Fighting words on the wave of mass strikes initiated by miners in South Africa
'Every eye shall be upon your church more especially your prophet. We live in the mystery and do things in the mystery, we no longer struggle with any faith. Through mysteries, you can change anything, a man into a woman ansd a woman into a man, yet the world will never understand this mystery.'
'The man of God called a guy called Thabiso and by the power of God he commanded him to turn into a horse and indeed it happened. The man of God then rode on it.'
'During the Sunday service on the 31st of August 2014, the man of God, Lesego Daniel, prayed for a bottle containing petrol to be turned to pineapple juice '
Petrol is poisonous to the body and ingesting it causes symptoms which include breathing difficulties, throat pain, burning in the oesophagus, abdominal pain, vision loss, vomiting (with blood) and bloody stools.
It also causes dizziness, extreme fatigue, convulsions, body weakness and unconsciousness, which members of the congregation appear to display in the video.
A few of the followers who consumed the 'petrol', ended up collapsing on the floor, displaying symptoms similar to those listed above.
These stories may disgust or amuse civilised readers, but it would be mistaken to imagine any separation between them and the roots of civilisation. Far from a barbarous perversion of the True Religion by superstitious savages, these demonstrations by African Christians, which are far more widespread than their more extreme versions might suggest, demonstrate before all else the magic and miracle at the heart of every religion. In fact, the magic and miracle in the Bible, Torah and Quran are far closer to the shenanigans of these modern-day prophets than are the rites of their pre-conquest ancestors. The religion of African savages, like those of European savages, involves a far more down to earth magic, based on the natural cycles of birth and death, growth, harvest, decay and renewal, the progression of the equinoxes and the measured spin of sun, moon and stars around the elliptical pivot of intergalactic motion. Pagan religion is not nearly as concerned with bizarre prestidigitation as is monotheism, whose believers seem particularly susceptible to dazzling sleight of hand performances. The Autumn first-fruits ceremonies and Spring fertility rites (by which transvestite virgins 'doctored' the fields, incidentally ensuring healthy circulation of the agricultural gene-pool through the mixing of the local seed-stock with those from neighbouring areas) that were once widespread practices among all agricultural peoples in Southern Africa, resemble the rituals performed by Medea at Colchis (the chthonic mysteries of the Mother Goddess that formed the spiritual centre of the pre-Hellenic Pelasgian world which later produced the Nike of Samothrace, long celebrated as the greatest masterpiece of ancient Greek sculpture) far more than they do the cheap tricks of contemporary pastors and their role-model, Jesus Christ.
AMCU President Joseph Mathunjwa is seen greeting mine workers as he arrived at the Wonderkop stadium to address thousands of AMCU members concerning the news of possible retrenchments in the platinum mining industry.
Just as contemporary South African Christianity demonstrates the fundamental tendency of all religion, so the spectacle of politcal-economy is revealed particularly clearly in its South African variant. Far from a backward misinterpretation of modern working-class organisation by an ignorant, semi-savage population, the religious character of proletarian representation demonstrated in the relation between the good shepherd of AMCU and his flock simply recapitulates the religious character of the modern spectacle in general, as ably described by Thorston Verblen in The Liesure Class, regarding the capitalist class, and by Guy Debord in The Society of The Spectacle, regarding the working class.
A priest-ridden society will naturally also be a cop-ridden, politician-ridden, union-bureaucrat-ridden one.
Two links
http://www.cnbcafrica.com/video/?bctid=3906733556001
http://www.iol.co.za/business/opinion/a-breakdown-of-the-collective-bargaining-system-will-result-in-chaos-1.1785008
Also:
'The month-long strike in the metal sector knocked back the third-quarter growth rate of the South African economy by more than half of what it could have been, the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) said on Monday.'
Also:'The large-scale strikes circling the world in recent years, and with growing intensity in the past year are best understood as political movements. They involve a significant part of the working class and those sectors in a position to fight effectively that, by striking, are often expressing directly the demands or experiences and needs of a larger part of the class or population in general. Thus, the strikes by the Mahallah textile workers, at Egypt’s largest factory, in 2006 and 2008 addressed the general questions of wages and by implication the inequality created during Mubarak’s neoliberal regime, and the issue of the dictatorship itself. Every strike in Vietnam or China addresses by default the inequality and low wages that fuel those countries’ export engines and at the same time the dictatorships and restrictions on strikes by political means that workers must of necessity challenge if they are to act at all. Nearly every strike in South Africa is implicitly a criticism of the governing of that country since Apartheid, of the relation of the trade union federation COSATU and the ruling ANC, and inequality that is now the world’s worst, dwarfing even that of the Apartheid-era itself. ...The strikes themselves are best seen as a response to and a deepening of the political crisis of national governments and of global governance itself. In and of themselves they are so far not revolutionary... Nowhere has the working class sought on its own power to take over both the workplace and government in its own name... But... there is a close and dynamic relationship between strikes and revolution, today every bit as much as in the past.' (Wildcat)
'Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and
fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in
individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting –
all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one
another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of
these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical
details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution.
The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle…It is the living pulse-beat of the
revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving wheel.' (Luxemburg)
The Strike Starts Where
The Buck Stops: Here
What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.
-- Antonin Artaud
Your style is too lofty ever to be of service to
the madmen who in discussing the gravest questions of our social
order, use paving-stones as their weapons. But see to it, sir, that
ere long they do not come, in spite of you, to seek for ammunition in
this formidable arsenal, and that your vigorous metaphysics falls not
into the hands of some sophist of the market-place, who might discuss
the question in the presence of a starving audience: we should have
pillage for conclusion and peroration.
– JA Blanqui
to PJ Proudhon, 1
May 1841
Introduction
1.
Two years ago, at the
beginning of 2012, I indicated the possibility of an eruption in the
platinum mines and called on others to join me in assisting the
coming struggle. This was communicated to dozens of contacts around
the world through email, on the websites and social media, but due to
various factors -- most notably the inadequacy of my own
communication, its limited distribution and the
disinclination/impotence/intelligence of its readers – the proposal
came to nothing.
Six months later, the eruption erupted, though not in any way I had expected. 100 miners were shot down in Marikana, while in the unrest which followed 100 000 workers went on wildcat strike across the country, from the mines of the north-east to the farms of the south-west. Now, the longest mass strike in the history of the country has just collapsed after five months of bitter struggle, with 70 000 miners waging courageous battle against starvation & division only to settle for less than peanuts. Of course, like the 'national liberation' of 1994, this pyrric-victory was portrayed as 'mission accomplished' by the official representatives. The power of the ruling organisation of appearances to turn reality on its head was demonstrated at a mass rally on 12 June 2014 where the offer of the bosses -- which was not even in the same solar-system, let alone ball-park, as the demand for which the workers had hitherto been willing to starve -- was at the start of the meeting greeted with jeers, boos, and shouts of 'Are they mad?' while by the end of the meeting thousands of workers were cheering senior union bureaucrats who declared 'The union has worked. Sign, Mathunjwa, sign!' Precisely what subtle deceptions the bureaucrats deployed to cajole the miners into accepting this ignominious sham-success is unknown, but the general outlines can be inferred from historical precedent.
Six months later, the eruption erupted, though not in any way I had expected. 100 miners were shot down in Marikana, while in the unrest which followed 100 000 workers went on wildcat strike across the country, from the mines of the north-east to the farms of the south-west. Now, the longest mass strike in the history of the country has just collapsed after five months of bitter struggle, with 70 000 miners waging courageous battle against starvation & division only to settle for less than peanuts. Of course, like the 'national liberation' of 1994, this pyrric-victory was portrayed as 'mission accomplished' by the official representatives. The power of the ruling organisation of appearances to turn reality on its head was demonstrated at a mass rally on 12 June 2014 where the offer of the bosses -- which was not even in the same solar-system, let alone ball-park, as the demand for which the workers had hitherto been willing to starve -- was at the start of the meeting greeted with jeers, boos, and shouts of 'Are they mad?' while by the end of the meeting thousands of workers were cheering senior union bureaucrats who declared 'The union has worked. Sign, Mathunjwa, sign!' Precisely what subtle deceptions the bureaucrats deployed to cajole the miners into accepting this ignominious sham-success is unknown, but the general outlines can be inferred from historical precedent.
After consideration of the many different angles of this struggle during the past two years, and extensive discussions with correspondents from around the world, I have come to a number of practical conclusions regarding the possibilities opened up by this strike, and the reasons why they were never realised. The remainder of this message is an elaboration of the above.
Although the rhythms of
work have imposed themselves once more in the life the highveld,
there remains much of relevance here that might contribute towards
producing less miserable results in other skirmishes of the ongoing
social war.
2.
It is in all our
interests to extend this sort of strike into areas over which we have
the most direct control: our own everyday lives. It is possible to do
so. It is necessary to act independently as well as collectively. The
individual action does not require discipline, the collective action
does not require centralisation. As an initial contribution towards
such a project, I offer the following formulations of possible
actions. They are designed to be discussed amongst individuals in
local groups and between groups internationally, and most of all used
wherever appropriate.
Formulary For Effective International Solidarity
In 1985 a wave of
rebellion swept through the jails of France, with prisoners rioting
in response to abuse by wardens, climbing onto the roofs 'to get a
breath of fresh air' and 'shout out their their revolt against
imprisonment, the daily terror exercised against them'. In solidarity
with this struggle a group of individuals under the name Os
Cangaceiros conducted a number
of supporting actions: forcibly stopping trains to
distribute a text among passengers in
order to get maximum publicity the rebellion, stealing architects’
plans for new prisons and distributing
them in the area to help prisoners escape, attacking
the architects of prisons and
sabotaging construction-sites of new jails.
They also provided rebels, mainly those in the French squatting
scene, with some good ideas on how to expropriate the expropriators –
ie how to rip off banks through “fraud” – and provided a
network that enabled such activity. While
the distribution of prison blueprints seems to have directly assisted
in a number of jail-breaks, and the advice must have proven
invaluable to a number of individuals with a distaste for
wage-slavery, the strategic value of the sabotage actions was
admittedly questionable: the participants themselves saw them more as
an attempt 'to partially fulfil
a completely natural rage and break with the decadence of our epoch
that allows anything to be done as long as there are economic or
state reasons.'
There was also an element of
retributive justice involved – ironic considering the ideology of
vengeance & punishment is precisely what supports the cops,
courts and prisons of this world in the first place: 'It
had become urgent to put a bit of ethics into public affairs and to
do so in such a way that none of the enterprises stirred up against
us would go completely unpunished.'
Although the rage expressed
by such actions are entirely understandable in a South African
context where proletarians are simultaneously criminalised and placed
beyond the pail of justice, where blacks are subjected to all the
violence of the black boers without any of the supposed protection,
where the landless and homeless are brutally dispossessed in the name
of property laws while their legal 'rights' to due procedure are
ignored, where those
unfortunates to have fallen into the clutches of the bastards in blue
are subjected to routine degradation on a scale that makes the
Marquis de Sade's tales look like children's stories (the latest
example addressed in the press being the St
Albans prison); the
tactical value of Os Cangaceiros
for our own struggles lies
elsewhere. As the critical
introduction to their text Freedom
is the crime that contains all crimes
incisively puts
it:
'What was exemplary in the support for the prison riots of ’85 was the combination of practical sabotage, a subversive text and a movement to which both related. It is this general positive “lesson” that is worth applying as part of a more general social movement – not specifically prisoners alone. However, to produce a text and an action which could contribute to subverting more general contradictions necessarily involves subverting the marginality imposed on us rather than pumping it up as something positive...'
Possible applications of
the above 'lesson' as they regard the platinum strike are outlined
directly below. Possible methods of subverting 'subverting the
marginality imposed on us' are addressed later in this text, in the
section on the Anti-Anti Land Invasions Unit.
2.
Farmworker's strike, Wolsley, South Africa, 2012. 'In 1838, one Stephens, a Methodist
parson, said to the assembled working people of Manchester:
“You have no need to fear the power of
Government, the soldiers, bayonets, and
cannon that are at the disposal of your
oppressors; you have a weapon that is
far mightier than all these, a weapon
against which bayonets and cannon are
powerless, and a child of ten years can
wield it. You have only to take a couple
of matches and a bundle of straw dipped
in pitch, and I will see what the
Government and its hundreds of
thousands of soldiers will do against this
one weapon if it is used boldly.”' (Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844)
The source of many of
these actions can be found in the first-hand account of the year-long
British coal miner's strike of 1984-85 presented by the producer of
dialectical-delinquents.com
(So
near So far:
A
History of The British Miners). This was inspired by certain
similarities between the current situation in South Africa and the
one described therein*, such as the outbreak of a prolonged mass
strike within the context of widespread social contestation, but many
of these tactics can be adapted to extend various different
struggles. As the text itself states:
'One could sense this volatile rumblings-under-the-surface type atmosphere at the time. And me and a group of friends and contacts wanted to contribute to this atmosphere. We had a project of occupying a disused church off Holloway Road, North London. The building needed a lot of cleaning it was partly squatted by pigeons, and hadn't been used for over 30 years, but was an unusual place, being round with a round corridor around it and a few rooms, plus a stage. We aimed to use this as a base for support for the miners and to somehow agitate to spread the struggle, as well as having free concerts which might have been used for collections for the miners. With this in mind, we hoped to go along to schools to distribute leaflets attacking education, to workplaces attacking work, to discos attacking the disco scene etc.etc. Plus we thought we might cover the area with interesting graffiti and maybe do a bit of appropriately-targeted vandalism. Plus use the place for mass meetings and discussions.'Other than opening dedicated spaces where those interested in extension of the struggle can congregate at all times of the day and night, I suggest collective steps towards the following interventions:
- Extensive research on global platinum supply chains in order
to identify targets for solidarity action
- Picket harbors that load/offload SA platinum
- Picket companies (manufacturers of catalytic converters and
the automobile corporations these supply) that use SA platinum
- Agitate among sailors, dock-workers, auto-workers, truck and train drivers, warehouse workers and others about the strike, encouraging them to refuse compulsion by their employers to work as scab-labour (which in fact they all are doing at the moment, given the global nature of production-chains) through conversations, pickets, pamphlets, invasion of workplaces, and any other possible means
- Prepare well to support workers who participate; intimidation and victimisation are sure to follow.
- Preparations can include: legal intervention (in some areas, especially those with democratic pretences, it is illegal to compel a worker to break an officially srecognised strike through scab labour)
- Agitation among fellow workers encouraging them to refuse to let their employers intimidate and victimise their colleagues
- Agitation among the general public to refuse to allow corporations to intimidate and victimise workers who act in favour of their own class interests (in other words who 'stand up for their rights' in the interests of 'solidarity'), encouraging them to boycott companies that force their workers to work with SA platinum whether it be through manufacture, transport, storage, or any other way
- Extension of the struggle in other directions, for example:
- Similar practical solidarity with the miners of Soma in Turkey, who's struggle in May 2014 erupted into major social upheaval involving a general-strike of hundreds of thousands, riots across the country, invasion of the mineworkers union by miners, and an occupation by 1000 people of the mining department at the Technical University of Istanbul. 'The department has blossomed into a lively community, with sleep rooms, unisex restrooms and makeshift movie theatres where students screen documentaries about problems in the mining industry. Students hold heated debates one after another in jam-packed hall. Just a few steps away, the names of each of the 301 miners who died at Soma have been written on the wall. We wont be engineers of the murderers. We will be the engineers of the people, reads one piece of graffiti. According to a participant The faculty is complicit in the deaths of the miners. The mining company delivered a seminar here two weeks before the disaster. We will not leave this building until those responsible are brought to account'
- It is not difficult to discover a practical basis for such solidarity. Every year hundreds of workers are swallowed whole by the mines of South Africa; the bosses and their stooges call these accidents but it is clear that under conditions where profits are adversely affected by the safety of proletarians, to the persistent detriment of the latter, there is nothing accidental at all in the equation. The same can be said for the hundreds of thousands killed by silicosis and other lung diseases, some of whom are fighting Anglo American in the courts as I write. The more proletarians are exposed to work, the more they are recklessly exposed to injury and death, with little if any compensation afterwards (how could a few coins possibly replace permanently ruined lungs?). In response to this deliberately disastrous set-up, the chemical workers of Porto Maghera in Italy embarked on a campaign of imaginative industrial action during the 1970s including checkerboard strikes (systematic deployment of short, unpredictable strikes by different sections of the workplace to apply the maximum disruption with the minimum hardship for strikers within a factory or industrial complex) and wildcat demonstrations within the workplace (an initial group forming a snake and working their way through the shop-floor picking up those from different areas as they go and forming a general assembly at the end -- a tactic that was applied to great effect at the level of entire industrial areas during the Durban strikes of 1973) under the slogan 'less work, more pay'. The relevance of this to the current miner's strike will be readily apparent.
- Similar practical solidarity with the Marikana land occupations in Cape Town and Durban, such as the formation of Anti-Anti Land Invasion Units
- Encouragement of those around the world to extend the Marikana struggle however they can, adopting the boycott methods above, inventing new ones of their own and communicating their actions internationally. The best way to encourage the international extension of the strike is to practically demonstrate what local contributions can be made to struggles from around the world.
- Extensive discussion and practical investigation into of all the above and much more, for example:
Co-ordination and communication of information
about how many are on strike and where, whether production
continues in any of the affected mines and why (what is the
proportion of strikers to scabs in these places, what are the
strikers doing to shut down production, if anything, and how have
such attempts fared over the duration of the strike) what is the
state of the reserves for those mines that have shut down and how
do the reserves get transported (is any picketing happening here)?
A recent newspaper article on the situation states 'Although 60% of
South Africa's platinum group metal supply has been sluggish, the
mining giants have been well placed to withstand the strike as many
of their operations in the eastern limb of the platinum belt, which
stretches into Zimbabwe, remain unaffected. Anglo American Platinum
(Amplats) is producing at 60% capacity with the continued operation
of its more profitable mines. Impala Platinum is producing at 40%.
Even Lonmin, which is considered the most vulnerable of the worlds
three largest platinum producers because it has no operations
outside of Rustenburg, is not as close to falling over as media
reports may suggest it is sitting on $351-million in unprocessed
inventory and at least half of this could be monetised.' ('How long
could the mines hold out?', Mail & Guardian, 13 Jun
2014) The billions worth of stockpiled inventory which currently
'mean the mineworker strike is almost convenient for the mining
companies' cannot be 'monetised' magically. It takes the form of
material goods sitting in Rustenberg alongside thousands of idle,
highly disgruntled strikers and the surrounding townships full of
equally disaffected proletarians. The warehouses in which it is
stored are staffed by fellow workers. There are entrances and
exits, roads and railways through which it must pass in order to
generate profit for the bosses, all of which are staffed by
transport workers. The unprocessed material must be refined at
centralised facilities, operated by other workers. These are
strategic facts which could be of great value in the struggle if
incisively & boldly used. The mining operations in Limpopo &
Zimbabwe are likewise staffed by fellow proletarians working under
similar conditions, their products must be transported through
specific, limited, possibly vulnerable lines of supply which are
themselves staffed by yet more workers. Just as the ability of the
mines to extract cheap labour from black proletarians who are in
the process destroyed generation after generation is not a
god-given certainty, so too the ability of the mines to 'hold
out' -- the continued availability of their other sources of profit
-- is by no means guaranteed by divine providence. Tactical
positions could be targeted by 'flying pickets' (convoys of
vehicles deployed to locations as and when the occasion demanded),
transport workers could refuse to cross picket lines like the bus
driver who stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street during a
demonstration in London during the British miner's strike. If the
income from these reserves & operations are shut down the
bosses will straightaway find the worker's demands much more
compelling. A comprehensive grasp of the situation of the strikers
could also be gathered for various possible uses. How many strikers
have their own reserves in the rural areas and how many don't,
what's the situation of those who do (how long can their reserves
hold out for) and those who don't (how do they survive?) in what
state is the network of support (like the looting of the entire
shopping centre in Rustenburg, the occupation of state houses &
illegal electricity connections in Sondela township) that help
those feeling close to scabbing survive a little easier, and so on.
