This paper provides a new analysis of socialist positions on the "national question" in South Africa in the early twentieth century. Most discussion on this issue has tended to centre on a dichotomy between the theory of "national democratic revolution" and the theory of "permanent revolution". This paper argues that not only have the differences between these two positions been exaggerated, but that the reduction of discussions to these two poles has been premised on the failure to examine alternative socialist strategies. In particular, there has been a failure to consistently or accurately examine pre-Communist Party of South Africa (1921) positions, which were, in the main, dominated by revolutionary syndicalist perspectives, rooted in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, there has been an uncritical acceptance of the Stalinist interpretation of South African socialist history established by Communist intellectuals in the 1940s.
Revolutionary syndicalism - a libertarian socialist position hostile to both the State and capitalism, arguing instead for the trade unions to seize power through a revolutionary general strike - profoundly influenced the early socialist movement. South African revolutionary syndicalists, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World, the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL) and the Industrial Workers of Africa, argued for a fusion of the struggle against racism and the struggle against capitalism through the axis of a revolutionary non-racial "One Big Union" that would ultimately seize and place under self-management the means of production. This provides the basis for a critique of the literature - dominated by interpretations developed by Communist Party intellectuals who deny the influence of revolutionary syndicalism and grossly caricature the positions of the revolutionary syndicalists - as well as a basis for a reconceptualisation of the chronology of socialist positions on the national question in South Africa. The implications of my analysis for contemporary socialist strategy with regard to the national question are addressed in the conclusion.
... In common with the Labour movement elsewhere in the world, South Africa passed through a period of vigorous reaction against politics on the working-class front ... The disillusion of the workers’ movement in the value of parliamentary reform was now spreading from Europe, from Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand ... From America came the ringing call to action of Haywood and Eugene Debs of the IWW, while from France was spreading an enthusiasm for the doctrines of the revolutionary Syndicalists with their faith in the industrial struggle and the general strike and their mistrust of politics ...
R.K. Cope, Comrade Bill: The Life and Times of W.H. Andrews, Workers’ Leader
Can we talk of the Cause of the Workers in which the cries of the most despairing and the claims of the most enslaved are spurned and disregarded? The new movement will break the bounds of Craft and race and sex. It will be founded on the rock of the meanest proletarian who toils for a master. It will be as wide as humanity. It will recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour.
The International, 3 December 1915, "The Wrath to Come"
We are here for Organisation, so that as soon as all of your fellow workers are organised, then we can see what we can do to abolish the Capitalist-System. We are here for the salvation of the workers. We are here to organise and to fight for our rights and benefits
A. Cetiwe, speech to meeting of Industrial Workers of Africa, May 1918
This paper will examine how socialists sought to approach the "national question" – specifically, racial oppression – in South Africa in the early twentieth century. South Africa provides a useful case study to examine how socialists in this period approached questions of broad social oppression. One reason for this is that the country's capitalist industrialisation process was deeply intertwined with processes of colonial domination. A second is that most significant currents of revolutionary socialist thought have been represented in South Africa at one point or another, which also suggests the use of the country as a case study in the examination of differing socialist approaches to the national question. This paper proceeds from a recognition that revolutionary socialist tendencies, whether Marxist or anarchist in approach, have, whilst basing themselves on the notion of class struggle, consistently sought to engage with broader forms of social and economic oppression, often codified as a series of "questions". Foremost among these was the "national question": following the 1848 revolutions, in which both socialist and national liberation movements came to the fore in European politics, the "national question" became "as much a concern for revolutionaries in Europe as ' social emancipation ' an issue that no major revolutionary figure in Europe could ignore." This concern remained central as socialist ideas spread into other regions of the world in subsequent years. Hence, the debate on the "national question" within the broad socialist movement must be understood as centring less on whether or not to resolve this "question" – although evidently some positions could have this effect in practice - and more on the issue of how best to do so. Consequently, this paper rejects the fashionable critique that revolutionary socialism and class analysis are "class-reductionist".
Focussing on the period 1910-1928, this paper provides a new analysis of socialist positions on the "national question" in South Africa in the early twentieth century. This period is significant for several reasons. It was only in the early twentieth century that an organised revolutionary socialist movement emerged in South Africa, and it was in this period that the key positions that continue to define left positions on the national question were formulated. Furthermore, it is possible to discern three distinct socialist approaches in South Africa to the "national question" in this period: those of revolutionary syndicalism, "Stalinism" and "Trotskyism".
