“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 over twenty years ago, seem to prophetically capture the calculated brutality of Marikana – an exemplary symptom of the crises of postapartheid South Africa, in which police massacred Lonmin miners peaceably striking for a living wage in 2012. But it is with the bitterest sense of irony that we should listen to these words, spoken by then key strategist for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Cyril Ramaphosa. InMiners 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 is a Lonmin shareholder himself – dramatises the abyss of economic and psychosocial privilege that hangs between South Africa’s poorest and its elites. At the time, Lonmin rock-drillers were earning a paltry R4, 600 per month, labouring under conditions the middle-classes would consider simply barbaric.
Miners Shot Down is a remarkable documentary which chronicles the six tense days which preceded the massacre, and demystifies the state-sponsored fiction that police acted in self-defence, with raw footage depicting 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). But the film is a paragon of activist consciousness, bridging the abstract tyrannies of capitalist economics to the lived-in realities of South Africa’s fantastic 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 remarks that “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 the tragedy of Marikana as an instance of, as Dali Mpofu reads it, “the collusion of State and capital”. Film-maker 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 says that strikes are evidence of a “robust democratic system”, but is cautious of strikes which turn violent – he marks this as a “behaviour pattern” that must be cancelled out. 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 which fates 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? Furthermore, 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 is the logical conclusion of this international system, one played out all across the blistered territories of the third-world. Ramaphosa thus seeks to diminish the haunting resonances 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 rather 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.