The following series of comments between Tahir W. and Sander of Internationalist Perspective took place this month on the Internationalists Discussion List. We re-post them here with permission
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Exchanges on South Africa
Comment #1 – September 11, 2012
This is what self-organization looks like!! These workers say that the unions have failed them during negotiations and now they’re going at it alone. They are going to various shops to persuade other workers not to go back to work!!!!!!
BBC Video on South African miners
Carol
Comment #2 September 11, 2012
I’m glad someone raised the Marikana mineworkers, an issue which has shaken the whole of South Africa. It arguably represents the first time in our history that naked class war has erupted.
This statement might come as a surprise given the history of struggle in SA and the frequency of labour unrest in the country generally, which is high. But when I say “naked” here I mean something quite specific. This is the first time that I have ever noticed the workers (a) telling the ruling political alliance (the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the SA Communist Party) effectively to go to hell and to embark on an illegal wildcat strike and (b) they have showed themselves willing to fight to the death against the police. This is truly remarkable and shows how far the post-1994-settlement politics have unravelled.
The workers ridiculed the National Union of Mineworkers (COSATU affiliate) spokespersons and also the ANC honchos that came to talk to them. They ridiculed the President.
One of the debates going on currently is why the mineworkers in particular are so hyper-militant compared to other sectors where the workers are relatively docile and still supportive of the ANC and COSATU. Part of the answer I think revolves around the migrant labour system that was a cornerstone of apartheid and has never really been dismantled. A large number of the miners at Marikana are from the Eastern Cape and other areas to the south. They live under very poor hostel conditions or in rented hovels without electricity or water and have to send part of their wages back to the areas where their dependents are. There are virtually no social benefits for the miners and their health tends to be poor, the work is incredibly heavy, the mines are amongst the deepest in the world and the fatality rate is high. The miners who are from the surrounding area live in impoverished communities where unemployment is very high. In fact it has been claimed that many people involved in the strike action were not actually miners themselves. The actual monetary wage is not that low compared to other workers in other sectors but the social wage is effectively nil and the living conditions appalling. Also the miners are aware that there are mining CEOs who earn in one day more than ten times what they earn in a month. So inequality, which is huge in South Africa generally, reaches astronomical proportions in the mining sector. These are all preliminary observations and there will be much more analysis to come.
Also there will be more information once the police action has been thoroughly analysed. But what some of us fear is that this is just the beginning of the fascism that has been threatening to come into the open for a long time. The issue of police brutality has been a growing concern, but now you must remember that this is the first time that such a massacre has occurred since the end of apartheid. It is being compared to the Sharpeville massacre in the early 1960s. There are now reports that some miners were shot in the back, others were apparently shot at point blank range (rather than being arrested) and there are also reports that arrested miners were tortured afterwards and assaulted in various ways by the police. Obviously the question arises of why the police confronted the miners in such a military style with only live rounds.
What is truly remarkable is the determination and resolve of the miners, even after some of their number had been shot. In fact it is noteworthy that there were two quite separate days of shootings. The killing of 34 miners on 16th August was preceded by the killing of a smaller number a few days earlier. This did not deter them and still has not deterred what seems to be the larger number, even though NUM has signed an agreement with the mine bosses. So they are clearly prepared to fight to the death. A few policemen have in fact been killed too.
At the same time one must not imagine that all these actions are coordinated with any developments in the political sphere. In fact the miners do not appear to have any clear notions of political alternatives, and they have hailed anyone who supports them. For example the thoroughly opportunist expelled leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who arrives to address the miners in his Mercedes Benz SUV is given something of a hero’s welcome. It has been pointed out just what a political windfall this whole thing has been for him.
