Making sense of Marikana
By Peter Hall
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Almost two decades after the end of Apartheid, with a modern constitution and seemingly endless goodwill, policemen shouldn’t be killing striking workers. But it happened, and now we have to try to make sense of it all.
1991:South Africa: Meeting of miners on a wildcate strike in Republic of Bophuthatswana, a fictional country that was granted independence by South Africa’s apartheid-era rulers in 1977. Copyright 1991 Robert Gumpert
To start, it’s important to put this story in its global context. The great recession, playing out in a resource-based economy with structural inequality, class divisions and neo-liberal policies, probably gets us far in understanding how the conditions for the August violence were laid. South Africa is not the only country in this situation. I emphasize this point because like many Americans, South Africans often play the exceptionalism card; for instance, both nations have their contradictory, colonial myths about spaces of unrecognized potential populated by savages. South Africa’s transition from Apartheid left its own mythologies; even the notion of ‘peaceful transition’ is a claim of exceptionalism that belies the death and destruction visited upon Angola, Mozambique as well as on citizens at home. And there is a powerful myth that South Africa has only a race problem, not a class problem. So, yes, some part of the Marikana story is the same story that is also playing out in Peru, Indonesia, China, Greece, the world.
But that’s not a very satisfying explanation for those of us who had, and who still have, so much hope for a democratic South Africa. It also doesn’t help us understand the particular form this violence took. A great deal of ink has been spilled reporting on the massacre of August 16th at Lonmin’s Marikana mine, though it is hard to get a clear picture of events. The strike at Lonmin – not the only strike in the South African mining sector this year – started on August 10th. Clashes in the week before the massacre between rival unions left several people, including some policemen, dead. It is unclear whether the police were actually directly threatened by the strikers on August 16th, but it seems reasonable to say both that they felt their lives were in danger and that they over-reacted. Since then, more people have been killed, including a local ANC councillor and a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official. In response, the army was sent in patrol the area, and bizarrely, charges against the striking miners for causing the death of other massacred miners were first laid and then dropped. Expelled ANC youth-leader, Julius Malema, got in on the act, rallying miners and his supporters against President Zuma. When pressed, the current South African president can talk a good populist game, but so far his government has defined itself mostly for continuing the same neoliberal policies of the Mbeki administration that preceded his presidency. A commission of inquiry is now underway; perhaps a full account of the events will yet be told.
“this is especially a story about a union that is increasingly perceived to be establishment-oriented, both at the shop-floor level and also by virtue of its alliance with business elites in the ANC-led government”
In one of the best articles I’ve read, academics Bezuidenhout, Chinguno and von Holdt (download article here) argue that the two institutional failures lie behind the tragic events. First, industrial relations institutions failed to contain workplace conflicts in a context of gross inequality. Both mine management and the NUM lost the trust of rock drill operators. In part this was because of decentralized bargaining in the platinum mining sector, which created large disparities in earnings amongst miners doing the identical, dangerous, work. But this is especially a story about a union that is increasingly perceived to be establishment-oriented, both at the shop-floor level and also by virtue of its alliance with business elites in the ANC-led government. Exhibit A is Cyril Ramaphosa, former NUM Secretary General, ANC heavyweight and Lonmin board member; Ramaphosa is now at the center of a controversy over email he sent to government officials on August 15 urging a crackdown on the striking workers. At several platinum mines, the rival Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union has been able to displace NUM on the strength of genuine worker unhappiness. Second, the academics point to the failure of local governance institutions in the informal settlements around the mines. Whereas in the past, migrant miners were likely to be housed in compounds, those miners with the least attachment to place are increasing the portion of their earnings they can remit to rural areas by moving into informal settlements. In the absence of functioning governance systems, from policing to sewage, these places have failed utterly to ensure a decent quality of life. It is no surprise that the violence took place next to one of these settlements.
So while there are global dimensions to the events at Marikana, they also reflect and will shape the particular conditions in which they occurred. All of this leads me to three observations about how the weight of history is reflected the events at Marikana, and what may happen next.
“…is this what happens when one party holds state power for almost 20-years?”
