Open Letter by Over 70 Scholars and Experts Condemns US-Backed Coup Attempt in Venezuela

"For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents."

The United States government must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government.

Actions by the Trump administration and its allies in the hemisphere are almost certain to make the situation in Venezuela worse, leading to unnecessary human suffering, violence, and instability.

Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years.

This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.

Under the Trump administration, aggressive rhetoric against the Venezuelan government has ratcheted up to a more extreme and threatening level, with Trump administration officials talking of “military action” and condemning Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a “troika of tyranny.” Problems resulting from Venezuelan government policy have been worsened by US economic sanctions, illegal under the Organization of American States and the United Nations ― as well as US law and other international treaties and conventions.

These sanctions have cut off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloff in oil production and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because they can’t get access to life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the US and other governments continue to blame the Venezuelan government ― solely ― for the economic damage, even that caused by the US sanctions.

Now the US and its allies, including OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, have pushed Venezuela to the precipice.

By recognizing National Assembly President Juan Guaido as the new president of Venezuela ― something illegal under the OAS Charter ― the Trump administration has sharply accelerated Venezuela’s political crisis in the hopes of dividing the Venezuelan military and further polarizing the populace, forcing them to choose sides.

The obvious, and sometimes stated goal, is to force Maduro out via a coup d’etat.

The reality is that despite hyperinflation, shortages, and a deep depression, Venezuela remains a politically polarized country. The US and its allies must cease encouraging violence by pushing for violent, extralegal regime change.

If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability. The US should have learned something from its regime change ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and its long, violent history of sponsoring regime change in Latin America.

Neither side in Venezuela can simply vanquish the other. The military, for example, has at least 235,000 frontline members, and there are at least 1.6 million in militias. Many of these people will fight, not only on the basis of a belief in national sovereignty that is widely held in Latin America ― in the face of what increasingly appears to be a US-led intervention ― but also to protect themselves from likely repression if the opposition topples the government by force.

In such situations, the only solution is a negotiated settlement, as has happened in the past in Latin American countries when politically polarized societies were unable to resolve their differences through elections.

There have been efforts, such as those led by the Vatican in the fall of 2016, that had potential, but they received no support from Washington and its allies who favored regime change. This strategy must change if there is to be any viable solution to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents that will allow the country to finally emerge from its political and economic crisis.

Signed:

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, MIT and Laureate Professor, University of Arizona

Laura Carlsen, Director, Americas Program, Center for International Policy

Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University

Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at Pomona College

Sujatha Fernandes, Professor of Political Economy and Sociology, University of Sydney

Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives

Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order and only UN rapporteur to have visited Venezuela in 21 years

Boots Riley, Writer/Director of Sorry to Bother You, Musician

John Pilger, Journalist & Film-Maker

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Jared Abbott, PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University

Dr. Tim Anderson, Director, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies

Elisabeth Armstrong, Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College

Alexander Aviña, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University

Marc Becker, Professor of History, Truman State University

Medea Benjamin, Cofounder, CODEPINK

Phyllis Bennis, Program Director, New Internationalism, Institute for Policy Studies

Dr. Robert E. Birt, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University

Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History, Salem State University

James Cohen, University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Associate Professor, George Mason University

Benjamin Dangl, PhD, Editor of Toward Freedom

Dr. Francisco Dominguez, Faculty of Professional and Social Sciences, Middlesex University, UK

Alex Dupuy, John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Wesleyan University

Jodie Evans, Cofounder, CODEPINK

Vanessa Freije, Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of Washington

Gavin Fridell, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in International Development Studies, St. Mary’s University

Evelyn Gonzalez, Counselor, Montgomery College

Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History, Indiana University

Bret Gustafson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

Peter Hallward, Professor of Philosophy, Kingston University

John L. Hammond, Professor of Sociology, CUNY

Mark Healey, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut

Gabriel Hetland, Assistant Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany

Forrest Hylton, Associate Professor of History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín

Daniel James, Bernardo Mendel Chair of Latin American History

Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice

Daniel Kovalik, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh

Winnie Lem, Professor, International Development Studies, Trent University

Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Professor-Researcher, National University of Anthropology and History, Morelos, Mexico

Mary Ann Mahony, Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University

Jorge Mancini, Vice President, Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA)

Luís Martin-Cabrera, Associate Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies, University of California San Diego

Teresa A. Meade, Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Union College

Frederick Mills, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University

Stephen Morris, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Middle Tennessee State University

Liisa L. North, Professor Emeritus, York University

Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor of History, University of Florida

Christian Parenti, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, John Jay College CUNY

Nicole Phillips, Law Professor at the Université de la Foundation Dr. Aristide Faculté des Sciences Juridiques et Politiques and Adjunct Law Professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law

Beatrice Pita, Lecturer, Department of Literature, University of California San Diego

Margaret Power, Professor of History, Illinois Institute of Technology

Vijay Prashad, Editor, The TriContinental

Eleanora Quijada Cervoni FHEA, Staff Education Facilitator & EFS Mentor, Centre for Higher Education, Learning & Teaching at The Australian National University

Walter Riley, Attorney and Activist

William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mary Roldan, Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History, Hunter College/ CUNY Graduate Center

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor of History, University of Maryland

Emir Sader, Professor of Sociology, University of the State of Rio de Janeiro

Rosaura Sanchez, Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature, University of California, San Diego

T.M. Scruggs Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa

Victor Silverman, Professor of History, Pomona College

Brad Simpson, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut

Jeb Sprague, Lecturer, University of Virginia

Kent Spriggs, International human rights lawyer

Christy Thornton, Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

Sinclair S. Thomson, Associate Professor of History, New York University

Steven Topik, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Stephen Volk, Professor of History Emeritus, Oberlin College

Kirsten Weld, John. L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of History, Harvard University

Kevin Young, Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Patricio Zamorano, Academic of Latin American Studies; Executive Director, InfoAmericas

Source: Open Democracy

Failing to Protect the Poor against Crime

South Africa continues to be a hazardous place for the Black poor. You don’t have to be a Marikana mineworker to die a death that is undignified, if not brutal and terrifying. The daily security concerns of the majority have never been further from the minds of politicians, who are either gripped with Mangaung mania, or – in the case of the DA - feverishly plotting the jingles and publicity stunts that they think will win them another metro city in the 2014 elections. COPE’s only recent claim to fame is its elderly MP who tried to open an aeroplane door in mid-flight, later escaping with a slap on the wrist after successfully arguing (with the support of the DA) that the combination of one alcoholic drink and one sleeping tablet made him lose his senses.

You know you are living in the most unequal country in the world when the mayor of a major metropolitan city can issue a self-congratulatory press statement – as the DA’s Patricia de Lille did recently – about the installation of less than 30 high-mast lights to be spread across numerous unlit informal settlements.

It is well known that in Cape Town’s townships and informal settlements, street lighting is almost non-existent, and as a result, that crime is rife. The complaint has been raised by residents at nearly every community meeting for years, no matter who organized the meeting or what else the meeting was supposed to be about. The DA likes to claim that communities vandalise every street light that ever gets installed but the truth is that street lighting has hardly been installed in the informal settlements and light bulbs are never replaced in the townships street lights. In Cape Town’s white suburbs, on the other hand, the DA city administration will send technicians out at 10pm to fix a streetlight bulb that died the same evening.

It emerged in a recent City of Cape Town press statement that poor, Black areas are not set to receive proper street lighting anytime soon. The DA city is instead going to rely on national government’s urban settlement development grant to install four lights here and there over the next two years. While the cost of keeping the streetlights on in white suburbs is part of the city’s normal budget, lighting the Black areas depends on donations.

The DA has already claimed that it is powerless to protect poor people on the Cape Flats from being caught in the crossfire between warring gangs, and that only the army would be able to do this. But with the re-emergence of necklacing in Khayelitsha as a community response to crime, the recent killings of four Cape Town metro police in the townships and the increase in the number of young people involved in violent gangs, it is clear that the DA is powerless on many more fronts and that things are unravelling fast in the “mother city”.

The concentration of public funds on white suburbs means the different races live totally different lives. White Capetonians can expect to wake up on the weekend and buy some beers for the night without incident. But for the past two Christmases, Khayelitsha residents have reported that police of all the different forces set up ad-hoc roadblocks on the pavements and ask residents returning from the bottle stores to show receipts for the beer they have purchased. If the residents have failed to keep their slips, or never got one, they are knocked around a bit and their alcohol confiscated. This is nothing to do with drinking in public but happens to ordinary people walking home after shopping.

