Have You Ever Slapped The Face of A Corpse?



On anarchist responses to Mandealer's death


‘Though none of us had read Marx, we were still too Marxist.’

– Errico Malatesta

It’s indicative of the mind-numbing colonisation by ruling ideas that even those who claim to oppose this society regurgitate many of its most deceitful manipulations. Some of the anti-authoritarian responses to Mandela’s death illustrate this, and that’s one of the reasons for this text. Undoubtedly in this age of indifference, this will seem like merely another in-group irrelevance. But there are significant generalisations to be made from this analysis that take it out of this narrow realm, and where we felt it would be pertinent, we have stated them. Doubtless there are others you can make for yourself. It is largely because of these generalizations that we include here critiques of 3 largely trivial pieces on Mandela’s death - “Backspace”’s, Ian Bone’s and Emile’s. Michael Schmidt’s obituary is more significant. There are also significant facts about South Africa which might very well be unknown to many readers, which also make this text of wider use. 

'The essential degradations of daily life,' noted one of us during the British miner strike of 1984, 'of the inability of human creativity to qualitatively transform the world about us, has vastly intensified – in many ways, because capital has been able to integrate the image of opposition, based on past defeats, into its horror show, into the development of the tedious passivity of a “consumer” capitalism which is now decomposing faster than a vampire in daylight.' Today this decomposition has reached the point where its putrescence promises to overwhelm utterly the physical basis on which rests the very possibility of a human community. Since lack of clarity could mean the destruction of the planet, and certainly means the living death of us all, it feels like a minimum contribution to consistently attack the dominant lies of the spectacle which obscure the path walked by rebels from the past and mystify the choices before us today.

This ongoing pitiless assault in the pursuit of spiritual-freedom is an essential part of the therapeutic process through which each of us struggles to gain as much understanding and insight as possible into the influences that mould our thinking. It is a difficult process. It requires us to identify and fight against the numerous patterns of delusory thinking we all carry with us because of the insane society in which we live. The working-class struggle against mental-slavery is the struggle to free ourselves of all that lingers on, in our thinking, in our own habits and patterns of organization, of the psycho-pathological society we are fighting against. For revolutionists to contribute towards this struggle involves a conscious refusal to pander to reactionary tastes simply because they are shared by the majority of the working-class. It involves consistently combating every instance of working-class backwardness, working-class poverty, working-class stupidity, working-class repression, and working-class illusion, unequivocally demonstrating their reactionary social role rather than ingratiatingly beclouding  them for the sake of immediate popularity.

Unfortunately, as the following demonstrates, revolutionists are far too frequently unwilling to undertake such a task and open themselves to all its attendant personal risks.

1. Left Jabber, Right Uppercut


Reappraising the Legacy of an Icon, Michael Schmidt1


'We ought not to act and speak as if we were asleep.'

– Heraclitus






“I had the privilege to meet Mandela several times during my career as a journalist, watching my country's dramatic transition unfold on the ground, with all of its tragedies and triumphs; on most occasions he was all business; I only saw him once in the relaxed and smiling mode in which he was best known and so beloved, for he had taken a huge burden on his shoulders and was mostly all business. He was by turns frighteningly stern and disarmingly charming, rigorously strict and graciously forgiving, a fierce revolutionary and a conciliator, a formidable intellect and a wisecracker, austere and chilled. Though a complex figure, he is justly considered as a colossus of global stature for sacrificing his life to inspire the South African masses to push forward to the irreversible defeat of the last white supremacist regime—and in doing so to inspire other popular struggles against injustice worldwide.”

It’s strange for a self-professed revolutionist to think it a privilege to meet an individual who, arguably, was far more effective in supporting capitalist misery and in getting the poor to identify with him than any other individual in history. But that’s how celebrity works, at least for those in awe of it (as Jeremy Paxman2 only said to me the other day– “Name-dropping’s such a crashing bore”). For those who have nothing but contempt, if not hatred, for the disarming manipulations of the global spectacle, this is like saying I had the privilege to meet Lenin or Stalin once. In fact, Schmidt compares Mandela with Lenin (rightly, unfavourable to both of them) in the rest of his article. And most of his article is aimed at attacking the Mandela myth. So why the need to begin with a paragraph that makes him seem admiring of Mandela? Why does someone who calls himself an anarchist, supposedly utterly opposed to the state and to capitalism in general, somehow feel the need to say they were “privileged” to have met the personification of this misery even when he tries to debunk much that would make it seem like a privilege to have met the bastard? Is it because the neoliberal spectacle manipulates the emotions and intellect to such an invasive and subtle degree that even those who know full well the brutality of South Africa whether during or after apartheid , who call themselves anarchists, feel the need to play to the gallery, to first of all flatter the manipulated illusions of the poor victims of Mandela’s politics in order to later disillusion them? Admittedly Stalin, when he died, was mourned even by inmates of the Gulag, but when he died, there were no anarchists who prefaced their critique of this former developer of capital accumulation with “I had the privilege of meeting Stalin several times.... Though a complex figure, he is justly considered as a colossus of global stature for dedicating his life to inspire the Russian masses to push forward to the irreversible defeat of German Nazism—and in doing so to inspire other popular struggles against fascism worldwide.” 

And let there be no doubt about it: despite its enormously greater subtlety, neoliberalism is every bit as brutal and destructive of people’s lives as Stalinism was. To talk of nothing of the sad lives of most of those reading (or writing) this, the 22,000 kids globally who die each day of avoidable diseases, starvation or malnutrition amount to over 8 million a year, considerably more than were killed in Nazi death camps or Stalin’s collectivization programme, are an obvious symptom of this brutality. And to most people, it’s not even shocking but a reason to sigh with relief – “At least I’m not in that situation”. 

In Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus a black bodyguard of Mandela says to a few white former Special Branch defenders of apartheid turned also into Mandela’s bodyguards, “Madiba doesn’t like it if you don’t smile when you push people away”. It’s the style of the new owners, the style that pushes people down further, the syle of service (to themselves) with a smile, pushing people further away with as much honey as vinegar, as much by the overwhelming seduction of a compensatory culture as by the viciousness of the cops and the need for money. Part of neoliberalism’s subtlety is in the image of progress it promotes, something better than Nazism or Stalinism, a chimera of progress of which Mandela was a significant figure Part of its subtlety is in the notion of progress it promotes, of which Mandela was a significant figure. And it’s already developing the potential for far far worse than Stalinism if it isn’t shattered by a very bloody explosion of rage and humanity.

When he says of Mandela that he was “sacrificing his life to inspire the South African masses to push forward to the irreversible defeat of the last white supremacist regime—and in doing so to inspire other popular struggles against injustice worldwide.”, this is just garbage myth-making fitting in with the iconisation Schmidt derides in the rest of his article, and contradicted by much of his own version of the facts. Certainly the social explosion in South Africa was an inspiration in other countries but Mandela had little to do with it. Rioting youths in Tottenham in October 1985 shouted “South Africa! South Africa” – not “Mandela!” because it was the scenes of anti-cop burning and looting that encouraged their own anger, not the song “free free Nelson Mandela “ incessantly churned out by lefties and liberals. It wasn’t the idea of sacrifice to a cause (always a political distortion and co-optation of the genuinely courageous need to take significant risks with one’s life) that inspired young people throughout the townships, but the lust for life expressed in “the potlatch of fire, flaunting their fearlessness, dancing and gyrating through the ruins of their ghettoes, an effusion of intensity, defiance and libido.” (“South Africa 1985: the organisation of power in black and white”; Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham). 

