In another article, we give an account of the French intervention which developed from mid-January onwards in Mali: it demonstrates that, as we had previously pointed out, the “critical areas” are multiplying under pressure from the worldwide crisis and that Africa is one of them. Meanwhile, however, news arrives from one end of the Continent to the other of the indomitable fighting spirit of a proletariat that is determined to set a high price on its scalps.
In Tunisia, where for many years strong social movement has been simmering (it was the starting point for the proletarian uprisings of 2011 which, before being deviated into the dead ends of democratic and petit-bourgeois claims, gradually boiled over into other countries on the Mediterranean’s southern shores), for some months now the working class has taken up the struggle again, demonstrating that no “change of régime” can “free” the proletariat from class oppression. Unemployment, social exclusion and the cost of living are increasing daily to an alarming degree (especially in the centre and south of the country where unemployment stands at between 25.3 and 26.1%; in Tunisi it is 19%), the proletarian neighbourhoods plunge into decline and neglect, tension grows and the now decades-long tradition of organization and conflict is still alive and clearly to be seen.
Last November in Siliana, a town of 25 000 inhabitants, 130 km. south of Tunisi, there were violent clashes with the forces of law and order during a general strike, with over three hundred wounded amongst the demonstrators, and these were followed by equally violent clashes with the paramilitary forces of the “Leagues in defence of the revolution”. In Gafsa, the production of phosphates, an important resource for the Tunisian economy, is more or less at a standstill due to strikes and sit-ins; in Sidi Bouzid, where the spark of revolt caught fire two years ago, strikes and protests follow on one another’s heels. The apparatus of repression, transferred lock, stock and barrel from the old régime to the new (having, if anything, been perfected, as befits a… democratic régime), hurled itself against workers and union activists, equipped with the full range of torture and murder, rape and “disappearances in prison”. This is sustained by the “ideological repression” operated by the forces of Islam which – as we have pointed out several times – fill the same counter-revolutionary function (in a religious version) as classical social-democracy. Subsequently, towards the end of January in Qairouan a large demonstration by the unemployed turned into a night of urban guerrilla warfare, violently repressed by the forces of law and order, resulting in many wounded and hundreds of arrests.
If we move to the other end of the Continent, to South Africa, the outlook is no different. Indeed. If the Marikana miners’ massacre came after a long period of agitation, harsh clashes inside the institutional unions and against a government which, beneath its democratic and “rainbow” façade, has continued the work of repression dating back to times of racial segregation, since then demonstrations of the miners’ enduring will to fight have not been lacking (and the miners are the core of the South-African proletariat: we must remember that the mining sector employs 500 thousand workers directly and just as many indirectly), along with other segments of the working class, but also impoverished sectors of the rest of the population.
The economic crisis is striking down victims also here – the Continent’s strongest imperialism. In mid-January 2013, the vast majority of the 58 thousand miners at the Khomanani, Thembelani and Tumela plants, belonging to Anglo-American Platinum (Amplats), a branch that owns 80% of the British mining giant Anglo-American and extracts 40% of the world’s platinum, came out on strike when faced with the threat of lay-offs for 14 thousand of them, as part of a wide-ranging restructuring project in the whole sector of platinum, of which South Africa is the world’s number one producer. The working conditions in the mining camps are dreadful: deeper and deeper excavations have to be made in extremely narrow and badly ventilated shafts and the costs of maintenance and modernization, particularly in times of crisis, are “unproductive”, a dead weight to be got rid of… The platinum mining sector which supplies the car industry (and not only jewellers!) is feeling the effects of the worldwide crisis in the automobile sector and the progressive increase in the cost of electrical power.
The bosses’ slogan can only be “higher productivity and lower costs, to become more competitive on the world market” = sacking thousands of workers. Here as elsewhere. Other restructuring operations loom on the horizon in other industries and mining sectors, with unemployment that already affects a quarter of the South-African population. Again in mid-January the vineyard workers (yes, South-African wine!) and the fruit and vegetable pickers in the western Cape region (60% of the country’s agricultural exports, 200 thousand workers), who had been fighting for months for 100% wage increases, clashed with police and private security forces in the vicinity of the town of De Doors: these are seasonal workers who earn a minimum daily wage of 69 rand (6 euros) – defined “starvation wages” by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy itself (South Africa’s wine-producing industry earns yearly profits of around 26 billion rand). The agitation has been going on since November, when the agricultural workers refused proposals advanced by the institutional central union COSATU to resolve the conflict, and is putting the harvests, including the grape harvest, at serious risk.
The South African police has intervened several times in full riot gear, firing rubber bullets and tear gas and making something like 150 arrests, whilst the main motorway connecting the Cape region to Johannesburg and many other roads was closed for almost a week, cut off by real barricades erected to prevent the arrival of blacklegs and stop police movements. And so we joyfully greet the South African proletarians who are continuing a class tradition dating back to the beginnings of the nineteen hundreds and too often betrayed and deviated towards the backwaters of racial and national issues. A poster displayed widely in Johannesburg in September 1917 by the Industrial Workers of Africa declared: “Unite as workers. Unite: forget the things which divide you. Let there be no longer any talk of Basuto, Zulu, or Shangaan. You are all labourers; let Labour be your common bond.”
From Tunisa to South Africa and viceversa, may the same cry echo!
International Communist Party