South Africa What went wrong?

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of profit in the mining of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other valuable resources. Manufacturing and the fi­ Following are major portions of a talk by Socialist nancial sector are also growing. Yet today, the share of Action member Marty Goodman at a panel discussion, “The Mandela Legacy,” sponsored by Socialist Action under racist apartheid. The term “class apartheid” best at the Left Forum in New York City, on May 31. Other describes South Africa today. speakers on the panel included Nellie Bailey, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, and Margaret Kimberly from Black devastating than in South Africa, which is one of the Agenda Report. most unequal societies on earth.

W hen we saw Obama with Mandela’s family on TV, 16% in 1995 and rose to 30% in 2002. Adding discour­ we were supposed to forget the CIA’s role in Man­ aged workers to that number, the figure was 43%. dela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. We were sup­ posed to forget that heroic Mandela spent 27 years in an to 2000, while average white household income rose apartheid jail but remained on the U.S. terrorist list until 15%. At the same time, primary corporate taxes dropped 2008. The TV images implied a passing of the torch from from 48% to 30% in 1999. Mandela to Obama. But can we compare the commander in chief of a country that promotes war and racism with income in 2000, down from 11.4% in 1995. The richest a man who played a colossal role in toppling the horrors 20% earned 65% of all income. of apartheid?

For decades U.S. imperialism blocked meaningful U.N. month, 47% of South Africans, mostly Black, remained sanctions, even after the Sharpville massacre in 1960, poor. In 1994, this figure was 45.6%. when 69 were shot protesting pass laws. The impunity continued long after the murder of anti-apartheid leader herited from the apartheid regime and assumed by the Steven Biko and up to 1000 school children protesting ANC government. Moreover, the ANC refused to press the Afrikaans language in schools were mowed down in for reparations from the corporations that profited from 1976. apartheid. And the ANC agreed not to prosecute apart­ All the while, U.S. investments poured into apartheid South Africa, topping $1 billion. New York’s Chase Bank Reconciliation Commission.” Compare that to the after­ was a prominent investor. It took a massive campaign for math of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, when Congress to finally override President Reagan’s veto, and several Nazis were hung! to allow a weak congressional sanctions bill to pass.

We are also supposed to forget how “democratic” Is­ came to realize that apartheid was an impediment to eco­ rael, itself an apartheid state, played its own sinister role nomic growth—that is, profits. Capitalists learned that, as South Africa’s second largest trading partner and a despite their racism, more Black workers were needed in source of weapons and military training in its dual role towns instead of being banished to bantustans. Moreover, as a U.S. surrogate. super-exploited Black workers, as well as “Coloureds” South Africa is a test of working-class strategy—re­ (mixed-race people) and “Indians,” could not afford to formism versus revolution. Unfortunately, 60 years after purchase a sufficient amount of South African-made the adoption of the so-called 1955 “Freedom Charter” goods for economic expansion (profits). and 20 years after the fall of formal apartheid, no com­ ponent of the ruling “triumvirate”—the 102-year-old Af­ signed an open letter in 1985 calling for full citizenship rican National Congress (ANC), the trade-union confed­ rights for “all our people.” Signers included mining in­ eration COSATU, or the South African Communist Party terests like the giant Anglo-American and de Beers cor­ (SACP)—has passed the test of revolutionary leadership. porations, and also multi-nationals such as General Mo­ As the leading economy in Africa, a socialist revolu­ tors, Coca Cola, General Electric, and Toyota. Finally, tion would have had a massive impact on the continent mass mobilizations, sanctions, and international outrage and world politics. It would be an alternative to what we at apartheid pushed these criminals to cut a deal with the see with the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria; people ANC. At an early stage, they undertook negotiations with would shun groups like Baku Haram. A revolutionary Mandela in his prison cell. government in South Africa would inspire revolutionary struggle, provide it with material aid, and give the masses unbanned the ANC, SACP, and Pan Africanist Congress an alternative to the World Bank starvation policies prev­ and released Mandela from jail. Apparently, as part of alent throughout Africa. the deal, the United Democratic Front or UDF, which Make no mistake, South Africa is a player in the world represented much of the mass movement, was asked to economy, seen as an “emerging country.” Decades of disband by the ANC. As the South African socialist Pat­ apartheid and its aftermath guaranteed a very high rate rick Bond puts it, “the ANC, in encouraging the UDF to 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2014 (Photo) Strikers at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, where police massacred 34 workers in August 2012. merely evaporate, has literally disarmed and dis­ qualified the popular movement in playing any ac­ tive ongoing role.”

