Victory to the Platinum Miners!

Elections and Miners Strike:
South African Popular Front in Crisis

For a Black-Centered Workers Government!
For a Revolutionary Workers Party with a Trotskyist Program!

APRIL 30 – South Africa heads to the polls May 7 in the most important election since the 1994 vote which marked the formal end of the apartheid system of white minority rule. Meanwhile, 70,000 platinum miners are in the fourth month of a bitter strike not only against the companies but also against the policies of the African National Congress (ANC) government which has backed the mine bosses to the hilt. The intersection of these two events could pose an explosive challenge to capitalist rule in the economic powerhouse of Africa: the non-white masses are gatvol (“fed up”) with the black capitalist regime which has kept them mired in poverty, while the corrupt rulers have no answers but bloody repression. Yet a key ingredient is lacking to provide a positive outcome to this crisis: revolutionary leadership.

South Africa’s ruling Tripartite Alliance – a “popular front” composed of the bourgeois nationalist ANC, the reformist South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – is confronted by popular discontent fueled by workers’ strikes and “service delivery protests” in the townships against the degradation of public services. After two decades of ANC rule, the rage against growing inequality coupled with the emergence of “tenderpreneurs”, a layer of black bourgeois fattened by state subsidies spells big trouble for President Jacob Zuma’s party in the elections for the National Assembly and provincial legislatures. Although the ANC will undoubtedly win, it will likely suffer severe electoral losses.

Last year the Financial Times (17 February 2013) noted, “Every big government upheaval has been preceded by trouble at the mines.” This voice of London bankers referred back to the imperialist “scramble for Africa” and the search for gold and diamonds which has been central to South African history. The miners’ strikes of 1946 and 1987 rocked the white supremacist apartheid system. Today, the cold-blooded massacre of 34 platinum miners in Marikana on 16 August 2012 has galvanized opposition to the Tripartite Alliance. The National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), with 340,000 members the largest union in South Africa, denounced the ANC and SACP as nakedly pro-capitalist and came out against electoral support to the ANC (or any other political party) at a special congress in December.

Concurrently with the election campaign, the platinum miners are once again battling for their lives. In a hard-fought strike begun on January 23, tens of thousands of miners have confronted police attacks and intimidation, financial hardship and threats of layoffs in a fight for the demand of the 2012 strike: a minimum monthly wage of R12,500 (South African rands, equivalent to US$1,190). They have been up against not only the imperialist mining trusts – Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), Impala Platinum (Implats), and Lonmin – and the bourgeois state, but also the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), whose bureaucrats are literally mine owners, as well as the COSATU tops. On April 29, leaders of the striking Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) announced that strikers had turned down the owners’ latest “offer.”

Conditions in the mining industry are a glaring proof that vicious superexploitation of black labor remains the basis of South African capitalism, and that the installation of the ANC in government in 1994 was designed to prop up this system. A thin layer of blacks have been incorporated at the top, while those at the bottom do not earn enough to support a family even in the miserable conditions of South Africa’s shantytowns. Thus billionaire ex-NUM president and ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa – who owns 9% of Lonmin shares – has the means to purchase a prize bull for $2.3 million, while miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine live in shacks and meet at Wonderkop stadium where “curls and curls of barbed wire line the entrance as if it were an animal enclosure” (Daily Maverick, 29 April).

With consummate cynicism, the ANC election manifesto announces the “first phase” of the “democratic transition” has been completed. Their mentors are the SACP, the high priests of the Menshevik-Stalinist theory of stages who excuse every crime with the mirage of ultimate “socialism.” According to the ANC, “our people’s dignity has been restored” in this first phase. Tell it to the Marikana miners, or the township residents gunned down by the police as they demand clean drinking water and housing! In mid-March, police and ANC officials shot at protesting schoolchildren at Bekkersdal in the Gauteng province around Johannesburg. Even The Citizen (a tabloid oriented to the black middle class) compared this to the 1976 Soweto uprising.

