Politics at a Distance from the State

Radical and African Perspectives

Lucien van der Walt, Kirk Helliker

• Editorial: PM Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781629639574
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Anarchismus

For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical transformation with capturing state power. The collapse of these statist projects from the 1970s led to a global crisis of left and working-class politics. But crisis has also opened space for rediscovering alternative society-centered, anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance from the state. These have registered important successes in practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and Rojava in Syria. They have been a key influence on movements from Occupy in United States, to the landless in Latin America, to anti-austerity struggles in Europe and Asia, to urban movements in Africa. Their lineages include anarchism, syndicalism, autonomist Marxism, philosophers like Alain Badiou, and radical popular praxis. This path-breaking volume recovers this understanding of social transformation, long side-lined but now resurgent, like a seed in the soil that keeps breaking through and growing. It provides case studies with reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe, and includes a dossier of key texts from a century of anarchists, syndicalists, insurgent unionists and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Originating in an African summit of radical academics, struggle veterans and social movements, the book includes a preface from John Holloway.

Politics at a distance from the state: radical, South African and Zimbabwean praxis today

Kirk Helliker and Lucien van der Walt

ABSTRACT

For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical social transformation with the capture of state power. The collapse of supposedly enabling states led recently to a crisis of left and working class politics. But this has also opened space for the rediscovery of society-centred, anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, labelled as ‘at a distance’ politics. These modes have registered important successes in practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and have involved strands of anarchism and syndicalism, and autonomist Marxism. This article, an introduction to a collection of papers emerging from a 2012 conference of academics and activists in South Africa, aims to help articulate an understanding of social transformation from below that has been analytically and politically side-lined not only in South Africa (and Zimbabwe), but globally. In doing so, it provides a preliminary attempt to map and create a dialogue between three major positions within the broad category of ‘at a distance’ politics.

Challenging state-centric change

For much of the ‘short twentieth century’, the dominant sectors of anti-systemic movements focused on winning state power, seeing an enabling state as the essential means for social transformation (Taylor 1991, 214–215). This drive for state power was ‘phenomenally successful’, in that, post-1945, social-democrats, Marxists and anti-imperialist nationalists headed most states, their rule corresponding, to a large extent, with what came to be called the ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ worlds, respectively (216).

Thus, over time, radical social transformation had come to be identified with wielding a supposedly ‘enabling state’: this outlook was shared by ever-increasing sectors of the anticapitalist left, of workers’ movements, and of national liberation forces. Seen in this context, the historical trajectory of South Africa’s leading nationalist formation, the African National Congress (ANC, formed 1912), from a popular movement that united a diverse range of forces, to a governing party deeply intertwined with the capitalist state apparatus and various forms of elite accumulation, is not unusual. Even relatively sympathetic commentary on ANC history notes that ‘the utopian element’ of its ‘non-racial nationalism’ always ‘envisaged a state-centric developmental project: either social democratic, revolutionary nationalist or Soviet socialist’. The ‘state loomed large’ despite the ‘various ideological inflections’ of the ANC’s project (Satgar 2012, 37). The ANC thus needs to be located in a larger rise of statist and hierarchical models of national liberation.

Possibilities for more democratic, bottom-up and radical models of transformation in South Africa (and elsewhere) were effaced by state-centric struggles and the project of capturing state power. But, within anti-apartheid organisations of the 1970s and 1980s, there was also an implicitly anti-statist tendency which sought to build a different form of politics, often consciously opposed to the top-down logic of state hierarchies and governance. For instance, the declared aim of the United Democratic Front (UDF, formed 1983) of constructing ‘people’s power’ and the stress by many black-centred trade unions, notably those in the ‘workerist’ tradition of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, formed 1979) on ‘workers’ control’, were indicative of a vision of an incipient politics of transformation that – despite ambiguities, contradictions and limitations – simply did not place the state centre-stage in liberation.

