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SACSIS: The Massacre of Our Illusions…and the Seeds of Something New

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1402

The Massacre of Our Illusions…and the Seeds of Something New

by Leonard Gentle, SACSIS

The story of Marikana runs much deeper than an inter-union spat. After the horror of watching people being massacred on television, Marikana now joins the ranks of the Bulhoek and Sharpeville massacres, and the images evoked by Hugh Masekela’s Stimela, in the odious history of a method of capital accumulation based on violence.

But this is not just a story of violence and grief. To speak in those terms only would be to add the same insult to the injury perpetrated by the police on the striking workers, as many commentators have done – seeing the striking miners as mere victims and not as agents of their own future and, more importantly, as the source of a new movement in the making.

The broader platinum belt has been home to new upsurges of struggle over the last five years. From the working class community activists of Merafong and Khutsong to the striking workers of Angloplat, Implat and now Lonmin, these struggles, including the nationwide “service delivery” revolts, are a sign that a new movement is being forged despite the state violence that killed Andries Tatane and massacred the Lonmin workers. Rather than just howl our outrage, it is time to take sides and offer our support.

After Marikana, things will never be the same again.

Firstly, the killings mark the end of the illusion that the ANC has not been transformed into the party of big capital. For some while now the ANC could trade on its liberation credits in arguing that all criticism came from those trying to defend white privilege. The DA was perfect to be cast in this role because it always attacked the ANC for not being business-friendly enough.

But Marikana was an attack on workers in defence of white privilege, specifically the mining house, Lonmin. Lonmin epitomises the make-up of the new elite in South Africa: old white capital garnished with a sprinkling of politically connected Blacks.

In this, the ANC steps squarely into the shoes of its predecessor, apartheid’s Nationalist Party, acting to secure the profits of mining capital through violence.

Secondly, the strike and the massacre also mark a turning point in the liberation alliance around the ANC – particularly COSATU. Whereas the community and youth wings of what was called the Mass Democratic Movement became disgraced after 1994 by their association with corrupt councillors, and eclipsed by the service delivery revolts of today, COSATU’s moral authority was enhanced. Within what is called “civil society”, COSATU continued to be a moral voice. So anyone who had a campaign sought out COSATU as a partner. This moral authority came because COSATU was simply the most organised voice amongst the working class.

Today COSATU’s links with the working class are only very tenuous.

It is almost intuitive that we consider the notion of a worker as someone working for a clear employer, on a full-time basis, in a large factory, supermarket or mine. Indeed classical industrial trade unions were forged by workers in large factories and industrial areas. This was the case in many countries where such unions won the right to organise and was also the case in South Africa, when a new wave of large industrial unions emerged after the 1973 Durban Strikes.

Going along with this structure were the residential spaces of townships. From the 1950s, the apartheid regime increasingly came to accept the de facto existence of a settled urban proletariat and built the match-box brick houses in the townships of the apartheid era: the Sowetos, Kathlehongs, Tembisas.

So the working class was organised by capitalism into large industrial sites and brick houses in large sprawling townships.

Since the 1980s, the neo-liberal phase of capitalism has changed this.

Neo-liberalism has not only been about privatisation and global speculation. It has also been about restructuring work and home. Today casualisation, outsourcing, work from home, labour brokers and other forms of informalisation have become the dominant form of work and shack dwelling the mode of existence of the working class. The latter is in direct proportion to the withdrawal of the state from providing housing and associated services.

Twenty years ago the underground workers of Lonmin would have lived in a compound policed by the company. Today the rock drill workers live in a shantytown near the mine.

Also, mining itself has changed. Much of the hard work underground is now done by workers sourced from labour brokers. These are the most exploited workers, working the longest hours with the most flexible arrangements. Today it is even possible to own a mine and not work it yourself but to contract engineering firms like Murray and Roberts to do the mining for you. Into the mix can be added so-called “illegal miners” who literally mine with spades and their own dynamite and then sell on to middlemen with links to big businesses.

