Civil Society, Citizenship and the Politics of the (Im)possible: Rethinking Militancy in Africa Today
by Michael Neocosmos
Abstract
The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its
economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its
political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political
thought and practice. This paper makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making
a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil
society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be
understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony
of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin
of civil society. The political passivity produced by neo-liberal thought must be countered
by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including
civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily
conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging
of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the
theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, the paper outlines the philosophy of change
of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on
the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’ and political ‘prescriptions’. It
then suggests that it is possible to identify a National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of
politics as a subjectivity which dominated on the continent from the 1940s to the 1970s.
The main characteristics of this NLS mode of politics are outlined. However, this manner
of thinking emancipatory politics has now come to an end, so that emancipation has to
be thought differently today on the African continent. The argument then makes the point
that the period 1984-86 in South Africa (re-) discovered the beginnings of a new mode
of politics, which in several important ways contradicted the core features of the NLS
mode. In particular this was a politics which did not see its object as the seizure of power,
but as the transformation of the lived experience of power. The paper ends by comparing
the politics of two current post-apartheid South African social movements - the Treatment
Action Campaign and the Abahlali baseMjondolo. It shows that, despite appearances,
it is the former which has operated within the domain of the state politics of civil society,
and the latter which operates beyond those subjective limits. Hence it is the latter which
shows the closest fidelity to the event of 1984-86, and which is thus the closest thing
today, at least in South Africa, to being the bearer of an experience and thought of
emancipatory politics.
Today the great majority of people do not have a name; the only name available
is “excluded”, which is the name of those who do not have a name. Today the
great majority of humanity counts for nothing. And philosophy has no other
legitimate aim than to help find the new names that will bring into existence the
unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are waiting for it.
- Alain Badiou
The possibility of the impossible is the foundation of politics (Alain Badiou).
To say that politics is of the order of thought is an attempt to conceive of politics
after the end of classism and within another space than that of the state; but first
and foremost, it is to say that politics is not given in the space of an object, be it
that of the ‘state’ or that of ‘revolution’ [...] The enterprise of conceiving politics
from elsewhere than from the state or from the economy is an enterprise of
freedom and of a domain proper to decision
- Sylvain Lazarus
We think. People must understand that we think
-Abahlali baseMjondolo activist
1. Introduction
Critical approaches to neo-liberalism in Africa have overwhelmingly concentrated on
analysing the problems, both theoretical and empirical, of its economic arguments and
policies. There are numerous texts and scholarly works criticising SAPs, the ideology
of the IFIs, the disastrous effects of neo-liberal economic policies on Africa, and the
inability of states to control their national economies and rethink development. Much
less has been said about the neo-liberal politics which necessary accompany the
economics of neo-liberalism, apart from a few rare critical commentaries on the notion
of ‘civil society’ and the state . This relative lack of attention to neo-liberal politics has
had the unfortunate effect of restricting the development of an alternative populardemocratic
discourse. Liberal conceptions of ‘human rights’, political parties, civil
society, the equating of politics with the state, the unproblematic notion of ‘the rule of law’
and especially formalistic political practices have regularly been taken over uncritically
in left-radical discourse, which is simultaneously attempting to develop alternatives to
economic neo-liberalism. For example, one often hears the view expressed that
economic neo-liberalism may be a disaster for most of humanity, but fortunately human
rights enable the mobilisation of alternative popular forces around ‘third generation
rights’ such as the ‘right to development’. The unfortunate tendency has been to
proliferate the number of human rights to be included in international conventions as if
somehow this will legitimise people’s struggles for an emancipatory future. An
accompanying tendency has been a failure to subject state politics to a thoroughgoing
critique, and hence to revert by default to setting up the statist politics of a social
democratic type as an alternative to neo-liberalism, simply as a result of the latter’s
familiarity, despite the obvious failure of social democracy in creating the conditions for
human emancipation in Europe and elsewhere. Much more work needs to be done on
thinking politics as emancipatory if a serious alternative to current hegemonic neoliberalism (what Francophones refer to as “la pensée unique”) is to be gradually
constructed both in theory and in practice.
In order to contribute to this project, this work attempts to help us think politics beyond
the state. It begins from the axiom that politics is always plural and that different politics
concern fundamentally different prescriptions. In so doing it attempts to do two things:
first to think citizenship as an active citizenship, and in particular to contribute to the
thinking of political agency on the African continent under conditions where the old
emancipatory modes of politics - those associated with Socialist Revolutions, National
Liberation Struggles and Developmentalism - are defunct; second to think the ‘politics
of the possible’, ie. the idea that - in addition to an analysis of the existing, of the world
as it is, it is also possible, indeed imperative, to develop an understanding of the
possibility, of understanding the thought of a different future in this existing present - of
the ‘could be’ in the ‘what is’. As we shall see, it is this activity which must be understood
as a prescriptive subjectivity (Lazarus, 1996, 2001).
The collapse of the modes of politics associated with socialism and national liberation
into state politics, and thereby the loss of their emancipatory content, is well known.
Today salvation is sometimes sought in social movements (eg. Hardt and Negri 2001,
Amin and Sridhar, 2002, Bond, 2004), hence in the exercise of citizenship rights by
disparate sectors of the population making claims on the state for economic, social or
political resources and entitlements. I have debated human rights discourse at length
elsewhere and have argued that it cannot form the basis of an emancipatory politics
(Neocosmos, 2006b, 2007); here I am more interested in addressing issues surrounding
the notions of ‘civil society’, ‘social movement’ and ‘emancipatory politics’ and in
suggesting alternatives to existing forms of conceptualising political agency. The purpose
of this paper is thus to open up conceptual space. I propose to do this by showing how
currently hegemonic ways of thinking alternative politics within these terms remain limited
to state conceptions, and how removing oneself from state subjectivity requires a reconceptualisation of citizenship as active citizenship, as well as an understanding of
emancipatory politics as prescriptive politics. I shall first elucidate the kind of politics
which the names or the ideas of ‘civil society’ and ‘social movement’ tend to assume, I
will then attempt a brief outline of some of the views of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus
in particular, who provide an alternative way of conceiving emancipatory politics, and will
sketch how their ideas can be applied to an understanding of the National Liberation
Struggle (NLS) mode of politics and its contestation in South Africa in the 1980s. I will
argue here that the period 1984-86 witnessed an ‘event’ in Badiou’s terms, in the sense
that it became impossible, after that event, to think emancipation in a statist manner on
the continent. I will end with two short case studies, assessing the existence of different
modes of politics in two different social movements in South Africa during the postapartheid
period, one within the realm of civil society, and another maintaining itself
firmly on the margins of civil society. I will suggest that it is in the latter, that a fidelity to the event of 1984-86 is clearly apparent. Throughout the argument, the examples of the
struggle for liberation and post-apartheid politics in South Africa are considered within
an African context, as illustrative of and not exceptional to the African experience. The
case of South Africa is, after all, probably the most consistently politically neo-liberal of
the African countries, at least it is so in the eyes of Empire, as the latter regularly sets it up as a model for the continent. The contradictions of political neo-liberalism in that
case therefore probably appear more clearly there than they do elsewhere.
2. “State = Political Society + Civil Society” (Gramsci, 1971: 263).
Perhaps the best way to initiate a discussion of the term ‘civil society’ and what it names,
is not so much through a return to a discussion of liberal theory, but rather to examine
a typical example of the way in which the term is conceived today in Africa. What does
‘civil society’ name today? The answer is that the term names a domain of politics, and
more specifically a domain of state politics within society. One of the fundamental
features of democracy for neo-liberal theory is a ‘vibrant’ civil society which can help
keep democracy afloat (Gibbon, 1996). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was
trade unions which organised workers at the point of production, which constituted the
typical civil society organisation which could create and maintain democratic norms
(Rueshemeyer et al.1992). Today it is doubtful that trade unions can continue to play
this role given the different forms of capital accumulation which, particularly, but not
exclusively in the South, assume large numbers of unemployed, subcontracting,
casualisation, increased insecurity and so on. In this sense, political organisation at the
point of production and particularly its expression by productivist theories gradually lose
much of their earlier centrality and power. In South Africa (with a 43-45% unemployment
rate), one recent argument (Buhlungu, 2004) has been the suggestion that the trade
union movement - which in the 1980s was at the vanguard of popular struggles against
the apartheid state, and which was instrumental in the winning of liberal democratic
rights - has today lost much of its ‘vibrancy’ with the de-politicization consequent on
liberal-democratization. In the post-apartheid period it is ‘new social movements’ or more
broadly organisations ‘of’ civil society which are now seen by many as the bearers of an
emancipatory future. How have these organisations fared in the post-apartheid period?
This question is dealt with by Habib (2004). We are told that relations between state and
‘civil society’ have taken three distinct forms in post-apartheid South Africa -
marginalisation, engagement and adversarialism - and that this plurality of relations is
good for liberal democracy and governance (op.cit.: 239). Here the liberal notion of
pluralism is extended by Habib from its usual meaning referring to a plurality of
organisations, to a plurality of relations with the state. Yet this argument fails to go
beyond its neo-liberal assumptions to show the possibility of alternatives. Political
liberalism is the best form of democracy for Habib precisely because of its plurality of
sate civil society relations. His concern is thus to “celebrate(s)” (p 228) pluralism, and he
concentrates on this rather than on analysing it.
