Apartheid is alive and growing in South Africa. The racist police massacre of 34 striking miners, the wounding of 78 others and the arrest of 259 outside the Lonmin platinum mine in Rustenberg on August 16 mirrors the apartheid of the late 20th century, the one of a racist white Nazi-type capitalist ruling class oppressing the entire black population. In fact, apartheid became a virtual synonym for racism.

“The strike and the government’s iron-fisted response are emblematic of…South Africa’s largely white-owned business establishment and…[the fact] that the ANC [African National Congress] and its allies have become too cozy with big business” (New York Times, 8/17). 

The current apartheid pits this mostly white big business class joined with a small black government elite of profiteers enforcing the same capitalist oppression against the entire, mostly black working class. And similar to the previous rebellions of the last century, workers are mounting armed resistance.

Eight miners were killed on August 10, when 3,000 miners, mostly rock drillers, went out on a wildcat strike demanding a tripling of their poverty-level wages which have remained as low as they were under apartheid, 18 years ago. “If we stop, it all stops,” they proclaimed.  “If neither the union nor the employer will listen, we will make them.  We will apply objective violence until they are forced to listen to our grievances.”

The mine cannot operate without the rock drillers who work at dangerous depths, holding 50-pound drills against the rock face, their bodies vibrating for the duration of their 8-hour shifts. Then they emerge to the misery of shack dwellings, with no electricity, running water or sanitation.

The rock-drillers are not allowed to live in the real cities of South Africa, sentenced like nonpersons to a life of wage slavery deep below ground in a “planet of slums,” but their strike shook the market in the great financial centers of the capitalist world.  They are an inspiration to workers everywhere!  

Lonmin — the world’s third largest platinum mining company in a country that produces 80 percent of the world’s platinum reserves — labeled the strike “illegal.” A largely black police force (BBC News, 8/17) was ordered out to escort in any potential scabs. On August 16, they set up a barricade of razor wire encircling the miners. The police demanded they disarm and disperse. The miners, armed with machetes, sticks, spears and clubs, fought back, outflanked the cops and tried to burst through the cordon to bar scabs from breaking the strike.

Then the police, holding automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns, began spraying the miners with tear gas. As the miners tried to escape the gas, the cops opened fire hitting many miners in the back. “After three minutes of gunfire, bodies littered the ground in pools of blood” (The Guardian, 8/17). A 36-year-old miner named Paulos said, “They started shooting at us with rubber bullets. Then I saw people were falling and dying for real. I knew then they were proper bullets” (New York Times, 8/18). The scene echoed the previous apartheid era when the cops and the military used live ammunition to quell protests.

The miners, who now earn $300 to $500 a month, are demanding monthly raises of $625 to $1,563. An August 14 report by the Bench Marks Foundation, which monitors multi-national mining corporations, said Lonmin has a “bad track record, with high levels of fatalities” and keeps workers in “very poor living conditions. Children suffer from chronic illnesses due to sewage spills caused by broken drainage” (Associated Press, 8/17).

Workers Condemn Bosses, Governing ANC and Union Partners

Miner Thuso Masakeng told the Agency France Press (8/17), “We can’t afford a decent life. We live like animals because of poor salaries….We are being exploited; both the government and the unions have failed to come to our rescue. Companies make a lot of money at our expense and we get paid almost nothing.”

Joyce Lebelo, a miner’s wife, built a tiny shack in 1998, thinking the new government would soon provide her with a proper house. She is still waiting. “When we voted, we didn’t think we would spend ten years living in a shack. The promises they made they have not delivered. The people who got power are fat and rich. They have forgotten the people at the bottom.”

As one official of a new, militant miners’ union said, “We made the ANC what it is today, but they have no time for us. Nothing has changed. Only the people on top and they keep getting more money” (NYT, 8/17).

PLP Analysis Proved
Correct

This situation was exactly what the Progressive Labor Party warned would ensue when Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress took the reins of government eighteen years ago. Although Mandela spent decades in jail, he was not about to lead a revolution against capitalism that created these abominable conditions. One of his early pronouncements was to reject worker demands for increased wages and benefits on the grounds that it would “discourage foreign [capitalist] investment.”

When PLP declared that the maintenance of capitalism would continue the apartheid-era exploitation of black workers, we were roundly criticized by all the liberals, nationalists and pseudo-leftists who predicted a “new era of freedom.” What the working class got was rampant unemployment, deep poverty, intolerable working conditions, squalid housing and an emerging, tiny elite class of black oppressors who — along with the dominant apartheid-era corporate rulers — profited from the misery of the masses. And then and now, U.S. corporations like GM and Ford netted tens of millions in super-profits from that racist exploitation.