Lonmin has exploited these divisions – using the old mining industry strategy of recruiting along tribal divisions. The rock drill workers are Xhosas who are railed in from the Eastern Cape to heighten the exploitation at the coalface.

Add to this the toxic mix of mine security, barbed-wire enclosures and informal housing, as identified by the BenchMarks Foundation, and a picture of institutionalised violence emerges.

By way of contrast, the dominant trade unions in South Africa have largely moved up upscale towards white-collar workers and away from this majority. Today the large COSATU affiliates comprise of public sector white-collar workers, like the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. The lower level blue-collar workers are now employed by labour brokers and are in services that have been outsourced, like cleaning, security and so on. They don’t fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.

The Lonmin strike was the second in the last three months to hit the platinum sector. It was preceded by a strike at Implats. Both involved the Association of Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (AMCU) as workers sought an outlet for their frustrations.

The mining trade journal Miningmix published this story in 2009:

(A) gradual change had taken place in the profile of the NUM membership over the last 15 years; one that nobody had taken notice of. The NUM was originally borne out of the lowest job categories of South African mineworkers, mainly from gold mines. More than 60% of its members were foreigners, mostly illiterate migrant labourers.

Nowadays that number has dropped to below 40%. On the other hand, an increasing portion of the NUM’s membership comes from what can be described as white-collar mining staff, who had previously been represented exclusively by Solidarity and UASA. The local NUM structures in Rustenburg, like the branch office bearers and the shop stewards, are dominated by these skilled, higher level workers. They are literate, well spoken and wealthy compared to the general workers and machine operators underground.

So while the NUM remains the largest affiliate of COSATU, it is changing from a union of coalface workers to a union of above ground technicians. It is these developments that led to the formation of a breakaway union. Whatever the credentials of AMCU, its emergence is a direct challenge to the hegemony of NUM and of COSATU. As such, the federation has embarked on a disgraceful campaign of slandering the striking workers and their union.

In this they have been joined by the media.

With the notable exception of the Cape Times, the media’s culpability in demonising the striking workers has been reprehensible. In addition to only quoting NUM sources for information, or focusing on Malema, there have been no attempts to dig beneath the idea of manipulated workers and inter-union rivalry. They all depicted the rock drillers as uneducated, Basotho or Eastern Cape Xhosas, whilst flogging the idea of an increase to R12 500 as “unreasonable”.

Then there is the notion that workers went to AMCU because they were promised R12 500. This fiction is repeated endlessly by the media. Journalists are of course happy to source this from “unnamed” NUM sources. The slander here is that workers are so open to manipulation that they will believe any empty promises. This plays to the prejudice repeated by Frans Baleni of NUM from his Nyala that rock drill workers are uneducated, and it bolsters the idea that AMCU is some kind of slick willy operation that must take responsibility for the massacre.

Anyone with any experience of organising knows that trade unions don’t come to workers like insurance salesman. In the main, workers form their own committees and then send a delegation to the union office demanding that an organiser come and sign them up. Or, they simply down tools forcing their employer to contact a union organiser.

Nor is any strike decision, let alone a strike such as this one – unprotected, under the umbrella of an unrecognised union, in a workplace with mine security and where the workers themselves are far from home in a strange region – ever taken lightly. Wildcat strikes are probably the most conscious act of sacrifice and courage that anyone can take, driven by anger and desperation and involving the full knowledge that you could lose your job and your family’s livelihood.

In normal times, trade unions can be as much a huge bureaucratic machine as a corporation or a state department with negotiations conducted by small teams far from the thousands of rank-and-file members. Strikes change all that…suddenly unions are forced to be conduits of their members’ aspirations.

Whatever the merits of AMCU as a democratic union or as one with any vision of transformation; whatever the involvement of the Themba Godis, the workers of Marikana made their choice: to become members of AMCU and risk everything, including their lives, for a better future.

For that we owe them more than just pious sympathy. There is a job of mobilisation and movement-building to be done.

