunder’ – and on the history of ethnicity in Southern Africa (Neocosmos, 1987b and 1995). Swaziland’s singular feature is its very small civil society, as the national state rules primarily through traditional society; this is why democratisation in that country is so difficult. The success of that kind of change would require at least an excessive politics among the rural population, who are always tightly controlled through the reproduction of the power of the chieftaincy by the chiefly control over land allocation, tribute labour extraction and other oppressive customs. Moreover, there is recent evidence in South Africa for

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the continued use of unpaid tribute labour and other payments to chiefs, including for road construction and funds towards chiefs’ homes, cars or legal fees.6 What is important to stress is that such state coercive practices have continued unaltered during the postcolonial period throughout the continent, reproduced by development interventions that regularly require the provision of unpaid labour by peasants, which is justified not only in terms of tradition but also of ‘self-sufficiency’ or ‘food for work’ ideologies. Outside traditional society, in civil or uncivil society, labour for public works is paid. As a result, Mamdani argues, such power amounted not to a ‘democratic’ form of rule with a separation of powers,7 but to the concentration of all powers in the hands of the chief as state agent (a ‘clenched fist’ over the peasantry, in Mamdani’s terms). The chief now became a chief ‘by the colonial state’ rather than ‘by his people’. This process of empowering the institution of the chieftaincy over the people was necessitated, according to Mamdani, by structural constraints, in particular by the fact that land was not a commodity and that access to it was governed by customary law. The colonial state was therefore forced to modify that law to suit its purposes of labour coercion and resource extraction. In rural areas, as a result, there developed the dominance of a discourse of tradition, entrenched and enforced by the power of the colonial state through the medium of the chieftaincy. All the same, as I shall show, the domain of traditional society is not reducible to the chieftaincy, its state form. Mamdani demonstrates how in the late 19th century, and continuing right up until the 1980s, in South Africa in particular, the state faced the problem of how a minority was to retain state power at a time of rapid industrialisation, which would create pressures for urbanisation, ‘integration’ and the ‘swamping’ of the ruling minority by an oppressed majority. The resolution to this problem was seen by the state as the ‘reproduction of autonomous peasant communities that would regularly supply male, adult and single migrant labour to the mines’ (p. 18). In Africa in general, for the colonisers in urban areas, separation of powers and elections allowed a colonial civil society to develop, as a distinction was retained between society and the state, between the private and the public realms, and between economic and political power, in conformity with European liberal state prescriptions. Mamdani says that, because of this separation, a ‘discourse of rights’ emerged in urban areas, while rural areas were structured by a ‘discourse of tradition’. The rights of free association and free publicity, and eventually of political representation, were the rights of citizens under direct rule, not of subjects indirectly ruled by a customarily organized tribal authority. Thus, whereas civil society was racialised, Native Authority was tribalised. Between the rights-bearing colons and the subject peasantry was a third group: urban-based natives,

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mainly middle- and working-class persons, who were exempt from the lash of customary law but not from modern, racially discriminatory civil legislation. Neither subject to custom nor exalted as rights-bearing citizens, they languished in a juridical limbo (p. 19). In my conceptual apparatus, Mamdani shows well how not only discourses but different political subjectivities were formed through state intervention within the distinct domains of civil society and traditional society in Africa. At independence, he notes, urbanised Africans demanded entrance into urban civil society. They sought access to democratic rights, but these were denied to peasants, who continued to be ruled by chiefs or chief-like cadres. The continuity of the state was ensured by the fact that urban groups simply demanded incorporation into existing civil society, while the rural population continued to be ruled as a subject population. The coercive structure of the state remained unaltered after independence, as neither the urban nor the rural form of rule was democratised. Urban groups were admitted into an existing form of rule as the state was ‘de-racialised’ but not ‘democratised’. It was de-racialised primarily through what was then called ‘Africanisation’ and what more recently has been called ‘affirmative action’ (p. 20). The state was not democratised, because that would have required a democratic transformation of the form of rule in rural areas. When rural transformation was attempted, ‘it was to reorganize decentralized power so as to unify the “nation” through a reform that tended to centralization. The antidote to a decentralized despotism turned out to be a centralized despotism’ (p. 25). This was the kind of reform attempted by ‘radical’ regimes. ‘Conservative’ regimes merely continued with the dual state form inherited from colonialism. Mamdani remarks: The radical states went a step further, joining deracialisation to detribalisation. But the deracialised and detribalised power they organized put a premium on administrative decision-making. In the name of detribalisation, they tightened central control over local authorities. Claiming to herald development and wage revolution, they intensified extra-economic pressure on the peasantry. In the process, they inflamed the division between town and country ... Both experiences reproduced one part of the dual legacy of the bifurcated state and created their own distinctive version of despotism (pp. 26–7). For Mamdani, urban Africans became citizens through their incorporation into a politics of the struggle over the rule of law and division of powers and a discourse on rights. Rural Africans remained subjects because they were ruled by a tradition that eschewed rights as it was based on a fusion of state powers. It follows, for Mamdani, that elections and multipartyism cannot on their own amount to a democratising

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process in Africa, as the political oppression of the peasantry has not been addressed. A genuine democratisation of the African state requires an ability to link a democratisation of rural tribal despotism with the demands for rights of urban civil society movements (p. 297). Mamdani says little about how this link could be forged, especially about the kind of politics necessary for such democratisation to be successful. This would have required an analysis of different modes of politics, which Mamdani does not undertake. While Mamdani is quite correct about the rural origins of customary law, traditional society as a mode of rule has frequently extended beyond its rural origins, so that such subjectivities can no longer be reduced to rural location. Postcolonial state rule has regularly used tradition as a form of control in urban areas, too, as chiefs have attempted to gain control in shack-dweller communities or as the state has used colonially created repressive traditional forms of control as useful methods for regulating the urban poor: traditional society is no longer a purely rural domain of state politics. At the level of theory, of course, modes of rule are not reducible to the social. Throughout his work Mamdani does precisely that. Not only is traditional society only rural, according to him, but the urban is characterised by subjectivities revolving around rights. As far as his analysis of popular resistance movements is concerned, this is informed by the idea that people who resist oppression are not considered as agents endowed with reason; instead, their subjectivities are simply thought as reflections of their social location. He notes, for example, that ‘because the peasantry lacks a strategic perspective on the character of the central state, peasant movements can be incorporated into diverse alliances. Their potential is therefore contradictory’ (p. 213). Here, theory simply determines what the limits of the thinking of peasants are. Moreover, Mamdani argues that the urban struggles in 1980s South Africa simply revolved around the provision of rights (mainly rights of workers to form trade unions) (pp. 233–46) and that the contemporary struggles by the National Resistance Army/National Resistance Movement in Uganda concerned the democratisation of traditional authorities (pp. 200–10). In other words, for him, the mode of resistance in these cases was simply shaped by the mode of rule; no theoretical room is left for the recognition of subjective inventiveness. Traditional culture is seemingly incapable of universal thought. I have shown in chapter 5 that struggles in urban South Africa during the 1980s far exceeded any discourse of rights and citizenship within civil society. The ideas of ‘people’s power’, of ‘workers’ control’ of the transformation of power relations in daily life, and of overcoming the division of labour between students, communities and workers are all illustrative of a politics of excess over rights. The fact of the matter is that politics of rights and citizenship and the formation of a civil society only started to become the object of thought in the late 1980s and took off in earnest in the 1990s.8 These were not categories deployed in politics at the time when the Freedom Charter’s

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prescription that ‘The people shall govern’ was taken literally to mean something quite different from notions of state representation. Moreover, I have also noted how the worker-peasants of Mpondoland in South Africa’s Eastern Cape region were also able to exceed their social location subjectively in the early 1960s. Apart from Mamdani’s exclusive operation within an expressive conception of popular subjectivity, there are two further theoretical lacunae in his work that limit the value of his analysis. The first is his false reduction of tradition to the state and power; the second concerns his related restriction of popular subjectivity to state interpellation, despite his analysis of social movements. Both are directly related to his statist conception of politics. We can begin to understand the first problem through a discussion of citizenship and Mamdani’s invocation of the notion of the ‘settler’. As I have noted, classical sociology has adhered to a notion of ‘moral community’ associated with citizenship in civil society. Citizenship is thus a relation to the state that is not simply determined by law. Contrary to Mamdani, a settler does not become a citizen merely by virtue of being incorporated into civil society and acquiring access to rights, particularly if she or he is not indigenous. A settler must often become a socially accepted ‘indigene’ before she or he can come to be seen as a citizen in society as well as by the state. This is not just a question of ethnic origin or colour: Lebanese, for example, have been successfully indigenised in many West African countries.9 Citizenship has social as well as legal features, and one cannot reduce it to the latter without abstracting people from their social conditions of existence, as some of the feminist literature on citizenship has stressed (Yuval-Davies and Werbner, 1999). Feminists rightly regard the idea of the ‘disembodied individual’ as an untenable liberal construct. Under colonialism, (middle class) Africans were supposed to become civilised, to become European, and to forget their original identity – to become assimilated into European culture. Europeans were not supposed to ‘go native’: they were supposed to maintain their social separateness, and thus could not become citizens, because they were not to be ‘nativised’. Mamdani concentrates exclusively on legal (or customary) rights in his conception of citizenship and ignores its social dimensions, a procedure that amounts to a state-focused perspective and that underplays the possibility of struggle within culture itself. These problems with Mamdani’s approach become apparent in the answer he gave to his own question at his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1988: ‘When does a settler become a native?’ Mamdani asserts that if we ask the question from the point of view of ‘ethnic citizenship ... the answer is NEVER’ (1998a: 6, emphasis in original). For Mamdani, the members of one ethnic group can thus never become members of another. One can never acquire another’s ethnicity, as this is defined by an ‘ancestral area’. ‘You were obliged to follow the custom of your ethnic group. Your rights and obligations were defined by your custom, and that

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custom was enforced as a “customary law”, by a Native Authority whose seat was the local state. The local state spoke the language of culture not rights’ (1998a: 1). Here, Mamdani adheres to a rigid conception of colonially constructed tradition and follows Martin Chanock (1985) closely in reducing custom to its legal form – ‘customary law’. Custom is thus reduced to the state, not to how people think. This conception implies that the African colonised simply reflected the rigid views of custom legally enforced by the colonial state, that custom was not (and is not) an object of struggle and eminently flexible, and that lived social situations are not fashioned by people themselves, but only by the state. In addition, Mamdani assumes an unambiguous separation between state and society, between the political and the cultural, that simply did not exist in Africa during the colonial period, as he himself implies. The separation of the state from the socio-economic is precisely what creates a domain of civil society, as I have noted in chapter 7. In the absence of such a separation, civil society does not exist and we remain within a society governed by tradition; indeed, chiefs are in most instances simultaneously the agents of the state as well as the guardians of popular traditions and customs. In the absence of a distinct domain of politics that is demarcated from culture and society, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the state-induced rigidity of custom and to reduce tradition to customary law. In fact, the colonial state itself went out of its way to engineer a fusion between political entities (‘tribes’) and socio-cultural entities (‘ethnic groups’) in cases where the two did not obviously correspond, particularly with the numerous large ‘minorities’ of recognised tribal polities, which sometimes were actually numerical majorities of culturally distinct but politically inferior non-indigenous groups.10 The idea was to produce a situation of cultural homogeneity that would prevent the contestation of the legitimacy of tribal authority and, hence, of customary law, as in the case of Botswana (Ramsay et al., 1996). With its racist, primordialist conceptions of tribe, the colonial state could not conceive of differences in any other than tribal form, because of its liberal equation of culture and territory and its intention to undermine any independent, society-based resistance to indirect rule. This social engineering was at the core of the formation of an authoritarian state system during the colonial period, as it ensured and entrenched the authoritarian fusion of state and society, the absence of which could have provided the foundation for democratic changes in the postcolonial period. The grafting of an electoral process onto this system could hardly have led to a meaningful democracy at independence. As far as Mamdani’s ‘ethnic citizenship’ is concerned, there are numerous examples of ‘strangers’ being accepted as fully fledged members of ethnic communities in Africa. For example, Lan (1985) shows that guerrillas who were strangers to their areas of operation during the liberation war in Zimbabwe became full community members through the influence of spirit mediums.11 Such ethnic citizenship could also be bestowed on foreigners through the payment of allegiance

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to a chief. Ethnicity and culture, even under colonial domination, were not as rigid as Mamdani makes out, nor indeed as the authorities hoped. There were, and are, regular contradictions within tradition and some of these are popular-democratic in nature (Shivji, 2000). Thus, although Mamdani seemingly moves beyond a liberal idea of citizenship by recognising a distinct ‘ethnic citizenship’ beyond the individual rights-bearing subject in civil society, he remains a prisoner of liberal assumptions because he reduces citizenship exclusively to a state-defined identity which ignores its relational and cultural features. This is apparent in his later work, where Mamdani perceives the colonial state as ‘constructing’ or ‘creating’ political identities.12 Because he does not think that politics exists beyond the state, Mamdani’s argument is based on the idea that subjects respond (more or less) automatically to the manner in which they are addressed or interpellated by the state. For Mamdani, people in Rwanda accepted the colonial state’s interpellation regarding whether they were an ‘ethnic group’ or a ‘race’. But the state’s political interpellation takes place within the whole panoply of culture, and not just at the level of the law and other state institutions. The political process is also a social process that is mediated by culture in various ways, and it is the object of struggle. The state usually requires groups in society that follow its line in order to impose its perspective. The sociology of this process is absent from Mamdani’s work, though he is sensitive to the fact that many members of political identities challenged such ascription (e.g. minorities among both Hutu and Tutsi, Banyarwanda, etc.). The point is not that Mamdani ignores an analysis of political agency, but rather that his analysis remains exclusively at the level of expressive politics and understands traditional society fundamentally from the point of the state, not from the perspective of people. The logic of popular politics is, in this case, one that reduces subjectivity to social place, thus implicitly denying the possibility of emancipatory thought. Mamdani argues that African colonial and postcolonial states interpellated people as ethnic or tribal subjects, institutionalised such identities over time, and thereby created the conditions for mass slaughter in 1994 Rwanda, for example. Despite his argument’s importance in accounting for genocide in terms of political identities (as opposed to economic or psychological forces), Mamdani is not able to account for the politics of those Hutu (for example) who protected and saved Tutsi from certain death (and vice versa); in other words, those who exceeded their ethnic identities in favour of a stress on humanity.13 Mamdani is thus not able to address the issues of the possibility and sites of an alternative politics in the specific situation of Rwanda in 1994, because his overriding concern is state politics and state-induced subjectivities.14 His thought is confined by the limits of a liberal view of the state along with an understanding of politics as representation. Thinking excessive politics from such a perspective is quite impossible. To sum up, the process of imposing political identity is itself a struggle, while people often resist and, at times, exceed the exigencies of interest. The state requires

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interests within society to pursue its agenda of creating tradition, a point discussed at length by several historians.15 First among such interests during the colonial period was the chieftaincy, which was not only an institution of power (as Mamdani stresses) but also a cultural one. Culture was closely intertwined with politics in tradition, which meant that the colonial state’s political categorisation had authoritative cultural support and resonated more with the people than it would have done had the chieftaincy been exclusively concerned with the exercise of state power. This is arguably the main reason why the colonial state’s prescriptions were so readily accepted by colonial populations, and why the colonial state insisted on identifying tribe with ethnicity and politics with culture. The state’s policies were contested, however, as women, youth, the poor and other dominated groups within particular identities challenged (often in hidden ways) the definition of tradition and culture imposed on them by the state in alliance with chiefs, men, the wealthy and other dominant groups. The resistance of women, in particular, is well documented.16 Mamdani’s theoretical position, despite the often brilliant insights it produces, is limited by the fact that it is state-centred, with the result that politics cannot be conceived outside state conceptions of what politics is – people are said to be simply what state institutions make them, politically. Mamdani is not alone in stressing the importance of organised interests in identity politics. This is the central point in Leroy Vail’s introduction to his edited volume (Vail, 1989). Here it is argued that ‘tribalism’ in Southern Africa was invented because it was in the interests of various groups (e.g. colonial administrators, chiefs, migrant workers, missionaries) to do so. Apart from its obvious tautology, this argument tends to forget that such invention was only possible because it was backed by colonial state power. Ethnic or tribal subjectivities are, from this perspective, seen as the core features of an invented traditional society, and resistance to them – or possible alternatives – are not considered. Ethnic identity and tribe (political power) are conflated. When Vail argues that it is interests that make tribalism in Southern Africa, he leaves out the possibility of a politics at a distance from the state developing within the limits of ‘culture’. That such creation and reproduction are said to be determined by interests leaves us in no doubt regarding the state character of political subjectivities in traditional society. Indeed, what the historians of the invention of tradition talk about is not so much the making of tradition or ethnic identity but a specific form of identity politics, namely communitarianism or ethnic politics, referred to usually as ‘tribalism’. It is important to insist that there are aspects of tradition which are popularly democratic and able to think universality. Consequently, an ongoing struggle operates within tradition over its character. It is crucial not to dismiss all ethnicity as reactionary in itself, as Africans live within ethnic cultures and express ethnic idioms of various sorts. Mamdani is indeed right to stress that at independence the new middle class enters civil society, while there is no transformation of traditional society. As far as the

