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Sunday September 30, 2007 09:37 by African People's Solidarity Committee
Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) tour exposes ongoing South African oppression and poverty under Mbeki and Mandela; Mfanelo Skwatsha, Executive Secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania (South Africa), will be a featured speaker at African People’s Solidarity Day events, October 13-21 in cities throughout the U.S. |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7There is a lot that needs to be criticized about this article.
Firstly, Azania is not a word for South Africa, it is a word for Africa in general.
Secondly, the article is right to point out that the current situation in South Africa is worse (economically) than during apartheid, a fact that many social movements in South Africa point out all the time, including the anarchist communist federation ZACF. The growing number of people that openly oppose the government get shot at with rubber bullets, and every week there are serious injuries when the police uses the same tactics as the former apartheid police did. They even get assassinated. Because of that many people have come to see that it is very likely that no government of any political party in this country will ever change their situation, including the PAC.
Thirdly, the poverty gap between rich and poor is increasing. However, contrary to the PAC’s belief that only white people are rich and only black people are poor, statistics show that this is not true anymore. Due to the BEE policies of the ANC government, there is a new black elite. White supremacy is therefore a myth and one has to question why the PAC still plays the racial card in a country where the main distinction is not between black and white anymore but between rich and poor (although we recognise that the majority of rich people are still white, but no racial generalisations should be made). To just give the land to a few black people who are friends with politicians won’t solve the poverty problem in South Africa. We need to distribute land so that everyone can use it, collectively.
Fourthly, the PAC is not at all an important political movement in South Africa anymore. They are internally split and only one seat in the parliament. It is also new that the PAC now talks socialists (well, they have some Maoists in their ranks) when in fact that was the reason why they split from the ANC (because the ANC seemed to be too socialist). They are not anti-capitalist. They do not want Africa (and the majority of Africans) to be exploited by whites, but they are quite happy to do so themselves. They also split from the ANC because the ANC was non-racial while the PAC used to have the slogan “one settler one bullet”. Pan-Africanism is not the most important ideology of the majority of the population. The SACP (South African Communist Party) says that to unite all black people doesn’t make any sense, what matters is class. As anarchist communists this should also be our main focus, class and not skin colour, the class struggle is the most important thing and not class-collaboration.
South African reality shows that black and white can perfectly live together and what we see here all the time is that the main distinction is not race anymore but class. Whites even openly say they are sorry and blacks acknowledge the fact that the whites living in South Africa now can't help the fact that they have been born here and that their ancestors may have been racists. The PAC however still thinks it's all about race which is a very dangerous idea.
There are many indigenous Africans who are quite happy to share the land with whites, despite all they are responsible for, and that is what we should support, as anarchists.
True self-determination is something people will only get without a government of any kind. The PAC does not organise for true self-determination but for self-determination of a few black people, just like BEE. Yes, colonial borders must be abandoned, all borders must be abandoned. It does not make sense to build an African economic and political block within this global system we have today. We can only have true self-determination without this economic and political system, only with true internationalism. A system without governments of any kind and without states of any kind.
What is really interesting and for some Anarkismo Editors not understandable is the fact that so many people (on the left) look away when it comes to pan-Africanism. It is a racist idea, no matter how bad Africa has been treated by the 'west' over the last centuries.
Many would say that pan-Africanism, even though it is racist, has it’s validity because after all it developed because of white racism. We agree that counter-racism is logical. But is it correct? We don't think so, especially we as anarchists should be colour-blind and not support racism or counter-racism of any kind. The result of a successful pan-Africanism could be genocide.
Pan-Africanism developed in the US and in the Caribbean, du Bois in the States, Garvey in Jamaica. What is interesting about these two people is firstly, that du Bois studied in Berlin where he first heard about pan-Germanism (= fascism) and thought it was great. Hence, he created pan-Africanism to unite all people with roots in Africa (based on skin colour while pan-Germanism was based on language).
Secondly, Garvey seemed to have been a really confused person. He not only worked together with the Ku Klux Klan because they had the same politics (Africans back to Africa) but he also crowned himself King of Africa. Without consulting Africans.
So, having originated in the Diaspora, when African Americans tried to import it to Africa Africans were suspicious, and quite rightly so because it looked like just another form of colonialism (see the first African Americans who settled in West Africa and exploited the African population as much as the white colonialists did). So, actually what developed in the Carribbean should be rightly called pan-black movement and only Nkrumah and other African politicians tried to make pan-Africanism out of it, as a clear separation from Africans in the Diaspora. This should also show that pan-Africanism is a movement that comes from an elite, it is a top-down ideology. It also shows that pan-Africanists in Africa only want to unite black Africans and don't want to have anything to do with Africans in the Diaspora.
Another weird thing about pan-Africanists is that they are African nationalists, they want to establish an all-African parliament and all-African government. That means, even less self-control than Africans already have.
