New South African Review 5: Beyond Marikana

Preface

Beyond Marikana, the fifth edition of the New South African Review, continues to present informed, scholarly discussion and debate about key issues animating the South African experience. Produced between January 2014 and May 2015, this particular volume was shaped largely around the contention that there are significant political shifts underway in South Africa today, with several chapters tracing their fault lines to the 2012 massacre by police of striking mineworkers in a place called Marikana.

Although the third volume in the New South African Review series offered an analysis and critique of the various forces immediately implicated in the tragedy associated with Marikana, it could not have anticipated the kinds of political ructions that we have since witnessed, especially from within different parts of the African National Congress (ANC) Alliance. The fifth volume once again, then, consciously draws attention to Marikana, but this time asking what its effects and affects have been, and why it has had such an impact. In this way, Marikana becomes the starting point for a much broader discussion and debate about the potential for new political alliances and forms to emerge in the current context, a discussion that resonates globally in the wake of the political experiments of movements, such as Occupy Tahrir, Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish Indignados, and will hopefully continue in editions to come.

New South African Review 5 also offers close analyses of contemporary developments with regard to other aspects of, and issues affecting, South African society – including corruption, the economy, the Constitution, and uranium poisoning as a by-product of the mining industry.

This volume would not have been possible without the generosity of all its authors, to whom we are extremely grateful. Thanks must also go to the team at Wits University Press who continue to provide excellent guidance, assistance, skill and support to us as editors, and ensure that there is a final product for us to share. Particular thanks to the Dean of Humanities, Professor Ruksana Osman; Head of the School of Social Studies, Professor Shahid Vawda; and the Strategic Planning and Allocation of Resources Committee (Sparc) Fund for their ongoing support of the New South African Review.

Gilbert M Khadiagala, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay and Roger Southall

May 2015

INTRODUCTION: Political reconfigurations in the wake of Marikana

Prishani Naidoo

On the weekend of 13-14 December 2014, two significant political events took place in South Africa. At a hotel in Kempton Park near Johannesburg, a national ‘people’s assembly’ was convened by unionists from the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) together with other activists (both independent and from a range of political formations), in preparation for the launch of the United Front. At the University of the Free State in Mangaung, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) held what it also billed as its first national ‘people’s assembly’. Both groups had emerged from dissatisfaction among Alliance members with the current leadership of the African National Congress (ANC). Both events borrowed, in the idea of ‘the assembly’, from the history of the struggle against apartheid and from contemporary experiments of collectives fighting against the various effects and manifestations of neoliberal policies around the world. It could, then, be argued that together they reflect a growing and deepening disappointment with, and critique of, existing political forms and practices that pass for democracy in South Africa today, and a desire for alternative ways of engaging collectively around common interests, needs and aspirations.

As I sat in the sea of yellow t-shirts in the Kempton Park assembly listening to presentations and discussions,¹ fellow participants connected to social media kept me abreast of proceedings in Mangaung. Although there was so much familiar and similar about what was unfolding in both spaces, there was also a profound sense that something new was afoot, that something different could be underway. Sitting in the same room in Kempton Park were activists who just a few years ago had been on opposing sides of earlier divides within, and splits from, different parts of the Congress Alliance.² Mangaung was also celebrating the first real mass exodus of young people from the ANC fold since 1994. They were coming together with other youth fed up with the limited choices available to them in their lives, to commit themselves to the building of a political alternative to the ANC.

For many of us, who had been part of earlier collectives that had mounted critiques of (and experimented with alternatives to) the ANC government’s neoliberal trajectory since the 1990s, this could not be cynically written off as déjà vu, as a much greater mass of people were beginning to find each other as comrades again, in a new cycle of struggle – a new cycle that, as this Introduction and several chapters in this volume argue, finds its roots in the events that have come to be known as ‘Marikana’.

