Red-baiting, used to smear individuals and organizations, remains the unofficial religion in capitalist America. Yet little is said about the role socialism played in building a strong labor movement and creating an unshakable anti-war movement.

Not only is this part of U.S. history whitewashed, so is the repression of dissidents before and after McCarthy. Between 1919 and 1920 some 10,000 people were rounded up and thrown in jail during the Palmer raids, notorious for their exceptional brutality.

During the 1920’s, local police departments formed official “Red Squads”, where police intelligence units working with business elites would conduct extensive surveillance; raid meetings, ransack offices and instill fear in workers attempting to unionize. The message was clear: anyone who considered joining a socialist group would be met with unyielding violence.

The war on this idea intensified in 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began targeting high profile public officials and members of the entertainment industry who were alleged to be Red. Anti-communism in the 1940’s and 1950’s reached such a degree of terror that 5,000 communists were forced to flee the country, and more than 1,000 went to prison.

In this edition of The Empire Files Abby Martin exposes not only the oft-ignored history of the American Left, but examines how the Empire remains just as vociferous in its attempts to snuff out any and all socialist traditions.

America’s Unofficial Religion — The War On An Idea

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When Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, the outpouring of praise from the political elite and establishment media around the world was overwhelming. In larger-than-life terms, Mandela was lionized and romanticized as the world’s most admired human being.

In some ways, such praise is encouraging in our age when the wealthy and powerful, usually lacking any admirable values, are held up by their mass media as our success stories. In a world with such dehumanizing, violent, and unjust images and unworthy role models, the overwhelming praise for Mandela is hopeful. His was a life of dedicated struggle for freedom, self-sacrifice, suffering, courage, and admirable moral, economic, and political values.

In other ways, such praise is hollow, hypocritical, self-serving, and troubling, especially when uttered by many who condemned Mandela during his lifetime of struggles for freedom and who continue to uphold the most anti-Mandela priorities and values. The powerful, lavish in their praise for Mandela, conveniently fail to mention how our economic and political elite favored white apartheid South Africa and classified Mandela as a “terrorist.” During the Nixon Administration, the Kissinger Doctrine singled out white supremacist, apartheid South Africa as one of America’s pivotal allies. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed the anti-apartheid divestment movement, despised the “terrorist” Mandela and opposed his release from prison. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense and later Vice President under George Bush, was extreme in expressing his contempt for Mandela, viciously labeling him a terrorist who should not be freed.

In general, those with corporate economic, political, and military power in the U.S. identified with the anti-Mandela white power elite in South Africa, who were pro-Western, anti-Communist, and provided access to South Africa’s diamonds and other vast economic resources and their exploited labor. Indeed, the elite professing current admiration for Mandela conveniently fail to note that he remained on the U.S. terrorist list until 2008, even while he served as President of South Africa’s first multiracial democratic government.

The establishment now praises Mandela by emphasizing his great humanity and his ability to forgive his enemies, even those who imprisoned him for 27 years. Yet it conveniently omits his radical critique of U.S. and other unjust relations of domination, corporate capitalism, imperialism, inequality and exploitation, militarism and war making, racism and other forms of oppression.

It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed “the struggle is my life.” In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses.

What exacerbates this problem is the global yearning of so many who suffer, including many oppressed and impoverished South Africans, to regard the very human leader as a kind of Messiah figure. In fairness, Mandela also contributed to this celebrity transformation, especially during the last two decades of his life. Partially based on very practical calculations, but enhanced by some personality weaknesses, Mandela, for all of his integrity, enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and the powerful.

Therefore, in assessing the significance of Nelson Mandela for us today, we are confronted with many contradictory questions: Which Nelson Mandela? Do we accept the disempowering narrative in which Mandela is celebrated as a kind of Messianic leader who will save us and overcome widespread injustice? Or do we accept a Mandela narrative more consistent with how he actually viewed his struggles as a remarkable but flawed human being; a complex narrative we can selectively appropriate in ways that are contextually relevant to our social justice struggles?

Mandela was primarily a revolutionary, a freedom fighter for equality and justice. As he developed as a freedom fighter, he developed his remarkable capacity for self-control, controlling his emotions, self-discipline, strength of will, focus, and seeing the world with its injustices clearly so that one could respond intelligently and most effectively.

