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!
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Syria: Nationalism Masked as Religion Spells Death for Workers
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- 04 July 2013 63 hits
Nationalism is a key weapon that the ruling class uses against the working class in order to keep us divided and fighting each other in the interests of those parasites who rule us. Nationalism is used to create the illusion that there can be all-class unity between local bosses and workers. This unity is a death sentence for our class. A major tragedy in Syria is the way that nationalism, in the form of religion, is being used to divide the working class and get workers to kill themselves in the interests of the imperialists. The major imperialists are in a proxy conflict: Russia and China, with Iran, against the U.S., U.K., France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for control of Syria.
The old Communist Movement did not have confidence that the working class would fight directly for communism. It believed that nationalism could be a progressive element in the fight against the capitalist class. Every national liberation movement and alliance with religious organizations has been doomed to be chained to capitalism and has never led, nor will lead, to communism.
The Progressive Labor Party does not agree with nationalism, nor will we align with “lesser-evil” national bosses. Though Russia is on a roll right now by supplying weapons systems to Syria with impunity, it is still a repressive fascist state with designs on dominating the world’s resources like any imperialist. A victory for Syria’s president Assad is still a defeat for the working class.
A victory for the rebels would also be a defeat for workers. The rebels are aligned on two ideological foundations — one is a secular liberal nationalism and the other is an autocratic Islamism that is concretely tied to Al Qaeda. The recent “victory” of U.S. imperialism in Libya has shown what misery is in store for the working class as thousands of armed militia and the thugs in government in Benghazi both terrorize our class.
This future is a probability for the working class of Syria should the rebels come out victors in that civil war. The resolution of a rebel victory would most likely be a second civil war between the Islamists and the nationalist Free Syrian Army. The nationalists are already losing ground to the better-trained and tenacious Islamists.
The recent victories by Syria and its Hezbollah allies have intensified the contradiction between different sects of Islam. In a part of the world where Druze, Christian, Alawite, et al, have lived together fairly peacefully, the regional Hegemons of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, most likely acting as a front for the U.S. and its puppet arch-imperialist Obama, are frantically inciting animosity between the sects. They are arming the rebels with weapons that can be used against working-class civilians. Religion, the bosses’ ideological weapon, is now being used to divide the working class and cause potential civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon and is also a factor in the unrest in Turkey.
The U.S. is desperate to force Russia out of the Middle East and Russia is just as tenaciously guarding its port in Tartus, Syria. Russia has countered the U.S. build-up of Patriot missiles, fighter jets, and troops in Jordan by sending aircraft carriers, submarines, and other weapons to its base in Syria. Iran has contributed Hezbollah guerillas and military planning. Assad is now in the process of mopping up the rebels in Aleppo and, most likely, once they have severed their supply lines, will then smash them piecemeal in the countryside.
This military disaster for the U.S. proxy forces in Syria is just another blemish on the ineffectual leadership of Obama. It’s part of the Vietnam Syndrome (the rulers’ fear of mass GI rebellions) that still haunts the U.S. bosses and inhibits them from entering wars that they need to preserve their empire. But the Vietnam Syndrome will not be enough to keep the U.S. from other wars of aggression against the world’s working class. That aggression will only cease when the U.S. and all of the world’s capitalists are destroyed by a communist revolution led by the PLP.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, June 29 — Led by Progressive Labor Party and friends, more than two hundred State University of Haiti (UEH) students took to the streets yesterday, turning a demonstration against fee hikes into a fight against imperialism and capitalist inequality.
The immediate struggle was sparked on June 24, when the UEH executive counsel announced a 200 percent fee hike for college entrance exams. Students quickly organized. Fifty people blocked traffic and broke gates and windows at the administration building. Students marched through UEH’s 11 metropolitan campuses, chanting, “The State University of Haiti will not be privatized!” They banged the gates of each campus to announce their arrival and painted slogans on walls as they marched through. U.S. students have much to learn from the militancy of these young fighters, and from their potential to build a communist movement.
At the medical school campus, protesters forced open the gate. Fifteen medical students in white lab coats joined the march in a show of unity against the ruling class. They shouted, “State University is of the working class; this is the result of the mass struggles!” They were referring to the long history of militant fightback at UEH, from an uprising against fascist dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the struggle against the United Nations’ “stabilization” troops (MINUSTAH) who brought cholera to Haiti.
