The idea of changing the society through the state has failed. These were the sentiments of visiting Mellon Senior Scholar and a Congolese historian at a recent two-day Sociology conference on Politics at a Distance.
World renowned theorist of emancipation and visiting Mellon Senior Scholar, David Holloway said bringing about change through the state continues to fail humanity. “What we are living is the disastrous, catastrophic failure of state centred politics, a disastrous failure of the idea that the road to better society is through the state and through gaining control of the state.”
He said that in South Africa so much time was dedicated to fighting the apartheid regime and many lives were lost in the process but the end product has been “the most unequal society in the world, a society that has sharp social divisions, rampant corruption and now Marikana.”
Holloway added that these failures could not be understood as a betrayal because it has happened everywhere in the world where social change has been pursued through the state.
Congolese historian, Jacques Depelchin, said that many social movements ended up controlling the state because of the failure to understand the nature of capital and how it manifests itself.
Depelchin added that human beings are both preys and vultures to the state, which encourages greed and consumption. “Extractivity is liquidating humanity. Our bodies are being extracted of that which is a powerful weapon, conscious,” he said.
The state is not a thing but it is “a form of organisation that excludes us”, said Holloway. “The state is made up of full time officials and that excludes all of us who are not.”
In cases where citizens complain to the state about housing conditions, representatives of the state tell them not to worry and to let the state solve their problems.
The relationship between citizens and the state is complicated by the fact that the state “seeks always to reconcile our social discontent with the need to reproduce capital.” The state promotes the exploitation of resources including the exploitation of people.
He said that a solution to this failure is to organise based on the recognition of dignity. “Dignity means a process of mutual recognition and recognising other people not as victims but as subjects, recognising other people as people who can create and must create a different world,” said Holloway. “It means a shift from a politics of talking and telling people what to do to a politics of listening and encouraging the participation of everybody.”
The conference was part of a global trend on politics at a distance from the state.