“What has developed in South Africa is a very powerful tradition of popular or populist politics. The role of the great political movements such as the ANC and the Congress Alliance has been to mobilise the masses against the repressive minority regime… Where virtually all the population is voteless and oppressed by a racial minority then a great alliance of all classes is both necessary and a clear political strategy.”
“These movements cannot and have not in themselves been able to deal with the particular and fundamental problems of workers. Their task is to remove regimes that are regarded as illegitimate and unacceptable by the majority. It is, therefore, essential that workers must strive to build their own powerful and effective organisation even whilst they are part of the wider popular struggle. This organisation is necessary to protect and further worker interests and to ensure that the popular movement is not hijacked by elements who will in the end have no option but to turn against their worker supporters.” (Foster, 1982 FOSATU Congress)
The killing of 34 Marikana mine workers on the 16th August 2012 showed clearly the class contradictions which Joe Foster predicted in the FOSATU 1982 congress. He did not call explicitly for a workers party. However, without a worker’s party to fight for and protect the class interests of the workers, the bosses with the help of the ANC were able to put their oppressive boot on the neck of the working class.
In fact, the betrayal of the working class by the ANC and SACP leadership was long in the making even before the 1994 elections. It was rooted in the fact that the ANC was created as the political instrument not of the black working class but that of the black capitalist class. Whilst they shared with the black working class a common opposition to white minority rule, the ANC’s vision of a post-apartheid SA was irreconcilably opposed to those of the working class. Their grievance against colonialism and apartheid was that they obstructed their capitalist aspirations. The fulfilment of working class aspirations on the other hand, requires the overthrow of capitalism.
That the aspirations of the working class and the black capitalist class were incompatible was not clearly evident to most after the adoption of the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown on June 26, 1955. The Congress of the People was of a multi-class character. On the one hand the Charter called for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. On the other it called for freedom to privately own property ie the banks, mines etc ie to preserve capitalism. Since a socialist programme would require the expropriation of the capitalist class and the transfer of ownership of the commanding heights of the economy under workers control, the Charter’s nationalisation clauses could be interpreted to be a blue print for socialism. These contradictory clauses could sit side by side in the Charter for as long as they remained on paper. Implementation of the Charter would require the resolution of this contradiction in favour of one class or the other. By the time the ANC came to power, state intervention in the economy even on a capitalist basis had been abandoned globally under neo-liberalism – the dominant model of global capitalism since the seventies.
Recognising this contradiction even during the immediate post-World War 2 period when the capitalist class in the advanced capitalist countries especially, had accepted state intervention as an unavoidable necessity, Mandela addressed the question in 1956. He revealed the ANC’s class character even more clearly than it had been since its birth in 1912. Mandela explained that socialism entails, amongst others, collective ownership of the means of production, distribution, exchange and production for social need not profit. He made it abundantly clear that the ANC does not stand for the socialist transformation of SA. He declared with crystal clarity that the ANC had never stood for socialism. Nationalisation therefore was not a step towards socialism. Its purpose was “to open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class.” This was nationalisation but on a capitalist basis. (from his article “In our lifetime” published in Liberation June 1956 as quoted in South Africa’s Impending Socialist Revolution (Inqaba Ya Basebenzi – Perspective of the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC March 1982) [1]
The ANC modelled its economic policy on that of the Nationalist Party post-1948 of significant state intervention to incubate an Afrikaner capitalist class. The logic of Mandela’s outlook meant that it was only a matter of time post 1994 that what the Charter set out on paper would in practice conflict with the aspirations of the black working class on whose electoral support it depended, revealing which side of the class divide it stood.
It was as a member of this “Non-European bourgeois class,’ and Lonmin mining company non-executive board member and the country’s deputy president in 2012, today the ANC and the country’s president, that Cyril Ramaphosa, created the climate for the Marikana massacre. He denounced the strike as “a criminal act that must be dealt with concomitantly,” and called on government for police intervention.
SACP leads Cosatu’s ideological capture an entrapment in tripartite Alliance
Fosatu general secretary Joe Foster’s 1982 speech sent shockwaves through the ANC and SACP. Foster’s sin was to merely imply the SACP was not the political representative of the SA working class as it arrogantly claimed, and that the working class must create its own party. The SACP through the pages of the African Communist, denounced Foster. BBC journalist specialising in the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Martin Plaut pointed out: “Not to put too fine a point on it, the liberation movement, in the form of the ANC and South African Communist Party, panicked. They realised that they were being outflanked on the left, and that they would have to re-assert their assumed role as the natural leadership of South Africa’s oppressed. Exactly how this was done has never been revealed in detail and no academic has investigated exactly what took place.”
