part of no part

“ The first terrain of struggle is, from this point of view, the universal right to move, work and learn on the whole global surface ” Antonio Negri South Africa is a nation-state, a member in good standing of the African Union and the United Nations and a participant in the world global economy based on free market capitalist economics and “the rule of law”. It is, in the parlance of international politics, a sovereign state, that is, in almost everything except in its ability to exclude itself from the global economy. Its economy is required to be open to free market activity in which capital is able to enter and exit its markets with unhindered certainty. But not People. South Africa as we know it today was born into a post-cold-war world, in which the end of history was proclaimed and the unfettered emergence of global capitalism was it future. The ANC, having been nurtured and fed on a diet of ideology which characterised the South African reality as one in which the...

There are people dying in the streets, their blood flowing over our consciousness in a dull stream of normality. Our anger and disgust might rise momentarily, but soon it will dissipate, while the conditions that feed the social ills remain, only for the orgy of anger to rise with greater intensity, elsewhere, in different circumstances, but with the same underlying colonial condition present.  It cannot simply be business as usual. It is a matter that we will have to face. Certainly, it requires discussion and debate and the forging of a common consensus. But unless the outcomes lead to a radical effort to deal with our colonial legacy, it is destined to be yet another placebo to a society that is stretched to the limits of its cohesion. If we are to avoid a gradual disintegration of our society into gratuitous acts of violence, aimed at the easiest targets, the most vulnerable of our society, it will require bold and ambitious interventions. This is what the EFF essen...

In a recent article espousing the heroic mission of the Independent Media Group(IMG) Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya, interestingly, not only acknowledges that the IMG has joined the establishment(after all it was Public/State money that funded the purchase) but plunges head long into a defence of the establishment and the IMG`s role in presenting the establishments narrative. What is not as interesting, rather deceiving, is the juxtaposition that Moya tries to establish between it and the rest of the establishment media. To appreciate the distinction I make in this regard it might require us to briefly consider what establishment means as Moya himself does not bother to explain to the reader what he means by establishment.  Moya instead presents all the media, pre-1994, and beyond, as anti-establishment and itself as pro-establishment on the basis of the illegitimacy of the pre-1994 government, and the legitimacy of the post 1994 government.  He further decries the ...

“Blackness emerged as an obstacle to unfettered injustice and become, in the moment of psychological terrorizing, the ethic of resistance. Therefore it is clear to be black is not merely an issue of colour nor simply the use of the language of the black people, but to use it to express the most progressive political, cultural and ethical interests that, in a racists society, must always be for human liberation and , thus, against all forms of oppression. ”  (Asante, 2005, p. 203) Molefi Kete Asante, while discussing Ama Mazama`s critique of Fanons Black Skins, White Masks (1967) after noting that “ blackness emerged as an obstacle to unfettered injustice ” remarks that “ it (blackness) has become over the decades  a trope of strong ethical dimensions with implications for a post-western construction of reality ”  (Asante, 2005, p. 203) Indeed, the idea of Blackness as articulated by Asante, challenged the fundamental underpinnings of the dominant Eurocentric w...