AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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Monday, February 15, 2016

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915 one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannon roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,” a new revolutionary international, would become the order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell), were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.

Under a False Flag^[3]

Written: Written not earlier than February 1915
Published: First published in 1917, in the first Collection of the Priliv Publishers, Moscow. Signed: N. Konstantinov. Published according to the text in the Collection.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 135-157.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README

Issue No. 1 of Nashe Dyelo (Petrograd, January 1915)^[4] published a highly characteristic programmatic article by Mr. A. Potresov, entitled “At the Juncture of Two Epochs”. Like an earlier magazine article by the same author, the present article sets forth the ideas underlying an entire bourgeois trend of public thought in Russia—the liquidationist—regarding the important and burning problems of the times. Strictly speaking, we have before us not articles but the manifesto of a definite trend, and anyone who reads them carefully and gives thought to their content will see that only fortuitous considerations, i.e., such that have nothing in common with purely literary interests, have prevented the author’s ideas (and those of his friends, since the author does not stand alone) from being expressed in the more appropriate form of a declaration or credo.

Potresov’s main idea is that present-day democracy stands at the juncture of two epochs, the fundamental difference between the old epoch and the new consisting in a transition from national isolation to internationalism. By present-day democracy, Potresov understands the kind that marked the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, as distinct from the old bourgeois democracy that marked the end of the eighteenth century and the first two-thirds of the nineteenth.
At first glance it may seem that the author’s idea is absolutely correct, that we have before us an opponent to the national-liberal tendency predominant in present-day democracy, and that the author is an “internationalist”, not a national-liberal.
Indeed, this defence of internationalism, this reference to national narrow-mindedness and national exclusiveness as features of an outworn and bygone epoch—is it not a breakaway from the wave of national-liberalism, that bane of present-day democracy or, rather, of its official representatives.
That, at first glance, is not only the possible but the almost inevitable impression. Yet it would be a gross error to think so. The author is transporting his cargo under a false flag. Consciously or otherwise—that does not matter in this instance—he has resorted to a stratagem by hoisting the flag of “internationalism” so as the more securely to transport under this flag his contraband cargo of national-liberalism. After all, Potresov is a most undeniable national-liberal. The gist of his article (and of his programme, platform, and credo) is in the employment of this little—and if you wish even innocent—stratagem, in carrying opportunism under the flag of internationalism. One must go into all the details of this manoeuvre, for the matter is of prime and tremendous importance. Potresov’s use of a false flag is the more dangerous since he not only cloaks himself with the principle of “internationalism” but also assumes the title of an adherent of “Marxist methodology”. In other words, Potresov pretends to be a true follower and exponent of Marxism, whereas in actual fact he substitutes national-liberalism for Marxism. Potresov tries to “amend” Kautsky, accusing him of “playing the advocate”, i.e., of defending liberalism now of one shade, now of another, that is to say, the liberalism of shades peculiar to various nations. Potresov is out to contrast national-liberalism (for it is absolutely indubitable and indisputable that Kautsky has become a national-liberal) with internationalism and Marxism. In reality, Potresov is contrasting particoloured national-liberalism with national-liberalism of a single colour, whereas Marxism is hostile—and in the present historical situation, absolutely hostile—to any kind of national-liberalism.
We shall now go on to show that such is the case, and why.

I

The highlight of Potresov’s misadventures, which led to his setting out under a national-liberal flag, can be best understood if the reader examines the following passage in his article:

“With their characteristic temperament, they [Marx and his comrades] attacked the problem, no matter how difficult it was; they diagnosed the conflict, and attempted to determine the success of which side opened up broader vistas for possibilities desirable from their point of view; thus they laid down a certain basis on which to build their tactics” (p. 73, our italics in excerpts).
“The success of which side is more desirable”—this is what has to be determined, and that from an international, not a national point of view. This is the essence of the Marxist methodology. This is what Kautsky does not do, thus turning from a “judge” (a Marxist) into an “advocate” (a national-liberal). Such is Potresov’s line of argument. Potresov himself is most deeply convinced that he is not “playing the advocate” when he defends the desirability of success for one side (namely, his own) and that, conversely, he is guided by truly international considerations with regard to the egregious sins of the other side.
Potresov, Maslov, Plekhanov, etc., who are all guided by truly international considerations, have reached the same conclusions as Potresov has. This is a simple-mindedness that borders on—well, we shall not make undue haste, but shall first complete an analysis of the purely theoretical question.
“The success of which side is more desirable” was established by Marx in the Italian war of 1859, for instance. Potresov dwells on this particular instance, which, he says, “has a special interest for us because of certain of its features”. We too, for our part, are willing to take the instance chosen by Potresov.
In 1859 Napoleon III declared war on Austria, allegedly for the liberation of Italy, but in reality for his own dynastic aims.
“Behind the back of Napoleon III,” says Potresov, “could be discerned the figure of Gorchakov, who had just signed a secret agreement with the Emperor of the French.” What we have here is a tangle of contradictions: on the one side, the most reactionary European monarchy, which has been oppressing Italy; on the other, the representatives of revolutionary Italy, including Garibaldi, fighting for her liberation, side by side with the ultra-reactionary Napoleon III, etc. “Would it not have been simpler,” Potresov writes, “to step aside and to say that the two are equally bad? However, neither Engels, Marx, nor Lassalle were attracted by the “simplicity” of such a solution, but started to search the problem [Potresov means to say, to study and explore the problem], of the particular outcome of the conflict which might provide the greatest opportunities for a cause dear to all three.”
Lassalle notwithstanding, Marx and Engels came to the conclusion that Prussia must intervene. Among their considerations, as Potresov himself admits, was that “of the possibility, as a result of a conflict with the enemy coalition, of a national movement in Germany, which might develop over the heads of its numerous rulers; there was also the consideration as to which Power in the Concert of Europe was the main evil: the reactionary Danubian monarchy, or other outstanding representatives of this Concert”.
“To us, it is not important who was right, Marx or Lassalle,” Potresov concludes; “what is important is that all were agreed on the necessity of determining, from an international point of view, the success of which side was more desirable.”
This is the instance cited by Potresov, and the way our author pursues the argument. If Marx was then able “to appraise international conflicts” (Potresov’s expression), notwithstanding the highly reactionary character of the governments of both belligerent sides, then Marxists too are at present obliged to make a similar appraisal, Potresov concludes.
This conclusion is either naïve childishness or crass sophistry, since it boils down to the following: since, in 1859, Marx was working on the problem of the desirability of success for which particular bourgeoisie, we, over half a century later, must solve the problem in exactly the same way.
Potresov has failed to notice that, to Marx in 1859 (as well as in a number of later cases), the question of “the success of which side is more desirable” meant asking “the success of which bourgeoisie is more desirable”. Potresov has failed to notice that Marx was working on the problem at a time when there existed indubitably progressive bourgeois movements, which moreover did not merely exist, but were in the forefront of the historical process in the leading states of Europe. Today, it would be ridiculous even to imagine a progressive bourgeoisie, a progressive bourgeois movement, in, for instance, such key members of the “Concert” of Europe, as Britain and Germany. The old bourgeois “democracy” of these two key states has turned reactionary. Potresov has “forgotten” this, and has substituted the standpoint of the old (bourgeois) so-called democracy for that of present-day (non-bourgeois) democracy. This shift to the standpoint of another class, and moreover of an old and outmoded class, is sheer opportunism. There cannot be the least doubt that a shift like this cannot be justified by an analysis of the objective content of the historical process in the old and the new epochs.
It is the bourgeoisie—for instance in Germany, and in Britain too, for that matter—that endeavours to effect the kind of substitution accomplished by Potresov, viz., replacing of the imperialist epoch by that of bourgeois-progressive, national and democratic movements for liberation. Potresov is uncritically following in the wake of the bourgeoisie. This is the more unpardonable, since, in the instance he has selected, Potresov has himself been obliged to recognise and specify the considerations guiding Marx, Engels, and Lassalle in those bygone days.^[1]
First of all, these were considerations on the national movement (in Germany and Italy)—on the latter’s development over the heads of the “representatives of medievalism”; secondly, these were considerations on the “main evil” of the reactionary monarchies (the Austrian, the Napoleonic, etc.) in the Concert of Europe.
These considerations are perfectly clear and indisputable. Marxists have never denied the progressiveness of bourgeois national-liberation movements against feudal and absolutist forces. Potresov cannot but know that nothing like this does or can exist in the major, i.e., the leading rival states of today. In those days there existed, both in Italy and in Germany, popular national-liberation movements with decades of struggle behind them. In those days the Western bourgeoisie did not give financial support to certain other states; on the contrary, those states were really “the main evil”. Potresov cannot but know—as he admits in the same article—that today none of the other states is or can be the “main evil”.
The bourgeoisie (in Germany, for instance, though not in that country alone) is, for selfish reasons, encouraging the ideology of national movements, attempting to translate that ideology into the epoch of imperialism, i.e., an entirely different epoch. As usual, the opportunists are plodding along in the rear of the bourgeoisie, abandoning the standpoint of present-day democracy and shifting over to that of the old (bourgeois) democracy. That is the chief shortcoming in all the articles, as well as in the entire position and the entire line of Potresov and his liquidationist fellow-thinkers. At the time of the old (bourgeois) democracy Marx and Engels were working on the problem of the desirability of success for which particular bourgeoisie; they were concerned with a modestly liberal movement developing into a tempestuously democratic one. In the period of present-day (non-bourgeois) democracy, Potresov is preaching bourgeois national-liberalism at a time when one cannot even imagine bourgeois progressive movements, whether modestly liberal or tempestuously democratic, in Britain, Germany, or France. Marx and Engels were ahead of their epoch, that of bourgeois-national progressive movements; they wanted to give an impetus to such movements so that they might develop “over the heads” of the representatives of medievalism.
Like all social-chauvinists, Potresov is moving backwards, away from his own period, that of present-day democracy, and skipping over to the outworn, dead, and therefore intrinsically false viewpoint of the old (bourgeois) democracy.
That is why Potresov’s following appeal to democracy reveals his muddled thinking and is highly reactionary:
“Do not retreat, but advance, not towards individualism, but towards internationalist consciousness in all its integrity and all its vigour. To advance means, in a certain sense, to go also back—back to Engels, Marx, and Lassalle, to their method of appraising international conflicts, and to their finding it possible to utilise inter-state relations for democratic purposes.”
Potresov drags present-day democracy backwards, not “in a certain sense” but in all senses; he drags it back to the slogans and the ideology of the old bourgeois democracy, to the dependence of the masses upon the bourgeoisie. . . . Marx’s method consists, first of all, in taking due account of the objective content of a historical process at a given moment, in definite and concrete conditions; this in order to realise, in the first place, the movement of which class is the mainspring of the progress possible in those concrete conditions. In 1859, it was not imperialism that comprised the objective content of the historical process in continental Europe, but national-bourgeois movements for liberation. The mainspring was the movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal and absolutist forces. Fifty-five years later, when the place of the old and reactionary feudal lords has been taken by the not unsimilar finance capital tycoons of the decrepit bourgeoisie, the knowledgeable Potresov is out to appraise international conflicts from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, not of the new class.^[2]
Potresov has not given proper thought to the significance of the truth he uttered in the above words. Let us suppose that two countries are at war in the epoch of bourgeois, national-liberation movements. Which country should we wish success to from the standpoint of present-day democracy? Obviously, to that country whose success will give a greater impetus to the bourgeoisie’s liberation movement, make its development more speedy, and undermine feudalism the more decisively. Let us further suppose that the determining feature of the objective historical situation has changed, and that the place of capital striving for national liberation has been taken by international, reactionary and imperialist finance capital. The former country, let us say, possesses three-fourths of Africa, whereas the latter possesses one-fourth. A repartition of Africa is the objective content of their war. To which side should we wish success? It would be absurd to state the problem in its previous form, since we do not possess the old criteria of appraisal: there is neither a bourgeois liberation movement running into decades, nor a long process of the decay of feudalism. It is not the business of present-day democracy either to help the former country to assert its “right” to three-fourths of Africa, or to help the latter country (even if it is developing economically more rapidly than the former) to take over those three-fourths.
Present-day democracy will remain true to itself only if it joins neither one nor the other imperialist bourgeoisie, only if it says that the two sides are equally bad, and if it wishes the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country. Any other decision will, in reality, be national-liberal and have nothing in common with genuine internationalism.

