Anti-apartheid
struggles and class
Jack Barnes, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, published a long analytical article on South Africa in the Fall 1985 issue of the magazine New International.' In this article Barnes deals with present- day South African society, the political forces in the popular movement and revolutionary tasks. Concluding the article he polemicises with the positions of articles in International Viewpoint, a magazine published under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
In February 1986 the International Executive Committee of the Fourth
International adopted the general political line of a report on the present situation in South Africa and the related political problems.? Although
Barnes wrote his article some months previously he implicitly polemicised with the political line which informed the International Executive Com-
We will take up Barnes" article without going back systematically over the
Fourth International leadership's political position, which we support. This polemic with Barnes takes as its starting point the line of argument of the
International's document. published in the previous issue of International
Jack Barnes" article outlines a sort of theoretical analysis of apartheid.
Formulations like 'apartheid state', 'South African imperialism' sistence on describing the working masses as an 'estate' and not as a proletarian class or his conclusions on the present struggles which according to him can only be democratic ... all this put together forms a distinct theory of
PETER BLUMER struggles:
mittee's report.
Marxist Revien:
apartheid.
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
DEBATE or his in-
100 International Marxist Review
However it is very difficult to work out whether Barnes has constructed this analysis on the basis of an a priori doctrine or has come to these conclusions after long research on the history and nature of this society. To say the least it is disturbing to note that he does not refer to any other theory or analytical work produced in the last thirty five years. Such works have been at the centre of decisive debates on the apartheid system. He makes a new and original interpretation (startlingly so) but does not refer to positions developed by people like Legassik or Wolpe? or even to those of active political forces like the South African Communist Party (SACP), the African National Congress (ANC) or others.*
Should we believe Barnes has produced this analysis ex-nihilo without going into the several decades-long debate and research on the nature of the South African system? What is the apartheid system? All theoretical writings worthy of interest that have analysed apartheid up to now start with an analysis of the contradictions of capitalism in South Africa. The system which reigns in this country is not the reflection of some sort of anachronism and even less of a blockage (to use one of Barnes' expressions) maintained by a stupid and reactionary white minority attached to a racist ideology.
Barnes recognises in passing that the South African state is a bourgeois state. He could not really avoid doing so, since for him it is an imperialist state. But he does not draw any consequences from this for the method he uses to examine the mechanisms of apartheid, its function and contradictions. He studies the government's policies, the existing laws and the situation of social groups as if they were in a closed, static universe. Rid of any reference to the contradictions of capitalism in general and to South African capitalism in particular, apartheid as Barnes analyses it appears as a static, abnormal system from the point of view even of capitalism.
The debate with all those who considered South African racism to be contrary to the needs of capitalism finished long ago. Even if Barnes does not spell things out quite so crudely his analysis of the social formation nevertheless shows he is not very far from this interpretation. Consequently just as he is mistaken about the system of social classes in South African society he is also wrong about the present contradictions of the system of rule. And therefore he does not grasp the problems of the mass movement today, nor the stakes involved
Barnes is not the first to commit this sort of error for good or bad reasons. Harold Wolpe has already pointed out the serious errors committed by all those who take such a subjective view of the racist system:
It is because of its reference to the racial or ethnic content of current laws, political decisions and ideological declarations that this approach makes race and not the mode of
production the decisive factor .... In this analysis the relationship between a dominant white group and a dominated Black group is perceived as the basic structure of society. It is extremely important to emphasise that while in this perspective the South African state is recognised as the whites' instrument of oppression over the Blacks, it is on the other hand considered to be neutral in class relations (and this is precisely due to the fact that these class relations are not taken into account in this analysis). Moreover insisting on the fact that the
South African state is also the instrument of class power in a specific form of capitalist society in no way puts into question the idea that the state is an instrument of white domina-
True, Barnes does not say the state is 'neutral' but his conception of the
South African social formation comes down to the same method denounced
Apartheid has turned the African population into what, for lack of a better word, we call an
Starting from this analysis Barnes insists several times on the fact that the overthrow of apartheid must free society from a constraint that limits the development of 'modern' social classes. So the anachronistic character of the system is indeed highlighted —but anachronistic for who and for what?
Barnes answers this question unambiguously, saying this system is anachronistic for capitalist development itself. He goes even further, thinking workers are demanding a 'truly' modern capitalist system:
... they do not have the freedom that comes with the proletarian condition in most capitalist countries, even very repressive ones. The Black workers in South Africa today are demanding to be free to sell their labor power to the highest bidder, free to travel, free to live
Having disconnected his analysis from any reference to the needs and contradictions of capitalism in South Africa, Barnes ends up privileging one aspect of the system of rule over others. He has centered his study on the legal status of Black labour. Otherwise, as Wolpe demonstrates, if he were to approach the question from the point of view of capitalist needs he would have to put into question his idea of the racial character of state power. Thus proceeding in this way obviously leads to a reductionist analysis of present- day reality. Furthermore one is very unlikely to come to grips with the dif-
Nobody would deny that the status of a sector of African labour can appear similar to a sort of 'serfdom'. But if we did use this term it would be to describe South Africa's racist barbarism, not to give a scientific analysis
Apartheid is a mechanism—a particular one-for regulating labour. A specific feature of South African capitalism has been that the majority of this
Black labour has been subject to extreme extra-economic coercion. Under slavery or feudalism this sort of coercion is absolutely essential for the continued functioning of the system. This is not the case under capitalism or tion.
by Wolpe. According to Barnes:
capitalist society. Nonetheless, it expresses the reality of apartheid.
and work wherever they want.
ferent reasons explaining the present crisis.
of its social classes.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 101
(Jack Barnes, New International, Vol.2, No.2, Fall 1985, p. 10)
(ibid, p.31.)
rather it is not strictly obliged to use it. Marx did not rule out the maintenance of such processes in a capitalist regime. The state reflects the relationship of forces in the class struggle and it can-according to the needs of class confrontation-extend or limit capitalism's power to appropriate the economic surplus.® In South Africa today the specific conditions of this confrontation between a white bourgeoisie of colonial origin and the Black masses implies particular forms of labour exploitation. Extra-economic coercion permitted the imposition of white domination and its reproduction.
But at the same time it was possible due to the colonial character of this country, for national domination to become the ideological justification of
Therefore apartheid is, in the last analysis, a system of extra-economic regulation of nationally oppressed labour in order to produce and guarantee super-protits. The policy of apartheid has had the effect of sustaining, including during the most varied conjunctures, a tendency for real wage levels to fall, keeping them under the minimum necessary to survive, particularly
By focussing only on the legal content of this regulation Barnes loses the thread of an objective analysis of the social classes. The Black masses are no longer seen as proletarian masses in the precise sense of the term but as an
Further work needs to be done on a sort of periodisation of apartheid. For example Merle Lipton in his book Capitalism and apartheid refers to an
'erosion' of apartheid in its traditional form in the present period. In our opinion we would say that big capital is faced with the question of a new management of labour power much more than it has been in the past. A study of the long South African recession bears this out well and highlights the new needs of accumulation. Zac de Beer, the boss of the powerful mining company which bears his name, called for the government to 'deregulate' the South African economy, making a reference in this way to the
The reforms pursued in the past ten years are responses to the needs of capital and at the same time are attempts to divide the Black movement.
Alongside the paradox of this dual objective there is the difficulty of having to also satisfy and reassure the most reactionary layers. While it is true that the bourgeois liberals hold a decisive sector of industry, the ethniclinguistic division of the South African bourgeoisie between Afrikaners and
English speakers, leaves them hardly any hope of winning an electoral
For all these reasons the implementation of the reforms is still incoherent and too late from the point of view of the initial hopes of their protagonists.
102 International Marxist Revien the whole system.
through the Bantustan system.
'estate"
majority for the moment.
Contradictions and evolution of the racial system rigidity of apartheid (Weekly Mail, 4 July 1986).
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 103 The results rarely match up to the initial projects with the struggles of the mass movement also intervening to stymie the official manoeuvres and projects. This is why repression is reasserted as the central axis of government policy.
It is not possible in a study of apartheid to ignore, as Barnes does, the complex significance of instruments aimed at revising the system like the Wiehahn and Riekert Commissions, the Delange Commission for Constitutional Affairs on urbanisation strategy or the Klein Report on industrial development strategy-all of which were para-government initiatives. These commissions with their proposals have been just as important as the Fagan and Sauer Commissions were in the 1940s which were already an expression of the debate between liberals and Afrikaner nationalists on the management of labour power.
Abandoning 'territorial' apartheid-that is, centered on the Bantustan system—and a perspective of setting up regional institutions taking in white zones and Bantustans is now on the agenda in government discussions. Inside these racially 'mixed' regions the segregation of residence and social services would be maintained through a very hierarchical system of salaries, even within the same industrial sector. Control of migration flows, secured today through the Influx Control regulations, would be replaced by new mechanisms that would be ostensibly non-racial in form, like 'antisquatter' laws, so-called 'orderly' urbanisation laws etc. The present dropping of the internal passport for Blacks already fits into this trend. All this represents a substantial modification of the system. But this creates new contradictions, correspondingly extending the masses' field of intervention and activity. Are we so pessimistic to think the bourgeoisie and the state could smoothly bring about such a mutation of the system? Absolutely not, because the essential factor of the class struggle has to be introduced which fortunately upset the calculations of the ruling class. Nevertheless it should be understood that these socio-economic changes are presently underway inside the apartheid system and the outcome of the struggles will depend on the way in which the classes and political leaderships respond and act in relation to these big manoeuvres. Ignoring the problem can even lead to sidetracking the solidarity movement. The question of the Black proletariat Even if we followed Barnes in his method we would be tempted to point out to him that the 'estate' of Black workers has in any case changed. Today a 'slave' who has worked for many years in a chemical plant of two or three thousand workers acquiring certain skills has not got a lot in common with a 'slave' of the 1950s working in a factory of ten workers. The difference is significant just from the point of view of consciousness. But Barnes, having deliberately limited his analysis of the Black working masses is not interes-
104 International Marxist Review' ted in class consciousness. Nowhere in his article does he show any concern for this question! Barnes' conclusions are therefore inevitably simplified The first error consists in not seeing how the system has evolved. How the bosses and even the state have got around their own laws. How the status of a sector of Black workers has changed. How the content of apartheid has been modified: the erosion of the job colour bar except in the mines, new trade union rights, new residential rights etc...