- The miners had expertise in the use of dynamite and inside access to ready supplies of it. They had experience of how goods moved through the mines and what the weak points in the supply chain were. Would it not have been both a straightforward and strategically valuable move to smuggle some sticks out and with a few well placed explosives (possibly with the help of decoy blasts to draw attention away from the real targets) cripple the ability of the bosses to benefit from their stockpiles? During a 1934 insurrection which forshadowed the coming revolution Asturian miners, in the absence of adequate arms and ammunition, used dynamite to devastating effect and so kept the might of the entire Spanish army at bay for 15 days. Could proletarians today not pit this valuable tool in their service in times when social war has not yet taken insurrectionary proportions? Indeed they can. On Friday 17 July 2015 Bolivian miners on the streets of the capital used heated arguments to persuade their president Evo Morales to keep his promises: 'Marching towards Plaza Murillo - the main square housing the President Palace and National Congress of Bolivia - protesters threw dynamite' (Reuters). The following Wednesday, according to Fox News, 'The miners used dynamite charges to attack the police... after learning that their leader... abandoned the meeting with the ministers to discuss the protesters' demands. After the failed dialogue attempt, Bolivian miners detonated a dynamite charge at the doors of the Interior Ministry and hurled rocks at the building. The miners placed the dynamite at the side door of the ministry and detonated it but only damaged the door, after which they occupied the building's interior patio and threw rocks at the building, breaking a number of windows'. If the Bolivians could use dynamite to peruse negotiations through other means, it is entirely plausible that other proletarians with similar access to this tool might use this tool to impose their own conditions on their class enemies. As the molotov-cocktail has since its inception been adopted en masse by rebels the world over, one might expect that more powerful incendiary devices would make a similarly useful addition to the arsenal of all proletarians engaged in class struggle, if not dynamite then something else assembled from materials closer at hand. The successful conduct of any war, including that of the class war, demands the effective use of whatever weapons may provide combatants with an advantage over their opponents. The collective engagements that currently occupy the terrain of conflict around the world can only produce favourable conclusions for the working-class if the participants relate to their activity in increasingly strategic ways. This is a simple fact which the capitalist class and its agents have never failed to recognise. Strategy that does not take into account the specific material terrain of a particular engagement and relate the tactics pursued at each moment to the goals they are meant to achieve, adapting present action as appropriately, creatively and devastatingly as possible to the concrete contours of the present terrain -- rather than mechanically based on ancient precedent abstracted from the immediate conditions of the present, as is the case with most strikes, which have become dominated by unthinking routine and empty ritual -- is quite obviously useless. The working-class repeatedly fails to realise its desires because it relegates strategic thought to a handful of specialist leaders who always trail behind the masses in audacity, courage and revolutionary consciousness. The generals of the revolution never know what to do when favourable conditions spontaneously erupt, but because they have laid responsibility for strategic thought to their representatives, neither do ordinary proletarians. In the hands of its enemies -- both the bourgeoisie as well as the officious managers of rebellion, who are always reactionary in relation to the masses -- strategic thought, which might be one of the greatest weapons of the proletariat, becomes on of its greatest foes.
- Research into previous solidarity actions such as those by the supermarket workers of Ireland and the dockworkers of Holland, the UK, Sweden and the USA who refused to handle apartheid goods: What were they thinking? How did their colleagues, their employers and their neighbors respond? Did their actions help them advance their own interests, how or how not, what were their interests and what were the contrary interests of their employers? How can we make use of this history, what practical conclusion can be drawn, today?
- Similar studies of, among others, the creative anti-apartheid solidarity actions of BZ in Denmark (whose struggle to defend the occupation of Rysegade in the 1986 was probably most tactically brilliant anti-eviction action in modern history) the British miner's strike of 1984-85, the Asturias coal miners strikes of 1963 and 1934 in Spain, the Harlan County coal miner's strike of 1972 & the Grant County zinc miner's strike of 1951 in the USA, the Alexandria bus boycott of 1957 and the incredibly rich hidden history of the revolutionary movement in South Africa, especially during the period 1976 - 1986 for the purpose of appropriating & improving ideas for possible actions, drawing conclusions for the conduct of current action, and so on
* There is also a more direct link, as pointed out to me by one of the producers of revoltagainstplenty.com: 'Just after the hell in Marikana I was with my bro on Woolley Colliery spoil heap where Arthur Scargill once worked. We picked up a copy of the local Barnsley paper and fell out laughing on reading that Cyril Ramaphosa had come (or was coming) to see Arthur Scargill, no doubt because the South African NUM was somewhat modelled on Scargill's moment at the helm of the British NUM [during the British miner's strike]. Whatever happened to that proposed meeting I simply do not know though I now read that Ramaphosa wants to take over from Zuma...'
3.
An example of the sort of strategic supply-chain research necessary for such actions, together with a demonstration of the possibilities for extending them in the direction of disruptions with significant , nearly immediate impact in the everyday life of everyone (those in Cape Town, or even Johannesburg, for example, only experienced the miner's strike as an external event taking place somewhere far away, mediated by mass communications media), can be seen in the text Choke Points, which mapped the high-traffic nodes and lines through which the majority of commodities circulate in the eastern United States. Noting the existence of only seven such lines passing from the ports to the rest of the country, and recent blockades of one such line in Canada by a handful of Native American activists, the authors asked:
'If an action conducted by a relatively small group of people (infinitesimal compared to the thousands present for the November 2nd shutdown of the Port of Oakland [following the repression of the 2011 Occupy movement]) could halt a major Class I route operated by CN [The Canadian National Railway Company] for a few hours, what could possibly emerge if intermodal railway line blockades became a tactic diffused and implemented in the same way plaza occupations were globally diffused in 2011-2012?' (Choke Points: Mapping an Anticapitalist Counter-Logistics in California; Degenerate Communism)
Such questions are well worth posing considering the fact that road blockades have become widely diffused on at least a national scale in South Africa during recent years, as they have during the struggles of the 1970s/80s; similar steps were taken in the 1997 - 2001 Argentinian piquetero movement; and both road and rail blockades were tactics deployed nation-wide in the 2006 anti-CPE movement in France as well as the recent revolt in Langa, Cape Town, in which all road and rail routes in and out of the township were blocked for the day.
This latter is a local demonstration of how the general strike today increasingly takes the form not of a voluntary withrdrawal of labour at the point of production, 'but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow... In such a situation,' say participants of the Oakland Commune in the very stimulating text Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts, 'the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.' The stay-away produced by the revolt, which was effectively a local general-strike as the vast majority of Langa residents worked elsewhere, was imposed by those unemployed, part-time and precarious young workers who blockaded the roads and railway lines of the township.
'Choke Points' also details the possibilities for blockades of intermodal rail yards and air cargo warehouses, concluding that the former would be rendered obsolete by successful blockade of rail lines and the latter insignificant by dint of the relatively low number of commodities involved -- not to mention the difficulty presented by far tighter security surrounding all air transport! Another possibility not mentioned in that text was demonstrated by the 2000 UK fuel protests in which the week-long blockade of major oil refineries and depots led to only 5% of normal fuel deliveries being made, with all the inevitable consequences. Further possibilities not mentioned in the text were suggested by the offensive carried out by postal workers: blockades of the major postal-depots around the country would not fail to produce impressive results. Another recent local development demonstrates an important point regarding the physical characteristics of blockades: they do not always require a continuous physical presence to be effective. 'Wednesday 30 July 2014 marked one of the biggest acts of sabotage ever committed on South Africa's public transport infrastructure', said Western Cape Premier Helen Zuma. 'Starting in the early hours of the morning, signal cables along Metrorail's central line in Cape Town were systematically cut in 25 places, disabling services to Khayelitsha, Philippi, Nyanga and Mitchell's Plain. Before repairs could be completed, at least four further signal cables were again destroyed by early Friday morning, before a single train had even passed. Altogether 11 stations were closed and 15 trains were taken off the tracks as Metrorail scrambled to find buses to ferry stranded passengers.' Less than a month later, on Wednesday 20 August 2014, another outbreak of what The national head of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) called the “pandemic” erupted when “Four carriages, overhead electrical structures and station facilities suffered extensive damage, effectively preventing operations of any kind." According to one evocative report 'The empty train had been on its way to Cape Town at about 7.20pm, when it was stoned and then either petrol-bombed, or hit burning debris on the line, or both. About 4.5 km of track was damaged on Wednesday night. On the scene on Thursday, overhead electrical cables, warped and blackened by the flames, hung swaying slightly in the crisp morning air. While the smouldering carriages had already been moved, broken doors and unidentifiable debris were scattered along the tracks. Melted metal lay on the platform. In some places, rocks and broken bottles still lay where they had landed after being hurled at the train. The carriages had burnt for a while under the traffic bridge that runs over the station. The underneath of the bridge was covered in soot and the structure had to be closed for safety reasons, as a crack had formed... Prasa said it had spent a total of R382 million over the past three years as a result of theft and vandalism. "Our replacement costs are escalating beyond our control. These are monies we could be using to improve our service and upgrade our assets. Closing the central lines in the Western Cape, or even the Vereeniging line in Gauteng, may be the only solution to this pandemic"'. (IOL News, 21 August, 2014). Considering the difficulty of maintaining physical barricades against the highly-equipped, ruthlessly organised violence of the state, mass occupations of railway lines might be most effective if they served as an opportunity to adopt the tools of sabotage so incisively wielded in the anonymous authors of the above actions. This tactic has been successfully used by people in the UK taking collective steps against a world completely colonised by cars, whose actions, the most creative of which were organised under the banner of 'Reclaim the Streets', forced the state to scrap 300 new road schemes in 1995 alone. A particularly audacious action involved the temporary liberation of major highway, the M41, in 1996. After a cat-and-mouse game with the police, 6,000 protestors took over part of the elevated motorway. Many sound-systems played. Hidden underneath dancers walking on stilts and wearing huge, wire-supported dresses, disguised by the loud music, jack-hammers knocked holes in the tarmac, in which trees were planted. Although no details were provided regarding the method used, it is reported that during a riot in Newclare, Johannesburg at the beginning of October 2014, sections of tarmac were ripped up in attempt to make the streets unpassable after the local train station was torched.
Widespread systematic blockades of ports, postal depots, roads, railways, highways, freight truck chokepoints, rail yards, air cargo warehouses and oil-refineries would not only significantly disrupt the circulation of all commodity-capital but also severely strain the capacities of the forces of law and order to crush such actions by forcing them to stretch their troops over widely dispersed locales thus depriving them of the ability to concentrate their offensive power at a single point. Police resources are already placed under strain by the rising tide of protest in the country. A recent incident during a taxi-driver's strike illustrates how difficult it is for them to contain concerted action even at the current level of operations:
On the first day of spring (1 September) a series of revolts sprouted throughout the fringes of Cape Town. In the townships of Nyanga, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha and Philippi, taxi-drivers torched seven buses, stoned four more, burnt tyres, closed taxi ranks and pelted passing cars with stones. The action spilled over onto the N2 freeway and the authorities closed a section of the road and diverted traffic. As has happened before, a section of township residents took the opportunity to unite with the drivers in their protest, in a significant moment of solidarity between the struggles of workers and those of township residents.
Curiously, earlier taxi driver strikes, in 2009, were the most recent prior occasion for the sort of solidarity in struggle demonstrated here. These included the burning of municipal vehicles by both striking workers and township residents in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and elsewhere:“in the Kuwait section of Khayelitsha, taxi drivers and residents set alight a car and a municipal van” (iol.com) as well as looting -- the main targets being sources of food: In Nyanga, one bread delivery truck driver was killed and another truck was “set alight and was later looted by members of the public.” (SAPA); a number of shops were pillaged: “Some excited residents could be seen running through the streets carrying looted food items.” (westcapenews.com) In Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) a wildcat strike by taxi drivers involved barricading roads as well as the stoning and petrol bombing of police vehicles, buses and government buildings across the city, again carried out by both workers and surrounding proletarians. (Port Elizabeth Herald) In the same report, a state spokesperson stated with typically staggering insight “These violent actions do not belong in a peace-loving society.” The strike was notable for its involvement of youth and the ferocity of their attacks on state authority. In scenes reminiscent of the uprisings of the 70s & 80s, various municipal buildings, including two clinics and one of the ruling party’s (ANC) offices were burned down.
In addition to a counter-attack against a state which has for years continued a relentless assault against them, the young proletarians used the strike as an opportunity to carry out a practical critique of an urban landscape whose sole purpose was the circulation of commodities – including the commodity which creates all others, labor. This critique, born of boredom and opportunity, seems to be the most reasonable explanation of a situation where delivery trucks were petrol-bombed by youths having no connection to the taxi drivers or their immediate interests, and where “gangs of youngsters were seen… stoning cars.” (The Port Elizabeth Herald) In times of crisis illusions are dispersed like teargas in a gust of wind. State provision of public transport was thus revealed to be not a social service to a human community but an economic service to the community of capital, just as the police were revealed not as guardians of human beings but bodyguards (antibodies) of the commodity economy, its veins (roads), its blood cells (cars), and its heart (capitalist accumulation).
This much was admitted by the provincial safety and security spokesman Bobby Stevenson when he revealed that, to the state, "safety and security" means nothing more than the provision of conditions which guarantee the free movement of the commodity. The following was all he had to say; here we see the meaning of “law and order” in this society; here is its justice, its democracy, its freedom, its morality:
‘“A situation of lawlessness cannot be tolerated in a democracy, and our economy cannot be held to ransom.” [He] said he had written to the provincial commissioner requesting that police members travel with commuters on buses equipped with radios. Police vehicles should escort buses and rapid response units [should] be located in strategic spots to ensure the free movement of buses and other vehicles that wish to convey workers to work.’
Attentive readers will notice how increasingly totalitarian the “freedom” of this democracy tends to become (cops on radio-equipped buses herding workers like cattle into their kraals).
What is of interest in this year's taxi strike, more particularly an incident therefrom involving a delivery truck, is the difficulty the authorities had in clamping down those whose actions were marked by audacity and anger. The truck was delivering dairy products to Shoprite supermarket in the township of Mfuleni when it was attacked. According to eyewitnesses the truck was approaching a traffic circle when it was stoned, allegedly by taxi operators.
Police patrolling the area quickly dispersed the crowd and advised the truck operator to park the vehicle next to a satellite police station in the vicinity, leaving the station with only the two officers stationed there on regular basis. Eyewitnesses said the mob returned after the police left and removed the battery from the truck, cut its wires and set it alight.
"They broke it open and people started looting yoghurts, milk and other dairy products," said one witness. 'Police in the station couldn't do anything to stop the looting as they were outnumbered.' (groundup.org.za; 2 September 2014)
Such moments, significant as they are, are nonetheless with their own contradictions, for example the mob-mentality of the crowd which tried to attack the truck-driver, a fellow-worker who did them no harm, even after he abandoned the vehicle. The point is not to ignore the continued poverty of such moments in order to eulogise them, but to identify tendencies expressed through them which illustrate possible openings and avenues for future steps along the road towards an endlessly enriched life for all.
When networks of commodity-capital circulation are disrupted, they open up space for new forms of action and relation. Streets are transformed from murderous conveyor-belts into marvelous living-rooms for dialogue, feast, festival, self-expression, protest, organisation, recovery. Rapid climate change turns what is normally a concrete desert dominated by dead objects into a fertile proliferation of teeming possibilities and playful people taking their chances with gusto and gut-rage, handfuls at a time. Thus a participant of last year's massive mobilisations in Brazil could take to the streets normally reserved for machines and dance to the music of now comradely strangers normally reserved and silent carrying a sign that said 'Cities are for people, not cars.' This reversal of perspective from the unfortunately normal state of things where 'streets, once the open forum of daily life are now the open sewers of car culture' is inseparable from a degree of disruptive ferocity. In order to end the endless accumulation of road casualties the first casualty must be the road itself. The need for speed which reduces millions of people into road-kill can only be abolished when those people kill the roads. A sign of the times was 'Men in cars come too fast'. Hence the 'negative' destruction of the tarmac during the liberation of in the M41 took place alongside the 'positive' festivity which saw 'transvestites snogging in the fast lane, stilt-walkers partying in the slow lane, and parents encouraging their children to play in the overtaking lane'. Even beyond any physical damage to infrastructure, destruction of the existing social function of any institution, whether it be that of a street, a factory, an office or a school, forms a necessary precondition for its liberation: streets freed from the dominance of commodity circulation, classrooms freed from the dominance of brain-dead discipline, tools freed from the dominance of work-money, time freed from the tyranny of the clock, a world free to be re-imagined, refashioned, remade, recycled. Material objects whose use-values are freed for the satisfaction of human passion and human need things whose old function, as exchange value for the accumulation of capital, is diverted towards other ends. Another sign of those times when streets were reclaimed and sabotaged with love and rage: 'Diversion Ahead', is pun and parable.
There are other tactics which divert networks towards radical ends, with disruption produced as a secondary benefit. One example is when the children of the townships commandeered buses during the uprisings of the 1970s/80s in order to transport people to neighbourhood assemblies and mass meetings, or to drive them into the sides of schools and factories. The practice of pressing trains into the service of rebellion was famously wide-spread during the Mexican revolution; more recent example is when members of the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign forced their way onto trains in order to join demonstrations in the city center.
The above by no means represents some sort of ultimate stratagem to be universally applied, once and for all, by masses assigned the task of implementing the directives of others. They are simply an outline meant to demonstrate a few directions for collective action not yet taken, inspired by what has already been done by those determined to change their own lives. The possibilities for subversion are limited by little more than your imagination, audacity, and organisational capacity.
Buses cleaned out during a bout of spring cleaning: taxi-driver's strike, Nyanga, 1 September 2014
3.
An example of the sort of strategic supply-chain research necessary for such actions, together with a demonstration of the possibilities for extending them in the direction of disruptions with significant , nearly immediate impact in the everyday life of everyone (those in Cape Town, or even Johannesburg, for example, only experienced the miner's strike as an external event taking place somewhere far away, mediated by mass communications media), can be seen in the text Choke Points, which mapped the high-traffic nodes and lines through which the majority of commodities circulate in the eastern United States. Noting the existence of only seven such lines passing from the ports to the rest of the country, and recent blockades of one such line in Canada by a handful of Native American activists, the authors asked:
'If an action conducted by a relatively small group of people (infinitesimal compared to the thousands present for the November 2nd shutdown of the Port of Oakland [following the repression of the 2011 Occupy movement]) could halt a major Class I route operated by CN [The Canadian National Railway Company] for a few hours, what could possibly emerge if intermodal railway line blockades became a tactic diffused and implemented in the same way plaza occupations were globally diffused in 2011-2012?' (Choke Points: Mapping an Anticapitalist Counter-Logistics in California; Degenerate Communism)
Such questions are well worth posing considering the fact that road blockades have become widely diffused on at least a national scale in South Africa during recent years, as they have during the struggles of the 1970s/80s; similar steps were taken in the 1997 - 2001 Argentinian piquetero movement; and both road and rail blockades were tactics deployed nation-wide in the 2006 anti-CPE movement in France as well as the recent revolt in Langa, Cape Town, in which all road and rail routes in and out of the township were blocked for the day.
This latter is a local demonstration of how the general strike today increasingly takes the form not of a voluntary withrdrawal of labour at the point of production, 'but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow... In such a situation,' say participants of the Oakland Commune in the very stimulating text Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts, 'the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.' The stay-away produced by the revolt, which was effectively a local general-strike as the vast majority of Langa residents worked elsewhere, was imposed by those unemployed, part-time and precarious young workers who blockaded the roads and railway lines of the township.
