Retirement
By Gene Bruskin
Retirement
Is it in fact a change of tires?
Front and rear
Replacing the balding spots
With new tread
Pumping in fresh air
To get a better grip on the road ahead
Getting ready for some bumps
And preparing to gently apply the brakes?
Or, more bluntly
Retire
As in re-tired
Tired again
More tired
Or just plain tired
The gentle slowing down
Of mind and body
And mission
Looking back not forward
To the good old days
Loosening the thread
Reflecting on what was
And could have been
Breathing deeply and channeling sadness
Resting the body
Peeking gradually into the darkness?
Or perhaps a more dialectical view
A life lived
A new one emerging
The end approaching
As it always has
With no date certain
No known final curtain.
Here the bell tolls
But the phone doesn’t ring incessantly
The emails don’t intrude obsessively
The mind sheds the many tasks
For the few
The daily churn of meetings
And greetings
Constant revisions and decisions
The swirl of people
Good, bad and ugly
All this is let go
Passed on
Left behind
But then, can one imagine
A new roaring lion emerging
Unleashing a passion of righteous fury
A project so intense
It absorbs the quite enormous energies
Of one whose tires have bumped up against
Many curbs
Testing many proverbs
In unfamiliar territory
What if one gigantic session on life
Broke through the sadness and frustration
And new vistas were revealed
Magic with electricity and zest
With all the pizzazz
Of Jazz that rhymed
And raged
And the body and mind and spirit
Wheeled off into the sunrise
What about that?
Gene Bruskin
August 7, 2011
Raising Expectations
By Peter Olney
The result is many unions today are operating as ghost ships…
In the face of the kind of anti-union terrorism practiced by corporate America, there is no substitute for face-to-face peer reinforcement organizing
Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement
By Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag Verso Books 2012
Raising Expectations has been a controversial book on the labor left. Much of that criticism flows from the fact that this book covers some of the controversial history of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
SEIU positioned itself as one of America’s most dynamic unions in the late 1980’s by being willing to throw massive resources into large scale organizing campaigns, most notably the Justice for Janitors initiative, which successfully reorganized and organized a largely Latino immigrant janitorial workforce in many of the country’s largest commercial office building markets.
A disclosure note; I had the privilege of working on this campaign in the early nineties in Los Angeles where I was able to see the campaign’s strengths and weaknesses, that have since come home to roost. SEIU has been severely weakened by its overreaching arrogance in trusteeing its large California statewide health care Local 250 in 2009. Since then, Andy Stern, the mercurial former SEIU President, has left the union for the Board of Directors of a big Pharma company, and his hand-picked leader of the California home care workers union, Tyrone Freeman, is heading to prison after being convicted of massive corruption.
McAlevey is unsparing in her criticism of various factions in SEIU’s internal wars. It would take a whole issue of Social Policy, and a far more rigorous historian than I, to unravel all the SEIU history and subplots described in Raising Expectations. In this review, I will focus on two important contributions in McAlevey’s autobiographical work: her account of contemporary union organizing challenges and her emphasis on “whole worker organizing,” an approach I agree is necessary to help move the US labor movement out of its doldrums.
Organizing in Right to Work Nevada
A fitting moment for the publication of McAlevey’s bold recounting of her 10 years of hell raising on various US labor fronts was the Michigan legislature’s decision late in 2012 to make the birthplace of the United Auto Workers a “right to work” state. “Right to work” means that membership in the union can no longer be a condition of employment. Now there are 24 so-called “right to work” states in the USA. “Right to work” severely weakens unions, in part because unions have stopped talking and relating to their members on a daily basis. The anti-union princes of darkness have found a point of vulnerability in labor: our reliance on compulsory membership and dues check off. In non “right-to-work” states, membership and monthly dues payments may be a compulsory condition of employment. A union leader need not even talk to members to sustain the resources they provide. The result is many unions today are operating as ghost ships, financed with automatic dues payments but functioning with little connection and involvement from their membership. This leaves unions incredibly vulnerable; they’re unable to motivate members to organize nearby non-union workers; members are susceptible to reactionary political appeals, including decertification and “right-to-work” appeals from employer fronts.
