Can we revive our democratic imagination?

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

Narendra Modi, a politician who combines a form of hypercapitalism that produces fabulous wealth for some at the cost of ruination for many others with a narrow and dangerously chauvinistic form of hypernationalism, will soon take office as the new prime minister of India.

The results of the election that bought Modi into office should give anyone who retains a naive faith that democratic processes will always favour democrats – or that the assertion of nationalist sentiment from those parts of the world trying to recover from colonial occupation is always a reaching towards justice – cause for concern.

Raymond Suttner on Disillusionment with Formal Politics

From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power

Giorgio Agamben, ROAR Magazine

A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non-democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy.

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

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”.

Christopher Merrett, The Witness

“AN ANC campus”: that is what University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Student Representative Council (SRC) members in Pietermaritzburg reportedly claimed last week when objecting to a visit and speech by Mamphela Ramphele.

She went ahead without disruption, but with the precautionary presence of a contingent of police.

There was a time, before South Africa became a democracy, when certain speakers were effectively banned from the local campus. During the State of Emergency, Inkatha was excluded on the grounds (later vindicated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) that it was an ally of the securocrats who had resorted to officially promoted lawlessness.

Achille Mbembe: Democracy and the Ethics of Common Life

Achille Mbembe: Democracy and the Ethics of Common Life from CenterforPlaceCulturePolitics on Vimeo.

Mbongi A NsiI: A New Possible Way Of Organizing Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo

MBONGI A NSI: A NEW POSSIBLE WAY OF ORGANIZING POLITICS IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO by TigersEye99

Robin Kelley: "The Long Rise and Short Decline of American Democracy"

Peter Hallward: Stifling Democracy in Haiti, 2000-2012

S'bu Zikode, Richard Pithouse and Pallo Jordon Debating the Record of the ANC in Oslo

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.

Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

by James Holston, 2007

Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence.

James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.

The Assault on Democracy in Haiti: Jeb Sprague interviewed by David Zlutnick

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

Stathis Kouvelakis: Marx's Critique of the Political: From the Revolutions of 1848 to the Paris Commune

Kouvelakis, Stathis - Marx's Critique of the Political

A Society Adrift Interviews and Debates, 1974-1997

This posthumous collection of interviews and occasional papers given by Castoriadis between 1974 and 1997 is a lively, direct introduction to the thinking of a writer who never abandoned his radically critical stance. It provides a clear, handy résumé of his political ideas, in advance of their times and profoundly relevant to today’s world.

For this political thinker and longtime militant (co-founder with Claude Lefort of the revolutionary group “Socialisme ou Barbarie”), economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, two endless interrogations—how to understand the world and life in society—were intertwined with his own life and combats.

An important chapter discusses the history of “Socialisme ou Barbarie” (1949—1967); in it, Castoriadis presents the views he defended, in that group, on a number of subjects: a critique of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of society and of the workers’ movement, and the primacy of individual and collective autonomy. Another chapter presents the concept, central to his thinking, of “imaginary significations” as what make a society “cohere.”

Castoriadis constantly returns to the question of democracy as the never-finished, deliberate creation by the people of societal institutions, analyzing its past and its future in the Western world. He scathingly criticizes “representative” democracy and develops a conception of direct democracy extending to all spheres of social life.

Aristide on democracy

Do not confuse democracy with the holding of elections every four or five years.... Only the day-to-day participation of the people at all levels of governance can breathe life into democracy and create the possibility for people to play a significant role in shaping the state and the society that they want.

-Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, 2000

Thought Amidst Waste

Presented by Richard Pithouse, WISER

Date: 

Monday, 28 May, 2012 - 15:00

Achille Mbembe argues 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”. This paper notes that people who have been rendered as waste in South Africa have often contested their position as the damned of the transition to parliamentary democracy by asserting their humanity, in principle and in practice. But it argues that some approaches to defending democracy in South Africa against growing hostility to democratic values and practices from within the ruling party are taking the form of an active reinscription of the rendering of people as waste. It suggests that we need to question the nature of our democracy rather than the demand for inclusion.

Towards a People's Democracy: The UDF View

By Murphy Morobe, 1987

When we speak of majority rule, we do not mean that black faces must simply replace white faces in parliament. A democratic solution in South Africa involves all South Africans, and in particular the working class, having control over all areas of daily existence - from national policy to housing, from schooling to working conditions, from transport to consumption of food. This for us is the essence of democracy. When we say that the people shall govern, we mean at all levels and in all spheres, and we demand that there be real, effective control on a daily basis.