Thinking with Abahlali : The Local State, Solidarity, and Research

Author response by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi

The (local) state and movements

Everything in South Africa comes back to the land question. The largest landowner in Durban is Tongaat Hulett, a sugar company that acquired much of its property under the racist laws of colonialism and apartheid. Loftus is rightly curious to learn more about the more recent 21st‑century decision by this sugar multinational to move towards the assetization and financialization of its land by no longer simply growing sugar but engaging in land development. We might find part of the answer to this question in recent news that the company entered bankruptcy. It clearly faced a situation of declining competitiveness in sugar production, perhaps as a result of the rise of Brazilian and Indian sugar multinationals and US corn and beet competitors carving out an increasing share of the sweetener market. Tongaat Hulett’s move to transform some of its sugar land into commercial and residential real-estate development can therefore be read as a failed attempt to restore profit rates by diversifying sources of revenue.

It is in this 21st‑century context that Tongaat Hulett decided to offload some of its worst land to the low-income housing development called Cornubia to be built by the state. For me, this is indeed a straightforward story about, as Loftus puts it, “how corporate power—and its relationship to the state—prevents any more radical forms of redistribution.” How movements might take advantage of this situation is a fantastic question. But I’m afraid I can’t speculate further on this point, and Loftus is correct that, in order to come up with an adequate answer, more research would need to be done. His point should lead us to pose exactly what Hawthorne rightly calls such “improvisational, experimental, and prefigurative” questions that might help inform movement strategy today.

Hawthorne zooms out from the particularities of the Cornubia case to pose the following crucial question : “Is there a version of the state apparatus that can be a vehicle for a true politics of liberation, or is the state itself a hindrance to this goal ?” From Abahlali and Raul Ornelas I learned that, in practice, even the most radical anti-statist movements tend to maintain a relation with the state, sometimes wanting the state to perform its functions better. Despite the popular and rhetorical portrayal of abolition as simply an anarchist practice, I read the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore as paralleling this nuanced and careful understanding of movement and state powers. And I think it is no coincidence that she has written recently about how to deploy our Leninism today by paying close attention to groups like Abahlali and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Gilmore 2024).

Enright poses a similar question but with regard to the specificity of the urban scale and the local state : “how might the lessons of AbM compare and be put in conversation with other kinds of experiments with direct democracy in local state form, such as community councils ; new municipalism ; citizen assemblies ; or public commons partnerships ?” These are indeed exactly the kinds of state–movement ties and experiments I believe are necessary to advance the goals of groups like Abahlali. Unfortunately, the violence of the ANC and their vanguardist mentality has prevented any similar experiments to those Enright rightly asks about from gaining ground in KwaZulu-Natal—at least not to my knowledge. But as the ANC continues to rapidly lose hegemony, it is always possible that movements like Abahlali might enter into some form of partnership with groups seeking to experiment with the kind of dual power exhibited by groups like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi or the Em Comu government in Barcelona.

(Anti-)blackness, Marxism, and solidarity

By deploying a notion of the “the afterlife of the apartheid city” to comprehend the everyday lives of shack-dwellers in democratic South Africa, I argue that racism is a powerful and ongoing structural reality shaping space and social relations in the country. Hawthorne productively asks about what is lost and what is gained in the trade-off between more general terms like racism, and more specific ones like antiblackness. This follows her incredibly productive and convincing thinking in Contesting Race and Citizenship, where she argues, building on the work of Michelle Wright, for the need to transcend the “middle passage epistemology” in global studies of blackness (Wright 2022, pp. 140–141).

Toward the end of her book, Hawthorne argues for the centrality of “transgressive solidarity” and thinking across overlapping forms of oppression in order to generate the collectivity required to overthrow structures of domination (pp. 191–196). This is a political argument I find extremely compelling, and one that often gets thrown by the wayside in academic studies obsessed with a one-dimensional description of prevailing forms of oppression.

In Ruptures, I walk a tightrope between an analytical commitment to describing the particularity of antiblack racism in South Africa and a Marxist and African Humanist commitment to the universality of struggle, requiring radical forms of solidarity across difference. As Hawthorne captures perfectly, this is precisely why I hold in tension—without resolving—the back-and-forth between notions of antiblackness and “becoming black of the world.” The result for some readers might be unsatisfying because of the obvious tension between these concepts. And yet I believe this tension can be productive if deployed appropriately.

It is for this reason that I also agree entirely with Loftus’s search for a synthesis between a metaphysical black radical tradition and a materialist Marxist tradition. The search for a dialectical synthesis that does not collapse one into the other, nor unhelpfully oppose the two, is precisely where my own political commitments lie and where I believe Abahlali’s political ideology can be found. Today, the movement often sings The Internationale to open branch meetings, while also drawing on a long-standing African humanist tradition. Nonetheless, I believe I could have made this point clearer in the manuscript, and Loftus’s question reminds me that I will need to do so in future writings.

The commitment to a synthesis between metaphysical black radical traditions and materialist Marxist traditions of struggle dovetails nicely with Enright’s interest in theorizing “rupture.” Rupture is best captured, I believe, as the “occurrence of the impossible.” This should be understood in contradistinction to commonly understood notions of what is possible on Earth, insofar as these ideas are shaped by both sociological positivism on the terrain of epistemology and by technocratic political science on the terrain of the political, where both are governed primarily by liberalism.