More disturbingly, Black township residents are increasingly being subjected to the sight of public group killings, which increase the fear and insecurity in those areas. Several Khayelitsha residents vented their shock on Facebook just this past weekend at seeing groups of 14 year old youths killing each other in Makhaza Park.

"The park is full...it's blood everywhere. These boys are carrying weapons I have never seen in (my) life. This is too painful to see. We have been calling the police over and over but they haven't come," wrote one person. She later posted an update that two police had arrived, watched for a while and then left. "These kids are continuing", her desperate update read. Less than two hours later, another update read: "Sad to say, we have lost two young boys and others are injured...am numb".

Such horrific practices would be unthinkable in one of Cape Town’s white suburban parks. But in the townships, the government has allowed these incidents to become part of "normal" life.

It was only last week that Cape Town’s largest shack area, the Enkanini informal settlement, was provided with 452 electricity points – for 11 000 homes. How 24 families are going to share one power point is a mystery. The DA says another 2000 electricity connections will be turned on before May 2013 but that the rest of the electricity will be installed in phases. It is still not clear whether every home will eventually have its own electricity point or not. This informal settlement is situated in a highly urbanised city, which recently won the title of “World Design Capital”, yet its high school only got electricity last week!

Townships in the rest of the country are equally under-developed and crime plagued. Rural areas are also experiencing a spike in crime. The situation will continue to worsen rapidly until the DA and ANC abandon their practice of maintaining the living areas set up by apartheid’s Group Areas Act.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen. The parties are two sides of the same coin. The ANC’s outdated neo-liberal economic policies were drawn up by the same international economists who wrote the policies of the DA. Successive ministers of Finance have focussed for 18 years now on pumping billions in public funds into tax breaks and incentives for overseas investors to set up factories that have never materialised.

Former president Thabo Mbeki said last week in a speech at Fort Hare university that South Africa was progressing “towards a costly disaster”, and was in a “dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionless and unguided national drift”.

This is rich coming from someone who, when he was in power, oversaw the arms deal; withheld anti-retroviral treatment from thousands of women living with HIV; set up the practice of wasting hundreds of millions of rands in public funds on hiring useless consultants for local and national government, and started the now defunct practice of paying retention bonuses to parastatal managers.

After 18 years, the DA and ANC have missed all opportunities to end apartheid in South Africa and improve the lives of the Black majority. The rapidly worsening situation, where more and more Black people are living without water, electricity, houses and schools as if in 17th century England, won’t be alleviated by either the DA or ANC. Their time has past.

Majavu is a writer concentrating on the rights of workers, oppressed people, the environment, anti-militarism and what makes a better world. She is currently studying for a Masters Degree in New Zealand.

Source: by Anna Majavu: SACSIS

Andrew Carnegie on value of money

"Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth." — Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie poured a great deal of his energies and resources into institutions which would support and further his dedication to free education for all and the notion of a meritocracy. By the age of 35, Carnegie decided to leave his business enterprises behind and concentrate on philanthropy and writing, rather than personal profit.  He sold the Carnegie Steel Company in 1901 to J.P Morgan for $480,000,000 and set up numerous institutions to fund educational projects around the world. Of these, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace still operate today. 

"People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents." — Andrew Carnegie

Source:  "Carnegie Libraries". Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Culture.

Richmond Farm Transit Camp in KwaMashu

Mchunu and Others v Executive Mayor of eThekwini and Others ('Mchunu')

implementation of court order - Siyanda - Durban High Court

In this matter, SERI and Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) seek an order against the Executive Mayor of eThekwini (Durban), together with two other senior officials in their personal capacities, to take all the steps necessary to implement a court order requiring housing to be provided to 37 occupants of the Richmond Farm Transit Camp in KwaMashu. The occupiers were evicted from the Siyanda informal settlement in March 2009 in order to allow the construction of a road. One of the conditions of the eviction order was that the occupiers would be provided with permanent housing within a year. The deadline for doing so expired almost two years ago and nothing has been done to comply with the order.

This is an important case because it establishes whether individual officebearers can be held personally responsible for the state’s failure to perform on specific obligations. SERI served the application in February 2012, and filed a replying affidavit in May 2012. Heads of argument were filed on 4 September 2012, and the case was heard in the Durban High Court on 17 September 2012.

On 19 September 2012, Acting Judge Nigel Hollis granted an order and delivered an ex tempore judgment in the Durban High Court. His decision requires the Mayor of eThekwini, the City Manager and the Director of Housing to take all the necessary steps, within three months, to provide permanent housing to the 37 families. They are “constitutionally and statutorily obliged to take all necessary steps” to comply with the 2009 order. If they do not, they may be held in contempt and fined or imprisoned.

• SERI and Abahlali baseMjondolo media statement (19 September 2012) here.
• Draft order (19 September 2012) here.
• Occupiers' supplementary heads of argument (14 September 2012) here.
• Respondent's heads of argument (13 September 2012) here.
• Occupiers' heads of argument here and practice note (4 September 2012) here.
• Replying affidavit (17 May 2012) here. Annexure A here and Annexure B here.
• SERI and AbM press release (29 February 2012) here.
• Short film entitled "A Fish in a Tin" about the eviction and relocation to Richmond Farm Transit Camp here.
• Notice of motion (12 December 2012) here.

Source: SERI

Financial parasitism and looting are the “new normal”

The decision by the US Federal Reserve Board to provide indefinite support to financial markets under a third round of so-called quantitative easing (QE3), announced last week, coupled with the earlier decision by the European Central Bank (ECB) to intervene in the bond markets, marks a new stage in the breakdown of the global capitalist economy that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The moves by the world’s major central banks to pump more money into the global financial system signify that four years after financial markets stood on the brink of collapse in September 2008, there is no prospect of a return to what were once considered “normal” conditions.

Far from lessening its support to the banks and financial institutions, the Fed is increasing it. The earlier interventions were implemented with time limits. In its latest decision, the Fed has given an indefinite commitment. As the headline of one article in the Financial Times put it, “Fed Sets Its Sights on Infinity and Beyond.”

Moreover, the form of the commitment marks a major turn. Rather than buying up Treasury bonds, the Fed is going to intervene to the tune of $40 billion a month to buy up mortgage-backed securities from the banks and investment houses. It will thereby enable the banks to offload some of the “toxic assets” that provided the trigger for the breakdown.

It used to be said that the task of the Fed was to take away the punch bowl just as the party was about to get going. No longer. Now the Fed is committed to increasing the alcohol content, with a pledge that it will keep topping up the supply indefinitely.

In providing a rationale for the decision, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke cited the continuing high levels of US unemployment—job growth, even at the lower wage levels now prevailing in the US, is failing to keep pace with population growth—and the anaemic growth in the US economy. According to conventional theory, the Fed’s actions will lower interest rates across the board, making investment decisions more attractive to corporations and leading to economic growth and increased employment.

But as Bernanke well knows, as does everyone else in financial circles, those conditions do not apply. Corporations, above all financial institutions, are continuing to accumulate profits, but they are not being used to finance new productive investments. Rather, they are being funnelled into large cash reserves to be deployed in speculation.

Moreover, cuts in government spending both in Europe and the US are lowering wages and increasing unemployment, thereby reducing consumer demand. The ECB has made it a condition that governments whose bonds it buys must put in place austerity programs aimed at cutting spending and increasing unemployment. In the US, government spending is contracting and may decline even further at the end of the year with the arrival of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” when earlier decisions by Congress to automatically initiate cuts come into effect.

The Fed’s decision is not aimed at bringing about economic “recovery” in any meaningful sense of the term. Rather, its market intervention is intended to raise the price of stocks and asset-backed securities, lifting the profits of corporations, above all the banks and finance houses, not through investment in the real economy but via financial operations. In other words, the very financial parasitism that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near-meltdown of the US and global financial system has become the official policy of the Fed.

The class interests served by this policy can be seen both in the manner of its implementation and its consequences.

Financial journalist Michael West accurately summed the circumstances of its introduction in an article published in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald.

“They demanded the Fed ‘deliver’,” he wrote. “The consequences of ‘failure’ were ‘dire’, they cried.” Bernanke then “obliged the denizens of Wall Street” with the “ultimate money-printing bonanza. And they then had the cheek to dress it up as a boon for the jobless. In reality, the banks get to shovel their lame mortgage debts plumb into the lap of the taxpayers at $40 billion a month.”

As he noted, the Fed is buying not just government bonds, but the “mortgage-backed securities which are clogging up Wall Street balance sheets.”

The Fed’s decision will have global consequences, all of which will impact adversely on the social and economic circumstances of workers as well as the world’s poorest people. Immediately the decision was announced, the prices of oil and gold jumped, signalling the start of a new round of commodity speculation.

