popular revolts. These revolts have also drawn attention to the limits of an authoritarian form of liberal democracy that appears to be biased against the majority, as it regularly excludes popular voices. The most notable of these rebellions have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East and have extended to southern and other parts of Europe and the Americas, while the continuous unrest in communities throughout South Africa can also be seen to form part of this worldwide reaction. This occurs particularly as capital attempts to make ordinary people pay for its financial profligacy, while, at the same time, supposedly democratic states appear to be governed increasingly by a culture of demophobia. Since neo-liberal capitalism has obviously shown itself unable to provide an emancipatory vision for all but a small oligarchy of wealthy rulers, and its Marxist historical alternative has been tainted by its past association with authoritarian states, there seems to be little in terms of an egalitarian alternative available. Uhuru is proving elusive if not unattainable.
Related points could be made in relation to the African nationalist project in its universally applied statist form. Influenced in no small measure by Marxism from the 1950s to the 1970s, by 1980 state nationalism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and external pressures; the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity by the African Union was one indication of this collapse and of its continued statism in a neo-liberal form. South Africa has been following this trend with a time lag of approximately two decades. While the ruling party and the state here have been plagued by the corrupting influences of capitalism and power, the vision of greater equality and freedom which had galvanised large numbers during the popular emancipatory upsurge of the 1980s has been heavily compromised, to the extent that ideas of the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good’ central to any notion of national freedom appear today to have vanished altogether from public discourse. A universal vision of an emancipatory future has been so eaten up by the gangrene of private accumulation through access to power that the state can no longer be said to represent the nation, the general interest. On the contrary, the fact that state power in Africa, independently of its ideological colour, has invariably been oppressive of the majority suggests that the problem resides within power itself, whether formally democratic or not. The Marikana massacre in South Africa, in which 34 miners were slaughtered by the police on a single day in August 2012, is only one powerful recent illustration of this fundamental collapse of an emancipatory vision and its replacement by the increasingly repressive practices of an ostensibly democratic state. At the same time, the simultaneous rise of Right-wing authoritarian nationalisms within so-called democratic societies has not bypassed Africa either. A globalised xenophobic politics is now pervasive. The dream of national liberation so prevalent in the 1960s in Africa, in spite of its brief revival in the 1980s, has thoroughly evaporated and been replaced by a vulgar simulacrum of its vision of freedom.
But to assert the end of history also amounts in fact to asserting the end of thought. At best, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou would say, all that is said to remain is opinions, all of which are of more or less equal value; not truths which are of universal value. Thus, to assert the end of history is at one and the same time to assert the finitude of thought and the absence of the truly human. Yet, as philosophy frequently has insisted, thought is eternal. In the words of the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, thought is ‘in its essential nature, incapable of limitation ... [Moreover] it is in the progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude’ (cit. Diagne, 2010: 44). We must therefore not allow ourselves to succumb to the intellectual laziness of opinion, particularly today, when the temptation to provide easy answers to complex problems is increasingly prevalent.
In order, then, to confront and overcome the crisis of thought, which has provided the conditions for quasi-fascist xenophobic politics to prevail from Nigeria to South Africa (not forgetting India, France, Greece, Russia, Italy and elsewhere), it is of crucial importance to develop new ideas of human emancipation, freedom and dignity; something which neo-liberal thought has abysmally failed to do, as it is obvious that it has presided over ever-widening inequalities. The core problem concerns precisely the provision of new concepts and categories that make a universal emancipatory egalitarian alternative thinkable again and understandable in what may be termed a ‘post-classist’ context. The classical Marxist view that there is a given subject of history, embodied in the social category of ‘the working class’, which will deliver humanity from capitalist oppression when its potential qualities are finally actualised, is no longer tenable. It is impossible to think universality through the simple deployment of identitarian particularities. The result of this problem has been that there is little left today in terms of a thought of emancipatory politics, with which to confront the massive increase in capitalist exploitation and oppression with its consequent economic disasters and wars resulting from unfettered plunder. These are combined with the political exclusion of greater and greater numbers of the world’s population from any ability to control, even in a minimal sense, their own lives – a fact which is itself arguably the main cause of the poverty that everyone deplores.
Of course, it is only from among the politically excluded that a political subject with an emancipatory politics can see the light of day; yet, at the same time, one cannot endow a specific social category in advance with the qualities required to propel history to a given end. Even though it is only the people who make universal history, who the people – more precisely, who the politically excluded – are in any specific situation differs, and they can only be recognised by what they think, say and do. The problem is fundamentally that social science today does not listen to what the excluded have to say; the knowledgeable apparently know what people think (or are supposed to think) in advance, for they speak for them, using a priori scientific categories. That large numbers of such excluded people live on the African continent is certainly not a new phenomenon, yet these people are still not being listened to, despite the historical exit of the colonial state. In fact, their numbers have been increasing under the depredations of an ever-violent and despoliating capitalism, while the fundamental features of colonialism, such as virulent racism and the view that the people constitute the enemy of reason and progress, continue to be crudely and uncritically reproduced.
Today it should be clear that there is no subject of history, neither is there an end to history. This means that there is no end to human agency; there is no end to politics, for politics is irreducible to the state, and this despite the fact that the horizon of emancipation is the disappearance of the state itself, for the notion of an ‘egalitarian state’ is simply an oxymoron. In order to rethink human emancipation (another word for equality) on the African continent, this book has of necessity therefore had to be a work of theory concerned with political subjectivities as objects of investigation and with developing categories for thinking an emancipatory future. It is not a work of history, even though there is much discussion of history in it. It is, rather, a book which opens up an area for investigation – that of emancipatory political subjectivities. It insists on approaching their understanding in a rational manner ‘from within’ – in other words, using their own terms and categories – and not exclusively as reflections or representations of something external to them such as social location within a complex matrix of social relations, or ‘Man’, or history, or culture, or state policies or even discourses of power, inter alia. Emancipatory politics concern not so much power relations as a process of subjectivation.
It follows that the exposition in this book is not chronological but is organised around theoretical questions: in Part 1, the question of understanding historical sequences of popular emancipation during which thought can be seen to exceed the notion, upheld by the discipline of history, of continuous objective time; and, in Part 2, the question of making sense of politics in its own terms and thus of exceeding the socially reductive analyses provided by the discipline of sociology. The absence of a chronological exposition has meant that there is some empirical toing and froing in the argument, although I have attempted to reduce this to a minimum. I thus pursue theoretical issues in depth in a rigorous manner and draw the appropriate consequences for the thinking of emancipatory politics on the continent. Although concerned
