Lessons from the five month miners’ strike in South Africa

After a long five month battle, the momentous strike of 70,000 platinum miners in South Africa, led by AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union), ended on June 23, 2014. Especially because of its duration and intensity, it has much to teach workers throughout the world, and not least in its further confirmation of the communist programme.

It was the longest strike in the history of the South African working class, much longer than the two most significant up to now: the strike in Durban in 1973, launched by the dockers but which spread to almost every sector; and the strike of 360,000 miners in 1987, which lasted three weeks and was led by the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). As we have recently had cause to mention (see article in Communist Left no.33) the class struggle in South Africa, a modern industrial country, is intensifying. This struggle doesn’t represent an exception but is rather one more manifestation of a general historical process: peace between the classes is impossible; it is a false and hypocritical notion used to keep the proletariat down. Class struggle remains the motor of history and the key to understanding its development, as expressed in Communist theory.

This strike has confirmed another fundamental communist position: the ending of apartheid and arrival of democracy haven’t altered the wretched condition of the working class and it is still being exploited. And it couldn’t be otherwise because the underlying cause is capitalism, not a particular form of government. In South Africa, as in the rest of the world, the underlying cause of all social contradictions is not race, religion, democracy or dictatorship, but the current mode of production, which is based on the division of society into the class of salaried workers on one side, today’s proletarians, and the class of owners or managers of Capital on the other, the bourgeoisie. The fake workers’ parties, in all countries, always try to convince the exploited masses that it is just one particular aspect of capitalism which needs sorting out, after which this society will finally be OK, even for them.

Apartheid

In South Africa as long as apartheid existed it was easy to get black proletarians to believe their miserable condition was due to the whites’ racism and not the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production. But the fact is that after the ending of the racist regime in 1994 the situation of the workers failed to improve and the growth of the class struggle over recent years confirms it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Notwithstanding this, opportunism, which can be depended upon to lie, explains low salaries as a yet to be tackled legacy of the past regime, defining them as the “colonialist wages of apartheid”: a typically ideological view which conceals the clear economic reasons which give rise to this condition. It is capitalism which pushes down wages! Today, in this rich and important country, a bourgeois government, made up of blacks, manages the interests not of whites but of national and international capital.

The magnificent battle fought by the miners also confirms our theses on trade unionism. As mentioned in earlier articles, COSATU is evidencing its pro-regime nature, same as in the other countries with large trade union organisations. With the ending of apartheid, and as a consequence of its reformist political line, which aims for an impossible reconciliation between the requirements of capitalism and the needs of the working class, it has become a pillar of capitalism, guaranteeing moderation of the workers’ demands. A regime union like the CGIL in Italy or TUC in Great Britain.

500,000 workers

South Africa is a great agricultural and industrial country which produces a third of Africa’s wealth. In the mines 500,000 workers are employed and many more indirectly. They are thus highly concentrated and due to extremely harsh working conditions they are the most combative sector in the country. This has made it easier for them to recognise the pro-bourgeois nature of the NUM, and of COSATU as a whole

In 2009, Piet Matosa, president of the NUM, intervened to try and shut down a strike at Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd., the biggest platinum mine in the in the world, and was chased off under a hail of stones. In May 2011, in Karee Mine, the miners went out on strike not against the company but against the regional leadership of the NUM, which had suspended the strike leaders at the mine. The AMCU thus became the main trade union in that mine. In January 2012, 4,300 rock drillers at Impala Platinum struck against a union agreement signed by the NUM which awarded a pay increase only to the higher grades. The rock drillers asked for a substantial increase to take their net pay up to 9,000 Rand. The NUM accused them of stopping others from going to work.

Machine gun fire on strikers

The struggle which marked the turning point in relations between the proletarians in the platinum mines, the NUM and the AMCU was the struggle in the following August, in which the rock drillers of the Lonmin mine in Marikana took strike action in support of a demand for a basic wage of 12,500 Rand. The NUM, which along with the mining company had declared the demand to be “unsustainable”, did everything it could to break the strike, and during the first three days of the strike there were ten casualties. On 16 August, the sixth day of the strike, the police opened fire with machine guns and killed 34 workers. The bloody massacre serves as a clear demonstration of the bourgeois continuity from the previous regime through to the new post-apartheid regime: a black government with a black police force repressing the black working masses. The only difference is that democratic South Africa can no longer disguise class oppression as racial discrimination.

