Strikes Against Layoffs,Austerity
South African Workers vs. ANC Capitalist Government
For A Black-Centered Workers Government!
JOHANNESBURG, August 28-The past month has seen the largest and most
significant labour struggle in South Africa since the white-supremacist
regime was replaced in 1994 by the black bourgeois-nationalist African
National Congress (ANC). Hundreds of thousands of public sector
workers-mainly teachers, nurses and civil servants-have hit the picket lines
and taken to the streets to fight against mass retrenchments
(layoffs), -austerity and union-busting. On August 24, a one-day nationwide
strike, organised by 12 unions representing some 800,000 workers, was called
to protest the government's arrogant refusal to even bargain with the
unions, instead offering a '~unilateral" wage increase of a paltry 6 percent
for the majority of workers.
While the ANC has mobilised the Congress of South African Students against
the teachers, the strike has won support from students and parents in the
black townships, especially in Soweto (near Johannesburg), a traditional
centre of black militancy. Such support is all the more important since ANC
spokesmen seek to blame ~'greedy," "overpaid" workers for the lack of money
for schools, hospitals and social services. Especially notable is that the
current labour struggle has also cut across the country's hard racial
divide. White teachers, nurses and civil servants, a relatively privileged
stratum with their own separate unions, joined with their black colleagues
in last week's protest strike. A white teacher from Pretoria explained:
"There is a feeling of desperation among us. That is why we are marching."
The principal unions engaged in the current strikes are part of the Congress
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), encompassing the main body of the
organised black proletariat. The leadership of COSATU is dominated by the
South African Communist! Party (SACP), which has long been closely allied to
the ANC and holds key posts in the capitalist government of newly elected
president Thabo Mbeki. Indeed, the minister of public services is SACP
member Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who is today acting as the government's
hard cop against the unions led by her party "comrades." Consequently, the
COSATU tops, despite a broad base of support extending from black township
dwellers to white teachers, have deliberately limited the effectiveness of
the strikes. The government has not been shut down, which the unions clearly
have the power to do, but has only been disrupted by selective strikes and
other actions.
At the same time, the pro-capitalist COSATU bureaucracy is under enormous
pressure from its ranks to resist the get-tough policies of the Mbeki
government. COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi told the August 24
labour rally in Pretoria, "If it takes months and months of confrontation,
we are prepared." But "months and months of confrontation" means a series of
partial and inconclusive actions, aimed solely at pressuring the government
to "negotiate" while exhausting and dissipating the workers' militancy. To
win, the unions must launch an all-out strike throughout the public sector.
It is not an accident that the biggest labour struggle confronting the ANC
regime has taken place right after elections in which Nelson Mandela was
replaced as head of state by Thaho Mbeki, his hand-picked successor. For
five years, Mandela managed to keep a lid on seething discontent among the
black masses, in large measure due to his great moral authority enhanced by
almost three decades in South Africa's prisons, most of them on the
notorious Robben Island. Mbeki, a generation younger, personifies the
aspiring black bourgeoisie who have hopped on the "gravy train" since 1994
and now drive BMWs, wear Pierre Car-din suits and have moved into posh,
formerly all-white suburbs.
In the name of "globalisation" and "efficiency," Mbeki has wasted no time in
spearheading a union-busting privatization drive and labour "restructuring."
Under the headline, "South African Labour Comes Face to Face with the Hard
Reality of World Economy," the London Financial Times (29 July) wrote:
"Mr Mbeki appears to be toughening his stance. He is committed to speeding
up privatisation and restructuring inefficient state-owned businesses. He is
also expected to start cutting South Africa's large civil service wage bill.
Both policies will mean job losses, at least in the short run.
Here it should be emphasised that about 40 percent of the black labour force
is at present unemployed, and that figure is far higher in townships like
Soweto. Consequently, much of the money earned by unionised black workers
goes to feed and clothe numerous impoverished relatives in the townships and
countryside.
As a capitalist party external to the workers movement, the ANC would not
shrink from seeking to smash the trade unions if this were necessary to
defend its class interests. Only a year after the ANC came to power, Mandela
unleashed the cops against a 1995 municipal workers strike while his
government demagogically denounced nurses for going on strike around the
same time. While Mbeki has made no secret of his hostility to the
fundamental needs and aspirations of the workers, the left face of the ANC
regime is provided by the reformist SACP. To retain its posts in the Mbeki
government, the SACP leadership is under increasing pressure to demonstrate
its loyalty to the masters of the Jo'burg stock exchange and their senior
partners in Wall Street and the City of London by supporting the
government's assault on the organised working class. The ANC has threatened
on more than one occasion to dump the SACP if it did not toe the line in
pushing through capitalist austerity measures.
