Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today

by Michael Neocosmos

Abstract
The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This paper makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. The political passivity produced by neo-liberal thought must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, the paper outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’ and political ‘prescriptions’. It then suggests that it is possible to identify a National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics as a subjectivity which dominated on the continent from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The main characteristics of this NLS mode of politics are outlined. However, this manner of thinking emancipatory politics has now come to an end, so that emancipation has to be thought differently today on the African continent. The argument then makes the point that the period 1984-86 in South Africa (re-) discovered the beginnings of a new mode of politics, which in several important ways contradicted the core features of the NLS mode. In particular this was a politics which did not see its object as the seizure of power, but as the transformation of the lived experience of power. The paper ends by comparing the politics of two current post-apartheid South African social movements - the Treatment Action Campaign and the Abahlali baseMjondolo. It shows that, despite appearances, it is the former which has operated within the domain of the state politics of civil society, and the latter which operates beyond those subjective limits. Hence it is the latter which shows the closest fidelity to the event of 1984-86, and which is thus the closest thing today, at least in South Africa, to being the bearer of an experience and thought of emancipatory politics.

Today the great majority of people do not have a name; the only name available is “excluded”, which is the name of those who do not have a name. Today the great majority of humanity counts for nothing. And philosophy has no other legitimate aim than to help find the new names that will bring into existence the unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are waiting for it.
- Alain Badiou

The possibility of the impossible is the foundation of politics (Alain Badiou). To say that politics is of the order of thought is an attempt to conceive of politics after the end of classism and within another space than that of the state; but first and foremost, it is to say that politics is not given in the space of an object, be it that of the ‘state’ or that of ‘revolution’ [...] The enterprise of conceiving politics from elsewhere than from the state or from the economy is an enterprise of freedom and of a domain proper to decision.
- Sylvain Lazarus

We think. People must understand that we think.
-Abahlali baseMjondolo activist

1. Introduction
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 SAPs, the ideology of the IFIs, the disastrous effects of neo-liberal economic policies on Africa, and the inability of states to control their national economies and rethink development. Much less has been said about the neo-liberal politics which necessary accompany the
economics of neo-liberalism, apart from a few rare critical commentaries on the notion of ‘civil society’ and the state . This relative lack of attention to neo-liberal politics has had the unfortunate effect of restricting the development of an alternative popular-democratic discourse. Liberal conceptions of ‘human rights’, political parties, civil society, the equating of politics with the state, the unproblematic notion of ‘the rule of law’ and especially formalistic political practices have regularly been taken over uncritically in left-radical discourse, which is simultaneously attempting to develop alternatives to economic neo-liberalism. For example, one often hears the view expressed that economic neo-liberalism may be a disaster for most of humanity, but fortunately human rights enable the mobilisation of alternative popular forces around ‘third generation rights’ such as the ‘right to development’. The unfortunate tendency has been to proliferate the number of human rights to be included in international conventions as if somehow this will legitimise people’s struggles for an emancipatory future. An accompanying tendency has been a failure to subject state politics to a thoroughgoing critique, and hence to revert by default to setting up the statist politics of a social democratic type as an alternative to neo-liberalism, simply as a result of the latter’s familiarity, despite the obvious failure of social democracy in creating the conditions for human emancipation in Europe and elsewhere. Much more work needs to be done on thinking politics as emancipatory if a serious alternative to current hegemonic neoliberalism (what Francophones refer to as “la pensée unique”) is to be gradually constructed both in theory and in practice.

In order to contribute to this project, this work attempts to help us think politics beyond the state. It begins from the axiom that politics is always plural and that different politics concern fundamentally different prescriptions. In so doing it attempts to do two things: first to think citizenship as an active citizenship, and in particular to contribute to the thinking of political agency on the African continent under conditions where the old emancipatory modes of politics - those associated with Socialist Revolutions, National Liberation Struggles and Developmentalism - are defunct; second to think the ‘politics of the possible’, ie. the idea that - in addition to an analysis of the existing, of the world as it is, it is also possible, indeed imperative, to develop an understanding of the possibility, of understanding the thought of a different future in this existing present - of the ‘could be’ in the ‘what is’. As we shall see, it is this activity which must be understood as a prescriptive subjectivity (Lazarus, 1996, 2001).

The collapse of the modes of politics associated with socialism and national liberation into state politics, and thereby the loss of their emancipatory content, is well known. Today salvation is sometimes sought in social movements (eg. Hardt and Negri 2001, Amin and Sridhar, 2002, Bond, 2004), hence 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 have debated human rights discourse at length elsewhere and have argued that it cannot form the basis of an emancipatory politics (Neocosmos, 2006b, 2007); here I am more interested in addressing issues surrounding the notions of ‘civil society’, ‘social movement’ and ‘emancipatory politics’ and in suggesting alternatives to existing forms of conceptualising political agency. The purpose of this paper is thus to open up conceptual space. I propose to do this by showing how currently hegemonic ways of thinking alternative politics within these terms remain limited to state conceptions, and how removing oneself from state subjectivity requires a reconceptualisation of citizenship as active citizenship, as well as an understanding of emancipatory politics as prescriptive politics. I shall first elucidate the kind of politics which the names or the ideas of ‘civil society’ and ‘social movement’ tend to assume, I will then attempt a brief outline of some of the views of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus in particular, who provide an alternative way of conceiving emancipatory politics, and will sketch how their ideas can be applied to an understanding of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics and its contestation in South Africa in the 1980s. I will argue here that the period 1984-86 witnessed an ‘event’ in Badiou’s terms, in the sense that it became impossible, after that event, to think emancipation in a statist manner on the continent. I will end with two short case studies, assessing the existence of different modes of politics in two different social movements in South Africa during the post-apartheid period, one within the realm of civil society, and another maintaining itself firmly on the margins of civil society. I will suggest that it is in the latter, that a fidelity to the event of 1984-86 is clearly apparent. Throughout the argument, the examples of the struggle for liberation and post-apartheid politics in South Africa are considered within an African context, as illustrative of and not exceptional to the African experience. The case of South Africa is, after all, probably the most consistently politically neo-liberal of the African countries, at least it is so in the eyes of Empire, as the latter regularly sets
it up as a model for the continent. The contradictions of political neo-liberalism in that case therefore probably appear more clearly there than they do elsewhere.

2. “State = Political Society + Civil Society” (Gramsci, 1971: 263).
Perhaps the best way to initiate a discussion of the term ‘civil society’ and what it names, is not so much through a return to a discussion of liberal theory, but rather to examine a typical example of the way in which the term is conceived today in Africa. What does ‘civil society’ name today? The answer is that the term names a domain of politics, and more specifically a domain of state politics within society. One of the fundamental features of democracy for neo-liberal theory is a ‘vibrant’ civil society which can help keep democracy afloat (Gibbon, 1996). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was trade unions which organised workers at the point of production, which constituted the typical civil society organisation which could create and maintain democratic norms (Rueshemeyer et al.1992). Today it is doubtful that trade unions can continue to play this role given the different forms of capital accumulation which, particularly, but not exclusively in the South, assume large numbers of unemployed, subcontracting, casualisation, increased insecurity and so on. In this sense, political organisation at the point of production and particularly its expression by productivist theories gradually lose much of their earlier centrality and power. In South Africa (with a 43-45% unemployment rate), one recent argument (Buhlungu, 2004) has been the suggestion that the trade union movement - which in the 1980s was at the vanguard of popular struggles against the apartheid state, and which was instrumental in the winning of liberal democratic rights - has today lost much of its ‘vibrancy’ with the de-politicization consequent on liberal-democratization. In the post-apartheid period it is ‘new social movements’ or more broadly organisations ‘of’ civil society which are now seen by many as the bearers of an emancipatory future. How have these organisations fared in the post-apartheid period?

This question is dealt with by Habib (2004). We are told that relations between state and ‘civil society’ have taken three distinct forms in post-apartheid South Africa - marginalisation, engagement and adversarialism - and that this plurality of relations is good for liberal democracy and governance (op.cit.: 239). Here the liberal notion of pluralism is extended by Habib from its usual meaning referring to a plurality of organisations, to a plurality of relations with the state. Yet this argument fails to go beyond its neo-liberal assumptions to show the possibility of alternatives. Political liberalism is the best form of democracy for Habib precisely because of its plurality of sate civil society relations. His concern is thus to “celebrate(s)” (p 228) pluralism, and he concentrates on this rather than on analysing it.

Let me briefly subject this celebration to critical scrutiny. The problems begin with the manner Habib understands civil society. This he sees as “the organized expression of various interests and values operating in the triangular space between the family state and market” (p 228)2. It should be noted, despite attempts to anchor this in classical writings, that this is not a definition which corresponds to that of Hegel (or indeed to that of any of his predecessors), to which it only bears a superficial resemblance, although it is fully in tune with current neo-liberal thinking. For Hegel and the classics of political philosophy the term “civil society” referred to the ‘triangular space itself, to a realm of activity (hence the term “society”) in which such organisations operate, rather than to those organised interests themselves.

Of course, to provide a definition which does not conform to that of the classics is not a sin, yet there is an important theoretical reason for referring to civil society as a realm of social and political activity. This is simply because many organisations in society are regularly excluded or exclude themselves from it. To visualise civil society as a realm of activity enables an understanding of inclusion and exclusion, which an equating of civil society with organised interests themselves cannot. Those outside civil society are often not legitimate state interlocutors, those within are.

The neo-liberal position espoused by Habib fails to recognise this, as it understands civil society as the organisations themselves, organisations which are simply legally defined as outside the state and business (“non-profit” in the case of South Africa, see Swilling and Russell, 2002). This makes it difficult if not impossible to understand the relations between organisations of society and the state. Is the Boeremag3 part of civil society?

Obviously not because it is not a recognised organisation whose politics are legitimate in the eyes of the state. In sum, the sphere of activity known as ‘civil’ society must be understood as limited by what the state sees as legitimate political activity and legitimate organising. This is why for neo-liberal theory there can be no civil society outside liberal democracy (eg. under authoritarian state systems such as colonialism or indeed apartheid). Of course no “revolutionary” organisation (however understood) could possibly form part of civil society as it would have as its political goal the overthrow of the state. Civil society therefore regularly excludes many popular organisations from its sphere of activity. If the state does not legally recognise the existence of an organisation it cannot possibly form part of civil society. In South Africa, the state party, the ANC itself, distinguishes today between “genuinely representative organisations” and those which are not (ANC, 1996). The latter are obviously not legitimate in its eyes. In the 1980s, the UDF and other organisations fighting for liberation did so outside civil society and only became part of civil society after 1990 when their legitimacy among the people was recognised by the state. ‘Civil’ society today is then it seems, simply society as viewed from the perspective of the state, the organised interests of society it sees fit to deal with. Any organisation challenging the monopoly of state politics - state universality - is therefore bound to be excluded. This becomes apparent in Habib’s classification.

Habib’s classification of civil society types is governed by their relationship to the state, from “accommodationist” to “adversarial”. The first group, as he accurately observes, is “sub-contracted” by the state to fulfill various of its functions. However he is not sensitive to the irony of referring to such organisations NGOs when they are not only funded by government, but operate on the basis of the same subjectivity and technicism, and in fact undertake state functions (Swilling and Russell, 2002). These so-called NGOs are more aptly termed ‘parastatals’. Of course one is entitled to question the whole idea of an ‘independent’ civil society in this instance, as the distinction between such NGOs and state institutions is simply a legal one, a state distinction.

The second group referred to as ‘adversarialist’, is also conceived in relation to the state, as its defining feature is its antagonism to the latter. This group includes particularly the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). We are told little regarding the politics of such organisations and no comment is made as to why the only two alternatives vis-a-vis the state should be adversarial or accommodation. If indeed this is so, it may tell us something regarding the character of the ‘public sphere’, where creeping authoritarianism and the intolerance of disagreement seem more and more to have become the order of the day so that one is forced either into total subservience or opposition to the state. Nevertheless, Habib points to an important feature of the state by noting that his third group consists of “survivalist responses of poor and marginalised people who have no alternative but to organise in the face of a retreating state that refuses to meet its socio-economic obligations to its citizenry” (p.236-7). Yet one wonders the extent to which these groups are not systematically excluded from civil society altogether by their very political marginalisation (and also by Habib’s own definitions as many engage in economic activities) let alone by their ‘informal’ character.

More important however is the foreclosure in Habib’s work of any possible alternative classification of civil society organisations, for example one which would not use the state as its reference point. If we admit that liberal democracy is not the only form of democracy, and that many popular organisations practice alternative popular forms of democracy, then why not classify such organisations in terms of the extent to which their vision of society, forms of operation and concrete demands may be democratic in ways which go beyond the limits of neo-liberalism?

A much more useful typology could have been based on a distinction between statist/managerialist organisations on the one hand and popular-democratic ones on the other, as it would enable the recognition and analysis of popular-democratic sites of politics beyond the state. Perhaps the ruling ANC is right in maintaining, as it has on many occasions, that ‘confrontational’ organisations and social movements are indeed often unrepresentative and ‘ultra-leftist’, maybe their politics are indeed authoritarian, but maybe they are not. If a genuine left-democratic alternative is to be developed, it is surely here in sites of popular politics that it is likely to be found, whether in civil society or indeed outside of it. These sites need to be investigated critically, but Habib’s typology disables such a possibility. Ashwin Desai’s and others’ enthusiasm for so-called “social movements” of “the poors” should not be taken at face value, without a critical investigation into the extent and character of the political alternatives proposed (see Desai, 2002). After all just because an organisation or movement is opposed to the state, does not make it either democratic or ‘progressive’ (despite the possible justice of its demands). Its politics may simply be concerned with incorporation into the existing system, and/or with providing a simple mirror image of state politics, and not with transformation in a popular-democratic direction. Unfortunately however, Habib’s liberalism forecloses the asking of such questions; his ends up being a highly conservative perspective.

Civil society must be understood as a realm of socio-political activity - of political subjectivity - in which contestation takes place between different political positions, but which ultimately constitutes the limits, structured by the state, of a consensual state domain of politics; ‘civil society’ is in fact the state ‘in’ society. Politics can and does exist also beyond the limits of civil society, beyond the confines of the state consensus.

Theoretical justification for this view can be briefly outlined as follows. Broadly speaking, ‘civil society’ has been introduced into our post-socialist world and emphasised by the ‘Washington consensus’ on political neo-liberalism as a way of increasing inclusiveness, so that popular participation in politics could be broadened beyond activity in political parties, to include within the ambit of power, organised interests, many of which may be genuinely popular-democratic in character. Civil society is said to be made up of organised interests, but it is more accurately understood as the political domain where citizenship rights are apparently realised through the forming of such interest groups.

The popular movements in Eastern Europe and in the Third World of the 1980s lie at the root of this redirection which has had as one of its effects on the African continent, an insistence on a ‘vibrant’ civil society to ensure pluralism. Another effect has been the reconfiguration of the OAU into the AU, the latter making provision for ‘good governance’ - usually equated with administrative efficiency and a good media image - and civil society participation in the continental body. Civil society is thus political agency in society as seen from the vantage point of the state (Beckman, 1992; Gibbon, 1996).

Civil society for neo-liberalism, is said to be the expression of ‘organised interests’, between the market and the state. Civil society in the literature is usually equated with NGOs, but this excludes organisations which operate at the margins of legality or which may be totally ‘informal’. It also excludes politics outside a domain formally recognised by the state. Civil society is better understood then as a domain of politics over which the state attempts to exercise its hegemony (Neocosmos, 2004a). This attempt is often successful (otherwise civil society is said not to exist) despite the possible contradictions between government and specific NGOs. It is in civil society that citizenship rights are said to be realised, however these are to be realised in a manner which keeps them firmly away from any (emancipatory) politics which question the liberal state itself as they take place within the framework of human rights discourse (Neocosmos, 2006b).

However, it is important to stress the fact that civil society is not the only realm of politics outside the confines of the state, and moreover it is possible to suggest that civil society in Africa today forms a realm of politics which is dominated by the state itself. To put the point simply, the politics of civil society are predominantly state politics, for it is the state which ultimately pronounces on the legitimacy of the organisations ‘of’ civil society and of their manner of operation.

From the perspective of a democratic emancipatory project, the state should not be allowed to dictate whether popular organisations are legitimate or not, and neither can intellectual inquiry allow itself to narrow the concept to adhere to state prescriptions; only people themselves should be entitled to bestow such legitimacy. In this sense South Africa for example, can be said to have had an extremely powerful and 'vibrant', as well as politicised, set of popular organisations in the 1980s but these never formed a ‘civil society’, and were not described as such at the time because of their quasi-illegal nature and their illegitimacy in the eyes of the state. In fact, it was precisely the political distance of these organisations from the state, the fact that they had exited the state domain of politics and operated beyond the (obviously restricted) civil society of the time, which accounts for the ‘vibrancy’ of such popular organisations in the South African townships of the 1980s (Neocosmos, 1998, 1999). Conversely, it can also be pointed out that the neo-liberal conception of civil society, also implies recognition by civil society organisations of the legitimacy of the state and of the hegemony of its mode of politics.

Popular organisations which reject this mode cannot be said to be part of civil society. For such a viewpoint therefore, these same opposition organisations in South Africa in the 1980s (UDF, Civics, Youth and Women’s organisations etc), which were fighting the apartheid state as such and which were thereby constantly testing the limits of legality (their activities were often wholly illegal), could not be rigorously said to form a ‘civil society’. Indeed they only were described in such terms in the 1990s, when the state had no option but to recognise their legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

For neo-liberalism therefore civil society exists solely under conditions of mutual recognition between it and the state, only under liberal democracy where the liberal mode of politics is consensual. Thus it is this mutual recognition which defines the parameters of the state consensus and is itself the result of struggle. Moreover it is the state which retains the monopoly of national universality. Civil society organisations can be tolerated but only if they represent particularistic interests. Any claims to such universality, in other words if a popular organisation is said to represent ‘the people’s interests’ or ‘the national interest’, would mean that it is liable to be seen by the state as a threat to the latter’s monopoly of universality. A state ‘national’ consensus is structured within a state domain of politics comprising the political relations between the state and its institutions on the one hand, and the ‘official’ or ‘formal’ civil society of citizens on the other. A state political subjectivity is thus usually hegemonic within civil society. Other forms of politics are excluded because visualised as beyond the political consensus (eg. they are ‘ultra-leftist’, ‘terrorist’, do not ‘follow channels’, etc.) and can thus be de-legitimised in state discourse. These organisations and politics therefore exist outside or beyond the limits (at best at the margins) of civil society. Because of such partiality therefore, ‘civil society’ cannot be conflated with ‘organised society’ as the term necessarily implies some form of exclusion. The distinction between liberal democracy and say colonial/apartheid forms of authoritarianism can be said to concern inter alia the extent and forms taken by such exclusion, not the absence of exclusion as such.