In the “second phase,” the ANC promises to “eradicate poverty” and reduce inequality by 2030. In the concrete, this amounts, not to real jobs but rather “work opportunities, many of long duration” and the like, meaning temporary jobs with low pay and no benefits. The SACP/ANC’s call for “radical socio-economic transformation” (not even a mention of “socialism,” of course) is a cruel joke, amounting to further capitalist immiseration.

Struggle Against Neo-Apartheid in the Mines

The platinum miners’ walkout is universally seen as a historic strike. Joseph Mathunjwa, the head of AMCU which is leading the action, called it a struggle against an “apartheid system of salaries.” Before the 2012 strikes, wages fluctuated between R4,000 and R5,000 per month. The mines are still heavily dependent on migrants from the Eastern Cape, Lesotho, Mozambique and elsewhere. All the workers killed in August 2012 were migrants, mainly from the former “Bantustan” of Transkei. Given this ethnic and national heterogeneity, communication among the workers is conducted by means of Fanagalo, a simplified form of Zulu plus some English and Afrikaan words. It was a great achievement of the 2012 strikes that these divisions could be overcome through common class struggle.

When the miners revolted against these conditions in 2012, they immediately ran up against the opposition of the NUM. During a protest march on their Marikana offices on 11 August 2012, NUM leaders and shop stewards emerged from the building and began shooting at the strikers, killing two. As one miner stated: “NUM shot its own people” (quoted in Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi, Marikana: A View from the Mountain Top and a Case to Answer [Auckland Park, 2012]). As for the August 16 massacre, an eight-page COSATU declaration on Marikana refers to the “tragedy” and “killings” but nothing about a massacre. Months later, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry, while still trying to scapegoat the strikers for violence, had to confirm the police responsibility.

The Commission uncovered evidence that the heads of the South African Police Service, working with Lonmin management, decided that August 16 was the day to “kill” the strike. Hundreds of police reinforcements were brought it to “disperse” the strikers’ supposedly illegal gathering (on public land). The authorities tried to corral miners with barbed wire, and when their intended victims starting marching back to their settlement, police vehicles chased them down and then special squads opened fire on them from a distance. Tellingly, in addition to the 16 cut down in the initial shooting spree, an equal number were tracked down and shot in the back at a second location in what amounted to a summary execution. And of course ex-NUM leader turned Lonmin boss Cyril Ramaphosa called for the slaughter.

There was also a deliberate targeting of miner militants. Today, Marikana strike leader Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki and organiser Steve Khululekile, both shot down that day in August 2012, are revered martyrs. In addition to the 34 killed, a least another 78 were wounded in the cold-blooded slaughter. The company and the government sought to drown the workers’ struggle in blood, but they did not succeed. The strikes spread from Marikana through the mines. In October 2012, Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) fired almost 13,000 miners. However, in the end workers won wage hikes, supposedly raising pay by up to 20%. But the mine bosses at Marikana reneged on the agreement. “They made fools of us after the Lonmin strike,” complained one shop steward (Mail & Guardian, 27 March).

As a new strike loomed, the mine owners brandished the threat of “restructuring” and mass lay-offs. But not because of weak demand: in July 2013 the CEO of Amplats, Mark Cutifani, announced that that he intended to increase the return on investment from 11% to 15% per year. In other words, they are not losing money, they just want to jack up profits. And keep in mind that just about everything officially reported by these companies is a lie – from the “transfer pricing” to false reports of worker housing to misreporting the number of workers with temporary contracts.

The strike had barely gotten under way when COSATU declared on January 29 that it was “concerned about safety at the mines.” Mind you, this did not refer to the brutal working hours and methods, COSATU denounced Impala management for “not providing security” to scabs. On March 11, CONSATU called on “the employers and the South African Police Service to devise some safe way for the workers in the platinum mines to go back to work.” A moribund Workers’ Association Union (WAU) was revived to get miners back to work. But as one AMCU shop steward remarked, “There is no use in caving in because of hunger, because if we go back underground with these peanut wages, we will still suffer from hunger. It is better we starve once” (Mail & Guardian, 27 March).

