Is Mandela really dead and the government lying again??!!
BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking 16 t
Nelson #Mandela is "responding to treatment" but he is still "critical but stable", South Africa's President Zuma says
The Guardian stands by it's stance: http://guardianlv.com/2013/07/nelson-mandela-death-dishonesty-and-denial/ …
#NelsonMandela the aging, anti white racist, ANC terrorist.
The only good terrorist is a dead one. Champagne on ice.. pic.twitter.com/mr9LogO8HI
"@dailynation: Nelson #Mandela grand-daughters tweet about burial row http://bit.ly/188XYEt :-) I
IS HE DEAD OR WAT COZ A DON'T GET IT?????
Africa Review @africareview 20 t
Nelson #Mandela grand-daughters tweet about burial row http://shar.es/AyRmD
Nelson Mandela grand-daughters tweet about burial rowshar.esThe duo insist that the family is still united
MORE SPECULATION or REAL NEWS?
BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking 3 t
Nelson #Mandela remains in a critical but stable condition and is responding to treatment - South African presidency http://bbc.in/133xTxN
and: Malema: We will have a revolution like Zimbabwe.
They were prepared to take the pain and have reclaimed their land. Unique in Africa.
Malema: There will be pain. "South Africans should know we are going to be punished heavily by monopoly capital." No bread on shelves.
Malema: Land is big enough for blacks and whites and belongs to all. But those who do not want to share "will be forced to share".
Malema: "We want to nationalise, and those mines we nationalise, we are not going to pay for them... We are a protest movement."
New Statesman @NewStatesman 28 m
John Pilger: Nelson Mandela's greatness may be assured – but not his legacy http://ow.ly/mRkQt
[ http://www.newstatesman.com/print/2013/07/nelson-mandelas-greatness-may-be-assured-not-his-legacy ]
Nelson Mandela’s greatness may be assured – but not his legacy
Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid.
By John Pilger [1]Published 11 July 2013
:quality(70)/www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullnode_image/articles_2013/96495640.jpg)
Nelson Mandela in 1990. Photograph: Getty Images
When I reported from South Africa in the 1960s, the Nazi admirer B J Vorster occupied the prime minister’s residence in Cape Town.
Thirty years later, as I waited at the gates, it was as if the guards had not changed. White Afrikaners checked my ID with the confidence of men in secure work.
One carried a copy of Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's autobiography.
“It’s very eenspirational,” he said.
Mandela had just had his afternoon nap and looked sleepy; his shoelaces were untied. Wearing a bright gold shirt, he meandered into the room.
“Welcome back,” he said, bursting into a smile.
“You must understand that to have been banned from my country is a great honour.” The sheer grace and charm of the man made you feel good.
He chuckled about his elevation to sainthood.
“That’s not the job I applied for,” he said drily.
Still, he was well used to deferential interviews and I was ticked off several times – “you completely forgot what I said” and “I have already explained that matter to you”.
In brooking no criticism of the African National Congress (ANC), he revealed something of why millions of South Africans will mourn his passing but not his “legacy”.
I asked him why the pledges he and the ANC had given on his release from prison in 1990 had not been kept.
The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”.
But once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme, was abandoned, and one of his ministers (Mbeki) boasted that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite.
“You can put any label on it if you like,” Mandela replied.
“. . . but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.”
“That’s the opposite of what you said in 1994.”
“You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change.”
Few ordinary South Africans were aware that this “process” had begun in high secrecy more than two years before Mandela’s release, when the ANC in exile had, in effect, done a deal with members of the Afrikaner elite at a stately home, Mells Park House, near Bath.
The prime movers were the corporations that had underpinned apartheid.
Around the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations. In 1982, he had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, where he could receive and entertain people.
The apartheid regime’s aim was to split the resistance between the “moderates” that it could “do business with” (Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Oliver Tambo) and those in the front-line townships who were leading the United Democratic Front.
On 5 July 1989, Mandela was spirited out of prison to meet P W Botha, the white-minority president known as Die Groot Krokodil (“the big crocodile”).
Mandela was delighted that Botha poured the tea.
With democratic elections in 1994, racial apartheid ended and economic apartheid had a new face.
The Botha regime had offered black businessmen generous loans, allowing them to set up companies outside the Bantustans.
A new black bourgeoisie emerged quickly, along with a rampant cronyism.
ANC chieftains moved into mansions in “golf and country estates”.
As the disparities between white and black narrowed, they widened between black and black.
The familiar refrain that the wealth would “trickle down” and “create jobs” was lost in dodgy merger deals and “restructuring” that cost jobs.
For foreign companies, a black face on the board often ensured that nothing changed.
In 2001 George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos, “South Africa is in the hands of international capital.”
In the townships, people felt little change and were subjected to evictions typical of the apartheid era; some expressed nostalgia for the “order” of the old regime.
The post-apartheid achievements in desegregating daily life in South Africa, including schools, were undercut by the extremes and corruption of a “neoliberalism” to which the ANC devoted itself.
This led directly to state crimes such as the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in 2012, which evoked the Sharpeville massacre more than half a century earlier.
Both were protests about injustice.
Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid.
He saw this as part of “reconciliation”. Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long that they were willing to accept and collude with the people’s enemy.
There were those who genuinely wanted change, including a few in the South African Communist Party, but it was the reform-and-redeem influence of mission Christianity that may have left the most indelible mark.
White liberals at home and abroad warmed to this, often ignoring or welcoming Mandela’s reluctance to spell out a coherent vision, as Amilcar Cabral and Pandit Nehru had done.
Mandela seemed to change in retirement, alerting the world to the post-9/11 dangers of George W Bush and Tony Blair.