Certainly this changes nothing of the violence and horror of the system. It is also true that these modifications have been brought in to meet the new needs of capital and to divide the Black masses in creating different categories and statuses. But the result is clear: apartheid has not substantially blocked the development of modern classes as Barnes would have us believe.
And that is where his second error comes in. He only focuses on the individual worker and at no time addresses the problem of the class as a whole, the class-in-itself. Furthermore if he had even addressed this question he would have to agree that the situation has evolved to a prodigous extent over the last twenty or twenty five years. In fact how could an 'estate' (that is, a lot less than a class-in-itself) have won the right of legally forming non-racial mass trade unions, struggled for better wages and working conditions (and, before the recession, often have some of its demands met)?
The existence of a modern working class in South Africa is proved by the ability of this class to struggle for its own demands. The formation of independent trade unions and of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in particular cannot be explained by the emergence of an enlightened left using the label of the trade unions to intervene. COSATU fundamentally expresses the development of the working class.
We can agree with Barnes in recognising the process is uneven and that a large number of workers do not enjoy these rights and have a more precarious situation. But the historical process is real enough and advances through apartheid serving capitalist development. 'Capital therefore presupposes wage labour,' said Marx. 'wage labour pre-supposes capital. They condition each other; each brings each other into existence... Increase of capital, therefore, is increase of the proletariat i.e.. of the working class'.® Denying aproletarian status to Black workers, agricultural workers. 'commuter' workers and even to miners leads directly to a false conclusion-apartheid is a brake on the development of social classes because it is a brake on capitalist development.
However the role of apartheid is not just to reproduce racial segregation and discrimination but also and fundamentally to ensure in this country, the reproduction of the capitalist system.
Important studies have been made to chart the internal evolution of the racist system. They show the latter developed in function of the needs of accumulation. New needs emerge as accumulation proceeds. Certainly the institutional system reacts a posteriori to these demands and the evolution of
law is de-synchronised from capitalist requirements. Furthermore this is the basis of the bourgeois liberal current's criticisms which express the interests of a part of the country's big finance and industrial capital. But the general
This is also why the system has now gone into a crisis that is different from past ones. It can be said that capitalism in South Africa now needs apartheid to end. But we must be even more precise: it is a need felt by the most advanced sectors and notably big manufacturing industry and the multinationals. It is also a question of breaking with apartheid, which does not mean finishing with all forms of segregation in practice. The debate inside the ruling class has therefore changed in character and Botha is steering between two sets of economic needs, those of the modern sector and those of the backward sectors of agriculture, services and certain industrial sectors protected by the racial system (low labour costs and high turnover).°
But other sectors need stable and skilled labour in order to lower their costs and thereby increase productivity. Still other sectors now need to expand internal demand since foreign markets are still too limited for South
African trade. South African industry has gone through a process similar to an industrialisation through import substitution (allowing for the limits of such comparisons). This system is now in crisis and the whole apartheid only the result of the international depression and even of political crisis. It is also connected with the structural crisis of the apartheid system.
All this is related to one's appreciation of the social formation and the development of class consciousness among the proletariat. Barnes should ask himself why the SASOL workers (in a state company), sacked en masse for taking strike action in November 1984 won reinstatement after their trade union struggle. The needs of capitalism and the working class's cap-
Basing himself on a totally subjective analysis of the social formation
Barnes ends up with a reductionist idea of revolutionary tasks. A subjectivist analysis of social classes generally turns things upside down. Thus the degree of crystallisation of the working class as a class is deduced from the level of consciousness. Barnes identifies a national consciousness among the Black masses but does not recognise their class consciousness. This is circular reasoning par excellence-they cannot have class consciousness formation is backward and the masses still not proletarianised that the South
African revolution must be a simple democratic revolution.
To illustrate his conclusion Barnes tosses out a typology of contemporary societies that, to say the least, is a risky one. In order to explain why there tendency still applies.
debate is linked to how 'to get over the crisis' acity to struggle are here combined.
A non-historical conception of apartheid since they are reduced to an 'estate'
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 105
' 1° The present recession is not
. So it is supposedly because the social
can be an anti-capitalist revolution in Nicaragua but not in South Africa, he
In these ways. Nicaragua under the Somoza regime was a bourgeois republic. although an extremely repressive and undemocratic one. and one exploited by imperialism. The South
African regime. however, is not a republic even in this sense. It bears more resemblance to some of the state structures of ancient Greece and Rome. where only a minority of the population had the right to own land. to vote. and to enjoy the other perogatives of citizenship... In other words. there was a modern class development and differentiation within
One understands why the term 'apartheid state" seems so important in
Barnes" vocabulary. For him it is an imperialist bourgeois state which resembles the structure of ancient Greece or Rome! This is certainly a category that Marx did not forsee. In order to facilitate the consumption of this indigestible theory he also takes the liberty in passing to embellish the truth
In South Africa the vast majority of the population has not yet been able to establish a nation
. The Sandinista revolution begins with a Nicaraguan nation state. Under the
Somoza tyranny all Nicaraguans were citizens of the country, with the formal rights to equal protection and treatment under the law. They had the formal right to vote. even
Is it possible to find a more formal and academic line of reasoning in an article that we are supposed to politely call Marxist? Here we have then a revolution in Nicaragua which is able to transform itself into an anticapitalist revolution thanks to the fact that there was a nation state and because the masses had formal rights (although they were not respected!)...
Moreover a 'nation state', in the grip of American influence, where in practice the state appararus was the property of a family clan and where a part of the population on the East Coast was left to their own devices and ignored.
Try and make head or tail of it if you can. In any case it seems Barnes does not worry too much about the details when drawing up his particular vision
Under the capitalist system can extremely oppressive forms of control and regulation definitively and qualitatively change traditional capitalist social relations? Can they be overturned to the point of creating a society where the opposition between capital and labour is no longer the major con-
They (the African people) were not free proletarians... But they gained none of the freedoms that under other conditions have historically accompanied proletarianisation:
freedom from being tied to the land, freedom to sell your labour power on the market on an equal basis with all other workers:.. freedom from all reactionary encumbrances.
restraints and prejudices of feudal society (...) Although there is a large Black working class in South Africa, only a relatively small percentage of these wage-earners comprise a hereditary African proletariat in the proper sense of the term. An African may work much of his life in the mines, yet constantly have to return to the rural 'homeland' where his
106 International Marxist Review states:
with respect to Nicaragua:
state..
of reality.
tradiction?
family lives.
the Nicaraguan nation. both in the city and countryside.
though Somoza's elections were rigged.
Barnes replies yes to these questions, saying:
(Barnes. op cit. p.26).
(ibid, p. 25)
(ibid, p. 15)
To come to this conclusion Barnes is obliged to commit two new crucial
• His argument implies that in 'modern' capitalist society it is self-evident that workers "freely' sell their labour power, that there are no extraeconomic measures that divide the working class and limit certain cat-
• He presents the population in the Bantustans as a majority peasant population, in the precise sense of the term. Consquently to return to the reserves means returning to the state of being a peasant. He thus wants to show that
Black workers do not only have unstable jobs but are definitely non-
... that is what we mean when we speak of Africans as constituting an estate under apartheid. It is an estate similar to—though not the same as—the peasant estate in Tsarist
Firstly we should remember all bourgeois states have made considerable use of various forms of regulation of labour that all alter the 'natural' law
The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions... The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not
The 'free' labourer is free to sell her/himself ... but workers are not free to leave the bosses. The worker can leave a specific boss if s/he can find another. Otherwise s/he dies of hunger. The economic constraint remains and therefore forms the basis of the whole legal system whose aims are to regulate the labour market, the wage differentials/hierarchy, the control of the reserve army of labour, the unequal statuses and situations inside the
Apartheid is founded on this reality and is embodied in racial discrimination, in other words, a dual labour market, territorial control of part of the reserve army of labour (Bantustans), regulation of job applications and an administrative structure between the job seeker and the employers (Labour
This system aims to atomise workers since it is precisely working class solidarity which can be the only counterweight to the economic constraint are means of alleviating this constraint, not of making it disappear. South
Africa trade unions demand the abolition of apartheid but also an end to unemployment and even the end of capitalist exploitation. It has not escaped the attention of South African trade unionists that formal bourgeois democracy would not fundamentally change the economic constraints of the system, the 'free worker' would still be compelled to find a boss in order to survive. The miners' leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, declared in June 1986: '...
experience has shown it is too late for free enterprise to save the country.
errors:
egories in their access to the labour market.
proletarian or at best only semi-proletarian.
These two errors leads Barnes to state:
Russia as late as the second decade of the twentieth century."
that Marx describes in Wage-Labour and Capital:
the required use, out of him.' (Emphasis in original.)
proletariat etc. '3
Bureau).
weighing over each 'free worker'
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 107
(ibid.. p.11)
. Freedom to organise and political rights
Workers want a socialist system because all they have experienced from free enterprise is poverty and low wages.' Will the press of the Socialist
Workers Party include this trade union leader in its denunciation of secta-
Barnes wants to escape this dialectic. Too concerned with building a
'Chinese wall' between the democratic revolution and the proletarian revolution he gives his own interpretation of what Black workers' demands
... freedom to sell their labour power on the market on an equal basis with all other workers: freedom to change jobs. to pack up and move from one part of the country to another. or even abroad, seeking work under the best conditions and for the highest pay available. freedom from all the reactionary encombrances, restraints, and prejudices of
But if the working class is not a true working class, if very slightly proletarianised workers cannot 'freely' sell their labour power, what is the use of trade unions? A trade union is a broad, unitary and united front organisation which aims first and foremost to struggle to raise the price at which workers sell their labour. What would be the function of the trade unions in the sort of South Africa described by Barnes? It would certainly not be a classic type of trade union and even less a mass, unitary trade union. Moreover Barnes, well informed this time about the debate between the South
African CP and some of the trade unions which set up COSATU, insists the trade unions should not in any way step outside their given role:
... their aim is not to become revolutionary vanguard parties, but to strengthen themselves as unions (Barnes' emphasis!), by defending the interests of the working class. by broaden-
In just a few lines Barnes liquidates a debate that has been going on for several years in South Africa on the question of the workers party, of the specific role of the proletariat and of the possibility that the trade union movement gives birth, in one way or the other, to a working class political organisation. It is a very complicated debate whose limits have been explained previously. ' But it is difficult to understand why, in a country where the workers, according to Barnes, do not constitute a modern working class, trade unions can only be what they are in traditional bourgeois and capitalist societies? In fact Barnes' analysis should on the contrary push him to consider the South African trade unions as more or less vanguardist mass political groupings to the extent that South African society is still full of the
Throughout his analysis Barnes leaves out a whole aspect of the problem.
