Socialist Transformation and the Freedom Charter Z, Pallo Jordan Though this paper will deal specifically with South Africa, and will be ad- dressing itself to the manner in which South African revolutionaries, par- tisans of the national liberation movement, have approached this question, and will attempt to outline the theory of the South African Revolution that has evolved from these approaches, we shall be drawing on the particularly rich heritage bequeathed to humanity by Marx and his co-worker, Engels. The writing of Marx and Engels on colonialism, the national question and the struggle for democracy, have a particular relevance for South Africa in the present day. Many of these, we feel, can assist us in throwing light on some of the more thorny problems of theory and revolutionary practice that confront our country and its people. A comparison of the map of Europe, east of the Rhine, during the 1840s when Marx first entered politics, and South Africa today, clearly demonstrates the relevance of Marx's work to the problems that beset our country in the present day. Both maps, on examination, would reveal an extraordinary degree of fragmentation, an immense disparity in the sizes of the various fragments and the levels of socio-economic development both within and amongst the fragments. What the observer would have to discover are the political realities behind that map: birthpangs caused by a new social and political order strug- gling to emerge. He would observe also, hidden behind that map, two ap- parently contradictory yet integrally related processes, the dismemberment of an empire/s and the unification of nations. 19th Century Europe and Southern Africa during the last quarter of the 20th Century are qualitatively different situations, we can hear our readers object. And we have to agree. But, let us focus our attention on one of these similarities for a moment to bring out the parallels we are referring to. Speaking at the Fourth Congress of the Frelimo Party, Comrade Presi- dent O.R. Tambo said inter alia of the ANC's vision of our country's future: SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 143 '. . . We conceive of our country as a single, united, democratic and non-racial state, belonging to all who live in it, in which all shall enjoy equal rights, and in which sovereignty will come from the people as a whole, and not from a collection of Bantustans and racial and tribal groups organised to perpetuate minority power'. (Sechaba, July 1983, p.7) Compare this with the first two clauses of the 'Demands of the Communist Party in Germany' drawn up by Marx and Engels soon after the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution: '1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic. 2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence'. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 7, p. 3) The similarities are striking. But these similarities are not the result of plagiarism on our part. They are, we contend, the outcome of similarities in the circumstances which led to the adoption of common solutions. An even more instructive parallel emerges when we focus on the relations bet- ween the Polish and German national movements of the period. Compare the words of Engels on the Polish question: '. . . We German democrats present here clasp hands with the Polish democrats, so the whole German people will celebrate the alliance with the Policy people on the very field of the first battle won in common'. (Collected Works, Volume 6, p. 552) with those of President Tambo, on Namibia: 'The ANC once again affirms its support for the people of Namibia in their legitimate struggle for national independence under the leader- ship of SWAPO. The apartheid regime must be encircled by your strug- gles and by your actions: by our struggles and by our actions. Together with you we shall be unconquerable and invincible'. (Sechaba, May 1982, p. 18) Decaying Feudalism and Monopoly Capitalism Though there are these parallels between the Europe of the 1840s and South Africa of the present, we do not intend that these be carried too far. More important and illuminating are the divergencies between the two situations. Europe, east of the Rhine, during the 1840s represented a stark picture of decaying feudalism, over-ripe for the bourgeois democratic revolution. This state of socio-political putrefaction rested on the twin pillars of the counter-revolutionary compact concluded in Vienna at the close of the Napoleonic Wars and the political flabbiness of the big bourgeoisie of these territories, especially Germany. One regional power, Tsarist Russia, under- wrote and sustained these obsolete institutions with its armed might. 144 Z. PALLO JORDAN The German bourgeoisie's fear was occasioned not by its economic backwardness or weakness but precisely by its strength. Within the confines of the archaic institutions of absolutism, the bourgeoisie had accumulated wealth, established factories and had even forced a half-hearted form of land reform on the landowning junkers. These developments, however, produc- ed their historical concomitant, the proletariat, which, though still in its in- fancy, had demonstrated its revolutionary potential and embraced political ambitions and a social vision the bourgeoisie might find impossible to con- tain. The images of Jaques Roux, the Enrages, not to mention Babeouf, were still fresh in the minds of the European bourgeoisie. They therefore chose to deal with the devil they knew rather than entertain the risky project of arousing the masses to revolutionary struggle. Commenting on this turn of events, Marx wrote: 'The German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly, timidly and slowly that at the moment it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw menacingly confronting it the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the pro- letariat . .. from the first the German bourgeoisie was inclined to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representative of the old society, for it itself already belonged to the old society . . . The big bourgeoisie, which was all along anti-revolutionary, concluded a defensive and offensive alliance with the reactionary forces, because it was afraid of the people, i.e. of the workers and the democratic bourgeoisie'. (Collected Works, Volume 8, p. 163) The abandonment of revolution by the bourgeoisie imposed on Marx and Engels the task of re-evaluating the whole character of the revolution in Ger- many. They concluded that a new type of bourgeois revolution was in the