Almost 40 years ago, in 1973, workers from companies around Durban came out in a series of wildcat – then really illegal – strikes. Today this event is celebrated by everyone as part of the revival of the anti-apartheid movement and the birth of a new phase of radical trade unionism, culminating in the formation of COSATU.

But in 1973, the media highlighted the threat of violence and called for the restoration of law and order. The apartheid state could not respond with the kind of killings that happened at Marikana because the strikes were in industrial areas, but they invoked the same idea of ignorant misled workers (then they were seen as ignorant Zulus) and had homeland leader Mangosutho Buthelezi send his emissary, Barney Dladla, to talk to the workers.

While in exile, the SACP questioned the bona fides of the strikes, invoking the involvement of Buthelezi to perpetuate the fiction of “ignorant Zulus” because they were not called for by the liberation aligned union body, SACTU. Some in SACTU circles raised the spectre of liberals and CIA involvement in the new worker formations with an agenda to “sideline the liberation movement”. This separation of the ANC and its allies from the early labour movement was to lead to the divisions between the “workerist unions” and the “populist unions” in the labour movement and was to continue within COSATU.

How easily people forget this when workers forge new movements today.

For a long time now the ongoing service delivery revolts throughout the country have failed to register on the iPads and Blackberries of the chattering classes. This is because of the social distance of the middle classes to the new working classes.

Now the sight of the police shooting striking workers on TV has brought the real world of current struggles right into the lounges and bedrooms of public opinion.

So far the strikers have stood firm not only against the police and Lonmin, but also against the media labelling their strike “illegal”. Strikes are not illegal in South Africa; they are only protected or unprotected. Meanwhile NUM and COSATU are rallying behind their ally, the ANC, to stigmatise the strikers and their union as “paid by BHP Billiton and the Chamber of Mines”.

In the midst of our outrage at this brutality let us acknowledge that a new movement is emerging. Such early signs do not as yet indicate something grand and well organised. Movements are notoriously messy and difficult to assign to some kind of predetermined ideological box. We do not know what ups and downs people will go through, but when the seeds of a new movement are being planted, it is time to ask what the rest of us can do to help it to grow.

Amandla: Echoes of the Past: Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike

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Echoes of the Past: Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike

by Chris Webb

On August 4, 1946 over one thousand miners assembled in Market Square in Johannesburg, South Africa. No hall in the town was big enough to hold them, and no one would have rented one to them anyway. The miners were members of the African Mine Worker’s Union (AMWU), a non-European union which was formed five years earlier in order to address the 12 to 1 pay differential between white and black mineworkers. The gathering carried forward just one unanimous resolution: African miners would demand a minimum wage of ten shillings (about 1 Rand) per day. If the Transvaal Chamber of Mines did not meet this demand, all African mine workers would embark on a general strike immediately. Workers mounted the platform one after the other to testify: “When I think of how we left our homes in the reserves, our children naked and starving, we have nothing more to say. Every man must agree to strike on 12 August. It is better to die than go back with empty hands.” The progressive Guardian newspaper reported an old miner getting to his feet and addressing his comrades: “We on the mines are dead men already!”[1]

The massacre of 45 people, including 34 miners, at Marikana in the North West province is an inevitable outcome of a system of production and exploitation that has historically treated human life as cheap and disposable. If there is a central core – a stem in relation to which so many other events are branches – that runs through South African history, it is the demand for cheap labour for South Africa’s mines. “There is no industry of the size and prosperity of this that has managed its cheap labour policy so successfully,” wrote Ruth First in reference to the Chamber of Mines ability to pressure the government for policies that displaced Africans from their land and put them under the boot of mining bosses.[2]

Masters and Servants

Mechanisms such as poll and hut taxes, pass laws, Masters and Servants Acts and grinding rural poverty were all integral in ensuring a cheap and uninterrupted supply of labour for the mines. Pass laws were created in order to forge a society in which farm work or mining was the only viable employment options for the black population. And yet the low wages and dangerous work conditions kept many within the country away, forcing the Chamber of Mines to recruit labour from as far afield as Malawi and China throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sordid deals between Portuguese East Africa and Apartheid South Africa ensured forced labour to be recruited for the mines and by 1929 there were 115,000 Mozambicans working underground. “It has been said,” wrote First in her study of migrant Mozambican miners, “that the wealth of Reef gold mines lies not in the richness of the strike but in the low costs of production kept down by cheap labour.”[3]