Unfortunately, the platinum miners have had to stand alone. NUMSA has been getting involved in the mining industry, organizing 1,800 workers at Amplats refineries, who struck separately in February and settled in March for wage increases of between 7.5 and 8.5% per year for the different categories of workers. Bloomberg News (4 April) quoted NUMSA national treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo saying of the miners strike that it was “a bad situation and we hope a solution will be found,” adding, “we support the struggle of workers irrespective of a union they are affiliated to.” Yet statements of solidarity are not enough. There should have been, and should be today, a mobilization of all of South African labor to defend the miners with solidarity strike action to bring South Africa to a standstill in support of the platinum strike.

This is all the more urgent as it is “increasingly obvious that the government are willing to wait out AMCU until it breaks,” according to a London market analyst (Bloomberg News, 30 April). The platinum miners strike is where the conflict between South African workers and the ANC government has come to a head. Yet instead of common workers action, the logic of bureaucratic infighting has prevailed. Even the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU) has done nothing to support its AMCU affiliate. And although NUMSA president Andrew Chirwa had been invited to address an AMCU rally in Rustenburg on January 19 to offer solidarity, and was even on stage, he was suddenly banned from speaking by the AMCU tops.

The mine bosses have claimed that they have enough platinum stockpiled to wait out the strike, and market prices for the mineral have not budged. Yet the companies have declared “force majeure,” a legal term allowing them to suspend payments and deliveries because of circumstances beyond their control. This would imply that their stockpiles are not unlimited. In the face of the conglomerates’ hard-line refusal to grant the mine workers’ elementary demands, and now threats of closing mines in retaliation as the gold mines did following the 1987 strike, mine workers and their allies should occupy the installations and institute workers control, including opening the companies’ books, as part of a revolutionary mobilization for a workers and peasants government to expropriate South African capitalism.

WASP Backstabbing Against Miners Strike

While the AMCU has no strategy other than waiting out the mine owners and has made no attempt to mobilize working-class solidarity action, it is also clear that the mine bosses were speculating on rifts inside the union. AMCU tops have pushed aside the workers’ committees which led the 2012 strikes and generally behave like typical trade-union bureaucrats. This has disappointed a layer of former workers committee members and AMCU shop stewards who have been drawn around the Democratic Socialist Movement, the South African affiliate of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI). These social democrats, who were buried inside the ANC until 1996, have now launched a Workers and Socialist Party (WASP). On the eve of the strike, the WASP issued a series of defeatist statements undercutting the workers’ action.

After wild accusations from AMCU president Mathunjwa that dissidents were being “wined and dined by [South African President] Zuma”, five shop stewards (or former shop stewards) called a press conference under the aegis of the WASP on January 20 to lambaste the AMCU bureaucracy and corruption. According to press reports, some “were equivocal on their stance regarding the strike. Others, such as Impala’s [Vuyo] Maqanda, seemed somewhat opposed to it, while Amplats’ [Gaddafi] Mdoda said they would support the upcoming strike only if Mathunjwa met them around a negotiating table to iron out their differences and allowed workers to discuss a strategy for the strike” (Mail & Guardian, 21 January). This shameful backstabbing could only aid the companies.

The next day, WASP spokesperson Mametlwe Sebei accused Mathunjwa of “playing into the hands” of the ANC by calling a strike which could become “violent” (Mail & Guardian, 22 January). Sebei also raised worries about company stockpiles and about future lay-offs, giving credence to the bosses’ blackmailing tactics. On January 23 an official statement by the WASP appeared to disavow Sebei, saying “we are emphatically supporting the strike action which began in the platinum industry today.” It claimed to have been “misrepresented” by the media, although not directly misquoted, and that it was just raising “concerns”. “Misrepresented”? The Mail & Guardian has been notably sympathetic to the WASP, including over attempts to deport its deputy general secretary, Swedish-born Liv Shange.

All of the talk about AMCU “authoritarianism” and “concerns” about the union going into the strike “divided” evade the fact that the strike had already been decided, including by a vote at the January 19 rally. This all bears a striking resemblance to attacks by Thatcherites and Labour traitors on the National Union of Mineworkers and its president Arthur Scargill for having “undemocratically” decreed the British miners’ strike of 1984-85. The WASP says it is for “the election of representative strike/workers committees, regular mass meetings for open and democratic debates on the strategy to win R12 500 and to rally the entire working class behind the mineworkers’ cause.” Nice words, but empty. Rather than winning the strike, the WASP is more interested in distancing itself from the AMCU.

