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Thought Amidst Waste

Richard Pithouse
Journal of Asian and African Studies 2012 47: 482
DOI: 10.1177/0021909612452702
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JAS47510.1177/0021909612452702Journal of Asian and African StudiesPithouse

JAAS

Article

Thought Amidst Waste

Journal of Asian and African Studies

47(5) 482497
The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0021909612452702
jas.sagepub.com

Richard Pithouse

Rhodes University, South Africa

Abstract
This paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the
urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can
be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaires terms, to the measure
of the world, a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect
of political agency, on the part of all people is to be recognized. It concludes by arguing that recent debates
about a return to a communist Idea need to be mindful of a history in which communism has been a form of
imperialism rather than a genuinely universal ideal.

Keywords
Communism, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rancire, shacks, South Africa, theory, waste

Introduction
In a recent essay Achille Mbembe (2011) argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the
interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that for the democratic project to have
any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and the
human from a history of waste (2011: para. 11, emphasis in original). He adds that the concepts
of the human, or of humanism, inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take
seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of the human as waste
(2011: para. 29). Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the
systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people but to insist that the idea of the human
needs to be delinked from what Aim Csaire (2000) called pseudo-humanism, the racialized imperial particularities masquerading as the universal. Csaire aspired to a true humanism . . . a humanism
made to the measure of the world (2000: 56) and Steve Biko (1995) envisioned a true humanity.
The idea that progress requires that some people be rendered as waste was central to the first
stirrings of liberal philosophy. Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy argue that waste is the
political other of capitalist value (2011: 1625) and show that, for John Locke, the figure of
waste comes to designate the unenclosed common, the external frontier and that its transformation into value, capitalist value, becomes the defining moment of political modernity
(2011: 1626). Unsurprisingly, when Csaire quoted a humanist French intellectual to demonstrate the howling savagery of pseudo-humanism, he chose a post-war French philosopher
Corresponding author:
Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa.
Email: indianocean77@gmail.com

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who argued that: The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of
agricultural labourers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities
among men but of widening them and making them into a law (2000: 37). Much of the modern
left, and certainly many of the various currents of thought that descend from Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, is, in the deep structure of its thought, and in spite of the nuances of Marxs
own thought particularly towards the end of his life (Anderson, 2010) organized around the
assumption that the rendering of people as waste will ultimately be redeemed as exploitation,
via the wage relation, becomes the primary mode of systemic domination and then the royal
road to emancipation. When Marxism is understood as a modernist theory the wage relation
often emerges as the fully modern mode of oppression and its transcendence as the fully modern mode of emancipation with the result that other forms of oppression, and resistance to them,
can appear as hangovers from the past, or as modern but extraneous to the central political
drama, and with limited salience to the grand struggle for an emancipatory future. At times the
Marxian critique of exploitation as the capture of productive labour and the theft of its productivity has been expanded to include forms of labour outside the wage relation, like slavery or
housework. It has also been supplemented with powerful critiques of objectification that, while
often linked to the exploitation of labour, cannot always be reduced to it racism, sexism,
homophobia and so on. And a consideration of the politics of space has been woven into the
critical vocabulary of a tradition of critique more usually concerned with the politics of time
(Sekyi-Otu, 1996). But while the left, and the radical academy, both of which aspire to be internationals of a sort, have certainly broadened their emancipatory horizons, the foundational
unease with human beings who have been rendered as waste but have not then been subject to
exploitation via the wage relation the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by
the lowest layers of the old society (Marx, 1848) a discomfort that is acutely present in some
of Marxs writings, and more so in Engels,1 has not been entirely overcome. Its mental sediment, and, indeed, a certain structure of feeling, endures. Anyone familiar with the South
African academy will be aware that it is not unusual to encounter an assumption which, while
often justified in the name of Marx and an implicit claim to a science of the political, is essentially ontological: that the urban poor, routinely described as lumpens in spaces like seminars,
are a priori incapable of emancipatory praxis and quite possibly an automatic threat to the possibilities of a progressive politics. There is, of course, also a liberal version of this hostility, a
hostility that sometimes takes the form of a Sartrean passion (Sartre, 1995) that frequently
slides into simple racism.
In Texaco, his novel about a shack settlement in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau writes of a
proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd
jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers (1998: 314).
But Texaco is also a novel of struggle, of struggle with the persistence of Sisyphus struggle
to hold a soul together in the face of relentless destruction amidst a disaster of asbestos, tin
sheets, crates, mud, tears, blood, police (1998: 354). Texaco is a novel of barricades, police and
fire, a struggle to call forth the poet in the urban planner (1998: 341), a struggle to enter
City. Its also about the need to hold on, hold on, and moor the bottom of your heart in the
sand of deep freedom (1998: 81).
The theoretical project, undertaken in and around the academy, of working towards the assertion
of a more genuinely universal humanism and a more genuinely universal emancipatory horizon
the sand of deep freedom is one thing. The political project of affirming an equal humanity
amidst relentless destruction and waste and holding to it with the persistence of Sisyphus is
another. It is not that often that they are brought together. One reason for this is that it is a common

