Showing posts with label The 'Lumpenproletariat'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The 'Lumpenproletariat'. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 May 2016
Tuesday, 14 January 2014
A Bogus Concept
Jan Breman, New Left Review
Up till the 1970s, the notion that the Rest would follow in
the footsteps of the West was intrinsic to the dominant development paradigm.
[1] Through industrialization and urbanization, the ‘underdeveloped world’
would replicate the experience of the advanced economies in the nineteenth
century: growing employment in manufacturing, rising living standards, mass
consumption. If there were not, as yet, many industrial jobs available for the
land-poor migrants who began flocking to the cities of Latin America, Africa,
the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, where land reform had been
negligible, the consensus was that urban life itself would help them in their
search for employment. For the time being they had to make do with whatever
low-paid work was accessible to them, as waged hands or self-employed, living
in makeshift shelters on the city outskirts or on vacant land. The burgeoning
informal sector was at first seen as a zone of transition, a buffer that would
disappear as labour was absorbed by the dynamics of industrialization into a
growing formal economy. This upward mobility turned out to be a rare
occurrence, however, and millions remained stuck in the informal economy that
they had helped to build, or drifting back and forth between the slums of the
urban periphery and the impoverished rural hinterland, forming a vast stratum
of precarious labour.
Monday, 21 October 2013
A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?
A Path
Through the Embers and into the Agora?
- Notes on
the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of the
World
Richard Pithouse
Richard Pithouse
Retrieving
life and the human from waste
Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering
of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South
Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it
should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”.
He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the
West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological
embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as
waste.” Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in
the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people
and to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what
Aimé Césairecalled 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading
as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism . . . a humanism
made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true humanity”.
A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?
A
Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?
-
Notes on the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of
the World
Richard Pithouse
Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering of human beings as waste
by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the
democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the
form of a conscious attempt to retrieve
life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts
of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We
will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in
long histories of "the human" as waste.” Mbembe is not the first to
want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of
the full and equal humanity of all people but to insist that the idea of the
human needs to be delinked from what Aimé Césaire
called 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism....a
humanism made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true
humanity”.
Monday, 7 January 2013
Fanon: Imperative of the Now (Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Fanon)
Volume 112, Number 1, Winter 2013Grant Farred, Special Issue Editor
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica
Obika Gray, Demeaned but
Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston:
University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
Obika Gray has made the political
role of the urban lower-class in Jamaica his central
subject. His earlier monograph, Radicalism and Social Change
in Jamaica, 1960-1972, dealt with urban working class
politics in the early years of independence. This book, by
contrast deals with a vaguer category, “the urban poor”, in
Marxist terms, the poorer urban working class and the
lumpenproletariat.
Gray’s central thesis involves a
dialectical relationship between what he calls the “predatory
state” and a lower class that resists the norms that state seeks to
impose by erecting its own values of “badness-honour”, a rival
standard to the middle-class nationalist values promoted by the
state.
Monday, 13 August 2012
"We Need a Popular Discipline": Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative
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I see my philosophy as an inheritor of the great contestatory movements of the sixties. In fact, my philosophy emerged out of these movements. It is a philosophy of commitment, of engagement, with a certain fidelity to Sartre, if you like, or to Marxism. What counts is that the intellectual is engaged in politics and commits to or takes the side of the people and the workers. I move in that tradition. Myphilosophy tries to keep alive, as best it can (it is not always easy), the idea that theris a real alternative to the dominant politics and that we are not obliged to rally around the consensus that ultimately consists in the unity of global capitalism and the representative, democratic state. I would say, then, that I work under the condition of the situation of political actuality, with the goal of keeping alive, philosophically, the idea of the possibility or opening of a politics I would call a politics of emancipation—but that could also be called a radical or revolutionary politics, terms that today are debatable but that represent all the same a possibility other than the dominant one.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
'Fanon & Violence': A lecture by Lewis Gordon
Click here to watch this video at the Histories of Violence project.
The Histories of Violence “Fanon & Violence” lecture is provided by Professor Lewis R. Gordon (Temple University, U.S.A.). At the time of filming, Professor Gordon was the Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. He was also Director of the Centre for Afro-Jewish Studies while a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Gordon has written many works in race theory, Africana philosophy, postcolonial phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political philosophy, film and literature, philosophy of education, philosophy of human sciences, and a variety of topics in the public interest. Before joining Temple, he taught at Brown University for eight years, during which the program in Afro-American Studies became the Department of Africana Studies under his leadership as chairperson. He also taught at Purdue University and Yale University, and he is Ongoing Visiting Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Professor Gordon has presented lectures internationally, and has been a recipient of numerous awards and distinguished fellowships.
