452711

2012
JAS47510.1177/0021909612452711Journal of Asian and African StudiesNeocosmos

Editorial Introduction
JAAS
Journal of Asian and African Studies

Political Subjectivity and the 47(5) 465­–481

© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
Subject of Politics: Thinking sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0021909612452711
Beyond Identity from the jas.sagepub.com

South of Africa

Michael Neocosmos
University of South Africa, South Africa

Politics must be thought as excess over both the state and civil society. (Alain Badiou, 1985: 20)

Contrary to knowledge, thought is deployed in relation to the as yet unknown. (Sylvain Lazarus, 2012: 74)

They say we have committed public violence but against which public? If we are not the public, then who
is the public and who are we? (S’bu Zikode cited Pithouse 2005: 15)

Introduction
If the idea behind the thinking of politics is to overcome the subjective and objective limits of our
current world, dominated as it is by capitalism and all its oppressive ramifications; in other words, if
the idea is to make possible a politics of emancipation in Africa, it is imperative to develop concepts
and categories which make alternatives thinkable and thereby possible. Moreover, if currently hege-
monic perspectives make it impossible to even consider the existence of politics as not simply socially
derivative but rather as capable of overcoming the social limits imposed on thinking, then it becomes
impossible to envisage alternative thought that is anything other than utopian. Yet many alternatives
proposed today by people in their daily practices are firmly grounded in reality, their lived reality.
They are frequently misunderstood or even more frequently ignored simply because they do not
appear within the horizon of thought structured by a social-scientific scientism; they are said to be
‘impossible’. Yet the whole point of an emancipatory politics is precisely to make what seems impos-
sible possible.1 This is why politics understood as practice is an art not a science, as Lenin famously
stated, with the result as Bosteels (2011: 236) notes that ‘it always entails a form of aesthetics as well’.
Some of the alternatives proposed by popular practice do indeed possess a universal character
well beyond their local origins, as we shall see in this issue. Such a universal politics always has
its roots within the singular; it is invariably located although it simultaneously transcends its loca-
tion subjectively. In fact, it both transcends its location and is invariably marked by it. It is the
object of this collection of essays to begin to demarcate a field of analysis of political practice and

Corresponding author:
Michael Neocosmos, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, Pretoria 0003, South Africa.
Email: michaelneocosmos@yahoo.com
466 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

popular militancy, to show that it is imperative in order to understand a process of political subjec-
tivization – the production of a political subject – to explain political subjectivities in their own
terms, without reducing them to external socio-historical invariants (man, state, power, economy,
history, etc.), in particular to their social place or location. The object of this introduction then is to
begin to outline the necessity for such a demarcation and analysis.

The Problem: Can Politics be Thought Beyond the Political?

The central issue of intellectual and political concern here is the absence, since the demise of classism
at a world level, of any conceptualization of emancipatory politics. By ‘classism’ I mean following
Lazarus (1996), a thought perspective which saw emancipatory politics as founded on the belief in
an already socially constituted proletariat as simultaneously a subject of history and a subject of poli-
tics. The fusion between social location or place (identified by the social sciences), political subjec-
tivity (identified by intellectuals in a party) and the process of history (which unfolds itself to a given
telos) is intellectually unsustainable today and has been historically transcended. Of course many still
cling to a dogma, especially in South Africa where a vulgarized form of classism still prevails, but
given the critiques of economic reductionism, of teleological conceptions of history and the renewed
weight ascribed to the subjective in the theoretical discourses of the past 50 years worldwide, along
with the collapse of ‘actually existing’ alternatives to capitalism into frankly criminal states and their
eventual disappearance, an adherence to dogmas (both liberal and Marxist) has lost all intellectual
foundation. Neither an abstract philosophical humanism (in Althusser’s sense) with its idealist
essence of ‘Man’, nor a materialist reference to concrete interests determined by a social division of
labour are able to provide the foundations for an adequate thinking of political subjectivities.
Yet it is difficult to orientate thought around an alternative new way of conceiving popular
emancipation. If we except from the present discussion those who juggle with the sociological term
‘working class’ in order to avoid thinking about the theoretical and political effects of real changes
in its composition,2 we are left with the distinct impression not only that Marx’s ‘productive worker’
has diminished into insignificance, but more importantly that its independent political presence has
virtually disappeared. Whereas this realization has not been a new one in Africa generally, it has
been hard to swallow in South Africa given the exceptionalism prevalent in that country which has
commonly insisted on its relatively high levels of proletarianization and industrialization, these
having been seen as crudely determinant of political consciousness, as we shall see. However,
given the simultaneous increase in social movements of the poor, shack-dwellers and landless inter
alia, in the political sphere from the 1980s and particularly from the 1990s onward, it has become
more and more difficult to simply adhere uncritically to crude classist dogmas.
The predominant effect of this crisis in thought and the perceived inadequacies of classism has
been the uncritical adoption of neo-liberal notions such as those of ‘civil society’, ‘human rights’,
‘modernity’ and ‘identity’ into radical leftist discourse. Of course this has been facilitated by what
has become known as the ‘language turn’ in social thought worldwide. The idea of ‘political identi-
ties’ has been perhaps the dominant intellectual notion here. But discourses and identities are sim-
ply reflections of the structure of interests; for Foucault, they are the structure. Studies of political
identities have become overwhelmingly dominant in the social sciences and humanities today in
the Global South in general and in Africa in particular within all disciplines. Thinkers as disparate
as Ali Mazrui, Achille Mbembe, Mahmood Mamdani, Valentin Mudimbe and Paul Zeleza (not to
mention a myriad of feminist writers) have all, in their different ways, thought African society,
state and politics in terms of identities: personal, social and political.3 One of the difficulties they
have tried to confront has been termed the ‘essentialism’ of identities which refers all thought to an
Neocosmos 467