In 1993, before the ANC fully took power and as apartheid laws were falling, a transitional govern­ ment, which included ANC officials, accepted a $850 million loan with secret, but typical, Interna­ tional Monetary Fund conditions—lower import tariffs, cuts in state spending, and large cuts in public sector wages. In 1996, when launching the neoliberal “GEAR” program, ANC leader Thabo Mbeki (and later South African president) said, “just call me a Thatcherite.” Mbeki had already said in 1974 that the ANC never pretended to be a socialist party, telling the world that the ANC would go easy on capitalism, if not welcome it.

This was reiterated in 1987, when a South Afri­ can Communist Party message to the second CO­ SATU trade-union congress warned, “socialism is not on the agenda.”

The U.S., British and other imperialists engaged in direct talks with the ANC, with the Soviet Union as partners. The ANC was asked to give-up armed struggle, limit mass mobilizations, and step back from nationalizing the banks, as the ANC had promised in the Freedom Charter.

One ANC top official told the Los Angeles Times as far back as 1988, “We are probably getting more pressure from Moscow to agree to negotia­ tions than we do even from London or Washing­ ton today.” Soviet officials advised the ANC to go slow on implementing the Freedom Charter and to accept “monopoly capitalism” for many years.

Dr. Neville Alexander, a South African Trotsky­ ist and leader of the Workers Organization for So­ cialist Action, later wrote, “the ANC itself never set out to overthrow the South African state; in­ stead, their stated goal was always to force nego­ tiations on the regime.”

Joe Slovo, the Stalinist SACP leader in 1992 and one time head of the armed wing of the ANC, offered the key compromise of a “Sunset Clause,” to be included wealth held by the Black majority is actually less than into the new South African constitution, which guaran­ teed that a white-Black coalition capitalist government would remain in power for at least five years. It was ad­ The failure of neo-liberal capitalism could not be more opted, although the term “power-sharing” was removed.

The impending collapse of the Soviet Union and the utter confusion of those educated by the politics of Stalinism • South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at drove these life-long sell-out reformists even further to the right.

By 1991, Mandela reassured President Bush and U.S. • Average Black household income fell 19% from 1995 corporate types that “our perspectives have changed” on the issue of nationalizing banks. “We chickened out,” ad­ mitted Ronnie Kasrils, ANC central committee member and one-time head of intelligence for the armed wing of • Half of South Africans earned just 9.7% of national the South African Communist Party.

South Africa followed a far different path than revo­ lutionary Cuba. The corrupt capitalist state in Cuba was • In 2013, using the national poverty line of $43 a smashed, but not so in South Africa. All of the capitalist institutions remain intact in South Africa, including the capitalist police and army.

Adding to those outrages is the $25 billion debt in­ A shock to the entire political system was the police/ government/corporate massacre in August 2012 of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. Clum­ sy attempts by South African officials at a cover-up in­ cluded planting weapons next to bodies. Incredibly, the heid murderers after the findings of its own “Truth and workers themselves have been charged with murder. All of this is shown and more in an incredible film: www. minershotdown.co.za.

ANC leader Cyril Ramphosa is on the board of the Lon­ What is interesting is that the capitalist class actually min mine and has an estimated wealth of $1 billion. He called strikers “criminals,” and even COSATU said much the same. The irony is that Ramphosa was once regarded as a militant miners’ union leader.

