Interview With Real News - Platinum Mineworkers and Political Rupture

See interview with Real News about struggles in platinum  mining and how this is is realigning South African politics.

SA Platinum Miners Struggle Creates Political Rupture

Searching For Sugarman Sixto Rodriguez : A South African and now ‘American Legend’?

The wonderful documentary by Malik Bendjelloul, Searching for Sugarman, , functions in various ways. It brings to life the elusive and unknown story of Sixto Rodriguez, popularly known as ‘Sugarman’ or ‘Rodriguez’. It addresses itself to the fiction of the tragic demise of Rodriguez  and in the end the reality of where Rodriguez ended up, since his disappearance, after he recorded his last album in 1971. It is investigative, revealing and heart rending. Its power lies in demonstrating that Sixto Rodgriguez was a folk musician who did not clinch a commercial and cultural following in the United States, but unknown to him, he was a celebrated musician in South Africa.  For South African writer Rian Malan (See Mail and Guardian, February 8 to 14, Friday section, pp. 8&9) understanding Rodriguez through the lens of South African hippiedom, there is a simple essentialist and binary explanation for this. On the one hand, South African hippies were not racist ( really? How many shared a Rodriguez album with a non-white during apartheid?) while middle class white hippie America was  and could not  appreciate the subversive message of an American Latino (born of Mexican migrant workers). Hence the likes of Bob Dylan thrives and becomes the leading cultural icon of America’s hippie generation and an American commercially constituted legend.  While there might be an element of truth about racism prevalent in hippie America, Malan’s generalisation of the non-racial orientation of South African hippies, gives us a very simplistic appreciation of why Rodriguez chose to abandon his musical career and why he was celebrated in South Africa.

Malan’s narrative fails to appreciate two realities in Rodriguez’s existence. The first the political economy of a commercialised music industry in the US, assimilating and blunting the subversive edge of sixties folk music. Those who survived and came out on top, tamed their radical folk roots and even in the end abandoned it to be commercially successful. This is where Bob Dylan ended up.  Rodriguez, chose a harder path, informed by  a sense of fidelity to what his music was all about.  Rodriguez in acknowledging his commercial failure, actually chose at the same time, to affirm his radical, existentially authentic and anti-establishment message. He chose the path of conviction and authenticity, themes very strong  in his lyrics. This is what lives on in South Africa; the authenticity of the subversive folk musician Rodriguez. This is what was capsuled and celebrated in South Africa for the past four decades.  

Moreover, Malan fails to accept, which Sugarman the documentary touches on superficially, that Rodriguez also chose to live within the realities of his situation. He was the child of Mexican migrant workers, a working class child, who understood that the reproduction of his own family and himself as a human was based on him working to earn an income. If music, as work, could not generate such a life supporting income, he was going to find it through being a construction worker. In a sense, Malan fails to appreciate the deeper existential philosophy of Rodriguez the worker and how this informed his choice to abandon the life of a worker in music.

 In addition, Searching for Sugarman functions  as a bridge between the star struck universe of a predominantly white  and South African hippy following and  its hero. Such a following yearned to venerate the legend they constructed, in their midst. It was about experiencing the celebrity spectacle. Sugarman had to be consumed, live, on stage.  More specifically, South African hippies wanted the fairytale,  they wanted the ‘knight in shining armour’,  Cinderalla or Arthur to appear before them. It was in essence all about experiencing the commodified celebrity spectacle.  This is  a challenge to Malan’s rather one sided reading of  Sugarman as merely  ending  Sixto Rodriguez’s ignorance about being a superstar in South Africa and conferring such a status on him.  The bridging role of Sugarman is about bringing together these two parallel universes: a celebrity struck mainly white progressive audience (and for Malan mainly hippies) and a Latino construction worker called Sixto Rodriguez, who was also, at one point in his life a music worker.

Malan goes further to suggest that Sugarman functions to achieve a crucial part of the American dream. It constitutes Sixto Rodriguez as an American legend, mainly through South African hippie veneration. This is what Sugarman and in the end Sixto Rodriguez is all about. An American legend whose time has come and who can now make money and live happy thereafter…a sort of superficial hippyish ending to his life! One cannot help feeling that Malan and his hippyish understanding and appropriation  of Rodriguez misses the deeper and real Rodriguez.

