SOUTH AFRICA, September 17—Last week, the auto workers had a strike here. They were demanding a 7% wage increase (147 Rands or about US$15 a week) — peanuts. The bosses insisted they couldn’t do anything above 4% but ended up settling for more.
The union that was supposed to lead the negotiation and the strike was NUMSA. It recently broke off from COSATU, the federation allied with the ruling African National Congress. But the union actively encouraged the workers not to strike. They came up with incentives of an extra 5000 Rands if they didn’t strike and worked instead, and maybe an extra 2000 Rands if they work on the weekends too. This was just to push more production so the bosses can make more profit, further exploiting the working class.
We took the Red Flag to the workers on strike. Most of the striking workers outside were black workers. The workers on the inside working were mostly coloured [mixed-race] workers. You see this division: most of the shop stewards and supervisors are coloured.
Many black factory workers think that most coloured workers are not to be trusted, that they are always more aligned with the bosses. This is a dangerous generalization because it paints this whole so-called racial group in South Africa as class traitors, but this is not the case.
People take one or two isolated incidents and they conclude this. Our party collective discussed that we need to investigate further, not just look on the surface.
The problem lies with the bosses. They create and exploit this conflict by giving more preferential treatment to coloureds. So the other workers won’t look at the boss as the main culprit but at the person who is used as a pawn to further divide the working class.
It’s crucial to understand why this division exists. These two groups make up the majority of the whole working class in South Africa. It is divided based on “race” instead of being united based on class. The capitalist wage system keeps all us workers in chains. At the same time that it requires divisions among the workers so the bosses can keep power.
To win the struggle for communism, this is the major gap we need to bridge so workers’ viewpoint can be based on class consciousness instead of “race.” Then they can understand they are more similar than different.
The strike was a learning experience for us. We saw that there has to be major representation of different “races” in our collective. This will reinforce our theory that even though we are different in terms of colour, we are still the same because we come from the same class. Our collective has to reflect that. We are encouraged by party collectives elsewhere that include comrades of different “races.”
When we distributed Red Flag to the striking workers, we made contacts with three workers in the same production line as our comrade. We visited them at home. We talked about communism. Some of them were interested. It didn’t take much convincing because the workers are experiencing the brutalities of capitalism first hand. We explained what we are prescribing as the solution.
These workers remind some of us of ourselves when we first joined the movement. They have a dangerous mix of nationalism with Pan Africanism and black consciousness. We needed to find something that we agreed on, which was the need for revolution. That there has to be a violent transfer of power from the ruling class to the working class.
The ruling class will never ever relinquish power voluntarily to our class. They see us as inferior to them. We are their wage slaves after all. To win power, we have to seize it. For that, the working class will have to be armed. Recruiting soldiers to our cause becomes imperative. They are from our class.
We showed that for this to happen there has to be a party that will give leadership to the workers for revolution. To win, it has to be a mass party. We said they should join the ICWP and invited them to the next meeting of our collective.
This struggle will help us. We have to always look for ways of doing things better. We shouldn’t be afraid, when something isn’t working, to try new things. It was a good experience.