BCM, the Struggle for Democracy and the Workers’ Movement

Originally published in Inqaba Ya Basebenzi No.7 (August 1982) under the pen name Basil Hendrikse.

by Weizmann Hamilton

Large numbers of today’s struggling youth have had their political baptism of fire under the banner of the black consciousness movement. For over a decade BCM was the vehicle through which successive classes of youth, in ever growing numbers, from the bush colleges down to the primary schools, expressed their unanimous opposition and burning hatred towards oppression and exploitation.

With black consciousness as their inspiration, the youth threw themselves into the battle against the armed might of the state in 1976 and after. Their unmatched courage and almost reckless revolutionary determination shook the capitalists to their bones.

Yet over the last year, with increasing momentum – and often in the same organisations that spearheaded black consciousness – a different rallying cry has emerged: that of the struggle for non-racial democracy.

What is the concrete meaning of this programmatic change? Programme – a common understanding of the tasks and methods of the struggle – is the key to political organisation. A revolutionary programme for solving the daily problems of the oppressed workers and youth is essential if we are to succeed in rallying to rid society of the vicious regime of apartheid and the bosses’ system which it defends. In what ways does the debate which has taken place in the movement serve to clarify our tasks?

The form that the youth movement took when it re-emerged ten years ago – the form of BCM – was a result of the political experience the black masses had gone through in the 1950s and 1960s, and in particular the conclusions that the youth had drawn about the policies of the leadership of these struggles. BCM represented, in many ways, an effort not to repeat the mistakes of the earlier period.

The ANC

In the early 1960s the independent trade unions organised in Sactu were brutally suppressed, the ANC and PAC were banned, and the leaders of the mass movement were arrested, put on trial and imprisoned (or went into exile).

All this brought to a close a period of political turmoil similar in many respects to the one we have now entered – a period in which every sector of society was affected by the atmosphere created by strikes, demonstrations, rent protests and azikhwelwa.

The post-war years, in fact, had witnessed one of the most serious and lengthy periods of class confrontation in SA history.

The capitalists could not survive except through maintaining the black workers as a cheap labour force. Thus the struggle of the workers to defend and improve their living standards rapidly transformed itself into a political struggle.

The black workers realised that the redress of their social grievances – the pass and influx control laws, the denial of trade union rights and the vote – could be obtained only through a political transformation: the bringing to power of a government of their own. They gave their support to the organisation which had begun to emerge, from the time of the Defiance Campaign, at the head of the struggle as the focal point for mass unity – the ANC.

Yet, because of the lack of clarity of programme and perspectives of the ANC leadership, the mass movement contained within it the seeds of its own disunity.

The leadership based itself on the view that the responsibility for the sufferings of the masses, for the denial of the franchise, for the whole machinery of racist oppression and the exploitation of the workers, was to be laid simply at the door of the racist policies of the Nationalist Party government.

In his presidential address at the annual ANC conference in 1953 Chief Luthuli said: “We are now in a position in Union politics when we have two main opposing forces: Afrikaner nationalism and African nationalism.” (Luthuli’s emphasis). The ANC, argued Luthuli, was the vehicle of African nationalism, and around it could become grouped all forces opposing the Nationalist government.

The practical nature of some of these “forces” was spelled-out, for example, at the annual ANC conference in 1958. The NEC lamented the fact that the liberation movement had failed to bring about the co-operation of all the “anti-Nationalist” forces – among whom it listed the United Party, the Liberal Party, and the editor of the Rand Daily Mail (L. Gandar).

Similarly, the NEC report to the 1959 ANC conference (its last before being banned) welcomed the “formation of the Progressive Party” because of its “rejection of racial discrimination and the colour bar.”

But what practical unity in action could be expected between the working masses in the ANC and these “forces” – all of them, including the Liberal Party, defending the capitalist system, and unable therefore consistently to oppose its basis in cheap labour and national oppression?

The Progressive Party – as the Financial Mail has recently confirmed – was financed at that time to the tune of R250,000 annually by none other than Harry Oppenheimer, in whose mines millions of black migrant workers have sweated blood. When these workers have protested against their exploitation, they have been shot down by the police sent in by that same government whose policies Oppenheimer allegedly opposed.

Without cheap labour, South African capitalists, however ‘progressive’, would find it impossible to withstand the cutthroat competition of their rivals in the world market.

Therefore the ruling class has little room to manoeuvre: it can bring about neither a substantial lasting improvement to the living standards of the working class, nor make any meaningful political concessions – the black working class would immediately use democratic rights to struggle for a change in their conditions.

