South Africa - May 10th, 2019 Elections in South Africa After the battles of the Marikana miners, the general strikes that overthrew Zuma and the struggles against the current governments…   THROUGH THE ELECTIONS TRAP AND THE VICTORY OF RAMAPHOSA… THE ANC AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY IMPOSE A MOMENTANEOUS DIVERSION ON THE MASS STRUGGLE FOR BREAD, WORK AND FREEDOM They want to give a breath to the “Reconciliation” regime, besieged by the exploited’s hatred The struggle of the “Free Born” youth, vanguard of the proletariat, called not to vote: It proves that the confrontation against imperialism and the capitalists is not over   The general elections this year gave the majority “again” to the ANC (in the government of South Africa for 25 years). The current president Ramaphosa “has won”. He ratified his presidency after he took office in advanced, due to the fall of the deposed president Zuma. But the number of votes for the ANC was the lowest in this party’s history. This causes concern to the bourgeoisie that during the latest years have suffered the mass uprisings against the government and hated “Reconciliation” regime.   These elections, a true fraud against the fair aspirations of the poor South African people, imposed a deflection to the exploited’s fights. The shortages, repressions, and misery suffered by exploited people in the past under the racist criminal Apartheid regime are the same nowadays under the ANC and his “reconciliation” with the white imperialist masters, those who stained the nation with blood. Taking into account the election as a “globular count of forces” we can say the convulsive situation of the country’s class struggle was expressed in a distorting way. Since 2012 from Marikana workers’ huge struggle and their picket lines (with 34 miners assassinated by the ANC police) till nowadays vast layers of the proletariat and masses have been breaking with and confronting the ANC and the hatred “reconciliation” regime. By this way, they have been pushing in every combat to open the road towards revolution. This process left a brutal crisis in the bourgeois government and regime, which is still ongoing today. The process was expressed inside the worker organizations and trade unions through the split of NUMSA (among other unions) and SAFTU (The South African Federation of Trade Unions) with COSATU bureaucracy and the ANC. The former president Zuma fell due to the mass revolutionary actions -general strikes and street combats- that shook the South African nation as well as the Anglo American and its junior partners, the black bourgeoisie. That’s why we affirm that these elections were a true trap imposed by imperialism, the native bourgeoisie and the treacherous leaderships in an attempt to divert the rise of the exploited fight, and give a breath to the ongoing crisis experienced by the government and slavers regime that is under besieged by millions of exploited. We affirm that if this trap can be set up was thanks to the leaderships at the head of the organizations of the worker movement and popular masses. Since the leaderships were in charge of putting in the ballot boxes the hopes of the workers and poor people to save the bourgeoisie.  We do not have any doubt that a brave call made by the worker organizations to continue the path of the general strike, with which we overthrew Zuma and cornered his successor Ramaphosa, will place us before a concrete possibility of defeating the pro-imperialist government of the ANC by a street fight. A call launched by NUMSA, SAFTU, and all the fighting and anti-bureaucratic trade unions to centralised the fights to strike as a single fist against the ANC, a call for the rank and file of COSATU to break with the collaborationist leaders, a call on the “Free Borns” and rank and file soldiers for conquer a true congress of the entire mass in struggle….it would place us at the door to conquer the power of those bellow…it would be in better conditions to fight for expelling the imperialism, recovering land for the South African people and expropriating capitalists and conquering all their demands. The South African working class, through hard fights per factory, and its vanguard, the “FREE BORNS” fighting against the electoral trap by calling for NOT TO VOTE shows there are enough forces and energies to end so many years of torment and oppression. If the unions had placed at the head of the struggle outside the parliament promoted by the “Free Borns”, by calling NOT TO BE PART OF THE ELECTIONS, this trap would have fallen in a second and the crisis in the regime and the government would have been deeper. The elections gave a partial super-structural victory to the bourgeoisie and now it must settle it in the class struggle, where nothing is over yet. The bourgeoisie is defensive. With traps and deceits, it is seeking to divert the pre-revolutionary situation, stopping it from advancing and open a revolution.   Ramaphosa, the candidate of the ANC and the imperialist pirates, won with the lowest amount of votes that Mandela’s party got in history What do the numbers say? 26 million people vote, out of 36 million people available to do so. Bearing in mind that in South Africa the vote is not compulsory, the abstention was the highest since 1994 (the “end of Apartheid”) up to now. 10 million people did not vote and 6 million of them are estimated to belong to the “Free-Borns”, youth between 20 to 30/35 years old that had grown and survived under the torments of the ANC government. Out of the 26 million votes total, the ANC (an alliance made by the African National Congress, the Communist Party and the Stalinist bureaucracy of COSATU) got 57.67% of the votes. It was the winner of the elections. However, as the figures seem high, those numbers actually show that the ANC got the lowest votes in its history (even when it manages the state apparatus to rig elections). This question keeps the great moguls of the transnational companies and imperialist banks, such as Goldman Sachs, worried, as it is mentioned in the international bourgeois press. On the other hand, the Democratic Alliance, the party settled in the white bourgeoisie and the most reactionary sectors of the country, kept its number of votes with 20.64%. It does not need more. The ANC knows how to guarantee and defend the profits of the Anglo American and the other imperialist gangs by shooting (as it did in Marikana against the miners that confronted Lonmin).   