The inner contradictions of the SACP a bourgeois workers party, as Lenin
described such reformist parties based on the working class but committed to
a thoroughly bourgeois programme~ould not be clearer and more acute. A
recent article in the SACP journal Umsebenzi (Augus~September 1999)
acknowledged:
"Leading Party comrades find themselves (in their capacity as ministers and
trade union leaders) on both sides of the public sector wage negotiations.
Rather than seeing this as a cause for embarrassment or hesitation, the
SACP, along with its alliance partners, sees in this reality a challenge."
Worker rnilitants who support the SACP must understand that their leaders
are not just pursuing a mistaken policy which can be reversed in the
interests of the black toilers. Praser-Moleketi's austerity measures and
union-busting are a culmination of the party's basic programme of class
collaboration as encapsulated in the slogan of "national democratic
revolution" supposedly led by "progressive" bourgeois nationalists like
Mandela and Mbeki. Indeed, for many years the SACP itself was part of the
core leadership of the nationalist ANC when it was in opposition. And today
the SACP encompasses everything from leading elements of the capitalist
state apparatus and outright b6urgeois nationalists to labour bureaucrats to
militant workers at the base looking for a revolutionary perspective.
Class-conscious workers must fight to build a revolutionary workers party-a
Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party-which will break the black proletariat
from bourgeois nati6nalism and split the working-class base away from the
reformist SACP. Proletarian revolution is the only road to national and
social liberation in South Africa. Spartacist South Africa, section of the
International Communist League, fights for the establishment of a
black-centred workers govern-ment, where there would be an important role
and full democratic rights for coloureds (mixed-race), Indians and other
Asians, and those whites who accept a government centrally based on the
black working people.
ANC's Neo-Apartheid Regime
Ten years ago, few people in South Africa would have envisioned or even
thought possible that Communist Party ministers would be breaking strikes by
black unions. How has this situation come about?
During the 1980s, the explosion of mass black struggle, centred on the
combative trade-union movement and extending to the township youth, shook
the apartheid police state to its foundations. At the same time, the ANC was
able to enhance its political authority as recognised leader of the national
liberation struggle against white-supremacist rule. This was consolidated in
the late '80s with the establishment of the “tripartite alliance" of the
ANC, SACP and the newly formed COSATU union federation. We characterised
this as a nationalist popularfront. the SACP tied a new generation of young
worker militants, many of whom saw themselves as revolutionaries, to the
aspiring bourgeois nationalists of the ANC.
By the early 1990s, decisive sections of the white ruling class and their
senior
partners in Washington and London had sI moved to co-opt the leaders of
the tri ol partite alliance in an attempt to restore social order and
weaken the power of the black union movement. Thus in 1994, Mandela's ANC
came to power in a "power sharing" agreement with the tr white-supremacist
National Party, while the legal structure of apartheid (e.g., the pass laws,
Group Areas Act) was dismantled. However, the economic basis of the old
apartheid system-the superexploitation of black labour by the white
capitalists--remained. The "new" South Africa a can thus be defined as
neo-apartheid.
What is the reality today five years after the proclaimed end of apartheid?
Under rigid apartheid based upon the totalitarian suppression of the black
proletariat, the capitalists ensured that there was virtually no social
spending for the overwhelmingly black majority. It's no different
now—hospitals without staff or emergency rooms, clinics with no medicine,
schools without electricity or water.In the townships, like Soweto,
Lamontiville and Gugulethu, schools still have libraries or laboratories. In
the cities and especially in the rural areas, there is no adequate housing,
health care, public transportation for the black masses. Black babies die
moments after birth in state hospitals which are on the brink of total
breakdown. More than a fifth of the South African black working
class-including 23 percent of all pregnant women--carry HIV, the virus that
causes
AIDS.
In the rural areas, the black poor-especially women-are facing savage
attacks, and even greater
misery and oppression. Rural black labourers are routinely murdered and
assaulted, while the
Mpumalanga farm worker's entire body was different now-hospitals without
staff or white racist
perpetrators get off in the courts. A few months ago, a Mpumalanga farm
worker’s entire body
was spray-painted with toxic paint by a white farmer who accused him of
trespassing.
