Zabalaza:
A Journal of Southern African
Revolutionary Anarchism #7
December 2006
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AFTER
10 YEARS OF GEAR: by Lucien van der Walt
South Africa’s transition, as we stated in Workers Solidarity in 1998, went sour a long time ago. Overthrowing apartheid was a tremendous victory, but not enough. It was soon overshadowed by the ANC’s neo-liberal policies, which built on those adopted in the last years of the apartheid regime.
LOST IN TRANSIT As an increasingly multiracial ruling class consolidated its position, the working class retreated. This retreat was - and remains - fundamentally a question of politics and strategy: COSATU and the SACP had no idea how to deal with the new situation. Having spent years believing the ANC would, like Moses, lead the people out of bondage in Egypt, they now found themselves in a strange new country. Apartheid was gone, but slavery was not. The supposed Moses now looked a lot like Pharaoh, but COSATU and the SACP remained part of the Tripartite Alliance.
ALL GEARed UP The miserable conditions in the townships continued, mass unemployment - which started in the 1970s - continued to grow, and neo-liberalism accelerated. 30% of TELKOM was privatised in 1996 and a further 20% was listed in 2003, and ESKOM and the SA Post Office were commercialised. While the GATT (now the World Trade Organisation) required tariff protection on telecommunications to fall to 20%, the government set itself the target of zero protection, and also opened up other controls over trade and capital movements. These approaches were consolidated in the 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR), but did not start with it. The unproductive financial sector shot up to 20% of the entire SA economy, although it employed only 1% of the workforce, while manufacturing and mining shrunk, with perhaps 1 million jobs lost in these sectors plus agriculture. The electricity and water grid was expanded, but with cost recovery applied, 10 million people suffered water cut-offs and 5 million were evicted.
SAVING THE ANC’S SOUL In this situation, COSATU and the SACP chose to try and save the unhappy marriage with the ANC. Afraid of being isolated from the seats of the mighty, flattered by pats on the head by ANC leaders, tempted by job offers, and unable to break with an almost religious loyalty to the ANC colours - and a well-established tendency to uncritically worship ANC leaders - union and Party policy makers spent fruitless years trying to redeem the ANC. Reinforcing this approach was the longstanding, and seriously flawed, view that South Africa must have a two-stage “revolution”: a “national democratic stage,” led by the ANC, to end racism, followed by a “socialist stage,” in a vague future. “Intervening” in the ANC, “contesting” it, “saving” its soul: these were the terms used to justify this approach. The fact that the ANC was - and always had been - a capitalist party that aimed to open up, as Nelson Mandela stated back in 1956, “fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class,” was ignored.
BEE-llionaires The fact that the major debate within the ruling ANC after 1994 was on how to link neo-liberalism to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) - the deliberate creation of the “non-European bourgeois class” - was ignored. The fact that the ANC had struck a deal with the apartheid-era ruling class, and had now joined it, was ignored. COSATU and SACP positions moved from the naïve (the idea that the ANC would drop neo-liberalism if only it would let COSATU provide good advice) to the paranoid (there was a conspiracy against “transformation”). For organisations that spoke in the language of class struggle, there was nothing in the way of a class analysis of the realities of the situation. COSATU and the Party were ignored by the ANC, and periodically insulted - except at election times, when their financial support and influence were eagerly sought. After elections, of course, it was business as usual, with South Africa’s particularly vile brand of capitalism flourishing. By 2006, the economy was booming, reaching 5% growth, the number of families with more than $30 million each shot up four times, but the income of the bottom 40% of the population fell by nearly half.
ZUMA AND COSATU This situation has played out in the Jacob Zuma controversy. Zuma, a leading ANC member, deputy president of South Africa, and head of the State-sponsored “Moral Regeneration Campaign,” was found to have been involved in corruption around the arms deal. His associate, Durban businessman Shabir Shaik, was found guilty in 2005, and Zuma himself now faces charges. Mbeki, not a man to tolerate rivals in the ANC, used the opportunity to oust Zuma from office. Another bombshell followed, when Zuma was accused of raping a close family friend who, it transpired, was HIV-positive. Now, it was fairly clear that corruption was not the main factor in Zuma’s dismissal. His replacement in office, Phumzile Mlambo-Nguka, was almost immediately involved in a scandal. She used a Falcon 900 executive jet of the SA Air Force to take her husband, children and friends on a holiday to the United Arab Emirates. It was also clear that Mbeki, an autocrat of the first water, was more than happy to use the judiciary and the State intelligence services to resolve internal disputes in the ANC.
COSATU’S POSITION There was also nothing surprising in the fact that Zuma used every trick in the book to whip up support at the rape trial, ranging from crude Zulu nationalist appeals to a legal team that effectively put his accuser on trial. Mobilisations outside the courthouse drew in a wide range of groups, with many reactionary features, ranging from slogans like “Burn the Bitch” to placards saying “No Woman for President.” A whole cult was built up around Zuma. The Friends of Jacob Zuma stated: “We, the people, will ensure that this man of honour, who dedicated his life to liberating us, will finally have the right to defend himself.” One protestor carried a cross, with a Zuma picture, claiming that this “man of honour” was being persecuted “just like” another “man of honour,” Jesus Christ. This seems ridiculous, but it was typical of the Zuma mobilisations. What was most surprising - at least at first glance - was COSATU’s almost uncritical support for Zuma during 2005 and 2006. The SACP was a bit more divided, but its Youth League was in the forefront of the Zuma mobilisation and the Friends of Jacob Zuma organisation.
STRANGE FRUIT This seems strange at first, but it is the logical outcome of the dead end in which COSATU and the SACP find themselves after ten years of “engaging” the ANC, after ten years of futile complaints about GEAR, after ten years of COSATU policy documents gathering dust at Shell House. Unable to break with the ANC, and unable to change it, the union and the Party placed their hopes in Zuma. Zuma had never uttered a word against GEAR, against capitalism or against neo-liberalism but he had one good point: he was not Mbeki, and it was hoped that he might be a new Moses to lead the people. After all, according to COSATU and SACP thinking, there must always be a great leader: the masses need to be led. The “support for Cde Jacob Zuma,” Blade Nzimande of the SACP recently told the NUM, exposed popular opposition to the crises of corruption, factionalism and personal careerism” in the ANC, “crises” that were “inherent in trying to build a leading cadre based on capitalist values and the symbiotic relationship between the leading echelons of the state and emerging black capital.” The Party Youth League grandly stated that “Our defence and support for Jacob Zuma is the defence of the constitution.” Meanwhile, speaking of the upcoming Zuma corruption trial, Zweli Vavi of COSATU called for Zuma to be reinstated in his positions: “”We will ensure that whenever comrade Zuma appears in court, our people will demonstrate en-masse.”