Let me briefly subject this celebration to critical scrutiny. The problems begin with the
manner Habib understands civil society. This he sees as “the organized expression of
various interests and values operating in the triangular space between the family state
and market” (p 228)2. It should be noted, despite attempts to anchor this in classical writings, that this is not a definition which corresponds to that of Hegel (or indeed to that
of any of his predecessors), to which it only bears a superficial resemblance, although
it is fully in tune with current neo-liberal thinking. For Hegel and the classics of political
philosophy the term “civil society” referred to the ‘triangular space itself, to a realm of
activity (hence the term “society”) in which such organisations operate, rather than to
those organised interests themselves. Of course, to provide a definition which does not
conform to that of the classics is not a sin, yet there is an important theoretical reason
for referring to civil society as a realm of social and political activity. This is simply
because many organisations in society are regularly excluded or exclude themselves
from it. To visualise civil society as a realm of activity enables an understanding of
inclusion and exclusion, which an equating of civil society with organised interests
themselves cannot. Those outside civil society are often not legitimate state
interlocutors, those within are.
The neo-liberal position espoused by Habib fails to recognise this, as it understands civil
society as the organisations themselves, organisations which are simply legally defined
as outside the state and business (“non-profit” in the case of South Africa, see Swilling
and Russell, 2002). This makes it difficult if not impossible to understand the relations
between organisations of society and the state. Is the Boeremag3 part of civil society?
Obviously not because it is not a recognised organisation whose politics are legitimate
in the eyes of the state. In sum, the sphere of activity known as ‘civil’ society must be
understood as limited by what the state sees as legitimate political activity and legitimate
organising. This is why for neo-liberal theory there can be no civil society outside liberal
democracy (eg. under authoritarian state systems such as colonialism or indeed
apartheid). Of course no “revolutionary” organisation (however understood) could
possibly form part of civil society as it would have as its political goal the overthrow of
the state. Civil society therefore regularly excludes many popular organisations from its
sphere of activity. If the state does not legally recognise the existence of an organisation
it cannot possibly form part of civil society. In South Africa, the state party, the ANC itself,
distinguishes today between “genuinely representative organisations” and those which
are not (ANC, 1996). The latter are obviously not legitimate in its eyes. In the 1980s,
the UDF and other organisations fighting for liberation did so outside civil society and
only became part of civil society after 1990 when their legitimacy among the people was
recognised by the state. ‘Civil’ society today is then it seems, simply society as viewed
from the perspective of the state, the organised interests of society it sees fit to deal with.
Any organisation challenging the monopoly of state politics - state universality - is
therefore bound to be excluded. This becomes apparent in Habib’s classification.
Habib’s classification of civil society types is governed by their relationship to the state,
from “accommodationist” to “adversarial”. The first group, as he accurately observes, is
“sub-contracted” by the state to fulfill various of its functions. However he is not sensitive
to the irony of referring to such organisations NGOs when they are not only funded by government, but operate on the basis of the same subjectivity and technicism, and in fact
undertake state functions (Swilling and Russell, 2002). These so-called NGOs are more
aptly termed ‘parastatals’. Of course one is entitled to question the whole idea of an
‘independent’ civil society in this instance, as the distinction between such NGOs and
state institutions is simply a legal one, a state distinction.
The second group referred to as ‘adversarialist’, is also conceived in relation to the state,
as its defining feature is its antagonism to the latter. This group includes particularly the
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). We are told little regarding the politics of such
organisations and no comment is made as to why the only two alternatives vis-a-vis the
state should be adversarial or accommodation. If indeed this is so, it may tell us
something regarding the character of the ‘public sphere’, where creeping
authoritarianism and the intolerance of disagreement seem more and more to have
become the order of the day so that one is forced either into total subservience or
opposition to the state. Nevertheless, Habib points to an important feature of the state
by noting that his third group consists of “survivalist responses of poor and marginalised
people who have no alternative but to organise in the face of a retreating state that
refuses to meet its socio-economic obligations to its citizenry” (p.236-7). Yet one
wonders the extent to which these groups are not systematically excluded from civil
society altogether by their very political marginalisation (and also by Habib’s own
definitions as many engage in economic activities) let alone by their ‘informal’ character.
More important however is the foreclosure in Habib’s work of any possible alternative
classification of civil society organisations, for example one which would not use the
state as its reference point. If we admit that liberal democracy is not the only form of
democracy, and that many popular organisations practice alternative popular forms of
democracy, then why not classify such organisations in terms of the extent to which their
vision of society, forms of operation and concrete demands may be democratic in ways
which go beyond the limits of neo-liberalism? A much more useful typology could have
been based on a distinction between statist/managerialist organisations on the one hand
and popular-democratic ones on the other, as it would enable the recognition and
analysis of popular-democratic sites of politics beyond the state. Perhaps the ruling ANC
is right in maintaining, as it has on many occasions, that ‘confrontational’ organisations
and social movements are indeed often unrepresentative and ‘ultra-leftist’, maybe their
politics are indeed authoritarian, but maybe they are not. If a genuine left-democratic
alternative is to be developed, it is surely here in sites of popular politics that it is likely
to be found, whether in civil soci ety or indeed outside of it. These sites need to be
investigated critically, but Habib’s typology disables such a possibility. Ashwin Desai’s
and others’ enthusiasm for so-called “social movements” of “the poors” should not be
taken at face value, without a critical investigation into the extent and character of the
political alternatives proposed (see Desai, 2002). After all just because an organisation
or movement is opposed to the state, does not make it either democratic or ‘progressive’
(despite the possible justice of its demands). Its politics may simply be concerned with
incorporation into the existing system, and/or with providing a simple mirror image of
state politics, and not with transformation in a popular-democratic direction. Unfortunately
however, Habib’s liberalism forecloses the asking of such questions; his ends up being
a highly conservative perspective.
Civil society must be understood as a realm of socio-political activity - of political
subjectivity - in which contestation takes place between different political positions, but
which ultimately constitutes the limits, structured by the state, of a consensual state
domain of politics; ‘civil society’ is in fact the state ‘in’ society. Politics can and does exist also beyond the limits of civil society, beyond the confines of the state consensus.
Theoretical justification for this view can be briefly outlined as follows. Broadly speaking,
‘civil society’ has been introduced into our post-socialist world and emphasised by the
‘Washington consensus’ on political neo-liberalism as a way of increasing inclusiveness,
so that popular participation in politics could be broadened beyond activity in political
parties, to include within the ambit of power, organised interests, many of which may be
genuinely popular-democratic in character. Civil society is said to be made up of
organised interests, but it is more accurately understood as the political domain where
citizenship rights are apparently realised through the forming of such interest groups.
The popular movements in Eastern Europe and in the Third World of the 1980s lie at the
root of this redirection which has had as one of its effects on the African continent, an
insistence on a ‘vibrant’ civil society to ensure pluralism. Another effect has been the reconfiguration of the OAU into the AU, the latter making provision for ‘good governance’ -
usually equated with administrative efficiency and a good media image - and civil society
participation in the continental body. Civil society is thus political agency in society as
seen from the vantage point of the state (Beckman, 1992; Gibbon, 1996).
Civil society for neo-liberalism, is said to be the expression of ‘organised interests’,
between the market and the state. Civil society in the literature is usually equated with
NGOs, but this excludes organisations which operate at the margins of legality or which
may be totally ‘informal’. It also excludes politics outside a domain formally recognised
by the state. Civil society is better understood then as a domain of politics over which
the state attempts to exercise its hegemony (Neocosmos, 2004a). This attempt is often
successful (otherwise civil society is said not to exist) despite the possible contradictions
between government and specific NGOs. It is in civil society that citizenship rights are
said to be realised, however these are to be realised in a manner which keeps them
firmly away from any (emancipatory) politics which question the liberal state itself as they
take place within the framework of human rights discourse (Neocosmos, 2006b).
However, it is important to stress the fact that civil society is not the only realm of politics
outside the confines of the state, and moreover it is possible to suggest that civil society
in Africa today forms a realm of politics which is dominated by the state itself. To put the
point simply, the politics of civil society are predominantly state politics, for it is the state which ultimately pronounces on the legitimacy of the organisations ‘of’ civil society and
of their manner of operation.
From the perspective of a democratic emancipatory project, the state should not be
allowed to dictate whether popular organisations are legitimate or not, and neither can
intellectual inquiry allow itself to narrow the concept to adhere to state prescriptions;
only people themselves should be entitled to bestow such legitimacy. In this sense
South Africa for example, can be said to have had an extremely powerful and 'vibrant',
as well as politicised, set of popular organisations in the 1980s but these never formed
a ‘civil society’, and were not described as such at the time because of their quasi-illegal
nature and their illegitimacy in the eyes of the state. In fact, it was precisely the political distance of these organisations from the state, the fact that they had exited the state
domain of politics and operated beyond the (obviously restricted) civil society of the time,
which accounts for the ‘vibrancy’ of such popular organisations in the South African
townships of the 1980s (Neocosmos, 1998, 1999). Conversely, it can also be pointed
out that the neo-liberal conception of civil society, also implies recognition by civil society
organisations of the legitimacy of the state and of the hegemony of its mode of politics.
Popular organisations which reject this mode cannot be said to be part of civil society.