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feature of a wide range of polities that the damned of the earth, people who may be seen as populations to be managed by the state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but who live and
work outside of the parameters established as legitimate by bourgeois society, are not welcome in
a shared agora. Indeed, it is common for their very appearance in the agora as rational-speaking
beings rather than as silent victims requesting help from their masters, or a cheering mass performing fealty to their masters, to be received as illicit as violent, criminal, fraudulent and consequent
to malevolent conspiracy even when their presence takes the form of nothing other than rational
speech. This is as common in states that aspire to liberal democracy as it is in states governed by
an authoritarian nationalism be it inflected with ideas of the right or the left. Its also equally
common when the masters in question are in the state, NGOs (across the political spectrum) or the
left understood, in Alain Badious terms, as the set of people who claim that they are the only
ones able to provide social movements with a political perspective (2006: 273). Jacques
Rancire is quite right to insist that, from the ancient world until today:
The war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics. The dispute over the count
of the poor as people, and of the people as the community, is a dispute about the existence of politics
through which politics occurs. (1999: 14)

We need to be clear that, while it is true that since Plato it has often been thought that workers
should keep to their place and function, it is also true that during the last century workers won a
political place, a subordinate place to be sure, in many societies. But there is often a significant
degree to which the urban poor, and especially people who live and work outside of the law and
civil society, are cast out of the count of who has a right to the political in a way that is far more
acute than that of a worker who lives and works within the law. This situation has often been
intensely compounded when people who have to make their lives on a path through embers have
also been raced.
Loc Wacquant describes the American ghetto and the Parisian banlieues as consequent to
regimes of sociospatial relegation and exclusionary closure (2008: 2) in which there is acute, and
deeply racialized, territorial stigmatization. Hes certainly correct. But we should recall that,
while the ghetto is often a strategy to contain the dangerous classes with which the modern state
and its civil society have often been comfortable to the degree that it succeeds in its function of
containment, both the modern state and civil society have always been acutely uncomfortable with
that part of the dangerous classes vagabonds or squatters that are, by virtue of their occupation
of space outside of state regulation, by definition out of place and threatening to domination constructed, along with other lines of force, on the ordering of space.2
In 1961 Frantz Fanon wrote that African shanty towns were seen as places of ill fame peopled
by women and men of evil repute (1976: 103). In 1976 Janice Perlman argued that, in Rio, the
myth of the marginality, the myth of the moral and political degradation of shack dwellers, was
produced by the constant attempt of those in power to blame the poor for their position because of
deviant attitudes, masking the unwillingness of the powerful to share their privilege (1976: 102).
She made it clear that the stereotypes held about the urban poor by scholars, policy-makers, leftists, rightists, and middle class liberals were strikingly similar (1976: 1). Perlman concluded that
the myth was anchored in peoples minds by roots that will remain unshaken by any theoretical
criticism (1976: 242). More recently Partha Chatterjee has argued that, in India, people, like shack
dwellers, living outside of the law are not just subject to stigmatization but are also structurally
excluded from the agora. They are, he argues, only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and
contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution. They are not, therefore, proper members of civil society and are not regarded as such by the state (2004: 38).

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The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics

Contrary to the myth of the inherent inability of the urban poor to engage in emancipatory political
practices there is, in reality, and across space and time, and as is the case with all other sociological
categories of people, a diversity of politics practised by the urban poor. This is true in both times
of crisis and under more ordinary circumstance. With regard to the former the reality is that, for
instance, some shack dwellers supported the right wing military coup in Brazil in 1964 (Perlman,
1976) and some supported elected governments of the left against attempted coups from the right
in Venezuela in 2002 (Fernandes, 2010) and Haiti in 1991 and 2004 (Hallward, 2007). In the mid
to late 1980s in South Africa, when the popular struggles against apartheid were at their height,
shack dwellers supported both state linked vigilante groups and the United Democratic Front
(Cole, 1987).
In more ordinary times there is also a wide variety of responses to life in legal and civil
limbo amidst acute material deprivation. Asef Bayat (1997) has shown that, in Tehran it has
opened up opportunities for the quiet encroachment of the poor. But it can also enable more
direct forms of confrontation with the power of state and capital. There are a number of studies illustrating this in the Latin American context (e.g. Robinson, 2008; Fernandes, 2010;
Zibechi, 2010). However, as Ananya Roy (2003) has shown in her study of Calcutta, informality can also produce systemic insecurity which can in turn result in profound dependence
on clientelist relations with political parties as people are only protected from eviction, and
are only able to access development, for as long as they continue to demonstrate loyalty to
party structures. Party political systems of clientelism and patronage are not the only forms
of local and often microlocal despotism. It is, for instance, not at all unusual for NGOs, sometimes acting in alliance with the state,3 and including NGOs on the left, to secure their turf
with very similar strategies to parties. There are also, in some cases, political authoritarianisms within community organizations that have been developed outside of party structures
(Siwisa, 2008). Communities can also come under the control of criminal networks
(Souza, 2009) or even, as with the Shiv Sena in Bombay (Hansen, 1999), popular fascist
organizations.
In contemporary South Africa the shack settlement has emerged as a central site in the wave of
popular protest that began at the turn of century and gathered real momentum since 2004 (Alexander,
2010). It has been the central site for the largest, best organized and most politically innovative
movement to have emerged to the left of the African National Congress (ANC) after apartheid
Abahlali baseMjondolo and it has also become the central site for movements such as the Landless
Peoples Movement or the Unemployed Peoples Movement, that were not founded as shack dwellers organizations. It was also the central site for the xenophobic pogroms that swept parts of the
country in 2008 (Neocosmos, 2010). The intensity of the shack settlement as a political site be it
of an assertion of equal humanity, a defence of clientelism, or xenophobic or homophobic violence
has a lot to do with material factors. But it also has something to do with the fact that to step into
the shack settlement is to step into the void. This is not because of any ontological difference
amongst the people living there, or because life there is entirely other at the level of day-to-day
sociality. It is because it is a site that is not fully inscribed within the laws and rules through which
the state governs society. Because its meaning is not entirely fixed it is an unstable element of the
situation. The unfixed way in which the shack settlement is indexed to the situation opens opportunity for a variety of challenges from above and from below, democratic and authoritarian, in the
name of the political and tradition, and from the left and the right to the official order of things.

