“… fifteen years more or less after the abolition of apartheid, the victory of Nelson Mandela’s African National Front and the much praised introduction of democracy, things have not changed so much compared to the past: the situation of South Africa’s proletarian class remains tragic in all senses and from all points of view. Amidst obsolete mines, non-existent maintenance, progressively worsening working conditions, could it be, then, that the problem is not skin colour, not one of “democracy against apartheid” but always and despite everything, in South Africa as elsewhere, one of class? And one that will thus require class perspectives and solutions?”
This is how, seven years ago, we concluded a short article reporting the rescue of three thousand two hundred South African miners, trapped for several days in one of the oldest and deepest gold mines in the country (a year before, again in South Africa, a similar “accident” had caused two hundred deaths) [1]. Ours were, as they are termed, “rhetorical questions”. The “problem” in South Africa had always been one of class: in a capitalist régime, “racism” and “racial segregation” are the ideological and juridical superstructures that serve to exploit wage labour - they are the expression of a deeper division between classes, a devastating isolation of the proletariat and harsh, repressive control.
The terrifying massacre of miners by the police in the democratic Republic of South Africa in mid August, near the Marikana platinum mine belonging to the English multinational Lonmin, some eighty kilometres from Johannesburg, was a tragic confirmation of this fact, recalling other massacres perpetrated at the height of the segregationist régime, such as those in Sharpeville in 1960 and in Langa in 1985. The official figures speak of 34 miners killed, at least seventy or so wounded (some seriously) and two hundred and fifty arrested: but, as always, behind these figures are concealed, unreported, the tragedies of whole families suddenly deprived of economic upkeep, in a situation that was already desperate to start with. The obscene massacre is far more serious than the raw figures betray and should revive the most profound hatred for the ruling capitalist class and its butchering mercenaries in proletarians of any latitude or longitude, of any language and any colour.
With 80% of the world’s reserves, South Africa is the leading producer and exporter of platinum, a precious metal used not only in jewellery but also in the production of automobile parts (catalytic exhausts): and Lonmin is the third largest producer of platinum in the world. Working conditions in these mines (as in others, of both precious and non-precious metals) [2] are extremely hard, wages are miserable and life in the shantytowns that spring up all around is on the borderline of survival. In this situation and following the example of their fellow workers in the plutonium mines of Impala in Rustenberg, protagonists of a victorious strike in January, in the first week of August the miners at Lonmin – whose avant-garde consists of the rock drillers with the task of cracking the rocks using pneumatic hammers (work that takes its high toll of illnesses, broken bones, amputated fingers and hands, atrocious deaths) – came out on an indefinite wildcat strike, demanding considerable rises (at least triple the 4000 rands a month they are paid today: around 480 dollars or a little less than 400 euros), shorter working hours and better living and working conditions – the basic claims of the working class movement. In response Lonmin (who complain of a drop in profits, sic!) threatened to fire 3 thousand miners. The latter did not allow themselves to be intimidated and persisted in their action: they gathered on the hills surrounding the mine singing “The fight, the fight, the fight will free us” [3] and grasping iron bars and machetes (many years of experience in clashes with the forces of law and order, in régimes of both apartheid and post-apartheid, had taught them that bare fists are not enough). At this point the police, who had arrived in large numbers in their anti-riot gear and with the support of armoured cars and water cannons, opened fire for some minutes, shooting wildly at eye level.
The wildcat strike, born spontaneously out of anger and exasperation, followed weeks of agitation both at Lonmin and in other mines (for example at Acquarius Platinum and, as stated, at Impala Platinum) as well as in other sectors of a proletarian class that has never, in all these years, ceased to demonstrate generously and energetically its will to fight against living and working conditions that are constantly worsening [4]. The strike was supported by the appearance in the field of the young Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), that came into being in 1988 out of a split with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the union that had been the protagonist of great battles in the past but which – with the end of segregation - has sided completely with the government and its economic policies and become the backbone of the powerful COSATU, the strong union congress which unites organizations from various sectors and takes the form of a real régime union: it is no coincidence that the NUM opposed the Marikana miners’ strike, even resorting to blacklegging which caused clashes – violent ones, too – between activists from both organizations. The AMCU positions itself as a more radical, grassroots organism, strongly criticizing the NUM (whose ex-president is on the board of Lonmin!), as well as the government constituted since 1994 by the African National Congress (many of whose ministers possess share packets in Lonmin!) and, in the course of recent years, has abundantly won over members from the NUM [5]. At the moment we do not possess sufficient facts to place the AMCU’s exact orientation and positions: certainly what is taking place here is an extremely violent stand-off between an institutional union and a union that intends carrying out action independently of the COSATU and the ANC.
