Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 9 (February-April 1983).
by Richard Monroe
The Coloured Labour Party’s decision at Eshowe, to participate in Botha’s new constitutional scheme, draws its leaders into responsibility for enforcing the regime’s racial ‘divide and rule’ dictatorship. This directly attacks the basic interests of the working class.
“We can’t fight for the unity of all workers on the factory floor”, the Food and Canning Workers’ Union has pointed out, “and allow a constitutional dispensation which discriminates against people of different races and excludes the majority”.[1]
The Eshowe decision violates previous positions taken by the Labour Party.
In 1977 its leaders denounced essentially similar NP proposals on the grounds that they entrenched racial division and dictatorship. In 1979 Allan Hendrickse vowed that “Coloured people would reject any constitutional proposals which did not include other black people”.[2]
In the same year the Labour Party leaders unanimously endorsed the Du Preez Commission’s call for one-person-one-vote in an undivided SA.
How is this turnabout by the ‘Labour’ Party leaders to be explained? What lessons can be drawn for the future course of the struggle for majority rule in an undivided SA?
Daily Struggle
As the FCWU statement underlines, the need of working people for a democratic government of their own arises not from passing fancy but – like the need for shop-floor unity – from the daily struggle for survival.
United struggle is the only means for the working class to defend wages, jobs and conditions against the attacks of the bosses. Only through united action, consolidated in the trade unions, has the working class achieved any gains in the hard struggles of the last decade.
But the gains are never secure. Wage increases disappear as the bosses raise prices. Jobs are at the mercy of the bosses’ profit-motivated decisions to contract or expand production.
Every struggle in the factories, the townships, the schools and the Bantustans reveals more clearly the basic problem: that power over all the decisions that determine the lives of working people lies with a handful of capitalists protected by the system of white minority rule.
This is because we live in an economic system organised to create profits for those who own the banks, mines, factories and farms. Deprived of other means of survival, the majority of the people must live by selling their labour-power to the capitalists.
The ownership of production is highly concentrated. Every sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of monopolies. Facts recently published show just how tiny – and interconnected – is the parasitic clique which controls the means of production.
The top twenty SA companies account for 60% of the assets of the top 100. Anglo American, whose annual turnover is believed to be larger than total SA government spending, has directors on the boards of five of the top six monopolies: Barlow Rand, SA Breweries, Sasol, Amic, and AECI.
Seven of the top ten monopolies have directors on the boards of the major banks.
Even during the 1960s, SA capitalism’s ‘best’ period, the monopolies could prosper only through cheap black labour. Now, with the world capitalist economy in a period of irreversible decay, the living standards of even the most privileged sections of the working class are under attack.
At the root of the struggle by black working people for a democratic government lies the burning need to end poverty wages and all the other miseries imposed by the profit system. The only genuine democracy is that which will take power out of the hands of the rich clique who presently hold it, and place it in the hands of the working majority.
That is the threat which the demand for majority rule in an undivided SA poses to the capitalist class.
To sustain their rule, they depend on a system of government that can hold back the struggle of the exploited masses for a decent life.
At the core of this system is the repressive machinery of the state – the police, the military, and the civilian army of state officials.
Unelected, moulded and trained as a hierarchy obedient to commands from above, the state is the central machinery organising the bosses’ resistance to genuine democracy.
Lenin explained that the state acts as an organ of class oppression by “the creation of ‘order’, which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes … depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors” (State and Revolution).
The state machine cannot indefinitely defend the interests of the capitalist class without a wider base among the population from which to draw for recruits and support.
Constitution
In the constitution of 1910 the SA capitalist class manifested its hostility to democracy by consolidating white minority rule. For generations the SA state has deprived the oppressed black people of “definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors” by drawing the white minority into the camp of privilege, setting them over and against the black masses.
In the experience of the black majority, capitalist rule has manifested itself in the control exercised by white foremen in the factory and by white officials in the pass offices, in the privileged position of white trade unions, in the voting rights accorded only to whites – and in brutal repression by the white-dominated police and armed forces.
