pithpouse cesaire fanon humanism

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DOI: 10.1177/0021909612452702 2012 47: 482Journal of Asian and African Studies

Richard PithouseThought Amidst Waste

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J A A S

Thought Amidst Waste

Richard PithouseRhodes University, South Africa

AbstractThis paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaires terms, to the measure of the world, a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect of political agency, on the part of all people is to be recognized. It concludes by arguing that recent debates about a return to a communist Idea need to be mindful of a history in which communism has been a form of imperialism rather than a genuinely universal ideal.

KeywordsCommunism, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rancire, shacks, South Africa, theory, waste

Introduction

In a recent essay Achille Mbembe (2011) argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and the human from a history of waste (2011: para. 11, emphasis in original). He adds that the concepts of the human, or of humanism, inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of the human as waste (2011: para. 29). Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people but to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what Aim Csaire (2000) called pseudo-humanism, the racialized impe-rial particularities masquerading as the universal. Csaire aspired to a true humanism . . . a humanism made to the measure of the world (2000: 56) and Steve Biko (1995) envisioned a true humanity.

The idea that progress requires that some people be rendered as waste was central to the first stirrings of liberal philosophy. Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy argue that waste is the political other of capitalist value (2011: 1625) and show that, for John Locke, the figure of waste comes to designate the unenclosed common, the external frontier and that its transfor-mation into value, capitalist value, becomes the defining moment of political modernity (2011: 1626). Unsurprisingly, when Csaire quoted a humanist French intellectual to demon-strate the howling savagery of pseudo-humanism, he chose a post-war French philosopher

Corresponding author:Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

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who argued that: The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural labourers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law (2000: 37). Much of the modern left, and certainly many of the various currents of thought that descend from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is, in the deep structure of its thought, and in spite of the nuances of Marxs own thought particularly towards the end of his life (Anderson, 2010) organized around the assumption that the rendering of people as waste will ultimately be redeemed as exploitation, via the wage relation, becomes the primary mode of systemic domination and then the royal road to emancipation. When Marxism is understood as a modernist theory the wage relation often emerges as the fully modern mode of oppression and its transcendence as the fully mod-ern mode of emancipation with the result that other forms of oppression, and resistance to them, can appear as hangovers from the past, or as modern but extraneous to the central political drama, and with limited salience to the grand struggle for an emancipatory future. At times the Marxian critique of exploitation as the capture of productive labour and the theft of its produc-tivity has been expanded to include forms of labour outside the wage relation, like slavery or housework. It has also been supplemented with powerful critiques of objectification that, while often linked to the exploitation of labour, cannot always be reduced to it racism, sexism, homophobia and so on. And a consideration of the politics of space has been woven into the critical vocabulary of a tradition of critique more usually concerned with the politics of time (Sekyi-Otu, 1996). But while the left, and the radical academy, both of which aspire to be inter-nationals of a sort, have certainly broadened their emancipatory horizons, the foundational unease with human beings who have been rendered as waste but have not then been subject to exploitation via the wage relation the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society (Marx, 1848) a discomfort that is acutely present in some of Marxs writings, and more so in Engels,1 has not been entirely overcome. Its mental sedi-ment, and, indeed, a certain structure of feeling, endures. Anyone familiar with the South African academy will be aware that it is not unusual to encounter an assumption which, while often justified in the name of Marx and an implicit claim to a science of the political, is essen-tially ontological: that the urban poor, routinely described as lumpens in spaces like seminars, are a priori incapable of emancipatory praxis and quite possibly an automatic threat to the pos-sibilities of a progressive politics. There is, of course, also a liberal version of this hostility, a hostility that sometimes takes the form of a Sartrean passion (Sartre, 1995) that frequently slides into simple racism.

In Texaco, his novel about a shack settlement in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau writes of a proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers (1998: 314). But Texaco is also a novel of struggle, of struggle with the persistence of Sisyphus struggle to hold a soul together in the face of relentless destruction amidst a disaster of asbestos, tin sheets, crates, mud, tears, blood, police (1998: 354). Texaco is a novel of barricades, police and fire, a struggle to call forth the poet in the urban planner (1998: 341), a struggle to enter City. Its also about the need to hold on, hold on, and moor the bottom of your heart in the sand of deep freedom (1998: 81).

