Thank you, Martin

March 3, 2016

By John Saul

At the beginning of this decade (November, 2010) I was asked to come to South Africa to present a keynote address for a “Conference in Honour of Martin Legassick” that was to held at the Red Location in Port Elizabeth. It was, in fact, a great honour for me to be invited by the organizers to do so and I gladly accepted, just as I am honoured to have been asked by Leo Zeilig to write briefly of Martin here on the sad occasion of his recent passing.

But where to start a discussion of a career so rich and varied, albeit one which I both admired but was on many occasions in disagreement with? After all, he was a “Trotskyist” while I am a kind of free-lance, New Left Marxist. And he had become a left-wing, working-class-focused critic of the ANC as an activist first within the Marxist Worker’s Tendency and then the Democratic Socialist Movement; meanwhile, I remained – albeit as an anti-apartheid activist deeply skeptical about the ANC/SACP’s vanguardism and deep-seated Stalinism and, closer to (my) home, unsettled by its wrecker’s role within the Canadian liberation support movement – much slower to become as outspoken about the ANC and those many compromises it made with capital that had helped ease its ascendancy than I should have been.

In fact, as a friend of Martin’s, I began my Port Elizabeth talk in 2010 with a few more personal words related to such realities. For, as I then said, it would be impossible for me, then or now, to overestimate all that I have learned from Martin Legassick about both class struggle and South Africa – especially since the night, 30 or more years ago, when I met with him and several of his comrades in the dingy office of their “Marxist Worker’s Tendency of the ANC” in a dark and rain-swept corner of London’s East-End. I was there, at his invitation, to have Martin’s case and that of his colleagues explained to me in order that I might relay it accurately to anti-apartheid activists in Canada. I won’t say that I agreed with everything Martin told me then, nor would I agree with him on every issue today. But I agreed more often than not and, in addition, have always admired and respected Martin, his strength of character and his dedication both to principle and to struggle. I remember, in particular and in this respect, one revealing story from his last stormy days in the ANC. At some important meeting or other of the movement in London, years ago when he was under stern fire from the powers-that-be of the ANC, he approached another similarly beleaguered member of the organization in the lobby and said to him militantly: ‘X, we’ve got to stand up to them…this may be our last chance.’ The other person’s reply: ‘You stand up to them, Martin. I’m already on my knees.’ Rest assured: Martin was never on his knees to anybody!

A Joint Work in Progress

Of course, Martin Legassick’s principles have come across in all his actions and in all his writings, writings that focused on a wide-range of both historical and contemporary matters, and I will not attempt to summarize that impressive body of work here. Let me merely concentrate on his grand 2007 volume (725 pages!), the summa of a life fully and militantly lived and entitled Towards Socialist Democracy. In that volume he begins his Preface by setting out his chief premise clearly:

This book is a contribution to debate about the way forward, in South Africa and internationally, towards socialist democracy. By socialism I mean a society that serves the needs of the people, rather than profit for a capitalist minority. The world is ripe – over-ripe – for socialism, and indeed it is increasingly a necessary development for human survival. The idea of socialism comes to the fore whenever masses of people are in struggle – as in South Africa in the 1980s, or in Latin American early in the twenty-first century.

He then gives a tour d’horizon of the left’s twentieth century endeavours, again globally and also in South Africa, and concludes (on pages 575 and 576):

The establishment in South Africa of workers’ democracy with a nationalized and planned economy would terrify big business internationally. However, with the respect by the masses of the world for the victorious mass struggle against apartheid, and with the turn to the left in many sectors of the world the example of a workers’ democracy in South Africa would be enormously appealing, and, with today’s communications technology, would inspire the international working class even more rapidly than did the example of the Russian revolution.

If the working-class does not take power worldwide in the foreseeable future, the anarchy of capitalism threatens to create a level of global warming which would eliminate life on the planet. That’s the final dreadful alternative posed by capitalism. Working-class power worldwide, by contrast, would point the way towards a harmonious, socially owned democratic planned economy on an international scale, widening the way to a classless society of abundance.

Here I should repeat that I basically agree with great deal of the above – although the outcomes it invokes are far more easily spoken of than realized (as Martin would, I’m sure, be the first to agree). And this is true both of (a) the making of a meaningful break with capitalism and (b), as twentieth century’s grim experience has suggested to us, of any genuinely democratic rendering of the winning and the consolidating of such an outcome.

Moreover, the more we look at the South African setting, the more it, like most settings in the Global South, inevitably drags us away from the most pristine Marxist formulations regarding the nature and importance of the working class and plunges us, even more than elsewhere, into a messy world of additional distinctions and differentiation that have pertinent effects for the realities of struggle, for the realization of socialism, and, of importance to Martin too, for the realization of democracy. For there was more of relevance to societal struggles for social justice and equality than just the complexities internal to the “working class” per se – although how much more and just how to integrate that “more” into our analyses and our practice was something Martin and I may never have entirely agreed upon.

Indeed, I had raised some such matters in my talk in Port Elizabeth and that later, and far into the night over dinner, we further debated many nagging problems, problems precisely about both the scope and meaning of various central concepts in our various writings and of their political implications: “the working class,” “democracy” and “revolution” to go no further afield. But Martin was always a good person to have such differences of opinion with because you knew that he deeply cared about the questions being raised (and was also deeply versed in them), about the diverse outcomes and practices differing definitions pointed towards, and about the long-term future success of each and every struggle we were ever concerned with – and not least, of course, as they affected the very forging of a revolutionary project in present-day South Africa.

Back to Port Elizabeth

To return to Port Elizabeth in 2010, I had launched my Port Elizabeth talk with a quote from Alain Badiou in his The Communist Hypothesis:

We know that communism [with a small “c”] is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon the hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy – the form of state suited to capitalism – and to the “inevitable” and “natural” character of the most monstrous inequalities.

Capitalism as, in effect, “common-sense”: this Martin knew full well simply would not do, knew that that capitalism and the recolonization of South Africa by capital, as overseen by the ANC and the unholy alliance of white and black elites, could not add up into a real liberation. In short, it simply could not serve as a meaningful and humane “common-sense” either – could not, in Badiou’s words, serve as something “inevitable” or “natural.” As I concluded my Port Elizabeth talk:

True, the elites of capital and the state are working hard to establish just such “commonsensical” and “natural” premises. Meanwhile, it is, quite obviously, to Martin Legassick’s enormous credit that he has kept the banner of real socialist common-sense, of class-struggle common-sense, aloft over and against the banner of capitalist “common-sense.”

In sum: thank you, Martin.

John S. Saul has also taught at York University, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), the University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author/editor of more than twenty books on southern Africa and development issues.

Towards Socialist Democracy

ROAPE

March 2, 2016

One of our great Marxist political economists, Martin Legassick, has died, after battling cancer so bravely the past couple of years. One of the best things to read, to understand and appreciate his contribution, are his remarks prepared for the closing plenary of the World Association of Political Economy forum on 21 June 2015 upon being awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award in Political Economy for the Twenty-First century.

By Martin Legassick

Let me say, once again, I am honoured to receive this Distinguished Achievement Award for my book, Towards Socialist Democracy. At its launch at the Cape Town Book Fair in 2007 Patrick Bond asked why the book was so long! I replied, Patrick, you publish a book every year, but this is the product of 40 years activism, discussion and research!

Here obviously I can only advance a series of propositions from such a long book without substantiating them, though, eight years later, I have updated their emphasis in line with the concerns of this forum.

In the first place, capitalism is in crisis. It offers only prospects of increasing austerity, increasing inequality, and increasing unemployment — particularly for youth, who in despair turn to gang culture, drugs and crime and are in danger of becoming a destroyed generation. Together with that, with ecological disasters and global warming, capitalism has the potential for destroying life on this planet.

I am for democratic eco-socialism built from below.

The crisis affects every country, at this moment most acutely in Greece. All working people (I return to what this means) need to support the struggle of the Greek people because the course of events there will affect the ability of capitalism to impose greater austerity on the working classes of other countries.

At the same time, there is the frightening rise of xenophobia, religious fanaticism and terrorism – horrible dangers suffered mainly by women who lose their breadwinners — created in futile reaction to imperialist oppression and division of the working class, together with the present weakness of left leadership.

A major theme of my book was a critique of Stalinism the ideology of “Communist” Parties such as the SACP. I maintain that the term Stalinism does not just describe a repressive system but a world view defending the interests of ruling bureaucracies against the working class – with international repercussions which have set back the struggle of the working class for generations. Stalinism is not a variant of Marxism, but alien to Marxism

Like all humans, Marxists make mistakes. Marx did; Lenin did. So did Trotsky. Their uncritical followers do too. But one tragic legacy of Stalinism has been to bury the legacy of Trotsky’s ideas. Stalin hated Trotsky and had him murdered, as well as tens of thousands of his followers. But Trotsky had many correct ideas which advanced the theory of Marxism. His analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, his analysis of fascism and critique of Stalinist’s then ultra-left approach – drawing on Lenin’s critique in the Comintern in 1920-1 of this tendency — were among the ideas which led Perry Anderson (not a Trotskyist) to write “The historical scale of Trotsky’s accomplishment is still difficult to realise today.” Trotsky’s innovative use of the concept of bonapartism in its proletarian variant characterizes the phenomenon of a totalitarian bureaucracy presiding over a (degenerate) workers’ state such as the Soviet Union was, and a number of other countries, including China – mostly if not entirely now reversed.

Regarding South Africa, my argument drew on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution – that national oppression would only be ended when capitalism is ended. It was a theory tested and proved in practice in the 1917 Russian revolution and proved negatively in the defeat of the revolution in China in the 1920s as a consequence of the rise of Stalinism.

The ANC claims, farcically, it is pursuing a ‘national democratic revolution’. But its policies are neo-liberal capitalist, serving the interests of mining and finance capital, entrenching South Africa as the most unequal society in the world, with horrendous poverty and unemployment. I heard at this meeting that there are 400 new coal mines in operation or being opened up (with the encouragement of government – despite its supposed commitment to the environment) – all dependent on cheap black labour and on the oppression of women as social reproducers.

The ANC’s policy of so-called black economic empowerment (the enrichment of a few blacks to join the white elite) cannot end racism or national oppression. The majority of blacks remain poor and tend to resent all whites as rich, while whites see poor blacks as threatening criminals. Racism and racial discrimination persists, and, with it, inter-racial violence (including a culture of internecine violence in the poor areas – in which women are subjugated). Only the replacement of the present state by a democratic workers’ state can begin to end all this – but then it could be ended rapidly.

Along with its bankrupt policies the ANC has become degenerate. With Zuma, (or even earlier, in the arms deal) corruption started at the top and has spread throughout.

