NUMSA: Which way forward?

The Marikana miners are the vanguard of the South African workers

NUMSA* broke with the ANC/SACP before the last election. It was then expelled from COSATU to prevent it from convincing the majority in COSATU to break from the ANC. This break however, is not complete. NUMSA President Irvin Jim calls for the return to the Freedom Charter which has been abandoned by the ANC/SACP. He presents the Freedom Charter as in the interests of workers when it was always the SACP inspired Stalinist program aimed at creating a Black bourgeoisie. Secretary General of COSATU Zwelinzima Vavi has thrown fuel on this fire in his recent Open Letter to the SACP slamming it for consistently opposing COSATU’s resistance to the neo-liberal policies of the ANC since 1994. While NUMSA calls for a ‘united front’, and a new ‘workers party’, at the same time as a ‘return’ to the Freedom Charter, this will lead to a new ‘popular front’ with bourgeois figures like Ronnie Kasrils, former Minister of Information in the ANC. We look at the stand taken by different currents on the left and put forward our position for a revolutionary workers party and program.


NUMSA Splits from the ANC/SACP*

On the left we note the positions of Socialist Project, the WASP and the WIVP. All welcome the NUMSA break with the ANC/SACP but disagree on how to make this break complete. The most immediate disagreement is whether NUMSA should fight to overturn its unconstitutional expulsion and continue with its fight to get COSATU as a whole to break with the ANC/SACP.

This is important because those like Socialist Project who think NUMSA should not challenge its expulsion abandon any fight for democracy in COSATU, leaving the rank and file of other unions at the mercy of the bureaucratic ANC/SACP dominated leadership. It leaves uncontested COSATU CEC’s unconstitutional action in blocking a special congress where NUMSA could advocate a COSATU split from the ANC. At the same time it writes off the role of COSATU and advocates a social movement perspective outside COSATU.

Second, those who want NUMSA to challenge its expulsion are divided over the use of the bourgeois courts. We say that since NUMSA is a workers organisation and has fought for decades to enshrine workers democratic rights in its Constitution, going to the courts to overthrow an illegal expulsion is not a matter of principle. The principle involved is: that defence of bourgeois rights is necessary when it advances the workers’ revolution. The tactics employed must serve this principle.

We are opposed to taking COSATU to Court over the expulsion under the current circumstances. We don't think it advances the workers revolution. It takes the struggle out of the hands of the rank and file of COSATU affiliates when it is strong enough to challenge the leadership, defend the constitution and overturn the expulsion. It seems that appealing to the Court is a tactic being used by the leadership to foster illusions in the Courts as independent of the ANC/SACP corrupt regime, rather than mobilising the ranks to throw out the corrupt COSATU leadership.

On the other hand, those who argue that NUMSA should abandon COSATU as corrupt and instead build a new union movement, are weakening the mobilisation of the rank and file within the unions to oppose the Irvin Jim leadership in going to the Courts, calling for a return to the Stalinist Freedom Charter, and inviting ‘progressive’ bourgeois factions who are proven enemies of the workers into the ‘united front’.

For example, the NUMSA ‘United Front’, at its small ‘preparatory assembly’ ahead of the launch next April, put the bourgeois politician Ronnie Kasrils, a former ANC Intelligence Minister responsible for collaborating with the CIA and Mossad, on its ‘interim leadership commission’! His ‘workers’ credentials are no more than opposing Zuma, and campaigning for a ‘no vote’ for the ANC. We agree with the WIVP that the NUMSA split is in danger of becoming ANC Mk2 by including corrupt bourgeois celebrities. Who is next: Julius Malema and his personality cult to revive the Freedom Charter?

Break from the Freedom Charter!

All of this points clearly to the main weakness of the NUMSA split from the ANC. It does not split with the Freedom Charter. It does not complete its break with the ANC/SACP program. If the bureaucratic expulsion from COSATU leads to a new bureaucratic labour movement, (despite the ‘united front’, workers’ party’, and ‘socialism’) then the democratic will of the mass of workers moving against the ANC/SACP/COSATU will face yet another bureaucratic barrier to their class independence and the socialist revolution.

The WASP approach to this problem is to ignore the question of program and talk only about organisation. It supports going to court to make COSATU hold a Special Congress. At the same time it calls for NUMSA to press ahead with its ‘united front’ to rally all COSATU and non COSATU unions around a ‘socialist’ program. Yet it neither critiques the COSATU leadership’s illusions in the Freedom Charter nor comes up with a ‘socialist program’ of its own.

It is not possible to build an independent trade union movement on socialist principles without a clear call to break from the Freedom Charter! Given the history of WASP in the Militant tendency, we expect that it to be silent about the ‘united front’ failing to challenge the Freedom Charter and making compromises with the bourgeois politicians like Kasrils which turns a workers ‘united front’ into a bourgeois ‘popular front’.

That is why the WIVP call to replace the Freedom Charter with a Workers Charter is correct.

“In opposition to the Freedom Charter, we propose the consideration of the development of a Workers’ Charter, based on working class demands, both democratic and Socialist, of a programme for working class power and a workers’ government. Let us cast off the old clothes and prepare the basis for a new revolutionary working class party.”

WIVP rejects the Freedom Charter as the ANC/SACP program for the national democratic stage in which the black bourgeoisie comes to power to prepare the road to socialism. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) did not lead the nation to independence from imperialism and open the road to socialism. 20 years of black bourgeois rule has proven beyond doubt that the rule of imperialism has been entrenched and the working class has been subjected to imperialist super-exploitation.

The Workers Charter as summarised by the WIVP is the Trotskyist Transitional Program. The task of revolutionaries is to raise it in all the ‘united front’ actions along with the call for the formation of a mass workers party. It would become a rallying point inside and outside the unions for a genuinely independent workers movement.

Use the Transitional Method!

Underlying the Transitional Program is the Transitional Method. This is another word for dialectics, the method Marx developed as the basis of his revolutionary critique of capitalist political economy. Dialectics means that society is based on a contradictory unity between objective reality and subjective reality where the latter acts on the former to make a new objective reality. Marxism does not separate theory from practice.

Theory helps us understand how capitalism works objectively as class society and this subjective knowledge transforms our class consciousness to guide our struggle to overthrow class society. The highest expression of this subjective reality is the Marxist Party which uses the program as a scientific weapon to advance the consciousness of the proletariat in its struggle to transform capitalism into socialism!

Is South Africa right now, the objective reality is the ANC bourgeois capitalist regime that oversees the super-exploitation of the working masses in return for a cut in the profits for the new black bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie ‘trickles down’ some of its profits to buy the bureaucratic leadership of COSATU as part of the ‘popular front’ to strangle any independent workers movement from breaking with the regime.

However, for Trotsky, the main task of the unions as "schools for revolution" is: the "...complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy."  

In South Africa the unions have begun the struggle for independence from the bourgeois state. Marikana expressed the objective reality of poverty in radicalising the subjective consciousness of the miners. It was this radicalising of the base of the unions that has forced the NUMSA leadership to split with the ANC and its Stalinist SACP bedfellows to head off a break with the Freedom Charter. The result is the big fight inside COSATU where the mass membership is moving to break with the Freedom Charter against the resistance of the bureaucratic leadership that is still defending it as the program of the black bourgeoisie.

In the words of Nelson Mandela:

“The Charter is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state...The Charter does not contemplate such profound economic and political changes. Its declaration “The people shall govern!” visualizes the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of the country be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty-bourgeoisie... For the first time in the history of the country the Non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

To activate this change in workers’ consciousness to the point of a complete break from both the bureaucracy and the bourgeois state revolutionaries must raise the Transitional Program in the unions. Replacing the corrupt union bureaucracy with a new leadership accountable to the ranks would prove wrong Socialist Project’s claim that trade unions cannot represent the majority of workers because they are irrevocably compromised by their links to the bourgeois state.

Like the Marikana strike it would prove that corrupted unions like NUM can be replaced by rank and file struggle unions such as the AMCU and that their isolation, as in the recent Platinum strike, can be overcome by a ‘united front’ of all unionised and non-unionised, domestic and unpaid workers preparing for a general strike.

Finally, it would coordinate all united front actions under the leadership of a mass workers party in which revolutionaries would fight for the adoption of a transitional ‘Workers Charter’, for “working class power and a Workers’ Government’, as part of an international struggle of the working masses of the whole of Southern Africa for a Federation of Socialist Republics.

20 December 2014

*Note ANC (African National Congress); NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa); SACP (South African Communist Party); COSATU (Congress of South African Trades Unions); WASP (Workers and Socialist Party); WIVP (Workers’ International Vanguard Party).

Leader of Black Capitalism, Nelson Mandela, Dies at 95

Reblogged from Worker Socialist, Central Organ of Worker Socialist Party of India

 

Rajesh Tyagi/ 8.12.2013 

The leader of black bourgeois nationalism, life time servant of capital, Nelson Mandela, is dead, leaving behind a shameful legacy of all sorts of compromises and capitulation to imperialism, alongside betrayal of the liberation struggle of toiling masses. Needless to say, that this legacy is equally shared with Mandela by bourgeois leaders of all backward and ex-colonial countries- from Nehru to Gaddafi.

Mandela’s death is being used by the ANC, to attempt to reclaim its lost credibility by chanting the history of struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa where workers and youth in the cities and towns, fought heroically against the brutal regime and its heavily armed security forces, and scores were killed or imprisoned.

Mandela and the ANC under him, however, never sought imperialism’s defeat, but rather its patronage, offering itself as nodal agency between the oppressive ruling class and the masses of black workers and oppressed.

Mandela, pressed his skills and courage to the demeaning service of capital and voluntarily accepted its servility. Behind the veil of dismantling the Apartheid regime, always stood his real-politik of defending capitalism and protecting the property and wealth of the country’s capitalist rulers and of transnational corporate investors.

Expressing their gratitude to the leader of “black capitalism”, for the invaluable service Mandela rendered to the national and international ruling elite, top imperialist leaders have sung praises for Mandela. US President Barack Obama, head of the criminal regime of world imperialism that has turned whole countries like Afghanistan and Iraq into living hell for people, has termed the ANC leader as “one of the most influential, courageous, and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this Earth”. George Bush, the principal mentor of modern US war machine, infamous for innumerable war crimes, including indiscriminate carpet bombings and savage torture of prisoners, has described Mandela as “one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time.” British right-wing Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron has called Mandela “a hero of our time” and ordered the flag at 10 Downing Street to be flown at half mast. Big Corporates like Bill Gates, have joined the mourning.

