BUSINESS AS USUAL
This is a devastating exposé of bloody collusion between capital and state, writes Kavish Chetty
Miners Shot Down ★★★★★
‘THERE is no such thing as a liberal bourgeois. They are all the same. They use fascist methods to destroy workers’ lives.” These remarks, made more than 20 years ago, seem to prophetically capture the calculated brutality of Marikana — an exemplary symptom of the crises of post-apartheid South Africa, in which police massacred Lonmin miners who were striking for a living wage in 2012. It is with the bitterest sense of irony that we should listen to these words, spoken by the then key strategist for the National Union of Mineworkers, Cyril Ramaphosa.
In Miners Shot Down, Ramaphosa functions as a metonym for a class of once-upon-a-time revolutionaries who now, latecomers to the global feast of capitalism, have strategically forgotten the impulses which animated the anti-apartheid struggle for economic equality. In fact, Ramaphosa — who is reportedly worth around R7-billion and was a Lonmin shareholder himself — dramatises the abyss of economic and psycho-social privilege that hangs between South Africa’s poorest and its elites. At the time, Lonmin rockdrillers were earning a pal- try R4 600 per month, labouring under conditions the middle classes would consider barbaric.
Miners Shot Down is a remarkable documentary which chronicles the six tense days that preceded the massacre, and demystifies the state-sponsored fiction that police acted in self-defence. Raw footage depicts the aggressions of this armed wing acting on behalf of multinational capitalism (at the close of the film, police commissioner Riah Phiyega is shown cheerleading her subordinates for having acted “responsibly” — this after their cold-blooded execution of 34 people).
The film is a paragon of activist consciousness, bridging the abstract tyrannies of capitalist economics to the lived-in realities of South Africa’s surreal disequilibria of wealth and power. There is no greater indictment of the circularity of historical oppression in this country than strike leader Mzoxolo Magidiwana’s impassioned words: “We work like slaves. Poverty forces you to forget your ambition, leave school and work as a rockdriller at the same mine where your boss will be the son of your father’s boss.”
The documentary gives us a unique vantage on Marikana and its political reverberations through interviews, security footage, materials from the Farlam Commission of Inquiry and unassailable videographic evidence which portrays Marikana as an instance of, as Dali Mpofu reads it, “the collusion of state and capital”.
Filmmaker Rehad Desai deserves our full measure of congratulation for not only elaborating a critique of the “fascist methods” the South African state uses to preserve its historical concentrations of wealth, but also for developing an exquisite sympathy for the dispossessed victims of this process.
Ramaphosa — now deputy president of the country — says strikes are evidence of a “robust democratic system”, but is cautious of those that turn violent — he calls this a “behaviour pattern” that must be changed. At stake in this interpretation is a misrecognition of the different orders of violence. For outside the explicit incarnations of violence (murder, rape), what of the structural violence that condemns whole swathes of the population to live as a dehumanised proletariat with only the frayed resources of their bodies to contribute to a grotesquely unequal system of national distribution?
Ramaphosa denies the historical specificity of these ruptures in South Africa by saying all countries, including “high-income” ones, have to contend with “waves of strikes”. But the problems of South Africa cannot be generalised away, and our particular crises are generated by the planetary divide of nations into core and periphery states, with our national bourgeoisie functioning as middle-men to uphold the interests of foreign capital. The massacre at Marikana was the logical conclusion of this system, one played out all across the blistered territories of the Third World. Ramaphosa seeks to diminish the haunting resonance of one strike leader’s remark: “The life of a black person in Africa is so cheap.”
Instead, we must view Marikana not as an aberration of domestic politics, but as constitutive of a national order which requires “legitimate” state violence to protect the bourgeois realm. Miners Shot Down begins to make these shadowy connections explicit, and is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to make sense of the underside of South African democracy. LS Kavish.chetty@gmail.com @kavishchetty