Free Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Page A

sites. The attacks took an inevitabletoll on unarmed white civilians. A 1983 MK guerrilla attack left nineteen dead. A 1986 raid killed three and injured seventy-three. 8 Kasrils was unrepentant. Blacks, he pointed out, paid a far higher price. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the apartheid state.
    Kasrils, a stocky bull of a man, argued that all rebels are driven by an instinctive compassion, concern for others, and a tendency toward “standing up for the underdog.” These impulses are often present in children, he said, but they are muted or crushed by the institutions of social control, including the family and school. Kasrils, although an atheist, said he saw the rebel in Jesus Christ, as well as in the thunderous denunciations of evil and oppression by the Hebrew prophets of the Bible. He said that those who endure oppression, such as Mandela, and rise up to resist are better described as revolutionaries. The rebel, he said, is one who often enjoys certain “liberties” but who is “prepared to give up his class or her class, or tribe.” Rebels, he said, turn their back on their own.
    Kasrils spoke about a discussion he had on the nature of the rebel with Jack Simons, a retired university professor who was teaching ANC recruits in Angola and who had been a leader in the South African Communist Party before it was outlawed in 1950.
    “Unconventional thought is a force for development,” Simons told Kasrils. “It is wrong to suppress it. The likes of you and I were thrown to the lions in Roman times and burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages as heretics.”
    It was in post-apartheid South Africa that Kasrils fully realized Simons’s wisdom. Kasrils’s relentless quest for political and economic justice eventually turned him into a fierce critic of the two organizations to which he had dedicated himself for fifty years—the African National Congress and the Communist Party. The failure of these two organizations to ameliorate the suffering of the poor, the rampant corruption that he said exists within the leadership of the ANC, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012, in which thirty-four striking miners were gunned down by the South African Police Service—the country’s most lethal single assault on unarmed civilians since the 1960 Sharpeville massacre—left him alienated, once again, from the centers of power. 9 Camus observed that “every revolutionary [who achieves power] ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.” 10
    “I have to speak up,” Kasrils said. “It’s deep within me.”
    Kasrils said that the ANC’s fatal mistake, which he concedes was partly his fault, was its decision during the transition to power in 1994 to shelve its socialist economic agenda, known as the Freedom Charter. Written in 1955, the charter had wide popular appeal. It demanded the end of the exploitation by the white oligarchic elite, who treated black laborers as serfs on farms, in mines, and on factory floors. It called for the right to work, freedom of expression, access to decent housing and land for all South Africans, and the sharing of South African wealth, especially its mineral resources. Banks, industries, and mines were to be nationalized.
    Kasrils and other ANC leaders believed that they could deal with economic injustice later. They were fearful of defying Western imperialism and, as Kasrils put it, “neoliberal global economy market fundamentals.” But the ANC’s capitulation to global pressure to adopt a free market economy has proved to be a disaster. South Africa continues to be one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Whites, although they number less than 10 percent of the nation’s population, earn 7.7 times more on average than their black counterparts. Only a few thousand of the country’s 41 million blacks earn more than $5,000 a year. It is apartheid by another name. 11 “[A] true rebel would not have accepted that,” Kasrils said.

    T he goal of the counterrevolutionary is