It is important for Sixto Rodriguez, a radical folk musician whose two albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality informed a sub-culture in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, be recognised and celebrated. As a young anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s I experienced him together with the more radical Dylan (the  non-commercial Dylan), Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and later Tracy Chapman, amongst others. And of course there was also Bob Marley and the message of Reggae. We should not let Malan’s reading of Sugarman take away from this function the movie plays. More importantly, we do not need Rodriguez to be a commercialised American legend to be celebrated.  The awards received by this documentary are well deserved and resurrection of the radical folk music of Rodriguez it achieves through mainstream and social media, through rocketing album sales, a few more concerts and well deserved income for the music worker Rodgriguez are all heartening.

However, Sugarman begins something which can only be accomplished by a deeper appreciation of the real Rodriguez. According to one of his co-worker mates in the documentary, he was a ‘silk worm who translated the raw material of reality into poetry’. This begs deeper questions about the ideological and existential make up of Rodriguez the ‘silkworm’. What prompted him as a construction worker to dress up with a tuxedo in worksites? What  kind of philosophy did he read and enjoy? Why did he invite militant ‘Latino activists’ on to the stage when he performed in California during the short span as a music worker? What are the social conditions and understandings that inform the militant humanism running through his music? What were the social and political questions that prompted Rodriguez to enter an electoral race to be the mayor of Detroit? What ethical values informed Rodriguez’s politics? Why did Rodriguez ensure his class location never became a barrier to giving himself and his family a culturally rich existence? The lyrics in Rodriguez’s songs challenge  the in-authencity of capitalist individualism, the cruelty of the powerful, exploitation and the deep alienation of  capitalist modernity. Despite the importance of Sugarman it does not assist  us in understanding the  sub-soil of Rodriguez’s existential consciousness that gave birth to his captivating and poetic lyrics. We encounter  a working class Rodriguez  but without  a full appreciation of his intellectual depth. This can only come to the fore with a serious biography on Rodriguez, involving him in clarifying who he is, what life experiences and what perspectives of the human condition engendered his songs. To reach such depths such a biography  should not be written by a hippie. Lets hope someone with the time, energy and commitment to the real Rodriguez comes forward to write  a biography which would be an important  part of 20^th century music history.

Moreover, Sugarman prompts us to take Rodriguez beyond hippie nostalgia and veneration and to ask what does the radical Rodriguez, the authentic voice of folk music, mean for us today. For workers engaged in struggles for improved wage and living conditions  in South Africa’s winelands and on the mines, these words from the song Cause in the album Coming From Reality have a profound resonance.

‘Cause I lost my job two weeks before Christmas

And talked to Jesus at the sewer

And the Pope said it was none of his God damn business…

Cause they told me everybody’s got to pay their dues

And I explained that I had overpaid them…

Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?’

For the deepening inequalities of our time, brought about by capitalist fat cats, including American and South African hippies occupying managerial boardrooms in transnational corporations,   Rodriguez’s song Sandrevan Lullaby, for instance, highlights the importance of a capitalist civilisation, centred in the US, being in a state of decline. These lyrics from the song make the point poetically:

‘Judges with metermaid hearts

Order supermarket justice starts

Frozen children inner city

Walkers in the paper rain

Waiting for the knights that never came

The hijacked trying so hard to be pretty…

America gains another pound

Only time will bring some people around

Idols and flags are slowly melting

Another shower of rice

To pair it for some will suffice

The mouthful asks for a second helping…’

The radical voice of Rodriguez  speaks to our contemporary human condition. It is a voice that chimes with the message of the Occupy movement in the US against the  1 per cent and  the movements struggling against the oppressions of a post-apartheid South Africa. His universal militant humanist message will continue to speak to the ongoing struggles of the oppressed all over the world.

Finally, for Sixto (if ever he gets to the read this) if there is a third album in the making, please don’t abandon your authentic and militant humanist voice for commercialised legendary status.  In South Africa whether white or black, that have encountered you, you have in the end given us a genuine transformative  experience, as we kept your militant humanist voice alive. We love you, as  the authentic  voice that comes through your lyrics, as you exist and in how you bring us into confrontation with  the realities of our time. On the stage you are a music worker, this is a cold fact in our common reality. I am confident you will not  surrender!!!

Interview 4 with Real News on Marikana

See interview entitled: South African Platinum Miners Win Pay Rise at
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8878

Interview 3 With Real News on Marikana

See interview entitled: South African Miners Strike a Challenge to the ANC at  http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8827

Whats Wrong With Fracking? What Can You Do?