Almost three years have passed since the massacre of thirty-four striking mineworkers at Marikana by the South African police, and yet the event continues to hold profound significance in the political realm, the depth of its influences and effects perhaps only beginning to be felt and understood today. In August 2012, the name ‘Marikana’ became etched in history and memory as a symbol of the willingness of the state to use brutal force against workers in protecting the interests of capital – and of an uncompromising spirit of resistance (or refusal to concede) to the impositions of such power.

As images of the bloodshed flashed across television screens and newspapers, South Africans across the political spectrum were moved. In the first instance, as the starkness of the inequalities and dangers borne by Lonmin workers in sustaining South Africa’s richest economic sector (platinum) was revealed, moral outrage was expressed in various forms of public critique of the ANC, its leaders, Lonmin’s management and directors, and the police – and in acts of solidarity and support for the communities affected by the massacre and its aftermath. The Introduction to New South African Review 3 provided one such critique, highlighting the contradictions within the ruling party and its Alliance, as well as among its leadership, made visible and undeniable by Marikana.

But beyond its laying bare of certain unmistakable facts about the life of the poor in post-apartheid South Africa and about the ANC, its leaders, big capital (and where their interests overlap), three years later why does Marikana continue to feature so prominently in our political engagements? And has it shaped contemporary approaches to politics in ways that hold the potential for new political imaginaries and practices to emerge?

As several chapters in this volume show, the events of August 2012 in Marikana produced significant shifts in the ruling party and its Tripartite Alliance, and can be seen to represent a questioning (and a failure) of corporatist frameworks of engagement that have become dominant since the 1990s as well as the industrial relations framework governing employment relations (particularly in the mining sector) since 1996. Coinciding with a spike in local-level protests made known by the media more popularly as ‘service-delivery protests’, the 2012 massacre also inspired a whole new wave of protests, the name ‘Marikana’ resonating across the struggles of a diverse range of people – from farmworkers to land occupiers to other mineworkers – in the following years. It also refocused public attention on the appalling conditions of work and life as well as the continued generation and distribution of profits in the mining sector – in particular the platinum belt, producer of most of the world’s platinum supplies – and on the character of public order policing.

This Introduction attempts to provide some analysis of the major political shifts that have occurred since Marikana, and to offer some thoughts on the reasons for its continued political influence and potential. In doing so, it takes as its starting point several of the chapters making up this volume. It is not a comprehensive overview of all the chapters but a snapshot of the major debates thrown up by the current conjuncture as analysed in several key chapters. In the tradition of previous introductions of the New South African Review, then, it hopes to provide some record of those debates that stand out in the interactions and engagements among and between a range of diverse groups including academics, researchers, policy makers, politicians, activists and students.

A CHALLENGE TO ANC HEGEMONY ON THE LEFT

Perhaps most significant among the many responses to Marikana have been the formation of the EFF as a political party under the commandership of former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema and the decision by Numsa to withdraw its support for the ANC in the 2014 national general elections and to work instead towards the establishment of the United Front and a ‘movement for socialism’. Tracing the origins of these shifts to Marikana, Noor Nieftagodien argues in this volume that they represent a serious challenge to the ANC’s hegemony, historically maintained through its ‘subordination of the workers’ movement to the economic and political interests of the elite’ through the mechanisms of the Tripartite Alliance but, since Marikana, fractured in the wake of workers’ resistance to the growing intolerability of this subordination.

Nieftagodien argues that Numsa’s decision and the establishment of the EFF together represent a rupture in the Alliance that has ‘opened the political space for the reconfiguration of left politics’. He identifies three further elements as important in shaping the character and outcomes of such a process of reconfiguration: ongoing local-level protests that have come to be known as ‘the rebellion of the poor’ (seen to be challenging the ANC at local level); the strike wave on the platinum belt between 2012 and 2014 (seen to have exposed the shared interests of ANC leaders with those of mining capital); the crisis of established trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the ongoing work of independent left activists in keeping open spaces of contention and critique. For Nieftagodien, Marikana and the political reconfigurations on the left that it has inaugurated hold the promise and possibility for the first time of the ‘constitution of a mass-based and national movement of the left outside and independent of the ruling Alliance’. Although he acknowledges the emergence of similar such contestations of the ANC in earlier periods, in particular through the experiences of ‘new social movements’ such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), and encourages us to learn from and draw on them, Nieftagodien argues that the most recent splits from the Alliance are of a different scale and thus have far more wide-reaching and deep-running effects, which hold the potential for the production of new political alliances unashamedly committed to the ongoing struggle for socialism or ‘economic transformation’.