Leaders of the SACP engage in poodle-like defence of every scandal of the ANC: Nkandla, El-Bashir, the Guptas etc – while the party masquerades as left! At this forum comrade Jeremy Cronin in his keynote address claimed the SACP had abandoned the two-stage theory – and was for building socialism now (within, of course, the framework of the ‘national democratic revolution’!) This while SACP leaders, including himself, sit in a government bankrupt in policy and reeking with scandal and corruption. Shame on all who remain in the SACP or under the influence of Stalinism!

In the same address Cronin spoke of “building socialism now” through advances in reindustrialization and advances of a non-commodified economy – by which he means the abolition of exchange-value (money) in favour of exchange of use values (for example, free public transport, free health, free education, free housing). Both aims are in my view futile if incremental and utopian to achieve against global capitalism. The real task for “building socialism now” is to build the forces capable of replacing the capitalist state with a democratic workers’ state which could then, together with international working class struggle, start to build socialism.

There are hopeful signs in the breakaways from the ANC-led triple alliance: the Economic Freedom Fighters, NUMSA’s United Front, AMCU replacing the NUM. They are signs – like the crises in the ANC Youth and Women’s leagues – of the beginnings of the disintegration of the ANC. SACP leader Blade Nzimande denounces these new movements as imperialist-inspired. This is typical Stalinism: link the so-called ‘ultra-left’ with the right while the party is in the ‘reasonable left.’ Hopefully building these new movements and eventually perhaps through their unity in action, they can constitute effective means for the working class to challenge for power, though presently all have weaknesses.

Who is the agency for change? The working class. Who are the working class? In the first place, all those separated from ownership of the means of production. Those actually working for bosses have the power to strike, up to unlimited political general strikes. But the working class includes not only those working for a boss but all the unemployed, whether of working age (young or old), pensioners or children. In particular women, who engage in social reproduction without a wage (as papers at this meeting have highlighted) as well as being among the most exploited workers (on the farms, as domestics, sex-workers) – have a strong interest in preserving the means of social reproduction. They are empowering themselves. Those women or men not actually at work also have potential power, to protest, demonstrate, block roads, etc as recent movements here and around the world have shown. In the present period together with all the poor hard-working peasants, the majority of the peasantry around the globe, have nothing to separate their interests from those of the working class and can join in protest to protect their interests and to build unity in struggle.

So I am an eco-feminist-democratic-socialist. I am indebted to Jacklyn Cock, a co-Award winner, an old friend of nearly 50 years, from whom I have recently learnt much on feminist theory and practice (I was first converted to feminism by Roxanne Dunbar, in the United States, in the 1960s). For my eco-emphasis in addition to Jacky, I am indebted to Vishmas Satgar, also a co-Award winner, and to Brian Ashley.

The majority of the middle class also have interests in socialism – but need to take their lead from the working class. The threat or the reality of costly indebtedness to the banks destroys their independence. In reality, they are also oppressed. The social movements are critical of NGOs who try to control them. The real critique that should be made is not of the middle class as such, but of middle-class political party leaders who posture as representatives of the middle class when they are really acting in the interests of capitalism.

In his keynote address Cronin advocates advancing the struggle by delinking from global capitalism. This, in my view, can bring for any country only temporary and partial relief and again, if incremental is futile and if full is utopian. The Freedom Charter is in fact the starting program for the struggle for power. The immediate task of a democratic workers state is nationalization of the banks, multi-nationals, and big monopolies under democratic workers’ control and management, and planning the economy democratically – moving rapidly to ensure that health, education, housing, transport, etc are free and open to all.

More than that, a fully non-commodified economy which Cronin advocates cannot be created in isolation – it requires the spread of workers’ democracy from country to country. How quickly this needs to occur is uncertain before degeneration would set in. But one example, even more than in Russia in 1917, could today inspire working people around the globe who are all suffering from cuts in living standards in a painful race to the bottom, from gross inequality, and with the threat of the eco-destruction of humanity hanging over them.

But the working class can win! For forty years I have believed this and continue to do so. Viva! Amandla!

Tributes to Martin Legassick

ROAPE

March 2, 2016

Martin Legassick (20 December 1940 – 1 March 2016) was a revolutionary socialist, brilliant researcher, teacher and mentor. He was an outstanding scholar and a pioneer of radical revisionist history in South Africa and a comrade and contributor to ROAPE. Here we post tributes to him and links to some of his work.

Revolutionary Socialist, Scholar, Teacher and Mentor

By Noor Nieftagodien

Comrade Martin Legassick passed away this morning, 1 March 2016, after a protracted and brave fight against cancer. Despite ill health and excruciating pain, he completed his final book project at the beginning of this year.

Comrade Martin was a revolutionary socialist, brilliant scholar, teacher and mentor. He was an outstanding scholar and a pioneer of radical revisionist history in South Africa. From the 1960s when he was a university student, Martin immersed himself in the struggle against apartheid, including mobilizing some of the first international student demonstrations in the United States. From the mid-1970s he became a founding member of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC (MWT of the ANC) and left his academic post to work as full-time political activist. He served on the editorial committee of the journal, Inqaba yaBasebenzi, and newspaper, Congress Militant. For this, he was expelled by the ANC in 1985. On his return from exile, Martin continued to play a leading role in the MWT of the ANC and simultaneously became active in working class struggles in the Western Cape. When anti-eviction struggles exploded on the Cape Flats, he spent most of his time working with activists and contributing to build these new movements of the working class. Evenings and weekends were dedicated to meetings and political education classes. After the Marikana massacre, he immediately travelled to the platinum mines to show solidarity and to be part of the movement emerging there. Similarly, he stood by the farm workers under the leadership of CSAAWU. He lived for the struggles of the working class. From 2008 he also dedicated some time to efforts to rebuild the socialist left, especially in the form of the Democratic Left Front and was hopeful that the United Front and a new trade union movement would galvanise the working class in co-ordinated struggles against poverty, inequality and racism. When I met him on his birthday in December last year, he wanted to know about the new wave of students’ struggles and, despite physical weakness, was excited about the prospects of a new generation of activists emerging from this movement.

Hamba Kahle Comrade Martin

In 2006 Noor wrote an article based on notes of a talk he did for Martin’s retirement from the University of the Western Cape, the paper was published in the South African History Journal and is available here.

Noor Nieftagodien is South African Research Chair (SARChI) in Local Histories, Present Realities and Head of History Workshop at the School of Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand.

Robust and Utterly Principled

By Patrick Bond

Martin was robust, forceful and utterly principled, apparently not caring if the distant margins of the political and academic worlds were his life’s home. Political relevance seemed important to Martin only if he looked across, horizontally, to his comrades, never vertically upwards to garner the bogus credibility that so many professional intellectuals seek. His anger was unforgettable, like a pure flame, and I was one to experience it – with various singes still in my memory – and yet I always knew it came from a good place. But he could also channel that energy, deploying his eloquence and likewise his demands on us all with sharp, short clarity, unmistakeable for its revolutionary political import. When facing leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers at an all-in labour-community conference of Amandla! magazine in late 2012, he was the only one amongst us who felt the urgency and courage to ask the necessary tough questions about Marikana, for example. Indeed, his personal fuel carried that strong odour of the arrogance that comes from fearless truth-telling, which he did as well as anyone I’ve ever met in South Africa. He lit veld-fires all over the intellectual landscape dating (quite remarkably) to 1964 in the New Left Review. His intellectual legacy provides the great historical sweeps, the micro-details so lovingly uncovered, and the thoughtful – never hackish – recourse to Marxist political-economic theory and historical materialist method. These are what I will always read from Martin’s dozens of major works, and what I will aspire to emulate. More power to his legacy: an exceptionally high standard of intellectual and political morality.

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban.

A Down-to-Earth Comrade

By Ashley Fataar

Although Martin Legassick was an academic and provided extraordinary articles, books and papers he remained a down-to-earth comrade who never wavered from the principles of socialism. He had his humorous moments as well as his grumpiness. He was prepared to explain things to new comrades and could also be blunt in criticism of comrades. Though Marin was always prepared to teach comrades and remained active until the last two years of his life. He was one a few Marxists who critiqued the Freedom Charter from a logical and reasoned perspective. I remember him in Cape Town speaking passionately on the housing shortage and crisis in South Africa and how communities were organising around the issue. He was always able to work with a variety of organisations and I noticed the enormous respect they had for him.

Ashley Fataar is a leading member of the Democratic Left Front in Cape Town and he writes for websites and newspapers around the world.

Articles and Links

In 1972 Martin spoke at the famous seminar series started in 1969 at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies coordinated by Shula Marks. The Societies of Southern Africa seminar series, welcomed Martin’s original approach. His paper titled, The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography is available here. In 1976 he co-authored with Harold Wolpe an article for ROAPE on The Bantustans and Capital Accumulation in South Africa which can be accessed here. In 2007 he wrote Flaws in South Africa’s ‘first’ economy which was originally presented at the Centre for Civil Society Rosa Luxemburg Political Education Seminar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in February 2006 and published in Africanus Journal of Development Studies. He also wrote an astonishing paper that he was too ill to deliver at the 2015 World Association of Political Economy conference which ROAPE Online has published here.

Kenya’s Cartels: the Power of Bandits in Suits

ROAPE

March 1, 2016

By Koert Lindijer

Youngsters loiter at their ‘base’. The base, an assembly point in a poor neighbourhood, is the place to play a game of cards, smoke bhangi (marijuana), plan criminal activities or preach the ideology of extremism. Drunken chatter from the bar nearby and rap music from the CD vendor fight for dominance. The stench of gasoline from a garage cannot compete with the smell of bhangi. It is here that young people get radicalized and express their disgust of the ‘stinking rich.’

‘We’re trapped here,’ says one boy as he lets bhangi smoke escape from his mouth, ‘My base is the centre of my world. And beyond I see rich neighbourhoods built with stolen money. On television I watch corrupt politicians. It’s my neighbourhood against yours. You’re rich because I am poor.’

The boy will not talk about the recruitment that is taking place in slum areas under the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab, the reason why I came to report in this area. ‘We have learned that we do not need to fight in Somalia’, says his friend. ‘There are plenty of reasons to fight in Kenya.’

The gap between rich and poor is enormous is Kenya. That is not just because of their different income, but primarily because of their different outlook on the country. From the perspective of the poor inhabitants – the majority – Kenya’s elite is rich thanks to massive corruption. Large-scale corruption does not only suffocate an economy, it kills any feeling of brotherhood and nationhood. ‘I am therefore declaring with immediate effect corruption as a national security threat’, declared President Uhuru Kenyatta last November.

In an interview I recently conducted with Dr. Willy Mutunga, the Chief Justice of Kenya, he said: ‘We have become a bandit economy. Africa has become stuck after 50 years of independence, after looting of resources. Inequality is also stuck.’ Putting the blame on the corrupt political elite, Mutunga added, ‘If our constitution and the clause Chapter 6 about corruption were being implemented, I am sure 80% of [politicians] would not be suitable for political leadership.’