The good news, as illustrated by McAlevey and others, is that some very strong union locals do get built in US “right to work” states because member participation is necessary to sustain the operation of the local. Members can’t be ignored, because without their dues the rent won’t be paid along with salaries of the union local’s leaders. The biggest chunk of McAlevey’s story is devoted to her work revitalizing the once dormant Service Employees International Union Local 1107 in “right to work” Nevada. Ten of the twelve chapters in her book tell the story of public and private sector organizing among health care workers in Clark County. These chapters are rich in detail and very evocative for any organizer who has experienced the highs and lows that McAlevey describes. She makes excellent observations on how to identify and develop leaders in the work force, how to move a large group of workers to action by escalating tactics that build their confidence, and how to tear down the invincibility of the boss. All this organizing, whether private sector hospital drives or contract campaigns in the public sector, shares the commonality of the need to engage with the existing members and ensure that they are signed on for the mission at hand. This involves the fundamentals of relational organizing; one on ones and deep worker contact. “Face book” and “open source organizing,” being recently touted as a new and more modern way to organize workers at WalMart, just don’t compare. In the face of the kind of anti-union terrorism practiced by corporate America, there is no substitute for face-to-face peer reinforcement organizing. In the four-year period that McAlevey describes, Local 1107 was able to achieve a membership level of over 70% in a right to work state. That high percentage of voluntary membership is a tribute to the intensive one on one work of McAlevey and her organizers.
“Whole Worker” Organizing
In describing a multi union AFL-CIO campaign to organize un-organized workers in Stamford, Connecticut, McAlevey points out “We found that it was actually important to replace community/labor with workplace/non-workplace in the everyday speech of our organizers and to talk about organizing whole workers.” What McAlevey highlights here is that those labor unions that are really in tune with the needs of their base can be powerful community organizations. They have softball leagues, turkey giveaways in the community, and countless other activities that stretch far beyond bargaining labor contracts. Many labor unions are more community rooted than many self described “community organizations” which are often funded almost entirely by foundations financed by liberal capitalists. But McAlevey went a step further and challenged the unions who were part of the AFL-CIO’s Stamford Organizing Project to engage in non-workplace struggles; what she calls “whole worker” struggles. She insisted that the Stamford Project make its first organizing drive a battle to save a public housing project inhabited by many members of the Service Employees local a battle they later won. It was a brilliant move that laid the basis for later victories in Stamford area workplaces. The unions won the confidence of workers by fighting for their immediate needs for affordable housing. With that victory and those lessons learned, facing employers became a lot easier.
The Long Haul
McAlevey’s book chronicles ten very rich years of hell raising, but she herself has moved on. She describes her own burnout and that of her fellow organizers, all brilliant young people who made contributions, but then moved on to other venues and in many cases other careers. These organizers are paid by the treasuries of national unions based in Washington, DC and have no real ongoing organic connection to the workers they are organizing.
Many other critics, including McAlevey, have cited this approach as a serious weakness that plagues modern union organizing, because young, outside organizers with little or no work experience have so little credibility with workers. This weakness is another symptom of the disconnected and disengaged membership in many unions that frequently hire successive waves of recent college graduates to work as organizers or business agents instead of developing leadership from among the union’s own ranks.
In her Epilogue, McAlevey notes that the two major social movements of the twentieth century, civil rights and labor, both got important resources from institutions that contributed leadership over the long haul; the Black church and the Communist Party respectively. “In both movements (Civil rights and labor) there were divisions within the institutional leadership over how much deep organizing to tolerate, but enough political space was created for a long enough period of time that the victories won are either still intact today or stood many decades before finally being torn down.” It took Harry Bridges and his band of left-wing agitators 20 years to build enough strength on the Pacific waterfront to ignite the general maritime strike in 1934 that led to a West Coast dockworkers union that is today’s ILWU. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union survives and prospers to this day because of the legacy of the Communist and labor left that McAlevey points to. Permanent revitalization of working class movements will require a similar long term and organic commitment of people and modern day institutions that have the roots and organic ties that McAlevey references in the Epilogue.
This last point raises an internal conflict within McAlevey’s account. Union organizing today is an extremely frustrating and difficult process, one that requires an ongoing commitment with plenty of reflection and critical thinking. Most successful organizers have invested decades of work to hone their craft and learn many painful lessons. But McAlevey has left union organizing work behind in favor of an academic endeavor. Since I did the same thing at one point, I can appreciate her decision, but I also hope she will consider resuming her organizing work at some point, because the long-term commitment is so essential.
“Raising Expectations” presents a vivid picture of life in the labor trenches. For those who have shared that experience it is a worthy read that will resonate on many levels. And for the uninitiated, it paints a graphic and compelling picture of the challenges facing U.S. organizers in the 21st century.
Peter Olney
Privilege
By Ivette Morales
I didn’t cry.
I kept it together,
They talked about class/social status,
I bit my tongue.
