Editorial Introduction: The Marikana Moment,Worker Political Subjectivity and State Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Worker subjectivity and the revolt against the state-politics of representation

The core problem in understanding Marikana begins with the sociological use of the term ‘the working-class’ to refer to workers with specific characteristics in common. The term is then assumed to designate a collective actor through ‘its own’ trade union organisation, which ‘represents’ its interests in relation to the employers or ‘bosses’. Through these steps the abstract category ‘wage-labour’ is concretised into agency. The working-class must act collectively through unions; it is that which subjectively constitutes it as a working-class – in other words, that which marks its specific ‘class consciousness’. ‘It’, then, is said to act in relation to employers and the state by entering into ‘collective bargaining’ agreements and, more broadly, into corporatist arrangements with the government. In this instance though, the workers at Marikana broke this sociological logic and rebelled against it, making it necessary to think beyond their structural class location ⁵ . There are three issues of importance here that are raised by the articles which follow. They concern the historical, the collective and the subjectivity of politics within this singular situation. They must be briefly elucidated in turn.

The first historical point of importance is one made by Paul Stewart (see this issue) in his article on the self-organisation of the Rock Drill Operators (RDOs) – the driving force behind the strike. In fact, he shows that RDOs fulfil a critical role in the production process and as a result possess a high level of power, but that RDO worker committees had been organising independently from the national Union of Mineworkers (NUM) since 1985 at least. These committees have enabled the formation of a particularly ‘powerful sense of political subjectivity’ over time, the latter managing to produce a powerful sense of solidarity which enabled them, at times, to acquire wage increases outside ‘the representational politics of the industrial relations system’ (Stewart, in this issue). In other words, the insistence of the miners at Marikana between 11 and 16 August 2012 to reject the NUM and to represent themselves, as it will be seen, was not without precedent. In fact, even prior to the arrival of the NUM on the platinum mines, RDOs had been negotiating directly with management; as Stewart points out, these informal committees were seen by management and presumably by the NUM also as ultimately a ‘disruptive’ influence in production. Their role, which Stewart points to during three strikes in 2004, is interpreted as a way for the RDOs to defend their position in the face of managerial authoritarianism, subcontracting and NUM inefficiency. Therefore, miners did not suddenly rebel against the NUM and the collective bargaining corporatist system in August 2012; neither were their independent committees a sudden expression of working-class consciousness as Alexander et al. (2012: 31) suggested. Rather, mineworker’s political subjectivities had been developing independently of state politics and representation for some time. Indeed, their independence was not unrelated to their rural origins.

Eighty percent of RDOs are, according to Stewart, migrant workers from the Eastern Cape Mpondoland region and it is this particular issue which forms the core of Bruchhausen’s contribution (Bruchhausen, 2015) ⁶ . According to her, the migrant character of the miners in question had a major impact on their collective subjectivity – something which Alexander et al. (2012) completely ignored. In actual fact, the history of independent action by migrant workers was apparent in the Mpondo revolt of 1960, which was made famous by Govan Mbeki’s (1984) book The Peasants’ Revolt, a major classic of South African nationalist literature. Despite the title of that text, most of the leading participants were not simply peasants but ‘worker-peasants’ or migrant workers who had worked mainly in Durban. The main point to stress in this context, and well made by Bruchhausen, is that the memory of that struggle has been present among the local population ever since, not least because it represented a brief moment when the Mpondo people were able to act collectively and to thereby assert their dignity, having been oppressed for years by colonialism and apartheid state politics. This episode clearly informed the miners’ struggle at Marikana, as witnessed not only by their collective songs and their gathering on what they called ‘the mountain’ (the popular organisation in Mpondoland was in fact called the ‘Mountain Movement’ – Intaba), but also because of their resolutely maintained independence and collective organisation. There has been a long tradition of popular self-organisation in South Africa, of which the Mpondo revolt was only one example. Moreover, the Mountain Movement was a rebellion against precisely a form of political representation enforced by the (apartheid) state and that which people rejected. The ‘Bantu Authorities’, as this form of representation was known, was, as Tom Lodge (1983: 282) has noted, an attempt to massively increase the powers of the chieftaincy in a situation where the corruption of power was rampant, and to entrench the chieftaincy as the sole representative institution for ‘natives’. Although these forms of state representation were primarily understood as designed for ‘rural dwellers’, the Marikana Moment itself was, similarly to the Mountain Movement, a rational popular rejection of state forms of representation, although of course now within a different social and historical setting and context.

