If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen
as a universal hero
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
Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a 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. Second, people remember the old African
National Congress that 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 criticise 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 recognised 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 abolition 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 the market
(inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of
the communist organisation 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 mobilise large crowds with
slogans that one cannot but characterise 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 realise 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
mobilises 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, United States foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of
how to exert damage control by way of rechanneling 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.
[...]
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