In South Africa, abysmal poverty and attacks against immigrants expose ANC betrayals

The joyous victory over apartheid in South Africa in 1994 is the stuff of legend. After half a century, freedom fighters finally battered down white supremacist segregation. They did it with material support from across Africa, as well as international solidarity.
Yet 14 years later, for two weeks in May, groups of young Black thugs beat, raped, and murdered African immigrant workers and refugees, looting and burning shacks and shops. They killed at least 62 people, injured a thousand, and displaced from 80,000 to 100,000. The explosive national chauvinism, racism, and endless poverty that fueled such assaults demand some hard questions and honest answers.
Besieged and betrayed. What happened to South Africa’s legendary victory and its radical, integrationist drumbeat? Global imperialism assaulted it from outside. And fake-revolutionary misleadership sold it out from within.
The catastrophic effects of neo-liberal austerity measures imposed on “developing nations” by the World Bank have been analyzed and militantly protested worldwide. Much less exposed is the undermining of South Africa’s courageous mass movement by opportunist heads of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party and the COSATU labor federation.
These deceivers are what Trotsky called the “middle caste” in his History of the Russian Revolution. They make up that comfortable layer of people between management and labor, who sabotage class struggle by pretending to represent working people but doing the bidding of capitalism. They are to blame for many unfinished revolutions around the world. And in South Africa, they are responsible for fostering acute xenophobic divisions in the working class.
Classic unprincipled alliance. A “Tripartite Alliance” runs post-apartheid South Africa. First is the ANC, a bourgeois nationalist party founded in 1912 that opposes white supremacy, but not the profit system. Its partner, the South African Communist Party, like other Stalinist groups, advocates peaceful co-existence with capitalism, and provides a leftist veneer for the ANC.
Then there is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). COSATU only represents the better-paid minority of workers who have fulltime jobs and shows little concern for the impoverished majority.
From the outset, this combination of false leaders made an agreement with outgoing apartheid rulers that legislative and police power could shift to the Black majority. But economic power would stay put. Nelson Mandela and his successor, President Thabo Mbeki, embraced the International Monetary Fund’s “economic restructuring” — acute privatization, low wages, and gross lack of public services.
The Tripartite Alliance gives lip service to the revolutionary goals of the Black freedom movement, but follows the dictates of imperialism.
As corporate profits in South Africa soar, so does the misery — and fury — of its workers, who now endure 40 percent joblessness. Forty percent are illiterate. The townships, hellish living areas created for non-whites under apartheid, are still home to a large percentage of the population. Today, even worse “shack dwellings” house the very poor, including immigrants. South Africa is now an informal apartheid system that still benefits rulingclass whites and now a few wannabe Black capitalists.
In a country of 50 million, four to five million are immigrants. An estimated three million are Zimbabweans, who have fled economic devastation and political upheaval in their own country. Other immigrants from across Africa have fled war, famine, drought, “ethnic cleansing” and political repression to come to the strongest economy on the continent. Now they are being blamed for the pervasive lack of food, water, electricity, housing, healthcare and sanitation actually caused by the government’s neoliberal policies.
Scapegoating of immigrants — government policy. May’s mob attacks were not new and not a surprise. State and city cops have been bulldozing immigrant workers and refugees out of shack settlements for several years. It is a gentrification method that profits developers, mining interests and other businesses, and shoves poor people off the land. And it is intensifying because of the coming World Cup competition to be hosted by South Africa in 2010.
Just last year, gun-toting state police demolished 2,500 shacks and forcibly moved residents 40 kilometers away. Even native-born South Africans have been arrested and deported to countries they’ve never seen, because “they could not speak Zulu well, didn’t have the ‘right’ inoculation marks or were ‘too black.'” These same tests of foreignness were used by thugs to pick their victims in the May attacks — and by South African police under the old apartheid regime.
New radicalism. Genuine rebels are rising to revive the South African freedom struggle and halt the divide-and-conquer tactics. Most South Africans condemned the xenophobic assaults and denounced the government’s appalling inaction. One eyewitness described residents “coming out of their homes, mosques and shops with loaves of bread and baby formula and piles and piles of nappies” to help 6,000 displaced shack dwellers near Johannesburg.
Independent unions that concentrate on casual and temporary workers are coming to the fore. For example, Sikhula Sonke is a women-led union for female farm workers who live on distant farms at the whim of landlords. The union confronts workplace issues and home evictions, and fights against school fees and for AIDS drugs. Shack dweller organizations, like Abahlali BaseMjondolo, are also predominantly made up of women. They teach and practice racial equality and class solidarity. Most of the settlements they have organized were free of xenophobic violence.
These are some of the rebellious who can dump their middle-caste betrayers and build a genuinely revolutionary movement. It must be led by men and women, with members of all hues, ethnicities and languages, determined to complete the workingclass revolution bravely begun not so long ago.