Introduction
[Walter] Rodney understood – perhaps better than any other ‘expatriate’ comrade in Dar [es Salaam] at the time – what race really meant. It was not simply an invented category, clouding analysis and somehow getting in the way of class analysis, but a living and breathing reality (born of a dreadful and long history). Rodney knew that the experience – in Africa and the Caribbean – of being on the ‘receiving end of white racism’ was a fundamental and defining one. If you were a European, white Marxist, no matter how impeccable your analysis, it meant that in certain circumstance one had to either understand what was being said, or shut up and stand down. In a word, he demanded that they [John Saul and others] listen – something that the radical Left has never been very good at. (Leo Zeilig, Walter Rodney: A Revolutionary for Our Time, 2022, 174, my emphasis)
What is seen to be missing in ROAPE are the previous concerns with political struggles on the ground … Rather than involving ourselves in these struggles we prefer to use them to ‘test’ some novel theoretical position. (Giles Mohan, in John Saul and Colin Leys, ‘ROAPE & the Radical Africanist: What Next?’, 1998, 268)
There is a spectre which haunts Africa’s ongoing struggle for liberation in the post-colonial period. The spectre sits at the impasse between race and class politics. It enables ‘theoretical positions’ and terms such as neoliberalism and racial capitalism to be expounded ad nauseam, offering astute structural-historical analysis which is nevertheless arguably out of touch with the needs and aspirations of ordinary working-class people. In heated debates in 1971 with faculty at the University of Dar es Salaam, including John Saul and Peter Lawrence (who subsequently became founding editors of ROAPE), Walter Rodney – the revolutionary scholar from Guyana – stood firm. He made the case that without the ‘living and breathing reality’ (Zeilig 2022, 174) of racial oppression and a genuine sense of people’s consciousness (becoming part of Tanzanians’ intimate ways of thinking and being in the world), the prospects for radical political-economic change were doomed (ibid.).
Rodney taught in Tanzania for a second stint in 1969, after having been banned from Jamaica for his role in the Black Power movement within and beyond the University of the West Indies. Following the adoption of the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which was the guiding document for Ujamaa – indigenous or cooperative Tanzanian socialism (see Campbell 1991, 100) – he became a lecturer along with other expatriates at the University of Dar es Salaam, which was in the late 1960s to mid 1970s ‘one of the intellectual and revolutionary capitals of the world’ (Bgoya 2022, 4). The curriculum was viewed as a crucial area in which preparations could be made for building the nation, especially in the context of President Julius Nyerere’s and his government’s proclaimed socialism as their developmental vision. However, as noted by Hirji, ‘The policy of Ujamaa (cooperative socialism) came, in practice, to signify the establishment of a dependent, neo-colonial form of state capitalism rather than socialism’ (Hirji 2017). Refusing to take the Tanzanian government’s line as gospel, Rodney’s analysis shifted. That was in part due to his connection to the people and his reading of radical scholarship, including Issa Shivji, a leading Marxist political-economist in Tanzania, who ‘recognized [by the mid 1970s] that the rhetoric of socialism masked the reality of neo-colonial dependency being implemented by a petty bourgeois bureaucracy’ (Hirji 2017).
Walter Rodney’s scholar-activism ran against the mainstream, ivory tower historians, whose ideology mirrors that of the colonisers. Ivory tower research was produced to support the dominant extractive industries or economic activities. Orthodox academic historians suggest that the point of scholarship is to produce an ‘objective’ account of the past and that in the quest to analyse what the past means for the present-day politics, they become biased. Internationally, researchers who have sought to advance beyond this approach tended to comment on what they thought opposition and resistance was about rather than aligning with the dispossessed or identifying with the aims of popular movements (see Mohan, cited in Saul and Leys 1998, 268). Like Paulo Freire, whose seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) elucidated a critical approach to pedagogy which sought to deconstruct and eliminate the unequal relationship between teachers and students, and therefore also between scholarship and popular movements, Rodney was not only a black Marxist historian and critical pedagogue, he was also a public intellectual at pains to connect study to radical social change.
A range of edited books and scholarly works on popular resistance in post-apartheid South Africa have tended to highlight the centrality of class over race, notwithstanding the relatively recent return to the concept of racial capitalism (see, for example, Levenson and Paret 2023; Sinwell, Ngwane and Maggott 2023). Contesting Transformation (2012), for example, investigated the extent to which movements offered a fundamental challenge to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The editors’ conclusion was that we require a ‘“master frame” which makes clear that capitalism is to blame for the problems that have been visited upon the vast majority and our planet’ (Sinwell and Dawson 2012, 266). McKinley’s chapter in the book indicated that ‘no anti-capitalist (socialist) vision and strategy exists that has the potential to fundamentally challenge and change South African capitalism and unite left forces’ (McKinley 2012, 23).
