As the presidents, prime ministers, princes and royals prepare for Mandela’s great funeral, consider just how suitable most of them are to be ‘mourning’ such a man.
How easily, too, the patronage and words of such figures displaces any true debate on Mandela’s politics or associations to those like Ronnie Kasrils, Joe Slovo and other such ANC subversives.
At the heart of the bargain with monopoly capital was we will globalize, we will embrace neoliberal globalized economics, while you de-racialize the structures of the South African economy which led to black economic empowerment and the creation of a class of super-rich blacks.
Jean Bertrand Aristide once said that “it is better to be wrong with the people than right without them”. Post-Apartheid, it seems to me that Mandela made the worst possible choice – to be wrong without the people.
At a town hall meeting in Harlem televised nationally, the deputy president of the African National Congress praised Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He called them “comrades in arms” in black South Africa’s struggle against the white minority government.
It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.
In memory of Nelson Mandela and the continuing struggle of the people of South Africa…
A documentary by John Pilger
John Pilger was banned from South Africa for his reporting during the apartheid era. On his return thirty years later with Alan Lowery, he describes the extraordinary generosity of a liberated people, but asks who are the true beneficiaries of a democracy – the black majority or the white minority?
The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite.
