On 16 August 2012, 34 workers from a Lonmin-owned platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, were shot dead by police while participating in a wildcat strike. A month later, workers returned to work after accepting a 22% pay increase and one-off payment of ZAR2000 following ‘successful’ negotiations between the mine's management, trade union officials, and delegates of striking employees. However, this agreement does not mark the end of South Africans' struggles for higher wages, better working and living conditions, and socio-economic and punitive justice. On the contrary, since returning to work, mineworkers in Marikana have demanded justice for their dead colleagues and better living conditions, while wildcat strikes continue to trouble the country's extensive mining sector.
The Marikana strike and ‘massacre’ is also just one example – albeit the most deadly – of nationwide protests that have come to characterise the daily lives of working class, non-working class, and under-employed South Africans. Thus, according to Peter Alexander:
during the last three years, 2009–12, there has been an average of 2.9 unrest incidents per day. This is an increase of 40 percent over the average of 2.1 unrest incidents per day recorded for 2004–09. The statistics show that what has been called the Rebellion of the Poor has intensified over the past three years. (International Labour Research and Information Group 2012)
So far this rebellion has largely focused on ‘economic’ issues. However, as Maha Abdelrahman reminds us in this issue – and in the context of Egypt's recent revolution – an ‘understanding of economic struggles as separate from, and even in contradistinction to, political struggles is falsely conceived’ due to the interconnectedness between economic and political relations (and distributions) of wealth and power. Similarly, South Africa's ‘Rebellion of the Poor’ is inherently political and stands as a protest against the African National Congress (ANC) government's failure to provide basic services and a decent standard of living, which could have significant political ramifications for the country's future. In this context, the fact that the worst incident of police violence since the end of apartheid took place in the face of strikes in the platinum sector is particularly significant given that this industry initially ‘occupied a special place in the ANC's transformation strategy’ (Capps 2012, p. 323), but one where the ‘logic of bourgeois reform’ nevertheless came to trump the government's commitment to ‘social justice’ (ibid., p. 330). In short, the platinum industry provides an important window onto a post-apartheid reality in which earlier struggles have been reduced to a political transition and economic continuity, with consequent frustration sparking new protests against the political and economic status quo.
This reality raises a number of important questions regarding the legitimacy of Jacob Zuma's presidency, the ANC government, and affiliated trade unions; the aims, objectives and failings of economic planning and development in South Africa; the extent to which the post-apartheid state differs from the apartheid regime in terms of the levels and forms of inclusion and exclusion, and means of state control; and the lessons that South Africa can learn (and has not learnt) from post-independence histories of other African states, and the lessons that other countries can in turn learn (and are not learning) from the continent's political and economic powerhouse. Perhaps most importantly, this reality – especially when taken together with the ‘Arab Spring’ and its aftermath – also raises questions about the ways in which elite interests diminish revolutionary struggles to a change of political leadership, and to the opportunities that current unrest and burgeoning demands for an organised and militant movement against dominant capitalist and neoliberal interests and agendas may nevertheless provide for a future dispensation that explicitly accepts the interconnectedness between the economic and political and thus the need for a radical overhaul of both systems.
This issue of the Review of African Political Economy explores some of the conditions that have generated increased worker unrest in South Africa. It also provides a timely reminder of the interconnectedness between the political and economic, and particularly of how economic unrest is political and how vested political interests generally seek to limit changes to an economic system that underwrites their power.
First, papers by Ben Fine, Alex Beresford, and Amanda Alexander all provide the kind of detailed and critical analysis of South Africa's political economy that is required for a full and nuanced understanding of the ‘Marikana massacre’ and broader socio-economic reality of popular unrest, state repression, political and economic continuity, and burgeoning demands for more substantive change.
