In the 1980s, the more radical layers of the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa believed that capitalism and apartheid were joined at the hip. Apartheid policies provided capitalism with a cheap, unfree, and racially structured working class; the capitalist profits that resulted, funded the development of a powerful and militarised local State. Many therefore thought that capitalism could not survive the abolition of apartheid.

APARTHEID AND CAPITALISM

This view was too simplistic. Apartheid policies benefited low-wage and low-skill sectors like mining and farming, but they were not useful for advanced sections of the manufacturing sector that grew dramatically from the 1940s onwards. By 1995, mining was only 10% of overall economic activity, with agriculture at 4,5%; manufacturing was nearly 40% of the whole economy.

Large manufacturing companies that relied on sophisticated machinery designed for mass production situations were constrained by the small local market and the under-skilled workforce. International pressures limited their ability to expand through exports. This meant a significant section of local capitalists WERE interested in a post-apartheid - and neoliberal - dispensation. Low wages would be guaranteed through the free market, rather than the heavy hand of the State. This type of view was expressed in books like The Assault on Free Enterprise: the Freeway to Communism, by A. D. Wassenaar, head of SANLAM.

“FRESH FIELDS FOR NON-EUROPEAN BOURGEOIS”

This shift converged with the pro-capitalist policies of the main national liberation movements. The ANC’s Freedom Charter of 1955 called for the nationalisation of major industries, but within a capitalist framework. Mandela made it clear in 1956 in Liberator the Charter aimed at opening up “fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class” that will for the “first time... have the opportunity to own in their own name and right, mines and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

It should be stressed that this statement was issued at the very same time as the ANC was forming an underground alliance with the SA Communist Party. The SACP did not object, as its strategic position stressed the need for a two-stage revolution in which a stage of “national democracy,” non-racial capitalism with a “non-European bourgeois class” must precede any socialist transformation. On the need for a “national democratic stage,” the ANC agreed - although it has no interest in a second stage.

The two-stage strategy is common enough amongst Communist Parties in the so-called “Third World,” and generally involved postponing the struggle against capitalism in favour of a struggle for “national” capitalism against a vague “imperialism” by multi-class nationalist parties. Generally it has been a disaster, leading the left to drop its own politics. In some cases, the left has paid in blood for this mistake.

The ANC’s position was no passing viewpoint: as Oliver Tambo said in 1985: The Freedom Charter does not even purport to want to destroy the capitalist system. All that the Freedom Charter does is to envisage a mixed economy in which part of the economy, some of the industries would be controlled, owned by the state (as happens in many countries), and the rest by private ownership- a mixed economy.

Today the ANC has even dropped the “mixed economy,” for neo-liberal “free markets.”

TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE

The negotiations of the 1990s finally opened the “fresh fields” through BEE policies. For example:

The Employment Equity Act requires all companies to promote people of colour into top positions. Other Acts and “charters” stipulate companies must have BEE plans.

In the 1950s, nationalisation was seen as the route to BEE. In the 1990s, privatisation assumes that role. State corporations subcontract operations to small BEE companies - TELKOM claimed over 500 such contractors in 2004.

The National Empowerment Fund Trust is a State structure that receives up to 20% of shares of State companies being privatised. These are either sold to BEE ventures at a discount, or sold to raise venture capital for BEE.

The Industrial Development Corporation provides loans, advice and other support to emerging businesses - if they have a BEE component.

RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT

BEE is fundamentally about creating an elite of Black capitalists. It is no accidental that these policies enrich a few individuals whilst leaving ordinary Blacks poor - that is the whole point. It does no good to pretend that BEE could be something else.

If the ANC were even a mildly reformist party of the working class, it would try and redistribute wealth and power downwards, to the popular classes. But because the ANC is a capitalist party, it focuses on promoting capitalism “as never before,” with particular emphasis on creating the “fresh fields” for the “non-European bourgeois.” Sometimes this clashes with ANC neo-liberalism, leading to policy contradictions

The class agenda has been stressed by Mbeki, whose famous speech to the Black business body, NAFCOC, called on Black capitalists to enrich themselves while “empowering” local communities. Peter Mokaba, then head of the ANC Youth League, was equally clear in an internal ANC paper in 1998 that the ANC is a “national liberation movement and not a socialist organisation,” and its goal was never to “destroy the capitalist class and establish socialism”. Rather it is to create a “vibrant and democratic, prosperous and non-racial capitalism.”

Mokaba, like all other senior ANC leaders, is now a prominent “national” businessman. The most prominent example is, of course, Cyril Ramaphosa, with a market influence of R137 billion, but he is hardly alone. As Smuts Ngonyama - spokesperson for Mbeki - said recently of his role in Genesis Telecom, “I did not struggle to be poor.”

AT THE PARTY

The Communist Party, and most COSATU leaders, have remained blind to what this says about the class agenda of the ANC. BEE commentary from these quarters remains constrained by lifelong support for the ANC and the two-stage perspective. This translates into an attempt to maintain the Alliance with the ANC while giving BEE a more “left” spin.

In the Financial Mail, Zwelinzima Vavi of COSATU made the illogical claim that labour must contest the “middle class” to ensure “black entrepreneurs” do not align with the “capitalist class” - which boils down to the moralistic belief that Black capitalists can be nicer than White capitalists if workers appeal to their consciences.

In a stinging reply to such views, Saki Macazoma of the ANC NEC - who got his start in the state-owned Transnet, where he fired 15,000, and Wits University, where he fired another 615 - argued it makes no sense to expect “socialist outcomes” from “capitalist methods.” In Umsebenzi, the SACP’s Jeremy Cronin admitted that changes in “the superficialities of pigmentation boardrooms” did not stop capitalist actions being shaped by the market, nor morality. But Cronin failed to define what “transformation” actually meant, or explain how it was linked to the SACP's supposedly socialist programme. In effect, he said nothing at all.

More recently, Archbishop Despond Tutu’s Nelson Mandela Lecture described BEE as elitist, attracting a vicious reply from Mbeki. Mbeki could not deny the point, and so his focus was on Tutu’s personal credentials.

Predictably, Blade Nzimande, the centrist SACP boss, has tried to smooth over the cracks raised by such exchanges, speaking of a “BEE debate convergence” but carefully defined the enemy as the “white capitalist class,” neatly sidestepping how the SACP’s struggle against “the capitalist system itself” would impact on Black, ANC, capitalists.

AGAINST CAPITALISM

There has been a profound transformation of the SA economy. By 1999, the financial sector had grown to roughly 20% of the economy, but only employed 210,881 people - about 1% of the labour force. This has underpinned a rapid increase in non-productive economic activities - share trading, currency speculation, and financial services. At the same time, the Sunday Times reports that the number of families with more than $30 million each, had increased four times from 150 in 1994 to 690 in 2003 - while 22 million live in poverty, with 6 million workers unemployed.

Both outcomes are a direct result of the neo-liberal and BEE policies of the ANC.

However, the major working class structures - the SACP, COSATU - remain wedded to the ANC; the poverty of their response to BEE shows the terrible limitations of a strategy of relying on the capitalist ANC for socialist results.

Fundamentally, the problem facing the working class movement in SA is a POLITICAL problem - a problem of weak perspectives and confused thinking. This blind loyalty to the ANC generates a politics of worshipping every utterance of Mbeki while trying to “contest” the ANC from within - a futile task.

Until this is resolved, the working class will remain crippled in the face of the neo-liberal capitalist onslaught. At the end of the day, workers get the leaders they deserve - until ordinary workers reject this nonsense, they will remain voting fodder for the ANC capitalists and their BEE strategy.

THE PRESIDENT FROM THE SKIES vs. THE AUNTIE WHO SAYS “NO!”

The growth of new social movements in post-apartheid South Africa has attracted a lot of media, academic and police attention over the past decade. The Centre For Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal organised the Social Movements Conference to bring together a range of academics, activists and representatives of the COSATU, SANCO and the South African Communist Party (SACP) to debate five broad themes that cut across 17 different movements. Two main points of debate emerged.