This paper makes several core arguments. Firstly, the case is made that the differences between Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches to the resolution of the national question have been greatly exaggerated, and obscure the more fundamental difference between these two approaches and that of revolutionary syndicalism. The difference between Stalinist and Trotskyist positions, on the one hand, and revolutionary syndicalist positions on the other, has also been obscured by conventional interpretations of South African socialist history, which remain dominated by the teleological analyses developed by Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921 (replaced by the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1953) aligned intellectuals. At the centre of these conventional interpretations is the notion that pre-CPSA socialists at best ignored the national question, and at worst accommodated to white racism, and that it was only with the rise of the CPSA that this issue began to be adequately addressed.
The paper argues,further, that this view of the pre-CPSA left is inaccurate ' is indeed, often a caricature and falsification of the historical record' insofar as the pre-1921 left did, indeed, have a comprehensive, consistent, radical, and distinct, position on the national question that has, essentially, been written out of history. This alternative socialist strategy, and pre-CPSA movement, was dominated by a revolutionary syndicalist perspective, and rooted, ultimately, in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. The pre-CPSA revolutionary left, represented by organisations such as the South Africa section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), and the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), argued for a fusion of the struggle against national oppression and the struggle against capitalism and the capitalist State through a revolutionary, non-racial, "One Big Union" that would overcome the racial divisions within the working class, forcibly remove racial laws, and also seize, and place under working class control, the means of production. This line of argument situates the South African revolutionary syndicalists of the 1910s squarely in line with the general anti-racist orientation of the international revolutionary syndicalist movement.
I use the term "revolutionary syndicalism" interchangeably with "anarcho-syndicalism" to designate an anti-authoritarian, or libertarian, socialist current that derives from classical anarchism, and centred on the notion that the trade unions are the authentic class organisations of the working class that can and must seize and place under self-management the means of production through a revolutionary general strike. Revolutionary syndicalism’s fundamental opposition to both capitalism and to the State structure itself stands in marked contrast to the positions adopted by both Stalinism and Trotskyism.
Revolutionary syndicalism was a powerful influence on the left wing of the international labour movement between the 1890s and the 1930s. Whilst the intellectual roots of revolutionary syndicalism may be found in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, who challenged Karl Marx for control of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864-1877), it was in the 1910s and 1920s that revolutionary syndicalism enjoyed its "glorious period". Between the 1890s and 1930s, revolutionary syndicalists strongly influenced labour movements in countries as varied as Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Sweden, the United States of America, and Venezuela, and controlled the main trade unions and trade union federations in countries such as Argentine, Brazil, Cuba, Portugal, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent, France and Spain. In its anti-statism, anti-authoritarianism, and stress on direct – as opposed to electoral – action, revolutionary syndicalism is an example of a broader libertarian socialist current. In English-speaking countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, the revolutionary syndicalist wave was exemplified by the IWW, which had sections in these countries, as well as in Chile, Mexico and Peru. The IWW spelt out its militant creed in the famous Preamble of the IWW:
' The working-class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, and abolish the wage system '
Following the seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 by the Russian Social-Democratic Party Maximalists – the "Bolsheviks" – led by V.I. Lenin, who advocated the need for a revolutionary elite, organised as a vanguard party, to seize State power and implement socialism from above through a "proletarian dictatorship", the new Communist movement increasingly eclipsed anarcho-syndicalism as an influence on radical labour. Not only could the supporters of Leninism point to what was, ostensibly, a successful revolution and socialist outpost, but the new Communist movement also received significant financial and political support from the new Soviet Union at a time when the anarcho-syndicalists fell victim to severe State repression. However, the new Communist movement soon fragmented into two rival tendencies, Stalinism and Trotskyism, which emerged as political currents within the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s.
The terms "Stalinism" and "Trotskyism" emerged as a result of the split in the ruling Bolshevik Party leadership that emerged after Lenin’s death, a split which led, eventually, to Joseph Stalin’s assumption of power in the Soviet Union in 1927-1928, and Leon Trotsky's subsequent exile and murder in Mexico in 1940. It was in the course of this struggle that the basic differences between the two positions were sharpened and clarified, and assumed organisational forms: in the first place, that of factions within the main Communist Parties, but subsequently, that of competition between rival groupings of aspirant vanguard parties.
The differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism consist, at base, in the following: Stalinism defends the possibility of socialism sustaining itself a single country, and consequently recognises and advocates the possibility of different national roads to socialism being taken in different countries at different times; Trotskyism insists on the international nature of a genuine revolution, and consequently insists that national revolutions can, at best, lead to degenerated or deformed forms of socialism; Stalinism defends, uncritically, the experience of the Soviet Union, admitting only to minor imperfections; Trotskyism analysed the Soviet Union as a degenerated "workers’ state" dominated by a parasitic "bureaucracy" that had to be removed through a "political revolution" led by a new party of the working class. Trotsky insisted that the Soviet Union was a fundamental advance for humanity, and, like the Stalinists, called for its unconditional military defence against external aggression.