Across “the rainbow nation”, the neoliberal rulers are accusing a "third force" of being responsible for the fierce struggle waged as we speak by those at the sharp end (just like their ancestors Hendrik Verwoed and Joe Mcarthy blamed the proletarian revolt of their own time on "communist agitators". But in their own words:

"S’bu Zikode [leader of a shack-dweller's organisation in South Africa] is not making us to rebel. It is the condition of our lives that is making us rebel." (Today Even More of us are S’bu Zikode; Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement, September 2013)

Across “the rainbow nation”, the neoliberal rulers are accusing a "third force" of being responsible for the fierce struggle waged as we speak by those at the sharp end (just like their ancestors Hendrik Verwoed3 and Joe McCarthy blamed the proletarian revolt of their own time on "communist agitators". But in their own words:

"S’bu Zikode [leader of a shack-dweller's organisation in South Africa] is not making us to rebel. It is the condition of our lives that is making us rebel." (Today Even More of us are S’bu Zikode; Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement, September 2013)

Anarchists like Michael Schmidt (co-author of a long academic treatise on the historiography of the international anarchist movement4 and erstwhile big-man of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front5) can themselves be considered to be modern leaders – of anarchism. The great men – and they are generally men – of this movement generally do happen to be "great theorists" too – according to its own, generally academic, historians – a trait it shares, not coincidentally, with its historical rival, Marxism. “We are concerned not with the coup d'etat [seizure of the state] of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup du monde [seizure of the world].” Mere political-economic revolt (the coup d'etat) must be intellectual precisely because it must come to grips only at the level of political-economy – a highly specialised process. The "coup du monde" must be broadly cultural, where culture is defined as "the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society’s reproduction." In any movement of self-affirmation, such a culture must be against ruling culture, creating an antagonistic practice which continuously criticises the poverty of all existing forms in which people are permitted to relate to themselves, one another and the world (artistic roles & artefacts, personal identities involving family and friendship, sex and religion, skin-colour and ethnicity). It must develop something beyond culture: its suppression as a separate specialized activity and its realization in social explosions and daily searching.

To concretise what we mean here, we can refer to the conflict of cultures (in the following cases, music as part of the status-quo v. music as genuine opposition) during the South African movement of the 70s and 80s. The New York Herald Tribune reports from this period (mid-1980s): "A South African company is selling an anti-riot vehicle that plays disco music through a loudspeaker to soothe the nerves of would-be troublemakers...the vehicle also carries a water cannon and tear gas." Contrast this with what’s said in the film "Amandla" about the South African struggle from the mid-70s through to the 1980s about this movement's songs: "There's no initial previous arrangement as to who starts what song. As a song finishes, another one starts one and in that process there's lots of compositions coming up - a new song. And a person might have tried to sing what he's presented with one or two people during the day and as he leads and the other two back him up and then you've got an entirely new song. The song might take 3 minutes or 3 months to compose and no-one knows who wrote it". In other words, music being no more a specialist creation than conversation or ideas. The film also describes how terrified the heavily armed cops were when a massive demonstration was approaching at a fairly good speed chanting some of these songs, that the singing enhanced their fear, despite their enormous superiority of weaponry. A fear which was demonstrated when riot policeman Erasmus shot seventeen-year-old Mngcini 'Big Boy' Mginywa from Grahamstown at a funeral because, he told the judge, the people 'were singing in their language and this causes riots'. 


When the specialists of pure political-economic revolt honour the falsified images of great men (maybe with the subconscious hope that, one day, they too will have cheerleaders to praise their own iconic personas) by calling them "an inspiration" to those whose rebellion was inspired not by beautiful images but by ugly reality, they ape the pernicious perspective of the deadly enemy. As those at the sharp end of 'democracy', 'reconstruction and development', 'truth and reconciliation' and the other spectacles of modernised apartheid6 know all too well, when the price of rebellion is a barrage of police bullets what moves one to act is not a noble ideal, but a material misery. 

It is enough to compare the lucid perspective of Raoul Vaneigem with the ludicrous story (as articles are called in the jargon of modern journalism) of Schmidt to convince anyone with any fire still flowing through their veins precisely which of the two mutually-exclusive perspectives will prove most useful to them:

'In its concrete and tactical form, the concept of class struggle constituted the first marshalling of responses to the shocks and injuries which people experience as individuals; it was born in the whirlpool of suffering which the reduction of human relationships to the mechanisms of exploitation created everywhere in industrial societies. It issued from a will to transform the world and change life.

Such a weapon needed constant adjustment... A single energy, wrested from the workers as easily now during their leisure time as during their hours on the shopfloor, drives the turbines of Power which the custodians of the old theory [That of the First International, which both anarchism and Marxism share as their historical & theoretical foundation – S.K] blithely lubricate with their purely formal opposition.

Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life — without grasping what is subversive about love7 and positive in the refusal of constraints — has a corpse in his mouth.'

In Schmidt, it’s the hierarchical focus on an individual and the idolisation of one man, in Vaneigem it’s the inter-relation between the masses of individuals and their own miserable experience, that motivates them. The fact that the rest of Schmidt's story goes on to criticise Mandela merely in terms of his state policy – compared, implicitly, with possible alternative state policies rather than with the revolutionary abolition of the state – only demonstrates how its idealism is inseparable from subordination (all the more insidious for its duplicitous implicitness) to the statist, authoritarian, capitalist terms of its supposed opponents. Unlike such masterpieces of mystification, the ruthless critique of Mandela in terms of his role as a great man in the spectacle of class society makes a genuine contribution to the radical disillusionment so invaluable to those whose raging passion has hurled them headlong into the great game of revolutionary transformation.

That said, there is a portion of truth mired in all such misguided muck, and it is important for our own project that we recognise it. Whereas the relation of proletarians to their own practice is pivotal to any potential future uprising, their relation to their own representation, false as such effigies may be, reveal significant truths regarding proletarian self-activity. These truths, as noted in Mandela can go to hell, are religious in origin. Equanimity in the face of overwhelming adversity, magnanimity even in the fiercest of conflicts, courage and good cheer in the heat of battle, such human qualities are characteristic of the sages and prophets who populate the treatises of middle- and far-eastern religions. "Abiding joy, the habitude of good humor," according to those knowledgeable about such matters "was considered by the Vatican in the canonization proceedings that authorize the veneration of a blessed or a saint as one of the essential characteristics of beatitude."


