Miners’ Wildcats Resist S. African Apartheid

MARIKANA, SOUTH AFRICA, May 17 — A new strike wave is sweeping this country’s minefields as thousands at the Lonmin mine here wildcatted on May 14, reacting to the murder of one of their union organizers and to looming job cuts. Lonmin is the world’s third largest producer of platinum and was the site of last August’s police massacre of 34 striking miners. The strikers have vowed to stop all scabs and have blocked highways, while marching to the area of last year’s atrocity.
This month is the region’s “strike season” when tens of thousands of workers pour into the streets demanding wage increases. The bosses and the government — dominated by the African National Congress (ANC) — fear the strike wave may reach the vineyards around Capetown and the auto industry in Durban.
Meanwhile, a wildcat looms at Anglo-American Platinum — the world’s top platinum producer — which announced a layoff of 6,000.
None of the essential demands and grievances stemming from last year’s strikes have been met. “It [our wage] is too little for us for the kind of work we do,” said miner Ayanda Ndabent. “I plant dynamite…inside the mines. We can die any time,” he continued. “We know the company makes a lot of money from the work we do.”
The black capitalists who took power from the former apartheid rulers and promised “liberation” of the masses have joined with the apartheid-era bosses who still control large sections of the country’s industries. They mirror the oppression of the racist apartheid system which was enforced by the kind of police massacres that occurred here last year. Unemployment is even higher than it was previously and workers still suffer the housing squalor that existed then.
This is the capitalism which the Mandela-led ANC maintained and used to cut out a slice of the profit pie for a small black ruling class. Liberation for the masses can only come from the overthrow of capitalism and creation of a worker-run communist society in which the miners and the entire working class will reap the fruits of their labors.