A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This
exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have
revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces
which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are
making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them.
These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural”
and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.[1]
Gramsci’s oft-cited formulation offers an entry point for an
understanding of South Africa—the ‘miracle’ country as of the year of 2012.
South Africa, despite 18 years of majority rule, continues to be one of the
most unequal societies on an increasingly unequal planet and is in crisis.
Around half the population, mostly black Africans, live below the poverty
line.[2] Almost half of all black African households earned below R1670 a month
in 2005–06, while only 2 percent of white households fell in that income
bracket.[3] South Africa, as of 2011, ranked as the second most unequal country
in the world after Namibia—according to the Gini measure.[4] Unemployment
consistently hovers unofficially at around 40 percent, and among 18–25 year
olds, it is now over 60 percent.[5] Millions of households, despite some
improvements still lack access to basic services; the education system still
equips most blacks for little other than a future as unskilled labor. This is
despite the existence of the much lauded “progressive constitution” with a bill
of rights which supposedly insures access to basic socio-economic rights.[6]
Essentially South Africa is fucking unequal and black African working class and
unemployed Africans continue to be the worst off.
This is normality. The unemployment rate in Greece after
four years of economic depression and the EU’s austerity project has just
reached over 25 percent, but South Africa’s unofficial unemployment rate is
over 40 percent, while 25 percent has been the officially stated figure for
almost a decade. What the Marikana massacre marks is the most visible display
of the failure of the ruling ANC’s hegemonic project and the inability of the
forces struggling to conserve the “existing structure” to contain multiple
forces emerging from the on-going crisis in South Africa. The ANC, despite its
seemingly unchallengeable political supremacy and its political alliance with
the 1.8 million strong trade union federation COSATU (Congress of South African
Trade Unions) and the politically, spiritually and morally, but not
financially, bankrupt SACP (South African Communist Party), has been unable to
forge a viable social compact with local capital capable of benefiting the
majority of South Africa. They’ve been unable to either create sufficient jobs
to combat mass unemployment (over 40 percent) or bring down levels of
inequality—which have increased since the the end of the bitter struggle that
brought about the demise of apartheid.
The ANC adopted a twofold economic strategy in which
policies would be introduced to create a black “national bourgeoisie”[7] to
counter the hegemony of white capital both in South African and worldwide and a
subsequent “development” program which would be based on attracting foreign
capital investment through capital intensive projects, creating favorable
business conditions and unleashing domestic capital from the chains of
apartheid-era sanctions and regulations. What in fact happened was that the
still fetishized foreign investors failed to materialize and domestic capital
was free to relocate to the favorable climates of the North. Many of South
Africa’s largest firms, such as Anglo-American, relocated to the UK while South
African capital was freed to pillage the rest of the continent previously
closed to it. On the local front, South Africa effectively introduced a
self-imposed structural adjustment package under the auspices of the ironically
named “GEAR” (Growth Employment and Redistribution) policy introduced in 1996,
which saw the privatization of basic services (which the government is
constitutionally obliged to provide), rapid cuts in the public sector and the
privatization of state owned entities.
Over a million jobs were lost as the much-vaunted foreign
capital failed to materialize and domestic capital either moved to the North or
reinvested their profits throughout the rest of Africa, while the South African
manufacturing sector declined dramatically due to the relaxation of trade
tariffs, leading to local industries being forced to compete with India, China
and Indonesia, etc., …leading to further job losses. Production in South Africa
has been largely overshadowed by the rise of the financial sector and the
traditional economic base of “extraction”.[8]
The structural crisis, which reached its height in the
1980s,[9] forced white capital to abandon apartheid as it was perceived to no
longer be the most efficient vehicle for capital accumulation. This process
began with covert meetings between the captains of South African industry and
the ANC leadership in exile and ended in the high drama of CODESA (Convention
for a Democratic South Africa).
Those that have benefited most from this transition were
white South Africans and white capitalists who saw their international pariah
status revoked and the new system slanted to their benefit. A new black middle
class and a small black bourgeoisie have also benefited. While the media is
flush with lewd reports of their perceived lavish lifestyles, many of those
dubbed “black diamonds” by the media rely primarily on their access to credit
and white capital’s need to display a black superstructure to disguise the
continued base of white ownership. Much of this emergent black bourgeoisie has
relied on political connections and access to the state as a vehicle for
accumulation. A select few, the likes of Patrice Motsepe, have amassed vast
fortunes and others, such as the once militant ex-chairperson of NUM Cyril
Ramaphosa, have made the seamless transition to billionaire status through
amassing shares and board positions in London Mining (Lonmin) and, of course,
the franchise owner of McDonalds South Africa. Members of both the Zuma and
Mandela families have seen a similar change in fortune over the last few years
as well.[10].