'Choke Points' also details the possibilities for blockades of intermodal rail yards and air cargo warehouses, concluding that the former would be rendered obsolete by successful blockade of rail lines and the latter insignificant by dint of the relatively low number of commodities involved -- not to mention the difficulty presented by far tighter security surrounding all air transport! Another possibility not mentioned in that text was demonstrated by the 2000 UK fuel protests in which the week-long blockade of major oil refineries and depots led to only 5% of normal fuel deliveries being made, with all the inevitable consequences. Further possibilities not mentioned in the text were suggested by the offensive carried out by postal workers: blockades of the major postal-depots around the country would not fail to produce impressive results. Another recent local development demonstrates an important point regarding the physical characteristics of blockades: they do not always require a continuous physical presence to be effective. 'Wednesday 30 July 2014 marked one of the biggest acts of sabotage ever committed on South Africa's public transport infrastructure', said Western Cape Premier Helen Zuma. 'Starting in the early hours of the morning, signal cables along Metrorail's central line in Cape Town were systematically cut in 25 places, disabling services to Khayelitsha, Philippi, Nyanga and Mitchell's Plain. Before repairs could be completed, at least four further signal cables were again destroyed by early Friday morning, before a single train had even passed. Altogether 11 stations were closed and 15 trains were taken off the tracks as Metrorail scrambled to find buses to ferry stranded passengers.' Less than a month later, on Wednesday 20 August 2014, another outbreak of what The national head of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) called the “pandemic” erupted when “Four carriages, overhead electrical structures and station facilities suffered extensive damage, effectively preventing operations of any kind." According to one evocative report 'The empty train had been on its way to Cape Town at about 7.20pm, when it was stoned and then either petrol-bombed, or hit burning debris on the line, or both. About 4.5 km of track was damaged on Wednesday night. On the scene on Thursday, overhead electrical cables, warped and blackened by the flames, hung swaying slightly in the crisp morning air. While the smouldering carriages had already been moved, broken doors and unidentifiable debris were scattered along the tracks. Melted metal lay on the platform. In some places, rocks and broken bottles still lay where they had landed after being hurled at the train. The carriages had burnt for a while under the traffic bridge that runs over the station. The underneath of the bridge was covered in soot and the structure had to be closed for safety reasons, as a crack had formed... Prasa said it had spent a total of R382 million over the past three years as a result of theft and vandalism. "Our replacement costs are escalating beyond our control. These are monies we could be using to improve our service and upgrade our assets. Closing the central lines in the Western Cape, or even the Vereeniging line in Gauteng, may be the only solution to this pandemic"'. (IOL News, 21 August, 2014). Considering the difficulty of maintaining physical barricades against the highly-equipped, ruthlessly organised violence of the state, mass occupations of railway lines might be most effective if they served as an opportunity to adopt the tools of sabotage so incisively wielded in the anonymous authors of the above actions. This tactic has been successfully used by people in the UK taking collective steps against a world completely colonised by cars, whose actions, the most creative of which were organised under the banner of 'Reclaim the Streets', forced the state to scrap 300 new road schemes in 1995 alone. A particularly audacious action involved the temporary liberation of major highway, the M41, in 1996. After a cat-and-mouse game with the police, 6,000 protestors took over part of the elevated motorway. Many sound-systems played. Hidden underneath dancers walking on stilts and wearing huge, wire-supported dresses, disguised by the loud music, jack-hammers knocked holes in the tarmac, in which trees were planted. Although no details were provided regarding the method used, it is reported that during a riot in Newclare, Johannesburg at the beginning of October 2014, sections of tarmac were ripped up in attempt to make the streets unpassable after the local train station was torched.
Before
Widespread systematic blockades of ports, postal depots, roads, railways, highways, freight truck chokepoints, rail yards, air cargo warehouses and oil-refineries would not only significantly disrupt the circulation of all commodity-capital but also severely strain the capacities of the forces of law and order to crush such actions by forcing them to stretch their troops over widely dispersed locales thus depriving them of the ability to concentrate their offensive power at a single point. Police resources are already placed under strain by the rising tide of protest in the country. A recent incident during a taxi-driver's strike illustrates how difficult it is for them to contain concerted action even at the current level of operations:
On the first day of spring (1 September) a series of revolts sprouted throughout the fringes of Cape Town. In the townships of Nyanga, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha and Philippi, taxi-drivers torched seven buses, stoned four more, burnt tyres, closed taxi ranks and pelted passing cars with stones. The action spilled over onto the N2 freeway and the authorities closed a section of the road and diverted traffic. As has happened before, a section of township residents took the opportunity to unite with the drivers in their protest, in a significant moment of solidarity between the struggles of workers and those of township residents.
Curiously, earlier taxi driver strikes, in 2009, were the most recent prior occasion for the sort of solidarity in struggle demonstrated here. These included the burning of municipal vehicles by both striking workers and township residents in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and elsewhere:“in the Kuwait section of Khayelitsha, taxi drivers and residents set alight a car and a municipal van” (iol.com) as well as looting -- the main targets being sources of food: In Nyanga, one bread delivery truck driver was killed and another truck was “set alight and was later looted by members of the public.” (SAPA); a number of shops were pillaged: “Some excited residents could be seen running through the streets carrying looted food items.” (westcapenews.com) In Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) a wildcat strike by taxi drivers involved barricading roads as well as the stoning and petrol bombing of police vehicles, buses and government buildings across the city, again carried out by both workers and surrounding proletarians. (Port Elizabeth Herald) In the same report, a state spokesperson stated with typically staggering insight “These violent actions do not belong in a peace-loving society.” The strike was notable for its involvement of youth and the ferocity of their attacks on state authority. In scenes reminiscent of the uprisings of the 70s & 80s, various municipal buildings, including two clinics and one of the ruling party’s (ANC) offices were burned down.
In addition to a counter-attack against a state which has for years continued a relentless assault against them, the young proletarians used the strike as an opportunity to carry out a practical critique of an urban landscape whose sole purpose was the circulation of commodities – including the commodity which creates all others, labor. This critique, born of boredom and opportunity, seems to be the most reasonable explanation of a situation where delivery trucks were petrol-bombed by youths having no connection to the taxi drivers or their immediate interests, and where “gangs of youngsters were seen… stoning cars.” (The Port Elizabeth Herald) In times of crisis illusions are dispersed like teargas in a gust of wind. State provision of public transport was thus revealed to be not a social service to a human community but an economic service to the community of capital, just as the police were revealed not as guardians of human beings but bodyguards (antibodies) of the commodity economy, its veins (roads), its blood cells (cars), and its heart (capitalist accumulation).
‘“A situation of lawlessness cannot be tolerated in a democracy, and our economy cannot be held to ransom.” [He] said he had written to the provincial commissioner requesting that police members travel with commuters on buses equipped with radios. Police vehicles should escort buses and rapid response units [should] be located in strategic spots to ensure the free movement of buses and other vehicles that wish to convey workers to work.’
Attentive readers will notice how increasingly totalitarian the “freedom” of this democracy tends to become (cops on radio-equipped buses herding workers like cattle into their kraals).
What is of interest in this year's taxi strike, more particularly an incident therefrom involving a delivery truck, is the difficulty the authorities had in clamping down those whose actions were marked by audacity and anger. The truck was delivering dairy products to Shoprite supermarket in the township of Mfuleni when it was attacked. According to eyewitnesses the truck was approaching a traffic circle when it was stoned, allegedly by taxi operators.
Police patrolling the area quickly dispersed the crowd and advised the truck operator to park the vehicle next to a satellite police station in the vicinity, leaving the station with only the two officers stationed there on regular basis. Eyewitnesses said the mob returned after the police left and removed the battery from the truck, cut its wires and set it alight.
"They broke it open and people started looting yoghurts, milk and other dairy products," said one witness. 'Police in the station couldn't do anything to stop the looting as they were outnumbered.' (groundup.org.za; 2 September 2014)
Delivery truck during taxi-driver's strike, Mfuleni, 2014. 'Rise, like lions after slumber/ in unvanquishable number!/ Shake your chains to earth like dew/ which in sleep had fallen on you:/ Ye are many—they are few!'
*
When networks of commodity-capital circulation are disrupted, they open up space for new forms of action and relation. Streets are transformed from murderous conveyor-belts into marvelous living-rooms for dialogue, feast, festival, self-expression, protest, organisation, recovery. Rapid climate change turns what is normally a concrete desert dominated by dead objects into a fertile proliferation of teeming possibilities and playful people taking their chances with gusto and gut-rage, handfuls at a time. Thus a participant of last year's massive mobilisations in Brazil could take to the streets normally reserved for machines and dance to the music of now comradely strangers normally reserved and silent carrying a sign that said 'Cities are for people, not cars.' This reversal of perspective from the unfortunately normal state of things where 'streets, once the open forum of daily life are now the open sewers of car culture' is inseparable from a degree of disruptive ferocity. In order to end the endless accumulation of road casualties the first casualty must be the road itself. The need for speed which reduces millions of people into road-kill can only be abolished when those people kill the roads. A sign of the times was 'Men in cars come too fast'. Hence the 'negative' destruction of the tarmac during the liberation of in the M41 took place alongside the 'positive' festivity which saw 'transvestites snogging in the fast lane, stilt-walkers partying in the slow lane, and parents encouraging their children to play in the overtaking lane'. Even beyond any physical damage to infrastructure, destruction of the existing social function of any institution, whether it be that of a street, a factory, an office or a school, forms a necessary precondition for its liberation: streets freed from the dominance of commodity circulation, classrooms freed from the dominance of brain-dead discipline, tools freed from the dominance of work-money, time freed from the tyranny of the clock, a world free to be re-imagined, refashioned, remade, recycled. Material objects whose use-values are freed for the satisfaction of human passion and human need things whose old function, as exchange value for the accumulation of capital, is diverted towards other ends. Another sign of those times when streets were reclaimed and sabotaged with love and rage: 'Diversion Ahead', is pun and parable.
There are other tactics which divert networks towards radical ends, with disruption produced as a secondary benefit. One example is when the children of the townships commandeered buses during the uprisings of the 1970s/80s in order to transport people to neighbourhood assemblies and mass meetings, or to drive them into the sides of schools and factories. The practice of pressing trains into the service of rebellion was famously wide-spread during the Mexican revolution; more recent example is when members of the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign forced their way onto trains in order to join demonstrations in the city center.
The above by no means represents some sort of ultimate stratagem to be universally applied, once and for all, by masses assigned the task of implementing the directives of others. They are simply an outline meant to demonstrate a few directions for collective action not yet taken, inspired by what has already been done by those determined to change their own lives. The possibilities for subversion are limited by little more than your imagination, audacity, and organisational capacity.
Self-Interested Enlightenment
It is in all our interests to extend this sort of
strike. Only a perspective based on the material interests of the
current conflict can form the basis for this sort of living
solidarity, which is usually obscured by leftist notions of
sympathy inherited from Christian Charity. The vast majority
of commentary on the Marikana Massacre and the recent miner's strike
remains on a superficial level because it fails to penetrate to the
underlying greed of the people involved. Proletarians are greedy,
capitalists are greedy. Greed is good. Life is bad. We are slaves;
for wanting to be free we are greedy. The owners of the world, those
whose material interests benefit from private property, satisfy their
greed through our slavery. They are not bad because they are greedy.
They are bad because they are slave masters. Only greed can make life
good. We, who own nothing but 'the golden chains of the bourgeoisie'
(the worthless toys dangled in front of our eyes as compensation for the countless miseries of modern society), we whose material interests suffer from
private property, are greedy because we want more than the loathsome life
of a slave; our greed must drive us to destroy all slavery, all
slaves and and all slave masters, or it is useless. Like Nietsche, 'We shall abolish
slaves because we cant stand the sight of them.' Only greed can
set you free.
It is necessary to elaborate briefly on some of the
implications of this self-centered perspective as it relates both to
rebellious activity in general as well as to the organisation of
strike solidarity actions in particular.
Their morals and ours: 'Since, as we have seen, no single field for the exercise of his manhood is left him, save his opposition to the whole conditions of his life, it is natural that exactly in this opposition he should be most manly, noblest, most worthy of sympathy. We shall see that all the energy, all the activity of the working-men is directed to this point, and that even their attempts to attain general education all stand in direct connection with this. True, we shall have single acts of violence and even of brutality to report, but it must always be kept in mind that the social war is avowedly raging in England; and that, whereas it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to conduct this war hypocritically, under the disguise of peace and even of philanthropy, the only help for the working-men consists in laying bare the true state of things and destroying this hypocrisy; that the most violent attacks of the workers upon the bourgeoisie and its servants are only the open, undisguised expression of that which the bourgeoisie perpetrates secretly, treacherously against the workers.'
This strike has to do
with race. The platinum industry has become one of the few sectors
where the ANC's Black Economic Empowerment scheme has been
substantial. As such, it has been around platinum that key black
capitalists, like Patrice Motsepe, Cyril Ramaphosa and Bridgette
Radebe have amassed great wealth (with ANC and state backing).
Commentary on the strike continues to generate much noise about the
avarice of 'white multinationals' when in fact, as revealed by the
commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre, it was comrade
Ramaphosa who personally directed the state to transform through, the
peculiar magic of the bourgeoisie, a labour dispute into a criminal
act, which the forces of order treated accordingly. It is not white
capital that gutted Aurora mines, leaving 700 workers to struggle on
without wages for four years and counting, but Mandela's grandson and
Zuma's nephew who chose to pay themselves hundreds of millions while
the miners were reduced to beggars. It is the docility of black
proletarians -- their determination to support the fraud bourgeois
justice which claims the rich man the poor woman, the cop and the
criminal each get what they deserve; their loyal commitment to the
slave-morality of the bourgeois work-ethic; their humility whose
highest aspiration is to achieve some petty success in a game that
sets them up to fail -- it is the complicity of black proletarians
that legitimises the lifestyles of black bosses such as Zuma so that
he can say 'I dont know about lavish. The only thing I know is that
Im living my life to the fullest every day, because I worked for it.'
Proletarian, you are on your own. It is you who passively accept the
white-supremacy that was forced on your ancestors, not very long ago,
only after the bitterest of battles. It is you who accept the defeats
imposed by a barbaric & moronic history as a god-given,
unchangeable fiat-accompli, 'the best of all possible worlds'.
It is you who every day produce this world against your own
interests. It is you who, roused from your indolence by some
particularly heinous outrage, dissipate your anger through the riots
which periodically illuminate the desolate landscape of submission
with the brief hope of insurgent revolt. Then the siren of social
peace lulls you back to sleep, and hope withers in the bud under the
desert wind. You who rise from your rightful place -- underfoot --
and, blinking in astonishment at the abundance born from 'the sweat
of your brow' but forever denied to you, burn and loot what you have
created. Rightly so: you have created a monster. You who, after
orgasm in an orgy of destruction, express nothing more than the
desire to go back to sleep. You who repeat the wretched cycle of
frustration, ejaculation and catharsis without ever taking your
rebellion past the point of no return by immediately seizing
all that rightly belongs to you. You are the revolution, and you are
a fool.
Without you the world could not function for a
minute. You who build, demolish, grow, drive, cook, assemble, sew,
dig, type, operate, sail, fly, nurture, carry, pack, count, clean,
calculate, organise, invent, heal and create: you who make every
object and perform every function in this world swallow the idiotic
fairytale that you are only capable of doing what you are told, the
irrational superstition force-fed to you by your betters that
although you create this world, you are incapable of directing it.
You who imagine the need to be ruled by idle bosses and politicians
without whose services (what HL Mencken called 'the dull, mechanical
tricks of the trade... that high talent for puerile and chiefly
mechanical expertness' that the present organization of society requires them to practice for a living) the world would function very
well, you who clamour for the protection of courts, cops and armies
whose only job is to crush, jail, shoot, harass, rape, humiliate,
mutilate, intimidate and torture you. Your ancestors knew it when
they drove all the black boers out of the townships during the 1980s
yet now, because your betters tell you so, you fancy all hell would
break loose if such uniformed thugs disappeared. It is your silence
that gives credence to the contempt of those who hold your lives so
cheap, those such as the boss of Anglo Platinum who awarded himself a
salary 216.1 times that of a miner with the words 'Am I getting paid
on a fair basis for what I'm having to deal with in this company?
Must I run this company and deal with all this nonsense for nothing?
I'm at work. I'm not on strike. I'm not demanding to
be paid what I'm not worth.' It is precisely those
who have begun to demand more than they are worth who have, through
their greed, laid siege to the citadel of stupidity whose god, Money,
has become the measure of all things: their disrespect for the
dominant values, their insolent presumption to question the ruling
standards of measurement, their courage that dares to challenge the
basic lies of supply and demand have begun to shake the tower of
bullshit under whose shadow you swallow the insults and humiliations
of your betters. Greed is the mother of all virtues. They have made a
start, but they are still not nearly greedy enough, as one of their
number himself admits. 'Whats happened, you can see, is I'm getting
fitter now because I cannot go underground. I'm becoming healthier.
These people have done this to our own forefathers, whereby they were
enslaving our forefathers. Now we can go and change our minds now
because that total of R12 500 is nothing. Maybe we decide to demand R
15 000, because what we are now demanding is nothing, its peanuts.' This temporary work-stoppage and its effects on the minds and bodies of workers reveal, more clearly than at other times, the seeds of a dormant desire for a totally different life normally obscured by the overwhelming effluent of production. It is one step away from the recognition that life is fitter, happier, better without work -- even in a moment of material scarcity; from the recognition that the demands of the current struggle are nothing (a recognition also very much in evidence during the 2012 farm-worker's strike); to the desire for an infinite strike that demands nothing and reclaims everything that is continually stolen by the automated machinery of exploitation; to the struggle for the permanent abolition of work, money and the artificial scarcity of class-society on which they are based. When some miners at a particular pit during the 1984-85 British miner's strike were asked on TV if they realised that by refusing to do maintenance work, they were putting the future of the pit in danger, one replied, “So what – who wants to go down the bloody pit again anyway?” It is these sensibilities, and the relations of solidarity and dialogue created by a community in struggle, that will have to be extended, step by step, street by street, day by day, on a global level, if the new desires for a new life briefly glimpsed during such rare moments of heightened class-struggle are ever to be realised in the everyday life of everyone.
It's not easy for proletarians to be sufficiently greedy. In commemoration of another massacre, where the police suppression of another public assembly in support of another strike brought on another instance of state-sponsored bloodshed -- an occasion whose anniversary is every year commemorated around the world on the first of May -- Voltarine De Cleyre summed up what is at stake:
Not for any great change, but for a meager bettering of conditions within the existing system, men are shot upon the roads; and their corpses cry up from the sod for justice, receiving none. What like, then, is it to be when they ask for all that nothing but their own ignorance keeps them from demanding? When they ask for the restoration and the perpetual indivisibility of the earth and the great stores within her bosom? When they ask for the free use of that which the genius of Man, not of men, has made? When they reclaim their right to the best in the world, not to the meanest and poorest? When they ask for room, and plenty of room, each and every one, no meagre little yard fenced in with walls, but acres and acres without fences where they may watch things grow and blossom, and feel again the joy of life and the sweet kinship with all living things, learn the forgotten lore of the savage who knew all the colors of the leaves, and the shapes of them, and the way they turned to the sun, and the peculiar instrument that played in the throat of every bird, and the promises of weather that boded in the sky, and saw every night a full clear unbroken view of the great arch with all its stars, not a blue patch cut into angles with roofs, fouled with smoke, seen out of the cellar of existence? When the man with the hoe shall look up from the sod, and beholding the glory that is around him, shall see in the clod what he has not seen before: beauties and possibilities endless, where before was only a heavy dull thing, that resisted his hoe, but must be turned for its masters sake - nay, when he shall feel in himself, till now the cold, dull, heavy human clod, something stirring towards birth, towards growth, towards light and liberty? When the nature that has been repressed in him, chilled, frosted, bound in abeyance, shall struggle into gleams in those sad eyes, and soften the brute jaw, and push out the backward slanting brow? When he shall feel tumultuous throbbings, beating, beating ineffectually but powerfully within him the desire to seize something indistinct, which shines, palely luminous in his old darkness the vision of a larger fuller life, the yearning for selfhood, self-expression, being that of which he dreams? Oh, no longer to echo the thoughts of others - to bring forth a note of one's own! No longer to move at the word of others, to move or be still at one's own desire! What will it be, when the digger in the depths, down in the blackness and the foulness, pictures to himself the life of light, and takes it boldly? When the toiler amid the machineries, in the clang and clash and roar, demands for his ears the sounds which mellow, the silence which stills? If for this paltry thing, an hour less of labor, a small wage-increase, men are shot upon the road, what will the answer be when they demand all this?
