On 27 March 1985, the NEC of the British Labour Party resolved that: “Regions, CLPs and affiliates have no contacts with SALEP, do not use its materials or allow it facilities and publish an Advice Note outlining the NEC’s principal criticisms of SALEP.”
This decision was bulldozered through the International Committee and the NEC, with a minimum of discussion, despite the opposition of left-wingers.
The Southern African Labour Education Project is an education project undertaken by Southern African workers, youth, and socialists. It provides socialist education materials for the workers’ and youth movement in Southern Africa which are not being produced within the region itself, and assists in building and strengthening direct contacts between Southern African workers and the workers’ movement internationally.
Every Labour Party member and labour movement activist in Britain – let alone in Southern Africa – will be curious to know what possible justification there could be for taking such extreme bureaucratic measures – of proscription from the Labour Party – against educational work of this kind.
The Labour Party, which SALEP encourages all its co-workers in Britain to be actively involved in, should be in the forefront of assisting the South African workers’ movement in securing socialist education and building direct links.
An examination of what lies behind this decision reveals that the right-wing leaders who presently have a majority in the Labour Party NEC are engaging not merely in an unwarranted witchhunt against SALEP – but a frontal assault on the fundamental goals and aspirations of the growing revolutionary movement of the black oppressed in South Africa: goals and aspirations which SALEP, within the limits of its resources and objectives, has sought to reflect and encourage.
“Charges”
The NEC decision emerged out of a three-month “enquiry” into SALEP initiated by the International Committee, and the production of a 21-page report by the Labour Party International Department.
The report is an incredible tissue of falsifications and fabrications, which barely manages to string together two political ideas in a coherent way.
Its principal “charge” is that “SALEP’s interpretation of events puts it completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa.”
Incredible as it may seem, among the arguments used to support this “charge” are:
- that “a central feature of SALEP’s approach is its heavy emphasis on wage levels in South Africa”;
- that SALEP does not draw a rigid dividing line between trade union education and political education;
- that SALEP stands for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter, the programme of the African National Congress;
- that SALEP believes the struggle for democracy in South Africa cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism;
Labour movement activists in Britain, let alone in South Africa, will be astonished to learn that these positions are “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” – let alone that they constitute “crimes” for which the punishment should be bureaucratic quarantining and proscription from the British Labour Party.
In reality, as we will show, this so-called “spectrum” of “mainstream opinion” rules out the opinions of those in struggle in the factories, the townships, the schools, etc.; it rules out the opinions of the trade unions, the youth organisations, and those struggling within the country to build a mass United Democratic Front and a future mass African National Congress.
In fact this so-called “mainstream spectrum”, when examined, represents only those who oppose the full implementation of the Freedom Charter, refuse to struggle for democracy against the capitalist class as well as the apartheid regime, oppose the arming of the workers in South Africa – and are even unwilling to give too “heavy” an emphasis to the struggle against starvation wages.
This is a very narrow – and very right-wing – “spectrum” of opinion – both in the British and the South African labour movement!
The NEC report, amazingly, also is bitterly critical of the recent visit made by striking British miner Roy Jones to the South African NUM, the single largest democratic trade union in South Africa. This visit was an excellent example of what direct links can achieved, and was warmly welcomed by the many black workers and youth that Roy met, as well as by those in the British labour movement who have heard his report.
His visit had the historic consequence that the SA NUM made the first-ever donation by a democratic SA trade union to a union in an advanced capitalist country, and that Roy Jones was made the first white member of the South African NUM.
Direct links of this kind, claims the NEC report in a shameless lie, are not supported by the non-racial democratic trade unions inside South Africa and should not be encouraged!
Not content with such false and reactionary ‘political’ argument, the report engages in suppression and falsification of basic facts. Founders and co-workers of SALEP – including black workers and youth – have a record of political struggle, as ANC members and trade unionists, against the regime in South Africa. Some have endured banning, detention, and imprisonment. Those who compiled the report knew this full well. Yet the report paints a picture of the supporters of SALEP as solely “white intellectuals.”
It is scandalous enough that such reactionary and false arguments should be advanced and endorsed by leaders of the British Labour Party.
What is more disturbing still is that the NEC report claims the mantle of authority of the African National Congress and the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
Labour Party Conference policy, it states, calls for the NEC to “jointly determine the details of policy with representatives of the African National Congress [and] the South African Congress of Trade Unions… With this in mind, this paper was prepared upon the basis of discussions with the above organisations as well as a meeting with SALEP.”
Within South Africa, the workers and youth are striving to build the African National Congress as a mass organisation democratically controlled by the organised working class, as the vehicle for carrying through the revolutionary struggle of all the oppressed for democracy and socialism. Members and supporters of SALEP join in this shoulder-to-shoulder with all other active strugglers.
