Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

STILFONTEIN: FOR WORKERS AND COMMUNITY ACTION TO RESCUE, DEFEND AND TREAT THE MINERS!

In November last year we wrote (https://www.cwgusa.org/?p=3595) in solidarity with the trapped miners, their families and community. Here we seek to highlight what has transpired since but the main thrust of our proposals and demands remain. We warned that the state was preparing to, “smoke them out” with the potential of another Marikana type massacre.” This has since turned out to be worse than Marikana, and even Sharpeville, not only in terms of numbers but also level of state planning and intransigence. The lessons of Marikana which proved that some union leaderships were collaborating with the state have not been learned.

Over 200 miners have been retrieved alongside 78 bodies with most of the miners in prison without the necessary medical care. Those in hospital have slim chances of survival given the critical conditions they are in as a result of the deliberate delay to offer medical care. A number of migrant workers have been summarily deported to countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho and Zimbabwe. The state, mainstream liberal media and some unions have been demonising the desperate miners and advancing a xenophobic argument that divides and demobilises workers.

We salute the heroic efforts of the community, volunteers, families, organisations, unions and individuals who offered assistance and solidarity especially those who retrieved the dead bodies using bare hands before the official rescue team came. We also pay tribute to the organisations that have offered legal assistance to ensure that provisions were sent and ultimately that the miners could be rescued and bodies retrieved. However, according to the community and volunteers, there are still miners and dead bodies underground who have to be retrieved despite the state prematurely ending the rescue operation. It is for this reason that the state wants to bury the dead bodies by blowing up the mine.

In our November article, among other key proposals, we proposed that, “democratic workers committees of miners and their supporters assemble to decide on and take action to defend the miners in the Stilfontein mine. Reject the “smoke them out” policy and any government criminalisation of our social class and xenophobic deportations!”

Without workers and community organisation and action there is no chance of rescuing the remaining miners and retrieving bodies, treating the critically sick miners and defending the miners including migrant miners facing victimisation and criminalisation. We call on workers to demand that unions initiate the building of organs to defend and organise informal miners and unite with communities to achieve that. The state, through its coercive organs, is well organised and ready to defend the interests of capital, both local and foreign, against workers and the poor struggling to earn a living. 

The message of Stilfontein is clear: Workers must break the fatal alliance between the unions and the state by rebuilding the unions as independent organs of workers power so that miners never again face criminalisation and death in their struggle to find work necessary to survive. Unions must be independent of the state so that the past defeats are not repeated and workers’ independent struggle  for power takes control of the means of production and opens the road for a workers’ government and socialist South Africa. 

RWG Zimbabwe, 22 January 2025

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe