In an interview with an Associate Professor of International Relations at University of the Witwatersrand we talk about why the South African experience can help us understand our present world and imagine the new one. Vishwas Satgar is the lead investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene, the editor of the book series Democratic Marxism and co-founder of the Climate Justice Charter Process and Movement. He speaks from the richness of lifelong experiences in struggles for a more just, free and kind world for all. 

How have your critical analysis and struggles against racism and colonial-capitalist exploitations developed? Does it surprise you that we are returning to expressions and concepts from decades past?

As a praxis-centred academic and intellectual my roots are in the South African National Liberation struggle. In 1980 I was eleven. Our home got surrounded by police looking for my older brother and I opened the doors. My brother led school boycotts. The next day I went and led a school boycott at my school.

I was a young child in that cauldron of mass politics. I got schooled. I understood that exploitation was racialised in South Africa as I moved around in working class communities and we mobilized against the apartheid system. I found solidarity there. We understood the racial oppression but apartheid was separating us – it wanted to make us all racists. I was interested in the antiracism solidarity among communities in that racist system.

I also understood that liberation from racism demands confronting capitalism. In South Africa class and race were intertwined. We had to confront capitalism not just because it was exploitative but also because it was racist. This became part of my political formation early on. Theories of national liberation movement became important, analyzing whether we were dealing with racial capitalism or a type of colonialism? I understood the broader frameworks of our struggle but also the specifics.

What family did you grow up in?

Mine was a communal working class family. My grandparents emphasized self-reliance and tended their own gardens. Food was important. There I see buds of my human-ecology consciousness. Food was central to social reproduction and to life-making. I did not call it ecological politics, it was part of our culture.

And there was also a strong organic feminist imprint. My aunt was a trade unionist and a librarian. Security police made trouble for her, so she retreated into the community and set up a library. She built a reading culture. Every week she gave us kids a book to read. Feminist awareness was indigenous. My mum came from an Indian religious tradition that was anti-cast-system, anti-male-domination and decolonial. Her Hinduism was very progressive. As a teacher she emphasized women’s rights. Similarly my father. My grandma was an activist. I was surrounded with strong women who stepped at the front of the society to fight oppression.

This was in the 1980s?

Yes. The 1980s left me with a Marxist imprint. I understood the class interconnectedness to race, the importance of feminism and, to an extent, of ecological awareness. Connecting it all was commitment to deep democracy. Apartheid was a grand social experiment. To fight it we had to fight it on all fronts, from sports and education to civic rights and student movement. Our imaginary for change was about giving people control over society and their lives. This deep democracy impulse shaped my generation and we carried it also into the post-apartheid period.

The South African transition coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We were excited because we were the new frontier – we knew about the events in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and in Poland. We knew the Soviet Union was not the answer and that we needed to imagine a new socialism. In the 1990s I joined the Communist Party of South Africa. We were interested in envisaging our Marxism, our socialism. I worked on National Political Education for a new future while we also formed the anti-apartheid alliance with the ANC and the Congress of South African Unions. I also worked for their think tank as I knew about the labour law and needed reforms. South Africa had one of the most racialised and gendered labour markets in the world. We wanted to dismantle and remake it. 

And changes happened?

Yes, I witnessed the shifts. But they were also towards neoliberalism. Strategic thinking about opening up to globalization was missing. We asked complicated questions and drew comparisons as we knew what was happening through structural adjustments on the African continent and in South America. We wanted a discussion but Nelson Mandela and the ANC firmly stood on the trajectory of deep globalisation. Three decades later we have a deeply unequal society, while patterns of racial capitalist accumulation and reproduction remain. Racism after apartheid is alive and well. The ANC has become criminal and corrupt and has eaten up the state from within.

We are in polycrisis of post-apartheid democracy-making. Only a few elites inside the ANC have benefited. This dire state in South Africa mirrors also situations around the world that has been restructured following deep globalisation and neoliberal imperatives.

Where does this leave South Africa?

South Africa is experiencing dynamics of a collapse. States around the world have been weakened. Public institutions, public electricity and water systems have been destroyed. A state is in a serious institutional crisis. This impacts the society. The current mode of accumulation is hyper-extractive, based around elite consumption and without recognized growth limits.

The ruling elite has divided the society and there has been an emergence of a new, exclusionary nationalist, xenophobic and racist Right. Politics have been fragmented and state failures create growing discontent and precarity. All this is converging, toppled with climate shocks. Between 2014 and 2021 we had the worst draught. Therefore, South Africa is emblamatic for the policrysis of capitalism. 

But capitalism had crises before?

Yes, in the late 19^th century, in interwar years, then in the 1970s and from the mid 2000 until now. Each crisis has had its own dynamics, political economy and political ecology conditions.