making in which the task of mobilising and leading the other revolutionary forces devolved on the proletariat, since the bourgeoisie had ceased being revolutionary. . The German bourgeois democrats and socialists, had conceived of the na- tional democratic revolution as entailing two inseparable processes: the unification of the German people, to include those of Austria and those of the smaller German principalities, on the one hand; and the emancipation of the various smaller nations oppressed by Austrian and Prussian absolutism, on the other hand. In contrast to them the forces of reaction in both Prussia and Austria, for divergent reasons, were opposed to the unification of the German people. Prussia, the weaker of the two, though favouring unifica- tion under its domination, realistically could not support it since it could lead to Austrian domination over Prussia. Austria too would have preferred unification under Austrian control but feared that advocacy of national rights SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 145 might have a subversive effect on its non-Germany dependencies. The Austrians therefore became proponents of confederation because this would enable them to dominate the other German states while retaining their op- pressive grip on the smaller nations within the Hapsburg Empire. The upshot was that Germany's transition to fully fledged capitalism was presided over by a Bonapartist regime headed by Bismarck and the military caste of Prussia. Austria was excluded from this unified Germany and wars of conquest rather than revolutionary struggle, initiated from below, became the chief agency of socio-political change. The tragic consequences of this evolution do not form part of our theme and have been widely discussed elsewhere. In sharp contrast to the decaying feudalism of 19th century Europe, South Africa today is a highly integrated capitalist socio-economic formation characterised by the domination of huge industrial, financial and mining monopolies. Yet we find that the country is being fragmented and sub-divided - into various ethnic and racial compartments. All fractions of the ruling monopoly capitalist class — to differing degrees — advocate the creation of artificial mini-states and tribal principalities as a bulwark against revolu- tionary change from below. Fearful that any popularly-initiated change of the political order may have consequences inimical to their property rights, the very class whose historical task was once described as being: 'political centralisation' almost daily con- cocts harebrained schemes — 'federalism, confederalism, consociationism, national pluralism' — anything but the unitary state, as a means of preserv- ing White minority domination and capitalist power under some superficial- ly 'new' guise. In the most obscene and absurd imitation of the White capitalist interests groups they serve various Black collaborationist leaders have offered up their versions in the shape of ethnic Utopias, the so-called 'Buthelezi Commission' and a host of other farcical proposals. The National Liberation Movement has thus emerged as the only cham- pion of democracy and national unity. Consistent with these principles, the ANC is also the only consistent ally and advocate of the national tion of the Namibian people under the leadership of their vanguard, SWAPO. We have here again the recapitulation of the tasks Marx and Engels assign- ed to the new democratic movement, headed by the proletenat of Europe more than 150 years ago. ^^ ^ The Evolution of a Theory of the South African revolution The South African liberation movement, headed by the ANC, is a multi- class alliance embracing movements that draw their inspiration from two modern political currents, nationalism and socialism. Though South Africa 146 Z. PALLO JORDAN is not unique in this respect, there is one dimension of our movement which was not present in others of this region; viz, the presence of an organised Marxist-Leninist party as a component of the liberation movement. African Nationalism in South Africa traces its origins to the liberal-democratic tradi- tions of the European 'Enlightenment', imbibed by the mission-educated African petty bourgeoisie. Socialism came to pur country in the baggage of European immigrant workers and returning Black students who had been exposed to the influences of the Labour Movement in Europe. The complex interaction between these two currents in our movement has been dealt with elsewhere. We shall focus here on how these two grew together, leading first to a political alliance and later to the emergence of a common approach to the immediate tasks facing our people and our country. To elucidate this process we shall discuss separately the various approaches that have evolved within these two traditions. African Nationalism in South Africa can be dated from the first half of the 19th Century, when two Black converts, Jan Tshatshu and Andries Stof- fels, travelled to Britain as part of a missionary led deputations to petition the British colonial authorities. Both were representatives of the 'new men' who had come into existence in the interstices between European colonizer and the African colonized. Attracted by the achievements of European thought and technique, the new men oscillated between collaboration and resistance. Unlike the majority of their countrymen they were modernists, seeking to master the instruments of European culture and the political in- stitutions created by the colonialists in the Cape. At the same time, they were repelled by the brutal aggression of the British and the racial arrogance of the colonialists. In the end, both Tshatshu and Stoffels finally opted for resistance. It was only after 1880 that a large enough number of Blacks with access to the political institutions of the Cape came into being. Before this time meaningful participation in Cape politics had not been possible. Organised Black politics is usually dated from this period, which 'saw the first mass registration of African voters and the publication of the first secular newspapers in the African languages (1884). The following three decades con- stitute the formative years of African political thought during which African political leaders were forced to adapt to and learn from the changing needs of Cape liberalism and the shifting of the British imperialists. The inaugura- tion of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brings this period to a close. The founding of the ANC in January 1912 marks the end, but also the beginning of a political