One of the more bizarre aspects of the media frenzy over the death of former South African President Nelson Mandela has been the obsessive focus on whether Mandela was ever a member of South Africa’s archane Communist Party. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn’t. Either way, he never seemed to be a Das Kapital-bashing disciple, realizing perhaps intuitively that communism would limit the freedoms of the masses as well as the rich, and he remained skeptical of instituting class warfare. Yet what is far more interesting – and relevant today – is Mandela’s uneasy relationship with capitalism, or rather, what he perceived capitalism to be.
Of all the inaccuracies and myths that surround South Africa’s former Apartheid government, the most persistent falsehood is that the Apartheid government was a purveyor of modern western capitalism. In part, the misnomer stems from the Apartheid government’s mistrustful, but symbiotic, relationship with the formerly English-owned mining houses. In part, it stems from its virulent anti-communism. In a world where the far left is often quick to characterize any anti-communist activity as “capitalist” this plays well. To be fair, the Apartheid government may well have been laboring under this misconception about itself too.
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