The recent death of Eugene Terre
Blanche, leader of the AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), at the
hands of two farm workers, has highlighted the situation that exists
today in South Africa, on the one hand the many unresolved problems of
the huge majority of black workers and poor, and on the other a
minority within the white population who cannot reconcile themselves to
the end of Apartheid, upon which their privileges depended.
Eugene Terre Blanch. Photo by Anton Raath.4000
neo-Nazi AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) supporters attended the
funeral service of Eugene Terre Blanche in the small rural town of
Ventersdorp. The AWB claims to be the voice of the Afrikaner population
(Afrikaans speaking descendants of Dutch colonists who occupied the
Cape of Good Hope in 1652 on behalf of one of the first global trading
companies, the Dutch East India Company). Despite the AWB’s claims to
represent Afrikaners, the insignificant numbers that attended his
funeral most weekends more than 50,000 Afrikaners watch the Blue Bulls
rugby team playing in Pretoria would suggest otherwise.
The fact is that the ethnic and racial facade that parades as South
African politics is little more than a smoke screen for the actual
class divisions that underpin the real political landscape of the
country. There is a small Afrikaner elite that forms part of the
capitalist ruling class, people such as the Ruperts who own means of
production in mines, factories and big agribusiness, for whom the
neo-liberal nature of political transformation since 1994 has posed no
threat. There is a much more substantial petit bourgeois component of
the Afrikraner group, retired civil servants, soldiers and politicians
who got golden handshakes (they were paid to step aside for the black
petit bourgeois civil servants) at the end of Apartheid. Included in
this petit bourgeois group are mine managers, small farmers, etc., and
also a layer of skilled white workers, such as fitters, turners,
plumbers, welders, mechanics, who were privileged by the Colour Bar
legislation under Apartheid, and would be described as “red-necks” in
the bible belt of the USA. While the Afrikaner elite were easily
accommodated by the historic compromise that led to the 1994 elections,
it was the petite bourgeoisie who were most threatened by universal
suffrage, black economic empowerment, and affirmative action, who were
most opposed to the compromise, while the capitalist ruling class
accommodated the negotiated settlement exactly because it managed to
extract from the African National Congress guarantees that it would not
pursue a revolutionary path once in power.
The terms “black economic empowerment” and “affirmative action” all
relate to an agreed to programme to create a black middle class that
would stabilise the capitalist relations of production in South Africa
and steer the country clear of the radical working class politics that
marked the decade of the 1980s. In any case the Apartheid capitalist
arrangement, where an almost exclusively black working class was
policed and governed by a petit bourgeois white minority on behalf of
global mining capital, was becoming globally unpalatable and
economically acted as a fetter on the further accumulation of capital –
the country started to experience severe skilled labour shortages, as
the white population was simply too small to continue supplying this
demand, while the black majority was simply excluded from meaningful
education and skills training.
During Apartheid white Christian National Education, and the state
controlled media indoctrinated the white minority, largely petite
bourgeois Afrikaner population, that theirs was a heavenly ordained
mission, that South Africa was the last western Christian bastion
against communism and “black barbarism” in the world, that the
Afrikaner ‘Volk’ (Nation) was God’s chosen nation, etc. The
sudden collapse of Apartheid as a result of sustained working class
action which saw almost daily strikes, working class slums called
townships becoming ungovernable and a costly war in Southern Angola and
Namibia, left no space or time for the regime to change the hegemonic
impact of the right-wing psychosis that evolved as a result of the
poison white youth were fed as Christian National Education.
the post-1994 elections government created a new class of black petit
bourgeois civil servants, soldiers and skilled workers, so it set about
destroying the white petite bourgeoisie through affirmative action,
affirmative procurement and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). White
civil servants became contracted consultants to government, became
suppliers to the mines and factories and redefined themselves
everywhere on the fringes of the economy. However, affirmative
procurement soon required that they demonstrated that their
“enterprises” boasted participation by formerly disadvantaged South
Africans; blacks, women and the disabled.
