05.09.2007

Icon of imperialism

Latief Parker, former militant of the Unity Movement (South Africa) and a member of the Campaign for a Marxist Party, looks at the reality behind the new Nelson Mandela statue

The 'toyi-toying' statue of Nelson Mandela erected on August 29 in front of the British houses of parliament was aptly placed alongside the great British imperialists, Lord Palmerston, Cecil John Rhodes and general Jan Smuts as a dedication to their most famous servant in Africa.

It is now a well established fact that protracted negotiations between the ANC in the UK and Europe and big business and politicians led to a deal being struck behind the backs of the oppressed people of South Africa to set the stage for the continuation of exactly the same economic system that had ruled before, once apartheid had ended. This would allow the multinational companies to continue and in fact increase their economic grip on the country.

In recognition for services rendered, the African National Congress was placed in office - not in real power, which was reserved for the European Union, US and Japanese corporations that retained full control of the economic reins. Nelson Mandela as the representative of this deal is therefore revered and deified by the elite of the west for enabling them to continue to exploit the considerable wealth of South Africa while appearing to provide democracy and freedom for the oppressed.

These political machinations allowed the real capitalist-imperialist class to disappear from political view - a trick designed to re-entrench the capitalistic-imperialistic system and depoliticise, confuse and betray the working class in cahoots with the leadership of the trade union movement. The ANC government pursued a policy of 'black economic empowerment' (BEE), that led to a few 'revolutionaries' like Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa and Mac Maharaj becoming rand billionaires. But these BEE companies control less than one percent of the market capitalisation of the Johannesburg stock exchange, the 99% remaining lying in the hands of foreign corporations, hedge funds, insurance companies, banks and companies like the Anglo-American group, headed by the Oppenheimers.

The ANC was the instrument of finance capital and the mechanism of control over the working class, aided and abetted by the South African Communist Party, in the deal hatched at Kempton Park over the period 1990-1994. The next step was to put tried and tested subservient blacks in office, but the commanding heights of the economy were still in the hands of the capitalist class. No substantive change occurred. The profits of the multinational companies trebled in the first five years of the 'new South Africa'.

According to The world factbook, compiled by the CIA and published by the US government, after the first 13 years of the ANC 50% of people now live below the poverty datum line, and life expectancy has dropped to 42.45 years. The infant mortality rate has increased to 59.44 (it was 45 in 1990). This in a country rated as 'middle income', with the 10th largest stock exchange in the world. The GINI coefficient, which is an indication of the income differential between the highest and lowest earners, now largely distinguishes between the rich black elite and poor blacks, whereas before it was between rich whites and poor blacks.

Racism still permeates all aspects of life in South Africa, and is used at every opportunity to promote African blacks, while it is common cause that 'coloured' and 'Indian' people never suffered under apartheid and therefore do not need to be considered as victims. Strangely enough, the group responsible for keeping the apartheid government in place over all the decades - ie, the whites - have gained the most out of this process, and continue to have the best of the political deal in South Africa: hence their worship of Mandela and support for Mbeki.

Access to healthcare, education, water, electricity, sanitation, jobs and housing is available to those who can pay for it, as even water supply has been privatised. In certain areas of the Eastern Cape, for example, unemployment is at 60% - the government claims that the national average is 30%. There is no social security network, so that unemployed people have no source of income, but rely on handouts from family and friends.

The present SACP came out of the former CPSA (Communist Party of South Africa). The CPSA was founded on July 30 1921 by the International Socialist League, Social Democratic Party, Durban Marxist Club, Cape Town United Communist Party and pro-Zionist Socialist Society. The executive was all white, under the chairmanship of Bill Andrews. After World War II, this party sent 'white' 'native representatives' to the all-white parliament.

Throughout its history the CPSA collaborated with the liberal wing of racist imperialism in South Africa. From the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, this party collaborated with the National Party and its Nazified Ossewabrandwag. It followed a policy of exclusion of people of colour in order to recruit Afrikaner members. The party endorsed Stalin's 'Moscow trials' and executions of Trotsky's comrades, Trotsky's own execution in 1940 and all Stalin's policies until his death in 1953. The CPSA never endorsed Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in 1956. It fought, often with violence, against the anti-imperialist National Liberation League in the late 1930s and the Non-European United Front, which it destroyed because the CPSA supported the Smuts government's racist-imperialist 'war effort'. It supported Stalin's position on the national question, making deals with the national bourgeoisie.

The SACP-ANC alliance therefore had no difficulty in becoming the executors of finance capital, while continuing to portray themselves as the liberators of the people in the name of freedom and democracy. They have allowed state assets to be privatised, have stopped subsidies on foodstuffs, education and healthcare They followed the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and IBRD to the extent that Trevor Manuel is lauded as being the best finance minister in the developing world.

It is a reflection of this philosophy that Mandela in 1995 was quoted in the national newspapers as saying that 'education is a privilege and not a right.' The system adopted was that of outcomes-based education (OBE), imported from Canada and advised by the Canadians at great financial cost. It had not worked in Canada or Australia, but was adopted by the ANC government in spite of opposition from domestic educators. It did not work in South Africa and they are currently making changes to the OBE programme.

Demands for improvement for schools, hospitals, medicine, electricity, provision of sanitation and water are met with the standard reply from government that there is no money. Government says that there are no resources because of the 'legacy of apartheid', yet R80 billion was easily found to spend on arms.