‘Civil society’ has achieved popularity in a context in which it is apparent that political parties have distanced themselves from society and have become frankly state institutions. A worldwide trend, which has not excluded Africa, is apparent in which parties are more and more bereft of politics, and rather simple vehicles for circulating elites around state positions (Neocosmos, 2007). On the other hand, research shows overwhelmingly that NGOs are sociologically staffed by middle-class professionals for whom they provide vehicles for employment and social entrepreneurship; they substitute (sub-contract) for state functions; they are overwhelmingly funded by the state or by (foreign) donors and also regularly provide vehicles for the formation of a clientele by political patrons (e.g. Swilling and Russell, op.cit.; Kanyinga and Katumanga, 2003).

Insofar as civil society is reduced to NGOs in particular (which it usually is), the evidence suggests that it contributes to the formation and extension of a state domain of politics structured around technico-legal practices and not politically emancipatory ones.

As we shall see below, this comment also applies to organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa which is said to be one of the most ‘successful’ (and ‘vibrant’) social movements in that it has been able to force the government to rethink its policy on HIV-AIDS. Recent research (eg. Vandormael, 2005) shows that in actual fact this ‘success’ has been such as to de-politicise the debate on AIDS by forcing it squarely within the hegemonic bio-medical paradigm of science which expects people to passively be the recipients of medical technology. In fact it could be suggested that this apparent success of the TAC, has resulted precisely from the congruence of its ideology with the perspective of the world medical establishment supported by the media.

The thrust of the TAC’s perspective has thus resulted in the incorporation of HIV-AIDS sufferers as passive citizens within an existing set of power relations (state, scientific, mass media, transnational corporations, etc) fundamental to the interests of capital and not in a questioning of such relations, which the Gay Movement in the United States for example had succeeded in doing to some extent, through its confronting of the medical establishment (Epstein, 1996). It can be argued then that one effect of the TAC success has been, paradoxically, its dis-empowerment and de-politicisation of popular struggles through the incorporation of sections of the population into liberal power-relations and technical bio-medical discourse. The overall effect then has been a ‘liberalisation’ of struggle, a contribution to the reproduction of a passive citizenry.

Other less fashionable social movements in South Africa have had to struggle against dominant discursive power, not along with it as the TAC has, and have thus not been so obviously ‘successful’, thus remaining at the margins of ‘civil society’ (Barchiesi, 2004). We shall see below however, that ‘success’ as measured by the ability to modify state policy in its particular interests is not the best indicator of a movement’s politics. A variety of social movements sometimes attempt to re-introduce agency but often simply provide a mirror image of state politics. For a politics to provide the basis for emancipation, it has to be situated at a subjective distance from the state. Citizenship exists at the interface of state and sociality, ie. in that fluid realm structured by the active or passive relationship between state and society. An assessment of the politics of social movements would have to ascertain the extent of democratic universality and prescriptive politics which characterises them.

At this stage however we still need to assess a recent argument which recognises the existence of a realm of politics outside civil society and the state. The argument that politics actually exists in countries of the South outside the domain of civil society, has been made by Partha Chatterjee. Chatterjee (2004), following on his work with Subaltern Studies has recently argued that, in the postcolony, there is a truly ‘political society’ beyond the state and civil society which is distinguished by its exclusion from the state domain and where activity is irreducibly political. He uses and extends Foucault’s conception of ‘governmentality’ to argue for the existence of another domain of politics beyond the limits of liberal rights and legal discourse. Chatterjee argues that in the postcolonial context, there are two sets of connections to power: the relations connecting a civil society of citizens to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty, and those linking “populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare” (ibid.: 37). Each of these, he argues, points to a distinct domain of politics.

There is no need to go into details here other than to note that he makes the point that it is not in civil society that politics is to be found because here claims follow legal and administrative (ie. technical) procedures whose access is limited to middle-class professionals; rather politics are to be found in what he calls a “political society” of the poor where “claims are irreducibly political” (ibid.: 60). It is therefore outside civil society that a politics of agency, an active citizenship is often to be found.

Chatterjee (2004) draws on Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and governmentality to specify two distinct modes of rule. Under sovereignty, the legitimacy of state rule takes place through a certain amount of participation by citizens in the affairs of state. Indeed classical liberal theorists of the state (in particular Rousseau and J.S. Mill) stressed the importance of active citizenship, as did the French Revolution of course. Under governmentality on the other hand, it is the provision of resources to the population which becomes the dominant mode of securing state legitimacy. This form becomes dominant in the 20th century for Chatterjee although Foucault (2000) stresses its appearance much earlier. The provision of resources to sections of the population is what ultimately gives rise to the disciplines of demography and statistics (stat(e)-istics) as the population needs to be classified, categorised and measured.

This latter mode of rule it could be said, becomes central under colonialism in Africa (late 19th/early 20th c) which was as Cowen and Shenton (1996) show, dominated/ justified by a notion of ‘trusteeship’. The state became a trustee of the welfare of its colonial (as well as of its metropolitan) charges. It is from within this political tradition that T.H. Marshall’s (1964) three forms of citizenship rights (especially his notion of social citizenship), which provided the main theorisation for British social democracy, emanated.

The social democratic (or‘keynesian-classist’) state secured its rule through the provision of social services, the ‘delivery’ (to use contemporary parlance) of particular social rights to the working people, on top of the civic and political rights central to all liberal-democratic states. In conditions of post-colonial Africa, this is clearly reflected in the ‘developmental state’ whereby the latter secures its rule through the provision of development ‘rights’.

This argument reinforces that of the centrality of the technicisation of politics by the sate, as governmentality exerts pressures for such technicisation, so that ultimately politics becomes submerged under the sophistication of managerial calculations and ‘delivery’, the provisioning of rights, the formation of passive citizens. It also shows how politics is expelled from the sate by technique, especially managerial technique. Civil society becomes part of a domain of state politics (as Chatterjee in fact argues) and the mutual relations between state and civil society become managerialist/technicist/legalistic as they mutually condition each other so that a technicist (and thus apolitical) subjectivity becomes hegemonic.

Chatterjee argues then that in the post-colonial context there are two sets of connections to power: the relations connecting a civil society of citizens to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty, and those linking “populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare” (ibid.: 37). Each of these he argues points to a distinct domain of politics. There is no need to go into details here other than to note that Chatterjee (ibid.: 60) makes the point that it is not in civil society that politics is to be found because here, claims follow legal and administrative (ie. technical) procedures whose access is limited to middle-class professionals; rather politics are to be found in what he calls a “political society” of the poor where “claims are irreducibly political”. Yet although this understanding of a realm beyond civil society in which politics may exist is absolutely crucial for understanding Africa today, Chatterjee’s claim that it constitutes a “political society” is problematic, not only because the term is usually used to refer to the state, but more importantly because it gives the mistaken impression that politics is always in existence within that realm, something which cannot be shown. Rather it makes more sense to suggest that politics may or may not exist within various sites as we shall see below (Lazarus, 1996). Finally, for Chatterjee, it is different modes of state rule which determine different connections to power, popular subjectivities have it seems, little choice in the matter.

3. Active Citizenship: the foundation of a ‘possible’
Citizenship, from an emancipatory perspective, is not about subjects bearing rights conferred by the state, as in human rights discourse, but rather about people who think becoming agents through their engagement in politics as militants/activists and not politicians (Neocosmos, 2006). In fact it is important to understand how these features were central to popular struggles (especially those for independence) and are still prevalent among many popular movements today. For example, both one of the first and one of the last national liberation struggles in Africa (Algeria and south Africa) exhibited such characteristics.

Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism4 is a detailed study of different changes in social relations brought about by popular struggle. These include changes in the position of women in society, the effect of independent radio station and changes in the family. All three of the above characteristics are eminently illustrated in Fanon’s account, but I merely wish to mention one of his comments on citizenship which contrasts radically with his later account of the same issue under postcolonial conditions. Written in 1959, ie. during the Algerian liberation struggle and before his work on The Wretched of the Earth he states:

In other words, the point is that during the period of popular national upsurge, citizenship is a unifying, inclusive conception. No distinction is made between people on the basis of indigeneity but only on the basis of their devotion to the struggle. By the time he writes The Wretched we have the following well known account of xenophobia under the post-colonial state:

We have here an account of a clear transition between the two forms of citizenship I have referred to: the popular inclusive conception founded on active citizenship and the state conception founded on indigeneity. It is also important to note the similarity with work on the South African struggle of the 1980s which makes similar points regarding the character of popular struggle in this period (Neocosmos, 1998, Van Kessel, 2000). The point is not to idealise popular struggle but to note that, despite all its contradictions, it enables the development of a different conception of citizenship. Van Kessel in fact notes explicitly in one of her case studies the centrality of a notion of moral community equated with political community of active citizens, an observation which pervades Fanon’s account.

Incidentally such notions are also prevalent in accounts of popular movements and community democratic political practices, they are present in Wamba-dia-Wamba’s (1985) account of the Mbongi, in Ifi Amadiume’s study of women’s struggles over citizenship in Nigeria (1997) and in Sibanda’s (2002) account of a peasant organisation in Zimbabwe inter alia. The point then is that in popular-democratic struggles, this alternative conception of citizenship and hence the possibility of emancipatory politics also exists (although this is not all that exists) as a counter to the statist equating of citizenship with indigeneity. There is then conceivably, a politics beyond Human Rights Discourse, a politics of prescriptions on the state. Such a prescriptions include, in the manner of the Freedom Charter: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, “The People Shall Govern” and so on. These prescriptions are assertions of rights to be fought for not pleas for human rights to be conferred by the state.

Active citizenship arguably enables the second most important right after the right to life, namely the right to think, by suggesting the possibility of something different to one way thought (la pensee unique). As a community activist recently stated in South Africa: The leaders [of the country MN] are saying that it is them who know everything and that the majority of the people can’t think. We are saying that everyone can think (Activist, Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign, 2003 cit. A. Desai and R. Pithouse, 2003:17).

