The global threat of race in the decomposition of struggle

ABSTRACT

Many of the struggles that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis eventually experienced decomposition in the face of multiple internal and external threats. While movement composition and decomposition are inevitable in the natural cycle of popular struggles, this article argues that what David Theo Goldberg has termed “the threat of race” constituted one important factor that brought about the eventual demise of these popular mobilizations. By drawing on the cases of US Occupy Wall Street, European anti-austerity protests, and South African struggles against xenophobia, it points to global continuity in anti-blackness across disparate geographies. As these same regions currently confront the threat of righting authoritarianism, this article argues we must also take a self-reflexive look at the seeds of reaction embedded in otherwise progressive and left-wing formations in order to achieve a more sobering account of our present predicament.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat of race
• Occupy Wall Street
• European anti-austerity
• South African xenophobia
• movement decomposition

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from close readings by Richard Pithouse, Chris Courtheyn, and Eve Darian-Smith, and from audience comments at a talk delivered at UHURU in Grahamstown, South Africa, and at a panel co-organized with Stevie Larson at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Sexton, “People of Color Blindness,” 48.

² Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 16.

³ Ibid., 17.

⁴ Ibid., 19.

⁵ Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” 16.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Farred, “Shoot the White Girl First,” 51.

⁸ Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 29, (my emphasis).

⁹ Darian-Smith and McCarty, The Global Turn.

¹⁰ Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance”; and Bachetta, Maira and Winnant, Global Raciality.

¹¹ Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”; and Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

¹² Robinson, Black Marxism.

¹³ Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin, 3–4.

¹⁴ Kipfer and Saberi, “The Times and Spaces of Right Populism”.

¹⁵ Goldberg, The Threat of Race; Darian-Smith, “Global Studies” and “Re-reading Du Bois.”

¹⁶ Speech at Occupy Boston, October 12, 2011.

¹⁷ Craig Hughes is also one of the editors of the extremely influential (among US-based activists) 2010 collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. As a long-time activist, a grassroots theorist, and a participant in Occupy Wall Street, his criticisms should therefore not be taken as a dismissal of the movement but precisely as an attempt to make it more effective at countering all forms of oppression.

¹⁸ Hughes, Occupy Zucotti, 4–5.

¹⁹ Ibid., 7.

²⁰ Ibid., 21.

²¹ Roy, “Dis/possessive Collectivism.”

²² Campbell, “A Critique of the Occupy Movement from a Black Occupier,” 50.

²³ Appel, “Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination,” 603.

²⁴ Hannah Appel, “There is Power in a Debtor’s Union,” Dissent. July 12, 2019.

²⁵ Groundwork Collective, “Leading with our Vision,” 239.

²⁶ Beeman, “Post-Civil Rights Racism and OWS.”

²⁷ Groundwork Collective, “Leading with our Vision,” 240.

²⁸ Woods, “‘Sittin’ On Top of the World’,” 48.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 71.

³¹ Hardt and Negri, Declaration, 29.

³² Trott, “Reading the 2011 Riots,” 543.

³³ Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot, 151, my emphasis.

³⁴ Ibid., 159–160.

³⁵ Trott, “Introduction to Rebellious Subjects,” 539–540.

³⁶ As Paul Gilroy argues, “In a post-secular celebrity-obsessed culture that conceives of selfishness as an innate virtue, the rioters’ greed and gratification, though undesirable, misplaced, and criminal, were also morally insufficient to make them truly deviant. We can see that their pursuit of gratification is in fact a mainstream attitude common to corrupt bankers, expenses-fiddling politicians, and others seeking the addictive thrill of acquiring something for nothing,” in “1981 & 2011: From Social Democratic to Neoliberal Rioting,” 556.

³⁷ For parallel analyses, see Al-Bulushi, “Learning from Urban Revolt” and The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection.

³⁸ Zizek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 14.

³⁹ Ibid., 12.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 53.

⁴¹ Gilroy, “1981 & 2011,” 555.

⁴² The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 113.

⁴³ Gerbaudo, “The Indignant Citizen.”

⁴⁴ Fominaya, “European Anti-Austerity and Pro-Democracy Protests,” 16.

⁴⁵ Theodossopoulos, “The Ambivalence of Anti-Austerity Indignation in Greece,” 489.

⁴⁶ This is a slogan popularized by Abahlali. It represents their own intervention into comprehending the xenophobic attacks that periodically occur in South African shack communities against migrant populations from neighboring African countries. It should also be read as their insistence upon adequate forms of autonomous organization in poor communities. Without such political structures, independent of moneyed interests and established political apparatuses, the anger of the poor can veer down a variety of inadequate and politically regressive paths.