The Histories of Violence “Fanon & Violence” lecture is provided by Professor Lewis R. Gordon (Temple University, U.S.A.). At the time of filming, Professor Gordon was the Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. He was also Director of the Centre for Afro-Jewish Studies while a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Gordon has written many works in race theory, Africana philosophy, postcolonial phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political philosophy, film and literature, philosophy of education, philosophy of human sciences, and a variety of topics in the public interest. Before joining Temple, he taught at Brown University for eight years, during which the program in Afro-American Studies became the Department of Africana Studies under his leadership as chairperson. He also taught at Purdue University and Yale University, and he is Ongoing Visiting Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Professor Gordon has presented lectures internationally, and has been a recipient of numerous awards and distinguished fellowships.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867-1948
by Charles
van Onselen (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984)
Introduction
Modern South Africa's industrial achievements are often pointed to with considerable pride — sometimes by outsiders, but more frequently by the powerful or privileged within the country. Viewed from the heights of the cabinet room, the company boardroom, the stock exchange or the bank, there is no doubt some justification for this pride. A country which in 1981 had a gross national product of approximately R70,000 million, a private consumption expenditure bill of almost R 38,000 million and a wage bill of close on R35,000 million is indeed, as a recent edition of the Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa put it, 'the economic workshop of the African Continent'1 Yet common sense as much as class analysis would lead one to believe that the view from the lower terrain of the township house, the mine compound or the farm hut would be more critical.
Introduction
Modern South Africa's industrial achievements are often pointed to with considerable pride — sometimes by outsiders, but more frequently by the powerful or privileged within the country. Viewed from the heights of the cabinet room, the company boardroom, the stock exchange or the bank, there is no doubt some justification for this pride. A country which in 1981 had a gross national product of approximately R70,000 million, a private consumption expenditure bill of almost R 38,000 million and a wage bill of close on R35,000 million is indeed, as a recent edition of the Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa put it, 'the economic workshop of the African Continent'1 Yet common sense as much as class analysis would lead one to believe that the view from the lower terrain of the township house, the mine compound or the farm hut would be more critical.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
'Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise'
by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward. Pain and panic set into the bones.
More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward. Pain and panic set into the bones.
Friday, 30 December 2011
Wageless Life
by Michael Denning, New Left Review, December 2010 (Click here to download this article in pdf)
Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being
exploited is not being exploited. Since the beginnings of the
wage-labour economy, wageless life has been a calamity for those
dispossessed of land, tools and means of subsistence. Expelled from
work, the wageless also became invisible to science: political economy,
as Marx noted in the earliest formulations of his critique of the
discipline, ‘does not recognize the unemployed worker’: ‘The rascal,
swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal
workingman—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but
only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger,
and bum-bailiff, etc; such figures are spectres outside its domain.’ [1]
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Review of Mike Davis' 'Planet of Slums'
by Richard Pithouse, Interactivist, 5 May 2008
Visions of the future, presented as aspiration or inevitability, exercise tremendous power over certain kinds of decision making in the present. In cities where local elites are able to imagine a convivial future for themselves and where the economy is based on local consumption as well as production or extraction for export, the vision of the future is, above all, the idea of a ‘World Class City’. This is the idea that guides and justifies the decisions of the technocratic elites organized in ‘partnerships’ across governments, donor agencies, NGOs, the academy and corporations. Their decisions produce broadly similar results around the world – the exclusion and eviction of the poor, the commodification of public space and public investment in projects for private profit such as conference centers, casinos, hotels, shopping malls, golf course estates, major sports events and so on at the direct expense of public investment in public housing, public facilities and public space. Rem Koolhaas tells us that it is time to get real and the reality is that shopping is “the last remaining form of public activity.”1
Visions of the future, presented as aspiration or inevitability, exercise tremendous power over certain kinds of decision making in the present. In cities where local elites are able to imagine a convivial future for themselves and where the economy is based on local consumption as well as production or extraction for export, the vision of the future is, above all, the idea of a ‘World Class City’. This is the idea that guides and justifies the decisions of the technocratic elites organized in ‘partnerships’ across governments, donor agencies, NGOs, the academy and corporations. Their decisions produce broadly similar results around the world – the exclusion and eviction of the poor, the commodification of public space and public investment in projects for private profit such as conference centers, casinos, hotels, shopping malls, golf course estates, major sports events and so on at the direct expense of public investment in public housing, public facilities and public space. Rem Koolhaas tells us that it is time to get real and the reality is that shopping is “the last remaining form of public activity.”1
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Frantz Fanon and the "Lumpenproletariat"
by Peter Worsley, Socialist Register, Vol.9., 1972
In 1960, I attended the All-African People's Congress in Accra, Ghana. The proceedings consisted mainly of speeches by leaders of African nationalism from all over the continent, few of whom said anything notable. When, therefore, the representative of the Algerian Revolutionary Provisional Government, their Ambassador to Ghana, stood up to speak for his country, I prepared myself for an address by a diplomat-not usually an experience to set the pulses racing. Instead, I found myself electrified by a contribution that was remarkable not only for its analytical power, but delivered, too, with a passion and brilliance that is all too rare. I discovered that the Ambassador was a man named Frantz Fanon.
In 1960, I attended the All-African People's Congress in Accra, Ghana. The proceedings consisted mainly of speeches by leaders of African nationalism from all over the continent, few of whom said anything notable. When, therefore, the representative of the Algerian Revolutionary Provisional Government, their Ambassador to Ghana, stood up to speak for his country, I prepared myself for an address by a diplomat-not usually an experience to set the pulses racing. Instead, I found myself electrified by a contribution that was remarkable not only for its analytical power, but delivered, too, with a passion and brilliance that is all too rare. I discovered that the Ambassador was a man named Frantz Fanon.
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