The current wave of attacks on foreign nationals in the slummy townships of Alexander, Diepsloot and elsewhere in the country is very regrettable indeed. So far 42 people have been reported killed and over 25 000 displaced in such related attacks across the country. In the mean time liberal right wingers, petty bourgeois politicians and their establishment thinkers continue to moralise the issue, talking much and explaining nothing, as if xenophobia is an innate human characteristic.

While the attacks continue to spread across the country with more people losing their lives and what little shacks they call homes, politicians and their liberal intellectuals refuse to correctly diagnose the cause of attacks, taking refuge in conspiracy theories such as “third force”. Such is the poverty of liberal morality. For me this atrocious violence is a supra-moral issue that is rooted in the material conditions within which the working class of South Africa finds itself post-1994. Even though the political establishment refuse to concede to this fact, some liberal commentators and petty-bourgeois intellectuals like President Mbeki’s younger brother Moelesti Mbeki have began to recognize its material basis, even though they shy away from locating its historical rootedness.

We need to realize that the anger of the people in Alexander is genuine and justified, although misdirected. It is a response to the betrayal they continue to suffer in the hands of their once trusted leaders and comrades which subject them to a life of poverty, unemployment, crime and disease. Therefore, examining the root of the current xenophobic attacks cannot be located in any context outside this betrayal and the current triumph of neo-liberal global capitalism.

We could ask a question, therefore, as to why would politicians like Ngxakula and Carsels have us believe that some “third force” is behind these attacks? To understand this convenient divergence from the real truth, we must understand how much pain the truth will inflict on their social position, how it will hurt their economic status. The petty bourgeois politicians would rather lie to the masses than have these masses’ anger redirected [correctly] against them.

Accepting the “third force” argument will be protecting the material interests of the rich owning class. We have to realize that xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia, and other such human rights violations are a product of modern day class society, that no one is born a refugee or foreigner, and neither is one born Zimbabwean, Mozambican or South African. We are human beings before we are certain nationals and before social conditions push us to, either legally or illegally; cross our national boarders in search of peace and better livelihoods abroad.

The failed socio-economic conditions in the townships coupled with an influx of desperate economic and political refugees have only exacerbated living conditions in slummy South African townships. However, this influx is itself not the cause of local suffering. But unable to diagnose the real problem to their suffering local citizens direct their anger at the already pressed foreigners. But, while it is true that there is, to some level, a contestation of jobs and other basic resources such as shelter, they are not enough to trigger a xenophobic outburst. We need to examine this closely with careful eyes.

The anger of the people in Alexander, Diepsloot and elsewhere is not out of some genetically inherent intolerance to foreign nationals. It is an expression of intolerance to over 14 years of socio-economic degeneration (pauperization, unemployment and homelessness, and disease) in their townships which sadly manifests itself through this violence against working class foreigners.

Why is it that this happens in townships and not suburbs? It is mainly because these societal triggers of intolerance (unemployment, homelessness and disease etc.) are overwhelmingly encountered among a people at community level in townships, that is why the attacks are not universal but class based. That’s why it is the working class that suffers. The rich owning class and their parasite upper-middle classes do not feel a pinch of these violent encounters because of their socio-economic position.

This is a working class prejudice and has historic origins in the period of transition to democracy. The politico-socio-economic decisions of our reformist liberal politicians in CODESA are at the centre of working class townships’ economic degeneration. Trotsky argued in Their Morals and Ours, that “there is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off defeats as victories, friends as enemies,…These means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already condemned by history.”

Therefore, if we locate these xenophobic atrocities in the failure of the negotiated settlement and the 1996 class project, we will realize that it was just a matter of time – this was bound to happen, and unless the status quo changes the worst shall follow.

Remember that since the democratic dispensation in ’94, and the advent of GEAR and other such related policies in ‘96, South Africa has become one of the most unequal countries in the world with concentrated wealth (estates and golf courses) of new dollar-billionaires in Kempsbay, Sandton and Broad-lands living alongside dire poverty in Joe Slovo, Alexander and Greenside informal settlements. It is this stark contradiction that has brought frustration in the working class of Alexander and elsewhere thus setting them against their class equals of other nations as easy target.

President Mbeki’s failed mediation in Zimbabwe has not made matters any better for either us or the foreign nationals themselves. Therefore, in seeking solutions, we need to realize that deploying the army and police, and appealing for calm with promises to apprehend suspects (“third force”) behind the attacks in the midst of such huge collapse of social fabric will not help the situation. Neither will deporting foreigners free them from the grips of their human rights violators. These will only suppress the public outburst of violent and insurgent masses, for a while, but not mend the broken socio-economic conditions of the masses or patch relations between citizens and foreign nationals in townships. We need decisive intervention that will lift our people, both foreigners and locals, from socio-economic desperation.

Zimbabwe’s economy is plunging into extinction and its human rights policy is almost non-existence, thus putting its people at the risk of starvation and murder as the recent election feuds may show. With this reality at hand, foreigners, both legal and illegal, will keep coming back.

To guard against this deepening into a national crisis that throws our nation into barbarism, South Africa needs to review its macro-economic policies, impose a moratorium on unemployment by putting the Right to Work as a constitutionally guaranteed right, and initiate some Employment Guarantee Schemes similar to India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme so that we could be able to put more people into work, provide healthcare and shelter, feed and clothe the poor etc.. It’s only when conditions for the development of people’s livelihoods seem possible that they will abandon such perceptions as xenophobic attacks, to phase each other out of the competition for jobs and other essentials.

Remember this is a war of victims against victims. The residence of Alexander, Diepsloot and elsewhere are victims, but the foreigners are victims of victims. Unless people’s economic conditions change for the better the worst is yet to come.

Mpho Ramaano, writer and poet,is an activist of the Right to Work Campaign in Turfloop -Limpopo.