The trinity of betrayal: The African National Congress, South Africa Communist Party and Congress of Southern African Trade Unions

LONDON—On 27 October 2012, executive officers from three “progressive” organizations locked arms with the South African police in a display of State violence against striking miners.
 
The miners had gathered at Rustenburg Olympia Stadium in Rustenburg, South Africa, to present their just grievances and demands.
 
Leadership from the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the National Union of Miners (NUM) helped the police to disrupt and crush the workers’ rally.
 
This group, with the exception of NUM, had been operating as the “Tripartite Coalition” that carries out the policies of Western imperialism, which previously was in the hands of the white settler-colonialist apartheid regime.
 
Now, it seems that NUM also has joined this opportunist crew of sell-out neocolonialist thugs.
 
Leading the attack on the workers at Rustenburg were South African Communist Party Secretary General, Blade Nzimande; COSATU President Sidumo Dlamini; COSATU Secretary General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi; and NUM Secretary General Frans Baleni.
 
With the exception of Baleni, each of these men are in the leadership of the African National Congress.
 
The events of 27 October at Rustenburg Stadium helped to expose the struggle between the dying forces of white imperialism and the growing forces of life and of the future: the African working class.
 
Instead of calling for the people to reclaim our stolen land and resources, and for black workers to overthrow the imperialist exploitation and oppression, the ANC, SACP, COSATU, and NUM joined forces with the police and with imperialism to carry out State violence against the workers.
 
The COSATU general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, in defence of the white imperialist-owned mine called on the workers to “reclaim the Rustenburg from the forces of counterrevolution.” The international capitalists who own the mine is the "counterrevolution."
 
Striking miners and other affected miners—some of whom are still current rank and file or former members of the NUM—attended the rally, determined not to allow the opportunist COSATU to dominate the event, since COSATU no longer represents the interests of striking miners.
 
The contrast between the opposing sides was clear-cut: the strikers, who are the majority, came to the rally wearing black T-shirts and carrying placards with slogans such as “Don’t let police get away with murder, remember the slain of Marikana!” and “Forward with living wages—R12500, we are here to bury NUM!"
 
COSATU and NUM assaulted the strikers with sticks, while the police sprayed tear gas and shot rubber bullets at the mine workers.
 
Nzimande, the SACP leader, praised the police action: “What I have seen is an extreme act of provocation; the police did well to disperse them. I am interested to see how the media will report this.”
 
COSATU, ANC and the SACP are the police.
 
They are neocolonialist oppressors, they have a unity of interests with the imperialists.
They work for the imperialists.
 
There can be no confusion anymore: COSATU and NUM leaders are not just opposed to workers struggle for living wages, but are in principle against African workers’ political independence and emancipation from neocolonial rule.
 
One worker got it right when he yelled at COSATU leaders, “We are dying underground while you sit on chairs above and earn money!”
 
Ramaphosa, traitor of the African Revolution, must end with people’s justice
 
Following the August 1 massacre of more than 30 African miners by ANC police, Cyril Ramaphosa offered $240,000 to pay for the funerals of the workers that his employer had just murdered.
 
Of course the money came from the exploited, now-dead workers.
 
Shanduka, a Ramaphosa company, is paid $360,000 per year by Lonmin to provide “empowerment” consulting.
 
Ramaphosa resigned his position as founder and secretary general of NUM to become secretary general of the African National Congress in 1991.
 
He used this position to negotiate the sell-out transfer of power from minority white settlers to minority African petty bourgeoisie, and is now a billionaire who also sits on the board of directors of Lonmin Mining in Azania.
 
State and ANC African petty bourgeoisie response to crisis created at Marikana
 
After killing the workers at the Marikana Lonmin site on 16 August 2012, the ANC police took the survivors to their sell-out courts.
 
Two hundred and seventy workers were charged with the “murders” of their co-workers and were prevented from attending the funerals of their slain comrades.
 
In reality, the ANC police had returned to the scene of the crimes and grotesquely attempted to plant evidence to suggest that they had acted in self-defence.
 
As reported by le Monde, “Since the beginning of the debates, the lawyers of the victims already affirmed that, according to reports of autopsy, at least 14 of the miners were killed because they were shot in the back, which suggests that they were cut down in cold blood whilst they were fleeing.”
 