Fraud 101
UEH is the main public university for Haiti’s working-class students. The entrance fee hike is an attack on rural and city workers and a move to exclude them from higher education. In a country where nearly half of all adults are illiterate, students already face intense competition to get into college. (At the UEH medical school, there are 100 seats for 6,000 applicants.) Those left out are at high risk of joining Haiti’s 80 percent unemployed and underemployed.
As they marched toward the administration building, students spray-painted every government vehicle in sight. They tore down the advertisement for the “Darling Mother” fraud, a phantom government program that diverts funding to pay off the bosses’ cronies. Students approached tents of street vendors, bus passengers, and passersby with a class-conscious message: “The working class can’t send their sons and daughters to college. We already have no work or wage. The government wants us to pay for their debts. Students are demonstrating once again they are aware that a fight against the state is a fight against the bourgeoisie!”
Arriving at the administration building, the students found that the bosses had shut the gates in fear. Protesters denounced the administration, threw stones, smashed windows, and broke open the gates. The courtyard was empty. The administrators had fled, but not before calling the cops. Students put large stones down the road to slow the police. As the protesters retreated from the cops, they kept chanting.
On their way, they ripped up a street poster of Haitian President Michel Martelly and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro visited the city this week to strengthen Haiti-Venezuela relations through the PetroCaribe fund, an alliance based on the exchange of food for oil. Under the agreement, Haiti has used millions of dollars from PetroCaribe to pay for fuel and repave the airport runway, renaming it after Venezuela’s phony-leftist late president, Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile, Martelly skimmed millions of dollars in kickbacks from funding for social programs. Be it Haiti, Venezuela, Bangladesh, or South Africa, the capitalist state can never serve workers’ interests. It uses its courts and police thugs to protect capital, legalize theft, pacify workers, and quell rebellions.
When the police caught up with the protesters, they threw tear gas and shot into the crowd, which threw rocks and tear gas canisters back at them. The cowardly cops targeted student leaders by shooting them in the back and neck with rubber bullets, and also kidnapped two women nearly unconscious from the gas. Protesters alerted the crowd and barricaded the streets, demanding the students’ release. After several hours of battle by the police station, they were freed.
Smashing the Bosses’ Schools
At a mass assembly the next morning, most students agreed the demonstration was successful. But some believed it was not militant enough, and most agreed the struggle should be expanded to the whole working class. Students made a list of demands, including refunds of exam fees to those not admitted, a more political curriculum, and UEH’s return to its bylaws to support “the community in the struggle for progress.” Others called for a more global analysis of the struggle against imperialism. A planning leadership committee was created.
So begins a potential long-term struggle. UEH students can be won to understand that all universities, public or private, are ruling-class institutions. No commitment to “progressive” bylaws can fundamentally change these factories for capitalist ideology. They must be destroyed. Our fight is not merely for reform, but to build a world where education is designed by and for the working class.
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Pakistan May Day: PL’ers Unmask ‘Nationalist Democracy’ as Capitalist Slavery
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- 04 July 2013 66 hits
The Progressive Labor Party’s growing membership in Pakistan was very active organizing for May Day. We struggled hard to bring all the trade union and student organizations to a single political platform and a large and united demonstration, a goal strongly supported by most workers and students. To some extent, we succeeded.
It became obvious that most of the trade union organizations are puppets of the International Labour Organization [the United Nations agency that promotes a false unity between capitalists and workers]. The bosses strongly resisted a unified workers’ holiday. So did some anti-communist student leaders who are affiliated with various nationalist parties.
These opportunist student leaders fear that PLP will attack their reactionary ideas of “national democracy.” They’ve been angry since last year’s May Day celebrations, when our comrades stressed the need to build an international revolutionary communist party and to create a new political, social, and economic system. This time around these so-called progressive nationalists helped the state identify communists fighting for revolution. As a result, one comrade was attacked by “unknown” people on a busy street of a big city.
PLP participates in reform struggles to educate the masses that this capitalist system cannot be reformed, and that it can only be changed by communist revolution. In the May Day celebrations, comrades criticized the right-wing political parties that use the term “revolution.” As our comrades pointed out, these parties are invested in the status quo. They are trying to sow confusion and deter people from real revolution. We must use the word communism to distinguish ourselves from the misleaders.