We do not know. But all
this, and not one jot less than this for each and everyone
without exception, and indeed much much more than this, is what
anyone with honesty, courage and integrity must mean by 'freedom from
slavery' (we don't need to talk about absolute Freedom, which is an
ideal neither desirable nor possible: one cannot be free, for
example, not to breathe or digest). When their betters tell blacks
they are free because they have a black president they do nothing
more than spit rancid insults in their faces. When blacks removed the
yoke of formal herrenvolk rule they certainly took one step
away from slavery as it then existed; when they accepted this
single step as the advent of what George Bush & Desmond
Tutu call Freedom and Democracy, however, they supported its
transformation into a vacuous political sham. After the terrible
devastation through which they struggled to claw their way forward
this far, it was truly an horrendous waste to stop here. Horrendous,
but far from uncommon. As William Morris wrote of the English
peasants' revolt against feudalism which was brutally crushed in
1381, 'men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought
for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out
not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they
meant under another name'. The sophistication of the spectacle
through which modern serfdom insulates itself against attack from its
servile spectators was in abundant evidence when Letta Mbalu &
Caiphus Semenya sang 'Not Yet Uhuru' at Mandealer's Presidential
Inauguration to an audience who, far from practically responding
in their everyday lives to
the spirit of the song, simply applauded precisely as they did
after Brenda Fassie's 'My Black President'. The majority were content
with clapping, while the intellectuals as usual could not resist the
urge to scribble something down about the sagacity of the
song-writers and their bravery in daring to 'speak truth to power'.
In both cases individuals remain passive spectators who make no
attempt to intervene in the
show which must go on before their very eyes in all its gory details
as long as they remain
determined to stay put.
As always there are some intent to ensure – and others
content merely to mouth – aluta continua. The strikers, for
their part, have taken a concrete step away from the neoapartheid
which has been under new management by the Male-lamers,
Man-dealers, God-Zilles and Get-out-of-jail-club Zumas of the land* –
though so modest a move that the desired destination hardly comes
into view. How could it? The ideas of the ruling class are always the
ruling ideas of the age. It can't be otherwise. This is exactly why
the vision of a new world is never the essential inspiration for
social movements: far more fundamental are the different relations
people create in opposing the old world by greedily imposing their
own interests onto their inherited conditions. In this regard the
proletarians of Marikana who, during the course of their struggle, bypassed their quisling union bureaucracy, self-organised
strike committees, defied the violent intimidation of the police and
company stooges, occupied vacant state housing and vacant public
property, hooked themselves up to free electricity, came together to
loot an entire shopping mall, independently organised the
infiltration and sabotage of company property, and routinely made
collective decisions at mass assemblies such as the one broken-up by
a barrage of police bullets, have brought to the world a brief but significant episode in the ongoing movement to build the basis for the
sort of freedom black Africans have been struggling for since the
first crack of the whip scarred blue bruises across the black back of
the first slave.
'We'll never have to work, O seas of fire! Oh my friends! My heart, I'm sure they're brothers: Black strangers, what if we started! Let's go! Let's go!' (Arthur Rimbaud)
* i.e. Julius Malema, populist politician and former
boss of the ANC youth-league, Nelson Mandela, Helen Zille, boss of
the official political opposition, and Jacob Zuma, the president who
wrangled a convenient escape from charges of rape and corruption
The Revolution Is Not A Civil Affair
'The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled. A kind of economic fatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists it or not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interests and his character. The church is regarded as a "redemption factory" of little importance, literature as a safety valve... The most burning question day and night is this: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough and above all vital enough to put an end to this state of affairs?'
-- Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time
'During the period immediately preceding the world war, when Socialism had become tame and gentle throughout Western Europe, when it was at home in salon and drawing-rooms and even frequented court circles, many great scientists, artists and literary men called themselves "Socialist." Even as far back as the "forties" of the last century Socialism had already become fashionable. The rulers and diplomats had lost their fears of its name. To be known as a Socialist was entirely harmless and placed no obstacle in the way of an "honorable" social career, the aspiration for higher positions and appointments to official positions... Social Democracy was no longer hostile to Capitalism, it had become a part of civil society.'
– Henriette Roland-Holst, The Artist and the Revolution
1.
Exemplary as the establishment of these new relations on the part of the strikers was, they were (as are all other relations in this society) riddled with contradictions which the miners would have to confront if their struggle was to have any hope of success. In the social war between those forces intent on maintaining slavery and those intent on abolishing it, there can be no linear progress. Nothing is given for certain. Advances are just as often followed by retreats. A tactical position is taken, and in the counter-attack it is lost again.
When the miners rejected their union the NUM and refused any representation separate from their own self-organised strike committees, they made one small step for the international movement, one giant leap forward for themselves. What none of the intellectual chatterboxes care to state about the Marikana massacre, because it throws into question their own professional position, is the fact that the primary product of this mass murder was the destruction of the community of unmediated dialogue & action which was at the time in process of formation. Two facts are immediately relevant here. Firstly, the bosses refused to discuss the grievances of the miners unless they were diverted through NUM, citing the law which allowed only a majority union to mediate industrial disputes; this is what led to the stand-off on Wonderkop hill in Marikana. Secondly, before AMCU was the majority union anywhere it made much noise opposing this law; now that it has a majority in the platinum mines these noises have altogether disappeared. It was the roar of police bullets that silenced the animated disputes and uninterrupted dialogue of the miners, it was the mass murder that drove them into the gaping maw of AMCU's bureaucrats, who pressured them to dissolve their committees and replace them with shop-stewards who are given massive pay-hikes by the bosses once elected. Of course, the forces of law and order did not necessarily understand its own action in these terms – though the writers of the prevailing labour legislation displayed ample understanding of what is at stake. As in previous times, the contradictions of the ruling ideology is such that the ruling class must invent ghost-stories about outside agitators in order to legitimise its repression: state violence directed against 'criminal elements' is always used as a justification when crushing mass movements. If the lesson of totalitarian regimes to rulers everywhere is that a lie repeated enough times becomes an accepted truth, a less understood lesson is that the liar lies to himself when he half-believes his own yarn. The coherence of the dominant equilibrium is expressed not at the level of ideas, where there is always contradiction, but in that of practice.
Moreover the bosses and their puppets can't be blamed for the collapse of independent organisation among workers altogether. In this regard a quote from an anonymous article in Amandla magazine is justified for the light it sheds on an extremely significant situation:
'The confrontation that has arisen between AMCU and the Lonmin Worker's council brings up the question of what are the strengths and limits of workers' committees as an organisational form. Workers' committees in South Africa are regularly formed to coordinate strike action, particularly in light of the murkier side of strikes, with the focus on keeping scabs out and ensuring workers don't break the strike. Tasks which unions are unable to 'officially' carry out, but are necessary in any successful strike action.'
In the same spirit as the above the houses of three scabs were stoned and petrol bombed and a number of vehicles belonging to scabs burnt during a strike at the docks in Nelson Mandela Bay earlier this year. It should go without saying that the definition of non-violence used here includes attacks on objects. It must be said, however, that if all non-violent measures are exhausted and scabs persist in siding with the bosses, the judicious use of violence by the majority is as appropriate and strategic in the case of strikes as in any other. When conducted by a minority, however, as was the case in Nelson Mandela Bay, even damage to property is altogether questionable. To return, in any case, to the worker's committees:
Predictably, the form of this coordinating committee took precedent over its content, and the real needs of the workers were sacrificed for the wet-dreams of the bureaucrats and their bid to exploit class-struggle for the purposes of enhancing their own pseudo-revolutionary appearances.
As the journalist astutely observed (the bourgeois press typically as sensitive to the pretenses of leftists as it is blind to those of its masters):
'Sebei's words can be read as an attempt to disguise the distance between the workers' immediate aspirations and the movement's agenda. This distance can be measured in the way he exaggerated the workers' readiness for a political party. When Sebei concluded Saturday's meeting with a press conference in front of a swelling media crowd, he appeared to be speaking more for himself and his organisation than for the crowd of strikers.' (Mine workers' hope lies in mass action; The Mail and Guardian, 19 October 2012)
Judging by its non-existent actions, the coordinating committee remained an empty shell used to bolster the image of Sebei and his cronies. Its leaders (who think, in all seriousness, that their mere presence among the unwashed masses can provide 'the most mortal threat to capitalism') failed to fulfill their promise to 'link themselves to the broader workforce and working-class communities who have already taken their discontent to the streets', choosing instead to concentrate on more worthy concerns: the promotion of their most mournful Workers and Socialist Party. Such is the fate of all proletarian organisations which allow power to be alienated from the workers in favour of representatives placed above them.
Some of the most significant revolutions of the modern era, such as those in Albania in 1997, Iran in 1979, Portugal in 1974, Chile in 1973, Hungary in 1956, Spain in 1936 & 1976, Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1919, all pose the same problem which in its general terms could be summarised as follows: Proletarians have hitherto always identified responsibility for life as a whole with their representatives rather than with themselves, leading them to put their faith in established structures and leadership figures whose powers they have themselves produced rather than their own ability to self-organise the world of their dreams.
Moreover the bosses and their puppets can't be blamed for the collapse of independent organisation among workers altogether. In this regard a quote from an anonymous article in Amandla magazine is justified for the light it sheds on an extremely significant situation:
'The confrontation that has arisen between AMCU and the Lonmin Worker's council brings up the question of what are the strengths and limits of workers' committees as an organisational form. Workers' committees in South Africa are regularly formed to coordinate strike action, particularly in light of the murkier side of strikes, with the focus on keeping scabs out and ensuring workers don't break the strike. Tasks which unions are unable to 'officially' carry out, but are necessary in any successful strike action.'
The author here is euphemistically alluding to what is otherwise known as 'intimidation'; one of the current limitations of such committees is that they don't see the need to invent any bews ways to carry out this necessary task other than the tried and tested resort to brute force: experimental attempts to deal with dissenting minorities through novel forms of dialogue, mediation, consensus-building, conflict resolution, persuasion, support and when these fail psychological & moral misapprobation could all add valuable to weapons to strikers arsenal; of course during the heat of struggle, when one is not sure where one will get the next meal, such experiments are easier said than done, but then again noone said revolution would be easy! Exemplary deployment of such tactics can be found throughout history. The traditional picket, when sufficiently uproarious & well organised, can be extremely effective in shaming (or scaring!) potential scabs away from work: this was used to good effect outside some Impala Platinum mine-shafts by Marikana miners themselves during the recent strike, reducing attendance from 20 to 8 percent. More unusual measures include the preparations among the migrant hostels by students who called a very successful general-strike in Soweto 1976: at the first strike hostility between migrants and young rebels had been exploited by the state leading to violent clashes; the second general-strike not only eliminated this conflict but emerged as the largest industrial action in the history of the country at the time. Similarly successful were the shop-floor demonstrations at invented at Porto Maghera in Italy during the 70s -- which were remarkably similar to the method Kropotkin and his school-mates used to secure the co-operation of 'goody boys' during a student rebellion at Russian Imperial Cadet Training Institute! -- 'With the demos we were able to spot the few workers who tried to chicken out. Later on in the canteen we ousted these workers by banging our plates, something which I think is psychologically difficult to bear. In order not to suffer this treatment a lot of potential scabs joined the strike.' Both tactics were deployed as pre-preemptive measures before the start of an action: the former taking the path of dialogue and persuasion, the latter of misapprobation and pressure. During the 1962-63 coal-miners strike in Asturias, Spain, on the other hand, appropriate measures were adopted once the action had already commenced: those who did not participate in the strike experienced the insult of grains of wheat -- food for chickens, symbols of cowardice -- being thrown before their respective doors.
During the British miner's strike of 1984-85 an awesome arsenal of imaginative actions was conjured up by the combattants. Some strikers’ wives convinced some of the wives of scabs to go on strike against housework. Some schookids also decided, independent of any outside suggestion, to go out after school to march in support of the miners and stop scab coke (the black stuff for burining, not the white stuff for snorting) lorries getting through to their destination. They were stopped by the cops but the initiative was taken up by the old age pensioners of the village who, both men and women, harrangued and battered on the lorries to such an extent that the next day several drivers reported to ‘their’ haulage firms that they felt too ashamed to continue delivery of scab coke. Scab cars parked outside the pits had their tyres slashed, brake pipes severed and windscreens smashed. A group of women found a scab on the road and beat him up (this is technically violent but attacks by women are much less likely to end in serious injury or death than those by groups of men). One formerly striking miner returned to work... The people of the village blocked the pits gates and besieged the scab's house. Some of the people from the neighbouring village attacked the cops from the rear. Lots of those arrested managed to escape. 8 young strikers and a farm worker set alight the shelter of a haulage company holding 5 buses used by scabs – all buses were burnt out. 6000 people encircle a mine-pit to prevent the entrance of one single scab. Police vans were attacked.
During the British miner's strike of 1984-85 an awesome arsenal of imaginative actions was conjured up by the combattants. Some strikers’ wives convinced some of the wives of scabs to go on strike against housework. Some schookids also decided, independent of any outside suggestion, to go out after school to march in support of the miners and stop scab coke (the black stuff for burining, not the white stuff for snorting) lorries getting through to their destination. They were stopped by the cops but the initiative was taken up by the old age pensioners of the village who, both men and women, harrangued and battered on the lorries to such an extent that the next day several drivers reported to ‘their’ haulage firms that they felt too ashamed to continue delivery of scab coke. Scab cars parked outside the pits had their tyres slashed, brake pipes severed and windscreens smashed. A group of women found a scab on the road and beat him up (this is technically violent but attacks by women are much less likely to end in serious injury or death than those by groups of men). One formerly striking miner returned to work... The people of the village blocked the pits gates and besieged the scab's house. Some of the people from the neighbouring village attacked the cops from the rear. Lots of those arrested managed to escape. 8 young strikers and a farm worker set alight the shelter of a haulage company holding 5 buses used by scabs – all buses were burnt out. 6000 people encircle a mine-pit to prevent the entrance of one single scab. Police vans were attacked.
In the same spirit as the above the houses of three scabs were stoned and petrol bombed and a number of vehicles belonging to scabs burnt during a strike at the docks in Nelson Mandela Bay earlier this year. It should go without saying that the definition of non-violence used here includes attacks on objects. It must be said, however, that if all non-violent measures are exhausted and scabs persist in siding with the bosses, the judicious use of violence by the majority is as appropriate and strategic in the case of strikes as in any other. When conducted by a minority, however, as was the case in Nelson Mandela Bay, even damage to property is altogether questionable. To return, in any case, to the worker's committees:
'Workers' committees are not bound by the structure of unions and are not subject to the same political limitations faced by unions in general and COSATU unions in particular in South Africa, with their ties to the ruling party. Workers' committees are able to engage with a wider political project, one intent on building independent working-class power not mediated by officials intent on securing their own position within the organisation. Furthermore, they are the starting point for any radical left political project that is focused on workers owning the means of production, as workers' committees represent a directly elected group of worker leaders able to build the organisational capabilities to move in this eventual direction. They are able to further link up to other similar committees and coordinate strike action without having to go through the legal wrangling imposed by the Labour Relations Framework within which unions have to operate.
The weaknesses, on the other hand, are that workers' committees are often seen by workers as temporary structures that are only necessary during strikes, so they tend to fragment as quickly as they were formed. Workers often identify with unions primarily, leading them to put their faith in the established structures and leadership figures in particular rather than their own ability to self-organise. Furthermore the leadership figures within workers' committees are often liable to cooption from either management or union leadership that is often hostile to independent workers grouping outside of the approved union structures.' (The state of the struggle: Lonmin workers organising one year later; Amandla Magazine)
This by no means represents an exhaustive list of the limitations of councilist organisation as it has hitherto been practiced. As far as can be ascertained, the committees did not extend their reach by confederating both with each other and with local councils bringing together the elements of the population (such as the children, unemployed, retired, disabled and those housewives who worked only at home) that were excluded from workplaces. Their scope for action, even at the limited level of strike/solidarity action, was thus limited to localised skirmishes; in military terms they could operate only at the tactical level, but not at either the theatre or the strategic levels. This limitation in turn ensured that the scope of their actions would indeed be limited to merely strike/solidarity action rather than extending beyond the boundaries of the immediate conflict into other areas of daily life. Other than the single communique included at the end of Movements in the Platinum Mines, 2009 - 2013, strike committeeshave never tried to communicate with workers abroad to spread their struggle, leaving themselves isolated and other proletarians in the dark. It is true during the massive strike wave following the Marikana massacre there was a meeting aimed at establishing a 'Rustenburg Joint Strike Coordinating Committee'. This meeting was, however, dominated by the Democratic Socialist Movement, a Marxist party with wet-dreams of managing their own leftist version of bureaucratic capitalism. One of its members, Mametlwe Sebei, assumed the role of Chairman. A journalist in attendance summarised the proceedings:
'According to the plan, as spelled out last Saturday at a widely represented but patchily attended Marikana meeting, the only way for the mine workers to maintain momentum is to link themselves to the broader workforce and working-class communities who have already taken their discontent to the streets. The meeting formalised the joint strike co-ordinating committee and hinted at a worker's party somewhere on their wish list.'
Predictably, the form of this coordinating committee took precedent over its content, and the real needs of the workers were sacrificed for the wet-dreams of the bureaucrats and their bid to exploit class-struggle for the purposes of enhancing their own pseudo-revolutionary appearances.
As the journalist astutely observed (the bourgeois press typically as sensitive to the pretenses of leftists as it is blind to those of its masters):
'Sebei's words can be read as an attempt to disguise the distance between the workers' immediate aspirations and the movement's agenda. This distance can be measured in the way he exaggerated the workers' readiness for a political party. When Sebei concluded Saturday's meeting with a press conference in front of a swelling media crowd, he appeared to be speaking more for himself and his organisation than for the crowd of strikers.' (Mine workers' hope lies in mass action; The Mail and Guardian, 19 October 2012)
Judging by its non-existent actions, the coordinating committee remained an empty shell used to bolster the image of Sebei and his cronies. Its leaders (who think, in all seriousness, that their mere presence among the unwashed masses can provide 'the most mortal threat to capitalism') failed to fulfill their promise to 'link themselves to the broader workforce and working-class communities who have already taken their discontent to the streets', choosing instead to concentrate on more worthy concerns: the promotion of their most mournful Workers and Socialist Party. Such is the fate of all proletarian organisations which allow power to be alienated from the workers in favour of representatives placed above them.
Some of the most significant revolutions of the modern era, such as those in Albania in 1997, Iran in 1979, Portugal in 1974, Chile in 1973, Hungary in 1956, Spain in 1936 & 1976, Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1919, all pose the same problem which in its general terms could be summarised as follows: Proletarians have hitherto always identified responsibility for life as a whole with their representatives rather than with themselves, leading them to put their faith in established structures and leadership figures whose powers they have themselves produced rather than their own ability to self-organise the world of their dreams.
2.
The progress of the unrest in the platinum & gold mines over the past two years provides one confirmsation of the theses advanced in Kammunist Kranti’s Self-Activity of Wage Workers. The workers were brought out on strike by union officials who wanted to reinforce their own influence: wage negotiations which end in annual increases below or barely in line with inflation result in strikes lasting for weeks which cost workers more than they gain. Whereas the wildcat strikes which led up to the Marikana massacre displayed tendencies that pointed towards a move from quantitative to qualitative struggle (see Movements in the Platinum Mines, 2009 - 2013), the moment workers accepted official representation, even by ‘independent’ unions, this was recuperated into mere posturing. In the recent platinum strike called by AMCU the wage demand of R12 500, originally raised by the Marikana strikers, became a token of false militancy used by the union to bolster its image of radicalism. Of course there was also pressure coming from the base to table these demands but the fact that it is being channeled through corporatist legal structures necessarily limits the continued intensive and extensive escalation of the struggle (unlike what happened in the wave of wildcat strikes before and after Marikana) which alone could have opened the possibility of victory. As stands now, the AMCU officials, after wearing down the strength of the workers on a hopeless strike which they cynically called for self-serving purposes, convinced their membership to accept a ‘realistic’ offer, 3 or 4% more than what was already being offered by the bosses. This already started seven weeks in, with AMCU revising its R12 500 figure, originally demanded for immediate application during the wildcat movement, saying the number can be reached in four rather than the three years it initially insisted on. Such revisions are nothing but an indication to the bosses that the workers are weakening, in other words an invitation for the mine companies to harden their position. Undermined by the stupidity of the beauracracy, the courage and determination of workers themselves loses its power; the employers grow bolder, the stalemate drags out longer, the workers waver in thier resolve, they buckle into accepting the idiotic terms negotiated by the unions who willingly agreed to play the bosses game of percentages (the dispute became a question of 12% vs 8%) when the workers explicitly rejected this from the start. As an academic noted, 'What’s been different with this process is that it is worker-driven, with workers wanting sums of money as opposed to percentages. It has de-professionalised the [negotiations] process. The current system, with grades of employment, needed a specialised negotiation team that can work within the parameters of that model. With this demand of R12 500, everybody understands it and can adjudicate whether it has been reached or not. Workers in other sectors will look at this and say: "Yes, that’s how we want to do it too." So Amcu has broken a paradigm and laid the groundwork for another.' Characteristically, the Senior Researcher who made this observation remains oblivious its self-contradiction in saying first that the process was worker-driven and then that it was the achievement of the very union who sabotaged it! The new paradigm was seen already during the strike itself, when workers at the Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) refineries and smelters went on strike in February, demanding pay increases of as much as 10 percent for higher-skilled employees and a raise of at least R2 500 monthly for the lowest-paid employees. These workers belong to NUMSA, the largest single union in South Africa which embarked on a 200 000 strong strike over the most paltry demands immediately after the miner's strike ended, and if this initial extention of the miner's strike continued among the rank-and-file a truly devastating movement would have emerged. “If we want to close the wage gap, we have to talk about rand and cents,” Nhlapo, who is Numsa’s head of basic metals and energy, said in an statement more reflective of his members' sentiments than the usual official rhetoric. “Percentages won’t get us anywhere.” The basis for such a continued extension was clearly in existence. Typically, however, AMCU's bureacrats were more interested in the threat of their membership defecting to NUMSA than anything else, and studiously avoided any dangerous fraternisation. No contact was made between the officials of the two unions, and AMCU's president even refused to allow NUMSA representatives to speak at a mass rally preceding the miner's strike. As usual, the interests of the strikers were merrily sacrificed in the union's maneuvers to maintain an iron grip on its membership.
