###### # # ####### # # ##### # # ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ###### ##### # # # ##### # # # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # ## # # # # # # # # # ####### ## ## ##### Other articles in this issue are: Turns Guns on Strikers Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners 15 Years After the Greensboro Massacre--3 November 1979 Defend Illinois Abortion Doctor! A Centrist for All Seasons--Mandel Fact Sheet Defend NWROC Anti-Fascist Protesters! Italy--Popular Frontism and the Strong State--Part Two California: Explosive Protests Over Anti-Immigrant Prop 187 Mobilize S.F. Labor to Win the Newspaper Strike!South African Workers Fight Mandela Austerity--Neo-Apartheid Regime Turns Guns on Strikers.
Six months into the "Government of National Unity" between Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) and former apartheid leader F.W. De Klerk, this "power sharing" regime has been graphically shown to be a front for continuing racist capitalist rule.
The ANC in office has broken strikes, evicted squatters and sent the apartheid army and police against black and union demonstrations. While President Mandela courts international capital, ANC ministers and parliamentarians have climbed on the "gravy train" of high salaries and government perks, and the ANC apparatus is now sitting pretty in the former Shell House. Meanwhile, close Mandela associates are trying to set up a fledgling black capitalist holding company with a hodgepodge of life insurance, media and communications companies ceded by the "verligte" (enlightened) apartheid capitalists like Anglo American, the giant mining conglomerate. But for the oppressed nonwhite majority there is no "gravy train"; tensions have grown along racial and ethnic lines as competition mounts for scarce jobs and resources.
The world bankers and business press are glowing over the ANC's conversion to "free market" economics and "fiscal responsibility." These now-bourgeois nationalists have ensconced themselves as junior partners in the exploitation of the black masses by imperialist and apartheid capital. In October, Mandela's top deputy, Thabo Mbeki, announced a sweeping austerity offensive, including massive layoffs with privatization of state-owned enterprises such as South African Airways, electrical utilities, railroads and oil explorations. Summing up the regime's first few months, a Washington Post (9 October) editorial hailed Mandela: "He has dealt with organized labor's strikes in a way that has cost him politically, since the unions are his allies, but has won him the essential respect and cooperation of the international banks."
In plain English, this has meant unleashing heavy repression and red-baiting against one of the biggest strike waves in South Africa's history. Thus the Mandela regime has set itself against the aspirations of the combative union movement which was the vanguard of the anti-apartheid struggle. In July, rubber bullets and police dogs were brought in against striking Pick 'n Pay supermarket workers in a hard-fought 24-day battle by the combative South African Commercial Catering & Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU). It was no surprise that the government called in the cops to back up the owners: Pick 'n Pay head Raymond Ackerman is a major financial backer of the ANC, and Mandela was "rankled" that Mr. Ackerman's stores had "borne the brunt of a raucous strike by store clerks" (New York Times, 12 September).
Shortly after came the 27-day auto workers strike in which 25,000 National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) strikers shut down the South African auto industry, including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Nissan, BMW, Toyota, Samcor and Delta. Workers were finally strong-armed by the government into going back to work only days before the opening of the fifth congress of the COSATU union federation. Simultaneously, police used stun grenades in an attempt to dislodge hundreds of striking miners occupying shafts of Anglo American's huge Kloof mine in Carltonville. But it was the bosses who were stunned when several thousand long-distance road haulers threw up blockades, paralyzing the major highways from Johannesburg to Durban and around Port Elizabeth in a wildcat truckers strike.
We have written that the "ANC/De Klerk Deal Is Betrayal of Black Freedom" (WV No. 599, 29 April). The bloody reality of the "new" South Africa was brought home when, on October 24, a phalanx of police in Cape Town stormed a demonstration of 5,000 striking municipal workers outside the civic center, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot pointblank into the crowd. Some 60 strikers, members of the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) were injured, but ten police were also sent to the hospital as marchers fought back with their fists, stones and bottles.
