https://socialistaction.org/2019/08/09/s-africa-the-anc-monopoly-is-over/
South Africa: The ANC monopoly is over
/ 1 day ago
Aug. 2019 NUMSA strike 2014 (Reuters)
Striking NUMSA members in 2014. NUMSA is the key force in the new SRWP.
(Reuters)
By MARTY GOODMAN
???We are the only ones fighting for the total destruction of capitalism.???
??? South Africa???s Socialist Revolutionary Worker???s Party spokesperson,
Phakamile Hlubi-Majola
The May 8 National and Provincial elections in South Africa revealed
deepening???potentially explosive???fault lines of class and race. The once
overwhelming choice of South Africa???s working class, the African
National Congress (ANC), the Party of Nelson Mandela, is ebbing. Disgust
with ANC corruption and neoliberal policies reduced voter turnout to 66%
of eligible voters, compared with 73% in 2014.
Even so, the national returns show the ANC garnered 57% of the vote,
earning it 230 seats in the National Assembly, down from 249 in 2014.
Following the May 8 results, the National Assembly elected ANC leader
Cyril Ramaposa as South Africa???s new president. Shocking to many outside
of South Africa, Ramaposa???s personal wealth was estimated at $550
million in 2017, a reality that highlights the extreme contradictions of
this supposedly working-class party. Ramaphosa is an ex-union militant
who led the National Union of Mineworkers.
The second-place Democratic Alliance (DA) slipped from 22% in 2014 to
20% this year. It will have 84 seats in the National Assembly, down from
89. Long regarded as the party of white conservatives, the DA has tried
to appeal to middle-class Blacks. As a result, the DA???s white right-wing
base switched to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), of separatist Afrikaner
racists. FF+ will now have 10 seats in the National Assembly, up from four.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), founded by Julius Malema, former
president of the ANC???s Youth League, won 10.79% of the vote and 44
seats, up from 6% in 2014, 19 more than it won five years ago. The EFF
successfully taps into much of the anger of impoverished Blacks. ???Our
land and jobs now!??? was the EFF slogan. EFF members dress in red,
including in parliament, and use leftist rhetoric, but lack a clear
perspective. The EFF has called for the ???expropriation??? of large, mostly
white-owned, land but modified their radical demand in a deal with ANC
parliamentarians. Malema was expelled from the ANC in 2011 by Ramaphosa.
The ANC assumed power in 1994 with the official fall of apartheid, and
despite its ???progressive??? posturing pretensions, has always been a
capitalist party. A centerpiece of its program is the ???Freedom Charter,???
a populist program that does not challenge the roots of exploitation,
i.e., capitalism. The ANC is part of a tripartite coalition that
includes the large COSATU union federation and the South African
Communist Party (SACP).
The ANC presides over a country of 55 million, 80% non-white, in which
37% of all workers are unemployed and more than half live in poverty.
One in four goes hungry every day. Merely 1% of the population owns 70%
of the wealth. Spending on basic education has declined 8% since the
economic crisis in 2008, which led to a nationwide student revolt.
Indeed, South Africa has been called the ???protest capital of the world.???
A turning point in post-apartheid South Africa was the August 2012
massacre of 34 unarmed strikers at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana.
As a non-ex-ecutive director of the mining company, Lonmin, ANC top
bureaucrat Cyrile Ramaphosa described the strikers to ANC cops in an
e-mail as ???plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such
??? There needs to be concomitant action to address this situation??? (see
the award-winning documentary, ???Miners Shot Down???).
That same year, the ANC???s Ramaphosa bid R20 million (US$1.5 million) for
a prize buffalo.
In 2018, Ramaphosa decreed a R20 minimum wage per hour (about 13.3 U.S.
cents per hour) for workers. In April 2018, NUMSA (the National United
Metalworkers of South Africa) led a nationwide strike against
Ramaphosa???s slave labor proposal (see Socialist Action, May 2018). More
recently, there have been escalating blackouts as the Eskom power
authority cuts electricity, enraging working-class customers. As a
???solution,??? the ANC is preparing privatization schemes for education,
water, communications, and health care.
The SRWP: An historic development?
An exciting new force in the electoral arena is the Socialist
Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), which has been stridently
revolutionary in its pronouncements. The nation???s largest union, NUMSA
(National United Metalworkers of South Africa), resolved in 2013 to form
a new party after its expulsion from the COSATU trade-union federation
for not supporting the ANC presidential candidate over the party???s role
in Marikana. For some reason it did not declare its intention to
actually run until only a month before election day.
Unfortunately, the SRWP received only 24,439 votes, not nearly enough
for a single seat in parliament, which means that even the NUMSA
membership did not vote for the party in any great numbers. It is too
early to judge whether the party???s overall strategies were to blame.
