South Africa: The massacre of our illusions … and the seeds of something new

By Leonard Gentle, director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (South Africa)

August 23, 2012 – ILRIG – The story of Marikana has so far been painted shallowly as an inter-union spat. In the first few days after the August16 police killing of  34 striking mineworkers, employed by the Lonmin mining corporation, 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 “pointing figures” or “stoking anger”. That buffoon, African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema, stepped forward as if scripted, and promptly lent credibility to those warnings. So South African President 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 “statesmanlike”.

But 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 – 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.

The broader platinum-mining belt has been home to new upsurges of struggles over the last five years – from the working-class community activists of Merafong and Khutsong – who drove the then African National Congress (ANC) chairperson Terror Lekota out – to the striking workers of Angloplat, Implat and now Lonmin. These struggles – including the nationwide “service delivery” revolts – 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.                        

Marikana 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 – including the workers at Lonmin who went on strike – who are outside the Tripartite Alliance and its constituent parts [ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South African Communist Party (SACP)].      

In this sense, after Marikana, things will never be the same again.     

First, 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 or freedom of speech could be dismissed as “foreign funded” or having darkly hidden agendas or being the tools of the liberal onslaught on majority rule.

But Marikana was an attack on workers in defence of white privilege – 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. [Cyril Ramaphosa was once a leading anti-apartheid activist and is a former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).]

Mining company profits

In this the ANC steps squarely into the shoes of its predecessors – apartheid’s Nationalist Party and Smuts’ South African Party – acting to secure the profits of mining capital through violence. This was Bulhoek and Bondelswaarts massacres 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 (black South Africans had to carry passbooks). This was the stuff of Hugh Masekela’s "Stimela" (Coal train).

Always successive governments did what was necessary to ensure a cheap, divided and compliant labour force for the mines.

Lonim epitomises the make-up of the new elite in South Africa – old white capital garnished with a sprinkling of politically connected blacks in the name of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).

Second, the strike and the massacre 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 of the 1980s and 1990s – specifically the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) and the South African Youth Congress (SAYCO) (remember the United Democratic Front was disbanded by the ANC) – 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 “civil society” COSATU continued to be a moral voice. So anyone who had a campaign – whether challenging the limitations on media freedom or fighting for renewable energy – sought out COSATU as a partner. This moral authority came because COSATU was simply the most organised voice among the working class.    

Today COSATU’s links with the working class is only a very tenuous one.

It 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 organise and bargain collectively – 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 South Africa apartheid increasingly came to accept the de facto existence of a settled urban proletariat – which intensified from the early 1970s – and built the matchbox brick houses in the townships of the apartheid era: the Sowetos, Kathlehongs, Tembisas and the like.

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

Neoliberal phase of capitalism

The neoliberal phase of capitalism – since the 1980s – has begun to change even this. Neoliberalism has not only been about privatisation and global speculation. It has also been about restructuring work and home. Today casualisation, outsourcing, homework, labour brokers and other forms of informalisation or externalisation have become the dominant form of work – when work is available at all – 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.

Also 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 “illegal miners”, who literally mine with spades and their own dynamite and then sell on to middle men who themselves have links to big businesses.

Lonmin has exploited these divisions – exacerbated by the old mining industry strategy of recruiting along tribal and regional divisions – the drill workers at Lonmin were known as Xhosas railed in from the Eastern Cape into an area which is largely Tswana speaking – to heighten exploitation at the coalface of drill workers while making cosy deals with the more skilled and white-collar National Uunion of Mineworkers members.

Add to this the toxic mix of mine security, barbed-wire enclosures and informal housing – identified by researchers such as Benchmarks 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 are public-sector white-collar workers – the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) and the unions among white-collar workers in the state-owned utilities – Telkom and Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) and Transnet and the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU). The lower level blue-collar workers are now in labour brokers and in services that have been completely outsourced – like cleaning, security etc, so they do not fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.

The AMCU

The Lonmin strike was 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 new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) as workers sought an outlet for their frustrations. In this sense the recent strike has been simmering for years.

The mining trade journal Miningmix published this story in 2009:

“One such issue was an agreement signed between the NUM and Implats in 2007, which stipulated a 50% plus one member threshold for recognition – 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% 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. For instance, there are two NUM branches at Implats – North and South. And the chairpersons at both these branches were beneficiaries of the 18% 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’ committee.”

So while the NUM remains the largest affiliate of COSATU, it is moving on from the union of coalface workers, to a union of white-collar above-ground technicians. It is these developments within the NUM that led to the formation of the breakaway union – 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.

In this they have been joined by the media..

With the notable exception of the Cape Times, which gave space to stories of family members of the dead workers and editorialised on the police and Lonmin’s practises, the media’s culpability in demonising the striking workers has been equally reprehensible. In addition to only quoting NUM sources for information of the strike or focusing on Julius Malema’s opportunism, there has been no attempt to dig beneath the idea of manipulated workers and inter-union rivalry.