While ANC members of parliament have protested the shooting and "investigations" have been launched into the Cape Town assault, this incident graphically shows that the structures of white supremacy are still intact. Like a page out of a Marxist textbook, these bloody incidents demonstrate how the nationalist "popular front" alliance of the ANC, COSATU and the reformist South African Communist Party (SACP) shackles the workers movement in the interest of the capitalist masters of neo-apartheid. There is no "power sharing" between the black toilers and a capitalist state defending the interests of the white Randlords. It is urgently necessary to break the COSATU/ANC/SACP class-collaborationist "alliance" and to forge a revolutionary workers party which can champion the cause of all the oppressed in a fight for workers revolution.
Truckers' Blockade
The fourth part of our series, "South Africa Powder Keg" (WV No. 606, 16 September) quoted the Weekly Mail's description of the August truck drivers' blockade as "a remarkable sign of worker solidarity, cutting across racial lines as black, white, Indian and coloured workers vented their frustrations jointly." This action, which mobilized the largely unorganized black truckers, was led by the militant "Turning Wheel International Workers' Movement," a split-off from the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). As we go to press, Turning Wheel is mounting a "go slow" protest and refusal to work overtime in an effort to win an 8-hour day in the trucking industry. On November 3, the owners' association obtained a court order interdicting any "interference" with or "obstruction" of road traffic, and many drivers are being threatened with dismissal.
In a series of dramatic actions, beginning on August 22-24, some 2,000-3,000 truckers blockaded the main N-3 highway at the Mooi River toll plaza in Natal. Their demands were for a big pay increase, an industrial bargaining council and reinstatement of fired drivers. The media screeched about the "highway siege" led by shadowy "revolutionaries" cutting off the "lifeline" to the cities. Trucks containing highly inflammable substances "sat like powder kegs on the N-3 highway between Durban and Johannesburg," wrote the Weekend Argus (28 August). The blockade was lifted after an agreement with the trucking industry bosses, as the TGWU tops scrambled to climb on board.
Weeks later, charging the Motor Transport Owners association with bad faith in carrying out the Mooi River Accord, on September 19 the truckers again launched a blockade, this time blocking both the Johannesburg-Durban and Port Elizabeth-Cape Town routes. On September 20, cops and soldiers in troop carriers descended on the unarmed striking drivers at the Mooi River plaza and sealed them off. Using tear gas and rifle butts, placing pistols with silencers at the heads of sleeping drivers, they forced the workers to lift the blockade. At least one striker was shot, and a number of workers were arrested. A Turning Wheel press release angrily declared, "The Government of National Unity has shown its true colours. It is a government which sides with the rich against the poor. It is a bosses' government."
The truckers' bold actions ignited a redbaiting frenzy stretching from the government to the press to COSATU union bureaucrats. The Sunday Tribune (28 August) denounced "The Heavy Lefties" and declared, "Mooi River Blockade the Brainchild of Clandestine Extremists." The Weekend Argus vituperated about "Militant, ultra-Left Trotskyites--many with international revolutionary connections." Turning Wheel was "allegedly linked to the Workers List Party and the Workers Organisation for a Socialist South Africa [sic]." The paper "discovered" that "Ultra-leftists believe in the theory of `permanent revolution' and would regard the ANC government as `sellouts'."
We gave critical support to the Workers List Party (WLP) in the April elections, noting that it drew a crude class line and that a vote for it was seen in South Africa as a vote for a workers party rather than for the ANC. While the ANC/SACP have viciously redbaited the WLP, its platform is nothing more than left- reformist. It did not call for socialist revolution, or even clearly state opposition to the ANC. The Workers Organisation for Socialist Action (WOSA), the centrist organization which initiated the WLP, projects a broad Labourite party embracing "all pro- worker, pro-democracy, and pro-socialism forces."
Meanwhile, COSATU bureaucrats called the truckers' demands "selfish" and warned of "agents provocateurs." TGWU national organizer Thulani Dlamini reportedly charged that the blockade was "linked to a revolutionary party that aimed to bring down the government" and "undermine the Reconstruction and Development Programme." Nonetheless, support for the action at the base of the trade-union movement was palpable. Even COSATU's Shopsteward (October/November 1994) reported favorably on the August action, noting that Turning Wheel was formed as the official union "acknowledged certain organizational weaknesses" in addressing the needs of long-distance truck drivers and their grievances.