For such a viewpoint therefore, these same opposition organisations in South Africa in
the 1980s (UDF, Civics, Youth and Women’s organisations etc), which were fighting the
apartheid state as such and which were thereby constantly testing the limits of legality
(their activities were often wholly illegal), could not be rigorously said to form a ‘civil
society’. Indeed they only were described in such terms in the 1990s, when the state had
no option but to recognise their legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
For neo-liberalism therefore civil society exists solely under conditions of mutual
recognition between it and the state, only under liberal democracy where the liberal
mode of politics is consensual. Thus it is this mutual recognition which defines the
parameters of the state consensus and is itself the result of struggle. Moreover it is the
state which retains the monopoly of national universality. Civil society organisations can
be tolerated but only if they represent particularistic interests. Any claims to such
universality, in other words if a popular organisation is said to represent ‘the people’s
interests’ or ‘the national interest’, would mean that it is liable to be seen by the state as
a threat to the latter’s monopoly of universality. A state ‘national’ consensus is
structured within a state domain of politics comprising the political relations between the
state and its institutions on the one hand, and the ‘official’ or ‘formal’ civil society of
citizens on the other. A state political subjectivity is thus usually hegemonic within civil
society. Other forms of politics are excluded because visualised as beyond the political
consensus (eg. they are ‘ultra-leftist’, ‘terrorist’, do not ‘follow channels’, etc.) and can
thus be de-legitimised in state discourse. These organisations and politics therefore
exist outside or beyond the limits (at best at the margins) of civil society. Because of
such partiality therefore, ‘civil society’ cannot be conflated with ‘organised society’ as the
term necessarily implies some form of exclusion. The distinction between liberal
democracy and say colonial/apartheid forms of authoritarianism can be said to concern
inter alia the extent and forms taken by such exclusion, not the absence of exclusion as
such.
‘Civil society’ has achieved popularity in a context in which it is apparent that political
parties have distanced themselves from society and have become frankly state
institutions. A worldwide trend, which has not excluded Africa, is apparent in which
parties are more and more bereft of politics, and rather simple vehicles for circulating
elites around state positions (Neocosmos, 2007). On the other hand, research shows
overwhelmingly that NGOs are sociologically staffed by middle-class professionals for
whom they provide vehicles for employment and social entrepreneurship; they substitute
(sub-contract) for state functions; they are overwhelmingly funded by the state or by
(foreign) donors and also regularly provide vehicles for the formation of a clientele by
political patrons (e.g. Swilling and Russell, op.cit.; Kanyinga and Katumanga, 2003).
Insofar as civil society is reduced to NGOs in particular (which it usually is), the evidence suggests that it contributes to the formation and extension of a state domain of politics
structured around technico-legal practices and not politically emancipatory ones.
As we shall see below, this comment also applies to organisations such as the Treatment
Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa which is said to be one of the most ‘successful’
(and ‘vibrant’) social movements in that it has been able to force the government to
rethink its policy on HIV-AIDS. Recent research (eg. Vandormael, 2005) shows that in
actual fact this ‘success’ has been such as to de-politicise the debate on AIDS by forcing
it squarely within the hegemonic bio-medical paradigm of science which expects people
to passively be the recipients of medical technology. In fact it could be suggested that
this apparent success of the TAC, has resulted precisely from the congruence of its
ideology with the perspective of the world medical establishment supported by the media.
The thrust of the TAC’s perspective has thus resulted in the incorporation of HIV-AIDS
sufferers as passive citizens within an existing set of power relations (state, scientific,
mass media, transnational corporations, etc) fundamental to the interests of capital and
not in a questioning of such relations, which the Gay Movement in the United States for
example had succeeded in doing to some extent, through its confronting of the medical
establishment (Epstein, 1996). It can be argued then that one effect of the TAC success
has been, paradoxically, its dis-empowerment and de-politicisation of popular struggles
through the incorporation of sections of the population into liberal power-relations and
technical bio-medical discourse. The overall effect then has been a ‘liberalisation’ of
struggle, a contribution to the reproduction of a passive citizenry.
Other less fashionable social movements in South Africa have had to struggle against
dominant discursive power, not along with it as the TAC has, and have thus not been so
obviously ‘successful’, thus remaining at the margins of ‘civil society’ (Barchiesi, 2004).
We shall see below however, that ‘success’ as measured by the ability to modify state
policy in its particular interests is not the best indicator of a movement’s politics. A
variety of social movements sometimes attempt to re-introduce agency but often simply
provide a mirror image of state politics. For a politics to provide the basis for
emancipation, it has to be situated at a subjective distance from the state. Citizenship
exists at the interface of state and sociality, ie. in that fluid realm structured by the active
or passive relationship between state and society. An assessment of the politics of social
movements would have to ascertain the extent of democratic universality and prescriptive
politics which characterises them.
At this stage however we still need to assess a recent argument which recognises the
existence of a realm of politics outside civil society and the state. The argument that
politics actually exists in countries of the South outside the domain of civil society, has
been made by Partha Chatterjee. Chatterjee (2004), following on his work with Subaltern
Studies has recently argued that, in the postcolony, there is a truly ‘political society’
beyond the state and civil society which is distinguished by its exclusion from the state
domain and where activity is irreducibly political. He uses and extends Foucault’s
conception of ‘governmentality’ to argue for the existence of another domain of politics
beyond the limits of liberal rights and legal discourse. Chatterjee argues that in the postcolonial context, there are two sets of connections to power: the relations connecting a
civil society of citizens to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty, and those linking “populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare”
(ibid.: 37). Each of these, he argues, points to a distinct domain of politics.
There is no need to go into details here other than to note that he makes the point that
it is not in civil society that politics is to be found because here claims follow legal and
administrative (ie. technical) procedures whose access is limited to middle-class
professionals; rather politics are to be found in what he calls a “political society” of the
poor where “claims are irreducibly political” (ibid.: 60). It is therefore outside civil society
that a politics of agency, an active citizenship is often to be found.
Chatterjee (2004) draws on Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and
governmentality to specify two distinct modes of rule. Under sovereignty, the legitimacy
of state rule takes place through a certain amount of participation by citizens in the
affairs of state. Indeed classical liberal theorists of the state (in particular Rousseau and
J.S. Mill) stressed the importance of active citizenship, as did the French Revolution of
course. Under governmentality on the other hand, it is the provision of resources to the
population which becomes the dominant mode of securing state legitimacy. This form
becomes dominant in the 20th century for Chatterjee although Foucault (2000) stresses
its appearance much earlier. The provision of resources to sections of the population
is what ultimately gives rise to the disciplines of demography and statistics (stat(e)-istics)
as the population needs to be classified, categorised and measured.
This latter mode of rule it could be said, becomes central under colonialism in Africa (late
19th/early 20th c) which was as Cowen and Shenton (1996) show, dominated/ justified by
a notion of ‘trusteeship’. The state became a trustee of the welfare of its colonial (as well
as of its metropolitan) charges. It is from within this political tradition that T.H. Marshall’s
(1964) three forms of citizenship rights (especially his notion of social citizenship), which
provided the main theorisation for British social democracy, emanated. The social
democratic (or‘keynesian-classist’) state secured its rule through the provision of social
services, the ‘delivery’ (to use contemporary parlance) of particular social rights to the
working people, on top of the civic and political rights central to all liberal-democratic
states. In conditions of post-colonial Africa, this is clearly reflected in the ‘developmental
state’ whereby the latter secures its rule through the provision of development ‘rights’.
This argument reinforces that of the centrality of the technicisation of politics by the sate,
as governmentality exerts pressures for such technicisation, so that ultimately politics
becomes submerged under the sophistication of managerial calculations and ‘delivery’,
the provisioning of rights, the formation of passive citizens. It also shows how politics
is expelled from the sate by technique, especially managerial technique. Civil society
becomes part of a domain of state politics (as Chatterjee in fact argues) and the mutual
relations between state and civil society become managerialist/ technicist/legalistic as
they mutually condition each other so that a technicist (and thus apolitical) subjectivity
becomes hegemonic.
Chatterjee argues then that in the post-colonial context there are two sets of connections
to power: the relations connecting a civil society of citizens to the nation-state founded
on popular sovereignty, and those linking “populations to governmental agencies
pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare” (ibid.: 37). Each of these he argues points to a distinct domain of politics. There is no need to go into details here other than
to note that Chatterjee (ibid.: 60) makes the point that it is not in civil society that politics is to be found because here, claims follow legal and administrative (ie. technical)
procedures whose access is limited to middle-class professionals; rather politics are to
be found in what he calls a “political society” of the poor where “claims are irreducibly
political”. Yet although this understanding of a realm beyond civil society in which
politics may exist is absolutely crucial for understanding Africa today, Chatterjee’s claim
that it constitutes a “political society” is problematic, not only because the term is usually
used to refer to the state, but more importantly because it gives the mistaken impression
that politics is always in existence within that realm, something which cannot be shown.
Rather it makes more sense to suggest that politics may or may not exist within various
sites as we shall see below (Lazarus, 1996). Finally, for Chatterjee, it is different modes
of state rule which determine different connections to power, popular subjectivities have
it seems, little choice in the matter.
3. Active Citizenship: the foundation of a ‘possible’
Citizenship, from an emancipatory perspective, is not about subjects bearing rights
conferred by the state, as in human rights discourse, but rather about people who think
becoming agents through their engagement in politics as militants/activists and not
politicians (Neocosmos, 2006). In fact it is important to understand how these features
were central to popular struggles (especially those for independence) and are still
prevalent among many popular movements today. For example, both one of the first and
one of the last national liberation struggles in Africa (Algeria and south Africa) exhibited
such characteristics. Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism4 is a detailed study of
different changes in social relations brought about by popular struggle. These include
changes in the position of women in society, the effect of independent radio station and
changes in the family. All three of the above characteristics are eminently illustrated in
Fanon’s account, but I merely wish to mention one of his comments on citizenship which
contrasts radically with his later account of the same issue under postcolonial conditions.
