The life and struggles of Nelson Mandela

– Where now for South Africa?

 A Coventry Socialist Party meeting

Wednesday, 11th December, 7pm, Coventry SQ Club

WhiteFriars Street, Coventry City Centre, CV1 2DT

A Coventry Socialist Party meeting to mark the sad passing of Nelson Mandela. Looking at the events & struggles in which he was part of, and the explosive situation developing within South African society today. Below is a piece written on his death, by members of the Socialist Party’s Sister organisation in South Africa – Democratic Socialist Movement.

Mandela’s legacy

Heroically leading ANC to power but struggle tragically into dead end

Weizmann Hamilton and Thamsanqa Dumezweni, DSM (CWI South Africa)

The Democratic Socialist Movement offers condolences to the Mandela family and all those in South Africa and internationally who are mourning the passing of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Mandela is a symbol of the struggles and sacrifices of millions over decades to end apartheid and win democracy. The hopes and aspirations of that heroic struggle – with the mighty black working class playing the decisive role – were invested in Mandela. We recognise him for his role in the defeat of one of the most odious systems of oppression and exploitation in history.

Mandela’s death on Thursday 5th December 2013 brings to an end a period of pre-mourning that commenced six months ago when he was admitted to hospital with a recurrent lung infection. His lung condition had its origin in the tuberculosis he contracted during hard labour in lime quarries on Robben Island where he served the first part of his 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid. For many his death will be seen as a welcome relief from the suffering he endured as he lay completely incapacitated in his Houghton home in Johannesburg, not least because it was widely believed that the ANC leadership was cynically keeping him alive with the intention of pulling the plug to derive the maximum benefit from his death in the 2014 elections.

Integrity and commitment

Mandela is rightly revered worldwide as a statesman ranking along great figures of history like Mohatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He is recognised for his role in the defeat of one of the most reviled regimes on the planet and one the most odious systems of oppression and exploitation in history. He has acquired the status of universal hero not least be­cause of his demonstration in practice of his commitment to self-sacrifice for a noble cause – the national liberation of the black majority. This is captured by his declaration, during the Treason Trial, that non-racialism was a principle that he was prepared, ‘if needs be’, to die for.

His willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause is borne out by the fact that he personally undertook the task of establishing the ANC’s armed wing, Umk­honto weSizwe (MK), secret­ly paying visits to countries like Algeria to seek support for the armed struggle lead­ing him to be installed as MK’s first commander-in-chief. His steadfast refusal to accept any kind of com­promise from the apartheid regime in exchange for his freedom, choosing instead to endure twenty-seven years of incarceration, reinforced his stature as a man of prin­ciple and integrity committed to the service of his people in sharp contrast to today’s unprincipled, corrupt politi­cal elite that is seen by many as trampling on the legacy he entrusted to them.

The current ANC leadership falsely portrays the defeat of apartheid as the more or less inevitable culmination of the continent’s oldest liberation movement’s hundred-year long march to victory. There can be little doubt, however, that, in terms of commitment, political and ideological out­look, strategy and tactics the ANC that endeared itself to the masses is the one of Mandela, of the second half of its cente­nary rather than it’s first.

Mandela transforms ANC

As part of a new generation of young leaders in the 1940s, inspired by the colonial revo­lution that shook imperialism at the end of the second world war, Mandela and his com­rades, principally, Walter Si­sulu and Oliver Tambo, shook up an ANC leadership whose character until then was deter­mined by the road along which they had sought salvation for the oppressed – begging the Queen of England to release the black oppressed from bondage while pledging, as subjects, their undying loyalty to her and the British empire.

From an organisation whose methods consisted of pleas and petitions, Mandela and his comrades, having taken con­trol of the ANC Youth League and adopting the 1949 Pro­gramme of Action, converted the ANC for the first time into an organisation committed to achieving its objectives by mass action – defiance cam­paigns, bus boycotts, anti-pass law protests and stay-aways.

From this followed the adop­tion of the Freedom Charter, whose radical demands re­flected the extent to which the working class masses had come to influence the outlook of the ANC, in contrast to the pre-Mandela leadership’s hostile distance correspond­ing to their class separation. From that point onwards up to liberation in 1994, it was possible for the antagonistic class aspirations of the work­ing masses and those of the middle class – the aspirant black capitalist class – held in common subjugation by the white minority regime, to co-exist in the same organisation under the same programme in mutual commitment to over­throw white minority rule. It would not matter… until it mattered. Until, that is, the time came to implement the Freedom Charter.

The next elections will be tak­ing place twenty years since the end of apartheid. The historic 1994 elections symbolised the triumph of the national libera­tion struggle – the lifting of the yoke of racial oppression and the opening of the doors to a society in which black people, now a head taller, could stand side-by-side with their white counterparts as equals. As­sured by the promises of a bet­ter life for all and the strength of their numbers, the black majority embraced the gen­erosity Mandela championed towards the white minority. Mandela’s leadership, it was believed, had averted a racial civil war thought unavoidable.

