The African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa is celebrating 102 years of its existence on January 8. The ANC from the beginning was a pro-capitalist party and its aim was to mislead the working class.
The South African government in 1913 passed the Land Act, which led to the formation of the segregation policy of apartheid. According to this law, the native people of South Africa were deprived of the right to possess land. The ANC wanted a dialogue with the government to amend the law.
The proposed meeting was postponed when inter-imperialist war broke out in 1914. The ANC urged and recruited black workers to fight and die for the profit of British imperialists. The ANC told the workers that by supporting the war efforts, they would get a favorable deal. After the war those hopes were dashed as the racist rulers rapidly started segregating the society based on race.
The more than 100-year history of the ANC is a history of class collaboration. Even after coming to power, the ANC championed a new constitution in 1997 which kept aspects of the apartheid regime and its Land Act of 1913. In spite of such sell out deals, the ANC gets landslide votes among black workers.
However, a very large number of workers view the ANC with contempt and disdain. The ANC's class collaboration has created conditions worse than what existed under apartheid. The only difference is that we have a small number of very rich black bosses and they use black police to suppress us with impunity.
They used to unleash hungry dogs at us under apartheid. Now they have helicopters hovering over our heads as they spray striking workers with tear gas and machine guns. Hundreds of thousands of workers in black neighborhoods are forcibly evicted to make way for glittering shopping malls, freeways and homes for the rich.
Under apartheid and now under ANC rule, the bosses have tried to silence and tame us by making life utterly impossible to live. When we protest, they sometimes throw crumbs at us to pacify us and the same bosses kill us in the street when we strike.
We are like hungry tigers. Neither bullets nor a few crumbs can satisfy us. We only become angrier. We are hungry for power, power that comes from communist society where there are no bosses to chain us to wage slavery.
What we hear from ICWP about communism is music to our ears. Our base, the workers and the poor, want communist revolution, not reform, to end brutal police killings of workers demanding basic services like clean water and electricity. We are determined to bring the ideas of our party to the masses by translating Mobilize the Masses for Communism in various languages here: Zulu, Sotho, IsiPedi, Tswana, Tshivenda, Ndebele, Xhosa.

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