So this is a remarkable series of events, unprecedented in South African history in some ways, but it is not clear what it portends for the country, which is becoming an increasingly dangerous place. Later this year the ANC will elect its leadership and the period leading up to that event could turn into violent civil strife, particularly between the supporters of Jacob Zuma and his opponents. The stakes are high for the nationalist movement - its leaders live lives of conspicuous consumption off their positions within the state structure and therefore a change of ruling factions can mean many of them losing their jobs. On the other hand the social movements that occasionally offer some opposition to the ANC are politically very weak and their actions seem to slide off the government’s politics like water off a duck’s back. There is no organised party to the left of the ANC. There are only spontaneous outbursts of ‘service delivery protests’, which are basically about the absence of necessary life support systems such as water and electricity and housing. Sometimes these turn violent too.
So yeah, a new stage for SA, but what it means for us and the world over the coming years is hard to say. I would be keen to hear how this whole thing is playing in countries abroad, whether there is awareness of it, etc.
Tahir
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Comment #3 September 19, 2012
Tahir,
Thanks for your input. I think many abroad realize this is an important struggle. The courage and determination of the workers are astonishing. The brutality of the state, managed by the ANC who were supposed to be “the good guys” must have opened some eyes. In the media here in the US, there is some reporting of it, mostly very superficial. The election spectacle sucks a lot of attention away. I wonder what you think of the agreement that was just reached. According to the BBC, the miners see it as a victory and are very happy. Is it really a victory? And if it is,
might it encourage other workers to emulate the miners’ example (like happened in China)?
Sander.
Comment # 4 September 19, 2012
Hi Sander
Yes, I can say quite a few more things in response to your queries.
First of all, concerning the image of the ANC as “good guys”: You need to understand that they are a nationalist movement, and they behave politically in the way that nationalist movements behave.
I was as member of the ANC for a short period from about 1990 to 1992 and at that time I began quite an intense engagement with this issue of nationalism, third world nationalism in particular, which of course led to my quitting that organisation well before the first elections of 1994. I now doubt whether there has ever been a nationalist movement that has played a progressive role, i.e. from a communist perspective. And when they encounter crises in their ability to rule, as the ANC is encountering now (big time), they resort to fascist methods. In my view there is nothing out of character in this. Here is a little extract from an essay that I wrote for an upcoming seminar “Guiding visions for the transition to a post-apartheid society”:
“In all nationalisms leadership tends to fall to a section of the
petite bourgeoisie, and the aspiration of the petite bourgeoisie is
naturally to become the grande bourgeoisie. Very often this aspiration
relies on direct participation in the organs of state and wielding these
so as to (a) amass wealth and (b) cement a support base of state
employees. This has been the path that has largely been pursued by both
Afrikaner and African nationalists and virtually all other nationalisms.
It is worth mentioning in passing that this inevitably involves not only
a class identification among sections of the domestic bourgeoisie [i.e.
black and white], such as I have described, but also some sort of
alliance with the foreign bourgeoisie, the hot-air rhetoric of
‘anti-imperialism’ notwithstanding.”
So to trust a nationalist movement is always a bad thing. This may be easy to understand for members of this list, but it is not understood by many left inclined individuals, certainly not in South Africa, where that peculiar construct of ‘race-nationalism’ dominates all politics.
And this has the effect of obscuring everything. Let me supply a bit more context to this miners’ strike, which is relevant for discussions like the one about ‘transitions to a post-apartheid society’.
The two pillars of colonial South Africa, including the apartheid period, were the expropriation of the land from the African people and the institution of the migrant labour system. From the late nineteenth century these two things worked symbiotically with each other. You needed to deprive the Africans of their livelihood on the land so that they would be driven to the cities to seek employment, particularly on the mines, which would not have been particularly attractive to them otherwise. There they would live packed into squalid hostels and would send money home to their families who would be living on increasingly confined and barren patches of land in the rural areas. The apartheid government perfected this system shortly after 1948 by declaring those
impoverished little patches of land to be independent states outside of South Africa, so that the migrant labourers could be treated of as temporary sojourners in South Africa, where they would not have citizen’s rights.
