Ranciere 1 - excerpt

paysanxxi

What is first at stake is the configuration of the possible. This also means what is first at stake is the distribution of the capacities. The struggle is between opposing ways of understanding the relation between the particular and the universal, the relation between the present and the future. The same goes, you know, for instance when networks of mostly anonymous social actors oppose the rational policy of the immigration quotas decided by our governments, when they oppose it with another idea of who can be counted as a member of our national communities.

The collective intelligence of emancipation is the collective capacity at work in those scenes of conflict. This collective intelligence has nothing to do with high-tech virtuosity. What it sets to work rather is the capacity which is common to that virtuosity and to the virtuosity that allows for instance the immigrant worker to cross all the geographical and legal boundaries, all the material and symbolical boundaries in order to prove that he is a French worker similar to any other French workers, if we take the example of France, and I think that this may prove a form of universalisation, a struggle for the universal, stronger, sometimes, then many discourses on universal values.

So, what is at stake is the common capacity of those different virtuosity, their common capacity to shift places and identities to break through the distribution of places, identities and competences in order to reframe the given situation of the capacity of producing a new configuration of the visible, the intelligible and the possible by implementing the capacity of anybody. That is the kind of universality the politics is about: the capacity of anybody. The political subject is not a part of the social structure, an element of the process of production. It has to come as a supplement to the distribution of powers, places, functions, and identities that make up a society, a supplement to the distribution of the capacity. But what comes as supplement to the distribution of capacity is undistributed capacity, the capacity of anybody, or rather the capacity created by the collectivisation of the power inherent in the equality of anyone with any other one. I called it “the part of the uncounted” or “the part of those who have no part”. It was sometimes misinterpreted as the power of the excluded. But what it truly means is the power of anybody, no matter who, the qualification of those who have no specific qualification. I think that investigation of this power, maybe more fruitful for the sake of artistic and political invention today by the endless denunciation of the power of the beast. The endless unmasking of the ghost.

Universality has been for long associated with the demonstration of the power of necessity. It might be time to explore its conjunction with the powers of contingency, with powers of indifference to difference that don’t amount to the equivalence of anything with anything, but with the empowerment of the capacity of no matter who.

Thank you. continue reading

Under Siege: A poem by Mahmoud Darwish

Under Siege

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.

***
A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent
For we closely watch the hour of victory:
No night in our night lit up by the shelling
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us
In the darkness of cellars.

***
Here there is no "I".
Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay.

***
On the verge of death, he says:
I have no trace left to lose:
Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand.
Soon I shall penetrate my life,
I shall be born free and parentless,
And as my name I shall choose azure letters...

***
You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

***
When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

***
Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank—
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass...

***
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

***
The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

***
Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment
Were it not for the visits of the rainbows.

***
We have brothers behind this expanse.
Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep.
Then, in secret, they tell each other:
"Ah! if this siege had been declared..." They do not finish their sentence:
"Don’t abandon us, don’t leave us."

***
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees...
Added to this the structural flaw that
Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.

***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

***
If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

***
Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

***

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

***
It is up to the soul to come down from its mount
And on its silken feet walk
By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime
Friends who share the ancient bread
And the antique glass of wine
May we walk this road together
And then our days will take different directions:
I, beyond nature, which in turn
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock.

***
On my rubble the shadow grows green,
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here...not over there.

***
In the state of siege, time becomes space
Transfixed in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.

***
The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word
You have given me back to the dictionaries
And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz.

***
The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse
I did not look
For the virgins of immortality for I love life
On earth, amid fig trees and pines,
But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it
With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure.

***
The martyr warned me: Do not believe their ululations
Believe my father when, weeping, he looks at my photograph
How did we trade roles, my son, how did you precede me.
I first, I the first one!

***
The martyr encircles me: my place and my crude furniture are all that I have changed.
I put a gazelle on my bed,
And a crescent of moon on my finger
To appease my sorrow.

***
The siege will last in order to convince us we must choose an enslavement that does no harm, in fullest liberty!

***
Resisting means assuring oneself of the heart’s health,
The health of the testicles and of your tenacious disease:
The disease of hope.

***
And in what remains of the dawn, I walk toward my exterior
And in what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps inside me.

***
Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to
The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the
Blackness of this tunnel!

***
Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me
In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces:
Greetings to my apparition.

***
My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me,
A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees
A marble epitaph of time
And always I anticipate them at the funeral:
Who then has died...who?

***
Writing is a puppy biting nothingness
Writing wounds without a trace of blood.

***
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.

by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Marjolijn De Jager continue reading

Greece: A letter to students

Struggle News, December 16 2008

An open letter to students by workers in Athens, against the background of the social upheaval following the police shooting of a young boy.

A letter to students

Our age difference and the general estrangement make it difficult for us to discuss with you in the streets; this is why we send you this letter.

Most of us have not (yet) been bald or big-bellied. We are part of the 1990-91 movement. You must have heard of it. Back then, and while we had occupied our schools for 30-35 days, fascists killed a teacher because he had gone beyond his natural role (that of being our guard) and crossed the line to the opposite side; he had come with us, into our struggle. Then, even the toughest of us got to the streets and riot. However, we didn’t even think of doing what you easily do today: attack police stations (although we sang “burn police stations…”).

So, you’re gone beyond us, as always happens in history. Conditions are different of course. During ‘90s they passed us off the prospect of personal success and some of us swallowed it. Now people cannot believe this fairy tale. Your older brothers showed us this during the 2006-07 students’ movement; you now spit their fairy tale to their faces.

So far so good.

Now the good and difficult matters begin.

We’ll tell you what we’ve learned from our struggles and our defeats (because as long as world is not ours we’ll always be the defeated ones) and you can use what we’ve learned as you wish:

Don’t stay alone. Call us; call as many people as possible. We don’t know how you can do that, you will find the way. You’ve already occupied your schools and you tell us that the most important reason is that you don’t like your schools. Nice. Since you’ve already occupied them change their role. Share your occupations with other people. Let your schools become the first buildings to house our new relations. Their most powerful weapon is dividing us. Just like you are not afraid of attacking their police stations because you are together, don’t be afraid to call us to change our life all together.

Don’t listen to any political organization (either anarchists or anyone). Do what you need to. Trust people, not abstract schemes and ideas. Trust your direct relations with people. Trust your friends; make as many people as possible in your struggle your people. Don’t listen to them when they’re saying that your struggle doesn’t have a political content and must seemingly obtain. Your struggle is the content. You only have your struggle and it’s in your hands to preserve its advance. It’s only your struggle that can change your life, namely you and the real relations with your fellowmen.

Don’t be afraid to proceed when confronting new things. Each one of us, as we’re getting older, has things planted in their brains. You too, although you are young. Don’t forget the importance of this fact. Back in 1991, we confronted the smell of the new world and, trust us, we found it difficult. We learned that there must always be limits. Don’t be scared by the destruction of commodities. Don’t be scared by people looting stores. We make all these, they are ours. You (just like we in the past) are raised to get up every morning in order to make things that they will later not be yours. Let’s get them back all together and share them. Just like we share our friends and the love among us.

We apologize for writing this letter quickly, but we do it swinging the lead from our work, secretly from our boss. We are imprisoned in work, just like you are imprisoned in school.

We’ll now lie to our boss and leave work: we’ll come to meet you in Syntagma sq with stones in our hands.

Proletarians continue reading

What is postcolonial thinking?

Eurozine, September 2008

An interview with Achille Mbembe

The faults in Europe's universalism, especially when confronting its colonial history, have nurtured a variety of critical perspectives in the West. Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe says that postcolonial thinking looks so original because it developed in a transnational, eclectic vein from the very start. This enabled it to combine the anti-imperialist tradition with the fledgling subaltern studies and a specific take on globalization, he says.

Esprit: "Postcolonial theory" is present in Africa, India, Great Britain, Australia and the United States, but hardly at all in France. Can you tell us what it is all about and what lies behind it? How, in particular, does it differ from anti-western and third-world currents of thought?

Achille Mbembe: What's known in the English-speaking world as "postcolonial studies" and "postcolonial theory" is characterised by its heterogeneity, so what constitutes its originality cannot be summed up easily in a few words.