EXODUS WITHOUT A MAP Nothing can better express the bankruptcy of the political outlook of COSATU and the SACP than these positions. Zuma is no different to Mbeki: another rich politician, another false Messiah who misleads the working class, another ANC scoundrel who would implement GEAR as much as Mbeki. In no way whatsoever would he break with the ANC policy of developing “a leading cadre based on capitalist values” and a “symbiotic relationship between the leading echelons of the state and emerging black capital.” However, there is nothing surprising about the COSATU and SACP position. Bound to the ANC by fear, flattery and a failed strategy - the two-stage theory that the ANC will open the door to socialism - and blinded by its traditional devotion to Congress and its leaders, the two organisations remain in a dead end. The fact that many of their leaders are only too eager to join the ANC leadership at the capitalist feast does not help either. In this situation, support for Zuma is certainly tragic but almost inevitable. Support for Zuma allows the ANC to remain sacred and untouchable, and the politics of relying on a saviour untouched. A hard look at the nature of the transition can be avoided, and a serious struggle against capitalism postponed, yet again. All problems could be blamed on Mbeki and his faction: Zuma has been discovered to represent the shining soul of the ANC; Mbeki became Satan overnight. In return for COSATU and SACP backing in the Alliance and internal ANC battles, the structures hoped Zuma might - just might - be nicer than Mbeki and might - just might - listen to the working class for a while. This is what the pro-Zuma mobilisations by working class organisations mean. The outcome of a disastrous politics, they don’t take the working class out of the dead end that loyalty to the ANC involves. The only way out is a break with the ANC, not a false choice between Mbeki and Zuma. The ANC is not the solution: it is a large part of the problem faced by the workers and the poor.
COLLECTIVE
BARGAINING BY RIOT:
Seeing the police move on a single column of smoke rising from two burning tyres over rebellious Khutsong, south-west of Johannesburg, on March 1, local government election day, I was reminded of the Native American warrior in Dances With Wolves remarking of the distant fire of a frontiersman that he would not tolerate “a single line of smoke in my own country”. The ANC-led government in similar fashion had determined that Khutsong would not explode on voting day; that the mockery of the vote that occurred would be “free”, albeit an enforced peace in a township that had driven ANC leaders out, revolting against an administrative transfer out of Gauteng province to an uncertain future in the poverty-stricken North-West.
FIRE IN KHUTSONG So two armoured Nyalas lumbered over to the smoking tyres where photographers were vainly trying to get a dramatic shot - but Khutsong was virtually deserted on the morning of the vote. The fire-gutted Gugulethu community centre was already defaced by crude sexual, gangster - and, in what is a hopeful sign, anarchist - graffiti. The presiding officer at the government’s Independent Electoral Commission tent set up next to the ruin glumly told me he did not expect a single soul to turn out to vote that day. He proved right, with barely more than 200 out of 29,000 registered voters exercising their hard-won right. Khutsong resident Albert Mamela stood near the smouldering tyres and told of his dream that the people of Khutsong - whether Zulu, Xhosa or “foreigner” - could “be like the Bafokeng” - the tribe that owns platinum mines near Rustenburg - and take ownership of Khutsong’s nearby gold-mines, the riches of which seldom finds its way into local pockets. Community ownership of the mines would render local government irrelevant, he said: “because then we will take care of development ourselves”. There is some healthy anti-capitalist sentiment here, but it is also confused. The Bafokeng royal house controls the mines in question, and exploitation carries on as before. A king makes the economic decisions: this is not the working class ownership and control anarchist-communists advocate . Khutsong Residents accused councillors of nepotism, the provision of toilets that did not work and, worse in their view, not living in the areas they supposedly represented, a common complaint. Mamela claimed that councillors said R1,2-million had been spent on the road to the Khutsong graveyard, whereas he knew it had only cost R800,000, suggesting the councillors had pocketed the rest. He suggested that Merafong mayor Des van Rooyen had, unlike previous mayors, acquired bodyguards “because he knew what he was going to do” in “selling” Khutsong to the North West province. But despite the powerful emotions circulating on voting day, Khutsong was suffering a hangover from the previous night’s celebration of the successful boycott call and was unlikely to produce drama, so I drove on into Gauteng, north-east to the gated suburbs of Houghton to watch former President Nelson Mandela cast his vote.
THE APF AND ELECTIONS I had far to travel, so bypassed Pimville in Soweto where the Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM) was contesting the elections. There was a fierce debate in the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) over the question of elections. Trotskyist leader, APF organiser and Soweto activist Trevor Ngwane jumped the gun, forming the OKM as a party and political vehicle for his career and his politics without an APF mandate. In stark contrast to the social movements in areas such as Motsoaledi, Orange Farm and Sebokeng stood firmly by a “no services - no vote” position [although in Motsoaledi, this was later reversed following an internal struggle]. Ngwane’s movement won a paid position as a councillor, based on 4,305 votes. Ngwane did not take the seat as expected, but the OKM councillor who did will have her lone left-wing voice drowned out by the 75 ANC and 31 DA councillors. Working class power lies in the community and in the workplace, not in the forums of the ruling class. Ngwane was ousted a month later at the Anti-Privatisation Forum annual general meeting as APF chair by Brickes Mokolo of the Orange Farm Crisis Committee - a key figure in the anti-electoral faction of the APF. This is a hopeful sign, for Mokolo has helped build a viable, anti-electoral strategy in that poor settlement.
THE OTHER HALF Houghton is old, genteel Joburg, replete with bowling greens, high walls and lanes of poplar trees and oaks, gated with booms and security guards. The old and new elites, with their black maids in tow, were smartly lined up to cast their ballots: no burning tyres here; only the worship of Mandela - the architect of post-apartheid neo-liberalism - as some sort of living saint of the wealthy. From Houghton, I drove north-east to the small diamond-mine and prison town of Cullinan to the east of Pretoria. There, the local Freedom Front Plus branch - Afrikaner seperatists - was hoping to oust the incumbent Democratic Alliance neo-liberals from the Nokeng tsa Taemane Municipality. The ANC won, but the only real excitement on the day was when Afrikaner singer Valiant Swart happened to pass through town.