Apartheid has in fact evolved over the last thirty years. Many legal parts of the system have changed. A substantial part of the reserve army of labour no longer lives in the Bantustans but in the big urban areas. Certain laws like the Job Colour Bar' have been gradually modified, indeed gutted of their substance. The Labour Bureaus have in practice changed in function. ' The
108 International Marxist Review rian ultra-lefts?
should be:
feudal society.
ing their capacity to think socially and act politically.
restraints and prejudices of feudal society.
(Barnes, op. cit., p.15)
(ibid., p.32)
bosses and even the state as employer have on many occasions sidestepped the segregation rules in order to have a greater amount of more skilled and
How can we explain this? In Intercontinental Press (a magazine formerly published by the Socialist Workers Party), Ernest Harsch explains:
... the change in the pass laws is not the first reform introduced by the Botha regime. There have been others since the late 1970s. All have come in response to the growing power and
This interpretation is blatantly simplistic. Obviously we can agree in saying the regime is trying to calm the mass movement with cosmetic reforms.
But this explanation is quite insufficient. The system has always had to also adapt to the demands of South African capitalism. A mountain of reports now explain how laws must change because they no longer correspond to needs of capital. This dimension of the problem is decisive. It is highlighted by the report from the Presidential Council, An Urbanisation Strategy for the Republic of South Africa, and has been extensively commented on by some South African researchers. " This is not to play down the Black movement by no longer giving it credit for certain victories won over apartheid, but rather to get to grips with the exact relations between capitalism and apartheid, between the Black working class and the bosses and between the
A big part of the problem with Barnes' article obviously relates to the fact that he gives a more than limited vision of the apartheid system. Consequ-
... the revolution in South Africa, by contrast (with Nicaragua), is a bourgeois democratic revolution (emphasis in original). What are the differences? The answer brings us back to
This is why it seemed to us so important to first of all emphasise our dif-
The tasks of the democratic revolution and its social character
What is on the agenda in South Africa is a bourgeois-democratic revolution, not the democratic stage of the socialist revolution. It is a bourgeois-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
What does this democratic revolution lead to? Barnes replies:
... they have to establish a democratic republic. They have to draw the big majority of the
And this revolution culminates: 'in the establishment of a non-racial democratic dictatorship of the South African proletariat and peasantry ' less unstable Black labour.
organisation of the oppressed Black majority. 1° state and the ruling class.
ently he writes:
ferences on apartheid itself.
Barnes spells it out in black and white:
revolutions.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 109 the character of the apartheid system and state structure.
toilers for the first time into commodity production and exchange.
(Barnes, op. cit., p.25)
(ibid., p. 23-24)
(ibid., p. 27)
Nobody denies that the freedom struggle in South Africa starts out on the terrain of democratic struggles. Our position is however that the struggle for a authentically non-racial South Africa involves a development of class struggles, a particular role for the proletariat, the formation of a mass workers party, the destruction of the South African state as a bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The whole merit of a genuine revolutionary leadership would be its ability to consciously act within the framework of a process of permanent revolution that historically combines the democratic and the proletarian revolutions. In this domain there is no easy solution and the specific combination depends on an infinite number of factors both internal and external, conjunctural and structural.
This is not a problem for Barnes since for him we are dealing with two different revolutions whose combination is not posed out of principle.
But as a communist activist he cannot completely block out the perspect-
How long will the transition period be between the opening of the democratic revolution and the beginning of the anti-capitalist revolution? Nine months? That was Russian time-from the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the Tsar to the Bolshevik-led
October revolution that brought to power the soviets of the workers", soldiers' and
Thus Barnes applies to South Africa his organisation's new theory on the democratic revolution and on the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. To do this he identifies his position with Lenin's. The
Fourth International's political majority has already produced long pol-
But Barnes himself gets tangled up in his own theory. What meaning does he give here to the term democratic dictatorship? Does he mean real state power, i.e. the social character of a new South African state, or a symbolic formula to characterise the workers and people's camp in a dual power situ-
Lenin, for his part, used this formulation when counterposing two 'gov-
This remarkable feature, unparalleled in history in such a form. has led to the interlocking of the two dictatorships: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie... and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry (the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies) (our empha-
But in the extract from Barnes we quoted above, it is not a question of a characterisation of dual power established by the working masses. It is absolutely clear that it is a new South African state just like the Russian state under Kerensky. For Barnes this democratic revolution establishes a republic, in other words, a state apparatus which will implement a democratic programme with nationalisations, land reform etc... There is no ambiguity about what he calls the new state power. And this is what he is comparing to the state arising from the February 1917 revolution in Russia!
110 International Marxist Review peasants deputies.
emics against this interpretation of history. ' ation?
sis). 19
Barnes himself seems to hesitate:
ive of the socialist revolution, even if it is a long way off:
(ibid., p. 28)
ernments' in order to define a dual power situation:
Will there be a provisional revolutionary government made up of a coalition of forces in which the representatives of the revolutionary workers will have won, or will be striving to
How can we ask such a question when he is proposing that this new state power takes measures that only a real and stable state apparatus can take, for example the implementation of the Freedom Charter? Furthermore, Barnes should be consistent. If there is indeed two distinct revolutions which can be separated from each other by some months or perhaps by a great number of years, then the new democratic regime we are discussing is very much a
'constituted' state and not one side of a 'dual power situation'. Consquently his reference to February 1917 is in total contradiction with Lenin.
Where we differ from Barnes is not that we believe in the possibility of establishing ipso facto socialist property relations in South Africa. On the contrary we think that only the dictatorship of the proletariat is capable of ridding this country of all vestiges of racial segregation. This distinction is
The fundamental task of any society that is reorganising on a socialist basis is the victory of the ruling class or rather the class in the process of becoming the ruling class.
They have not yet fully appreciated the fact that the proletariat is the ruling class.?
Now what does Lenin say about this state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a state where the dominant class learns gradually it is the class in power and where the economy remained to a large extent regulated by the
Now try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state, for the landowner-capitalist state, a revolutionary-democratic state i.e. a state which does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionarydemocratic state. state-monopoly capitalism inevitably (our emphasis) and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism! ... For socialism is merely the
Lenin understood the combined character of the two revolutions. He did not make the mistake of thinking the 'democratic revolution' of February
1917 could satisfy the initial economic demands. He protested:
It is the greatest delusion, the greatest self-deception, and a deception of the people, to attempt, by means of this state apparatus, to carry out such reforms as the abolition of the
And further on he polemicises against a certain I. Prelejaiev:
... The only trouble is that the author forgot that the question of the firm course to take, of courage and resolve, is not a personal matter but a question of which class is capable of manifesting courage and resolve. The only class capable of this is the proletariat. A courageous and resolute government steering a firm course is nothing but the dictatorship of the
So Lenin is talking about the dictatorship of a class, a single class, and not of
Barnes does not know how long the transition between the two revolutions win, the leadership? Will there be a kind of dual power?
fundamental but Barnes does not make it. 2°
For Lenin, refering to the tasks of the state of the soviets:
On the workers themselves he says:
laws of capitalism:
next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. 23 landed estates without compensation, or the grain monopoly, etc.
proletariat and the poor peasants. 2
Barnes' version of the democratic dictatorship.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 111
(Barnes, op. cit., p.29).
112 International Marxist Review will last. But this is what Lenin had to say about it:
... What better evidence is needed to show that after six months of revolution (which some call a great revolution, but which so far it would perhaps be fairer to call a rotten revolution), in a democratic republic. with an abundance of union, organs and institutions which proudly call themselves "revolutionary democratic', absolutely nothing of any importance has actually been done to avert catastrophe, to avert famine??
How easy it seems to paraphrase Lenin to describe the 'democratic revolution' as Barnes would have us accept it in South Africa-that is without a stage of proletarian revolution. It would certainly be a country where legal discrimination no longer existed. But it would be a country where the white neighbourhoods, the white schools, a rich white-controlled agriculture, anti-Black discrimination in jobs and an army led by whites... would still exist because the social inequality and income ditterences would divide society according to the colour of one's skin. Of course as a bonus there would nevertheless be the cooption of a layer of well-off Blacks associated with the day-to-day management of the system 26 The question of the peasantry In Barnes' mind this whole strategy flows from the idea he has of a socially backward South Africa. This society has to be freed from its straitjacket for modern classes to emerge and to finally provide a basis for modern class struggle. Meanwhile we have to struggle for a bourgeois democratic revolution. What will be the tasks of this revolution?
One of the goals of the South African revolution is the 'deproletarianisation' of a part of this class, in the sense of winning the right to become property-holding farmers (...) it will make possible the development of the South African nation. opening the door to progressive class differentiation allowing some to farm, some to become professionals, some to become retailers and others to be wage workers—all regardless of race.
