The Workers’ Movement, Sactu and the ANC – a Struggle for Marxist Policies

MEMORANDUM

TO: The National Executive Committee of Sactu

FROM: The editor of Workers Unity

Comrades,

After an absence of fourteen years, Workers Unity reappeared in January 1977 as the official newspaper of Sactu, to present our ideas and policies to the workers of South Africa and to the world. Now, more than two years later, and after fourteen issues have been produced, it is necessary to draw-up a balance sheet of what has been achieved, what we have failed to achieve, and what tasks now confront us.

It is in this regard that I would like to submit some thoughts for the consideration of the comrades who, as members of the National Executive Committee, have the future of Sactu in their hands. Regrettably, I am prevented from being present to discuss these matters personally with comrades.

Although, apparently, Workers Unity has been left out of the agenda for the NEC meeting, I hope that it will be given the necessary time.

Part 1 – The Future of Workers Unity

I believe that the publication of Workers Unity over the past two years has been an important step forward for Sactu. But, at the same time, we have only made a small beginning and what has been done so far is only a drop in the ocean in comparison with what still has to be done.

There is really only one way that we can thoroughly test our work, and that is by measuring it against the tremendous tasks which the workers’ struggle at home places upon us. How does Workers Unity measure up to this test?

A Workers’ Paper and an Organising Weapon

When we launched Workers Unity at the end of 1976, we did not intend it mainly as an international solidarity paper (although it was expected to, and certainly does, cover that area as well). We intended Workers Unity as an organising weapon for the workers’ struggle inside South Africa. We wanted it to become a genuine workers’ paper.

Workers Unity is today a paper written for workers – but it is not a single step nearer to being a workers’ paper than when it appeared over two years ago. We have to frankly acknowledge this weakness, so that we can tackle it and overcome it without delay.

Many comrades, constructively criticising Workers Unity, have remarked that it is not sufficiently agitational; that articles are too long and abstract; that the style is too sophisticated; that the paper is sorely lacking in hard news from the factory floor; that the commentary is often too general and does not show a feel for the actual situations which the workers face – the concrete details, the personalities, the tactical twists and turns of the daily struggle at home. These comrades are quite right.

Where does the solution lie? The hard reality is that ours is a paper produced in exile by an organisation based in exile. We need to strike the right balance between the more theoretical articles and the vitally necessary agitational pieces. But we cannot ‘agitate’ out of thin air. The living details of factory and township life from day-to-day, the facts of strike situations and the small but important changes in conditions which are constantly taking place – these are the raw materials from which agitation is made. We cannot draw them merely from inspiration. To attempt to ‘agitate’ without the facts is no solution – it always rings false, as empty boasting or bravado.

There is only one solution. Workers Unity can fulfil its purpose of becoming a workers’ paper only to the extent that Sactu as a whole fulfils its purpose of becoming an organisation of the workers, rooted in the living struggle at home.

Isolation from the Workers’ Movement

To illustrate the present isolation of Workers Unity from the workers’ movement in South Africa, let us note a few facts.

Take the distribution of the paper. Well over 50,000 copies have been printed in all – yet the number which have been transported through our organisation into South Africa cannot total more than a few hundred copies over these two years!

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Only the tiniest fraction even of the organised workers in South Africa can be said EVER to have seen a copy of Workers Unity, let alone to receive it regularly.

The point must be taken further. A genuine workers’ paper does not rely solely on distribution to workers. It relies on receiving a constant steam of information, reports, criticisms, suggestions and eventually whole articles from workers in the field of struggle. Like a plant, dependent on the flow of sap from the roots, our paper needs the life-juices of the workers own experience, their own ideas and their own ways of expression – if it is to survive.

In the space of more than two years, unfortunately, we have not received a single contribution to Workers Unity from any Sactu machinery which may exist in South Africa. In recent weeks we have, for the first time through Sactu, received some very welcome comments on Workers Unity from within South Africa – but these can still be counted on the fingers of one hand. Responses which have from time to time reached us independently of Sactu’s organisation, are alone sufficient proof of the enormous impact Workers Unity could have in the workers’ movement if only it reached the workers.

But we are not reaching the workers.

A year ago I pointed out to certain of the comrades who are members of the NEC that, if Workers Unity was not drawn closer to home (not in the sense of its production and printing but in the sense of its content) within the course of the year, it would begin to become noticeably sterile. Cast a critical eye over the fourteen issues. In the six issues of the first year, Workers Unity clearly went through a period of forward development. Each issue tackled a subject of immediate importance to the workers’ organisations in their practical struggle. And each built progressively upon the ground laid in the ones before.

The leading articles in each issue show this:

• Issue No. 1: An analysis of the lessons of Soweto and the road ahead.
• Issue No. 2: Why it is necessary to fight for independent unions.
• Issue No. 3: Unemployment; why reformist policies hold no way out.
• Issue No. 4: Our programme of fighting demands, linking these to the struggle for state power, national liberation and the end of capitalism.
• Issue No. 5: How do we organise? The explanation of the need for underground trade union organisation, the role of Sactu and a call to establish Sactu groups in the factories with definite tasks.
• Issue No. 6: An explanation of our wage demand: a R50-a-week national minimum wage, with automatic future increases linked to price rises.

During 1978, the development of Workers Unity levelled-off. The change was not noticeable immediately, or in any single issue, but taking Issues 7-14 as a whole we can see the following:

We have continued to put forward and explain our general standpoint and policies on general subjects. But the general has begun to take-up more and more of the paper. Our content has become increasingly abstract and timeless – in the sense that it would not matter in which issue or even which year many of our articles appear. Only in two cases (when we eventually dealt with the Wiehahn Commission, and when we printed a very general solidarity article on the struggle for Crossroads) can it be said that we have tackled any new subjects of burning importance to the workers’ movement at home. We have been frustrated, for example, in our intention to write on the struggle over the schools because we have no contact with the developing situation on the ground.

Our news reporting on factory and township struggles is drawn entirely from already published material – and almost always from the South African bourgeois press.

Since Issue No. 5 (September 1977) we have not carried a single article on how to organise, nor have we even dealt in general terms with methods and problems of underground work. Since Issue No. 3 (May 1977) we have not analysed critically a single development or current of thought within the trade unions.

The Consequences of Isolation

The strength of Workers Unity up to now is the same as the strength of Sactu itself – our principles and general policies; our clear working class standpoint; and the method by which we analyse and explain the issues facing the workers.

And, on the other hand, the weakness of Workers Unity is exactly the same as the weakness of Sactu as a whole – our weakness at home. Unless this is overcome in our organisation with the greatest urgency, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain even the present standard of our paper.

Its ‘exile’ character – unavoidable perhaps at the start – will become increasingly obvious and unacceptable. Our readers may have tolerated this until now on account of the infancy of the paper, but as time passes this will lead to very serious questions being raised, not only about Workers Unity, but about the character of Sactu.

Detached from the living movement of the workers in South Africa, the style of the paper will tend to become stereotyped and the content increasingly ‘hack’. Our readers at home who have been excited and pleased to receive the paper will tend to lose interest and may object to having to take the risk of receiving it. Our readers abroad, who tend to like the paper precisely because it is written for workers in South Africa, will be disappointed and our subscriptions, presently rising, could well start to fall. Our capacity to generate funds for Sactu in the solidarity field would likewise fall off.

This is not alarmist talk – it is simple fact. A paper is a living thing: it must either develop or perish. Workers Unity cannot survive unless Sactu develops into a real, fighting workers’ organisation inside South Africa. The future of Workers Unity (and it could have a great future) is completely bound up with the rebuilding of Sactu at home.

Should Workers Unity now move to Africa?

Over the past year I have given a lot of thought to the question whether the isolation of Workers Unity from the workers’ movement at home could at this stage be solved by moving the editorship and production of the paper to Africa. I believe it is clear that the answer is no. The problem will not be solved by such a step until Sactu has built an underground organisation in South Africa on a scale large enough to maintain a constant flow of ideas, information and guidance backwards and forwards between our cadres active in the field of the workers’ struggles and the editorial board of the paper.