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Limits to Orthodox Marxism

Given the reality that shack dwellers have and continue to engage in a wide variety of political
practices it is necessary to reject, with equal vigour, both Marx and Engels highly pejorative
account of the lumpen proletariat and its inverse, Mikhail Bakunins view that in them [the lumpen
proletariat], and only in them, and not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallized the
entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution (1873). Instead of making a priori
judgements about peoples intellectual and political capacities on the basis of their sociological
location, it is necessary to consider each situation, and each response to each situation, on its own
terms. Emancipatory political practices can and do occur in the shack settlement and so the question of how to think an emancipatory politics in the situation constituted by the shack settlement
requires the same consideration as that of political praxis in any other situation. To assert this is not,
as partisans of orthodox interpretations of Marxism often assume, to suggest that the prospect of a
universally redemptive exercise of historical agency has now shifted from the industrial working
class to the urban poor. It is merely to note that a wide range of modes of politics, including emancipatory politics, does exist in the shack settlement and must be taken as seriously as any other
expression of human agency. However, given the scale of informal work and land occupation in the
Global South, it does mean that there are important limits to the degree to which radical theory
developed out of engagement with the social realities of the North can illuminate modes of domination and resistance in the South.
Moreover, it is clear that forms of Marxism that continue to fetishize the male industrial worker
as the revolutionary subject and to deny the possibility of emancipatory political agency to the
lumpen proletariat offer no automatically emancipatory path for the urban poor living outside of
waged employment, be it in the ghetto or the shack settlement. It is a plain fact that Marxism,
whether wielded by states or oppositional left projects, has often been mobilized to endorse the
expulsion of the urban poor from the agora. In South Africa, Marxism and its vocabulary are frequently (although of course not inevitably) used this way, and in the form of a knee jerk reaction
rather than as part of any thoughtful consideration of particular empirical realities, in the state, the
academy and in some of the left NGOs. When Marxism is used in this way it must be considered
as the oppressive philosophy of an elitism that, while it is a dissident elitism, is an elitism nonetheless. When Marxism or other forms of putatively radical thought continue to present the urban poor
in the language of venality and depravity, as automatically criminal, violent, irrational, open to
malevolent external manipulation and so on, and representations of specific political moments or
sequences as rational and ethical as a priori false or even fraudulent, and when these claims are
made without engaging in actual or credible research on the particular case, it is absolutely necessary to dismiss them as part of what Rancire calls the logic of the police:
an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees
that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the
sayable that sees that a particular activity and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and
another as noise. (1999: 29)

We also need to be attentive to the fact that Marxism is currently being used to illuminate the
condition of the planet of slums (Davis, 2004) and wageless life (Denning, 2010) in ways that
either, like Davis, declare, in an astonishing denial of reality, that there is no politics in these spaces
or that, like Denning, share a conceptual map of the expression of popular agency that is indistinguishable from that of the World Bank which (Narayan et al., 2000) valorizes the Self-Employed
Womens Union in India as the exemplar of a politics of the formally unemployed. The inability on

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the part of influential figures in the metropolitian left to recognize popular political agency in the
Global South, let alone to recognize it on its own terms rather than seeing it through categories
derived from their own political experiences, or those of local elites that are frequently dependent
on the NGO/donor/academic nexus in the North, often appears to be consequent to a methodological flaw that has its roots in the fact that, as Giyatri Spivak puts it, the privileged inhabitant of
neo-colonial space is often bestowed a subject-position as geo-political other by the dominant radical (1999: 339). It is commonly assumed that academics and NGOs in the Global South are somehow subaltern when, as Spivak notes, The politics of global civil society and the like are
fundamentally a politics of elites (1999: 277). Peter Hallward grasps very well that NGO and
academic elites in the Global South are often horrified by popular politics conducted outside of
their control and committed to what he terms an aristocratic mode of politics that is, in a country
like Haiti, often acutely racialized (2007: 177189).
In South Africa, where there is often a similar racialization of these relations, it has long been
clear that some currents in the intersection between left NGOs and the left academy are investing
more energies in using access to donor money from the North to be able to claim to represent popular struggles to the left NGO/donor/academic nexus in the North4 rather than in working to support
popular day-to-day resistance on the ground. One result of this is that the particularity of local
struggles, including the intellectual work done in and in dialogue with these struggles, is often
masked in these encounters. Instead of enabling a conversation between equals, the representation
of local struggles is conscripted into a narrative that has attained global stature as a result of its
position in a global hierarchy rather than as a result of it attaining some measure of the struggles of
the world as a whole. This tends to function to re-inscribe the global division of labour in which
theory is produced in the North and is applied, often via the mediation of local elites, to the South.
It therefore becomes impossible to approach singular points of political subjectification as singularities, as nodes where resistance has been thought sometimes in ways that exceed the logic of
domination with the result that critique becomes a mirror of systems of domination. The problem
with this is that, as Badiou argues, The subjectivization of a singular situation cannot be reduced
to the idea that this situation is expressive of the totality (Badiou, 2002a: 329).

