International Socialists

Mike Tait

To speak of South Africa is to address racism in the most concrete form it has taken since Nazi Germany. It is a history of victorious struggle too. Thanks to decades of selfless organising by tens of thousands of militants and the courage of the South African people – supported by untold numbers in the rest of the world, including NZ – the forces of racism have been defeated. The laws and myths that demeaned non-white South Africans have been erased, but the state – with its judges, prisons, police and army – remains, as does the enormous gap in wealth between black and white.

In this sense, the history of South Africa is perhaps most relevant. The fall of apartheid can seem very last century, but the way that the struggle was sold out and betrayed by Nelson Mandela, the ANC and the SACP – that has to be a primary concern for anyone who wants to work for a better world.

1) Post-apartheid South Africa
Pretty much everyone in NZ will know a South African, typically white and professional, who has emigrated here since the fall of apartheid. These South Africans usually cite high levels of crime, especially car-jackings, as the primary reason for their departure. Unemployment and declining incomes is another reason sometimes offered.

Crime rates in South Africa are shocking. A survey for the period 1998-2000 compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked South Africa second for assault and murder (by all means) per capita and first for rapes per capita. Certainly, imprisonment rates are climbing steadily, with South Africa second only to the United States in terms of per capita imprisonment. In the US, remember, one in nine black males between 20 and 30 are behind bars.

Without doubt, underlying the crime rate is high unemployment – up to 40 % according to broad measures and with 25-30% actively seeking work. And while legal segregation has been scrapped, economic segregation is worsening.
“South Africa's wealth gap is widening and the average black citizen still only earns an eighth of what his white counterpart does nearly 14 years on from the end of apartheid, SA’s Fin24 website reported in January….The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation… “transformation” audit found that the per capita income of black South Africans was 13 percent of that of whites, 14 years after the end of the white minority apartheid government. And women were feeling the pinch more and more, with the income of female-headed households measured at 46.2% that of male-headed households - down from 47.9% in 2006.”
Some blacks have however increased their wealth – such as Cyril Ramaphosa, once a firebrand union leader who became Minister of Defence in the Mandela government (responsible for protecting the apartheid military from budget cuts) and is now a billionaire. A scheme called BEE aims to create Black Economic Empowerment. In Soweto they add another E – Black economic empowerment for the elite.

The departure of Mandela from the political stage was probably the wisest thing he ever did – leaving his successors like Mbeki and Zuma to wallow in the corruption and compromises that are the logical results of Mandela’s policies.

2) Apartheid South Africa – description, origins, Nazism
But the shocking state of South Africa at present is in no way an argument for the return of apartheid, as some right wingers insinuate. It is true that the black liberation governments in Africa have nowhere managed to change the poverty, hunger and illiteracy that has characterised the continent since European colonialism but all this shows is that these governments have been forced to continue Africa’s subordination in the world economy. Apartheid was no golden age, nor was direct British imperialism.

While the prison rate stands at about 341 per 100,000 in 2007, under apartheid (in 1981-2) it stood at 585, and the rate for blacks was 1066 per 100,000. But that is just the beginning (Ormond).
Apartheid ideologists aimed to eliminate black South Africans by creating Bantustans – supposedly independent homelands ruled by puppet governments where all Africans would theoretically reside, although they would still work in white South Africa’s factories, farms and homes.

As UK journalist Bernard Levin wrote in the 1970s
“Every action in the field of race relations taken by the South African government for at least 20 years has been designed to increase the domination of the vast majority of the population by the white minority. The majority have been progressively stripped, by the white minority, of every fundamental right, every dignity, every vestige of decent treatment. They may not live where they choose; they may not strike; they may not criticise their conditions; they may not marry whom they please; they may not mingle with people of other races; they may not engage in any political activity… they may not travel where they wish; they may have their employment cancelled without notice or reason, by officials; they may be arbitrarily declared to be of whatever race officials decide they are; they have no unqualified right to have their children living with them; the men have no right to have their wives living with them; and in short – I could go on for ten times as long with similar examples – their subjection to the white minority, which lives in comfort on their labour, is complete and is to remain so as long as the minority has the power to enforce it. (Newnham, 14).