Mandela also emphasized the importance of core principles, of which one could then work out appropriate tactics and strategy. He was a radical egalitarian who believed in the core principle that everyone should have equal rights. During the 1980s while in prison and after his release on February 11, 1990, he focused on the core belief that South Africa should become a multiracial, democratic, constitutional, unified nation with a one-person, one-vote basis.

Although he experienced so much racism, classism, exploitation, humiliation, and inhumanity, Mandela believed that human beings are basically good, which was central to his remarkable focus on forgiveness. Not only are human beings basically good, but if you approach them as if they are, it will more likely bring out the best in them.

In contrast to our dominant Western view of the separate individual with one’s individualistic orientation, Mandela emphasized the basic interconnectedness and unity of life. This is often expressed through the African concept of Ubuntu: I am an integral part of a meaningful whole, and I am human only in relation to others. This belief system was part of the tribal decision-making process of Mandela’s youth in which group consensus was valued over conflict; in his view of his African National Congress as a collective, in which others were “comrades” and part of a unified community; and his emphasis on restorative justice, depersonalizing evil, and struggling for freedom and equality in which each one of us can realize our true interconnected unity.

Although Mandela should be seen as a freedom fighter in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, who spent 21 years in South Africa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he did not fully endorse their views of nonviolence. Mandela personally disliked violence, but he disagreed with earlier African National Congress policies upholding nonviolence starting with its founding in 1912; the position of Chief Albert Luthuli, the proponent of nonviolence and head of the ANC, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, as was Mandela in 1993; and the philosophies of Gandhi and King, both of whom he greatly admired. For Mandela, nonviolence is not an absolute principle, philosophy, or way of life. In different contexts, where nonviolence is not possible or effective, the use of violence may be justified.

Nelson Mandela’s real legacy raises difficult questions about the contexts within which Mandela and we live, and how they reveal limitations of what we can achieve. These contextual power structures and relations are both limiting and enabling. From his youth and throughout his life, Mandela was willing to take big risks, defy authority, challenge or evade status quo limitations, and radically change his own positions. But there were always real economic, political, military, cultural, and historical limitations on his remarkable achievements. In other words, in dealing with the real world, and not some utopian world of his imagination, Mandela had many personal and political setbacks, and he was necessarily limited in the extent to which he and his comrades could reshape their South African world in ways that reflected his vision.

It is certainly open to debate as to how Nelson Mandela understood the changing limits throughout his life, and whether he redefined his positions in the most adequate ways. A small sample of such topics on contextual limits would include the following: Mandela’s earlier anti-white, Africanist view of the African National Conference as only open to blacks and his later formulations of a multiracial ANC and South Africa; his earlier anti-Communist views and exclusion of Communists from the ANC and his later embrace of important Communists as among his mentors and closest comrades in the ANC; his conclusion that policies of nonviolence had become ineffective and suicidal, with his launching of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the Spear of the Nation) in 1961 as the arm of the ANC dedicated to armed struggle directed at weakening the hold of the white apartheid regime; his conclusion while in prison that the liberation forces could not defeat the white racist regime through armed struggle; his subsequent decision, defying the ANC positions on negotiating and on collective leadership, that he would negotiate on his own with representatives of the white power structure; and most controversially, his secret meetings and negotiations with the most powerful white economic leaders after his release from prison that led to radical shifts in his own values and policies.

The ongoing debate often focuses on what limits necessitated changes in values, priorities, and policies and which changes were not necessary but reflected disastrous shifts, concessions, and even betrayals. This is significant in terms of Mandela’s ineffectiveness in realizing many of his major goals during his Presidency. It is especially significant when examining Mandela’s post-apartheid, independent South Africa with growing class inequality, incredible poverty and frustration and violence among the black masses, continuing white power and privilege, and the rapid emergence of a corrupt, wealthy, black elite.

Through his secret negotiations with the white power elite, Mandela accepted loan arrangements with the International Monetary Fund and its structural adjustment requirements, endorsed what has been labeled as “the U.S. Consensus Plan,” and adopted policies of neoliberalism promoted by globalized corporate capitalism. The results for the overwhelming majority of South Africa have been disastrous.

In fairness, the situation that confronted Mandela was very complex and daunting with South Africa’s large debt; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aggression of triumphalist globalized capitalism; the fact that Mandela and the ANC were part of a freedom movement with limited knowledge of economics and of the politics of running a nation; and, most importantly, Mandela’s understandable immediate priority of avoiding a likely civil war, with an incredible bloodbath, and creating a unified, multiracial, democratic nation that would not repeat the patterns of extreme divisiveness, dictatorship, tribalism, religious hatred and violence, and genocide found throughout Africa.

