
Politics at a Distance from the State
Description
For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical change with capturing state power.
The collapse of statist projects from the 1970s fostered both neo-liberalism and a global crisis of left and working-class politics. But it also opened space for rediscovering democratic, society-centered and anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance from the state. This resurgent alternative has influenced the Zapatistas in Mexico, Rojava in Syria, Occupy, and independent unions and struggles worldwide around austerity, land, and the city. Its lineages include anarchism, syndicalism, autonomist Marxism, philosophers like Alain Badiou, and popular praxis.
This pathbreaking volume helps recover this once sidelined politics, with a focus on South Africa and Zimbabwe. It includes a dossier of texts from a century of anarchists, syndicalists, radical unionists, and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Originating in an African summit of scholars, social movements, and anti-apartheid veterans, this book also features a preface from John Holloway.
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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