With a leadership that demon­strated an apparently single-minded determination to lead its people to freedom, there was no reason to doubt the promise of a better life for all to come. Through Mandela’s leadership, a new democratic dispensation based on what has been described as the most progressive constitution in the world had been ushered in. On its foundations there would arise a new, ‘rainbow nation’, from which racial oppression and its companions – pov­erty, illiteracy, disease, home­lessness – would be banished ‘never again’, in Mandela’s words, to return. In this new SA there would be equality of opportunity for all in a nation ‘united in its diversity’.

Reality looks different

As SA completes the second decade of democracy, real­ity looks rather different from the promise that came out of the negotiated political settle­ment worked out in the early 1990s. Although the racist FW De Klerk government duly va­cated the seat of political pow­er for the ANC, and the ANC has been regularly returned with large majorities, for the overwhelming majority little has changed.

A striking feature of the eu­logising of Mandela, is the conflict­ing class interests converging around what appears to be a common public manifestation of a nation united in its pre-mourning.

The ‘nation’ that Mandela has bequeathed is as unrecon­structed today as it was before the end of apartheid, disaggre­gated into its two main social forces – the working class on the one side and the capitalist class on the other. SA is re­puted to be the most unequal society on Earth. As many as 8 million are unemployed, 12 million go to bed hungry, mil­lions are excluded from decent education, health and housing.

The ruling ANC elite is ex­hibiting the same character­istics as the one which it re­placed – corrupt, inept and with an insatiable appetite for self-enrichment and power. Even worse, whilst condemn­ing apartheid order policies as a crime against humanity, the representatives of the new elite are displaying a growing infatuation with similar meth­ods of rule as their predeces­sors, taking shelter behind re­pressive legislation such as the Secrecy Act, the National Key Points Act and the Traditional Courts Bill to secure their grip on power, and to keep the na­tion in the same sort of dark secrecy and repression as the apartheid regime.

Instead of the fulfilment of the dreams of equality and pros­perity the masses had been led to believe lay in store for them under democracy, its benefits have accrued to only a tiny minority. Far from the promised ‘Rainbow Nation’ of equals, SA today resembles, as ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe has himself admit­ted, ‘an Irish Coffee’ – black at the bottom, on top a thin layer of white cream sprinkled with chocolate.

A common theme running through the overwhelming ma­jority of evaluations of Man­dela’s life is that the conduct of his successors in the ANC leadership and his squabbling family represent not just a de­parture from everything that Mandela stood for, but con­stitute the desecration of his legacy. Does this assessment stand the test of close scrutiny?

Capitalist commentators would have us believe that SA would have been if not the country of our dreams then at least a better place had Man­dela’s successors continued to walk in his footsteps. The truth, however, is that this is precisely what they did, at least in respect of all the funda­mental questions of policy on which the ANC’s near twenty-year rule has been based.

Mandela and Gear

Mandela played the decisive role in the abandonment of the Freedom Charter and every­thing the ANC was believed to have held sacred until then. The decisive break was the adoption of the Growth, Em­ployment and Redistribution (Gear) programme in 1996. Gear was to bring the ANC government incrementally into open collision with the work­ing class – in the workplace, townships and squatter camps and tertiary education institu­tions and introduced the first serious strains in the Tripar­tite Alliance. The difference between Mandela’s reign and that of all his successors is more in style than substance.

Somewhat unfairly, for in­stance, Mbeki, who proudly proclaimed himself a Thatch­erite, has come to be person­ally associated with Gear. Yet Gear was adopted under Man­dela’s presidency. In spite of the fact that Mbeki spearhead­ed the adoption of Gear, he did so with Mandela’s (and that of the rest of the ANC leadership including the SACP’s) full blessing.

Within the period between his release in 1990 and the ANC’s accession to power four years later, Mandela’s position swung from an unswerving commit­ment to the Freedom Charter and a reaffirmation of its na­tionalisation clauses at its heart as fundamental to ANC policy, to a declaration, well before the ANC entered parliament that privatisation – at the heart of Gear’s original strategic ob­jectives – was now the ANC’s fundamental policy. It was Mandela that led the ANC to power with the promise of jobs for all, and the same Mandela who declared in parliament af­ter Gear had been adopted that the ANC government was ‘not a job-creating agency’.

In performing this heart transplant, Dr Mandela did not consult the patient. Whereas the adoption of the Freedom Charter was the culmination of the most democratic process in the ANC’s history, the adoption of Gear was profoundly undemocratic. The Freedom Charter was the summation of the in-puts of thousands of workers in urban and rural areas and of people of all walks of life across the country whose proposals were written on pieces of paper and forwarded to the Congress of the People there to be incorporated.