The theoretical project, undertaken in and around the academy, of working towards the assertion of a more genuinely universal humanism and a more genuinely universal emancipatory horizon the sand of deep freedom is one thing. The political project of affirming an equal humanity amidst relentless destruction and waste and holding to it with the persistence of Sisyphus is another. It is not that often that they are brought together. One reason for this is that it is a common


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feature of a wide range of polities that the damned of the earth, people who may be seen as popula-tions to be managed by the state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but who live and work outside of the parameters established as legitimate by bourgeois society, are not welcome in a shared agora. Indeed, it is common for their very appearance in the agora as rational-speaking beings rather than as silent victims requesting help from their masters, or a cheering mass perform-ing fealty to their masters, to be received as illicit as violent, criminal, fraudulent and consequent to malevolent conspiracy even when their presence takes the form of nothing other than rational speech. This is as common in states that aspire to liberal democracy as it is in states governed by an authoritarian nationalism be it inflected with ideas of the right or the left. Its also equally common when the masters in question are in the state, NGOs (across the political spectrum) or the left understood, in Alain Badious terms, as the set of people who claim that they are the only ones able to provide social movements with a political perspective (2006: 273). Jacques Rancire is quite right to insist that, from the ancient world until today:

The war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics. The dispute over the count of the poor as people, and of the people as the community, is a dispute about the existence of politics through which politics occurs. (1999: 14)

We need to be clear that, while it is true that since Plato it has often been thought that workers should keep to their place and function, it is also true that during the last century workers won a political place, a subordinate place to be sure, in many societies. But there is often a significant degree to which the urban poor, and especially people who live and work outside of the law and civil society, are cast out of the count of who has a right to the political in a way that is far more acute than that of a worker who lives and works within the law. This situation has often been intensely compounded when people who have to make their lives on a path through embers have also been raced.

Loc Wacquant describes the American ghetto and the Parisian banlieues as consequent to regimes of sociospatial relegation and exclusionary closure (2008: 2) in which there is acute, and deeply racialized, territorial stigmatization. Hes certainly correct. But we should recall that, while the ghetto is often a strategy to contain the dangerous classes with which the modern state and its civil society have often been comfortable to the degree that it succeeds in its function of containment, both the modern state and civil society have always been acutely uncomfortable with that part of the dangerous classes vagabonds or squatters that are, by virtue of their occupation of space outside of state regulation, by definition out of place and threatening to domination con-structed, along with other lines of force, on the ordering of space.2

In 1961 Frantz Fanon wrote that African shanty towns were seen as places of ill fame peopled by women and men of evil repute (1976: 103). In 1976 Janice Perlman argued that, in Rio, the myth of the marginality, the myth of the moral and political degradation of shack dwellers, was produced by the constant attempt of those in power to blame the poor for their position because of deviant attitudes, masking the unwillingness of the powerful to share their privilege (1976: 102). She made it clear that the stereotypes held about the urban poor by scholars, policy-makers, left-ists, rightists, and middle class liberals were strikingly similar (1976: 1). Perlman concluded that the myth was anchored in peoples minds by roots that will remain unshaken by any theoretical criticism (1976: 242). More recently Partha Chatterjee has argued that, in India, people, like shack dwellers, living outside of the law are not just subject to stigmatization but are also structurally excluded from the agora. They are, he argues, only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution. They are not, there-fore, proper members of civil society and are not regarded as such by the state (2004: 38).


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The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics

Contrary to the myth of the inherent inability of the urban poor to engage in emancipatory political practices there is, in reality, and across space and time, and as is the case with all other sociological categories of people, a diversity of politics practised by the urban poor. This is true in both times of crisis and under more ordinary circumstance. With regard to the former the reality is that, for instance, some shack dwellers supported the right wing military coup in Brazil in 1964 (Perlman, 1976) and some supported elected governments of the left against attempted coups from the right in Venezuela in 2002 (Fernandes, 2010) and Haiti in 1991 and 2004 (Hallward, 2007). In the mid to late 1980s in South Africa, when the popular struggles against apartheid were at their height, shack dwellers supported both state linked vigilante groups and the United Democratic Front (Cole, 1987).

In more ordinary times there is also a wide variety of responses to life in legal and civil limbo amidst acute material deprivation. Asef Bayat (1997) has shown that, in Tehran it has opened up opportunities for the quiet encroachment of the poor. But it can also enable more direct forms of confrontation with the power of state and capital. There are a number of stud-ies illustrating this in the Latin American context (e.g. Robinson, 2008; Fernandes, 2010; Zibechi, 2010). However, as Ananya Roy (2003) has shown in her study of Calcutta, infor-mality can also produce systemic insecurity which can in turn result in profound dependence on clientelist relations with political parties as people are only protected from eviction, and are only able to access development, for as long as they continue to demonstrate loyalty to party structures. Party political systems of clientelism and patronage are not the only forms of local and often microlocal despotism. It is, for instance, not at all unusual for NGOs, some-times acting in alliance with the state,3 and including NGOs on the left, to secure their turf with very similar strategies to parties. There are also, in some cases, political authoritarian-isms within community organizations that have been developed outside of party structures (Siwisa, 2008). Communities can also come under the control of criminal networks (Souza, 2009) or even, as with the Shiv Sena in Bombay (Hansen, 1999), popular fascist organizations.