The edited volume Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective (2017) was driven by a desire to bring ‘Marxism and capitalism back in to the study of social movements’ by locating popular resistance in ‘broader historical and political economic contexts’ (Paret 2017, 12). ‘This includes’, Paret added in his introduction to the volume, ‘an emphasis on class structure and class struggle’ (Paret 2017, 12). The recent edited book Protest in South Africa arguably does more to obscure ideological orientation, preferring an approach that is more open-ended and liberal. This book’s thrust is to demonstrate that ‘protest is underpinned by a rejection of the status quo, a reassertion of interests, and a reclaiming of the political and democratic space’ (Brooks, Chikane and Mottiar 2023, back cover); however, these are variously defined in relation to questions of race, class and gender oppression.
While the relationship between class and race is dealt with to some extent in the literature, those relatively independent umbrella organisations to the left of the tripartite alliance (with the exception of the Economic Freedom Fighters, as we shall see in the second part of this article) have tended to obscure race (or treat it as a ‘second fiddle’ or add-on to class analysis). Almost as quickly as the wave of new social movements in the post-1994 period were born, debates surfaced about the ways in which these were represented in writing and more generally to the public. For example, Mngxitama made the contentious observation that:
consistent with the historical denial of the salience of race as a determinant of politics by the South African white left, we are now told that the transition has been from ‘racial apartheid to class apartheid’. We are told, ‘drop the racial thing, your problem is neo-liberalism’. (Mngxitama 2004)
We would do well to ask ourselves: what it would look like if our mode of analysis centred on challenging and unpacking the outstretched arms of white supremacy as much as and in tandem with our denunciation of rapacious capitalism? Reflecting on the political debates on the left in the aftermath of BlackLivesMatter in the USA, Roediger has made the case that the tendency is to try to ‘bend the stick in one direction’ (Roediger 2017, 16) towards either race or class. ‘Race and class demands’, he adds, however, ‘do not exist in a zero-sum relationship’ (ibid., 18). From Roediger’s perspective a problem occurs among Marxists, whereby ‘injecting a word about class becomes an act of extraordinary free-thinking courage … they get to count as speaking truth to power’ (ibid., 16). In the drive to build struggles in support of the working class against capitalism and imperialism, there exists the misleading assumption that race-based demands and identity formations are simply stumbling blocks. What is required from this perspective, he jabs, is to hit the ‘mute button where race talk is concerned’ (ibid., 19).
The relationship between race, class and knowledge production highlights the contestation over the meaning of transformation and the perceived need for decolonisation, an issue which is not only important in terms of building resistance against a racist, capitalist state, but within movements that are purportedly pro-working class and anti-racist. This article draws mainly from my own experience as a researcher of popular mobilisation in South Africa over the last 10 to 15 years, as well as my limited but consistent involvement in worker, community and student movements in South Africa. I suggest that, with few important exceptions, our scholar-activism has reached an impasse and that tinkering with our available approaches, or relying upon recycled methods of the past which tend to be rooted in an abstract conceptualisation of radical political economy, is unlikely to be the most productive way to contribute towards building an alternative.
The next section introduces a debate between the ‘grounded’ Walter Rodney and other mainly white lecturers as a pivot from which to explore the limitations and possibilities of radical scholarship in South Africa in the 2000s, which tended to focus on empowering the working class in the context of the adoption of neoliberal policies by the ruling ANC. The meaning and politics of voice were key in this debate. I then turn to more recent developments after the Marikana massacre in August 2012, when it became clear, if it was not already obvious, that blackness and race and gender identities would remain, or become, key frames of reference through which collective groups of black men and women would assert their demands and frame their conception of the world.
Grounding scholarship: learning from and with the dispossessed
Critical pedagogy challenges top-down notions of education which view the teacher or lecturer as the primary holder of knowledge who must simply disseminate well-organised information to the students at the bottom who are deemed unknowing. Freire (1970) calls this the banking model of education, whereby in mainstream neoliberal education frameworks students, the oppressed, are receptacles to be filled by the wise teacher, elite or organiser. Rodney, like Freire, is among those opposed to the dominant or mainstream system of education where ‘the teacher teaches and the students are taught … the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing’ (Freire 1970, 59). Freire instead suggests that students and teachers must meet on equal grounds and learn in dialogue from each other. It is only by becoming part of the worldview and discursive frameworks of students or the oppressed that education for social change can take place. The learner is not an empty vessel to be filled by the teacher, but rather someone who comes with important knowledge since it is based on their own experiences. The learning process is ‘impossible without a relation of mutual understanding and trust’ between the learner and the teacher (Freire 1970, 102). Freire’s approach provides an antidote to top-down tendencies which assume that the teacher knows, and therefore the student must merely absorb and then regurgitate what they are told. Within a Freirean framework, the dialogical process between the teacher and the student opens possibilities for the co-production of knowledge.
