Was it a ‘tragedy’ or was it a ‘massacre’? Were the police, shocked by the killing of cops and security guards a few days before, entitled to feel threatened by an advancing column of panga-wielding strikers fortified with traditional medicine to immunise them from bullets? Or were the cops guilty of penning the strikers in, making an unnecessary attempt to disarm them by force, employing unconscionable firepower to block their escape and killing stragglers in cold blood? Who fired the first round of live ammunition?

What we do know is that on August 16^th 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s Northwest Province, and that there was at a minimum an unforgivable failure of police crowd control.

With luck, a government-appointed judicial commission will tell us who did what to whom and in what order. In the meantime South Africans nurse their bewilderment.  Theirs is a violent land in which fifty people are slain daily in ‘ordinary’ criminal murder, and strikes are often enforced with deadly brutality, but a special shame attaches to a slaughter by state forces so redolent of apartheid-era massacres.

There are layers to this story. It’s about wage grievances, but also a battle between unions. Black platinum miners have until now been organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, a member of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions. Critics claim that NUM, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, is now a status quo union. Comfortable as management’s recognised bargaining partner, NUM resists calls for mine nationalisation. The union increasingly represents upwardly mobile above-ground workers rather than the rock drillers who do the most arduous work. The fact that NUM negotiated a better wage deal for the former than for the latter appears to have been a spark for the unrest.

Rock drillers have it hard. Platinum companies have invested little in surrounding communities. Those of its employees who do not wish to live in hostels are given living-out allowances to find their own accommodation nearby, where they are left to the tender care of dysfunctional ANC-led municipalities. Most end up in shack settlements threaded with bumpy roads and open sewers.

Given this, it is little surprise that a breakaway union, the Association of Construction and Mining Union, has found in drillers a ready recruiting pool. Precisely what role AMCU has played in the Marikana strike remains to be determined.

There is a gloomy economic context to this. The country’s crucial mining sector – weighed down by electricity price hikes, falling ore grades, safety concerns, labour unrest and skittishness about nationalisation – failed to ride the recent global commodities boom. Platinum long seemed immune from the industry’s decline. South Africa produces 80% of the world’s platinum, an extremely rare  metal vital in catalytic converters. In 1999 international platinum prices began a long surge that transformed becalmed bushveld mining towns into new conurbations. But recently prices have fallen and platinum companies face financial losses. Successive strikes at platinum mines have made matters worse for the companies, their workers and a middle-income country that still depends on mineral exports for foreign exchange. Job losses loom.

The political ramifications could be equally far reaching. Expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, an arch critic of President Jacob Zuma and longstanding mine-nationalisation enthusiast, has returned to prominence on the back of mineworkers’ grievances. Zuma’s prospects for being re-elected as ANC leader at the party’s December leadership conference suddenly look shaky, especially with so many of the strikers hailing from the politically crucial Eastern Cape.  The hegemony of NUM, a pro-Zuma union, is under threat. So perhaps is that of Cosatu, a federation willing to challenge the government but viewed by some as guarding a labour aristocracy in a sea of labour casualisation and unemployment. The ANC too is getting nervous: the Marikana strike is just the latest in thousands of incidents of local unrest signalling growing disaffection with the party of national liberation.

I for one do not welcome Malema’s opportunistic intervention or the left’s instant attributions of heroism and villainy. South Africa urgently requires a social-democratic accord, one underwritten by strong trade unions capable of winning decent work and expanding employment in exchange for industrial peace and productivity gains. Nationalisation may work for Norway’s oil industry but the South African state is chronically incapacitated and lacks the fiscal means to meet demands for new mining investment and rising mine wages. The splitting of established unions could weaken organised labour and leave mining in a limbo between institutionalised bargaining and quasi-revolutionary insurrection.

The truth of what happened at Marikana also needs to be objectively established, and its discovery is ill-served by incendiary sloganeering. Blame must be carefully apportioned and justice must be done. Only that will clear the air sufficiently to enable a worthwhile debate about what sort of socio-economic regime South African mining needs.

