Liberation and Ethics: Is there a connection?

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation Struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight. The process leading to the present state of affairs has been long in the making.

Racial terror from Columbus to Charleston

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

Since the 1920s, Charleston has been the name of a dance, a dance with roots in Africa, made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 when Charles II of England granted land in Carolina to some of his supporters after he was restored to the throne. The city and its putative Southern gentility were built on two great historical crimes – the genocide of the indigenous American people and the African slave trade.

South Africa in the Twilight of Liberalism

Richard Pithouse, Kafila

South Africa was supposed to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere else.

There was a mass movement that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism, apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the ‘rendezvous of victory’.

Charles Mills Interviewed by George Yancy

New York Times Opinionator

George Yancy: You are a philosopher who thinks very deeply about issues of race. Can you provide a sense of your work?

Charles Mills: I think a simple way to sum it up would be as the transition from white Marxism to (what I have recently started calling) black radical liberalism.

G.Y.: So, how does “white” modify Marxism? And what is it about the modification that helps to account for the transition to what you’re now calling black radical liberalism?

Middle East: a blind spot for liberals

Steven Friedman, Business Day

IT IS hard to convince many in the Middle East that liberal democracy can work for them when the headlines from Israel and Palestine signal that liberalism now insists that all people should enjoy equal rights — unless they are Palestinian.

The Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians has been a blind spot for liberals here and abroad for years. Liberals, who believe in the right of all to vote in free elections, did not protest when the winners of Palestinian elections were rewarded with Israeli and US sanctions and military action, a signal that Palestinians can elect who they like as long as the Israelis like them too.

The Long History of Liberal Brutality

Richard Pithouse, The Con

As the Israeli state rains its murder on the people of Gaza we are confronted with a stark demonstration of the ways in which there is, in so many quarters, official sanction for according radically different values to human lives. Some of us are taken as sacrosanct, others as disposable. It has often been suggested that in the case of Israel and Palestine the inequality in the value ascribed to human life can be rendered as a mathematical ratio. In this calculus there is no such thing as a life for a life, or a prisoner for a prisoner, or a set amount invested in the education of each child.

Liberalism: A Counter-History

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

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”.

There is no liberal tradition in South Africa

by Z. Pallo Jordon, Amandla

Liberalism regards the individual as the ultimate social and political agent, endowed with a number of rights. The ideology also acknowledges that individuals live in societies and are not totally autonomous. Consequently it also recognises a number of societal obligations the individual should fulfil in order to co-exist with others. In the continent of its birth liberalism proved most attractive to the propertied classes who had embraced the anti-feudal ethos of high social status attained through individual achievement rather than through birth. As propertied persons the early liberals were, however, very distrustful of the working poor and the property-less, whom they saw as venal and easy to corrupt. The franchise and attendant political rights were therefore to be enjoyed by the propertied classes and extended to the other classes on the basis of merit, demonstrated by a certain lifestyle.

Mandela is very much with us!

by Premesh Lalu, Economics & Politics Weekly

If one believes media reports, Nelson Mandela is no longer with us. Yet, in more ways than one, he is. In the midst of the frenzy of soundbites and images that now circulate through the space left by his macabrely anticipated absence, there is danger that Mandela will be honoured, even monumentalised, but not meaningfully remembered. Part of the problem it seems is that the anti-apartheid struggle to which Mandela contributed so substantially has been recalled as an event, as a passing phase, not a sustained development of a thought that opened onto a concept of the post-apartheid.

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus by TigersEye99

Charles Mills - Liberalism and Racial Justice

Racism and the Political Economy of Domination

Charles W. Mills interviewed by Tom Mills, New Left Project

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.  He is the author of The Racial Contract and has written extensively about racism and political theory.  In an interview with Tom Mills he discussed his views on race, liberalism, capitalism and the potential for social change.

The concept of race as an objective category has long been discredited by anthropology and biology, yet the social sciences show that racial disadvantage persists. How do you understand the concept of race and racism?

Charles W. Mills - The Racist Roots of Liberalism

Lewis Gordon's New Introduction to Steve Biko's 'I Write What I Like'

Some years ago Lewis Gordon wrote a new introduction for an America edition of Steve Biko's I Write What I Like. It's online here.