Ossome, Lyn2023-01-292023-01-291994Ossome, L. Limits to Democracy and Emancipatory Politics in South Africa post-1994. Inequality, Democracy Development, 51.https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicholas-Kilimani/publication/317721291_Inequality_Democracy_and_Development_under_Neoliberalism_and_Beyond/links/594a831ca6fdcc89090cb29d/Inequality-Democracy-and-Development-under-Neoliberalism-and-Beyond.pdf#page=51https://nru.uncst.go.ug/handle/123456789/7383Who is the subject of democracy? For whom does it hold out promise, and how does the existential condition of those who aspire for freedom through democracy impose conditions upon the very practice of democracy? In this paper I show how racialized, classed, autochthonized and gendered people in South Africa are gradually being condemned towards a ‘slow death’, and towards an existence more akin to the ‘living dead’. As the people’s possibilities of freedom become more and more defined by and restricted to place, inward-looking logics – anti-immigration legislation and xenophobia– deepen the notion of South Africa’s exceptionalism and, increasingly, the people seek a reactionary validation from within the ethnic group, nation and race. Such de-radicalization of a politics of being is more profoundly expressed as the reality of abject existence becomes apparent and the people no longer find validation or affirmation of their humanity in and of itself. Reduced to their ‘entitlements’ rather than their rights, the people are faced with the stark realization that the government has long abandoned them, and the race/nation/gender/class to which allegiance once meant a politics of resistance, now merely function as institutionalized identities, depoliticized by their (neo)liberal application under the constitution. As social identities becomes a liability, so too do any politics that suggest a common existence and a politics of struggle based on shared suffering. This atomization of individuals and their alienation from the structural roots of their oppression suggests the impossibility of claiming justice from a state that has long disarticulated its interests from those presented by the people, and now merely functions as a guarantor of society’s slow death.enDemocracyEmancipatory PoliticsArticle