Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa

Download or read book Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mass upsurge here was not of religious inspiration but quite secular, contrary to the thinking of the dominant perspective in the social sciences which had been stressing the decline of secular politics in that part of the world since the 1980s. [...] 1, 2014 Yet neither of the two contested the existence of the capitalist system as such and the idea of emancipation did not feature in their vocabulary.6 The neo-liberal critique of the state which found political expression in the new 'Washington Consensus' was dismissive of the African state as corrupt, illegitimate and unrepresentative of the general will. [...] The political struggles of the workers were thus not only deemed to be self-liberating but also understood to provide the foundation for the liberation of the whole people - the 'uprooting' of the class system as such - precisely because, as Jacques Rancière (1995) has put it, the proletariat was in nineteenth century Europe 'the part of no part', the collectivity which, because of its exclusion f. [...] In the absence of concepts to enable a thinking of politics, we are invariably drawn into the politics of the state and the tyranny of the objective so that political choices become impossible given that politics becomes guided if not determined by the objective course of history. [...] In fact, such a notion of 'excess' is arguably present in Marx's conception of the political consciousness of 'communist proletarians' referred to in the Communist Manifesto as, in his words, 'they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement' (Marx and Engels, 1848.