Apartheid Alive in South Africa Armed Miners Defy Racist Massacre

Apartheid is alive and growing in South Africa. The racist police massacre of 34 striking miners, the wounding of 78 others and the arrest of 259 outside the Lonmin platinum mine in Rustenberg on August 16 mirrors the apartheid of the late 20th century, the one of a racist white Nazi-type capitalist ruling class oppressing the entire black population. In fact, apartheid became a virtual synonym for racism.

“The strike and the government’s iron-fisted response are emblematic of…South Africa’s largely white-owned business establishment and…[the fact] that the ANC [African National Congress] and its allies have become too cozy with big business” (New York Times, 8/17). 

The current apartheid pits this mostly white big business class joined with a small black government elite of profiteers enforcing the same capitalist oppression against the entire, mostly black working class. And similar to the previous rebellions of the last century, workers are mounting armed resistance.

Eight miners were killed on August 10, when 3,000 miners, mostly rock drillers, went out on a wildcat strike demanding a tripling of their poverty-level wages which have remained as low as they were under apartheid, 18 years ago. “If we stop, it all stops,” they proclaimed.  “If neither the union nor the employer will listen, we will make them.  We will apply objective violence until they are forced to listen to our grievances.”

The mine cannot operate without the rock drillers who work at dangerous depths, holding 50-pound drills against the rock face, their bodies vibrating for the duration of their 8-hour shifts. Then they emerge to the misery of shack dwellings, with no electricity, running water or sanitation.

The rock-drillers are not allowed to live in the real cities of South Africa, sentenced like nonpersons to a life of wage slavery deep below ground in a “planet of slums,” but their strike shook the market in the great financial centers of the capitalist world.  They are an inspiration to workers everywhere!  

Lonmin — the world’s third largest platinum mining company in a country that produces 80 percent of the world’s platinum reserves — labeled the strike “illegal.” A largely black police force (BBC News, 8/17) was ordered out to escort in any potential scabs. On August 16, they set up a barricade of razor wire encircling the miners. The police demanded they disarm and disperse. The miners, armed with machetes, sticks, spears and clubs, fought back, outflanked the cops and tried to burst through the cordon to bar scabs from breaking the strike.

Then the police, holding automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns, began spraying the miners with tear gas. As the miners tried to escape the gas, the cops opened fire hitting many miners in the back. “After three minutes of gunfire, bodies littered the ground in pools of blood” (The Guardian, 8/17). A 36-year-old miner named Paulos said, “They started shooting at us with rubber bullets. Then I saw people were falling and dying for real. I knew then they were proper bullets” (New York Times, 8/18). The scene echoed the previous apartheid era when the cops and the military used live ammunition to quell protests.

The miners, who now earn $300 to $500 a month, are demanding monthly raises of $625 to $1,563. An August 14 report by the Bench Marks Foundation, which monitors multi-national mining corporations, said Lonmin has a “bad track record, with high levels of fatalities” and keeps workers in “very poor living conditions. Children suffer from chronic illnesses due to sewage spills caused by broken drainage” (Associated Press, 8/17).

Workers Condemn Bosses, Governing ANC and Union Partners

Miner Thuso Masakeng told the Agency France Press (8/17), “We can’t afford a decent life. We live like animals because of poor salaries….We are being exploited; both the government and the unions have failed to come to our rescue. Companies make a lot of money at our expense and we get paid almost nothing.”

Joyce Lebelo, a miner’s wife, built a tiny shack in 1998, thinking the new government would soon provide her with a proper house. She is still waiting. “When we voted, we didn’t think we would spend ten years living in a shack. The promises they made they have not delivered. The people who got power are fat and rich. They have forgotten the people at the bottom.”

As one official of a new, militant miners’ union said, “We made the ANC what it is today, but they have no time for us. Nothing has changed. Only the people on top and they keep getting more money” (NYT, 8/17).

PLP Analysis Proved
Correct

This situation was exactly what the Progressive Labor Party warned would ensue when Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress took the reins of government eighteen years ago. Although Mandela spent decades in jail, he was not about to lead a revolution against capitalism that created these abominable conditions. One of his early pronouncements was to reject worker demands for increased wages and benefits on the grounds that it would “discourage foreign [capitalist] investment.”

When PLP declared that the maintenance of capitalism would continue the apartheid-era exploitation of black workers, we were roundly criticized by all the liberals, nationalists and pseudo-leftists who predicted a “new era of freedom.” What the working class got was rampant unemployment, deep poverty, intolerable working conditions, squalid housing and an emerging, tiny elite class of black oppressors who — along with the dominant apartheid-era corporate rulers — profited from the misery of the masses. And then and now, U.S. corporations like GM and Ford netted tens of millions in super-profits from that racist exploitation.

As we said then and reiterate now, only a communist revolution, and the building of a party to lead it, can solve the problems these miners, and all workers, face. Only a system without bosses and profits can enable the working class, which produces everything of value, to reap all the fruits of our labor, according to need.

Union Colludes with Bosses

The capitalist media has been painting the miners’ struggle as one stemming from competition between rival unions rather than growing out of real demands over real oppressive conditions. The rank-and-file rock-drillers are self-organized, under their own leadership and have armed themselves to fight for the integrity of their strike against all comers, joined by women from the shantytown armed with knobkerries (clubs).

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is closely allied with the governing ANC, and has lost the majority of its miner members. The NUM’s former leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, is now a rich director on the Lonmin board. The NUM has been challenged by the new, militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The latter has been demanding “sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working conditions for miners” while exposing the NUM’s alliance with the government.

NUM general secretary Frans Baleni defended the police action, saying, “The police were patient.” (NYT, 8/17) When the NUM president addressed the strikers and echoed the bosses’ line, calling on them to return to work, the miners began yelling their opposition, forcing the cops to escort him safely away. The traitorous South African “Communist” Party called for the arrest of the AMCU leaders. However, the latter head a reform union with no political vision beyond immediate demands. While verbally defending the workers against the avalanche of media condemnation, they did not organize the strike or join the workers in battle. 

A striking winch operator and AMCU member who gave his name as Kelebone and makes $500 a month for difficult, dangerous work said, “NUM has deserted us. NUM is working with the [rulers] and getting money. They forgot about the workers.” (Boston Globe, 8/17)

The British-owned company, declaring the strike “illegal,” has obtained a court order to force the workers back to work or be fired. But winch operator Makosi Mbongane, 32, told the Associated Press, “They can beat us, kill us and kick and trample on us,…do whatever they want to do, we aren’t going back to work.”

As AMCU strike leader Joseph Mathunjwa told Reuters, “We’re going nowhere. If need be, we’re prepared to die here.”

This is an anti-imperialist struggle against a huge mining company, tightly knit with the rich post-apartheid local elite, who sit on the board and protect their super-profits. It is also an antiracist struggle. Only communism can end racism everywhere.

This is a huge potential base for an international revolutionary communist movement and party, the missing ingredient needed to turn these brave miners toward revolution based on international class unity. This can bypass the mistakes of the old communist movement and dare to win it all.