In contemporary South Africa the shack settlement has emerged as a central site in the wave of popular protest that began at the turn of century and gathered real momentum since 2004 (Alexander, 2010). It has been the central site for the largest, best organized and most politically innovative movement to have emerged to the left of the African National Congress (ANC) after apartheid Abahlali baseMjondolo and it has also become the central site for movements such as the Landless Peoples Movement or the Unemployed Peoples Movement, that were not founded as shack dwell-ers organizations. It was also the central site for the xenophobic pogroms that swept parts of the country in 2008 (Neocosmos, 2010). The intensity of the shack settlement as a political site be it of an assertion of equal humanity, a defence of clientelism, or xenophobic or homophobic violence has a lot to do with material factors. But it also has something to do with the fact that to step into the shack settlement is to step into the void. This is not because of any ontological difference amongst the people living there, or because life there is entirely other at the level of day-to-day sociality. It is because it is a site that is not fully inscribed within the laws and rules through which the state governs society. Because its meaning is not entirely fixed it is an unstable element of the situation. The unfixed way in which the shack settlement is indexed to the situation opens opportu-nity for a variety of challenges from above and from below, democratic and authoritarian, in the name of the political and tradition, and from the left and the right to the official order of things.



Limits to Orthodox Marxism

Given the reality that shack dwellers have and continue to engage in a wide variety of political practices it is necessary to reject, with equal vigour, both Marx and Engels highly pejorative account of the lumpen proletariat and its inverse, Mikhail Bakunins view that in them [the lumpen proletariat], and only in them, and not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallized the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution (1873). Instead of making a priori judgements about peoples intellectual and political capacities on the basis of their sociological location, it is necessary to consider each situation, and each response to each situation, on its own terms. Emancipatory political practices can and do occur in the shack settlement and so the ques-tion of how to think an emancipatory politics in the situation constituted by the shack settlement requires the same consideration as that of political praxis in any other situation. To assert this is not, as partisans of orthodox interpretations of Marxism often assume, to suggest that the prospect of a universally redemptive exercise of historical agency has now shifted from the industrial working class to the urban poor. It is merely to note that a wide range of modes of politics, including eman-cipatory politics, does exist in the shack settlement and must be taken as seriously as any other expression of human agency. However, given the scale of informal work and land occupation in the Global South, it does mean that there are important limits to the degree to which radical theory developed out of engagement with the social realities of the North can illuminate modes of domi-nation and resistance in the South.

Moreover, it is clear that forms of Marxism that continue to fetishize the male industrial worker as the revolutionary subject and to deny the possibility of emancipatory political agency to the lumpen proletariat offer no automatically emancipatory path for the urban poor living outside of waged employment, be it in the ghetto or the shack settlement. It is a plain fact that Marxism, whether wielded by states or oppositional left projects, has often been mobilized to endorse the expulsion of the urban poor from the agora. In South Africa, Marxism and its vocabulary are fre-quently (although of course not inevitably) used this way, and in the form of a knee jerk reaction rather than as part of any thoughtful consideration of particular empirical realities, in the state, the academy and in some of the left NGOs. When Marxism is used in this way it must be considered as the oppressive philosophy of an elitism that, while it is a dissident elitism, is an elitism nonethe-less. When Marxism or other forms of putatively radical thought continue to present the urban poor in the language of venality and depravity, as automatically criminal, violent, irrational, open to malevolent external manipulation and so on, and representations of specific political moments or sequences as rational and ethical as a priori false or even fraudulent, and when these claims are made without engaging in actual or credible research on the particular case, it is absolutely neces-sary to dismiss them as part of what Rancire calls the logic of the police:

an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (1999: 29)

We also need to be attentive to the fact that Marxism is currently being used to illuminate the condition of the planet of slums (Davis, 2004) and wageless life (Denning, 2010) in ways that either, like Davis, declare, in an astonishing denial of reality, that there is no politics in these spaces or that, like Denning, share a conceptual map of the expression of popular agency that is indistin-guishable from that of the World Bank which (Narayan et al., 2000) valorizes the Self-Employed Womens Union in India as the exemplar of a politics of the formally unemployed. The inability on


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the part of influential figures in the metropolitian left to recognize popular political agency in the Global South, let alone to recognize it on its own terms rather than seeing it through categories derived from their own political experiences, or those of local elites that are frequently dependent on the NGO/donor/academic nexus in the North, often appears to be consequent to a methodologi-cal flaw that has its roots in the fact that, as Giyatri Spivak puts it, the privileged inhabitant of neo-colonial space is often bestowed a subject-position as geo-political other by the dominant radi-cal (1999: 339). It is commonly assumed that academics and NGOs in the Global South are some-how subaltern when, as Spivak notes, The politics of global civil society and the like are fundamentally a politics of elites (1999: 277). Peter Hallward grasps very well that NGO and academic elites in the Global South are often horrified by popular politics conducted outside of their control and committed to what he terms an aristocratic mode of politics that is, in a country like Haiti, often acutely racialized (2007: 177189).

In South Africa, where there is often a similar racialization of these relations, it has long been clear that some currents in the intersection between left NGOs and the left academy are investing more energies in using access to donor money from the North to be able to claim to represent popu-lar struggles to the left NGO/donor/academic nexus in the North4 rather than in working to support popular day-to-day resistance on the ground. One result of this is that the particularity of local struggles, including the intellectual work done in and in dialogue with these struggles, is often masked in these encounters. Instead of enabling a conversation between equals, the representation of local struggles is conscripted into a narrative that has attained global stature as a result of its position in a global hierarchy rather than as a result of it attaining some measure of the struggles of the world as a whole. This tends to function to re-inscribe the global division of labour in which theory is produced in the North and is applied, often via the mediation of local elites, to the South. It therefore becomes impossible to approach singular points of political subjectification as singu-larities, as nodes where resistance has been thought sometimes in ways that exceed the logic of domination with the result that critique becomes a mirror of systems of domination. The problem with this is that, as Badiou argues, The subjectivization of a singular situation cannot be reduced to the idea that this situation is expressive of the totality (Badiou, 2002a: 329).

All People Think

In the situation where the affirmation of the mere existence of a capacity to engage in politics on the part of those who have been denied a place in the agora requires a degree of rupture with both the official (state) way of doing things and the official (NGO) alternatives, theres no prospect of a sustained and ultimately effective emancipatory path through the embers without both the persis-tence of Sisyphus and the development of a transcendent conception of emancipation that can be rendered imminent to actually existing emancipatory practices without being reduced to them.

Politics, conceived as an actually existing popular practice, must always be thought in a spe-cific situation. Badiou is quite right to insist that the singularity of situations as such . . . is the obligatory starting point of all properly human interaction (2002b: 14). One reason for this is simply that, in Peter Hallwards precise formulation, A consequential prescription requires an effective foothold in the situation it transforms (2005: 773). You cant, as Hallward notes, effec-tively oppose capitalism or globalization in the abstract but you can, certainly, take a side with actually existing struggles the same struggles that are invariably dismissed by certain modes of leftism as too local, too narrowly focussed, too dependent on ideas like dignity rather than a fully elaborated conception of socialism and so on. But given that every situation is unique, dynamic, too complex to be grasped in its entirely, and is, in so far as it contains a human



presence, permeated by the void of human freedom, any attempt to impose ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility (Marx, 1871) can only do damage to the open, fluid and always partial and contingent work of thinking and constantly rethinking a particular situation. It is equally clear that there are no ready-made utopias to intro-duce par dcret du peuple and that, instead, it is necessary for people to work out their own emancipation (Marx, 1871). This point must be defended, emphatically, on an epistemological level. But it should also be defended with equal vigour as a matter of ethical principle. A concep-tion of emancipation that assumes a right to impose itself from above, rather than to be worked out together, is inherently authoritarian and objectifying.

Amilcar Cabrals dictum that nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revo-lutionary theory (1966) is true enough in so far as successful political challenges to oppression require ideas about strategy and alternatives. But it has often been deployed as an alibi for the elite domination of popular politics with results that seldom, if ever, conform to the predictions of the theories in the name of which such domination is imposed. A Leninist party is, Kristin Ross argues in her profound book on May 68, a radical intelligentsia that says we have the right to rule and that seeks to do so on the same basis, social division, in this case expressed as a hierarchical relation between militants and the working masses . . . that is the very foundation of the existence of the state (2002: 75). Moreover, a dogmatic adherence to pre-given theory is often a barrier to grasping and thinking the novelty of actually existing forms of popular poli-tics. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward observed, The movements of the people dis-appoint the doctrine, and so the movements are dismissed (1979: xi). Moreover, from the Haitian Revolution to the Paris Commune to May 68, or the United Democratic Front to Lavalas, rupture, real rupture, rupture that opens the political, and enables participation without regard to social location, and beyond the limits of immediate material interests, has often been thought from below more than from above. From the congregations around the mechanic preachers in the English Revolution (Hill, 1975) to the ti legliz in contemporary Haiti (Hallward, 2007) mass mobilization has often been sustained by the creation of popular and oppositional intellectual spaces. This can be done by seizing the forms of knowledge and modes of engage-ment previously monopolized by elites, as with the Welsh miners libraries in the 1930s (Rose, 2001), or by creating different forms of knowledge and modes of engagement more rooted in extant popular practices, like the neighbourhood councils in La Paz (Zibechi, 2010), or a com-bination of the two.

Equality as a Starting Point

Any assumption that the task of thinking a situation is the sole preserve of a particular caste of people, be it a self-selected political vanguard, the academic theorist, or the professional political expert in an NGO, is a priori, inimical to the development of an emancipatory politics. We could, following Ross reading of Rancire, declare, as an axiom, that Political emancipation means emancipation from politics as a specialized activity (2008: 24). Taking this seriously requires, again following Rancire, that: To pose equality as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish. Equality is a pre-supposition, an initial axiom, or it is nothing (Rancire, 2003: 223). Fanon makes a similar point when he declares that: I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every conscious-ness (1967: 232, emphasis in original) as does Paulo Freire in his famous injunction that the oppressed cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings (1996: 50, emphasis in original).


