The industrialisation of South Africa brought into ex\u00adistence the\nmassive black working class concentrated in the urban centres, and in so doing\nentirely changed the conditions in which the struggle – fought for many\ngenerations against colonial conquest, dispossession, ex\u00adploitation and\nnational oppression of the African people – could now be carried forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In action, the African working class had begun to show its\nemerging power, and so too its potential to lead a movement of all oppressed\npeople for liberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conditions existed not only for the building of in\u00addustrial unions\nof the mass of workers. From the 1920s onward, a fertile ground existed at\nleast to lay down the roots for a mass party of labour – a party which could,\nas it arose, have welded black workers together as a con\u00adscious political\nforce; which could then attract the follow\u00ading of the rural people and win\nsupport of the urban middle-class blacks; and which also, by offering a real\nsocialist alternative to the racist system of capitalism in South Africa, could\neventually draw sizeable numbers of white workers and middle class away from\nthe camp of the ruling class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For such a mass party of the working class to have emerged in the\ncourse of struggle in South Africa in the pre-war period, would have required\nyears of concen\u00adtrated work – preparing and training a working-class cadre as\nits backbone and leadership – in the same way that Lenin and the Bolsheviks in\nRussia worked from the early 1900s to lay the foundations for the workers’\nvictory in 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In South Africa, around the time of Union, a Labour Party had been\nformed on the basis of the organised white minority of the working class –\nespecially the craft workers making up the labour aristocracy. Locked into the\nsectional interests of this privileged section, and dominated by racist leaders\nwho sought collaboration with the capitalists, the Labour Party was never able\nto emancipate itself from this heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the left wing of the Labour Party, in 1921, emerged the\nCommunist Party of South Africa, under the inspiration of the Russian\nRevolution. Filled with revolutionary enthusiasm and working-class determina\u00adtion\nto overthrow capitalism, the early Communists in South Africa needed to base their\nparty unambiguously on the awakening African working-class movement, there to\nroot the development of their still partly-formed Marx\u00adist ideas and build the\nproletarian movement on sound foundations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Correctly identifying themselves as part of the inter\u00adnational\nworking-class movement, the CP in South Africa joined the Communist\nInternational, a mass organisation of workers’ parties, which had been formed\nagainst the background of the revolutionary wave sweeping Europe and many other\nparts of the world after the first world war, and which had as its core the\nvictorious Russian Communist Party, then led by Lenin and Trotsky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fledgling CP in South Africa – to develop its leadership,\nideas and method of work on sound lines, and to free itself of the early\ndistortions in its perspective caus\u00aded by its origins in the organisations of\nthe white work\u00ading class – vitally needed the guidance of an experienced and\nhealthy revolutionary International.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tragedy of the South African Communist Party (and in a real\nsense the tragedy for the working class so far this cen\u00adtury) was that the\nCommunist International degenerated in the 1920s and thereafter, as the\nrevolutions in Europe, China and elsewhere suffered defeats, and as the\nbureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin arose out of the isola\u00adtion and terrible\nconditions of backwardness of Soviet Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dependence of the inexperienced Communist Par\u00adties around the\nworld upon direction from Moscow turn\u00aded into slavish obedience to Stalin’s\ndemands. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, ruthless purges were carried\nout to rid all these parties of all opposition to the bureaucracy and to impose\nabsolute adherence, without democratic debate or criticism, to Moscow’s often\u00ad-changing\nline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transformation of the parties of the Communist International,\namong them the South African Communist Party, in\u00adto uncritical servants of the\nruling bureaucracy in Moscow, ran parallel with a savage counter-revolution\ncarried out in the Soviet Union itself (which destroyed all the revolutionary\ngains of October 1917, apart from the central one, the state-owned property\nsystem – on which the bureaucracy had come to rest).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Slaughter of\nBolsheviks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This political counter-revolution involved the imprison\u00adment in\nlabour camps and eventual slaughter of tens of thousands of Bolsheviks loyal to\nthe traditions of the Revolution and to the workers’ movement international\u00adly.\nBy the 1930s (when all surviving “Trotskyists” in the prison-camps,\nwith their families down to the age of 12 years, were exterminated in Russia),\na gulf of blood separated the regime of Stalin from the revolutionary\ngovernment of Lenin and Trotsky. Only the label of “Marxism” and\n“Leninism”, not its substance, remained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internationally, bewildering zigzags in policy were im\u00adposed on\nCommunist Parties according to the changing national self-interest of the\nRussian bureaucracy, as the Stalinists saw it. In the colonial world, the\npolicy line swung from subordinating the workers to nationalist bourgeois and\npetty-bourgeois leaders; then to absurd ultra-left “putchism” when\nconditions did not allow the workers to take power; then back again to the\nright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Europe, the policy swung from uncritical co\u00adoperation with the\nleaders of reformist parties; then to the sectarian ultra-leftism of refusing\njoint struggle with other mass workers’ parties against fascism (labelling\nSocialist parties “social fascist”); then to outright co\u00adoperation\nwith imperialist powers and hence opposition to any workers’ revolution in\nthose countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this latter phase (that of the so-called “Popular\nFronts” from the mid-1930s onwards), instructions were given to the\nCommunist Parties to collaborate with bourgeois parties on a limited democratic\nprogramme, and to keep the workers’ movement from advancing socialist demands.\n(The “theory” of separate so-called “stages” of revolution\nwas vigorously propagated in this period for the purpose, and applied to every\ncountry. It has remained the gospel of Stalinism ever since.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Soviet bureaucracy had come, by this time, to the conclusion\nthat a workers’ revolution in any developed, industrialised country would\nthreaten its own hold on power and privilege – for the workers of the Soviet\nUnion would be encouraged thereby to rise and take power once again into their\nown hands, and establish a workers’ democracy. The bureaucracy therefore set\nits face against any spread of workers’\n<\/strong>revolution internationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Against this whole background, the South African CP underwent a\ntragic degeneration and, at times, virtual col\u00adlapse. Unable to devise a policy\nlinking the struggle for national liberation to the struggle against capitalism\nand for workers’ power – an idea which had become anathema to the bureaucracy\nin Moscow – the CP leaders in South Africa adapted themselves, on the one hand,\nto the nationalism of the African middle class, and, on the other hand, to the\nreformist promises of the liberal bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s many militant African workers looked\nto “Communism”, and hence to the CP, to organise the working class\nand take the lead in the struggle against racialism, poverty and exploitation.\nHowever, as the party’s own historians admit, in the 1930s the CP degenerated\ninto small inward-looking fac\u00adtions, fighting each other with sectarian denunciations\nand expulsions, in an atmosphere of suspicion and in\u00adtrigue. The party\nleadership grew increasingly isolated from the movement of the working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, some CP members continued active work in the unions,\nand, with the rise of a movement of African workers during the second world\nwar, the CP found itself with an influential position in the trade unions of\nthe CNETU. Disastrously, the party leadership deliberate\u00adly used its influence\nto hold the workers back from struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The CP’s policy during the war followed the radical shifts in\nMoscow’s policy. First it supported the Stalin\u00ad-Hitler Pact. Then, after\nHitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, CP policy switched to one of\ncollabora\u00adtion with Allied imperialism – in the name of assisting the war\neffort against Hitler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, the South African CP called on “all South Africans to\ncombine their forces now and to strengthen the Government” – called, in\nother words, for black workers to support and strengthen the Smuts regime! [1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Such a policy was not pursued only in South Africa. In Britain,\nthe CP broke strikes, in Newcastle and other areas. In India, for instance, the\nCP policy was to postpone the struggle for independence from Britain un\u00adtil\nafter the war – a position that put it well to the right of the\nbourgeois-nationalist Congress Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By such means Stalin sought the friendship of Chur\u00adchill and\nRoosevelt. But the Allied powers, far from wag\u00ading a real fight against\nfascism, had helped Hitler’s rise to power and, through most of the war, held\nback their forces hoping that Germany and Russia would bleed each other to\ndeath. The major Allied war effort opened in the West only after the Germans\nhad met defeat on the Russian front and when the Red Army was advancing into\nEurope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imperialist war<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Allied powers waged the war as a predatory im\u00adperialist war,\nas Hitler did. Appeals to the working class in the Allied countries to support\ntheir capitalist govern\u00adments could only push the German workers behind Hitler.\nThe only effective basis on which to fight fascism and defend the Soviet Union\nwas to mobilise and unite the working class in a conscious struggle to end\noppression and capitalist exploitation everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the CP policy meant in South Africa, in concrete terms, was\nthat the party used its position within the unions to oppose and actually halt\nstrike action. Strategically powerful sections of African workers – in the\npower industry, in iron and steel, and in the mines also – were held back from\nstrike action during the war. Inevitably this led to division, confusion and\ndemoralisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time mineworkers went on strike in 1946, they, and the\nwhole black trade union movement were in a far weaker position. At the height\nof the war, in contrast, concerted industrial action on a wide scale –\nsupported if necessary by the mobilisation of national political strikes –\ncould have won big concessions and speeded the whole development of workers’\norganisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The war period was one of ferment not only in the workplaces, but\nin the townships – with bus boycotts, squatters’ movements, and a struggle\nagainst the passes. A clear lead at this time by the CP could have evoked huge\nsupport and even laid the basis for a mass workers’ party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the opportunity was lost. Instead, the mineworkers (when they\ncould no longer be held back) moved into ac\u00adtion only in 1946, when the tide of\nmass struggle had begun to ebb. The strike lacked preparation, organisa\u00adtion,\ncoordination and direction. It involved only a minority of mineworkers and was\nquickly defeated by ruthless police action. The CNETU, already losing\nmembership, undertook to call a general strike in solidari\u00adty with the\nmineworkers, but failed to organise this and it never materialised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defeat of the 1946 strike further demoralised workers in the\ntrade unions, and deepened the ebb of the movement there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, well before the 1950s, the lack of a mass party of the working class, with a clear revolutionary perspec\u00adtive and policy, was already exercising a paralysing in\u00adfluence on the development of the movement.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nContinue to Chapter Three<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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