(Barnes, op. cit., p.33)
First of all Barnes should study more closely the urban social formation in South Africa. In fact there is a very substantial layer of Black liberal professional people, Black shopkeepers and Black small capitalists. True they do not have the status and stability of the whites. That is obvious. But the golf course for Black millionaires is a concrete reality in Soweto. Black bank deposits in the African Bank, the residential neighbourhoods in the coloured or Indian townships and zones and the development of an 'African' capitalist sector—all this actually exists. The National African Federation Chamber of Commerce (NAFCOC) is a supplementary proof of this since part of its membership can no longer be in general classed as small shopkeepers, but are already capitalist bosses.
We must then weigh carefully what Barnes is explaining to us. He does not only forsee the social upheaval caused by this revolution creating a space for the development of a non-white petty-bourgeois layer. We would completely agree with him on this, particularly since the state would avoid any
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 113 leftist error of attacking, as a principle, any sort of private property. In this case it would be a complex socio-economic phenomenon that the revolutionary leadership would have to control and evaluate-with the fullest information-the risk of a Thermidor based on the rise of these new layers. But Barnes is saying something else. He says the task of the revolution is to develop these classes, which is quite different. He puts forward the development of the Black petty bourgeoisie as an historic task of this revolution!
The question of the peasantry is decisive here since Barnes is proposing the dictatorship of two classes, the proletariat and the peasantry. The report adopted at the International Executive Committee meeting explains how we define the rural population in South Africa. Strictly speaking there is no African peasantry. The poor rural masses whose main income only very rarely comes trom working the land does not constitute a peasantry in the traditional sense of the term. This in no way diminishes the land problem in South Africa, on the contrary. But it radically changes the type of struggles for land, particularly by this population. Barnes himself becomes aware of the phenomenon because he says revolution has to produce this peasantry!
Due to Barnes' definition of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry takes on a quite abstract even metaphysical form. It would be a joint dictatorship where one of the components would be created a posteriori during the revolution, in other words during the existence of the democratic republic which is supposed to incarnate the power of these two classes. Lenin, the author of Two Tactics of Social Democracy (however we place this work in the history of Lenin's thought), evidently had not envisaged this strange scenario because in Russia there was a huge peasantry.
The joint dictatorship recommended by Lenin in 1905 had an objective basis. Barnes' version is an illusion. He might have brought up at least the quantitative weight of the rural masses or the semi-proletarianised population. He could have said these constituted a decisive base for the revolutionary struggle ... All that would have been correct. Unfortunately he is talking in quite a different vein—a revolution whose content would be strictly bourgeois democratic because it is based on an alliance between two classes, one of whom is not proletarian. Barnes has no luck, this peasantry—we repeat, these social layers-are atrophied in South Africa. This does not mean there are no farmers who till crops or keep animals. This does not mean no Blacks work the land. Please spare us that type of discussion! What interests us when we want to know if there is a peasantry or not is envisaging the possible forms of radicalisation of the rural population and their demands.
We have to distinguish two very different things: the general struggle of the whole Black population for the reappropriation of national territory and the struggle in the rural areas for the extension of land to be worked as a means of production. Both struggles can exist in South Africa, but there is no longer a peasantry like the one that exists in Latin America or Asia. If one wants to take up this question from the point of view of agricultural produc-
114 International Marxist Review tion of any sort of significance and which also supplies the local market we can define a layer of landowners and farmers mainly in the Kwazulu and Transkei regions. But the determinant factor behind these sectors and consquently of their reproduction is very much the patronage and pay-off system of the ruling regimes in the Bantustans. These sectors are tied up with the regimes. These very small numbers of petty-bourgeois peasants do not have much in common with a revolutionary class. The resolution from the International Executive Committee already mentioned this point.
Then there is the role Barnes assigns to the peasantry. Here again he is a long way, a very long way, from Lenin. The latter in 1909 said the following:
Thus the 'formula' which the Bolsheviks have chosen for themselves reads: the proletarian leading ihe peasantry (draft resolution written in 1906) ... (from the resolution:) Only the proletariat can bring the democratic revolution to its consummation. the condition being that the proletariat, as the only throughly revolutionary class in modern society leads the mass of the peasantry ... The Bolshevik resolution contains no other formulas to express the idea of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. And further on against the Mensheviks he added:
Thus the difference between them is reduced by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks themselves to the alternative: 'leader' and guide' of the revolution, who 'leads' the peasantry. or 'driving force of ihe revolution, which 'supports' the various steps taken by the bourgeois democrats?27
How does Barnes come to get involved in beginning to choose the second formulation, that of the Mensheviks? He does so by replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat with a diluted formulation of the dictatorship of the "toilers' — in other words the working population in general!
Is this a byzantine debate? Probably it would be for someone who does not know what the leadership of a political organisation or a real mass movement is. But for someone who alternatively follows the debates and struggles in South Africa it is clear that the role of the trade unions or the way movements like the United Democratic Front (UDF) are organised and led is different according to whether one aims for a revolution led by the proletariat or by the masses in general. 2 The South African CP has violently attacked what they call the 'workerism' of some trade union leaderships, using rather similar arguments to those of Barnes. This type of discussion and confrontation has also existed inside movements like the UDF which are often led locally by the middle classes (something Barnes has still not noticed). The debate on the ANC In order to legitimise his theory Barnes illustrates it through the ANC's positions which he considers to be in line with his own. Further on we will look at the validity of this interpretation. For the moment the most surprising thing is that Barnes' article provides no concrete analysis of this current.
He limits himself in reality to a biased apology for the ANC, remaining silent about the most important problems. Having reduced the ANC question to its most simple expression he can then elevate this abstraction to the level of a model very different from concrete reality. The ANC is a complex movement with important contradictions. It is a broad movement. The debates (and the issues at stake) in its external leadership and the hetereogenity
In Barnes'opinion the ANC is the vanguard of the democratic revolution in South Africa and he bases this judgement on two factors: the ANC's programme and its mass influence. We agree with him when he says:
... the ANC has changed over the decades, as the class structure and relationship of forces the ANC has earned the right to address the people of the world in the name of the
• The ANC does not have genuine hegemony over the mass movement. Its leadership knows this perfectly well and this is why it treats with extreme prudence all attempts at discussions or negotiations proposed by various bourgeois circles. In other words the mass movement can be as a majority in favour of the ANC and identify with the figure of Nelson Mandela but it is not structured and educated in such a way as to deliberately follow the line being proposed by the ANC. A great number of broad, unitary meetings held in 1985 and 1986 have shown this to be the case. On the other hand, in the trade union movement, that is, in the industrial working class the ANC/
UDF current is not today in a position of strength in relation to the independent currents. The contest for hegemony inside COSATU is proceeding at
• Barnes' position leads inevitably to Stalinists' refrain in the solidarity movements: that the ANC is the legitimate representative of the South
African people. We have to firmly oppose this. The South African masses are struggling in the first place for democratic rights without any discrimation. Consequently it is to say the least incongruous for people from the outside to want to nominate a 'representative' for this people having the right to speak in its name. Very concretely this can lead part of the international solidarity movement to claim to be sending material support to COSATU via the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) apparatus-an apparatus in exile linked to the ANC. At best one could define such a practice as support for a specific political current inside COSATU, but certainly not as giving aid to the whole of the confederation. As it happens we could recognise the ANC's 'hegemony' without for all that deducing, as Barnes does, that one political leadership (which is a long way from the seizure of power) is the only force able to speak in the name of 25 million oppressed of its base cannot be ignored. 29 has shifted in South Africa.
freedom struggle in South Africa.
There are three errors here:
the present time.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 115
But where we part company with him is when he claims:
(Barnes, op. cit., p.36)
(ibid, p.36)
116 International Marxist Review South Africans. Invoking a 'non-sectarian' approach, Barnes ends up with a completely sectarian proposal for the solidarity movement. He is wrong to allocate all efforts just to the ANC current which is unfortunately the practice, for example, of the European communist parties. • The third error is related to the implicit idea behind this line of argument—a national liberation struggle led by a unified national movement, as was the case in Algeria, Angola or Mozambique. This is a false vision of reality because it does not come to grips with the South African social formation. It is wrong to think that in such a country the mass movement will organise in the same way as in countries with colonial social and economic structures or which are clearly in a backward state. A nationalist movement representing the 'unified nation in formation' is a delusion as far as South Africa is concerned—-a semi-industrialised country with sharp social differentiation and a rich and diversified political history. It is always premature to proclaim the hegemony of a political leadership (and not only of a movement) when the duration and difficulty of a revolutionary struggle generally leads to political differentiations and organisational pluralism. Furthermore Barnes is careful not to mention the ANC current's sectarianism during the five year-long trade union debate. He avoids bringing up the sectarianism of certain fringe sectors of the UDF to anybody outside the Front or not identifying with the Freedom Charter. Just because sectarianism afflicts all currents in this country is not a reason for absolving the ANC.
Barnes also falsely states: "The ANC doesn't claim to lead most of the major unions'. (ibid., p.59) The ANC at the very least wanted to take all the credit in this field during the whole period when the independent trade union movement was little known. There are a great number of quotations from SACTU explaining, for example, that it was the underground leadership of the trade union movement as it developed, whereas any observer of this sort of political hijacking knows that the main trade unions which formed COSATU were opposed to this sort of political hijacking of their efforts. 3°
If we want to discuss the ANC a whole series of myths and nonsense have to first be swept away. Around 1983-4 the ANC emerged from a very difficult period during which it was marginal to struggles inside the country. Its sectarian errors, conflicts inside the apparatus and political mistakes were also carried out in the name of the Freedom Charter. So it is useless lecturing us today on how its programme, this Charter, enables the ANC to develop at the present time, particularly since all the currents have a minimum programme of this type. The ANC has undoubtedly evolved. Part of its political activity has clearly become more refined. It has a series of cadres who are skilled political activists, that is, they know how to take advantage of openings, make tactical shifts and build an organisation. This should be seriously taken into account and studied. Then the fundamental questions have to be discussed —the programme, aims and concrete activity.