Despite the ’Marikana Massacre’ as it has since become known, the strike continued for a further four weeks, spreading to other mines, and not just those mining platinum. On September 18 the Lonmin miners of Marikana accepted an increase of 22%, taking their pay up to around 5,500 Rand ($485). This result, which however would only be partially conceded by the company, fell far short of the workers’ demands, but the courage and determination shown by the miners was such that their sense of unity would remain intact despite the only partial nature of their victory. As the 1848 Communist Manifesto explains, the most important result of workers’ struggles is not the contingent economic benefits they bring, but rather the strengthening of proletarian unity and organisation

The democratic electoral circus is useful to the bourgeoisie because it disguises the underlying dictatorship of capital, persuading the workers they have a say in things

It marked the end of the NUM in the platinum mines. The AMCU became the biggest union in the Amplats (60%), Impala and Lonmin mines (66%).

In 2013, from the strikes in May at Lonmin to the strikes in September at Amplats, both led by the AMCU, there was a steady stream of victims in the Marikana area in the struggle between members of the NUM and those of the AMCU.

On 23 January of this year, a year and four months after the Marikana Massacre, the miners went out on strike again to fight for their original objective: basic pay of 12,500 Rand. To begin with the mining companies agreed to open a dialogue with the AMCU, but once they saw how resolute the union was, after it rejected their ridiculous offer, they shut down negotiations. On 29 April thousands of miners, summoned to the Wonderkop Stadium in Marikana by the AMCU, rejected the company’s latest offer.

The NUM and COSATU openly declared their opposition to the strike and went about organising blacklegs. On May 1st, at the COSATU demonstration in the Olympia Park Stadium in Rustemberg, 30 kilometres to the east of Marikana, the president of the NUM declared: “We appeal to all workers to go back to work; this strike is against the economy of our country”.

At the end of April the ANC office in Marikana was attacked and set on fire. The presence in the area of the President of the Republic, Zuma, campaigning for re-election, was confirmed right up to the last minute, to demonstrate there was nowhere in the country he couldn’t go, but in the end the visit was cancelled. The provincial head of the ANC declared that the decision was made in order not to favour “anarchists and their initiatives”. On 5 May, for the first time since the struggle had begun, Zuma got directly involved in the matter and issued a condemnation of the strike. On 7 May the elections went ahead and the ANC-SACP governmental coalition was confirmed.

Electoral circus

The democratic electoral circus is useful to the bourgeoisie because it disguises the underlying dictatorship of capital, persuading the workers they have a say in things, but once it was over the anti-proletarian front composed of Government, State and bourgeois trade unions passed openly on to the attack. The platinum mining companies sent telephone messages to the miners in which each of them were asked if they accepted the pay agreement rejected by the AMCU or not. This was a way of circumventing the union by dealing with the workers individually and then, justified through their use of the ideological weapon of democratic consultation, putting themselves in a better position to organise blacklegs. The companies’ declared intention, backed by the NUM, was to see the majority of the miners return to work by 14 May. The AMCU stood firm. It urged the workers not to allow themselves to be intimidated and organised demonstrations to block the roads giving access to the mines. This led to the first confrontations with the police, resulting in injuries and arrests. On 14 May thousands of miners once again filled the Wonderkop Stadium in Marikana, providing a great show of strength.

There have been various battles resulting in casualties between the striking miners and the NUM blacklegs. In the platinum mines this union’s power is now compromised but it continues to exert an influence in the coal, gold and diamond mines. This has prevented the strike from spreading to other miners, which would surely have allowed greater success. The same goes for the rest of the working class, controlled by COSATU, in which there have been no cases of organisation and struggle outside and against this confederation comparable to AMCU’s initiative.

The 70,000 platinum miners have thus struggled heroically for five months on their own, isolated from the other miners and from the rest of the working class. The attempt by AMCU to extent the strike to the gold mines was blocked by the Labour Court which declared the action illegal; just one more fact confirming the bourgeois nature of the South African, democratic post-apartheid regime.

The Court’s sentence was condemned by the leaders of the NUMSA, the metal-workers’ federation within COSATU, which was expelled from the Confederation last November. This is a matter of no small importance which we will return to in the future. After the NUM’s loss of more than 50,000 of its members to the AMCU, the NUMSA had become the biggest federation within the COSATU, organising around 270,000 workers. In December 2013, in anticipation of the political elections in the following May, it withdrew its support from the ANC-SACP governmental alliance and thus lined up against its own confederation. After the elections, which confirmed the previous government in place, the NUMSA called for an extraordinary congress of the COSATU, which never took place.

NUMISA calls off strike

The NUMSA’s conduct was ambiguous. In the refinery and smelting works of the Amplats (Anglo American Platinum) mine, where the workers had still not gone out on strike with the miners, on 2 February the NUMSA initiated a strike of 1,800 workers but instead of taking up AMCU’s demand for a basic salary of 12,500 Rand it called for a lower increase. On 17 March it called a general strike in the sector but again for demands which were extraneous to the ongoing miners’ struggle. Three days later, on 20 March, The NUMSA called off the strike after it accepted a deal agreeing pay increases for its members in the Amplats refinery and smelting works. In a communiqué in early April it declared that due to the length of the strike an unspecified number of miners were abandoning the ACMU in order to join not the NUM but the NUMSA.

