在納爾遜•曼德拉的最后二十年里，他被譽為楷模，克制著獨裁統治的誘惑和反資本主義的態度，把南非從殖民主義的枷鎖中解放出來。簡言之，曼德拉不是穆加貝(津巴布韋總統——觀察者網譯注)，南非保留了多黨民主制，媒體自由，經濟蓬勃發展，與全球市場融洽接軌，排斥草率的社會主義試驗。現在，隨著曼德拉的去世，圣人般的睿智形象似乎被永遠定格在那里：好萊塢有關于他的電影，扮演者摩根•弗里曼也曾在其他電影中飾演過上帝;搖滾明星、宗教領袖、運動員、政客(包括比爾•克林頓和菲德爾•卡斯特羅)都對曼德拉的逝世表示哀悼。
然而，這是故事的全部嗎?有兩個關鍵的事實被悼念活動所掩蓋。大部分南非人都還很窮，與種族隔離時期一樣，他們仍然生活在水深火熱中;政治權利和公民權利的提升被日益嚴重的社會不安全感、暴力和犯罪抵銷了。最主要的變化在于，原先處于統治地位的白種人現在加入了黑人精英。另外，人們還記得，過去的非洲人國民大會(African National Congress，ANC)曾承諾不僅終止種族隔離制度，而且保證社會更公平正義，甚至達到社會主義水平。“非國大”這段更為激進的過往歷史正從我們的記憶中逐漸消失。難怪貧窮的南非黑人越來越激憤。
南非的這一面只是當下左翼不斷重復的故事中的一個版本。在群眾的熱情中，一個領袖或政黨被選舉出來，承諾一個“新世界”——但是之后，他們遲早會遇上關鍵性的兩難困境：被選者是敢于去觸動資本主義機制，還是決定“玩這場游戲”?如果他打破這些機制，那么他很快就會被市場波動、經濟混亂和其他因素所“懲罰”。這就是為什么不能簡單責怪曼德拉在終結種族隔離制度后放棄社會主義：他真的可以選擇嗎?走向社會主義真的是一個選項嗎?
曼德拉在終結種族隔離制度后放棄社會主義。他真的可以選擇嗎?走向社會主義真的是一個選項嗎?
嘲諷艾茵•蘭德(Ayn Rand，俄裔美國哲學家、小說家——觀察者網譯注)很容易，但她在小說《阿特拉斯聳聳肩》(Atlas Shrugged)中著名的“金錢頌”(Hymn to Money)中寫道：“當且僅當你發現錢是所有美好的根基時，你才會想要自我毀滅。當錢不再是人與人之間解決問題的方式時，一個人就會成為別人的工具。血，鞭子和槍支，或是美元。你選一個——沒有其他選擇。”難道馬克思沒有在他著名的理論中說過類似的話嗎?在商品全球化的情況下，“人與人的社會關系被物與物的關系所掩蓋”。
在市場經濟中，人與人之間的關系可以呈現出相互承認的自由與平等：統治不再是直接實施的、可見的。問題在于蘭德的言外之意：統治和剝削的聯系是注定存在的，唯一的選擇在于，這種聯系是直接還是間接的，任何其他選項都將如烏托邦般消散。然而，盡管如此，我們仍應謹記蘭德荒謬的意識形態主張中的一點真相：直接廢除私有財產和市場調控的交換，將導致生產過程缺乏穩固的社會調控形式，實質上必然使奴役和統治間的直接關系死灰復燃。如果我們僅僅廢除市場(包括市場剝削)，而沒有用一種適當的共產主義生產和交換的組織來加以替代，統治將伴隨報復和直接剝削重來。
反抗通常從抵抗壓迫性的“半民主體制”開始，就像2011年中東的情況一樣，用口號發動大批民眾，這些口號只能看作是為了取悅民眾，比如“民主”、“反腐”。但之后我們逐漸碰上更困難的選擇：反抗在直接目標上取得勝利的時候，我們就意識到那些真正煩擾我們的(不自由，恥辱，腐敗，缺乏體面生活)前景正在一種新的偽裝下繼續著。主導的意識形態使出全力阻止我們得出這一基本結論。他們開始跟我們說，民主自由是要付出代價的，我們還不夠成熟，不能期待從民主中得到太多。這樣，他們就責備起了我們的失敗：在一個自由的社會中——就像他們告訴我們的那樣——我們都是資本家，投資自己的生活，如果我們想要成功，就要在教育而非娛樂上花費更多。
從更直接的政治視角來看，美國外交政策制定了詳細的戰略，即如何將普遍的暴亂扭轉到可接受的議會制-資本主義，控制其破壞性，就像在種族隔離制度瓦解后的南非、馬科斯下臺后的菲律賓、蘇哈托下臺后的印度尼西亞及其他一些地方，他們都成功地做到了。而激進的解放政治幾乎同時面臨著最大的挑戰：在第一波熱潮結束后，如何推進下去，如何在不向“極權主義”誘惑這一大災難屈服的前提下邁出下一步?簡單地說，就是如何在曼德拉的基礎上走得更遠，并且不變成穆加貝。
如果想繼承曼德拉的遺產，我們應忘記那些紀念曼德拉的“鱷魚的眼淚”，把目光放在他沒有完成的承諾上。曼德拉在道德上、政治上無疑是偉大的，因而我們可以想象，在他生命的最后時刻，雖然也只是一個失落的老人，但他一定很清楚自己特別的政治成就以及被提升為全球英雄的榮譽是這一苦澀失敗的面具。他在全球的光輝，也正是他根本沒有打破世界權力秩序的標志。
（本文載于《紐約時報》網站2013年12月6日，原標題Mandela's Socialist Failure；觀察者網張苗鳳/譯）
(翻頁請看英文原文)
Mandela’s Socialist Failure
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
December 6, 2013, 2:15 pm
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.
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