Friday, 30 November 2012
Thursday, 29 November 2012
A Reconnoitre of Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Mutation
by Jocelyn Coldrey, 2012
The goal
of this paper is to explore Frantz Fanon’s theory of mutation to track the
manner in which the psyche of a human has to change to such an extent that a
new meaning can be given. Though many Fanonian theorists have asserted that it
is necessary for us to explore Fanon’s writings through the geographically
space of right now, this paper will rather explain a principle of his thought
in order to take it one step further and use it in the present. The necessity
of radical mutation is crucial in order to entirely de-colonialize and for a
human society to exist alongside symbols and equal opportunities for all,
despite ontological and epistemological difference.
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Fanon, black female sexuality and representations of black beauty in popular culture
by Efemia Chela, 2012
Frantz
Fanon’s works are all very personal. Black
Skins, White Masks, a treatise on the lived experience of being black is
based on his experiences in Martinican society, being a student and then a
black doctor in France. A Dying
Colonialism is the Algerian War through the prism of his work with the FLN
and The Wretched of The Earth arises
from his experiences visiting post-colonial African countries, interacting with
future African leaders and observing colonial and native elites. Even though
Fanon was a man his oeuvre have great
relevance to women and this piece will focus on the representation of black
women in Fanon’s works and how his observations can be used to analyse
contemporary depictions of black beauty in popular culture and hip-hop. This
essay will also address the dimensions of black female sexuality and the
similarities between sexism and racism.
A Critique of Crain Soudien’s Realising the Dream: Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School
by Mbali Baduza, 2012
Crain
Soudien’s “Realising the Dream:
Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school” is a book whose
publishing could not be more relevant to the current South African reality. He
poses a question that is not uniquely modern, but a question that has been
faced throughout the centuries: “what kind of human beings do we wish to be?”
(Soudien, 2012: 2-3). Although, a
seemingly simple question at first, when we take seriously the factors and
implications which confront it, it becomes a question pregnant with meaning.
This is because, I argue, it calls into question what we mean by being human. Soudien says and I quote at
length (2012: 2):
“What
it means to be a human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply
of one’s rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it
more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task
of gifting that right to others – is a question that arises in South Africa
with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question
is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in
elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature.”
A critical assessment of David Harvey's suggestion that we should "adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal"
by Jane Hoffe, 2012
Around the globe urbanisation has increased at an alarming
rate with more people occupying cities today than the entire world population
in 1960 (Davis, 2004:5). However, the process of urbanisation has brought
success and prosperity to only a select few. Grounded in the development of the
capitalist system, Harvey (2008; 2012) argues that cities developed out of a
notion of individual monetary gain with little recognition of the collective
will. Through an analysis of the context and structure of today’s modern city
it becomes evident that many who occupy the capitalist urban centre are left on
the periphery of political and social influence of the cities in which they
inhabit. Harvey (2008; 2012) therefore suggests the adoption of what he terms
“the right to the city” as both a working slogan and political ideal in
addressing the problems faced by city dwellers. By first assessing what the
“right to the city” truly means and how it fits into the context of the modern
city structure, one is then able to discuss in what shape the adoption of such
a right will take and the challenges faced by those adopting it.
The Contemporary Relevance of Frederick Engel's Critique of 'Haussmann'.
by Darsha
Indrajith, 2012
Frederick Engels’s critique of the ‘Haussmann’ method forms
a part of his discussion on an issue that is applicable to many cities today –
the housing problem. Thus, it is evident that the problem that Engels discusses
is relevant today, but so is the method that is used to deal with it,
‘Haussmann’, and Engels’s critique of it. In The Housing Question though, Engels speaks mainly of housing in
relation to the working-class and their employers. In most modern cities
though, housing is also a problem for the unemployed. Therefore, in order to
make Engels’s critique more relevant to today’s housing issue, the scope of his
argument should be broadened to include the unemployed. The general ideas and
critiques that Engels articulates can be easily moulded to include the
unemployed.