Mutunga is averse to the pomp, wealth and self-regard that is the hallmark of many Kenyan politicians. He has been nicknamed, ‘the Robin Hood of the Kenyan judiciary.’ Mutunga claims corruption in Kenya has never been worse than today. ‘The influence of the cartels is overwhelming,’ he said. ‘They are doing illegal business with politicians. If we do not fight the cartels, we become their slaves. But leaders who do take on the cartels must be prepared to be killed or exiled.’

Mutunga’s opinion is similar to the view from the “hood”. The perception that Kenya is more corrupt than ever seems to be vindicated in reading Kenyan newspapers. One of the more sensational stories recently focuses on a judge called Philip Tunoi. It was reported to Mutunga’s office that the judge from the Supreme Court took a two million dollar bribe to sway the opinion in an election petition in favour of Evans Kidero, the governor of Nairobi. The shock was the amount; Kenya is not (yet) Nigeria and high amounts like this are not common in bribing officials.

An even more intriguing newspaper story is about former minister Anne Waiguru, under whose watch 8 million dollars reportedly vanished in her ministry. No minister accused of abuse of office has ever been taken to court and then prison in Kenya’s history. The first big opportunity to show that the rule of law is paramount occurred in 1966. Journalists at the Daily Nation had uncovered evidence that minister Paul Ngei had stolen money from the Maize Marketing Board. Ngei’s political opponent, the equally powerful minister Charles Njonjo, called the editor of the newspaper and consequently gave permission to publish the story.

But the revelation regarding Ngei presented the then president Jomo Kenyatta with a dilemma. A strong bond existed between the two dating back to the anti-colonial struggle. More importantly, Kenyatta could not do without the support of Ngeis Kamba tribe. So the minister went free. The government proposed an inquiry, a usual trick in the cover-up culture. Since then a secret code has applied in Kenya: powerful politicians are above the law, no matter what newspapers reveal about them. Yet it was in Jomo Kenyatta’s time that a mania of predatory profiteering, a system of corruption and patronage, took hold.

The case of Anne Waiguru makes it an even more interesting reading because she is rumored to have had an affair with Uhuru Kenyatta, a rumor denied by the president. But why is she so well protected? Kenyans speculate. She seemed to have everybody in the state apparatus on her side. She was quickly cleared by the official Anti-Corruption Commission. Until a businesswoman involved in the scandal signed an affidavit claiming that Waiguru not only shared in the loot but also played a role in the cover-up. That raised many disturbing questions about the Anti-Corruption Commission.

Waiguru hit back this week saying that the businesswoman ‘was only … a front for a broader, more powerful cartel with various beneficiaries from the political establishment and the bureaucracy.’ Waiguru pointed fingers at a group around deputy president William Ruto, laying bare the mistrust within the ruling coalition of Kenyatta and Ruto, painting a picture of a political marriage marked by vicious infighting over lucrative procurement tender deals.

That brings to mind what Mutunga told me. ‘Yes, I am now at the top. I’m riding a tiger, hoping that the monster will not devour me. But as long as I fight the cartels and they are protected, you cannot achieve anything. You are taking these people into a corrupt investigating system, through a corrupt anti-corruption system, and a corrupt judiciary.’ Mutunga’s challenge is a historic fight indeed.

Koert Lindijer has been based in Nairobi since 1983 and works as the African correspondent for the Netherlands’ daily paper NRC Handelsblad and NOS, the national radio station.

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised

ROAPE

February 29, 2016

By Heike Becker

‘The revolution won’t be televised – the revolution will be live.’ Gil Scott-Heron’s famous 1970 poem has been given a new lease as the title of an extraordinary new documentary by Rama Thiaw. The Senegalese director’s second feature-length film recently premiered during the 66th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) to excited acclaim.

Thiaw tells the story of the ‘Y’en a marre’ movement that rose up in Senegal against octogenarian President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to clinch to power in 2012. Y’en a marre translates as ‘enough is enough’, or – even more to the point – ‘we’re fed up’. The movement was started by musicians Thiat and Kilifeu, and some of their friends. This was the first West African revolution led by rappers (more recently Y’en a marre’s act was followed by the Burkinabe ‘Balais Citoyen’ movement, led by musicians Sams’K Le Jah and Smockey, that swept Blaise Compaoré out of office in 2014 after 27 years). Rap and new popular protest movement politics make for a fast-paced sequence of meetings, campaigns, concerts, marches, arrests, travel, taking the viewer through the streets of Dakar, to the provinces of Senegal; to Burkina Faso, to the grave and the living history of Thomas Sankara, through music and politics and meetings in university buildings where hardworking old fans cut the thick hot air above. Y’en a marre’s is an exhilarating story of new democracy movements, of a new generation of Africans who are fed up with old men who persist on their claim to autocratic power. A documentation of its story was, more or less, what I expected when I queued up at the Berlinale main movie site on a rainy, cold February night.

I have to confess upfront: The film far exceeded my expectations. Yes, Rama Thiaw follows the rappers and the movement, the self-declared grandsons of Cheikh Anta Diop and sons of Thomas Sankara. She explores the tension and the conflicts between music and politics, the streets and the state, the old, and old-style politicians and the young protesters who emphatically decry power: ‘We are not politicians’, they say, and ‘we are a new type of Senegalese’ who want more than just a change of political leadership; ‘we need a new system’ the rappers declare after newly elected President Macky Sall visits the Y’en a marre headquarters, a run-down old house in Dakar.

Here a new space has opened up for politics as much as for sleeping, Nintendo games, and moving gestures of friendship between the – mostly male – activists of the emerging youth protest movement. Thiaw who has spent years with Y’en a marre from their inception shows the rappers and their environment with an amazing intimacy. The rapper-activists are shown in their everyday life, in their full, loving, fragile humanity. They doubt, find spiritual solace at the beach, argue with each other, let one other and the audience see their vulnerabilities, their emotional and physical exhaustion as much as their conviction, their determination, and their longing for new beginnings. Thiaw’s draws a stirring portrait of a country – and a region – in the grip of change. She also shows, in the most poetic and most intimate, even tender ways possible, a new generation of youthful African activists and their ways of speaking to the world, addressing it from an Africa, which is at the centre of global political and cultural movements.

The film’s extraordinary poignant powers and poetics rose also during the discussion that followed the world premiere in Berlin, where Rama Thiaw shared the stage with Thiat and Kilifeu. The roots of this stirring, intimate portrait are deep, drawing on the extraordinary trust between the director and the main protagonists, who had not even seen the final cut of the film before the first night. Thiat called Thiaw a “visionary modern story teller”, whose work had really complemented their political and musical desires. This is a remarkable story told from the inside.

Thiaw, on her part, significantly spoke about her motivation to make the film. Born in 1978, she had been part of the generation that had brought Abdoulaye Wade to power with the resurgence of the Senegalese student movement in the late 1990s. She wanted to tell a story of different generations of activists, bridging the inspirational histories from the 1950s and 1960s, the 1990s, and the most recent wave, embodied in Senegal in Y’en a marre. The film is fittingly dedicated to Khady Sally, the great Senegalese cineaste, who died in 2013.

‘The revolution won’t be televised – the revolution will be live.’ Writer and director: Rama Thiaw. Production: Boul Fallé Images. Dakar Camera: Amath Niane. Length: 110 minutes. Languages: French and Wolof (with English subtitles)

Heike Becker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, where she directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity.

Murder of Giulio Regeni

ROAPE

February 25, 2016

ROAPE Online is shocked and saddened by the news about the murder of Giulio Regeni, an activist and a PhD student at Cambridge University working on the Egyptian new labour movement. Under a pseudo name, Giulio wrote reports on his research for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Today, Il Manifesto published his latest, and tragically last contribution. While Egyptian authorities first attributed the death to a robbery or car accident, sources now confirm evidence of torture on Giulio’s body and a slow death. Giulio’s murder is a stark reminder of both the dangers and the importance of research which is politically committed to economic and social justice. It is now estimated that there are more than 6000 political prisoners in Egypt and new prisons are built to house summary arrests without any due process. For us an important question is whether Giulio’s murder is the product of a policy to create fear for all researchers or if it was the action of rogue state agents in competing security services. ROAPE Online sends its condolences and solidarity to Giulio’s family and friends. We encourage all our supporters to sign the online petition calling for the a full investigation into Giulio’s death.

The London Fix: Price-Making in Capitalism

ROAPE

February 25, 2016

By Khadija Sharife

Barring some resources in Russia and elsewhere, South Africa claims more than 70% of global platinum production, and over 95.5% of known global reserves of this metal. In 2014, the country’s platinum sales totaled over R84 billion (upward of 7.5 billion USD). Despite its global dominance at the level of resource ownership and production, South Africa (from government to industry) has little input in the price-making process. Indeed it is a price taker. Instead, the ‘value’ and price of platinum is determined primarily by large banks in an institutional set-up that is a de-facto insider racket.

Historically, four entities largely determined the pricing process during two daily teleconferences. These proceedings were confidential and inaccessible to the public including traders, refiners and other participants. Some of the four members were involved in every aspect of the trade from warehousing to buying and selling it, laying the field wide open to anti-competitive behavior including price-fixing. Known as the London Fix, the process appeared quite literally a fix driven by global banking behemoths: Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Standard Bank, alongside one chemical company, Germany’s BASF. The members operated through a private company that determined the global reference price: London Platinum and Palladium Fixing Company Limited (LPPM). It is evident that the textbook idea of abstract global forces of demand and supply making prices is erroneous in this power-laden set-up where price-making is at the disposal of the few.

From 2007 until 2014, alleges the US-filed class action lawsuit (2014), members used privileged insider information to manipulate the prices of precious metals including platinum. The secrecy of the process allowed members to ‘execute trades…to make artificial the prices of physical platinum and palladium and platinum and palladium-based financial products…to reap substantial profits …while non-insiders were injured.’[1] To give roape.net readers a scale of the effect of damages: say, a South African mining company produced 580 000 oz at $1400 per oz or $812 million in sales; if the value-cum-price was artificially reduced by the price fixers by $100 per oz at a strategic point in the process, about $58 million in value would be ‘disappeared’ at that level of transaction, but be pocketed by others in the commodity chain that got the metal $100/oz cheaper than would otherwise be the case.

A high level source close to the LPPM members assessed that this price setting system violated the global administrative and regulatory standards of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). Notably, BASF declined to comment on the allegations due to ongoing litigation, while Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Standard Bank declined, or failed, to respond. [2]

On December 1 2014, responsibility for the LPPM system was claimed by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) replacing the old system with a new process: Cue the London Metals Exchange (LME). Part of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd (HKEx) transacting more than 70% of the world’s non-ferrous metals, the LME won the bid offer to run a custom-built electronic system, facilitating digitized bidding and ordering processes, building in a mirror of sorts. This meant that an external body would now have access to information used to formulate pricing.