Written in 1959, ie. during the Algerian liberation struggle and before his work on The
Wretched of the Earth he states:
"[...] in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the
outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian. In tomorrow’s
independent Algeria it will be up to every Algerian to assume Algerian citizenship
or to reject it in favour of another" (Fanon, 1989: 152).
In other words, the point is that during the period of popular national upsurge, citizenship
is a unifying, inclusive conception. No distinction is made between people on the basis
of indigeneity but only on the basis of their devotion to the struggle. By the time he
writes The Wretched we have the following well known account of xenophobia under the
post-colonial state:
"On the morrow of independence [the] native bourgeoisie [...] violently attacks
colonial personalities...It will fight to the bitter end against these people ’who insult
our dignity as a nation’. It waves aloft the notion of the nationalization and
Africanization of the ruling classes. The fact is that such actions will become
more and more tinged by racism, until the bourgeoisie bluntly puts the problem to
the government by saying ’We must have these posts’...The working class of the
towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen for their
part line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only
follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into
competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against
non-national Africans [...] From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism,
to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners are called on to leave; their
shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked, and in fact the government [...]
commands them to go, thus giving their nationals satisfaction" (ibid.: 125).
We have here an account of a clear transition between the two forms of citizenship I
have referred to: the popular inclusive conception founded on active citizenship and the
state conception founded on indigeneity. It is also important to note the similarity with
work on the South African struggle of the 1980s which makes similar points regarding the
character of popular struggle in this period (Neocosmos, 1998, Van Kessel, 2000). The
point is not to idealise popular struggle but to note that, despite all its contradictions, it
enables the development of a different conception of citizenship. Van Kessel in fact
notes explicitly in one of her case studies the centrality of a notion of moral community
equated with political community of active citizens, an observation which pervades
Fanon’s account.
Incidentally such notions are also prevalent in accounts of popular movements and
community democratic political practices, they are present in Wamba-dia-Wamba’s
(1985) account of the Mbongi, in Ifi Amadiume’s study of women’s struggles over
citizenship in Nigeria (1997) and in Sibanda’s (2002) account of a peasant organisation
in Zimbabwe inter alia. The point then is that in popular-democratic struggles, this
alternative conception of citizenship and hence the possibility of emancipatory politics
also exists (although this is not all that exists) as a counter to the statist equating of
citizenship with indigeneity. There is then conceivably, a politics beyond Human Rights
Discourse, a politics of prescriptions on the state. Such a prescriptions include, in the
manner of the Freedom Charter: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, “The People
Shall Govern” and so on. These prescriptions are assertions of rights to be fought for
not pleas for human rights to be conferred by the state.
Active citizenship arguably enables the second most important right after the right to life,
namely the right to think, by suggesting the possibility of something different to one way
thought (la pensee unique). As a community activist recently stated in South Africa:
The leaders [of the country MN] are saying that it is them who know everything
and that the majority of the people can’t think. We are saying that everyone can
think (Activist, Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign, 2003 cit. A. Desai and R.
Pithouse, 2003:17).
One of the important dimensions of struggles for national liberation, had always been
that, although they did contain for many an economic dimension, this demand for access
to economic resources (eg land) was intertwined with its symbolic political value (of land,
eg “our land must be re-taken the colonialists”) which included an emancipatory
component. Economics was always subordinated to politics in the struggle for freedom.
In the process of struggle for political emancipation, citizenship as agency was
paramount, so that political agency was the manner in which economic power was to be
acquired. After independence, it was access to economic resources which became
central as Fanon (1990) notes, with access to state power (not agency as such)
becoming the instrument through which such resources were to be secured at the
expense of the most vulnerable (generally the excluded such as the poor or ‘foreigners’).
In other words the grabbing of resources from foreigners was founded on claims of
indigeneity - rights secured by the state - after independence, and it illustrates an
instance of state politics and passive citizenship replacing active citizenship; of
economics replacing politics. It was therefore a direct result of a process of depoliticization
whereby the state took over for itself the political agency of people. This
process could thereby easily lead to xenophobia among state institutions and society as
a whole (Neocosmos, 2006a). In sum we can note that this example illustrates a
transition common to the continent in which citizenship was transformed from an active
and inclusive conception (in which citizens were those who fought colonialism, hence the
dominance of pan-Africanist discourse in the struggle) to a passive and exclusive one;
from a conception of citizenship founded on popular politics to one founded on
indigeneity and national essentialism underpinned by state power.
In fact, if we do not restrict citizenship identity to a national community but consider it
much more broadly in terms of ‘belonging’ to any kind of community (village, ethnic
group, etc), then cultural prescriptions become more important and popular ‘participation’
in such an identity more apparent [to various extents] as cultural prescriptions tend to be
more fluid and less rigid. In contrast then, popularly founded conceptions of citizenship,
although they may also show similar characteristics to state conceptions [eg as in
essentialist ‘ethnic politics’], also often exhibit different understandings. This is of course
particularly the case in periods of popular political upsurge and regularly includes the
important dimension of the formation of a moral community of active citizens in opposition
to crude conceptions of arbitrary and violent state oppression. Such alternative
perspectives may exhibit:
1. an inclusive (as opposed to exclusive) understanding of citizenship and the
nation, ie the nation is the people and the people are those who work and struggle
here, and
2. an active conception of citizenship, ie citizenship is seen as concerning political
agency, it is bounded by the exercise of political agency not by physical borders.
In Africa this active citizenship has taken the form of popular-democratic pan-
Africanism (Fanon) and I have argued elsewhere that it must still take this form
today although adapted to current post-colonial conditions (Neocosmos, 2003).
3. the creation of a moral community of active citizens where one’s duty to the
community is connected directly to actively engaging in political activity for the
common good (ie a universalistic conception and not just a reflection of interests
economic or otherwise).
This active citizenship can in no way guarantee the development of an emancipatory
politics, yet it can be seen as enabling a number of ‘possibles’, of alternatives to the
existing situation. This alternative conception of citizenship can be traced throughout all
popular emancipatory projects of the modern period from the French Revolution to the
Paris Commune, to the various Socialist Revolutions, to the National Liberation Struggles
against colonialism with the case of South Africa being one of the most recent; it
arguably constitutes one of the possible conditions for an emancipatory politics.
Popular-democratic political trends have thus regularly stressed alternative conceptions
of citizenship which have laid emphasis on inclusiveness and agency. The political
sequences of socialist revolutions and of national liberation struggles are historically
over. A new alternative emancipatory political sequence may be one which, in the words
of Holloway (2002), is not about achieving state power but about transforming power, it
is arguably about democratising power, not about replacing some politicians by others.
In the formulation of Lazarus (1996), it’s concern is with prescriptions on the state. Does
this amount to a new political sequence at word level? What are its manifestations on
the continent? How can popular Pan-Africanism to be rethought under these new
conditions? To what extent are new and not so new popular movements able to move
beyond arguing for their incorporation into the world of capital and that of the liberal
state, and to what extent are they expressing prescriptive demands for freedom, justice
and equality in new ways? In other words, in what sites can a new mode of democratic
politics be found in contemporary Africa? In order to begin to answer such questions,
we need to contribute to a rethinking of citizenship along the lines I have suggested
above, but we also need to rethink the basis of political agency itself5.
4. Theorising Emancipatory Politics: an outline
Here the most important writers today are definitely Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus6.
Badiou is currently being translated into English as he has been discovered by American
audiences; Lazarus on the other hand still remains untranslated into English. These
authors have also had an important influence on the thought of Ernest Wamba-dia-
Wamba. While Badiou’s work remains at the highest level of abstraction as it concerns
ontology, Lazarus’ work is more approachable by social scientists.
4.1 Alain Badiou: “event”, “fidelity”, “truth”.
Perhaps the best place to start is the idea of agency which is so central to philosophical
and social science discourse today. Feltham and Clemens (2003: 6) explain that for
Badiou, the question of agency “is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate
an action in an autonomous manner, but rather how a subject emerges through an
autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation”. Thus it is not everyday actions
and decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou, these are simply part of being
and existence, they are unavoidable as are social interests, opinions and conversations.
Rather, it is “those extraordinary decisions and actions which isolate an actor from their
context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that
supports new chains of actions and reactions.” As a result: “not every human being is
always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to
a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in”.
Gone here is any notion of a universal human subject; Man is dead as God was
proclaimed dead by the Enlightenment. As a result for Badiou there can be no Ethics
founded on a universal human subject, and the whole idea of “human rights” is undercut.
In this sense Badiou follows very much in the different steps of Althusser, Foucault and
Lacan who in their different ways, had proclaimed the death of Man. Of course such a
conception has radical implications for conceiving ethics and (so-called human) rights
not to mention democracy and the state. It is these dimensions that interests me here
rather than the many aspects of Badiou’s ontology. This is simply because the
conception of politics and democracy which constitutes “la pensée unique” and which is
hegemonic today, is one which is founded on precisely a universalist conception of Man
linked within political liberalism with a reduction of politics to the state and to state
practices. I have argued elsewhere at length (within the context of South Africa in
particular) how human rights discourse and political liberalism more generally, have as
a necessary effect the ‘technicisation’ (hence the ‘de-politicisation’) of popular politics,
and how as a result, human emancipation is thought to be realisable only by the state
(Neocosmos, 2006). This conception is now becoming clearly apparent as a major
contradiction after the failure of the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century which
were all, at their core, state projects.