Perhaps I'd better start by making clear that it has little to do with the caricature of "third-worldism" projected by the chorus of penitents in France. In truth, it's a way of thinking that derives from a number of sources and that is far from constituting a system because it is in large part being constructed as it moves forward. That's why it would in my opinion be an exaggeration to call it a "theory". It derives both from anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles on the one hand, and from the heritage of Western philosophy and of the disciplines that constitute the European humanities on the other. It's a fragmented way of thinking, which is both a strength and a weakness. In spite of its fragmented nature there are some forms of reasoning, and some arguments, which distinguish this current of thought and which have made a major contribution to alternative ways of reading our modernity.

To begin with I'd draw your attention to the critique, not of the West per se, but of the effects of cruelty and blindness produced by a certain conception – I'd call it colonial - of reason, of humanism, and of universalism. This critique is different from that once made by the existentialist, phenomenological and post-structuralist movements in post-war France. Of course, it is chiefly concerned with the issue of self-creation and self-government. But its approach is not wholly confined to the problem of the "death of God" à la Nietzsche. It differs in many respects from the Sartrean idea of "man without God" taking the place vacated by the "dead God", and hardly subscribes either to Foucault's notion that "God being dead, man is dead too".

On the other hand, it does put its finger on two things. Firstly, it exposes both the violence inherent in a particular concept of reason, and the gulf separating European moral philosophy from its practical, political and symbolic outcomes. How indeed can the much-trumpeted faith in man be reconciled with the way in which colonized people's life, labour and world of signifiers got sacrificed so unthinkingly? That is the question Aimé Césaire poses in his Discourse on Colonialism, for example.

Secondly, postcolonial thinking stresses humanity-in-the-making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away. This hope in the advent of a universal brotherly community is very close to Jewish thought – as projected by Ernst Bloch at least, or even Walter Benjamin – minus the politico-theological dimension.

That said, the postcolonial critique operates on several levels. On the one hand, like Edward Said in Orientalism, it deconstructs colonial prose: that is to say the mental set-up, the symbolic forms and representations underpinning the imperial project. It also unmasks the potential of this prose for falsification – in a word, the stock of falsehoods and the weight of fantasizing functions without which colonialism as a historical power-system could not have worked. In this way it reveals how what passed for European humanism manifested itself in the colonies as duplicity, double-talk and a travesty of reality.

Indeed, colonization never ceased telling lies about itself and others. As Frantz Fanon explains so clearly in Black Skin, White Masks, the procedures for racializing the colonized were the driving force behind this economy of duplicity and falsehood. In postcolonial thinking, race is the wild region, the beast, of European humanism. To borrow Castoriadis's terms on racism, I'd say that the beast puts it more or less this way: "I alone possess value. But I can only be of value, as myself, if others, as themselves, are without value".

Postcolonial thinking aims to take the beast's skeleton apart, to flush out its favourite places of habitation. More radically, it seeks to know what it is to live under the beast's regime, what kind of life it offers, and what sort of death people die from. It shows that there is, in European colonial humanism, something that has to be called unconscious self-hatred. Racism in general, and colonial racism in particular, represents the transference of this self-hatred to the Other.

There is a second level in the postcolonial critique of European humanism and universalism which, if the term had not given rise to so many misunderstandings, could be called biopolitical. The face of Europe which was experienced by the colony (and before that, under slavery, by the "plantation"), and which gradually became familiar, was far from being that of liberty, equality and fraternity. The totem which colonized peoples discovered behind the mask of humanism and universalism was not only deaf and blind most of the time, it was also, above all, characterized by the desire for its own death, but insofar as this death was necessarily conveyed through that of others, it was a delegated death.

It was also a place where law had nothing to do with justice but, on the contrary, was a way of starting wars, continuing them and perpetuating them; and above all a place where wealth was but a means of exercising over others the right of life and death. As a result it could be said of postcolonial thinking that it is not a critique of power as usually understood, but of force – a force that is incapable of transformation. Once again it is Fanon who has analyzed, better than anyone else, this kind of necropolitical force which, in passing through fiction, becomes sick of life or else, in an act of permanent reversion, takes death for life and life for death. That's why the colonial relationship fluctuates constantly between the desire to exploit the other (seen as racially inferior) and the temptation to eliminate him, to exterminate him.

What – thirdly - characterises postcolonial thinking is entanglement and concatenation, unveiled chiefly through its critique of identity and subjectivity. From this viewpoint it is opposed to a particular Western illusion, that there can be no subject other than in the circular, permanent referral to oneself, to an essential and inexhaustible singularity. In countering this, postcolonial thinking stresses the fact that identity arises from multiplicity and dispersion, that self-referral is only possible in the in-between, in the gap between mark and demark, in co-constitution. In this situation colonisation no longer appears as mechanical and unilateral domination forcing the subjugated into silence and inaction. Quite the reverse – the colonized person is a living, talking, conscious, active individual whose identity arises from a three-pronged movement of violation, erasure and self-rewriting.

Moreover, as Ghandi himself suggested, the universalization of imperialism cannot be explained by the violence of coercion alone: it was a consequence too of the fact that many colonized people agreed, for more or less valid reasons, to become consciously complicit in a fable which they found attractive in a number of respects. The identity of the colonized and of the colonizer was shaped by the intersection between ellipsis, disengagement and renewal. Postcolonial thinking endeavours to analyse this vast area of ambivalence and the aesthetic reasons behind the confusion and its paradoxical effects.

This is perhaps the moment to point out that postcolonial thinking, the critique of European humanism and universalism, is not an end in itself. It is carried out with the aim of paving the way for an enquiry into the possibility of a politics of the fellow-creature. The prerequisite for such a politics is the recognition of the Other and of his or her difference. I believe that this enrolment in the future, in the interminable quest for new horizons for man through the recognition of the Other as fundamentally human is an aspect of this thinking that is all to often forgotten. It is a constituent part of Fanon's quest, of Senghor's in the Poetical Works during his imprisonment in a German camp (Front Stalag 230), of Edward Said's meditations at the end of his life or, more recently, of Paul Gilroy's considerations about the possibility of convivial life in a henceforth multicultural world (Postcolonial Melancholia). The same note is struck in much Afro-American thought, confronted as it is with the difficulty of reappropriating the heritage of slavery and racism, with organising them in the service of the resistance of the dominated without however falling into the trap of racialization and race glorification.

One last point. What constitutes the political strength of postcolonial thought is its enrolment in the historic social struggles of colonized societies and especially its rereading of the theoretical praxis of what we call liberation movements. So it is a way of thinking which, in several respects, still believes in the postulate that the only true learning is the leaning that aims to transform the world. It is a way of thinking that belongs to the being-subject, to the being-for-itself, to the manner in which the dialectic of master and slave, of colonist and native, might be transcended. Finally, if postcolonial thought today is the preserve of British and American academic institutions and of English-speaking intellectuals, it should not be forgotten that this current was largely inspired by French thinking. I've mentioned Fanon, Césaire and Senghor; I could have added Glissant and others too. Today, certain works of African francophone literature have taken their place among the canonical texts of postcolonial criticism.

But added to this is the influence of French thinkers of Otherness like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas and many more besides; also the contribution made to postcolonial thinking by the analyses of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan. It's therefore a way of thinking that in several respects is very close to a peculiarly French approach to reasoning, so it's rather paradoxical that, because of its cultural insularity and the narcissism of its elites, France has cut itself off from these new ventures in world thought.

Unfortunately it looks as though absolutely nothing can be salvaged from the post-war French critical tradition, in spite of the well-known fact that it placed centre-stage not only the phenomenon of Nazism, but of colonialism too. It's as if the colonial event belonged to another age and another place, and as if it had absolutely nothing to teach us about how to understand our own modernity, about citizenship, about democracy, even about the development of our humanities. As a result France finds it difficult not to speak solely about itself: contemporary French thought is no longer capable of speaking about the Other, even less to the Other; it prefers, in the good old colonial tradition, to speak in the place of the Other with – we know – catastrophic results, as during the urban riots recently, and on the occasion of the surreal debate about the benefits of colonization.

A way out of third-worldism

Esprit: Can a link be established between globalization and postcolonial thought?

AM: It can be said that postcolonial thought is in many respects a globalized way of thinking, even if initially it does not use that term. In the first place, it shows that there is little disjunction between the history of the nation and that of the empire. The Napoleon of the restitution of slavery and the Toussaint Louverture who represented the revolution of human rights are dual aspects of the same nation and the same colonial empire. Postcolonial thought demonstrates that colonialism itself was a global experience which contributed to the universalization of representations, techniques and institutions (in the case of the nation state, even of merchandise of the modern kind). It shows that this process of universalization, far from being a one-way street, was basically a paradox, fraught with all sorts of ambiguities.