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urban is concerned, in South Africa (the most urbanised country on the continent) this was not the manner in which the popular movement conceived the struggle for freedom; rather, this outcome was itself a result of a subjective political shift, as I have shown. The notions of civil society and human rights only became prevalent in popular discourse within South Africa at the end of the 1980s. Moreover, the ANC, before capturing state power, had seen itself as a revolutionary organisation, and not a civil rights movement demanding that existing rights for Whites be expanded to all. It had regularly affirmed its desire to transform the state itself and not simply to enter into the existing ‘democracy for Whites’, which prevailed under apartheid. That it ended up doing so was intimately connected with the ANC’s focus on achieving power, which in turn resulted from its notion of politics as representation and, ultimately, from a demophobia – from a fear of people representing themselves – as a result of which people were systematically depoliticised when the ANC embraced the New World Order. The outcome of a discourse of rights, citizenship and entry into civil society was the effect of a reactive subjectivity; it was in no way inevitable.17 Popular politics clearly also contest state power in traditional society, as Mamdani recognises. That most of these rebellions in Southern Africa attempted to reassert the tradition that ‘a chief is a chief by his people’ is apparent. For some, like Lekhotla la Bafo (the Commoners’ League) in Lesotho, it was a matter of returning to a past tradition of consultation that chiefs were seen to have betrayed (Edgar, 1988). For others, such as the Mountain Movement in Mpondoland, the idea was to return power to people themselves by replacing the individual chief with an elected popular assembly, without altering the popularly founded institution of the chieftaincy as such (Lodge, 1983; Neocosmos, 1995). These were both struggles for democracy within traditional society, but whereas the Mpondoland rebellion was an attempt to exceed state political subjectivities, the Commoners’ League was not. That the former exhibited such an excessive subjectivity largely accounts for the apartheid state’s extremely violent response. The point is that not only does struggle take place within traditional society, but traditional institutions still exist that show the continued possibility of excessive politics within that domain. I now turn to a more extensive elaboration of this point.

resolving contradictions among the people: thinking a politics of peace and social healing It should be apparent that violent approaches to resolving popular contradictions are today (again) seemingly all-pervasive on the African continent. The patent inability of the (new democratic) African state to resolve popular contradictions has led to more or less vocal calls for ‘foreign help’, with consequences that are often too ghastly to contemplate. It is here not simply a question of state-deployed violence but also of popular violence (e.g. of an ethnic or xenophobic kind). In South Africa, a ‘culture

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of violence’ has been systemically produced by specific forms of political thought and practice and not simply inherited from a colonial or apartheid past. In Nigeria, the state’s insistence on addressing the Boko Haram phenomenon militarily has (predictably) backfired, leading to the kidnapping of teenage children and general attacks on the civilian population. The only popular response on offer seems to be a moral one: ‘Free our girls.’ The absence of alternative politics should be evident. The following argument attempts to think a political alternative to violence founded upon concepts and categories inherent in African traditions, i.e. in actually existing (although often subterranean) popular practices. These cannot be understood as mere survivals but have been imaginatively altered and reconstructed to different extents and in different ways because of the need for people to cope with ongoing crises in their lives, from the slave trade onwards. The argument is fundamentally conceptual and methodological in order to redirect analyses and begin to make alternatives thinkable; it is not prescriptive. What I mean in particular is that it is not my intention to set out or evaluate strategies for achieving peace. For example, despite its otherwise useful observations and recognition that ‘communities of people have the agency to shape things’ (Anderson and Wallace, 2013: 176) and thus that political choices are possible, a recent text by Anderson and Wallace suffers from the limitations of not being able to transcend an ‘interventionist’ ‘NGO-ist’ view of ‘conflict prevention’. In this manner the issue addressed is depoliticised and technicised; my intention, on the other hand, is to insist on the need to alter our way of thinking in order to begin to think new concepts and categories that contribute to a politics of peace rather than restricting ourselves to seemingly neutral methods and techniques. Moreover, I would argue that the currently predominant conceptions, such as ‘civil society’, ‘governance’ or ‘citizenship’ (i.e. the language of liberal democracy), are of little use for thinking political subjecthood from an emancipatory perspective, which is what is required if one wishes to understand the contributions that singular popular experiences may make to a universal conception of humanity. We need to begin by thinking a politics of peace in relation to a politics of violence. And we can only think a politics of peace through the theoretical lens of an emancipatory politics, because violence is not exceptional but systemic to the current form of capitalism and neo-colonial state under which we live. It is now generally admitted that recourse to violence has become widespread and endemic in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa, as it is worldwide. The apparent legitimacy of violent solutions to personal or political contradictions and conflicts is so prevalent throughout South African society that it is probably accurate to speak of a national ‘culture of violence’. One should be careful to stress that such a ‘culture’ cannot be grasped as a given reflection of social relations inherited from the past, resulting from an as yet incomplete ‘transition’ to democracy or as endemic to

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African society. Instead, it is created and re-created today on a daily basis as an effect of specific political subjectivities and choices. Thus, despite such violence being overwhelmingly criminal rather than ‘political’ in nature, it is directly connected to what is seen implicitly, if not always explicitly, by the state as legitimate activity for the resolution of conflicts. To account for a culture, then, is to account for specific subjectivities. These are produced as effects of complex interactions in various domains of politics between power and its hegemonic modes of thought, on the one hand, and people’s reactions to them, on the other. The latter do not always simply conform to the former. Resistance may give rise to thought and not merely to knowledge; in other words, it may exceed the subjective limits imposed by the state. As I have argued, in state thinking, subjectivities are always seen as reflective (expressive) of social location or place. Reasoned thought in excess of state subjectivity is simply effaced; people are not supposed to think outside their social location or place. All these subjectivities, whether state expressive subjectivities or excessive subjectivities at a distance from the state, provide the conditions of possibility for political agency, in the sense that they pose parameters within which problems and solutions of particular kinds in particular situations are thought and to which agency conforms. Thus it may be held by power, for example, that the ‘problem’ of ‘illegal immigrants’ can be solved through increased repression by the state, which then smoothly translates into the deployment of violence against ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’ by the people themselves, so long as they remain within the subjective parameters of the ‘foreigner’ as the excluded Other. This amounts to the production of a politics of fear of the stranger (Neocosmos, 2008, 2010a). Moreover, the fact that perpetrators of xenophobic violence are rarely punished contributes to a culture of impunity, which further legitimates violence. At the core of these particular political subjectivities are state subjectivities and practices. These in turn often remain unchallenged, so that it becomes easier for them to appear to be reducible to the social attributes of the excluded; they become naturalised. The naturalisation of subjectivity is, as we know, regularly associated with the state and its modes of thinking, so this effect should not surprise us; but the first step in the subjective process of ‘naturalisation’ is one of social reductionism through which subjectivity becomes linked exclusively to objective social location as a result of its equation with ‘interest’. The reflection or expression of interest in political subjectivity is known as political identity.18 Yet the reduction of subjectivity to objective social location or place is not inevitable, for it is possible to think beyond the interest allocated to place. People are able to think beyond their objective social position and interests – beyond identity – simply because they are capable of reason. Therefore, if we are to confront violent state political subjectivities in practice, there can be no hiding behind objective historical accounts in terms of processes of ‘transition’, for example, for this would only mean confronting a state politics with another state politics, which would continue to occlude and exclude

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people as thinking beings.19 In the absence of an alternative political subjectivity or consciousness, one which explicitly puts forward in its discourse and practice an alternative politics of peace from the point of people, the state politics of violence will continue unchallenged and unabated. I have shown in chapter 13 how a politics of violence can be accounted for in Africa, and in South Africa in particular. There is no need to repeat the arguments here, other than to note that a hegemonic subjectivity of political violence (a ‘culture of violence’) is an effect of a particular mode of state rule (with its attendant subjectivities) deployed within a specific domain of politics, which I have called ‘uncivil society’. Here I wish to note that if an alternative political subjectivity of peace is to become the object of thought – i.e. if it is to become possible to think such a politics – it must be excessive of interest and founded on a principle of equality. It must first be thought as a resolution to contradictions within political community, as a politics of peace, and not as ‘conflict resolution’ between antagonistic communities. Such thinking has taken place, and is still taking place, within traditional society and is endogenous (not indigenous) to Africa; it may provide the foundation for a subjective excess over state politics, precisely because some aspects of the politics of traditional society already exist subjectively at a distance from state politics. I have chosen to focus my reflections on three sets of issues. Firstly, I wish to privilege concepts and categories, because I think that there is very little theoretical thinking surrounding the African process of community healing and a politics of peace;20 secondly, the thinking of African practices in this regard takes place overwhelmingly today from within Western liberal perspectives, so I wish to take a deliberate Afrocentric perspective here; and, thirdly, I am concerned to make visible the regularly occluded aspects of popular tradition and thought which, I believe, form the raw material from which an alternative politics of peace can begin to be conceived and practised.21 In general, I wish to argue that the essence of social healing in Africa consists of a form of politics among people who think, and that consequently it cannot be technicised and professionalised without at the same time losing its healing powers. This means that social healing is not to be understood as a (‘subjugated’, ‘indigenous’ or whatever) knowledge, but as a (possible) truth, in Badiou’s sense of a political process of creation (not one of discovery) of a universal. It necessarily presumes that people are capable of thinking beyond social interest, as they search for alternatives in their daily struggles to exercise some kind of agency over their lives in conditions of political exclusion.

The politics of social healing Endogenous to African society have been conceptions and procedures for resolving contradictions (both social and individual) which were always community-based and which emphasised the intimate connection between the individual and the community as well as the universality of the human. Arguably, the tradition goes back 4,000

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       The domain of traditional society and its politics     501

years at least, to the ancient Egyptian (Kmt) conception of Mâât, which was concerned with maintaining and restoring balance to community, especially after periods of violence and upheaval.22 For Diop (1991), early African culture was founded on a moral philosophy of peace and was matriarchal in content. For Amadiume (1995: 42), ‘the values of matriarchy seem to have generated anti-state and anti-centrist tendencies’, as women resisted the imposition of patriarchal rule in Africa during the modern period (from about 1593 onwards). Amadiume also argues that ‘the matriarchal value and moral system which generated the concepts love, harmony, peace and co-operation, and forbade bloodshed, imposed a check on excessive and destructive masculinism’ in ancient (precolonial) Africa (p. 47). Central to these practices is a notion of ‘social healing’ or ‘community healing’ in which both individual and community are assumed to be so interrelated that contradictions in the one have effects in the other, and vice versa. Given that the ancestors are also part of the community (and guide it), healing or re-achieving a delicate balance involves spiritual, physical and detailed ceremonial activity. Simultaneously, skills in manipulating words – rhetoric – were highly prized, as they were central to the reintroduction of balance to the social world (Blake, 2009). Particularly in stateless BaKongo societies (beyond the Kongo kingdom) in the 17th–18th centuries, sophisticated organisations were developed on the basis of spiritual beliefs in order to resist social disintegration in the face of the twin disasters of the slave trade and colonialism, such as the Lemba healing cult, mentioned in chapter 2 (Janzen, 1982). Janzen (1992) also traces the existence of such healing cults throughout the Bantu-speaking world. I wish to argue that such practices of ‘social healing’ are fundamentally based on excessive politics, which are not simply given but always need to be fought for. At the core of the whole idea of the healing process is a popular traditional institution referred to by different names but known generally as the palaver (from the Portuguese palavra, meaning ‘word’) or as the mbongi in KiKongo.23 Dismissed by colonialism as a mere time-wasting exercise or ‘talk-shop’, the palaver was the central means of healing in societies in all parts of the continent. It was also often central to popular forms of rebellion against colonialism, and cultures developed that valued the skills of rhetoric and speaking. While war was often (and has regularly been conceived as) the normal way of resolving contradictions with those named as ‘the enemy’ (i.e. the ‘Other’, the ‘excluded’), among people who were not enemies but friends and relatives (i.e. the ‘included’ in community) talking and persuading was the central method. It is crucial to begin from this observation: namely that not all contradictions are of the same order – some are antagonistic and some are not – and consequently that different contradictions need to be resolved in different ways.24 This is also dependent on who is counted as ‘included’ and who is ‘excluded’, but traditionally – if I may be allowed a generalisation – African societies were generally inclusive of strangers.

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Today, when politics is seemingly reduced to war (politics is apparently today the ‘continuation of war by other or similar means’ for a number of writers),25 as even within the same party people are often referred to as enemies, such thinking is of paramount importance, for it challenges the dominant legitimation of political violence.26 Of course, even between enemies, contradictions can often be resolved through talking – this is precisely what negotiations consist of – but this process is not the central issue of concern here.27 In any case, a political challenge to a state-propagated culture of violence, in order to take root, must arguably be developed ‘from below’. My main concern is to begin to put on the agenda a form of politics that can be referred to as a ‘politics of peace’. Not to be confused with pacifism as a moral injunction, a ‘politics of peace’ is concerned with the resolution of ‘non-antagonistic’ contradictions; in other words, it confronts differences and contradictions between people within ‘community’, however ‘community’ may be conceived. It puts talking and persuasion at the centre of this process of the resolution of conflict, not coercive practices; politics here becomes closer to an art form than to a science, which war has regularly been understood to be. How does one begin to think through this process? Firstly, it is important not to essentialise or to reify culture here. The dominant notion of ‘culture’ as a given set of norms and values, by insisting on action as habit or tradition or custom,28 occludes agency as reasoned practice. It effaces subjectivation – the process of production of a subject – as it assumes a given subject and an identity, a way of being and doing that is reflective or expressive of and, hence, tied to a social situation or place. Here, people-subjects simply act within state-induced subjectivities; it is taken for granted that they do things without knowing why they do them and that we therefore need social science to tell us why. Social scientists are thus required to translate the idioms of popular traditions into recognisable categories of liberal scientific discourse.29 As a result, politics as reasoned practices excessive to location are removed from the domain of thought. Given what we have been told, namely that tradition and culture are created and re-created by interests and identities (e.g. Vail, 1989), and particularly by power, the depoliticising and naturalising effects of such modes of thought should not surprise us. ‘Culture’ is the core name of the politics of traditional society. Like ‘rights’ within civil society, it should be understood as created, re-created and struggled over within that domain of politics. Moreover, an African institution such as the palaver is not simply given in cultural memory, waiting to be rediscovered (it is not ‘authentic’); it is constantly created and re-created – Badiou (2009a) would say ‘resurrected’ – in different forms in different circumstances. The use of the gaçaça in Rwanda is a case in point. As is well known, this institution was re-created by the Rwanda Patriotic Front-dominated state after the genocide as a way of processing the backlog of perpetrators (known as génocidaires) who could not possibly have been processed through Western courts.30 It also

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served two other functions: firstly, in achieving a degree of community reconciliation and, secondly, in reinforcing state power at local or community level, thereby helping to enable the reproduction of an ethnic Tutsi state at central level. In other words, it was initiated as a ‘top-down’ process, which may have worked to reconcile in some respects but which has also undermined reconciliation in others – for example, through political rivalries and personal vendettas (Clark, 2012). This outcome was helped by the fact that gaçaça had already been a chiefly process before colonialism (Reyntjens, 1990). Secondly, it is also important not to think simply in terms of ‘conflict resolution mechanisms’ underpinned by Western notions of ‘transitional justice’ or ideas of ‘democratisation equals Westernisation’. For such conceptions, Western ideas of state liberal democracy are taken as a universal ideal to be attained, while African tradition is simply understood as a leftover from the past, defined by absences (by the absence of liberal features such as human rights, for example) and not as contemporary to modernity. The manner in which the gaçaça experiment in Rwanda has been regularly dismissed in Western legal literature as a ‘kangaroo court’ is an example worth noting, although in other (often anthropological) literature it has been idealised as ‘authentic’. There is, however, no linear leftover or development of traditional systems; rather, such capacities are constantly being reinvented and practised to a greater or lesser extent in conditions of or after violent disruption. The African state itself cannot impose any idea of the ‘traditional’ on its people without subjectivity collapsing into some ‘ethnophilosophical’ conception (in the sense developed by Hountondji, 1997) divorced from popular practice; it can only be successful if socially rooted and practically enacted at the ‘grassroots’, so to speak. The failure of the South African state’s idea of ubuntu is a recent example of this, but one can also refer to Mobutu’s ‘authenticité ’ in Zaire, and even to Nyerere’s Ujamaa, which despite their ideological differences were all, ultimately, ‘top top-down’ state conceptions. That Ujamaa did enable popularly driven cooperative experiments simply points to the fact of its rootedness in popular practice. Finally, the notion (widespread in South Africa) that the past can be ‘mummified’ in institutionalised memory (in museums, statues, public buildings) avoids all discussion of contradiction as such, and thus evacuates from view the living politics of popular agency. Unsurprisingly, such state activities are regularly contested while people attempt to reappropriate their memories for themselves. Popular agency must be the core focus of any discussion of social healing. In brief, there are three major orientations associated with neo-colonial perspectives on resolving contradictions which must be avoided: firstly, the technicisation of ‘conflict resolution’ so that the issue is reduced to one of management and expertise; secondly, the ‘anthropologising’ of popular practices by a distant respectful outsider so that what people do is relegated to some form of (perhaps useful, but ultimately alien)