The situation of the strategic core of the black industrial proletariat is
no better and in some ways worse than under the old apartheid system. The
industrial~murder last month of 18 miners in a methane gas explosion in a
Carletonville mine shaft clearly reveals the utter cheapness of black life
for the rapacious mine bosses. In fact, three more miners were killed the
very day of the funeral for the Carletonville victims.
More 'than 82,000 miners face retrenchment in an industry where the labour
force has already been slashed by 350,000 since 1987. Historic East Rand
Proprietary Mine started the avalanche of retrenchments, liquidating in late
August and leaving 7,000 jobless, more than 55 percent of whom hail from
Mozambique and others from Lesotho. The Randlords like Anglo American can
mine gold profitably only by paying slave wages. With the market price of
gold dropping beneath U.S. $250 an ounce,, well below the cost of extracting
it from the mines, about a third of South Africa's 16 mines claim they
cannot stay in business.
The Mbeki government's war on labour is matched by its ruthless drive to
deprive
the inasses of the Triost minimal f~c,ilitjes;' - -with 'th6usa"h~ds"' irt"
~ 'in'c'~asingly having basic services like electricity cut off for
non-payment. At the same time, -the South African government is currently
planning the largest arms purchases in the country's history, as this
regional imperialist power prepares for a greate~ role as gendarme in the
wars in Southern' Africa, especially in Congo and Angola.
Left Apologists for Bourgeois-Nationalist ANC
Given the continuing immiseration of the black masses, how 4oes one explain
the ANC's re-election a few months ago with an even larger majority than in
1994? First, the popular-front policy of the SACP ensured that there was no
electoral alternative of a mass character opposing the capitalist ANC from
the left. Furthermore, almost all of the small "far left" groups likewise
supported the ANC while fatuously calling on it to carry out a socialist
programme in the interests of the black working people.
Consequently, the main opposition to the ANC in the elections was from the
right, from the predominantly white Democratic Party headed by capitalist
magnate Tony Leon. ANC spokesmen were thus able to appeal, as in the past,
to the deepgoing racial/national solidarity of the oppressed black majority.
They evoked memories of the hated apartheid police state with its dogs
attacking peaceful demonstrators and black activists routinely tortured and
killed. They presented the ANC as the only obstacle to the restoration of
white-supremacist rule.
To the left of the ANCISACP are a number of groups which falsely claim the
"revolutionary Marxist" tradition. Most of these supported the ANC while
denying or obfuscating that it is a bourgeois party. Instead, they maintain
that the ANC can be pressured into carrying out the demands of the workers
and oppressed. Typical in this regard is the Keep Left group (formerly
Socialist Workers Organisation) affiliated with the British-centred left
social-democratic tendency headed by Tony Cliff, which argued: "Only one
thing stands in the way of Mbeki's ability to live up to the expectations
which have been created-the minority who controls the economy for profit"
(Keep Left, July 1999). Similarly, a leaflet distributed by the Socialist
Forum group during the latest publicsector strike asserted:
"Our understanding was that the ANC was elected by working people and the
rural poor to better our lives. That the rich and the bosses, those who
benefited from apartheid cheap labour policies would be taxed to make sure
that there was the money needed to uplift our services and those that
provide them."
The ANC is not some kind of class-neutral party standing midway between the
white capitalists and black toilers which can be pushed or pulled to one
side or the other. Basically, it is the party of an aspiring black
bourgeoisie, whose aspirations have increasingly been realised in the "new"
South Africa. Large numbers of ANC and other black political activists have
been recruited into the executive suites of Anglo American and the other big
white-owned corporations or have set up their own businesses, usually with
the financial backing of white capitalists.. Cyril Ramaphosa, former head of
the National Union of Mine-workers and subsequently ANC parliamentary
leader, for example, is now deputy chairman of New Africa Investments. Mbeki
& Co. are just as committed to and materially interested in maximising the
exploitation of. black labour in South Africa as Tony Leon, the CEOs of
Anglo American and the other Randlords. Insofar as there are differences
between the ANC leadership and the white bourgeoisie-and there are
differences-they involve the division of the profits (who gets how much)
extracted from the workers who man the country's factories, mines and farms.
