Gold and Imperialism

Scan page 8

HISTORY OF SOUTHERN AFRICA. PART TWO: THE LABOUR MOVEMEN May 1900 - the South African republican flag is taken down in murrendar Peneng. Li roto whic ¡Afric Sout ente: foun to ta Afri io t! Labo The nature of the Boer War was summed up by the liberal middle of the war (1900):

*If this war can be successfully accomplished and a "settlement' satisfactory to the mine owners call ut icacucu, lue tust non ha mannhal tha fiant fruits of victory will be represented in a large cheap submissive supply of black and white labour attended by such other economies of "costs" as will add millions per annum to the profits of the mines.

It is no extravagance to argue that the blood and the money of the people of Great Britain are being spent for this purpose; that at present no other definite tangible result of the conflict can be shown.

The men who, owning the South African Press and political organ'isations engineered the agitations which have issued in this war are I the same men whose pockets will , swell with this increase; open eyed and persistent they have pursued their course, plunging South Africa into temporary ruin in order that they may emerge victorious, small confederacy of international mine owners and speculators holding the treasures of South Africa in the hollow of their hands"

Hobson was right. After the Boer war poor white Afrikaners, driven from the land by war devas: tation and inflation drifted to the towns to swell the ranks of the . working. class.

SOCIALISTS

The small band of revolutionary socialists in Cape Town.- in the main, English immigrants bringing organisations like the Social Democratic Federation with them -thought that these poor whites would form the basis of a strong class movement of white and black unskilled workers.

The opposite happened. By the ¡mid 1920's an alliance of the labour aristocracy of skilled mineworkers, Afrikaner poor whites and Afrikaner farmers had formed the basis of the regime which has tyrannised South Africa to this day. How did it happen?

Thr mineowners used the poor white: and African labour in an attem: " to undermine the condi ons of the skilled miners.

Th miners reacted with a campaign o strengthen the colour bar in the nines.

ARISTOCRACY

This was the policy that naturally occurs to the labour aristocracy - strengthening its position through restrictions on entry into the trade.

The miners still had however, to delend elementary trade union rights against the employers onslaught. A massive strike in 1907 and : general strike in 1913 for ¡trade union recognition resulted in Prime Minister Smuts sending British troops against the miners.

The defence of the colour bar and tie defence of trade unionism had become intermingled. Despite this, many African mineworkers joined in in 1913, in defence of the right io organise and were brutally dealt with by Smuts.

The Labour party, founded in 1910 echoed the sentiments of the white miners. It won 4 seats in the ¡1911 elections on a programme of detence of the colour bar.

LAND ACT our . also supported the yus Native Land Act of 1913 restricted the mass of is to 8% of the land of Africa! olutionary socialists • had the Labour Party on its ion but the party's refusal seriously the organisation of workers alienated the left.

Labour Party capitulation war along with the British Party was the last straw and the socialists split to form the International Socialist League - (to become the Communist Party in 1921) and • pledged to fight for a class based united movement of black and white workers.

In 1912 Tom Mann had visited South Africa and warned strongly that there could be no mass trade unionism. in South Africa without the African workers.

STRIKE

The Rand stike of 1922 - one of the most famous events of South African labour history - spread like wildfire and was only defeated after the declaration of martial law and the bringing in of aircraft and artillery by Smuts.

The Miners Union saw itself fighting to "maintain a white standard of living" and produced the notorious slogan "Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa"

This Slogan cemented the relationship • between the skilled miners and the Afrikaners.

The Afrikaners were in economic terms in an identical position to the unskilled African miners. Although there were various small instances of joint action on this basis (eg on unemployment committees in the 1930's) the dominant tendency was in the opposite direction.

The poor whites, rapidly urbanised from the rural society of the Boers which had been based on enslavement of Africans, resented "sinking down' to the same employment situation as African workers and remained under the domination of their traditional racist ideas.

Before these had a chance to be whittled away through common experiences with the Africans, the Afrikaner farmers and petty bourgeoisie under whose political domination the poor whites remained, saw their chance.

The farmers, still smarting from the defeat of the Boer War, saw the chance to win over the English labour aristocracy to the cause of the Afrikaner "Volk' and away from the Empire, hitherto so dear to the hearts of the Labour bureaucracy.

