A polemic against the politics of waiting
By Diaan Mynhardt
We have become remarkably accomplished at discussing what ought to be done. We convene, consult, deliberate, develop frameworks, establish committees, draft principles, and formulate strategies. We speak of participation, empowerment, transformation, and emancipation. We produce increasingly sophisticated accounts of why the world must change, and then we wait. We wait for permission, funding, consensus, leadership, and the right conditions. We wait for someone with sufficient authority to tell us that we may begin.
The world continues to be made and remade through the practices of everyday life. Hierarchies reproduce themselves, dependencies deepen, and possibilities disappear. We congratulate ourselves on having understood the problem.
Praxis, the reciprocal relationship between reflection and action, has become a comfortable word. It allows us to describe our intellectual commitments as transformative without necessarily transforming anything. We reflect upon action, and act upon reflection, but our reflections have becomes institutions unto themselves. We have mistaken the preparation for emancipation for emancipation itself.
Domination does not survive through coercion alone, it survives because its logic becomes ordinary. We learn who may speak, who must listen, who may decide, and who must seek approval. We learn to recognise authority before we recognise possibility, and we mistake obedience for cooperation, conformity for solidarity, and silence for agreement. We cease to notice the permissions we are waiting for.
This is hierarchy’s most enduring achievement; not merely restricting what we may do, but shaping what we imagine ourselves capable of doing. Those who are repeatedly denied the opportunity to exercise judgement may come to doubt their judgement. Those whose decisions are always made elsewhere may find collective self-government unfamiliar, even threatening.
We point to the resulting dependency as evidence that some of us are not yet ready to govern ourselves. What a magnificent circular argument! We deny ourselves opportunities to develop our capacities, then invoke our supposed lack of capacity to justify our continued denial. The remedy is not another programme that teaches people to become ready for freedom. The remedy is to create the conditions in which freedom can be exercised.
We are told that we must first be educated before we can participate, acquire the necessary skills before we can take responsibility, understand democracy before we can practise it. But how do we learn to govern without governing? How do we develop judgement without judging, cooperation without cooperating, or initiative without initiating?
The answer is not to abandon education, expertise, or preparation, but to reject the artificial separation between learning and doing. We learn democracy by practising democracy. We learn solidarity through acts of solidarity. We develop our capacities for individual and collective agency through the exercise of that agency. Not inevitably, not without mistakes, and not without conflict, but there is no emancipatory education that can substitute indefinitely for the exercise of freedom.
A commons is not constituted by declaring something common, but through the relationships by which people collectively sustain, govern, contest, and transform what they share. The meeting matters, and so does the meal, the person who notices what needs doing and begins, or the person who refuses an unjust demand. These are not merely preliminary activities before the real work of transformation. They are where transformation becomes possible.
Action alone is insufficient. We can practise domination, become extraordinarily skilled at exploitation, and reproduce hierarchy through the most democratic-looking procedures imaginable. A meeting can have equal speaking time while preserving unequal power, a cooperative can distribute its profits fairly while exploiting those outside its membership, or a participatory research project can invite everyone to contribute while the researchers reserve the authority to interpret contributions.
Practice does not become emancipatory simply because it is collective, which is why we must go further than our familiar calls for uniting reflection and action by making our practices themselves objects of critical inquiry. We must consider not only what we accomplished, but how we accomplish it, who was able to initiate, who deferred, who was excluded, whose labour became invisible, and which relationships of power survived our supposed transformation? Most importantly, we must ask what must change in the way we practise if our next actions are to become more emancipatory than our last?
This is the praxis of practice; we transform our circumstances through activity, while transforming the practices through which we act. This distinction matters since institutions of domination are remarkably capable of surviving changes in personnel, policies, and vocabulary. We can replace the leader while preserving the authority of leadership, or democratise a procedure while leaving its underlying assumptions untouched. If everything changes except the relationships through which domination is reproduced, then what, precisely, have we transformed?
The demand to act must itself be challenged. Not every refusal is passivity, not every silence is submission, and not every withdrawal is defeat. The most consequential exercise of agency may be the refusal to participate in a practice that demands one’s subordination. Refusing to legitimise an unjust procedure is an action, as is declining to perform gratitude for paternalistic assistance, or withholding cooperation from an exploitative arrangement.
We must reject the convenient fiction that agency is measured by visible activity, productivity, or willingness to participate. A politics that demands constant participation can become another instrument of domination, so emancipation must include the freedom to rest, to dissent, to withdraw, and to refuse. These freedoms must be substantive; the right to refuse means little when refusal costs a person their livelihood, security, or belonging. Agency is not simply the capacity to choose, it is constituted and exercised within the relationships that make choices impossible, possible, or meaningful.
