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<TD class=createdate vAlign=top>Friday, 06 December 2013 19:15 </TD></TR>
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<P><IMG border=0 align=left
src="http://www.socialistsouthafrica.co.za/images/stories/mandela1.jpg">Mandela’s
death on Thursday 5<SUP>th</SUP> 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.</P>
<P>The Workers and Socialist Party offers condolences to the Mandela
family and all those in South Africa and internationally who are mourning
his passing. 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.</P>
<P>For many his death will be seen as a welcome relief from the suffering
he endured as he lay completely incapacitated in his Houghton,
Johannesburg, home, 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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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”.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P><STRONG>The article was written in August when Mandela was seriously
ill.</STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG></STRONG></P>
<P style="TEXT-ALIGN: center"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: medium"><STRONG>Mandela’s Legacy</STRONG></SPAN></P>
<P>Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is rightly revered worldwide as a statesman
ranking along great figures of history like Mohatma Ghandi 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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>Mandela transforms ANC</STRONG></P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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’.</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>Reality looks different</STRONG></P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>A striking feature of the eulogising of Mandela as the country and
the world awaits his passing, is the conflicting class interests
converging around what appears to be a common public manifestation of a
nation united in its pre-mourning.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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 hin layer of white cream sprinkled with chocolate.</P>
<P>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?</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>Mandela and Gear</STRONG></P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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’.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>Business pacts with Mandela</STRONG></P>
<P>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…’</P>
<P>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.’</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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 con-trolled by
foreign capital.’</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>Mandela before elections</STRONG></P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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 <EM>per se</EM>, but a capitalism that
favoured one race against the other. For this the ruling class is forever
grateful to Mandela.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P align=center><STRONG>New workers’ party</STRONG></P>
<P>Almost as if conspiring to affect a symmetry in the life cycle of the
party he led so heroically and that of Mandela himself, history appears to
have determined that the imminence of Mandela’s demise should coincide
with the implosion of the ANC.</P>
<P>There is little doubt that the ANC’s fast eroding cohesion will
accelerate after Mandela’s passing. With him will be buried the last rays
of its halo as a liberation organisation.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>The capitalists and their spokespersons are justified to be worried
about the possible 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 capital-ism they cannot do away with them. Only
under socialism will the workers rid society of these capitalist evils. It
re-mains 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.</P></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>