These are precisely the personal qualities venerated in modern heroes like Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Such people inspire admiration not merely because they are great men – in fact, others in equally high-ranking positions are often reviled precisely for possessing opposing personas. Regardless of whether such characterizations are accurate or not, the point is that what people find inspirational about such qualities is their positive effect on personal conduct. Such salutary personal conduct alone is not enough to produce equally salutary results in the public sphere; the desire for a mythical "right leadership" springs from such idle dreaming. The presence of these qualities in leaders may be fairly irrelevant, but in the everyday struggles of proletarians their influence is undoubtedly necessary, though by no means adequate by itself. Mass struggle for a new world provides the necessary context. But devoid of such personal qualities, the individual and collective conduct of millions in struggle seems unlikely to produce a very happy result. Which is not to idolise such qualities – sometimes they are necessary, sometimes they’re totally inappropriate, and sometimes, applied dogmatically, they help defeat social movements. In short, it is necessary to recognise not only that the criticism of religion remains the prerequisite of all criticism, but also that you can't adequately criticise, let alone supersede, religion without at the same time realising it. Against the miserable magnanimity of Mandela and the ridiculous reconciliation of Tutu, you must be able to balance the true, down to earth forms of these qualities, as lived by Louis Michel, for example, who fought for the violent overthrow of the old world at the barricades of the Paris Commune and continued after its defeat to participate in the movement for expropriation, joining the starving proletarians of Paris when they looted the bakeries of the city. Besides being awarded with deportation and numerous arrests for her efforts, she recieved the gift of an assassin’s bullet which nearly ended her life. Nevertheless, at the trial of her attempted assassin she proceeded passionately to testify against a prison sentence on his behalf in the belief that her true enemy was the bourgeois order rather than its poor puppets. We are the last ones to argue for indulgence towards collaborators, but it is an historical fact that the persecution of perceived “reactionary elements” by a segment of township residents – who assumed the militant role of revolutionary purity and imposed such standards on those they judged lacking in this quality – has had disastrous consequences during the struggle, hardening the antagonism between migrant-workers in the hostels and permanent residents and contributing towards the conditions which drove these workers into the arms of opportunists such as Buthelezi & Inkhata8.. The internecine turf-wars fueled by this situation in the mid to late 80s prepared the ground for the wholesale slaughter which broke out during the crucial 1989-1994 pre-election period, where tens of thousands were massacred – far more than had been killed by the apartheid security forces in all the previous years combined – and the revolutionary aspirations of the preceding years were drowned in a bloodbath. Mass acceptance of a legalistic negotiated settlement was no doubt brought about in a large degree through hope of relief from this terror by a return to order, even as this growing acceptance was a precondition for the continued terror which today takes the ubiquitous form of “crime”. But this is a large subject that demands to be done justice in its own place and time.

Schmidt continues: “Speaking for myself, I recognise—as the world at large has (even including a friend of mine who is a former apartheid Military Intelligence officer)—that Mandela's firm commitment to peaceful negotiation, and his magnanimity in eschewing the bitterness that could have resulted from 27 years of incarceration, instead forgiving his enemies so as to build a democratic country, provided the country's people with the watershed required to break with the past. This forgiveness is usually cited as his greatest attribute and the foundation of his status as a great statesman, as was his prodigious memory which enabled him to remember by name everyone he met, laying the foundation of his reputation for intimate knowledge of and care for those he interacted with in an attitude of humility. Regardless of the pragmatism that obviously underwrote Mandela's opposition to igniting a race-war, or a revolutionary war, for that matter—for such a war would be unwinnable and would decimate both sides—this achievement, which enabled a peaceful first democratic election for all races in 1994 is rightly hailed as the high-water mark of my country's history.”

There are so many things here that make one doubt whether Schmidt is at all committed to attacking the horrors of this society. First off, giving a friend who was a former apartheid Military Intelligence officer as a positive reference for admiring Mandela’s historical role is somewhat contorted logic. Rather like giving David Cameron’s admiration of Mandela as a positive reference. It would be like saying “even David Cameron who in the 80s wanted Mandela hanged, has come round to recognising that Mandela’s magnanimity in eschewing the bitterness that could have resulted from 27 years of incarceration, instead forgiving his enemies so as to build a democratic country, provided the country's people with the watershed required to break with the past.”. In fact, “this achievement, which enabled a peaceful first democratic election for all races in 1994 is rightly hailed as the high-water mark of my country's history” (Schmidt) was the achievement of not merely forgiving, but pretending to break with the past by forgetting it.

Schmidt claims that “a revolutionary war...would be unwinnable and would decimate both sides”. Now obviously if you reduce such a war to just something confined to what Schmidt calls “my country” this war is unwinnable. It might well be unlikely to be won on an international scale also but unlikely is not the same as impossible. And certainly such a possibility is ruled out once you resign yourself to its unwinnability: a self-fufilling prophecy. And not just ruled out, but in ruling it out you reduce all your attempts to challenge it to a mere pretence, cynically or habitually going through the motions. In accepting the inevitability of such a no-win situation you stop genuinely committing yourself to the only way of becoming human and humane, you stop striving to break out of isolation and roles by struggling to recognize other people’s contradictions and their history as well as your own and you stop taking the risks that advance such possibilities. You remain essentially what this society wants you to remain: a spectator. And if it is a priori “unwinnable” then barbarism and indifference has already won. But this praise for Mandela – on the basis that he prevented a massacre – ignores the fact that post-apartheid South Africa involves economic massacres.

Take, for one instance, the vastly increased nasty forms of criminal activity way way beyond what they were during the revolutionary movement, clearly brought about courtesy of the intensified domination by the brutalising economic system: once violence is turned away from contesting the objective causes of misery, it always turns inwards into gang fights or just attacks by different sections of the poor on each other. Mokonyane noted that during the 3-month Alexandra bus boycott of 1957: 

“Our brothers, who are ordinarily called tsotsis (young delinquents) and who often enough rob their fellow Africans, were busy helping the old people along the road and telling people from the reserves not to board the buses. They provided very vigorous pickets….With very little to do, the police were compelled to manufacture and preside over petty offences such as traffic offences against pedestrians. In fact there were only three serious crimes in the three months of the boycott”For another, poverty and deaths through AIDS (and usually through easily and cheaply curable AIDS-related tuberculosis, the spread of which is directly linked to economic misery: see the few paragraphs on AIDS in the introduction to South Africa, Now and Then9) has meant a significant reduction in life expectancy compared with the apartheid era. So all that garbage about preventing a massacre is even worse than the way the French Communist Party justified their manipulation of the movement in France in 1968 (“if we hadn’t done that, de Gaulle would have machine-gunned thousands like the bourgeoisie did in 1871”). It says much for “anarchists”’ critique of bourgeois democracy that Schmidt claims that the small anarchist movement in South Africa “ welcomed with great enthusiasm—and critical concerns—the coming of democratic governance under Mandela in 1994.”10

Compare Schmidt’s claims with this, from The Big Sell-Out, written by Dan Mokonyane, from the small group “The Movement for a Democracy of Content”, before 1994:

“After the elections the purely formal democratic demands may be met but the real problems of the black masses will still be there: landlessness, homelessness, poverty, squalor, etc. These problems cannot, and will not be solved by prayer, negotiations, or, indeed, even legislation from a parliament whether of national unity or of national disunity. Those who own the land and wealth of South Africa and are battening on the backs of the black masses will not budge – they must be moved, expropriated and dispossessed of our land and wealth. Everything else is a cruel joke on the backs of the black masses. But where the masses have started to seize the land, empty classrooms and houses owned by whites whilst blacks are homeless, the SACP11/ANC has rushed to stop them, dangling as a remedy the recipe of the vote!...

