Lewis Gordon on Disposable Life

Disposable Life - Lewis Gordon from HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE on Vimeo.

Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons

Vinay Gidwani: Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons by TigersEye99

Shack fires: A devil in the detail of development

According to the City of Cape Town, within the boundaries of the municipality alone, there are more than 100 deaths from shack fires every year. JARED SACKS examines the root causes of the problem and the city’s failure to address it. The Daily Maverick

On New Year’s morning a devastating fire broke out in BM Section shack settlement leaving about 4,000 people homeless and at least five dead.

Residents claim it took almost two hours for fire trucks to arrive, despite the Khayelitsha fire station being only a kilometre away. By then, hundreds of shacks were already ablaze and the single truck that responded to the emergency failed to get close enough to the fire to make a difference. It soon ran out of water and had to leave to find more. Eventually, more fire trucks came and, with the help of hundreds of residents using buckets to draw water from local taps, they were able to slow down the rapidly spreading inferno.

African lives cheap as ever

Editorial in the Sowetan the day after the Lonmin Massacre

WERE South Africa the normal country that our Constitution envisages - where the right to life is paramount - a calamity of the proportions of Marikana would have led to drastic measures being taken by the government.

Failure to do so would lead to the resignation of the government.

The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond (1971)

The Discarded People
by Cosmas Desmond 

Apartheid era South Africa was also one of the great
innovators in the ultimate form of marginalisation –
discarding. It discovered that it could discard “surplus” people. One of the classic books that exposed the horror of apartheid practice was Cosmas Desmond’s The Discarded People that described how several million Africans were removed from their homes in land that had been declared “white” They were categorised as ‘superfluous and ‘unproductive’. They were not needed in white cities, towns and farming areas. Declared aliens in the land of their birth
they were dumped in remote rural slums, areas for which the government took no responsibility.

Accumulation by Dispossession and Its Limits: The Southern Africa Paradigm Revisited

by Giovanni Arrighi & Nicole Aschoff & Ben Scully, 2010

The dispossession of agricultural producers from the land has long been considered a condition of successful capitalist development. The main contention of this paper is that such dispossession has in fact become the source of major developmental handicaps for at least some and possibly many countries of the global South. We develop our argument by focusing on the South(ern) African experience as a paradigmatic outlier case of accumulation by dispossession—that is, as one of its extreme instances capable of highlighting in almost ideo-typical fashion its nature and limits. After reconstructing interpretations of capitalist development in Southern Africa that in the early 1970s established the region as a paradigm of accumulation by dispossession, we discuss how useful these interpretations are for understanding the more recent developmental trajectory of South Africa. We then suggest ways in which these interpretations from the 1970s should be reformulated in light of subsequent developments. We conclude by briefly examining the theoretical and policy implications of the analysis.

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.

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment
PhD Thesis by Anna Selmeczi, April 2012

Starting from the observation that today the urban emerges as the main site for the production and abandonment of surplus life – a life whose capacities cannot be rendered useful and is therefore not to be fostered – in this thesis I offer a re-politicized reading of abandonment by drawing on my field-research with the largest South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Grounding this re-politicized reading in the problem of excess freedom that emerges on the horizon of governmental rationality between the political inclusion of the surplus population and their obstructive uselessness, I begin the inquiry by asking how the current order of neoliberal urbanism contains the surplus population when the establishment of the educative trusteeship of development is no longer pertinent.

Rural poverty in the Eastern Cape Province: Legacy of apartheid or consequence of contemporary segregationism?

Ashley Westaway, Development South Africa, 2012

Poverty in South Africa in general has not declined since 1994, and it is particularly severe in the former Bantustans. This paper discusses two important issues related to rural poverty in the Eastern Cape Province. It questions the applicability of the notion of legacy to explain recent trends in rural poverty and constructs an argument that explains these trends in relation to post-1994 segregationism. It argues that the notion of legacy is not useful in explaining why rural poverty remains entrenched, long after 1994. Rural poverty today cannot be explained as something left behind after the end of apartheid, because its causes and drivers are the same now in 2012 as they were in 1970. The continuity between the pre- and post-1994 periods is best described by exploring and understanding post-1994 policy decisions and power configurations as an expression of contemporary segregationism.

Democracy as a Community Life

by Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

What might be the conditions of a radical, future-oriented politics in contemporary South Africa? Interrogating the salience of wealth and property, race and difference as central idioms in the framing and naming of ongoing social struggles, Achille Mbembe investigates the possibility of reimagining democracy not only as a form of human mutuality and freedom, but also as a community of life.

The Politics of Disposability

by Henry Giroux, Dissident Voice
As we observe the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, citizens in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially, we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of a natural disaster and government incompetence, a perfect storm of bad luck that provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry.

Challenging abandonment: The South African shack-dwellers’ “living politics” as counter-conduct

by Anna Selmeczi, 2011

In late October 2009, following members’ reports on the workshops or conferences that they attended or the journeys to which they were delegated, a middle-aged woman took the floor of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s general meeting held in the fully packed ‘Board Room’ of the office building where the movement now has its headquarters. She said she lived in Richmond Farm where years ago she bought a plot to build her shack on but for the past few months she had been threatened with eviction and the demolition of her home because the landowner sold the same piece of land to someone else; this time with a title deed. When she resisted the orders of the new owner to move out, people affiliated with the local party committee started to threaten her. Detailing the manifold and humiliating ways they are trying to chase her away – such as throwing human feces at her shack – she soon burst into tears and could not stop crying for several minutes. In their efforts to comfort her, other women in the room chanted a song and someone went out to refill an empty bottle to get her some water.

“We are the people who don’t count” – Contesting biopolitical abandonment

by Anna Selmeczi

About a year before his lecture series “Society Must be Defended!”, in which he first elaborated the notion of biopolitics, in a talk given in Rio de Janeiro, Foucault discussed the “Birth of the Social Medicine”. As a half-way stage of the evolution of what later became public health, between the German ‘state medicine’ and the English ‘labor-force medicine’, he described a model taking shape in the 18th century French cities and referred to it as ‘urban medicine’. With view to the crucial role of circulation in creating a healthy milieu, the main aim of this model was to secure the purity of that which circulates, thus, potential sources of epidemics or endemics had to be placed outside the flaw of air and water nurturing urban life. According to Foucault (2000a), it was at this period that “piling-up refuse” was problematized as hazardous and thus places producing or containing refuse – cemeteries, ossuaries, and slaughterhouses – were relocated to the outskirts of the towns.