MPUMULANGA From Cullinan, I drove out to Siyabuswa in Mpumalanga, the former capital of the apartheid-era homeland of kwaNdebele, because here, the Ministry of Provincial and Local Government had promised me, was an example of a municipality that, while not wealthy, was exceptionally well run. Siyabuswa means “we are governed”, but I found that the way that governance works sadly conforms to the patterns of endemic corruption so well established in apartheid days. Residents such as Amos and Elisabeth Msiza and their friend Petros Mhlangu - all in their fifties - complained that their water-supply (charged at a rate guessed by the council because their meters didn’t work) was intermittent and that they lost their pre-paid electrical power whenever it rained. “If you have money, this government helps you - but not those who struggle,” Mhlangu said. The three residents blamed unelected municipal manager George Mthimunye for Siyabuswa’s shoddy service delivery. Their view was supported by ex-ANC independent candidates such as July Msiza who told me that Mthimunye faced not only criminal charges of having sexually harassed his secretary, but was also accused of having stolen council funds to pay for two friends of his to be trained as traffic officers (one of whom allegedly crashed a council vehicle she was illegally using for her own purposes, in far-off White River). So much for well-governed Siyabuswa!
TWELVE YEARS ON Fast-forward to April 27, “Freedom Day”, twelve years down the line from what Archbishop Desmond Tutu memorably called the “Rainbow Nation” waiting to make their mark in the first post-apartheid ballot. And what a mark it has been: from the heart-rending wail of Fort Callata’s mother at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings to the ascendancy of the Black Economic Enrichment phalanx into positions of capitalist and state power; from the collapse of the neo-fascist AWB to the rise of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka as a possible future president thanks to the axing of Jacob Zuma. Trevor Manual is the darling of this elite and its middle-class praise-singers, for whom fiscal discipline is a golden calf and equality a sin. This mutual admiration society has decreed a perpetual round of expensive parties to praise the near-feudal conditions on which their empires are built, a perpetual celebration so to speak (I’m reminded of Jello Biafra’s phrase “the happiness you have demanded is now mandatory!”). But millions look set to be unemployed for life and HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, malaria and ailments of malnutrition such as kwashiorkor and marasmus - usually associated in the popular imagination with famine in Sudan or the Horn of Africa - stalk the population. Last May, at the second annual National Security Conference, two analysts from very different sectors had a dire warning for the country: COSATU chief economist Dr Neva Makgetla and Standard Bank credit policy and governance director Desmond Golding agreed that a highly educated but permanently unemployed “underclass” constituted the country’s biggest security threat. The working class is retreating, but not defeated, and it haunts the imagination of those who rule this country.
UNFREEDOM DAY Further rioting and arson in Khutsong attended the elevation of councillors to office on the basis of a 2% poll - an election that Human Sciences Research Council society culture and identity specialist Dr Mncedisi Ndletyana rightly described during a TV interview as “illegitimate”. The official celebration was declared an “unFreedom Day” by the poor in Durban who decried the evaporation of the dream of equality the 1994 elections had promised, but which the elites had betrayed. They demanded an end to evictions, cut-offs and forced relocations, saying they were fighting for unconditional access to the resources fenced off by the rich. Local government specialist Greg Ruiters of Rhodes University told me that the yawning chasm between the developmental promises of neo-liberalism and the grinding poverty of South Africa’s sprawling shackland (three out of every four South Africans now lives in urban areas) would increasingly see people take to direct action. “The key problem for all parties contesting the local government elections,” Ruiters said, “is that citizens have discovered another, more direct, channel for giving voice to their needs: ‘collective bargaining by riot’ may become more common than waiting to vote.” The key problem for all the poor, however, is that electoral, representative politics is so limited and disempowering. As Sheila Meintjies of Wits University’s political studies department put it, “there is a growing sense that the councillors don’t necessarily hold all the power, that the officials are really, if anything, to blame for a lack of service delivery.” These unelected municipal officials, she said, were directly lobbied by very powerful big-business interests that short-circuited the country’s bourgeois-democratic process and skewed development in favour of the rich. A grim example of this powerful bureaucratic class is eThekwini (Durban) municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe, an ANC strategist and die-hard opponent of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack-dwellers’ Movement), whose protest marches he illegally tried to ban. In March, Sutcliffe and his ideological cohorts suffered two key court defeats - by the Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Soweto Concerned Residents - which confirmed the absolute right of people to gather and to demonstrate without requiring police permission. This is a big victory for the social movements that they should fully exploit.
WORKING CLASS DEMOCRACY We anarchist communists would go further than Meintjies, underlining that it is simply impossible for the country’s 400 Members of Parliament to truly represent the interests of 46.9-million people. It is even less likely that 37 very wealthy party-political Cabinet Ministers, tainted by the elitist idea of “democratic centralism” will bend over backwards for the working class and poor. Both our Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and the ANC’s “democratic centralism” are anything but democratic. The elections of 1994 were a huge victory inasmuch as apartheid’s doom was sealed. But there were not enough, and could never be enough, and their achievement is increasingly overshadowed by the grim neo-liberal class war being waged by the ruling elite . Capitalism, with its class system, will always benefit the few at the expense of the many. Activists in Swaziland and Zimbabwe should take heed. Real popular empowerment and real economic and social equality can only be achieved by well-organised, mass-based, directly-democratic, community-controlled action against the parasite class. “Collective bargaining by riot” is a good start, but we must build working class power until we can move onto the offensive, and remake the world.
THE ANTI-LIBERATION MOVEMENTS by Alan Lipman
I joined the Communist Party of South Africa in 1948 as a Wits student. Before then I had just accepted that the way things were was normal. Then I went to Italy which had a very strong Communist Party and the feeling was that it would sieze power any day. The US Third Fleet was patrolling the Mediterranean at that stage and we asked ourselves what they were doing. They were trying to prevent communist take-overs in Italy, Greece and to a lesser extent Spain. One day I saw a huge crowd running towards me, being chased by the police who were beating them with truncheons. I ducked into a doorway and the shopkeeper took me inside and explained it was a communist meeting addressed by Palmiro Togliatti [the head of the Italian Communist Party]. They were protesting the American presence and I saw how they were treated. Later when I returned to South Africa, I joined the CPSA under Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo and JB Marks because it was then the only organisation where people from all races came together... In 1955, messages were sent out to community leaders - which was itself a problem, that it was only the leaders - to consult the people on what they wanted from a free society. Thousands of scraps of paper came back, mostly from poor people, saying things such as they wanted to send their children to university. Rusty Bernstein of the SACP [the renamed CPSA] turned all the demands into “The People Shall Govern...” because he had that poetic ability. Whatever its faults and problems, the Freedom Charter was a people’s document.
