Politics at a Distance from the State: Radical and African Perspectives

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.

Lucien van der Walt is a South African sociologist and labour educator, involved in the working-class movement. His research includes anarchism/syndicalism, working-class and left history, and neo-liberalism. He has been active in workers' education since the 1990s, including for DITSELA, the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, the Vuyisile Mini Workers School, the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, and the Red & Black Forums.

Kirk Helliker is research professor in sociology at Rhodes University, South Africa, and director of its Unit of Zimbabwean Studies. His books include the edited Everyday Crisis: Living in Contemporary Zimbabwe (2021) and the authored Fast Track Land Occupations in Zimbabwe in the Context of the Zvimurenga (2021), both in collaboration with Sandra Bhatasara and Manase Kudzai Chiweshe. He was deported by the apartheid regime.  

John Holloway is a professor of sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autùnoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement and on the new forms of anticapitalist struggle. His book Change the World Without Taking Power has been translated into eleven languages and has stirred an international debate. His book Crack Capitalism (Pluto, 2010) takes the argument further, suggesting that the only way in which we can think of revolution today is as the creation, expansion, multiplication, and confluence of cracks in capitalist domination.