If this is correct, then there is a way in which rupture as a transcending of the positivist tradition, without abandoning materialism, can be understood precisely also as a synthesis between metaphysical and materialist traditions of struggle. As Robin Kelley (2002) has argued in his study of the black radical imagination, “Keeping it Surreal” (chap. 6), and as Alejo Carpentier (2017) captures in his foundational magical realist study of the Haitian revolution in his historical novel, The Kingdom of This World, the actually existing black radical tradition, in its prevailing artistic and political expressions, has been defined by a commitment to realize divinity in the here and now.

How researchers should study and theorize movements

In many senses, this focus on rupture—understood in Abahlali’s terms as a recognition of the capacity of the poor to think—also guides my own methodological commitments regarding how we might study and theorize social movements. But ruptures are never produced seamlessly, without their own geographical specificities, and their own internal tensions and antagonisms. This is the final thread linking Loftus’s question about Abahlali’s tactical endorsement of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in 2014, Hawthorne’s questions about community research, and Enright’s questions regarding the lessons urbanists across the world might take away from Abahlali’s praxis.

The struggles over water that Loftus captured so well in Inanda in the early 2000s were indeed evocative of what happens when former movement militants go to work on behalf of the state. As he points out : “the old civic structures were thus partially rejuvenated in an effort to rework the political ecology of Inanda. This micro-level passive revolution employed former activists in the hope that they could […] be used to consolidate new choreographies of power represented in the responsible fee-paying consumer of services” (2012, p. 103 ; my emphasis).

In the case of Abahlali’s endorsement of the Democratic Alliance, I don’t believe a similar degree of movement capture by state-centered political parties actually occurred, however baffling the endorsement may have seemed, and however much it might appear on the surface like a parallel form of passive revolution. Some of their closest local interlocutors and supporters, who have at times operated as extremely useful internal critics of some of the movement’s actions, now agree in retrospect that this endorsement actually operated more in Abahlali’s favor, and not the other way around, arguing that “their protest vote worked” (Buccus 2024 ; Jeenah 2024 ; Abahlali 2014b). Because I share the Gramscian commitments of Loftus, I did my best in the manuscript to bring some of those complexities to the foreground. But Loftus’s questions remind me that I think I still could have done a better job elaborating the kind of “dialectical translation” that Stuart Hall pursued, and will try to do so in my future work on movements.

When Hawthorne asks, “Does this entity we refer to as ‘community’ speak with a single voice ?”, I think we can definitely answer, “No.” The political struggle lies precisely in coming together in order to develop a united position, but to try to do so in a way that also respects internal plurality. The debates over tactically endorsing the DA and the EFF are evocative of this balancing act between a democratic praxis involving long discussions, and the ultimate need to act as a united body by taking bold political decisions, despite knowing that such decisions might generate blowback or exacerbate internal tensions.

While I have a degree of intimate familiarity with the important cases Hawthorne cites regarding some of these internal tensions, I’m still not prepared to comment on them because I don’t believe this is the right venue to do so. However, I should point to Abahlali’s writings on how they have handled such cases, as they offer important additional context and background (Abahlali 2014a, 2014b, 2015). The work by Richard Pithouse on “the propaganda of the present in South Africa”—thinking with Du Bois’s notion of “the propaganda of history”—is also a crucial tool to be deployed in this regard, as it offers us one way to sift through the many different academic and popular distortions by academics and journalists of radical social movements like Abahlali (Pithouse 2026).

Both Enright and Hawthorne raise the specter of internationalism and the ongoing Israeli campaign of genocide against Palestinians. For Abahlali, the South African ICJ case against Israel is illustrative of a rare moment of ethical internationalism on the part of the ruling ANC—one that should be acknowledged and celebrated as a sign that the anti-apartheid movement’s internationalist vision of liberation is still not extinguished. Abahlali’s position has been to celebrate this move by the ruling ANC, even as they decry the ANC’s refusal to apply such high standards for human life and dignity domestically within South Africa’s borders (Abahlali 2023). But precisely because their own internationalism is built on ties between movements, they are weary of excessively statist visions of freedom. Abahlali therefore has preferred to build alliances directly with Palestinian movements on the ground, bypassing both their own state and the budding Palestinian apparatus of capture and repression that is the quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority.

In this fashion, I believe Abahlali has modeled for us an internationalism of “transgressive solidarity” that allows the ideas in their movement, as well as the analysis of the structures of oppression they are facing, to travel beyond strict national, racial, ethnic, or continental demarcations. This is an extremely inspiring form of horizontal internationalist praxis, and it is also a portable “model” that both urbanists and movements alike might emulate.

Articles in this series :

• 1. Introduction, by Christopher Courtheyn & Joseph Palis
• 2. Urban Racial Regimes, Development, and the Black Radical Tradition in South Africa, by Alex Loftus
• 3. Settler Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and the Urban Political, by Theresa Enright
• 4. Rethinking Capitalism, the State, and Black Politics from the Global South, by Camilla A. Hawthorne
• 5. Author response | Thinking with Abahlali : The Local State, Solidarity, and Research, by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi

Bibliography

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