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As soon as our organisation has developed at home to the point where Workers Unity could have constant contact with significant numbers of organised workers, I would strongly favour moving the editorial centre of the paper as near as possible to the borders of South Africa without delay.

In time, of course, our aim must be not only to move the paper to Southern Africa, but to develop our ability to reprint and eventually produce Workers Unity clandestinely inside South Africa.

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How “Worker’s Unity” Could Develop

Based on an underground organisation at home, actively involved in the day-to-day struggles of the workers, Workers Unity would rapidly develop from its present style as a propaganda organ into an agitational paper in the thick of the action. Publication in African languages and in Afrikaans would become feasible. The practical problems of distribution and of production would take on a completely different character in these circumstances.

There are no short cuts to the solution of the problems facing Workers Unity. The only answer is the building of Sactu in South Africa.

In this work itself, of course, Workers Unity has a very important role to play. We must see Workers Unity as an organising weapon and we must make full use of it for that purpose.

As a very first step, we should be forming groups of workers in different parts of South Africa to read and discuss the ideas in Workers Unity, and the policies it presents. The groups of Sactu militants which are formed in the factories should make the paper a central focus of their discussions and training, and its circulation to other workers one of their most important tasks.

As it develops, Workers Unity would be able to spread the spark of ideas across the length and breadth of the country, establishing communications between tens-of-thousands of workers who are physically isolated from one another, and generalising their experiences.

In an underground organisation, the paper would serve as a vehicle for the vitally necessary democratic discussion within our ranks, without which effective central decision-making and discipline in action is impossible.

Real living contact with workers’ organisation would at once bring Workers Unity into its own. Every hundred copies printed and secretly distributed among workers would act as another Sactu organiser, supplementing our efforts where we could not be present ourselves: raising the issues, stimulating discussion, explaining policies, reviewing tactics, advancing slogans and demands.

Let this be the future of Workers Unity!

Part 2 – The Need to Build Sactu in South Africa

The situation in South Africa today cries out for the building of Sactu as a revolutionary trade union organisation of mass proportions. The most favourable conditions exist for the swift growth of our forces and the extension of Sactu’s influence in the workers’ movement throughout the country. The possibilities are great, but time is short. Can we frankly say that our whole organisation is really committed to this task – straining every nerve and muscle to build Sactu among the workers at home? I fear that we cannot.

In January last year, the NEC adopted as its policy a Political Report by the General Secretary (published as a pamphlet entitled Looking Forward). There the urgency of building Sactu was repeatedly stressed. Sactu’s most essential task, it was said, the one to which all others must give precedence, “is that of building and helping to build the organised forces of the black workers within the mines and factories, and on the farms. To build, build and build again our forces and cadres within the country! It is to this task that our main energies must be devoted.”

But have these words produced any decisive change in our orientation, in our recruitment, in our training of cadres, in the setting of our priorities, in the allocation of our human and material resources between solidarity work and the work at home, in the urgency with which we are tackling this work, in the efforts we are making to distribute our publications in South Africa…?

When it comes to our tasks at home, a strange paralysis still grips Sactu. What is the root cause of it? I would like to submit for the consideration of the NEC that the root cause is political. We are affected by a lack of clarity about Sactu’s role and future. There are deep differences of opinion within our ranks on the importance of trade union work; on the relationship between the workers’ movement and the struggle of all the oppressed; on the relationship between national liberation, democracy and socialism; on Sactu’s position in relation to armed struggle.

Sactu can only grow at home on the basis of clearly worked-out political perspectives. If we are to build, as we have promised, an underground trade union organisation in South Africa “to mobilise and lead the workers in their everyday struggles, linking the economic and political sides of the struggle together” (Looking Forward), our cadres will have to come to grips with all the problems facing the future development of the mass movement, and point out a clear way forward to the trade unions.

Sactu is a trade union organisation, but it is compelled nonetheless to address itself to all the basic political questions of the South African revolution. It is precisely the question of the political basis upon which Sactu must go forward – the only basis on which our organisation can be built, and Workers Unity with it – that I wish to bring to the fore in this memorandum.

The Crisis of the System

As has been explained many times in Sactu publications, the apartheid system developed in South Africa to suit the needs of capitalism. The political system of national oppression has been built upon foundations of class oppression and exploitation of the black workers. Now the system, economic and political is suffering a crisis more acute than at any other time in its history. The incurable sickness of world capitalism, and the particular features of that sickness in the South African economy, provide the basis on which all the social contradictions built-up during the decades and even centuries of oppression and exploitation now demand to be resolved.

The outlines of this crisis, a crisis of apartheid and of capitalism woven together, have been set out in Looking Forward. It was clearly recognised there that this is no temporary crisis, despite its ups and downs. The capitalists are well aware of the cancer that affects their system. The slight recovery of the economy is accepted to be short-lived. Divisions within the white population, reflected especially in the crisis in the Nationalist Party, are now deeper than at any other time since the early 1920s.

Around the world the tide of social revolution is rising, not least in Southern Africa itself. At home, the combativity of the oppressed masses, particularly of the black working class, is repeatedly expressed in action under the most difficult conditions – in the struggle over education, for higher wages, trade union rights, transport and housing, over rents and removals, over the pass laws and the migrant labour system, and demands for political rights.

During the long period of the economic boom in South Africa, mining, agriculture, industry and commerce were massively developed and dazzling riches – the profits from cheap labour – poured into the pockets of the ruling class. But from this great expansion of wealth and productive power, the black working class derived only hardship, poverty and suffering. The first onset of economic stagnation only multiplied the weight upon the backs of the people.

Today, as capitalism lurches from one crisis to the next on a world scale, it can afford no substantial or lasting concessions to the mass of the working people of South Africa. Our rulers know this only too well. To the extent that the ruling class is putting out feelers in the direction of ‘reforms’, it seeks to win the collaboration of the black middle class against the power of the workers.

The incapacity of the system to carry out significant reforms is shown by the emptiness of the gestures made by the ruling class in that direction, accompanied by the more and more intensified repression and the slide towards increasing militarisation.

The black working people need jobs for all. Capitalism answers this need with two million unemployed, with a rise in this figure of 30,000 a month, and with the certainty of mass unemployment persisting so long as the profit system remains.

The black working people need a living wage (at present that would be at least R50 a week minimum for all workers). Capitalism answers this need with an average wage for black workers which is well below the breadline – in some Bantustans as low as R5 a week. It answers with price rises which have meant as much as 20-30% a year on the cost of living in the townships.

The black working people need trade union rights, and an end to the pass laws and the migrant labour system. But the denial of trade union rights, the pass laws and the migrant labour system are nothing but measures developed by capitalism in South Africa to chain the workers in the service of profit.

In Workers Unity we have taken up these and many other demands. In doing so, however, we have been under no illusion that the system in South Africa can grant these things. We know full well that capitalism means more unemployment, more poverty and more oppression for the working class. In demanding concessions and reforms from the capitalists and the apartheid regime, we have sought to gain new footholds and strengthen the fighting capacity of the workers for revolutionary ends. We have explained again and again that even the most basic economic demands of the workers can only be secured through the victory of the struggle to smash apartheid and end the profit system.

The struggle for democracy has exactly the same implications. The ruling class realises that for the working class, democratic rights are not ends in themselves, but means to an end. They understand that workers demand political rights because they intend to use those rights to carry out a revolution in the conditions of their life and work – to end poverty, starvation and unemployment; to provide homes, clothing and comfort for their families and education for their children; to progressively free themselves from all discrimination, inequalities, privilege and dictatorship.

National liberation and democracy cannot be secured by the black workers, but only through the liquidation of capitalism and the building of socialism. There can be no separation of stages in the South African revolution between its national-democratic aims and its socialist aims. This understanding must be the cornerstone of Sactu’s approach to the revolution.