Material published by the ANC does not represent a homogenous point of
view. It is very difficult to work out if this diversity reflects a debate or mere nuances. In fact there is a whole approach which corresponds with Barnes'
The Black middle strata probably understand the meaning of this clause (of the Freedom
Charter) more than anybody else, because it is they, in particular, who have been deprived by the colonial regime of these rights under the 'free enterprise' system. This clause implies the opening of the ground for the wide development of these middle strata, based on the
At the present stage of the revolution, the liberation movement aims to uproot national oppression and release the economy fron control by transnational monopolies. It is not
Barnes would have had to point out two things to his readers if he genu-
• The traditional ANC position on South African society was that of four nationalities (African, white, Coloured and Indian) that co-existed and had to negotiate power-sharing. This was the theoretical basis for justifying the democratic limits the ANC programme set to the freedom struggle. Whatever one may think of it today this conceptual framework was underpinned in the 1940s and 1950s by a rather static, non-historical analysis of society, where, it is true, most people's consciousness was first of all that of belonging to an ethnic or skin-colour group. The ANC only understood what was happening very late-the gradual formation of a 'non-racial' consciousness among the broad vanguard. It is in the process of changing on this question, in particular because of external pressure but also internal pressure from the
• The Communist Party, whose position inside the ANC has got stronger, has in fact an analysis that the country is under the regime of 'colonialism of a special type ' in which two nations confront one another —the whites and the Blacks as a whole. This is the analysis of South African society used by the CP to justify the national democratic stage in other words, an anti-
Various other South African currents have criticised these positions for a long time. This theoretical debate underlies the differences on tasks which divide the South African political movement. Barnes does not say a word about this. 33 He is transfixed with admiration for the Freedom Charter written in 1955 as a democratic programme for the society of that time, but
It is as much an error of method as of providing the facts. Barnes would be surprised to discover the richness of the debate underway in South Africa today on the Freedom Charter and on the political tasks and how its protagonists precisely avoid becoming hypnotised by this sort of reverent contemplation. This is even the case of those who defend the line of the Charter.
The present debate in South Africa on the Charter particularly centres on the social content of this programme. Among other points the participants in position:
laws of development of commodity production.
or again:
directed against the owners of domestic capital. 31 inely wanted to get into the real debate:
CP.
colonial struggle. 32 does not outline the theoretical basis of this programme.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 117
(Sechaba, October 1985)
118 International Marxist Revien this public discussion are asking whether one should still use the definition given by Nelson Mandela:
...a programme for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis ... 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.
Thirty years later a leader from the Transvaal UDF executive, Raymond Suttner said: 'My view is that there is no reason why other democrats should not welcome liberals into the ranks of those who support the Freedom Charter.' (see Free Azania, August 1985)
The Charter is a democratic programme. But all South African political currents put forward programmes of this type, more or less brought up to date with the changes in society. The National Forum has raised the perspective of a socialist republic in a document which is meant for propaganda and debate. Nobody in this country thinks one should carry out agitation for the dictatorship of the proletariat ... That is not the problem. But another question is working out the strategic tasks one puts forward for the mass movement. This is where the differences arise in South Africa, and here between ourselves and Barnes. This was at the centre of the differences over the UDF, its leadership, its social composition, its initiatives and its functioning. These differences were not raised just by small propagandistic political currents, but also by the leaderships of the biggest workers trade unions. Who should have social hegemony in the liberation movement? What form of democracy is organised? What specific place does one give to the working class and its organisations etc.?3 Such were and still are the debates taking place in and between the leaderships of the popular movement. Barnes ignores them for the sake of his line of argument.
We do not claim the answers are easy or self-evident in function of some ideological pre-supposition. We think it is quite the reverse. But the South African political movement is a hot-bed of ideas and rich discussions. Barnes' doctrinaire method drowns all that in dogmatic and sterile contemplation. The question of the South African Communist Party Another problem Barnes ignores is the Communist Party. The SACP has undoubtedly strengthened its position inside the ANC, at least in the external apparatus and in the leadership. The ANC in turn no longer hides its close relations with the CP, as it did in the past. There is a large number of documents and declarations which confirm this judgement. For example Joe Slovo, a CP and ANC leader, writing in the ANC official organ states:
... the South African Communist Party is the party of the working class: the disciplined and advanced party that has no interests separate from those of the working people. 35 And also this is what SACTU says:
... the continuing role in the development of our struggle of the Communist Party, operating
More significantly however the ANC seems to be re-examining its old theories in the light of the CP's programmatic positions. This is likely to be the case particularly on the national question. We outlined above the traditional position of the ANC (four nationalities, the ANC representing the Africans) and that of the CP (colonialism of a special type and the existence of two nations). The two organisations were able to reach agreement on the democratic revolution on the basis of the convergence of these two positions. But over and above that there were differences of interpretation on the nature of South African society and the national question. Now that everybody takes up the slogan of a 'Unified and non-racial South Africa'
(which was far from being the ANC and CP's position even a few years ago) the ANC is perhaps considering aligning itself on the CP's theoretical analysis of the national question. In the Sechaba (October 1985) in fact one
Today both the ANC and the SACP recognise the existence of two nations in South Africa.
the oppressed and the oppressor nations... Congress policy, on the contrary, and that of the SACP equally, holds that the oppressed constitute an 'internally' colonised nation that will finally merge and integrate all the people of South Africa into one nation without oppression ... South Africa, incidentally, is such an abnormality, a special colony. Apartheid is not a norm of capitalism(our emphasis) it is backwardness, some kind of pre-capitalist
The CP's position on 'colonialism of a special type' starts from a correct observation: in this country there is 'a sort of juxtaposition of two
, one colonial and the other imperialist. But this still has to be interpreted in terms of social relations. Now precisely by putting the theory back on its feet we must grasp the fact that there are overall social relations in a single South African society. The CP's position eliminates any historical dialectic from the way 'white society' and 'Black society' articulate in a
What does Barnes think of the theory of colonialism of a special type?
How does he think this ANC/CP position relates on a day to day basis with leading a movement like the UDF? Is it not important to mention the problems and debates underlying all that, on the united front, the character of the leaderships, on the Indian political movements (for example the Natal
Indian Congress) etc? The CP's ultra-sectarianism, amply illustrated by its press, has certainly had a strong influence on ANC activities. Its self- proclamation as the workers' revolutionary party can only have had a negative effect in trade union debates, on the day to day relations between
Just how strong is CP influence in the ANC leadership? We cannot say with any great precision. But there is no doubt that a number of the spheres of intervention acquired by the ANC over the last ten years has come through the CP. It is useful to recall that the armed struggle and the setting up of the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, had been worked out underground since 1950. has been ignored. 36 finds the following:
political and economic relations.
'societies' modern industrialised society.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 119 trade unionists linked to the UDF or SACTU.
through an agreement of bilateral collaboration between the two organisations. 37 The ANC in that period had few cadres and above all very little political and organisational capabilities. The CP brought in its 'know-how' a new vision of society and the world, not to mention the logistical support of the Soviet Union. Significant relations between the two organisations have gone back a long way, from the 1940s and the work in the South
African Indian Congress and then the drawing up of the Freedom Charter.
But after 1961 the CP opted for a systematic investment of its forces in the ANC to such an extent that each important national meeting, like the
Morogoro Congress in 1969 and the June 1985 Congress always included an implicit point on the agenda concerning the role of CP cadres and of non-Africans (generally CP members) in the organisations. 38
On the other hand a certain vocabulary developed in the ANC press whose ideological origins are not difficult to gauge. Oliver Tambo explained for
In this regard we should also mention that in 1980 we experienced the massive involvement of the 'coloured' people in the mass struggle. Of particular importance is the fact that this struggle took place in the Western Cape, the main area of concentration of these
Black masses and historically, the main stronghold of Trotskyism in our country. 39
In a recent article on the question of the armed struggle a Sechaba contributor refers to Stalin several times to exemplify the class struggle against
Once the struggle has been adopted it begins to affect all the activities of the national liberation movement. During the Second World War the legendary J.V. Stalin, when addressing the Soviet people, used to start with the officers and men of the Red Army (...) Stalin was a great state and party leader but fully understood the demands of the time, that is, was presented for the first time on the same level as Oliver Tambo and
Nelson Mandela in an article that denounced criticism of the ANC together with anti-Sovietism, Trotskyists and some South African groups like the
Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). It is certainly the case that this sort of comment would have been unthinkable in the ANC's press even just a few years
So if we want to discuss the ANC today it is not possible to duck the
• On the organic relations between the CP and the ANC. In an important
1976 document The enemy hidden under the same colour the CP explained how some of its members had been coopted as delegates to the ANC's 1969
The non-Africans who attended were in fact appointed as delegates by the ANC's executive
(which at that stage included men like Makiwane, Resha and Matlou) to ensure the presence of at least a few comrades who had connections with the ANC's allied organisations-the
• On the programmatic basis of its political line. In a 1964 article Strive for world community unity the authors explained how the theory of 'colexample:
fascism:
ago.
question of the CP.
Morogoro Congress:
120 International Marxist Review
SACP, SAIC, CP and SACTU.41
onialism of a special type' was linked to the working out in South Africa of the Stalinist theory of that time called the 'non-capitalist road' (to
We considered, and still do, that the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Programme it adopted for the building of Communism, were outstanding contributions to the development of Marxist-Leninist theory. These conclusions are embodied in our own programme The Road to South African Freedom which
• On its self-proclamation as the revolutionary party and sectarianism to
The history of the working class movement is full of examples of 'theorists' who accept the leading role of the working class in the struggle against capitalism but reject all forms of revolutionary discipline (...) The attempt to separate the trade union from the political struggles led by the liberation movement are not innocent... What then is the content of this 'hidden agenda'? First, the assumption that the workers" interests against capital and for social emancipation have nothing to do with the concerns of the South African
How can one make a judgement on the ANC/CP bloc while ignoring all this, failing to point out the consequent problems and therefore refusing to raise what is behind the debates inside the trade union movement and the leaderships of the mass movement in South Africa? Perhaps one day these debates will break out even inside the ANC itself.
ANC and CP currents to the left of Jack Barnes ...
Defending the theory of revolution by stages is not easy even in South Africa.