In general the media all painted the rock drillers as uneducated, Basotho or Eastern Cape Xhosas etc., while flogging the idea of an increase to R12,500 as “unreasonable” (nobody has even bothered to check what rock drill workers actually earn at present).  

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 and are simply too lazy to check with the striking workers themselves, or from  the 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 – repeated by Frans Baleni of NUM from his Nyala (armoured car) – that rock drill workers are ignorant and uneducated – and it bolsters the idea that AMCU is some kind of Slick Willy operation which must take responsibility for the massacre.

Anyone with any experience of organising knows that trade unions don’t come to workers like insurance salespeople or vendors of encyclopaedias. 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 simply down tools forcing their employer to contact a union organiser to come and talk. Nor is any strike decision, let alone such 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 acts of sacrifice and courage that anyone can take, driven by anger and desperation and involving the full knowledge that you could lose you 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 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’ aspirations.  Whatever the merits of the AMCU as a democratic union or as one with any vision of transformation; whatever the involvement of Themba Godi and whoever else, the workers of Marikana made their choices – to become members of the 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 like the Frame Group in Durban came out in a series of wildcat – then really illegal – 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, which culminated in the formation of COSATU in 1985.

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 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.

While in exile the South African Communist Party (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 or led by the official liberation aligned union body – the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). Some in SACTU–SACP circles (like Blade Nzimande today) raised the spectre of liberals and CIA involvement in the new workers' 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” (independent) and the “populist unions” 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. 

How easily people forget when workers forge new movements today.

Current struggles

For a long time now the ongoing service delivery revolts throughout the country have failed to register on the laptops and blackberries of the chattering classes. This is because of the social – and even geographic distance – of the middle classes to the new working classes and the poor.

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.

According to statistics supplied by the University of Witswatersrand’s Peter Alexander:

In 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 percent over the average of 2.1 unrest incidents per day recorded for 2004-09. The statistics show that what has been called the Rebellion of the Poor has intensified over the past three years.

This kind of “spontaneous” revolt is now also extending to the industrial sphere – witness the unprotected strikes in the platinum mines at AngloPlat, Implats and now Lonmin.               

So far the strikers have stood form not only against the police, and Lonmin threatening dismissal, but also against the media labelling their strike “illegal” (strikes are not illegal in South Africa, they are only protected or unprotected) and the NUM and COSATU rallying behind their ally – the ruling ANC – to stigmatise the strikers and their union as “paid by BHP Billiton and/or the Chamber of Mines" (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 investigat the AMCU and the possibility that it is being financed by business interests to break NUM (that vanguard of the working class) – this from the SACP cabinet minister, Blade Nzimande, who wines and dines with big business every day of his life.     

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.

How police planned and carried out the massacre at Marikana

Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope and Peter Alexander investigate the scene of the killing

August 25, 2012 – Socialist Worker (UK) – Strikers were surrounded by heavily armed police and soldiers, and killed while fleeing from gunfire. The state forces were not “protecting themselves”. They participated in well-organised, premeditated slaughter.

We interviewed surviving miners and looked at physical evidence on the site of the massacre. What we found is even more shocking than the story presented in the media, even here in South Africa. Follow numbered events on the map above.

1: On the day of the killing about 3000 striking miners were gathered on and just below the “mountain” (actually a small hill). Joseph Mathunjwa, president of their union, the AMCU, came and pleaded with them to leave to avoid a police attack. The miners refused.

2: Within 15 minutes of Mathunjwa leaving, the police and army laid razor wire, separating the strikers from the Enkanini informal settlement, where many of them live. Casspirs (armoured cars), horses and water cannon moved up to encircle the workers.

3: Some workers walked down to the razor wire to see if they could still get out through a gap. Witnesses say police near the “small koppie” (hillock) opened fire on them, probably with rubber bullets.

Some workers fled through a five metre gap in the razor wire. They were met with a barrage of live fire from the police and many died. Images of this shooting were broadcast around the world.

4: Terrified strikers scattered in all directions, with a large number heading for cover by a koppie about 300 metres in the opposite direction from the wire. This “killing koppie” is where the largest number of strikers died.

No cameras recorded this slaughter. But evidence remained on Monday, four days after the massacre. There are remnants of pools of blood. Police markers show where corpses were removed. We found markers labelled with letters up to ‘J’.

5-8: Other strikers were killed as they fled across the fields. Some examples are marked on the map. Shots were fired from helicopters and some workers, heading for hillock, were crushed by Casspirs.

By Monday the whole area had been swept clean of rubber bullets, bullet casings and tear-gas canisters. We also saw patches of burned grass, which local workers claim are the remains of police fires used to obscure evidence of deaths.