Showing posts with label Emancipatory Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emancipatory Politics. Show all posts
Friday, 4 July 2014
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
How do we move towards an emancipatory politics in South Africa?
Raymond Suttner, Polity
Political analyst Steven Friedman correctly concludes (in
Business Day, 9 May 2014) that the ANC may not face electoral defeat for the
foreseeable future, though he, uncharacteristically, treats this as everything
that may be entailed in the notion of politics. ‘What happens inside the
African National Congress (ANC) remains more important to our political future
than what happens outside it.’ If we
want a sense of where our politics is headed, he says, ‘we need to look at the
tensions within the ANC rather than the challenges it faces from outside.’
‘Outside’, here, refers to other electoral parties, not the
whole of the ‘outside’. It is important to define our understanding of politics
and its scope. It may well be that some who voted ANC will be on the streets
protesting today or in the near future. It is reported, for example, that the
ANC scored 60% of the vote in the Bekkersdal hotspot.
Thursday, 20 September 2012
‘Politics at a Distance from the State’ Conference
‘Politics at a Distance from the State’ Conference
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South
Africa
29th-30th September
2012
The conference is intended as a space at
which academics & activists sympathetic to, supportive of, or involved in
‘politics at a distance from the state’ can freely explore, discuss and debate
this type of politics.
It considers anti-statist politics in
South Africa and beyond, including anti-statist moments and currents in the
anti-Apartheid movement, and contemporary attempts at building alternative,
pre-figurative forms of communality in South Africa and abroad.
Attendees will include activists from the
1980s BCM, UDF and trade union movement, writers like John Holloway, Jacques
Depelchin, Michael Neocosmos, Richard Pithouse, and Lucien van der Walt
(co-author Black Flame), plus today’s movements supportive of 'at a
distance' politics, like shack-dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondoloolo.
|
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
The Capacities of the People Versus a Predominant, Militarist, Ethno-Nationalist Elite: Democratisation in South Africa c. 1973-1997
 |
| UDF Poster |
In
January 1983, Allan Boesak called for the formation of a front to
oppose specific apartheid constitutional changes, and after a series
of regional conferences, the United Democratic Front was launched in
Cape Town in August. Boesak says that fifteen hundred people were
present, representing 500 organisations and all sectors of society.
The listing of the Front’s eventual affiliates included trade
unions, youth and student movements, women’s and religious groups,
civic associations, political parties and a range of support and
professional groups. Within the next few years, the Front embraced
almost 1,000 affiliated groups. Because of the UDF’s capacity to
provide national political and ideological coordination to these
affiliates, radical political action ‘assumed an increasingly
organised form’, says Swilling, ‘enhancing its power and
effectiveness.’ As
previously with the BCM, the arrival of the UDF was not welcomed by
the ANC.
Monday, 19 September 2011
Richard Turner and the Politics of Emancipation
by Duncan Greaves, 1987
Richard Turner died in the early hours of January 8, 1978; he was gunned down, at the age of 37, by an assailant who has yet to be identified. In the decade since then political violence in South Africa has escalated to the point where we now stand on the brink of civil war. Or perhaps I should say anti-political violence; for there is a sharp limit to which the purposes of politics and violence can be reconciled. There is, to be sure, an intimate and complex link between the two; it has often been suggested that war is the prosecution of diplomacy by other means, and, by a logical extension, that civil war is the prosecution of politics by other means. But the link is one of tension, for the one does not simply translate into the other as the need arises. Instead, we typically find that violence tends to drown politics in its own purposes.
Richard Turner died in the early hours of January 8, 1978; he was gunned down, at the age of 37, by an assailant who has yet to be identified. In the decade since then political violence in South Africa has escalated to the point where we now stand on the brink of civil war. Or perhaps I should say anti-political violence; for there is a sharp limit to which the purposes of politics and violence can be reconciled. There is, to be sure, an intimate and complex link between the two; it has often been suggested that war is the prosecution of diplomacy by other means, and, by a logical extension, that civil war is the prosecution of politics by other means. But the link is one of tension, for the one does not simply translate into the other as the need arises. Instead, we typically find that violence tends to drown politics in its own purposes.
Monday, 11 July 2011
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today
by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, Vol. 1., No. 2. 2010
The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This work makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. Neo-liberal politics predominantly produces passivity or rarely a politics of petitioning the state. This political passivity must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, this work briefly outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’ and political ‘prescriptions’.
The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This work makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. Neo-liberal politics predominantly produces passivity or rarely a politics of petitioning the state. This political passivity must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, this work briefly outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’ and political ‘prescriptions’.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)