South Africa's Radical Tradition • a documentary Volume One 1907 - 1950 Allison Drew (Editor) (Buchu Books, Mayibuye Books, UCT Press, Cape Town) Reviewed by Charlie van Gelderen. THIS BOOK, the result of years of diligent research by Allison Drew, will serve as a text book for all students of the development of South Africa trom a racist colony to tae democratic republíc, inaugurated by the election of a blackdominated government by universal franchise.
The victory of the ANC under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, is the culmination of vears of struggle by socialists and naThese documents preGOnKSS. sent a factual record of that struggle.
A documentary history has the one advantage over narrative bias of the author. It is the nearest we can get to an objective view of the events recorded.
While there was resistance, often violent, from the onset of colonial conquests, these are not the subject of this book. Its theme is the birth and growth of the socialist and labour move. ment, and the struggle for naSocialism and trade unionism were brought to South Africa by the skilled workers from Britain who came to work in the diamond and gold mines in the 19th century, and the immigrants fleeing from Czarist oppression in Eastern Europe.
They brought with them the ingrained traditions of their countries of origin.
Drew s sciccuon ol documents faithfully chronicles these carly years. The British workers, while often militant in their demands against their employers, never looked upon the non-white sector of the working class as allies in that struggle, but rather as a threat to their own privileged standards of living.
Macdonald
Thus we have a letter from the Cape Labour Party to Ramsay Macdonald (August 12 1908), then secretary of the British Labour Party, complaining that "... the interests of the savage Zulus, the comfort of the Chinese criminals in the compounds & the convenience of Indian coolies, seem to be nearer the heart of the English (sic) Labour Party than the continued oppresston.... of their white brethren of the same flesh and blood.....
(Echoes of lan Smith and the white Rhodesians' appeal to their "kith and kin'.)
This division along racial lines was to run as a red thread throughout the history of the abour and Socialist movement in South Africa right up to the end of apartheid.
Even the Communists and Trotskylsts had difficulties in this gegard. Although free of the racism and xenophobis of the South African Labour Party, sire criticism, they accepted the orthodox Marxist view that the struggle for socialism would be spear-headed by the organised industrial workers — and these were, for the most part, white, and, of course, male.
They tried to overcome this Black and white workers unite", or W.H Andrews - a founding father of the Communist Party - "equal pay for equal work".
Although the Communists made serious efforts to work in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), and strongly opposed all racist legislation, it was not until Stalin's Comintern foisted the "Native Republic" thesis on the SACP that they began any in-depth study of the issues involved.
Until then the majority of communists and socialists saw the movement for nattona liberation and democratic rights as reformist goals, inherently subordinate to the working class struggle.
This thesis was strongly opposed by S.P. Bunting and Eddie Roux at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, reflecting the views of the majority of South African communists at that time.
Trotsky
Although flawed, it turned the attention of the movement to the importance of what was then known an the "Native Question". Similarly, it was not till Trotsky's intervention in the debate with his "Remarks on the Draft Theses of the Workers Party of South Africa, 20th April 1935 , that the Trotskyists began to relate the struggle for socialism with the struggle for Mandela: jailed in 1964: President in 1997 national liberation.
Even as late as 1944, A. Mon (M.N.Averbach), one of the leading Trotskyist theoreticians, while recognising the growth of an urbanised non-Europcan working class and inteligentsia still believed that ".the socialist movement alone will solve the democratic tasks... ",and that " ... The struggle will inevitably place the proletarlat in power as the ruling class."
With the growing threat of war, and the victories of fascism in Germany and Sosin. and the spate of reactionary legislation being passed by the United Party government, the left in South Africa began to explore the setting up of alliance which cut across the party and sectarian divides. hese are faithtuliv chronicled In Drew' s selection.
The documents take us up to the outbreak of war, and its consequences as it affected the radical movement in south Africa. Changed line The SACP gave their full support to the war. until the Stalin-Hitler Pact drove them into opposition, only to change position again after the Soviet Union was invaded in June 194l. The Workers Party, anticipating repressive legislation, voluntarily dissolved itself. On the Left, only the small remaining Trotskylst groups irreconcilably opposed the imperialist war. The Fourth International Club, Cape Town and the Socialist Workers League, Johannesburg, issued this Joint Manifesto:
Workers Of South Africa Unite for the freedom of colonial peoples against the tyranny of ImUnite in the ondy just war-the soar against the oppressors, the exploiters, against thelr perfidious agents in the working class.
Fight against capitalist rule, for the liberation of all oppressed regardless of race, colour or creed.
Build the Fourth International.
These documents represent the nervous system, the veins and arteries, the muscles and skeleton of South Africa's radical movement. We look forward eagerly to Volume Two.
Bloody Sunday: British troops vaulted over barricades to attack civil rights marchers. Most of the victims were shot in the back points the British could have had a very favourable deal with the pan nationalist alliance of Dublin. the SDLP and Sinn Fein but at crucial moments these were lost because of the tensions which even the minor concessions necessary caused within the Tory Party.
Tensions
These tensions have usually been about policy on the EU rather that Ireland, but they had the effect of preventing any initiative which might have led to a deal.
Riair and Mowlem's "me too ism" means that the second team has no alternative to the Tories. In Government their platitudes will sound good only until the next With the Tories in opposition free to give vent to their ancient imperial and racial hatreds, Labour can be expected appease them and their Unionist brethren by repressing the nationalists - all in the name yor opposing sectarianism of course.
In previous crises of de-colonisation the British ruling class were able to impose a solution, even if that meant sacrificing the interest ol