We also launched a massive effort to educate Pakistan’s poor working class about the bosses’ elections. At rallies and big public meetings, we distributed thousands of leaflets and flyers to let people know that these elections are designed to preserve the capitalist system. Capitalist “democracy” frees the bosses to exploit the working class by in part, sucking workers into voting and supporting candidates rather than fighting. The bosses’ parliaments are set up to protect the interests of national and international capitalists and to provide legal cover for the murderers and exploiters. Rich people use elections to gain more control over the state apparatus. They get the “right” to use the police and the judiciary against their opponents, and against any workers who seek to challenge their power or exploitation.
Our printed material reminded workers of the false promises made by the bosses in the last elections. The former government vowed to provide electricity and employment and to improve hospitals and schools. It promised to control inflation and to curb the terrorists and fundamentalists. It pledged to strengthen labor laws to protect factory workers and to get rid of contractual labor. It promised free health and education services for workers’ families, along with comprehensive health insurance.
But in the inflated economy, prices rose as much as 100 percent. Electricity shortages increased from four hours to 18 hours per day. Hospitals had the same poor equipment and costly medicines. Meanwhile, school enrollment declined because poor workers were forced to send their children to work. Teachers were selected not on their merit but for their political affiliations. Thousands of schools and colleges did not have water or sanitary facilities.
U.S. and Islamic terrorism is out of control. No place in Pakistan is safe. On an average day, 15 to 20 workers are killed in terrorist attacks. In the city of Karachi alone, 7,500 people have been killed in the last 27 months.
More than 800 workers lost their lives in factories last year alone because of owner negligence, yet nobody was prosecuted. As unemployment went from 8% to 16%, contractual labor and child labor increased and the harassment of women workers worsened. Farm workers are treated like slaves. Over the last five years, about 10 million workers have lost their jobs.
All of this proves that the bosses use elections to ruthlessly exploit the poor masses and create illusions about the system. Their promises are just election slogans to dodge workers’ anger. As communists, we must fight to smash the capitalist election system and to build a communist society where leaders serve the working class, not the rich bosses.
Now teachers and clerical, railway, and postal workers are demonstrating to protest price hikes and wage freezes. PLP is organizing more strikes to bring more people into the streets. We are informing the working class that only communist revolution led by a single international communist party can bring prosperity, justice and equality.
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Legal Services Strike Ends, Militance Signals Future Struggles
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- 04 July 2013 61 hits
NEW YORK CITY, June 24 — Today members of UAW Local 2320 the Legal Services Staff Association voted to end their six-week strike and return to work. With the deck stacked against them, and knowing that this offer was “as good as it’s going to get” for now, the 270 lawyers, para-legals and clericals accepted a concession contract and resumed representing their poor, mostly black, Latino and immigrant clients. During the strike, PLP was welcomed on the picket lines and dozens of workers were introduced to CHALLENGE.
The workers waged a militant fight. All strikers participated on local strike committees, and the local established a Hardship Fund to cover strikers’ rent, utility and other bills in an emergency. Women played a leading role in the strike. The International UAW paid the strikers’ health insurance after the millionaire corporate lawyers that run the NYLSC cut them off retroactively and without notice. While this was a great help to those on strike, it also gave the International union tremendous leverage in leading the workers to accept concessions.
The UAW’s strategy was to rely on Democratic Party politicians, especially mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn, to win a contract loaded with concessions, although less than what the union-busting bosses had hoped for. Letters of support came from New York City’s Congressional delegation and a long list of City Council members. But that “support” was used to get workers to pay more for their health care, and anticipated layoffs in the coming year. “Layoff equity protections” with management (there is one manager for every three staff) almost guarantees layoffs, as long as some managers are laid off too.
With all this “political clout,” why wasn’t there a no-layoff guarantee? Why are we contributing 1% of our salary to health care premiums? Because these are the same politicians that have overseen a drastic reduction in staff and the closure of several neighborhood offices over the past several years. These cutbacks, while costing our members jobs, are mainly aimed at the unemployed and working poor clients we serve. They are racist to the core. They are part of the destruction of the old social contract, the so-called safety net of social benefits such as unemployment insurance, social security, and medicaid. More cuts are on their way to pay for the bosses’ widening imperialists wars.
No strike or contract can stop war and fascism. Only communist revolution can do that.
The contract is retroactive to July 1, 2012, and will expire in July, 2014. More than a few who voted to accept this contract are also talking about walking out again a year from now. But most important, we need to build a mass PLP among legal service workers and clients.