In his chapter, Devan Pillay shares Nieftagodien’s optimism about Numsa’s holding the potential for reorienting politics on the left. Pillay argues that there are two ‘Numsa moments’ that are significant with regard to this potential – the first, its inclusion of ecological concerns in its programmes as it has oriented towards an eco-socialist politics, and the second its decision to withdraw its support of the ANC and establish the United Front. Although Pillay acknowledges the long and deep influences of a particular brand of political doctrine named ‘Marxist-Leninism’ within Numsa, with tendencies towards vanguardist and Stalinist practices among its members and leaders, he seems confident that enough space and critical thinking exists within Numsa for contestation over the ideas of ‘Marxist-Leninism’ to happen and for these ideas to come into conversation with others developed in Numsa in relation to ecological questions and to the realisation of the socialisation of production.

The question of how open (to difference) a process the building of a united front will be (or can be) is, for me, the most crucial indicator of its potential for success in bringing together trade unions, community movements and organisations, left political parties and other progressive formations, and sustaining their working together over time. Since early 2014, Numsa has reached out to social and community movements and organisations, as well as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), in various ways, culminating in the first national people’s assembly, which took place shortly after Numsa was formally expelled from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). In this time, activists have begun experimenting with different forms of organising at local level (in township communities, on university campuses, and so on) in an attempt to bring people together in discussion about the building and shaping of a united front. At the same time, a national steering committee, as well as provincial steering committees, were elected at the assembly in December 2014 in an attempt to ensure coordination of joint campaigns and ongoing engagement among activists across the front as it is being shaped and built. At play at all these levels are differing political traditions and different individual as well as collective experiences of political engagement, and how these play out will be important in determining the fate of the front. Although Numsa is guided by what many of its leaders call ‘Marxist-Leninism’ and many Numsa leaders imagine themselves as constituting a political vanguard invested with the historical duty of emancipating the broader working class from its bonds of servitude, there are also many within Numsa who have begun to argue for the opening up of conversations about issues and problems over which there is no longer much certainty – for example, growing unemployment and the failure to create jobs; alternatives to neoliberal models of economic development and the very question of what socialism is, what kind of society it might enable and what the struggle for it should look like.

It is sad, then, that the mainstream media has largely missed the potential opened up in Numsa by its decision to speak out against the actions of the ANC and its subsequent expulsion from Cosatu, refusing to read the scenes unfolding through new lenses and instead evaluating them according to old frameworks and approaches to politics. In a newspaper article written after the national assembly, Numsa stalwart Dinga Sikwebu, also recently elected to the national steering committee of the United Front, took issue with what he saw as the mainstream media’s poor characterisation of Numsa’s leadership of the process towards the establishment of a United Front, undertaken in 2013, and of the first national people’s assembly (Mail & Guardian, 22 December 2014). He refuted what he saw as the media’s general reduction of the Front to a vehicle for the establishment of a political party, and he also refuted criticisms of the first national assembly for its apparent uniting of delegates only in their antagonism towards the ANC and not through any positive programmes.

Sikwebu clarified that ‘the assembly asserted the principles of democratic plurality, diversity, political tolerance and respect for different views within the front’ with participants committing to a ‘politics of mutual listening and learning where participating organisations and individuals influence each other’ and resolutions that the assembly had adopted warning ‘against any know-all pretences and reliance on trans-historical blueprints’. He pointed out that, rather, ideas emanating from the assembly included seeing the Front as ‘a learning space where organisations travel together, discover solutions jointly and unlearn oppressive, undemocratic and sexist methods of organisation and struggle’. The United Front also imagined itself as working ‘to inculcate different politics’ by encouraging ‘all those who associate with the coalition to acknowledge their own weaknesses and adopt ‘politics of consistency that call on all, to actively reflect on and address their own racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and privilege’. Those present at the assembly, clarified Sikwebu, had ‘committed themselves to confidence-building struggles where they fight for winnable demands while also democratically re-imagining and building their long-term vision of an egalitarian society’. Finally, Sikwebu put to rest claims that the Front was being viewed from within solely as the makings of a political party:

