Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
and in political practice, it is fundamental to begin from an understanding of what people who are struggling against oppression actually say themselves, and not to assume that a recourse to scientism – collapsing reason into power-knowledge – can substitute for thought. The second is the Congolese scholar and activist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, who introduced me to the writings of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, with whom he had worked and who, he said, were thinking politics not as politicians but as militant activists. The result, he insisted, was that through using their work, one could begin to think new concepts and categories for a different political practice in Africa, which did not revolve around the taking of state power and the endless repetition of a politics of authoritarian statism. I have followed his advice. Given my personal experience of popular struggles for emancipation in South Africa in the 1980s and of their rapid deterioration into state politics, I was precisely in search of a way of overcoming this problem intellectually without collapsing into a crude notion of ‘betrayal of the revolution’ by a ‘petty bourgeoisie in search of state avenues for accumulation’. After all, ideas of ‘people’s power’ and ‘workers’ control’ seem to have penetrated mass popular consciousness in the 1980s in South Africa, and I was ideologically unprepared – like many others – for the rapidity with which such popular subjectivities were excluded and replaced by the crass corruption of what is sometimes known as ‘pork-barrel politics’.
This book is the result of this intellectual search. Its writing has been a long process. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, it has been in the making on and off for just under 20 years. The title, Thinking Freedom in Africa, is purposely designed to refer to a discussion of how ‘ordinary’ Africans themselves have thought freedom along with all its contradictions, as well as of how we can begin to think freedom in Africa in the 21st century in a ‘post-classist’ period, so to speak – when even most of those who call themselves Marxists no longer see the working class as the universal subject of history anyway, but merely use the notion as an abstract justification for their statist politics of self-appointed representation. What can be called ‘classism’ is now exhausted as a way of thinking emancipatory politics, yet in the 20th century it made crucially important contributions to thinking human emancipation, as it was able to defeat capitalist power across significant portions of the globe. However, at the same time, it proved unable to construct a sustainable viable alternative. Those who are committed to an emancipatory future cannot continue as before: for ‘all repetition dis-courages ... Courage is never the courage to recommence as before’ (Badiou, 2007: 98–9).
The subtitle, Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, is meant to convey the idea that the purpose of the book is not to propose a full-blown theory – not least because such a theory is largely contingent and always developed through practice – but rather to attempt to open up conceptual space in order to contribute towards making an emancipatory future thinkable in Africa again. As the reader will soon notice, the book’s foundational axiom – following upon the seminal work of Sylvain Lazarus – is that ‘people think’. In the absence of this point of departure the academic investigator or the political activist inevitably puts himself or herself in the position of trustee, interpreter or spokesperson for others who are located within what may be called a ‘subaltern’ position in society. The powerful simply speak on behalf of the powerless; a politics of representation becomes dominant and naturalised. Yet it is imperative to do away with such a notion of politics if human emancipation is to become again the object of thought, as a politics of representation is, ultimately, simply a politics of silencing. A politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is invariably concerned with presentation rather than with representation. When the South African shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, or ‘People of the Shacks’, insist that activists and politicians speak ‘to’ them rather than ‘for’ them, they are underlining precisely such a politics of self-presentation.
This book has been written from within the Marxist tradition, but, as the reader will note, it is constantly in a critical debate with Marxist orthodoxy. The fundamental problems with Marxism are not to be found, to my mind, in its political economy even though that political economy may at times be Eurocentric. After all, if, as Marx insists, the period of modern capitalism dates from the discovery and colonisation of the Americas and ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (1867: 712), then colonialism, genocide and racism must be thought of as central to capitalism itself; consequently, the production process and hence, to a certain extent, the industrial working class must be shifted from its often unique position of privilege in our understanding of capitalism. Forms of colonial domination are as important as forms of labour exploitation for the reproduction of the capitalist system, yet the latter forms have been seen as primary and the former as somewhat secondary in what is usually referred to as Western Marxism. As a result, politics was thought of as secondary to and derivative of economics. Beyond the West, in the colonial world, it was not quite so easy to ignore the question of politics, because colonial capitalism was so evidently contingent on the deployment of violence and the systematic dehumanisation and extermination of colonised peoples. As C.L.R. James (2001) was one of the first to note, it was in the New World that colonial capitalism acquired its clearest expression and, hence, where its political roots were most obvious. Whereas in Europe it was the industrial factory that epitomised capitalism, in colonial capitalism in the Caribbean it was the slave plantation. Given the centrality of politics in colonial capitalist development, ‘economism’ has had greater difficulty in establishing theoretical roots in Marxist thought outside the West.
Nevertheless, despite their limitations, Marxist political-economic analyses remain crucially important in broad terms for an understanding of the differing forms of accumulation and exploitation in the world, including Africa today. The problems with Marxism are to be found elsewhere, in the political statism consequent upon thinking politics simply as a representation of interests made apparent precisely by political economy. The result has been that this political economy could easily remain, and did in fact become in post-independence Africa, a ‘doctrine of state’. In other words, there is nothing in political economy, whether Marxist or otherwise, which enables us to think an emancipatory political practice beyond interest; and in consequence Marxist politics have remained, along with liberal politics, overwhelmingly statist in their practice. The problems which Marxism faces are therefore not to be found so much in its structuralism, but in its failure to think of an egalitarian emancipatory political practice as an exceptional occurrence located within existing relations.
A similar point could be made with regard to the discipline of history (along with other social sciences), which tends to conflate the crucial understanding that it is people who make history with an ex post facto analysis that imposes a necessary, objective, causal pattern on time. Although both political economy and history are central to understanding the social world we live in, they are currently limited by their inability to provide an understanding of the unpredictable exceptions during which political subjectivities are able to exceed a reflection or representation of the social, simply because all humans are reasoning beings. Indeed, as currently constituted, these disciplines efface an understanding of politics precisely because that excessive reason is asocial and consequently remains unthinkable. It remains unthinkable because it is fully understandable only as a subjective upsurge in the present and not as a structured necessity ex post facto, after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s well-known metaphor. We can no longer, to use Jacques Rancière’s (2012) terms, understand this exception – the foundation of emancipatory thought – within a logic of causal necessity, but only as an unpredictable aleatory event.
According to Sylvain Lazarus (2013), such subjectivities can indeed be rationally studied, as people – anyone – can imagine alternative possibilities (he talks of ‘possibles’) when they think beyond the limits established by social place or identity. Of course, people do not always think ‘out of place’ or ‘out of order’. But when they do, they illuminate the present in a manner that cannot be thought by the categories deployed by historians and sociologists. There is no need to collapse into vulgar psychological or moralistic accounts to begin to think popular subjectivities independently of their social foundation; to do so is to naturalise them, whereas the point is to foreground the existence and necessity of political choices. The central concern, then, is to oppose a politics of activism and militancy to a politics