Martin Plaut was correct in his appraisal of the SACP/ANC’s fear of what Joe Foster’s speech represented. The African Communist statement was the SACP’s first step to reclaim its self-appointed role as the leadership of the oppressed and of the working class in particular. However, to understand “how this was done”, Plaut would have had to be armed with a Marxist understanding of the impact of the emergent trade unions before, and after Joe Foster’s speech as well as the impact of international events, especially the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there, through the 90s.
In the early eighties the full political significance of the impact of the emerging trade union movement that had followed the 1973 Durban strikes escaped the exiled SACP/ANC leadership understanding. The role of the organised working class in the struggle against white minority rule was viewed as no more than as adjunct in the generalised resistance to apartheid.
The MWT argued for recognition of the working class as the spearhead of the mass movement and the necessity for a programme linking the struggle for national liberation to that for the overthrow of capitalism, towards a socialist SA. ANC leader Oliver Tambo responded that “we must not exaggerate what workers as workers can do.” For the ANC leadership, the working class was but one of the four pillars in the liberation struggle alongside mass mobilisation, underground organisation, the armed struggle and international isolation of apartheid SA through diplomacy and sanctions.
The MWT of the ANC on the other hand, recognising that the struggle for socialism was international, appealed to the international labour movement through the Southern African Labour Education Project (SALEP)’s “Direct Links” campaign for solidarity with the emerging trade unions including with strikes like that at British Tyre and Rubber (BTR). With the assistance of the British section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), Militant, which led the Labour Party Young Socialists, SALEP, as well as our Campaign for a Socialist SA, won huge support in the British labour movement especially, as well as amongst students and youth.
At its worst, the SACP/ANC’s attitude towards the organised working class was hostile in that initial period. Instigated by the SACP, the ANC and Sactu leaderships pressured the right wing Labour Party leadership into conducting a witch-hunt against SALEP to have it banned from receiving support from Labour Party structures. SALEP was charged with the crime of campaigning for the overthrow of capitalism, for a socialist SA and for the promoting the idea of the leading role of the working class against apartheid and capitalism. Following a 3-month enquiry by the LP International Committee, a 21-page report was submitted to the LP NEC. It found SALEP’s arguments as a “horrifying, very fundamentalist Marxist bias and an extremely narrow via of Marxism”. It went on to adopt a resolution on 27/03/1985 directing that: “Regions, CLPs (Constituency Labour Parties) and affiliates have no contact with SALEP, do not use its materials or allow it facilities and publish an advise NOTE outlining the NEC’s principle criticisms of SALEP….”.
In the article under the front page headline “‘Direct links’ Stink,” in the April 1982 edition of its organ, Workers Unity, Sactu stated: “The Special branch stands at the at the gate of our prisons – at the border and the airport. All who enter or leave are controlled and followed. It is true not all who visit us are arrested but then we ask the question, why? It is because they are doing what the Special branch wants them to do….’Direct Links’ are nothing more nor less than a new form of colonialism in which the Far Left joins the Far Right in opposing the Congress movement in SA”. Yet the very same ANC endorsed the US’s Senator Edward Kennedy visit to SA in 1985 – one in a long line of representatives of British and US imperialism ANC leaders had “direct links” with in exile.
Undeterred, SALEP continued its campaign, succeeding, for example, in forging direct links between the SA National Union of Mineworkers NUM) and the British NUM. During the British mineworkers strike in 1984/85, SALEP arranged with the NUM in SA for a British mineworker, Roy Jones, to pay a visit to the SA NUM. Jones addressed mineworkers and shop stewards meetings and was taken into the shafts underground. The SA NUM in turn made its first ever donation in solidary with the British mineworkers during the 1984/85 strike. Sactu denounced the visit and claimed we had no evidence of the SA NUM’s support for it.
