Theory – Abahlali baseMjondolo (original) (raw)

2 April 2008

Essays, Interviews & Talks

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx, 1851
Some aspects of the Southern question, by Antonio Gramsci, 1926
Extract from ‘A Seventh Man’ in Race & Class by John Berger, 1975
The debt crisis, Africa and the new enclosures, Silvia Federici, 2000
Shall We Leave it to the Experts? by Arundhati Roy, 2002
Tresspass At Will: Squatting as Direct Action, Human Rights & Justified Theft by Erin Wiegand, 2002
Another world is necessary by Nawal El Saadawi, 2003
Ngicelwe ukuba ngikhulume ngokuthi “kungaliwa kanjani noMbuso?” Lo ngumbuzo onzulu, anginazo izimpendulo ezilula ngu-Arundhati Roy, 2003
Towards a Post-Colonial Modernity, Partha Chatterjee interviewed by Nermeen Shaikh, 2004
Haitian Inspiration by Peter Hallward, 2004 (Now available in isiXhosa as Umzekelo omulhe wase Haiti: ngeminyaka engamakhulu anambini wokuzimela kwaseHaiti)
Purging the Poor by Naomi Klein, 2004
That have not been asked: ten dispatches about endurance in face of walls by John Berger, 2005
Survival and Existence in El Alto by Raul Zibechi, 2005
The de Soto Delusion by John Gravois, 2005
Fear and Money in Dubai by Mike Davis, 2006
Ghettos & Anti-Ghettos: Anatomy of the New Urban Poverty, Interview with Loïc Wacquant, 2006
Demolishing Delhi: World Class City in the Making by Amita Baviskar 2006
Drowning by Numbers – The Non-Reproduction of New Orleans by Benedict Seymour, 2006
The Politics of Disposability by Henry Giroux, 2006
Hurricane Katrina and the Crisis of Black Politics by the editors of New Beginnings, 2007
Squatters and the cities of tomorrow by Robert Neuwirth, 2007
The routes and possibilities of a South – South subversive globalization: Africa and Brazil by Jacques Depelchin, 2007
A tale of two towns by Paul Rogers, 2007
Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution, by George Ciccariello-Maher, 2007
“We Learn as we Go” – Zapatista women share their experiences by Hilary Klein, 2008
Slums law based on flawed interpretation of UN goals, by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2008
Venezuela From Below: An Inteview with George Ciccariello-Maher, by Jeffery Webber, 2008
“We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative Interview, Alain Badiou, 2008
The New Ecology of War, Mike Davis interviewed by Mattias Hagberg, 2009
Interview with Jacques Rancière by Lawrence Liang, 2009
A Republic of Cities, by Gautam Bhan, 2010
Eviction is for black women what incarceration is to black men, by Megan Cottrell, 2010
The Politics of Dignity and the Politics of Poverty by John Holloway, 2010
The Rationality of Rebellion, by Nigel Gibson, 2011
The Weight of the Poor Cornel West interviews Frances Fox Piven, 2011
Democracy as Community Life, Achille Mbembe, 2011