There are, thus, clear differences in orientation between the Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions. However, these differences should not be unduly exaggerated, as Stalinism and Trotskyism converge in a significant number of respects: both situate themselves within the Marxist camp, albeit in opposition to the "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International (1889-1914), both lay claim to Lenin’s mantle and political legacy, both defend the Leninist stress on the centrality of the vanguard party and the need for "proletarian dictatorship" through a "workers’ state", both advocate(ed) the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against attack, and both implicitly defend the experience of the early years of the Russian Revolution as a model for socialist revolution everywhere. Indeed, there are even more points of similarity than these - as I will demonstrate further convergences in my discussion of the two tendencies - approaches to the national question below but it may be noted for now that both tendencies are also examples of "political socialism", the general tendency within the broad socialist movement that advocates "a political battle against capitalism waged through ' centrally organised workers’ parties aimed at seizing and utilising State power to usher in socialism." This paper will therefore classify both Stalinism and Trotskyism as varieties of Leninism because insufficient grounds exist for declaring one the "true" Leninist approach, and the other, heresy, which is the traditional approach of partisans of each respective tendency.
As the official Communist movement, represented by national Communist Parties and the Communist International (or Comintern, 1919-1943), Stalinism historically overshadowed Trotskyism in terms of size, resources and implantation within the working class, with Trotskyism, with few exceptions, unable to effectively compete for influence within the working class; certainly Trotskyism has never been a serious rival for influence within the South African situation. Hence, it may be said that anarcho-syndicalism’s real rival for influence within the international labour movement has always been Stalinism, and never Trotskyism. Nonetheless, Trotskyism’s analyses of the South African national question are of great interest and will be returned to later.
Before doing so, however, it is necessary to outline the material conditions with which these three tendencies were confronted in South Africa in the early twentieth century. Previously marginal to international processes of capital accumulation, the territory that would become known as South Africa attracted substantial amounts of capital following the discovery of diamond and gold deposits in the interior, in 1867 and 1886, respectively.
Now amongst the "focal points of capitalistic activity in the world economy", the political economy of the region underwent substantial change. Vast urban areas emerged, notably Kimberley in the south, and the giant Witwatersrand complex in the interior, centred on the gold-mining town of Johannesburg, and its band of satellites, ranging from Carletonville on the far west rand, through Randfontein, Krugersdorp, and Roodepoort, and continuing through Germiston, Boksburg, Benoni, Brakpan and Springs on the east rand. In 1886, Johannesburg had about 3,000 prospectors; ten years later, it was a city of 100,000, and by 1913, it housed 250,000.
Massive capital investments underpinned the rapid emergence of a technologically sophisticated deep-mining sector, which in turn provided an impetus for the development of secondary industry and the rapid commercialisation of the previously stagnant white-owned farms of the interior. Ownership of the diamond and gold mines was soon centralised in the hands of a few giant capitalist companies, who were further linked to one another through a Chamber of Mines formed in 1887. Gold output grew steadily: by 1898, the Witwatersrand produced 27 percent of the world’s gold output, and this rose to 40 percent by 1913.
State power was also rapidly centralised: although diamonds and gold were not the only reasons for renewed British imperialist interest in the South African interior, imperial interest in keeping the Witwatersrand within the ambit of the British Empire contributed directly to the first annexation of the Afrikaner Transvaal republic (1877), a series of colonial wars against the Zulu and Pedi (both defeated in 1879), and the brutal war against the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State which lasted from 1899 to 1902. At least 28,000 Afrikaners (whites descended from colonists who came to South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and 14,000 Africans, died in British concentration camps during this war. The two British colonies of the Cape and Natal were then merged with the two defeated Afrikaner republics in 1910 to form a British dominion called the Union of South Africa.
What is of particular interest for the purposes of this paper is the colonial character of the capitalist relations of production that developed in the new mining industry. The majority of the new workers on the mines were African labourers forced into the labour market through hut taxes, labour taxes, and restrictions on land ownership and access enacted by colonial governments in the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African workers were typically male migrants who worked on contracts of limited duration sometimes lasting a year' following which they returned to their rural homes and families in the defeated and dismembered African kingdoms. Because these workers were not fully separated from the means of production, employers could pay "bachelor" wages on the grounds that the workers' families supposedly subsisted by farming in the rural areas.
African wages were also held down by the Chamber of Mines, which set up official agencies to recruit African workers for its members: the Native Recruitment Corporation, operating within South Africa proper, and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, recruiting from countries in the region. The Portuguese colony of Mozambique was particularly significant: between 1904 and 1929 it supplied at least 40 % of the Transvaal African labour force. The aim of this monopsony was to set a standard level for African wages and prevent upward pressure in wages as a result of mining houses competing for labourers.
