Socialist South Africa

The Internationalist No. 36 January-February 2014 50¢ Break with the Tripartite Alliance Popular Front – Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! South Africa: Workers Slam ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime The August 2012 massacre of mine workers at Marikana marked a turning point in South African history, intensify- Alexander Joe/AFP ing class struggle and opening what could become a revolutionary period. If the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 drove home the murderous nature of the apartheid regime of white supremacy, Marikana laid bare the deadly reality of its successor, the neo-apartheid regime presided over by the African National Congress (ANC), which is still based on the super-exploitation of black labor. Sharpeville, with its toll of 69 black protesters killed and more than 18,000 activists arrested in the aftermath, produced an outpouring of mass disobedience of the notorious passbook laws, as well as the banning of the ANC and the start of armed resistance. We are now witnessing the political fallout of the point-blank police slaughter of 34 strikers at the Marikana mine, and the reverberations will be felt around the world. Its role as guarantor of racist capitalism exposed, the ANC’s governing alliance is beginning to come undone in the face of massive discontent among the vast black and non-white majority over the continued poverty, police brutality and exclusion. As South African workers direct their anger at their black capitalist rulers, the key to the outcome will be to forge a revolutionary Auto service workers, members of NUMSA, on strike in Johannesburg, 9 September 2013. workers party to fight for international so- ers union has been the object of a vilification continue to suffer poverty, unemployment of workers…. cialist revolution – a fight that starts now, not campaign by the ANC, SACP and COSATU. and inequality. “The ANC has been captured by the some time in the distant future. Otherwise, At the congress, NUMSA secretary general Barely a week later, the 1,200 delegates representatives of an enemy class. It has as always in the past, it will be the capitalist Irvin Jim declared that the union was “gat- at the NUMSA congress voted to break with adopted the strategic plan of that class. Its slave masters who will profit. vol” (fed up) with the attacks on it and would the ANC in no uncertain terms. The Declara- leadership has shown that it will not let From December 17 to 20, the National no longer support ANC candidates. tion issued by the congress states that: the small issue of democracy get in the Union of Metalworkers of South Africa NUMSA’s break came shortly after “… the leadership of the ANC and way of defending its control. As well as (NUMSA) held a special congress which the death of ANC leader and South African SACP is protecting the interests of white the continued poverty of the majority of the working class, the result of this has officially declared its break with the ANC, president Nelson Mandela, and the special monopoly capital and imperialism against been the slaughter of workers. and with the Tripartite Alliance – which congress was postponed in view of the offi- the interests of the working class. The ANC and SACP leadership defends the also includes the Congress of South Af- cial mourning period. For over a week, mil- “It is clear from this picture that the ownership and control of the mines, rican Trade Unions (COSATU) and the lions came out to view the casket, participate working class cannot any longer see the 1 banks and monopoly industries in the ANC or the SACP as its class allies in any South African Communist Party (SACP). in mass assemblies and line the streets for hands of white monopoly capital and meaningful sense.” The Metalworkers condemned the police the funeral procession in order to pay their imperialism…. The Declaration noted that “for more massacre at Marikana, while the SACP and respects to the man seen as the symbol of “That is why our comrades died as they than 20 years we have been urging our COSATU leaders defended the police and the fight against apartheid. But current ANC did at Marikana and de Doorns [where members to swell the ranks of the ANC and the government. Since then the Metalwork- president Jacob Zuma was roundly booed police shot down striking farm workers SACP,” but that “our existing strategy was and jeered by the thousands-strong crowd 1 NUMSA represents auto and steel workers, in January 2013]. It was not incompetence becoming outdated. Swelling the ranks has at the December 10 memorial meeting in Jo- while the NUM (National Union of Minework- on the part of the police. It was the merely resulted in delivering more working hannesburg’s soccer stadium. Many turned conscious, deliberate support, by the ers) had grown so close to the mine bosses that class victims, like lambs to the slaughter thumbs down and called for Zuma to resign armed forces of the state, for the interests at Marikana it called for the bloody suppression by the ANC’s bourgeois leadership.” of its own striking members. over pervasive corruption while the masses of shareholders and against the interests Consequently, the Congress “calls on COSATU to break from the alliance,” and stated that “NUMSA as an organization will Defend Wyatt McMinn, neither endorse nor support the ANC or any other political party in 2014.” NUMSA’s break with the Tripartite Defeat “Right to Slave”! . 