A-Infos (en) South Africa, Against the WCAR fraud: Anarchism, Racism And the Class struggle

["Lucien van der Walt" <029walt@cosmos.wits.ac.za>]

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South African anarchist statement on the UN "World Conference Against =
Racism" to be held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to 7 =
September 2001
=20
Against the WCAR fraud

Anarchism, Racism And the Class struggle


(Produced by the Anarchist Union and Bikisha Media
Collective - 2 South African Anarchist groups - contact
details at the end)
=20

WILL EDUCATION END RACISM?

According to South Africa's ruling elite, the problem of
racism is basically a problem of ignorance.  "Education",
according to Barney Pityana of the Human Rights Commission,
"will cure racism".
This argument sounds appealing, but it is inaccurate and
misleading.
Most importantly, this view conveniently ignores the role of
the CAPITALIST SYSTEM in inventing and perpetuating racism.
Since capitalism emerged in the 1500s, it has committed many
crimes against humanity.  But few of these crimes are as
vile as racism.
Perhaps that is why Barney Pityana - as a defender of
capitalism and the ANC government's privatisation policies -
wishes to hide capitalism's dirty laundry with his stress on
"education".


CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY

Capitalism developed as a world system based on the
exploitation of workers, slaves and peasants - black, brown,
yellow and white.  In the early period of capitalism
("merchant capitalism") in the 1500s and 1600s, capitalism
centred mainly on Western Europe and the Americas.
In the Americas, vast plantation systems were set up.  Based
on slavery, they were capitalist enterprises exporting
agricultural goods to Europe.
It was in the system of slavery that the roots of racism are
to be found.  In the words of the black Caribbean scholar,
Eric Williams, "Slavery was not born of racism: rather,
racism was the consequence of slavery".1
In the beginning, the slave plantations were not organised
on racial lines.  Although the first slaves in the Spanish
colonies in the Americas were generally Native Americans,
slavery was restricted (at least officially) to those who
did not convert to Christianity.
The Native Americans were succeeded by poor whites shipped
in from Europe.  Many of these workers were only enslaved
for a limited period, as indentured servants serving
contracts of up to ten years or more.  Others were convicts
sentenced for "crimes" such as stealing cloth or prisoners
of war from uprisings and the colonisation of areas such as
Ireland and Scotland.
There were also a large number of life-long European slaves,
and even amongst the indentured, a substantial number had
been kidnapped and sold into bondage against their will.2
Conditions on the "Middle Passage" (the trip across the
Atlantic) for these indentured servants and slaves were, in
Williams' words, so bad that they should "banish any ideas
that the horrors of the slave ship are to be in any way
accounted for by the fact that the victims were Negroes".3
More than half the English immigrants to the American
colonies in the 1500s were unfree indentured servants4, and
until the 1690's there were still far more unfree whites on
the plantations of the American South than black slaves.5


SLAVERY AND RACISM

It was in the 1600s that racist ideas first emerged.
In the 1600s and 1700s, the trade in human flesh shifted
increasingly from the Americas and Europe ...  to Africa.
The main reason for this shift to African slaves was not
racism, but the fact - so cheering to the capitalists - that
African slaves were cheaper and easily available.6
The African elite, which now hides its guilt under a
mealy-mouthed "anti-racism," actively collaborated in
kidnapping millions of African peasants and selling them to
white merchant capitalists at the ports on the East and West
coasts of Africa.

"The trade was...  an African trade until it reached the
coast.  Only very rarely were Europeans directly involved in
procuring slaves, and that largely in Angola".7

In the 1600s, facing pressure from slave revolts and radical
grassroots movements in Europe itself, the slave-owners
invented the ideology of racism.  One of the most important
slave-owner groups were the "British sugar planters in the
Caribbean, and their mouthpieces in Britain" who used
differences in physical appearance to develop the myth that
black African people were sub-human and deserved to be
enslaved: "here is an ideology, a system of false ideas
serving class interests".8
Racism, in short, was invented to justify a long-standing
system of slavery in the face of demands within Europe and
the Americas for equal rights and equal duties for all
working people.
The enslavement of Native Americans had been justified as
being on the grounds of their "heathen" beliefs; European
servitude was justified as being the lot of inferiors from
the lower classes; African slavery was justified through
racism.
The people who benefited from slavery were not Europeans in
general, but the capitalist ruling classes of Western
Europe.  African ruling classes also received major
benefits.
Many poor whites were indentured or enslaved, whilst poor
white farmers within the Americas lost their land and
markets to the slave-owners, whose drive for more land led
to poor whites being driven off their family farms.9  (The
vast majority of Europeans never owned slaves: only 6
percent of whites owned slaves in the American South in
1860).10
Slavery, in short, benefited the capitalists, to the
detriment of working people of Native American, European and
African descent.