When AMWU was formed in 1941 black miners earned 70 Rand a year while white workers received 848 Rand. White miners had been organized for many years, but there was little solidarity between the two groups as evidenced by the 1922 Rand Rebellion led by the whites-only Mine Workers Union. White miners went on strike against management’s attempt at weakening the colour bar in order to facilitate the entry of cheaper black labour into skilled positions. Supported by the Communist Party of South Africa under the banner of “Unite and Fight for a White South Africa!” the rebellion was viciously crushed by the state leaving over 200 dead. The growth of non-European unions in the 1940s was dramatic and for the very first time the interests of African mineworkers were on the table. Their demands threatened the very foundations of the cheap labour system, and so in 1944 Prime Minister Jan Smuts tabled the War Measure 1425 preventing a gathering of 20 or more on mine property. Despite these difficulties the union pressed on and in 1946 they approached the Chamber of Mines with their demand for wage increases. A letter calling for last minute negotiations with the Chamber of Mines was, as usual, ignored.

By August 12th tens-of-thousands of black miners were on strike from the East to the West Rand. The state showed the utmost brutality, chasing workers down mineshafts with live ammunition and cracking down on potential sympathy strikes in the city of Johannesburg. By August 16th the state had bludgeoned 100,000 miners back to work and nine lay dead. Throughout the four-day strike hundreds of trade union leaders were arrested, with the central committee of the Communist Party and local ANC leaders arrested and tried for treason and sedition. The violence came on the cusp of the 1948 elections, which would see further repression and the beginning of the country’s anti-communist hysteria.

National Union of Mineworkers Poster on Fortieth Anniversary of 1946 Strike.

While it did not succeed in its immediate aims, the strike was a watershed moment in South African politics and would forever change the consciousness of the labour movement. Thirty years late Monty Naicker, one of the leading figures in the South African Indian Congress, argued that the strike “transformed African politics overnight. It spelt the end of the compromising, concession-begging tendencies that dominated African politics. The timid opportunism and begging for favours disappeared.”[4] The Native Representative Council, formed by the state in 1937 to address the age old ‘native question,’ disbanded on August 15th and ANC president Dr. A.B. Xuma reiterated the demand for “recognition of African trade unions and adequate wages for African workers including mineworkers.”[5]

The 1946 mineworkers strike was the spark that ignited the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC Youth League’s 1949 Program of Action owes much to the militancy of these workers as does the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s and the emergence of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in the 1960s. It is too early to say what sort of impact the current Lonmin strike will have on South African politics, but it seems unlikely that it will be as transformative as those of the past. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), arguably the heirs to the 1946 strike are currently engaged in a series of territorial disputes with the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Meanwhile COSATU’s muted response has echoed the ANC’s line of equal-culpability and half-mast public mourning. The increasingly incoherent South African Communist Party has called for the arrest of AMCU leaders with some of its so-called cadres defending the police action. Former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema’s plea for miners to hold the line and form a more militant union reek of political opportunism.

Still Dependant on Cheap and Flexible Labour

What no one has dared to say, aside from the miners themselves, is that the mining industry remains dependant on cheap and flexible labour, much of it continuing to come from neighbouring countries. This has historically been the source of most miner’s grievances. A recent Bench Marks Foundation study of platinum mines in the North West province uncovered a number of factors linked to rising worker discontent in the region. Lonmin was singled out as a mine with high levels of fatalities, very poor living conditions for workers and unfulfilled community demands for employment. Perhaps most significant is the fact that almost a third of Lonmin’s workforce is employed through third party contractors.[6] This form of employment is not new in the mining industry. In fact, since minerals were discovered in the 19th century labour recruiters have scoured the southern half of the continent for workers. The continued presence of these ‘labour brokers’ on the mines and the ANC’s unwillingness to ban them – opting instead for a system of increasing regulation – is the bloody truth of South Africa’s so-called ‘regulated flexibility.’

