by Phil Duncan

The latest Oxfam report on global inequality (October 2014) shows that, 20 years after ‘liberation’, South Africa is the most unequal society on earth. So unequal, in fact, that the two richest people are as wealthy as the poorest 50% of the population! Today in South Africa, reports Oxfam, a platinum miner would have to work for 93 years just to earn the average CEO’s annual bonus.

Among the super-rich is Cyril Ramaphosa, once-upon-a-time the leader of the militant black miners union. Ramaphosa was able to leverage his union experience into a profitable career as a business adviser and then expand his own businesses thanks to his long involvement in the ANC (African National Congress) and the connections that provided him with when the ANC took power in 1994.

The black working class, economically worse off than ever, are supposed to forget about their own interests and poverty, let alone fight for something better. Instead they’re supposed to revel in the ‘success’ of the likes of Ramaphosa.

The ANC has been instrumental in managing South African politics to ensure that a small layer of black parasites were able to enter the wider, previously almost totally white capitalist class. What has happened in South Africa should not come as any surprise. It is the logical product of the ANC’s race-before-class politics.

In one sense, it is New Zealand’s ‘Brown Table’ writ large, with the difference that the ANC governs whereas the Maori Party, which represents the aspiring Maori capitalists, does not and never will.

However, the chief lesson of South Africa, as we have noted before, is that class politics are perfectly capable of encompassing the struggle to uproot racism, but ‘anti-racist’ politics, by their nature, are not sufficient to uproot class exploitation. Those who suffer racialised oppression the most are therefore left at the bottom of society, as long as capital continues to rule.

Below are articles we’ve run on South Africa, the struggle against apartheid, post-apartheid South Africa, and Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela and the travesty of liberation

South Africa’s non-revolution

South Africa, class and the ANC: an interview with Brian Ashley

The Marikana Massacre: lessons for class politics in New Zealand

The Marikana Massacre: a premeditated killing

South Africa: workers, unions begin to rebel against the ANC

South Africa: the working class fights back

South African trade union federation expels biggest union for fighting for workers