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strangeness; thirdly, the uncritical celebration of ‘memory’ or ‘tradition’ (the past) by a nationalist state. In all cases the effect is one of depoliticisation. It follows that social healing cannot be turned into a pedagogy and located at a university without losing its healing powers; it must remain a popular practice in order to be effective. Indeed, it is arguably because of the inability of the episteme of social science and history to recognise such practices as political that they have been systematically occluded, except as anthropological oddities and ‘traditional leftovers’ or even as exceptional occurrences. A people’s politics that does not correspond to what the scientistic episteme requires it to be – for example, to correspond to what the ‘political’ is meant to look like in liberal or Marxist theory, as explicitly concerning the state, the civic, etc. – is dismissed and occluded under the terms ‘superstition’ (during colonialism) or ‘religion’ (under liberal postcolonialism) or ‘false consciousness’ (vulgar Marxism) or ‘culture’ (multicultural respectful anthropology today). Resolving contradictions and healing simply become an oddity, with some interesting aspects. It bears repeating that popular systems of healing must be understood politically, not in the sense of state, parties or civil society, but in the sense of popular practices of democracy (often using idioms that are not obviously ‘political’). In other words, it must be understood that people engage in healing practices in times of necessity, as with all popular politics, in order to assert some form of control over their lives. These processes need to be conceived as collective processes and decisions – which are, after all, what popular politics consist of. This argument has a number of consequences for analysis which I will illustrate with examples. First and foremost, the resolution of contradictions or (potential) conflicts within communities is to be understood as resolving conflicts not between antagonistic groupings but among community members; in community, there is no Other, as everyone is included. In this case there is no enemy; outside community, the Other is the potential enemy. The whole point of the process sometimes referred to as ‘othering’, as in the case of xenophobic interpellation, is that people are first excluded from community as ‘strangers or outsiders’ before being violently attacked as enemies. It is crucially important to reflect on this, as politics today regularly degenerates into violence and war, simply because any potential other is viewed as an enemy – in the recently rediscovered work of Carl Schmitt (1932), for example, politics is understood first and foremost to be about identifying the enemy. But politics is not simply concerned with identifying and confronting an enemy; it also concerns ensuring balance and cohesion in community, i.e. ‘healthy relations’ among ‘friends and family’ without which a community cannot survive or exist in the first place. No society can live in a state of permanent crisis, and, while in crisis, it cannot confront its enemies adequately anyway. So the idea of ‘community healing’ or ‘social healing’ implies the resolution of contradictions within community (among ‘families and friends’ – ‘kith and kin’). At the core of the idea of social healing is the desire for unity. It is this desire that governs the peaceful resolution of non-antagonistic contradictions. As we shall see, the

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ancestors frequently embody the idea of unity in Africa, precisely because the present crisis is understood as a dramatic shift from a unified past. Of course, no such desire is necessary in the process of negotiation between enemies. Politics concerns both friends and enemies – in fact, probably the former more than the latter, as the latter cannot be successfully confronted in the absence of unity among the former; it is therefore absolutely crucial to be able to distinguish between the two. To reduce all contradictions, irrespective of who they involve (friends or enemies), to a matter of ‘conflict resolution’ is to equate healing with ‘negotiation’ and, hence, with technique. It is not accidental that negotiations between employers (representing the interests of capital) and organised labour – i.e. class conflict (between class enemies)31 diverted onto a negotiating table – is referred to as ‘collective bargaining’. The point in healing is not simply to ‘resolve’ conflict and to ‘bargain’ with the Other (a process of ‘give and take’), but to reconfigure the community itself, to re-create on a new basis a collective balance (health) within the community. As a result, what is said to be the view of the ancestors plays a crucial role here, as the ancestors themselves define the idea of balance, which is derived from a view of the past when the community was healthy. Who interprets the past through tradition and how it is interpreted therefore becomes crucial. It is for this reason that elders or other knowledgeable people often play an important role in the process; yet knowledge is not all that is required. What is also necessary is an understanding of the truth that all are equal within the palaver process itself, at least if the palaver is to reflect the views of all and not exclude some. To sum up, the unfortunate theoretical reduction of such politics to ‘conflict resolution’ has a number of negative effects. Firstly, it obscures the crucial distinction between ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’, so that both are treated in the same way, in most cases as enemies; but resolving contradictions between friends and between enemies requires different politics and different methods. Secondly, it reduces the political process of healing to a technique that can thus be learnt by ‘experts’ (e.g. managers, negotiators, arbitrators), taught at universities and ‘applied’ in different contexts. Thirdly, it disempowers ordinary people by creating expertise and vesting power in experts and professionals. Fourthly, it simultaneously occludes politics (understood as popular collective action to enable control over one’s life and social environment) and disables collective decision-making, so that it further disempowers. And finally, it therefore amounts to a typical neo-colonial conception of depoliticisation and disempowerment.

African social healing as political practice The idea must be to reintroduce politics (understood as a process of collective ‘taking control’) into thinking the social healing process. The ideas and practices of what can be called the ‘politics of healing’ become quite clear in historical examples of the social healing process in different parts of Africa, although they take different forms.

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I refer to four examples in which it will become apparent that when the palaver is under popular control, it is a much more egalitarian and democratic process than when under state control. Example 1: The palaver [mbongi]32 among the BaKongo. The palaver, especially as developed among BaKongo people in Central Africa, is a particularly important instance of a process of healing, as it constitutes probably the best example there is of a popularly constructed African process, for interference by external (colonial) power was largely resisted. Many different kinds of palavers have been practised over the years, and during the colonial period in particular, according to Wamba-dia-Wamba (1985), there were attempts at class differentiation, by those with connections to power within rural communities, that were often combated precisely by calling palavers. The following points stressed by Wamba-dia-Wamba (1985) should be particularly noted. A palaver is a collective/individual cleaning-up of people as community (physically, biologically, anthropologically, sociologically and spiritually) ... The palaver appears as a mass bursting of active involvement in matters of the entire community and of ‘free’ or ‘liberated’ (i.e. with no taboos, no restrictions, no diplomacy, etc.) speaking ... When a palaver is artificially organised by oppressive ruling powers, however, it degenerates into a formal exercise without life and (de)void of mass spontaneous creativity: people speak, as it is said, with ‘tied tongues’ or with ‘tongues in the cheek’ (pp. 3, 4, emphases in original). The description is clear: a palaver involves everyone equally; otherwise, if organised under the aegis of the powerful, a politics of interest is practised in order not to offend them and the palaver fails to resolve contradictions. A palaver is egalitarian and democratic, or not at all. ‘The palaver requires of and provides to each community member the right to carry out, and the obligation to be subjected to, an integral critique of/by everyone without exception’ (p. 7). Important ‘conflicts, emerging in, and threatening the life/existence of the community qua community, need to be resolved with appropriate methods’ (p. 4). To resolve contradictions elicited by both internal and external forces, a struggle takes place over whom the ancestors represent. The dominant members of the community ‘present themselves as the real servants ... of the powers of the ancestors ... It is claimed that ... the ancestors [speak] through them, and the masses of the community must obey them without question and reservation’ (pp. 5–6). Other members of the community oppose this, and invoke the view of the ancestors through visions and dreams which affirm that ‘the community has deviated from the ancestral line’ (p. 6). They do this because ‘to evoke the ancestors is to re-affirm their line, the one which allowed the community to reproduce’ (p. 11). The ‘ancestral line’ is, for

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them, founded on equality. The palaver, therefore, through its struggle around the meaning of the ‘ancestral line’, helps to resolve social conflicts and re-establish social egalitarian balance. To do so, it combines political processes with cultural representations, forms and rituals that constitute a complex language through which the palaver can be understood and, therefore, succeed. One can see then that all social differences, hierarchies and relations fall away during the palaver so that these may be reconstituted on a new basis after the conflict has been resolved. Given the absence of hierarchy within the political moment, specific intellectuals are charged with running the proceedings, articulating and clarifying the various positions expressed and adhering to rituals. These are the Nzonzis: ‘the collective self-criticism is carried out under the intellectual (dialectical) leadership of the Nzonzis who articulate positions and counter-positions in relation to the theoretical, ideological and symbolic requirements of the palaver’ (p. 11). In sum, Wamba-diaWamba concludes: ‘1) There cannot be any people’s consensus through silence ... 2) Democracy is first of all a free collective and individual exercise of free speech by everyone and by the whole community ... 3) A true leader is one who listens tirelessly ... 4) [The] Nzonzi has as a duty to surmount every obstacle to clarification, democratization, simplification, creativity, etc.’ (p. 14). It should be emphasised that this particular case illustrates a totally participatory popular process which emphasises egalitarianism as the political solution to contradictions within African community: the ‘true essence ... [of the palaver is] freedom’ (Diong, 1979: 83). The palaver, when run in a truly free manner, can be said to be a site of ‘excessive’ politics at local level, as it occurs at a distance from state thinking (both colonial and postcolonial). It is not surprising that it was a threat to the colonial power as well as to those aiming to set themselves above the people; both wished to undermine the institution. The eventual infrequency in the calling of palavers is a symptom of the gradual decline of excessive thought within African communities. Example 2: The shir in Somalia. In this account I rely on the detailed study by Samatar (1982), who observes: ‘The pastoral Somalis, egalitarian and lacking a partial authority to compose differences, readily resort to violence ... Force is exercised not only in action but also in words ... The pre-eminence of the spoken word has its roots in an essentially democratic society in which men who wield influence do so mainly through their powers of persuasion rather than coercion’ (pp. 26, 27). The Somali assembly is called the shir, and Somalis distinguish between four types of assembly that deal with different issues, such as justice, conflict resolution, clan praising and collective manufacturing of implements (p. 28). Both prose and poetry are used, and rhetoric and poetry have developed into sophisticated forms. The two main offices in the shir are those of the ‘chairman’ and the ‘wordbearer’; their role, according to Samatar, is ‘simply ceremonial’. ‘The function of the chairman is ... to oversee an

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orderly execution of business. The function of the wordbearer ... is to repeat loudly and clearly key parts of an argument after each orator so that everyone present has an opportunity to hear and understand what is being said’ (p. 47). The ‘wordbearer’ here seems to fulfil a similar function to that of the Nzonzi in the mbongi although with less responsibility, as certain distinctions such as those relating to age and gender still operate within the shir, with the result that egalitarianism is compromised. Samatar (p. 55) makes a very important observation which sums up the centrality of the use of language in the shir: ‘Poetry is the central integrating principle without which harmonious relationships in society would be unthinkable.’ Verbal eloquence is fundamental to providing unity and social health (‘harmonious relationships’); as a result, it was poetic oratory that was a central feature in unifying Somalis in resistance to colonial domination in the Dervish movement. Clearly, the politics of talking and persuasion in this case was achieved through specific, highly sophisticated verbal forms of communication and rhetoric, despite the absence of a complete egalitarian process in the shir itself.33 Example 3: The gaçaça in Rwanda. This is perhaps the most well-known institution of this type today. As noted earlier, it was reinvented by the Rwandan state for the reasons already given. A few remarks will suffice. The literature on the gaçaça is overwhelmingly located within Western conceptions of law, ‘transitional justice’ and ‘conflict resolution’. Clark (2010), the most detailed analysis I have seen to date of gaçaça in practice, operates squarely within this paradigm, as does Bornkamm (2012), who looks at the legal context of rules. There is usually little discussion of the origins of gaçaça, and only its post-genocide workings are discussed.34 One exception is provided by Mironko and Rurangwa (2007: 203), who note: Traditionally, Gaçaça was used at the local level to resolve disputes within one family or between close families ... The basic unit of Gaçaça was the council of elders, with all adult members of the community as observers. Although judgments were reached by elders, and not necessarily by popular vote or consensus, the principle behind each judgment was the restoration of social harmony, the re-establishment of order, the reintegration of the offender, and the reconciliation of the two parties. It seems that gaçaça was already a state institution in precolonial times, which would explain why it so easily collapsed during the colonial period and degenerated into arbitrariness after independence (p. 204). It was revived by the post-genocide state and has recently been terminated (in 2012). Most of the discussions in the literature concern whether it corresponded to Western conceptions of justice, and its failure to discuss the crimes of the Rwanda Patriotic Front itself (Clark, 2012).

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       The domain of traditional society and its politics     509

Yet, at the same time, the process has contributed to healing. Clark insists on using the term ‘healing’ only for the resolution of the psychological traumas of individuals (2010: 258), and reserves the term ‘reconciliation’ for processes that result in ‘communal healing’. There is a clear reticence to discuss African conceptions of social healing here, while the Rwandan state, despite its gestural invocation of African tradition, is fundamentally concerned with establishing ‘social cohesion’, like all states.35 Given the history of animosity between Tutsi and Hutu in particular, and the minority nature of ethnic Tutsis who run an ethnic state, this fear is understandable, although not condonable. What is particularly clear is the distinction between the popular concerns and popular-democratic thinking in the palaver and shir and the much more state-focused concerns of the gaçaça. Evidently, this is linked to the character of the societies in question: the first two lack a central state, while the third is statist. Example 4: The judiya in Darfur (Sudan). An important detailed study of the judiya is that undertaken by Tubiana et al. (2012). They note: Judiya is the main term for traditional justice and reconciliation mechanisms in Darfur. The term is derived from jud, which translates to generosity or magnanimity in Arabic. The judiya process is facilitated by ajawid (sing. ajwad). The central tenet is that of a consensual mediation that brings together a commonly acceptable outcome for the parties. Problems are not solved by punishment, but by a common acceptance of social ties ... When Darfurians want to say that a mediator is good, they will label him an ajwad, and when they want to indicate that a conference was good, they will call it a judiya. Both terms are strongly positive (p. 37). Here, the central figure in the process comes under a different name, and clearly from important men with status: ‘traditionally, ajawid are chosen among elders and notables known for both their neutrality and their competence in traditional matters. Elders or notables will put themselves forward to serve as ajawid, or be recommended by leading members of the community’ (p. 57). We are told that the foundational component of customary justice and reconciliation in this context is material compensation: the offending party must compensate the aggrieved party for the offence. If there was loss of limb or life, the compensation comes in lieu of blood. Compensation is also the recognition of responsibility, and can therefore lead to reconciliation. Compensation can be ordered by the court, recommended by ajawid or other mediators, or agreed by consensus among the parties. It comes in three forms: diya (blood money), ta’wid (compensation for non-human losses) and khasarat (costs) (p. 27). These institutions resemble more closely what are known throughout the continent as ‘customary courts’, founded on tradition.

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It comes as no surprise that these customary courts were first recognised and institutionalised by British colonialism and, subsequently, by the postcolonial state; they are controlled by ‘traditional leaders’ and are comparable to ‘traditional courts’ elsewhere on the continent in the sense that they form the bottom level of the official judicial system. There is very little evidence of popular politics in either the government-controlled areas of Sudan or the rebel-controlled areas; yet, at the same time, these courts retain a popular legitimacy that customary courts in South Africa do not possess. The first priority of the ajawid is to stop ongoing violence. Today, the first step is often to call the police, at least in government-held areas, where most of the population lives. This is in keeping with a tradition now so distant it has become a legend, according to which elders of both sides would physically restrain their youth with rope to stop the violence and allow a judiya. Using police rather than rope began during colonial times – perhaps more an opportunity to show the military power of the hakuma, the government, than any attempt at Solomonic justice (p. 61). Darfurians agree that they favor judiya over any court because it is more efficient and swifter – not least because, unlike the courts, it has no appeal process. Above all, judiya is less risky and less divisive. It is less risky because the outcome is the result of a negotiation, and therefore the process offers more control than that depending on an unpredictable court process. It is less damaging because it offers an opportunity to manage relations with an individual or group one is likely to have to deal with in the future. ‘When the government [that is, the statutory court] imposes a sentence, it is cutting ties between people,’ a camp leader in eastern Chad explained (p. 62). Darfurians will say that a successful judiya involves truth-telling, which in turn allows for, and obliges the other party to, discount in the compensation, forgiveness, and a lasting reconciliation. ‘It is very important to tell the truth. To be forgiven, you must tell the truth,’ said a Fur intellectual who has been a close observer of reconciliation processes (p. 66). It appears that judiya possesses a high level of legitimacy in Darfur despite its state character, but its functions are clearly limited to the legal resolution of conflict and do not extend to social healing. Interestingly, this lower state court brings forth a distinction between such a state institution and government. The necessity for the former’s legitimacy is recognised, while the latter’s partiality is emphasised:

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Making an incident the responsibility of many people creates powerful social disincentives for violence. Darfurians of all sides are quick to point out that the conflicts of the past twenty-five years show what happens when a powerful external actor – the government – enables local groups to become immune to traditional conflict mitigation processes by arming them, giving them political support, and undermining the mechanisms that should provide a disincentive to violence. This is particularly so among groups that have been militarized by the government and gradually integrated into official armed forces (p. 68). In sum, we can note that, despite what may be called its ‘statisation’, this ‘customary court’ has nevertheless attempted to mitigate and resist the effects of violence in an extremely violent environment, through disincentives to violence such as collective social responsibility. The four examples outlined here – mbongi, shir, gaçaça and judiya – exhibit different levels of statisation of the politics of peace. In the last two cases (gaçaça and judiya) the institutions are unmistakably state institutions and are restricted to court functions; thus, although we may be able to speak of reconciliation, there is much less evidence of healing, as the processes are less democratic than the mbongi and even the shir. Indeed, it can be suggested that the greater the ‘statisation’ of the process, the less it is an issue of healing and of resolving contradiction, and the more it amounts to a question of deploying legal precepts, i.e. power. The levels of variation in these processes give some idea of the rich traditions available for resolving contradictions among the people in Africa.

Some popular practices in South Africa In South Africa, since ‘customary courts’ have largely lost their popular legitimacy, having been used as systems of control under colonialism and apartheid, the experience of popular assemblies with an element of healing is mostly to be found in the practices of some popular social movements. If we except the state-structured TRC process in the 1990s, such assemblies are practised in conditions that do not receive official recognition. Their presence in popular practice makes this process much more in conformity with the palaver and shir (it takes place ‘at a distance’ from state institutions), although the level of utilisation of ritual and symbolism is much more limited to the sacrifice of a small animal (poverty plays a central role here). I am not aware of social healing processes having taken place in the rural areas of Mpondoland (from where most of the migrants came to the Lonmin mine) after the recent Marikana massacre, for example, but this certainly does not mean that they did not take place. The same is valid for the post-xenophobic violence of 2008. Given the extreme effects of colonial and apartheid domination during which the repressive powers of the centralised chieftaincies were systematically bolstered, popular

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assemblies are predominantly an affair outside official ‘culture’. At the level of the state, what are performed are formal ceremonies such as the ‘tradition of cleansing violence’ performed by the ‘nkosi’ (chief ) himself,36 while ‘traditional courts’ in rural areas mainly serve the chieftaincy as a means to control the population and enable the plunder of resources from the people through arbitrary forms of coercion (Mamdani, 1996a).37 Popular traditions of social healing are in need of resurrection in South Africa. The organisation with the most evident current experience of this is Abahlali baseMjondolo, the movement of shack-dwellers. Central to Abahlali’s conception of politics is what they call ‘living politics’, which simply refers to the practice according to which any shack-dweller (whether member or not) can turn to the movement with her problem, and anyone can raise any point of concern at any gathering of the movement ... In addition to the conviction that everyone’s suffering is equally unjust ... this implication also points to the second sense which living politics points to. Beyond the healing effects of ‘providing that ear’; ‘something that people are craving’, in this second meaning, living politics attends to formulating a responsibility to effectively deal with the problem which the cry is about (Selmeczi, 2012: 508). A specific example of living politics concerns the way Abahlali responded to violent attacks on their leaders prior to the mass attacks in Kennedy Road in September 2009. Rather than launching revenge attacks, they discovered who their assailants were and entered into discussion with their grandmothers (given the predominance of elderly women in Abahlali, this is very pertinent), who then put pressure on the youth to come to a reconciliation meeting. The community was reconciled after much discussion, and an animal was bought by the offending parties and sacrificed.38 Given the multi-ethnic character of Abahlali (and the multi-ethnic character of shackdweller communities), an elected committee is often entrusted with resolving differences, and the offending parties provide reparation in the form of a small animal (e.g. a chicken). Moreover, tensions in meetings are sometimes diffused by an elderly woman who goes into a trance and communicates with God (or the ancestors), who then insists on the need to maintain unity. The need for unity is then addressed through the outpouring of emotion rather than argument, affect rather than reason.39 Yet the insistence on achieving unity is totally rational, irrespective of the manner in which it is achieved. This kind of healing politics is integral to the politics of Abahlali. It works because it is founded on popular participatory democratic practices along the lines of the palaver and shir. People feel involved, and are indeed involved, in the process of devising politics collectively. Community meetings of this sort are accompanied by rituals borrowed from African ‘tradition’ as well as from Christianity, but what is central is

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the ability of everyone to talk and to be listened to, as in the case of the palaver. While these practices do not only occur ‘post-violence’, when they do they are relatively easy to organise in those cases where a culture of discussion and debate within community has already been fought for and instituted. Given the multi-ethnic character of the community and the leadership of the organisation, there is somewhat less possibility of traditional chiefs taking over the running of these politics and pushing them in an authoritarian direction. In any case, Abahlali’s politics of peace are being ‘reinvented’. They do not conform to a formalistic traditional model, although they perform similar functions to the more formal African processes discussed above. What all these examples strongly suggest is that a genuine popular politics of healing and the resolution of contradictions in community has taken many different forms in Africa. Such a politics is successful when it is already founded on ongoing popular-democratic practices that involve everyone equally, irrespective of the cultural particularities within which it may operate. The forms taken by popular assemblies are clearly the outcome of struggles: when the state or local elites have established control over the process (e.g. in the case of gaçaça), the content of the popular assembly differs fundamentally from when it is directly under popular control (e.g. in the mbongi). In South Africa, popular forms of resolving contradictions in communities are also clearly located within an understanding of the politics of healing. In other words, they are not a technique with potentiality, but the deployment in actuality of ancient methods adapted to current needs. They provide the potential for an alternative politics of emancipation. This is in a sense why Cabral (1973) insisted on a ‘return to the source’ if such a politics is to be effectuated. These methods of resolving contradictions are in most cases much more humane than anything the formal criminal justice system can provide. Their importance is increased by the fact that poor people are equally alienated by the workings of the criminal justice system and by the ‘traditional/customary courts’ in the rural areas over which the chieftaincy exercises its arbitrary powers. The question therefore remains: how can a politics of social healing be made central to a politics of peace, and how can it be made more widespread so that it acquires a more prominent place in politics today? It needs to be noted that none of the examples of social healing in action are based within parties, and I know of none which are. In the case of Abahlali, we have the only ‘non-rural’ example provided, yet the rural–urban distinction is largely misleading because it is invariably associated with the supposed ‘traditional’ character of the rural and the ‘modern’ character of the urban; subjectivity here is reduced to place. This is an unhelpful procedure. The point is that the political subjectivities associated with parties are not conducive to the resolution of non-antagonistic contradictions. Parties regularly deploy a militaristic subjectivity which is geared to ‘othering’, as a prelude to seeing the Other as the enemy. This is largely because parties are subjectively geared towards attaining state power to the exclusion of other parties. Another obvious consequence of

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parties’ focus on attaining power is that people are not considered capable of thought; only experts are, for only they can fathom the objective. People divided into classes, for example, are thought as ‘forces’ but never as capable of thinking for themselves, as in the militaristic notion of the ‘objective balance of class forces’, identified by the knowledgeable, on which the attainment of state power is ultimately said to depend. However, a politics of peace, as I have begun to outline it above, necessarily assumes that people think.40 The same is not true of NGOs – another ‘modern’ institution – as their concern is not with capturing power but with assuring the interests of their funders. This is not to maintain that NGOs are open to the idea that people think, but rather that they operate with a different subjectivity. There have been a number of NGOs that have concerned themselves with violence and peace in South Africa (e.g. the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation). But, overwhelmingly, these NGOs think within Western parameters that remain statist, especially those of ‘transitional justice’, (parliamentary) democracy and human rights, and they are consequently unable to open up to the thought of alternative, popularly based politics, as well as to the fact that people are capable of developing their own political thinking. The main point remains: it is largely impossible for a politics of peace to be thought from within a party-type organisation. This constitutes yet another reason for the necessity of thinking outside the parameters of party-state politics and its expressive objectivism. Finally, we should be clear that because excessive politics may occur in one domain does not automatically mean that it will be transferred to others. In a sense, each domain constitutes a subjectively distinct world. Abahlali’s politics of peace and universality have not so far been able to transit to civil society. On the other hand, the idea of communal property in land inherent in traditional society has influenced Abahlali’s conception of landownership, and there is much evidence that migrant labour has impacted over the years on collective action in traditional society (e.g. in Mpondoland). The most impervious domain is that of civil society, as here the fantasies of freedom upheld by the middle classes are very difficult to influence. But there is no inherent reason for thinking that its subjectivity will not be permeated by universal ideas emanating from beyond its boundaries. This would require another set of struggles against the social division of labour.

conclusion: the time of emancipation There is no alternative to taking popular practices of social healing seriously, simply because they also enable us to think transformation at the level of the symbolic.41 In particular, the palaver is the clearest model of such practices located deep within African humanistic traditions. A number of features suggestive of a politics at a distance from the state are central to the traditional palaver; they are not given, though, and they have to be constantly reaffirmed, fought for, prescribed. These include

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the total freedom granted to everyone, irrespective of their social location, to speak openly ‘without fear or favour’. They also include the central role of those highly respected intellectuals, the Nzonzis, known under different names in other contexts. However, at the core of the palaver – and perhaps its most important feature – is its understanding of time as following other requirements than those demanded by a utilitarian rationality. Given the centrality of time in biological healing processes, the palaver seems to suggest that time is also crucial in relation to social healing; in other words, in resolving contradictions among the people. If the idea in resolving such contradictions is to provide a unity of purpose in the community, then time has to be thought differently. That the colonial enterprise could not comprehend its importance, so that the term ‘palaver’ came to signify its wastage (a waste of time), merely confirms the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist foundation of colonialism and the universality of humanity central to African conceptions of culture and reaffirmed by Africans in the course of their struggles against oppression. The dismissal of the palaver by capitalist subjectivities symbolises both their contempt for humanity and their systematic effacing of popular politics. Here I wish to cite Alain Badiou, who, in his discussion of the disastrous effects of the deployment of ‘revolutionary violence’ and terror in an attempt to resolve political contradictions in emancipatory struggles, insists on the need for a different conception of time attuned to humanity, one that does not attempt to compete with the urgency inherent in the market. The African invention of the palaver contains within it the potential for social healing: its practices, or something like them, are of central importance to any politics of human emancipation in the contemporary world. Badiou notes: what experience shows is that, over the long term, neither antagonistic action, based on the military or police model, directed against enemies, nor Terror within your own camp can resolve the problems created by your own political existence ... Ultimately, every political problem boils down to a problem of the unity of orientation on an issue that is collectively defined as being the main issue of the moment or of the situation. Even a victory over the enemy depends on the subjective unity that was the victors’. Over the long run, the key to a victorious treatment of antagonisms lies in the correct handling of contradictions among the people  – which also happens to be the real definition of democracy ... The main lesson learned from the last century’s revolutions can be expressed as follows: the political time of the communist Idea must never compete with the established time of domination and its urgencies ... There is a necessary slowness, both democratic and popular in nature, which is particular to the time of the correct handling of contradictions among the people ... What ... [that paradoxical] violence especially destroys is the time of emancipation, which is on the scale of the life of humanity, not on that of the market’s profit cycle42 (Badiou, 2013d: 9–11, emphasis in original).

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In addition to the question of the need to rethink the problem of time, it is also important to stress the centrality of an understanding of the historical evolution of gender relations in Africa for an understanding of a politics of peace. While I have noted the importance of women in the contemporary struggle for the peaceful resolution of contradictions among the people in Africa, Amadiume (1997: 95) also reminds us: Accumulation through the appropriation of the fruit of other people’s labour means that appropriators resort to more and more violence, since human beings – as history rightly shows – always rebel against oppression in one form or another. In Africa, irrespective of internal contradictions and conflicts, the most effective and destructive instruments of oppression were imported from outside that continent: horses and firearms which were used to kill, capture and enslave. The ideology of violence was monolithic masculinist ideology, which ... had roots in European social systems. It entered Africa gradually through Islam ... it is generally agreed that it was Europeans who first domesticated the horse and used it as an instrument of war ... This was also the case with gunpowder, which the ancient Chinese and Egyptians in their concern with balance and harmony only used medicinally and not for destruction and murder. The important point is that with the introduction of firearms into Africa in the sixteenth century by European colonizers and slavers, by sea, the whole of the African continent became totally militarised. While the absence of violence in early (pre-contact) Africa may be somewhat overstressed, it is also pertinent to note that what Amadiume overlooks somewhat is Africans’ capacity to resist militarisation through the matriarchal systems, which she analyses so clearly, although she does state that ‘the religious character of indigenous African kingship itself ensured relative stability’ before the secularisation consequent upon the last phase of Islamisation (Amadiume, 1995: 43). There is evidence of such resistance; for example, I noted in chapter 2 that the Mandé Charter of 1222 was an early case of the affirmation of a universal politics of humanity in opposition to slavery in Mali. In John Janzen’s work, ‘drums of affliction’, ‘healing cults’ or ‘rituals of affliction’ (ngoma) have been and still are important ways through which Bantuspeaking peoples of Central and Southern Africa deal with individual and collective misfortune and affliction (Janzen, 1992). These healing rituals, in which women play a prevalent role, are still widespread. Indeed, Janzen (1992) remarks: In colonial and postcolonial Africa, the logic of the use of affliction and adversity for the organisation of social reproduction has contributed to the perpetuation, even the proliferation, of cults of affliction, often in a way that has baffled government authorities and outside observers. Cults have arisen in connection with epidemics, migration and trade routes, shifts in modes of production, and

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in response to changes in social organization and the deterioration of juridical institutions. Colonialism itself undoubtedly generated many of the cults of affliction that appeared in the twentieth century. Post-independence conditions have continued to provide grist to the mill of cult formation ... The role of ngoma networks in popular resistance in South Africa’s townships is not yet known to scholars, but it may be substantial (pp. 75, 77). With such social healing cults so widespread and so resilient, and which proliferate ‘where misfortune is rampant and where social chaos prevails’ (p. 79), it would seem that the people of Africa themselves have been able to utilise tradition in order to exceed state subjectivity and thereby resist and survive its coercive power. In doing this, excessive subjectivities are not reduced to obvious political terms only, but also involve complex processes of symbolisation and rituals that also need to form part of any thought of emancipation. These practices are not simply given in culture, waiting to be ‘applied’, but they may form a popular resource that can be drawn upon in thinking a politics at a distance from the state.

notes 1. For evidence of the latter view, see the text of the All-African People’s Conference held in Accra, 5–13 December 1958, reproduced in Mutiso and Rohio (1975: 365–7). 2. Wallerstein argues that the first break in the liberal consensus at the global level occurred in 1968 (1995: 97, 103). 3. Even Nkrumah began to expel foreign Africans before he was removed by a coup. See Wamba-dia-Wamba, ‘A People’s Unification of Africa’, http://www.ru.ac.za/ uhuru/people/profernestwamba-dia-wamba/. 4. This is true only for intellectuals outside South Africa; in South Africa, given the continued dominance of liberal White culture, nativism is often prevalent as a petty-bourgeois ideological reaction to it. 5. Mamdani is the originator of the term ‘mode of rule’ (Mamdani, 1996: 294). In this book I use the expression in a manner different from his. 6. Amounts cited in a recent newspaper article included family payments of R500 for road construction, from R200 to R1,000 from the parents of a pregnant girl, from R300 to R1,000 for the unveiling of a tomb, and so on. These amounts are extortionate for poor rural families. See the Mail & Guardian, 24 February – 1 March 2012. 7. Mamdani too easily identifies democracy with the separation of powers. Whereas the fusion of such powers in the chieftaincy is clearly despotic, the Paris Commune’s combining of executive with legislative powers was not so; in Marx’s terms, it was a ‘working assembly’.

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8. In Uganda, the fact that Resistance Committees (RCs) collapsed so rapidly is an indication that they may not have been rooted in popular struggles, but this is a secondary issue. 9. I am grateful to Adebayo Olukoshi for reminding me of this point. 10. Such as the Kalanga in parts of Botswana and Zimbabwe, for example. 11. For a similar situation in Morocco, see Rachik (2000). 12. Mamdani (2001: passim; 2002: 500). 13. There are many examples of this in the literature; see, for example, Gourevitch (1998) and Cohen (2001). 14. See, for example, Anderson and Wallace (2013: 157–68) for a case study of Muslims in Rwanda who rejected and opposed the ethnic violence and attempted to uphold a universal conception of humanity. See the second epigraph at the head of this chapter. 15. See Vail (1989). For a critical discussion of these histories as well as an assessment of the struggles over tradition in Southern Africa, see Neocosmos (1995). 16. See Schmidt (1990). 17. The organisation which most epitomised this ‘civil rights’ movement was the Black Sash, an organisation of White middle-class liberal women; see Spink (1991). 18. As I have already noted in chapter 6, the naturalisation of subjectivity is usually addressed through the deployment of a supposedly apolitical technique – as nature can only be transformed through technique and knowledge – with the result that political agency is effaced in favour of technical ‘neutrality’. 19. A common example here is the contradiction between national identity and ethnic identity politics in Africa. 20. The argument here is influenced particularly by Wamba-dia-Wamba (1985). 21. Of course, it would not do, for example, to begin from a Gandhian conception of Satyagraha here, as this is founded squarely within Hindu culture. 22. Much like Confucianism in China, Mâât insists that maintaining balance is also about maintaining existing hierarchy and obedience to authority, as the pharaoh was a personification of God on earth. However, as a practice, it is arguably not reducible to this function, as balance and, hence, social health alter in different situations; moreover, the ‘big Other’ need not be understood as God or a pharaoh but as an egalitarian society. This is illustrated by Barthélemy’s (2000) discussion of bossale society in Haiti, for example. 23. Strictly speaking, the mbongi refers to the place where palavers are held. The activity of ‘palavering’ itself is called ntungasani (Wamba-dia-Wamba, pers. comm.). 24. The classic text in which the distinction between antagonistic contradictions (between the people and the enemy) and non-antagonistic contradictions (among the people) is developed is Mao Zedong (1957). He notes with reference to the non-antagonistic contradictions: ‘Here, the essential thing is to start from the desire for unity. For without this desire for unity, the struggle, once begun, is certain to throw things into confusion and get out of hand’ (p. 390). 25. See, for example, Foucault (2003b).