These heads of the US and Western Capitalism, who had remained unfazed as black youth and workers were being shot in the streets, hanged on the gallows, jailed by the thousands, tortured in police cells and tear-gassed and clubbed while protesting in schools, universities, factories and mines, are mourning the death of Mandela. The very same imperialist governments that yesterday had turned a cold shoulder to the most genuine and legitimate struggle in history, are paying homages to the leader of black capitalism.

These leaders and the governments under them, always stood in staunch defence of the big Western capitalists who have continued to make a fortune from the cheap black labour, during and after apartheid in South Africa.

Thatcher and Reagan were particular in their praise of the Pretoria regime as a loyal Western ally. President Reagan told CBS in 1981 that he supported South Africa because “it was a country that has stood by us in every war we’ve ever fought, a country that, strategically, is essential to the free world in its production of minerals”.

Big corporate, Shell, Consolidated Goldfields, Caltex, Mobil, Honeywell, IBM, Ford, GM, Westinghouse, Pilkington, BP, Blue Circle, Cadbury Schweppes and dozens alike, have made their fortunes from extreme exploitation of black labour. While these profits continued to be minced, Western businesses and governments turned a blind eye to the oppression of black South Africans. The same governments are paying homage to the leader of black capitalism, who made it possible for them to continue the exploitation and oppression in South Africa till his death.

Death of Mandela, for us, however, is an occasion to draw a balance sheet on the role and character of the bourgeois nationalist movements, like that of ANC, all of which have become props of world capitalism, offering the countries under them as cheap labour and raw material platforms to it.

Founded in 1912, the ANC is one of the oldest of these movements, having drawn its inspiration from Indian National Congress. It has played pivotal role in the negotiated end of the apartheid regime in South Africa and for the last about two decades has been the country’s ruling party.

After coming to power, the leadership of the ANC, far from making any effort for realizing the aspirations of the workers and toilers, betrayed them and exploited their sacrifices to reinforce its own integration into the ranks of the imperialist and national capitalist rulers.

Nearly 20 years after the end of Apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Grotesque levels of exploitation and poverty afflict most of the population, with just over 50 percent living below the official poverty line. Officially, unemployment stands at 25 percent of the workforce, but the real figure is far higher. South Africa has the largest population infected with HIV/AIDS in the world, with up to 6.4 million people, or 12 percent of total population, including 450,000 children affected. Official data shows that only 28 percent of those infected are able to afford and receive medical aid. Life expectancy is 58 years, among the lowest in the world.

So-called“free market reforms” have assured that those at the top, including the old white elite and the new black leaders of ANC and its Trade Unions, have accumulated immense wealth. A tiny minority that now includes a layer of ANC, ex-Stalinist, and trade union leaders, has amassed enormous personal wealth. The country now has the highest number of Trillionaires among all African states, with 14 individuals now in this category, up from two a decade earlier. Those sitting at the top of the capitalist pyramid, like Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers and secretary general of the ANC, having worth USD 275 million alone, have become the sole beneficiaries of the policy of “Black Economic Empowerment” inaugurated and supervised by the ANC.

The African historian Achille Mbembe has rightly described the ANC as a party “consumed by corruption and greed, brutal internecine battles for power and a deadly combination of predatory instincts and intellectual vacuity.”

Right from the beginning of his political career in 1943, when he joined the ANC, Mandela remained a hostile opponent of Marxism. He was opposed to program of any independent organisation of the working class, and instead advocated the idea of subordinating the working class to national bourgeois and its party, ANC. Mandela was instrumental in opposing the mass strike by working class of Johannesburg, in 1950, by organising strike breakers and through physical violence. As successful strike demonstrated the political strength of working class, Mandela retreated under compulsion.

Later, after doubly assuring himself of political impotence and incapacity of Stalinists, ANC under Mandela developed close ties with Stalinist SACP. In their turn, the South African Stalinists, following the Menshevik “two stage” theory of Stalin, argued that South Africa, like other backward countries, will have to first pass through a period of “democratic” capitalist development, under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie, before it could rise up to struggle for socialism. This was exactly in line with bourgeois program of ANC. Neither Mandela nor the ANC, nor even the SACP ever placed socialism on the agenda in South Africa. Socialism, for the SACP, at best, was something that awaited South Africa several decades after the supposed “first stage” of the revolution- the national democratic revolution, was completed.

Having close proximity with Stalinists in South Africa, Mandela consciously rejected the program of Fourth International under Trotsky, that unambiguously proposed ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a pre-condition for any genuine revolution in South Africa, including its national liberation. Narrating his encounter with the South African Trotskyist Isaac Tabata, in 1948, Mandela, the leader of black bourgeois and by then an ally of Stalinists, told his biographer Anthony Samson, “It was difficult for me to cope with his arguments. I didn’t want to continue arguing with the fellow because he was demolishing me just like that”.