This will impact the prices of fuels for transport as well as for cooking and heating, and set off inflation in basic foodstuffs. Already the prices of corn, wheat and soybeans, crucial for the well-being of billions of people, have started to increase.

By printing money, the Fed is also undermining the value of the US dollar in global currency markets, which will have a significant impact in Europe as the euro rises. This will lead to further cuts in exports and increased unemployment as firms find it increasingly difficult to compete.

Countries such as Brazil and Australia, where increases in currency values have already heavily impacted on manufacturing, will also be adversely affected. Further downward pressure on the dollar increases the prospect of “currency wars,” as national governments strive to maintain their export markets.

There is also a political aspect to the Fed’s decision. In 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers played a crucial role in swinging the support of key sections of the American ruling elite behind the election of Barack Obama over his Republican opponent John McCain.

The Fed’s latest action in the run-up to this year’s election will similarly provide a boost to the Obama re-election campaign.

But the most significant political conclusions are those that must be drawn by the working class. The decision to promote financial parasitism at the expense of the jobs, livelihoods and social position of the working class in the US and the world over is another powerful expression of the historic crisis and bankruptcy of the capitalist system. There is no economic “recovery” waiting around the corner.

The banks and financial interests represented by the US Federal Reserve and the ECB have a program: parasitism accompanied by the systematic looting and impoverishment of the population.

The working class in the US and internationally must adopt its own independent program, thought out and fought for to the end. It must initiate a struggle for workers’ governments committed to the expropriation of the banks and finance houses as the first, and indispensable, step in the establishment of a planned socialist economy, in which the resources created by the labour of billions are used to meet human needs instead of profit.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

South Africa after the Marikana massacre

The police massacre of striking miners at Marikana is a watershed for post-apartheid South Africa and for the international class struggle.

It demonstrates in the starkest form imaginable that the perspective of “black empowerment” and the “National Democratic Revolution” providing the basis for overcoming economic and social oppression has failed utterly. The central lesson of Marikana is that the fundamental division within society is class, not race.

The African National Congress, having come to power in 1994 as a result of immense sacrifice and revolutionary struggle by millions of workers, has revealed itself to be every bit as ruthless as its white predecessors in enforcing the most brutal exploitation on behalf of the major global corporations.

The ANC sent in the police to shoot, kill and maim striking workers whose sole crime was to fight for the right to live as human beings and not beasts of burden. Now, after the police have killed 36 and wounded another 78, some 270 imprisoned strikers are being charged with the murder and attempted murder of their colleagues under Apartheid-era “common purpose” laws designed to blame the victims for “provoking” police violence.

The Marikana miners are paid less than $500 a month for living in squalid communal huts and working in hazardous, back-breaking conditions for the UK-based Lonmin, extracting platinum that sells for over $1,400 an ounce. Their fate, worse still, is shared by millions in what has now become the most unequal country in the entire world.

Meanwhile the ANC has spawned a grasping layer of black bourgeois, with a reputation for unparalleled corruption and repression. It is synonymous with terms like Black Economically Empowered (BEE) companies and “tenderpreneurs”—those who have enriched themselves by acting as front-men for the transnational corporations or who have used their control of the state apparatus to secure a direct role in exploiting the working class.

Even as charges were being brought against the arrested miners, South African Minister of Mining Susan Shabangu was reassuring “our investors, incumbent and prospective” at a gathering of mining executives in Perth, Australia, that President Jacob Zuma is “determined to isolate bad elements in our society.”

The ANC in turn relies upon its partners in the Tripartite Alliance—the South African Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation—to impose the dictatorship of global capital and the South African bourgeoisie upon an increasingly restive population.

The Stalinist SACP insisted throughout the struggle against apartheid that black majority rule of a capitalist South Africa was a necessary stage in an eventual transition to socialism. It has portrayed COSATU as a bastion of working class power within government that would guarantee this transformation.

Events have proceeded in an entirely opposite direction. For services rendered, SACP leaders were granted key roles in the post-apartheid regime and a share in the spoils of office. COSATU and its affiliated unions have functioned as an industrial police force and a mechanism for the self-enrichment of the bureaucracy.

Philip Hirschsohn, Professor School of Business and Finance at the University of the Western Cape, pointed out last year how the trade unions have taken on “oligarchic characteristics.”

The position of shop steward has become a mechanism for securing management positions, as part of the “emergence of entrepreneurial and career unionists,” with SACP membership a favoured “stepping stone” for “access opportunities in managerial ranks or in government.”

Former NUM leader and high-ranking ANC politician, Cyril Ramaphosa is now the 34th richest man in the whole of Africa, with a net worth of $275 million. One of his many companies has a contract to supply labour at Marikana in a form of indentured slavery. He is paid R12 000 ($1500) per worker per month by Lonmin, but only pays his workers R4000 ($500) per month.

Its role as an adjunct of management has meant that NUM membership has declined to less than 50 percent of employees in many mines; most of these are skilled white collar and surface workers. The strikers at Marikana are either members of the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) or not unionized at all.

The NUM, COSATU and the SACP have all called for police to clamp down on the strikers, defending the massacre and urging the suppression of the AMCU. NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni said of the Marikana massacre that, “The police were patient, but these people were extremely armed with dangerous weapons.”

This has not prevented the pseudo-left groups internationally from opposing the necessary break from COSATU and its affiliated unions, without which any struggle against the ANC is impossible.

The South African affiliates of the Committee for a Workers International, the Democratic Socialist Movement, instead urge “workers in both unions to demand united solidarity action, beginning with a local general strike” and ending in a “national general strike”—all presumably led by the NUM and COSATU.

The Socialist Workers Party in the UK is more despicable still, writing on August 17, “Whatever its intentions, AMCU has sometimes been used to introduce disunity at a time when workers face big challenges. It would have been better for the workers who formed the rival union to fight among the NUM rank and file and shift its policies from below.”

Support for the NUM and COSATU is support for the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance government. It is support for the continuation of capitalism and imperialist oppression.

The theory of Permanent Revolution provides the political basis for the workers and youth of South Africa to conduct the life-and-death struggles that lie ahead. The evolution of the ANC is a graphic confirmation of Leon Trotsky’s insistence that bourgeois nationalist movements, tied as they are to capitalism and organically opposed to ending the brutal exploitation of the workers and poor farmers, are incapable of carrying through the struggle for democracy and liberation from imperialist domination.

The working class, mobilising all the oppressed rural and urban layers, must break with the ANC and its defenders in the SACP and the trade union apparatus and build their own socialist party.

A workers government must be established to take the entire economy into social ownership and utilise the vast natural wealth presently monopolised by the super-rich to meet the needs of all for decent jobs, housing, education and health provision. This revolutionary struggle must be extended throughout Africa and internationally through the construction of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.

Chris Marsden

Source: World Wide Socialist Web Site

Poverty now a crisis in the first world: Motlanthe

The adverse impact of capitalism on social and economic growth requires a mind shift in socialism, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said today.

"The global crisis of capitalism and imperialism, which is negatively affecting growth, widening social inequality, increasing levels of poverty and worsening [un]employment figures, needs a sharpened, radical shift in the approach the Socialist International takes," he said in Cape Town.

Speaking at the opening of the 24th Congress of the Socialist International (SI), he said debates had to focus on the reform of the organisation. Poverty was no longer just a problem for developing nations, but also now becoming a crisis in the first world. "Therefore this leaves us with no choice but to review, analyse and rethink the impact of the global economic crisis on society and the toiling masses of the world." He said there were various concerns sociality parties needed to confront. These included a need to strive for conflict resolution, while securing conditions of development.

Motlanthe's sentiments were echoed by the SI's president and former Greek prime minister George Papandreou. Innovative and alternative solutions were needed in a changing world, he said. "This human ingenuity needs to be accompanied by political and democratic will to make these changes... That will, my friends, has been lacking in Europe and around the world."

Papandreou defended the SI's existence, saying leftist parties were important to achieve, among others, peace, justice, good governance, equality, growth and employment for all. He warned against attributing blame for the global economic crisis. "We point fingers at each other rather than reach out our hands and lift each other up."

Papandreou lamented the fact that immigrants were being held responsible for the economic troubles in several countries. He said international co-ordination was needed now more than ever. "We've seen this spectacular rise in nationalism over the years, and at the same time we've noticed a terrifying rise in racism, prejudice."

Source: Times Live

The unions, the pseudo-left and the South Africa massacre

The massacre of 34 striking workers at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in South Africa has cast into sharp relief the role of the official trade unions, in South Africa and internationally, amid a global upsurge of the class struggle.