Moreover, where the Atlantic is concerned, the "colony" was added to another power-formation, the "plantation", a key unit of an earlier age which could be called the age of proto-globalization. The postcolonial critique shows that our global modernity needs to be viewed in context well before the nineteenth century, starting with the period when the merchandization of private property was conducted hand-in-hand during the slave trade with that of people. The age of the Atlantic slave trade is also the age of the great migrations, even if they were carried out under duress. It was the age of the forced intermixture of populations, of the creative fission in the course of which there arose the creole world of the great contemporary urban cultures.

It was also the age of the great planetary experiments. As Paul Gilroy shows in The Black Atlantic, and as do historians like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (The Many-Headed Hydra: Slaves, Sailors, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic), it was the moment when people, torn from the land, blood and soil, learned to imagine communities that transcended the bonds of land, blood and soil, forsook the comfort of repetition and invented new forms of mobilisation and transnational solidarities. Before colonies became the great laboratories of modernity in the nineteenth century, the "plantation" prefigured already a new consciousness of the world and of culture.

Alongside these historical factors there exist other levels of connection of a theoretical nature. This is particularly the case where a dialogue starts to take shape between postcolonial thought and Afro-modern thought, in the United States and the Caribbean especially. This Afro-modern thought is one of interconnections and of the in-between. It maintains that an appeal to the world can only truly be made where, by force of circumstance, one has been alongside others, with others. Under these conditions "returning to oneself" is above all "leaving oneself", leaving the night of identity and the lacunae of my little world. So here we have a way of reading globalization that rests on the radical affirmation of the density of proximity, of displacement, even of dislocation. In other words, consciousness of the world arises from the actualization of what was already possible in me, achieved through my encounter with the lives of others, my responsibility towards the lives of others and towards seemingly distant worlds and, above all, towards people with whom I have apparently no connection: the intruders.

Esprit: To what extent can the development of this current of thought be explained by the historical and political situation? It's doubtless no accident that the current emerged after the failure of postcolonial nation-states. Isn't the problem today the reconstruction of politics?

AM: This question requires a lengthy answer. It can be said that there were three cardinal moments in the development of postcolonial thought. Anti-colonial struggles were its starting point. These struggles were preceded and accompanied by extended reflection upon themselves by the colonized – a reflection on the contradictions arising from their dual status as "natives" and imperial "subjects"; an examination of the forces that enabled them to resist colonial domination; debates on the relationship between "class" factors and "racial" factors. The discourse then centred on what may be called the politics of autonomy, that is, to adopt Vincent Descombes's terms, the ability to "say I", to "act independently", to acquire citizen status and, thereby, to participate in the universal. In the French-speaking African and black diaspora tradition, Césaire, Fanon, Senghor and many others, including novelists and people of action (trade unionists and political leaders), have written the canonical texts of this period.

Next comes the second moment, which I would situate around the 1980s. It is the moment of "high theory", and its high point was the publication by Edward Said of his major work, Orientalism – a work he extended and clarified a few years later in The World, the Text and the Critic and in Culture and Imperialism. It was Edward Said, a stateless Palestinian, who laid the first foundations for what was gradually to become "postcolonial theory", in the sense this time of an alternative form of knowledge about modernity and a separate academic discipline. One of Said's decisive contributions was to show, in opposition to the Marxist doxa of the period, that the colonial project was not reducible to a simple military-economic system, but was underpinned by a discursive infrastructure, a symbolic economy, a whole apparatus of knowledge the violence of which was as much epistemic as it was physical. The cultural analysis of the discursive infrastructure and of the colonial imagination would gradually become the very subject of postcolonial theory and give rise to severe criticism from intellectuals in the Marxist and internationalist tradition like Aijaz Ahmed (In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism), and Benita Parry.

In the Indian context, three other thinkers would help widen the breach opened up by Said. First up was Ashis Nandy, who in The Intimate Enemy advanced the proposition that colonialism was, above all, a psychological affair; that, as such, the struggle against colonialism was both a material and mental war, and that in any case the resistance to colonialism, and the nationalism that was its corollary, were forced to operate in the terms defined beforehand by the West. It was Nandy who, well before the rest, facilitated Fanon's passage into India. At the same time he introduced psychoanalysis into postcolonial discourse while at the same time opening up a dialogue between that current of thought and Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Then there was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian academic and translator of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, and author of a famous text that has since become a classic (Can the Subaltern Speak?) and of a summa entitled Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Finally there was Homi Bhabha, editor of the symposium Nation and Narration and author of The Location of Culture and of a commentary on Fanon.

It was during the 1980s, too, that a start was made on forging links between postcolonial thought and several other currents of distinctive pedigree. Suffice it to mention two, the merit of which was to offer a historiographical foundation to what, up till then, had chiefly consisted of the analysis of literary texts. First of all, subaltern studies, a current of historical thought that arose in India, developed a critique of nationalist and anti-colonial historiography while at the same time trying to recover the historical voices and capabilities of decolonization's rejects (peasants, women, the untouchable caste, the underprivileged, inferiors) through a revision and selective rereading of Marxism (see in particular Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe). Because of the pride of place accorded to the "voiceless" and the "powerless", a good part of the initial theoretical inspiration of the subaltern-studies school derives from Gramsci. But the "translation" of Marx into non-European languages and contexts was aimed above all at understanding why, in India, the anti-colonial struggle led not to a radical transformation of society but to a sort of "passive revolution" characterized by the return of "communalism", that is, in the last resort, to an anti-nationalist scenario.

On the other hand there is a whole Afro-modern current of thought which developed around the shores of the Atlantic and which took this oceanic and transnational formation as its basic unit of analysis (notably Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic). Its proponents are Afro-American, Black-British and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals, and its central concern is the rewriting of the multiple histories of modernity at the meeting point between racial factors and factors of social class. In that perspective, this Afro-modern current is just as much interested in the question of diasporas as in the procedures by which individuals are subjugated to ignominious categories blocking all access to the status of subject in history. Such is the case particularly with confinement in a race.

From this viewpoint W.E.B. Dubois, author of The Soul of Black Folks, is the Afro-American thinker who has offered the best analysis of the effects of the "sombre veil of colour" in which people of African origin have been confined in the New World. He highlights the fact that such a "veil" not only covers the individual forced to wear it, but makes him or her unrecognizable and incomprehensible, prey to a "double consciousness".

This current of thought is also alert to the themes of the "liberation of minds" and of memory in conditions of captivity (religion, music and the performing arts in particular) and to the issue of dispersion (diasporas), as well as to what Glissant calls the "poetics of connection". Artistic and aesthetic experience occupies a central place in this current. In discussing slave songs, "old, mysterious songs through which the soul of the black slave spoke to people", Dubois says that "those who walked in darkness, in olden times, sang songs of grief – because their hearts were weary". Paul Gilroy, too, takes up the theme of black music, in his analysis of jazz and reggae.

As can be seen, the postcolonial current is an intellectual constellation the strength and the weakness of which have their origins in its very fragmentation. Being the product of the circulation of knowledge between different continents and across different anti-imperial traditions, it is like a river with multiple tributaries. What gives it its strength in English-speaking universities is not only the radicality of its eclecticism; it is above all because it has managed to decentre the question of the humanities. Thanks to its anti-systematic syncretism, its creative syntheses, its recourse to hybrid methods, its insistence on cultural and epistemological pluralism, even its generally intelligent and fertile misreadings, it has made possible the installation of other questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of the academy.

The third moment is marked by the central phenomenon of our epoch, globalization, that is the generalized expansion of trade and its grip on the totality of natural resources, of human production, in a word of living in its entirety. It seems to me that in these circumstances the literary text alone can no longer be the sole archive of choice. But critical reflection on contemporary forms of life-instrumentalization can gain in radicality if it accepts that slavery and colonization – capitalism's old and recent formations – need to be taken seriously. It's clear, indeed, how constant was the refusal, in the way colonial capitalism functioned, to institute the sphere of the living as a limit to economic appropriation. As for slavery, it was a mode of production, circulation and distribution of wealth grounded in the refusal of institutionalization in any domain whatever of the "non-appropriable". From every point of view, the "plantation", the "factory" and the "colony" were the principal laboratories in which experiments were conducted into the authoritarian destiny of the world that we see today.
Reinvention of the subject

Esprit: Is the postcolonial era both the hope of an exit from an inhuman world – with consequences in terms of religion – and a time of necessary reinvention?