His description of Blair as “Bush’s foreign minister” was mischievously timed; Mbeki, his own successor, was about to visit Chequers.
I wonder what he would make of the “pilgrimage” to his cell on Robben Island by Barack Obama, the unrelenting jailer of Guantanamo.
When my interview with him was over, he patted me on the arm as if to say I was forgiven for contradicting him.
We walked to his silver Mercedes, which consumed his small grey head among a bevy of white men with huge arms and wires in their ears.
One of them gave an order in Afrikaans and he was gone.
John Pilger’s film “Apartheid Did Not Die” can be viewed on johnpilger.com [2]
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The question of 'Inqindi ne Marxism' today
Paul Trewhela 11 November 2008
Paul Trewhela writes that while the ANC is a mass of jelly real steeliness resides within the SACP
Some people, understandably, have questioned my statement that the South African Communist Party is now the "most important political party in South Africa ".
(See "The Modern Prince in South Africa", here).
I will repeat my statement and strengthen it: the SACP is now the most powerful party in South Africa.
By comparison with this organised, coherent and carefully prepared party which exists both outside and inside the African National Congress, the ANC is a mass of jelly.
The ANC's national conference at Polokwane last December should now be understood as a carefully prepared and democratically conducted purge by the SACP and its allies of the only organised and coherent opposition to the Communist Party within the ANC: the grouping around ex-President Thabo Mbeki.
The Mbeki grouping suffered a rout.
It was wiped out in the senior executive body of the ANC, its National Executive Committee, and thus also - given the despotic nature of South Africa's electoral law, which allows Members of Parliament no accountability to constituents and thus no freedom of conscience - in Parliament and in the Government.
Given the despotic character of the ANC's practice (developed under the Mbeki presidency) of party "deployment" of its so-called "cadres" throughout the agencies of state, there is no independent civil service, and the SACP is now increasingly in control of the levers of state.
In that sense, the eleven months since the conference at Polokwane have seen a fully constitutional "coup" within Government and the state in South Africa.
That is the significance of two related facts of the last six months: that an unelected ANC backroom apparatchik, Kgalema Motlanthe - whatever his qualities might or might not be - was parachuted into Parliament and then into the Presidency of the country, followed by the departure from the ANC of forfmer senior leaders of the Mbeki grouping and their forming of the nucleus of a rival political party, currently known as the Congress of the People.
With its two most senior leaders the former Minister of Defence and ANC national chairman, Mosiuoa Lekota, and the former Gauteng premier, Mbhazima Shilowa, this indicates the scale of the rout.
Only by means of withdrawal from the ANC could the Mbeki grouping - a year ago, still the princes of ANC and government - attempt to regroup and recover some of its lost political position in the country.
In order to regroup, the Mbeki faction has had to change.
Despite the fact that Mbeki himself and most of his most senior former administrative aides (his former Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad; his secret services minister, Ronnie Kasrils; his police minister, Charles Nqakula; and even Shilowa, former premier of the most powerful economic and administrative region of the country) are all former members of the SACP and had commanded the party for decades, and are in the best position to know the scale of their defeat by a revamped SACP, this faction has been forced to turn to many of the most important ideas in the political philosophy of its former main rival, the Democratic Alliance, rooted in the liberal and constitutional history of western Europe and the United States.
The leopard has had to change its spots.
Lekota was best placed to represent the former Mbeki grouping as its most articulate public exponent, in making this sharp turn.
This was for several reasons.
He had not been a member of the SACP. He did not go into exile, and had not been part of the Stalinistic apparatus of the SACP and the ANC in their despotic rule over ANC members in exile.
He had developed extensive personal support and respect as a leader of the United Democratic Front within South Africa during the Eighties.
He belongs to the generation of the Black Consciousness Movement within the country from the late Sixties and Seventies, and thus has a completely different political pre-history by comparison with his older colleagues, who were suckled almost from the womb by the SACP and the ANC.
And finally, in a grouping heavily dependent for mass support on an ethnic base so far mainly of isiXhosa speakers, he is a SeSotho speaker.
The SACP prepared well.
No adequate attention has been given to this by any political commentator, myself included, despite the fact that the thinking of the SACP in preparing itself to become kingmaker of the country has been in the public domain for at least three years.
The victory at Polokwane was won by years of slow, careful winning of support on the ground by the SACP, particularly in the trade unions, but also in ANC branches and in ANC bodies such as the Youth League, the Women's League and the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association, as well as in a variety of civic associations.
This was guided by a significant re-positioning of the political philosophy of the Communist Party.
By the time of the downfall of the Soviet Union in the very early 1990s, the SACP - and its predecessor, the Communist Party of South Africa - had been governed by a slave-like obedience to the dictates of the Russian state for roughly 70 years.
No demand by Moscow for this or that political turn was ever refused, or ever seriously contested.
When Stalin and Bukharin (soon to be eaten up by Stalin) demanded a major reorientation of the South African party at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, it duly complied, and accompanied its new turn with the expulsion of the party's founder and ardent loyalist, Sidney Percival Bunting.
(He was lucky not to be in Russia, and died in his bed in South Africa).
Return of the SACP to South Africa as a legal body in 1990, and access of its members to government from 1994 as leaders of the ANC, was best symbolised in the figure of Joe Slovo, the leading architect of the party's political and military strategy over the previous thirty years.
The fact that Slovo was born and bredin Lithuania, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union very shortly before the Nazi invasion less than five years after his family's departure for South Africa, was not entirely unconnected with the slavish loyalty of the SACP (and of the ANC in exile) to the Soviet state.
