NEW YORK CITY, August 16 — Thirty comrades from Progressive Labor Party, including members from other countries, went from the 2015 PLP convention to join more than one hundred professors, students, and other workers of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) to turn up the heat on the South African consulate. We rallied in solidarity with the 20,000 South African workers who gathered on that same day in the northern town of Marikana to protest the brutal slaughter of striking workers there three years earlier. In August, 2012, platinum miners were on a wildcat strike against Lonmin, the British-owned mining giant, demanding a living wage and an end to intolerable housing conditions. On August 16, in a planned attack, the police opened fire on a large crowd, killing thirty-four miners and wounding eighty. The Marikana Massacre is the worst since sixty-nine demonstrators were slaughtered by the apartheid regime at Sharpeville in 1960.
The International Committee of the PSC, the union of faculty and staff at the City University of New York, organized the demonstration, whose members are in the midst of a difficult five-year battle to obtain a labor contract in the face of the insistence by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (close ally of NYC’s business elite) that all state workers accept concessionary agreements. As in Greece and South Africa, CUNY faculty, staff and students have been hit with tuition hikes and are experiencing the harsh reality that politicians serve the ruling class. Several PSC members and union leaders gave speeches drawing these connections, after which the crowd enthusiastically chanted:
Hey hey, ho ho, the murder of strikers has got to go! economic apartheid’s got to go!
Same struggle, same fight, South African & U.S. workers unite!
Same struggle, same fight, workers North & South unite!
One of our PLP comrades spoke of his experiences in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was murdered and Black workers are fighting back. He compared Ferguson to the racist conditions in South Africa, which exist because the ouster of the apartheid government left capitalism in place. Although South Africa has tremendous mineral, manufacturing and agricultural wealth, it has enriched only the capitalists, while the actual producers – the working class – have been left impoverished. Our comrade told the gathering that if we want to defeat racist oppression here and in South Africa we must first identify the root cause – capitalism – and commit ourselves to overthrowing it.
A long-time PSC activist read a letter from protest organizer Trevor Ngwane, who blasted the African National Congress (ANC) government for working hand-in-glove with capital and making a mockery of the “freedom” millions fought for under apartheid. Another speaker, representing workers in New Jersey, noted that South African workers have a proud history of international labor solidarity. In 1986, for example, workers in Freehold, NJ were fighting the 3M corporation’s plan to close their plant. In support of U.S. employees, the 3M workers in South Africa went on strike. Imagine how much stronger the working class would be if concrete acts of worker solidarity like this became commonplace!
Revolution, not Reform
The decades-long, bitter struggle against apartheid was marked by tremendous personal sacrifices, and workers all over the world protested and were jailed supporting the anti-apartheid struggle. The ANC fought hard to liberate people from the iron heel of apartheid. But as the past two decades of ANC rule have shown, we must also topple the racist economic order that is its foundation: capitalism. Because that wasn’t done, life for Black workers in South Africa is even harsher today than it was under apartheid – more poverty and greater inequality. The only thing that’s changed is that a few ANC top officials – like Cyril Ramaphosa, the former president of the miners union who now sits on the board of directors of Lonmin – have become millionaires. Maintaining capitalism turns former “liberators” into exploiters, whether in South Africa, Mozambique, El Salvador, Vietnam or anywhere
The Progressive Labor Party has members in Africa, and we extend an invitation to workers in South Africa to join our party and organize for communist revolution throughout the continent. This time let’s nail the coffin shut on hundreds of years of colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid by smashing capitalism!