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The assumption of equality as a presupposition requires a mode of engagement on the part of the university-trained intellectual that is rooted in open-ended conversation, and conversation held on the terrain of the oppressed and open to the possibility of mutual transformation. For Fanon the vocation of the militant intellectual is to be present in the real movements that abolish the present state of things to be present in the zone of occult instability where the people dwell (1976: 183), in the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge (1976: 181) and, there, to collaborate on the physical plane (1976: 187). He is clear that the university-trained intellectual must avoid both the inability to carry on a two-sided discussion, to engage in genuine dialogue, and its obverse, becoming a sort of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the people (1976: 38). Against this, he recommends the inclusion of the intellectual in the upward surge of the masses (1976: 38) with a view toward achieving a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment (1976: 143).

The assumption of equality as a presupposition also requires a mode of engagement on the part of the university-trained intellectual that recognizes that there are multiple modes of expressing intellectual and ethical ideas. Actually existing emancipatory political practices are often rooted, to some degree, in what EP. Thompson called a moral economy a traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community (1991: 271). Thompson shows that both reason and the ethical can be elaborated through the matrix of a moral economy and, similarly, Ranajit Guha affirms that in what he calls the politics of the people rebellion is a motivated and conscious undertaking (2009: 195). But just as a purely sociological account of popular politics can only deny human freedom, so too does any purely anthropological account. In every cultural matrix a diversity of views are expressed and a diversity of political practices are developed. Popular politics is always mediated through sociological and anthropo-logical categories, but it is never reducible to them. There is, for the same reason that there is a void in every situation constituted, even if in part, by human beings, always an excess.

Moreover, while it is, following the Subaltern Studies project, necessary to affirm that a politics of the people can exist outside of the categories of elite politics, including its dissident currents, it is equally necessary to affirm, following Rose and Rancire, that the worker (or housewife, shack dweller, etc.) may also read Plato (or Fanon, Shakespeare, etc.). Popular politics is very often, if not invariably, thought in a way that draws from both a popular and often particular moral economy and ideas, often international, with greater currency amongst elites. The inevitably dynamic and often contradictory mix of ideas and norms that shape a struggle may be primarily worked out in the collective common sense constructed in the heat of the action (Zibechi, 2010: 63) or through spaces specifically constructed for collective deliberation, but there is always some degree of col-lective reflection, formal or informal, in any struggle and so no purely spasmodic account of popu-lar political action will do. As Ral Zibechi argues, this is the point at which the road forks: we either accept that the oppressed have their own autonomous political capacities or label their activi-ties spontaneous; that is, politically blind, not conscious or structured, as in, unconscious and pre-political (2010: 8485).

When popular struggles begin to attain some capacity to challenge constituted power grass-roots, militants often move between popular and elite spaces.5 Those who accept pedagogic proj-ects, formal or informal, that pose the automatic superiority of elite conceptions of politics tend to rapidly lose popular support and often end up working for elite projects in positions where they are supposed to function as a synecdoche, to stand in for the people structurally excluded from these spaces in order to legitimate these spaces. But those who are able to develop a fluency in both spheres, and to make use of ideas and practices drawn from both, as and when this is appropriate, can generate an effective and enabling translation between popular and elite spheres of politics. It



is also possible for the university-trained intellectual to refuse to take any position of authority over a struggle in any space that exists outside of the struggle, be it an attempt to create a Leninist van-guard; an informal network premised on privileged access to languages of power, technology, resources and networks; or the exercise of donor-backed NGO authority over popular struggles; or, as is common in South Africa, an often acutely racialized synthesis of the three, and to rather seek to participate, on the basis of equality, as a person amongst people, in popular struggle.

The anxieties produced by these transgressions, in which grassroots militants appear in elite spaces as people with some fluency in these spaces but also as genuine representatives of popular struggles and accountable to those struggles, and university-trained intellectuals participate in popular struggles and elite spaces while refusing to participate in external attempts to exercise authority over popular struggles, are often extraordinary and are often acutely present in the acad-emy and amongst the left both of which contain currents that prefer that everyone keep to their allotted places. This is not at all unique to South Africa. Ross (2002) brilliantly illuminates the phenomenon with regard to May 68 in France.

The fact that people think, that all people think and that people think outside of and beyond their allotted places in society, should be entirely tautological and therefore trivial. But the recognition of the open door of every consciousness is so widely denied, including in the academy and the left, that it is necessary for it to be asserted as a militant and transgressive axiom in spaces as far apart as radical philosophy in Paris and grassroots movements in South Africa. In Paris, Emilio Quadrelli (2007) has shown the huge gulf between speculative academic leftism, delinked from concrete engagement and as radical as it is politically inoperative (Bosteels, 2005: 762), and the actually existing struggles in the banlieues by the simple but effective device of juxtaposing theo-retical flights of academic fantasy ungrounded in any actual experience of participation in popular struggles with interviews with grassroots militants. In South Africa it is, as an example with equal illuminating power, instructive to contrast the accounts of academics that have spent months or years participating in the day-to-day activities of Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban which all, without exception, point to deliberative practices in the movement that are democratic and ethi-cally and intellectually serious with statements by academics that have not been present in the movements meetings or spaces, or even interviewed people that have, and yet stridently dispute these representations as romantic or even fraudulent on the basis of plainly prejudicial a priori assumptions about the limited political capacities of poor African people.6 The fact that the aca-demic and pseudo-academic policing of the right to access political space as a rational participant with the same right to speak as all others has extended to direct complicity with specific state attempts at de-legitimation that have been accompanied with serious violence, arrests, long periods of detention, the destruction of peoples homes and so on is not irrelevant. It is also, as Peter Hallward (2007) shows with regard to contemporary Haiti, not unique to South Africa.

