Department of Politics & International Relations, Rhodes University

Constituent Power in the Modern World: A Brief Introduction

A post-graduate course to be taught by Richard Pithouse in the first semester, 2015
Throughout the modern era constituent power has been in conflict with constituted
power, the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. Whereas constituent
power opens each revolutionary process, throwing open the doors to the forces of change
and the myriad desires of the multitude, constituted power closes down the revolution and
brings it back to order. In each of the modern revolutions, the State rose up in opposition to
the democratic and revolutionary forces and imposes a return to a constituted order, a new
Thermidor, which either recuperated or repressed the constituent impulses. The conflict
between active constituent power and reactive constituted power is what characterizes
these revolutionary experiences.
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From the introduction to Antonio Negris Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the
Modern State (1999)

We currently inhabit a moment of sustained popular political action in South Africa. This is
also a moment where new forms of popular politics, sometimes insurgent, are appearing in
many parts of the world. In South Africa some of these struggles have, particularly in their
early phases, chosen self-presentation over authorised forms of representation. Some of
these struggles have also organised direct appropriation, especially of urban land, and forms
of disruption, such as road blockades, that exceed the limits of both the liberalism to which
our society is formally committed and the various disciplinary discourses and practices
(which also often operate beyond the limits of liberalism) available to the forms of
nationalism that conflate the nation with the ruling party and the state. This escalating
sequence of popular protest has reactionary aspects as well as aspects that are potentially
emancipatory.
For many years popular protest was largely ignored by elite actors. When it was engaged it
was often presented, sometimes as a question that was essentially a matter of policing, as a
backdrop to real politics. However although it has never been centrally organised, or
formally networked, the scale and tenacity of popular protest over the last decade has

increasingly brought it towards the centre of public life. Competing elites are now seeking to
capture popular protest by presenting themselves as radical or even revolutionary
vanguards.
This course offers students an opportunity to think, in a community of inquiry, about a
range of forms of insurgent forms of popular politics in the modern world - and to do so
outside of the constraints of the liberal and statist paradigms that often constituent the
common sense of the university. This course will run for one semester and so it cannot be
comprehensive and has many striking omissions. Nonetheless its range across space and
time is sufficient to make it an introduction to actual practices of constituent power that
avoids both Eurocentricism and parochialism. It will offer useful resources to equip students
to begin to engage the concept of constituent power outside of the old and often stolid
dogmas that so often stifle the radical imagination in the South Africa.

Recommended Theoretical Reading Prior to the Commencement of the Course

1. Alain Badiou The Communist Invariant (2010)
2. Cornelius Castoriadis Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (1991)
3. Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
4. Silvia Federici Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist
Struggle (2012)
5. Ranajit Guha The Small Voice of History (2013)
6. John Holloway Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)
7. Domenico Losurdo Liberalism: A Counter History (2011)
8. Nivedita Menon Seeing Like a Feminist (2012)
9. Antonio Negri Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999)
10. Jacques Rancire Disagreement (1998)
11. Cedric Robinson Black Marxism (1983)
12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past (1997)

Other Generally Recommended Books

1. Alain Badiou The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012)
2. Asef Bayat Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2009)
3. George Ciccariello-Maher We Created Chvez: A People's History of the Venezuelan
Revolution (2013)
4. Roberta M. Feldman & Susan Stall The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents'
Activism in Chicago Public Housing (2006)
5. Sujatha Fernandes Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chvezs
Venezuela (2010)
6. James Holston Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in
Brazil (2009)
7. Alex Khasnabish Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (2010)
8. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings
(2011)
9. Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed,
How They Fail (1978)
10. Srila Roy Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in Indias
Naxalbari Movement (2013)

Seminar Schedule

Seminar One, 16 February 2015: On the Cusp of the Modern (Part One)

Compulsory Reading
Paul Landau Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 14001948 (2013)

Recommended Reading
Norman Etherington The Great Treks (2001)
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Noel Mostert Frontiers (1992)

Seminar Two, 23 February 2015: On the Cusp of the Modern (Part Two)

Compulsory Reading
Peter Linebaugh & Markus Rediker The Many Headed Hydra (2001)

Recommended Reading
Luther Blisset Q (1999)
E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
Silvia Federici Caliban & the Witch (2004)
Peter Linebaugh The London Hanged (1991)

Seminar Three, 2 March 2015: The French Revolution

Compulsory Reading
Eric Hazan A Peoples History of the French Revolution (2014)

Recommended Reading
Daniel Gurin Class Struggle in the First French Republic (1977)
Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1996)
Jonathan Israel Revolutionary Ideas (2014)
Georges Lefebvre The French Revolution (1962)

Seminar Four, 9 March 2015: The Haitian Revolution

Compulsory Reading
Nick Nesbitt Universal Emancipation (2008)

Recommended Reading
Robin Blackburn The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (2011)
Carolyn Fick The Making of Haiti (1990)
C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (1938)
Toussaint L'Ouverture The Haitian Revolution (2008)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past (1997)

Seminar Five, 16 March 2015: Revolution and Reaction in Spain

Compulsory Reading
Chris Ealham Class, culture and conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (2014)

Recommended Reading
Ronald Fraser Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979)
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Abel Paz Durruti in the Spanish Revolution (2006)
Hugh Thomas The Spanish Civil War (1961)

Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt Black Flame (2009)

Recommended Film
Ken Loach Land & Freedom (1995)

Seminar Six, 23 March 2015: The Industrial & Commercial Workers Union

Compulsory Reading
Helen Bradford A Taste of Freedom (1987)

Recommended Reading
A.W.G. Champion The Views of Mahlathi (1982)
E. David Cronon Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (1995)
Clements Kadalie My Life and the ICU (1970)
Paul la Hausse The Struggle for the City: Alcohol, the eMatsheni and Popular Culture in
Durban, 1902-1936 M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town (1984)

Seminar Seven, 13 April 2015: Anti-Colonial War in Africa

Compulsory Reading
Frantz Fanon A Dying Colonialism (1959)

Recommended Reading
Donald L. Barnett & Karari Njama Mau Mau From Within (1968)
Shimmer Chinodya Harvest of Thorns (1990)
Mandla Langa The Texture of Shadows (2014)
Tanya Lyons Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation
Struggle (2004)
Ousmane Sembne Gods Bits of Wood (1960)
Yvonne Vera The Stone Virgins (2002)

Recommended Films
Gillo Pontecorvo The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Gran Olsson Concerning Violence (2014)

Seminar Eight, 20 April 2015: May 68

Compulsory Reading
Kristin Ross May 68 and its Afterlives (2002)

Recommended Reading

Tariq Ali Street Fighting Years (1987)

H. Bourges Student Revolt: The Activists Speak (19680
Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman Worker-Student Action Committees, France May '68
(1970)
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Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative (1968)

Seminar Nine, 27 April 2015: The Black Power Moment in the United States

Compulsory Reading
Angela Davis An Autobiography (1974)

Recommended Reading
James Car: BAD: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975)
George Jackson Soledad Brother The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1971)
Peniel E. Joseph Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in
America (2007)
Manning Marable Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a biography of Malcolm X (2012)
Assata Shakur An Autobiography (1987)
Akinyele Omowale Umoja We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom
Movement (2013)
Malcom X The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965)

Recommended Film
Gran Olsson The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011)

Seminar Ten, 4 May 2015: Latin America in the 70s

Compulsory Reading
Eduardo Galeano Days and Nights of Love and War (1978)

Recommended Reading
Pilar Aguilera Chile: The Other September 11: Reflections and Commentaries on the 1973
Coup in Chile (2006)
Hugo Blanco Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru (1972)
Fidel Castro The Declarations of Havana (2008)
Rgis Debray Conversations with Allende: Socialism in Chile (1971)
James Dunkerley Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952-1982 (1984)
Eduardo Galeano Open Veins of Latin America (1971)
Che Guevara Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1963)
Gustavo Gutirrez A Theology of Liberation (1971)
Pablo Neruda The Sea and the Bells (1973)
Pablo Neruda Memoirs (1974)
Henri Weber Nicaragua: The Sandinist Revolution (1981)
Matilde Zimmermann Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (2001)

Seminar Eleven, 11 May 2015: Recent Resistance and Repression in Haiti

Compulsory Reading
Peter Hallward Damming the Flood (2010)

Recommended Reading
Jean-Bertrand Aristide In the Parish of the Poor (1990)
Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart (2000)
Paul Farmer AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (1992)
Michael Griffin and Jennie Weiss Block In the Company of the Poor: conversations between
Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez (2013)
Justin Podur Haiti's New Dictatorship (2012)
Jeb Sprague Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (2012)

Seminar Twelve, 18 May 2015: The Return to Popular Struggle in Post-Apartheid South
Africa

Compulsory Reading
Nigel Gibson Fanonian Practices (2011)

Recommended Reading
Sakhela Buhlungu A Paradox of Victory: COSATU and the democratic transition in South
Africa (2012)
Church Land Programme Living Learning (2009)
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Jane Duncan The Rise of the Securocrats (2014)

Gillian Hart Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (2013)
Michael Neocosmos From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners: Explaining Xenophobia in
South Africa (2006 & 2010)
Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony
Way (2011)
Ineke van Kessel "Beyond Our Wildest Dreams": The United Democratic Front and the
Transformation of South Africa (2000)
Elke Zuern The Politics of Necessity (2011)

Recommended Films
Dara Kell & Chris Nizza Dear Mandela (2011)
Rehad Desai Miners Shot Down (2013)

Seminar Thirteen, 25 May 2015: Bolivia and the Epistemological Earthquake

Compulsory Reading
Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar Rhythms of the Pachakuti (2014)

Recommended Reading
June Nash We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (1993)
Jeffery Webber Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (2011)
Raul Zibechi Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (2010)
Raul Zibechi Territories in Resistance (2012)
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