South African reality does not easily lend itself to the erection of a 'Chinese wall' between the bourgeois democratic revolution and the proletarian revolution. Even those who, out of ideological conviction, are the most attached to their stagist prejudices are occasionally led to concede ground
The ANC and CP leaderships attentively observe the popular movement and they know the best declarations of principles about the democratic revolution do not have a great influence against the dynamic of a mass move-
The CP leadership for its part would find it difficult to present itself as the 'working class leadership' and deny at the same time that the proletariat has a specific role to play. The CP intervenes in the ANC and has key positions, but it does not control it in the same way a party controls a front organisation. The CP has to therefore justify its own specificity inside the
CP/ANC bloc. Remaining strictly at the national democratic stage involving without distinction all the social components of the Black population would therefore hand over to the ANC alone the historic responsibility of this struggle. So the CP, the 'vanguard party' must theoretically explain its relationship to the ANC by a combination of the democratic revolution and the struggle for socialism. This political 'compositing' comes out clearly development):
the independent trade union left.
Communist Party. 43 to 'Trotskyist theories' ment as extensive as the one in South Africa.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 121 was adopted at our Fifth National Conference in 1962. 42
We pioneered the concept that the main content of the present phase of the South African revolution is the liberation of the African People. For this reason we have always recognised the leading role in the liberation front is played by the national organisation of the African majority. the ANC. (...) It (the CP) considers that the achievement of its aims (the Freedom
Charter) will answer the pressing and immediate needs of the people and lay the indispensable basis for the advance of our country along non-capitalist lines to a communist and
And even in the ranks of the ANC, CP members defend this political line:
The ANC's position is that just as there are two kinds of equality. so there are two kinds of revolution. separate yet interwined. One is the national democratic revolution for equal rights: the other the socialist revolution for public ownership. workers" control and classless society. The national revolution for equal rights is the special province of the oppressed nationalities. the socialist revolution takes the form of a class struggle led by the working class of all national groups. The two revolutions co-exist, operating side by side. They interact. binding at many points and fructifying each other. This is not the place to debate
Joe Siovo also makes the point in the columns of Sechaba:
This reality reinforces the conclusion that we cannot restrict the struggle objectives to the bourgeois democratic concept of civil or democratic rights. There is an inseparable link in South Africa between national liberation and social emancipation. 46
One can obviously find other quotations or material to contradict those above. But their simple existence shows the contradictions of the CP and
ANC's traditional theories in the South African context. The interpretation of these paradoxes can be discussed. We can look for the reasons for these articles in the particular position of CP. At the same time one could place alongside them the multitude of articles denouncing the 'workerists' or the
"Trotskyists'. But at the very least we should note that Barnes' stagist positions are not enthusiastically accepted even in the ranks of the political current he defines as the vanguard and which he presents as the embodiment
Justifying its existence probably pushes the CP to juggle with the 'combination' to two revolutions ... But Barnes has decided that the two revolutions are not combined and so the question of the vanguard party is of little immediate importance for him. Once again this is a fundamental point
The national, democratic struggle unfolding in South Africa is also decisive for the forging of a communist leadership there. The ANC is not a communist organisation, and it does not strive to become one. It is a revolutionary democratic organisation, the political vanguard of the national, democratic revolution in South Africa. Out of the revolutionary struggle that is being led by the ANC, however, a growing South African communist
He is a bit short on argument... The Lenin who wrote Two Tactics saw
122 International Marxist Review in the CP's press:
socialist future. 44 of his theory.
The question of the vanguard party vanguard will be forged and tested.
the separation of functions or nature of the alliance.
separating him from Lenin. According to Barnes:
(Barnes, op cit, p.40)
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 123 the victory of the democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry closely related to the Bolshevik Party. For Barnes on the other hand the communist leadership emerges gradually ... but he does not say when and where from.
Can the democratic revolution, Barnes version, triumph without the leadership of the movement being a communist one? And if this were the case, must there also be inside the mass movement a strong revolutionary communist organisation? By completely ducking this question Barnes ends up with a stagist framework for building the vanguard party-today there is no need get ahead of things, the ANC will lead the democratic revolution ... after that there will always be time to build a revolutionary party for the second revolution! We completely disagree with this position. We think on the contrary that it is urgent that a political movement emerges in this country expressing the interests of the proletariat. This does not end the debate on the ways and means of building this movement. But at the very least we must point out the importance of this question, not only because we are for a revolution in which the proletariat is hegemonic, but also because we think the existence of a mass Marxist party can guarantee the interests of all popular layers and the toiling masses in general.
Barnes in fact makes a supplementary error in believing that his dictatorship of the toilers or the working masses can be guaranteed by a political leadership which is not a revolutionary communist leadership. All liberation struggles have shown that the seizure of power by forces whose programme, indeed social nature, is essentially petty bourgeois, have resulted in the marginalisation of popular demands. Many African countries which have a much more backward social formation than South Africa's have gone through upheavals or revolutions that their leaderships have called 'national democratic'. What happened afterwards, in the absence of really independent workers movements and a communist leadership? Was there a 'progressive' development of the classes favouring struggles for socialism? Or was there on the contrary the formation of a bureaucratic and arrogant petty-bourgeois regime which has limited even further the autonomy of the popular masses?47
This is why Lenin, when he supported the call for a democratic dictatorship of two classes nevertheless insisted on the irreplaceable role of the Boshevik Party. Barnes does not see this problem because he is a prisoner of his own attitude to the ANC... He thinks an apologetic approach is required in order to justify his support for the ANC's programmatic positions ... But by doing this he no longer says anything about the social and political character of the vanguard leadership which can and must guarantee that the democratic revolution does not bypass the popular classes.
It is really a tricky problem for him-he would have to contend that these social interests can be guaranteed under a democratic regime by a party representing at one and the same time these different social classes. But Barnes, like us, knows very well that the only class able to guarantee the
interests of the small peasantry, for example, is the working class and it alone. And this inevitably raises again the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the revolutionary communist party.
Furthermore he needs to explain to us why on page 40 of his article he thinks the ANC, which leads the democratic revolution, must not be a communist vanguard and then why on page 55 he thinks that for a communist vanguard to be forged a communist leadership must learn to lead the
... a communist leadership cannot be built in South Africa by trying to leap over the democratic revolution to get more quickly to the socialist revolution. It is only through the struggle to lead the democratic revolution, to carry out its minimum program to the
But who in South Africa wants to skip over the democratic programme in order to impose a socialist programme on the mass movement? Is Barnes thinking of Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO) or the National Forum?
Well, he is mistaken and despite the fact that we have many criticisms to make of these currents we do not think Barnes' attack is justified. 48
The National Forum criticises the UDF for giving a disproportionate place to Black petty bourgeois layers and liberal whites. It reproaches the leaderships of this organisation for not raising the qestions of a socialist republic for the eradication of racial discrimination. ... but it does not propose this goal be part of day to day agitation. Barnes ought to share this point of view because Lenin said something similar in 1903 when he talked of the programmatic basis for day to day work among the peasantry:
That is why the Social-Democratic workers say that the only way to put an end to the poverty of the people is to change the existing order from top to bottom, throughout the country, and to establish a socialist order, in other words, to take the estates from the big landowners, the factories from the factory owners, and money capital from the bankers, to abolish their private property and turn it over to the whole working people throughout
Barnes, after quoting Nelson Mandela on the Freedom Charter, is pleased that the letter 'took care to explain that "it is by no means a blueprint for a socialist society," (ibid, p.21). This was indeed Mandela's point of view at the time. But Barnes, should explain to us today more carefully how a revolutionary democratic regime in South Africa can nationalize the monopoly-owned riches of the earth, of the banks and of industry, 'transfertion of how this relates to the system of accumulation and the laws of capitalism? In order to get around the problem Barnes has recourse to a good old solution which consists in identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the socialist economy and the state takeover of all industry.
124 International Marxist Review democratic revolution:
end, that a communist party will be forged in South Africa...
the country.
Some supplementary errors
', without ipso facto posing the quesing them to the ownership of the people',
(ibid, p.55)
According to Barnes the democratic dictatorship will nationalize the monopolies, but its programme, Freedom Charter version, 'is not a socialist program. It doesn't advocate nationalising all industry, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, (ibid, p.54). What
We would like to reassure Barnes-even the dictatorship of the proletariat would not have the possibility of nationalising all the country's big mining trusts or certain financial companies. In fact, workers' or even state control would be particularly difficult in South Africa, at least in an initial period, given that a substantial sector of the white technical and administrative personnel would be in the non-progressive camp and the Black masses would still not be in a position to replace them. The transition in
South Africa, in a situation of revolutionary proletarian power would therefore be very complex and the economic ultra-leftism Barnes seems to identify with any dictatorship of the proletariat would undoubtedly be
But Barnes seems to also underestimate the real blows the nationalisation of the monopoly sector would inflict on the bourgeoisie. He, who thinks the degree of monopolisation there is very high and consequently the nationalisation of this sector would strike a mortal blow to the white ruling class. 50 Why does he want on the one hand to defend the Freedom
Charter's nationalisation programme and on the other hand argue that he is happy this programme does not deal a fatal blow to the bourgeoisie? Our point was something quite different, that is, the contradiction the ANC or any other movement would have in wanting to negotiate with liberal sectors and at the same time defending the need to nationalise the monopolies
Barnes gets mixed up in all these question. On the land question he says:
The ANC does not propose to take land from working white farmers. To the contrary.
The ANC guarantees not to take land from exploited farmers, white or Black.
Where has he found a substantial layer of 'working white farmers'? This affair is important to Barnes because through it he tries to painstakingly justify that the regime must not be a dictatorship of the proletariat yet at the same time arguing that this dictatorship would be equivalent to the neardisappearance of the whole bourgeoisie. For our part we would say on the contrary; 'the revolutionary regime will not be able to expropriate from the start all the white landowners. But all white farmers are exploiters'.
There is another problem in Barnes's analysis of the white bourgeoisie-he mentions the liberals as a political current. He says for example that there are many liberals in the UDF. Now this version of reality is false. On the one hand there are liberal currents that everybody in South Africa identifies as representatives of a dominant fraction of big industrial and financial capital, represented in parties like the Progressive Federal Party an amalgam catastrophic in South Africa conditions.
South Africa is an that the latter control.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 125
'imperialist' country, should moreover understand that
((ibid, p.56).
126 International Marxist Review (PFP). 5' On the other hand there are individuals who may be part of the PFP's electoral base but who we can characterize as democrats. The two phenomena are obviously not identical even if there are links and major channels between them. This distinction would have prevented Barnes engaging in a false polemic with our position. We have never criticised the ANC/UDF for establishing contacts with white democrats and for wanting to associate them with the struggle. Furthermore we have not even criticised the discussion between the ANC and the bosses' representatives from the biggest South Africa companies... What we have to analyse is how the social classes are actually lining up today in the South African crisis. It is impossible to correctly follow these events at the present time if one does not look closely at the positions and actions of the bosses from Anglo-American and other big companies.
It is not insignificant that the director of the very liberal and democratic South African Institute of Race Relations is chairperson of the operation dubbed 'Kwanatal' (which includes people like Chief Buthelezi), a sort of diversion aiming to demonstrate the reliability of a regional integration of "white" Natal and the Zulu Bantustan.
The advanced tendencies of liberalism can frequently be found among the mining bosses whom are precisely denounced by the workers for the low pay and high rate of exploitation they impose (cf. the debate between Cyril Ramaphosa of the National Union of Mineworkers and Harry Oppenheimer, a liberal, but still at the head of the Anglo-American business empire). Obviously a sufficiently advanced political leadership can and must, inside South Africa, use all possible tactics to weaken the present government. The debate does not turn around that point, but Barnes' attitude on this matter will not in any case solve such a complex question.
Why shouldn't we duck the problem in this way? Because it might throw doubt on the ANC and its negotiations? That is not our opinion. The question of discussions in Lusaka between the ANC and representatives of the big bourgeoisie is not a question of principle but a tactical problem. The outcome of these sort of contacts depends on the nature of the leaderships, their ambitions, their long term perspectives and means of action.
On the other hand we have no interest in hiding the problem of the liberals, just as it is useless to conceal the zig-zags of Desmond Tutu towards the latter or towards the Kwazulu chief, Buthelezi. 52 It is even less pertinent, when one is active in the United States and is confronted by a strong 'antiapartheid' capitalist lobby, to find the critical analysis of Kennedy's trip to South Africa sectarian when it was an operation linked to the manoeuvres of the PFP and the liberal big bosses. It seems Barnes does not appreciate that even in the UDF's ranks there were people who were against going to meetings with Kennedy. Perhaps that is awkward for him, but it is the truth. There be an interest too in clarifying once and for all in the United States
the position of the American multinationals operating in South Africa. They have formed the US Corporation Council on South Africa and some of them buy whole pages in the South African press to denounce apartheid and the
At the SWP Congress in August 1985 Barnes explained in relation to
We take this movement as it is. We take the action coalitions that exists as they are. We take the people and organisations who are moving into gear around this issue as they are. 53
Does this excuse playing around with the complex reality of South Africa in an article published in a theoretical review like New International? Don't
Marxists precisely have to inform and educate those in the solidarity movement who want to learn and discover? Isn't it decisive for intervening in the solidarity structures that political activists are the most informed about
The counterposition that is set up-correct and reasonable theory against leftist, sectarian theory—perhaps reassures certain readers. Closing a debate at the same time as opening one is perhaps the best way of feeling you are right. But building up an analysis from a very partial vision of the facts later results in difficulties. Unfortunately one should remember that too often one gains nothing in transforming reality into something one would like it to be. Facts themselves can be interpreted in different ways according to whether one clarifies them from one approach or the other. Furthermore this is in principle a basis for serious differences. But one still has to bring
Why does Barnes duck so many problems, so many parameters and so many facts? In any case it is very difficult to follow his method which appears to be a series of strong, thinly-argued assertions, giving the impression that the article is a dogmatic, doctrinaire production whose aim is to
'hand down the line' rather than to get to grips with the complexity of the
1. J.Barnes, 'The coming revolution in South Africa', New International, Vol.2.
2. 'Black Revolt in South Africa', International Marxist Review, Vol.2, No. 1
Martin Legassik, South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence',
Economy and Society, Vol 3, No.3 1974 and Legislation, ideology and economy in post 1948 South Africa', Journal of South African Studies, 1974.
Harold Wolpe: 'Capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa-from segregation to apartheid', Economy and Society, Vol 1 No.4, 1972: The theory of internal colonialism-the South African case, the societies of South Africa in the Nineteenth and Iwentieth Centuries. (Institute of Commonwealth government's policy.
concrete reality?
together all the facts.
problem.
No.2, 1985.
3.
the solidarity movement in the United States:
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 127
Notes
Studies) and 'Industrialisation and race in South Africa', Race and racialism,
One can refer in particular to South African Communists Speak, 1915-1980,
K. Marx, Capital, Part 111. Chapter X, pp 297-299, (New York: The Modern
Doug Hindson and Marian Lacey, Influx control and Labour allocation-Policy and Practice since the Riekert Commission'. South African Re-
128 International Marxist Review
(London: Tavistock, 1970)
London: Inkukuleko Publications.
5.
Library).
7.
view, No. 1, 1983.
ument).
8.
ional Party', South Africa Review No. 1
10. Financial Mail, 27 September 1985.
'colour caste' he supports a clearly liberal option.
Wolpe, Capitalism and cheap labour, op. cit.
do with the democratic jurisdiction of the labour market.
----- panel printed with this article -----
See also on this question South African Labour Bulletin and the article in Work in Progress (October 1985) 'A black future for free enterprise—urban foundation strategies for change' by Paul Hendler. Also Urbanisation and influx control, Doug Hindson from Work in Progress, February 1986 and by the same author: "Orderly urbanisation and influx control', (Roneo doc- K. Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, Chapter 6, p.32, (New York: Inter- national Publishers, 1975.) For Marx 'free labour' signifies free labour-as-a- commodity and not labour as a liberty. The 'free worker' is not presented as a worker 'free to choose his/her exploiter'. S/he is, says Marx, free to leave it when s/he wishes. S/he 'sells her/himself on her/his own and by the 'piece' (hour)'. The idea of a 'free worker' under the capitalist system has nothing to 9. Craig Charney, 'Restructuring White Politics: the transformation of the Nat- 11. The South African Neville Alexander uses the term caste in the sense of *, but he makes clear that it is only tenable if articulated with the fundamental class structure of a capitalist social formation which he considers pre-determinant. J. Barnes has perhaps been more inspired by Merle Lipton who writes '... its legalised nature had similarities with the medieval 'es- tates'-classes whose rights and privileges were entrenched in law' Lipton, Capitalism and Apartheid. (London: Wildwood House, 1985 p. 15). But Lipton has an approach to this question which is undoubtedly influenced by his desire to relativise the class nature of democratic struggles to the extent An 'estate' or a 'condition' forms a group united by a common situation on the legal or juridical level. But the 'Third Estate' of the French Revolution was itself a mixture of various social layers ... The Third Estate was the juridical expression of the bloc of classes opposed to Absolute Monarchy and the aris- tocracy. Throughout history and with respect to the societies examined the
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 129 relations between class and 'estate' are extremely varied. To make sense of it we need to study it in the framework of the particular economic organisation, that is the dominant relations of production (this is what we would do for example for the caste system in India). J. Barnes turns this reasoning upside down and uses the juridical status of the Black worker (why not the big Black commercial businessmen who do not have any more constitutional rights?) as a way of dodging the vital question of the links between apartheid and the capitalist mode of production. The social relations existing between individuals in social production play an essential role even if they are mediated or obscured—occasionally for a long time-by legal, religious or ethnic classifications. In 1789 the notion of the Third Estate could be relatively functional to the extent that the proletariat as such still did not yet exist, except in an embryonic way. But when capitalist relations extend and deepen the relationship between estate and class is no longer simple. Therefore one could-for the sake of demonstration—talk of "conditions' or 'estate' with reference to South Africa, not only to designate the situation of Blacks but also that of Coloureds, Indians and whites. But this usage of the term must not be used inadvisedly otherwise it becomes a simplistic and confusing notion for understanding class relations in this country. 12. Marx. Wage Labour and Capital, op cit. p.20 13. The "freedom' of workers to sell their labour power is an economic constraint.
The proletarian condition in fact means that the direct producer has been 'deprived' of access to the means of production and subsistence, an access which they had in general both under feudalism and in an economy of small-scale commodity production. This "freedom' is celebrated by bourgeois ideology as an individual freedom-which is what Barnes is implicitly doing here. Incidentally we might add that neither are democratic rights (right to associate ...)
a natural condition of capitalism. 14. International Marxist Review, op cit. Also see International Viewpoint, South
African Labour Bulletin op. cit. and Ingrid Obery, 'Long Road to Unity', Work in progress. No.37, June 1985. And finally Denis MacShane, Martin Plant,
David Ward. Power! (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1984). 15. Doug Hindson, 'The role of the Labour Bureaus in South Africa-a critique of the Riekert Commission Report'. Southern African Studies, Vol 3 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press). 16. Intercontinental Press, June 2 1986. 17. • Work in Progress, No.40. February 1986. 18. 'The Present stage of Building the Fourth International', Resolutions of the
Twelfth World Congress of the Fourth International, International Viewpoint,
1985. Ernest Mandel, 'In Defence of the Permanent Revolution', International Viewpoint, No.32, 13 June 1983.
130 International Marxist Review 19. V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (CW) Vol 24. (London/Moscow: Progress Publishers, Lawrence and Wishart 1974) p.60-61. 20. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p.250: 'The predominance of socialist over petty bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy—we are still far from that— but by political measures taken up by the dictatorship.
Also see L.Trotsky, Results and Prospects, (New York; Pathfinder Press,
1974). pp 100-104.