If we agree that political emancipation means, in part, emancipation from politics as a special-ized activity, then both the strictures of logic and the bitterness of experience allow no other con-clusion than that there can, by definition, be no emancipatory politics without a break with that part of the left that carries an assumption of an automatic moral right and strategic necessity to exercise political authority over popular struggles. But while Badiou advocates for a break with the left defined as the set of people that assume a sole right to exercise authority over popular struggles this break with the left does not mean, not at all, a break with the emancipatory ideals of the left which the left itself has often played a vital role in carrying across space and time. On the con-trary, his proposal to reactivate the communist hypothesis as a Kantian Idea, a regulative ideal rather than a programme, has incited considerable renewal in radical philosophy in the Global North (Douzinas and iek, 2010; Bosteels, 2011).


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The Communist Idea

For Badiou the communist Idea is, essentially, an Idea of equality that holds out the prospect of a society in which material and political inequality are transcended. He argues that, across space and time, As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear (2008) and calls this repetition of aspects of the com-munist Idea in popular struggle the communist invariant. In Badious estimation, with experi-ments of fragments of truths, which are local and singular, yet universally transmittable, we can give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism (2010: 260). Bosteels, rejecting radical ontological investigations that tend towards spectrality, virtuality, potentiality but not towards actuality (2011: 62), and insisting that politics must be inscribed into an actual situation, nonetheless poses, via Garcia Linera, the idea of a communist horizon, but stresses the necessity for a dialectic between concrete historicity and the ahistorical kernel of emancipatory politics (2011: 278). This is perfectly compatible with a certain reading of Marx, the Marx who wrote that:

nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the worlds own principles. (1843: para. 9)

In Stathis Kouvelakis reading of Marx:

How to make criticism radical and how to make it practical are . . . inseparably linked questions, each of which presupposes the other. Solving them requires going beyond the philosophical form of criticism, which also means going beyond the unreflected character of practice. (2003: 325)

Theoretical insights worked out in particular situations can be used to illuminate, and some-times with extraordinary power as with Gramscis afterlife in India, other situations across space and time. But when these insights are reified and applied in a dogmatic manner they are far more likely to blind us to the novelties, subtleties and possibilities of the new than to offer any illumina-tion. A living struggle, a genuine mass struggle, always thinks a time and place. It is always what Sbu Zikode (2009) calls a living politics a homemade politics in the hands of ordinary women and men posing their humanity against oppression. To affirm this is to affirm the need to think each situation in its particularity, for new generations to think their own politics and for actually existing struggles to be the primary space for this work. But if the truths that emerge from living struggles cannot be shared across space and time we will always, across space and time, be beginning again and we will never attain a critical mass against global forces of domination.

There are situations that include struggles that are so clearly posing justice against injustice and which, usually in the first flushes of their rosy dawn, there is such a clear priority given to the ethical, that the attempt to think a situation is largely an attempt to think strategically. In these situations there can be moments where the primary theoretical task is merely to affirm the exis-tence of the movement, and its character and to say that communism, or whatever name one wishes to give to an emancipatory politics, is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things (Marx, 1845).

But movements are rooted in particular places, even when they have a transnational aspect, while many forms of oppression have a genuinely transnational form. Moreover, emancipatory movements are far from being an inevitable response to oppression. As Piven and Cloward note



only under exceptional conditions are the lower classes afforded the socially determined opportu-nity to press for their own class interests (1979: 7). When emancipatory movements do arise they are repressed, they decline, pervert their course, are captured, accept the reduction of emancipation to a concern with narrow technical issues deemed appropriate to their station and collapse. As Sylvain Lazarus argues there is no politics in general only specific political sequences (cited in Neocosmos, 2009: 126) which means, as Michael Neocosmos notes, that: different kinds of poli-tics are distinguished by their historicity, in other words they have a history, they arise and then they pass on (Neocosmos, 2009: 126). For all these reasons it is essential to place Marxs comment about communism being the real movement in the wider context of his argument. Marx insisted that communism as a local event will be abolished and concluded that:

Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples all at once and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism . . . The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a world-historical existence. (1845, emphasis in original)