Very low wages were also secured by subjecting the African workers to coercive labour practices including indenture, pass controls over movement, and housing in tightly regulated and closed compounds on the mine premises. These regulations applied specifically to African workers and built on practices of unfree labour from the pre-industrial colonial period. Further, Africans (like Coloureds and Indians, and unlike whites, who had manhood suffrage from 1907 onwards) were largely disenfranchised, with the exception of a small petty bourgeois layer in the Cape and Natal. All of these mechanisms helped prevent African worker unionisation and held African wages at the extremely low levels needed to make the Witwatersrand’s vast amounts of low-grade ore profitable on world markets. In 1913, there were 195,000 Africans on the mines - mainly miners, but including layers such as clerks and policemen - and a further 37,000 African workers in domestic service, and 6,000 working in factories, workshops and warehouses.
In addition to African workers, the new urban areas had small communities of Coloureds, a racially mixed people largely descended from the slaves imported into the Cape colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth century from Asia and Africa, and Indians, imported into Natal in the 1860s as indentured farm labourers. There were also 38,500 white workers on the Witwatersrand in 1913: 22,000 worked on the mines, 4,500 on the railways, and the remainder in building, tramways, printing, electricity and other industries. Initially most white miners were immigrants from abroad, up to 85 percent of whom were British-born in the 1890s, often arriving in South Africa via other mining regions, and attracted by the prospects of employment at unusually high wages. On the mines, wages for professional miners and some artisans were generally at least double, and sometimes up to five times, higher than wages for comparable categories of worker in other settled mining areas.
The structure of the working class created serious tensions within its ranks. On the one hand, the working class was occupationally stratified. The white working class was divided between artisans, such as the miners, organised into craft unions, and a large local "poor white" layer drawn from Afrikaners proletarianised by the stratification within their rural society and by the wartime devastation of their farms. Many of this under-employed layer were resident in Johannesburg’s multi-racial slums, and involved in criminal and trading activity. On the other hand, the working class was divided by race and skill, categories that strongly overlapped. White miners typically earned about five times the wages of African miners in this period, reflecting, in turn, the differential relations existing between these different fractions of the working class and the capitalist class. African miners were a colonised people who entered the labour market under a coercive regime; skilled white workers were drawn from the labour markets of Australia, North America and Europe by the promise of higher wages. The other non-African minorities, the Coloureds and Indians, were largely situated in an intermediary position. In the Cape, there was a noticeable layer of Coloured artisans, and many occupied semi-skilled positions elsewhere; in Natal, Indians were a significant proportion of manufacturing workers.
For white workers this situation was fraught with peril: employers consistently sought to fragment artisanal jobs and replace expensive white labour with cheap semi-skilled Africans; many unskilled whites found that employers preferred rightless Africans in labouring jobs. Yet for all workers – although most especially Africans – conditions on the Witwatersrand in this period were shocking. Living costs were high, housing poor and in short supply, and the ravages of silicosis on African and white miners severe: in the first decade of the 1900s, their average working life was twenty-eight years shorter than that of the average male population. Illnesses such as pneumonia also took their toll: in 1903, nearly 5,000 African miners died of this illness. Labour repression was applied to both African and white workers in the first two decades of the twentieth-century. Strikes and desertion by African workers were generally forcibly suppressed, yet even the white trade unionists who organised general strikes in 1913, 1914 and 1922 found themselves facing the guns of imperial and local troops.
White labour, however militant, was rarely revolutionary. It was dominated by a chauvinist "white labourite" tradition similar to that of mainstream Australian labour and large sections of American labour. The early labour movement in South Africa, which emerged from the 1880s onwards, was largely made up of craft unions established by immigrant whites. Faced with replacement by unfree African labour, these unions typically advocated the reservation of specific jobs for white workers, doing so as early as 1896, and barred Africans from membership. This demand was retained by early twentieth-century craft union federations such as the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council and the South African Industrial Federation as well as by the craft union-sponsored South African Labour Party, which won six out of 121 seats for the 1910 all-white elections on a strictly segregationist platform.
A further element of the social mix on the early Witwatersrand was the African petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The Cape Colony, in particular, adhered for much of the nineteenth century to a liberal mid-Victorian vision of assimilating suitable colonial subjects into non-racial gentry. The African petty bourgeoisie, an educated stratum engaged in the professions and in commerce rooted in the mission stations and early towns, could soon be found in Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand. With the retreat of mid-Victorian liberalism in the face of late nineteenth-century imperialism, and the parallel rise of racist science, the insecurity of this stratum became acute, trapped as it was between increasingly limited access to the elite, and growing employer demands for cheap African labour. Its response was to found the African nationalist movement, exemplified by the SANNC, which was established in January 1912 by the "chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race", as one delegate approvingly noted. Opposed to racial discrimination, the class agenda of the African nationalists was assimilation into the capitalist mainstream, and its favoured tactics at the time were those of reasoned moderation, petitioning, deputations to authority, and professions of loyalty to established authority.