Ben Fine's paper sets the scene at the macro level by detailing how one important policy document – the New Growth Path – has emphasised the need for trade unionists to make sacrifices to enable the government to alleviate poverty at the lower levels. Fine shows how this recommended ‘trade-off’ ignores inefficiencies, constraints, and unutilised capacity within the nation's economy, but also how it fails to address the key determining features of South Africa's political economy; namely, ‘the (international) financialisation of (domestic) conglomerate capital especially associated with (illegal) capital flight, the complicity of a newly formed black elite, and the continuing reliance upon how these interact with South Africa's longstanding minerals–energy complex (MEC)’. For Fine, the failure to address these issues can help explain how post-apartheid planning and development has failed to tackle inequality and poverty. In turn, what remains absent from South Africa's economic planning – and what can also help explain a burgeoning sense of abandonment among the working and non-working classes and high levels of social unrest – is a ‘commitment to secure long-term finance for investment in labour-intensive domestic production to meet domestic consumption of basic needs, thereby creating jobs, alleviating unemployment and addressing the backlog of provision and inequality inherited from apartheid.’
In turn, Alex Beresford's paper on organised labour and South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) provides a detailed analysis of how a change in membership to increasingly skilled, higher-level workers has led to the erosion of a coherent class identity, ‘fuelled mistrust and suspicion between regular members and union leaders’, and undermined the NUM's ability to represent workers' interests and control the means by which demands are made. These are problems, which as Beresford notes, have been brought to international attention by recent strikes and formation of the Association of Mining and Construction Union (AMCU), which ‘could prove to be a watershed moment for NUM’, as the union either adapts to renewed radicalism amongst its constituents or faces displacement by more radical actors.
In addition to highlighting the ANC's protection of capitalist interests and distance between union leadership and the rank and file, wildcat strikes have also brought attention to the extreme levels of poverty that led workers to risk everything – their livelihoods and lives – by participating in illegal and violent protests. In this context, Amanda Alexander's analysis of how the South African state, encouraged by the World Bank, withdrew from providing and supporting basic housing, and instead sought to become an ‘enabler of market forces’, is critical to understanding how so many South Africans have come to live in squatter camps without basic services, as decades of informal settlement upgrading projects and efforts to provide affordable private housing led to a situation where decent housing is unaffordable to the poorest, who are instead forced to living in shacks without basic amenities.
The fact that ‘economic’ protests in South Africa are inherently political in that they offer a critique of power relations and distribution of resources, and that they also offer an opportunity – albeit an uncertain one – of more revolutionary reform in the future, is drawn out in a comparative setting in Maha Abdelrahman's timely discussion of Egypt's revolution. Abdelrahman reveals how – in the decade of protests that preceded Mubarak's downfall in February 2011 – struggles for economic and political struggles were inextricably linked, and how the country's new ruling elite, in an ‘unsurprisingly familiar’ manner, has sought to accentuate ‘differences between “political” and “economic” activisms’ by casting the latter as extraneous to the revolution and as a threat to its success in an effort to reduce the revolutionary process to a transition to democracy. Finally, however, Abdelrahman highlights how revolutionary pressures remain, with the country's future characterised by uncertainty as the path to continuity and repression or change and upheaval remain only partially paved. In addition to providing a timely overview of the Egyptian context, Abdelrahman's analysis also offers strong parallels with anti-apartheid, nationalist, and pro-democracy struggles across the continent. In turn, her analysis raises a challenge to activists who seek a different economic and political order in any context to reconnect the economic and political in ways that might bring about a more substantive and radical overhaul of the status quo than neoliberalism twinned with occasional elections.
The final paper looks to Kenya and outlines the way in which financial rewards have become the main motivation for the country's elite female runners – the emphasis on an individual's need to secure economic success for themselves, their families, and their communities, providing an important commentary on the failings of the postcolonial Kenyan state. Thus, while Jarvie and Sikes outline the way in which athletic success can bring substantial rewards to particular individuals that can be associated with some trickle-down through local investments and philanthropy, they also recognise that ‘sport is but a microcosm of the broader political economy context’. Unfortunately, in the Kenyan context, the motivation to run for money stems from high levels of poverty and limited alternatives for economic advancement, which offers an implicit critique of Kenyan politics and international development efforts. Moreover, at the global level, a motivation to run for money can have counterproductive impacts as witnessed during the 2012 London Olympics, where the failure of Kenya's runners to meet national expectations has been closely associated with a range of political economic factors from poor management and a flawed selection process to a sense that runners were insufficiently focused on the Olympics as just one financial opportunity among many. Thus, once again, the economic is revealed to be political, and the political economic.