invariant kernel or essence of the identity in question which evidently de-historicizes and natural-
izes it. Attempts have been made to overcome this difficulty with reference to the relational side of
identity – the idea that there is no ‘self’ without the ‘other’ – but unfortunately these do not over-
come the problem for relations presuppose the existence of differences and only stress their inter-
connections even though these may be given a central effectivity;4 neither does the notion of
‘hybridity’ or the recognition of a complex multiplicity of identities.5
Africans of course have been overwhelmingly analysed – by outsiders as well as by themselves
– in terms of their social location in Africa and in terms of the latter’s continental place: in ‘human
evolution’, in (colonial) history, in the world economy, in its collective culture and identity and
even in its ‘personality’ (inter alia its ‘darkness’ or its ‘blackness’).6 The study of identities has
simply become pan-disciplinary in Africa today. Displacement – the politics of excess beyond
social location and identity – has rarely provided the theoretical foundation for a history of Africans,
and yet it is surely displacement which is the truly universal phenomenon of politics and hence of
history.7 The once common statement that it is people who make history has largely been forgotten;
it is time to revive it and to insist that people think. In this context, the consequences for thinking
emancipatory politics of recent events in North Africa and the Middle East need to be urgently
drawn.8
The dominance post-1980s of a concept of ‘civil society’ provided a boost to the sociology of
social movements as well as to a left critique of African state parties as various dictatorships were
replaced by parliamentary democracies partly as a result of popular protests, partly as a result of
external pressure from the neo-liberal consensus. Throughout the continent, but in post-apartheid
South Africa in particular, there has been a dramatic increase in the study of so-called organizations
of civil society.9 Yet what is important to note as regards politics is that social movements and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) are always organized interests; in other words, as they invari-
ably represent interests of various sorts, their politics are overwhelmingly the politics of
representation with the result that their mere existence (however much they may ‘resist’, ‘protest’
or ‘critique’) provides us usually with little more than popular examples of state politics. This of
course is precisely how the Sociology of Social Movements analyses them, even in cases when
movements may have been able to invent a politics of excess over their social location.10 A universal
politics of emancipation on the other hand is not given by the existence of social movements; if it
is to exist, such a politics must step out from its limitations of interest, from its confines of place. In
Rancière’s (1995:60) terms, a process of political subjectivization, if it is to be emancipatory, must
be one of ‘dis-identification’, one of ‘tearing away from the naturalness of place’ which amounts to
the ‘opening up of a subject space’. Such subjectivisation therefore constitutes a break from iden-
tity politics which are founded upon the naturalised character of social place. Any organization
doing so ceases to be a social movement in the strict sense and transcends place while remaining
localized. We can call this process a singular process to distinguish it from the usual notion of the
particular. It overtakes its location while its politics acquires the potential to become universal (to
produce a ‘truth’ in Badiou’s terms); it thereby creates itself as a collective subject of politics.11
Another difficulty with identity studies has been precisely their inability to conceptualize poli-
tics beyond the particular with the consequence that a universal politics of emancipation, which
people are evidently clearly crying out for, remains untheorized. Identity politics, which vary from
the totally reactionary (in the case of ethnic or xenophobic politics) to the state-focussed liberalism
of multiculturalism, workerism and of currently dominant feminisms, are incapable of providing a
basis for the thinking of a politics beyond state democracy and hence beyond current configura-
tions of neo-liberal capitalism. As a result one is left with a theoretical vacuum which is desper-
ately demanding to be filled. The question crudely put is: given the exhaustion of past political
468 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

perspectives (of Marxist politics in particular) in thinking emancipation today (Badiou, 1985:
26-30), how is the latter to be thought, assuming that it is indeed to be thought, something which
is here taken for granted? The social sciences as currently constituted, given as they are to reducing
consciousness to social location or place, are subjectively constrained by their current episteme, in
Foucault’s sense of the term, and thus unable to theorize a necessary notion of excess over interest
such as the idea of dignity, for example.12
The fundamental problem of identity studies from the perspective of emancipation is that politi-
cal identities are necessarily derived from social location; they ‘represent’ such social location or
place in what is termed ‘the political’. As a result identities can only reproduce such places subjec-
tively along with their accompanying hierarchy, thereby leaving a universal notion of emancipa-
tion (equality, freedom, justice) unthought and indeed unthinkable. Simultaneously, the absence of
a thought of politics beyond identity, the inability to think a politics of excess, has also had other
problematic effects. Central to these has been precisely the inability to break free from state modes
of thought, from ‘seeing like a state’ as James Scott (1998) puts it. It is important to understand
that, irrespective of which (class or other) interests control it, regardless of the contradictions
within it and independently of the form it may take (authoritarian, democratic, colonial, postcolo-
nial, etc.), the state is and remains a set of institutions which create and reproduce differences and
hierarchies. It regulates not only the various interests founded on a social division of labour but
also manages differences so that any given situation is reproduced. The state can be politically (i.e.
subjectively) little more than a machine for creating identities as the latter are simply the subjective
representations of interests (Rancière, 2010).
State ‘politics’ then concern the representation of interests (by parties, interest groups, social
movements, NGOs) and the management of such interests thus restricting them to controllable
limits. State politics can therefore not be concerned with excess over identities, or change beyond
what exists. For state politics, all historical change is natural and objective (progress, development,
modernization, etc.) and obviously linear and teleological. For emancipatory politics, change from
the current situation can only be primarily subjective as it has to overcome place on the understand-
ing that there is no end to history or for that matter to difference. In the absence of concepts to
enable a thinking of such politics, we are invariably drawn into the politics of the state and the
tyranny of the objective so that political choices become impossible given that politics becomes
guided if not determined by the objective course of history.
What this argument also implies is that there can be no socially given subject of history (the
proletariat, the nation, the people, the multitude, etc.). There is of course a subject of politics
which, for writers like Rancière and Badiou, is always collective, but it results from a process of
conscious political self-creation or affirmation (subjectivization), as several of the articles in this
issue show; it is never given. Therefore there can be no way of filling a spontaneous immanent
Hegelian process of ‘in itself–for itself’ with other newly identified supposed subjects of history
along the lines of the ‘multitudes’ proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), for example. In fact,
such immanent potentiality denies the necessity of thinking a political process whereby people can
collectively form themselves into a political subject. Invariably this position comes back to think-
ing politics in terms of representation by parties or movements as only they possess the capacity
(through their monopoly of knowledge) to uncover the given potentiality of a situation, and thus to
drive history from potentiality to actuality. It necessarily follows, therefore, that here real change
is impossible for people cannot think for themselves. Potentiality, like truth, is produced: it is not
given in a situation just waiting to be discovered by the knowledgeable (Badiou, 2009).
Another important consequence of the above argument is that we can no longer think politics
as existing exclusively within a clearly demarcated domain, that of ‘the political’ – that is, that of
Neocosmos 469

