Full Description
For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical transformation with capturing state power. The collapse of these statist projects from the 1970s led to a global crisis of left and working class politics. But crisis has also opened space for rediscovering alternative society-centred, anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance from the state. These have registered important successes in practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and Rojava in Syria. They have been a key influence on movements from Occupy in United States, to the landless in Latin America, to anti-austerity struggles in Europe and Asia, to urban movements in Africa. Their lineages include anarchism, syndicalism, autonomist Marxism, philosophers like Alain Badiou, and radical popular praxis. This path-breaking volume recovers this understanding of social transformation, long side-lined but now resurgent, like a seed in the soil that keeps breaking through and growing. It provides case studies with reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe, and includes a dossier of key texts from a century of anarchists, syndicalists, insurgent unionists and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Originating in an African summit of radical academics, struggle veterans and social movements, the book includes a preface from John Holloway.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, with the addition of a new dossier on the history and voices of a century of politics at a distance from the state in South Africa.
Contents
Preface: at a distance from the state John Holloway 1. Politics at a distance from the state: radical, South African and Zimbabwean praxis today Kirk Helliker and Lucien van der Walt 2. Constructing the domain of freedom: thinking politics at a distance from the state Michael Neocosmos 3. Back to the future: revival, relevance and route of an anarchist/syndicalist approach for twenty-first-century left, labour and national liberation movements Lucien van der Walt 4. Prefiguring democratic revolution? 'Workers' control' and 'workerist' traditions of radical South African labour, 1970-1985 Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich 5. Broadening conceptions of democracy and citizenship: the subaltern histories of rural resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana Camalita Naicker and Sarah Bruchhausen 6. A feminist perspective on autonomism and commoning, with reference to Zimbabwe Tarryn Alexander and Kirk Helliker 7. From Below: An Overview of South African Politics at a Distance from the State, 1917-2015, with Dossier of Texts Compiled and edited, with introduction, by Lucien van der Walt