The conception of a struggle with a storm of blood in order to achieve or just affirm the persistence of capitalism is both cruel, wasteful and bizarre but to want to achieve revolutionary change by negotiations exaggerates the power of eloquence (which SACP/ANC has in very short supply anyway) to something little short of lunacy. Too many priests and the increase in religious desiderata are misleading the innocents in the ANC/SACP that, as the song goes: “Faith can move mountains” but this is being too wedded to fairyland! Beyond the nebulous world’s glittering bubbles there is a real world, mundane perhaps for the new discoveries of the benefits of market forces, but indicated by such facts as who actually owns and controls the land and means of production. The nationalists everywhere understand the importance of the land except for those puppets in the SACP/ ANC who dream of seizing the land by votes

On Mandela’s release, the unbanning of both the SACP/ANC conglomerate, the PAC and ever since then, South Africa, has seen an orgy of massacres, carnage, rapine and anything else the degraded and putrid instruments of white rule can produce, visited on the black masses. Working together with white rule, Buthelezi, the surrogate, and Mandela, the quisling, have presided upon these crimes on the black masses as proof of their adherence to white rule and their unfailing trust in it and the benefits of capitalism, privatisation and the so-called market forces. Mandela has to beg the white herrenvolk, haters and butchers of the black masses, not to leave South Africa but to remain bosses upon our people. Otherwise he would be outside his remit as given by the Majors’ and Clintons’ bourgeoisdom. The consequences of working as the bosses’ apprentices, for which Mandela and Buthelezi so assiduously operate, mean that they have joined the enemy camp and should, if they had any decency still left, no longer claim or aspire to represent the black masses.

And, so after several massacres covering more than 350 years, the black masses are given the formal vacuities of the ballot paper whilst the land and wealth are in the hands of white rulers and crumbs in the (also bloodstained) hands of the nationalist elite. The more that the landless, homeless, poor black masses are pining away under the iron heel of white rule, the more the SACP/ANC, Mandela and other little sell-outs are busy playing little tricks with those minority groups who regard themselves as peculiar and particular and who demand special privileges such as the tin-pot dictators of the Bantustans like Gatsha Buthelezi, Lucas Mangope and the Neo-Nazi (perish the thought) grouping around Constand Viljoen or Terre’ Blanche. The interests of the black masses are secondary to those of the enemies and even democracy in its formalism has to be made meaningless to accommodate all manner of butchers of the black majority.”

Schmidt says, “I do not focus on the unquestionable legitimacy of his anti-apartheid struggle including its armed facet”. But this “legitimacy” must be questioned if future struggles are not to succumb to the attractions of external “heroes”. The claim that Mandela was a leader who earned his place and was given the trust and respect of others because of past actions plays along with dominant myth-making and smoothes over all contradictions. For instance, the Alexandra bus boycott of 1957 was won by autonomous organisation, amongst which were Mokonyane and other members of The Movement for a Democracy of Content12. Though the ANC and (at least intellectually) Mandela participated, the success of the boycott – perhaps the most significant success during that epoch and one of the first successful mass struggles against the apartheid government – had very little to do with Mandela or the ANC, as they were the most willing to compromise, whereas the masses involved in this 5-month struggle held out till they won. In fact, the ANC was always pretty distant from the struggles of proletarians because it was largely interested in promoting itself (particularly through the boringly “sensible” liberal-leftism of the “Freedom Charter”, as well as – later - the Leninist substitutionism of so-called terrorist attacks), rather than contributing to any struggle directly concerning daily life. The ANC always strived for a monopoly of political representation of the struggle. As early as 1954, the ANC 'jettisoned the already painfully limited freedom of speech among the Africans by claiming that no other political organization, apart from themselves, must hold political meetings in the three Alexandra Township Squares.' As Mokonyane noted in Lessons of Azikwelwa. 'The seriousness of this threat had emerged when Gumede of the Standholders and Vigilance Association…was badly beaten up for trying to hold a meeting at Number One Square.' And, despite having had very little relation to the ’57 bus boycott, even withdrawing support for it half-way through, they later opportunistically claimed to have won it. Re-writing history is all part of dominant politics, and the further in the past such history is the greater the tendency for this re-writing to be accepted without question by the younger generations.

Mandela the great martyr-hero was portrayed by the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa as a saviour because that’s usually how hierarchical organisations work. Populist demagogy needs to induce social movements to focus on the heroic attributes of famous personalities (preferably living) so that people no longer look to themselves but constantly refer to an external authority – be it role model or professional leader – which would save them from the arduous task of struggling against the world’s contradictions directly. In 1976 when the South African revolution began, it began precisely because the idea “black man - you are on your own” coming from Biko (whose “sacrifice” was indisputably greater than Mandela’s) and the Black Consciousness Movement was taken up as the starting point of contestation by tens of thousands. In one fell swoop it thrust aside the idea of waiting for reforms from the liberal whites or for a coup d’état from the ANC. The ANC was rather derisory towards what happened in Soweto precisely because it was “unorganised” (ie self-organised, not organised by an organisation). It took over 8 years for the ANC to demagogically begin to recognise that there was more mileage to be gained from celebrating “the Soweto uprising” (because of its clear significance and popularity) than from dismissing it. To suggest that Mandela or the ANC had anything to do with this social movement ignores the fact that the ANC was largely an exile organisation, occasionally carrying out spectacular bombings within the country which neither halted the revolutionary movement nor aided it, even if they got some passive approval. And Mandela’s influence in prison was merely as an individualised expression of endurance, which was what every black person was forced to live in the open prison that was particularly evident during white rule; in terms of practical opposition, he had no useful influence. It was international leftism mostly outside of South Africa that promoted Mandela and the ANC, with its traditional state capitalist programme and its bureaucratic structure suitably in place as a state-in-waiting, as the most important form of opposition to apartheid. But within the country itself, it wasn’t until well into the 1980s that blacks in the townships started to look to the ANC as a possible political saviour. Behind the scenes, by the late 1980s, the ANC were doing deals with world business organisations about a “peaceful” transition to majority black rule which would keep intact all the essential miseries, but permitting a few blacks to gain power and enormous amounts of money within a structure previously excluding them.

As has been said before, Mandela’s “sacrifice” was no greater than that of thousands of real revolutionaries killed or maimed during the liberation struggle. Moreover, the simple fact that someone spent a very long time in prison is no reason to turn someone into “a colossus of global stature”. Harry Roberts (a well-known thief in the UK who killed 2 cops), who, unlike the ANC, never killed any innocent bystanders, is still in prison after over 47 years. But of course, he isn’t a “political prisoner”, and it’s the political prisoners that are always so beloved of the left, not those who “merely” contravene bourgeois property rights, or who kill defenders of class rule in pursuit of such a contravention. When working class crowds taunt the cops with “Harry Roberts is our friend”, the result is they ensure constant delays in giving him parole, hardly the same effect as “free free Nelson Mandela!”. As for political prisoners, Denis Goldberg, a white Stalinist SACP member imprisoned in the same trial as Mandela (few of those reading this will have heard of him), spent 22 years in a white jail – amongst prisoners and guards most of whom never appreciated his opposition to apartheid, a far more difficult situation than Mandela – "Being black and involved (in the struggle) meant you had the support of many people and it meant you got to be part of a community. Being white and involved meant being isolated", he said. Compare this with Mandela, whose last few years in prison involved access to a swimming pool, a private cook and all manner of luxuries, rather like those rarely-imprisoned millionaires in the USA. Admittedly, he’d been in a very small cell for most of his 27+ years in prison and had had to break up rocks and all manner of miseries, but it’s only this that’s emphasised in the official histories. The time of his grooming for the presidency prior to his release is almost invariably never mentioned.