the state and its appendages. The political or the civic or the ‘house of power’ (to use Max Weber’s
suggestive phrase) is of course said to be the domain within which conflicts of interest are
deployed, represented and managed. Politics cannot be thought of as concerning power, for to do
so is to restrict them to the state. Even more interesting perhaps for the arguments which follow
is that the discourses and practices which are to be labelled ‘political’ cannot be so labelled simply
because they explicitly deal with identifiable objects of state politics (states, nations, trade unions,
movements, citizens, NGOs, etc.). There are two points of note here. The first is that a clearly
demarcated domain of the political cannot always be assumed to exist (as in the obvious case of
African ‘traditional’ societies); a second is that the various idioms and discourses deployed by
people in affirming their politics, in presenting themselves on the ‘stage of history’, are not always
evidently ‘political’ in the sense that they may invoke ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or other forms of
language which do not count as ‘politics’ for the liberal (or Marxist) episteme. In other words, the
idea of the political, emanating as it does from liberal roots, has a clear neo-colonial content to it.
Moreover, of course, the form of the state today in Africa, as elsewhere, is one where the liberal
distinction between the public and the private has not been apparent for some time now. The
national or public interest today has largely disappeared, smothered by the (over)weight of the
private (Neocosmos, 2011b).
The overwhelming consequence of the current phase of neo-colonialism known as globalization
in the sphere of politics has been the fetish of democracy, understood in its hegemonic liberal
Western form. Yet recent popular upsurges in North Africa inter alia have shown that the popular
demand for democratization cannot simply be equated with Westernization. In post-apartheid
South Africa the democratic fetish is so overwhelming today that it has become extremely difficult
to question the equation of such state democracy with freedom itself. Yet one courageous popular
organization in particular – Abahlali baseMjondolo - has done so in practice, taking a principled
stand, as Selmeczi shows below, not to participate in elections and not to celebrate a non-existing
freedom for the poor. In fact, in that country it has been popular organizations and intellectuals
emanating from grassroots struggles, not the university variety, who have been at the forefront of
a questioning of democracy; academics have so far been overwhelmingly mesmerized by the trap-
pings of state ideology. Several of the contributors to this volume are therefore courageous excep-
tions in many respects.

Historical Continuity and Discontinuity

Central to any thinking of emancipatory politics in Africa must obviously be an assessment of
nationalist politics as well as the continuation of colonial-type politics in a different form today
long after freedom was supposedly achieved. In thinking through the reasons for this, one is invari-
ably drawn to an assessment of the emancipatory content of nationalism. Yet it is not just simply
that nationalism may have ‘failed’ in fulfilling its emancipatory promises evidenced by the obvious
continuity in state forms, culture and domination post-independence which have been sufficiently
generalized to name the period simply as ‘postcolonial’ (with or without the hyphen); to constantly
harp on the failure of nationalism under continuing neo-colonial conditions is to place oneself
politically on the side of this neo-colonialism. Of course continuities have clearly been dominant
over discontinuities at the level of state politics, but this has not been unconnected to the hegemony
of neo-liberal economics and politics worldwide, a neo-liberalism which has always assumed and
enforced the predominance of state politics over popular ones.
Premesh Lalu, in his article in this issue, reminds us that it is important then to ask, as Partha
Chatterjee (1993) had done in the context of India, why has nationalism seemed to merely replicate
470 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

the colonialism it opposed? The problematic of ‘failure’ is unhelpful in answering this question for it
shows an inability to grasp the limits of the nationalist politics of the 50s and 60s in their own terms,
within their own logic of thought. Arguably much more important in this context is the rejection of a
monolithic view of nationalism in order to distinguish between its different and often contradictory
forms and to elucidate their character and effects. The work of Lalu is crucially important here. In his
article, Lalu sees the politics of nationalism in the past in Africa as framed by both gender and gen-
erational conflicts. Governed by an affect of sadness, Lalu argues, the nationalist narrative was
obliged to evoke and utilize subalternity for its own needs and yet this process was also made visible
in artistic productions which attempted a critical response to elite nationalist narratives. The political
subjectivity thus created is illustrated in Lalu’s piece by means of aesthetic productions, more par-
ticularly the paintings of George Pemba and the more clearly anti-neo-colonial cinema of Ousmane
Sembene and Abderrahmane Sissako. Lalu is thus able to deconstruct the specific political ideology
of an elite nationalist narrative for which it transpires that a subaltern affect of sadness was constitu-
tive. Arguably though, Lalu tends to conflate a nationalist politics with its representation in narratives
which of course had themselves in the past been produced by elite intellectuals. One could indeed ask
whether the conflation of elite nationalist politics and nationalist narratives does not emanate from
the elite nature of the narratives themselves and whether it thereby does not reduce nationalism to its
elite form. Yet there is more to this process of essentializing one form of nationalist politics.
What is noteworthy in this context is that narratives sensitive to the trope of sadness have in this
instance been produced by politically committed non-subaltern artists despite the former’s creative
capacities.13 The subaltern does not speak directly here although Sembene’s beggars echo Brecht’s
in speaking truth to power. But this is not because the subaltern is bereft of speech or reason. For
in most cases, as Neocosmos makes clear in his discussion of the work of Ranajit Guha later in this
issue, subaltern political (as well as artistic) idioms have been viewed by power, particularly colo-
nial power, as apolitical and expressive of religious or traditional beliefs, for the (African) masses
are supposedly given to ignorant irrational expressions as they lack the gift of reason. The narra-
tives of subaltern nationalist politics are often hidden in the interstices of historical time. The poli-
tics of popular artistic expression are often as invisible to state thought as the expressions of popular
politics. Thus in the absence of a fundamentally political fidelity of some sort to an emancipatory
experience, the continuity of state (or in Lalu’s terms ‘elite nationalist’) politics is what makes pos-
sible the provision of a continuity in history.
Retrospectively, the change induced by emancipatory political subjectivity, however novel and
impossible it may have seemed to be in relation to its own context at the time of its enacting, as the
new situation establishes itself under the regulation of a new state form, now appears to have been
inevitable and objectively necessary. What follows then is the ironing out in historical narratives of
any and all subjective emancipatory political glitches on an otherwise smooth statist linear concep-
tion of objective change. What was a subjective process which required much thought and courage
now appears as an objective one. Of course, after Fanon in particular, it becomes much more diffi-
cult to ignore the fact that a powerful subaltern national consciousness has existed in Africa which
can in no way be equated with its statist eponym. Yet the collapsing of totally distinct forms of poli-
tics under a single name, in this instance that of ‘nationalism’, only contributes to the dominance of
state politics and the occluding of alternatives in history. Arguably the only way to avoid such occlu-
sion is to begin to think politics in history as discontinuous rather than as a continuous process.
The articles by both Hayem and Neocosmos in this issue refer at some length to the theorisation
of the discontinuity of politics developed by Sylvain Lazarus who himself is influenced by
Foucault on this point (1996: 105–108). For Lazarus, the notion of the ‘failure’ of an emancipatory
politics is untenable as it presupposes a judgement made from beyond its conceptual parameters
Neocosmos 471