The current crisis links to marketization and financialization of everything, pushing the biophysical limits. Biodiversity loss, the rupture in the Earth system, the climate crisis with growing oil, coal and gas consumption, this is new. South Africa embodies all these dimensions of our planetary crisis.

I was expelled from the Communist Party for raising these fundamental questions but my journey for liberation continues. By editing Democratic Marxism series I want to keep alive the impulse for critical thinking in the academy and in society. I work on the project Emancipatory Future Studies in the Anthropocene trying to answer, how do we survive in a heating world. I have researched emancipatory futures in history, the decolonial futures, utopia and distopia, grand eco-centric futures … and tried to combine it to a renewal of transformative practices in South Africa.

If we are to confront this fourth, great, planetary crisis of capitalism and of our biophysical living conditions, we have to engender a whole new imaginary and conception of political.

We are at a new frontier for left politics. There is a new imaginary that has emerged from cycles of resistance. I am trying to translate and work with it, bringing it to the front and centre. Left politics have not been completely defeated, neither because of the fall of the Soviet Union nor by neoliberal triumph. Even in the shadows of the present hegemonic moment, in the midst of our crises, there are amazing intellectual and political resources for an effective Left response.

What role did the Non-aligned Movement play in emancipatory projects?

South African struggle embodied different currents. There was the big Soviet project; the social-democratic project and also the revolutionary-nationalist anti-colonial project, all with all their variants. We looked towards India, Vietnam and around Africa, from Algeria to Angola and Mozambique. In the mid-1950s The Freedom Charter was written, combining different progressive forces and visions of the society we wanted. It embodied a very state-centric conception of liberation, that was common to all mentioned traditions of the Left, but it also included the concept of the agency of the people. So, the South African national liberation imaginary joined all these reference points.

The internationalism bound together different national liberation movements through all these fronts. For us India, an important voice in the Non-Aligned Movement, was a key ally as well as Cuba. There was an imaginary of the “third-world” states but the liberation movement was positioned in all the worlds. Anti-apartheid movement as a precursor of our contemporary anti-globalization movements embraced all three left projects: there were solidarities with the Soviet Bloc, with social-democratic tradition as well as with the Non-Aligned Movement.

Today the fight against racism is again at the forefront, we see the fight against the Israeli apartheid in Palestine, South Africa has played an important role in resisting the genocide in Gaza. Are the terms we use, starting with settler colonialism and apartheid, the right ones? And if so, where have the struggles of the last century gone so wrong that we are waging these fights again?

Inside the South African liberation struggle there was a weakness in understanding global reversals. Our theory and understanding of racism and the notion of special-type colonialism imbued us with exceptionalist consciousness.

Apartheid was a unique formation in the world history, but racism existed in America and in various frontier societies like Canada and Australia. There were similar, deeply racist dynamics at play in their political economies and in the makings of their societies. We were a bit too inward looking in understanding racism. We resisted colonialism but missed how global capitalism is imbricate with racism. Post-apartheid we missed these continuities and we need to put all of this into an intelligible framework. We can approach it differently: planetary racism uses the decolonial perspective and in Latin America they see how coloniality continues even if colonialism has ended, reproducing racialized hierarchies in knowledge, geopolitics and in the world system.

In South Africa we have been analyzing how coloniality continues post-apartheid and what role globalization plays. The decolonial framework is one way to think about the current situation, implicating that Euro-American supremacy still prevails over us.

And other approaches?

One is based on racial capitalism and the third analyzes apartheid as a method. We see that apartheid is used to explain the system of opression in Palestine and some of my students are outlining this new form of apartheid. There are also Palestinian scholars working on this. Apartheid as a method helps us think about the continuities of racial oppression worldwide.

Very important is also the indigenous knowledge with its phenomenology, rich experiences of racial oppression and ecocide, resisting destructions of ecosystems, biodiversity and peoples. For 500 years indigenous knowledge has been marked with these destructions and today it has its own ecology and cultural resources we can all learn from.

The present global accumulation with over-extractivism has put the indigenous communities back on the frontlines, from the Amazon and Alberta, Canada to the rainforests of Congo and the Standing Rock in the USA. For resistance the indigenous thought, ecology and practices are a necessary part of the emancipatory framework of the antiracist politics.

But while we analyze and frame our situations mass destructions of nature and people are ongoing and accelerating, begging for actions. You have mentioned the need to reimagine political – what would this entail?

At the moment, Marxism is not hegemonic nor does it lead the resistance and global struggle. The Marxist Left has not been able to overcome the setbacks and defeats and reflect self-critically. I aim for this in the Democratic Marxism Series, raising the ecological awareness or the racist nature of capitalism. There is a need for critical revisiting of Marxism. However, it will not give shape and answers to everything.