As structural unemployment persists and those who are lucky
enough to find work find their income unable to keep up with the steep
increases in cost of living and large swathes of the country lack access to
basic services, a recipe for militant protest arises. South Africa has been
described as the protest capital of the world. In the last three years, there
has been an average of 2.9 “gatherings” per day resulting in 12,654 “gathering”
incidents during 2010–11,[11] although such statistics say little about the
actual political character of these protests and it shouldn’t necessarily be
taken as a sign of the rise of a new counter-hegemonic bloc in the country.
Indeed to refer back to Gramsci’s formulation, these protests rather indicate the
forces emerging in relation to the continuing crisis, which the political
forces seeking to preserve the existing structure are unable to overcome. What
in effect these political forces stand for, as a whole, remains an open
question and the crisis is expressed in the “vocabularies of the local”.
What is clear though is that there is a deep social unrest
which has been escalating over the last few years as the government has been
either unwilling or unable to craft a program capable of reducing poverty and
inequality or cajole white capital into some sort of sustainable social compact
à la the East Asian developmental state often promoted as a model for South
Africa to emulate. Less has been said about the nature of proletarian
insurgency at the work place—violent and militant strikes are a regular feature
of South African labor relations, due to a high level of militant consciousness
and unionization among the black South African working-class. With union
leadership increasingly being co-opted into ANC politicking and forming
“working relationships” with capital, workers have been embarking on wildcat
strikes to reach their demands—particularly in the mining sector. The rise of
independent unions such as AMCU (Association of Mining and Construction workers
Union) is a direct response to the inability of established trade unions within
COSATU to represent workers interests.
The existing set of labor relations in South Africa has seen
the continuation of the apartheid-era two tier model of skilled, mostly white
middle and upper income work for a select few, while the majority of blacks
find themselves competing over the few jobs available to “low wage” and
“unskilled labor,” such as those working at Marikana. The persistence of these
labor structures and high unemployment has meant that those with work often
have to support large and extended families on their low wages, restricting
both the growth of an internal market in South Africa and ensuring that most
black employed South Africans still live in appalling conditions. This is not a
“challenge,” as described by ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe at a recent
COSATU conference—this is a crisis, one which has been building for decades.
In the first major industrial action of the year, platinum
miners at the Implats mine won a 5,000 rand increase, in the face of state
repression and violence. But the last few months have seen the most sustained
and militant victorious proletarian struggle since the fragile birth of
“liberal democracy” in 1994, following the brutal massacre of 34 workers by
police at the Marikana mine owned by the British company Lonmin on the 16th of
August. The massacre of these workers occurred in the midst of a wildcat strike
brought about by the perceived failure of the dominant mining union NUM
(National Union of Mineworkers) to protect the interests of workers. Miners
still operate in the same hyper-exploitative extractive sector and within the
two-tier labor market which has been both the primary source of South Africa’s
riches and tragedy for over a 100 years. Men plucked from the former bantustans
go up North, far removed from their friends and family, to work for as long as
12 hours a day for an average wage, after deductions, of around 4,500 rand a
month (around $550). To put this in perspective, Frans Baleni, the chairperson
of NUM, earns around 1.4 million rand ($165,000) a year. This is what drove the
miners to strike, demanding 12,500 rand a month ($1,512). They downed their
tools and embarked on a 6 week strike in which they faced down the power of
state and capital.