The only space where they could practise their Christian National
world view was on small family farms operating at the fringes of
agri-business. Many would fly the vierkleur, the old
Transvaal Boer republic flag, most would insist that the new
Constitution stopped at the gate of the farm, many would deny election
officials, labour department officials and trade union organisers entry
onto their property, and many would chase farm workers who lived as
labour tenants in a semi-feudal set up of the land so as to escape new
land reform legislation and regulations that required that farm workers
be given small pieces of land in proximity to their meagre dwellings
(often mud-huts) and many refused to pay minimum wages.
The worst fate that could befall a human being on this planet is to
be born to black parents working on a South African farm. The only
equivalent must be the caste system of “untouchables” in India. A life
of poor nutrition, limited education, appalling housing, rags for
clothing, and stimulation limited to the environment of the farm and
the wages of the parents await such a soul.
The farmers themselves live on the periphery of large scale
agri-business, monopoly wholesalers and retailers, who underpay for
produce and overcharge for commodities sold in mega-malls in the
cities. They are all indebted to hostile banking institutions that
favour big mining, big retail and big manufacturing interests; and to
the Land Bank which is suddenly in the hands of a government they
consider hostile. The South African government’s eagerness to comply
with Washington Consensus Institutions such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund has seen the government voluntarily adopt
structural adjustment programmes and remove protectionist policies that
benefitted agriculture under Apartheid. The Afrikaner petite
bourgeoisie is being pauperised while the government is pursuing a
policy of actively creating and sponsoring a black middle class. The
Afrikaner petite bourgeoisie, long the policeman and administrator of
Apartheid racial capitalism, is suddenly redundant, finding itself on
the scrap heap of history.
The decay of this middle stratum does not imply that it is being
absorbed into the proletariat, because the largely black South African
working class has been shedding a gigantic army of unemployed since the
mid 1980s – one of the primary causes of crime and overflowing prisons
in the country. 1994 has not seen the nationalisation or socialisation
of the commanding heights of the economy; there has therefore not been
any significant redistribution of wealth, instead there has been a
squeezing of the white petite bourgeoisie to make way for an emerging
black petite bourgeoisie. The pauperisation of the white petite
bourgeoisie has meant that this tiny minority on the South African
political landscape, already suspicious of democratic parliamentarism,
came to openly reject it. This petite bourgeoisie, also confused by the
capitulation of the National party at the historic compromise of 1994,
rejected all political parties associated with that compromise, as it
rapidly dissolved their status as privileged citizens in a capitalist
system that created an ideological superstructure that advantaged them.
This petit bourgeois minority of ex-civil servants, ex-apartheid
soldiers and farmers could not accept that their reactionary “heroism”
and “sufferings” in defence of “Volk en Vaderland” [nation and
fatherland] had not only not been rewarded, but had come to nothing.
Hence their hatred for the new political dispensation, the black
population in general and the black working class in particular, and
the easiest targets of their rage are farm workers. Thus since Terre
Blanche was murdered by two farm workers a week ago one farmer has
assaulted farm workers with a pipe and threatened them with a gun near
Ventersdorp, another has held his workers hostage near Randburg,
beating them up with a machete and forcing one to rape fellow female
workers at gunpoint on a small farm near Randburg, while two whites
travelling in a bakkie (pick-up truck) to the east of Johannesburg shot at passengers in a taxi commuter bus, wounding one woman.
