26 September 2024
Xolani Khoza, a leader of the South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union and a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), was arrested on trumped-up charges that have nothing to do with the TikTok post alleged to be the reason for his incarceration. The video only expressed his deeply felt sense of political dissatisfaction with the difficult social and economic conditions visited on the oppressed masses of South Africa and those who benefit from this regime—the black bourgeois-nationalist elite and the white minority.
Khoza is due in court in Mbombela on 27 September, facing charges of incitement to commit terrorism, public violence and intimidation—all based on a social media post. His arrest and continued legal victimisation for what are essentially thought crimes, in violation of his constitutional rights, is a clear case of political persecution of an active trade-union militant. This is a brutal reminder of the denial of political rights to the majority black masses under colonial rule and apartheid, further demonstrating the continuity between these regimes and the post-1994 neo-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) project. Under South African racist capitalism, blacks are forcibly kept at the bottom of the neo-apartheid economic pecking order—whites at the top, followed by Indians, then the coloureds who are very close to the black African majority at the bottom. At a political level, this continuity is represented by the so-called Government of National Unity between the ANC Alliance and the apartheid liberal white racists of the Democratic Alliance (DA).
After thirty years of black bourgeois-nationalist management by the ANC and its alliance partners in the Stalinist-derived South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country suffers from a deepening crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality. The face of unemployment and resulting poverty is black, while the beneficiaries of inequality are the dominant white minority and a tiny black elite acting as frontmen. The growing gap between promises of a better life for all made by the ANC and its partners and the living reality of destitution is revealed by the ANC government's increasing political repression, which reached savage heights with the August 2012 killing of 34 striking workers at Marikana, and could do so again.
The only way to break this system is the independent mobilisation of the working class from and against all bourgeois-nationalist parties, including the EFF, who serve as agents of the dominant white elite in South Africa and their imperialist masters in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. The EFF was founded by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, who was expelled not for political reasons but inter-bureaucratic jostling in the ANC. After the May 2024 election produced no outright winner, EFF leaders begged the ANC to select them as coalition partners instead of their ultimate choice of the DA.
The EFF, Spartacist South Africa and others are organising credible united-front defence of Xolani Khoza and we call on the left and workers' movement to join them, but the working class has no interest in giving the bourgeois nationalist EFF any political support. By calling for a vote to the EFF in the May 2024 national elections, Spartacist South Africa and the International Communist League betrayed the working-class principle of irreconcilable independence from the bourgeoisie and all its political parties. The EFF does not even pretend to stand for the interests of workers as a class against the capitalist order, despite its calls for land and jobs for the black masses. Political support, such as that of the Spartacists, only gives credence to the lie that economic freedom can be achieved by capitalist formations short of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, it is essential to defend democratic rights, and the International Bolshevik Tendency calls for all opponents of capitalist oppression and exploitation to demand: Freedom for Xolani Khoza, now! Drop all the trumped-up charges! Build a revolutionary workers' party to overthrow neo-apartheid capitalism!