Unbanned in 1990, the ANC de-mobilised anti-apartheid struggles and structures in the early 1990s. The process was exemplified by the closing of the UDF in 1991 and the transformation of many UDF structures into ANC branches or affiliates, and the formation around the same time of the ANC-headed ‘Tripartite Alliance’ with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, which replaced FOSATU in 1985), and the South African Communist Party (SACP, formed 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa, CPSA). This was followed, in short order, by a technocratic, neo-liberal programme pursued vigorously by the ANC party-state formally inaugurated with the 1994 non-racial elections in South Africa, which entrenched core inequalities and devastated industry (e.g. Siedman-Makgetla 2004). In this process, it has sought to use formations like COSATU and the SACP to dampen popular opposition. The UDF’s decline and the ANC’s rise marked a shift in national liberation from ‘people’s politics’ to ‘state politics’ (Neocosmos 1996). To reiterate, the ANC’s evolution since taking state power in 1994 is not aberration, capitulation or abdication: it is the logical outcome of its nationalist project, and of a view of politics that declared (with Kwame Nkrumah) ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you’ (quoted in Biney 2011, 2). The ANC’s evolution was quite typical of the fate of nationalist movements aiming at state power.

By the 1990s, however, state-centric models, whether social democratic, Soviet-Marxist, or anti-imperialist nationalist, were widely regarded as failing. They were marked by economic failures, goal-displacement, an inability to sustain themselves in the face of an increasingly internationalised capital structure, a deep crisis of accumulation and a shifting geopolitical order. Always marked by endemic inequality, they all faced popular unrest and dissatisfaction with their top-down, bureaucratic and statist approaches (van der Walt 2015), with some of the most trenchant critiques coming, not from the right, but labour and the left (e.g. Ascherson 1981; Larmer 2007; Wilks 1996, 97–98), and it proved impossible to co-opt or pacify the popular classes (e.g. Larmer 2007).

Multiple crises, including legitimacy crises, ended the era of the ‘three worlds’, and the absence of a clear labour and left alternative at the time opened the door to the victory of global neo-liberalism, marking the end of the era of state-led models of capitalism. The end of the enabling state disabled anti-systemic movements enamoured of states. Neo-liberalism centres on free markets: the state is not gone but is manifestly an agency for massive interventions to subsidise capital, expand commodification and disci-pline the popular classes.

Rather than an ‘end of history’ marked by the ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’ (Fukuyama 1989, 3, 4, 12), the end of the ‘three worlds’ opened a present marked everywhere by malaise, crisis and turmoil and deepening inequality, following the fault-lines of class, nation, gender, ethnicity, race and economic and political instability. In its ‘golden age’ (roughly from 1950–1973) capitalism ‘appeared to achieve the impossible’, but since then, it has staggered from crisis to crisis (Hobsbawm 1992, 59). Further, while parliamentary democracy now exists worldwide on a scale unmatched in previous eras, public scepticism of its value is equally widespread and unprecedented.

The question though is not whether people will resist, but how the forces of popular dissatisfaction will develop now and in the future. Of significance is that state-centric left politics continues to retain substantial support, despite its manifest impotence and declining credibility. Globally, there has been some revival in the fortunes of left-of-centre parties, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany and the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil, as well as the formation of various new left parties during the 2000s. But these parties have failed to revive the old statist projects, and have, despite some reforms, embraced in large part the status quo of neo-liberalism. Dramatic examples are provided by the experiences of Zambia in the 1990s, Brazil in the 2000s and Greece in the 2010s.

The old options simply do not and cannot work anymore, given the deep structural changes in economy and politics that have taken place (Satgar 2012; Wilks 1996). Firstly, while social democratic proposals remain surprisingly widespread, social democratic systems like the Keynesian welfare state have failed. Rather than seeking to govern capitalism, social democracy today involves effectively, minimalist welfare and tax reforms. Secondly, rather than creating egalitarian ‘new nations’ against imperialism, ‘third world’ nationalism increasingly reveals political and cultural intolerance, and elite enrichment. This includes the deliberate promotion of ethnic, racial, regional and religious divisions (Ake 1983), and the rise of right-wing parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. And, thirdly, most of the mainstream of Marxism – Communism – has moved from revolution to a modest social democratic outlook such as Eurocommunism, CPI-M-led Kerala in India, COSATU and the SACP in the Alliance (e.g. COSATU/SACP 1999; SACP 1995) or an outright embrace of neo-liberalism (e.g. China and Vietnam). Today, ‘there are only a few places left where seriously communist parties still exist’ (Anderson 2014, xiii).