Now it is important to understand that very little of this has essentially changed since 1994. The land still does not belong to the indigenous people, except in very small patches. The migrant labour system on the mines is still in place. What has changed is that all the former ‘homelands’ have been incorporated into a unitary South Africa and all have citizenship in SA.
But the deep structure of society has not changed. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly I think that the ANC hierarchy has neither the will nor the ability to change this. Their class interests are far too deeply vested in the status quo and their entanglement with conservative ‘white’ capital is now complete. Many of these mines are in fact part owned by top ANC people, who are therefore themselves direct exploiters of mine labour. Even their social and political ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), is infested with the same elements (I don’t even mention the contemptible SA Communist Party). The top unionists earn exorbitant salaries and the unions themselves own shares in the mines. A number of former unionists turned big-time capitalists also own considerable shares. Add to all this the legendary corruption and incompetence of the ANC led government and you realise that SA society cannot change its essential character, and no talk about democracy, non-racialism or nation building will do a damn thing about that. If I have been surprised by anything it is by the long time it has taken for fascism to actually show itself as clearly as it now has.
But thinking about it further, perhaps you could even say that it is the ANC, rather then the former regime, who have actually perfected the socio-economic system and its fascistic template, i.e. by de-racialising it! So it remains there, but now less visible and thoroughly mystified. Now we not only have exploitation, we have sustainable exploitation, the one thing apartheid could not deliver.
Mining in South Africa has made people fabulously wealthy and turned the lives of millions of others into untold misery. SA is the largest gold producer in the world, one of the largest producers of diamonds and by far the largest producer of platinum. In fact the area around
Rustenburg in the North of the country, where the recent events occurred, is where more than half of the world’s platinum is produced. There the migrant miners live without any social services whatsoever, either in the same old hostels or else in unserviced shantytowns around
the mines, without even running water or electricity with streets like open sewers.
In this situation the wage takes on a special significance. The miners push for a higher wage than other workers in the country to make up for all the dangers, diseases and desperation of their peculiar lifestyles, divorced from family, comfort and any normal sociality which other workers take for granted. So this explains the ferocity and the determination of their actions (even charging at police who are armed with automatic weapons, while themselves armed only with spears and machetes). It also explains how they, of all workers in SA, are the ones
to have had the blinkers fall from their eyes with regard to the ANC and its union allies. Their actions have been essentially wildcat, although there is now some influence from a newly formed independent union that has splintered off from the National Union of Mineworkers. It is important to realise that there is no coherent politics to this and it would be unreasonable to expect it to appear. The miners are focused on life support and the very basics of quality of life. The political project is quite separate to this and barely exists as a possibility in SA public life, as I mentioned in my previous post.
These points are important to stress in answering your question about the agreement that appears to have been reached. I presume you mean the one announced just yesterday. Yes it is true that the miners seem to see it as a victory and that they are pleased about it. Is it really a victory? Well if the reports are true that appeared in this morning’s papers, that the increases amount to 22% across the board, then that is not only a victory but quite an astonishing one, perhaps unprecedented in SA mining history. I have no doubt that this will stimulate other workers, firstly across the rest of the mining sector (non-platinum), and then perhaps beyond that. However, there are great doubts as to whether the mining sector as a whole can absorb such costs and, secondly, whether such a widely perceived workers’ victory can be allowed to go unchallenged by the government and its vested interests in the profitability of this sector.
I think that one must expect not only increased strike action, but also repression. There is constant talk in the media about the perceptions of foreign investors, which I regard as a veiled threat. If you are in charge of a nation state and your power lies in your relationship with
imperialism, a relationship without which you would be unable to rule, then all talk of foreign investors and their jittery ‘perceptions’ is nothing more than a threat not to rock the boat. In addition the police force in South Africa has been directly antagonised by the fact that some of their own members have died violently in these actions and the desire for revenge and asserting their own macho manhood, etc., will be strong. In other words they will not be backward in grabbing any opportunities for reprisal that present themselves. This was undoubtedly already a factor on 16th August.