(Had they remained, all Slovo's family would have perished under Hitler).
ANC government was a triumph for the SACP, but combined with the downfall of the Soviet Union - its essential precondition - this was also the cause of a major crisis for the party.
A whole swathe of senior SACP leaders from exile, including Jacob Zuma, the current ANC president, as well as Mbeki, simply abandoned their membership of the CP.
Simultaneously, a whole corps of ANC leaders and significant supporters were almost overnight inducted into the capitalist class, whether by means of state-enforced Black Economic Empowerment programmes or through the strategic opening of their executive bodies to politically helpful black leaders by previously white-owned major corporations.
This in turn was integrally related to the strategic neglect by the ANC (managed essentially by the Mbeki grouping) of the statist economic paragraphs of the ANC's most general programmatic document, the Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955.
A Stalinist-type command economy had been advocated by the SACP within the ANC for decades.
Within South Africa, however, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe - home from home for many of the exile leaders, and hundreds of their cadres - was followed by a rush for sudden wealth by the ANC and former SACP elite, a bizarre social transformation in which so-called revolutionaries became fat cats overnight.
The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), a proposed statist economic programme prepared by the Macroeconomic Research Group (Merg) under the direction of the former SACP leader, founder of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, former Maoist and former official of the Bank of China, the late Vella Pillay, was left to gather dust.
A fixed pillar of the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies - that no action should be taken against the primary interests of big capital in South Africa, and against the rights of property in general - remained firmly in place: until Polokwane.
Its most visible expression, a grotesque embourgeoisment of the firmament of black political life in South Africa, was sullenly resented however by lower-level leaders and members of the SACP, who saw their erstwhile comrades elevated into gods while "the masses" continued in poverty more or less as before, and in some cases, in worse poverty.
Along with this sense of "the revolution betrayed", and a sense among lower-level party cadres that they had been relegated to the status of oxen for bringing in the vote for the elite at election time, the tide of economic globalism simultaneously swept away a good deal of South Africa's former industrial base; and words were sometimes heard among older black people that, economically, life had actually been better under apartheid.
This was good growing weather for the language of economic autarky, whether of the fascist or the Stalinist type: the state in command over capital, the state as the miracle-worker that would put an end to the poverty and disenfranchisement of the masses, as the dispenser of social justice, and as the avenging angel of retribution on the bowed heads of the elite.
The rhetoric of the Zuma grouping at the head of the ANC "alliance" now speaks this language, so familiar from the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It is the language of the mob, of "Kill for Zuma", of the establishment by the party-state of street committees (or rather, vigilantes) in the place of an efficient police force, of dispensing with the right of the accused to remain silent when in the hands of the police (see here).
Organiser-in-chief within this state can only be the SACP, the party which has most carefully prepared for this day.
The self-implosion of its former temple of holiness, the Soviet Union, required this party to begin to think for itself (a little), or die.
It has done so, more thoroughly than it has been given credit for. Its principal "theoreticians", among them the party's deputy general secretary, Jeremy Cronin, replaced the worn-out, sclerotic loyalty to the dead letter of the Soviet textbooks (familiar from the days of his predecessor, Michael Harmel) with eclectic magpie borrowings from varied writings made available by the international New Left of the Seventies, which had previously been Verboten to the party faithful.
Principal among these has been the strategy of the flexible, patient, building-up of support at base throughout the society, as advocated in the writings of the jailed Italian marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), discussed previously here).
There was a time in exile when a committed Gramscian in the ANC would have landed up in Quatro prison camp in Angola, the SACP/ANC centre for the re-education and rehabilitation of dissenting voices.
Now, however, even more terrible concepts from the lexicon of the doomed have entered the basic thought structures of the revamped SACP, among them - get thee behind me, Satan! - Trotsky's concept of "the revolution betrayed" and his theory of the "uninterrupted revolution".
(Such unwise sentiments led to their murder for tens of thousands in the days of Comrade Stalin, applauded enthusiastically by the SACP and its predecessor, the CPSA). But more is nog 'n dag, and the SACP has been liberated by the downfall of its Soviet patron to flirt fruitfully with the language and concepts it previously scorned and punished as heretical.
"The revolution betrayed" - by this, the SACP explains the defection from its ranks of the leaders of the Mbeki wing who became transmogrified into the sleek, well-tailored administrators of the post-1994 capitalist state.
"Uninterrupted revolution" - by this classic phrase from Trotsky (alternatively, "the permanent revolution", or "the revolution in permanence"), the SACP means that the task ahead is the really important, second revolution that will transfer the state power into its own hands and all the means of production into the hands of the state (i.e., itself).
"Bonapartist" - here too the Central Committee employs a phrase from the vocabulary of trotskysim.
Given that the SACP is a Stalinist party, it does so rather creatively, since Trotsky used the phrase to refer principally to Stalin and the way in which Stalin's bureaucracy imposed itself as the dictatorial power following the decline of the revolutionary process, in the same way that Napoleon Bonaparte ascended as Emperor of the French after the revolutionary Jacobins had followed their moderate rivals, the Girondists, to the guillotine. The SACP refers to Mbeki and his apparatus as "bonapartist" (not without good reason, given its autocratic behaviour).
This is thoroughly dishonest, however, since no party in South Africa is as programmatically commited to bonapartist dictatorship as this unregenerate Stalinist party itself ("dictatorship of the proletariat").
These three phrases from the banned book of trotskyism are accompanied by a fourth phrase, generally heard during the decades of the exile from the followers of Chairman Mao Zedong. (Some few of these followers were expelled from the SACP, as in the case of the jailed maoist leader, Rowley Arenstein, and also Vella Pillay in London ).