The Marxism that can in my view explain our lived realities is the decolonial eco-feminist Marxism. It is situated on what I call a tree of emancipatory praxes. At its roots there is the brutality of capitalism, the barbarism in the Middle East, especially against the Palestinian people, destruction of ecosystems and the ruptures with the Earth system. These are the contradictions of capitalism and the roots of our tree: super-exploitation, hyper-racism and neofascism. These contradictions are part of our precarious, lived reality – we all feel the uncertainty and fragility. On the trunk of this tree there are different alternatives. Even in the midst of a crisis and domination of capitalism there is a pushback. It might not be on the scale we would want but it is there. There are imaginings of systemic alternatives, either in programmatic politics or in transformative politics from below … the trunk is very rich, diverse and seasoned.

Then there are ideological branches that shape response. One is decolonial eco-feminist Marxism, another is indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples’ praxes. then there is eco-feminism with its frameworks, concepts and modes of resistance. There is an anarchist branch, a social-ecological branch, also the branches with practices and concepts of Öcalan and Zapatistas. All have something to offer.  

I do not see all ecologies as emancipatory. There is domination ecology, the ecological modernization that continues with capitalism. But there is also a branch of emancipatory ecologies that include conservation biology and Earth science.

We can also add a branch of spiritualities. Many feel there is an ethical crisis and people realize something is wrong. The crass accumulation and barbarism make people search for resources to re-centre them ethically on how to navigate this world.

This tree is my metaphor to think about different forms of resistance, coming together to confront the crises we live in. They come from different social forces but reach the same conclusion about deleteriousness and dangers of capitalism. They search for answers, exists and alternatives. And all of this is very different from the Left of the 20^th Century.

The 21^st Century Left are all these different currents, shaping a new transformative imaginary. Although I sit on the decolonial eco-feminist Marxist branch I believe we have to be open to all of them. If we are open-minded and reflexive we can learn from anarchism, indigenous knowledge, emancipatory ecologies … and this metaphor helps me make sense of where the resistance is, who is fighting and how. It is no longer just one hegemonic framework of resistance – it is more complex and much richer.

You have mentioned precarity of life. Many strive for order in which they believe is security. How important is it to reshape our thinking about vulnerability, changes and what security is to embrace this richness and variety of different resistances?

We live on a new, different planet, especially after 2015. In that year we overshot the one degree Celsius heating compared to pre-industrial era. Most people have not yet internalized what this means but our habitats have been changing dramatically since. As the Earth conditions shift we are leaving behind the stable biophysical conditions we have known for 11 000 years. And this brings uncertainty. Any day there can be disruptions in the form of cyclones, landslides … and these disruptions are here to stay for at least a few couple of hundreds of years. Our world is uncertain, unpredictable and it will be constantly disrupted.

Another thing to keep in mind is that capitalism has projected a false sense of stability and order. Neoclassical economy demands market stability and prices adjustment to manage any risk to the capital. This has nothing to do with societal stabilities and security. We have experienced four major shocks in our globalized food system since 2006. For people in Africa this means hunger. This is not security. Mainstream conceptions of stability and order do not capture people’s realities.

Ecological modernization and economics of climate treat carbon and ecosystems as commodities and as objects of exploitation. Now we also know that carbon-pricing and market off-set mechanisms do not work. Yet they are mainstream policies.

Stability in the capitalist system is therefore orthodox, dogmatic, closed-minded and irrational. We have a climate crisis that brings about also epistemological crisis, because capitalists cannot make sense of this. Therefore, we are going to face run-away disruptions of capitalism that will overwhelm the system, destabilize and gridlock it.

Why?

Because the ruling capitalist elites do not listen and do not have the capacity to systemically solve these problems. The climate change will impact food systems, infrastructure and solvency of societies at large. Markets will not be able to solve it.

Similarly, with the biodiversity loss. Ecosystems are reaching limits and collapsing. If extinction rates continue, there will soon be no more certain types of foods, forests will grow silent … we will have barren soundscapes and landscapes.

These are the uncertainties of climate disruptions, epistemological system crisis and disruptions brought about by doing business-as-usual. If our response is a range of emancipatory transformative praxes, then we are already transitioning towards a different life-world. All, who organize themselves politically on material bases of politics around these new practises and alternatives, will find exists.

You are in India at the moment?

Yes, I have been studying the natural farming movement in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are one million small-scale farmers who have turned their backs on “green revolution” and they use indigenous practices with zero-input-cost agriculture, using natural farming methods. They produce more than the farms that use mono-industrial production methods. They better manage biodiversity, are more eco-centric and bring back eco-systems. I have spent time on their farms that are no longer dead-zones of mono-industrial farms. There are insects and incredible biodiversity. Farmers face water shortages and draughts but their farming methods help them build resilient food- and eco-systems. They support their communities and families. They are going to thrive. They have found an exit.

And they are not alone?