So a victory yes, but perhaps the beginning of another dark chapter of violence and fear in this country that has already experienced plenty of that. As I say, what will be of interest is to see what political forces take shape over the next few years.
Tahir
Comment #5 September 21, 2012
Tahir,
… Recent events confirm your analysis. I have one question. You write:”If I have been surprised by anything it is by the long time it has taken for fascism to actually show itself as clearly as it now has.” Many on the left use the word ‘fascist’ whenever the state resorts to nakedly violent, brutal methods. This use of the word implies that such methods are incompatible with (capitalist) democracy. Which is manifestly untrue: democratic states have proven many times that they can be equally ruthless. So it amounts to a whitewash of what capitalist democracy really is. Both fascism and capitalist democracy are opposed to real democracy, to the power of the people, or more precisely, the collective worker. But fascism is opposed to capitalist democracy as well. So my question is: do you use the word ‘fascist’ in that leftist sense that renders hommage to the ideal of bourgeois democracy, or do you really see a tendency in the South-African state to do away with democratic institutions? If so, how does that express itself?
Sander
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Comment #6 September 21, 2012
Yes, that is a good question. I concede that the word fascism has been overused in the way you suggest and also as a kind of generalized swearword. I am a linguistics professor and I understand such issues and have my own take on them. Consider this: would you abandon the word ‘communism’ just because it was used by Stalin and millions of others in a particular way? Your understanding of communism or mine might in fact represent the understandings of a tiny minority of those people who have ever used this word.
So I do believe that there are some words that one must stand firm on. However I personally almost never use the word ‘socialism’ nowadays because there have just been too many ‘socialisms’ for the word to mean anything to me. Usually it just refers to something like state capitalism.
OK coming back to fascism: If you mean that there is no distinction between fascism and say liberalism, because it is all just capitalism, then I disagree. The marxian approach towards capitalism has never been just to condemn it but also to understand it in some detail, including its variations. The fact that most people find it more pleasant to live under liberal democratic regimes than fascist ones is not without interest, but that is not my main point.
I think that fascism is a specific phenomenon that manifests a crisis in bourgeois rule. This is very typical in third world countries and tends to make only cyclical appearances in the more developed world, although it is not inconceivable that this could finally lead to worldwide terminal crisis of all bourgeois rule. But bear with me. In countries where the ruling class is very weak and where there are strongly nationalist movements of liberation this type of phenomenon is ever-present. It was no less true of apartheid than it is of African nationalism in SA. In other words the movement is caught in a double bind: it must stand against colonialism and imperialism even while it cannot function without their support. So what you get is a kind of neo-colonialism where the indigenous bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former rulers, while remaining dependent upon them. The masses are duped through the discourse of the ‘nation’, ‘our people’, etc. into submitting to a very harsh discipline, with the understanding that to
gripe against this somehow plays into the hands of the foreigner. The domain of discourse begins to shrink and the use of coercion grows accordingly.
My shorthand for this is simply: fascism = ultra-nationalism. It is the very argument for communal solidarity against the Other that is used to discipline the masses and to obscure the true class forces.
This is why I am very skeptical of movements that aim at taking state power; they make this sort of turn from liberation movement towards ultra-nationalism. The new rulers know that their position is dependent on international capital even while their rhetoric is turned against the
foreigner and for national unity, nation building and all the rest. Here are some paragraphs from a piece that I wrote about the negotiated settlement of the early 1990s that led to the elections of 1994. The process was called CODESA (Congress for a Democratic SA or something).You won’t know all the individuals mentioned but you should be able to get the gist of it:
“The current state of affairs can surely not be grasped without some
reference to the CODESA negotiations of the early 1990s. What was the nature of the relationship between the parties? One might characterize this in a quasi-Hegelian way by saying that the mutual recognition between the two sides was based on that kind of relating where what one relates to is the self-relating of the other. The shrewder among them would have realized that, that the other was starting to relate to his or her own self in a new way, developing a new ‘self ‘image’ as they say. This involved the recognition that those who until very recently had been implacably opposed to each other, and had defined themselves as such, were, in the new situation, beginning to develop a deep and profound mutual identification, an identification based on class membership held in common.