They talked about their privileges,
Their disadvantages,
It made me want to scream.
I kept my mouth shut.
It’s not our fault,
We are dealt the hand that Life gave us,
And with that we do what we can.
I don’t want to hear your pity,
Your guilt or your sorrow.
I don’t want to feel your pain.
I get sick just by listening to their guilt.
Their guilt means nothing to me,
They still have every advantage that I don’t.
They get to go back to their precious lives,
While I go back to struggling for money for mine
All they have to do is look in their bank account, and it’s there
While I stay up all night trying to figure out how my family is going to get through the week.
They say they understand their privilege,
But the truth is that they don’t.
They don’t understand the power that money has over someone,
They don’t understand what money means.
Money is security, a safe place to sleep,
It’s food on the table, a stable home,
A warm bed,
It’s the toys we never had as children,
The nice house we never got to live in,
It’s our own bed’s that we didn’t get to have.
Money is opportunity,
The chance to travel,
to see the world that we so desperately yearn for.
It’s seeing our parents happy,
Instead of crying,
stressful,
And depressed.
Money is education,
An education that we all deserve to have
But that we so rarely receive.
They complain that they have so much, and they wish they could share it.
I’m tired of listening to their complaints,
I don’t want to hear them talk,
I want to see their actions,
I want to see things done.
Django: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
By Stewart Acuff
“Django Unchained” shows all the sadism and inhumanity and evil and barbarism of what some once called the peculiar institution of American slavery. “Django Unchained” repeats what others have said about the existence of slaves,”She is my property and I can do as I please with her. ”
The movie also shows the absurdity and ridiculousness and cruel silliness and vapid nature of white, wealthy slavery culture.
Some disclaimers are in order. I am a southerner. Like many southerners my forefathers and foremothers include the Scots-Irish, Chickasaw and Cherokee Native People, and African-Americans. I am fortunate and grateful that the family tree split relatively recently within the memory of the living. I am a movie philistine and as an art form I have no business reviewing any movie. And, generally, I hate Quentin Tarantino’s work. I hate his typical gratuitous violence and seeming love of gore. I hate his total rejection of any Hollywood responsibility for the violence in our society.
But in this case, Tarantino’s faults serve him, the movie, and the movie-goer well. Slavery was every bit as horrible and more so than this movie shows. To Tarantino’s credit, he tries in one movie to demonstrate in every way possible the total lack of humanity in slavery–from gang rape of “comfort women” to allowing dogs to rip a runaway to death, to forcing men to fight one another to death, to the intentional splitting of slave families, to the forced hatred of one’s race.
This last consequence of slavery may be its most enduring. Some of the most racist among us are the closest to the race they denigrate. I loved my mother. Her eyes reflected part of a heritage from Sierra Leone. But when she told me Big Mama wouldn’t let her own brother dismount his horse in her yard and enter her house because he was too dark and Big Mama was passing for white , my mother said one side of our people were Black Indians, just very dark Indians. We all know Strom Thurmond raped or had sex with his family’s Black housekeepers.
Almost as importantly, “Django Unchained” shows the ignorance and stupidity of white slave culture from Leonardo DiCaprio’s character of an incredibly sadistic plantation owner who likes to put on the airs of a Parisian gentleman and demands to be addressed as Monsieur but who speaks no French to the overseers whose sport and entertainment is sadism.
I will leave it to others to talk about the things reviewers are supposed to comment on. What is important here is the reflection of our nation’s past. As great Mississippi novelist William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even really past. ”
I don’t know if or when America will ever get beyond its slavery past and the racism that served as its foundation. Clearly the modern Republican Party gained its base in the South with year after year and election after election of blatant and sometimes coded racism. Huge elements of our nation’s entertainment and “news” culture still rely on racism to attract viewers and listeners–Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and many others.
Progress is possible and we are making progress, but progress requires constant vigilance not only of our culture but of our own hearts.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Tarantino for making this gruesome movie and telling the truth.