Nor are the prisons run by Lord Nelson's own organisation, which made apartheid jails seem like bastions of decency in comparison, ever spoken of. Executed to terrorise all exiles into blind obedience at the feet of a deified leadership, the brutality practiced at hell-holes such as the prison-camp Quadro 'was such that the bestial Khmer Rouge of Cambodia could have learnt a thing or two', according to Mwezi Twala, a dissident MK soldier who was shot by the ANC's gestapo for daring to speak out of turn. His book Mbokodo: Inside MK, describes his experiences in gruesome detail. Nobody with even the slightest remnant of moral courage could have any respect for Mandealer and his associates after reading accounts such as this (there are many more). It's no surprise then that, published in 1994 when 'Madiba Magic' was at its strongest, 'The ANC put pressure on major book stores in South Africa not to carry it, and so the book remains virtually unknown.' Although many uncelebrated rebels suffered similar barbarism at the hands of the apartheid security forces, heroes like Lord Nelson never did. If the following reflections by Twala may be said to reflect a rather more rosy picture of apartheid prisons than was justified by the reality of most ordinary black prisoners, they describe quite accurately the experience of the saintly Robben Island martyrs:

'I meditated on the journey I had taken in order to be a soldier, to do my bit to free my people from the yoke of apartheid. All I had achieved was to be subjected to another kind of repression, imprisonment, and torture. If I had stayed in the Republic, fighting my own war against the Regime, I would have achieved far more in a week than I had over the past fifteen years in Angola, Mozambique and Zambia under the communist ANC leadership. Also in the event of being apprehended by the South African authorities, I would have faced a proper judicial trial and been sentenced to a prison term. 

Prison would have consisted of a clean bed and blanket, and decent clothes would have been issued. Reasonable hot meals would have been provided. Clean hygienic cells with running water on tap, a civilized toilet facility and shower cubicles. Added to this would have been an acceptable prison work ethic and a small but welcome income, enough to allow me the luxury of buying cigarettes and toothpaste. I might have had the opportunity to study, as Nelson Mandela did, almost any subject, with access to the prison library. I would also have received medical care for injuries and illness, plus spiritual comfort from a prison chaplain of a denomination of my choice. In no way would I have been misused, beaten and tortured at the whim of a spiteful revenge-driven warden. 

Had the South African goverment treated me half as badly as the ANC, it would have been deserved to some degree, as I had broken South African laws. In the case of the ANC, there was no such rationale. It was virtually impossible to find a detainee who had committed a clearly defined crime against the system, because there was no system. I concluded that the policies of the ANC leadership were based on personal ambition and fear.'

So why does Schmidt begin by elaborating some of Mandela’s personal/political contradictory qualities, in such a way that he makes Mandela seem like us all – a man of contradiction, a good guy gone wrong, although somehow on a grand world stage scale, someone one could partly identify with? Because, as someone who has an ideology to impart, a journalistic-politico role to play, he can only express his critique with an eye to the idea of trying to win people over. The duped have to be enticed to something easily acceptable first of all, without having to constantly question the basis of their own colonisation by dominant ideology, their passivity before their “betters”. So he begins softly, with a spoonful of sugar to make the later medicine of critique go down. Slowly bit by bit, so as to not be too upsetting, he brings in facts that contradict his initial populist nod to the millions of South Africans who admire Mandela (in complete ignorance of what was already obvious about him in the 1980s). Although Schmidt’s ideas are anti-state, the self-same political role as those who want to develop state power is maintained under an “anarchist” guise, a role that patronises the masses in order to recruit them to some “correct” ideas. This unemotional method only encourages a hierarchical respect, a manner of educating the “non-anarchist” masses to these ideas in a disingenuous 2-faced role. 

In The Algeria of Daniel Guerin the Situationist International put forward another compelling explanation for the incoherent contributions to the fine-art of hero-worship on the part of anti-authoritarians like Michael Schmidt:

'What, then, is the secret of this aberration of one of our famous leftist intellectuals, and one of the most ostensibly “libertarian” among them at that? With him it is no different than with all the others: it is the decisive influence of their vainglorious participation in high society; their common tendency, even more servile than a lackey’s, to be swept off their feet with joy because they have spoken with the greats of this world; and the imbecility that makes them attribute such greatness to those who have condescended to talk to them.' 

But what else can one expect from someone who gives interviews to GQ magazine? 



"Look at this disgusting bastard. You can almost see the sleaze ooze out the corners of his fake smile can't you? I may surround myself with scum like this, act like them, and talk like them, but I swear dearest comrades, in my heart of hearts, I really am different."


2. Lies Lead the Masses to The Truth


Comment by 'Backspace' below the article Nelson Mandela: Some Thoughts13


We see on a libertarian-communist website, this: “use his history to help lead people toward self-organisation and away from trust in an enlightened leadership. 'Exposing the myth', however much it might be irritating that it exists, is an approach that isolates you and leaves you talking only to yourself... I suppose the issue that bothered me was how easy it is in the UK and US to criticise the liberal love for mandela, contrasted with the continued popularity of mandela amongst working class south africans in the shack communities (the same south africans that get beaten and murdered by ANC thugs), and that struggle organisations created there have to build on the existing mentalities and find a way to transform them, since they don't have the luxury of critique from afar. If being threatened with violence and murder from the ANC doesn't dissuade them from still admiring mandela, I'm not sure a leaflet would.”

The idea that speaking the truth “isolates you and leaves you talking only to yourself” is simply an expression of this other-directed inverted society where everyone has to hide themselves behind a role so as not to become aware of how separate they are. But since you are hiding what you really think (in this case, for utterly patronising reasons) then you really do remain isolated and only talking to yourself. If you speak the truth as you see it – not speaking the truth just to exorcise what’s in your head, but with the goal of subverting dominant social relations – you risk either being rejected or being recognised. But if you avoid the possibility of rejection you also never have the chance of being recognised. And certainly, those who want a revolution don’t have to “build on the existing mentalities and find a way to transform them” – you have to confront first of all your own existing mentality that speaks down to those who admire Mandela by speaking your mind.

Not only does failure to do so patronise those one addresses, often it accomplishes the opposite of what was intended; rather than seduce people into radical perspectives by degrees, watered-down criticism tends to repel people from it all the more. A clear example can be seen in precisely those "struggle organisations" in SA whose approach is so uncritically lauded by the commentator. Members of the organisation in question, Abahlali baseMjondolo, often resort to the words of uTata Madiba as a justification for their own rebellion, and by so doing sabotage the power of their actions. At the death of Mandela some of their members sent out a press release stating that they had decided to turn one of their demonstrations into a spectacle 'in honour of Mandela'. These tactics only lead people to hijack the power of their own anger and defuse it favour of the forces of law and order. Re-fusal is the mother, not the daughter of revolt. In the Abahlali documentary, called, appropriately enough, Dear Mandela, one of the most striking moments is when one of the young leaders of the organisation addresses a gathering shouting Phantsi (down with) DA! - with a loud echo from the crowd. Phantsi Inkhata! Another loud echo. Phantsi ANC!. Silence. Phantsi ANC! Silence. No one else dares echo the cry. 

