Mandlenkosi ka Phangwa, activist with the Azanian section of the Fourth International
He will be speaking on 8 November at the international rally in Paris
A wave of xenophobic pogroms, organised by a mysterious “March to March” movement which enjoys the police’s complicity, is sweeping across South Africa. In the space of a few days, 25,000 workers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been forced to flee the country, fearing for their lives.
“The Azanian section of the Fourth International (a member of the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International, CORQI-OCRFI) unequivocally condemns the current wave of xenophobia. Xenophobia divides and weakens the working class. It protects the system responsible for poverty, unemployment and inequality.
“Anti-immigrant rhetoric has become increasingly normalised within sections of Azania’s political landscape. It channels the justified anger of the unemployed and the dispossessed away from monopoly capital and towards the immigrant worker, who has no command over land, mines, banks or factories. Xenophobia therefore serves the interests of the South African capitalist class. It is the modern expression of the old colonial strategy of ‘divide and rule’, now orchestrated by a black political class serving the capitalists.
“The roots of today’s xenophobia go back to the colonial conquest itself. The borders that divide Africa today are principally the legacy of the 1889 Berlin Conference, where European imperial powers partitioned an entire continent without the participation or consent of its peoples. Communities that had traded, migrated, intermarried and shared political life for centuries were separated by artificial colonial frontiers designed to facilitate conquest, resource extraction and imperial domination.
“In 1994 in South Africa, the defeat of the racist apartheid regime (which had oppressed the black population since 1948 – ed.) represented a historic victory. Millions sacrificed so that political democracy could be achieved. However, whilst the ANC (African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s party, which incorporated the South African Communist Party – ed.) secured political rights for the black majority, it struck a deal with the white capitalist minority to leave the economic structures of colonialism and apartheid substantially intact. Land ownership remained concentrated in the hands of white farmers; the mines, banks and large corporations remained in private hands. Privatisation, the Marikana massacre (the killing of thirty-five striking black miners in August 2012) and three decades of austerity budgets are not “deviations” from ANC’s governance. They are the consequences of its betrayal in 1994.
“Three decades later, millions of Black people are unemployed. Poverty continues to define the lives of the majority. Landlessness persists. Informal settlements continue to grow. Young people face bleak prospects, despite living in a country rich in natural and human resources.
“This situation is not the fault of migrant workers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the DRC or Malawi.
“Moreover, the migration of these workers to South Africa is the direct product an imperialist regional order: structural adjustment programmes imposed on neighbouring states, the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy under the combined pressure of sanctions and plunder by its elites, decades of imperialist-fuelled war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the regional dominance of South African capital itself, which extracts wealth from the region while contributing nothing to its development. To speak of migration without naming these causes is to manage a symptom while protecting the disease.
“We reject any framework that calls upon the bourgeois state to ‘regulate migration humanely’. The South African state is the state of Sputh African capital, which divides and exploits. Instead, we call on independent organisations of the working-class to render this division amongst the exploited impossible, by forging the unity of all workers in the struggle.
“This struggle requires a transitional programme, linking today’s struggle to the conquest of working-class power: Against unemployment: we need democratic planning of industrial development and a programme of major public works under workers’ control. Against landlessness: we must expropriate the land of large-scale farmers, without compensation or buy-back, and establish democratic social ownership of land, putting an end to centuries of colonial dispossession for the black majority. Regarding migrant workers: we must demand equal rights for all, regardless of their status; a single Labour Code and a single minimum wage for everyone, migrant or otherwise, in order to eliminate employers’ use of competition from migrant labour to weaken the trade union movement; and full trade union rights and legal protection for undocumented workers. We call on the trade union confederations (COSATU, FEDUSA and SAFTU) to reject any tolerance within their ranks of anti-migrant rhetoric. We call on them to set up grassroots committees uniting South African and migrant workers in the workplace and in the informal trade and casualised labour sectors.
“These tasks can only be achieved through the autonomous organisation and mobilisation of the working class against the capitalist class. This is a matter of international workers’ solidarity, of the conscious unity of the exploited across colonial borders they did not choose.
“The only struggle worth waging must not pit South Africans against other Africans, but those who labour against those who profit from the exploitation of labour.
“The Azanian section of the Fourth International calls upon workers, students, unemployed youth, community organisations and independent trade unions to reject xenophobia in every form.
“Let us link the struggle against xenophobia to the struggle against unemployment, the struggle for land and the fight against exploitation, for it is one and the same struggle against the capitalist system.
“Our enemy is not the African worker who crosses an artificial border in search of a better life. Our enemy is capital, imperialism, the state and the government that manage our exploitation, in Pretoria as everywhere else. Workers of Azania, Africa and the world: unite!
“This struggle is inseparable from the fight for the political independence of the working class, for the conquest of power. And therefore, for a workers’ party in Azania and for the reconstitution of the Fourth International as instruments of this struggle. This is what we will be saying from the podium at the international rally in Paris on 8 November.”
International Workers Committee - Comité ouvrier international - Comité obrero internacional 