This fourth phrase, the term "comprador", is used to describe the members of a weak, colonial bourgeoisie intimately bound up with and dependent on the great metropolitan capitals of the main centres of international finance: Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse, and so on.
Under the term "comprador", these local capitalists are regarded as traitors to the nation in which they operate, as agents of the imperialist foreign powers.
A substantial number of them found themselves before the firing squad in Mao's China , the prototype for the revamped SACP in its war against the "comprador" black bourgeoisie in South Africa , which it accuses of betraying the masses of black people in the interests of white capital.
No doubt this discourse sits uneasily in the post-Polokwane ANC, given the (temporary) co-existence alongside Jacob Zuma and the SACP of a most eminent trio of alleged "compradors" and beneficiaries of BEE: Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, all notoriously accused of treachery by ex-President Mbeki in 2001 through the agency of his then police minister, the late Steve Tshwete.
The careful preparation over three years of the SACP's peaceful "coup" at Polokwane should be studied even more carefully by anyone interested in the future of South Africa.
An important document from the SACP in which the subject matter of this article is discussed at length appeared in a special edition of the party's online magazine, Bua Komanisi (May 2006).
It is preceded by a foreword written by the party's general secretary, Blade Nzimande, who states that it is an official discussion document of the party's Central Committee, though it did "not constitute the official views of the SACP".
Interestingly, it indicates that the current dispute over the role of the SACP in South African politics between the Lekota-Shilowa grouping in the "Congress of the People" and the Zuma wing of the ANC (with the SACP its principal organiser and strategist) is the outcome of a long-lasting thread of argument in South African political life.
It notes that the issue was expressed in a debate among very senior political prisoners on Robben Island in the 1970s and 1980s, around a paper written by the High Command of Umkhonto weSizwe, entitled 'Inqindi ne Marxism' (Nationalism and Socialism).
The acrimonious response of the Mbeki grouping (then at the head of the ANC, in party and government) to the SACP's document of May 2006 in Bua Komanisi is available here.
It ends (page 10) with a series of difficult questions for the SACP, including problems of infiltration and asking (item 53) whether the SACP has the right to align itself with some sections of the ANC against others - and asks how the ANC should respond.
These questions are now given an even sharper edge, as the beaten political grouping which once seemed almost as secure as the old National Party surveys its one-time ally, turned adversary, turned master in the party and the government.
Ahead of the general elections next year, the question of the SACP is the question of the hour. Nobody knows this party so well as its former members and allies.
One would be unwise to think that the leaders of the Lekota/Shilowa grouping do not know what they are talking about when they argue - however they might restrain their language in public - that the SACP is a threat to the Constitution.
These documents should be studied and restudied, and their thinking carefully analysed. They are at the centre of the forthcoming election campaign, and much else.
When Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu warned in September that "The way of retribution leads to a banana republic", and Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of the ousted President, argued that South Africa is entering an "era of anarchy" these are the parameters of the coming conflict, in which a central place is held by the Communist Party.
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19 February 2009 02:15Paul Trewhela on the economics of the ANC
The ruling party may go left or right but can it turn away from sleaze?
Corruption in the ruling party, in government and in the judicial process, now redolent in the air with exposure of the scandal over Carl Niehaus - spokesperson until last week of the African National Congress, appointed to promote its election campaign under the presidency of Jacob Zuma - is an iconic reality that reveals a bigger and wider truth about contemporary South Africa.
A pervasive culture of sleaze, on which the Niehaus saga throws a shaft of light, sits squalidly beneath a cult of ideological rectitude and faith within the ANC, which requires attention in its own right.
As a primary division within the dominant ruling party, this conflict over ideology probably did not receive the study and attention it required in the English-language media in South Africa.
What it has in common with the Niehaus imbroglio is its concern with the economic - according to Karl Marx, the fundamental determinant in human affairs.
In my article "Jacob Zuma in exile: three unexplored issues" (Politicsweb, 16 February, see here), I argued that Jacob Zuma's "declaration of continued faith in its ideological goals" at the Party conference of the South African Communist Party in 2000 was a "key component of a now dominant political praxis which is certain to reverse the economic policy" of former President Thabo Mbeki, after the coming general election in April.
I suggested that this declaration in 2000 by Mr Zuma, a former member of the Politburo of the SACP, might be a guide to understanding the passions that have torn the ANC apart over the last two years.
In the eyes of the SACP, I wrote, "Mbeki's own reversal of ANC economic policy in 1996, through his high-handed replacement of the ANC's previous statist economic Reconstruction and Development Policy (RDP) with the free-market policy of Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), was an act of treason, by which he earned the undying hatred of the Party."
Strange as it might seem, it might be helpful to visualise this conflict within the ANC in terms of a diverted religious impulse.
During the 20th century, societies deriving from a previously strong Christian ethos became predominantly secular and post-religious in their intellectual, cultural, political and social conduct.
For South Africa, this has taken shape particularly as an influence coming from societies in which the predominant language is English: now the principal language of government of South Africa.
For people brought up in this linguistic culture, the prevailing secularist ethos in the media makes it very hard for them to see how religious passions, certainties and divisions - such as those of Europe four hundred years ago - could be a guide to understanding the totalitarian dynamics and passions of the 20th century, and of the early 21st century.
Provided one does not stretch the analogy too far, it is feasible to approach the internal conflict within the ANC - and now between the ANC and its breakaway defeated offshoot, the Congress of the People (Cope) - in the light of the culture of the religious war, as a prototype for understanding the wars of ideology.
