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South Africa:
Capitalism orchestrated a massacre in an abandoned gold mine, 87 killed, 248 suffered from starvation
South African capitalism has reached another stage in its brutality: an abandoned gold mine near Stilfontein has witnessed capitalist barbarity. The government of the African National Congress (ANC), through which the capitalist regime has passed into the hands of black political elites since 1994, as the loyal organ of South African capitalism, orchestrated and directed the starvation and death of the desperate human beings found in the abandoned mine: 87 killed, 248 emaciated almost to death.
Their crime? The struggle for survival in a social reality where poverty and unemployment (about 30%, around 60% for youths) is a daily reality. This massacre in Stilfontein truthfully demonstrates the continuity of oppression and barbarism from apartheid (South Africa's policy of racial segregation applied until the 1990s) to capitalism led by the black bourgeoisie.
This massacre is merely the latest episode in the history of systematic oppression and violence against the workers and impoverished masses in South Africa. During the apartheid era, the labour force of coloured workers was ruthlessly exploited to fuel the mining industry and line the pockets with profits of the white bourgeoisie, which consolidated its domination through policies of racial segregation and violence. The end of apartheid did not bring prosperity and liberation to the non-privileged non-white masses, but a new reconfiguration of exploitative structures built on the same foundations. After the end of apartheid, under the ANC, the mining industry was dealt a severe blow: some 6000 mines were closed, South Africa fell from first place in gold production to eleventh place, and mining continued to decline...; local communities were driven to illegal and dangerous mining for their survival.
These
illegal miners, the so-called Zama zamas, aptly named "risk takers", are a
product of the decline of the mining sector; they risk their lives, many of
them migrants from neighbouring countries, with improvised means, in
abandoned shafts to extract the gold that, with other raw materials in which
South Africa is rich, once powered South Africa's economic machine. The
driving impulse behind these Zama zamas is sheer desperation for their
survival, not the greed and opulence associated with gold - a desperation
born of the reality of a capitalist society where their living conditions,
and those of their families, are neglected and left to utter ruin.
In 2023, the ANC government launched Operation Vala Umgodi ('Close the Hole'), a militarized campaign to crack down on illegal mining. The Stilfontein mine became the site of this campaign from August 2024. Security forces blockaded the mine and, as part of an elaborate plan, tried to starve them out by cutting off their food and water supplies. The miners trapped underground have struggled for months to live in unimaginably horrific conditions in the face of death.
The police claim that the miners refused to come to the surface for fear of reported arrest is cruelly distorted. Survivors' testimonies reveal a different aspect of the story: many were too weak to climb out by improvised means, while others were actively prevented by members of the organized criminal groups controlling mining in these mines.
When the government was forced to act on court orders - after long court battles, it was allowed to deliver small amounts of food and water in November and December - its response was insensitive and flippant. Rescue operations could have begun months earlier; the final operation, begun on 13 January 2025, took just three days. By that time, 87 people had already lost their lives - a massacre caused not by bullets but by organized starvation and callousness.
The ANC narrative portrays the Zama zamas as criminals who are robbing the national economy: it is reported that in 2024 alone, illegal mining cost the South African economy $3.2 billion (€3 billion). But the reality, as always, is far more complex. Illegal mining is indeed organized - but this organization is a much larger framework within which the miners themselves are exploited. Criminal syndicates operate according to clearly defined functions: they exploit workers and get gold onto world markets through illegal channels. These groups are not 'isolated' gangs, but highly organized networks with roots in local communities, and more importantly, they are linked to the police, the (local) authorities.
The same police officers who blockaded the Stilfontein mine are accused of criminal conspiracy and taking bribes to allow the criminal groups to operate unhindered. The local authorities also often turn a blind eye. This 'organization' mirrors capitalism itself: hierarchical, exploitative and cruel. The miners at the bottom of this pyramid bear the full brunt of its violence.
The horror in Stilfontein echoes the 2012 massacre in Marikana (1), where 36 striking (not illegal!) miners were shot dead by the police. The murderous methods may differ, but the basic dynamic remains the same: the role of the state as the collective organ of capitalist interests. In both cases, workers struggling to survive met brutal repression.
The ANC-led state has added a new dimension to the event: xenophobic rhetoric. It has chosen migrants from neighbouring countries as scapegoats, and by denigrating them it seeks to divide the working and poor masses and to obscure the common exploitation and oppression they all face. This divisive strategy serves only one purpose: to strengthen the power of the state, of capital, and to weaken the possibility of a social explosion of the masses.
The ANC, once a symbol of the struggle against apartheid, is now in a position of governance in a deeply unequal society. ANC leaders, many of whom have become rich through the mining industry, are parasites on the shoulders of the working class. People like Cyril Ramaphosa, once a union leader for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and now a mining magnate, are the epitome of this. Their wealth has been made from the sweat and blood of the workers they criminalize in this post-apartheid era.
The Minister of Mineral Resources, Gwede Mantashe, also a former union leader and also a former top official of the South African Communist Party (SACP), commented callously on the Stilfontein tragedy when he likened miners to people voluntarily taking risks by lying down on the tracks. Such statements demonstrate the true role of government: serving not the people but capital.
As has already been said, the massacres at Stilfontein or Marikana are not isolated incidents, but external manifestations of the systemic violence inherent in capitalism. The fate of the miners points to the broader conditions of the South African working class: soaring unemployment, pervasive poverty, an exploitative informal economy, and the insurmountable reality of the unequal status of the coloured masses inherited from white colonialism and apartheid.
The ANC has never projected an overcoming of the capitalist regime: as early as 1964, Nelson Mandela himself demonstrated that it was a reconfiguration of the superstructure: 'At no time in its history has the ANC ever advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor [...] has it ever condemned capitalist society'. The working and poor masses could never expect the ANC to resolve their living and social situation; the Black Economic Empowerment programme was effectively aimed at one thing: the establishment of a black bourgeois elite.
In this cycle of violence, the working class cannot rely on the ANC, nor on the SACP, nor on the class collaborationist NUM/COSATU unions; this trinity perpetuates its oppression. The only way forward is to organize outside the framework of class collaboration, independently of the state, its institutions and the false friends of the working and poor masses who continue to offer them the illusion of prosperity under black capital; by the very reason for the existence of migrant workers across borders, international solidarity is necessary, but the struggle in South Africa reflects the exploitation faced by workers around the world.
These and other massacres are grim reminders of the inhumanity of capitalism. But they are also calls to arms. Workers in South Africa - and around the world - must unite to eradicate the structures of the capitalist regime that perpetuate their suffering; they must be joined by the impoverished masses because only the modern proletariat, the class of wageworkers, is called and capable of revolutionary struggle to end cycles of exploitation and build a society in which human life is more valuable than profit.
Let the bloodshed in Stilfontein fuel the explosion of the class struggle!
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
(1) See Proletarian, No. 9, Winter 2012-2013; and https://pcint.org/07_TP/009/009-massacre.htm
January, 27th 2025
International Communist Party
Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program
www.pcint.org
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