The “Free Borns” by calling NOT TO VOTE were the electoral expression of the mass uprising that undermined the pillars of the pro-imperialist South African bourgeois regime   The “Free Borns” are becoming the true ghost haunting imperialism and the local bourgeois partners. They head the majority of the demands of the exploited and are the ones –together with their siblings and parents- that confront labour slavery and the thirst for profits of the enslaver bosses. They know each other from the barricades, schools, universities and mainly the streets, where there are too many unemployed that have nothing lo lose. That’s why in these elections, as not being represented by any party, the “Free Borns” called not to vote, making a campaign under the ironic hashtag #IwannaVoteBut leaving each one to complete their reason not to vote. Hundreds of thousands, through social media, said they would not vote because “despite the government change their characters (speaking of Zuma leaving and Ramaphosa taking office, leading the ANC) the life of the people never change”. Besides of denouncing they have no access to education, as it is private and a luxury only available to the wealthy sectors, many said they would not vote because “they missed their parents”, making reference to the massacre of the Marikana miners. The “Free Borns” expressed the feelings of millions of South African in their campaign. The ANC keeps 27% of the workers unemployed, while 55.5% of South Africans live beneath the datum poverty line. About poverty, “the figures in each race change radically, the white is only 1% while the black is 64%” (El Pais Newspaper, May 8th 2019). The same source claims “the black only have 14% of the board in every company, despite being 80% of the economically active population, and only 3% of the major corporations belong to black citizens”. That is to say, in these 25 years of ANC rule, the black population is still separated from the wealth created by their work and inherited from the natural resources of the land, just as it happened in the Apartheid. The structural democratic problems, such as expelling imperialism, that is to say the white bourgeoisie, recover the land and making a true black nation to rise, were not solved. The workers and poor of the farms and the cities make this known to all those who speak on behalf of “socialism” and turn their backs on the true aspirations of the masses that have no place in the ballots of the ANC and the renew of the reconciliation regime. This regime, with the new rich black bourgeoisie, has expropriated the anti-colonial revolutionary struggle against Apartheid and tied the black nation with new shackles to the white imperialist pirate domination.   With election demagogy and against white imperialism rhetoric, the party of the “Economic Freedom Fighters” of Malema was another major player to subordinate the left wing of the masses to the electoral trap and strengthen the ANC government As we have said above, the black population in South Africa suffers the miseries caused by the capitalists. The EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) grew up electorally, reaching 10.5%, about 2.5 million votes, because their leader, Malema, forced by the struggle of the large masses, in its electoral demagogy, had to denounce the “white imperialism” and demand to “share the land for the black”, to “create jobs for the black”, “formation projects for the black and management jobs for the black” and “progressive tax system on the white’s fortune”. This way, this party, which emerged from a SACP split, has channelized into elections an important layer of the disposed that cannot stand the ANC anymore nor the white bourgeoisie that manage the large resorts of the South African economy, or the “rich black caste” that live over a sea of slaves. This rhetoric, of a fraction of the black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that was left out of the businesses in South Africa, is just a speech to subordinate the workers and the poor to the election trap, helping the “reconciliation” regime and Ramaphosa’s government to take a breath from the suffocating breath generated by the workers struggles.   The SWRP, founded in the last minute by Castro-Stalinism, with the support of renegades of Trotskyism, with their “socialist platform” under brothers Castro and Maduro, was not believable for the workers, as they did not vote for a minor copy of the ANC   Meanwhile, the SRWP, recently founded by a Castro-Stalinist leadership, supported by trade union bureaucrats and renegades of Trotskyism (which we may call a third South African Communist Party) had a failed election debut with only 0.14%, less than 20,000 votes. It is almost a non-existent figure, if we take into account that the SRWP leadership is also the leadership of NUMSA, the union of metalworkers, which has over 300,000 industrial workers affiliated. This is because this party was not the expression of any struggle and did not call the workers to continue their struggles against the ANC government in the path of the General Strike of April 2018 that threatened to overthrow Ramaphosa, repeating the history of Zuma, and opening the South African revolution. The new party’s