Permanent Revolution no. 4

PERMANENT REVOLUTION

APARTHEID:

FROM RESIST TO REVOLUTION

SUMMER

1986

Price 80p

Contents

introduction

The Apartheid State Keith Hassell

The South African Working Class Sue Thomas

The Crisis of Leadership Stuart King

The National Question Dave Stocking

Building Solidarity Sue Thomas

Select Bibliography

ae

22 224! 3363

AWS ARS

rd F Reve

introduction

"A nationwide political crisis is in evidence in Russia, a crisis which effects the very foundation of the state system and not just parts of it, which effects the foundation of the edifice and not an out building, not

merely one of its storeys, No matter how many glib.

phrases our liberals and liquidators trot out to the effect that ... political reforms are on the order of the day ... the fact remains that not a single liquidator or liberal can point to any reformist way out of the situation.” ("May Day Action by a Revolutionary Proletariat" Lenin 1913)

A new phase of the South African revolution has opened with che formation of COSATU and the success of the -mighty May Day strike which it called, One and a half _million black workers struck, tens of thousands attended rallies and demonstrations in defiance of the repression. In the townships the youth have shown themselves undaunted by the savage onslaught that the armies of police and the state-backed ‘vigilantes’ have unleashed against them,

Over 1500 have been killed since the major upsurge began in the Autumn of 1984 - 600 or more ‘officially' killed by police or army. Yet still the demonstrations, strikes and boycotts continue to shake the apartheid state to its foundations. They have shown themselves intransigent both to repression and to the deceitful concessions of Botha.

We ure witnessing the opening of a revolutionary situaction in South Africa. A prolonged economic crisis combined with over a year and a half of contlnuous revolt has drawn wider and wider sections of the masses into the struggle. From the students and youth in the townships, the workers in the factories to the ‘immigrant’ workers of the hostels and increasingly the masses of the ‘homelands’, the people of South Africa are in a mighty insurgence against the apartheid regime, determined even at the cost of their lives, to bring about its total destruction.

But as Lenin recognised the heroism of the mass revolt is not, in itself, sufficient to bring about a revolution;

"It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it ts

essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at

least a majority of the ciass conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully reaiise that revolution is necessary and that they should be prepared to die for it: second that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward workers into politics..." (Left

Wing Communism)

In South Africa the crisis has faced the ruling class with precisely the fact that it can no longer "live and rule in the old way", Yet every attempt to modify [ts method of exploitation, to ‘reform’ the apartheid system has proved ty be too little and roo tate, It has been contemptuously rejected by the masses who push forward demanding the dismantling of the regime itself, whilst the very offer has thrown the racist camp into confusion and rage.

The paralysis of PW Botha's Nationalist Party is itself a reflection of the growing political crisis of the ruling class. Balancing between the anti-reform "Verkrampte" and

2 reformist "Verligte™ wings of his own party, Botha is acutely aware that even the small reforms offered have

produced ever widening splits in the white natlonalist alliance forged around the apartheid system. The growth of support for the HNP and Conservative Party and now the dramatic rise of the clearly fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), only underline the tmpossibility of pursuing Botha's reformist strategy. The sudden sabotage of the commonwealth mission, which was engineering a deal to allow talks with the ANC (the pet project of the Verligte wing and its most prominant figure, Foreign Mintster Pik Botha) by means of the bombing raids on the frontline states, is symptomatic of Botha's inability to go any further down the reform road.

Botha's regime has shown itself unable to either repress the mass movement or to satisfy its demands. Most of its reform plans lie in tatters. The 1983 constitutlonal reform, which began the current wave of struggle, ts rejected by the vast majority of black South Africa including the "“coloureds" and "Indians" it was meant to draw into the system. The focal councils in the black townships lie in ruins, only 5 out of 38 still functioning. Collaborators and their black police protectors are driven out by mass action. Committees of struggle, made up of the young ‘comrades’ have sprung up to organise the boycott weapon and other aspects of the resistance in the townships. Although the total schools boycott, which went on for almost a year, has been suspended, the schools remain in turmoil as strikes and demonstrations take place against victimlsations and imposed “security guards".

Above all the working class, through [ts trade unions, has entered the struggle in a decisive fashion. The Transvaal General Strike of November £984, which united trade unions and townships, was symptomatic of this development. The formation of COSATU in December 1985, organising half a million workers, the success of the May Day Strike and the General Strike called for the June 16th anniversary of Soweto, all spell out the growing threat to apartheid and the Botha regime.

The opening of a revolutionary situation by no means ensures the success of che revolution. This development will be accelerated, retarded or even reversed, depending on che strategy adopted and the leadership offered in the coming months. The South African revolution cannot merely mark time. It must either go forward to the revolutionary destruction of apartheid or it is in serious danger of a crushing counter-revolution,

Already the regime has been marshalling its forces. Since the second half of 1985 it has been encouraging and arining its black "vigilantes" - che "Amabutho", "“Mbhokoto", "Green Berets", Pakhatis". In townships like Crossroads the ‘vigilantes’ have launched a terror campaign - a dirty war against radical leaders and activists. The appearance of a afrikaner fascist movement with obvious support within sections of the white police, signals the growing possibility of a counter revolutionary offensive. While the fascists are undoubtedly a last resort for South Africa's rulers, a more or less open military dictatorship which sweeps away the fast judicial and puarllamentar’ restrictions on the repression and seeks to destroy the mass movement is a serious possibility.

The potential for avoiding such a defeat depends abo.-= ail on the leadership now being given to the blac: struggle. The ANC, which is undoubtedly the major for-= within the movement, Is pursuing its "twin track" strate<:.

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The potential for avoiding such a defeat depends above alt on the leadership now being given to the black struggle, The ANC, which is undoubtedly the major force within the movement, is pursuing its "twin track” strategy. Declaring for a “peoples war", for the setting up of "Revolutionary People's Committees" to "transform no go areas into mass revolutionary bases", whilst at the same time using the threat of “"ungovernability™ to try and force negotiations and serious concessions from the Botha regime, Nowhere in the ANC's strategy for making the country "ungovernable" does there appear, as the central weapon, the general strike. Yet the fight for a mass general strike against the regime remains che burning need of the moment,

Only a country wide general strike can paralyse the South African economy, can tay the basis for dual power through the occupation of the factories and, via the trade unions, the uniflcation of the township committees of struggle into real soviet type bodies, organising the workers, students, youth, housewives and the community as a whole against the regime.

It is vital to win the unions and the working class to such a perspective as the only way to total victory. A general strike will almost certainly lead to a civil war situation, Dual power will not emerge fully formed or peacefully in South Africa. The racist regime has a reactionary mass base not only amongst the whites but amongst the “conservative” blacks, the homeland stooges, their ‘vigilantes’. A general strike is the only way of fissuring this reactionary alliance. When millions of workers show their determination, then the basis of the regime wilt start to totter, beginning with the blacks who face the insurgent people, in the police ferce und the army and in the homeland defence furces,

In such an immediate struggle to smash the apartheid regime the workers will find themselves in alliance with petit-bourgeois and even black bourgeois forces, namely, the popular frontist UDF or ANC. Such united fronts are net only permissable in the South African context But necessary tO ensure the success of the intmediate, prac~- tical task of smashing the apartheid state. Workers imust inake sure that they retain their political independence ins any such blocs of struggle. The apartheid regime must be smashed. The outcame of its destruction must not be ‘negotiations’ with the nationalists or a 'convention' sponsored by the frontline states or the Commonwealth. Ail such deals will be a treiendous betrayal.

The workers organisations, and first and foremast COSATU should in the organising of the general strike

create township-trade union councils to organise the strike and to lead the struggle for apartheid's total destruction. All those anti-apartheid forces should be united at base level but also at leadership level around the demand for the total destruction of white rule, for the total disbanding and disarming of the SADF and the police; for the arming

‘of a mass workers and popular militia and the immediate

convocation of a revolutionary Constituent Assembly based on one person one vote for all over sixteen years of age.

Bot the workers demands and goals must go further, for the smashing of the capitalist system of exploitation in South Africa and the establishment of working class power. To achieve this goal the workers need above all a revolutionary party which. fights against the subordination of the workers demands to the interests of the nascent black bourgeoisie, one which fights for permanent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

These are the problems of the South African revolution which are unalysed and dealt with in this journal, the origins and nature of South African tmperialism, the rise of the black proletariat and the problems of revolutionary leadership. The revolution in South Africa has momentous significance for the world working class, The smashing of the South African state will be an even greater blow to imperialism than either the overthrow of the Shah or of Somoza in Nicaragua. It will dramatically aid the struggle for liberation from imperialist domination throughout the African continent and throw imperialism and its stooges into disarray,

The British working class is called upon to stand four square on the side of the black struggle in South Africa/Azania, There is no doubt where the Thatcher government will stand, even if Botha launches a new and more terrible wave of repression - with her friend Reagan, firmly on the side of counter-revolution. Only massive working class action can obstruct such blows against the South African revolution.

We dedicate this journal to the black workers in South Africa/Azania, who under dire conditions of poverty and illegality, using enormous reserves of courage and ingenuity, built the mighty new trade union movement in South Africa which is the gravedigger of apartheid; and also to the youth und students of the townships who by their self-sacrificiang heroism have confronted the apartheid state's repression on a daily basis, at the cost of many fallen comrades.

Victory is yours!

June 1986

The Apartheid State

Seta LELASS@LL

The uneven and combined development of world capitalism is nowhere more starkly expressed than in the vast continent of Africa. The bele of Sub-Saharan countries, crushed by imperialist exploitation, contains the most impoverished peoples on earth. Burkhina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) has the smatlest per capita income in the world. Yet at the southern tip of the continent the South African racist state power presides over a highly developed and monopolised capitalist economy. South Africa produces nearly one quarter of the continent's GDP, accounts for some 40% of its manufacturing output and consumes over 50% of the whole continent's energy.

Alone among the continent's forty-five states South Africa has escaped imperialist economic enslavement to become an imperialist power in its own right. Its capital dominates the economies of the surrounding states - even those that emerged out of a powerful anti-colonial liberation struggie like Angola and Mozambique. All of the front-line states are heavily dependent on the economy of the apartheid state. In addition it

independent

keeps Namibia in colonial servitude and Lesotho, Botswana _

and Swaziland are semi-colonies whose formal independence is little more than a charade.

South Africa today has taken its place within the inodern imperialist world order. An imperialist power in iis own right, but one tied to two of the largest powers - USA and Britain. It receives their constant aid and

protection and in return performs a vital service for them.

The colonial empires of the European imperialists were replaced after the Second World War by a system of semi- -colonies; that is, formally independent states where the local military hierarchy, the state bureaucracy and the

black bourgeoisies won or were entrusted with, political power but where imperialist exploitation went on virtually unchecked.

South Africa ~- and for a= short period ‘Rhodesia'- were exceptions. The South African state acts as a wedge, driven into the post-colonial states, promoting internal rivalries and division, aiding the Balkanisation of Africa. The South African armed farces intervene to weaken or crush liberation movements in the adjacent states.

Within South Africa no normal national development could take place. Racism became the basis of the state in a way unsurpassed outside of Nazi Germany. However, it aimed not at the genocide of a minority but at the perpetual enslavement of a vast majority of the people of South Africa. Twenty three million blacks are deprived of all political rights. Political power and social wealth is concentrated in the hands of some 4.5 million whites; 60% of whom are Afrikaners (descendants of Dutch settlers) and the rest of English extraction. The ‘Coloured! (9%) and ‘Asian’ (3%} population form intermediate oppressed social strata.

The black African population, although they form the overwhelming majority of the proletarian wealth producers and 72% of the SA population, receive only 29% of total personal income. Some 60% flows into the bank accounts of the whites. Whether In employment, housing or social and public life, the systematic segregation and discrimination against blacks condemns millions to super exploitation, repression, poverty. Yet this very system has produced a massive explosive charge of rage that threatens to blow apart not only this brutaf racist regime hut also monopoly capitalism itself.

Fromm Settler States CO TRDeCrIAUISE LROWE?

How has it been possible for a country, which at the beginning of this century was a colony of British imperlal-

‘ism - in origin a settler state - to be transformed into a imperialist power in the second half of the twentieth century?

The Putch, a mercantile capitalist power, occupied

the Cape to guard the route to their colonies tn the Fast Indies, The excellent agricultural land drew in settlers, When in the last hatf of the Seventeenth century Tritain fought and eventually subordinated the Dutch she began to exert a powerful influence in the region.

By the Nineteenth century commerce was radiating outwards from Cape Town. This commerce and = the

economic liberalism accompanying modern capitalism began

to undermine the traditional master/slave relations of the Boers. This the Boers tolerated as long as they could benefit from this growing commerce, in particular by becoming cash farmers catering for the Cape Town market. Those further inJand who could not, saw in urbanisation only a threat to their way of life. Many of these Boers decided to trek into the interlor. Once there, having

dispossessed local tribes, they founded the two oer republics, At first Britain ignored these republics, content to

control the vital seaboard. All this changed with the discovery of diamonds, and later gold, in the interior. Their allure proved irresistable, particularly when the Boer republic of the Transvaal began to move closer to Brit-

ain's arch-rival - Germany. In the Anglo-Boer war that followed (1899-1902) Britain defeated the Boers.

The colonisation of the Boer republics accelerated the penetration of British capital into the region and crippled the economic aspirations of the nascent Afrikaner bourgeoisie. However, despite defeating the Boers in a bitter war, Britain did not treat the foers as a conquered enemy but rather as potential allies; allies it needed to help maintain the continued oppression of the native African population.

The essence of this alliance was a pact between British mining capital and the large Afrikaner landlords, Afrikaner landlordism acted as a junior parcner, providing agricultural produce for the mines and mining-towns. It flourished on the basis of cheap, coerced black labour and state subsidies from taxed mine income. In 1910 manufacturing contributed Jess than 5% to the economy. Up to the Second World War, mining and = agriculture’ regularly accounted for half of GDP and over half of export earnings.

The modern apartheid system period 1916-1924 as the result of the development of an indigenous South African capitalism. In this period a cross-class alliance was forged. It was born in a period of unrest for both black and white workers. The post~First World War period saw severe clashes between the mineowners and the white miners. Caught between the competition of the growing black proletariat and = the capitalists, the white workers faced mine owners determined to drive down their wages and progressively replace them with cheaper black Jubour, The white miners’ militancy focussed on the defence of their privileges against the black workers, White working class militancy reached its high pointe in 1922 with the Rand revolt which led to the defeat of the white mine workers.

The capitalists were therefore faced with an increasingly militant working class, both black and white after the First World War. The imilitancy of the black workers was progressive, in pursuit of better conditions; that of the white workers became increasingly reactionary, a defence of racial privileges, It was out of this split in the working class that the modern South African state emerged - the apartheid state,

The other major component of the alliance was the Afrikaner petit-bourgeoisie. Despite their military defeat at the curn of the century they had never given up hope of regaining dominance within the South African state. This they badly needed in order to sponsor the growth of fledgling Afrikaner capital and to secure advance in the English dominated state bureaucracy.

Gradually, this alliance was to attract support from the larger farmers. With the growth of urban industry these farmers were more and more interested in imposing #reater restrictions on the movement of black labour to halt the drift from the land to the towns, The decimation of the small farmers by the inexorable growth of large-- scale farming had created a growing mass of Afrikaner unskilled labour squeezed between the vast reserves of cheap unskilled black labour and = skilled white English immigrants,

The conflict between the mine-owners and white labour together with the growing pressure of black labour, presented the Afrikaner nationalists with the opportunity of winning white labour to their side. In 1924 the Labour Party, supported mainly by English-speaking white workers and the Nationalist Party formed an alliance and won the elections. In return for its support, the privileges of white workers were enshrined in law. These included the Miners & Works Act of 1926 barring Africans from skilled mining jobs, the Immorality Act (1927} and the Urban Areas Act, both of which enforced social segregation. As a result of this reactionary alliance, the white workers Jost all semblance of class independence; the Lubour Party duly withered as the nationalist and tiberal! bourgeois parties gained at its expense.

The recession in the 1930s rent the alliances that made up the Nationalise Party, allowing the old pro-English United Party back into power. Its return however was to be shortlived, for in 1946 there occured one of the

was born during the

greatest events in the annals of Dlack South African labour history - the 1946 miners’ strike. This strike together with rising black working cluss militancy through out the economy petrified the whites. The war had seen a rapid

growth of industry and consequently a rapid growth in the urban black working class. The spectre of black workers using their class strength to shake the racist

state and capitalist economy drove the whites into the arms of the reforged Nationalist Party. The Nationalists were seen by most whites as the only party capable of suppressing the black working class. The result was the landslide victory of che Nationalist party in 1948 and its subsequent extension and consolidation of the apartheid state. |

The role of the apartheld capitalist state was to act as mid-wife for the birth and development of a national Afrikaner economy. The first move to broader national economic development hegan with the formation of the South African fron and Steel Corporation {ISCOR) under Hertzog's nationalist government in the late [9$20s. This was legislated for in the tecth of opposition from Britain, who saw in South Africa an important market for Its own depressed steel industries.

The secret of South Africa's independent economic development, in a world dominated by imperialism, was gold, It was the product of black Jabour turned golden,

thousands of feet underground. To these millions of labourers, working in hellish conditions, whose sweat built South Africa, the mine dumps stand today like pyramids: mute testimony toa their efforts as well as to the rapacious drive of capitalism.

The gold mines became the axis around which the national econumy developed, In their shadow grew the towns. To service the mines an infrastructural web arose; ports, roads, railway lines, power stations. In addition the mines constituted a huge inarket for agricultural and industrial products. Finally, by channelling all gold sales through its hands, and through taxation, the state diverted an increasing share of the profits from gold into national economic development.

Because of the super-profits derived from gold-mining, the apartheid state was able to reconcile the antagonism between the emergent national bourgeoisie and the imperialist bourgeoisie of the UK and the USA. This was due to the high rates of exploitation. The powerful

sapartheid state was able to force the black working class

to produce enough profits to attract foreign capital as well as providing for local accumulation. On top of this there were sufficient super-profits to pay for the extensive privileges of the white working class,

The Second World War proved a watershed in the economic development of Afrikaner capitalism. The desperate needs of British imperialism drew South Africa into the war effort. As a result the war saw the rapid expansion of Jocal production. Indeed, many of the large companies in South Africa, such as Premier Milling, date back to this cime. By the end of the war _ industrial employment exceeded minlng employment for the first time.

Moreover, British imperialism emerged from the Second World War severely weakened in relation to U.S. imperialism. Its Inability to retain its existing domination over the South African economy led it to seek a jointly beneficial accomedation with the newly developing native capitalism; one which safeguarded its position within South Africa and ensured that the apartheid state would take over policing the interests of both British and U.S. imperialism in the southern part of the continent,

Britain's decline was reflected in South Africa by the erosion of British control over the mining industry during the war. By 1945 only 47% of dividends were transferred abroad, compared co 85% in 1910, The growth of Sauth African owned mining companies was spearheaded by the Anglo-American Corporation. However, English-speaking South African capitalists still predominated, Afrkaners only owning 1% of mining shares in 1945.

It wus clear that in a world capitalist ecunoms sirecc. dominated by giant monopolies, the develupmest of nates South African monopolies would have to occur st = rslic

pace, and so it was to be. Tf industrialisation proper hegan in the Second World War, then within twenty-five years South Africa had become a highly monopolistic economy,

The victory of the Nationalists in 1948 accelerated the pace of industrialisation. Import controls and quotas were introduced to protect and extend local industry. The state set up financtal institutions such as the National Development Curporation to provide cheap loans to aspiring capitalists.

One of the first tasks of the incoming Nationalist Party government was to centralise credit. [In 1549 it set up the Natlonal Finance Corporation. In the early 1950s it set up the Discount House and Acceptance bank. Hence by the mid-1950s a money market had come into being in Johannesburg which, together with the banks and Stock Exchange were able to mop up all the available funds and channel them for investment.

This development reflected the growth of indigenous finance capital in the South African economy. Between 1945 and 1960 internal financing grew from 31% of total investment to 43%. In the mid-1950s, Anglo-Americanthe largest mining conglomerate- moved into banking. Union Acceptances Ltd is now the largest merchant bank in South Africa.

This process was mirrored within the Afrikaner community itself. The Afrikaner bourgeoisie still constituted the weaker section of the ruling class. They were heavily reliant on state support and their ideological domination, through nationalism, of the white Afrikaner workers, civil servants and smali farmers. These were encouraged to deposit their savings in two large Afrikaner financial] insitutions - Volkskas and Sanlam. In this way Afrikaner credit and investable funds were centralised so as to compete with ‘Engtish' capital.

Without the centralisation and development of credit, South African economic development would have been considerably slowed down and the bourgeoisie would have had great difficulty financing new factories. This centralisation, in the context of a small ecanomy, meant that from an early stage each industry was composed of a small number of companies.

The unprecedented world ‘'‘Jong-boom' from the late 1940s to the late 1960s allowed South Africa ta grow into the space vacated by a declining British imperialism. The Second World War was the decisive turning point in this 're-division' of the world. Moreover, the expansion of the world economy in the 1950s and 1960s ensured that there was only marginal friction between South Africa and Britaln. In addition, the long boom created a stable, long term demand, both for gold {$35 per oz} and South Africa's mineral wealth, which provided the resources for Industrialisation. Finally, the booming world imarket provided a ready outlet for South Africa's agricultural exports and its growing mineral exports,

The high rates of profit to be earned in these post-war yeurs meant South Africa became a magnet for foreign investment. As a result the 1960s witnessed a boom exceeded in scope only by Japan. The economy grew by 76% in this decade. The black working class meanwhile enjoyed none of this. While white workers wages increased by 40%, black workers enjoyed no increases, As a result white mine workers wages grew from seventeen to twenty- -one times the level of black workers' wages.

This decade was also a tine of increased transference of the ownership of capital from foreign into South African hands. By the late 1960s the mines were predom-~- inantly South African owned, Today, anly 24% of mining shares (30% of gold mining) are foreign held and _ this sector has the highest concentration of foreign capital. In the same time span the South African economy lessened its dependence on mining and agriculture as the big mining monopolies diversified into other areas. Manufacturing grew rapidity - by over 8% per year In the 1960s. {In 1950 agriculture contributed 18% of GDP, mining

13% and inmanufacturing 18%. By 1970 agriculture represented 9% of GDP, mining 10% and manufacturing over 23%,

Anglo-American demonstrates most forcefully the growing monopolisation of the South African economy. It has 831 South African subsidiaries, 186 non-South African

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subsidiaries and major investments in 506 other foreign companies, One example of what Lenin described as a very important feature of capitalisin in its highest stage of development, namely, "the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry® cun be seen in Anglo's inove into the related area of metal production. In the early 1960s it formed che Highveld and Vanadium Corporation to exploit South African vanadium deposits. Krom there it took over Scaw Metals, a user of specialised steels which became one of South Africa's leading exporters of manufactured goods,

At the heart of South African monopoly capitalism jay a contradiction, Without apartheld the emergence of a distinct South African Unperialism would have been impossible. The super-exploitation of the black masses was a pre-condition of the relatively non-antagonistic development of an independent capitalism in South Africa.

Likewise the stagnation and further development of

this capitalism in the 1970's was a combination of the general contradictions that beset all capitalist powers at this stage of development (declining profitability, productivity and investment) and the specific cramping effect that apartheid had on the continued expansion of production.

In particular, apartheid operated to accelerate the inherent tendency towards declining productivity. The

specific toll that apartheid policies levied on productivity and profitability performance is difficult to assess. Nevertheless, by the early 1970's it was clear that there was deepening stagnation in the South African economy,

By 1969 GDP growth was down to 2.9% per annum, Under the impact of the 1974-78 recession (the worst in South Africa since the 1930s} growth was negative in 1977, The declining profitabillty that lay behind this slowdown was clearly evident also, as the following table Indicates:

> year average ~ rate of return.

1960-64 16.9% 1965-69 =15.1% 1970-74 11.8% 1975-79 9.7% 1980-84 8.7%

{Source: South African Reserve Bank Quarterly Reviews.)

In other words between the early 1960s and the early 1980s the rate of return halved.

The fajl in the rate -of profit led to a fall in investment. In the first half of the 1960's [Investment grew at a rate of 20% per annum. This was one of the highest rates in the world and it helped to explain South Africa's rapid growth. During the 1970's the growth rate of investment halved to around 10%,

With the recession in the mid-seventies investment actually fell in the second half of the decade. Although this fall was interrupted in 1980/81 due to a dramatic increase in gold prices, since 1982 investment levels have continued to fall. In the three and a half years to 1985 real gross domestic investment had fallen by 18%,

Contributing to this cycle of falling profitabitlty and investment were profound structural! changes within South African monopoly capitalism. By the end of the 1960s manufacturing had become the biggest sector in commodity production {27% of GDP). Manufacture relied increasingly upon skilled or semi-skilled fabour as mechanlsation = proceeded, Between [946-1970 the capltal-labour ratlo doubled as flxed capital stock more than quadrupled. This technological change created an even further intense shortage of white labour and sharply highlighted the economic costs to the employer of the job bar on blacks.

Although apartheid provided capitalism with cheap unskilled Jabour, it also deprived it of the productive, semi-skilled Jabour that export-oriented manufacturing

industry needed. While apartheid did not cause the stagnation of monopoly capitalism certain of its feature: hindered the employers from overcoming it, The job bar above all contributed to the low productivity of labour: in industry as it gave the white labour aristocracy ~- incentive to work harder and it retarded the process - mechanisation because of the shortage of skilled lab<--.

By the 1970s, with the imperative need for capital to find expanded markets outside South Africa, many bosses realised they would never be competitive in the international markets until they raised productivity.

Yet because of the cross-class alliance that existed at the heart of apartheid cupitalism a direct onslaught on the privileges of white workers to improve productivity was Out of the question, Consequently, stugnation continued and competition between the manupolies deepened.

in the 1970's companies and banks were hard pressed to find new investment opportunities in industry. Hemmed in by exchange controls, confronted by rising competition, companies began to buy up other companies. A wave of mergers in the 970s swept through the economy. Each Industry came to be dominated by a handful of monopolies. By the midseventies, 5% of manufacturing companjes accounted for 63% of turnover, white in distribution 0% of companies controlled 70% of turnover.

In turn these monopolies were themselves gabbled up by eight financial corporations and banks - AngloAmerican, Barlow Ruand, South African Breweries, Rembrandt, Sanlam, south African Mutual, Volikskas and Anglo-Vaal. Since then merger mania has continued apace, and the economy is beginning to be dominated by only five finance-capital conglomerates. Of these, the giant of giants- Anglo-- American -controls 56% of shures on the stock exchange, In fact, South Africa is, next to Japan, the mast highly monopolistic country in che world.

Increasing stagnation internally also fed to an acceleration of the export of capital. Of course, this tendency was not a novel feature of the 1970's. Namibia, in particular, was exploited as a direct colony by South Africa in the decades after the Second World War.

In the 1950's and 1960's a massive export of capital from South Africa and western based multinationals ted Namibia's GDP to grow by 573% between 1946 and 1962 and a further 320% over the next decade. Angto's subsidiaries, such as the Standard Bank of Angola, Merchant Bank (Zambia) Ltd, Standard Bank of Mozambigue and many industrial subsidiaries, spread throughout southern Africa.

Increasingly, South Africa begun to dominate the whole region, Today South Africa exports: over R2 billion worth of goods to the region. South Africa supplies Botswana with 88% of its imports, Malawi with 36%, Zimbabwe with 22%, Zambia with 16% and even Angola with 13%, Not only does South Africa provide a large proportion of these countries’ imports, but inuch of the rest passes through South African ports. 70% of Zambia's imports pass through South Africa, 60% of Mulawi's, 57% of Zaire's and 50% of Zimbabwe's,

Neither were South African capital exports limited to Africa. MINORCO, another subsidiary of Anglo, invests heavily in the USA, Canada and Latin America, Indeed, in the early 1980's MINORCO was the single biggest investor in the USA, ahead of such giants as Royaj Shell, BP and ICI.

In response to this pressure to export ever more capital, exchange controls were relaxed In the early 1980's. Indeed, in che ten years up to 1984 South Africa's private external assets grew by over 731% compared to a growth in foreign capital inflows of only 449%. Nevertheless, foreign investments in South Africa are still two to three times larger than South African investments abroad,

This growing economic domination translated itself into an imperialistic foreign policy. In the early 1970's, South Africa attempted to set up a Southern African Constellation of States. When this attempt at detente failed, mainly due to the anti-imperialist struggles in the then Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique, South Africa adopted a more interventionist policy. South African foreign policy aims at stifling the economic growth of the region thereby increasing its economic subservience on South Africa, and turning it into a market for South African investments and goods. In this way South African capitalism is attempting to resoive its economic crisis at the expense of the peoples of the whole region. |

The major imperialist powers need South Africa and must at all costs prevent the fall of the apartheid state as a result of a revolutionary upsurge of the black masses. Historically, South Africa has provided imperialism with three things.

mE el me

First it is a source of key minerals for their industries, particularly the metal and defence industries. The US gets 94% of its antimony, 82% of its chrome, 99% of its manganese and 91% of its platinum from South Africa. These sources must be protected,

Secondly, South Africa has been a profitable area for investment, Although US interests there are relatively small ($14 billion in 1982) compared to investment in the rest of the world, they have been extremely IJucrative. Rates of return of US manufacturing companies in South Africa in [967 was 12.6% as compared to the European investments’ return of 8.6%, The rate of return on US mining interests were even higher (e.g. 43.3%, 1963-67 as compared to 19.9% in Latin America). British imperialism with £11 biltion has been eclipsed by the US during the 1970s as the biggest single investor in South Africa, but Europe as a whole is far more important than the USA, The EEC accounts for over half of all foreign investment in South Africa, Until 1977 the UK was still South Africa's main trading partner but it now ranks fourth. Nevertheless, due to the historical and political ties and the role of British financial interests in South Africa, British imperialism still exerts enormous Influence on the regime. This is the reason why Thatcher refuses ta harm South African trade links,

However it has to be remembered that the renewed crisis of the !980s has drastically reduced the profitability of South Africa for overseas investors. In t983 the average rate of return to US companies investments slumped to 7% {compared to 31% in 1980 due to the high gold price). This is only likely to accelerate the trend which has seen

Monopoly capitalism was born out of apartheid. Apartheid made possible the most ruthless exploitation of the black working class and earned the monopolies gigantic profits that were the envy of capitalists the world over.

Underpinning the ability of the South African capitalists to take advantage of these factors lay the apartheid system itself which ensured the masses lived in canditions worse than those of colonial servitude. Denied political rights, the right to organise and turned into a massive reserve army of labour through the residence laws, the South African ruling class was able to deny the black proletariat any share in the growing wealth of the country. Wages remained pitifully low, while migrant labour was used on a massive scale within the mines. In this way a level of 'super-profits' was maintained which would have been impossible outside the system of apartheid capi-~ talism,

But to preserve these profits, the monopolies were forced to modify apartheid, beginning in the 1970s, Under pressure of the world capitalist recession and growing black militancy they were forced to begin undermining the privileges of what was the most labour aristocratic section of workers the world has ever seen- the white working class. The modifications all had one purpose; to again reduce average labour costs. The monopolies could no longer afford all the privileges of the white labour aristocracy. Thus, the reforms did not flow from the softened hearts of the capitalise class; rather, they flowed from the needs of their pockets. Restructuring apartheid, not getting rid of it was their object.

British imperialism in the late Nineteenth century systematically racially oppressed the black workers of the gold mines, This was a common condition of all ‘coloured’ peoples enslaved by imperialism - deprived of all their rights or possessing merely a mockery of them. But the absence of polltical rights for the black majority was only one part of this system of racia! oppression.

[t wus used to enforce systematic job discrimination and Segregation,

residential While in part inherited from the

A A

a net outflow of over Ribn of long term foreign fixed investment in the private sector in the fast eight years.

This increased tendency to export capital and decreased tendency to import capital has reduced the foreign stake in the South African economy. From 1965-75 foreign capital accounted for 10.4% {average per annuin) of Gross Domestic Fixed Investment. This has fallen in the Jast ten years to an annual average of less than 1%.

Thirdly, South Africa has acted as the representative of all the imperiatist powers against the nationalist movements in the region, attempting to bring them to heel both by direct military attack, by backing reactionury movements (UNITA} and by exerting its economic stranglehold. By these means it has forced humiliating deals on bourgeois-nationalist regimes (Nkomuti Accords or the previous Vorster-Kaunda '‘detente'), Only with French imperialism does South Africa's interests occasionally threaten to collide in a region where it is often a keen competitor in the same markets. Hence, Mitterand's recent espousal of the need for sanctions. However, imperialist commitment to the apartheid system is far from total. They do not want endemic instability in South Africa. They want South Africa to incorporate representatives of the black masses

and that means ones with real nationalist credentials nat just puppets like the local councillors or stooges like Buthelezi.

In the last analysis they will do anything to preserve imperialism's interests including even a South African equivalent to ‘the ‘Lancaster House’ type settlement - getting black nationalists to take direct political repsonsibility for defending these interests.

«Capitalism ane) 4\Sardnacic!

colonial period, apartheid was systematically extended and deepened after the formation of the Union (1910) and developed into a total system by the Nationalist Party governments in the period 1948-70, Apartheid in this post-war form lay at the heart of South Africa's successful growth. Yet through the creation of a modern capitalism and a black working class, it helped to undermine its further continuation.

Apartheid is a system of discrimination designed to benefit the various sections of big capital, the ‘new middle class' of the state bureaucracy and the white workers, Consequently, these ‘allies’ often fal! out about which aspects of apartheid need to be defended and whlch modified or relaxed in order to create conditions favourable to their continued prosperity. But they are all united in denying to the blacks the destruction or dismantling of the system as a whole. The histroy of aparthied's development was determined by the conflicting and changing interests of the various elements of the racist alliance.

In the tate nineteenth century and up to the Second World War agricultural capital did not insist upon a job bar to blacks nor did white workers seek one as the latter drifted from the Jand to seek skilled jobs in the towns and mines. Mine owners actually opposed the job bar on blacks since they needed a mass of unskilled, cheap black labour. - They fiercety resisted the statutory imposition of the job bar and constantly wrestled with the white unions over the legal ratio of white to black labour.

Nevertheless, mineowners insisted upon severe restrictions on black labour mobility and benefited from the Pass Laws which prevented black migration to the towns, Both sectors of capital gained directly from the Land Acts

‘of the early 1920s which deprived blacks of the possibility

of sufficient Jand for independent production and_= so created a mass supply of black labour. .

In every area of tife after 1948 these measures were extended in order to atomise the growlng black proletariat. The Bantu or homeland policies of ‘separate deve

lopment’ in the 1950s and 1960s were aimed at this. [Ph

i a ee Eee ee el

Bantustans are the keystone of Grand Apartheid, ensuring the existence of a pool af cheap and insecure black labour, and acting as a dumping ground for the economically inactive.

The African reserves, making up 13.7% of the total land area, were given legal sanction in the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936. In post-war apartheid, successive Nationalist governments attempted to construct a myth of ‘separate development' and ‘self-government’.

By 1970, Vorster had abandoned the idea that the reserves were economically viable. Population density, which is 13.7 per hectare in South Africa as a_ whole, reaches 89 per hectare in ‘independent’ Ciskei. By the early 1970's, an estimated 70% of the land in the ‘homelands! was unsuitable for cultivation. But forced removals ta the ‘homelands’ continued.

The consequence of these policies on the black masses by the late 1960s were terrible. In manufacturing and construction the wage differential between whites and blacks. was 6:1 by 1970. In the gold mines it was 21:1. An average wage for Africans was R208 per year while for whites it was R4,329, In housing, education and cultural amenities these grotesque disproportionalities were repeated,

The ‘homelands! policy has resulted in the virtual elimination of the South African peasantry. Instead, it has hetped to create a targe semi-proletariat. This class is mainly dependent on waged work in industry and parttally reliant on what Jiving could be scratched in the ‘homelands’. Further, the intensification of the policy has led to a situation where two-thirds of the black population in che Bantustans is landless.

Apartheid threw a massive burden onto the backs of black women, Virtually no element is included in wages for workers families, that is, for the reproduction of the next generation. Procuring subsistence has been ijeft largely to the women. Over 5 million women are expected to survive on tiny plots of land in these areas where they live without their husbands, denied any kind of family support. Some receive tiny remittances from their working husbands, although only 23% of African women = are married,

Women suffer also by a complete denial of political and legal rights. Women are almost all considered 'minors' with no rights to hold land, even though in reality they are 70% of the heads of households. Many women seek employment as casual agricultural ltabourers on white farms, or apply to gain a pass to work in urban areas. Permission for such a move is required from both the local rural Jabour bureau and their guardian - husband or father. Any lucky enough to get a job may find that they lose their rights to their plot of land.

PAY OIFFERENTIALS: 1941 (Monthly Pay}

Rands per month Saurce Oficial Statistics.

Canstruction

Mining Manulacturing

White Indian Coloured Alrican

The 1970's was a decade of significant changes within the apartheid system. By the end of the decade many bourgeois commentators had hailed the Vorster regime's reforms (1970-78) and those of his successor P.W. Botha, as heralding a gradual but unstoppable process of the withering away of the aparthied state; as signifying the possibility of a humane liberal capitalism - free from the degrading and stultifying effects of apartheid.

Indeed, those ten years did see a drastic erosion in white economic and social privileges in a number of areas. For example, although the job bar barely shifted in the gold mines during the period 1971-82 the white/black wage ratio fell from 21:1 to 5.5:1 as a result of real wages for blacks rising by 400% compared to 3% for whites. In manufacturing «and construction the respective figures were from 6:1 to 4.41.

Many elements of ‘petty apartheid’ were eroded at this time {e.g. sport, soctal mixing) as well as the legal removal of the jobs bar in 1973, An attempt was also made to create small businesses and a concomitant black middle class that could be used at a later stage to incorporate the black masses into the system, Finally,

‘there were changes in residency rights for about 2.5

million blacks (Section 10'ers and ‘commuters').

Some apologists for upartheid have attempted co explain the raising of the living standards of the black proletariat in the 1970s as a recognition by employers that capitalism could only continue co flourish in South Africa by massively raising effective demand in the internal market, This they could only do by raising the purchasing power of the black population. However, this was not the impulse for the change.

Boosting the general level of wages of the black proleturiat without improving productivity would have depressed profitability and competitivenéss further. The rea) aim of removing the job bar, of Improving training and education of the black masses was to reduce overall labour costs. Only training blacks to do white skilled jobs at lower rates of pay could do this,

The relatively large increases in the wages of black workers in the gold mines is explained by three facts. Firstly, after the end of the fixed gold price in 1971, the price of gold soared, from $35 per ounce in 1971 to $800 in 1980, Hence, real wages improved but so did profits at an even faster rate. Secondly, black workers mijitancy increased in the 1970s. The 1973 Durban strike frightened the mine owners, Thirdly, after 1974/76 the overwhelining dependance of the mine owners on non-South African black labour changed as several black countries imposed limits on the numbers allowed into South Africa, In order to attract unskilled and skilled labour to the mines -given the attraction of jobs in industry- wages had to rise.

Manufacturers, mineowners and farmers all reacted differently to different aspects of apartheid's Jubour policies. From the 1960s increased farm mechanisation heightened the farmers’ need for skilled labour too, As with the mineowners they fiercely opposed changes in labour mobility, that is, the ability of black workers to move freely around the country in search of work.

The most resistance to change came from the huge state bureaucracy itself. This was for two reasons. First, large numbers of Afrikaner workers doing relatively low-- skilled jobs were threatened by any relaxation in the job bar. Secondly, a vast amount of the bureaucracy existed precisely in order to administer the rules of apartheid. There were strict limits to the process of ‘reforming! (in reality the re-structuring} of apartheid. Although by 1978 most jobs were legully open to blacks, employer discrimination was still the norm, Those blacks who were upgraded found that their white counterparts were ‘reclassified’ co allow them tu retain their wage differentials,

Moreover, the ‘separate development' policy of the 1970s and 1980s deepened apartheid, Fearful of the growing tendency of urbanisation among the black proletariat Vorster and Botha extended the hamelands system, eventually depriviag millions of South African citizenship in an attempt to atamise the growing black working class, In similiar vein the state introduced the ‘decentralisation! policy, which aimed to relocate industries near border

TL | ES EE ANU FS a

areas, Intimately connected to this was the continued resistance to ‘stabilisation’; that is, the ability of black workers to have their families with them.

It should also be remembered that the 1970s witnessed an intensification of the policy of forced removals of black workers and the permanently unemployed who were illegally settled in the cities and towns, Needless to say, the Pass Laws remained in force.

The massive growth in the security apparatus in the 1970's paralled the extension of repressive legislation which was used against black activists. Deaths in detention ‘increased, including that of Steve Biko in !976.

All of these policies had the same central! aim; to atomise the growing black proletariat - itself a product of the development of industry ~ and prevent the development of a collective class experience. This involved enforcing the separation between community struggles in the townships and ‘homelands’ on the one hand and the struggle af workers in the factory and mines on the other.

Towerlng above ail other considerations, however, has been opposition to ending political apartheld. Fierce restrictions on the black trade unions' political activity ls one element, but absolute opposition to black political

rights remained within Afrikaner nationallsm throughout the 1970s, An attempt {overwhelmingly unsuccessful) was made

to incorporate the ‘Coloured’ and Asian minorities in an attempt to divide the black population. Further proposals to extend some political rights to black Africans since 1983 has met with fierce resistance from most Afrikaners.

The original weakness of Afrikaner capital had forced it to rely heavily on white workers, civil servants and small farmers. By the early 1970s Afrikaner capital had matured into monopoly capital. Volkskas, Trust Bank, Rembrandt, Sanlam, Genrale Mynbou, and Federale Mynbou began to stand on their own two feet. The monogpolists, regardiess of whether they were ‘English’ or AfrikanerAnglo-American or Generale Mynbou- now shared a unity of interest.

This much became clear with the forced departure of Vorster in the mid-1970s. By then, the stagnating economy had reduced the number of Investment opportunities. The monopolists eyed the juicy and profitable companies in the state sector with relish, They demanded privatisation but were opposed by Vorster and his cabinet. This conflict was brought to a head by the dispute over who should own the new giant SASOL plants, Finding a convenient scandal, the monopolists unceremoniously bundied Vorster out of office and SASOL, together with other state assets, passed into the hands of the private sector.

P.W. Botha replaced Vorster. The fact that he was only the second Prime Minister to come from the Cape was not without significance. The Cape had always represented the seat of the most developed Afrikaner capital (SANLAM), P.W. Botha, in fact, was the personification of Afrikaner monopoly capitalism.

P.W. Botha's ascendancy has been accompanied by renewed crises and recession. Offloading this onto the backs of the black workers has meant necessary changes in the South African state. This state combines the features of a brutal police-military dictatorship to the black population with the characteristics of an ‘imperialist democracy' for the whites. The crisis has driven the ruling Afrikaner bourgeoisie to increase the powers of the

executive and the military, that is, to move in a bonapartist direction,

The 1977 Constitution extended the exclu-

. precludes a

tm nn, Oe

sion of ‘English' South Africans from political power. P. W. Botha - Minister of Defence since 1968 and head of the military faction within the ruling National Party is a suitable figurehead far these tendencies. In the 1970s alone the armed forces doubled, to stand at 82,000. The state Security Council! has become more important than the Cabinet.

The #983 Constitution deepened this trend, strengthening Presidential powers and removing debate on key policies from Parliament into a Committee of Minlsters. The creation of a pseudo-parliament for ‘'coloureds' further devalues the white parliament and increases the arbitrating role of the President, who can present himself as above sectional interests of the parliaments,

The underlying econamic rationale for these changes has been an attempt to reduce the claims and pressure of the white working class upon the monopoly capitalists. The latter desperately needed to relax job reservation in industry to boost profitabillty. Yet there are extreme limitations to the bonapartist tendencies of Botha's executive in [tts attempts to resist the claims of the white workers, farmers and petty bourgeoisie. The state. forces consist of precisely these classes in uniform and would never willingly dismantle their own bloated privileges. Whenever he has been faced by a ‘white backlash’ Botha has hastily retreated turning his repression on the black labour movement despite the disappointment this has caused in Washington and London.

Just as it did in 1916 and 1946, the militancy of the black working class has strengthened the alliance between capital and the white working class. Botha recognises his dependancy on. the white workers, He fears their backlash, He faces increasing pressure from within the hard line (verkrampte} faction in the Nationalist Party. In particular the Conservative Party (a 1982 split from the Nationalist Party) and the neo-fascist HNP and NCP threaten to increase thelr support among the Afrikaners at the expense of the Nationallst Party. The latter two parties achleved 17% of the votes in the 1981 elections, and in by-elections tn late 1985 showed signs of spectacular gains as the challenge of the black workers mounts.

Alienating whlte workers Invites a coup from the right, a move which will undoubtedly strengthen the hand of white workers, On the other hand, granting meaningful power sharing to the black population does not guarantee that the black masses would stop their revolution halfway.

Botha is therefore drawn back into the traditional alliance between capital and white labour. Increasingly Botha turns his guns against the courageously militant black communities. Piet, ‘the great reformer’, turned out to be ‘Piet the skiet' (the shoot), The thousands of deaths since the early 1980s spells out in blood that the apartheid state cannot be reformed away.

Of course, there are those sectors (foreign impertalism, Anglo-American, PFP) who wish that enough concessions could be made to entice black representatlves into a set-up that will preserve their investments and profits. The reactionary mass base of the whites almost wholly ‘reform from above’ perspective - dear as this 1s to bourgeois liberals within South Africa, Apartheid must and can only be destroyed from the bottom up: It is a task for the millions of black workers.

Of course, this does not mean that given a huge and successful upheaval that ‘reform from above’ may not be offered as the only way of swindling the black masses out of the full fruits of their own sacrifices and in order to preserve capitalism.

The South African Working Class

Sue Lineohas

12

The South African revolution will be successful because the black African proletariat decisively enters the struggle for democracy or it will not be successful at all. In that fight the six million strong black and one million 'coloured! and Asian workers will find themselves pitted against the overwhelming bulk of the one and a half million white workers. Why?

At the turn of the century most white workers were English immigrants jealously guarding their wages and conditions in craft unions. Gradually, the destruction of the class of small Afrikaner farmers resulted in a growing class of unskilled Afrikaner workers.

Their reactionary stamp was given early on. On the one hand they allowed themselves to be used as scabs to break the strikes of the English immigrants, as in the 1907 miners’ strike, which ended. with them establishing a toe-hold in the industry. On the other, between 1893-- 1926, the Afrikaner unions fought to establish (and eventually enforce in law} restrictive controls over the mass of unskilled black labour so as to create a pool of scarce skilled Afrikaner labour and hence secure domination over the black working class. :

In 1922 white mineworkers struck in defence of the colour bar. Subsequently in 1929 a system of national collective bargaining was established - the Industrial Conciliation Act- which excluded African workers, The

‘penetration of Afrikaner nationalism into the white working

class and trade unions in the 1930's and 1940's, through the Broederbond, brought semi-skilled workers into an alliance with Afrikaner capital to extend job reservation and protect white privilege, Today, the white trade unionists organised In the Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA) and the South African Confederation of Labour

(SOCAL) remain wedded to the protection of privilege and of apartheld, although the latter is more openly reactionary.

While the overwhelming majority of the white workers have always formed a labour aristocracy over the black workers, the intensive and extensive growth of its privileges oceurred precisely in South Africa's imperialist growth phase - the 1960's, Between 1948 and 1970 real wages for whites doubled. In addition, the racial profile of the occupational structure illustrates the fact that whites by and large perform a managerial/supervisory role over black workers in production or inhabit the state bureaucracy which is largely geared to the enforcement of apartheid, For example, only 16% of manual production workers today are white. Less than 5% are categorised as unskilled. Nearly 70% of white collar workers are white, while 91% of the managerial/adminstrative grade

are white, compared with 4% of black workers. The white working class, however, is not homogeneous. Historically, the English speakers dominated white-collar

occupations while Afrikaners generally occupied lower blue collar grades. The years after the Second World War - under the perpetual rule of the Afrikaner nationalists- redressed that balance,

The biggest change in the conditions of the white proletariat rejative to the black has been since the start of the 1970's. The end of the legal job bar In many areas has gradually resulted in about 250,000 whites (17% of these in work) .being overtaken in the job hierarchy by a small rising strata of black white-collar workers.

This partial erosion of the labour aristocratic homogeneity of white workers, has and will continue to deepen the reactionary politica! outlook of many Afrikaners. In the depths of the 1977-78 recession railway workers threatened a go-slow over the pace of black workers advance. In addition, the Diamond Cutters Union went on an eleven week strike against black advancement.

This tendency had deepened in the late 1970's and 1980's, in a 1979 by-election in a working class Afrikaner constituency, some 40% voted for the neo-fascist HNP candidate having only polled 3.2% nationally in the previous Genera) Election. By the 1981 Election the HNP" increased its poll to 200,000 votes (14.1%). In a spring 1985 by-election there was a 22% swing to the Conservative Party. A series of elections in late October 1985 indicated that the Nationalist Party may have finally lose the allegiance of a majority of Afrikaners as the voters moved right,

The post-1976 (Soweto) threat of the black working class, has split the Afrikaner nationalist alliance, The developing crisis in South Africa will undoubtably open fissures within the white working class. Unemployment and pressure on wages will increase. It {is possible that under the impact and teadership of black workers some white workers may be won over to opposition to apartheld (already, the 59,000 strong mixed-race Boilermakers Union has led a move out of TUCSA, taking its white workers with it), It is even possible that sections of the white working class will be won to a revolutionary party.

But this is by no means a necessary or inevitable development. The likely reaction of the white working class will be to further protect Its privileges and maintain its alliance with the ruling class. The bulwark of the reactionary Afrikaner working class - the 26% working in the state sector- will probably desert to fascist parties rather than concede decisive reforms. “Many of them are in low grade jobs, many of them owe their jobs to the continuation of the job bar,

Above all, many of their jobs are directly concerned with pollciIng apartheid and would disappear with apartheid. The South African revolution cannot wait for white workers tO come over to its side - it must confront them with a sharp choice: "Go under defending your exploiters

or join with us in building a society which puts an end to both oppression and exploitation".

THE BLACK WORKING CLASS

The gravediggers of South African capitalism - the black proletariat - has risen to its full height only in the lJast thirty years, with the growth of manufacturing industry and construction. [t is this which has, despite apartheid, contributed to the growing urbanisation and proletarianisation of African workers.

Some 1.2 million African and half a million ‘coloureds' and Aslans work in industry or the building trade. About 750,000 thousand work in the mines, nearly half a million of these in the gold mines. Unti! 1974 about 80% of those were foreign migrant workers, Today, about 58% are ‘internat’ South African black migrants from the ‘homelands’. There are also about one and a half million black agricultural workers. The black peasantry has been virtually eliminated by a series of forcible land seizures by whites.

This then is where the social power of the African working class resides, It is also a concentrated class. 70% of GDP is produced in the eight metropolitan areas, but 40% is produced in the ‘PWV triangle’ around Johannesburg, Pretoria and Vereeninging. The ‘homelands’ account for a mere 3% of social wealth.

Large and concentrated, this is the core of the black protetariat which must be mobilised against the apartheid stare If it is to he Shattered and destroyed, There are still some 2.5 million service sector workers (700,000 domestic servants included), In addition there are as many as 1 million unemployed or semi-employed who are part of the black working class, lacking leverage on production but whose oppression makes them intransigent foes of apartheid and whose weight must be thrown onto the scales to bring down the racist regime.

However, the apartheid state has done its best to prevent the growing homogeneity of the black proletariat, to prevent it from progressing from a_ 'class-in-itself' to a ‘class-for-itself. The battery of repressive Jaws (on residence, job influx} have prevented the black workers from establishing concentrated working class communities, Rather, apartheid has created three types of workers. First, there are some 1.6 million migrant workers {25% women} who are kept on short-term contracts and are often moved from one job to another over the years. In between they are allowed short return visits to the ‘homelands’, This is the lot of most mineworkers and many factory workers.

Secondly, there are about 700,000 black ‘commuter' workers who travel daily from a homeland area to work in a nearby white urban area. Life for these workers often means a 2am start with a four hour journey to work, A long duy's work is followed by a similiar return journey, getting home at 8 30pm. Thirdly, there are over three million permanent resident workers who live in black townships outside the ‘homelands' and on the edge of white urban areas, These are the biggest anomaly within, and greatest threat to, the apartheid system of ‘separate development’. Bur they have become an indispensible stable element in the factory labour force. Finally, to these we must add the million black people who live illegally in shanty towns/squatter settlements on the edge of cities {eg Crossroads settlement, east of Cape Town).

Since 1964 when a total ban was placed on women entering urban areas other than with work passes, many women and their families have come to these settlements both to be with their partners and to seek wark, Largely women and youth, constantly harassed, they form a large resevoir of semi-employed and unemployed.

Black women now make up a significant section of the working class. They are 32% of the workforce, a substantial leap from 23% in 1960. African women workers are concentrated in agriculture (19%) and the service sector (50%) Yet they are increasingly entering industry. This is because they are cheaper to employ, the wage-gap still being in the order of 20% between men and women,

One quarter of all black women workers are domestics. Wages are Jow and canditions are appalling. They are

‘truly unstoppable force.

forced to live in separate accomodatlon, denied all employment protection, expected to work all hours and robbed of the right to their own family life. While they create a comfortable life for their employers and particularly their children, they are not allowed to have their own husbands or children with them, ;

The erosion of the job bar and of wage differentials has created a more diversified black working class spread across a wider range of occupations, In the years 1960— 1980 the number of blue-collar black workers slightly less than doubled, while the number of agricultural workers

remained relatively stable. But the number of black workers who moved into professional grades increased by more than 400%, and, into lower level white-collar

grades by over 1000%, It is from among the former layer - black ‘labour ‘aristocrats’ and petlt-bourgeois- that the candidates for conciliution with the whites are drawn. Meanwhile, at the bottom the number of unemployed grows relentlessly. Their numbers increased by 400% in the twenty years to [980. Since then the unemployment rate has accelerated, and it will do so again as South Africa fails to achieve the 3.5% of GDP growth each year which it needs just to absorb the new additions to

‘the labour force.

ft is the unemployed in the townships, together with the school students, who ure the backbone of the rebellion on. the streets. They are overwhelmingly young. Some 54% of black Africans are under 19, and two-thirds are under 25, It is this post-Soweto generation of politically aware and confident youth which must be organised and allled to the growing trade union movement to forge a

co

coeds

Soweto youth after the funeral of one of their comrades

The fiest trade union of black‘ workers in South Africa was founded in an auspicious year - 1917, The influence of revolutionary syndicalism in the USA is shown in its title - The ‘Industrial Workers of Africa’ (adapted form the [WW, the Wobblies}. It exerted strong pressure on the South African Native National Congress (SANNC later to be renanied the ANC) to take up workers’ grievances.

The IWA and the SANNC attempted to call a genera!

strike for a minimum rise of one shilling a day for all

black miners, It organised a black miners strike in July 1918 und participated in the anti-pass campaign of 1919, [In 1919 a strike of black mine workers directly challenged the colour bar. All these struggles were brutally smashed by military and police repression but a glorious tradition had been launched. This tradition was taken up by the Industrial and Commercial Workers Unton (ICU) which was founded in 1919 amongst black and coloured Cape Town dock workers, its principal leader wus Clements Kadalie. The ICU faced hot only the state buce the most disgusting racist scabbing

I3

14 Founding conference of SACTU, 5 March 1955

the cuse even when

by the white workers unions, This though the [CU had supported the they struck.

The ICU however rapidly became a huge tnass movement, helped by the conservatism of the ANC which turned more and more to petitioning and protest by respectable blacks. By 1926 it had a membership of over 100,000. But its great weakness lay in its inability to penetrate the compound system and organise miners. [ts main strength lay amongst the rural and urban workers, During the Rand Rebellion of 1922, the white miners adopted a reactionary demand for the defence of the status quo agreement that kept a ratio of black to white miners in force. Attacks took place on black workers and the [CU found itself supporting the Smutt's government's repression of the white miners.

Was white workers

The lack of a firmly anti-racist communist movement.

amongst the black and white miners was bitterly felt. The 1924 coalition government, that brought the Nationalists into power and initiated a systematic drive to impose what became upartheid, put the ICU to the test. It was a test that Kadalie and the majority of Its leadership failed, Communists were expelled from the union for advocating direct action, strikes, pass-burning, tax boycotts etc. The right around Kadalie wanted to 'go carefully’. At first the union continued to grow. In 1928 it had perhaps a quarter of a million members, But its crash and disintegration was as rapid as its rise.

Communists and expelled communists, Trotskyists and other socialists al! played an important role in building black unions in the 1930s, A notable example is Max Gordon, a Trotskyist who built unions in the laundry, baking and printing industries and in shops and warehouses, Various loose co-ordinating bodies attempted to unite these unions but had no lasting success.

During the war the influence of the Communist Party grew substantially. In 1942 the Counci! for Non-European Trade Unions {(CNETU) was founded and by 1945 had 119 affiliated unions with 158,000 members. The mid-forties saw the zenith- of these black unions strength. Their

the black’

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historic weakness remained their inability to penetrate the brutal compound system and organise the most decisive sector of the black proletariat - the miners, Also under the leadership of the CP the unions collaborated in the war effort.

Hlow they were to be repaid was to be seen after

1948. In 1946, the CNETU affiliate, the African Mine Workers Union demanded a minimum wage of ten shillings

a day, In Auyzust the mines on the Witwatersrand were brought to a standstill by the largest miners’ strike in South African history with some 73,000 miners out on

strike. However the full weight of repression was unleashed against the miners resulting in twelve dead and 1,200 woulded. Phe union leaders were arrested and the union sitashed. This served a heavy blow to the CNETU, Unemployment and the advent of the Nationalist Government was to finish it off.

When it assumed power in 1948 the Nationalise Party set up a commission - the Botha commission - which drafted proposals on the black workers! unions by 1951. It obliged these unions to register with the state and subjected them to a series of harsh conditions. They were to have no right to participate in an industrial council - the framework for collective bargaining. They were only to negotiate with the employer via a government appuinted 'Native Trade Union officer’, Direct negotiations were pussible only on condition that the white workers in the industry or firm did not object and the employer agreed to it. Political activity was strictly prohibited and any federation of the btack unions explicitly banned, The right to strike was prohibited and compulsory arbitration enforced. Sympathetic strikes were outlawed and unionisation banned in three critical! areas - the mines, on the land and amongst government employees,

Even before these draconian recommendations could be enforced the unions suffered a series of terrible blows, In 1951 the right-wing white unions decamped frou the South African Trades and Labour Council (SATLC) - a multi-racial federation and formed their own all-white

South African Federation of Trade Unions. Mixed unions were split or destroyed. Another phase of union organisation and struggle had ended in defeat and repression.

The rump of the old SATLC formed the Trade Union Councit of South Africa (TUCSA). In response to the vicious anti-black union laws they organised parallel unions under the tutelage of the white unions. In Murch 1955 the unions opposed to this ‘polite racism! the remains of the CNETU to form the South African Congress of Trades Unions (SACTU),

From the beginning SACTU was openly political. Its politics were those of the ANC and especially of the new «tilitunt leadership of this body, It joined the Conwress Alliance, signed the Freedom Charter and = participated in all its campaigns of the tate 1950s and early 1960s. Unlike previous federations it was highly centralised, Ac a local, factory or mine level it was weak. Consequently, it abundened the industrial untow perspective und opted for building generul unions, rallying workers from smatl and isolated workpluces, The idea was to divide them into industrial unions at a later stage.

In fact, SACTU was able to organise few strikes or iudustriat disputes and those it did were brutally repressed. Its main activity was in the ANC led campaigns such as the bus boycott of 1957 and the £1 a day Compaign for a minimum wage from 1957 to 1963. According to Don Neube the minimum wage campaign was:

"not based on a specific action programme in order

to filter and be translated into tangible action on the

shop floor. There was no organisational machinery to implement and to monitor the practical aspects of the campaign. Instead it was hoped that the campaign would gather momentum like a messianic movement

.«« ” {Black Trade Unions. Johannesburg 1985)

A ‘stay-at-home’ stoppage was attempted in 1958 but it failed to become a general strike.

In fact the failure of the ANC and the South African CP leadership to put trade union organisation and workers’ direct action at the centre of their strategy meant that SACTU failed to become a mass organisation of the black proletariat. [t was not SACTU's commitment to politics in general, or to the liberation struggle that was to blame for this. Rather it wus a direct consequence of the popular front, ‘peaceful procest' politics of the ANC,

SACTU was also drawn into the split within the ranks of black Nationalism. In 1959 the AFL/CIO {and therefore CIA) dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) organised, via TUCSA, the founding of the Federation of Free African Trade Unions of South Africa (FOFATUSA). FOFATUSA was heavily influenced by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), formed to fight ‘communist influence’ und related to the new bourgeois African states that were replacing colonialism throughout the rest of the continent.

Though it was anti-communist, the PAC, partly in order to outmanoeuvre the ANC, launched a_ powerful disobedience campaign aimed at the pass system. PAC leader Rober Sobukwe led this campaign. The police reply was the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960. A wave of strikes and rioting led to the government's State of Emergency, the passage of the Unlawful Organisations Act and the banning of both the ANC and the PAC on April 8th t960. SACTU itself was not banned. [t continued to participate in the protests and struggles of the next three years suffering severe repression until it collapsed in 1963,

The collapse of SACTU effectively left TUCSA's parallel black unions as the only option for black workers. Yet the collapse of effective black unionism encouraged the temporarily triumphant «apartheid regime to put pres-~ sure on TUCSA which in 1969 declared African unions to be inelligible for membership.

In 1970 the officialdom of the defunct African Affairs section of TUCSA founded the Urban Training Project (UTP). This was to be an important germ of the new black unions of. the mid-1970s to 1980s period. It was largely an educational! and trade union cadre training body, Strikes and union struggles in the late 1960s und early 1970s were rare events. Atlied to it was a co-ordinating body formed in 1973 - the Black Consultative Conimittee.

united with

They helped form a whole series of new unions in 1973-4,

The decisive change in the black unions’ circumstances was to come with the great strike wave of 1973 in the Durban/Pinetown area, This led to the creation of the Metal and Allied Workers Union and the National Union of Textile Workers in 1973, the Chemical Workers [ndustrial Union and the Transport and General Workers Union in 1974, The Black Consciousness Movement of those years led to the formation of a general community-based union - the Black Allied Workers Union. It made a_ principle of ‘black leadership’ whereas in the other unions white organisers initially place a very significant role.

The significant growth of this new movement of unionised workers faced the. racist regime with a dilemma, It was already under pressure from the mujor employers to relax certain measures of the apurtheid labour code. The scarcity of white skilled manpower meant opening certain fields to trained black workers. Employers wanted to regulate relations with them - i.e. to engage in collective bargaining with bureaucratised and incorporated trade unions. They wished to bring an end to the ‘chaotic’ strikes of the earf¥ and mid-1970s, Under this pressure the regime established a Commission of I[nquiry into Labour Legislation chaired by N.E. Wiehahn.

FOSATU strike meeting

The Wiehahn Commission recommended thut the basic rights of che {International Labour Organisation (ILO), be applied to the new unions. This meant freedom of association, the abolition of statutory job reservation, the registration of unions and their participation in statutory machinery for collective bargaining. Registration was clearly aimed at restricting the freedom of maneouvre of the new unions although in South African terms it

‘meant an extension of legality for the new unions.

As a result the 'new' or ‘independent’ unions combined into tow major federations - the Pederation of South African Trades Unions (FOSATU) established in 1979) and the Council of Unions of South Africa {CUSA), A number of unions remained unaffiliated. FOSATU was pledged to the principle of non-rucialism. Its membership and its

leadership was open to whites. [t was committed to in-.

dustrial unionism and its powerful shop-floor orientation encouraged the creation of networks of shop-stewards, Jt promoted plant-level rather than national or industrial negotiation, establishing itself in the workplace first before approaching management for recognition,

FOSATU was initially opposed to to participation in the ‘industrial councils’ of Wtehahn. Eventually however it compromised and allowed unions to seek both providing this did not mean accepting racial limitation or undue restrictions, Politically FOSATU was

registration and

I5

16

very guardedly ‘independent’, refusing to join the UDF or subordinate itself to the ANC's leadership.

CUSA, established in 1980, was much more influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement, It made a principle of black leadership and was and is much more community orientated. It was more uninhibited about registration under the Wiehahn legislation. Politically CUSA showed it neutrality by joining both the UDF and the National Forumn Committee in 1983, Internationally ic is linked to the ICTFU which regards it, rightly or wrongly, as sumething of a bulwark against communism.

CUSA's most successful affilate was to he the National Union of Mineworkers ~ founded in 1982 and recognised by the Chamber of Mines in the following year. The NUM's creation and dramatic growth represents a historic advance for the Souch African proletariat. With its growth and with the recognition and wages struggles of the next years the ground was laid for the formation of a new federation of non-racial trade unions.

Today about 880,000 black workers are organised in unions compared to 40,000 in 1973. The NUM has 150,000 alone. This still] represents less than 10% of black workers, although many non-members lfook to and follow the lead of the union activists who form the vanguard of the black working class.

The successes born of struggle and the concessions wrung from employer and state alike have contributed to both a greater stratification within the black proletariat together with a greater sense of confidence and combativity. Since these successes have almost always been on the wages front, they have also helped to foster a certain 'economism’ amongst their leaders; that is, a neglect or postponing of "political questions’, This has slowed down the development of the political consciousness of the mass of union members.

Two urgent tasks confront the black trade union movement today. The first is the need to complete the building of trade union unity.

The formation of the Canfederation of South African Trade Unlons (COSATU) on December 2nd 1985 marked a great step forward for the black proletariat. The 971 delegates representing 450,250 paid up members in 34 trade unions decided to create a federation based on industrial unions. They also seek to organise rural workers, domestic servants, transport workers, and the unemployed - all as yet largely unorganised, In addition, COSATU has pledged itself to fight discrimination affecting women, to fight for equal pay for equal work, maternity rights and for a campaign against sexual harassinent,

The new federation has also pledged itself to continue the FOSATU/NUM practice of rank and file democracy, Before the fusion 23 COSATU unions had 12,462 shop stewards representing 363,000 workers {an average of one steward to 29 workers). These unions in addition had 306

UNION MEMBERSHIP

PAID UP | SIGNED UP

COSATU| 430 coo | 565 000 TUCSA 340 000 . cuSA | - | 180 000

SACLA 100 000 azacTul = 1

1985 | 1983 Number of shop stewards 12 462] 6 000 No. of shop steward committees 1 443 -

Number ot paid officials 306 - Number of agreements 450 420 No. of workplaces organised 3421 756

Elija Barayi, President of COSATU

paid officials. The NUM, perhaps the most powerful and strategically placed of the unions, has over 150,000 paid up members and a shaft-steward system, This democratic tradition needs to be maintained and extended to the newly organised workers to ensure that the unions’ growth and their recognition by the state and the employers does not lead to the development of a caste of privileged bureaucrats. At the moment there is no substantial material base to sustain a union bureaucracy given the low level of wages and subscriptions of the union members. A bureaucracy also needs the support of the bosses to sustain itself and this it most certainly has not yet got.

To rely on anti-bureaucratic organisational measures alone would be to nurture dangerous syndicalist illusions. The only real barrier to bureaucratisation is to build a revolutionary communist leadership in the unions, that is, to turn them to support a strategy for the seizure of power by the working class. The struggle to prevent bureaucracy and resist class collaboration in the new unions points directly to the task of building a revolutionary party of the black working class vanguard,

CUSA and the Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions {AZACTU) remain outside the super-federation, CUSA is an affiliate of the International Congress of Free Trade Unions ((CFTU) and claims to be ‘black oriented and controlled’, It criticises the 'non-racial' positions of the other unions. It is open about seeking good relations with the employers. AZACTU, the smallest of the federations, is closely tied to AZAPO, It was AZAPO's Labour Secretary, Rev. Joe Seoka, who condemned the two-day stay-away of November 1984.

Whilst AZACTU is affiliated to the National Forum and opposes the UDF it should not stand aside from in volvement in COSATU. If it really wishes to combat popular frontism together with the influence of the UDF and the ANC then it must do so within the mass trade union federation or perish as a serious trade union. The goal of an all-black leadership is wrong. A minority of whites, such as Neil Agett, have given their lives to the struggle to build the unions. It is one thing to seek to ensure that the union leadership fully reflects the numerical strength of the black proletariat but quite another to be ‘black exctusivist'’ either with regard to union membership or leadership.

Also the clinging to community-based unions as against the project of Industrial unions is to turm ones back on the most effective means of organising the black workers into a force capable of ensurlng the conmmon downfall of apurtheid and capitalism, General unions can indeed

be important for organising ununionised industries but they should give way to industrial unions as soon as possible,

he beta t > sae tatveed:

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S i) © Pa oe S 3 ‘b © ™~ 9 Fa) b “ c

POLITICS & THE TRADE UNIONS

The second urgent task is to resolve the current debate within and between the various black independent unions over what political role the unions should play in South

Africa. The terrible repressive conditions that overhang even today's legal unions, which make 'norimal' trade union activity impossible, force al! unions to confront this problem,

Since 1979 and 1980 - with the emergence of FOSATU and CUSA respectively - these unlons have been forced tao respond politically to the deteriorating political situation,

When in 1984 Botha introduced the new Constitution,

creating fake parliaments for ‘Coloured’ and Indian representatives with no enfranchisement for the black African majority, the trade unions joined In the successful boycott campaign.

The aimost significant political action called by the unions before the formation of COSATU was the two day stay-away (protest strike) in the Transvaal in November 1984. An estimated 800,000 workers took part. The strike was called on the combined issues of educational reform, including the end of sexual harassment in schools, the withdrawal of security forces from the townships, the release of detainees and no increases in rents or fares.

These actions and their varled success have served to pose ever more sharply che question of what political organisation of the working class will best unite the disparate struggles. The response to date has been varied. CUSA has taken the attitude of working with both the UDF and the National Forum (black consciousness grouping). The MGWU affiliated to the UDF alone. FOSATU,

FCWU and the GWU kept cheir distance from these nationalist organisations. They objected to subordinating the workers to other classes within the 'multi-class'

framework of the UDF or NF. FOSATU's attitude was motivated by both pusitive nepative arguments, Broadly, its leaders’ expressed independence and hositility to subordi-

and desire for | class

nating workers interests to ‘broad alliances' was correct. But there is also an accompanying economism .which tends to limit the unions to struggles over wages and conditions,

The working class and its economic organisations - the trade unions ~ cannot ‘keep ouc of politics’, Their choice is simply whether they will tail other class forces politically or whether they will support an independent working class political party. Some union leaders such as the secretary of the Metal and Allied Workers Union in the Transvaal, Moses Mayekiso have in the past catled for ‘a workers freedom charter’ and for the unions to form a ‘workers party’.

The very size and strength of the new federation will draw it into politics. Indeed the leaders have been much more outspoken since its formation, Elijah Barayi, President of COSATU has called for nationalisation of the mines and major industries and commented:

"Ultimately there will be a socialist state in South

Africa.” fn other interviews however he has said he:

"regarded himself as a moderate, had no particular

communistic leanings but was committed to attaining

one man one vote in a unitary South Africa.” Politically this position is identical to that ANC/UDF.

Other leaders of COSATU, including Jay Naidvo the General Secretary and Sydney Mafumadi (Assistant General Secretary) are uctive supporters of the UDF. The wari welcome that the ANC has given to the new federation contrasts sharply with its attitude in the 1970's when it regarded the ‘independent unions’ as coHaborationist and counterposed to them the largely defunct SACTU,

This change indicares that the ANC senses the growing hold of its 'policy of alliances’ and the declining strength of what it calls 'economism' and 'sectarianism'.

Elijah Barayi has promised a campaign of pass-burning {starting in June 1986} unless Botha scraps the Pass Laws. This is in line with the auxiliary role the ANC sees for the unions. Direct class struggle by the unions is subordinated to civil disobedience tactics, mass rallies, appeals to foreign governments to apply boycott and disinvestment policies, plus guerilla attacks on military personel and economic targets. None of these tactics, singly or all

of the

John Sturrock (Report)

cee Oe,

eee

together, can smash the apartheid state, But they are Hot meant to. They are ulmed at forcing the government to the negotiating cable. ;

Yet there is not the slightest guarantee chat they will do that. Revolutionary crises do not last forever, The present economic crisis of the regime is not eternal but is related to the cyclical crisis of the world economy. The masses’ revolutionary energy is not inexhaustible. Enthusiasm can wane if the struggle does not move towards a decisive confrontation with the dictatorship. Demoralisation and demobilisation can set in. The resistance of the unarmed townships to brutal repression and repeated massacres is not limitless. The terrain, as well as the economic and social conditions in South Africa make sustained guerilla warfare difficule if not impossible.

Nor can the trade unions be expected to continue their growth free from repression. Any substantial improvement in the government's situation will presage new attacks. The unions need to perfect their organisation and take up immediate class interests and democratic struggtes. Yet it must always be within the context of preparing decisive action against any government attack. These preparations must centralise the mass uprising of the people into a General Strike. Political subordination of the unions to the UDF/ANC will derail the chances of this strategy succeeding.

A WORKER’S PARTY

Trade unions are not adequate to carrying out political tasks. Since the trade unions are the only mass workers' organisations, the revolutionary vanguard should call on then to play a key role in building an independent class party of the proletariat.

fin this work it is clear that revolutionaries will have to fight alongside workers and union leaders who as yet

dv not see that such a party must become u revyalutionary communist combat party. In this sense the call for a workers party is an algebraic slogan, It is one thar starts from the agreed need for a separate and independent party but which assigns the decision on its programme and final structure to the result of democratic internal debate and the free campetition of tendencies.

Doubtless a tendency will arise which will seek to direct the workers’ party onto the road of a reformist Labour Party. Stalinisin, despite its opposition to a mass independent workers' party would, if the unions actually cook up its formation, certainly Intervene to direct it towards a class colluburationist, popular front strategy.

Therefore, it is mot inevitable that a broad, trade union-based and programmatically '‘open' workers party would come into existence or last for a prolonged period. But it is equally certain that no propaganda circle can yrow by ones and twos into a party large enough to lead the overthrow of apartheid in the current crisis. In the present period the slogan of the workers party enables the fight for a revolutionary programme to be carried out alongside the most politically conscious imembers of the untonised working cluss; that is, with its spontaneous vanyuard. This way the formution of a conscious Trotskyist vanguard party can be dramatically forwarded.

In the contest inside such a workers party with Stalin-

ists and social-democrats, revolutionarles would have to fight for the structure and organisation of a_ Leninist combat purty. ft is essential! that it become a professional organisation, Combining legal and illegal methods, for only such an organisation could survive the brutal repression that is ever present in South Africa.

Above all, revolutionaries would have to fight for an action programme which started froin the immediate political tasks of the proletariat- smashing apartheid - and show how this must culminate in the seizure of political power by the working class.

/\ [REVOIMICIONALS7

A revolutionary situation is developing in South Africa. Its economic and social pre-requisites, the crisis of the economy and the reduced situation of South African capitalism, have delivered a tremendous shack to all classes and strata of society.

Lenin's classic objective conditions which make up a revolutionary situation ure all to be observed. I[t is indeed “impossible for the ruling class to maintain their rule without any change", There is a profound "crisis in the policy of the ruling class" which has fed "to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes bursts forth". As we have seen this situution exactly describes the crisis within the South African bourgeoisie today.

From this point one pusses froin the objective co the subjective conditions for a revolutionary situation, The ruling class is unable and the working class unwilling to carry on in the old way. Trotsky noted that " a revolutlonary situation develops out of the reciprocal action of objective and subjective factors". The most important of the latter is that of the proletariat which "begins to search for a way out not on the basis of the old society, but along the path of a revolutionary insurrection against the existing order".

The massive struggles of 1985, the strikes of the mineworkers, the successful stuy-awuy of May Day 1986, the revolt of the townships and the huge demonstrations which meet with the most bloody repression, all tndicate the depth and seriousness of South Africa's revolutionary crisis. Section after section of workers, layer after Jayer of the population ~'coloureds', Asians, the various religious

Acton Programme

communities, including the tiuslims- have all been drawn into what is already a truly great people's moveinent. The vanguard role of youth is particularly noticeable. Their courage is without equal, They are breaking from every vestige of ensluvement and submission and they are leading their elders to inake this break themselves,

Yet again as Lenin observed not every revolutionary situation turns into a revolution, For this the spontaneous mass revolutionary consciousness needs to find wa directing centre and a clear, caherant strategy for victory. It needs to find a revolutionary party.

As the working class is the only revolutionary class that can consistently fight South African capitalisin und its apartheid system to its end, so only a revolutionary conlmunist purty with a programme for workers power can be adequate to leading the black, ‘coloured! and Asian masses to victory. The only scientific basis for a programme in the imperialist epoch in a country where the masses are suffering a colontal-style dictatorship jies in the theory of permunene revolution.

IMMEDIATE DEMANDS

The South African tmusses lack the most basic democ-_

which have long been in the possession of workers in the ‘advanced’ imperialist countries. They need the most basic human and civil rights: the right to reside where they wish jin their own country, citizenstip, freedam from arbitary arrest and deportation, the right to vote in municipal, regional and national etections,

ratic rights

I9

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_ OEE ee

20

the right to marry and live with whom they choose.

In addition they suffer exclusion from the land of their forebears, massive super-exploitation at work, terrible restrictions on thelr trade union rights, non-existant social services and woefully inadequate educationa} provision.

Thus the struggles of today all start from democratic and immediate demands but it would be false to draw from this the conclusion that a "“bourgeois-democratic" revolution awaits South Africa. As we have seen South Africa is as economically developed as any country which has broken from colonial dependence to become = an imperialist power during this century. In the present and for the forseeable future the world capitalist system is wracked with crisis. No prolonged period of capitalist devetopment will improve the conditions of the masses merely if apartheid were abolished. Capitalism must perish with apartheid.

The programme of permanent revolution alone can fuse the struggle against apartheid with a battle to destroy capitalism and create a workers state. Fighting for the programme of permanent revolution in South Africa does not, however, mean that Trotskyists counterpose_ the slogans of proletarian revolution to the democratic demands now being raised by the masses. On the contrary, the programme of permanent revolution is, in Trotsky's words, %....a combined programme, reflecting the contradictory construction of historic society,..“. What we reject is the notion that the solution of the democratic tasks necessarily pre-dates the fight for socialise revolution and that only democratic slogans can be advanced in the present stage. We must fight to give the democratic struggle a proletarian direction and content.

The highest points of the struggle to date have been the stay-aways and school boycotts, the boycotts of white businesses, the strikes of the mineworkers and the street fighting with Botha's armed forces. The imposition of the state of emergency and the subsequent wave of brutal repression posed the need for a higher and more general form of struggle. The formal end to the state of emergency has changed little. If anything the repression has intensified.

DEMOCRATIC DEMANDS

The revolution unquestionably starts as a democratic one. The existence of the white dictarorship, denying the most elementary of democratic rights (universal suffrage - one person, one vote} ensures this. Therefore, revolutionary communists must put the demands of democracy in the forefront of their programme, They must demand, alongside the broadest masses, universal, equal and secret suffrage for all men and women above the age of sistcen years. They must demand the total abatition of all discriminatory laws and regulations of apartheid, the smashing of its rucist police force, its army, judicial system and state bureaucracy.

The standing ariny must be replaced by an arined inilitia of the whole people and in particular of the urban and rural workers. The urined people is the only secure busis for democracy and national independence, But in advancing this the coilers will pose another question to themsetves - which class shall rule in South Africa? We deny absolutely that the fact that democratic slogans are now in the foreground means that the working class must allow the biack bourgeoisie or petit-bourgeotsie to come to power because the revolution is a 'democratic' une or in its ‘democratic stage’. Nor is sharing power with this class an option, for it inevitably means the subordination of the workers to their exploiters and the preservation of their system of exploitation.

THE AGRARIAN QUESTION

The working class of the townships and the mining areas must form an alliance with the workers in the countryside. They must extend a hand to help them organise a powerful trade union based on an elected delegate committee an each large farm. The reactionary laws imp-

eding the organisation of rural workers must be broken,

A central democratic demand must be the nationalisation of all the Jarge and medium sized farms monopolised by the whites, with no compensation to these land thieves. This demand in itself is not incompatible with the survival of capitalism, meaning only that land ownership should be vested in the state.

Beyond this lie che vita! questions; who shall use the lands; how shall agricultural production be organised; who wiil benefit from it? The proletarian answer is that those who work the large-scale farms should manage them as part of an economic plan in the interests of the masses. This is impossible except as a result of the victory of the working class and the expropriation of the whole exploiting class and the creation of a planned economy. To achieve this goal the rural workers must fight now for workers contro! over the farms,

The agrarian revolution must of necessity involve the small farmers of the Bantustans, the squatters, the occupiers of '‘'blackspots'. The working class must fight side by side with them for the seizure of enough good quality land to assure decent living conditions,

The working classes' programme does not involve a #eneral parcellisation of che large farms into tiny peasant holdings or a ‘return co the land’ of the urban population,

This would be ai retrogade step economically for the masses. Only large-scale, scientific, mechanised farming, once it is directed to the welfare of the masses, can

meet the demands of a modern developed society. Politically, it would be a retrogade step too, to return millions of city and township dwellers to rural fragmentation and isolation. Private ownership would also, in the situation of intermixed language gropups jead to disputes between them about land ownership.

However, revolutionary soctalists cannot be doctrinaire abstainers from living struggles. If the oppressed rural workers and displaced cultivators within the homelands take up the struggle to seize and divide the large farms of the white landowners, it is our duty to lend the maximum support and indeed offer leadership in the onslaught on apartheid. For once the racist regime was smashed and the urban workers and rural toilers have established. their- own state power, a process of creating democratic co-operatives, of state organised mechanisation schemes and scientific farming could overcome the dangers of fragmentation and subsistence farming.

THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The apartheid regime has repeatedly attempted to fragment and divide the majority of black South Africansto hide their miniority monopolisation of economic and political power within a constellation of fake ‘independent states’ and Bantustans. The South African/Azanian revolution must sweep away these minute puppet states. These cover only 13% of the Republic's territory yet claim as citizens 55% of the countries black population, The firmest unity between all the oppressed linguistic groups und cominunities is vital to overthrow the apartheid state,

The working class is the class objectively most able to achieve chis unity. fhe conditions arising from its position in production and the struggles that arise there dictate the closest unity across tinguiscic, ‘racial' and natio-

nal divisions. The proletariat should even welcome into its ranks all] white workers who forsake the defence of the racist state and cheir privileges and are prepared

to solidarise unconditionally with their black fellow workers.

An integral part of the proletariat's democratic demands must be the recognition of the right of self-determination up to and including separation for all South African oppressed peoples. The working class should defend this righe -but certainly not advocate sepuration- in order the better to bond all the communities together. In this way internecine conflict can be minimised or avoided. It is in the interests of the working class to form the largest and strongest stute in southern Africa that it can, It cun do this only by helping the workers and peasants of Namtbia and the surrounding states to cast Off che

Dee SOD i nage eee

eo

shackles of imperialism. to this end ft should fight for a United Socialist States of Southern Africa.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION

Any great peoples' revolution must cake up the demands of all the oppressed if it is to triumph. Women

have suffered extremes of hardship under apartheid. The right to a united family home, to live where you choose, are basic rights denied cto the masses of South Africa. Women were the most courageous opponents in the campaign against the Pass Laws in the 1950s and 1960s. It took eleven years from 1952 toa impose

them on women.

Women must also fight for the right to work, an end to the farce that says they can survive on subsistence plots of inadequate land. Equal pay, and maternity

rights are also immediate demands for women.

Women in the workforce must be drawn into the trade unions to fight alongside the men, In the post-war

years women were especially important in building up the trade unions. Some 10% of the unions in 1983 had women General Secretaries. Women must continue

to be organised and to lead the unions. The women's organisations in townships have been decisive in organising the boycott campaigns, These groups, together with those in the ‘squatter’ areas need to be linked to the unions in a militant unity that can challenge apurtheid, Their heroism in the townships must find a place in these most powerful organisations of the class. Women in the Bantustans must also be organised, and through rural councils of action, be linked to agricultural unions.

Women have demonstrated their ability to resist apartheid, This must be fused with the general working class struggle by a mass working class women's movement which can take the struggle forward to challenge not onty aparcheid but their own fundamental oppression, rooted deep within the soil of class society.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

The victorious revolution in South Africa must denounce all the secret treaties and military agreements’ with other imperialist powers, publishing the evidence of the latters’ plots against the freedom and_= integrity of the other states of Africa.

It should aid the completion of the liberation struggles of the neighbouring States where imperialist puppets have long oppressed their peoples (eg. UNITA in Angola or Hastings Banda in Malawi). [t would call for a Federation of South African states to fight imperialism and

prevent the encirclement and disruption of the revolution by counter-revolutionary forces,

The question arises who, or what body, can fulfil these democratic demands? In our view the dictatorship of the proletariat alone can fulfil and defend the democratic demands. However, repetition of this truth in a situation where the masses have enormous illusions in ‘democracy’, that is, bourgeois democracy, is insufficient as a guide to revolutionary action. Our task is to combat their illusions and at the same time “utilise whatever is progressive about these illusions". (Trotsky) .

In the present situation this means we raise to the fore the call for a sovereign Constituent Assembly. From

Zimbabwe to Nicaragua we have seen petit-bourgeois nationalists, Stalinists and social democrats thwart the democratic aspirations of the anti-imperialist masses,

Councils of state, bonapartist "guardians of the revolution’ and other such things have been the instruments for halting anti-imperialist revolutions.

While the masses are not yet organised for, and in their great majority not yet prepared to accept, soviet power, we communists will fight for the consistently

democratic slogan of che Consituent Assembly. Within it the programmes of the contending parties can be openly viewed by the masses.

In this way the proletarian vanguard and the revolutionary communist party can, as Marx said, “win the battle for democracy"; for democracy is not a resolution or abolition of class conflict, but an arena for it. The working class has its own democracy, that of the workers

councils which is superior to all forms of bourgeois democracy because it combines the direct election by the toiling masses of their representatives. These are

at all times answerable to assemblles of their constituents and recatlable and replaceable by them. This is a democracy far superior to that of the freest bourgeois parllament.

Moreover not only can the workers councils deliberate and legistare, they can execute their own decisions, cutting away the necessity of a huge unelected and unanswerable bureaucracy that thwarts the will of the people and serves the interests of a minority of exploiters.

Yet as Jong as the majority of the masses have illusions in a parliamentary assembly we must go along with such a demand, trying to protect the masses against the

deceptions and tricks which accompany all bourgeois democracy. Thus the product of the revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid state must not be a 'national

convention’, This would only bargain with the imperialists

- and South African racists, or the ex-stoages of apartheid

in the homelands. Still less can there be an agreement to allow whites a veto, or concede them a federal republic. A sovereign, revolutionary Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage alone is acceptable.

The organisations of the workers and the cammunities should see to it that its election ts fully «democratic as to equal electoral districts, distribution of election propaganda, unrestricted campaigning, and the democratic registration of candidates (excluding racists and collaborators). Above all the election and canvocation of the Constituent Assembly should be done under the protection of the armed people and its militias No prior agreements or limitations on the competence of the Constituent Assembly must be tolerated.

Is there any guarantee that such an assembly will come into existence? No, because the exploiter {black as well as white) will do everything they can to: avoid having the people as a whole exert their will in the matter of the nature of the republic and the government that will emerge in South Africa. This fact poses, in its starkest form, the necessity of working class leadership in the South African revolution.

GENERAL STRIKE

[t is now obvious that the winning of democracy alone -in racist South Africu- is a revolutionary task, that is, one of smashing the racists’ state. Negotiations, compromises and national conventions, cannot lead to the abolition of apartheid so long as the rifles, the tanks, and the aircraft are in the hands of the white racists.

2I

ni

22

The repeated onslaught of the state furces puses co the organised proletariat the need to throw its weight into the struggle. The South African bourgeoisie and its British and US backers are terrified that the tap of exploitation and super-profits will be turned off by the black proletariat. This can only be done by political mass strikes aiming at a republic-wide general strike. Indeed unless such a strike vccurs then sooner or later the Botha regime will re-establish order on the basis of the exhaustion of the struggle in the townships.

The general strike can mubilise the entire working class. Its momentum can and will draw the many workers not yet unionised, the youth and unemployed in the townships, the students and black petit-bourgeoisie into a direct confrontation with the state power of apartheid, All the variety of forms of struggle now being waged by the oppressed in South Africa can be © strengthened, co-ordinated and given a revolutionary direction by means of the general strike. ,

In the course of a general strike the masses must develop their self-organisation, The stay~away and boycott committees in the townships have drawn in delegates from all sectors of the masses. Strike and factory committees too, must be built and must fuse with the township and countryside based committees so that the strike can be organised and prosecuted by action councils representing all the workers and oppressed.

Such councils cannot and should not be restricted to the workplaces. They must be built in the townships and communities to replace the government stooge councils. They must draw in the key existing organisations of school students and the unemployed. [n the countryside they must also become organs of the agrarian revolution against the white landowners.

Last but not Jeast, im the process of breaking up the armed forces of apartheid the opportunity exists to win the black rank and file from their white officers, to create black soldiers councils, to elect officers and to mete out punishment to the racists, Factory, mines, township, rural workers and soldiers councils; these are the necessary organs of struggle and insurrection on the road to democracy.

The general strike cunnot allow itself to be crushed by Botha's police and army. Workers’ mass pickets will have to link up with student and unemployed youth to create a militia - a militia that can offer real defence und resistance and which must set out on the difficult task of arming itself and winning over Botha's black police and troops.

Appeals should be made to the black ‘nationalist’ states, to the guerilla forces, to the ‘workers states' and to the western labour moveinents for immediate unconditional aid and the fuilest supportive action.

The demands around which a general strike may be launched would be immediate and concrete - for example, a particularly brutal massacre, the decluration of a state of emergency, the arrest of prominent nationalist or workers leaders. It must be some issue which by its importance electrifies the masses.

The initial immediate and partial demands muse strike at the central weapon or atcuck of the government. Then as the struggle develops broader and more strategic gouls will come to the fore. Ic would be schematic and abstract to vuess as to whether one or several geucral strikes will suffice to break and divide the ruling class, to mabilise and arm the masses, to put on the order of the day an insurrectionury struggle, setting as its immediate aim the smashing of the stete forces. Yet this is the direction the struggle must take if apartheid and all racial oppresston is to be destroyed without trace,

Once having paid in blood for the downfall of che upurtheid state should, indeed can, the working class content itself with a democratic republic in which a black capitalist class replaces the white. racists as exploiters? It must not unless it wishes to sacrifice 90% of the real social content of the revolution for the exploited anil oppressed people: decent housing, food, education, welfare - all these are possible only on the basis of a commonly owned and democratically planned economy.

Therefore, the democrutic revolution - che fight for

majority rule and the overthrow of the whole apartheid state - poses at every stage the question of working class power.

TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS

The task facing revolutionary communists is to Start from the position of total solidarity with the masses in struggle, to advance consistent revolutionary democratic slogans, linking them to the class demands of the proletariat.

These must include immediate and partial both political and economic :

* For fundamental improvements in conditions;

* For an end to wage and job inequality between white and black workers;

* For full trade union rights and recognition; maintain the total independence of the unions from the state;

* For full residence and citizenship rights for workers and their families;

* For decent housing for all workers.

in addition the working class must take up the cause of the unemployed, of the school students and of women, thus preventing the bosses and the state from being able to mobilise those whithout a job against the organised proletariat,

Yet such immediate demands are insufficient either to meet the needs of the working class or to point the road to working class power. Transitional demands must be fought for which centre on challenging the bosses despotism in the workplace and the economy and the state's despotism in society,

In the workplace we must fight for workers control of production, of hiring and firing, of the speed and intensity of work, of safety, of the length of the working day.

A reduction in the working week with no loss of pay must be fought for so that the unemployed can be taken on in the factories and mines. Likewise wage demands need to be formulated with the backing of committees of women and need to include a stiding-scale of wages to protect working class living standards against inflation,

Committees of delegates in each workplace, elected at mass meetings free of management spying and intimidation cun lead these struggies and establish workers control. The business secrets of the South African and international monopolists aeed to be opened up toa workers inspection. Never will such astronomical exploitation and plunder of the workers have been revealed. This needs to be exposed to the proletariat of the whole world, It will greatly help in winning their aid and assistance for the revolution. In turn it will aid their own struggle against these companies in semi-colonial and imperialist heartland alike.

slogans-~

pay and working

NATIONALISATION

The nationalisation of individual enterprises or whole industries is posed to workers in their day to day trade union struggle, Companies and industries that reject the workers’ vital demands for radical improvements In wages, health and safety conditions, housing and so forth- pleading ‘inability to afford it'- must be met with the demand to nationalise their company/industry and to open all their records to workers’ inspection. The occupation of factories by workers must be used to enforce this demand, But, least of all in South Africa, is mere state ownership the answer.

State ownership means simply that the capitalist class as u whole owns and takes responsibility for operating production. In South Africa this state is not only capitalist but also an oppressor, racist state, The reformist notion of state ownership as being equal to demucratic or popular ownership has not even a semblance of truth. _

fo the demand for nationalisation therefore workers raust add the demand - no compensation. Not a cent/penny for the rucist super-exploiters. They must not rely on the actions of the state but on their own organised power

eee a

to installf workers control in the enterprise and the industry. They must above all realise that only the expropriation of the whole class of big capicalises and the seizure of state power by the working class cun preserve and muke permanent the workers’ gains,

The call for expropriation arises not only from the immediate struggles of the working class but also from the democratic aspirations of the masses. A fully democratic republic - where the votes of the black majority were decisive - would be a mockery if the factories, the mines, the banks and the land remained in the hands of a tiny white minority,

The inasses should demand the nationalisation of the wealth of South Africa. lt is impossible to do this and to indemnify the South African and foreign imperialists. On the contrary, the complete expropriation of these parasites opens the road to a socialised and planned economy.

There is no gradual or peaceful road for the South African masses to really control their own country and their own destiny. Any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois

nationalist governinent that attempted to take the road of gradual nationalistion with compensation or even partial! expropriations would be undermined by economic sabotage of all kinds.

The enemies of the revolution would use all the tricks of political destabilisation such us has been used against Angoja and Mozambique by the South African racists and by the US imperialists against Nicaragua, Only the working class, by expropriating the imperialists, can put the immense natural and productive wealth of South Africa at the service of her people and of the oppressed and exploited of the whole continent.

A WORKERS’ STATE

The advance of these demands is a measure - an acid

test - of the real achievements of the working class, Any state, any republic, whoever stood at its head and whatever political liberties it conceded, would still be

a bourgeois state - a capitalist dictatorship at every level. All talk by nationalist leaders of 'socialism' would be a deception.

Even when the working class has established its own power in the factories and is able to guard it in the streets with their own militia, the task still remains to selze the state power for the working class. The workers must resolve the dual power situation by destroying forever the capitalists power.

Without doing this the workers gains, however extensive, will be temporary. The possibility of counter-- revolution will hang suspended over the heads of the working masses. This will be equally true whether the bourgeoi-

They

to Buthelezi, or even The working. is not to

its defence to Fotha, tf it is forced to hand power to Mandela, class must establish its own dictatorship if it see all its gains eroded or destroyed,

To this end the working class vanguard must fight for its ckass goals and those of all the oppressed masses. Inust stress that to achieve in full measure their objectives the republic must be an urban and rural workers republic. That imeans the elimination of all large scale private property in the imeans of production, transportation, commerce and the media, and their replacement by a democratically planned economy.

To achieve this the working class must concentrate full power in the hands of their own organisations - workers councils - and must create a workers government answerable to a congress of them, This programime must be fought for in the mass organisations first and foremost but the party of the proletarian vanguard must likewise press its cause on the Constituent Assembly. |

Whether the Consituent Assembly will come into existence independently of the deceit and trickery of the exploiters and whether ic will meet the wishes of the majority of the people cannot be spelled out in advance of the struggle. What is certain is that if i¢ obstructs the worker and peasant masses trying to press beyond the wishes of 'their' representatives elther because the miusses have become more radical or because the legislators have become more conservative or reactionary, then it will have to be swept aside. The working class must allow no democratic demand to become a noose to strangle the revolution whose safety is the supreme law.

What will a workers republic mean in South Africa? It will be the first giant step toward the liberation of the whole of Africa from imperialist servitude in which it suffers starvation and untold: miseries despite the formal! independence of its states. A workers Azania/Sauth Africa will press forward two interlinked struggles; against imperialism and against the puppets - the pseudo-radical desmagogues and military dictators who infest the continent,

It will aid the workers and peasants to throw off their tormentors and apply their skills and training to Africa's enormous natural wealth, This wealth can then be used in the interests of the people and not of the European and North American exploiters. In carrying forward this fight it will inscribe on its banner:

sie entrusts

FOR A WORKERS! REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA/

AZANIA,

FOR A FEDERATION OF WORKERS’ STATES OF

SOUTHERN AFRICA!

23

The Crisis of Leadership

24

SCUAPE INI

Writing nearly fifty years ago Leon Trotsky, chief figure within the Military Revolutionary Committee that planned and directed the October insurrection, the founder of che Red Army and the "organiser of victory" in the civl] war wrote,

"PoHtical leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the policy of the chief command during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process, Otherwise why leaders? Why parties? Why programmes? Why theoretical struggles?"

(Trotsky: "Fhe Party, the Class and the Leadership")

The South African proletariat has demonstrated incredible reyolutlonary strength, tenacity and intelligence in the struggle of the past three years. [tr would be folly to draw from this the stale and complacent recipes of spontaneism, The leadership of the South African masses lies largely in the hands of the ANC, whose chief inspirer is the South African Communist Party. The feadership of the unions is more varied but certainly COSATU does not represent an alternative political leadership to the ANC, The Jeaders of the ANC, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in prison and exile and Winnie Mundela have enormous prestige amongst the masses, While their courage and sacrifice have earned them this their political the black

strategy is nevertheless a disastrous one for proletariat. There is in the South African revolution a crisis of leadership, one that will become all the more

obvious in the months ahead,

In the revolutionary situation in South Africa the question of teadership, of strategy and tactics, of programme and party, take on a burning urgency. It is vitally necessary for revolutionary communists to voice clearly and openly their criticlsms of the leaderships in the South African/Azanlan’ struggle because their pollcies will muke the vital difference between victory and defeat.

This article deals with the history and current strategy

of the ANC and SACP as well as the UDF. Our criticisms of these currents are placed firmly within the context of giving them unconditional support in their struggle against the South African ruling class and its imperialist backers. We recognise that in imperialist Britain, it is our first duty to expose the lies and hypocrisy of Botha's ally - Thatcher - and to help organise

workers action to aid those in struggle in South Africa.

Unfortunately not only is the South African movement dominated by a powerful Stalinist current. {[¢ also contains a number of organisations which bear all the hall marks of degenerate, centrist "Trotskyism" ~- the Unity and the New Unity Movements, the Cape Action League and, through the influence of the CAL, to sume extent AZAPQO itself. This article therefore also deals with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USEC), one section of which has already politically gone over to Stalinism -the SWP(US). Meanwhile che other wing, supporting Ernest Mandel, has abandoned all semblance of Trotskyism and waits on the “objective process" of the revolution to carry the struggle to victory.

If this were not enough two of the largest centrist organisations in Britain, the Militant Tendency and the Socialist Workers Party, one of which has supporters in South Africa {the Militant-lIInked Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC), have put forward a caricature of Trotskyism. Both are united in their sect like passivity in the face of a revolutionary crisis of enormous proportions. Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the SWP, has recently claimed that the MWT, “has produced some of the best recent analysis of the struggle in South Africa, Its basic analysis is very similar to that of this journal... " (International Soclalism 2:31)

indeed it is. While the USEC lauds the "revolutionary process", Militant/SWP deny its very existence. The revolutionary crisis ts "years in the future’. This has toa be the case for these centrists, because they have no operative programme and tactics for thls complex revolutionary situation which stares them in the face, This leads both of them to attack the ANC/SACP from the right on the question of tempo and immediate tasks in South Africa.

Trotsky summed up the role of such would-be leaders in the French situation of 1935,

"At the present time, all that the plous mouthings

of the phrase ‘non revolutionary situation’ can do ts

crush the minds of the workers, paralyze their will, and hand them over to the class enemy. Under the cover of such phrases, conservatism, indolence, stupidity, and cowardice take possession of the ieadership of the proletariat, and the ground is laid, as it was in Germany, for catastrophe.” (Once Again, Whither France) Had these groups any mass influence In South Africa thls Is precisely the role that their degenerate "Trotskylsm" would play.

Une ZANIC

The African Nationa! Congress (ANC) claims to represent the whole people of South Africa in their struggle against eapartheid, It is a petit-bourgeais nationalist formation dominated politically by the Stalinist South African Com-

munist Party (SACP), Through the United fMemocratic Front (UDF) - the “legal! anti-apartheid organisation in South Africa - and through control of the now ifegul

students’ organisation, COSA, the ANC exercises consider- , able influence in the present struggle against the racist state,

The ANC was formed in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress. It was the black African organisation formed alongside similar types of Congress in South Africa for ‘Indians’ and 'Coloureds' with the objective of pressuring white fiberals (especially the English) to,

be

— ee

historical

of capitalism.

Cee Tee ene ee eee ee

grant limited reforms, such as the right of blacks to vote for blacks subject to a property quallfication - a right that existed in Cape Calony. It was dominated by chiefs, known as the ‘princes of African blood', who formed an upper house in the Congress.

The campaigns launched by the ANC included petitions and passive resistance on the model of Ghandi's National Indian Congress. After 1925 the African Congress took its present name ~ ANC - but still eschewed any tactics that went beyond its method of ‘peaceful persuasion’ to bring about reform. lt survived und grew in the 1930's through its liaison with che Communist Party of South Africa {CPSA),

By this rime the CP was a thoroughly Stalinist organisaion. In the context of South Africa this meant that its perspective restricted the revolution that would destroy white supremacy within a bourgevis democratic framework. This was spele vut by the CPSA theoretician of the time, A.T. Nzula:

"The basic content of the first stage of the revolution in Black Africa is the struggle for land and a war of national liberation, In this case, therefore, the revolution will in its initial stage be a bourgeols democratic revolution."

This perspective of the democratic stage of the revolution has remained part of Stalinisin's programme since 1928, Fhe strategy has taken various political forms -

‘from passive resistance to armed struggle - but the bour-

geois-democratic objective has always remained. The revolution is limited in scope to suit the petit~bourgeois nationalists with whom the Scatinists bloc and who are seen as the leading force in this stage of the struggle.

The Stalinists thus subordinate the workers’ movement politically to a ‘peoples front’ of petit-bourgeois and even bourgeois nationalists and ‘put off’ {in fact abandon) its goal and tasks to a distant future in favour of an idealised (bourgeois) democracy, This strategy is reactionary and utopian. It is reactionary because it hands over the leadership of the national, anti-racist revolution to the petit-bourgeoisie - a class not fitted to lead this revolution to success.

The petit-bourgeoisie, whenever it is not firinly led by the working class, because of its thousandfold ties with private property in the means of producion, has a historic tendency to submit cto the domination of the bourgeoisie at the critical moment.-The petit-~bourgeoisie will compromise with the big (imperialist) bourgeoisie, first assuring its own rights and privileges and then deserting the proletariat and the rural and urban poor,

The Stalinist strategy is utopian because even bourgeois democracy with its historically progressive features is neither achievable nor maintainable on the basis of the crisis racked capitalism of the last quarter of the Twentieth century. The history of the ‘democratic revolutions! of the Twentieth century, from Mexico and China (1910 and 1927) to Iran and Zimbabwe shows that the possibilities of capitalist democracy emerging are slim indeed, The choice is between a weak capitalism with a bonapartist dictatorship- a bloody disaster for the workers and poor peasants- or a workers government and the overthrow

strategy enabled the CPSA to How-

The Stalinist stage-ist win friends in the ANC and inftuence its policies,

ever, the miserable failure of its popular frontist strategy |

was cruelly exposed by the election of the Nationalist

Party Government in 1948.

The government carried out the full scale imposition of apartheid and illegalised the CPSA in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act. So tied was the CP to the popular frontist perspective (which had taken them so far as to defend racist South Africa and its white bourgeoisie in the Second World War} that it voted to dissolve itself in the face of this Act. Only in 1953 did it re-emerge as the South African Communist Party (SACP),

The ANC's brand of petit-bourgeois nationalism took raot amongst the black masses in the 1950's. The development of a total segregationist policy under Herzog in the triumph of the Nationalist Party in

1930's, the

1948 and the beginning of Grand Apartheid ended the Influence of the older generation of would-be collaburators In the ANC. A radical leadership, including Nelson Mandela, emerged through the Congress Youth League and took the ANC into a period of mass protest with the Defiance Campaign of the 1950's. Whilst even they did not move beyond Ghandian methods, they did turn the ANC inte a mass nationalist inovement,.

The failure of the Defiance Campaign sent the ANC once more louking for white 'progresslve’ support, It is why only in this period that the Influence of the SACP on the ANC has been decisive.

In 1955 the ANC formed the Congress Alliance with the white Congress of Democrats (communists and liberals) and the ‘Indians' and ‘Coloureds’ Congress. The ANC, with SACP backing, even invited the bourgeois United Party to attend this 'Congress of the People’,

The Congress Alliance adopted the Freedom Charter. The year after it was adopted, Nelson Mandela made clear that the programme was a democratic, not a_ socialist one.

"Whilst the Charter proclaims democratic changes

of a far-reaching nature it Is by no means a blueprint

for a socialist state but a programme for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis, Under socialism the workers hold state power. They and the peasants own the means of production, the land, the factories and the mills. All production is for use and not for profit.

The Charter does not contemplate such profound eco-

nomic and political changes. Its declaration ‘The

People Shall Govern!! visualises the transfer of power

not to any single social class but to all the people

of this country be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty bourgeoiste."('In Our Lifetime’, June

1956)

The SACP and the Marxist Workers Tendency of the’

ANC (Ingaba), like to emphasise the 'sociallst aspects' of the Freedom Charter. It states for instance that "The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”. While all other industry shall be ‘controlled' to assist the well being of the people.

Clearly this commitment is vague enough to be Interpreted in many ways by various groupings in South African society - and it is Intended to be. How many monopolies will actually be nationalised has been carefully left open. Olver Tambo, after his recent discussions with the maonopoly capitalists of Anglo-American, talked of nationallsing ‘some Inchistries' and establshing a ‘mixed economy’. Of course, the Charter says nothing about expropriating these industries from the capitalists who have been already paid a thousand fold in profits extracted from the super-- exploited black labour force. Nor is there any intention of establishing workers contro] over them,

Such nationallsatlons, however large, would leave the power of the monopolles over South Africa untouched, Anglo-American would be quite willing to live with this kind of nationalisation. It would be a repeat performance of the nationalisation carried out by the Zamblan government In relation to Anglo-American's copper mines, which did nothing to weaken Anglo's hold on this vital sector of Zambia's economy.

As Mandela explains, the demands of the Charter do not aim to break the power of the capitalists and establish a socialist state in South Africa, rather thelr purpose is to establish a black capitalist class alongside the white capitalists:

"The breaking up and democratisation of these mono

polies will open up fresh fields for the development

of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non--

Furdpean bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to

own in their own name and right, mines and factor-

ies; trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before." {Ibid)

Thus the Freedom Charter is the programme for the popular front which aims to mobilise all classes, including the nascent black bourgeoisie, around a programme _ to establish a more ‘democratic capitalism’. For all cheir

25

We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our

country and the world to know:

that Suulh Africa belungs to al} who live io it, bleach and while, asd thal ac guvermment can justlh, claim authority uolees if is based

om the iil of all ibe people; ="

that our peuple have been robbed of their birthright tu tand, liberty and peace by & form uf goserninent fouoded ong iojustice aad

inequality ;

that our country will sever be prosperous or. free volil al) ous people live in brotherhued, cojnying equal rights and oppurtuaities;

that ualy « democratic state, based on the will of ail the peopl, cam becure fo ali ibeur birthrigh! without distinction of cofuur,

race, sex oF beliel;

And therefurt, we, fhe peuple of South Africa, black aod white joyetber—ryuals, couatryinen and brothers—adupl this Freedom Charter, And we pledge ourelves tu mrive together, sparing neither slzength oor courage, unl) the democralic changes here sel

out burve been won.

THE PEOPLE SHALL QOVERN!

krery man and woman thell have tbe tagnt ue vote fur and tu Sian as a candidate poe ad bodies whieh mike laws:

Ali pouple shall be entiied to tube part in the admiastratnel wl the cuuatry,

bhe tegtts of ibe peagle shath be the same, regardless of fuce, whsur Gf stn;

All bunhed of ipmaiay rule, advisory boards, commile ated authisilees shal} be seplaccd by democratic organs ef seligoverameiit

ALL NATIONAL GAQOUPS EBHALL HAVE EQUAL RIQHTS!

Ynece shall be ecyuai siatus We Ihe Dowes of stale, in’ the cuwlis sudan the schools fur all qahonal grvups and races,

All people shall have equal righ? to vse herr own languages, aad to develop ther uwa folk culture ated cuss,

All natiunel groups shall be protected by law against ansills Ww ther sace aod national pride,

The preactosg and pracice of atonal, tace of eodoui Mirciginelod ahd wontenpe shall be a Punstaole crinic,

Al apalibend laws and practices shall be set nade.

THE PEOPLE SHALL @HARE IN THE COUNTRY’S WEALTH

the national wealllh ol cor ssunies, Whe Rerwtoye al ail Seite Sbigeaes. sthall bee iestured $y tag Pruipls,

Iie uencta) wealth benesth the sail the Hambs asd MiuNapuiy eSustiy shall be bansterfed to the owos(ship wf the

peeple 43 4 while,

Ali «ther andusiy an) trade shall be contiulicd ta ssanst the well being of the peupie, “7.

All peuple shatl fave equal teghts qe itaue where Mey ENGvee, lu Daaftulacturs aod ty enter ald Ciades, evalls aad professions

THE LAND SHALL BE SHARED AMONG THOGE WHO WORK iT!

KHesuicneds of land owaerstip wn i iacial Basi stall be saded aud all phe fat tedivided amicogal (house who work of, fu banioh tamung atid lad Hunger,

The state shall ligip the peasatis with uupkement, seed. flackirs aod damy ta save the som aad asset fhe dllers,

Licedam of qiovedient shall be guatanlerd to all wha work qa oubie dabriids

All shell have the ght to occupy lamd wherever they Choise;

Peapte shall not be robbed of ther cattle and furzed lebuui and farm priaavis shalt be abubshed.

ALi BHALL BE EGUAL BEFORE THE LAW!

Nu one shail be emprisuned, deporied of resticled withoul a iatt écial,

Nu ote shall b¢ candemncd Ly the order of any Guvernment ofdcial,

‘Phe courts shall be sepiesentamve of at) Ihe people.

liniprsoument shall be woly for aciuus crimes aganat the people, and shal) aun ad re-tducatioga, oul vebgtunce,

‘The police lorce and army shalt he open tu alt on an equat bua aod stall be the netpers and piolesduca of the peuple,

ALU Jaws which discliminate On grouads of sace, coivur or belic] shall be repealed

ALL GHALL ENJOY EQUAL HUMAN RIGHTS!

the law shall guaranice to all they right to speak. lo ofgamoe, fu meet togetter, Ie publish, to preach, to warship aad to educate whew children;

The prisacy of the houme frum police caida thal) be pioigcted by law,

All shail be Ince lo travel withoul restention frum country

aide tu town, frum pruvace to proviace, and from Seuth

Atrea abruad; Pass Laws, perinds and alt ulhex bawa festratog these

freedumis shall be abublshed.

THERE SHALL BE WORK AND SECURITY!

Alb wlio work shall be diee Ba devin trade unsons. bo elecd hear oolivera aad oth Niake wage agreements wilh heer empliyeta;

The state shall tresgiise the tight aad duty et all to work, aad tt dtaw fud aneinpliyenie ib Desgetly.

Bien and women ot all races stall recemwe equal pay for Cyyal wire,

Trete shall te oa teats tut) withing werk, 4 falwonal mira wage. paid anual tease, and sich leave lor all workers, aod wiateraily leave un full pay tere aif working mothers;

Miners, domestic workers. Farm workers aod civok see eanls shudt have Ibe sanic sights ay uit wihiess who walk;

Chak Jabwege, Cea panting ladwur, the ber system and caniracl labour ahal} be aaulished

THe DOORS OF LEARNING AND OF CULTURE G@HALL BE OPENEDI

Phe goveimment shalk dincewe?. ahevelop aa ensouruge Hatonat talent fur (he ¢atiamiecment wt wor cultura) lite,

All ine sublueal Creasures Gf mankind shall be open ta all, by fice cachange uf Dowie, tdeas add contact with ather Lands;

The gon of education shall be ww teach the youth to love then people ath ther .sullote, de hoaewr Hunwi browherboud, bites ats peace,

Pduttieas vbalh dig fire. veuripulswty. itmscesat and equal tar sil chaddien,

Itahee tdur sina aid doch al Vd aadtdlibg shall be upested troll bp oeeey oh tule aelowumees aid schalusbips owerded

cue the beasas aad precited, Adult siliteracy shold be coded bp a toss alate cufucauon

plan;

Teachers shal thave all the tobis of «ther cetszeas,

Lhe cakiue Bar co cullutal Tite, on sport and in edaecathan Shall be ebulisine.t

THERE GHALL BE HOVSES, SECURITY AND COMFORT!

All people statl biave fe tight me lise where they choose, to he weecutly tierused, and to brig up these lanubes in coinfogt

and sccurity;

Wiiused deueng spac te be mude avatuble to the peapk,

Rent and prics stalk ie huweed. tood pheatilul and oo whe stad ger Husigiy,

A pitventive Health ateme shall be run by the stats;

Free medecal cate aml Kosmtalsation shall be provided for all, with spreeiad cave Cot onthers and young ¢hileten;

Sturm $nail be demeedisbed. abd new svhorhs budlé where all bare transport, toads. highoug, playig fields, creches asd whl Centers,

Fhe aged, (he orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for Gy the abate,

Keal, leaute sod recfcalias shall be the right of all;

fenced Jodtivat aad gheitucs shall be aholited, and laws which break up lauuhies aball be repeated.

THERE @HALL BE PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP!

Suuth Alewa ohait be «a fully independent slale, which sespe.ts the tights atl sovereignty of all nations,

Suuth Aliica shall ative tu muintain world peace and the actliemeat of vi) anieimatienal disputes by gegotiatien-~ nat war;

Peace and Jieadship amongst all wus people shall be secured by uphulding the equal mightily, opportunitica aod atatus of all;

Fhe people af ghe profectoraies: -Hasuloland, Bechuanaland

amd! Swagland shali be li¢e tu decide tue themselves the own fuluee;

the coght of aff the peoples of Afcica tu independence and self yoereradicat shall be recaghiscd, add shall be the basi of chuse ts? Gperalion

Let al! who love theis people and their country now say, as we say here: “THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTHLE WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY.”

Adopted ad ung Cimgries of ube Peophe, Kh poms, domi Altwa, vo déth Jue, IFS.

talk about ‘uninterrupted’ revolution this Is the programme the SACP endorses and fights for.

Fhe South African CP seeks to divert all democratic struggles into a self-contained ‘democratic stage’ - a distinct bourgeois revolution. This means doing violence to the manifold objective connections between all democratic issues and the overthrow of capitalism in South -\frica. It means intervention to put a brake on and Interrupt the dynamic of the strugg!e against Apartheid.

However a democratic programme like the Freedom Charter, fought for by the peaceful Defiance Cumpaigns wus enough to evoke a vicious wave of repression by the apartheid regime, The treason trials of the fate 950s were a prelude to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC. The ANC had done nothing to prepare the masses for this repression. They had deluded the masses with hopes of reforms, The masses paid for it with their lives.

-FoNowing Sharpeville it was no longer possible for the ANC to retain its hold over the masses by a strategy of peaceful protest It turned to armed action against the Apartheid state. Much of the ANC's credibility, particularly with the black youth, is due to its long, armed caimpaign against the racist regime.

Neither the ANC or the SACP advocated a turn to armed struggle until i961. The justification for this, given by the ANC in the 1969 Morogoro Conference document Strategy and Tactics of the South African Revolution and by Joe Slovo in No Middle Road (1976), is that until that date, the necessary factors were missing. These were and are - that the masses have found for themselves that peaceful processes could not bring change and are ready to make the necessary sacrifices, that there is a tried and tested political leadership, and that other objective conditions are right:

"The act of revolutionary leadership consists in provid-

ing leadership to the masses and not just to its most

advanced elements, it consists of setting a pace which -

accords with objective conditions and the seal possibili-

ties at hand.” (Strategy and Tactics)

This avoids the question of why neither the SACP or ANC propagandised earlier for the necessity of armed struggle or for the organised defence of protest action. ‘Setting a pace’ In effect means opportunist adaption or alternatively, it is a cover for the fact that neither the SACP or ANC, prior to 1960, considered that violence would be necessary.

The strategy adopted by the ANC/SACP was of "a tong term, multi-staged campaign of disciplined violence" starting with sabotage, to be followed by a campalgn of priimarily guerilla warfare. [t is striking that this did not relate to the existing, although admittedly retreating mass movenent. For instance, the failure of the protest stay aways led the ANC to write them off rather than consider how to plan for their defence, for rebuilding in the workplace, for overcoming the dissipating effect of one and two day strikes etc. The armed struggle was to be separated from the masses.. It is significant that the rural guerilla caimpaign was not rooted in, in fact was launched two years after, the major land war on the reserves, the Pondoland revolt of 1959/60,

Throughout the {960s and 1970s campaign, the black working class was relegated to the background by the SACP. Ic demonstrated a highly sectarian attitude to the emerging trade union movement in the 1970s, pronouncing that as the Apartheid state was fascist, the independent trade unions could not grow. Ilerein lies the key weaknesses of guerilla warfare as a strategy, I[t is far removed from the struggles of the key revolutionary class - the working class. The ANC gets millions in aid to fund its armed wing - Umkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Despite this lt has been the largely spontaneous township revolts - not the ANC's armed actions - that have shaken

the regime. The revolts have an immediate effect on the.

class relations in South Africa, The guerilla actlons, by and large, have not had thls effect. Yet, as Trotsky explained with regard to China, it is precisely the relatlonship of

class forces that ts decisive in struggle: What is involved here is not whether or not we are

sympathetic toward the military movement that has begun, and not even of organisation and material aid to it. There is no need at all to waste words on that score... Every bit of aid that comes from the sidelines is necessary, but it is not decisive. The relations among the Communist Party, the revolutionary troops, the workers, and the poor peasants ts what is decisive. But these relations are determined to a good extent by politics as a system of slogans and actions, You can give any kind of material ald you want to a rebelling army, but if the question of power is not posed pointblank, if the slogans of soviets is not raised, and if a complete programme of economic measures linked to the establishment of soviet power is not put forward then outside material ald to the armies wil! not produce the desired results".

Nelson Mandela

In the 1960s and 1970s the ANC substituted the urmed struggle for a fight to win the masses to act against Apartheid, Their strategy fatled. After the sabotage campaign, guerilla warfare, "in our case the only form in which the armed struggle can be launched". (Strategy and Tactics), was to be launched in Operation Mayibuye. The capture of the ANC and MK High Command at Rivonia

in 1963 effectively ended this. Training was renewed but.

many cadres were lost alongside ZAPU in the late 1960s.

The ANC/SACP's self criticlsm of the periad concentrates

on the lack of proper political preparation for illegal work and so forth, but does not question the strategy. The 1969 Morogoro Conference confirmed the strategy of guerilla warfare, and stressed the subordination of the military to the political, In 1970, the SACP's Augmented meeting of the Central Committee also endorsed the guerilla struggle but referred to armed action in the towns as an “Indispensible corollary front".

The ANC's strategy for armed struggle has thus been historically characterised by a separation of armed actions from mass struggle. But if ‘war is a continuation of politics by other means‘, then for working class politics, for the advance of the revolutionary programme of the working class, the tactics of the arined struggle must relate to the actions of the masses (which is not the same as being tied to them). Their object must be to aid the working class to seize power, not to enable a petit-bourgeois leadership to negotiate the fate of the nation over the heads of the -masses. Such opportunities occur with the need to defend protests, strikes, boycotts and so forth, with the need to prevent forced evictions, land seizures. This is the context of che call for a workers militha which remains essential even if in practice repression, illegality ete. force all kinds of constraints, limit the number of

27

cadre than can be trained and so forth. With the building of such a militia the working class can go forward to take the offensive with factory seizures, undermining the police force {a large part of which is black}, sustaining a general strike. Sabotage and guerilla warfare may yet be necessary but they will be subordinate elements of our strategy for revolution.

The Nkomati Accords of 1984 dealt a potentially severe blow to the ANC's ‘armed-struggle’ strategy. South Africa's agreement with Mozambique meant that the ANC had to teove its operational headquarters and it lost its major supply routes, But as the ANC regained influence with the growing muss movement inside the country, and as the pressure for action increased, it raised the call for an extension of the armed struggle and its transformation into ‘Peoples War’,

This amounts to a tactical but not a strategic change in the nature of the ANC's armed struggle perspective. The June 1985 Consultative Conference confirmed the need for both the stepping up of guerilla warfare and the creation of ‘mass combat units’ in urban areas, The ANC calls for these to be spread and strengthened in 1986, ‘The Year of Umkhonto We Sizwe', within ‘mass insurrectionary zones’,

There is indeed an urgent need for effective combat units to defend townships, demonstrations and strikes. There is also a preparedness to do so as witnessed by the actions of miners at Bekkersdal township who fought off police and army attacks on a meeting. But the ANC does not call on the working class to form its own militia or

ba PE ee natalie cn iene te btn

28 onc, Platform at the Congress of the People, 26 June 1955

defence units. Otiver Tambo's Anniversary uddress in January 1986 called on the masses to continue: 'protection' of the ANC combat units and for cooperation with them There was no reference to defence in relation to strikes, tawnship committees, still less the fight for soviets.,

The demands of the struggle itself will undoubtedly ensure that defence units are established. But the ANC's strategy will noc build units that are responsive to the needs of struggle and controlled by the working class itself,

THE ANC, THE UDF & THE CHURCH

The United Democratic Front {UDF} was formed in 1983 to organise against Botha's new tri-cameral constitution, which excluded Africans, It was important in organising the successful boycott and went on to provide leadership in the rent and consumer boycotts and to campaign agalnst the fake township councils in 1984-5.

While having considerable working class support through some union affiliates, school students and community organisations, the UDF is nevertheless a popular front. That is, it is an openly cross-class body, including reprcsentatives of the petty bourgeois led Natal and Indian Congresses, the African Chamber of Commerce, white liberais and church organisations - which ties the workers, the rural and urban masses to the demands of the most

conservative element of this alliance. The effects of its popular frontism have been evident in the last period,

Whereas the UDF is formally committed to fight for one person, one vote - a fact which gives It its enormous support from black organisations and the masses - cven this sometimes appears as negotiable far off goal. The UDF's first annual conference held earlier last year for a series of reforms which would “mark the beginning of a process of transition to a new democratic state", A UDF statement went on to assert "there js still time to achieve peace through consultation between the state and authentic popular leaders for a transfer of power to the people". {Anti-Apartheid News June {985}.

This perspective dominates the UDF strategy. It is one based on seeking alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie both within South Africa and amongst the imperialise powers tn order to win reforms. Violence and mass action could frighten off these gentlemen and therefore must be avoided or at best used only to ‘warn’ the government of the consequences of their intransigence. [It is this programme and the attempts to tie the workers' organisation to it through calling on them to affiliate to the UDF, which is so dangerous to the current struggle. It is utopian to believe that reform can be negotiated via the progressive bourgeoisie, which means tying the hands of the proletariat, which alone has the power tao smash the apartheid system,

The ANC is undoubtedly a major ideological force withIn the UDF, The ANC 1s able to exist happily alongside the clerics and the small businessmen, despite its emphasis on the armed struggle. It can do so because of an agrced perspective on the goals of the present struggle.

The ANC is at pains to reassure sections of what it calls ‘domestic’ or ‘indigenous’ capital that Is programme is not a threat to their existence. In a recent article in Sechaba (official magazine of the ANC) on the Freedom Charter, which embodies the ANC's programme, Jack Simons emphasises that this 1s not a soctalist document and that "Congress is not a workers’ party with a socialist programme", This is because: "At the present stage of the revolution, the liberation movement aims to release the economy from control by transnational monopolies. It is not directed against the owners of domestic capita!®. (June 1985) He goes on to denounce the "workerist tendencies" (within the trade unions} "and self-styled ‘marxists' (who) reject all forms of capital, emphasise the class struggle and set their targets at the achievement of socialism".

Confining the struggle of workers to the struggle for democracy means in practice, subordinating the demands of the workers and the struggle for socialism to maintaining an alliance with the church and hoped for alliance with domestic capital. The willingness of the ANC/SACP to tie the trade unions to the programme and perspectives of the UDF, despite the objections from the unions that its structure gave middle class organisations far too much weight, is a reflection of this policy.

The bankruptcy of this strategy was proved decisively in the 1970's with the massive explosion of trade unionism and working class organisation which virtually bypassed the ANC, After a short period of trying to dismiss the independent trade union movement the ANC was jolted into recognising its enormous growth and potential. But still the working class struggle ts not seen as the central means of struggle against the apartheid state.

Despite the enormous potential of general strike action demonstrated by the November 1984 'stay away’ and the 1986 May Day general strike the ANC/SACP have never made the fight for general strike action central to the current struggle. Despite on occasion calling for ‘extended stay aways' the ANC has posed different methods of struggle under the state of emergency.

Oliver Tambo, in a statement issued after Botha's Durban speech appealed to “the business community of our country, the professionals and the intellectuals, the religious community and others” to join the struggle to destroy apartheid. He appealed not for international working class action in solidarity, but for che West and "the entire business community to cut all links™ (ANC press statement, 6th August 1985).

Bishop Tutu

Despite its talk about the leading role of the working class, the ANC has not changed its spots. They still see the working class as a helpful adjunct to the struggle, In the 1980s it was seen only as a recruiting ground for the guerilla's underground struggle, in the 1980's it Is assigned the role of footsoldiers for the popular frontist leaders of the UDF.

Ominously, the meeting that ANC leaders held in Zambia with white South African capitalists {described as ‘useful’ and ‘cordial’ by Anglo-American boss Gavin Reilly) points to the ANC leaders’ -appetite for a counter-- revolutionary deal with sections of the bourgeoisie. The talks confirm the dangers with the ANC's strategy of

looking for progressive sections of capital at home and abroad. If this strategy ls victorious inside the Diack trade

unions and opposition movement, it could tie the working class into a fatal alliance with their present exploiters. In this way the ANC/SACP, for ali their talk of destroying ‘apartheid capitalism', could actually abort the South African revolution.

In this task they will be helped by the churches, In recent years, the churches have played an increasingly prominent role in the opposition to apartheid, especially within the UDF, They occupy an important pasition of influence amongst the black population, Where political and cultural life has been brutally restricted for decades, where poverty and oppression reigns there is fertile ground for the churches. But the preaching of resignation and promising pie-in-the-sky could not last in such circumstances either.

Pushed by the desires and actions of the masses, influenced by the young radicals for whom the church provides one of the few outlets to a decent education, the churches have tncreasingly taken a stand against the Botha regime. But they also hold back and mislead the mavement, They call for peaceful protest. They cannot tolerate calk of mass action to 'stnash’ the regime.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, has been a consistent advocate of non-violent opposition to Botha. This position of peaceful refarm through :nas: pressure has been Increasingly difficult to Maintain in tie

29

face of the Botha regime's intransigence.

Tutu declared hiinself “shattered and devastated" by Botha's Durban speech of late 1985 which refused to consider any serious reforins. "More and more I will be seen as increasingly irrelevant" he complained to a Sunday Times reporter, "I am using terms which are increasingly irrelevant. I talk of peace and non-violence",

Dr Allun Boesak, another clericul leuder, patron of the UDF, and President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, was a central orguniser of the visit by Edward

- Kennedy to South Africa, This move reflected the hopes

that the leadership of the UDF place in wooing ‘progressive’ Americun bourgoeis politicians to their cause.

This inove was similar in intent and similar in import tao the ANC's meeting with white business men. [n the absence of a significant Dlack bourgeoisie, the church, through organisations jike the World Council of Churches which provide it with a line of communication to the bourgeoisie in the imperialist heartlands, can become a

lynchpin in the popular fram. While many christians will be in the front line against upartheid, their leaders like Tutu, will be ready to sell the struggle short. Revolutionaries inust slrive, in a Non-sectarian fashion, to drive a wedge between the ordinary black worker and youth who go to church and the Tutu's and Boesak's.

Tutu's fears that the pacifist preaching of the church may go unheeded have been increasingly confirmed as the strugyle has intensified in the course of 1986. As heroic self-sacrifice meets Afrikaner intransigence, there is little room jeft for the peaceful reform that the likes of Tutu and Boesak advocate, These figures have been eclipsed by others, such as Winnie Mandela- a supporter of the armed struggle, and therefore more in tune with the demands and expectutions of the masses. Tutu has been relegated to the role of international globe ctrotter, pleading with the international bourgeoisie to take action which will defuse the crisis in a peaceful manner.

Line RIAGK COMSEGousness MOVeERent

30

Fhe foremost critics of the UDF, within the opposition to apartheid, are the National Forum Comimnittee (NFC) and the major organisation within it, the Azanian Peopies Organisation {AZAPO) The NFC criticises the UDF's courting of capitalist politicians. For instance it opposed the visit of [dward Kennedy which was supported by the UDF. [t speaks in general terins of the need for socialisin and the centrality of the working class in the struggle. The Manifesto of the Azanian Peoples Organisation usserts that the strugzie for national liberation is directed against "the historically evolved system of racism and capitalism"

and therefore that the struggle against apartheid is no more than the "point of departure for our liberatory efforts."

together with the fact that the NFC established critics of the Congress/- Charter tradition such as the Cape Action League and Neville Alexander, have led sections of the left internationally to consider the NFC to be the socialist alternative to the UDF/ANC, Veteran exiled South African Trotskyist €. van Gelderen, for instance, has argued that the NFC holds a fundementally different class analysis from that of the UDF. This is not born out by an examination of the propaganda or record of the NFC,

The NFC was formed in 1983 with the object of organising opposition to the new Constitution, Its main components were organisatlons coming from the black consciousness tradicion. The ‘Africanist’ current within the liberation movement goes back ta the teadership provided by Anton Lembede to the ANC Youth League in the 1940's. But Lembede's opposition to collaboration with whites foundered when the Youth League discovered that the CPSA for its ex-members in the period after it was dissolved) provided their main allies in the campaign for mass action. Subsequently the SACP led the ANC into a Papular front Alliance with che white Congress of Democrats in the Congress Alliance,

In reaction co this, the Pan African Congress (PAC) led by Robert Sobukwe, revised the ideas of African black nationalism, rejecting collaboration with white liberals and also with communists. But ics failure to build significant support in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre led it into equally dubious alliances, tncludiug with Patrick Duncan of the Liberal Party and with Peking.

In the 1970's black consciousness was the dominant set of ideas amongst youth organisations and also uinonygst some of the growing independent black trade unions. Reacting against che patronage of white liberals and criti-

These feutures contains within it

cising the Congress Alliance tradition for its collaboration

with white democratic forces, the black consciousness

moveinent insisted 'Biack Man, you are on your own!

In this, black consciousness reflected the influence of the U.S. ‘Black Power' movement as well as the Africanist tradition in South Africa. It fought to achieve independence from the political tutelage of white liberals in all spheres of the jife of black people. As such it undoubtedly helped train a new generation of leaders and activists, teaching them self-respect and self-reliance, But even the most clear sighted of the leaders of the mid-- seventies failed to develop a coherent strategy for revolution, Thus Steve Biko said:

"The Black Constousness Movement does not want to

accept the dilemma of capitalism versus communism.

It opts for a socialist solution that Js an authentic

expression of black communalism."

Biko argued for collective enterprises and co-operatives but also envisaged ‘black’ banks and businesses,

The black consciousness movement went through a crisis after the murderous repression aimed at Its leaders after 1976. The outcome was AZAPO, founded in 1978, The re-growth of the ANC and the strengthening of the black trade unions both exerted a pressure on AZAPO; it moved leftwards. When the National Forum was formed in 1983 it appeared that a radical alternative existed to the leadership of the ANC,

The NFC/AZAPO forces make very wide ranging criticisms of the UDF. The NIFC's Manifesto of the Azanian People claims to put the struggle for national liberation in South Africa an a socialist course:

"The Black working class, inspired by revolutionary con-

sclousness, 1s the driving force of our struggle for nat-

inonal self-determination in a unitary Azania’.

They denounce the UDF as a popular front In which, "worker organisations have no independence....will lose their voice and will not be able to fight for working class demands, Instead they will simply be supporting voices for middle class demands," The Cape Action League (CAL),

body of the NFC, categorically reject

bourgeolsie:

"an alliance between workers and bosses (popular front)

can only serve the interests of the bosses, The UDF

is such a popular front,"

This overt rejection of both the popular front of the Stalinists and the stage-Ist ‘Freedom Charter’ represents both the contlnued influence of ‘Trotskyism', albeit of a

another constituent alllances with the

LQG EE

centrist-Ilquidationist varlety, and the pressure towards class independence emanating from the growth of the black proletariat and its independent trade unions.

Yet the ‘Manifesto of the Azanlan Peopte'’ does not represent a fundamental programmatic alternative to the ‘'Freedom Charter’. It speaks about the 'maximum programme of socialist transformation’ but this is left as an abstract and distant perspective. Its immediate programme for a ‘workers’ or ‘socialist government’ is the entrenchment of a series of ‘rights'- to work, to free education, to adequate and decent housing, to free health, to legal, recreatlonal and other community services. It further demands the abolition of all discriminatory Jaws based on ‘colour, sex, religion, language or class, the re-integration ef the Bantustans into a unitary Azanla’, the formation of trade unions that will ‘heighten revolutionary worker consclousness' and the development of a ‘natlonal culture informed by socialist values.’ It is noticeable that the inanifesto, whilst i¢ calls for ‘workers control’ and for the nationalisation of the land, nowhere calls clearly, explicitly and unambigiously for the expropriation of all the large enterprises, that is, for the socialisation of the means of production,

Without a bedrock anti-capitalist programme, all talk of 'sociatism' and ‘werkers control’ is a deception and a snare for the working class. In this respect, the Azantan Peoples Manlfesto fails to confront the touchstone of the Freedom Charter's popular front strategy, namely, the defence of private property in the means of production.

Also the black consciousness tradition does not produce a correct orientation cowards the trade unions. Supporters of this tendency dominate the AZACTU and are influential in the CUSA federations. They fight against being drawn into the UDF popular front behind the slogans of non-- political trade unionism. The opposition to entering the UDF is correct but the compromise with non-political unionisin is seriously wrong when the unions are faced with the task of leading the mass resistance to Botha's crackdown, Likewise the refusal to enter or acceptance of exclusion from the superfederation (COSATU) by AZACTU is a potentially disastrous error, All unions should be within COSATU, fighting to direct the working class into a decisive political struggle with apartheid and capitalism.

Neither does the Cape Action League have an understanding of the united front which would enable it to do this. They define the united front as a stage in advance of mere ‘tactical unity’, calling it a ‘strategic unity’. A united front ts when

"two or more organisations with different principles

and conceptions of struggle define their political goals

during a given phase of the struggle in the same terms.....United fronts are usually fertile soil for creative and constructive debate about the ideological and theoretical questions. The members of the different parties or organisations, as they learn to act together and through struggle to trust one another, in spite of party differences and to influence one another. The prevailing spirit in a united front is one of tolerance for other parties’ point of view within the framework of the common strategic goal.

Often, the successful united front leads to a convergi-

ng and even a merging of parties that were previously

opposed or in competition to one another". (Cape

Action League: Documents)

This approach to the united front is totally at variance to the principles of che revolutionary Comintern and it is no surprise that the document above cited gives as an example of a successful united front - Frelimo - in Mozambique. I[t cites as the goal of its united front "liberation from apartheid and capitalism" and its political slogan "for a non-racial, democratic and undivided Azania/South Africa." The ‘united front’ is to contain "the vast majority of black workers and the radical black middie class", This view clearly guided and _ influenced the setting up of the National Forum in June 1983,

Its error is that it ruJes out the united front to organisations with a bourgeois standpoint but which are based on the organised workers and urban and rural poor, in particular, the ANC and components of the UDF. Since

these are the dominant force in the liberation movement, to abandon united front tactics with regard to them will prove a fatal mistake for the CAL. Thus as a united front the CAL's position is too narrow -in fact sectarian. However, as a political force, as the organised vanguard of the proletariat and as a programme of action it is too broad, too amorphous, a mish mash of nationalism, populism and 'socialism'. What the black proletariat needs is a revolutionary communist party, whose doors are open to every one in the ‘radicat middle class’ who abandons a petit-bourgeois outlook,

It is instructive that the CAL seems to have no clear priority of orientation towards the union movement, Rather ic orients towards the community based struggle and to the student movement. Whilst it is vital to orient to such Struggles and to train marxist cadres from them, ‘intellectuals' will only become ‘organic’ if they fuse with the main body of the working class, that is, become party cadres working with the organised black proletariat of the large factories, the mines as well as the farm workers. |

The experience of Frelimo and the work of Samora Mache! will help them little in this. The works of Lenin and Trotsky, the experience of the Dolsheviks, in a country more backward than South Africa, and with difficult and varied national problems can far better serve as a guide.

Steve Biko

The militants of AZAPO and the Cape Action League are more radical in thelr nationalism than those of the ANC. They have been subject to physical attacks from the Stalinists. Revolutionarles should obvlously orient to these militants, seeking to show that the programmatic and tactical Jogic of rejecting the UDF popular front is the espousal of a transitional programme for workers power In Azania and a united front now against the aparthied's regime’s retgn of terror.

Self-isotation within small ‘united fronts’ or semi-- permanent blocs, or the maintenance of small union federations such as AZACTU wil only strengthen the ANC's hold over the awakenlng but still politically {nexperlenced masses. Class independence, which the AZAPO and the CAL aspire to defend, can only be established by building a revolutionary workers party based on the programme of permanent revolution.

3I

CeneHiStaannocskeyiSting

32

Two groupings which claim to stand in the revolutionary tradition of Trotsky and the Fourth International have a presence in South Africa, Ingaba, the Marxist Workers Tendency ({MWT} of the ANC, is linked to the British Militant yrouping of Ted Grant, while the Cape Action League is clearly influenced by the positions of the Mandellte wing of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USEC).

THE USEC DIVIDED

As in other revolutlonary situutions- Portugal 1975-76, Iran 1979-82, the USEC has split down the middle, This time it is over tactics and strategy for the South African revolution, For the first tlme, however, these divisions have centred on the actual class nature of the revolution being fought for. The ‘Barnesite', Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) has hurriedly drawn the practical conclusions of its rejection of Trotksy's theory of permanent revolution and it has declared itself opposed to any fight for a socialist revolution in South Africa in the current stage of the struggle:

"the South African revolution today is a bourgeois

democratic revolution... It is a democratic revo

lution, a national revolution, The working people are striving to lead it to victory and to create for the first time a South African nation state.

The South African revolution today is not an anti-- capitalist revolution, but no one can predict how long, or short, that stage will be. That will be determined by the relation of class forces in South Africa and internationally that will emerge from the revolutionary overthrow of apartheid.” (The Coming Revolution in South Africa ~ Jack Barnes)

Barnes pours scorn on those who dare to criticise the ANC's strategy or its programme. the Freedom Charter- - as ‘ultra left sectrarians'. The AZAPO/NFC are attacked for “their ultra left standpoint. They criticise the Freedom Charter for not raising socialist demands".

Instead, for Barnes and the SWP(US):

"The Freedom Charter is a solid programme for the

national revolution in South Africa... It is the mini-

mum programme of a _ revolutionary workers party, of a communist party in South Africa today... ANC leader Nelson Mandela was accurate when he said the

Freedom Charter is no blue print for socialism. And

it shouldn't be." (ibid)

Barnes positively revels in the SWP's born again Menshivism and Stalinism. Like any convert he overdoes himself in heaping praises on the stages theory and its nationalist and Stalinist protagonists. Barnes rails against those who would raise socialist demands as being guilty of ignoring democratic demands. However, this is just setting up a ‘straw man’,

The fight for permanent revolution does not ‘ignore! democratic demands. It bases itself on the perspective that such demands wil! be fought for and won, indeed, can only be fully won, via a socialist revolution. It is the Menshevik method which counterposes the two. Barnes would exclude virtually any working class goals and tactics from the struggle in South Africa, The majority class in South Africa must boycott its own historic interests. Not for the SWP(US) the struggle for workers control in the factories, the fight for the general strike, the struggle for soviet type bodies linking the struggles in the factories to the communities, the expropriation of the capitalists. Along with its Stalinist allies in the ANC the SWP(US) is in the forefront of denouncing such struggles and demands as ‘ultra lefe'.

The SWP's perspective amounts to a criminal disarming of the South African working class, not only with regard to the perspective of a struggle for socialism by also

in the here and now in the fight to smash Botha's dictatorship. Barnes blithely declares:

"It {the South African revolution - WP) is a bourgeols democratic revolution that will be made and led by the working people, and it will open the road to the transition to the socialist revolution. But these are not merely stages of a single revolution: they are two revolutions." (Barnes ibid)

And what historic law is there to compel a bourgeois regime, once established in power, to ‘open the road! to a socialist revolutton? All experience answers that there is none! With the self-proclaimed ‘Marxist-Leninist' Robert Mugabe at its head in Zimbabwe no road to socialism was ‘opened up'. On the contrary the halting of the anti-imperiallst struggle with the establishment of a regime defending capitalism ensures that it will, under pressure from the ‘world economy’ {ie imperialism) turn on the working class and poor peasantry, cheating them of the social gains of the struggle they gave their lives for.

And if such a regime stood up to the IMF or US and European imperialism- as Nicaragua has to some extent done- then imperialism will open up with all the weapons of economic blackmai! and armed counter-revolution, What role does self-limitation to a capitalist stage play in such a situation? Only che artificial protection of the internat counter-revolution and the demobilisation and demoralisation of the proletariat and the poor peasants. Imperialist intervention poses harsh historic choices. Either forward to the proletarian dictatorship to smash internal and external Ccounter-revolution or succumb to its offensive and allow the triumph of a brutal bourgeois dictatorship,

The best, indeed in the long run the only, effective counter to the forces of reaction ls the mobilisation of the working class and the rural poor, To do this effectively they must not be deprived of their own immediate and historic class goals. Only in this way can a bourgeois-- democratic, nationalist counter-revolution on the one hand or a brutal imperialist restoration on the other, be avoided.

Indeed, in the event of the smashing of apartheid by the masses it would be precisely the extent to which the working class had fought for and won its own demands and had built soviets, workers militias, which would determine the possibility of the growing over into a socialist revolution, But these are exactly the demands the Barnesltes fight against.

In any case South Africa's rulers would only be forced to accept a real and total dismantling of apartheid {a democratic revolution) if they were faced with a working class movement threatening their very existence as a Class, It is inconceivable that anything less would force them to dismantle their system of super-exploitation. With the struggle in the hands of the ANC, which the SWP{US) uncritically supports, such a perspective for the struggle has to be fought for tooth and nail.

The greatest danger Lancaster House type settlement at best; one which preserves some form of white minority veto, along with the power of the capitalists. Such a solution would deprive the South African black masses even of a thorough going democratic revolution, One thing is certain when faced with this threat. With the ANC already in the field, the Barnesites perform the ridiculous task of fifth wheel on the cart af Menshevism in the South African revolution.

Despite their formal ‘defence of Permanent Revolution' the Mandelite wing of the USEC does not provide a revolutionary communist alternative to Menshevik stage-ism.

The majority resolution on South Africa was passed by the USEC in January 1983 (Intenational Viewpoint 25, March 1983). While In ftself Inadequate, the major tactics and slogans put forward in this resolution to guide work on South Africa have consequently been campletely abandoned following the, upsurge of the struggle around the

is an aborted revolution - a-

election boycott and the formation of the UDF and NFC.,

Here we see the classic method of Mandelite centrism, As with the Nicaraguan revolt, at the first explosion of the mass movement the last remnants of ‘Trotskyist orthodoxy' are thrown overboard In order to ‘relate’ to those who are thought to be leading the mass movement,

The 1983 resolution is riddled with 'pracessism'. While formally defending the theory of permanent revolution, the USEC turns the struggle for a _ socialist revolution into a tnevitable process which flows from the nature of the South African state:

"The South African revolution will conform with class reality, that is with the social, economic and political structures of the country. It will take the form of - a process of permanent revolution... . The South African. revolution witl begin on the terrain of the national question, The struggle in the factories expresses above all the will of blacks to organise as black workers to win their emancipation, Their mobiltsations combine diverse immediate demands (salaries, work conditions, residence rights, solidarity against repression) with the struggle for national democratic demands for national Ilberation (equal rights, freedom of expression and organisation), The development of the revolutlonary process from a struggle for national democratic demands into a fight for anti-capitalist objectives wil! thus be uninterrupted.” {emphasis In original)

Such inevitable-ism and verbal hymns to the objective process have nothing in common with the method of Lenin and Trotsky. It has far more in common with the pre-1914 Kart Kautsky. The leaders of Bolshevism posed obectives and slogans of struggle; tasks to be fulfilled by the proletariat and its leadership. These taks if unfulfilled would lead to different and opposite results - not revolution but counter-revolution, Making the South African revolution permanent is a task of the proletarian vanguard in South Africa. {It can be fulfilled by revolutionaries fighting not only for immediate democratic demands with the methods of class struggle but also by winning the proletariat to transitional demands. Unless revolutionaries are fighting for the forms and methods of struggle which guide the working class to victory- for the general strike, factory committees, councils of action or soviets- then the perspective of permanent revolution remains a dead letter, But none of these demands appear in the USEC's resolution which relies on the ‘revolutlonary process' to automatically zive the movement its ‘anti-caplrallst objectives’.

Having ‘noted’ that the ANC in the past was ‘dominated by the Communist Party’ and that its: |

"greatest weakness remained the absence of a class

perspective and its strategy of revolution by stages", cle USEC goes on to speculate that the mass struggle Tight open up ‘serious divergences within it’. AZAPO ua the other hand has failed to understand the "necessity -> unify all the mass movement (and not only the ‘African')" despite its recognition of the “importance of -te working class". The perceived ‘weaknesses! of these Tarces together with the growth of the black trade unions ads the USEC to call for a:

"Workers Party devoted to the interests of the whole

working class and oppressed people."

This might appear ta be one step forward but the USEC immediately jumps two steps back. The programme of such a party turns out to be a purely democratic one; abolition of apartheid laws and repressive legislation, for a constituent assinebly. Again their is no connection between these, in themselves absolutely correct, democratic demands and the struggle for socialism - the fight for permanent revolution. And this in a programme put forward for the formation of a Workers party. Little wonder that the USEC declares:

"this process may lead to the constitution of a Workers

and Peasant government™. (our emphasis}

Courtesy of the ‘revolutionary process' no doubt, Certainly not through any fight for it on the part of the USEC!

But even these centrist genuflections in the direction of Trotskyism were unceremoniously broken off once the Mass upsurge against Botha reappeared. With the formation

with mass a terrible to fall in Barnesite's

of the UDF and the NFC as opposing forces influence these opportunists were faced with dilemma. Al the instincts of the USEC were bebind the most popular force - the UDF. The did precisely that, But the NFC, AZAPO und CAL were attacking the UDF for its class collaboration and many unions made similar criticisms. The USEC decided that abstention was the best policy. While the UDF was of a ‘hybrid social nature’ {it included employers associations) they were worried about the NFC's ‘sectarianism’. Thus the USEC dectaration of September 1984 stated:

"Recent struggles have also shown the need for politi-

cal centralisation; in their own way the UDF and the

NFC are seeking to fill this vaccuum." (IV. 60.)

One searches in vain for any warnings about the policies of the UDF or the ANC/SACP, On the dangers of the popular front, the subordination of the workers demands to the maintenance of an alliance with the black middle class, the USEC is silent. In International Viewpoint 83 a major article comiments on the UDF:

"some currents see this form of organisation as involv~

ing a danger for the long term interests of the

masses,"

And the USEC? What is their opinion? This revolutionary jeadership will no doubt tell us after the revolutionary crisis has passed. The Workers Party? The Workers and Peasants governinent? Vanished without trace ~- such slogans, even when gutted of the slightest trace of an anti-~- capitalist programme, are obviously still too much for the USEC when it comes to the actuul struggle. The USEC shows what Lenin called the ‘servility of theoreticians’,

in practice there is not a ha'penny worth of difference between the two wings of the USEC. The pragmatist Burnes wants to bring the organisations ‘theory! iato line with its actual practice in every revolutionary situation since the late {940s and formerly ubandon permanent revolution in favour of the Stalinist stage-ist theory. The Mandelites want to retain permanent revolution as a ‘theory’ of the ‘objective process' leading to a maximum goal, Yet this perspective is immediately boycotted as soun as the ferces of Stalinism and _ petit-bourgeois nationalism achieve leadership in the struggle. The Mandelite worshippers of the accomplished fact roll up their unnecessary theories and fall in behind the ANC,

IMPERIALIST POWER OR

SETTLER’S STATE

If the Mandelites put forward a bankrupt strategy “for the South African revolution, then their “theoreticians” do no better when it comes to providing a Marxist analysis of the South African state itself.

We explain tn this pamphlet how South Africa passed from colonial settler-state, through semi-colony, to imperialist nation.* We believe that our analysis remains true to the marxist theory of imperialism initiated by Hilferding and Bukharin and developed by Lenin. A break from their method, however, is to be found in the characterisation of South Africa by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFT).

In the USFI's 1983 Theses on South Africa the Republic is designated:

"sa semi-industrialised country, still dependant, despite

important industrial development, on investments and

technological assistance from imperialism", More recently in New International (Vol. 2 No. 2} Mandel has written;

"it suffices to characterise the state of South Africa

* In 1983 Workers Power stated in its Fundemantal Principles of Our Programme document that "No new imperialist powers have emerged" in the post-second World War period. (Permanent Revolution No 1 pl00) On the basis of subsequent work on imperialism and South Africa we recognise we were wrong on this point,

33

as a semi-industrialised settlers colony and as such

a military arm of imperialism.” (original emphases)

{ p174)

Mandel's definition of South Africa is but one part of a general re-classification of a range of countries traditionally recognised by Trotskyists as ‘semi-colonies'.

At root the USEC's method of analysis owes more to the modern “dependency theorists” than it does to the Marxist inethod of Lenin's Imperialism. Our dispute with Mandel is not over the possibility of “intermediate” or “transitional” regimes. But by this Lenin did not mean the development of a group of countries existing over jong periods which were neither imperialist not imperiallsed. He was talking on the one hand of countries such as China, Persia, Turkey, which still retained to one degree or another a form of political independence, but which were being increasingly subordinated to finance capital, and whose "independence" Lenin thought could well be short lived. On the other hand he was talking of countries like Argentina, which while a semi-colony of Britain and USA was develaping quickly in the early 19th century. Lenin did not rule out the development of new imperialist powers, As we now know Argentina was not to be one of them, and remains in semi-colonial servitude. While South Africa, Canada, Australia made the transition to minor imperialist powers; part of the new world system of imperialism after World War Ii.

Our differences with the USFI over the characterisation of South Africa are at three levels: certain economic facts; the significance attached to them; and finally, the method of approach to the problem of categorising South Africa. Let us begin with the last, the most important point. It is well known that Lenin's seminal work of 1916 Was:

"a composite picture of the world capitalist system

in its international relationships. . . " (p189),

Extremely important was his insistence that in the study of tmperialism one must not take:

“examples of isolated data (in view of the extreme

complexity of the phenomena of social life it is always

possible to select any number of examples or separate data to prove any proposition), but al! the data on re basis of economic life in... the whole world.”

p!89 This approach implies, as a crucial aspect, a historical approach to the development of imperialism. Lenin was aware that new imperialist powers were developing at the turn of the century:

"Capitalism is growlng with the greatest rapidity in

the colonies and overseas countries. Among the latter,

new Imperialist powers are emerging (eg Japan)." (p274

emphasis in original, ibid}. Their further development (or the cutting off of that development) depended on the antagonistic re-division of the world through war. Lenin, in other words, far from excluded the development of imperialist powers. This would have gone against his whole dialectical conceptlonn of the uneven and combined development of capitalism:

"The uneven and spasmodic development of individual

enterprises, individual branches of industry and indivi-

dual countries Is inevitable under the capitallst system."

(p241 tbid)

The social-llberal economist J A FTlobson, whom Lenin pratsed for his objective approach to the question of imperialism, in fact came nearer to Lenin's approach than the USFI. He made some remarkably far-sighted observations on the question of South Africa. As early as 1903 liobson predicted the possibility of a South African imperialism. His starting point was the contradictlon developing between Great Britaln and the ‘self-governing colonies’ of Canada, Australia and South Africa. Incapable of subordinating them milltarily, Hobson believed that Britain would be forced to sponsor South Africa's independent transition to Imperialism in order to make sure it carried out a political role for the more powerful imperialism in an ‘tmperial federation’:

"Independently of the centralised Imperialism which

issues from Great Britain, these colonies have within

themselves in greater or less force, all the Ingredients out of which an Imperialism of their own may be

formed... These men at the Cape, in the Transvaal

and in Rhodesia, British or Dutch, have. fostered a

South African Imperialism, not opposed to British

Imperialism, willing when necessary to utilise it, but

independent of it in ultimate aims and purposes... -

their absorbing aim hereafter will be to relegate British imperialism to what they concelve to be its proper place, that of a ultima ratio to stand in the far background while colonial imperialism manages the business’ and takes the profits... Such a federal state (SA) will not only develop an internal policy regarding the native territories different from, perhaps antagonistic to, that of British imperialism, but its position as the

‘predominant’ state of South Africa will develop an

ambition and a destiny of expansion which many bring

it into politics on its own account." (Imperialism, A

Study. p345-6)

Of course, the political pre-conditions and possibilities that Hobson observed were not a guarantee of the imperialist development of South Africa, Yet as our pamphlet shows this development occured due to a range of factors after WW2; the transferance of capital ownership (especially ia mining) contingent upon the weukening of British imperialism in two World Wars; the redivision of the world as a result of the 1939-45 war and the boom period in the two decades after; the escape from dependence based upon steady native capital accumulation arising from fixed gold prices.

Lenin did not deat with South Africa in his pamphlet of seventy years ago. Yet his approach to Portugal of that time has significance for our treatment of South Africa, Lenin states:

“Great Britain has protected Portugal and her colonies

in order to fortify her own position in the fight against

her rivals, Spain and France. In return Great Britain has received commercial privileges, preferential conditions for importing goods and especially capital into

Portugal and the Portuguese colonies . .. " (p264}

We think that this relation between Portuguese imperialism and British imperialism was to find a striking echo fater in South Africa itself,

In place of this approach to the question Mandel and the USFI substitute a method that Lenin specifically inveighed against; namely, the arbitary isolation of certain facts and investing them with decisive importance. South Africa it is claimed, is a sesni-industrialised dependant nation becuuse it shares the three main characteristics of this supposed cateyory. Firstly, because its exports are mainly composed of raw materials, Secondly, because it is dependent on foreign technology. Thirdly, because economic growth is dependent on foreign capital.

The first two characteristics can be dealt with quite simply. When we define whether a country is imperialist or not, we do not ask what is produced but how it is produced, The fact that South Africa exports raw materials and imports high technology does not determine

whether it is imperialist or not. 2 | oo. This speaks more for the international division of labour

and the restricted nature of the South African market than it does about the level of the development of capitalism in South Africa, If we had to apply this criteria, what would we say about the USA, whose single biggest export is food, or Hong Kong where manufactured goods account for over 90% of exports? Would this mean that the USA is a dependent nation and Hong Kong = an imperialist nation? We think not! It is the export of capital, not commodities as such, that is decisive,

South Africa's import of high technology ts to be expected from such a small economy. Most of the imperialist economies to a greater or lesser degree, including the USA and Japan, are dependent on the International division of labour. What we could expect in a minor Imperialist nation like South Africa is its lack of dependancy on any particular major imperialist nation, its ability so to speak, of being able to play off the major imperialist nations against each other. And indeed this is so. South Africa is not dominated by US, or British or Japanese or German multi-nationals, even though they are all present in South Africa.

Finally, the dependance on foreign capital. The marxist

yy

method is to always examine things in motion, to examine trends. As we have shown elsewhere, exports of South African capital are rising much faster than imports of capital. In fact the Inflow of capital has slowed markedly. South Africa ts coday far less dependent on capital imports than before. What better proof than Its ability to weather the recent flight of capital and its ability to declare a inoratorium on debt repayments.

Nor does the welght of fvoreign~sourced investment in itself prove that South Africa is not imperialist. We only, need to remember [tn this regard the example of Russja itself at the time of the First World War. Lenin regarded Tsarist Russia as an imperialist nation, one of the oppressor countries, The chief determining characteristic of this imperialism was undoubtedly its possesslon of colonies - in size second only to those of Great Britain, Its export of capital was relatively slight compared to Germuny, GB and France. Moreover, Russian capital formation was overwhelmingly dominated by French loan capital exported to Russia. What does the USFI make of this fact?

It is vital to recognise that Lenin {and Bukharin) painted a ‘composite picture’ of world imperialism. Lenin argued that:

"if it were necessary to give the briefest possible defi-

nition of imperialism we should have to say that impe-

rialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." (p266)

Elaborating on his brief definition, Lenin argues that under imperialism monopolies play a decisive role; that finance capital rules supreme; that the export of surplus capital becomes decisive as against the export of commodities; that international monopolies have divided the world up and chat territorially the division of the world is complete, that is, it can only be forcibly re-divided.

At the time of Lenin's work certain Imperialist powers exhibited certain of these features and others hardly ae all, Finance capital (the fusion of banking and industrial capital) was highly developed in the country that had least colonial possessions - Germany. Precisely the opposite polarity existed in Great Britain. The forms of capital export were radically different in the cases of France and Germany. Apply this method to South Africa today and we can say that above all else it exhibits the dominance of monopolies and finance capital which is mainly domestically controlled, together with considerable colon~- ial/semi-colonial territorial 'possession'’ in Southern Africa. We have no doubt that Lenin's method applied to South Africa can lead to oaly one conclusion: that the apartheid

state is definitely in the camp of oppressor nations as a junior partner in the coalition of world imperialist

INOABA YA BASEBENZI

Inqaba, the journal of the 'Marxist Tendency of the ANC', like the British ‘Militant’ group with which It is in political solidarity, is equally reliant on the ‘objective process' to deliver a socialist revolution in South Africa. While the SWP(US) positively revels in the idea of a demo cratic stage in the South African revolution, [ngaba seeks to prove that such a stage is 'impossible'.

The two documents South Africa's Impending Socialist Revolution and South African Perspectives: Workers Revolution or Racial Civil War, far from presenting perspectives to arm the black working class to overthrow capitalism, present a thoroughly opportunist 'schema' into which the class struggle is distorted to fir. This schema holds that there ls currently no revolutionary situation In South Africa. Workers are told with monotonous regularity throughout Ingaba publications that it is wrong to think that the revolution or the overthrow of the regime is imminent. "It will require years of drawn out tenacious struggles", It will take "five, ten or even more years" we are told to “prepare the ground" for such an eventuality. (Inqaba issue 16/17). Having declared in advance that the mighty struggles rocking the Apartheid regime have little hope tn the near future of destroying the apartheid system, Ingaba goes on to explain why its schema proves this to be the case,

with progressive capitalists,

For Inqaba “apartheid and capitalism are inseparably bound together". This means the only revolution in South Africa which Is possible is a socialist one. The fact that the ANC one of the major forces in the struggle, and now quite influential in the Trade Unions, is arguing for a democratic revolution which involves a popular front will have no effect on the \ikelihood of this outcome because such an eventuality is an 'impossibility'. A negotiated settlement, as well, is absolutely ruled out. We are told that if there were negotiations about a transfer of power to the black majority: nit would be impossible for talks to succeed... even

if the ANC leadership, on the one hand, and the S.A.

regime on the other wished to achieve a negotiated

settlement with each other... because the constituencies, the respective class bases on which the two sides rest, are irreconcilable, even temporarily." (Inqaba

16/17 emphasis in orlginal)}

Quickly looking over their shoulder at the obvious embarrasing parallel of Zimbabwe and the ‘Lancaster House’ deal, Inqaba is forced to bluster about the ‘objective conditions' being completely different in South Africa. It declares that the crucial difference with South Africa ts that in Zimbabwe the proletariat “remained passive during the decisive stages of the struggle up to independence", a fact which laid the basis for the sell-out.

Here we see the fatal reliance of the Militant/Inqaba op ‘objective conditions’ and the ‘revolutionary process' to sweep away false leaderships - petit bourgeois and reformist, and a complete underestimation of the grip

these ideas have on the working class. Inqaba might like

to console Itself that it is ‘impossible’ for a Lancaster House type deal to be achieved, but precisely where a massive rising of the black struggle threatened the very basis of South African capitalism such schemes could be resorted to be a desperate ruling class. And the ANC with its enourmous influence would play a major role in leading the working class into such a debacle.

And since when has the arousal and militancy of the working class been a guarantee against a reformist (social democratic) or Stalinist leadership compromising and betraying such a struggle? Do the wiseacres of the Militant not remember the lessons of Germany 1919, Spain 1936, Chile 1973 just to mention three instances? But perhaps these proletariats also were 'too passive’?

But to admit this possibility would be a severe embarrasment to [nqaba, for they have been consistently trying to direct the mass organisation of these workers into the popular front of the ANC and the UDF. The basis of this ‘tactic’ is that is necessary ‘to go where the masses go’. As Ingaba puts it:

"The history of revolutionary movements in all indus-

trialised countries shows that the main body of the

proletariat returns to its traditional organisations, des-

pite even the worst defeats and betrayals by its leaders

in the past." (No 16/17 p40) This flaccid prostration before reformism has nothing in common with Marxism, Leninism, or Trotskyism. If the working class has been obliged to return to soclal democracy or stalinism despite the ‘worst defeats’ it is not due to some kind of congenital fixation but to a fallure to find an alternative revolutionary leadership. But = In South Africa the Militant recipe blithely lgnores the fact that this ‘traditional organisation’ is not even a workers organisation (in the sense that Lenin defined the British Labour party as a bourgeois workers party) but a popular front of different classes. [ts leadership is predominantly petit-bourgeols, while its programme - a commitment to preserve capitalism, is openly bourgeois. {ff Militant were consistent, such a position would lead them to work to build the Democratic party In the USA - the 'traditional organisation’ of the US working class and certainly the Peronist party in Argentina!

This is mot to say that Revolutionaries should ignore the workers in the ANC/UDF or refuse to enter its base organisations whenever those assume a mass character. We would fight to win those workers away from their popular frontist leaders via the United Front. This was always Trotsky's position towards the popular front in

35

ary tactic

France, Intransigent opposition to it, combined with latervention via united front action with its base organs, where they were involving the workers organtsations, in order to win them away from it. Ingaba on the other hand wants to build the ANC on ‘a socialist basis',

Of course revolutionaries have developed tactics for precisely these situatlons where a mass upsurge and unlonisatlon of workers finds only bourgeots or pettt-bourgeois led parties in existence - this was the Labor Party (or Workers Party) tactlc developed by Lenin and Trotsky in relation to the USA. But it is precisely this revolutlonthat the Militant/Inqaba reject. in fighting against the formation of a workers party based on the trade unions, Ingaba declares: .

"The mass of the workers already look to the ANC.

They obviously do not have need of a reformist party."

(Inqaba No 16/17 p38)

We have already dealt with, elsewhere, how Trotskyists fight for a revolutionary workers party, a tactic Militant/- Ingaba clearly do not understand if they think its a fight

_for a reformist party. But to Justify its position Inqaba

finds it necessary to consistently exaggerate the influence of the ANC in the working class,

lInqaba has argued for ‘building the ANC' since 1979.

It was necessary for them to totally downplay the weakness of the ANC as a mass formation In the succeeding five years and to hush-up its hosttlity toward the fast emerging Black trade unions, Ingaba is quite willing to join in the denunciation of the' Trade Unions' refusal to joln the UDF/ANC as evidence of 'syndicalism', but quite unwilling to direct the justified suspicions of many workers' leaders of committing their trade unions to popular front organisations tnto the fight for a workers party. Again as if to absolve itself from directing the working class into the jaws of the popular front it declares:

"There could never in South Africa be a_ coalition

government between the ANC and the bourgeosie al-

though many ANC leaders might earnestly desire it-

- » « We cannot conceive of condition which would

permit an ANC government on a bourgeois basis." (ibid

p30} These are people who have learnt nothing from history.

Another argument used by Ingaba is to stress the difficulties of forming a workers party. They point to the lessons for South Africa of the emergence of Social Democratic and Labour Parties in the west to argue it was ‘a very complicated’ and long drawn out process, while pointing out that in South Africa today "revolution is knocking at the door”. (Inqaba Noll) Firstly this contrasts: rather stongly with their ‘it is 5, 10 or even more years to revolution in South Africa’ refrain. (But obviously any argument against a workers party and for the ANC is worth using for Inqaba.) Secondly the situation in South Africa is far more fayourable to the speedy construction of a mass workers party ~ a massive growth of trade unions, a revolutionary crisis, mass strikes - than in say Brazil] where nevertheless a workers party - albeit still with a minority of the working class - came inta existence over a short period of time. But how much more difficult it is to transform the ANC. An organisation which, as ingaba points out, is dominated by the SACP, whose leading organs are in exile and who expel bureaucratically at the first hint of opposition e.g. the Marxist Workers Tendency itself.

And neither would a mass influx of the workers movement magically transform the ANC as Ingaba seems to think. It Is more likely to come about as a result of the dominance of the ideas of the leadership of the popular frontist ANC within the workers movement. Inqaba virtually admits this to be the case when having argued consistently for workers to join the Papular Front UDF since its formation, it now reverses its position. [t admits:

"In the main, the unions have not entered the UDF,

and those which have entered have not at aH trans-

formed it - although this could easily have been done.”

{Ingaba 18/19) What a confession line! | |

Certainty there is no guarantee that the fight for a

Of baukruptey for a major tactical

would result in rather than a reformist or centrist one, But that fight would be carried on within a workers organ-

workers party within the trade, unions

a revolutionary,

isation, not a cross-class one. Where the mass working class base could be mobilised against any attempts to produce a bureaucratically dominated party. There is no question that in conditions of Itlegality or semi-illegallty this would be difficult {but so It is in the totally illegal ANC) but the traditions of rank and file control and democratic stewards systems built up in the black trade untons, precisely because of their origins fn these conditions, would undoubtedly weigh in our favour.

There is a further element behind Inqaba's schema which leads {ft on many questions to take positions far to the right of the current policies of the SACP/ANC, For Inqaba the winning over of the white working class and in particular the rank and file of the white army and police is virtuatly an essential precondition for a successful revolution. Workers Revolution or Racial Civil War, as Its title implies holds out the scenario of mass’ destruction of both contending sides. It talks of ‘a long war of mutual destruction’ the unlikely outcome of victory being gained only ‘at the cost literally millions of (mainly. black) Hves', of ‘laying waste the productive forces - the basis of civilised existance’ etc etc. For Inqaba the:

*. . . more real prospect (is) a victory of the revolution

under the class consclous leadership of. the biack work-

ing class, which proves able to split the whites deci-

sively on class lines," | Indeed they make the winning over of the bulk of the white army a precondition for a successful outcome of the struggle in arguing that:

“the winning over of the white troops is absolutely

. indispensible",

Thig of course is only possible where:

"the revolutionary working class movement fights on

a clear programme for the socialist transformation

of society, and with a conscious Marxist leadership”. Beneath its lengthy verbiage Inqaba is in fact arguing that it is only possible or indeed desirable, to smash apartheid in South Africa when the workers movement is under a Marxist leadership. That is why they have to deny there is a revolutionary situation in South Africa at the moment. Why they argue it will take ‘5, !0 or more years’ to achieve it. Militant and Inqaba prefer to wait for a ‘pure revolution! before they enter the fray. And as Lenin said:

"Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never

live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolu-

tion without understanding what revolution is.“ (The

Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up) fs it ‘indispensible to win over’ the white army? In South African conditions to argue such a position is a recipe for passivity. The army must certainly be smashed by the mighty crisis and explosion of working class insurrection that would be necessary to smash the apartheid state. The army would certainly not be unaffected by the inevitable vacillations and divisions which will be produced in the ruling class itself. Whether major sections of the white working class and petit-bourgeoisie faced with a bloody civil war of destruction will be forced to acquiesce to majority rule or resort to a mass emigration, only the class struggle will determine. To build one's perspective on the '‘indispensibility' of winning them over is in fact to accommodate, indeed to surrender, to the privileged white labour aristocracy.

This perspective lies at the root of ingaba's attacks on the ANC and SACP's ‘insurrectionary' turn. Far from attacking the SACP and ANC for failing to fight and organise for the only tactic which can achieve this - a massive general strike which brings the working class to the leadership of a mighty upsurge which could paralyse the country - they criticise it from the right. They denounce the very idea of an ‘Iran type insurrection’ as an ‘adventure’. They pour scorn on the idea of ‘popular

organs of power within the townships - along the lines of soviets' emerging until there is a ‘direct fight for power', te. 'S, 10 or more years’ in the future. They

castigate calls for the organising of an ali out indefinite’ strike for the same reasons. Ilere we see the real bank-

a a i Onnennnnn ee

ruptcy of Inqaba,. On every key tactic which would Strengthen the working class and its organisation in the

struggle for power, the fight for soviet-type organisatlons,

for an ail out general strike and for the insurrectionary movement necessary to smash the armed might of the regime, they argue against.

inqaba and the Militant tendency offer the biack working class no revolutionary alternative to stalinism, despite their abstract cricitisms of that tendencies stageism. Far from applying the communist perspective of ‘permanent revolution’ to South Africa/Azania, they offer only warmed over Kautskyism - much verbiage about the unstoppable ‘revolutionary process’ to lead the working class to victory in the future. But this combined with a rejection of every tactic which can Jead to It in the here and now.

If this is Trotskyism then the sooner the South Africa workers learn that Trotsky was no such ‘Trotskyist’ the

better. ; The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) declares it ls for a

socialist revolution in South Africa and, like the Militant/- Ingaba tendency, is critical of the ANC/SACP perspective of the need for a bourgeois ‘democratic stage’ of the revolution,

However, when it comes down to putting forward a strategy to achieve a workers’ revolution, to build a party that can lead {t in the midst of the revolutionary crisis that grips South Africa, the SWP is completely at a loss.

While Alex Callinicos thinks that the Militant-aligned Marxist Workers Tendency's perspective of transforming the ANC into a revolutionary party “has some merits", he has no time for the formation of a_ revolutionary workers party based on the black trade unions. "Any such quasisyndicalist strategy falls to confront the fact that the mass of black trade unionists are likely to lock towards either the ANC or the Black consciousness movement for political leadership." (Socialist Review September 1985)

And why are they likely to look towards the ANC or the National Forum? Clearly because there is no alternative political party representing the interests of the workers, fighting for socialism and leading the democratic Struggle against the Apartheid regime. This struggle is now teft precisely under the leadership of the UDF and ANC. Callinicos rejects any struggle to involve the mass of black workers in political leadership through thelr trade unions and a workers’ party. This is in fact a recipe for not challenging the hold of the ANC and UDF.

Besides, Callinicos, like the Marxist Workers Tendency, exaggerates the degree to which black workers, especially trade unionists, look to the ANC for leadership, In the past few years South African workers have been engaged in a historic task - that of constituting themselves as a conscious class, buiiding a mass organised labour movement, From trade union tasks they are beginning to raise the question of a workers’ political party.

The October 1985 Socialist Review carries an Interview with a leader of MAWU, the Metal Workers’ affiliate of FOSATU, Moses Mayekiso. Mayekiso represented an important current within the old FOSATU unions, one which sees the need to build a workers’ party. "The general feellng is that the workers must have their own party and their own freedom charter" declares Mayenkiso, "The (ANC's Freedom) Charter is a capitalist document. We need a workers’ charter that will say clearly who will control the farms, presently owned by the capitalists, who will control the factories, the mines and so on. There must be a change of the whole society." (SR October 1985)

Mayekiso clearly represented a trend within FOSATU which saw the need to counterpose a working class political programme to that offered by the UDF/ANC. At the

time of the interview Mayekiso tentatively suggested that such a party could be launched by the new Trade Union federation which was about to be formed. Since the formation of COSATU, which obviously saw a compromise with the UDF/ANC supporting unlons, the comrade has retreated from this position, arguing that forming such a party would be ‘divisive’, while sticking to the need to develop a programme for the working class which would be socialist {See Socialist Worker 5 April 1986), Clearly a programme without a party to fight for it is impossible, unless Mayektso is proposing a syndicallst strategy for the unlons.

But how did the SWP respond to this positive desire to urge the trade unions to build a mass Workers! Party — on a revolutionary working class programme? Predictably Nigel Lambert in the same issue of Socialist Review takes up Callinicos' theme that it {ls not possible to build a mass revolutionary party in South Africa at the moment. "Any mass workers’ party formed under existing circumstances would end up with ‘fudged' politics, It would be a centrist and not a revolutionary party." (Emphasis in original) |

So what does the SWP tell workers who want to struggle for a mass workers’ party, one which can really inftuence events, and break the hold of the multi-class and non-socialist organisations like the UDP and ANC have on the struggle? It is of course the identical recipe these bankrupts peddle for Britain, "recruit the ones and twos",

Such a proposal is laughable when transferred to a country convulsed by revolutionary upheaval, Involving hundreds of thousands of the toiling masses. The "Leninist Party" is grotesquely misrepresented in Lambert's article as coming about by "the conscious decision of a handful of likeminded individuals".

Why a handful? It is described as a “grouplet™ and of course, "it is unlikely that such an organisation would be able to lead the masses in struggle”. Indeed. So this is the wretched perspective that the SWP offers the South African working class. This ts the politics of a pathetic sect, not a revolutionary group claiming to be a ‘party’.

A revolutionary party would grasp at the desire of significant mumbers of workers to forin their own party, not discourage it. It would intervene [In the struggle for such a party.

Rather than standing on the sidelines declaring ‘it will all end in tears’, it would fight to win such a party to a revolutionary perspective - a revolutionary programme, It would have on its side the enormous energy of a new proletariat, with only an embryonic trade union bureaucracy to hold it back.

In such circumstances, even if such a party came Into

belng as a mass centrist party, the revoluttonaries would

have gained a serious influence with the best elements, providing they had fought alongside them for revolutionary not centrist politics. But this approach is quite beyond the ken of the SWP, At the declsive moment of the mass upsurge they offer a "grouplet" unable to "lead the masses in struggle”.

The unspoken logic of their position is that the trade unions and their mass membership should not mess with politics. If they did it would only end in a centrist mess. So what should they do? Leave politics to the Stalinist popular frontists of the ANC/UDF and .get on with the good old ‘economic struggle’. That is the inescapable logic of their position.

‘Leninist Party', ‘Socialism', 'workers revolution' = - for the SWP this is the music of the future, and a very distant one at that! What is this political method? Economism and tailism just as Lenin characterised it in "What Is to be Done?!

DAVE SKOEKING

38

The National Question is probably the imast extensively debated issue of the South African revolution, This is because it has become the central ideological! question for all the contending parties.

For the white racists their aiulti-national and multiracial theory is central, both to the maintenance of their rule over the black majority through splitting it into a series of ‘minorities’, and to a justification of it to the ‘oublic opinion’ within the imperialist democracies. To this end the whites huve attempted to consolidate ‘hative reserves’ into ‘homelands’ for the so-culled nutions; Zulu, Tswana, Sotho and so on,

These linguistic und cultural groupings owe their origins co the consolidation and creation of Bantu kingdoms during the great period of upheaval, war and migration in the carly Nineteenth century, This was known as the Mfecane (the crushing’) among the Zulu or the Difagane ('forced wnigration') amongst the Sotho. In this period the cattle. raising Bantu tribes were led by figures such as King Shaka, who founded the powerful and expansive Zulu kingdom. ing Moshoeshoe founded the Kingdom of Basotho, Mzilikaze that of the Ndebele, Soshangane the Gaza emp

the old -

The National Question

ire.

These states and their peoples had hardly come into existence Before they were disrupted by che trek of the Boers and the expansion of the British Cape colony. Econ. . omic development in the Twentieth century has thoroughly mixed the peoples of South Africa despite all the attempts of the racists to prevent it.

The apartheid state and the employers have long tried to divide their black workforce by playing upon 'tribal' (in reality linguistic) differences. They have long used the Zufus in particular as policeman in the mine compounds, In addition the Bantustan system has artificially preserved or restored the system of ‘chiefs’ and ‘kings’. This has left a legacy of division which every progressive movement has sought to overcome,

Therefore within the liberatian movement -the Congress tradition, the Pan-African tradition, the Black Consciousness Movement and the Unity movement- there have always been compelling reasons to address the National Question. Has South Africa one, two, four or even more nations? Let us look first at the majority tradition, that of the ANC and its Scalinise core.

THE ANC & THE NATIONAL QUESTION

At the heart of the ANC's and the South African.

Communist Party's (SACP) programme is their analysis! of South Africa as a ‘colonialism of a special type. Obviously it is the case that every country posseses 4

unique combination of features in its development. But:

revolutionaries should always beware of a method that the

counterposes the exceptional to the general, or nationally specific to the international. Stalinism with its multitude of ‘national road’ programmes always pleads unique circumstances that the overthrow of capitalism is not a task of coming struggle. In common with its counter-revolutionary twin -Social Democracy- it holds that working class power and socialism are a distant and not an immediate goal.

The South African racist state certainly has its origins in colonisation by white settlers and was for a_ whole epoch a colony of the Dutch and then the British. But South Africa has long been ruled by an indigenous bourgeoisie. To confuse the present situation with colonialism is to mistake the past for the present. In reality however this ‘mistake’ igs not an accidental error on the part of the ANC/SACP theoreticians.

It enables them to give the struggle against apartheid the character of an anti-colonial struggle - just tike those

that have taken place in all the other states of Africa, What interests the ANC in doing this ts the fact that not one of these anti-colonial struggles led ta the over-

throw of capitalism. They stand in the ANC's view as testimony to the separate ‘historic stage’ of national independence. Of course the ANC stresses that this

in order to come to the conclusion. the

colonialism is ‘of a special type’:

"What is 'special' or different about the colonial system as it obtains in South Africa is that there is no spatial separation between the colonising power (the white minortty state) and the colonised black people. ... The special features of South Africa's internal colonialism are also compounded by the fact that the South African state, parliament and government are juridically independent of any metropolitan country ... " {Apartheid South Africa - Colonialism of a Special Type, issued by the ANC)

The 8910 Act of Union, the 1931 Statute of Westminster and the 1961 Declaration of the Republic are not seen as the legal and constitutional reflections of South Africa's shedding of its colonial and the semi-colonial status. Rather they are treated simply as acts of deception. The ANC believes that these juridical formalities shauld not be allowed to cloud the colonial content of the white supremacist state, and that:

"Flowing from this analysis of the South African racist

state as essentially colonial, the South African struggle

is an anti-colonialist national liberation struggle."

The means to attain this objective, as in the rest of Africa, is:

"the abolition of the colonial state and the transfer

of power to a national government elected by popular

suffrage”. Again and again the SACP repeats:

"What needs to be stressed here is that national self-~

determination, as in all other national liberation

struggles is the dectsive issue."

The ANC has altered its position onthe national question several times since the SACP's rise to dominance within it. But its analysis has always been made to fit both the stages theory and the popular front strategy. The position enshrined in the Freedom Charter reflected the Congress Alliance popular front of the 1950s. The Charter therefore talked of ‘national groups’. Later SACP writers spoke of an ‘African Nation’ in counterposition to the tribalisation attempts of the racist regime, adding to this a ‘Coloured nation’ and an ‘Indian nation’.

After the Morogoro Conference in 1969 heavy stress was placed on the idea of the African nation as the ‘majority nation’ whose national Hberation was to be ‘the main content of the present stage of the South African revolution’. The upsurge of the Black Consciousness Movement in the mid-seventies, with its insistence on the unity of the non-white population, plus the effects of the Nationalist Government's multi-nation policy designed to minoritise all the black ‘nationalities’, obliged the ANC to abandon its own theory of nationa! groups:

"Today both the ANC and the SACP recognise the

existence of two nations in South Africa, the

oppressed and the oppressor nations..." (Selected

Writings on the Freedom Charter [985)

Yet even here the ANC is not consistent. It seeks to limit the nationhood of the whites, elsewhere referring to them as: ;

“the colonising ‘nation’, the white national groups".

("Questions on the National Democratic Revolutton.'

Sechaba October [982)

B Molapo writing in African Communist (1977) reveals the reason for clinging to at least a two nation or nationality thesis:

"The great disadvantage of the one-nation thesis ts,

then, that it obscures the colonial nature of our

society and in consequence the national character of our liberation struggle”.

The SACP/ANC view of the national liberation struggle against colonialism claims to stand in the tradition of Marx and Lenin. Before we can finaily reveal ali its errors it is necessary to honestly explain the Marxist position on the National Question.

MARXISTS & THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The classic definition of a nation comes from Stalin's one work of theoretical significance in the history of ai namely, Marxism and the National Question 1913):

"A nation is a historically constituted, stable commun-

ity of people, formed on the basis of a common lan-

guage, territory, economic fife, and psychological! make up manifested in a common culture.” ( Works

Vol 2, p30.)

Trotsky was later to concur with this view;

"This combined definition, compounding the psychologi-

cal attributes of a nation with the geographic and

economic conditions of its development, is not only correct theoretically but also practically fruitful, for then the solution to the problem of each nation's

fate must perforce be sought along the lines of chang- .

ing the material conditions of its existence, beginning

with territory.” (Leon Trotsky, Stalin vol I, 230.)

The views of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were developed in counter position to the subjective-idealist national theory of the Austro-Marxists. Otco Bauer in The National Question and Social Democracy (1907) arrived at this definition of a nation;

"The nation is the

through a common

totality of men bound together destiny with a community of

character.” This is an entirely circular description of national consciousness, Elsewhere Bauer says explicitly that "a

nation exists if its component parts believe it to be a nation", Karl Renner -another Austro-Marxist- brought out the full idealism and subjectivism of this approach ten years after Bauer's book was written. In 1917 he

wrote:

"Long before the nation emerged as a political factor it existed unconsciously as a national character, semi-- consciously as national feeling and finally as a clear national consciousness. The feeling, and awareness of the feeling, that someone who has the same language and culture belongs to us, that ‘we' are different from ‘foreigners’, that we have to stand with our own people and against foreigners, is naive nation alism: that primitive, certainly genuine, and in a sense eternal impulse in the life of the emotions."

The subjective emotional expression of modern nationalistic ideology is projected backwards as a cause of the nution's existence and forward as its eternal nature.

This view insists that today's national community is a result of destiny or fate. The nation is locked between an unalterable past and an Inevitable future. This thoroughly a-historical ‘bourgeois approach leads inevitably to the fatal national chauvinism which the Austro-Marxists espoused in the First World War. Against it Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky defined the nation in materialist terms.

Nevertheless one must corrections to Stalin's famous formula. check list of characteristics is wrong, erroneously proclaims:

"There is no nation which at one and the same time

speaks several languages.”

What about Switzerland? It speaks three major languages and several dialects of a minor one and has existed as a nation for centuries. What is important is, firstly, intercommunication and community of culture, not necessarily a single ltanguage and secondly absolute equality and absence of privileges. Under these conditions differences of ‘mother language’ will not be sufficient to split a nation united by economy, culture and history.

A second, more substantial objection to Stalln's definition is that it deats with being rather than becoming. In other words it is a static categorisation that fits existing nations but cannot grasp a struggle for national existence, The third objection is that in Stalin's 1913 definition national culture and psychology or character ignores class differences within the nation. These criticisms are not true of Stalin and Lenin's whole corpus of work on the national question in the years 1912-14, but Stalin's composite definition does have this weakness.

A nation is a community composed of exploiting and exploited classes which has developed within a definite territory on the basis of a common economic life, a common language(s) and a common culture which expresses a conscious identity distinct from that of other nations.

The development of nations must be understood hlistorically. The nation state is the typical state form of the bourgeois epoch. [t sweeps away the political and state forms of earlier epochs. Thus for example the feudal state with its local or provincial particularlism was hased on fiefdoms held together in personal union and transmitted and modified by dynastic means. [ts subjects, divided into Orders or Estates, were ruled via a series of privileges {private Jaws).

Modern nations began to form fn the final disintegrating phase of feudalism. National struggles centred on

make certain criticisms and To use it as a Stalin himself

the tasks of unity and independence. Merchant and manufacturing capital sought the formation of a wider arena for the development of exchange and production

free of the multiplicity of customs duties, legal systems, local currencies and arbitary plunder or extortion by the aristocracy. [t sought the freeing of the land from what it regarded as parasites,

in short capitalism needed an expanded arena for the development of its own productive forces. This necessitated a compact, contiguous bloc of territory, a common language or mutually understood languages as a means of verbal and above all literary communication. It meant the creation of a common economic life based on a uniform currency, welghts and measures, external but not internal customs barriers and a uniform legal system. in short, it needed a unified national inarket.

The ideology of this struggle wus ‘nationalism’ and involved the revolutionary bourgeoisie and its petit-bour-

39

40

in the creation of a national culture, with a standardised national language which was a_ written medium first and foremost, a nationa) education system and a literary culture. All this was enormously progressive as against the remnants of feudalism with its dynastic loyalties, its dialects and its ‘rural idiocy’.

Yet despite the progressive nature of this struggle against all pre-capitalist modes of production, the nation and the nation-state are composed of antagonistic classes, The national state is a state of capitalism's ruling class. All ‘national culture’, though shared by other classes, remains predominantly bourgeois {it has as its purpose the domination of these classes), Of course, such national cultures have ‘democratic’ and ‘poputar’ elements within them. These elements are contributed from the life and struggles of the urban petit-bourgeoisie, the poor peasantry and the proletariat against their class enemies. But these are either appropriated into the bourgeois national culture in so far as they do not clash with fundamental bourgeois values, or they are subordinated into regional, local or class sub-cultures.

This phase of development was experienced in Europe, North and South America and Japan in capitalism's earliest and progressive phase. By and jarge however in Africa and Asia large-scale capitalism came with their domination by imperialism - an aggressive external force which trampled on the existing pre-capitalist modes of production, breaking them up militarily aad economically, Consequently, modern nationalism was born in these continents as a response to this onslaught, with the petit-- bourgeoisie usually having to stand in for a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that was either very weak or tied to imperialism.

Petic-bourgeais nationalism found itself in conflict with the bourgeoisie and in fear of the class independence of the proletariat, In the colonial and semi-colonial countries it faced the task of unifying states where the productive forces had not developed sufficiently to create national markets, and where the state boarders reflected the division imposed by inter-impertalist rivalries. As a result the 'peoptes’ of these states were made up of various language groups, often lacking literacy, and with a history of the cynical exploitation of these differences by the imperialist administrators or rival imperialism's from outside. :

This has left to the formally independent states of Africa, the Middle East and Asia a legacy of internal and external divisions which have either prevented or stunted the development of a nationalism within these states. They face cunstant pressure from imperialism. This pressure comes economically from the IMF, the World Bank. Militarily and politically it comes from US and European imperialism either directly or through its minor imperialist stooges and semi-colonial gendarmes, This has led to trans-state nationalisms such as 'pan-Islamism', 'pan-Arabism’ and 'nan-Africanism'. Yet the existing states with their particular history, their economic structure, their culture inherited from capitalist development has made these ‘pan-nationalisms' a utopian project, constantly breaking down when faced with the class interests of the semi-colonia! bourgeoisie and their military bonapartist representatives,

Thus the national struggles of the oppressed peoples are on the one hand a justified and progressive force against imperialism and against backward feudal, tribal or collaborationist elements within their own states. Yet as nationalisms they are utopian in that in the imperialist epoch no prolonged period of national development {on a capitalist basis) is likely to Intervene. This utopian nationalism is in addition reactionary wherever iL clashes with the development of the working class into a conscious force defending its own interests and seeking to lead the rural poor and the difference nations oppressed by imperialistm against it.

The attempt tu Create a pure non-ctuss nationalism or even a ‘proletarian nationalism’ is a utopian and reactionary project. Lenin and Trotsky's approach was quite different. Trotsky summed up Lenin's position on the national question succintly:

"lt was Lenin's view that the right of sclf-determinat-

geois allies

Lenin

ion was merely an application of the principles of bourgeols democracy in the sphere of national relations. A full-bodied, all-sided democracy under capitalism was unrealisable; in that sense the national independence of small and weak peoples was likewise ‘unreaHsable', However, even under imperialism, the - working class did not refuse to fight for democratic rights, including among them the right of each nation to its independent existence. Moreover, in certain portions of our planet it was imperialism itself that invested the slogan of national self-determination with extraordinary significance." (Stalin Vat 1 p229} ror Marxists, as opposed to all forms and types of nationalists, the national question which arises from _ this demands only a consistent and total opposition to all national oppression. It does not oblige the proletarian vanguard to became nation-builders. Lenin was quite clear on this question: "For Marxists the national programme .. . advocates firstly the equality of nations and languages and the impermissibility of all privileges in this respect and also the right of nations to self-determination... - secondly the principle of internationalism and uncompromising struggle against contamination of the proletartat with bourgeois nationalism, even of the most refined kind." (Critical Remarks on the National Question) : When Lenin talks of the 'mogt refined’ nationalism he means that of the oppressed - indeed he refers to that of "the most oppressed and persecuted nation -the Jews.™. He concludes that: "dt is the Marxist's bounden duty to stand for the most resolute and consistent democratism on all aspects of the national question. Its task is largely a negative one, But this is the limit the proletariat can go to in supporting nationalism, for beyond that begins the ‘positive’ activity of the bourgeoisie striving to fortify nationalism.” (ibid) The argumentation about how many nations or ‘nationalities’ or ‘national groups’ exist in South Africa, while Interesting in ttseff bears no decisive importance for our programme. What decides the existence or non-extstence of nations is not the cognitions of theoreticians or the chop-logic of politicians trying to bolster up artificial stages, but the existence or development of national strug-

wles.

In South Africa the ‘national’ question is an aspect of the general democratic revolution, that is, the destruction of the racist dictatorship over alJl non-white South Africans. Without recognition of this reality all ‘nationalisms’, tribalisms or religious community ideologies will play a divisive role in the general democratic struggle. The apartheid state has realised this from the outset - hence its Bantustan and community policies aimed at Balkanising South Africa.

Yet a ‘positive’ espousal of ‘Black Nationalism' or a two nation and even a one nation theory, also disarms the proletariat. The ‘national' question par excellence is to end the brutal oppression and monstrous privileges of the whites and to unify the artificially separated peaple of South Africa. But the proletariats programme and its demands cannet stop here. It has to overcome the ‘tribalist' ideologies of the Bantustan leaders like Burhelezi here and now and counter the constant attempts of Bocha aid company cto set the linguistic groups and communities 4t one anothers throats. This means allaying the fears of any language group or community amongst the oppressed that it will be a helpless minority in the new state.

Therefore the proletariat should make clear that it is fighting for a unified South Africa which is free of all ‘racial’ or ‘national’ privilege and oppression. This would mean the free use of all languages in education and cultural life, the creation of local government which ensures no oppression of one community by another, It would also mean that whilst the working class, whether under capitalism or under its own dictatorship needs a large and centralised state as possible, this must be a voluntarily chosen centralism.

The workers party should therefore include in its programme for the morrow of the destruction of apartheid, the right of self-determination for all non-oppressor peoples; for all those for whom autonomy or even separate statehood woukl not mean oppression for another people. This programme alone enables the working class to assemble around it all the oppressed peoples without succumbing to bourgeois natiunalist influence itself.

Seen as Lenin saw it, the ‘national question’ is not an obstacle to the seizure of power by the proletariat. [It does net necessitate a separate national liberation stage as the ANC/SACP claim but is a task of the permanent-- revolution that will only be fulfilled progressively if the proletariat selzes power. The history of the other African states shows. that where ‘national liberation’ installs the bourgeoisie or its military-bonapartist caretakers, this does not solve the question of nationalism, tribalisim and separate communities. The bitter and bloady experience of the Congo, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia have shown this, The South African proletariat can and must solve this question -as the Russian proletariat did -in 1917- under its own class rule,

The ANC/SACP's repeated insistence that national self-determination is the decisive issue is the stance of petit-bourgeois democracy, of nationalism as opposed to proletarian revolution. The apartheid state’s repressive apparatus exists to ensure the super-exploitation of the black proletariat and the exclusion from the land of the great muss of toilers, It is the fight against this unendurable exploitation and oppression that is the main explosive charge of the South African revolution. The masses see democracy -one persan one vote- as the means to end this nightmare.

South African Stalinism is a priori wedded to keeping the struggle against apartheid within the limits of a bourgeois revolution. tte has subsequently arranged and re- -arranged its view of the national question to fit this Strategic commitment,

PERMANENT REVOLUTION

Trotsky neither coatused the national question nor indeed any other major bourgeois-defhocratic struggle (the land question, the democratic republic) with the strugvle of the proletariat for its own social emancipation.

Nor did he draw from their distinction the conclusion ‘

Trotsky

ae titi

42

that separate historic stages and distinct class rules (dictatorships) were imposed by this fact. If he had conflated bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks by calling the former socialise he would have thereby been a petit-bourgeois populist - whose ‘socialism’ would become an instrument of deception for the profetariat. If he had espoused a stages theory he would have been a Menshevik. Despite Stalinist. slanders Trotsky was neither. The theory of permanent revolution neither ignores the demo cratic revolutionary tasks nor confuses them with socialist

anes. What this means was expressed by Trotsky quite clearly in the one major article he devoted to South Africa. (On the South African Theses. Writings of Leon

Trotsky: 1934-35). He stressed heavily the fact of racial and national oppression exercised by the whites;

"The South African possessions of Great Britain form a dominion only from the point of view of the white minority. From the point of the black majority, South Africa is a slave colony". | This gives the starting point, the cnormous explosive social force to the revolution in South Africa, It is Trotsky says: “unthinkable without the awakening of the native masses” involving the growth of "confidence in their strength, a heightened personal consciousness, a cultural growth." Trotsky continues; | "Under these conditions, the South African republic will emerge first of all as a ‘black republic’... But 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 the relation not only between the classes but also between the races and will assure to the blacks that place in the state that corresponds to their numbers, thus far will the social revolution in South Africa also have a national character.

We have not the slightest reason to close our eyes to this side of the question or to diminish its significance. On the contrary, the proletarian party should in words and deeds openly and boldly take _the solution of the national (racial) question in its hands, , |

Nevertheless, the proletarian party can and must solve the national problem by its own methods. The historical weapon of national liberation can be only the class. struggle". : Trotsky goes on to criticise the alternative method

developed by the Stalinised Comintern which turned national liberation into "an empty democratic abstraction that is elevated above the reality of class relations”. [n this schema "different classes liberate themselves (temporarily) from material interests and become simple ‘anti-imperialist’ forces." ‘(to encourage them to perform this act of class amnesia they are promised a "national-democratic" State. - - Reference to Lenin's pre-19!7 position is, says Trotsky, entirely frauculent; "Lenin always spoke about a revolutionary bourgeois democratic dictatorship and not about a spiritual ‘people's state’, Moreover he drew no strategic class alliance perspective:

he did not offer a bloc of all ‘anti-czarist forces’ °

but carried out an independent class policy of the proletariat. An ‘anti-czarist' block was the idea of the Russian Social Revolutionaries and the Left Cadets, that is the parties of the petty and middle bourgeoisie". Again Trotsky stresses: "The Bolshevik Party defended the right of the opprressed nations to self-determination with che methods of proletarian class struggle, entirely rejecting

the charlatan ‘anti-imperiallst' blocs with the numerous petty-bourgeois ‘national’ parties of czarist Russia {the Polish Socialist Party - PPS the party of Pilsudski in czarist Poland - Dashnaki in Armenia, the Ukranian nationalists, the Jewish Zionists, etc etc). The Boisheviks have always mercilessly unmasked these parties, as well as the Russian Socialist Revolu-

tionaries, their vacillatians and adventurism, but espe-

cially their ideological He of being above the class

struggle. Lenin did not stop his intransigent criticism even when circumstances forced upon him this or | that episodic, strictly practical, agreement with them.”

There could be no question of any permanent alliance with them under the banner of ‘anti-czarism'. Thus Trotsky rejects the grossly opportunist use of the ‘anti-- imperialist united front’ developed by the Stalinist Comintern into a strategic alliance committed (deceitfully) to the establishinent of a bourgeois nationalist regime and later openly developed as the Popular Front. Trotsky agrees that it is completely wrong to "compete with the African Nationalist Congress in nationalist slogans" as the South African Trotskyists theses put it, but makes clear that chis must mean neither abstention from the democratic tasks nor capitulation to nattonalism.

The Bolshevisk-Leninists (Trotskyists}) must "put themselves in defence of the Congress, as it is, in all cases where it is being attacked by the white oppressors". They (lust recognise and support the progressive tendenctes in the program of the Congress. They must

"unmask before the native masses the inability of

the congress to achieve the realisation of even its

own demands, because of its superficial, conciliatory policy. In contradistinction to the Congress, the SGol-

shevik-Leninists develop a programme of revolutionary .

class struggle.”

Trotsky stresses that united action, temporary united fronts are possible.

"Separate episodic agreements with the Congress, if they are forced by circumstances, are permissable only within the framework of strictly defined practical tasks, with the retention of full and complete independence of our own organisation and freedom of political criticism".

Trotsky sums up the perspective of permanent revolution for South Africa, It does not leap over the "nattonal or the agrarian questions" but poiuts out that these "can be sofved only in a revolutionary way". That this

"leads inevitatly to the dictatorship of the proletariat,

which guides the native peasant masses; and that

the dictatorship of the proletariat will open an era

of soviet regime and socialist reconstruction".

Lastly Trotsky stresses that it would not be sufficient ty repeat this "cornerstone of our programme” as an abstraction;

"6... the masses must be brought to this general 'strategic' formula through the medium of a series of tactical slogans. It is possible ta work out these slogans, at every given stage, only on the basis of an analysis of the concrete circumstarces of the life and struggle of the proletariat and peasantry and the whole internal and international sttuations."

AZAPO & THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The muin representative of the Black consciousness tradition, Azapo, oscillates between a two and a one nation theory. More specifically its 'final goal’ is 'One Azania, One Nation’ yet its present definition of the national strugzle to overthrow white rule centres on the bluck warking class and its black middle class allies and excludes tbe whites on principle; "For us the class alliances that need to be forged are those between the black working class and sections of the black middle class, those willing to act on the dictates of the working class .. ." Azapo sincerely denies being anti-white buc draws from this a false conclusion: "Black people are incapable of racism. By racisia we mean the discrimination against a group of people by another group with the aim of subjugation.” (Cape Action League News, June/July 1984) | Class antunces can only be based on common class

en gp pg A OO a eEOOO

To talk of an alliance with che middle class on the basis of the latter accepting ‘dictates’ and the goat of a ‘sucialist' Azania is typical petit-bourgeis populism. Whilst individuals from the middie classes, possibly in large numbers, can join the worklng class forces, accepting thelr socialist goal they can do so only on the basis of forsaking and renouncing their own class standpoint. If they do this it ls in no sense a class alliance. On the other hand,the working class can win allies, form blocs or united fronts with other classes for limited common goals. There will, however, always be a probability that the bourgeoisie will betray such temporary alllances out of fear of the proletariat preferilng subordination to its oppressor 'class brothers’.

This is one more way of saying that the ‘national' bourgeoisie, despite its oppression, cannot consistently and firmly fight against external imperialism or internal reaction. The petit-bourgeoie is more radical but whether it will hold firmly to the struggle depends on the strength and the forward march of the proletariat. Otherwise its nature is to vacillate. If the proletariat, however, is misled into sharing not only a struggle but an ideology {nationalism) and an organisation (a peoples party or front) with the petit-bourgeoisie it is heading for disaster,

The black workers need first and foremost not two class or non-class parties, organisations or strategic united fronts hut a revolutionary class party whose programme is Internationalist, AHL nations and al! nationalism can become oppressive and racist. Unfortunately, present opp ression does not give immunity from the future possibility of becoming an oppressor. The tragic history of Zionism in this century proves this all too clearly. Black exclusionism is not racist as the Stalinists falsely claim; but it ls nationalist and , therefore, nor socialist.

Azapo want to merge socialist and nationalist ideolo-

gies. In reality they abandon a purely democratic position without achieving a proletarian internationalist one; "We reject the concept of race, There can be no two or three different races or nations in South Africa, We are striving for the emergence of a single undivided nation in South Africa and for a society which is non-exploitative," |

This is an inconsistently democratic position. By espousing positively a ‘one-nation'’ position its defenders deny self-determination to the various potential minorities within South Africa.

Of course now, under the apartheid state the claims of the Bantustan leaders to be exercising national selfdetermination are completely bogus since these statelets are not the result of a free choice for separation by their peoples but were brutally timposed by the racist regime, Forcible population transfers gave them what spurious homogeneity they can clalm. |

Nevertheless, the Xhosa (18%), Sotho (13%), Zulu (20%), Vhacenda (2%), Twsana (9%), Swazl (2%) and Ndebele (2%) speaking communites or peoples nevertheless exist. Equally, the ‘coloured’ (9%} and the Asians (3%) constitute as yet distinct communites. These distinctions may have dissolved in the trade union or anti-aparthied struggle for the vanguard elements and for Jarge sections of the working class. It is indced vital for the struggle against apartheid that there {is the maximum unity. Therefore the oppressed peoples should combine wherever they are willing to do so in non-racial, non-‘national’ organisations.

The class best able to accomplish this fs the working class whose organisations can, do and should be formed on this basis. To fight the bosses and the state this unity is essential. But In the homelands and outside them there remain ‘backward’ sections of the masses, To maintain and strengthen unity and to bring the ‘backward!' sections in behind the vanguard it is vital to undercut any suggestion that any of these ‘peoples’ or communitics will on the achievement of majority rule be coerced into a unitary state or that in a Black republic they may expect to find themselves an oppressed minority. Apart from = anything else this ts important in order to undermine the demagogy of wretches such as Fiuthelezi.

Given the fate of the Ugandan Asians or the ‘tribal! minorities' In Zimbabwe, it would be foolish to suggest that a black republic would be incapable of national opp-

intereses.

ression. All bourgeois states and even deformed workers states ruled by a bureaucratic caste can and do oppress national minorities. The need to fight to abolish the Bantustans of today does not release black South African/- Azanian democrats and revolutionary socialists from makntaining within their programme the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. Moreover, these peoples must themselves decide if they are a nation and if they wish autonomy or separation, freely and by democratic means. ;

The reality of South Africa today is that there are divisions in the oppressed majority. These divisions have been fostered by Botha and aided by the ‘homeland’ leaders. The spring 1986 clashes over land between Ndebeles and Sothos indicate this. The extstence and serious threat that Inkatha poses, with its murderous attacks on militants and its attempts to split the trade unions, requires in Natal to be -politically combatted and undermined. And here the assertion of the unity of the Azanian people is insufficlent to win over the masses who are not directly involved in mifltant unton struggles or school and community boycotts.

NEVILLE ALEXANDER

The principal writer on the national question opposed to the ANC/SACP tradition is Neville Alexander (No Sizwe) author of One Azania, One Nation - The National Question in South Africa (1979) and An Approach to the National

Question in South Africa (Azania Worker vol 2, No 2,- Dec 1985)

Alexander mounts a powerful critique of the racist regime's nationalities policy and of the multi-national

positions of the SACP and the ANC, He sets ont ta coimbat both the Batkanisation policies of the apartheid regime and its 'homeland' stooges and the Stalinist stages theory that dictates a bourgeois democratic solution to the anti— apartheid struggle. He does this because he believes that "a pluralist position on the national question carries the inevitable implication of a two-stage revolution" (No Sizwe p106) Alexander wishes to give the proletariat the leading role in the national struggle, to proclaim its unbreakable linkage to the struggle against capitalism and to give it a socialist goal. This leads him to advocate one form, and one form only, of resolution to the anti-apartheid struggle - a unitary South African/Azanian nation state. |

Nevifle Alexander

43

Not only is the “reactionary 'nationalism' of the ‘home~- land' leaders" bogus, but consequently "the ‘nations’ they claim to represent, be they ‘Xhosa’, “fswana‘', ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’, or anything else are non-existent entitites which no recourse to theory can create.” (No Sizwe p 180)

He is willing to grant only that the

"so called ‘ethnic groups’ are specifically either lan-

guage groups, colour-castes, religious groups or admin-

istrative groups and no more.” (ibid)

However he makes a serious hole in his own case when he concedes that they could attain national identity but only as a result of counter-revolution and defeat (e.g. the formution of Israel out of Palestine or Pakistan out of India). As we have seen in the struggle to prevent such divisions, the refusal of recognition of the nationhood, ethnic group status, etc, of these groupings will be of no help whatsoever,

The other problem with Neville Alexander's nationality theory is that it leads to a merging of nation and class and a simple identification of the anti-apartheid struggle itself with the struggle against capitalism. In his position

mn... the ractal oppression of the black people is

understood as a function of the capitalist system itself... What is necessary is the liquidation of those institutions and practices which have given rise to national oppression, to the exclusion of the majority of the people from the body politic and from the enjoyment of equal rights in all spheres, This means nothing else than the abolition of capitalism itself". (No Sizwe p 178) Alexander argues that because of apartheid ns .. the struggle assumes a national form. But its content is necessarily a social one, It cannot be haited at the mere integration of the black people into the existing economic relationships on a_ basis of ‘equality'’.” (ibid) The national question is thus released from its basis in bourgeois society and becomes the basis of a struggle against bourgeois society. The nation for Alexander is

' question

to be formed without the bourgeoisie and indeed against the bourgeoisie;

"The nation - consists of all the people who are pre-

pared to throw off the yoke of capitalist exploitation

and racist oppression.” (ibid) | Therefore Alexunder concludes that

"The working class, in short, has become the leading

class in the nation and is about to constitute itself

as the nation of South Africa." (ibid p 180)

By 1985 Alexander was posing this proletarian nation approach even more vigorously;

"The positive historical task of the black workers

in solving the national] question in South africa is

the construction of the (socialist) nation of Azania."

(An Approach to the National Question ... }

By giving the proletariat a positive approach to the nation Alexander espouses a form of nationalism - albeit one that he insists has a proletarian class content. He has already rejected Lenin and Stalin's views on the national as Euro-centred. He claims that in Europe it was matural to think that the national question was a bourgeois one, In the [Imperialised world it 1s different. Again Alexander confuses national struggles with nattonalism and (falsely) ascribes to Lenin the view that he assigned to the bourgeoisie the role of the leading class in this bourgeois-democratic question, Lenin no more did this than he assigned this role to the bourgeoisie in the agrarian question or the question of the democratic republic. He fought for the proletariat to take the lead in the resolution of all these questions (questions which together comprise the ‘bourgeois revolution’).

Nor did Trotsky disagree with this approach. He simply insisted that they could only in fact be resolved by the proletariat establishing an alliance with the peasantry and passing uninterruptedly from bourgoeis-democratic to proletarian social tasks. This did not lead in any way to Trotsky confusing the class nature of these tasks.

If one insists, as Alexander does, in confusing these tasks via an eclectic ‘form and content’ analogy - which

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the Stalinist charlatans resort to in order to yoke together vulgar contradictions - then you turn the national struggle into an utopian ideology and rob the proletariat of its internationalism,

"tt can be stated clearly, therefore, that in historical

practice in the 20th century, working class movements

and their organisations in different countriés have in fact led struggies for national liberation and national re-unification , and ipso facto, taken the lead in building or consolidating the particular nations in the national states. Of course this does not imply that Marxists or socialists are or should be nationalists in any chauvinistic or exctusivist sense, The point is simply that the working class starts from a national perspective rather than an internationalist one." (An

Approach to the National Question .. .}

This positive espousal of nationalism leads to a subjective idealist approach to the national question. Alexander atopts this from the writings of various ‘Academic Marxists' originating from the post-Althusserian school, especizily Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1985) witch defines the nation as “an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign"..

Alexander himself remarks that this ‘smacks of idealism' but merely offers a corrective to it by adding thar this imagined community must be "a_ social reality to which individuals inside and outside the nation have to respond” and that it must be “embedded in very concrete capitalist or socialist relations on concrete national territory". Alexander thus merely insists that it be a collective icc. a class ‘imagining’ and this must reste itself In either capitalist or post-capitalist social relations,

This however does not escape from idealism and it creates as its subjective standpoint ‘the class' whether bourgegis or proletarian, Naturally this ideal nationality that the proletariat has positively to establish has to have its consciousness prepared for it by specialists in the production of ideas - intellectuals, Alexander praises Anderson's work because it

"enables us to concentrate on the nation as an ideo-

logical construct" (ibid p 5)

From this it is clear that

"The positive historical task of the black workers

in solving the national question in South africa is

the construction of the (socialist) nation of Azania"

{ibid) and that:

"... it is the nature of the process of liberation

that the political and ideological construction of the

new nation precedes its socio-economic realisation.”

Alexander believes that in the task of ‘ideological construction’ it is the role of ‘organic intellectuals’ such as himself to assist the working class:

"to fashion an oppositional or, more accurately a

counter-hegemonic ideology. This they do by, amongst

other things, careful attention to the language which is inserted into and generalised in the political programmes and actions of the organisations of their class. The importance of this scholarly activity derives from the fact that it is in and through language that the individual is constituted as a subject". (ibid)

From this approach, adopted from 'semiology', flows the obsession with language and terminology - with denying the terms, nation, national group, ethnic group to the various groupings of South African society as wel! as his insistence on the one-ness of the Azanifan nation. I[t. leads also to an essentially propagandist role for the ‘organic intellectuals’. |

Indeed the role that Neville Alexander and the Cape Action League seem to have set themselves is to ‘permeate’ Azapo with a ‘correct’ view of the national question, namely, that

"the struggle for national liberation fs, from the point

of view of the exploited classes, the inescapable polit-

ical form of the class struggle".

This view can indeed be accepted -in words- by the Black Consciousness Movement without [t altering their petit-bourgeois populist practice one iota. Indeed Alexander is in effect manufacturing an Ideology, in the , negative sense of the term, one that can be used to demagogically deceive the proletariat in the way that Mugabe, Machel and others have cone before,

The duty of the proletarian vanguard in South Africa is to defend a consistently revolutionary democratic position on the national question which opposes all existing national oppression and which will give no ground for any future oppression. This means adopting an Internationalist

not a nationalist vlewpoint.

Trotsky once observed with regard to Marx's famous slogan, ‘The workingmen have no fatherland’ that it has Fmore than once been evaluated by philistines as an agitational quip". The slogan has not been outdated either by the incorporation of the working class within the democrat lc system as the social-democrats of Europe claim or by the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations, as the ‘Third world’ petit-bourgeois nationalists assert.

All positive espousal of ‘national interests’ involves the fracturing of the working class’ unity both 'at home’ and tabroad'. Whilst the working class {s not at all indifferent to national oppression it fights it from the vantage point of consistent democracy, that is to say, no privileges for any. nation. It fights it with the purpose of averthrowing "tts own' ruling class and helping Its class brothers and sisters to do likewlse. Jn short, revolutionarles must take their part in the national struggle, their banner held alofc, and on It must be inscribed the words of the Communist Manifesto:

Workers of all countries, unite!

45

uilding Solidarity

Sucmhonnas

An immense responsibility now lies with the British

labour movement to impose a really effective workers' boycott. Britain is South Africa's third largest trading partner. British firms inake up 40-45% of foreign invest-

ment in South Africa, However strong in its own right, the murderous Pretoria regime cannot survive without the continued export of minerals and foodstuffs, It relies on imports of key components and on the financial support of the big banks and multi-national corporations such as Barclays, Dunlops (3.T.R.}, Tube Investments and Rawntrees.

The undoubted groundswel! of support for solidarity and against British backing of apartheid adds al! the more urgency co the question of what sort of solidarity action the labour movement should be conducting. The traditional answer from the national Anti-Apartheid Movement has been to push for cutting business links, and to pressure for government sanctions combined with sports, consumer aad cultural boycotts. Its policies have been tailored to suit its 'Broad Church’ approach of attempting to appeal to all ' progressive’ sections of the community.

This strategy is wrong on a number of counts, Firsely in its reliance on the government to take action. The determination of the Thatcher Government to avoid even the mildest of measures as agreed at the Commonwealth Conference shows just how fruitless it is to concentrate on such calls for sanctions. Yet the 1985 TUC's resolution on apartheid concluded:

"Congress instructs the General Council to urge the

British Government to apply sanctions against South

Africa and calls all unions to consider ways in which

they can usefully oppose the South African regime”. The first instinct of the TUC is to ask the Government, and when it comes to action, the terms are typically evasive.

it is possible that the growing solidarity movement will force Thatcher to take further measures after the Commonwealth's investigatory team of ‘wise men' report. But what would the purpose of such sanctions be for Thatcher and her friends? They would be used to encourage cosmetic changes within apartheid rather than its overthrow. Any reforms would be designed to allow profit making to continue, Why else appoint a director of Standard Chartered bank (the biggest banking concern after Barclays with South African interests) to be the British twise man'? Anthony Barber can be relied on to uphold the interests of international capital.

The second dangerous aspect of the sanctions campaign has been its disinvestment strategy. Of course, at the present critical juncture, with Pretoria fighting for its life, all such measures which hit the South Afrlean economy serve to weaken the regime. This has been recugnised in the recent statements of the black and non-racial South African trade unions including the new _ federation COSATU, its predecessor FOSATU, and the black consciousness trade unions. The trade unions were previously

Of course,

‘Churches, the

critical of a strategy of disinvestment where this meant firms one by one closing down and dismantling their factories. This would mean a gradual weakening of the black working class. It is for this very reason that we oppose any long term strategy of disinvestment especially as It relies on the 'morality’ of the capitalists!

But direct action by trade unionists against firms with major interests in South Africa is of a different order, It demonstrates working class solidarity and a recognition of the need for concerted and massive action against the regime in 1986, However militants must be on their guard and ready to oppose each and every chauvinistic and reactionary urgument that is raised in favour of action against firms with South African investment and a boycott of imports. Sometimes it is argued that trade unions should support investment at home and import controls in order to bolster British industry, That is an argument against all overseas investment and all foreign goods, not just South African ones! [t suggests that British workers have a cominon interest with British bosses against fellow workers in foreign countries,

In fact the bosses know better. They happily move investment and orders from country to country in order to maximise profits, The way to flght them is by building international working class solidarity. Our argument for workers’ action against apartheid is motivated by the need for that solidarity, not by chauvinism. When the racist regime Ils overthrown, and workers in South Africa appeal for help in building their new society, we shall be for ail possible aid to them. We will be for exports from Britain of what they need and for imports of what they produce,

Thatcher's intransigence and the urgency of the situation in South Africa prompted Oliver Tambo (ANC President) ro issue a call, in October 1985, for ‘Peoples Sanctions’, In line with this, the plans for action in 1986 issued by the AAM lay increased stress on the need for direct action. But the term 'Peoples Sanctions’ is mlsleading. It is not true that all sections of the ‘people’ have an interest in helping the solidarity movement.

The ruling class have an interest in preserving capitalism in South Africa, The working class, on the other hand, has an enormous objective interest in seeing the downfall of apartheid and the capitalist system that produced it, Solidarity activity should be aimed at winning Workers' Sanctions. Of course this might frighten off some of the middie class supporters of the anti-apartheid struggle - the liberals. But effective action should never be sacrificed to win these unreliable 'friends'.

The most effective form of workers’ sanction is the trade union boycott. Jt can be argued for, imposed and defended collectively. And very significantly, it can be lifted when workers in South Africa request that and not before. [t cannot be turned on and off at the behest of the bosses and investors.

Other forms of activity being proposed in the trade union movement should be supported but not as a substi-

LN eee

tute for the workers’ boycott. Disinvestment {or ‘divesting') of trade union and council funds is a gesture of solidarity and the discussion can be used to educate the membership,

Other activities have mobillsed considerable energy but remain based on the actions of isolated individuals and can never deliver the necessary blows to the apartheid regime. This applies to consumer boycotts and campaigns for picketing stores. Campaigners for a workers’ boycott should stress that such activity depends on workers acting individualy and on the dedication of activists to keep up the pressure. It can never be as effective as a real workers buycott. That is why shopworkers should be approached to join the action themselves, following the lead given by Dunnes workers in Dublin.

But doesn't the workers’ boycott put some sections of workers jobs at risk? After all, the Dunnes strikers are still striking for their jobs. The answer must be to build a massive and well organised campaign in which as many sections of the movement as possible are directly involved and all sections are committed to taking action to defend any workers sacked because they {mposed the boycott. This is possible to achieve given a clear lead, education and preparation, The response to the attack on trade unionism at GCHO showed the depth of commitment amongst British workers to defending hard won rights. A serious and concerted campaign which explained the issues in South Africa should be mounted.

Such a campaign means confronting racism at home as well as 6,000 miles away. It means exposing and fighting to put an end to British trade unionism's dereliction of its duty in the fight against racism.

Joint committees should be organised at every level of

the movement to organise action, The action of Southamp-

ton dockers who stopped a shipment of machinery for the:

arms industry was successful because, not only were there links at national level through Maritime Unions Against Apartheid, but dockers' shop stewards were involved.

Already in a number of areas, solidarity committees have been set up to encourage and co-ordinate trade union action. In Birmingham and Coventry, committees exist with the backing of the Trades Council and the AAM. These must be spread and made real delegate bodies, Local demonstrations can be a focus for launching action, Youth and the black communities should be drawn into this campaign.

The labour movement must give practical not just verbal assistance to those in struggle against the Apartheid State in South Africa. Regular financial aid from the trade unions to those campaigns for the release of all political activists and trade unionists should be built. Mass protests

against the repression are aeeded as well as sympathy strike action, particularly in those companies with subsidiaries in South Africa.

WHAT'S IT GOT TO DO WITH US?

Frequently in trade union branches and workplaces when the need for solidarity is raised, the question comes well, what has it got to do with us? Everything: Workers dare not take a nationalistic view of this. If workers in Britain

‘ignore the struggles in South Africa, or South Korea, or

Brazil they put their own jobs at risk. British capitalists would rather invest in a low wage country like South Africa than Britain. In turn cheap imports from these countries flood back into Britain. To compete, workers in Britain are forced to work harder for less. This is how the cupitalists use low waged countries to depress wages incernationally.

It therefore makes sense for British workers to support the struggles of workers in low wage and oppressive countries like South Africa. Failure to do so serves to undermine our own jobs here. Hence workers’ internationalism is a vital necessity,

Secondly racism is used to turn white workers against black workers. Racism means workers end up fighting each other instead of the bosses. In Britain this racist division has led tao many strikes being lost. A failure by British workers to defend black workers in South Africa will only encourage the basses to intensify this division here.

Thirdly, a defeat for the apartheid state will mean a defeat as well for one of its largest backers, British imperialism. It will weaken the British boss class and make it easier for British workers to take them on.

Finally, British workers must not view South Africa as something completely unique. South Africa may be the only society where capitalist exploitation and racial oppression take the particularly intense form of apartheid; but it ts not the only society which practices systematic racism and divides the working class against itself. It is not the only society where workers’ picket lines are attacked, their union rights denied and their communities put under siege. ft is noc the only society where young people are harassed, made homeless and can onty look forward to a jobless future.

These features may be sharper in South Africa, but they exist here too, and are growing. As our rulers find their profits under threat, thelr attacks will increase. ‘Thatcher's dream is our nightmare and South African society confronts workers everywhere with what that nightmare means. Its overthrow will mark a new stage in the battle against capitalism worldwide.

47

Select Bibliography

S Biko I Write What I Like London 1978

C Bundy The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry London 1980

A Callinicos Southern Africa after Zimbabwe London 1981

Is a revolution possible in South Africa? in International Socialism 31 Spring 1986

A Callinicos and J Rogers Southern Africa after Soweto London 1977

B Davies, D O'Meara and S$ Dtamini The Struggle for South Africa. A reference guide to movements, organisations and institutions (two volumes) London 1984

D Denoon and B Nyenko South Africa since 1800 (second edition) Harlow 1984

D Innes Angio American and the Rise of Modern South Africa

London 1984

International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa Apartheid The Facts London 1983

M Lipton Capitalism and Apartheid Aldershot 1985

ED MacShane, M Plant and D Ward Power! Black workers, their unions and the struggle for freedom in South Africa Nottingham 1984

8 M Magubaue The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa New York/London [£979

N Mandela No Easy Walk to Freedom London 1965

S Marks and R Rathbone {eds} Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa

London 1982

J Nattrass The South African Economy: its growth and change Cape Town 1981

D Neube Black Trade Unions in South Africa

Johannesburg 1985

No Sizwe Qne Azania One Nation - the National Question in South Africa 1979

R Omond The Apartheid Handbook Harmonsworth 1985

E Roux Time Longer than Rope Madison 1972

R Sandbrook and R Cohen (eds) The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action London 1975

J Simonds and R Simonds Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 (Reprint by International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa) London 1983

fh Wall and K Luckhardt Organise or Starve: The History of the South African Congress of Trade Unions London 1980

Working for Freedom: Black trade union development in South Africa throughout the 1970s Geneva 1981

Db Ward Black Trade Unions in South Africa Nottingham 1982

Periodicals ANC - News Briefing Azania Worker Azania Bulletin Cape Action League News Financial Mail Financial Times Inqaba ya Basebenzi Journal of the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC

Sechaba Official Organ of the African National Congress

South African Labour Bulletin

The African Communist

The Weekly Mail

Work in Progress

South African Reserve Bank Quarterly Review

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