South Africa: Workers battle local bosses and rival imperialists

Thirty years after the end of apartheid rule, racist capitalism remains in power in South Africa, while rival imperialists China and the U.S.A. contend for influence in this strategic part of the world. Militant workers demand change, and some, led by the National Union Of Metalworkers Of South Africa (NUMSA) have broken up with the African National Congress (ANC) to organize independently. Like workers everywhere, they need an international communist party to battle both local and global capitalists.

Bosses’ economic and political crises
Facing a soaring cost of living and ANC government inaction, hundreds of thousands of workers in South Africa went on strike in November 2022, demanding big wage increases. Inflation is currently above seven percent, and the government is offering unions only three percent wage increases (Al Jazeera, 10/4/2022). The unemployment rate is 33 percent. In this global economic crisis, all the ruling class offers is empty promises. 

The bosses’ promise to end “corruption” has sunk the government into a political crisis. More than a third of the population has had to bribe police, judges, or magistrates (L.A Times, 9/30/2015). President and ANC head, Cyril Ramaphosa, vowed to “clean up” corruption, but he himself is currently mired in possible tax evasion, kidnapping, and bribery (Africa News, 10/22/2022). ANC political rivals, including former president Jacob Zuma, accuse the others of corruption while involved in it themselves. Zuma still faces old charges of selling billions of dollars of state assets to his business associates.

South Africa: Workers fight back!
But crying “corruption” obscures the reality that all bosses—Ramaphosa or Zuma, Biden or Trump—are the enemy of workers. Workers in South Africa know that being organized and fighting back is the only way to win. In 2012 we saw the Marikana wildcat strikes, where miners demanded better pay and working conditions, and the state responded by sanctioning the police murder of 34 mineworkers. Not bowing to state terrorism, workers unleashed a strike wave from 2012-14 in mining, auto, trucking, and farming. In Fall 2021, the metalworkers in NUMSA, the largest union on the continent, struck in auto, and in Fall 2022, port workers for Transnet tied up Durban and Cape Town ports (Reuters, 2021, 2022). In the first half of 2022, strikes cost bosses 1.6 million work days (Bloomberg, 2022).

Such bravery and militancy are needed in a country with the worst inequality in the world. Although white settler-colonialism was supposedly defeated, racism and segregation still prevailed. Just as the election of Barack Obama did nothing to end racism in the U.S.

The transition to a Black-led government has done nothing to improve the lives of the working class in South Africa, where 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 10 percent of the population.

Workers are also facing crises in basic services like housing, power, water, and sewage; some neighborhoods have been without electricity for more than three years (New Frame, 6/20/2022). After capitalists steal the surplus-value workers create in the workplace– they keep as much of that profit as possible through government denial of basic services to workers’ communities. But as strikes shut down workplaces for higher wages, organized protest for basic services has also surged in workers’ shack dweller communities (Ngwane, Amakomiti, 2021).

Imperialist tug-of-war for South Africa
Surrendered to capitalism by the new ANC rulers, South Africa is simultaneously the object of a tug-of-war between competing imperialist powers. While Western capitalists still own key banking and extractive industries, China’s influence is rising. South Africa is part of the China-led grouping, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which aims at countering U.S.-led imperialists, refusing, for instance, to join the U.S. in sanctioning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But BRICS does not benefit workers.

Transnet, the huge South African rail, port and pipeline company, showed the increasing influence of Chinese capital when it purchased locomotives at vastly inflated prices from a state-owned enterprise, the Chinese Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC). This involved 20 percent kickbacks to the Gupta family, now notorious for their “state capture” of the government under Zuma (BizNews, 2/2/2022). Chinese capital also has a 20 percent interest in South Africa’s largest bank (African Business, 12/2007). The influence of Chinese capital threatens institutions like the World Bank, representing “Western” or “Global North” imperialists and the global dominance of the U.S. dollar. But China’s rise is no more beneficial to workers than the U.S. decline.

The different wings of the U.S. ruling class respond differently to China’s challenge in South Africa. Trump, when he led the small fascist wing, was not interested in “winning” South Africa and amplified racist accusations about the organized killing of white South African farmers (NPR, 8/23/2018). Big Fascist Joe Biden (see Glossary on page 6), representing the imperialist interests of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is trying hard to win Ramaphosa to support NATO’s war with Russia (AP News, 9/1/2022).

Choose communism!
Neither Chinese bosses nor Black ANC bosses will save workers in South Africa from class exploitation and inequality. Some of these workers, heroic veterans of antiracist class struggle, have broken with the sell-out leadership of the ANC, the SACP, and the union federation COSATU. If they go on to choose communism over reformism and nationalism, they will again play a vanguard role in liberating all workers from imperialism. The goal of the Progressive Labor Party is to build an international revolutionary communist party with such workers in South Africa and everywhere in the bosses’ world.