One of the important dimensions of struggles for national liberation, had always been that, although they did contain for many an economic dimension, this demand for access to economic resources (eg land) was intertwined with its symbolic political value (of land, eg “our land must be re-taken the colonialists”) which included an emancipatory component. Economics was always subordinated to politics in the struggle for freedom.

In the process of struggle for political emancipation, citizenship as agency was paramount, so that political agency was the manner in which economic power was to be acquired. After independence, it was access to economic resources which became central as Fanon (1990) notes, with access to state power (not agency as such) becoming the instrument through which such resources were to be secured at the expense of the most vulnerable (generally the excluded such as the poor or ‘foreigners’).In other words the grabbing of resources from foreigners was founded on claims of indigeneity - rights secured by the state - after independence, and it illustrates an instance of state politics and passive citizenship replacing active citizenship; of economics replacing politics. It was therefore a direct result of a process of depoliticization whereby the state took over for itself the political agency of people. This process could thereby easily lead to xenophobia among state institutions and society as a whole (Neocosmos, 2006a). In sum we can note that this example illustrates a transition common to the continent in which citizenship was transformed from an active and inclusive conception (in which citizens were those who fought colonialism, hence the dominance of pan-Africanist discourse in the struggle) to a passive and exclusive one; from a conception of citizenship founded on popular politics to one founded on indigeneity and national essentialism underpinned by state power.

In fact, if we do not restrict citizenship identity to a national community but consider it much more broadly in terms of ‘belonging’ to any kind of community (village, ethnic group, etc), then cultural prescriptions become more important and popular ‘participation’ in such an identity more apparent [to various extents] as cultural prescriptions tend to be more fluid and less rigid. In contrast then, popularly founded conceptions of citizenship, although they may also show similar characteristics to state conceptions [eg as in essentialist ‘ethnic politics’], also often exhibit different understandings. This is of course particularly the case in periods of popular political upsurge and regularly includes the important dimension of the formation of a moral community of active citizens in opposition to crude conceptions of arbitrary and violent state oppression. Such alternative perspectives may exhibit:

1. an inclusive (as opposed to exclusive) understanding of citizenship and the nation, ie the nation is the people and the people are those who work and struggle here, and

2. an active conception of citizenship, ie citizenship is seen as concerning political agency, it is bounded by the exercise of political agency not by physical borders. In Africa this active citizenship has taken the form of popular-democratic pan-Africanism (Fanon) and I have argued elsewhere that it must still take this form today although adapted to current post-colonial conditions (Neocosmos, 2003).

3. the creation of a moral community of active citizens where one’s duty to the community is connected directly to actively engaging in political activity for the common good (ie a universalistic conception and not just a reflection of interests economic or otherwise).

This active citizenship can in no way guarantee the development of an emancipatory politics, yet it can be seen as enabling a number of ‘possibles’, of alternatives to the existing situation. This alternative conception of citizenship can be traced throughout all popular emancipatory projects of the modern period from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, to the various Socialist Revolutions, to the National Liberation Struggles against colonialism with the case of South Africa being one of the most recent; it arguably constitutes one of the possible conditions for an emancipatory politics.

Popular-democratic political trends have thus regularly stressed alternative conceptions of citizenship which have laid emphasis on inclusiveness and agency. The political sequences of socialist revolutions and of national liberation struggles are historically over. A new alternative emancipatory political sequence may be one which, in the words of Holloway (2002), is not about achieving state power but about transforming power, it is arguably about democratising power, not about replacing some politicians by others.

In the formulation of Lazarus (1996), it’s concern is with prescriptions on the state. Does this amount to a new political sequence at word level? What are its manifestations on the continent? How can popular Pan-Africanism to be rethought under these new conditions? To what extent are new and not so new popular movements able to move beyond arguing for their incorporation into the world of capital and that of the liberal state, and to what extent are they expressing prescriptive demands for freedom, justice and equality in new ways? In other words, in what sites can a new mode of democratic politics be found in contemporary Africa? In order to begin to answer such questions, we need to contribute to a rethinking of citizenship along the lines I have suggested above, but we also need to rethink the basis of political agency itself5.

4. Theorising Emancipatory Politics: an outline
Here the most important writers today are definitely Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus. Badiou is currently being translated into English as he has been discovered by American audiences; Lazarus on the other hand still remains untranslated into English. These authors have also had an important influence on the thought of Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba. While Badiou’s work remains at the highest level of abstraction as it concerns ontology, Lazarus’ work is more approachable by social scientists.

4.1 Alain Badiou: “event”, “fidelity”, “truth”.
Perhaps the best place to start is the idea of agency which is so central to philosophical and social science discourse today. Feltham and Clemens (2003: 6) explain that for Badiou, the question of agency “is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner, but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation”. Thus it is not everyday actions and decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou, these are simply part of being and existence, they are unavoidable as are social interests, opinions and conversations.

Rather, it is “those extraordinary decisions and actions which isolate an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions.” As a result: “not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in”.

Gone here is any notion of a universal human subject; Man is dead as God was proclaimed dead by the Enlightenment. As a result for Badiou there can be no Ethics founded on a universal human subject, and the whole idea of “human rights” is undercut.

In this sense Badiou follows very much in the different steps of Althusser, Foucault and Lacan who in their different ways, had proclaimed the death of Man. Of course such a conception has radical implications for conceiving ethics and (so-called human) rights not to mention democracy and the state. It is these dimensions that interests me here rather than the many aspects of Badiou’s ontology. This is simply because the conception of politics and democracy which constitutes “la pensée unique” and which is hegemonic today, is one which is founded on precisely a universalist conception of Man linked within political liberalism with a reduction of politics to the state and to state practices. I have argued elsewhere at length (within the context of South Africa in particular) how human rights discourse and political liberalism more generally, have as a necessary effect the ‘technicisation’ (hence the ‘de-politicisation’) of popular politics, and how as a result, human emancipation is thought to be realisable only by the state (Neocosmos, 2006). This conception is now becoming clearly apparent as a major contradiction after the failure of the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century which were all, at their core, state projects.

It is mainly for this reason, because of the importance of thinking about politics beyond the realm of the state, of detaching politics from the state, that Badiou’s philosophy of ‘subjective militancy’ is of interest to Africa. On the continent, our manner of thinking about politics has been overwhelmingly dominated by a liberalism for which the state is the sole legitimate domain of the political. Central to liberal discourse, has been a conception revolving around the idea that politics is reducible to the state or that the state is the sole legitimate domain of politics. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is the state. This idea has permeated so much into African political thinking for example, that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself. In South Africa in particular, state fetishism is so pervasive within the hegemonic political discourse that debate is
structured by the apparently evident ‘common sense’ notion that the post-apartheid state can ‘deliver’ everything from jobs to empowerment, from development to human rights, from peace in Africa to a cure for HIV-AIDS. As a result not only is the state deified, but social debate is foreclosed ab initio; the idea simply becomes one of assessing policy or capacity, in other words the focus is on management not on politics. Badiou, I suggest, enables us to begin to think a way around this problem. His ideas of “Event”, “Fidelity” and “Truth” are the three important categories here, all are dimensions of what he calls a “truth-process” or “truth-procedure”.

Event

The event is both situated - it is the event of this or that situation - and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from , or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation [...] You may then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question [...] We may say that since a situation is composed of the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch at it names the not-known of the situation. To take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ’proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat - being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage - is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital. To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event. (ibid.: 69).

An event then names the void, the absence, what is considered simply ‘impossible’, that which is not conceivable from within the knowledges of the situation. An emancipatory politics or a truly popular-democratic politics is difficult if not impossible to conceive from within the parameters of liberalism, a politics of saving and helping the ethnically oppressed is inconceivable within a politics of ethnic genocide and so on. The event is something which points to alternatives to what is, to the possibility of something different.

In politics today, and in Africa in particular, which is what concerns me here, an event would be expected to point us towards a different way of engaging in and thinking about politics, beyond the one-way thinking of liberalism and its liberal ‘democracy’, “the best possible shell for capitalism” as Lenin used to say. For outside of hegemonic political liberalism today, all there is a void. When events happen, they force us, for a while at least, to think of the situation differently. Popular upsurges, however brief, if they are powerful enough, force new issues on the agenda for example, they enable changes in thinking in the public sphere. In France for example, they have suddenly re-discovered their ‘banlieues’ after the events of November 2005. The extent to which this was a real event for politics in that country is however still a moot point. The popular struggles in different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 90s, what was optimistically referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues on the agenda for a while, before
these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (Ake, 1996).

Fidelity
This “is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break” (Badiou, 2001: 67). Fidelity to the event is an attempt to sustain the consequences of the event in thought. It is a refusal to return to the “status quo ante”, to return to the idea that what happened was impossible. Fidelity can be sustained by an individual, groups, organisations etc. There is no guarantee that this fidelity will be sustained, this requires a “disinterested-interest” on behalf of the participants. It follows that the perseverance of the “being-subject” remains uncertain. For in order to be transformed into a subject, a being has to remain true to disinterest. It is on the basis of this uncertainty that Badiou is able to construct an “ethic of truths” (Badiou, 2001: ch. 4).

Truth
For Badiou a truth is “constructed” as a result of this process of fidelity to the event, not “discovered”. It is “the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces”. (ibid.: 68). “Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences. This is something we have always known, even if sophists of every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same for all.” (Ibid.: 27). “A truth punches a ‘hole’ in knowledges, it is heterogeneous to them,
but it is also the sole known source of new knowledges. We shall say that the truth forces knowledges. The verb to force indicates that since the power of a truth is that of a break it is by violating established and circulating knowledges that a truth returns to the immediacy of the situation, or reworks the sort of portable encyclopaedia from which opinions, communications and sociality draw their meaning” (ibid.: 70).