The ANC leader utilised the Stalinists as a means to subordinate the South African working class to the bourgeois nationalist platform of ANC and its capitalist program. The ANC’s Freedom Charter, adopted in 1956, was drafted by a member of the CP, Rusty Bernstein. Warding off any misconception on that count in advance, Mandela clarified in one of his article, that the Charter was “by no means a blue-print for a socialist state”.Referring to the call for the nationalisation of the banks, gold mines and land, in the Charter, Mandela reaffirmed his commitment to the national and international bourgeois that these measures would be capitalist in character:“The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own, in their own name and right, mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

The social and economic disaster, so evident now in South Africa, is no less than an indictment of Mandela’s role in preserving capitalist rule and of his program of nurturing a “non-European bourgeoisie.” Stalinist SACP through its own demagogy about revolution and class struggle and its alliance with ANC, made it possible for the ANC to fool the masses of workers and toilers and to draw support for its bourgeois regime.

Starting in the 1960s, the ANC, in alliance with the Stalinist South African Communist Party, employed the rhetoric of revolution and class struggle, but Mandela’s perspective of empowering and enriching an aspiring black bourgeoisie remained at the helm of its program.

Before being sentenced to life by the court in Rivonia Trial in 1964, rejecting allegations of him being a communist, Mandela, told the court during his trial, “The realisation of the Freedom Charter would open up fresh fields for a prosperous African population of all classes, including the middle class. The ANC has never at any period of its history advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it, to the best of my recollection, ever condemned capitalist society.”

When the uprisings in Sharpville, Soweto and the other black townships disrupted the apartheid state, making impossible for it to hold further, the white ruling elite, led by the Anglo-American Corporation, engaged black bourgeois leaders in negotiations for a peaceful end to apartheid and a formal transfer of power to black bourgeois, with the aim of quelling the revolutionary challenge from workers and toilers and preserving their wealth and property from wrath of the revolution.

During mid-1980s, engulfed in a wave of mass strikes and revolts by workers and youth across South Africa’s cities and towns, the government, first imposed martial law in 1985, but failed. Alarmed at the revolutionary threat, in a bid to suppress the insurrectionary struggles being waged by working class and black youth, the government, opened up dialogue with Mandela finding in him the best hope for diffusion of the revolutionary situation. Mandela was courted by the leading corporate executives from jail.

The talks, led to a negotiated settlement between ANC and the government that took off with Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990.

In August 1990 Mandela ordered the cessation of armed struggle, that signified its further willingness to accommodate with imperialism. Young ANC supporters condemned the shameful move as a sell-out and surrender, scores of them, angry at beheading the armed struggle, at a time when the government was unleashing death squads against militants across the country. They confronted Mandela with placards “Mandela, give us arms” and “You are acting like a sheep while the people are dying”.

The conditions negotiated by Mandela were, however, entirely consistent with his long-standing politics. He had always supported private enterprise and a bourgeois parliamentary set-up, with only rider that black bourgeois is not excluded from participating in them.

Implicit in the settlement, was an assurance from ANC that the property, wealth, and commercial interests of both the white elite and international finance capital would be protected. The negotiations, even included a secret commitment by ANC, as Anthony Samson explained,“to reduce the deficit, keep the high interest rates and to keep the economy open for international investments”. In return, access to an IMF loan of $850 million, was promised, if required.

Late 1993, came the capitulation by the ANC to the Constitution dictated by the imperialists, that secured property rights and extraordinary dominance of banks giving the central bank, and the South African Reserve Bank, complete insulation from impending political change, coupled with a pledge to prepay the apartheid debt of $25 billion, which ANC had been demanding to write off for decades, This capitulation loomed heavily on the back of toiling masses of South Africa.

The multi-party elections that followed in 1994, resulted in the ANC taking to power with a clear sweep of 62 percent of the total vote. Mandela continued to head the government for the next five years, until 1999.

Repelling all genuine aspirations of the toiling masses for a change in their living conditions, as the government under Mandela took to power, Mandela declared, “We must rid ourselves of (the culture of entitlement that leads to) the expectation that the government must promptly deliver, whatever it is, that we demand”. On the contrary, Mandela warned the workers, to tighten their belts” and get ready to accept low wages so that investment would flow.

As Mandela took over Presidency of South Africa, exchange controls were relaxed to great extent, permitting the foreign investors to invest and take away the proceeds, more freely than ever. Mandela got so much popular among billionaire investors, that when he left office in 1999, big investors relisted from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to London, New York, and Australia creating a situation of ‘capital flight’ on Johannesburg stock exchange.

Seeking to attract investments, while competing with other low wage countries on African continent and outside, the ANC regime under Mandela, had continued to push the real wages lower and lower since then, sinking them to the lowest during the recent global capitalist crisis. This in turn, has triggered enormous social tensions.

Retreating from the program of ANC, for nationalisation of banks and mines, shamefaced Mandela told his interviewer that “nationalisation is not on the agenda of Reconstruction and Development. Two years later, even this weak reformist ‘Reconstruction and Development’ Program, was substituted with a crude neoliberal “Growth, Employment and Redistribution”program, drawn straight from the World Bank recipe book.

The wealthy citizens of Sandton, a virtually all-white posh suburb of Johannesburg, erected a statue in Mandela’s honour at their local shopping centre.

Toiling masses however are left in lurch, battling for access to basic necessities -water and electricity, decent housing, clinics for better medical care, and better schools, recreational facilities, and even garbage disposal.

Oblivious to the woes of workers and toilers, Mandela remained friendly with billionaires in SA. Even the Guardian,that termed Mandela as great democratic leader, was forced to recognize in its obituary, Mandela’s “attachment to the glamour of the very rich.” The newspaper writes: “Money was dazzling. Once freed, he holidayed at the Irish businessman Sir Tony O’Reilly’s Caribbean island and gave the go-ahead for his takeover of South Africa’s biggest newspaper group, in anticipation of his‘magic money’ providing black empowerment in the media. He allowed the casino king, Sol Kerzner, to host the wedding of his daughter Zinzi. He borrowed rich men’s houses and flew around South Africa in their aircrafts.”

Since coming to power of ANC, a new black bourgeoisie started to emerge quickly, under rampant cronyism, while ANC leaders continued to move into mansions in posh “golf and country estates”. Disparities between white and black have since paved way to more widened inequalities between black rich and poor. George Soros , a Hungarian-American business magnate and investor, proudly claimed before Davos Economic Forum in 2001, “South Africa is in the hands of international capital.”

Much trumpeted and promised wealth redistribution, remained the worst casualty of pro-investor and pro-corporate policies of ANC regime, comparable only with Brazil and Namibia, and the inequality has continued to rise in huge proportions under Mandela. Today, South Africa tops on the list of richest men in the world, as also on the list of poorest in the world. After two decades of ANC rule, South Africa is home to extreme poverty, illiteracy, inequality, diseases and depravity.

As workers revolted against the degraded living conditions, no different from the apartheid state, the government under ANC, flanked on the left by the Stalinist SACP, did not hesitate from organising mass murder of workers at Lonmin platinum mines on August 16 last year. The brutal repression of Marikana strikers that finds its echo in Soweto and Sharpville mayhem committed by the white racist state, had left 34 dead and dozens wounded.

In 1935, Leon Trotsky, in a letter to his followers in South Africa, warned of “the inability of the ANC to achieve the realization of even its own demands because of its superficial, conciliatory policy.”

This warning stands vindicated. The ANC’s trajectory, like that of all the other bourgeois nationalist and national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East- Indian National Congress to ANC and from Sandinistas to the PLO- has upheld the fundamental perspective advanced by Trotsky in his theory of Permanent Revolution.

Trotsky’s perspective propounded that the bourgeoisie in the oppressed countries, tied to imperialism and fearful of the working class, is organically incapable of carrying out the struggle for democracy and an end to imperialist domination. Those tasks can be realized only by the working class, leading the oppressed masses, seizing power into its own hands and going over to a socialist revolution as part of the struggle of the international working class to put an end to capitalism on a global scale.

Notwithstanding all criminal misdeeds of Mandela, for which, the ANC and its Stalinist and trade union allies are deeply hated by the working class, the death of Mandela, coincides with ever mounting social and political tensions in South Africa, having their roots in most genuine aspirations of toiling masses, touching their zenith. Driven by the general crisis of world capitalism, there are growing indications of a resurgence of the class struggle in South Africa. Since Marikana massacre, South African workers stand in direct conflict with the ANC government, the big business, global banks and corporations that it represents.

These spiralling social tensions are bound to result in volcanic eruption of revolt of working and toiling masses in South Africa, sooner than later. Our task is to arm the South African proletariat with a program of socialist revolution and integrate its struggle for liberation from the yoke of capitalism with that of the international proletariat for complete wiping out of capitalism from the face of the earth.

Also check: http://workersocialist.blogspot.in/2012/09/marikana-massacre-completely-exposes.html

http://johnpilger.com/videos/apartheid-did-not-die

Beware Falling BRICS: South Africa and China

Strategic Alliance: Jacob Zuma bows to Hu Jintao

The Marikana Massacre has exposed the reactionary ANC regime as a client state of imperialism. The ANC is attempting to head off a growing mass uprising of workers by building a new ‘strategic partnership’ with China in the hope that this will produce ‘win-win’ deals to allow the country to develop its economy and reap the wealth produced. China, however, is no saviour as it is no different to the former colonial exploiters. As an emerging imperialist power its interest is in the super-exploitation of South African workers. The global crisis is creating a militant opposition to the rule of capitalist imperialism everywhere. In South Africa, as elsewhere, for workers to live they will have to unite to overthrow capitalism. Forward to the South African Revolution!

Marikana – A South African Spring?

What is behind the Marikana Massacre? It is a re-opening of the democratic revolution that has the potential for permanent revolution similar to that of the Arab Spring? Why does the national democratic revolution need re-opening? In 1952 the ANC and SACP joined forced to lead the national democratic revolution to power. The ANC adopted its program on national development, the Freedom Charter, from the Stalinist SACP which held that SA must go through a bourgeois stage of capitalist development to create the pre-conditions for socialism.

We trace this Stalinist theory of stages to the Menshevik position in Russia in 1923 which Stalin reverted to once he was in power in the Soviet Union. The democratic revolution would empower the working class to nationalise the means of production to speed up the transition to socialism. This would be possible if the bourgeois state was under the control of the ANC representing the Black majority working class. The Freedom Charter written in 1955 made ‘nationalisation’ of the mines central to its program of national development. Thus ‘nationalisation’ meant ownership by the bourgeois state ‘governed’ by the ANC, not the social ownership of the working class in a socialist workers’ state. The working people would delegate this task to the ANC and not have direct control over its implementation.

