Category Archives: Michael Neocosmos

Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

Michael Neocosmos

It should be apparent to all that violent approaches to resolving popular contradictions are today (again) seemingly all-pervasive on the African continent. The patent inability of the (new democratic) African state to resolve popular contradictions has led to more or less vocal calls for ‘foreign help’, with consequences which are often too ghastly to contemplate. It is not simply here a question of state deployed violence but also of popular violence (e.g. of an ethnic or xenophobic kind). In South Africa at least a ‘culture of violence’ has been systemically produced by specific forms of political thought and practice and not simply inherited from a colonial/apartheid past. In Nigeria the state’s insistence on addressing the Boko Haram phenomenon militarily has (predictably) completely backfired leading to the kidnapping of teenage children à la (originally Ugandan) Lords’ Resistance Army. The only popular response on offer seems to be a moral one: ‘free our girls’. The absence of alternative politics should be evident. This paper attempts to think a political alternative to violence founded upon concepts and categories inherent in African traditions; i.e. in in actually existing (although often subterranean) popular practices. These cannot be understood as mere survivals but have been imaginatively altered and reconstructed to different extents and in different ways because of the necessity of people to cope with ongoing crises in their lives from the slave trade onwards. The paper then is fundamentally conceptual and methodological in order to redirect analyses and to begin to make alternatives thinkable.

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Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

People Think! The Padkos Engagement with Michael Neocosmos

A living politics is the movement out of the places where oppression has assigned those who do not count – S’bu Zikode, Talk at CLP Fanomenal Event

Democracy: what does it name?

by Michael Neocosmos

I wish to begin by discussing the term democracy as deployed in public discourse in SA. My discussion is founded on and inspired by the ways AbM have questioned the term democracy as applied to the SA state. This questioning has not been picked up and debated by commentators, academic or otherwise. It has not been taken seriously, but I think it should be taken very seriously. Remarks by AbM have included at various times: ‘democracy is for the rich not the poor’, ‘we do not count’ (i.e. we are excluded from democracy) and ‘elections are only for politicians’ as well as the idea of ‘unfreedom’ (there is no freedom for the poor) and that of ‘dignity for all’. These are very important innovations in political thinking in a context where ‘democracy’ has become a fetish which is never questioned, and therefore they must be taken seriously. ‘Seriously’ here for me means thinking about them both theoretically and politically. Lets start by examining the term democracy. Continue reading →

Michael Neocosmos: From People’s Politics to State Politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984 -1994

From People’s Politics to State Politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984 – 1994

This article, written in 1994, the first year of the ‘new South Africa’ examines the shift from popular people’s politics to state politics during the transition from apartheid. It has been a valuable article for South African anarchists.

The 1980s in South Africa witnessed an explosion of popular-democratic struggles championed by a host of autonomous civil society organisations whose activities became central in the campaign against the apartheid system and the quest for the creation of a democratic state. By the 1990s, however, especially in the lead up to and after the election of the ANC into office, South African politics appears increasingly to be subjected to the same broad logic of statism that was experienced in other parts of Africa at the dawn of independence from colonial rule. At the heart of this statism is the defeat of the popular movements which, in South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, were so vital in the struggle for political change, being the oppositional forces with the popular democratic tradition and agenda that offered the best chance for the emergence of a democratic state. Increasingly depoliticised, the role of the popular movements has been emptied of the vitality that can ensure that `the people’ are able to generate and make autonomous democratic prescriptions on the state. The politicisation of civil society and the democratisation of the state are projects in the South African transition which will have to be revived if the authoritarianism that inheres in statism is to be defeated. This is the challenge before the democratic forces of opposition and change in contemporary South Africa.

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From people's politics to state politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984-1994

Pogroms: A Crisis of Citizenship

Bu makaleyi Türkçe okumak için buraya tiklayin.

A Crisis of Citizenship

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club. Continue reading →

Neocosmos: The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics (Essay on the pogroms)

The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics

by Michael Neocosmos, 5 June 2008

Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in the country, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the whole range of political ideologies, from communism to fascism and anything in between. In actual fact, poverty can only account for the powerlessness, frustration and desperation of the perpetrators, but not for their target. After all why were not Whites or the rich or for that matter White foreigners in South Africa targeted instead? Of course it is a common occurrence that the powerless regularly take out their frustrations on the weakest: women, children, the elderly… and outsiders. Yet this will not suffice as an explanation. The systematic and concerted attacks on those deemed to be foreign according to popular stereotypes requires more of an explanation than powerlessness can provide, however important a factor that may have been. Continue reading →