Reflecting growing pressurefrom the base, one SACP shop steward in the
Metalworkers union reportedly distributed a statement recently promising
workers that the first stage of the "national democratic revolution" would
soon be over and then socialism would come. But the bankruptcy of the
MenshevikiStalinist "two-stage" scheme, which ties the proletariat to the
oxcart of bourgeois nationalism, is underscored not least by the current
position of the ANC as an integral part of the exploiting class. As Leon
Trotsky first laid out in 1905 in elaborating his theory of permanent
revolution for tsarist Russia, in the epoch of imperialist decay the
bourgeoisies of the dependent countries are incapable of carrying out the
historic tasks associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in 17th-
and 18th-century Europe. National and social liberation for the toiling
masses in South Africa can only be achieved through the proletarian seizure
of state power.
Fissures in the Tripartite Alliance
While at first the results of the recent elections appeared to strengthen
the ANC's political authority, the actual effects have been just the
opposite. Mbeki & Co. quickly moved to implement the programme of economic
austerity demanded by international finance capital. This was answered by a
massive upsurge of labour struggle and a heightening of social and political
instability. The London Independent (25 August) pointed to the "deepening
tensions within the decades-old alliance between the African National
Congress (ANC), Cosatu and the South African Communist Party."
These tensions could clearly be seen at a special COSATU congress held in
mid-August to appoint a replacement for former COSATU chief Sam Shilowa, who
was elected premier of Gauteng province earlier this year. The congress was
convened only as a result of pressure from the base. The government was
represented at the congress by Defence Minister Patrick "Terror" Lekota,
whose mission was to verbally terrorise the delegates. He lashed out at
"highly placed comrades criticising or agitating against the movement,"
accusing them of placing weapons in ihe hands of our opponents" and creating
an "atmosphere for agent provocateurs." Some of the 2,200 delegates booed
his speech, especially when he went on to push privatization, arguing that
the government had to look for money somewhere and hinting that the
alternative was to raise the Value Added Tax, which labour fought against in
the early 1990s as a regressive tax. Lakota's line was strongly seconded by
SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande, who en-
dorsed the government's economic policies and directed his fire at "the
ultra-left" for policies and actions which threatened to break up the
governmental alliance.
While the COSATU leaders bent over backwards to be cQnciliatory in response
to Lekota and Nzimande, the class conflict between the ANC government and
the unions could not be completely suppressed. A Mineworkers delegate
pointed to COSATU's aim of politicising the members in support of government
policies and said, "COSATU cannot politicise members who have empty
stomachs." In his concluding remarks, newly elected COSATU president Willie
Madisha, formerly a leader of the embattled teachers union, stated, "We will
not smooth over cracks in the alliance" and spoke of "genuine fears" that
"the tendency by the government to flout agreements and disregard the
concerns of labour might become a major obstacle in the way of social
transformation."
Going beyond Madisha's mild criticisms, many militants are now calling for
COSATU to pull out of the Mbeki government. Some argue for the launching of
a mass workers party. COSATU should break its ties with the tripartite
alliance. And to the extent that workers are feeling the necessity of
breaking with the ANC and creating their own independent party, that is the
beginning of wisdom. But only the beginning. These workers must understand
the kind of party-its principles, programme and organisational
character-needed to fight for the workers' interests against the powerful
forces of the world capitalist system.
During the early 1990s, there was considerable talk in the labour movement
and left about forming a workers party as an alternative to the tripartite
alliance. At the time, we emphasised the difference between a reformist
party, like the British Labour Party or Brazilian Workers Party, and a
revolutionary workers party like the Bolshevik Party which Lenin built in
tsarist Russia.The workers in South Africa and elsewhere can achieve a
substantial and permanent improvement in their living conditions only by
overthrowing the capitalist order and replacing it with a planned,
collectivised economy.
Especially in a country like South Africa, this, in turn, requires that the
working class, led by its vanguard party, place itself at the head of all
oppressed sections of society. What is needed in South Africa is a
revolutipnary workers party which does not simply defend the particular
interests of the working class, especially its unionised sector, but fights
to eradicate all forms of national and social oppression-the mass
homeless-ness in the black townships, the hideous conditions of the millions
of Africans still trapped on the "tribal homelands," the degradation of
women and such practices as the selling of women through lobola (bride
price), the plight of immigrants from neighbouring African states now facing
expulsion.
The Iron Fist of the "New" South African State
Seizing on the vulnerability felt by large sections of the population in the
face of rising crime, including astronomical levels of rape, Mbeki's regime
is rapidly strengthening the police and army. Mbeki's real aim in this is to
intimidate and crush workers and the oppressed. Just after the elections,
the government launched a new national police agency called the "Scorpions,"
modelled on and trained by the American
FBI.