Through this subtle manipulation they maintain their image of a democratic union which does not push through unpopular settlements like their competitors NUM but merely follows a mandate given by the rank and file during consultation. But if disgust and anger at the blatant manipulation of NUM and COSATU has undermined the basis for their powers of recuperation, dejection and dissapointment due to deliberate defeats will do the same thing with AMCU, and its rapid rise will fast fizzle into exhaustion and apathy. As happened in the South African miner’s strike of 1946 (in which an identical number of workers — 70 000 — suffered a crushing defeat due to the underhanded tactics of their own union) the success of AMCU in engineering the defeat of the workers will be their own downfall.
Through this subtle manipulation they maintain their image of a democratic union which does not push through unpopular settlements like their competitors NUM but merely follows a mandate given by the rank and file during consultation. But if disgust and anger at the blatant manipulation of NUM and COSATU has undermined the basis for their powers of recuperation, dejection and dissapointment due to deliberate defeats will do the same thing with AMCU, and its rapid rise will fast fizzle into exhaustion and apathy. As happened in the South African miner’s strike of 1946 (in which an identical number of workers — 70 000 — suffered a crushing defeat due to the underhanded tactics of their own union) the success of AMCU in engineering the defeat of the workers will be their own downfall.
Immediate intercourse among proletarians poses so deadly serious a threat to both intellectuals and activists because it involves a refusal to submit subversive struggle to terms set by the spectacle. It is the means by which greed, the enlightened self-interest whose vital force is identical to that of hunger, organises an end to the stifling state of affairs that has kept the world in chains for so long. Only that explosive creativity invented by a revolutionary community engaged in uninterrupted, generalised dialogue possesses that compelling force capable of producing an entirely new framework with which to replace the rotten terms imposed by the spectacle. These terms, such as the laws which the bosses used as an excuse to lock-out the autonomous strikers, invariably require the mediation of representatives & spokespeople: precisely those parasitic positions on which intellectuals and activists build their careers. The acceptance of professional mediators goes along with every other separation of rebels from their own power, and always tends to be diverted into political rackets, authorised channels, civil-society talk-shops, and the effluvia of those build reputations and careers from the misery of their constituents.
In South Africa mass trade unions were never spontaneous products of the self-organised struggles of workers; the very appeal of such organisations is their administration by intellectual specialists adept in intricate legal-financial technicalities built into bourgeois industrial-relations institutions so that ordinary workers are excluded from successful participation without professional representation. The rise of industrial unionism among black workers after the second world war, represented by the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU - first-generation predecessor to COSATU), was largely the work of Trotskyist activists such as Max Gordon (expelled from the SACP) and Dan Khoza, as well as other excommunicated Stalinists like T.W. Thibedi and Gana Makabeni. Alongside such militants, “it was already obvious in the late 1930s that there were men who, with few outlets for their entrepreneuurial proclivities, sought their livelihoods through the unions” as Baruch Hirson observed. In many cases the lines between such people and ‘genuine’ militants were blurry. “In some cases they undoubtedly helped their members secure improved conditions” Hirson continues, and it’s clear that the racist constraints preventing the social advancement of talented blacks such as Daniel Khoza left them “undoubtedly angry and frustrated, and [their] work in the unions provided an outlet for [their] passion and energy” -- just as criminal activity, religion, and community organising would do for others (some, such as James “Sofasonke” Mpanza, self-declared King of Orlando and Founding-Father of Soweto township, managed to combine all three!).
Inevitably the combination of stifling social relations in the wider society and hierarchical relations within organisations would reproduce the same sorts of situations both before and after the era of Daniel Khoza. The ICU itself was torn by scandal involving misappropriation of funds by organisers, and the description by W.G. Ballinger in 1944 of “the tendency for certain Secretaries of African Unions to regard them as their own personal enterprise” applies today not only to servants of the State but likewise to officials of autonomous organisations such as the Anti-Eviction Campaign & Abahlali baseMjondolo, both of which have imploded in similarly corrupt ignominy. Neither is this anything new. The squatter’s movement of the 1940s which led to the establishment of Soweto, involved both the desperate expropriation of land by the dispossessed as well as the exploitation of these same people by their own leaders, who charged squatters monthly fees for rent, and policing and administration. In such cases an action could be both militant occupation and protection-racket in one. The reproduction of capitalist relations within opposition movements is the most ubiquitous, as well as insidious, feature of social contestation in the modern epoch.
I don’t particularly care whether AMCU ends up undermining its own social base through its double dealings. The tendency for all forms of proletarian representation to do so is by now quite well established around the world. It’s nothing to mourn about. Of course, the rank and file will have plenty to complain of, just as most people in democracies are quite critical of all politics, but this criticism without action is all they are allowed and as long as they remain within the realm of the possible the talk is just talk. From what others who have gone to the area told me, even during the wildcat strikes when AMCU was just rising to power, the miners were very wary of all unions, but that didn’t stop them from joining it en masse and placing their struggle in its hands, to no discernible benefit whatsoever (the fact that this is a ‘protected’ strike changes little — most miners fired during unprotected strikes are rehired as long as they return to work in the end anyway, although the bosses try, with varying degrees of success, to reset their accumulated benefits). The proof of the pudding is in the doing. Certainly it’s important to understand the whys and wherefores of the doing or non-doing, but these reasons permeate the conditions we all find ourselves in, and as such can be discovered and combated anywhere. 'It is very possible', as comrades from the Casual Workers Advice Office noted, 'that AMCU will prove to be a temporary stopover as South African workers continue their search for alternative organizing forms to traditional trade unionism.'
The primary question for me in this sordid story is therefore: what can we do to arm adequately the enthusiastic fighting spirit we see so terribly doomed to destruction all around us? How can we contribute to the search for alternative organising forms, or strengthen those, such as the worker's councils which arose before the Marikana massacre, which have already emerged, only to be immediately overcome by internal weaknesses and external pressures?
Although I certainly don't claim to know the answer, I do know that when a mass movement begins to pose such problems explicitly, it had best do so from a very wide-reaching perspective. Narrow-mindedness, whether in terms of time, space, or the varieties of experience in everyday life, only play into the hands of the enemy, because the influence of the dominant equilibrium extends everywhere.
Police protect the people at an eviction, Marikana Occupation, Cape Town, 2014
3.
As we prepare to move forward, we look backwards at the century of failure in the world revolutionary movement which has brought us to this point, determined not to repeat the same mistakes which continue to be reproduced throughout the world today. A century characterised by the generalized failure of attempts at change, in the realm of emotions as much as in the political realm. A century which began with world war one, whose centenary anniversary begins this week, and intimately includes our own recent history: 61 years ago, as the former German colony of South-West Africa was being annexed by Apartheid South Africa, the rebellion in Stalinist East Germany, begun as a wildcat strike on June 16 (a date on which the these rebellions at the beginning of a troubled era would reverberate 23 years later, when the unrest of the age had reached near-ripeness, across the streets of Soweto, Alexandra, Port Elizabeth, Gugulethu, Langa, Athlone and elsewhere) was crushed under tank-tread by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A century born amid the death of the international revolutionary movement whose ignominious collapse into the nationalist barbarism of 'the war to end all wars' was echoed by the barbaric mass murder of striking miners in South Africa by their nationalist government in 2012. A century whose historic reverberations continue with the conclusion of a five month long strike by these same miners around the anniversary of the revolutionary uprisings in East Germany and South Africa. The desperate struggle continues, and the fate of our own efforts today depends in large part on our ability to confront frankly and concretely the reasons why it does so despite all the enthusiasm, passion, energy and lives consumed in the attempt to end it.
Police protect the people in Ferguson, USA after killing a young black man, 2014
4.
This strike has to do with world revolution. It is eminently international. The platinum miners come from South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique (there were more Mozambican than South Africans in the Witwatersrand gold mines before 1970) and Zambia. The strength of the strike depended on the collective refusal of workers from all over the subcontinent to allow national borders to divide and conquer them. A delegation of executives who tried to persuade those in Lesotho to return to work was met with the following reply: 'We don't have a problem with going back to work; the only concern is our safety because when we went on strike, it was a collective decision. The entire workforce went on strike, so at the moment, we don't know how the other workers feel about returning to work with our initial conditions not having been met.' It could be said that this refusal was violently enforced by the majority on the minority (what is commonly called intimidation), but it can't be said that the minority did not recognise the legitimate basis of this violence should they unilaterally act against what they themselves acknowledge to be a collective decision. There is a real challenge in devising appropriate means of dialogue and decision-making among a geographically-dispersed group of individuals engaged in collective action; clearly the way forward involves addressing the difficulty rather than denying it in favour of the abstract Rights of The Individual. Experimentation with the latest communication technology could reveal many advantageous possibilities on this score.
The success of such a strike as this largely depends to on the extent to which it can disrupt the mining companies continued supply of stockpiled metal to markets around the world. If this residual income is cut off together with all production, the companies would have been in a far weaker position than they have hitherto been. The unions have no resources to undertake such a task on the only terms it knows how - through the deployment of official agents. They would have to rely on the self-organised self-activity of proletarians engaged in direct dialogue. Such intimate intercourse among workers is by no means in the interests of unions, of course, since it cuts them out altogether and throws the necessity for their existence into question. Thus, it is clear that all that obstructs dialogue, every form of middle-man, whether it be political party, NGO or unions, must sabotage even the reformist goals which they claim to monopolise. Even by their own poverty-striken standards, the rich variety of proletarian self-representation are garbarge, unable to achieve their apparent goals without destroying the basis for their own existence. This points to a necessary generalisation: in an epoch when modern slavery produces and is produced by the spectacle, the organisation of appearances, intentions are not what they appear. Rather, they are subject to an internal contradition, the orginial intention is split into the sort of double-motivation I have spoken of in Why I am not an anarchist. In the case of unions, there is the apparent motivation of improving the conditions (and with 'revolutionary unions' abolishing the slavery) of wage-workers, and the actual motivation of controlling the sale of as many workers as possible. The despicable action of NUM and Solidarity, both of which actively worked to defeat the striking miners simply because they were not under their control, are simply two examples among countless others that unions are no better than any other pimps. Increasingly, however, workers are taking steps outside of union control, as suggested by the latest report of the Department of Labour which indicated that more than half the strikes during 2013 were 'unprotected', i.e. wildcat. An exemplary series of such strikes, which have been ongoing since January this year, has continuously crippled the SA postal service; the casual workers first struck successfully for permanent employment and, once made permanent workers, have gone on strike again for more money. This struggle has for the most part been conducted completely outside of union control, who conclude useless agreements with the bosses only to be left standing on the sidelines as the workers go on a new offensive. Observing such developments, these stalwart working-class representatives might ruefully recall the letter Steve Biko sent to the student representative council of his university: 'The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.'
As for political parties, Julius Malema is right to say that the ANC are responsible for the mass-murder of the miners. For saying this he was with much spectacle expelled from parliament by the ruling party. Unfortunately the role of Beloved and Respected Comrade Leader Maolema itself is no better than that of a pimp either. Like the ANC during the revolutionary period after 1976, Maolema is greeted warmly in almost any situation of struggle in the country, not because of the practical consequences of his activity but because of the publicity-stunts he and his party astutely manipulate with little risk to themselves (disruptive action by politicians in parliament is met with expulsion; disruptive action by proletarians in real life is met with bullets and prison), the populist rhetoric with which he decorates his electioneering (telling those in struggle to do what they have already started to do themselves, and basking in the glow of reflected militancy), and the paltry tokenistic patronage he offers (he was the first to offer financial support for the funeral services after the Marikana massacre and recently this millionaire donated the grand sum of R50 000 to the strike-fund). Less iconic racketeers, such as the Trotskyists who herded the previously autonomous strike-committees of the miners into a National Strike Coordinating Committee which was saved from the ignominy of their manipulations by its precipitate dissolution, are greeted similarly, for similar reasons. Reproducing in miniature the general history of the decrepit Labour Movement, it was militant politicial organisers such as these who paved the way for mass acceptance among miners (who were, as reported to me by someone who visited Marikana, initially very reluctant to accept any professional mediatiors) of that other great opportunist representative of the proletariat, AMCU: the true beneficiary of the Trotskyists' realpolitik. A number of the delegates from the dead strike-committees have thus been recruited into the new Workers and Socialist Party which the Trots had hoped, falsely as it turned out (they got 0.05% of the national vote), would give them widespread legitimacy in the recent elections.
The charity industry, comprising the religious institutions and the rackets of the liberal intellentsia, did not pretend to contribute anything at all of significance to the task of extending the miner's rebellion, and it lived up to its promise.
This, in sum, is the lauded civil society into whose safe hands the aspirations of black wage-slaves are currently placed. As with their predecessors during the era of chattel-slavery, the real role of these Great Emancipators lies in accommodating the masses of combative field-niggers to the placid perspective of the house-nigger. In this noble mission, they have hitherto not ceased to be victorious.
Cop observes the unleashing of evil passions after his colleagues killed a young black man, Cincinnati, USA, 2001
Precisely 100 years ago, Herman Gorter tried to make sense of the catastrophe that reduced The International Workingmen's Association which was founded in 1864, imploded under the stupidity of the infamous Marx-Bakunin split in 1872, and was resuscitated in 1889, to ‘a heap of ruins.‘ He concluded that ‘Imperialism was, for the near future and even for the distant future, the point that dominated everything.’ Today the spectacle -- the organisation of appearances, the self-representation of the proletariat -- constitutes ‘the cardinal point of the whole struggle’: both in the realm of emotions, as outlined by Wayne Spencer’s On Failure and its Possible Remedies, and the realm of political-economy, as outlined by the present text. Against all the radical artists, organic intellectuals, revolutionary politicians, critical academics, alternative journalists, progressive social-workers, independent unionists and other respectable citizens whose honorable social careers fill the void made by the silence of proletarians with professional soporifics, the direct intercourse of the dispossessed must begin to arm itself with weapons appropriate to the immensity of its task. The social war has long moved beyond the phase of straightforward mass-action emphasised by Gorter. We have had, and continue to have, plenty of it: something more effective is urgently required. Dialogue must now concern itself with the passive-aggressive spectacle of barbarous civil-society explicitly, or face the same suppression under which it has suffered for the past century.
When Gorter sketched out an alternate path to the disastrous defeat of 1914, he proposed the possibility of ‘mass action on a national scale’ initiated by the organised labour movement which, as things turned out, proved itself to be ‘a confused mass which had allowed the great events of history to fall on its head… rotten, useless and without content’. In 1994, after 80 years of catastrophic failure where the organisations that claimed to represent the working-class seemed determined to perfect the suicidal role of their predecessors, the proletarians of South Africa found themselves passing through a climacteric which reproduced, in miniature, the choices set before the world proletariat on the eve of the Great War. The mass demonstrations against capitalist violence suggested by Gorter, the general strikes which involved millions of workers during the latter half of the 1980s: these were the weapons needed to respond to the impasse which had produced a stalemate after ten years of black insurrection. The nation-wide State of Emergency imposed in 1986, the near-total obliteration of functioning Bantu Authorities in the townships, the occupation by the army: these had ended the street-fighting phase of the revolution. Lacking the above-mentioned arms to respond to the new offensive by the forces of order, black South Africans were outmaneuvered in an end-game involving the time-honoured formula of reform & repression: they had nothing with which to respond to the massacres of the 1990s and the neo-apartheid negotiated during the same period. Perhaps deployment of such weapons would not have been enough to resolve the stalemate in their favour. Capital — which rules all and to which all are subject, both petit and big bourgeoisie — the spectacle with its false-opposition which fronted Mandealer as the poster-boy for modernised misery, with its sophisticated nationalism and its enthusiastic slaves, were still too powerful. This is probably true. But if blacks had resisted to the end and until the last moment, they could have made the liberation struggle, and perhaps even its defeat, into the foundation for the revolution after the elections, rather than the foundation for two decades of near-total passivity and retreat. Already at this stage it was clear that the organised labour movement could not initiate such action: Its bureaucrats, like those of 1914, ‘allowed themselves to be diverted and manipulated by appearances’ into blind faith in struggle-celebrities and the promises of paper-democracy. Self-organised mass action, such as the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott, the general strikes organised by the Soweto students after 1976, targeted arson and the demonstrations carried out on a grand scale until the State of Emergency in 1986, were the sort of steps necessary. Today, in 2014, the uselessness of organisations which are working-class in nothing but appearance is even more glaring. In fact, as revealed by the incidents immediately prior to the Marikana Massacre, when wildcat strikers were shot dead by the officials of their own union, such organisations are not merely useless but life-threateningly dangerous. It must be frankly acknowledged that such incidents are only extreme cases of a general situation whose causes and consequences must be made concretely clear: civil-society -- the operating-theater in which the professional mediators of everyday poverty provide the spectacle with its ever-necessary 'extreme-makover' -- is the enemy of the proletarian. 'Only by upsetting the imperatives of time and social space will it be possible to imagine new relations and surroundings. Desires can only change if one changes the life that produces them', wrote the anonymous authors of At Daggers Drawn, emphasising one necessary precondition for significant change which is deadly to the healthy functioning of a vibrant civil-society: the passionate disruption of everyday life.
'The unleashing of all evil passions, as the Russian revolutionary said, is the irresistible force of transformation. Passions are evil, in that they are prisoners suffocated by that gelid monster, normality. But they are also evil because the will to live rather than shrink under the weight of duty and masks, transforms itself into quite the opposite. When restricted by daily duties, life denies itself to reappear in the guise of a servant.* In order to act freely it is necessary to be able to talk to each other without mediation. In order to discuss freely one must snatch time and space from social obligations. After all, dialogue is inseparable from struggle. It is inseparable materially (in order to talk to each other it is necessary for us to take time and seize the necessary space) and psychologically (individuals like talking about what they do because that is how words transform reality). If they do not wish to deceive themselves and others, those struggling for the demolition of the present social edifice must face the fact that subversion is a game of wild, barbarous forces.'
The revolution is not a civil affair.
'The unleashing of all evil passions, as the Russian revolutionary said, is the irresistible force of transformation. Passions are evil, in that they are prisoners suffocated by that gelid monster, normality. But they are also evil because the will to live rather than shrink under the weight of duty and masks, transforms itself into quite the opposite. When restricted by daily duties, life denies itself to reappear in the guise of a servant.* In order to act freely it is necessary to be able to talk to each other without mediation. In order to discuss freely one must snatch time and space from social obligations. After all, dialogue is inseparable from struggle. It is inseparable materially (in order to talk to each other it is necessary for us to take time and seize the necessary space) and psychologically (individuals like talking about what they do because that is how words transform reality). If they do not wish to deceive themselves and others, those struggling for the demolition of the present social edifice must face the fact that subversion is a game of wild, barbarous forces.'
