Trevor Ngwane: ‘Barbarism is no longer an abstraction. We can see it right in front of our eyes’

[Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of the speech given by Trevor Ngwane on the “Repression and the threat to intellectual freedom: Russia and beyond” panel at the “Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today” online conference, which was organised by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign on October 8. Ngwane is a South African socialist, anti-apartheid activist, author and teacher at the University of Johannesburg. Transcripts and video recordings of other speeches given at the conference can be found at the campaign website freeboris.info.]

We are living in difficult times. Rosa Luxemburg said the sharpening of the class struggle in the context of a rolling capitalist crisis would soon put a stark choice before humanity: socialism or barbarism? I think today that moment has come.

Barbarism is not an abstraction. It is not a speculation. We see it right there in front of our eyes with the genocide in Palestine and the murderous invasion of Ukraine.

Today, it is normal that a decision made by a government somewhere in the world, or indeed even by a single techno-capitalist in New York — say, South African born and Trump groupie [and now member of Trump’s administration] Elon Musk — can lead to the suffering and even death of thousands of people in many parts of the world.

Capitalist violence is the order of the day. It comes in many forms. It can be a bullet or a bomb. It can be an economic policy. Austerity. Structural violence. Let the children die. Killing thousands of people has become a news item you think about before your train of thought is rudely disrupted by a commercial.

British singer David Rovics sang these lines in a song he called “As the Bombs Rained Down”:

See the homes apartment blocks. 
See the mosques reduced to rocks. 
Spill the oil and feel the shock. 
As the bombs rained down.

This is happening in Palestine and in Ukraine. I categorically oppose the illegal occupation of Palestine and the massacre and hardships the Zionist government is visiting upon Palestinians, including men, women and children. 

I also denounce, in the strongest terms, the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s armies. He is dropping bombs on residential and industrial areas where the working class lives and works, with the resultant death, injury and displacement of thousands and millions of people.

I also recognise that the same is happening in Asia and other parts of the world.

South Africa: 30 years after apartheid

Thirty years after the end of apartheid, poverty, unemployment and inequality have become normalised. The three social ills have become an acronym: PUI. Most political and economic analysts and their audiences will know what you mean when you refer to the PUI challenge facing the country in the name of national liberation.

The party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC), supervised the country into normalising a neoliberal capitalist hell. South Africa is regularly labelled the most unequal society in the world. In 2023, the Gini coefficient was 63, the highest in the world.

Another notorious acronym in South Africa, which is used daily, is GBV (gender-based violence). South Africa has one of the highest rape rates in the world, with 132 incidents per 100,000 people. A woman is raped in South Africa every 12 minutes. One in four men admit to committing a rape. Life is a nightmare for women.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of stunted child growth in the world, with 27% of children under five years of age affected. Stunting is a form of chronic malnutrition which impacts cognitive development and has severe implications for learning, earning, and the general well-being of a person, including their health. Let the children cry.

I can say from my own observation of life in Soweto, the biggest township in South Africa, that there is an alcoholic and substance abuse epidemic in South Africa. The working class is facing a severe socio-economic crisis. Is there a political solution?

One step forward, two steps backward

No one was surprised when, in the last general elections, the ANC lost its parliamentary majority. Its mismanagement of the country as it ruthlessly implemented pro-capitalist and anti-working-class policies, including its policy of creating a Black bourgeoisie, has ensured that the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.

It has also made working class voters turn against it. The ANC got 40% of the vote. Instead of finding a partner to form a coalition government, it opted for a government of national unity. This was a ploy to work together with right and centre-right political parties. The aim is to use the politics of compromise and consensus associated with governments of national unity as a fig leaf to allow the ANC to continue implementing the very same pro-capitalist policies that made it lose its majority.

In truth, the main concern of ANC leaders is to keep in the running and to be part of the racket, as Frantz Fanon described the post-liberation national bourgeoisie in Africa. Many of the leadership changed their residences from jail cells in Robben Island, guerrilla camps in Angola and dingy flats in London, to palatial mansions, as many of them became the first Black millionaires and billionaires. They became a nouveau bourgeoisie at the expense of the working class — and they have no intention of stopping now.