I Wish I Was in New OrleansKen Colyer’s Journey to the Birthplace of Jazz
By Martin Colyer
In 1952 Ken Colyer was a young would-be jazz trumpeter. His drive and determination to become a better musician led him to travel from London to the fountainhead of the style of jazz that he loved—New Orleans. He had no idea of how to make it happen or what he’d find when he got there, but his hunger outweighed the obstacles that stood in his path, and in October of that year he arrived there. Ken’s remarkably eloquent letters from New Orleans give a vivid impression of how things were in the early fifties before integration was permitted. It was a revelation for the young visiting white Englishman, made extraordinary by the affection he was shown by members of the black community. This momentous pilgrimage became the catalyst for the birth of skiffle in Britain, giving the world Lonnie Donegan, and kickstarting a phenomenon which led to thousands of youngsters (amongst them Lennon and McCartney, Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards) picking up guitars, making tea-chest basses and forming groups. But before getting to Louisiana, a little background from Ken’s older brother, Bill…
Left to right: Ken and Bill Colyer
Bill Colyer: The same way that George Lewis and the New Orleans kids who grew up with those sounds from the cradle—Ken’s was the same sort of background; he’d got sounds in his head…
Bill Colyer was an obsessed jazz fan, sending off for records from the USA and hunting down jazz 78s, which in the late thirties were difficult to find. He joined the army in the early forties. When Bill was off fighting (at D-Day, and then on through France and Germany) his sister had written, telling him that his brothers were playing his records.
Bill Colyer: I get home with all this gear—your kitbag (there’s your whole life in your kitbag) and your rifle and your five rounds of ammo—and I chastised Bob [the middle brother] and then I was going to belt Ken, and all of a sudden I thought, “Hold on.” I said, “What records did you play?” I was knocked out. He’d done the Sleepy John Estes; he got into the blues records. The names, they’re all legendary: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Red Nelson, Champion Jack Dupree and many more. Well, it turned out that Ken had mainly played all my blues 78s, the Brunswicks and the Vocalions. What would he have been then? Twelve years old and he’s already steeped in this music. He had heard them played by me—that’s probably why he picked them out—but for the twelve weeks I was away, the ones he’d been playing were the blues records. What a grounding he was getting.
Post-War, Bill and Ken both joined the Merchant Navy, and travelled widely.
Bill Colyer: I’d been playing with Ken all that time in the Merch. Seven days a week when he came off duty, he went down to his cabin and practiced, played his horn. The chippie [carpenter] would be on a guitar they bought in Canada, the baker would hold his guitar and pluck the bass string and I would be on wire brushes on a stainless steel kettle and a suitcase.
On one trip, Ken landed in New York and sought out a jazz club, where he was told: “If you stick around ’til about one-thirty, Oscar Peterson usually looks in after he has finished his hotel job.”
Ken Colyer: I had never heard of Oscar Peterson, and I doubt if anyone else had in England at that time, as he was a Montreal boy and about the same age as myself, around nineteen. I was sitting sipping my beer when a man came in wearing an expensive-looking gabardine. The barman knew him and they started talking. The man did most of the talking. From the gist of the conversation it appeared that a gang were after his blood. “I’ve been to the police for protection but they won’t. So I’ve brought my own protection.” With this he reached inside his coat and produced a .45 automatic. The bartender quietly said, “Now put that away and calm down. They are not going to come for you here.” The man said something else and left. Time went by and they opened up upstairs. I went up and sat at a table and ordered another beer. Girls began turning up—they were dancers in the floor show. A slim, dapper, well-dressed Negro arrived. “Snookums!” they all cried. He was the star singer of the show. He made a dramatic entrance with the lights dimmed down and a white spotlight. It was very effective. He did some patter then went into Shine. He said he was now going to do a number that had made him famous sometime in earlier years: Brown Boy, Chocolate Boy. He was very good and got a big hand.
As I was having a drink I noticed that there was a hush in the place. A whisper rustled round the room: “Oscar’s here.” I looked around and then saw this giant of a Negro walking toward the bandstand. They all greeted him warmly. The pianist immediately left the piano and the front line got off the stand. Oscar sat down at the piano, looked over at the drummer and Cheekum. Then the place started to rock. He was powerful and used both hands, all ten fingers. The rhythm section was swinging superbly. As he warmed up, his massive frame leant further over the keyboard. The atmosphere was electric. “You see them fellows standing behind him?” someone said. “They’re all pianists trying to watch his hands.” I had never heard piano playing like it and the place was in an uproar after each number.
Bill Colyer: Ken brought a 78 back of Oscar doing two Albert Ammons numbers. Of course, he started as a boogie man, a real left hand. Ken was on leave and he and I walked round Charing Cross Road (London), where there was a load of music shops, to take this record round and rave about it, but none of them were interested. That really hurt me and Ken because by then we were deep jazzers and we’d heard this piano. We had some good piano players here, but nothing of that stature. So there’s Ken, only into his teen-age, hearing all this, and he knew all the names because I would tell him personnels. I was a bible. I knew every personnel; I was a walking mine of information; that’s why I ended up in that first jazz store.