The Need for Workers’ Power

Just as national oppression is rooted in class exploitation, so the national liberation struggle is rooted in class struggle. The two great opposing poles of action and attraction in the struggle are on the one hand, the capitalist ruling class and, on the other, the rising power of the black working class.

In the struggle for power, the whole of society will inevitably divide itself between these two poles. The state power will more and more blatantly reveal itself as a sledgehammer wielded by the capitalist class against the movement of the black working class and its allies.

This central conflict between capital and the black working class determines the path of development of the South African revolution. If liberation is to be achieved, capitalism must be confronted with the full power of the only force that can liquidate it – the workers.

The black working class in South Africa – because of its position in production and society; because it has no property to protect, no privileges to defend, and ‘nothing to lose but its chains’; because the full weight of national oppression presses on its shoulders – is the only consistently democratic and anti-capitalist class, and the only social force capable of leading the revolutionary mass struggle for national liberation and socialism. Only under the leadership of the organised workers can the revolution be carried through to its conclusion and its gains be secured against counter-revolutionary attack.

For the black workers to lead the struggle for national liberation, democracy and socialism – to challenge the capitalist ruling class at the head of all the oppressed people – they must be organised first and foremost as workers. We can afford no shyness on the question of the leading role of the working class, or on the need for independent organisations of the workers to guarantee that leading role. Sactu’s historic task is to fill with a revolutionary content the idea of working class independence in the trade union field. Any hesitation or shyness on this matter will weaken the struggle for national liberation and open up possibilities for counter-revolution and defeat.

The ruling class fears nothing more than the awakening of the black workers, class-conscious and organised. More and more the repression and trickery of our rulers will be concentrated on attacking the growth of effective organisation among the workers, and on undermining its independence.

The ruling class understands only too well the connection between the struggle for national liberation and the struggle against capitalism. It understands the threat to its property and privilege which this struggle represents. The full force of the armed state is brought to bear against every national and democratic demand of the masses of the oppressed people because these struggles can only be brought to victory in the socialist revolution.

We must remember that capitalism in South Africa (in contrast with most other countries of the colonial or former colonial world) is in an advanced stage of growth and development, is very deeply rooted, and is maintained in power by large social forces. Deep as the crisis may be which affects this system, capitalism in South Africa will not easily be pushed aside.

The ruling class – the relatively small number of big capitalists who own the mines, banks, industries and big farms – rely for the stability of their power over the mass of the people on numerous intermediate layers of the middle classes and the white labour aristocracy. These forces of real or potential reaction are concentrated in the white population, but are being deliberately extended to an increasingly noticeable extent among the small elite layers of the black population as well.

To undermine, divide and paralyse the social reserves of reaction potentially at the disposal of our enemy – to draw them in growing numbers to the side of the revolution – will prove impossible unless we clearly link the struggle for the overthrow of apartheid to the promise of a new social order which can guarantee the liberty and material well-being of all the people of South Africa, with equality for all.

The struggle for national liberation and democracy will either achieve victory through consciously linking itself at every step to the struggle against capitalism, under the leadership of the working class, and by passing over without interruption to socialist tasks – or else it will reach an impasse, a blind alley, and open the way to capitalist counter-revolution and defeat.

Even in 1955 it was clearly recognised in the Freedom Charter that the establishment of democracy in South Africa is impossible without a fundamental attack on capitalist property and power. All subsequent experience has richly confirmed this fact.

Our freedom, as we have emphasised in Workers Unity, cannot be achieved “unless the power of the exploiters is replaced by the power of the workers and the wealth of our country restored to the people as a whole.” (Issue No. 5.) It is precisely the recognition of this iron necessity of our struggle which separates revolutionaries from every brand of reformism, whether blatant or disguised.

It is this, too, which explains why the road forward leads of necessity towards the armed seizure of state power.

To establish genuine democratic people’s power in South Africa, which can only be secured on the foundation of workers’ power, means to smash the South African state – not merely as an apartheid state, but equally as the capitalist state which it essentially is. Victory is inconceivable, and it has always been inconceivable, without the armed uprising of the working class.

Arming the Mass Struggle

The great Marxist teachers of the working class, summing up the experience of the workers’ struggle in all capitalist countries, long ago explained that the capitalist state – and the South African state is no exception – boils down in the last analysis to armed bodies of men, defending the property of the ruling class in the land, mines, factories and banks against the struggle of the working people to seize that property and organise production for their common benefit.

The harsh experience of our movement in South Africa, especially since the 1950s, has schooled the most advanced and conscious workers and fighters in one lesson above all others: our struggle is not for the pipedream of reform from above, but for revolution from below. It is not a struggle for concessions from our masters, but to take state power in order to end the rule of all masters. The struggle for the seizure of state power takes many forms and many courses linked together, but at the decisive point that struggle can only be won by defeating the armed force of the state with the revolutionary armed force of the masses.

The turn of the Congress movement in the early 1960s to the use of armed force, does not signify that the victory of the liberation struggle was previously possible without arms. It was rather that events themselves, especially the Sharpeville massacre and its aftermath, exposed the futility of a strategy of confining the struggle to unarmed methods of action. In the early 1960s, broad masses of the oppressed people became conscious of the fact that not even significant reforms could be expected from the apartheid regime, and that it was necessary to overthrow it entirely.

After Sharpeville and Langa, there was a spontaneous straining of the masses, especially of the black working class, towards the use of armed force against the state, towards striking at the oppressor with all the means at their disposal. It was from the experience of those times that there developed among the black people, in particular among the workers, the overwhelming popularity of the idea that armed struggle is necessary if the liberation struggle is to succeed. The whole of subsequent experience has confirmed this conviction.

It is true that some people, when they speak of ‘armed struggle’, regard it merely as a means of increasing the pressure on the regime and ruling class to give concessions and reforms. But such a view does not represent the interests or the standpoint of the black workers of South Africa. It cannot be the standpoint of Sactu.

Likewise, the most advanced and politically conscious layers of the working class have never counterposed armed struggle to mass struggle, as if they were different things. For them and for us, it is a question of the organisation, mobilisation and arming of the mass of the people, headed by the organised workers, towards the eventual armed insurrection and seizure of state power.

The Paramount Importance of Mass Organisation

A revolutionary strategy directed towards armed insurrection – the only genuinely revolutionary strategy possible in South Africa – requires at every stage that clear priority must be given to building organisations of mass struggle.

It means the building of illegal and underground organisation as the vital foundation of all the legal and open organisations which are used by the people as weapons in their struggle, whether in township, mine, factory or farm, in every part of the country.

It means a struggle to lead these organisations through all the tactical phases, the advances, the unavoidable retreats, the turns and re-advances necessary to unite the workers and draw behind them the oppressed people as a whole. It means giving central importance to political mobilisation around slogans and demands which are constantly being tested and reformulated in order to build an unbreakable bridge between the immediate needs and consciousness of various groups and layers of the working people and the seizure of state power. It means to build through struggle a mass consciousness of the necessary link between genuine national liberation, democracy and socialism.

It means that armed struggle must not be separated from mass struggle, but fused with the development of the mass movement at every stage. It means that politics – the politics of mass struggle – must at every point command the gun.

It means the fullest participation of militarily trained revolutionaries in the day-to-day struggles of the people, as political cadres first and foremost, involved in the mobilising, educating, training and arming of the mass movement.

It means that the armed action on our side should in its early stages have mainly the character of organised self-defence by the mass movement against the terror tactics of the state. It means armed defence, in favourable circumstances, of strikes, demonstrations, ‘squatter’ camps and schools; against police raids, pass arrests, forced removals and so forth. As the mass movement gains strength, confidence and fighting skills, as the camp of the enemy weakens and divides, the basis will be laid for passing over to the offensive.

Our revolution needs the aid of the bullet and the bomb in order to carry out its work, but the bullet and the bomb do not produce the revolution. The essential conditions for revolutionary victory are in the first place political, and only in the second place military.