First, there’s nothing new or unusual about the ANC and its allies trending right and then being pulled left by events. The ANC’s ‘natural’ political tendency is at the centre of the political spectrum. I know, I know, the ANC is in an alliance with the South African Communist Party and it got support from the Soviet Union during the struggle against Apartheid. But that is because communists were among the first white anti-racists, and because this was how the cold war alliances played out in Southern Africa. The ANC was started by an urban intellectual elite and it has always embraced non-racialism and a mixed class character. In 1960, Nelson Mandela was pushed into the armed struggle in part to capture political territory lost to the successful pass-burning campaigns of the Pan African Congress; in 1973 and 1976, frustrated workers and students took matters into their own hands and again pushed the ANC to act more boldly against the Apartheid state. That is part of the story of the ANC’s incredible, century-long success. Indeed, I will take it as a sign of the ‘weakness’ of the current ANC leadership if they cannot exploit Marikana to re-incorporate worker-based organizations and others on their left flank through a series of populist concessions. Conversely, perhaps the unwillingness of the ANC leadership after Mandela to act in a more populist way suggests that something more fundamental has changed; is this what happens when one party holds state power for almost 20-years?
Second, that state which granted so many privileges to generations of white South Africans continues to exert inertia. Part of the Marikana story is about ill-equipped and frightened policemen getting incomplete or outright bad orders. Changes in the leadership and composition of the police, or indeed other organs of the state are important, but they do not quickly translate into changes in operating manuals and training practices, let alone organizational cultures and deeply ingrained stereotypes. Changing the name of the South African Police Force –as it was known under Apartheid, with its overtly militaristic connotation – to the South African Police Service was a necessary step, but not the sufficient one. And what of the doctrine of common purpose under which some miners were charged with causing the death of the other miners shot by the police? In the initial reporting of these charges, a lot was made of the fact that this same doctrine was used in the Apartheid era against people participating in protests that resulted in the deaths of councillors, policemen and others accused of aiding in oppression. But the problem was then, and is now, the application of the doctrine by state officials, not its existence. ‘Common purpose’ doctrine makes sense in the context of South Africa’s legal system which combines both legal code and case-based precedents. With or without Apartheid, you still need a way to charge someone who holds another person down while they were being strangled. Charging the strikers for causing the death of other strikers was spectacularly stupid; but let’s not imagine that changing state institutions is easy.
“… there is a long history of racist laws in South Africa – from well before the formal start of Apartheid in 1948 – that were designed to encourage rural workers to migrate to work in mines, factories and homes, but to never become permanent urban residents.”
And third, the events at Marikana reveal yet another instance of incomplete urbanization. Numerous factors have contributed to the persistence of circulatory migration in Southern Africa. These factors include everything from a legacy of British colonialism that attached all subjects to a notional rural homeland, to cultural practices which value traditional lands and social attachments. And, there is a long history of racist laws in South Africa – from well before the formal start of Apartheid in 1948 – that were designed to encourage rural workers to migrate to work in mines, factories and homes, but to never become permanent urban residents. Numerous apartheid laws sought, unsuccessfully, to reinforce these patterns. Today, over three-fifths of South Africans live in urban areas, but the legacy of incomplete urbanization can be seen in housing and service shortages, and in rampant urban unemployment, that have proven remarkably resistant to improvement. It is unfair to say that successive ANC governments have not tried to address these problems and that there have been no successes; but it is also inaccurate to say that enough has been done. Marikana is an extreme example, but across the country, so-called ‘service protests’ occur with regularity. The nation – and its cities in particular – still await truly transformative development.
Marikana was a tragedy that shocked and saddened me, but it probably should not have been unexpected given the institutional failures, structural inequalities and the weight of history I have tried to highlight here. The most likely scenario is that the ANC will temporarily shift in a leftward and populist direction to contain the problem. It may work at first; yet, somehow, the short term solution feels especially inadequate this time around.
Additional reading: SA Social scientists on Marikana Massacre
Peter Hall
Hall’s thoughtful, informed reflections on the Marikana massacre last August make several enlightening points that we who are not South Africans (or South Africanists), but who are for the governing “tripartite alliance” (the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP), need to study to understand better how to support it. Of his points I think the two most important for us at the start are (a) that the ANC tends not to the left, but to “the centre” of South Africa’s “political spectrum,” and (b) that the mightiest economic forces in the country, great foreign mining companies, have created a hellish labor market, with hellish social consequences, on which see, e.g., http://www.bench-marks.org.za/research/rustenburg_review_policy_gap_final_aug_2012.pdf . It was from these conditions, as Hall writes, that the raw conflict among workers in the platinum minefields broke into the slaughter at Marikana.