There are various examples worldwide. With my partner, we are finishing a book that took some 10 years of research. One transformative alternative is in rural Venezuela where a 40-year-old cooperative movement Cecosesola combines agricultural production in the mountains, consumer cooperatives in the cities, a credit union and a cooperative hospital. They have their whole system.

In Trento in Northern Italy there is an amazing century old cooperative movement. We know about Mondragon in Spain and workers’ factories in Argentina – there are many challenges but these can all be exits and transformative prefigurative emancipatory practices. They will face the crisis grounded in solidarity, with ethics of care and with transformative imaginary.

In your talk during the Ljubljana International Summer School of Political Ecology you mentioned the distrust of systemic solutions, as many workers and farmers feel left behind. How can we avoid a pushback against changes when marginalized communities feel the injustices grow?

It is about the climate justice politics – and climate justice is too important to be an empty motto. It demands that we stand with those most vulnerable, who are usually the least responsible for the climate breakdown. It demands a systemic approach. It has nothing to do with green modernization or technocratic climate politics.

The EU and even South African Climate Commission follow many technocratic unscientific solutions, like the 2050 net-zero target. They take great care not to disrupt markets and they incorporate climate policies in the global market management. This is not transformative and has nothing to do with climate justice.

South Africa is a hot spot. It will heat up more than the world average. Yet, this is not debated. We hear that climate change will be gradual and that we will be net-zero in 2050. All of this is wrong. The green techno-management politics are the problem. 

What can be done?

Climate crisis cannot be solved top-down, with elite politics or technocratic management. It implicates all spheres of our lives and is post-normal.

Farmers, particularly if they farm mono-industrially, contribute to emissions and to biodiversity loss but they are not the enemy. Similarly, energy workers – we have around 80.000 coal-miners in South Africa. They work to feed their families. If we treat climate crises as a post-normal problem, we have to involve all of the society in solving it. We need deeply democratic, inclusive and just transitions. Climate justice means that coal-workers and farmers work with us to find these just transitions. No one gets to be left behind.

In South Africa we have done a lot of work on food sovereignty and on transitioning our food system. We are challenging the Presidential Climate Commission that has a narrow, lame duck focus and delays change.

What does this mean?

They want to exploit offshore oil and gas reserves and argue that gas is part of the transition.

We claim that we need a triple, deeply democratic transition of our food system. Away from mono-industrial food systems in dialogue with mono-industrial farmers, making the subsidies conditional. We need a transition we can all carefully manage in a democratic way. Subsidies can be conditioned on restoring the land, depleted by chemicals and fertilizers, on embracing agro-ecological farming systems and lastly, on planning de-concentration of farms.

Currently, there are 400 mega farms in South Africa that control 62 percent of the country’s water resources. This, with the looming climate crisis, is untenable. So another condition would be a joint dialogue on how to bring about a just land and water reform.

Next transition is enabling small-scale farmers, households, community farmers and micro-gardeners to build a food sovereignty system. And the third transition aims for oceans to become ocean commons in our Earth system.

All of these demand democratic planning where everybody has a voice, where there is an incentive structure that brings everybody on board of the transitions and where we are informed by the urgency of science and risks of climate change. We have put together a People’s Food Sovereignty Act that we are discussing and we will present to the Parliament on the World Food Day demanding a new food system for the country through this triple transition.

If we have genuine climate justice politics that are deeply democratic and treat climate crisis as a post-normal problem that involves all of the society, then we can have deep transformations addressing the real causes of the crisis. This of course is a big challenge to the ruling elites and mainstream transactional elitist politics but it is what the new Left politics is all about: bringing about transformative rationality that ensures politics are embraced and owned by everyone.

It seems a challenge also to many on the Left – it sounds like, shoulder up, get organized and get to work.

We have lost a lot of time. In the 20^th Century we had mass movements. In the 21^st Century we replaced these with crowd politics. On social media you can organize a crowd and believe you are changing the world but the power structures and politics are impervious to crowd politics. They do not shift gears, change the trajectory or bring about departures we need. We need to get back to building mass movement based politics, that I call transformative: where we are figuring out solutions to the problems from below, with all members of society. We are co-creating the next world now.

The state therefore becomes a moment in this larger process. It is neither the determining nor the defining factor. We are not waiting for it to build our next food system – we are doing it in townships and communities. We are not waiting for the state to address the democratization of the water commons. In South Africa the water systems are in crises – in towns, villages and cities. We build politics around this, so that people can democratize the water commons and take control of them and solve their problems. The state will be important at some point in this process but we are not waiting for it. We are not waiting for the rupture in the old style revolutionary politics. We are not waiting for technocratic concessions that meet the needs of the market but cannot meet the crises we are in. We are doing transformative politics by starting to build the next world now. Yes, we have to get out there, we have to give this imaginary space to breathe and to make a difference – now.

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