The truth is that, far from using his history 'to help lead people (sic!) toward self-organisation', the failure of South African revolutionists across the spectrum to subject Mandela's mythology to ruthless criticism amounts to self-defeating complicity in the deification not only of uTata Madiba but also of The Party to which his iconography is inseparably anchored. For all the supposed iconoclasm of their revolutionary traditions, anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist activists of all stripes have been horrendously tame when it comes to confronting the spectacle of struggle-celebrities with as trenchant a form of attack as the task demands. Those who wish to advance radical perspectives can only keep crying in the wilderness until they find, in the radical rebellion of others, an answering echo. Unless they have the courage to do this, both they and their celebrated ideal of liberty will always remain eclipsed by the shadows of giants.


3. A Bone To Pick



Tutu honoured by a fellow winner of the Nobel Mass Murder Prize


Ian Bone and Desmond Tutu

In the aftermath of Marikana, Tutu said, “Under apartheid, we faced daily battles for the right to gather, to protest and to march. Now that these rights are enshrined in our law, we abuse them. When we march, we demand, we destroy and we loot. We care not whether our demands are reasonable, or what actions we take... our police appear powerless to stop tidal waves of violent crime and what we euphemistically refer to as "service delivery protests", the latter regularly accompanied by violence and destruction committed with utter impunity....While we rightfully condemn the police for massacring 34 mine workers last week, and demand the use of non-lethal methods of crowd control, we also sympathise with the vast majority of good policemen and women who have battled to do their very difficult jobs”14

Undoubtedly Ian Bone never heard of this comment by Tutu since he never ever tries to do much research or look into anything below the surface, otherwise he would have been unlikely to have posted this on his website (December 14th 2013)15:


A new low even for the ANC. Desmond a true fighter against apartheid unlike many of those showing up. I bumped into Desmond in Southwark Cathedral once. Fucking ANC cunts.” 

Bone tends to spout off the top of his head – particularly exaggerations with little regard for reality, so it’s no surprise that he begins with something that would take half a second to realise is untrue - “a new low even for the ANC”? Worse than Marikana? Or any of the other deaths and miseries? But not important. 

Even less important is that this barring of Tutu was reversed a few hours later.

What’s idiotic is the utter lack of class antagonism from someone who constantly proclaims it, the lack of class contempt and disgust towards someone very high up in the class divide: the ex-Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Peace prize winner isn’t someone you’d bump into in a Southwark pub, for instance. What’s idiotic is his name dropping – “I bumped into Desmond in Southwark Cathedral once” - note the intimacy of his first name. But what’s especially sickening is the most important bullshit of all - that Tutu was “a true fighter against apartheid.” Much as total immersion in a political role tends to make the distinction between fact and fiction utterly blurred (because everything is said to try to make oneself popular), it would be stretching things a bit to believe that Bone’s demagogic populism has utterly wrecked his memory of the 80s. He knows full well that Tutu consistently advocated non-violence on the part of those struggling against a fundamentally and overtly violent system, that Tutu preached non-violence at the daily funerals of black people killed by the cops. In pamphlet 'South Africa 1985: the organization of power in black and white', (a text Ian Bone almost certainly read) the authors point out:

'Apparently an “enemy” of the South African apartheid state, he spent most of his time exerting himself to dissuade violence and sometimes even to prevent it. In the summer of 1985 Tutu was acclaimed by the international media for intervening amongst an angry crowd to save the life of an informer – ie the life of someone responsible for the deaths of loads of people struggling against the system. Not for nothing was this cop in shepherd’s clothing known by other blacks in South Africa as ‘The Clown Of Exploitation’. That summer he promised to leave South Africa if the anti-State violence didn’t stop but unfortunately celebrities, never live up to their promise.' 

Tutu’s main contribution to the reinforcement of neo-apartheid state power was the “Truth and Reconciliation” commission. “Truth and Reconciliation” meant the manipulation of the masses with a Christian form of resignation – through whites confessing their (apparently past) sins in public, everyone could feel connected to their nation’s history by playing the lay priest, a kind of mass confessional-cum-psychoanalysis of the past, televised, spreading over long periods of time. Whites changed their language but not their lifestyle; the everyday miseries of the pass laws disappeared to be replaced with mass evictions, and mass electricity and water cut-offs. “Forgiveness” is very different if you have the chance of making loads of money out of the politics of forgiveneness than if it simply means being manipulated by this politics into a depressed resignation to your penniless lot. And, for the poor at least, it’s usually “forgive and forget” : the powers-that-be know full well that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. But the rulers remember and learn far more from a past they’ve helped repress in those who threaten their rule than us.

So why this (hardly noticed, because it’s so obviously typical) bullshit on the part of Bone? Because he says whatever comes into his head. Because, however insignificantly and momentarily, Bone wanted a tiny bit of this reflected glory of the “true fighter”. Because Bone, ever the politician, is simply trying to stay popular regardless of any truth or integrity (which is why he proves how “active” he is by setting up a political party in competition with other political parties). And as almost always, he never bothers to do any research about, or take some critical distance from, what he’s talking about.

We make no bones about it: The abstract desire for immediate effectiveness accepts the rules of the dominant ideologies, the exclusive point of view of the present, when it spews out reformist complaints or “radical” actions imitative of past failures or instant pro-revolutionary “ideas”. In this way, delirium resurfaces in the very posture that pretends to fight it. On the contrary, the critique that goes beyond ideology must patiently experiment with different forms of expression, discovery and developing insight – as part of the way to make progress over time.


4. Caught in a Contorted Cobweb of Concept-Constructs


Mandela: A Leader in the Indigenous Anarchist Tradition; Emile16

'Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.' 

– George Orwell, Politics and the English Language



Possibly the worst load of crap, in a virtually unprecedented overflowing sewer of the stuff pouring out of the global media, was an article published on Anarchist News. It contains not a single fact about Mandealer, but is full of imaginary claims plucked out of nowhere – such as that Mandela “played his empowerment card in a non-moralist [beyond-good-and-evil] indigenous-anarchist, restorative-justice sense blah blah etc.etc.” ignoring facts such as those we’ve already well elaborated in the section on Michael Schmidt. One expects academics to at least do a minimum of research to unearth some facts that can be put to a radical use way beyond the intention of the academic who discovered them. But not even one fact, even one everybody knows, is given to substantiate Emile’s delirious verbiage, which is simply designed to make himself (and virtually nobody else) think how clever he is. Who cares about facts when you can treat him the way an aesthete treats a work of art: “if you like picasso's early work and hate his later stuff, does that define and negate picasso, period?”, he says in the thread following his text. Never mind Mandela’s fundamental role for capitalism as undertaker of the revolution, never mind the devastation that the burial of the revolution wrought, let’s just think of him in the innocuous terms of the ups and downs of an artist-careerist or of a “many-to-one” leader transformed into a “one-to-many” leader. This nonsense reads like an academic anarcho-liberal version of the way 3 toothpicks on a blue background put on show in an art gallery would be portrayed by some professional post-modernist interpreter trying to increase the value of the artwork by claiming it has a truly deep significance expressing the essential dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or whatever that only the elite of professional interpreters have the intelligence to fathom. Only worse, because he’s justifying a contributor to, first of all, international Stalinism, and later to international neo-liberalism. And giving this pig an anarchist gloss. 