When the ANC came to power in 1994 the SACP program of ‘nationalisation’ was already realised in the Soviet Union by its return to state capitalism. The Stalinist policy of Perestroika and Glasnost had opened the road to the restoration of the capitalist market. Yeltsin in 1992 defeated any resistance to capitalist restoration forcing state property to be privatised or the remaining SEOs to be subject to the law of value in global capitalist market. This translated globally as a retreat from not only workers property, but from bourgeois ‘nationalisation’, to the ‘mixed economy’ dressed up sometimes as ‘market socialism’. So by 1994 the Stalinist world was already rejecting ‘nationalisation’ as the preferred road to socialism. Thus the bourgeois national revolution in SA was deformed at birth as part of a historic defeat of the world working class that brought the downfall of the degenerate workers states including the Soviet Union, destroying workers property, the main gain of the October 1917 Revolution.

In coming to power in 1994 the ANC junked the Freedom Charter for a developmental state model of ‘market socialism’ where the state regulates the market to meet the goals of ‘socialism’. It wasn’t until 2002 that it succeeded in overcoming resistance to the nationalisation of mineral resources in the ground. Today the ANC leadership still rules out nationalisation of the mining companies’ assets as too costly and politically destabilising. It says the nationalisation of the assets of listed mining corporations would cost $1 Trillion and bankrupt the country leaving it at the mercy of a Structural Adjustment Program. It therefore continues to opt for a range of taxes, royalties and other ‘value-sharing’ measures to implement its particular brand of ‘national development’.

Has the national revolution created the pre-conditions for socialism?

The ANC/SACP policy of the bourgeois national revolution is one of using the state to redistribute surplus value towards the gradual social ownership of the means of production. Imperialism is understood as based on unequal exchange where normal profits (surplus-value) are inflated into super profits by extracting ‘super-value’. The two main mechanisms are using a reserve army to force de-value wages below the level of reproduction, and undervaluing the price of the commodities produced and exported via transfer pricing. This means that on top of normal capitalist profits (surplus value), imperialist corporations ‘steal’ super-profits (super-value). The ANC/SACP policy is that the national revolution ‘empowers’ workers governments to tax or regulate imperialism to reduce or eliminate unequal exchange as the basis of super-profits. There have been ongoing attempts to achieve this using a number of rules including the latest attempts to stop transfer pricing. But there is now a growing consensus that this has failed and that SA is one of the most super-exploited semi-colonies on earth.

This means that in practice for 18 years the ANC has proven that its Stalinist SACP theory of the progressive national revolution is a fraud. It has presided over the return of EU and US multinationals into the mining industry and failed to put an end to imperialist super-exploitation of low wages (reflected in the poverty living standards of workers) and transfer pricing. The lion’s share of value pumped out of mining continued to go into the coffers of the mining multinationals, Anglo-American, Lonmin, Glencore etc. The rate of super-profit remains massive. The minority share that came to the regime via royalties, taxes and minority shareholdings such as the BEES (Black Business Empowerment) did not benefit the mass of South Africans, but went into the pockets of a newly emerging Black bourgeoisie. The ANC is now shown up by its failed national revolution as the party of a new Black national bourgeoisie presiding over the super-exploitation of the South African working class.

All of this was predicted decades ago by revolutionary Marxists who fought the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. The Stalinist popular front empowered a bureaucracy and a new bourgeoisie by disempowering the working class. These revolutionaries are once again vindicated by events in South Africa. The ANC Tripartite regime has trapped SA into dependency on Western imperialist super-exploitation. It has led to the rise of a Black bourgeoisie and crony capitalism, and the rising mass dissatisfaction with the successive leadership of the ANC, its statified union Congress, Cosatu, and of its political leadership in the SACP, is today beginning to rise up. The miners of Marikane are but the first wave of mass insurrection that rejects the ANC regime and its state force and is embarking on the road to workers power!

ANC Response

Despite the recent attempts at Polokwane to outline a new plan for national development based on a greater share of the resource rent these pathetic paper proposals have been overwhelmed by the global crisis and falling demand for minerals which has put pressure on the regime to contain and discipline mining workers to screw down labour and production costs to restore levels of super-profits. This created a wave of dissatisfaction with the NUM and the series of disputes that ultimately led to the Marikana Massacre.

The ANC response to the Massacre has been to resort to police suppression of the militants to defeat and contain the miners’ strike, and at the same time try to keep control of the moderates by holding a public inquiry and promising major economic reforms. These reforms amount to promises to tax the mining super-profits via tougher Resource Rent Tax that will create a Sovereign Wealth Fund to invest in national and economic social development. This conception of national development is tied to SA’s membership of the BRICS led by China. It is being promoted as an attempt to reduce its dependence on Western imperialism by collaborating with the ‘market socialist’ giant whose developmental model can be copied. Instead of ‘Western’ imperialist exploitation the ANC sees China as an alternative economic power with which it can enter a “win-win” partnership based on “equal exchange”.

Thus in the SIMS plans launched in March 2012 the ANC proposes that on the back of a SWF funded by the 50% RRT it can develop upstream in energy (power and infrastructure) and downstream, manufacturing, education, housing etc much as China has. It wants to build Pilot Beneficients Hubs based on the Chinese SEZs which allow new investment, technology etc to drive up the ‘value chain’ to add-value and fund jobs and rising living standards. This, they say will allow SA to follow China’s path to national development overcoming the barriers of super-exploitation, unemployment and poverty.