Last night David Fig, one of South Africa's leading eco-justice activists, spoke at a WITS University Amandla Forum about fracking.  David challenged us to think about the following issues:

- The country leading on fracking is the USA but the science about fracking and its consequences are only trickling into the public arena; it is an untested technology in terms of its social and ecological impacts. In short,  it is not clear what was the scientific basis for the South African cabinet's decision to remove the ban on fracking. The cabinet memorandum has not been made public. We need to know what was the scientific basis for the cabinets decision;

- The removal of the ban on fracking opens the way for Shell, Falcon and Bundu to engage in exploration for shale gas. The government regulations and practice generally tends to lean towards giving licenses. In short, the removal of the ban opens the way for full blown exploration.

- The consequences of fracking range from methane emissions (hence greater green house gases), water contamination, heavy road traffic in a pristine part of South Africa, the potential destruction of viable eco-tourism and sheep farming in the Karoo and no guarantees that shale gas would be part of the national energy mix.

- South Africa does not have an appropriate regulatory framework. There is no fracking law, we do not have a strict EIA process to deal with fracking, our water laws are not aligned and  monitoring standards are not clear. The ban on fracking should have ensured South Africa tightened its regulatory framework.

- How do we explain the national planning commission's support for fracking and cabinets decision to remove the ban on fracking? Is this part of the 'resource nationalism' of the ANC to encourage elite formation through BEE in partnership with transnational capital? Is this our new 'arms deal' with all the trappings of corruption? Is this what foreign direct investment-led growth is all about? Is this government just continuing a fossil fuel economy without serious commitment to renewable energy options?

- We can we do? The struggle is not over. We need to support September 22nd, the international day to ban fracking, we need to demand tighter regulation of South Africa's gas industry, we need to demand greater community participation and a stringent EIA process, we need to demand a public debate about the science around fracking including the science the SA government looked at, we need to strengthen grass roots mobilisation against fracking including Shell, Bundu, Falcon and other shale gas grabbers,  we need tight monitoring standards, at a minimum.

- If you would like David Figs power point presentation and academic paper he delivered on fracking at a conference in Iceland do not hesitate to contact me. These are great resources which can be used in small group discussions, in workshops and in community meetings.

The struggle continues.

Ban Fracking!!

Send a message to our government on Global Anti-Fracking day, September 22nd 2012, by joining other South Africans who are opposed to fracking, when they CALL FOR A PERMANENT BAN ON FRACKING in South Africa. We will meet in front of the gates of Parliament in Cape Town, corner of Plein Street and Roeland Street at 10h30, until 12h00.

The event is open to everyone and supported by several organisations, including TKAG, Earthlife Africa, SAFCEI, the Southern Cape Land Committee, Environmental Monitoring Group, Coalition for Environmental Justice, and others. For more information, and to RSVP, please visit the facebook event page:https://www.facebook.com/events/188429077955901/. Please invite all your friends – we need many feet on the street!

Please be creative with your anti-fracking banners and posters, and feel free to dress up: 22 Sept is also the first real day of spring, as the spring (vernal) equinox is on 21 Sept - WHAT IF SOUTH AFRICA decided to make a NEW BEGINNING, to live in harmony with nature, to embrace a truly renewable, sustainable energy future, and not allow polluting industries to destroy our people's land and scarce water resources for their corporate profit?

This event is part of the Global Frackdown, a project of Food and Water Watch (http://www.globalfrackdown.org/activist-toolkit/).

Marikana and the Anti-Worker Role of the ANC-led Alliance

(A shorter version of this blog piece was published in this weeks Mail and Guardian in the Comment and Analysis pages under the heading: Marikana Marks Rift in ANC

Ideology. See http://mg.co.za/article/2012-09-07-00-marikana-marks-rift-in-anc-ideology) 

.

Workers in South Africa live and work in a social system premised on violence. This is not exceptional, but inherent to the general condition of capitalism. Karl Marx described it as a system, ‘drenched in blood and dirt’.  On August 16^th the  Marikana Massacre brought to the fore two forms of violence coursing through the everyday lives of workers. The first is an asymmetric violence expressed through the coercive capacity of the ANC state: the hi-tech and militarised fire power of the police force. The second, more invisible, but shaping the lives of the workers is the structural violence of a globalised and financialised capitalism. It is a violence that works through creating a society in which the link between wage labour and reproducing human life is  broken. Put differently, super exploited, precarious and disciplined work is far from sufficient to ensure a descent life. This implies the secular trend of super profits of South Africa’s platinum mines, despite short-term fluctuations in prices, is simply an act of violence aimed at producing impoverished and degraded human life. It is an act of violence supported, encouraged and promoted by the ANC government’s commitment to deep globalisation and foreign direct investment led growth. More sharply, this is a government that privileges risk to capital over risk to human life (particularly the working class) and nature.