and from a hindsight which fails to analyse the logic of its problematic. What he calls historical
‘modes of politics’ arise and then fade away. They are always limited in time; in other words they
are rare and sequential. They come to an end through what he calls ‘saturation’; that is, they reach
a point when they can no longer be sustained. For Lazarus, politics does not always exist; in fact,
it exists less frequently than it does not (1996: 88–95). Identifying the beginning and end of a
political sequence is thus not an easy matter. Hayem shows quite clearly that, in the factory she
studied, workers were thinking their relations with management in terms of ‘happiness’. Rather
than a simple affect, this term also referred to how they themselves expressed their work condi-
tions subjectively and how they structured their thinking around relations with management. The
sequence within which this term was deployed was a short one concerning only the immediate
post-apartheid period (1995–1998) within this particular factory. The elucidation of the various
terms around which these workers thought at the time is, Hayem shows, the work of a new kind of
anthropology. The anthropological techniques she deploys in this instance enable the identifica-
tion of a specific sequence of the subjectification of what she calls the ‘figure of the worker’ in this
particular location at that particular time (Hayem, 2008). When it comes to conceiving past politi-
cal sequences, fieldwork is no longer pertinent and other forms of investigation are necessary.
Lazarus (1996) investigates the subjectivities of a number of historical modes of emancipatory
politics in particular through the analysis of the terminology which they deployed and the catego-
ries they used.14 These are shown to be specific to that mode and to be located in a limited number
of particular sites. In this manner, then, the activists in each sequence themselves provide the raw
material for the understanding of that historical mode. Most obvious perhaps is the evident distanc-
ing of this analysis in the case of the French Revolution, form the views of Kant for whom only an
external dispassionate analysis could help to understand the politics of that time. Lazarus (1996:
224–232) insists on the contrary that this can only be done through an analysis of the writings of
the participants themselves, particularly of the work of Saint-Just.
In looking at this issue of popular political subjectivities in the context of both colonial Africa
and Asia, Neocosmos assesses below the work of historians. In Africa, that of John Lonsdale on the
Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the early 1950s and in India the more detailed theoretical arguments
of Ranajit Guha of Subaltern Studies fame. Both these authors are intent on explicating popular
political subjectivities. For Lonsdale, though, this attempt is undertaken via a notion of ‘moral
ethnicity’ which ultimately fails to allow the rebels to speak for themselves as it ties them to a
preconceived ethnic social location. In the case of Guha, it is shown that he provides the most
aware discussion of this issue while attempting all along to remain within the parameters of a his-
torical analysis which is founded on an epistemic reason which systematically disables recognition
of the specificity of subaltern thinking. Guha’s project of displaying the reason of peasant historical
rebels under colonialism reaches its limits in his adherence to a liberal demarcation of ‘the politi-
cal’ which ultimately excludes from view subjectivities which do not appear as contained within
that domain. As a result the scientistic episteme of the discipline of history, Neocosmos argues,
invariably leads to the exclusion of popular voice. As Spivak had famously noted, the subaltern
cannot speak through scientific discourse.
For Bucher, in his article below, on the other hand, it is still important to insist on the subjective
character and effects of the state politics Foucault called biopower. Through an analysis of the
events surrounding the death of Steve Biko and the hidden assumptions of medical practice, Bucher
teases out the power politics of what he calls the ‘possibility of care’. As he puts it: ‘more than the
grounds upon which a critique of repressive power starts from, the connection between expertise
and agency provide the very basis for medical power to operate’. In this sense, then, there is no
simple discontinuity between medical power under the apartheid and post-apartheid states.
472 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

Although I have insisted here that power is not the place to begin an understanding of politics, state
(and in this case its variant of disciplinary) power nevertheless exists and has to be thought from
the point of emancipatory subjectivity. Bucher’s analysis is particularly illuminating because,
rather than simply re-iterating the power of the medical profession, he is able to show how this
power not only gives force to subjectivities but that the latter can produce and transform it in dif-
ferent ways. He notes: ‘the extremely unethical conditions of apartheid could, and sometimes did,
produce an ethical sense among a small group of subjects whose actions may be worth recalling’.
The thinking of politics, although it cannot begin from power, must have the capacity to think
power from a point outside state thinking.

