Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
with varying degrees of political agency who exist within specific contexts (see my discussion of the work of Ranajit Guha (1992a) in chapter 3). Rancière’s notion of ‘symbolic rupture’, ‘when people start talking about things that were not supposed to be their business’, is precisely meant to capture this point.35 In any case, people in Africa, when left to their own devices, have been quite capable historically of providing solutions to their own problems, including the thinking of a politics beyond their apparent material interests.
THINKING A POLITICS OF DISINTERESTED INTEREST
It has become quite clear that there exists, at certain times in certain sites, a politics beyond interest and that this politics is the core idea behind a politics of emancipation, as emancipation is always ‘for all’ and never ‘for some’, as Badiou (2001) has put it. Such subjectivity can therefore not be understood as ‘reflective’ or ‘representative’ of any dimension of the social division of labour. It has also become clear that interest or identity politics as such are, in one way or another, always the foundation of state political subjectivity, as it is always the state that manages interests and resists emancipation precisely by denying the existence of a universal politics beyond interest. For modes of thought located within state thinking, all politics is founded on interests or identities: it is ultimately the same thing. What is required in Africa is indeed a universal Idea, as Mbembe recognises, but clearly such an Idea must be thought outside the constraints of the social and must simultaneously be able to ‘cut through’ the social, as, for it to have an emancipatory content, it must consist of a singular and objective ‘pure affirmation’ (Badiou, 2009c), independent of social referents and ‘in excess’ of them, much as Fanon (1990) showed ‘national consciousness’ to be in the 1950s in Algeria. This kind of singularity is central to such a politics and hence to its recognition. Finally, as will be shown in the following chapters, universal political singularities of emancipation have existed in the past in Africa at different times within specific historical sequences; such singularities may also exist in the present in some specific sites, which today can only be found not just beyond the state but also beyond civil society itself.
As I have noted, in the 19th century Marx recognised that the European proletariat embodied a notion of universal emancipation. Yet that proletariat, while obviously existing as a socio-economic grouping in the guise of a working class, had to be constituted politically (i.e. subjectively): it had to unify itself around the acquisition of a common consciousness of its own objective location and universal political role in society. As Marx understood it, the process of class constitution was ultimately a political process; in other words, it concerned a specific political subjectivity, a communist subjectivity in his terms. All classes had to constitute themselves politically as such and were not simply given by production relations. This process could be one of constitution only in relation to other class forces. The European bourgeoisies, for example, constituted themselves in relation to a feudal aristocracy, in relation to the working people and eventually the working class, and in relation to one another through wars. The state, and hence state politics, was central to this process of ruling-class constitution and national unification. Indeed, Marx and Engels insisted in the German Ideology (1846: 47) that, as the bourgeoisie had to constitute itself as a class through conquering state power, so must the proletariat; but after the failure of the Paris Commune their view changed and they stressed that the existing state had first to be ‘smashed’ before an alternative could be constructed (Marx and Engels, 1872: 32). These European bourgeoisies were not simply given with an already existing national character, as the African literature often repeats in order to emphasise a contrast with the African bourgeoisies, which are said to be ‘compradorial’ in nature (i.e. linked to colonial interests). There are countless instances in European history of bourgeoisies caving in to the pressures of their foreign adversaries or of ‘calling in’ these bourgeois adversaries to help in putting down popular resistance, most notoriously in 1871 with the Paris Commune itself.36 Marx’s concept of the proletariat as a political subject follows precisely from its political constitution in Europe through the workers’ movements of the 19th century (1830, 1848 and 1871).
Badiou (1985: 26–30) emphasises the fact that the singular importance of Marxism as a mode of thought does not reside in its analytical power or its ‘meta-narrative’ of history. Rather, out of all the revolutionary (i.e. emancipatory) doctrines emanating from the 19th century, Marxism was the only ideology that achieved extraordinary historical credit in the 20th; a validation which was reflected in three major areas. The first of these was the existence of a series of states which played an emblematic role as actually achieved revolutionary transformations and not simply as imagined ones. Marxism was actually lived as that subjectivity through which the oppressed (workers, peasants, national minorities, colonised, etc.) could vanquish the military might of their oppressors, if not for the first time in modern history – that honour belongs to the slaves in Saint-Domingue, as we shall see – at least for the first time in the 20th century. This resulted not only in Marxism becoming a state ideology – and in the vanguard party becoming a state-party – but also in the creation of a beacon to which popular forces all over the world could refer and by which they could be inspired. Secondly, this credit was reflected in the struggles (and wars) of national liberation, in which the ideas of the nation and the people were often fused (as in China, Algeria and Cuba) under the direction of a party and of Marxist ideological hegemony. These national liberation struggles in turn had a major ideological impact on youth struggles elsewhere, such as during May 1968 in Europe. Finally, it was reflected within the working-class movement in the West itself, where Marxism had a major ideological effect on trade unions and parties, which became a permanent feature of state politics. These three cases proved the exceptional and successful character of Marxism as an emancipatory discourse during the previous century. The crisis of Marxism was occasioned by the gradual collapse of these three referents, while the failure of socialism as well as that of national liberation to enable popular emancipation was a failure of a politics focused entirely on the state and its capture. The state in fact cannot emancipate anyone; its fundamental reason for existence is precisely to reproduce at most a continuity with the extant; it is opposed to discontinuous (i.e. real) change as such. Yet this failure has not meant the disappearance of the need to think human emancipation nor implied the end of history. The difficulty consists in identifying precisely the source of that subjective problem and in beginning to overcome it without abandoning an emancipatory politics. The thought of emancipatory politics must thus be developed from within Marxism itself and must be a politics of activism and militancy, not one focused on state power and the problematic of state capture.
In this context it is crucial to insist on the fact that political subjectivities can be analysed, explained and understood rationally as much as any objective factor can be, and that this can be done without any collapse into idealism. We must therefore have the courage to move beyond Marx’s statement in his famous 1859 Preface and to assert that the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out’ can indeed be explained rationally without reducing them to ‘the existing conflict between social productive forces and the relations of production’ (1859: 182). In fact, Badiou shows quite clearly that subjectivity itself is part of the real, and not expressive of it in a distinct domain; it is this that allows for a rational investigation of political subjectivities. As a result, Badiou argues, the core concept in an analysis of politics must be that of ‘practice’; politics therefore must be understood as a ‘thought-practice’.37 It is this that makes it real:
I do not think it pertinent to oppose idealism to materialism on the basis of the distinction between thought and the real (primacy of the first over the second for idealism, and the opposite for materialism). Because this very common conception misunderstands the fundamental (materialist) point that thought is part of the real. To define materialism in terms of the primacy of the real over thought is already to have taken an idealist position ... Materialist, dialectical thought (dialectical materialism) itself begins with the notion of practice. What does ‘practice’ mean? For me it means that the finitude of objective conditions allows for the development of an immanent exception (Badiou, 2012c, 24 October, 14 November 2012, my translation, emphasis in original).38
For