All People Think

In the situation where the affirmation of the mere existence of a capacity to engage in politics on
the part of those who have been denied a place in the agora requires a degree of rupture with both
the official (state) way of doing things and the official (NGO) alternatives, theres no prospect of a
sustained and ultimately effective emancipatory path through the embers without both the persistence of Sisyphus and the development of a transcendent conception of emancipation that can be
rendered imminent to actually existing emancipatory practices without being reduced to them.
Politics, conceived as an actually existing popular practice, must always be thought in a specific situation. Badiou is quite right to insist that the singularity of situations as such . . . is the
obligatory starting point of all properly human interaction (2002b: 14). One reason for this is
simply that, in Peter Hallwards precise formulation, A consequential prescription requires an
effective foothold in the situation it transforms (2005: 773). You cant, as Hallward notes, effectively oppose capitalism or globalization in the abstract but you can, certainly, take a side with
actually existing struggles the same struggles that are invariably dismissed by certain modes of
leftism as too local, too narrowly focussed, too dependent on ideas like dignity rather than a fully
elaborated conception of socialism and so on. But given that every situation is unique, dynamic,
too complex to be grasped in its entirely, and is, in so far as it contains a human

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presence, permeated by the void of human freedom, any attempt to impose ignorant platitudes
and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility (Marx, 1871) can only do
damage to the open, fluid and always partial and contingent work of thinking and constantly
rethinking a particular situation. It is equally clear that there are no ready-made utopias to introduce par dcret du peuple and that, instead, it is necessary for people to work out their own
emancipation (Marx, 1871). This point must be defended, emphatically, on an epistemological
level. But it should also be defended with equal vigour as a matter of ethical principle. A conception of emancipation that assumes a right to impose itself from above, rather than to be worked
out together, is inherently authoritarian and objectifying.
Amilcar Cabrals dictum that nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory (1966) is true enough in so far as successful political challenges to oppression
require ideas about strategy and alternatives. But it has often been deployed as an alibi for the
elite domination of popular politics with results that seldom, if ever, conform to the predictions
of the theories in the name of which such domination is imposed. A Leninist party is, Kristin
Ross argues in her profound book on May 68, a radical intelligentsia that says we have the
right to rule and that seeks to do so on the same basis, social division, in this case expressed as
a hierarchical relation between militants and the working masses . . . that is the very foundation
of the existence of the state (2002: 75). Moreover, a dogmatic adherence to pre-given theory is
often a barrier to grasping and thinking the novelty of actually existing forms of popular politics. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward observed, The movements of the people disappoint the doctrine, and so the movements are dismissed (1979: xi). Moreover, from the
Haitian Revolution to the Paris Commune to May 68, or the United Democratic Front to
Lavalas, rupture, real rupture, rupture that opens the political, and enables participation without
regard to social location, and beyond the limits of immediate material interests, has often been
thought from below more than from above. From the congregations around the mechanic
preachers in the English Revolution (Hill, 1975) to the ti legliz in contemporary Haiti (Hallward,
2007) mass mobilization has often been sustained by the creation of popular and oppositional
intellectual spaces. This can be done by seizing the forms of knowledge and modes of engagement previously monopolized by elites, as with the Welsh miners libraries in the 1930s (Rose,
2001), or by creating different forms of knowledge and modes of engagement more rooted in
extant popular practices, like the neighbourhood councils in La Paz (Zibechi, 2010), or a combination of the two.

Equality as a Starting Point

Any assumption that the task of thinking a situation is the sole preserve of a particular caste of
people, be it a self-selected political vanguard, the academic theorist, or the professional political
expert in an NGO, is a priori, inimical to the development of an emancipatory politics. We could,
following Ross reading of Rancire, declare, as an axiom, that Political emancipation means
emancipation from politics as a specialized activity (2008: 24). Taking this seriously requires,
again following Rancire, that: To pose equality as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of
progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish. Equality is a presupposition, an initial axiom, or it is nothing (Rancire, 2003: 223). Fanon makes a similar point
when he declares that: I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness (1967: 232, emphasis in original) as does Paulo Freire in his famous injunction that the
oppressed cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings (1996: 50,
emphasis in original).