People Do Think in Africa

This brings us to the core of the question. The statement that ‘people think’ is the primary axiom
of the thought perspective developed here. To say that people think is to affirm that people are
capable at particular times of developing subjectivities which transcend their place in the social
hierarchy regulated by the state. The difficulty simply consists in making as much as possible
that thought visible on the one hand, and on the other in developing concepts for an understand-
ing of the politics which that thought makes possible. We have already seen with reference to
Hayem’s contribution that in fact people’s thought can be identified and analysed, but anthropol-
ogy is not inherently concerned with studying a subjectivity of displacement. Yet Hayem points
us to probably the best place to begin the discussion: workers’ political ‘consciousness’ in South
Africa.
The relationship between workers and political subjectivity, which used to be referred to as
‘class consciousness’ has a clear if convoluted history in the thought of politics in South Africa
during what was known as the ‘liberation struggle’. It should be recalled that it was never workers
as such who were said to possess any subjectivity but a supposedly coherent social and political
entity given by theory: ‘the working-class’. The category of the working class has had a pervasive
role in South African political thought going back, not surprisingly, to the early 20th century. In the
more recent past it was at the core of intellectual debates on the proletarianization of the Southern
African peasantry and migrant labour in the 1970s and 1980s as well as on the character of eman-
cipatory politics.
Quite astonishingly, in hindsight, a supposedly rapid historical proletarianization of an African
peasantry in the Southern African region as a whole along with the growth of radical trade unions
in the early 1970s were seen as sufficient reasons to assume a rapid political transition to a socialist
future (or a rapid collapse of capitalism itself in those cases when race and class were equated) with
the end of the apartheid state. An imputed socio-historical trajectory was simply transposed into a
political one. Thus Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul (1973), two of the more important left intel-
lectuals at the time, derived two conclusions from their argument that the peasantry had been
effectively proletarianized in South Africa and colonial Rhodesia. First, they asserted that there
was ‘little, if any, room for a neo-colonial solution’ in these countries (p. 87). Second, they main-
tained that ‘the revolution in South Africa and Rhodesia, if it is to come, can only be a proletarian
and a socialist revolution’ (p. 65).
These views were not restricted to academics and had the force of consensus at the time. For
both the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC) for
example, the working class was conceived as having a project which was to ensure that ‘genuine
and lasting emancipation’ (understood primarily in economic terms) was brought to the people of
South Africa:15
Neocosmos 473

This perspective of a speedy progression from formal to genuine and lasting emancipation is made more
real by the existence in our country of a large and growing working class whose class consciousness
complements national consciousness. Its political organizations and the trade unions have played a
fundamental role in shaping and advancing our revolutionary cause. (ANC, 1969: 33–34)

This statement, written for the Strategy and Tactics of the ANC at the 1969 ‘Morogoro Conference’,
has the character of wishful thinking as so-called working-class organizations were banned and
only re-emerged in 1973. But it was clear that, in ANC/SACP official thinking at the time, the sheer
weight of numbers of workers in South Africa provided in and of itself a guarantee that liberation
would not be blocked at the ‘national democratic stage’. The sociological existence of workers was
largely conflated with the existence of a working-class subject with a political project. Again in the
words of the ANC document adopted in 1969 at Morogoro, it followed that:

In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to
have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a
fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To
allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and
does not represent even the shadow of liberation. (1969: 32–33)

In fact what was inconceivable in 1969 became not only conceivable but also reality from 1990 and
this despite the fact that so-called working-class organisations (i.e. the Congress of South African
Trade Unions, COSATU in particular) were now immeasurably more powerful. The crude reduc-
tion of political potentiality to simple socio-economic class formation, along with an accompany-
ing uniform conception of nationalism, arguably contributed to this reality as politics remained
fundamentally unthought.16
As a result of seeing class as social first and political second so that consciousness is always
understood as ‘consciousness of . . .’, the problem of thinking political subjectivity becomes one of
matching the politics (the subjective) to the social (the objective), and the party which represents
the working class is (or intellectuals are) tasked with ensuring that this match is a perfect fit, or as
perfect as possible in the situation. Because what people themselves invent in their practice (inde-
pendently of the party ‘line’) no longer features in thought, what ultimately counts is exclusively
party or state ‘politics’. This follows necessarily from a concept of the working-class for which no
practice is necessary to constitute it; thus the working class does not require a concept of politics
in order to exist.17 Whatever notion of practice is referred to is external to and not constitutive of
class: first socio-economic class exists as a structural totality/unity and only then it may be deemed
to have a politics. Such views were at the core of the perspective which led to the statist smothering
of independent popular thought in post-apartheid South Africa. They are still very much in evi-
dence today; they leave little room for an investigation of what workers themselves may be think-
ing as workers are deemed to be mere bearers of their structural position in a capitalist system
dominated by neo-liberalism no more, no less.18 If they fail to manifest such a class identity they
will be put right by those in the know.
As workers formed their own independent unions in the early 1970s in South Africa, academic
research followed close behind and led to the creation of a specifically South African discipline of
the Sociology of Work. Then, as unions gradually became depoliticized throughout the late 1980s
and early 1990s as they entered into corporatist arrangements with the state, the same discipline
concentrated its gaze on the structural constraints on workers’ lives to the exclusion of their own
political subjectivities. It generally saw little need to investigate what workers themselves thought
as their identity was assumed to be determined by wage-labour. With the decline of the importance
474 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

of classic wage-labour in post apartheid South Africa, recent attempts have emerged which chal-
lenge the dominance of structural studies of the labour process, changing legislation, corporatist
institutions and the altered character of unions. One case has been the work of Franco Barchiesi,
another has been that of Judith Hayem as I have already noted. Both make a concerted attempt to
take what workers themselves actually have to say seriously.
Barchiesi has recently argued that work became the ‘normative premise of virtuous citizenship’
during the post-apartheid period. He points out that, in the narratives of workers he interviewed

images of decent work . . . are deeply linked with ideas of family respectability, strict gendered division of
household tasks, masculine power and national purity, where ‘disrespectful’, crime-prone youth are kept
out of the streets and under control, women are confined to domesticity, reproductive care, and migrants
don’t ‘steal’ national jobs. (Barchiesi, 2011a).

He points out that wage work is not for workers in post-apartheid South Africa the central feature
of their identity, many preferring to see themselves in different terms. He notes that ‘subaltern
demands for decommodification, or dignified lives independent from employment status and mar-
ket relations, were . . . marginalized’ so that in what he calls ‘the politics of melancholia . . . expec-
tations of an ideal order centred on respectable work question the current social status of
employment’ (Barchiesi, 2011b: 231, 255).
Of course, with the collapse of formal employment as ‘post-Fordist’ forms of ‘flexible accumu-
lation’ entered neo-liberal South Africa with their emphasis on subcontracting from ‘labour bro-
kers’ and on increased precariousness and informality, massive poverty ensued reaching half of the
population, while unemployment hovered around the 20–30% depending on how it was calculated.
Under such conditions, of course, traditional productivist theories lose much of their relevance and
it is no longer ‘subjectivity at the point of production’ which is politically determinant, as Marx had
shown it was in the 19th century and as social democracy had stressed during the 20th. In South
Africa, government discourse adamantly maintains the false assumption that unemployment is the
main source of poverty, despite the obvious fact that large numbers of employed people are also
poor (p. 255).