The “indifference to differences” simply means that an emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to any specific interest, it is “for all” never “for some”. It follows we can say that for Badiou emancipatory politics does not ‘represent’ anyone:

Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims [...] but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves [...] Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation [...] it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence (Badiou, 1985: 75, 87).

An emancipatory politics therefore cannot be deduced from a social category (class, nation, state) it can only be understood in terms of itself. Moreover, the state itself is “indifferent to” truths and thus also to (emancipatory) politics; the democratic state in particular is merely concerned with knowledges and opinions which it organises into a consensus.

Historically speaking, there have been some political orientations that have had or will have a connection with a truth, a truth of the collective as such. They are rare attempts and they are often brief [...] These political sequences are singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental history [....] from the people they engage these orientations require nothing but their strict generic humanity (Badiou, 2003:70).

Therefore, (emancipatory) politics may or may not exist at any time and must be understood as pertaining to the realm of thought: “any politics of emancipation, or any politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act” (ibid.: 71). In order to develop these points in some detail, we must now shift to the work of Lazarus.

4.2 Political subjectivity, modes of politics, political prescriptions, the extant and the possible in the work of Sylvain Lazarus
I cannot at this juncture outline in detail what is an incredibly original and complex theory, this will have to wait for another time. For the present, it must suffice to provide a sketch of some of the main ideas put forward in Lazarus’ work. In order to make sense of his work, we need to begin with an understanding of the fact that Lazarus is interested in making intelligible, not just the existing configuration or structure of social situations of various types, but the existence of possible alternatives to the manner in which these
situations are configured. In other words he is interested in theorising the subjective and the objective, not only as distinct, but as at a distance from each other. Not only is there no ‘correspondence’ between the two, but there is in many cases a distinct distance between them. In such cases the possibility exists that people’s subjectivities - thought can assert something different from what is, an alternative to the existing. In fact he argues that the “extant” is identified via the possible:

Politics is of the order of thought
If politics as doing, (he rejects the term ‘practice’), politics as ‘prescription’ as he puts it, is what denotes the distance between what is and what could be, then what this means is that what is required is an understanding of politics as concerning thought exclusively, as remaining purely within the domain of the subjective. Like Badiou, who relies on him heavily (see Badiou, 2005, ch. 2), Lazarus is interested in theorising politics as a militant ‘practice’ while remaining consistent with rationalism, ie. materialism.

What he attempts is no less than a materialist theory of the subjective. This theory he calls an anthropology (after all anthropology has generally been precisely the study of the subjective, culture, belief etc), more specifically an “Anthropology of the Name”. It is this anthropology he argues, which makes politics thinkable as thought. But in order to think thought purely within thought, all scientistic assumptions must be dropped as these assume some correspondence between thought and object, between subjective and objective; the ‘concept’ then becoming a more or less accurate expression/representation of the real. This axiom is then pursued to its logical conclusion building a system of names and categories which help to identify the real. If the relation between the real and the subjective is not the issue, how are we sure that we are indeed investigating the real? This requires a rigorous consistency to two foundational statements/axioms which Lazarus sees as the core of his theoretical system, these are: 1. People think (les gens pensent); and 2. Thought is a relation of the real (la pensée est rapport du réel).

To maintain that politics is subjective, is simply to say that it is of “of the order of thought” as Lazarus (op.cit.) puts it. “To say ‘people think’ is to say that they are capable [...] of prescribing a possible that is irreducible to the repetition or the continuation of what exists” (Badiou, 2005: 32). Anyone is able to think politically, and such thought is not the preserve of experts. At the same time, such thought is itself a real relation because that prescriptive thought is indeed material as we shall see below. In this manner politics can be comprehended in terms of itself and not in terms of some other entity (or “invariant”) external to it (Badiou, 1985). Politics is thus irreducible to the economy, to the state, to ethnicity, to society, to history or to any entity outside itself:

In actual fact for Lazarus, it is not all politics which is capable of fulfilling the criterion of irreducibility, only (various modes of) emancipatory politics do so. As a result such politics do not always exist. Lazarus (op.cit.: 53) refers to the example of Lenin’s thought for which the existence of a working class as a social class is distinguished from its existence as a political class. The existence of the latter cannot be deduced form the former in Lenin’s thought. In fact in Lenin, ‘class’ is no longer a historico-political category as in Marx - after the failure of the Paris Commune, the historical certainty of the Communist Manifesto is no longer sustainable - but is rather replaced by a category of “organised political consciousness” (Lazarus, 1993: 25). With Lenin, “politics must possess its own specific terms [...] as it passes from the certain to the possible” (ibid.:26). Thus, in Lenin’s terms, the proletariat must ‘demarcate itself’ politically from other classes by its party acquiring a unique set of ideological positions on the issues of the day. This means that politics is not an ‘expression’ of social conditions or of history, but that the relations between politics and history are much more complex (Neocosmos, 1993, part 1). This perspective is clearly apparent, for example, in Lenin’s analyses of the “national question”, where he argues, against Luxemburg in particular, and “imperialist economism” in general, that the national question is not reducible to class (the right of nations to self-determination is not a bourgeois demand) but is a “democratic” issue - ie. a political issue - of concern to the people as a whole (see eg. Lenin, 1986).

In Marx’s thought, the issue is treated differently. For him, “scientific notions are also notions of political consciousness, they are realisable [...] from this perspective, human emancipation is not a utopia but a real possibility”. For Marx the science of history and the politically prescriptive are fused into one unique conception (ibid.: 55). It should be noted in passing that when we study politics as ‘practice’, there is no such thing as a unified ‘Marxism’; the politics expressed and practised by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Gramsci, Lukaçs, Cabral, Che Guevara, etc are crucially all distinct, they (may) formulate different modes of politics.

Modes of Politics and their Sites
For Lazarus, “there is no politics in general, only specific political sequences. Politics is not a permanent instance of society” (ibid.: 89). Different kinds of politics are distinguished by their historicity, in other words they have a history, they arise and then they pass on. Lazarus refers to these as historical modes of politics or “the relation of a politics to its thought” (loc.cit.). They are identified by different sites (lieux) and have their own activists (militants). The former refer to the sites in the concrete situation where that particular mode exists, the latter to those who most clearly embody, express and represent that mode in thought. Politics does not always exist, it is rare and is always sequential. Lazarus outlines different historical modes of politics with their own sequences, some of which have been emancipatory due to the fact that they conceive of politics “internally” and others which reduce politics to an “external invariant”. Clearly, these are not the only modes of politics which have developed historically, and others remain to be elucidated and analysed; however a brief recapitulation of these different modes serves to illuminate his form of reasoning9.

Lazarus includes four examples of emancipatory modes of politics which he has identified. The first of these is what he calls the “revolutionary mode of politics” associated with the experience of the French revolution between the summer of 1792 to July 1794. Its main site was the Jacobin Convention and its main militants and theoreticians were Robespierre and Saint-Just, the co-authors of the 1793 constitution.

Its conception of politics was one which proclaimed that “a people has only one dangerous enemy:its government” (Saint-Just, 2004: 630) and which understood politics as a form of moral consciousness or ‘virtue,’ to be combined with ‘terror’ against the revolution’s enemies (Zizek, 2007). For Saint-Just, “it is leaders who must be disciplined because all evil results from the abuse of power” (op.cit.: 758). Thus, “Saint-Just regularly proposes analyses and policies which, although they concern the state and the government, are thought outside of and are explicitly directed against a statist logic” (Lazarus, op.cit.: 225ff).

The second he terms the “classist mode of politics” whose sequence is opened up in 1848 by working-class revolutionary movements throughout Europe, and which closes with the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871. Clearly the main figures here were Marx and Engels and its sites were the working class movements of the nineteenth century. It is not here a question of politics within a party, but of politics within a mass movement, as modern political parties only develop in the period following 1871. For Marx as noted above, history and politics are fused into one unique conception mediated by class.

The third is termed the “Bolshevik mode”. Its sites were the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party) and the soviets (People’s Councils), and Lenin was its militant figure and theoretician. "Proletarian political capacity is seen here not as spontaneous, neither is it historically or socially determined but it is obliged to specify its own conditions of existence” (ibid.: 90). The party mediates between consciousness and history. This political sequence opens up in 1902 (year of the publication of Lenin’s What is to be Done?), reaches a peak in 1905 and closes in 1917. After that date the party becomes ‘statised‘ as no solution is found to Lenin’s contradictory conception that the party must be both the state as well as the defender of the masses against the state; and the soviets which disappear, cease to be the sites of an emancipatory politics (ibid.: 91).

The fourth mode Lazarus terms the “dialectical mode of politics”. Its main theoretician is Mao Zedong and history is here subordinated to the masses, as the influence of the former disappears behind subjective notions such as an ”enthusiasm for socialism”. Political consciousness develops in leaps and bounds and “there exists an exclusively political knowledge because such a knowledge is dialectical without being historical. Even if the party exists it does not identify the mode of politics.” The sites of this mode are those of the revolutionary war: the party, the army, the United Front; its limits extend from 1928 to 1958 (ibid.: 91).

The above modes of politics conceive of politics internally, in terms of its own specificity, without reference to what Lazarus calls “external invariants”. In fact it was only in the Bolshevik mode that the party had a central role. In all cases there was a multiplicity of sites, and there is maintained a political distance from the state. In Wamba-diaWamba’s (1993: 98) terms: “it is the existence of an independent (emancipative) politics which makes the destructive transformation of the state possible”. This emancipative consciousness is purely political and exists under conditions of a subjective break with spontaneous forms of consciousness.

