Neo-Apartheid Police Terrorise Workers, Immigrants, Township Poor

On February 26, in broad daylight, nine police gruesomely tortured Mozambican taxi driver Emidio Macia before the eyes of dozens of people in Daveyton, east of Johannesburg, before he died in custody. A video taken by someone in the crowd shows the cops tying Macia’s hands to a police van and dragging him away toward the police station, where he died of head injuries, internal bleeding and lack of oxygen. As the horrific images of the dragging went around the world, there has been an outpouring of anger over this latest demonstration of naked cop terror. The killing of Macia came just over six months after the Marikana massacre of 16 August 2012, when police gunned down 34 striking black mineworkers like wild animals. As one protester put it, on a placard held at a demonstration outside the bail hearing for the cops who killed Macia: “What Have We Done to Die Like Dogs?”

In response to the outcry, the police brass and ministers of the Tripartite Alliance government, which is led by the African National Congress (ANC) and includes the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), have gone into “PR mode”, feigning shock and dismay at the actions of the Daveyton cops. Don’t be fooled for a second by this cynical stage acting: These are the top cops responsible for commanding the whole machinery of racist state repression, and they have no qualms about spilling the blood of workers and the oppressed to maintain the rule of capital. Take police commissioner Riah Phiyega, who cried crocodile tears for Macia and condemned the cops in a press conference the week after the killing. Directly after the Marikana massacre, Phiyega told a gathering of cops, “Don’t be sorry about what happened.”

President Jacob Zuma and Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa ludicrously try to portray the Daveyton cops as just a few “bad apples” in an otherwise benevolent police force. Just a few weeks after the Daveyton incident, another cop was arrested in North West Province for an assault just like the one that killed Macia! The victim in this case, a court interpreter, was targeted because he had advised a youth being harassed by two policemen. According to Independent Police Investigative Directorate spokesman Moses Dlamini, one of the cops “grabbed the complainant by the neck and asked him if he knew what police were capable of these days” before dragging him for 100 metres behind a police car.

In the face of erupting social discontent, the bourgeois Alliance tops have increasingly given the police free rein to terrorise striking workers, immigrants and the township poor. Here are some of the other people killed by police and private security guards during strikes and service delivery protests over just the past two years: Petros Msiza, a shop steward from the COSATU-affiliated South African Municipal Workers Union who was picketing during a March 2011 strike by bus and refuse workers in Tshwane/Pretoria; Andries Tatane, a teacher and activist, during a service delivery protest in Meqheleng, Ficksburg, in Free State Province in April 2011; three farmworkers in De Doorns and other towns in the Western Cape during the farmworkers strike between November 2012 and January 2013; four people during service delivery protests in February in Zamdela township, Sasolburg, in the Free State. The list goes on and on.

Last year, 30 cops from the infamous Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit in KwaZulu-Natal were charged with over 100 crimes, including 19 counts of murder. In Cape Town, 12 cops are also facing murder charges. There have been numerous reports of torture of arrested protesters, including many survivors of the Marikana massacre and strike leaders from other mines whom the cops have tried to intimidate. Over 900 people died in police custody in the space of a year during the reporting period 2008-09, a number that declined only slightly to 720 during the reporting period 2011-12. According to Cape Town journalist Palesa Morudu, “The highest number of killings by the apartheid police reached 763 in 1985, the year PW Botha declared a state of emergency” (“Human Rights Lessons from Mthethwa and Company”, Business Day, 12 March).

The Tripartite Alliance government administers the capitalist state in defence of the same capitalist system as under apartheid and British colonial rule—a system that is still based on the superexploitation of mainly black labour and the grinding oppression of the mass of the non-white majority. And they have borrowed wholesale from the repressive machinery of apartheid white minority rule. Don’t forget that some 270 Marikana mineworkers who survived the massacre were initially charged by the National Prosecuting Authority for murdering their own comrades on the basis of the apartheid-era “common cause” law! Many of these and other striking mineworkers still face various charges. Drop all the charges against wildcat strikers! It is urgently necessary for the entire working class to defend these workers and other victims of police repression, because otherwise the cops will be emboldened to clamp down on all of labour. An injury to one is an injury to all!

