A Cynic Meets Hope

December 6, 2013

The real Madiba…

Public Power in the Age of Empire
Arundhati Roy

“In 1987, the United States was a staunch ally of apartheid South Africa. The African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were listed as "terrorists”…

Time and again we have seen the heroes of our times, giants in opposition, suddenly diminished. President Lula of Brazil was the hero of the World Social Forum in January 2002. Now he’s busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers’ Party. Lula has a worthy predecessor in the former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment that has left thousands of people homeless, jobless, and without water and electricity. When Harry Oppenheimer died in August 2000, Mandela called him “one of the great South Africans of our time.” Oppenheimer was the head of Anglo-American, one of South Africa’s largest mining companies, which made its money exploiting cheap black labour made available by the repressive apartheid regime.

Why does this happen? It is neither true nor useful to dismiss Mandela or Lula as weak or treacherous people. It’s important to understand the nature of the beast they were up against. The moment they crossed the floor from the opposition into government they became hostage to a spectrum of threats - most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader’s personal charisma and history of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works….

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.

So when we speak of public power in the Age of Empire, I hope it’s not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public that disagrees with the very concept of Empire. A public that has set itself against incumbent power - international, national, regional, or provincial governments and institutions that support and service Empire.“

http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2121/stories/20041022008300400.htm

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Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power.

And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now…”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/don-t-sanitize-nelson-mandela-he-s-honored-now-but-was-hated-then.html

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“Marxism’s call to revolutionary action was music to the ears of a freedom fighter. The idea that history progresses through struggle and that change occurs in revolutionary jumps was similarly appealing. In my reading of Marxist works, I found a great deal of information that bore on the types of problems that face a practical politician. Marxists gave serious attention to national liberation movements, and the Soviet Union in particular supported the national struggles of many colonial peoples. This was another reason why I amended my view of communists and accepted the ANC position of welcoming Marxists into its ranks.”
(A Long Walk to Freedom)
http://theagentofchange.tumblr.com/post/46190674476/nelson-mandela-on-marxism-and-the-relationship-between

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“(We) fight for a world where there will be no unemployment, no poverty and starvation, disease and ignorance. In such a world there will be no capitalists, no imperialists, no fascists. There will be neither colonies nor wars.”

- Nelson Mandela, in his handwritten Manuscript ‘How To Be A Good Communist’.
https://archive.org/stream/HowToBeAGoodCommunist/Mandela#page/n23/mode/2up