The new situation consisted of: the economic stalemate of apartheid;
the collapse of the state socialist (‘communist’) regimes in Eastern
and Central Europe; the inability of the liberation movements to seize
power either through insurrection or guerilla warfare (ostensibly their
aim); the rise and high-water mark of neo-liberalism; the rise to
prominence of certain leaders whose vision had become distinctly, and
one might say, opportunistically, pragmatic. De Klerk is the prime
example, together with the younger Roelf Meyer, but one should not
underestimate the rather similar role played by younger members on the
other side, whose credibility enabled them to sell to their supporters
the deal that had essentially already been negotiated by Mandela: people like Chris Hani, Bantu Holomisa, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale. Obvious and necessary casualties of this pragmatic moment were apartheid and black consciousness.
One does not have to be Hegel to know that any recognition is always
accompanied by a misrecognition – after all this is how we learn, by
grasping our earlier misrecognition – and one does not have to be
Frantz Fanon, although it probably helps to have read some of him, to
realize that the misrecognition here is one that exists at the secret
heart of all nationalisms. (Certainly Fanon would have helped us to
predict and to understand better the current impasse.) The pitfall of
nationalism and the essential misrecognition it involves is that the few
presume to speak on behalf of, and substituted for, the people as a
whole, and, on the grounds of nationalist identification, they are
largely granted that right by the ‘people as a whole’. Largely but
not entirely; compare Gatsha Buthelezi with Harry Gwala, for example, or Marthinus van Schalkwyk with Eugene Terreblanche. Nevertheless the rhetoric of nationalism is compelling, if unifying only superficially.
The factor that must prevent nationalism from becoming a truly unifying
force is the misrecognition mentioned, which naturally entails an
unconsciousness of class.”
All of that took us a bit beyond your question! But yes I think fascism is something in particular, it is scary and most people don’t like it. What underlies it is the inability of a ruling class to rule by ‘normal’ means and their resort to other means, such as severe limits on expression and association as well as regular and violent coercion. In South Africa an aggravating factor is the corruption and incompetence of the governing party and their frustration at their failures being so
exposed to the ‘international community’ as well as to the liberal bourgeoisie at home. So there is a definite psychological element to it. It may be, as I suggested, that with the international crisis of capitalism, this type of rule will spread to all countries and become the new norm. But that is enough for now.
By all means pass on anything that I have written here.
Tahir
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Comment #7 September 21, 2012
Tahir,
No, my point was not “that there is no distinction between fascism and say liberalism, because it is all just capitalism”, quite the opposite, because there is a distinction, I wouldn’t use the word fascism to characterize SA and other countries managed through (bourgeois) democratic institutions. My point was that this distinction is mainly in form, not in content and should not blind us to the brutality democratic governments are capable of : that violent methods and capitalist democracy are quite compatible. So I find your definition of fascism rather too broad. Here is an interesting text by Werner Bonefeld in which this issue is addressed:
But I do agree that the capitalist class in ‘third world’ countries is often too weak to manage society and the exploitation of the working class through a democratic system. With the deepening of the crisis, and the deepening gap between rich and poor, between capital and workers, the ruling class resorts more and more to intimidation and naked force, bypassing their own rules. This is, to a lesser extent, also happening in the most developed countries (increased control, extra-judicial detention etc). This led many in the Occupy movement to protest the ‘fascism’ of the NYPD etc and to portray democracy as an something that we lost and need to return to (through amending the constitution etc). So the term fascism is used to idealize capitalist democracy and reduce the protest to resistance to certain forms of capitalism, rather than capitalism itself.
Sander