Similarly, Rodney’s Groundings with my Brothers (1969) was rooted in critical pedagogy. In Jamaica, he learned from the ground up, thus distinguishing himself from ivory tower scholars. ‘I have spoken’, he recalled, ‘in what people call “Dungle”, rubbish dumps, for that is where people live in Jamaica’ (Rodney 1969, 64). Rodney went to their homes, where they survived and worked, to listen without passing judgement. ‘The black intellectual, the black academic’, he persuasively argued, in this context must therefore ‘attach himself to the activity of the black masses’ (Rodney 1969, 63, emphasis in original). When words like socialism and black power were in vogue in Tanzania, he did not impose an abstract theoretical framework. Rather, his mission was to maintain trust with the people. The thrust of his book centred on his sense that ‘we have to “ground together”’ beyond the classroom context:
You can learn from them what Black Power really means. You do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it and they add something to what you are saying … I was [therefore] prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power … a sitting down together to reason. (Rodney 1969, 63–64)
In the 1960s, anti-colonial sentiments in Africa exploded after hundreds of years of imperial occupation by the British, French and Portuguese. These turning points and political histories on the continent and in the USA, for example, where the Black Power and civil rights movements were part of the wave of hope that came to define the experience of hundreds of millions of black people across the world, no doubt shaped and resonated with the struggles in South Africa. The silence and erasure of African culture and knowledge systems by colonialist education necessitated an alternative public history, perhaps no more so than in Tanzania, when the government sought to ‘break the alienation and snobbery of colonial schooling’ and to support the ‘development [of] new institutions which would serve to progressively harness the knowledge, the skills of the African masses’ (Campbell 1986, 59).
Walter Rodney taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in the aftermath of the Arusha Declaration in 1967, when the African liberation movements based in Tanzania were searching for a philosophical framework to guide the decolonization process. The debates on socialism, social emancipation, underdevelopment and imperialism attracted progressive scholars who taught and researched in the University. Walter Rodney’s writing and teaching contributed to and formed an essential part of this intellectual framework. (Campbell 1991, 99)
The hired staff during this period was ‘predominantly expatriate, Europeans and Americans for the colonial system did not train African University teachers’ (Campbell 1986, 60). On 24 November 1971, a group who happened to be foreign white academics in the faculty, including Saul and Lawrence, and one black South African, Archie Mafeje, who was evidently viewed as a ‘traitor’, pitched a programme for curriculum decolonisation. Walter Rodney, who was on the brink of publishing his landmark book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), took a principled position when Tanzanian lecturers in the faculty opposed the programme on the grounds that it was driven by mainly white intellectuals who were not only out of touch with the realities of the people, but were set to leave the country altogether in the upcoming months (Zeilig 2022).
Saul called their rejection a ‘very opportunist and highly rhetorical brand of black-nationalist racism’, while Lawrence maintained that it was ‘structured on racist lines’, arguing that the suggested changes to the curriculum were ideological and political and therefore not about race. In a situation that would be familiar to many black consciousness advocates in the contemporary period, Rodney noted in response that ‘the open letters which charge me with having made racist utterances at no point repeat what was supposedly racist’. The problem, in his view, was that a ‘few Europeans, who would describe themselves as “Leftists” and “Progressives”, have been acting in an arrogant, manipulative and hegemonistic manner’ (Zeilig 2022, 172).
Rodney personally chose not to make a permanent home in Tanzania since, in his view:
it is much more than a legal definition that makes one effective [as a revolutionary scholar] … [O]ne must have a series of responses and reflexes that come from having lived a given experience … [one must also] master the higher level of perception which normally goes into a culture. And I didn’t believe that I could afford that. (Zeilig 2022, 194).
Rodney had been banned from Jamaica in 1968 no doubt for ‘mastering’ this ‘level of perception’ and would ultimately give his life for this, being assassinated in 1980 after taking up a post at the University of Guyana in 1974. The South African, Canadian and UK-born expatriates also returned home around the same time. It was Tanzanians who remained behind to live through the effects of economic crisis in the 1980s which in part led to the consolidation of neoliberal policies, contra to Ujamaa, from the 1990s to the early 2000s.