PRO-GOVERNMENTAL vs. ANTI-GOVERNMENTAL FORCES: IS THERE A POSSIBLE COMMON “LEFT PLATFORM”?

Project co-director Adam Habib (Human Sciences Research Council, HSRC) in his introductory remarks stated that: “The social movements occupy a continuum from the counter-hegemonic to the rights-based,” from those which advocated “the overthrow of the state and the establishment of socialism” to those that worked within the system. Patric Bond (Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, CCS) said he saw this as “a temporary problem” that would be resolved either by a combined state strategy of concessions and repression, with the resulting demobilisation of the new social movements, or by a split in the ANC Alliance itself.

Such a split has been long anticipated by opponents of the Alliance or of some of its constituent organisations, but the Alliance has shown itself to be resilient against such a challenge. Certainly, it appears that a dramatic vertical split, separating the Alliance into its components, is highly unlikely while a less obvious, slower horizontal split, with all Alliance partners bleeding membership at the grassroots level, is a process that is already underway.

It is interesting that the state-as-entity in its own right (as distinct from the government) has become a point of debate once again, especially in the light of how it either accelerates or impedes social progress. Activists’ ideological attitude towards the failed state-capitalist command economies of the former Soviet Bloc tend to colour their views of the state.
In the red corner, the most outspoken critics of the “democratic” and “developmental” nature of the state and current government policies were Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) militant Ashraf Cassiem, independent researcher Ashwin Desai, Peter Dwyer of the Alternative Information & Development Centre (AIDC), Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) spokesperson Dale McKinley, and Landless People’s Movement (LPM) national organiser Mangaliso Kubheka. Their basic position was that massive job-losses, water & electricity cut-offs, all under the ANC’s Growth, Employment And Redistribution (GEAR) economic austerity programme were hurting the poor, and that the government had unreasonably turned its guns and dogs against those protesting this situation.

In the yellow corner, the most outspoken critics of the supposed “imposition” of foreign socialist ideology onto the social movements were Michael Sachs, of the office of the ANC secretary-general, SACP spokesperson Mazibuko Jara, Young Communists League (YCL) executive Buti Manamela, Donovan Williams of the SA National Civics Organisation (SANCO), and Neil Coleman of COSATU. Their basic position was that the ANC government had made massive strides over the past decade in securing labour, gender and basic amenities rights despite the crippling legacy of apartheid, and that the social movements’ anger at government was misdirected, becoming, by opposing the ANC’s new democratic order, de facto anti-democratic, so they should rather join forces.

Sihle Mkhize, of the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) and a board member of the National Land Committee (NLC), noted that the new social movements “were described as ultra-Leftist, but their activities were largely within the ambit of the [South African] Constitution.” Mkhize recalled a point made earlier by McKinley (APF) that despite the ANC’s attempts to criminalize the social movements, 99% of all criminal charges brought against activists over the past 10 years, some for offences as serious as arson and attempted murder, had resulted in acquittals.

The ARN noted that while the social movements of the apartheid era had been established as a deliberate anti-state counter-power (popular civics, street committees, militia etc), the new social movements were often springing up in massive squatter camps where the state simply did not exist, bar perhaps the odd police raid for illegal immigrants. People with no experience of the state other than a policeman’s boot once in a while had either no, or at the very least, an estranged, relationship with the state, but it was really the vacuum of any state structure in these areas that generated the development of mutual aid movements to address social concerns where the state had no capacity.

Thus many social movements were extra-state rather than anti-state, a product of vacuum rather than of adversarial relations, as they have often been seen by the ruling party. In other words, they have adopted a “counter-hegemonic” position out of necessity, not ideology. The formation, development, structure, aims and alliances of such movements were markedly different from those in more formal serviced areas: the difference being between people fighting for access to water and those fighting against cut-offs. Firoz Khan (University of Stellenbosch) made a similar point, noting that the new social movements sprang up as a result of the “deficiencies of developmental planning practice”, of the disjuncture in democratisation of the apartheid state that saw “citizens still suffer routine violation of their rights” despite their “formal status”.

Trevor Ngwane (Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, SECC) said that the ANC had been attempting to disrupt the realignment of the working class - as a class in its own right with its own identity, separate from the interests of the expanded bourgeoisie - by diversions such as sport and patriotism, but that “the unions, COSATU and the social movements must oppose this.”

He earlier said that: “The ANC leads the attack on the working class. That is notwithstanding the good that it has done. This does not preclude alliances with COSATU and SANCO rank-and-file. The ANC has found itself having to rely on heavy-handed policies instead of hegemony. In South Africa, there is race identity, nationalism, gender, class, youth, etc. What we need is a ‘new person’ to overthrow capitalism - and this will only happen through struggle.”

Ngwane’s point was taken up by Sachs (ANC), who suggested that alliances could be struck between the social movements and progressive members of the administration, saying: “Surely, the Jo’burg City Council is not a monolithic bloc of neo-liberal guys waging a war on the poor? The political elite is not the same as the economic elite.” He noted that the recent Diepsloot “rebellion”, as he termed it, over rumours of the forced removal of a shack settlement north of Johannesburg, had been waged in part between local ANC and SANCO factions.

But he warned against the “European proposition” that what mattered today was no longer the contest between Right and Left, but between “centres of power and the periphery”. He claimed that the ANC government had a higher expenditure on social services than European governments at the height of their welfare states, so the government could not be regarded as a “mechanism for neo-liberalism”.

The theme of some form of engagement between social movements and the Alliance was probably best expressed by Coleman (COSATU) who noted: “One shouldn’t gloss over serious differences [but] we need to distinguish between strategic and tactical alliances. We need to engage. There is no monolithic state, no monolithic government or monolithic Alliance... We need to build a Left platform within the ANC and the Alliance and without it. In 2002, relatively progressive decisions were made at the ANC Congress.”

Coleman earlier provided the delegates with a brief historical sketch, from COSATU’s perspective, of recent ideological shifts in the Alliance, saying: “The period from 1996 [the year of the ANC’s shift from the social-democratic Redistribution and Development Programme to the neoliberal GEAR] until 2001, COSATU was hammered by Right-wing forces in the ANC [some of whom even wanted to] cause a split in the Alliance, but in 2001 and 2002, those forces were defeated. Then from 2002 until now, we’ve focussed on issues of economic policy. And we made a breakthrough yesterday on the anti-terror legislation. The possibility of a new developmental path is being explored.”

Coleman claimed that “COSATU has relied on the power of its constituency, rather than on its historical relationship with [the ANC] government.” His overarching message to social movements was that with “a refusal to engage, the danger is that you cede the ground to other forces. Without a national platform between Left forces and a Left-of-centre government, all your gains are under threat.” Bond suggested that a new common Left platform could be “de-commodification”, based on a combined struggle for free basic services, and against cost-recovery, privatisation and their offspring.

The point was made earlier by Sakhela Buhlungu (Sociology of Work Programme, SWOP, at Wits University, who produced the study on the APF) that COSATU largely addressed the concerns of the fully-employed, while the social movements focussed largely on the unemployed, leaving casualised labour unrepresented. Coleman responded that “within our affiliates, there is an increasing engagement with casuals.” This suggested to some delegates that flexibilised labour was a possible field of convergence between the organised labour and social movements. Peter Alexander (Centre for Sociological Research, Rand Afrikaanse Universitieit, RAU) said that the self-defined working class was expanding to include beggars, sex-workers and home-keepers, but warned that the broader the concept of the class became, the further one moved from the Marxist labour theory of value.

Alexander emphasised the fact that COSATU had recently been able to mobilise marches of some 100,000 workers around the public sector wage negotiations, so the social movements could ill afford to divide the working class by ignoring them. Dinga Sikwebu (organiser, National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA, at Iskor) said: “My interest is in the unity of the working class... it’s easy to say ‘NUMSA is a sweetheart union’, but why are our members in Soweto not finding themselves in the APF?”

