THOUSANDS of mine workers have downed tools at South Africa’s Marikana Lonmin mine after an AMCU union leader, Mawethu Steven, was shot dead at the weekend, along with a number of other workers who took part in the recent strike movement. This movement was met by the South African state which organised the Marikana police massacre, in which 34 miners were killed, and many more wounded.
Yesterday, the workers were singing and dancing in the streets as the whole of South Africa watched their struggle, with more and more sections of workers and youth joining the developing strike wave.
Hospital workers, busworkers and now telex workers are taking strike action, or are about to.
In Phillipi, workers who were evicted from their homes on May Day by the riot police have said that they are continuing with their struggle and have been inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the Marikana miners to call their settlement ‘Marikana’.
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed youth who have no future under South African capitalism are also drawing inspiration from the struggle of the Marikana miners, and are joining revolutionary movements to put an end to South African capitalism.
They cannot be intimidated by any number of state-organised assassinations. They say that, decades after the end of the Apartheid regime, the black masses are worse off than they were under De Klerk.
They say that the only people who have benefited materially from liberation are the South African ruling class, which has managed to hang on to and increase its wealth, and a host of former liberation fighters, who formed a black government that went over to defending South African capitalism, and then advanced from its ranks officials who went on to become billionaires, acquiring a huge stake in keeping South African capitalism going, and with it the enslavement of the working class and the rural and city poor.
These former liberation forces opposed the strike action of the Marikana miners and continue to support the actions of the capitalist state to subdue the mass movement of the working class.
None of this has been forgiven or forgotten by the millions of the working class and the poor. This is why South Africa is now one huge powder keg that is exploding, with massive anger directed at the ANC leaders in the government and the Cosatu trade unions, who have massively prospered out of maintaining South African capitalism and the continued oppression of the working class.
In fact, ‘liberation leaders’ such as Cyril Ramaphosa who founded the South African NUM, rapidly made their peace with the bosses and became billionaire capitalists, with as much to lose from a socialist revolution as did the bankers and bosses that ran the Apartheid system.
As far as the masses are concerned, the revolution was halted before it could develop from a national liberation struggle into a socialist revolution, with the working class taking power.
It was the fatal halting of the revolution by the ANC leaders and the Communist Party that condemned the masses to decades of more poverty, bad or no housing, and appalling health care, along with poor education.
All of the working people of South Africa understand that this is the case.
This is why the Marikana uprising will grow and grow, regardless of repressions and massacres and assassinations.
The working class and the poor and the youth will salute the memory of those who have fallen, such as Mawethu Steven, by building a revolutionary party that will complete the revolution that Ramaphosa and others sought to abort.
The working class is now pushing forward. The South African socialist revolution that will put the working class into power, will revolutionise the whole of Africa, and will be a vital part of the world socialist revolution.
This is the struggle that is now underway. There is no stopping it as the Ramaphosas and the others are learning.