{"id":344,"date":"2012-10-07T18:08:10","date_gmt":"2012-10-07T18:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2012\/10\/07\/the-massacre-of-our-illusions-and-the-seeds-of-something-new-leonard-gentle-2012\/"},"modified":"2012-10-07T18:08:10","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T18:08:10","slug":"the-massacre-of-our-illusions-and-the-seeds-of-something-new-leonard-gentle-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2012\/10\/07\/the-massacre-of-our-illusions-and-the-seeds-of-something-new-leonard-gentle-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Massacre of Our Illusions…And the Seeds of Something New – Leonard Gentle (2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThe story of Marikana has so far been painted shallowly as an inter-union spat. In the first few days after the fateful Thursday and the shock and horror of watching people being massacred on TV there have correctly been howls of anger and grief. Of course no one wants to take responsibility because to do so would be to acknowledge blame. Some pundits have even gone the way of warning at anyone \u201cpointing figures\u201d or \u201cstoking anger.\u201d That buffoon, Julius Malema, stepped forward as if scripted, and promptly lent credibility to those warnings. So Jacob Zuma’s setting up of an inquiry and his call for a week of mourning for the deceased and their families could come across as \u201cstatesmanlike.\u201d
\nPolice Minister Nathi Mthethwa and President Jacob Zuma<\/strong>.
\nBut this is not just a story of hardship, violence and grief. To speak in those terms only would be to add the same insult to injury perpetrated by the police on the striking workers as many commentators have done \u2013 that of seeing the striking miners as mere victims and not as agents of their own future and, even more importantly, as a source of a new movement in the making.
\nThe broader platinum belt has been home to new upsurges of struggles over the last five years \u2013 from the working-class community activists of Merafong and Khutsong \u2013 who drove the then ANC chairperson Terror Lekota out \u2013 to the striking workers of Angloplat, Implat and now Lonmin. These struggles \u2013 including the nationwide \u201cservice delivery\u201d revolts \u2013 are the signs 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.
\nSquandered Legitimacy<\/strong>
\nMarikana now joins the ranks of the Sharpeville and Boipatong massacres in the odious history of a method of capital accumulation based on violence. The ANC’s moral legitimacy as the leading force in the struggle for democracy has now been irrevocably squandered and the struggle for social justice has now passed on to a whole new working-class \u2013 including the workers at Lonmin who went on strike \u2013 who are outside the Tripartite Alliance and its constituent parts.
\nIn this sense, after Marikana, things will never be the same again.
\nFirstly, the killings mark the end of the illusion of a moral high ground occupied by the ANC and the completion of its transformation into the governing party of big capital. For some while now the ANC could trade on its liberation credits in arguing that all criticism came from quarters who were trying to defend white privilege. The Democratic Alliance (DA), of course, was perfect to be cast in this role because it always attacked the ANC for not being business-friendly enough. NGOs who ramped up the criticism of the ANC’s attacks on the media and freedom of speech could be dismissed as \u201cforeign-funded\u201d or having darkly hidden agendas or being the tools of the liberal onslaught on majority rule.
\nBut Marikana was an attack on workers in defence of white privilege \u2013 specifically the mining house, Lonmin. Although it is partly owned by one of Cyril Ramaphosa’s companies, its major shareholders include British investors and ex-South African (and ex-Eskom) Mick Davis’s Xstrata.
\nIn this the ANC steps squarely into the shoes of its predecessors \u2013 Apartheid’s Nationalist Party and Smuts\u2019 South African Party \u2013 acting to secure the profits of mining capital through violence. This was Bulhoek and Bondelswaarts all over again. This was the setting up of forced recruitment over Southern Africa leading to the dreaded migrant labour system, the compounds and the dompas. This was the stuff of Hugh Masekela’s Stimela.
\nAlways successive governments did what was necessary to ensure a cheap, divided and compliant labour force for the mines.
\nLonim epitomises the make-up of the new elite in SA \u2013 old white capital garnished with a sprinkling of politically-connected Blacks in the name of BEE [Black Economic Empowerment].
\nA Turning Point<\/strong>
\nSecondly the strike and the massacre mark a turning point in the liberation alliance around the ANC \u2013 particularly COSATU. Whereas the community and youth wings of what was called the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s and 1990s \u2013 specifically SANCO and SAYCO (remember the UDF was disbanded by the ANC) \u2013 became disgraced by their association with corrupt councillors and eclipsed by the service delivery revolts (and the ANCYL became a home for the tenderpreneurs) COSATU’s moral authority was enhanced after 1994. Within what is called \u201ccivil society\u201d COSATU continued to be a moral voice. So anyone who had a campaign \u2013 whether challenging the limitations on media freedom or fighting for renewables \u2013 sought out COSATU as a partner. This moral authority came because COSATU was simply the most organized voice amongst the working-class. Today COSATU’s links with the working-class is only a very tenuous one.