The revolution is not a civil affair.
Groups of miners in discussion at Wonderkop hill
in Marikana: 'The professional chatterboxes dread nothing like they
dread dialogue. The plan to deal the fatal blow to the world is quite
simple. It consists in replacing money and the State with universal
dialogue...When proletarians dialogue, the world shakes in its
jackboots.' (Jean-Pierre Voyer, Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the People's Misery)
* Hence the prevalence for all sorts of reactionary violence, from fascism to patriarchy, militant religion to gang-war...
The End of Pre-History
'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency... The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.'
-- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1940
-- Mikhail Bakunin, toast at the end of a dinner party
This strike has to do with the making of history. It
is the outcome of a particular historical development, the birth of
capitalism. It is at the same time the outcome of the death of
capitalism. The contradiction arises from the fact that capitalism is
at the same time busy being born and busy dying. History has made
capitalism, and now capitalism has made history, and eventually
capitalism will be history.
2.
The miner's strike, which
was first and last a wage dispute, came about due to the
crisis of capitalist accumulation which at the end of the 1880s (vast
gold reefs were discovered in the Witwatersrand at precisely this
moment) moved into a new phase where, as Engels noted at the time
'most of the old crisis-points and circumstances for crisis
formation' were swept aside and replaced with 'chronic stagnation
as the normal condition of modern industry.' The various
stupendously idiotic attempts to escape the 'chronic stagnation'* of
this crisis has caused, among other marvels, world wars one and two, the 50 million deaths
from starvation of Stalin's five-year plans and the 70 million of
Chairman Mao's 'superpower program', the 5 million children a year
who continue to die of malnutrition, the 7 million premature deaths a year from air pollution, every colonial war and
occupation since the 16th century, the Great Depression, and the long
'finance-related crisis' which began in the late 1970s (concurrent
with the overthrow of the International Gold Standard and absolute
supremacy of the Dollar) including the current debt crisis which
erupted in 2008.
By far the most significant product of these attempts, however, was the increasing integration of state and economy which gave rise, out of the catastrophic defeat of the classic worker's movement**, to the society of the spectacle. It is a specific product of the irrational contradictions of capitalism, one of which is the fact of immense poverty in the midst of immense abundance, and another the violent enforcement of a system that has for the first time in human history released the entire population from the need to work (a system already well advanced in places like South Africa where nearly half the work-force has been rendered permanently redundant and Zimbabwe where practically the entire workforce is formally unemployed) while at the same time imprisoning the entire population by the need to work by forcing them to pay to live. The money-economy has eliminated the need to work, but can't eliminate the need for money (therefore work) without eliminating itself. This task the workers themselves (whether employed or unemployed, homemakers or students) will have to do. This revolutionary (non)work, itself a product of the growth of capitalism, produces the death of capitalism. The crisis thus finds its twofold nature expressed in the twofold character of the strike: the strike which arose in reaction to what bourgeois propaganda terms 'market failure' but is actually market nature – the permanent breakdown of capital whose internal contradictions render it unable to generate an acceptably competitive rate of profit without holding the vast majority of the world proletariat in a state of want & misery (and therefore dissatisfaction) -- and the strike whose worldwide qualitative extension could produce the final breakdown of capital in a revolutionary rendezvous with a luminous new life. The willingness of the bosses to endure so extended a stoppage with all its attendant losses demonstrates a fact that will have to be candidly faced by combative proletarians in the future: the owners cannot possibly be made to pay more, but they can be made to disappear.
The the latter outcome can be accomplished by pushing all those means necessary to accomplish the former to their ultimate conclusions. As Raoul Vaneigem says in his Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized Self-Management, this implies 'a tactic of qualitative progression in which inevitably partial actions each entail, as their necessary and sufficient condition, the liquidation of the world of the commodity. It’s time to begin the positive sabotage of spectacle-commodity society. As long as our mass tactics stick to the law of immediate pleasure there will be no need to worry about the outcome. It is easy to mention here, merely as suggestive examples, a few possibilities which will quickly be surpassed by the practice of liberated workers: On every occasion — openly during strikes, more or less clandestinely during work — initiate the reign of freeness by giving away factory and warehouse goods to friends and revolutionaries, by making gift objects (radio transmitters, toys, weapons, clothes, ornaments, machines for various purposes) and by organizing “giveaway” strikes in department stores; break the laws of exchange and begin the end of wage labor by collectively appropriating products of work and collectively using machines for personal and revolutionary purposes; depreciate the function of money by spreading payment strikes (rent, taxes, installment payments, transportation fares, etc.); encourage everyone’s creativity by starting up provisioning and production sectors exclusively under workers’ control, even if this can only be done intermittently, while regarding this experimentation as necessarily groping and subject to improvement; wipe out hierarchies and the spirit of sacrifice by treating bosses and union bureaucrats as they deserve and by rejecting militantism; act unitarily everywhere against all separations; draw theory from every type of practice and vice versa by composing leaflets, posters, songs, etc.'
Revolution does not take its poetry from the ruins of the past, but neither does it draw its life from dreams of the future. Life will be made new by all those who, lustily following their own passions, come together to liberate the ruins they have inherited, take them apart bit by bit, and reassemble their components into whatever forms are needed: gimlets to pierce through the rotten heart of the old world, goblets to toast the heady eruption of the new.
* The Crisis of the Gross National Spectacle by Robert Cooperstein (1976) is one of the few texts to detail the contradictions of the modern efforts by the owners of society which does not take the autonomous movement of the commodity and the alienation of those who produce it for granted. Contrary to those brave souls who can only criticise this world on its own terms, which posit alienation and its products as an eternal and objective natural law, such an perspective, which cuts through the mystification of economic 'laws' by noting the class interests which determine them, is concerned at each moment with the autonomous movement of the producers themselves within the context of these competing class interests, and the history, consequences and intentions of this class of individual.
** 'The classical workers movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the defeat of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937.' (Situationist International, The Bad Days Will End, 1962)
3.
'“ South Africa: a world in one country,” touts a Johannesburg tourist calendar. South Africa reveals not the excesses of global Power, but its naked and brutal truth. Liberalism and stalinism, the two principal forms of geopolitical domination, fuse, in South Africa, into one; permeating each other and together the society, they reveal their common rotten core... It is rather the South African proletariat that is showing the world the pathway towards progress. And progress for them can only mean continuing the adventure of total negativity; doubting everything and enforcing this doubt; forgiving nothing and forgetting even less. Those who are officially the most unskilled are today at the forefront of the struggle to make specialization obsolete. All this world is like a ghetto called Soweto.'
In his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord noted that by 1988 'the spectacle's domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation molded to its laws. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has effectively lived constitute a precise and comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid; and also all that it will permit.' It will therefore be instructive to examine how these conditions affected the South African revolutionaries whose movement was coming to an end precisely at the moment this was written. Only such an investigation can hope to understand what happened during this period that was capable of transforming a moment which was described in 1985 this way: 'The situation makes people defiant and courageous. They are not armed, but they are the toughest, most politicised, most rebellious proletariat in the world today.' (Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham; South Africa 1985: the organisation of power in black and white) into one of the most successful pacification operations the world has ever known, orchestrated by three Nobel Peace Prize winners and a world-class campaign of reform, repression and falsification which had effectively liquidated all effective independent social contestation by the time Lord Nelson was elected president in 1994, although this movement was already effectively moribund by the time he was released from his luxury prison in 1990, decimated by state repression, para-military terrorism, internecine turf wars between rival political rackets, and -- most importantly -- recuperation into the process of 'democratic transition' orchestrated by its enemies which it was not able to recognise as its most formidable adversary. The detailed evaluation required to do justice to such a project is outside the scope of the present text. All that is possible here is an outline of a few major lines of development which, among others, would have to be persued.
The fusion of liberalism and stalinism observed in the South Africa of 1980 by Shutes was one of the pioneering efforts (preceded by Italy in the late 1970s where a similar situation of advanced mass-struggle, sophisticated repression and increasingly intensified recuperation prevailed) in the global emergence of what Debord would later designate 'the integrated spectacle' which 'shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated [as in totalitarian dictatorships] and diffuse [as in liberal democracies]': a new form of domination 'attributable to a number of shared historical features, namely, the important role of the Stalinist party and unions in political and intellectual life, a weak democratic tradition, the long monopoly of power enjoyed by a single party of government, and the need to eliminate an unexpected upsurge in revolutionary activity'.
Integration occurs when the colonisation of expanding portions of everyday life by the spectacle reaches the point that almost no aspect of reality remains external to it; no independent bases remain from which resistance might be mounted. Henceforth, the increasingly difficult task of the revolutionary project is to launch a total assault from within a realm entirely occupied by a hostile power willing and able to use the most sophisticated totalitarian means to support its self-perpetuation. 'When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part.' The South African Revolution emerged within this moment of universal integration, wherein the dominant forms of the global spectacle (the diffuse form represented by Lord Nelson, St Tutu and Komandant De Klerk's Rainbow Nation & the concentrated form represented by the formal apartheid of more archaic Afrikaaners) rapidly came together in an integrated form represented by Jacob Zille & Helen Zuma's South Africa.
The continual collapse of dictatorships (whether neo-liberal as in Latin America, fascist as in Europe, or 'socialist' as in Africa and Asia) gave rise by the last half of 1980s to the dominance of a society perfect for governing, the self-proclaimed democracy of the integrated spectacle, which all who aspired to govern the crumbling states that hitherto reigned throughout four continents found desirable. Although in South Africa it is only fairly recently that this instrument of government has been perfected, its efficiency during the process of formation of the 1980s was precisely what enabled its ultimate triumph. The success of a few of its principle features are particularly notable for their role in defusing what had hitherto imposed itself as the most formidable proletarian struggle.
One of these features is the elimination of all historical thought, without which the conscious creation of one's own history remains impossible. The attempts by Afrikaaners to justify apartheid by claiming that the land their ancestors stole was unoccupied, or willfully given, or rightfully taken, was as notorious as it was unsuccessful. The attempts by English liberals to absolve themselves for the harmful effects of apartheid by blaming everything on the Boers was rather more successful. Most successful of all, however, was the falsification of the historical liberation struggle on behalf of those struggle-celebrities who would go on to profit from it. Whereas there always remained a vast area of the world beyond the reach of Stalin's police, where his schemes could be ridiculed, the global spectacle of false-opposition eliminated this troublesome problem for its chosen poster-boy, Mandealer, and his cronies. Despite the complete failure of the armed struggle at which Lord Nelson was commander in chief, and the woeful role of the ANC in all proletarian struggle throughout the 7 decades of its existence, there remained a huge amount of enthusiasm for this racket and its leaders both at home and abroad which was unable to find any effective challenge outside of the perspective of some rival racket (IFP, PAC, BC, or the state). Whatever criticism might have circulated among the revolutionary masses in the country -- whose acts certainly did not betray the perspective of fawning cheerleaders for decrepit politicians -- never found any adequate visible form. The march of events revealed the unfortunate truth that in the absence of such formulations, followed to their practical conclusions by their producers and expressed explosively enough to compel consequential decisions on the part of others, 'ineptitude compels universal respect; it is no longer permitted to laugh at it. In any case, it has become impossible to show that one is laughing.'
Two further features of our times, which are also some of the principle means by which the liquidation of history is effected, are the prevalence of generalised secrecy and unanswerable lies. Such methods were skillfully deployed in a number of ways by the forces of order and their allies. As is well known, unsubstantiated accusations were routinely used by the apartheid state, as was the case in Italy in the 1970s, to fill the prisons 'with thousands of people condemned to do penance for a civil war which did not take place, a kind of mass armed insurrection which, by chance, never actually happened, a putsch woven of such stuff as dreams are made of.' Like the detentions themselves, the secrecy with which such conduct was shrouded under the guise of National Security is something with which today everyone is all too familiar. What far less familiar is the identical activity of the self-professed enemies of apartheid. Not only was the ruthless suppression of internal dissent carried out with all the refinements available to modern barbarism in the ANC's pseudo-armed-struggle camps, but the bloody turf wars between the UDF and the BCM, and later between the ANC and the IFP, were conducted in the same manner. The victims of this violence, many of which belonged to no organisation at all, were all accused of counter-revolutionary activities and summarily executed. What was concealed most successfully of all, however, was the real target of these purges: the independent revolutionary movement, which was ultimately to fall victim to a combination of such sophisticated repression and the crude propaganda of the struggle heroes and their lackeys which are the necessary elements of 'the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world.' As Paul Trewhela observes, 'No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long. In its thirty years’ existence, the Anti-Apartheid Movement put international collaborative organisations of the period of the Spanish Civil War and of the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance to shame. Extending to the press, the churches, the bourgeois political parties, the trade unions and the radical, even the ‘trotskyist’ left, the Anti-Apartheid Movement has been an outstanding success for Stalinism...' (Inside Quadro)
Nowhere has the scandal of this success been given the attention it deserves precisely because the development of spectacular domination has reached the point where, although certain actions may appear officially unauthorised, the habitual deployment of such actions themselves become an unofficial tool of authority. It should be noted, in this regard, the near-total suppression of all consciousness regarding the reality of the self-proclaimed peaceful and democratic transition, a supression which the ideology of reconciliation, reconstruction and development did everything in its power to accomplish: As negotiations to establish a new constitutional order in South Africa were underway during the period 1989 to 1995, over 18 000 people were to lose their lives in violence which centred on KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng. In fact, in the transition period the violence claimed far more lives than did the fight against apartheid itself. As mentioned above, almost none of this violence was not directed against the state or members of political organisations but against ordinary proletarians. Just as the murderous depredations of 'crime' and its 'prevention' today appear not to be rationally directed by the established order against any particular target but by ‘rogue elements’ lashing out ‘at random’, so too the chaotic appearance of this historical bloodbath masks an entirely coherent social role: that of 'low-intensity warfare' conducted by various competing sections of the exploiting class simultaneously against one another and -- more importantly -- against the proletariat as a whole. In The Dying Days of Apartheid, for example, Rupert Taylor and Mark Shaw note that 'It should be recognised that an argument for state complicity can be made from the seeming unpredictable nature of the violence, whereby randomness may in fact be seen as being part of the strategy.' The complicity, however, involved not only the state but also those political rackets who professed to oppose it even while contriving to negotiate their future participation within it, showing just how and with whom this pseudo-opposition intended to continue to rule South African society. If massacres were orchestrated by neo-fascists, it was also true that these very neo-fascists were at the heart of the secret service which would go on to protect the black presidents of the future along with the interests these presidents would themselves protect.
In the defense of spectacular power everything is permitted, including the various partial critiques which serve to strengthen it. 'With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened.'* If the dominant order was able to impose this spectacular retreat even at the height of the revolutionary movement, and so reduce the formidable achievements of this most advanced proletarian struggle to nothing, it should come as no surprise that imbecility is now given absolute free-reign in a present built from the ruins of this movement. The effect of these conditions, more effectively totalitarian than anything Mao, Hitler or Stalin dreamed of, on the social contestation of the epoch goes some way towards explaining the spectacular success of the ANC, which was effectively able to derail a revolutionary mass movement which had advanced without it for more than a decade within a few short years. If the radical extension and intensification of moments such as this strike are ever to gain momentum as that series of widening and deepening negations of capitalist production known as proletarian revolution, its participants will have to confront such conditions and their consequences, which have only become more severe, with far more rigour, vigour, strategy and clarity than their ancestors have done. Before they can do that they will have to at least match the level of confrontation reached by the most radical struggles of the past. This stage is nowhere near being reached anywhere in the world today. But there are signs that indicate movement in that direction everywhere. This strike is one of them. The redoubtable conditions of domination today demand that alongside such a step, and side by side each one like it, critical theory must attack the authority of the spectacle and the miserable past on which it is built. The failures of our ancestors can never be surpassed with anything less.
* My comrade and I have elaborated on some of the above in the following texts: Have You Ever Slapped a Corpse in the Face, Mandela Can Go To Hell, With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? and The Joy of Dialectics.
By far the most significant product of these attempts, however, was the increasing integration of state and economy which gave rise, out of the catastrophic defeat of the classic worker's movement**, to the society of the spectacle. It is a specific product of the irrational contradictions of capitalism, one of which is the fact of immense poverty in the midst of immense abundance, and another the violent enforcement of a system that has for the first time in human history released the entire population from the need to work (a system already well advanced in places like South Africa where nearly half the work-force has been rendered permanently redundant and Zimbabwe where practically the entire workforce is formally unemployed) while at the same time imprisoning the entire population by the need to work by forcing them to pay to live. The money-economy has eliminated the need to work, but can't eliminate the need for money (therefore work) without eliminating itself. This task the workers themselves (whether employed or unemployed, homemakers or students) will have to do. This revolutionary (non)work, itself a product of the growth of capitalism, produces the death of capitalism. The crisis thus finds its twofold nature expressed in the twofold character of the strike: the strike which arose in reaction to what bourgeois propaganda terms 'market failure' but is actually market nature – the permanent breakdown of capital whose internal contradictions render it unable to generate an acceptably competitive rate of profit without holding the vast majority of the world proletariat in a state of want & misery (and therefore dissatisfaction) -- and the strike whose worldwide qualitative extension could produce the final breakdown of capital in a revolutionary rendezvous with a luminous new life. The willingness of the bosses to endure so extended a stoppage with all its attendant losses demonstrates a fact that will have to be candidly faced by combative proletarians in the future: the owners cannot possibly be made to pay more, but they can be made to disappear.
The the latter outcome can be accomplished by pushing all those means necessary to accomplish the former to their ultimate conclusions. As Raoul Vaneigem says in his Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized Self-Management, this implies 'a tactic of qualitative progression in which inevitably partial actions each entail, as their necessary and sufficient condition, the liquidation of the world of the commodity. It’s time to begin the positive sabotage of spectacle-commodity society. As long as our mass tactics stick to the law of immediate pleasure there will be no need to worry about the outcome. It is easy to mention here, merely as suggestive examples, a few possibilities which will quickly be surpassed by the practice of liberated workers: On every occasion — openly during strikes, more or less clandestinely during work — initiate the reign of freeness by giving away factory and warehouse goods to friends and revolutionaries, by making gift objects (radio transmitters, toys, weapons, clothes, ornaments, machines for various purposes) and by organizing “giveaway” strikes in department stores; break the laws of exchange and begin the end of wage labor by collectively appropriating products of work and collectively using machines for personal and revolutionary purposes; depreciate the function of money by spreading payment strikes (rent, taxes, installment payments, transportation fares, etc.); encourage everyone’s creativity by starting up provisioning and production sectors exclusively under workers’ control, even if this can only be done intermittently, while regarding this experimentation as necessarily groping and subject to improvement; wipe out hierarchies and the spirit of sacrifice by treating bosses and union bureaucrats as they deserve and by rejecting militantism; act unitarily everywhere against all separations; draw theory from every type of practice and vice versa by composing leaflets, posters, songs, etc.'
Revolution does not take its poetry from the ruins of the past, but neither does it draw its life from dreams of the future. Life will be made new by all those who, lustily following their own passions, come together to liberate the ruins they have inherited, take them apart bit by bit, and reassemble their components into whatever forms are needed: gimlets to pierce through the rotten heart of the old world, goblets to toast the heady eruption of the new.
* The Crisis of the Gross National Spectacle by Robert Cooperstein (1976) is one of the few texts to detail the contradictions of the modern efforts by the owners of society which does not take the autonomous movement of the commodity and the alienation of those who produce it for granted. Contrary to those brave souls who can only criticise this world on its own terms, which posit alienation and its products as an eternal and objective natural law, such an perspective, which cuts through the mystification of economic 'laws' by noting the class interests which determine them, is concerned at each moment with the autonomous movement of the producers themselves within the context of these competing class interests, and the history, consequences and intentions of this class of individual.
** 'The classical workers movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the defeat of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937.' (Situationist International, The Bad Days Will End, 1962)
3.