I have to observe that his precis of the article he cites (above, Bezuidenhout, Chinguno, von Holdt) misses a significant turn in the article’s explanation of the conflicts among workers in platinum mining. The article, brief but highly interesting on industrial relations, the structure of work, and the technically strategic position of drill operators in platinum, makes clear that the conflicts among workers were not originally and have not been essentially between “rival” unions, the established National Union of Mineworkers (the biggest union in South Africa) and a new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. The conflicts have come rather from wildcat strikes, especially among migrant workers, over wage differentials and housing, and they began months before Marikana. The NUM, defending collective contracts, has mostly tried to stop them. The AMCU, essentially a corporate operation to break the NUM, has either instigated them or rushed into them to lead a charge against the NUM. There is now a rivalry, but it is between an established national industrial union (with many problems) and a capitalist movement to use justified labor grievances (which it has provoked) for its own subversive purposes.
This awful episode leaves much to study. More than any other event in South Africa since 1994, it has cast terrible, ever brighter light on the contradictions not only in the government that the ANC-COSATU-SACP alliance forms, but also between these organizations and within each of them. It is therefore now critical that we who from abroad support the alliance keep in mind certain points that South Africans (and South Africanists) may not make because they take them for granted.
Here I would make six points. Hall suggests a couple of them, but I want to give them a different twist. The others I do not see in his reflections, maybe because he takes them for granted, or maybe because he does not think they are right or worth making. Anyway, here they all six are, as briefly as I can make them, some obvious to South Africans (and South Africanists), but probably none I believe obvious to most US American readers, and hopefully all helpful to the tripartite cause:
1. The ANC, the COSATU, and the SACP, though in alliance, are very different organizations, with different origins, histories, forces, constitutions, membership, programs, directions, and trajectories. And none of them has ever been the kind of tight machine each has sometimes (for good or ill) pretended to be, or the dictatorship their enemies have usually represented them to be. This is most true of COSATU, since from the beginning of the mining industry in South Africa to date it has like a pack of bloodhounds sought migrant labor for its live productive force.
2. The “tripartite alliance” involves overlaps and cooperation among the organizations and among their members, and it constantly promotes “unity.” But it remains an alliance, really, despite the hopes and propaganda for “unity,” more in the nature of the deal among the UK, the USSR, and the USA during World War II, than a definite bloc, like the old Labour Party in the UK, or an indefinite bloc, like the present Democratic Party, NOW, AAJ, and AFL-CIO in the USA. It started and remains a combination of political organizations (only the SACP actually a political party) with different bases, in different positions, and after different goals, but each judging it in its interest to maintain as much cooperation as they can, because the various alternatives to the alliance would almost certainly be much worse for all three and for their country’s exploited people.
3. Hall seems to me too innocent in his statement of “hope for a democratic South Africa.” The tripartite alliance is explicitly for “the national democratic revolution” in South Africa, but this is impossible for US Americans to understand if they think they have the “democracy” that the ANC-COSATU-SACP is struggling for. Most US Americans for South African “democracy” are badly in need of a good South African education in the meaning of “democracy” there. US American culture fosters an Easter-Bunny, Carl-Sandburgian notion of “democracy,” of natural popular harmony, folkish anthems, “middle-class” dignity and contentment, happy Rousseauvian communities, equality of “opportunity,” individual and collective rights (no duties), freedom of “choice,” and all resolved in “free and fair elections.” I know not everybody here carries this confused notion. But from long, bitter experience I know it is the dream from which the great majority of US Americans come, which they find it hard to get over, when they awake to discussions of “democracy,” in the USA or elsewhere. Typically, a honest discussion between US American friends of a “democratic national revolution” elsewhere and the fighters for this revolution, in a country in Latin America, say, or in Africa, who do not imagine how shallow typical US American notions of “democracy” are, has been a dialogue of the deaf, or better said, a dialogue of the mutually uncomprehending. And over the last 15 years it has grown much worse, as Washington has adopted the vocabulary and some tactics of “democratic revolution,” for New York’s purposes. South Africans who want “the national democratic revolution” in South Africa have (among many other tasks) to teach their would-be friends in the USA to overcome US political ignorance, provincialism, delusion, and presumptions about “democracy”–and to recognize and discredit Washington’s “democratic revolutionary” operations. The core of the problem is the typical US American ignorance of what class, class in the socialist sense, means for democracy. This, I think, is the ignorance that in particular COSATU and the SACP should not try to use, but to overcome and dispel, insofar as they have any influence in the USA.