With this approach, it is possible to view the titanic conflict of nearly 70 years ago between the two most powerful totalitarian states in Europe - both atheist and post-Christian in their philosophical foundation - as a terrible re-emergence in modern conditions of the worst, most manic features of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933 defiantly threw off the last remaining inhibitions deriving from a Christian moral order.
This did not inhibit these two polities however from each creating a military, political, cultural and ideological regime governed by a type of religious zeal.
Each viewed the other as a species of embodiment of Satan, in much the same way that theocratic Iran continues after three decades to view the United States as "the great Satan". Each deified its Fuhrer or Vozhd (great leader).
Each excommunicated, pursued and annihilated its heretics, such as Leon Trotsky, with the single-mindedness of a global Inquisition, and each established the most terrible and inflexible organs of inquisitorial domination over the lives and deaths, and minds, of its subjects: the Cheka/GPU/OGPU/NKVD/KGB in Russia, as the primal agency of the European atheist totalitarian police state, followed by its German successor and rival, the Gestapo and the SS. In Germany a whole people, the Jews, were type-cast as the Devil's children, to be wiped out, so that the congregation of the pure should be made clean.
Built by the atheists and philosophical materialists, Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union was the great teacher and educator of the ANC in its thirty years of exile, through the role within it of the SACP. In the past two years, the SACP has proved itself again to be the unrivalled motive force within the ANC, succeeding as the organiser and engineer of the civil, non-violent coup which toppled the Mbeki hierarchy first at the ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007, and then in toppling it from government last year.
This Party, which has inhabited the entrails of the ANC for 80 years, derives more directly than any other major political party in South African history from one of the two model European totalitarian states, in this case Stalinist Russia.
Until only twenty years ago, the ANC was furthermore directly dependent on the Russian state for money, weapons, international political support, military training and above all: ideological rectitude.
This could suggest how a division over economic policy within the ANC might have brought about such a significant political outcome, and may yet have far greater consequences in South Africa's material economic life, affecting the lives and livelihoods of all its people.
If the economic programme of the SACP can be seen as an article of religious faith, articulated as an atheist political party with the mighty force of displaced religious fervour - as in Russia and Germany in the Thirties and Forties, with their demons, heretics and fanatical warfare - then one might imagine how the proponents of this economic programme in South Africa might seek to translate their dream into reality, in the face of pragmatic or rational considerations.
In this area, too, as I argued previously, the biography by Jeremy Gordin, Jacob Zuma: A Biography (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg , 2008), provides no adequate information or analysis.
And once again, in the battle of the books, it is the biography by Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg , 2007), to which one can turn for a historical background, together with interpretive framework.
For this one must begin, though, with the statist economic provisions, hovering somewhere between Stalinism and Keynesianism, in the ANC's programmatic and iconic document, the Freedom Charter, formulated in good part by Communist Party activists only two years after the death of Stalin and adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955.
These have a distinctly anti-capitalist character, though the form in which they might be implemented was left unclear.
The principal economic articles of the Freedom Charter state:
"The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.
"All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people.
"...all the land [shall be] redivided among those who work it.
"The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers.
...All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose."
The crucial phrase here is: "the state". The major economic activity of the society is to be put into the hands of the state.
This could be interpreted either as a programme for a violent Communist revolution, on the model of Russia and China , or for a massive non-violent programme of economic state control going way beyond anything attempted in Britain or Sweden after the Second World War.
Faced with the problem of how to implement this programme after the downfall of the Soviet Union and its sclerotic statist empire in Eastern Europe after 1989, the ANC in government after 1994 decided on caution.
Having won the universal franchise sought in the first article of the Freedom Charter ("The people shall govern!"), the government under the effective direction of then Deputy President Mbeki fudged on its economic articles, several years after Mbeki, Zuma, Aziz Pahad and other luminaries had let lapse their former CP membership, as had Nelson Mandela many years previously.
A crucial catalyst in January 1996 was President Mandela's appointment of Trevor Manuel to replace the (white) "non-partisan banker", Chris Liebenberg, as Finance Minister.
(The description comes from Gevisser, p.663).
As Gevisser continues, since being appointed head of the ANC's Department of Economic Policy in 1991, Manuel had become the "driver of the profound revolution in economic policy that Mbeki had begun in exile, and was an impassioned advocate of fiscal austerity and other market-friendly policies.
But the market chose not to hear this: it saw a black man, a former revolutionary, and it panicked.
The currency lost 30% of its value between January and May 1996, haemorrhaging South Africa's reserves.
The situation was exacerbated by a rancorous public debate taking place between big business on the one side and the labour movement and its allies [with the SACP to the fore - PT] on the other, as both sides scented the government's insecurity over macro-economic policy and attempted to gain advantage over it." (pp. 663-64)
Gevisser recalls Manuel telling him just after his appointment in 1996 that it was time for Africans to stop seeing the World Bank and the IMF either "as God or the Devil Incarnate. My view is the agnostic one..." (p.664)
He notes that when Manuel took office, he found on his desk a "draft policy that Mbeki had quietly godfathered the previous year. It had been developed by a group that included academics and World Bank consultants, overseen by Alec Erwin, then the deputy minister of finance..."
Manuel concluded that "South Africa had no option: the proposals went through his legendary spin machine and came out, three months later, as GEAR - the Growth, Employment and Redistribution macro-economic policy.
"Manuel took GEAR to cabinet in May 1996, having previously caucused Mbeki's support. There was no debate".