The struggle did not take place in a vacuum. Six months earlier, scores were killed after 17,000 miners were fired nearby at the world’s second largest platinum mine, Im­ pala platinum. The Marikana massacre itself was fol­ lowed by a massive wave of wildcat strikes.

In recognition of these realities, some corporate leaders What went wrong in South Africa? The post-apartheid South African tragedy was not a mistake. The ANC was not caught napping; nor has it merely succumbed to the temptations of power.

No, there’s something more fundamental here. The ANC was heavily influenced by the SACP, which made the error of embracing capitalist rule as part of its accep­ tance of the strategy of so-called “two-stage democratic revolution.” This doctrine, which was developed under Stalin, views capitalist development as a “progressive”

In February 1990, National Party President de Klerk replacement for backward dictatorships. The socialist goal, workers’ power, is relegated to a distant future.

The reformist Russian socialists of the early 20th cen­ tury, called Mensheviks, held a similar view. Backward Tsarist Russia, they said, must go through an extended period of capitalism, which would grant democratic (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) rights. The Mensheviks supported the liberal capitalist government of Alexander Kerensky after the fall of the Tsar.

A version of the “two-stage democratic revolution” was used by Lenin in his early essay, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” as he strat­ egized the tasks of workers and peasants in power. But Lenin discarded that vague formula in 1917 in his famous “April Thesis,” delivered on his return from exile. Lenin castigated the leadership of the old Bolshevik Party (Sta­ lin, Kamenev, etc.) for supporting Kerensky.

Why was Lenin angry? Because the capitalist system was already imperialist, globalized and deeply entangled with the Russian aristocracy. The capitalists became a re­ actionary force, as they are in South Africa and all over the world today.

The revolutionary Lenin-Trotsky government, as it was known, declared “all power to the soviets,” the mass workers’ coalitions. After workers toppled the bourgeois Kerensky, they began to carry out the democratic tasks of the revolution, at the same time that they moved forward on socialist goals. This was Leon Trotsky’s famous “per­ manent revolution” in practice: There are no progressive capitalist governments anywhere—neither here in New York nor in Cape Town. Not in the age of imperialism.

In the 1930s, the conservatized, privileged bureaucracy led by Stalin applied the “stagist” strategy worldwide. This retrograde strategy led to defeats and massacres in China and Spain, and later in Chile, Indonesia, and many other countries.

The political landscape appears to be slowly changing in South Africa, with some promising developments. The South African national election, on May 9, resulted in sustained support for the ANC, with 62% of those voting, about the same as 1994, although significantly down in several urban centers. The center-right democratic alli­ ance drew 22%.

The new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by former ANC youth leader Julius Malema—who is facing (continued from page 12: “New Ukraine president promises war & austerity”) have said in media interviews that they come from the Russian side of the border—but they emphasize that they are “volunteers.” Evidence of organized and direct Russian military intervention remains elusive, no matter how much the White House and the Kiev government scream about it.

On June 1, Reuters printed an interview with the commander of the Vostok Battalion, Alexander Kho­ dakovsky, a Donetsk native who formerly had been the head of an elite unit of the Ukrainian state security service. Khodakovsky told Reuters that he had gradu­ ally shifted his political outlook, from rejection of the Kiev coup in February to now embracing the cause of complete independence from Ukraine.

“The split of the country is final. There is nothing uniting us with them (the Kiev leadership) now,” Kho­ dakovsky said. He told Reuters that he had no illusions in Russia’s immediate goals for the region: “I think Russia uses us to pursue its geo-political interests, have a buffer between itself and the West. We do not deceive ourselves about that. But even knowing this, we stick to Russia because it is our culture.”