The collective organisation of migrant workers at Marikana was clearly influenced by popular experiences of struggle; it was also made possible, as Camalita Naicker reveals in her article below, by a form of community politics and solidarity within the community of Nkaneng itself, where miners lived and in which women played a central role. Through detailed interviews with people in the community, Naicker shows that the women of Nkaneng in particular were not simply ‘supporting’ the miners but were participants in a ‘subaltern politics’ which was ‘unwilling to divorce what happened on the 16^th August from broader practices of injustice by Lonmin’, the company concerned. The workers’ experience, she shows, cannot simply be reduced to a productivist logic. The fact of ethnic exclusion is also central to local grievances, as the shacks within which the community lives are located on traditional Tswana land, to which people from the Eastern Cape are not automatically entitled. The informal settlement of Nkaneng is, therefore, built ‘illegally’ and neither the mine company nor the traditional authorities seem willing to help with regularising it. In addition, Naicker cites one respondent as saying that in Mpondoland men and women practice politics separately and that, therefore, ‘women’s absence at mountain committee meetings’ should not be confused for ‘lack of politics’. In fact, women formed their own organisation, Sikhala Sonke, to organise their collective response to the crisis and to police brutality in Nkaneng more generally.

There is much more then to the politics of the people of Marikana than a simple sociological ‘workerist’ response to exploitation ‘at the point of production’. This issue is addressed very clearly in Hayem’s contribution below. Using primarily the interviews collected by Alexander et al. (2012), Hayem shows quite clearly that the workers’ own subjectivity devised through collective discussion was not simply reflective of their structural position within production relations. Rather it was ‘the desire to speak in their own name, and directly with their employers’ which was pivotal. It was the denial of the workers’ humanity corroborated by the contempt shown them by their own union, the NUM, which was the driving force behind their self-organisation. Moreover, their action was not simply directed against the NUM, but also against the Association of Miners and Construction Union – its rival. In fact, the insistence of self-representation was precisely directed against union mediation as such and brought to the fore a crisis of the state system of representation. Hayem notes that ‘if they [the miners] had simply been recognised as interlocutors … the strike could have been, if not resolved, then conducted without recourse to armed violence’. By acting the way they did, Hayem concludes that the miners raised an issue of political significance and not simply yet another instance of conflict between capital and wage-labour. In fact, I would go even further to argue that from 11 August to 18 September 2012 it can be shown that the workers of Marikana constituted themselves into a political subject – ‘political’ because their collective subjectivity exceeded state identity politics - and insisted on a universal conception of human dignity and on the centrality of affirming one’s own political existence (Neocosmos, forthcoming). It is this brief period which defines the ‘moment’ from the point of the workers themselves and it is this period which also defines a process of subjectivation, of the formation of a political subject.

The Marikana Moment was, therefore, a short-lived rebellion by workers against the state itself, even though it ostensibly took the form of a strike for higher wages. At the same time, one cannot account for the vicious response by the state and its repressive apparatuses simply on the basis of the fact that the state in general represents the interests of capital, which it undoubtedly does, and that it was, therefore, resisting a wage increase. Hayem suggests that it was the fact of rebellion itself that largely accounted for the state’s vicious reaction. While I believe this idea is much closer to the truth, I do think, however, that this is only partly valid, for the violent character of the South African state has been gradually becoming more apparent since at least 2006; it is this greater reliance on violence which I believe has been acquiring a systemic character in South African society. This point requires further elucidation.