The Right to the City
by Tarryn de Kock, 2012
The
city exists as a space and place of multiple meanings that are performed by
those concerned with it on a daily basis. It is a place of work and play, home
and holiday, prayer and education, relaxation and activity, and as such forms
part of the way people perceive themselves and who they aspire to be. David Harvey
adapts the idea of the right to the city from Henri Lefebvre, and asserts that
it should be both a working slogan for urban change, as well as the political
ideal backing it (Harvey 2008:40). However, how do these ideas translate into
action for people living on the margins? The right to the city is not a
simplistic concept, as will be elaborated on in this response, and the action taken
to address it thus cannot be simplistic either. The city is a constantly
changing space, and its meanings are contested on a daily basis because of that
change and complexity (Adebayo 2010:2). Harvey’s ideas on the right to the city
have sustainable merit, but arguably he fails to qualify how the
democratisation of urban resources will in any manner relate to a change in the
real value of urban life for marginalised people, and people outside urban
spaces too. In this response, issues of group identity, the criminalisation of
the urban poor and the way the city is conceptualised according to rights will
be explored against the backdrop of the right to the city.
Hebron: The capital of ugly and keffiyehs
The keffiyeh has been a powerful political symbol for
decades. But Hebron, where it is manufactured in bulk and worn as a statement
of courage, is the broken centre of a fast-unravelling region. By NINA BUTLER
in Ramallah. The Daily Maverick
The keffiyeh has been the most provocative and explicit
emblem of Palestinian solidarity since Yasser Arafat gave it global exposure in
the 60s and 70s. Throughout his political career, Arafat was rarely seen
without the traditional headdress of Arab men in the Middle East. Western media
outlined its powerful symbolism by circulating images of Leila Khaled wearing a
keffiyeh and holding an AK-47. The female member of the armed wing of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who is famed for being
involved in the 1969 high jacking of TWA flight 840, is a prominent face on the
Apartheid wall and buildings in Gaza and the West Bank to this day, as are
images of Arafat*.
Revolution at Point Zero
A review of Silvia Federici's anthology, Revolution at Point
Zero, by Joshua Eichen, Mute Magazine
In 2012, we all pay at least lip service to the
entanglements of class, gender, and race when not also struggling to
incorporate other threads into our explanatory frameworks and actions. So when
you come across clarity of vision that precisely explains those relations, one
can only marvel that it was written 37 years ago and try not to be too dismayed
that it isn’t more widely known. Hopefully this new collection of work by
Silvia Federici will change that.
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Review of Fanonian Practices
African Studies Quarterly | Volume
13, Issue 3 | Summer 2012 http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/pdfs/v13i3a5.pdf
Nigel Gibson. 2011. Fanonian
Practices in South Africa from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo.
Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press. 312 pp.
The author employs a Fanonian
theoretical and ideological framework in his penetrating critique of
post-apartheid South Africa in an earnest commitment to the aspirations and
“living politics” of the shack dwellers of South Africa. It is a highly
important work that illustrates the relevance of Fanon’s philosophy of
liberation to the socio-economic and political developments in South Africa
since the ANC formed the country’s first multi-racial democracy in April 1994
to date. In short, “ultimately a Fanonian perspective insists that we view the
sweetness of the South African transition from apartheid as bitter, realised at
the moment when ‘the people find out that the ubiquitous fact that exploitation
can wear a Black face’ (Fanon 1968: 145) and that a Black, too, can be a Boer
(amabhunu amanyama)” (p. 5).
From Gaza to the Congo: Whose blood is more worthy of attention?
by Khadija Patel, The Daily Maverick
There has been a marked disparity in the coverage of
conflict in Gaza and the Congo in recent days. A disparity that has led some to
question whose blood is more worthy of mainstream media attention. It’s
certainly not a competition, but the disparity and the continuance of these
conflicts is an indictment of a lot more than a jaundiced media focus.
In August 2009, around the time I still believed myself to
be sane, I interviewed Professor Norman Finkelstein while he visited South
Africa on a speaking tour. I was buoyed by the curious combination of
nervousness and confidence that only the young and stupid can attest to.
Finkelstein had, just months before that, made headlines for losing tenure at
the university where he taught owing to his views on Israel. As I spoke to
Finkelstein, about Gandhi, colonialism and the legacy of the Holocaust in his
own family, I also asked him how he responded to observations that conflict in
Middle East was apportioned too much media coverage. What about the Congo,
where more than 1,000 people were killed in December 2008 – around the same
time as Israel’s Operation Cast Lead? Why does Gaza get more attention than the
Congo?