While the imagination of the welfare state contained a certain glorified idea of work as creating citizens
. . . South Africa’s precarious liberation, instead, emphasizes work as the tool individuals wield in their
daily battle against a naturalized vulnerability. The experiment is, however, constantly unstable; precarious
employment and commodified reproduction reinforce each other in making jobs intolerable by exposing
them not just to the violence of the workplace, but to the urgency of social necessities. (p. 211)

For Barchiesi then, the identity of workers, rather than revolving around the centrality of wage-
labour, is now much more amorphous and obviously more typical of a postmodern world. Although
not necessarily a full proponent of Hardt and Negri’s idea of the ‘multitudes’ as the new subject of
history, it is nevertheless very much within a neo-Foucauldian (Deleuze-Guattari/Hardt-Negri/
Agamben) perspective that Barchiesi’s arguments unfold. Workers have identities which reflect
their objective location in South Africa’s postmodern society and express political frustrations in
response to them. Their frustrations are termed ‘political’ because they concern power or the lack
of it. This perspective ultimately fails to consider that workers can actually think beyond the limits
of their complex social locations; whether in favour of ‘formal’ wage-labour or whether in favour
of ‘informal’ ‘income-generating activities’, there is little difference in the manner consciousness
is conceived; the determinant of political subjectivity for Barchiesi is ultimately only structural.
Neocosmos 475

As I have had occasion to note, these limitations are consciously transcended in Hayem’s work.
Hayem’s question is: what do workers think when they think? The answer is never pre-determined
by their structural location in changing socio-economic relations and idioms of accumulation.
Rather, it is the workers’ own logic of their relations with management which is uncovered in
workers’ own language, in the terms which they themselves use. No generalizable claims are made.
Rather, it is a specific methodology which is deployed here through which workers are allowed to
speak and think for themselves. In this manner their subjectivity is shown not to be a simple reflec-
tion of structural conditions and relations. Hayem’s argument is that such subjectivities cannot be
apprehended through a classist perspective and that consequently the latter misses an important
dimension of workers’ thinking. The subjectivity she uncovers is not in itself a political one in the
sense developed here, although Hayem insists that workers expressed principles which could have
led to political thinking. Rather, it is simply what the workers at that time in that place thought and
how they viewed their relations with management. It reveals them as thinking beings and as pro-
ducers of a particular variety of what Hayem calls, following Lazarus, the ‘figure of the worker’.
These workers’ thinking, the terms and names they used, guided their actions in relation to man-
agement during a short sequence. Hayem’s discussion is thus crucially important as it details how
people’s thought can be made intelligible beyond its reduction to the socially objective.
For Pithouse in his article in this issue, it is no longer among the working-class as such that an
alternative politics is to be sought today in South Africa, but among the inhabitants of the informal
city settlements, the shack-dwellers traditionally dismissed in Marxist theory as a mere lumpen-
proletariat; hence his emphasis on a Fanonian conception of the colonial city. It is not that shack-
dwellers replace the proletariat as the new subject of history but, rather, that given current conditions
of capital accumulation and their effects, it is among the vast mass of ‘informal’ city dwellers,
including rural and foreign migrants, that new forms of resistance have been developing. It is there-
fore totally counterproductive to simply adhere dogmatically to workerist conceptions. Not only
are these inappropriate but they are ‘a priorist’, meaning that they do not allow for the possibility
that people themselves are perfectly capable of thinking through their own predicaments as well as
of developing a politics to transcend them. Against both the left in South Africa as well as against
those I have termed ‘Neo-Foucauldians’, Pithouse insists that located politics cannot be deduced
from any general theory. In Badiou’s terms:

In order to treat a local situation in its political terms, that is, in its subjective terms, something more is
needed than an understanding of the local derived from the general analysis. The subjectivization of a
singular situation cannot be reduced to the idea that this situation is expressive of the totality. (Alain
Badiou, interview with P. Hallward and B. Bosteels in Bosteels, 2011: 329)

People’s consciousness must therefore not be forced into a priori theoretical paradigms, but it is
stressed that it must be understood in its own terms. If emancipation is to again become the object
of thought, it is from this premise and this premise alone that we must begin our thinking of politi-
cal practice. Fanon’s understanding of the centrality of practice in politics which insists on entering
‘the zone of occult instability where the people dwell’ (Fanon, 1990: 183) is therefore fundamental
to thinking political subjectivity in the neo-colonial world. In politics one can only begin from
what people think and do and never from a preconceived general theory; at its inception, any uni-
versal politics of emancipation is always a singular local process.
Fanon’s thought is particularly relevant in the current African context not only because he
develops a critique of the postcolonial state, but also and more importantly because he is the only
African theorist who enables us to think a non-identitarian nationalism, a crucially important
476 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

conception in present times. This is because Fanon is not interested in understanding the nation in
terms of its supposed social basis in indigeneity but purely as a political affirmation in which
people move beyond their ‘spontaneous’ consciousness structured by their ethnic identity founded
on indigeneity (Neocosmos, 2011a). In the current evidently neo-colonial context where the
thought of politics is dominated by Western prejudices, it is only on that basis that a consistent anti-
imperialist pan-Africanism can be constructed, one that is for all and not only for so-called natives.