AM: To my mind it's the era both of the end and of reinvention, starting with the reinvention of what has suffered the most damage, the body. But it's also a time of fresh struggles. In the context of extreme poverty, of extreme racialization and of the omnipresence of death, the body is the first to be affected, the first to be hurt. Fanon had already drawn attention to this at the end of his first book Black Skin, White Masks, where he turns to his body and utters this prayer: "Oh my body, make of me a man who asks questions".

As is clearly shown by the example of South Africa on its emergence from apartheid, nothing can be reinvented unless one is capable both of glancing backward and of looking forward, because if what began in blood ends in blood the chances of a new beginning are lessened by the haunting presence of the horrors of the past. Put another way, it is difficult to reinvent anything if one simply repeats against others the violence once inflicted on oneself. There is no "good violence" that can follow on automatically from "bad violence" and be legitimized by it. All violence, "good" or "bad", always sanctions a disjunction. The reinvention of politics in postcolonial conditions first requires people to depart from the logic of vengeance, above all when vengeance wears the shabby garb of the law.

That said, the struggle to escape from an inhuman order of things cannot do without what may be called the poetic productivity of the sacred. After all, what would Africa be without the sacred? Here the sacred represents the imaginative resource par excellence. The sacred is to be understood not only in relation to the divine, but also as the "power of therapy" and of hope in a historical context in which violence has touched not only material infrastructures but psychological infrastructures too, through the denigration of the Other, through the assertion of the latter's worthlessness.

It's this discourse – sometimes interiorized – about worthlessness that is challenged by certain forms of the sacred, the ultimate aim being to enable those who were on their knees to "arise and walk" at last. In these circumstances, the philosophical, political and ethical question is how to give support to this "ascent in humanity" – an ascent at the end of which person-to-person dialogue becomes possible and replaces commands delivered to the object.

Esprit: When you speak of this ability to be oneself, to say "I", to "arise and walk", are you thinking in terms of individuals, or of peoples and collective entities?

AM: Both. I'm referring to the task of learning again to envisage oneself as a universal source of meaning. Harm has been done to individuals quite as much as to communities. Liberation struggles always bring centre-stage people who emerge from a community and who are expert at scrutinizing the hour, keeping a weather-eye open, and shouldering on the community's behalf the question "When?". They are people who probe the night sky for a glimpse of the dawn and who lead the community towards the light. This was what Martin Luther King did, and Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi – heroes for whom revolutionary asceticism began with the drive for self-transformation.

South Africa shows clearly that the injunction to "arise and walk" is addressed to all, to the oppressed of yesteryear and to their enemies. It is pseudo-liberationist to believe that it is enough to kill the colonist and take his place for relationships of reciprocity to be restored. South Africa enables us to see what it is in the politics of revenge that merely reproduces the Cain complex. What could lie beyond destruction and resentment can only be imagined in a painful confrontation with the questions, "What is to be done with the enemy? Who is my neighbour? And how can we answer in a responsible fashion for both?" That said, the desire for reconciliation alone cannot easily take the place of the radical demand for justice. In order to enable those who were on their knees not long before, bowed down under the weight of oppression, to arise and walk, justice must be done. So there is no escape from the need for justice.

Esprit: What do you think of the experience of the "Truth and Reconciliation" commission in South Africa?

AM: It was the path that had to be followed. I'm not saying that everything has been achieved. But people, blacks and whites, had to be wrenched from the jaws of the dog-mentality, the pig-mentality and the rabble-mentality that is so characteristic of racism in general. The cornerstone of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the notion of deliverance from self-hatred and from hatred of the Other. Indeed, what centuries of racism had done was to lead everyone to the narrow gate of the sepulchre. Having lived beside the sepulchre, people had to be brought back to life.

What the South African experience teaches us is that to make a fetish of the fact of having been a victim in world history often makes the person who has been prey to such a misfortune wish to shed blood, any blood; unfortunately, all too frequently, never that of the torturers but almost always someone else's, no matter whose. Because, in order to be able to function, the fetish requires endless sacrifices and thus fresh victims killed to appease the sacrificer-god. Central to the victimary economy is the desire for expiation: it takes the form of the spirit of vengeance - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – in line with the ancient monotheistic religions. Indeed, insofar as the transcendent is never grounded in one's own death, it has to be through the sacrificial killing of someone else that the sacred is established.

That was what South Africa sought, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to avoid, and what distinguishes the South African experience from that of a country like Israel. Indeed, those states which define themselves mainly as victimary subjects often appear too as subjects filled with hate, that is subjects that can never stop miming death by sacrifice and inflicting on others all the acts of cruelty of which they were once themselves the expiatory victims.

Esprit: On the question of victims' memory, is there a specifically black dimension, of blacks and their history, different from that of the experience in India, for example? Or are these specificities transcended by reflection on these issues?

AM: First, a general answer. It doesn't seem to me that people in South Africa believe in a primary, endless mourning compared to which all other grief is merely pagan. People don't think, either, that in order for one's own suffering to be acknowledged it's necessary to deny the suffering of others and empty it of all human meaning. The issue of memory in South Africa is not about which human suffering should be sanctified and which suffering is basically only of incidental significance, of no value on the scale of lives and deaths that truly matter. Every human life is universal, as it every death. And what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has taught us is how to free ourselves from the addiction to the memory of one's own suffering that characterizes all victimary consciousness. Because freeing oneself from this addiction is the necessary condition for learning to speak a human language again and, potentially, to create a new world.

That said, apartheid consisted in establishing a total distinction between whites and everyone else (blacks, Indians and coloureds), in creating subdivisions within each of these groups, in translating these subdivisions into institutions and governmental technologies specific to each group, and in translating all of that into the geographical space by setting up Bantustans and by barring blacks from taking up residence in the cities. Before apartheid (which began in 1948), colonial ideology had in any case been based on the conviction that for "civilization" to advance it was necessary to wage war on the "inferior races". So there had, historically, been a specific way of depriving the blacks of their humanity. But in the vocabulary of South Africa, "negritude" included the Indians and the coloureds too: anyone who was not "white" was "black".

So I'd say that in contemporary South Africa the question of memory is posed in terms of a painful past, but also a past full of hope, which all protagonists try to accept as a basis for creating a new and different future. That presupposes the exposure of the suffering once inflicted on the weakest; that the truth, the whole truth, be told about their sufferings; that concealment, repression and denial be renounced in return for pardon, that is the desire on the part of everybody to begin everything again on the basis of a mutual recognition of humanity of each and every one, and of the right of everybody to life in freedom before the law.

What is striking is that a considerable part of the work of memorialization that is in progress is being carried out with this aim in mind. It translates, for instance, as the appropriate burial of the remains of those who died in the struggle, the erection of funeral steles where they fell, the consecration of trado-Christian religious rituals aimed at "curing" the survivors of anger and the desire for revenge, the creation of numerous museums and parks devoted to the celebration of people's common humanity, the encouragement of the arts, and above all the launch of policies of reparation aimed at making up for centuries of neglect (a roof, a school, a road, a clinic, clean water, electricity, and one person one vote).

As can be seen, the work of memory is inseparable from meditation on the way to interiorizing the presence of the physical destruction of those who have been lost and reduced to dust. Meditation on that absence, and on ways of symbolically restoring what has been destroyed, here in large part consists in giving the theme of the sepulchre its full subversive force. But the sepulchre is not so much the celebration of death as the reference to the extra bit of life that's needed to raise the dead which lies at the heart of a new culture that promises never to forget the vanquished.

So this is an approach which both embraces and transcends the question of specificity. It is not without its tensions and contradictions. The process is not complete. The tensions can be seen in the way the de-racialization of urban spaces, as well as of institutions and the economy, is being carried out. In any event the future, viewed from this angle, is not some sort of afro-centrism, but what I'd call afropolitanism – a way of being "African" open to difference and conceived as transcending race.

Memory and responsibility

Esprit: In your book, On the Postcolony. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, you mention Cameroon frequently. In current controversies in France victims competing with each other – blacks from West Africa, from Martinique and from other islands – are taking up different positions. They are very mindful of what is said about their memory.