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26. See President Zuma’s utterances on the ‘enemy within the party’ in the run-up to the ANC’s December 2012 congress in Mangaung, http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/ beware-of-enemy-within-zuma-warns-1.1402085. 27. ‘[In politics] killing simply produces the illusion of the disappearance of a problem rather than the reality of its solution’ (Badiou and Milner, 2012: 130, my translation). See also Badiou (2013d: 9–11). 28. For example, as in the notion of habitus in the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work. 29. As in the idea of ubuntu popularised in South Africa. As it is predominantly understood, ubuntu is reduced to a cultural ethnophilosophical practice more or less undermined by colonialism/apartheid and more or less adhered to. It follows that in circumstances where this practice has been reduced, if it is to revive it has to be taught, like all cultures. See, for example, Praeg and Magadla (2014: 101). The reduction of, for example, complex African conceptions to a metaphysical ethnophilosophical notion that ‘I exist because of others’ (p. 96) effaces the centrality of political agency in African thought (i.e. that such a conception of mutual interdependence must be struggled for by a political practice) in favour of an anthropological notion of culture. It thus becomes compatible with communitarian identity politics. 30. It may be important to ask whether the genocide of 1994 would have occurred had the gaçaça been in widespread use; in any case, the state has now switched the gaçaça on and off, which says much about the weakness of popular politics in that country. 31. Some may recall former prime minister Margaret Thatcher referring to trade unions in Britain as ‘the enemy within’, as opposed to Argentina during the Malvinas War, which was seen as the ‘enemy without’. 32. Also called yemba, boko, lusanga (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2013: 12). 33. Although I have not had the opportunity to check the empirical evidence for this, one could speculate that the rise of ethnic politics in postcolonial Somalia (eventually finding expression in warlordism) was not unrelated to the decline of the shir as a site of popular politics. 34. Although Bornkamm (2012: 33) notes the following about the precolonial gaçaça: ‘The principal objective of dispute settlement was not to render justice. Customary legal rules were only a starting point for the discussion. The primary objective was always to restore peaceful relations within the community, which could even justify an unfair result. While the damage caused would certainly have to be compensated to some extent, the wrongdoer also had to be fully reintegrated in the community. In fact many traditional African societies perceived formal justice according to pre-established rules as working contrary to reconciliation. It was believed that a final judgment would only further exacerbate a conflict rather than settle it’ (emphasis added). 35. It should be noted that the idea of ‘social cohesion’ is on the state’s agenda in Africa at the moment, as a number of governments like to refer to its necessity, given the perceived ‘challenges’ in current society resulting from the failure of nation-building. The South African state in particular has been using this term more and more. Interestingly, the term rarely used by the state is ‘inclusion’. The reversion to the

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terminology of 1950s conservative ‘functionalist’ sociology is itself interesting and worthy of note, as it tells us something about hegemonic state subjectivity in the current political sequence. 36. See the report of King Zwelithini’s performance of rituals to cleanse perpetrators of violence (Times, 6 November 2012). 37. It is in this sense that it increases the powers of the chieftaincy that the South African government’s Traditional Courts Bill is fundamentally oppressive of rural people, although most opposition has taken a different perspective, emanating as it has from human rights discourse and gender rights in particular; see, for example, Clappaert (2012). 38. Abahlali activist (pers. comm.). 39. Abahlali activist (pers. comm.). 40. One noteworthy contradiction among the people was expressed in the political differences between Fanon and Césaire, for example. Césaire supported the attachment of Martinique to France via the DOM-TOM system; Fanon opposed it. Beyond the specifics, though, the contradiction was one of more general import between the figure of the politician (Césaire) and that of the militant (Fanon). It is this contradiction which needs to be brought out in the open and discussed. At different times this contradiction has prevailed within one proper name itself – for example, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong, Thomas Sankara, Maurice Bishop and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who were all politicians and militants, i.e. state revolutionaries, to different extents and in different ways. They attempted to speak and act for the popular politics of the masses while in state power, with devastating results. This issue is treated rather summarily in Badiou’s (2013e) play The Incident at Antioch. 41. It is relevant in this context to think in terms of the distinction stressed by Lacan between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. For a useful introduction to Lacan’s thought, see Žižek (2006). 42. The classic historical treatment of the character of time under capitalism is Thompson (1967).

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Chapter 16

Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions Toute vie (humaine) est une vie. [Every (human) life is a life.] – The Hunters’ Oath or Mandé Charter, 1222 Tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun. [Every person is a person even if they are not

the same person.]

– Haitian popular saying, 1804 Unyawo alunampumulo. [A person is a person wherever they may come from.] – Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2014

thinking beyond the neo-colonial To conclude Part 2 of this book, I wish to note that, despite the limitations of human rights discourse, which are sometimes admitted in the liberal literature, it is regularly assumed that these are of unquestioned benefit in transforming ‘tradition’, in enabling the previously ‘rightless’ under tradition to ‘acquire human rights’ and thus to assert their humanity in the face of a presumed ‘state of nature’ which, in the famous Hobbesian formulation, is seen as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The assumption that the character of liberal democracy today is liberatory and universal relative to tradition, which is seen as invariably particularistic, is reflected, implicitly or explicitly, in a number of interrelated discourses on the continuing relevance of tradition in modern society, particularly in South Africa, where the idea often dominates feminist politics in relation to tradition.1 It is such thinking, when associated with the capacity to deploy power, that lies at the heart of the neo-colonial conception of ‘the responsibility to protect’. On the other hand, alternative feminist positions – reacting to women’s oppression ‘from within’, so to speak – point in the direction of recognising popular ‘voice’.2 I wish to briefly address these arguments here.

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At issue particularly in South Africa is the role of traditional institutions, such as the chieftaincy, in a modern secular state. Also important is the issue of women’s ‘rights to land’ under ‘traditional tenure’ in conditions of legally prescribed liberal gender equality. Both of these issues are regularly the subjects of debate within liberaldemocratic discourse in post-apartheid South Africa.3 They seem to have relatively ‘obvious’ answers from a democratic perspective, yet in both cases I suggest that such ‘obviousness’ is superficial and ultimately misleading. This will draw me to a brief critical assessment of the opposition between ‘human rights’ and ‘tradition’, which I argue is founded on liberal and fundamentally colonial-type assumptions about the nature of political activity, assumptions that ultimately have the consequence of opposing people’s rights to state democracy. A politics of solidarity must overcome this opposition, so that the people most affected can fight oppression in their own ways. I will end by noting the repeated historical experiences of a politics that has developed at a distance from the power of the state over many years in Africa as indicating precisely the manner in which people have thought their freedom as a human universal. Although the authoritarian character of the traditional institution of the chieftaincy produced during the colonial and apartheid periods is scarcely defensible (Chanock, 1985; Vail, 1989; Ranger, 1993; Mamdani, 1996a), it has also frequently provided peasants and other rural inhabitants with a vehicle for the expression of their grievances against the authoritarian and frequently corrupt actions of central and local government. In Southern Africa, the powers of chiefs are usually untrammelled by popular constraints, as traditional community assemblies (such as the pitso or kgotla) have gradually lost their powers. Nonetheless, stories abound of chiefs taking a stand, with popular support, against the depredations of secular authorities bent on imposing ‘development’ from on high (Alexander, 1993). Still, the chieftaincy’s often genuinely representative character does not diminish its despotic nature, as the institution combines administrative and police powers with legislative and judicial ones. However, the undemocratic nature of the institution of chieftaincy and the agency of individual chiefs are not the central issues. These issues are rather reflections of the false assumption that the practices of the central, regional or local state must be democratic simply by virtue of their executive members having been elected.4 In fact, the debate regarding whether chieftaincy or the central state in Africa is the more democratic, or whether the chieftaincy is compatible with liberal democracy (e.g. Dowling, 1997), is spurious, and we should rather be concerned with an assessment of the importance of genuine popular accountability. For rural inhabitants, it is regularly more a question of whether the secular state or the chieftaincy is the lesser of two evils in circumstances of poverty and systematic oppression. There can be little to choose between rights and culture in such a context. The issue is, rather, the extent

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or absence of genuine popular accountability of power within both civil society and traditional society. A similar point can be made regarding the frequent argument that the South African constitution, by allowing for property ownership irrespective of gender, is in a position to ‘empower’ rural women to access land rights otherwise denied them by traditional tenure systems. Actually, women have access to land under traditional tenure in Southern Africa, though usually through a man, but sometimes even direct access can be negotiated (Meer, 1997: 3). But women are also dependent on men for access to cattle, bank loans, collateral and ploughs, in fact for most of their resources, and it is only human rights discourse that arbitrarily focuses on land access as a more ‘fundamental human right’ while ignoring other aspects of this dependency.5 Of course, giving the poor, women included, access to freehold tenure on an individual basis would be disastrous, as it would easily enable land alienation and concentration and would without doubt lead to increased rural poverty (Neocosmos, 1995).6 It is important to stress that to use a liberal constitution in this manner is to undermine tradition – including its popular character – from beyond tradition’s boundaries, and to substitute for a democratic contestation within tradition the imposition of top-down state-juridical liberal rights which, in the long run, can only undermine democracy. Apart from anything else, this makes more likely a backlash from those who wish to entrench authoritarianism within tradition, including many chiefs whose power is evidently dependent on authoritarian conceptions of custom. There is indeed little difference between this procedure and the well-known colonial one of outlawing traditional practices, such as forced marriages or bridewealth, on the grounds of their ‘repugnance’ to Western liberal sensitivities (Schmidt, 1990; Mamdani, 1996). Such arguments are the source of the common suspicion in Africa (with the notable exception of elite South Africa) that human rights discourse and neo-colonialism are linked (Mamdani, 2000a). These kinds of top-down interventions undermine the democratic aspects of tradition, including collective forms of land allocation and popular power within democratic institutions for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.7 Broadly speaking, two feminist positions prevail today regarding tradition in Africa. The first is a liberal statist position that provides a version of the argument for state intervention in tradition through the medium of rights. This position is currently dominant in South Africa. The second argues for a defence of tradition, but also for pursuing a struggle within it for popular democracy. This position is most developed by feminists who struggle within the context of Islam, although it can be found in various forms throughout the continent. Elements of the second perspective are also present in the writings of some South African rural women writer-activists, such as Moleleki (1997) and Ngcwecwe (1997), who have stressed that tradition can and should be democratised from within, in the interests of women and other oppressed sectors within traditional society.

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Another highly publicised example of the neo-colonial, patronising and ultimately authoritarian imposition of human rights, this time outside the Southern African context, is the liberal reaction to the case of Amina Lawal, one of the women condemned to death by stoning by a Sharia court in Nigeria in 2003. While the court’s judgment was greeted with justifiable outrage by human rights organisations worldwide, the response regularly emphasised the supposed barbarity of Islamic culture and tradition. Only later was it noted that Nigerian rights activists were pursuing the issue of appeal from within the Islamic judicial system itself. In other words, a democratic struggle took place from within tradition to contest not only this particular judgment, but also several others concerning Sharia and women in general in Nigeria in 2003. The local organisation of activists, BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, noted that none of the sentences of stoning to death had been carried out in Nigeria, either because appeals had been successful or because the appeal process had not yet been exhausted. Moreover, in a letter widely circulated on the internet, the activists stressed that the more immediate danger to Ms Lawal came from deliberate action by those in power to defy international pressure. Dominant colonialist discourses and the mainstream international media have presented Islam (and Africa) as the barbaric and savage Other ... Accepting stereotypes that present Islam as incompatible with human rights not only perpetuates racism but also confirms the claims of right-wing politico-religious extremists in all of our contexts ... Muslim discourses and the invocation of Islam have been used both to vindicate and protect women’s rights in some places and times, and to violate and restrict them in other places and times ... The point is for us to question who is invoking Islam (or whatever belief/discourse) for what purposes, and also to acknowledge and support internal dissent within the community involved, rather than engaging in a wholesale condemnation of peoples’ beliefs and cultures (BAOBAB, 2003: 3–4). The organisation’s document bears out the theoretical point that I am stressing here.8 Human rights discourse takes on a colonial character when it is substituted for a democratic struggle within traditional culture. The universalism of rights can only exist through its particularity within the social context that contributes to making humanity human. To assume a universal human subject founded on a Western liberal ideal, and then to impose this notion on traditional society through state legislation or international pressure, is to undermine democracy, not to advance it. The central issue is not one of modernity (or postmodernity) versus tradition, but rather of popular-democratic politics versus various forms of neo-colonial state politics of trusteeship within civil society, uncivil society and tradition. Liberal state politics, premised on such a combination of a universal human subject with state power, cannot address tradition democratically and thus pits human rights against popular democracy.

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A very similar conclusion is arrived at by a number of women who have intervened in the debate on female circumcision in Africa. Human rights advocates have insisted on the so-called backward and primitive character of African culture in this regard, expressing a version of colonial ‘repugnancy’. On the other hand, writers such as Obiora (2003) and Oyěwùmí (2001) have rightly criticised works such as Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker, 1993, for ‘a stereotyped vision of present-day Africa’ in this context (Obiora, 2003: 204). The point is not to celebrate tradition, but to argue that, rather than self-righteous indignation and the neo-colonial imposition of Western ‘universals’, ‘no substitute exists for the involvement of the women who provide the impetus for the practice. Consequently it behoves feminist crusaders to steer clear of absolutist dogma in favour of more collaborative schemes and strategies’ (p. 212). Crucial here is the need to concede ‘to local women the right to take the lead in identifying their needs and formulating their solutions’ (p. 212), a conclusion also arrived at by Gruenbaum (2001). This is, of course, what is meant by solidarity, a politics applicable precisely in relations between civil society and traditional society within Africa, as it is in those between the West and the Global South. The Raha Iranian Feminist Collective (2012) came to a similar conclusion, noting: ‘solidarity is not charity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual – though far from identical – struggle’. They continued: ‘for solidarity to be effective, it must be concrete ... support [must be] thoughtful, appropriate to the context and, ideally, in response to specific requests initiated from within’. It is only on this basis that a politics of solidarity can be built that transcends the neo-colonial politics of human rights so as to adequately address and confront the divisions between civil and traditional societies. The apparent contradiction in the fact that Western human rights discourse, which originally developed as a democratic alternative to aristocratic despotism in Europe, turned fundamentally into its opposite within a (neo-)colonial African context should not be put at the door of different cultural particularisms. The point is not to make a plea (yet again) for the exceptionalism of Africa, either in terms of its difference (e.g. ‘our people don’t understand democracy as it is culturally foreign’) or indeed of its backwardness (e.g. ‘our people are not yet ready for democracy’). These perceptions have been used as excuses for authoritarianism. Neither is the point to seek a return to the past by arguing the viability of precolonial African state formations (Davidson, 1992). These arguments do not take us beyond thinking identity politics. The point I have argued here is a different one. It is, rather, that a true universal politics of emancipation can only be understood, comprehended and fought for from within the specificity of singular contexts. Indeed, the universals of democracy, truth, justice, equality and dignity, which we all adhere to, require an excessive subjectivity over the pursuit of interest and identity. What this suggests is that, as Badiou correctly stresses, a universal truth can only be apprehended through fidelity to a singular event.