Fifty years later, Lawrence’s sober reflections on the disagreement with Rodney highlights an emergent sense that for socialism to have any chance it needs to connect with the people:
I think we thought we knew the answer – ignore the racial issue because we were color blind, weren’t we – and act as though we were fervent Tanzanian followers of Ujamaa … Rodney’s position was one of identifying first with Tanzanians and only second with socialists … Rodney saw the issue of race much more centrally than we white foreign lefties did. We thought we were doing what Nyerere wanted but maybe the local academics and others had a different agenda and a different politics, and we didn’t understand that (Zeilig 2022, 174–175) … In retrospect, we played it badly because we looked like a left version of colonialism. (Zeilig 2022, 173)
Rodney engaged in a sustained, relatively equal, dialogue in the Freirean sense with oppressed groups of people. He had to become one of them. He could not impose abstract ideals of socialism or black power onto those literally living in garbage heaps. But we need not romanticise movements either and it is important to note that revolutionary activists, Rodney and Freire not excluded, must find an important balance between the imposition of a coherent working class or black radical programme and listening to the voices of the people. Indeed, it was arguably Rodney’s astute Marxism, combined with his leadership skills and sense of culture, that led to his life being taken. In the years prior to his assassination by the Guyanese government, Rodney played a key role as spokesperson and organiser of the Working People’s Alliance, which sought to unite Indians and Africans in Guyana who had under white supremacy been defined as racially distinct.
Social movements in post-apartheid South Africa, including the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) and the Thembelihle Crisis Committee (TCC), have been heroically successful to the extent that they have nurtured scores of independent organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense.1 The core concern here is not necessarily the race or class of an individual, nor is ‘listening’ or amplifying voices sufficient even when one aligns these voices effectively to one’s socialist programme, important as these may be in their own right in any context. Instead, as in the time of Rodney, this article suggests that it is the independent left’s failure to take race as seriously as class (and in some cases vice versa) in the struggle to build radical alternatives alongside grassroots movements and those masses of people who could potentially self-determine a radical alternative to racial capitalism.
As I demonstrate in the next section, the idea of a ‘left version of colonialism’ nevertheless resonates strikingly with the contemporary South African context, where the tension between race and class politics and between theoretical propositions and practice festers. South Africa has a long tradition of radical or Freirean practices of adult education centred around community engagement and social justice or, in other words, a long-term process geared towards ‘democratising power relations’ (Vally 2020, 5). Rooted in the notion of People’s Education and ‘mass democratic struggles against apartheid’, this approach has ‘increasingly been eroded or disappeared’ (Von Kotze, Ismail and Cooper 2016, 281). The transition to non-racial higher education in the post-apartheid period occurred in parallel with market-oriented or neoliberal forms of education centred on notions of ‘performance’ and outcomes in other parts of the world (ibid.). Within this context, Freirean approaches to teaching and learning exist on the margins of higher education in contemporary South Africa. There is nevertheless outstanding work by the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) run by Salim Vally which seeks to create a space to ground Freirean practices within and outside of the academy.
In South Africa, from the mid 2000s the politics of representation of social movements began to feature in debates that included a radical critique of ‘voice’. Building theory from the ground up, that is grounded theory or histories from below, often centres around ‘listening’ to an unproblematised or romanticised community. This sounds nice in and of itself, but the politics of listening and the profiling of specific voices is highly contested and potentially treacherous terrain. I have recently argued that ‘amplifying the voices of the poor is often a quick fix incapable of delivering concrete and lasting social change’ (Sinwell 2023, back cover). The history-from-below school urges us to listen to ordinary people at the grassroots and to tell their histories.2 Yet this practice on its own, when hidden from complex sets of cultural and structural contexts, falls short in honouring the legacy of Rodney and other radical scholar-activists that emerged at the coalface of anti-colonial struggle.
The post-apartheid South African ‘poors’
In 1998, Giles Mohan initiated a recurring debate in ROAPE about the extent to which the knowledge produced in the journal continued to engage with the ‘concerns with political struggles on the ground’ (see Saul and Leys 1998, 268). This debate emerged at almost precisely the same time that a new wave of resistance against water, electricity cut-offs and evictions bubbled up in townships across South Africa as residents began to feel the tightening grip of cost-recovery neoliberal policies. While it initially appeared to many observers and activists that social movements would no longer be necessary under a democratic state led by Nelson Mandela, it soon became evident that these movements would become a central feature of democracy. In part as a response to the ANC’s adoption of growth, employment and redistribution (GEAR) neoliberal policy, which in practice meant rolling back the state and further entrenching the logic of privatisation, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of 1994 came to be associated with the building far from urban centres, of low-quality RDP houses. The ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ approach to land distribution meant that accessing the land was mainly left to the market. The Landless People’s Movement (LPM), Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), Anti-Eviction Campaign, Concerned Citizens Forum (CCF) and especially the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) waged a valiant series of protests to improve the lives of ordinary people who had not yet reaped the fruits of democracy.
