In the last two decades of
his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country
from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial
power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Mugabe, South
Africa remained a multi-party democracy with free press and a vibrant economy
well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty Socialist
experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems
confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him — he was
impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in
another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from
Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.
Is this, however, the whole
story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South
Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as
under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced
by the growing insecurity, violence, and crime. The main change is that the old
white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Secondly, people
remember the old African National Congress which promised not only the end of
apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much
more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that
anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.
South Africa in this respect
is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader
or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” — but,
then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to
touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one
disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market
perturbations, economic chaos, and the rest. This is why it is all too simple
to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of
apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real
option?
It is easy to ridicule Ayn
Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous “hymn to money” from her
novel Atlas Shrugged: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of
all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the
means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other
men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.”
Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the
universe of commodities, “relations between people assume the guise of
relations among things”?
In the market economy,
relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom
and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such.
What is problematic is Rand’s underlying premise: that the only choice is between
direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any
alternative dismissed as utopian. However, one should nonetheless bear in mind
the moment of truth in Rand’s otherwise ridiculously-ideological claim: the
great lesson of state socialism was effectively that a direct abolishment of
private property and market-regulated exchange, lacking concrete forms of
social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct
relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish market (inclusive
of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the
Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a
vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.
The general rule is that,
when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the
case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with
slogans which one cannot but characterize as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against
corruption, for instance. But then we gradually approach more difficult
choices: when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realize that
what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack
of prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. The ruling ideology
mobilizes here its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical
conclusion. They start to tell us that democratic freedom brings its own
responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we
expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our failure: in
a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalist investing in our lives,
deciding to put more into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed.
At a more directly political
level, the United States foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how
to exert damage control by way of re-channeling a popular uprising into
acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints – as was done successfully in
South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in Philippines after the fall
of Marcos, in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto and elsewhere. At this
precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest
challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is
over, how to make the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the
“totalitarian” temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without
becoming Mugabe.
If we want to remain
faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile
tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can
safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness,
he was at the end of his life also a bitter, old man, well aware how his very
political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a
bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb
the global order of power.