Reports on the 18th of September suggested a deal had been
reached between the miners and Lonmin for a 22 percent salary increase across
the board and a 2,000 rand bonus for returning to work. Despite the fact that
the miners didn’t win their 12,500 rand, this is still a historic victory. The
miners, with little or no support from “civil society” or the “left” and a
hostile media, managed to face down a state prepared to kill to defend the
interests of capital and wrangle a demand still deemed “irrational” by a
morally decrepit bunch of hacks and economists (still mostly lily white) who
style themselves as the voices of reason in this country. To give an indication
of how little this is, rock drillers working at platinum mines in Canada,
performing exactly the same job, get paid around $130,000 a year—earning more
in a month than a South African miners earns in a year. Reports from miners
have suggested the company has been lying about the nature of the increase and
is still skiving off money from the workers and, despite the increase, miners
on the ground are still dissatisfied with their pay indicating that the saga of
Marikana is far from over.[12]
The miners were forced to negotiate as the police had
imposed an unofficial state of emergency in the area with the near-full support
of the red-baiting, panicked corporate media. They still saw another three
people murdered bringing the total death toll to 47. Workers reported that any
man on the streets at night in the area was a target for the police and police
forcibly dispersed and attacked any attempted gathering while patrolling the
streets with armored cars and assault rifles (the same rifles used to shoot
down the miners on the 16th of August).[13] Police also raided the hostels and
homes of the miners in an attempt to intimidate them the weekend before the
deal was reached. Reports indicated they shot several people including the
local ANC (African National Congress) councilor who later died from her
injuries.[14]
The deal reached at Marikana does not mark the end of the
industrial unrest spreading across South Africa’s Platinum belt; rather it
marks the beginning of what is surely an intensification of proletarian
struggle in the mining sector. I say this for reasons other than the
continuation of the appalling living conditions present in the communities
located in this area.[15] and the low remuneration for miners. What Marikana
has shown is the violence which the state is willing to unleash in defense of
capital and its allies in the form of NUM. This, as I will discuss later, is
part of pattern of increasing violence which has been deployed to break up
community and social movement protests. Furthermore, it has shown that it is
possible to take on the full force of the state and capital and win. It has
inspired miners across the Platinum Belt to fight for a 12,500 minimum wage
across the sector. Some reports have even suggested miners in Namibia are
considering taking up a similar demand. Finally, it has shown that the
established “representatives” of the working-class, in the form of NUM and
COSATU, are incapable and unwilling to take up the demands of the workers and
unable to provide either a straight condemnation of the massacre or any
material aid to the workers. If anything, NUM has been shown to be an agent of
both the interests of the ruling Zuma faction within the ANC and the mining
industry.
The situation brings to mind Rosa Luxemburg’s remarks on the
German printers’ union written in the heady days of 1907:
the classical embodiment of that trade-union policy which
prefers peace to struggle, settlement with capitalism to conflict, political
neutrality to open support for the Social-Democratic Party, and which, filled
with scorn for revolutionary “fanaticism,” sees its ideal in the English type of
trade union. It has taken a long time, but now the fruits of such a policy have
become obvious to even the most short-sighted of persons.[16]
Gramsci suggests that, as “hegemony” or rule by consent
breaks down, direct violence will increasingly be relied on to preserve the
established structure. The South African government increased its repressive
force and tactics over the last few years,[17] as the police have been
militarized beginning with the World Cup. Slogans like “shoot-to-kill” have
been taken up by police “generals.” Military ranks have been reintroduced and
the number of police shootings rises ever year. Force has been used on a
consistent basis to break up community protests and to target social movement
activists.
Beginning with the torture of activists from the Landless
People’s Movement (LPM), becoming more visible with the pogrom directed towards
the shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) at the Kennedy Road
settlement in Durban in 2010,[18] and last year in the televised murder of
Andreas Tatane by the police in Ficksburg. This suggests that the violence
which occurred in Marikana was not an isolated incident; rather it fits in with
the character of “political violence” which has become an increasingly visible
presence in South Africa.[19] The ANC under Zuma has thrown off much of its
socialist and “progressive” trappings despite the craven unconditional backing
of this faction by the SACP and elements of COSATU. A masculinist discourse of
patriarchal tradition has become the dominant feature of Zuma’s attempt to
anchor the ANC in something resembling a coherent ideology.[20] While the ANC
attempts to make up for its failures through the employment of outright
repression, this repression is partially condoned by the anti-working class and
reactionary media, as well as fully condoned by the center-right opposition
party the Democratic Alliance (DA)—whose support base and political character
is largely formed by ex-National Party (NP) voters, despite the DA’s liberal
pretensions.
Where does that leave the independent South African left?
Mostly in a position of increased isolation from working-class struggles. The
South African Left has, to an extent, been pursuing what I consider to be a
contradictory strategy in relation to COSATU and the SACP—which I will suggest,
in effect, are organs of the state in subordination to the ruling party. The
independent left has been very careful to not sever its ties with COSATU and
elements of the SACP, the reason being the assumption that these organizations
form the potential of a revolutionary base which will eventually abandon the
ANC due to the ANC’s continued support of anti working-class neo-liberal
policies. These organizations would then turn to the independent left and a new
mass workers party could emerge capable of challenging the hegemony of the ANC.
At the same time much of the independent left has attempted to win over social
movements and communities to a socialist project. The problems within this
strategy are multiple and I will, for the interests of brevity, not delve into
all of them. I will instead indentify a few key flaws.