4. Most of the commentaries I have read (including Hall’s) on the Marikana massacre omit consideration of the forces most dangerous to the tripartite alliance and its three parts. These are the US government, the British government, and the Israeli government, a foreign tripartite alliance, serving great New York-London corporate interests. Since 1994, behind their expressions of friendly support, respectful questions, and democratic, humanitarian concern for South Africa’s “national democratic revolution,” whatever the honesty or sincerity of individuals inside or apart from these governments and cooperating private agencies, Washington, London, and Tel Aviv-Jerusalem have been waging a war of low-intensity (like that in Central America in the 1980s-90s) against the South African tripartite alliance and severally against the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP. These organizations have plenty of problems of their own making. But the foreign triple alliance through its operations in South Africa adds to their problems and aggravates them at every opportunity. And on this strength, that is, on the opportunities it gives to foreign business in South Africa, the mining companies can deliberately scheme to divide the ANC, subvert and destroy COSATU, and totally isolate and finally evaporate the SACP. (Consider their public promotion of the AMCU before the Marikana massacre, for examples: http://www.miningweekly.com/article/emerging-amcu-mine-union-favours-competitive-coexistence-joseph-mathunjwa-2012-06-06; http://www.miningweekly.com/article/new-amcu-mining-union-on-recruitment-drive-2012-06-07; http://www.miningweekly.com/article/joseph-mathunjwa-2012-08-03.) If it is impossible to understand the hellish conditions in which the South African poor try to get jobs, work, and survive, without taking into account the mining industry and its enforcement of migrant labor, it is impossible to understand the frequent, manifest, miserable difficulties of the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP, without taking into account the foreign triple alliance’s constant war on them.
5. To begin to understand the problems of South African tripartite alliance and of its three parts, especially the problems of COSATU and the SACP, we here have to recognize the tremendous, endlessly complicated difficulties of having the responsibilities of a national government professing leftist inclinations in the face of greater powers foreign and domestic, the difficulties of honestly (never mind dishonestly) trying to make changes leftward happen, but not being able to do it, the inability to force the changes on greater powers that do not want them. What do you do? Do you hold onto positions that it would be a plunge most probably into oblivion or martyrdom to abandon, and in those positions keep trying, despite all the frustrations and disappointments and factionalism and subversion, to stay true to some laborite or socialist goal? Or do you take your chances on unarmed protest against right-wing ANC elements, protected by state security? Or do you try armed revolution, against the foreign triple alliance and South African state security? Or do you just quit? I do not mean that to recognize these difficult questions is at once to understand them, much less to have an answer for them. I know they require terrible debate. I know too the debate could be eternal, so useless. But if there is any course worse than eternal debate, or making honest mistakes, it is ignorance of the difficulties, indifference to them, flippant disregard of them.
6. My last point is, in learning more about South Africa, its injustices, the structural reasons for the miseries of its working classes, and the struggles there for the exploited, we can learn more about the rest of the world, including the USA, so that we could better struggle for justice and against exploitation here, which would do much good for such struggles elsewhere.
State inertia is real and it is not unexpected that patterns of state responses from the past repeat themselves again despite the democratic transition. However, those in power – be it in government or business – have made many choices in the past fifteen to twenty years. These have been choices about what needs to change, how should things change and who should drive the change. We cannot always be victims of some invisible – or at times in South Africa a very visible – hand of history. For example, the consistent choices to place the oversight and management of police in the hands of political appointees who could offer little in the way of comprehensive restructuring of the police force other than taking bribes or shouting “Shoot to kill” has meant that Marikana was probably inevitable. The choice to pin South Africa’s economic development path on the volatile mining-energy intersections took attention away from a host of other factors – most notably education – that might give the country a more sustainable economic path beyond the feeding at the trough of narrow economic transformation whilst easily dismissed externalities stain the countryside. Those of us on the fringes of the powerful or even those who represent many whose gains from post apartheid South Africa have been meagre are also at fault for spending too much time wathcing from the sidelines as a patronage machine consumes the state from the inside. The tide has to turn, but it could get messier before the fragments of incredible potential that sparkle around this country are assembled in such a way that they provide hope rather than be revealed as nothing more than a mirage.
This is a most insightful commentary on the events in Marikana. Thank you, Peter. On my recent trip to Pretoria in October 2012 I couldn’t help but pick up on the rather pessimistic mood of some of my friends and family in the aftermath of Marikana happenings. The strikes that followed invoked more violence and left us feeling really disempowered. Burning trucks delivering food to people because drivers do not adhere to the stike, burning trains because they run late not only have a huge economic cost, but the irrationality of these actions is certainly a wake up call. I do agree that the government needs to become more committed to work through these labor issues with the mines and the unions. Afterall – that was what we fought for when Apartheid was abolished!