In South Africa, the masses rebelled against their miserable living conditions by looting stores and attacking state institutions. Over 110 people died and 1200 were arrested. In the bourgeois press, the uprising is interpreted as a reaction to the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma.
This is not very credible, because Zuma and the ANC have lost extreme trust in recent years because they do not provide a solution to the poverty of large sections of the people. Also symptomatic is the rise of the revolutionary Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which aggressively calls for the expropriation of large (white) landholdings. It is clear that some of Zuma's minions seek to exploit these contradictions with the aim of restoring lost privileges, but occasion and reason clearly diverge in these depredations.
To be used with caution: State statistics
The majority African population, which led the fight against apartheid, feels betrayed because little has improved for them economically since then. Zuma, for his part, has repeatedly made negative headlines with corruption, nepotism and rape. For the equivalent of more than 16 million euros from state funds, he had a swanky estate built in the countryside, to name just one example. Nevertheless, he survived one vote of no confidence after the next, which further eroded confidence in parliamentarism. The very restrictive Corona measures acted as an accelerant to impoverishment; at the beginning of the year, one-third of the population was unemployed. At the same time, inflation in South Africa is at its highest level in 30 months. The reason for the poverty in this resource-rich country is its position in the imperialist system. As a semi-colony, South Africa is known primarily as a supplier of precious metals, the mining of which has already been divided among international mining corporations. In labor disputes against the miserable working conditions, miners have been repeatedly murdered by so-called security forces in the recent past.
While the masses are being attacked and arrested by the military, the diehard revisionist ANC-affiliated South African Communist Party applauds them and condemns them as "counterrevolutionary". Even the EFF, because of its ideological deficiencies, does not place itself at the forefront of the uprising, as can be seen from its media channels. Once again, it is painfully evident that there is no Maoist Communist Party to give perspective to the people's struggle and to organize the destruction of the old to build the new.