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The assumption of equality as a presupposition requires a mode of engagement on the part of

the university-trained intellectual that is rooted in open-ended conversation, and conversation held
on the terrain of the oppressed and open to the possibility of mutual transformation. For Fanon the
vocation of the militant intellectual is to be present in the real movements that abolish the present
state of things to be present in the zone of occult instability where the people dwell (1976: 183),
in the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge (1976: 181) and, there, to
collaborate on the physical plane (1976: 187). He is clear that the university-trained intellectual
must avoid both the inability to carry on a two-sided discussion, to engage in genuine dialogue,
and its obverse, becoming a sort of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the
people (1976: 38). Against this, he recommends the inclusion of the intellectual in the upward
surge of the masses (1976: 38) with a view toward achieving a mutual current of enlightenment
and enrichment (1976: 143).
The assumption of equality as a presupposition also requires a mode of engagement on the part
of the university-trained intellectual that recognizes that there are multiple modes of expressing
intellectual and ethical ideas. Actually existing emancipatory political practices are often rooted, to
some degree, in what EP. Thompson called a moral economy a traditional view of social norms
and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community (1991:
271). Thompson shows that both reason and the ethical can be elaborated through the matrix of a
moral economy and, similarly, Ranajit Guha affirms that in what he calls the politics of the people
rebellion is a motivated and conscious undertaking (2009: 195). But just as a purely sociological
account of popular politics can only deny human freedom, so too does any purely anthropological
account. In every cultural matrix a diversity of views are expressed and a diversity of political
practices are developed. Popular politics is always mediated through sociological and anthropological categories, but it is never reducible to them. There is, for the same reason that there is a void
in every situation constituted, even if in part, by human beings, always an excess.
Moreover, while it is, following the Subaltern Studies project, necessary to affirm that a politics
of the people can exist outside of the categories of elite politics, including its dissident currents, it
is equally necessary to affirm, following Rose and Rancire, that the worker (or housewife, shack
dweller, etc.) may also read Plato (or Fanon, Shakespeare, etc.). Popular politics is very often, if
not invariably, thought in a way that draws from both a popular and often particular moral economy
and ideas, often international, with greater currency amongst elites. The inevitably dynamic and
often contradictory mix of ideas and norms that shape a struggle may be primarily worked out in
the collective common sense constructed in the heat of the action (Zibechi, 2010: 63) or through
spaces specifically constructed for collective deliberation, but there is always some degree of collective reflection, formal or informal, in any struggle and so no purely spasmodic account of popular political action will do. As Ral Zibechi argues, this is the point at which the road forks: we
either accept that the oppressed have their own autonomous political capacities or label their activities spontaneous; that is, politically blind, not conscious or structured, as in, unconscious and
pre-political (2010: 8485).
When popular struggles begin to attain some capacity to challenge constituted power grassroots, militants often move between popular and elite spaces.5 Those who accept pedagogic projects, formal or informal, that pose the automatic superiority of elite conceptions of politics tend to
rapidly lose popular support and often end up working for elite projects in positions where they are
supposed to function as a synecdoche, to stand in for the people structurally excluded from these
spaces in order to legitimate these spaces. But those who are able to develop a fluency in both
spheres, and to make use of ideas and practices drawn from both, as and when this is appropriate,
can generate an effective and enabling translation between popular and elite spheres of politics. It

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is also possible for the university-trained intellectual to refuse to take any position of authority over
a struggle in any space that exists outside of the struggle, be it an attempt to create a Leninist vanguard; an informal network premised on privileged access to languages of power, technology,
resources and networks; or the exercise of donor-backed NGO authority over popular struggles; or,
as is common in South Africa, an often acutely racialized synthesis of the three, and to rather seek
to participate, on the basis of equality, as a person amongst people, in popular struggle.
The anxieties produced by these transgressions, in which grassroots militants appear in elite
spaces as people with some fluency in these spaces but also as genuine representatives of popular
struggles and accountable to those struggles, and university-trained intellectuals participate in
popular struggles and elite spaces while refusing to participate in external attempts to exercise
authority over popular struggles, are often extraordinary and are often acutely present in the academy and amongst the left both of which contain currents that prefer that everyone keep to their
allotted places. This is not at all unique to South Africa. Ross (2002) brilliantly illuminates the
phenomenon with regard to May 68 in France.
The fact that people think, that all people think and that people think outside of and beyond their
allotted places in society, should be entirely tautological and therefore trivial. But the recognition
of the open door of every consciousness is so widely denied, including in the academy and the
left, that it is necessary for it to be asserted as a militant and transgressive axiom in spaces as far
apart as radical philosophy in Paris and grassroots movements in South Africa. In Paris, Emilio
Quadrelli (2007) has shown the huge gulf between speculative academic leftism, delinked from
concrete engagement and as radical as it is politically inoperative (Bosteels, 2005: 762), and the
actually existing struggles in the banlieues by the simple but effective device of juxtaposing theoretical flights of academic fantasy ungrounded in any actual experience of participation in popular
struggles with interviews with grassroots militants. In South Africa it is, as an example with equal
illuminating power, instructive to contrast the accounts of academics that have spent months or
years participating in the day-to-day activities of Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban which all,
without exception, point to deliberative practices in the movement that are democratic and ethically and intellectually serious with statements by academics that have not been present in the
movements meetings or spaces, or even interviewed people that have, and yet stridently dispute
these representations as romantic or even fraudulent on the basis of plainly prejudicial a priori
assumptions about the limited political capacities of poor African people.6 The fact that the academic and pseudo-academic policing of the right to access political space as a rational participant
with the same right to speak as all others has extended to direct complicity with specific state
attempts at de-legitimation that have been accompanied with serious violence, arrests, long periods
of detention, the destruction of peoples homes and so on is not irrelevant. It is also, as Peter
Hallward (2007) shows with regard to contemporary Haiti, not unique to South Africa.
If we agree that political emancipation means, in part, emancipation from politics as a specialized activity, then both the strictures of logic and the bitterness of experience allow no other conclusion than that there can, by definition, be no emancipatory politics without a break with that part
of the left that carries an assumption of an automatic moral right and strategic necessity to exercise
political authority over popular struggles. But while Badiou advocates for a break with the left
defined as the set of people that assume a sole right to exercise authority over popular struggles
this break with the left does not mean, not at all, a break with the emancipatory ideals of the left
which the left itself has often played a vital role in carrying across space and time. On the contrary, his proposal to reactivate the communist hypothesis as a Kantian Idea, a regulative ideal
rather than a programme, has incited considerable renewal in radical philosophy in the Global
North (Douzinas and iek, 2010; Bosteels, 2011).