For months, the ANC regime has carried out a military occupation of the
coloured townships in the Western Cape. Titled "Operation Good Hope," this
repressive action was launched after the "Planet Hollywood" bombing
allegedly linked to People Against Gangsterism and Drugs-an "anti-drug"
vigilante grou~with the ostensible aim of combatting "urban terrorism." The
intensification of police repression is seen in the fact that this summer
more than 30,000 people were arrested in one month alone in the Vaal
Triangle region. Meanwhile, there has been a growing clamour for restoration
of the death penalty.
The latest ''anti-crime'' push to institute gun control laws means that the
cops and criminals will be the only ones with arms while, as in the days of
apartheid, the black population is disarmed. We defend the democratic right
to bear arms and oppose all gun control laws, which are designed to ensure
the state's monopoly on the means of violence and keep the oppressed down.
Meanwhile, vigilante murders are on the increase. In the past month, a white
vigilante group known as Die Vuis (The Fist), composed of "former" members
of the military and police, has sprung up in Cape Town. Its emergence
coincided with the arrival in Gauteng of the previously rural-based Mapogo a
Mathamaga, a 35,000-strong vigilante army led by black businessmen with ties
to hardline white racists. Their recent opening of offices in Pretoria and
Alexandra is an ominous development. Their targets are the victims of
neo-apartheid capitalism-the working class and all of the oppressed.
Ethnically integrated workers defence guards are vital to defend against
vigilante terror, by mobilising the urban and rural poor behind the power of
labour to sweep away the vigilante scum.
Despite all of these developments, illusions in the "democratic" character
of the "new" South African state is nearly universal on the left. This is
expressed most clearly in the belief that the police, especially black
police, are an integral part of the workers movement. Thus the Socialist
Forum leaflet cited above called for "a united front of public sector
workers that is built across union lines in the hospitals, schools and
police stations and every government office." Recently, cops attacked
picketing workers in the Columbus steel strike in Middel burg, seriously
injuring two and jailing almost 200 Yet large contingents of cops organised
by the Police and Prison Civil Rights Union are routinely allowed to
participate in labour rallies. Cops, whether black or white, are the bosses'
thugs. We say:
Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions!
For Proletarian Internationalism!
Mandela's immense moral authority was able to hold in check the country's
explosive national and social contradictions. However, if the ANC leaders,
abetted by the SACP, cannot contain the workers movement through political
demagogy, they are prepared to use other weapons. The invasion and
occupation of the small statelet of Lesotho by the South African arrny last
year not only demonstrated the ANC government's role as regional gendarme
for the Rand-lords. The army's mission to "restore order" in Lesotho was
also a test run for a similar mission directed at the militant labour
movement in South Africa itself.
The "new" South Africa is not a stable bourgeois democracy. The privileged
white minority continues to enjoy "First World" living standards while the
mass of black toilers remains hideously impoverished. The inequality of
income and wealth is more extreme in South Africa than in any other country
in the world, including the Third World. In 1995, we wrote in a polemical
letter to the Workers Organization for Socialist Action, led by Neville
Alexander, which held that the ANC government was a stable bourgeois regime:
“When the current, fragile neo-aparthied order breaks down—and it will break
down—
if the workers movement does not seize state power, various sectors of the
desperate nonwhite population will compete with each other over
available scarce resources. Thus the black working class and plebeian masses
cannot simply defend the gains and positions of
organizational strength achieved during the struggles of the 1980s. e
"A rev6lutionary workers party must be ii built to lead the working class
in the d struggle for state power, drawing in the rest of the oppressed
black African, 'coloured' (mixed-race) and Indian masses, along with
anti-racist whites, ti with the program and perspective elab 5 orated
by Trotsky as the permanent revolution."I
-reprinted in The Fight for a
Revolutionary Vanguard Party:
Polemics on the South African
Left (April 1997) 1.
The concept of permanent revolution holds that the national bourgeoisie in
backward countries-even ones which are regional imperialist powers in their
own right, like S9uth Africa-is so weak and tied to world imperialism that
it cannot play the progressive role that the bourgeoisies of West Europe and
North America did in the era of their ascendance. Social and economic
modernisation and an end to national oppression in countries like South
Africa can be achieved only under the leadership of the working class,
through proletarian revolution and its extension to the imperialist centres
of West Europe, North America and Japan.
In South Africa, class exploitation is integrally bound up with national
oppression. Despite a sizable coloured proletariat, especially in the
Western Cape, and an urban Indian working class in Natal, the overwhelming
majority of workers in the white-owned factories, mines and farms are black
Africans. Black Africans make up 80 percent of the countrry’s overall
population, more if one takes into account tne recenr wave ol lmIHIg[dLIulI
from neighbouring African states.
