The Bottomline - Special Edition: 9 April 2010 *In this issue:*
- Chris Hani; My Life: An autobiography written in 1991<http://www.ycl.org.za/main.php?include=pubs/bot/2010/special0409.html#one> - One capitalist, one bullet: A red card to exploitation<http://www.ycl.org.za/main.php?include=pubs/bot/2010/special0409.html#two> Chris Hani; My Life: An autobiography written in 1991 Chris Hani, born on 28 June 1942, in Cofimvaba, Transkei. General-Secretary of the SACP since December 1991 and ANC NEC member since 1974. Matriculated at Lovedale, 1958; Universities Rhodes and Fort Hare - 1959/61, BA Latin and English. Joined ANC Youth League 1957. Active in Eastern and Western Cape ANC before leaving SA in 1962. Commissar in the Luthuli Detachment joint ANC/ZAPU military campaign 1967, escaped to Botswana, returned from Botswana to Zambia 1968, infiltrated SA in 1973 and then based in Lesotho. Left Maseru for Lusaka in 1982 after several unsuccessful assassination attempts. Commissar and Deputy Commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, armed wing of ANC. Chief of Staff, MK 1987. The following brief autobiographical account was written by comrade Chris Hani in February 1991: I was born in a small rural town in the Transkei called Cofimvaba. This town is almost 200 kilometres from East London. I am the fifth child in a family of six. Only three of us are still surviving, the other three died in their infancy. My mother is completely illiterate and my father semi-literate. My father was a migrant worker in the mines in the Transvaal, but he subsequently became an unskilled worker in the building industry. Life was quite harsh for us and we went through some hard times as our mother had to supplement the family budget through subsistence farming; had to bring us up with very little assistance from my father who was always away working for the white capitalists. I had to walk twenty kilometres to school every five days and then walk the same distance to church every Sunday. At the age of eight I was already an altar boy in the Catholic church and was quite devout. After finishing my primary school education I had a burning desire to become a priest but this was vetoed by my father. In 1954, while I was doing my secondary education, the apartheid regime introduced Bantu Educaiton which was desighend to indoctrinate Black pupils to accept and recognise the supremacy of the white man over the blacks in all spheres. This angered and outraged us and paved the way for my involvement in the struggle. The arraignment for Treason of the ANC leaders in 1956 convinced me to join the ANC and participate in the struggle for freedom. In 1957 I made up my mind and joined the ANC Youth League. I was fifteen then, and since politics was proscribed at African schools our activities were clandestine. In 1959 I went over to university at Fort Hare where I became openly involved in the struggle, as Fort Hare was a liberal campus. It was here that I got exposed to Marxist ideas and the scope and nature of the racist capitalist system. My conversion to Marxism also deepended my non-racial perspective. My early Catholicism led to my fascination with Latin studies and English literature. These studies in these two course were gobbled up by me and I became an ardent lover of English, Latin and Greek literature, both modern and classical. My studies of literature futher strengthened my hatred of all forms of oppression, persecution and obscurantism. The action of tyrants as portrayed in various literary works also made me hate tyranny and institutionalised oppression. In 1961 I joined the underground South African Communist Party as I realised that national liberation, though essential, would not bring about total economic liberation. My decision to join the Party was influenced by such greats of our struggle like Govan Mbeki, Braam Fischer, JB Marks, Moses Kotane, Ray Simons, etc. In 1962, having recognised the intranisgence of the racist regime, I joined the fledgling MK. This was the beginning of my long road in the armed struggle in which there have been three abortive assassination attempts against me personally. The armed struggle, which we never regarded as exclusive, as we combined it with other forms of struggle, has brought about the present crisis of apartheid. In 1967 I fought together with Zipra forces in Zimbabwe as political commissar. In 1974 I went back to South Africa to build the underground and I subsequently left for Lesotho where I operated underground and contributed in the building of the ANC underground inside our country. The four pillars underpinning our struggle have brought about the present crisis of the apartheid regime. The racist regime has reluctantly recognised the legitimacy of our struggle by agreeing to sit down with us to discuss how to begin the negotiations process. In the current political situation, the decision by our organisation to suspend armed action is correct and is an important contribution in maintaining the momentum of negotiation. *Chris Hani February 1991 * One capitalist, one bullet: A red card to exploitation Like the martyr, Hani, the death of the racist capitalist (Terre’Blanche) has for no reason put the issue of race back on the table of South African politics. Media institutions that have latched on the weaknesses of South Africans on race and have sought to interpret it as a "race killing" have spurned this. The AWB, once a dead Afrikaner right wing organization has been resurrected and has itself sought to feed on the carcass of Afrikaner fears with inflammatory statements that have sought to racialize an incident that has nothing to do with race but worker exploitation. It also baffles me how the entire black community must answer for an act of two workers in a farm. Instead of instigating a sober political discourse that triggers critical analysis, the death of the racist capitalist has even led our movements into defensive mode; calling for calm when there has been no chaos or uprising, such that calls for calm are needed. Most saddening, has been the undialectical treatment of the whole issue by our own movements which have interpreted it as a matter of life and death rather than a matter of class struggle and manifestation of that class struggle to the point of a confrontation between workers and capital resulting in the worker demanding proceeds of its labor power violently. This is the arena this paper intends to deal with. This paper intends to draw lessons from this admirable working class act rather than shrink. *Who are the real murderers?