As anarchist communists we are therefore opposing pan-Africanism as a racist, nationalist (even though regionally internationalist) and class-collaborationist idea. We point as an alternative to a system without a state, truly internationalist without racism of any kind.
I hesitate to comment on this article, as I am quite ignorant of news about Africa, to say nothing of life there. However, the comments of "South African anarchists" above so closely resemble discussions regarding race in the USA, that the matter is compelling. So I will comment on the American discussion, note the similarities to the African discussion, and leave it at that.
Some militants in the USA define racism as a form of oppression. Therefore, when personal prejudice on the part of blacks against whites is termed racist, we scoff: only a privileged group can oppress. A black person who despises all whites may be guilty of stereotyping, may be prejudicial, but is not "racist" in the same sense that a corporate board, town council, or even white police officer or floor boss too often is.
When whites in the USA decry racism on the part of blacks--and conservatives love to do just that--the matter of racism becomes reduced entirely to a case of prejudice on the part of an individual. Lost is any consideration of relations between blacks and whites as collectivities, as communities. (Race is a social construct to be sure, but no less "real" for all that, in that people function according to its logic. So I contend that white and black communities exist, in a sense.) So, when collective considerations are dismissed, ignored, so too is the fact that as the oppressor group, the white community owes a debt, some manner of reparation, to those who have historically suffered at our hand. All this, without going into the possibility (likelihood) that blacks in the USA do not only suffer as the legacy of past oppression, but continue to be oppressed in a manner that follows directly from their race.
Now, not only are we discussing different cultures on different continents, but we have introduced a measure of semantics, the definition of "racism". The words are of course less important than the ideas they represent, and the programs that logically follow from those ideas. I offer my comments in a spirit of inquiry to my comrades in Africa. I am sure there is much to be criticized in pan africanism--to the extent that it ignores inter-african class divisions, it must be challenged--but I find, at the very least, the language of the criticism to be troubling.
There are many interesting things in the previous comment. I will start by saying that, as far as I'm not an expert oh Pan Africanism I will not refer to the ideological aspects of it, although I agree fully with the editors opinions against class collaborationism and against State as an institution we reject -in any colour or under any class label.
What I will say on Pan Africanism is, that while it is true that it produced ambiguous right wing figures such as the "prophet" Garvey, it also produced remarkable left wing figures such as CLR James. So I think it is extremely biased to portray it as a "fascist" movement -it was quite a loose and broad movement gathering black people in colonial and neo-colonial situations, experiencing racism first hand and trying to look for a solution to their situation, a solution of their own at a time when most of the left ignored racism as a problem altogether. Broad as this movement was, it sheltered people from all of the political spectrum and this is precisely the clearest indicator of its own limitations.
What I think is more remarkable of the above comment is the simplistic view of class vs. race that is used to counter-argue PAC. A view probably as simplistic as the race vs. race view that PAC allegedly has (I personally largely ignore their political views to voice my own opinion about them). I think this is typical of class struggle anarchism that, because of its correct emphasis in class, often tends to ignore other forms of oppression or the interaction between oppression and exploitation.
According to my own knowledge and experience in Latin America -that I would assume would not be that different from most other colonial contexts-, because of the fact that up to the present the ruling class descends from an alien population, class and race tend to go quite hand in hand. In the third world, class struggle is mainly experienced in colours, often more complicated than the mere black and white dichotomy.
Colonialism classified people according to groups and levels of proximity to the conquering race. Some cases were an extremely refined version of this: St. Domingue (modern Haiti) produced a pigmentocracy that classified over a hundred different types of humans according to their respectove proximity or distance to the absolute white and the absolute black. This had a definite impact on your social condition, and often a free black would have less rights than a white tramp. Exploitation was linked to race oppression in quite a complex way.
To be true, the colour of the skin explained nothing as such on the class structure of St. Domingue society, beyond the fact that slaves came from Africa. Neither did pigmentation provided any inherent qualities to the slave or to the master. But race became a way to classify people, to solidify an extremely oppressive society and became the way to rationalize this particular system of domination. But it would not be enough to say that race was a mere "surface" to the class conflict: it was the specific form in which it manifested itself and helped its perpetuation. It is true that the black masters that came after the independence where as oppressive as the masters they have known in the days before the revolution. This proves that the mere race analysis is insufficent to understand the causes of oppression and exploitation, and therefore to provide a road to liberation. But it does not make it an irrelevant factor or one that we can just ignore -particularly in colonial or neocolonial contexts. Being "colour-blind" does not help us to explain the structure of colonialism and its heavy legacy still haunting us 200 hundred years later.