Created in 1912, the African National Congress set itself up from the very beginning as a cross-class organization: a radical, bourgeois party committed to guiding the anti-segregationist movement while never moving beyond these limits [6]. Subsequently, when in 1994, after an intricate path of negotiations with the previous régime, the abolition of apartheid was achieved, the ANC won the elections and formed its own government, based on an alliance with the COSATU and the… South African “communist” party, which for some time had been acting as a reference point and ideological inspiration for the ANC and is thus jointly responsible for all the economic policies adopted.
In an article published in 1994, immediately after the “first democratic elections” in South Africa, we wrote: “As Marxists we would never have taken the ambitious and demagogic programme of nationalization and ‘redistribution of land’, loudly proclaimed at the time by the ANC, seriously: the relations of capital exist in a régime of nationalization, just as they do in a régime of privatization; salaried labour remains the same in the former as in the latter. It is nonetheless significant that the leading exponents of Mandela’s party have officially ‘converted’ to the thesis that it is no longer a question of ‘opposing the large business enterprises as such’ but at the most of introducing the usual anti-trust laws; that, far from weighing on the State balance with the faux frais (unproductive costs) of a ‘social’ policy, it is a question of ‘adjusting and gradually reducing the State’s running costs, so as to free resources for use in productive investments’ (see: Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1994)” [7]. Of course the problem reached far beyond the “simple” question of nationalization: the spirit of democratic and pious reform expressed by the “left” right up to Mandela deviated the proletarian class movement (which had fought fiercely not only against segregation) towards a miserable solution – and this must be pointed to as an authentic betrayal of the proletariat. In the light of the above, it comes as no surprise that, when the ANC, the COSATU and the South African “communist” Party (the so-called triple Alliance) form the government and poverty, hunger and repression plague the proletariat, formations such as the AMCU emerge. On the other hand, we are not interested in the dynamics of labels and self representations: the class struggle, the conflict between capital and labour, is incessant – the old mole that never ceases to dig, independently of what proletarians may think about themselves and what the organizations which they create on individual occasions may declare themselves to be.
At this point, however, let us take a short step backwards and ask ourselves: why apartheid and what was the path to post-apartheid? In 1990 this is what we wrote while the, not even very clandestine, negotiations were going on between DeKlerk’s all-white government and the ANC: “The apartheid system had basically been introduced by land property and mining capital, who exploited black labour reserves on a semi-slave basis: initially industrial capital took considerable advantage of this but now the time has come for industries to operate on the basis of ‘free’ labour, i.e. modern slavery in golden chains; their very development demands, though at the same time through gradual reforms, the establishment of racial equality at work and the launching of the right democratic slogans to make their dominion more secure, because less hateful at the level of race relations. This is a process that had already started off some years before and which aims to refine little by little (the estimated plan is for 5 years…) [in actual fact only four were sufficient] the more backward aspects of the South-African constitution, under added pressure from the foreign multinationals who were in favour of adapting the system to the situation of bourgeois society and economy and to the necessity, for example, of creating a vast internal market, making black labour mobile and no longer hampered by the internal passport and migrant workers system and drawing on a better qualified reserve of black labour.” And we added, as the umpteenth confirmation of Marxist theory: “at a given point in its development, the production organism generates a specific superstructure functional to a precise historical moment which will in turn be replaced by another superstructure responding to the needs of the next process of accumulation. The forms of production thus enter into conflict with the forces of production.” [8]
Four years later, when the process of democratic change had begun, with the ANC having triumphed at the elections and amongst the hymns of all true democrats to Mandela’s “rainbow nation”, we were in a position to write (not “prophets of doom” nor Cassandras, but materialists): “South Africa’s coloured proletariat will thus be placed – is already placed – before the crude reality of exploitation that is in no way mitigated by the presence of men with their same skin colour in the government and indeed in the direction of it; they will, like it or not, have to take the hard but crystal-clear direction of a relentless class struggle against a miserable salary and infamously excessive working hours, as well as against the trials of unemployment and under-employment. We white-skinned proletarians will have to fight, and shall fight, with them and for them, as they with us and for us.” [9]
South Africa is not as far away as it might seem on the world map, it is not a marginal country: for some time, before and after the fall of apartheid, it has been one of the essential links in the world chain of imperialism. What has happened in this summer of 2012 follows a script that has been repeated thousands and thousands of times over at every longitude and latitude, yesterday as today, and is unfortunately destined to be repeated again, if the world proletariat does not manage to extract a whole series of lessons from the obscene massacre of its black brothers: that the outcome of any social conflict, even if it were “only” to win rises and better working and living conditions, depends on the organized strength brought onto the battlefield – it is a question of power (“those who have iron have bread,” said Auguste Blanqui, one of the heads of the Paris Commune); that on the rocky path towards a return to general class struggle, the proletariat will have harsh clashes with all political and union formations, always ready to bar their way when they really come out to fight; that no government hesitates to take recourse to its cops to counter any attempt at questioning, even minimally, the relations between exploited and exploiters; that the State, be it democratic or fascist, with all its legal and illegal armed units, is the tool with which Capital and the ruling class maintain and defend their dominion.