State politics and systemic violence

Camalita Naicker has noted, quite correctly, that the term Marikana ‘has come to refer to the violence unleashed by the state against people organising outside of authorised institutions and demanding that the government account for its actions, or listen to the demands of its people’ ⁷ . The vicious deployment of state violence at Marikana was not the first time this had occurred. In fact, South African society is more and more characterised by what a number of commentators have referred to as a ‘culture of violence’. The intellectual difficulty here consists in reconciling this violence, which has given more and more the impression of being systemic rather than accidental, with the characterisation of the state as a ‘democratic state’. It is not the mere existence of violence which is the problem but the fact that, insofar as the majority of the population is concerned, its experience of the state repressive apparatuses – the police in particular – is one of systematic violence; in fact, violence is often thought of as a legitimate way of resolving contradictions in society. The xenophobic violence meted out on a regular basis to those considered foreigners or outsiders constitutes part of the same problem. The recent attempts by the state to address xenophobic violence through organised state violence (so-called ‘operation fiela’) is again an indication of the same political subjectivity. The state itself is the first to justify violence as legitimate, particularly as internal or external putative ‘enemies’ are frequently blamed for chaos and de-stabilisation. State discourse shows evident signs of paranoia as factions grapple for access to power. This is most evident at the level of local, municipal and regional state politics where the direct mobilisation of popular support is necessary for access to power and where patronage relations are prevalent (Hart, 2013).

The work of David Bruce (2012) in particular has traced the increasing deployment of violence by the police against popular movements and popular protests, but whereas the state may have been the originator of violence both through its discourses and its actions, it is clear that recourse to violence is both widespread and often anything but a last resort in society itself. Of course, history is of importance here. Colonial and apartheid state and society were nothing if not violent, yet the effects of history are not ineluctable; the mass slaughter at Marikana was the first time since the mid-1990s when the state has behaved so callously on a mass scale. Beyond the questions regarding who was to blame – an issue of law, addressed by the Harlam Commission of Enquiry – the fundamental question concerns how it was even possible for such a subjectivity to enter the parameters of state thought, particularly as this state is generally seen as a democratic state. In other words, this is meant to be a state for which conflicts are supposed to be resolved reasonably peacefully – institutions have been built for this very purpose – and violence is deployed only as a last resort and, even then, in a minimal way – not as was evidenced in the case of Marikana, a situation where violence was utilised in a crudely authoritarian and seemingly vindictive manner. Thus, the deeper intellectual question concerns the nature of the South African state. How is it to be understood and perforce named? Is the term ‘democratic’ still a useful appellation for understanding its actions? Of course there is no doubt that the state represents the interests of capital and the small oligarchy of politicians and others who do its bidding and accumulate at the people’s expense. Yet it does not follow that a small worker rebellion should be confronted with a massacre. The massacre could have been easily avoided had the voice of the workers been listened to, which it seems was all that they wanted. Were the state’s modes of representation so fundamental as to warrant such a violent response?

Well perhaps, but I believe that there is more to this question. In particular, the state has become used to dealing with the majority of the poor, the black working class, the shack dwellers and, more broadly, the inhabitants of South African townships, as if they were still the subjects of a colonial state. In fact, the subjective relations between the majority of the urban population of the country and the state are not based on a notion of citizenship rights. As one of the miners interviewed by Alexander et al. stated, ‘We as mineworkers are excluded from this democracy’ (Alexander et al. 2012: 116). Or as another also said,

Here it seems that human rights do not apply … This is an ongoing war on the people of Marikana – to weaken their resolve. It is terrifying … We are living as if we are back in the days of apartheid – constant fear. ⁸

