Defend South Africa Against Trump

Last month’s Oval Office spectacle of Trump bullying South African president and ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa was pure “white man’s burden.” In a raw display of imperial arrogance mixed with racist contempt, Trump read the riot act to Ramaphosa and made absolutely clear the consequences of defiance for South Africa. Everyone knows there is no genocide of white farmers in South Africa. In fact, the real crime occurring on the country’s white-owned farms is the daily horrific abuse and exploitation of black farm workers at the hands of their Boer bosses.

The real story, though, is not that Trump is a liar, but rather that his strong-arm job is part of a broader agenda: creating a new world order to reassert U.S. imperialism’s slipping dominance in anticipation of heightened conflict with China. South Africa is one of the BRICS countries, and the ANC claims “non-alignment” in its foreign policy. This does not sit well with Trump; South Africa is to be forced to line up behind the U.S. To this end, he is openly demanding greater subservience from the South African government while flexing U.S. imperialism’s muscle by slapping tariffs on the country. The resulting economic shocks have exacerbated the misery of the nationally oppressed black masses. As U.S. imperialism further turns the screws, the South African working class and urban and rural poor will only lose more.

The nonsense about “white genocide” in South Africa also lets Trump give a wink and a nod to racist reactionaries while playing on the real insecurities of white workers in the U.S. to sell himself as their savior and polarize the working class here.

This racial polarization helps keep working people divided against themselves as he launches attacks on immigrants and the unions. Trump’s crushing and starvation of the black South African masses goes hand in hand with his tightening the noose on the most vulnerable in the U.S. and assault on workers’ living standards. The threat to this country’s black population is unmistakable.

Many black people in the U.S. already feel a connection with black South Africans. Having suffered the consequences of segregation in this country, black workers strongly supported the struggle against apartheid. Now that the liberal mask has been torn off, the true face of racist U.S. imperialism again reveals itself.

Trump wants to eliminate all affirmative action programs in the U.S. and South Africa alike. While these token measures never had a prayer of redressing the massive inequality between black and white in either country, U.S. imperialism has dispensed with even the pretense of promoting racial equality. While liberal DEI initiatives hurt the black struggle by blaming racial oppression on the supposed “privilege” of white workers in the U.S. and thereby pushing them toward Trump, he is now rolling back these initiatives to whip up even greater racial hostility. The only way out of this mess is to bridge these divisions based on the need for all those under siege to take a united stand against the common U.S. imperialist enemy.

It should be lost on absolutely nobody that Trump’s eagerness to bring white Afrikaner farmers into the U.S. is surpassed only by his eagerness to kick out all other, especially brown and black, peoples. In line with this, Trump has all but declared open season on the black South African workers, toilers and poor. They are reviled by the U.S. ruling class for yearning for land, decent jobs, adequate housing, basic services and control of the mines and other imperialist-owned property—in short, for yearning for an end to brutal, imperialist-backed neo-apartheid. That’s what is behind Trump’s instruction to Ramaphosa to take care of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema: snuffing out any movement that even gestures toward fighting for the land and resources that rightly belong to the black masses. Hands off Malema and the EFF!

For over 70 years, black South Africans have been waiting for the ANC to implement the burning democratic demands for land and equality contained in its Freedom Charter. But to achieve any of these demands requires a fight against the imperialists and Randlords. This is exactly the opposite of the ANC’s strategy of working in tandem with them to suppress the aspirations of the working and toiling masses. Even while calling for class struggle against imperialism and for the expropriation of the land and mines, the EFF leaders try to keep to a “middle road.” They offer themselves as potential coalition partners of Ramaphosa, and in so doing restrain the struggle from going straight up against white capital/imperialism—and therefore doom it to failure.

The situation cries out for socialist intervention among the black masses to unlock their struggle and win their deeply felt demands by exposing all obstacles to its progress. Leftists like the Internationalist Group in the U.S. who denounce the Freedom Charter for its failure to call for socialist revolution cut themselves off from intersecting and directing the masses toward revolutionary conclusions as the only means to fulfill these aspirations. Even worse, with this opposition they find themselves telling the South African masses to reject the popular expression of the very demands that U.S. imperialism is now explicitly attacking.

The U.S. imperialists, aided and abetted by billionaire white Randlords like Johann Rupert, call the shots in South Africa. Ramaphosa’s role is that of a complicit puppet beholden to white capital with the blood of black workers on his hands—the 34 striking miners gunned down in the 2012 Marikana massacre. You certainly can’t look to him or the ANC to defend South Africa from a rampaging Trump. Only the working class, linked to all the oppressed layers of society, can bring the kind of decisive force needed to turn back U.S. imperialism’s Commander-in-Chief.

Trump and his AfriForum buddies would gladly turn back the clock in South Africa to before 1994 and the end of formal apartheid, while the black elites facilitate imperialist plunder because they have been able to retain their sliver of the pie. In fact, the current “Government of National Unity” (GNU) coalition—made up of the ANC and the openly pro-imperialist and white-dominated Democratic Alliance—has already resorted to apartheid-era tactics in order to prevent any resistance to the strangulation of the black masses that the GNU enforces on behalf of Trump and the Randlords.

One such case is that of Xolani Khoza, an EFF member and trade unionist. In response to Xolani’s helping organize a strike for better wages and working conditions and making a TikTok video critical of the government, he has been an early target of the GNU, which had him kidnapped and imprisoned. Xolani is now being framed up on “terrorism” charges. In South Africa, the defense of Xolani is an urgent and necessary first step in the fight to organize a broad defense of the working and oppressed masses against the Trump/GNU onslaught.

Here in the belly of the imperialist beast, the U.S. working class has every reason to take up Xolani’s defense, not only as an expression of international labor solidarity, but also as an expression of opposition to U.S. imperialism and its squeezing of black Africa. Doing so would cut against the hold of the trade-union bureaucracy, which throttles working-class struggle for a better quality of life by pushing loyalty to U.S. imperialism. Cases like Xolani’s can be the springboard for a broader working-class defense against Trump—a defense whose successes in the U.S. will be a boost to the struggles of the South African masses, and vice versa. The best defense of Xolani and South Africa’s workers and oppressed peoples is for the multiracial working class here to launch a concerted fight to hold off the racist capitalist rulers—including the Democrats as well as Trump. And it is in the course of just such a fight that the struggles of the workers and the oppressed can be fused together to push forward the cause of black freedom against U.S. imperialism to the benefit of all working people.

• Cancel all imperialist-held debt!
• Hands off South Africa!
• For united-front defense of Xolani Khoza!
• Down with U.S. imperialism!
• For the united struggle of black and white workers for black liberation!