The government has created a commission, based in Rustenburg, that will announce its verdict in January 2013.
 
One does not need to be a mind reader to know what the conclusion would be.
The ANC, which exonerated apartheid criminals in 1994, will exonerate the Marikani cop killers, too.
 
It is the same criminal imperialist system; the police are the first line of defence in the protection of white property, and they are there to protect the status quo.
 
Where are the ANC's charismatic, historic leaders, experts in negotiating peaceful solutions?
 
We know that their police were at Marikana on 16 August 2012.
 
And we have dead bodies to prove it.
 
During the struggle against apartheid white settler colonialism, the ANC told us they were nonviolent.
 
Nelson Mandela, in his first speech following his release from the infamously violent Robben Island Prison, told our people to throw away our pangas (spears) into the sea.
 
Where were Desmond Tutu and his Truth and Reconciliation Committee to stop the police from killing African people?
 
In a society split into irreconcilable class interests, the reality is that there is no such thing as a nonviolent police, court or army.
 
The ANC betrayed the people a long time ago.
 
Complete the Azanian Revolution
 
 
“Twenty years before the fall of direct white power (apartheid) in 1994, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) understood that the struggle in Occupied Azania was/is a struggle for land and black workers’ power.”
 
“A struggle for national liberation and a leading entity in the quest for a United and Socialist Africa.”
 
The ANC temporarily succeeded in obscuring the nature of our struggle by defining and reducing it to a struggle against racism—apartheid, as it was known at that time.
 
In actuality, the ANC and the capitalist ruling classes worldwide were ensuring that, post apartheid, the African petty bourgeoisie would be handed over, in tact, and a new administration would continue the system of settler colonialism in South Africa.
 
The cover that the ANC provided white imperialist capitalism for nearly two decades has been shattered by worker mobilization and resistance.
 
The parasitic capitalist shareholders around the world are concerned by the new life of militancy that is consuming the lives of the African working class.
 
The surges in militancy of African workers in Azania are the consequences of the deep and profound crisis that imperialism is engulfed in today.
 
All over the world the oppressed colonial peoples are resisting and taking back our resources.
 
South Africa is not exempt from this process; it, too, is in crisis.
 
The ANC can't save it this time around.
 
The ANC is not the answer
 
Many people inside the African Liberation Movement at home and abroad refuse to criticise and expose the class character of the ANC.
 
Too often we heard people saying to “just give them time,” and, “Surely ANC’s rulers are better than apartheid‘s rulers!”
 
This is similar to the situation in the U.S., where liberals keep wanting to give Obama a chance.
 
But traitors are always worse than the perceived enemy, because they have gained the trust of the people while knowing that their mission is to stab the people in the back.
 
As in the other fronts of the African Revolution, the critical question of what social force should lead the African Liberation Movement has never been settled, because the African revolutionaries have been either murdered or jailed before they can settle the question.
 
From the defeat of the international Black Revolution of the Sixties, the murders of African workers in Sharpville, and the permanent imprisonment of Robert Sobukwe, we knew that the ANC had sold out.
 
The African Liberation Movement at home and abroad has been dominated by the African petty bourgeoisie, which does its best to liquidate the class question.
 
Factions of the African petty bourgeoisie rivalled in ingenuity to mask their class character by calling themselves socialists, Marxists, revolutionaries, people’s movements or the like.
 
The ANC did not call themselves Marxists, but were in alliance with the SACP and COSATU.
 
Thus, together they have formed an opportunist alliance known as the tripartite government.
 
This alliance mobilized and organized workers as tools to allow the African petty bourgeoisie to seize power.
 
The workers sweat and bled profusely to force the apartheid regime to transfer political power and the administration from the settler colonial state to the African petty bourgeoisie, organized essentially around the African National Congress.
 
The political power gained during our bitter struggles against white settlers is in the hands of the ANC‘s African petty bourgeoisie.
 
The fruits of our labour, which once went into the pockets of the white settler ruling class, are now flowing into the pockets of the African petty bourgeoisie of South Africa.
 
The class question can no longer be obscured!
 
We have placed the class question back at the top of the workers’ agenda.
 

Political power in our own workers’ hands! Complete the Azania Revolution! Build the African Socialist International!

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