Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
democratic practice and democratic theory is to be popular it must not only come to terms with the class principle ... It must also come to terms with the rights of political minorities in Africa’, whether those of ethnicities, women or youth. But the authors were correct in an empirical sense only. They overlooked the fact that the working class in the Marxist tradition was not only conceived of as a socio-economic category with particularistic interests beloved of sociologists; they forgot that it had also been theorised politically as a universal subject of history, that in its political form the proletariat was seen by the classics of Marxism as the only social force capable of emancipating humanity as a whole. The political struggles of the workers were thus not only deemed to be self-liberatory but also understood to provide the foundation for the liberation of the whole people – the ‘uprooting’ of the class system as such – precisely because, as Rancière (1995) has put it, the proletariat was in 19th-century Europe ‘the part of no part’, the collectivity which, because of its exclusion from politics, could only emancipate itself by destroying the whole capitalist system and hence emancipating humanity in the process.12
None of the other identities added onto that of the working class by (largely postmodernist) social analysis (e.g. women’s movements, ethnic and religious movements, youth movements and environmentalism) have ever been said to fulfil in themselves the same universal function.13 However oppressed the groups they represented may have been, and however radical their struggles, these have not generally gone beyond the right to be included in the existing ‘capitalo-parliamentary’ system, as Badiou (2009d) has termed it, the existing framework of power relations from which they had hitherto been excluded. If these identities or movements ever acquired an anti-capitalist character, it has largely been due to their incorporating more universalistic ideologies – such as nationalism or socialism, for example – external to their particular identity politics during periods of mass emancipatory upsurge, such as in urban South Africa in the 1980s.
Thus, the adding of ‘new identities’ and ‘new’ social movements to ‘old’ class identities and movements could not replace the ‘classist’ politics of the Marxist tradition with any alternative emancipatory vision; it amounted to a purely additive empiricist observation bereft of any theory other than the assertion of the inclusion of all into an existing democratic state to be ‘radicalised’ by the Left (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). At best we were provided with the liberal idea according to which ‘respect for or tolerance of the Other’ within a ‘multicultural society’ (the South African version became known as the ‘rainbow nation’) could pretend to be the norm. Unfortunately, such ‘respect for the Other’, it soon became noticeable, meant tolerance only of those others who agreed with one’s own idea of tolerance, not of ‘intolerant cultures’ or those deemed to be ‘outsiders’ (Badiou, 2001). Such an incoherent idea could only provide the foundation for a hypocritical, unprincipled politics (Žižek, 1999, 2008). Yet the roots of this idea are arguably to be found, as I shall show throughout this book, in the deeply ingrained depoliticising effects of social analysis, a fact which we have great reticence in admitting or even recognising today, as we take such effects for granted.
CAN EMANCIPATORY POLITICS BE THOUGHT IN AFRICA TODAY?
An emancipatory political subjectivity or consciousness can only exist ‘in excess’ of social relations and of the social division of labour; otherwise, any change from the extant cannot possibly be the object of thought. Such a politics cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘expression’ of existing social groupings, their divisions and hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character which ‘interrupts’ the reproduction of the regular, the habitual, politics can only be sought within the social itself and ends up being simply conflated with ‘the political’, with the state and its ‘political society’. Badiou himself enjoins us to think politics ‘as excess over both the state and civil society’ (1985: 20), for ‘dialectical thought does not begin from the rule but from the exception’ (p. 90, my translation), from the interruption of repetition, of habit; and to understand that a truly ‘political process is not an expression, a singular expression, of the objective reality but it is in some sense separated from this reality. The political process is not a process of expression, but a process of separation’ (Badiou, 2005d: 2). Yet, Badiou argues, this process is more accurately grasped as an exception, as mere separation can be equated with an intervention from beyond the political situation (such as divine intervention, colonial domination or economic growth). ‘It is very important to distinguish separation from ... an exception. An exception remains internal to the situation (made of legal, regular and structural data). It is an immanent point of transcendence, a point which, from within a general immanence, functions as if it were exterior to the situation’ (Badiou, 2013f, 16 January 2013, my translation, emphasis in original).
It is this point of exception which I have called ‘excessive’ here.14 Emancipatory politics therefore can ultimately only exist to some degree ‘in excess’ of both state and civil society, the domain of the organised form of that social division of labour, as I shall show throughout this book. Another way of making the same point is to insist that emancipatory politics are ‘dis-interested’ – in other words, that they eschew narrow interests in favour of a ‘disinterested interest’ or universal interest beyond social interests and identities – and are founded on principles that have been collectively agreed upon. In fact, a notion of excess is arguably present in Marx’s conception of the political consciousness of ‘communist proletarians’ referred to in the Communist Manifesto, as ‘they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 62). In other words, whereas Marx maintained that it was indeed ‘social being’ that determined ‘social consciousness’, this process was not mechanically or universally applicable; some were able to embody an ‘excess’ in consciousness over their social being in order to think beyond it. Such people were communists, who could imagine another world and understand the contradictions of capitalism that gave rise to it.
Does the fact that we can no longer seriously maintain that there is a socially given subject of history of whatever kind (whether the working class, the people, the masses, the nation or the multitude) mean that all emancipatory political thought must be simply discarded? Does the extinction worldwide of the idea of an emancipatory working-class politics (in other words, of ‘classism’) mean the disappearance of emancipatory thought today? Is the view that people make history dead? These questions clearly seem to be answered in the affirmative in recent thinking about the solutions proposed to political crises on the African continent by Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe, two of Africa’s best-known radical public intellectuals, whose work emanates from quite distinct intellectual and theoretical traditions, but who, in the past, had been very much concerned with the thinking of history from the perspective of a popular political subject. In both cases the idea of popularly founded solutions, which was central to African radical thought in the second half of the 20th century, has been abandoned. The solutions proposed to us today are invariably state-focused, with no emancipatory content whatsoever. While Fanon (1990: 159), for example, stressed again and again that the people he refers to as ‘honest intellectuals’ can only come to the conclusion that ‘everything depends on [the masses]’ and that ‘the magic hands [of the demiurge] are finally only the hands of the people’, radical intellectuals today have discarded the central tenet of any emancipatory politics, which is to ‘have confidence in the masses’, in whatever way this may be understood, and replaced it by a deep-seated ‘demophobia’.15
In one of his recent books, on the Darfur crisis in the Sudan, Mamdani (2009) rightly attacks the human rights discourse and politics of Western humanitarian solutions to the African crisis as necessarily providing a neo-colonial response to Africa’s problems which hides an agenda of recolonisation. Yet his solution, although located in Africa, is to appeal to the African Union (AU), that vulgar simulacrum of pan-African unity, to resolve the problems of Sudan and, by extension, those of the continent as a whole, as it evidently has no direct interest in specific conflicts and can insist on political reconciliation. But the AU has not been able to overcome the problems of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in that it is