As highlighted by the intricate politics imbued in the 1971 disagreement among radical political economists in the University of Dar es Salaam, the relationship between radical scholars, popular movements and the state has been hotly contested in South Africa. In the early 2000s, debates centred around the politics of research and community engagement in a context where the hegemonic discourse among radical political economists perhaps understandably was constructed mainly around class rather than race (see, for example, Bond 2001). As with the sentiment ‘another world is possible’, popular in the lead-up to the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, scholars tended to suggest that movements, and resistance, were necessarily opposed to neoliberal capitalism (Dawson and Sinwell 2012). Yet on the ground there was a growing recognition that this declaration was neither as grounded in the world views of ordinary people, nor was it necessarily detached from elitism.
Abahlali baseMjondolo in particular captured the imagination of researchers in Durban, and also those internationally, who flocked to the informal settlement on Kennedy Road where Abahlali was founded to learn about the ‘genuine’ struggle of poor people who were supposedly carrying with them a Fanonian lens when they analysed their living conditions, resisted evictions and embarked on protests to hand over petitions to authorities. Two primary intellectual threads developed: there were Abahlali ‘supporters’ who blame outsiders for purportedly controlling the movements from the top-down as vanguardists, and those who criticised scholars aligned to the movement for amplifying the voices of the ‘virtuous poor’ shack dwellers while simultaneously silencing those who criticise it.3 It is perhaps telling that while it is not unreasonable to assume that the scholar-activist practices of these two sides led or might lead to completely different political outcomes, they both nevertheless pitched a sharp critique of the ANC’s neoliberal policies.
In July 2006, Ashwin Desai presented a controversial paper entitled ‘Vans, Autos, Kombis and the Drivers of Social Movements’ which remains one of the most important pieces of academic-activist writing in the post-apartheid period. His message, which resonates in the present, laid a sharp critique against so-called outsiders (including himself) in poor people’s movements. Desai urged ‘a complete rethink in the way left academics presently relate to – and sometimes impose themselves on – grass-roots organizations’ (Desai 2006, 1), further describing a situation in which scholars bring with them ‘infectious political diseases’ (Desai 2006, 2).
A debate piece in ROAPE in 2008 suggested that researchers may play a divisive role within post-apartheid social movements, benefiting from ‘uncomfortable collaborations’ and unequal relations of power (Walsh 2008, 73). The ‘favoured academics’ of the movement position themselves as supporters who, unlike those who are labelled vanguardists, are involved with the movement but supposedly do not take power. Shannon Walsh has argued that Abahlali’s emphasis on service delivery protests in its early stages shifted to a liberal strategy centred on ‘voice’ as academics became involved. This shift was central to the neoliberal World Bank discourse intended to counter Marxist anti-colonial tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s.
The concern here is that merely amplifying the voices of the poor and assuming that those participating from below necessarily embody the truth does not enable us to understand the potential and limitations of movements, nor is there any possibility in this line of thinking to chart a collective way forward for liberation or to contest capitalism. Instead, the poor are virtuous because of their poverty – ‘to be poor is to have power’ (Walsh 2008, 264). However, this is problematic since, according to Bertrand Russell, ‘if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue’ (see Walsh 2008, 82).
It is in this vein of thinking that Heinrich Bohmke indicated that romanticising movements is no longer useful and may in fact be detrimental. He argues that the time has come to break with the misleading binary opposition between ‘romantic “servants” of movements dedicated to amplifying their true voice (who are all good) and those authoritarian Leftists and other vanguards who dare to challenge, censure, engage and influence movements politically (who are all bad)’ (Bohmke 2010, 26). One of the starting points of these contentious issues is that movements are unable to challenge neoliberalism and that they have become ‘more liberal NGO than radical movement’ (Bohmke 2010, 1). It became evident to some radical scholars that the consistent forms of militancy were centred on the struggles of different groups of poor people to claim a relatively tiny piece of pie on offer from the neoliberal state (Sinwell 2011).
The Democratic Left Front (DLF), an anti-capitalism umbrella movement founded in 2011 at the University of the Witwatersrand, for example, worked with dozens of civic organisations across the country. In Gauteng, where I was provincial chairperson for a period, we were perhaps strongest in terms of maintaining links with and positioning community organisations in the drivers’ seats, but one occurrence seemed to summarise the DLF’s relationship to the grassroots. We learned that the representatives of Zandspruit informal settlement in the northwest of Johannesburg, who we had been working with for months if not years and were one of the leading affiliates, called themselves Zandspruit Democratic Left Front (ZADLF) when they were with us, but when they engaged with ANC, they were the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO) – which is part of the ANC.