A river of blood now separates the miners from the National Union of Mineworkers—the central component of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which is closely aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) government. The NUM has revealed itself as a tool of state repression and murder.

The eruption of working class anger against the giant mine owners has put workers in direct conflict with the organizations that supposedly represent them. After the massacre, NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni demanded that “all workers to go back to work and for the law enforcement agencies to crack down on the culprits of the violence and murders”—which, according to the NUM, are the workers themselves.

The conflict between the working class and the NUM does not stop at Marikana. The mining industry site mineweb.com wrote recently, “What is particularly worrying here is that the miners are bypassing the NUM, suggesting a total lack of trust in the traditional mining union setup. The NUM appears to be being seen as a vassal of the ruling African National Congress political party—i.e., part of the new South African establishment.”

This alignment of forces—in which the unions fall in behind the corporations and the government—is international in scope. So too is the growing rebellion of workers against these right-wing, pro-corporate institutions, as the ruling class carries out an international program of social counter-revolution.

In Europe, wherever struggles have escaped from the confines of actions officially sanctioned by the unions, the unions have collaborated with the government in repressing them. During the strike of Spanish air traffic controllers in 2010, the government called out the military to break the strike, with the support of the unions and their political allies.

In the United States, a series of significant struggles have erupted over the past two years in opposition to the AFL-CIO, as workers have sought to fight the corporate attack on jobs and benefits now spearheaded by the Obama administration.

In 2010, workers in Indianapolis, Indiana overwhelmingly rejected a 50 percent wage cut backed by the United Auto Workers, driving out union executives from a local meeting. A section of workers formed an independent rank-and-file committee to organize a fight to defend jobs and wages. A few months before, auto workers erupted in a near-riot against UAW officials supporting the closure of the NUMMI plant in Fremont, California.

Just last week, workers at the Chrysler Dundee Engine plant in Michigan, angered by forced overtime and two-tier wages, voted overwhelmingly against a local contract, to the surprise and anger of management and the UAW. Where struggles have broken out under union control—as in the strike of Caterpillar workers in Joliet, Illinois—workers quickly came up against the fact that the union works for their isolation and defeat.

These events powerfully confirm the analysis made by the International Committee of the Fourth International of the nature of the trade unions. In 1993, the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, explained that the degeneration of the trade unions was rooted in their nationalist and pro-capitalist perspective, which was undermined by the globalization of production and the breakdown of the post-war social order: “The role of these bureaucratic apparatuses in every country has been transformed from pressuring the employers and the state for concessions to the workers, to pressuring the workers for concessions to the employers so as to attract capital.”

At Marikana, the unions have moved from pressuring workers to open, violent repression. When circumstances require it, they will act the same way in Europe, the United States and beyond.

Workers’ efforts to break free of these institutions provoke the outrage not only of the corporate elite, but also of middle class organizations that posture as “left” or even socialist.

Typical is an article on the South Africa massacre published on August 21—after four days of silence—by the International Socialist Organization in the US. After cynically feigning sympathy with the workers and criticizing the NUM, the ISO makes clear that it is adamantly opposed to any attempt to break the stranglehold of this institution. The ISO even criticizes the NUM’s rival union, the more militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).

“Without a doubt, the mining bosses are overjoyed at the sharpening discord between different wings of South Africa's labor movement,” the ISO writes. “And at times, AMCU leaders have been drawn into maneuvers that exacerbate the divisiveness that the mine bosses have hoped to foment.”

In fact, the mine companies are not “overjoyed” by “sharpening discord” between the unions, but desperately afraid that their NUM allies will lose control over the workers. The ISO makes clear that it too is determined to prevent “divisiveness”—i.e., working class opposition to the NUM.

A companion article, reprinted by the ISO from the South African journal Amandla!, denounces the AMCU for advancing “unrealistic demands” and “failing to condemn the violence of its members.” That is, the workers are themselves to blame for their deaths because they have the temerity to desire a decent wage.

Amandla!, closely aligned with the Democratic Left Front of South Africa, writes elsewhere that the “union’s role, once wage negotiations are complete, is to transmit the decision to the rest of the workforce.” And workers are supposed to accept this “transmission” without complaint.

The ISO and its international co-thinkers speak for privileged, complacent and reactionary sections of the upper middle class. For them, the unions are both a source of potentially lucrative careers and a mechanism to maintain organizational and political control over the working class—and thereby prevent any struggle against capitalism.

Whatever the hopes of the trade union executives and their allies, however, the objective crisis is driving millions of people along a different path—towards the formation of new organizations of struggle and towards socialist politics. The bloody events in South Africa have exposed the class lines, and they must become a strategic experience for the entire international working class.

Joseph Kishore

Source: World Socialist Web Site

The Massacre of Our Illusions...and the Seeds of Something New

The story of Marikana runs much deeper than an inter-union spat. After the horror of watching people being massacred on television, Marikana now joins the ranks of the Bulhoek and Sharpeville massacres, and the images evoked by Hugh Masekela’s Stimela, in the odious history of a method of capital accumulation based on violence.

But this is not just a story of violence and grief. To speak in those terms only would be to add the same insult to the injury perpetrated by the police on the striking workers, as many commentators have done - seeing the striking miners as mere victims and not as agents of their own future and, more importantly, as the source of a new movement in the making.

The broader platinum belt has been home to new upsurges of struggle over the last five years. From the working class community activists of Merafong and Khutsong to the striking workers of Angloplat, Implat and now Lonmin, these struggles, including the nationwide “service delivery” revolts, are a sign that a new movement is being forged despite the state violence that killed Andries Tatane and massacred the Lonmin workers. Rather than just howl our outrage, it is time to take sides and offer our support.                      

After Marikana, things will never be the same again.   

Firstly, the killings mark the end of the illusion that the ANC has not been transformed into the party of big capital. For some while now the ANC could trade on its liberation credits in arguing that all criticism came from those trying to defend white privilege. The DA was perfect to be cast in this role because it always attacked the ANC for not being business-friendly enough.

But Marikana was an attack on workers in defence of white privilege, specifically the mining house, Lonmin. Lonmin epitomises the make-up of the new elite in South Africa: old white capital garnished with a sprinkling of politically connected Blacks.  

In this, the ANC steps squarely into the shoes of its predecessor, apartheid’s Nationalist Party, acting to secure the profits of mining capital through violence.
                                                   
Secondly, the strike and the massacre also mark a turning point in the liberation alliance around the ANC – particularly COSATU. Whereas the community and youth wings of what was called the Mass Democratic Movement became disgraced after 1994 by their association with corrupt councillors, and eclipsed by the service delivery revolts of today, COSATU’s moral authority was enhanced. Within what is called “civil society”, COSATU continued to be a moral voice. So anyone who had a campaign sought out COSATU as a partner. This moral authority came because COSATU was simply the most organised voice amongst the working class.   

Today COSATU’s links with the working class are only very tenuous.

It is almost intuitive that we consider the notion of a worker as someone working for a clear employer, on a full-time basis, in a large factory, supermarket or mine. Indeed classical industrial trade unions were forged by workers in large factories and industrial areas. This was the case in many countries where such unions won the right to organise and was also the case in South Africa, when a new wave of large industrial unions emerged after 1973’s Durban Strikes.

Going along with this structure were the residential spaces of townships. From the 1950s the apartheid regime increasingly came to accept the de facto existence of a settled urban proletariat and built the match-box brick houses in the townships of the apartheid era: the Sowetos, Kathlehongs, Tembisas.

So the working class was organised by capitalism into large industrial sites and brick houses in large sprawling townships.

Since the 1980s, the neo-liberal phase of capitalism has changed this.
 
Neo liberalism has not only been about privatisation and global speculation. It has also been about restructuring work and home. Today casualisation, outsourcing, work from home, labour brokers and other forms of informalisation have become the dominant form of work and shack dwelling the mode of existence of the working class. The latter is in direct proportion to the withdrawal of the state from providing housing and associated services.

Twenty years ago the underground workers of Lonmin would have lived in a compound policed by the company. Today the rock drill workers live in a shantytown near the mine.   

Also, mining itself has changed. Much of the hard work underground is now done by workers sourced from labour brokers. These are the most exploited workers, working the longest hours with the most flexible arrangements. Today it is even possible to own a mine and not work it yourself but to contract engineering firms like Murray and Roberts to do the mining for you. Into the mix can be added so-called “illegal miners” who literally mine with spades and their own dynamite and then sell on to middlemen with links to big businesses.