There are a number other findings from the Bench Marks study that are worth mentioning as they illuminate some of the real grievances that have been lost amid photos of waving pangas. The number of fatalities at Lonmin has doubled since January 2011, and the company has consistently ignored community calls for employment, favouring contractors and migrant workers. A visit by the Bench Marks Foundation research team to Marikana revealed:

“A proliferation of shacks and informal settlements, the rapid deterioration of formal infra-structure and housing in Marikana itself, and the fact that a section of the township constructed by Lonmin did not have electricity for more than a month during the time of our last visit. At the RDP Township we found broken down drainage systems spilling directly into the river at three different points.”[7]

In fact, the study predicted further violent protests at Marikana in the coming year. The mass dismissal of 9000 workers in May last year inflamed already tense relations between the community and the mine as dismissed workers lost their homes in the company’s housing scheme.

Once again, these facts are hardly new in the world of South African mining. Behind the squalid settlements that surround the mineshafts there are immense profits to be made. In recent years the platinum mining industry has prospered like no other thanks to the increased popularity of platinum jewellery and the use of the metal in vehicle exhaust systems in the United State and European countries. Production increased by 60 per cent between 1980 and 1994, while the price soared almost fivefold. The value of sales, almost all exported, thus increased to almost 12 per cent of total sales by the mining industry. The price rose so dramatically throughout the 1990s that it is on par with gold as the country’s leading mineral export.[8] South Africa’s platinum industry is the largest in the world and in 2011 reported total revenues of $13.3-billion, which is expected to increase by 15.8% over the next five years. Lonmin itself is one of the largest producers of platinum in the world, and the bulk of its tonnage comes from the Marikana mine. The company recorded revenues of $1.9-billion in 2011, an increase of 25.7%, the majority of which would come from the Marikana shafts.[9]

For risking mutilation and death underground workers at Marikana made only 4000 Rand, or $480 a month. As one miner told South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper that, “It’s better to die than to work for that shit … I am not going to stop striking. We are going to protest until we get what we want. They have said nothing to us. Police can try and kill us but we won’t move.” These expressions of frustration and anger could be from 1922, 1946 or today. They are scathing indictments of an industry that continues to treat its workers as disposable and a state that upholds apartheid’s cheap labour policies. •

Chris Webb is a postgraduate student at York University, Toronto where he is researching labour restructuring in South African agriculture.

Endnotes:

1. Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946,” 1976.

2. Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labour,” Spearhead, 1962.

3. Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labour,” Spearhead, 1962.

4. Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946,” 1976.

5. Dr. A.B. Xuma quoted in Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946.”

6. The Bench Marks Foundation, “Communities in the Platinum Minefields,” 2012.

7. The Bench Marks Foundation, “Communities in the Platinum Minefields,” 2012.

8. Charles Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 211.

9. Marketline Advantage Reports on South Africa’s Platinum Group Metals, 2011.

SACSIS: ‘Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise’

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1330

‘Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise’

by Richard Pithouse

More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward. Pain and panic set into the bones.

Some people are able to keep their spirits up with the support of family, friends and congregations that sustain warmth and community amidst desolation. Others succumb to depression, cynicism, various ways of numbing pain or the temptation to blame other vulnerable people for their inability to bring their lives to bloom.

The deep roots of this disaster lie in the long night of colonial and apartheid dispossession. This is one of the reasons why we can’t pretend to be a normal country until the question of justice has been properly attended to. But we cannot allow this reality, urgent as it is, to be misused to allow the ANC to deny its own complicity with the ongoing waste of human life.

The ANC’s policy choices have often actively reinscribed the systemic exclusion of millions of young people from social opportunity. The failure, the gross failure, to adequately reform education; the ongoing resegregation of our cities on the basis of class and in the name of ‘development’ and ‘delivery’; and the failure to develop rural and urban economies that can meet people’s needs cannot be reduced to ‘the legacy of the past’.