Walter Sisulu, also in 1953, put Luthuli’s argument in a different way:

The immediate task of the people of SA is to win the right to determine what sort of society they are going to live in. When democratic rights have been won, we can discuss what type of social system we are going to have. Meanwhile democrats of all shades must unite to win political equality.

But the working people cannot achieve the ability to “determine what sort of society they are going to live in” without dismantling the machinery of repression protecting the capitalist system. So long as the capitalists and their political representatives are defended by their army and police, they will “discuss” types of social system only by force.

The interests of the working class and those of the capitalists are irreconcilable. Against the consistent democracy of the working class, the capitalist class can afford to be ‘democratic’ only so long as its system is not challenged. Thus between those democrats on the side of the working class and the ‘shades’ of pro-capitalist democrats there can be no unity.

Only the working class, struggling for democracy, national liberation, and material welfare by struggling to establish workers’ rule, can act as a magnet for the unity of all the oppressed.

The Liberals

The so-called ‘liberals’, representatives of big business, could therefore play no other role in the liberation movement except to sow disunity, by persuading the organisations of the oppressed to moderate their stance, to try to attain their objectives step-by-step.

The ‘liberals’ fully exploited the lack of a clear revolutionary programme on the part of the ANC leadership, and involved them in secret meetings. Jordan Ngubane, a right-winger who broke with the ANC in 1955 and would have no reason to exaggerate the conservatism of its leaders, revealed that at one particular meeting (organised by the Institute of Race Relations, to which he had been invited together with Chief Albert Luthuli and two former ANC Presidents): “the majority on the white side wanted us to pursue a course so moderate our people would promptly lynch us.”[1]

The Role of the SACP

The leadership of the SA Communist Party, banned in 1950 but then regrouping underground, gave uncritical support to the programme of the ANC leadership.

Thus in 1956 – barely a week before being arrested by the SA government with numerous other leaders on charges of treason – Moses Kotane, general secretary of the SACP, wrote that this was not the time for restricting the ranks of unity to those supporting the Freedom Charter. The opportunity existed “to bring the overwhelming majority of anti-Nationalist South Africans together with a common programme of struggle against the Government.”[2]

Only in 1962 did the banned SACP publish a complete programme, The Road to SA Freedom. This both confirmed and sought to provide an explanation for the positions taken by the SACP in the 1950s – and still stands as the SACP programme today:

The immediate and imperative interests of all sections of the South African people demand the carrying out of … a national democratic revolution which will overthrow the colonialist state of White supremacy and establish an independent state of National Democracy in South Africa. The main content of this revolution is the national liberation of the African people…

It is in this situation that the Communist Party advances its immediate proposals before the workers and democratic people of South Africa. They are not proposals for a socialist state. They are proposals for the building of a national democratic state.

This is the policy of ‘two-stage’ revolution. Every worker and activist would be quite happy to divide the struggle into two, 20, or even 20,000 stages if needed, if only at the end of it all the chains of oppression and exploitation could be snapped… if it could be done that way!

In fact however, it is quite utopian to believe that “national freedom” can be won, that race discrimination and privilege can be completely abolished, while the power of the capitalist class is un-broken. Marxism explains the need for the overthrow of capitalism by the working class, not because it seems a ‘good idea’, but precisely because it is the only way in which national liberation itself will be realised and all the concrete demands of the struggle achieved.

In putting forward its erroneous position on the character and tasks of the revolution, the SACP disarmed many workers who had turned towards it for a lead.

Militant workers, distrustful of the open pro-capitalist reformism of the nationalist section of the ANC leadership, and sensing behind this the influence of the ANC’s capitalist “allies”, sought from the CP a clear class answer to the questions thrown up by the struggle. Many of these workers, bitterly disappointed by a “Marxism” that was itself indistinguishable from white “liberalism”, turned to the radical-sounding alternative of Africanism.

The PAC

The failure of the ANC and CP leadership to provide a clear way forward created conditions for a split and the emergence of the Pan Africanist Congress, which sought the solution to mass oppression in a programme of African nationalism. Even when it used the language of ‘class’, this programme sought to deny the class basis of society.

In January 1959 Robert Sobukwe (in an interview in The Africanist) declared that the PAC differed from the ANC in holding that “we are oppressed as a subject nation – the African nation… Those of the ANC maintain… That ours is a class struggle. We are, according to them, oppressed as WORKERS, both white and black. But it is significant that they make no attempt whatsoever to organise white workers. Their allies are all of them the bourgeoisie.” (Our emphasis)

In these accusations there was, as many workers were well aware, more than a grain of truth. But the middle class PAC leadership took advantage of this fact in an opportunist fashion in seeking to swing the black workers behind them.