practice that had developed amongst the Black elite over the last decades of the 19th century. It brought to a close the preceding period during which Black politics had been concerned with fighting an un- SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 147 successful rearguard action in defence of the few rights the Black petty bourgeoisie had enjoyed under colonial rule, but it was also the beginning of a new era during which Black politics would increasingly challenge the insitutions of White overlordship and in the process learn to pose alternatives and new options for the country as a whole. In this light the conception of the ANC as an alternative parliament, so often decried as puerile mimicry of the British ruling class, was itself a revolutionary measure. As the 'parlia- ment of the African people', the ANC assumed unto itself the role of custo- dian of ideals, aspirations and political values that had no place in the 'of- ficial' White parliament. Implicit in these actions was the intent to seize the initiative from the White minority and reshape the entire body politic along their own design. The European liberal tradition formed the core ideas of the politics of the national movement during its early years. These were the ideas the leader- ship had learnt from their predecessors. They shared an idealised perception of the British Empire and its institutions, all supposedly rooted in this political tradition. That the empire was in reality a prison house for millions of Africans and Asians escaped their notice. They, like their White counter- parts therefore, turned to Britain, as the final arbiter in South African af- fairs and tried to legitimise their claims by an appeal to this political tradi- tion. It was of course the economic realities — rich mines, large farms, the need for a mass labour force — that carried weight in Whitehall. Hence it was the pro-imperialist White settler bourgeoisie and its Afrikaner Nationalist opponents who received a sympathetic hearing in London. The political programmes and objectives of both these political forma- tions dove-tailed with the interest of British imperialism. African Nationalism did not. Thus, despite the skeleton of the Boer republican rebellion rattling in his political cupboard, General Hertzog was able to secure a firm promise for greater autonomy when he went to London at the end of World War 1 in 1918. The African Nationalists, who had loyally stood by the Empire and enthusiastically mobilized volunteers for the Native Labour Contingent, came back empty-handed. The racial exclusivity of the Union constitution however also had a quite unintended effect. Racism circumscribed the activities of the Black ehte in the state, the economy, political and cultural insitutions to deahng mainly with their own people. This tended to reinforce group cohesion and solidari- ty, both which became factors in political action. Confined to the ghetto oi its skin colour, the elite also became susceptible to aspirations and objec- tives that were not necessarily its own. It gradually came to realise that tne fulfilment, even of its own limited objectives and ambitions, was contingent upon the status of the Black community as a whole. This realisation impos- 148 Z. PALLO JORDAN ed on it the task of acting as the spokesman of the African and other op- pressed nationalities. As Thomas Hodgkin has noted, every African colonial city was divided into an opulent White section and an impoverished African section, which stimulated an identification with socially radical causes. The legal racial bar- riers erected to hold back Black advancement made it plain that the distribu- tion of wealth, power and privilege were not pre-ordained but the direct con- sequences of a particular mode of organisation of the economic and political order. The intransigence of the White ruling class, the vacillation and betrayal of principles by erstwhile friends in the liberal establishment and the grow- ing capacity for struggle displayed by the poorer strata of the Black popula- J s ovf H a radlCaJsing toP** on *e Black elite which synchronised with its own changing self-perception. faCtOr to t he radicalisation of Black S G> WaS t he i m p a ct of industrial develop- t he ™gence of a rapidly growing Black urban com- i K ^ h e l m i n g ly of industrial workers who had acquired S s t^ m?df" s e c t or of the economy. It was from amongst first mass Black Trade Union, the ICU, developed during the °D t he C a pe T o™ ^erfront, the workers. The inflow of Sfcfaed ^ their political initiation i 7^ ^ of losiah T. Oumel mitted liberal, violently anJt^\ t c o m m u m s ^ g T e l f r i l^ M a d e v o ut Christian and com- » * »» ^ nc emer^n $ N a t i ve Administra;ion BiU, he By 1926' at the 7^°8 cy conference convened f o d i s t u f S - ?^ ^ emerged as the leading s r o SZ ed mainly of young"men c S ZX m "^ T^ petitioning and deputations ~tn T ?V generaUy agreed that the decisive s t e ^ f0 1 84 T^me'S o n s l a uSh t- » * ^ T ^" he a t t e n d ed t he W o r ld C o n" gress of the League Against Imneritl to the ANC's national c o n f S et ^ ^f B™SelS * 1927' H is r e p o rt °f t h at y e ar contrfbuted to his election as President. But it is ^ radicaI v i e ws coincided with the mood of the general nTr^J a known communist was elected"^ IJ™* t h at h is P W h e" we r e c a 11 t h at E d d ie K h a i I e. r a d l C al m e a s u r es ~ °ther than CaU™' C°m p°S- 1 A «ected as Secretary-General by the same national SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 149 conference. Though it is difficult to document the specific contribution of Gumede and Khaile's leadership to the evolution of ANC policy because of the scarcity of primary sources, the few that are extant indicate that they introduced a revolutionary new theme into ANC politics. Before June 1927, it would be fair to describe the ANC's strategy and the political outlook of its leadership as liberal-reformist. The notion of over- throwing white minority domination and replacing it with a government representative of the majority was at best considered Utopian, at worst the scheme of wild-eyed extremists. The aims of the ANC, as expressed in the 'African Bill of Rights', adopted in 1923 were: 1. The restoration of the Cape African Franchise and its extension to the other provinces (i.e. a property-owner franchise). 