Link the struggles against Botha!
By HARRY SLOAN A DEEP economic recession is now playing a role in escalation of the crisis of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Unemployment has doubled In twelve months; the rand is low in value against other currencies; inflation is eroding already pitiful pay packets; and the profits of retailers and consumer goods firms are plunging, while interest rates remain high.
The consequence is economic demands of South Africa's black working class must increasing ly merge with the mass demands tor sweeping democratic changes to break down the racist apartheid state.
So far the mass struggles on the streets against Botha's hired killers have remained largely isolated from large-scale industrial action. The recent miners strike was deliberately restricted by union leaders to a wages-only struggle, and contined to only a handful of "selected" mines suicidal tactic which predictable setbacks to the militants who came out on strike.
Elsewhere, with the exception of the massive 2-day general strike by up to 1 million workers in the Vaal triangle area last winter, the unions have in general held back from using their industrial strength to support mass mobilisations demands and against repression.
But the explosion of struggle in November at the giant Baragwanath Hospital In Soweto, in which police arrested 600 striking vorkers (only to provoke supporting strike action by 800 student nurses) has once again shown the integral link between economic" "democratic" demands repressive South African state.
The ancillary staff came out on strike for a pay increase not had a rise since 1983. When they Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p.22
Recession raises struggle for jobs and wages the baton-charged than more police!
tion, and the the union, that the ment immediately brought separation economic demands.
powers of the on democratic ruthlessly deployed.
the ancillary
Botha's course.
and the in the
- they have third one were subjected to mass arrest, and an 8pm curfew was imposed upon nurs. ing staff to contain the situation, hundreds of nurses demonstrated. When by cops. they counter-attacked and drove back the
The student nurses then refused to work or attend classes: they are also demanding the recognition of their union, the Health Workers Associaancillary workers General and Allied Workers Union (GAWU). Manageannounced the sacking of all 1,800 strikers — but the nurses refused to accept pay-off cheques. Ancillary workers were marched off the premises at gunpoint by police, while troops were brought into cover the work of strikers.
In a country where a simple pay claim can explode this easily into a full confrontation with the armed bodies of the state, there can be no of democratic and
Certainly the Botha regime sees the connection between these elements of the black struggle, It is to defend the whole basis of profits of South African Industry as much as any ideological tenets of apartheid that the brutal state are being so,
It will take more than feeble attempts at "diplomatic" pressure from imperialist countries and bourgeois black Africa to change
Since the pathetic gesture of the Nassau Comonwealth conference, he has substantially extended the repressive measures of the state of emergency to include Cape Town and seven surrounding areas:
dictatorial emergency powers now cover over 9 million people - of South Africa's
South Africa population lo wield the whip more effectively the police force is to raise its strenath by another 11,000 - nearly 20%. This is their answer to the recognition from General Wandrag, the country's chief counter-insurgency commander that the situation is close to sliping out of control:
Even those people we used to be able to rely on have dwindled."
General Wandrag, like many of the regime's spokespersons, blames this erosion of the authority of the state upon the media exposure of police violence:
"Rioters are seen as innocent victims of a brutal police and army," he complained to a security conference in Johannesburg.
With the death toll of black youth and workers gunned down by cops rising steadily day by day. Botha's answer to this problem was to clamp down on press - and particularly television coverage. This transparent attempt to turn the lights out on the brutality was met by a predictably weak-hearted response rom those who have argued that Botha is taking steps towards "reform".
More courage was shown in challenging Botha's clampdown by the South African editor of the Cape Times (who risked a heavy Jail sentence by publishing an interview with ANC leader Oliver Tambo) than by any of the Western news agencies.
Of course the muzzling of television coverage has not ended the violence of Botha's cops and soldiers, whose tally of school students and young workers has steadily risen.
Significantly, the more blatant ambush and slaughter of stone-throwing children (a few days after the Nassau deal) followed the first major Incursions of the black struggle into the white shopping areas of Johannesburg - in the wave of anger at the execution of pro-ANC poet Benjamin Moloise.