RACE AND EMPIRE

Racism was thus born of the slavery of early capitalism.
However, having been once created, later developments in
capitalism would sustain and rear this creature of the
capitalist class.
Solidly established in the Americas and Western Europe by
the 1700s, capitalism soon became increasingly interested in
expanding its operations in Asia and Africa.
Capitalist outposts already existed - often based on
slavery, as was the case in the early Cape Colony, which was
modelled on American slavery - and conquest was not far
behind.
Between the 1700s and early 1900s, most of Asia and Africa
were conquered as Western European capitalist governments
invaded - hungry for profit from trade, from cheap labour
and cheap raw materials, and profit from new markets to sell
manufactured goods.11
In the period of imperialism - of the establishment of
Western empires in Asia and Africa - racist ideas were
pressed into service to justify imperial conquest and rule.
It was said that Africans and Asians were unable to govern
or develop themselves, and needed to be ruled by external
forces - conveniently, this meant the ruling classes of
Western Europe.12  (Japan, which began to carve out its own
capitalist empire in the 1800s, used a similar racism
against Koreans, in particular).
Empire did not benefit workers in the colonies, nor in the
imperialist countries.  The profits of empire went to the
capitalist class.13  Meanwhile, the methods and forces of
colonial repression were deployed against workers in the
imperialist countries (most notably, the use of colonial
troops to crush the Spanish Revolution), whilst lives and
material resources were wasted on imperial adventures.
Today, multi-national companies cut jobs and wages by
shifting to repressive Third World client regimes.


SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa's history cannot be understood outside of the
history of slavery and empire.
When Jan van Riebeck arrived at the Cape in 1652, he did so
as an envoy of the Dutch East India Company.  Within twenty
years, a slave system modelled on the plantation slavery of
the Americas was emerging.
In the 1800s, growing British and European interest in the
region was justified by an increasingly strident imperialist
racism that hid its capitalist motives under the shawl of
concern with "bringing Africa out of darkness."
Britain took over the Zulu kingdom in 1879, the Pedi in
1879, Botswana in 1885, Zimbabwe in 1890-3 and Swaziland in
1902.  It wrapped up its conquests with the crushing of the
Afrikaner republics in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
Germany also got in on the act with the conquest of Namibia
in 1884, whilst Portugal maintained control of neighbouring
Angola and Mozambique.
It was in this period of British imperialism that all of the
key features of Apartheid were developed: segregation, pass
laws, restrictions on African trade unionism and the cheap
labour migrant system.
These instruments from the heyday of imperialism were
refined and perfected under the National Party after 1948,
which saw how useful racism was for capitalism.
The capitalist class in South Africa has, in short,
benefited from 300 years of racism, which has provided
cheap, right-less black labour on demand.


MODERN RACISM

Clearly, capitalism gave birth to racism.  Racism as an idea
helped justify empire and slavery.
With the collapse of the European and Japanese empires
between the 1940s and the 1970s, racist ideas and theory
became less and less acceptable.
Why then does racism continue even today within the
Americas, Europe and Japan?

It continues because it serves two key functions under
capitalism.

First, it allows the capitalists to secure sources of cheap,
unorganised, and highly exploitable labour.  Immigrants and
national minorities are sources of cheap labour that
capitalists pit against the rest of the working class.
Secondly, racism allows the capitalist ruling class to
divide and rule the exploited classes.  Across the planet,
billions of workers and peasants suffer the lashes of
capitalism.  Racism is used to build divisions within the
working class to help keep the ruling capitalist class in
power.

Praxedis Guerrero, a great Mexican Anarchist, described the
process as follows:14

"Racial prejudice and nationality, clearly managed by the
capitalists and tyrants, prevents peoples living side by
side in a fraternal manner...  A river, a mountain, a line
of small monuments suffice to maintain foreigners and make
enemies of two peoples, both living in mistrust and envy of
one another because of the acts of past generations.

"Each nationality pretends to be above the other in some
kind of way, and the dominating classes, the keepers of
education and the wealth of nations, feed the proletariat
with the belief of stupid superiority and pride to make
impossible the union of all nations who are separately
fighting to free themselves from Capital...

"If all the workers of the different nations had direct
participation in all questions of social importance which
affect one or more proletarian groups these questions would
be happily and promptly solved by the workers themselves."