It is mainly for this reason, because of the importance of thinking about politics beyond
the realm of the state, of detaching politics from the state, that Badiou’s philosophy of
‘subjective militancy’ is of interest to Africa. On the continent, our manner of thinking
about politics has been overwhelmingly dominated by a liberalism for which the state is
the sole legitimate domain of the political. Central to liberal discourse, has been a
conception revolving around the idea that politics is reducible to the state or that the
state is the sole legitimate domain of politics. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is
the state. This idea has permeated so much into African political thinking for example,
that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not
reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself. In South Africa in particular, state
fetishism is so pervasive within the hegemonic political discourse that debate is
structured by the apparently evident ‘common sense’ notion that the post-apartheid state
can ‘deliver’ everything from jobs to empowerment, from development to human rights,
from peace in Africa to a cure for HIV-AIDS. As a result not only is the state deified, but
social debate is foreclosed ab initio; the idea simply becomes one of assessing policy or
capacity, in other words the focus is on management not on politics. Badiou, I suggest,
enables us to begin to think a way around this problem. His ideas of “Event”, “Fidelity”
and “Truth” are the three important categories here, all are dimensions of what he calls
a “truth-process” or “truth-procedure”.
Event
This is what “brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted
knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as
soon as it appears” (Badiou, 2001: 67).
The event is both situated - it is the event of this or that situation - and
supplementary; thus absolutely detached from , or unrelated to, all the rules of the
situation [...] You may then ask what it is that makes the connection between the
event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier
situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as
the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised
the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question [...] We may say
that since a situation is composed of the knowledges circulating within it, the
event names the void inasmuch at it names the not-known of the situation. To
take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he
designates, under the name ’proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois
societies. For the proletariat - being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the
political stage - is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude
established by the rule of those who possess capital. To sum up: the fundamental
ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of
that for which it is an event. (ibid.: 69).
An event then names the void, the absence, what is considered simply ‘impossible’, that
which is not conceivable from within the knowledges of the situation. An emancipatory
politics or a truly popular-democratic politics is difficult if not impossible to conceive from
within the parameters of liberalism, a politics of saving and helping the ethnically oppressed is inconceivable within a politics of ethnic genocide and so on. The event is something which points to alternatives to what is, to the possibility of something different.
In politics today, and in Africa in particular, which is what concerns me here, an event
would be expected to point us towards a different way of engaging in and thinking about
politics, beyond the one-way thinking of liberalism and its liberal ‘democracy’, “the best
possible shell for capitalism” as Lenin used to say. For outside of hegemonic political
liberalism today, all there is a void. When events happen, they force us, for a while at
least, to think of the situation differently. Popular upsurges, however brief, if they are
powerful enough, force new issues on the agenda for example, they enable changes in
thinking in the public sphere. In France for example, they have suddenly re-discovered
their ‘banlieues’ after the events of November 2005. The extent to which this was a real
event for politics in that country is however still a moot point. The popular struggles in
different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 90s, what was optimistically referred to as the
‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues on the agenda for a while, before
these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (Ake,
1996).
Fidelity
This “is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation,
under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break” (Badiou,
2001: 67). Fidelity to the event is an attempt to sustain the consequences of the event
in thought. It is a refusal to return to the “status quo ante”, to return to the idea that what
happened was impossible. Fidelity can be sustained by an individual, groups,
organisations etc. There is no guarantee that this fidelity will be sustained, this requires
a “disinterested-interest” on behalf of the participants. It follows that the perseverance
of the “being-subject” remains uncertain. For in order to be transformed into a subject,
a being has to remain true to disinterest. It is on the basis of this uncertainty that Badiou
is able to construct an “ethic of truths” (Badiou, 2001: ch. 4).
Truth
For Badiou a truth is “constructed” as a result of this process of fidelity to the event, not
“discovered”. It is “the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces”. (ibid.: 68). “Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences. This is something we have always known, even if
sophists of every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same
for all.” (Ibid.: 27). “A truth punches a ‘hole’ in knowledges, it is heterogeneous to them,
but it is also the sole known source of new knowledges. We shall say that the truth
forces knowledges. The verb to force indicates that since the power of a truth is that of
a break it is by violating established and circulating knowledges that a truth returns to the
immediacy of the situation, or reworks the sort of portable encyclopaedia from which
opinions, communications and sociality draw their meaning” (ibid.: 70).
The “indifference to differences” simply means that an emancipatory politics is universal
and not linked to any specific interest, it is “for all” never “for some”. It follows we can say
that for Badiou emancipatory politics does not ‘represent’ anyone:
"Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims [...] but to be faithful to
those events during which victims politically assert themselves [...] Politics in no
way represents the proletariat, class or nation [...] it is not a question of whether
something which exists may be represented. Rather it concerns that through
which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and
simply presents its own existence" (Badiou, 1985: 75, 87).
An emancipatory politics therefore cannot be deduced from a social category (class,
nation, state) it can only be understood in terms of itself. Moreover, the state itself is
“indifferent to” truths and thus also to (emancipatory) politics; the democratic state in
particular is merely concerned with knowledges and opinions which it organises into a
consensus.
"Historically speaking, there have been some political orientations that have had
or will have a connection with a truth, a truth of the collective as such. They are
rare attempts and they are often brief [...] These political sequences are
singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental
history [....] from the people they engage these orientations require nothing but
their strict generic humanity" (Badiou, 2003:70).
Therefore, (emancipatory) politics may or may not exist at any time and must be
understood as pertaining to the realm of thought: “any politics of emancipation, or any
politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act” (ibid.: 71). In order to
develop these points in some detail, we must now shift to the work of Lazarus.
4.2 Political subjectivity, modes of politics, political prescriptions, the extant and
the possible in the work of Sylvain Lazarus.
I cannot at this juncture outline in detail what is an incredibly original and complex theory,
this will have to wait for another time. For the present, it must suffice to provide a sketch
of some of the main ideas put forward in Lazarus’ work. In order to make sense of his
work, we need to begin with an understanding of the fact that Lazarus is interested in
making intelligible, not just the existing configuration or structure of social situations of
various types, but the existence of possible alternatives to the manner in which these
situations are configured. In other words he is interested in theorising the subjective and
the objective, not only as distinct, but as at a distance from each other. Not only is there
no ‘correspondence’ between the two, but there is in many cases a distinct distance
between them. In such cases the possibility exists that people’s subjectivities - thought can
assert something different from what is, an alternative to the existing. In fact he
argues that the “extant” is identified via the possible:
"In people’s thought, the real is identified via the possible. The investigation of
what exists takes place but is subordinated to the investigation of what could be.
The methods of investigation differ according to whether they are linked to the
category of the “possible”or to that of the “extant”." (Lazarus, 2001: 8, unless
otherwise indicated all translations from the French are mine - MN).
Politics is of the order of thought
If politics as doing, (he rejects the term ‘practice’), politics as ‘prescription’ as he puts it, is what denotes the distance between what is and what could be, then what this means
is that what is required is an understanding of politics as concerning thought exclusively,
as remaining purely within the domain of the subjective. Like Badiou, who relies on him
heavily (see Badiou, 2005, ch. 2), Lazarus is interested in theorising politics as a militant
‘practice’ while remaining consistent with rationalism, ie. materialism. What he attempts
is no less than a materialist theory of the subjective. This theory he calls an
anthropology (after all anthropology has generally been precisely the study of the
subjective, culture, belief etc), more specifically an “Anthropology of the Name”. It is this
anthropology he argues, which makes politics thinkable as thought. But in order to think
thought purely within thought, all scientistic assumptions must be dropped as these
assume some correspondence between thought and object, between subjective and
objective; the ‘concept’ then becoming a more or less accurate expression/representation
of the real. This axiom is then pursued to its logical conclusion building a system of
names and categories which help to identify the real. If the relation between the real and
the subjective is not the issue, how are we sure that we are indeed investigating the real?
This requires a rigorous consistency to two foundational statements/axioms which
Lazarus sees as the core of his theoretical system, these are: 1. People think (les gens
pensent); and 2. Thought is a relation of the real (la pensée est rapport du réel).
To maintain that politics is subjective, is simply to say that it is of “of the order of thought” as Lazarus (op.cit.) puts it. “To say ‘people think’ is to say that they are capable [...] of prescribing a possible that is irreducible to the repetition or the continuation of what exists” (Badiou, 2005: 32). Anyone is able to think politically, and such thought is not the preserve of experts. At the same time, such thought is itself a real relation because that
prescriptive thought is indeed material as we shall see below. In this manner politics can
be comprehended in terms of itself and not in terms of some other entity (or “invariant”)
external to it (Badiou, 1985). Politics is thus irreducible to the economy, to the state, to
ethnicity, to society, to history or to any entity outside itself:
"As soon as the conceptual categories in operation are those of consciousness [...]
there can no longer be an expressive dialectic between relations of production
and forms of consciousness, otherwise this dialectic remains that of history, that
of the state or of the economy and no longer possesses a prescriptive character"
(Lazarus, 1996: 57).