The Marikana Massacre as an event takes on a profound historical meaning,  as a defining moment in post-apartheid South Africa, in this context. It is a defining moment in its withdrawal of  the ideological warrant for core tenets of national liberation ideology: ‘the working class leads’ and   ‘working class bias’ of the much vaunted ANC-led ‘National Democratic Revolution’. If these ideological precepts had traction in reality Marikana should not have happened. The murder of workers by the ANC state renders hollow and hypocritical these ideological props. After Marikana, working class support and commitment to the ANC and its monopoly of power is unhinged; it is no longer a certainty in South African politics. The memorialising of Marikana (like Andries Tatane) at the grassroots, as a massacre of workers by the ANC state, can never be erased from working class consciousness in South Africa. After Marikana, when the ANC calls on workers to vote for it the foremost question in the minds of workers would always be that this state has murdered workers; the lives of workers are not important to the ANC state. The workers that make up COSATU and the working class in general will find it impossible to ignore this fact. Marikana as a defining moment in post-apartheid South Africa represents  a fundamental rupture  in working class consciousness and its  commitment to ANC rule.

It is this recognition by the ANC state that assists in explaining how it has tried to smear and scape goat the Marikana workers with collective purpose murder charges but then temporarily withdrawn by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). In itself this is an act of desperation which has not worked and which has prompted  more serious questions to come to the fore in the  national conversation: why has the ANC state not suspended, charged and started investigating the police officers that shot the workers, the National Police Commissioner and Minister of Police  for the Marikana Massacre? Why has Zuma not fired the head of the NPA after the ridiculous collective purpose murder charges were imposed?  These are the questions on the minds of most South Africans which further expose the anti-worker orientation of the ANC government and ultimately ANC-led Alliance.

However, since August 16^th the ANC state and Alliance has not only tried to smear the Marikana workers with collective murder charges to crush the strike. Various reports from Marikana community members suggest ongoing police harassment and arrests. This accounts for the 270 (not just miners but also community members) that were arrested over two weeks since August 16th but recently released. Currently, there is a heavy police presence in and around Marikana. In addition, the most insidious move by the ANC state and alliance to crush the strike has been to actively champion from above a ‘peace accord process’. This process was surfaced in the public arena by none other than Cyril Ramaphosa, former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and board member of Lonmin. This entire process centred around pressurising the workers to return to work and then bargain for wages. Essentially the ‘peace accord’ has been a strike breaking tactic, supported by the ANC-led Alliance, that has been emphatically rejected by the striking miners and AMCU(  Association of Mine Workers and  Construction Union). With the ANC-led Alliance being out manoeuvred by the workers the most Gwede Mantashe, General Secretary of the ANC, could concede on national radio was the ongoing strike was because of Lonmin. Actually, the ongoing strike was more than this but a rejection of ANC rule and the dubious anti-worker leadership of the ANC-led Alliance.

Will Julius Malema save the ANC by preventing working class re-alignments away from the ANC? To answer this question requires a distinction between Malema the individual and Malema the populist phenomenon. Malema the populist phenomenon is scripted and performed by Malema but constituted in our public sphere by sections of the media. The Malema phenomenon  in the context of the Marikana Massacre has been brazenly opportunistic, as captured by the cartoonist Zapiro.  However, it is an opportunism that extends to sections of the media that constitute this phenomenon and cheer Malema on. After August 16^th, Malema was given space and voice in two leading Sunday newspapers. Malema’s populist politics was diffused into our national conversation as a cleavage in the ANC-led Alliance. This is the real value of Malema to sections of the media. However, like him these sections of the media are also responsible for his unscrupulous appropriation and instrumentalising of the Marikana tragedy.

But despite support for the Malema phenomenon, within sections of the media, it is not given that Malema would build a political base amongst the working class outside the ANC. The Congress of the People (COPE) experience highlights the limits of building an alternative to the ANC in the mould of the ANC; it is not given that the working class has an appetite for another dead end. Moreover, it is not given that Malema’s facile populism has a class belonging amongst the working class despite his rhetoric about nationalisation. If it did, all of COSATU and the unemployed would be marching behind him, for instance.  Moreover, it would seem that the post-Marikana working class are likely to use Malema rather than be  instrumentalised by his narrow self-seeking populist politics. Although building a political base amongst the working class is  a  necessary condition  for his survival outside the ANC, the most Malema might  achieve is a deepening rift in the ANC. Such a rift  might split the ANC, given the deep factional cleavages tearing through the ANC,  but Malema is unlikely to deliver the awakened post-Marikana working class back to the ANC.