For some in the ANC this is not enough to stop super-exploitation. By its own calculations, SIMS proposed 50% RRT taxes only half the super-profits of mining companies. Julius Malema, the expelled ANC Youth League leader, and his faction want to replace the leadership of the ANC and its policy of taxing profits. Their main demand is ‘nationalisation without compensation’. Here we can see that Malema is trying to contain the political radicalisation of workers to rescue the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance by promising a more radical reform than the current leadership. Malema is popular with the striking miners who support more militant moves to share the wealth. Many are now breaking with the NUM and Cosatu and calling for directly negotiated share of the profits.

Malema’s factional fight inside the ANC does not break with the popular front. Nationalisation without compensation is still a bourgeois nationalisation. This is not a nationalisation from below based on workers occupation and workers control! ‘Nationalisation’ undertaken by the ANC would be a bourgeois nationalisation. The process will remain one led by the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, Cosatu and SACP in which a bourgeois state is the agent of national capitalist development continuing to act as a junior partner of imperialism. Malema is unlikely to win a majority in the upcoming ANC Congress for ‘nationalisation’ as a panacea, because the ANC leadership is confident that its reforms will be bankrolled by China. “This time round” the global crisis which has now burst to the surface at Marikana and spreading to all the mines is pushing the ANC leadership to ‘reinvent’ itself by modelling SA development on China’s ‘market socialism’.

In other words ANC wants SA to “takeoff” and raise living standards like China and the other BRICS. “Not surprisingly then, the new investments from China will be centred on “geology and mineral resources” as well as on financial cooperation between the Development Bank of South Africa and China Development Bank. But according to Kgalema Motlanthe, South Africa’s deputy president, things are different this time around. The deals, he said, are meant to “strike a healthy balance” in trade volume between the two countries.“This financial cooperation agreement is between development banks and the specific projects in which they are going to invest, they have to identify these projects,” Motlanthe, who is on a three-day trip China, was quoted by Reuters as saying. “To that end, the difference is, instead of just exporting these minerals as raw materials, there will be…value add to create jobs on both sides,” he added.”

In other words a ‘win-win’ deal. China may be investing in the old ‘imperialist’ ventures of energy, minerals and banking, but it won’t be extracting super-profits! Or at least the super-profits will be divided equally – hence ‘win-win’ for both Chinese and South African bourgeoisie! A recent delegation from the province of Gauteng visited China to sign up to a deal on infrastructure projects. It was led by Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane who said: "Our people's lives will improve because after this partnership is sealed, we will see a massive roll-out of infrastructure projects. Already in Tshwane, we have a number of flagship projects in the pipeline including the construction of the Tshwane International Conference Center and Rainbow Junction, among others," said Ramokgopa.

Can South Africa develop like China?

Let’s look at this prospect. The global crisis and the slump in demand for minerals as well as the hardship facing workers that led to Marikana, may speed up the China connection. China continues to keep the economies of the BRICS steaming along so long as its own economy is still growing rapidly. The current slowdown in China from 8% to maybe 7% is still a raging boom by comparison with Western imperialist states. In this sense China appears to be different from the established imperialist powers in continuing to keep the world economy from slumping into deep depression.

So is Chinese investment an alternative to imperialist super-exploitation? Is China different to the Western Powers? Can it sustain the world economy and in particular the BRICS. Will South Africa be able to attract more trade and investment out of China, and also increase its share of the rent from mineral extraction? And will he Chinese model of development reproduce in SA an increase in added value based on transfer of technology and knowledge?

Deborah Brautigam of China in Africa: The Real Story sees China as different from the European powers, but still expecting a commercial advantage from its investments in Africa. China is not copying European colonisation which sucks out resources and labour power without concern for upstream or downstream development, but can see the benefits in developing Africa after the Chinese model. Not only is China exporting its model to semi-colonies like South Africa but since 2000 and the policy to “Go Out” and membership of WTO, it is demonstrating this process of going up the value stream from cheap labour to high tech in its FDI in SA. This shows that China has used FDI in semi-colonies like South Africa to launch its “Go Global”. It does not compete directly against the established brands of EU, US and Japanese corporate, but starts cheap or contracts to established brands to develop a competitive product and then develop its own brands globally.

In SA Chinese FDI took off after 2000 where it used SA as a ‘learning arena’ for the globalisation of its banks and industries. So China is not only doing swaps of loans for resources, it is investing in upstream energy and infrastructure, and downstream consumer goods such as domestic appliances, electronics and communications. “Adding these estimates suggests that Chinese assets in South Africa in mining alone were probably worth close to US$700 million at end of 2007. This suggests that MOFCOM’s figure of US$702 million was reasonably accurate, in contrast to the SARB figure of US$70.” The Edge, p8. “The period since 2000 has seen a major expansion in the Chinese presence in South African mining with the doubling of Sinosteel’s investment during 2006, and the entry of other mining companies as discussed above. Several major Chinese corporations have entered the banking and construction sectors.” Ibid p 18. Thus China’s ‘demonstration effect’ is a major factor in reviving hopes that ‘win-win’ deals will see South Africa and other African states make the same leap from underdevelopment to development made by China. 