Thus it is a question of power: of who has the power and defends it at the cost of bloodbaths, and who does not have it and must win it, organizing themselves in the immediate present to defend their living and working conditions and recognizing, at a political level, the need for a revolutionary guide, solidly based on a tradition and possessing a programme that has been historically verified and confirmed. The long 1990 article, to which we refer the reader for further details of all the related historical, political and economic issues, ended as follows: “To come into existence in South Africa, the bourgeois mode of production does not need a bourgeois revolution: it has already been solidly established there for well over a century. It can reform in a desperate effort to survive the waves of revolutionary rebellion that are crashing against it from all sides of the social substrata; but it cannot, thanks merely to a few rags and tatters of “egalitarian” reform, close its debts with its bloody past of labour exploitation. It can sweeten and maybe even some day abolish segregationist slavery but only in order to keep wage slavery alive and, if possible, gain a wider basis for it. As for the rest of the world, and indeed even more so there, the axis of the situation is the proletarian and communist revolution. The possibility of it exploding and destroying the pillars of capital will be decided by the birth, development and strongly centralized organization of the world communist party, in the context of a re-awakening of the world class struggle. We know that our objective is not close at hand; there is no time to lose in setting out along the path leading to it.” [10]
We have nothing to add to what we wrote twelve years previously – if not that, in the final accounts we will be presenting to a bourgeoisie as blood-seeking as it is useless, we shall be including the martyred bodies of our class brothers struck down on the hill of Marikana in South Africa.
[1] “Sud Africa: salvi i tremila minatori, resta il problema principale [South Africa: the three thousand miners rescued, the main problem remains]”, Il programma comunista, no.5/2007.
[2] South Africa is the world’s largest exporter, not only of platinum, but also of gold, manganese, chrome and vanadium; the second largest of antimonium, diamonds, fluorene and asbestos; the third largest of titanium, uranium and zirconium.
[3] New York Times, 16/8/2012.
[4] It should be remembered that, as well as the large black African contingent, the South African proletarian class consists of sectors defined “coloureds”, of Asians and of whites: unemployment is 30% amongst blacks, 22.30% for “coloureds”, 8.60% for Asians and 5.10% for whites (Source: Statistics South Africa – Economic Indicators for 2009–2010 by Year, Key Indicators and Month). To this can be added more data relating to the percentage of the population living below the poverty line: 31.3% in 2009 (according to the World Bank). As regards per-capita income, taking that of the white population as 100, 60.0 goes to Asian labour, 22.0 to “coloureds” and 13.0 to blacks (Source: Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid, OECD iLibrary). It can, moreover, be noted that according to a study in 2011 by the University of Cape Town, relating to the richest 10% of South Africa’s population, 40% of it consists of a black upper middle class: further proof of the fact that the problem is not one of colour but of class.
[5] See the Italian daily Il Manifesto, 19/8/2012.
[6] For a more detailed analysis, see “Rapporti fra classi e fra razze nel Sud-Africa [Relations between classes and races in South Africa]”, Il programma comunista, nos.13-14/1956, and “Sud Africa: Realtà e contraddizioni dell’apartheid [South Africa: reality and contradictions of apartheid]”, Il programma comunista, n.3/1990.
[7] “Sud Africa: I proletari sono appena all’inizio della loro lotta” [South Africa: the proletarians are only at the beginning of their battle]”, Il programma comunista, no.4/1994.
[8] “Sud Africa: Realtà e contraddizioni dell’apartheid [South Africa: Reality and contradictions of apartheid]”, cit. Also see “Le riforme in Sud Africa alla misura del capitalismo [Reforms in South Africa to suit capitalism]”, Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1990.
[9] “Sud Africa: I proletari sono appena all’inizio della loro lotta [South Africa: The proletarians are only at the beginning of their battle)”, cit.
[10] “Sud Africa: Realtà e contraddizioni dell’apartheid [South Africa: reality and contradictions of apartheid]” , cit.
International Communist Party