The tragedy of the platinum mining complex, reaching a crescendo with the Lonmin , Marikana killings and the ultimate police shooting of the workers and their sympathizers on 16th August 2012, was not only a sinister event, but clearly exposed lack of leadership, and the deep inertia the South African society finds itself in, since the excitement of the 1994 democratic breakthrough. The antiquated production relations, perpetuated in the mining industry in South Africa, coupled with unethical labor movement leadership, the dearth of ideological guidance and the decline of intellectual muscle in labor revolutionary representation, gave rise to overnight mining millionaires and billionaires, while spawning extreme inequalities and a vast expanse of poverty ridden ghettoes along the rising mining shafts, which sprang incessantly, especially in the North West-Limpopo Provinces Platinum complex. The right to labor representation and workers’ rights protection as enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic, and given expression in various Acts of Parliament and through representation in NEDLAC have proved grossly inadequate to address the antiquity and dangers of the backwardness of the production relations in South Africa. The need to possess a strong political will by the leadership, to rally the society behind a common united vision of a better life for all, through the implementation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution of the Republic to transform our society is a definite necessity, which so far has been ignored by the leadership for various strategic reasons, even though some are simply selfish and driven by greed. The mining ownership patterns have not changed much, for the benefit of the workers, regardless of the establishments of the new assets. Rather traditional ownership in the mining sector has been consolidated with the assistance of some of the new political elite drawn from the national liberation movement, and the politically connected lumpen-proletariat in some instances. Drawing back to the experiences of yesteryears, one can note that the deployment of the elite, agents provocateurs and lumpen-proletariats, is not new, and is a favored tool of deflection by capital, to take the heat off its face. It is often successfully deployed, especially when the state is untransformed, and reaction parades as progress. In Tsarist Russia in 1905, during the heat of the anti-Tsar struggle, a priest by the name of Georgi Gapon, took advantage of the Russian workers and organized about 8000, a huge number for that time. He mobilized them to march to hand over a petition to the Tsar, and that led to a “Bloody Sunday” on the 22nd January 1905. Gapon was later exposed to be an agent provocateur working with the Okhrana, the Tsarist political police. He was later found hanged, after he had attempted to recruit an underground Social Democratic Revolutionary into his web. What is instructive here is not the way Gapon died, or how he was a police informer, but importantly, how the workers dire circumstances were taken advantage of, in the absence of ethical, politically clear and ideologically grounded leadership. In December of 1921 in South Africa, emerging from the 1st World War, the South African economy faced depression, and mining which was the backbone of the economy, strongly leaned on the Smuts government to amend the Labor Laws to allow blacks to do some jobs which have been reserved for whites. The objective of amending those laws were not necessarily to put blacks on par with their white colleagues, but was to promote them, (blacks) in those positions, and pay them much less than what their white counterparts had been earning. The position was clearly to maximize mine-owners profits at the expense of whites, and to the disadvantage of blacks whose super exploitation was being elevated to more complex jobs. This resulted in a bloody strike by the white miners against the promotion of their black counter parts. This strike became one of the most militant in this country and saw white workers fighting pitched battles against the army. It was ignobly supported by the newly formed, Communist Party of South Africa, later reconstituted as the South African Communist Party. This strike and its suppression led to General Jan Smuts’ South African Party losing the elections to the alliance of GeneralJ.B.M Hertzog’s Nationalsit Party and Colonel Cresswell’s Labour Party. Cresswell’s Labour Party was linked to the mine workers, and obviously promised them the unrealizable, while Hertzog enjoyed the support of the Afrikaners who were poor and worked in the mines to subsidized their farming operations. This strike evolved the consolidation of the white workers as an labor aristocracy favored by racist politicians and their parties, while suppressing black workers and relegating them to little more than slave labor. It divided not only the workers but crafted an ever, gaping division between the black and white working class. What is evident in this phenomenon, is the over enthusiasm of white workers to strike to stop the promotion of their counter-parts from doing a job normally reserved for white workers. While the reaction of the labour leadership, and indeed the CPSA, was to support the white workers without giving much thought to the plight of the super exploited. The political arrangement which came with Creswell and Hertzog, was baked in opportunism and ultimately