Marxisms past and present
- Authors: Helliker, Kirk D , Vale, Peter C J
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/71263 , vital:29825 , https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513612470532
- Description: Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2013
Radical thinking in South Africa’s age of retreat
- Authors: Helliker, Kirk D , Vale, Peter C J
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/71214 , vital:29818 , https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909612442654
- Description: This article traces the rise and fall of radical praxis in South Africa and offers a critique of the prevailing practices of former Marxists under post-apartheid conditions. Western Marxism emerged in the 1970s in South Africa and Marxist activists became deeply involved in the liberation movements. With the unravelling of apartheid, the main liberation forces made a social pact with capitalist forces and former Marxists embraced a statist project. In the context of the rise of ‘new’ social movements, radical thinking of a more Libertarian kind is emerging in contemporary South Africa.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2012
Fanon’s Curse: re-imagining Marxism in South Africa’s age of retreat
- Authors: Helliker, Kirk D , Vale, Peter C J
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: conference paper , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61029 , vital:27924 , http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.587.740&rep=rep1&type=pdf
- Description: Given its growing, even dark, reputation for xenophobia, it seems extraordinary that South Africa remains open to ideas from the outside. Fifteen years after apartheid in South Africa ended, the country’s great cities are branded with the same imported images that clutter glittering malls in New York, London or Sydney. The rapidity of this makeover from apartheid’s grey conformity is held to be testimony to the success of neo-liberal globalisation which was enthusiastically embraced with apartheid’s ending.
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- Date Issued: 2009