Strikes Sharpen New Class Struggle in South Africa

There is life in the class struggle in South Africa.  Leading the wave is a strategically important strike that is galvanizing workers and disrupting the global platinum market and the South African economy. On January 23, the world’s big three platinum producers, Anglo American, Impala, and Lonmin, were struck by seventy thousand miners in the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (AMCU). This new and militant union is up against the African National Congress government, whose police fired rubber bullets into three thousand strikers trying to stop scabs at Anglo American.  
The strike was expanded on Feb. 3 by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest union in Africa, which joined in with their own wage demands.  While the AMCU miners have diverged from the traditional ANC miners’ union (the National Union of Mineworkers), NUMSA has gone further, breaking completely with the ANC and thus opening a new era of class struggle.
Class Struggle Survives the ANC Sellout
We can now see the anti-apartheid period in South Africa as a great wave of antiracist struggle forced into a deadend by its ANC leadership. These leaders reformed the apartheid state but left racist capitalism intact.  Imperialists worldwide first fought the anti-apartheid alliance, which also included the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and labeled participants as communists and terrorists. But when it became obvious that apartheid was a losing strategy for maintaining capitalism in a majority-black society, the rulers changed their tune.
Once the alliance agreed to keep capitalism intact, local bosses and imperialists everywhere praised Mandela to the skies. Despite this misleadership, the class struggle went on independently of the alliance from the 1980s to the present day. Twenty years after the first ANC election, workers suffer the same level of poverty, 10 percent higher unemployment, and a level of inequality among the highest in the world. So they continue to rebel.
With the ANC alliance discredited, what politics will lead the new struggles — reform or revolution? The same clash of ideas can be seen throughout the world, among armed fighters in Syria (some of whom are genuinely fighting for a better world), garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, antifascists in Greece and Pakistan, and students in Chile and Haiti. We need a new communist internationale, the Progressive Labor Party, to lead our class worldwide. Slowly but surely, workers will get there. Militant strikes, breaking with pro-capitalist leaders, can become schools of worldwide revolution.
Two years ago, these same South African platinum miners ushered in the new era with a bang with their ferocious strike against Lonmin’s mines at Marikana. Taking many casualties, they battled not only the company but the National Union of Mineworkers (the key union in the ruling alliance) and the killer cops of the ANC state, whose massacre of 34 strikers reminded everyone of the apartheid years. (The dictatorship of the capitalist class was intact under a new governing party.)
Now the AMCU strikers seek “a living wage” instead of “an apartheid wage” — a doubling of the entry-level monthly pay to 12,500 South African Rand (US $1,129). The raise would threaten the current economy of platinum production. With NUMSA now in the strike, will more workers start thinking about using their power to abolish capitalism and the wage-and-profit system altogether?
Killer Cops Prop Up the Rand
The strike exposes many contradictions in that system. On one side are the local ANC bosses who would like to placate workers and strengthen their political position by showing some improvements in miners’ conditions, along with stronger regulation of foreign direct investment. On the other is international Big Platinum, which wants to keep miners as low-paid as possible and expects the ANC to keep them in check.
The government is pretending to strengthen health and safety provisions in the mines. But the ANC also needs its killer police, their main strikebreaking weapon, to prop up their credit rating and the value of their currency (the rand). In 2012, labor disputes lowered the economy’s growth rate to 2 percent and knocked 25 percent off the value of the rand.
Imperialist investors are worried about the weak performance of South African platinum mines, which contain 80 percent of the world’s reserves but account for only 53 percent of market share. There is high demand today for platinum, a component of catalytic converters and fuel cells, as carmakers turn away from petroleum. But the striking workers stand in the way of capitalist dreams of higher profits. They must save their own lives and capital be damned! The battle lines are drawn.
The Fight for Communism
But again, with what politics?  Forces on the left seem to be reorganizing as the ANC weakens. Amid expanding strikes and a tide of community protests (about thirty a day), NUMSA’s breakaway from the ANC alliance could give a push to organizing directly against capitalism. The NUMSA is exploring a movement for socialism. While these forces seem honestly opposed to capitalism, PLP would point out that history has shown that fighting for socialism leads directly back to capitalism. Even though we hail the tremendous advances that occurred in the Soviet Union and China, in the final analysis, socialism is state capitalism. The working class must abandon socialism as a stage and fight directly for communism.
PLP believes such discussions are exactly what workers everywhere need, and we look forward to working with the comrades in South Africa who are taking up this task. We will learn from one another to create a new communist internationale, the only alternative to the grind of racist capitalism, constant economic crisis, and endless imperialist wars over strategic resources like oil and platinum.