2. The abolition of the statutory colour bar. 3. Restoration of the African rights to buy and sell land anywhere in the country. In other words, the struggle was conceived of as essentially a struggle for civil rights, an extension to the blacks of the rights enjoyed by the whites within the framework of the 1910 Union constitution. As for the idea of radically restructuring the economy, that was not even part of their political vocabulary. The clearest exposition of the poUtical strategy and programme associated with the Gumede-Khaile leadership of 1927-30 is contained in Gumede's presidential address to the ANC's annual conference in April 1930. It was ironically this address that precipitated his removal from the presidency. This should hardly be surprising if we bear in mind that this was the first explicit call for majority rule emanating from a sub-Saharan liberation movement in the period preceding the Second World War. Gumede's radicalism frighten- ed the ANC old guard, reared on the politics of moderation and 'respectful petitioning'. The most radical departure was in the area of strategy. Gumede called upon the oppressed to unite and rely on their own organised strength rather than on the empty promises and doubtful loyalties of the liberal establishment. The tactics of deputations and petitioning had proved fruitless, the regime would only respond to power . .. And that lay in the numbers of the op- pressed and the dependence of the economy on their labour power. Though the movement had been conceived as the poUtical home of aU the African people, it had in fact mainly struck root amongst the educated elite in the rural areas and the most acculturated and urbanised amongst the ur- ban Africans. The outlook of the leadership and the tactics it employeo reflected this rather narrow poUtical base. The influx of workers into tne 150 Z. PALLO JORDAN movement was beginning to change all that. Having been called into the political arena by the predominantly petty bourgeois leadership, the black working class was acquiring objectives of its own, which it could in time im- pose on the movement as a whole because of its numerical strength. The political implications of such a strategy were clear to a number of the old guard of the ANC. If accepted, it would hasten this process and thus take matters out of the hands of the elite. Gumede also introduced a new dimension into the ANC's self-image. From its inception the ANC had a pan-African vision, embracing the whole conti- nent and peoples of African descent in the new world. Gumede now sought to extend this making references to the Asian struggles for liberation, establishing a community of interests based not only on skin colour and geography, but principally on common struggle against imperialism. The strategy of the ANC, as he saw it, would embrace these two aspects as its primary thrust - the self-emancipation of the oppressed black people and the solidarity of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist forces. As the immediate programme towards which to strive, Gumede broke com- pletely with the reformist tradition. His premise was the illegitimacy of the white racist regime. From this it followed that what was required was not a re-arrangement of its parts but a completely new structure. This was ex- pressed in the call for a 'Black Republic' as the ANC's central political de- mand It was this that proved to be the last straw for the old guard. Though he did not spell out the institutional framework of this 'Black Republic', it is clear that ,t necessarily entailed majority rule and the creation of political institutions of popular power as a condition and guarantor of majority rule. T ..Y Pesiaency and restored the status quo of the ANC. The revolutionary nSioSsmV worinflB .^ s uP P ° ^s out as an underground current'wiSn tS m Z^ eSP°USed- T1' S,Urvlved , when a new generation of fighters rediscovered* The Revolutionary Nationalist Tradition "i«uii uie movement, reaDDeanne during the 1040s °^ . of a r a d i c al At its founding congress the ideology of African National S *£* % ^ * ^ "am, mat ii saw itself as the 'brains trust and ZTu a l SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 151 power station' of this ideology within the ANC, whose objective was to transform the movement into a broadly based movement fighting for na- tional freedom and the unity of the African people. The principles of African Nationalism, as understood by the ANCYL, are set out in one of its founding documents. The Youth League Manifesto: • That the African people, like any other people, had the 'inalienable right to national self-determination'. • That the emancipation of the African people 'will be achieved by the Africans themselves'. • That the leadership of the ANC 'must be the personification of the aspira- tions of the people'. We can note in these the continuities between the thinking of the ANCYL leaders and the radicals of the 1920s. These were to be the most enduring contribution of these two groups to the evolution of ANC strategy and tac- tics. We may note the following themes: i) White supremacy, no matter in what guise, is essentially illegitimate, ii) The oppressed people claim the right to national self-determination — i.e. racist South Africa cannot be considered a sovereign state, iii) The oppressed people must be their own liberators, iv) Since power will not be wiffingly conceded, the need to employ whatever means are necessary to wrest power from the White minority regime. It was on the initiative of the ANCYL that the ANC adopted the famous Programme of Action of 1949 whose preamble states: 'The fundamental principles of the Programme of Action.. . are in- spired by the desire to achieve National Freedom. By National Freedom we mean freedom from White domination and the attainment ot poUtical independence. This implies the rejection of the conception ot segregation, apartheid, trusteeship, or White leadership which are all motivated by the idea of White domination . . • The implications in Gumede's earlier call for reliance on the organised strength of the oppressed were translated into reality after the Programme of Action was adopted in 1949. The 1950s saw the transformation of the ANC into a mass poUtical movement leading and initiating popular cam- paigns, strikes, civil disobedience campaigns during what we know as the fighting fifties. In neither the perspectives propounded by Gumede nor the Youth League was there an acknowledgement of the need to pass beyond the National Democratic Revolution. True, specific individuals Uke Khaile, assoaated with both, espoused such causes. How do we then include these developments as significant to the theme 'SociaUst Transformation'? 