Author: Jonathan Matthew Smucker
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Recapture the Flag (new post at Beautiful Trouble)
Andrew Boyd and I have a new post at Beautiful Trouble: Recapture the Flag. Check it out!
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Strategic logic falls on deaf ears
Strategic logic falls on deaf ears; upon ears that have heard enough strategic logics. From birth through youth, daily we are barraged with appeals to buy sugar cereal, candy, toys, and the latest gadgets. And before long we learn the essence of an elaborate manipulative logic whose central goals are private profit and power. We […]
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Boring ramble about levels and units of analysis for examining political contention
Note: The word “boring” is the first word in the header; if you read this and are bored, you have only yourself to blame! For practical shorthand we treat groups as if they had coherent singular wills. A political group navigates a terrain—distinct and external to itself, ostensibly—that it finds itself situated within, in order […]
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Let the culture have Mandela
Originally published December 10, 2013 at Waging Nonviolence.
A screenshot of Apple’s homepage. (WNV/Jonathan Matthew Smucker)Nelson Mandela’s legacy is not the exclusive property of the revolutionary Left, and we should not want it to be. Bob Herbert and many others are certainly right to insist on the inclusion of Mandela’s revolutionary content in the popular story told about him. This is not at all to disagree with such insistence, but to add a fine point: It is important that we who are involved in social justice movements understand that Mandela wanted the popular culture to embrace him.
Moreover, Mandela wanted to be popularly embraced precisely because he was a revolutionary. As “a revolutionary committed to the wholesale transformation of his society,” Mandela understood very well that toppling the Apartheid regime would depend both on a strong fighting core and also a broad and unlikely alignment of social forces. Winning over such broad alignment is hardly a matter of proving how revolutionary you are. It depends upon many critical factors, including telling a popular moral story, raising expectations and demonstrating skillful leadership. Each of these aspects undermined the ruling regime, while bolstering the aligned opposition, over the course of a protracted struggle. In the case of the anti-Apartheid struggle, winning allies was perhaps especially important.
What can be hard to grasp is that revolutionary leaders like Mandela are often quite okay with using — and even themselves being — ambiguous symbols. As an ambiguous catalyzing symbol, Mandela was able to move whole swaths of society that would not have signed up for a full revolutionary platform had it been presented as a laundry list or manifesto (or a broadsheet sold at the periphery of a protest).
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Mandela round-up
Thanks to Tej for this roundup of analyses re: Mandela. Articles by: Ariel Dorfman Barbara Ransby Bill Fletcher Jr. Bill Keller Bob Herbert Breyten Breytenbach Dara Kell Desmond Tutu Francis Njubi Nesbitt Gary Younge Jelani Cobb Jonathan Matthew Smucker Kate Doyle Griffiths-Dingani Leonard Peltier Melissa Harris-Perry Nicholas Kristof Patrick Bond Peter Beinart Robin D.G. Kelley […]
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I’m posting at Waging Nonviolence
Hello regular readers. I’ll be posting some articles at Waging Nonviolence. I’ll still be posting my more sub-par and off-topic memos here, so don’t remove it from your bookmarks. My first post is up today: Let the culture have Mandela Check it out!
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 