'“ South Africa: a world in one country,” touts a Johannesburg tourist calendar. South Africa reveals not the excesses of global Power, but its naked and brutal truth. Liberalism and stalinism, the two principal forms of geopolitical domination, fuse, in South Africa, into one; permeating each other and together the society, they reveal their common rotten core... It is rather the South African proletariat that is showing the world the pathway towards progress. And progress for them can only mean continuing the adventure of total negativity; doubting everything and enforcing this doubt; forgiving nothing and forgetting even less. Those who are officially the most unskilled are today at the forefront of the struggle to make specialization obsolete. All this world is like a ghetto called Soweto.'
- Chris Shutes, On The Poverty Of Berkeley Life and the Marginal Stratum of American Society in General, 1983
The fusion of liberalism and stalinism observed in the South Africa of 1980 by Shutes was one of the pioneering efforts (preceded by Italy in the late 1970s where a similar situation of advanced mass-struggle, sophisticated repression and increasingly intensified recuperation prevailed) in the global emergence of what Debord would later designate 'the integrated spectacle' which 'shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated [as in totalitarian dictatorships] and diffuse [as in liberal democracies]': a new form of domination 'attributable to a number of shared historical features, namely, the important role of the Stalinist party and unions in political and intellectual life, a weak democratic tradition, the long monopoly of power enjoyed by a single party of government, and the need to eliminate an unexpected upsurge in revolutionary activity'.
Integration occurs when the colonisation of expanding portions of everyday life by the spectacle reaches the point that almost no aspect of reality remains external to it; no independent bases remain from which resistance might be mounted. Henceforth, the increasingly difficult task of the revolutionary project is to launch a total assault from within a realm entirely occupied by a hostile power willing and able to use the most sophisticated totalitarian means to support its self-perpetuation. 'When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part.' The South African Revolution emerged within this moment of universal integration, wherein the dominant forms of the global spectacle (the diffuse form represented by Lord Nelson, St Tutu and Komandant De Klerk's Rainbow Nation & the concentrated form represented by the formal apartheid of more archaic Afrikaaners) rapidly came together in an integrated form represented by Jacob Zille & Helen Zuma's South Africa.
The continual collapse of dictatorships (whether neo-liberal as in Latin America, fascist as in Europe, or 'socialist' as in Africa and Asia) gave rise by the last half of 1980s to the dominance of a society perfect for governing, the self-proclaimed democracy of the integrated spectacle, which all who aspired to govern the crumbling states that hitherto reigned throughout four continents found desirable. Although in South Africa it is only fairly recently that this instrument of government has been perfected, its efficiency during the process of formation of the 1980s was precisely what enabled its ultimate triumph. The success of a few of its principle features are particularly notable for their role in defusing what had hitherto imposed itself as the most formidable proletarian struggle.
One of these features is the elimination of all historical thought, without which the conscious creation of one's own history remains impossible. The attempts by Afrikaaners to justify apartheid by claiming that the land their ancestors stole was unoccupied, or willfully given, or rightfully taken, was as notorious as it was unsuccessful. The attempts by English liberals to absolve themselves for the harmful effects of apartheid by blaming everything on the Boers was rather more successful. Most successful of all, however, was the falsification of the historical liberation struggle on behalf of those struggle-celebrities who would go on to profit from it. Whereas there always remained a vast area of the world beyond the reach of Stalin's police, where his schemes could be ridiculed, the global spectacle of false-opposition eliminated this troublesome problem for its chosen poster-boy, Mandealer, and his cronies. Despite the complete failure of the armed struggle at which Lord Nelson was commander in chief, and the woeful role of the ANC in all proletarian struggle throughout the 7 decades of its existence, there remained a huge amount of enthusiasm for this racket and its leaders both at home and abroad which was unable to find any effective challenge outside of the perspective of some rival racket (IFP, PAC, BC, or the state). Whatever criticism might have circulated among the revolutionary masses in the country -- whose acts certainly did not betray the perspective of fawning cheerleaders for decrepit politicians -- never found any adequate visible form. The march of events revealed the unfortunate truth that in the absence of such formulations, followed to their practical conclusions by their producers and expressed explosively enough to compel consequential decisions on the part of others, 'ineptitude compels universal respect; it is no longer permitted to laugh at it. In any case, it has become impossible to show that one is laughing.'
Two further features of our times, which are also some of the principle means by which the liquidation of history is effected, are the prevalence of generalised secrecy and unanswerable lies. Such methods were skillfully deployed in a number of ways by the forces of order and their allies. As is well known, unsubstantiated accusations were routinely used by the apartheid state, as was the case in Italy in the 1970s, to fill the prisons 'with thousands of people condemned to do penance for a civil war which did not take place, a kind of mass armed insurrection which, by chance, never actually happened, a putsch woven of such stuff as dreams are made of.' Like the detentions themselves, the secrecy with which such conduct was shrouded under the guise of National Security is something with which today everyone is all too familiar. What far less familiar is the identical activity of the self-professed enemies of apartheid. Not only was the ruthless suppression of internal dissent carried out with all the refinements available to modern barbarism in the ANC's pseudo-armed-struggle camps, but the bloody turf wars between the UDF and the BCM, and later between the ANC and the IFP, were conducted in the same manner. The victims of this violence, many of which belonged to no organisation at all, were all accused of counter-revolutionary activities and summarily executed. What was concealed most successfully of all, however, was the real target of these purges: the independent revolutionary movement, which was ultimately to fall victim to a combination of such sophisticated repression and the crude propaganda of the struggle heroes and their lackeys which are the necessary elements of 'the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world.' As Paul Trewhela observes, 'No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long. In its thirty years’ existence, the Anti-Apartheid Movement put international collaborative organisations of the period of the Spanish Civil War and of the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance to shame. Extending to the press, the churches, the bourgeois political parties, the trade unions and the radical, even the ‘trotskyist’ left, the Anti-Apartheid Movement has been an outstanding success for Stalinism...' (Inside Quadro)
Nowhere has the scandal of this success been given the attention it deserves precisely because the development of spectacular domination has reached the point where, although certain actions may appear officially unauthorised, the habitual deployment of such actions themselves become an unofficial tool of authority. It should be noted, in this regard, the near-total suppression of all consciousness regarding the reality of the self-proclaimed peaceful and democratic transition, a supression which the ideology of reconciliation, reconstruction and development did everything in its power to accomplish: As negotiations to establish a new constitutional order in South Africa were underway during the period 1989 to 1995, over 18 000 people were to lose their lives in violence which centred on KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng. In fact, in the transition period the violence claimed far more lives than did the fight against apartheid itself. As mentioned above, almost none of this violence was not directed against the state or members of political organisations but against ordinary proletarians. Just as the murderous depredations of 'crime' and its 'prevention' today appear not to be rationally directed by the established order against any particular target but by ‘rogue elements’ lashing out ‘at random’, so too the chaotic appearance of this historical bloodbath masks an entirely coherent social role: that of 'low-intensity warfare' conducted by various competing sections of the exploiting class simultaneously against one another and -- more importantly -- against the proletariat as a whole. In The Dying Days of Apartheid, for example, Rupert Taylor and Mark Shaw note that 'It should be recognised that an argument for state complicity can be made from the seeming unpredictable nature of the violence, whereby randomness may in fact be seen as being part of the strategy.' The complicity, however, involved not only the state but also those political rackets who professed to oppose it even while contriving to negotiate their future participation within it, showing just how and with whom this pseudo-opposition intended to continue to rule South African society. If massacres were orchestrated by neo-fascists, it was also true that these very neo-fascists were at the heart of the secret service which would go on to protect the black presidents of the future along with the interests these presidents would themselves protect.
In the defense of spectacular power everything is permitted, including the various partial critiques which serve to strengthen it. 'With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened.'* If the dominant order was able to impose this spectacular retreat even at the height of the revolutionary movement, and so reduce the formidable achievements of this most advanced proletarian struggle to nothing, it should come as no surprise that imbecility is now given absolute free-reign in a present built from the ruins of this movement. The effect of these conditions, more effectively totalitarian than anything Mao, Hitler or Stalin dreamed of, on the social contestation of the epoch goes some way towards explaining the spectacular success of the ANC, which was effectively able to derail a revolutionary mass movement which had advanced without it for more than a decade within a few short years. If the radical extension and intensification of moments such as this strike are ever to gain momentum as that series of widening and deepening negations of capitalist production known as proletarian revolution, its participants will have to confront such conditions and their consequences, which have only become more severe, with far more rigour, vigour, strategy and clarity than their ancestors have done. Before they can do that they will have to at least match the level of confrontation reached by the most radical struggles of the past. This stage is nowhere near being reached anywhere in the world today. But there are signs that indicate movement in that direction everywhere. This strike is one of them. The redoubtable conditions of domination today demand that alongside such a step, and side by side each one like it, critical theory must attack the authority of the spectacle and the miserable past on which it is built. The failures of our ancestors can never be surpassed with anything less.
* My comrade and I have elaborated on some of the above in the following texts: Have You Ever Slapped a Corpse in the Face, Mandela Can Go To Hell, With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? and The Joy of Dialectics.
Ten Givaway Signs That He's Really Into You
The significance of the present crisis provoked by the strike can be gauged by the response of the rulers and their minions, which has been nothing less than revealing. Clutching at straws, Lonmin issued an ultimatum to the strikers to return to work by 14 May or else. The miners
called Lonmin's bluff, but when the deadline arrived without any
resumption of work Police Minister Nathi Mthetwa made the ominous
remark during a press statement on the same day: "Anarchy will
not be allowed, whether disguised as industrial action or not."
(This comment must be understood in the light of the agreement among
the mine bosses and the state prior to the 2012 massacre that the
wildcat strike then taking place was similarly 'a criminal act' in
disguise.) It was then revealed that the army has been deployed to
the area and are stationed at the Rustenburg polices public order
base in the case of eventuality in Marikana. This is one week after
the army moved in to crush protests against vote-rigging in Alexandra
-- the first time soldiers were sent into the townships since the
State of Emergency of the 1980s.
On the same day police spokesman Brigadier Thulani Ngubane from Marikana said the soldiers would be on standby. They are our supplementary forces. The operation is run by the SAPS. The level violence being prepared can be measured by the fact that these forces are to supplement the same paramilitary police who, in camouflage gear, armored vehicles, with helicopters circling in the air, mowed-down 100 miners with high-calibre machine guns. All this is considered insufficient firepower 'in the case of eventuality'. In this the forces of order are quite correct, considering that right under the barrels of all the big guns a crowd of 4000 proceeded to loot an entire shopping-center next to Impala Platinum's number 9 mine-shaft in addition to burning a number of public buildings with no more than four people (0.1 % of the looters) arrested.
Neither have the other
forces of law and order been idle. Taking heart at these recent
movements of the armed wing of capital, and suggesting further
developments of its own, a letter published in Business Day under
the titled Economic Sabotage stated 'The 1922 strike of mine
workers on Witwatersrand gold mines was regarded by the government as
sufficiently damaging to the economy for it to call in the army to
arrest the strike leaders the Hanekom brothers [not to mention
subject the rank-and-file strikers to aerial bombardment, artillery
shelling and machine-gun fire]. The platinum miners strike is tragic
in many respects, not least of which is the apparent inability of the
government to recognise the seriousness of the situation and act
accordingly.' Having already learned a thing or two from their
historic forbears in the arena of mass murder, our political leaders
might well take the hint. An economist quoted in the same paper
suggested 'If the government intervenes in this strike because they
surely have no incentive not to that will reflect positively on South
Africa's labour policy. It sends a message that government is willing
to stop labour movements that are damaging to economic growth.' The
business papers are daily full of such ominous outpourings.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Mineral Resources essayed a failed intervention in the strike negotiations. The union Solidarity is living up to its name by asking the constitutional court to declare the strike illegal. The Labour Court itself has tried its hand at facilitating mediation. The landlords of the mining companies have gone to court to obtain their own legal resolution of the strike. The Secretary General of the ANC questioned 'whether this was a collective bargaining strike or a political strike... after having noted disturbing developments'. The Department of Labour has begun to look into the possibilities for a change to the law that would compel parties, under 'certain circumstances' [for example when greedy proletarians demand more than they are worth due in a political strike], to undergo compulsory arbitration [i.e. put a legal time-limit on strikes]. Former Bantustan dictator Bantu Holomisa (now boss of a political party characteristically named United Democratic Movement) repeated calls for a mining commission while calling for a roundtable discussion on the economy like Codesa in the early 1990s. Codesa, or the Convention for a Democratic SA, was a series of negotiations between 1990 and 1993 between political parties and the former government to end formal apartheid. Finally, in the State of the Nation Address, numbskull number one affirmed that “Government will play its part in the implementation of the landmark Framework Agreement for a Sustainable Mining Industry entered into by labour, business and government last year, under the leadership of former Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe. (Pregnant pause) The process will now be led by the President .”
On
the technological front, innovations were introduced when the bosses
used text messaging to contact miners directly in an attempt to get
them to vote individually through a 'secret ballot' over whether
they wanted to return to work or not. At present this was done merely
for propaganda purposes, but the introduction of compulsory secret
ballots as a means of breaking strikes was proposed by the mine
companies and is one of many measures being considered by the state.
Then there is the introduction of robotic warfare
in the form of aerial
drones armed with deafening audio, strobe lighting, HD cameras with identification & thermal infrared capability, and machine guns loaded with of multi-coloured pepper-spray balls & rubber
bullets capable of firing at a rate of 20 rounds per second, carrying 4000 rounds on board. 25 such
contraptions have already been sold to an unnamed multinational
mining company.
These are just a few shenanigans that have made it into the news over the last few weeks. Add to that everything that has taken place during the earlier stages of the five month strike and all the other hush-hush scurrying about going on behind closed doors and it is possible to appreciate the severity of the situation in the eyes of the rulers and their minions. They are people whose material interests depend on their ability to unify the disparate elements of control and domination, to mine the general out of the particular. Our enemies are certainly addressing the implications of this strike with the seriousness it deserves. Are we?
On The Passage of A Few Possibilities Through A Brief Period of Time
If a few thousand miners
are able assert their interests with such inspiring vigour against
the whole organised force of the old world when the struggle revolves
over a mere 1000 Euro wage, what might the united movement of the
whole class not accomplish when what is at stake is everything:
the possibility of every child, woman and man to participate fully in
every aspect of life they have any interest in?
And how to pass from the former to the latter?
Might workers, school-kids, students, and the landless unemployed decide, instead of the symbolic union-controlled general strike traditionally employed during moments of generalised contestation, to transplant the checkerboard strike to the national economy as a whole? Might participants in neighborhood assemblies, building and land occupations apply the method of the derive -- developed by the Situationist International to apply the perpetual motion of the nomad to the habitation of the urban environment -- to their own congregations to invent the portable occupation? Might they themselves as individuals or groups drift continually from one situation to the next across the city in an effort to traverse the racially, classically divided boundaries of an unchallenged urban tradition? Might they move from the realisation and suppression of political-economy to that of art, culture, religion, science, medicine, philosophy, then education, then love and the family, then back to political-economy again?
How to dive down to the most general by delving deep into the heart of the particular?
One possibility was indicated in Portugal where a
vast social movement developed during the ensuing years out of a
token general strike called by the unions for one day in 2010. We can
claim for ourselves, whatever the immediate future brings to the
platinum miners, the slogan sprayed across the walls of Lisbon,
Oporto and elsewhere:
THE STRIKE DOES NOT END HERE
Outlines for A Plan of Oraganisation and Activity of An Anti-Anti Land Invasions Unit
The
following formulations compose no more than a brief outline, sketched
in broad strokes, of a project to be born only among an abundance of
discussion, so it can grow up healthy and strong through the rich
nourishment of intimate conviviality and lively intercourse. Please
keep in mind that everything set down here is entirely open to
question. Moreover, please note that the wall-poster Whiteout,
still-born from my brief affair with the Marikana Land Occupation on
the outskirts of Cape Town, forms the context of all that follows.
The
central thesis of the above poster, itself modelled on a tactic
widely used for subversive purposes to undermine Chairman Mao's
bureacracy during the Cultural Revolution, is that solidarity
begins at home. The central thesis of the present programmatic
platform is similar: subversion begins at home.
Marikana, the question
of the boer to the Zulu 'did you step on a white man's land?' and the
difference between african nationalism whether of the PAC or ANC
stripe and the revolutionary communism of Mokonyane's Movement for a
Democracy of Content and Winstanley's Diggers (The former say it is
black man's land – that it belongs to men like Ramaphosa, Mandela
and Zuma – the latter say that it is no man's land, neither
black nor white. The earth was a gift by the creator (whether Marx &
Mokonyane's nature or Winstanley & Prudhon's God) as 'a common
treasury for all'. Creation and the
means of subsistence: Life
and the means of life: Freedom
for personal
self-realisation and the means for practicing it:
Such is the
fundamental Grace
on which depends all others, just
as the courage to seize it is
the basic Virtue
on which depends all others.)
This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each
time unknown people try to live differently. But it was always far
away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain
outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are
separated from it by our own nonintervention. And end up being rather
disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? When
did we miss our chance? We havent found the arms we needed. We've let
things slip away.
This message is addressed to those sick of letting things slip away. It is intended neither for the would-be leaders nor the has-been cheerleaders of other people's struggles.
The significance of the
Black Consciousness break with NUSAS can best be grasped in reference
to four examples: The Marikana land occupations (their storming of
the trains, their procurement of a letter signed by some law-clinic),
The occupation of Rysegade by BZ, The situationists and their breaks,
and Rian Malan's description of the patent impotence of whites ('it
was almost impossible to be white and conscious') - the impotence of
the white radical so perceptively detailed by Malan is the impotence
of the militant detailed by the Situationist International (The split
between the white UDF march and that of the blacks which sparked off
the uprising in Cape Town, the split between the Belgian who had
occupied the university in Europe and her retreat into Malan's
'circle of hell' (what if, instead of the theatrical demonstration
ritual, the UCT students had occupied their own campus, split into a
contingent which would remain to defend and extend the occupation and
a mass which would march to the townships, connect with the rebels
there and invite them to march back to UCT to participate in the
occupation... in the ensuing confrontation with the state, the cops
would be very unlikely to unleash the usual brutality, while march
would be just as unlikely to disperse in ignominy as usual... even if
such a march failed to make it back to the campus, which is almost
certainly the case, the occupation itself could have become a locus
of struggle through which the township rebellion might have
developed... the train ride by the black & coloured students to
town centre in 1976, for example, which accomplished nothing, might
have diverted to the campus, and really led to interesting
developments, especially considering the proximity of black areas
such as Walmer Estate & Athlone which might have served as
bridges between struggles in the white areas and those in the Cape
Flats. The fruit of Jorn's 1958 statement: 'As long as one is on the
move, one will not remain alone.' For nearly ten years the everyday
reality of the situationists seemed to belie that; they were very
much alone, as practically isolated from wider social movements as
any ultra-leftist sect. Unlike such sects, however, they really were
on the move, and in 1966, with the eruption of the Strausbourg
scandal whose implications widened and deepened over the course of
two years to break into a wildcat general-strike involving 10 million
workers which, for a few weeks in May 1968, was 'only hours away'
from taking those steps towards a new life from which there can be no
return, they confirmed Jorn's 10 year old hypothesis in the most
astonishing manner. The critiques of the occupations made by Perlman
and Le Manach, however, to be made use of in any such future
movement.
Anti-Anti Land Invasions unit (Negation of the Negation) platform for collective struggle against the colonisation of our own lives by the spectacle, its occupation of all space, language and communications media, and eviction of each and everyone from the position in which they can determine the form and content of their own lives. This is the only way the slogan 'We are all Marikana' can be charged any real explosive content; as it currently stands it's simply another empty populist phrase trotted out alongside 'We are all Trayvon Martin', 'We are the 99%' & 'We are all Keynesians now'. Such vacuous phrases are useless precisely because of their divorce from any everyday practice based on a continuously widening, deepening pursuit of common material interests: the only basis for overcoming the real contradictions which practically divide the theoretical we into a reality of countless conflicting me's. This is why such slogans can be all things to all people, and why they tend to change according to whichever way the wind blows, as Thabo Mbeki, whose Party maintained a generic Social-Democratic line ever since it rose to prominence, wryly observed in the late 80s: 'We are all Thatcherites now'. It is the only way the slogan 'Remember Marikana' can be given any revolutionary content in everyday life, rather than in the spectacle of tragedy and sympathy, outrage and patronage, it currently supports: passive spectators can contemplate it on their daily commute by gazing at the slogan sprayed along the road; they can buy a green Remember Marikana badge to wear as a progressive fashion accessory (eerily reminiscent of the Chairman Mao badges disseminated in the hundreds of millions during the Cultural Revolution: there is a big difference between a wildcat strike leader and a Communist Party leader but little difference in the relation between any spectator and any icon of a 'Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader'); they can watch moving documentaries or read detailed books about the massacre and talk about how deeply affected or well-informed they were by them; they can take photos of themselves alongside strikers at fund-raising events and post them on the internet. In short, they can participate in the image of revolt while doing absolutely nothing in their own lives to challenge the common slavery whose invisible hand ensures
'Till Kingdom come' (quoth Sir Zuma)
Its will be done (our will be damned)
In Delft as it is in China.