Our perception of movements might shift, but it does not change fundamentally what the struggle meant to the people. The foremost discussions either seek to amplify voice or they discuss class, but for ordinary people – not necessarily active in organised formations or given a public platform – racism remained a fundamental component of their everyday lived experience. In this first wave of protest in South Africa from 1999 onwards through the 2000s, race arguably did not feature as prominently either among radical scholars or among the independent left, but by the early to mid 2010s it became a focal point for discussions of transformation and decolonisation.
The grassroots speak: untamed black voices rising
Julius Malema became president of the ANC Youth League in 2008 and founded the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) below the infamous mountain in Marikana in 2013. He consistently highlighted to many disenfranchised youth, workers and the unemployed his ability to speak truth to power through the untamed, uncensored, body of a black man. One of his most important contributions was to inspire confidence that black people can exist as their own person without fear of being silenced or otherwise victimised by the fantasies embedded in white supremacy.
In an article Politikon in 2014, Bandile Mdlalose brought the roles of race, class and gender in scholarship on grassroots movements in South Africa into sharp relief. Yet as she did so, as a black woman from Durban who had been part of Abahlali, writing about the movement she was part of and based on her own lived experiences, she was told by a group of academics led by Steven Friedman, who happens to be white, that her work was not scholarly enough (Friedman 2015).4 Returning to the debate she provoked in ROAPE almost a decade earlier, Walsh reflected on this case in Politikon since for her it signified ‘the continued attempt to sanitize and hide the reality of the influence of white academics on social movements’ (Walsh 2015, 123). ‘The academic Left’, Walsh argued, is:
bound up with emancipatory, and sometimes pseudo-revolutionary, desires for another possible world. This attachment or relation is not limited to South Africa, but very often it is Black bodies (or the bodies of indigenous people) who are objectified for this kind of fantasy to play out. The fundamental antagonism is one in which the poor-Black is a repository for the projected desires and longings of (white) revolutionary fantasy. (Walsh 2015, 125)
Arguably in a similar manner to Tanzania after the Arusha Declaration, the white left in South Africa historically positioned black identity as ‘one polarity in a “race-class” debate that configured racial blackness in terms of culture and identity, thereby expunging from it any structural or ontological salience’ (Barchiesi 2017, 4). Barchiesi (2011) had effectively argued that the struggle for wage employment in South Africa was inextricably linked to notions of citizenship and was central in the exercise of governmentality in the post-apartheid period. However, under the neoliberal capitalist policies adopted by the ANC the prospects for attaining dignified work and upward mobility for the vast majority of black South Africans remain a pipe dream. We would do well, as Franco Barchiesi suggests, not only to name racism in the present, but to engage ‘the antagonism between White humanity and its violently defined Black object as an intra-Human conflict between capital and labor’ (Barchiesi 2017, 6, emphasis in original). The anti-apartheid movement’s cultural and visual work has also been the subject of a critique of the role of race in left politics, with Athi Jola (2019) challenging Judy Seidman, a prominent white ANC activist who played an invaluable role in the Medu Art Collective in Gaborone, Botswana, which she joined in 1980. Jola argues that her ‘workerist iconographic scenes’ reflect a preoccupation with class rather than the system of white supremacy. Jola maintains that this conveniently ‘places black people in service of the vaunted class struggle and not the other way around’ (Jola 2019).
The independent left’s perception of the revolutionary subject in South Africa was accentuated in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre, when on 16 August 2012 the police killed 34 striking black mineworkers at what was then the third-largest platinum mine in the world. In a sense the mineworkers became the left’s revolutionary subject. One poster which was produced in conversation between the workers and the DLF read: ‘MINEWORKERS’ NEEDS BEFORE BOSSES GREED’.5 But despite offering solidarity by raising money for strikes in the face of hunger and supporting the workers’ committees which drove the unprotected strikes of 2012, minuscule political effects from the independent left of the tripartite alliance were noticeable in the years following the 2014 general elections.