The SRWP is based on the militant NUMSA, with a total membership of over
370,000. NUMSA played the leading role in founding the SAFTU union
federation in 2017, which now has 800,000 members. It is the next
largest trade-union coalition next to ANC partner COSATU.
Clearly, the SRWP, at least in its declarations, has rejected the
endless latch-ups of middle-class ???socialist??? formations in recent years
such as Greece???s SYRIZA party, PODEMOS of Spain, the Green parties, the
Sandinistas, and Venezuela???s United Socialist Party (PSUV), etc.,
parties that oriented toward elections and accommodation to capitalism.
Also, since the SRWP is based on South Africa???s largest trade-union,
NUMSA, the party???s emergence is of world significance for the working
class, in a country that is second economically on the African continent.
SRWP National Chairperson and NUMSA secretary-general Irvin Jim, puts it
bluntly, ???As communists we have an old view that elections are not
necessarily a solution; however, they are a tactic that can be explored
to test if we have the support of the working class.???
In addition, the SRWP pledges that if any SRWP ca didates win
legislative seats in the upcoming election they will be subject to
instant recall by the party and will not be paid more than the wage of
an ???average skilled worker,??? principles advanced by the Bolshevik party
of Lenin.
The SRWP has protested the vote totals and is not accepting the May 8
election results at face value. It gives examples of ???evidence of faults
and fraud??? at the hands of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC)
and concludes that it would be ???impossible??? for the party ???to
scientifically accept the accuracy of the results of these elections.???
The SRWP, however, has not faulted its own approach to the masses. Where
the truth lies remains to be seen.
Thus far, the SRWP has also refrained from criticizing the EFF, possibly
so as to not rule out a future political block or fusion. If so, the
lack of political clarity may prove costly in the end. Another possible
reason for the omission is that the EFF obviously received many votes
from NUMSA members but also, it has been reported, a third of the votes
in the platinum mining area of Marikana.
Stalinism and the ANC
A key component of the leadership of the ANC has always been the South
African Communist Party. The SACP was founded in 1921 and within a few
years became politically aligned with the perspectives of the Stalinized
Communist International. The Comintern was led by the USSR???s Premier
Joseph Stalin, (1878-1953) and solidified after the death of Vladimir
Lenin in 1924 and the expulsion and later murder of revolutionary leader
Leon Trotsky in 1940 on Stalin???s orders.
Stalin reigned over a conservatized Soviet bureaucracy that enjoyed
material privileges. Aided by repression, the once revolutionary
Bolshevik party moved to the right. After around 1935, revolution was
seen by Stalinist parties as a two-part process in which support for a
???democratic??? capitalist government was to be a stage on the road to
socialist transformation, i.e., workers power???which never arrives when
led by Stalinists. But, as the Lenin-Trotsky leadership had insisted,
???democratic??? capitalism is not a progressive force under modern
imperialism but counter-revolutionary through and through. Reliance on
???democratic??? capitalists, and not the revolutionary power of workers,
led to bloody defeats again and again (Chile, Spain, etc.).
The Stalinist ???two-stage??? strategy was accepted by the SACP beginning in
the 1930s and subsequently, despite the fact that party leaders took
their distance from some of Stalin???s ???excesses??? after his death. In the
1950s, the party adopted the tactic of working within the ANC; its
strategy was fully consistent with the famous ???Freedom Charter.??? In
1987, a SACP message to the second COSATU trade-union congress warned,
???Socialism is not on the agenda.???
When Nelson Mandela, who appears to have been a Communist Party member
in the 1960s, took over in 1994, large loans from Western banks were
already in the pipeline conditioned on neoliberal measures, i.e.,
belt-tightening for workers. In 1992, Joe Slovo, an SACP leader, offered
the key compromise of a ???sunset clause,??? to be included into the new
South African constitution, which dropped all references to
nationalizations. In 1996, when launching the ANC???s neoliberal ???GEAR???
program, the ANC???s Thabo Mbeki, later South Africa???s president, said,
???Just call me a Thatcherite.???
SRWP may carry considerable political baggage of reformism, Stalinism,
etc., but the revolutionary statements from its leadership should make
us hopeful and ready to mobilize our solidarity in future struggles.
South Africa may have officially thrown off the chains of racist
apartheid but it is now in a state of ???economic apartheid,??? crushing the
lives of the Black majority and all other workers. As the SRWP correctly
states, elections are merely a barometer of class consciousness. Only
revolution can obliterate the nightmare of capitalism in South Africa.
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August 9, 2019 in Africa.
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