Consultation with the Congress of South African Trade Unions was, as Gevisser reports, "limited", the GEAR programme being effectively "imposed by the executive." (p.664-65)
Therein lies the central source of Mbeki's apostasy, as seen by the SACP, Cosatu and the Zuma-led ANC, which considers itself to have returned to sacred text, to the economic provisions of the Freedom Charter, on the eve of the most severe world financial collapse and resulting mass unemployment since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Gevisser notes that GEAR would come to be seen as the "final betrayal, by Mbeki and the middle-class values he represented", and would engender "far more internal dissent that either Mbeki's AIDS scepticism or his ‘quiet diplomacy' in Zimbabwe" and would lead directly to the "most serious schism the party had experienced in its century of existence - and would fuel the rebellion against Mbeki following his firing of Jacob Zuma in 2005."
Mbeki was "inevitably targeted as the West's Trojan horse, ferrying global capitalism into the ANC beneath the eyes of his comrades." (p.666)
The catalyst for GEAR's opponents, transforming them from disgruntled dissenters into the coming government of the state, was Mbeki's dismissal of Zuma as Deputy President, following his indictment on corruption charges.
In the fork in the road of the ANC in 1996, over GEAR, Mbeki had followed the pragmatic route.
His adaptation to the global realities governing South Africa's capital markets followed also the cautious approach of the predominant current within the leadership of the ANC, represented in exile in Lusaka by Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki himself, and by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in prison on Robben Island, as opposed to the emphatic Stalinist approach on Robben Island of the SACP leaders Harry Gwala and Govan Mbeki, Thabo's father.
In context of the debate on Robben Island on the fundamental issue of "Inqindi ne Marxism" (very roughly, nationalism or Marxism), this pragmatic current prevailed in the ANC in the transitional negotiations over the dismantling of apartheid until the end of the Mbeki presidency, and followed the route of "Inqindi".
(For a discussion of this debate, see my article "Inqindi ne Marxism"here).
Under the aegis of the SACP in its mobilisation of support for Zuma, the ANC has now reversed track towards the path of "Marxism", as advocated on Robben Island by the veteran Stalinists Harry Gwala and Govan Mbeki.
These were two of the young Jacob Zuma's principal mentors in his ten years in prison. In a valuable passage in his biography, Gordin notes that "what really gets Zuma going, when he talks about his years on Robben Island , is the study groups and political discussions." In conducting their political education, Zuma told Gordin, it was "the Durban boys who were at the forefront.
There were five of us from Durban, including myself and Harry Gwala.... [We] studied intensely.
We really worked hard." Gordin cites a third "Durban boy", Ebrahim Ebrahim, as stating that it was "Gwala and himself who played a major role in expanding Zuma's knowledge of English, and especially his political horizons."
Gordin observes that some of these political discussions, tremendously formative for the young Zuma, "became extremely heated, and that Mandela and Govan Mbeki clashed repeatedly to the detriment of their relationship." (p.21)
Relying on first-hand information from Mac Maharaj as well as documentary material, Professor Padraig O'Malley has provided a valuable insight into one of the most important of these historical debates.
On Robben Island, he writes, Govan Mbeki and Harry Gwala "argued that the ANC and the SACP were one and the same; Mandela insisted they were not.
After acrimonious exchanges, the matter was deferred to the ANC in Lusaka, which came down on Mandela's side."
(Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, Viking, New York, 2007, p.155)
In this decision from the ANC headquarters in exile, the views of Tambo and Slovo could only have been crucial. O'Malley adds further that in his second period of incarceration on Robben Island from1976 to 1988, "Gwala was openly opposed...to Mandela's nationalism; for Gwala, communism - a socialist state - was the end of the struggle." (note 15, p.561)
This was the ANC leader who "came closest to being a warlord in his own right," in the words of O'Malley, and who "declared a scorched-earth policy on Inkatha" in the internecine warfare of the late 1980s and early 1990s in KwaZulu-Natal. (p.264)
Contrary to Harry Gwala, Zuma played a critical role in 1994, however, in close association with Mandela, in helping to put an end to the carnage raging between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, when, as two fellow Zulu-speaking former members of Umkhonto weSizwe have written, the country "teetered on the brink of full-out civil war".
Thula Bopela and Daluxolo Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe: Fighting for a Divided People, Galago, Alberton, 2005. p.255)
Gordin records that Zuma expressed a belief, in discussions with him, that "the deathly battles that broke until the mid-1990s were the result of Mandela not having been allowed to see [Chief Mangosuthu] Buthelezi [the leader of the IFP] immediately on his release."
He quotes Zuma as saying: "Of course it was vital that Buthelezi was made to feel part of what was happening....If Mandela had embraced him in the beginning, what happened might not have. And it wasn't even so much the national leadership that stopped Mandela - it was the Natal leadership, people like Harry Gwala. It was a giant mistake." (in Gordin, p.54)
This suggests that while perhaps susceptible to the "Marxism" argument advocated by Gwala and Govan Mbeki in prison, urging the identity of SACP and ANC interests in economic policy, Zuma as a future President of South Africa might well attempt to pursue rather the direction of "Inqindi", as did his predecessors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
The Niehaus saga, however, suggests - again - that there will be no Damascus turn from sleaze, given the manner in which the materialist economic philosophy of the SACP and the ANC in the Soviet period translated instantly into a collective materialist practice of personal enrichment, once the ANC became government of the state.
In a profound article this week reflecting on this process, Justice Malala recalled Thabo Mbeki's words in delivering the Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 2006, in which the former President lamented the ideology of "Get rich! Get rich! Get rich!" which seized the beneficiaries of the ending of apartheid.
There is no reason to believe that any new ANC administration, however, will do any more than Mbeki, than add words to deeds.