As we said then and reiterate now, only a communist revolution, and the building of a party to lead it, can solve the problems these miners, and all workers, face. Only a system without bosses and profits can enable the working class, which produces everything of value, to reap all the fruits of our labor, according to need.

Union Colludes with Bosses

The capitalist media has been painting the miners’ struggle as one stemming from competition between rival unions rather than growing out of real demands over real oppressive conditions. The rank-and-file rock-drillers are self-organized, under their own leadership and have armed themselves to fight for the integrity of their strike against all comers, joined by women from the shantytown armed with knobkerries (clubs).

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is closely allied with the governing ANC, and has lost the majority of its miner members. The NUM’s former leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, is now a rich director on the Lonmin board. The NUM has been challenged by the new, militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The latter has been demanding “sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working conditions for miners” while exposing the NUM’s alliance with the government.

NUM general secretary Frans Baleni defended the police action, saying, “The police were patient.” (NYT, 8/17) When the NUM president addressed the strikers and echoed the bosses’ line, calling on them to return to work, the miners began yelling their opposition, forcing the cops to escort him safely away. The traitorous South African “Communist” Party called for the arrest of the AMCU leaders. However, the latter head a reform union with no political vision beyond immediate demands. While verbally defending the workers against the avalanche of media condemnation, they did not organize the strike or join the workers in battle. 

A striking winch operator and AMCU member who gave his name as Kelebone and makes $500 a month for difficult, dangerous work said, “NUM has deserted us. NUM is working with the [rulers] and getting money. They forgot about the workers.” (Boston Globe, 8/17)

The British-owned company, declaring the strike “illegal,” has obtained a court order to force the workers back to work or be fired. But winch operator Makosi Mbongane, 32, told the Associated Press, “They can beat us, kill us and kick and trample on us,…do whatever they want to do, we aren’t going back to work.”

As AMCU strike leader Joseph Mathunjwa told Reuters, “We’re going nowhere. If need be, we’re prepared to die here.”

This is an anti-imperialist struggle against a huge mining company, tightly knit with the rich post-apartheid local elite, who sit on the board and protect their super-profits. It is also an antiracist struggle. Only communism can end racism everywhere.

This is a huge potential base for an international revolutionary communist movement and party, the missing ingredient needed to turn these brave miners toward revolution based on international class unity. This can bypass the mistakes of the old communist movement and dare to win it all.

“I never thought I’d see this in my South Africa in a million years.” That’s how one young reporter, speaking for many, expressed his horror at the racist police massacre of 34 striking miners, the wounding of 78 others and the arrest of 259 outside the Lonmin platinum mine on August 16.

This horror is compounded by the fact that one of the most inspiring and heroic struggles of the later 20^th Century was the mass struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. Workers and students organized a movement of millions under the most Nazi-like terror, led by the African National Congress (ANC). Miners, auto and transit workers and students led strikes and walkouts while their leaders were either in prison or in exile. They carried out armed struggle.

But rather than fight for communism, the ANC came to power almost 20 years ago after reaching an accommodation with the racist bosses and bankers and disarming the workers and youth. This horrible betrayal was celebrated with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after more than 25 years.

On August 10, 3,000 miners, mostly rock drillers, went on a wildcat strike demanding a tripling of their poverty wages (they earn $300 to $500 a month). Lonmin, the world’s third largest platinum mining company has a “bad track record, with high levels of fatalities” and keeps workers in “very poor living conditions. Children suffer from chronic illnesses due to sewage spills caused by broken drainage.” (Associated Press, 8/17)

Last week, The ANC government sent black and white police to set up a barricade of razor wire encircling the miners. The miners, armed with machetes, spears and clubs, outflanked the cops and tried to stop scabs from breaking the strike. The police gunned them down.

This fight is as much against the ANC as it is the mine operators. As one official of a new, radical miners’ union said, “We made the ANC what it is today, but they have no time for us. Nothing has changed.” (NYT, 8/17)

Back when the ANC made peace with Apartheid, workers and youth were waving red flags and demanding more guns. The most militant youth movement called themselves the “Comrades.” The Lonmin massacre is a grim reminder that there can be no peace with the racist profit system. The bosses and cops must be destroyed. A communist society that meets the needs of the international working class must be built on their graves. The heroic Lonmin miners are giving us a lesson in blood. We in Progressive Labor Party support them. We oppose their foes. We fight for communist revolution, from South Africa to the U.S.

Click here for this flyer in pdf. 

The mass racist killings on August 5 by a neo-Nazi veteran in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was not an isolated atrocity. When Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded three others in a Sikh temple, he reflected both the long-term needs and contradictions of U.S. imperialism. As the U.S. ruling class proceeds on its collision course with rising capitalists in China over the world’s oil and gas and cheap labor, its murderous brutality will victimize workers at home, as well. 