It is notable that there was a sharp increase in police killings before 2009. In those years, Zuma and his supporters campaigned for him to take over as leader of the ANC and the government, with a central focus on the call to “get tough on crime”. In April 2008, then-deputy cop minister Susan Shabangu declared to a group of cops at an “anti-crime imbizo” in Pretoria: “You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community.... I want no warning shots. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot.... There are to be no negotiations with criminals.” She was supported by Zuma, and in the years since, police commissioners and numerous government tops have declared that the cops must “shoot to kill”.

 The government then began “militarising” the police and creating and expanding special forces units like the Berets, who are regularly unleashed to brutalise and harass street vendors and anyone else trying to eke out a desperate existence. Of course, in the eyes of the capitalist rulers and their government ministers, the worst “crime” imaginable is for the working class to “violate public order” by challenging its position as wage slaves of the capitalists. It’s no surprise that in the days before 16 August 2012 Susan Shabangu, now minister of mines in Zuma’s government, howled along with other Tripartite Alliance tops for the blood of the striking workers in Marikana, whom they denounced as “criminals”!

For a Socialist Federation of Southern Africa

The grisly killing of Macia, an immigrant from Mozambique, has reminded many people of the sadistic cops who in 1998 were filmed using three Mozambican immigrants as training bait to incite police dogs against blacks. While in 1998 it was six white Afrikaner cops who reveled in carrying out that racist atrocity, this time it was a group of black cops. As we have repeatedly argued since 1994, the cops in this neo-apartheid system, whether black or white, are hired thugs of the (still mainly white) bourgeoisie who enforce racist terror against the black toilers and oppressed. This understanding is opposed to the false consciousness of black nationalism, which says that all black people—from black police and mining capitalists like Patrice Motsepe to the rock drill operators working in the mines—share a common interest that stands above class divisions.

When the racist attack on Mozambican immigrants was uncovered in 2000, we described how this and other racist atrocities at the time exposed the fairy tale of the “rainbow nation” (“Racist Terror in the ‘New South Africa’”, WV No. 748, 15 December 2000). We emphasised in that article: “It’s either going to be multiracial class struggle or interracial, intertribal bloodletting. There can be no non-racial bourgeois democracy in South Africa. It is only through a working-class social revolution that racial domination can be put to an end.” If the masses’ frustration does not find expression along class lines, it will continue to fuel every other kind of division as different sections of the oppressed fight and kill each other over a few meagre crumbs from the capitalists.

This warning was confirmed, in the negative, most starkly by the outbreak in May 2008 of the anti-immigrant pogroms that spread across townships throughout the country and took the lives of 62 people. These attacks were encouraged by state repression against immigrants. For example, almost 205 000 Zimbabweans were deported in 2007. During the May 2008 pogroms that followed, the police mostly looked on approvingly or joined in terrorising immigrants. In 2010-11, the state began a campaign to crack down on immigrants, ending the “special dispensation” that had allowed Zimbabweans to stay in the country without documentation. As a result, there were nearly 43 000 deportations to Zimbabwe between October 2011 and October 2012. Many other immigrants are still being held at the Lindela deportation camp in the West Rand, where inmates rioted in March 2012 against hellish conditions.

State terror is wind in the sails of the reactionary mobs carrying out attacks in the streets, which have been on the rise. In May this year, anti-immigrant attacks broke out like wildfire across the country. From Diepsloot and Orange Farm, near Johannesburg, to townships around Port Elizabeth, dozens of shops—mainly ones owned by Somalis—were looted, and at least one Somali immigrant was killed, stoned to death. Various “business forums” of South African shop owners have fanned the flames for the attacks, complaining of “unfair competition” from immigrants. We support the efforts that immigrants in a number of areas have made to organise self-defence. In addition to this, some township residents have bravely come out to oppose the attacks. What’s urgently needed are integrated, multiethnic defence guards based on the organised working class.