Its January 23 statement promised that “Workers and Socialist Party will be campaigning … in the whole trade union movement and throughout the country to raise support for the strike and its demands.” Really? So where is this promised support? Certainly not on the WASP website, which hasn’t had a single article or statement about the strike since January. No mention either in its election poster and two election leaflets, and only a dismissive remark in its election Manifesto about lack of “serious preparation for a campaign of action to win the R12 500 per month minimum wage notwithstanding the present platinum strike.” Well, “notwithstanding” its pseudo-support for the strike, as social-democratic electoral reformists, WASP has “weightier” matters to attend to, namely chasing after votes in the May 7 election.

“Notwithstanding” their socialist pretentions, the DSM/WASP campaign is directly counterposed to the “Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism” (1920) of the Communist International, which declared: “Election campaigns should not be carried out in the spirit of the hunt for the maximum number of parliamentary seats, but in the spirit of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses for the slogans of the proletarian revolution.... It is necessary to utilize all mass actions (strikes, demonstrations, ferment among the soldiers and sailors, etc.) that are taking place at the time, and to come into close touch with them.” Sound like the WASP campaign in South Africa today? Not hardly. Even its call for nationalization of the economy would let the apartheid criminals retain 10% of their plunder!

Moreover, its election Manifesto states: “WASP fights against police brutality, -corruption, -racism and sexism and for holding the police to account…. [W]e need to fight for democratic working class control over the police, also appealing to the sense of class solidarity among rank-and-file police officers.” This garbage, a hallmark of the CWI, is utterly anti-Marxist. There can be no “democratic working class control” over the police or any other part of the bourgeois state, and spreading illusions about a “sense of class solidarity” among the cops – the armed fist of the bourgeoisie – is a deadly delusion. The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) talks of “advancing the working-class struggle within the criminal justice system” – and then they carry out massacres like Sharpeville, at Marikana and in the townships.

“ANC Reloaded” or Revolutionary Workers Party?

The nomination of Moses Mayekiso as the WASP lead candidate is certainly evocative. Mayekiso once represented the “workerist” tendency in the anti-apartheid struggle which was wary of what the bourgeois nationalist ANC held in store for the workers – with good reason, as history has shown. But whereas Leon Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution holds that in semi-colonial and late-developing capitalist countries like South Africa, even basic democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution cannot be achieved short of proletarian revolution, the workerists had no overall political program counterposed to capitalism. As a result they were reduced to a pressure group on the ANC and were ultimately eaten alive by the ANC/SACP. Mayekiso himself ended up in the SACP.

Although the WASP campaign claims to be focused on the fight against corruption, this was not a hallmark of Mayekiso’s subsequent career. After helping break the Mercedes-Benz strikes as a NUMSA bureaucrat in 1990, he went into the South African National Civic Organization­ (SANCO) which was supposed to empower the townships. He became head of Sanco Investment Holdings (SIH) which set up joint ventures privatizing municipal services, including with the British firm Biwater, which had close connections to Margaret Thatcher, for water supplies. The SIH collapsed when its money disappeared. Mayekiso then created the Congress of South African Non-Racial Civic Organisations Movement on behalf of the ANC to punish SANCO for supporting anti-privatization protests (and for failing to elect him president) in 2001.

In addition, there are accusations of bribery around an arms deal with Sweden. Since 2008, Mayekiso has been a leader of the “Congress of the People” (COPE), a pro-free market, explicitly anti-Marxist split from the ANC. But in the current trade-off, WASP gets press coverage for its candidates and Mayekiso gets a new “left” cover. The WASP does not merit support by class-conscious workers seeking to pose a revolutionary challenge to South African capital, to the black bourgeois ANC government which manages its affairs, to its SACP ideologues, and to the union bureaucracies which have climbed aboard the “gravy train.”