In actual fact for Lazarus, it is not all politics which is capable of fulfilling the criterion of irreducibility, only (various modes of) emancipatory politics do so. As a result such
politics do not always exist. Lazarus (op.cit.: 53) refers to the example of Lenin’s
thought for which the existence of a working class as a social class is distinguished from
its existence as a political class. The existence of the latter cannot be deduced form the
former in Lenin’s thought. In fact in Lenin, ‘class’ is no longer a historico-political
category as in Marx - after the failure of the Paris Commune, the historical certainty of
the Communist Manifesto is no longer sustainable - but is rather replaced by a category
of “organised political consciousness” (Lazarus, 1993: 25). With Lenin, “politics must
possess its own specific terms [...] as it passes from the certain to the possible”
(ibid.:26). Thus, in Lenin’s terms, the proletariat must ‘demarcate itself’ politically from
other classes by its party acquiring a unique set of ideological positions on the issues
of the day. This means that politics is not an ‘expression’ of social conditions or of
history, but that the relations between politics and history are much more complex
(Neocosmos, 1993, part 1). This perspective is clearly apparent, for example, in Lenin’s
analyses of the “national question”, where he argues, against Luxemburg in particular,
and “imperialist economism” in general, that the national question is not reducible to
class (the right of nations to self-determination is not a bourgeois demand) but is a
“democratic” issue - ie. a political issue - of concern to the people as a whole (see eg.
Lenin, 1986).
In Marx’s thought, the issue is treated differently. For him, “scientific notions are also
notions of political consciousness, they are realisable [...] from this perspective, human
emancipation is not a utopia but a real possibility”. For Marx the science of history and
the politically prescriptive are fused into one unique conception (ibid.: 55). It should be
noted in passing that when we study politics as ‘practice’, there is no such thing as a
unified ‘Marxism’; the politics expressed and practised by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin,
Gramsci, Lukaçs, Cabral, Che Guevara, etc are crucially all distinct, they (may)
formulate different modes of politics.
Modes of Politics and their Sites
For Lazarus, “there is no politics in general, only specific political sequences. Politics
is not a permanent instance of society” (ibid.: 89). Different kinds of politics are
distinguished by their historicity, in other words they have a history, they arise and then
they pass on. Lazarus refers to these as historical modes of politics or “the relation of
a politics to its thought” (loc.cit.). They are identified by different sites (lieux) and have
their own activists (militants). The former refer to the sites in the concrete situation
where that particular mode exists, the latter to those who most clearly embody, express
and represent that mode in thought. Politics does not always exist, it is rare and is
always sequential. Lazarus outlines different historical modes of politics with their own
sequences, some of which have been emancipatory due to the fact that they conceive
of politics “internally” and others which reduce politics to an “external invariant”. Clearly,
these are not the only modes of politics which have developed historically, and others
remain to be elucidated and analysed; however a brief recapitulation of these different
modes serves to illuminate his form of reasoning9.
Lazarus includes four examples of emancipatory modes of politics which he has
identified. The first of these is what he calls the “revolutionary mode of politics”
associated with the experience of the French revolution between the summer of 1792
to July 1794. Its main site was the Jacobin Convention and its main militants and
theoreticians were Robespierre and Saint-Just, the co-authors of the 1793 constitution.
Its conception of politics was one which proclaimed that “a people has only one
dangerous enemy:its government” (Saint-Just, 2004: 630) and which understood politics
as a form of moral consciousness or ‘virtue,’ to be combined with ‘terror’ against the
revolution’s enemies (Zizek, 2007). For Saint-Just, “it is leaders who must be disciplined
because all evil results from the abuse of power” (op.cit.: 758). Thus, “Saint-Just
regularly proposes analyses and policies which, although they concern the state and the
government, are thought outside of and are explicitly directed against a statist logic”
(Lazarus, op.cit.: 225ff).
The second he terms the “classist mode of politics” whose sequence is opened up in
1848 by working-class revolutionary movements throughout Europe, and which closes
with the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871. Clearly the main figures here were Marx
and Engels and its sites were the working class movements of the nineteenth century.
It is not here a question of politics within a party, but of politics within a mass movement,
as modern political parties only develop in the period following 1871. For Marx as noted
above, history and politics are fused into one unique conception mediated by class.
The third is termed the “Bolshevik mode”. Its sites were the RSDLP (Russian Social
Democratic and Labour Party) and the soviets (People’s Councils), and Lenin was its
militant figure and theoretician. “Proletarian political capacity is seen here not as
spontaneous, neither is it historically or socially determined but it is obliged to specify
its own conditions of existence” (ibid.: 90). The party mediates between consciousness
and history. This political sequence opens up in 1902 (year of the publication of Lenin’s
What is to be Done?), reaches a peak in 1905 and closes in 1917. After that date the
party becomes ‘statised‘ as no solution is found to Lenin’s contradictory conception that
the party must be both the state as well as the defender of the masses against the state;
and the soviets which disappear, cease to be the sites of an emancipatory politics (ibid.:
91).
The fourth mode Lazarus terms the “dialectical mode of politics”. Its main theoretician
is Mao Zedong and history is here subordinated to the masses, as the influence of the
former disappears behind subjective notions such as an ”enthusiasm for socialism”.
Political consciousness develops in leaps and bounds and “there exists an exclusively
political knowledge because such a knowledge is dialectical without being historical.
Even if the party exists it does not identify the mode of politics.” The sites of this mode
are those of the revolutionary war: the party, the army, the United Front; its limits extend
from 1928 to 1958 (ibid.: 91).
The above modes of politics conceive of politics internally, in terms of its own specificity,
without reference to what Lazarus calls “external invariants”. In fact it was only in the
Bolshevik mode that the party had a central role. In all cases there was a multiplicity
of sites, and there is maintained a political distance from the state. In Wamba-diaWamba’s
(1993: 98) terms: “it is the existence of an independent (emancipative) politics
which makes the destructive transformation of the state possible”. This emancipative
consciousness is purely political and exists under conditions of a subjective break with
spontaneous forms of consciousness.
In addition, two modes of politics are identified by Lazarus which each make reference
to an “external invariant”. These are the Parliamentary mode of politics and the Stalinist
mode of politics; both of these have been dominant in twentieth century world history.
For both these modes, political consciousness is subordinated to a consciousness of the
state. The principle of parliamentary politics is not that “people think” but rather that
people have opinions regarding government (Lazarus, op.cit.: 93). “The so-called
‘political’ parties of the parliamentary mode, far from representing the diversity of
opinions, are the subjective organisers of the fact that the only thought deemed possible
is an opinion regarding the government”. It follows that parties are not so much political
organisations, but rather state organisations which distribute state positions. Thus for
the parliamentary mode there is only one recognised site of politics and that is the state
(loc.cit.). Similar functions are fulfilled in this mode by trade unions, which are also very
much state organisations. Voting, as the institutional articulation between the subjective
side of opinion and the objective character of government, is the essential political act
of parliamentarianism. Voting does not so much serve to represent opinions but to
produce a majority of professional politicians who are provided by parties; “it transforms
the plural subjectivity of opinions on government into a functioning unity” founded on
consensus. “Voting transforms vague ‘programmes’ or promises of parties into the
authority of a consensus” (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993: 117; 1994: 249). In other words,
voting amounts to a legitimising principle of the state consensus, and ‘politics’ is
ultimately reduced to a question of numbers.
The Stalinist mode of politics refers to a political subjectivity which existed not just in the
Soviet Union, but also throughout parties linked to the ‘Third International’. “The party
is viewed as the condition of revolutionary political consciousness. Politics, in this
mode, is thus referred to the party; the party is finally revolutionary politics and
revolutionary politics is the party” (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 250). Politics is confined
to the party and the party is understood to be the very embodiment of that
consciousness. “As the party is presented as the source of all political truth”, the
Stalinist mode “requires the credibility of the party” (ibid.). The party-state is the only
political datum provided to subjectivity and the only practical domain of that subjectivity.
The only site of politics is the state-party. The sequence of this mode begins during the
early 1930s and ends with Gorbachov’s accession to power (Lazarus, op.cit.: 94).
Where does all this leave the conceptualisation of contemporary politics on the African
continent? The answer provided by Wamba-dia-Wamba is that one must identify modes
of politics historically present in Africa which he attempts in the case of Zaire/ DR Congo
(Wamba-dia-Wamba: 1993), and also, more importantly, specify the basic
characteristics of an emancipatory mode of politics on the continent (Wamba-dia-
Wamba: 1994). The latter project is, in his writings, highly informed by the analysis of
Lazarus so I shall continue to briefly outline them together.
Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive
relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that
politics must exist [...] Generally in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it [this
political capacity] to the state (including the party and liberation movements
functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot
transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by
imposing consensual unanimity [...] the thrust of progressive politics is to be
separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, ie. a
state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if
people only ‘think’ state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves
(Wamba-dia-Wamba: 1994: 258).
In post-colonial Africa therefore, it is noted that one form or other of state-fetishism has
been the dominant way of conceiving the political capacity to transform reality, however
I do attempt to specify below some of the features of a ‘national liberation struggle’ mode
which can be said to have existed prior to independence to various extents. If the
problem in Africa has been the state, then a new way of conceiving politics must be
developed. For Lazarus, three fundamental conceptions have to be put forward here:
first it has to be understood that there are or can be multiple sites of politics including
especially sites outside and beyond the state, and second that emancipatory politics
concerns democratic prescriptions on the state; finally, of course an organisation of
activists is required, but this cannot be a state organisation as the state is not concerned
with (popular) politics, and rather suffocates all political prescriptions. Rather, this must
be an emancipatory political organisation, which is consistently democratic in its
practices and which thereby enables the development of democratic political
prescriptions on the state.