The racial divisions within the working class, and the racial structuring of capitalism, posed a very difficult and complex national question for socialists in South Africa. Among the issues raised were the relationship between the socialist project and the African nationalist movement, the role of white labour in the movements for national liberation and socialist change, and the relationship between national liberation and socialism itself.
For, in South Africa, racial divisions amongst workers were not simply based on sentimental prejudice but existed and were reproduced in a racialised labour process and a racially segmented labour market; further, racism was not simply an ideological aspect of capitalist hegemony, but fundamentally intertwined with the process of capital accumulation itself. Hence, the national question posed tactical challenges for the building of a working class movement, as well as posing challenges around the strategy and ultimate aims of the socialist movement itself. At the same time, the historic development of capitalism in South Africa tended to foreclose on some of the more conventional solutions to national oppression, such as secession or national autonomy, insofar as the early struggles of the white working class suggested it might play an important role in a national liberation project in the country, and insofar as the existence of a common economy made a territorial division improbable.
Before moving on to discuss the approach developed by the organisations characterised at the start of this paper as revolutionary syndicalist, this paper will deal with the Stalinist and Trotskyist views on the national question in South Africa. This task will be undertaken by reference to the official positions taken by local organisations aligned with each tendency in the period under review, viz., the CPSA, on the one hand, and the Workers’ League of Africa (founded in 1932) and the Lenin Club (founded in 1933), on the other.
The CPSA was formed in July 1921 by a diverse collection of far left groupings in South Africa, including the IndSL and the ISL, with the latter providing most of the early leadership and activists, as well as a printing press and a weekly newspaper, the International, which continues today as the rather more infrequent Umsebenzi ("The Worker"). Throughout the early 1920s, the CPSA tended to lack clear strategic positions on a range of issues, not least of which was the national question.
The Party’s early eclecticism – which included a continued revolutionary syndicalist influence – was, however, ended in 1927 and 1928 when the Comintern began to pressurise the CPSA to adopt a "Native Republic" thesis. The Comintern’s position on the colonial and semi-colonial countries had been left somewhat vague in its early congresses, and became the central item on the agenda after 1925. As such, however, it became embroiled in the Stalin/Trotsky factional struggle, with each side developing apparently distinct positions on the issue. The "Native Republic" thesis is a prime example of the developing Stalinist approach to social struggle in colonial and semi-colonial countries, and maintained that the immediate task of the South African revolution was national liberation of African people from foreign and racial domination; in its original formulation, this struggle was to be led by the rural "peasantry".
At the 1928 sixth world congress of the Comintern the "Native Republic" thesis was adopted as official Comintern policy. Despite fierce internal debate within the CPSA on the issue, with Party members such as S.P. Bunting, T.W. Thibedi, and Eddie Roux expressing serious reservations, the organisation adopted a version of the thesis in January 1929. This described the CPSA’s aim as "An Independent South African Native Republic as a stage towards the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic, guaranteeing protection and equality to all national minorities".
The reasons why the CPSA came to adopt this thesis need not detain us at this point. What is crucial about the "Native Republic" thesis is the manner in which it diachronically separates national liberation and socialism into separate stages and strategic tasks. Although the thesis may be read as positing a necessary, and logical, progression from national liberation to socialism, it does have three important practical implications: firstly, the national liberation struggle is denuded of any evident working class character insofar as the crucial "actor" in the first stage is the colonised nation including the national bourgeoisie; secondly, the thesis disarticulates national liberation from any change in the relations of production insofar as it, in effect, claims that national liberation can be – indeed, must be – achieved prior to socialism, and, so, assumes that full national liberation can be achieved under capitalism and yet, at the same time, lay the basis for a transition to socialism; and thirdly, the thesis tends to treat nationalism as the true bearer of national liberation for the whole people, rather than analyse it as a particular approach to national liberation.
In practice, then, the thesis made it clear that the immediate strategic task of the Communist Party was not "communism," but decolonisation; the Party’s field of operation was not the working class, per se, but all classes in the oppressed nation, explicitly including the African bourgeoisie; whilst it was important to organise workers, the political content of the workers’ movement had to be framed within the goals of national liberation, whilst the Party also had to work within, and help radicalise, rather than compete with, the African nationalist movement. These conceptions, which were later elaborated and modified as the thesis of "Colonialism of a Special Type" (CST) – wherein black South Africa was conceptualised as an "internal colony" of white South Africa – still form the basis of the SACP’s ongoing alliance with the African National Congress (ANC), and underlie the SACP’s strategic goal of "national democratic revolution" in South Africa.