Turning Wheel leader Richard Madime said, "Maybe what angers our detractors is that we are aligned to the Workers List Party-- which is seen as `communist inspired.' If that is what they are beefing about, tough luck. We have a right to exist just like all other unions" (Sowetan, 23 September). The government repression of the truckers is a blow against the entire South African union movement. What's posed is the need to mobilize all of labor-- including, in particular, fighting within the unions in COSATU to break the straitjacket tying them to the ANC--to support the truckers and other strikers against the bosses and their government.
Break the ANC/COSATU/ SACP Alliance! At the COSATU Congress in early September, Nelson Mandela told the workers to ease up on strikes, because they are frightening foreign investors. "Tighten your belts," he told them. Black workers don't have belts to tighten, one worker retorted. COSATU president John Gomomo criticized the line coming from the media and the government which denounces the union federation as "a labour elite, a small, well-paid group of workers protecting our interests against the millions of unemployed and rural poor." Gomomo responded, "Tell that to our unemployed families in the townships and villages, with whom we share our meagre wage packets" (Weekend Star, 10 September).
While Mandela escaped the wrath of angry workers at the Congress, sparks flew against Trade and Industry Minister Trevor Manuel. COSATU general secretary Sam Shilowa launched a blistering attack on Manuel for being "provocative, contemptuous, a destroyer of jobs, a union-basher and a strike-breaker" (Financial Mail, 9 September). On Friday, September 2, Manuel announced that import duties would be cut by 20 percent. This was a major blow to the four-week-old auto strike, greatly strengthening the hand of the employers. NUMSA and COSATU denounced the move, but by Monday the strike had folded.
Everyone saw behind the government's action the spectre of plant closures. And as COSATU deputy president Connie September said, "When you close down a plant in the motor industry, you close down a township." In fact, slashing tariffs could put the entire auto industry in jeopardy, given the relatively higher pay of South African auto workers--won through sharp class battles--compared to Thai or Brazilian workers, for instance. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ANC is prepared to deliberately sacrifice this industry in order to get rid of the most radical, combative and strategic union in South Africa. Already NUMSA has seen its membership plummet from 275,000 to 170,000, and its leaders such as SACP Central Committee member Moses Mayekiso have been co-opted into parliament or the government.
At the Congress, and for the last few months, there has been constant debate over the ANC/SACP/COSATU "triple alliance." The Weekly Mail (14 October) recently discussed deep-going rifts within the ANC itself, saying, "it is predicted that `a lot of heads will roll'--mostly those of people seen as `leftwingers,' including members of the South African Communist Party and former trade unionists." The right wing around Thabo Mbeki, loyal to the International Monetary Fund bankers' cartel, are reportedly prepared to purge even such conservative elements as Cyril Ramaphosa, who was promoted by Harry Oppenheimer and Anglo American to be head of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Going into the COSATU Congress, The Shopsteward (August/September 1994) ran a special section, "The Alliance: What's in It for the Workers?" The editors argued the SACP line that the unions must be centrally involved in the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in order to get the workers' "voice" heard. But it also reported NUMSA's position that formal coalition with the ANC government should be terminated, and the Workers List Party's call for breaking the alliance and building a "mass workers party." Disputes over the nationalist popular front may come to a head at COSATU's "conference on socialism and the RDP," finally being held as we go to press. While there is much talk of junking the ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance, this impulse toward class independence must be directed to forging a class-struggle leadership in the unions and a revolutionary workers party.
Contradictions of Neo-Apartheid
We have repeatedly stressed that the ANC-led nationalist movement could not achieve any semblance of "democracy" for the nonwhite masses while maintaining South African capitalism, which has always (long before the formal institution in 1948 of the apartheid system euphemistically known as "separate development") been based on the superexploitation of black labor, centrally in the (increasingly depleted) gold mines, where this is the only way to realize any profit. This is the economic bedrock of white supremacy, and the fundamental reason why apartheid could not be reformed away through negotiations and elections. The impossible contradictions of the neo-apartheid system are nowhere so sharp as when it comes to the army and police, those "special bodies of armed men" (Engels) who constitute the heart of the capitalist state.. In defending the present property system, they necessarily enforce the subjugation of the black majority.