During the five month miners’ strike the NUMSA did nothing to support them. In May it declared, in the face of rising tension, that it would consider the possibility of calling a strike in solidarity with the miners, but first it wanted to take the proposal to the COSATU’s central committee. A move, therefore, which was more to do with promoting itself than anything else. Insofar as the NUMSA is the biggest federation within the COSATU and organises an entire sector, the metalworkers’ which, along with the miners, represent the core of the working class, it thus caused a rupture within the working class and isolated the strike. This appears even more evident if we consider that the NUMSA waited for the miners’ strike to end, which eventually happened on 23 June, before launching its own general metalworkers strike on 1 July! The unity of the two struggles would have inflicted a mortal blow to the resistance of the mining and industrial companies and ensured a great victory for all workers. The NUMSA was careful to prevent that unity from occurring. And that counts for much, much more than all its bombastic declarations and professed eagerness to take part in congressional debates. Facts are stubborn, as Lenin used to say.

There is something else that is important. Since 2012 the platinum miners, organised first in struggle committees than in the AMCU, have been demanding a basic salary of 12,500 Rand, around 890 Euros. The NUMSA called the metalworkers out on strike on 1 July for a basic salary of 5,600 Rand. This indicates two things: firstly the modesty of the claim, compatible with capitalist interests, and indeed supported by COSATU; secondly that the metalworkers’ are paid about the same as the miners, and therefore the battle for a basic wage of 12,550 Rand was entirely their battle as well.

This situation and the trade union struggles in South Africa confirm both the tendency of the trade unions to submit to the bourgeois regime, a defining characteristic of capitalism in its imperialist phase and considered by our party to have become more or less entrenched in the post-Second World War period; and the consequent spontaneous reaction to reconstruct the trade union organisation through class struggle, either by means of an internal struggle within the unions subservient to the regime, or through an organisation outside and against them. The party cannot always predict which of these two roads the movement will take but the activity of the militants within the movement enable it to study at close quarters the spontaneous defensive stance which the class takes, the aim being to predict the difficulties and modalities which might occur in subsequent phases of the class’s contingent defensive battle and to prepare for it in advance, and to chart a course that doesn’t contradict with the general revolutionary deployment directed by the Party.

“Anti-communist”

To the AMCU goes the great merit of having led with great courage and determination the longest strike in the history of South Africa, refusing to give in to the intimidation of the mining companies and the bourgeois regime. This union has earned the trust of the miners. The trade union committees in the various mines, which were associated with the NUM to begin with and then detached themselves in order to conduct the struggle on their own, eventually joined the AMCU. About this union however we still know very little. Due to the fact it is fighting against COSATU, and in particular the NUM, which is influenced by the fake South African communist party, it is held to be ‘anti-communist’. Its leader, Joseph Mathunjwa, is a fervent Christian. The political line which a trade union takes cannot but influence its actions, for good or for ill. The leadership of the AMCU declares itself to be ‘apolitical’. But ‘politics’ is just the expression of the conflicting class interests: there can be no ‘apoliticism’ in a society divided into classes. Anyone who declares him or herself to be apolitical, and thus rejects communist political principles, ends up embracing bourgeois principles. For example, at the end of the strike Mathunjwa addressed thousands of workers gathered in the Rustemberg Stadium with the following words: “Comrades, you have made South African history: this victory is not ours alone but the entire country’s”. This is already a political declaration, in which a bourgeois political principle is enunciated.

Strikes “damage capital”

Maybe the head of the AMCU was responding to the industrialists who accused the strikers of damaging the national economy. But the strikers were right to do precisely that! Strikes always damage companies and countries, in a word, they damage capital. On 16 June the international finance agency Fitch lowered its forecast from stable to negative because “the prospects for growth in South Africa are threatened above all by the miners’ strike which for five months has been weakening the platinum industry”. A few hours later the sister agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moodys, did the same. In the first quarter of 2014 the GDP fell for the first time since the recession in 2009, by 0.6%, with manufacturing activity down by 4.4% and mining by 24.7%.

The miners’ struggle undoubtedly did contribute to the economic recession in South Africa, but, rather than being a negative factor for the working class this in fact serves to demonstrate its power and strength, confirming the communist argument that the workers’ struggle shouldn’t defend the national economy because it is necessarily opposed to it: national economy equals capitalism. The only honest, consistent and effective response to the inevitable bourgeois anger against the strikers, who have been publicly vilified as defeatists as regards to the national interest, lies not in trying to deny the evidence for this accusation, but in defending the assertion that if the national economy is hit by the workers’ struggles it can only be to the workers’ advantage because it favours the political collapse of the capitalist regime and therefore the revolutionary conquest of power. To defend this view means stepping outside the sphere of ‘trade-unionism’, which doesn’t actually exist in isolation. But the fact remains: only after the system as a whole has been brought down and replaced will it be possible to finally respond properly to the needs of working humanity rather than those of the profit mongers; and this will involve subverting the function of productive activity and organising it in a rational way, according to a global plan, and certainly not restricting it within national borders, which for a long time have been far too restrictive for capitalism itself and used by the latter merely to divide and oppress the working class.

