Table of Contents

Preface: at a distance from the state John Holloway 1. Politics at a distance from the state: radical, South African and Zimbabwean praxis today Kirk Helliker and Lucien van der Walt 2. Constructing the domain of freedom: thinking politics at a distance from the state Michael Neocosmos 3. Back to the future: revival, relevance and route of an anarchist/syndicalist approach for twenty-first-century left, labour and national liberation movements Lucien van der Walt 4. Prefiguring democratic revolution? ‘Workers’ control’ and ‘workerist’ traditions of radical South African labour, 1970–1985 Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich 5. Broadening conceptions of democracy and citizenship: the subaltern histories of rural resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana Camalita Naicker and Sarah Bruchhausen 6. A feminist perspective on autonomism and commoning, with reference to Zimbabwe Tarryn Alexander and Kirk Helliker 7. From Below: An Overview of South African Politics at a Distance from the State, 1917-2015, with Dossier of Texts Compiled and edited, with introduction, by Lucien van der Walt

About the Author

Kirk Helliker is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa, as well as the Director of the Unit of Zimbabwean Studies within the department. His main research interests are land reform, civil society and political transformation with particular reference to Zimbabwe.


Lucien van der Walt is professor of Industrial and Economic Sociology at Rhodes University, South Africa. A prize-winning scholar, he is involved in labour education and has published and spoken widely. His main areas of research are anarchism and syndicalism, labour and left studies and history, and the political economy of neo-liberalism.