Of course, the various activities above can be used
to make valuable subversive contributions in many situations. The
criticism offered here does not relate to them in the abstract;
it concerns the concrete context of today, an epoch wherein
such activities together comprise a spectacle of opposition
whose main product is a self-righteous satisfaction in their own
pacification -- a daily separation between their own lives and the
possibility for meaningful rebellion -- on the part of would-be
progressive spectators. Revolt is understandably unpopular: it
involves practical action and personal risk rather than
inconsequential contemplation and comfortable consumption. Unless we
betray them through resignation to the triumph of that which
destroyed them, it is necessary to assert in the language of deeds:
the memory of victims is not past; it is present. It is not
commiseration and sadness; it is determination and combat.
On 25 April 2012 in Lisbon, Portugal, after the traditional procession commemorating the carnation revolution, some fifty people put this into practice when they entered an abandoned four-storey building on Sao Lazaro street, the site of an earlier occupation evicted in 2010. In solidarity with what was happening at ES.COL.A (where an abandoned school was occupied in Oporto on the same day) the building was occupied. The Sao Lazaro occupation also aimed at opposing the rotten peace of the institutional commemoration with a protest as combative as the long-forgotten memory it suppressed - or as the institutions and their spectators would have it, 'commemorated'. In ‘On the Passage of a Few Thousand People Through a Brief Period of Time (2010-2013)’, some participants of these actions described the strategic importance of such a step:
"A thousand pages could be written about the experience of this occupation which today continues to reverberate everywhere. Nevertheless, certain aspects deserve particular attention. Right from the start, ES.COL.A [Espaço Colectivo Autogestionado (Collectively Self-managed Space): both a play on the Portuguese word escolaor school, which happens to be what the occupied space was before being abandoned by the city of Porto, and the acronym for the recuperated space itself] stemmed from strong ties with the surrounding territory and the forms of life that inhabited it. It was not the occupation that emancipated the bairro [working-class 'hood], but the bairro that intensified the occupation, in a grassroots project built step-by-step by acquiring resources, knowledge, experience and the ability to work as a collective. Take, for example, the number and quality of posters... which are usually seen in more artistic scenes. ES.COL.A was not closed in on itself or even on the bairro, but rather swept across the entire city and let itself be crossed by it. Otherwise, it would not have brought out two thousands demonstrators.
Arguably, the confluence of multiple subjectivities and points of view in the ES.COL.A assembly (anarchists and left militants, vegetarians and gunas [chavs], artists and punks, etc.) kept the occupation from becoming a crystallization of identities and any one of its components from taking it over and manipulating it. The result – autonomy – seemed good. ES.COL.A demonstrated, amongst other things, that the occupation of spaces can be conceived, not as the search for refuge or a roof over one’s head, but as the indispensable material base for an offensive against modern urbanism and the capitalist organization of the city."
In 2004 residents of Khayelitsha who had formed the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign occupied an
abandoned school and ran it themselves. It was later a casualty of
the collapse of this organisation, although an NGO sponsored
crèche does remain. Next time something similar happens, anywhere
around the world, the participants could use the Portuguese
experience as a starting point for further developments.
A common criticism of proposals such as this is
that if they do not locate their focus on the townships and poor areas they will fail
to bridge the class divide. The problem with such criticism is that -- followed to its logical conclusions by NGOs, populist politicians, and
other such opportunists -- it leads to the position that it is better to
create a fake community in a squatter-camp than a real one in the
central business district of the city. Such tokenistic activism, hard
at work on the reorganisation of appearances, has only bridged the
class divide: the point, however, is to destroy it. This
involves the consciousness among those categorised as middle-class
that the material facts of their everyday existence scream out loud
and clear that they remain slaves with no control whatsoever over
the decisions that most deeply and directly affect their lives, just
as much as it involves what we in South Africa call 'the poors', who
already know this fact more clearly, taking collective steps to put
their knowledge into practice by acting to change
its object. Thus the understanding of revolutionary practice
as 'the science of the concrete', as 'sensuous transformative
activity'. Unless the knowledge in question be merely
academic, to 'know' is not a state of being acquired once
and for all but an act that like any other can only be
performed here and now. Knowledge is as knowledge does. To know
anything merely in theory is useless; it is necessary to know in
practice. That's why it makes sense to say that Black
Consciousness had two historic expressions:
Firstly, as the written crystallization of a praxis developed amongst the middle-class black students who learned to know their place in society as it really was, as a position of oppression rather than privilege. This self-education, based on direct investigation of their own everyday lives shorn of the various forms of delusion foisted on them, came in direct opposition to the organisation of appearances. The oppression of blacks as a whole was, of course, based on the fable that they were put in a priveledged position compared to their barbarian ancestors by the beneficent civilisation of the white man: Vorster, during one of the great climacterics of the revolution, said in a 1976 parliamentary speech which recieved a standing ovation 'We say in defiance to the slanders spread about us around the world: Never before have 4 million done so much for 18 million as in South Africa'. Bantu Biko & Okgopotse Tiro's fellow students had in their turn benefited from the benevolence of white civilisation more than any other blacks of their own generation: they were among the few to attend university in an era when graduation from secondary school was still a very rare occurrence among blacks -- often secondary school teachers themselves didn't even matriculate! They were an elite of an elite: my mother and her generation, the class of 1976 which came of age under a deluge of state barbarism immediately after the intellectuals of the Black Consciousness left university, continued the black tradition of failing to complete high-school. Significantly, however, this generation dropped-out due to boycotts whereas all those in previous generations were pushed out due to poverty: the word 'push-out' was prevalent in the South Africa of my mother's youth, the word drop-out became prevalent after this generation had graduated in the open-aired classroom of struggle: 'The school for the oppressed is a revolution'. They were what in the United States was called 'the talented tenth'. Everything, from the ideology of their parents to those their parents and many of their peers, worked towards the self-perception among these students that they were, far from oppressed, extremely privileged. But they refused to capitulate to this pressure, and almost immediately everything changed. As they came to know their real place in society they also came to know the desire to change society, and in this very process they changed their own position. They were no longer middle-class non-whites but black proletarians. A similar process has to happen with the priveledged proletarians of today, naturally it will no longer be based on any positive racial, national, sexual or cultural identity. Times have changed, the old world has saved itself by permitting every sort of liberty except the most fundamental one.
Secondly, as the practical criticism of everything that exists developed among the drop-outs, school-kids, workers and unemployed youths of the townships in the 10 years following from 1976: in the direct action that destroyed all physical expressions of herrenvolk supremacy from Beerhalls to Bantu Authority buildings to schools & buses; the barricades, wildcat strikes and boycotts; the mass meetings at funerals, fields, schools and in the streets; the mass expropriations, rent-strikes, demonstrations and workplace sabotage.
Firstly, as the written crystallization of a praxis developed amongst the middle-class black students who learned to know their place in society as it really was, as a position of oppression rather than privilege. This self-education, based on direct investigation of their own everyday lives shorn of the various forms of delusion foisted on them, came in direct opposition to the organisation of appearances. The oppression of blacks as a whole was, of course, based on the fable that they were put in a priveledged position compared to their barbarian ancestors by the beneficent civilisation of the white man: Vorster, during one of the great climacterics of the revolution, said in a 1976 parliamentary speech which recieved a standing ovation 'We say in defiance to the slanders spread about us around the world: Never before have 4 million done so much for 18 million as in South Africa'. Bantu Biko & Okgopotse Tiro's fellow students had in their turn benefited from the benevolence of white civilisation more than any other blacks of their own generation: they were among the few to attend university in an era when graduation from secondary school was still a very rare occurrence among blacks -- often secondary school teachers themselves didn't even matriculate! They were an elite of an elite: my mother and her generation, the class of 1976 which came of age under a deluge of state barbarism immediately after the intellectuals of the Black Consciousness left university, continued the black tradition of failing to complete high-school. Significantly, however, this generation dropped-out due to boycotts whereas all those in previous generations were pushed out due to poverty: the word 'push-out' was prevalent in the South Africa of my mother's youth, the word drop-out became prevalent after this generation had graduated in the open-aired classroom of struggle: 'The school for the oppressed is a revolution'. They were what in the United States was called 'the talented tenth'. Everything, from the ideology of their parents to those their parents and many of their peers, worked towards the self-perception among these students that they were, far from oppressed, extremely privileged. But they refused to capitulate to this pressure, and almost immediately everything changed. As they came to know their real place in society they also came to know the desire to change society, and in this very process they changed their own position. They were no longer middle-class non-whites but black proletarians. A similar process has to happen with the priveledged proletarians of today, naturally it will no longer be based on any positive racial, national, sexual or cultural identity. Times have changed, the old world has saved itself by permitting every sort of liberty except the most fundamental one.
Secondly, as the practical criticism of everything that exists developed among the drop-outs, school-kids, workers and unemployed youths of the townships in the 10 years following from 1976: in the direct action that destroyed all physical expressions of herrenvolk supremacy from Beerhalls to Bantu Authority buildings to schools & buses; the barricades, wildcat strikes and boycotts; the mass meetings at funerals, fields, schools and in the streets; the mass expropriations, rent-strikes, demonstrations and workplace sabotage.
***
 |
| 'While you watch TV, I make history for you!' |
"It is a matter of giving ourselves the means by which all those questions, which when addressed separately can drive one to depression, can be resolved. How to get rid of all the dependencies that weaken us? How to get organised so as to no longer have to work? How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without "leaving for the countryside"? How to shut down the nuclear plants? How not to be forced, when a friend goes mad, to resort to psychiatric pulverisation; to the gross remedies of mechanistic medicine when he falls ill? How to live together without mutually dominating each other? How to react to the death of a comrade? How to ruin empire?
We know our weaknesses: we were born and we have grown up in pacified societies, which are as if they have been dissolved. We have not had the opportunity to acquire the consistency that moments of intense collective confrontation can give. Nor the knowledge that is linked to them. We have a political education to mature together. A theoretical and practical education.
For this, we need places. Places to get organised, to share and develop the required techniques. To learn to handle all that may prove necessary. To co-operate. Had it not renounced any political perspective, the experimentation of the Bauhaus, with all the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that we have of space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowledge and experience. The Black Panthers equipped themselves with such places; to which they added their politico-military capacity, the ten thousand free lunches they distributed everyday, and their autonomous press. Soon they formed a threat so tangible to power that the special services had to be sent to massacre them.
Whoever constitutes themselves as a force knows that they become a party to the global course of hostilities."
There is a danger in this approach, however, which arises whenever those who conceive of their project in these terms fail to distinguish clear boundaries between the limitations of their own activity, inasmuch as it constitutes itself as a coherent force, and the generally incoherent force of revolutionary masses whose self-activity only gains consciousness of its aims and methods through violent eruptions of confusion and exuberance involving millions who had previously never given rebellion a second thought. If the vanguardist conception tended to absorb the class into the Party as Organisation, the conception advanced by the authors of call and their associates can tend to absorb the class into the Party as Activity. In order to make revolution millions of proletarians must become dialecticians -- they seize the revolutionary theory that will arm them for their struggle -- but they do not, and statistically cannot, need to become revolutionists. Workers will not need to first become situationists before they make situationist revolution: the contradictions of the real movement which abolishes existing conditions tends to compel the working-class as a whole to become an increasingly dangerous body of revolutionaries without ever having been revolutionists. The traditional vanguardism which today finds popular in the politics of the Green Party and the figures of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Julius Malema, involves a substitution in which proletarians are expected to make revolution by giving the professional revolutionists more and more vociferous -- but nonetheless passive -- support. The disembodied vanguardism which plagues a certain sector of the most sophisticated revolutionists involves a sort of substitutionism in which proletarians are expected to make revolution by becoming more and more like them. This idea seems to me mistaken. It follows precisely the old voluntarism of the revolutionary unions, communes and co-operatives of the old labour movement which aimed to draw more and more workers into a particular form of action and association until capitalism would eventually have nobody left to exploit. It is a beautiful notion, and I as much as anyone wish were true, but practically and theoretically it is doomed to eternal failure. 'Whoever constitutes themselves as a force knows that they become a party to the global course of hostilities' Whether these are the hostilities of economic competition which turn every successful co-operative and commune into capitalist organisations, or the hostilities of the territorial competition which turn all isolated powers into proto-state forces (the state at its most basic expression as 'bands of armed men'): any party which envisions themselves and their activities as the focal point of revolution are engaging in a fantasy which all too easily leads to very real, very unfortunate, consequences. The authors of Nihilist-Communism, keenly aware of this, drew the conclusion that the best way to avoid such delusions was to avoid any activity whatsoever other than publishing propaganda. They reckon there's nothing for it to sip tea and wait for the revolution to come to them. Those who through exhaustion, disappointment, lack of ambition or want of dialectics use the simple observation 'A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait' to justify their own ideology of nihilist-quietism go so far again in the other direction that they introduce an essentialist separation into the relation between Class and Party whose reality, as much as it needs boundaries in order to make sense (to remain clearly sensible rather than hopelessly confused), involves an inseparable movement of mutual-reciprocity: an intimate intercourse through which both are continually changed through interaction with the other. Because of the continuous basis of this interaction, it makes no sense to pretend, as some do, that revolutionists can do nothing of consequence until moments of mass insurrection erupt. All indications are that, if they have done nothing by that stage, they will be able to do less than nothing at a time when people and the ideas they passionately espouse are judged not by their revolutionary rhetoric but by their practical consequences. Such was the observation of Bob Black in his review of the inactivist manifesto, a sentiment I wholeheartedly share, as do the authors of Call:
"We know that building a power of any scale will take time. There are lots of things that we no longer know how to do. In fact, as all those who benefited from modernisation and the education dispensed in our developed lands, we barely know how to do anything. Even gathering plants for cooking or medicinal purpose rather than for decoration is regarded at best as archaic, at worst as quaint.
We make a simple observation: everyone has access to a certain amount of resources and knowledge made available by the simple fact of living in these lands of the old world; and can communise them.
There would be many inappropriate ways to say what we envisage: we neither want to leave for the countryside nor gather ancient knowledge to accumulate it. We are not merely concerned with the reappropriation of means. Nor would we restrict ourselves to the reappropriation of knowledge. If we put together all the knowledge and techniques, all the inventiveness displayed in the field of activism, we would not get a revolutionary movement. It is a question of temporality. A question of creating the conditions where an offensive can sustain itself without fading, of establishing the material solidarities that allow us to hold on.
We believe there is no revolution without the constitution of a common material power. We do not ignore the anachronism of this belief.
We know it is too early and also that it is too late, that is why we have time.
We have ceased to wait."
Revolutionary critique, considered as the consciousness of the class-struggle as a whole, may need to know how to wait, revolutionists do not have that luxury. Life is short. The passions of the heart are either spent with exuberance or they rot in their treasure chest. To denounce the insipidity of bourgeois happiness and renounce any attempt to peruse more subversive pleasures leads only to one choice: suicide or heartless self-compromise, conscious collaboration in a spectacle whose seductions are poisoned with nothing for it but to admit the toxicity but swallow it anyway. There is another possibility. It involves the invention of subversion able to satisfy our own needs, not those of masses who remain outside ourselves. Equipping oneself as well as possible to contribute to the great game of revolution whose state of play becomes more decisive every day so that when the decisive moment arises one will be able to intervene as effectively as possible -- not 'concsiousness raising' of empty-buckets into which ready-made questions and the answers are poured. Thus the organisation of Party returns to make its contribution towards that of the class without swallowing it in a false ideological unity or severing relations with it in a false ideological separation.
Greed, the pursuit of material self-interest, is basis from which the proletariat derives its revolutionary force as the one class for which communism is a necessary precondition to its self-realisation. It is necessary for the conduct of those who, in the pre-revolutionary period, constitute themselves as a material force, to base their everyday practice on just this self-interested self-activity.
It is this capacity of its own participants to intervene that must be developed by the Party whose activity is nothing other than the collective self-organisation of this capacity. Such intervention may not divert such spontaneous mass actions towards revolutionary insurrection, but they may be able to take advantage of the increased possibilities for action and organisation which such actions open -- such as the liberation of empty buildings, for example -- so that the fallout results in the escalation of everyday contestation, the increased ability to subvert of normality, rather than a mere dissipation of energy.
'If one had to make a show of force Rome was probably the right place to do it in, in so far as it is the institutional centre of a well-organised powerful movement. However, it remains true that tackling the institutions through all out confrontation on a military terrain was a tactic doomed to defeat. It was not a matter of storming a Winter Palace, henceforth stripped bare, but of organizing a capillary action to circumvent all attempts at normalisation. And, further, to bring into the movement all those proletarian strata, which were still having doubts about the social democratic programme. To storm the Montecitorio or the Palazzo Chiga was a mad idea not only because from a military point of view it was impossible to pull off but also, because even if it were to come about, we would be right back to square one. The need, in other words, was to work out really revolutionary ideas. The absence of any communication with the working class was a problem that was deeply felt by the movement and, after the March days, in an even more acute form.'
Money-capital yields to the will of proletarians constituted as a material force in Ferguson, USA, 2014
National and Class Struggle in The World Revolution
The BC
celebration of mozambican independence and the revolution in Portugal
which triggered it and the possibility of immediate union between
proletariat of post-colonial and former imperialist states: not
merely granting of independence as might have happened in support of
revolution in Morocco during Spanish Revolution and Algeria during
May 68 but much further, for example declaring dissolution of
citizenship, union of two countries in mutually-beneficial alliance
with Portugal making available all its technical expertise for
material development of Mozambique to assist it to 'skip' the
capitalist phase of development as much as possible, Mozambique
providing arms and volunteers to fight against counter-revolutionary
forces in Portugal. Also, similar
link up of these two with
the black struggle in
South Africa.
Initiative for this unity is not restricted to either side. It is entirely possible that the Mozambican's could have taken the lead, hoping their fellows among the colonial powers would join them, as was greatly hoped after the Russian Revolution (a hope which was devastatingly close to realisation)
The dynamic was the
same as in SA: there could be no basis for unity unless the
priveledged proletarians refuse their priveledged servitude and take
up arms against their own dispossession.
Wayne's Fragments on Revolutionary theory.
Wayne's Fragments on Revolutionary theory.
Why strike when you can organise mass
sabotage?
If you must strike why not do so in
ways that cause maximum damage?
If you warn bosses before you strike
don't you give them an advantage?
If you strike unpredictably, for short
periods, how does this affect the ability of the lords to use their
stockpiled wealth as leverage?
If those fired for unprotected strikes
are supported through immediate sympathy-strikes how can some be
victimised as an example to terrorise all others?
If you are satisfied with your life, or at any
rate with the frantic diversions and pastoral protests to which you
are permitted, I have no argument with you. This message is addressed
to those who are sick of the fraud of happiness force-fed to
them day after day, who abhor the watery meals of canned
subversion presented to them year after year, those prepared to
abandon the table laden with pristine plastic-fruit in order to seek
their just deserts, who want not merely to assert but to ensure
THE STRIKE DOES NOT END HERE. It is an altogether unsavoury
proposition, offered under the fog of a foreboding evening on the
corner of a disreputable street in a sinister quarter of the city. It
would be well to disregard it as one does an unpleasant dream, to
dismiss it with a shudder like an uninvited memory from childhood, a
streak across consciousness of an unsettling desire better forgotten.
Consider it, dismiss it, laugh at it if you will, act on it if you
dare.
This message is a call for desertion.
This message is a call for desertion.