In his discussion of ‘South Africa’s New Left Movements’, which was written at a time when scholars and activists were reflecting on the limitations of this wave of movements for building an anti-capitalist alternative outside of the traditions of the alliance, Noor Nieftagodien offered a sober assessment. He indicated that scholar-activists and public analysts tended to obscure the centrality of race in the discursive construction of radical alternatives to capitalism. He noted that the idea of reconciliation, highlighted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process, was a core element of the nation-building project post-1994. This approach, he added, however, was ‘supposedly cathartic’, but in fact the idea of reconciliation brushed over the history of racism, and it also failed to fully grasp its survival in the present:
it required the black majority to forgive in exchange for political and economic freedom, a contract many black people were prepared to embrace even as they continued to live with the pain and anger engendered by generations of white racism. In the first period of democracy, instances of white racism were regarded as the aberrant behaviour of a die-hard but dying breed of racists. But the continuation and even increase in incidents of overt racism, as well as the ubiquity of thinly disguised everyday practices of racism, have highlighted a systemic problem, undergirded by the intersection of exploitation, poverty and race. (Nieftagodien 2017, 171–172)
With the launch of the EFF, Julius Malema and his party developed an ideological framework arguably rooted in the tradition of Frantz Fanon (EFF 2013, 1). They also were extremely effective in a short space of time at rooting their political discourse in ordinary black people’s growing sense of tension within the country around race relations. According to its manifesto, the EFF is a ‘radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement with an internationalist outlook anchored by popular grassroots formations and struggles’ (EFF 2013, 7). The EFF has ‘robustly’ managed to project ‘the disillusionment and anger of young black people whose lives have been rendered precarious by neoliberal capitalism’ (Nieftagodien 2015, 447). From 2015, South Africa’s student movement intensified debates around race and class and the meaning of transformation. The movement centred around fees in a context where these had increased beyond the rate of inflation each year since 1994, but it was sparked by the #RhodesMustFall campaign initiated in 2015 which highlighted the ‘statuses of imperialists and white heroes in the post-apartheid landscape, the intensity of black pain in the face of white supremacy and the inability of many whites to understand “what the fuss was about”’ (Nieftagodien 2017, 183). The #FeesMustFall movement was then initiated at the University of the Witwatersrand in the following months, as tens of thousands of students protested, culminating in the shutdown of universities across the country. While the ability or inability to pay fees in higher education are inextricably tied to race and class in South Africa given the country’s history, the student movement (though not homogenous) arguably tended to fall victim to what the first Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State, for example, referred to as ‘race essentialism’, which positioned race (as opposed to class) as the cornerstone of the movement.6
While initially generational bridges were built between the students and exploited cleaners and security on campus, most notably under the auspices of the #Oct6 campaign against outsourcing, thus bringing students and underpaid workers together in struggle, these linkages soon fizzled out and rarely were student demands tied explicitly to militant labour and radical protest in informal settlements in townships.7 Despite the fact that fees remain a recurrent challenge, especially in light of the slow payments of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and the announcement that 121,000 students may have their funds cut by 2025 (Damons 2013), there is no substantive campaign or movement on campuses that has maintained a coherent commitment to a politics that extends beyond the boundaries of the university. The EFF garnered just under 2 million votes in 2019 and has 44 seats in Parliament. Many of the country’s student representative councils (SRCs) are led by the EFF, suggesting that its politics have to a certain extent become mainstream. While the EFF has been incredibly effective in tying together notions of race and class in its discourse when compared to the independent left, which tends to centre class relations of exploitations alone, the below analysis suggests that the relationship between race and class, for the EFF, is important mainly to the extent that this can produce a black middle or upper class in professional and other arenas, including but not limited to universities.
Black pain and the limits of the EFF
The EFF has its own shortcomings given the extent to which it is tied to the congress traditions which arguably impose a programme onto the people and are rooted in the logic of black (as opposed to white monopoly) capitalism. In her article centred on a critical discussion of Du Bois, Mosa Phadi makes the case that the EFF’s quest for economic emancipation is evident in the shared belief in the centrality of the state as the vehicle to bring about radical change: reforming the state to better leverage capitalism towards pro-poor goals. This echoes the ANC’s imagination of the 1950s, which sought to dismantle white hegemony and reshape capitalism to include black elites. The EFF is thus:
repeating the same ideological options that the ANC presented when it was attempting to relate to the radicalism which was brewing in various working-class communities. Yet, as with the ANC of the 1950s, the EFF seeks to incorporate working class demands by aligning them to the Black middle class and emerging elites. (Phadi 2020, 424–425)
In a more recent interview with Amandla! magazine, which – although marginal to mainstream politics – is widely regarded as one of the leading anti-capitalist news sources in South Africa, Phadi posits that the ‘Left didn’t even care about that majority [students, young people]. In its inception, EFF understood them. And when the language of the EFF came, they could relate easily because it spoke to them’ (Phadi 2023, 16). Previous modes of organising drawn from the traditions of the 1980s, in her view, could not relate to the young people. Instead, she suggests that because the left had ‘a particular way of formulating issues’ activists in the EFF were considered to be ‘not one of them’ so they told themselves: ‘No, we’re not gonna join EFF. The EFF is problematic, it’s nationalist’ (ibid.). According to Phadi’s interpretation:
They were not seeing the wave when it was coming because they were dealing with ‘the working class’. And it’s like – where’s the working class? … The Left needs to analyse fully rather than dismissing. There should be an engagement and we need to think harder about an array of ideologies that are playing out at the moment … In order to revive itself, a different kind of young people have to lead and come with a different imagination. The old guard cannot lead in the same way and try to co-opt people who sound like them. We need to start actually going to communities, and I don’t mean only like informal settlements, or only communities that are affected by mining, but an array of different communities where black people settle. (ibid.)