In addition, two modes of politics are identified by Lazarus which each make reference to an “external invariant”. These are the Parliamentary mode of politics and the Stalinist mode of politics; both of these have been dominant in twentieth century world history. For both these modes, political consciousness is subordinated to a consciousness of the state. The principle of parliamentary politics is not that “people think” but rather that people have opinions regarding government (Lazarus, op.cit.: 93). “The so-called ‘political’ parties of the parliamentary mode, far from representing the diversity of opinions, are the subjective organisers of the fact that the only thought deemed possible is an opinion regarding the government”. It follows that parties are not so much political organisations, but rather state organisations which distribute state positions. Thus for the parliamentary mode there is only one recognised site of politics and that is the state (loc.cit.). Similar functions are fulfilled in this mode by trade unions, which are also very much state organisations. Voting, as the institutional articulation between the subjective side of opinion and the objective character of government, is the essential political act of parliamentarianism. Voting does not so much serve to represent opinions but to produce a majority of professional politicians who are provided by parties; “it transforms the plural subjectivity of opinions on government into a functioning unity” founded on consensus. “Voting transforms vague ‘programmes’ or promises of parties into the authority of a consensus” (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993: 117; 1994: 249). In other words, voting amounts to a legitimising principle of the state consensus, and ‘politics’ is ultimately reduced to a question of numbers.

The Stalinist mode of politics refers to a political subjectivity which existed not just in the Soviet Union, but also throughout parties linked to the ‘Third International’. “The party is viewed as the condition of revolutionary political consciousness. Politics, in this mode, is thus referred to the party; the party is finally revolutionary politics and revolutionary politics is the party” (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 250). Politics is confined to the party and the party is understood to be the very embodiment of that consciousness. “As the party is presented as the source of all political truth”, the Stalinist mode “requires the credibility of the party” (ibid.). The party-state is the only political datum provided to subjectivity and the only practical domain of that subjectivity. The only site of politics is the state-party. The sequence of this mode begins during the early 1930s and ends with Gorbachov’s accession to power (Lazarus, op.cit.: 94).

Where does all this leave the conceptualisation of contemporary politics on the African continent? The answer provided by Wamba-dia-Wamba is that one must identify modes of politics historically present in Africa which he attempts in the case of Zaire/ DR Congo (Wamba-dia-Wamba: 1993), and also, more importantly, specify the basic characteristics of an emancipatory mode of politics on the continent (Wamba-dia-Wamba: 1994). The latter project is, in his writings, highly informed by the analysis of Lazarus so I shall continue to briefly outline them together.

Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that politics must exist [...] Generally in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it [this political capacity] to the state (including the party and liberation movements
functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by imposing consensual unanimity [...] the thrust of progressive politics is to be separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, ie. a state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if people only ‘think’ state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves (Wamba-dia-Wamba: 1994: 258).

In post-colonial Africa therefore, it is noted that one form or other of state-fetishism has been the dominant way of conceiving the political capacity to transform reality, however I do attempt to specify below some of the features of a ‘national liberation struggle’ mode which can be said to have existed prior to independence to various extents. If the problem in Africa has been the state, then a new way of conceiving politics must be developed. For Lazarus, three fundamental conceptions have to be put forward here: first it has to be understood that there are or can be multiple sites of politics including especially sites outside and beyond the state, and second that emancipatory politics concerns democratic prescriptions on the state; finally, of course an organisation of activists is required, but this cannot be a state organisation as the state is not concerned with (popular) politics, and rather suffocates all political prescriptions. Rather, this must be an emancipatory political organisation, which is consistently democratic in its practices and which thereby enables the development of democratic political prescriptions on the state.

Sites of emancipatory politics in Africa are varied and they may include the factory (which is not just a place for producing commodities), ‘traditional’ and popular institutions such the palaver, village assemblies, the sovereign national conferences in several Francophone African countries in the early nineties (all mentioned in ibid.) as well as social institutions such as educational institutions, neighbourhood groups, social movements and so on, in sum all organisations in which the possibility of democratic politics exists. Clearly, such sites do not always exist, as emancipatory politics is not
always present in them. For example, street committees, area committees and trade union ‘locals’ were all sites of emancipatory politics in the townships of South Africa of the 1980s, but this is no longer the case. They have either disappeared as political structures completely or have been incorporated into the state domain of politics (Neocosmos, 1998). Parties on the other hand, incarnate a state project of one form or another as they propose the state as the exclusive reference of consciousness.

Currently these are not sites of emancipatory politics in Africa, which means that extending the number of parties in existence (from single to multi-partyism) will not, of itself, enable the development of democratic-emancipatory politics on the continent (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994 : 258-9).

While possible sites of politics can be found anywhere where state and society relate, emancipatory politics only exists when democratic prescriptions on the state emanate from such sites. Democratic political prescriptions are possible only when distancing oneself politically from the state. This idea corresponds, in essence, to the possibility of a domain of politics beyond the state and civil society, which I have detailed above; but this domain must now not be understood spatially or institutionally as defined by the form of state rule as in Chatterjee (2004), but fundamentally as distinctly political subjective. It must be stressed that: “one can prescribe to the state only on condition of being independent of it, by placing oneself precisely in a political position clearly distinct and separate from it” (LDP, no 14, July 1995, p. 9). Thus ‘distance’ here refers to political distance rather than to occupational distance for example, although clearly these are by no means unconnected. This signifies in particular that a democratic political practice must be clearly distinct from a state practice. ‘Democracy’ here no
longer refers to a set of state institutions.

Political Prescriptions
What does prescribing to the state actually mean for Lazarus? It is easiest to outline this with reference to one specific example. To argue publically and consistently that everyone must be treated equally by state laws and practices under conditions where this is evidently not the case, is to make a democratic prescription on the state, according to this perspective. This is particularly of relevance to the modern state in both Europe and Africa, because this state systematically practices various forms of discrimination against a number of people living within its boundaries on the basis of gender, ethnicity and nationality as well as social class. “Any state which is founded on ethnic or communitarian distinctions is a state producing civil tensions and war” (LDP, no 14, p. 9). It is thus imperative to uphold the view politically that the country is made up of “people of all origins” (“les gens de partout”), and that no single individual should count for any more or less than any other. This would be in Badiou’s terms an indication
of fidelity to the axiom of equality. New categories and terms should be thought up to transcend such differences10. If this view is not consistently upheld, then the door is left open to various forms of state discrimination with disastrous results (LDP, op.cit., pp.910)11. To make democratic prescriptions on the state is precisely to assert such a position for example, from a multitude of sites where it is of relevance; in addition “to make democratic prescriptions on the state [...] is to view the latter not only as a juridical and formal structure but also as being the object of prescriptions” (ibid.). In other words that the state can be prescribed to with important results for politics:

Clearly the argument here is that alternatives and choices are always possible and that it is imperative to force the state, from sites within civil society, to treat all people living within its boundaries equally and not to discriminate against some for whatever reason.

Today in Africa, the main bases for such discrimination are gender, nationality and ethnicity, although other social divisions based on class, age, rural-urban differences and so on are also transformed into discriminatory distinctions by state practices and ideologies.

For Hallward (2005: 770) following Badiou, prescription is “first and foremost an anticipation of its subsequent power, a commitment to its consequences, a wager on its eventual strength”. It is fundamentally the divisive application of a universal axiom or principle which serves to demarcate a partisan position with the result that “politics is the aspect of public life that falls under the consequences of a prescription” (ibid.: 773). Politics is thus not reducible to ‘the art of the possible’ in the usual sense. It is indifferent to interests and to their compromises, as a prescription is of a universal character. Prescription implies freedom to make political choices, “without such freedom we cannot say that people make their own history; we can merely contemplate the forms of their constraint” (ibid.: 781), which has been precisely what a politics deduced from political economy has done in the second half of the twentieth century in Africa. However, we still remain here at a relatively high level of abstraction. It is important to descend to what this means in more concrete terms.

The Extant and the Possible
In his most recent work, Lazarus (2001) uses the notion of prescription to distinguish the understanding resulting from the thought of people, from that developed by a scientistic approach. All social science comes down in one way or another to a matter of definition in order to resolve the “polysemic” contradictions between meanings attributed to words in life. Contrary to this, Lazarus insists that this discursive polysemy is a reflection of different prescriptions attached to the word in question, some of which may contest what exists (the extant) in terms of possible alternatives. “It is through prescriptions - for there is not only one - that the word is submitted to something other than a definition” (Lazarus, 2001: 7).

An approach via the objective evaluation of things can end up with predictions, scenarios, tendencies or determinations. It is not in this way that the possible must be understood. For the first approach, the objective of thought is to isolate the logic of the real. For the second, the objective is not to articulate theses on what exists. The field of intellectuality presents itself differently: the question regarding what exists is only given in relation to what could be (ibid.).

A definition is scientistic and only proposes a unique conception of the real. On the other hand, because a number of prescriptions may exist on the meaning of words, the possibility exists of conflicts between prescriptions, each one sustaining a distinct order of the real. Because of this confrontation between prescriptions amounting to conflicts between different theses on the real, “knowledge is confronted by a choice which is not that between the true and the false, the imaginary and the rational, but that between different orders of the real” (ibid). For example if an interlocutor says: “at the factory they call me a worker, outside they call me an immigrant because they have forgotten that I am a worker”, the figure of the worker is maintained in the context of the factory and denied in society. There are here two orders of the real founded on two prescriptions, one for which the figure of the worker is asserted and another for which it has disappeared. It can thus be seen how prescriptions resolve the polysemic multiplicity in a manner which is in no way definitional (ibid.). As a result a number of possibles are apparent. It is thus the question of the possible which specifies people’s thought.