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If the universal can indeed only be truly apprehended through the singular, it means that the opposition between the two (like that between tradition and modernity) is redundant. It also means that all universalistic conceptions based on a notion of Man also become redundant in so far as this universal notion is simply a generalisation of a Western conception. It means, furthermore, that rights today are not attributes of a humanity founded on this Western notion of Man, but of a different conception of the human, one in which people are products of social differences and are, within such differences, capable of thought, of transcending the narrow identities that divide them, in order to demand a better world founded on truly universal conceptions of justice, equality and freedom. It is this that makes them ‘eternal’, as Badiou (2001) puts it. It is time that we expand our own conception of humanity in Africa, but to do so we have of necessity to distance ourselves from state politics which deny us the right to think. Western liberal democracy and state nationalism or nativism – all based on state conceptions of politics – lie behind the absence of a truly political engagement with tradition in both its despotic and democratic aspects. A popular-democratic nationalism would have to acknowledge the struggle over tradition, and would attempt a recovery of popular-democratic politics both within tradition and within rights discourse. In each case, what is required is a recovery of politics founded within popular traditions and cultures of struggle, so that ‘voice’ replaces ‘silence’ among people, and popular-democratic struggles are pursued and supported wherever they take place, with respect shown to the specificity of every condition and its struggle.

universal humanity and the politics of excess: a slight return The three statements at the head of this chapter, from the 13th century to the present, represent the continuing struggle of some Africans to affirm the universality of humanity and their place within it. These statements express the truth that no one can be free unless everyone is free, and they do so at completely different periods of the continent’s history. Badiou (2009a: 66) succinctly puts the central point as follows: ‘every truth is eternal; of no truth can it be said, under the pretext that its historical world has disintegrated, that it is lost forever’. The truth of the prescriptions emphasised by the Mandé Charter (1222), the bossales (Haiti, 1804) and Abahlali today has been resurrected throughout the ages in a literally extraordinary manner. The idea that every person or human life must be treated equally is not to be understood as a habitual feature of African culture, for within African cultures people were not treated equally. The point here does not concern the cultural unity of Africa but, instead, the potentiality that exists for such culture to be exceeded. Even though there are clear cultural similarities on the continent, the search for a common identity is simply another form of culturalist essentialism, which ultimately ends in nativism.

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At issue is not the essence of culture but rather a political struggle for equality made possible through the use of cultural, idioms which activate the potential for a thought of equality. The point is not to emphasise the social yet again, but the exceeding of the social. It is such excess, emphasised here in prescriptions about the universality of humanity, which has defined a politics in Africa, whether in the kingdom of the Mandé in 1222, among the Haitian bossales or in South Africa today. These prescriptions, it is apparent, were not made by the guardians of cultural orthodoxy, the powerful and the wealthy, but rather by the excluded in each historical sequence. They are not therefore to be understood simply as part of an African culture to be taught to children and to those who have forgotten their ancestry by experts assigned to this role by power. If such teaching is to be done, it should emphasise the struggles of our ancestors from all walks of life for an equal and just society and a dignified life. In other words, these statements exceed ethnophilosophical thinking – in the sense used by Hountondji (1983, 1997) – and, perforce, any state-sponsored culturalism, such as ubuntu discourse in South Africa. Hountondji (1983: xviii) comments in relation to such colonial ethnophilosophical thinking: The white scholar’s discourse is based here on the black man’s silence, and this, in turn, is the outcome of a long historical process which remains unquestioned ... Ethnophilosophy ... was based on oversimplification and a reductionist view of the societies under study ... the assumption that one could freely construct such a system without the subjects’ participation and then expect them to approve of it, seemed to me unacceptable. The consequence was ... the illusion that all men and women in such societies speak with one voice and share the same opinions about all fundamental issues. This implies ... the sweeping away of all internal contradictions and tensions, the denial of the intense intellectual life, and the extreme cultural richness associated with these societies. The ethnographer’s silencing is, of course, a colonial state practice, and that practice continues unabated today. One cannot search for emancipatory inspiration in past or present idealised cultures, but only in the exceeding of culture through the contradictions which it itself engenders. African political prescriptions must be treated as guides to action, and not as quaint cultural artefacts to be repeated by rote with little understanding of what they require from each of us in terms of commitment and practice. A number of concluding comments can be made on all three of these statements. Firstly, the statements are politically prescriptive in the sense that they affirm what needs to be done by collective agency; they are not descriptive or even an analysis of a given situation or world. This point should be clear. All three statements stress that in order to confront the exploitation and oppression based on the inequalities and identities backed by power and prevailing in each particular context, a politics should be developed that treats

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everybody in the same way. Whether we are dealing with confronting slavery, a counterculture distancing itself from the state, or a political opposition to xenophobia, the stress in each case is placed on the universality of humanity, and not on identity. All three statements are political prescriptions or affirmations; they define political thought-practice. These attempts to think universality are unequivocally political; they are founded on a particular thought to be fought for, and not on the search for an ideal culture. Secondly, though the statements are separated in time and space, they say the same thing in essence. It is actually uncanny the way these statements are so similarly expressed: that each person is a person, that every human life is worth the same as any other, irrespective of whether one is a master or a slave, a man or a woman. In each case, the statements propose a fundamental understanding of the universally human despite reference to differences. Everybody is worthy of respect because everyone possesses the capacity precisely to practise this thought of universality. At the same time, each of the statements is a singularity emanating from the particular; each therefore combines the singular and the universal in a unique way. Moreover it should be quite clear that colonial capitalism never managed to wipe out the liberatory features of African cultures (in particular the idea of the universality of humanity) so that people could draw upon them when they needed to. There was therefore little or no ‘coloniality’ or ‘epistemicide’ of the cultures of the popular masses. Such acculturation was rather a feature of petty-bourgeois life as Cabral, for one, clearly understood: ‘The people ... have kept their culture alive and vigorous despite the relentless and organized repression of their cultural life ... The influence of the culture of the colonial is almost nonexistent in the ... dominated society outside of the capital and other urban centers ... Its impact is significant only ... and affects, in particular, a group we may call the “native petite bourgeoisie” ’ (Cabral, 1972: 162-3). Thirdly, the statements cannot be understood to reflect a common African culture, but rather to refer to the potential inherent in African culture for exceeding that culture, i.e. to the possibility of an ‘immanent exception’, in Badiou’s sense. The immanent exception here concerns a politics made possible by excluded traditions; a potentiality often already exists within such exclusion which can be activated by struggle. The idea that every person or human life must be treated equally is thus not to be understood as a habitual feature of African culture, for it is quite apparent that within African cultures people were (and are) not treated equally. Past African societies were not usually egalitarian because in most instances states were prevalent by the 18th century (although there were exceptions such as the San people in Southern Africa). This is fully apparent, for example, in the Kurukan Fuga charter of 1236 (referred to in chapter 2), which is seen today by UNESCO as an authentic expression of African culture. The point here does not so much concern the cultural unity of Africa, but rather the potential provided within African culture for such culture to be exceeded. It can be exceeded because the thought of the truly universal is existent in African cultures ‘in potential’, so to speak; as a result, it may directly inform the expressive–excessive dialectic. Of course, there is no necessity for this potential to be

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‘realised’ in any particular case, but the point is that it does not need reinventing, although it must be actively struggled for to ensure its existence. Should such a struggle not be present, it is likely to be smothered by hegemonic liberal precepts. To put the same point in another way, the universality of humanity is thinkable from within African cultures. It is possible for it to enter the parameters of thought, something that is not so easy from within Western liberalism, which assumes such universality while being founded on the exclusion of those in the ‘profane space’, as Losurdo (2014) shows. Liberalism, therefore, would tend to produce resistance in the form of identity politics as a matter of course, at least initially, although a category of the universal would not usually be an immediate response to it. In this case, one would have to contest and critique the whole basis of liberal thought itself in order to affirm the universality of humanity, which is precisely what Marxism did in the 19th century in Europe. Interestingly enough, the Marxist response was also founded on an identity – that of the proletariat – which was itself supposed to combine its particular interests with universal ones. As we have seen, for Marx, there was a crucial idea of universality inherent in the objective position of the proletariat itself – and manifested subjectively in communists – and consequently its insurrectionary movements would speed up the objective course of history towards the abolition of the class system. As I have noted, its political form was, for him, to be found in the Paris Commune. During the 20th century, the mistake was made to assume that the universal could be represented in a state, with the result that people had to be coerced into conformity with this universality (Badiou and Engelmann, 2015). In Africa, on the other hand, it seems that the possibility for thinking the universal may already be immanent beyond state thinking; it may exist ‘in potential’ and ‘only’ require a process of political activation. One should perhaps recall that Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas, the mass popular movement with which he was associated, revived the popular prescription ‘tout moun se moun’ in their politics during the 1990s (Aristide, 1992; Hallward, 2007). All three of these statements are not systemic but anti-systemic; that such anti-systemic thought is possible is precisely what potentiality is all about. It is not a question of rediscovering ‘subjugated knowledges’, in Foucault’s sense, for example, but rather of a political struggle for the rediscovery of human universality. There exists a difficulty in that these excessive subjectivities tend to be limited to the domain of traditional society within which they arise. They do not enter the domain of civil society today, at least not automatically. Indeed, the egalitarianism of the Haitian bossales remained largely restricted to the rural peasantry, while the practices of Abahlali have not extended to the rest of South Africa. This would require a collective political intervention in order to occur. It should thus be evident that one does not have to live exclusively within the modernity of a ‘civil’ society for the human universal to be thinkable. Neither are the statements simply concerned with deploring the destruction unleashed onto Black bodies; they do not stress victimhood, but the struggle against oppression and for universal

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dignity. The three statements express the continuing struggle of Africans to affirm the universality of humanity and their place within it. This universal truth is thus made possible by African political potentials after they have been activated by struggle. It is indeed conceivable that a different modernity could be constructed on this basis. Perhaps there is no better place to end this discussion than with a restatement of a politics of universality in the world. In one of his books published during his lifetime, Frantz Fanon – who, incidentally, chose to be an Algerian African during the Algerian people’s upsurge against colonialism – makes a well-known statement which puts my point succinctly: ‘It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude’ (1989: 47). The statement is clear: Blackness is a creation of Whites, but as a form of resistance Blacks tend to emphasise and idealise their distinctive identity, with the result that human universality becomes unthinkable. Fanon’s statement is actually incomplete, because by creating the Black, Whites also create themselves as White, something they were not prior to this act. Fanon makes this specific point elsewhere: ‘the disaster and inhumanity of the white is to have killed man somewhere’ (1986: 231, translation modified). In other words, human universality was destroyed by the forced elevation of a European particularity into a human universality (by liberalism), through the racial distinction between Whites and Blacks made possible by a specific politics – a politics of Whiteness which excluded non-Europeans, most obviously those deemed to be Black (see Gordon, 2013). ‘Whiteness’ must thus be understood as a form of (state) politics that is irreducible to skin colour but that accompanies and reproduces colonial domination in its various avatars. Races do not exist apart from within racist oppressive relations inherent in liberalism itself. It is racism that creates race, not the other way around. How, then, are we to think human universality from within a context defined by such racist parameters? Given the arguments in this book concerning state modes of rule and the neocolonial character of the state in Africa, it could be suggested that the two principle colonial modes of rule namely rule via a process of exclusion – apartheid being the most extreme form – or rule through acculturated inclusion – of which assimilation is the most obvious – are now apparent in new forms. In South Africa, for example, exclusion is deployed as a mode of rule in uncivil society while assimilation is the dominant form of domination in civil society. As such these neo-colonial modes of rule are most obviously linked to class location. The new petty bourgeoisie in South Africa is dominated through (obviously racist) forms of assimilation while the poor are considerd the enemy and ruled through the deployment of violence. It is clear, therefore, that in a society such as South Africa, governed as it is by liberal norms, for anyone to talk in terms of the irrelevance or absence of colour distinctions in favour of a liberal notion of universality (‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity’ in today’s parlance or ‘rainbowism’ in South Africa) is simply to take for granted and to ‘universalise’ racial dominance. Blacks must ‘become’ White, assimilate culturally and intellectually, and alienate themselves from their own social existence. We are then firmly

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located within a neo-colonial process of assimilation and the dissolution of identity into a dominant Whiteness. Here the idea of ‘universality’ is a false one, for it remains within the liberal parameters so clearly analysed by Losurdo (2014); it acts as a de facto mechanism of exclusion. On the other hand, the true universality emphasised by the African potentials already discussed can become the object of thought only on the basis of vanquishing a politics of Whiteness through a principled politics of the universal, so that the racially in-existent can think beyond racial resistance and all can relate exclusively as humans. It is not possible to say in advance what forms the struggle against the politics of Whiteness will take in any context, but only through a struggle to produce a truly inclusive society on a new basis, and thus by overcoming the divisions between various classes of the excluded (the in-existent), could a universal thought of humanity become dominant in which we could then truly maintain, along with Fanon (1986: 231, translation modified), ‘The black is not, any more than the white’.

notes 1. This statement is obviously ambivalent when it emanates from the ranks of the new elite in South Africa, for, even though the virtues of liberalism over tradition are uncritically extolled, tradition is simultaneously equally uncritically asserted to form the basis of an authentic African culture, one opposed by nationalist discourse to Western (i.e. liberal) dominance. 2. One of the best expositions of such an argument in South Africa is Gasa (2008). 3. See Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (1997). 4. It is therefore misleading to argue, as Ntsebeza (2005) does, that chiefs should be elected in order for the chieftaincy to be democratised. The accountability of chiefs must be enabled from within tradition, which is precisely what the Mountain Movement in Mpondoland in the late 1950s and early 1960s insisted on doing, for example. 5. I am grateful to Pauline Wynter for reminding me of this point. 6. See the extraordinary position taken by Nomboniso Gasa, whose arguments for the democratising of traditional gender relations from within tradition are coupled with an argument for the privatisation of land tenure; http://mg.co.za/ print/2012–05-24-designed-to-suit-the-psychology-of-the-natives. 7. The opposition to the attempt by the South African government to introduce a Traditional Courts Bill, which entrenched the arbitrary powers of the chieftaincy, overwhelmingly followed this kind of argument, although there were also some more subtle perspectives that drew attention to the need to democratise tradition itself. See, for example, Aninka Claassens in the Mail & Guardian, 28 September – 4 October 2012, and also the submission of the Makuleke community on the Traditional Courts Bill at http://www.lrg.uct.ac.za/usr/lrg/docs/TCB/ 2012/makuleke_feb2012_ncopsubmission.pdf. 8. Also see El Saadawi (1997, chs. 8 & 9), particularly Abu-Lughod (2013), and Mamdani (2000a) inter alia.

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Conclusion Reclaiming the domain of freedom As the people had not appeared for a single moment on the scene of public affairs for one hundred and forty years, the powerful had completely ceased to believe that they could ever do so. Seemingly unconscious, the people were assumed to be deaf, with the consequence that when interest in their condition revived, the powerful would speak of them, before them, as if they were absent. It seemed as though their only listeners were to be those placed above the people and that the only danger they faced was not to be understood by the latter. – Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la révolution, 1856 (my translation) It is essential to tear away political practice from a fascination with power. –  Alain Badiou, ‘Le Socialisme est-il le réel dont le communisme est l’idée?’, 2011 (my translation)

political representation and political thought In her excellent book on May 1968 in France, Kristin Ross (2002) argues that the importance of that particular event lies elsewhere than in the question of whether it was a ‘failed revolution’ or not. Rather, she suggests, ‘the narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power ... is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power’ (p. 74). Focusing on the dimension of power – and thereby restricting the idea of politics to the state – has served to efface what was perhaps the predominant threat to power of that event: ‘the subjectivation enabled by the synchronization of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student’ (p. 74). The subjectivation produced by this transcendence of the categories of the social division of labour as well as with the identities that accompany them ‘lay in the verification of equality not as an objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such’ (p. 74).

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Ross recounts that practices were developed that ‘demonstrated such a synchronization’. Because they revealed the irrelevance of the division of labour, they formed ‘as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of the state – perhaps more so’ (p. 74). It should be apparent that politics here is understood as thought. Notwithstanding the use of Marxist language, these practices exceeded much of what classism could itself imagine. Indeed, Ross continues, the subsequent reduction of those politics to sociological categories of ‘students’, ‘youth’ or ‘generation’ – in other words, to a social division of labour – eventually ended up depoliticising them. ‘Students’, ‘youth’, and ‘generation’ dissolve politics into sociology by positing distinct, circumscribable social locations, a definitive residence for the movement. And yet ’68 was about nothing so much as the flight from social location. May brought together socially heterogeneous groups and individuals whose convergence eroded particularities including those of class and age. It realized unpredictable alliances across social sectors ... The anxiety generated by the reconquest of the street by anonymous people fuels both personalization and sociological abstraction ... A movement that began by disarticulating ‘sociology’ and its functionalist version of the social was succeeded by sociology’s triumphant reaffirmation. The reduction of ’68 to a sociological agent, ‘youth’, once again reasserts a naturalist definition of politics wholly at odds with the May movement, a determinism that produces a politics that abolishes politics (pp. 207–8, emphasis in original). Ross’s argument illustrates at the very least two points concerning mass emancipatory popular movements in general. Firstly, the experience of May 1968 draws attention to the much wider phenomenon of the transcendence of all existing theories and discourses of freedom by the practices of people themselves in struggle, and to the possible changes in predominant subjectivities resulting from these practices, which may take the form of ‘obviousness’. It is indeed possible for equality to become an obvious accepted reality. Remaining within the parameters of a critical analysis of these existing discourses disables an understanding of freedom, for ultimately this resides in popular practice rather than in the models proposed by intellectuals which are always developed historically after the fact. Secondly, Ross’s discussion also shows the deep effect of depoliticisation produced by sociological and other conceptual categories that are returned to post facto in order for the event to be apprehended in thought. These academic categories, which reduce inventive political subjectivities to the social, reassert the hegemony of state modes of thought by depoliticising politics and effacing their inventiveness. Representation is simply reimposed by the power of a social science.