Yet the LBMA – regulating the price of gold and silver, too – operates along much the same lines of power as the LPPM did: an old boys’ club comprised of major London-based bullion banks. The platinum club itself has not been altered with the exception of one new member – UK-based Johnson Mathey. In effect, though control has been severed, influence over prices remains in the hands of a few powerful banks. ‘The pricing mechanism is dependent on their [the four members] participation,’ said Kathy Alys, spokesperson for the LME. The spokesperson declined to speak to the ongoing litigation against the members arguing that it predated LME’s involvement. But Mrs Alys confirmed the open door policy to other participants saying it ‘maximises the effectiveness of the price discovery process.’ In other words, the view here is the more players, including refineries and manufacturers, the better to break the bankers hold.[3]

The above described price setting mechanisms located in a cartel of banks and characterised by collusion of a few players matters for the political economy of price-taker countries such as South Africa, as we will see below.

The Great Divide

Some background first. Platinum is largely mined from South Africa’s Bushveld Complex, arguably the world’s richest platinum reserve. About 20 tonnes of ore must be processed to recover 1 or 2 ounces of platinum. The metal is the country’s second largest export revenue earner trailing behind gold. Platinum was known as platina or little silver during its discovery period in the 18^th century. The mineral isn’t really used to adorn high fashion jewelry and therefore not as visible a metal as say, gold. But it has often traded at a similar premium to gold, silver, bonds and equities.[4] Its value lies in the superior performance of platinum as a super-metal with excellent resistance to oxidation and corrosion, good conductivity, and catalytic uses.[5] Most importantly, platinum is the future of clean energy through reducing GHG, poisonous gas and other emissions.[6]

South Africa is rated solidly among mining investors: from 140 countries assessed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2015, the country took 1st place for strength of auditing, 2nd for regulation of security exchanges, 3rd for efficacy of corporate boards, 14th for investor protection, 24th for property rights etc.[7] What the WEF hasn’t assessed is to what extent the country has ensured that resources are strategically transacted: when, how and at what price. That the current price setting mechanism is grossly misrepresenting the role and power of South Africa in the global platinum industry is recognised by some; for instance, a former senior official from the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) commented: ‘There is a need for a great debate on this – why South Africa isn’t playing a role in shaping price. This is a debate for the WEF.’

That said, one major question is: why is there not more pressure from South African actors to change the price making process? We tried to investigate this matter. Roger Baxter, CEO of South Africa’s Chamber of Mines, reports: ‘The fact is that platinum producers are price takers, with price determined by a combination of factors…A large portion of metal production is sold directly to long term customers …with specific reference to spot prices.’ That is, while the mining companies directly sell to clients, the price determined by the LPPM affects their revenue, and in so doing, the country’s take via taxes and royalties.

Speaking off record to people within the mining industry, we learned that some players don’t want more government involvement in price setting. One reasons for this is the perceptions of government corruption and inefficiencies, including the role of ‘patrons’ within the BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) sector; some therefore argued that business is better off with the laws of the ‘democratic market’ than a bigger role of government, even if that market is potentially ‘influenced’ by banks.

The knock-on effect of artificial undervaluation of platinum reported above, however, are distinctly political and socio-economic; for instance, the industry’s cost of production is perceived higher relative to market value, putting pressure on labour costs (between 35% – 50% of total industry costs) and pre-tax profits.

What the market sees

Scholars probing the makings of labour wages say that affordability of wages depends on the prices of platinum group metals (PGMs). Wages, then, are determined not simply by a country’s constitutional laws and the mining companies, but also, the banks directing global markets.

Since the Marikana shootings in 2012, intense protracted strikes endemically spreading throughout the mining industry decreased production. Platinum mining, employing over 130 000 people, can significantly – if temporarily – disrupt production if strikes are coordinated or, in this case, frequent. There is another interesting dynamic concerning price setting going on when it comes to wages in the industry: Lonmin’s former CEO Ian Farmer was paid R1.2 million per month excluding bonuses, shares etc. The miners received averages of R6000 per month in basic income, and lobbied for R12 500 per month.[8] The strike was eventually settled at R11 000 for some (slightly more or less depending on roles) with a R2000 bonus.[9] Yet in 2014, when platinum output, dropped, the new CEO, Bennetor Magara, earned R12 million in salary and R11 million in shares.

The injustice was not simply in the general level of wages earned at the lower bottom of the industry, but the wage disparity between classes of labour, i.e: CEO and Worker alike. Both ‘values’ are normalised by the abstract functions of the market. And though Lonmin is used as an example here, similar discrepancies and wage-setting injustices exist across the South African economy, prevalent in most industries and is not exceptional to mining.

As in the case of the pricing of platinum, the reference to the pricing of labour being an outcome of market effects and the ‘invisible hand’ is erroneous: the market’s reach is long or short depending on where and how governments, and constitutional courts, exert authority or remain absent. The catch-22 is also that BEE patronage has intertwined the interests of political elites with their corporate counterpart. South Africa’s government is itself conflicted: one party the African National Congress (ANC) dominates both government and BEE mining tenders held by powerful party members. Financiers to political parties are kept confidential as are party finances. The market, as ‘sole regulator’ of value – from humans to commodities – is kept in place for its fictive neutrality, its political-economic usefulness in not ‘seeing’ and therefore disguising socio-economic issues and conflicts, and not least, for passing the buck around contradictions informing South Africa’s political economy.

Whether erroneous or coherent, the platinum price fixed in ‘London’ (or other financial hubs) has real effects on price setting of blue collar labour in South Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. In other words: the prices for both the resource and labour remain legal (i.e. market-produced), whatever the injustice of it. It’s all to ‘the markets’ resulting in no ceiling for executive wage and no floor for labour wage.

In sum then, prices matter. Prices are political, so is the process by which they come about. Where countries hold the monopoly on finite resources and pricing is opaque, governments in Africa must revisit their role in price setting in the global industry, both for resources and for labour. After all, owning resources is one thing. The ability to develop those same resources in equitable conditions is another. The ‘market’ is only able to exact a certain value for labour and platinum where no other authority exerts itself – this includes the government.

This article was supported by Oxfam.

Khadija Sharife is the editor at the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting and a fellow at the World Policy Institute. She is the author of Tax Us If You Can: Africa (Tax Justice Network).

Notes

[1] http://fideres.com/media/Platinum-Class-Action-Complaint.pdf

[2] http://fideres.com/media/Platinum-Class-Action-Complaint.pdf

[3] The Discovered Price – i.e., the price achieved via the LME’s bespoke bidding platform – holds only if the difference between this LME assessed price, and the Member assessed price, is less than 4,000 troy ounces. If the imbalance is higher, the process is repeated. https://www.lme.com/~/media/Files/Metals/Precious%20Metals/LBMA%20Platinum%20and%20Palladium%20Prices%20%20Price%20Discovery%20Process%20Schedule%201.pdf

[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/30/platinum-in-a-funk-worse-than-golds/#5ada7f604cde

[5] http://www.miningweekly.com/article/the-uses-of-platinumgroup-metals-2006-11-10

[6] file:///C:/Users/knuti/Downloads/cmsa-futuresa-pgms-20151020%20(1).pdf

[7] file:///C:/Users/knuti/Downloads/cmsa-futuresa-pgms-20151020%20(1).pdf

[8] Total cost to company http://www.smesouthafrica.co.za/August-2012/The-great-R12m-R10-500-salary-divide/

[9] Others earned more or less depending on different role: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-19-marikana-the-strike-ends-now-what/#.Vqt0ELJ97IU

World Bank Dogma: Why Some Things Cannot be Named

ROAPE

February 23, 2016

By Patrick Bond

‘South Africa can claim to have one of the world’s most redistributive public purses,’ argues Johannesburg Business Day newspaper associate editor Hilary Joffe, drawing upon World Bank research findings. This nonsense. The Bank’s silences about poverty and inequality speak volumes.

To illustrate this in next-door Lesotho, Stanford University anthropologist James Ferguson’s famous book The Anti-Politics Machine criticised the World Bank’s 1980s understanding of Lesotho as a ‘traditional subsistence peasant society.’ Apartheid’s migrant labour system was explicitly ignored by the Bank, yet remittances from Basotho workers toiling in mines, factories and farms across the Caledon River accounted for 60 percent of rural people’s income.

Ferguson explained: ‘Acknowledging the extent of Lesotho’s long-standing involvement in the modern capitalist economy of South Africa would not provide a convincing justification for the ‘development’ agencies to ‘introduce’ roads, markets and credit.’

Using Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, Ferguson showed why some things cannot be named. To do so would violate the Bank’s foundational dogma, that the central problems of poverty can be solved by applying market logic. Yet the most important of Lesotho’s market relationships – exploited labour – was what caused so much misery.

Three decades on, not much has changed. Today, the Bank’s main South Africa research team reveals a similar “Voldemort” problem. Like the villain whose name Harry Potter dared not utter, some hard-to-hear facts evaporate into pregnant silences within the Bank’s latest ‘South African Poverty and Inequality Assessment Discussion Note.’ Bank staff and consultants are resorting to extreme evasion tactics worthy of Harry, Ron and Hermione.

The Bank’s point of view

From the Bank’s viewpoint: ‘South Africa spent more than other countries on its social programs, with this expenditure successfully lifting around 3.6 million individuals out of poverty (based on US$2.5 a day on a purchasing power parity basis) and reducing the Gini coefficient from 0.76 to 0.596 in 2011.’

Ahem, this is worth unpacking.

1) ‘Spent more than other countries’? Of the world’s 40 largest economies, only four – South Korea, China, Mexico and India – had lower social spending than South Africa, measured in 2011 as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

2) ‘Millions lifted out of poverty?’ In fact many millions have been pushed down into poverty since liberation from apartheid in 1994. Unmentioned is poverty that can be traced to neo-liberal policies such as the failed 1996-2001 Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan co-authored by two Bank economists, which made South Africa far more vulnerable to global capitalist crises.

The Bank’s South Africa poverty line was $2.5/day in 2011, the date of the last poverty census. In contrast, the official state agency StatsSA found that food plus survival essentials cost $124/month or about $4/day that year, and the percentage of South Africans below that line was 53 percent. (University of Cape Town economists argued convincingly that StatsSA was too conservative and the ratio of poor South Africans is actually 63 percent.)

For a net 3.6 million people, i.e. more than 7 percent of South Africans, to have been ‘lifted out of poverty’ is plausible only if the Bank’s much lower $2.5/day line is used. But by local standards, the number of poor people has soared by around 10 million given the rise of 15 million in population since 1994.

3) The Bank adjusts the Gini Coefficient (measuring income inequality on a 0-to-1 scale) ‘from 0.76 to 0.596’ by including state social spending that benefits poor households. But here another silence screams out. The Bank dare not calculate pro-corporate subsidies and other state spending that raise rich people’s effective income through capital gains.