IMMIGRANTS AND NEO-LIBERALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

Workers, in short, are told to blame and hate other workers
- distinguished by culture, language, skin colour, or some
other arbitrary feature for their misery.
A classic example is the scape-goating of immigrants and
refugees for "taking away jobs and housing".  In this way,
our anger is deflected onto other workers (with whom we have
almost everything in common) rather than being directed
against capitalists (with whom we have nothing in common).
An "appearance" of common interest is created between
workers and bosses of a given race or nation.
South Africa is a perfect example.  The capitalist policies
of the ANC - privatisation, pension cuts, massive
retrenchments - all prove that the ANC is an outright enemy
of the African working class.
Because of the ANC's neo-liberal capitalist policies, the
legacy of apartheid is not only not addressed... it is
worsened.  African workers and their families, the victims
of apartheid, now become the main victims of neo-liberalism
(joined by a layer of Coloured, Indian and white workers).
But the new ruling elite, which is increasingly
multi-racial, increasingly plays the race card to fragment
us and so consolidate its class rule.  Whether it is the
ANC's Mbeki or the DA's Leon who plays the race card, the
effect is the same: more power to the capitalist class and
so, less and less chance of ending the legacy of apartheid.
And so, South African workers are pitted against each other
and against African immigrants.  And the rich get richer
whilst the poor get poorer.
The race card is thus played both in the "West" and the
"South" to disorganise the working class.


OUR POSITION

Our position is simple.
As anarchists, we oppose racism, and stand against racism
wherever it raises its ugly head.  Racism is not only a
crime against humanity, but a direct attack on the working
class.  Racism divides us, increases capitalist profits, and
leads to lower wages for all workers.
White American workers, for example, in no way benefit from
the existence of an impoverished and oppressed minority of
African American workers who can be used to undercut wages,
and working and living conditions.
Therefore we support revolutionary education against racism
as part of a programme of developing a non-racial,
international, anti-nationalist, anti-racist working class
movement capable of crushing capitalism and the governments
that defend it.  This means every government, because every
government - not excluding Cuba and China- is a capitalist
instrument, a capitalist trade union.
We aim at the destruction of capitalism and the creation of
a libertarian communist society under direct working class
self-management of all aspects of society - whether the
workplace, the school, the campus or the neighbourhood.

THE UN FRAUD

As anarchists, we consider the World Conference Against
Racism (WCAR) by the United Nations to be an enormous fraud.
Sitting cosily in expensive hotels, the world's elite - the
people directly responsible for racism - will have an
all-expenses-paid opportunity to posture as champions of
anti-racism.
These elites, drawn from every race, will sit cosily and
listen to lectures on the evils of racism...  something none
of them ever experience.  Racism is reserved for the poor:
the capitalist elites are protected by their lawyers and
money.  The UN is a rich-man's club, not a weapon against
racism.  Like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the UN serves as
an instrument of collective capitalist power against the
world's working class and peasantry.
Our own elite, represented by the ANC, will use the
opportunity to try and take the tarnish off its six years of
anti-working class rule by posturing as a "model" of
anti-racism.=20


CAPITALIST ANC HIJACKS EVENT

For the ANC, the WCAR is a golden opportunity to hide away
the fact that privatisation and job loss are accelerating,
and that the main victims are African workers and
communities.
This is expressed in the march by the ANC Alliance -
including COSATU - in support of the conference...  only
days after COSATU mobilised tens of thousands of workers
against ANC policies!
We look instead to the new anti-privatisation movement and
the Durban Social Forum as vehicles for moving the fight
against racism beyond the bounds of the UN banquets.


REPARATIONS

The demand has been raised for reparations to African
peoples for the impact of the slave trade.  This is a
progressive demand that, if realised, would go a long way
towards ending the legacy of slavery in the Americas and
West Africa.
However, it is extremely unlikely that reparations can be
attained under capitalism.
The capitalists know that if they open the door to
reparations for slavery, they will be asked for reparations
for every one of capitalism's many crimes.
Furthermore, across the world, whether "West", "South" or
"East", the capitalists are bent on crushing working and
poor people through the implementation of neo-liberal
policies of privatisation, cuts in schools, pensions and
hospitals, flexible labour, free trade etc.
It is therefore unlikely in the extreme that the western
ruling classes will now reverse the trend and introduce
major social reforms. Their aim, for now, is to redistribute
wealth from the poor to the rich.
Real reparations for the many crimes of capitalism will only
be achieved under libertarian communism.  And under
libertarian communism, the capitalist elites of the world
will be judged harshly for these crimes, rather than
rewarded and rewarded and rewarded for evil, as is the case
today. =20