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Similarly, in Africa the ideas of freedom and emancipation which have been deployed in the past by nationalism, socialism and (neo-)liberalism have not been able to live up to their liberatory promise, precisely because they stifled and effaced an understanding of inventive popular politics and subjectivation by simply seeing them as expressive of the social. While their conceptions were undoubtedly important contributions to thinking freedom at the various times they were constructed, they are of much less use today in the 21st century, for they are all founded on thinking emancipation through state power; in other words, they are founded on not recognising as legitimate any thought of politics that may exceed state hierarchies and practices (irrespective of which forms they may take), thereby occluding the process of subjectivation noted by Ross. It should then be apparent that such thinking cannot think politics as power relations but rather must insist on understanding a process of ‘subjectivation’, the formation of a collective subject through a specific thought-practice. It is not useful today to restrict one’s discussions to nationalism, socialism or neo-liberalism, for all three amount to categories that are not central to popular thought and rather are imposed on such thought by politicians, NGOs and academics, among others. In all cases these categories simply reproduce a thought of politics founded on state thinking. Instead, an alternative vision of freedom must be affirmed, and it is the old statist conceptions of emancipation and freedom that need to be critiqued, as well as the ideologies on which they were founded. In order to do this, we need to propose new categories and concepts as part of a new vision of freedom. Moreover, without opening up political subjectivities – including those of freedom (i.e. equality, justice, dignity, etc.) – to rigorous study, thus recognising their existence as worthy of analysis in their own terms, we will remain stuck within the parameters of these three ideologies, which continue to conceive politics simply as different versions of state politics, thereby proving daily to be inappropriate for our times. Emancipation cannot be thought through these three ideologies and their categories, not so much because they are wrong but because they are redundant. The state cannot liberate anyone. As I have stressed, all three ideologies orient their politics from within state modes of thought – in other words, from within a thinking that believes political subjectivity (i.e. what used to be known as ‘consciousness’) to be exclusively representative of social location. Such thinking does not usually allow for the space to consider thought that is not expressive or representative of social place; it reduces all political subjectivity to some form of identity politics. There is little space left for reason as such, for reason may at times demand an exceeding of the simply social and a fidelity to a universal humanity. Within any kind of emancipatory politics, there is always a measure of asocial thought and egalitarianism, which is precisely what occurred in May 1968, as Ross shows. Emancipatory politics is affirmation, it is thought, an ‘excess’ over place that cannot be grasped as representation; yet, in the concrete conditions of its unique singularity, it is simultaneously related to the social

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in complex ways, simply because excess is always immanent in the situation of that which it exceeds. This general point can be illustrated with reference to South Africa in the 1980s, in four ways. Firstly, in South Africa nationalism leant very much on Marxism for its thinking, much as it had done in the 1950s and 1960s in the rest of the continent. The categories that activists had at their disposal to make sense of emancipatory subjectivities proved inadequate for the situation. Indeed, at the time, the concepts and categories available for an adequate comprehension of the new mode of politics that was developing in the 1980s did not exist. The conceptions of ‘class analysis’, ‘class consciousness’, ‘class leadership’, ‘democracy’ or ‘national identity’, for example, were not always useful or even adequate for understanding a politics that was being forged in terms of people’s daily experience of living, and that involved people from all walks of life. Moreover, those categories that did develop at the time, such as ‘people’s power’ or ‘workers’ control’, were themselves not sufficiently thought out. As a result, the novelty of what was happening was not properly understood; it was misunderstood – or, rather, the consequences of the ability of people to think political agency for themselves – their subjectivation – were simply not recognised, while the universalising of the obviousness of popular capacities was soon abandoned. Indeed, it was unrecognisable, given the categories and logic dominant at the time. The concepts available were valid for guerrilla warfare, for underground parties, for attaining state power, for sociological theorising; in brief, for a politics of representation. What was happening was political presentation on the scene of history – something else completely, as parties were not present – yet activists insisted on reading the unfolding situation in terms of party political categories; in other words, categories devised for a politics of representation. The debates regarding unions and politics, those concerning the class content of popular organisations, the weakness of attempts to hold leaders accountable, the deference to the ANC in exile, were all indicative of a politics of representation. This was a similar process to that which had obtained among European intellectuals in the 18th century, who completely failed to recognise the capacity of slave agency; one can in fact say it was an example of the manner in which trusteeship fails to recognise that people think. Secondly, when Nelson Mandela and the ANC came to share state power in 1990, they themselves did not fully understand what had happened – i.e. that people wished to ‘control themselves’, as it was put in the language of the time. Hence, they simply talked as trustees, as representatives; they substituted their individual or party will for that of the active people.1 In this they were, more often than not, supported by the people themselves, who implicitly assumed their leaders’ thinking would be similar to theirs. Mandela was freed from his life sentence in 1990 by a mass movement of the people of South Africa, but, in a very important sense, his release from jail finally symbolised a subjective change (which had begun a few years earlier): from a politics

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of people ‘acting on the scene of history’ (‘we can change the system ourselves’), with all its attendant practices and contradictions, to one relying on their leaders to change it for them through access to power (Neocosmos, 1998).2 The freeing of leaders from jail came to be fused in national subjectivity with the freeing of the people from apartheid oppression. Once the socialist model of freedom had so obviously vanished with the collapse of the state in the Soviet Union and its satellites, leaders became seduced by the market model of freedom, to which they saw no alternative. As contestations took place within state modes of thought, it was quite simple for nationalism to lean on neo-liberalism for its understanding of freedom. After the socialist vision was discredited, neo-liberalism won out with barely any opposition, because its vision had been fully theorised, and also because it was obviously in a position of global power to become universalised very rapidly within the state. On the other hand, the popular vision of freedom was not understood and had not been theorised; it was feared for what it could unleash, as was rapidly shown by the mass riots following upon the assassination of Chris Hani on 10 April 1993.3 Economically, the view that won out was, crudely put, that apartheid had been a state intervention in the market; therefore, all that was required for freedom to be realised was a short-term ‘levelling of the playing field’, so that a Black middle class could develop, and the market would equalise racial society in the long run through a ‘trickle-down’ process. South Africans have been suffering from this misunderstanding ever since. Politically, the dominant perspective came to be founded on multiculturalism. What this meant was that on returning from exile in 1990, the ANC, driven by Mandela himself, went about allying itself with the ethnic elites within apartheid state-created social divisions, whom it now saw as genuinely representative. It did this over the heads of grassroots activists who had been struggling successfully against these same elites during the 1970s and 1980s (Boesak, 2009). All it could see in its political field of vision were identities; the emancipatory thought and practice that had managed to transcend such identity politics remained invisible to it. As a result, electoral politics now emphasised ‘Indian’ culture and its ethnic politicians in Durban, traditional ‘Coloured’ politicians in Cape Town, and the politics of the chieftaincy in the Eastern Cape. The years of patient struggle, which had managed to produce a new excessive popular politics that had undermined ethnic divisions and had affirmed a new conception of the nation in practice, a truly African united ‘new nation’, were themselves rapidly undermined. Those ethnic politicians who had lost legitimacy were brought back into the statist politics of ‘rainbowism’; in other words, into the politics of a crude multiculturalism. The people of the country, who had entered politics precisely by overcoming such social divisions, assumed that, given their primary role in ‘the struggle’, they would be taken seriously and listened to, that, as the Freedom Charter put it, they themselves ‘would govern’ and have access to freedom as they understood it (dignity, jobs, housing, etc.); but this did

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not materialise. Their attempts at agency after 1990 came to be seen as illegitimate and unprocedural at first, and much later as a real threat to both the market and the state. Their independent attempts at agency in the 1980s were rapidly turned into victimhood by the TRC process. By 2008, a politics of fear seems to have become fully entrenched in state discourse – fear of the African poor, fear of the poor and excluded as such (Neocosmos, 2008). The third point is also germane to all experiences of national liberation politics founded on mass movements. When the new state is not yet in existence, the people are equated with the nation; i.e. the political affirmation that the people equal the nation exists only under conditions when the new state is still absent, under the condition of an emancipatory politics (Badiou, 2013a: 14). Moreover, the change in political subjectivity from a point where the nation is equated subjectively with the people to a point where it is identified with the state, ‘on the morrow of independence’, as Fanon (1990: 125) put it, concerns the replacement of a politics in the true sense of the term by the hegemony of state subjectivities, when the nation is reduced to indigeneity and political subjectivity to identity. How does this subjective shift take place? What are its conditions of possibility? Isn’t the idea of political representation, as I have argued, of central concern here? Of course, at the core of national liberation politics in the 20th century was the idea that emancipation would take place through the state; yet it has become apparent that the state cannot emancipate anybody, and whatever credentials it may have had on the African continent and elsewhere in the Global South through its leadership of a national development project in the past have now largely evaporated. In any case, South Africa achieved its liberation during a world sequence when the state’s role as the demiurge of freedom was replaced by the market itself. In some ways, we seem to have gone back in historical time to a period before the modern invention of what Badiou has called the ‘communist hypothesis’ in the 19th century (Badiou, 2011c). It is worth emphasising that this new conjuncture contributed to making possible the transformation of the universal emancipatory vision of popular nationalism in South Africa into an ideology for the advancement of the new Black petty bourgeoisie, helped by heavy doses of academic and other nativist statements by power. What the hegemonic ideology of private accumulation and individual agency has enabled is the reappropriation and ‘socialisation’ of the erstwhile excessive political vision of ‘national consciousness’ that emerged during the 1980s. That this was made possible by state subjectivities and the weakness of alternative visions of the nation – despite the valiant efforts of Abahlali baseMjondolo to retain a fidelity to the politics of the ‘people’s power’ event of the 1980s – should by now be evident. Fourthly, as a result of the overwhelming dominance of a politics of representation within a post-1980s neo-liberal environment, in which the national role of the state has been minimised, the ‘national question’ has not been resolved and is unlikely to

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be resolved in the near future in South Africa. The decision of Mandela and the ANC to minimise the interventionist role of the state in the national interest and to take the neo-liberal route has led to an inability to unify the nation around a state-led project. The absence of such a state-led project of nation-building, through development in particular, has meant not only the failure of reconciliation between the White middle class and the new Black petty bourgeoisie, but also the exclusion of the vast majority of the population from access to resources like jobs, housing and education. But this failure was founded directly on the politics of representation, simplified by the fact that Mandela not only represented the nation but actually embodied it. Unlike some of his successors, Mandela could not be said to have feared the people of South Africa; they absolutely adored him and have continued to do so, yet his attitude towards people was a personal, not a political, one, as he was unfamiliar with popular politics. Arguably, then, Mandela’s undoubted principles were fundamentally moral rather than truly political. The politics of representation initiated towards the end of the 1980s, and systematically entrenched by the new state while simultaneously hidden beneath what can only be described as Mandela’s charismatic leadership, eventually produced this fear of the people, especially of the poor, within state thinking itself. Two simple and spectacular examples of this widespread fear are the reaction to the rebellion in Marikana in August 2012, which was savagely put down by the state, and the construction by the president, Jacob Zuma, of a bunker under his private residence. Today, it is no longer possible to remain at this point and continue thinking within a politics of representation and, hence, within state subjectivity, simply because the failure of previous conceptions of freedom is evident for all to see. Abahlali have understood this, as evidenced by their notion of ‘unfreedom’. They have shown us that it is indeed possible to be faithful to the idea that ‘The people shall govern’, i.e. to a vision of representation in which what people say when they think at a distance from the state is taken seriously. The political problem consists in how to sustain this vision and the practices that flow from it. That is the central question of politics, according to Badiou (2011c). For this to happen we need – at the intellectual level – to recognise and understand that political subjectivities, whether expressive or excessive of the social, exist as a specific object of inquiry. I have proposed to do this by beginning with the fundamental affirmation that ‘people think’; in other words, that they may add an excessive Idea to their agency and hence to their practice: The Idea, understood as that which orients an effective journey in the world, must always be thought as active, and not, as is usually the case, as a generally static and fanciful representation. This is the reason why Marxist materialists begin from the ‘primacy of practice’, which must be understood as the primacy of the Idea as practice. There is no contradiction whatsoever between the ideological

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dimension of politics and its practical dimension; when all is said and done, they are the same thing. And already in Plato himself, the Idea is not a representation; it is explicitly destined to exist as a practice, a practice of existence, a practice of the just life (Badiou, 2013f, 14 November 2012, p. 9, my translation). Yet the idea that ‘people think’ must be supplemented with categories that help us identify this thought in practice. One such category is the notion of prescription. Lazarus refers to this as ‘the possible under condition’; in other words, the collective identifying and overcoming of what the state deems to be impossible under the condition that militants are collectively agreed on such overcoming. It is this that puts thought into practice. The prescriptions of the slaves in Saint-Domingue were of two different kinds: firstly, the demand for unconditional legal freedom, and, secondly, the struggle for parcel ownership. Both of these prescriptions concerned freedom, but they were fashioned in relation to different singularities. Prescription is thus a concept that helps us to understand the purely political, as well as suggesting that people are able to think universal principles in excess of identity. It is prescription which identifies that thought is a ‘relation of the real’, in Lazarus’s terms; in the absence of prescription, i.e. of ‘acting on the real’ to change it, to make the impossible possible, it may not be apparent that people think. It is clear that alternatives only become possible under the condition of a new subjectivity which is maintained over time by an organised politics; it is this that is recognisable in the politics of Abahlali.

thinking politics at a distance from the state: a purely subjective question In this book I have attempted to prise open a space for the rational analysis of political subjectivities, particularly emancipatory ones in Africa. I have been forced to do this with a kind of theoretical crowbar because that space has been firmly shut and locked by overwhelmingly hegemonic notions of representation: human reason has been occluded de facto in favour of a view of popular subjectivity as simply expressive of the social, with the result that, in Badiou’s (1985: 109) words, ‘the complex of the state and the economy occupy the whole of the visible’. The idea that ‘people think’ has represented the hard point of the crowbar in my attempt to ensure that a politics of excess becomes visible. I have forced open this intellectual space by deploying a number of somewhat new theoretical categories, derived principally from the thought of Alain Badiou, Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Rancière as well as Frantz Fanon and Partha Chatterjee, while dialoguing with Marxism, historically the most effective thought of human emancipation. The reader will also note strong influences and terms borrowed from the popular political subjectivity of Abahlali as they try to come to grips with their situation in South Africa and confront it.

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In the first part of the book, I elucidated this space in relation to history, relying primarily on a notion of ‘historical sequence’. This concept attempts to delimit history exclusively in subjective terms and is developed at length in Lazarus’s work. In particular I identified and analysed a number of emancipatory sequences in African history through specific analyses of the dialectical operation between excessive and expressive subjectivities in each singularity. In the second part of this book, I analysed the same dialectic, but this time in relation to a number of issues fundamental to the thought of politics in Africa, such as political representation, the state, human rights and tradition. Central to the argument throughout has been the notion of an alternative politics of emancipation – of freedom – being necessarily a ‘politics at a distance from the state’. It is on an elaboration and clarification of this notion that I wish to conclude. When one thinks emancipation, it is more often than not useful to begin from Lenin’s 20th-century formulations in order to transcend them, for Lenin arguably was the first to think emancipatory politics as a unique object. Lenin’s main formulation regarding the state and freedom reads as follows: ‘So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state’ (Lenin, 1918a: 91). Following Marx, Lenin thought of the state as ‘withering away’ along with the growth of communism on the horizon. Here, the state is understood objectively, institutionally, structurally,4 and freedom is grasped as something dependent on the physical absence of the state and thus on the end of politics. Although politics, for Lenin, was not immediately reducible to the social, as it has been for most Marxists since, his position ultimately remained that politics is equated with the state and its capture, given that he did not develop a theory of practice but remained within a notion of politics as representation. Politics ends along with the end of the state, an idea that has remained at the core of all Marxist conceptions of politics. But there need be no end to politics if politics is not equated with the state, if by politics we understand an organised collective popular agency governed by an Idea (of equality) in practice. We are now necessarily faced with the understanding that the state may disappear while politics may remain, as we have detached politics from the state in thought. This was the case, of course, with ‘acephalous’ African societies, and is indeed the case where the state is absent for whatever reason, as it has recently been in several regions of Africa.5 On the other hand, for Badiou, Lazarus and Rancière in particular, freedom is understood subjectively. Because we are concerned with political subjectivities, we cannot think the state solely and certainly not primarily as an objective structure or structures, however complex and contradictory. Rather, it must also be thought as prescribing specific subjectivities. There are two such subjectivities that are worthy of particular attention, as they exist at the core of the state itself. The first is that the state prescribes divisions and hierarchies while purporting to exist above them; it is