SACTU ignored the letter from the SA NUM that SALEP submitted to LP international department. This letter, addressed to the President of the North Staffordshire NUM (Roy’s area) signed by President, James Motlatsi and General Secretary Cyril Ramaphosa, the SA NUM thanked their British counterparts stating that “Roy’s presence has helped forge much greater links between your union’s area and our union. We hope that eventually links will be formed between the entire British NUM and a shining example of the British working class… We look forward to your victory in your struggle against pit closures … Kindly accept our humble donation to your strike fund. You are not alone!” The Rand Daily Mail (19/12/1984) reported the Chamber of Mines’s condemnation of Roy Jones’ exposure of SA mineworkers exploitative conditions stating that he had no credibility.
The masses arise…
The re-emergence of the workers movement changed the balance of forces decisively against the apartheid regime and raised the confidence of the working class movement. The enormous leap in confidence was accompanied by a rising level of class, ideological and political consciousness. The inspiration provided by the workers movement ignited the youth who entered the arena of struggle in the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
The struggle rapidly acquired a more directly political character. The yearning for unity led to the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 to directly challenge the apartheid regime on the political plane to thwart its attempts to reverse the growing unity of the oppressed through the sham reforms of the Tricameral Parliament. The UDF inflicted a resounding defeat on the apartheid regime’s 1984 Tricameral Elections for Coloured and Indian chambers calculated to break Coloured, Indian and African unity. This in turn ignited the near-insurrectionary movement of 1984-6. The regime’s attempt to crush this nationwide uprising through the imposition first of a partial state of emergency in 1985 and then a full one in 1986, failed. The regime deployed troops in black townships across the country, arrested thousands and instigated a “black-on-black” civil war using the Inkatha Freedom Party that was to claim thousands of lives into the nineties.
In the working class movement’s greatest step forward, the emerging trade unions united to launch Cosatu in 1985, under the guns of the partial state of emergency. These events confirmed what Marx had pointed out: that sometimes the revolution needs the whip of the counter-revolution to move forward.
These developments forced a complete change in strategy on the part of the ANC/SACP leadership towards the independent trade unions and Cosatu in particular. To assert control over a movement that had developed independently of the ANC and the SACP, the leadership began engaging Cosatu’s leaders to pressurise them to abandon its independence and subordinate it to the ANC politically. This culminated in the Cosatu leadership beings summonsed to the ANC’s exiled headquarters in Zambia in 1985. The South African Labour Bulletin reports that “a high powered delegation, consisting of (newly elected secretary general) Jay Naidoo, his deputy, Sydney Mufamadi, and NUM secretary general, Cyril Ramaphosa, went to Lusaka to meet the ANC on 5 and 6 March. The ANC was represented by Oliver Tambo, its president; John Nkadineng, Sactu secretary general; Thabo Mbeki, head of Information and publicity; Chris Hani of Umkhonto we Sizwe; and Mac Maharaj, a senior member of the political department.” (Weekly Mail, 07- 13/03/86).
In the statement that followed, Cosatu officially announced its support for the ANC as the only party that can lead the working class supported by the SACP. Prior to the Lusaka meeting the pressure exerted on the independent trade unions had already led to the leadership pledging its allegiance to the ANC by the incorporation of the word “congress” into the name of the new federation – politically orienting it towards and subordinating it to the ANC. This was the Cosatu leadership’s first public repudiation of its class independence. They publicly reneged on the spirit of its founding statement that “it is important that the politics of the working class eventually becomes the politics of all the oppressed people of this country”. From that point onwards, the programme of the capitalist class took precedence over and elbowed aside that of the working class.
The working class vanguard draws socialist conclusions
The bourgeois press in Britain and SA reflected the alarm of the capitalist class internationally and in SA, over the yearning for a socialist SA which expressed itself throughout all formations in the 80s. The Financial Times reported: “In the eyes of the young, apartheid is equated with capitalism” (26/03/1985). Harry Oppenheirmer complained in the British Sunday Times: “left wing radicals, often Marxists .. believe that racial discrimination and free enterprise are parts of the same system and should be eliminated together,”
The SACP leadership apparently shared these fears of the class enemy. They precede to trample these ideas underfoot in the name of Marxism-Leninism. From the experience of the struggle against apartheid, the understanding developed that the struggle for national liberation from white minority rule was bound up with that of the struggle against capitalism. This became the dominant outlook of the leading layers of the mass movement.
