Shifting the Ground of Radical Reason

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.

Life after Marikana

Stuart Wilson, The Daily Maverick

First the facts. In August 2012, a group of Rock Drill Operators, dissatisfied with their wages, and with the representation available from either of the labour unions with a presence at the Lonmin Marikana Shaft, embarked upon an unprotected strike to push Lonmin for higher wages. The strike, and its attendant protest, soon gained widespread support, and incited a violent response – both from union officials and the police. In the days before 16 August 2012, the striking miners, union officials, Lonmin security guards, and the police themselves, all took a small number of casualties. The striking miners – about 3,000 of them – retreated to the top of a small rocky outcrop just outside the Lonmin shaft compound. There they stayed for four days, demanding that Lonmin management come and address them on their demands.

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Richard Pithouse

Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it on as an individual obligation.

A few good whites: Will civil society take Dr Ramphele back?

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

Ramphele’s assumption that she will be accepted into civil society, where she can continue her project of ‘active citizenship’ without having to be directly accountable to a real live constituency, speaks volumes. The good doctor is not wrong in this regard. Sadly, many civil society groups will accept her because the sector is not yet robust enough, not yet racially secure enough to tell prominent blacks (and whites) where to get off when they mess up.

"There is Marikana everyday in South Africa" - an interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus by TigersEye99

Re-configuring South Africa’s Youth Political Sphere

by Nomalanga Mkhize, Oppidan Press

A challenge was posed to me by the Chairperson of the Rhodes University South African Students Congress (SASCO), Mthobisi Buthelezi, at the seminar on “teaching born frees”.

He asked me to define what I meant when I said there was a missing “in-between sphere” in contemporary South African youth politics.

At the seminar I defined two dominant spheres of post-apartheid “youth political activity”.

Armed struggle: Mamdani tells politicians to learn from Luwero

By Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi A. Habati, The Independent

Mahmood Mamdani

Leading political philosopher Mahmood Mamdani says the government’s ban on the political pressure group Activists for Change (A4C) is naïve and likely to drive opposition underground. He spoke to The Independent’s Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi A. Habati.

Reflections on Human Rights Discourse and Emancipation in Africa in the Twenty-first Century

by Michael Neocosmos, Solidarity Peace Trust, Zimbabwe (undated)

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).

Whoever is engaged in popular struggles for democratic emancipation in Africa today is confronted with an immediate problem concerning human rights.  While on the one hand a discourse of rights is seemingly necessary for thinking democratisation, given that the state regularly flouts these, on the other 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 (Zimbabwe, Sudan, maybe Cote D’Ivoire, Iran) oppose a discourse of nationalism to one on 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 exampling in Thabo Mbeki’s South African government, a central contradiction appeared in the form of a commitment to neo-liberal conceptions of rights on the one hand along with a sensitivity to national and racial oppression in Africa on the other. This was reflected in government reactions to a number of different issues including Zimbabwe. In fact this contradiction is arguably constitutive of the subjectivity of the new South African bourgeoisie itself.  On the one hand their private accumulation is premised on an adherence to neo-liberal precepts including human rights, on the other a sensitivity to racism and to a lesser extent to Western hegemony in African affairs is also evident.  The manner in which the vagaries of this contradiction were navigated explains much regarding Mbeki’s presidency (Neocosmos, 2002).

In Search of a Bulwark against the Steady Drift from Democracy

by Richard Pithouse, The Cape Times

Jacob Zuma has often been presented as an avuncular man who needs to stop dithering and get on with the business of governing. But the trajectory of the ANC under Zuma is actually very clear. From the fascination with the authoritarian capitalism of China to the return to brutal methods of policing, the nature of the attacks on the media, the judiciary and civil society, the escalation of the powers and role of the intelligence agencies and the increasingly brazen repression of grassroots activists and organisations the drift towards a more authoritarian order is clear. This drift is being accompanied by an increasingly strident critique of the liberal democratic arrangements on which the post-apartheid order was founded.

From people's politics to state politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984-1994

by Michael Neocosmos, 1994 (Published in Politea in 1996)

The 1980s in South Africa witnessed an explosion of popular-democratic struggles championed by a host of autonomous civil society organisations whose activities became central in the campaign against the apartheid system and the quest for the creation of a democratic state. By the 1990s, however, especially in the lead up to and after the election of the ANC into office, South African politics appears increasingly to be subjected to the same broad logic of statism that was experienced in other parts of Africa at the dawn of independence from colonial rule. At the heart of this statism is the defeat of the popular movements which, in South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, were so vital in the struggle for political change, being the oppositional forces with the popular democratic tradition and agenda that offered the best chance for the emergence of a democratic state. Increasingly depoliticised, the role of the popular movements has been emptied of the vitality that can ensure that `the people' are able to generate and make autonomous democratic prescriptions on the state. The politicisation of civil society and the democratisation of the state are projects in the South African transition which will have to be revived if the authoritarianism that inheres in statism is to be defeated. This is the challenge before the democratic forces of opposition and change in contemporary South Africa.

Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, 2011

Rather than seeing the prevalence of systemic political violence in Africa as resulting from a purportedly difficult “transition to democracy”, this article insists that accounts of such violence must be sought within the modes of rule of the democratic state itself. In particular, the manifestation of a contradiction between democracy and nationalism in a neo-colonial context, takes many different forms which cannot be resolved consensually given
existing modes of rule and the enrichment of the oligarchy at the expense of the nation. Xenophobic violence in South Africa is used to illustrate the argument. It is shown that a distinction between domains of politics (including modes of rule) must be drawn. In particular, this means distinguishing between a domain of “civil society” and one of “uncivil society”. It is within the latter that most people relate and respond to state power. Within that domain, the state does not rule people as citizens with legally enforceable rights, but simply as a population with various entitlements. In this domain, violent political practices by the state tend to be the norm rather than the exception, so that violence acquires a certain amount of legitimacy for resolving contradictions among people. The overcoming of systemic violence (itself a political choice) can only begin to be conceived via a different thought of politics as subjective practice.

The climate change revolution will not be funded

by Jared Sacks, Pambazuka

‘Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories!’ - Amilcar Cabral

Over the past few weeks, world leaders, technocrats, and NGOs descended upon Durban for the 17th Conference of Parties (dubbed the Conference of Polluters by its critics). After 17 years of meetings to address climate change, the lack of action from world leaders clearly shows that the biggest polluting nations not only lack the political will to address the issue, but also seem to be actively carrying out the anti-environmental agenda of the largest corporations on this planet.

Dark corners of the state we're in

Church Land Programme, Padkos

Just after the attacks on Kennedy Road in 2009, S'bu Zikode, then President of the shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo said: "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" (29th September 2009).

Eating from One Pot: The Dynamics of Survival in Poor South African Households

by Sarah Mosoetsa

Sarah Mosoetsa investigates the fall out of plant closures in the garment and footwear industries of Durban … She entered the hidden abode of household production to discover a very different world from the one painted by the merchants of social capital and livelihood strategies. Rather than the romance of poor people struggling together to survive, she found a fractious and often violent world.
– From the foreword by Michael Burawoy

Some comments for the discussion on thinking politically the recent Abahlali experience.

Michael Neocosmos was not able to attend the recent meeting hosted by Church Land Programme to discuss the character of South African democracy in the wake of the attacks on AbM. But this document was circulated to the meeting. Abahlali.org

The comments below follow from an attempt to develop new concepts for thinking the Abahlali experience of being subjected to violence in Kennedy Road and subsequent experiences of the criminal justice system. I would like to discuss these issues at length sometime but as I cannot attend the CLP meeting I would like to make a few points. These are developed at greater length in a more academic format in my paper on ‘Transition, Human Rights and Violence’ which some of you have. I am going to attempt to make these points below in a more succinct form. Further debate and explication of them is necessary.

Prisoners of Freedom Human Rights and the African Poor

In this vivid ethnography, Harri Englund investigates how ideas of freedom impede struggles against poverty and injustice in emerging democracies. Reaching beyond a narrow focus on the national elite, Prisoners of Freedom shows how foreign aid and human rights activism hamper the pursuit of democratic citizenship in Africa. The book explores how activists’ aspirations of self-improvement, pursued under harsh economic conditions, find in the human rights discourse a new means to distinguish oneself from the poor masses.

Among expatriates, the emphasis on abstract human rights avoids confrontations with the political and business elites. Drawing on long-term research among the Malawian poor, Englund brings to life the personal circumstances of Malawian human rights activists, their expatriate benefactors, and the urban and rural poor as he develops a fresh perspective on freedom—one that recognizes the significance of debt, obligation, and civil virtues.

Transition, Human Rights and Violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Critical Studies Seminar, Rhodes University, 31 August 2011

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 thesis of „the end of history‟. In doing so they have provided renewed enthusiasm for 'people power' and a popularly driven process of mass mobilisation in which people can not only force the resignation of dictators and seemingly the (partial or full) collapse of 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. Yet the appearance of the masses on such a broad scale on the political scene for the first time since independence cannot be assumed to mean that they will remain there, and not only because coercive military power has yet to be transformed.

Permanent Black Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee

Permanent Black

Q: Your concept of ‘political society’ in your book The Politics of the Governed and now in your next work, The Lineages of Political Society, adds a new dimension to our understanding of how non-Western democracy functions. Could you explain this concept simply, and how you came upon it?

Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony

"This book represents an original, compelling and critical rethinking of the nature and form of United States foreign policy in the Third World 1980s and 1990s. Robinson has developed his own theoretical framework and synthesis drawn from comparative political sociology, political economy and political theory, one that takes its global inspiration from both world-systems and neo-Gramscian approaches to international relations. Robinson's theoretical strengths are combined with excellent empirical research... In his meticulous and detailed exposition of the nature, limits and contradictions of these cases, Robinson makes a fundamental contribution to our possibilities of understanding the contours of crucial aspects of North-South relations in this and the next century." Stephen Gill, York University, Toronto