The weakening and division of the forces at the disposal of the ruling class; the power, unity and determination of the revolutionary forces; and the quality of the revolutionary leadership – these are the basic ingredients in the development of a revolutionary situation in South Africa and the pre-conditions for the successful armed seizure of power.

The crisis of the economic and political system has already been referred to. Out of this crisis emerge the most favourable objective conditions for the rapid maturing of a revolutionary situation.

In the vital process of strengthening the revolutionary forces, and weakening and dividing the forces in the hands of the ruling class, the single most important factor is the organisation and unity of the working class. In South African conditions, this unity, arising from struggle, can most rapidly take root among the black workers. With the black workers on the march, militant, class-conscious and united, all the rest of the oppressed people would fall in behind them and the basis would also be laid for sections of white workers and youth to break decisively with the ruling class. The struggle for workers’ unity opens up the shortest and surest way to the revolutionary conquest of power.

It has been necessary to dwell on these matters here because they have the closest bearing on the whole development of Sactu. An independent, revolutionary trade union organisation, though it concentrates its activities in a definite field of struggle, can only carry out its responsibility to the workers if its whole strategy for trade union work is directed towards the aim of eventual armed insurrection and the seizure of state power by the working class.

The Upsurge in the Struggle

The struggle of the oppressed people, to which the movement of the black workers has supplied the forerunners, the initiative and the driving force, has entered a qualitatively new stage. Beginning with the waves of industrial strikes from 1972-3 onwards, followed by the mass resurgence of student radicalism and reaching its high point in the uprisings and political general strikes of 1976, the movement has raised itself more or less spontaneously to the point where even the heroic actions of the 1950s and early 1960s have been overshadowed.

At the present moment, we are passing through a period of relative lull. But this should be only a very temporary period, giving way again to a new upsurge of resistance. Inevitably, after the titanic battles of 1976-77, the black workers and youth are recovering their energies, reflecting on their experiences, weighing up the lessons and doing whatever they can to map out the way ahead. One of the pointers to the temporary character of the present lull is the fact that the uprisings and the general strikes which followed the first Soweto massacre were not defeated – they were at most held at bay. The slaughter of school-children by the regime might, under different circumstances, have led to demoralisation and the collapse of the mass movement, but in fact it had the opposite effect. A most striking feature of the struggle in this period has been the death-defying courage (primarily of the black youth, but infusing also the ranks of the workers) with which our people have thrown themselves into action, time and again, virtually bare-handed against gas and guns.

Despite the current lull, the spirit of confidence in the black working class runs deep. This is shown, for example, in the movement of the workers into the trade unions after the Soweto uprisings, in the growing unity of different sections of the black workers and the renewed outbreak of industrial strikes in 1978, all the more remarkable for taking place when there are over two million unemployed. (A reflection of the pressure among workers towards greater unity is the setting up of Fosatu by trade union officials, as a new federation to the left of Tucsa.)

The mood and capacity for struggle of the working class in this period is clearly shown by, the magnificent resistance of the people of Crossroads against the threatened demolition of their homes and their forced removal to the reserves. In the face of this resistance the regime has been compelled to draw back.

There has been a great strengthening and hardening of the revolutionary class consciousness of broad layers of the black working class. As was said in the Political Report last year (Looking Forward):

The long-standing hatred of the oppressed masses for white supremacy in South Africa and for all the institutions of apartheid, has itself become sharpened and refined over the years as the system has developed. With the enormous growth of the black proletariat and its harsh experience of township life, and of mine, farm and factory labour, its political and class-consciousness too has advanced enormously. The connection between apartheid and capitalism is part of the living experience of the majority of our people. This is being demonstrated to us every day, not only in the older black workers, but also in the youth, their actions and their statements. No distinction can be drawn in the struggle, and no distinction is drawn by those in the thick of it, between the system of racial oppression and the system of economic exploitation.

This consciousness, hardened in the heat of battle over the past eighteen months, has in fact been the product of whole decades of the rapid development of capitalism in apartheid South Africa.

This entire period of renewed mass struggle in South Africa has indicated the extent to which the workers, digesting the experiences of the repression during the 1960s, have developed organisation and leadership hidden from public view and protected against easy attack by the bosses and the police. The Natal strikes of 1973, and the political general strikes of August and September 1976, are the clearest examples of the effectiveness of this underground organisation, built mainly through the initiative of the workers themselves.

We could not wish for more favourable conditions for the building of our own organisation underground among the workers. These conditions have now existed in South Africa for years. But what sign is there that we are placing our stamp upon events – upon tactics, slogans and mass demands? The spontaneous forms of organisation developed in the mass movement in the heat of struggle are a magnificent gain. But at the same time they are afflicted by inevitable limitations, which must become more serious the more the mass movement advances towards its task of conquering power. Are we not compelled to acknowledge that there has not yet been built in South Africa the necessary, nationally co-ordinated, revolutionary underground organisation for leading the mass struggle in all its forms to the arming of the people and the insurrectionary seizure of state power?

It is the task of Sactu to address this problem in the field of trade union organisation. I think it is necessary to draw out here some of the implications of this problem in trade union work, because it underlies all the current questioning which is taking place in our ranks about the role of Sactu, the future of Workers Unity, and the further development of our policies.

The Renewed Struggle for Independent Unions

The new period of the struggle in South Africa, beginning in the early 1970s, has seen an enormous resurgence of African workers’ organisations and sustained attempts to build independent unions. Available statistics (always to be taken, of course, with a pinch of salt) show that at least 60,000 African workers are trade union members. This compares favourably with the situation in 1960-61.

This is, admittedly, only a fraction of the industrial working class, but in the conditions of vicious repression and harassment it represents a tremendous step forward and a sign of the renewed militancy of the black working class.

Since 1918 there has never been a time in South African history when African trade unions were entirely absent. The regime has never succeeded in eliminating entirely the open organisation of African workers into legal unions. At the present time, the regime and the ruling class are faced with serious problems in this regard: the more the new independent unions develop, the more the workers organised in them represent a threat to the stability of the system, yet the more politically dangerous and difficult it becomes for our rulers to attempt simply to destroy the unions by outright repression.

The main task of the Wiehahn Commission (whose report has still not been published) has been to propose to the government alternative and indirect methods for containing the movement of the workers and frustrating the growth of independent unions. (See Workers Unity, Issue No. 13.)

Trade unions of black workers which operate exclusively legally invariably have a dual character. On the one hand, when the state and the ruling class are unable politically to suppress the unions completely, every effort is made to deform the unions into indirect organs of bourgeois control over the working class. This is the purpose served by the growth of bureaucracy in the trade unions and the cultivation of reformism within them.

On the other hand, however, the trade unions represent for the workers weapons which they can use to advance their economic struggle and defend their gains. But, as we have seen, not one of the vital material needs of the working class (jobs for all; a living wage – to name but two) can be secured on the basis of capitalism. Every partial gain by the workers in the economic struggle is immediately placed in jeopardy and sooner or later stolen back again by the employers and their apartheid state. The economic struggle is thus doomed to frustration unless it is linked to the revolutionary struggle for state power, the destruction of apartheid, the expropriation of the capitalists and the building of the foundations of socialism.

This dual character of the trade unions makes them an arena of continuous conflict between two basic opposing tendencies – the reformist and the revolutionary. This struggle, whether more or less open or disguised, is a constant feature of the legal trade union organisations built up by black workers in South Africa.

What fundamentally distinguishes the revolutionaries from the reformists in trade union work is this: Consciously revolutionary trade unionists take as their starting point, as the point which governs their whole orientation, the necessity of the workers seizing state power, and strive to mobilise and organise the workers through day-to-day struggles for concessions and reforms towards that goal. Reformists take as their starting point only the immediate demands of the workers, making these the self-sufficient aim and object of the trade union movement.

