Abstract
It’s rare to find a book that is as theoretically brilliant as it is ethnographically rich, so the publication of Delivery as Dispossession should be a moment for celebration. The book’s importance is even more so for those interested in Antonio Gramsci’s spatial historicism and how this approach might develop in conversation with theorists and activists in the Global South. Through seven carefully crafted chapters, Levenson shows us why we should think very carefully about what Gramsci would refer to as the integral state. More than that, he shows us how we might approach the integral state methodologically, as Gramsci suggested. Levenson does so through refusing to separate civil society and political society analytically, even if he switches between these two different lenses when interpreting the relations shaping South Africa’s deeply unequal distribution of housing.
On the surface, Delivery as Dispossession is a book about the shifting historical relationship between the delivery of housing and land dispossession in South Africa. While often assumed to be antithetical, Levenson wants ‘to explore how the two [delivery and dispossession] are articulated in novel configurations in different historical conjunctures’. Delivery and dispossession echo the consent/coercion couplet through which Gramsci conceptualised the operation of power within the integral state. Thus, understanding the articulation of delivery and dispossession – the ways in which they work in concert rather than separately – means getting to grips with Gramsci’s novel theorisation of the state. Under apartheid, the delivery of housing became a means through which dissent could be managed: consent and coercion were combined in a historically and geographically (and, ultimately, devastating) configuration. Simultaneously, housing policy rendered the unequal geographies of apartheid permanent, with townships becoming one of the most obvious material expressions of what was once described by David M Smith (1982) as ‘the most ambitious exercise in applied geography’ (p.1).
Post-apartheid, consent and coercion continue to operate as a dialectical pairing, albeit in different ways, shaping the ability of South Africans to access housing, dividing the deserving from the undeserving poor, and diffusing dissent through ‘shifting politics onto the judicial register’ (p.42). This understanding of the judicialization of politics (drawn from the Comaroffs’ writings) describes the ways in which land occupiers find themselves trapped within bureaucratic struggles, through lengthy trips to courtrooms and hearings that are then delayed for days, weeks and months. Developing a thick description of the struggles of land occupiers in Kapteinsklip and Siqalo, Levenson provides a deeply nuanced – and, at times, affecting – understanding of the twists and turns, the successes and the failures, of these two land occupations. His methodological approach, laid out in an appendix to the book, is both reflexive and ethically accountable. The ability to draw on the diary of one of his key participants, Faeza, is particularly interesting, adding a situated perspective that would otherwise not have been possible.
The reflections on the directions Levenson’s research could have taken are also fascinating. An initial plan to map ‘eviction frontiers’ using municipal data and Geographical Information Systems gave way to one more focused on gentrification, albeit read through an understanding of the massive proliferation of informal housing in the Global South. Each of these research projects foundered on an ‘autonomous theory of the state’ in which local government is seen to act upon populations rather than being shaped in relation to struggles that ensure the success of some occupations and the failure of others.
Against this somewhat crude interpretation of the state as an autonomous ‘thing’, Levenson presents an extended interpretation of the integral state. This interpretation is implied at the outset of the monograph in the argument that delivery and dispossession – consent and coercion – should not be understood as antithetical but, instead, as part of a dialectical pairing, working differently in different contexts. Levenson’s approach to the integral state, an approach that shapes the overall structure of the book, provides a crucially important challenge to many common understandings of Gramsci’s overall approach. Hegemony, it is often assumed, works through – or in – ‘civil society’. Following this initial assumption, Gramsci’s strategic contribution is usually taken to revolve around the adoption of a ‘war of position’. Conventionally juxtaposed with the ‘war of movement’ – the revolutionary strategy adopted by the Bolshevik’s in ‘the East’ – the war of position is taken to be Gramsci’s understanding of the correct strategy for militants operating within ‘the West’, the so-called ‘march through the institutions’, and one that would shape what became known as ‘Eurocommunism’.
Although developing one of the most intellectually compelling and elaborate readings of Gramsci, Perry Anderson’s (1976) essay ‘On the Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ has perhaps done the most to propagate such an interpretation of hegemony and of the war of position. For Anderson, the consequences of (what he claims is) Gramsci’s ‘antinomian’ approach are disastrous. In seeing bourgeois rule as operating through ‘consent’ (civil society) more than ‘coercion’ (political society), Gramsci underestimates the ability of the bourgeois state to monopolise the means of violence and to assert its authority through repression. Such power is all the greater given the consent to repression made possible through bourgeois democratic institutions. Equally disastrous, in advocating for a war of position and the need for the Modern Prince to assert leadership through civil society, Gramsci falls back on ‘an ethos of command’, an ethos that reflects a failure to recognise the ways in which ‘proletarian hegemony and insurgency go together’.
Levenson refuses Anderson’s (1976) mischaracterisation of Gramsci’s ‘antinomies’, showing why it fails to capture the mutually constitutive relations between consent/coercion and delivery/dispossession. Early in the book, Levenson writes that ‘hegemony . . . does not straightforwardly play out on the “terrain” of civil society’ (p.28). Instead, ‘hegemony entails not just organizing civil society but equally ensuring that the political society articulation of a collective struggle safeguards a class project’. Once again, the direct consequences of such an interpretation for struggles to access housing in South Africa are evident: notions of delivery structure a moral code around which ‘waiting for housing’ is seen as a citizen’s duty. The swift eviction of those stepping outside this moral code represents the brutal coercive force of the state.
