Is SALEP’S “interpretation of events … completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion, both within and outside South Africa?”
This is the political ‘accusation’ levelled against SALEP in the NEC’s report.
Even were it true, it would in no way justify the bureaucratic decision to try to proscribe SALEP from the Labour Party. SALEP, like any other organisation, has the right to win support from members and bodies of the Labour Party through discussion and debate and the ability to put forward its ideas.
However, the accusation is totally without foundation.
The arguments and explanations put forward by SALEP are precisely in the ‘mainstream’ of the opinions of working people in struggle in South Africa, and of millions in the worldwide labour movement in solidarity with that struggle.
Let us examine the ‘arguments’ on which the NEC bases its accusation.
1. “A central feature of SALEP’s approach is its heavy emphasis on wage-levels in South Africa. Its first two publications – Profiteering from Cheap Labour and Asinamali!: The Workers Case provide a valuable insight into SALEP’s very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.”
It will be astounding news to workers struggling against low pay and starvation wages that “a heavy emphasis on wage levels” is “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion.”
In Britain workers look to the Labour Party and to the TUC to carry forward an implacable struggle against cheap labour, whether in Britain or anywhere in the world.
In South Africa in the 1950s, the South African Congress of Trade Unions was built around a campaign which placed a “heavy emphasis on wage levels” – the campaign for a £1-a-day minimum wage for black workers on starvation wages.
The rebuilding of the trade union movement in South Africa in the last twelve years has been based – above all – on the struggle against poverty wages, constantly eroded by rising prices; and it is a struggle which has been carried forward overwhelmingly through the weapon of illegal strike action.
Both Profiteering from Cheap Labour and Asinamali! were published by SALEP as a contribution towards arming the workers’ movement in South Africa to continue this struggle, and to strengthen solidarity with this struggle in the international labour movement.
So far “outside the spectrum” of “mainstream progressive opinion” was Profiteering, for example, that it attracted widespread attention and favourable comment in the labour movement press. Its impact was acknowledged even in the capitalist-owned media.
Within South Africa, the Transvaal Post – then the leading daily newspaper for blacks in the country, which was banned not long afterwards – devoted two front-page stories to the publication.
The first[1] was headlined: “BRITISH COMPANIES EXPOSED: BAD PAY SHOCK” – and its reporters, on the basis of the facts revealed in Profiteering, conducted a campaign to expose some of the companies involved, drawing attention to the fact that some of them were paying wages less than R20 (£11) a week in 1979.
Profiteering sparked-off investigations into companies paying low wages in SA, not only by the Post in SA, but by the Birmingham Post and the Slough Evening Mail in Britain.
Labour Weekly,[2] official organ of the British Labour Party, pointed out – from the pamphlet – that the same companies which had laid off over 200,000 workers in Britain during May and June 1980 were paying their black workers in South Africa less than one-third of the wages they paid in Britain.
The TGWU Record (October 1980) stated that Profiteering raised the question “Do you know what your employer pays its workers in South Africa?” – and the TGWU National Executive ordered 50 copies for its own use.
Labour Research[3] described it as “a very useful pamphlet”, and The Food Worker[4] said it “should prove invaluable to the labour movement”.
None of these – or other labour movement reports and reviews –needless to say, criticised SALEP for placing a “heavy emphasis” on wage-levels in South Africa.
But the publication was criticised… by the South African bosses and their spokesmen!
Defending the employers, the South African Star accused Profiteering of having a position on wages “which is couched in anti-capitalist jargon.” (Anticipating by almost five years the ‘insight’ of today’s Labour Party NEC, the Star might have added that this showed SALEP’s “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.”)
Profiteering was also one of the publications used by a United Nations body at a government conference on South Africa in Geneva. The Dutch bourgeois delegate criticised the UN’s use of “tendentious documents prepared by radical groups, including one entitled Profiteering from Cheap Labour”.[5]
To say the least, it is curious to find the same criticisms made by the South African and European bosses and their spokesmen echoed in a document of the British Labour Party.