Whatever its discourse about "worker and poor" and its reiteration of the anti-capitalist clauses of the Freedom Charter, statification of the economy by a Zuma/SACP administration coupled with a forcible redistribution of property will simply add an additional tranche of beneficiaries to the client state, and further debilitate the economy.
As a former political prisoner has wisely written, "Are secrecy and cover-up essential parts of post-liberation politics?
Do we inevitably carry the 'necessary deceits' of extra-parliamentary struggle politics into post-liberation - so steeped in lying to the authorities in the struggle years that we cannot tell the truth to others or perhaps even ourselves afterwards - or are we simply blinded by the 'radiance' of our cause and the end justifying the means?"
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October 13, 2012
Upheaval Grips South Africa as Hopes for Its Workers Fade
TEMBISA, South Africa
When Morris Sello arrived in Johannesburg from his home province of Limpopo in 1994, his horizons seemed limitless.
Apartheid, the oppressive hand that smothered opportunity for black people for decades, was gone.
He dreamed of a slice of the life white South Africans had enjoyed for years: a good job, a house, a car, good schools for his children.
He found a job as a truck driver.
But nothing else has worked out the way he planned. Instead of a house, he lives with his wife and four children in a fetid shack in this sprawling township.
A car is unthinkable.
The local schools are abysmal, and his faith that his children will do better in life is ebbing.
“I hope they can do better,” he said, a mix of resignation and despair in his voice.
“I hope.”
Mr. Sello was among tens of thousands of workers to walk off the job in the biggest wave of labor unrest to hit South Africa since the end of apartheid.
Wildcat strikes by gold, platinum and iron ore miners have crippled one of South Africa’s most important industries, prompting the nation’s first credit rating downgrade in nearly two decades and a slide in the country’s currency, the rand, to a three-year low.
And the troubles are far from over.
The truck drivers have ended their nearly three-week strike, but not before causing food and fuel shortages that sent shudders through an already struggling economy.
The mine strikes have dragged on, and some municipal workers have announced plans to join the picket lines as well.
South Africa’s economy was already ailing.
The crisis in Europe, its largest trading partner, has taken a grim toll. Amid the slump, hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared. Economists are cutting their already anemic growth forecasts for South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy.
Infighting among leaders of the ruling African National Congress has all but paralyzed the government's response. Much of South Africa's political elite are focusing on whether President Jacob Zuma's deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe, or another rival will challenge him as head of the party and president of the country. In explaining its downgrade of South Africa, Moody's said that it acted in part because of "increased concerns about South Africa's future political stability."
South African employers and unions have long had rancorous relations, and strikes are a common feature of life here. But this time seems to be different. While the unrest is specifically about pay, it has tapped a deep well of anger among the employed, who are frustrated with the African National Congress, which came to power in 1994 at the end of white rule promising “a better life for all.”
Nowadays, the party is increasingly seen as interested mainly in self-enrichment, an impression underscored by reports that the government is paying for $27 million in renovations to Mr. Zuma’s private village home, ostensibly for security reasons. The project is the subject of multiple investigations.
Altogether, the labor unrest, broad disillusionment, dimming economic prospects and political inertia represent perhaps the most serious crisis South Africa’s young democracy has faced.
“In 1994 there were massive problems, but there was also a massive amount of hope,” said William Gumede, a political analyst.
“Now people feel hopeless.
People have lost confidence in all of these institutions they trusted will make a difference, like the unions and the A.N.C.
The new institutions of democracy — Parliament, the courts — people have also lost confidence that those can protect them and help them.
That is why they go for violence and take law into own hands.”
South Africa’s peaceful transformation from brutal white rule to a nonracial democracy has been called a miracle, but in reality it was something more pragmatic and, its architects hoped, more durable: a grand bargain.
Full voting rights for all would end white political rule. White-dominated capitalism remained in place, but aggressive programs to include blacks were created.
Workers were given the right to strike, but unions linked arms with the A.N.C.
Now the terms of that bargain are increasingly unacceptable to South Africa’s poor, threatening to unravel the fragile consensus that kept Africa’s richest economy going through a tumultuous transition.
According to the Afrobarometer, a survey completed last year, 47 percent of South Africans rated the country’s economic condition as “very bad” or “fairly bad.”
The survey found that 41 percent said their living conditions were at least “fairly bad.” Asked whether the country was headed in the right direction, 46 percent said “yes,” and the same percentage said “no.”
These frustrations have boiled into violence in the past two months as illegal strikes have roiled the mining industry.
It began when rock drill operators at a platinum mine in Marikana walked off the job in August, and spiraled out of control when the police opened fire on them, killing 34.
The workers ultimately won a hefty pay increase, and other miners have adopted their tactics.
Reuters reported that about 1,000 protesters were dispersed by police using tear gas and rubber bullets near Rustenburg on Friday night.
No injuries were reported.
Carrying traditional weapons like clubs, spears and machetes, the workers have provided a menacing spectacle on the news and frightened international investors.
Most of the strikers were not members of the National Union of Mineworkers, the country’s largest union and part of the trade union group that is allied with the A.N.C.
They had left the union for more radical upstarts, painting the old-line unions as too complacent with power and wealth.
The crisis has prompted mainstream unions to take a tougher line.
“We don’t want cowards in the struggle, comrades,” declared one transport union leader at a rally in Johannesburg.
The A.N.C.’s actions since the end of apartheid are notable.
A government program to give houses to the poor has put roofs over the heads of 2.5 million families.
More than 15 million South Africans get small but essential welfare grants to stay afloat. Electricity and running water have become available to millions of black South Africans for the first time.
But schools in townships and rural areas are a shambles. Hunger and disease still gnaw at the poorest.