flourished announcements of “fighting” for “socialism” had no repercussion in any fraction of the working class, because it is not believable to speak of “socialism” under the banners of Castro, which advance in restoring capitalism in Cuba. It is not believable to speak of “socialism” under Maduro who gave up before the US master and defended the business deals of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie and the imperialist vultures, at the expense of starvation, misery and huge suffering of the Venezuelan poor. This kind of “announcements” may attract opportunists and careerists but not the workers that fight for their demand every day. Only the workers and socialist revolution can provide a solution to their most felt problems. Now, why would the masses vote for the SRWP if it supports the new Cuban bourgeoisie, emerged from the Communist Party, and to the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, as the ANC does, when the ANC is hated by millions of exploited that want to defeat it? Furthermore, the worker that still has illusions in the scam called “socialism of the 21st century” of Castroists and Chavezists would never vote for the SWRP led by Castro-Stalinsm, as the ANC has the same policy and is bigger. To tell the truth, it is clear that by using the word “socialism”, Castro-Stalinism has created a new “socialist” appendix of the ANC to deceive and contain the vanguard of the industrial proletariat, and prevent it from leading a struggle called by the “Free Borns” to not to vote and continue the fighting in the streets against Ramaphosa, the ANC and the infamous regime. Unfortunately, currents that claim to belong to Trotskyism, such as WIVP, and others such as the British SWP (which has long ago broken away from the program, strategy and theory of the Fourth International) were part of the foundation of that party under the banners of Castro-Stalinism. They have aligned themselves with the current that handed over the workers states (like USSR, China, the Eastern European nations and now Cuba) to capitalism. They betrayed every revolution. They are true enemies of the struggle for socialism. They are the murderers of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik-Leninists and the fighters of and for the Fourth International. The South African working class has to know who are their allies and their enemies, in order to prepare the next combats, defeat the treacherous leaderships and guide the black masses to victory by overthrowing the bourgeois power and state and raising the power of the exploited, with the method of the proletarian revolution. From WIL Zimbabwe and the FLTI we are a supporting point to group cadres for fighting against Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism that are setting up new international re-alignments and parties to strangle the struggle of the workers and the people. We are convinced that the Trotskyists and the revolutionary proletarian vanguard will help the masses, by their own experience and fights, to set up the revolutionary internationalist leadership they deserve and need for victory.   From the workers of NUMSA and SAFTU, from the “Free Born” youth and all the mass organizations in struggle: Centralize the forces of the workers and the exploited together with the rank and file soldiers in a true workers and popular congress, to set up the power of those from below, conquer the revolutionary general strike and sweep away with the ANC and the “reconciliation” regime Two programs and two strategies are facing each other in the African continent in general and today in South Africa in particular. On the one hand, the treacherous class collaboration policy imposed by Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism, supporting the national bourgeoisies when they posed as “anti-imperialist” or “democratic”. On the other hand, the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution, which says “With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.” It is a matter of life or death for the working class and the militant youth to defeat the policy of the Castro-Stalinist currents and of those nationalist bourgeois factions that have divided us and subordinated to the electoral farce, to guarantee a breath for the ANC and the “reconciliation” regime. The current situation in South Africa puts, as a first order task, to prepare the working class for the next class clashes that will inevitably come. Together with the militant unions, it is needed to set up the structures to centralize all the masses that enter to the fight fighting for water, wages, houses, education and so on. It is needed, as an emergency, that NUMSA and SAFTU workers boldly call the Free Borns and all the workers and popular organizations (COSATU workers in the first place) to break with the bourgeoisie, to expel the class-collaboration leaders and to set up a National Congress of the Exploited. It should include a call to the privates (which were taken to the black bourgeoisie by Stalinism before) to set up their rank and file committees and fight together with the workers and the poor to conquer the REVOLUTIONARY GENERAL STRIKE, defeat Ramaphosa, the ANC and the “reconciliation” regime. It is about conquering the power of those from below, breaking with imperialism, the native bourgeoisie and their servants. It is about conquering a provisional revolutionary workers and peasants government. This government would be the only one able to expel imperialism and expropriate the capitalists, to recover the land, bread, work, freedom and true national independence… fighting for the workers and socialist revolution. This is the way forward to advance to the Black Republic, the Bantu Republic, which will once again emerge in history by conquering the Federation of Workers Socialist Republics in the entire Southern Africa!