在纳尔逊•曼德拉的最后二十年里，他被誉为楷模，克制着独裁统治的诱惑和反资本主义的态度，把南非从殖民主义的枷锁中解放出来。简言之，曼德拉不是穆加贝(津巴布韦总统——观察者网译注)，南非保留了多党民主制，媒体自由，经济蓬勃发展，与全球市场融洽接轨，排斥草率的社会主义试验。现在，随着曼德拉的去世，圣人般的睿智形象似乎被永远定格在那里：好莱坞有关于他的电影，扮演者摩根•弗里曼也曾在其他电影中饰演过上帝;摇滚明星、宗教领袖、运动员、政客(包括比尔•克林顿和菲德尔•卡斯特罗)都对曼德拉的逝世表示哀悼。
然而，这是故事的全部吗?有两个关键的事实被悼念活动所掩盖。大部分南非人都还很穷，与种族隔离时期一样，他们仍然生活在水深火热中;政治权利和公民权利的提升被日益严重的社会不安全感、暴力和犯罪抵销了。最主要的变化在于，原先处于统治地位的白种人现在加入了黑人精英。另外，人们还记得，过去的非洲人国民大会(African National Congress，ANC)曾承诺不仅终止种族隔离制度，而且保证社会更公平正义，甚至达到社会主义水平。“非国大”这段更为激进的过往历史正从我们的记忆中逐渐消失。难怪贫穷的南非黑人越来越激愤。
南非的这一面只是当下左翼不断重复的故事中的一个版本。在群众的热情中，一个领袖或政党被选举出来，承诺一个“新世界”——但是之后，他们迟早会遇上关键性的两难困境：被选者是敢于去触动资本主义机制，还是决定“玩这场游戏”?如果他打破这些机制，那么他很快就会被市场波动、经济混乱和其他因素所“惩罚”。这就是为什么不能简单责怪曼德拉在终结种族隔离制度后放弃社会主义：他真的可以选择吗?走向社会主义真的是一个选项吗?
曼德拉在终结种族隔离制度后放弃社会主义。他真的可以选择吗?走向社会主义真的是一个选项吗?
嘲讽艾茵•兰德(Ayn Rand，俄裔美国哲学家、小说家——观察者网译注)很容易，但她在小说《阿特拉斯耸耸肩》(Atlas Shrugged)中著名的“金钱颂”(Hymn to Money)中写道：“当且仅当你发现钱是所有美好的根基时，你才会想要自我毁灭。当钱不再是人与人之间解决问题的方式时，一个人就会成为别人的工具。血，鞭子和枪支，或是美元。你选一个——没有其他选择。”难道马克思没有在他著名的理论中说过类似的话吗?在商品全球化的情况下，“人与人的社会关系被物与物的关系所掩盖”。
在市场经济中，人与人之间的关系可以呈现出相互承认的自由与平等：统治不再是直接实施的、可见的。问题在于兰德的言外之意：统治和剥削的联系是注定存在的，唯一的选择在于，这种联系是直接还是间接的，任何其他选项都将如乌托邦般消散。然而，尽管如此，我们仍应谨记兰德荒谬的意识形态主张中的一点真相：直接废除私有财产和市场调控的交换，将导致生产过程缺乏稳固的社会调控形式，实质上必然使奴役和统治间的直接关系死灰复燃。如果我们仅仅废除市场(包括市场剥削)，而没有用一种适当的共产主义生产和交换的组织来加以替代，统治将伴随报复和直接剥削重来。
反抗通常从抵抗压迫性的“半民主体制”开始，就像2011年中东的情况一样，用口号发动大批民众，这些口号只能看作是为了取悦民众，比如“民主”、“反腐”。但之后我们逐渐碰上更困难的选择：反抗在直接目标上取得胜利的时候，我们就意识到那些真正烦扰我们的(不自由，耻辱，腐败，缺乏体面生活)前景正在一种新的伪装下继续着。主导的意识形态使出全力阻止我们得出这一基本结论。他们开始跟我们说，民主自由是要付出代价的，我们还不够成熟，不能期待从民主中得到太多。这样，他们就责备起了我们的失败：在一个自由的社会中——就像他们告诉我们的那样——我们都是资本家，投资自己的生活，如果我们想要成功，就要在教育而非娱乐上花费更多。
从更直接的政治视角来看，美国外交政策制定了详细的战略，即如何将普遍的暴乱扭转到可接受的议会制-资本主义，控制其破坏性，就像在种族隔离制度瓦解后的南非、马科斯下台后的菲律宾、苏哈托下台后的印度尼西亚及其他一些地方，他们都成功地做到了。而激进的解放政治几乎同时面临着最大的挑战：在第一波热潮结束后，如何推进下去，如何在不向“极权主义”诱惑这一大灾难屈服的前提下迈出下一步?简单地说，就是如何在曼德拉的基础上走得更远，并且不变成穆加贝。
如果想继承曼德拉的遗产，我们应忘记那些纪念曼德拉的“鳄鱼的眼泪”，把目光放在他没有完成的承诺上。曼德拉在道德上、政治上无疑是伟大的，因而我们可以想象，在他生命的最后时刻，虽然也只是一个失落的老人，但他一定很清楚自己特别的政治成就以及被提升为全球英雄的荣誉是这一苦涩失败的面具。他在全球的光辉，也正是他根本没有打破世界权力秩序的标志。
（本文载于《纽约时报》网站2013年12月6日，原标题Mandela's Socialist Failure；观察者网张苗凤/译）
(翻页请看英文原文)
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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