It is easy to second guess and have a critical analysis in hindsight, recognizing what has happened to South Africa and the globalized world, but it is fair to ask whether Nelson Mandela was pressured, flattered, and seduced by those with dominant power in ways that greatly sabotaged and subverted his vision, core values, and priorities, often expressed upon his release from prison and to the end of his life. Mandela is often praised for adopting a more “mature” and realistic “pragmatism,” but questions remain as to whether he compromised too much and unwisely gave away concessions that were not pragmatically necessary. Did he give such a high priority to overcoming the fears of whites and winning over their trust that he deemphasized the needs of the disadvantaged masses and what was needed for radical changes in the unjust power relations?

“Apartheid” is a Dutch Afrikaans word in South Africa meaning “separateness.”  It was the name used for an economic, political, legal, and social system of the separation and control of black Africans and other nonwhites by the dominant white minority. It finally became the official system of apartheid or “separate development” of the Afrikaner National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

Educating ourselves about the system of apartheid, showing solidarity with the liberation movement in South Africa and throughout the world, and exposing U.S. and University of Maine complicity in profiting from apartheid became major issues at UMaine, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for a decade. In 1982, the University of Maine (and the Maine System) agreed to divest all of their holdings in corporations and banks doing business in South Africa (one-third of the principle portfolio). We became one the first ten universities in the U.S. to divest completely. It took six more years of intense organizing and struggle before the semi-private University of Maine Foundation agreed to divest its large holdings in apartheid South Africa. We had the sense of a spectacular, rare, significant, and meaningful victory.

At this celebratory event, I read some of Mandela’s heroic and defiant speech at the Ravonia Trial in 1964 before his imprisonment. This included his words that had so inspired us, proclaiming that he was prepared to die for freedom: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.” Mandela continued: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

In 1990, after his dramatic release from prison, Mandela went on a tour of the United States that included being honored at a huge evening gathering at Yankee Stadium in New York. A group of us, who had been anti-apartheid activities for many years, gathered during the day at a church for workshops and celebrations. Suddenly, to our great surprise, Nelson Mandela appeared, much to the overwhelming tearful and joyful responses of the activists. I’ll always remember his words. “Tonight, all of the famous influential politicians and dignitaries will praise me. However, I want you to know that I’ll never forget who my real friends are, those who struggled all those years against the apartheid system and for my freedom.” In the last years of his life, Mandela made similar kinds of statements.

While preparing several Nelson Mandela talks after his death and in writing this article, it struck me how most students and community members easily admire Mandela and his message and genuinely believe in equality, freedom, democracy, and the need to overcome the injustices and oppressions of economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. But we feel powerless, are so easily discouraged, and are often cynical. When one begins to appreciate what Mandela went through, his suffering and sacrifice and long struggle, it really puts into perspective how easily we become discouraged, feel hopeless, and give up.

Mandela leaves us with a legacy of hope; that even in the darkest of times, we can live meaningful value-based lives of integrity and bring about dramatic, qualitative changes in the unjust status quo. Mandela shows us that we can live lives of admirable courage, even when we have deep fears and insecurities, as he often had. In an age when we are socialized to desire instant rewards and gratifications, Mandela teaches us the necessary value of disciplined will power and perseverance, as evidenced in the title of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and in his frequent declarations that we must view what we are doing in the long run. Mandela shows us the importance of having worthy principles, of clarifying what we really believe, and then, as he quoted Gandhi, “Be the change you seek.”

In an age when I am socialized to view myself as separate, isolated I-me, egotistic individual, who lives in an adversarial world of win-lose competitions and learns to calculate what is in my own narrow self-interest, Mandela teaches us that such aggressive self-interested individualism is false and destructive; that I am really an integral part of interconnected unified wholes in which others are a necessary part of who I am and how I can live a meaningful life.

It is now up to us to understand, appreciate, and selectively appropriate what is of lasting value in Mandela’s vision, values, and ideals and to contextualize his legacy in ways that inspire us, give us hope, and inform our lives as integral to an action-oriented interconnected movement working for a much better world.