This description is accurate enough as regards the legal situation, but Levin is wrong to suggest that apartheid was a recent phenomenon. Many of the worst features of apartheid – restrictions on voting rights and intermarriage and control of migrant labour through pass laws were features of South Africa under British imperialism. Indeed, many features of apartheid law were borrowed wholesale from Queensland, Australia. What most distinguished British and French imperialist ideology from the ancient empires of Greece, Rome, China, etc was precisely its racist theory and law.

Nonetheless, South Africa was a settler colony like Australia, NZ and Canada, so why did it evolve an explicitly racist legal system, while these other countries did not?

The usual explanation is that the descendants of the Dutch settlers, the Afrikaaners, were racist, while the British were parliamentary liberals. This myth is behind Levin’s comment above and was common in South Africa as well as the other white settler countries.

The reality is that first, the differences are not as great as our governments would like us to believe – let’s be frank - in all these countries unofficial apartheid still exists to a greater or lesser degree and in many cases is worsening.
Second, what differences there are can be explained by the differences in the countries that were colonised. As a simple example, take the differing cases of Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. All were part of the British Empire, but in one, the mechanism was straight annexation and attempted genocide, in the second, a treaty followed by wars and crooked deals that succeeded in alienating the majority of Maori land and, in the third, a treaty with no attempt at land alienation – the native chiefs were instead confirmed in control and made partners in administration.

The primary difference is population density and militarization. The second is the relative value of these three lands to the British empire.

Another way of comparing the countries is to look at SA alongside Australia and Canada. All three were immense, and rich in minerals and agricultural potential. However, in Australia and Canada, it was possible to crush native resistance at the earliest stage of colonisation and replace the population with white settlers. In SA, the analogy with Australia is almost perfect as regards the Hottentot or Khoikhoi people, hunter gatherers of the Cape, who were easily dispersed and their lands usurped by the early colonists. Further to the north though, the African or Bantu population was larger, more technologically advanced, and militarily much stronger.

Dutch and British colonisation continued – the wealth and strategic importance of South Africa assured that – but the machinery of repression required to maintain colonisation, farming, mining and capitalist industry was much greater and a racist ideology went with that.

That racist ideology crystallised during the 1930s depression. Just as the bitterness of the German ruling class at their defeat in WW1 led them to back Hitler’s Nazi party, the Afrikaaner elite had been defeated by by the British in the Boer War of 1890 odd. And unemployment and poverty in both countries provided the mass embitterment that led to the formation of anti-Semitic, racist political parties. The subterranean connection between these fascist organisations and the apartheid state cannot be overemphasised. The political elite of South Africa was steeped in a racist world view.

3) Cold War - Freedom Charter, ANC, SACP, South Africa as a bulwark – Zionism

But Nazi Germany, thank God, did not win the Second World War, even though the Afrikaaner National Party won the 1948 election. They had to adjust to a new reality – US dominance of the world and a rising tide of anti-colonial movements. In South Africa, this movement was led by the ANC, which called a conference in Kliptown in 1955 that signed a “Freedom Charter”. In itself, the document was liberal, not radical, but the SA government seized on a clause that called for the wealth of the country to be returned to the people to label the ANC as pro-Soviet. Apartheid had found a new reason for existing in the Cold War environment – Western imperialism’s attack dog in Africa.

Although the US encouraged decolonisation, because it meant the break-up of European monopolies in the Third World, it was out of step with the actual decolonisation movements, which everywhere demanded more than capitalism wished to deliver. The US aim was a transfer of power from one section of western imperialism to another, not to the populations of those countries.

Nor was it the aim of the US to allow colonisation to be replaced by Soviet influence. For much of the Cold War era – right up to the Afghan war – the USSR was seen as a benevolent power by many liberation movements. It was weaker than the US, and therefore less able to buy off local elites and more likely to encourage popular measures like health and education, and was not associated with Western colonialism.
Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was an imperialist power – a state capitalist regime bent not on liberating the third world but competing with the USA for world dominance.

This Cold War environment saturated politics. There was not a single NGO or charity or trade union or political party or armed movement that was not aligned with East or West during the Cold War. The dualism of international politics in this period is essential to grasp.

