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.

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.

Stuart Hall: The Life & Times of the New Left

Stuart Hall: LIFE AND TIMES 
OF THE FIRST NEW LEFT by TigersEye99

Reconstruction or Transformation

by Ari Sitas, The 1995 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, Republished in Theoria

Click here to download this file in pdf.

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).

Himani Bannerji On Rebuilding the Left

What is the Left?

by Alain Badiou
 
An excerpt from The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics in Polemics, Verso, 2006. To read the full essay in pdf click here.

To start with, let's note that before the Commune there had been a number of more or less armed popular and workers' movements in France in a dialectic with the question of state power. We can pass over the terrible days of June 1848 when the question of power is thought not to have been posed: the workers, cornered and chased from Paris upon the closing of national workshops, fought silently, without leadership, without perspective. Despair, fury, massacres.