As U.S. rulers and international capitalism glorify Nelson Mandela, they have a hidden agenda: to conceal his collaboration with the murderous profit system that controls South Africa and the world. Mandela allied himself with the biggest U.S. and British bosses. Under the cloak of black nationalism, he “empowered” black capitalists and helped create a tiny class of black billionaires. Along with some of the biggest international capitalists, these black bosses continue to exploit workers in South Africa and hold them in abject poverty.
Unemployment today in South Africa is 40 percent, higher than it was under apartheid, the system of legalized segregation that preceded Mandela’s rise to power. According to the United Nations, one of four persons tries to survive on less than $1.25 a day. Millions live in miserable shacks without clean water, electricity or sanitation. In many respects, the country’s working class is worse off now than under the apartheid regime of the 1980s.  
The international working class carried on a worldwide struggle against this fascist system. As a leader of the African National Congress and a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (which led the movement against apartheid), Mandela was part of a mass movement that waged armed struggle against a brutally racist state. He and others made great personal sacrifices to the cause; Mandela spent 27 years in prison, most of them at hard labor in a rock quarry. He became an international media symbol for the workers’ heroic, anti-racist fight.
By the time he got out of jail, however, Mandela was following the liberal politicians’ script and sided with the bosses. Soon after he became president in 1994, his phony call for “liberation” was exposed when he stopped workers from striking for higher wages, telling them it would “hurt foreign investment.” His legacy lives on in the ANC, whose desegregated police force massacred 36 striking black miners in 2012.
Mandela betrayed the class he pretended to serve. We have no reason to mourn or worship such a traitor. He gained his secular sainthood by delivering millions of militant workers into the hands of their capitalist oppressors. He helped his mine-owning masters misdirect the anti-apartheid struggle into supporting the profit system rather than destroying it. His ANC continues to back U.S. imperialists who are hell-bent on global war.
U.S. Rulers Backed South Africa’s Open Racists
Mandela never changed his stripes. Born into an aristocratic family of the Thembu tribe, his sympathies were always for the ruling class. His evolution from terrorist to capitalist servant, at least in the eyes of U.S. and allied British rulers, reflected a shift in the inter-imperialist rivalry as well as splits among South Africa’s bosses.
The nationalist Afrikaners chafed under imperialist British influence in South Africa. In 1948, with Britain still weakened by World War II, they seized political power in an election and established apartheid. During the Cold War, when launched by the U.S. against the Soviet Union in a worldwide battle for spheres of influence, Mandela rotted in prison as long as his ANC leaned toward the Soviet Union, their only source of weapons. For decades the U.S. stood firmly behind South Africa’s openly white-supremacist, Afrikaans-speaking regime despite worldwide opposition to apartheid. Both the U.S. and UK branded Mandela and the ANC as terrorists.
It wasn’t until the 1990, when the Soviet threat was receding, that U.S. and UK strategists pounced on the chance to manipulate Mandela and dump the Afrikaners.
Anti-Communist Secret Weapon
British-leaning Harry Oppenheimer, head of South Africa’s richest family and despised by the ruling Afrikaners, was Mandela’s biggest champion. For more than a century, black workers have perished by the thousands in the Oppenheimers’ Anglo-American gold, diamond and platinum mines. Oppenheim kept Mandela on ice for decades as his anti-communist, anti-Afrikaner trump card.
The website for the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, founded by the Oppenheimers (along with David Rockefeller and Bill Clinton), fondly retraces the ANC’s anti-communist history. It quotes Mandela in a 1960 trial: “I strongly supported the resolution to expel the Communists from the ANC.” Then it says, “A small political party formed in 1960. A major sponsor was Harry Oppenheimer, then the Chairperson of Anglo-American Corporation.” This led to formation of the Progressive Federal Party, “the main opposition party in the white parliament.” Helen Suzman, the Progressive Federal party’s sole member of parliament, began meeting with the imprisoned Mandela in 1967.
Post-Soviet Turnabout
But because Mandela’s ANC remained pro-Soviet, Oppenheimer had to wait for the Kremlin’s collapse to play his trump. By 1985, the Soviet military had been defeated in Afghanistan. Its oil revenues tanked after President George H. W. Bush made a price-lowering deal with Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, U.S. bosses’ backing of Poland’s Solidarity Party and its anti-Soviet miners’ rebellion was sapping the political influence of Moscow’s bloc.