Local and national attempts at insurgent autonomy can make important although structurally limited gains but they are always hemmed in and often crushed. And contrary to Marxs optimism about a coming communism, modern moments of genuinely transnational revolt 1848, the anti-colonial movements, 1968 and so on have also arisen, been absorbed, contained or repressed and passed on. There have been world historical events but there has been no final showdown at the O. K. Corral. In Marxs own terms communism has never existed empirically. This doesnt mean that it is necessary to follow Lenins response to the crushing of the Paris Commune and propose that politics be handed back to a vanguard, a party that is the organizer of a centralized, disciplined capacity that is entirely bent on taking state power (Badiou, 2006: 264). But it does mean that there is a need for an always developing set of ideas of emancipation that can emerge from specific experiences of struggle and reach towards the universal so that they can connect struggles across space and time. This means that, amongst many other things, universal ideas and principles need to be separated from the particular modes of sociality that sustain the persistence of Sisyphus in particular contexts at the same time as it is recognized that universal ideas and principles detached from specific modes of sociality and particular struggles in specific situations are not a real movement.

All People Think Everywhere

But there is another problem which is, of course, Marxs assumption (one that he would not hold to for all of his life) that communism must be the act of the dominant peoples. Cedric Robinson shows that, in the new world black thinkers like CLR James and WEB Du Bois:

men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival . . . were particularly troubled by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. (1983: 313)

We could add, while marking a clear distance from the racist feminisms that demonize poor black men and cast poor black women as their dupes, or as nobly carrying the burdens of society,7 that a good portion of this work of survival has been carried by black women outside of waged labour and


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that this fact marks a fundamental limit of the assumption that is central to some forms of Marxist thought, and which has often been both raced and gendered, that revolutionary agency resides solely in the industrial working class.

In 1934 Moses Kotane argued that the Communist Party of South Africa must:

become more Africanized or Afrikanized, that the CPSA [Communist Party of South Africa] must pay special attention to S Africa, study the conditions in this country and concretize the demands of the toiling masses from first-hand information, that we must speak the language of the Native masses and must know their demands. That while it must not lose its international allegiance, the Party must be Bolshevized, become South African not only theoretically, but in reality, it should be a Party working in the interests and for the toiling people in S Africa and not a party of a group of Europeans who are merely interested in European affairs. (1934: para 8)

In his 1956 letter of resignation from the French Communist Party, Aim Csaire wrote that what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the services of Marxism and communism (1956, para. 32). Today the same point could and certainly should be made to global civil society, as well as to the global justice movement, and, indeed, certain formulations of radical theory that assume a global reach, from the perspective of popular struggles in South Africa. It has recently been made against some of the South African engagement with the international movement that began with occupation of Wall Street and the South African connection with the international Climate Justice movement at the Conference of the Parties (COP-17) in Durban (Payn, 2011; Sacks, 2011).

The line of modern communist thought that goes back to the International Working Mens Association emerges from a specific situation in place and time and is hardly genuinely universal. This problem is not automatically resolved by the suggestion that the Communist Idea be affirmed as a Kantian regulative ideal. After all, as Spivak shows, The subject as such in Kant is geopoliti-cally differentiated (1999: 27). One response to this reality, which is also true of modern liberal-ism, has been to assert difference. In some cases, as in Steve Bikos thought, difference is asserted in order to be able to reject a false universalism with a view to, as noted at the outset of this paper, eventually being able to achieve what he called a true humanity. In other cases difference is asserted as absolute. The latter strategy tends to overlook the fact that the people who have most to gain from a genuine humanism and a genuine universalism are the people who are most oppressed, the people whose claim to count as people equal to all others has been subject to the most acute denial.

Amongst university-trained intellectuals it is often assumed, perhaps in a neo-Platonic way, that an abstract concept or principle is more universal, truer and perhaps also more beautiful than the necessarily messier engagement with situated reality. But this fundamentally misun-derstands the production of the universal. In politics, as in art, the particular is the route to the universal. A political truth emerges from a confrontation with a particular situation. Any denial of the particularity from which a political truth must emerge is, ultimately, a denial of the full-ness of the human experience. Any presentation of human being abstracted from context runs a clear risk of illegitimately universalizing dominant particularities. At the same time the presen-tation of any human experience as singular and contained rather than specific but nonetheless communicable, a fallacy that is endemic to both colonial and postcolonial thought (Hallward, 2001), but much less so to anti-colonial thought forged in struggle, consigns that experience to a sealed existence. We should not forget that the truths that Fanon found in the battles in the back streets of Algiers and the mountains in rural Algeria cast their brilliance from Tehran, to Chicago and Durban.



If we accept some version of Badious (2005) idea that, along with the constant flux of bodies and languages, the human world is also constituted by truths, murmurs of the indiscernible that, via subjective affiliation, via embodied fidelity, attain sufficient force to alter the way in which the elements of a situation are normally counted, then we must ask where such ideas come from. The temptation to assume that spaces of metropolitan power, or spaces networked through metropolitan power, have privileged access to insight is widespread. This is often racialized and for many uni-versity-trained intellectuals it is mediated through academic and civil society networks that are, despite the language of justice, often frankly neocolonial and bereft of any real prospect to unite force and reason against oppression.