Accordingly the Afrikaner farmers mobilised the poor whites into militia to defend the strike and even had the 'Red Flag' translated into Dutch for the occasion!

The strike threw the infant Communist Party into confusion. Blind to the fact that the vast majority of the miners, the Africans, had been shunned by the white unionists and of the fact that black workers were beginning to reveal a strong sense of trade unionism, the Communist Party was able to make no attempt at intervention, but resolved to find something progressive in a strike to defend the colour bar!

The Communist Party characterised the strike as "reactionary in form but progressive in content" and argued that as the strike proceeded, be replaced by class con-. racism would of its own sciousness and the white strikers would turn to African workers for support. Meanwhile the Communist Party refused • to take a stand against the "White South Africa" siogan.

The Communist Party ignored the role of the Afrikaner petty bourgeois leadership and its opportunism in allying with the prejudices of the English workers.

MULTI-RACIAL

Under other circumstances it might have been possible to win a section of the white workers to a multi-racial struggle against the mineowners.

As it was, the white working class set itseli on a course of cooperation with the Afrikaner Nationalists which it has maintained to the present.

Trade union activity was in any case difficult in the mines for African workers.

The mineowners kept the African migrant workers locke d in compounds closely guarded by company police - a system that exists to this day.

African trade unionism thus tended to develop outside the mines at first.

The first, and for a time highly successiul, African trade union was the famous Industrial and Commercial Workers Union led by Klemens Kadalie, a black worker from Nyasaland (Zambia).

The ICU was constructed on the lines of the American IWW by whom Kadalie was much influenced' Syndicalism was thus a strong element in the ICU which after a successful African docky rorkers strike in Cape Town in 1920 gained ahn in strength, opening branches in Rhodesia.

The ICU tended to concentrate on industrial workers, as yet only a small percentage of the African oppressed classes, failing to tackle in any systematic way the land question and the peasantry.

This left African political leadership in the hands of the African National Congress, founded in 1912 and by 1919 carrying out the first • long series of campaigns against the notorious pass laws.

The pass laws besides being a method of direct state control over all the movements of the African, were a crucial barrier to trade union rights.

Although it was legal for African trade unions to exist, the pass laws exclude Atricans from the definition of 'employee'. And only employees have the right to bargain over pay, and to strike!

Again the wrong policies of the Communist Party prevented it from playing a leading role in the struggle for African trade union rights.

Black workers remembered the African gold miners Party's vacillation in supporting the 1922 colour bar strike.

In 1926 Kadalie expelled African Communist Party sympathisers from the ICU without much resistance and then moved sharply to the right, affiliating the IC to the British TUC, following the advice of walter Citrine to keep the ICU "out of politics"

Kadalie, in London in 1927 was treated disgustingly by Citrine who denied him attendance at the 1927 TUC conference as a guest lest the white unions and the South African Labour Party take offence! By 1930 the ICU was dead.

MISTAKE

The Communist Party also made the elemental mistake of equating African nationalism - the nationalism of the oppressed workers and peasants against a vicious colonialIst regime, and Afrikaner nationalism - the reactionary nationalism of the Fural white petty bourgeoisie, as the same thing!

Thus during the 1920's flying

Scan page 9

the face of Lenin's teachings, the A Review of "Be Folrose Books, Joh analysis Rather the articles set out to show how Healy's method turns the formal verbal trappings of Marxism into idealist phrasemongering.

As Trotsky points out:

...though he swear by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian is the direct negation of dialectical materialism which takes experience as' its point of departure and always returns to it."

An example of the WRP's revisionism is quoted in the second distorted the history of struggle of the murdered Vietnamese Trotskyists in order to uncritically praise the Hanoi Stalinist leadership following the overthrow of the US puppet regime in May 1975.

We now know that this revisionist position adopted by the wR (never altered) was only the beginning of a move towards an uncritical political support for the PLO including Yassir Arafat, along with other Arab nationalist leaders like Gadaffi of Libya - as expressed in the new and thoroughly opportunist paper The News Line.

WŘP on the Road Back to

----- pull-quotes -----

historian of imperialism, J.A. Hobson, who wrote in

108 = TA FRiTET