THE COMMUNIST BETRAYAL But in 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. The whole thing seemed mad to me: I wondered how a people could oppose their own government, and a communist government at that? The Soviets said they were defending Hungary from the reaction, an argument that they would later use regarding their interventions in Czechoslovakia and Poland, but the more I read about the situation, the more I realised this was not true. My communist ideas were suddenly in danger and my questioning lead me to question the ANC which we all then regarded as the “Big Daddy” of the liberation movements, as our father. At that time, I worked for New Age, the SACP and ANC newspaper that changed its name several times (each time it was banned we relaunched it under another name until they finally banned us from doing so). My wife worked as a journalist for New Age in Durban, and I also helped out because I was not doing well as an architect. The newspaper was edited by Brian Bunting. I wrote a letter for the newspaper which I submitted to Bunting, arguing that the ANC as a people’s liberation movement should object to the Hungarian invasion and I said that Chief Albert Luthuli [then head of the ANC], who I’d met and respected very much, should lead such a campaign. Bunting initially refused to publish it, only later printing it in a very censored form. At that stage I worked on New Age with Mac Maharaj, but he was away doing something. I met some very fine people in the Communist Party and they introduced me to the world and taught me philosophy... At that time I was - and I don’t think I’m being boastful here - quite an influential member of the Party. But later, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, you’d find there was always someone in the local Party who would explain it away as a good thing. I came from a middle-class family but it was members of the Party who were my friends. Then when I began to criticise the Soviet Union, which was where we believed there was real socialism and people were equal, my friends began freezing me out. I became isolated: socially, economically and intellectually. I started reading other material and came out of communism, though it was later my son who turned me into an anachist: which shows that you often learn more from your children than your parents! [After leaving the SACP, Lipman and a few other disaffected members successfully firebombed the office where the apartheid state held the records that were being compiled to include black women in the hated pass-law system that so severely restricted black men’s movement. For a year, he fought alongside the African Resistance Movement which conducted several anti-apartheid bombings, but became disenchanted with its “feeble liberalism” and left it].
THE DIVISIONS OF APARTHEID One strange story is that one day when I lived in Hillbrow... Detective-Sergeant Johan Coetzee - later General Johan Coetzee, the head of BOSS [the secret police agency, the Bureau Of State Security] knocked on my door and he and his policemen searched my flat and took all the books and shook them out to see if he could find anything hidden in them. He found a poem by Eugene Marais, which is good for a winter day like today: “O koud is die windjie en skraal / En blink in die dof-lig en kaal...”: “Oh cold is the wind and thin / And shining in the dusk and naked...” He was surprised that I, a Jodse komunis [Jewish communist] read Afrikaans poetry. He asked me if I liked the poem and I said of course. He said “It’s a wonderful poem.” Then he found another poem, where I’d written in the margins that it was Boy Scout rubbish: “Gee my ‘n roer in my regterhand; gee mey ‘n bok wat vlug oor die rand...” [“Give me a rifle in my right hand; give me a buck that flees over the ridge...”]. He said he didn’t like that one either. He found my rugby clothes and asked me what team I played for. I could see he was wondering what someone like me was doing playing his game. He then found some papers that my wife Beata had hidden under some shirts. He looked at them, then looked at me, then called out to his men that they were finished the search. I never knew why he did that. Perhaps under other circumstances, Johan Coetzee and I could have been friends. Later at the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission, held 10 years ago], I saw him there, but I didn’t talk to him, because I was there to support [ANC member] Marius Schoon whose wife Jeanette and six-year-old daughter Katryn were blown up in a bomb planted by [Security Branch spy] Craig Williamson’s people... [Lipman later said that Coetzee was the one who had tipped him off that he was on a list of militants targeted for arrest in what became the Rivonia Treason Trial. Lipman, having passed on Coetzee’s warning to the liberation movements, was out of the country at the time of the 1963 Rivonia raid that netted Nelson Mandela and other top ANC and SACP leaders. Lipman thus narrowly escaped becoming a long-term Robben Island political prisoner. He said he never discovered why Coetzee tipped him off. [After fleeing into exile in the United Kingdom where he sat on the national council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). After being attracted to various libertarian socialist critiques of Stalinism, he became an anarchist. Lipman, who returned to South Africa in the early 1990s after 30 years in exile and wrote his memoirs, which will soon be published by the ZACF, is a living link between the generation that rejected the ANC and SACP’s false vision in the 1950s - and those like the ZACF who reject it today.]
THE PARTY FEARS THE PEOPLE I always liked the phrase from the feminist movement: “The personal is the political and the political is the personal.” In other words, your economic oppression is your personal problem - but it is also a real public issue. For example, hundreds of golf courses have sprung up after 1994 and they consume so much water, yet you are battling to get clean water to drink in your homes. I left the “official” liberation movements for personal reasons, but I still support the real liberation. [President Thabo] Mbeki’s a clever man, but I don’t trust him as far as I can throw this building. I’ve seen too many forced evictions from this supposed “world class city” of ours where those who have remove those who they say make dirt or who don’t look smart. We live in a country in which the hopes of the past have been pushed into the dirt. I guess I’d be seen as an “ultra-left” in Mbeki’s terms. My philosophy used to be the Christian “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you,” which is not a bad rule for life. But as an anarchist, to me, the most important truth is that humans can manage their own affairs. You don’t need leaders; leaders are mostly dangerous people. The reason that the Communist Party today is the same as any other party and behaves in the authoritarian fashion it does is because it doesn’t trust the people. I also believe that what you do to get what you want is as important as what you want. The newspapers are owned by big corporations and they tell the stories they want to hear. But although the newspapers have behaved disgustingly over the Zuma affair [the acquittal in May on a rape charge of ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma], there is no real difference between Mbeki and Zuma. It won’t be better under Zuma. I spent 35 years of my life supporting the liberation struggle but the ANC is now an anti-liberation movement. Now we need a real “People’s National Congress” - under people’s control - to take back real liberation forward.