* The primitive accumulation of South African capital, involved the most ferocious and most violent struggles of dispossession. The remains of many of those who fell as a result of colonial wars have never been identified nor received dignified burials. The impoverishment of the Xhosa tribes through the folly of Nongqawuse and the cattle killing engineered by British Cape Governor Sir George Grey has not yet been compensated. The atrocities committed in the name of apartheid capitalism, whose main aim was to assist the primitive accumulation of Afrikaner capital are not worth mentioning. So who are the real murderers? The farm workers who only wanted their wages or those who benefited from the acts of those whose colonialism led to the impoverishment of the farm workers? What about the continuous atrocities that are daily committed by farm owners towards their employees that have not been fully understood let alone stopped, but yet we want to make an issue of the killing of one capitalist farmer who refused to pay wages to his workers during Easter nogal. Before anybody barks about the death of Terre’Blanche, let the question be answered first; why were the wages of the workers not paid? Did the racist capitalist farmer see slaves out of these two employees who he had concluded should work without expecting compensation, because they are kaffirs? Millions of young South Africans sit without jobs or education while millions of South Africans live beyond the poverty line. Many South Africans die of diseases that would have been prevented or cured had those affected had sufficient funds. Many fellow South Africans sleep in the streets at the mercy of bloodthirsty thugs yet the capitalist class complains that white farmers are dying; of what - being Rich? What about the majority that continuously goes to sleep without the slightest knowledge of what they are going to eat before sleeping or when they wake up? The bloody murderers in our country are the capitalists who continue to rake millions in profit and live opulent lifestyles while the majority of South Africans are destitute and cannot afford one damn meal. Those who sit with blood in their hands are those government officials and politicians who collaborate with white capital. It is those who instead of using their positions of power to the benefit of poor South Africans are busy chasing tenders instead. The real murderers are those corrupt bastards who loot money that could have been used to provide water and housing for the poor and cannot even perform the services they have been contracted to provide. *Brave and epoch-making* Right or wrong, the working class knows what it wants. Never in the history of our country have we heard of something as courageous as this. This, the act of the farm workers, is not just the bravest of its kind, it is also epoch-making. This is the first time in South Africa the working class is known to have gone to such great lengths in demanding compensation for the value of its labor power. Instead of burying our heads in shame on the face of such an epoch-making act, we should rejoice like Marx who once triumphantly exclaimed that the workers of Paris had "stormed heaven" and did not cry like Plekhanov who in the words of Lenin, "cried, liberal fashion: ‘They should not have taken up arms’". Refused by the racist to participate in trade union activity what else should they have taken up? Of course, the events of Paris and the recent murder of Terre’Blanche occurred in totally different settings, but to me they remain heavily interrelated: one was a working class uprising against the capitalist system that resulted in a brief workers state while the other is not an uprising against the system but a demand for compensation from a capitalist for the labor power expended, but all are brave acts against the capitalist nevertheless. Although we may not be overjoyed by the death of a human being, we should be delighted that the working class has decided that enough is enough. We should not, for one moment harbour the illusion that because we have a bourgeois constitutional democracy that the capitalist class would allow working class organizations to take over state power peacefully. Capital would trample on every tenet of our constitution to ensure that it maintains its hegemony. The recent trampling over the constitution with the changing of tittles in the Police service is one case in point. Does our constitution not say the President will appoint a National "Commissioner"? Where does the temerity to change this constitutionally stipulated position to General come from? Is this not a clear indication that the ruling class is not afraid of the constitution? Recently, the police an instrument of capitalist coercion, have been ordered to shoot and kill. Who are they to shoot? Capitalists. No, they must shoot the lumpen proletariat. They must shoot those who poverty has driven to the point of thuggery. They will not shoot the real thugs; those thugs that sit in offices and embezzle millions of government funds that are the real danger to our society. But police are mobilized to shoot the lumpen-proletariat. Police should not shoot the capitalists who daily rob the working class of millions in surplus value and claim that it is their "profit". The legalized thuggery of the capitalists does not raise one voice of discontent from our government and yet we believe that the capitalist class cares about the rule of law. We should not, for one moment have sympathy for these bloody exploiters. Let them face the wrath of the working class. The accumulation of capital in South Africa occurred in the most violent manner, it is not up to us to sympathize with the capitalist class when it receives what its forefathers did to the South African population. Our sympathy should be reserved for the great majority of unemployed and poor