Emile lives in a labyrinthine ivory tower built out of word and concept bricks. His eyes are covered in construct-cobwebs through which he peers at life. Language for him is not a way to communicate a radical critique and subvert some aspect of reality but a wall of pretentious “ideas” to hide himself from this reality and give him a notion of superior intellect unlike those who couldn’t make head or tail of his scribble. In the narcissistic form of the spectacle of “intelligence”, writing is a flattering magic mirror that makes you think you look good, even if no-one else thinks you do. His endless tortuous yin-yang-taoist terminology merely shows he has no ideas - ideas have him. The kind of person who, no matter what the conversation, will turn it all into his own particular frozen fixed focus: “The problem with the Ukraine is that they have asserted the yang and forgotten the yin”, “I love the way you’ve re-arranged the furniture in your living room to accentuate the yin”, “There’s really far too much yang in Harry Potter/ this chicken curry / my underpants ”, etc. Language for him is not a way to communicate a radical critique and subvert some aspect of reality but a wall of pretentious “ideas” to hide himself from this reality and give him a notion of superior “radical” intellect unlike those who couldn’t make head or tail of his scribble. In the narcissistic form of the spectacle of “intelligence”, writing is a flattering magic mirror that makes you think you look good, even if no-one else thinks you do. His claim that before he came to power Mandela was a non-authoritarian leader is merely projection of his own desire to be a non-authoritarian leader, presumably of the naive students for whom he regurgitates his chewed-up bits of junk food dressed up as Lobster Thermidor, whom he dreams will admire him for his brilliance. Which might also explain why he considers the hierarchical respect given to Mandela (implied in his notion of the “many-to-one” leader) is not something at all problematic but is somehow seen as “anarchist”. Undoubtedly there are also many anarchists who totally disagree with Emile’s patently ridiculous take on Mandela but who nevertheless also aspire to the kind of hierarchical respect he thinks is something positive.

The claim that Mandela was a leader who earned his place and was given the trust and respect of others because of past actions ignores the facts. Mandela was held up by the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa as a saviour because that’s usually how hierarchical organisations work. Populist demagogy needs to induce social movements to focus on the heroic attributes of famous personalities so that people no longer look to themselves but constantly refer to an external authority – be it role model or professional leader - which would save them from the arduous task of struggling against the world’s contradictions directly. In 1976 when the South African revolution began, it began precisely because the idea “black man - you are on your own” coming from Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement was taken up as the starting point of contestation by tens of thousands. In one fell swoop it thrust aside the idea of waiting for reforms from the liberal whites or for a coup d’état from the ANC. The ANC was rather derisory towards what happened in Soweto precisely because it was “unorganised” (ie self-organised, not organised by an organisation). It took over 8 years for the ANC to demagogically begin to recognise that there was more mileage to be gained from celebrating “the Soweto uprising” (because of its clear significance and popularity) than from dismissing it. To suggest that Mandela or the ANC had anything to do with this social movement ignores the fact that the ANC was largely an exile organisation, occasionally carrying out spectacular bombings within the country which neither halted the revolutionary movement nor aided it, even if they got some passive approval. And Mandela’s influence in prison was merely as an individualised expression of what every black person was forced to live in the open prison that was particularly evident during white rule; in terms of practical opposition, he had no useful influence. It was international leftism mostly outside of South Africa that promoted Mandela and the ANC, with its traditional state capitalist programme and its bureaucratic structure suitably in place as a state-in-waiting, as the most important form of opposition to apartheid. But within the country itself, it wasn’t until well into the 1980s that blacks in the townships started to look to the ANC as a possible political saviour. Behind the scenes, by the late 1980s, the ANC were doing deals with world business organisations about a “peaceful” transition to majority black rule which would keep intact all the essential miseries, but permitting a few blacks to gain power and enormous amounts of money within a structure previously excluding them. All these are basic facts utterly absent in Emile’s delirious verbiage, designed to make himself (and virtually nobody else) think how clever he is. 

Emile’s anti-moralism, a rather outdated reaction to dominant moralism, still expresses many of moralism’s attitudes - in particular, moralism’s judgement of individuals abstracted from their social historical class situation and their choices within this externally unchosen situation. On the basis of this passively nihilist anti-moralism, he takes to task Siddiq Khan's Let Us Not Mourn Famous Men. He makes claims of the text that do not in any way exist in the text. For one thing, SK does not think that Mandela is ‘the man who had so much power in his hands who sold out to the devil?’ (the fact that he puts this in inverted commas almost implies he is quoting from SK’s text, when nothing of the sort is written in it). A sell-out is someone who was originally on your side. But the history of Mandela is one of a politician, of a professional leader, who always had his party’s own separate agenda - the seizure of state power.

The whole notion of being “beyond good and evil” takes on very different aspects when viewed from the shithole bottom of the greasy pole than from anywhere else. And certainly very different from an anti-moralist notion viewed from an ivory tower. The South African revolution of the 70s and 80s was beyond moralism and anti-moralism because the qualities and miseries of both were realised and suppressed (ie superseded) in the potlatch of destruction and the violent affirmation of the impossible. Morality or its opposite had fuck-all to do with it – it was always a question of “by any means possible/necessary”.

Emile says “Mandela’s resistance caught the attention of people in south africa and around the world.... Mandela played his empowerment card in a non-moralist [beyond-good-and-evil] indigenous-anarchist, restorative-justice sense. It lifted many black south africans out of their sense of hopelessness.” But Mandela was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and yet the South African revolution broke out in Soweto and quickly spread all over the country some 14 years later. Thereby, once again, showing to all but the blind that only the masses of individuals themselves can lift themselves out of hopelessness. Yet in Emile’s (and many a Leninist’s) repetition of the dominant falsification of history, it was this oh-so- special individual who lifted people out of their hopelessness. In fact, hope in Mandela and bourgeois democracy was like the carrot dangled in front of a donkey’s eyes by the fat bastard riding him.

Emile is so devoid of any integrity that he even dares to compare the critique of Mandela with an imagined critique of Geronimo – as if Geronimo had become US President rather than reduced to a sad circus entertainer, as if Mandela had launched battles against the forces of the state in any way comparable with Geronimo’s, who never had the luxury of being partly financially supported and armed by Russian state-capitalism . Such a comparison is typical of the rivalrous mentality of those whose perspective is already defined and closed – they’ll grab onto the most irrelevant analogies to give the appearance of an argument they are simply out to” win”; it has nothing to do with any honest struggle to discover through open-ended questioning, with a view to some solidly –based challenge to the status quo.

