Rick Turner's Politics as the Art of the Impossible
The pro’s and cons of future utopia as a societal guide
In a nutshell: A new Wits University Press collection of essays revives the work of political philosopher and activist Rick Turner for the current era. Turner, an anti-apartheid activist, evoked future-led aspirational thinking as a device to turn the wheel of social justice… but didn’t stop at thinking. In a different world this would not have got him killed, but the future is where utopias collide.
When a new book comes out regenerating the work of an obscure political philosopher who died 45 years ago, one must start with “why now?”
Now because, “Rick Turner’s Politics as the Art of the Impossible” editors say, “Turner’s life was testimony to making the impossible possible,” Given the societal and ecological wicked problems we face today, the recipe for doing this is as relevant as ever.
Turner was a white anti-Apartheid academic and activist. He was assassinated by the South African state in 1978, aged 37. (To this day neither his murderers nor their handlers have faced justice, including not via the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process.)
The book is a collection of essays, edited by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Lawrence Hamilton, Laurence Piper and Gideon van Riet, and published by Wits University Press. WUP has been South Africa’s flagship academic publisher for over a century.
The editors’ introduction picks up Turner’s central idea, that political theory requires utopian thinking. That is, to escape the strictures of present conundrums and impasses requires conceptualizing an ideal future and acting in line with it, a thesis Turner laid out in his main work “The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa” (1972).
Defining an ideal future and working back from it aligns with a strand of futures theory known variously as visionary futures, backcasting, and more latterly Futures Literacy.
The rub with utopianism and all forms of aspirational futures and sunlit uplands, is the getting there. Dreaming is easy. As the old and politically incorrect saying goes: “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
But this is exactly why Turner is relevant. Because he dreamed the dream and walked the walk. His was not merely describing a better world, it was about making it though personal and social acts. He was a dissident, an activist, a key player in the ‘Durban Moment’ of the 1970s which turbo-charged the trade union movement that became a huge factor in SA’s political transition. (Among many other things it brought Cyril Ramaphosa to prominence.)
The twist in all this is the Turner was not just a ‘workerist’ like many around him. He was equally a product of the existentialism he was exposed to while getting his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in the mid-1960s. Wrapped together this meant collective organisation and action to change society is necessary, but personal transformation is as well.
To this, Turner lived a life not of his present, but of his future utopia. His circle of friends was color blind—including notably Steve Biko (killed in police custody in 1977.) He married a woman of Indian descent, which at the time contravened Apartheid’s Mixed Marriages Act, Immorality Act, and Group Areas Act.
In many senses the world has caught up with Turner in recognizing “the political is personal.” We recycle plastic, fly less, don’t buy from sweatshop supply chains, etc., notwithstanding that Turner might have viewed much of this as superficial and performative, not fully embracing the contradiction between how we live and the future we want.
But there is also a deeper way that Turner informs the present. From global heating to Middle-East peace to closing billionaires tax havens, the future appears “impossible” on many fronts. As did a non-racial democratic South Africa in the 1970s.
But Apartheid was not born, it was made—first by British colonialism, and then by the colonialists who hijacked the car, upgraded the engine and drove it for another 30 years. And what is made can be unmade by contending personal choices and political action.
Writing in 2022, Foszia Turner-Stylianou, Turner’s wife of the time reflects this spirit of contention: “Rick and I chose to shrug off the coats of shame and fear and live openly as a couple, willing to take on the ubiquitous surveillance of the state, poised at any moment to push us back into conformity and/or prison.”
Or death. But, herewith the second rub with utopianism: who’s utopia? When Turner was killed it was by someone with a different future vision, an agent of a system constructed to around a different utopia. As with Putin. As with Trump, as with every dark lord of every Hollywood blockbuster. So utopias are not agreed outcomes: they define the battleground over the future, as Turner well recognized.