working class communities and households that suffer at the yoke of South African capitalism. Our sympathy should be with the great majority of South Africans that are forced to drink disease ridden water because government officials have looted money set aside to provide water and sanitation. Our sympathy should be with those who continue to walk long distances to school because tenderpreneurs have produced dilapidated roads because they opted to buy expensive cars, clothes and houses with money set aside to build access roads to schools. *Dangers of de-unionization* What is the class struggle for if it is not about gaining as much control of the proceeds of one’s labor power as possible? Trade union struggle is precisely designed for this reason. The working class in our country, through its trade union movement (COSATU) is engaged in a continuous non-violent battle for control of as much of the proceeds of its labor power as possible. If not properly managed by the capitalists themselves, this struggle for control of production proceeds could turn violent and this would be at the detriment of nobody else but the capitalists. Whether they realize it or not, the capitalist class and its government need unions in order to ensure that the struggle for proceeds of production between workers and capitalists does not turn violent. In order to ensure that this class struggle does not turn violent, the capitalist class needs trade unions to contain the reaction of the working class and to keep it within the domain of non-violent contest. It is not so much the working class that needs unions, but capitalists. It is no accident that the murder of a capitalist who refuses to compensate the working class occurred in the most under-unionized sector: farming. This is why attempts to de-unionize the military are not just irresponsible but mobilize worker violence. Rather than send shivers down our spines, this act by farm workers acts as a clear message that the de-unionization of the military is not just an unpalatable disaster for the capitalist class itself but will come at a great human cost. That is why I believe that rather than blame the workers, farm owners should be kicking themselves for stifling union activity in their farms such that farm workers have to act spontaneously in demanding their wages something which has now led to a racist being killed. Had it not been for the absence of a union in Terre’Blanche’s farm, he would, unfortunately, still be alive. If this does not fix the matter firmly in the eyes of government that de-unionization of the military will not only act to weaken working class action but might as well lead to a violent working class contingent in the military which may use violent means to negotiate salaries nothing else will restore sanity in the minds of government officials. *Spontaneity* Slowly, but surely, the class struggle has begun to sharpen in a manner that has been quicker than the readiness of working class organizations. For instance, in the recent years, post-2005, we have seen various worker protests (municipal workers, teachers) and community protests (Khutsong, Standerton) sliding into violence. Seldom do worker protests, nowadays, occur without the trashing of streets and burning of tires blockading roads and correctly destabilizing the capitalist economy. The recent killing of a racist capitalist is one other such incident. Sadly, all these tire burnings and now the recent murder, all occur without the approval and leadership of working class movements such that during protests, working class organizations often condemn and accuse an unknown "criminal element" of taking over legitimate protests. Thus far, this "criminal element" has not yet been found but has been accused of all manner of entrysm in worker protests. Instead of celebrating this proletarian bravery, working class organizations join the ruling class in condemning acts of anger from the working class and this should not be so. Of course, working class organizations cannot act as uncritical cheerleaders of working class action, without analysing the causes and implications of such action in order to determine whether this signals a sharper pursuance of the class struggle or a slide into reaction. Despite the fact that all these may be spontaneous working class acts of vengeance some of which may be regrettable but also this exposes a deep sense of bitterness by workers towards exploiters and their collaborators (managers). Rather than jitters and confusion, this necessitates working class organizations to realize the causes of this anger and to channel it properly towards a general contestation with the capitalists as a class rather than momentary and isolated acts of anger and vengeance. Clearly, the South African working class, at the point of production and in the periphery of production is not afraid to stake its life and future in pursuance of the struggle for economic control. It is up to working class organizations to properly direct and channel this energy towards the system as a whole rather than towards individual capitalists. The continuation of the exploitation and the marginalisation of the working class by the capitalists class will lead to the murder of many of a capitalist and no one must shed even one tear. The continuation of the marginalisation of the working class by corrupt tenderpreneurs who are actively engaged in a struggle to weed out communists from the ANC will lead to the trashing of streets and the burning of tires and no one must raise one voice of discontent but rather rejoice at the sight of working class decisiveness. The working class should rise against its exploitation because as Marx said: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains". *Lazola Ndamase is the Secretary General of SASCO* The theme for the April month is *"WE WANT TO BE LIKE HANI"*, We encourage members of the YCLSA to write within the context of "Pitfalls of National Reconciliation and Class Exploitation". We would like to hear from you on how the youth can be more like Cde. Chris Hani today. -- Gugu Ndima +27 76 783 1516 -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. 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