Sites of emancipatory politics in Africa are varied and they may include the factory
(which is not just a place for producing commodities), ‘traditional’ and popular institutions
such the palaver, village assemblies, the sovereign national conferences in several
Francophone African countries in the early nineties (all mentioned in ibid.) as well as
social institutions such as educational institutions, neighbourhood groups, social
movements and so on, in sum all organisations in which the possibility of democratic
politics exists. Clearly, such sites do not always exist, as emancipatory politics is not
always present in them. For example, street committees, area committees and trade
union ‘locals’ were all sites of emancipatory politics in the townships of South Africa of
the 1980s, but this is no longer the case. They have either disappeared as political
structures completely or have been incorporated into the state domain of politics
(Neocosmos, 1998). Parties on the other hand, incarnate a state project of one form or
another as they propose the state as the exclusive reference of consciousness.
Currently these are not sites of emancipatory politics in Africa, which means that
extending the number of parties in existence (from single to multi-partyism) will not, of
itself, enable the development of democratic-emancipatory politics on the continent
(Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994 : 258-9).
While possible sites of politics can be found anywhere where state and society relate,
emancipatory politics only exists when democratic prescriptions on the state emanate
from such sites. Democratic political prescriptions are possible only when distancing
oneself politically from the state. This idea corresponds, in essence, to the possibility
of a domain of politics beyond the state and civil society, which I have detailed above;
but this domain must now not be understood spatially or institutionally as defined by the
form of state rule as in Chatterjee (2004), but fundamentally as distinctly political
subjective. It must be stressed that: “one can prescribe to the state only on condition of
being independent of it, by placing oneself precisely in a political position clearly distinct
and separate from it” (LDP, no 14, July 1995, p. 9). Thus ‘distance’ here refers to
political distance rather than to occupational distance for example, although clearly
these are by no means unconnected. This signifies in particular that a democratic
political practice must be clearly distinct from a state practice. ‘Democracy’ here no
longer refers to a set of state institutions.
Political Prescriptions
What does prescribing to the state actually mean for Lazarus? It is easiest to outline
this with reference to one specific example. To argue publically and consistently that
everyone must be treated equally by state laws and practices under conditions where
this is evidently not the case, is to make a democratic prescription on the state,
according to this perspective. This is particularly of relevance to the modern state in
both Europe and Africa, because this state systematically practices various forms of
discrimination against a number of people living within its boundaries on the basis of
gender, ethnicity and nationality as well as social class. “Any state which is founded on
ethnic or communitarian distinctions is a state producing civil tensions and war” (LDP,
no 14, p. 9). It is thus imperative to uphold the view politically that the country is made
up of “people of all origins” (“les gens de partout”), and that no single individual should
count for any more or less than any other. This would be in Badiou’s terms an indication
of fidelity to the axiom of equality. New categories and terms should be thought up to
transcend such differences10. If this view is not consistently upheld, then the door is left
open to various forms of state discrimination with disastrous results (LDP, op.cit., pp.910)
11. To make democratic prescriptions on the state is precisely to assert such a
position for example, from a multitude of sites where it is of relevance; in addition “to
make democratic prescriptions on the state [...] is to view the latter not only as a juridical
and formal structure but also as being the object of prescriptions” (ibid.). In other words
that the state can be prescribed to with important results for politics:
"[In politics] there always exists an ensemble of possibles more or less open
depending on the issues, but rarely completely closed. It is here that what we
call “prescriptions on the state” can take root. To prescribe to the state is to
assert as possible a different thing from what is said and done by the state [...] our
idea of democracy is to sustain point by point democratic prescriptions in relation
to the state" (LDP, op.cit., pp. 10-11, emphasis in original).
Clearly the argument here is that alternatives and choices are always possible and that
it is imperative to force the state, from sites within civil society, to treat all people living
within its boundaries equally and not to discriminate against some for whatever reason.
Today in Africa, the main bases for such discrimination are gender, nationality and
ethnicity, although other social divisions based on class, age, rural-urban differences
and so on are also transformed into discriminatory distinctions by state practices and
ideologies.
For Hallward (2005: 770) following Badiou, prescription is “first and foremost an
anticipation of its subsequent power, a commitment to its consequences, a wager on its
eventual strength”. It is fundamentally the divisive application of a universal axiom or
principle which serves to demarcate a partisan position with the result that “politics is the
aspect of public life that falls under the consequences of a prescription” (ibid.: 773).
Politics is thus not reducible to ‘the art of the possible’ in the usual sense. It is
indifferent to interests and to their compromises, as a prescription is of a universal
character. Prescription implies freedom to make political choices, “without such freedom
we cannot say that people make their own history; we can merely contemplate the forms
of their constraint” (ibid.: 781), which has been precisely what a politics deduced from
political economy has done in the second half of the twentieth century in Africa.
However, we still remain here at a relatively high level of abstraction. It is important to
descend to what this means in more concrete terms.
The Extant and the Possible
In his most recent work, Lazarus (2001) uses the notion of prescription to distinguish the
understanding resulting from the thought of people, from that developed by a scientistic
approach. All social science comes down in one way or another to a matter of definition
in order to resolve the “polysemic” contradictions between meanings attributed to words
in life. Contrary to this, Lazarus insists that this discursive polysemy is a reflection of
different prescriptions attached to the word in question, some of which may contest what
exists (the extant) in terms of possible alternatives. “It is through prescriptions - for there
is not only one - that the word is submitted to something other than a definition”
(Lazarus, 2001: 7).
An approach via the objective evaluation of things can end up with predictions,
scenarios, tendencies or determinations. It is not in this way that the possible
must be understood. For the first approach, the objective of thought is to isolate
the logic of the real. For the second, the objective is not to articulate theses on
what exists. The field of intellectuality presents itself differently: the question
regarding what exists is only given in relation to what could be (ibid.).
A definition is scientistic and only proposes a unique conception of the real. On the other
hand, because a number of prescriptions may exist on the meaning of words, the
possibility exists of conflicts between prescriptions, each one sustaining a distinct order
of the real. Because of this confrontation between prescriptions amounting to conflicts
between different theses on the real, “knowledge is confronted by a choice which is not
that between the true and the false, the imaginary and the rational, but that between
different orders of the real” (ibid). For example if an interlocutor says: “at the factory
they call me a worker, outside they call me an immigrant because they have forgotten
that I am a worker”, the figure of the worker is maintained in the context of the factory
and denied in society. There are here two orders of the real founded on two
prescriptions, one for which the figure of the worker is asserted and another for which
it has disappeared. It can thus be seen how prescriptions resolve the polysemic
multiplicity in a manner which is in no way definitional (ibid.). As a result a number of
possibles are apparent. It is thus the question of the possible which specifies people’s
thought.
That a situation can be apprehended by ‘possibles’ is an overturning of historicist
and scientific thought, for which it is a precise investigation of what exists, in
terms of determinations, causes and laws, which may then permit an answer to
the question of what may come. The possible here is totally subordinated to the
extant. In people’s thought [on the other hand], the real is identified through the
possible. The investigation of what exists is also involved, but is subordinated
to the investigation of what could be. The investigation differs according to
whether it relates to the category of the ‘possible’ or to that of the ‘extant’ [...] We
are confronted with two different modes of thought: the first is analytical and
descriptive, it asks questions regarding what exists; irrespective of the eventual
complexity of its research protocols and discoveries, it proposes the scientific
character of sites (lieux). The second is prescriptive and has as its principal point
of entry the question of the possible (ibid.: 8).
While the former perspective proposes to apprehend reality as extant, the latter
maintains that in order to access what exists now, the ‘now’ can only be grasped as a
conjunction of different ‘possibles’. “Knowledge of a situation is grasped by people in
terms of the identification of its possibles. The possible is not of the order of what is to
come but of the order of the now”. (ibid.: 9). The investigation utilising categories such
as ‘present’ and ‘possible’ “works through words [...] on the thought of people which is
outlined in singular intellectualities, to which one can accede from the words used and
the singular theses which they constitute” (ibid.: 11).
Lazarus develops a new theory and detailed methodology for understanding the
possible in the extant, the ‘what could be’ in the ‘what is’. There is no space to develop
all the details here, but enough has been said to suggest the originality and
inventiveness of the whole perspective, which opens up a whole new manner of
investigating politics precisely because this is about conceiving a situation other than
what exists. It has the advantage vis-a-vis Badiou’s work, of moving beyond the
extremely abstract ontological statements which characterise that discourse, to enable
the thinking of precise concrete investigations of the possible in the extant, in other
words of people’s political thought. I want now to attempt to utilise some of the ideas
outlined above to sketch the character of what may be termed a ‘National Liberation
Struggle Mode’ (NLS) of politics at least in Africa and to ask the question of the extent
to which the resistance struggle in South Africa of the 1980s broke with this mode. I will
suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.
The standard reading of the liberation struggle in South Africa, is that this struggle seen
as a continuous process from the formation of the ANC in 1912 to the achievement
of liberation marked by the first elections by universal suffrage in 1994 - operated very
much within the theoretical confines of the NLS mode. Even when the importance of the
popular struggle of the 1980s is acknowledged as a specific process independent of the
organisational requisites of the ANC in exile, this popular struggle tends to be seen as
a ‘radicalised’ variant of the NLS mode. One of the better arguments developed along
these lines is made by Yunis (2000) who suggests that the national liberation struggle
in South Africa in the 1980s was radicalised because its class composition was more
democratic and popular. For Yunis (2000: 33-5), the struggle for national liberation in
South Africa (as that in Palestine) was ‘radicalised’ along with the historically gradual
dominance of more popular classes: 1910s -1940s dominance of elites, 1940s -1970s
dominance of a middle-class leadership, mid-1970s -1980s dominance of popular
classes. In this conception, the 1980s simply mark the ‘radicalisation’ of an ongoing
NLS, unfolding on the basis of the class composition of the movement. For me, this kind
of perspective disables an understanding of the truly inventive nature of the popular
politics of the 1980s, which I believe constituted an event, in Badiou’s sense, probably
for the African continent as a whole. It does so, not only because of its historicism
(incidentally a curtailed and thus unrealised historical trajectory as the popular classes
did not achieve their imputed radical aims), but also because of its insistence on
articulating politics to an external social invariant, namely class. In this manner, it does
away with the singularity and specificity of these politics and makes them unthinkable
outside a pre-given NLS mode.