Living Politics versus Biopolitics

If people can think politically in Africa, what in fact are they thinking? Does a singular emancipa-
tory form of thought exist anywhere? If so how is that politics to be understood and, in particular,
how is it related to affect (‘happiness’ in the case studied by Hayem, ‘sadness’ for Lalu, ‘suffering’
for Selmeczi)? Sartre maintained that ‘philosophers must be angry, and in this world, stay angry’
(Gerassi, 2009: 178); is an affect of anger therefore sufficient for the development of a politics? To
believe so would be far too simplistic. Affect may be a necessary catalyst but it is no way sufficient
for the development of a politics. Selmeczi in her article below is clear that the suffering experi-
enced by the poor in South Africa cannot of itself account for the sophisticated political thought of
Abahlali baseMjondolo. The experience of suffering is arguably more likely to lead to passivity
and victimhood and to thinking these within Agamben’s statist neo-Foucauldian conception of
‘biopolitics’ or the mere administration of life by power (Agamben, 1998). Abahlali today are,
among many other things, a concrete example inter alia of the rejection of victimhood; but they
illustrate much more than that. They show that it is possible for people to think ‘beyond their sta-
tion in life’, beyond their suffering, beyond the ‘lethal segmentation of the urban order’ as Selmeczi
puts it below.
She argues that, in fact, the ‘freedom inscribed in foundational documents’ of newly formed
democratic states, such as that in South Africa, clearly appears as a supplement (she calls it ‘excess’)
in the real lives of poor people. She continues:

It only emerges as such once the order of the audible and the visible is disturbed by the appearance of a
subject that does not fit the account of the order . . . because it makes visible what was supposed to be
tossed out of sight and communicates what was supposed to be inscrutable, thus demonstrating that, in
fact, it has capacities that it was not supposed to have.

The influence of Rancière’s thinking is apparent here as for him politics only begins to exist when
those who are not supposed to think show in fact that they can by stepping out of place, or, as
Badiou puts it, when the ‘inexistent’ begin to exist.19 A political subject here is not given by capital-
ism, by postmodernity, by postcoloniality or by anything else; rather, it emerges as a result of a
process of what Salmeczi calls ‘subjectivization’ which in the case of Abahlali was the result of an
event20 (a road blockade organized to protest against the betrayal of a promise by power), of an
affirmation of their humanity vis-à-vis the unjustness of their suffering, and of a detailed critique
of the state’s conception of freedom. But this only constitutes the beginning of a genuine politics.
Subjectivization must be sustained. Such a process requires an organization and a theory. Abahlali
indeed construct an organization and develop such a theory in their idea of ‘living politics’. Central
to living politics is a rejection of representation, whether by the state, parties or NGOs and an
insistence on what Salmeczi terms a ‘politics of proximity’ to the experience of living in shacks.
Their insistence to the government and NGOs in particular that they should ‘talk to us and not for
us’, their refusal to be involved in the corporatist politics of ‘stakeholders’ where independence is
Neocosmos 477

equally compromised, their democratic decision-making processes and their refusal to vote for
politicians who only consider them as election fodder, all together combine to produce an indepen-
dent politics which is often beyond state comprehension as it consciously eschews and resists any
notion of representation; rather, it is a politics which stands firm on principles.

Our politics starts by recognizing the humanity of every human being. We decided that we will no
longer be good boys and girls that quietly wait for our humanity to be finally recognized one day. Voting
has not worked for us . . . Our politics is about carefully working things out together, moving forward
together . . . We do not allow the state to keep us quiet in the name of a future revolution that does not
come. We do not allow the NGOs to keep us quiet in the name of a future socialism that they can’t build.
We take our place as people who count the same as everyone else. Sometimes we take that place in the
streets with tear gas and the rubber bullets. Sometimes we take that place in the courts. Sometimes we
take it on the radio. Tonight we take it here. Our politics starts from the places we have taken. We call it
a living politics because it comes from the people and stays with the people. It is ours and it is part of
our lives. (Zikode, 2008)

In this sense then it should be apparent that, in refusing representation, Abahlali are far from
constituting a simple social movement which would reflect particular interests so that, ultimately,
their demand for land and housing ends up being a secondary issue; it is not a demand or a pro-
gramme which constitutes a politics but its daily practice and its principles expressed in statements.
Abahlali’s politics have a universal content because they have exceeded their allotted place in
society. It is precisely this universal character which not only makes Abahlali an organization
whose struggle resonates in many parts of the world, but which also turns into a major problem for
the state which always sees itself as possessing the monopoly of the universal. Given that the South
African state is representing the nation less and less (Neocosmos, 2011b), the statements put out by
Abahlali on questions of citizenship, for example, resonate far beyond their immediate location
such as when they reacted to the May 2008 xenophobic pogroms by stating publically in connec-
tion with the term ‘illegal immigrant’ constantly blurted out by the state and all its agents: ‘An
action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person wherever they may find
themselves’ (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2008: 1). Such public utterances ensure that Abahlali capture
and remain consistently on the moral high ground despite constant attempts to vilify them verbally
and to attack them physically.21 This statement’s simplicity, truth and clarity are incontrovertible.
It was the only political statement in the true sense of the term uttered at the time because it was
able precisely to express a truth evident to all. It is arguably by thinking along these lines that
Lalu’s project of ‘loosening the grip of biopolitics on African subjectivity’ may be fundamentally
enabled.

Conclusion
It should be apparent that the thought of emancipatory politics is marked both by location (place)
as well as by its transcendence of this location, in other words this means that subjective political
excess is always an excess over something extant. For example one can see that the idea of free-
dom held by the African slaves of Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 was one marked by the fact
of slavery; the very alternatives in which freedom was thought were marked by their prior location
within a relation of slavery22. The ideas of freedom expressed by workers in the 19th century and
those of the colonised in the 20th, despite the fact that each contained a universal idea of equality,
were clearly also informed by the structural locations of those who developed them: workers and
colonised. There exists therefore a dialectic of knowledge and thought contained within the very
478 Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

