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.