Those who define politics as a game within the purview of parliamentarians, political parties or paid politicians will remain blind to attempts by delegates at the meeting in December to put actions of ordinary people to determine their destiny as the real politics (Mail & Guardian, 22 December 2014).

Although the Numsa leadership did, at the end of April 2015, announce more concrete plans to establish a workers’ party for socialism, work still continues through the United Front to bring people together beyond and outside building a political party. The party exists as an idea, but leaders of Numsa also insist that a lot of hard work has to be done before its actual establishment, and there is still space for discussion and debate about the shape it will take – and for other forms of political engagement outside of the political party model. Whether the United Front becomes the vehicle through which politics is returned to the site of action of ‘ordinary people’ will depend very much on how questions of difference and contestation play out (or are allowed to play out). What is certain, however, is that, for now at least, ‘ordinary people’ are questioning their leaders inside and outside traditional political formations, and the Front offers us one site of political experimentation.

Whereas Numsa has included in its re-imagining of itself post-December 2013 the space of politics beyond Parliament and the state, the EFF has confined itself to (and been most successful in) the game of electoral and parliamentary politics. In a very short space of time, the EFF was able to garner enough support at a national level to become the third most popular political party in the May 2014 elections, mounting significant challenges to the ANC’s traditional support bases in the North West province (the site of Marikana and the base of many of those workers, their families and supporters, who disinvested from the ANC Alliance in the aftermath of the massacre). For Nieftagodien, this, together with their visible and palpable appeal to a whole generation of disaffected youth, makes the EFF the most significant youth movement to have emerged in South Africa since the 1990s, and a force with the potential to effect radical change. Nieftagodien argues, however, that the EFF needs to take much more seriously its own internal processes of decision making, leadership and hierarchies, and commit to the democratisation of its own internal mechanisms, relations and processes if it is to realise this potential. I would add to this the need for the EFF to take much more seriously the building of democratic forms of engagement and decision making among collectives at a much more local level – in communities where people live, where workers come together, in universities, and so on. This would allow the EFF to become a space through which those disaffected by politics as we have come to know it are able to speak and act in their own names once again.

What is striking about voting patterns since 2009 is the increasing number of people who are not voting. In the May 2014 election, the percentage of the eligible voting age population that actually cast a vote stood at just 58 per cent (compared to 86 per cent in 1994) (Schulz-Herzenberg 2014: 2). It would seem, then, that the EFF has to win people over to voting by demonstrating the value of participation in the system through its own actions in Parliament and the state more generally, or to experiment with new forms of political engagement that are meaningful to a generation increasingly critical of representative forms of democracy. As Nieftagodien highlights, contemporary protests across the globe (from Tahrir Square in Egypt, to the Spanish Indignados, to Occupy Wall Street and beyond) have largely seen the coming together of young people in protest at existing forms of leadership, government, representation and unequal economic relations, questioning their democratic value and experimenting with alternatives in their own practices and demands. Although the EFF’s critique of the current ANC leadership might resonate among young people for various reasons, and whereas its militant language and style might resemble that of other fighting youth across the world, it will have to find ways of involving critical young people in ongoing and meaningful conversations about the development of these alternatives from the local level if it is to be part of the growing global movement questioning traditional forms of representative democracy and establishing more participatory, deliberative and direct modes of engagement and decision making.

But it is perhaps both the EFF’s and Numsa’s emergence as political animals from within the Congress movement that present the greatest limit to the realisation of their political potentials.³ Knowing only the forms of organising and relating in collectives learned in this political tradition (including commitments to certain authoritarian modes of engagement and hierarchies of command), leaders of the EFF and Numsa have imagined themselves as and behave as political vanguards, seeking to bring those imagined as ‘the masses’ to their point of view and approach rather than to listen and allow themselves to be led and directed by the thinking and experience of those imagined as ‘the masses’.