But in exile, unfortunately, the African National Congress is dominated by middle class nationalists and the South African Communist Party. Instead of basing their policies on the revolutionary and socialist aspirations of the mass of the oppressed, they have argued that apartheid can be ended on the basis of compromises with “progressive” capitalists, inside and outside South Africa.
For years – while black workers were patiently laying the foundations of militant independent trade unions (now grown to more than half-a-million strong) – these exiled leaders argued that no genuine trade unionism could exist under the repressive conditions of apartheid. They remain opposed to the building of direct links between the workers’ movement inside South Africa and internationally.
They fear the quest of the organised workers and youth for genuine Marxist methods and policies on which to build the movement in the country. In recent years, at the behest of the SACP leadership, there has been a bureaucratic suppression of Marxist ideas within the ranks of the ANC in exile.
Who is behind these “charges”?
The witchhunt against SALEP must seem a mystery to activists in the workers’ movement – until it is understood that this has been instigated to serve the interests of a narrow right-wing Stalinist clique in exile. They are hysterically hostile to the modest contribution which SALEP is making towards socialist education and the development of direct links. Now they have succeeded in carrying their attack on SALEP into the ruling bodies of the British Labour Party with the assistance of right-wingers plus certain so-called ‘lefts’ over whom they exercise an influence.
Not accidentally, the investigation into SALEP was launched (on the Labour Party NEC’s Youth Sub-Committee), by an official of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS). This organisation is presently led by a faction of self-styled ‘lefts’, whose real politics are shown in the fact that they sought to discourage British students from actively supporting the miners’ strike, and who continued to support the state-controlled Polish student union during the 1980-81 workers’ uprising against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
This NOLS official launched his attack by opposing funds for a leaflet produced by the Labour Party Young Socialists and SALEP in support of the mid-1984 struggle of the black South African mineworkers for a living wage.
The International Department report, later endorsed by the NEC, was “researched” by another ex-student leader of the same stripe, now employed by the Labour Party headquarters.
Not content with launching this divisive witch-hunt on their own account, moreover, this narrow clique of Stalinists and their supporters, is relying on and collaborating with right-wing leaders of the British labour movement who presently dominate the NEC and other committees of the Labour Party.
Thus in the end the so-called “spectrum of mainstream of progressive opinion” with which the NEC report identifies, reduces, when closely examined, to the class-collaborationist interests of the right-wing of the labour movement, which coincide on this issue with the narrow factional interests of Stalinists.
Perhaps it is not coincidental that the same right-wing elements in the British trade union movement, at the same time that this attack is taking place on the South African workers’ movement, have launched an organisation called ‘Mainstream’ to counter-attack against the growing influence of the Broad Left within the British trade union movement.
Nor is the attack confined to Marxism within the South African labour movement. In the same month that the NEC report was issued, Marxist trade unionists in Zimbabwe (including supporters of SALEP) campaigning for democratic unions and socialist workers’ education, were detained – and some tortured – by the Mugabe government.
“One up for Mugabe”, trumpeted the right-wing Tory newspaper, the Daily Telegraph,[1] who saw in this evidence that the so-called ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Mugabe was without doubt bowing to capitalist ‘realities’.
Scandalously – in another example of the rapprochement between so-called “Marxist-Leninists” and Labour’s right-wing – Labour Party General Secretary Mortimer blamed these detentions not on the Zimbabwe government – but on the detained activists themselves![2]
Not only in Southern Africa, but in Britain and other countries, the ideas of genuine Marxism are under concerted attack from the right-wing leaders of the labour movement and the “Communist” party leaders too. It is a sign of their inability to face-up to the deepening world crisis of capitalism, which is bringing the big battalions of the international labour movement into renewed struggle for workers’ power and socialism – and into renewed struggle to transform their own organisations into fighting democratic instruments for that task.
Today there are greater demands being placed on SALEP from the movement in Southern Africa to carry forward our work than has been the case since SALEP’s formation. It is to fulfil these needs that our energies must be directed.
At the same time, we find it necessary to reply to this attack which has been launched on SALEP, not merely to answer the ‘charges’, but to reveal what lies behind them.
We do this in the confidence that the rank-and-file of the labour movement in Britain, judging the issues on their merits, will continue to give support to SALEP’s work and campaign to reverse the decision of the NEC. Also we believe that, through clarification of the issues involved, the labour movement will be better armed to give the most effective support to the revolutionary movement of working people in South Africa against apartheid and capitalism.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).
Continue to Part 1
[1] 3 May 1985
[2] See Guardian, 3 May 1985