What these remarks suggest is that the politics of the state in South Africa are here not conceived as governed by the rights of citizens within a domain of civil society. We are in a completely different domain of politics altogether, one where people are not considered as possessing ‘the right to rights’ in Arendt’s (1973) sense. Here then, the state’s mode of rule is not characterised by the rule of law but by arbitrary state actions and violence, as it is not citizenship rights that prevail but a politics based on patronage and violence. What we have then, at least in urban South Africa, are two domains of state politics characterised by two distinct modes of rule ⁹ . The first is civil society, where the rule of law prevails, where the police force respects the rights of citizens and where wrongs can be righted in a court of law, and the second is ‘uncivil society’, where people’s rights are flouted, where violence is understood to be a legitimate way of ruling by ‘strongmen’ (councillors, businessmen, ruling party power-holders or power-seekers) and where the state power systematically breaks its own laws.

Each of these domains is fundamentally enabled by two different subjective modes of rule which allocate people to their socio-political places. As a result, the kind of politics deemed to be possible and impossible in each case also differs. People whose primary relation to the state is found within uncivil society are subjected to indignity and ‘unfreedom’; they face extraordinary obstacles when they wish to assert their rights directly as citizens and attempt a movement beyond their political place, for their political existence is outside the domain of rights – civil society. The functioning of the mode of rule itself in uncivil society is such as to enable the distortion/diminution, if not the extinguishing, of the meaning of citizenship itself, given that people in this domain do not have automatic access to the right to rights. Of course, there is no one-to-one relation between mode of rule and social location; while it is mainly the urban poor who are ruled from within uncivil society, this is not exclusively the case. But thinking in this manner enables us to understand also that these two domains of state politics are also domains in which social life can occur at a distance from each other. The predominantly middle class and white rights-bearing citizens of civil society can live in total ignorance of the systemic violence that prevails in uncivil society and only become aware of it occasionally when it makes its appearance on the mass media – when someone gets killed or dragged behind a police vehicle in front of cameras. The brief affects of disgust and anger this produces are insufficient to enable the thought of an alternative truly democratic politics. People in civil and uncivil society live in quite distinct worlds despite the occasional attempts to bridge them. Within the latter, violence is systemic although not structural; it has identifiable perpetrators who are rarely brought to book. This is precisely why those guilty of xenophobic violence common in South Africa are seemingly not subject to the law, although they are frequently known in the community. In any case, it now becomes clear why the exercise of extreme violence by the police at Marikana was not particularly exceptional, why it was not difficult for it to enter the thought of ‘decision-makers’, why the idea was not to minimise the loss of life but seemingly to subject rebellious workers and their community to state terror.

It also becomes clear why the Marikana Moment was not able to have lasting effects among the largely middle-class citizens of civil society, although it is now becoming apparent that the more widespread flouting of the law by the police may hold the danger of gradually creeping into civil society itself. For example, there is evidence to suggest that the raiding of people’s homes by the police without a warrant – a common experience of state violence in shack-dweller communities in uncivil society – may be beginning to be experienced in civil society also. In fact, a newspaper reported in July 2015 that the police had ‘smashed their way’ into a white businessman’s home who had been a critic of the president; they later apologised and promised to pay for all the damage (see Mail&Guardian, July 17-23, 2015 ). Of course, the police would not have apologised or reimbursed the damage caused to the homes of those in uncivil society, but this simply goes to show that the dangers for the middle class in the country are becoming clear if the state cannot be forced to obey its own laws and to treat everybody equally. Under such conditions, the epithet ‘democratic’ is not particularly useful as a way of orienting a critical analysis of state power; much more useful is the notion of a neo-colonial state for which the majority of the people are conceived to be the enemy (Neocosmos, forthcoming). The consequences for intellectual thought of the Marikana Moment cannot be fully grasped if one remains exclusively within the limits of the capital/wage-labour relation; it is rather crucial to begin to think about how political subjectivities, whether they are those of the state or those of the people, are anchored in but not deducible from the social.