Lonmin has exploited these divisions – using the old mining industry strategy of recruiting along tribal divisions. The rock drill workers are Xhosas who are railed in from the Eastern Cape to heighten the exploitation at the coalface.

Add to this the toxic mix of mine security, barbed-wire enclosures and informal housing, as identified by the BenchMarks Foundation, and a picture of institutionalised violence emerges.      

By way of contrast the dominant trade unions in South Africa have largely moved up upscale towards white-collar workers and away from this majority. Today the large COSATU affiliates comprise of public sector white-collar workers, like the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. The lower level blue-collar workers are now employed by labour brokers and are in services that have been outsourced, like cleaning, security and so on. They don’t fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.

The Lonmin strike was the second in the last three months to hit the platinum sector. It was preceded by a strike at Implats. Both involved the Association of Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (AMCU) as workers sought an outlet for their frustrations.

The mining trade journal Miningmix published this story in 2009:

(A) gradual change had taken place in the profile of the NUM membership over the last 15 years; one that nobody had taken notice of. The NUM was originally borne out of the lowest job categories of South African mineworkers, mainly from gold mines. More than 60% of its members were foreigners, mostly illiterate migrant labourers.

Nowadays that number has dropped to below 40%. On the other hand, an increasing portion of the NUM’s membership comes from what can be described as white-collar mining staff, who had previously been represented exclusively by Solidarity and UASA. The local NUM structures in Rustenburg, like the branch office bearers and the shop stewards, are dominated by these skilled, higher level workers. They are literate, well spoken and wealthy compared to the general workers and machine operators underground.

So while the NUM remains the largest affiliate of COSATU, it is changing from a union of coalface workers to a union of above ground technicians. It is these developments that led to the formation of a breakaway union. Whatever the credentials of AMCU, its emergence is a direct challenge to the hegemony of NUM and of COSATU. As such, the federation has embarked on a disgraceful campaign of slandering the striking workers and their union.

In this they have been joined by the media.
        
With the notable exception of the Cape Times, the media’s culpability in demonising the striking workers has been reprehensible. In addition to only quoting NUM sources for information, or focusing on Malema, there have been no attempts to dig beneath the idea of manipulated workers and inter-union rivalry.

They all depicted the rock drillers as uneducated, Basotho or Eastern Cape Xhosas, whilst flogging the idea of an increase to R12 500 as “unreasonable”.

Then there is the notion that workers went to AMCU because they were promised R12 500. This fiction is repeated endlessly by the media. Journalists are of course happy to source this from “unnamed” NUM sources. The slander here is that workers are so open to manipulation that they will believe any empty promises. This plays to the prejudice repeated by Frans Baleni of NUM from his Nyala that rock drill workers are uneducated, and it bolsters the idea that AMCU is some kind of slick willy operation that must take responsibility for the massacre.

Anyone with any experience of organising knows that trade unions don’t come to workers like insurance salesman. In the main, workers form their own committees and then send a delegation to the union office demanding that an organiser come and sign them up. Or, they simply down tools forcing their employer to contact a union organiser.

Nor is any strike decision, let alone a strike such as this one - unprotected, under the umbrella of an unrecognised union, in a workplace with mine security and where the workers themselves are far from home in a strange region - ever taken lightly. Wildcat strikes are probably the most conscious act of sacrifice and courage that anyone can take, driven by anger and desperation and involving the full knowledge that you could lose your job and your family’s livelihood.

In normal times trade unions can be as much a huge bureaucratic machine as a corporation or a state department with negotiations conducted by small teams far from the thousands of rank-and-file members. Strikes change all that…suddenly unions are forced to be conduits of their members’ aspirations.

Whatever the merits of AMCU as a democratic union or as one with any vision of transformation; whatever the involvement of the Themba Godis, the workers of Marikana made their choice:  to become members of AMCU and risk everything, including their lives, for a better future.

For that we owe them more than just pious sympathy. There is a job of mobilisation and movement-building to be done.
                         
Almost 40 years ago, in 1973, workers from companies around Durban came out in a series of wildcat - then really illegal - strikes. Today this event is celebrated by everyone as part of the revival of the anti-apartheid movement and the birth of a new phase of radical trade unionism, culminating in the formation of COSATU.

But in 1973, the media highlighted the threat of violence and called for the restoration of law and order. The apartheid state could not respond with the kind of killings that happened at Marikana because the strikes were in industrial areas, but they invoked the same idea of ignorant misled workers (then they were seen as ignorant Zulus) and had homeland leader Mangosutho Buthelezi send his emissary, Barney Dladla, to talk to the workers.

While in exile, the SACP questioned the bona fides of the strikes, invoking the involvement of Buthelezi to perpetuate the fiction of “ignorant Zulus” because they were not called for by the liberation aligned union body, SACTU. Some in SACTU circles raised the spectre of liberals and CIA involvement in the new worker formations with an agenda to “sideline the liberation movement”. This separation of the ANC and its allies from the early labour movement was to lead to the divisions between the “workerist unions” and the “populist unions” in the labour movement and was to continue within COSATU.
                                              
How easily people forget this when workers forge new movements today.

For a long time now the ongoing service delivery revolts throughout the country have failed to register on the iPads and Blackberries of the chattering classes. This is because of the social distance of the middle classes to the new working classes.

Now the sight of the police shooting striking workers on TV has brought the real world of current struggles right into the lounges and bedrooms of public opinion.

So far the strikers have stood firm not only against the police and Lonmin, but also against the media labelling their strike “illegal”. Strikes are not illegal in South Africa; they are only protected or unprotected. Meanwhile NUM and COSATU are rallying behind their ally, the ANC, to stigmatise the strikers and their union as “paid by BHP Billiton and the Chamber of Mines”.   

In the midst of our outrage at this brutality let us acknowledge that a new movement is emerging. Such early signs do not as yet indicate something grand and well organised. Movements are notoriously messy and difficult to assign to some kind of predetermined ideological box. We do not know what ups and downs people will go through but when the seeds of a new movement are being planted it is time to ask what the rest of us can do to help it to grow.

Gentle is the director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), an NGO that produces educational materials for activists in social movements and trade unions.

Read more articles by Leonard Gentle. 

 

Source: SACSIS 

Can't you hear the thunder?

The headlines scream 'Marikana Massacre'; 'Killing Fields of Rustenburg'. Radio and TV Talk shows and social media all display the anger and expose the psyche of a nation badly wounded. The bloodiest security operation since the end of apartheid has left us shocked and asking what went wrong? The reality is, many things went wrong. Way too many things went wrong, for way too long now. Jay Naidoo

When I think of Marikana, I am reminded of Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth: “Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent and resolute.”

As a union organiser in the ’80s, I knew that taking workers out on strike on a legitimate wage demand is not an uphill battle. Taking workers back to work after a failed strike is the ultimate test for any union leader. Now is the time for calm heads to prevail.

The Judicial Commission of Enquiry appointed by President Zuma will hopefully present all the facts. It is the right decision. But it will take painstaking commitment on all sides to rebuild the trust that has been shattered. And that involves us all as citizens. There is not going to be a simple solution. This is a complex dispute that is at its very essence a microcosm of South African society.

Today a community struggles to recover from a bloody confrontation that has left the crumpled bodies of 44 citizens lying in the veld, seen starkly in our lounges and across the world. It has split brother from brother and left a community divided and volatile. This is the real trial of leadership on all sides. It is a tinderbox. We do not need demagoguery that stirs explosive emotions or to engage in finger-pointing that adds fuel to the fire.

The critical question is how could this have happened in 2012, 18 years into our democracy and the centenary commemoration of the ANC’s struggle for social justice and human dignity?

The answer simply is that there has been a massive failure of leadership on all sides. The critical question is why we did not act earlier on this festering dispute that today the nation mourns?

There is growing ferment in our land. The people in our townships, rural areas and squatter camps are bitter that democracy has not delivered the fruits that they see a tiny elite enjoying. Our leaders across the spectrum are not talking to our people, they are not working with them systematically to solve their problems, in providing the hope that one day, even in their children’s lives, things will be better.

All they see is the obscenity of shocking wealth and the chasm of inequality growing. The platinum mines they toil in, for a pittance, yield a precious metal that makes exorbitant jewellery that adorns the necks of the affluent and catalytic converters for the expensive cars the middle classes drive. The workers live in hovels, in informal squatter camps, surrounded by poverty and without basic services. All they experience is a political arrogance of leaders who more often than not enrich themselves at the expense the people. They are angry and restless.