152 Z. PALLO JORDAN To answer this question we have recourse once more to the work of the founders of scientific socialism. Referring to the Polish question, Engels in a letter addressed to Karl Kautsky during 1882, says inter alia: 'It is historically impossible for a large people to discuss seriously any internal question as long as its national independence is lacking . . . To get rid of national oppression is the basic condition of all healthy free movement . . .' (Quoted by Horace Davis, 'Nationalism and Socialism', NY 1973, p. 7) We as a movement, concurring with Engels, would insist that the seizure of political power is the sine qua non of any social change in South Africa. The significance of the tradition pioneered by Gumede and Khaile, later built on and developed by the ANCYL leaders, lies in its contribution to the theory of the national democratic revolution. But before we can pass over into the present phase it is necessary to trace the other political tradi- tion that has inspired our liberation alliance. The Marxist Tradition In their writings on colonialism Marx and Engels bring to light two contradic- 2 ^v S1 8r-fy r C l a t ed t e n d e n c«s m colonialism. This was first express- ed by Marx with reference to India: S ^ f J t9 lay (MarxTh?r (Marx. The First Indian War of Independence, Moscow 1971, p. 30) fUlfil a d o u b Ie mission in India; one destructive the f o u,n d a t l on of Western society in Asia'. tteTaS^ ~J*5 annih"ation of old Asiatic society, and to riorde?fh *?** " "" °f duaUty of aU of h i s t o r i c^ Presses, Marx recorded the human cost of this regenerating role: ^ ^ S ^ S S c ^ t T^ world, with no ^ain offnstltutK>n yet appearing. This loss of his f r a m e w o rk of J«dian society, a PfticuIar k i nd of melancholy to the J S ^ i S ^ ^ S ^^ (Marx. The First Indian War of Independence, p. 16) were, howeverTuncotscSv^fff W e s t e rn society in Asia', the colonialists have consequences thev h*T ••"Orming their historical task which would y IMU neitner planned nor anticipated. Thus Marx: . w i t h o Tee x d u s f v f ^ o f S S ?i n t e nd to e n d o w I n d i a***r a U ways and other raw m a Ss f o f t S "8 at dim i n i s hed expenses the cotton once introduced machinery hW ^,manufacatures. But when you have u l"e locomotion of a country, which SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 153 possesses iron and coal, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrica- tion. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of in- dustry not immediately connected with railways'. (Marx. The First Indian War of Independence, p. 34) Because of this, Marx concludes: 'Whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history . . ." (Marx. The First Indian War of Independence, p. 20) These unintended consequences of colonialism were nonetheless realities which Marx and Engels anticipated would shake Asia out of its torpor and bring it abreast of developments in Europe and North America. But the In- dians would never really derive the full benefit of this social revolution until: '. . . in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been sup- planted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether . (Marx, The First Indian War of Independence, p. 34) It was specifically in relation to Ireland that Marx and Engels were able to study the effects of colonialism at close quarters and began to define a revolu- tionary strategy for relating the anti-colonial national struggles to the work- ing class struggles in the metropolitan countries. As we can see above, Marx at one time hoped that a succesful working class movement in Britain would be able to extend national independence to the colonies. The militancy oi the Chartist movement during the 1840s and 1850s reinforced these hopes. By 1869, in a letter addressed to Engels, Marx was forced by events to revise his earlier assessment: 'For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy . . . ° ^ L ; ™ °J has convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever musi be applied in Ireland'. ,;oj ,o~, _ ,, (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence. Moscow 1975, p. zity From this followed the conclusion that it was the task of the British working class to support the Irish independence movement both as a deserving cause in itself and as an essential condition for their own emancipation from capiuu- Marx in these writings begins to draw linkages between the colonial revolu- tion and the struggle for socialism. In relation to the Irish movement in par- ticular Marx stressed that these two fronts of struggle are mutually dependent. 154 Z. PALLO JORDAN The destructive/regenerating aspects of colonialism have perhaps been nowhere more evident than in South Africa itself where British imperialism pulverised the pre-capitalist African societies in order to make room for the most far-reaching social revolution yet experienced in Africa. In a matter of a few generations the people of South Africa were force marched from early communalism into the epoch of monopoly capitalism. The mining revolution of the 1880s marks the watershed of South African economic history which saw the implantation of the capitalist mode of production and the transformation of erstwhile traditional peasants into a bonded mass labour force, press-ganged into the service of capital by taxation and land hunger. But, as Marx had predicted, the South African proletariat, forged in the cruci- ble of these barbarities and tempered in the heat of bitter class struggles, is demonstrating with each passing day its capacity to undertake the pro- found historical task of leading South Africa to freedom. Before the First World War, though there were a number of socialists in South Africa, none of them had really addressed themselves to the national question in our country. The split in the South African Labour Party, precipitated by the outbreak of war, led indirectly to the first halting steps in this direction taken by the International Socialist League in 1915. Adherence to the principles of internationalism was the basic distinction separating the left from the right wing in South African socialism at the out- break of the war. The left, as constituted in the ISL, established links with the Zimmerwaldists and were among the first to hail the October Revolu- tion. When the Communist International met in 1919, they immediately sought affiliation. The ISL's identification with Soviet Russia was to have a profound effect on the whole course of the Communist movement's subse- quent history, eventually introducing another crucial distinction