White farmers and petit bourgeois Afrikaners claim that there is a
government orchestrated programme of genocide against them – some 1500
farmers have died in farm attacks since 1994. Scientific research has
found that 90% of the murders were the result of crime. Since 1994,
some 230,000 black people, mainly in working class townships and
ghettoes, have died as a result of crime. Is the system failing white
farmers or is it failing the black working class? If a crime is
committed on a farm it is likely that the victim will be white because
most farm owners in South Africa are white – an indication of the
failure of land reform in South Africa. (Whites still own more than 70%
of the land despite being less than 10% of the population). These facts
put the whole situation in context. There is no genocide against whites
in this country. We have a crime problem which can be traced directly
to the neo-liberal policies of the government, such as the
privatisation of safety and security (there are three private security
men protecting the bourgeoisie and its business interests to every one
state-employed policeman protecting the general population), the
commodification of housing, the privatisation of health, education and
social services and the commodification of legal rights and justice.
The poor, especially the lumpen proletariat – the tens of thousands of
workers who have lost their jobs as a result of neo-liberalism – have
no rights because they have no money and therefore they resort to crime!
The AWB leadership originated from the lower and middle ranks of the
old Apartheid army and state security apparatus, just as the membership
arises from the white petite bourgeoisie threatened by the compromise
reached between the mining corporations, the monopoly banking sector,
and manufacturing industry, where as a result of affirmative action
they are being replaced, while white farmers fear land restitution and
reform. In the Namibian, Angolan and township wars these reactionary
elements had learned to speak the language of command, and to risk
their own lives and those of the sons of the Afrikaner petite
bourgeoisie in what they perceived to be wars against communism and
black majority rule. The defeat of Apartheid has left them with a
smouldering anger and a penchant for power.
TerreBlanche was also a product of the state security apparatus. He
demonstrated a big temperament; his harangues were louder than those of
others, and like the rest of this category of garbage left over from
the Apartheid era he was a self-assured apartheid veteran with the
insulted soldier’s thirst for vengeance. He speeded up his political
career by focussing on the fears and suspicions of the petit bourgeois
Afrikaners of the negotiation process, leading to his invasion of the
negotiation chambers in a Quixotic replay of Mussolini’s
“March on Rome” on 25 June 1993. In March 1994 the working class in the
Bantustan of Bophuthatswana went on a general strike that brought
mining, industry, education, health, the civil service and broadcasting
to a standstill. The Bantustan dictator Lucas Mangope called on the AWB
and the Afrikaner Freedom Front to destroy the uprising. Ordinary
soldiers in the Bophuthatswana army and the police joined the uprising
and the right wing was defeated and driven out. This working class mass
action sent shockwaves through the South African ruling class who
feared that it would spread throughout South Africa – the transitional
government intervened speedily to resolve the situation before it could
spread.
While history was marching forward Terre Blanche was putting himself
forward as the leader and spokesperson of the ruined and drowning
Afrikaner petite bourgeoisie. His quasi-Christian and racially tainted
national socialist harangues sounded like commands, of the kind white
males were attuned to before massacring refugee camps in Angola, or
houses accommodating refugees in Lesotho or Botswana during the
Apartheid era; like prayers by the voortrekker Piet Retief on invading the land of the Zulus, or the prayers of Boer
general Delarey in the Anglo-Boer War. As Trotsky puts it, “Doomed
classes, like fatally ill people, never tire of making variations on
their pliants or of listening to consolations.” Terre Blanche’s
speeches were like those of Hitler (on whom Terre Blanche loosely
modelled himself), they “were well attuned to this pitch… Sentimental
formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance along with
gaudy erudition – these minuses turned into pluses”. They supplied
Terre Blanche with the possibility of uniting all types of white petit
bourgeois dissatisfaction around the beggar’s bag of Christian National
ideology. However, the easiest and most defenceless targets for this
grandstanding were farm workers.
It is therefore not surprising that Mr TerreBlanche died at the
hands of two farm workers – one a fifteen year old minor (his
employment in itself constituted a breach of the labour laws of the
country) and the other a twenty seven year old. The dispute that led to
the act of violence was the apparent failure of Mr Terre Blanche to pay
their wages of R300 per month (less than £30). This was far below the
statutory government stipulated minimum wage for farm workers.
(This article first appeared on www.marxist.com)