Doug Allen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine. He is Coordinator of the Marxist and Socialist Studies Program at UMaine, and he has lectured and published extensively on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.

Photo by Flickr user Emanuele Bertuccelli

(A quick note to US readers: left and right in this piece do not refer to the American liberal-conservative spectrum – both of which are considered neoliberal – but to the broader left-right spectrum as traditionally conceived, ranging from far-left communism/socialism to far-right fascism.)

It’s been an eventful few weeks for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), also known as the Zapatistas, midway through their 20th anniversary year.

First, Jose Luis Solís López, also known as “Compañero Galeano”, was murdered by a paramilitary group with ties to the Mexican government, which also injured fifteen other Zapatistas and destroyed a school, clinic and water system in the same attack. The attack then prompted the Zapatistas to change strategies, with well-known spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos stepping down.

These developments serve to remind us of the EZLN’s status as, in the words of Chris Hedges, “the most important resistance movement of the last two decades” – important enough to warrant the rather violent attention of the Mexican government and its paramilitary associates.

The EZLN, a group based in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, launched an armed rebellion against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994 as an act of protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which entered into effect on the same day. However, instead of attacking the Mexican state and society and causing endless bloodshed, the Zapatistas set up a system of self-governance in the territory it controlled, creating autonomous communities each with its own health clinic and schools to fill the void that the Mexican government had actively sought to widen in the interests of US and Canadian multinational corporations.

What the Zapatistas demonstrate is a vision of the notion articulated in the motto of the World Social Forum: another world is possible. They provide evidence that contradicts the belief that the status quo under neoliberal capitalism, in which the haves have it all and the have-nots are left to fend for themselves, is not only the best system but indeed the only viable system. The Zapatistas represent a victory for the oppressed peoples of the world over the powerful political and economic interests that rule over them. But more importantly, they represent a victory for the values of egalitarianism, compassion and solidarity – what I call the left-wing ethos. A victory over the idea that those who rule have the divine right to further their own interests, regardless of the consequences for the rest of humanity – an attitude that epitomizes what it means to be “right-wing”.

Marko Attila Hoare boils down the left-right spectrum to a simple distinction: that “the left supports the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor while the right opposes it”. But we can remove the entire spectrum from politics entirely to expose the values that underlie them: lefties value social equality, whereas righties value social hierarchy. Why, though? The answer lies in our individual worldview. As a self-identified lefty, I consider it more than possible for all of us to peacefully coexist in the world and have all of our common needs met, if (and only if) that’s the goal that we all work together to try to achieve. In a left-wing worldview, it’s therefore neither necessary nor ethical for us to undermine others in order to benefit ourselves. In other words: compassion, not competition. Without claiming complete objectivity, a right-wing worldview revolves around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world in which the best we can do is fend for ourselves and get our share before someone else takes it.

Human history has been almost entirely dominated by the right-wing worldview. It’s been an endless cycle in which privileged groups have taken turns dominating each other in a seemingly eternal battle between the powerful and the powerless. From the imperial conquests of the ancient world through European colonialism, the two World Wars and Soviet communism to modern neoliberal capitalism, it’s always been the same story, flowing through different chapters but reaching the same inevitable conclusion: Oligarchy. It’s a story familiar to the Zapatistas as well as countless other sites of confrontation between the haves and the have-nots in recent years. The hierarchical, conflict-ridden relationship today between those who rule the world and those who are ruled, between corporate bosses and workers, between autocrats and their citizens, between the rich and the poor, is a continuation of this cycle of domination.

The right-wingers among us will assert that history simply reflects human nature, that it is in our nature to be maliciously selfish rather than compassionate, that this is the best we can do, or even that there’s nothing wrong with the world we’ve created. But their argument fails to acknowledge that the dominant worldview of the past has created the world we know today. As an example, the domination of the indigenous populations of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania by European invaders and colonizers was not an inevitable result of human nature, but rather a product of widespread extreme right-wing beliefs such as Manifest Destiny and the white man’s burden. Similarly, the dominant worldview of the present will determine the world of tomorrow. A child raised in a society that values getting ahead at all costs is encouraged is far more likely to act accordingly than one raised in a society that values empathy and compassion. The dominant worldview in a society is therefore not inherent in human nature but in fact reinforces itself.