South Africa, like Israel, was a perfect ally for the US in the Cold War bcause it was so isolated from its neighbours, from its region, indeed from much of the world. South Africa, like Israel today, was a pariah state that would do anything to maintain its lifeline to the US. Like Israel, its primary task was to destabilise Africa. The apartheid regime fought wars in almost all their neighbours and its secret service conspired constantly against independent African governments. (Bantustans, nuclear secrets, uzis)

As Victoria Brittain put it: “In the former Portuguese colonies of …”

Of all African countries, SA was the only one where a pro-capitalist, pro-US state could survive. Even though the government rested on only about 10% of the population, that was still 2.7 million people. SA was militarily and economically strong, but not strong enough to stop resistance.

4) Decolonisation
The heroism of the resistance cannot be over stressed. Apartheid South Africa was probably the most complete police state since Nazi Germany. I’ve already mentioned the prison statistics – when one remembers that black Africans were legally aliens in their own country, the terrifying power of the police becomes clear. Armoured cars loaded to the hilt with white conscript soldiers were a regular sight on the streets and TV news trumpeted razor wire and riot squads. Detention without trial was common and death in detention all too common. But despite the massive repressive machine being directed against resistance, it never ceased and ultimately, the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands, if not millions around the world bore fruit and history was changed.

Despite this, it has to be said that the resistance was badly led. The decisive force in South Africa was the working class, and it was COSATU more than any other organisation that can take the credit for bringing down apartheid, but the theory of the SA revolution was completely different.

Instead of apartheid being overthrown from within by the people that made the wheels of industry turn, it was supposed to be overthrown by a heroic band of military adventurers – Umkhonto We Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation. Following Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara, who had both turned Marxism – the theory of working class revolution – on its head, arguing the revolution could only be brought to the cities from the countryside – and by extension only be brought to the First World from the Third. The experience of Angola and Mozambique proved the opposite, if anyone was watching. There, a revolution in Portugal in 1974 against the fascist, colonialist regime was the immediate cause of the liberation of Angola, Mozambique, and in our neighbourhood, East Timor in 1975. The lesson is clear – when the oppressed strike at the heart of the system, its grip on the outlying regions is broken.

South Africa was not dependent on a European power though, it was an industrial power in its own right. What’s more, the post-war boom, especially in the 1960s, had greatly expanded the black working class in the cities and mines. By the 1980s this working class was organised and ready to fight. In the early 1980s, the unions grew by leaps and bounds.

They were seldom registered and even when they were took a very hostile line towards the state and arbitration. Unions also organised neighbourhood committees in the townships which brought workers from different sites together and generalised experiences and strategies. An economic downturn in the 1980s, combined with political opposition to apartheid brought the unions and the state into a collision course.

Some of the more far-sighted SA capitalists saw at this stage that apartheid could not be maintained and started to investigate alternatives. The Reagan administration in the USA, particularly the under-secretary for Africa Crocker, encouraged “constructive engagement” throughout the 1980s. Although this strategy was denounced by anti-apartheid activists as one more name for collaboration with a vicious regime, constructive engagement was much more than that – it was a realistic plan to keep the reality of apartheid while removing its racist appearance.

The irony is that anti-apartheid activists, if they thought there was any danger in transition in SA, thought it would come from communist tyranny not liberal sell-outs. Most actually believed the Cold War propaganda that labelled the ANC as terrorists and communists.

The truth is as Trosky said, a terrorist is just a liberal with a bomb. Mandela and his cohorts were more than willing to compromise with capitalism – in many cases the were so enthusiastic they became capitalists themselves. In this they were supported by their allies in the SACP, who followed Stalin’s two-stage theory of revolution, according to which the working class should support the national bourgeoisie in the struggle for a capitalist democracy, before launching a struggle for socialism.

Under Stalin, that time had nothing to do with the readiness of the local working class and everything to do with Stalin’s own political needs. Since the demise of the USSR, the SACP is stuck following the ANC.

5) Against two-stage theory, for the working class, for socialism from below
Things need not have turned out this way. Although the overthrow of apartheid is a world-historic victory, it really could have happened much earlier. If the political leadership of the resistance had focused on the working class, apartheid could have been finished much earlier. And if that leadership had been a part of the working class, then the massive sell outs of the 1990s could never have taken place.

Even now, the SA working class is one of the most combative in the world. The lesson of SA is “Struggle for reforms, struggle for revolution”.

If you want to be a part of that – join the international socialists.