Addressing the question of non-Ukrainian volun­ teers, he said, “there are no Chechens now. There were. They left yesterday [May 29] with their injured and killed.“ The Donetsk Peoples Republic was reinforced by a May 11 referendum; it was announced that 96 percent of voters in Luhansk province had endorsed self-rule for the DPR and almost 90 percent in Donetsk prov­ ince. Since then, support for the DPR appears to have remained strong in the region. If anything, according to reporters on the ground, bloodshed caused by the Ukrainian military offensive has hardened popular opinion against the Kiev regime.

Striking coalminers marched and rallied in Donetsk’s Lenin Square on May 28 in support of the DPR and in protest of the attack by the Kiev army. Many spoke out against the presence of fascists in the Kiev govern­ ment. The miners, on strike in at least six mines, were members of the Union of Mineworkers, which appar­ ently has had links to ousted President Victor Yanu­ kovych’s Party of the Regions.

And on May 25, several thousand people demon­ strated in Donetsk against the coup government in Kiev and the Ukrainian presidential election held the same day. Later, a large portion of the crowd marched to the residence of Rinat Akhmetov, an industrialist who is supposedly the richest man in Ukraine.

The protesters were angered by the fact that several days earlier Akhmetov had ordered thousands of his workers to march in daily rallies against the “sepa­ ratists.” The workers were reportedly given time off corruption charges—won 6.4%. The EFF has demanded nationalization of the banks and the redistribution of land, as did the historic Freedom Charter. Their repre­ sentatives appeared in parliament in red berets and red worker’s clothes.

A significant development took place when the Nation­ al Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, or NUMSA, declared last December that they are splitting from the ANC alliance. They have vowed to form a workers’ party (“United Front and Movement for Socialism“) that might run candidates in 2016, but they sat out any role in the last election. Their leading spokespersons, like General Secretary Irwin Jim, claim to be Marxists and call for the from work for the rallies, and threatened with repri­ sals if they refused. In retaliation, some of the May 25 protesters demanded nationalization of Akhmetov’s properties, which include mines, metal works, banks, insurance, power generation, media, and real estate.

Demands for nationalization of the property of the oligarchs, which have been made in several instances, show that a degree of working-class consciousness underlies the protest activity in Ukraine—especially in the major industrial belt in the country’s east. With little doubt, many working people realize that yoking their country to the big imperialist powers, the United States and the European Union, will provide few re­ wards for Ukraine. They are fearful that the economic measures stipulated by the EU will send their already low living standards tumbling.

Unfortunately, a mass-based leadership that can speak to the interests of working people is as gravely lacking in the Donetsk Peoples Republic as it is in the rest of Ukraine. This is readily reflected in the provi­ sions of the DPR’s constitution—which is a profound­ ly conservative document.

The constitution, adopted on May 16, proclaims the DPR as a parliamentary state, with Russian and Ukrai­ nian as its official languages. It is evident that the doc­ ument’s framers believe the new state must remain capitalist. For example: “The right of private property is protected by law.”

The constitution enshrines the Russian Orthodox Church as the “leading and dominant belief” in the new republic and as the “backbone” of the “Russian World.” Rights are granted to citizens of the DPR “from the moment of conception,” a phrase that indicates there will be restrictions on the right of women to choose to terminate pregnancies. And gay and lesbian relationships are outlawed: “Any forms of perverted unions between people of the same sex are not ac­ (Above) NUMSA General Secretary Irwin Jim. nationalization of resources.

Jim has spoken to the formation of a “united front” of class struggle and the building of a “movement for so­ cialism.” NUMSA has said that its break with the ANC is “irreversable.” If this union, with its 340,000 work­ ers, pursues a genuinely class-struggle movement, then it will be a development of world importance. With few exceptions, the leaders of the working class throughout the world come as beggars to the capitalists’ table. With­ out revolutionary leadership, the workers’ movement will remain beggars. n (Left) Construction workers cheer striking miners as they march in Donetsk on May 28.

knowledged, not allowed, and will be pros­ ecuted.”

The constitution also raises the prospect of the new state’s becoming part of “Greater Russia,” although Moscow has so far given a cold shoulder to this. Annexation to Rus­ sia, however, would provide little relief for Ukrainian workers. Working people in Rus­ sia are held down by their own exploitative capitalist class, and oppressed by the auto­ cratic Putin regime.