Class struggle provides the basis on which ethnic, national and other divisions within the working class can be overcome and class unity forged against the bourgeoisie’s divide-and-rule tactics. An example of this can be seen in De Doorns in the Western Cape. In 2009, some 3 000 mostly Zimbabwean immigrants were forced to flee De Doorns following anti-immigrant attacks. Three years later, De Doorns was at the heart of the wildcat strikes by farmworkers throughout the Western Cape demanding an increase in the minimum wage to R150 per day. The white farmers and the racist Democratic Alliance provincial government tried to foment divisions between coloured and Xhosa workers, and between South African and foreign workers. But the workers resisted this, and immigrants from Lesotho and Zimbabwe played a prominent role in the leadership of the strike. Since the strike ended, there have been threats by farmers to hire immigrant workers as a way of getting around the increased minimum wage of R105 per day and of fueling anti-immigrant bigotry. It is an urgent task of the workers movement to fight to organise immigrant workers into trade unions, linking this to a fight for full citizenship rights and against state repression and discrimination of any kind.

The key is to build a revolutionary internationalist leadership which recognises that the interests of the working class are irreconcilable with the capitalist system. A Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party that will act as tribune of the oppressed, fighting against all manifestations of capitalist oppression and opposing all forms of bourgeois nationalism, must be built. The national borders in sub-Saharan Africa, as in many parts of the Third World, are completely artificial. They were imposed by the imperialist colonisers, who fought among each other to carve out spheres of domination, drawing arbitrary borders that would suit this purpose.

Our perspective is for a socialist federation of Southern Africa. Then the current domination of the region by South Africa’s racist rulers will be replaced by a system in which the relatively advanced South African economy can be put to use on the basis of rational planning and collectivised ownership of the means of production, to raise the living standards of the masses throughout the region. This must be part of fighting to link up with workers revolutions in the imperialist centres and creating an international planned socialist economy, which is necessary to lift Africa out of poverty.

It is from our revolutionary internationalist framework that we address the death of 13 South African army (SANDF) troops earlier this year, who were deployed in the Central African Republic (CAR). They were killed when some 200 South African troops were sent packing by insurgents of the Seleka military coalition, who went on to depose the regime of Francois Bozizé that the SANDF was trying to help prop up. In response, there was an outpouring of chauvinism in the bourgeois media and by the government in South Africa about the “fallen heroes” of the SANDF. Amid this, little note was taken of the carnage wreaked on the population of the CAR, one of the world’s poorest countries, where it is estimated that more than 200 000 people had been displaced by mid 2012, and up to 30 000 have fled the country since the latest fighting broke out.

Both Bozizé and the insurgents who deposed him are reactionary tin-pot dictators who have appealed to the American and European imperialists for support. For its part, the South African army was deployed in an attempt to demonstrate the Zuma government’s reliability in guaranteeing “stability” so that the South African capitalists and their imperialist senior partners could plunder the diamonds and other mineral wealth in the CAR. (The government suffered a black eye with the death of the 13 soldiers and apparently withdrew the others at least temporarily.) South African troops are currently stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan as part of African Union (AU) contingents, which act as adjuncts to the United Nations and other imperialist forces.

In September 1998 the South African government launched a military invasion of Lesotho by South African and Botswana troops. While using the pretext of saving the government from the threat of a developing mutiny, the first target of the South Africans was a group of 16 sleeping Lesotho Defence Force members who were killed guarding the Katse Dam away from Maseru (the capital of Lesotho), where the uprising was taking place. The Katse Dam provides fresh water to South Africa’s industrial hub of Gauteng Province. Scores of other Lesotho citizens lost their lives as a result of this invasion.

The use of the military abroad is a reflection of how the bourgeois state is used at home to oppress the working class and the poor: Don’t forget that the SANDF was also sent to Marikana and surrounding areas to reinforce the police against the striking mineworkers. We say: South African, AU troops out of the CAR, DRC and Sudan! UN, French and other imperialists get out!

The State and Revolution

The National Prosecuting Authority took the step of charging the Daveyton cops caught on video killing Macia with murder, and the judge denied them bail. This is “damage control”, designed, like the bogus Farlam commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre, to let people blow off some steam and to whitewash the capitalist state. Anybody with illusions that justice for the victims of police terror will be granted by the courts and prosecution, which are part of the same bourgeois state, should look at the case of the teacher Andries Tatane. The cops who killed Tatane were caught on camera shooting him at pointblank range with rubber bullets, and he died minutes later with those bullets lodged in his heart and lungs. That was April 2011. Some two years later, the trial concluded on March 28 with all the cops getting off without even a token slap on the wrist!