Not Even the Dead
 |
| Richard Pithouse |
And then, despite the fear, I set off
I put my cheek against death's cheek
− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty
Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006
On the 26th of September 1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant
writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely
attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself,
for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the
border between Spain and France, with his library lost to the Gestapo in Paris
and his way through Spain blocked, he took his own life.
Monday, 26 November 2012
Friday, 23 November 2012
ANC lacks internal democracy
by William Gumde, Pambazuka
The
way in which the ANC elects its president is deeply flawed, is skewed towards
churning out poor quality leaders and turns members and supporters into
frustrated and impotent bystanders.
Firstly,
the 4500 voting delegates that will vote for the ANC president at the party’s
upcoming December 2012 national conference are not representative of ordinary
ANC members and supporters, let alone the country.
The Value of Palestinian Existence and 'Normality' Under Israeli Occupation
by Nina Butler, Nina Butler
Days are short in Palestine. It is pitch black by 5pm and
winter has not yet even solidified over the barren, beige land, scarred with
barbed wire and mountains of trash.
Lives are short here too.
Thursday, 22 November 2012
Counter Power and Colonial Rule in the Eighteenth Century Cape of Good Hope: Belongings and Protest of the Labouring Poor.
by Nicole Ulrich, 2011
Framed
by an anarchist reading of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The
Many
Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of
the
Revolutionary
Atlantic (2000), this study examines the dynamic nature of colonial
and
class
rule in the eighteenth-century Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa,
and the
forms
of belonging and traditions of political protest developed by the
labouring poor.
This
study draws on archival material from national and international
repositories,
focusing
on government records, criminal court trials, and travellers’
accounts.
Colonial
rule, the under-class, and resistance in the Cape are located in a
global
context,
with special attention being paid to changes associated with the ‘Age
of
Revolution
and War’ and rise of the modern world. Breaking with the tendency
to
treat
different sections of the motley (many-hued) labouring poor in the
Cape as
discreet,
often racially defined, and nationally bounded population groups,
segmented
also
by legal status, this study provides a comprehensive study of labour
in the Cape
that
includes an examination of slaves, servants, sailors, and soldiers
recruited, or
imported
from, Asia, Europe, and other parts of Africa.
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann and African feminist literary imaginings
by Pumla Dineo Gqola, 2008
Abstract. ‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann
and African
feminist literary imaginings. The story of Sarah Bartmann
has been one of
the fascinations of academic writing on ‘race’, feminism and
poststructuralism in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century. An
enslaved Khoi woman, she was transported to Europe where she was displayed for the amusement, and later scientific inquisitiveness of
various public and private collectives in London and Paris. Her paradoxical
hypervisibility has meant that although volumes have been written about her,
very little is recoverable from these records about her subjectivity. In this
paper I am less interested in tracing and engaging with some of the debates
engendered by this paradox and difficulty more broadly. Rather, I want to read
and analyse how African feminist literary projects have approached
Bartmann’s absent presence. My paper then tasks itself with exploring the
possibility of writing about Sarah Bartmann in ways unlike those traditions of
knowledge-making that dubbed her ‘the Hottentot Venus’. It analyzes a variety of
texts that position themselves in relation to her as a way of arriving at an
African feminist creative and literary engagement with histories which fix
representations of African women’s bodies, via Bartmann in colonialist
epistemes.
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Ghosts of Kamerun
by August Conchiglia, New Left Review
On 9 October 2011, the Cameroonian president Paul Biya was
re-elected for yet another seven-year term, amid widespread electoral
violations. [1] Aged 79, he has been in power since 1982, when he was appointed
to the presidency by his predecessor, Ahmadou Ahidjo; the latter had in turn
ruled the country since independence in 1960. In fifty-two years, Cameroon has
had only two presidents, who have held this country of 19 million in an iron
grip: behind a fraudulent, electoral façade stands a highly repressive regime
which has imprisoned or killed its opponents, muzzled the press and salted away
trillions of dollars in oil revenue. The balance sheet is catastrophic.