Ken’s trumpet playing was improving and he joined The Christie Brothers Stompers, a band that, in Ian Christie’s words played “all the good places. Sunday nights in various towns where they had cinemas—films during the week, then they’d have a concert on Sunday. We were very big in Liverpool. We played the Cavern before those guys with guitars came in. Ken played the music that we thought was New Orleans jazz better than anyone we could speak of—that kind of style. He played like, let’s say, Mutt Carey. He could play all that lovely shakey stuff. Exciting, kind of vibrant.” But Ken was getting dissatisfied. One of the band, Ben Marshall, said that “Ken felt he had taken a wrong turning down the road to the ideal band that he had in his head” and, some three months after joining, Ken said he was leaving to rejoin the Merchant Navy in the hope of getting to New Orleans.
Ken Colyer: The brief brilliance of the Stompers was short-lived. I was down in the dumps, Everything’s Wrong, Ain’t Nothing Right (Lil Armstrong). We had been getting the American Music’s recorded by that marvellous man William Russell—Bunk Johnson is the greatest teacher I have ever had. Then I thought: These men were still playing in New Orleans—they weren’t that old—they must still be playing, so the logical thing was to get there while they were still playing.
I checked into the visa business. The problems were insurmountable. Unless you were a man of means, you had no chance. The only way I could think of at the time was to rejoin the Merchant Navy and somehow or other find a boat that took me to New Orleans. The big snag was very few British boats went to the Gulf ports. They were looking for crew for the Empire Patrai which was sailing out of Mobile, Alabama—that’s near enough, this is as near as I’m going to get. I made my decision.
I went to the Victoria Docks to see about getting signed back on the pool. The Seamen’s Union reared its ugly head. I went to the union office. I tried to argue that I had been a member of the NUR and the MU for some time, but with the “brotherly love” that these people have for the workers they said I would have to pay the back dues from the time I had left the Merch up to the present. Bill helped me out and I paid up and got reinstated.
Ken Colyer, in the “merch”
After a while I thankfully got a standby job on the Port Lyttelton. The guys gave me a farewell session at Cranford and I took the train to Newcastle, getting aboard the ship in the early hours of the following morning. The Lyttelton was to me a brand-new ship. She was a motor ship built in 1947 and very civilised compared with some of the tubs I had sailed on.
This was the start of a succession of ships that would take Ken to the Empire Patrai in Mobile.
Ken Colyer: The weather was fine and we sailed back to Mobile for another cargo. I had some New Orleans phone numbers… Somebody had discovered a phone book in the Westminster Public Library [in London], and had made a note of all the men he knew. Among them was Doctor Edmond Souchon’s. I thought it worth a try and [when we docked in Mobile] phoned him from the Seamen’s Club. He was
Ken Colyer’s notebook
completely bewildered as I tried to explain to him who I was, and how I came to be in Mobile. Eventually he told me there was to be a session at the International House, Gravier Street, if I could make it. Mobile is about 160 miles from New Orleans and I didn’t know how long it would take to get there. When we finished work I got ready as quickly as I could… then went to the Greyhound Bus Station.
It took longer than I expected to get there, and part of the session was over when I got to the International House. Doc was a nice fellow with a bluff, hearty manner. He had played guitar with the Johnny Wiggs band. Paul Barbarin’s band was there with Kid Howard and Albert Burbank. Richard “Abba Labba” Maclean on bass was the most powerful man I had ever heard, playing with a big tone and plenty of drive. I was in a daze. I had finally made it. It had been a long haul but I was finally there talking and listening to the men.
Ken Colyer letter to Bill Colyer, Friday, 10 October 1952, 1.50 pm: Am taking a flying visit to New Orleans, will get hell for it, as the boat’s due to leave at any time—but I guess it’s worth it. Just talked to Dr. Souchon on the phone again. I am going to meet at Journalists’ reception at International House, Gravier Street. George Lewis Band will be there, and another
New Orleans: Ken sits in with the George Lewis band, colour bar not withstanding.
New Orleans: Newspaper with news of Ken Colyer’s arrest and jailing.
group. Will give you results of trip as soon as I can… Doc Souchon was irascible but lovable. He blew hot, he blew cold. He was an eminent figure in New Orleans and a practising surgeon. He showed me great kindness at times. He took me round the old historic places. The ruins of Spanish Fort, where Armand Piron used to play. Bucktown, which he assured me was really wild in the early days, and several other places of interest. Where Mahogany Hall had stood. Doc remembered his young days well. He said he was a heller until he knuckled down and studied medicine. He remembered King Oliver in New Orleans and also heard him in Chicago. He maintained that the band was never as good in Chicago as it was in New Orleans. He saw Tom Brown’s Band off on a northern trip before the O.D.J.B. went north. He remembered booking Jelly Roll Morton’s band for his college dances. He said they had to treat Mr. Morton with respect, even then. Jelly would take no truck from anyone.