between of- ficial 'social democracy* and Marxism-Leninism in South Africa — solidarity with the national liberation movement. Though the left-labourites who constituted the ISL considered themselves Marxists, they were not particularly well-schooled in Marxism and were com- pletely unfamiliar with the Marxist tradition relating to the national and^col- onial question. The embryonic South African Communist movement had developed in the peculiar environment of the White immigrant working class struggles in the Witwatcrsrand and the port cities of South Africa. It was strongly influenced by syndicalism and conceived of the class struggles in terms closely related to what is today referred to as 'workerism'. Consequently they simply regarded the Black workers as the allies of the White workers and ignored the national aspirations of the Black workers as members of an oppressed race. They proceeded from the premise that national differences were a device employed by the capitalist class to weaken working class solidari- ty and therefore should either be ignored or downplayed. SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 155 - • J • This attitude also dominated their approach to the national movement led by the Black petty bourgeoisie. In their view this was an elitist pressure group aimed at securing petty bourgeois sectional interests at the expense of the workers of all races. The pro-imperialist pronouncements of the national leaders of the time only reinforced this view. The Communists' understan- ding of the South African struggle was put to a profound test barely six months after the founding of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, July 1921) when the whole White working class on the Witwatersrand rose in rebellion in defence of the colour bar. This forced a major rethinking of the entire strategy of the South African communist movement and led to the resolution to concentrate on the Black working class, sponsored by Bun- ting at the 1924 annual conference. The CPSA's turn to the Black working class was not merely a reflex to the reverses suffered in 1922, but represented a courageous attempt to deal creatively with the new developments in industry brought about by the war. By 1924, the Black industrial working class, called into existence by the growth of secondary industry during the war years, had chalked up a series of stirr- ing mass struggles beginning with the 1918 Bucket Strike in Johannesburg and culminating in the closure of 21 Rand mines during the miners' strike of 1920. The phenomenal growth of the ICU, reflecting the development of a national and class consciousness amongst the Black workers, also put paid to the racist fears that Blacks were incapable of sustained struggle. Alone amongst the White socialists, the founders of the CPSA recognised the possibilities these developments held out and tried to devise policies to unify the racially diverse working class. After 1924 the CPSA was the only political party in South Africa that sought to appeal to all races. In approaching the national question in South Africa the CPSA leaned on the experience pf the Russian Revolution. The relationship between the revolutionary working class movement and the oppressed nationalities in the Tsarist empire had been the subject of intense debate from the inception of the RSDLP. Though most of the theoretical debate revolved around the Rus- sian dependencies in the West (Poland, the Ukraine, etc.) the principles evolv- ed in relation to these were held to be generally applicable. After the seizure of power by the proletariat in the leading urban and industrial centres of the empire, the pursuance of these principles yielded mixed results. Exercis- ing their right to secede from the dominant Russian nation, former dependen- cies in the west opted for independence and promptly became springboards for the counter-revolution and interventionists. In the east, the knowledge that the formerly dominant nation had no interest in oppressing them helped to draw the oppressed nationalities to the new Soviet government. This seemed to bear out the essential rectitude of the Bolshevik policy on the national question Respite the disappointments in the west. 156 Z. PALLO JORDAN Palmiro Togliatti of the Italian Communist Party, and the Finnish Com- munist, Otto Kuusinen. Togliatti's report was a scathing critique of the col- onial policy of the Second International, which had met in conference a few weeks previously. The report elaborated the repudiation of the notion that colonial freedom would be the by-product of socialist revolution in the metropolitan coun- tries. This had been a widely held view in the Second International, even before the First World War. It was based on the assumption, Togliatti held, that the colonial peoples were either incapable or unwilling to free themselves. The political effect of such ideas, the actual intent of their authors not- withstanding, was to give unwitting support to imperialism by reinforcing racist and chauvinist attitudes within the European working class. Most im- portantly the report drew attention to the crucial distinctions between capital accumulation as it had occurred in the metropolitan countries, and the pro- cess taking place in the colonies. According to Togliatti's account, because the colomes were not self-governing, even when sectors of the economy were developed, they had no means of regulating the inflow and outflow of capital ana profits. The imperialist had devised a number of policies to perpetuate meir domination of the colonies. In some instances as in India, after defeating ie iorces ot feudalism, the imperialist entered into alliance with them as means ot holding down the aspirant bourgeoisie. In others, the colonial l m p°T S ed l ts o wn regime and sponsored a comprador-collaborationist strnt I S t l f U ng t hC e m e r«e n ce of an indigenous coalition of classes that woulTd ,.Op a sPi r it of independence. Lastly, there were the cases where the cn\ ^ nronri!.?1 T P r e v e n t ed the coalescence of a proto-bourgeois class by ex- nng the people of their land and handing it to White settlers (as in Rhodesia and Kenya). o f t e n r e T u h e d l n3 1 1 0 11 p u r s u ed by t he col°nialist, large plantations which tries once reno^l°T\o c x l i t m e' ™fa* u n t o ld violence on the soil so that coun- Galloping rates of of the compensat "^ peasants had bee charged.' f°r t h dr C r°p S> p e r i o d i c a l ly suffered crop failures, i mP °v e r i s h me n t, all the more painful in the absence e v e I o p m e nt of industry that could absorb the destitute e c o me almost universal in the colonial countries, the report tionmovement aS tO h a ve a Pr o f o u nd i mPact on the colonial libera- wider meaning w i ? ?r t i l*g to t he c o n c e pt of national self-determination a also economic inri W°U ld e™0™?