Corruption is pervasive, from the apparatchiks of the ruling Rassemblement
Démocratique du Peuple Camerounais—until 1990 the only legal political
party—down to local traffic cops. According to the World Bank, 40 per cent of
the population live below the official poverty line, while life expectancy, at
52, is five years shorter than in Liberia and twelve shorter than in Ghana. In
2011, Cameroon’s Human Development Index ranked it 150th out of 187 countries
surveyed by the UNDP.
Forced Removals in Greater Cape Town, 1948-1970
by Martin Legassick, 2006
During and after the Second World War the African population of the Cape Peninsula grew enormously in number. Until at least the mid-1950s most black Africans lived not in official ‘locations’ such as Langa but in privately-owned and rented high density flats and houses along the docks-Observatory axis, scattered through the predominantly white and Coloured residential areas of Cape Town as plot owners or tenants -- and, mainly, under conditions of extreme squalor, in unregulated ‘pondokkie’ settlements in the peri-urban areas around the fringes of Cape Town. In the 1950s, however, Cape Town “became a test case for influx control and racial segregation”. Government policy, implemented by local authorities, forcibly removed the African population to official ‘locations’ or endorsed them out of the area altogether.
Monday, 19 November 2012
Ambitious tomes offer grand, unrivalled sweep of history
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA: Volume 1 edited by
Robert Ross, Carolyn Hamilton and Benard K Mbenga; Volume 2 edited by Robert
Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson
(Cambridge University Press)
Andrew MacDonald, Mail & Gaurdian
The late master Eric Hobsbawm, in his biography Interesting
Times, recalled his time as a young radical in the English fens in the 1930s
and described what he called Cambridge University's peculiar "principal of
unripe time": whatever somebody may propose and however good the proposal,
the time is inevitably not yet ripe. Thus it is that the last time Cambridge
University Press produced a general volume on South African history, pneumonic
plague took the lives of 350 South Africans.
Lindela Figlan Speaking in Edinburgh
A fantastic talk by Lindela Figlan, spokesperson from Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shackdwellers' movement of South Africa. In Edinburgh October 2012, co-hosted by Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty (ECAP) and Edinburgh Anarchist Federation.
Saturday, 17 November 2012
The NGO Republic of Haiti
The Nation
The wire fence that surrounds Haiti’s National Palace in the
heart of the country’s capital has been covered, recently, with a green mesh.
Inside, the multi-domed structure has been reduced to rubble, finally knocked
down after it was all but destroyed by the country’s deadly 7.0-magnitude
earthquake on January 12, 2010. The worst national disaster in the history of
the Western Hemisphere, the temblor killed an estimated 200,000 people in just
thirty-five seconds.
‘I can hear the roar of women’s silence’
On the 25th Anniversary of Sankara's assassination Sokari
Ekrine considers the importance of his vision for women's emancipation. Red Pepper
It was Thursday, 4th August 1983 in what was soon to be
renamed Burkina Faso. On this day, a coup d’etat led by Captains Thomas Sankara
and Blaise Compaoré set in motion a Pan-Africanist, Marxist, revolution which
sought to liberate Franz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” from the clutches of
imperialism and neo-colonialism. Sankara emphasised the universality of the
Burkinabe revolution in his address to the UN General Assembly a year after
becoming President of the National Council of the Revolution.
Not in the Mood
Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew
Brown
Polity, 629 pp, £25.00, November, ISBN 978 0 7456 5615 1
‘Anyone reading these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques
Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood
everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them,
while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you
can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future
biographers, think again. Derrida worried that the diaries might one day be
privileged over his philosophical writing or, worse, used as a way of ‘finally’
steering through the obstacles he had consciously placed between himself and
his readers.
Friday, 16 November 2012
Cape winelands: Why the farmworkers defied Cosatu
Driving through the Hex River Valley after Wednesday’s chaotic protests feels like entering a ghost town. Yet when one manages to find residents and speak to them, it becomes crystal clear that the farm workers are planning to hold out for their wage demands – and that few of them know anything of the well-publicised promises that they would be back at work this week. By JARED SACKS, The Daily Maverick
Entering the Hex River Valley on Thursday morning was a surreal experience. Following Cosatu's well publicised statement on Wednesday, I had expected that most farmworkers would already be in the fields trying to recuperate their lost wages over the past two weeks.
