Marikana Miners Win, Strike Wave Spreads

South Africa

SEPTEMBER 24—A six-week wildcat strike ended in victory for rock drillers and other platinum miners at the Lonmin complex in Marikana, who went back to work four days ago with wage hikes ranging from 11 to 22 percent. As we reported last issue, the August 16 police massacre of 34 strikers—an event that brought to mind the vicious repression of the old white-supremacist apartheid regime—did nothing to quell the determination and fighting spirit of the miners. In fact, their militancy inspired tens of thousands of other platinum miners to launch their own strikes in defiance of the capitalist government led by the African National Congress (ANC). Now their wage victory has emboldened gold and chrome miners to strike, demanding a similar pay rise and even more.

Workers are battling not only the mine bosses and the government but also the misleaders of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the COSATU trade-union federation, in which the South African Communist Party (SACP) is politically dominant. The leaders of the SACP and COSATU, which along with the ANC make up the ruling Tripartite Alliance, were some of the loudest voices howling against the “violence” of the Marikana workers. And now they’re condemning the wage settlement precisely because it is inspiring more struggle! With 15,000 miners on strike at Gold Fields in Driefontein, south of Johannesburg, demanding a 12,500 rand ($1,500) monthly wage, COSATU leader Zwelinzima Vavi rushed out of his organization’s national congress last week to lecture them that the strike was “illegal” and they should get back to work. The miners defied him and vowed to continue the strike until their demands were met.

In a country that produces 75 percent of the world’s platinum—a crucial component in auto production—and is also a leading producer of gold and chrome, the strikes have caused a major crisis for the capitalist ruling class and its Tripartite Alliance political police. ANC president Jacob Zuma announced last week that he was deploying the army to back up the police in the “maintenance of law and order in the Marikana Area…and other areas around the country” until the end of January. It is also reported that the government has issued an arrest warrant for Julius Malema—a wealthy expelled ANC Youth League leader whose populist demagogy has gained a hearing among many miners—on corruption charges.

Prior to the Lonmin settlement, police backed by 1,000 soldiers invaded the Nkaneng squatter camp, where many of the miners live in shacks without electricity, running water or basic sanitation. A running battle ensued as strikers fought side by side with other residents to repel the state’s attempt to disarm them. Thirteen people were reported arrested, and strike leaders were forced underground. Those killed by state forces in the last week include an Anglo Platinum striker who was run over by an armored police vehicle and an ANC councilor killed by police firing on a shantytown near Marikana.

When the superexploited, mainly black working class fought courageously against the apartheid regime in the 1980s, its struggles won widespread sympathy and support from workers around the world, not least black American workers who saw in apartheid the mirror image of their own oppression. Today the South African proletariat’s fight against the same capitalist exploiters demands active solidarity by miners and other trade unionists internationally. Drop all charges against arrested strikers! Free all those behind bars! Military out of the mining areas!

The South African ruling class and its financial senior partners in London and New York dread the prospect that the mechanisms put in place to control black labor—arbitration courts, nationally negotiated contracts, etc.—are breaking down. After the strike wave hit AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest bullion producer, the Financial Times (21 September) noted that gold companies had wrongly assumed they would be spared because they “use collective bargaining” and because the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), which led many of the striking platinum miners, has “a much weaker presence in gold mining, where the NUM dominates.” The article continued: “But the unrest has shown workers becoming increasingly frustrated with their union representatives and taking unilateral action that exacerbates tensions and complicates negotiations.” NUM spokesman Lesiba Seshoka is quoted moaning that the “contagious” wage demands “will undermine collective bargaining and that’s going to be chaos.” Fearing just that, the mining bosses called the NUM leadership into an emergency meeting at the Chamber of Mines on September 21.

South Africa reveals in the rawest form some basic truths about the capitalist profit system. It took class war for the Marikana miners to win a pay hike that barely begins to redress the miserable wage structure inherited from apartheid. That settlement excludes the 9,000 even more miserably paid workers—nearly one-fourth of the mine’s workforce—supplied by bloodsucking labor brokers (contractors), whose role in the economy has grown since the days of apartheid. A crucial lesson that the August 16 massacre should burn into workers’ consciousness is the role of the bourgeois state as an organ for the violent suppression of the exploited and the oppressed in the service of capitalist rule and profits. The fact that “Communists” like SACP national secretary Blade Nzimande have ministerial positions does not change the nature of that state one bit.

The mine strikes demonstrate the enormous social power of the proletariat. But the South African proletariat cannot realize its revolutionary potential when it is tied to its exploiters through the ANC and its bourgeois-nationalist ideology. While the ANC gained enormous authority among the oppressed masses in the struggle against apartheid, its commitment to private property meant that it could not deliver on the promise of liberation.

After 18 years of neo-apartheid, South Africa is marked by the continuing desperate poverty of the non-white majority and mass unemployment. Angry protests by township dwellers demanding housing and basic services are so commonplace that the roadblocks are reported as routine traffic news. And now the ANC is marking its 100th anniversary with the slaughter of striking black workers! Meanwhile, the ANC’s labor lieutenants have furiously tried to squelch any solidarity with the Marikana miners. Bureaucrats at the COSATU congress mobilized a goon squad to attack and set fire to a Spartacist/South Africa literature table, angered by placards denouncing the August 16 massacre and calling to break workers from the Tripartite Alliance (see letter to COSATU on this page).

Uniquely on the South African left, our South African comrades have always refused on principle to give the least political support to the Tripartite Alliance, a nationalist popular front. As the SSA wrote in a leaflet protesting the Marikana massacre (reprinted in WV No. 1007, 31 August): “Trade-union militants from COSATU and SACP members who genuinely want to fight for communism must be broken from the pro-capitalist programme of these organisations and won to a policy based on the independence of the working class from all bourgeois-nationalist forces.” Those forces include Julius Malema, a bourgeois politician whose racialist demagogy obscures the class divide in society. Breaking workers from the Tripartite Alliance is crucial to the task of forging a revolutionary workers party based on the perspective of permanent revolution, which was captured in the conclusion of the SSA statement on Lonmin:

“The national oppression endured by the black majority, imperialist domination, and many-layered oppression and backwardness characteristic of capitalism in South Africa can only be overcome through workers revolution, extending internationally. We need a black-centred workers government, part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, which fights like hell to link up with workers revolution in the imperialist centres and create an international socialist planned economy.”