Important to consider would be the very potential coming together of these two forces, evidently considered and worked towards (unsuccessfully) in the early days of both. It would be valuable to reflect on some of the difficulties and problems encountered in trying to bring these two forces together, two forces seemingly made to fit as a result of their shared critical histories with the ANC. Perhaps it is because the leaderships of the EFF and of Numsa each imagine themselves the vanguard that the two forces of change are prevented from sharing their struggle.

In their chapters both Nieftagodien and Pillay call for a return to ideas and experiments of the 1970s and 1980s when struggles of workers, youth, women and other groups organised against apartheid began to coalesce in meaningful and effective ways, often in times of uncertainty and the absence of traditional forms of leadership. Although I agree with their general arguments, I would add that such a return to this past must be premised on the belief that we return to learn as much about the mistakes, problems, challenges, difficulties and conflicts of the past as we do to celebrate collective victories and to look for tactics and strategies already successful. We need also to read this past in the context of the present, making sense of its successes and failures in relation to the particularities of the present.

A FAILURE OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS FRAMEWORK AND A CHALLENGE TO TRADE UNIONS

At the centre of the crisis that catalysed Marikana stood the self-organisation of workers independently of any trade union, and the representation of their demands to Lonmin management by an elected strike committee. Initiated by a group of rock drill operators (RDOs), the strike brought together workers across trade union affiliations. RDOs are responsible for undertaking some of the most dangerous and pivotal aspects of the job of extracting platinum (working underground with heavy machinery for long stretches of time), and have been said to possess, for this reason, an extraordinary collective strength in the bargaining process into which they enter with their employers, even in the absence of a trade union to represent them (Stewart 2013). This was to become a significant factor in events leading up to the massacre, with these workers able to win small wage gains for specific mine shafts in the preceding months without representation by any trade union. RDOs gained the courage to question the actions of the dominant trade union in the sector, NUM, and when they decided to approach their employer for a wage increase in August 2012 they embarked on unprotected action without the leadership of any trade union (Alexander et al. 2012).⁴

Crispen Chinguno’s chapter in this volume shows how the actions of workers at Lonmin in Marikana were inspired by much earlier victories at Impala Platinum by independent strike committees of RDOs established outside of NUM (or any trade union) in 2011, victories secured outside the official processes of collective bargaining governing engagements between workers and management. Chinguno argues that Marikana manifests the failures of the existing industrial relations framework to meet the needs and interests of the mineworkers who led the strike. He looks at the organising of mineworkers across the platinum belt with a particular focus on the strike wave of 2012-2013, and shows how the institutionalisation of industrial relations in South Africa, particularly through the system of centralised collective bargaining, produced in NUM a rigid, bureaucratic organisational form that came to benefit only small layers of its leadership whose interests have become increasingly vested in the productivity and profit margins of the companies employing them. He goes on to show the erosion of NUM’s power in the sector as the distance between leaders and members widens, and argues that the success of RDOs in negotiating better wages and conditions for themselves outside the system of collective bargaining and union representation reflects both a failure in the existing industrial relations framework to address the needs of today’s workers and an alternative form of engagement considered to be more beneficial to workers by workers themselves.

Since Marikana, however, mineworkers have swelled the ranks of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), and the 2014 strike on the platinum belt (lasting five months, the longest in the country’s history) was conducted under its leadership. Chinguno postulates that it is the very existence and enforcement of the industrial relations framework on the platinum belt that has produced this result for Amcu, with workers acknowledging that their interests are better served within the current system by a registered and recognised trade union. Nevertheless, workers have kept their independent committees going at local level, allowing for their integration into the formal structure. According to Chinguno, while it might be the case that trade unions are bureaucratised through their participation in the institutionalised system of industrial relations, workers are always able to contest and reshape the very forms in which they take up their demands – that is, they often embark on processes of ‘de-institutionalisation’ if their interests are not met within the institutionalised frameworks. This was certainly the case in Marikana, and on the platinum belt prior to the tragedy of August 2012.