That a situation can be apprehended by ‘possibles’ is an overturning of historicist and scientific thought, for which it is a precise investigation of what exists, in terms of determinations, causes and laws, which may then permit an answer to the question of what may come. The possible here is totally subordinated to the extant. In people’s thought [on the other hand], the real is identified through the possible. The investigation of what exists is also involved, but is subordinated to the investigation of what could be. The investigation differs according to whether it relates to the category of the ‘possible’ or to that of the ‘extant’ [...] We are confronted with two different modes of thought: the first is analytical and descriptive, it asks questions regarding what exists; irrespective of the eventual complexity of its research protocols and discoveries, it proposes the scientific character of sites (lieux). The second is prescriptive and has as its principal point of entry the question of the possible (ibid.: 8).

While the former perspective proposes to apprehend reality as extant, the latter maintains that in order to access what exists now, the ‘now’ can only be grasped as a conjunction of different ‘possibles’. “Knowledge of a situation is grasped by people in terms of the identification of its possibles. The possible is not of the order of what is to come but of the order of the now”. (ibid.: 9). The investigation utilising categories such as ‘present’ and ‘possible’ “works through words [...] on the thought of people which is outlined in singular intellectualities, to which one can accede from the words used and the singular theses which they constitute” (ibid.: 11).

Lazarus develops a new theory and detailed methodology for understanding the possible in the extant, the ‘what could be’ in the ‘what is’. There is no space to develop all the details here, but enough has been said to suggest the originality and inventiveness of the whole perspective, which opens up a whole new manner of investigating politics precisely because this is about conceiving a situation other than what exists. It has the advantage vis-a-vis Badiou’s work, of moving beyond the extremely abstract ontological statements which characterise that discourse, to enable the thinking of precise concrete investigations of the possible in the extant, in other words of people’s political thought. I want now to attempt to utilise some of the ideas outlined above to sketch the character of what may be termed a ‘National Liberation Struggle Mode’ (NLS) of politics at least in Africa and to ask the question of the extent to which the resistance struggle in South Africa of the 1980s broke with this mode. I will suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.

The standard reading of the liberation struggle in South Africa, is that this struggle seen as a continuous process from the formation of the ANC in 1912 to the achievement of liberation marked by the first elections by universal suffrage in 1994 - operated very much within the theoretical confines of the NLS mode. Even when the importance of the popular struggle of the 1980s is acknowledged as a specific process independent of the organisational requisites of the ANC in exile, this popular struggle tends to be seen as a ‘radicalised’ variant of the NLS mode. One of the better arguments developed along these lines is made by Yunis (2000) who suggests that the national liberation struggle in South Africa in the 1980s was radicalised because its class composition was more democratic and popular. For Yunis (2000: 33-5), the struggle for national liberation in South Africa (as that in Palestine) was ‘radicalised’ along with the historically gradual dominance of more popular classes: 1910s -1940s dominance of elites, 1940s -1970s
dominance of a middle-class leadership, mid-1970s -1980s dominance of popular classes. In this conception, the 1980s simply mark the ‘radicalisation’ of an ongoing NLS, unfolding on the basis of the class composition of the movement. For me, this kind of perspective disables an understanding of the truly inventive nature of the popular politics of the 1980s, which I believe constituted an event, in Badiou’s sense, probably for the African continent as a whole. It does so, not only because of its historicism (incidentally a curtailed and thus unrealised historical trajectory as the popular classes did not achieve their imputed radical aims), but also because of its insistence on articulating politics to an external social invariant, namely class. In this manner, it does away with the singularity and specificity of these politics and makes them unthinkable outside a pre-given NLS mode.

Contrary to this view, I would suggest that there was a clear distinction, as well as a struggle, between different conceptions of politics within the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s - politics that cannot be understood simply in class terms - particularly between the democratic politics made possible by the popular movement inside the country and the party-bureaucratic politics of the NLS mode attached to the proto-state institutions outside the country, despite their similarities in discourse. However this contrast should not suggest uncontradictory politics in either of these sites. Rather the UDF and its affiliates, as well as the trade unions in particular, constituted sites which enabled the development of a political subjectivity which was centrally located in popular control of conditions of life, something which could not be prevalent in sites such as military camps and exile, simply because the latter were evidently cut off from popular concerns. In neither of these cases was politics reducible to sociological class categories. After all the politics of exile were conducted within a Marxist discourse which, as numerous official documents of the ANC/SACP attest to, privileged (the working-) class in the construction of the nation, as did the politics inside the country.

Reference to class was then not what distinguished them. Rather, it can be argued that, during the years 1984 -1986 at least, a quite new political sequence develops which identifies elements of a distinctly new (although incompletely developed) mode of politics which breaks in some crucially important respects with the fundamental tenets of the NLS mode, while reproducing it in some other respects.

5.1 The National Liberation Struggle Mode of Politics in Africa
To think purely subjectively about a National Liberation Struggle mode at Third World and even at an African level in the twentieth century, is extremely difficult without collapsing into model building, ie. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no one major single individual who expressed such a politics intellectually.

A situated analysis of say the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well beyond the scope of this work. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode provided the parameters of political thought in the colonial and neo-colonial social formations of the immediate post-world war II period up to the 1970s. Its main figures included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Ghandi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-imperialism, even if only in rhetorical in form. This contrasts with the position today when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of the new empire. As Chatterjee (2004:100) has so accurately observed, today the new “empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella”. In other words the underlying conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as ‘the South’, is to be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic’ empire.

We should start first be stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation from colonialism. Not many European thinkers understood this point. One exception was Jean-Paul Sartre who was able to show that as colonisation was centrally a political endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty), social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological, however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance. Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was a necessary outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics, especially of the mass politics which were in most cases necessarily unleashed in the struggles against colonialism. Politics was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with independence, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism and democracy was overcome by the need to solve the “social question” (Arendt, 1963) known in the post-colonial period as ‘development’. The absence of politics in the postcolonial period has been accurately expressed by Issa Shivji (1985) inter alia on the continent. Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think the disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacing of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all ‘politics’ to itself. The difficulty faced by the national liberation struggle mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political conception of politics. This became more and more an obvious intellectual problem after independence as it was clearly a particular (state) politics which created the social in the form of (a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’) class rather than the expected opposite of politics ‘reflecting’ the social category of class (Shivji, 1976).

Thus the reasons for the difficulty in thinking the emancipatory character of mid-twentieth century anti-imperialist politics, are arguably related to the fact that, while ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations, the national liberation struggle mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation, thus unavoidably referring politics to an external (social) invariant such as nation, state and/or class. Only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not thought exclusively via external referents. These rare instances - the writings of Fanon and Cabral come particularly to mind here (although there may also be others) - were brief and would have to be analysed as thinking the political singularities of Algeria and Guinea Bissau during short historical periods, a fact which lies well beyond the scope of this work. What is however interesting to note, is that both these figures were spared the dubious status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular, was excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age, while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power.

In general then, the NLS mode was a mode ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, lasting probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People's Conference in Accra 5-13 December 1958) and 1973 the assassination of Cabral (Hallward, 2005)12. The NLS mode is a truly twentieth century mode13 and its language was often borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode. However the term ‘class’ as the referent of the latter’s politics was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral, for instance even speaking in terms of a ‘nation-class’ to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Its two main external invariants were ‘state’ and ‘nation’ although ‘class’ clearly also featured in this capacity. By 1975, the last vestiges of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe which was, in most instances, only a pale reflection of the experience of its predecessors. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South African ANC (African National Congress) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest that during the 1980s in South Africa, a new sequence of politics was inaugurated, and during the period 1984-1986 in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed as evidenced inter alia by the absence of any figure to systematise it theoretically.

In general, it can be suggested that in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a national politics, of the nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions of this politics were thus: who is the nation? (and not what is the nation?) and what are its politics? The answer provided - at last by the most emancipatory versions of that mode - was that the nation is those who fight consistently against colonialism/neocolonialism.

To the extent that this was adhered to then, this politics could be said to be partly structured “in interiority”. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender (see Fanon on the struggle of Algerian women), it is not tradition, it is not even state, but it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins (Neocosmos, 2004). Hence this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism. National consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words:

Thus, insofar as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the ‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the most excluded; they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism, only they can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and democracy. The (petty-) bourgeoisie and workers as well as the inhabitants of the towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism, they vacillate and are not consistently anti-colonial, their political and cultural references are to the metropole. There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently realised during the post-colonial period (Shivji 1985). However, in the final analysis, the nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom irrespective of social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its popular-emancipatory version, insofar as the latter existed.

It is the national movement (made up of a ‘Front’ or ‘Congress’ of a number of organisations) which usually (but not always) embodies the organisational subjectivity of the nation, not usually a party as such. Although there are differences here, parties are for some (eg Fanon) Western imports with few roots among the people. The dominant tendency, however, was for political movements to become state parties more or less rapidly (arguably a necessary outcome of seeing politics as representing the social in the form of the nation), evidently so at independence, and in many instances long before that, in which case the emancipatory character of politics collapsed. In all cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the emancipation of the nation. The aphorism attributed to Nkrumah - “seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee” - accurately expresses this collapse into a disastrous politics - often a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture as in Mobutu’s ‘authenticité’ - as the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied, meant that the latter was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins.

It was this dominant tendency which assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely emancipatory content to the national liberation mode, and the continuation of a colonial set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since. The neo-colonialism which ensued, was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not its cause. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geo-political context of the “cold war” and its fetishism of state power, meant its frequent ideological dependence on either the Stalinist or the parliamentary modes, a fact which ensured its final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see therefore how easily a politics with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when consciousness became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation, became party, became state14. This movement from internal to external mode was most evident at independence, but for many national liberation movements, the transition to proto-states or ‘states in waiting’ was effected long before independence (eg PAIGC, SWAPO, ANC etc, see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols 2&3) many being recognised by the United Nations as “the sole and authentic representatives” of their nations long before taking power.