Contrary to this view, I would suggest that there was a clear distinction, as well as a
struggle, between different conceptions of politics within the anti-apartheid movements
of the 1980s - politics that cannot be understood simply in class terms - particularly
between the democratic politics made possible by the popular movement inside the
country and the party-bureaucratic politics of the NLS mode attached to the proto-state
institutions outside the country, despite their similarities in discourse. However this
contrast should not suggest uncontradictory politics in either of these sites. Rather the
UDF and its affiliates, as well as the trade unions in particular, constituted sites which
enabled the development of a political subjectivity which was centrally located in popular
control of conditions of life, something which could not be prevalent in sites such as
military camps and exile, simply because the latter were evidently cut off from popular
concerns. In neither of these cases was politics reducible to sociological class
categories. After all the politics of exile were conducted within a Marxist discourse
which, as numerous official documents of the ANC/SACP attest to, privileged (the
working-) class in the construction of the nation, as did the politics inside the country.
Reference to class was then not what distinguished them. Rather, it can be argued that,
during the years 1984 -1986 at least, a quite new political sequence develops which
identifies elements of a distinctly new (although incompletely developed) mode of
politics which breaks in some crucially important respects with the fundamental tenets
of the NLS mode, while reproducing it in some other respects.
5.1 The National Liberation Struggle Mode of Politics in Africa
To think purely subjectively about a National Liberation Struggle mode at Third World
and even at an African level in the twentieth century, is extremely difficult without
collapsing into model building, ie. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no one major
single individual who expressed such a politics intellectually. A situated analysis of say
the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well
beyond the scope of this work. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode
provided the parameters of political thought in the colonial and neo-colonial social
formations of the immediate post-world war II period up to the 1970s. Its main figures
included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh,
Mohandas Ghandi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom
expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was
impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-
imperialism, even if only in rhetorical in form. This contrasts with the position today
when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of the new empire. As Chatterjee
(2004:100) has so accurately observed, today the new “empire expands because more
and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic
prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella”. In other words the underlying
conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as ‘the South’, is to
be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic’ empire.
We should start first be stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation
from colonialism. Not many European thinkers understood this point. One exception
was Jean-Paul Sartre who was able to show that as colonisation was centrally a political
endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the
problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty),
social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological,
however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance.
Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was a necessary
outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly
political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics, especially of the mass
politics which were in most cases necessarily unleashed in the struggles against
colonialism. Politics was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and
politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with
independence, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism and
democracy was overcome by the need to solve the “social question” (Arendt, 1963)
known in the post-colonial period as ‘development’. The absence of politics in the postcolonial
period has been accurately expressed by Issa Shivji (1985) inter alia on the
continent. Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think the
disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacing
of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all ‘politics’ to itself. The difficulty faced by the
national liberation struggle mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political
conception of politics. This became more and more an obvious intellectual problem after
independence as it was clearly a particular (state) politics which created the social in the
form of (a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’) class rather than the expected opposite of politics
‘reflecting’ the social category of class (Shivji, 1976).
Thus the reasons for the difficulty in thinking the emancipatory character of mid-
twentieth century anti-imperialist politics, are arguably related to the fact that, while
ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations, the national liberation
struggle mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation, thus
unavoidably referring politics to an external (social) invariant such as nation, state
and/or class. Only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not
thought exclusively via external referents. These rare instances - the writings of Fanon
and Cabral come particularly to mind here (although there may also be others) - were
brief and would have to be analysed as thinking the political singularities of Algeria and
Guinea Bissau during short historical periods, a fact which lies well beyond the scope
of this work. What is however interesting to note, is that both these figures were spared
the dubious status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular, was
excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age,
while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power.
In general then, the NLS mode was a mode ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, lasting probably
between 1958 (the date of the All-African People's Conference in Accra 5-13 December
1958) and 1973 the assassination of Cabral (Hallward, 2005)12. The NLS mode is a truly
twentieth century mode13 and its language was often borrowed from Marxism, particularly
from the Stalinist mode. However the term ‘class’ as the referent of the latter’s politics
was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral, for instance even speaking in
terms of a ‘nation-class’ to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança
and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Its two main external invariants were ‘state’ and
‘nation’ although ‘class’ clearly also featured in this capacity. By 1975, the last vestiges
of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese
colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe
which was, in most instances, only a pale reflection of the experience of its
predecessors. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South
African ANC (African National Congress) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation
struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest that during the 1980s in
South Africa, a new sequence of politics was inaugurated, and during the period 19841986
in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode
of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed as
evidenced inter alia by the absence of any figure to systematise it theoretically.
In general, it can be suggested that in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian
politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a national politics, of the
nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions
of this politics were thus: who is the nation? (and not what is the nation?) and what are
its politics? The answer provided - at last by the most emancipatory versions of that
mode - was that the nation is those who fight consistently against colonialism/neocolonialism.
To the extent that this was adhered to then, this politics could be said to
be partly structured “in interiority”. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender (see Fanon on the struggle of Algerian women), it is not tradition, it is not even state, but it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins (Neocosmos, 2004). Hence this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism. National
consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words:
"if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression,
national liberation is necessarily an act of culture [...] The liberation movement
must [...] embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture - which
is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society"
(Cabral, 1973:43-4).
Thus, insofar as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the
‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has
a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the
most excluded; they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism, only they
can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and
democracy. The (petty-) bourgeoisie and workers as well as the inhabitants of the
towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism, they vacillate and are not
consistently anti-colonial, their political and cultural references are to the metropole.
There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently
realised during the post-colonial period (Shivji 1985). However, in the final analysis, the
nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom irrespective of
social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its
popular-emancipatory version, insofar as the latter existed.
It is the national movement (made up of a ‘Front’ or ‘Congress’ of a number of
organisations) which usually (but not always) embodies the organisational subjectivity
of the nation, not usually a party as such. Although there are differences here, parties
are for some (eg Fanon) Western imports with few roots among the people. The
dominant tendency, however, was for political movements to become state parties more
or less rapidly (arguably a necessary outcome of seeing politics as representing the
social in the form of the nation), evidently so at independence, and in many instances
long before that, in which case the emancipatory character of politics collapsed. In all
cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the
emancipation of the nation. The aphorism attributed to Nkrumah - “seek ye first the
political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee” - accurately expresses this collapse
into a disastrous politics - often a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture as
in Mobutu’s ‘authenticité’ - as the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied,
meant that the latter was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins.
It was this dominant tendency which assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely
emancipatory content to the national liberation mode, and the continuation of a colonial
set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since.
The neo-colonialism which ensued, was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the
submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not
its cause. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geo-political
context of the “cold war” and its fetishism of state power, meant its frequent ideological
dependence on either the Stalinist or the parliamentary modes, a fact which ensured its
final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see therefore how easily a politics
with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when
consciousness became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation,
became party, became state14. This movement from internal to external mode was most
evident at independence, but for many national liberation movements, the transition to
proto-states or ‘states in waiting’ was effected long before independence (eg PAIGC,
SWAPO, ANC etc, see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols 2&3) many being recognised
by the United Nations as “the sole and authentic representatives” of their nations long
before taking power.
The nationalist form of struggle had violence at its core. For Fanon, violence ‘purifies’
(ie. distinguishes) the nation from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of
violence as a counter to colonial violence, with the democratic aspirations of the people
is to be found in the people’s army, people’s war and the practice of guerrilla warfare.
The guerrillas were supposed to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla
army was the people at war. “We are armed militants, not militarists” (Cabral, cit.
Davidson, 1981:v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics when
that existed, varied but were likely to include, the mass movement and its constituent
organisations, the guerrilla army, peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation
from this conception (easily fallen into given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when
military solutions became dominant over political ones. In sum, the general trend was
for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial
politics in their practice. The sequence of this mode in Africa, with all its contradictory
attempts to resist colonialism is today clearly over, and has been so for about thirty
years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end?
I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can.
5.2 The popular struggle against apartheid: a new political sequence and mode?
Today we are in a situation when an emancipatory politics must be thought as
fundamentally distinct from state politics, as the state is incapable of emancipating
anybody (Neocosmos, 2007). In this context, it could be suggested that the national-
liberation movement in the urban areas of South Africa during the period 1984-86
constitutes an event for politics on the continent. This is fundamentally because the
urban popular masses of the oppressed black population took an independent role in
the politics of transformation and managed, for a time, to provide an inventively different
content to the slogans of the NLS mode. Moreover, the organisational expression of this
movement, the United Democratic Front in the South Africa of the 1980s, was not a party
organisation but a loose confederation of local political affiliates, which all adhered to
some common principles. These retained their organisational autonomy meaning that
organisationally, the UDF constitutes a useful recent non-party form of political
organisation from which it is important to learn, although serious detailed research on
this question has yet to be undertaken (but see Neocosmos, 1998, Van Kessel, 2000).
Moreover, beyond this organisational form, the fact that the authority of the party in exile
(the ANC) was recognised by most of these internal anti-apartheid formations, had a
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