The language of articulation from which Levenson draws is adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Gramsci – a reading that was developed in close conversation with South African debates over the relationship between race and class (as discussed in detail in Paret and Levenson (2024)). Moreover, unlike Anderson’s reading of Gramsci (which, as others have noted, is somewhat bizarre given that the latter was writing from within the repressive apparatus of a fascist prison), Levenson’s account of land occupations is acutely aware of state repression in the form of the Anti Land Invasion Unit. Hegemony is constituted through the ‘ability to represent every seemingly independent and collective action as necessarily in dialogue with political society’ (p.29). In addition to a conversation with Hall, Levenson’s understanding draws on Peter Thomas’s (2009) groundbreaking text, The Gramscian Moment, which develops perhaps the most ambitious philological reading of The Prison Notebooks, a reading constructed against the hugely influential (mis)interpretations of both Anderson (1976) and Althusser and Balibar (1970 [1965–1968]).
While providing a framework for conceptualising the integral state, alongside a means of analysing how delivery and dispossession come to be articulated in different conjunctures, Levenson finds it helpful to turn to Sartre’s notion of seriality for making sense of how collectives come together (or don’t come together) when struggling to access housing. Crucially, seriality helps in interpreting the extended comparison around which the monograph is framed – the successful land occupation at Siqalo as opposed to the failed occupation at Kapteinsklip. It is worth quoting Levenson directly on why Sartre is needed to make sense of these divergent trajectories:
The eviction of [Kapteinsklip] but not [Siqalo] was not overdetermined by any variety of factors, nor was it decided in a vacuum by an omniscient state. Rather, the form of struggle adopted by each set of occupiers produced distinct, albeit unintended, political society articulations, which impacted how their struggle leaped from civil to political society, or at the very least, traversed these two moments. To differentiate these forms, I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre’s opposition of the ‘series’ to the ‘fused group’, two possible trajectories of group formation. (pp.29–30)
Seriality is taken from the existential philosopher’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and describes different types of group formation under conditions of scarcity. A ‘series’ refers to a situation in which people relate to one another rather like figures in a bus queue: Levenson quotes Sartre, writing that such (queuing) individuals are united in the ‘structure of their practico-inert being’. They relate to one another as part of an ‘abstract unity’. In contrast, within a ‘fused group’ individuals relate to one another collectively. Groups can shift from being a series to a fused group and vice versa. In the former situation, passivity gives way to the ability to work collectively, alongside a self-consciousness of being a united group. Overall, ‘the Kapteinsklip occupation was characterized by its seriality, while the Siqalo occupation assumed the form of a fused group’.
Although discussed widely in the late 1960s and early 1970s – and having a significant influence on feminist thinkers such as Iris Marion Young – Sartre’s writings on seriality are much less known than Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis (even if the latter’s writings are widely misquoted). They clearly represent Sartre’s own attempt to grapple with questions that have been widely debated on the Left for well over a century around the relationship between class, class struggle, collective consciousness and the role of the Party (for an extended interview with Sartre in which he refers to each of these questions in relation to seriality, see the issue of The Socialist Register from 1970).
While it would be reasonable to debate the value or otherwise of Sartre’s own approach to group formation (I’m not convinced it’s useful!), more important is that seriality – to me, at least – appears as an unnecessary appendage to what is an otherwise careful Gramscian interpretation of the integral state. Perhaps more than an unnecessary appendage, ‘seriality’ detracts from theorising the integral state in relation to subalternity, Gramsci’s distinctive understanding of how subaltern social groups ‘are integrally “included”, or “actively integrated” in the hegemonic relations of the bourgeois integral state’ (Thomas, 2020: 179). It is the dialectical pairing of political society and civil society within the integral state that ensures hegemony over subaltern social groups. As Marcus Green (2011) writes, ‘Gramsci’s definition and understanding of “subalternity” is directly linked with his conceptions of hegemony and state and civil society (or integral state)’ (p.70). (Thomas (2020) would add to this Gramsci’s interpretation of passive revolution). Indeed, the notion of subalternity is explicitly addressed at the question of how subordinate social groups might overcome the fragmentation that is a result of the hegemony of dominant social groups in the form of the integral state. As Sartre might have it – although I find the language clunky – subalternity is concerned with the question of how a group might move from being serialised to ‘fused’. Nevertheless, it does so not as an aside but in conversation and through deepening the conceptualisation of the integral state. Gramsci’s extended discussions of ‘normative’ and ‘spontaneous’ grammars are similarly a very clear attempt to grapple with the ways in which subaltern social groups might traverse the two moments of civil and political society. While in no way a critique of Levenson’s careful – and situated – theorisation of the two occupations in Cape Town, it strikes me that turning to Sartre represents a missed opportunity to extend Gramsci’s theorisation of the integral state in relation to the question of subalternity.
To turn this review into intellectual sparring between different European thinkers and activists would be a huge injustice to the struggles of housing activists in South Africa and to the book that Levenson has carefully crafted around these struggles. More importantly, with the careful intellectual histories of racial capitalism that Levenson and Paret have been crafting, I’m hopeful that they will eventually turn to a broader discussion of subalternity in relation to the integral state and passive revolution. Any of my minor criticisms will no doubt be quickly redundant. With or without a broader discussion of subalternity, this is a brilliant book. And – as I wrote at the outset – its publication is to be celebrated.