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The Communist Idea

For Badiou the communist Idea is, essentially, an Idea of equality that holds out the prospect of a
society in which material and political inequality are transcended. He argues that, across space and
time, As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments
or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear (2008) and calls this repetition of aspects of the communist Idea in popular struggle the communist invariant. In Badious estimation, with experiments of fragments of truths, which are local and singular, yet universally transmittable, we can
give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism (2010: 260).
Bosteels, rejecting radical ontological investigations that tend towards spectrality, virtuality,
potentiality but not towards actuality (2011: 62), and insisting that politics must be inscribed into
an actual situation, nonetheless poses, via Garcia Linera, the idea of a communist horizon, but
stresses the necessity for a dialectic between concrete historicity and the ahistorical kernel of
emancipatory politics (2011: 278). This is perfectly compatible with a certain reading of Marx, the
Marx who wrote that:
nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles,
the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not
confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: here is the truth, kneel down before it! We
develop new principles for the world out of the worlds own principles. (1843: para. 9)

In Stathis Kouvelakis reading of Marx:

How to make criticism radical and how to make it practical are . . . inseparably linked questions, each of
which presupposes the other. Solving them requires going beyond the philosophical form of criticism,
which also means going beyond the unreflected character of practice. (2003: 325)

Theoretical insights worked out in particular situations can be used to illuminate, and sometimes with extraordinary power as with Gramscis afterlife in India, other situations across space
and time. But when these insights are reified and applied in a dogmatic manner they are far more
likely to blind us to the novelties, subtleties and possibilities of the new than to offer any illumination. A living struggle, a genuine mass struggle, always thinks a time and place. It is always what
Sbu Zikode (2009) calls a living politics a homemade politics in the hands of ordinary women
and men posing their humanity against oppression. To affirm this is to affirm the need to think each
situation in its particularity, for new generations to think their own politics and for actually existing
struggles to be the primary space for this work. But if the truths that emerge from living struggles
cannot be shared across space and time we will always, across space and time, be beginning again
and we will never attain a critical mass against global forces of domination.
There are situations that include struggles that are so clearly posing justice against injustice
and which, usually in the first flushes of their rosy dawn, there is such a clear priority given to the
ethical, that the attempt to think a situation is largely an attempt to think strategically. In these
situations there can be moments where the primary theoretical task is merely to affirm the existence of the movement, and its character and to say that communism, or whatever name one
wishes to give to an emancipatory politics, is the real movement that abolishes the present state
of things (Marx, 1845).
But movements are rooted in particular places, even when they have a transnational aspect,
while many forms of oppression have a genuinely transnational form. Moreover, emancipatory
movements are far from being an inevitable response to oppression. As Piven and Cloward note

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Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5)

only under exceptional conditions are the lower classes afforded the socially determined opportunity to press for their own class interests (1979: 7). When emancipatory movements do arise they
are repressed, they decline, pervert their course, are captured, accept the reduction of emancipation
to a concern with narrow technical issues deemed appropriate to their station and collapse. As
Sylvain Lazarus argues there is no politics in general only specific political sequences (cited in
Neocosmos, 2009: 126) which means, as Michael Neocosmos notes, that: different kinds of politics are distinguished by their historicity, in other words they have a history, they arise and then
they pass on (Neocosmos, 2009: 126). For all these reasons it is essential to place Marxs comment
about communism being the real movement in the wider context of his argument. Marx insisted
that communism as a local event will be abolished and concluded that:
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples all at once and simultaneously,
which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up
with communism . . . The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity,
can only have a world-historical existence. (1845, emphasis in original)

