Free Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek Page A

for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him; rock stars, 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 are obfuscated in this celebratory vision. In South Africa today, the miserable life of the poor majority remains broadly the same as it was under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by growing insecurity, violence, and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class has been joined by a 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 being obliterated from memory. No wonder that anger is growing among the black poor.
    South Africa is here just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary Left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world”—then, sooner or later, it stumbles upon the key dilemma: should one dare to interfere with the capitalist mechanisms, or should one decide to “play the game”? If one chooses to disturb the mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” with 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 ever 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
Atlas Shrugged
: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of allgood, 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 about 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 or visible as such. What is problematic is Rand’s underlying premise: that the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, we 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 exchange, in the absence of concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (and so market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the Communist organization of production and exchange, domination will return with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.
    The general rule is that, when a revolt breaks out against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large numbers of people with slogans that can only be described as “crowd pleasers”—for democracy, against corruption, etc. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when therevolt succeeds in its immediate goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (social corruption, our un-freedom, humiliation, lack of prospects for a decent life) continues in a new guise. The ruling class here mobilizes its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. We are now told that democratic freedom brings with it 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