Anc No Lead for S. African Workers

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Box 5277, London WC1V 6XX. Printed by Morning Litho Printers Ltd. not necessarily represent the views of the Workers Socialist League South Africa's "Freedom Day", June 26, was celebrated by a large rally in Camden organised by the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Stalinist-dominated African National Congress of South Africa.

The keynote address to an audience of several hundred was given by Alfred Nzo, the General Secretary of the ANC (in the absence of the President Olivier Tambo).

The tone of the speech (as of the rally as a whole) was one of self-congratulation by the ANC.

Nzo, of course, described the giant tidal wave of youth and workers mobilisations of the last few weeks.

Of course, he was unable to claim that the ANC was at the head of these mobilisations.

He could directly associate the name of the ANC only with the successful sabotage attempts a month ago against the important SASOL coal-to-oil plants.

But far from honestly recognising the limited role which the upsurge of mass struggle, Nzo ment which gave full credit for ment which gave Ill cical Io it to the ANC.

Sabotage actions which the ANC has carried out over recent years, Nzo argued, instill confidence" in the masses and "convert latent hostility into open opposition".

These armed actions, he said, "create the appropriate psychological and political climate" for open mass struggle.

Nzo was not however referring to the undoubted effectiveness of armed struggle carried out as an integral element of the mass struggle against the capitalist apartheid state.

He was claiming that the ANC's isolated armed guerrilla actions were themselves the things which stimulated the mass struggle.

This is a position which must be emphatically rejected by revolutionary socialists who consider the masses not as automotons who simply react to dramatic events but as having a political consciousness based upon their own experience in Nzo's speech showed that the ANC cannot provide the leadership which can recognise and develop that mass consciousness.

The programmatic content of his speech was restricted to the purely bourgeois democratic programme adopted by the ANC twenty-five years ago.

The programme-The Freedom Charter-contains the following demands:

*The people shall govern.

*All national groups shall have equal rights.

*The people shall share in the country's wealth.

*The land shall be shared among those who work it.

*Ăll shall be equal before the law.

*All shall enjoy human rights.

*There shall be peace and friendship. But tion of already beyond gramme Outside the hall the ANC gave some examples of its methods of programmatic debate and "democracy"

A group of expelled ANC members selling a pamphlet critical of the ANC leadership were slandered by stewards and ANC members as "agents of the South African BÕSS" (the secret police).

One of them was manhandled by an ANC member, as was a Socialist Press seller who protested against this.

Despite the continued domination of the traditional nationalist organisations among exiled South Africans, their selfcongratulation and attempts to suppress democratic rights of their own members are evidence of the old leaders' fears that the latest wave of struggle will once again (as in Soweto) clearly show the way they have been politically superceded. the present mobilisathe masses show them in some ways passing the ANC's limited pro-

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ANC, with its guerrillaist orien- tation, is playing in today's