Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Sharpville remembered

Forty-seven years ago today 69 demonstrators were killed and 180 injured in Sharpeville, South Africa. More than 10,000 were imprisoned in subsequent protests. Nelson Mandela wrongly saw the solution to problems experienced by the great oppressed majority as more bloodshed.

Socialists do not look at the activities of 'great' men as a way of explaining such events. We are materialists, and as such our perspective on, for example, the Sharpeville massacre (not to mention South Africa, past and present), is very different from assorted orthodox interpretations, as the contemporary quotation below shows.

"The recent events in South Africa have made starkly clear the real real nature of the conflict there. The entire capitalist world, Governments and press, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, has denounced the measures taken by the ruling class in South Africa to bolster its position....After the Sharpeville massacre it was announced that the pass laws would not be enforced for the time being. This was an astonishing concession for the ruling landowners' class to make to the capitalists. It showed how much the landowners had been shaken, for the pass laws are the cornerstone of the society built by landed interests. The aim of these laws is to keep Africans in the country, where they must work on the white men's farms in order to live, and prevent them from coming to the towns, where they could obtain higher pay in the capitalists' factories. If despite the pass laws they come to the towns, they are arrested - in numbers running into hundreds of thousands each year - and sent back in convict gangs to labour on the farms for a mere pittance. The news that the pass laws had been suspended was a tonic to the South African capitalist class: the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which had slumped at the news from Sharpeville, recovered some of its losses. Then came the announcement that the pass laws would be reimposed: again share prices fell. And the South African Federated Chamber of Industries was reported to be seeking a meeting with Dr. Verwoerd to urge some modification in his policies. The question now in South Africa is this: how long will the growing capitalist class allow the landed interests to continue ruling their country." (Socialist Standard, May 1960)

The question today is how long will it be before the great oppressed there (but everywhere really) come to realise that swapping one ruling class for another, regardless of their skin colour, does not end exploitation.? Only then will we be able to forget the crazy artificiality of the divisions imposed on us by the necessities of private property. Only then will we discard the bogies of nationality and race, and remember what we really are - one race, the human.
RS

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