Saturday, March 29, 2014
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Baruch Hirson-Resistance and Socialism in South Africa
Markin comment (2010):
The International Communist League (ICL), the international organization of which Workers Vanguard is the flagship publications, in numerous articles and published conference reports has emphasized, correctly I believe, that in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union that the political consciousness of the international working class, although unevenly, has taken big steps backward in its consciousness. The shorthand way to speak of such a condition is that on a day to day basis the bulk of the workers do not connect their defensive struggles with the struggle for socialism.
Seemingly working class history for the past 150 years or so is a blank page although those in the least bit familiar with that history know that it is rich in examples, positive and negative, of working class struggle for our communist future. Although one could see that retrograde situation developing, in some cases graphically as on the American labor scene, well before that demise something snapped in the international labor movement in reaction to the incessant “communism is dead” triumphalism of the international capitalist class and its mouthpieces. Although that situation is slowly changing under the conditions of the current capitalist onslaught, especially in Europe, that sense of the decline of political consciousness is still pervasive.
That brings us to the class consciousness that underlies the article under review in this entry on the situation in South Africa. I mentioned above (as the ICL has in its articles as well) that the decline of political consciousness was not monolithic. South Africa, due to many factors in its national framework not the least the massive struggle against apartheid, may represent the classic contrary case. In the immediate post-Soviet period when everyone, their brothers, their sisters, and their great-aunts was disclaiming anything but hardened and eternal hostility to the word communism, communist organizations, or even lukewarm socialist formations in South Africa they were making an event, a public event, out of the legalization of the Communist Party.
Of course, we know, at least those of us who claim the Trotskyist tradition, that this was the just the legalization of another old time Stalinist, class- collaborationist, two-stage revolution operation but that party represented communism down at the base, communist revolution as the “comrades” understood it. Hey, these guys and gals, these street militants, were waving red flags night and day with the expectation that not only apartheid was over with the African National Congress(ANC) taking over the reins of government but that the meek (militant meek, that is, the others get nothing in this wicked old world) shall finally inherit the earth. It gives me no satisfaction, none whatsoever, nor should it to you that their illusions have been cruelly dashed overt the past sixteen years.
If South Africa represented (and in many ways still does, witness the recent wide-spread strikes AGAINST the ANC-SACP-COSATU government) something like the vanguard of political consciousness in the international labor movement it also represents the classic Stalinist (and not Stalinist alone) stagist theory of revolution in less advanced countries. In short, first the democratic revolution then, in the future, the socialist revolution. Sixteen years on and the “comrades” are still waiting. Thus we have a pretty good idea when that second stage kicks in-never.
And that is my second point. If the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 proved once and for all that the bourgeoisie of an emerging capitalist country is incapable, for a thousand reasons not the least its myriad intermingled links to the major imperialist powers, of leading (or maybe even tolerating) a democratic revolution then several decades later the emerging (or already existing) bourgeoisies in less advanced capitalist countries are even less likely to so. In South Africa Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution retains its validity. No, not just it validity, more than that it is merely the beginning of political wisdom for those crushed “comrades” down at the base still waiting for the second promised stage. Thus the order of the day is for the black-centered workers movement to break with the ANC as a matter of elementary political hygiene.
Sometimes one can overuse analogies (although that does not prevent anyone from doing so, or it hasn’t in the past, including by this writer) from one period to the next. Obviously there are major differences (not the least the question of political leadership of the working class) between the situation in Russia 1917 and South Africa today but I keep being drawn to the Menshevik’s notion in 1917 (and before and after, as well) that the bourgeoisie should lead the democratic revolution in Russia and the role of peasant and working class socialist organizations was to “support” or “push” them forward. That candidate in 1917 was the Cadet party (Constitutional Democrats); today in South Africa (at least for now) for the Mensheviks of today, the SACP and its hangers-on, it is the ANC. So what, as is pretty well described in the linked article above, we see in South Africa is what Russia might have looked like if the Menshevik “vision” had worked out. No, thank you, then and now. Learn the lessons outlined in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Forward!
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
One of the first campaigns fought by white workers was on the diamond fields in the 1870s when the men rebelled against body searches for hidden gem stones. These men, supported by black workers, won their battle with the mineowners. But the cooperation was one sided, and it was only the whites who won release from this obnoxious procedure. This victory only served to separate blacks from whites, and set a pattern that persisted, with few exceptions, throughout the history of working class struggles. The struggles continued and became fiercer and bloodier, reaching a peak in the general strike of 1922, when General Smuts brought out the bombers to subdue the workers.
The history of black labour struggles, which did not often converge with the struggles of the whites, extends back to the first master-servant rela-tions. The fullest accounts are of local resistance to tyrannical land owners or whites who misused their labourers, but there is no satisfactory overall history. Some are chronicled, and it is quite clear that there was no support from the white workers. In this colonial society the fight against racial oppression was to become inseparable from the struggles for ‘liberation’, the class lines being blurred by colour differentiation. In the light of state power and national oppression, it was inevitable that disaffection expressed itself in religious separation, of appeals to spirits to assist their people, and of chiliastic hopes that the local oppressors would he smitten by some foreign agency [1] The historical accounts include cattle killing by the Xhosa people in 1856, and the many incidents in which it was believed that magic water could protect people from bullets. These important instances of resistance fed into the myths of nationalist movements, but, at the time, they were local and community bound.
The discrimination embedded in legislation and social practice, to-gether with the gross inequalities in living standards, led each community to develop its own forms of struggle.
The earliest Socialist groups seem to have been established at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were all white, and were often confined to particular communities. The ideas expressed in these groups ranged over the spectrum of Socialist thinking elsewhere. Syndicalists, Social Democrats and ethnic separatists intermingled, some members belonging to more than one group—and there were changes of affiliation over time.
The Jews brought with them methods of organisation that were rooted in Eastern Europe. In particular, they formed branches of the Bund, the specifically Jewish working class movement that had built some of the first trade unions in Tsarist Russia. They were also immersed in a particular Yiddish culture, and combined this with their Socialism. Similar groups, whose history has not been recorded, were built by German and other immigrant communities. None of them seem to have established links with the Social Democratic Federation that was strongest in the Cape, and which took its inspiration from the British movement of the same name.
There was one other significant early group, strongest on the Witwatersrand, that grouped itself around the Voice of Labour , with a strong Syndicalist tendency. It is known more particularly for the activities of ‘Pickhandle’ Mary. The name was acquired when Mary Fitzgerald led a band of strikers against mounted police who wielded the infamous pick-handles. Picking up batons which the police had dropped, Mary and her followers wielded them against their original owners. Thereafter her co-horts broke up meetings of their opponents with the now notorious pick-handles, and she was always to be found when demonstrators were needed during strike action. Yet even Mary Fitzgerald, who created a living myth around her activities, who worked with the miners’ union and then or-ganised the first general women’s trade union, appeared after the war as a highly vocal racist. When she died many years later, an alcoholic recluse, her passing went largely unnoticed.
The South African Labour Party (SALP), with its strongest section in the Transvaal, was established in the image of its British counterpart, but was openly racist, and its members could justly claim that they had been the first to call for complete segregation. By that means, they said, they hoped to protect the interests of the white workers from unfair competition, and maintain their standard of living. The SALP was from its inception a parliamentary party, claiming, as in Britain, to represent the (white) working class and the trade unions. But there is little evidence of the trade unions providing the kind of support that was apparent in Britain.
In sharp contrast to this, a small band of white, mainly Jewish, profes-sional men and women gave their fullest support to Gandhi in his campaigns against discrimination in South Africa. They were Tolstoyans rather than Socialists, but they mixed with and influenced others who had Socialist sympathies. Among these was one of South Africa’s most original thinkers, the novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner, whose ideas were partly rooted in the newly emergent Socialist movements in Europe. It is still not possible to estimate her influence on Socialists in South Africa. Her messages were inspirational, but always ‘from afar’, because she was never a joiner of groups. From Schreiner came a militant feminism and adherence to the suffragette movement (but only if the vote was extended to all women), a strong antipathy to discrimination on grounds of colour or ethnicity, a desire to right the wrongs of women workers (following her writings in Women and Labour ), and a rationalism that bordered on agnosticism. Acquiring some of her values from radicals in Britain, Schreiner also condemned the Tsarist regime in Russia for its oppression, and in particular its anti-Semitism. This made her an early champion of the Bolshevik regime in its fight against the White generals. In the latter period of her life, she inspired a number of radicals, mainly attached to the University of Cape Town, but they, too, remained outside formal organisation, and the extent of their influence on the Socialist movement is a matter of conjecture.[2] Among the whites there were other radical thinkers in the country: Harriet Colenso (daughter of the apostate Bishop Colenso), who gave her support to the formation of the ANC; Ivon Jones, who came to South Africa as a devout Unitarian and ended his life as a Bolshevik; Clare Goodlatte, a nun in the Anglican community and principal of their teacher’s training college in Grahamstown, who retired in 1920, shed her religion and ended her career as editor of the Trotskyist journal, The Spark. But the effect of their ideas, and the extent of their influence, has not been fully explored.
It is still arguable whether the majority of white workers, and particular-ly those who came from Britain, were ever involved in the Socialist move-ment. They did join trade unions, and some were associated with the Labour Party, but, except for a few obvious exceptions, their activities were not ostensibly Socialist. Afrikaner workers, who had their own political agenda, also organised and used the strike weapon to improve their work conditions. Although some seemed to be moving towards the SALP before the First World War, they were seduced by the call of Nationalists to close ranks against foreign overlords when war was declared. Whether their joining the Labour Party would have altered that movement is an open question, but their commitment to Socialism was not very strong, despite the appeal of the anti-imperialist slogans of the time. Like the English speaking workers, they gave no support to the struggles of other communities, and although there must have been some for whom colour was not an issue, most were probably as racist as the rest of the Afrikaner community.[3]
This racism, or at least indifference to the problems faced by other communities, was not one sided. The leaders of black movements, and many of their constituents, were also locked into conflicts with those who were ethnically different. But, like all generalisations, there were exceptions. There were differences inside each ethnic group, some class based, that need examination to understand the complexity of the situation. For ex-ample, the Indians, a pariah community in the eyes of the government, were far from homogeneous, and were split in their methods of struggle. And the differences were based on the sharp class divisions in the community. The middle and lower middle class followed Gandhi in his use of ‘passive resistance’ and boycotts to remove discrimination (and racism), but the farm labourers on the sugar cane fields, living at subsistence level, ceased work or rioted during the Indian passive resistance campaigns in 1913, against the wishes of Gandhi. In like fashion the Coloured leaders demand-ed incorporation into the white dominated society, whilst the Coloured and African women of the Orange Free State, with a different set of objectives, marched in unison in 1913 to stop the application of passes to women.
There were some expressions of solidarity across the ethnic divide and some blatant examples of racial indifference if not antagonism in those early years of struggle. In 1914, for example, Gandhi suspended his marches in order not to embarrass the government when it was confronted by a strike of railway workers, and the ANC in conference turned down a motion of support for the white miners in their strike action. This was but the mirror image, even if understandable, of white working class attitudes. Despite the call of a few white working class leaders for class solidarity, the whites involved in strikes in 1913-14 stood apart from their black fellow workers, and in one instance, on the Jagersfontein diamond mines, helped the police suppress black workers who rioted after one of their number had been killed by a white worker. Also, the few trade union leaders who publicly expressed support for the Indians in struggle were condemned by their own rank and file. It was, therefore, not exceptional for the Coloured and African leaders to condemn the white miners in the general strike of 1922, and for white and black workers to be involved in racist clashes during the strike.[4]
The South African Native National Congress (later renamed the Af-rican National Congress) was not the first ethnically organised movement, nor the largest. Yet its potential constituency led to its later predominance in the country as the representative of the African people. It was launched in 1912 by a small group of Africans, many of them professional men. The Congress had little formal organisation outside a national conference that was convened annually. It confined itself to appearances before commis-sions, to delegations and to petitions. The Congress ignored the early strike movement of 1913, and it was only after the First World War that its leadership was involved in some of the urban protests, both at the work-place and in an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand. But their invol-vement was short lived, and the leading figures withdrew from activities when their followers took to the streets.
The closest that the white workers came to class struggle was at a trade union level. These too had a strong ethnic base, aiming in part to keep the ratio of white to black miners constant. The miners’ strikes, repeating in 1913 a struggle that had been taken up in 1907, were a matter of life and death. The main demand was for a reduction of the number of drills (used by Africans underground), and a shortening of the time spent at the ore face. Although there can be little doubt that there was a racist element in the demand which would have cut the ratio of white to black employees, recent research shows that the primary concern of the miners was to prevent the spread of miners’ phthisis which reduced the working lives of miners to four years, and actual life to seven years. Although a reduction of time at the ore face and a reduction of the number of drills at work would have resulted in only a slight improvement, the demands were rational and reasonable. The result, however, was a brutal suppression of the white miners’ strike in 1913, including a massacre of white citizens who had gathered to hear a call for a general strike.[5]
There were some expressions of solidarity with black struggles from a minority of white miners’ leaders. They urged African mineworkers to join them in strike action, and some spoke publicly in support of the Indian struggle. Yet, as mentioned above, this was not reciprocated by leaders of the Coloured, Indian or even African movements. Reasons were not always given, and some of the motives are suspect, but white workers, who showed few signs of class solidarity, did nothing to bridge the racial gap.
The struggles of the white workers followed the trade union tradition that workers had brought from Europe—but only at the lowest level. Their racism (whether overt or covert) was even more rampant than that of their employers. But the class struggle did not need examples from abroad, and many confrontations were due to bad working conditions and an intran-sigence on the part of the ruling class. The government, in alliance with the employers, were prepared to shoot unarmed citizens, and mowed them down in 1913. It was a brutal suppression, and this was followed in 1914, when the railwaymen came out on strike, by a declaration of martial law, the investment of the Trades Hall where the strike leaders were in session, and their illegal deportation. It was this action by the government that led to the radicalisation of men inside a very tame and segregationist Labour Party, and took them eventually into the Communist Party.
The First World War was the dividing line between small-scale local groups and attempts at building a Socialist movement on a national level. Taking their stance on the resolution of the International Socialist Bureau against the war, and already angered by Smuts and the government after the strikes of 1913-14, a group in the Transvaal broke away from the Labour Party to form the International Socialist League (ISL), first as pacifists and then as international Socialists. They were isolated from the English speak-ing workers, who supported the war, and from the Afrikaner workers who opposed Britain and the Allies. This was one of the factors that led the leaders of the ISL to turn to the black workers. To them goes the credit of having been the first to create a black workers’ union, the International Workers of Africa. Yet there was doubt about the role the black worker would play in the transformation of the country. The issue received publicity in 1919 when municipal workers in Johannesburg paralysed the town by cutting the power supplies, and established a ‘Board of Management’ which they called a ‘soviet’. Meanwhile, their supporters attacked African workers who were involved in an anti-pass campaign, and the ’soviet’ leaders made a gratuitous offer to the government that they were prepared to form defence groups to protect white women and children. SP Bunting, one of the three leaders of the ISL, rounded on the white workers for the preten-tiousness of their use of the word ’soviet’ and for their racism. Jones, probably the most outstanding of all the early Socialist leaders, used the pages of the journal to criticise Bunting, and came to the defence of those ‘on strike’.[6] But Bunting was also unable to chart the possible evolution of the African working class. In a statement that is reminiscent of the Narod-niks of Tsarist Russia, he said that after the Socialist revolution (by whites!), Africans would be given back their land and saved from their miserable existence in the towns. Jones also thought that the white workers would overthrow the capitalist regime, but added as a corollary that the white workers could not sustain their revolution unless it was spread to the blacks within 24 hours.
It was the ISL which formed the central core of the Communist Party when it was launched in 1921, incorporating groups in Cape Town and Durban. Their conception of South Africa must be understood in terms of the class forces they could see at the time. The white workers seemed to constitute a force that could spearhead a Socialist movement. Africans might need sympathy, but were too far removed from the industrial prole-tariat that might take power. In their internationalism was nurtured the sympathy they felt for the revolution from its inception in February 1917, and they gave their allegiance to the new state in Russia. Ivon Jones had stated soon after the news reached Johannesburg in the local press, that the revolution in this advanced period of capitalism could not stop at this stage, and that the workers of Russia would take it further.
This loyalty to the Russian revolution was cemented when Jones went to Russia. He translated and publicised some works of Lenin from the Russian. He worked for the Comintern and the Profintern (the Communist and Red Trade Union Internationals), called on the Comintern to organise an international conference of Negro toilers, and was placed on the Execu-tive Council of the Comintern as a delegate for South Africa. Jones was seriously ill by this time and died in mid-1924. Those who remained in the CPSA lacked his critical ability, and became blind followers of Comintern policy. Even when part of the leadership disagreed fundamentally with Comintern policy, as SP Bunting did in 1928, they accepted the line laid down by the leaders of the USSR.[7]
There are indications that black mineworkers on the Witwatersrand tried to form African trade unions as early as 1912, but these early attempts failed.[8] There are slightly more details about an strike of 9000 miners in 1913, parallel to the white miners’ strike—but a warning that they could he prosecuted for breaking the law led to the men returning to work. Then came the war, and Africans faced increasing privation. There was rampant inflation, and conditions in the Reserves worsened, with more demands on the men from their families for money. Strikes during the war were spor-adic, but from 1918 to 1920 tools were downed in the towns and the mines, there was a boycott of the stores on the mines, which held a monopoly on trading and raised their prices ahead of inflation, and an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand. And finally in 1920 an anti-pass campaign in the towns coincided with the biggest walkout on the mines prior to 1987. Initially, the ANC leaders supported this action, but they withdrew when the crowd grew more militant. This was taken by men like Bunting as confirming their view that the Congress was led by men who could not and would not lead their people in militant action.[9]
There was news of rural disaffection in the eastern Cape soon after war was declared, but this, too, was smothered by strong administrative pres-sure. It was only after 1918 that a wave of action in the towns and in the countryside provided evidence that the African workers were not prepared to accept their lot passively. Besides the strikes on the mines and among municipal employees, and an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand, there were extensive foci of unrest across the country. Although some of these have been described and the incidents well known, there is still no overall picture of the many events of the period of 1918-20. Where there was armed intervention, as in the case of Bulhoek, the events were notable for illustrating the depth of oppression in the country, and also for the first protests by Socialists against such action.[10]
The small group of whites who had left the Labour Party to form a more radical organisation were isolated in the white community. Their can-didates were soundly beaten in local and provincial elections, and there was little support from white workers. The English speaking white workers rallied to the support of the Empire; the Afrikaner workers tended to support their Nationalist leaders in opposition to the British. It was this, in part, that turned this small group to the organisation of a black general workers’ union, the Industrial Workers of Africa. The IWA was involved in some of the strikes of 1918, but heavy infiltration by police and a court case after the bucket workers’ strike led to its demise.
The leaders of the ISL were ahead of their followers in many respects, and there were many resignations. There was further discontent over policy following the dispute over the Johannesburg ’soviet’, and finally there were splits over the decision to support the general strike of 1922. It was in this struggle that the workers raised the slogan: ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.’ This Orwellian style banner, which many black workers at the time found unexceptional, was both anti-cap-italist and racist, with different factions in the struggle stressing one or other interpretation. Ultimately, the strikers were bombed into submission, some of their leaders were killed, and others were hanged by a revengeful government. Whether the party was right or wrong in the strike is still a matter of dispute, but the consequences were disastrous, and the members of the CPSA emerged even more isolated than previously (see below).
Independently of any other organisation there was an attempt, at the end of the First World War, led by Selby Msimang, a Nationalist leader, to form a general workers’ union, known as the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union. This was a name appropriated in 1920 by Clements Kadalie and popularised under the name ICU (I See You, White Man).[11] Members of the CPSA joined the ICU, and some were elected to senior posts on its Executive. In 1925, following a riot over beer brewing in the Bloemfontein location, the town officials came to the conclusion that the riot was the result of the low wage structure in the town. In a daring move the civic authorities appointed a commission of six whites and six blacks, three of them drawn from the local ICU leaders. The outcome was a minimum daily wage of 3/6d set for the town. This was the year in which the ICU first established a branch in the Transvaal—but few noted then or subsequently that there was no organisation in factories, railways, or even shops.
The ICU groups that came into existence were either based in the rural areas, in small villages, or in the townships. There was an internal logic in this move that most histories ignore. There were no industries large enough to sustain a trade union except for the mines and the railways: unions were not allowed access to the former, and the government would not recognise a black railway union (the white union being effectively a company union). Consequently, following the success in Bloemfontein, the ICU organised in the townships but not in the workshops. Then, in a separate set of campaigns, they went into the rural areas, calling for liberation and the right to own land. They ended by collecting money from their members for the purchase of land—and, as in all such ventures, the money vanished into the pockets of the collectors.
The ICU was not a trade union, but (in the towns) a community based organisation. Its constituents in the townships were mainly workers, but the form of organisation was not directed at the scene of production. It cam-paigned for township rights, and in at least one case (as noted above) helped secure a minimum wage for an entire township. It was a notable victory, although the wage was still miserable. But the movement did not succeed as a trade union.
The ICU faced harassment and persecution, but that was only one of its problems. Urged by conservative whites, like the authoress Ethelreda Lewis, the ICU expelled members of the CPSA, thus depriving itself of its most dedicated and efficient members. The arrival of WG Ballinger, a member of the Cooperative Society in Motherwell, to act as an adviser to the ICU, could not help, and his presence only speeded up the disintegra-tion of the ICU. Corruption was also rife in the ICU. Officials dipped deeply into union funds, committee meetings were disrupted by members who were too drunk to stay awake, there were expulsions, counter-expulsions and splits, and the ICU, after a last burst of activity in which it was involved in strikes in the eastern Cape and near Johannesburg, faded out of exist-ence.
In the wake of the defeat of the general strike in 1922, the CPSA was isolated and reduced to a small handful of mainly white members. It was under these conditions that it debated the possibility of affiliation to the Labour Party, in line with Lenin’s suggestion that the small parties in the English speaking countries try an entryist tactic. An application for affilia-tion in 1923 was rejected by the SALP, and the CPSA decided in December 1924, by a small majority, not to try again. The party was split on the issue, and among those who resigned were Frank Glass, and he was supported by Bill Andrews (later Chairperson of the party during the Second World War). It seems that a group in Cape Town, led by Manuel Lopes, also resigned, and like Glass joined the Labour Party. This move could not be sustained, particularly in view of the Labour Party’s segregationist position. Individually or together, these former members of the CPSA left the Labour Party in the late 1920s.
The CPSA, manipulated by Comintern apparatchiks, was forced in 1928 to accept the Black Republic slogan during the notorious Third Period, which was supposed to signal the onset of world revolution. In the squabbles that followed leading members were expelled and pilloried under the most disgraceful conditions. At times it was apparently expulsion for expulsion’s sake (because that was the only way to keep the party on its toes!).
It was at this point that some former members gathered together as supporters of the Left Opposition. Glass (who was the first to have a letter published in The Militant, organ of the American Left Opposition) left South Africa in 1931 for China, where he worked with the Trotskyists under the name of Li Furen.[12] Others helped to form the Independent Labour Party in Cape Town in 1932.[13] Only a few of those expelled from the CPSA entered the Trotskyist groups. Most dropped out of all political activity.
There proved to be one centre in which members of the new Trotskyist groups were able to seize the initiative. Members of the CPSA on the Witwatersrand had organised African trade unions, partly to overcome their exclusion from the ICU, and partly to create an active link with the Profintern. In accordance with Third Period tactics, the unions were led into ill-prepared strikes, and lost many of their members. The collapse of the unions was hastened by the expulsions of leading organisers, and it was in the political space left open that Trotskyists formed a network of African trade unions in the Transvaal. This is discussed below.
When the first Trotskyist groups were formed, they were confronted by a white working class, the most important of whom, on the mines and the railways and in heavy industry, had made their peace with their employers. The black workers were still small in numbers, but the political and trade union organisations had succumbed to inertia, to harassment, or to internal corruption. It was time to start afresh and the field was open to any dynamic group—but the task would not be easy, and many of the earlier Socialists had been destroyed by their experiences inside the CPSA.
Markin comment (2010):
The International Communist League (ICL), the international organization of which Workers Vanguard is the flagship publications, in numerous articles and published conference reports has emphasized, correctly I believe, that in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union that the political consciousness of the international working class, although unevenly, has taken big steps backward in its consciousness. The shorthand way to speak of such a condition is that on a day to day basis the bulk of the workers do not connect their defensive struggles with the struggle for socialism.
Seemingly working class history for the past 150 years or so is a blank page although those in the least bit familiar with that history know that it is rich in examples, positive and negative, of working class struggle for our communist future. Although one could see that retrograde situation developing, in some cases graphically as on the American labor scene, well before that demise something snapped in the international labor movement in reaction to the incessant “communism is dead” triumphalism of the international capitalist class and its mouthpieces. Although that situation is slowly changing under the conditions of the current capitalist onslaught, especially in Europe, that sense of the decline of political consciousness is still pervasive.
That brings us to the class consciousness that underlies the article under review in this entry on the situation in South Africa. I mentioned above (as the ICL has in its articles as well) that the decline of political consciousness was not monolithic. South Africa, due to many factors in its national framework not the least the massive struggle against apartheid, may represent the classic contrary case. In the immediate post-Soviet period when everyone, their brothers, their sisters, and their great-aunts was disclaiming anything but hardened and eternal hostility to the word communism, communist organizations, or even lukewarm socialist formations in South Africa they were making an event, a public event, out of the legalization of the Communist Party.
Of course, we know, at least those of us who claim the Trotskyist tradition, that this was the just the legalization of another old time Stalinist, class- collaborationist, two-stage revolution operation but that party represented communism down at the base, communist revolution as the “comrades” understood it. Hey, these guys and gals, these street militants, were waving red flags night and day with the expectation that not only apartheid was over with the African National Congress(ANC) taking over the reins of government but that the meek (militant meek, that is, the others get nothing in this wicked old world) shall finally inherit the earth. It gives me no satisfaction, none whatsoever, nor should it to you that their illusions have been cruelly dashed overt the past sixteen years.
If South Africa represented (and in many ways still does, witness the recent wide-spread strikes AGAINST the ANC-SACP-COSATU government) something like the vanguard of political consciousness in the international labor movement it also represents the classic Stalinist (and not Stalinist alone) stagist theory of revolution in less advanced countries. In short, first the democratic revolution then, in the future, the socialist revolution. Sixteen years on and the “comrades” are still waiting. Thus we have a pretty good idea when that second stage kicks in-never.
And that is my second point. If the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 proved once and for all that the bourgeoisie of an emerging capitalist country is incapable, for a thousand reasons not the least its myriad intermingled links to the major imperialist powers, of leading (or maybe even tolerating) a democratic revolution then several decades later the emerging (or already existing) bourgeoisies in less advanced capitalist countries are even less likely to so. In South Africa Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution retains its validity. No, not just it validity, more than that it is merely the beginning of political wisdom for those crushed “comrades” down at the base still waiting for the second promised stage. Thus the order of the day is for the black-centered workers movement to break with the ANC as a matter of elementary political hygiene.
Sometimes one can overuse analogies (although that does not prevent anyone from doing so, or it hasn’t in the past, including by this writer) from one period to the next. Obviously there are major differences (not the least the question of political leadership of the working class) between the situation in Russia 1917 and South Africa today but I keep being drawn to the Menshevik’s notion in 1917 (and before and after, as well) that the bourgeoisie should lead the democratic revolution in Russia and the role of peasant and working class socialist organizations was to “support” or “push” them forward. That candidate in 1917 was the Cadet party (Constitutional Democrats); today in South Africa (at least for now) for the Mensheviks of today, the SACP and its hangers-on, it is the ANC. So what, as is pretty well described in the linked article above, we see in South Africa is what Russia might have looked like if the Menshevik “vision” had worked out. No, thank you, then and now. Learn the lessons outlined in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Forward!
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Baruch Hirson-Resistance and Socialism in South Africa
THE HISTORY of working class struggle in South Africa, which extends back to the nineteenth century, matched the bitterness and the ferocity of class struggles elsewhere. However, the conflicts in South Africa were more often noted for the manner in which the class struggle was subverted and converted into racial clashes.One of the first campaigns fought by white workers was on the diamond fields in the 1870s when the men rebelled against body searches for hidden gem stones. These men, supported by black workers, won their battle with the mineowners. But the cooperation was one sided, and it was only the whites who won release from this obnoxious procedure. This victory only served to separate blacks from whites, and set a pattern that persisted, with few exceptions, throughout the history of working class struggles. The struggles continued and became fiercer and bloodier, reaching a peak in the general strike of 1922, when General Smuts brought out the bombers to subdue the workers.
The history of black labour struggles, which did not often converge with the struggles of the whites, extends back to the first master-servant rela-tions. The fullest accounts are of local resistance to tyrannical land owners or whites who misused their labourers, but there is no satisfactory overall history. Some are chronicled, and it is quite clear that there was no support from the white workers. In this colonial society the fight against racial oppression was to become inseparable from the struggles for ‘liberation’, the class lines being blurred by colour differentiation. In the light of state power and national oppression, it was inevitable that disaffection expressed itself in religious separation, of appeals to spirits to assist their people, and of chiliastic hopes that the local oppressors would he smitten by some foreign agency [1] The historical accounts include cattle killing by the Xhosa people in 1856, and the many incidents in which it was believed that magic water could protect people from bullets. These important instances of resistance fed into the myths of nationalist movements, but, at the time, they were local and community bound.
The discrimination embedded in legislation and social practice, to-gether with the gross inequalities in living standards, led each community to develop its own forms of struggle.
The earliest Socialist groups seem to have been established at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were all white, and were often confined to particular communities. The ideas expressed in these groups ranged over the spectrum of Socialist thinking elsewhere. Syndicalists, Social Democrats and ethnic separatists intermingled, some members belonging to more than one group—and there were changes of affiliation over time.
The Jews brought with them methods of organisation that were rooted in Eastern Europe. In particular, they formed branches of the Bund, the specifically Jewish working class movement that had built some of the first trade unions in Tsarist Russia. They were also immersed in a particular Yiddish culture, and combined this with their Socialism. Similar groups, whose history has not been recorded, were built by German and other immigrant communities. None of them seem to have established links with the Social Democratic Federation that was strongest in the Cape, and which took its inspiration from the British movement of the same name.
There was one other significant early group, strongest on the Witwatersrand, that grouped itself around the Voice of Labour , with a strong Syndicalist tendency. It is known more particularly for the activities of ‘Pickhandle’ Mary. The name was acquired when Mary Fitzgerald led a band of strikers against mounted police who wielded the infamous pick-handles. Picking up batons which the police had dropped, Mary and her followers wielded them against their original owners. Thereafter her co-horts broke up meetings of their opponents with the now notorious pick-handles, and she was always to be found when demonstrators were needed during strike action. Yet even Mary Fitzgerald, who created a living myth around her activities, who worked with the miners’ union and then or-ganised the first general women’s trade union, appeared after the war as a highly vocal racist. When she died many years later, an alcoholic recluse, her passing went largely unnoticed.
The South African Labour Party (SALP), with its strongest section in the Transvaal, was established in the image of its British counterpart, but was openly racist, and its members could justly claim that they had been the first to call for complete segregation. By that means, they said, they hoped to protect the interests of the white workers from unfair competition, and maintain their standard of living. The SALP was from its inception a parliamentary party, claiming, as in Britain, to represent the (white) working class and the trade unions. But there is little evidence of the trade unions providing the kind of support that was apparent in Britain.
In sharp contrast to this, a small band of white, mainly Jewish, profes-sional men and women gave their fullest support to Gandhi in his campaigns against discrimination in South Africa. They were Tolstoyans rather than Socialists, but they mixed with and influenced others who had Socialist sympathies. Among these was one of South Africa’s most original thinkers, the novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner, whose ideas were partly rooted in the newly emergent Socialist movements in Europe. It is still not possible to estimate her influence on Socialists in South Africa. Her messages were inspirational, but always ‘from afar’, because she was never a joiner of groups. From Schreiner came a militant feminism and adherence to the suffragette movement (but only if the vote was extended to all women), a strong antipathy to discrimination on grounds of colour or ethnicity, a desire to right the wrongs of women workers (following her writings in Women and Labour ), and a rationalism that bordered on agnosticism. Acquiring some of her values from radicals in Britain, Schreiner also condemned the Tsarist regime in Russia for its oppression, and in particular its anti-Semitism. This made her an early champion of the Bolshevik regime in its fight against the White generals. In the latter period of her life, she inspired a number of radicals, mainly attached to the University of Cape Town, but they, too, remained outside formal organisation, and the extent of their influence on the Socialist movement is a matter of conjecture.[2] Among the whites there were other radical thinkers in the country: Harriet Colenso (daughter of the apostate Bishop Colenso), who gave her support to the formation of the ANC; Ivon Jones, who came to South Africa as a devout Unitarian and ended his life as a Bolshevik; Clare Goodlatte, a nun in the Anglican community and principal of their teacher’s training college in Grahamstown, who retired in 1920, shed her religion and ended her career as editor of the Trotskyist journal, The Spark. But the effect of their ideas, and the extent of their influence, has not been fully explored.
It is still arguable whether the majority of white workers, and particular-ly those who came from Britain, were ever involved in the Socialist move-ment. They did join trade unions, and some were associated with the Labour Party, but, except for a few obvious exceptions, their activities were not ostensibly Socialist. Afrikaner workers, who had their own political agenda, also organised and used the strike weapon to improve their work conditions. Although some seemed to be moving towards the SALP before the First World War, they were seduced by the call of Nationalists to close ranks against foreign overlords when war was declared. Whether their joining the Labour Party would have altered that movement is an open question, but their commitment to Socialism was not very strong, despite the appeal of the anti-imperialist slogans of the time. Like the English speaking workers, they gave no support to the struggles of other communities, and although there must have been some for whom colour was not an issue, most were probably as racist as the rest of the Afrikaner community.[3]
This racism, or at least indifference to the problems faced by other communities, was not one sided. The leaders of black movements, and many of their constituents, were also locked into conflicts with those who were ethnically different. But, like all generalisations, there were exceptions. There were differences inside each ethnic group, some class based, that need examination to understand the complexity of the situation. For ex-ample, the Indians, a pariah community in the eyes of the government, were far from homogeneous, and were split in their methods of struggle. And the differences were based on the sharp class divisions in the community. The middle and lower middle class followed Gandhi in his use of ‘passive resistance’ and boycotts to remove discrimination (and racism), but the farm labourers on the sugar cane fields, living at subsistence level, ceased work or rioted during the Indian passive resistance campaigns in 1913, against the wishes of Gandhi. In like fashion the Coloured leaders demand-ed incorporation into the white dominated society, whilst the Coloured and African women of the Orange Free State, with a different set of objectives, marched in unison in 1913 to stop the application of passes to women.
There were some expressions of solidarity across the ethnic divide and some blatant examples of racial indifference if not antagonism in those early years of struggle. In 1914, for example, Gandhi suspended his marches in order not to embarrass the government when it was confronted by a strike of railway workers, and the ANC in conference turned down a motion of support for the white miners in their strike action. This was but the mirror image, even if understandable, of white working class attitudes. Despite the call of a few white working class leaders for class solidarity, the whites involved in strikes in 1913-14 stood apart from their black fellow workers, and in one instance, on the Jagersfontein diamond mines, helped the police suppress black workers who rioted after one of their number had been killed by a white worker. Also, the few trade union leaders who publicly expressed support for the Indians in struggle were condemned by their own rank and file. It was, therefore, not exceptional for the Coloured and African leaders to condemn the white miners in the general strike of 1922, and for white and black workers to be involved in racist clashes during the strike.[4]
The South African Native National Congress (later renamed the Af-rican National Congress) was not the first ethnically organised movement, nor the largest. Yet its potential constituency led to its later predominance in the country as the representative of the African people. It was launched in 1912 by a small group of Africans, many of them professional men. The Congress had little formal organisation outside a national conference that was convened annually. It confined itself to appearances before commis-sions, to delegations and to petitions. The Congress ignored the early strike movement of 1913, and it was only after the First World War that its leadership was involved in some of the urban protests, both at the work-place and in an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand. But their invol-vement was short lived, and the leading figures withdrew from activities when their followers took to the streets.
The closest that the white workers came to class struggle was at a trade union level. These too had a strong ethnic base, aiming in part to keep the ratio of white to black miners constant. The miners’ strikes, repeating in 1913 a struggle that had been taken up in 1907, were a matter of life and death. The main demand was for a reduction of the number of drills (used by Africans underground), and a shortening of the time spent at the ore face. Although there can be little doubt that there was a racist element in the demand which would have cut the ratio of white to black employees, recent research shows that the primary concern of the miners was to prevent the spread of miners’ phthisis which reduced the working lives of miners to four years, and actual life to seven years. Although a reduction of time at the ore face and a reduction of the number of drills at work would have resulted in only a slight improvement, the demands were rational and reasonable. The result, however, was a brutal suppression of the white miners’ strike in 1913, including a massacre of white citizens who had gathered to hear a call for a general strike.[5]
There were some expressions of solidarity with black struggles from a minority of white miners’ leaders. They urged African mineworkers to join them in strike action, and some spoke publicly in support of the Indian struggle. Yet, as mentioned above, this was not reciprocated by leaders of the Coloured, Indian or even African movements. Reasons were not always given, and some of the motives are suspect, but white workers, who showed few signs of class solidarity, did nothing to bridge the racial gap.
The struggles of the white workers followed the trade union tradition that workers had brought from Europe—but only at the lowest level. Their racism (whether overt or covert) was even more rampant than that of their employers. But the class struggle did not need examples from abroad, and many confrontations were due to bad working conditions and an intran-sigence on the part of the ruling class. The government, in alliance with the employers, were prepared to shoot unarmed citizens, and mowed them down in 1913. It was a brutal suppression, and this was followed in 1914, when the railwaymen came out on strike, by a declaration of martial law, the investment of the Trades Hall where the strike leaders were in session, and their illegal deportation. It was this action by the government that led to the radicalisation of men inside a very tame and segregationist Labour Party, and took them eventually into the Communist Party.
The First World War was the dividing line between small-scale local groups and attempts at building a Socialist movement on a national level. Taking their stance on the resolution of the International Socialist Bureau against the war, and already angered by Smuts and the government after the strikes of 1913-14, a group in the Transvaal broke away from the Labour Party to form the International Socialist League (ISL), first as pacifists and then as international Socialists. They were isolated from the English speak-ing workers, who supported the war, and from the Afrikaner workers who opposed Britain and the Allies. This was one of the factors that led the leaders of the ISL to turn to the black workers. To them goes the credit of having been the first to create a black workers’ union, the International Workers of Africa. Yet there was doubt about the role the black worker would play in the transformation of the country. The issue received publicity in 1919 when municipal workers in Johannesburg paralysed the town by cutting the power supplies, and established a ‘Board of Management’ which they called a ‘soviet’. Meanwhile, their supporters attacked African workers who were involved in an anti-pass campaign, and the ’soviet’ leaders made a gratuitous offer to the government that they were prepared to form defence groups to protect white women and children. SP Bunting, one of the three leaders of the ISL, rounded on the white workers for the preten-tiousness of their use of the word ’soviet’ and for their racism. Jones, probably the most outstanding of all the early Socialist leaders, used the pages of the journal to criticise Bunting, and came to the defence of those ‘on strike’.[6] But Bunting was also unable to chart the possible evolution of the African working class. In a statement that is reminiscent of the Narod-niks of Tsarist Russia, he said that after the Socialist revolution (by whites!), Africans would be given back their land and saved from their miserable existence in the towns. Jones also thought that the white workers would overthrow the capitalist regime, but added as a corollary that the white workers could not sustain their revolution unless it was spread to the blacks within 24 hours.
It was the ISL which formed the central core of the Communist Party when it was launched in 1921, incorporating groups in Cape Town and Durban. Their conception of South Africa must be understood in terms of the class forces they could see at the time. The white workers seemed to constitute a force that could spearhead a Socialist movement. Africans might need sympathy, but were too far removed from the industrial prole-tariat that might take power. In their internationalism was nurtured the sympathy they felt for the revolution from its inception in February 1917, and they gave their allegiance to the new state in Russia. Ivon Jones had stated soon after the news reached Johannesburg in the local press, that the revolution in this advanced period of capitalism could not stop at this stage, and that the workers of Russia would take it further.
This loyalty to the Russian revolution was cemented when Jones went to Russia. He translated and publicised some works of Lenin from the Russian. He worked for the Comintern and the Profintern (the Communist and Red Trade Union Internationals), called on the Comintern to organise an international conference of Negro toilers, and was placed on the Execu-tive Council of the Comintern as a delegate for South Africa. Jones was seriously ill by this time and died in mid-1924. Those who remained in the CPSA lacked his critical ability, and became blind followers of Comintern policy. Even when part of the leadership disagreed fundamentally with Comintern policy, as SP Bunting did in 1928, they accepted the line laid down by the leaders of the USSR.[7]
There are indications that black mineworkers on the Witwatersrand tried to form African trade unions as early as 1912, but these early attempts failed.[8] There are slightly more details about an strike of 9000 miners in 1913, parallel to the white miners’ strike—but a warning that they could he prosecuted for breaking the law led to the men returning to work. Then came the war, and Africans faced increasing privation. There was rampant inflation, and conditions in the Reserves worsened, with more demands on the men from their families for money. Strikes during the war were spor-adic, but from 1918 to 1920 tools were downed in the towns and the mines, there was a boycott of the stores on the mines, which held a monopoly on trading and raised their prices ahead of inflation, and an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand. And finally in 1920 an anti-pass campaign in the towns coincided with the biggest walkout on the mines prior to 1987. Initially, the ANC leaders supported this action, but they withdrew when the crowd grew more militant. This was taken by men like Bunting as confirming their view that the Congress was led by men who could not and would not lead their people in militant action.[9]
There was news of rural disaffection in the eastern Cape soon after war was declared, but this, too, was smothered by strong administrative pres-sure. It was only after 1918 that a wave of action in the towns and in the countryside provided evidence that the African workers were not prepared to accept their lot passively. Besides the strikes on the mines and among municipal employees, and an anti-pass campaign on the Witwatersrand, there were extensive foci of unrest across the country. Although some of these have been described and the incidents well known, there is still no overall picture of the many events of the period of 1918-20. Where there was armed intervention, as in the case of Bulhoek, the events were notable for illustrating the depth of oppression in the country, and also for the first protests by Socialists against such action.[10]
The small group of whites who had left the Labour Party to form a more radical organisation were isolated in the white community. Their can-didates were soundly beaten in local and provincial elections, and there was little support from white workers. The English speaking white workers rallied to the support of the Empire; the Afrikaner workers tended to support their Nationalist leaders in opposition to the British. It was this, in part, that turned this small group to the organisation of a black general workers’ union, the Industrial Workers of Africa. The IWA was involved in some of the strikes of 1918, but heavy infiltration by police and a court case after the bucket workers’ strike led to its demise.
The leaders of the ISL were ahead of their followers in many respects, and there were many resignations. There was further discontent over policy following the dispute over the Johannesburg ’soviet’, and finally there were splits over the decision to support the general strike of 1922. It was in this struggle that the workers raised the slogan: ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.’ This Orwellian style banner, which many black workers at the time found unexceptional, was both anti-cap-italist and racist, with different factions in the struggle stressing one or other interpretation. Ultimately, the strikers were bombed into submission, some of their leaders were killed, and others were hanged by a revengeful government. Whether the party was right or wrong in the strike is still a matter of dispute, but the consequences were disastrous, and the members of the CPSA emerged even more isolated than previously (see below).
Independently of any other organisation there was an attempt, at the end of the First World War, led by Selby Msimang, a Nationalist leader, to form a general workers’ union, known as the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union. This was a name appropriated in 1920 by Clements Kadalie and popularised under the name ICU (I See You, White Man).[11] Members of the CPSA joined the ICU, and some were elected to senior posts on its Executive. In 1925, following a riot over beer brewing in the Bloemfontein location, the town officials came to the conclusion that the riot was the result of the low wage structure in the town. In a daring move the civic authorities appointed a commission of six whites and six blacks, three of them drawn from the local ICU leaders. The outcome was a minimum daily wage of 3/6d set for the town. This was the year in which the ICU first established a branch in the Transvaal—but few noted then or subsequently that there was no organisation in factories, railways, or even shops.
The ICU groups that came into existence were either based in the rural areas, in small villages, or in the townships. There was an internal logic in this move that most histories ignore. There were no industries large enough to sustain a trade union except for the mines and the railways: unions were not allowed access to the former, and the government would not recognise a black railway union (the white union being effectively a company union). Consequently, following the success in Bloemfontein, the ICU organised in the townships but not in the workshops. Then, in a separate set of campaigns, they went into the rural areas, calling for liberation and the right to own land. They ended by collecting money from their members for the purchase of land—and, as in all such ventures, the money vanished into the pockets of the collectors.
The ICU was not a trade union, but (in the towns) a community based organisation. Its constituents in the townships were mainly workers, but the form of organisation was not directed at the scene of production. It cam-paigned for township rights, and in at least one case (as noted above) helped secure a minimum wage for an entire township. It was a notable victory, although the wage was still miserable. But the movement did not succeed as a trade union.
The ICU faced harassment and persecution, but that was only one of its problems. Urged by conservative whites, like the authoress Ethelreda Lewis, the ICU expelled members of the CPSA, thus depriving itself of its most dedicated and efficient members. The arrival of WG Ballinger, a member of the Cooperative Society in Motherwell, to act as an adviser to the ICU, could not help, and his presence only speeded up the disintegra-tion of the ICU. Corruption was also rife in the ICU. Officials dipped deeply into union funds, committee meetings were disrupted by members who were too drunk to stay awake, there were expulsions, counter-expulsions and splits, and the ICU, after a last burst of activity in which it was involved in strikes in the eastern Cape and near Johannesburg, faded out of exist-ence.
In the wake of the defeat of the general strike in 1922, the CPSA was isolated and reduced to a small handful of mainly white members. It was under these conditions that it debated the possibility of affiliation to the Labour Party, in line with Lenin’s suggestion that the small parties in the English speaking countries try an entryist tactic. An application for affilia-tion in 1923 was rejected by the SALP, and the CPSA decided in December 1924, by a small majority, not to try again. The party was split on the issue, and among those who resigned were Frank Glass, and he was supported by Bill Andrews (later Chairperson of the party during the Second World War). It seems that a group in Cape Town, led by Manuel Lopes, also resigned, and like Glass joined the Labour Party. This move could not be sustained, particularly in view of the Labour Party’s segregationist position. Individually or together, these former members of the CPSA left the Labour Party in the late 1920s.
The CPSA, manipulated by Comintern apparatchiks, was forced in 1928 to accept the Black Republic slogan during the notorious Third Period, which was supposed to signal the onset of world revolution. In the squabbles that followed leading members were expelled and pilloried under the most disgraceful conditions. At times it was apparently expulsion for expulsion’s sake (because that was the only way to keep the party on its toes!).
It was at this point that some former members gathered together as supporters of the Left Opposition. Glass (who was the first to have a letter published in The Militant, organ of the American Left Opposition) left South Africa in 1931 for China, where he worked with the Trotskyists under the name of Li Furen.[12] Others helped to form the Independent Labour Party in Cape Town in 1932.[13] Only a few of those expelled from the CPSA entered the Trotskyist groups. Most dropped out of all political activity.
There proved to be one centre in which members of the new Trotskyist groups were able to seize the initiative. Members of the CPSA on the Witwatersrand had organised African trade unions, partly to overcome their exclusion from the ICU, and partly to create an active link with the Profintern. In accordance with Third Period tactics, the unions were led into ill-prepared strikes, and lost many of their members. The collapse of the unions was hastened by the expulsions of leading organisers, and it was in the political space left open that Trotskyists formed a network of African trade unions in the Transvaal. This is discussed below.
When the first Trotskyist groups were formed, they were confronted by a white working class, the most important of whom, on the mines and the railways and in heavy industry, had made their peace with their employers. The black workers were still small in numbers, but the political and trade union organisations had succumbed to inertia, to harassment, or to internal corruption. It was time to start afresh and the field was open to any dynamic group—but the task would not be easy, and many of the earlier Socialists had been destroyed by their experiences inside the CPSA.
Notes
1. For example, throughout the 1920s there was a belief that Americans would appear in the sky to emancipate the African people. This was based on the belief, brought over from the First World War, that all Americans were black, and this was combined with stories of the effectiveness of the Garveyite movement in the USA.
2. See B Hirson, ‘Ruth Schechter: Friend to Olive Schreiner’, Searchlight South Africa , no 9.
3. This, despite the fact that in 1913 Dr Malan, the future Prime Minister in 1948, gave a lecture in praise of Socialism and of Marx. The circumstances that led to this peroration are not clear.
4. For Jagersfontein see B Hirson, Judy Jancovich and Julie Wells, ‘Diamonds are Forever but Gold is For Now: Whatever Did Happen At Jagersfontein?’, seminar paper at Southern Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London. The 1922 strike produced the slogan: ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.’ However, there was an ambiguity in the interpretation of that slogan, with many workers believing (correctly) that the strike was a defence against the mineowners’ assault on their standard of living. Even the extent of the racial attacks is in need of reinterpretation. There were only a handful of these fights—and these were highlighted by the government to discredit the strikers. Some were started by whites, others by blacks, and in some cases the whites were incensed by the use of black workers as scabs.
5. See Baruch Hirson and Gwyn Williams, The Delegate for Africa: The Life of David Ivon Jones , forthcoming. General Smuts, who was Minister of Justice, Minister of Defence and Prime Minister in several governments, called in the (British) Dragoons during the events of 1913. He also used bombers to break the resistance of the Bondelzwarts in South West Africa, and to destroy centres of working class revolt in 1922.
6. Yet Jones was to change his approach, and stated in 1919, when he appeared in court as the first Bolshevik to be tried in South Africa, that the future of the revolution lay with the black working class, and the South African Lenin would most probably be black.
7. See the contributions of Bunting at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern when he spoke against the Black Republic slogan, reprinted in Searchlight South Africa , no 4.
8. These were reported in the Voice of Labour.
9. There was discontent in the towns, fuelled by the decline in real wages and a strike of ‘bucket boys’ (that is, night soil removers). The arrest of these men and the callous way in which they were treated by the court (they were sentenced to do their work under armed guard without pay) led to a general radicalisation of the urban Africans.
10. The Bulhoek massacre as described by Frank Glass at the time is printed in Searchlight South Africa , no 6.
11. The ICU was associated initially with a dock workers’ strike in Cape Town. The strike was successful, but only the Coloured workers gained a wage increase. The African workers gained nothing. Nonetheless, the smell of victory gave this new movement an impetus (and a myth) that sustained it over many years.
12. According to Wang Fanxi he was asked by Glass to coin a name. He decided on Li, because it was a common Chinese name and Furen because it was the nearest that he could get to Frank. In the old Wade-Giles system of transliteration, his name appears as Li Fu-Jen.
13. Those members of the CPSA who joined the Labour Party in Cape Town in 1925 found working in a colour bar organisation impossible. They resigned and helped form the ILP, a small group that contained Stalinists and Social Democrats. When the ILP collapsed, those attracted to the Left Opposition joined the Lenin Club.
In Honor Of The 143rd Anniversary
Of The Paris Commune-From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007)-
On American Political Discourse
A good example from the not too distant past, which I am fond of citing because it seems so counter intuitive, was opposition to the impeachment of one William Jefferson Clinton, at one time President of the United States and now potentially the first First Ladies’ man. How, one might ask could professed socialists defend the rights of the Number One Imperialist –in-Chief. Simple, Clinton was not being tried for any real crimes against working people but found himself framed by the right wing cabal for his personal sexual preferences and habits. That he was not very artful in defense of himself is beside the point. We say government out off the bedrooms (or wherever) whether White House or hovel. We do no favor political witch hunts of the highborn or the low. Interestingly, no one at the time proposed that he be tried as a war criminal for his very real crimes in trying to bomb Serbia, under the guidance of one Wesley Clark, back to the Stone Age (and nearly succeeding). Enough said.
Markin comment:
In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain,
attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American
presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed
election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the
event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious,
in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who
really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the
Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world
politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially
the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois
commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things
to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies,
the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for
a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some
of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.
************
NO TO RELIGIOUS TESTS FOR OFFICE -
FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Every once in a while left wing
propagandists, like this writer, are forced to comment on odd ball political or
social questions that are not directly related to the fight for socialism.
Nevertheless such questions must be addressed to in the interest of preserving
democratic rights, such as they are. I have often argued that socialists are,
or should be, the best defenders of democratic rights, hanging in there long
after many bourgeois democrats have thrown in the towel especially on
constitutional questions like abortion and searches and seizures.
A good example from the not too distant past, which I am fond of citing because it seems so counter intuitive, was opposition to the impeachment of one William Jefferson Clinton, at one time President of the United States and now potentially the first First Ladies’ man. How, one might ask could professed socialists defend the rights of the Number One Imperialist –in-Chief. Simple, Clinton was not being tried for any real crimes against working people but found himself framed by the right wing cabal for his personal sexual preferences and habits. That he was not very artful in defense of himself is beside the point. We say government out off the bedrooms (or wherever) whether White House or hovel. We do no favor political witch hunts of the highborn or the low. Interestingly, no one at the time proposed that he be tried as a war criminal for his very real crimes in trying to bomb Serbia, under the guidance of one Wesley Clark, back to the Stone Age (and nearly succeeding). Enough said.
Now we are confronted with another
strange situation in the case of one ex-Governor of Massachusetts and current
Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney on the question of his Mormon
religious affiliation and his capacity to be president of a secular state.
Romney, on Thursday December 6, 2007 fled down to Houston, apparently forced by
his vanishing prospects in Iowa, and made a speech about his Mormon faith, or
at least his fitness for office. This speech evoked in some quarters, at least
formally, Jack Kennedy’s use in the 1960 presidential campaign of the same tool
concerning his Roman Catholicism as a way to cut across anti-Catholic bigotry
in a mainly Protestant country and to affirm his commitment to a democratic
secular state. I pulled up that speech off the Internet and although Kennedy
clearly evoked his religious affiliation many times in that speech he left it
at that, a personal choice. He did not go on and on about his friendship with
Jesus or enumerate the virtues of an increased role for religion in political
life.
Romney’s play is another kettle of
fish entirely. He WANTS to affirm that his Mormon beliefs rather than being
rather esoteric are in line with mainstream Protestant fundamentalist tenets.
In short, Jesus is his guide. Christ what hell, yes hell, have we come to when
a major political party in a democratic secular state has for all intents and
purposes a religious test for its nominee for president. A cursory glance at
the history of 18thcentury England and its exclusion clauses,
codified in statutes, for Catholics and dissenters demonstrates why our
forbears rejected that notion. It is rather ironic that Romney evoked the name
of Samuel Adams as an avatar of religious toleration during some ecumenical
meeting in 1774. Hell, yes when you are getting ready to fight for a Republic,
arms in hand, and need every gun willing to fight the King you are damn right
religion is beside the point. Revolutions are like that. Trying to prove your
mettle as a fundamentalist Christian in order to woo the yahoo vote in 2007 is
hardly in the same category. Nevertheless on the democratic question- down with
religious test for political office, formal or otherwise.
Now to get nasty. Isn’t it about time we started running
these religious nuts back into their hideouts? I have profound differences with
the political, social and economic organization of this country. However, as
stated above I stand for the defense of the democratic secular state against
the yahoos when they try, friendly with Jesus or not, to bring religion
foursquare into the ‘public square’. We have seen the effects of that for the
last thirty or forty years and, hit me on the head if I am dreaming, but isn’t
the current occupant of the White House on so kind of first name basis with his
God. You know, all those faith-based initiatives Look, this country is a prime
example of an Enlightenment experiment, and tattered as it has become it is not
a bad base to move on from. Those who, including Brother Ronmey, want a
faith-based state-get back, way back. In the fight against religious
obscurantism I will stand with science, frail as it is sometimes, any day-
Defend the Enlightenment, and let’s move on.
Friday, March 28, 2014
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Baruch Hirson-The Economic Background to South Africa
Markin comment (2010):
The International Communist League (ICL), the international organization of which Workers Vanguard is the flagship publications, in numerous articles and published conference reports has emphasized, correctly I believe, that in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union that the political consciousness of the international working class, although unevenly, has taken big steps backward in its consciousness. The shorthand way to speak of such a condition is that on a day to day basis the bulk of the workers do not connect their defensive struggles with the struggle for socialism.
Seemingly working class history for the past 150 years or so is a blank page although those in the least bit familiar with that history know that it is rich in examples, positive and negative, of working class struggle for our communist future. Although one could see that retrograde situation developing, in some cases graphically as on the American labor scene, well before that demise something snapped in the international labor movement in reaction to the incessant “communism is dead” triumphalism of the international capitalist class and its mouthpieces. Although that situation is slowly changing under the conditions of the current capitalist onslaught, especially in Europe, that sense of the decline of political consciousness is still pervasive.
That brings us to the class consciousness that underlies the article under review in this entry on the situation in South Africa. I mentioned above (as the ICL has in its articles as well) that the decline of political consciousness was not monolithic. South Africa, due to many factors in its national framework not the least the massive struggle against apartheid, may represent the classic contrary case. In the immediate post-Soviet period when everyone, their brothers, their sisters, and their great-aunts was disclaiming anything but hardened and eternal hostility to the word communism, communist organizations, or even lukewarm socialist formations in South Africa they were making an event, a public event, out of the legalization of the Communist Party.
Of course, we know, at least those of us who claim the Trotskyist tradition, that this was the just the legalization of another old time Stalinist, class- collaborationist, two-stage revolution operation but that party represented communism down at the base, communist revolution as the “comrades” understood it. Hey, these guys and gals, these street militants, were waving red flags night and day with the expectation that not only apartheid was over with the African National Congress(ANC) taking over the reins of government but that the meek (militant meek, that is, the others get nothing in this wicked old world) shall finally inherit the earth. It gives me no satisfaction, none whatsoever, nor should it to you that their illusions have been cruelly dashed overt the past sixteen years.
If South Africa represented (and in many ways still does, witness the recent wide-spread strikes AGAINST the ANC-SACP-COSATU government) something like the vanguard of political consciousness in the international labor movement it also represents the classic Stalinist (and not Stalinist alone) stagist theory of revolution in less advanced countries. In short, first the democratic revolution then, in the future, the socialist revolution. Sixteen years on and the “comrades” are still waiting. Thus we have a pretty good idea when that second stage kicks in-never.
And that is my second point. If the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 proved once and for all that the bourgeoisie of an emerging capitalist country is incapable, for a thousand reasons not the least its myriad intermingled links to the major imperialist powers, of leading (or maybe even tolerating) a democratic revolution then several decades later the emerging (or already existing) bourgeoisies in less advanced capitalist countries are even less likely to so. In South Africa Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution retains its validity. No, not just it validity, more than that it is merely the beginning of political wisdom for those crushed “comrades” down at the base still waiting for the second promised stage. Thus the order of the day is for the black-centered workers movement to break with the ANC as a matter of elementary political hygiene.
Sometimes one can overuse analogies (although that does not prevent anyone from doing so, or it hasn’t in the past, including by this writer) from one period to the next. Obviously there are major differences (not the least the question of political leadership of the working class) between the situation in Russia 1917 and South Africa today but I keep being drawn to the Menshevik’s notion in 1917 (and before and after, as well) that the bourgeoisie should lead the democratic revolution in Russia and the role of peasant and working class socialist organizations was to “support” or “push” them forward. That candidate in 1917 was the Cadet party (Constitutional Democrats); today in South Africa (at least for now) for the Mensheviks of today, the SACP and its hangers-on, it is the ANC. So what, as is pretty well described in the linked article above, we see in South Africa is what Russia might have looked like if the Menshevik “vision” had worked out. No, thank you, then and now. Learn the lessons outlined in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Forward!
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
This was the position when the first whites arrived to set up a refreshment station for the ships of the Dutch East Indian Company (DEIC) in their passage to the East Indies. In the seventeenth century merchant capitalism, assisted by the growth of shipping fleets, was the prevailing form of enterprise, and it was the might of the Heeren 17 (the directorate of the DEIC), not to mention their arrogance and aggression, that allowed the Dutch to take control of the Indies, and subsequently the Cape. The men who arrived at the Cape were servants of the DEIC, and were required to stay within the jurisdiction of the Dutch-appointed governor. Their task was to provision the passing ships and to feed and protect the local settlement. Men came first, and because there was a dearth of Dutch women, the earliest marriages or liaisons included many with the women of the local Khoi or San clans (known derisively as Hottentots and Bushmen respectively).
The story of the region was of the dispossession of the local inhabitants: of their cattle and their land, of their decimation and their reduction to servitude. The DEIC also sent prisoners from Malacca and the east (described later as Malay people) who were reduced to slavery. These people provided a labour force that was otherwise not available, and in time they rose to become the artisans employed in the Cape. More workers became available for the white settlers when the Khoi were subjugated and the African peoples conquered.
Ethnicity divided the growing Cape settlement, and yet, at first, the colour barrier was set aside for those who were converted to Christianity, and ‘free’ men and women arose from the baptismal font. Even at the topmost levels colour was a matter of small concern; one of the appointed Governors being of ‘mixed’ blood. Only later were rigid ethnic boundaries defined and hardened, and religious conversion was no longer a passage to ‘freedom’.
The Governors at the Cape could not, or would not, control the outward movement of the settlers, and extended the colony’s boundaries to maintain their control. Nor could the Governors stop trading, cattle rustling or clashes on the ever-moving borders, as the settlers met with African peoples, themselves moving down the coast. When the Xhosa people, moving down the south-eastern coast, were confronted by migrating settlers in what is now the eastern Cape, they were defeated in frontier wars. This was the beginning of the subjugation of an entire people and their absorption into the settler economy as a servile class. The possession of the Cape by the Dutch prevailed until Britain, during the Napoleonic wars, claimed that its sea route to India was in danger. It occupied the region and added the Cape to its Empire.
Marx has written in purple prose of the disastrous effect of the expansion of capitalism on the people of the colonies, and this needs no repetition. However, he argued that capitalism, with all its faults, transformed the world, established a single world market and undermined, if not destroyed, archaic social systems. This was the way of progress, and, concerned as Socialists might be for the colonised people, the sweep of capitalism across the globe was necessary and inevitable.[1] The task of the colonies was to supply raw materials for the European countries, act as military or supply bases, and trade with their ‘mother’ countries.
The settlers at the Cape were able to supply passing ships, but had little to trade, and they found no minerals to mine. This meant that the region that was to grow into the Cape colony was poor and remained poor, despite the development of its farmlands. Ostrich feathers, wool and hides and an inferior wine were not the basis for large-scale capital accumulation.
The first significant change in the nineteenth century occurred in or around 1836, when groups of Dutch in the eastern Cape, rejecting controls imposed by the new British administration—particularly on slavery and the status of Africans—crossed the coastal mountain ranges and moved into the interior of the country. Current research suggests that the interior had been emptied by slavers (of Portuguese or of Cape origin).[2] This revisionist view, still hotly denied by historians who maintain that the people of the interior had scattered because of Zulu expansionism, has still to be proven. But whatever the reason, large portions of the interior were desolate, and the trekkers occupied the land in what became the Orange Free State, carving out huge areas for themselves as farmland, and incorporating previous occupants as labourers or labour tenants.[3]
The Dutch also moved into Natal, where they came into conflict with the Zulu people, who were ultimately defeated in battle. The British followed, and there were further battles to secure the subjugation of the indigenous peoples. The control by white settlers led inevitably to the opening of the interior to trade. Sugar cane was tried in Natal, and its success led to the importation of labourers from Asia. First there were indentured Indian labourers, introduced to work on the sugar fields in 1860 in the colony named Natal. After serving their time they were repatriated unless they chose to stay, either to work their own plots of land or to move into the towns as labourers. Then in 1905, after the South African war, when Africans were reluctant to work at lowered wages, Chinese labourers were imported to work on the gold mines. This complicated the race question in South Africa even further, until they were repatriated after agitation in South Africa and Britain.[4]
This is jumping ahead. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a thin sprinkling of whites in the interior of the country, and a British administration and British police or troops in the Cape and Natal colonies. This was in keeping with the British policy of protecting the sea route to its imperial treasures in the East. The interior region was less important, although the Boer republics, named the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (SAR, later the Transvaal), were annexed and then freed. It is not always certain whether such moves were the result of local administration initiatives or were ordered from London. The Treasury in London wept crocodile tears every time more money was requisitioned for troop movements—but the money was always forthcoming.
Yet, it must be stressed, there was no unity in the subcontinent. Even the South African Republic consisted of semi-autonomous communities who policed their own regions and owed minimum allegiance to the central government. There was even less contact with scattered African peoples, and there were three regions, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, that gained autonomy outside the white controlled regions and maintained a tenuous independence by accepting, or appealing for, British trusteeship. The subjugation of those people who fell within the borders of white settlement was achieved through skirmishes or wars, and over several decades they were incorporated into the labour force for the whites. Ultimately everyone fell under the control of one overarching economy—but inside this economic control, local African peoples maintained aspects of their past social structures and their original polities. These ossified and were converted into branches of administrative control.
In 1868 diamonds were discovered at Kimberley inside the Orange Free State. In a diplomatic move that was little less than criminal, the region was annexed by the Cape. There was a massive injection of labour from across Southern and Portuguese East Africa as the digging commenced for these precious stones. With the discovery of diamonds the economic prospects of the country were transformed. These stones provided a sudden and instant source of finance for diggers, the diamond buyers and the Cape administration. The railway, which had not previously exceeded 10 miles in and around Cape Town, was extended to Kimberley, 500 miles away.
People from across South Africa, together with adventurers from around the world, flocked to the diamond fields, and although black labour was used to dig the extensive fields, there was a place at one end of the diggings for a small group of African and other entrepreneurs who mined on their own account. Most significantly, the diamond buyers, who concentrated this operation in fewer and fewer hands, acquired wealth on a scale not previously seen in South Africa.[5] Some of this money was to be used for opening up the gold mines in 1886 in and around Johannesburg (or Goli, the city of gold) on what became known as the Witwatersrand (the Ridge of White Waters). The discovery of gold brought in foreign finance capital, and transformed the subcontinent. This was the money commodity, and there was no shortage of investors. Yet there was a paradox in this new activity. The shaft sinking, which eventually took the miners a mile below the surface to the low grade ore, together with the equipment to recover the gold, required investments of millions of pounds. It was because gold was being mined that investors were attracted. This was because the demand for this commodity could not be exhausted, and dividends, low as they were, were assured. Yet this was capital accumulation with a catch. The low grade ore on the Witwatersrand had to compete with gold that was panned with little capital outlay as nuggets and with the store of gold that stretched back to antiquity. Consequently, the price set for gold coming onto the market was far below its value, that is, the price that would have been charged for any other product requiring the same amount of work. Also, as in all colonies (whether physically or economically dominated), dividends had to be shared between local entrepreneurs and foreign finance houses. More importantly, the price of gold was internationally determined and fixed with little regard to local conditions. Because the price was pegged at a level that would not upset the world’s money exchanges, the price per fine ounce was kept well below its value (measured in hours of labour required for its extraction) in South Africa.
The mineowners protested that the price was too low, and so did the government, but they were not going to stop production. Consequently, the one factor in production that could be kept low, that of wages paid to African labourers, was pared. Every means was employed to ensure that workers were paid the lowest possible wages. This was managed at several levels: labourers was imported, the work force was divided, and the white labour sector paid at levels that were adjudged well above the cost of labour in any other working class occupation. The African labourers, a large part recruited from outside the country’s borders, were employed for fixed short terms and then sent back home. The workers were housed in single sex compounds which were sealed to outside organisers. Even the African workers were divided, with specified tasks assigned to men of different ethnic origin, the division bolstered by separating dormitories, the heads of which were ethnically-based by installing tribal sub-chiefs. The manyfaceted means of dividing the workers extended from the differential use of men from different tribes in selected mines to the fostering of tribal dance teams and the weekly open air competitions sponsored by the mines.
There were historic factors that allowed for the division between white and black workers. There had been a large importation of skilled workers from Europe and a much larger number of unskilled African labourers from local territories. The whites were housed separately from blacks and were paid 15 or more times the rate received by Africans. Even the work skills were defined on ethnic grounds, excluding Africans from certain tasks. There were also differential tasks given to tribesmen and these came to acquire a particular status. Quite how this evolved is uncertain, but the effect was clear: there was intense intertribal rivalry.
The opening of the goldfields led to a further expansion of the railways, and with them the docks. They carried goods, both exports and imports, across the 1000 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town and the 500 miles to Durban, displacing dispatch riders and wagons alike. As the system expanded and went even further towards Portuguese East Africa and Rhodesia, the labour force grew, bringing in thousands of men. Once again, segregation was imposed. Engine driving and even stoking was reserved for whites, whilst blacks were relegated to permanent way repairs or to cabin services.
Originally the mines were in the hands of Uitlanders (foreigners), but the sites were in the South African Republic (SAR), a Boer territory. This led to the infamous Jameson raid in 1895, with the minefields as the target. Backed by Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, in the best tradition of age old pirates, this failed. That left only one option for the gung-ho imperialists: the SAR was conquered and annexed by Britain in the war of 1899-1902.[6] It is one of the myths of the time that the war of 1899 was waged across an ethnic divide of Boer against Brit, in which blacks were excluded. But this is a gross oversimplification. Several European powers gave moral backing to the Dutch, and a section of the more militant white workers supported the Boer government, whom they saw as their protectors against the mine magnates. Blacks intervened at various levels. However, the crucial fact is that the British army prevailed in the war even though the cost in men and money was high. Britain gained firm control of the territories and also of the source of gold—the money commodity of the era in which sterling (linked to gold) reigned supreme.
The war between Britain and the Boer republics has been a centre of historical attraction for many authors. That is understandable. However, the description of military action in 1900, interesting as it may be and important for an understanding of the origins of trench warfare, does not provide any insight into the events leading to that war, or of its social consequences. There can be little doubt that the war was fought in order to gain control of the country which contained these crucial gold fields, and that after the conclusion of hostilities political power over the country was replaced in the hands of the Boer leaders. The bitterness left by the war, however, led to the unfolding of an Afrikaner nationalism and a legacy of hatred of the British and foreign financiers. It was during the war that JA Hobson developed his ideas on parasitic rentier capitalism. It was Hobson who wrote vitriolic attacks on imperialism, and the message was taken up by some Afrikaner leaders. It was thus no accident that Dr DF Malan, future leader on the National Party, spoke in 1913 in favour of Socialism and praised Marx for his insight into capitalism.[7]
The single greatest factor that motivated the mineowners was the need to depress the wages of the black workers, both before the war and in the construction of the subsequent state. They saw that a movement of black workers between mines allowed them to bid up wages, and they consequently set out to minimise competition among themselves and stop the free movement of the workers. It was for this reason that the Chamber of Mines and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wanela) were formed. The latter had recruiting agents at every main centre to find labour, and obtained an annual levy of men from the Portuguese.
The Chamber set about imposing an internal pass (the notorious pass law) on a reluctant SAR administration. This was the basis of the law that restricted black movement until revoked in recent years. There were other factors that motivated the mineowners in their attacks on the Boer states. The mines needed a unified state, both for the recruitment of labourers and for their control, and for a unified transport system. The Boers, predominantly farmers, had little interest in supplying black labour to the mines—in conflict with their own needs—and their resources were too slender to allow them to police the pass laws or the liquor laws as demanded by the mine management.
The British state was called in to clear out Boer obstacles, and Milner, an agent of the state, created the centralised unified bureaucracy to enforce the regulations required by the mineowners. He and his imported officials (Milner’s ‘kindergarten’) laid the foundations of the modern South African state, and imposed some of his own racist laws on the country, in particular the discriminations against Indians that were to trouble that community through the coming years.
The population of South Africa was always small, estimated at four million at the end of the nineteenth century (one million of them white). The country attracted few immigrants, and the local growth rate was small. To the Dutch were added French Huguenots and German immigrants, British settlers (after 1814), and a trickle of immigrants from Europe. Separately at first, and then together, the whites -whatever their internal differences—reduced the colonised people to an inferior status. Even growing class divisions among the whites that came with the development of the economy only reinforced ethnic divisions as each group specialised (or indeed, had no option but to take on certain trades).
The importation of skilled craftsmen and miners from Europe led almost automatically to the importation of trade unions, with many of the original sections being branches of British unions. This right to organise which helped to advance the workers’ rights and allowed for strike action stood in vivid contrast to the illegalisation of black strike action and a refusal to grant them state recognition under (much later) industrial legislation. If there had been no colour bar in employment this would have opened up that differential anyway. As it was, the already existent racial differences (in wages, housing, social and sporting activity, and so on) were buttressed by the protection or advances of white living standards relative to those of Africans.[8]
Even more significantly for the period that followed, the capitalists who owned the gold mines made one crucial concession over labour policy. Though the white miners were defeated in two strikes in 1907 and 1913, and bombed into submission in the general strike of 1922, and had their claims negated in a subsequent court case, they were allowed to retain their privileged position even when it was no longer justified economically. This helped bolster the new form of racism that was associated with the control of a sector of the labour market.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, there were three main centres of economic development: on the white owned farms, and in the two mining areas: Kimberley for diamonds and the Witwatersrand for gold. Elsewhere, the economy of the country was stagnant. The internal market was small and relatively poor, with the African population unable to purchase anything but essentials.[9] There was a small expansion of manufacture during the First World War, and then stagnation again until after the lifting of the depression of 1929-31.[10] The finance houses associated with mining capital saw little reason for investing in manufacture. It was cheaper to import goods from Europe, including materials for building, bricks excepted. Consequently, African men who came into (or were allowed into) the towns were employed generally as domestic servants and gardeners, and even as washermen. Only a small number entered trades, and then merely as unskilled workers, the main occupations of whom consisted of carrying tools and materials, digging trenches, storing or distributing goods, or making tea and running errands. This was the beginning of a workforce but not yet a working class. When the African working class was being formed in the 1930s, it was concentrated along the Witwatersrand and in small pockets around the ports of Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. The workers in the western Cape were predominantly Coloured, and Indians were a significant force in Natal, although here too they were dominant as waiters or barmen in the hotels.
African women played almost no part in the early industrial period. Where they came into town (and they were restricted both by regulations of government and control by African tribal chiefs), they were confined to domestic service, replacing the African men. Others brewed beer illegally, and some were full or part time prostitutes.
There was a growing informal sector. Africans became hawkers or even shopkeepers, craftsmen who made furniture or offered services in the black townships. A small number entered the church (and in particular the independent churches), became teachers (with a primary school plus two years teacher’s training qualification), or found some place in the police force, prison service and so on. This was barely a petit-bourgeoisie, and there were never more than a handful that could be called well-to-do.
If the mines and later the industries constituted the crowning heights of the economy, agriculture was always a source of exports, earning a large portion of foreign exchange, and also growing food for the population. Furthermore, the white agricultural region was collectively the largest employer of labour in the country. However, as in all colonies, the pattern of farming activity was not simple. Until 1936 Africans were allowed to own land—mostly on a communal basis—on about seven per cent of the land area of the country. Legislation in 1936 provided for the doubling of this area, but only as Trust Land under tight government control.[11] An African peasant class, supplying produce for the market, had come into existence at the end of the nineteenth century, but had been squeezed out by the white farmers. Thereafter, only a minority, mostly associated with chiefly families, acquired wealth. Most of the rest (about one-third of the African population) were reduced to subsistence farming, and lived in the Reserves only when they were not seeking employment in the towns. An even larger number of Africans were squatters on the white farms, in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, providing labour in exchange for the right to farm plots for part of the year, or they were farm tenants or labourers. Among the latter were men removed from the towns after breaking segregatory laws, and who were used as cheap convict labour. In the western Cape Coloured labourers were employed, paid in part by the notorious tot (liquor) system. In Natal Africans had largely replaced Indian labourers in the cane fields.
The demands of the rural population were diverse, but most demanded the enlargement of land holdings in the Reserves, or in the white controlled farms, and the return of what the tenant farmers and squatters saw as their own land. The complaints of the farm labourers and the people on the Reserves took in the need for better social amenities, for schools and health, for more time to tend their own plots, and for the right to leave the farmer or indeed the rural areas.
I have concentrated attention on the black population, because they were in the majority, and because they alone could form the mainstay of an opposition to the ruling class. But there were obviously other people who filtered into industry, both from abroad and from the whites already resident in the country. The latter included large numbers of young women, and some men, who left the rural areas and sought work in the towns. They came from families of white labour tenants who were the first victims of the depression in the late 1920s.[12] When they entered the towns they were employed as domestic workers or as waitresses, in the sweated clothing trade, and in sweet, canning, tobacco, chemical and other burgeoning workshops. The men found employment on the trams and the railways, and in the trades. They were small in number, but they played a significant role in the working class movement in the 1930s, and were among the more militant white workers.
White immigrants came to South Africa throughout the twentieth century, always in smaller numbers than those who went to the Americas or Australasia, but they arrived and included in their ranks entrepreneurs and workers. They brought with them some capital or their ability to work, and among the latter there were many with experience in the European labour movement. There were others, particularly Jews, who brought with them a tradition of Socialism. Many immigrants joined the impoverished white farm workers in the newly established manufacturing plants in the early 1930s. Their work conditions were miserable and their wages were low. These establishments were dwarfed by the mining houses and state enterprises, which now included the railways and docks, the water and electricity industries, the state steel enterprise, and the enterprises controlled by municipal, provincial and state bodies. But it was the small industries that provided the base for a new and militant trade union movement. However, with few exceptions, the workers were indelibly divided by colour, and the few instances of collaboration across the colour line are noteworthy as exceptions to the rule.
Although the number of black workers grew, and there was significant organisation during the 1930s, their position in production only altered appreciably during the Second World War when they replaced the whites who had volunteered for service in the army. There was an increase in the number of small workshops to replace previously imported goods, road building was accelerated for potential defence purposes, and gold production was increased to pay for Britain’s war machine. Indeed, some of the specie was shipped direct to the USA on Britain’s account. Agriculture also expanded to feed the troops in Africa, for export to West Africa and for the local market. These were all areas of increased black employment.
An urbanised black working class, as distinct from a labour force (and migrant at that), was coming into existence. The time for organisation had arrived, and among those actively engaged in organising the trade union movement in the Transvaal were Trotskyists. Some of that story is told in the pages that follow.
Markin comment (2010):
The International Communist League (ICL), the international organization of which Workers Vanguard is the flagship publications, in numerous articles and published conference reports has emphasized, correctly I believe, that in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union that the political consciousness of the international working class, although unevenly, has taken big steps backward in its consciousness. The shorthand way to speak of such a condition is that on a day to day basis the bulk of the workers do not connect their defensive struggles with the struggle for socialism.
Seemingly working class history for the past 150 years or so is a blank page although those in the least bit familiar with that history know that it is rich in examples, positive and negative, of working class struggle for our communist future. Although one could see that retrograde situation developing, in some cases graphically as on the American labor scene, well before that demise something snapped in the international labor movement in reaction to the incessant “communism is dead” triumphalism of the international capitalist class and its mouthpieces. Although that situation is slowly changing under the conditions of the current capitalist onslaught, especially in Europe, that sense of the decline of political consciousness is still pervasive.
That brings us to the class consciousness that underlies the article under review in this entry on the situation in South Africa. I mentioned above (as the ICL has in its articles as well) that the decline of political consciousness was not monolithic. South Africa, due to many factors in its national framework not the least the massive struggle against apartheid, may represent the classic contrary case. In the immediate post-Soviet period when everyone, their brothers, their sisters, and their great-aunts was disclaiming anything but hardened and eternal hostility to the word communism, communist organizations, or even lukewarm socialist formations in South Africa they were making an event, a public event, out of the legalization of the Communist Party.
Of course, we know, at least those of us who claim the Trotskyist tradition, that this was the just the legalization of another old time Stalinist, class- collaborationist, two-stage revolution operation but that party represented communism down at the base, communist revolution as the “comrades” understood it. Hey, these guys and gals, these street militants, were waving red flags night and day with the expectation that not only apartheid was over with the African National Congress(ANC) taking over the reins of government but that the meek (militant meek, that is, the others get nothing in this wicked old world) shall finally inherit the earth. It gives me no satisfaction, none whatsoever, nor should it to you that their illusions have been cruelly dashed overt the past sixteen years.
If South Africa represented (and in many ways still does, witness the recent wide-spread strikes AGAINST the ANC-SACP-COSATU government) something like the vanguard of political consciousness in the international labor movement it also represents the classic Stalinist (and not Stalinist alone) stagist theory of revolution in less advanced countries. In short, first the democratic revolution then, in the future, the socialist revolution. Sixteen years on and the “comrades” are still waiting. Thus we have a pretty good idea when that second stage kicks in-never.
And that is my second point. If the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 proved once and for all that the bourgeoisie of an emerging capitalist country is incapable, for a thousand reasons not the least its myriad intermingled links to the major imperialist powers, of leading (or maybe even tolerating) a democratic revolution then several decades later the emerging (or already existing) bourgeoisies in less advanced capitalist countries are even less likely to so. In South Africa Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution retains its validity. No, not just it validity, more than that it is merely the beginning of political wisdom for those crushed “comrades” down at the base still waiting for the second promised stage. Thus the order of the day is for the black-centered workers movement to break with the ANC as a matter of elementary political hygiene.
Sometimes one can overuse analogies (although that does not prevent anyone from doing so, or it hasn’t in the past, including by this writer) from one period to the next. Obviously there are major differences (not the least the question of political leadership of the working class) between the situation in Russia 1917 and South Africa today but I keep being drawn to the Menshevik’s notion in 1917 (and before and after, as well) that the bourgeoisie should lead the democratic revolution in Russia and the role of peasant and working class socialist organizations was to “support” or “push” them forward. That candidate in 1917 was the Cadet party (Constitutional Democrats); today in South Africa (at least for now) for the Mensheviks of today, the SACP and its hangers-on, it is the ANC. So what, as is pretty well described in the linked article above, we see in South Africa is what Russia might have looked like if the Menshevik “vision” had worked out. No, thank you, then and now. Learn the lessons outlined in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Forward!
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Baruch Hirson-The Economic Background to South Africa
THE HISTORY of Southern Africa stretches back over millennia. It is a story of peoples who occupied lands before meeting with, and being conquered or incorporated by, peoples who moved from their original lands near the Cameroons across Africa and down the east coast. Some time after 300 AD the forebears of the African people entered the region now known as South Africa. Crafts were developed, metals mined, trade conducted and then seemingly abandoned until the predominant occupations became hunting, cattle herding and/or cultivation of crops.This was the position when the first whites arrived to set up a refreshment station for the ships of the Dutch East Indian Company (DEIC) in their passage to the East Indies. In the seventeenth century merchant capitalism, assisted by the growth of shipping fleets, was the prevailing form of enterprise, and it was the might of the Heeren 17 (the directorate of the DEIC), not to mention their arrogance and aggression, that allowed the Dutch to take control of the Indies, and subsequently the Cape. The men who arrived at the Cape were servants of the DEIC, and were required to stay within the jurisdiction of the Dutch-appointed governor. Their task was to provision the passing ships and to feed and protect the local settlement. Men came first, and because there was a dearth of Dutch women, the earliest marriages or liaisons included many with the women of the local Khoi or San clans (known derisively as Hottentots and Bushmen respectively).
The story of the region was of the dispossession of the local inhabitants: of their cattle and their land, of their decimation and their reduction to servitude. The DEIC also sent prisoners from Malacca and the east (described later as Malay people) who were reduced to slavery. These people provided a labour force that was otherwise not available, and in time they rose to become the artisans employed in the Cape. More workers became available for the white settlers when the Khoi were subjugated and the African peoples conquered.
Ethnicity divided the growing Cape settlement, and yet, at first, the colour barrier was set aside for those who were converted to Christianity, and ‘free’ men and women arose from the baptismal font. Even at the topmost levels colour was a matter of small concern; one of the appointed Governors being of ‘mixed’ blood. Only later were rigid ethnic boundaries defined and hardened, and religious conversion was no longer a passage to ‘freedom’.
The Governors at the Cape could not, or would not, control the outward movement of the settlers, and extended the colony’s boundaries to maintain their control. Nor could the Governors stop trading, cattle rustling or clashes on the ever-moving borders, as the settlers met with African peoples, themselves moving down the coast. When the Xhosa people, moving down the south-eastern coast, were confronted by migrating settlers in what is now the eastern Cape, they were defeated in frontier wars. This was the beginning of the subjugation of an entire people and their absorption into the settler economy as a servile class. The possession of the Cape by the Dutch prevailed until Britain, during the Napoleonic wars, claimed that its sea route to India was in danger. It occupied the region and added the Cape to its Empire.
Marx has written in purple prose of the disastrous effect of the expansion of capitalism on the people of the colonies, and this needs no repetition. However, he argued that capitalism, with all its faults, transformed the world, established a single world market and undermined, if not destroyed, archaic social systems. This was the way of progress, and, concerned as Socialists might be for the colonised people, the sweep of capitalism across the globe was necessary and inevitable.[1] The task of the colonies was to supply raw materials for the European countries, act as military or supply bases, and trade with their ‘mother’ countries.
The settlers at the Cape were able to supply passing ships, but had little to trade, and they found no minerals to mine. This meant that the region that was to grow into the Cape colony was poor and remained poor, despite the development of its farmlands. Ostrich feathers, wool and hides and an inferior wine were not the basis for large-scale capital accumulation.
The first significant change in the nineteenth century occurred in or around 1836, when groups of Dutch in the eastern Cape, rejecting controls imposed by the new British administration—particularly on slavery and the status of Africans—crossed the coastal mountain ranges and moved into the interior of the country. Current research suggests that the interior had been emptied by slavers (of Portuguese or of Cape origin).[2] This revisionist view, still hotly denied by historians who maintain that the people of the interior had scattered because of Zulu expansionism, has still to be proven. But whatever the reason, large portions of the interior were desolate, and the trekkers occupied the land in what became the Orange Free State, carving out huge areas for themselves as farmland, and incorporating previous occupants as labourers or labour tenants.[3]
The Dutch also moved into Natal, where they came into conflict with the Zulu people, who were ultimately defeated in battle. The British followed, and there were further battles to secure the subjugation of the indigenous peoples. The control by white settlers led inevitably to the opening of the interior to trade. Sugar cane was tried in Natal, and its success led to the importation of labourers from Asia. First there were indentured Indian labourers, introduced to work on the sugar fields in 1860 in the colony named Natal. After serving their time they were repatriated unless they chose to stay, either to work their own plots of land or to move into the towns as labourers. Then in 1905, after the South African war, when Africans were reluctant to work at lowered wages, Chinese labourers were imported to work on the gold mines. This complicated the race question in South Africa even further, until they were repatriated after agitation in South Africa and Britain.[4]
This is jumping ahead. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a thin sprinkling of whites in the interior of the country, and a British administration and British police or troops in the Cape and Natal colonies. This was in keeping with the British policy of protecting the sea route to its imperial treasures in the East. The interior region was less important, although the Boer republics, named the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (SAR, later the Transvaal), were annexed and then freed. It is not always certain whether such moves were the result of local administration initiatives or were ordered from London. The Treasury in London wept crocodile tears every time more money was requisitioned for troop movements—but the money was always forthcoming.
Yet, it must be stressed, there was no unity in the subcontinent. Even the South African Republic consisted of semi-autonomous communities who policed their own regions and owed minimum allegiance to the central government. There was even less contact with scattered African peoples, and there were three regions, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, that gained autonomy outside the white controlled regions and maintained a tenuous independence by accepting, or appealing for, British trusteeship. The subjugation of those people who fell within the borders of white settlement was achieved through skirmishes or wars, and over several decades they were incorporated into the labour force for the whites. Ultimately everyone fell under the control of one overarching economy—but inside this economic control, local African peoples maintained aspects of their past social structures and their original polities. These ossified and were converted into branches of administrative control.
In 1868 diamonds were discovered at Kimberley inside the Orange Free State. In a diplomatic move that was little less than criminal, the region was annexed by the Cape. There was a massive injection of labour from across Southern and Portuguese East Africa as the digging commenced for these precious stones. With the discovery of diamonds the economic prospects of the country were transformed. These stones provided a sudden and instant source of finance for diggers, the diamond buyers and the Cape administration. The railway, which had not previously exceeded 10 miles in and around Cape Town, was extended to Kimberley, 500 miles away.
People from across South Africa, together with adventurers from around the world, flocked to the diamond fields, and although black labour was used to dig the extensive fields, there was a place at one end of the diggings for a small group of African and other entrepreneurs who mined on their own account. Most significantly, the diamond buyers, who concentrated this operation in fewer and fewer hands, acquired wealth on a scale not previously seen in South Africa.[5] Some of this money was to be used for opening up the gold mines in 1886 in and around Johannesburg (or Goli, the city of gold) on what became known as the Witwatersrand (the Ridge of White Waters). The discovery of gold brought in foreign finance capital, and transformed the subcontinent. This was the money commodity, and there was no shortage of investors. Yet there was a paradox in this new activity. The shaft sinking, which eventually took the miners a mile below the surface to the low grade ore, together with the equipment to recover the gold, required investments of millions of pounds. It was because gold was being mined that investors were attracted. This was because the demand for this commodity could not be exhausted, and dividends, low as they were, were assured. Yet this was capital accumulation with a catch. The low grade ore on the Witwatersrand had to compete with gold that was panned with little capital outlay as nuggets and with the store of gold that stretched back to antiquity. Consequently, the price set for gold coming onto the market was far below its value, that is, the price that would have been charged for any other product requiring the same amount of work. Also, as in all colonies (whether physically or economically dominated), dividends had to be shared between local entrepreneurs and foreign finance houses. More importantly, the price of gold was internationally determined and fixed with little regard to local conditions. Because the price was pegged at a level that would not upset the world’s money exchanges, the price per fine ounce was kept well below its value (measured in hours of labour required for its extraction) in South Africa.
The mineowners protested that the price was too low, and so did the government, but they were not going to stop production. Consequently, the one factor in production that could be kept low, that of wages paid to African labourers, was pared. Every means was employed to ensure that workers were paid the lowest possible wages. This was managed at several levels: labourers was imported, the work force was divided, and the white labour sector paid at levels that were adjudged well above the cost of labour in any other working class occupation. The African labourers, a large part recruited from outside the country’s borders, were employed for fixed short terms and then sent back home. The workers were housed in single sex compounds which were sealed to outside organisers. Even the African workers were divided, with specified tasks assigned to men of different ethnic origin, the division bolstered by separating dormitories, the heads of which were ethnically-based by installing tribal sub-chiefs. The manyfaceted means of dividing the workers extended from the differential use of men from different tribes in selected mines to the fostering of tribal dance teams and the weekly open air competitions sponsored by the mines.
There were historic factors that allowed for the division between white and black workers. There had been a large importation of skilled workers from Europe and a much larger number of unskilled African labourers from local territories. The whites were housed separately from blacks and were paid 15 or more times the rate received by Africans. Even the work skills were defined on ethnic grounds, excluding Africans from certain tasks. There were also differential tasks given to tribesmen and these came to acquire a particular status. Quite how this evolved is uncertain, but the effect was clear: there was intense intertribal rivalry.
The opening of the goldfields led to a further expansion of the railways, and with them the docks. They carried goods, both exports and imports, across the 1000 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town and the 500 miles to Durban, displacing dispatch riders and wagons alike. As the system expanded and went even further towards Portuguese East Africa and Rhodesia, the labour force grew, bringing in thousands of men. Once again, segregation was imposed. Engine driving and even stoking was reserved for whites, whilst blacks were relegated to permanent way repairs or to cabin services.
Originally the mines were in the hands of Uitlanders (foreigners), but the sites were in the South African Republic (SAR), a Boer territory. This led to the infamous Jameson raid in 1895, with the minefields as the target. Backed by Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, in the best tradition of age old pirates, this failed. That left only one option for the gung-ho imperialists: the SAR was conquered and annexed by Britain in the war of 1899-1902.[6] It is one of the myths of the time that the war of 1899 was waged across an ethnic divide of Boer against Brit, in which blacks were excluded. But this is a gross oversimplification. Several European powers gave moral backing to the Dutch, and a section of the more militant white workers supported the Boer government, whom they saw as their protectors against the mine magnates. Blacks intervened at various levels. However, the crucial fact is that the British army prevailed in the war even though the cost in men and money was high. Britain gained firm control of the territories and also of the source of gold—the money commodity of the era in which sterling (linked to gold) reigned supreme.
The war between Britain and the Boer republics has been a centre of historical attraction for many authors. That is understandable. However, the description of military action in 1900, interesting as it may be and important for an understanding of the origins of trench warfare, does not provide any insight into the events leading to that war, or of its social consequences. There can be little doubt that the war was fought in order to gain control of the country which contained these crucial gold fields, and that after the conclusion of hostilities political power over the country was replaced in the hands of the Boer leaders. The bitterness left by the war, however, led to the unfolding of an Afrikaner nationalism and a legacy of hatred of the British and foreign financiers. It was during the war that JA Hobson developed his ideas on parasitic rentier capitalism. It was Hobson who wrote vitriolic attacks on imperialism, and the message was taken up by some Afrikaner leaders. It was thus no accident that Dr DF Malan, future leader on the National Party, spoke in 1913 in favour of Socialism and praised Marx for his insight into capitalism.[7]
The single greatest factor that motivated the mineowners was the need to depress the wages of the black workers, both before the war and in the construction of the subsequent state. They saw that a movement of black workers between mines allowed them to bid up wages, and they consequently set out to minimise competition among themselves and stop the free movement of the workers. It was for this reason that the Chamber of Mines and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wanela) were formed. The latter had recruiting agents at every main centre to find labour, and obtained an annual levy of men from the Portuguese.
The Chamber set about imposing an internal pass (the notorious pass law) on a reluctant SAR administration. This was the basis of the law that restricted black movement until revoked in recent years. There were other factors that motivated the mineowners in their attacks on the Boer states. The mines needed a unified state, both for the recruitment of labourers and for their control, and for a unified transport system. The Boers, predominantly farmers, had little interest in supplying black labour to the mines—in conflict with their own needs—and their resources were too slender to allow them to police the pass laws or the liquor laws as demanded by the mine management.
The British state was called in to clear out Boer obstacles, and Milner, an agent of the state, created the centralised unified bureaucracy to enforce the regulations required by the mineowners. He and his imported officials (Milner’s ‘kindergarten’) laid the foundations of the modern South African state, and imposed some of his own racist laws on the country, in particular the discriminations against Indians that were to trouble that community through the coming years.
The population of South Africa was always small, estimated at four million at the end of the nineteenth century (one million of them white). The country attracted few immigrants, and the local growth rate was small. To the Dutch were added French Huguenots and German immigrants, British settlers (after 1814), and a trickle of immigrants from Europe. Separately at first, and then together, the whites -whatever their internal differences—reduced the colonised people to an inferior status. Even growing class divisions among the whites that came with the development of the economy only reinforced ethnic divisions as each group specialised (or indeed, had no option but to take on certain trades).
The importation of skilled craftsmen and miners from Europe led almost automatically to the importation of trade unions, with many of the original sections being branches of British unions. This right to organise which helped to advance the workers’ rights and allowed for strike action stood in vivid contrast to the illegalisation of black strike action and a refusal to grant them state recognition under (much later) industrial legislation. If there had been no colour bar in employment this would have opened up that differential anyway. As it was, the already existent racial differences (in wages, housing, social and sporting activity, and so on) were buttressed by the protection or advances of white living standards relative to those of Africans.[8]
Even more significantly for the period that followed, the capitalists who owned the gold mines made one crucial concession over labour policy. Though the white miners were defeated in two strikes in 1907 and 1913, and bombed into submission in the general strike of 1922, and had their claims negated in a subsequent court case, they were allowed to retain their privileged position even when it was no longer justified economically. This helped bolster the new form of racism that was associated with the control of a sector of the labour market.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, there were three main centres of economic development: on the white owned farms, and in the two mining areas: Kimberley for diamonds and the Witwatersrand for gold. Elsewhere, the economy of the country was stagnant. The internal market was small and relatively poor, with the African population unable to purchase anything but essentials.[9] There was a small expansion of manufacture during the First World War, and then stagnation again until after the lifting of the depression of 1929-31.[10] The finance houses associated with mining capital saw little reason for investing in manufacture. It was cheaper to import goods from Europe, including materials for building, bricks excepted. Consequently, African men who came into (or were allowed into) the towns were employed generally as domestic servants and gardeners, and even as washermen. Only a small number entered trades, and then merely as unskilled workers, the main occupations of whom consisted of carrying tools and materials, digging trenches, storing or distributing goods, or making tea and running errands. This was the beginning of a workforce but not yet a working class. When the African working class was being formed in the 1930s, it was concentrated along the Witwatersrand and in small pockets around the ports of Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. The workers in the western Cape were predominantly Coloured, and Indians were a significant force in Natal, although here too they were dominant as waiters or barmen in the hotels.
African women played almost no part in the early industrial period. Where they came into town (and they were restricted both by regulations of government and control by African tribal chiefs), they were confined to domestic service, replacing the African men. Others brewed beer illegally, and some were full or part time prostitutes.
There was a growing informal sector. Africans became hawkers or even shopkeepers, craftsmen who made furniture or offered services in the black townships. A small number entered the church (and in particular the independent churches), became teachers (with a primary school plus two years teacher’s training qualification), or found some place in the police force, prison service and so on. This was barely a petit-bourgeoisie, and there were never more than a handful that could be called well-to-do.
If the mines and later the industries constituted the crowning heights of the economy, agriculture was always a source of exports, earning a large portion of foreign exchange, and also growing food for the population. Furthermore, the white agricultural region was collectively the largest employer of labour in the country. However, as in all colonies, the pattern of farming activity was not simple. Until 1936 Africans were allowed to own land—mostly on a communal basis—on about seven per cent of the land area of the country. Legislation in 1936 provided for the doubling of this area, but only as Trust Land under tight government control.[11] An African peasant class, supplying produce for the market, had come into existence at the end of the nineteenth century, but had been squeezed out by the white farmers. Thereafter, only a minority, mostly associated with chiefly families, acquired wealth. Most of the rest (about one-third of the African population) were reduced to subsistence farming, and lived in the Reserves only when they were not seeking employment in the towns. An even larger number of Africans were squatters on the white farms, in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, providing labour in exchange for the right to farm plots for part of the year, or they were farm tenants or labourers. Among the latter were men removed from the towns after breaking segregatory laws, and who were used as cheap convict labour. In the western Cape Coloured labourers were employed, paid in part by the notorious tot (liquor) system. In Natal Africans had largely replaced Indian labourers in the cane fields.
The demands of the rural population were diverse, but most demanded the enlargement of land holdings in the Reserves, or in the white controlled farms, and the return of what the tenant farmers and squatters saw as their own land. The complaints of the farm labourers and the people on the Reserves took in the need for better social amenities, for schools and health, for more time to tend their own plots, and for the right to leave the farmer or indeed the rural areas.
I have concentrated attention on the black population, because they were in the majority, and because they alone could form the mainstay of an opposition to the ruling class. But there were obviously other people who filtered into industry, both from abroad and from the whites already resident in the country. The latter included large numbers of young women, and some men, who left the rural areas and sought work in the towns. They came from families of white labour tenants who were the first victims of the depression in the late 1920s.[12] When they entered the towns they were employed as domestic workers or as waitresses, in the sweated clothing trade, and in sweet, canning, tobacco, chemical and other burgeoning workshops. The men found employment on the trams and the railways, and in the trades. They were small in number, but they played a significant role in the working class movement in the 1930s, and were among the more militant white workers.
White immigrants came to South Africa throughout the twentieth century, always in smaller numbers than those who went to the Americas or Australasia, but they arrived and included in their ranks entrepreneurs and workers. They brought with them some capital or their ability to work, and among the latter there were many with experience in the European labour movement. There were others, particularly Jews, who brought with them a tradition of Socialism. Many immigrants joined the impoverished white farm workers in the newly established manufacturing plants in the early 1930s. Their work conditions were miserable and their wages were low. These establishments were dwarfed by the mining houses and state enterprises, which now included the railways and docks, the water and electricity industries, the state steel enterprise, and the enterprises controlled by municipal, provincial and state bodies. But it was the small industries that provided the base for a new and militant trade union movement. However, with few exceptions, the workers were indelibly divided by colour, and the few instances of collaboration across the colour line are noteworthy as exceptions to the rule.
Although the number of black workers grew, and there was significant organisation during the 1930s, their position in production only altered appreciably during the Second World War when they replaced the whites who had volunteered for service in the army. There was an increase in the number of small workshops to replace previously imported goods, road building was accelerated for potential defence purposes, and gold production was increased to pay for Britain’s war machine. Indeed, some of the specie was shipped direct to the USA on Britain’s account. Agriculture also expanded to feed the troops in Africa, for export to West Africa and for the local market. These were all areas of increased black employment.
An urbanised black working class, as distinct from a labour force (and migrant at that), was coming into existence. The time for organisation had arrived, and among those actively engaged in organising the trade union movement in the Transvaal were Trotskyists. Some of that story is told in the pages that follow.
Notes
1. Marxists got it wrong. The ‘archaic’ social systems were undermined and transformed but survived to become instruments of colonial control. Rosa Luxemburg in her Accumulation of Capital was particularly faulty on this issue.
2. If correct, this will replace earlier beliefs that the country had been left desolate by a warring Zulu people.
3. Families who had to work for the farmer in exchange for small plots of land which they could work on their own account.
4. It seems most likely that the factor leading to the repatriation of the Chinese was their increasingly militant protests—a factor that is not mentioned in most texts. White workers were in the forefront of the agitation for the removal of the Chinese. This helped protect the privileged position of the mineworkers by removing potential competitors.
5. The concentration of buying, ultimately in the hands of Cecil Rhodes. kept control of the market supply. This maintained the price of gem stones at an artificially high level.
6. This was not the first such annexation. The British had annexed the Orange Free State and the SAR in the late 1870s, and had relinquished them after an inconclusive war, with clauses that were a constant source of irritation.
7. Malan, a doctor of theology, was a publicist and Afrikaner National Party leader. He served in the government in the 1920s, and was Prime Minister in the National Party government in 1948—hence the use of the name Malanite to describe narrow white nationalism.
8. The system was made more complex in the 1920s by the governments policy of promoting the employment of whites during the periods of economic stagnation and depression, and the use of such policies to replace Indian workers on the railways.
9. This included manufactured goods like primus stoves, oil lamps, candles, bicycles and suitcases, gramophones and records, foodstuffs like condensed milk, cigarettes and, illegally until the 1970s, wines, beer and liquor.
10. In the 1930s South Africa was able to get out of the depression by going off the gold standard and benefitting by the rise in the price of gold. The tact that in the current depression South Africa has not been able to repeat its past practice is an indication of the changing role of gold within the world monetary system.
11. The extra land was only partly acquired, and there was no relaxation of land control despite the growth of the rural population and evidence of gross overcrowding.
12. The depression in the countryside started in South Africa, as elsewhere, about twoyears before the Great Crash in 1929. This was the final straw for most farm tenants, and in the first instance young Afrikaner women, who did not can money in the rural areas, left home to earn money in the towns. Their wages were miserable, but part of what they received was remitted to their families on the farms. They became the mainstay of the militant unions in the light industries.
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