Shivute Kaapanda

Learning from the recent social and political developments in the Namibian political space, many who follow politics would have observed the working class mobilisations led by the NEFF’s commissar Michael Amushelelo, who is currently a trending force and icon in Namibia as far as the awakening and mobilisation of the working class’ struggle is concerned. 

The exploitation of workers in Namibia by capitalist employers, more especially in the private sector, has escalated beyond the ordinary. The white compatriot capitalists, who represent the minority Namibian population but own the larger chunk of the Namibian economy, are the driving force in workers’ exploitation through wage exploitation. 

The Chinese and the Indians are second and third to the whites, respectively. That capitalist whites, Chinese and Indians have Namibian politicians in their pockets is what has really kept many trade unions toothless and useless in fighting for the interests of the working class. Those who disagree must be reminded of the Jack Huang’s of this world; the Stina Wu’s and many other handlers of Namibian politicians who give instructions on anything to politicians, and nothing can happen against them. 

One would argue that the arrival of Michael Amushelelo’s politics is necessitated by the decaying of Namibian trade unions, who have abandoned their mandates to represent workers that they are now being run and bought by capitalist-handled politicians to watch workers being exploited. 

Amushelelo has filled the political vacuum that would not have existed should trade unions have been fulfilling their mandates as expected. Therefore, in understanding these societal dynamics of ruthless capitalism, one would use tools of analysis such as Marxism and Leninism to understand what capitalism is, and how we as Africans can break away from it,
using Amushelelo’s politics as a case study.

It is Karl Marx out of which we speak Marxism; as a science or a philosophical way of understanding society, its development over history through ’dialectical materialism’. The science of understanding society and its relation to the means of production. According to Marx, capitalism is a class society in which people’s relationship to the means of production is 

mediated by means of classes. The bourgeoisie/capitalists (those who own the means of production) and the proletariat/working class (those who do not own the means of production). 

In this case, those who do not own the means of production survive by selling their labour to the capitalists so that they can work for long hours, and be paid low wages as a means for the capitalists to take more through wage labour. By nature, capitalists become the best exploiters, like the owners of Café Bistro in Windhoek, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Pep Stores and Choppies. 

Capitalists are not owners of little spaza shops in town or in the village; capitalists are proper owners of capital, banks, private hospitals and insurance companies. The working class is those who through the labour market try to sell their labour, and get robbed by the bourgeoisie. They are never paid the real wages. The working class are those who cannot survive without going to work in government or the private sector. 

Capitalism is the whole system that survives on the dispossession of workers through wage labour. The working class is often those who do not properly own commercial land, and cannot survive without working. 

With capitalism, the wealth is owned and reproduced among the few, thereby pushing the majority into poverty and hopelessness. It is very difficult to have everyone rich in a capitalist system because how you become rich has nothing to do with how brilliant your business idea is; the rich have everything to do in monopolising the wealth and capital. It is, therefore, not a sustainable system because it leaves the majority of people in poverty, and creates suffering because all development is driven for profit maximisation by the constant management of wages to get surplus value
(profit). Therefore, because of these contradictions, Marx recommends that the bourgeoisie be crushed by uniting and mobilising the working class, like Amushelelo is doing through his political programmes, to liberate themselves from the bourgeoisie so that they can free the wealth from the selfish capitalist hands into the hands of the majority.

Vladimir Lenin was a Russian revolutionary, who led a real working class revolution (the total overthrow of the capitalist society). In 1917, Lenin presided over a working class-led revolution that led to one of the sustainable developments in Russia. Lenin realised that for the industrious society to exist, it doesn’t necessarily need the bourgeoisie. 

It does not need private profit individuals for development to happen.  In countries such as Namibia, all the entities of the State, such as the army, the police, the prisons and the courts are organised in such a manner to defend and work in the interest of the bourgeoisie. They are there to make sure that the private profiteering of the bourgeoisie is not interrupted. 

Many have observed how the police were deployed in Chinatown when activists protested on counterfeit goods sold by the Chinese, and how the Namibian Police have been instructed to intimidate and arrest Amushelelo wherever he mobilises the working-class struggle. 

In a bourgeois state, the laws which govern society, including the religion and the education system, are made to guard the domination of profit interest of a profit system. 

In Namibia, all Cabinet ministers, the chiefs of police, defence, prison services are all appointed by the president. Therefore, they all dance to the tunes, and are by implication bouncers of the appointing authority, which is problematic. 

In answering the question whether Namibia is a bourgeois state, Lenin recommends exactly what Amushelelo is practising, that we need to mobilise the working class to dismantle the

laws of private property and profiteering and use the state, democratise it and use it as a developmental path for the people, the same way it is done in Cuba or China, but even more effective as Namibia is and has been a capitalist/bourgeois state forever.

*Shivute Kaapanda authored a book The Conscious Republic published in 2020, which can be found on Amazon. He can be contacted on iskaapanda@gmail.com