AM: In many respects my book adopts a different approach from that of most postcolonial thinking, if only over the privileged position accorded by the latter to questions of identity and difference, and over the central role that the theme of resistance plays in it. There is a difference, to my mind, between thinking about the "postcolony" and "postcolonial" thought. The question running through my book is this: "What is 'today', and what are we, today?" What are the lines of fragility, the lines of precariousness, the fissures in contemporary African life? And, possibly, how could what is, be no more, how could it give birth to something else? And so, if you like, it's a way of reflecting on the fractures, on what remains of the promise of life when the enemy is no longer the colonist in a strict sense, but the "brother"? So the book is a critique of the African discourse on community and brotherhood.

So it can be said that it is concerned with memory only insofar as the latter is a question, first of all, of responsibility towards oneself and towards an inheritance. I'd say that memory is, above all else, a question of responsibility with respect to something of which one is often not the author. Moreover I believe that one only truly becomes a human being to the degree that one is capable of answering to what one is not the direct author of, and to the person with whom one has, seemingly, nothing in common. There is, truly, no memory except in the body of commands and demands that the past not only transmits to us but also requires us to contemplate. I suppose the past obliges us to reply in a responsible manner. So there is no memory except in the assignment of such a responsibility.

Esprit: What is postcolonial thinking's position with regard to Europe? Is it an anti-European current of thought, or does it adopt Europe's values? Shouldn't the reflections of the postcolonial school be understood, too, as reflections on the decentring of European thought?

AM: postcolonial thought is not an anti-European thought. On the contrary, it's the product of the encounter between Europe and the worlds it once made into its distant possessions. In showing how the colonial and imperial experience has been codified in representations, divisions between disciplines, their methodologies and their objects, it invites us to undertake an alternative reading of our common modernity. It calls upon Europe to live what it declares to be its origins, its future and its promise, and to live all that responsibly. If, as Europe has always claimed, this promise has truly as its object the future of humanity as whole, then postcolonial thought calls upon Europe to open and continually relaunch that future in a singular fashion, responsible for itself, for the Other, and before the Other.

But postcolonial thought is also a dream: the dream of a new form of humanism, a critical humanism founded above all on the divisions that, this side of the absolutes, differentiate us. It's the dream of a polis that is universal because ethnically diverse. It's what, in his poetical writings, Senghor hoped for: the "rebirth of the world", which he speaks of in his "Prayer to the Masks", for example.

The thinking of the postcolony, on the other hand, is a thought of responsibility and life, seen through the prism of what belies both. It is in the direct lineage of certain facets of black thought (Fanon, Senghor, Césaire and others). It is a thought of responsibility, responsibility in terms of the obligation to answer for oneself, to be the guarantor of one's actions. The ethics underlying this thought of responsibility is the future of the self in the memory of what one has been in another's hands, the sufferings one has endured in captivity, when the law and the subject were divided.

Postcolonial thought cannot fail to be valid for the relationship between Europe and itself. If one were to apply the postulates of postcolonial theory to France, for example, one would say that since the time of the slave trade and colonization there is no French identity or French heritage sites that don't simultaneously encompass the elsewhere and the here. In other words, the elsewhere is a constituent of the here, and vice-versa. There is no longer an "inside" cut off from an "outside", a past cut off from the present. There is a time, that of the encounter with the Other, which unfolds constantly and which consists not of scission but of contraction, winding and joining. Here, in any case, is a map of the subject and a geography that makes it possible to pose in another way the burning questions of the suburban ghettoes, the nation, even of immigration.

Esprit: Third-worldism is chiefly aimed at the United States. What is postcolonial theory's view about that?

AM: As far as I'm concerned the controversy is about the way in which, historically, successive US governments have claimed to build universalism and promote democracy on the basis of crimes that are presented as so many earthly fulfilments of God's law and divine providence. So it's the political theology of the American state that is what people have a problem with insofar as the god it invokes is a melancholy god, irascible and vengeful. Mercy has no part in his laws and precepts. He is a jealous and unforgiving god, swift to destroy and forever requiring human sacrifice.

This critique of the political theology underpinning American power-politics (hyper-hegemony) is absolutely necessary in the current climate. And in any case the best critiques of this theology come from the United States itself. How, indeed, can one claim to "make world" on the basis of a politics almost exclusively founded on a single question: Who is my enemy, mine, here and now, and how can I exterminate him?

So it's not the United States as such that people have a problem with, but an idea of politics and of the world that is closely associated with the history of the enemy – the enemy as an ontological, even theological entity in the sense that my enemy is, as a matter of principle, always the enemy of God – no more, no less – and the hatred I feel for him is, necessarily, a divine hatred.

I don't think one can "make world" on the basis of a relationship between human beings in which all idea of morality is suspended precisely at the moment when morality is constantly being invoked as acts of immorality and barbarism are being carried out. The global politics of the United States today is a politics that seeks to free itself from all constraints. In the name of security it seeks exemption from all responsibility. This politics of boundless irresponsibility must be subjected to a firm, intelligent and sustained critique.


Interview by Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur and Jean-Louis Schlegel

Published 2008-01-09

Original in French
Translation by John Fletcher
First published in Esprit 12/2006 continue reading

Damning the Flood

Mute Magazine, October 2008

By supporting NGOs instead of popular movements, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti.

The inequality of class, first universalised into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalisation of capital has always been accompanied by the violent division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at building solidarity across these divisions have often been insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective.

In the contemporary world the failure to attend to the objective difference of particular situations often results in the assumption that all struggles should aspire to the form that the anti-globalization movement has taken in the metropole. Amongst other problems this immediately renders the (usually) white Northern activist an automatic and universal expert on what a popular radicalism should really look like. A failure to attend to the subjective choices with which people confront particular situations often results in a reifying culturalism that sees struggle as a natural expression of cultural difference. It is inevitably complicit with some form of racism and often risks an inability to discern domination within a nation or movement.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher who has thought about the question of solidarity across the divisions that structure domination with a rare combination of subtlety and militancy. The themes that link his work on contemporary post-colonial theory, French philosophy and Haitian politics include a consistent stress on the fact that every one thinks and that thought is the subjective confrontation with specific objective situations. Hallward affirms the specificity of particular situations and affirms the subjectivity with which they are confronted and thereby “maintains the relation between subjective and objective (and between subjects) as a relation in the strict sense”.

He is committed to a prescriptive politics. He argues that genuinely political actions must elaborate universal principles (principles that hold for everyone), that for these principles to be meaningful they must be adhered to directly and immediately, that adhering to them is necessarily divisive and requires collective unity and a willingness to confront domination. In other words he proposes a politics of popular self-emancipation organised around popular intellectual work and consensual disciplined commitment. From the beginning his work has taken the view that, following Paulo Freire, “true generosity consists in fighting to destroy the causes which lead to false charity.”

Damming the Flood is a richly detailed account of the popular Haitian movement Lavalas (‘the flood’) in and out of power. There is a focus on how the movement was vilified and its president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, removed from office by the American military with considerable support from global civil society.

Hallward’s basic argument is that as Lavalas developed into a formidable force in the late 1980s it began to constitute a serious threat to the US-backed Haitian elite. They responded to the election of Aristide to the Presidency in December 1990 with an attempted coup in January 1991 and then a successful military coup in September 1991. It left 5 000 dead. Aristide returned to office in November 2000 with 92% of the vote and disbanded the army at which point the Haitian elite, with strong support from elites in Canada, the US and France, began to wage an elaborate propaganda and destabilisation campaign against the Lavalas government. This was supported by many NGOs, including those on the left, and was followed by a military attack after which Aristide was removed from the country by the US military in February 2004. Lavalas supporters were then subject to sustained repression by occupying United Nations forces at a cost of several thousand more lives. Nevertheless resistance has continued.

Hallward takes the view that the objective constraints imposed on Aristide’s administrations by imperial power were severe and that there was no prospect for fundamental transformation. Nevertheless there were important innovations by way of a higher minimum wage, a literacy programme, a school building project, health care and so on. Even IMF statistics confirm clear progress in these areas. But Hallward’s analysis breaks with the economism of much leftism and he also takes symbolic and political movement as significant. For instance he takes seriously the political ramifications of Aristide’s choice to open up the swimming pool in the presidential palace to children from poor families. But the primary thrust of his assessment stresses that popular support for Aristide was never passive and was rooted in a network of grassroots organisations through which people could work for their own empowerment. It is also noticeable that the practical action taken by Aristide’s governments in support of the poor often found ways to combine material support with support for popular democratisation. For instance housing was not reduced to the provision of houses but included the development of town squares in shack settlements.