The reader should not let himself be deceived by the pretentious terminology Potresov employs to conceal his switch over to the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. When Potresov exclaims: “. . . not towards individualism, but towards internationalist consciousness in all its integrity and all its vigour”, his aim is to contrast his own point of view with that of Kautsky. He calls the latter’s view (and that of others like him) “individualism”, because of Kautsky’s refusal to decide “the success of which side is more desirable”, and his justification of the workers’ national-liberalism in each “individual” country. We, on the contrary, he, as it were, says, we—Potresov, Cherevanin, Muslov, Plekhanov, and others—appeal to “internationalist consciousness in all its integrity and all its vigour”, for we stand for national-liberalism of a definite shade, in no way from the standpoint of an individual state (or an individual nation) but from a standpoint that is genuinely internationalist. This line of reasoning would be ridiculous if it were not so—disgraceful.
Both Potresov and Co. and Kautsky, who have betrayed the standpoint of the class which they are trying hard to represent, are following in the wake of the bourgeoisie.

II

Potresov has entitled his article “At the Juncture of Two Epochs”. We are undoubtedly living at the juncture of two epochs, and the historic events that are unfolding before our eyes can be understood only if we analyse, in the first place, the objective conditions of the transition from one epoch to the other. Here we have important historical epochs; in each of them there are and will always be individual and partial movements, now forward now backward; there are and will always be various deviations from the average type and mean tempo of the movement. We cannot know how rapidly and how successfully the various historical movements in a given epoch will develop, but we can and do know which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another, determining its main content, the main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch, etc. Only on that basis, i.e., by taking into account, in the first place, the fundamental distinctive features of the various “epochs” (and not single episodes in the history of individual countries), can we correctly evolve our tactics; only a knowledge of the basic features of a given epoch can serve as the foundation for an understanding of the specific features of one country or another.
It is to this region that both Potresov’s and Kautsky’s main sophism, or their fundamental historical error, pertains (Kautsky’s article was published in the same issue of Nashe Dyelo ), an error which has led both of them to national-liberal, not Marxist, conclusions.

The trouble is that the instance chosen by Potresov, which has presented a “special interest” to him, namely, the instance of the Italian campaign of 1859, as well as a number of similar historical instances quoted by Kautsky, “in no way pertain to those historical epochs”, “at the juncture” of which we are living. Let us call the epoch we are entering (or have entered, and which is in its initial stage) the present-day (or third) epoch. Let us call that which we have just emerged from the epoch of yesterday (or the second). In that case we shall have to call the epoch from which Potresov and Kautsky cite their instances, the day-before-yesterday (or first) epoch. Both Potresov’s and Kautsky’s revolting sophistry, the intolerable falseness of their arguments, consist in their substituting for the conditions of the present-day (or third) epoch the conditions of the day-before-yesterday (or first) epoch.
I shall try to explain what I mean.
The usual division into historical epochs, so often cited in Marxist literature and so many times repeated by Kautsky and adopted in Potresov’s article, is the following: (1) 1789-1871; (2) 1871-1914; (3) 1914 - ? Here, of course, as everywhere in Nature and society, the lines of division are conventional and variable, relative, not absolute. We take the most outstanding and striking historical events only approximately, as milestones in important historical movements. The first epoch from the Great French Revolution to the Franco-Prussian war is one of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph, of the bourgeoisie on the upgrade, an epoch of bourgeois-democratic movements in general and of bourgeois-national movements in particular, an epoch of the rapid breakdown of the obsolete feudal-absolutist institutions. The second epoch is that of the full domination and decline of the bourgeoisie, one of transition from its progressive character towards reactionary and even ultra-reactionary finance capital. This is an epoch in which a new class—present-day democracy—is preparing and slowly mustering its forces. The third epoch, which has just set in, places the bourgeoisie in the same “position” as that in which the feudal lords found themselves during the first epoch. This is the epoch of imperialism and imperialist upheavals, as well as of upheavals stemming from the nature of imperialism.

It was none other than Kautsky who, in a series of articles and in his pamphlet Der Weg zur Macht (which appeared in 1909), outlined with full clarity the basic features of the third epoch that has set in, and who noted the fundamental differences between this epoch and the second (that of yesterday), and recognised the change in the immediate tasks as well as in the conditions and forms of struggle of present-day democracy, a change stemming from the changed objective historical conditions. Kautsky is now burning that which he worshipped yesterday; his change of front is most incredible, most unbecoming and most shameless. In the above-mentioned pamphlet, he spoke forthrightly of symptoms of an approaching war, and specifically of the kind of war that became a fact in 1914. It would suffice simply to place side by side for comparison a number of passages from that pamphlet and from his present writings to show convincingly how Kautsky has betrayed his own convictions and solemn declarations. In this respect Kautsky is not an individual instance (or even a German instance); he is a typical representative of the entire upper crust of present-day democracy, which, at a moment of crisis, has deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie.
All the historical instances quoted by Potresov and Kautsky belong to the first epoch. The main objective content of the historical wartime phenomena, not only of 1855, 1859, 1864, 1866, or 1870, but also of 1877 (the Russo-Turkish war) and 1896-1897 (the wars between Turkey and Greece and the Armenian disturbances) were bourgeois-national movements or “convulsions” in a, bourgeois society ridding itself of every kind of feudalism. At that time there could have been no possibility of really independent action by present-day democracy, action of the kind befitting the epoch of the over-maturity, and decay of the bourgeoisie, in a number of leading countries. The bourgeoisie was then the chief class, which was on the upgrade as a result of its participation in those wars; it alone could come out with overwhelming force against the feudal-absolutist institutions. Represented by various strata of propertied producers of commodities, this bourgeoisie was progressive in various degrees in the different countries, sometimes (like part of the Italian bourgeoisie in 1859) being even revolutionary. The general feature of the epoch, however, was the progressiveness of the bourgeoisie, i.e., its unresolved and uncompleted struggle against feudalism. It was perfectly natural for the elements of present-day democracy, and for Marx as their representative, to have been guided at the time by the unquestionable principle of support for the progressive bourgeoisie (i.e., capable of waging a struggle) against feudalism, and for them to be dealing with the problem as to “the success of which side”, i.e., of which bourgeoisie, was more desirable. The popular movement in the principal countries affected by the war was generally democratic at that time, i.e., bourgeois-democratic in its economic and class content. It is quite natural that no other question could have been posed at the time except the following: the success of which bourgeoisie, the success of which combination of forces, the failure of which reactionary forces (the feudal-absolutist forces which were hampering the rise of the bourgeoisie) promised contemporary democracy more “elbow room”.
As even Potresov has had to admit, Marx was guided, in his “appraisal” of international conflicts springing from bourgeois national and liberation movements, by considerations as to whose success was more capable of contributing to the “development” (p. 74 of Potresov’s article) of national and, in general, popular democratic movements. That means that, during military conflicts stemming from the bourgeoisie’s rise to power within the various nationalities, Marx was, as in 1848, most of all concerned with extending the scope of the bourgeois-democratic movement and bringing it to a head through the participation of broader and more “plebeian” masses, the petty bourgeoisie in general, the peasantry in particular, and finally of the poor classes as a whole. This concern of Marx for the extension of the movement’s social base and its development is the fundamental distinction between Marx’s consistently democratic tactics and Lassalle’s inconsistent tactics, which veered towards an alliance with the national-liberals.
The international conflicts in the third epoch have, in form, remained the same kind of international conflicts as those of the first epoch, but their social and class content has changed radically. The objective historical situation has grown quite different.
The place of the struggle of a rising capital, striving towards national liberation from feudalism, has been taken by the struggle waged against the new forces by the most reactionary finance capital, the struggle of a force that has exhausted and outlived itself and is heading downward towards decay. The bourgeois-national state framework, which in the first epoch was the mainstay of the development of the productive forces of a humanity that was liberating itself from feudalism, has now, in the third epoch, become a hindrance to the further development of the productive forces. From a rising and progressive class the bourgeoisie has turned into a declining, decadent, and reactionary class. It is quite another class that is now on the upgrade on a broad historical scale.
Potresov and Kautsky have abandoned the standpoint of that class; they have turned back, repeating the false bourgeois assertion that today too the objective content of the historical process consists in the bourgeoisie’s progressive movement against feudalism. In reality, there can now be no talk of present-day democracy following in the wake of the reactionary imperialist bourgeoisie, no matter of what “shade” the latter may be.
In the first epoch, the objective and historical task was to ascertain how, in its struggle against the chief representatives of a dying feudalism, the progressive bourgeoisie should “utilise” international conflicts so as to bring the greatest possible advantage to the entire democratic bourgeoisie of the world. In the first epoch, over half a century ago, it was natural and inevitable that the bourgeoisie, enslaved by feudalism, should wish the defeat of its “own” feudal oppressor, all the more so that the principal and central feudal strongholds of all-European importance were not so numerous at the time. This is how Marx “appraised” the conflicts: he ascertained in which country, in a given and concrete situation, the success of the bourgeois-liberation movement was more important in undermining the all-European feudal stronghold.
At present, in the third epoch, no feudal fortresses of all-European significance remain. Of course, it is the task of present-day democracy to “utilise” conflicts, but—despite Potresov and Kautsky—this international utilisation must be directed, not against individual national finance capital, but against international finance capital. The utilisation should not be effected by a class which was on the ascendant fifty or a hundred years ago. At that time it was a question of “international action” (Potresov’s expression) by the most advanced bourgeois democracy; today it is another class that is confronted by a similar task created by history and advanced by the objective state of affairs.