The aim of a socialist SA was the common thread running through statements across the board:
- Metal and Allied Workers Union (Numsa’s predecessor) secretary general and Fosatu Transvaal regional secretary, Moses Mayekiso’s, address to its 1983 Annual General Meeting (Fosatu Worker News October 1983)
- The centre pages of the 250 00-strong Council of Unions of SA (Cusa) (official journal, Izwilethu, June/July 1984)
- The 70 000-string SA Allied Workers Union president Thozamile Gqweta’s address to its annual conference, (SAAWU newspaper The Worker, October 1984)
- Thamil Mali, chairman of the committee that led the 1 million strong 2-day Transvaal general strike’s interview in November 1984 (Sunday Express – 11/11/1984)
- Statements by workers leaders at the Joint May Day rally 1985 of 31 trade unions as reported in the Star – 02/05/1985)
From SALEP’s socialist education work – why does the Labour Party NEC want to ban it? 28/05/1985.
A similar position was put forward in the 1984 manifesto of the National Forum, representing 400 organisations primarily from the Black Consciousness Movement which considered themselves to the left of the ANC such as Azapo (Azanian People’s Organisation), Azasm (Azanian Student Movement), and Soya (South African Youth Organisation), Action Youth, the Cape Action League.
Recognising that it was not possible to completely erase socialism from the consciousness of the working class and yet committed to the preservation of capitalism that the two-stage theory dictated, the SACP abused the illusions in it that it was “communist.” It denounced calls for the revolution to proceed without interruption to the socialism as ultra left and Trotskyite. Socialism was still on the agenda they assured workers … but not now. The shortest route to socialism was through the “national democratic revolution.” The immediate priority was to use the “democratic breakthrough” to avert a racial civil war.
Yet in reality the more sober minded amongst the apartheid SA Defence Force (SADF) generals had recognised the decisive change in the racial and class balance of forces. They above all recognised the insurrectionary mood amongst the black working class masses. They prevailed over the “bittereinders” (who wanted to fight to resist to the bitter end), recoiled from and abandoned the idea of holding onto power by force.
The SADF generals, moreover, had been assured by the incoming ANC leadership that there would be no Nuremberg trials for the “crimes against humanity” the ANC had persuaded the United Nations to designate apartheid as. The SADF would essentially be preserved with the combatants of the ANC’s and Pan Africanist Congress’ armed wings, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the Azanian People Liberation Army respectively, merely incorporated into the renamed SA National Defence Force. As further reassurance, it was to be announced that MK’s armed struggle had been “suspended”- a euphemism for abandoned – without the consent or even prior knowledge of Chief of Staff, Chris Hani.
In addition, in the last whites-only referendum, in March 1992, in a massive turnout of 96% in some areas, an overwhelming majority of 68.3% had” voted “Yes” for a continuation of the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) negotiations that had begun in 1991. The white population had clearly demonstrated that they had no appetite for a racial civil war and in effect surrendered to political realities; they reconciled themselves to the end of white minority rule and the inevitability of black majority rule. The SACP was mimicking the methods of the Communist International, which, after falling under the control of Stalinism, had imposed on its affiliate the policy of class collaboration with capitalist parties in the 1920s and 30s by exaggerating the forces of capitalism and imperialism. It imposed popular fronts with “good capitalists” leading to catastrophic defeats of the working class in eg China and Spain.
Under the influence of the SACP leadership, the Alliance completely misrepresented the balance of racial and class forces in society and the mood of the whites, to justify a capitulation on the democratic and social demands of the black working class majority. Their real agenda was the preservation of capitalism to afford a “patriotic bourgeoisie” the opportunity to ascend to the summits of the economy as part of the post-apartheid capitalist ruling class. The 1994 GNU was in reality a popular front of a “special type”, the political medication the SACP ideological doctors prescribed to end apartheid in line with their diagnosis of SA as “colonialism of a special type”.
The SACP thus marched Cosatu into the political and ideological prison of the Tripartite Alliance. Whist the alliance was in words, one of equals, it was emphasised that it was to be ANC-led. The Stalinist position of the SACP in practice meant that it was to be the black capitalist class that should benefit first from the centuries old struggles of the working class for socialism. The realisation of the interests of the working class would have to wait.
[1] Mandela’s said “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 economic 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-bourgeoisie.”
In the same speech Mandela even goes further to say “It is true that in demanding the nationalisation of the banks, the gold mines and the land the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude. But such a step is absolutely imperative and necessary because the realisation of the Charter is inconceivable, in fact impossible, unless and until these monopolies are first smashed up and the national wealth of the country turned over to the people. The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous Non-European bourgeois class.”