notion of subjective ‘excess’ itself as the latter is always an ‘excess over something’, that ‘some-
thing’ being the situation - itself a combination of structures and knowledges (hegemonic, subju-
gated or anything in between) – within which emancipatory political thinking sees the light of day.
Of course if resistance to oppression remains within the confines of interests and identities, there
is strictly speaking no thought present, only a more or less accurate knowledge of the situation;
there is no real politics, only the defence of those interests and the expression of those identities.
As Lazarus points out in the statement at the head of this introduction, thought must be clearly
orientated towards the ‘as yet unknown’. It is thus not simply a matter of a ‘critique’ here. Critique
can end up very well reproducing the oppressive relations of capitalism as has been shown by a
number of feminisms. It is rather a matter of learning that political choices based on principles are
always available and drawing the consequences of this understanding for thought and action. In
reaching this understanding, we need to insist that any emancipatory thought must learn from those
politics that are currently practiced by people.
It is clear that the contributors to this special issue are not thinking in unison. Considerable dif-
ferences prevail between authors, and in some cases these are quite fundamental. Yet what they do
have in common is a commitment to a thought perspective which maintains that political subjec-
tivities are worthy of analysis in a manner that does not simply equate them with identities and
reduce them to interests and which consequently attempts to understand them in their own terms.
The continued dialogue between the various positions developed here is what will contribute to the
demarcation of a field of study. Without such a field of study in the humanities and social sciences,
we are left prisoners of what I have called above the ‘tyranny of the objective’ where political
choices are not thinkable so that we are left to believe that we are impotent to transform the world
we live in. After the enthusiasm of the first wave of independence and the genuinely transforma-
tive popular impulses of the 1980s, Africans have been left without concepts and categories with
which to think emancipation. It is with a modest endeavour to rectify this theoretical lack that this
special issue has been concerned.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Judith Hayem and Peter Hallward for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes
  1. ‘The possibility of the impossible is the foundation of politics’ (Badiou, 1985: 78).
  2. This procedure is particularly true of much of the left in South Africa which exhibits a strong atheoretical
streak while maintaining some nominal allegiance to a crude economistic version of classical Marxism.
From this perspective the category ‘working class’ is left unconceptualized with the result that it can be
applied to almost any group one wishes to affirm depending on the circumstances. As Pithouse shows
below, the term is counterposed to the ‘lumpen proletariat’ but without any rigorous theoretical justifica-
tion other than gestural reference to Marx as if the situation in 19th century European capitalism was of
the same order as that in the semi-periphery in the 21st century.
  3. References are too numerous to cite here. It will suffice to note the scholarly work on social movements
emanating from the democratic struggles of the 1980s on the continent such as Mamdani and Wamba-
dia-Wamba, 1995; Ake, 2003; Chole and Ibrahim, 1995.
  4. It may be worth recalling here in the context of class identities that, considered as a political subject, the
‘other’ of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie but the state and the whole political edifice of capital-
ism. This was, it will be remembered, the core of Lenin’s argument in What is to be Done (1978).
  5. Again the list is a long one but one can refer to the works of Appiah, Mbembe, Mudimbe and so on.
  6. The idea of ‘African personality’ has been associated with Senghor. In this regard it is interesting to
peruse the collection of nationalist writings edited in the mid 1970s by Mutiso and Rohio (1975).
Neocosmos 479

  7. One such attempt constrained by a classist framework was provided by Temu and Swai (1981).
  8. This process has begun: see especially Badiou (2011b). See also Neocosmos (2011b).
  9. The extensive rise of social movements of ‘civil society’ in South Africa has, in Gillian Hart’s (2010: 90)
accurate words, ‘pulled masses of researchers along in their wake’ much as the rise of independent trade
unions in the early 1970s had done to a previous generation of academics. These researchers have not
been concerned with understanding people’s own political thought but with what they see a priori as peo-
ple’s responses to various dimensions of their structural poverty and to neo-liberal economic policies. As
people are poor it follows for this logic that their protests must be demanding government provisioning
or ‘delivery’ in South African state parlance. For a recent example of this thinking see Alexander (2010).
10. This was particularly the case with the student and workers’ movements of May ‘68; see Ross (2002).
11. See Badiou (2009, 2011b, as well as 2011–2012).
12. The notion of dignity was central to the popular upsurge in Tunisia in late 2010; see Khiari (2011).
13. In particular see Rancière (1989) which details subaltern humanistic production which is deemed to be
beyond their capacity. Incidentally it is noteworthy that African art is regularly reduced in European eyes
to wood carving, dancing in grass skirts and drumming. It is rarely recognized that Africans produce
novelists, painters and philosophers like everyone else.
14. For details see the discussion in Neocosmos (2009b).
15. This kind of perspective was dominant among all national liberation movements at the time; see, eg., De
Braganca and Wallerstein (1982). It was part of a world historical sequence dominant in the 20th century
for which emancipation was understood in statist terms. See Neocosmos (2009a).
16. The debate between ‘workerists’ and ‘populists’ in 1980s South Africa was at its core a debate over the
character of ‘working class politics’ particularly in its relationship to ‘nationalist politics’. Not only were
forms of politics essentialized but their essences were obviously social; both sides agreed that the issue in
contention concerned the nature of the link between social class and politics, between the objective and
the subjective. For an account of the debate see in particular various issues of the South African Labour
Bulletin from 1985 to 1987.
17. The importance of political subjectivity (for him founded in culture) in the formation of a working class
was of course the central concern of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1968).
18. There are few analyses of production relations in South Africa today where presumably a working class
would be located; what dominate are structural analyses of poverty. The absurdity of referring to the
working-class as an incipient political unity today in South Africa is apparent in the fact that some of its
imputed members see other members of the same class as a threat to their existence and hence engage
in (xenophobic) violence in order to apparently resolve their problem. The prevalence of xenophobic
politics among the ‘working class’ can only be understood politically and unfortunately not in terms of
poverty or inequality (Neocosmos, 2010, 2011b). See also Neocosmos (2012).
19. See Badiou (2011b); and also his current Séminaire (2011–2012).
20. In Badiou’s sense: ‘An event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of myriad new possibilities,
none of which is a repetition of the already known’ (2011a); also Badiou (2011–2012: 18).
21. For the details of the 2009 attack on Abahlali at Kennedy Road, Durban see Kerry Chance (2010) as well
as the article by Selmeczi below. It is arguably the universal content of their politics which was one of
the reasons for the violence unleashed against them in 2009, for any universal politics directly challenges
the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly of universality.
22. See Fick (1992); for the ex-slaves in Haiti, freedom meant independent peasant production.

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Michael Neocosmos is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and
Honorary Professor in Global Movements, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of
From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. He
is working on a book entitled Thinking Freedom in Africa.