Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
from Part 1 - Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Without … freedom [to make political choices] we cannot say that people make their own history; we can merely contemplate the forms of their constraint.
– Peter Hallward, ‘The Politics of Prescription’, 2005The possibility of the impossible is the foundation of politics.
– Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 1985Dare to think, dare to speak, dare to act!
– Mao Zedong, 1958AGENCY AND THE STATE
The loss of emancipatory content in the politics associated with socialism and national liberation, as well as their subsequent collapse into state politics, is by now well known; in fact, this outcome has been so common that it seems to have the status of a ‘law of repetition’, as Achille Mbembe has put it in relation to his reading of Fanon. Today salvation is sometimes sought in social movements of an undifferentiated ‘multitude’ (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001; Amin and Sridhar, 2002; Bond, 2004), or in the exercise of citizenship rights by disparate sectors of the population making claims on the state for economic, social or political resources and entitlements. I debate human rights discourse at length in chapter 14 and argue there that it cannot form the basis of an emancipatory politics; here I am more concerned to address issues surrounding the notions of ‘civil society’, ‘social movement’ and ‘citizenship’, the key concepts for thinking popular politics in the current sequence, in which consensus is governed by liberal thought, and to suggest alternatives to existing forms of conceptualising political emancipation. I will argue that in thinking emancipatory politics, these cannot be reduced to mere agency; the point is not simply to demarcate an ‘active’ citizenship from a ‘passive’ one (although that splitting may provide in actual practice the basis for a thought of politics), but rather to think beyond the constraints of ‘citizenship’ itself, which denotes only one particular contemporary form of the relationship between the state and its people in Africa.
Critical approaches to neo-liberalism in Africa have overwhelmingly concentrated on analysing the problems, both theoretical and empirical, of its economic arguments and policies. There are numerous texts and scholarly works criticising structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the ideology, practices and perspectives of the international financial institutions (IFIs), the disastrous effects of neo-liberal economic policies on Africa, and the inability of states to control their national economies and rethink development.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 189 - 221Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016