Barack Obama’s visit to South Africa was a fitting tribute by the top figurehead of U.S. capitalism to the man who helped to end apartheid and create a new “rainbow” alliance of brutal, racist capitalist bosses: Nelson Mandela.
Apartheid was the brutal and legalized segregation enforced by South Africa’s white Afrikaner rulers from 1948 to 1994. The system enabled U.S. corporations like General Motors to pay black workers 56 cents an hour to slave away in its auto factories. It netted British and U.S. mining interests billions in profits. It penned workers and their families into townships that were virtual concentration camps.
Apartheid also sparked a mass, militant, worldwide anti-racist movement. In South Africa, workers and students staged massive, often violent protests against the vicious Afrikaner regime. In 1976, in Soweto, tens of thousands of black high school students fought racist cops. Up to 700 of the young protesters were killed.
From Rebellion to Black Bosses
After Mandela became the country’s president, the anti-apartheid movement was ultimately co-opted by U.S.-British imperialism with the active collaboration of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party, the new local capitalist rulers. Hundreds of millions of workers, in South Africa and across the globe, were steered away from revolution and down the dead-end path of nationalism and electoral politics. One of Mandela’s first presidential acts was to attempt to break workers’ strikes for higher wages. His argument: the workers’ struggle would “discourage foreign investment.” By misleading the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, Mandela aided U.S.-led imperialism and sustained the racist
super-exploitation of South Africa’s working class. The only real difference was that the local bosses were now black as well as white.
As Barack Obama recently celebrated the ailing Mandela in Johannesburg, workers and students engaged in mass protests against the U.S. president’s visit and his murderous drone bombings. They hoisted signs comparing Obama to Hitler. As one worker said, “Whether Mandela lives or dies, South Africa is worse now than under apartheid.”
Shooting Workers in the Back
Mandela’s ANC successors, including current president Jacob Zuma (who’s been linked to massive corruption and fraud), are responsible for last August’s Marikana Massacre. When platinum workers staged a wildcat strike over low pay at the Marikana mine, owned by London-based Lonmin, the ANC sent in cops, both black and white, and killed 36 miners. Most were shot in the back. Subsequent walkouts of tens of thousands of heroic workers virtually shut down the country’s lucrative mining industry.
Mandela’s billionaire booster, Patrice Motsepe, is a poster child for nationalism and what it means for our class. Shortly after Mandela’s rise to power, billionaire Harry Oppenheimer and his Anglo American mining company began selling mines to black businessmen via favorable loans. Bobby Godsell, chief executive of Anglo’s gold and uranium division, said, “I was seeking to create capitalists out of people who had no capital” (Forbes, 3/6/2008). After buying Anglo’s Orkney gold mine, Motsepe promptly cut wages by 25 percent and instituted “profit-sharing,” which amounts to a pay cut with speed-up.
As Motsepe has prospered to become the fourth-richest man in South Africa, with a net worth of $2.9 billion (Forbes), national unemployment is now estimated at 40 percent, higher than before the ANC took power in 1994. According to the United Nations, one of four South Africans lives on less than $1.25 (U.S.) per day.
That is the real Mandela legacy.
Imperialists Pull Strings, ANC Dances
Obama’s visit to Africa reflects a U.S. attempt to counter growing influence by archrival China throughout the continent. The president is seeking deals with Africa’s local bosses to expand profits for U.S. investors. Obama’s agenda was made plain when he chose to meet Mandela’s family at a shrine built by U.S. imperialists and the local rich to promote their capitalist ideology. According to the New York Times (6/30/13), the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory serves as “ground zero in the effort to maintain and shape the legacy of Nelson Mandela...and to make sure that the narrative of the struggle does not deviate too much from what Mr. Mandela wanted it to be.”
On its website, the Centre boasts former U.S. President Bill Clinton, David Rockefeller (longtime chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, now JP Morgan Chase), and Patrice Motsepe as “Founding Nelson Mandela Legacy Champions.” A place devoted to remembering conveniently forgets Rockefeller’s steadfast lending to the fascist apartheid regime throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Nor does it recall that benefactor Motsepe and honoree Mandela both owe their success to South Africa’s fabulously wealthy Oppenheimer family, the same clan that has maimed and murdered countless starvation-wage miners.
For more than a century, imperialist rivalry amid class struggle has driven world history. It explains Mandela’s checkered journey from lawyer to prisoner to president to saint. Britain’s empire shrank after World War II, especially in Africa. In 1948, South Africa’s white, openly racist Afrikaans-speaking plantation owners seized control from weakened London-backed rulers and imposed apartheid to control the black working class. Mandela was by then an attorney in the ANC, which was allied with the pro-Soviet South African Communist Party. He pushed the group in a nationalist, capitalist direction rather than toward multiracial, working-class unity. In 1964, Mandela’s anti-government activism landed him in the prison on Robben Island. He spent the next 26 years behind bars.
At the height of the Cold War, when the main imperialist rivalry pit the United States and its NATO allies against the Soviet Union, the U.S. and junior partner Britain tolerated South Africa’s rabidly anti-Soviet Afrikaners. Washington and London accepted the regime’s embarrassing human rights abuses as long as it suppressed pro-Soviet political movements in the region and guarded the crucial shipping route to the Cape of Good Hope. As a result, Mandela and many political prisoners like him rotted in jail.
Black Empowerment Smokescreen
In the 1980s, however, Mandela took on new importance for the U.S. and U.K.  The Soviet imperialists’ fiasco in Afghanistan signaled the U.S.S.R.’s coming eclipse as a first-tier power. Though Mandela and the South African Communist Party still had mass influence within the ANC, their pro-Soviet stance no longer posed a threat to U.S. imperialist interests. With Moscow in retreat and in reaction to a worldwide resistance movement, liberal capitalists proceeded to pacify the working class’s fight against apartheid and racist exploitation. U.S. and British rulers began to exploit the Mandela brand to win back influence in Africa under the smokescreen of black empowerment.
In turn, Mandela and other ANC leaders sold out the heroic struggle of millions of workers. In the 1980s, Helen Suzman, the Oppenheimers’ liberal bought-and-paid-for member of South Africa’s parliament, began visiting Mandela at the Robben prison. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger, the Rockefeller lieutenant and former Nixon Secretary of State, arranged meetings between patriarch Harry Oppenheimer and embattled Afrikaner rulers. After being promised a cushy post-apartheid existence, the Afrikaners grudgingly agreed to free Mandela. (The imperialist representatives were true to their word. F. W. de Klerk, Mandela’s presidential predecessor, today lives in an all-white neighborhood with five black servants.)
In 1985, acting to impose a deal on the crumbling apartheid regime, the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank stopped lending to the South African government. Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Four years later he became South Africa’s first black president.
Roger Phillimore, Harry Oppenheimer’s godson and chairman of the bloodstained Lonmin platinum company, has followed Mandela’s liberal lead. He recently replaced his white CEO with a black one. 
Learning from South Africa
Despite its setbacks, the history of working-class fightback in South Africa — against both the apartheid regime and its ANC successors — has much to teach workers worldwide. Mass anti-racist struggle, whether in South Africa or elsewhere in the world, can squeeze the capitalist ruling class and disrupt its moneymaking machine. But the international working class must not be fooled into thinking it can be freed while capitalism continues to flourish. We cannot follow the Mandela path to exchange one group of exploiters for another. Only through communist revolution, led by the Progressive Labor Party, can workers liberate themselvess and crush the savage profit system for good.
As Mandela nears death and celebrations of his capitalist legacy engulf the world, we must bring our communist message to the workers of the world. The real lesson of the fight against apartheid is: Join and build the PLP!