THE SOUTH AFRICAN ANC government and its state apparatus have taken a very clear class stand, alongside international capital, with their decision to charge 270 striking platinum miners with the murders that were carried out by the ANC police force, who shot many of the miners in the back, on behalf of the UK-based Lonmin Company.
The decision by the state to proceed and use its notorious ‘common purpose’ doctrine from the apartheid era, to bring charges against the victims of the police attack, the striking miners, confirms that the so-called state inquiry into the massacre is an attempt at a complete cover-up.
t has only been announced to gain time for the police and the state, and if it ever concludes will decide that the murderers are the heroes, and that the oppressed, now facing life sentences, richly deserve their fate.
With the decision to bring these murder charges the ANC is establishing that it is an instrument of the international bankers and the bosses. It is signalling to them that whatever measures are necessary to impose what the bosses want onto the working class, the ANC and its state apparatus is committed to taking them.
They have entirely thrown their lot in with that of the the capitalists. The miners are to be made an example of, in an attempt to do what the Apartheid state apparatus always sought to do, create an atmosphere of terror and acute fear, in which only the bravest would dare to even question the power of the state.
Never has a declaration of class loyalty been made more boldly or more provocatively than with the levelling of these ANC murder charges.
The purpose is to try to drive the working class and the youth, that are breaking from the Cosatu-supporting trade unions and the Communist Party, that keep the ANC in power, back under the political control of these organisations, by terror tactics.
However, the working class is standing fast, the miners are continuing with their strike action for 12,500 rand a year and the strike actions are spreading.
What is required now is the organisation of an indefinite general strike to force the dropping of the murder charges against the miners, and to see that the police and the ministers involved in the organisation of the massacre are charged with murder.
In fact, the time is right for the organisation of a massive revolutionary youth movement, from the millions of youth in the townships, with no jobs and no future under the ANC and capitalism, as the basic fighting force under the leadership of the revolutionary party, the South African section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to mobilise the entire working class and rural poor in a socialist revolution, to bring down the ANC government and bring in a workers and small farmers government in South Africa.
This will expropriate the bosses and the bankers, put the industries under workers control and then workers management, and expropriate the land for the use of the rural poor, to develop a socialist planned economy to satisfy the needs of the working class and to give youth a real future.
This is the only way to turn the ANC-led political revolution – in which the masses overthrew apartheid, but placed a black bourgeois government into office, that served the bosses just as loyally as de Klerk ever did – into a social revolution where the working class takes the power and breaks the back of capitalism in south and southern Africa as part of the socialist revolution throughout the continent.
As in every other continent, capitalism is finished in Africa, and must be replaced by the working class taking power throughout the continent, replacing bankrupt capitalism with a Socialist United States of Africa, that can realise the enormous potential of Africa through a socialist planned economy with the working class in charge.
This is the struggle that is on hand, after the open declaration of the ANC that it stands with the oppressors against the oppressed and that it serves Lonmin and the other monopolies and not the working class and the rural poor.
The masses have now had enough of the ANC-Communist Party betrayals. Now is the time to go forward to the socialist revolution in South Africa and throughout the continent.