Such wealth accruing through rising corporate share prices is enjoyed mainly by richer people when companies benefit from new, state-built infrastructure in their vicinity. Also ignored by the Bank, radically lower corporate taxes (from 48 to 30 percent) mainly benefit the rich in the same way. (Until the mining industry’s post-2011 crash, South African firms’ after-tax profits have been among the world’s very highest, according to the International Monetary Fund in 2013.)

Indeed the Treasury’s single biggest fiscal policy choice has been to condone ‘illicit financial flows.’ These escape through bogus invoicing and other tax avoidance strategies. The Washington NGO Global Financial Integrity recently estimated they cost South Africa an annual $21 billion from 2004-13, peaking in 2009 at $29 billion. The Bank dare not mention these flows or the resulting capital gains enjoyed by South African shareholders.

Capital gains are extremely important in raising the wealth levels of those who are already wealthy. To illustrate, the United States Congressional Budget Office calculated that, in 2011, the share of total US income from capital gains enjoyed by the top 1 percent of earners was 36 percent; for the bottom 95 percent it was only 4 percent.

In South Africa, shares on the super-bubbly Johannesburg Stock Exchange constitute much of household wealth. For aggregate South African households in 2011, wealth was composed of an extremely high 77 percent in the form of financial assets and 23 percent non-financial assets (in contrast to India where the ratio was 12 percent financial to 88 percent non-financial assets). This aspect of class apartheid appears to be beyond World Bank comprehension.

4) The Bank was most impressed by government’s ‘provision of free basic services (mainly water, sanitation, electricity, and refuse removal), and social protection mainly in the form of social grants, primary health care, education (specifically no-fee paying schools), enhancing access to productive assets by the poor (e.g. housing and land), as well as job creation.’

But the Bank evades vital details, such as how ‘free basic water’ was piloted in Durban in 1999 before becoming national policy in 2001. After a tokenistic 6 free kiloliters (kl) per month, the price of the second block of the water within the tariff was raised dramatically (in Durban and most municipalities). Overall, by 2004 the price had doubled. In response, the lowest-income third of households lowered monthly consumption from 22kl to 15kl, while in contrast, the highest-income third cut back by just 3kl/month, from 35kl to 32kl (they enjoy home swimming pools and English gardens). The Bank turned a blind eye.

5) Another unmentionable concerns the Bank’s largest-ever project loan: $3.75 billion granted in 2010 for the corruption-riddled, oft-delayed Medupi coal-fired power plant, the biggest now under construction in the world. Repayment of that loan plus other financing has hiked the price of electricity to poor people by more than 250 percent since 2007.

But neither the loan, the borrower, the project nor the soaring price of electricity are mentioned. Nor are Eskom’s special pricing agreements with the mining mega-corporations BHP Billiton and Anglo American, that cut electricity prices to a tenth as much as what poor households pay.

6) The Bank applauds a grant that ‘now reaches 11.7 million children. Grant payments have risen from 2.9 percent of GDP and now amount to 3.1 percent.’ But a meagre 0.2 percent of GDP suggests the amounts provided are tokenistic. The child grant of just $21/month is about a third of today’s StatsSA poverty line.

Ignoring quality in education

Another example, education, the single largest budgetary commitment, illustrates how dubious the alleged social spending benefits for recipients can be. Most public schools produce extremely low-quality education, thus locking in inequality with regard to life chances.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2015–16 rated South African education as the worst of 140 countries in terms of science and mathematics training, and 138^th in overall quality. As local expert Nic Spaul remarked after studying the 1994–2011 outcomes: ‘South Africa has the worst education system of all middle-income countries that participate in cross-national assessments of educational achievement.’

It’s not just class that plays out in educational inequality, but also race. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development observes that ‘in 2008, only 1.4 percent of working-age Africans held a [university] degree, compared to almost 20 percent of working-age Whites. This proportion for Africans has hardly increased since 1993, while the proportion for Whites has grown by 5.4 percent.’

Given such outcomes, it could just as easily be argued that inequality is amplified by the manner in which public education is provided to the low-income majority. This story is fairly typical of maldistributed state resources. As senior Treasury official Andrew Donaldson acknowledges, ‘In areas such as education, health care and urban transport, service provision tends to evolve in differentiated ways […] the result is a fragmented, unequal structure in which the allocation of resources and the quality of services diverge.’ Combined with semi-privatised systems, such public spending, he admits, ‘entrenches inequality between rich and poor.’

Other areas of state spending have similar biased effects, but the Bank simply does not consider large chunks of South Africa’s budget, e.g.:

13 percent for ‘Defence, public order and safety,’ which is likely to have a strong bias towards protecting the lives and property of wealthier classes;

10 percent for debt servicing, for which wealthy financiers and other bondholders are the main beneficiaries, taking their gains in deferred income (although a fraction of the working class who are fortunate to have a retirement fund also invests indirectly in debt securities); and

9 percent for aspects of ‘Economic affairs’ – economic infrastructure, industrial development and trade, and science, technology innovation and the environment – items that, arguably, disproportionately benefit corporations and the higher-income groups that own their shares.

The South Africans who cannot be named

Notwithstanding such evidence of pro-corporate bias, the Bank endorses government’s ‘apparently sound policy’ on redistribution because Bank researchers cannot grapple with the core problem that best explains why South African capitalism causes poverty and inequality: extreme exploitation systems amplified after apartheid by neoliberal policies.

The most cited scholarly research about post-apartheid exploitation is by local political economists like Sampie Terreblanche, Hein Marais, William Gumede and Gillian Hart – but the Bank dare not reference these books.

To truly tackle poverty and inequality, only one force in society has unequivocally succeeded since 1994. That force is the social activist.

Their successes include raising life expectancy from 52 to 62 over the past decade (thanks to AIDS medicines access), reversing municipal services privatisation, cutting pollution and raising apartheid wages. But the organisations responsible – such as the Treatment Action Campaign, Anti-Privatisation Forum, South Durban Community Environmental Alliance and trade unions – are also, from the Bank’s viewpoint, South Africans who cannot be named.

As the pernicious influence of the World Bank researchers’ project grew in the past year, with numerous citations of their dubious data, I queried the work and received a series of (ultimately bureaucratic, denialist) emails from its officials.

Fortunately, upon asking the main Bank inequality consultant, Nora Lustig of Tulane University, why more accurate assessments of the state’s pro-corporate fiscal benefits were not attempted so as to offset the bias from only considering social spending, she took up the challenge with honesty: ‘Your questions are very valid. Regretfully, we have yet to figure out a solid methodological approach to allocate the burden/benefit to households of the list of interventions you list.’

And regretfully, the Pretoria regime’s pro-rich interventions continue, even though extreme pressure has recently arisen from credit rating agencies to reduce social spending, following a 2015 Budget that cut the real value of welfare grants by at least 4 percent. Much worse austerity is anticipated in the 2016 budget, to be announced on 26 February.

So beyond the flaws in measurement, the main risk of the World Bank research on South African inequality is its ghastly political bias. If the alleged improvements to poverty and inequality rates are accepted by the ruling elite as valid, their tendency to cut social spending on (bogus) grounds that already, ‘South Africa can claim to have one of the world’s most redistributive public purses’ is that much more tempting.

Resistance is bubbling up everywhere but the realm of ideologically poisonous research cannot be avoided.

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban. A version of this blog was published on the CounterPunch website.

In the Spirit of Marikana: Disruption, Workers and Insourcing

ROAPE

February 18, 2016

In a penetrating analysis of events in South Africa, Jonathan Grossman writes that the student mobilisations have directly challenged the myth of the rainbow nation. They have done this through direct action, disruption and interference bringing, as did workers at Marikana. This is still a movement confronted by the ongoing search for alternatives to the oppression and exploitation of everyday life, facing challenges of every kind including patriarchy and class issues in their own movement. But a new legacy of struggle is being built as an old legacy of struggle is being rediscovered and rescued. There is a narrative that says students did for workers what workers could not do for themselves, or that it was students who gave workers voice. However the reality was a deep solidarity between workers and students taking action. It was not about giving voice. Instead, it was about building the strength to force managements to do what they would not themselves have done. Grossman argues that the struggle for free education and against outsourcing in the public sector at the universities has to become the struggle for free education at all levels and free basic services. The struggle against the commodification of labour in the universities has to be made a struggle against outsourcing and for a living wage across the whole of the public sector. It can become part of a resurgence of the workers movement which can and must be in alliance with students and youth in struggle. This articles argues that these are themselves requirements for the renewal of the workers movement. The student movement is enriching all struggles in South Africa with a totalising vision of decolonising, bringing a resurgent vitality to the student worker alliance.

By Jonathan Grossman

In February 2015, a student activist at the University of Cape Town (UCT) symbolically defaced a statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes with human excrement. He did this as part of an emerging pattern of ‘poo-protests’ which had been developed in working class communities in the struggle for sanitation and other necessary services. RhodesMustFall (RMF) became the mobilising slogan and then the tag of a movement which rapidly developed from a focus on the statue to a much deeper broader focus on the continuing legacy of colonialism in everyday life.[1] In the face of mounting protest, the university authorities removed the statue. As exams approached in October 2015, students mobilised across many campuses around the demand for no fee increase. In the face of massive protests at Parliament, the Union Buildings administrative seat of government, and ANC national headquarters, a nervous government was rapidly forced to concede. Students have continued with a broader struggle for free education, as part of a deeper struggle for a de-colonising transformation across tertiary educational institutions and society more broadly. This is now reflected in a national movement #FeesMustFall.[2] In demanding free education the students are taking their place in a broader movement centred in working class communities, focused on services necessary in everyday life.

At one of the first RMF meetings, before the statue had in fact been taken down, outsourced workers in the UCT Workers Forum[3] brought their own set of ongoing demands, putting it like this:

Black workers built UCT with their own hands in the colonial past. Black workers were oppressed at UCT in the Apartheid past. Black workers were retrenched and outsourced at UCT in the post-Apartheid past. The first people to know about racism and sexism and exploitation at UCT are the black women workers. It is there in workers lives every day. … It cannot be that students can only learn if workers suffer. It cannot be that academics can only do their work if workers suffer. It cannot be that there is only education if capitalist bosses can make a profit. But it is all happening here at UCT. It must change for workers. Workers together we must change it….We are angry….Together in struggle and solidarity, workers and students we must change UCT! The time for the strike is coming.

The workers demanded what was in effect a doubling of wages ‘as a step towards a living wage in the spirit of Marikana.’ And continued, ‘This is a public sector institution. There should be no capitalist companies brought here to make profits. Education must be free. UCT must directly employ everyone working here. Workers must know that their job is safe. With decent working conditions. And comfortable lives. Outsourcing must end. The bosses must go. All the workers must stay.’