It is the scandalous failure to provide anti-Aids treatment that has resulted in the ANC presiding over the death of nearly 1,000 people a day from Aids-related deaths and the fact that 21.7% of the adult population is HIV-positive. It should be remembered that when the ANC government took office in 1994, South Africa did not owe the IMF or World Bank a penny, yet today it owes billions, which will have to be repaid by the taxpayers of the country without anything to show in terms of improvement of their living standards.

One of the true legacies of apartheid that the ANC has not begun to address is that of black adult, especially female, literacy and the appalling treatment of women (South Africa has one of the highest incidence of rape in the world). This is partly to blame for the fact that both infant and adult mortality rates have increased in the past 13 years, coupled with the failure to address the issue of the Aids epidemic.

Furthermore, the ANC government spent R104 billion in the first six years on forward cover losses, which benefit the multinational corporations, not the vast majority of the population, who must pay taxes in numerous forms. The state has been subsidising banks and mining houses so that shareholders could get bigger dividends while Mandela told the working class to 'tighten their belts'.

They blame all these contradictions on globalisation and the free market, but the market is for the capitalist class who are its beneficiaries, whereas socialist planning is for the proletariat. They do not say that capitalist-imperialism is the cause of poverty in South Africa, as in the rest of the world, where 1.5 billion people live on less than $1 a day and another 1.5 billion live on less than $2 a day.

As of December 31 2006 the surplus in the 20 major banks in the world was $17 trillion cash on demand. What we need to do for the future of mankind is to move away from the capitalist-imperialist system towards socialism, not reform the capitalist system, because that solves nothing. $1.2 trillion is spent on the military-industrial complex in the world - these enormous resources could be made available for socially necessary projects.

The South African state remitted to the imperialist countries $7 billion in 2004 as dividends, profits, management and franchise agreements, besides the over-invoicing of machinery and capital imports to South Africa, for the year 2000, according to the Reserve Bank statistics. One of the first things the ANC-SACP government did was to allow multinationals such as De Beers, Old Mutual and Rembrandt to externalise their capital base - eg, on the London and New York stock exchanges.

Joe Slovo, as chairman of the SACP, Chris Hani, Mac Maharaj, Joe Radebe, Sam Shilowa, Geraldine Fraser Moleketi, Ronnie Kasrils and many other 'freedom fighters' were all part of the Kempton Park settlement. They also supported the policy of Stalin on the national question, making deals with the national bourgeoisie sub-serving imperialist powers - as in China, where Stalin advocated a deal between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. This policy later caused millions of communists to die in Iran, Indonesia and Iraq.

It is crucial to understand the economic world downturn of the 1970s that followed the Bretton Woods conference, where the Keynesian policies and the gold standard adopted after World War II were abandoned (in 1972) in favour of military expenditure under the pretext of the 'cold war' against the USSR. Many third world countries incurred crippling foreign debts because they were used by first world countries to fight proxy wars, and spent huge amounts on buying arms, which sustained the military-industrial complex.

In this atmosphere it became apparent that the capitalist system could not afford apartheid any more and it would be cost-effective to install the black nationalists and their allies into office. The deal was that the black nationalists would look after the affairs of state without altering the economic structures. This would thereby save the racist elite, largely white, from what they thought would be a bloodbath as a result of the then rising militancy and political consciousness of the black oppressed at the time of the strikes and the Soweto uprising of the 1970s.

It was this crisis in the imperialist capitals and not Mandela that brought about the abolition of apartheid in 1994. It was the very National Party government that abolished the pass laws, together with the Group Areas, Mixed Marriages and Job Reservation Acts, before Mandela's government took office in 1994.

The ANC-SACP government follows the social democratic and Stalinist theory of 'stages' in history and in political struggles of workers and oppressed peoples. This theory, last associated with the Stalinist liberal, Harold Wolpe, in comfortable 'exile' in London, consists of various stages. These stages, however, were peculiar to Europe and were alien to Marx's concept of Asiatic despotism, which typified not only Asian, but also African and pre-Columbian American history.

The SACP theory of stages was not only generally ahistorical for most of the world, but conceived to justify collaboration with the racist elite, multinationals and the 'black empowerment' bourgeoisie in a so-called democratic state after a 'democratic' revolution. The SACP stages died in the 1994 tragic farce of the 'new South Africa', when even the reconstruction and development programme of the ANC was abolished.

There is a great potential for Marxism, Leninism and the permanent revolution principle of Leon Trotsky in South Africa. This triplex forms the basis for internationalist anti-imperialist struggles leading to socialist revolutions.

People looking for an alternative solution in South Africa will learn in hard life that socialism is not a dream but the logical end of an internationalist anti-imperialist struggle. On the one hand, this anti-imperialist class struggle is the only possible road to socialism. On the other hand, socialism, because of its anti-imperialist birth pains, so to speak, will, of necessity, have as its first task the destruction of the imperialist, including racist, structures on its path and in its way.

The anti-imperialist class struggle for socialism is the highway out of the present disastrous trajectory of capitalism. To guide our feet onto and along this highway we need a good understanding of Marx's dialectic philosophy and historical materialism.

It is a myth that the struggle for socialism will be led from the third world, but it will have to be fought in collaboration with the working class of the metropolitan countries. This is the internationalism of the working class that we will struggle to achieve.