In Issue No. 5 of Workers Unity, we set out Sactu’s general policy towards the efforts which have been made during the past six years in South Africa to build again open, non-racial trade unions (and similar organisations), within the legal strait-jacket imposed by the regime. We said:

To avoid being smashed they have been forced to take up a public posture of being non-political – concerning themselves exclusively with the ‘economic’ hardships of the workers.

Within them and among their leaders, various tendencies are to be found. There are, of course, not a few reformists, opportunists and even collaborators – but there are also many who walk a tightrope of personal danger in truly serving the struggle of the working class…

These organisations are forced by the repression to keep themselves cut off from the liberation struggle as a whole, but we do not oppose them. Our policy is to fight for independent unions and to give these new organisations our support – in as far as they advance the workers’ struggle.

We also, of course, encourage all forms of international solidarity in support of the struggles of these unions for recognition and for the demands of their members. We explain our support for these unions as follows:

Ours is a revolutionary struggle. Every means, legal and illegal, open and underground, on issues small and large, must be used to build the fighting strength of the working class.

Tens of thousands of black workers are using the new organisations to put forward wage demands, take up complaints in the factories, defend themselves against victimisation, gain training and experience, and press for full trade union rights.

We support to the full every struggle to defend and extend the field of legal activity for the trade union movement.

But that, of course, is only one side of the question. As we go on to say in Workers Unity:

…at the same time, the immense pressures of intimidation, arrests, bannings and so on, take their toll on these unions. The regime picks off the best elements among the leaders and officials, thus clearing the way for those whose inclination is to bend the unions to the will of the bosses, and surrender to government pressure. In many subtle ways the ruling class cultivates this trend.

As the narrow circle of legality is drawn steadily tighter round the necks of these organisations, the difficulties of keeping them on course as real instruments of the workers’ struggle, will increase enormously.

From this we conclude that the foundations of the workers’ movement in South Africa have to be built underground. “Only by organising ourselves on this secure foundation can we be sure that our struggle will advance strongly, and the necessary link be maintained between our trade unions and our whole liberation struggle.”

That is the central task to which Sactu has committed itself – but how much have we actually done to give effect to these words?

The Role of Sactu as a Revolutionary Trade Union Organisation

The monstrous growth of state repression, the relentless attacks by the regime against militant trade unionists, the wholesale bannings, detentions, and murder of active fighters against apartheid and capitalist exploitation in South Africa, have since the early 1960s rendered it impossible for Sactu to organise openly in its own name on the basis of the principles and policies for which it was formed.

The organisational structure embodied in our constitution – a structure which reflected the situation and conditions of struggle in the labour movement in the mid-1950s – has thus been superseded by events.

But while events have overtaken our original organisational structure, they have more and more strikingly confirmed the correctness of the declaration of principles on which our constitution is based.

Expressed in the language of the time,

• the Constitution declares the vital importance of the organisation of the workers into effective trade unions;
• it emphasises workers’ unity as the basis of progress in the workers’ movement;
• it proclaims the leading role of the working class in the struggle to liberate South Africa from oppression and exploitation;
• it insists that this great task and responsibility of the working class depends on its unity, its strength, its consciousness and its ORGANISATION.

Since its foundation on the basis of these principles, Sactu has maintained consistently the standpoint that the trade union struggle of the working class is bound-up with its political struggle.

No organisation in South Africa which maintains and expresses these policies can remain within the narrow bounds of ‘legality’ imposed by the apartheid regime. Consequently, in the face of the systematic repression against Sactu and our allied organisations which was launched by the regime from the early 1960s onward, it was the task of the leadership of Sactu to turn more and more to underground work, there to build the foundations of the mass revolutionary trade union movement of the future.

When, in the article “How do we organise?” in Issue No. 5 of Workers Unity (September 1977), we explained this task, we were merely repeating the ABC of what must have been obvious among experienced militants for at least fifteen years.

Sactu is an organisation of workers or it is nothing. It was for the purpose of organising workers that Sactu was created. It was as an organisation of workers that Sactu grew to prominence, co-ordinating the efforts of tens-of-thousands of union members and attracting to its banner in the course of struggle some hundreds of thousands more.

From 1955 to 1963, Sactu established itself in the consciousness of large numbers of the oppressed workers as their legitimate organisation and leadership in the trade union field.

Sactu’s claim to speak on behalf of the workers of South Africa stemmed from the accomplishments of that period. It is true that our organisation represents the workers of South Africa in the sense that our principles and policies are the only ones by which the working class can secure its liberation from exploitation and oppression. In another and equally important sense, however, we can only claim to represent the working class to the extent that we are active in the workers’ own field of battle; to the extent that we are growing among the advanced guard of the organised workers in the factories, mines and on the farms; to the extent that we are organising, mobilising and drawing wider and wider layers of the working class into conscious struggle.

How does Sactu stand in the light of this test today?

In asking these questions, no disrespect is intended to comrades engaged in the most difficult and dangerous work of our struggle, the work at home, nor indeed to those heroes of Sactu’s history who have made great personal sacrifices and accepted great suffering, even death, as a result. It is rather out of loyalty to them and to the whole future development of Sactu and the workers’ struggle that we need to ask frankly and try to answer questions about the adequacy of our own methods and work.

It is a striking fact of the 1970s that the resurgence of trade unionism among African workers, and the building of new open independent unions especially since 1973, has not been matched by our efforts to build the revolutionary underground trade union organisation which we have acknowledged to be essential.

I would ask comrades of the National Executive Committee to consider what the root cause of this is. Is it not the result of a lack of political clarity in our own ranks about the importance of trade union work and the role of a revolutionary trade union organisation in the struggle for power?

Common Misconceptions Which Hamper Our Work

(a) About the Effect of Repression

It is sometimes said that repression by the regime has prevented the building of underground organisation on the part of Sactu. Surely this cannot be the answer. On the contrary, it was the repression which created the necessity for underground work. Admittedly repression has brought with it some very serious difficulties, great dangers and great risks – but the task of leaders of underground organisation is precisely to adapt the methods of work to the difficulties imposed by the enemy.

The remarkable development of informal underground co-ordination and leadership, revealed in the 1973 Natal strikes and the recent general strikes, shows what the workers on their own initiative have been able to achieve. This is no substitute for our own work, but it shows that some of the foundations have already been dug. It is a sign to us of Sactu’s own great potential, through concerted and correct work, to build very rapidly an organised network of definite underground links between the factories, extending in due course to the mines and farms.

In the conditions of repression in South Africa, with the extreme sophistication and brutality of the police methods, it is not every kind of ‘underground’ work which can succeed. Inward-looking conspiratorial groups, for example, tend to be short-lived, suffering elimination one-by-one. Only underground organisation which is a living part of the concrete existence and everyday struggles of the mass of the oppressed workers, can survive and flourish in South Africa.

We all recognise that the necessary basic form of organisation in these conditions must consist of small groups of active workers, kept secret from the bosses and the regime. But it is only when the task of building and linking these groups has been carried out on a large-scale, that our underground organisation will be inoculated against destruction by informers and preserved from the constant war of attrition by the regime.

This is the basis of the golden rule of underground organisation that the only effective underground work is mass work. This is the secret which underlay the success of the M-Plan in the areas where it was implemented, and it is of equally vital importance in the revolutionary trade union field.

From small beginnings, from foundations carefully and precisely laid, from even a handful of dedicated and trained cadres guided by policies and perspectives clearly worked out in advance, our underground organisation could rapidly expand to embrace the whole active layer of the black working class. To accomplish this, it is necessary to have confidence in the workers themselves, their initiative, boldness, inventiveness and courage.

Is this the approach which has characterised the very limited amount of organised underground work which we in Sactu have carried on over the past fifteen years? Has Sactu’s work really been devoted to the building of the foundations of a mass revolutionary trade union movement?

(b) About Trade Unions in a Revolutionary Struggle

It is sometimes argued that the realisation on the part of the Congress movement in the early 1960s that liberation could only be achieved in South Africa through force of arms has rendered Sactu’s work as a trade union organisation irrelevant.

This argument is completely wrong – it is the very opposite which is true. There is no contradiction between trade union organisation and armed struggle for state power in South Africa – and those who maintain that there is, misunderstand both trade unions and armed struggle.

A genuine revolutionary strategy for the seizure of state power in South Africa is a strategy based on mass mobilisation and organisation leading to the arming of the mass of the people for insurrection. Some of the implications of such a strategy have been noted earlier in this memorandum.

To think that ‘armed struggle’ renders trade unions irrelevant is to get the whole thing twisted round the wrong way. Someone who takes this view really has the illusion that the seizure of power is simply a military question – whereas it is primarily a political question. This mistake of militarism, if it ever took a firm hold in our ranks, would have far more ruinous consequences for our struggle than could ever be the case in less industrialised countries.

It is an elementary duty of revolutionaries to make work in the trade union movement in South Africa one of the top priorities of the whole struggle. This work is indispensable if we are to find a road to the mass of the workers, to unite them through concrete struggles towards armed self-defence and the eventual forcible seizure of power.

This is where Sactu’s role and future lies. Yet there is, it seems, no clear consensus on this within our ranks. There is, for example, the tendency (represented both on the NEC of Sactu and on the Editorial Board of Workers Unity) which holds the view that Sactu’s role is to serve as a ‘signpost’, directing the workers to Umkhonto we Sizwe. Whatever the loyal motives of the comrades who hold this view, it can only have a damaging effect on our whole struggle. Of what use is it to the mobilisation, organisation and eventual arming of the mass movement if Sactu, which should be building a stable underground network of class-conscious workers to take the lead in collective action in the factories, mines and farms, collapses itself instead into a mere agency for the recruitment of individuals for guerrilla training? Or if all the best, most advanced and most politically conscious workers’ leaders are to be removed from their living contact with the everyday struggles of the class? This ‘signpost’ idea is really nothing short of a formula for the liquidation of Sactu. Yet how widely is the view held in Sactu itself?

Along the same lines is the peculiar argument that all trade unions operating in South Africa are ‘yellow’ unions; that anyone who is not dead, in jail or out of the country is a ‘traitor’; etc., etc. In these ideas are reflected only bitter frustration and extreme distance from the workers’ movement at home. Is this to be our message to the tens-of-thousands of black workers battling in South Africa for trade union rights and recognition at this very moment? To the women sacked at Eveready in Port Elizabeth when they went on strike to demand recognition of their union? To the 500,000 African, Coloured and Indian workers who united to carry out the political general strikes in 1976? Or to the heroes of the youth and students’ movement who are still carrying on their struggle at home?

No. Such notions are not an expression of the principles of Sactu over nearly twenty-five years. They are in complete opposition to the whole approach and content of Workers Unity, Sactu’s official organ for the past two years. They are contradicted by the letter and the spirit of every page of the policy statement in Looking Forward, from which it is necessary here to quote only these few concluding lines:

Our efforts must be doubled and redoubled to build up the organisation which we need in order to co-ordinate and lead the workers’ struggle IN THE PLACES WHERE THE WORKERS ARE.

(c) About Reformism in the Trade Unions

A third argument which one often hears, and which tends to run closely in step with the other ideas previously mentioned, is the argument that trade unions in South Africa are ‘inevitably’ reformist. This, too, is altogether incorrect. In the conditions of South Africa, economic organisations of the black workers are potentially extremely explosive and revolutionary. Is there in fact any country in the world where trade unions are less inevitably reformist or more potentially revolutionary?

As was explained in Looking Forward, the crisis of apartheid and capitalism in South Africa “will force the ruling class to mount greater and greater attacks on the position of the workers, their jobs and their living standards.” Our rulers will be forced to “maintain and even increase the intensity of the repression against the masses of our people. No concessions or reforms of any real significance can be offered to ease the burden of the black workers and their families.”

Every serious economic clash in South Africa confronts the black workers with the murderous state power of the enemy, and may thus pose sharply for the workers the need for the conquest of state power. For revolutionaries working in the trade unions, the economic struggle presents opportunities at every moment to educate and raise the consciousness of their fellow workers about the political struggle; to extend a revolutionary underground base beneath the open union structures; to campaign against reformist bureaucrats who control the unions from the top; and eventually, by painstaking work, to transform the unions into organs of the workers’ own revolutionary struggle.

So direct and obvious is the link in South Africa between the economic and political struggle, that reformist leaders are compelled (and will increasingly be compelled) to renounce the economic demands of the workers – to water them down, depress wage claims, obstruct economic strikes, stifle inner-union democracy, advance policies of appeasement towards the bosses and even (in some cases) engage in underhand collaboration with the bosses, the labour department and the security police against the workers.

The only firm platform for the economic struggle of the working class is a revolutionary platform. The trade union movement can only fulfil its responsibility to the working class, and indeed to the whole of society, by consciously linking the struggle for better wages and conditions to the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the apartheid regime and the expropriation of the capitalist exploiters.

For revolutionaries to turn their backs on the trade unions means to abandon these organisations to opportunist and reformist leadership. If there is anything that needs explaining, it is not how revolutionaries can work in the trade unions, but how reformists have managed to maintain a grip on the black workers’ unions in South Africa in these revolutionary times.

The only basis on which it can be said that trade unions are ‘inevitably’ reformist in South Africa, is if it is imagined that they must ‘inevitably’ confine themselves to legal work. But that is precisely the question to which Sactu is called upon to supply the practical answer!

Could reformists retain their grip on the trade union movement in South Africa if we devoted every ounce of energy and determination to really building Sactu as a revolutionary underground organisation inside South Africa?

Imperialist Influence on the Trade Union Movement

At the present time the efforts of the imperialist powers to frustrate the revolutionary struggle in Southern Africa are being stepped-up enormously. The struggle in South Africa itself is more and more preoccupying the attention of these powers, whose central aim is to keep our country under capitalist rule and thus subject to imperialist control and exploitation.

While great numbers of trade unionists in the imperialist countries are rallying to the support of the oppressed workers and people of South Africa, there are to be found in certain of the Western trade union bodies elements who actively further imperialist aims.

From these quarters a sustained campaign against Sactu is presently being mounted.

At the root of this campaign is a hatred and fear of Sactu’s revolutionary principles and policies – the integral connection which Sactu potentially represents between the workers’ economic struggle and the whole liberation movement. But, ironically, they dare not attack us on the basis of these policies, which are overwhelmingly acceptable not only to black workers in South Africa but to broad layers of the rank-and-file of the trade unions in their own countries.

Remaining silent on the subject of our policies, these elements proceed to promote their own reformist policies among the trade union officials in South Africa, oiling their way with large sums of money. Their aim is precisely to bind the unions to a ‘non-political’ (!) course; to separate the workers from the liberation movement; to confine the workers’ struggle to the most conservative economic demands.

What is the present thrust of their campaign against Sactu? That we are doing nothing in South Africa – that Sactu is a clique of exiles. Regardless of the sources from which this now comes, we have to recognise that this is a very damning charge indeed. Can it be effectively countered by pointing to any concrete evidence that we are building our forces in South Africa? Under clandestine conditions it is, of course, never possible to provide details – but the extent of our activities and influence, our presence or absence from the field of struggle, will always make itself visible by indirect means.

One of the surest tests of the work of any underground organisation is the extent to which its sections abroad are clearly in touch with the mood of the masses, and the intricacies of various disputes and strikes. It is frankly embarrassing to find that, in the case of almost every major workers’ action that occurs in South Africa, we know less about it than either the international press or the reformists at the head of some of the trade union bodies in the imperialist countries.

The result of this is that, through our own deficiencies, we are actually supplying the political ammunition for the imperialists to use against us.

Even more serious, of course, than the charges which the international agencies of trade union reformism fling against us, are their own unimpeded activities in the trade union field in South Africa. The heightened interest and intervention in South Africa by leading officials of bodies such as the ICFTU and the AFL-CIO have as their aim to ward-off the danger of revolution through the cultivation of reformist leadership and policies in the black trade unions.