Buhlungu (SWOP) noted that organised labour and the social movements could at least co-exist peacefully in parallel, “instead of shouting at each other as if they are contesting the same things.” But Cassiem (AEC) pointed out that a conceptual gap existed between the way social movements and organised labour approached alliances, saying that the AEC had made approaches to COSATU, but COSATU had “wanted leadership-to-leadership contacts, while we want to access the floor.” He warned that while the Alliance partners wanted to disregard the social movements, their own memberships would decline if they ignored the issues being raised by the poor.

Pieterse recalled a quote that “the ballot-box is the enemy of revolutionaries”, but the debate is far from resolved. The most recent and controversial example of co-operation between social movement and Alliance forces is the decision by the LPM to join the SACP’s “Red October” land reform campaign. This came in for some withering criticism, and was staunchly defended in turn. This could be viewed as the first of Pieterse’s forms of engagement: pressing for a national land summit in partnership with an Alliance member, while mobilising the peasantry autonomously at the base.

Desai (independent) said: “This LPM thing confuses me... is it entryism into the SACP to turn it into a communist organisation?” This raised a lot of laughs. Someone else (my handwriting failed me here) asked whether the LPM saw it as likely that the SACP would go as far as land invasions if necessary, stressing that they would eventually become necessary. Kubheka (LPM) said the LPM’s “No Land, No Vote” campaign earlier this year had seen President Thabo Mbeki “coming down from the skies begging for votes. The LPM is not going to be aligned with any political party... If the SACP is genuine, we’re with them, but if not, even if the train is going 200km/h, we’ll jump off.”

Kubheka said: “Only if the SACP is with us are they a true communist party. They mustn’t wear the T-shirt of Ché Guevara if they are playing, because that man wasn’t playing!” Manamela (YCL) appealed for a common front, saying that the “unity of the UDF [United Democratic Front] lead to the defeat of racial oppression. If we fight, we’ll never get anywhere.” McKinley responded that the basis of unity had to be a class position, one that the Alliance had “buried” since democracy.

So if I could suggest a possible resolution to this debate (though none was drawn collectively by the conference), it is that both “sides” recognise that their opposites are not monolithic and that a common Left programme is certainly possible - at least at rank-and-file level, and especially desirable between the Social Movements Indaba (SMI) umbrella formation and other social movements on the one hand and COSATU and other organised labour on the other.

Clearly, the SMI sees COSATU’s membership of the Alliance as bedevilling the possibility of this realignment taking place, while COSATU sees itself as sufficiently autonomous of the ANC and powerful enough in its own right for this not to be a problem. In terms of terrain, there appears to be definite reasons for the two forces to converge expand to deal with the concerns of casualised and self-employed labour, and with the common theme of decommodification. This convergence, it must be pointed out, aspires to be horizontal (within the working class) and not vertical (a cross-class pact). Now that I have dealt with the main point of convergence, let us examine the main point of divergence, as phrased by Bond:

INSURGENT AUTONOMISM OF THE MULTITUDE vs. PROGRAMATIC SOCIALISM

Bond did not explain his terms, but an elastic definition of programmatic socialism could embrace the social democrats of the Alliance (if one accepts Sachs’s assertion that “all of us here belong to a common progressive movement”). Moving leftwards across the spectrum one would find a range of Trotskyist formations, while the autonomists (much as they dislike being pigeon-holed) and the anarchists represent the insurgent multitude line. But in practice, all South African Left revolutionaries would employ a shifting combination of both programme and insurgency, recognising the constantly changing tensions between the masses and a revolutionary minority with a set programme.

The insurgent multitude position was perhaps best expressed by Dwyer (AIDC), who said the Alliance “needed to put to bed the fear that they [the social movements] are a mob lead like sheep by charismatic leaders. The people are not against leaders, but against leaders who are not under their control... Take care not to reduce these organisations to their leaders, because they are much more complex.” Cassiem (AEC) described AEC meetings as “organised chaos” which operated according to democratic rules that were not immediately apparent to outsiders. “We are not social movements, we are not NGOs; our members are our communities.” Bobby Peek (environmental group Groundwork) maintained the legitimacy of direct action, saying that “engagement can happen in a variety of ways, militant as well as [formal].”

The programatic socialism position was expressed by Jackie Cock (Department of Sociology, Wits, who compiled the report on environmental movements), echoing Coleman (COSATU) in favour of cross-class collaboration: “To renounce formal politics is to leave formal bourgeois state power uncontested.” Sachs (ANC) said: “The problem in South Africa with academics associated with the social movements is that they are close to Northern [hemisphere] analyses, but not to local analyses,” adding that a definition of the social movements seemed to require the participation of “middle-class intellectuals and NGOs.”

Jara (SACP) said: “Historically, there is a tendency in the country on the Left and outside the ANC: to what extent has that tendency driven the social movements?” Sachs had earlier said “the discourse that says the central divide is institutions versus the masses is not able to survive,” criticising the “new Left that is outside of and in opposition to institutional power”, saying this position put them in opposition to the liberation movements.

Desai (researcher on PAGAD), hit back at Sachs’ theory of the Northern origins of the theories being applied by SA intellectuals to the domestic social movements: “Sachs says our ideas come from Europe. Where does GEAR come from?... Is Washington closer to us because it’s full of African-Americans?... Social movements are challenging the trajectory, nature and form [of GEAR]. A living politics is what is outside the Alliance.” McKinley (APF) responded to Sachs, saying the transition to democracy had failed to deal with “the fundamental question of private property. Privatisation is not an issue; it’s fundamental to life.”

McKinley went on to say: “We have a loyalty to the content of the liberation struggle, while the Alliance has a loyalty to the form. These grandmothers didn’t come out of some small Trotskyist sect that wants to smash the state. It’s not an anti-ANC or anti-Alliance thing, its anti-capitalist; there’s a difference between those.” He said the state had “institutionally marginalised” the social movements. “The amazing thing is the social movements are reclaiming those [socialist] traditions while the traditional Left is disavowing them.”

“The big question,” said Habib (HSRC), “is who makes the choices?”, claiming that “the role of leadership, of an advanced cadre and of resources is crucial” to the emergence, development and sustainability of social movements. Dwyer later put it differently, saying: “Leadership is also about the auntie in Chatsworth who says ‘No!’” He did warn, however, that “people who were against structure, were often in leadership” - a problem that we anarchists call “the tyranny of structurelessness”, the avoidance of responsibility and the pretence not to be in command thanks to amorphous, mandateless organisation. Dwyer said it should be acknowledged that “these organisations are ideological terrains and politics with a small ‘p’ can’t be pushed out because it’ll come back in the side door.”

Sophie Oldfield (Environmental and Geographical Sciences, University of Cape Town, who did the study on the AEC) also said that the different traditions that activists came from coloured their relations with the state and its “new mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession [privatisation].” But under these conditions, social movement engagements with the state had often tended to be entanglements with the police, plus defensive court actions, Desai (independent) noted: “The state responded to the social movements with mass arrests, criminalisation...”

Independent researcher Stephen Greenberg (who compiled the report on the LPM) said that the “social movements emerge out of direct grassroots action” rather than some imposed socialist ideology. Cock (Wits) asked whether the demand for decommodification could unite a “new socialist movement”. Lesbian activist Donna Smith (Forum for the Empowerment of Women, FEW) recalled that at a life-skills-training workshop on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, “one young girl said ‘the Constitution means nothing to us because we are fighting for survival’.” The black lesbian community had no social spaces of its own in the townships, yet regularly suffered from extreme violence, rape, victimisation, unemployment and psycho-emotional health issues, as well as HIV/AIDS.