This "two-stage" conception immediately came under fire from South Africa’s emergent Trotskyist movement, which began to coalesce in the late 1920s. The origins of South African Trotskyism are at once international and national: international insofar as the emergence of a South African Trotskyist tendency from the late 1920s echoed the struggle within the Soviet Union and the Comintern in this period; national insofar as the early Trotskyist cadre were drawn largely from CPSA activists expelled from the Party in waves of purges that began in 1930, removed almost all the ISL and IndSL veterans, including Thibedi and Bunting, and reduced the Party to impotence with around 150 members by 1933 (this was down from nearly the 3,000 members claimed in 1929).
The first organised Trotskyist organisation on the Witwatersrand was an ephemeral Communist League of Africa, founded in 1932 by Thibedi, followed by a succession of small Trotskyist groups in Johannesburg. In the Western Cape, which was to become the historical stronghold of South African Trotskyism, the first organisation was the Lenin Club, which was formed in 1933. It split soon after, with its majority faction joining with Johannesburg-based groups to form the Workers Party of South Africa in 1935, and the remainder forming the Communist League of South Africa. The South African Trotskyists were, from the start, characterised by centrifugal tendencies, and were also disunited in their response to the two-stage theory of the CPSA.
Despite their myriad differences, the two factions concurred with the CPSA that imperialism and racial domination had to be combated, and they agreed, also, that a resolution of the land question was a central aspect of the South African revolution. However, they differed from the CPSA in several fundamental ways: in the first place, both maintained that the working class had to lead the revolutionary movement in South Africa, and operate in an alliance with the rural poor; in the second place, both placed great emphasis on the immediate need to unite black and white workers in South Africa (a task relegated to the second stage by the CPSA) as the leadership of the rural poor; and, in the third place, both maintained that the struggle against imperialism, and for democratic rights and the resolution of the land question, which implied black majority rule, would transform itself, uninterruptedly, into a revolution against capitalism, a "permanent revolution". This is not, of course, to overstate the theoretical clarity of the Trotskyists, or deal exhaustively with the minutiae of their differing programmes and emphases: the point is that both factions did develop their programmes within the framework of the "permanent revolution" thesis.
As such, these organisations’ views both converged with, and underlined the limitations of, Trotsky’s approach to the national question in colonial and semi-colonial countries. As originally formulated, the theory of the "permanent revolution" maintained that in conditions of late development, the bourgeoisie was too weak to carry out its supposed historic "bourgeois-democratic" tasks of ending feudal landlordism, instituting basic democratic rights, securing national independence and fostering economic development. As a result, these ostensibly necessary "bourgeois-democratic" tasks had to be undertaken by the working class movement itself, in alliance with the peasantry: in other words, the working class would carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution in lieu of bourgeois revolutionaries. Such a substitution could not be without consequences: Trotsky insisted that the working class might, emboldened by its new found power, proceed (under the appropriate leadership, of course) to make the socialist revolution as well: in these conditions, he wrote, "The democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist, and thereby becomes a permanent revolution."
As argued above, there are many points of convergence on general issues between Stalinism and Trotskyism. These include the shared belief in the necessity of a vanguard party and a dictatorship of the proletariat expressed in the existence of a workers’ state, and the common roots of both within the Marxist tradition. A closer look at the approach of each current to the national question also reveals substantial similarities. Both accept the necessity for a "bourgeois-democratic" stage as a discrete historical period, and both accept that such a stage will lay the basis for the transition to socialism. Both are, thus, still trapped within the broader Marxist notions, firstly that a bourgeois revolution is a precondition for a working class revolution, and, secondly that the rise of the national bourgeoisie is associated with the extension of democratic and land reforms; the latter are seen as intimately linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie as a class, rather than, as the anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued, concessions forced upon bourgeois revolutionaries and the bourgeois revolutions by the struggles of the working class and peasantry. Hence, there is no need to exaggerate the dichotomy between the "two-stage revolution" and "permanent revolution", as both are better understood as variations on a broader principle of revolution by stages within the Marxist tradition rather than truly alternative socialist strategies.
