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| John Holloway |
Lineages
of freedom. I love the title of the colloquium, with its suggestion
of a discontinuous continuity between past and present. It makes me
think of Bob Marley: These songs of freedom, redemption songs,
redemption songs.
That’s
what it’s all about, isn’t it? Redemption. It’s the word that
keeps on coming back to me in South Africa. I know that there are
people in the room who were imprisoned and tortured in the struggle
for a better world. I am sure that many of you will have known people
who gave their lives in that struggle. And there must be a sense that
this is not what you fought for, that this is not what you dreamed
of. There have been great changes, of course, fundamental changes,
but I cannot believe that in the world you dreamt of, there would be
so much poverty beside so much wealth. I cannot believe that your
ambition for South Africa was that it would win first prize as being
the most unequal society in the world. I cannot believe that Marikana
was part of your dreams. There have been fundamental changes, but the
pain of capital is still there, the pain of a form of social
organisation that quite literally tears up the earth and destroys the
humans, animals and plants that live on it.