\nIt is almost intuitive that we consider the notion of a worker as someone working for a clearly-defined employer, on a full-time basis, in a large factory, mine or supermarket. Indeed classical industrial trade unions were forged by workers in large factories and plants and industrial areas. This was the case in many countries where such unions won the right to organize and bargain collectively \u2013 and was also the case in South Africa, when a new wave of large unions formed industrial unions after 1973’s Durban Strikes. And going along with this structure of work were the residential spaces of townships. From the 1950s in SA apartheid increasingly came to accept the de facto existence of a settled urban proletariat \u2013 which intensified from the early 1970s \u2013 and built the match-box brick houses in the townships of the apartheid era: the Sowetos, Kathlehongs, Tembisas and the like.
\nSo the working-class was organized by capitalism into large industrial sites and brick houses in large sprawling townships. The neoliberal phase of capitalism \u2013 since the 1980s \u2013 has begun to change even this.
\nNeoliberalism has not only been about privatization and global speculation. It has also been about restructuring work and home. Today casualization, outsourcing, homework, labour brokers and other forms of informalization or externalization have become the dominant form of work \u2013 when work is available at all \u2013 and homelessness and shackdwelling the mode of existence of the working-class. The latter is in indirect proportion to the withdrawal of the state from providing housing and the services associated with formal housing.
\nTwenty years ago the underground workers of Lonmin would have lived in a compound provided by and policed by the company. Today the rock drill workers live in a shanty town nearby the mine.
\nAlso mining itself has changed. Much of the serious hard work underground is now done by workers sourced from labour brokers. These are the most exploited and insecure workers who work the longest hours and most flexible arrangements. It is even possible today 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 are so-called \u201cillegal miners\u201d who literally mine with spades and their own dynamite and then sell on to middle men who themselves have links to big businesses.
\nLonmin has exploited these divisions \u2013 exacerbated by the old mining industry strategy of recruiting along tribal and regional divisions \u2013 the drill workers at Lonmin were known as Xhosas railed in from the Eastern Cape into an area which is largely Tswana-speaking \u2013 to heighten exploitation at the coalface of drill workers while making cosy deals with the more skilled and white collar NUM members.
\nAdd to this the toxic mix of mine security, barbed-wire enclosures and informal housing \u2013 identified by researchers such as Benchmarks and a picture of institutionalized violence emerges.
\nBy way of contrast the dominant trade unions in SA have largely moved upscale \u2013 toward white collar workers and away from this majority. Today the large COSATU affiliates are public sector white collar workers \u2013 the SA Democratic Teachers\u2019 Union (SADTU), the National Education, Health and Allied Workers\u2019 Union (NEHAWU) and the unions amongst white collar workers in the parastatals \u2013 Telkom and Communication Workers\u2019 Union (CWU) and Transnet and SATAWU. The lower level blue collar workers are now in labour brokers and in services that have been completely outsourced \u2013 like cleaning, security etc, so they do not fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.
\nThe Lonmin strike was the second in the last three months to hit the platinum sector. It was preceded by a strike at Implat (and before that at Angloplat). All involved the AMCU as workers sought an outlet for their frustrations. In this sense the recent strike has been simmering for years.
\nThe mining trade journal Miningmix published this story in 2009…
\n\u201cOne such issue was an agreement signed between the NUM and Implats in 2007, which stipulated a 50 per cent plus one member threshold for recognition \u2013 practically making Implats a closed shop where minority unions have no rights. That removed any competition and gave the NUM a monopoly in South Africa’s largest single mining complex. Secondly, and most importantly, 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 per cent of its members were foreigners, mostly illiterate migrant labourers.
\n\u201cNowadays that number has dropped to below 40 per cent. 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. For instance, there are two NUM branches at Implats \u2013 North and South. And the chairpersons at both these branches were beneficiaries of the 18 per cent bonus that sparked the strike. During wage negotiations in September 2011 Implats wanted to give rock-drill operators a higher increase than the rest of the workforce, but a committee of NUM shop stewards demanded the money be split among the whole workforce. Needless to say, there wasn’t a single rock-drill operator on the shop stewards\u2019 committee.\u201d
\nSo while the NUM remains the largest affiliate of COSATU it is moving on from the union of coal-face workers, to a union of white collar above-ground technicians. It is these developments within NUM that led to the formation of the breakaway union \u2013 the AMCU. 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.
\nThe Role of the Media<\/strong>
\nIn this they have been joined by the media. With the notable exception of the Cape Times who gave spaces to stories of family members of the dead workers and editorialized on the police and Lonmin’s practises, the media’s culpability in demonizing the striking workers has been equally reprehensible. In addition to only quoting NUM sources for information of the strike or focusing on Malema’s opportunism there has been no attempt to dig beneath the idea of manipulated workers and inter-union rivalry.
\nIn general they all painted the rock drillers as uneducated, Basotho or Eastern Cape Xhosas etc… whilst flogging the idea of an increase to R 12,500 as \u201cunreasonable\u201d (nobody has even bothered to check what rock drill workers actually earn at present).