Entering the Hex River Valley on Thursday morning was a surreal experience. Following Cosatu's well publicised statement on Wednesday, I had expected that most farmworkers would already be in the fields trying to recuperate their lost wages over the past two weeks.
Thursday, 15 November 2012
The Farm Workers' Strike: It's Far From Over
by Anna Majavu, SACSIS
The mines and the farms are two enduring symbols of old
white colonial theft, of the minerals and land. Because of the monopoly of the
National Union of Mineworkers, whose leaders and officials have long preferred
compromise and co-determination over worker control, it has been difficult for
mineworkers to strike – until the Marikana massacre.
From Commoning to Debt: Microcredit, Student Debt and the Disinvestment in Reproduction
An audio recording of a talk by scholar, teacher and activist Silvia Federici at Goldsmiths University (London, UK) on 12 November 2012.
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Police are getting away with murder
by Imraan Buccus, The Mercury
The difference between our laws and policies and the realities on the ground has reached crisis proportions
The difference between our laws and policies and the realities on the ground has reached crisis proportions
THE COMMISSION of inquiry into the Marikana massacre
is revealing the extent of the crisis in our policing. We have learnt that
there was widescale torture after the massacre and that weapons were planted
near the bodies of the slain miners.
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Pallo Jordan’s speech at the 20th anniversary of the Bisho massacre
 |
| Pallo Jordan |
by Z. Pallo Jordan
Like so many of the landmarks along our long walk to
freedom, September 7th 1992 does not mark a happy occasion. It was day on which
the political and social forces striving to give birth to a democratic South
Africa, clashed head-on with the joint forces of reaction represented by the
tin-pot military strongman, Brigadier Oupa Gqozo and the die-hards of the
apartheid regime. Twenty-eight people were mowed down in a desperate act of
repression.
Friday, 9 November 2012
Biko: A Biography
 |
| Xolela Mangcu: Biko |
Thursday, 8 November 2012
Fire in the Vineyards: The Making of a Farm Worker Uprising in the Hex River Valley
by Chris Webb, The Amandla Blog
As labour tensions continue to simmer in South Africa’s
mining industry, farm workers in the Hex River Valley have called attention to
the fact that they earn some of the lowest wages in the country. Their voices,
so often silenced by the paternalistic relations that still define rural social
relations, have once again been dismissed by commercial agricultural interests
and their allied political leaders as the voices of mob, directed by shadow
‘third force.’ In reality the deprivations of hunger, poverty and violence are
the driving force behind this uprising, as anyone who has visited the shack
settlements that skirt the N1 highway in this region and will know. In the township
of Stofland workers survive on seasonal work on the farms (often for as low as
R65 a day) and rely on social grants and family remittances for the rest of the
year. Few trade unions have made inroads in this region, and the firing of live
rounds on striking workers by farmers demonstrates the brutal face of modern
industrial relations in parts of the agricultural sector.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
Marikana: a cover-up for all to see
by Greg Marinovich, The Guardian
The Farlam Commission into the Marikana mine killings
continues to be the vehicle for revealing the most shocking information about
what happened at the place called Small Koppie on 16 August.
On Monday, Captain Jeremiah Apollo Mohlaki, crime scene
investigator, was presented with two sets of images taken at the scene. The
first set was taken while there was still daylight and showed the dead miners,
few of whom had weapons near them. The commission then presented corresponding
images of the same miners with traditional and hand-made weapons close by, even
on top of the dead strikers.
Today's loan shark feeding frenzy, tomorrow's revolution
In Grahamstown, there’s a woman who only gets
R120 from her monthly social grant of R1,200, because the rest is 'eaten up' by
loan sharks. In a country where close on half of all credit-active people are
impaired, the rampant growth in unsecured lending and illegal lenders is
creating a real context for insurrection. By MANDY DE WAAL, The Daily Maverick
A template for Marikana was made in Ermelo a year ago
by David Bruce, Business Day
IN JANUARY last year, the operational response
services component of the South African Police Service (SAPS) was moved out of
the "crime prevention" division and re-established as a full police
division in its own right. The units that comprise the division are the Special
Task Force, the National Intervention Unit, the Public Order Police and the
Tactical Response Team.