General Theory

The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, (Chapter 25 of Capital) by Karl Marx, 1867
Power Corrupts the Best by Mikhail Bakunin, 1867
Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg, 1904
The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions by Rosa Luxemburg, 1906
The Problem of Dictatorship, by Rosa Luxemburg, 1918
On Bureaucracy & Self-activity of The Masses by Aleksandra Kollontay, 1921
The Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci, 1923-1939
Anti-Semite & Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, 1946
Intellectuals by Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, 1949
Voluntarism and the Social Masses by Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, 1949
Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of “Economism” by Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, 1949
On the Women Question by Raya Dunayevskaya, 1951
North African Syndrome, by Frantz Fanon, 1952
The Negro and Language, by Frantz Fanon, 1952
Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon, 1952
The Fact of Blackness, by Frantz Fanon, 1952
Discourse on Colonialism, by Aimé Césaire, 1955
Letter to Maurice Thorez, by Aimé Césaire, 1956
Every Cook Can Govern by C.L.R. James, 1956
The Working Class and Organisation by Cornelius Castoriadis, 1959
The Pitfalls of National Consciousness by Frantz Fanon, 1961
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, 1961
Excepts from the Critique of Dialectical Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1960
The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, by Rick Turner, 1972
Sex, Race and Class by Selma James, 1973
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney, 1973
Dialectical Reason by Rick Turner, 1973
South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence, by Martin Legassick, 1974
Philosophy of Liberation by Enrique Dussel, 1980
Preface to Proletarian Nights, by Jacques Ranciere, 1981
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis, 1981
The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, Ranajit Guha, 1983
Experiences of Democracy in Africa: Reflections on Practices of Communalist Palaver as a Method of Resolving Contradictions by Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, 1985
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance by James C. Scott, 1985
Weapons of the Weak, by James C. Scott, 1986
Black Consciousness 1977-1987 by Nigel Gibson, 1987
Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988
The Underside of Modernity by Enrique Dussel, 1993
From people’s politics to state politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984–1994, Michael Neocosmos, 1994
An Unthinkable History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1995
Linking the Urban and Rural by Mahmood Mamdani, 1996
Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, by Ato Sekyi-Otu, 1996
Disagreement: Politics & Philosophy by Jacques Rancière, 1995 (English translation 1999)
Figures of the Thinkable (including Passion and Knowledge) by Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997 (English translation, 2005)
Homer Sacer by Giorgio Agamben, 1998
Listening to Africa, Misunderstanding and Misinterpreting Africa: Reformist Western Feminist Evangelism on African Women, by Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome 1999
Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences by Lewis Gordon, 2000
The Debt Crisis, Africa and the New Enclosures by Silvia Federici, 2001
Black Capitalism, by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, 2001
The Pitfalls of South Africa’s ‘Liberation’ by Nigel Gibson, 2001
Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala South Africa and Porto Alegre by Patrick Heller, 2001
Ten Thesis on Politics, by Jacques Rancière, 2001
An Introduction to Dual Power Strategy, by Brian Dominick, 2002
Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway, 2002
Going in the Wrong Direction or Mephistopheles: Not Saint Francis of Assisi, John Holloway, 2002
The Twilight of Vanguardism by David Graeber, 2003
Fanon and the Possibility of Post-Colonial Critical Imagination by Ato Sekyi-Otu, 2003
The Explosive Alliance by Richard Pithouse, 2004
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber, 2004
Infinite Thought by Alain Badiou, 2004
Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice by Peter Hallward, 2004
Dignity’s Revolt by John Holloway, 2005
Twelve Theses on Changing the World without taking Power by John Holloway, 2005
Indianismo and Marxism: The mismatch of two revolutionary rationales, by Álvaro García Linera, 2005
Jacques Ranciere and the Subversion of Mastery by Peter Hallward, 2005
New Introduction to Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like by Lewis Gordon, 2005
The Not Yet Counter-Partisan by Grant Farred, 2005
The Politics of Prescription by Peter Hallward, 2005
[ Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic](Alain Badiou Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic Radical Philosophy 2005 pp.20-24.pdf) by Alain Badiou, 2005
Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Rise of Stalinism: Theory and Practice by John Eric Marot, 2006
From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa by Michael Neocosmos, 2006
Populations & Political Society, Partha Chatterjee, 2006
Precarious Labour: A Feminist Viewpoint by Silvia Frederici, 2006
Is Fanon Relevant? Translations, the postcolonial imagination and the second stage of total liberation by Nigel Gibson, 2006
African-American Philosophy, Race and the Geography of Reason by Lewis Gordon, 2006
What is the Left? by Alain Badiou, 2006
Challenges of NGOisation, Richa Nagar & the Sangtin Writers, 2006
Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography, Koni Benson and Richa Nagar, 2006
The Situation of Human Rights, Chapter One from Harri Englund’s Human Rights & the African Poor, 2006
The Hidden Lessons of Civil EducationChapter Three from Harri Englund’s Human Rights & the African Poor, 2006
Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction by Andy Merrifield, 2006
Chapter Eight from Damming the Flood on NGOs in Haiti, Peter Hallward, 2007
Selma James & the Wages for Housework Campaign by Shemon Salam, 2007
Patricia Hill Colins: Intersecting Oppressions, 2007
On the Coloniality of Being by Nelson Maldonado Torres, 2007
Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa by Michael Neocosmos, 2007
Through the Hellish Zone of Non-Being: Thinking Through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth by Lewis Gordon, 2007
Against and Beyond the State, An Interview with John Holloway, 2007
Learning to Walk: NGO Practice and the Possibility of Freedom by Mark Butler with Thulani Ndlazi, David Ntseng, Graham Philpott, and Nomusa Sokhela, August 2007
Problematic People and Epistemic Decolonization, Lewis Gordon, 2007
Beyond State Politics, by Brother Filippo Mondini, May 2008
We Refugees, by Giorgio Agamben, 2008
The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics, by Michael Neocosmos, 2008
Politics at stake: a note on stakeholder analysis, by Mark Butler & David Ntseng, July 2008
Noam Chomsky on Postmodernism, by Noam Chomsky, December 2008
Preface to the new Hindi edition of Nights of Labour, by Jacques Ranciere, 2009
Why Biko Wouldn’t Vote, by Andile Mngxitama, 2009
Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons, Midnight Notes, 2009
D/developments after the Meltdown, Gill Hart, 2009
The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism by Peter Hallward, 2009
The Revolutionary Potential of Social Scum, by Phil Dickens, 2010
Sites, truths and the logics of worlds: Alain Badiou and human geography, Ian Shaw, 2010
Communists without communism?, by Jacques Ranciere, 2010
Marx at the Margins, by Kevin B. Anderson, 2010
The Rationality of Rebellion, by Nigel Gibson, 2011
Transition, Human Rights & Violence: Re-thinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony, Michael Neocosmos, 2011
Fanon and Political Will, by Peter Hallward, 2011
Subalternities that Matter in Times of Crisis, Sharad Chari, 2011
The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots & Uprisings, Alain Badiou, 2012
“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment, by Anna Selmeczi, 2012
Thought Amidst Waste, by Richard Pithouse, 2012

Theory & the City

‘The Great Towns’, from The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels, 1845
‘The Paris Commune’ from The Civil War in France by Karl Marx, 1871
The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State by Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
The Housing Question by Frederick Engels, 1872
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, 1935
Building, Dwelling, Thinking by Martin Heidegger, 1951 (translated 1971)
‘The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of Capital’, Chapter 6 of Marxism & Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya, 1958
On Violence, by Frantz Fanon, 1961
Theses on the Paris Commune by the Situationist International, 1962
Urbanism and Community Planning by Kenneth Rexroth, 1964
‘On Violence’ from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, 1965 (Constance Farrington’s translation)
‘Territorial Domination’ chapter 7 from The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, 1967 (Kenn Knabb’s translation)
Rationality in the Slum: An Essay on Interpretive Sociology, by Alejandro Portes,1972
‘Cities and Insurrections’, an excerpt from Revolutionaries by Eric Hobsbawm, 1973
The Production of Space, by Henri Lefebvre, 1974
The Myth of Marginality by Janice Perlman, 1976
Housing by People by John Turner, 1976
Spatial Deconcentration in Washington D.C. by the Midnight Notes Collective, 1981
The Commune of Paris, 1871 by Manuel Castells, 1983
Polluting the Body Politics: Race and Urban Location by David Theo Goldberg, 1993
Un-civil Society: The politics of the ‘informal people’ by Asef Bayat, 1997
From`Dangerous Classes’ to `Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South by Asef Bayat, 2000
Urban Development on the Basis of Autonomy – politico-philosophical and ethical framework for Urban Planning and Management by Marcello Lopez de Souza, 2000
Logics of Urban Polarisation: the view from below by Loïc Wacquant, 2000
The Wall & the Eye an interview with Eyal Weizman, 2002
Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?, Partha Chatterjee, 2002
Towards a Dictatorship Over the Poor: Notes on the penalization of poverty in Brazil by Loïc Wacquant, 2003
Logic of the Site by Alain Badiou, 2003
The Right to the City, by David Harvey, 2003
Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid, by Nicholas Blomley, 2003
No Trespassing! by Anders Corr, 2004
Places of their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Mid Twentieth Century by Andrew Wiese, 2004 (Excerpt on ‘urban renewal’ and ‘slum clearance’ as ethnic cleansing)
Decivilizing and Demonizing: the social and symbolic remaking of the black ghetto by Loïc Wacquant, 2004
The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality by Nelson Maldonado Torres, 2004
‘The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics’ in Polemics, by Alain Badiou, 2006
Together with the state, despite the state, against the state by Marcello Lopez de Souza, 2006
Territorial Stigmatisation in the Age of Advanced Marginality, by Loïc Wacquant, 2007
Fanon and Space: colonization, urbanization, and liberation from the colonial to the global city by Stephan Kipfer, 2007
The Ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist: The Work of Henri Lefebvre by Stanley Aronowitz, Situations, 2007
What is an African architecture?, by Jose Forjaz, Conference on African Architecture, Kumasi, Ghana, June 2007
The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape by Slavoj Žižek, 2007
Liberated Territories by Slavoj Žižek, 2007
Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics by Emilio Quadrelli, 2007
Lethal Theory by Eyal Weizman, 2007
The Militarization of the World’s Urban Peripheries by Raúl Zibechi, 2008
Surveilliance, the Law & the Rules by Martin Mongin, 2008
The Communist Hypothesis by Alain Badiou, 2008
The Right to the City, by David Harvey, 2008
Social Movements in the Face of Criminal Power, Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2009
Participatory Society: Urban Space & Freedom, by Chris Spannos, 2009
Going Nowhere or Staying Put, Neil Gray, 2009
Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South, by Faranak Miraftab, 2009
Cities for people, not for profit—from a radical-libertarian and Latin American perspective by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2010
Which right to which city? In defence of political-strategic clarity by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2010
A (Very Short) Tale of Two Urban Forums by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2010
Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism, by Ananya Roy, 2011
The ‘Arab Spring’ and the city, by Marcelo Lopes de Souza & Barbara Lipietz, 2012
Learning from urban revolt, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, 2012
Rebel Cities, by David Harvey, 2012
The Urban Peripheries? Counter-Powers from Below?, by Raul Zibechi, 2012

Theory & Land

Land in South Africa: Gift for All or Commodity for the Few? by Mark Butler & Graham Philpott, 2004
Concept Note on ‘Willing Buyer Willing Seller’ by Mark Butler, 2006
The Food Crisis Is Not Just About Food, by Jacques Depelchin, 2008
Rural poverty in the Eastern Cape Province: Legacy of apartheid or consequence of contemporary segregationism?, by Ashley Westaway, 2012

Theory & Education

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, 1968
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, by Jacques Rancière, 1981

Theology

The Gospel of Matthew, c100
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, 1963
A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King, 1967
Archbishop Romero’s Pastoral Letters, 1977-1979.
The Kairos Document, 1985
Liberation versus Submission, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, 1987
In the Parish of the Poor, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 1990
Remebering the Poor, Gustavo Gutiérrez, 2003
Black Liberation Theology (audio), James Cone, 2008
Introduction to A New and Unsettling Force: Reigniting Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, by the Poverty Initiative, 2009
Gustavo Gutierrez and the preferential option for the poor, 2011

David Harvey’s Organising for the Anti-Capitalist Transition and Responses in Interface, 2010

Organizing for the anti-capitalist transition, David Harvey
A new and unsettling force: the strategic relevance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, Willie Baptist
“The interests of the movement as a whole”: response to David Harvey, Laurence Cox,
Educating resistance, Anna Selmeczi
Which right to which city? In defence of political-strategic clarity, Marcelo Lopes de Souza

Books on Poor People’s Movements (& other forms of struggle) Around the World

Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, by Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward, 1979
Street Politics: Poor people’s Movements in Iran, by Asef Bayet, 1997
City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, Ananya Roy, 2003
Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica, Obika Grey, 2004
The Politics of the Governed, by Partha Chatterjee, 2004
The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing, by Roberta Feldman & Susan Stall, 2004
Class, culture and conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937, Chris Ealham, 2004
Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters, by Salwa Ismail, 2006
Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, by Raúl Zibechi, 2010
Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia, by Jeffery Webber, 2011

Also see