These conditions, rather than formal politics or ideology, forged their identity and their activism. As Alexander (RAU) said, the movements were “not just conjured up by Ashwin and Dale.” It was noted by other activists, that the social movements had been absent from recent social upheavals such as Harrismith and Diepsloot, indications that the grassroots are under extreme pressure of pauperisation that is not linked to any ideology, but that also such insurgent sparks, lacking ideology and an overarching project, died out swiftly in the night. They were united merely by what Cock (Wits) - who had examined a failed social movement, the Steel Valley Crisis Committee - called “carnival bonds”, lacking any long-term commitments, research skills at community level (relying too heavily on outsiders), and international links.

Buhlungu (SWOP) noted that organisations like the APF were not undifferentiated, with strong debates already experienced around possible participation in the local government elections, with more looming ahead of the next local elections (the SECC having already decided, he said, to participate). This debate has proved particularly fiery, with a range of different opinions emerging, roughly divided between: a dual strategy of building an electoral front in council, to give profile to the grassroots struggle; or an exclusive concentration on grassroots struggle, either because electoralism is seen as premature or as a corrupting diversion.

Khan (Stellenbosch) said the new movements also arose because of “a contestation between technocratic knowledge and grassroots knowledge” and that if one protested outside the formal, legal channels, “you’re busted, arrested.” This amounted to “representative rather than substantive justice and the marginalisation of the poor.” If the state wanted to call itself developmental, Khan said, the challenge was to “tilt the institutional resource base in favour of the poor.” Engagement existed in three forms, he said: actively bargaining at the top and applying pressure from below; a passive “politics of patience” that allowed matters to develop both within the state and outside it; and an adversarial “break with corporatist negotiations” by an emergent radicalism.

It seems clear that the social movements engage in all these three forms, shifting according to circumstance, but that a very real divide, based on a complex interplay of class, identity and struggle tradition, exists between the programmatists (especially of the government) and the insurgents. I would suggest that though this divide can be crossed, and capital has shown itself very adept at compromising the militant working class, it is a divide that history has shown should never be crossed.

LESSONS FOR THE LEFT

In the view of the ARN, the lessons of the conference were threefold: a) a recognition that vast common ground exists between the social movements and organised labour in which they should collaborate, autonomously and horizontally between grassroots affiliates and rank-and-file members, to build working class unity and autonomy, outside of the capitalist bourgeoisie, and against it whenever necessary. We cannot prescribe to the movements whether this collaboration can be extended to allegedly progressive individuals within the administration: that decision needs to be taken by the constituents themselves, though we would warn against collaboration with bourgeois forces, noting that it is irrational to expect a rape victim to find common cause with their rapist; b) a recognition of the importance of dealing with the problems some of our constituencies have with poor internal democracy, organic leadership and access to adequate resources, in ways that give greater voice to our poor and marginalised; c) a recognition that the social movements, however uneven, are an organic part of the proud, pluralistic traditions of a century of anti-capitalist anti-racist working class struggle that has constantly renewed the true, egalitarian southern African liberatory project and will continue to do so as long as class rule remains the order of the day. We are not anti-democrats, but ultra-democrats.

Extracts from an Anti-Repression Network (ARN) report on the Social Movements Conference, Johannesburg, October 28 & 29, 2004. Full report online at: www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,10,1472

DOING THE LIBERATION LANG-ARM: AFRICA & SOUTH AFRICA AFTER “AFRICAN SOCIALISM”

Ten years into our new bourgeois democracy and the ANC released a triumphalist analysis of its achievements entitled “Towards a 10-year Review”. But one has to go further back and look at the continental soil within which the roots of the “miracle” transition from racial class rule to deracialised class rule grew. Our analysis here is mainly extracted from an interview with the ZACF published by the 36-year-old British anarchist journal Black Flag.

AFRICA’S ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Long under the whip of hyper-extractive colonial regimes, the development of the entire spectrum of left-wing revolutionism in Africa has been slaved firstly to the late or very narrow development of an industrial working class in a handful of countries - and secondly to the development of bourgeois national liberation struggles. In the first case, it was only countries such as South Africa, Algeria and Egypt where colonialism established significant settler populations (many of them labourers from Europe, or indentured labourers from India and Asia) to run sophisticated economies based on mining, commercial agriculture and their associated infrastructure. It is no accident that it is in these countries that anarchism first gained a foothold more than a century ago, finding its highest expression in the IWW-influenced revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA, founded 1917) and of the Indian Workers Industrial Union (IWIU, founded 1919) in South Africa. A notable exception to the trend is in the then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique, where it appears that an anarcho-syndicalist trade union tendency allied to the powerful Portuguese General Confederation of Labour (CGT) flourished into the late 1920s in the complete absence of a domestic communist party.

Two factors contributed to the decay of the “first wave” of revolutionary syndicalism & anarcho-syndicalism in Africa. Firstly, as with other Anglophone countries (former British colonies), the lack of specific anarchist organisations crippled revolutionary syndicalist organisations in meeting the challenges of Bolshevism and of emergent petit-bourgeois black nationalism (the ANC for instance), so the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU, founded 1918) that the IWA and IWIU gave birth to, spread as far afield as Zambia and peaked in 1927, but collapsed in ideological confusion thereafter. Secondly, from the early 1930s, much of Africa started to fall under fascism: Mozambique, Angola and other Portuguese territories under Salazar’s regime after 1927; Libya, Ethiopia and Eritrea under Mussolini’s Italy in the late 1930s; Morocco and Spanish Sahara under Franco’s Spain from 1936; Algeria, French West Africa (and Madagascar?) under Vichy France during the war; and Belgian Central Africa under the Rexist regime during the war. The post-war acceleration of national liberation struggles thus took place in a vacuum - but also in a condition of largely Soviet or Maoist seduction and patronage, while parts of Africa remained under fascist control into the mid-1970s (Angola and Mozambique).

The concept of “African socialism” as defined by continental so-called liberation leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, Ahmed Ben Bella and others has been hugely influential in the mal-development of the continent, both ideologically and economically. Some post-liberation countries experimented initially with a form of statist decentralisation, notably Libya under Muammar Gadaffi and Tanzania under Nkrumah while on the opposite side of the spectrum were the hyper-authoritarian Marxist regimes of the likes of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia or the outright neo-fascism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. The primary external “socialist” influences (based on direct military/political/economic investment) were the old USSR and to a lesser extent Cuba, China, North Korea and East Germany. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc had a big impact on the sustainability of the façade of “socialism” across much of the continent. Some regimes, like that of Mengistu, have collapsed. Others like Frelimo in Mozambique, have transformed themselves into bourgeois-democratic regimes. Still others like Zambia under Chiluba have capitulated wholesale to neo-liberalism. The evaporation of funding from foreign “communist” states was instrumental in provoking the collapse of unsustainable African “socialism”.

COLD WAR’S END USHERS IN TURBO-CAPITALIST “LIBERATION”

The collapse of apartheid and the end that brought to cross-border conflicts in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique in particular, the defeat of the old US client regimes like the former Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and proxy forces (like UNITA in Angola), and the exit of dictators like Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya and Hastings Banda of Malawi has brought the Cold War in Africa to an end. But the raping of the DRC by trans-national corporations, under the cover of military conflict between nine countries, the exposure of the fraud of electoral politics through the corruption of new “democratic” regimes like that of Frederic Chiluba of Zambia, and the last-ditch scorched-earth stance of “socialist” dinosaurs like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe have kept tensions high. Adding to this is the smooth sub-imperialism of South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and his neo-liberal “New Partnership for Africa’s Development” (NEPAD) that has ushered in a whole new era of struggle on the continent.

Lacking sustained anarchist/libertarian/syndicalist mass organised traditions, the continent has not proven a rich environment for the revival of anti-authoritarian organisations. Where they have arisen, it has perhaps been only in part because of the ideological vacuum created by the collapse of the validity of “socialism”, and perhaps more because of specific local conditions: in Sierra Leone, it was the pitiful working conditions in the diamond mines that gave rise to the IWW section there; while in Nigeria, leftist opposition to military rule helped forge the Awareness League. In South Africa, the legitimacy crisis of the reformist SACP and the erosion of worker gains by neo-liberalism have helped spur some interest in anarchism. But levels of interest and involvement in anarchist organisations on the continent are extremely low (by comparison to Latin America or Eastern Europe, for example) and should not be overemphasised.

Today, there are significant structural, legal, economic, political and social changes in the “free” South Africa - but also a widening wealth gap that for many black inhabitants means very little has changed in real terms. The scattered black homelands and their duplicate bureaucracies (including their armed forces) have been consolidated into a unitary state. A new human-rights-based constitution and the scrapping of all overt racially discriminatory laws has established a bourgeois parliamentary democracy in which the ANC is by far the dominant party with a 2/3 majority that they hope to consolidate in this year’s general election. Less overt racial laws, those that are class-based and biased in favour of big business have, however, ensured that the black majority remains landless, impoverished tenants in their own country. The country’s protectionist economics - reinforced by sanctions isolation - has been replaced by an open-door policy that has allowed cheap imports to flood the country, leading to the loss of some 1-million jobs since 1994. Probably the hardest-hit is the clothing-manufacturing sector that has long been a stronghold of workerist organising, as well as organised agriculture. Wildcat strikes have been most marked in the motor manufacturing sector, and in the late 1990s there were a spate of blockades of arterial roads by radicals in the transport sector. Labour battles between progressive and reactionary unions lead to a few murders in the ports and mining sectors. Unemployment stands at perhaps 40%, but we will discuss labour in more detail later.

THE REAL MEANING OF THE END OF WHITE SUPREMACY

The fault-line of racism (closely duplicated by class) is the fundamental reality of South African life after three centuries of white supremacist rule and deliberate under-development of the ruled, whether indigenous, Asian, brown or black. This is an inescapable fact and one that has troubled, challenged and enlightened our movement right from the start when we were essentially two underground organisations in the dying days of apartheid. While the laws dividing people along colour lines have changed, inequality and the wealth gap are increasing. Some 75% of all SA homes lack food security and one can find children suffering from malnutrition-related diseases like marasmus and kwashiokor on the doorsteps of our cities. HIV/AIDS has taken a huge toll and thousands of child orphans now find themselves the heads of their households, caring for their infant siblings as best they can. Some 62% of all blacks, 29% of all coloureds, 11% of all Asians and 4% of all whites currently live below the poverty line, a dramatic increase during the “decade of democracy”. Some 3.5-million have been evicted from their homes since 1994, often at gunpoint, while millions more have had their water and electricity cut off by municipalities who are far more interested in cost-recovery than the health of their residents. Many black people have commented on how life under the old apartheid regime was in some ways better in that there was more job security and there were state subsidies in services, which have been eroded by the neo-liberal GEAR (Growth Employment And Redistribution) economic policy of the ANC, which is a home-grown structural adjustment programme that even surprised the IMF and World Bank with its austerity.

As the ZACF, our overarching approach as revolutionaries is class struggle - but that in the SA context this so closely replicates a struggle against white supremacism that the two have to work in tandem, without the class issue absorbing or downplaying the importance of race. As a “multi-racial” organisation that has deliberately united activists from divided backgrounds, our main difference with the Western anarchist movement is that we do not feel the need for separate organisations for people of colour. We must say that we welcome the founding of ethnic organisations such as the Anarchist People of Color (APOC) network in the US, or the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magon (CIPO-RFM) in Mexico - where such organising appears to be crucial to establishing the validity of anarchism in marginalized communities. But in a majority black region where we have for too long been separated, racially-specific organisations would send out totally the wrong signals to the oppressed classes.

The racist white ultra-right has gone into a significant decline following the failed pre-1994 election Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) invasion of the Bophuthatswana bantustan and the last-gasp election bombing campaign. The current treason trial against the Farmer Force (Boeremag) is demonstrating how weak and pathetic the white right is, despite grandiose plans of blowing up dams and seizing control of the armed forces - all of which came to naught. Still, racism is a deeply entrenched reality in many farming areas where black labourers have been murdered, tortured or shot at, often for the mildest of supposed infractions. On the other hand, studies have shown that most murders of white farmers are criminally and not politically motivated. Right-wing vigilantism and murder has become a problem, both with the black/white Mapogo a Matamaga organisation in the northern provinces and the PAGAD Muslim/criminal organisation in the Western Cape, but both seem to be pretty quiet now. The main thing to recognise is that the mainstream right-wingers, both white and black, are now all in parliament. And not a single parliamentary party is opposed to neo-liberalism. So for many black, coloured, Asian and indigenous South Africans, their historical experience of marginalisation, joblessness, poverty, malnutrition and racism is unchanged, perhaps even deepened.

THE PSEUDO-SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONISM OF THE ANC & SACP

The ANC remains a member of the Socialist International - yet President Thabo Mbeki is a self-described Thatcherite. The ANC still talks at its public rallies of its “national democratic revolution” - and in the boardrooms about market fundamentalism. It has fired on peaceful demonstrations at home - and cosied up to noxious dictators like Gadaffi, Suharto, Mugabe, Musharraf, Kabila and Castro abroad. These contradictions are supposedly resolved by what the ANC claims is a “developmental state” theory. Now clearly, the party has to deal with the basic provision of infrastructural services in order to do three things: encourage foreign direct investment; secure their voter base; and improve the overall skills levels of the black working class so as to ensure a significantly large domestic market and a skills base to enable manufacturing to take the economic lead from primary industries like mining, agriculture and fishing. The ANC leadership has embraced the neo-liberalism that has meant stupendous wealth for some 300 black dynasties-in-the-making, the 5% of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange that represents “black empowerment”. It was mid-way through former President Nelson Mandela’s term that the ANC shut down its quasi-socialist pretensions (the Redistribution and Development Programme, RDP) and instead wholeheartedly embraced GEAR. In essence, the ANC is leading its working-class voters on a merry dance, a sort of “liberation lang-arm”, headed for the poorhouse.

It is important to recognise that the ANC does not rule alone (a common misconception abroad, we find), but previously in cahoots with the Zulu chauvinist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and also the anti-communist Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). In the Western Cape at provincial level, it has even been in bed with the retread New National Party (the old apartheid government). These alliances of convenience have tilted the overall political balance of the ruling clique in the direction of centre-right, which is despicable, given the decades of socialist rhetoric that motivated millions of South Africans (and their foreign allies) to back the “liberation” movements against apartheid. Today, Mbeki’s ANC is a blatantly capitalist party (although like Lula in Brazil and Chavez in Venezuela, it talks left while acting right). It introduced GEAR, which calls for cuts in social spending, privatisation, the casualisation of labour etc. With the socialist rhetoric of the past discarded, the ANC is revealed to be true to its original class interest: it is the party of an emerging bourgeoisie, of chieftains and technocrats from the black middle class who wanted to have a bigger slice of the capitalist pie.

The Communist Party alongside COSATU - which at some 1.8-million members is the biggest trade union organisation in South Africa - is in an alliance with the ruling ANC, the Tripartite Alliance. The SACP basically toes the ANC party line and uses their influence to gain votes for the ruling party, and in return high-ranking SACP party officials have seats in government. The rank and file of the SACP is pretty inactive with many members abandoning the party to join the social movements and other members who don’t like the direction the party is taking being expelled. The role of SACP in its own view is to provide a “critical socialist engagement” with the ANC regime, but its critics say its real role is to provide “red cover” for the ANC’s anti-working class policies. On the other hand, despite the fact that key ministers are communists - police (which glories under the name Safety & Security, SS), public works, public enterprises, the office of the presidency, water affairs & forestry - the SACP clearly is a subservient organisation. This was shown by the ANC forcing SACP deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin to apologise for warning about the possible “Zanufication” of the ruling congress, meaning it was starting to take on the dictatorial attitudes of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party. We characterised the spat as one between “Cronin capitalism and crony capitalism”! Cronin himself, a loyal Stalinist (and don’t Stalinism and Thatcherism go well together?) booted a real Bolshevik, Dale McKinley, out of the SACP for, essentially being too communist. McKinley is today spokesman for the Social Movements Indaba, the umbrella of the social movements within which the ZACF works.