US IMPERIALISM AND THIRD WORLD ELITES

Nowhere is the role of the UN as a rich-man's club made more
clear than the bullying role of the US in the run-up to the
WCAR.  The US, as the most powerful capitalist country, has
championed the removal of reparations and the repression of
the Palestinians by the Israeli state from the WCAR.
Clearly, the US capitalist class wants to prevent any
discussion of the two issues.
In this it is, unsurprisingly, supported by the ruling
classes in Africa, who have scrapped the demand for
financial reparations for slavery and colonialism in favour
of more debt relief and more free trade.
This move illustrates that Third World ruling classes are
complicit in the system of neo-liberal capitalism and
imperialism. Our immediate enemy, as
South African militants, is not a vague "US imperialism,"
but the local ruling class which acts as a junior partner in
capitalism, which is, after all, modern slavery. The enemy
is at home!
The rich will not succeed in setting the agenda for
anti-racist and anti-imperialist activism, because it is in
the streets that the real demands and actions will take
place! Struggle from below will help set out a working
people's agenda against racism and imperialism, and the
system that creates and recreates these social evils:
capitalism.


ANARCHIST DEMANDS

It is our view as anarchists that the key to meaningful
freedom for ordinary working and poor people is a struggle
against racism, for libertarian (free) communism.  The
creation of a truly non-racial South Africa requires a
social movement against capitalism and neo-liberalism, and
for a society based on collective ownership and the
principle "from each according to their ability to each
according to their needs".
We stress the common interests of all workers across the
world, and oppose the nationalists who are trying to use the
WCAR as an opportunity to fragment workers and distract
attention from the real class war in the streets, workplaces
and communities

Our immediate demands are
* an immediate end to privatisation, which can only increase
poverty and misery
* refusal to pay unfair electricity and water charges
* an immediate halt to retrenchments
* trade union independence from all political parties
* full trade union democracy
* an election boycott: elections are a fraud that serve only
to waste our time and confuse our people
* reparations for slavery
* equal rights for immigrants
* land occupations by self-managed rural collectives
* factory occupations by the workers and their trade unions
* freedom for the Palestinians, Burmese, Tibetans and all
victims of racism, colonialism and capitalist dictatorship.
* abolition of the third world debt, which serves as an
instrument of capitalist imperialism and the closure of the
IMF, World Bank, WTO and UN

In order to implement these demands, we must not rely on
liberation from above, which will never happen.  We must
struggle from below, taking direct action against the
bosses, the local councillors and other sectors of the
elite, organising ourselves for a social war for the freedom
of the working class.
=20



=20
"Anarchism does not derive from the abstract reflections of
an intellectual or a philosopher, but from the direct
struggle of workers against capitalism, from the needs and
necessities of the workers, from their aspirations to
liberty and equality, aspirations which become particularly
alive in the best heroic period of the life and struggle of
the working masses."

P. Arshinov, N. Makhno and others, 1926,
The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists.


>From Prague to Seattle, Continue the Battle!


Reverse the Drive to Privatise!


There is no contradiction between the class struggle and the
struggle against racism.  Neither can succeed without the
other.


=20
1. Eric Williams, 1944, Capitalism and Slavery.  Andre
Deutsch, p. 17.  See also Peter Fryer, 1988, Black People in
the British Empire.  Pluto Press, chapter 11.
2. Williams does not take sufficient account of the
institution of life-long slavery among Whites.
3. Williams, p. 14=20
4. williams, p. 10=20
5. Leo Huberman, 1947, We, the People: the drama of America.
Monthly Review Press, p. 161.
6. Williams, pp. 18-19, 23-29
7. Bill Freund, 1984, The Making of Contemporary Africa: the
development of African Society Since 1800, Indiana
University Press, p. 51.
8. Fryer, p. 64. =20
9. Williams, pp. 23-26; Huberman, p. 167-168
10. Huberman, p. 167. =20
11. See Freund for a discussion of the African experience.
12. Fryer, pp. 61-81; Freund.
13. And not to workers as Fryer claims, pp. 54-55.
14. Programa del la Liga Pan-Americana del Trabajo in
Articulos de Combate, p. 125-5, cited in D. Poole, "The
Anarchists and the Mexican Revolution, part 2: Praxedis G.
Guerrero 1882 - 1910, Anarchist Review, No. 4.  Cienfuegos
Press.



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There are also BMC contacts for Port Elizabeth and Cape
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