Right-wing theorists have a crucial role to play in promoting their worldview, too. “Realist” international relations scholars, capitalist economists, or simply those at the top of the social hierarchy love to tell us how it’s in our nature to always act in self-interest. They tell us that “greed is good” and that we all collectively benefit from constantly undermining each other, as ludicrous as that may sound. Yet, for the most part, even despite their contempt for those below them in the social hierarchy, even right-wingers behave in an incredibly left-wing manner towards those closest to them. And that’s because humans organized themselves into what we nowadays call “societies” precisely so that we could all benefit from being interdependent. That interdependence required us to develop compassion to allow us to survive in a society. The “savage” who undermines and betrays everyone he or she comes into contact with doesn’t survive for very long and, sociopaths aside, doesn’t find much happiness either. Surely we as a species are capable of applying that same logic to our everyday actions in today’s world so that we can all thrive at the same time instead of striving to be the “last man standing”?

Roman Krznaric couldn’t have put it any better: we need an empathy revolution. We need to turn the right-wing world that we live in into a left-wing one in which we recognize our fellow human beings as worthy of a livelihood and worthy of happiness and, in return, receive the same recognition. As the economic crisis in Greece goes to show, humans are capable of compassion even in the most desperate of situations: rather than stealing from each other, many Greeks are stepping in to provide the services that their government has failed to deliver and those that some of their compatriots can no longer afford, from food to medical services to street lighting – all for free. Similar systems have been devised in Serbia as well as in Macedonia, where numerous bakeries have introduced “solidarity baskets” to allow customers to buy an extra bun or piece of bread to leave to those who can’t afford to eat. And many customers indeed comply.

But showing empathy on our part only does half the job. While it spares those around us from our own potential malice, what it doesn’t do is liberate ourselves from those who have their hands around our necks. That involves critically examining and rethinking the false ideologies and pseudo-theories invoked by the powerful for the sole purposes of justifying their own dominating behaviour. After all, ideologies are all too often used as pretenses to mask the hidden agendas of those who assert them rather than a reflection of the values that they truly believe – in other words, purposeful bullshit. We mustn’t forget how the left-wing idea of communism was employed by self-described revolutionaries to justify right-wing oligarchic tyranny. Similarly, we can’t afford to look away when libertarians cite the dogma of enriching big businesses at the cost of everyone else, or when rich countries proclaim free trade to justify infiltrating the economies of developing countries. We’ve been raised to regard Soviet-style communism as tyranny and Western capitalism as freedom, but we need to recognize both for what they are: systems of oppression backed up by pseudo-theories that have no empirical basis and only serve those who preach them.

The empathy revolution needs a theoretical and social component. Neither pacifism nor confrontation can do the job alone. We need to channel our discontent into action by adopting the autonomist ethos of the Zapatistas to build the society we want. We need to form cooperatives and make use of cryptocurrencies, local currencies, open source, open knowledge, peer-to-peer practices, the sharing economy and countless other methods of grassroots social and economic organization the mainstream media doesn’t want us to hear a word about. What these methods all have in common is that they’re all built on the basis of cooperation and collaboration rather than malice and treachery – exactly what society needs and what the oligarchs don’t want.

Modern society is diseased and needs treatment. It’s only when we renounce one-upmanship in favour of cooperation and collaboration that we’ll be able to construct a society not for the few at the top, but for all of us. After all, isn’t fulfilling our mutual needs the whole point of even living in a society? It’ll require a good deal of empathy and creativity, as well as plenty of critical thinking to distinguish truth from pseudo-theory and other purposeful bullshit. Left-wing and right-wing are no longer a question of politics, but a question of social values and social justice. The right-wing worldview has failed us, and as the Zapatistas have shown, another world is certainly possible. It’s time to recognize that, for the purposes of redeeming ourselves from perpetual oligarchy, left is right.

Written by Ming Chun Tang, photo by flickr user aeneastudio

http://clearingtherubble.wordpress.com/

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Jacobin Magazine’s Bhaskar Sunkara on Breaking the Set

How the Zapatistas’ Success Threatens Global Status Quo

MEDIA ROOTS – On this episode of Media Roots Radio, Abby and Robbie Martin talk about the LAPD’s manhunt against Chris Dorner, the subsequent cover-up of his death and police thuggery; how 9/11 and Ron Paul coalesced the divide between libertarians and leftists and caused people to rally behind core issues, the corporate co-option and transmogrification of the Ron Paul movement and the current divide growing between the two factions of anti-establishment political ideologies.

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