Workers and capitalists are enemies. Capitalists’ wealth comes from exploiting workers’ labor. We never have common interests with our exploiters. The working class has one common interest—to unite against the capitalists and eliminate exploitation and wage slavery.
The modern South African state is the product of one of the world’s fiercest, most intense, battles against racism. Its major governing institutions earned their leadership credentials in the battle, starting in the 1950s, against the overtly racist system called apartheid, or “apartness.”
As mass resistance grew, the government responded with violence. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960, where the government killed 69 unarmed demonstrators, angered the world and drew support for the struggle against apartheid.
Years of sustained state violence countered but never conquered the resistance. In 1976 when police killed hundreds of unarmed high school students in Soweto, the anger exploded. Arrests, torture and murder of youth failed to intimidate the masses. Mass strikes of miners and other industrial workers shook the worlds’ capitalists.
The whites-only government could no longer protect the interests of world banks like Barclays or the Fortune 500 companies. In 1994 Nelson Mandela, freed from decades in jail, was made South Africa’s first black President.
The African National Congress (ANC), which had led the resistance, became the party that administers capitalism. It in backed not only by the old imperialist powers, Britain and the US, but increasing allied with their rising imperialist rivals, China and India.
Black Economic Empowerment created hundreds of black millionaires but increased the misery and racist oppression of the masses. The number of people who live on less than $1 a day has doubled since 1994. President Zuma has a multi-million dollar swimming pool while people who live in townships have no running water!
Trained by generations of resistance to exploitation, South Africa’s workers have risen up again. In 2012, an unofficial strike of platinum miners at Marikana was met with state violence. Corralled by the police, 34 miners were shot, and then 270 arrested and charged with murder!
Former ANC freedom fighters are now capitalist exploiters and assassins. Cyril Ramaphosa, once head of the National Union of Miners, is now on the Board of Directors of Lonmin Mining Company, which owns the Marikana mine.
Marikana exposes the lie of nationalism: that workers of one “race,” ethnicity or nationality, have more in common with their bosses than with workers seen as belonging to another “race,” ethnicity or nationality. Along with racism, it is one of the most powerful weapons the capitalists have to prevent the revolutionary unity of all workers.
Today’s Economic Freedom Fighters, combining black-nationalist symbols with demands for nationalization of mines and industry, are another example of capitalist reformism masked by nationalist rhetoric.
ICWP Grows in South Africa
From Sharpeville to Soweto to Marikana the workers of South Africa have shown that our class is an unstoppable force, but to defeat racist oppression, we must defeat capitalism itself.
ICWP comrades in South Africa have rejected the nationalist betrayal of the ANC and find an enthusiastic response to mobilizing the masses directly for communism. After our international conference in November, 2015, we have built collectives among industrial workers, students and unemployed workers and have begun organizing among miners in the North West.