5 continued on page 2 with ANC. This has provision of basic services is outrageously led to an eruption of deficient. But the masses of black South Af- popular unrest over the ricans still live in impoverished townships, last decade – over evic- shantytowns have spread, and the police still tions, police brutality, move in like an occupying military force to cutoffs and price hikes put down unrest. The massacre at Marikana of electricity, transport was only different in scope, as protesters costs, unemployment – in Khyelitsha, Grahamstown or Kennedy as South Africa has be- Road, Durban can confirm. come the “protest capi- The same “Randlords,” the owners of tal of the world.” But the mining conglomerates and banks who with NUMSA’s break, formed the core of the South African ruling this dispersed “rebellion class under apartheid, run the show today. Alon Skuy/The Times of Johannesburg Times Alon Skuy/The of the poor” could gain And this is also part of Nelson Mandela’s powerful working-class legacy. On his release from prison, he spoke organization and leader- of “a fundamental restructuring of our po- ship – and that spectre litical and economic systems to address the has South Africa’s rul- inequalities of apartheid” and nationalizing ers, white and black, the mines. But shortly after, as South African worried. economist Sampie Terreblanche explained The 1994 elections in his book, Lost in Transformation (2012), marked the end of for- Mandela started having secret meetings mal apartheid with its with Harry Oppenheimer, the retired head Marikana massacre, 16 August 2012. South Arican police pose with guns drawn over their rigid segregation, ex- of the Anglo-American Corporation and De victims. Then ANC authorities charged the victims with murder under apartheid-era law. clusion and denial of Beers Consolidated Mines, and in the end “Numsa will explore the establishment of basic rights, including the ANC leader agreed not to tamper with South Africa... a Movement for Socialism as the working voting, to the vast black majority (three- South African capitalism. continued from page 1 class needs a political organization quarters of all South Africans), as well as Another key factor was the collapse Alliance promises to be an earthquake in committed in its policies and actions to the discrimination against the coloured3 and of the Soviet Union, as a result of which, South African politics, and could even cost establishment of a socialist South Africa. Asian populations. But the elaborate legal according to SACP leader Ronnie Kasrils, the ANC its so-far overwhelming elec- Numsa will conduct a thoroughgoing superstructure was devised to secure a “doubt had come to reign supreme: we toral majority. With over 330,000 members, discussion on previous attempts to build regime of white supremacy based on the believed, wrongly, there was no other op- NUMSA is not only the largest trade union socialism.” superexploitation of black labor which tion” (Guardian [London], 23 June 2013). on the African continent, it has also been The question is, what is meant by existed long before the institution of formal Kasrils, the head of the ANC’s armed wing, looked to by hundreds of thousands of mem- “socialism,” and how do you get there? apartheid in 1948, and which survives es- Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Na- bers of other unions as the main leader of While the leaders of the National Union of sentially intact today. In fact, unemploy- tion), went on: working-class resistance to the increasingly Metalworkers, and many others in South ment has increased sharply in recent years, “From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the right-wing policies of the ANC government. Africa, accuse the SACP of abandoning the reaching 35% of the workforce; real wages ANC’s soul got under way, and was But more than that, the break puts the need struggle for socialism and instead admin- of workers have fallen, and the degree of eventually lost to corporate power: for a genuinely revolutionary workers party istering capitalism, they have not broken economic inequality is notably greater we were entrapped by the neoliberal 4 economy – or, as some today cry out, we front and center.

Load more