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totally opposed to any egalitarian principle that, while recognising difference, refuses divisions. ‘The idea of an egalitarian state is an oxymoron,’ Badiou insists (2014a, 9 October 2013, my translation). The second concerns the fact that the state always prescribes what is deemed to be possible and what is said to be impossible for human agency. For example: ‘It has been stressed profusely that the state was the real oppressor, but in a more fundamental way, the state is what distributes the idea of what is possible and what is impossible. The event, on the other hand, transforms that which has been declared impossible into a possibility; the possible will be torn away from the impossible’ (Badiou, 2010b: 21, my translation). The problem inherent in Marx’s idea of the ‘withering away’ of the state (adhered to closely by Lenin) is that the analogy gives the impression that such withering, like that of a leaf on a tree, is itself the result of something objective; not the seasons or the weather this time, but the development of the productive forces, the disappearance of classes, the end of class struggle or whatever. For example, contrary to anarchists, who want to abolish the state overnight, Lenin argues that Marxists hold that ‘the complete abolition of the state ... can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution’ (Lenin, 1918a: 106–7). Lenin’s position was guided in this respect – at least until the fusion of the party with the state – by a fidelity to the Paris Commune, along with a confidence in the economic benefits derived from the enactment of socialist state policies: Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the Communards ... The possibility of ... [the] destruction [of the bureaucracy] is guaranteed by the fact that socialism will shorten the working day, will raise the people to a new life, will create such conditions for the majority of the population as will enable everybody without exception to perform ‘state functions’, and this will lead to the complete withering away of every form of state in general (Lenin, 1918a: 111, emphases in original). The state finally ‘withers away’ after objective changes have taken place with the enactment of appropriate policies. But if we detach politics from the state so that politics does not disappear with the disappearance of the state, as politics is no longer reduced to the state, then it follows that the state has to be ‘withered away’, ‘struggled away’, so to speak: the accent is now put on agency. Simply stated, there is no end to political struggle, as there is no end to history. It also follows from this that such a process of absenting the state in thought can begin in politics, irrespective of whether the state exists as a set of institutions or not; this ‘absenting of the state in thought’ is central to a practice of politics that wishes to think an emancipatory future today. Badiou puts this idea as follows: ‘What is the moment of freedom in politics? It is that when one distances oneself from the state’ (Badiou, 1985: 166, my translation) or, again, ‘Politics is about making politics exist, so that the state should no longer

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exist’ (Badiou, 2013e: 115). These formulations alter the direction of the process of change, so that politics comes first and the disappearance of the state follows thereafter. The moment of freedom can thus be understood as the absenting of the state in thought, and this means the ability to think the impossible – to maintain that what the state says is impossible (e.g. ‘there is no alternative’) is indeed quite possible. Ideally, politics should be organising the ‘withering away of the state’; it is therefore completely related to the latter, but in such a way as to aim for its disappearance ... [for even] if politics cannot make the state disappear through the wave of a magic wand, it must nevertheless be coextensive with the idea of a gradual withering away of the state and the replacement of its management figures by figures of association and creativity (Badiou, 2010b: 63–4, my translation). The point is not to forget about the state, to distance oneself from the state in an objective sense, as many utopian experiments in Latin America and elsewhere have historically attempted. The position developed here is not an anarchist one: politics ‘at a distance from the state’ does not necessarily mean ‘anti-state’, although it does necessarily mean a ‘politics without a party’, as we have seen at different points in this book.6 Neither is it a liberal one, which sees civil society as the domain of freedom because it is composed of ‘rights-bearing citizens’. To adhere to such a position is to conflate objective and subjective distance. It should be clear that civil society, which is seen to exist at an objective distance from the state, cannot form the foundation for thinking an emancipatory politics, for that distance must be subjective and not objective; it must be political. In order to enable the thinking of an emancipatory politics, the idea of ‘distance’ must be understood as ‘subjective distance’ from state thinking, and not as ‘objective distance’ from state institutions. In particular, state political subjectivity privileges interests, social place and political identities, which the state itself has the function of managing to the benefit of the oligarchy in existing society and its given structure. It is this kind of politics that reproduces the core features of capitalism and its various ramifications. Moreover, the notion of distance employed here is a general theoretical one. One cannot simply deduce from it the specifics of any singularity; whatever political position one holds in relation to a particular state, the question whether one opposes the state, fights it, enters it, or however one prescribes to it, is ultimately determined by specific conditions and cannot be answered at a general level. Nevertheless, given that this subjective distance is never total, is never such as to completely replace state conceptions with unrelated ones, being socially and historically located, it varies according to the extent to which it exhibits ‘expressive’ or ‘excessive’ qualities. The greater the excessive quality of the subjectivity in question, the greater this distance from state thinking. Of course, such excessive features vary

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over time, and it is precisely these that a political organisation attempts to maintain. Badiou (2011c) refers to this as the problem of sustaining the inventions of ‘movement communism’ over time. The difficulty in doing so accounts for what Lazarus calls the ‘saturation’ of the historical mode of politics, as a point is reached where excess over state thinking is no longer in evidence. This is the crucial problem of sustaining emancipatory politics, and illustrates the idea that ‘distance’ here must be grasped prescriptively, as sustaining a practice rather than as describing or analysing an event. It amounts to distinguishing politics from history. At the same time, any distance from state knowledge and practice is unique not only because of its singular location in sites but also because state rule – and, consequently, state political subjectivity  – differs between the domains within which its power is expressed. As a result, political reaction to it (including its supersession) will also differ. Rebellions that exhibit excessive subjectivities will thus differ between their locations in civil, uncivil and traditional society because the thought of rebellion will confront different forms of oppression. These distinctions are not altogether dissimilar from that drawn by Losurdo in his detailed history of liberalism, between what he calls the ‘sacred space’ and the ‘profane space’ (Losurdo, 2014: 297ff). He argues that from its inception ‘liberalism was the intellectual tradition which most rigorously circumscribed a sacred space wherein the rules of the limitation of power obtained. It was an intellectual tradition characterized more by celebration of the community of free individuals that defined a sacred space than by celebration of liberty of the individual’ (p. 309). In contrast to the small ‘sacred space’ populated by chosen people, the ‘profane space’ is populated by the majority of the ‘unenlightened’, ‘where the distinction between man and nature does not seem to emerge, or does not play a prominent role’ (p. 310). Of course, the profane space is composed of slaves, Amerindians, Africans and other colonised peoples whose systematic oppression, even to the extent of extermination, is thereby easily justified. These two spaces, although they remain continuous in liberal discourse, are flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances, including resistance, so that under colonial conditions they alter into racial spaces. Although Losurdo refers to these subjective spaces within liberal discourse, I have discussed them in terms of domains of state politics; despite the difference, the fundamental idea is a similar one. An African liberal-democratic state form today regularly distinguishes between ‘civil society’, the domain of universal freedom, and ‘traditional society’, where freedom is smothered by particularisms. Yet excessive thought, as I have shown, is possible in each, though it will differ in each. In this book I have argued that excessive thought is therefore never ‘pure’, but always ‘mixed’ with some expressive conceptions, by virtue of the fact that excess always exceeds something represented in state discourses, and is always formed in struggle against the expressive; for this reason, social location always exercises an effect on thought, from which it is always difficult to tear it away. For example, if we were to follow Foucault’s

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and Chatterjee’s analyses of history and note that, although sovereignty through rights in civil society was demanded by the new post-independence elite in Africa, governmentality was reproduced and expanded by the idea of nation-building through a state development project, we would simply be providing a sophisticated account of subjectivities as state-induced. We need in addition to note, as I have done in chapter 5, that the establishment of sovereignty was accompanied by an often coercive undermining of alternatives that exhibited excessive thought beyond the idea that the nation equalled the state. In this manner, trusteeship was transferred from the colonial state to the postcolonial state at independence. Without a critique of the role of the state as representative of the nation, the dichotomy empire–nation becomes difficult to transcend subjectively, for alternatives both in practice and in thought were historically closed down and continue to be closed down. Although this dichotomy had been transcended or exceeded within various local struggles that posed the question of equality and popular power, these subjectivities were then submerged by the new postcolonial state politics of representation. The core problem with the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics was precisely that the struggle for freedom combined a struggle against the state as well as a struggle for a new state. The contradictory political subjectivity of the National Liberation Struggle mode could shift from a subjectivity wherein the nation was the people, to one where the nation was equated with the state, or from presentation to representation, as the term ‘nation’ was central to thought in view of its ‘circulating’ character. The result was invariably contradictory: while freedom was conceived as the attainment of power and state construction, the people who fought for freedom insisted on equality and (relative) autonomy from the state during the process of struggle itself. One can notice this in relation to the struggles for independence in Africa, as well as in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle. In Tanzania in the 1970s, for instance, this took the form of Ujamaa villages; in Zimbabwe, it was rural egalitarianism and land redistribution; in South Africa in the 1980s, it was street committees and access to jobs and housing. This process also explains the disappearance of a popular pan-Africanism – which had formed the cradle of nationalism – and its replacement by its reactive statist simulacrum of which the OAU and then the AU were the outcome. The nation as represented and conceived by the state has always been premised on forms of popular exclusion. In Haiti, the egalitarian core of emancipatory politics was sustained over a long period. People did this successfully by thinking the ‘impossible’ of legal freedom, followed by the ‘impossible’ of independent peasant family production. The slaves in Haiti tried to absent themselves totally from the state by setting up independent parcel cultivation. Present here was a political subjectivity that combined political control outside the state and its prescriptions with economic survival and independence. These various experiments can be read not as a way of constructing a new state from

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the bottom up, but as an attempt to distance oneself from state power itself, which is, in a sense, what creating one’s own forms of self-regulation is all about within popular subjectivity. In sum, any struggle for freedom is a struggle against a particular form of state, yet it is bound simultaneously to contain within it elements of a struggle against power as such (‘anti-power’, in John Holloway’s formulation). It is also formed in excess of state thinking and, therefore, continuously shaped in relation to that thinking. A resolution to this contradiction can only begin to be thought, firstly, by developing categories and politics from ‘the point of people’, as Lazarus (1996) puts it – in other words, at a subjective distance from the state – and, secondly, by thinking a state that is not a state, a state that provides the conditions for its own undermining, i.e. its ‘withering away’. Of course, this is what Marx meant by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, an unfortunate term because it refers to another form of state, but a term that made sense at the end of the 19th century. As is well known, Marx and Engels saw the Paris Commune, with its popular-democratic features, as the paradigm of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Engels, 1891: 259), ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour’ (Marx, 1871: 72); yet, in the 20th century, that dictatorship took a fundamentally different and much less democratic form: the dictatorship of the party. This was precisely owing to a politics of representation, which maintained that ‘the party of the proletariat’ represented the class, something that was not the case in 1871 during the time of the Commune.7 In the 20th century, the party represented the class and spoke and acted for it within ‘political society’, because of its monopoly of knowledge. Today the terms ‘dictatorship’ and ‘democracy’ have to be thought in other ways than simply as forms of state.8 I have attempted to do this for democracy in Africa in chapter 12. The use of armed force to defend popular gains cannot be excluded in advance, and is only thinkable within singular conditions, not in general. Irrespective of whether we are in the presence of an emancipatory politics or not, the perspective taken here opens up the study of political subjectivities in their own terms. These have been generally occluded by the social sciences, which have overwhelmingly understood our world in terms of state categories and have held that thought is rarely present in the knowledge of the excluded. The excluded are not expected to reason and to speak for themselves, by definition; they are considered to be both deaf and dumb, as Tocqueville noted with reference to the Ancien Régime in France before the Revolution. I have already cited Badiou as noting: ‘ordinary history, the history of individual lives, is held within the state. The history of a life is, in itself, ordinarily bereft of decision or choice; it is a part of the history of the state of which the classical mediations are the family, work, the motherland, property, religion, customs’ (Badiou, 2009d: 199, my translation).

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Badiou is not referring here to the life of civil servants, but to the state subjectivities within which life is overwhelmingly lived. There is little in terms of excessive thought within the history of a life as habitually lived. It is for this reason that the social sciences have, in Rancière’s terms, purported to speak for those who do not habitually speak. Therefore, when it does occur, speech needs to be made audible; the theoretical and methodological space to do so must be opened up. This is what I have attempted in this book, and propose to outline more formally now. If we assess the diagrams appearing below, it is the excess that is being made visible, for any social change requires a strong asocial component if change is to have any real meaning. If the excessive is in-existent or minimal, only the expressive of the social is visible and appears as reflecting the phenomena in existence, such as simple identity politics. For this subjectivity, which dominates in the social sciences, what exists is the only thing that can exist; real change and equality are impossible, and only some form of ‘evolution’  – progress, development, modernisation  – are possible, as the habitual regularisation of social hierarchies by the state remains. Social science must be reconfigured to include investigation into political subjectivities ‘from within’. An analysis of capitalism must include analysis of colonial capitalism (‘racial capitalism’ in South Africa) along with detailed investigations into state modes of rule, but it must also analyse how the presence or absence of excessive thought may have impacted upon it. With the inclusion of the excess in political thought, of the exceptional (when it exists), the extant, the expressive, the habitual becomes visible for what it is: only one possibility among many, located at the end of a continuum of possibilities that exceed it to various extents. It follows that all popular political subjectivities must be analysed and evaluated from within, in terms of their own statements and categories, and never simply from pre-existing categories imposed more or less a priori by theory; in this way, one can abstract thought from an idea of necessity and leave open the possibility of something previously unthought. In this book it has thus been my intention to make visible the distance between emancipatory politics and state politics, between a politics of excess and a politics of expressing identities and interests. I have also insisted that expressive and excessive politics mutually condition each other in a dialectical relation. To prise apart the one from the other is an intellectual struggle as well as a political struggle, which every attempt to think an alternative to the present world must face. At this point I simply wish to prise them apart more formally than hitherto, in order to make an excessive politics more visible theoretically. This is undertaken in the formal schemata below, in which the position on the left of each diagram represents the knowledge of social science of the habitual, and the position on the right refers to the exceptional. The excess obviously refers to the part between these two end points; this excess can also be referred to as a ‘distance’. The distance referred to here is a distance from state subjectivities that is variable and measurable, like all distances: it describes less or greater distance from state thinking.

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the thought of excessive politics: a diagrammatic presentation In general, the movement of thought beyond the limits imposed by the state can be represented as following a direction away from the habitual, where nothing really changes, for thought, if represented in action, is merely expressive of the existing social. The exceptional event whose consequences are more or less subjectively sustained over time is represented by a certain distance from the habitual, as shown in the first diagram below, for its political subjectivities are not founded on interests but on principles; this represents an ‘excessive gap’ in collective political thought. Habitual                Exceptional (Politics of interest and identity)     (Disinterested political principles) --------------------> Politics at a distance from the state -------------------> 1. The ‘excessive gap’ (empirically measured) Subjective distance from the state, like all distance, is quantitatively variable and therefore measurable; this distance can be referred to as the ‘excessive gap’, i.e. the distance in thought between the expressive and the excessive. This gap can be said to delineate a domain of freedom: ‘Freedom ... consists in a distancing of the state effected through a collective fixing of a measure of the excess. And if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure up to it’ (Badiou, 1998a: 160, my translation). The first case of this formalisation is a simple indication of a variable subjective gap whereby distance from the state or habitual thought can be measured along an axis. The socially expressive is more or less subjectively exceeded. Relatively limited forms of subjective distance, such as the example of Marikana, can be plotted closer to the left; major emancipatory subjectivities, such as the politics of the slaves in SaintDomingue/Haiti, are plotted further to the right, as their distance from state thought was comparatively greater. Expressive politics |----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|-----|--------- Excessive politics State politics (xenophobic pogroms, wage demands, demands for inclusion, gender identity, etc.)

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Politics at a distance from the state (emancipatory politics of equality, exceptional subjectivity beyond place, the historical event)

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2. Theoretically dialectical The second case represents how expressive and excessive political subjectivities mutually oppose or affect each other, so that we can even have a contradictory subjectivity, as in the National Liberation Struggle mode (beyond state politics and yet new state politics). All emancipatory politics are dialectical in nature. The expressive–excessive dialectic of agency also makes clear that it is through an understanding of the exceptional that we can fully understand the normal or habitual: for example, as rebellion makes oppression fully visible. Expressive politics --------------------------> Excessive politics 4. Depoliticisation The final case shows the movement from a point of excess on the continuum governed by principles back to state politics, as identity and organised interests become the main referents for politics after having been exceeded for a period. After showing evidence of a universal politics of equality and subjecthood, everyone returns to their place in the division of labour and acts according to this place; sociologically speaking, such places may have changed and the subjectivities corresponding to them may also have altered somewhat, but this change and such effects as it entails

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denote a ‘weak singularity’, in Badiou’s sense. For example, in South Africa trade unionism and nationalism, although excessive in the mid-1980s, were no longer excessive from the 1990s; organised interests are now represented in civil society. This process of depoliticisation refers also to the dominance of reactive and obscure subjectivities: i.e. broadly speaking, those of the national state and neo-colonial power. It is this process that helps us to identify the continuity between ‘past’ and ‘new’ forms of state politics in Africa and which accounts for the consequent political disorientation, as the reactive subjectivity of the state still utilises the names of a previous emancipatory sequence within its ‘new’ form of rule, with the result that it is understood to have ‘betrayed the revolution’ with monotonous regularity. Again, given its dialectical nature, the process of depoliticisation cannot be understood as a linear one. Expressive politics