SWAZILAND AFTER THE BOMBINGS by MK (ZACF,
Swaziland)
In December and January, the royal dictatorship of Swaziland was rocked by a series of 17 petrol-bombings of state targets by pro-democracy militants. No-one was seriously injured in the attacks, but the paranoid state overplayed its hand, arresting several militants and charging them with treason, which normally carries the death penalty, for an offence that at most amounted to damage to private property.
THE ZACF POSITION ON INSURGENCY VERSUS MASS ORGANISING The independently-owned Times of Swaziland was quick to place the blame for the bombings on the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) which is organised clandestinely in Swaziland - the only significant left force in the country after the collapse of the Swazi Communist Party, but hardly an organisation "even mightier than PUDEMO [the outlawed main opposition Peoples’ United Democratic Movement] or SWAYOCO [the Swaziland Youth Congress]". In a January 15 article headlined "Zabalaza’s claims of bombing police van," the writer, Mduduzi Magagula, falsely claimed that the ZACF had "stoned and petrol bombed a police vehicle in Manzini during a PUDEMO organised demonstration recently." The false claim perhaps arose from a misreading of a ZACF report from Manzini on the bombing of an armoured police "hippo" by young comrades. Nevertheless, the Times was professional enough to publish in full a denial of involvement in the bombings by the ZACF - including the federation’s stated aims in the country: 1) The ZACF, which operates in both South Africa and Swaziland, supports the pro-democracy movement in Swaziland, but it does so realising that the Swazi political system can only be changed democratically by the bulk of the Swazi popular classes organising en masse to change it at grassroots level into a form acceptable to themselves. A few people running around with petrol-bombs is both insufficient to change the system and is an anti-democratic substitution of shadowy unaccountable individuals for democratic mass action. 2) Therefore, the ZACF as a whole has no policy of petrol-bombing state or capitalist targets, and its membership in Swaziland have denied to our annual regional congress in December 2005 to having taken part in any such bombings. The report carried on our website of the attack on the hippo has been misread to suggest that ZACF members participated in the attack. The reference to "comrade-controlled" territory simply implies territory controlled, at least at the time, by comrades of the pro-democratic movement, not necessarily ZACF members. 3) The ZACF remains committed to the struggle for mass participatory democracy for all people resident in Swaziland (and more broadly in southern Africa) but, as The Times of Swaziland article correctly reported, "agitates to go beyond the usual bourgeois betrayal and involve a destruction of the Swazi capitalist state and its replacement by decentralised popular assemblies" of the working class, poor and peasantry.
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AT THE TREASON TRIAL Still, the bombings awoke the Swazi populace from their traditional political timidity. After the bombings, the masses throughout the country have now realised that with the support of internationalism, they can do anything against the system. It’s as if before the bombings, the majority had the belief that the decisions of the royal family, cabinet ministers and the parliament were always final. The proof of the system’s weakness is their over-reaction, threatening suspects with 25 years in prison for treason. Those accused are: PUDEMO secretary-general Ignatius B. Dlamini (41), Mduduzi E. Mamba (34) of Sipofaneni, Robert Nzima (40), Sicelo Mkhonta (22), Goodwill Du Pont (19) of Matsetsa, Themba Mabuza (32) of Mbelebeleni, Vusi Shongwe (37) of Sidzakeni, Kenneth Mkhonta (32), Mfanawenkhosi Mtshali (31) and Sipho Jele (36) of Mshikishiki, Mfanukhona Nkambule (26), Sipho Hlophe (38) of Gobholo, Wandile Dludlu (24) the president of the University of Swaziland’s students’ representative council, Mphandlana Shongwe (43), and Gibholo Mfan’fikile Nkambule (16) of Nkwalini. After this decision by the government, everyone sympathised with the accused guys. But nobody voiced their disagreement with the decision because it came from the "master", someone who looks like and is known to be a monster, King Mswati III. The accused claim they were tortured in custody, as did Mduduzi Dlamini of Mhlosheni, who may be forced to turn state’s witness after confessing to treason in February. However, international interest in the trial of the alleged bombers - who the state has so far failed to prove guilty - proved crucial. On the final day in court, everyone was interested to see the power of the international supporters of the accused compared to the Swazi prosecutors and the different way they treated Swazi citizens. When bail was granted to the suspects on March 15, most of the close comrades and friends of the accused came and congratulated us, expressing trust in the display of international solidarity. And I trust that everybody realised that they can take direct action against these leadership sects, whether state, business or so-called revolutionary. For PUDEMO’s stance on the treason trial, read Swaziland: Smoking Gun or Replica? online at: www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=2412
THE MASSES START TO REGAIN THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS - AND THE ELITE START TO SQUABBLE AMONG HEMSELVES The fact that the ruling class responded with such a heavy hand to the bombings forced a change in the people’s mentality. This change is proven by the five key developments. Firstly, there is much movement on the ground: for example, the youth in Manzini are mobilising against the system of patriarchy that enables their elders to reserve all jobs for themselves without any going to the youth. Furthermore, even the state-owned media has now started to take action against the corrupt national leadership - throwing the spotlight, for instance, on a cabinet minister who was caught with his pants down with a young woman not his wife. Now the ZACF does not take a moral position on adultery, but the point we want to make is rather that the media is no longer scared to take action against the ruling sect that believes it is always right. Thirdly, there are even cabinet ministers who are currently banned from leaving the country after being suspected of corruption - and all these suspicions were raised by working class people. This shows that the masses of Swaziland have started to regain their feet, and their sense of self-confidence to challenge the autocracy. It also suggests that the Imbokodvo vehicle is becoming contentious, is beginning to break down and will eventually fade completely (the Imbokodvo National Movement is the sole legal political party, established in 1964 by Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza II who outlawed all opposition in 1973). Fourthly, within the cabinet ministers, a scandal has arisen around the Minister of Health and Social Welfare Mfofo Mkambule who organised some parliamentarians and citizens into a structure called the Inhlava Forum, which purports to be merely a discussion forum, but which has raised the eyebrows of the leadership who see it as the embryo of a political party. As a result, Mkambule was axed. The Inhlava Forum’s Manifesto called for a conventional bourgeois-democratic separation of powers between "parliament", the courts, the monarchy and Imbokodvo and for a constituency-based representative democracy that consults social organisations in pursuit of serving the needs of the Swazi majority. But it did not spell out how this would differ from the false representation already entrenched as the Tinkhundla system. Under Tinkhundla, constituency MPs are nominated by loyalist local councils headed by tribal chiefs and the "parliament" to which they are elected has nothing but advisory powers. Last year, the High Court ruled political opposition parties "non-existent" after they demanded a say in the revised one-party constitution of 2005. Now an apparently bogus political party, the African United Democratic Party (AUDP) has been allowed, under this non-party system, to "negotiate" with the parasitic elite. Clearly the elite is starting to feel the heat from the grassroots and is trying various strategies to squirm out of the trap it has painted itself into.