Lizzie Miles, New Orleans 1958. “Best wishtes to Ken Colyer who plays my kind of music”
In London. Left to right: Ken Colyer; Alex Korner; Lonnie Donegan; Bill Colyer (on washboard); and Chris Barber on bass.
Thanks to Ken’s widow Delphine, Chris Stotesbury, Kay and Tony Leppard of the Ken Colyer Trust, Mike Pointon and Ray Smith.
Useful Links:
Ken Colyer: here, here and here
The book “Goin’ Home: The Uncompromising Life and Music of Ken Colyer” can be ordered from you local bookstore.
Marikana, South Africa
By John Womack
A brief note on the following post: In October of last year Peter Hall wrote a piece for us on Marikana and what it might mean for South Africa. HIs piece has been receiving a number of comments. Then about two weeks ago John Womack sent us his thoughts and while I posted them as a comment, we at the Stansbury Forum felt his response really warranted a post of his own and it follows below.
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.
“Just Cause”: Isn’t it time for all workers to have some job security?
By Rand Wilson
During World War Two, employers were prohibited from raising wages because of wartime Wage and Price controls. With labor in short supply, employers and union leaders sought ways around the government limits and agreed to new health insurance benefits as an alternative to increased compensation. Thus was born our odd system of employer-based health insurance.
That seemed like a good idea at the time because union leaders could achieve through collective bargaining what had been elusive through government reform: health security for their members.
Over the next thirty years or so, health insurance benefits expanded. As more and more workers were covered by private insurance plans provided through their employers, the urgency of winning broad political reforms diminished and labor backing to win universal coverage faded. Our failure to expand the health benefits achieved through collective bargaining to the entire working class eventually left union members in a vulnerable position. At a certain point, union health benefits for the relatively few union members were far more generous than what most workers had. Faced with out-of control health costs employers sought to make cuts and throughout the 90s and 2000s union members increasingly were not able to defend them.
The final result is the very mixed result of ObamaCare, a plan that is sadly not universal and now is actually being used by employers to attack so-called “Cadillac Plans.”
“The United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing at-will employees to be terminated for arbitrary reasons.”
That lesson shouldn’t be lost as we face what I predict will be the next collective bargaining battleground: the job security provisions of union contracts, including the “just cause” clause.
Instead of waiting for such an attack, we should seize the opportunity to champion passage of “Just Cause” standards into state laws. It’s a labor law reform proposal that will appeal to all workers while putting employers on the defensive.
It’s long overdue. The United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing at-will employees to be terminated for arbitrary reasons. Governments such as France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom require employers to have a “just cause” to dismiss non-probationary employees. Just cause appeals to basic fairness, just as due process does in court.
Just cause marks the dividing line between employees with job security and “at-will” employees. At-will employees have no job security: they can be fired for a mistake, an argument with a supervisor, a critical comment about the enterprise or management, taking a sick day, a complaint about working conditions or pay, or involvement in outside political campaigns* – all activities that just-cause covered workers can take part in without worry.
One state has passed a law. The Montana Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act was passed in 1987. Applicable to non-union non-probationary employees, it prohibits discharges without good cause, allows workers to sue for up to four years of back pay, and provides a method for workers to recover attorneys’ fees. Despite fear-mongering by opponents, the Big Sky state’s robust economic growth has not been affected. Statutes in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands also prohibit termination without “good cause.”
Winning “just cause” legislation would certainly not be easy. But building a movement to win it offers union leaders and activists an opportunity to champion an issue that would benefit all workers and also help union growth. Short of state or federal legislation, local unions, CLCs (Central Labor Councils) and workers’ centers could seek to enforce a just cause standard through workers’ rights boards and / or community pressure.
A “just cause” campaign would potentially engage working people at many different levels. One can imagine communities declaring certain areas, “Just Cause Zones” and fighting to enforce it as a community standard with employers. Other supporters could be involved using the proposed legislation as a “litmus test” for labor support in electoral campaigns. Still others could be involved in holding hearings on the importance of achieving a “Just Cause” standard and lobbying for passage with city councils and state legislatures.