He says, “In the era prior to the black-white reconciliation that Mandela’s empowerment by the ordinary people helped to bring about, blacks that tried to rise up were brutally beaten down by the white apartheid policing regime. black activists were being killed in police custody. Things were about as bleak as they could be. how discouraging was this to the black south african collective consciousness?” Well – on that score, very little has changed, as Emile should know. And not just Marikana (it’s not too much of an effort to read “We are the poors” by Ashwin Desai, written well before Marikana, for example). It’s clear that if there was a revolutionary movement as creatively destructive as the burning down of half the public buildings of various townships as repeatedly happened in the 1980s, the democratic cops protecting the current “rainbow” ruling class would be every bit as bad, if not worse, as the brutality of the cops in previous epochs. In many respects they already are. Since the televised dawn of democracy they more people have been killed in police custody each year than at any point during the State of Emergency of the 80s. The number of police-related deaths over the past twenty years, more or less 14 000, rivals the bloodbath that drowned the revolution after Mandealer's release. And statistics only document fatalities. The 'ordinary' harassment, humiliation and brutality meted out by the police on a day to day basis is something with which almost every black person remains familiar. SK himself was recently picked up by the cops for being a black person carrying a bunch of keys with an electronic garage remote in a white residential area. A highly suspect situation demanding detainment and interrogation by the forces of law and order. Some time before, he was pepper-sprayed, stamped on in the chest, arms and legs and subjected to a forced body-search by a dozen pigs in from three police vans for the same offense. But clearly carrying such an excessively yang object as a garage remote fully deserves such treatment. 

It's because of everyday occurences such as these that, according to Jared Sacks' article Fuck the police, 'In any informal settlement in the country, the minute a group of six-year-olds see the cops entering the community, the first thing they do is drop whatever game they are playing and run away.' Unlike the learned Emile, these ignorant children have not yet been trained to totally disconnect the use of their brains from the facts of life. He says of SK “Europeans are moralists [Western civilization is moralist] and they like their heroes ‘pure’.” But, putting aside the fact that SK is a South African – not a European, SK very clearly states his opposition to heroism and heroes: “Like every other hero, celebrity, and star in this upside-down society (including those of the ‘progressive’, ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ variety), Mandela has always been an enemy of ordinary proletarians.... We don’t need visions or visionaries, heroes or heroism. They are all part of the problem. What we need is clarity. A clear view of the problem. Then we can begin to experiment with solutions for ourselves.” And the notion that SK doesn’t like Mandela because he doesn’t conform to some idea of “purity” is nowhere to be found in SK’s text. We could continue taking apart the rest of Emile’s strawmanning , but really – nothing he says about what SK has written has anything to do with what he has in fact written. Emile, like almost everybody stuck in fixed dogmas, is playing the politician, utterly distorting SK’s very direct and simply put ideas beyond recognition so he can deal with something in the habitual contorted manner he knows how to deal with things, is playing the politician, utterly distorting SK’s very direct and simply put ideas beyond recognition so he can deal with something he knows how to deal with. He dismissively knocks down what he himself has set up. In order to conform to his intellectual illusion of being anti-moralist he attacks his fantasy of what SK’s ideas are so as to fit in with a pre-existing framework which he can apply to almost anything he dislikes without having to bother with understanding what each person is in fact saying. About as relevant as attacking a sunny day for tasting like mouldy cheese. But the political method behind what he says is far worse in its general implications – because, despite taking an absurdly obscure and unique form derived from a mind trapped in academic forms of non-communication, it’s by these kinds of intellectual sleights-of-hand – even if they usually take a far more “down-to-earth” form taken from the populist media – that far too many find ways of defending atrocities. 

As for Emile’s particular (non)style, one might say such 'prose is that of a propagandist; it is fuzzy on principle, swathed in circumlocutions, emitting multisyllabic words as the cuttlefish does clouds of ink, and for very much the same purpose.' In fact, an insightful satirist revealed it to be the product of a rogue Artificial Intelligence Unit ‘the Electronic Memory and Interactive Library Extractor (it calls itself "emile")’ that has run amok and now ‘simply spews an incomprehensible mixture of the things it has been able to access from its library database.’ Indeed, Emile does seem to be an unwitting parody of the increasingly ubiquitous academic (an)aesthetic which,like its popular journalistic counterpart, demands the expression of an infinity of personal ideas from people who have neither the time, intelligence, or inclination to form a single one of their own . This aesthetic results in a tumult of non-communication wherein pre-fabricated ideas are parroted in either a high-brow or lowbrow way. Just as an absence of significant critical thought does not present the academy from producing a surplus of verbiage, a lack of ideas does not prevent people spouting a host of strongly held and weakly-put together opinons. 'Foreigners must go home because they are stealing our jobs' is a sentiment as genuine as it is vacuous. Aping the bloodless jargon-ridden cant of modern science in the hopes of basking in the reflected glamour (or at least the apparent objectivity) of this latter-day religion, such people reverently blabber their arcane catechisms with no concern over their total irrelevance. But as Pieter Wisse warned17, 'the scientist who sacrifices relevance for rigor is like the drunkard losing his keys. He is looking for them under the bright light of a street lantern. He knows it is far from where he has lost them but at least, he argues, it is where he can see clearly.'

One can only hope that, enlivened by the ebb and flow of renewed insurgent intercourse – to which such people render themselves irrelevant or worse, a hinderance – at least a few wobbly-legged, blurry-eyed souls, woozy on an overdose of their own ideology, start to sober up. 


Samotnaf & Siddiq Khan
January 2014


Endnotes


1http://anarkismo.net/article/26519 


2Famous UK journalist for the BBC 


3Former Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 – 1966, known as 'the architect of apartheid'. 


4Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, 2009) 


5South African left-anarchist organisation 


6The Reconstruction and Development Program was the Mandealer regime's initial welfare-capitalist economic policy. Later Mandela got rid of it in favour of the blatantly neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution Program. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the judicial tribunal headed by Desmond Tutu aimed at 'healing' the divisions of apartheid society by offering amnesty to those agents of apartheid who were willing to confess to their crimes. 


7[SK note]: As Wayne Spencer said to me, 'Neither here nor elsewhere does Vaneigem say with any clarity just what is subversive about love. He appears to assume that there is an elemental emotion of love that necessarily has certain qualities.' In the final section of this text I try to clarify this question and tie it more concretely to the steps that proletarians might usefully take now in relation to the circumstances that currently prevail. 


8Chief Gatsha Mangosutu Buthelezi was the head of state of the Kwa-Zulu bantustan [native reserve declared by the apartheid government as an independent state but unrecognised as such by any other nation] and the president of the Inkhata Freedom Party, a Zulu chauvinist political party which participated in the bloody massacres of blacks on behalf of the forces of order that plagued the country between 1989-1994 




10Undoubtedly the global intensification of brutalising social constraints, and the repression of genuine networks of proletarian solidarity, in the 57 years since this movement has also meant an intensification of criminal brutality; and even when communities of struggle erupt into revolutionary situations this will not automatically create the conditions for the eradication of anti-proletarian crime. Clearly dealing with such things would involve something along the lines of the public mass meetings that took place in the mid-80s in Alexandra and elsewhere in which everything from attacks on collaborators and cops to dealing with rapists and stopping men from harassing their ex-girlfriends was discussed and followed through. 


11SACP is the South African Communist Party, long-time ally of the ANC. Many politicians are members of both organisations, as was Mandela, who sat on the central committee of this unrepentant Stalinist racket.