The nationalist form of struggle had violence at its core. For Fanon, violence ‘purifies’ (ie. distinguishes) the nation from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of violence as a counter to colonial violence, with the democratic aspirations of the people is to be found in the people’s army, people’s war and the practice of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas were supposed to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla army was the people at war. “We are armed militants, not militarists” (Cabral, cit. Davidson, 1981:v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics when that existed, varied but were likely to include, the mass movement and its constituent organisations, the guerrilla army, peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation from this conception (easily fallen into given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when military solutions became dominant over political ones. In sum, the general trend was for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial politics in their practice. The sequence of this mode in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism is today clearly over, and has been so for about thirty years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can.

5.2 The popular struggle against apartheid: a new political sequence and mode?
Today we are in a situation when an emancipatory politics must be thought as fundamentally distinct from state politics, as the state is incapable of emancipating anybody (Neocosmos, 2007). In this context, it could be suggested that the national-liberation movement in the urban areas of South Africa during the period 1984-86 constitutes an event for politics on the continent. This is fundamentally because the urban popular masses of the oppressed black population took an independent role in the politics of transformation and managed, for a time, to provide an inventively different content to the slogans of the NLS mode. Moreover, the organisational expression of this movement, the United Democratic Front in the South Africa of the 1980s, was not a party organisation but a loose confederation of local political affiliates, which all adhered to some common principles. These retained their organisational autonomy meaning that organisationally, the UDF constitutes a useful recent non-party form of political organisation from which it is important to learn, although serious detailed research on this question has yet to be undertaken (but see Neocosmos, 1998, Van Kessel, 2000). Moreover, beyond this organisational form, the fact that the authority of the party in exile (the ANC) was recognised by most of these internal anti-apartheid formations, had a number of crucially important effects including the need to engage in a ‘revolutionary’ politics the object of which was not the attainment of state power, but deferring to its ultimate authority. I will outline some of the features of this new politics as I understand them, below.

The struggles for liberation in South Africa during the 1980s were part of a new worldwide wave of resistance which in Africa has been referred to optimistically as ‘the second struggle for independence’. In South Africa however this struggle emerged as the first. Particularly in the period 1984-1986, it can be described as an ‘event’ in Badiou’s sense of the word, meaning a process after which the political reality of the situation could no longer simply be understood in the old way it had been before (see Badiou, 1988). In his own inimitable style: “... there exists no stronger a transcendental consequence [of an event - MN] than that of making something appear in a world which had not existed in it previously” (Badiou, 2006b: 285)15.

These struggles denoted a fundamental break with liberalism for which the nation is to be identified with the state and democracy with a form of state. For the state, the mass movement in the 1980s substituted for a while a notion of ‘people’s power’. One of the main characteristics of this event which constituted a break from previous modes of resistance politics is that arguably, for the first time, nationalist/nationwide resistance did not take the form of a mirror image of colonial/apartheid oppression; that mirror image already existed in the politics of the exiled ANC. Rather, that resistance and the culture which emanated from it, acquired its inspiration directly from the struggles of people in their daily lives for political control over their social-economic environment, thus providing the ‘enabling environment’ for the unleashing of popular political initiatives and inventiveness. In this sense this experience was a truly democratic event, and a fidelity to its lessons forces us to think about politics differently. In particular I have argued elsewhere (Neocosmos, 1999) that rather than thinking ‘vertical’ distinctions as central, (eg the distinctions around which leaders would mobilise followers such as the ideologies of nationalism or socialism), this mass movement put the ‘horizontal’ opposition between democracy and authoritarianism firmly on the agenda, in terms of political practices in particular. In broad outline, the most important of the nationalist politics of the period can be sketched as follows.

The most important and truly original organisational expression of popular resistance in the 1980s, was the United Democratic Front (UDF) which was formed in 1983 initially ostensibly to mobilise opposition to the state's constitutional proposals and other legislation (known collectively as the Koornhof Bills) including the Black Local Authorities Act which increased the powers of reviled township councillors. The UDF brought together under its umbrella a coalition of civic associations, student organisations and youth congresses, women's groups, trade unions, church societies, sports clubs and a multitude of organisations who retained and often increased as a result of their affiliation to the UDF, their ability to organise independently. At its peak it claimed it had around seven hundred affiliates grouped in ten regional areas and amounting to a total of over two million people (Lodge et al. 1991: 34). With the upsurge of township unrest beginning in earnest in 1984, it was the young people of the townships who provided the main impetus behind the struggle, while this leadership passed over to the Trade Unions in 1988. In one important respect at least, the UDF managed to build on the experience of township based organisations such as civic associations, in that it successfully combined local and national grievances.

Nevertheless, the history of the mass upsurge, even though enabled as well as expressed by the UDF, cannot be reduced to the organisation16. Frequently contradictions existed between popular initiatives and the national organisation and the latter often ‘trailed behind the masses’ (Seekings, 1992). The important point to understand is that while the organisational existence of the UDF spans the years 1983-1991, the political sequence of the event along with the beginnings of a new mode of politics, can be said to have lasted between August/September 1984 and mid-1986. While the early political intervention under the banner of the UDF adhered to standard protest politics and the gathering of signatures against the apartheid state’s introduction of a ‘tricameral parliament’, a mass upsurge started in earnest in September 1984 and took the form of bus and rent boycotts, housing movements, squatter revolts, labour strikes, school protests and community ‘stay-aways’. This change in the mode of politics was not the result of any strategy by the leadership of the UDF or of a change in policy. It was forced on the leadership from below (Swilling, 1988: 101). Indeed, by mid-1985 it was becoming clear that the UDF leadership was unable to exert effective control over developments despite its popularity:

In 1986 the apartheid state instituted a massively repressive state of emergency which covered the whole country with the result that from late 1986 onwards UDF campaigns were more and more initiated 'from above', by the 'national leadership' operating exclusively at the national level. At the same time, more and more coercive measures were being applied to township residents to adhere to various boycotts, a fact which showed the weakening of popular control, 'the struggle' was acquiring more of a militaristic character, and vigilante activities acquired more and more support from businessmen affected by youth directed boycotts. All in all, after that date, the politics of coercion were gradually taking over from the politics of popular democracy.

What characterised this political event during this two year period was not simply a dominance of popular power ‘from below’ to be replaced by an imposition of a change in politics ‘from above’; after all this is a regular occurrence throughout history, including in contemporary Africa. Rather, the reason for considering this period a new political sequence or an event for politics, is fundamentally rooted in the bringing to the fore of new political questions and new political solutions. Broadly speaking this new political conception can be sketched under five headings. All these enable a brief elucidation of a new form of popular democracy.

Politics without a party
What was fundamental was that, in its essence, the politics of the political movement led by the UDF was a politics without a party. The whole idea of ‘capturing’ or ‘seizing’ state power whether through elections or the force of arms was absent from its politics (Suttner, 2004: 695-6). In this way it differed significantly from the perspective of the NLS mode including that of the ANC. This was the case primarily because the UDF viewed the exiled ANC as the rightful leader of the national movement and deferred to it in terms of overall political dominance. Yet given the virtual absence of an organised presence within the country, the ANC could never exercise party control, and the open structure of the UDF meant that its affiliates, themselves largely controlled by their rank and file, were primarily the ones to set out the forms of struggle. Leadership was however not only reacting to pressure from below, but was forced to be accountable to activists as we shall see. Systems of accountability were instituted largely as a result of trade union influence which had itself developed from popular resistance through the wave of strikes in the Durban area in 1973.

The main demands of the UDF concerned what one of its leaders called removing the “barriers to democracy”, by which was meant creating “the necessary conditions for the democratic process to expand” (Morobe, 1987: 86). These included: “the lifting of the state of emergence, the withdrawal of troops and vigilantes from townships, and the release of detainees” as well as the unbanning of the ANC, SACP and other banned organisations, the safe return of exiles and the repeal of racist legislation. These were of course very limited demands and implied a deference to another leadership, yet the taking over and putting into practice the demands of the Freedom Charter in particular the political flag of the Congress alliance - meant that, pushed from below, the mass movement thus constituted, engaged in a politics which focussed on transforming the living conditions of the masses of the people, especially in urban ‘townships’. What was meant by ‘democracy’ and the content given to the first demand of the Freedom Charter “The People Shall Govern” went far beyond anything which had been dreamt of before or established since. This will appear clearly in what follows. Yet the advantage faced by the popular movement in the 1980s - i.e. the absence of a controlling ‘party line’ turned out to be one of the reasons for its eventual demise, as it gave way, after being seriously weakened by state coercion, to the returning exiled party of the ANC (Neocosmos, 1998).

Community-based organisation and active citizenship
The mass actions from 1984 onwards succeeded in mobilising:

The state declared a first state of emergency in 1985 as it state attempted to control this mass upsurge and reassert control over "ungovernable areas". Interestingly, both popular rebellion and political organisation grew during this period which saw the setting up of 'street committees' in particular. These took over the functions of local government especially in ungovernable areas. One local activist in the Port Elizabeth area stated:

The ANC view as expressed by their spokesman Tom Sebina was that street committees "grow out of the need of the people to defend themselves against State repression...and in response to ANC calls to make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable [so as to forge them into] contingents that will be part of the process towards a total people's war". Contrary to this view which saw street committees as tactical adjuncts to the development of a militaristic process and as simply 'oppositional' to the apartheid state, local activists spelt out a different assessment:

One activist expressed the new situation as follows: