Browsing by Author "Nash, Andrew"

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    Capitalism and nature in South Africa: racial dispossession, liberation ideology and ecological crisis
    (2018) Andrews, Donna; Nash, Andrew
    This dissertation is an historical examination of policy and discourse as it impacts on ecological questions in South Africa, with a focus on land, mining and fishing. It shows how ecological issues are embedded in relations of class, race and gender. It argues that relation of nature and society and social relations form each other historically. Specifically, it makes visible how apparently progressive ideas to overcome the legacy of apartheid have served to perpetuate the ecological crisis after the end of apartheid. That is, although liberation ideology aims to overcome irrational and harmful forms of domination, current strategies of overcoming racial dispossession on the basis of capitalism rely on increasing and unbridled exploitation of natural resources. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of political perspectives and agency responding to the ecological crisis in South Africa today. It provides a survey of government, activist and community initiatives and assesses their capacity to help create a new relationship of nature and society, as the basis for a new society.
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    Democratizing money : from the federalist papers to the community currency movement
    (2011) Wainwright, Saul; Nash, Andrew
    This thesis examines the political idea of democratic money, within the historically specific capitalist democracy (Wood, 1995: 213), and critically evaluates counter claims to be democratizing money made by advocates of community currencies.
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    Excellence in Higher Education: Is There Really No Alternative?
    (2013-03) Nash, Andrew
    Excellence, according to Bill Readings, “has become the unifying principle of the contemporary university” (1996: 22). Excellence is the central category in the university’s current self-conception, the point on which managerial authority believes itself to be at its strongest, and at times believes itself to be impregnable. The only alternative to excellence in this discourse — or the only alternative that can be admitted — is mediocrity. In the South African context, this contrast can be given a political and racial edge, as in Mamphela Ramphele’s claim that “Black people did not fight against apartheid only to settle for mediocrity” (2008: 219). Student struggles against apartheid raised the banner of freedom, rather than excellence, but these struggles can be used to legitimate excellence and to give retrospective content to the idea of freedom. To think critically about excellence, we need to see it not just as an outcome but also as a managerial practice or system that impacts on every aspect of higher education. We also have to see how it fills a pressing historical need within academic life. All too often, the advocates of excellence conceal that history, making it impossible for us to ask whether that need could be met in other ways.
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    Frantz Fanon and the Dialetic of Decolonisation
    (2010) Ndlovu, Siphiwe; Nash, Andrew; Garuba, Harry
    It has been more than five decades since the wave of decolonization swept across Africa. For people on the continent, the rise to power by the former liberation movements brought hope for a better future in the post-colonial state. However later developments showed that independence would, in fact, not change the material and social conditions of the ordinary people. Although the national liberation movement took over the government of the former colony, colonial institutions and structures of power, which were founded on the economic exploitation of the colony, remained unchanged. Thus in this thesis I set out to examine Frantz Fanon’s thought in order to provide a critique of post-independence failures in Africa. I will argue that whilst Fanon shared the same ideals as the anti-colonial movements in their objective to remove colonial regimes from power, that Fanon, in fact, had a critical attitude towards the anti-colonial movement. Whereas the latter conceived of freedom as independence, Fanon conceived of freedom as disalienation, premised on the complete recovery of the black self from the negative effects of colonialism. Thus the study sets out to examine the extent to which Fanon offered an alternative idea of freedom and liberation to the one which was being advanced by the national liberation movements.
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    Liberalism and the problem of colonial rule : three-stages in Anglo-American thought
    (2009) Campbell, Craig Grant; Nash, Andrew
    From as early as the 15th century when European explorers rounded the tip of Africa in search of trade routes to the East, until the early twentieth century, the West, through the territorial expansion of empire, established itself as the dominant authority within the global political order. Ideologically inspired conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century, Cold War tensions and the process of decolonization, however, resulted in a fundamental change in the nature of this power and global influence, and led to the construction of a new global order that had never existed before. After centuries of being structured around the power of a few European countries with colonial subjects, the post-colonial order was based on formal equality between states, where the notion of territorial expansion and paternal rule were no longer accepted practices. Instead, power within the international system was determined by economic competition and the notion of 'civilization' was replaced by the ideal of economic development, predominantly through the forces of the international capitalist system. The aim of the following chapters is to highlight the dominant discourse of the AngloAmerican liberal tradition within the context of the changing global order, and argue, more specifically, that the process of decolonization can be used as a lens through which changes reflecting how the 'liberal task' was conceived within Anglo-American political thought, can be traced. Furthermore, it aims to show that Anglo-American political philosophy in the postcolonial era can understood as a part of a larger historical process. dating back to the work John Stuart Mill in the early nineteenth century. By contrasting the liberalisms of Mill, the British Idealists and Isaiah Berlin, and their responses to the question of colonial rule, this history sheds light on the fundamental impulses of the liberal tradition between the colonial and post-colonial periods. It is widely known that Mill was employed by the East India Company and that the subject of colonial rule, to some extent, informed his liberalism.
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    Marikana’s path
    (Taylor & Francis, 2015) Nash, Andrew
    The Marikana massacre of August 16, 2012 broke open an unexpected clearing in South African political life. The immediate response of many mainstream commentators and institutions – from political parties to universities – was to close that space up again, or pretend it was not there. Far from recognising how Marikana had changed our horizons, they treated it as a momentary aberration or unforeseeable tragedy, the result of criminality, backwardness, police indiscipline and the like. Instead, more than two years after the massacre, Marikana has cut open a path of its own. No one knows for certain where that path will lead, whether it will take us to the future society that Marikana workers fought for or even to a clearer vision of that future, extending beyond the lives of the mineworkers to society as a whole. In the meanwhile, I describe five stations along that path, distinct and yet interrelated.
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    Zen Communist: Breyten Breytenbach’s view from underground
    (Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Assosiasie, 2009) Nash, Andrew
    In an interview after his release from prison, Breyten Breytenbach describes himself, at the time he became involved in underground politics, as a Zen Communist. He returns occasionally to this interaction of Marxist ideas of social revolution and Buddhist ideas of non-attachment, but never attempts to explain the resulting synthesis systematically. Indeed, for Breytenbach, being a Zen Communist is to resist systematic positions, to accept contradiction as a constant source of surprise and invention disruptive of all systematic thought. This paper examines how this interaction of Marxist and Buddhist ideas and practices has informed Breytenbach’s politics in three contexts: his initial exploration of a radical philosophy of history in his poetry (“Bruin reisbrief”, “Brown travel letter”); his role in the underground politics of Okhela in the 1970s; his reflections on politics and social change in his prison and prison-related writings.