In competition with the WASP campaign, SACP veteran Ronnie Kasrils, who was founder and leader Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s armed wing, and former South African intelligence minister, has launched together with other ANC worthies the “Sidikiwe! Vukani! Vote ‘NO’” campaign. This campaign is in fact nothing more than an expression of frustration in the ANC and/or an attempt to pressure it into more “acceptable” policies. But the same is true of the WASP calls for a campaign to recall Zuma over the “national embarrassment” of the extravagant expenditures on the president’s Nkandla residence. None of this represents a break from bourgeois electoral politics, and much less a move toward workers revolution.

The fact of the matter is that the bulk of the South African left is waiting for NUMSA. Its painfully late formal break with the ANC/SACP opens a lot of doors, but the union tops are not prepared to go through them. The Metalworkers organized a national protest strike against the Youth Employment Incentive Act (a mix of slave labor for youth and further giveaways to the “tenderpreneurs”) in March, but with mixed results. NUMSA has been more focused on reinstating ANC critic Zwelinzima Vavi as General Secretary of COSATU. Pro-government forces had suspended Vavi using charges of corruption and sexual harassment. While the WASP, among others, hailed a decision by the Johannesburg High Court reversing this as a victory, Vavi has now turned around and indicated he will be obliged to campaign for the ANC.

Is the break with the ANC going to be reduced to bureaucrat in-fighting arbitrated by the bourgeois state? NUMSA’s special congress last December made vague references to a “united front” – not the unity of the working class in revolutionary struggle proposed by the Communist Party in its initial period, but rather the United Democratic Front of the 1980s. The UDF was a popular front which subordinated working-class forces to the bourgeoisie, and which specifically served to bring workers’ militancy and township revolts in that period back under the control of the ANC. NUMSA also calls for a “Movement for Socialism” which could mean anything from a reformist workers party such as the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil –which has unleashed its own brand of capitalist austerity – to a bourgeois populist party like those in Venezuela and Bolivia.

The NUMSA bureaucrats remain wedded to the 1955 ANC Freedom Charter which promised liberation to all classes. As we have noted, its prescriptions for nationalization had nothing “socialist” about them: as Mandela wrote in his June 1956 article, “In Our Lifetime,” the goal of the Charter was “the development of a prosperous Non-European bourgeois class.” The ANC was thus clearly committed to capitalism well before it took office in 1994. And we now have that “prosperous Non-European bourgeois class” ruling South Africa on the backs of the impoverished non-white working masses.

Another variant of a return to the supposedly pure sources of the ANC is represented by populist demagogue Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters. With the consummate opportunism so often exhibited by the bourgeois opposition parties to the ANC, Malema has concluded a sort of non-aggression pact with the Zulu chauvinist, virulent anti-communist and anti-ANC ally of the apartheid regime Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha party. Despite his often scathing critiques of ANC corruption (which he knows well from the inside), Malema’s immediate perspective can only be as a junior partner in a continuation of the neo-apartheid system, despite the WASP’s frantic attempts to form an electoral bloc with the EFF.

Genuine revolutionary Marxists warned in 1994 that a vote to the ANC was a trap chaining the working class to the bourgeoisie. So, too, would be a vote today to any component of the government (i.e., the SACP as well as the ANC) or any other variant of bourgeois nationalism like the EFF. As for the WASP, it is not even a deformed expression of a mass pro-working class, pro-socialist groundswell against the Tripartite Alliance, but rather a vehicle for peddling the CWI’s Labourite nostrums.

The struggle against neo-apartheid will continue, regardless of the results on May 7. It will be pursued in the mines and factories and townships. It must be a struggle against the Tripartite Alliance popular front and all forms of class collaboration. What it cries out for is forging a Leninist revolutionary workers party armed with a Trotskyist program linking the fight against neo-apartheid wage slavery in the mines and factories, for land, for “service delivery” and massive construction of high quality public housing in the townships, and against all forms of special oppression, to proletarian struggle to expropriate the capitalists, including in their lairs in the USA and Britain. This is the program of permanent revolution of the League for the Fourth International. ■