This is part of a general labour and left retreat from projects of deep change to a narrow focus on immediate grievances and vague demands for ‘democracy’, disarticulated from clear alternatives and strategies for transition. The global working class is larger than ever, labour movements remain resilient, but, while even capitalists despair in capitalism (e.g. Foroohar 2016), radical left politics is impoverished. If the radical left remains wedded to the failed statism of the three worlds, it will disintegrate, and the forces of the right will fill the gap it leaves. The discrediting of secular, progressive alternatives leads directly to the rise of religious fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist currents (Taylor 1991, 216–217; also Hobsbawm 1992, 64). This is borne out, in recent years, by developments in Egypt, India and the United States, where right-wing figures ride the tides of popular misery and disillusion.

Towards a ‘politics at a distance from the state’

But this second round of failures – the failure of state-centred revolts against neo-liberalism, which emerged against the backdrop of the failure of the ‘three worlds’ – has not, in itself, foreclosed progressive, secular options. This is because left theory and practice has always included both state-centred and society-centred models of change. State-centred positions, which stress capturing the state, have been widely challenged by the failure of the old statist models, the failure of attempts at reviving them and the failures of left and workers parties, old and new. Society-centred positions involve a politics of anti-capitalist transformation that question fundamentally state-centred change. This may seem counter-intuitive, given that anti-statism has been widely appropriated by the neoliberal right, but, as we will show, there is a rich and varied left anti-capitalist anti-statism that bears closer examination. This should not be confused with liberal-pluralist conceptions of ‘civil society’ as a counter-balance to the state, precisely because its radical outlook amplifies the deep social antagonisms obscured by the notion of civil society, and aims at far more than moderating state excesses.

Society-centred models have revived and registered some important successes. Alain Badiou provides a useful means of framing society-centred politics in its many possible, varied and heterogeneous forms (Badiou, Del Lucchese, and Del Smith 2008, 647, 649650). Stressing the need to ‘keep alive’ the ‘idea that there is a real alternative to the dominant politics’ of capitalism and parliamentarism, he also argues for the need to reject the Marxist-Leninist vanguard model, and its party-state, which had secured, not emancipation, but ‘a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself’. While the ‘organisation of the masses is still the fundamental issue’, a real ‘politics of emancipation’ has to take place at a ‘distance from the state’, because the capture of state power is not likely or desirable, and also because the standard party form, which is ‘entirely articulated with the state’, is not and never will be desirable: a historical failure, it does not deserve repetition.

When Badiou (2006, 270) calls for a politics ‘outside the spectre of the party-state’, he is also emphasising a practice of ‘thinking politics outside of its subjection to the state’, which invariably involves ‘a rupture with the representative form of politics’ (289, 292, our emphasis). This means moving from the politics of representation by others, to a politics of presentation, of experiences, concerns and aspirations outside of rigid hierarchical arrangements, in formations like assemblies. Other writers suggest this entails an autonomous politics with ‘self-established rules, self-determination, self-organisation and selfregulating practices particularly vis-à-vis the state’ (Böhm, Dinerstein, and Spicer 2010, 6).

‘Politics at a distance from the state’ does not signify, in other words, a unified perspective, but rather encompasses a range of positions, not all of which are – as we will show below – altogether anti-statist either. It is a ‘descriptive, negative, characterisation’ signifying a break with the ‘subordination’ of politics to the ‘question of power and the state and parties’ (Badiou, Del Lucchese, and Del Smith 2008, 649–650).

In recent years, a variety of alternative approaches, broadly ‘politics at a distance from the state’, have been devised, revised, revived or reinvigorated. Notable moments have included the public emergence of the neo-Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, which explicitly rejected vanguardist conceptions of armed struggle, and initiated global ‘encounters’ against neo-liberalism; innovative developments in political philosophy that, starting from a broadly Marxist and anti-capitalist foundation, have sought to reframe the notion of revolution, including works by Badiou, John Holloway and Jacques Rancière; and a growing literature on the history and politics of nonMarxist left radicalisms (e.g. Linebaugh and Rediker 2000).

The debates these works have helped reignite also take place in the context of a revival of anarchism and syndicalism, an anti-statist left current dating back to the 1860s. A small ‘avalanche’ of publications on the topic (Anderson 2014) is matched by, for example, its notable role in the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, including the ‘black blocs’ (Dupuis-Déri 2015), Occupy Wall Street (Bray 2013) and unions, including important anarcho-syndicalist currents in Spain and the Italian ‘committees of the base’ (Ness 2014). The most radical attempt to change society in the wake of the Arab Spring has been in parts of Turkey and Syria, notably the Rojava region, where the Kurdistan Worker...