In the same way as the ANC and CP leadership, they put forward the task of national liberation without explaining that this could be achieved only through the struggle for workers’ rule. Despite its radical polish, their programme was no different from the bankrupt reformism of the ‘two-stage’ theory.

In addition the PAC leadership, criticising the ANC for paying lip service to the vital (though difficult) struggle for workers’ unity, themselves threw it out of the window altogether. Their programme could offer to the black working people only the perspective of struggling for victory against a solid reactionary mass of whites, with white workers permanently abandoned to serve as the instrument of the ruling class.

The ruling class took advantage of the confusion created among the workers by the reformism of the ANC-CP leadership, and by the emergence of the PAC ‘alternative’. With the movement divided and weakened, the state stepped up its repression. Instead of conceding reforms, it proceeded to smash the organisations of the masses.

Why BCM?

The crushing of the black workers’ movement, together with the political consolidation of “white unity” around the bourgeoisie, provided the ruling class with the political conditions to take full advantage of the period of economic expansion that followed.

In the 1960s the post-war boom of world capitalism hitched the SA economy to its train, albeit as one of the coaches at the rear. Foreign and local capitalists reaped huge profits and white workers’ living standards soared, in a period of relative class peace which the ruling class succeeded in imposing for almost a decade.

BCM was born towards the end of this period, calling to battle a new and refreshed generation of youth. Its birth was a signal to the bourgeoisie that the class ‘peace’, and the brief honeymoon of unhindered exploitation of the masses, had come to an end.

The youth, as Trotsky once said, act like the topmost leaves of the trees, rustling first to the gusts of an impending storm. The rise of BCM took place in parallel with the first renewed stirrings of the working class.

The enormous expansion in the 1960s of the productive forces (the number, size, and mechanisation of the factories, mines and farms) massively increased the size and strategic placement of the black working class. While grappling with repression the black workers healed their wounds, reflected on the lessons of past defeats, and prepared for a renewed onslaught on oppression and exploitation.

The youth, sons and daughters of the working class, responded with revolutionary enthusiasm to the spirit of defiance and hatred which, as BCM, spread like wildfire throughout the bush colleges, schools, and townships. But at first the youth marched separately from the working class.

BCM arose without a legacy of Marxism to draw upon, without the guidance of an experienced underground cadre steeled in the Marxist method. The youth had to confront afresh the problems of developing a revolutionary movement and sewing together the disunity of the past.

The youth were faced with the ostentatious wealth of the whites contrasted against the stark poverty of the blacks. They were provoked by the racist arrogance of the government, police and the army, and also of white supervisors on the factory floor.

At the same time the main forms of open, organised ‘opposition’ to the government were the feeble reeds of white liberalism – uttering weak echoes of the reformism of the 1950s, and seeking to stifle the new voice of the youth. It was inevitable and understandable that the youth would, in an attempt to salvage the national pride of the oppressed, develop an ideology of intense and defiant black nationalism.

Limitations of Black Consciousness

The youth felt it their task to mobilise the black people as a whole behind the radical slogans of black consciousness. Until 1976 BCM grew alongside, but separate from, the movement of the workers. The strike wave of 1972-74, and the birth of the independent union movement, touched the youth only indirectly.

1976 proved to be a watershed in the development of the youth movement. The struggle in the schools was suddenly confronted with the unleashed barbarity of the regime – a greater force in practice than even the most intense nationalism had anticipated in theory.

Barely two months after they had hurled themselves against the state in June, the youth were forced for the first time to call on the workers for support. Instinctively at first, but later with far greater understanding, the youth appealed to their parents, brothers and sisters to join them in the battle to overthrow oppression and exploitation.

The events of this period etched into the consciousness of the youth the lesson that their own forces in isolation were incapable of bringing the state, and the society which it defended, to its knees. Burned into their understanding by bullets and teargas grenades was also the realisation that baasskap was the means of defending the capitalist system of the bosses, local and foreign.

These lessons sowed the seed in their minds for the beginnings of a reassessment of the programme of black consciousness.

Calling their parents to action the youth discovered, in the workers’ struggle, a force immeasurably more powerful than themselves alone.

Yet the political general strikes of that period, mobilised from ‘outside’ rather than by the workers’ Own organisations, left many questions of strategy and programme unresolved. How should the revolutionary energy of the youth movement relate to the immense potential power of the workers’ movement?

