southern African trade unions? Such issues hardly ever come up on labour movement agendas. British unionists don't ask their leaders to account for how their dues are spent abroad. The Labour Party's "international' policy debate is a Eurocentric sham and its second Socialist International is a caricature of solidarity
The left have by and large replicated, rather than challenged, the political bankruptcy Workers across Southern Africa must unite of the labour movement over Africa. Look in vain through Marxism Today or other left publications for a vision which sees how socialist revolution in Africa is possible. At its last conference, leading lights in the Review of African Political Economy, showed a new despair over the simplistic, autarchic (Castroite) solutions that they themselves advocated throughout the late 1970s and 80s. Although few now believe in Ujamaa villages, most are still wedded to varieties of the neomarxist school of dependency theory. They have either posed the question of socialism in Africa as a simple country-specific task, usually in populist-reformist terms, or haven't posed it at all.
The marxist approach
One of the only theorists to write seriously about revolutionary prospects in souther Africa as a whole, namely Alex Callinicos of the British Socialist Workers Party, has now limited himself purely to the study of domestic processes in South Africa (see 'South Africa between Reform and Revolution', Bookmarks, 1990). At a time when it is possible that an ANC government in South Africa might soon sit at the head of vital purse strings for workers and peasants from the Cunene River, the Zairian/Zambian copperbelt and Lake Malawi in the north, to the Cape Penninsula in the South, this is irresponsible. In neglecting the regional SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990
SUPPLEMENT COSATU dimensions, Callinicos slips back into the thinking of a long line of white South African socialists, whose chauvinism has rubbed off on African nationalists. When Trotsky received copies of the draft theses of South Africa's in- cipient Left Opposition in 1935, he concluded his written reply by stress- ing the importance of a Soviet South black continent'. And, at the end of his meeting two years earlier with US Left Oppositionists concerning 'the Negro question', he pointed out that the central problem of real colonial liberation in Africa was the lack of changed, these general guidelines retain their urgent relevance for socialist revolutionaries TOMORS 1960 today; yet they only the are starting point for analysing material condi- tions and specifying con- tasks. crete Trotsky ad- mitted that he
IDAF was too insufficiently ac- quainted with the conditions in South Africa' to provide *a full conclusive opinion on practical series of questions*. Certainly, his vision was couched in terms of some of the backward cul tural notions of the 1930s: *To help the negroes to catch up to the white race, in order to ascend hand in hand with them to new cultural heights, this [proletarian mutual co- operation between black and white in Africa] will be one of the grand and noble tasks of a victorious socialism.* Clearly, work much remains to be done. In the absence of strong support from the workers' movement in the imperialist countries, the relatively small and im- poverished working class in Africa will have grave dif- ficulties in leading the mas- ses to socialist liberation. Faced with ruthless state repression, African worker leaders and socialists require support of a special kind. This complex problem should be discussed urgently. Cam- paigns in the imperialist countries against racism, the IMF/World Bank debt regime, primary commodity price reductions, military collabora- tion and in favour of immediate can- cellation of all Africa's debt, democratic inter- trade union nationalism, repect for human rights, ecological renewal and international African representation must begin now. Most of all, support for a democratic