™5 n ot o n lv Political independence, but and national reco T " ^ "06 to be a c h i e v ed t h r o ugh an agrarian revolution t h r o u8h t he c r e a t i on of an indigenous industrial base In the count - tion would entail th* d o m i n a t ed b? W h i te s e t t l e r s' s u ch as agrarian revolu- quivocally Togr t • e xPr oPr i ation of the settlers: stating the matter une- °n SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 157 The results of the implementation of the Bolshevik nationalities policy could be traced to the specific features of the Russian Empire. Three quarters of the empire was backward — a sea of peasants, as one writer expressed it — while in a few urban pockets, all of them west of the Urals, some of the largest industrial concentrations employing some of the most advanced in- dustrial plants and productive methods, constituted islands of modernity. It was the revolutionary movement based in these industrial portions of the empire that overthrew Tsarism and later the provisional government, thus creating the political space for the western dependencies to secede and the eastern dependencies to choose voluntary association with the new Soviet power. In this respect the living experience of the Russian revolution seemed to bear out the relationship anticipated in the writings of Marx — the na- tional emancipation of the colonial peoples as a by-product of working class j ascendancy in the metropole. This idea, the liberation of the colonies from without, as a by-product of socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries, was in fact written into the Communist International's first manifesto to the workers of the world. It was only at the Second Congress of the Comintern that Lenin finally repudiated the concept of the derivative colonial emancipation. The early South African communist mechanically transposed the lessons of the Russian experience to the South African setting. The apparent endorse- ment of this idea by the Comintern in 1919 probably reinforced its legitimacy in the eyes of many. Assuming that the South African revolution would follow the same path as the Russian, the CPSA regarded the White working class as the leading force in the South African revolution, which would on its vic- tory 'concede the fullest rights which the native working class is capable of claiming'. {South African Communist Speak, London 1981, p2l) In keeping with this conception of the South African revolution, the CPSA, while cultivating ties with the Black working class, was keen: to retain and preserve its roots amongst the organised White working class. The events of 1922 indicated that it would be difficult to straddle this divide. It took many years for the revolutionary left to grasp the centrality of the national question to any project of a South African revolution. The Sixth Congress of the Comintern The Sixth World Congress of the Comintern was spread over a number of weeks during which the colonial and national questions were thoroughly review- ed by the International Communist Movement. In many respects this con- gress was the culmination of a process which began during the Second Con- gress when Lenin decisively broke with the tradition that regarded the coi- onial countries as mere auxiliaries in the ranks of the world revolution. 1 he keynote address and reports on the colonial question were delivered by i i 5 . T l i. ;. ;: • • i : i • * 158 Z. PALLO JORDAN The natives had been robbed of their land by the Whites. The agrarian revolution, therefore, will have as its chief point in almost all colonial countries the seizure from the Whites of the land which they have stolen . (Inprecor, No. 68, 1928, pp. 1234-43) In regard to South Africa the congress adopted the famous 'Black Republic' resolution as part of a larger resolution on the 'Negro Question'. Read in relation to the Congress report by Togliatti and Kuusinen, the section of the resolution dealing with South Africa is greatly illuminated. In 1930 an elaborated version of the resolution adopted in 1928 was published. This was the clearest exposition of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the South African revolution. The Black Republic Resolution of 1930 characterised South Africa as a .isft dominion of t he col°mal type, its central feature being the disposses- sion in w L " fg e n o us P^Ple of their land. The main content of the revoln- Deonl T u ^lU*therefore the restoration of the land to the indigenous would "beth "a t i o n al liberation struggle the principal revolutionary agent proletariat"* African peasants, in alliance and under the leadership of the r e s o l u t i o ns then pose a number of strategic tasks, the first of whioh • u f felopment of «n alliance between the Communist Party and the naf the national™ I l b e r a t i on movement. To be effective, the thesis argued, and the p r o l e S ! "™ mUS} b a Se i t s df °n t he P*3 8 2"1*'t he ^mi-proletariat ^i m p a ct of an organised peasant and worker contingent n nT social vision wh-1n a t l°n aI m o v e m e nt w o u ld itself led it a more profound t he less ambitious pro- jects of the stl? WOUld b"ng ft i n tO c o n f I i ct ^h self-confidencJfif^111^ C W e f s- As t he w o r k ers and peasants acquired ideological do™- intellectuals PoHtical action would also undermine the n u n a t l on of the national movement by the petty-bourgeois was • mde^ndent i d e n t i f i ed M British imperialism and the White S e ^A S h a rp ^ ^ ^ ^n w as d™m between the exploiter classes and the S i WagC e a r n e r s' w h om ^e thesis regarded as potential allies of thenatin and White unitvT ,r e v o I u t i o nary movement. It however stressed that Black Africa was first a^Tf "** ^ b a S ed on Pa n d e r i ng to White chauvinism, South stituted a minorit o r e m o st a nd African country in which the Whites eon- struggle wagedhf!fck.Republic w as conceived as the apex of a revolutionary the national liber*?C rican Peasantry, through their peasant associations, • m o v c m e nt a nd in aUiance with the Communist Par- ty, as tne class or da would be the 8aiufatlon of t he working class. The first task on its agen- resolution of the agrarian question, the establishment of SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 159 organs popular power and