Because even the workers’ political struggle in 1976-77 led to no decisive victory against the regime, because the workers’ industrial movement entered a period of lull in the economic downturn between 1975 and 1978, because the banning of BCM organisations in 1977 necessitated a period of regroupment for the youth, these questions receded to the background for a while – only to re-emerge in 1980-81.

By that time the resurgence of the workers’ movement, fuelled by the temporary economic upturn, had begun to transform the whole political atmosphere. In strike after strike the working class was showing its power to smash back at the bosses and serve as a militant pole of attraction for all sections of the oppressed – and this when only the first regiments of the working class army had entered onto the battlefield.

As the youth threw themselves again into struggle, the previous instinctive and spontaneous co-operation with workers was replaced by a more conscious drawing together. First the education struggle, and later community struggles, brought together the youth and their parents. The youth mobilised active support for workers’ action, as in the Fatti’s and Moni’s, the meat workers’ and the Rowntree strikes.

Democracy

The unprecedented militancy and high level of organisation of the workers’ movement has set in motion among the youth a lively discussion in search of the ideas and methods of organisation which can consolidate a unity rooted in the workers’ movement.

What the development of the struggle has revealed is the impossibility of working out a programme and perspective within the framework of black consciousness. The problems posed, and incompletely resolved after 1976-77, are now urgently demanding practical answers.

This is reflected in the overwhelming turn among the youth towards a class approach to the struggle, and towards an understanding that the problems of the society will not be solved until the working people have a government of their own.

This understanding has been expressed in the turn to the slogan of ‘non-racial democracy’. Yet this slogan is only a general formula, which needs to be filled in by struggle rooted in an understanding of the class forces that can achieve it.

For the working class, the struggle for non-racial democracy represents no concession to capitalist reformism or liberalism. For the working class, democratic organisation is the essential means for building its own self-confidence and power; democracy in society is the indispensable guarantee of its welfare and security.

Non-racialism expresses the vital intention of creating the strongest unity of the working class across all the racial divisions imposed by the ruling class.

For the workers’ movement, the struggle for non-racial democracy in SA is waged inch by inch against the implacable enmity of the capitalist class, its regime, and their supporters, and can be victorious only through replacing the capitalist state by the democratic rule of the working class.

Yet the huge uplift of the mass struggle in the recent period, underpinned by the workers’ movement, has also allowed onto the stage those middle class ‘democrats’ who peddle illusions in the possibility of the democratic reform of SA capitalism. Posing the struggle for ‘non-racial democracy’ in the abstract, they consciously or unconsciously seek to dilute the class thrust of revolutionary nationalism, as well as the struggle of the working class to take power.

These old liberals in new dress will take advantage of any lulls in the workers’ movement to sow confusion among the masses. In this they will serve the interests of the ruling class.

Nor is any solution offered to the problems faced by the workers, the youth (and the middle class itself) by those middle class elements who cling or revert to exclusive black nationalism. The battle against liberalism and reformism can be won only by strengthening the struggle for workers’ unity and workers’ power.

The youth have a vital role to play in the workers’ movement in sustaining and developing the struggle for consistent democracy and national liberation, and exposing and defeating the democratic and nationalist ‘diluters’. Absorbing the lessons of the 1970s and the recent period must go hand in hand with guarding against the mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s.

Programme

For forging unity in the struggle for a government of their own, the working class is turning increasingly towards the ANC. With the workers, the youth also have turned their support more and more to the ANC.

To achieve non-racial democracy and national liberation, the ANC will need to be built on a conscious socialist programme. The turning of the workers towards the Freedom Charter reflects the quest for a programme that can serve both to meet the demands of the everyday struggle, and as a rallying point around which to consolidate the unity of the movement in action.

This can only be done if the immediate demands of the Charter are concretised into a programme of action. They can serve as a basis for further consolidating the unity of the oppressed by bringing together the community organisations and the trade unions in campaigns to enforce those demands.

In these struggles it is the task of Marxists to explain that the struggle of the working people for a democratic government of their own cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. Those who support democracy consistently have no choice but to support this struggle.

Thus the key demand of the Charter is the demand for the nationalisation of the banks, mines and monopoly industry. This can be realised, under workers’ control and management, only if the capitalist state is smashed and replaced by a workers’ state, which will fulfil not only the aspirations of the working class, but of all the oppressed.

© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).

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LETTER | “Youth Movement Must Integrate into the Workers’ Movement”

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Continue to Part Four

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[1] From Protest to Challenge, Vol 3

[2] Brian Bunting, Moses Kotane, pp.226-7