saw white workers sliding further into a position that put them as bosses over their black counter-parts. A situation which still plagues South Africa even today. The evidently common issue here with the Lonmin, Marikana narrative is that in both instances names of mine owners, and even those of their companies which are the beneficiaries of the application of brute force, are receding, and have receded into oblivion. The conflict in both, is presented as that of labor and the state. Those who stood and stand to benefit financially in the conflict of this nature are not prominent, as they should as the source of the conflict. But standing out like a sore thumb, are the weaknesses, which come in the currency of the failure to transform the state that ought to have seen, to the change of the pattern of mine ownership to the benefit of the workers. This monumental failure after 20 years of freedom which has brought with it expectations, has sled the labor leadership into an ignoble elite which seemed to have completely forgotten about its role work for the betterment of the workers plight. It became an elitist leadership, which competed for positions because they led to cooption which comes with better resources. In the process this leadership formed around personalities who brutally controlled membership statistics and marginalized those who did not conform. On the other hand, those who found themselves outside, put their feet on the ground, mobilized the workers around their genuine needs. But went further to promise the unrealizable, in the circumstances of an untransformed state. However their apparent militancy in the face of immense workers’ dire economic plight appeared better, than the relaxed and content attitude of the coopted incumbents. The workers economic plight, characterized by ever growing shacks around mine shafts, and the declining wages due to retrenchments in other industries, and the weakening of the currency and its buying power, said nothing to the comfortable incumbents. The tide was set to turn. The entry of workerists activists in that space, not that they are a new phenomenon, gave impetus to the organizational capacity of the marginalized former leaders. This capacity compelled mine-managers to hedge on this new kid on the block, and see an opportunity to break the back of organized united labor which is an albatross on the neck of the mine bosses. The genuine demands of a section of the mine-workers, the rock drillers, was isolated and raised to give an impression of a general wage increase outbreak. National Union of Mineworkers was caught with its pants down. Not in the real sense of what happened at COSATU House, (lol) but in terms of missing the reality of anger and desperation driven by the economic situation of the mineworkers. The other body of our hard to transform, or rather untransformed state, the South African Police Services, reacting to senseless violence directed at the NUM and the SAPS, reacts in the manner the police force of an untransformed, or poorly transformed state can do, they react with emotion and brute force, and open fire against a poorly armed group of workers and sympathizers. The ignoble act is caught on camera for all, the world to witness. The workerists pride themselves on ‘their’ own ‘militancy’ and get hefty contributions from their secretive benefactors. They get a voice and feel emboldened. The jury is still out on the script whether it will be the victory of opportunism and worker disunity as it happened post 1921 white miners’ strike. Just like the post WW1, white miners strike, the Lonmin, Marikana workers’ economic plight, manipulated by unscrupulous leadership burst out in a way that threw principle out of the window. While the white miners anger divided the white and black working class for almost a century now, they catapulted racist Afrikaner nationalism to taste power in alliance with labor opportunism of Cresswell. On the other hand, the Lonmin Marikana tragedy succeeded to break the unity of the mineworkers and weaken their bargaining power, while giving workerists behind their leaders, a taste of bargaining power. It has also sent a motley of opposition parties to their side, while the ANC seemed dazed on what to do to save the strength of the Alliance from crumbling. The Party of Kotane and Marks, which is supposed to have given political guidance to NUM through COSATU, enters the fray with threats and condemnation, instead of salvaging the situation. The bosses are rubbing their hands with glee, their will for now, is done. What is of critical importance is that the reactionary act of white workers in the 1921 strike, strengthened the hand of the racist colonial state, to suppress the super-exploited black workers, and oppress the black people for almost about 72 years since that event. In the name of those who died by the hand of the state in our democracy, and those who perished by the hand of their fellow workers in our democracy still, one hopes we shall realize that the Constitution of the Republic, the will of the majority and the reality of abundant poverty and inequalities, give the leadership of the society any reason to be bolder, facilitate the search and finalization for a common united vision, to transform our state for the benefit of all, especially the working class and the poor.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 18:35:12 +0000
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