We have the responsibility to see to it that these efforts do not succeed – but we can only do that if we are ahead of them in the field! Our answer to them must be to organise, organise, organise – and fight on that basis until reformism and all opportunity for imperialist influence has been rooted-out of the workers’ movement in South Africa.

Sactu is Vital to the Victory of the Workers’ Struggle

In pointing to our weaknesses and deficiencies, I do not wish at all to strike a negative note. The workers of South Africa have never more urgently needed a trade union organisation with the principles and policies of Sactu than they do today. Our task is to build Sactu to answer that need.

Sactu is the only organisation presently in existence and with a tradition of working class allegiance, which is capable of combining:

• national leadership and co-ordination of the workers’ struggle in the trade union field on the basis of policies of non-racialism, workers’ unity and the genuine independence of the workers’ movement

WITH

• the necessary building of underground organisation to sustain the trade unions on a revolutionary course, and effectively link them to the whole liberation struggle.

Despite the weakness of our own work over the past fifteen years, our organisation remains vitally important to the victory of the workers’ struggle and to the liberation of South Africa.

Part 3 – The Policies of Sactu

The strength of Sactu and of Workers Unity lies in our basic principles and policies. The established policies of Sactu provide a continuing firm foundation for all the new situations which arise and which our organisation has to prepare itself to meet. Over the past two years in Workers Unity, in numerous articles on various subjects:

• We have shown the inseparable connection between the apartheid system and capitalism; between the oppression of the black working people and their exploitation.
• We have explained why the struggle against apartheid is rooted in class struggle, and why freedom cannot be secured without smashing the power of the capitalist class.
• We have emphasised the leading role of the working class in the struggle for national liberation, and the central importance of mass struggle.
• We have stressed the vital importance of workers’ organisation in South Africa on the basis of policies of workers’ unity and the independence of the trade unions.
• We have stated Sactu’s task of working to build the necessary underground foundation for a revolutionary trade union movement in South Africa.
• We have affirmed the alliance between Sactu and the ANC.

Demands as Bridges to the Revolution

In taking up the great social issues of unemployment, homelessness and poverty, we have explained that these stem not only from the oppression of blacks under apartheid, but fundamentally from the capitalist system. Not a single serious and lasting improvement in the conditions of life of the mass of our people is possible while this system remains.

We have therefore explained the revolutionary conclusions that must be drawn from the daily hardships and suffering of our people.

In advancing our demands, we have sought to build bridges from the economic to the political, from the desire for reforms to a realisation of the necessity for revolution. Thus, our economic demands are formulated in such a way that they clearly answer the concrete needs of the people in their daily lives – but cannot be secured in practice except through the overthrow of the apartheid regime and (because they come up against the barriers of the capitalist system) on the basis of the transition to socialism.

By organising and struggling on the basis of these demands, the mass of the workers will be drawn through experience towards revolutionary consciousness and action.

It is necessary to dwell a moment on this question because there is often a confusion among revolutionaries about the importance of the immediate ‘economic’ demands of the workers in a struggle for state power. Some think that economic demands cannot be revolutionary because they are asking for improvement under the present system and the present regime.

The answer to this is that revolution arises precisely out of the inability of the regime and the system to satisfy the concrete needs and demands of the working people, including first and foremost their economic demands. Thus the task of conscious revolutionaries is to link the everyday demands of the working people to the necessity for the seizure of state power and the building of a new social system that can and will satisfy these needs.

The mistake of thinking that economic demands are not and cannot be revolutionary, leads one down a slippery slope into a whole number of other mistakes as well. There is a very close connection here between this first mistake and some of the confusions referred to earlier – e.g., the idea that trade unions are ‘inevitably’ reformist; that everyone who wants to struggle must leave the country; etc. Also related to it is the tendency which one sometimes finds for people to merely repeat slogans calling for the seizure of power – without showing the concrete steps which the mass struggle needs to take in order to reach that point. This invariably leads to frustration when the masses do not instantly respond to the rousing appeals, and this in turn is only one step-away from desperation, the abandoning of the mass movement, and the attempt to substitute for it the more obedient explosive power of dynamite and guns.

The answer again can only be an all-round strategy for the mobilisation of the masses and the arming of the mass movement for the eventual seizure of power.

How do we correctly link the workers’ economic demands to the revolution? This is an art which we can fully master only when we are actively involved in leading the actual struggles of the mass of workers themselves. But there is one basic rule, which we have tried to follow in Workers Unity. This is to put forward demands which are supported by the workers as clearly right and reasonable, but which strike at the very roots of apartheid and the capitalist system. They are demands, in other words, which cannot be conceded by our enemy – in some cases not at all, in others at least not on any permanent basis.

Within the framework of these demands, we then struggle to advance and defend every partial gain made and victory won, but always bringing to the fore our full programme and the necessity for revolution.

While Sactu, as a trade union organisation, stresses economic demands, we do not content ourselves with the purely economic. Consistent with Sactu’s approach since its foundation, we strive to generalise the workers’ life experience of factory and township, mine and farm, to its necessary political conclusions. We have to bring out in practice – not merely through the demands, but through struggles organised round the demands – the total incapacity of the system in South Africa (or any reforms within that system) to provide a decent life for the working people.

For example, our wage demand combines two aspects. Firstly, it sets the minimum wage at an entirely reasonable level of R50 a week for all workers – approximately what the workers know they need to live a basically decent and healthy life. This is impossible to achieve while capitalism has its strangle-hold on the development of the South African economy. Secondly, our wage demand adds another element. It prepares the workers in advance for the old trick of the capitalist class under pressure – to raise wages and then, in order to maintain profits, to eat the wage increase away again at the first opportunity with higher prices. Therefore, the minimum wage demand also insists that the bosses must agree to automatic future wage rises whenever prices rise. This also completely undercuts the capitalist argument that wage rises cause price rises.

In the few countries of the world where the ruling class agreed, during the economic boom, to link wage rises automatically to price rises, they are now engaged in serious struggles with the organised workers to force a retreat from this position. A demand by the workers for ‘index-linking’ is no substitute for their own strength and action, but rather an important focus for struggle and the development of revolutionary consciousness among the workers.

Perhaps the clearest combination of concrete demands, formulated so as to bring out their revolutionary character, which we have so far carried in Workers Unity, is to be found in Issue No. 9 (May 1978). There we deal with a number of questions arising out of the negotiations between the registered unions and the bosses in the metal industry over wages and the job colour bar. The political implications of these demands are obvious.

• For a national minimum wage of R50 for a 40-hour week!
• For reasonable differentials in the wages of skilled workers, on a single wage scale agreed among all the workers before any negotiations with the bosses! No separate bargaining with the bosses by skilled workers or by workers of different races!
• Automatic future increases for all workers, linked to price rises!
• Abolish all discrimination on the basis of race or sex, in jobs, wages and working conditions!
• Equal pay for equal work!
• No redundancies! Work-sharing with no loss of pay!
• Technical training for all workers to be paid for by the employers!

Our approach has been to build our fighting demands as solid bridges to the revolution. In practice, however, it will be impossible to develop or even sustain this approach unless we are actively involved in organising workers and engaging ourselves in the struggles of their daily lives. Sactu’s set of fifteen fighting demands will not endure like the tablets of Moses – they need to be constantly updated, checked against the changes taking place in the factories and townships, tested against the successes and failures of real battles, and so on.

As things now stand, it is becoming increasingly difficult in Workers Unity to make a practical contribution, whether through general guidance or the putting forward of specific demands, to any actual struggle involving workers in South Africa. We simply lack the facts – and we shall not get the facts until we are working on the ground.

Policies on Tactics

Every bit as important as the formulation of our demands is the role which we must play in providing answers and leadership in relation to the main tactical questions which arise in the workers’ struggle. Again, we have to fight for revolutionary tactics – tactics leading the workers’ movement towards the eventual seizure of power – against the reformist tactics which are put forward in order to frustrate this development.