Local and national attempts at insurgent autonomy can make important although structurally
limited gains but they are always hemmed in and often crushed. And contrary to Marxs optimism
about a coming communism, modern moments of genuinely transnational revolt 1848, the anticolonial movements, 1968 and so on have also arisen, been absorbed, contained or repressed and
passed on. There have been world historical events but there has been no final showdown at the
O. K. Corral. In Marxs own terms communism has never existed empirically. This doesnt mean
that it is necessary to follow Lenins response to the crushing of the Paris Commune and propose
that politics be handed back to a vanguard, a party that is the organizer of a centralized, disciplined
capacity that is entirely bent on taking state power (Badiou, 2006: 264). But it does mean that
there is a need for an always developing set of ideas of emancipation that can emerge from specific
experiences of struggle and reach towards the universal so that they can connect struggles across
space and time. This means that, amongst many other things, universal ideas and principles need
to be separated from the particular modes of sociality that sustain the persistence of Sisyphus in
particular contexts at the same time as it is recognized that universal ideas and principles detached
from specific modes of sociality and particular struggles in specific situations are not a real
movement.

All People Think Everywhere

But there is another problem which is, of course, Marxs assumption (one that he would not hold
to for all of his life) that communism must be the act of the dominant peoples. Cedric Robinson
shows that, in the new world black thinkers like CLR James and WEB Du Bois:
men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival . . . were particularly troubled
by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that
Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly
assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. (1983: 313)

We could add, while marking a clear distance from the racist feminisms that demonize poor black
men and cast poor black women as their dupes, or as nobly carrying the burdens of society,7 that a
good portion of this work of survival has been carried by black women outside of waged labour and

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that this fact marks a fundamental limit of the assumption that is central to some forms of Marxist
thought, and which has often been both raced and gendered, that revolutionary agency resides
solely in the industrial working class.
In 1934 Moses Kotane argued that the Communist Party of South Africa must:
become more Africanized or Afrikanized, that the CPSA [Communist Party of South Africa] must pay
special attention to S Africa, study the conditions in this country and concretize the demands of the toiling
masses from first-hand information, that we must speak the language of the Native masses and must know
their demands. That while it must not lose its international allegiance, the Party must be Bolshevized,
become South African not only theoretically, but in reality, it should be a Party working in the interests and
for the toiling people in S Africa and not a party of a group of Europeans who are merely interested in
European affairs. (1934: para 8)

In his 1956 letter of resignation from the French Communist Party, Aim Csaire wrote that what
I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black
peoples in the services of Marxism and communism (1956, para. 32). Today the same point could
and certainly should be made to global civil society, as well as to the global justice movement, and,
indeed, certain formulations of radical theory that assume a global reach, from the perspective of
popular struggles in South Africa. It has recently been made against some of the South African
engagement with the international movement that began with occupation of Wall Street and the
South African connection with the international Climate Justice movement at the Conference of the
Parties (COP-17) in Durban (Payn, 2011; Sacks, 2011).
The line of modern communist thought that goes back to the International Working Mens
Association emerges from a specific situation in place and time and is hardly genuinely universal.
This problem is not automatically resolved by the suggestion that the Communist Idea be affirmed
as a Kantian regulative ideal. After all, as Spivak shows, The subject as such in Kant is geopolitically differentiated (1999: 27). One response to this reality, which is also true of modern liberalism, has been to assert difference. In some cases, as in Steve Bikos thought, difference is asserted
in order to be able to reject a false universalism with a view to, as noted at the outset of this paper,
eventually being able to achieve what he called a true humanity. In other cases difference is
asserted as absolute. The latter strategy tends to overlook the fact that the people who have most to
gain from a genuine humanism and a genuine universalism are the people who are most oppressed,
the people whose claim to count as people equal to all others has been subject to the most acute
denial.
Amongst university-trained intellectuals it is often assumed, perhaps in a neo-Platonic way,
that an abstract concept or principle is more universal, truer and perhaps also more beautiful
than the necessarily messier engagement with situated reality. But this fundamentally misunderstands the production of the universal. In politics, as in art, the particular is the route to the
universal. A political truth emerges from a confrontation with a particular situation. Any denial
of the particularity from which a political truth must emerge is, ultimately, a denial of the fullness of the human experience. Any presentation of human being abstracted from context runs a
clear risk of illegitimately universalizing dominant particularities. At the same time the presentation of any human experience as singular and contained rather than specific but nonetheless
communicable, a fallacy that is endemic to both colonial and postcolonial thought (Hallward,
2001), but much less so to anti-colonial thought forged in struggle, consigns that experience to
a sealed existence. We should not forget that the truths that Fanon found in the battles in the
back streets of Algiers and the mountains in rural Algeria cast their brilliance from Tehran, to
Chicago and Durban.

