Youth and Workers Join Forces! -

Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 4 (October 1981).

by Yusuf Fakir and Paul Storey

Black youth have demonstrated time and time again their willingness to sacrifice their lives to free themselves from racism, oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Capitalism has brought to the overwhelming majority of black youth nothing but permanent unemployment, grinding poverty, gutter education, an absence of sports or recreational facilities, and a bleak future in the prison-like environment of the townships.

Over the past years there has been a constant ferment among the youth, battling for ideas and a correct programme to take the struggle forward.

The problems facing black youth are part and parcel of the national oppression and wage slavery inflicted on the black population as a whole. Experience has begun to drive home the lesson that the power to defeat the regime and change society lies in the hands of the working class.

This growing awareness was reflected, for example, by AZASO’s congress in July which recognised capitalism as the root of national oppression in South Africa, and stressed the importance of the trade unions in the struggle for political power.

The youth have begun to turn these lessons into practice. Increasingly they are seeing the need to organise with the workers and give support to strikes.

The mass struggles of 1976 and 1980 have shown how important it is to bring the magnificent fighting capacity of the youth fully into the ranks of the workers’ movement. There are hundreds of thousands of militant youth, with undefeated will, burning with anger, who are determined to transform society.

Yet, by their own efforts alone, the youth have been unable to enforce their demands. Through united struggle with the youth, the trade unions should begin to take up these demands.

The youth movement needs to become fully conscious of its working class roots, and to boldly define itself as the youth arm of the rising labour movement. This will in turn speed up the process of clarifying political ideas among the youth.

Trotsky made a point to young revolutionaries in America in 1938, which is very relevant to our situation also:

The basic attribute of socialist youth … lies in the readiness to give itself fully and completely to the cause of socialism. Without heroic self-sacrifice, courage, resoluteness, history in general does not move forward. But self-sacrifice is not enough. What is necessary is to have a clear understanding of the unfolding course of development and the appropriate methods of action. This can be gained only through theory and living experience. The most flaming enthusiasm soon cools-off and evaporates if it does not find this timely support in a clear understanding of the laws of historical development.

Therefore it is vital for the youth to take up the study of Marxism in a systematic way. But this should not be approached abstractly. Trotsky speaks of “theory and living experience” which need to be combined.

The essential experience of the working class, which moulds its whole outlook, is the experience of production and of day-to-day exploitation under the heel of the bosses. This experience of the adult workers needs to be absorbed also into the bloodstream of the youth – students and unemployed alike.

It is by participating in the life and struggles of the workers’ organisations that the youth can develop their revolutionary capacities to the full. At the same time they will see more concretely how the apartheid system is bound up with capitalism itself, and that unemployment, poverty, migrant labour and influx control can only be overcome on the basis of a planned economy under the control and management of the working class itself.

This will lead the youth movement all the more quickly to openly proclaim the national and democratic demands of our struggle as elements – central elements – of a vitally necessary socialist programme for the revolution ahead.

How can the linking of the youth and workers’ movement be achieved practically? An important indicator of the way forward has been SAAWU’s call for the formation of a youth section.

The only way for the youth movement to develop now as the youth arm of the workers’ movement is to link up organisationally with the independent trade unions. The unions are the way in which the mass of workers are becoming consciously and deliberately organised as workers. They will remain the basic machinery of working class organisation, and central elements in the struggle for workers’ power.

If the workers’ movement already possessed its own mass political party, enabling tens and hundreds of thousands of workers and their families to participate regularly and openly in organised political life – then it would be possible to pose the tasks for the youth somewhat differently. Then we could envisage the development of a socialist youth movement directly as an arm of the mass workers’ party.

In different conditions, that is the way the movement is developing, for example, in some of the advanced capitalist countries.

In South Africa, however, that is still the music of the future. Today, the growing independent trade union movement of black workers is laying the foundations on which the mass of the workers will carry forward their struggle, both for industrial and political demands. On this foundation, initially through underground work, the working class will develop its political organisation.

Strongest Sides

We think this process will take place round the banner of the ANC, which the workers are taking-up as their own. It will also lead, in due course, to the mass of workers flooding into the ranks of the ANC, preparing the way for democratising and transforming the ANC for the tasks of the socialist revolution.

Such a perspective needs to be clearly raised to provide the bridge between the militant black youth and the workers’ movement.

It will prove to be no easy task to link the youth movement to the trade unions. Boldness, tact, patience and far-sightedness will need to prevail on both sides. Some young comrades will need to resist the idea that they have a great deal to ‘teach’ the older workers. Trade unionists will need to guard against a tendency in their midst to conservatism and a narrowness of outlook on the struggle.

Several times over the past five years the youth movement has sprung forward to occupy the centre of the political stage. The youth have achieved an unequalled reputation for militancy and self-sacrifice, and a sense of national unity in a single movement.

In comparison, especially earlier on, the independent trade union movement has appeared to the youth as rather lumbering, and has so far not united its forces under one federation.

At the same time, the enormous difficulty for the youth of laying down solid organisational foundations, or of achieving a single national organisation, has become very obvious. This results from the position of students and youth in society, while the workers themselves, rooted in daily production, naturally build more steady, if more slow-moving organisations, ‘from the ground up’.

Today, however, it should be possible to begin to fuse together the strongest sides of both main parts of our working class movement – the youth and the workers themselves.

This would open the way towards a firmly-based national youth movement, founded on the rock of organised labour. In turn it would add whole battalions of militant young strugglers to the ranks of the trade unions.

But the condition for such a development is the unity of the independent unions.

The youth as a whole will quite correctly be unwilling to be divided into numerous ‘youth sections’ of the various unions. This would seem a step backwards as far as they are concerned.

Therefore the building of the trade union united front also provides the only route to the creation of a mass socialist youth organisation linked to the trade unions.

To bring this into reality, it is vital for the leaders of all the independent unions and of the youth organisations to hold discussions together towards the building of a national youth movement as a conscious part of building the trade union united front.

The local solidarity committees called for by the Cape Town conference of independent unions can become concrete bridges between the youth and the workers, discussing how to link the struggles in factory, township and school.

Activists in the trade unions and the youth organisations should explain these tasks to their fellows in order to commit their organisations to such a course of action.

Here, too, the emphasis needs to be placed on a programme of action, round specific demands on which there is general agreement, to mobilise the youth and workers together:

Free and compulsory education for all;
Training facilities for all workers;
Special leave for all workers as of right to improve their qualifications and develop skills;
A minimum starting wage of R90 a week for all workers;
Unemployment benefits equal to the minimum wage for all who cannot find suitable work;
The provision of adequate housing for all and the removal of all restriction on residence.

These are the kind of demands around which united campaigns can be prepared.

With campaigns on this basis, hundreds of thousands of young workers and unemployed youth and students who are as yet unorganised could be attracted. The youth movement could serve as a vehicle by which whole new layers of working class youth are drawn into the organised labour movement, swelling its ranks and transforming the unions themselves.

United in action, the movement of the workers and youth together can prepare the way to blow the apartheid system to shreds.