to as ‘demophobia’, which blocks any attempt at understanding the existing world through the evacuation of politics from thought, and which consequently makes it impossible to begin to think an alternative politics in the present. On the other hand, the ‘masses’ themselves are quite capable of thought. As Abahlali affirmed in response to xenophobic violence in 2008:
There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves ... We hear that the political analysts are saying that the poor must be educated about xenophobia. Always the solution is to ‘educate the poor’. When we get cholera we must be educated about washing our hands when in fact we need clean water. When we get burnt we must be educated about fire when in fact we need electricity. This is just a way of blaming the poor for our suffering. We want land and housing in the cities, we want to go to university, we want water and electricity – we don’t want to be educated to be good at surviving poverty on our own ... It is time to ask serious questions about why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation. In South Africa some of us are moved out of the cities to rural human dumping grounds called relocation sites while others are moved all the way out of the country. Some of us are taken to transit camps and some of us are taken to Lindela.33 The destinations might be different but it is the same kind of oppression. Let us all educate ourselves on these questions so that we can all take action (Abahlali, 2008).
Here is a statement from poor people from the shacks which is clear in its politics of equality; the Idea of universal equality is evidently their central concern and the statement is not concerned with ‘interest’ or ‘identity’, both of which are clearly exceeded. It is apparent, as Lazarus (2013: 115, my translation) insists, that ‘the subjective power of people is a thought and not a simple reflection of their social or material conditions’. The importance of making politics thinkable, then, must be to make appropriate concepts available in order to understand people’s thought of politics and to begin to think emancipatory and exceptional political subjectivities along with them. There is unfortunately nothing in the proposals of either Mamdani or Mbembe to cause one to question the fundamental necessity of rethinking emancipatory politics on the continent. Neither is there anything to suggest that popularly founded solutions are irrelevant simply because earlier emancipatory experiments have tragically failed (Badiou, 2009d). One needs to start by proposing the basic axiom that must form the point of departure of any such reassertion, namely that, as Abahlali show in the extract above, people are capable of thought and that therefore we need to rekindle fidelity to the old slogan of ‘confidence in the masses’, which should never be abandoned. The issue here does not concern an ‘empty signifier’ or a blind faith in whatever poor people choose to do, but a simple statement of fact. No emancipatory project founded on liberty, equality, dignity and justice for all can possibly be brought to fruition without genuine political agency by people themselves. That itself should be self-evident. Moreover, political emancipation can only be a universal project, not one restricted to certain strata, classes, races or groups, and thought and undertaken by leaders in power with or without popular support.34
Of course, this necessarily implies that the contradictions and frequent opposition between intellectual and manual labour, leaders and led, inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself, be addressed. In particular it should be stressed that, contrary to the dominant conception of theory in social and human science, people who resist oppression politically are not simply bearers of their social location (class, gender, ethnicity, nationality or whatever) or of a universal conception of ‘Man’, but reasoning beings with varying degrees of political agency who exist within specific contexts (see my discussion of the work of Ranajit Guha (1992a) in chapter 3). Rancière’s notion of ‘symbolic rupture’, ‘when people start talking about things that were not supposed to be their business’, is precisely meant to capture this point.35 In any case, people in Africa, when left to their own devices, have been quite capable historically of providing solutions to their own problems, including the thinking of a politics beyond their apparent material interests.
THINKING A POLITICS OF DISINTERESTED INTEREST
It has become quite clear that there exists, at certain times in certain sites, a politics beyond interest and that this politics is the core idea behind a politics of emancipation, as emancipation is always ‘for all’ and never ‘for some’, as Badiou (2001) has put it. Such subjectivity can therefore not be understood as ‘reflective’ or ‘representative’ of any dimension of the social division of labour. It has also become clear that interest or identity politics as such are, in one way or another, always the foundation of state political subjectivity, as it is always the state that manages interests and resists emancipation precisely by denying the existence of a universal politics beyond interest. For modes of thought located within state thinking, all politics is founded on interests or identities: it is ultimately the same thing. What is required in Africa is indeed a universal Idea, as Mbembe recognises, but clearly such an Idea must be thought outside the constraints of the social and must simultaneously be able to ‘cut through’ the social, as, for it to have an emancipatory content, it must consist of a singular and objective ‘pure affirmation’ (Badiou, 2009c), independent of social referents and ‘in excess’ of them, much as Fanon (1990) showed ‘national consciousness’ to be in the 1950s in Algeria. This kind of singularity is central to such a politics and hence to its recognition. Finally, as will be shown in the following chapters, universal political singularities of emancipation have existed in the past in Africa at different times within specific historical sequences; such singularities may also exist in the present in some specific sites, which today can only be found not just beyond the state but also beyond civil society itself.
As I have noted, in the 19th century Marx recognised that the European proletariat embodied a notion of universal emancipation. Yet that proletariat, while obviously existing as a socio-economic grouping in the guise of a working class, had to be constituted politically (i.e. subjectively): it had to unify itself around the acquisition of a common consciousness of its own objective location and universal political role in society. As Marx understood it, the process of class constitution was ultimately a political process; in other words, it concerned a specific political subjectivity, a communist subjectivity in his terms. All classes had to constitute themselves politically as such and were not simply given by production relations. This process could be one of constitution only in relation to other class forces. The European bourgeoisies, for example, constituted themselves in relation to a feudal aristocracy, in relation to the working people and eventually the working class, and in relation to one another through wars. The state, and hence state politics, was central to this process of ruling-class constitution and national unification. Indeed, Marx and Engels insisted in the German Ideology (1846: 47) that, as the bourgeoisie had to constitute itself as a class through conquering state power, so must the proletariat; but after the failure of the Paris Commune their view changed and they stressed that the existing state had first to be ‘smashed’ before an alternative could be constructed (Marx and Engels, 1872: 32). These European bourgeoisies were not simply given with an already existing national character, as the African literature often repeats in order to emphasise a contrast with the African bourgeoisies, which are said to be ‘compradorial’ in nature (i.e. linked to colonial interests). There are countless instances in European history of bourgeoisies caving in to the pressures of their foreign adversaries or of ‘calling in’ these bourgeois adversaries to help in putting down popular resistance, most notoriously in 1871 with the Paris Commune itself.36 Marx’s concept of the proletariat as a political subject follows precisely from its political constitution in Europe through the workers’ movements of the 19th century (1830, 1848 and 1871).
Badiou (1985: 26–30) emphasises the fact that the singular importance of Marxism as a mode of thought does not reside in its analytical power or its ‘meta-narrative’ of history. Rather, out of all the