Our recognition that proletarian revolution in South Africa is also the
supreme act of national liberation in no way entails support to nationalism
as an ideology or to the project of "nation-building." Quite the contrary!
To break the chains of the ANC's neo-apartheid order and achieve genuine
nation~ and social liberation, the working class must transcend the ideology
of nationalism, the false belief that the black African people-brutally
oppressed by the white rulers of South Africa-all have a common interest
which stands higher than class divisions.
While historically and centrally black African nationalism has been directed
at the white ruling elite, developments since 1994 have added another
element to the country's explosive national mix: a large influx of
immigrants from Mozambique and other neighbouring black states. The ANC-led
government has increasingly blamed "foreigners" for rising unemployment
caused by the mine closures and layoffs. Speaking at Vista University in
May, Mandela told students to "buck up" and improve their grades or else
"foreigners from Zimbabwe, Malawi and other African countries will take the
top jobs." Such anti-immigrant demagogy has had bloody consequences. For
example, in January a lynch mob "necklaced"-burned alive-four Mozambicans in
Tembisa township near Johannesburg. The workers movement must combat such
murderous anti-immigrant chauvinism. We say: Full citizenship rights for all
immigrants!
The pro-ANC labour bureaucracy has joined in pushing chauvinist poison. The
National Union of Mineworkers in Rustenburg called for a moratorium on
hiring Mozambicans during wage negotiations. Meanwhile, the SACTWU clothing
and textile workers union has organised rallies protesting Chinese imports.
At the COSATU congress, the bureaucrats raised a furor because some of the
caps made for congress delegates had been produced in China. Such
anti-Chinese
diatribes are not only protectionist but anti-Communist, dovetailing with
imperialist threats against the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers
state. It is the duty of South African workers and workers everywhere to
stand for unconditi6nal military defence of China against imperialist attack
and internal counterrevolution. The BeUing Stalinist bureaucracy which is
driving the country headlong toward capitalist restoration must be ousted by
the Chinese proletariat through political revolution.
The present industrial wealth of South Africa has in good part been created
over the decades through the superexploitation of black workers drawn from
outside its borders, especially in the gold and diamond mines. The
industrial and mineral wealth available to a black-centred workers
government in South Africa will not be limited to south of the Limpopo
River, but must be used to enable the impoverished masses of all Africa to
escape famine and destitution.
Mandela, Mbeki & Co. explain away their drive to hold down wages and
privatize state-owned enterprises as well as the failure to carry out the
promised reforms by pointing to the pressures of the world capitalist
market, low-wage competition from East Asia, the harsh demands of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, etc. In defending the
government's anti-labour austerity policies at the recent COSATU congress,
SACP leader Blade Nzimande argued that "we do not make history under
circumstances of our own choosing." By this Nzimande meant that the South
African workers movement and oppressed nonwhite masses had to accept and
operate within the framework set by the global domination of capitalist
imperialism.
However, the South African working class can change the course of world
his-tory. We fully recognise that a socialist revolution in South Africa
would confront formidable enemies. Emboldened and strengthened by the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the
competing imperialist powers, chiefly the U.S., are determined to obliterate
any obstacles to their domination. Yet a socialist revolution in South
Africa, centred on the black proletariat, would immediately find
strategically powerful allies. The post-Soviet "New World Order" is anything
but stable. A militant young proletariat has emerged in countries such as
South Korea and Indonesia, while the powerful working class of West European
countries like Italy and France have engaged in sharp struggles which could
threaten the control of the reformist labor bureaucrats and go toward a
struggle for power.
Millions of union members, students and others around the world actively
solidarised with the struggle against white supremacy in the apartheid
state. Racial minorities and immigrants facing persecution identified
strongly with the black South African masses. A South African workers
revolution would have an immediate radicali sing effect on the oppressed
black masses of Brazil, fo? example, as well as on American black workers,
who have historically tended to be a vanguard of militant class struggle and
social activism in the U.S. Thus even within the strongest imperialist
bastions, revolutionary South Africa will find a powerful echo.
Precisely because a nationally isolated proletarian revolution in South
Africa could not survive, there can be no nationally limited revolutionary
workers party in South Africa. The struggle for world socialist revolution,
wherever the first breakthrough occurs, is inseparable from the struggle to
build an international cormmunist vanguard through reforging a Trotskyist
Fourth International.
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