Communist Miners Organize in South Africa
SOUTH AFRICA—On August 16, 2012, the African National Congress (ANC) government’s cops murdered 34 of our class brothers, striking miners at Marikana, in cold blood. We must never forget who was responsible for this.
Instead of being held accountable for their crimes, those responsible have been rewarded with lofty positions. They ordered the execution of workers in broad daylight.
Eight years ago, Cyril Ramaphosa, the current President of South Africa, was a private citizen. He was a director at Lonmin Mine, where miners organized a mass strike. The directors ordered the ANC government’s cops to shoot the miners.
In the 1980’s, Ramaphosa had founded the National Mineworkers’ Union, one of the oldest mining unions here. He organized for the ANC in the mining sector. When the ANC was unbanned in the 1990’s, he held one of its most powerful positions. He helped negotiate the settlement of South Africa under the minority rule of the apartheid government, keeping capitalist rule intact.
Ramaphosa left politics after 1994 because Mandela appointed Mbeki as president instead of him. He went into the private sector, amassing a fortune and becoming a billionaire exploiter.
We can see in this the unholy alliance between the private sector and government and its exploitation of the workers.
The workers in Marikana showed the international working class that we must stand firm in the face of injustice. They were not begging, but fighting, when they demanded a wage of 12,000 Rands a month. Even today they have not received that money.
Miners risk their lives each and every day, going into the depths of the earth, for peanuts. We have seen first-hand their living conditions: shacks lacking sanitation, running water, electricity. Yet they are expected to leave their families and sacrifice for the bosses’ profits.
The whole working class needs to violently struggle against this. We need to unify our working-class family to violently resist the exploitative capitalist system. We must eradicate capitalism and build communism.
We can learn from what happened in Marikana that when we fight for reform, the people leading these reform struggles always end up being the only ones who benefit. It’s opportunism. Once their needs are taken care of, they no longer care about the working class.
When we fight for higher wages, the things that tie us to the bosses, those battles are futile. Instead, we must fight to liberate ourselves from the chains of wage slavery. The workers of Marikana fought bravely against the bosses, but they were encouraged to fight for only reforming their chains. We as ICWP fight to break those chains, to do away with the wage system. That is the main lesson we can draw from what happened there.
As we commemorate the bravery shown by the miners in Marikana, we must be reminded about our responsibilities. We need to organize our party. We have an advanced line, which can give leadership to the international working class. We are actively struggling to establish more ICWP cells around the world.
We will succeed. We must move past the divisions that are encouraged by the bosses amongst our class brothers and sisters: especially sexism and racism. These are the results of capitalism which we must actively struggle against. But we must not be distracted from our main task of eliminating capitalism.
We need to fight the disease as a whole, the capitalist state. Once we are able to smash the capitalist state, racism and sexism will not simply wither away. We will still have to struggle against them, but we will then have a solid foundation to be able to eliminate them.
In the mining sector, we have seen the sexist treatment of women underground. There are many documented cases of abuse. We have given the Red Flag to some women mineworkers.
We are encouraged by the efforts of ICWP in struggling to unify the international working class. More work needs to be done. But we are on the right track. The only Party which is getting into a position to defeat capitalism is our Party. We actively invite these workers to join our cause because they can bring energy and hasten the fall of capitalism.