Under the huge pressures brought to bear by the struggles of black workers and youth in the last decade, the system of white minority rule has begun to crack. This has opened up a political crisis for the capitalist class and its political representatives, which is reflected in the increasing turmoil and divisions in their ranks.
“The strength of finance capital”, explained Trotsky (leader, with Lenin, of the 1917 Russian Revolution),
…does not reside in its ability to establish a government of any kind and at any time according to its wish; it does not possess this faculty. Its strength resides in the fact that every non-proletarian government is forced to serve finance capital; or, better yet, that finance capital possesses the possibility of substituting for each one of its systems of domination that decays, another system corresponding better to the changed conditions. However, the passage from one system to another signifies the political crisis which, with the concourse of the activity of the revolutionary proletariat, may be transformed into a social danger for the bourgeoisie.
Bonapartism and Fascism, 1934
At Eshowe, the ‘Labour’ Party leaders defended participation in Botha’s new scheme on the grounds that, had they refused, the old constitution would have remained in force. In reality, the new constitution represents an early but necessary effort by the ruling class to substitute for its decaying system of domination another system “corresponding better to the changed conditions”.
Even capitalist commentators ridiculed the ‘Labour’ leaders’ argument: “They surely could not have believed that themselves and must have known that the NP was forced by various factors to initiate reform”.[3]
As the ruling class recognises, the “factors” that are cracking open the old white dictatorship will only intensify in the period ahead.
At the root of this situation lies, on the one hand, the worsening conditions of life which is the only perspective that capitalism can offer to the mass of the people. The sheer needs of survival will draw ever wider layers of the workers, the youth and all the oppressed into struggle.
On the other hand lies the increased power of the working class to impose its collective will in struggle against the bosses. The very growth of industry, which has been the source of the monopolists’ wealth and power, has drawn the black working class – with no vested interest in any system of exploitation – into the strategic centres of production in greater numbers than ever before.
The bankruptcy of capitalism and the rising strength of the working class open up an irreconcilable conflict threatening not only the system of white minority rule but the survival of capitalism itself.
The perspective of unfolding revolutionary conflict is the “social danger” against which the capitalist class seeks new methods to moderate the conflict between the classes and defend its system. The differences among the capitalists and their political parties are only differences about the methods by which this can be achieved.
Though it can no longer guarantee the economic privileges which most whites have enjoyed in the past, the capitalist class cannot afford to abandon its base of support among them. The state machine would be reduced to a shell without its reliable white core.
But only a tiny minority of the capitalist class, represented in the Conservative Party, presently cling to the old NP belief that exclusive white minority rule and Bantustan methods are alone sufficient to divide and contain the forward movement of the masses.
This would rapidly be tested and found wanting were the CP to come to office. A Treurnicht government would either disappoint its own supporters by capitulating to the same compulsions to ‘reform’ – or its stupid intransigence would accelerate the crisis.
It is these realities which have pushed the NP into changing the constitution. At the cost of a vast and irreversible split in its ranks, its present scheme rests on the gamble of (a) maintaining a white electoral majority while (b) drawing Coloured and Indian politicians into the three chamber ‘parliament’ and into government offices in defence of capitalism and the state against the African majority.
But the imperialist powers and the SA monopolies, the strongest and most decisive section of the ruling class, are well aware that this is no final answer to the revolutionary upheavals on the agenda.
A US government spokesman expressed support for Botha’s scheme “not for what it is, but what it might become”.[4] Botha’s government itself promises that the present scheme is only the beginning of a process whose end is not yet specified.
While denying any intention of establishing an African ‘fourth chamber’, the government can see that any ‘new deal’ that offers no constitutional place to the African majority other than in the homelands is doomed to failure through lack of credibility.
Thus the Cabinet committee recently appointed to consider constitutional solutions for ‘urban Africans’ debates new methods of dividing the African people.
It is said to be basing itself on the new Black Community Development Act, which aims to draw new layers of black bureaucrats into ‘self-government’ of the township ghettos, to enforce the authority of the state and the bosses over the masses.
This is to form the bottom layer of a “four layer cake” (!) – including metropolitan-level “co-operation” between white, brown and black municipal governments, “urban African constituencies” for the Bantustan “parliaments” – and iced with a “grand confederation” of ethnic governments.
The PFP declares its opposition to the present scheme on the grounds that it provides no place for the African people. In reality, the direction being charted by the NP brings them closer to the PFP programme, also based on methods of dividing the African majority so as to deny them their legitimate numerical influence on government.
The PFP formally accepted one-person-one-vote only with the explicit qualification of the continued federal fragmentation of SA into a patchwork of divided communities.
What even the PFP leadership – the ‘progressive’ wing of the capitalists – recognises is that one-person-one-vote in an undivided SA would bring to bear on the government and the bosses the overwhelming weight of 26 million black citizens in a population of 31 million, demanding an immediate end to poverty wages, the pass laws, slave-education, and all the other burdens of capitalism.
PFP policy also defends capitalism and its state against the struggle of the masses for a decent life. As Van Zyl Slabbert recently explained, his approach “has always been that one should use the executive institutions for the purposes of bringing about peaceful and evolutionary change”.[5] This approach also forces the PFP in reality into the defence of the white political privilege which remains indispensable to the survival of that state.
All the plans of the capitalist class for effecting a transition from exclusive white minority rule to a new system of dominating the African working class majority rest on their ability to secure the support of black leaders with some authority among the masses. When, by entering into the regime’s schemes, these black leaders undermine their credibility, this only intensifies the ruling class’s search for new schemes and other, more credible, leaders.
The decision by the ‘Labour’ Party leadership at Eshowe is a stage in this unfolding process. Moreover, in deciding to enter the new scheme, they have explicitly abandoned the democratic goals on which they previously stood.
The Eshowe resolution reformulated the Party’s goals as “one man one vote in a unitary system (the latter negotiable)”.[6] The significance was spelt out by Hendrickse in an interview with the Financial Mail,[7] organ of big business:
If we are going to look at a federal structure, then its emphasis must be geographic rather than ethnic. It is true that, even geographically, areas would have elements of ethnicity within them…can you really see the clock being turned back in terms of Bophutatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, or any of the others? I can’t see a fait accompli being unscrambled. So I want to believe that the ultimate answer is going to be a federal structure.
Thus, from rejecting racially divisive constitutions, the ‘Labour’ leaders shift, not only to participating in, but accepting their basis. From here it is only a short step to the blatantly ‘ethnic’ appeal to a “Coloured identity’’’ which has resurfaced at their recent report-back meetings.
In Eldorado Park, Miley Richards, deputy national leader, said that “the coloured people were tired of being in the middle and losing out at both ends, and that the time had come for them to stand up and fight for their rights”. Jac Rabie, Transvaal leader, added “They take our farms for a black township, but not one black leader stands up to object.”[8]
Many in the movement have correctly condemned the Eshowe decision, and pointed out its betrayal of the democratic principles the Labour Party once professed. But mere condemnation is not enough to explain the leaders’ role, nor the reasons for their turnabout.
To view this purely as an opportunistic ‘sell-out’ by individuals would fail to explain the past history of ‘sell-outs’ by those in whom the masses have placed their trust. It would also fail to arm the movement against being taken by surprise by similar ‘sell outs’ in the future.
In reality, the vacillation of these leaders is a reflection of the conflicting pressures which come to bear on the middle layers of society in a period characterised by increasing polarisation and conflict between the capitalist class and the exploited workers.
The middle class has always been ‘in-between’, and therefore lacking any clear identity. Elevated to a position of petty privilege above the masses, it fears being plunged into their appalling condition, while its upper and most educated layers, in awe of the bosses’ power, chafe with frustrated social ambition.
But the growing domination of finance capital has dealt harshly with middle class dreams. Their avenues for self-enrichment are steadily choked-off by the spreading tentacles of big business, and the chances of reduction into the ranks of the working class are increased.
Middle Class
In SA the black middle class has been subjected to the additional burdens of racial humiliation and political oppression. This has restricted its growth, and created obvious bonds between itself and the working class.
The growing crisis of monopoly capitalism now squeezes not only the black middle class, but even the far more protected and privileged whites. Thus the small white farmers, despite state assistance, are increasingly indebted to the banks – at present, to the tune of R7,700 million, which means an average of over R100,000 per farmer!
Relaxation of racial restrictions on business enterprise cannot solve the problems of the black middle class. The new “township market” is gobbled-up by the big capitalist-owned hypermarkets. For every one black drawn into “junior partnership” by white big business, a dozen or more black traders are bankrupted.
Oppressed by the monopolists and the apartheid state, the black middle class is nevertheless isolated from the collective experience of the working class. It shares neither the workers’ instinctive sense of class struggle against the capitalists who exploit them, nor the power of the workers to combine, paralyse production and challenge the state.
The middle class is weak, flung to and fro between the big opposing classes, and subjected to conflicting pressures from above and below. These contradictory pressures polarise it, and make its various layers and spokesmen vacillate with the ebb and flow of the class struggle.
Under the pressure of the forward movement of the working class, large sections of the middle class – particularly its younger and poorer layers – will be drawn into the struggle against the bosses and the regime. This has been demonstrated time and again in the last decade, and will be confirmed in the period ahead.
Even the traders can at times be drawn to the support of black workers on strike, as in the Cape Town meat strike, the Rowntree’s strike, etc. Only the most reactionary sections of the middle class, who have already thrown in their lot with the state, such as the Bantustan puppets, dare stand out against this process.
The general drift of society towards revolutionary crisis and upheaval, and the increasingly obvious disarray of the ruling class, impel every serious black middle class leader towards a radical position. The determination and self-confidence of the masses in struggle encourages such leaders to push themselves to the head of the movement for democracy and social reform.
Many middle class leaders have condemned the government’s constitutional proposals and the Eshowe decision. “Nothing short of full democracy in a united SA will satisfy our aspirations,” stated Dr Essop Jassat, a leading figure in the moves to re-establish the Transvaal Indian Congress.[9] “We shall not betray the ideals we have, the belief in a truly democratic SA,” said Dr Allan Boesak in calling for a united front of opposition to the proposals.[10]
Illusions
Yet, as the revolutionary crisis unfolds, the ruling class will be compelled more urgently to seek wider support for their rule. Relying on the formidable character of its repressive apparatus, it will play on the illusions of the middle class in the benevolence of “progressive capitalists”, to encourage the belief that the only “practical politics” is within its own system.
“Progressive” change, in the eyes of these middle class “democrats”, will come to mean limited reforms from above, carried-out by the existing state machine, with themselves in positions of power.
And if – as will tend to be the case in a revolutionary crisis – the masses are not satisfied with limited reforms, then the task of the “democrats” becomes to assist in crushing the mass movement in order to save “democracy”.
Only the organised working class, compelled by its conditions of existence towards a life-or-death struggle against the capitalist class and the state, can develop the power to cut across the manoeuvring of the ruling class, and rally the majority of the middle class behind it in the fight for genuine democracy.
For this the organised workers need a clear class programme, with concrete aims for mass actions, providing a standard by which the actions of all “radical leaders” can be judged.
It is the present weakness of working class organisation (despite the strides that have been made), and the failure of the leaders of the movement to put forward a clear programme of this kind, that gives room for the ruling class to trap the middle class in its manipulations.
In this situation it is inevitable that short-sighted self-interest should prevail again and again among the middle class over the vaguely perceived perspectives for revolutionary change. Ambitious and unscrupulous politicians will enter into deals at the expense of the masses – and at the expense of the majority of the middle class.
History provides us with clear parallels.
In February 1917 a huge movement of workers overthrew the Russian Tsar. But even in this revolutionary situation middle class leaders who claimed to be democrats were diverted into a scramble for privileged positions tied to the old state machine.
Lenin explained:
The development, perfection and strengthening of the bureaucratic and military apparatus proceeded during all the numerous bourgeois revolutions which Europe has witnessed since the fall of feudalism. In particular, it is the petty bourgeois who are attracted to the side of the big bourgeoisie, and are largely subordinated to them through this apparatus, which provides (them) with comparatively comfortable, quiet and respectable jobs raising their holders above the people. Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts … have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made to put them off… But there has been no delay … in the matter of dividing the spoils, of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy-ministers, governors-general, etc, etc. This game of combinations that has been played in forming the government has been, in essence, only an expression of this division and re-division of the ‘spoils’ which has been going on above and below, throughout the country, in every department of central and local government. The six months between February 27 and August 27, 1917 can be summed-up beyond all dispute, as follows: reforms shelved, distribution of official jobs accomplished and ‘mistakes’ in the distribution corrected by a few re-distributions.
State and Revolution
At this early stage in the unfolding of the SA revolution, the pressures to abandon the standpoint of democracy and enter this scramble for positions are already making themselves felt among politicians of the middle class.
More and more, however, the struggle of working people for a democratic government will raise the question of whose interests the economy and the state is to serve: the profit-making of the tiny capitalist clique, or the need of the overwhelming producing majority.
There is a need for absolute clarity on this question in the movement, and especially among the leadership. Even small elements of confusion can open the way for later vacillation which in turn can lead to compromise with the capitalist class and betrayal of the workers’ struggle.
It is no accident that in the same interview in which he defended federalism, Hendrickse reaffirmed his commitment to ‘private enterprise’; notably too the Eshowe decision was preceded by the open support of the ‘Labour’ Party leaders for the motor industry bosses against last year’s strike by NAAWU.
Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha denounced the Eshowe decision as a “betrayal of the black cause of liberation” and of “sowing the seeds of disunity among blacks”.[11] Buthelezi has also announced his support for united moves to oppose the government’s scheme.
Yet at the same time this tireless defender of the ‘free enterprise’ system has been conducting his own independent negotiations with Mantanzima and other Bantustan leaders for a… “united demand for a non-racial federal solution”.[12] It is small wonder that Botha indicated he would not stand in the way of this ‘united’ initiative… to sabotage the struggle for democracy.
There is a disturbing ambiguity also in the position of some of those who supported the formation of a United Democratic Front against the new constitution.
While rejecting the present scheme as “a ploy to buy time for a government in difficulty”, Dr Jassat at the same time stated that “It would be foolish to reject a genuine [?] opening”.[13] In calling for united opposition to the proposals, Dr Boesak hoped that the PFP “will be given the wisdom to decide to remain in the mainstream of opposition – that is, with us”.[14]
Bishop Tutu, commenting on the new constitution has been
…[at a] loss to understand why Mr Botha, a courageous man, risked so much and yet stopped short of what would help to solve the crisis of our country….Why did he hold back from going the whole hog? Why did he vitiate his total strategy by the fatal flaw of excluding blacks?
Star, 2 December 1982
These statements show a failure to understand that it is only the organised revolutionary struggle of the working class that can create a “genuine opening” to democracy, and that only the working class has a consistent interest in going the “whole hog” towards majority rule in an undivided SA. Between this struggle, and the interests of the big business backers of the PFP, there lies an unbridgeable gulf.
To oppose this struggle the main efforts of the ruling class are concentrated on fortifying its state machine.
The new constitutional scheme itself is based on reducing the influence of every “chamber” of parliament, while strengthening the Executive Presidency. The implications were not lost on one awestruck press commentator reporting on the first week of the 1983 parliamentary session. General Magnus Malan, he wrote,
…left no doubt about who is in control in SA … This is not to suggest that Mr Malan runs the Prime Minister or vice versa… the two men are involved in a symbiotic relationship feeding on each other’s considerable power and combining it into the most formidable administration the country has had… The week ended with the unmistakeable impression that Government emphasis on security and internal repression still out-shadows its moves towards internal reform.
Rand Daily Mail, 5 February 1983
Today the army is employed in colonial occupation of Namibia and in open and covert foreign adventures. These, together with ‘joint operations’ with the police in the townships, are intended to prepare it for future confrontations with its principal enemy: the SA working class in revolutionary struggle.
Core of State
At the same time it is the armed forces at the core of the state which will increasingly provide the fulcrum on which the ruling class balances, as it manoeuvres this way and that in its efforts to win black middle class ‘democrats’ to its defence without sacrificing white support.
These manoeuvres may or may not buy time, but they cannot avert the day of reckoning for the ruling class. As Lenin pointed out in explaining the events in Russia after the revolution that began in February 1917:
The more the bureaucratic apparatus is ‘redistributed’ among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties … the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. Hence the need for all bourgeois parties, even for the most democratic and ‘revolutionary-democratic’ among them, to intensify repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen the apparatus of coercion, i.e. the state machine. This course of events compels the revolution to ‘concentrate all its forms of destruction’ against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.
State and Revolution
That was the task carried out by the Russian working class in October 1917.
The victory of the working class in the SA revolution alone can lead to the establishment of a genuine democracy – a workers’ democracy. The democratic mass organs which will be built by the workers will need to confront this task concretely as the question of power is posed. The class struggle internationally has shown the essential basis for a democratic workers’ state:
- all officials elected and subject to instant recall;
- officials’ pay not to exceed the average wage of skilled workers;
- immediate introduction of control and supervision by all;
- no separate army but the people armed, so that no military or police power can be the tool of a minority against the majority.
This is the key to ending the undemocratic economic stranglehold of the capitalist class through the banks and monopolies. This will open the way to nationalisation, under workers’ control and management, of the commanding heights of production. On this basis production can be planned for the needs of the people, not the profits of the rich. In the present struggle against the new constitution, only the working class can effectively resist the manoeuvres of our rulers. In taking up and leading this struggle, the organised workers will also develop and prepare their forces for the revolutionary tasks ahead.
Reflecting the workers’ understanding of the inseparable connection between the industrial and political struggle, some trade union leaders have already called for united mobilisation against the new schemes.
But it is not the workers’ leaders who are at the fore in forming the United Democratic Front. The UDF is dominated by a political approach which remains entangled with capitalism, and reflects the contradictory position of the middle class.
Yet in any real campaigns of action launched by the UDF it will inevitably be the organised workers who carry the brunt of the struggle. It is the responsibility of the trade union leaders to ensure that campaigns of this nature serve to build-up the organised power of the working class, and to develop its consciousness of that power.
Workers’ Power
Decisions to participate in campaigns should be based on full democratic discussions in the ranks of the trade union movement. The power of the workers must not be subject to decisions arrived at outside their own ranks.
The struggle for unity of the workers’ organisations in order to take the lead in the fight for democracy can restore the momentum towards trade union unification around a campaign of social and to political demands.
Linking the social with the political demands of the working class can provide a clear beacon for the youth to rally around and join hands with the workers’ organisations – contributing all their fighting energy, enthusiasm, and dedication.
AZAPO opposes the UDF because one of the organisations that will support it, the TIC, is ‘ethnically’ based. But the mistake of basing organisation on ethnic division will not be overcome by ultimatums or standing apart – only by the force of example of workers’ unity in action.
Inqaba supporters in the unions and among the youth will be in the forefront of raising these ideas, and will take the opportunity in every campaign to explain the need for the working class to retain its independence of action. “March separately, strike together” must be the watchword.
Rather than simply expressing its “deep regret” at the Eshowe decision, it is the task of the National Executive of the ANC to explain why that decision took place, and to arm the working class with a consciousness of its own power to transform society.
A mass campaign of action against the government’s proposals, drawing fresh layers of workers into organisation, can serve at one and the same time to build the trade unions and consolidate the struggle for democracy and socialism – for workers’ rule – which, in time to come, will be organised openly under the banner of the ANC.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2022).
[1] Rand Daily Mail, 2 February 1983
[2] Sunday Post, 29 April 1979
[3] Rand Daily Mail, 18 January 1983
[4] Daily News, 6 January 1983
[5] Rand Daily Mail, 27 January 1983 – our emphasis
[6] Rand Daily Mail, 6 January 1983 – our emphasis
[7] 18 February 1983
[8] Rand Daily Mail, 12 February 1983
[9] Star, 8 January 1983
[10] Rand Daily Mail, 24 January 1983
[11] Rand Daily Mail, 26 January 1983
[12] Financial Mail, 28 January 1983
[13] Financial Mail, 4 February 1983
[14] Star, 24 January 1983