If “just cause” campaigns succeed, workers will have more security to participate in union campaigns. Union leaders and organizers will be able to make the point that they are experts at enforcing just cause protections and can provide representation at hearings etc.
Even if campaigns for just cause do not succeed, millions of non-union workers will learn about the concept (especially if campaigns are based on ballot referendums) and the increased security it could bring to their lives. By popularizing the “Just Cause” concept, more workers may respond by thinking, “If we can’t get this important protection through the legislature, let’s get it by forming a union!”
Meanwhile, if employers do seek to roll back the just cause articles in our contracts, union members won’t be in the same position we were with the attacks on health care. Instead, we will have laid important groundwork to win broad public support and the employers’ attack can be parried, perhaps even used to strengthen the broad campaign.
Imagine the labor movement leading a campaign to win Just Cause protections for all workers. The sooner we get started the better!
Readers interested in learning more about the Just Cause standard should read Robert Schwartz‘s new book, “Just Cause: A union guide to winning discipline cases.” The book lays out seven tests that are the guiding principles for discipline and discharge in most union workplaces. With reform, those same standards could apply to everyone. More info got to Work Rights Press
*As reported in Think Progess. Or this Examiner.com piece titled “Report: Multiple CEOs and businesses threaten workers over Obama’s re-election“.
Poems
By Martin Marquez
“These eyes of mine”
These eyes of mine
Have witnessed the innocence of young children dying
Boys and girls knowing about the latest fashion designs,
Partying, violence, and sex before the age of nine.
How I wish I can hug em all
As if they were all mine
And show them
The beauty of being a child during this time
I remember kids…
Running freely in the park,
Giggling when they would hear someone fart,
Hysterically laughing as they got higher and higher
Swinging on the swings
Spreading their arms out,
Imagining they had wings.
Feel liberated…little one
Your imagination is one of the best things in
Life that is free.
They grow up fast
Leaving their childhood in the past, and oh so far.
Listen to the media that only tears them apart
Telling girls to
Look just like Rihanna, Megan Fox, and Beyonce
Cut your hair off, wear less clothes,
Practice Miley Cyrus’ performance of “Party in the USA”
Like she did at the Teen Choice Awards
On that stripper pole.
Parents then say, “They’re fine, it’s just a phase.”
Telling the boys to
Act like Kanye, Eminem, and Lil Wayne.
Repeat and memorize the lyrics and imitate their swag
So you won’t be made fun of for carrying a handbag.
Say, “Fuck em’ ALL!” to release the hidden anger and pain.
It didn’t matter what the color of their skin was or what was their race
Because they were always surrounded by the smiles
Coming from other kid’s face.
Now they have their identity to embrace
Because in schools and groups in society
They are seen as jokes and wasteful space…
Being judged to never succeed, and grow up lame.
There was a girl who
Hated what she saw in her reflection
Doing anything she could do to not receive rejection
She would throw up everything that her stomach had stored.
Thinking about the crush she had on a boy
Shoving her finger down her throat,
Making the chicken nuggets, skittles, and apple she had the whole day
Leaving her body and system by force.
There was screaming and arguing coming from the kitchen room
Realizing that her parents would be getting a divorce soon.
Trying to mute the sound
That came from their mouths
She took a thick razor…
Cutting so deep into her veins
Until she was about to faint.
Blood so dark, so cold, and so red
Tilts her head back
Gets up and slowly cries herself to bed.
The scares are now visible on her arms.
Connecting them like dots or like the stars.
13 years of age,
Surrounded by her families rage
Living in a body were she doesn’t feel accepted
But caged.
Cutting so deep to take away the pain.
Esssssssh…The innocence is dying.
There was once
A little boy.
One day,
He finds, on the floor,
A loaded gun
Grew up being torn apart and now wants to
What he thought was his revenge and fun.
Using it at first to
Pose in front of his bathroom mirror
Reflection so clear…
But all that really showed
Was the soul, inside, that lived in so much fear
He stared stealing candy from the corner store,
Jacking change from the younger kids for food he would buy to
Satisfy his stomach a little more.
All of a sudden
BANG!
Shots go off
Shakes his neighborhood with fright.
BANG!
A 4 year old boy falls off his bike.
BANG!
An old woman’s scream disappears in the dark night
BANG!
A woman with a baby in her hand gets shot in the head
BANG!
A brother runs to his younger sister and
Sings her a song so she can go back to bed.
BANG!
Little boy with gun, having some fun
BANG! BANG! BANG!
There he was
Standing alone. Dead.
Roaming around the city, feeling his body slowly decaying.
He looks at the beautiful stars that
Are reflecting on the bay.