Hallward deals frankly with the problem of opportunism, a problem that every movement has to confront when it reaches the point of winning some access to or control over state resources. He also deals directly with the reality that any movement operating in a repressive environment in which its membership is generally criminalised is going to have to take on some of the judicial and security functions usually reserved for states with inevitable risks and inevitable condemnation. Nevertheless he concludes that “Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the outer limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilisation can proceed under the pressure of exceptional powerful constraints.”

Hallward’s claims about a campaign of demonization against Lavalals are persuasive. It is instructive to set aside Hallward’s arguments about this and apply Chomsky’s propaganda model to the recent history of Haiti by excluding highly disputed events and examining only those on which there is some agreement as to the basic facts, and comparing only those that can be as closely matched with others as is possible. It quickly becomes evident that, for instance, violence attributed to Lavalas has been systematically treated in a very different way in the elite media and civil society to that of other actors such as the Duvalier’s paramilitaries, the Haitian Military, the US Military, the anti-Aristide paramilitary groups, the United Nations and so on.

The fetishisation of leaders of popular movements has a sorry history and it is worrying that some of the solidarity work with Haiti seems to be more interested in deifying Aristide rather than supporting ongoing popular struggles in Haiti. Hallward describes his book “as an exercise in anti-demonization, not deification.” This seems fair – especially given that he is clear that Lavalas emerged from discussions amongst ordinary people in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince and that its continued strength after Aristide’s kidnapping is rooted in the ongoing practice of similar discussions and the modes of grassroots militancy that they have engendered.

Aristide is an interesting theorist in his own right and his own thought provides as good a measure as any for measuring the value of moblisation. His political thought is rooted in liberation theology. For Aristide, who says that when we say God “We mean the source of love; we mean the source of justice”, liberation theology is “the Christian impulse that does not separate belief from action, that exasperates conservatives, and annoys so many people on the left who dream of realizing the happiness of others...without the others.” He is clear that the political movement that twice bought him to power begins from and is sustained in the ‘little church’, or what liberation theology in Latin America calls ‘base communities’. They are small groups that meet in their own neighbourhoods to discuss, on their own time and in their own language, their ideas about politics and society. The fundamental principle in the little church is that “All persons are human beings, and to be cherished.” The fundamental political task is to “fan the fire of hope and to turn it into a tool for the people.” This theological politics is not unwilling to take a side. Aristide has long been clear that the preferential option for the poor should be “total, unrepentant, intransigent” and that “If they [elites] do not wish to share fraternally...They must accept that it is they, not I and my colleagues, who are advocating war.” He’s also made it very clear that as people assume political agency “Liberation theology then gives way to a liberation of theology, which can also include a liberation from theology.” This is a politics of popular self-emancipation. It recommends, as Lavalas seems to have achieved, a form of organisation closer to that of a series of linked congregations rather than a party and rooted in the self-organisation of the poor.

Hallward argues that although “NGO administrators and left-leaning academics are often uneasy with what they see as a merely populist deviation” this popular power is necessary for any kind of meaningful challenge to domination. He has a point. As C.L.R. James noted in his history of the Haitian Revolution “It is force that counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses…It is what they think that matters”.

Lavalas took state power under extremely hostile circumstances and sought to subordinate the state to society by demobilising the military while continuing to mobilise society. When Aristide was first elected President in 1990 he declared that “I will not be president of the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the people, even if this means confronting the very government I am creating.” He held to this position and ten years later wrote that people should “not confuse democracy with the holding of elections.”

The often hysterical demonization of Lavalas can easily be understood and slotted into a familiar pattern of imperial attempts to contain oppositional movement that includes the fate of Lumumba and Allende, the war against the Sandinistas and the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002. William Robinson provides a useful lens for this kind of analysis in the years after the Cold War. He argues that the US and its allies moved away from supporting dictators and that this shift was rooted in a recognition that support for dictators like Botha in South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti had produced oppositional movements that were not only demanding the removal of dictators but also the popular democratisation of society. This recognition led to a shift in policy that saw the creation of liberal democracies as a more effective way of containing popular aspirations. There had been, Robinson argued, “a reconceptualization of the principal target in intervened countries, from political to civil society, as the site of social control.” Robinson quoted Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot as observing that “Even after our [military] exit [from Haiti] in February 1996 we will remain in charge by means of USAID and the private sector.” In South Africa and the Philippines this worked well enough as the new regimes were enthusiastic about demobilizing the movements that had brought them to power. But in Haiti the Lavalas project was to subordinate the state to society via ongoing popular democratisation. This was unacceptable. The result was a return to political society as a key target of political control – a return to regime change.

But there is another aspect to the demonization of Lavalas which may be more discomforting for some on the left. Hallward elaborates a consistent critique of NGOs. His criticism of racist ideas about enlightened white charity, the role of NGOs in promoting the agendas of foreign governments and his critique of the limits of the human rights project all cover familiar ground. But his criticism extends to the explicitly anti-neoliberal NGOs that position themselves on the left. He is completely sceptical of their political effectiveness in opposing domination arguing that:

"Rather than organize with and among the people, rather than work in the places and on the terms where the people themselves are strong...[they]... organize trivial made-for-media demonstrations against things like the uncontroversial evils of neo-liberalism or the high cost of living. Such protests are usually attended by tiny groups of 30 or 40 people – which is to say, by nobody outside the organizers’ tiny circles."

However Hallward sees their support for regime change as a very significant in offering an appearance of some kind of legitimacy for the coup. His explanation of why the left NGOs would oppose a movement with tremendous popular support centres around an interview with a women’s rights activist who explains the NGO hostility to Lavalas in terms of class rivalry. “Foreign observers underestimate, she explains, the massive gap between elite (wealthy, French-speaking, internationally orientated) NGO professionals and grassroots (poor, Kreyol-speaking, neighbourhood-orientated activists. Aristide makes a similar point arguing that:

"Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun – every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don’t accept this, when they look at the nègres of Haiti – and consciously or unconsciously, that’s what they see – they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It’s a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It’s also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master."

There is a fundamental difference between forms of left politics that propose alternative policy arrangements or ways of being without developing any capacity to force the realisation of their goals and those that actively develop popular power and alternative modes of community and are willing and able to confront domination collectively and directly. The former can be called the expert left and the latter can be called the popular left. The expert left tends to operate in the languages of imperial power, to be dependent on state or donor funding, to require certification from bourgeois institutions as a condition of entry, to be located on the side of the razor wire where the police offer protection and to organise via international travel and the internet.

It is not unusual for the expert left to be entirely unaware of the existence of a popular left even when it is a literal stone’s throw away. Discourse in the wrong language, in the wrong place, in the wrong philosophical matrix and, most of all, in the mouths of the wrong people is often just invisible to the expert left. This lamentable fact is never innocent of class and can be deeply racialised.

If the popular left reaches the point of being able to stage some sort of major interruption into bourgeois space it is not unusual for the elite left to be entirely unable to comprehend the rationality of that revolt. This is often predicated on an inability to comprehend the existence of grassroots intellectuals or grassroots political militants.

When the expert left is confronted with the concrete reality of the popular left via a direct demand for recognition and respect it is not unusual for the response to take the form of denial, paranoia, criminalisation and recourse to conspiracy theory in which the speech of grassroots militants can only be understood as manipulation by a rival elite.

In his essay on the Paris Commune Alain Badiou defines the left as “the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement. Or, in more contemporary terms, that they are the only ones able to provide 'social movements' with a 'political perspective'.” He concludes that the decision of the communards to take public affairs into their own hands was a decision to break with the left and that a political rupture, a rupture with the logic of representation, “is always a rupture with the left.”

Badiou also agues that after Lenin concluded that the slaughter of the communards necessitated the development of a centralised, disciplined project aimed at seizing state power the party has been the mode by which the left has sought to organise popular politics. But Badiou does not address the new form that the official left has taken in most of the world – the NGO. The party is not dead. On the contrary it retains considerable power in places like India and in South Africa. And there are countries, such as Haiti or Brazil, where the church is also a contender for influence over popular struggles. But while there is a large critical literature on vanguardism and clericalism the critical literature on NGOs generally criticises NGOs that work for directly imperial agendas - such as the NGOs that work with the World Bank, USAID and so on - while valorising the left NGOs that operate in spaces like the World Social Forum. But in most of the world it is precisely the left NGOs that assume the right to give direction to social movements and to monopolise the resources that can mediate the development of international solidarity. Most of the left texts that seek to offer a global picture of the contemporary moment are based on the experience and thinking of these NGOs rather than the experience and thinking of popular movements. Most attempts at international solidarity are organised through these NGOs. Hallward’s book breaks decisively with this consensus and seeks direct engagement with popular politics.