The first and most obvious flaw is that these goals lead to
a contradiction in terms of prioritizing struggles. A key problem is that the
SACP in particular,[21] and elements of COSATU adopt a paranoid authoritarian
stance towards protest and politics located outside of the ruling alliance and
are often complicit as evidenced by Marikana in state repression often directed
towards movements and communities which the left is trying to “win over”. This
contradiction is not trivial and has often resulted in the left being held in
deep suspicion by the so-called left within the ruling alliance and popular
struggles on the ground. Simple logic
dictates that the left either has to prioritize supporting local struggles and
movements or maintaining their ties, unofficial or official, with “the
ANC-aligned Left.” Often some of the most vocal “left” critics of the ANC
maintain cozy relationships with the likes of the odious Blade Ndzimande,
Jeremy Cronin and others or even consult for the state. This further hampers
the ability of the left to build working and sustainable connections with
communities in struggle and has resulted in a tendency to attempt to channel local
struggles towards the “real” enemies of neo-liberalism and the World Bank at
the expense of the local contradictions which gave rise to these struggles in
the first place. In response to Marikana, elements of the left have expressed
support for the striking workers but, at the same time, limited their actual
material support so as not to alienate COSATU, which has adopted a shameful and
cowardly position towards the massacre and who has increasingly prioritized
factional politics within the ANC over the material interests of workers.[22]
This contradictory policy has alienated much of the
independent left from local struggles and has further hampered the ability of
the independent left to establish zones of counter-power and powerful movements
capable of challenging the hegemony of the ANC. The origins of this problematic
position lie in both the age-old left tradition of fetishizing the state as the
source of all progressive change. The state is treated as an instrument which,
if only the right people were in charge, would be capable of bringing about
transformative change. The result is a general immobility of the left if the
conditions are not right for the revolution or the seizure of state power, this
leads to inertia and is one of the primary reasons for what has been an
observable decline in the power and ideas of the left following 1994. This is
closely linked to the demobilization of the mass movements and grassroots
locales of counter-power which emerged in the 1980s for a variety of reasons
including a widespread faith in the ANC’s ability to bring about transformative
change in South Africa and the ANC leadership’s attempt, upon returning from
exile, to monopolize their power within the wider democratic movement at the
expense of the leaders which emerged from domestic mass struggles.
The second problem with the left’s position is in the
changing character of the South African black proletariat and their relation to
COSATU. Marikana marks a point of departure or rupture if you like within these
relations. It is fair to assert that leadership of COSATU has been incorporated
into the ANC. Many have made the transition between union leadership positions
and government posts. COSATU as an organization intervened directly in internal
ANC politics to help Zuma unseat the then president Mbeki and bring Zuma to
power. Since then, COSATU has found itself prioritizing ANC politics at the
expense of the interests of workers. This reality is combined with the
precarious state of the mining industry in South Africa. The South African gold
industry is in its last days, as gold reserves, historically the foundation of
the South African economy, decline. And platinum prices continue to drop. This
is the real reason for the intensification of extractive mining practices,
without workers being compensated for the added risk with any rise in wages.
The wave of wildcat strikes has since moved into the gold sector and has seen
40 percent of gold production in the country shut down[23] as workers, inspired
by Marikana, have taken up the 12,500 minimum wage demand[24]; this demand
might even have been taken up by workers in the neighbouring country of Namibia
and workers in the transport sector which has seen 20,000 workers go on strike.
Unions like NUM have responded to this by forming close
relationships to the companies such as Lonmin and Anglo-American, in which NUM
has agreed to keep a check on workers’ demands and negotiate gradual increases
in return for favourable treatment and business links between ex-NUM leaders like
Cyril Ramaphosa and Marcel Golding; furthermore NUM’s investment wing (standing
at R 2 billion) has even invested in the mining sector. This, combined with
unions’ continued attachment to the ANC which has pursued, as indicated
earlier, a rather orthodox neo-liberal line since coming to power, has in
effect resulted in an antagonism displayed most clearly at Marikana between a
union leadership increasingly removed from the shop floor unable and unwilling
to represent the interests of workers.