There is a particular arrogance in the conviction that we must emancipate others. It is often expressed with the best of intentions: we will empower them, give them a voice, build their capacity, and teach them to participate. Who appointed us the custodians of the agency of others? We are not empty vessels awaiting the gift of freedom, nor does acknowledging structurally produced trauma, dependency, or constrained agency entitle us to diagnose entire communities as incapable.
The problem is not that some of us possess agency and others lack it, but that social relationships distribute the conditions for exercising and developing agency profoundly unequally. Our task is not to transfer agency from the powerful to the powerless as though it were a commodity, but to transform the relationships through which powerlessness is produced and maintained.
This transformation requires resources, land, time, education, security, accessible institutions, and for us to confront colonialism, patriarchy, class domination, and the exploitation of nature. No degree of enthusiastic participation will compensate for the absence of material conditions, but neither will material redistribution alone guarantee emancipation if the relationships through which people organise their lives remain unchanged.
We cannot know everything an emancipatory practice must become. Indeed, those claiming to possess the final form have already betrayed it. We must expose our theories to the world, our principles must encounter those whose lives they concern, and our practices must remain open to criticism, contradiction, and revision.
We must be willing to discover that what we believe is emancipation is reproducing domination, and when that happens we must resist the temptation to protect our theories from the evidence of our practices. Such a contradiction is not an embarrassment to be concealed, but an invitation to discover what our understanding has failed to recognise.
We must be prepared to change not only what we do, but what we believe we are doing. This is neither action without reflection nor reflection without action, but the refusal to grant either theory or practice immunity from transformation.
None of us need to wait for the perfect theory of democratic life before we may begin to live democratically, nor may we claim that our actions are democratic merely because we intended them to be. We begin where we are, with the people and possibilities before us, and we organise, cooperate, disagree, make mistakes, and confront the consequences. We change our practices, and then begin again, under conditions that our previous actions have helped to transform.
Practise solidarity without demanding conformity, democracy without surrendering dissent, cooperation without concealing conflict, emancipation without appointing yourself the emancipator. Practise the freedom to refuse, and refuse to treat any practice, including this one, as beyond criticism. Practice praxis!
Not tomorrow, when the conditions are perfect, not after the committee has approved the possibility of initiative, and not when everyone agrees. Now. And when your practice reproduces the very world you intended to transform, change your practice. For emancipation is not something we achieve before we can begin to live freely, it is something we struggle to constitute through the very practice of freedom.
Domination and exploitation are not separate problems to be addressed in succession, nor is exploitation an additional concern to be appended to an otherwise complete account of emancipation. They are distinct but reciprocally constituted relationships through which power, dependency, material conditions, and the possibilities for agency develop. Domination creates conditions under which exploitation becomes possible, normalised, and durable, while exploitation creates and maintains the material and social conditions through which domination becomes possible, normalised, and durable. Neither relationship can be reduced to the other, and neither precedes the other. Their particular forms and interactions emerge historically, through the practices by which we organise our relationships with one another and with nature.
This reciprocity has profound implications for emancipatory praxis. We cannot adequately challenge domination without examining the exploitation it enables, sustains, or conceals, nor can we adequately challenge exploitation without examining the relationships of power through which it is organised, justified, and reproduced. A democratic institution may preserve exploitative relationships, and a redistribution of resources may preserve domination. A transformation that challenges one may inadvertently reproduce the other. The task of emancipatory praxis is therefore not simply to oppose domination and exploitation as two separate injustices, but to understand and transform the reciprocal relationships through which each constitutes the conditions for the other’s reproduction. Because these relationships are reproduced through practice, their transformation requires the praxis of practice itself.
We must examine not only who exercises power, but how that power shapes the appropriation of labour, resources, and ecological benefits. We must examine not only who benefits from collective activity, but how those benefits shape the distribution and exercise of power. We must ask how domination enables exploitation, how exploitation sustains domination, and how their reciprocal operation constrains the development and exercise of agency. Most importantly, we must ask how our own practices participate in these relationships, even when those practices are explicitly intended to be emancipatory.
For emancipation cannot be understood as freedom from domination with exploitation left intact, nor as freedom from exploitation with domination left intact. It requires the transformation of the relationships through which both are reproduced.
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Note: A large language model was used for drafting parts of this text. The final rewrite and editing was done by a human.
Originally published on 7 November 2026: Practice Praxis!.
Archived copy on the Wayback Machine.
© 2026 Diaan Mynhardt.
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