The Selling of a Massacre: Media Complicity in Marikana Repression
By Ben Fogel, Ceasefire
The 16th of August 2012 will surely join June 16 1960* and March 23 1976** as a day of infamy in South African history. The police force of the democratically elected government shot 102 black working-class miners (killing 34 and wounding 78), while arresting an additional 270 men at the Lonmin (London Mining) mine in the small North West town of Marikana. This followed the deaths of 10 other men in the week leading up to the massacre, beginning with the murder of two miners- allegedly by NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) officials.
Jacob Zuma’s second term: the fall and rise of democracy
by Jane Duncan, published in the Cape Times
It seems more than likely that Jacob Zuma will
be elected President of the African National Congress (ANC) in December, which
will undoubtedly see him remaining President of South Africa for another five
years. What will South Africa look like after ten years of Zuma’s rule? Will
society have become more open, or will growing authoritarianism lead to
democratic spaces being closed down.
Monday, 5 November 2012
Is the idea of communism potentially emancipatory?
by Makasa Chinyata
1. Introduction
This
essay will argue that the idea of communism is potentially emancipatory. It
will therefore attempt to build on Alain Badiou’s claim that “the communist
hypothesis is the hypothesis of emancipation” (Badiou as cited in Ranciere,
2010:167). Communism has quite generally been thought of as an oppressive mode
of politics. This particular misconception is largely due to the fact that
communism generally tends to be conflated with the Soviet Union. As a result of
this, the failure of the Soviet Union (apparent long before its eventual
‘defeat’ in the Cold War) is generally thought to signify the failure of
communism – hence its relegation as a form of politics that is largely spurious.
This essay will therefore attempt to portray illegitimacy of claims that view
the Soviet Union as representative of communism and argue that the Soviet Union
was in fact contradictory to the idea of communism. Secondly this essay will
argue that communism is potentially emancipatory. In order to argue the latter,
this essay will be based on Sylvain Lazarus claim that “there is no politics in
general, only specific political sequences [and that] politics is not a
permanent instance of society” (Neocosmos, 2009:13). This claim renders
possible the argument that communism as a political idea, can be traced in
particular political sequences that have occurred over the course of history
with varying success. Alain Badiou’s concept of communism being above all else
the exemplification of an “egalitarian society which, acting under its own
impetus, brings down walls and barriers” (Badiou, 2010:60) will therefore be
applied to specific political sequences (or ‘events’ - in the philosophical
sense of the word): the Haitian revolution and the Paris Commune. In doing so,
this essay will attempt to postulate the validity of conceiving of the idea of
communism as potentially emancipatory.
Revenge of the Commons: The Crisis in the South African Mining Industry
By Keith Breckenridge, History Workshop
Most accounts of the Marikana massacre, and the resulting
turmoil in the South African mining industry, stress the ongoing importance of
structural poverty, and the gross inequalities of life in South Africa after
the end of Apartheid. If the writers on this subject (and many other events of
contemporary South African politics) are correct, little has changed. But they
are not right, at least not straightforwardly. The violent protests on the
mines have been prompted by very dramatic changes in the distribution of power
on the mines, changes that have brought about conditions of civil war within
the mines’ unionised work force. And what that internecine conflict shows is
that the long-term structures of political economy that supported the mines,
and the distinctive features created by Apartheid South Africa, present an
unexpected threat to the union movement, mining capital and the state.
Sunday, 4 November 2012
Jacques Rancière on the 'evil third party'
Why has the
philosophy of the intelligentsia or activists always needed to blame some evil third
party (petty bourgeoisie, ideologist or master thinker) for the shadows and
obscurities that get in the way of the harmonious relationship between their
own self-consciousness and the self-identity of their popular objects of study?
Was this evil party contrived to spirit away another more fearsome threat: that
of seeing the thinkers of the night invade the territory of
philosophy?
- Jacques Rancière, Introduction to Proletarian Nights
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