The clearing of Occupations in New York and around the country has presented challenges to and new possibilities for the Occupy Wall Street movement. A particularly creative group, which I joined and have described here, The Think Tank, is creatively responding to the challenge. They continue to hold sessions in Zuccotti, as they are also moving to other city locations. The summary here prepared by Aaron Bornstein of a session he facilitated in the Park on November 20, 2011, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, reveals the power of the actions. I received the report from Bornstein as an email to people working in the group. I publish it with his permission. -Jeff

Topic: “Policing and the movement: How to engage, whether to engage,and whether it’s a distraction”
facilitator: aaron

This was a really spirited discussion of what police are doing, what they should be doing, and whether we are distracting ourselves by focusing too much on them. Participants seemed to have broad consensus on maintaining nonviolence, but standing our ground in the face of police aggressiveness, even if it meant they would use force on us. Multiple participants pointed to the immense value of widespread cameras and recordings, in both preventing police violence and transmitting images of it to the world. Participants seemed split on the question of whether the attention given to police aggression was distracting from the movement’s goals. Some thought it was an unfortunate focus, some thought it was part of the problem we were fighting.

One exchange in particular sticks out in my mind. Over the course of the discussion, several participants had suggested that police officers were just trying to do a job, and thus couldn’t shoulder the entire blame for their actions. When Richard got on stack, he delivered a rather passionate excoriation of this suggestion, and then took it further by posing the question of who exactly it is that takes that kind of job, which — please correct me if I’m wrong, Richard –
I took as a suggestion (which seems to be borne out by experience) that police tend to be individuals who are prone to this sort of violence. Captain Lewis was sitting right there, in full uniform as he usually is, and I have to say the tension was pretty palpable.

Lewis then delivered a direct response in which he said Richard was essentially right. He said that departments assess recruits using the MMPI (Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory), which, among other things, quantifies the emotional sensitivity of individual officers before they undergo training. He said that departments exclude the more sensitive recruits. They do this because they feel that the six months of training would be lost money when those sensitive officers encounter the stresses and gore that are necessarily part of the job, and quit or get depressed. Thus, the ones who you keep will skew towards the less sensitive — more brutal — end of the scale.

He proposed that one specific action we could all take, and one he takes himself, would be to point out to the mayors and representatives who control PD policies that taking the less-sensitive officers is actually *more* of a financial drain, since it often leads to multimillion dollar liability lawsuits (we’re starting to see these lawsuits come out of Occupy, and my suspicion is many more are on the way).

Soon after, Richard asked Captain Lewis if he believed this was a factor in racial profiling and abuse. He responded yes.

Yes, I have that all recorded.

I’m going to editorialize a bit here:

I think this “revelation” about police selection is not at all surprising to anyone on this list, but to hear a police captain flat out admit it, with no hesitation, is pretty powerful. This sort of exchange, among a group of people who probably don’t normally cross paths, but who came together here, in this space, in Occupy, in Think Tank, and who had a frank and respectful and mutually beneficial discussion about a Deeply Important and powerful topic… well, I think this is what we’re here for. It’s certainly what I’m here for.

Thank you all for continuing to provide these powerful experiences.

These events may not be at the core of the problem of racism.  That is manifested more in the daily struggles and interactions of ordinary people, beyond the public eye, as they get on with their lives.  But the events, “media race events,” permit the symbolic enactment of American moral codes about race.

Blacks and whites perceived the OJ trial and acquittal differently.  In and of itself this would appear to be a trivial matter.  It took on great significance because it revealed how separately and differently blacks and whites live and perceive themselves and each other in America.  Distinctions, differences and commonalities about race were revealed. With an African American President, such a case, which inevitably appears periodically in American life, has taken on a new dimension.  The head of state, the central symbol of authority in the society, is now black, and this necessarily has meaning.  The first case in point in the course of the Obama Presidency is “Gates-gate,” a socio-political drama in three parts.  The case suggests both how racisms persists and has not much changed even with the election of a African American President, but also how the election has changed everything.