Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
becomes guided, if not determined, by the objective course of history.
What this argument also implies is that there can be no subject of history (the proletariat, the nation, the multitudes, etc.). There is, of course, a subject of politics which for writers like Rancière and Badiou is always collective, but this subject results from a process of conscious political self-creation or affirmation – a process of subjectivation. Therefore, there can be no way of filling a spontaneous immanent Hegelian process of ‘in itself–for itself’ with other newly invented subjects of history, along the lines of the ‘multitudes’ proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), for example. In fact, such an immanent transfiguration denies the necessity of thinking a political process whereby people can think for themselves and collectively constitute themselves as a political subject; invariably this comes down to thinking politics in terms of representation by parties or movements and to asserting that real change is impossible, for people cannot think independently of representation. Unlike the concept of ‘the people’, which is a purely political concept, the idea of the multitudes for Rancière (2015: 92) ‘emphasizes that politics is not a separate sphere of existence but instead that which expresses the multiple as the Law of being’. Politics in this understanding simply expresses or represents the social.
Another important consequence of the argument above is that we can no longer think politics as existing exclusively within a clearly demarcated domain, that of ‘the political’, i.e. that of the state and its appendages. The political or the civic or the ‘house of power’ – to use Max Weber’s suggestive phrase (1970b: 194) – 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 that follow is that the discourses and practices which are to be labelled ‘political’ cannot be so labelled simply because they deal explicitly 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 ‘traditional society’ in Africa; the 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 linguistic tropes, 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 in which 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 globalisation – in the sphere of politics has been the fetishisation of democracy, understood in its hegemonic liberal Western state form. Yet recent popular upsurges in North Africa have shown that the popular demand for democratisation cannot simply be equated with Westernisation. 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 organisation in particular – Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers’ movement based in Durban – has done so in practice, taking a principled stand (at least between 2005 and 2014) not to participate in elections and not to celebrate a non-existing freedom for the poor. In fact, in this country it has been popular organisations and intellectuals emanating from grassroots struggles, not the university variety, who have been at the forefront of the questioning of democracy; academics have so far been overwhelmingly mesmerised by the trappings of state ideology.
It is indeed quite demoralising to see the extent to which intellectuals today are simply cut off from those sites in which ordinary people – particularly those living in informal shack settlements, the most ‘lumpen’ according to Mbembe (2010b) – are themselves attempting to find solutions because, after all, they are the first to suffer the consequences of the crises that intellectuals analyse from their positions of relative comfort. The work of the people of Abahlali baseMjondolo, for example, who are intellectuals in their own right, has gone in some ways much further in assessing the crisis of the African continent than that of many professional academics.32 What seems to underlie the thinking of intellectuals today in Africa is fundamentally a ‘fear of the masses’, what Rancière (2005) refers to as ‘demophobia’, which blocks any attempt at understanding the existing world through the evacuation of politics from thought, and which consequently makes it impossible to begin to think an alternative politics in the present. On the other hand, the ‘masses’ themselves are quite capable of thought. As Abahlali affirmed in response to xenophobic violence in 2008:
There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves ... We hear that the political analysts are saying that the poor must be educated about xenophobia. Always the solution is to ‘educate the poor’. When we get cholera we must be educated about washing our hands when in fact we need clean water. When we get burnt we must be educated about fire when in fact we need electricity. This is just a way of blaming the poor for our suffering. We want land and housing in the cities, we want to go to university, we want water and electricity – we don’t want to be educated to be good at surviving poverty on our own ... It is time to ask serious questions about why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation. In South Africa some of us are moved out of the cities to rural human dumping grounds called relocation sites while others are moved all the way out of the country. Some of us are taken to transit camps and some of us are taken to Lindela.33 The destinations might be different but it is the same kind of oppression. Let us all educate ourselves on these questions so that we can all take action (Abahlali, 2008).
Here is a statement from poor people from the shacks which is clear in its politics of equality; the Idea of universal equality is evidently their central concern and the statement is not concerned with ‘interest’ or ‘identity’, both of which are clearly exceeded. It is apparent, as Lazarus (2013: 115, my translation) insists, that ‘the subjective power of people is a thought and not a simple reflection of their social or material conditions’. The importance of making politics thinkable, then, must be to make appropriate concepts available in order to understand people’s thought of politics and to begin to think emancipatory and exceptional political subjectivities along with them. There is unfortunately nothing in the proposals of either Mamdani or Mbembe to cause one to question the fundamental necessity of rethinking emancipatory politics on the continent. Neither is there anything to suggest that popularly founded solutions are irrelevant simply because earlier emancipatory experiments have tragically failed (Badiou, 2009d). One needs to start by proposing the basic axiom that must form the point of departure of any such reassertion, namely that, as Abahlali show in the extract above, people are capable of thought and that therefore we need to rekindle fidelity to the old slogan of ‘confidence in the masses’, which should never be abandoned. The issue here does not concern an ‘empty signifier’ or a blind faith in whatever poor people choose to do, but a simple statement of fact. No emancipatory project founded on liberty, equality, dignity and justice for all can possibly be brought to fruition without genuine political agency by people themselves. That itself should be self-evident. Moreover, political emancipation can only be a universal project, not one restricted to certain strata, classes, races or groups, and thought and undertaken by leaders in power with or without popular support.34
Of course, this necessarily implies that the contradictions and frequent opposition between intellectual and manual labour, leaders and led, inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself, be addressed. In particular it should be stressed that, contrary to the dominant conception of theory in social and human science, people who resist oppression politically are not simply bearers of their social location (class, gender,