A blow-up over "integration" of the former black guerrilla "armies" into the apartheid army has been brewing. Some 21,000 soldiers of the ANC armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation," or MK), and 6,000 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) guerrillas are due to be assimilated into the "reformed" South African National Defence Force (SANDF) by 1996. Foot-dragging by the SANDF top brass over rank, salaries, housing and other issues for thousands of their former enemies sparked a mutiny of some 7,000 former guerrillas who were AWOL in mid-October, refusing to return to base. On November 7, ANC/SACP defense minister (and former MK commander) Joe Modise ordered dismissal of more than 2,200 soldiers who refused to return despite the intervention of Mandela.
The incongruity of trying to "integrate" black anti-apartheid activists into the army and police of their historic oppressors was brought home in an incident reported in the London Independent (1 November). An Afrikaner traffic policeman was only doing what came naturally when, riding down a busy Pretoria street on a Saturday night, he spotted a car double-parked outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken take-out restaurant. He stopped and rudely shouted at the black driver to "Remove the bloody car!" When the man complained there was no need for such rude behavior, the policeman grabbed the driver by the throat and packed him off to the police station. Only at the precinct did the white cop make the appalling discovery that his black victim was none other than Sydney Mufamadi, the minister of police!
In addition to brutal repression, white minority domination was maintained by the manipulation of racial, ethnic and tribal divisions. This legacy is ever-present, particularly from the bloody feuding pitting Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Zulu paramilitary Inkatha movement (armed and instigated by the apartheid authorities) against the ANC, whose leadership is heavily Xhosa. Buthelezi is currently home affairs (interior) minister in the Government of National Unity, from which position he has been leading a chauvinist campaign (also supported by the ANC leadership) against "illegal" immigrants. This has included placing electric fencing along the borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe. But Buthelezi's hold on the rural Zulu population has been challenged by the ANC (already dominant in the urban townships around Durban), which has allied with the traditional Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini. This conflict blew up in late September, when Buthelezi and his armed entourage roughed up the king's man, Prince Sifiso Zulu, on a live SABC television broadcast.
Ethnic tensions have escalated particularly over the question of housing. On September 15, the townships west of Johannesburg exploded in demonstrations, strikes and running street battles with police as residents demanded lower rent and service charges and for their arrears to be wiped off the books. These were townships formerly designated as "coloured" (mixed-race) areas under the apartheid regime's Group Areas Act. Rent boycotts in black townships were a major tactic in the anti-apartheid struggle. For at least a decade, residents in Soweto and Sharpeville and scores of other townships have made no payments for rent or utilities, in protest against the miserable shacks with meager or no water and electricity services to which apartheid rule consigned black people. Now, under the Mandela regime, they're still living in the shacks, but the ANC, rather than leading the protests, is trying to get the rent paid.
Joe Slovo, head of the South African Communist Party, is now the minister of housing, from which position he has been vituperating about "ending the culture of non-payment." The government, in agreement with the banks, has already agreed to write off debts in black townships like Soweto. So residents in the "coloured" townships were simply demanding the same. When the provincial housing minister, after condemning the protests, agreed to scrap rent arrears in black, coloured and Indian townships, Slovo went ballistic, warning that people who boycott rent or mortgage payments would be evicted from their homes. The Weekly Mail (21 October) headlined, "Slovo, the Boycott-Buster" and asked, "Can He Win?"
The battle over the boycotters has exacerbated ethnic tensions. Provincial premier Tokyo Sexwale tore into coloured community organizers, saying their rent protests were an excuse for "racism" and that he wanted to "vomit" when "others try to use (our) legitimate grievances" (Cape Times, 19 September). The coloured townships resounded in a justified cold fury against these obscene remarks. A letter to the editor from coloured residents in Coronationville noted:
"Our children also burnt the flag and were detained without trial. Many still bear the scars of those turbulent years.... "It is disturbing that our actions should cause you to vomit when we are only following (mildly) the precedent you have set for many years.... "We did not vomit when we voted you into power, knowing there would be no instant solutions, but you promised equality for all, except it seems us (the shadow people)."--Johannesburg Citizen (28 September)
As tensions mounted, the government backed down and agreed to scrap the demand for payment of arrears in the townships. The coloured townships in the Witwatersrand voted for the ANC, but in the Western Cape province, including Cape Town, the country's second-largest city and site of the national parliament, the ANC lost badly to De Klerk's National Party because the coloured population voted for the Nats. An article in the New York Review of Books (20 October) by William Finnegan probes the reasons underlying this major defeat for the ANC. In the election, the party of violent, racist Afrikaner nationalism which had ruled the country since 1948 became, according to its own publicity, a party of "liberal reformers." At the same time, the Nats launched a smear campaign against the ANC, stressing its traditional theme of the "black peril" (swartgevaar), but this time appealing to the coloureds' rather than whites' fear of black Africans.