Indeed, the myriad of secret negotiations between the new U.S./EU-advised Ukraini­ an government, Russia, and the U.S. appear to be centered on critical economic matters that include who will control Ukraine’s mas­ sive shale gas reserves, the fourth largest in the world, and whether Russia’s annexation of Crimea will be eventually formally recognized.

The future exploitation of oil, gas, and other fossil-fu­ el resources are at stake in all these matters. Crimea’s offshore fossil fuel resources, estimated to be worth over $1 trillion, are currently under Russian hegemo­ ny, while U.S. oil cartels, before and after the February coup, have been signing contracts to frack Ukraine’s massive reserves.

In all these instances, the pursuit of profit for the capitalist elite trumps the needs of the Ukrainian people, not to mention the interests of all humanity. Today, diplomatically conducted and increasingly mil­ itary-backed “oil wars” over the very resource whose continued use spells doom for humankind are in full swing in the events surrounding the struggle for pow­ er in Ukraine.

Working people in Ukraine need a revolutionary party and program that can transcend national and cultural differences and unite the country in a broad movement to sweep away the capitalist oligarchs and their fascist shock troops. Instead of the current Kiev government of billionaires and thieves, Ukraine needs a government that is led by working people and serves their interests. That is a socialist government.

In the meantime, the Kiev government is escalating its war against people in the east who are seeking self-rule or autonomy. Once the conflict widens, the dan­ ger increases of direct U.S. military intervention.

With U.S. troops taking part in ongoing maneuvers in Poland and the Baltic states, and U.S.-backed mer­ cenaries from Blackwater already on the ground, this is no small threat. This danger must be answered in the United States by building a powerful and united antiwar movement that stands in uncompromising opposition to all U.S. intervention in Ukraine. n SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2014 7

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May May Gong / Socialist Action (Left) Nat Weinstein (ctr.) joins construction workers’ picket line in San Francisco in 1980s. socialist revolution.

In this critical internal dispute, he put aside a host of legitimate organizational differences, which might have caused oppositionists to focus on important but second­ ary matters, in order to organize a principled opposition in defense of the party’s fundamental ideas. These were expressed in texts that Nat authored and/or supported with regard to the 1979 Nicaraguan and Iranian Revo­ lutions, when the SWP majority leadership adapted to critical weaknesses of the Sandinistas and essentially lent support to the bourgeois Iranian leadership of the Ayatol­ lah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In the face of what soon became a massive and unex­ pected purge of all SWP oppositionists, Nat stood firm in his ideas and traveled to several branches around the country in an effort to convince comrades of the valid­ ity of the SWP’s historic program. He thereby began the process of assembling the initial cadre who, in 1983-84, became Socialist Action’s founding members. These in­ cluded some dozen old-timers—founding members of the SWP and the Fourth International in 1938. At the height of the purge of SWP oppositionists, Nat, who fought to remain in the party in order to try to reorient the SWP and to win the best militants to his cause, was compelled to operate under the most difficult of con­ ditions. These included the occasion after Nat’s longtime mentor, Tom Kerry, who had been in political agreement with him, passed away and Nat was called on to be the obvious keynote speaker at Tom’s memorial meeting. Nat took on this difficult assignment with courage, real­ izing that mere mention of Tom’s critical views on the evolution of the SWP—at a public meeting—could lead to his rapid expulsion from the party.

I will never forget how skillful Nat was in recounting Tom’s life, including his dedication to the founding ideas of the party that he and Tom had devoted their lives to. To remain in the party during the great purge initiated by the SWP’s Jack Barnes leadership while doing justice to Tom Kerry’s life was done with the utmost honesty. Tom, a top SWP leader for decades and co-leader with Farrell Dobbs of the SWP following the death of SWP founder James P. Cannon, would have been proud of Nat’s oration.