An additional convergence between Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches in South Africa also exists in their general understanding of the historical development of the socialist tradition in the country, something that they share with academic historians. Whilst scholars and activists have debated the applicability of the "Native Republic" thesis and its subsequent evolution to the South African situation, as well as pointed to the Party’s own inconsistent application of the thesis, almost all concur that the adoption of the thesis was, nonetheless, a fundamental advance for the local socialist movement, insofar as the pre-1921 left is argued, or is assumed, to have, at best, ignored the national question and, at worst, pandered to white racism. Thus, for Drew, the thesis was "a significant advance ' for the first time socialists put South Africa’s pressing social problems ' at the top of their political programme," for Legassick, the ISL basically ignored the national question whereas as the CPSA at least sought to deal with it, and for Johns, the new programme of the Comintern "did draw the attention of the South Africans to the national, colonial and agrarian aspects of the South African situation which they had previously neglected." From this perspective, too, the Trotskyist reaction to the "Native Republic" thesis is itself testimony to the importance of this thesis in centring socialist debates around an ostensibly previously neglected national question.
The assumption that the pre-1921 left ignored, or pandered to, racial oppression in South Africa is, as I will show below, fundamentally incorrect and based on, at best, a misunderstanding and inadequate researches on the pre-CPSA period, and, at worst, deliberate falsification of the record. What is significant to note at this point is that the notion of the 1928 position as a fundamental advance for socialism in general is itself based upon, and reflects the continuing hegemony of, the interpretation of socialist history in South Africa set out by CPSA- and SACP- aligned intellectuals from the 1940s onwards, and elaborated over the next four decades. These interpretations, which centre on two notions 'that the pre-CPSA left was at once largely Marxist in orientation and incapable of properly answering the national question' may be traced through the works of R.K. Cope (1940?), Eddie Roux (1944, 1948), Lionel Forman (1959), Jack and Ray Simons (1965, hereafter "the Simons"), "Lerumo" (Michael Harmel, 1971), Brian Bunting (1975, 1981), and Jeremy Cronin (n.d., 1991).
These writers, who produced the first published histories of socialism in South Africa, were all associated with the Party on one way or another, and their works reflect and articulate the version of socialist history and correct socialist policies held by that Party. For this reason, I refer to these works as the "Communist school" of South African socialist history. For the "Communist school", the evolution of the CPSA and SACP is presented in the literature as a process of ongoing and continual advance.
This teleological evolution of the Party propounded by this interpretation is marked by a series of important milestones. The Party emerges from the "Communist nucleus" of "true socialists" in the ISL, who had, within an uneven ISL, championed an anti-war analysis "closely approaching the stand of Lenin", supposedly anticipated the formation of the Comintern, and developed an "unerring" interpretation of the Russian Revolution. The "true socialists" typically signalled out for praise in this regard are three founder members of the ISL: W.H. "Bill" Andrews, S.P. Bunting, and David Ivon Jones (who was the ISL’s delegate to the Comintern). These three, always presented as the leaders of the ISL, apparently fought against the supposed chauvinism of many ISL members, almost single-handedly switching the revolutionary "nucleus" on to the correct tracks, whilst at the same time fighting off the sectarians and ultra-leftists on their left.
For the most part this was a role they continued to assume in the CPSA. Bunting, his protégé Roux tells us, committed the Party for the first time to taking the black working class seriously in a tumultuous congress in 1924. This helped open the way for the subsequent adoption of the "Native Republic" thesis, which the Simons, like the academics cited above, describe as a "great advance in the analysis of the relations between national and class forces in the liberation movement," a "dramatic" change that placed the Communists "squarely on the side of national liberation." Despite some difficulties in the 1930s, despite false starts and several workerist deviations, this correct understanding finally culminated in an enduring alliance between the Party and the ANC for "national democracy" in the 1950s. The Party thus eventually became "the pace-setter in the united front of liberation, centred on the African National Congress; the front rank detachment of the national democratic revolution." In the Simons' sanguine formulation, at last "the class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation."
The notion that it was only with the formation of the CPSA that the national question began to receive due attention in South Africa is echoed in a broader assumption about the historical significance of the Leninist tradition as a whole at the international level. Both Stalinist and Trotskyist analyses of the national question commonly share the Leninist notion that the national question was never adequately dealt with by socialists - including Marxists - in the pre-Leninist era.
Lenin, for his part, specifically critiqued the "orthodox" Marxism of the Second International for dismissing the revolutionary potential of the anti-colonial movements, arguing that these movements "initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and perhaps play a much more revolutionary part than we expect," whilst the early Comintern lambasted Second International "orthodox" Marxism which "in reality only recognised the white race." This line of argument is also found in the claim by James P. Cannon, the key figure in the early American Trotskyist movement, that "Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distinguished from all other revolutionary tendencies by their concern for the problems of oppressed nations and national minorities, and affirmative support of their struggles for freedom, independence and self-determination." From this perspective, there is no genuine socialist approach to the national question outside of the Leninist tradition, for in practice, the other socialists are at best, only nominally committed to national emancipation, and, at worst, actively pander to national chauvinism. It is thus perfectly appropriate, from this perspective, that debates on socialist approaches to the national question are conducted within the Leninist tradition alone.