A narrow law and order approach will not work in this depressing context. There is genuine anger out there that needs a political solution. I am aghast at the rapid rate at which our government had militarized the security forces and the creeping stranglehold of securocrats within the state. I wonder why our police intelligence failed so miserably to avert a disaster that threatens the country’s economic prospects. Are the securocrats in the state so occupied in searching for imaginary enemies in NGOs and civil society organisations and with passing “Secrecy Laws” that they missed one of biggest crises to face our democracy? There are important choices to be made by the government, but hard questions must first be asked. What are our priorities? What is the root cause of conflict in our society? These may be tough questions, but they are also unavoidable.

Inter-union rivalry is part of the problem. Lonmin management has recognised the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), which claims between 20% and 30% of the workforce, for dealing with shop floor issues affecting their membership; but they have fanned the rivalry by only giving recognition to the dominant unions, the National Union of Miners (NUM) and Solidarity, in official wage bargaining structures.

When you recognise a union but exclude it from the collective bargaining negotiations around the core issue of wages, you have a recipe for disaster.

The leadership of NUM and Cosatu need to address why so many mineworkers chose a different union and why they lost confidence in a Cosatu affiliate.

I have been in many places where I am personally told: “Comrade, we do not see union organisers. We don’t know what is happening in our union. Our leaders are too involved in politics and we do not get the services and education we did in the past.”

Have we lost touch with our members? After all, these workers were seasoned unionists who have fought many battles, yet they consciously joined an alternative union. We will need some brutal self-assessment here.

Collective bargaining is the cornerstone of our democracy. I believe it was the prototype of the political negotiations that laid the basis of our democracy. The battles fought by hardened antagonists who faced each other across a negotiating table that recognised the alternative to negotiations was a “scorched earth”. As trade unionists, we knew all the negotiating tactics: strikes, go-slows and lockouts and compromises. When industrial disputes spilled into the streets we united to find solutions and face the heat of angry workers.

Putting this collective bargaining machinery at risk will be a severe blow to our democracy. We cannot afford a free-for-all in such a fragile stage of our democracy.

Rustenburg is not a homogenous community. The growth of the platinum belt created an opportunity to develop the new non-racial towns of the future. Instead, all we see is the mushrooming of informal settlements, racial divisions and the spatial planning of our apartheid past. As job seekers flooded in from all over the country the competition over scarce resources was inevitable. We ignored the festering discontent in the bosom of our economy.

And linked to that, Lonmin, a company with its head in the sand, was woefully oblivious to the conditions its workers lived under. It is a reminder to corporate leaders that social stability must be part of the mainstream business agenda. It cannot be written off as a responsibility of the local government and political leaders. It’s not good enough to tick off the neat box of social corporate responsibility or say “I pay my taxes and this is not my job.”

Lonmin was more intent in the early stages on accusing workers of an illegal strike. When the massacre left 34 workers dead and 78 injured, its executives vanished, refused to meet the workers and then started issuing ultimatums for workers to return or face disciplinary action. Callous mine management, in their plush boardrooms in luxury London headquarters, are the face of rapacious capitalism. Their only preoccupation is the all-important production target of 750,000 saleable ounces of platinum that will be missed due to the closure of the Marikana mine. It is an attitude that will only stoke the anger in our communities.

And to us, horrified citizens, will we ever know the names of the dead workers and police officers? Who are they, what were their aspirations, how many children and dependents do they leave behind? Have we become so inured to endemic violence that it does not matter anymore?

They are statistics. Alongside the 15-million South Africans who are only saved from starvation because of social grant. Do we care that almost half our population lives in poverty or that that single mineworker probably supports eight people on a take-home minimum wage? According to Labour Force Survey figures, 60% of all workers earn less than R2,500 a month. Many of these workers are the sole income earners in their households.

These are statistics those of us living in the cosy bubbles of walled security suburbs like Sandton ignore at our peril.

The problems at Marikana were further compounded by the fact today many of these workers are sub-contracted. It has all the features of the heinous migrant labour system. Workers families are as invisible as they were in the Bantustan labour reservoirs of the past.

We had a foretaste of this dispute at Impala Platinum last year. The pay hikes granted to rock drill operators there sparked a similar demand at Lonmin. What did it teach us? There has to be a change of heart and business strategy in the mining sector.

I have often heard notable analysts complain of the high cost of labour. I don’t know which universe they live in. But how can you justify company executives and directors earn up to 250 times as much a rock driller? (Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Lonmin’s CEO, Ian Farmer was paid R15 million in 2011.)

Just as Marikana is a wake-up call for Cosatu, so it is for business and the ANC. Our democracy needs a strong union movement independent of political parties and business interests. But too much of Cosatu’s time is occupied debating the upcoming ANC leadership contest. The coming Cosatu Congress will be a watershed, where political divisions in the movement may herald the death knell of an independent labour movement that can represent the interests of the poor and marginalised.

Cosatu need to return to its founding principles of serving its members or Marikana will become the start of a downward spiral.

The Northwest province is ruled by the ANC, which also controls the bulk of the seats in the Rustenburg municipality. The platinum miners are the bedrock of the ANC support. The broken promises and the brazen corruption affect them directly. Criminal tenderpreneurs are flourishing in their midst. Most local authorities are dysfunctional. There is a deep-seated anger growing in the Northwest. There is a deep-seated anger growing in the country. And yet the leaders are not at the coal face. People feel robbed of their voices and powerless.

In the absence of strong, legitimate political organisation in the communities, they see violence as the only language their leaders will listen to. It’s is a vicious cycle that sees our people burning down any institution representing the state, whether a school, a library or a public building.

My hope is that the president will take us into his confidence. I know it hurts you deeply that the blood of our fellow citizens has been needlessly spilled. My desire is that the road to Mangaung should be shaped by the lessons of the road from Marikana. Our people, Mr President, are exhausted by the excuses given by our leaders. They want solutions and not more task teams, policy statements and conferences. They want action that improves the day-to-day lives, that delivers water and textbooks to schools, ARVs and medicines to our clinics.

I, like the majority of South Africans, have more questions than answers. But we must engage in a healthy open and frank debate. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate.

Source: Daily Maverick

French Communist Party backs killing of South African miners

The World Socialist Web Site notes with contempt the French Communist Party’s defense of the massacre of 34 striking South African platinum miners by police at Marikana.

After sympathetically quoting South African President Jacob Zuma and cynically expressing its “indignation and horror” at the violence, the brief communiqué published August 17 by the Communist Party (PCF) states: “The PCF reaffirms its solidarity with all the political and trade union forces in South Africa in their struggle to reduce inequality, for progress and for social justice under the true rule of law.”

It is public knowledge that the “political and trade union forces” defended by the PCF ordered and defended the massacre. The African National Congress (ANC) government’s national police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, declared after the massacre that she “gave police the responsibility to execute the task they needed to do.” She opposed any prosecution of those responsible for the miners’ deaths, saying, “This is no time for finger-pointing.”

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), whose former president Cyril Ramaphosa has gone on to amass a fortune of $275 million, has opposed the miners’ strike. NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni defended the police, stating, “The police were patient, but these people were armed with dangerous weapons.”

The PCF’s fellow Stalinists in the South African Communist Party (SACP), who historically have supported the ANC, dismissed the police killing of strikers as “worker-to-worker violence.”

The massacre of South African miners is an event of international significance, testifying to the murderous hostility of bourgeois “left” parties and the trade union apparatus towards any militant movement of the working class that threatens to escape the suffocating grip of the official unions. It is also a sharp warning to the working class internationally.

By praising police toadies in South Africa as fighters for justice and the rule of law, the PCF is signaling that it and PCF-affiliated unions like the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) will not object to similar acts of police violence to crush strikes in Europe.

The rest of France’s petty-bourgeois “left,” which operates within the CGT and with the PCF on the periphery of France’s social democratic government, is maintaining a telling silence on this outrage. As of this writing, five days after the killings, the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) has still not commented on the Marikana massacre on its web site.

As for the Workers Struggle (LO) group, the CGT’s most dogged promoter, it has published only one brief, eight-line news dispatch on the massacre. LO is totally silent on the role of the ANC and NUM, but concludes: “Whatever some kind souls may claim, the class struggle is still present, sometimes ferocious. This is proof.”

LO’s platitudes are calculated to allow the French petty-bourgeois pseudo-left to maintain its political support for the organizers of the Marikana massacre.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

South Africa's White Elite: The Dog that Doesn't Bark

Keeping their heads down and operating behind the scenes, South Africa's white business elite have managed to maintain their economic position. When the curtain finally came down on South Africa’s apartheid in 1994, it happened in a way that none of the key players had predicted. Both the African National Congress (ANC) and its opponents in the white supremacist National Party were surprised that they could reach an accommodation through dialogue and negotiation rather than armed force.