But the NEC right-wing majority (and its so-called ‘left’ supporters) are clearly untroubled by any such coincidence. Nor have they noticed a little contradiction in the ‘charges’ they level against SALEP. We are accused, at one and the same time, of placing a “heavy emphasis on wage levels” and of conducting a “political … rather than … genuine trade union” education programme.
The real objection of the NEC is revealed in the words: “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.” All their haughty declarations shrivel into a bare defence of reformist against revolutionary ideas – to kow-towing to capitalism rather than supporting a struggle for its overthrow.
Thus they advance the charge:
2. SALEP holds the view that “the struggle (for liberation in South Africa) cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism.”
The struggle for democracy – for one-person one-vote in an undivided South Africa – is the central political issue for the mass movement.
The African majority – overwhelmingly working people and their families – demand the right to determine the policy of central government in accordance with their numbers. They demand the right to elect representatives who will set about changing the material conditions of their lives – securing decent wages and homes, jobs, education and health for all.
But the actual conditions in which the working people struggle hammer-home all the time that there can be no separation between the struggle for democracy against the apartheid regime and against the capitalist bosses.
Despite repression, despite censorship, this is the position put forward frequently and widely in the trade union, youth etc. movement and their press.
Let us take just a few examples.
Moses Mayekiso, Transvaal branch Secretary of the 40,000-strong Fosatu-affiliated Metal and Allied Workers Union, addressed its 1983 Annual General Meeting.
Since that time Moses Mayekiso has served as Fosatu representative on the committee which led the November 1984 two-day general strike in the Transvaal – a strike of nearly one million workers in the industrial heartland of South Africa. For serving on that committee Brother Mayekiso recently faced charges of ‘subversion’.
To an audience of 5,000 at the Mawu AGM Brother Mayekiso stated:
We must fight all kinds of exploitation through our strength…We believe that workers as a class should fight their own problems. As the enemy is only one – capitalism – and all other things like influx control are merely appendages…Retrenchments have taught workers that the capitalists are only interested in production and profits – not the workers.[6]
Thozamile Gqweta, President of the 70,000-strong South African Allied Workers’ Union, spoke to its Annual Conference in 1984.
Brother Gqweta has been in and out, in and out, of the regime’s torture chambers. He is presently, along with a number of leaders of the United Democratic Front, facing charges of ‘high treason’.
To this conference Brother Gqweta said:
The workers’ struggle in South Africa has entered a new and quite fascinating phase; that is the emergence of class consciousness content in their struggle for total liberation. The community struggles against removals at Cross Roads in Cape Town, the community struggles against bus fare increases at Lamontville in Durban, and the community struggles against bus fare increases in East London…are living manifestations of this class consciousness in the present phase of our working class struggle in South Africa…
Let us all look forward to the workers’ struggle ahead with rededication and hope and fight them with the consciousness of the workers and their knowledge about trade unionism to a commendable level of awareness and will drive away all their fears thus leading the way to the intensification of their struggle against capitalist exploitation.[7]
Finally, let us take a centre page article in Izwilethu, (June/July 1984), official journal of the Council of Unions of South Africa. CUSA presently claims a membership of 250,000.
This article states:
Apartheid and its Big Brother capitalism has been with us in one form or another for centuries.
It is time this comes to an end. The Workers have built up this country. It is time it belongs to them…
The real struggle is for a new system which will redistribute the wealth of this country to as many people as possible – selfish and individualistic capitalism has no place in it.
The government realises this. It is not trying to preserve an irrational racism. It is fighting for the survival of capitalism.
That is what the real struggle is all about.
Pik Botha said he was not prepared to die for apartheid in a lift. P.W.Botha agreed – adapt or die, the Wise Man said.
But what they both forgot to tell us was that they were prepared to die for capitalism. Adapt apartheid, yes, but in such a way that capitalism will not be changed.
Here spokesmen for three of the main union bodies in SA – representing an overwhelming majority of organised black workers – state clearly the inseparable connection between apartheid and capitalism.
Yet the NEC report has the audacity to claim that the view that the struggle in South Africa is against capitalism is “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion inside and outside South Africa”!