Rodney was concerned that a group of self-appointed white, and in some cases black, scholars were uncritically determining the curriculum for black people – imposing their own blueprint for radical change. Similarly, in South Africa, especially from the mid 2010s, Phadi (ibid., 15) observed that ‘amongst left academics and activists, when you talk about race it’s like, oh, no, you’re nationalists.’
These debates are important in their own right, but they are relatively marginal in the broader scheme of organising in communities. It is hard to discern any fundamental change in the way that radical scholars and the independent left (outside of mainstream parties) engage movements. As Phadi pointed out to me in an informal conversation, the left does ‘not necessarily see it necessary to do their work in conversation with black thinkers. They create a revolution through them since they are in protest.’ Rather than engage radical politics centred around race, for example, she suggests that the left is dismissive since it cannot fit within their predetermined template of thought and action. Since 2020, when George Floyd was killed, Phadi reminds me, ‘we are finally debating whether it is race or class, but more than a century ago [Du Bois] people understood that it is both’ (Phadi, personal communication, 2024).
Phadi’s analysis points to the need to investigate the historical role of racism in shaping the representation of social movements. Phadi goes so far as to suggest that the imposition of class-based analyses in the absence of a sense of the lived experience of racism is a form of ‘embedded racism’:
When certain people are seen as subjects and you feel you can shape their revolution or its expression in a particular way to fit what is familiar to us. White people need to know what black people think [to control and pre-empt it]. Then that’s racism. If you don’t know it, you dismiss it. Trained in this left racist ideology, many are not willing to move towards constructive engagement. Only those organic intellectuals who are seen to represent the true working-class voice are given space at conferences. We want more of these [empty] voices instead of asking: ‘Why are we failing’? (Phadi, personal communication, 2024)
On the one hand, within various movements the left has romanticised movements, acting as their mouthpiece, while on the other we remained tied to a relatively static socialist line and label through which to interpret their actions. As Adolph Reed Jr has argued, in the case of the USA, interventions in grassroots politics were based on a foundation of ‘global laws of socialist revolution - that were so distant from mundane political life that they could not provide clear bases for apprehending the significance of the everyday micropolitical processes around which the new black political order congealed’ (Reed 1999, 6).
Conclusion
Rodney argued that the ruling class are not too worried about empty slogans but instead are ‘afraid of that tremendous historical experience of the degradation of the black being coming to the fore’ (Rodney 1969, 62), a point which is remarkably absent from the language and ideology of the independent left in South Africa. Within this framework, memory of the past is in itself black power. He observed that ‘they do not want anybody to articulate those grievances which the masses are talking about all the time’ and asked the persistent question which remains with us today: ‘how do we break out of this Babylonian Captivity?’ (Rodney 1969, 62). Our obsession with the public spectacle, rather than what happens outside of the corridors of power and behind closed doors – the intimate conversations, the culture of people – limits our understanding of grassroots movements.
Radical political economists arguably have to contribute if they, we, do not have our fingers on the pulse of what ordinary people are thinking and feeling. Theory is only effective to the extent that it is or may be produced and shaped in dialogue with the people. Without this, as Lawrence reflected 50 years after the debate with Rodney, our scholar-activism is merely a new shade of left-wing colonialism. Freire points to a situation in which those who maintain the status quo
talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his [sic] trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favour without that trust. (Freire 1970, 6)
We need to go, as Rodney did, where the people are, to understand them as producers of knowledge themselves. Immovable socialist or solely race-based templates disconnected from grassroots movements might distract us from alternative ways of being and seeing in the world that operate outside the logic of racial capitalism. Those who adhere to ‘global laws of socialist revolution’, as Reed summarised it, tend to be out of touch with shifting consciousness and culture and the emergent black politics in post-colonial societies. Despite the democratic intentions of many activists, myself included, socialist theory cannot be effective if it is driven mainly by a predetermined plan of the state or ‘enlightened’ group of people.
If memory and our individual and collective consciousness are indeed weapons in the hands of the oppressed then the reconstruction of histories rooted in the lived black experience of ‘white terror’ and the ‘logic of white supremacy in materialist thought’ (Roediger 2017, 27) require more sustained focus.8 Left-wing engagements with mass movements may have fallen short in the post-colonial period. But given South Africa’s present burgeoning of right-wing politics, including misogynistic language and femicide, a conscientiously driven, radical feminist, anti-racist left movement which connects to Marxist ideas is required more than ever.