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If we accept some version of Badious (2005) idea that, along with the constant flux of bodies
and languages, the human world is also constituted by truths, murmurs of the indiscernible that, via
subjective affiliation, via embodied fidelity, attain sufficient force to alter the way in which the
elements of a situation are normally counted, then we must ask where such ideas come from. The
temptation to assume that spaces of metropolitan power, or spaces networked through metropolitan
power, have privileged access to insight is widespread. This is often racialized and for many university-trained intellectuals it is mediated through academic and civil society networks that are,
despite the language of justice, often frankly neocolonial and bereft of any real prospect to unite
force and reason against oppression.
In the post-colony it is still often assumed, as Fanon said of Martinique 60 years ago, that the
metropole is sacred ground on which one can be sanctified. A genuinely internationalist political
orientation is not one that is orientated to the global in so far as the global is taken to refer to those
spaces with the symbolic and material resources to achieve a material reach that is transnational.
These spaces provide enormous cultural capital to elites in the Global South but to assume that they
are automatically internationalist spaces is a profoundly corrupted sense of what it means to be
open to the universal. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, in the midst of a very different political sequence,
For the Internationalist revolutionary, Argentina is a centre of the world as is any other country
(1984: 635). But an openness to the universal exceeds an openness to the international.
Political innovation may certainly be found in New York or London, or in a salon in
Johannesburg or Sao Paulo, but it is not necessarily to be found there. Theres also the square in
Cairo, the backstreets of Port-au-Prince and the shacks in the hills of La Paz. Badiou is entirely
correct to insist that every world is capable of producing its own truth within itself (2005: 24).
Any assumption that all people do not have the same capacity to think and to be ethical, or that all
places do not have the same capacity to be sites for thought and political action, is complicit with
the logic of the police.
A politics may be internationalist but still be incapable of recognizing the political agency of
people who fall out of its theoretical conception of where progressive political agency is located.
In order for a conception of the political to be open to the universal the breadth of its vision must
be as expansive as is possible on both the horizontal and vertical axes. It is necessary, to put it
plainly, to understand that a conversation amidst the classes rendered dangerous by all kinds of
bourgeois thought, including its dissident streams, be it in a candle lit shack in Johannesburg, Sao
Paulo, Port-au-Prince, or, precisely, anywhere, has the same potential as a conversation in any
other space to attain to the conditions necessary for serious and penetrating political discourse. A
genuine opening to the universal must understand that, although the logic of capital and states
orders people and places into hierarchies, and excludes some from the count altogether, there is,
beneath the names that mark all the metaphysical and theological niceties, indeed, the crackling,
living fragrance of a vast and generous wholeness (Neruda, 1975: 181). There are people everywhere. People think everywhere and weigh their being against nothingness, not to mention the
police, everywhere and that includes the shack settlement. The emancipatory horizon, whether
we call it communism or something else, needs to be open to the truths that emerge from all
struggles everywhere.
Capital and states treat millions of people as waste. An emancipatory politics has to begin with
the immediate recognition of the equal humanity and political capacity of all people. It must refuse
to consider any group as waste on the grounds that this is both unethical and rendered entirely
unreasonable by the actuality of empirical reality. If we are to follow Badious suggestion and
rethink the communist hypothesis as an emancipatory horizon for today, we cannot confine the
intellectual labour to the narrow spaces and political locations to which it has, thus far, been largely

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(Douzinas and iek, 2010), although not entirely, kept. It needs to be opened to all the actual
struggles inhabiting the actual world including, of course, those for which a standard Marxist optic
is not particularly well suited as an illuminating tool. We could say that to be radical is to grasp
things by the root but that for women and men the root is all women and men, without regard to
how their lives conform to theory as it currently stands. A communism that is not fully open to
thought amidst waste will not be a communism for all which means that it will not be a communism at all.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Michael Neocosmos for thoughtful comments on the first draft of this paper. The usual disclaimers
apply.

Notes
1. Stathis Kouvelakis argues that Engels presents us with an outrageously overdrawn portrait of the Irish
poor that comes close to being an expression of pure and simple hatred (2003: 209).
2. Kristin Ross develops some important insights on the politics of vagabondage in her book on Rimbaud
and the Paris Commune (2008: 5559).
3. In this regard see Marie Huchzermeyers (2011) nuanced and important critique of Shack Dwellers
International in South Africa.
4. Jared Sacks (2011) and Jonathan Payn (2011) have developed the most recent critiques in this regard.
5. In South Africa this is usually mediated by the ability to speak English.
6. Marie Huchzermeyer (2011: 222223) makes some reference to this set of virulent and consistently
fantastical attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo and on academics that have written about the movement
on the basis of sustained day-to-day engagement over long periods of time. It is not irrelevant that these
attacks, none of which are grounded in anything remotely approximating credible research, all come
from people who have their roots in, or are allied to people with their roots in, a ground-breaking but
nonetheless plainly authoritarian engagement with popular politics (the Concerned Citizens Forum)
organized around demagogic individual charisma. In the brief life of the Concerned Citizens Forum in
Durban, the most important forms of decision making were exclusively reserved for a small, unelected
and unaccountable network of people who were all middle class and not one of whom was African.
Buntu Siwisa (2008) deals with some of this. What we are dealing with here, as in Quadrellis example
from Paris, is an active silencing of the present.
7. These feminisms are often directly complicit with neocolonial reactivations (e.g. in the World Bank,
Shack Dwellers International, etc.) of the colonial idea that, in Fanons words, Lets win over the
women and the rest will follow (1965: 37). As Spivak notes, the Women from the South is . . . the
favoured agent-as-instrument of transnational capitals globalizing reach (1999: 201).

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