White people in Africa did not travel from Europe to toil for African masters in the same way that current African immigrants go to England or France. This foundational event marks the framework of the future evolution of society. Some may regret it openly. But this, positive as it may be, is clearly insufficient. Regret will not heal the wounds of centuries of oppression and exploitation, particularly, when the effects of racism are structural. No matter you are not racist, having the right colour of skin will put you in a better position from the start. This is not to play the politics of guilt, but to acknowledge the importance of a number of oppressive relations many anarchist -for a mechanic single focus on class- often ignore.
I'm not too sure if you can say that "white supremacy is a myth". As you say correctly that giving land to a few blacks will not solve the land problem, the fact that some blacks are in power does not solve the problem of racism or "white supremacy". Most colonial societies had a number of "friendly indigenous people" doing the dirty work of the metropolis and this does not mean those societies where less racist -apartheid was an extremely racist case that produced an absolute segregation between races.
The couple of privileged blacks that exist should be acknowledged and this proves that race is not an absolute factor. But I don't think that this new black bourgeoisie makes suddenly disappear the racial inequality I'm sure is still present in South African society -what's the relationship between the standard of life of the average black compared to the average white? How much are the possibilities for a black person to make it to college compared to a white person? How big numerically and proportionally is the black bourgeoisie in comparison to the white bourgeoisie? I'm sure the answer to those questions will reveal a lingering inequality between social groups. The figure given in the article of 96% of arable land in the hands of whites it is quite telling. This inequality does exist in every neo-colony or post-colonial society ad the legacy of the old society which gave the new one its skeleton as the framework in which it based itseelf.
This is as true for Latin America, where Indians keep representing the poorest sector of society and where racism remains as a powerful means of oppression. It is true that this all exists in the framework of capitalist and class relationships, but ignoring the race factor -as much as ignoring gender- is short sighted and limited, and does not explain the obvious oppression certain sectors of society have to suffer. As race alone is not an explanation that will help us find the road to liberation and to a new society of equals, I'm not too sure if class struggle anarchists should ignore the link between class and race in colonial, neo-colonial or post-colonial societies. Racism is not simply an ideology or an "evil thought"; it is an institution shaped in the course of class struggle in colonial contexts.
I agree with Randy that racism is a problematic category and that the language which is used in the above comment is a bit unfortunate, as it could be opened to misinterpretations. I would understand, however, the use of "racism" in that comment as "playing the race card only".
But there are two issues in which I don't think I expressed myself that clear in my previous comment so I'll pose them as bullet points again to help further discussion:
1. Genetics don't create class condition. We all know that. Class do not have inherently a colour of skin. But in colonial contexts ruling groups, being alien, tend to belong to a certain racially defined group different to the majority of the local population. In Latin America, for instance, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to have a blonde person who is working class. Just by the looks you know someone is well off. And frequently this "incident" (the fact that Europeans were white and not black) is taken to re inforce the class nature of neo-colonial societies -whites are richer not because they were the conquerors, but because they are a superior kind of people, etc. We all have heard that and have internalized that to different degrees in colonial societies -even those oppressed. But really the fact is that this racist ideology is a mechanism to conceal the true nature of the system: not every blonde person in the world is bourgeois. If this is the case in Latin America is only because of the conditions in which blonde people arrived there. But ignoring this race factor and favouring an abstract class analysis -abstract in as much as it denies the concrete way in which class is intertwined with the colonial process- does not help to understand the mechanism that reproduce structural racism and the way it reinforces the status quo and a particular type of third world capitalism.
2. When I say that "being sorry is not sufficient" I'll explain it again with some other example. You say that white people in South Africa can't help it when it comes to the heinous things their ancestors did. Fair enough point. Pinochet's descent are not necessarily responsible for what the infamous dictator of Chile did. But it is not enough if they are ashamed or sorry. They should not be allowed to keep the money and property that he robbed to the Chilean people. I think the same is true for South Africa. It is quite easy to be sorry for whites while the white landowners still hold 96% of arable land, as the article states. Given the fact that this land was obtained by well known means, it is necessary not only to be sorry but for an act of justice to take place in the form, for example, of Agrarian Reform. This does not mean "give the land to buddies, or to the black bourgeoisie", but anarchism should actually have something to say on that instead of conforming in just stating that we are all quite happy to share anyway.
I intend to reply to the above comments at a later stage but, in the meantime, some further thoughts on the issue.
I of course support the need for redistribution and compensation, but redistribution within the context of class society, as BEE has show, can perpetuate and, in the context of an international neo-liberal trend, exaggerate class inequality.
I am by no means an expert on pan-Africanism but it is my understanding that pan-Africanism seeks reparations and the returning of wealth and stolen land to the indigenous population - which is all good and well - but that it purports to do so within the framework of a class society, the consequence of colonialism, leaving the rights for private ownership of property intact.