Members of the NEC should have attended the recent May Day meeting organised by 31 of the non-racial unions in a hall in the centre of Johannesburg – which was ringed, in the course of the meeting, by police armed with automatic rifles (the first time these weapons have been deployed in the centre of Johannesburg).
At this meeting, reports the bourgeois press:
Most speakers spoke in Zulu and identified capitalism as the enemy of the black working class in South Africa. Others spoke of the fight for an eight-hour day and the abolition of overtime as exploitative… Mr Sipho Radebe, of the 250,000-member Council of Unions of South Africa, said the meeting was historic because they had achieved a unity which surpassed even their own expectations.
‘Our solidarity and unity will leave the oppressors trembling with fear,’ he added.
‘No other class can set us free from our bondage, but we ourselves in the working class.’
… A speaker from the Federation of South African Trade Unions, introduced only as Ntsamani, brought most of the audience to its feet when he said capitalism was the enemy of the workers and sang and hummed: ‘Capitalism, capitalism is our enemy’.[8]
The same views dominate in the youth movement: even a journalist in the principal newspaper of the capitalist class in Britain, the Financial Times, recently conceded that, in South Africa, “in the eyes of the young, apartheid is equated with capitalism.”[9]
Of course, the bosses would like to pretend that such views do not represent the “mainstream”. Thus Harry Oppenheimer, the biggest capitalist magnate in SA, recently attacked in the Tory Sunday Times “left-wing radicals, often Marxists, who believe that racial discrimination and private enterprise are parts of the same system and should be eliminated together” who often “succeed in taking the much larger numbers, who believe in free enterprise and would like to see the blacks sharing fully in its benefits, for a ride.”[10]
Is the Labour Party NEC falling for Oppenheimer’s “interpretation of events”, rather than that of Mayekiso,Gqweta, Radebe, Ntsamani, etc., and the organisations they represent – and the whole black South African youth movement besides?
Or is it not rather the responsibility of the British Labour Party to take its cue from those in the forefront of the struggle inside South Africa, and join with them in the struggle not merely against the apartheid regime but also against the capitalist class whose profit system it defends?
3. SALEP “sees trade unions acting in the place of political parties and the ANC”.
Of course, this claim is nonsense, and the report could find no evidence for it in SALEP’s publications or anywhere else.
The trade unions are essential instruments in the day-to-day struggles of the workers, and have at the same time a vital political role to play. But, in its struggle, the working class needs a political arm as well as an industrial arm.
This is why SALEP supports the building of the African National Congress as the mass political organisation of the oppressed, under the leadership of the working class, to carry forward the revolutionary struggle against apartheid and capitalism.
On this issue, too, the International Department report cannot get matters straight. SALEP, it states, “acknowledges that workers in South Africa see the ANC as the organisation that will bring liberation”.
Working people in South Africa support the ANC, because of the role it played in the 1950s, as the vehicle through which their ranks can be politically united in mass struggle against the regime and the bosses. But, already engaged in huge battles against one of the most formidable regimes on the planet, they do not ‘see’ the ANC as something outside themselves whose leadership will ‘bring liberation’ to them, while they sit waiting for it.
From where would such ‘liberation’ be ‘brought’? Would it come as a gift from somewhere? From Botha perhaps? Or from Western imperialism? Or would it be a gift from the ‘gods’?
In reality, the more that working people move into struggle in South Africa, the more it is clear that it is through their own organised efforts alone that liberation will be fought for, and won. But, for victory, this struggle must be politically unified, in a single organisation, with a clear perspective, programme and strategy, and a leadership imbued with this.
More and more among the organised workers and the youth seek to build, for this purpose, a mass African National Congress. But, to achieve victory, it will be necessary that the ANC is built around a programme for democracy and socialism under the control of the organised working class, rallying all the oppressed.
This will require the struggle by the organised workers and the black youth for Marxist perspectives, programme, strategy and leadership within the ANC.
It is this struggle which the British Labour Party should be supporting to the hilt.
It is as a contribution to carrying forward this work that SALEP produces its educational material and assists with the strengthening of direct links.
4. SALEP “dismisses” the United Democratic Front.
Again, this charge is absolute rubbish.
In the present conditions, where the working class is not yet able to rebuild the ANC as an open mass organisation in South Africa, SALEP has warmly supported the formation of the United Democratic Front, but not without criticism.
In its last Annual Report, SALEP welcomed the formation of the United Democratic Front:
In August 1983 the United Democratic Front was launched at a huge conference outside Cape Town. Organised and unorganised workers greeted its formation with enthusiasm, hoping that here was a nationwide banner continuing the best traditions of the Congress movement of the 1950s, which would serve as a vehicle for unifying and taking forward the political struggle against the regime.
We continued:
Unfortunately, the UDF has thus far failed to live up to the expectations vested in it. This is because the leaders of important trade unions have failed to take their members into it in an organised way, transforming the UDF into an organisation led by the workers, and with a clear workers’ programme in the interests of all the oppressed.
To support it’s “charge” that SALEP has “hostility” to, and “dismisses” the UDF, the NEC report characteristically distorts the evidence. It quotes from our Annual Report the second of these paragraphs – while totally suppressing the preceding one!
SALEP, it continues, criticises the “middle class” character of the UDF leadership. Quite so.
In fact, precisely similar criticisms of the UDF leadership have been voiced, and continue to be voiced, by workers and youth inside South Africa.
The Fosatu Central Committee of October 15/16 1983, for example, resolved that “the unity of purpose created within worker-controlled organisations whose class base and purpose are clear would be lost within an organisation such as the UDF. The UDF represents a variety of class interests with no clear constitutional structure within which the majority of citizens can control the organisation.” The UDF is regarded by Fosatu, in other words, as a non-worker-controlled, i.e. middle class-controlled, organisation.
The NEC report asserts that SALEP’s criticism of the UDF “draws its meagre strength from the absence of some union groupings from its ranks” but that our “case is exaggerated”.
This is a further – and double – distortion. In the first place the “some union groupings” which remain unaffiliated to the UDF include most of those which will launch a new democratic trade union federation in the course of this year – the most representative organisation of the African workers ever, with an initial membership of some 300,000!
But, in the second place, unlike the leaders of these trade unions, SALEP has not drawn the conclusion that the workers’ answer to the problem of the middle class leadership of the UDF is to remain outside its ranks.
Let us repeat what SALEP representatives said to the International Department ‘researcher’ who interviewed us in compiling this report.
The UDF, we said, needs to be built as an organisation under the control of the workers. Trade union leaders in South Africa have said its leadership is middle class. But this criticism is made not because the workers want to drive away the middle class (on the contrary, the bulk of the middle class, oppressed by the monopolies, has an interest in ending not only apartheid but capitalism too).
But there is a big difference between an organisation rallying all the oppressed under the leadership and control of the organised workers, and the present situation of an organisation dominated by its middle class leadership.
We think it is actually a mistake for major trade unions to have stayed outside the UDF, rather than going into the UDF in an organised way and transforming it.
As we also pointed out, events have driven the unions into common action with the UDF, in the hugely successful election boycott last year, for example. Also, the UDF supported the call initiated by most of the major trade unions and the youth organisations for the two-day general strike in the Transvaal in November.
From these facts the NEC report concludes, with an undated quotation from New African magazine, that “Differences in political emphasis have been put aside.”
This is entirely to underestimate the debate that has raged in the black workers and youth movement, and continues to rage, on the political tasks of the organised workers’ movement, and the organisational means by which they can be carried forward. It is entirely to ignore the dissatisfaction felt with a UDF leadership that fails to link the struggle for democracy with the struggle against capitalism.
SALEP continues to call for the building of a United Democratic Front controlled by the organised workers, rallying all the oppressed. In no way is this position “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion”.
Nor would any genuine activist within the workers’ movement in South Africa suggest that the differences which continue to exist on the political way forward for the workers’ movement can be solved by arbitrary bureaucratic fiat – or by attempting to witchhunt ideas out of the workers’ organisations.
In South Africa, and internationally, the traditional method in the workers movement of dealing with differences of viewpoint is through ongoing democratic debate coupled with unity in action against the class enemy.
It is the duty of the Labour Party not to suppress, but to recognise and encourage constructive debate within the workers’ movement, in Britain and internationally.
5. SALEP stands for the ‘full implementation” of the Freedom Charter; SALEP puts forward positions “at variance with the Freedom Charter”.
Here are two completely self-contradictory “charges” – both of which presumably put SALEP “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion”!
This is one of the many brainteasers to be found in the pages of the NEC report.
In reality SALEP supports the Freedom Charter, the programme of the African National Congress – and opposes any attempts to water-down or retreat from its implementation.
The Freedom Charter was first adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955 – the most democratic gathering ever held in South Africa up to that time. Today, as the mass movement has again developed, with unprecedented strength and confidence, it is the programme of the Freedom Charter to which hundreds of thousands of oppressed working people turn.
How does the NEC report justify its claim that SALEP holds positions “at variance with” the Freedom Charter? By quoting one passage from one of our publications, Asinamali!:
The extract reads:
To defend the capitalist system, to protect the property of the capitalists, to maintain the conditions for profit-making, the bosses are supported by the army, the police, the courts, the state as a whole. Together, they resist any changes which would strengthen the workers and endanger their own interests. Naked force backs-up all their ‘arguments’.
In South Africa they rely on the apartheid system with its pass laws, reserves, system of migrant labour and its denial of trade union and political rights to maintain and control the force of cheap black labour which they exploit in their factories, mines and farms.
Thus the struggle for a living wage lies at the root of the class struggle – a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class over how much of the value produced by the workers is taken by the bosses and how much remains for the workers.
Only through the united efforts of the workers, organised together as a class, can the bosses be made to raise wages. The bosses (no matter what they and their ‘liberal spokesmen’ may say) will not do this unless they are forced to.
The NEC also finds this a ‘horrifying’ illustration of SALEP’s “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias” and “extremely narrow view of Marxism”!
What is there in this passage that those on the NEC who have endorsed this report find so offensive? What is there in it that they claim lies “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” in South Africa? What is there in it that they claim is at variance with the Freedom Charter?
Is there any sentence in it which they can deny represents the reality of life for black workers in South Africa?
Will they stand up and explain, to the thousands of mine workers killed and injured by the South African police last year, when they were called in by the Chamber of Mines to brutally suppress a legal strike for higher wages, that it is not “naked force” that backs up all the arguments of the mine-owners – or that the bosses do not rely on the apartheid system?
Will they stand-up and explain that to the relatives, friends and comrades of Steve Biko, Neil Aggett, Andries Raditsela – and all those who have been slaughtered by the South African police and army in Uitenhage, Crossroads, Sebokeng and many other places in the struggles of the last few months alone, at a rate of at least one or two a day.
“At variance with the Freedom Charter”?!
Where does the Freedom Charter deny that the SA bosses rely on apartheid to maintain the cheap labour system? Where does it deny that to defend their interests in profit, the bosses rely on the state machine? Where does it deny that the struggle for a living wage lies at the root of the class struggle?
The Freedom Charter declares:
THERE SHALL BE WORK AND SECURITY
All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers;
The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits;
Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work;
There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all working mothers;
Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work;
Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished.
Will those on the NEC who endorse this report stand up and explain to the black masses in struggle in South Africa how “THERE SHALL BE WORK AND SECURITY” except through “the united efforts of the workers, organised together as a class”?
Of course the bosses have other answers to such questions – which reduce in the end to the argument that the welfare of the workers must be left to what their ‘liberalism’ can afford. Is this the argument which this NEC report endorses?
Let us cite a recent statement by just one boss, Zac De Beer, a long-time member of the ‘liberal bourgeois’ Progressive Federal Party, and also an executive director of Anglo American Corporation – which, as a monopoly empire, owns itself nearly 60% of the shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Anglo American Corporation was one of the mining houses which called in police to maim and kill black mineworkers on strike last September. Miner Roy Jones returned from his visit to the SA NUM with one of the plastic bullets which had shot out one such worker’s eye.
Acknowledging that in the past he had campaigned for higher minimum wages, Zac de Beer now calls for all statutory minimum wages to be scrapped. “Today I am pleading for people to be allowed to work for any wage, no matter how low, that they are prepared to accept.”[11]
This shift to the right among the capitalist class is a sign of the times – a sign of the growing economic crisis within South Africa, with over three million unemployed, approaching one million relying for food on charity relief, and the official inflation rate moving upwards towards 20% .
This crisis will compel the capitalists to increase their attacks on the living standards of the working class, and, equally, it will direct the attention of increasing numbers of working people in struggle ever more sharply towards the need not merely to end apartheid, but the profit system of capitalism along with it.
And indeed, the Freedom Charter stands precisely for such a transformation of society – for the nationalisation of the mining industry, the banks and the monopolies under a genuinely democratic government.
“The mineral wealth beneath the soil”, it states, “the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.”
In fact the NEC is scandalised that SALEP stands for “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter. Indeed it proclaims that such a programme is impossible to achieve!
Those who most fear the “full implementation” of the Charter – which includes these demands – are the South African monopolies, and the British and other foreign monopolies and banks with which they are intertwined.
Against imperialism and capitalism SALEP is proud to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with those in struggle in South Africa for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter.
Moreover we share the view expressed in an interview with a SA journalist by Thami Mali, chairman of the committee which organised and led the two-day general strike of one million workers in the Transvaal last November.
Asked what the goals of the struggle were, Thami Mali, reports this journalist, told him that they were one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa, “but that’s not enough. It must be a ‘workers’ state’ based on the principles of the Freedom Charter which they call ‘a set of minimum demands.’ The Freedom Charter is … all about how ‘the people shall govern’ and how the land ‘shall belong to all those who work it.’ … ‘So you want a socialist South Africa, the journalist asked Mali. “ ‘Exactly’, he replied”.[12]
Do those on the Labour Party NEC and International Committee who endorsed this report dare to claim that this courageous strike leader – who has already served five years on Robben Island for giving shelter to ANC activists, and was detained one day after giving this interview – has an “interpretation of events” which puts him “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa” – and which deserves banning from the Labour Party?
SALEP’s support for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter, states the NEC report, “echoes … a similar British debate.”
It is clear that they are referring to the “debate” over Clause IV, Part IV of the Labour Party’s constitution – the clause which calls for the nationalisation under workers’ democratic control and management of the commanding heights of the economy.
What they mean by a “debate” over this clause is the attempt of the Gaitskellite right-wing in the 1950s to remove this clause from the constitution – and the attempt by the present-day right-wing to bury any policies which would allow this clause to be implemented.
Not content with abandoning the struggle in Britain to implement Clause IV, Part IV, the right-wing of the British Labour Party leadership – and those so-called ‘lefts’ who support them – now want to impose the same dilution of the struggle on the movement of the black oppressed in South Africa!
And, moreover, those who call for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter – or, by implication, the full implementation of the Labour Party constitution – are regarded as guilty of a “crime” that warrants banning from the Labour Party!
Only those whose horizons are limited by the belief that capitalism is an ‘eternal’ system that cannot be ended maintain that either the Freedom Charter, or Clause IV, Part IV of the Labour Party constitution cannot be “fully achieved”. In reality, organising and uniting on the right lines as the rallying point for all the oppressed, the working class is perfectly capable of succeeding in these tasks.
Indeed in the present epoch, only the full implementation of the Freedom Charter (or of the Labour Party constitution) – by setting in motion the socialist transformation of society – can guarantee an end to poverty wages, and provide work and security for all.
A leadership of the British Labour Party worth its salt would be going out of its way to defend and support the struggle of the impoverished black workers in South Africa in every demand they have raised against the regime and the employers it defends.
Whether as regards Britain or South Africa, a leadership of the Labour Party should be mobilising the maximum struggle against the Zac de Beers and their class – against the multinational monopolies that dominate the world capitalist economy and enslave working people everywhere.
Instead, the majority of the British Labour Party NEC direct their attack…at SALEP!
But we ask the ANC and Sactu leadership too, (whose authority is claimed by this report) what is your attitude to this attack on those who stand for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter?
We call on the ANC and Sactu leadership to publicly dissociate themselves from this attack, and to reaffirm their commitment to the full implementation of the programme with which they are entrusted by the masses.
6. “SALEP believes that ultimately only by ‘arming the workers’ in preparation for a ‘massive workers’ armed insurrection’ will the apartheid regime be overthrown and replaced by a ‘workers’ democracy’.”
Here, the supporters of this report no doubt believe, lies the ultimate clincher to prove that SALEP’s views stand “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion, both within and outside South Africa.”!
In fact SALEP, in its publications, has nowhere expressed its viewpoint on the question of arming the workers’ movement. If, in South Africa, merely propagandising for socialism can bring serious criminal charges, it is understandable that discussion on this question is undertaken with caution. All the more must care be taken by an education project aiming to assist the trade unions in SA.
Nevertheless black workers and youth in South Africa, and members and supporters of SALEP with them, have their views on this question, which they will raise in appropriate discussions.
For many British workers, living under conditions of relative democracy, it may be difficult yet to see that in South Africa no genuine democracy can be achieved without a thoroughgoing, and armed, revolution.
But this is the reality which working people in South Africa face, and which shapes their own understanding of the tasks they must undertake.
The central reality which faces all those in struggle in South Africa is the vicious state machine, built up over generations, resting on the support of, and staffed by, privileged and racist whites. It is a military-police dictatorship more formidable than anywhere else in the capitalist world – and it has at its disposal, and will not hesitate to use against the struggles of the working people, a whole array of weaponry: not merely tear-gas, rhino-whips, dogs trained to maim, plastic and rubber bullets, buckshot… but also machine-guns, tanks, and bombers.
Those on the picket lines in the British miners’ strike, facing the violence of the police, had a real but tiny taste of what black working people have had to fight against for generations in order to defend themselves against even more vicious enslavement.
This state machine has been constructed to defend a system of cheap labour which is the only basis on which capitalism in South Africa can survive – and which it becomes more necessary than ever for the ruling class to defend as capitalism seeks deeper into crisis.
The demand of the oppressed masses for democracy in order to end the cheap labour system brings them into head-on and irreconcilable conflict with this state machine and those who stand on its side.
To defeat and dismantle this state machine of apartheid is indispensable to the achieving of democracy, and it will be a formidable task, requiring every ounce of organisation, determination, and ingenuity that the oppressed masses of South Africa can summon-up.
Even today, when the mass revolution against apartheid and capitalism has only just begun, the regime finds it “necessary” to shoot, injure and imprison thousands in the course of a single year. What will it resort to when its authority is fundamentally challenged?
Those who believe that the regime, or the bosses it defends, can be persuaded to “change heart” and institute democracy peacefully – to remove their fangs and become non-violent tigers – are living in cloud-cuckoo land.
In these circumstances, working people in struggle will have no alternative but to seek the ways and means to defend themselves against the regime – not only through organisation, but through armed organisation.
Those in the labour movement abroad who have seen the small glimpses of the struggles presently taking place in South Africa which are permitted them by the ruling class’s TV, and who have tried to put themselves in the shoes of the black workers and youth there, will instinctively understand that the movement is seeking the ways to arm itself as a mass against the brutality that it faces daily.
And yes, in the end, the apartheid regime will be overthrown only by the mass of the workers, organised and armed, in a “massive workers’ armed insurrection”.
This viewpoint, far from being “completely outside the spectrum” of mainstream opinion among the black masses in struggle, is already being foreshadowed in action.
The middle class ‘liberals’ in South Africa wring their hands, and engage in blanket condemnations of violence – the violence of the oppressed together with that of the oppressor.
But if the Labour Party NEC regards it as a “crime” to support the arming of the workers in South Africa – then what standpoint do they take? Do they believe in the possibility of a “peaceful solution” which will guarantee genuine democracy – one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa? Are they opposed to the mass of black workers and youth securing themselves the means to defend themselves against a vicious regime of racist oppression?
In the future, the British Labour Party will not be able to escape the reality that the choice for the mass movement in South Africa will be to organise the means of armed self-defence, or to face crushing defeats. It will be the responsibility of the British Labour Party to give every support to the oppressed black masses in this task.
While the NEC majority was arrogantly holding forth on what is in the “mainstream” and what is “completely outside” the mainstream of “progressive opinion” on South Africa – and while it was brazenly claiming the authority of the whole ANC for its own narrow right-wing views – it forgot to notice that a little change was taking place… in the public policy of the ANC.
How embarrassing! The ANC has now proclaimed, in place of its old reliance on guerrilla warfare, “an important shift of tactics towards a popular Iran-type insurrection.”[13] The task has been identified of preparing the mass movement for the armed overthrow of the regime.
We shall leave aside here the question whether the SA regime can be overthrown by the same method of revolutionary insurrection as toppled the Shah in Iran. The point is that the NEC majority has been caught with its pants completely down on this issue, and with the real nature of its famous “mainstream” naked for all to see.
Attack on Goals of Masses
In reality the NEC report is an attack on every fundamental goal and aspiration of the oppressed masses in struggle in South Africa.
Even in Britain, those who fall inside its “spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” represent, at best, the extreme right-wing of the labour movement.
British workers will be astounded that the majority of members of the Labour Party NEC could have endorsed this report at all. In fact, if even the slightest serious attention had been allowed it on the NEC, what members of the Labour Party would expect is that those responsible for it would have been laughed at for political incompetence.
But perhaps the members of the NEC did not read it. Perhaps they rested on the understanding that what was contained in the report was – as the report implies – endorsed by the leadership of the African National Congress.
One thing is certain. Those struggling to build inside South Africa a mass ANC would be horrified were this the case. But, since this is the implication of the report, it is the responsibility of the NEC of the ANC to publicly dissociate itself from these positions, and from the witchhunt being launched by the Labour Party NEC against SALEP.
Unfortunately, however, there does exist within the ANC in exile a narrow right-wing clique clustered around the South African Communist Party. The SACP regards itself as the ‘custodian’ of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ – in reality, Stalinism – within the South African movement. In the name of this ‘Marxism-Leninism’, it puts forward the wholly utopian position that democracy can be achieved in South Africa without a struggle to end capitalism.
Up to the end of the 1950s – indeed, only months before the Sharpeville massacre – SACP leaders continued to maintain that a peaceful transition to democracy was possible in South Africa.
The ‘strategy’ of this ‘Communist’ Party, indeed, springs from the wholly opportunist belief that the ‘liberal’ capitalists and their representatives – in South Africa and in the West – must not be ‘alienated’, because they can be induced to support the ‘broad’ struggle against apartheid for a democratic society.
Hence they wish to bury the Freedom Charter’s demands for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy; hence they fear the mass arming of the workers’ movement.
In the name of this strategy the South African Communist Party has not hesitated to oppose – and not only oppose, but slander, vilify, manoeuvre and use their bureaucratic power against – those who take the standpoint of the working class in South Africa.
Unfortunately, moreover, the SACP, in this, has been able to rely on their uncritical supporters and fellow-travellers within the labour movement in Britain and other countries around the world. SALEP believes that the misrepresentations and falsehoods contained in this report have the SACP and its supporters behind them. SALEP believes also that the Labour Party will do not only the liberation struggle in South Africa but also its own reputation a tragic disservice by taking at their face-value the ‘facts’ and ‘arguments’ put forward by the South African Communist Party, or of its supporters within the ranks of the Labour Party itself.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).
Continue to Part 4
[1] 11 August 1980
[2] 8 August 1980
[3] 8 August 1980
[4] December 1980
[5] Financial Times, 9 September 1981
[6] Fosatu Worker News, October 1983
[7] Reported in Saawu’s paper, The Worker, October 1984
[8] Star, 2 May 1985
[9] 26 March 1985
[10] 21 April 1985
[11] Rand Daily Mail, 28 February 1985
[12] Sunday Express, 11 November 1984, quoted in an ANC News Briefing. (Our emphasis)
[13] Guardian, 10 May 1985