Damming the Flood is rich with empirical detail and nuanced insight. Its author has paid close attention to the realities of the situation confronted by grassroots militancy in Haiti as well as to the key choices made within that militancy. One of the clearest contributions of the book is the concrete development of Hallward’s early theoretical work on the question of solidarity. An aspect of this that is developed with particular force can be formulated in terms of a choice confronting anyone wanting to develop solidarity across the brutal divisions of human existence: will that solidarity be with the expert left or the popular left?

Notes

i Peter Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press,, 2001, p. 330.

ii Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial, p. 335.

iii Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment London: Verso, 2007, Damming the Flood, p.314.

iv Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.Xxxv.

v Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000, p.63.

vi Jean Bertrand Aristide Dignity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996, p. 103.

vii Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, New York: Orbis, 1990, p. 57.

viii Aristide, Dignity, p.49.

ix Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, p.18.

x Aristide In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, p.17.

xi Hallward Damming the Flood Haiti, p.318.

xii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.137.

xiii C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 286.

xiv William Robinson Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 291

xv Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, p.36.

xvi Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 68.

xvii Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 311.

xviii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p. 181-182.

xix Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.184

xx Cited in Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.342. This kind of situation is not at all unique to Haiti. See, for instance, the comments on NGOs from The National Convention Against Displacement & SEZs held at Bhubaneswa in India in 2007 at http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/ In South Africa there has been an extraordinarily hysterical, vicious and entirely dishonest set of responses from within the NGO left to the polite rejection of their authority by the popular left. The paranoia and ruthlessness of the NGO left in the face of autonomous popular mobilisation has rivalled that of the state. For an early comment on this see the statement by the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign at http://abahlali.org/node/3032

xxi Consider, for example, the inability of the letter campaigns in support of Amina Lawal in 2003 to comprehend that there was a project to defend Lawal within Nigeria and within Islam. See the statement against the letter campaigns at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-18546

xxii Emilio Quadrelli developed an excellent analysis of this in an essay on the 2005 revolt in the Paris banlieaus. Quadrelli’s intervention simply contrasted interviews with grassroots militants with the pronouncements of the elite left who could see nothing but an inarticulate cry for help by the ‘socially excluded’. See ‘Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics’ Mute, 30 May 2007 http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politics

xxiii This is typical of all of the various forms of discourse by which a faction of the academic and NGO left in South Africa have tried to render explicit and constant rejection of their authority from popular movements as speech that does not count.

xxiv Alain Badiou ‘The Paris Commune: A political declaration on politics’ in Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p. 272.

xxv Badiou, The Paris Commune, p. 289.

xxvi This is not to suggest that NGOs and academics are necessarily separate from and opposed to popular mobilisation. On the contrary these relations are a matter of choice and it is in principle perfectly possible for the NGO and the academic to work to support the popular left from within its practices, spaces, languages and structures. But when this is achieved the resulting project remains an instance of the popular rather than the expert left. Similarly an NGO that secures a constituency (or the appearance thereof) for its projects via some form of patronage and clientalism remains an instance of the expert left. continue reading

Land & Housing

Text of a speech by S'bu Zikode at the Diakonia Council of Churches Economic Justice Forum - an audio recording of the speech, including the discussion afterwards, is available from Diakonia. Click here to read the report on the speech in the Sowetan.

Land and Housing

Thursday 28 August, 2008

I have been asked to speak on the burning issues of land and housing. I only get these invitations because of the strength of the movement of which I am part and so, on behalf of Abahlali baseMjondolo, I thank Diakonia for this platform.

The churches have rallied to our struggle in difficult times – after fires, after arrests, after beatings. We know about the role that the churches have played in Brazil and in Haiti and we believe that the churches can play the same role here if they take a clear decision, as some church leaders bravely have already, to be with the people, to clearly take the side of the people instead of being just another 'stakeholder'. Bishop Rubin Philip has stood strong in the politics of the poor and tonight I want to say that we wish him a quick and full recovery from his illness.

The right to land and the right to housing remain huge problems in South Africa. These problems are not technical, they are political. These problems will not be solved by consultants' reports, academic conferences at the ICC and meetings with the MEC at Suncoast. These problems will be solved when the people who do not count in this system, the people that have no proper place are able to stand up and to take their place and to be counted as citizens of this country.

Our politics starts by recognizing the humanity of every human being. We decided that we will no longer be good boys and girls that quietly wait for our humanity to be finally recognized one day. Voting has not worked for us. We have already taken our place on the land in the cities and we have held that ground. We have also decided to take our place in all the discussions and to take it right now. We take our place humbly because we know that we don't have all the answers, that no one has all the answers. Our politics is about carefully working things out together, moving forward together. But although we take our place humbly we take it firmly. We do not allow the state to keep us quiet in the name of a future revolution that does not come. We do not allow the NGOs to keep us quiet in the name of a future socialism that they can't build. We take our place as people who count the same as everyone else. Sometimes we take that place in the streets with teargas and the rubber bullets. Sometimes we take that place in the courts. Sometimes we take it on the radio. Tonight we take it here. Our politics starts from the places we have taken. We call it a living politics because it comes from the people and stays with the people. It is ours and it is part of our lives. We organize it in our own languages and in our own communities. It is the politics of our lives. It is made at home with what we have and it is made for us and by us. We are finished with being ladders for politicians to climb up over the people.

Sometimes it gets hard but we keep going forward together. Sometimes we don't know what to do any more but we keep thinking together. Sometimes a settlement stays strong. Sometimes a settlement fails to stay strong. But we keep going forward together.

Tonight we need to talk about the politics of land. We need to talk about the politics of housing.

We need to talk about the politics of fire. We need to talk about the politics of toilets. We need to talk about the politics of xenophobia and the politics of rape.

To think about all this we must start with where we come from.

It has become clear to us that when ever we talk about history we are seen to be launching an offensive. It has become clear to us that this is because the rich want to believe that we are poor because we are less than them – less intelligent, less responsible, less clean, less honest. If we are poor because we are just less than the rich then we must be happy for every little thing that we are given, we must be happy with a hamper or some old clothes when our children are dying in the rats and the fire and the mud.

But we are not poor because we are less than the rich. We are poor because we were made poor. The rich are rich because they were made rich. If your ancestors had the land you will go to university and get a nice job and look after your family well. If your ancestors lost the land you will be lucky to find a dangerous job that you hate so that your family can just survive.

The growing poverty in rural communities encourages mostly young people to migrate to the cities. Therefore as long as the cities grow in the same way as poverty, urbanization is not an exception. People will have to keep moving to the cities in search of hope. This reality calls upon all city authorities to learn to share the cities and to accept this growth. It is the same poor people that build cities and then get kicked out to rot in places like Parkgate once they are finished building for the attraction of foreign investment. It is the same poor people that wash and iron for the rich who have live in shacks where it is very difficult to wash and iron their clothes. It is the same poor people that bravely guard the homes and business of the rich who come home to find their homes illegally destroyed by the criminals that are called the Land Invasions Unit.

This is wrong. We need democratic cities. We need fair cities. We need welcoming cities. We need cities for all.

We need to think about how we can create a new kind of communism, a new kind of togetherness. A living communism that recognizes the equal humanity of every person wherever they were born, wherever their ancestors came from, whether they are poor or rich, women or men. This new togetherness must also understand that the world, what God has given to us all, must be shared by us all.

The system we suffer under now keeps the land in the hands of the descendents of those who had stolen it through the barrel of colonial guns. The system turns the once most trusted leaders in our cities into enemies. The enemies that do not only hate and neglect the poor but the enemies that send police to beat the poor, arrest and shoot them when ever we voice out our concerns. Tonight we remember Mthokozisi Nkwanyana, a student and a shack dweller, who was killed by the police in a student protest on Thursday last week. The system talks a lot about democracy, but does not practice democracy. The system talks more about all the rights, gender equality and justice but does not make any of this real. This is a system where almost everything is done in the name of the poor but only for the poor to be betrayed and undermined again and again. This is a system that allows formations of many institutions such as NGOs, NPOs, businesses and states to violate the human rights of the poor and the marginalized in our society.

We need to ask ourselves what is this system?