Also interesting in Chinguno’s chapter is his discussion of some of the ways in which workers were able to come together and build solidarity among themselves that were not part of the organisational culture or repertoires of NUM, and could in fact sometimes be seen as offensive by NUM leaders – for example, the use of Fanakalo (a mix of English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa developed on the mines for communication between bosses and workers) and the use of traditional medicines. Although we could very easily see such acts as reflecting the distance between NUM and ordinary mineworkers, it would be more useful to understand them as symptomatic of the inability of NUM fully to translate the desires, needs and interests of mineworkers in its present form of organisation – that is, the trade union form.

There is more work to be done with regard to how workers came together in ways different from or hostile to traditional trade union culture in Marikana in August 2012. (A chapter that has interesting resonance with this is that by David Dickinson, which homes in on the lived experiences of the poor in a South African township, illustrating how the exercise of their agency often goes against society’s expectations of them.) Chinguno focuses on recent developments on the platinum belt and the bureaucratisation of NUM as a central reason for the independent organising of mineworkers (Marikana being his point of inspiration and beginning) but it is also important to acknowledge that the trade union in its traditional form has been facing several challenges as a result of the growth of flexible forms of labour, and the concomitant difficulties of organising the workforce, for some time now. Nieftagodien’s and Marcel Paret’s chapters remind us of other incidents in which trade unions within the fold of the Congress Alliance have been faced with difficulties related to organising casual, contract, part-time and seasonal workers, and with confronting differences among members about relations to the ANC, seen to be increasingly neoliberal in its approaches in government towards macroeconomic policy, industrial relations and forms of engagement. For example, in 2003 the entire regional leadership of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union (Ceppwawu) was suspended for holding a referendum among members about their attitudes to the ANC Alliance, and questions were raised by national leaders about a project established to keep recently retrenched members involved in means to survive without a regular wage.⁵

It would seem, then, that the new needs of workers presented by the changing nature of work were coming into conflict with the trade union leadership’s attempts to enforce the organisational discipline and structure it saw as best suited to the needs and interests of an industrial workforce. The introduction of flexible forms of work presented trade union leaders with a number of challenges for collective forms of engagement as the nature and form of the employment relationship changed, and several questions emerged around the place of work and its character. In the Ceppwawu case, the suspended leaders came together with other members to form a new, independent trade union called the General and Industries Workers’ Union of South Africa (Giwusa), committed to organising those in flexible forms of work alongside those in more traditional forms of work, and not aligned to the ANC or any other political party. Giwusa would instead become an affiliate of the APF (and, today, Giwusa is part of the United Front).

Marikana was by no means, then, the first or the only incident in which a Cosatu affiliate was being challenged by workers and the role of the trade union in its traditional form was questioned. Rather, Marikana brought this reality much more sharply into the popular consciousness and will hopefully force a rethinking and reshaping of approaches to questions of organisation and political alliances, so that the changes in and the particularities of work today are addressed in meaningful ways.

POSSIBILITIES FOR NEW POLITICAL ALLIANCES

Running beneath the surface of discussions and debates about political alliances is the question of political consciousness and the related belief that particular groups in society hold greater potential than others to effect radical change in the world. In the Congress movement, this came up in the 1980s as a conflict between ‘workerists’ and ‘populists’. The former believed in the centrality of the organised working class (in the form of the trade union movement) in uniting the working class in leading the struggle against apartheid. The latter argued strongly that the only possible way to defeat the apartheid state was to build cross-class alliances in a struggle for the creation of a democratic and racially inclusive nation state as a precursor to a second stage in which questions of economic redistribution would become more predominant.