South Africa's working class

The working-class movement was never defeated in South Africa. Instead, the ANC used the moment of liberation to demobilise, demoralise and contain organised labour and the militant Black working-class movements that successfully challenged the apartheid regime and led to its defeat.

The tripartite alliance between the ANC, South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) became a tool to ensure that working class leaders committed class suicide. Not the class suicide envisaged by Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, but rather their embourgeoisement. Many of them, such as the current ANC president of the country, Cyril Ramaphosa, organised workers in the mines during the anti-apartheid struggle and then became mine owners in the so-called New South Africa. They crossed the class line.

Of course, many ANC leaders were members of a radicalised Black petite bourgeoisie. Race-based capitalism pushed them to join the national liberation movement and even dabble in working-class politics. They justify their bourgeois aspirations and greed for riches on the grounds of the racial and class frustrations engendered by racial capitalism.

Attacks on the right to strike

The right to strike was under attack from year one, 1994, the year of liberation. Indeed, the lead up to the first democratic elections in South Africa was marked by Communist leaders, such as the late Joe Slovo, consistently admonishing workers to stop their militancy and their strikes. The struggle is over, he argued. The strike movement was the battering ram that forced capital to seek a solution to the political and economic crisis beyond apartheid, starting with the 1973 Durban strikes.

Workers engaged in strikes without following any procedure because there was no procedure. Apartheid did not allow Black workers to form unions, let alone go on strike. Over time, the strikes became very militant, including sit down strikes that involved occupation of factories and mines, community support for strikes, consumer boycotts of buses, etc.

The solution, from the point of view of the capitalist class — back then appropriately called white monopoly capital — was the institutionalisation of industrial conflict, including implementing a Labor Relations Act that required long drawn out and complicated procedures before workers could go on strike, including cooling off periods and compulsory mediation and arbitration.

When Ramaphosa took over as president of the country in 2018, he made it his priority to further attack the right to strike, introducing various regulations to achieve this end. Managerialism, underpinned by an aggressive assertion of the managerial prerogative, has created a dictatorial regime in South African workplaces, in the public and private sectors.

The culmination of this was the Marikana massacre in August 2012, when 34 miners on strike were shot dead by the state police. The dynamics of that strike included the class collaboration of trade union leaders with the bosses. Worker leaders would sign weak agreements with bosses and then commit themselves to policing such anti-working-class policies.

All this in the context of an unemployment rate of 40%, deregulation and flexibilisation of the labour market, and political disorientation and other challenges facing workers. The position of employed workers has been severely undermined, and their power weakened.

The organic capacity of the working class

Going forward, it is important to realise the need to go back to basics — the basics of working-class politics. Karl Marx said the working class is the revolutionary class because of its structural location in the capitalist system, in the mode of production.

Workers’ power derives from their role as producers, most importantly as collective producers, despite the atomisation and decomposition dynamics introduced by capital. The class-in-itself exists and it can become a class-for-itself.

The absence of a fighting working-class movement is the denominator and chief characteristic of the reversals faced by the class and by humanity today. Our job is to revitalise this movement.

We must not sidestep this task. We must not rationalise it away. We must not play it down. The struggle for socialism is a struggle to revive and revitalise the working-class movement and its allies, to remove all obstacles that stop workers becoming what they can be.

The battle to liberate Boris Kagarlitsky

An aspect of this struggle is to recognise and denounce the capitalist restoration taking place in Russia and China. 

Boris Kagarlitsky is a comrade and hero with a long and proud track record of fighting behind the red flag for the socialist alternative. He stood up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his totalitarian regime, refused to leave Russia and choosing to fight in the belly of the beast. 

“Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arc of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space” in a prison cell in Zelenograd.

He did this in solidarity with all the millions of workers who are never given the option of walking away to settle abroad. There are those who just cannot walk away, and those who try to walk away, but are followed by the assassin’s bullet or killer’s poison.

He also stood up in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He joined the anti-war movement in Russia and as, comrade Adam Novak said, Boris took a Leninist position: defeatism. Russia should be defeated in its war with Ukraine. 

The battle to liberate comrade Boris Kagarlitsky is part of that struggle.