III

The second epoch or, as Potresov puts it, “a span of forty-five years” (1870-1914), is characterised very inconclusively by him. The same incompleteness is the shortcoming in Trotsky’s characterisation of the same period, given in his German work, although he does not agree with Potresov’s practical conclusions (this, of course, standing to the former’s credit). Both writers hardly realise the reason for their standing so close to each other, in a certain sense.
Here is what Potresov writes of this epoch, which we have called the second, that of yesterday:
“A detailed restriction of work and the struggle and an all-pervading gradualism—these signs of the times, which by some have been elevated to a principle, have become to others an ordinary fact in their lives, and, as such, have become part of their mentality, a shade of their ideology” (p. 71). “Its [this epoch’s] talent for a smooth and cautious advance had, as its reverse, firstly, a pronounced non-adaptability to any break in gradualness and to catastrophic phenomena of any kind and secondly, an exceptional isolation within the sphere of national action—the national milieu. . .” (p. 72). “Neither revolution, nor war. . .” (p. 70). “Democracy became the more effectively nationalist, the longer the period of its ‘position warfare’ was protracted and the longer there lingered on the stage that spell of European history which . . . knew of no international conflicts in the heart of Europe, and consequently experienced no unrest extending beyond the boundaries of national state territories, and felt no keen interest on a general European or world scale” (75-76).
The chief shortcoming in this characterisation, as in Trotsky’s characterisation of the same epoch, is a reluctance to discern and recognise the deep contradictions in modern democracy, which has developed on the foundation described above. The impression is produced that the democracy contemporary with the epoch under review remained a single whole, which, generally speaking, was pervaded with gradualism, turned nationalist, was by degrees weaned away from breaks in gradualness and from catastrophes, and grew petty and mildewed.
In reality this could not have happened, since, side by side with the aforesaid tendencies, other and reverse tendencies were undoubtedly operating: the day-by-day life of the working masses was undergoing an internationalisation—the cities were attracting ever more inhabitants, and living conditions in the large cities of the whole world were being levelled out; capital was becoming internationalised, and at the big factories townsmen and country-folk, both native and alien, were intermingling. The class contradictions were growing ever more acute; the employers’ associations were exercising ever greater pressure on the workers’ unions; sharper and more bitter forms of struggle were arising, as, for instance, mass strikes; the cost of living was rising; the pressure of finance capital was becoming intolerable, etc., etc.
In actual fact, events did not follow the pattern described by Potresov. This we know definitely. In the period under discussion, none, literally not one, of the leading capitalist countries of Europe was spared by the struggle between the two mutually opposed currents within contemporary democracy. In each of the big countries, this struggle at times assumed most violent forms, including splits, this despite the general “peaceful”, “sluggish”, and somnolent character of the epoch. These contradictory currents have affected all the various fields of life and all problems of modern democracy without exception, such as the attitude towards the bourgeoisie, alliances with the liberals, the voting for war credits, the attitude towards such matters as colonial policies, reforms, the character of economic struggle, the neutrality of the trade unions, etc.
“All-pervading gradualism” was in no way the predominant sentiment in all contemporary democracy, as the writings of Potresov and Trotsky imply. No, this gradualism was taking shape as a definite political trend, which at the time often produced individual groups, and sometimes even individual parties, of modern democracy in Europe. That trend had its own leaders, its press organs, its policy, and its own particular—and specially organised—method of influencing the masses of the population. Moreover, this trend was more and more basing itself—and ultimately based itself solidly—on the interests of a definite social stratum within the democracy of the time.
“All-pervading gradualism” naturally attracted into the ranks of that democracy a number of petty-bourgeois fellow-travellers; furthermore, the specifically petty-bourgeois conditions, and consequently, a petty-bourgeois political orientation, became the rule with a definite stratum of parliamentarians, journalists, and trade union officials; a kind of bureaucracy and aristocracy of the working class was arising in a manner more or less pronounced and clear-cut.
Take, for instance, the possession of colonies and the expansion of colonial possessions. These were undoubted features of the period dealt with above, and with the majority of big states. What did that mean in the economic sense? It meant a sum of super-profits and special privileges for the bourgeoisie. It meant, moreover, the possibility of enjoying crumbs from this big cake for a small minority of the petty bourgeois, as well as for the better placed employees, officials of the labour movement, etc. The enjoyment of crumbs of advantage from the colonies, from privileges, by an insignificant minority of the working class in Britain, for instance, is an established fact, recognised and pointed out by Marx and Engels. Formerly confined to Britain alone, this phenomenon became common to all the great capitalist countries of Europe, as their colonial possessions expanded, and in general as the imperialist period of capitalism grew and developed.
In a word, the “all-pervading gradualism” of the second epoch (the one of yesterday) has created, not only a certain “non-adaptability to any break in gradualness”, as Potresov thinks, not only certain “possibilist” tendencies, as Trotsky supposes, but an entire opportunist trend based on a definite social stratum within present-day democracy, and linked with the bourgeoisie of its own national “shade” by numerous ties of common economic, social, and political interests—a trend directly, openly, consciously, and systematically hostile to any idea of a “break in gradualness”.
A number of Trotsky’s tactical and organisational errors (to say nothing of Potresov’s) spring from his fear, or his reluctance, or inability to recognise the fact of the “maturity” achieved by the opportunist trend, and also its intimate and unbreakable link with the national-liberals (or social-nationalists) of our times. In practice, this failure to recognise this “maturity” and this unbreakable link leads, at least, to absolute confusion and helplessness in the face of the predominant social-nationalist (or national-liberal) evil.
The link between opportunism and social-nationalism is, generally speaking, denied by Potresov, by Martov, Axelrod, V. Kosovsky (who has talked himself into defending the German democrats’ national-liberal vote for war credits) and by Trotsky.
Their main “argument” is that no full coincidence exists between yesterday’s division of democracy “along the line of opportunism” and today’s division “along the line of social-nationalism”. This argument is, firstly, incorrect in point of fact, as we shall presently show; secondly, it is absolutely one-sided, incomplete and untenable from the standpoint of Marxist principles. Persons and groups may shift from one side to the other; that is not only possible, but even inevitable in any great social upheaval; however, it does not at all affect the nature of a definite trend, or the ideological links between definite trends, or their class significance. All these considerations might seem so generally known and indisputable that one feels almost embarrassed at having to lay such emphasis on them. Yet the above-mentioned writers have lost sight of these very considerations. The fundamental class significance of opportunism—or, in other words, its social-economic content—lies in certain elements of present-day democracy having gone over (in fact, though perhaps unconsciously) to the bourgeoisie, on a number of individual issues. Opportunism is tantamount to a liberal-labour policy. Anyone who is fearful of the “factional” look of these words would do well to go to the trouble of studying the opinions of Marx, Engels, and Kautsky (is the latter not an “authority” highly suitable to the opponents of “factionalism”?) on, let us say, British opportunism. There cannot be the slightest doubt that such a study would lead to a recognition of the coincidence of fundamentals between opportunism and a liberal-labour policy. The basic class significance of today’s social-nationalism is exactly the same. The fundamental idea of opportunism is an alliance or a drawing together (sometimes an agreement, bloc, or the like) between the bourgeoisie and its antipode. The fundamental idea of social-nationalism is exactly the same. The ideological and political affinity, connection, and even identity between opportunism and social-nationalism are beyond doubt. Naturally, we must take as our basis, not individuals or groups, but a class analysis of the content of social trends, and an ideological and political examination of their essential and main principles.
Approaching the same subject from a somewhat different angle, we shall ask: whence did social-nationalism appear? How did it grow and mature? What gave it significance and strength? He who has been unable to find answers to these questions has completely failed to understand what social nationalism is, and is consequently quite incapable of drawing an “ideological line” between himself and social-nationalism, no matter how vehemently he may assert that he is ready to do so.
There can be only one answer to this question: social nationalism has developed from opportunism, and it was the latter that gave it strength. How could social-nationalism have appeared “all of a sudden”? In the same fashion as a babe appears “all of a sudden” if nine months have elapsed since its conception. Each of the numerous manifestations of opportunism during the entire second (or yesterday) epoch in all the European countries was a rivulet, which now flowed “all of a sudden” into a big though very shallow (and, we might add parenthetically, muddy and dirty) river of social-nationalism. Nine months after conception the babe must separate from its mother; many decades after opportunism was conceived, social-nationalism, its ripe fruit, will have to separate from present-day democracy within a period that is more or less brief (as compared with decades). No matter how good people may scold, rage or vociferate over such ideas and words, this is inevitable, since it follows from the entire social development of present-day democracy and from the objective conditions in the third epoch.
But if division “along the line of opportunism” and division “along the line of social-nationalism” do not fully coincide, does that not prove that no substantial link exists between these two facts? It does not, in the first place, just as the fact that individual bourgeois at the end of the eighteenth century went over either to the side of the feudal lords or that of the people does not prove that there was “no link” between the growth of the bourgeoisie and the Great French Revolution of 1789. Secondly, taken by and large, there is such a coincidence (and we are speaking only in a general sense and of movements as a whole). Take, not one individual country but a number of them, let us say ten European countries: Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland, and Bulgaria. Only the three countries given in italics may seem the exceptions. In the others, the trends of uncompromising antagonists to opportunism have given birth to trends hostile to social-nationalism. Compare the well-known Monatshefte and its opponents in Germany, Nashe Dyelo and its opponents in Russia, the party of Bissolati and its opponents in Italy, the adherents of Greulich and Grimm in Switzerland, Branting and Höglund in Sweden, and Troelstra, Pannekoek and Gorter in Holland, and finally the Obshcho Dyelo adherents and the Tesnyaki in Bulgaria.[5] The general coincidence between the old and the new division is a fact; as for complete coincidences, they do not occur even in the simplest of natural phenomena, any more than there is complete coincidence between the Volga before the Kama joins it, and the Volga below that point; neither is there full similarity between a child and its parents. Britain only seems the exception; in reality, there were two main currents in Britain prior to the war, these being identified with two dailies—which is the truest objective indication of the mass character of these currents—namely, the Daily Citizen,[6] the opportunists’ newspaper, and the Daily Herald,^[7] the organ of the opponents of opportunism. Both papers have been swamped by the wave of nationalism; yet, opposition has been expressed by under one-tenth of the former’s adherents and by some three-sevenths of the adherents of the latter. The usual method of comparison, whereby only the British Socialist Party is compared with the Independent Labour Party, is erroneous because it overlooks the existence of an actual bloc of the latter with the Fabians^[8] and the Labour Party. It follows, then, that only two out of the ten countries are exceptions, but even here the exceptions are not complete, since the trends have not changed places; only (for reasons so obvious that they need not be dwelt on) the wave has swamped almost all the opponents of opportunism. This undoubtedly proves the strength of the wave, but it does not in any way disprove coincidence between the old division and the new for all Europe.
We are told that division “along the line of opportunism” is outmoded, and that only one division is of significance, namely, that between the adherents of internationalism and the adherents of national self-sufficiency. This opinion is fundamentally wrong. The concept of “adherents of internationalism” is devoid of all content and meaning, if we do not concretely amplify it; any step towards such concrete amplification, however, will be an enumeration of features of hostility to opportunism. In practice, this will prove truer still. An adherent of internationalism who is not at the same time a most consistent and determined adversary of opportunism is a phantom, nothing more. Perhaps certain individuals of this type will honestly consider themselves “internationalists”. However, people are judged, not by what they think of themselves but by their political behaviour. The political behaviour of “internationalists” who are not consistent and determined adversaries of opportunism will always aid and abet the nationalist trend. On the other hand, nationalists, too, call themselves “internationalists” (Kautsky, Lensch, Haenisch, Vandervelde, Hyndman, and others); not only do they call themselves so, but they fully acknowledge an international rapprochement, an agreement, a union of persons sharing their views. The opportunists are not against “internationalism”; they are only in favour of international approval for and international agreement among the opportunists.
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Notes

[1] Incidentally Potresov refuses to make up his mind as to whether Marx or Lassalle was right in appraising the conditions of the war of 1859. We think that (Mehring notwithstanding) Marx was right, whereas Lassalle was then an opportunist, just as he was during his flirtation with Bismarck. Lassalle was adapting himself to the victory of Prussia and Bismarck, to the lack of sufficient strength in the democratic national movements of Italy and Germany. Thus Lassalle deviated towards a national-liberal labour policy, whereas Marx encouraged and developed an independent, consistently democratic policy hostile to national-liberal cowardice (Prussia’s intervention in 1859 against Napoleon would have stimulated the popular movement in Germany). Lassalle was casting glances, not downwards but upwards, as he was fascinated by Bismarck. Bismarck’s “success” was no justification of Lassalle’s opportunism. —Lenin

[2] “Indeed,” Potresov writes, “it was during that period of seeming stagnation that tremendous molecular processes were taking place in every country, the international situation too was gradually changing, the policy of colonial acquisitions, of militant imperialism becoming its determining feature.” —Lenin

[3] A number of changes were made in Lenin’s article “Under a False Flag” by the editors of the Collection issued in March 1917 by Priliv Publishers.

[4] Nashe Dyelo (Our Cause )—a monthly of the Menshevik liquidators; mouthpiece of social-chauvinists in Russia. It began publication in 1915 in Petrograd to replace Nasha Zarya, which had been suppressed in October 1914.

[5] Obshcho Dyelo (The Common Cause ) adherents (also known as Shiroki socialists)—an opportunist trend in Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party. The journal Obshcho Dyelo was published from 1900 onwards. After a split at the Tenth Congress of the Social-Democratic Party in 1903 in Ruse they formed a reformist Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party (of Shiroki socialists). During the world imperialist war of 1914-18 the Obshcho Dyelo adherents took a chauvinist stand.

Tesnyaki—a revolutionary trend in the Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party, which in 1903 took shape as an independent Bulgarian Workers’ Social-Democratic Party. The founder and leader of Tesnyaki was D. Blagoyev, his followers, Georgy Dimitrov and Vasil Kolarov, among others, later heading that Party. In 1914-18 the Tesnyaki came out against the imperialist war. In 1919 they joined the Communist International and formed the Communist Party of Bulgaria.

[6] The Daily Citizen—originally organ of the opportunist bloc—the Labour Party, Fabians and the Independent Labour Party of Britain, published in London from 1912 to 1915.

[7] The Daily Herald—organ of the British Socialist Party, published in London since 1912.

[8] The Fabians—members of the Fabian Society, a British reformist organisation founded in 1884. The name is an allusion to the Roman commander Quintus Fabius Maximus (d. 203), called Cunctator, i.e., the Delayer, for his tactics of harassing Hannibal’s army without risking a pitched battle. Most of the Society’s members were bourgeois intellectuals: scholars, writers, politicians (such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, Ramsay MacDonald), who denied the need for the class struggle of the proletariat and a socialist revolution, and insisted that the transition from capitalism to socialism lay only through petty reform and a gradual transformation of society. Lenin said it was “an extremely opportunist trend” (see present edition, Vol. 13, p. 358). The Fabian Society, which was affiliated to the Labour Party in 1900, is one of the ideological sources of Labour Party policy.

During World War I, the Fabians took a social-chauvinist stand. For Lenin’s description of the Fabians, see “British Pacifism and the British Dislike of Theory” (the present volume, pp. 260-65).

A View From The International Left-South Africa-Race and Class Under Neo-Apartheid-For a Black-Centered Workers Government

	Workers Vanguard No. 1081	15 January 2016

South Africa-Race and Class Under Neo-Apartheid-For a Black-Centered Workers Government

Part One

The article reprinted below was published in December as a supplement to Spartacist South Africa, newspaper of the International Communist League’s South African section. The term “coloured” refers to the mixed-race, partly Malay-derived population in that country.

It is now 21 years into the “new” South Africa, and of the myths proclaimed in 1994, that of the “rainbow nation” today stands exposed as perhaps the most threadbare lie of all. To anyone with eyes to see, it is clear that today’s South Africa is anything but a paradigm of racial harmony. Indeed, in many important respects racial antagonisms have increased in recent years, and a real hardening of racial attitudes can be seen both among different oppressed racial groups and among the privileged white minority. Expressions of ethnic and racial exclusivism—like car stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “100% Zulu” and “100% Venda,” or pronouncements of being “Coloured and Proud”—have increased noticeably. Meanwhile, a survey released last year by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) revealed that only 52.8 percent of whites surveyed in 2013 agreed that apartheid was, in the words of the survey, “a crime against humanity”—down from 70.3 percent in 2003.

As Marxists, we understand that these retrograde developments at the ideological level are fundamentally a product of the brutally oppressive, racist material and social reality that continues to define life in South Africa. More than two decades after the end of the apartheid system of rigid, legally enforced racial segregation and white supremacy, the vast majority of the country’s non-white masses still live in “Third World” misery, alongside a “First World” inhabited mainly by the white minority. Despite some moderate increase in socialising and other interactions across racial lines—mostly among the wealthy—the relationships between whites and blacks largely remain those of masters and servants. Racial oppression and degradation are the material basis for white racist ideology, as is clearly reflected in the numerous cases of white racist attacks on black domestic workers that get reported in the media. On a much larger scale, the 2012 Marikana massacre was a bloody reminder that the lives of black workers are just as cheap today as under apartheid.

The growth of racial, tribal and other divisions among the oppressed non-white masses is also a product of the racist neo-apartheid system, which the capitalist ANC-led [African National Congress] Tripartite Alliance government is responsible for administering and maintaining. Far from delivering the “better life for all” that was “promised” in 1994, this government acts as enforcers for the superexploitation of mainly black labour by the same capitalist class that ruled under apartheid—now with a sprinkling of non-white faces. In order to deflect the growing anger at the base of society away from itself and the racist capitalist rulers, the ANC-led Alliance inevitably resorts to pitting different sections of the oppressed against each other.

Since the 1990s, we have repeatedly warned that if the seething discontent of the masses does not find expression along class lines, it will fuel and embitter every other kind of division. The deadly anti-immigrant pogroms of 2008—in which 62 people lost their lives—and the smaller outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence that have become a grotesquely common feature of life in the years since are stark proof of this grim fact.

The goal of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), of which Spartacist/South Africa is a section, is the establishment of a world communist society. Only then will economic scarcity be eliminated as a result of the qualitative advance in production made possible by collectivising the wealth and resources of society in the service of human needs. In a communist society, all forms of racial discrimination and oppression—along with the very existence of race, ethnicity and nationality as categories of any social significance—will be nothing but memories of a barbaric capitalist past. But getting there requires a series of workers revolutions to sweep away capitalist rule, including especially in the imperialist centres. Combating the very real racial, national and other prejudices that today divide the working class is a crucial part of forging the revolutionary leadership—i.e., a Leninist vanguard party—needed for working-class victory.

Snapshots of Black-Coloured Divisions Under Neo-Apartheid

Racial tensions between the black majority and the coloured minority have various expressions and causes, but a big factor is feelings of coloured marginalisation in post-1994 South Africa. As one popular saying goes, many coloured people feel that “there’s no brown in the rainbow nation.” This marginalisation has served to reinforce anti-black resentment, as the bourgeois-nationalist ANC is perceived to represent the black majority and favour them at the expense of coloureds. The tensions and mistrust are, of course, stoked and manipulated by the capitalists, their political parties and media mouthpieces, who exploit them for their own benefit. While they are not always openly expressed, often smouldering beneath the surface, there are plenty of cases where these tensions break out in the open because of one thing or another that lights the spark.

A recent example is the conflict between black and coloured parents and teachers following the appointment of a black principal and two black deputy principals at Roodepoort Primary School, an integrated school with a majority of black pupils that is situated in the predominantly coloured neighbourhood of Davidsonville, Roodepoort (west of Johannesburg). Feeling that the appointments had snubbed the coloured residents and pupils, protests were launched in February 2015, led by the Davidsonville Community Forum (DCF), to demand that the three be removed and replaced with coloured candidates. While the DCF and some protesters have tried to claim that their grievances are “not about race” but rather about alleged corruption in the appointment process, it is clear that they have everything to do with racial tensions. The DCF’s anti-black politics are revealed on its Facebook page, where in July an invitation was posted to “Anyone and any organisation that believes that Coloureds, Indians, Khoisan, Afrikaner and other marginalised minorities now needs [sic] to stand politically on their own” to attend the Gauteng launch of the Patriotic Association of South Africa in Davidsonville!

The protests had an unmistakable anti-black thrust, with parents demanding the school’s coloured pupils “needed a principal of their own race” (news24.com, 22 February 2015) or complaining that it’s “only just black people that are...making it violent” (702.co.za, 20 February). They have also been vitriolic in their denunciation of the teachers’ union SADTU, with a DCF statement accusing SADTU members of bribery and demanding a Hawks [Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation] investigation into the union. The DCF also blames the union for the wretched state of education, denouncing it for having “no prospects or ideals...other than focussing more on its growth and the protection of its members.”

As Marxists, we oppose interference by the capitalist state into the trade unions as a matter of principle. We have sharp political criticisms of the pro-capitalist leadership of SADTU, as well as that of the other unions. But our perspective is to replace these misleaders with a class-struggle leadership that would seek to strengthen the fighting capacity of the unions against the bosses. Calls like that of the DCF for state intervention are aimed at crippling the unions. Labour must clean its own house; this is not the task of the class enemy.

The racial polarisation in Davidsonville serves to undermine the conditions of all teachers, and inevitably makes it more difficult to fight against funding cuts and other attacks that will worsen the conditions of the pupils. Black teachers at the school have rallied around the principal (their boss), while coloured teachers boycotted class demanding her removal. In June, it was reported that disciplinary letters were handed out to 14 teachers. Amidst this nasty racial polarisation, the school was shut down more than once and at least one protest—where black and coloured parents faced off along racial lines—was brutally dispersed by cops with rubber bullets. In August, a petrol bomb was hurled at the principal’s car outside the school.

Another incident occurred in the Western Cape farming town of Grabouw (east of Cape Town) in March 2012. It began with protests against massive overcrowding and lack of resources at the area’s Xhosa-language school, where some 1,900 pupils were crammed in a building with a capacity of 600. According to The Times (20 March 2012), the protests initially included plans for black and coloured residents to travel to stage a protest in Cape Town. The night before that was to happen, black residents started burning tyres and setting up barricades in the street. During this protest, a classroom in a nearby Afrikaans-language school, where the majority of the pupils are coloured and roughly 40 percent are black, was set on fire. This triggered a tense standoff and a day of running battles between blacks and coloureds, during which racist insults were hurled back and forth and several people were attacked by mobs.

As is especially common in the Western Cape—the one province where the ANC is not in government, and where the coloured people are the majority—the tensions were fanned by the ANC and its bourgeois political rivals of the neoliberal, white-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA), the ruling party in the province. Both parties were campaigning at the time for a by-election in the area, and sought to win votes by implicitly and explicitly mobilising racial antagonisms and prejudices (while, of course, cynically denying it). For example, then DA leader and Western Cape premier Helen Zille inveighed on Twitter against “education refugees” from the Eastern Cape who were supposedly overburdening the Western Cape—a transparent attempt to stoke racist anti-Xhosa sentiment.

The Times quoted a coloured woman in Grabouw who was part of the crowd that gathered at the Afrikaans school: “They, these blacks, came and burnt our children’s school. Why? We waited for this school for so long. They must wait their turn.” Indeed, at the root of most racial clashes among the non-white oppressed masses is the desperate struggle over a few wretched crumbs from the capitalists’ table. This is a basic part of how the bourgeoisie—a fabulously wealthy, minuscule minority amidst a sea of misery—maintains its rule. It is hardly unique to South Africa; in the 1800s, the notorious American “robber baron” Jay Gould once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

For communists, breaking through these retrograde divisions is centrally about advancing the vital objective interest that black and coloured workers have in united struggle against their common enemy—the racist capitalist ruling class and its political representatives, which include both the ANC and the DA. This class unity is in no way an automatic outcome of growing mass discontent, but must be fought for. That means fighting against all manifestations of racial oppression and against all racial, ethnic and national prejudices.

A popular cliché to describe feelings of coloured marginalisation post-1994 is: “First we weren’t white enough and now we’re not black enough.” Mohamed Adhikari, a coloured academic from the University of Cape Town who has written extensively on coloured identity, notes:

“A principal cause for Coloured dissatisfaction with the new order...is that members of the Coloured community, especially the working classes, see themselves as having gained little, if any, tangible benefit from the new dispensation.... In the Western Cape, the unwinding of distortions caused by the Coloured Labour Preference Policy is not only affecting the Coloured community adversely but is also perceived to be the result of government policy unfairly advantaging Africans.”

— Not White Enough, Not Black Enough—Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Double Storey, 2005)

In many respects, the living standards of the coloured masses have deteriorated significantly since the early 1990s. To cite just a few examples, the number of coloured people living in poverty increased by 20 percent between 1996 and 2012; the incarceration rate among coloured people—who make up 18 percent of the prison population—is far higher than among other racial groups; and social ills like gang violence, drug addiction and alcohol abuse hit the coloured poor more severely than other communities.

On top of this, government ministers and other high-ranking officials from the ANC have periodically launched vicious anti-coloured diatribes that give the lie to the ANC’s charade of “non-racialism.” Sometimes these chauvinist rants retail the nationalist line that since coloured people were “privileged” under apartheid, their oppression was less real and they deserve to suffer more today. For example, Tokyo Sexwale once said he wanted to “vomit” when “others try to use (our) legitimate grievances” (Cape Times, 19 September 1994). Other times, they simply promote vile racist stereotypes of coloureds, like when Roderick Blackman Ngoro—at the time media advisor for the ANC mayor of Cape Town—railed in 2005 that coloureds would “die a drunken death” if they did not “undergo an ideological transformation,” i.e., vote for the ANC (not surprisingly, few heeded his directive).

It is crucial to expose and combat this nationalist filth as part of fighting the influence of anti-coloured prejudices among the black proletariat and poor. Black workers must be won to the understanding that they too have a vital interest in fighting against the capitalist ANC government’s attacks on the coloured people, as this fight is crucial to the integrity of the working class and its ability to wage class struggle against the common enemy. A particularly clear illustration was in 1997, when Sexwale’s ANC provincial government in Gauteng moved to begin collecting back rates and rent from tenants in the coloured township of Eldorado Park, justifying this with nationalist demagogy about settling the score for coloured “privileges” under apartheid. Since then, the ANC government has launched the same attacks on tenants in black townships.

Coloured Sectoralism: A Dead End

At the same time that we combat the anti-coloured demagogy of the ANC and other black nationalists, we also recognise that the “not black enough” cliché is an expression of backward consciousness in response to the very real marginalisation and continued oppression of coloureds under neo-apartheid. Though manifesting itself in various, often contradictory, forms, a feature of this false consciousness is pseudo-nationalist coloured sectoralism: the interests of the coloured people are seen as separate from (and, in many cases, antagonistic to) those of the black majority, and therefore coloureds supposedly need to “look out for their own.” In practical political terms, this has in fact mainly translated into support for the DA and other white bourgeois parties as a purported “lesser evil.”

The politics of bourgeois lesser-evilism are often accompanied by anti-black prejudices that play on racist stereotypes of Africans as inherently corrupt, violent, etc. For example, in 2003 award-winning coloured actor Anthony Wilson spoke at an arts festival forum on coloured identity, railing: “The Boers stole, but at least they budgeted and did not steal everything. They stole the cream, but the darkies are stealing the cream, the milk and the bucket. We swapped five million farmers for 34 million blacks” (Cape Argus, 2 April 2003). This poisonous anti-black racism would be music to the ears of the late P.W. Botha, who in the 1980s launched the Tricameral Parliament—offering a phoney franchise to coloureds and Indians, and excluding blacks—in an (unsuccessful) attempt to bolster white minority rule by promoting divide-and-rule.

Wilson’s rant was polarising, including among coloured political commentators. Cape Town radio personality Nigel Pierce sharply condemned the racist poison spewed by Wilson and others who promote the myth of swart gevaar (the “black peril”) and notions of racial superiority among the coloured population, saying, “If we go that route, we’ll marginalise ourselves.” In contrast, Rhoda Kadalie apologised for Wilson’s rant, saying it was “very encouraging, because I think people need to talk about it.... Coloured people rightly feel that they have been left out of the pie, and that they get the crumbs.” This argument, like Wilson’s own attempt to justify his racist remarks by warning that “the oppressed should not become the oppressors,” plays on and promotes a widespread misconception that the racial hierarchy in post-1994 South Africa has somehow been inverted, and that coloured people are suffering because blacks are now on top.

This is a profoundly false picture of the nature of neo-apartheid capitalism. At an economic level, it is simply absurd. By almost any social measure—poverty, unemployment, life expectancy—it is blatantly obvious that the racial hierarchy that existed under apartheid remains intact, with whites on top, Indians and coloureds occupying intermediate strata, and blacks at the very bottom. For example, in 2012 the average household income of whites was 1.5 times that of Indians, 3.6 times that of coloureds and six times that of blacks.

Coloured sectoralists often draw an analogy between the ANC post-1994 and the National Party (NP) post-1948. This is just as false. Whereas the policies of the NP really did economically benefit the white population as a whole, eliminating any trace of white poverty and insuring that even less skilled whites got well-paid jobs in the civil service, the ANC has obviously done no such thing for the vast majority of blacks, whose conditions have in many respects gotten worse since 1994. Nor could it be any different, for the main source of profits for the South African capitalists remains, as it has been for over a century, the superexploitation of black labour.

This heavy overlap between class exploitation and racial oppression is a unique product of European colonisation as it played out in South Africa. That overlap did not fundamentally change in 1994—otherwise there would have been no possibility of a negotiated settlement between the ANC and the white rulers. What changed is that the ANC-led Alliance was installed in government as black front men for the capitalist rulers, who are (still) overwhelmingly white. To be sure, this has also resulted in the growth of a privileged black elite, including a handful of black capitalists like Patrice Motsepe and Cyril Ramaphosa, who have used their political connections to become exploiters in their own right.

The big lie—promoted by both the likes of Anthony Wilson and the Tripartite Alliance—is that the bourgeois government and the black elite are representative of the black majority. If anyone needed any proof that this is a lie, they got it with the Marikana massacre—including Ramaphosa’s role encouraging police action on behalf of the Lonmin board. Marikana starkly exposed that this government does not represent the interests of the black masses, but those of the South African capitalists and their imperialist big brothers.

Coloured sectoralism is a dead end that only serves to isolate the coloured oppressed from their best potential ally—the black proletariat—and tie them to their worst enemy—the racist white bosses. The clearest demonstration of this is the considerable coloured support for the DA and other white parties, particularly in the Western Cape, in the 1994 and subsequent elections.

Many leftists impressionistically believed that the collaboration between black and coloured anti-apartheid activists meant that racial divisions had been eliminated. For example, the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF), which led the campaign to boycott the Tricameral Parliament elections in 1984, had a mass base among the coloured population in the Western Cape. UDF and other leftist coloured activists promoted “coloured rejectionism”—the idealist notion that a distinct coloured population was simply an artificial invention of the white rulers—as a response to apartheid’s racist divide-and-rule.

These leftists were shocked when in the 1994 elections a majority of coloureds in the Western Cape voted for the National Party, who won the province in large part through a campaign of crude swart gevaar propaganda. As the ICL observed at the time, “The actual prospect of a black nationalist government, however liberal its ideological stance, opened up clearly visible fissures within the nonwhite population” (“South Africa Powder Keg,” Black History and the Class Struggle No. 12, February 1995).

The ANC gained control of the Western Cape in the 1999 and 2004 elections—albeit with a minority of the vote in both—as the NP went into terminal collapse and the DA was emerging as the main white opposition party. Since 2009, the DA has won the Western Cape with clear majorities, both by exploiting coloured disillusionment and resentment over the ANC’s attacks on the poor and anti-coloured demagogy, and by stoking anti-black prejudices with swart gevaar tactics.

One certainly doesn’t have to be an apologist for the bourgeois-nationalist ANC to recognise that the neoliberal DA is (also) bad news for all the oppressed, including not least coloured people. In Cape Town and the Western Cape, local and provincial DA governments have meted out vicious cop terror to all who dare to stand up and fight against racial oppression and grinding poverty—from coloured fishing communities and backyard dwellers, to black shack dwellers, to black and coloured farm workers. State repression and union-busting provocations show the real meaning of the DA’s nauseating “open, opportunity-driven society” neoliberalism: “open” season for untrammelled exploitation by the racist capitalists.

The DA dresses up its defence of white privilege by presenting itself as the saviour of “minority groups, fearful of majority tyranny and single party domination,” as Helen Zille put it in 2008. But what the DA racists stand for is just one (white) minority. Cape Town, which has been governed by the DA since 2006, is widely regarded as one of the most racist cities in the country. Media reports of white racist attacks were so frequent that the city government launched a bogus “Inclusive City” campaign in March 2015 to try to fix its image problem. It is not uncommon to hear stories of even black celebrities and politically well-connected members of the black elite being turned away from Cape Town’s “up-market” restaurants and hotels because they’re not white.

Some bitter lessons from the history of white minority rule are worth recalling for anyone with illusions that white bourgeois parties like the DA are some kind of “friend” of the coloured people. Beginning in the early 1900s, successive white minority governments pursued the tactic of aiming the most severe racist measures first at the black majority, only to later follow them up with similar attacks against other non-whites. An example was influx control and residential segregation. The 1923 Urban Areas Act provided for the compulsory registration of black Africans and gave local authorities the power to keep them out of urban areas and deport those deemed “idle and undesirable.” This and other laws were used to deport tens of thousands of blacks from the Western Cape, especially in times of economic downturn when the capitalists had less demand for cheap labour to exploit.

The white rulers cynically and demagogically passed off these measures as an act of benevolence for the coloured community, “protecting” them against competition from black labour. Pettybourgeois coloured misleaders like Abdullah Abdurahman, president of the African Political Organisation (APO, later renamed African People’s Organisation), sometimes opposed these attacks on black Africans in words. But in practice, the APO and Abdurahman aided and abetted this racist divide-and-rule, for example by appealing to the government to merely exempt coloureds from residential segregation, or even calling on the white baas to replace black workers with coloureds. The APO’s right-wing opponents among the coloured political elite were even worse, openly embracing Barry Hertzog’s racist National Party.

The end result was only to weaken resistance to the white racist onslaught and sabotage the possibilities that existed at the time for common struggle by the black and coloured oppressed. With apartheid, the system of racial segregation was taken to a whole new level, and even the limited concessions to coloureds, made to promote divide-and-rule, were scrapped. For example, following the 1950 Group Areas Act some 150,000 coloured people were forcibly evicted from their homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985, most of them relocated to desolate coloured ghettoes like the townships in the Cape Flats.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1082	29 January 2016

South Africa-Race and Class Under Neo-Apartheid-For a Black-Centered Workers Government

Part Two

Below is the second part of an article that was originally published in December as a supplement to Spartacist South Africa, newspaper of the International Communist League’s South African section. The term “coloured” refers to the mixed-race, partly Malay-derived population in that country. Part One appeared in WV No. 1081, 15 January.

The DA’s [Democratic Alliance] default response to exposures of racist outrages in the Western Cape is to point out that similar things are happening in the rest of the country, where the ANC is in government. Responding to the outcry over revelations that local police in Worcester were issuing a new “dompas” [pass book] that black and coloured gardeners and domestic workers were required to carry in order to enter certain wealthy white suburbs, Helen Zille pointed out that the same system was being promoted in ANC-run Gauteng.

Indeed, in March 2015 the Gauteng MEC [Member of Executive Council] for “community safety” convened a “Rural Safety Summit” with representatives from the police and various farmers organisations—the African Farmers Union of South Africa, as well as right-wing white racist outfits like the Transvaal Agricultural Union and Agri SA. The summit adopted a plan for increased police repression in rural farming communities, including the directive that “farmers must hire legal and documented workers and create profile cards to be verified at local stations.” This in fact reveals a lot more about neo-apartheid South Africa and the Tripartite Alliance government than Zille and the DA intend—namely, it is but one example of how, fundamentally, both the ANC and the DA defend white privilege. Obviously, they come at this from very different starting points, but in both cases it is a function of administering the racist capitalist system.

Going back to the ANC’s founding days in 1912, its aim has always been to promote the development of a black elite to join in the exploitation of “its own” people. They didn’t want to leave that to the Boers and the British. While at times adopting more or less populist rhetoric and militant protest tactics to mobilise the black masses behind this aim, the final goal never changed. And the path to this goal necessarily led to striking a deal with the white rulers and acting as their black front men. The anti-coloured chauvinist demagogy of some ANC leaders—just like their promotion of anti-immigrant bigotry—is in large part designed to conceal this fundamental reality by scapegoating coloureds and other marginalised oppressed groups for the miserable living conditions of the black majority.

Black nationalism—the false view that all black people share a common interest standing above class divisions—is the key obstacle to revolutionary consciousness among the South African proletariat. It is the ideology through which the working-class base of COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions] and the SACP [South African Communist Party] is subordinated to the bourgeois ANC and the capitalist exploiters via the Tripartite Alliance. Even with the enormous discontent and anger against the ANC and its Alliance partners, nationalism remains the dominant form of false consciousness among black workers. After the platinum belt around Rustenburg became a “no go area” for the ANC following the Marikana massacre and the massive wave of militant wildcat strikes by mineworkers in 2012, it was the bourgeois nationalist-populists of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) that gained the most in the 2014 elections.

The dominance of nationalist false consciousness among the proletariat is above all a product of the overwhelming weight of national oppression felt by the black majority. To address this burning issue and set the proletarian and plebeian masses against the nationalist misleaders, we have advanced a programme for proletarian leadership in the struggle for national liberation, encapsulated in the slogan of a “black-centred workers government.”

We fight to win class-conscious coloured workers and other anti-racist coloured activists to this programme. This is based on the understanding that the fight for national liberation of the oppressed black majority is the strategic motor force for workers revolution to smash the racist neo-apartheid system that oppresses all of the non-white toilers. The oppression of coloureds (and Indians) is directly conditioned by the superexploitation of the black proletariat, and any meaningful fight to end this oppression necessarily means fighting for the national liberation of the oppressed black majority. Likewise, any meaningful fight for black liberation means an unyielding fight against black nationalism, which is riddled with anti-coloured and anti-Indian bigotry. This understanding is critical for building a racially integrated Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party that can intervene and fight for revolutionary leadership among all sections of the oppressed. Under a black-centred workers government, there would be an important role and full democratic rights for coloureds, Indians and Asians, and those whites who accept a government centrally based on the black working people.

Particularly in the early years of neo-apartheid, many South African leftists vehemently objected to our slogan, arguing that by acknowledging that there are differences and divisions among the non-white masses, we echoed the line of the apartheid rulers who constantly played divide-and-rule among the racial groupings and sought to promote tribal and ethnic identities. Instead, these leftists—including the New Unity Movement, the forerunners of the Democratic Socialist Movement/Workers and Socialist Party and the pseudo-Trotskyists who are now in the orbit of the ILRIG (International Labour Research and Information Group) labour think tank—embraced the ANC-promoted illusion of “non-racialism.” In doing so, they ignored the real and dramatic expressions of division along colour, national and tribal lines in Mandela’s neo-apartheid state. The nationalist fictions of the “rainbow nation” and “nation-building” were their means for denying reality, because their reformist programmes are fundamentally incapable of changing it.

Thus, in 1997 a Cape Town-based fake-Trotskyist outfit, the Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL, now renamed Workers International Vanguard Party) wrote us a 19-page “open letter” that was largely devoted to retailing the nasty slander, “The Spartacists promote racial divisions in South Africa.” WIVL objected to our call for a black-centred workers government, because to them it meant “a workers’ government in South Africa should have a racial guarantee worked into its very constitution.” In our reply to WIVL (printed, along with WIVL’s “open letter,” in Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacists No. 1, July 1998), we pointed out that this “colour-blindness” was in reality a mask for WIVL’s accommodation to coloured parochialism and a denial of the structural racial hierarchy of South African capitalism with its special oppression of black Africans at the bottom.

In South Africa, class exploitation is integrally bound up with national oppression. Despite a sizeable coloured proletariat, especially in the Western Cape, and an urban Indian working class in Natal, the overwhelming majority of workers are black Africans. WIVL’s attack on our call for a black-centred workers government was in fact an attack on Leon Trotsky himself. In his only substantive writing on South Africa, a 1935 letter to South African revolutionaries, Trotsky insisted:

“It is entirely obvious that the predominant majority of the population, liberated from slavish dependence, will put a certain imprint on the state.

“Insofar as a victorious revolution will radically change not only the relation between the classes, but also between the races, and will assure to the blacks that place in the state which corresponds to their numbers, insofar will the social revolution in South Africa also have a national character.”

— reprinted in The Fight For a Revolutionary Vanguard Party: Polemics on the South African Left, April 1997

Our recognition that proletarian revolution in South Africa is the supreme act of national liberation in no way entails the slightest political support to nationalism as an ideology or to the project of “nation-building.” South Africa is not a nation but a colonial-derived state, encompassing diverse peoples and based on a brutal racial hierarchy. The boundaries of almost all African states, including South Africa, were drawn arbitrarily by the colonial powers and have no national legitimacy. A single tribe or people often were dismembered between two or more countries, while two or more historically antagonistic peoples were often forced together in a single state. A democratic, egalitarian and rational solution is impossible under capitalism. The fight for a black-centred workers government in South Africa is part of our perspective of a socialist federation of Southern Africa.

Combating nationalist ideology means confronting the prejudices and chauvinist stereotypes about coloureds that are common among black Africans, which the ANC, EFF and other nationalists promote. In many African languages, racially derogatory terms like amaBoesman (“bushman”) are the standard—sometimes the only—words to refer to coloureds. There is also a widespread misconception that the coloured population simply arose from miscegenation between black and white people. This misconception is often accompanied by anti-coloured prejudices—that coloured people “don’t know where they come from,” are “unreliable,” etc. It reflects an acceptance of the notion of “races” as inherent, fixed biological categories—a fallacy that has traditionally been promoted as part of racist pseudo-scientific attempts to justify slavery and black oppression by “proving” that blacks are “inferior.” (For a debunking of these myths in the U.S. context, see “The ‘Bell Curve’ and Genocide U.S.A.,” Black History and the Class Struggle No. 12, February 1995.)

Racial categories are a product of human social relations, not of genetics, which means that the corresponding racial identities, prejudices, etc., are shaped by the particular historical development of the society in which they exist. The coloured population is made up of various mixtures of the different peoples that have inhabited South Africa over the centuries—slaves from East Africa and South and Southeast Asia; Dutch and other white European colonisers; the Khoikhoi, San and other native inhabitants.

While there was a complex racial hierarchy in the Cape Colony during the time of slavery, the consolidation of these diverse peoples into the coloured population as it essentially exists today—a race-colour caste of intermediate status in the racial hierarchy—was a later development. This process was intimately bound up with the formation of a modern capitalist economy in South Africa in the late 1800s. As Ian Goldin argues in Making Race—The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa (1987): “It was no accident that the period which saw the evolution of a distinct Coloured identity also saw a dramatic transformation of labour” as people migrated to the towns of the Cape Colony in search of employment. Goldin describes how this distinction emerged among the labour force in the 1890s, with employers on the docks, on the farms and elsewhere dividing workers into “Natives”—who they preferred to hire for unskilled and heavy manual work—and “cape boys” or “coloureds”—who were preferred for artisan jobs as carpenters, brick layers, etc.

Class Struggle and the Role of Communists

It would, of course, be wrong and extremely one-sided to think that the relations between blacks and coloureds are only characterised by antagonisms and mistrust. Besides the examples of racial clashes, there are also notable examples of struggle against the bourgeoisie’s divide-and-rule tactics. Against those who promote racial stereotypes, it is important to stress that the coloured population is by no means homogeneous (nor is the black population, for that matter)—political and social attitudes vary widely between individuals, based on class background, personal experiences and other factors. Moreover, the prevalent attitudes among the coloured population are also not fixed, but vary with time and location. For example, there has generally been much less support for the DA among coloured working people in the rural areas—the agricultural regions of the Western Cape, as well as much of the Northern Cape—than in urban areas.

In terms of communist intervention, a key focus must be the industries where black and coloured workers are integrated at the point of production—for example, in auto factories in the Eastern Cape, as well as in agriculture in the Western Cape. The racial divisions between blacks and coloureds go against the basic material interests of the working class, and the very workings of capitalist exploitation compel the workers to organise collectively against the employers. Class struggle creates the objective conditions for combating and breaking through the racial and other divisions: every hard-fought strike inevitably poses the need for class unity against the capitalists.

Take the farm workers strike of 2012-13 in the Western Cape. A focal point of the strike was De Doorns, which in 2009 was the site of violent anti-immigrant pogroms that forced some 3,000 mostly Zimbabwean immigrants to flee to refugee camps. According to some reports, these attacks were sparked by South African labour brokers, who, in an effort to eliminate competition from Zimbabwean labour brokers, incited the anti-immigrant mobs by blaming Zimbabwean workers for “stealing” jobs from South Africans. This and many other examples show how the white farm owners and parasites like the labour brokers play divide-and-rule in order to keep all of the different sections of farm labourers viciously exploited, including by pitting men against women, permanent workers against seasonal workers, coloured workers against black workers, etc.

When the strikes broke out in 2012, the farm owners tried to use the same tactics to undercut the strike by sowing divisions, with support from the Western Cape government of Zille and the DA. But this failed to break the solidarity and unity of this militant strike across racial and national lines. One strike committee leader told Jesse Wilderman of Wits University: “The people were all united—Zim, Sotho, coloured, Xhosa speaking—everyone was united.... The strike brought back the struggle culture [of] the 1980s and we were really united across the whole group” (Farm Worker Uprising in the Western Cape: A Case Study of Protest, Organising, and Collective Action, 26 September 2014). The strikers faced down extreme state repression and won a modest concession when the minimum wage was raised from R69 to R105 ($4 to $6) per day.

In response to even this incredibly meagre increase in starvation wages, the racist farm owners carried out a whole range of reprisals aimed at intimidating and scapegoating strike militants. The farmers have combined the reprisals with calculated provocations designed to promote divisions among the workers. Some farmers have brought in new foreign workers to get around the increased minimum wage, some are reportedly bussing in coloured workers from other areas to avoid hiring seasonal workers who were active in the strike, and others have evicted permanent workers who participated in the strike from on-farm housing. There are indications that these measures have succeeded, in some areas, in reviving the old reactionary national and racial divisions. Thus, Wilderman reports that one group of workers he interviewed in De Doorns threatened a repeat of the 2009 pogroms.

A key lesson from the strike and its aftermath is that while the economic struggles of the workers do pose the need for class unity across racial and other divisions, in and of themselves these struggles are not capable of forging this unity on a consistent and lasting basis. For that, a revolutionary workers party of the Bolshevik type is needed. As Lenin explained in What Is To Be Done? (1902), history shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is unable to spontaneously generate socialist consciousness. That consciousness must be introduced from without, through the intervention of a vanguard party that has summed up the lessons of the history of class struggle internationally in a revolutionary Marxist programme. Such a party would not limit its intervention to the immediate economic struggles of the working class, but must act as a tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.

The Bolshevik party built by Lenin fought vigorously for the democratic rights of all nationalities in the “prison house of peoples” of tsarist Russia. Central to Lenin’s attitude on the national question was the urgent need for proletarian revolutionaries to champion the struggles against national oppression and stand for the equality of all nations in the interests of clearing away the obstacles to working-class unity. In “Critical Remarks on the National Question” (1913), Lenin wrote: “Working-class democracy contraposes to the nationalist wrangling of the various bourgeois parties over questions of language, etc., the demand for the unconditional unity and complete amalgamation of workers of all nationalities in all working-class organisations...in contradistinction to any kind of bourgeois nationalism.”

Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained the political authority to fight for the unity of the proletarian vanguard across national divisions because they were known as the staunchest fighters against Great Russian chauvinism and oppression of all national minorities. At the height of the 1905 Revolution in October, when the tsarist autocracy threatened to “drown the revolution in Jewish blood,” rumours of an anti-Jewish pogrom spread through Petersburg. Within a matter of hours some 12,000 armed workers had been mobilised by the workers soviet (council) to repulse the reactionary “Black Hundreds” gangs.

There are important differences between the patterns of national/racial oppression in South Africa and tsarist Russia. Most significantly, whereas the majority of the workers that made the 1917 Russian Revolution were ethnically Russian—fighting against Russian exploiters who oppressed other nationalities—in South Africa, the overwhelming majority of workers suffer national oppression at the hands of a white minority. Moreover, the various peoples that inhabit South Africa do not constitute separate nations, as they are integrated into one economy. Despite these differences, the approach of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is very relevant for addressing the racial, tribal and other divisions among the oppressed here—especially with regard to the burning need to mobilise the proletariat in defence of immigrants.

The Controversy Over Affirmative Action

One flashpoint for racial antagonisms in recent years has been affirmative action. Controversy escalated in 2011 in response to proposed amendments to the Employment Equity Act that would have required employment targets and quotas to reflect national, as opposed to regional, demographics. This was justifiably seen by coloureds in the Western Cape as a racist attack on them, as it would mean that despite being a majority in the region, the employment targets for coloureds would be pegged at about 9%. The logic of the proposal is a racist programme of forced population transfers—one of the many reactionary directions that capitalist “nation building” can take. This was spelled out by Jimmy Manyi (then leader of the Black Management Forum and later a spokesman for the ANC government), who in multiple interviews railed against the “over-concentration” of coloureds in the Western Cape.

In a similarly nationalist vein, Manyi also decried the high numbers of Indians who had benefited from affirmative action and “Black Economic Empowerment,” implying that they should be excluded from both. While the proposed change in affirmative action was dropped from the final amendment following a ruling by the Cape Town Labour Court, there has been a sustained anti-Indian campaign in recent years, centred in KwaZulu-Natal and driven by black business associations trying to cut out Indian competition for state tenders and the like. This reactionary crap is supported by members of the ANC and Malema’s EFF. While the EFF today poses as “friends” of the coloured people and has gained some coloured support in the Western Cape, it should not be forgotten that in 2011, when they were leading the ANC Youth League, the current EFF leaders Malema and Floyd Shivambu were outspoken supporters of Jimmy Manyi.

These racist attacks on the coloured and Indian minorities serve to strengthen the racial divisions and drive the coloured and Indian working people into the arms of their worst enemies. Thus, the reactionary white-dominated trade union Solidarity was able to pose as the champions of the coloured minority by challenging the proposed guidelines in court. Solidarity’s aim is scrapping affirmative action entirely, part of its broader purpose of defending white privilege, as clearly spelled out in an old entry (since deleted) on its website: “Because of the ideology of representation the masses do not benefit and whites are being seriously disadvantaged.”

Solidarity’s court case was on behalf of ten prison guards (nine of them coloured and one white), who had been passed over for promotion based on quotas using national demographics. It must be clear that all jailers—whether black, coloured or white—are the bitter class enemy of workers and the oppressed. Just like the police, their job is to mete out racist repression in defence of the capitalists. They have no place in the trade unions or other working-class organisations.

While we defend affirmative action against racist rollback and also oppose the racist attempts to exclude coloureds and Indians, the aim of communists is not to defend the miserable status quo under capitalism. Affirmative action is incapable of solving the pervasive, racist discrimination in employment and education, because it is premised on maintaining the capitalist system under which the oppressed are pitted against each other for a handful of jobs in a society with a massive level of unemployment.

For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

What’s urgently posed is a political struggle within the trade unions for a new, class-struggle leadership. Such a fight must be waged against both the treacherous pro-Alliance leaders of COSATU and their reformist opponents like the NUMSA metal workers union bureaucracy. A class-struggle leadership would seek to unite workers—black and coloured, male and female, employed and unemployed, etc.—in common struggle, based on the understanding that all their interests are fundamentally antagonistic to those of the capitalists. As long as workers are pitted against each other in competition for a limited pool of jobs, the bosses will always play divide-and-rule to weaken the labour movement.

What’s needed is a fight for union control of hiring, with special union-run programmes aimed at reaching out to and training workers from specially oppressed layers. This must be linked to the fight for jobs for all, demanding that the available work be divided at no loss in pay among all those capable of working. We need a class-struggle fight to smash labour-broking slave labour, mobilising the unions to fight for permanent jobs for contract workers, with equal pay for equal work, union conditions and full union protection for all workers. This includes fighting for full citizenship rights for all who have made it here.

The ANC’s policy document “Affirmative Action and the New Constitution,” written by Albie Sachs in 1994, makes it explicit that affirmative action was chosen as an alternative to the obvious solution to begin addressing the monumental injustices of white minority rule, which would have been to “confiscate the spoils of apartheid and share them out amongst those who had been dispossessed.”

This, of course, was never something the ANC was going to do, at bottom because of its commitment to maintaining capitalism. And this points to the issue that underlies the continued racial and tribal divisions among the non-white masses, like so many of the other burning issues of economic and social backwardness that are the racist legacies of imperialist domination and apartheid and cannot be resolved under capitalism. Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution uniquely points the way forward to the economic and social modernisation of countries of belated capitalist development. Its application in South Africa is encapsulated in the call for a black-centred workers government.

Adequate housing for the millions in the townships, squatter camps and villages, including racially integrated housing, free quality education, the eradication of lobola and other traditional patriarchal practices oppressive to women: these desperately needed measures require the overthrow of neo-apartheid capitalism. A black-centred workers government in South Africa would start by expropriating the Randlords and their black front men, seizing the “spoils of apartheid” and the means of production. Under a workers government, these would be used not merely to redistribute wealth, but more fundamentally to reorganise and expand production on a socialist basis, which is what is really needed to bring about the economic and social modernisation so desperately needed.

The success of socialist transformation will depend crucially on the international extension of the revolution, particularly to the imperialist centres. Proletarian revolution internationally would mean the expropriation and centralised control of the productive wealth of North America, Europe and Japan. The full, rational utilisation of economic resources, particularly investment embodying the most advanced technology, will produce a quantum leap in labour productivity, moving rapidly toward a fully automated economy. The resulting vast increase in output will allow the massive transfer of productive resources to the more backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The victory of proletarian revolution on a world scale will, of course, not be an easy task. But it is the only alternative to capitalist barbarism. As explained in the ICL’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” (1998), this victory

“would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilization. Only then will it be possible to realize the free development of each individual as the condition for the free development of all.”

This is what Spartacist/South Africa fights for as a section of the International Communist League. We urge those looking for an alternative to the vicious racism and oppression of neo-apartheid capitalism to check out our revolutionary, internationalist Trotskyist programme.

The Individual In History- Clifton Webb’s The Man Who Never Was

The Individual In History- Clifton Webb’s The Man Who Never Was

DVD Review

By Lester Lannon

The Man Who Never Was, starring Clifton Webb , Gloria Grahame, 1956

No question war, especially World War II, is an especially fertile ground for thrillers, for the portrayal of the best laid plans of mice or men, going awry or not. Even better, again using World War II as the example, is the role that anonymous individual have in turning battles or other events one way or the other and turning history that way on a dime. Of course as in the film under review, The Man Who Never Was once even the most interesting real life plan has to be glossed enough to be audience-friendly and so certain liberties give the whole plot grander effect that the normal ho-hum of intelligence work really looks like. Ask your nearest clandestine spy and he or she will give you the real skinny.

Here what is what on this one. The British (and Allies) after clearing North Africa and its environs of Jerries, oops German, by 1943 are ready to make their way to back to Europe by setting up a second front via Sicily and eventually to Italy and then eastward. The deal though is the Germans are entrenched on Sicily and elsewhere and since they are prepared for some kind of invasion from the South they would if at full strength make the Allied casualty lists even longer. So somebody in Naval Intelligence, a staff officer played by Clifton Webb last seen in this space trying to corner the Gene Tierney market in the film noir Laura, proposed the idea of trying to fake the Germans into thinking that the invasion was going to come through Greece, or elsewhere thus diverging those German divisions elsewhere. A hard trick to pull off, no question since the Germans had not conquered a good part of Europe by being duped by every harebrained scheme the enemy came up with. But our captain is clever and resourceful. Why not have a dead man “volunteer” (by his grieving but patriotic father) filled with war plans and personal items be washed up on the Spanish coast and see if the Germans buy the ruse. The rest of the film, and the film’s tension, revolves around getting everything right to fool the Germans from real letters to sales receipts from men’s clothing stores.

And it mainly works. But like I said the Germans were not born yesterday and so they sent a spy into Britain to get the scoop on this dead body. As the spy gets more information he becomes convinced that this plans found on the dead body are real. The icing on the cake, and the reason that Gloria Grahame last seen here in this space as a gangster’s moll in half the great B-noirs of the late 1940s and early 1950s, gets some top billing despite her small role is that when the spy goes to her to see her reaction to the death of the dead man who was supposed to be her fiancé she puts on a convincing demonstration for him, although she was mourning the fly-boy she was engaged to who was killed in a plane crash. Nice twist. Nice to that an individual did have a small effect on the outcome of World War II with all the mass deaths and destruction.

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Monday, February 15, 2016

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-

Under a False Flag^[3]

I

II

III

Notes

A View From The International Left-South Africa-Race and Class Under Neo-Apartheid-For a Black-Centered Workers Government

The Individual In History- Clifton Webb’s The Man Who Never Was

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About Me

Monday, February 15, 2016

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-

Under a False Flag[3]

I

II

III

Notes

A View From The International Left-South Africa-Race and Class Under Neo-Apartheid-For a Black-Centered Workers Government

The Individual In History- Clifton Webb’s The Man Who Never Was

Under a False Flag^[3]