And, the authoritarian and predatory nature of some of factions in the political class cannot be denied. The limits to the messianic self-belief that has often led the ANC and many of its supporters to assume that the mere fact that it holds state power automatically changes the nature and consequence of that power are equally evident.

For some time, the ANC was able to contain people left out of the new order with a mixture of welfare and the collective optimism generated by the end of apartheid. But as it slowly became clear that time is not, as it had first seemed in the warm glow of liberation, on the side of the poor, containment has increasingly included clientelism and repression, both often organised through local party structures. There are now parts of the country where for many poor people accessing basic services, or some forms of work, requires a party card and where the police, or party members, openly repress dissent. And while Jacob Zuma’s ascent to the Presidency was heralded by some as a victory for the left it was, from the moment of the Polokwane Resolutions, openly accompanied by a turn towards a policy agenda aimed more at the spatial containment and political control of the poor than at inclusion and political empowerment. Zuma’s Presidency has been marked by a decisive shift towards a more authoritarian state complete with a militarised police force; phone taps, torture and mob violence in the shadows and a series of open attempts to formally reverse some of the democratic gains made in 1994.

But popular protest has continued to escalate and the ANC has continued to lose the support of intellectuals in the elite public sphere. The new weapon in the arsenal being prepared to sustain the ANC’s hegemony in the rocky days to come is an attempt to capture popular anger and direct it against enemies, real and imagined, outside of the party. In terms of the numbers on the streets it has, thus far, been a real failure. But in a society as deeply structured in elitism as ours, the idea of a ruling party using confrontational rhetoric to summon popular anger into the streets carries a real charge in the elite public sphere even when it is not backed up with real material force.

As our more thoughtful commentators have noted, the reality is that it is COSATU, and not the ANC, that has a real organisational machinery on the ground and a real capacity to mobilise. This is one reason why COSATU’s power within the alliance is rapidly increasing and why there is a real sense in which the ANC is now dependent on COSATU. But while the democratic currents in COSATU are certainly an important brake on the authoritarian nature of Zuma’s project, and while COSATU is an essential bulwark against the dangerous liberal consensus that we should be competing as a low wage economy, the growing power of COSATU does not mean that the people as a whole are gaining more effective routes into participation in government. COSATU, as has often been noted, increasingly represents middle class workers and does not represent most precarious workers or the unemployed. Its record of support for the diverse set of struggles that have been waged by the urban poor in recent years is, to say the least, slim. These facts are not trivial.

In the thinking of the modern left the systemic denial of the fullness of human life has often been primarily conceived in terms of work as a vampyric or crushing force. This is well captured in Oswald Mtshali’s 1971 poem The Song of Sunrise where it is work “that squeezes me like a lemon / of all the juice of my life.” Over time some measure has been taken of the ways in which work has been raced and gendered, and of unwaged work, from the plantation to the leaden longing in the kitchen. The anti-colonial struggles brought a concern with national oppression to the fore and also generated a concern amongst the radical intelligentsia for the agrarian question that continued into the postcolonial world. In some cases this became a romantic form of radicalism in that the ‘true’ nation was imagined to inhabit the villages.

And, especially since the end of the Second World War, and into the flowering of more open forms of radical thought in the 1960s, there has been a widening of the recognition of forms of dehumanisation that are not reducible to material exploitation. This enabled a fuller recognition of the political agency of students, gay people, migrants and others. But despite the opening in the 1960s it remains the case that the left has often viewed the urban poor, assumed to be cut adrift from the discipline of rural tradition and not subject to the discipline of modern industry, in terms that range from outright hostility to more moderate forms of suspicion and condescension.