 This shows yet again that there is no justice in the bourgeois courts. No amount of reformist tinkering with the machinery of state repression can change the viciously racist and brutal nature of the neo-apartheid police. V. I. Lenin explained in The State and Revolution (1917): “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled.” The state is an instrument for the oppression of one class by another—under capitalism, for the oppression and exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie.

As Lenin wrote, the state power “consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command”. There is no way to reform the capitalist state machinery to make it serve the interests of the workers and oppressed. It must be smashed through workers revolution and replaced by a state that can serve the interests of the majority, the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Lenin’s words: “Every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organisation of this kind, capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters.”

Since the 1990s, the pass laws, Group Areas Act and countless other apartheid laws upholding white minority rule are no more. But the material, social basis of apartheid, which is rooted in the superexploitation of black labour, remains unshaken. The Tripartite Alliance government administers a neo-apartheid capitalist system. In almost 20 years, nothing has changed in the grinding poverty and exploitation suffered by the overwhelming majority of blacks and other non-whites, and in many ways their conditions have deteriorated. On the other hand, a handful of black elites have enriched themselves by joining in the exploitation of “their own people” and acting as political front men and labour lieutenants for the white Randlords and their imperialist senior partners, who continue to dominate the economy.

The reformist leaders of COSATU and the SACP spout all kinds of anti-Marxist nonsense about the South African state being a “class-contested terrain”, etc. This is just an attempt to justify the countless wretched betrayals they have carried out in the service of their alliance with the ANC. The Tripartite Alliance is a nationalist popular front through which the working-class base of COSATU and the SACP are subordinated to their own exploiters, while the leaders of those organisations have joined the capitalist government, thereby taking responsibility for administering the racist capitalist system.

While SACP leader Blade Nzimande currently serves as minister of higher education in the Zuma government which oversaw the Marikana massacre, earlier SACP government ministers included Charles Nqakula as minister of the cops and Ronnie Kasrils as spy minister, both under the Thabo Mbeki government. COSATU includes among its affiliates the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU), while other COSATU affiliates also organise security guards and police and the SACP welcomes cops as “comrades” in its own organisation. This is suicidal fraternisation with the capitalist exploiters’ shock troops, the deadly enemies of the working class.

In the fight against police terror, class-conscious militants must demand: Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions! This is part of the struggle for the political and organisational independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie, its state and its parties. We seek to break the Tripartite Alliance along class lines, winning pro-communist militants from COSATU and the SACP to forging the Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party that can lead a revolutionary struggle against this rotten system. A new leadership of the unions, based on a programme of class struggle, must come to the fore in the course of building the revolutionary party.

The sellout SACP and COSATU tops are aided and abetted by pseudo-socialist outfits like the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), Keep Left! and the Workers International Vanguard Party (WIVP), all of which push the grotesque reformist lie that the cops are fellow workers. The DSM has recently been trying to capitalise on the prominence it gained through the mineworkers strike wave by forming a “new mass workers party”, the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP). At a meeting to launch WASP in Pretoria on March 21, the DSM welcomed a “union” of private security guards and invited them to address the crowd as one of the organisations (another was the WIVP) supporting the formation of WASP!

Despite the SACP’s talk about the “national democratic revolution”, South Africa never had a revolution of any sort. The much-vaunted “most democratic constitution in the world” was the outcome of a negotiated settlement between the white rulers and the ANC/Alliance tops, the latter of whom betrayed the struggle for black freedom in order to ensure a “smooth transition”, i.e., to avoid upsetting the capitalist profit machine. As a result, and with the explosive social contradictions of this society, the democratic rights that were granted have always been reversible and bourgeois parliamentary democracy highly unstable. We are witnessing this today, as the social contradictions begin to explode and protests by the working class and other oppressed layers are met with increasingly brutal, deadly state repression.

The workers and the oppressed do not need reformist and liberal sermonising and hand-wringing about the rights supposedly guaranteed by the bourgeois constitution. They need a leadership that points clearly to the class interests behind the machinery of state terror, and to the revolutionary struggle needed to put an end to grinding immiseration and repression. The only salvation is a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party fighting for a black-centred workers govern­ment and new October Revolutions all over the world.