That was also the year that Chase Manhattan Bank, under board chairman David Rockefeller, dramatically stopped lending to the Afrikaners. In October 1985, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher informed South Africa President P.W. Botha of the coming turnabout. Mandela’s release, she told him, “would have more impact than almost any single action you could undertake.” As the New York Times wrote (12/8/13), “Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated and China had gone capitalist, the last white rulers of South Africa could no longer pose as necessary allies on the right [U.S.] side of the Cold War. They knew the game was up.”
Mandela’s Phony Communism
A rare disparaging article, “Nelson Mandela, Communist,” by former Times executive editor Bill Keller, ranks among the paper’s best efforts at anti-communist disinformation. Keller accurately nails Mandela’s unprincipled opportunism: “He was at various times a black nationalist and a non-racialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.”
At the same time, however, Keller attributes the current misery of South African workers to Mandela’s ties with phony leftists, rather than his abject service to capitalists. The columnist says, “[Mandela’s] Communist affiliation...helps explain why South Africa has not made greater progress toward improving the lives of its large underclass.” But the writer’s real grievance with Mandela is rooted in his own family’s history; Keller’s father chaired Chevron in the 1980s and made millions off the apartheid regime. It’s true enough that the global outcry against Chevron and other apartheid business partners endangered their profits. But it’s also true that Mandela was a die-hard capitalist. After Harry Oppenheimer died in 2000, he eulogized his guardian angel: “His contribution to building partnership… [with] big business…can never be appreciated too much” ( Independent Online, 21 August 2000).
A broader war now looms between various capitalist coalitions, including China and Russia, versus the U.S. South Africa holds immense strategic importance for this coming conflict, both for its minerals and its location astride the Cape of Good Hope, a shipping chokepoint. Mandela’s last service to his U.S. and UK imperialist masters was his endorsement of the Oppenheimers’ Brenthurst Foundation, also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Brenthurst urges all Africa to follow “the example of Australia” in how to deal with China. In other words: Sell China raw materials for now, but forge military alliances with the U.S. to prepare for a clash.
Lessons for Our Class
There is much to learn from the Mandela/South African experience:
   • To emancipate the international working class, we must never ally with one capitalist faction or another. Whichever side wins will exploit us all the more. Only by organizing and relying ourselves can workers destroy capitalism.
   • Voting in capitalist elections can only produce more capitalism. In South Africa it produced a small class of black billionaires who have joined forces with their white counterparts.
   • Non-violence protects the violence perpetrated by the bosses. When the black Marikana miners struck the mining billionaires in 2012, the “non-violent” ANC government called out the cops and slaughtered 36 strikers. Whenever the bosses see their profits threatened by an organized working class, they do not hesitate to use their state power. What is it but racist violence when South Africa’s black and white rulers subject workers to slave-like conditions? What is it but racist violence when these bosses cause countless deaths through poverty, lack of health care, malnutrition and massive unemployment?
   • Finally, what does “liberation” entail? Masses of workers and youth in South Africa aspired first to national liberation and then, later, to communism.  (Or socialism, as they saw it.) They were betrayed because this two-stage theory enabled the anti-apartheid capitalists to maintain the profit system and continue to exploit the working class. This nationalist strategy was a great weakness of the old communist movement in the Soviet Union and China. South Africa’s Communist Party (SACP) followed the same political line. Equally damaging, the SACP submerged its politics into the mass reformist, anti-apartheid movement that pledged to “normalize” capitalism. By allying with “progressive capitalists,” the workers only got more capitalism. The biggest winners of the smashing of apartheid were U.S. and British bosses.
Liberation for the working class means to be free from the wage system that creates profits for bosses and misery for workers. The heroism of communist leaders like Joe Slovo and of thousands of youth in the 1976 Soweto Uprising, when over 700 were slaughtered, cannot be questioned. But their movement was undermined and effectively destroyed from within because they followed the wrong politics.
When Mandela and the ANC took power and were unanimously praised as “liberators” of the working masses by every pseudo-left group in the world, as well as by all the liberal capitalists, only the Progressive Labor Party exposed the fallacy of uniting with “progressive” capitalists. PLP was denounced by every one of these forces. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Mass poverty and racist brutality continues to afflict South Africa. Billionaires — black and white — still profit by exploiting workers. The lesson of South Africa is clear: Nationalism spells death for the working class.
While mass anti-racist struggle can squeeze and disrupt the ruling capitalist class, there is no liberation for workers while capitalism flourishes. We cannot follow the Mandela path of exchanging one group of exploiters for another. As the celebrations of Mandela’s capitalist legacy flood the world, we must bring our communist message to the international working class.
The real lesson of the fight against apartheid is: Join and build the PLP!