In South Africa the material power and political quality of the political agency exercised by organised workers from the 1970s and, despite some dangerous alliances and compromises, into the current order is widely acknowledged. But its potency, often masculinised, should not blind us to other experiences and other modes of political agency. One of the reasons why this ethical necessity also takes on a strategic urgency is that today, a moment in which there are more workers in the mines and factories of the world than there have been at any point in history, the Communist Manifesto, with its sense of the relentless division of society into two contending class, both primarily articulated to the factory, increasingly makes a lot more sense in Surat or Shenzhen than in Detroit or Johannesburg.

In contemporary South Africa there are millions of young people whose oppression is characterised more by a lack of access to work than exploitation at work. For these people their suffering is less about being ‘squeezed like a lemon’ than, in a line from Head on Fire, Lesego Rampolokeng’s new collection of poems, “living a stray existence where the township cracks / frustrated hoisted then dropped against the rocks of promise.”

The old grammar of the left, centred on ideas like work, exploitation, unions and strikes is inadequate to take full measure of the forms of contemporary oppression gaining ground in our own country and in much of the world – including places like Greece, Spain and parts of the United States that had come to imagine themselves as holding a secure place in the zones of privilege.

Exclusion and redundancy are becoming as central to contemporary modes of oppression as the long history of dispossession and exploitation. Community struggles for access to land and cities; for services, education, housing and democratic decision making; and tactics like occupations, road blockades and vote strikes are central to the grammar of the new struggles, often less masculinised than the old, being forged by people who have been rendered surplus to capital rather than exploited by it.

Trade unions remain important and in South Africa, their importance could well be decisive. But the limits to their claims to representation are now classed as well as gendered. If we are to find a way through the crisis of the present, we will have to take the rebellion of the poor in all its diversity and in all its promise and peril, at least as seriously as trade unions. The old left dogma in which the organised working class stands in for the people as a whole, is a fiction from an age that is well lost.

The 2010 Mass Strike in the State Sector, South Africa: Positive Achievements but Serious Problems

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The 2010 Mass Strike in the State Sector, South Africa: Positive Achievements but Serious Problems
Social.History Online / Sozial.Geschichte Online
by Ian Bekker and Lucien van der Walt
Issue 4 / 2010
pp. 138-152

Abstract

The August-September 2010 mass strike in the South African state sector demonstrated remarkable working class unity across racial and ideological lines, as 1.3 million workers of all colours stopped work for four weeks despite severe economic recession. The strikers’ determination reflected growing frustration with low wages and at the glaring political corruption and enrichment of the elite, plus the drive – by African, coloured and Indian workers specifically – to attain living conditions breaking decisively with the oppression and immiseration of the apartheid past. Yet the strikers’ partial victory was tarnished by tactics that divided strikers from the larger working class – notably, hospital disruptions – and a failure to raise demands that linked union and community struggles against both neo-liberalism and the apartheid legacy. The top-down manner whereby the strike was ended makes workers cynical about their own unions, demonstrating the alarming bureaucratisation and centralisation that has arisen, in large part, due to union leaders being enmeshed in the African National Congress (the neo-liberal governing party) and state industrial relations machinery. Unions should re-orientate towards other working class movements, outside and against the state, to fight for a libertarian and socialist transformation, from below. The ideas of anarcho-syndicalism – raised at the 2009 COSATU Congress – provide a useful starting point.

Links: South Africa: Workers’ factory takeover to defend jobs enters second month

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Workers’ factory takeover to defend jobs enters second month

November 17, 2010 — A militant factory occupation by South African metalworkers is about to enter its second month. On October 20, 2010, workers at the Mine Line/TAP Engineering factory in Krugersdorp, just outside Soweto, began the occupation to prevent the removal of machinery and other assets and to fight to save their jobs. The workers are demanding the state take over the factory, so that it can be reopened as a democratically run workers’ cooperative.

The workers are organised by the Metal and Electrical Workers Union of South Africa (MEWUSA), in which the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM, the affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International in South Africa) plays a leading role.

Mine Line/Tap Engineering produces valves, locomotives and other items for the mining industry. It was shut down in August when the owner, Waynerd Mulder, attempted to escape responsibility for the deaths of three workers in an August 4 accident, caused by gross disregard for workers’ health and safety. Despite the economic crisis, Mine Line has remained a viable business. The insolvency is the direct result of Mulder’s criminal looting, fraud and theft. He took 15 million rand in cash from the company account, in addition to the fleet of luxury cars and helicopters he had bought with company money, and filed for bankruptcy the following day. While he has since been colluding with the liquidator, Commonwealth Trust, to loot the company, stealing its funds to set up business elsewhere, the 107 workers and the families of the workers who were killed are left with nothing to show for, in most cases, over 25 years of service.

Workers decided on October 20 to guard the premises to stop the ex-owner and the liquidator from stealing any more machinery or other assets from the factory. They have also changed the locks at the factory, which is located near Doornkop Mine. Some men have brought in beds, so they can sleep there at night, while woman take part in the sit-in from the morning until the afternoon because they have children to look after at home.

“Entering the main office where about 50 workers are assembled, one immediately conjures up images of the Paris Commune, a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 28 to May 28, 1871, and which was made up of anarchists and Marxists. It was hailed as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution”, reported the November 14 Business Report.

Union spokesperson Mametlwe Sebei said Mulder had been taking assets from the factory and stripping it of whatever value remained, hence the occupation. “Until there is a proper inventory, Mulder is not allowed to take any assets away”, he said.

On November 15, the workers with the support from the solidarity committee resisted the owner’s son’s attempt to steal one of the computers and scrap metal. In his speedy getaway, his 4X4 bakkie [ute] got stuck in a ditch. It has become clear that the security firm is colluding with the owners and liquidators and are looking for ways to break the occupation.

The workers are fighting to save jobs, pensions and benefits, but also to show that production and society in general can be run without the capitalist bosses. The workers are demanding that the state transfer ownership to the workers and inject capital to revive the business, and are forming a cooperative to run the factory, as a step towards the nationalisation of the company under workers’ control and management.

The occupation of Mine Line is the first action of this kind by workers in South Africa to defend jobs since the onset of the recession in 2008. More than 1 million jobs have been lost in South Africa since the recession set in — according to the IMF this is the world’s highest rate, relative to growth rates. Fifty-five per cent of South Africa’s working-age population is not economically active (although the official unemployment rate is “only” 25%).

The Mine Line workers are refusing to pay for the crisis caused by their boss and are sending a loud and clear message to workers everywhere to do the same.

The workers are mobilising and appealing for the support of other workers and their communities. The Democratic Socialist Movement and the Conference of the Democratic Left, a new united left initiative, are taking an active part in building support for the occupation. A Mine Line/TAP Workers Solidarity Committee has been established, which includes Mine Line/TAP workers and the following organisations: MEWUSA, NACTU, Conference of the Democratic Left, Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre, Concerned Wits students and Academics, Democratic Socialist Movement, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Landless Peoples’ Movement and the Anti-Privatisation Forum.

On October 27, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) expressed its support for the decision taken by Mine Line workers to takeover and the run the company. “This decision taken by workers is consistent with the objectives of the Freedom Charter of making sure that economic power is transferred to the hands of the people”, NUMSA’s regional secretary, Sizwe Dlamini said.

There is now an urgent need to unite the weight of the entire labour movement and the mass struggles of communities and youth into a mass solidarity campaign. Pressure also needs to be put on the company’s main creditors: ABSA bank to pursue the ex-owner, not the company, to recover what is owed to it (he borrowed R35 million on false pretenses and never invested it in the company). The same applies to the R15 million owed to the South African Revenue Services.

The workers have been inspired by the courageous examples set by workers at the Vestas and Visteon occupations in Britain, and are appealing to all working-class political organisations, trade unions and individuals to send brief messages of solidarity to MEWUSA and the Mine Line Workers Committee, as well as letters of protest to the liquidating company (model letter of protest and details below). Please send all messages and protest letters c/- mewusa@lantic.net or to MEWUSA, 107 Market St, Elephant House, 5th floor, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa.

[This article is based on a report that appeared at http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/4626 and other reports.]