Gear on the other hand was developed behind the backs not just of the membership, but of the majority of even the ANC cabinet itself. It was adopted and implemented in 1996, and presented to the member-ship at the ANC’s Mafikeng conference in 1997 as an accomplished fact after it had already been approved by big business.

As former MK leader, SACP Central Committee member and Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils confirms, in an admission astonishing for its honesty, under Mandela’s leadership, the ANC betrayed the ‘poorest of the poor’ to domestic capital and imperialism in the Codesa negotiations.

Business pacts with Mandela

Quoting Stellenbosch University’s Sampie Terreblanche, Kasrils writes: ‘…by late 1993 big business strategies – hatched in 1991 at the mining mogul Harry Oppenheimer’s Johannesburg residence – were crystallizing in secret late-night discussions at the Development Bank of South Africa. Present were South Africa’s mineral and energy leaders, the bosses of US and British companies with a presence in South Africa…’

What transpired out of these ‘late-night discussions’? Kasrils reveals: ‘Nationalisation of the mines and [the commanding] heights of the economy as envisaged by the Freedom Charter was abandoned.’ Kasrils describes how the ANC leadership prostrated itself before domestic capital and imperialism: ‘The ANC accepted responsibility for a vast apartheid-era debt… a wealth tax on the super-rich to fund developmental projects was set aside, and domestic and international corporations, enriched by apartheid, were excused from any financial reparations. Extremely tight budgetary obligations were instituted that would tie the hands of any future governments; obligations to implement a free trade policy and abolish all forms of tariff protection in keeping with neo-liberal free trade fundamentals were accepted. Big corporations were allowed to shift their main listings abroad.’

The roots of the ANC leadership’s latter-day disenchantment with the constitution, and their growing exasperation with the parliamentary democracy itself, are to be found in the trampling of their own internal democracy.

Contrary to the propaganda of the old regime, the ANC leadership, despite its embrace of the SACP, was never infected by the ‘disease’ of communism. Mbeki, whose ideological outlook has falsely been portrayed as fundamentally at variance with that of Mandela’s, in stating such was merely echoing within earshot of the working class what Mandela had made crystal clear already back in 1956, within a year of the adoption of the Freedom Charter, and later at the Treason Trial in 1964.

He did not want the Freedom Charter to be confused with socialism. The Freedom Charter, he explained ‘…is by no means a blue-print for a socialist state. It calls for the redistribution, but not nationalisation, of land; it provides for nationalisation of mines, banks, and monopoly industry, because big monopolies are owned by one race only, and without such nationalisation racial domination would be perpetuated despite the spread of political power.

As we have pointed out before, the ANC’s support for nationalisation has never been as a step towards the abolition of capitalism, but to use the state to accelerate the development of a black capitalist class in much the same way as the Nats did for the development of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie. As Mandela explained in the Treason Trial: ‘The ANC’s [nationalisation] policy corresponds with the old policy of the present Nationalist Party which, for many years, had as part of its programme the nationalisation of the gold mines which, at that time, were controlled by foreign capital.’

Mandela before elections

The ANC finds itself at this point in history, not because it has been derailed from the historical path it plotted for itself, but because this is where, given its history, social character and historical purpose, it has always been headed.

The ANC’s surrender of the mandate of the Congress of the People at Codesa was no deviation from this path. In fact it was the fulfilment of the ANC’s historical mission. It was signalled in Mandela’s Treason Trial speech where he made clear the leadership’s preparedness to compromise even on the fundamental principle of majority rule based on one-person-one-vote by offering to negotiate for a limited number of seats for blacks for a fixed period to be followed by a gradual increase after a fixed period. He signalled this further by engaging in secret negotiations with representatives of the apartheid regime’s intelligence services and big business as early as 1985 for which he had no mandate from his own organisation.

The ‘talks about talks’ that followed in the form of more high level engagements with the regime were preceded by talks with members of the political establishment in 1987 in Dakar Senegal. The abandonment of the armed struggle without any consultations with the MK cadres or even Chris Hani, proved that the armed struggle had always been nothing more than a propaganda of the deed tactic to force the regime to the negotiating table. Codesa was the logical sequel.

The Nobel Peace prize was conferred on Mandela and De Klerk to perpetuate the myth that the negotiated settlement was the fortuitous confluence of the conversion on the road to Damascus of an Afrikaner-led capitalist establishment and a Mandela-led ANC leadership magnanimous in its victory. But as even Mandela felt obliged to point out, the country was liberated not by him or the ANC leadership but the working masses themselves.