The ex-GI’s crime exposes a serious flaw in the U.S. war machine, where racism cuts two ways. On the one hand, the top brass needs racism to motivate troops to kill dehumanized enemies. On the other, racism hinders U.S. bosses’ ability to mobilize for ever-larger wars that will inevitably become global.

A substantial number of U.S. troops share Page’s virulent hatred for black, Latino and Asian soldiers and superiors. Some racist officers refuse even to recognize Barack Obama as commander-in-chief. Racist “hazing” (actually torture) discourages working-class Asians from enlisting. Moreover, the extreme racism rampant in the U.S. — police killings of black and Latino youth in big cities nation-wide; double jobless rates for these groups; turning their schools into prison-like institutions; their mass incarceration (70 percent of prisoners in the U.S. are black and Latino); the massive deportation of immigrant workers — all deter black and Latino youth from joining the military.

Throw in the two Middle East shooting wars over the last decade, and it’s no surprise that black recruitment plummeted 58 percent between 2000 and 2007, despite the patriotic frenzy following 9/11. And Page’s anti-Sikh rampage further dampens Pentagon hopes that tens of millions of U.S.-led Indian troops will join a potential future battle against China’s vast forces.

The bosses’ dilemma is that capitalism can’t live without racism. The lower wages and benefits paid to black and Latino workers net U.S. bosses hundreds of billions in super-profits, which the capitalists depend on for their very existence. These inequities hurt white workers as well, because they’re used as a club to keep white workers from demanding more or even keeping what they’ve got. The differential is designed to split the working class and weaken its ability to unite to fight the bosses’ attacks.

As the U.S. president, it is Obama’s job to enforce the capitalists’ profit system that wages its economic war on the entire working class. Obama’s racism may be less overt than Wade Page’s, but it is no less dangerous to workers.

The one way for the working class to rid itself of this racist profit system is to join and build the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party in organizing a communist revolution. Communism unites all workers and eliminates bosses, profits, and the wage system that divides us. It enables our class to share all the value that workers — and only workers — produce.

Racists in the Military

In the run-up to the 2001 Afghan and 2003 Iraq invasions, Pentagon chiefs worried openly over the dubious loyalty of racists like Page and how they hurt enlistment figures. They were right on both counts. In 1995, Page was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when two neo-Nazi soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division killed a black couple in nearby Fayetteville. Page himself belonged to a neo-Nazi group. The Army punished him for dereliction of duty and going AWOL.

As Togo D. West, Jr., the former black Secretary of the Army, once said, “Extremist activity compromises fairness, good order and discipline and, potentially, combat effectiveness” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 8/6/12). Yet West’s Army routinely teaches and trains recruits using racist slurs to wipe out “hajis” and “ragheads.”  

In 2010, Lt. Col. Terry Larkin, an Army doctor, refused orders for Afghanistan because he challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. The year before, Maj. Stefan Rhodes did the same thing, while Capt. Connie Rhodes rejected deployment to Iraq. All three tried to cover their gutter racism with the “birther” argument, the spurious idea that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and therefore is ineligible to be president. 

But regardless of his color, Obama must enforce racism to serve his master capitalists. He has deported more immigrant workers than any other president. He endorses education policies that perpetuate racist schools. Racist unemployment and housing foreclosures have soared on his watch.

Tea Party Challenges the Dominant Power Structure

The Tea Party represents domestic bosses with less of a vested interest in imperialist wars. Its dubious loyalty to the dominant power structure makes it a threat to the liberal, imperialist, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. In 2010, a U.S. Army training document envisioned the use of troops on U.S. soil under the following scenario: 

In May 2016 an extremist [read “racist” — Ed.] militia motivated by the goals of the “tea party” movement takes over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest. Activists remove the chief of police and either disarm local police and county sheriff departments or discourage them from interfering. In truth, this is hardly necessary. Many law enforcement officials already are sympathetic to the tea party’s agenda, know many of the people involved, and have made clear they will not challenge the takeover.  

U.S.-India Tie Strained

In the wake of the Milwaukee bloodbath, the bosses’ pressing concern is that it could set back the Pentagon’s dream of a grand war alliance with India against China’s vast forces. On August 1, after returning from India, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton D. Carter reported back to the ultra-imperialist, Rockefeller-founded Asia Society: “India is a key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century. The U.S.-India relationship is global in scope…. Our security interests converge” (Times of India, 8/2/12). “Rebalance” refers to Obama’s new anti-China military build-up. Carter vowed “to work with the Indians on developing a joint vision for U.S.-India defense cooperation.”

But this plan may be compromised by Page’s slaughter. “Sikhs make up 10-15% of all ranks in the Indian Army and 20% of its officers, while Sikhs form only 1.87% of the Indian population, which makes them possibly 10 times more likely to be a soldier and officer in the Indian Army than the average Indian.” (BBC, 8/8/07). In fact, India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh is a Sikh.

