The African National Congress (ANC) wasted no time after sweeping the April parliamentary elections in South Africa to demonstrate that the new government under Jacob Zuma would crack down on strikes and township protests. The day after the elections, military personnel were called on to break a strike by doctors demanding overdue pay hikes and more funds for the overburdened, hellish public health system. Municipal workers who struck this winter for a rise in their paltry wages were attacked by cops firing rubber bullets and thrown in jail. Protesters throughout the country demanding houses, roads and sewage systems for their impoverished townships have met with similar treatment.
Like the “neoliberal” Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela before him, the populist Zuma is doing his job as chief of the capitalist state—an apparatus of organised violence, based centrally on the police, military and prisons, that is wielded on behalf of the filthy rich ruling class against the overwhelmingly black masses they exploit and oppress. This bourgeois class dictatorship, which continues to defend a system of white privilege, is cloaked by the “non-racial democracy” that was installed in 1994, when white-supremacist apartheid rule was replaced by a government led by the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
As revolutionary Marxists, Spartacist South Africa, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), declared that no party in the April elections represented the interests of the working class and the poor. The SACP and COSATU bureaucracy worked overtime to get out the vote for the ANC, tirelessly portraying Zuma as a “friend” of the workers as opposed to the leaders of the Congress of the People (C.O.P.E.), who split from the ANC to the right after Mbeki was ousted as president. But as we wrote in Workers Vanguard No. 933 (27 March 2009), newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.: “Despite the ANC’s ‘pro-worker’ and ‘pro-poor’ rhetoric, the ANC and C.O.P.E. are both bourgeois-nationalist—i.e., capitalist—parties” that “represent the interests of the aspiring black bourgeoisie and the predominantly white capitalist ruling class.”
At the core of the recent spate of strikes and protests is the explosive anger at the base of society over the failure of the Tripartite Alliance, after 15 years in power, to fulfill expectations of social and economic equality for the majority. Township protesters complain that they voted for a better life but what they have is getting worse. Striking postal workers demanded the closing of the apartheid wage gap. Adding to longstanding mass unemployment, the world recession has thrown hundreds of thousands more out of work.
A new study shows that the chasm between the wealthy at the top and the masses at the bottom has become the largest in the world, surpassing that in Brazil. The wealthiest are overwhelmingly white and enjoy First World living conditions, while blacks as well as coloured [mixed-race] and Indian toilers are at Third World levels. This is a damning indictment of the SACP/COSATU misleaders, who promised the masses that the alliance with the bourgeois ANC would bring social transformation and equality. The result instead was neo-apartheid capitalism. While the political superstructure underwent a major change with the end of the apartheid system of rigid, legally enforced racial segregation and subjugation, the foundation of the capitalist economy remains the superexploitation of mainly black labour.
As the black majority’s anger over their unbearable conditions continues to build, the Zuma government has made clear its intention to beef up the state’s arsenal of repression against labour and the poor. On the opening day of the COSATU national congress in September, Zuma lectured delegates about “violent strikes.” In a speech a week later, he supported giving cops more leeway to “shoot to kill,” supposedly to fight South Africa’s “abnormal criminal problem.” Zuma’s reprimands, echoed by COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, did not go down well at the COSATU congress. Leaders of the SAMWU municipal workers and SATAWU transport workers unions criticised the top COSATU leadership for failing to condemn police attacks on their strikes this year. But these same unions include cops and security guards whose job is to defend capitalist rule and profits by violently repressing workers and the poor. SSA demands: Cops and security guards out of the unions!
Source: Spartacist
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