In the negotiations that had followed the release of Nelson Mandela and unbanning of the ANC, the parties sealed an unspoken deal. This handed political power to the black majority and left economic power in the hands of whites. There was to be no seizure of white assets, although there were, of course, plans to gradually achieve a more equitable balance of wealth.

Black economic empowerment?

Indeed, there were already plans afoot to bring the leadership of the ANC into the fold. White business magnates had begun to transfer assets into black hands in order to incorporate those at the top of the new political order. The new policy was ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE). As the commentator Moeletsi Mbeki put it: “BEE was, in fact, invented by South Africa’s economic oligarchs, that handful of white businessmen and their families who control the commanding heights of the country’s economy, that is mining and its associated chemical and engineering industries and finance”.

He pointed out that the policy was adopted well before the ANC came to power. In 1992, Sanlam Limited, a cornerstone of Afrikaner capital, helped create the flagship black empowerment company New African Investments Limited – led by Nthato Motlana, Nelson Mandela’s former doctor. Further deals followed and soon the new BEE elite were well-entrenched.

On the face of it, the policy was a success. A more equitable sharing out of the spoils of economic development came about, creating a new black bourgeoisie. At the same time the ANC abandoned its more radical economic policies allowing rich whites to continue enjoying a very pleasant lifestyle. A considerable proportion of South African assets were transferred to the BEE elite, but even at their height, these transfers were smaller than they appeared. As my colleague Paul Holden points out, the total value of BEE deals were around R250 billion ($30 billion), still a drop in the ocean when compared with the total value of private sector resources of R6 trillion ($700 billion).

Worse still, the BEE transfers were loans, not gifts. The companies had to earn profits and from these profits the loans would be repaid. That was at least the theory. In reality, many of the new black elite had little or no experience of business and a good number of the BEE companies were soon in difficulties. As the government’s own assessment of the problems of BEE rightly put it, this led to contracts being signed by people who lacked the necessary capital: “This has encouraged debt-driven deals that are likely to work only when the economy is growing rapidly and company profitability is expanding significantly”.

Soon the new elite were scrambling around to find a way out. They hit on a plan to nationalise the mines. This would transfer a sizeable chunk of their problems onto the shoulders of the state, which could buy them out at favourable rates. At this point they hit a stumbling block. The ANC’s left-wing allies, the unions of COSATU and the South African Communist Party opposed this solution.

The Communist Party openly attacked those who called for nationalisation. The party declared that it had warned against the use of state finances to bail out the new rich and came out strongly against “diverting billions of Rands of public funds to serve the interests of a narrow black (and white) capitalist stratum”.

Nor was it just a question of “bailing-out debt-ridden BEE capital”, according to the party. They reported that mine union officials had been quietly approached by members of the new black elite, asking for their support. They were told, “Why don’t you support the nationalisation of the mines? If government takes over the mines they will turn to us to run them.” The Communist Party accused the right in the ANC of being seduced by the emerging black capitalist class.
White business

While black business is in a relatively precarious position, their white contemporaries have worked hard to secure their privilege. For a start, they have kept their heads down and operated behind the scenes. Business South Africa, which whites controlled, merged with the Black Business Council in October 2003 to form Business Unity South Africa. Not all black businesses appreciated the change, and some broke away from the new body in 2009. Nonetheless, the white business community had found a convenient new home for their interests. From here they could lobby the ANC government.

Some in white business went further, joining the ANC’s Progressive Business Forum. Its stated purpose is to open direct links with the ruling party. Within a year of its formation, the forum was being portrayed in the press as a means of “buying face-time with cabinet ministers and senior government officials”. The ANC responded briskly that there was “nothing untoward about this”.

Today it is clear that the Progressive Business Forum is a potent means of raising money for the party. A seat at President Zuma’s table at a banquet held in Johannesburg in June 2012 was going for no less than R500,000 ($60,000).

This is not the only way the ANC has raised money from business. An investigation in 2006 by the Institute of Security Studies revealed the existence of a group of companies controlled by a firm called Chancellor House, which quietly accumulated stakes in minerals, energy, engineering, logistics and information technology. This has been a major source of funding for the ruling party and has resulted in inevitable conflicts of interest. “More often than not, these business opportunities have been dependent on the government’s discretion – the award of state tenders, mineral rights and the like. The ANC, as ruling party, has been both player and referee”, says the report.

“As it has always been”

Nearly two decades after the ANC came to power, the black middle class is both powerful – through its influential role in the ANC – but also dependent on the party for its position. It is insufficiently well-resourced to stand on its own feet and reliant on state contracts and BEE legislation for its positions. The white elite, on the other hand, are better endowed and better resourced. Some have moved to become consultants rather than hold formal positions in companies. Others have moved some or all of their wealth offshore – treading the trail blazed by companies formerly listed in South Africa like Old Mutual and Anglo-American, which are now listed on the London stock exchange. At the same time, white business has learnt to live with the ANC in government, working behind the scenes rather than raising their voices in public.

President Zuma summed up the situation rather astutely when he addressed ANC’s policy conference on June 26, 2012. Much had been achieved since taking power in 1994, he said, but much still had to be done. The president went on to outline the key issues that had to be tackled – among them were economic relations, which, he said, were still largely unchanged.

When the end of apartheid came, he said, “We had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time. Thus, the economic power relations of the apartheid era have in the main remained intact. The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males as it has always been.”

Further reading: Think Africa Press' review of "Who Rules South Africa?" and interview with the authors Martin Plaut and Paul Holden.

Source:

Lonmin, the 'unacceptable face of capitalism'

The company that preceded Lonmin was once dubbed ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ by a British prime minister. Tiny Rowland, man who turned the company into an international colossus, wore the slur happily. In the aftermath of the Marikana shootings, it seems like not much has changed since his day. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

The deaths of dozens of people on August 16 has thrown South Africa into a frenzy of outrage, grief and soul searching.  President Jacob Zuma announced that the following week would be declared one of mourning. Over the weekend the situation had calmed down at Lonmin’s Marikana shaft, close where the shootings happened, but the dead had yet to be fully identified and a breakthrough to the deadly wildcat strike action had not been found yet.

On Sunday, Lonmin issued an ultimatum to its employees: if they did not return to work on Monday, they could be fired summarily.

“The final ultimatum provides RDOs [rock drill operators] with a last opportunity to return to work or face possible dismissal,” the company statement said. “Employees could therefore be dismissed if they fail to heed the final ultimatum.”

News reports out of Marikana said that the news was greeted with anger. The unsanctioned strike would continue unless the miners got the 300% pay hike they were demanding. The ultimatum came at a time when many friends and family of injured or dead miners were still trying to deal with the fallout of the shooting.

“London-based Lonmin accounts for 12% of global platinum output. It is already struggling with low prices, weak demand and may miss its annual production target of 750,000 ounces as the quarter to the end of September is typically its best,” Reuters said.

The ultimatum seems callous, and harkens back to the company’s unflattering roots on the continent.
Lonmin has always battled with unions in South Africa, but this particular incident is a nightmare on a scale that it will never have seen before.

Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland was a British man (born Walter Furhop in India to German parents) who came to southern Africa in the aftermath of World War II to escape the heavy tax regime in England and to enjoy the higher standard of living that European colonialists enjoyed in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). He soon ingratiated himself well with African politicians.

The Independent said, “He became a pillar of the social circuit in Salisbury, southern Rhodesia – now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe – earning his living as an upmarket car dealer. He soon discovered that his undoubted charm and dazzling smile worked well on African politicians eager for respectability and access to Western capital and know-how.”

In 1961 he was chosen to head the London and Rhodesian Mining Company (Lonrho) and quickly changed the way the company made money. He made the business depend heavily on his personal contacts and diversified swiftly. After that, he made some very risky calls on drawing up accounts, which spooked pension fund investors and lead to a commission of inquiry. The company then appointed non-executive directors to try to keep Rowland in check. The certain fight came when he tried to hide certain financial information from the board and the directors tried to get the company shareholders to jettison the volcanic chairman. The decision went the other way instead. It cemented Rowland’s reputation as something of an escape artist. The pension fund investors immediately dumped Lonrho’s shares.

The British prime minister at the time, Edward Heath, disgustedly labelled Lonrho an “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism". Rowland famously replied that he didn’t want to be its acceptable face.

Lonrho’s dealings in Africa were often viewed with suspicion. He was often accused of helping out less-than-savoury regimes in various ways, especially at times when the thrust of global opinion was not particularly favourable.