As pan-Africanism, again in my understanding, does not generally speak out against or seek to abolish private ownership of property and therefore the ability to accumulate wealth, it follows that the class structures and inequality resulting from private property - as introduced through colonialism (as most land in Africa was communally owned prior to colonisation) - will persist post redistribution. This means to me that, although the land, wealth and natural resources of the African continent may be 100% black-owned, they will still be under the private ownership and control of a minority of the, albeit black, population. It will be black on black exploitation and oppression as pan-Africanists do, I understand, intend to participate in the world economy (through nationalisation and/or privatisation of African industry) and black industrialists and land owners will therefore still need to employ black labour. I don't think it matters that much to a black miner who spends half his time underground, extracting Africa's natural resources to be sold to the West, what colour the mine owner's skin is.
As an anarchist I agree that Africans have unfairly been dispossessed of their land and access to natural resources, and that it is only fair and just that they should regain access thereto. I also believe, however, that the non-indigenous population who, depending on their age, may have had nothing to do with colonialism or apartheid - although they have obviously benefited from it - should have access to land and natural resources proportionate to their numbers.
In an anarchist communist society, where each person works according to their ability and therefore receives according to their needs, it would naturally follow that this would be the case; that the majority of land and resources would fall under the control and use of the majority black population, and that whites and other non-indigenous inhabitants of the continent would likewise use land and natural resources, and receive what they need from the social wealth, in proportion to their numbers. Of course I also hope that there would be no devision between black and white but, statistically speaking, that the above scenario would be the case.
As anarchist communists I do not think we should limit ourselves to supporting and fighting for the return of private property and ownership of wealth to the indigenous population, as it will only perpetuate the age-old problem of class inequality, but that we should argue and fight for the abolishment of private ownership of property altogether. In so doing the distribution of land, social wealth and access to natural resources will naturally be redistributed proportionately amongst the inhabitants of the continent, and held in common.
Ultimately, we fight for and promote a world where skin colour does not matter and, as long as a person works and contributes towards the good of society, and is a productive member thereof, they will be considered African in Africa. Not because of their skin colour or from whence they descend, but because of the work they do for the benefit of all Africans, for our collective humanity.
Some comments to add to josé antonios comment titled two problematic issues
He says: "In Latin America, for instance, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to have a blonde person who is working class"
Altough I agree with most of his comment I don´t with this part but this does reinforce his argument about the parallelism of class and race in general instead of weakening it.
In Argentina you can see many blond workers and lots of white workers. This is because after the invasion of america by european colonialists the spanish elite in this land was not able to dominate the indian population to exploit as slaves because of the rebelliousness of them and their nomadic habits and low numbers (neither needed a huge amount of workers as minery needed in peru), and thus most workers came from the working class spanish immigration at first. They did not show a rejection of indians and indeed gave birth to a numerous mestizo community wich cannot be strongly distiguished from the ruling class by their appearence. Even more important to this is the huge immigration to argentina at the start of the century from europe of, again, mostly workers.
This however has not stopped the ruling class from seeing the working class as "negros" (black, usually followed by a number of denigrating expressions) nor the working class from adopting the same view of sector of themselves and trying to differentiate from the rest instead of denying the whole discourse as an expression of priviliged elitism. This can be seen regardless of the ascendancy of particular workers or capitalists. It amybe has to do from the subordinate role of argentina in the global context and the minor artner view of argentinas burgeoise that makes it tend to adopt the values and views of the global burgeoise
When I was writing the sentence that Javier quotes, I had, precisely, in mind the Argentinian and Uruguayan cases. That's why I said "extremely difficult, almost impossible" and not "impossible" full stop. Out of certain pockets, the correlation in most of Latin America between race and class is enormous. Still though, this pockets exist and they can be explained by sociological and historical reasons. Both Argentina and Uruguay, as well as parts of Brazil, are remarkable in a Latin American context for the massive wave of European immigration from the late XIXth Century on and by the degree of extermination of the indigenous population, only comparable to the US in some ways.
These are exceptions that confirm the rule. Because even in the absence, as you rightly say, of an "objective" genetic basis for racism, class is experienced in terms of colours. Regardless of your skin colour, if you are working class or South American immigrant in Argentina at all times you can be called by the elite "negro de mierda". In most of Latin America, the same applies to anyone poorer who could be called "indio de mierda" even by someone not much better off than the subject of his/her insult (expression particularly used in Chile and Colombia).
There's a Haitian saying that in my opinion sums up the social nature of race and how this is perceived as an integral part of class in neo-colonial contexts. The saying says "Milat Pov se Neg, Neg rich se Milat" ("A poor Mulatto is a Negro; a rich Negro is a Mulatto"). Racism in our societies is not merely a prejudice: it is an ideology that reinforces and reproduces an extremely uneven social structure based on the most brutal forms of capitalist class relationships.