uprooting the whole edifice of the colonial-racist state. The democratic republic would have a national form — it would be Black — but a democratic content, expressed both in its social character — the peasant/worker alliance, and in the instututional guarantees of the rights of national minorities. The Black Republic Thesis was the first declaration of the demand for ma- jority rule in our country, encapsulated in the slogan - Afrika! mayibuye' - which the CPSA adopted as its own after 1928. It infused a truly revolu- tionary content into the internationalism of the young CPSA and created the opportunity for the Marxist tradition to enter the mainstream of the na- tional liberation movement. Advocacy of majority rule and alliance with the national liberation movement clearly demarcated marxism-Leninism from the reformist tendencies in South African socialism. But this was an achieve- ment won through painful struggles of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, which tested the mettle of South Africa's communists. The most important facet of the Black Republic Thesis however remains its laying bare the symbiotic relationship between national oppression and capitalist exploitation. The national and class dimensions are inseparable, neither can be stressed at the expense of the other, they must be read together. 1 his was a theoretical departure which was to have the most profound im- plication once it was grasped by the liberation movement. The Freedom Charter The Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955, is the common programmatic statement of the liberation alliance comprising the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the South African Con- gress of Trade Unions (SACTU). At the time it was drafted it was conceived as and remains also the formulation of the strategic line of march of the South African revolution. The central features of the Freedom Charter are clearly stated in its first five clauses — which are the demand for majority rule, in- stitutionally expressed as an adult suffrage; the abolition of all forms of racial and national domination, to be embodied in statutory rights for all national groups; the transference of the key centres of economic power to the owner- ship of the people; the dismantling of the White minority's monopoly over the best agricultural land; and civil liberties for all. This is a programme around which the widest spectrum of forces opposed to White racist domina- tion can be mobilised. Within this broad, alliance of class forces it is general- ly recognised that the vanguard contingent is the Black working class. As conceived by the ANC and its allies, the line of march entails a national alliance of all the oppressed and exploited strata, under the leadership of the Black working class, to dismantle the racist state and create in its stead institutions of popular power bearing the hallmark of this national alliance. 160 Z. PALLO JORDAN The Freedom Charter and its subsequent elaboration at the Mbrogoro Con- ference, The Strategy and Tactics oftheANC, represent the crystallisation of the theory of the South African revolution as it has evolved from these two principal sources. Though we do not claim any dramatically new theoretical contributions, there are two departures we feel we can point to. In the Marxist tradition as we have traced it in the preceding pages, the principal controversy surrounding the relationship between the national libera- tion and class struggles has revolved around which of these two takes precedence over the other, or which shall be the dominant and which the derivative. Marx in his writings on India and Ireland, before 1869, seemed to be in little doubt that the class struggle in the metropolitan countries takes precedence and would in fact result in the liberation of the colonies. His rever- sal of this position with regard to Ireland in 1869 had far reaching implica- tions both with regard to British socialism and the colonial liberation move- ment. If, as Marx implies, the lever must be applied in the colonies, does this not suggest that the colonial struggle can take precedence over the struggle in the metropole? The experience of the Russian revolution appeared to pro- vide the answer in practice. But, by 1920, Lenin himself was beginning to recognise the limitations of its applicability. South Africa presents the theoretician with an anomaly in which the metropole and the colony exist within the same national boundaries. This anomalous situation is compounded by the fact that the decisive sections of the proletariat are not of the metropole but of the colony. We can therefore suggest that South Africa will see an inversion of the Russian experience — it will be the working class of the colonised people that will take in tow the other class forces. In this context could one separate the class from the na- tional liberation struggle? If neither takes precedence, does this then suggest that the two are coterminous? These are questions we suggest cannot be answered in the seminar room, but rather by revolutionary practice. What then is the relationship between the Freedom Charter and socialist transformation in South Africa? We would suggest that the Freedom Charter, though itself not a socialist document or programme, lays the basis for the seizure and holding of political power by the oppressed in South Africa. The radical measures of agrarian reform and nationalisation it entails will go a long way towards removing the commanding heights of the economy from the sphere of private ownership and open up the way for the socialist transfor- mation of our country. However, the precondition for all this is the revolu- tionary overthrow of the Pretoria racist regime. In conclusion we return to a point raised at the beginning of this paper, the counter-revolution directed against the efforts of Southern African states to construct socialism. While we are certain that all of us have much to learn SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION 161 from the rich storehouse of experience already accumulated in this region, we must not minimise the grave dangers that beset us all. The primary source of all these — the one regime which is the bulwark of reaction in our midst — is the Pretoria regime. The greatest single contribution of South Africa, under the leadership of the ANC, will make towards socialist transforma- tion in our region, is the destruction of White domination and apartheid. We think we are justified in demanding the support of all the social scien- tists of the region.