And V.I. Lenin, 'Speech at the First Congress of Economic Councils', May
1918 CW, Vol 27, p. 410. 'The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' ', December 1919, Vol 30, Chapter IV, pp 264-265. 21. V.I.Lenin, 'The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government', March 1918,
Chapter V, published as a pamphlet; Workers Control and the nationalisation of Industry. (Moscow, Progress Publishers). 22. V.I.Lenin, ' Report on the Activities of the Council of People's Commissars'
(Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants'
Deputies, January 1918). CW Vol 26. 23. V.I. Lenin, CW Vol 25, p. 357/8 (September 1917). 24. V.I.Lenin, CW Vol 25. First part of quote, p.369/370, second part. p.372. 25. V.I.Lenin, CW Vol 25, p.324. 26. We are not the only people to think that one of the perspectives of big capital would be to de facto maintain certain types of segregation inside a formally democratic South Africa. See for example: Linda Chisholm. 'Re-defining skills: South African education in the 1980s.' Carnegie Conference Paper.
SALDRU. University of Cape Town. 1984. 27. V.I.Lenin. CW Vol 15: p.362/363. 28. Establishing whether the proletariat is or is not leading the popular movement does not only affect the question of the rural areas, but also all the problems of the urban movement since forces that are essentially petty bourgeois are working within it like the Churches and their hierarchy, movements like the Natal
Indian Congress, an organisation of white liberal women called the Black Sash etc. Once again the answer is not easy and workerist solutions can be as wrong and as serious in their consquences as the symmetrical opportunist ones. But in the South African case this question has clearly been an issue for discussion in many struggles, beginning with the consumers and school boycotts. On the other hand we should remember that it was the myth of a classically peasant rural society which was behind the ANC's projects of armed struggle in the 1960s. What does Barnes think of this armed struggle, its social context and its negative balance sheet? Isn't there a real basis for discussion about the existence of an 'African peasantry"? Readers can refer to the following for
Tom Lodge, Black politics in South Africa since 1945, Johannesburg; Ravan
Press, 1983). Dan O'Meara, Volks Kapitalism, (Ravan Press, 1983). Colin
Bundy, The rise and fall of the South African peasantry, (London; Heinne-
29. The SWP published a book by Ernest Harsch in 1980 called South Africa, white rule, Black revolt (Pathfinder). This book, which Barnes now considers to be sectarian. contains an historical interpretation of the ANC. The SWP
30. True. the SWP press provided scant information relevant to this during that whole period. E. Harsch takes on board the criticism made by the ANC and the
CP according to which the non-UDF affiliated trade unions refuse to politically commit themselves in the anti-apartheid movement (Intercontinental
Press, 30 December 1985) and he gives credibility to the idea that the
SAAWU, a trade union very much in sympathy with SACTU, has a very broad audience in South Africa (The Militant, 20 September 1985). No observer has been able to confirm such an assertion and the negotiations for the foundation
32. On the ANC and the CP readers can consult in particular? Lodge, op cit. Eddie and Win Roux. Rebel Pity: (London: Penguin, 1970); T.R.H. Davenport
South Africa, a modern history (South Africa: Macmillan. 1977); E. Harsch
South Africa, white rule and Black revolt (New York: Pathfinder, 1980); And
33. See No Sizwe. One Acania, one Nation, the national question in South Africa
(London: Zed. 1979). For the debate on the Freedom Charter readers can refer to: South African Labour Bulletin Vol 11 No. 1 September 1985, Alec Erwin.
'The question of unity: Vol 11 No.2 December 1985. Duncan Innes.
•Workers and Freedom Charter': Vol 11 No.3 January 1986. Bob Fine, 'The
Freedom Charter': Vol 11 No.4 February 1986, David Lewis, 'Capital, Unions and Liberation': Vol 11 No.6 June 1986. Hugh McLean, 'Socialism and the Freedom Charter'. And also Duncan Innes, 'Workers Polities and the pop-
37. The policy of the armed struggle was initiated in 1961 (and not 1960) by the
ANC and (our emphasis) the SACP (a fact which is deliberately omitted by the group of 8). For tactical reasons both organisations decided that the armed wing—Umkhonto-should operate as an "independent body' ('The enemy hidfurther analyses on the rural society: mann, 1979). 31. Jack Simons. Sechaba. June 1985.
last but not least. the ANC and CP press. 34. Pourer, op cit. 35. Sechaba. September 1985. 36. Workers Unin: No.36 June 1983.
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 131 leadership has since withdrawn this book from sale.
of COSATU have clearly demonstrated it to be incorrect.
ular movement'. Work in Progress No.41. April 1986.
den under the same colour'. Statement by the SACP Central Committee on the activities of the 'gang of eight'. In African Communist, Second quarter. 1976).
The CP considers 'the revolutionary movement as represented by the African
National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the South African
Congress of Trade Unions continues to gain popularity'. (African Communist
38. 'We must achieve a broad collaboration between the ANC and the other community bodies. We must cement a formal working relationship between the
Party and the ANC and so on' (Plenary Session of the SACP Central Committee, 1970). The CP's graft' onto the ANC is a problem the bourgeoisie and imperialism obviously is trying to destabilise. The CP is concerned at this and wrote recently: 'This is accompanied by persistent efforts to break the alliance between the ANC and the SACP and between the ANC. Soviet Union and the world progressive movement. as well as determined efforts to rid the ANC of
40. Sechaba. March 1986 p14. 18. The article in question seems implicitly to take up a debate on the problems of the leadership of the armed struggle: 'The question whether senior commanders (at national level) should be at present deployed inside the country or not must not be taken to extremes. The principle is that they must be deployed where they will better discharge their duties...
This question must not be approached emotionally... Foolish is the commander who leaves his commanding post and joins his forces in the battle, and at the end of the day he finds himself having lost the troops control of his soldiers'
42. 'Workerism and economism', African Communist No.104. First quarter.
1986. The CP has made a lot of attacks on what it defines as workerisin. It especially laid into Joe Foster. then general secretary of FOSATU who had proposed the idea of the trade union movement in the long term giving birth to
African Communist. No.99 and also Revolutionary Trade Unionism and the tasks of the Party'. African Communist. No. 103. Also see 'United Front to end apartheid', African Communist, No.97 where the CP's line is elucidated on the basis of quotes from Georgi Dimitrov on the Popular Fronts in 1935. In an article entitied 'New "Marxist" tendencies and the battle of ideas in South
Africa'. in African Communist, No. 103, 1985 there is the following passage:
A discussion on the leading role of the working class would be incomplete if we did
'workers' control' over production as the main objective of working class organisation and maintain that the hope of achieving this objective raises working class
132 International Marxist Review
Second quarter 1986).
its anti-imperialist content' torial of African Communist No. 105. Second quarter 1986.
39. Sechaba. January 1986.
(p. 20).
41. South African Communists speak... op cit. p400-416.
not say a word or two about the 'workerists'
. This question comes up twice in this same edi-
. These are people who advocate
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles 133 consciousness. For the 'workerists" capitalist society is characterised by a basic contradiction between capital and labour based on the fact that the wealth produced by the class of non-owners of means of production is appropriated by the class of owners. This places these two classes in an antagonistic relationship in which the class interest of the one can only be realised at the expense of the other. 'Workerists" see this contradiction as the primary one in capitalist society and locate it most explicitly at the point of production... There are problems with this position... 44. 'The enemy hidden etc... 'op cii. page 314. 45. Jack Simons, Sechaba, June 1985. 46. Sechaba, February 1985. 47. The political victory in Zimbabwe of Mugabe's ZANU rather exemplifies this situation. In the same issue of New International as the one with J. Barnes' article, Ernest Harsch notes that in this country, despite reforms favouring the
Africans, 'many problems and obstacles remain ... The Mugabe government has thus far abided by the Lancaster House accords.' Very well then, but why has the democratic' revolution put forward by Mugabe resulted in this situation? Isn't it obvious that for the Zimbabwean masses (just as for Lenin) this
"revolution' is 'rotten'? And is it not a case of some sort of 'transition' towards a second revolution, but a political transformation within the bourgeois state.
What is the reason for all that? Just the Lancaster Accords? Or is it also the petty bourgeois ZANU leadership's line of national democratic revolution? 48. In its issue dated 22 November 1985, Weekly Mail asked the various currents what their immediate demands were. The replies from the UDF and AZAPO representatives were not very different. The AZAPO representative replied for example:
There can be no way in which any meaningful resolution of the political conflict can be achieved without the universal franchise. One person, one vote is the sine qua non for any meaningful political solution and must be understood to be a nonnegotiable issue. To us the granting of universal franchise can only take place within the meaningful context of repossession of the land—that can only be realised in the process of struggle for national self-determination.
In the article published in International Marxist Review Vol.2, No.1 we made a critical analysis of the AZAPO current. But Barnes has literally fabricated an image of South African 'leftism' which is false. The differences do not turn centre on what he claims i.e. on the question of the immediate. democratic programme. 49. V.I. Lenin, CW, Vol.6 pp 373-374. 50. Duncan Innes. Anglo-American and the rise of modern South Africa, (Johannesburg: Ravan). Incidentally, we have never said 'South Africa is dependent on economic aid' nor that 'the South African economy is ... a 'monocultural"
economy, facing the disaster that hits many semi-colonial countries'. We have said that this country is semi-industrialised and dependent. 'Dependence' refers to the general structural relations of South African capitalism to the dom-
134 International Marxist Revien inant imperialist market (gold prices set outside South Africa. purchase of technology, weight of foreign investment. type of primary product exports and place in the international division of labour). This question of the dependence of the mode of accumulation is one of the main themes in economic literature on the Third World. 51. According to one survey 72% of the bosses vote for liberal groups (48% for the PFP and 24% for the NRP). Marches Tropicaut et Mediterranneens. !!
July 1986. 52. In 1985 Tutu took part in an attempt at a 'national convention' with Buthelezi and the bourgeois liberal party. the PFP. 53. The Militant. September 13 1985.
Four conceptions of farmers' government
Since the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada in 1979 a discussion has been taking place within the Fourth International, and amongst its supporters around the world, concerning the theoretical implications and general applicability of the term '