can ultimately only exist to some degree ‘in excess’ of both state and civil society, the domain of the organised form of that social division of labour, as I shall show throughout this book. Another way of making the same point is to insist that emancipatory politics are ‘dis-interested’ – in other words, that they eschew narrow interests in favour of a ‘disinterested interest’ or universal interest beyond social interests and identities – and are founded on principles that have been collectively agreed upon. In fact, a notion of excess is arguably present in Marx’s conception of the political consciousness of ‘communist proletarians’ referred to in the Communist Manifesto, as ‘they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 62). In other words, whereas Marx maintained that it was indeed ‘social being’ that determined ‘social consciousness’, this process was not mechanically or universally applicable; some were able to embody an ‘excess’ in consciousness over their social being in order to think beyond it. Such people were communists, who could imagine another world and understand the contradictions of capitalism that gave rise to it.
Does the fact that we can no longer seriously maintain that there is a socially given subject of history of whatever kind (whether the working class, the people, the masses, the nation or the multitude) mean that all emancipatory political thought must be simply discarded? Does the extinction worldwide of the idea of an emancipatory working-class politics (in other words, of ‘classism’) mean the disappearance of emancipatory thought today? Is the view that people make history dead? These questions clearly seem to be answered in the affirmative in recent thinking about the solutions proposed to political crises on the African continent by Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe, two of Africa’s best-known radical public intellectuals, whose work emanates from quite distinct intellectual and theoretical traditions, but who, in the past, had been very much concerned with the thinking of history from the perspective of a popular political subject. In both cases the idea of popularly founded solutions, which was central to African radical thought in the second half of the 20th century, has been abandoned. The solutions proposed to us today are invariably state-focused, with no emancipatory content whatsoever. While Fanon (1990: 159), for example, stressed again and again that the people he refers to as ‘honest intellectuals’ can only come to the conclusion that ‘everything depends on [the masses]’ and that ‘the magic hands [of the demiurge] are finally only the hands of the people’, radical intellectuals today have discarded the central tenet of any emancipatory politics, which is to ‘have confidence in the masses’, in whatever way this may be understood, and replaced it by a deep-seated ‘demophobia’.15
In one of his recent books, on the Darfur crisis in the Sudan, Mamdani (2009) rightly attacks the human rights discourse and politics of Western humanitarian solutions to the African crisis as necessarily providing a neo-colonial response to Africa’s problems which hides an agenda of recolonisation. Yet his solution, although located in Africa, is to appeal to the African Union (AU), that vulgar simulacrum of pan-African unity, to resolve the problems of Sudan and, by extension, those of the continent as a whole, as it evidently has no direct interest in specific conflicts and can insist on political reconciliation. But the AU has not been able to overcome the problems of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in that it is simply a collection of states which is incapable of any real pan-African conviction, and which can only think statist solutions to continental problems. In at least one clear case, that of Somalia, it has simply followed US policy, which has been totally inimical to the interests of the people of that country (Samatar, 2007). Nowhere in his book does Mamdani attempt to move beyond thinking in terms of statist solutions to investigate the possibility that there may be alternative popular solutions to what amounts after all to a major catastrophe for the people involved. The idea is simply to turn to state power(s) in order to find solutions for problems which state politics in whatever form have themselves largely initiated. After all, it could be important to ask: how are the appropriate social forces within the country to be identified and ‘mobilised’ to sustain a reconciliation process which is brokered exclusively from the outside and to which internal forces are only marginally committed at best? Such a sustained mobilisation would imply the commitment of substantial sectors of the population to a politics of peace and hence to an alternative set of political prescriptions, which would not simply concern an ‘adequate’ management of power interests (dare one say ‘good governance’?) in the interests of a (reconstituted) oligarchy. Given the lack of legitimacy of African states among their own people, such solutions, developed among sectors of the oligarchy, will always be suspect. Mamdani’s search for solutions beyond interest leads him to look in the wrong place because of his reduction of politics to power and the state.
Mamdani is primarily interested in analysing the colonial origins of the political in Africa today, the way in which the state exercises its rule, rather than in thinking politics as subjective practice.16 His concerns since the publication of Citizen and Subject (1996) have focused on (particularly ethnic) identity state politics and their institutional conditions of existence, while his normative arguments concern the imagining of a truly liberal state form. His liberal conception of the political means, however, that he cannot provide a way to thinking militancy and, in particular, a subjective politics of emancipation through which a universal politics of equality, rather than a particularistic conception of communitarianism, could be imagined. Emancipation in Africa is not a matter of tinkering with institutions of power under ‘expert’ advice, assuming this would be possible, or of waiting for a philosopher-king to achieve power or, for that matter, of relying on supra-national state institutions, for these simply reproduce the problem of state power, which is by its very nature antithetical to freedom, justice, dignity and equality. For a truly ‘democratic state’ to be established – one that is responsive to popular needs and that is thus forced to confront its own ‘oxymoronic’ character – a universal egalitarian politics must be continuously affirmed. Thus, we need to move beyond an understanding of state forms of politics, liberalism included, if we are to begin to think an emancipatory way forward. In sum, Mamdani’s concerns are with the political, the anatomy of power, so to speak, whereas what I maintain is required today, given the need to enable emancipatory thought in a post-classist period, is a concern with politics as subjectivity, as a thought-practice, more specifically a subjectivity that transcends interest. This is a distinction I maintain rigorously throughout this book: the political concerns power, it is captured and structured by interests; on the other hand, politics in its real sense – in other words, in the sense that it enables agency and emancipatory change – concerns thought, it is lived, it is affirmed. Moreover, if this is so, popular politics cannot be reduced to the ‘politics of civil society’, as this is understood as the domain where organised interests are upheld by rights-bearing citizens.
Mbembe’s perspective is also problematic, for he does not seem to be concerned with an analysis of what an emancipatory subjectivity could look like, other than referring to the politics of civil society. Reviewing the experience of Africa after 50 years of independence, Mbembe (2010b) laments the absence of a democratic project as well as the absence of a basis for social revolution on the continent, while stressing the ‘irrepressible desire of hundreds of millions to live anywhere else but at home’ and the emergence of a ‘culture of racketeering’ (p. 3, my translation throughout). Thus bemoaning the absence of any Idea, as both people and governments seem to have been ‘de-classed’ or ‘lumpenised’, the author resurrects old names in the form of some kind of ‘New Deal’ to be ‘negotiated between African states and international powers’, in terms of which the question of democracy in Africa is to be ‘internationalised’ so that ‘rogue states’ can be ‘legitimately deposed by the use of force and the authors of these political crimes arraigned before international courts of justice’ (p. 11). For Mbembe, ‘the democratisation of Africa is indeed firstly an African question. It clearly must pass by the constitution of social forces which are capable of giving birth to it, to carry it and to defend it. But it is equally an international affair’ (Mbembe, 2010a: 28, my translation). Of course, the whole idea of solidarity in any democratic and egalitarian struggle is crucially important, yet if this solidarity is not thought independently