A victory for the international working class

This victory of the miners, but even more the actual struggle itself, has taken on an importance that goes way beyond the particular workers who took part in it, the platinum miners, but it certainly won’t be ‘the country’ – all the classes in South Africa, that is — which will have cause to celebrate it; rather it is a victory for the entire South African and international working class.

It could be that the AMCU’s failure to extend the strike beyond the platinum belt to other mines was due to timidity or a lack of decisiveness. We certainly haven’t come across any appeals by AMCU inviting other miners to join the strike. If their stance derives from a wish not to cause too much damage, through the mobilisation of other workers, to the national economy, then we can already see how the union’s policy of wishing to remain apolitical is affecting its actions: by effectively blocking the unification of the working class struggle. Clearly the AMCU will have to solve this knotty problem soon, and the way it does so will see it either continuing on the path of defence of working class interests, or taking the path of defence of capital’s interests, onto which the COSATU has already turned.

Compromise

The strike was concluded with a compromise, presented as a victory by the AMCU, although it appears it has met with a positive response from the strikers. The original demand for a basic wage of 12,500 Rand, involving a pay hike of 125%, wasn’t achieved. Instead it was agreed there would be an incremental agreement stretching over three years, at the end of which basic pay would be 8,900 Rand (630 Euro), a 46% rise. The increases are greatest for the worst paid categories, which is a positive thing because reducing wage differentials helps to unify workers (In Italy Cisl, Uil and Cgil, including Fiom, are applying the opposite principle: bigger increases for the workers who are already earning more, and less for those on a lower wage).

Beyond the economic outcome of any workers’ struggle we should always remember that the fundamental result is whether there is a lessening or increase of workers’ unity, i.e. in their organised strength in view of the battle to come. This unity will soon be put to the test in the struggles already announced, after the Lonmin mining company declared on 25 August, in response to the recent pay increases, that it would be sacking 5,700 workers, which corresponds to 21% of the company’s labour force in South Africa. This is not long after the latest unemployment figures were announced on 29 July, now risen to the highest ever of 29.5%.

Beyond the economic outcome of any workers’ struggle we should always remember that the fundamental result is whether there is a lessening or increase of workers’ unity, i.e. in their organised strength in view of the battle to come.

In response to the sharpening of the class struggle this bourgeois regime in democratic garb is preparing to take remedial action, and already various of its representatives have expressed themselves in favour of a law to limit the duration of strikes, with State arbitration being imposed after a certain length of time: Mildred Oliphant, the minister of labour, declared that “The government has to intervene. We cannot have strikes of this length in our country; where mediation isn’t possible it must be imposed by arbitration”. As we can see, when it’s a matter of class struggle, democracy quickly reveals its true, bourgeois nature.

On 1 July the NUMSA strike began. This too was a long strike, which held out for four weeks until 28 July. The works of Toyota in Durban, Ford in Pretoria and General Motors in Port Elizabeth, to name just the biggest, were shut down. Contrary to what happened in the Miners’ strike, which had every possible obstacle placed in its path, the strike received the support of the COSATU and its federations, amongst which the NUM, which naturally limited its involvement to solemn declarations. This may be explained by the sense of responsibility its leaders feel towards Capital, and this, as we have seen, emerges from the very modest nature of its economic demands.

Another sign of this emerges from the declaration of the NUMSA’s National Executive Committee at the start of the mobilisation: “The strike was a painful, not an easy, decision. “Organising a strike was never on our agenda; it was imposed on us. We use the strike as part of a tactic whose aim is to put pressure on the bosses to return to the table with an offer which is acceptable to our members”. A conciliatory tone analogous to that of the trade unions in Italy.

Rebuild class-based trade unions

The NUMSA fights against what it calls “colonial apartheid wages”, following an opportunist formulation which attributes the cause of low salaries not to capitalism but to a worse form of it, even if it was liquidated twenty years ago. The problem for workers, in a nutshell, is their pay, which national and international capitalism is forcing down. And the workers certainly won’t be able to fight against low pay if they are led by unions who are scared of using the strike weapon!

In South Africa, then, same as everywhere else in the world, the struggle between wage labour and capital involves the rebuilding of a trade union organisation which expresses the interests of its working class membership, not those of capital and the nation.