However, the blind spot in this very fluid Marikana moment are the convergences taking place in progressive civil society. Mainly unreported and unacknowledged by most in the media. This confluence of solidarity with the Marikana workers  in this space is around building the Campaign For Solidarity With Marikana, based on two guiding principles. First, determining solidarity actions in dialogue with the Marikana workers and communities. Second, democratic practice within the campaign that is transparent and mediated through collective decision-making. Both these principles keep in check crusading and opportunism; instead this engenders a principled solidarity. For the first time since the 1980s, the dynamism of progressive civil society solidarity is bringing together grass roots movements, legal NGOs, humanitarian organisations, womens groups, religious organisations, left groups, transnational activist networks and concerned individuals to take a stand with the Marikana workers.  The organising practices coming to the fore straddle face-book networking, online petitions, blogging, symbolic protest actions, pamphleteering, localised community actions, mobilising solidarity funds, building watchdog capacity over the governments judicial commission and organising conventional mass protest actions. The Democratic Left Front is a crucial non-vanguardist actor within this emergent campaign to build principled solidarity with the Marikana workers. Inadvertently, the Marikana moment is also strengthening the tide for a post-national liberation and post-neoliberal politics in South Africa; it is bringing to the fore alternative political forces unwilling to sit back and let South Africa’s democracy be destroyed by an increasing authoritarian but self destructing ANC-led Alliance.

 Author: Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a senior lecturer in international relations at WITS University. He is a member of the national convening committee of the Democratic Left Front.

Interview 2 With Real News on Marikana

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8751

NPA Charges Against Marikana Workers: An Abuse of Power!

DEMOCRATIC LEFT FRONT

www.democraticleft.za.net

30 August 2012

The Democratic Left Front (DLF) is shocked, disgusted and angered by the decision of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to charge the 270 workers from the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana currently in custody with the murder of their 34 fellow workers, comrades and strikers who were callously mowed down by the South African Police Service on 16 August 2012. The NPA has the audacity to justify this decision on the basis of the common law doctrine of common purpose where “suspects with guns or any weapons and they confront or attack the police and a shooting takes place and there are fatalities” (as stated to the BBC by an NPA spokesperson, Frank Lesenyego). Infamously, the common purpose charge was last used in a high profile case by the apartheid regime with the Upington 6 case. So much for all the last week's meaningless platitudes and crocodile tears over the Lonmin massacre from the ANC and government! 

Clearly, President Zuma’s Judicial Commission of inquiry has been rendered irrelevant by this charge. Why waste money on a Judicial Commission when the state has already decided that the workers are responsible for having themselves shot at and their comrades killed by the police? What a travesty of justice! This amounts to cynical cruelty and a flagrant contempt for truth. This opens the door to an official cover-up of the publicly witnessed shooting of the striking workers by the police. Already, there has beenwanton destruction of evidence at the crime scene. All this, together with today’s problematic decision of the Garankuwa Magistrate’s Court to grant the State permission to postpone the bail application of the workers for another 7 days. These workers have been in jail for more than 15 days. All this militates against a fair trial of these workers.

On the basis of a doctrine of common affront, and solidarity, the DLF calls on all people in South Africa who stand for the truth and social justice to all line up at police stations demanding to be charged with murder. We call for this action for Thursday, 06 September when the arrested workers next appear in court.

The DLF calls on the NPA to withdraw the charges of common purpose against the Lonmin workers. The DLF calls on the NPA to lay charges of murder against the police. We say no to a police cover-up. We say no to a Judicial Commission of Enquiry that will whitewash the police.

The DLF calls for solidarity and the mobilisation of all legal, financial and other resources in order to ensure effective legal assistance to the charged workers as well as to ensure that the stories, voices and interests of the affected workers and communities are effectively heard in a transparent and unbiased process. The DLF reaffirms its support for an independent commission of enquiry as endorsed by various Marikana solidarity campaigns launched in Johannesburg and Cape Town in the last week.

ENDS

FOR COMMENTS, CONTACT:

Brian Ashley – 082 085 7088

Mazibuko K. Jara – 083 651 0271  

Vishwas Satgar – 082 775 3420 

Interview With RealNews on Marikana Massacre

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8750