China’s 21st century imperialism

This is not the familiar 19th or 20th century imperialism, but rather a supersession of 19th and 20th century imperialism as a new form of 21st century imperialism. On the surface it is easy to see why semi-colonial governments can hope to do ‘win-win’ deals with China. Moreover, the Chinese developmental model which is regarded widely as a form of ‘market socialism’ fits snugly with the central role of the state in ownership and control of African economies in the ideology of the ANC, ZANU PF and other African governments. All of this hinges on the assumption that China is a new form of economy – a hybrid of a socialist state and the capitalist market – which is not governed by the laws governing the economies of the other big powers. Thus it appears that China has escaped the trap of Western imperialism and shows the way for the rest of the BRICS and other ‘developing’ countries to follow the same road.

But on closer analysis, China is not essentially different from Western Imperialist economies as its policies are dictated by the laws of motion of monopoly capital and by the growing rivalry with other imperialist states. Standard neo-liberal economic theory argues that China’s Overseas FDI is different from established developed economies as they are not global leaders in any sector. This view is echoed on the left, that China cannot catch up with imperialism because it does not have competitive advantage in any global sector of production. Some argue that this fits with Lenin’s concept of imperialism where imperialist firms must be world leaders to monopolise a sector of production, e.g. oil, banks, steel, autos etc.

What this theory overlooks is that China with its centralised state capitalist apparatus is able to leverage its 100s of millions of low paid workers to create huge surpluses to catch up with its stagnating rivals. This means that it has a massive accumulated super-profits to buy existing assets or resources and form joint ventures to break into sectors where seeks to dominate in the future. In South Africa as well as FDI in minerals and financial services China sought markets for assembled CKD goods and offer more competitive, cheaper, brands and services on the basis of technology transfer arising from FDI inside China itself.

Thus, China has been able to ‘capitalise’ on its history as a Degenerated Workers State to accumulate surplus value rapidly and ‘go out’ by applying its developmental model in key countries like South Africa. So not only has China demonstrated by its rapid expansion that it is an emerging imperialist power, it is also proving that it is not immune to the deepening global capitalist crisis and is showing signs of overproduction of capital. This is now becoming evident as China’s economy is slowing down. Perhaps China’s slowdown is only because it is tied to the global market, and not due to any inherent crisis of overproduction? This is the most common view on the reformist left, a view shared by the ANC and other African regimes. Because the ANC views capitalism as capable of being reformed into ‘socialism’ by equalising exchange, China is ‘socialist’ to the extent that it can use ‘Keynesian’ state deficit spending to compensate for falling trade. But in a capitalist economy state investment in infrastructure will generate stagflation unless that infrastructure contributes to the production of commodities that China can sell in the world market.

China’s crisis then, exposes for all to see, the limits of ‘market socialism’ as dependent on the underlying laws of global capitalism. The BRICS look to the ‘China model’ of state managed development to strengthen trade and investment relations and move toward swap deals where China provides long term loans or infrastructure deals in exchange for resources. Yet the BRICS categorised as ‘emerging markets’, hides essential differences behind surface similarities. The essential differences are that Russia and China are imperialist countries and have no interest in ‘developing’ the other BRICS unless they can reap super-profits. This means that BRICS like South Africa cannot escape the ‘sphere of influence’ of Chinese and Russian imperialism without a socialist revolution.

Russia and China are newly emerging imperialist countries having made the transition from DWS back to capitalism. Despite massive problems associated with capitalist restoration, their strong state and relative independence from existing imperialist states has allowed them to escape the fate of the other BRICS which remain trapped in their colonial dependence. We can see how Russia and China have formed a new imperialist bloc competing with the US led bloc by creating its own sphere of influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This sphere of influence now includes the other BRICS (Brazil, India and South Africa) as well as other intermediate states such as Iran, Venezuela etc. Yet inevitably this sphere of influence is one in which Russia and China dominate and super-exploit their semi-colonial clients. India, Brazil and South Africa are all characterised by the continued dominance of imperialist FDI which limits their ability to develop an independent bourgeoisie and accumulate capital on their own account.

Way Forward

Our conclusion is that the ANC cannot lead South Africa out of imperialist super-exploitation by following China’s development model. It has proven that the bourgeois democratic revolution cannot be completed by means of a popular front government but in fact holds back its completion by trapping the working class in a client state of imperialism. This will prove to be the case with China also. China is not a new form of society that can escape capitalist crisis. It is an emerging imperialist power that is now the main rival of the US bloc in Africa. The ANC’s strategic alliance with China will see it staying trapped in semi-colonial super-exploitation and its people trapped in poverty and misery.

The miners of Marikana will not win freedom or economic security without leading a socialist revolution in SA. For that to happen the workers need their own Revolutionary Party and a program that opens the road to revolution. It is necessary to build a working class movement based on the mines; workers councils in every workplace and township; workers defence militias; for the seizure of power and formation of a Workers and poor farmers Government to expropriate imperialist and capitalist property and plan a socialist economy!

Build a Workers Party that unites the militant vanguard from China the Middle East to the USA!

For a new World Party of Socialist Revolution!

Liaison Committee of Communists

Revolutionary Workers Group (Zimbabwe)
Communist Workers Group (USA)
Communist Workers Group (Aotearoa/NZ)