\nThen there is the notion that workers went to AMCU because they were promised R 12,500. This fiction is repeated endlessly by the media. Journalists are of course happy to source this from (unnamed) NUM sources and are simply too lazy to check with the striking workers themselves, or from AMCU, and do not even observe the most basic principle of saying this is an unsubstantiated allegation coming from 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 \u2013 repeated by Frans Baleni of NUM from his Nyala \u2013 that rock drill workers are ignorant and uneducated \u2013 and it bolsters the idea that AMCU is some kind of slick-willy operation who must take responsibility for the massacre.
\nAnyone with any experience of organizing knows that trade unions don’t come to workers like insurance salesman or vendors of encyclopaedia. In the main workers form their own committees and then send a delegation to the union office demanding that an organizer come and sign them up … or simply down tools forcing their employer to contact a union organizer to come and talk. Nor is any strike decision, let alone such a strike such as this one \u2013 unprotected, under the umbrella of an unrecognized union, in a workplace with mine security and where the workers themselves are far from home in a strange region \u2013 ever taken lightly. Wildcat strikes are probably the most conscious act of sacrifice and courage which anyone can take, driven by anger and desperation and involving the full knowledge that you could lose you job and your family’s livelihood.
\nIn 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 of no more that a dozen or so far from the thousands of rank-and-file members. Strikes change all that … suddenly unions are forced to be conduits of their members\u2019 aspirations. Whatever the merits of AMCU as a democratic union or as one with any vision of transformation; whatever the involvement of the Themba Godi’s and whoever else, the workers of Marikana made their choices \u2013 to become members of AMCU and risk everything \u2013 including their lives \u2013 for a better future. For that we owe them more than just pious sympathy. There is a job of mobilization and movement building to be done.
\nAlmost 40 years ago \u2013 in 1973 \u2013 workers from companies like the Frame Group in Durban came out in a series of wildcat \u2013 then really illegal \u2013 strikes. Now this event as celebrated by everyone as part of the revival of the anti-apartheid mass movement and the birth of a new phase of radical trade unionism \u2013 which culminated in the formation of COSATU in 1985.
\nBut 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 around Durban, 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.
\nWhile in exile the SACP questioned the bona fides of the strikes, invoking the involvement of Buthelezi to perpetuate the fiction of \u201cignorant Zulus,\u201d because they were not called for or led by the official liberation aligned union body \u2013 SACTU. Some in SACTU \u2013 SACP circles (like Blade Nzimande today) raised the spectre of liberals and CIA involvement in the new worker formations with an agenda to \u201csideline the liberation movement.\u201d This separation of the ANC and its allies from the early labour movement was to lead to the divisions between the \u201cworkerist unions\u201d (independent) and the \u201cpopulist unions\u201d in the labour movement and was to continue within COSATU until the period of the political negotiations when there was more-or-less an agreement that the ANC would take centre-stage.
\nHow easily people forget 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 lap tops and blackberries of the chattering classes. This is because of the social \u2013 and even geographic distance \u2013 of the middle classes to the new working-classes and the poor.
\nNow 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.
\nAccording to statistics supplied by Wits University’s Peter Alexander:
\n\u201cIn 2010-11 there was a record number of crowd management incidents (unrest and peaceful), and the final data for 2011\/12 are likely to show an even higher figure. Already, the number of gatherings involving unrest was higher in 2011-12 than any previous year. During the last three years, 2009-12, there has been an average of 2.9 unrest incidents per day. This is an increase of 40 per cent over the average of 2.1 unrest incidents per day recorded for 2004-09. The statistics show that what has been called the \u2018Rebellion of the Poor\u2019 has intensified over the past three years.\u201d
\nThis kind of \u201cspontaneous\u201d revolt is now also extending to the industrial sphere \u2013 witness the unprotected strikes in the platinum mines at AngloPlat, Implats and now Lonmin.
\nSo far the strikers have stood firm not only against the police, and Lonmin, threatening dismissal, but also against the media labelling their strike \u201cillegal\u201d (strikes are not illegal in SA, they are only protected or unprotected) and NUM and COSATU rallying behind their ally \u2013 the ANC \u2013 to stigmatize the strikers and their union as \u201cpaid by BHP Billiton and\/or the Chamber of Mines\u201d (why either of these would pay to form a striking, volatile union rather than a sweetheart union like NUM who sits in all their bargaining chambers and acts to respect agreements, makes no sense. But some people choose to believe this nonsense). The SACP even goes on to call on Zuma’s Commission of Enquiry to investigate AMCU and the possibility that it is being financed by business interests to break NUM (that vanguard of the working-class) \u2013 this from the SACP cabinet minister, Blade Nzimande, who wines and dines with big business every day of his life.
\nIn 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 organized. 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. \u2022
\nLeonard Gentle is Director of the International Labour and Research Information Group in Capetown, South Africa. This article first appeared in The Bullet, the e-bulletin of Socialist Project<\/a>, Canada: E-Bulletin No. 686, August 23, 2012<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}