Questions of tactics provide some of the most difficult and complex problems that the organised workers’ movement has to deal with, because correct tactics are generally impossible without the deepest and clearest political understanding. We cannot play our vital part in helping to resolve these problems, and in providing and training tactical leadership in the workers’ everyday struggles, if we remain on the sidelines or fail to commit our full energies to the work at home.

Fundamental questions of how to organise and how to struggle which confronted the trade union movement of the black workers in the early 1960s, with the systematic repression in the aftermath of Sharpeville, remain unanswered in practice to this day.

With the resurgence of open trade union organisation among African workers since 1972, a whole number of important tactical (or even, in some cases, strategical) questions arose. Anyone who has been active in the field during this period knows the intense discussions and debates – many of them still not entirely resolved – which have taken place among those concerned.

Here are just a few examples of questions which had to be answered:

Whether the organisation of African workers under the present repressive conditions should take the form of public and open trade unions, seeking the tolerance of the law. If so, whether the unions should be built on an industrial basis; or rather as general unions with an industrial sub-structure.

What the policy should be towards the government’s works committee system. Whether works committees, like liaison committees, should be totally boycotted. Or whether the policy should be to make use of the cover of works committees, as elected bodies of workers alone, in order to safeguard the work of activists in laying democratic foundations for trade unions. How changing conditions in different areas have affected these tactics.

Has Sactu ever fully considered and taken policy decisions on these questions? In the struggle at home, of course, many other and more difficult questions have also arisen:

• What emphasis should be given to education and training, including literacy training, in the development of the trade unions. What content these courses should have, what line they should reflect and how far they can afford to go within the limits of legal work.
• How to conduct a struggle against reformist tendencies, and tendencies towards bureaucracy and undemocratic manipulation by union officials.
• How to oppose correctly the efforts made by Buthelezi to take the Natal unions under the domination of his bourgeois-nationalist Inkatha organisation.
• What, in practice, the independence of the workers’ organisations means. How to fight for independence and defend it.
• How to work towards the unity of African workers with all other black workers. How, in practice, to maintain towards the white workers also the standpoint of the necessity for workers’ unity.
• How to orient the independent unions towards the rank-and-file of the registered unions in order to win them in action to a programme of the unity of the working class.
• How to prepare the independent unions for the serious practical difficulties which are being prepared for them by the Wiehahn Commission.

In reality, the answers to these questions can only be found in the field of practice, through the effective combination of legal and illegal work. Since the resurgence of the African trade unions from about 1972, can we say that Sactu has really come to grips with these questions and played a leading role underground among the workers to show the way forward?

Yet, these are only a small part of the issues and problems confronting the workers’ movement in South Africa. Far more difficult and important are the great questions of the tactics needed fully to develop the organised workers’ movement towards its revolutionary goals and the seizure of power.

Towards Power

These are some of the practical issues which Sactu ought already to be studying and discussing, and which Workers Unity and our other publications ought to be writing about:

• The possibilities and the limitations of strike action under present conditions in South Africa.
• Other forms of force which are available to the workers to use in an organised and collective way in support of their demands.
• The relationship which it is necessary to build, through our underground work, between factory or purely trade union struggle, and movements which include the townships and the community at large.
• Tactics which are open to the workers in the struggle to extend effective control over their daily lives, at home and at work, to push back and hold at bay the dictatorship of the bosses, supervisors and police.
• Lessons which we can learn from the experience of the workers’ struggle in other countries, especially under extreme repression, such as in Spain under the dictatorship of Franco.
• The significance of the general strike in our revolutionary struggle in South Africa. Its strengths and limitations. Precisely what kind of organisation and mobilisation is necessary to support such action.
• The role in the struggle to be played by occupations of factories and in what circumstances. How we envisage the mass movement of the workers developing to the point where seizures of mines, factories and farms becomes possible.
• How we envisage the arming of the organised workers eventually to take place. What our views are on the circumstances in which it is tactically correct for workers organised in trade unions to resort to force of arms in the course of strikes and other struggles, and in what circumstances this is likely to be tactically incorrect and self-defeating.
• The role which the trade unions should play in the eventual insurrection and armed seizure of state power.

These and similar questions will have to be tackled if Sactu’s work of building an underground trade union organisation and leadership is to be seriously undertaken and carried to its conclusion. Of course, for the most part, such questions cannot be answered in the abstract, or purely theoretically. It is only by applying our policies and method in the course of practical work that these questions can be properly resolved to the advantage of the whole struggle.

Even, it seems to me, our tactics in regard to such a relatively straight-forward matter as the Wiehahn Commission, and our policy towards Fosatu (the new trade union federation in the arena of legal work), can only be fully worked out from the vantage point of active engagement in the organisation of workers.

The Wiehahn Commission, and the legislation which follows it, will almost certainly lead to a major crisis for the independent unions. Will Sactu be prepared to meet that crisis in the field of organisation at home? Will we be ready for the next wave of industrial strikes, like Natal 1973? Will we be ready for the next general strike and the next Soweto uprising?

As was said in the 1978 Political Report (Looking Forward):

“The South African struggle has entered a period of tumult in which every organisation – trade union and political – will be put to the severest test. Events will fall like a sledgehammer on those which fail to measure up.” History has so far dealt us no final blows. But every day developments at home are preparing to confront Sactu with test after serious test.

If Workers Unity is to progress, if Sactu is to fulfil its potential and play its vitally important role in the revolutionary struggle of the workers of South Africa, 99% of our energies, time and resources will have to be devoted to a single task: THE BUILDING OF SACTU WITHIN SOUTH AFRICA.

No turning back!

We have very big tasks, and the comrades on the NEC who lead Sactu have a very big responsibility. To gear our whole organisation for the tasks at home will not, I believe, be accomplished without a struggle. In our own ranks we will have to overcome the tendency to confine Sactu to the comfort of a diplomatic role in exile. There is the tendency, referred to earlier, to minimise and subordinate Sactu’s role in the revolution – a tendency bound up with the misconceptions and confusions about trade union work which have already been described.

If we are to be frank about it, even on the Editorial Board of Workers Unity, it has been necessary over the past year or more to wage a struggle in order to defend the line of the paper and of the green pamphlet, Looking Forward, against a tendency to dilute it and reverse it.

There are comrades who would prefer us not to speak so clearly about the working class, about its tasks, its leading role and the need for its independent organisation. They seek to separate the struggle for national liberation from the struggle against capitalist exploitation. They say Sactu is against the capitalists, but not against capitalism! Sactu has never stood for socialism, they say, despite the fact that our constitution itself (in the carefully chosen legal language of the 1950s) proclaims the “ultimate objective of complete emancipation”.

In recent weeks it has even been necessary to struggle on the Editorial Board for approval to include in Workers Unity a demand for an end to first-class, second-class and third-class carriages on the railways! This is a symptom of the obstacles we now face in trying to defend and develop the revolutionary working class standpoint of Sactu in the pages of Workers Unity.

Comrades, there must be no turning back. The clear principles and basic policies of Sactu, so well set out in our constitution, have more than stood the test of time. The application of these policies and principles to the present situation, in the first year of Workers Unity and in the General Secretary’s Political Report of 1978 (Looking Forward), has already been fully endorsed by the NEC at its meeting last year.

Since then Workers Unity has maintained and expounded the same basic approach. There is room for improvement – yes, considerable improvement of the kind already described – but its basic lines have been correct. Let us go forward together on these lines with a clear lead from the NEC.

The acid test of all our words will be provided by the workers at home, as we tackle the task of rebuilding Sactu as an underground organisation in the mainstream of the mass movement.

Robert Petersen

Editor of Workers Unity London, 8 April 1979

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

Continue to Letter to NEC from the dismissed Editor (17 July 1979)

[1] Certain passages of this memorandum have been omitted here for security reasons. The omissions are indicated at the relevant points by the insertion of dots. The passages deal with organisational questions and facts which are not crucial to the political argument. [Original footnote]