In 1999 UCT had been the first South African university to outsource.[4] The driving force was Mamphela Ramphele, later to become an Executive Director of the World Bank. Public sector outsourcing takes the provision of goods and services necessary to the functioning of even a very limited public sector in the capitalist economy and makes it dependant on private companies reaping a profit. It has a particular significance where the goods and services may not have been available to the working class – making extension of provision dependant on profit and private capitalist companies. The institution becomes an agent for redistributing public funds to the private sector. Underpinning the opposition to outsourcing was an opposition to privatisation in general and the vision of a public sector tasked with meeting needs as opposed to providing profits.

Since outsourcing, worker demands had been taken to UCT in petitions, marches, protests and memoranda. Workers were met with a standard response: ‘UCT has investigated and decided to continue with outsourcing. Insourcing is now off the agenda.’ UCT was met with a standard response from workers. ‘It might be off your agenda. It stays on our agenda.’ In 2015 the demand for insourcing was adopted by RMF, echoed across a growing number of campuses and brought together in a national day of action on October 6. Despite some unevenness and inconsistency, the struggle of students embraced the struggle of workers for insourcing. On 24 October in the face of growing student and worker action, UCT became the first university to formally agree to insourcing.

Faced with ongoing campaigning by workers over years since initial outsourcing, UCT had been forced to concede that outsourced workers could meet and protest on campus. This removed one of the basic advantages to management of outsourcing: the displacement of disruption. It had also been forced to recognise that wages set in law and paid by the companies it hired were too low – and had interfered to set higher minimums. This was extended to other conditions of service and employment, like maternity leave, in a Code for Service Providers, initially adopted in 2006. This too removed some of the cost-cutting claims of outsourcing and the denial of responsibility for what happened to workers on whom UCT depended. UCT had been forced, even while denying this, to act visibly like ‘the real boss’, to recognise that the demand for insourcing would not go away. In the word ‘forced’ above is years of campaigning and protest action by workers against UCT. No number of reports, investigations or announcements did anything to change that. In the course of this struggle, most workers at UCT had become members of the main COSATU public sector National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU) despite COSATU policy which allocated them to different ‘industrial unions’. This sometimes involved forcing their way into the public sector union, a process which over years faced a combination from union officialdom of hostility, indifference, inefficiency, suspicion albeit with significant cases of individual support. In the face of similar responses, there had been formed a NEHAWU Joint Shop Stewards Council (JSSC). Over years, management faced ongoing pressure from ordinary workers, sometimes actively drawing support from their union, in an unyielding, vigorous, relentless persistence of the demand for direct employment and associated improvements. As exams approached in October 2015, there were two additional factors which forced UCT’s hand. One was a less visible legal process of workers united across all outsourced companies and through the NEHAWU JSSC declaring a dispute with UCT around wages and related issues. Although there were legal complexities which obstructed this process, and although it had become bogged down in internal bureaucratic problems inside the union, UCT knew that the move towards a strike was serious, and that it was planned to begin on the first day of exams, 26 October.

Above all else, there was the overwhelmingly visible consistent support from mobilised students who were determined and successful in generating the disruptive action at UCT which had not yet come from workers and which had forced management to close the campus in the weeks preceding exams.

On Friday 23 October, UCT management responded to the union dispute demands in the normal way. The following day, without any additional ‘research’, UCT abandoned its position, indicating its intention to pursue insourcing. In the face of continuing student and worker action, this was rapidly escalated into a decision to insource – again, without any of the research which they had always invoked as necessary. What workers had been saying for years was confirmed: UCT was responsible for outsourcing. UCT had the power to insource.

The myth of the rainbow: mists over continuities in everyday life

Change in South Africa came with continuities. The new South Africa for workers at UCT, as elsewhere, had meant outsourcing: retrenchments, cutting wages, reducing benefits, undermining unions. Over time, the issue of whether things were better or worse post-apartheid was an abstraction. Nothing was good enough. Across the working class more generally, generations saw their hope stolen; new generations saw hope being denied. Workers lost confidence that there could ever be solutions. Theft and denial of hope became mistrust – of politics, politicians, and most importantly of themselves each other, their organisations – any organisations.[5]

Insourcing agreement at UCT and the agreements which followed in other places are arguably the biggest single advances in the struggle against privatisation in post-apartheid South Africa. Those advances followed ongoing struggles in working class communities and the Marikana and platinum strikes. At Marikana, workers brought to the fore in the private sector and mines what had sometimes surfaced and sporadically developed in the public sector and communities. At its core was a developing anger and resistance to the continuities of apartheid experienced in post-apartheid working class life. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) was emboldened by Marikana to become the first COSATU union to break from the ANC and the SA Communist Party. Students were emboldened by Marikana and the NUMSA break. Workers at universities were emboldened by students. Once this began to coalesce into an ongoing movement, everyone was emboldened by the movement. Black consciousness was revitalised by students from a history supressed by the myth of a rainbow post-racist South Africa in their thirst for what was inspirational and liberatory in everyday life and struggle.

The myth of the rainbow mists over the deep social structures of racial oppression which are denied, patriarchy which is trivialised, and the deeply socially structured exploitation of the working class which is rendered as ‘poverty and inequality’ – stripped from the capitalist relations and private ownership of which it is the product. This ideologised obfuscation has also been disguised by an earlier sustained myth of convergence: the part of official history which says that an anti-apartheid opposition of capital and the anti-apartheid struggle of the working class converged into a common unified struggle for non-racial democracy. [6]

The capitalist class post-apartheid has been able for much of the time to exploit this myth and promote its protection through invisibility – including of its own culpability under apartheid as the agent and beneficiary of systematic gross violations. Marikana and the platinum strikes were decisive in placing the role of capitalists at the fore and shattering the myth of convergence. The student mobilisations have directly challenged the myth of the rainbow. They have done this through direct action, disruption and interference bringing, as did workers at Marikana and other strikes, a new, qualitatively enriched challenge to the demobilisation on which the ‘negotiated settlement’ partly depended. Pursuing this challenge has necessarily meant confrontation with an ANC now running a bosses’ government in tightened collaboration with COSATU and the SACP. This is still a movement confronted by the ongoing search for alternatives to the oppressions and exploitation of everyday life, facing challenges of every kind including patriarchy and class issues in their own movement. But a new legacy of struggle is being built as an old legacy of struggle is being rediscovered and rescued.

UCT management forced to insource

UCT, the first university to outsource was also the first university forced by this movement to meaningfully and seriously commit to insourcing. Ordinary workers who laid the path of a sustained struggle against outsourcing now embraced and made real solidarity and support for students.

In this long history, workers interfered with the decisions and the control of management, but using only a small part of their strength. What was missing – and repeatedly acknowledged as necessary – was serious and decisive disruption. Initially separated in different unions, workers were under the stranglehold of a class collaboration Labour Relations Act which purported to give the right to strike and in fact, in much of lived experience, actually took it away. And while class collaboration meant a stranglehold of legalism and proceduralism, the necessary disruption was obstructed. Coming together in one union in dispute with UCT placed united strike action on the agenda. While that was happening, the students brought the disruption of direct action which forced the university to shut down. There was interference, and challenge which went wide and deep. Faced with the relentless demand, the threat of disruption coming from workers, the reality of disruption created by students and a deepening worker-student solidarity, UCT was forced to become the first institution to concede to the demand for insourcing.

After the about-face of UCT management, the JSSC signed an insourcing agreement without taking it back to workers for a mandate. At a time when protest action had closed UCT, they endorsed management’s call for a return to normal functioning – an end to student and worker action. Workers were left uncertain about the content of the agreement and the actual meaning of insourcing. They were also angered by the lack of democratic practice and the interference with a deeply felt solidarity with students in struggle. At a massive general meeting, workers had the chance to show this. Although the JSSC began the meeting with an apology, it was too little too late. For a moment, workers took their union back into their own hands through the displacement of the shop stewards, the ejection of the official, and the creation of a Workers Committee. It was the organic capacity of the working class in mobilised action. Even at the moment when they themselves make such assertion and defiance possible, workers were pressed to look for easier options: undermined and denigrated by everyday life, there was a quest for someone who knows better, is more important, with more resources, who can seemingly achieve what workers have been unable to achieve. The possibilities for substitutionism were there and could only be dealt with by consistent political respect for workers.

The Workers Committee seemingly disappeared almost before it appeared and has not functioned. The moment did not last, open to different forces who took advantage of it. This was a very particular situation but these were ordinary workers, taking the opportunity to express what is widespread across the working class. They created an extraordinary moment. When the same thing happens and is more sustained, widespread, firmly in the hands of workers, when it coalesces, is coordinated, affirmed, celebrated, organised together into a movement of solidarity and confidence of workers in themselves and each other, we will have the renewal of the workers movement which South Africa so desperately needs.

At times like that, workers leap over ‘stages’. Muck is stripped away, cast aside, and the organic capacity is freed. In fact, it is not exactly leaping over stages. It is doing in a moment what they have heard and thought about for years. It is all condensed and concentrated into that moment. It is why the protection of the moment becomes so important. And its protection can only be secured by its development. As one message in the social media platform of the UCT Workers Solidarity Committee said, ‘The hands of workers do all the work. Everything we need comes from those hands. The struggle of workers goes forward when its workers who take that struggle into their own hands.’

Workers have been struggling for insourcing at UCT for years. They have been fighting that struggle directly against UCT as the real boss for years. They have heard and said for years that UCT is not a good boss – there is no such thing. But it is the real boss. They have been hearing and saying for years that insourcing must come because there is no university without the hands of workers. On this basis, when UCT decided to insource – no worker said thank you. Instead they said that insourcing must not be about changing uniforms, it must be about changing lives. And their response was focused on that: what about job security, wages and conditions? Everyday control? Will life be different? It was a simple message, echoing a mood across the working class and its struggles against the continuities in everyday life, even in the context of a changed South Africa.

It is part of the hegemony of neo-liberalism that across the political spectrum, politics has been reduced to economics. Economics has been reduced to arithmetic. It is all about the arithmetic of managing the crisis: how many litres of free water? How much free electricity? How many jobs created by the Extended Public Works programme? How many children in school? How many new places in tertiary institutions? The arithmetic is deployed to make the argument that things are worse or that things are better. None of this addresses the encounters with oppression and exploitation, uncertainty, theft and denial of hope, yearning for something better. Increasingly amongst ordinary workers is a single message: it does not matter if things are better. Better is not good enough. Nothing is fine. Nothing is good enough.

No arithmetic can deal with that. It demands vision of alternatives. Solutions. And for that to happen, there must be an agent. Where is the power to create real solutions to all these problems? Where is the power to create something that is qualitatively different?

Decommodification: the basis of alliance and future struggles

Using the apparently objective criterion of merit as reflected in school results, the ‘top’ universities are already deeply and essentially elitist. There is a funnel of the deeply entrenched inequalities of the racist patriarchy of capitalism which serves to filter and exclude. At historically white universities, black students have illuminated the everyday meaning, particular depth and breadth of institutional racism. Many have challenged patriarchy. For increasing numbers of black students, extended access to higher education post-apartheid actually means being forced into unemployment or insecure employment with certificates and debts. All of this fuelled the student movement. For workers in the universities, it means being forced into employment where you and your work are denigrated as ‘non-core’ and unskilled because you do not have enough certificates. And you also have debts because of this. These worlds can connect directly when the black student and the black outsourced worker encounter each other in struggle. The certificate does not mean problems are solved. The absence of the certificate does not mean the educational institution can or does function without you. The pervasive ideology insists on both. And the university itself is core to the development, maintenance and dissemination of the ideology.

This tends to be reinforced by the ideologised conventional wisdom which represents the rolling capitalist crisis as a problem of a skills deficit to be resolved by skills development. For the individual, education is presented as the route out of poverty. For the society, skills development is the route out of unemployment. This ideoligisation does its job of both reflecting and distorting underlying realities, existing in the context of the competitive individualism and the drive for competitive productivity which capitalism demands. In the lived experience of an outsourced worker, the university is not in fact a site of education but a site of work and exploitation. And there is something particularly galling when the worker sees and must deal with the commodification of education: searching for school fees and associated costs for children in ‘township schools’, knowing that you can enter the university to clean but will not be able to qualify to enter to learn. Knowing that there is no university without the labour of workers, but having to deal with the drive to push down the costs of employing those workers as if they are an unwelcome expense in the way of education. In different ways, something similar is replicated across the public sector where the hands of workers are essential to providing the service, but the workers themselves are denigrated as non-core.

While it can be less brutal than the case of other services, commodification of education is pervasive. Its outcome includes a deep alienation of the human being whose value and contribution is reduced to a mark, a certificate and place in the queue to serve capitalist masters. In the case of the outsourced worker, forced to queue to serve capitalist masters, the value and the contribution are reduced to a poverty wage, insecurity, and the absence of the certificate. The skills deficit becomes a deficit of a human being. The commodification of education meets the commodification of labour and it leaves human beings denigrated, alienated and damaged.

The commodification of labour is an historically primary commodification, core to the very existence of capitalism. The struggle for free education is in continuity with all the struggles in the public sector – all the struggles against privatisation. It is about the commodification of services including health, education – and labour. In the recent struggles we have seen a meeting point: the commodification of education meeting the outsourced workers, a brutal instance of the commodification of labour.

Often forced into unemployment and debt; forced into employment and debt, the distance between the middle class black student and the black worker is bridged by the black student from working class backgrounds. As much as this makes for daily dehumanisation, so it also opens the door to solidarity and generosity of sharing between workers and students in struggle. A moment in history has occurred. Students are fiercely determined to define and own that moment. Like all the best moments of struggle, its value will lie also in the ways in which it is shared beyond and outside of itself with all who can live without oppression and exploitation. As such, it is a moment which belongs also to workers who brought to it their own demands together with a deep sense of solidarity and support for students. Social media was crucial to the building of the movement and the solidarity which it developed. It can also be a beguiling instrument of solidarity. One of the features of this student movement was the extent, depth and determined perseverance of support from workers for student activism and student demands. Of course this was shared by those student activists. The point about workers is that it went far beyond the activist layer. It was the ordinary outsourced worker who expressed, felt and showed a deep support and care for the students in struggle.

Building and renewing legacy of struggle

These insourcing victories against privatisation in the public sector remind us, as did workers who do not say thank you, that they are belated defence against an attack, not a step forward to a better life. Central to the theft of hope had become the loss of confidence amongst workers that there can be any real solution, and above all else, that they and their own class and self-organisation can bring that solution. There are emerging narratives which combine, although they come from very different places, to promote this. Amongst part of the left, the assessment is that students achieved in days what the trade unions/labour movement/workers failed to achieve in 20 years. From UCT management, it is the assessment that this struggle has been about giving the voiceless a voice. They merge all too easily into an assessment, sometimes stated, more often implied and hinted, which suggests that students did for workers what workers could not do for themselves, or that it was students who gave workers voice.

The fact is that after years of relentless campaigning and demands, one relatively limited instance of disruption, with some national co-ordination across campuses, succeeded in doing what 20 years of non-disruption had failed to achieve. At UCT, in the immediate event, that disruption came primarily from the actual action of students and the threatened action of workers. At University of Johannesburg, in the event, it came primarily from the action of workers. In both situations, there was the basis and the reality of a deep solidarity between workers and students taking action. It was not about giving voice. Instead, it was about building the strength to force managements to do what they would not themselves have done, forcing people to listen when they exercised power to ignore and reject what they heard. In all of the struggle and with all of the demands, there was only one which was rejected out of hand by UCT management: the demand that it guarantee workers the right to strike with protection, whether or not they followed the restrictive procedures of the LRA. Any management has the power to do that. UCT management in fact was forced to exercise that power under apartheid. But the demand was about freeing the power of workers – shackled as it is by myriad of constraints including the provisions of the post-apartheid law. As it happened, it was only when a tiny part of their power was freed by action that workers could seriously move forward, even if only in defence against the earlier attack of outsourcing. Extended into the broader struggle, it is the power of workers to stop production. It goes far beyond that – in the hands of the working class is also the power to produce. This is not about consultation, participation or voice. It is about who decides, on what basis, through what process – about power itself. Extended as it must be beyond the university and beyond the public sector, it is about the alternative to capitalist class rule – working class rule.

A living wage is not decommodification. But it is a necessary part of the workers struggle for decommodification. And, focused as it is on the core of the processes of capitalist profit generation, it can be turned into an organised challenge to profit making and made a transitional part of the struggle for socialism. It is interference with the ordinary processes of bourgeois price-fixing: about who decides the price, through what process, and according to what criteria. In the everyday of capitalism, all of these questions are given answers which reflect capitalist power derived from private ownership and protected by the state. In the hands of the workers movement, it is workers who decide, using workers democracy in organisation and action, on the basis of needs.

In the individualised, hierarchical structures of racist capitalist society, free education at the tertiary level is all too easily turned into an elitist privilege. In the capitalist logic of the market, if costs are not recovered in education, they have to be recovered elsewhere – a redistribution of commodification. In the hands of the workers movement, it can be turned into an essential transitional part of the struggle for socialism. It means decisions about all social services – including education – being brought into the hands of a renewed workers movement, pursued through organisation and action, and based on needs. And in the hands of such a renewed workers movement it cannot stay at the level of tertiary education, nor can tertiary education be based on who to exclude, not who to include, or about how to serve profits, rather than how to serve needs. The struggle for free education and against outsourcing in the public sector at the universities has to become – be made – the struggle for free education at all levels and free basic services. And the struggle against the commodification of labour in the universities has to be made the struggle against outsourcing and for a living wage across the whole of the public sector. It can become part of a resurgence of the workers movement which can and must be in alliance with students and youth in struggle. These are themselves requirements for the renewal of the workers movement.

As much as the public sector is corrupted, diseased and undermined, it embodies a residual sense of welfare, the common good, public services, the needs of the community. Pursuing the struggle against commodification on the basis of social needs provides further grounding for vision – a vision which once did and once again must extend to the end of private property which is the basis of commodification. The struggle against apartheid was precisely that – about negation. The future was about a vision, increasingly called by the name of socialism. It is happening again in a movement characterised by negation: decommodification, disalienation, anti- privatisation. The student movement is enriching it with a totalising vision of de-colonising, bringing a resurgent vitality to the student worker alliance.

There are accumulating signs of resurgence, a history which has not yet happened, but is being made possible and forged on the ground, carrying with it the hope of a new centre of authority in a renewed workers movement. Even in the face of the numerous challenges and obstacles, institutions, laws and politics of class collaboration are increasingly being directly and consciously defied and rejected. It may be visibly highlighted in a left movement amongst prominent individuals and groups of leaders – as in the NUMSA moment. But to be successful it must be shaped and depends on a series of struggles – events and processes of organisation and mobilisation – on the ground. It will have to build on struggles which have happened and are happening: characterised by solidarity, direct action against the capitalist class, willingness to disrupt in defiance of law and agreement, demands based on needs, workers control, organic organisations of struggle of the working class rank and file, and a vision of complete negation – an end to all forms of oppression and exploitation. In that, it is actually also renewing and revitalising the best of the legacy of struggle of the past. Above all else, it is creating a new experience which is allowing workers to build a resurgent confidence in themselves, their class and their capacity to collectively create solutions with trustworthy allies in struggle. It is best called the spirit of Marikana – not just a commission, a massacre or a tragedy, but the grounding of a workers’ future.

Jonathan Grossman in Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town. His writing and research focuses on the public sector and alienation in the everyday experience of working class life under capitalism. Jonathan is also an activist and socialist, assisting the organisation, mobilisation and struggles of outsourced worker in the public sector.

Notes

[1] See https://www.facebook.com/RhodesMustFall/?fref=ts&ref=br_tf; see also https://www.facebook.com/UCTLSF/

[2] See https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/feesmustfall?source=feed_text&story_id=1100412756669927

[3] On the UCT Workers Forum see Grossman, J. (2009). Renewed organising in the outsourced pubilc sector workplace of the global village: The experince of the Workers’ Forum at UCT. In V. Cornell, New forms of organising (pp. 202-217). Cape Town: International Labour Resource and Information Group Group .

[4] See Grossman, J. (2006). World Bank Thinking, world class institutions, denigrated workers. In R. Pithouse, Asinamali: University struggles in post-apartheid South Africa (pp. 93-108). Asmara: Africa World Press.

[5] This view of the transition is elaborated in Ngwane, T. and Grossman, J. (2011). ‘Looking back moving forward: Legacies of struggle and the challenges facing the new social movements. In Essof, S. and Moshenberg,D. Searching for South Africa (pp. 160-189). Pretoria: University of South Africa.

[6] On the myth of convergence see Grossman, J. (1997). The right to strike and worker freedom in and beyond Apartheid. In Brass, T. and van der Linden, M. Free and unfree labour (pp. 145-172). Bern: Peter Lang.

South Africa’s May 1968: Decolonising Institutions and Minds

ROAPE

February 17, 2016

By Heike Becker

Throughout 2015 students at South African universities rose up in a mass revolt. They made their voices heard from their campuses, from the streets, from the grounds of Parliament in Cape Town, and the lawns of the Union Buildings, the seat of national government in Pretoria. Students brought down a symbol of colonialism and exploitation, they fought against fee increases in higher education, they called for the end of racism and of neo-liberal outsourcing practices of support services at universities. Students demanded free education in more than one sense. As students are returning for the new academic year, and tensions have already flared up again at some universities it is appropriate to mull over the movement’s practice and theory.

