Ramaphosa, the ANC, and "the left"

John Game on FaceBook made a sensible but indirect and rather dead-end comment on Ramaphosa's open hostility to the Marikana mineworkers (25 October 2012, 9.56am). I commented:


Well,  not just "remains" within the bounds of  capitalism but is forcibly and murderously constrained within the bounds of capitalism. John, you're right about the logic of *bourgeois* national liberation. Not about national liberation as such - the class contradictions can drive national liberation if the leaders of the mobilization are conscious of the class logic of the permanent revolution.
If you want to  lead the working class and poor peasants to emancipation and prosperity you can only do it by leading them to power in society and this means removing the bourgeoisie and landlords and their property rights (your property wrongs  ;-). Mandela never wanted this class emancipation. His Congress (like Gandhi's in India) never wanted this. The Freedom Charter sat even less convincingly on the ANC than Clause 4 did on the Labour Party. Marikana is Mandela's Sharpeville. The Stalinist ANC bourgeoisie is uglier than the apartheid regime because it is based on lying and treachery.
The ANC (and the PAC, and every other fighting organization) deserved the unconditional support of working class revolutionaries during the war against apartheid, but this did not entail support for their anti-socialist programme, their counter-revolutionary perspectives or corrupt bureaucratic organization. It's the same situation as with the Saddam regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And of course it was the same situation with regard to the Korean war and facing up to US imperialism, which is why the Cliffite, state capitalist tradition is so lost when the chickens start coming home to roost.
Supporting forces like the Taliban doesn't mean capitulating to them politically. Even Mao understood this in practice when he allied the CCP with the Kuo Min-Tang during the war against the Japanese imperialists. The CCP, almost against its own desires, retained control of its policy-making and above all its command structure. (See Peng Shuzi's report on the Chinese revolution and the CCP http://www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm). "The left" - a really crap political category, by the way - has made capitulation and tailing political forces hostile or indifferent to the working class into its major strategic principle since the 1930's turn from ultra-left adventurism to Popular Frontism. Time to dump both "the left" as a worthwhile political agent and opportunist sniffing around for exciting bandwagons to jump on. We're not poodles looking for a good post to pee on.