Although COSATU is the most progressive of the four big labour federations, it has been compromised in its struggles for the interests of the rank-and-file; instead of organising workers for struggle the congress has preferred to negotiate with bosses behind closed doors. Like the SACP, the high-ranking COSATU officials are also using their positions to get comfortable seats in government and to canvas for the ANC. With the fall of apartheid, workers on the shop floor have been dissuaded from taking militant action, and a once strong fighting union has become a lapdog for the ruling elite. One of the main compromises made by COSATU is its endorsement of a Labour Relations Act that, while supposedly guaranteeing more labour rights, in fact places so many mediation obligations before aggrieved workers that it is extremely difficult to embark on a legal strike. Also, COSATU is party to NEDLAC, a cross-class labour/government/business policy forum that tends to lock it into agreements with the ruling class.

Then there is the growing practice of organised labour investing in capitalist companies or investment schemes, leading to possible conflict of interest problems if labour disputes arise at the companies invested in. In addition to this, the forced amalgamation of COSATU’s more radical and powerful unions (chemical, and transport in particular) with defunct and backward ones (paper & pulp, and another transport outfit, respectively) created mega-unions on paper, but diluted the radicalism and effectiveness of these progressive redoubts of organised labour. This, combined with the erosion of internal democracy by the imposition of “democratic centralism” to silence comment from the floor, the expulsion of revolutionary leaders and shop-stewards and the bugging of union offices by suspected ANC internal intelligence agents have neutered the power of COSATU.

This also lead to an anarchist change of tactics away from the anarcho-syndicalism represented by the Workers’ Solidarity Federation (WSF), shut down in 1999 in order to reorient ourselves more towards building serious militants outside the compromised unions, but inside poor communities of the unemployed and underemployed. But times are changing: COSATU has, on its own version, aided in the defeat of the right-wing within the ANC that wanted to marginalize worker interests; has taken a stridently independent line at loggerheads with the ANC on the Zimbabwean question; has extended an olive branch to the once-spurned radical social movements (see our report in this journal on the Social Movements Conference); and continues to mobilise hundreds of thousands of workers in strike actions, the latest being the 50,000-strong National Union of Mineworkers strike in March 2005 as we write this.

NEPAD & SOUTH AFRICA’S SUB-IMPERIALIST ROLE

South Africa has a very specific condition that makes it distinct from the rest of Africa. As the continent’s most powerful economy, it is also its most important sub-imperialist power, acting as a sort of regional policeman and continental viceroyalty on behalf of British imperialism. The distinction of the UK as our imperial power is as important - and neglected - as the recognition that Brazil is the sub-imperialist power in Latin America, operating on behalf of US interests. Remember, even if the UK is junior to the US, post-colonial Britain continues to dominate relations in Anglophone Africa, which include four key regional economies: Egypt in the north, Nigeria in the west, Kenya in the east and South Africa in the south. The only other imperialist power that wields quite as much influence in Africa is France, but France had only one key regional economy, Algeria, and lost much control there after “liberation”, leaving it with the purely extractive raw material / cheap labour pools of the Francophone west. As the main continental sub-imperialist power, post-apartheid SA has: pushed the neo-liberal New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); restructured the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as the neo-liberal African Union (AU); invaded its neighbour Lesotho in 1998 to falsely “restore democracy” (i.e.: crush a pro-democratic mutiny and claim it was a coup attempt); hugely expanded its own multinationals like Anglo American into the interior, often as buy-ins to privatisation; and advanced exploitation by, for instance, enclosing huge areas of northern Mozambique by pushing peasants off the land and settling white racist commercial farmers there.

SA’s infrastructure, economy - and armed forces - make it a formidable capitalist adversary to the working classes of our neighbours north of the Limpopo River. So the SA situation is intimately tied to being in the sub-imperialist centre on the one hand - and on the other to having a large industrialised working class with a very recent insurrectionary history. The class in SA also has an appreciation of the promises of communist liberation fresh in its memory - while it stares down the barrel of ANC-driven neo-liberalism. Otherwise, the wars in central Africa (DRC and southern Sudan in particular) are winding down, while West African regions like Sierra Leone (where until destroyed by the civil war, there was a 3,000-strong IWW section) and Liberia continue to bleed. Still, the DRC “peace” deal has foolishly endorsed rule-by-the-gun by simply recognising all combatants as legitimate claimants to a slice of the pie. This, the continuing attracting of plundering countries like Angola and the DRC of diamond and oil wealth by foreign (and African) multinationals, and the continued presence of interahamwe Hutu militia in the Great Lakes region make it appear that central instability is likely to continue for some time. And when the guns fall silent, there is still class rule, so no true peace. There is only one remaining colony - Western Sahara, which remains under Moroccan occupation - so the dynamics of national liberation are long faded. Essentially, we all face the same neo-liberal enemy today, but many of our neighbours do it without basic human rights, infrastructure, the means of living beyond a medieval average age of 40 - and without any libertarian revolutionary tradition within living memory.

AN INSURRECTIONARY PHOENIX: THE “GUERRILLAS” OF THE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

It was the opposition to privatisation by the SA Municipal Workers Union (a COSATU affiliate) that helped spark the new wave of resistance to capitalism. The unions may be hamstrung at the moment, but the bite of neo-liberalism is taking its toll on the shop floor just as much as in the township streets, so we believe it is only a matter of time before they experience a resurgence of rank-and-file militancy. In about 2000, several new anti-neo-liberal resistance strands (those opposing the payment of apartheid foreign debt, or the privatisation of municipal water, for example) united to form a constellation of new radical and progressive social movements. After holding the fort for several years in a political wilderness where criticism of the ANC/SACP was virtually unheard of (maintaining a propaganda initiative and running the Workers Library & Museum in Johannesburg as an independent working class space), the anarchist movement got directly involved in the new social movements, helping found, alongside comrades of various revolutionary persuasions, the Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg. Today the movements embrace an estimated 200,000 supporters across SA - as compared to the SA Communist Party’s largely inactive 16,000-paper membership.

It must also be pointed out that it was comrade B and the late comrade Mandla of the ZACF collective, the Shesha Action Group (SAG) in Soweto who started Operation Khanyisa, meaning “light”, the operation that illegally re-connected some 25,000 homes in Soweto. These “guerrilla electricians” are literally heroes to the millions of poor people who have had their lights cut off by state power supplier Eskom since 1994. We as the ZACF do not adopt a rose-tinted view of these social movements, for they are very uneven in theory and practice, are currently in a period of disorientation and retreat, and embrace reactionary as well as progressive and revolutionary elements. But they, hopefully in alliance with resurgent militants within COSATU’s rank-and-file, have enormous potential to form the core of an emergent working class power that will be able to challenge the barons of neo-liberalism with the aim of putting large swathes of the economy in the hands of the producers.

SWAZILAND: A BITTER TASTE TO THE SUGARCANE

INTRODUCTION

On January 25 and 26 this year, the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) held a national strike to try to force Africa's last absolute monarchy to transform itself into a multi-party bourgeois democracy. But it was a poor showing, with a demonstration of only 500 in Mbabane. Leaders from the SFTU, the Swaziland Federation of Labour (SFL), the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO) and the Ngwane National Liberation Congress (the last unpopular among the youth for “scratching the belly of the beast”) lead the Mbabane march. SFTU general secretary Jan Sithole said the regime's Imbokodvo party rode to power on the back of popular struggle: “The people of Swaziland liberated themselves from the British rule.”

But the lesson of popular power that he hinted at appears to have been lost. The strike was a far cry from the power of that demonstrated by the general strike of 1997 in which tens of thousands of workers including many from the state sector downed tools in response to the state's detention of four pro-democracy leaders including Sithole. In 1997, the general strike shut down the economy for almost two weeks and suggested an insurrectionary, social solution. But it was not to be: as the following report from our members in Swaziland will show, the pro-democracy movement there is still heavily compromised by bourgeois nationalist influences - notably the duplicitous ANC and SACP.