Unemployment is rife.
And the misery is not equally shared: South Africa also has one of the world's highest levels of income inequality.
A tiny, wealthy black elite has emerged, while millions more remain in poverty.
Workers like Mr. Sello are supposed to be the lucky ones.
They have jobs, unlike more than a quarter of their fellow citizens (the jobless rate is even higher among young black people).
Still, Mr. Sello struggles to live on his take-home pay of about $650 a month.
There are the usual expenses — rent and food — plus many costs resulting from the government’s failure to provide basic services.
The schools in Tembisa, a black township that dates to apartheid, are so bad that he sends his children to distant suburban schools.
With no reliable public transportation there, Mr. Sello spends as much as a quarter of his salary on minibus fares for his children.
His younger brother is unemployed and has a child, and his mother depends on him, too. Crime is a constant worry — three times his cellphone was stolen; his house was broken into and all of his clothing taken.
“The money I get is never enough,” Mr. Sello said.
His salary is too high to qualify for a free government house, too low to qualify for a mortgage. His eldest son, Kgomotso, hopes to become a doctor, but Mr. Sello said he had nothing saved for tuition. “I tell him, study hard, don’t end up like me,” Mr. Sello said. “But I don’t know where the money for varsity will come from.”
His early hopes have disappeared. He voted in 1994’s euphoric election, and again in 1999.
But he did not vote in the last election, in 2009, and has no plans to do so in the next presidential election, in 2014.
“I am very disappointed in this government,” Mr. Sello said. “I lost faith in them.
They are stealing too much and leaving us with nothing.”
Mukelwa Hlatshwayo contributed reporting
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http://www.zcommunications.org/south-africa-s-new-apartheid-by-sabine-cessou
South Africa’s New Apartheid
A group of building workers relaxed on the pavement in central Cape Town, enjoying their lunch break.
Every minute was precious; nobody was in a hurry to get back to work.
“They pay us peanuts,” said a bricklayer with a gold tooth. On the equivalent of $1,470 a month, he is not too badly off; in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, the builders’ unions secured pay increases of 13-16% by threatening not to complete work in time. They are the exception.
There has been extreme tension in South Africa since 16 August, when the police killed 34 strikers at Lonmin plc’s platinum mine in Marikana, near Johannesburg, an incident of huge symbolic importance, since the forces of law and order shooting at demonstrators remind all of the apartheid era. Yet South Africa is now a democratic and multiracial state, since 1994 governed by the African National Congress (ANC).
The strikers were part of its historic electoral base, South Africa’s poor and black majority.
According to official figures, poor households (62% black, 33% mixed-ancestry) make up half the population (25.5 million) of this industrialised country, the only emerging market in sub-Saharan Africa.
The reaction to the Marikana killings recalls that to the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, when the forces of the apartheid regime (1948-1991) killed 69 black people in the township, 60km from Johannesburg.
They had been demonstrating against the requirement for “non-whites” to carry passbooks outside their homelands or designated areas. When the news reached Cape Town, rioters in the black township of Langa burned public buildings.
Since Marikana, there have been wildcat strikes by mine, transport and farm workers. Farm workers in Western Cape Province have demanded that their pay be doubled from the minimum wage of 75 rand a day to 150 rand ($20).
This has led to clashes with the police, the burning of vineyards and the looting of shops. Workers have been sacked, but there is no social dialogue. In November two farm workers were killed during a demonstration in the village of De Doorns, 180km from Cape Town.
The Lonmin miners had demanded a pay increase from $540 to $1,620 a month; after a six-week strike, they secured a rise of 22% and a bonus of $255. With the help of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the farm workers around De Doorns won a 52% rise in February, bringing their pay to 105 rand ($13.50) a day.
“It’s like cancer spreading,” said Andile Ndamase, a union representative at a cement company in Cape Town and disillusioned member of the ANC. “The riots started well before Marikana; since then the unrest has only got worse.
We are demonstrating for a better tomorrow, and we are tired of waiting for it.”
Political heritage
The social power struggle is part of the political heritage of the apartheid era. The black trade unions affiliated with Cosatu were authorised in 1985 by a racist regime that had its back against the wall and needed negotiating partners.
While Nelson Mandela was still in prison and the ANC was banned, Cosatu took part in a huge protest movement. Its calls for a national strike helped to paralyse the South African economy, under pressure from international sanctions since 1985.
Today the black trade unions, which have 2.2 million members, are demanding real social policies from the government and improved working conditions for all. Yet these unions are in government. In 1990 Cosatu, the South African Communist Party and the ANC formed a “revolutionary” tripartite alliance for far-reaching social change.
The left wing of the ANC is made up of Communists and trade unionists, whom the party tries to keep in line by giving them key jobs.
Senior Communist Party figures fill many ministerial posts; representatives of Cosatu sit on the ANC’s national executive committee.
This undermines the credibility of their opposition to the ANC’s neoliberal economic policy.
Change in our lifetime?
Early in the morning, the station in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest black township, was crowded with people buying tickets. A
one-way trip into town costs 8.50 rand ($1.15); a monthly public transport pass is $13.50, 5% of the average salary of a private security guard ($270).
On the train, women caught up on their sleep while vendors walked up and down selling crisps, drinks, socks and earrings.
In Cape Town, many of the passengers made their way to the bus station, on the roof of the railway station, where minibuses and taxis waited to ferry them to the white residential suburbs where they work.
These private taxis make up for the considerable deficiencies of the public transport system.
From dawn to dusk, they cover most of the transport needs of black South Africans who don’t own a car.
The journey costs 5 rand.