The Labour Party International Department which compiled the NEC\u2019s report was fully aware of all this educational work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet it suppresses most of this information. No mention is made of SALEP\u2019s publications in African languages, nor of its audio-visual productions. No mention is made of SALEP\u2019s material on Zimbabwe. No mention is made of SALEP\u2019s training programme for black youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nevertheless, without even presenting serious argument to support them, the report lays the most sweeping \u2018charges\u2019 against SALEP\u2019s educational work. Let us examine them in turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. \u201cNo evidence is forthcoming from South African black and non-racial unions that they support SALEP.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under apartheid law most strikes are illegal. It is also a serious criminal offence to advocate \u201cany political, industrial, social or economic change\u201d by so-called \u201cdisruptive\u201d means, i.e. by the methods of collective action which are all that lies at the disposal of the South African masses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only workers and youth in struggle, but even simple advocates of disinvestment, as well as mild \u2018liberals\u2019 have been prosecuted under these and related \u2018security\u2019 laws of the apartheid regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it is not surprising that SALEP does not seek to publicise evidence of its supporters in South Africa, nor of precisely who is using or benefiting from the material that it has produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless the statement that \u2018no evidence\u2019 was forthcoming from South African trade unions of their support for SALEP is a straight and deliberate lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such evidence was presented to the International Department researcher who compiled the report, and further evidence was presented to the Labour Party NEC. This was not all the evidence that could have been produced. But it was enough to show this work was welcomed by a major trade union, and that there were demands for SALEP to be producing more material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. SALEP\u2019S educational work \u201cgives the appearance of being a method of creating political cadres rather than assisting genuine trade unionists.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Black workers in South Africa have built the trade unions over the last ten years first and foremost as mass instruments for defending and advancing their living standards. But they have built these organisations at the same time with a political purpose and for political goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Thami Mali, one of the leaders of the two-day general strike in the Transvaal in November last year, stated to a capitalist newspaper: \u201cMore than ever before people have realised that their struggle at the factory floor will never be solved until the whole system of government has been changed.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether in South Africa, Britain, or elsewhere, only the most crass right-wingers in the labour movement assert that a rigid dividing line can be drawn between trade unionism and politics, or between trade union education and political education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does the Labour Party NEC believe that education of trade unionists about Tory anti-union legislation, or about the Tory attack on the political levy, is \u201ca method of creating political cadres rather than assisting genuine trade unionists\u201d \u2013 which warrants the proscription of those who engage in it from contact with the Labour Party?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea is absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still less can workers in South Africa, faced day by day with a regime which acts hand-in-hand with the employers to attack workers\u2019 living standards, workers\u2019 rights, and workers\u2019 demands, afford to draw any water-tight division between \u2018trade-unionism\u2019 and \u2018politics\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1950s the South African Congress of Trade Unions was built on the principle that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sactu is conscious of the fact that the organizing of the mass of workers for higher wages, better conditions of life and labour is inextricably bound-up with a determined struggle for political rights and liberation from all oppressive laws and practices. It follows that a mere struggle for the economic rights of all the workers without participation in the general struggle for political emancipation would condemn the Trade Union movement to uselessness and to a betrayal of the interests of the workers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n SALEP, with the whole militant workers\u2019 movement in SA, firmly defends these principles. All our material bases itself on the everyday needs of the mass of workers \u2013 such as the struggle for a living wage. At the same time SALEP consistently points out how this struggle is inseparable from the overall political struggle to end apartheid and capitalism in South Africa, and from the political struggle of the workers internationally to transform society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What on earth is there in this position to warrant the quarantining of SALEP from the Labour Party? On the contrary, it represents the finest traditions of the labour movement, in Britain, South Africa, and internationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. \u201cRelations with the black and non-racial trade unions in South Africa would be put in jeopardy if the Party gave any encouragement to SALEP.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the NEC report provides not a shred of evidence or argument for this ridiculous assertion, nor could they.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How could the encouragement of socialist education or international worker contact put the Labour Party\u2019s relations with the black and non-racial trade unions \u201cin jeopardy\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did the International Department, in compiling this report, even ask a single one of the democratic trade unions in South Africa of their attitude to SALEP, or to SALEP\u2019s material \u2013 let alone pose the question to them of whether SALEP is so \u2018dangerous\u2019 to the workers\u2019 movement as to warrant quarantining from the Labour Party?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In reality it is only the capitalist class and its supporters, in South Africa and internationally, that has anything to fear from socialist education or the promotion of direct links among workers internationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NEC\u2019s Model for Workers\u2019 Education<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What, however, is more disturbing than these ridiculous accusations is what the NEC report advocates as a model form of workers\u2019 education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SALEP\u2019s grand offers of educational support to workers are insignificant, given their exile, compared to organizations providing education on the ground. British Trade Unions have, through the ICFTU,[2]<\/a> supported the Urban Training Project and the Industrial Health Research Group who are performing valuable work with shop stewards on the ground in South Africa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Urban Training Project (UTP)? What is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Workers in South Africa, deprived by the apartheid regime of access to any real education, have sought to benefit as much as possible from anything provided. The Urban Training Project may have, within its limits, served certain of their needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time workers whose trade union dues in Britain are being channelled via the TUC and the ICFTU to the UTP should be aware of precisely what this organisation is and how it is regarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The UTP was established in the Transvaal in the early 1970s as one of several \u2018service centres\u2019 for the emerging independent trade union movement. Other such centres included the Institute for Industrial Education in Durban, and the Western Province Workers\u2019 Advice Bureau in Cape Town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even at that time, the UTP was regarded within the emerging workers\u2019 movement \u2013 and also by the IIE and the WPWAB \u2013 as on the right-wing of the trade union education spectrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A British TUC delegation which visited South Africa in 1973 itself characterised the UTP as a \u201cmoderate and cautious organisation, working within severely practical limits\u201d. It pointed out that, in contrast to the other education centres, the UTP was uncritical of the white-dominated Trade Union Council of South Africa, which was seeking to bring African workers under its paternalistic domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole thrust of the UTP\u2019s education has been to reproduce in South Africa the prescriptions of the right-wing of the British labour leadership \u2013 that the function of union leaders is to persuade workers to accept the inevitability of \u2018compromise\u2019 with their bosses, and to keep trade-unionism separated from politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its bitter hostility to SALEP\u2019s modest contribution to socialist workers\u2019 education, this is the alternative which the Labour Party NEC seeks to impose on the South African workers!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today only a small minority of the black workers organised in democratic unions use the UTP for workers\u2019 education. Neither the trade unions affiliated to the Federation of South African Trade Unions, nor such unaffiliated unions as the General Workers Union, or the Food and Canning Workers Union, nor the South African Allied Workers Union, have anything to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even within the Council of Unions of South Africa, whose affiliates have used the UTP in the past, its educational work is not unchallenged. At the 1984 CUSA annual conference the South African National Union of Mineworkers, by far the largest of the CUSA unions, criticised the UTP\u2019s education for being \u201cineffectual\u201d.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If the Labour Party NEC intends to hold-up the UTP\u2019s educational programme as the model for the education of the workers\u2019 movement in South Africa \u2013 then it is this attitude which risks \u201cjeopardising\u201d its relations with the South African trade unions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this position indicates how far to the right the right-wing, and even a part of the \u2018left\u2019 of the leadership of the Labour Party is moving in its policies towards the South African liberation struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On March 22nd<\/sup> 1975, Ken Gill, General Secretary of AUEW-TASS, and seven Labour Party MP\u2019s, including Neil Kinnock, signed a letter to the Guardian<\/em>. They expressed \u201cdeep concern\u201d at the contact that had been established between Ruskin College, Oxford and the Institute of Industrial Education (IIE) in Durban, and at the TUC\u2019s financial support for the IIE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They stated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is certain that such a trade union centre would need the agreement of the Vorster regime to function, otherwise the leaders and full-time black organisers would become very easy prey to the security forces and suffer the same fate as those before them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The TUC\u2019s action \u201ccould be construed as contravening the boycott of South Africa\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even then, this position \u2013 of isolating trade unionists and workers\u2019 education programmes along with the apartheid regime \u2013 was a profoundly mistaken one, which reflected the false perspectives being propagated by the SACP leadership in exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For, despite the repression of many of those workers trained by the IIE at the hands of the security police, the trade unions they were helping to build have gone from strength to strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the main point is that while in 1975 Neil Kinnock was calling for a total boycott of the IIE \u2013 ten years later he and his supporters are holding-up as a model an education programme (the UTP) which stands well to the right of where even the IIE did ten years ago! <\/strong>All this for the purpose of denying support to a socialist education project \u2013 SALEP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SALEP has never expected that the right-wing of the Labour leadership, or those \u2018lefts\u2019 moving rightwards, would offer positive support for the socialist educational programme which we are undertaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However the black South African workers demand the right to determine for themselves the kind of workers\u2019 education that they want, and not to have models forced on them, or withheld from them, at the dictates of the leadership of the British labour movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SALEP calls for no more and no less than the right to campaign for support<\/strong> for its work by putting forward its ideas in the labour movement, whether in Southern Africa, Britain, or elsewhere, and to have those ideas tested, supported, modified, or rejected, in the light of the workers\u2019 own experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SALEP, which would defend that same right in respect of the UTP, however much it might disagree with the UTP\u2019s ideas, calls on the NEC of the Labour Party to remove the proscription which it is placing on SALEP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, as if it were not bad enough that the leadership of the British Labour Party is endorsing such reactionary views on how workers\u2019 education should be conducted in South Africa, it is also claiming in the report the authority of the African National Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do these arguments represent in reality the viewpoint of the National Executive of the ANC or the National Executive of Sactu? Were this the case, black workers and youth in South Africa would be scandalised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Would these bodies maintain:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black workers and youth in South Africa seeking to build a mass ANC on a socialist programme for an end to apartheid and capitalism have the right to know the answers to these questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the responsibility of the International Department, which compiled this report, to produce the evidence on these matters. What discussions were held with representatives of the ANC and Sactu? And with which representatives were they? Does the International Department have written statements from the NEC\u2019s of the ANC or Sactu on these questions \u2013 or on any other of the \u201ccharges\u201d that it raises in its report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the report bases its arguments on principles of \u2018joint determination\u2019 of policy with the ANC and Sactu, the leadership has the responsibility to confirm or deny these claims. SALEP calls on the National Executives of the ANC and Sactu to make clear whether or not these arguments represent their position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a9\u00a0Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a> Financial Mail<\/em>, 16 November 1984<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> International Confederation of Free Trade Unions \u2013 MWP, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a> Financial Mail<\/em>, 23 November 1984<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Continue to Part 3<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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