PRAYERS OF DESPERATION

You are in Manzini! The taxi with a South African registration is blasting toyi-toyi struggle songs, reminding you of the days when people's fear was replaced by the spirit of resistance during the fight against the apartheid regime, coupled with its demise towards the 1994 elections. Amongst the folks, individuals are wearing bright yellow ANC T-shirts with Mbeki's head on them, as if they are appealing to the king: “Please learn from the South African government. If you don't listen the same thing that happened to the former South African regime is going to happen to yours.”

Many people are attracted to immigrate in South Africa for jobs. When they visit back home they introduce the life of the big city. And they've tasted a disparate life to their fellow-country people, which gives them guts to challenge royal power. There are quite a considerable number of hawkers and street vendors from Mozambique who also have T-shirts of the main political parties in Mozambique with the head of that political party's candidate. Those in Swaziland have few ideas on how to achieve their freedom except praying, because wearing the T-shirt of the local movement can be leading to misery. Inside the fleet of buses, which is the major transportation of people, only gospel music is played and screened. The mainstream media is state-controlled and manipulated by the royal family and its friends. Many people in the very remote, primitive and forgotten villages have no access at all to any source of media.

The unemployed, peasants and workers are mostly dependent on subsistence farming for survival. As for the workers, their wages are paltry. Doubled with miserable working conditions, workers are continuously trampled. For more than 10 years the entire work force at the royal hotels were only casuals. The bosses are issuing retrenchment notices unilaterally. State workers are not allowed to join unions or strikes. For months nurses did not receive their wages. The trade union bureaucracy whines occasionally, but only to justify the king at the end of the day. Unanimous with the need to have the king, they say: “The king is innocent but only his advisers are to blame.”, which helps keep the king interesting and civilised to his counterparts on the continent who are implementing neo-liberalism.

LAND-BARONS ON THE WARPATH

The king is on a land-privatising spree. There's an influx of land prospectors, resulting in white strangers falling on the land, staying and introducing their western and European designed houses and their 4x4s. The next thing people hear are that dams, sugar cane fields and game reserves will be built on the same land where they are staying. Sugar is one of Swaziland's big exports. Already there are peasants who got lured into the snare by the hope that their lives will improve when they were told they'd automatically have ownership in the sugarcane fields. Later when the time to benefit comes, after they've worked so hard turning their land to sugarcane fields, they are told they owe the bank and the price of the sugar has gone down. Which means their land is now owned by the bank and they are advised to sign retrenchment documents.

In other incidents, the peasants are being told they may not have more than ten cows. A commotion erupted between the inhabitants of the land and the government authority over evictions from the land without remuneration: sheriffs instructing bulldozers, with police to arrest anyone resisting. If the attacked communities show any solidarity in resisting the evictions, the army is immediately sent to set up a checkpoint in the vicinity, and the entire community is evicted. This madness of harassment is also advancing the plan by the state to group the people together (the state says it is planning on installing water, electricity, roads, shops and that there will be jobs for people, but this is all being done at the state's convenience, not the people's).

BOURGEOIS NATIONALIST POLITICIANS TREAD WATER

There are three political parties, of which one is the People's Democratic Movement (PUDEMO). The other two have nothing much to do with the masses; mostly they represent the interests of the local businesses and they are infested by the administrators of the same regime. But PUDEMO is sub-ANC and it remains convinced the ANC will bring change in Swaziland. They believe in the ANC, not the masses of South Africa, because they only know the ANC “liberated” South Africa without understanding exactly who marched, demonstrated, boycotted and died for a complete change, not the neo-liberal war on the poor under the ANC of today. When the current king, Mswati III, came to power, PUDEMO urged the people to give him a chance. Within couple of years PUDEMO started barking as the king became more repressive than his father, King Sobhuza II.

Because of the decree declared in 1973 by Sobhuza, which gives the king absolute powers in decision-making, political parties and similar bodies can be dissolved and prohibited if they pose questions about royal power. There has been an attempt to amend this decree, by leaders of political parties and heads of state. Initially they took a diplomatic approach to build the bridge, but the Swaziland National Council (SNC), which is the main shareholder in the negotiations, is just an appendix of the state, which in turn is subject to the king. The negotiations have been going for more than a decade. But the people on the ground have no idea whether the amendment will feed the entire Swaziland or just the very few. They've been waiting patiently. And every time their leaders are coming out of the talks empty-handed.

Whenever there's a public outcry, leaders from different sectors are summoned by the king to have an amending ceremony with him (he's always doing cultural rituals to remind everyone not to forget him). Clearly the heads of state are procrastinating on negotiations, but the pressure is amounting on the movement because their promise to have a multi-party government by 2008 is being shattered. This has caused impatience and exhausted the slightest lawful means and it is driving mostly the youth in the direction of armed struggle because the youth blames their leaders for wasting time. During these unnecessary delays the state is brutally storming activists with beatings, torture, arrests, interrogations, raiding and confiscations of office equipment. Some have been killed or paralysed.

PARALYSIS ON THE LABOUR FRONT, TOO

The two federations are Swaziland Federation of Trade Union (SFTU) and Swaziland Federation of Labour (SFL). The SFTU's two biggest affiliates are the Swaziland Nation Association of Civil Servants (SNACS) and Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT), both of which are currently suspended from the federation after they expressed dissatisfaction about lack of transparency and democracy in the SFTU federation's bureaucracy. Although SNAT only mentioned late balloting of its members, as the cause of its failure to participate in the strike, both affiliates shunned this year's strike at the last minute, because of their suspensions. The affiliates of the union federations are run like spaza shops. There's no solidarity: affiliation is only for recognition. Most leaders of the affiliates are civil servants in the highest posts, where they have to dance the tune of the king. And they are involved within certain sub-structures which keep the communities submissive to the king's orders.

It is the same with the union federations. There's a fight amongst its national executive committees, mostly because of their relationships with certain political parties: everyone needs to have their political party's agenda recognised. Currently four affiliates are suspended. PUDEMO's relationship with the federation is bitter and most of the suspended affiliates are close to PUDEMO. But the relationship between the trade unions and the political movement is vague and unpredictable. The movement gets its funding and guidance from the ANC government and the tripartite alliance. Obviously the sole interest of the South African government has nothing to do with liberating the oppressed, suppressed and repressed destitute indigenous masses of Swaziland, but rather to protect and advance business co-operation with South Africa and abroad so the mega-rich and up-coming black capitalists can collaborate with the king in expropriating the land belonging to the people. Also to get cheap labour and expand their market claws. So the political movement is expected only to democratise the kingdom - not to get rid of the entire royal power.

REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH ENTER THE FRAY

But outspoken members of student organisations have also expressed their disapproval of the SFTU's leadership. The Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO) is the sub-division of PUDEMO. The youth on the ground have been autonomously influential in grassroots political activities, which keeps the movement in step with the oppressed men and women in the street of Manzini and Mbabane. These are mostly the youth in the high-school level, who are frustrated at the extreme poverty and disease in their communities and at the lack of job prospects, limited mainly among male students to possible careers in the state security apparatus (the regime is the largest employer and the entire work force is only 96,000). They are mainly inspired by the youth in South Africa during the 1976 uprising and are demanding free and quality education with their student representatives taking part in decision-making.

Active in an environment where HIV/AIDS, hunger and curable disease decimate their communities, these energetic young up-coming revolutionaries are prepared to go beyond PUDEMO's reformist agenda. After explaining to them what is happening today in South Africa under the ANC government, they immediately realised that the ANC is playing a dirty game in Swaziland. Clearly, the ANC betrayed masses around the world. In Swaziland the masses were promised that immediately after South Africa was freed, Swaziland would be liberated, but until this day, the masses are still waiting. The 1996/7 uprising in Swaziland came from the Swazi people on the street, hoping the ANC would give them support. But instead, leaders from various pro-democracy groups ended up in the government and became obstacles to the possible fall of the king. These political activities were always there, although 1996/7 is most remembered because of the influence of the South African masses.

BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY COUNTER-POWER

Today the people of Swaziland are so completely downtrodden that the youth are starting to speak of going for guerrilla training and taking up the armed struggle, in emulation of MK in South Africa. But that path is the road to disaster, as clearly shown by the ANC-lead state's military invasion of the constitutional monarchy of Lesotho in 1998 in order to crush a pro-democratic mutiny. Swaziland, a landlocked country similar in many ways to Lesotho, can only expect a similar bloody military intervention if its people resort to arms too early. The only real option for the people of Swaziland now is for them to forever sever their dreams of liberation from trickster politicians and opportunistic labour leaders.

Swaziland is not undergoing a national liberation struggle in the conventional sense. But its popular classes are still having to fight against the neo-colonialism of South African and British capitalists allied with local chiefs. Against this background, the opportunities for a real pre-revolutionary dual-power situation to be developed by committed rank-and-file revolutionaries in Swaziland are great. This is because a) it is geographically and culturally very close to the grassroots revolutionary traditions of South Africa, b) there is no communist party or any other substantial left-wing presence able to sidetrack the struggle, c) the entire civil society, trade union and political movement is excluded from power - but corrupted by bourgeois aspirations, and d) people are angry at poor working conditions and at blatant land-grabs by capitalist agribusiness and brutal evictions by the state.

The revolutionaries among SWAYOCO's youth must start building counter-power in Swaziland by forming horizontal links with like-minded groupings in the region, especially in South Africa, who have more members and resources to assist them. They must start building secret rank-and-file members' networks within SWAYOCO, PUDEMO, SFTU, SFL and the suspended unions, and within social groupings of the working class, peasantry and poor, whether of women, or high-school children. So long as they remain directly democratic, allowing their policy decisions to be taken by those most immediately affected, these local and regional networks will be able to form the foundation of a social force strong enough to undermine the capitalist monarchic state by seizing power - and putting it in the hands of their communities and so build a libertarian socialist system.

These new networks must shatter the chains that bind them to bourgeois nationalist politics. Their united voices should cry out - not for patriotic chauvinism - but for A SOCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE OPPRESSED CLASSES! They must realise that tens of thousands of Swazis live beyond Swaziland's borders, thus the liberation of the Swazis recognises no such artificial boundaries: the movement must be INTERNATIONALIST and ANTI-IMPERIALIST. They must also recognise the liberation of the Swazis requires the liberation of all other ethnic groups, black, white, brown or yellow, united against all centres of exploitation: the movement must be ANTI-RACIST and ANTI-CAPITALIST. They must recognise that to deny the king and his Tinkundla system its authoritarian rule is not to deny their “culture,” but to deny the ruling class its extraction of profit from their sweat in the name of culture. Anarchists only support what is progressive and democratic in each culture. We are against the chieftaincy, the monarchy, and traditional laws that oppress women. We want grassroots democracy, not authority, traditional or otherwise.

The power of the people is not to be found in the boardrooms of the parasite class that feeds off the people: the movement must be ANTI-BOURGEOIS, but militate for WORKING CLASS SOLIDARITY. Recognising that our enemies are anti-democratic, the movement must practice DIRECT ACTION IN THE FIELD and DIRECT DEMOCRACY IN DECISION-MAKING. Recognising that our enemies sow only distrust, disease, death and dismay, the movement must practice MUTUAL AID, and fight its resistance struggle in ways that LIBERATE, not enslave, those they seek to free. These new networks must champion the autonomy of grassroots organisations, for WORKER CONTROL OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION and COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MUNICIPALITIES. That path is the road to a true social revolution that the 1997 general strike only hinted at.

ZACF International Secretaries

ABC-SA PROTESTS THE MURDER OF CIPO-RFM ACTIVISTS

The Anarchist Black Cross (southern Africa), a member collective of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF), held a protest against the Mexican government on Saturday March 19 as part of the Anti-War Coalition's contribution to the international anti-imperialist day of action marking the 2nd anniversary of the mass-murder by Coalition forces of Iraqi draftees.

The ABC (SA)'s Anti-Repression Network, the Anti-War Coalition and the Freedom of Expression Institute were among more than 100 signatories of a protest petition that was sent to Mexico's ambassador to South Africa, M de Maria y Campos, protesting the murders by death-squads of 27 members of the Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magon (CIPO-RFM), numerous attacks on CIPO-RFM autonomous municipalities and the shutting down of their community radio station.

The CIPO-RF embraces well over 1,000 members in 24 autonomous villages in Oaxaca state, southern Mexico. It is named after Oaxacan anarchist revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon who was murdered in the American prison of Fort Leavenworth in 1922, a martyr to anti-imperialism if ever there was one. CIPO-RFM has close fraternal ties with the Zapatistas' indigenous councils and autonomous municipalities in neighbouring Chiapas state.

Although it is an unarmed formation that uses passive resistance tactics, CIPO-RFM has come under severe repression from death-squads, apparently backed by the neo-liberal Mexican state under President Vicente Fox. This state is acting as the instrument of destructive US imperialist policy in Central America and has filled its jails with almost 400 political prisoners, many jailed for life for “crimes” of resistance to Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA-ALCA).

March 21 was called by the CIPO-RFM as an international day of protest against the killings by the death-squads that serve US-Mexican elite interests against the peasantry, working class and the poor. Given the prior plans for the anti-war march on March 19 and given the common American imperialist source of both the Mexican and Iraqi people's pain, we combined our protest with those of our comrades in the social movements.

The ABC (SA)'s action also recalled the centenary of the ABC, founded in Tsarist-occupied Poland in 1905 during the uprising of that year, and now with an operational presence in some 64 countries across the globe. The ABC and its fellow centenarian organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), have demonstrated a militant libertarian longevity that has far outlasted any of the facile “communist” internationals that were mere fronts for nationalist foreign policies.

As an African anarchist delegate to Zapatista-held Chiapas in 1996 and a personal acquaintance of CIPO-RFM delegate Raul Gatica, who is in hiding in fear of his life, I appeal to the international anarchist community to shame the Mexican government into calling the dogs off our vulnerable comrades in Oaxaca.

- Michael Schmidt, ABC (SA)
www.zabalaza.net/abc/

ZIMBABWE: TIME FOR AN END TO THE ELECTORAL ROAD

The April 2004 elections pose tough questions for the MDC, ZCTU. The choices made now will have massive consequences. We suggest a way forward.

UP FROM UNDER

In 1999, the class struggle in Zimbabwe was at an all-time high. An ongoing series of general strikes in the private and State sectors had shaken the State apparatus headed by Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF machine. The union movement, centred on the ZCTU, was numbered among the ten fastest growing worldwide. Riots in urban townships, a farm workers strike of unprecedented scale and success, a militant student union, ZINASU, and protests by war veterans crippled the neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that had been in place since 1991. The SAP - championed by a ZANU-PF in office since 1980 - was quietly abandoned by the end of 1997.

These events, reported in Zabalaza, and its predecessor, Workers Solidarity, were immensely inspiring, and were part of a broader upsurge of class struggle in South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia. The possibility of a post-neo-liberal and post-nationalist Zimbabwe seemed very real. ZANU-PF was widely reviled, corruption scandals well known. The party’s hold on power seemed shaky. What was, in practice, a one-party State, seemed doomed: throughout southern Africa, popular movements were toppling postcolonial rulers, and Zimbabwe seemed next in line. In 1999, the ZCTU, ZINASU, the National Constitutional Assembly, NGO, and others, began a process that led to the formation of a very popular “Movement for Democratic Change” (MDC). Then, in early 2000, ZANU-PF lost a popular referendum on changing the constitution.

HOW THE REST WAS LOST