THAT’S WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT! WORKING CLASS MASS DIRECT ACTION Lastly, at Nhlangano in the southern part of Swaziland, the masses and the poor are doing things against their immediate class enemies. For example, there is one textile company by the name of Zheng Yong with more than 2,000 employees, whose factory was burned to the ground. This factory produces the famous fashion brand Timberland. Initially, the workers had embarked on a strike for a wage increase and 30 days’ maternity leave. The case went to court and the courts performed their class role by declaring the strike illegal. The decision divided the strikers, with those who feared the power of the law returning to work. But those who stood by their rights as workers decided to take direct action and, recognising their employers as their immediate class enemy (capital, the monarchy and the state being more remote enemies), the source of their poverty and exploitation, burned the factory down. This shows that the workers, a key component of Swazi society, for a long time politically inactive, have started to recognise their class enemy and start to do something to directly address the problem. Recognizing that the oppressed people of Swaziland have demands of their own, which we endorse provided they are progressive and democratic in nature, the ZACF demands the following: 1) A general amnesty for all political prisoners; 2) Freedom of association, assembly and speech, and full trade union rights; 3) The abolition of the pseudo-democratic Tinkhundla, Liqoqo (chieftains inner circle), royal and state power structures and their replacement by directly-democratic, decentralised popular assemblies of the working class, poor and peasantry which will be horizontally federated across the territory; 4) Equal rights for women; 5) Abolition of all chiefly privileges - especially the power to steal land from the poor; 6) Land redistribution in both commercial and traditional sectors; 7) Free and democratic education, with student representative councils at schools; 8) A living wage campaign in the plantations, factories and farms; 9) A ban on retrenchments, and well-paid decent jobs for all: and 10) an end to discrimination based on HIV/Aids status and free anti-retroviral drugs for all people living with the virus. They
can arrest us, torture us, and beat us.
A FREE WORKING
CLASS NEEDS FREE MINDS:
Most workers know increasingly little about May Day. Many have simply forgotten it's meaning, and some are disillusioned. Instead of calling it "Our day" many mindlessly speak of "Worker's Day," and think "Long weekend". And the bosses give workers time off, appearing lenient and generous, making the workers seem ungrateful, with no excuses to complain.
GET RICH ON MAY DAY Taking advantage of the apathy, enterprising bosses cash in on soccer events, brewery production and other activities. They benefit from the pain of workers and their communities, and take control of the minds and lives of the masses, and distance them from discussing - and questioning - their endless miseries. Yet the workers are the ones who produce everything, yet have neither control nor ownership of anything. We own our labour, but without food, cannot exist at all. So, we are bound to sell our labour for next to nothing, to the bosses who control everything we need to survive. And the bosses have made it impossible for the working class people to think and do things independently through laws and media under their control. They use these as tools to protect and advance their interest at our expense. Social needs are distorted by profit and power; the wealth of society is not used to keep us alive, happy and healthy, but to divide us. In recent years many entertainment enterprises have been booming, particularly in the south of Johannesburg region. The youth and the unemployed are drawn into immoral activities, and accept highly exploitative jobs just to make sure they don't miss the weekends, especially the long ones. Drinking beer and being a soccer fan has become a national hobby, and used as a sign of patriotism: "love your country and be proud of the black government". Even commemorations of human rights milestones like Sharpeville, June 16 and Women's Day get drawn into the circle of unthinking entertainment, escape from hard realities and empty patriotism.
KWAITO AND CLASS STRUGGLE Community radio stations were set up to convey the views of ordinary people, allowing previously disadvantaged opportunities to express themselves. The Kwaito music style seemed to be a promising weapon to raise issues and awareness, because of its origin within black townships and its reflection of our lives in the communities. But this has not happened. Kwaito has been commercialised, and has nothing to do with advancing the minds and lives of the people. The everyday hardships of communities are presented as a hip lifestyle choice, something to laugh about. Instead of raising political issues, DJs and Kwaito glorify the hardships of people, and make a living - like soccer and media stars - ambassadors between the rich and poor, earning large amounts of money and middle class lives. Major companies move in Nike, Sasol, Coca Cola, Absa, Vodacom, Nokia, MMW etc. - as sponsors, shaping people's minds, and leaving no stone unturned. The masses, particularly the youth, who adore these stars, take them as role models. But few can make it out of poverty, they end up frustrated, with time wasted and nothing achieved during a vital period of their lives. Rather than explore, improvise, demand and enjoy life to its fullest, they become mentally crippled and caught up in social and family demands.
UNEMPLOYMENT AND LOW WAGES Those who are unemployed are faced with a pitiless situation of mental and physical slavery. Their families close doors on them, calling them loafers who belong nowhere in society. They are driven to the job market, with its crumbs and exploitation. Like sheep, they wait at the slaughtering pens, hoping to be next under the knife when the bosses need new blood. Many dream of work, and slaves to capitalism. The bosses appear as kindly people who care and doing everything to save lives by doling out a tiny number of jobs. And their mask of sympathy soon falls away. Workers are thrown on the street for asking for clarity on contracts, and the other workers learn to take care never to slightly upset their masters, because there are hundreds other unemployed workers waiting and starving, ever ready to jump to slaughtering pens. The workers fight amongst each other, and the bosses become kings and queens, on guard 24 hrs a day. The governments back up the bosses, and the workers demands for safety and a living wage are drowned out by the bosses' demands for higher profits - despite already having sucked the workers dry. The bosses are automatically excused for job losses and the workers are the scapegoats. We are constantly reminded to protect our jobs, and avoid trouble, because getting a job is almost impossible. Workers' rights are walked over: the bosses alone decide, because if their interests are not respected they will leave the country; other bosses won't set their foot in the country. This would leave the workers alone, and stranded, with no one to turn to and ask "Please, I want to be your slave". Wages are cut, as an excuse to employ more workers, or as an excuse to retain existing workers. Workers' confidence is shattered, and their basic needs become unthinkable: women give birth at work to keep their jobs safe.
