Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 20/21 (September 1986).
Issued by the Editorial Board of Inqaba ya Basebenzi
8 September 1986
Inqaba supporters urge fellow activists on the left in the UDF to combine in opposing the “proposed joint statement” of the UDF leadership on “national unity”.
We call for united action by the UDF and Cosatu to lead the struggle of black working people against apartheid and capitalism.
The UDF leadership has issued for discussion purposes a statement calling for “national unity against apartheid and the emergency”. It says, “We are determined to campaign for national unity of all forces opposed to apartheid and the National Party”.
This means that the black working class must seek unity with the bosses who criticise the Botha government, in order to carry forward the struggle against the system. How can that possibly be correct?
Have the comrades forgotten that the system which has created apartheid and led to the State of Emergency is the capitalist system? This system needs black workers to remain cheap-labour slaves so the bosses can take the profits at our expense. We cannot be free to build a decent life until we overthrow the Nationalist government, apartheid and the bosses’ exploitation.
Have they forgotten that the ‘reforms’ which liberal big business urges on the government are only those changes intended to keep the black working people from achieving power?
A call for “national unity” with these bosses against the government misleads our people to believe it is real changes, genuine democracy, which the bosses support. That is not, so. Black people need to understand this clearly. The task of the UDF is to ensure that they do.
Every actual step forward in the struggle against the apartheid regime has been achieved by the mass action of black working class people.
Have the difficulties created by the emergency caused our leaders to forget that?
These comrades call on “all patriots” (including the bosses) to show “national unity by … uniting in action at a regional and national level, with all other forces opposed to the emergency and apartheid.”
When have the bosses ever taken action against their own state?
Working people go on strike, take part in rent boycotts, withhold service charges, and take many other forms of action which mean serious personal hardship and risk for the sake of the struggle. Meanwhile the liberal bosses pay for the upkeep of the murderous state and ‘security forces’ by handing over taxes to the government out of the wealth which workers produce.
If they really are “opposed” to our oppression, let them stop paying these taxes to the state, so that it grinds to a halt.
Liberal words are cheap. Scoundrels can also call themselves “patriots”, and frequently do. The suffering, struggling mass of black people gain nothing from declarations of goodwill and “unity” from the social criminals who say they “oppose” apartheid while sucking the workers’ blood under the protection of the South African state.
If our leaders want “national unity” with the liberal bosses’ Progressive Federal Party, have they forgotten that these charming friends of the black people are confirmed supporters of the SADF – and that their present leader, Eglin, called for the strengthening of the SA Police after troops first went into Sebokeng?
PFP member Del Kevan, Soweto’s director of housing, ‘unites’ with us by trying to evict rent strikers – and now bears major responsibility for the state slaughtering up to 30 people there.
If our leaders want “national unity” with the likes of Van Zyl Slabbert, have they so soon forgotten that on 25 November 1985, in secret talks, he tried to advise Botha how to “pull the teeth of the ANC” (his actual words)? By that he meant to “pull the teeth” of the revolutionary black working class which looks for leadership to the ANC. Surely the comrades don’t want to help any such teeth pulling by presenting Slabbert as a friend?
We want the widest and most effective unity in action against the apartheid regime. But the foundation for that has to be the mobilisation and unity of the massive black working class, fighting for its own needs and for power.
We want honest middle class support for the revolution. But that cannot be secured by pretending that they will not have to choose sides between the working class and the capitalists.
A cosy, classless “national” unity in words with capitalists and middle class politicians only deceives the masses – and is bound to fall to pieces as the real struggle mounts.
The working class can draw behind it many ordinary middle class people, so repelled by the state and by monopoly capitalism that they will join forces with a giant revolutionary force determined to overturn the system, to establish democracy and end exploitation.
While the UDF leaders concentrate attention on “unifying” themselves with all and sundry outside the working class, UDF activists have to ask the question: Has everything been done which should be done to mobilise and unite black working people in a serious national action campaign?
It has to be said that the UDF, since its launch, has not so far used its potential to link together youth and workers, to link together the social and political issues important to the working class, in a clear and sustained national action campaign which could mobilise this force of millions against the oppressor.
The fight is difficult, especially now. Leadership is difficult. Working people do not have unrealistic expectations of their leaders. Nevertheless errors have to be criticised, particularly when they reflect basically mistaken ideas.
The Western Cape UDF Executive, in its August Briefing Paper, fails to give any direction to activists. Instead it says: “Each person will have to work out our tasks – we cannot expect the executive or ‘someone else’ to come up with the answers”! This is a reflection of the rudderless drift within the UDF leadership in other regions also.
The national UDF leadership must give a clear lead. At the same time the activists cannot wait. The task is to build the UDF on the firm foundation of the working class, its needs and strength. Only in that way can we lay the basis for a mass ANC which will be able to take power, achieve national liberation, and go forward to socialism.
We must link the working class Congress youth with the industrial workers in Cosatu. Building the Cosatu locals, organising the unorganised, and joining forces in local, regional and national action campaigns which unite the UDF and Cosatu, the movement can take major steps forward even under the present repression.
The UDF leadership must not alienate the working class by proclaiming unity with our exploiters. That does not ‘broaden’ or ‘strengthen’ the forces fighting against apartheid and the emergency – it narrows and weakens them.
Comrades, how can the mine workers of the NUM be mobilised in political campaigns linked to the UDF if you are fraternising with the mine bosses? How can the magnificent fighting forces of Mawu be rallied to the UDF if you are seeking unity with the so-called ‘anti-apartheid’ bosses within Seifsa?
How can we expose Buthelezi before his own followers in Natal, and break the Inkatha mafia, unless we show to the Zulu workers how this ‘warrior’ is selling their skins to the capitalists, helping to hold down wages, weakening trade unionism, and frustrating their national and class liberation?
Yet how will we do this if you, the comrades of the UDF leadership, make friends with the self-same capitalists and proclaim them as our allies? Your method would only strengthen Buthelezi, the murderer of UDF comrades in Natal (see Defeating Inkatha).
Indeed, from the wording of the statement, it would seem that Buthelezi and Inkatha could well be included in the proposed “national unity” against apartheid! Surely you don’t intend that?
But should we not exploit the splits among our enemies? By all means, encourage the revolutionary confidence of the mass movement by highlighting these splits.
Should we not use the liberal bosses, the liberal judges, and so on, against the apartheid regime? Yes, where we can, in strictly limited practical matters – while always making plain our political opposition to them. Seeking “unity” with them is not using them – it is inviting them to use us.
Remember that the splits among our class enemies open-up precisely as our movement gains in strength – because they fear revolution, and can no longer agree among themselves how to stop it. If some courts today pass judgements against the security powers, we should ask ourselves why they have suddenly discovered merit in legal reasoning which ten years ago they booted out of court!
Use the courts, but do not encourage trust in them, comrades! Promote the splits among the bosses – by subjecting them to the merciless revolutionary pressure of the black working class movement struggling for power.
“Unite” with these bosses and you would only confuse workers and youth, blunting the cutting edge of the struggle.
The working class is tremendously loyal to the UDF and ANC, and with that loyal to the leadership. The leadership has a duty to show in its every action that it is loyal to the working class.
It must never be forgotten that the strength, courage and determination of the working class, young and old, has made the UDF and the ANC the force that they are today. Without massive, united and active working class support, our Congress movement would be in real danger of being crushed by the enemy.
The comrades of the leadership ought to learn more from the history of the movement, especially the lessons of the 1950s.
Then, too, under pressure of increasing state repression by the Nationalist government, the Congress leadership turned towards the idea of an “anti-Nat alliance” of all classes. They encouraged black working people to have faith, not in their own class strength and the mass struggle for power, but in sections of the ruling class opposed to the government.
The uncompromising demand for majority rule gave way to talk of settling for less than full democracy. At the time of the April 1958 white elections, Congress merely put forward the slogan, “Defeat the Nats”. This, wrote Sactu leader Dan Tloome at the time, was wrong and misleading, for it “led a considerable section of the people to believe that the Congresses were in favour of the United Party coming to power, as a party capable of solving our problems in SA”.
Activists were divided and confused, and through policies like this the conditions were created for a disastrous split of the mass movement, frustrated at the barriers placed by the leadership in the way of decisive action.
The mistakes of the 1950s must not be repeated.
Inqaba supporters will do their best, along with other Congress militants, to prevent any split of the mass organisations. A divided working class is a cause for comfort only to the enemy. We are confident that the battle for Marxist ideas can be won within the Congress movement when the youth and workers who make up its fighting ranks see how these ideas meet their need for clear answers and a way forward to power.
Within Congress the SA Communist Party claims to defend Marxism and uphold the interests of the working class as the best guarantee of success of the whole movement. Why, then, has the SACP leadership remained silent about the UDF leaders’ proposed call for “national unity” with the capitalists?
Why is it left to Inqaba and the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC to express the rank-and-file activists’ concern about the rightward drift of the leadership in practice?
We do not believe the ‘Communist’ party leadership is communist at all. We believe they have given up communism in favour of utopian ideas of getting freedom through an allegedly ‘popular’ alliance with the liberal capitalists (see The Counter-Revolutionary Role of the Communist Party).
Those black working class youth and workers, however, who look to the SACP do mean business. They want to build an ever more powerful mass Congress movement on Marxist ideas, with real communist or socialist aims. We are fully with them in that.
Let us join forces in the urgent effort to turn the UDF away from the mistaken plan of its leadership to proclaim “national unity” with our class enemy. Let us mobilise wider working class support.
Youth whose slogan is “Viva Tambo! Viva Socialism!” must realise they will be expected to drop the call for socialism if the “national unity” idea takes hold. How can “unity” with the bosses and the socialist aims of our movement be proclaimed at the same time?
The Freedom Charter must be defended against the threat of this “national unity” call. How can the clause promising nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries be upheld by a leadership seeking allies among the monopoly capitalists and their agents in politics?
How can the living wage, homes for all and the entire program of social reforms demanded by the Freedom Charter be vigorously fought for if we are to have “national unity” with the capitalists whose profit system cannot afford these reforms?
The choice is clear: we can have either a mass movement of black working people determined to change society through action or an impotent “national” unity of sugary words and promises from our liberal exploiters. We cannot have both.
If we could get the changes we need with the assistance of the bosses, workers ask, why then was it necessary to go to all the trouble of building militant independent unions over the past 13 years?
Why was it necessary for youth to learn the bitter lesson that big business and the military-police state are “two sides of the same bloody coin”?
The direction we should take is clear:
- Oppose the “national unity” policy proposed by the UDF leadership!
- For a joint action campaign of the UDF and Cosatu on clear social and political demands to mobilise the black working class nationwide!
- Down with the apartheid regime and the bosses!
- Forward to an ANC government on a socialist program!
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2021).