In the debates that unfolded between these two camps, there were those whose positions were informed by the belief that workers organised in formal structures such as trade unions had greater power than others to bring the system of oppression and exploitation to a halt – by virtue of their relationship to the process of production. In other words, workers could, by withdrawing their activity in the production process, prevent the continued generation of goods and services (and hence profits) necessary to keep the system functioning, unlike other groups in society (like the unemployed or students or women) who were not seen to have the same link to the process of production. In such discussions and debates, a clear separation emerged in the ways in which activists imagined and spoke about work at the place of production (the factory or the mine) and other forms of human activity (and hence productivity), such as reproductive labour, schoolwork, the work of survival, and so on. A separation between two political subjects – ‘labour’ and ‘community’– began to become part of the discourse of the liberation movement.

This separation continued to frame the thinking of activists engaged in the struggles of new social and community movements that emerged during the 2000s, and continues today to shape the ways in which activists are thinking about the current political reconfigurations underway. Paret’s chapter (this volume) provides historical evidence of this separation as he takes us back to a 2005 debate that emerged between activists involved in the new social movements of the 2000s about the role and place of trade union struggles in relation to the growing phenomenon of local-level protests by poor people demanding access to the necessary resources to live decently in a context of growing unemployment and rising poverty. In that debate, as activists argued either for orientation by the new social movements towards Cosatu or towards the more incipient local-level protests brewing in poor communities, I, as an activist involved primarily in the work of the APF and Indymedia-SA, took the position that our struggle should be imagined and fought for on terms not set by the limits of the system of wage labour. Today, returning to these questions after the experience of Marikana, I am even more convinced.

We need to begin by moving away from making such a clear separation between the subjects of ‘labour’ and ‘community’. While the industrial workplace might have produced a particular collective experience of and response to conditions of exploitation recognisable as a singular political subject – ‘labour’, distinguishable from another set of political expressions grouped under the sign of ‘community’ – the new experiences of flexible forms of work have inaugurated a very different relationship to wage labour for a growing majority, with formal sector, full-time, permanent, protected forms of work becoming less and less accessible to people all over the world. In trying to understand these changes and to shape practices meaningful to those coming together around their shared experiences in this changed context of work, it is important that we allow for the organic constitution of a new political subject today, one that moves across the traditionally separate poles of ‘labour’ and ‘community’. This is also important because of the changing nature of work and the changing composition of the working class under the regime of flexible labour and rising unemployment.

It is also significant how the decision to establish Giwusa independently from Ceppwawu and Cosatu affected discussions and relationships in the APF, to which some of the affected Ceppwawu regional leaders and members belonged – in fact, John Appolis, a key figure in the formation of Giwusa was also a founding member and the first chairperson of the APF. In the immediate wake of Giwusa’s formation and a request from its members to affiliate to the APF, heated debates ensued between activists about the form that the APF’s orientation to organised labour and the changed context of work (as well as its consequences for the composition of the working class and aspects of organising and working-class struggle) should take.

One line of argument, coming largely from those with Trotskyist and more traditionally socialist leanings, was that the formation of Giwusa was premature and that the APF should encourage its affected members to return to the fold of Cosatu and allow the processes within Ceppwawu to take their course, working hard to win over the support of the majority of workers in the union and federation. This view was premised on the belief that the only real possibility for a socialist transformation in capitalist society lies in that social force holding the collective power to bring the production process (and hence the generation of profits) to a grinding halt through the withdrawal of its labour power. For these activists, the APF should take its political direction on issues related to work and workers from Cosatu.

Others argued strongly for the APF to support the formation of Giwusa as a union independent politically from the ANC Alliance and working to develop ways of tackling the changed conditions and nature of work. With the APF bringing together unemployed people, retrenched workers, individuals involved in community income-generation projects, students, academics and self-employed researchers and NGO workers, the question of work could not be approached simplistically. But I would argue that this was a lost opportunity in the APF for a serious rethinking of possibilities for politics and life in the spaces and time opened up by the absence of full-time, permanent, protected forms of work as discussions and debates were continuously folded back onto the old division between the subjects of ‘labour’ and ‘community’ (see Naidoo and Veriava 2005 for a fuller discussion).

MINING AND POLICING UNDER SCRUTINY

Marikana has also been significant in turning the world’s attention to mining, an industry and economic sector historically central to the development of capitalism in South Africa. With the appalling work and living conditions of mineworkers in the spotlight, several scholars and commentators have also reminded us of the vast inequalities between mine owners and management on the one side, and striking workers on the other, and of the fact that in spite of problems experienced as a result of crises in the global economy, mining (and platinum mining in particular) continues to be among the highest earners for South Africa’s economy.

While we have come to know in great detail the lives of the mineworkers who died and their families through the media (both activist and mainstream), we have spent less time dissecting the platinum sector (and mining more generally) in terms of its changing (or unchanging) patterns of ownership, its profit margins, its contribution to the South African economy and the global economy – and its effects on economic, social and political developments more generally. In an extremely comprehensive and rich chapter, Samantha Ashman helps us to move into such a discussion, showing how the core of the South African economy resides today in the minerals-energy-finance complex (MEFC – a revision of Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee’s earlier conceptualisation of the South African economy concentrated in the minerals-energy complex (MEC), now affected by the growing financialisation of the economy). Focusing on the increasing importance of platinum and the decline of gold as part of her exploration of the changing composition of the minerals core of the economy, Ashman argues that in spite of these differences not much has changed in terms of ‘the concentrated ownership and organisation of the sector’. She also highlights how the growth of finance has been accompanied by ‘extraordinary growth in unsecured lending and growing indebtedness’, all of these factors combining to ‘reproduce elements of the past and in so doing place constraints on the possibility for more broad-based and inclusive economic development without a more radical shift in policy’. Ashman provides an analysis of the National Development Plan (NDP), arguing that its policy proposals do not offer a challenge to the dominance of the MEFC in spite of its claiming to see the need for economic transformation, and can, in fact, be seen to work to reinforce neoliberal approaches (for example in the NDP’s commitments to support for greater infrastructural development, Ashman shows the potential for private business interests to benefit far more out of related projects than poor communities in need of infrastructure for social development). In doing this she indirectly provides support to Numsa’s contention that the NDP shows up the ANC’s rightward shift away from any possibility of a socialist transformation – a key reason for its decision to remove its support for the ANC as a political party.

In Chapter 5, Ross Harvey adds another dimension to the story of mining and its place in the economy today, homing in on the changing and complicated nature of state-business relations with regard to transformation of the mining sector. Looking in particular at black economic empowerment (BEE) deals and the relations they have produced between politically connected elites and business elites, Harvey argues that private interests have stymied any kind of transformation of the sector that might have been meaningful and useful in the lives of people. Harvey shows how BEE quickly became a space through which the politically connected elite began to get rich through personal deals struck with business players in need of ‘transformation partners’ or ‘equity partners’ if they were to hold onto their companies and their profits after the end of formal apartheid. It is precisely this complicated mess of political and private business entanglements that Marikana has exposed and kept in the public eye.

Marikana has also made it extremely difficult for some of the ANC’s most senior leaders to deny or hide (and to convincingly explain to the public) the multiple roles played by themselves in key institutions and processes of the state and the ruling party (as political leaders), as well as in the mining sector (as shareholders and directors of company boards, and so on). It has also exposed how particular relationships between business and the state foster the unequal administration of the law and the services of the police and armed forces in the interests of protecting private property over the interests of people.

At the time of writing, President Zuma had not yet released the report from the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into Marikana. But the work of the Commission has already generated national (and international) debate and discussion, inter alia about the role played by Cyril Ramaphosa in using his position as an influential player in the ruling party and government to ensure the mobilisation of the police against workers and in the interests of mining capital – the latter coinciding with his own personal interests as a board member of Lonmin, raising questions about the independence of the police from political and business interference. There also still remain several unanswered questions about the reason for such brutal force in crowd control at Marikana, questions that have also emerged in growing protests at local township and municipal levels in which police have begun to use increasing violence against protesters, resulting in a growing number of deaths (Grant 2014). In response, activists have begun to come together in campaigns highlighting this, one of the more recent including a united front national day of action against police brutality on 21 March 2015.

Monique Marks and David Bruce survey the