This system is a system where the people are separated into two – those that count and those that do not count. Those that count are those with money. Those that do not count are those without money. This system values business profit before humane value. This system turns democracy into a way to become rich. Money is made to dominate human thinking. Therefore we have to turn it upside down and put the human being first. Always we must start with the worst off.

What went very wrong in our society is when business profit is put ahead of human value. What went very wrong in our society is the thinking that sees development as being only the job of the few clever technical people, who are meant to think about development for the majority. Grass root organizations such as Abahlali baseMjondolo are strongly opposed to this top-down approach to development that sees people as nothing else than the helpless individuals who can not think for themselves. In this view the work of the poor is to vote when we are told and to be passive receivers of services. This is why the so called experts on the poor and our struggles always want to call our protests as 'service delivery protests' even when we clearly state what we are struggling for.

We are the people that are not meant to think. We are the people that are not meant to participate in planning and to debate on issues that affect us. We are the people that should be happy to live on hampers. The poor are strongly opposed to these dehumanizing human characteristics of the top down system that has terrorized our communities and our lives.

Abahlali have said over and over that the majority of our people believe in a true democracy, a democracy that caters for every gogo and mkhulu's at home, a democracy that does not see people differently, a democracy that does not make few people better than the majority, a democracy that is not driven by the wealth that has torn our society apart. We believe in a participatory development of the people, for the people and by the people themselves. We are concerned that at least most of the houses that are being built, they are built for the people, without the people. This is why some people reluctantly accept these houses and then they either rent them out or sell them to some desperate fellows and run back to jondolos. This is not a matter for the police and the NIA. The reason for this is not that shack dwellers can not think or are stupid. The reasons for this is the failure of authorities to involve shack dwellers not only in the planning but right from the project identification through to the implementation, monitoring and evaluation - in fact all through the project cycle. If you take people out of their communities, sometimes at gun point, and move them to rural human dumping grounds where there is no work they will not stay there. People have to survive. We want it to be clearly understood that the bottom up development approach that recognizes that a properly human life is what the majority of the poor prefers. Thus communication and consultation is vital if authorities were to be serious and respecting of those that they call 'beneficiaries'.

It is very sad that some business men, like Ricky Govender in Motala Heights, have been terrorizing their communities in search for a land to expand their business and wealth. In Motala Heights the settlement leadership and very senior families have been forced up and down the lawyers and courts to defend their right not to be evicted from their land. It is the same with the eNkwalini community who have consistently been threatened with eviction by the farmer, who had just bought the farm in Northen KwaZulu-Natal. What is more upsetting with all the evictions that are taking place in eThekwini is that they are not only illegal because they are carried out without the court orders but that they are also criminal. We have had to advise the police and municipal officials quite several times of section 26 of the South African constitution and the Prevention of Illegal Occupation of Land Act that protects the homeless, the poor and most vulnerable members of our society, children and women. Abahlali baseMjondolo has managed to stop most evictions in eThekwini in settlements like Motala Heights, Shannon Drive, Pemary Ridge, and Arnett Drive just to mention a few. But while we were winning an important victory in the High Court against evictions in Arnett Drive on Tuesday the Municipality was outside illegally demolishing shacks in Siyanda at the very same time! If already the law is not respected by the authorities then it is difficult to imagine how other new laws like the very notorious KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Slums Act will be used.

It is very sad that some academics and NGOs continue to think that it is their natural right to dominate instead of to support the struggles of the poor. We have kept our silence for years but now we must say that it is clear that at the Centre for Civil Society the work of the intellectual is to determine our intelligence by trying to undermine our intelligence. They try to buy individuals, intimidate our comrades and tell the worst lies to try and show that we are too stupid to think our own struggles. They fail to understand that we are poor, not stupid. This is their politics.

The shack dwellers believe that land and housing in the cities will bring about the safer environment, an environment that is free from shack fires, an environment that is free from rats, rapes and crime when our children and women have to find water and toilets in the bushes. If we were to be serious about caring cities, the first step will have to be to respect human life and human dignity. Mnikelo Ndabankulu a spokesperson for Abahlali baseMjondolo often says that "we do not need electricity, it is needed by our lives''. Our settlements are not temporary. Some of us have lived our whole lives in them. Our children have grown up in them. Electricity, water and sanitation can no longer be denied to shack dwellers. The eThekwini Municipality has often told us that money is not a problem, but that the problem is land. But the problem has never been just that there is no land in the cities as we have always been told. There is land. The political problem is that that land is privately owned by companies like Tongaat-Hulett. That problem can be solved but that would require recognizing the humanity of everyone and there has never been human recognition in the first place. For this City being poor, living in a shack or selling in the street, is seen as a crime. Until this is fixed right the poor will always be taken as trouble makers when in fact they are excluded from positive thinking that could contribute in the building of a caring city. A city where everyone has a say and an equal opportunity in shaping and reshaping this city into a caring one.

One of the biggest mistakes when planning development in the city is when the city does not provide basic services that are urgently needed by human lives. I am talking about services like the inadequate provision of water supply, not enough toilets and no proper collection of refuse as there is no access road to inner shack settlements. The result of these denied services is very serious. Without refuse removal there are rat bites and diseases. Without electricity there are shack fires. Who is to be blamed for the fact that we still live without these life saving services other than those who are meant to save the public in governments? We have seen the authorities shifting blame to the poor themselves with childish claims that the shack dwellers are dirty or lazy or that we do not want to move from filthy conditions. They say in the newspaper that "Zikode must educate his people'', as if people living in shacks are stupid and as if they all belong to one ordinary man like Zikode. I want to make it very clear that we have built a democratic politics and that our settlements are far too well organized to be controlled or thought by one man like Zikode. Zikode has his own kids to educate like any other responsible parent who cares about the future of their children. But Zikode does not educate the people who elected him to speak with them and then for them. In fact every day Zikode is educated by the suffering and the courage and the intelligence of the people that elected him. Therefore it is very disrespectful to say that elderly people must be educated to light paraffin stoves or light candles. The solution to fires is not education. The solution to fires is that electricity must be provided in all settlements. Electricity is not a luxury. It is needed to save lives. We cannot compromise on this point. I hope that tonight we can all agree on the need for the settlements to be electrified.

Abahlali's concerns over the shack fires that have terrorized our communities have caused this Movement to call upon all shack settlements to discuss this matter openly and to allow every shack settlement to have a say on what they think could be a solution. We have called a city summit on shack fires that will include all those who care about the lives of our people, be it the municipal authorities, progressive NGOs, churches, individuals etc.We believe that all of what is seen to be problems associated with the shack dwellers can be resolved by and with shack dwellers themselves. Thus Abahlali believes that the issue of land and housing is not just the issue for the technical people and for the government but of all who are meant to benefit from it.

The shack fire summit will be held on Monday 22 September. The day before, Sunday 21 September, we will hold a mass prayer for all the shack dwellers who have died in the fires.

People are often confused about what our movement stands for when it comes to land and housing. Tonight I want to suggest a list of ten demands on the burning questions of land and housing that could be used to begin a discussion about a platform for a united front on land and housing. These demands cone out of years of discussion in our movement. We would be very happy if you could discuss them in your own organizations so that we can, together, start the work of shaping a new vision for our cities.

1. There must be no more evictions.

2. Life saving basic services, including electricity, water, refuse removal and toilets, must be provided to all settlements.

3. The land on which the settlements have been founded must be transferred to the collective ownership of the people living in each settlement.

4. Settlements must be upgraded where they are where ever this is possible.

5. When people have to be relocated they must be given the option of moving to well located land.

6. Land must be expropriated from Tongaat-Hullet to house the poor.

7. There must be no more forced removals. People must only be relocated voluntarily.

8. Government must negotiate with the organizations that represent each settlement and not with the councilors.

9. Shack dwellers have a right to disagree with the government.

10. Shack dwellers have a right to organize themselves outside of the political parties.

We have asked people to speak to us, not for us. We have asked people to work with us, not for us. We have asked people to think with us, not for us. We have asked people to understand that our movement will always belong to its members and never to any NGO or political party. We have asked people to understand that we need a living solidarity, a solidarity that is built in partnership with our living politics, a solidarity that is built around the real everyday suffering and struggles of our people. I thank Diakonia for this invitation to speak. I thank the churches for their brave support during difficult times in our struggle. I invite everyone here to work to build a partnership for a democratic city together with us and with all democratic organizations of the poor. I invite you all to our summit on shack fires. Maybe we can start there. Let us see. continue reading