IMMIGRANTS AND DIVIDED LABOUR It is common for bosses to prefer workers coming from countries devastated by civil wars and famine. These workers are desperate, rightless, often "illegal," and easy prey to bosses who can avoid any responsibilities to cover for workers' health and safety. The immigrant workers are not citizens, and the labour laws do not apply. This way bosses don't have to worry about the precautions and safety equipment and measures expected by the labour laws. Because of these workers' extreme desperation, they have to accept anything the boss decides. They have no one to turn to. The government plays its part, smashing any possibilities for these people to raise their heads, by randomly harassing and arresting them for identity documents. South African workers are pitted against the immigrants, told that they are lazy, and instructed to "ask Mandela" for a job. In a situation of mass unemployment, this provides breeding grounds for xenophobia and hatred from South African workers against their fellow workers from neighbouring countries. Blaming immigrants, rather than bosses, for their misery, some South African workers call the immigrants insulting names, and inform the police who the immigrants are, and where they stay. This behaviour is driven by the jealousy and hatred that is the by-product of poverty.
ETHNIC CONFLICTS But this is not only happening to the immigrants. Amongst the African workers there is a good deal of prejudice and distrust, especially in the townships, hostels and squatter camps where migrants from different parts of the countryside converge to find jobs. Many treat their shacks as temporary camps, and long to return to the country. The mindset of ethnic rivalry and the belief in a return to the country makes it difficult for these communities to challenge the government policies affecting our lives. Ideas like " This is not our home, we are only here to work, as long as we have a place to sleep," and "There's no use to fight for people who'll turn their back on you tomorrow, and "We cannot be ruled by such-and-such nationality" are common enough. Such sentiments were the grim centre of the cloud that hovered above the ANC versus IFP massacres in the 1990s. These ethnic divisions were also used during the rise of the mining industry, where jobs were allocated on an ethnic basis, and workers were housed in different ethnic hostels. People from a particular ethnic group were, for example, often mine police. The chiefs played a role too, recruiting people, providing written permission to work on the mines, and the government did not allow the workers to settle in town. They were always reminded that they belonged in the countryside and were harassed and arrested by the police for pass offences. So working class people's identities were deeply shaped by where they came from, and the language they spoke. Whether immigrant, or Zulu, or Xhosa, the worker often saw fellow-workers as aliens stealing jobs, as traitors who stole the national wealth. Today we see this with xenophobia, but also with the view that the ANC is a Xhosa party, and that its capitalist policies were somehow caused by Xhosas - rather than the ruling class. The chiefs remain powerful, and the politicians use ethnicity and other legacies of the past to lead the working class astray. This allows them to implement their neo-liberal policies, without collective questioning from the masses who vote these crooks into power. And all of this is presented as in the ordinary people's interest. It is called democracy and gender-equality because a few wealthy black people drive fancy cars and mingle with wealthy Whites. The people are told anyone can get rich: "just listen to the your black government"; if you are poor, it is your own fault.
FREE YOUR MIND These mental illusions - "get rich quick," "the immigrants steal jobs," "the struggle is over" - must be identified and rooted out so we can become healthier and strong again. Surely we need to take care of things that benefit our communities at the end of the day, and leave aside anything that has a possible threat to our lives. Surely the working class can take back its traditions, with community soccer teams and genuine community media controlled collectively by the people. These must be used as weapons to defend and protect ourselves from the enemy. Every human being must know and be aware on the tricks of the class enemy. Those who choose to become traitors must do so - but not at our expense.
THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA by Michael Schmidt
AMERICA MUSCLES INTO “FRENCH TERRITORY” Former colonial power France maintained the largest foreign military presence in Africa since most countries attained sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s. But France reduced its armed presence on the continent by two thirds at the end of the last century, though it continues to intervene in a muscular and controversial fashion. For example, under a 1961 “mutual defence” pact, French forces were allowed to be permanently stationed in Ivory Coast: the 500-strong 43rd Marine Infantry Battalion is based at Port Bouet next to the Abidjan airport. When the civil war erupted there in September 2002, France added a “stabilisation force”, now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne, which was augmented in 2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) “peacekeepers” drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. In January this year, the United Nations extended the mandate of Operation Licorne until December. But piggybacking off the French military presence in Africa are a series of new foreign military and policing initiatives by the United States and the European Union. It appears the US has devised a new Monroe Doctrine for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of US interventions in what it saw as its Latin American “back yard”). Under the George W Bush regime’s “War on Terror” doctrine, the US has designated a swathe of territory that curves across the globe from Colombia and Venezuela in South America, through Africa’s Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel regions into the Middle East and Central Asia as the “arc of instability” where both real and supposed terrorists may find refuge and training. In Africa, which falls under the US military’s European Command (EUCOM), the US has struck agreements with France to share its military bases. For example: there is now a US Marine Corps base in Djibouti at the French base of Camp Lemonier with more than 1,800 Marines stationed there, allegedly for “counter-terrorism” operations in the horn of Africa, the Middle East and East Africa - as well as controlling the Red Sea shipping lanes. But the US presence involves more than piggybacking off French bases. In 2003, US intelligence operatives began training spies for four unnamed North African countries - believed to be Morocco and Egypt and perhaps also Algeria and Tunisia. It is also conducting training of the armed forces of countries such as Chad and in September last year, Bush told the United Nations Security Council that the US would, over the next five years, train 40,000 “African peace-keepers” to “preserve justice and order in Africa”. The US Embassy in Pretoria said at the time that the US had already trained 20,000 “peace-keepers” in 12 African countries in the use of “non-lethal equipment”. And now, while the US is downscaling and dismantling military bases in Germany and South Korea, it is relocating these military resources to Africa and the Middle East in order to “combat terrorism” and “protect oil resources”. In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, and São Tomé & Príncipe. These “jumping-off points” will station small permanent forces, but with the ability to launch major regional military adventures, according to the US-based Associated Press. An existing US base at Entebbe, Uganda, under the one-party regime of US ally Yoweri Museveni, already “covers” East Africa and the Great Lakes region. At Dakar in Senegal, the US is busy upgrading an airfield.
SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE “WAR ON TERROR” Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts include Gabon, Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a “second Guantanamo” in the Indian Ocean where alleged terror suspects kidnapped in Africa, the Middle East or Asia can be detained and interrogated without trial: a detention camp, refuelling point and bomber base situated on the British-colonised Chagos Archipelago island of Diego Garcia, an island from which the indigenous inhabitants were forcibly removed to Mauritius. In South Africa’s case, while it is unlikely there will ever be US bases established because the strength of the country’s military, the SANDF, makes that unnecessary, in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the US’s Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme which is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (read: imperialist) objectives. South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as its 13th African member, effectively joined the American “War on Terror”. ACOTA started life as a “humanitarian” programme run by EUCOM out of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1996. After the 9-11 attacks, the Pentagon reorganised ACOTA and gave it more teeth. Today, its makeup is more obviously aggressive rather than defensive. According to Pierre Abromovici, writing in the July 2004 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique about rumours that South Africa was preparing to sign ACOTA - a full year before it did so - “ACOTA includes offensive training, particularly for regular infantry units and small units modelled on special forces... In Washington, the talk is no longer of non-lethal weapons... the emphasis is on ‘offensive’ co-operation”. The real nature of ACOTA is perhaps indicated by the career of the man heading it up, Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, “a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs,” Abromovici wrote. “He is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defence Board, and, in the 1960s, he took part in clandestine operations against the Sandanistas. He was accused of involvement in drug-trafficking to fund arms sent to Central America” to prop up pro-Washington right-wing dictatorships. Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent “anti-communist” - whether that means opposing rebellious States or popular insurrections. He also sits on the executive of a strange outfit within the US military called the Cuban-American Military council, which aims at installing itself as the government of Cuba should the US ever achieve a forcible “regime-change” there. The career of the US ambassador who concluded the ACOTA pact with South Africa is also an indicator of US intentions. Jendayi Fraser, now Bush’s senior advisor on Africa, had no diplomatic experience. Instead, she once served as a politico-military planner with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Department of Defence and as senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. According to Fraser’s online biography, she “worked on African security issues with the State Department’s international military education training programmes”.
IS THERE A MURDEROUS “SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS”? Those programmes include the “Next Generation of African Military Leaders” officers’ course run by the shadowy African Centre for Strategic Studies, based in Washington, which has “chapters” in various African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of “School of the Africas” similar to the infamous “School of the Americas” based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous death-squad killers, right up to Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002. Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of Nicaragua in 1980 and the “El Mozote” massacre of 767 villagers in Guatemala in 1981 were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC down, is on an FBI “anti-terrorism” watch-list. So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch cannot confirm these fears. And there is more: we’ve all heard of the “Standby Force” being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa’s authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia), the African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism. The Centre is based in Algiers, Algeria, at the heart of a murderous regime that has itself “disappeared” some 3,000 people between 1992 and 2003 (according to Amnesty International: equivalent to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, but ignored by the African left). The Centre’s director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a think-tank and trainer of “anti-terrorism” judges, but that it would also have teeth, providing training in “specific armed intervention” in support of the continent’s regimes. Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said, however, that only 10% of terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only 6% on state figures and institutions, though the latter were “focussed”. She warned that a major cause of African terrorism was “a growing void between government and security forces on the one hand and local communities on the other”. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are recruited into rebel armies, even though few of these offer any sort of real solution. The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU’s Algiers Convention on Terrorism, which is notoriously vague on what defines terrorism, opening the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the new counter-terrorism forces. It would be naïve to think that bourgeois democracy - which passed South Africa’s equally vaguely-defined Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act into law last year - will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.
IS CHINA AFRICA'S NEW IMPERIALIST POWER? by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt
The African tour of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, centred on fostering trade relations between China and African and Arabian countries, highlights an important recent development. Revolutionaries in Anglophone Africa have always seen Britain and France as the dominant imperialist powers on the continent, but other forces are emerging from the shadows to challenge their continued post-colonial dominance - and it’s not just the United States. Southern African anarchist-communists would normally see the former British colony of South Africa as acting as a sub-imperialist power on behalf of the big capitalist powers and its own capitalist ruling class in the region, a sort of regional policeman as it were: if British interests in Swaziland are threatened by the democracy movement, we are sure that South African military might will intervene (as it did against Lesotho in 1998) to shore up the Swazi elite. But the international scene is changing and today we can chart the rise of the People’s Republic of China as one of Africa’s most powerful kingmakers, whether backing the genocidal regime in Khartoum, or embarking on large-scale building projects including the new Luanda airport (in exchange for 10,000 barrels of crude oil a day) and the Number One Stadium in Kinshasa, a city that with its giant gold statue of a fat, Mao-like Laurent-Desire Kabila is looking like a city on the Yangtze River instead of the Congo (the DRC's mimicry of the Chinese national flag, before adopting a new flag this year, was too obvious to miss).
STATE CAPITALISM Unlike the old Soviet Union, China has managed to engineer a successful transition from closed State-capitalism (the Maoist era) towards an export-orientated neo-liberal model. Its rapid economic growth and cheap goods - overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP - may see the country overtake the US as the largest manufacturing power worldwide by 2010. This capitalist boom has been built on the back of a brutal suppression of the working class and peasantry. Strikes are illegal, dissidents are murdered, and the top 20% of households earn 42% of total urban incomes while the poorest 20% receive just 6%. There has been a sharp rise in class struggle, with strikes rising from 8,150 in 1992 to 120,000 in 1999. Last year residents of the village of Huaxi, Zhejiang province, battled the police and local officials in hand-to-hand combat in April and drove them off. In December, hundreds of villagers armed with dynamite and petrol-bombs attacked police in Dongzhou, Guandong province, after police killed 20 villagers who had protested against land seized to build a power plant. A source close to the CCP central committee revealed last year that some 3-million workers took part in protests last year. This is a country where the official monthly minimum wage is US$63 (compare that to US$45 to US$55 in rural and urban Vietnam, respectively, levels won by Vietnamese workers last year by embarking on wildcat strikes against their communist bosses), which has probably the worst mining fatality record in the world (the official Xhinhua News Agency figure is 5,986 dead in coal mines alone in 2005, resulting in some cases in miners armed with dynamite attacking their bosses), and multinational sweat-shop operations such as Nike and McDonalds setting up operations in special “economic exclusion zones”. While terror and repression fuel China’s economy, the country’s capitalist ruling class looks outwards for cheap labour, raw materials and fuel supplies. Africa, economically sidelined in the world economic crisis starting in the 1970s, has suddenly become hot property. In 2005, the overall African economy grew at 5% - it’s fastest in decades - as demand for African raw materials shot up, with Chinese demand playing a key role. The 1980s and 1990s saw Africa fall off the investment map, with Africa getting less than 1% of all private direct investment to “third w |