His heart is now hardening like clay.
Only 11 years old…
Tears in his eyes
Knowing he will not see the day
When the sun is shining bright
And turns 12 this coming May.
Police sirens are near
Now everything became clear
Says softly to himself
“Take my own life…
So I can disappear like a firework in this empty, dark, and sad sky.”
BANG!
The once free soul,
Who wanted to be bold.
Now lies dead
Shivering cold.
*Whisper “bang bang bang…” the innocence is dying.
“How I wish”
How I wish
They didn’t use violence to belittle your character
Shoving their force into you like an excruciating splinter
Making you feel as cold as the winter
How I wish I were in your shoes
So I can know the horrific feeling of being vulnerable, confused
By that significant one that you thought loved you.
How I wish I could tell them all to leave you alone
To stop looking at you as just a sexual object, a satisfying toy,
To rape…no more
How I wish they didn’t put the blame on you
Saying that because of the clothes you wore, your intake of booze
All led to you being misused and abused.
How I wish you didn’t have to suffer with this permanent tattoo
This scar, painful growing bruise,
That you have to live with because everyone defuses your views
This is something that you didn’t choose,
To be refused of your dignity, your beautiful confidence that you once knew,
All of which have been reduced.
How I wish, how I wish…
You can walk comfortably alone in the night moon light
To not be filled with fright,
Knowing that you are going to be alright
And not think or question if you will be having to fight for your life.
How I wish you can feel safe
At parties, bars, your campus, and any other place
Seeing that you are more than just a pretty face,
That you are a woman filled with virtue and grace
How I wish more males were in this room
To know the reality that many of you go through,
To stop being ignorant about the rape and violence that is TRUE.
Overlooking the marks on your face that are purple and blue
Neglecting the fact that the rape that happened at school could have been you
All because you have a smile on your face that makes it seem as if everything is completely fine and cool.
How I wish your pain can fade away
Stopping the tears in your eyes from raining down your face.
That you didn’t feel like such a waste,
How I wish you didn’t go through this.
That you would once again trust the beauty of a genuine kiss
And that you once again feel appreciated, loved, and remember your existence.
How I wish I can be in your shoes
Just to see what it is to be you
Experience what you go through…
How I wish, how I wish
This can all stop.
Living Post Racial
By Shane Koss
First a note from the the Forum folks: In the aftermath of the 2008 election there was much talk of a post racial America. Well that didn’t prove to be true. With the election of 6 November and the reelection of President Obama the “chatters” have discovered America is shockingly multicultural and ethnically mixed. And that the young in fact vote. So we thought it might be interesting to post up a couple of essays over the next couple of weeks from college students on living in this recently discovered “new” United States. The first is “Living Post Racial” by Shane Koss.
Despite our generation’s young age, we have faced several pressing issues such as still not yet living in a post racial society. I believe this is the most significant problem that our generation is facing because it has existed in all previous generations in America and has submitted countless groups of people to violence, hatred, and other forms of discrimination. But, our generation just may be the one that ends this problem. Many people will cite Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. as the two who helped put an end to racial discrimination. They did, but only on paper can we be truly called a post racial society because everybody, regardless of race, gender, or nationality is equally protected under the law.
Some would argue that we do in fact, live in a post racial society and may present President Obama as proof. If we truly did live in a post racial society, then why did so many people during the 2008 presidential election accuse Obama of being a Muslim as if it were something terrible or shameful? The very fact that so many people would be in shock that if Barrack Obama was actually a Muslim is strong evidence that they are uncomfortable and most likely have prejudices against Muslims as well as any people that might look like Muslims, namely people of Middle Eastern heritage. Another example is the racial profiling done by Transportation Security Authority agents after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even to this day, a man wearing a turban or a woman wearing a hijab can seldom get through airport security without scrutiny.
Unfortunately, racism is perhaps the toughest habit to break because it is passed down from generation to generation and it can be near impossible to go against the grain in some extreme cases. This is why the South tends to exhibit, both overtly and covertly, racial prejudices. In some cases these ignorant viewpoints have been passed down for generations, some from the start of slavery in America. But, the truth is that if left unchecked and unchanged, progression towards a post racial society will slow and eventually stop.
Our generation can be the one that makes people of all origins equal within everyday society. Although this task spans the entire country and perhaps the entire globe, this can be the one issue that can solve many social problems within today’s society. The benefits of an entire country being able to look past the color of a person’s skin on a social level are enormous. Racial violence would be a thing of the past and the unemployment gap between blacks and their white peers would begin to close.
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