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Vol. 82/No. 9 March 5, 2018
(front page)
Capitalist rulers in South Africa see new government as road to profits
BY SETH GALINSKY
The propertied rulers in South Africa are hoping the ouster of President
Jacob Zuma and his replacement with wealthy businessman Cyril Ramaphosa,
who recently replaced Zuma as president of the African National Congress
as well, signals a more favorable environment for stability and
capitalist development.
Production and trade never recovered in South Africa, the most
industrialized nation in Africa, after the economy was ravaged by the
2008 worldwide capitalist economic crisis. Mining, which once comprised
close to 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, generated
just 7.3 percent by 2016. International rating agencies downgraded the
government’s credit rating to junk status in November.
Zuma was forced to resign Feb. 14, after a bitter fight inside the ANC,
which has ruled South Africa since the overthrow of the hated apartheid
system in a mighty democratic revolution in the early 1990s. Ramaphosa
defeated the Zuma-backed candidate for ANC president Dec. 18, leading to
replacing Zuma as president of the country.
Ramaphosa was a leader of the struggle against apartheid, like Zuma, and
a founder of the National Union of Mineworkers. He became ANC general
secretary after Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990 and helped write the
nation’s new democratic constitution after apartheid was brought down.
In 1996 Ramaphosa resigned his government posts, using his connections
and ANC influence to become one of South Africa’s wealthiest
businessmen, part of the new layer of Black capitalists.
Ramaphosa’s wealth is estimated at $450 million, with stakes in mining,
finance, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola bottling plants.
He was a board member of the Lonmin mining company when 34 miners were
cut down in cold blood by cops in 2012 during a strike for higher wages
and better working conditions. The day before the miners’ rally was
attacked, Ramaphosa called on police to act against what he called the
“dastardly criminals.”
The capitalist class hopes that Ramaphosa still has enough authority
from his days as an anti-apartheid and labor leader to push through what
they call a “reset” in the economy.
Democratic revolution
Half the population in South Africa today is too young to have been
part of the democratic revolution that overturned white supremacist rule
in South Africa, a revolution that inspired working people across the
globe.
For decades the South African government controlled virtually every
aspect of the lives of African peoples there. Every individual was
assigned a race category — White, Indian (many of them descendants of
indentured servants brought to the country), Coloured (of mixed race),
and Black.
Black Africans were denied the most basic rights: where to live, who
they could live with, the right to change jobs, to own land, to farm, to
vote, to protest. A notorious pass system was imposed to control the
movement of Blacks.
“The apartheid system had one central and overriding purpose: to
organize and perpetuate the superexploitation of African labor by
capital,” wrote Jack Barnes, national secretary for the Socialist
Workers Party, in a 1985 article titled, “The Coming Revolution in South
Africa.”
In 1954 the African National Congress joined with the Indian Congress,
the South African Coloured Peoples Organization and the Congress of
Democrats — made up of white opponents of apartheid — to organize the
Congress of the People.
“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” said the
Freedom Charter the 3,000 delegates approved. The first four sections
were: The people shall govern! All national groups shall have equal
rights! The people shall share in the country’s wealth! The land shall
be shared among those who work it!
It became the program of a decadeslong struggle waged through strikes,
marches and mass disobedience. The struggle received a decisive boost
when thousands of internationalist volunteers from revolutionary Cuba
helped defeat a series of invasions of neighboring Angola by the South
African army, culminating in the 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The
defeat of the apartheid army there punctured the regime’s myth of
invincibility. Within two years the apartheid rulers were forced to free
Nelson Mandela.
The democratic revolution ended the hated system of white supremacy,
guaranteed universal citizenship rights to all who make up the nation
and opened space for working people to organize. But many demands of the
Freedom Charter have never been carried out and a revolutionary
working-class leadership has never developed that could lead the toilers
to power.
Capitalist South Africa still unequal
Although post-apartheid governments built millions of homes, extended
access to water and electricity, expanded health care, and provided
welfare payments to millions of people, class divisions have widened.
Millions live in shantytowns. A third of the population has no toilet.
Official unemployment is at 26.7 percent and Blacks still make less than
a fourth of what whites earn.
The response to Ramaphosa’s election is class-divided. He is hailed by
employers and middle-class layers in the Black community, who relate to
his story as a successful businessman.
Working people aren’t so sure. Most say they stick with the ANC, but it
doesn’t do much for them. “I keep thinking it might change, it might
change, let me give him some time,” Dipuo Kalodi, a domestic worker,
told the New York Times. “But there’s no change.”
The situation of farmworkers in the Eastern Cape have deteriorated over
the last several years, Owen Tapiwa told the Militant by phone from De
Doorns Feb. 20. Tapiwa was a participant in strikes by thousands of
farmworkers in 2012 and 2013.
“The country is rich,” Tapiwa said. “In some places people are living
good and for others it’s like another world. Thousands of farmworkers
are living in shacks, nothing is provided to them. They don’t have
proper clinics, proper food, electricity.
“We have a leadership, the ANC, but no one is actually fighting for the
people,” he said. “Here in De Doorns, the same people in the ANC are the
labor brokers, who provide workers to the farm owner.”
As Ramaphosa has taken the leadership of the ANC and the government, the
currency has surged and the South Africa Reserve Bank cranked up its
growth forecasts.
He has pledged to “engage” with mine owners on new, pro-capitalist laws.
In his Feb. 16 State of the Nation speech, Ramaphosa promised to work to
change what he admits is “a highly unequal society, in which poverty and
prosperity are still defined by race and gender.” He also called for
mine bosses, union leaders and “communities” to work together, code
words for speedup, deeper exploitation and higher profits.
On Feb. 20 Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba released the 2018 budget
promising “tough measures,” including a higher sales tax that will hit
working people hardest. Also on the table are proposals to overturn laws
passed after the fall of apartheid that make it harder for bosses to
fire workers.
Related articles:
South African revolution: Historic victory for the working people
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