⁴⁷ Achille Mbembe, “Blacks from Elsewhere and the Right to Abode,” New Frame. October 4, 2019.

⁴⁸ Didier Fassin, “From Right to Favor: The Refugee Question as Moral Crisis.” The Nation. April 5, 2016.

⁴⁹ Pithouse, “Conjunctural Remarks on the Political Significance of the Local.”

⁵⁰ Peter Alexander, “A Massive Rebellion of the Poor,” Mail and Guardian, April 13, 2012.

⁵¹ Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis.

⁵² Ashman and Pons-Vignon, “NUMSA, the Working Class, and Socialist Politics in South Africa.”

⁵³ Gillespie and Naidoo, “#MustFall.”

⁵⁴ Ibid., 193.

⁵⁵ Robins, From Revolution to Rights in South Africa.

⁵⁶ Neocosmos, “Rethinking Politics in Southern Africa Today.”

⁵⁷ Webster and Pampallis, The Unresolved National Question.

⁵⁸ Gibson, “Calling Everything into Question,” 4.

⁵⁹ Sinwell, “Is ‘Another World’ Really Possible?”

⁶⁰ Bond and Mottiar, “Movements, Protest, and a Massacre in South Africa.”

⁶¹ Pithouse, “Conjunctural Remarks on the Political Significance of the Local.”

⁶² Friedman, “Beyond the Fringe?”; and Naidoo and Veriava, “Re-membering Movements.”

⁶³ This critique should not be taken to mean that scholars of South Africa fail to situate the dynamics of South African capitalism within a broader global context. My argument, rather, is that the conversation around South African movements is rarely presented within a broader global conversation of internal movement dynamics. This does not entail merely suggesting that all movements are struggling against a global neoliberalism, but rather requires an exploration of the dynamics of class composition within each struggle.

⁶⁴ Interview June 2011; and Interview August 2013.

⁶⁵ Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis, 5.

⁶⁶ Christopher McMichael, “Don’t let Capitalism Blame Migrants for its Failures,” New Frame. December 10, 2018.

⁶⁷ Neocosmos, From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners, 117.

⁶⁸ Crush, “The Perfect Storm,” 11.

⁶⁹ Field notes, July 27, 2012.

⁷⁰ Salo, “Gendered Citizenship, Race and Women’s Differentiated Access to Power in the New South Africa.”

⁷¹ Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS, 86–87.

⁷² Hickel, “‘Xenophobia in South Africa,” 107.

⁷³ Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS.

⁷⁴ Makhulu, Making Freedom.

⁷⁵ Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS. 86.

⁷⁶ Pithouse, “Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town.”

⁷⁷ Mbembe, “Democracy as a Community Life,” original emphasis.

⁷⁸ Interview June 25, 2013.

⁷⁹ Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 191.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 192.

⁸¹ “RDP house” is the common term for the public housing the ANC government has built since 1994. RDP refers to the broadly Keynesian, redistributive economic plan called “Reconstruction and Development Programme” released in 1994, quickly eclipsed by the more neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) unveiled in 1996 after much World Bank consultation. Following a revised housing policy in 2004, rebranded as Breaking New Ground (BNG), the government has tried to replace the term “RDP house” with “BNG house”. In my experience, however, the most common general term deployed by shack dwellers for a government-provided home remains “RDP house”. For more on the successes and failures of BNG policy, see Marie Huchzermeyer’s excellent study, Cities with Slums.

⁸² Neocosmos, From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners, 128.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 129.

⁸⁵ For a good example of this, see Jan Bornman, “The People who Sparked the Xenophobic Violence,” New Frame. September 11, 2019.

⁸⁶ Cited in Neocosmos, From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners, 132.

⁸⁷ Hardt and Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” 84.

⁸⁸ Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South.

⁸⁹ Al-Bulushi, “Precarity, Surplus, and the Urban Political.”

⁹⁰ Zibechi, Territories of Resistance, 189–266.

⁹¹ Abahlali, “Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg.”

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Ibid.

⁹⁷ Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” 22, original emphasis.

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Yousuf Al-Bulushi

Yousuf Al-Bulushi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research sits at the intersection of comparative global movements, political theory, urban geography, and African and Africana Studies. His work can be found in the journals City, Geoforum, Transforming Anthropology, and Urban Geography, as well as in the edited book The Urban Political.