anti-black trade unionism

written by Maleke Montshiwagae Mahlomaholo


the cosatu shenanigans with respect to the black condition reminds me of my favorite book by J Sakai titled ... Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat....

One writer praised this book as follows:

“When Settlers hit the tiers of San Quentin, back in 1986, it totally exploded our ideas about what we as a new class of revolutionaries thought we knew about a so-called ‘united working class’ in amerika. And what's more, it brought the actual contradictions of national oppression and imperialism into sharp focus. It was my first, and as such my truest, study of the actual mechanics behind the expertly fabricated illusion of an amerikan proletariat.”
—Sanyika Shakur,

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the interesting thing for me also has being the illusive construction of the working class unity beyond race!....

reason being that the earliest trade unionism in Amerika was based on the importing of for example, people like the Basques whom the so-called pure Anglo saxon race used as workers and who were already class conscious from the contradictions arising from europe, therefore the idea was that the black slaves would see these Basques people as fighting for the workers interests while in the mean time, black slaves did not form part of the settler society class hierarchy because they[blacks] themselves were commodities as owned by the Anglo saxon pure white race...

on the other hand, the very Basques people's interests were those of labour aristocracy in terms of establishing ranks within the working class itself as we see with the cosatu tendencies....

therefore the point is that black slaves were under the illusion that the trade union working class unity and struggle included them, but it couldn't have been the case as they were the underclass...

the Anglo Saxon upper class did this working class illusion deliberately to avoid mass reaction from the increased number of black slaves ........ simply because the blacks would think that they share the same struggle as the working class struggle!

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by the way just for info:

the Basques people are ''whites'', but they are one of the first of the earliest ''white stock'' who actually arrived as the Grimaldi Negroid from Afrika and mutated over time into the so-called Cro-Magnon man in europe.... crudely put, they are one of the first whites who became white from black people through processes of adaptation and selection, there was no new humans as modern humans had already developed in Afrika, it was just a mere phenotypic change! ((()))) taken from Prof Diop's book: Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology

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therefore they were considered not good enough to be white by the later Anglo saxon white race....

so the black underclass was not receiving any wage[free labour] while the working class Basques and others were wage earners .... it was blacks in the plantations and the Basques in the workshops etc....

from this then, it becomes clear that we are blacks first...

cosatu for me fails to reflect deeply on black matters....