This antagonism has led to the wave of wildcat strikes
coming to its first point of rupture at Marikana; workers here are in effect
forced to become an autonomous force in order to secure their interests,[25],
through unsanctioned militant action. As unions and the ANC continue to fail to
support workers in their demands for a living wage, working-class action will
continue to take on such autonomous character united in hostility both to
capital and organs of state power in the form of unions such as NUM and local ANC
branches.[26] As the state is unable to provide some sort of solution to the
organic crisis present in South Africa, repression will be relied on to contain
industrial action and community protest. Marikana has shown that in order for
workers achieve their demands, they need to operate autonomously from their
union representatives. Marikana has inspired a wave of other wildcat strikes in
the mining sector which don’t seem to be fading out. In this, class
conciousness on the shop floor appears to be emerging, despite the SACP’s
pathetic attempts to claim that the actions at Marikana were led by some sort
of third middle class force,[27] which doped up the miners on muti and was
aligned to the forces of imperialism and the bogeyman of expelled ANCYL (African
National Congress Youth League) president Julius Malema.[28] They also absurdly
charged that these strikes were a result of a “lack of class
consciousness.”[29]
It is from this recognition of the increasingly autonomous
nature of the South African proletariat that any sort of left strategy should
emerge from Marikana. I can’t claim to have all the answers but two things
stand out. First, there is a need for the left to abandon the COSATU leadership
as working partners[30] and instead attempt to build working relations and
provide material aid to workers at the shop floor. The second lesson is for the
need to build fortresses of counter-power at a distance from the state; instead
of NGOs, legalistic tactics and insular debate, we need to create zones which
show the possibility of challenging the hegemony of the ANC. We need to invest
in culture, in alternate radio stations, in new publications, in communities in
drawing on South African’s history of grassroots militancy and civic
organizations. An insurgent movement, capable of challenging the structure of a
country in crisis, needs to abandon the politics of mediating the masses’
interests and instead focus on building zones in which a revolutionary future
can be glimpsed. Now is not the time to talk about the “armed seizure of state
power,” but that does not mean we can sit back and wait.
[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks,
New York: International Press (1971), p. 178. ↩
[2] Hein Marais, Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy
of Change, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press (2011), p. 203. ↩
[3] Marais, ibid. ↩
[4] World Bank, 2011. ↩
[5] Youth unemployment: South Africa’s ticking bomb. ↩
[6] Constitution of South Africa. ↩
[7] See Fanon’s prescient condemnation and critique of the
“national bourgeoisie” in The Wretched of the Earth. ↩
[8] I base this account on Marais’s outstanding Pushed to
the Limit. ↩
[9] See Gelb, “Making Sense of the Crisis,” Transformations
(1987), p. 5. ↩
[10] “Aurora’s Zuma must be held to account for mine
debacle,” Times Live, January 13, 2012. ↩
[11] Protests and Police Statistics in South Africa: Some
Commentary. ↩
[12] Lonmin miners crack under pressure. ↩
[13] Lonmin miners crack under pressure. ↩
[14] Marikana’s theatre of the absurd claims another life. ↩
[15] Unsafe House, Unsafe Job? The foul truth about living
conditions at Marikana. ↩
[16] The Two Methods of Trade-Union Policy. ↩
[17] The South African Police Service and the Public Order
War ↩
[18] See Kerry Chance, The Work of Violence: A timeline of
Armed Attacks at Kennedy Road (2010). ↩
[19] See Jane Duncan, Dissent Under Jacob Zuma (2011),
unpublished. ↩
[20] Facing Reality. ↩
[21] See Dale T. McKinley. ↩
[22] See Cosatu Congress: Vavi’s time of reckoning, and the
elusive “Lula moment” and Cosatu Congress: Allies talk about Marikana and the
enemies of the struggle ↩
[23] Strike contagion shuts down 40% of SA gold. ↩
[24] First poll results known. ↩
[25] I take this understanding of the autonomy of the
working class loosely from the Italian autonomia theoretical tradition,
although the theoretical tendency emerged in a vastly different socio-political
context with its description of the emergence of the “mass worker” in the Keynesian
Planner states within the 1960s and 1970s. I find it provides a useful starting
point in Negri’s ‘concept of the “self-valorization of the working-class (see
“Worker’s Party Against Work,” in Books for Burning, London: Verso (1973,
2005), pp. 74–77) referring to the working class’s ability to define itself as
a class outside of the logic of the state and capital. ↩
[26] It remains to be seen whether workers will abandon the
ANC in the absence of any realistic alternatives either in the form of the
parliamentary opposition or the extra-parliamentary left. ↩
[27] Cosatu Congress: Allies talk about Marikana and the
enemies of the struggle. ↩
[28] Malema has perhaps been the only prominent political
actor in the country to display any sort of support for the miners in the form
of both his unique brand of rhetoric—think Hugo Chavez meets Kanye West and the
form material and legal aid. Malema has been accused rightly of using Marikana
to hit back at his nemesis, President Zuma, and has faced both death threats and
threats of arrest from reactionary white formations and the state. Despite his
opportunism, he has shown up the cowardice of the ruling alliance in their
response to Marikana. ↩
[29] Politicsweb. ↩
[30] Mangaung Versus Marikana: COSATU Chooses Sides. ↩
