Everybody Thinks, Everybody Counts, Everybody Cares, Everybody Acts: Twenty Years of Abahlalism
Speaking at Curries Fountain this weekend, twenty years after Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged from the shack settlements of Durban, I was reminded of what genuine popular democracy looks like when it refuses co-option.
Continue reading “Everybody Thinks, Everybody Counts, Everybody Cares, Everybody Acts: Twenty Years of Abahlalism”The Opposite of MAHA
Original at the Boston Review
More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery stores that kept prices low. An archipelago of tienda-asilos (shelter or asylum shops) had opened across the country in 1886, offering low-cost food for the burgeoning population of urban poor people. For the store’s proponents, tienda-asilos offered a way for working people to buy a square meal without the indignities of charity.
Continue reading “The Opposite of MAHA”Badiou’s Spinoza in the Field
Decades ago, Richard Pithouse and I were reading Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, and discussing his ideas with our comrades in Abahlali baseMjondolo. If you’re picking up a trace of Badiou’s set-theory-as-ethics in this quote by the organisation’s General Secretary – “Every human being, everywhere, must be counted as a human being” – then this might explain it. Thapelo Mohapi, who offered this counter to the xenophobia of South Africa’s Operation Dudula, wasn’t part of our original discussion group, joining Abahlali years after those first conversations. But the trace seems to persist.
Continue reading “Badiou’s Spinoza in the Field”Mamdanimania
Care and Resistance
A few years ago, I was invited to join a meeting to think through the polycrisis. It happened a few weeks after the assassination of Lindokuhle Mnguni, one of the most startlingly wise and visionary leaders I’d ever met – he was 28 years old. The polycrisis – understood as climate emergency, democratic decline, pandemic disease, the sixth extinction, authoritarianism and the emboldening of supremacists everywhere – felt very close to home. The discussions were, however, centred mainly on Europe and North America – the donors who convened the meeting had little experience of networks elsewhere.
Despite never having funded outside Europe and North America, they agreed to bankroll a project anchored by Focus on the Global South, in which Lilak – Purple Action for Indigenous Women’s Rights, Southern Peasant Federation of Thailand, Abahlali baseMjondolo South Africa, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, and West Street Recovery exchanged ideas about how they were navigating this polycrisis. The result, just published by A Growing Culture, is brilliant.
Here’s some of the art, the zine, and the movement conversations.
Bella Ciao and the arts thinking & eating
H5N1p-2025: A Scenario
Books
Agricultural Subsidy Transition Bonds
You can tell I’m looking for excuses not to knuckle down and finish my next book project, because I’m catching up with posting things here. I’m very pleased to have put together a bit of research on the Andhra Pradesh Community-Managed Natural Farming programme with Vijay Kumar Thallam, just out in Nature Food. The reason we wrote it is prompted in part by the Indian Government’s PM-PRANAM policy, a plan to wean India off industrial fertilizer imports.
Continue reading “Agricultural Subsidy Transition Bonds”