At the same time, Finnegan writes, the ANC made a number of "serious political mistakes." Thus, many coloureds in the 1980s joined the United Democratic Front (UDF), which they saw as a broad umbrella organization generally supportive of the ANC. They were upset when the ANC leadership summarily dissolved the UDF without consulting its constituent groups, as if it were merely an ANC front. But the most important factor was the flood of new black African arrivals in the Western Cape, spurred by repeal of the pass laws in 1986. Cape Town's black population more than tripled between 1982 and 1992. Many in the Afrikaans-speaking coloured population, who had been given precedence over blacks in employment and housing under apartheid laws, felt threatened. While the ANC did nothing to reassure them, and Xhosa tribalists like Winnie Mandela whipped up tensions with the relatively conservative coloured community, at bottom what is going on is a sharp competition for scarce resources in capitalist South Africa.
The ANC was perceived as an organization dedicated to advancing the black African population, and so long as the struggle is confined to the limits of capitalism--which means grinding poverty and excruciating shortages of housing and other services (such as education) for the masses--it will be seen as "us vs. them" along ethnic and national lines. This engenders the sort of raw racial hatred that led to the vicious murder last year of a white American student supporter of the ANC, Amy Biehl, in the Guguletu township near Cape Town by black youths associated with the ultra-nationalist PAC. And it stokes the flames of hostility between coloured and black, between Zulu and Xhosa and Indian, over and above the basic divide between the privileged white caste and the oppressed nonwhite majority. The "divide and rule" practices inherited from British colonialism are still at work today, and will generate even more deadly feuding and "ethnic cleansing" until the national framework is transcended and the enormous wealth, land and resources of South Africa are taken from the white capitalist ruling class.
The way out of this cruel dilemma can only be through building an integrated Bolshevik workers party that fights for a workers revolution centered on the black majority. Its ranks and leaders must be drawn from throughout the multiracial and ethnically diverse South African society, including those whites who are prepared to live in a black-centered workers republic based on genuine equality and integration. And despite the treachery of the SACP, whose leaders now hold key ministries of the capitalist state, South Africa is one of the few places in the world today where the workers and poor identify with the goal of communism. But the struggle cannot be limited to a narrow national framework or it will be defeated. South Africa is the industrial powerhouse of the continent, and indeed many of those who toil in the hellish mines producing its wealth are "foreigners." It is only by aiding the famine- and poverty-stricken masses throughout Africa to build up their own production that a workers South Africa can cease to act as a besieged fortress.
Above all, particularly in this epoch of "globalization," a socialist revolution must be extended to the imperialist centers and their other "production sites." The government's slashing of tariffs during the recent auto strike underscores not only the role of the new ANC rulers but also the futility of limiting the workers' struggles to the national terrain. And Western imperialists would respond to workers revolution in South Africa with military intervention and economic blockade, just as they did to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. To defeat the inevitable imperialist onslaught would require mobilizing the working masses in North America and West Europe.
The internationalism symbolized by South African miners' aid to their British class brothers and sisters during the 1984-85 British coal strike is what is needed to win against the tremendous power of international capital. And this solidarity must go in the other direction as well: it is the duty of American and European workers to come to the aid of their South African comrades in struggle. So long as the workers are pulling the cart of nationalism, they cannot achieve amandla (freedom). ANC Ltd. will not be their liberators. The South African workers revolution shall
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The above article is from the November 11 issue of Workers
Vanguard, the Marxist working-class biweekly of the Spartacist
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Message-Id: 199411220639.GAA02568@orion.sas.upenn.edu
Date:Tue, 22 Nov 1994 00:40:20 -0500
From: Faraz Fareed Rabbani