Ravi Srinivasan, a Hindu, West Point graduate, and veteran of Afghanistan, lamented how Page may have strained U.S. alliances:

Diversity is a force multiplier on the front lines. It offers a means to relate to… our coalition partners…. Whether or not Page’s military record had any effect on his racist views, the fact that he is a veteran makes him an ambassador for the military….[T]he next time we invade a country, the consequences of that perception may follow us there (New York Times, 8/7/02).

Rulers’ Achilles Heel

These are problems that racism, an essential component of capitalism, poses for the capitalists themselves. Even as the bosses use racism to exploit and divide workers, it will prove to be the rulers’ Achilles heel. The imperialist war machine’s racist outrages and atrocities sparked widespread militant revolts during the U.S. genocide in Vietnam (see box). With communist leadership, such rebellions could lay the groundwork for destroying the deadly profit system.

The fight against racism needs to start in the belly of the beast, here in the U.S. That has been a cardinal principle of the Progressive Labor Party since our inception half a century ago, as shown by our active support of the 1964 Harlem Rebellion. Our Party has joined the current fight against the racist police murders of Shantel Davis and Ramarley Graham in New York and the racist executions of Manual Diaz and Joel Acevedo in Anaheim, California. PLP mobilizes the working class in the workplace and the unions, the military, the communities, and the churches. It fights racism on college campuses and attacks Jim Crow segregation in Brooklyn’s high schools. The Party’s anti-racist struggles help unite our class as a prerequisite for communist revolution.

As our Party has grown and expanded onto five continents, we have spread our anti-racist fight to opposing mass evictions in Palestine-Israel and uniting all ethnic groups in Pakistan and Mexico as well as other areas (see pages 3,4,5). 

Join this international class struggle. Organize class war against capitalism. Join and build
Progressive Labor Party!

U.S. rulers’ worries over the Pentagon’s ability to field a reliable military harkens back to the mass GI rebellion during the Vietnam War. Writing in the June 1971 Armed Forces Journal, Col. Robert Heinl, a Marine historian, described it as “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” And it was a massive collapse:

• Heinl reported that sedition “infests the Armed Services….There appear to be some 144 underground newspapers…at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas.”

• “Fragging” — the hurling of fragmentation grenades at officers — was common. GI’s raised bounties of up to $1,000 for leaders they wanted to rub out. Requests were published in the GIs’ underground papers. GI Says publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on the lieutenant colonel who led the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in 1969. In 1970 alone, the Pentagon reported 209 fraggings.

• In October, when the USS Kitty Hawk was ordered to return to the Philippines’ Subic Bay, black sailors led a major rebellion, including hand-to-hand battle with Marines sent to break up a meeting on board. The ship was forced to retire to San Francisco for a “6-month re-fitting job” and was removed from the war altogether.

• By November 1972, five giant aircraft carriers were tied up in San Diego, forced out of combat in the Gulf of Tonkin by crews involved in anti-war activities. When the USS Ranger was ordered into action in June 1972, 20 acts of sabotage culminated in the destruction of the main reduction gear, delaying its sailing for more than four months. When the ship made it back to the Gulf of Tonkin, sailors disabled it once again by deliberately setting it on fire, the sixth major disaster in the Seventh Fleet in a five-week period.

• Sailors on the USS Coral Sea organized a “Stop Our Ship” (SOS) movement, forcing its return to San Francisco. SOS then spread to the USS Enterprise through its underground paper.

• By the end of 1971, resistance was intensifying to the point that U.S. commanders ran short of reliable ground troops to send into battle. When President Richard Nixon resorted to massive air power, launching a 12-day, all-out bombardment of much of North Vietnam, individual pilots refused to participate. The super-secret 6990th Air Force Security Service unit staged a work stoppage bordering on open mutiny. During the stoppage, according to Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, there were cheers whenever a B-52 was shot down by the Vietnamese.

• In March 1972, when the USS Midway was ordered to leave San Francisco for Vietnam, protests and sabotage swept the ship. Crewmen spilled 3,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/24/72).

• “Search and evade” — avoidance of combat by units in the field — became a virtual principle of the war.

• Between July 1, 1966 and December 31, 1973, there were 503,926 “incidents of desertion” (NY Times, 8/20/74). In 1970 alone, the Army recorded 65,643 deserters, the rough equivalent of four infantry divisions.

These incidents are only a sampling of the massive resistance and rebellion by GIs during the Vietnam War. Books have since described what was largely kept from the U.S. population. As Colonel Heinl reported in his “Collapse” article, these “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam…have only been exceeded in this century…by the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917” in the Russian Revolution.

What GIs did in the past can be done again.