Mazibuko Jara |
Last August, 34 platinum miners at Lonmin Corp's Marikana Mine in Rustenberg, South Africa were massacred by South African police. In December, I had the opportunity to interview a prominent leader of the South African left, Mazibuko Jara of the Democratic Left Front, in an hour-long interview discussing Marikana, the new wave of miners' and farmers' struggles in South Africa, the role of the ANC government, among other questions. What follows is an excerpt from the full interview, which is now up on the web at:
http://newpol.org/content/south-africa-marikana-massacre-and-new-wave-workers%E2%80%99-struggle.
A print version will be published in the next issue of New Politics magazine.
JG: I’m here
with Mazibuko Jara. Mazibuko is from the Democratic Left Front of South Africa.
He was spokesperson for the South
African Communist Party and the deputy secretary for the Young Communist
League, back a decade and more ago. He is one of the co-founders of Amandla
magazine and the Democratic Left Front, and they’ve been extremely active in
the support for the Marikana miners and for South African farmworkers, and
elsewhere. We’ll talk about this and more in this interview. Today is Sunday,
Dec 2, 2012.
JG: Mazibuko, can you give us a bit of background on the
current events in South Africa and how you personally got involved and became
so prominent in the South African movement?
MJ: I became a socialist in 1989, in the last years of the
apartheid regime in South Africa. Since then I’ve been a committed Marxist
socialist, so that explains my long-term involvement in the political struggles
and movements in South Africa.
Right now, I’m part of the Democratic Left Front, which has actively
supported the recent wave of mineworker and farmworker strikes in South Africa,
starting with platinum workers at the Lonmin Corporation’s Marikana mine and spreading
to other mines. That Marikana movement of workers’ struggles has thrown the DLF
into the spotlight in terms of what it can do to support the workers’ struggle
and also to bring a socialist perspective into those workers’ struggles that
goes beyond the immediate workplace issues. That is important because there have been some 18 years in
South Africa of a post-apartheid political dispensation founded on a democratic
constitution and including a democratically elected government which has been
dominated and led by the party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress
(ANC). The ANC works together with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and
the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the form of a tripartite
alliance. Those 18 years have left
a number of systemic features from the past quite intact. Firstly, the economic
structure of South Africa remains a capitalist economy owned by a small number
of capitalists, particularly in the mines and in finance and in agriculture,
and a smaller layer in industry, especially manufacturing. Of course now, there’s been a rise in
the services sector alongside a wave of increased financialisation of the
economy.
So the post-apartheid administration has not really
challenged the ownership/control of the economy by this capitalist class as
well as the power of this capitalist class in general. There has not been significant
redistribution of wealth through taxation or through land redistribution or
other measures. But we’ve seen
high levels of profits – super-profits in some instances – by South African
companies. And these high levels of profits have been at the expense of South
African workers. Workers have been more productive, which means they produce
more profits. But we’ve seen a decline in the share of national income going to
workers. This explains then why there has been a lot of unhappiness among
workers, because there are billions of rands in profits which are being held onto
by the bosses instead of being invested in more productive investments or being
paid as wages to workers. Of
course, beyond workers there are millions more of unemployed people who are
structurally out of the economic system. These unemployed people basically
depend on the minimal social security program that the state provides with some
elements of a social wage (basic amounts of water and electricity, free housing
for the poor, etc.) But the social security grants and the elements of a social
wage system are immediately undermined by the economic policies of the state,
immediately undermined by the huge unemployment crisis. For example, the logic
of a social wage is undermined by cost recovery, wherein the unemployed are
expected to pay for the costs of these services. So the restlessness that we see among the unemployed and the
workers in South Africa is basically an attempt by ordinary people to say
what’s the benefit of this constitutional promise if it’s not changing our
lives?
JG: The massacre of the Marikana miners this past August 16
has received international attention.
Can you describe the events that led up to it, because there has been a
lot of controversy and confusing surrounding these events? We’ve heard charges
of “anarchism”, and “nihilism” leveled at the Marikana miners and / or their
leaders. There have been allegations that the Marikana miners have been
deceived and led to murder their opponents. There have been accusations of
“dual unionism”. Can you explain
the background to the miners strike and the August 16 events?
MJ: The strike
at the Lonmin mine in Marikana has deep systemic roots in the conditions of
workers in that mine. For several
years now that mine has increasingly used labor from labor brokers. So they
would hire a company to bring workers on a part-time basis to work the mines,
particularly underground. So that
group of workers which were brought in through labor brokers did not have full
benefits and were paid very low wages.
So that’s quite significant, because many of these mineworkers need to
support two families: one in the mining area, and one in their rural homes in
far-flung provinces or in nearby countries. But also, another factor is that the mining system has taken
away the subsidy for accommodations that it used to provide to workers. It is
true that these accommodations in the mining compounds were horrible. But now,
the mining companies charge the workers for these accommodations in the mining
compounds. So many of the
mineworkers have opted to stay in the informal settlements that emerged around
the mining areas. So that was a
further squeeze. Apart from that,
there have been very problematic attempts by management to increase salaries
for certain parts of the workforce, but not for the entire workforce. And by the union’s own calculation,
that was meant to reward those more critical in the production process. But you can imagine the kind of
unhappiness that this would generate, given that very few workers were getting
any kind of fair wage.
But also: the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is
the largest union representing mineworkers in South Africa, had increasingly become removed from
the conditions, the grievances, and the demands of the lowest rank of the
workers , the most exploited – particularly those who drill the rocks. Because those who drill the rocks must
be physically strong, since they work the hardest and work the longest, and
they were not getting increased wage rates at all. The NUM had increasingly been led by a layer of quite
streetwise, English speaking, white collar workers. Most of them had been
working above the ground, as mining clerks or other officers in the
system. So this combination of
factors meant that there was no outlet, there was no forum, to hear and address
the grievances of underground workers.
So in this combination of circumstances what then emerged was very
significant anger, very significant agitation, which led to what is called an
unprotected strike from the end of July or the beginning of August at Marikana
when workers demanded a way out of their squeeze, they demanded a living wage,
a wage that would make it possible for them to meet their expenses and live
decently. This strike was basically an initiative of the workers themselves. Of course, the NUM was facing some
competition from a smaller breakaway union called AMCU (Association
of Mineworkers and Construction Union). However, to view the strike as NUM vs. AMCU is not helpful,
because it ignores the real, concrete conditions that workers were unhappy
about. NUM vs. AMCU is a dynamic
that is part of the strike, but it is not the main dynamic of the strike. And anyway, as it turned out, that strike
saw workers wanting to negotiate with the management on their own. That logic of workers wanting to feel
their own power was also present in other strikes triggered by Marikana.
Continued at:
http://newpol.org/content/south-africa-marikana-massacre-and-new-wave-workers%E2%80%99-struggle
Continued at:
http://newpol.org/content/south-africa-marikana-massacre-and-new-wave-workers%E2%80%99-struggle
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