THE PROBLEM OF CLASSISM

My concern throughout this book continues to be the carving out of theoretical space for the thinking of politics in its own terms in Africa. The central issue of intellectual and political concern to be explicitly addressed in this chapter is the problem inherent in what may be called the perspective of ‘classism’. By ‘classism’ I mean, following Lazarus (1996), a thought perspective that sees emancipatory politics as founded on the belief in an already socially constituted working class or proletariat as simultaneously a subject of history and a subject of politics. The fusion of social location or place (identified by the social sciences), political subjectivity (identified and represented by intellectuals in a party) and the process of history (which unfolds itself to a given telos) is intellectually unsustainable today, and has been historically transcended, for it is ultimately incapable of thinking an emancipatory future. In its current vulgar form in South Africa, classism amounts to an identity politics and exhibits no universal content. Of course, many still prefer to cling to this dogma, but, given the extensive critiques of economic reductionism and of teleological conceptions of history, and the renewed weight ascribed to the subjective in the theoretical discourses of the past 50 years worldwide, along with the collapse of ‘actually existing’ alternatives to capitalism into frankly criminal states and their eventual disappearance, adherence to dogmas (both liberal and Marxist) has lost intellectual foundation.