If imperialism and the capitalist establishment in SA exerted pressure on the apartheid regime to negotiate with the ANC it was because they understood that the struggles of the masses – from the 1973 strikes in Natal to the 1976 uprising of the youth to the insurrectionary movement of the 1980s spurred by the establishment of the UDF and in particular the socialist consciousness of the workers of Cosatu – posed a mortal threat to their system. Had white minority rule be overthrown by an insurrection of the masses, the future of capitalism itself would have been threatened. The behind-the-scenes negotiations with Mandela had convinced the more far-sighted strategists of capital that Mandela was a man they could do business with. Mandela had never contemplated the abolition of capitalism. His problem was not capitalism per se, but a capitalism that favoured one race against the other. For this the ruling class is forever grateful to Mandela.

The ANC leadership was never committed to thoroughgoing transformation of SA society. Far from desiring the over-throw of capitalism, it sought accommodation within it. With capitalism now in the throes of its worst crisis since the 1930s, the incapacity of this capitalist government to fulfil the expectations of the people has become more and acute. The crisis of capitalism is reflected now in the ANC itself.

New workers’ party

Almost as if conspiring to affect symmetry in the life cycle of the party he led so heroically and that of Mandela himself, history appears to have determined that Mandela’s passing should coincide with the implosion of the ANC.

For the ruling ANC elite Mandela’s passing is certainly a welcome distraction from the latest blows to their credibility as the Public Protector’s reports just released contained damning findings of corruption and maladministration against two of his ministers to add to the ongoing saga of the provisional report into corruption associated with the more than R200m spent on president Zuma’s private residence in Nkandla, Kwa-Zulu Natal.

No doubt the ANC leadership will use Mandela’s death to try and revive the fortunes of a party that has alienated the working class to the point where the special congress of the National Union of Metal Workers scheduled for 13-16 December, is widely expected to pass a resolution not to support the ANC in the 2014 elections and to withhold its R8m contribution from its campaign coffers. Against the background of a survey of shop stewards political attitudes revealing that 67% of Cosatu shop stewards would support a workers’ party should Cosatu support it. The passing of such a resolution would reverberate across organised workers within and beyond Cosatu, almost certainly split the federation itself and deal a severe blow to the ANC’s electoral performance. That is why Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini, leader of the pro-Zuma capitalist faction in Cosatu, has wasted no time in cynically using the occasion to appeal for unity for “Mandela’s sake”.

But any benefit from the sympathy of the masses will be at best temporary. For all Zuma’s eulogising of Mandela as SA’s “greatest son”, for many the country is being presided over by its worst. So low is Zuma’s standing that his closest advisors are reported to hold him in barely concealed contempt cringing at the thought that the ANC’s most revered leader is to be buried by its most reviled, who with his shameless embrace of Zulu chauvinism had revived the very tribalism that the ANC was created to combat, clearing the way for the relatively progressive nationalism of the ANC to follow in the ignominious footsteps of the racist reactionary nationalism of the apartheid Nationalist Party. In burying the founder of the modern ANC, the first by the last, Zuma will be burying the modern incarnation of the party itself.

With him will be buried the last rays of its halo as a liberation organisation. The death of Mandela will most likely accelerate the process of the ANC’s decline. Around him the ANC was still able to cohere, to bask in his reflected glory. With the Workers and Socialist Party, already with the support now of the National Transport Movement – the 50 000-strong break away from Cosatu’s corruption infested SA Transport and Allied Workers Union, – acting as a beacon, the way is being cleared for the emergence of a mass working class alternative with a socialist programme.

Thus whilst the capitalist class mourns the imminent collapse of its Codesa salvation, the working class has awoken to the sounds of the guns of Marikana – the party they believed for so long to be their own is in fact the party of the bosses. What happened in reality was an exchange of political captains of capitalism; the racist white government was replaced by a ‘non-racist’ democratically elected government based on the black majority.

The establishment of the Workers and Socialist Party represents an historic step for-ward: the reclamation by the proletariat of its class and political independence, its liberation from the ideological and political prison camp of the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance in which it was incarcerated for nearly two decades. The march towards a socialist SA, from which the working class had been diverted since 1994, has now resumed.

The capitalists and their spokespersons are justified to be worried by the death of Mandela. Even if some of them are shedding crocodile tears, the point is that he gave SA capitalism a new lease on life. It is almost twenty years now since his ANC came to power. These twenty years have consistently revealed the brutality of capitalism – poverty, unemployment and inequality to which his ANC leaders refer as triple challenges. Under capitalism they cannot do away with them. Only under socialism will the workers rid society of these capitalist evils. It remains for the workers and youth of today to follow what is the best example set by Mandela – selfless and determined struggle – but also to learn that in the struggle we are fighting a compromise with a class enemy is impermissible, because they inevitably lead to betrayals of the masses as capitalism cannot meet their aspirations. More importantly, they must learn that the working class should only rely on its independent political leadership, organisations and programme to transform society in its own interests and those of the poor, for a socialist South Africa and a socialist world.