Veale stope op the as yee hudand
reveals more: the as yet unused potential repressive power of the South African state, Botha has to act more firmly than ever to suppress dissident currents among his former A passbook: the fight for democratic rights links with demands for jobs and wages Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 pl3 upporters lis regime has been more anc more business leaders. Now even leader by stridently denounced the Dutch Reformed Church have had to be bludgeoned out of a planned trip to meet AN leaders by theats to withdraw their passports.
Passports of students from the former orthodox Afrikaaner hotbed of Stellenbosch University were confiscated after they, too, planned to meet the ANC.
Botha's motives are clear: only by preventing direct discussions and Information about the ANC can he sus tain his Cold War propaganda myth that they are a bunch of red revolutionaries, and thus reinforce the hostility of white South Africans to any kind negotiations compromise.
The reality — as the Cape Times Interview and many others with ANC leader Oliver Tambo have shown -is very different. The ANC's political perspective is restricted to achieving a democratic reform of South African capitalism.
Tambo told the Cope Times that — like many reformist prarammes, the ANC Freedom Charter enviseages that:
"the state would control some of the Industries, solely with a view to ensuring an equitable distribution of the wealth that we have.
He admited that even the business leaders who met the ANG accept that there should be some redistribution of wealth, and then stressed that the ANC programme would retain capitalism in South Africa:
"It would be a mixed economy. But there would be private ownership. there would be levels of private enterprise and it would all be geared to the situation that obtains at the time."
Roy Hattersley could well make similar statements. The ANC, for all its talk of armed struggle, seeks to reform rather than smash the apartheid capitalist state machine in South Africa, Its deliberate separation of apartheid from the question of capitalist rule Is no accident: it chimes in exactly with the white
"liberals" Federal Party is best known in the whose Progressive form of MP Helen Susman. Her view is that:
"The fact that young blacks today believe that apartheid and capitalism go hand in hand is of course a misconception.
Botha knows better. And Botha Is also under pressure from the far right, who are alarmed by even the tokenistic reforms that have been made so far, and who made significant gains in the recent by-elections. This reactionary pressure makes it even more likely that police violence will continue at its present high levels, and escalate further for every black mobilisation which reaches into "white" areas.
Instead of the fragmentation of the struggle, and the separation of the trade unions from the fight for democratic rights, South African blacks need to find ways of linking the community organisations. students' unions, trade unions and all political organisations committed to fight the apartheid regime in councils of action in each locality.
Such joint bodies would in many cases necessarily be clandestine because of the emergency regulations, but, as Solidarnose showed in Poland, under conditions of mass revolt they can still be built.
They would offer the best forum to thrash out a programme of demands linking the democratic issues in each area with immediate economic demands - taking up local issues on housing, rents, transport, unemploy ment, wages, redundancies and all other questions affecting the black communities. The recent develop ment of student struggles - turning from school boycotts to school occupations - could also be linked to community mobilisations through councils of action.
Meanwhile the growing tide of police violence is finding only spontaneous flurries of retaliation from a largely defenceless black population. Despite ANC talk of launching armed struggle, their record over the past year suggests that they still see this as
OP
a few Isolated heroic acts by a small (Top) Youth Soweto: (Above)
unemployed workers in Johannesburg minority of trained cadres - and not the systematic organisation of self defence by the mass movement of black workers.
it is difficult to prescribe precisely the forms and methods that are possi ble under the varied conditions of repression. But the move to prepare a workers militia to defend the townships and workplaces against the raids of police and army is a crucial issue if the power of Botha's state machine is to be confronted and cracked.
With more and more black families experiencing the tragedy of young relatives martyred to the fight against apartheid, the appeal tor collective, mass self defence will gather pace by the day.
In the fight for the linking of the democratic and economic demands, and for the leading role of the working class in the struggle to smash the apartheid regime, the building of a farxist Party capable of grasping th olitics of the ANG, UDF and othe political currents of the mass move ment is increasingly urgent. SOUTH
South Africa's black workers need a class leadership as conscious and committed as Botha is to white supremacy and the capitalist system which apartheid defends. Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985p14