Decolonizing institutions, decolonizing knowledge, decolonizing the mind; have been the tags of the new generation of activists who have dominated South Africa’s Fanonian moment, the term coined by the political philosopher of post-colonialism, Achille Mbembe, who is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”) in Johannesburg. The Fanonian moment, as Mbembe explains, occurs at a time when twenty years or so after the country’s initial independence a new generation enters the social scene and asks new questions regarding the incomplete decolonisation. South Africa’s student activists have asked new questions, they have challenged the country’s old and new establishments; they have also forged new alliances and have engaged new political forms. Their activism has drawn on new, distinctive theoretical intersections combining recent theories of intersectionality with the writings of Frantz Fanon, the militant philosopher of revolutionary, anticolonial humanism.[1]

From #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall

The South African student uprisings attained much attention when mass protests took place across the country in the second half of October 2015. The mobilisation did not occur on the spur of a moment though but was the catalyst of a politicisation that had spread-out on South African campuses over the preceding six months. In March, students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) had begun a forceful campaign, dubbed #RhodesMustFall to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed, which had been sitting on the university grounds in a prominent position for the past eighty years. It all started with an individual activist’s spectacular deed. On 9 March UCT student Chumani Maxwele threw a bucket full of human faeces onto the statue of a seated Cecil Rhodes.

From the initial defacing act, the movement got traction fast. Three days later, a well-attended meeting took place to discuss the future of the statue. A week later students marched to the seat of the UCT administration and demanded a date for the removal of the statue. While Vice-chancellor Max Price was addressing the protesters about the removal of the statue, students occupied the Bremner administrative building, which they renamed Azania House, thus expressing an ideological affiliation with Pan-Africanist positions. Over the next few weeks, students occupied the building, supported by academics from UCT and other universities in the Cape Town area, along with members of the public. Azania House became a space of vigorous and at times controversial discussions around issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Activists successfully disrupted everyday business on the UCT campus, and initiated a debate about racism and demands to decolonise education. The movement succeeded to find the support of the university’s governing bodies; on 9 April the objectionable item was removed under the thunderous applause of a large crowd who had gathered to watch this significant moment.

The movement quickly spread to other campuses, mostly those of the former white-liberal English-medium universities, such as Wits and the small university in the Eastern Cape, which bears the name of Rhodes, but also the conservative, Afrikaans, still overwhelmingly white Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. Throughout the South African winter and spring of 2015 students campaigned for changes of their universities’ symbolism; they demanded the removal of colonial memorials and renaming of buildings. They called for the appointment of more black academics. And they insisted upon the reform of curricula, which they said conveyed racist and colonialist forms of knowledge and ignored, even scorned African intellectual experience.

Ostensibly the mass protests that shook South Africa in October and November 2015 were in response to an increase of tuition fees. Protests started at Wits. This time around they rapidly spread to universities across the country; now protests also affected institutions with a predominantly poor, working class student population, such as the University of the Western Cape (UWC) or the University of Johannesburg (UJ); even students at former technikons, such as the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) joined in.

On 23 October, while thousands were protesting at the Union Buildings, the national government conceded that there would be no fee increases. This, partial, victory was not the end of the protests. While at some universities the end-of-year exams were concluded in a volatile return to ‘normality’, at others, protests continued well into November. Local circumstances now prevailed, e.g., demands for debt relief for poor students. At a number of institutions, the attention shifted to alliances with lowly-paid workers, such as cleaning services and security staff. Under the hashtag #EndOutsourcing the protests called for higher wages for low earning university staff who worked for private contractors and for them to be employed directly by universities.

The uprising of a new generation

The student protests arose in a situation, which has been marked by growing socioeconomic inequality in post-apartheid South Africa and by the ANC government’s policies of neoliberal restructuring. The positions of both poor students and lowly-paid labour have been rendered precarious in the corporate university, which has fast been emerging with the neoliberal restructuring of the higher education sector. On the other hand, an increasingly corrupt patronage politics has been the hallmark of the Zuma administration.

South Africa’s new affluent elite, with connections to those in government, ostensibly asserts its Africanity. As pointed out by Nigel Gibson (2011), a neoliberal (or: corporate) Black Consciousness discourse prevails today. This exclusionist ideology has little in common however with the militant Black Consciousness philosophy, associated with Steve Biko. Rather, in the ‘new’ dispensation the ‘dehumanising and derogating attitudes formerly projected towards all Blacks are now channelled towards the Black poor’.

Put together, these developments have caused a disaffection of urban youth with the ANC government. For many youngsters the older generation’s claim to respect on the basis of struggle credentials doesn’t hold true anymore.

Students constituted the first social movement since the end of apartheid that engaged mass protest on a national scale. However protests have been occurring in informal settlements and townships ever since 2004, generally dubbed ‘service delivery protests’ because of their demands of access to services such as sanitation, new land occupations, etc. Forms of disruptive activism had been practised in the struggles of the urban poor. On many occasions roads have been blocked, human faeces were dumped at the Cape Town International Airport already during the so-called ‘poo protests’ in June 2013 etc.

Now it was university students, however, who threw human excrements to emphasise their point, who blocked roads, who occupied – and ‘renamed’ – buildings on their campuses, who held mass meetings, which forced senior university administrators into negotiations. Campuses across the country were brought to a standstill just before the end of the year exams were about to start.

The students took protests to the streets. Black and white students together marched through Cape Town’s Central Business District toward the national parliament. Some broke through the police cordon and entered the parliament precinct. In downtown Johannesburg thousands descended upon the ANC headquarters. At the end of this extraordinary week in October, thousands demonstrated in Pretoria at the Union Buildings. Protests and marches took place throughout the country, in the major cities, but also in smaller towns, and even from rural campuses.

Behind the protests were, generally, not the official Student Representative Councils (SRC) [2]. The ANC and its allies, such as the South African Students Congress (SASCO) repeatedly articulated suspicion of independent student politics. The protesters were manipulated by ‘political masters with dubious motivation’ for their own ends, which they considered a ‘sinister danger’ was claimed, for instance, by Thabo Masemola, who in his day job writes speeches for Higher Education Minister Blade Mzimande (Sunday Tribune, 3 January 2016). Nor did groups of the South African organized left play much of a role. Conspicuous was the silence of the massive National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), which has, since withdrawing its support from the ANC in 2013, called for an alternative movement of the working class. The uprisings were organised by independent, informal and flexible leadership structures. As indicated by the hashtag names of campaigns, social media played a major role; some quipped that the revolution was being tweeted.

Decolonisation & intersectionality

Central to the movement’s pursuit was the aim of ‘decolonizing the mind’. Palpable was the hunger for new forms of knowledge, the extraordinary return to critical black intellectual traditions, to black feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies. Activists drew particularly on theories of intersectionality, which they fused with radical thought, which was inspired by the writings of Fanon.

The notion of intersectionality was central to discussions and practices. One placard, for instance, held up next to the contested Rhodes statue proudly proclaimed: ‘Dear history, this revolution has women, gays, queers & trans. Remember that.’ Later in the year new alliances of students and workers, the recognition of class as a profound category for understanding a grossly unequal, racist society. The concerns of socioeconomic inequality, in turn, inspired new intellectual desires. Mbembe observed that to the preoccupations of critical black studies were now being added a renewed critique of political economy, which aimed at bringing together, dialectically, questions of race and property, of class and inequality, and of identity and lived experience.

Steve Biko was read again by young students who regarded his call to autonomous Black action as still relevant for contemporary South Africa. Most notably however the new generation celebrated the writings of Fanon, taking up especially his philosophical critique of racism and insisting, as he had done, the need for Blacks to seize recognition. At the peak of the #RhodesMustFall campaign UCT students put Fanon’s notion of mutual recognition as a precondition of true humanism into practice when they walked around campus with ‘recognize me’ written on placards hanging around their necks. This extraordinary initiative got students and academics engaged in vibrant conversations about inclusion and decolonisation. Radical critics furthermore took up Fanon’s incisive comments on the perils of the postcolonial period as applicable for post-apartheid South Africa. Fanon has been engaged by the student activists also for his militant critique of the normative compulsion to non-violence.

Violence and media representations

‘Violence’ became a significant topic in several respects. During the #FeesMustFall protests police responded initially in a heavy-handed manner while media reports condemned the ‘violence’, allegedly perpetrated by activists’ blocking of roads. With the mass marches though much of public opinion came out in support of the protests.

Even then media reporting sharply distinguished between the protests of students at the country’s formerly ‘White’ universities and at those institutions whose students are mostly of poor urban and rural backgrounds. While the protests at universities such as UCT and Wits were given fairly sympathetic attention, the incomparable experience of violence and repression that struck historically ‘Black’ institutions received almost no consideration. If the mainstream media reported at all on what was happening at universities such as UWC, the protesters were portrayed as ‘savages’ and prone to violence. For instance, it was inaccurately asserted that UWC students had danced around smouldering timbers inside the Student Union. Unfortunately, there were indeed violent turns at some institutions during the last stage of the protests, provoked and escalated, to an extent, by what some observers described as failures of executive management.

South Africa’s 1968 moment?

Broadly sympathetic veteran activists, academics, commentators, and members of South Africa’s organized left have at times criticized the ideological orientations of the young students for what they considered an over-emphasis on racial identity politics at the expense of class analysis. Mbembe, who had accompanied the movement with critical analysis and engagement, worried in a widely publicized blog that ‘decolonization’ was ‘in truth a psychic state more than a political project in the strict sense of the term’ (Mbembe 2015). Student activists of course refuted this suspicion.

Some commentators have dubbed the protests ‘South Africa’s May ’68 moment’. In 2015 in South Africa like in Paris 1968, a nation was forced to ask itself what it believed in, and in both instances, the answer seemed to be something like, ‘We can’t really say, but we can’t stomach what the grey-hairs are telling us to believe’ (Bloom 2015). If anything has become crystal clear through the protests it is this: The ANC has completely lost touch with many among the new generation, who are challenging the country’s post-1994 dispensation.

Heike Becker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, where she directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity.

References

Kevin Bloom, We’ll always have Paris: South Africa’s May ’68 moment’, Daily Maverick, 25.10.2015.

Nigel Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg 2011.

Achille Mbembe, ‘The State of South African Political Life’, Africa is a Country, 19.9.2015. <africasacountry.com/2015/09/achille-mbembe-on-the-state-of-south-african-politics/>

Notes

[1] Christopher Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press and Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015.; Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution, London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. A different version of this article will appear in German in iz3W No. 353 (March/April 2016)

[2] There were some notable attempts by the ANC to ‘hijack’ the movement with the aim of incorporation; this was the case especially during the Pretoria march of 23 October.

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Thank you, Martin

Towards Socialist Democracy

Tributes to Martin Legassick

Kenya’s Cartels: the Power of Bandits in Suits

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised

The London Fix: Price-Making in Capitalism

In the Spirit of Marikana: Disruption, Workers and Insourcing

An interview with David Hemson – lessons from the South African...

Ruth First Prize: James Musonda’s radical analysis of the 2021 election...

When the IMF and World Bank visited my father

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