In the post-colony it is still often assumed, as Fanon said of Martinique 60 years ago, that the metropole is sacred ground on which one can be sanctified. A genuinely internationalist political orientation is not one that is orientated to the global in so far as the global is taken to refer to those spaces with the symbolic and material resources to achieve a material reach that is transnational. These spaces provide enormous cultural capital to elites in the Global South but to assume that they are automatically internationalist spaces is a profoundly corrupted sense of what it means to be open to the universal. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, in the midst of a very different political sequence, For the Internationalist revolutionary, Argentina is a centre of the world as is any other country (1984: 635). But an openness to the universal exceeds an openness to the international.

Political innovation may certainly be found in New York or London, or in a salon in Johannesburg or Sao Paulo, but it is not necessarily to be found there. Theres also the square in Cairo, the backstreets of Port-au-Prince and the shacks in the hills of La Paz. Badiou is entirely correct to insist that every world is capable of producing its own truth within itself (2005: 24). Any assumption that all people do not have the same capacity to think and to be ethical, or that all places do not have the same capacity to be sites for thought and political action, is complicit with the logic of the police.

A politics may be internationalist but still be incapable of recognizing the political agency of people who fall out of its theoretical conception of where progressive political agency is located. In order for a conception of the political to be open to the universal the breadth of its vision must be as expansive as is possible on both the horizontal and vertical axes. It is necessary, to put it plainly, to understand that a conversation amidst the classes rendered dangerous by all kinds of bourgeois thought, including its dissident streams, be it in a candle lit shack in Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Port-au-Prince, or, precisely, anywhere, has the same potential as a conversation in any other space to attain to the conditions necessary for serious and penetrating political discourse. A genuine opening to the universal must understand that, although the logic of capital and states orders people and places into hierarchies, and excludes some from the count altogether, there is, beneath the names that mark all the metaphysical and theological niceties, indeed, the crackling, living fragrance of a vast and generous wholeness (Neruda, 1975: 181). There are people every-where. People think everywhere and weigh their being against nothingness, not to mention the police, everywhere and that includes the shack settlement. The emancipatory horizon, whether we call it communism or something else, needs to be open to the truths that emerge from all struggles everywhere.

Capital and states treat millions of people as waste. An emancipatory politics has to begin with the immediate recognition of the equal humanity and political capacity of all people. It must refuse to consider any group as waste on the grounds that this is both unethical and rendered entirely unreasonable by the actuality of empirical reality. If we are to follow Badious suggestion and rethink the communist hypothesis as an emancipatory horizon for today, we cannot confine the intellectual labour to the narrow spaces and political locations to which it has, thus far, been largely


Pithouse 495

(Douzinas and iek, 2010), although not entirely, kept. It needs to be opened to all the actual struggles inhabiting the actual world including, of course, those for which a standard Marxist optic is not particularly well suited as an illuminating tool. We could say that to be radical is to grasp things by the root but that for women and men the root is all women and men, without regard to how their lives conform to theory as it currently stands. A communism that is not fully open to thought amidst waste will not be a communism for all which means that it will not be a commu-nism at all.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Michael Neocosmos for thoughtful comments on the first draft of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. Stathis Kouvelakis argues that Engels presents us with an outrageously overdrawn portrait of the Irish poor that comes close to being an expression of pure and simple hatred (2003: 209).

2. Kristin Ross develops some important insights on the politics of vagabondage in her book on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (2008: 5559).

3. In this regard see Marie Huchzermeyers (2011) nuanced and important critique of Shack Dwellers International in South Africa.

4. Jared Sacks (2011) and Jonathan Payn (2011) have developed the most recent critiques in this regard.5. In South Africa this is usually mediated by the ability to speak English.6. Marie Huchzermeyer (2011: 222223) makes some reference to this set of virulent and consistently

fantastical attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo and on academics that have written about the movement on the basis of sustained day-to-day engagement over long periods of time. It is not irrelevant that these attacks, none of which are grounded in anything remotely approximating credible research, all come from people who have their roots in, or are allied to people with their roots in, a ground-breaking but nonetheless plainly authoritarian engagement with popular politics (the Concerned Citizens Forum) organized around demagogic individual charisma. In the brief life of the Concerned Citizens Forum in Durban, the most important forms of decision making were exclusively reserved for a small, unelected and unaccountable network of people who were all middle class and not one of whom was African. Buntu Siwisa (2008) deals with some of this. What we are dealing with here, as in Quadrellis example from Paris, is an active silencing of the present.

7. These feminisms are often directly complicit with neocolonial reactivations (e.g. in the World Bank, Shack Dwellers International, etc.) of the colonial idea that, in Fanons words, Lets win over the women and the rest will follow (1965: 37). As Spivak notes, the Women from the South is . . . the favoured agent-as-instrument of transnational capitals globalizing reach (1999: 201).

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Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He is the author of numerous articles on popular struggles and the city.


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