“In the 1980s he was accused of helping the Marxist government of Mozambique manage its agricultural resources, and he increased Lonrho's South African holdings while sanctions against the Apartheid government were still in place,” the BBC said. “Then in 1992, Mr Rowland controversially sold a stake in some of Lonrho's hotels to the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi, only three years after the Lockerbie bombing which was attributed to Libyan terrorists.”

The board was especially stung by the Gadaffi revelation, and unseated him as chairman in October 1995. He was removed from the board of the company he had turned into a vast conglomerate the next year, and died in 1998.

At the news of his death, the eulogies from African leaders were extremely flattering. “He made an enormous contribution, not only to South Africa, but to the whole of Africa," said former president Nelson Mandela, who had bestowed upon him the Order of Good Hope in 1996.

Two months before Rowland’s death, the company was split, and Lonrho Plc. was created to handle the non-African businesses and mining assets. In 1999 the company changed its name to Lonmin and narrowed its portfolio to the platinum metal group in the Bushveld Complex of South Africa.

The company struggled continuously with unions, both in its North West and Limpopo operations. In May last year, the company sacked more than 9,000 workers at its Karee mine near Rustenburg – then reinstated them afterwards. That particular call was made after a wildcat strike spurred by an internal union power struggle.

The company’s current CEO, Ian Farmer, was appointed in 2008. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the company paid him £1,220,629 (R15,860,000) in 2011. His pay that year was 293 times more than what rock drill operators working at Lonmin’s Marikana mine earn.

The presidency issued a statement on Sunday saying that North West Premier Thandi Modise and the ministers of mineral resources Susan Shabangu, police Nathi Mthethwa, social development Bathabile Dlamini, co-operative governance Richard Baloyi, labour Mildred Oliphant, defence and military veterans Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, health Aaron Motsoaledi, state security Siyabonga Cwele, and home affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma would be deployed to Marikana to coordinate and lead support to the families and relatives of the dead or injured miners.

At that point, Lonmin’s representatives still had not shown face at the Marikana squatter camp, where the majority of the strike action had been concentrated. And now Lonmin, the company that was at the centre of the great calamity, has issued new threats to the rock drillers. The fact that the dead and injured, more than hundred of them, are still not even identified, seems of little importance.

Unacceptable face of capitalism indeed, Lonmin.

Source: Daily Maverick
Informed people live longer

Nordic governments ponder benefits of expert input

The Nordic countries are increasingly using academic experts as members of government-appointed committees mandated to advise on research into economic, societal and environmental issues.

The extent to which this influences research policy issues, and political and strategic government choices, may depend on whether the appointments are short term and ad hoc or part of a long-term strategy for governing research policy.

The rector of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Professor Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson, last week suggested in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that Denmark could serve as a model for Swedish research.

“Long-term investments in research are the key for successful research,” she said. “Swedish research is suffering from splitting and short-term measures.”

Danish reforms involving university mergers, reorganisation of the ministry and a coupling of research and innovation policy are now producing results, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

An analysis by the bibliometric group at the Karolinska Institute in June showed that from 1995-2011, Denmark had more research articles ranked among the world’s top 5% than the UK and Sweden.

Last year University World News reported findings from the Nordic research coordination organisation Nordforsk that Danish researchers are cited 27% more frequently than the world average, compared with 13% for Sweden, 11% for Iceland, 8% for Norway and 5% for Finland.

Long-term strategy needed

Wallberg-Henriksson wrote in the context of ongoing work on the Swedish government’s research White Paper for the next four years, to be presented in early 2013: “In Denmark the government has appointed a permanent research-political council, independent of the political parties, universities, or research councils.

“The council is mandated to work out strategies for research and innovation for considerably longer periods than four years.”

In Scandinavia, Finland and Denmark have established long-term government-appointed research and innovation councils. Finland’s includes the participation of the prime minister, up to six other ministers and six high-level research experts.

In contrast, Sweden and Norway use a combination of short-term advisory boards for specific mandated research-related issues, and policy advice worked out in research councils.

Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry Trond Giske has appointed members of the Norwegian Technology Board (NTB) to advise on future opportunities in new technology, including IT, biotechnology and gene technology, starting on 16 August.

Established in 1999, the NTB is an independent body with a broad range of tasks related to assessment, counselling, dissemination and public debate on the opportunities and consequences of new technology. It has 14 members, most of them high-level academic experts.

The Swedish government last year appointed the Commission on the Future, headed by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt with party leaders in government and nine members representing different areas of Swedish society, supported by a secretariat of eight full-time staff.

Their mandate is to make recommendations on the future of Sweden with regard to immigration, integration and work, and “to minimise social exclusion, and strengthen the collective spirit that defines Sweden”.

The commission will also consider strategies for coping with the downsides of globalisation and ensure sustainable and green growth, linking these processes to research, higher education and innovation before the summer of 2013.

Academics and experts respond

Daniel Guhr, managing director of Illuminate Consulting Group, said most European countries operate with expert-driven science and technology research policy mechanisms. A key differentiator is how effective the interplay is between scientists and politicians.

“Politics, especially on wedge issues, can lead to bad science policies, and scientists can occasionally forget that societies have a legitimate expectation of affordable and effective research.

“Scandinavia has historically done well with regard to research and education performance based on a highly integrated but also occasionally fairly static policy model. Whether this approach will yield the best possible results going forward remains to be seen.”

Professor Anders Flodström, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a board member of the European Institute of Technology, said perceptions of the value of research, especially publicly financed research, would change.

Currently, value is determined by how much the research is seen as ground-breaking, as perceived by researchers and measured by publications and citations in peer-reviewed journals.

“In the future the value will be more connected to the impact of the research from societal and industrial and economic growth viewpoints,” he said. “Today jobs change much faster than education and if we are going to benefit from more innovation we need new people with the right skills."

While Sweden is rated number one in Europe on innovation, this is based on input indicators, such as research funding, not on output or impact indicators.

“I like the impact approach,” Flodström said. "It also gives a natural role to social sciences and humanities, because we all know that when it comes to many of mankind’s challenges, they are often in more need of social or human innovations than technology.”

Professor Matthias Kaiser, director of the centre for the study of sciences and the humanities at the University of Bergen, said preparation of science and technology policies through the active involvement of scientific and technological experts is common practice in all Nordic countries. It is also customary for draft policy papers to be subjected to broad public hearings.

Furthermore, all Nordic countries have a range of more or less independent advisory bodies that routinely offer advice. Despite this, final priorities are set through political processes.

Professor Sverker Sörlin, who was responsible for setting up the Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology’s environmental humanities laboratory, said there was a strong tradition of involving scientists in the strategic planning of publicly funded research in the Nordic countries, possibly more than in most European countries.

“It is also clear that politicians have always used their prerogative to take the final decision, and also to choose what issues to discuss with their advisors. There seems now to be a growing interest in a more long-term planning.”

Kaiser said it was important to note that the involvement of larger segments of the public is also widespread in Nordic countries, although perhaps more so in Denmark and Norway. Thus, science and technology are not restricted to high-level experts. The Norwegian Board of Technology in particular is required to seek input from the public.

“Ideally one would envisage a balanced dialogue between politics – that is decision-makers – experts and the public,” he said. “However, in my view the strong interest groups from diverse sectors in society still have a very dominating role, very much like in other European countries.”

Sörlin added it was crucial to insist on the democratic foundation of research and development policy, as with any other policy.

“However, this sphere of policy is special and needs to be long term and informed by strategic thinking about society's need for knowledge.

“For example, if the popularity of and confidence in research among the general population should rule, all research money would go to cancer and virtually nothing to the humanities and the social sciences. In that sense, we need expertise to deal with the issues.

“Precisely because of this, it is in fact good if long-term planning is carried out by a quite independent agency, which could then present its thinking to politicians. It would also spread responsibility for research and development to more parts of the government than the current situation when the department of education holds the strings to the research purse, which is the case in all Nordic countries, except perhaps Finland.”

Guhr doubted that participatory models accurately reflect current societies and their future needs. Most science and technology policy committees did not include young entrepreneurs or rising young scientists. As such, they run the inherent danger of representing yesterday's societal, research and innovation structures.

Said Guhr: “When setting policy, governance structures are often as important as policy design.”

Sörlin believes universities should be much more active as policy-makers. They have a tendency to lobby only for their own good.

“Ideally, universities should take on the role of saying interesting things about higher education, research and innovation and related issues, regardless of whether it is in their own special interest or not. That would enhance their respect in society, which has been waning in recent years.”

Source: University World News