In the remainder of this paper, I will examine the other socialist tradition - anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism - and in doing so, develop two main arguments: firstly, I will provide an analysis of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist approaches to national and racial oppression in the "glorious period" of the movement, demonstrating the vacuity of the claim that Leninism was the first socialist tradition to develop a positive and revolutionary response to these issues; secondly, I will demonstrate the applicability of this point to South Africa as well, demonstrating not only that the pre-CPSA socialist groupings were primarily revolutionary syndicalist in character, but also that these organisations developed a consistent and revolutionary approach to the national question, thereby refuting the teleological conception of South African socialist history as well as the notion that Leninism and Marxism are the sole fount of a progressive position on the national question.
In closing, I will demonstrate that the roots of the notion that the pre-CPSA groupings failed to progressively grapple with the national question lie in the "Communist school" of South African socialist history, which is, to a large extent, premised on inadequate and even falsified research. I will also show how later researchers have tended to replicate the fundamental precepts of the "Communist school's" approach in their writings. In short, the remaining sections of the paper will contest two basic flaws in much of the literature on socialism and the national question: first, the general tendency to conflate the history of revolutionary socialism with the history of State-centred forms of socialism, and, specifically, the history of Marxism; second, the simplistic and, in cases, caricatured portrayal of the positions of non-Marxist revolutionary socialists, such as the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists.
In Leninist discourse, anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism are often caricatured as forms of "left-economism" that are entirely oblivious to political and social issues. This is reflected in the South African debates over political strategy and the role of the trade unions in the anti-apartheid movement, where the non-racial independent trade unions – the "workerists" associated with the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) – were labelled "syndicalist" and "economistic" by ANC and SACP supporters for their refusal to align with particular political parties and coalitions. Oddly enough, this analysis has its echo in the standard histories of anarchism by Joll, Kedward, Marshall, Nettlau and Woodcock – Guerin’s work is an important exception – all of which simply fail to provide any consistent analysis or discussion of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist positions on national oppression and racial discrimination.
It is my contention, on the contrary, that although the international anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movement often lacked an organisational centre in the form of a sustained international organisation that could codify and enforce particular understandings on social questions, it adhered to a coherent, positive, principled, revolutionary and libertarian approach to issues of national oppression and racial discrimination. I will discuss this through a series of case studies, which will be followed by an abstraction of the principles underlying these struggles. At an immediate level, however, it should be noted that support for national liberation follows directly from anarchism’s opposition to hierarchical political structures and economic inequality, and advocacy of a freely constituted international stateless confederation of self-administrating communes and workers' associations.
Bakunin’s own political roots lay within the national liberation movements of Eastern Europe, and he retained a commitment to what would nowadays be called "decolonisation" throughout his life. When Bakunin moved from Slavic nationalism towards anarchism in the 1860s, following the disastrous 1863 Polish insurrection, he still argued in support of struggles for national self-determination. He doubted whether "imperialist Europe" could keep the colonial countries in bondage: " Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics asleep in their servitude will necessarily awaken and begin to move." Bakunin went on to declare his "strong sympathy for any national uprising against any form of oppression", stating that every people "has the right to be itself ... no one is entitled to impose its costume, its customs, its languages and its laws." He also declared that he regarded all human beings, of whatever race, as equal, arguing for the "recognition of human right and human dignity in every man, of whatever race [or] colour..," insisting that apparent racial differences were "solely the result of the social environment."
The crucial issue, however, "in what direction and to what end" will the national liberation movement move? For Bakunin, national liberation must be achieved "as much in the economic as in the political interests of the masses": if the anti- colonial struggle is carried out with "ambitious intent to set up a powerful State" or if "it is carried out without the people" and "must therefore depend for success on a privileged class," it will become a "retrogressive, disastrous, counter-revolutionary movement."
Every exclusively political revolution – be it in defence of national independence or for internal change' – that does not aim at the immediate and real political and economic emancipation of people will be a false revolution. Its objectives will be unattainable and its consequences reactionary.
Hence, if national liberation is to achieve more than simply the replacement of foreign oppressors by local oppressors, the national liberation movement must thus be merged with the revolutionary struggle of the working class and peasantry against both capitalism and the State. Without social revolutionary goals, national liberation will simply be a bourgeois revolution. This clearly implies the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the national liberation movement, or the splitting of this movement into competing and hostile bourgeois and worker-peasant tendencies. A national liberation movement by and for the working class and peasantry requires that "All faith in any divine or human authority must be eradicated among the masses" and the rejection of bourgeois nationalism, called "patriotism" by Bakunin: "The bourgeoisie love their country only because, for them, the country, represented by the State, safeguards their economic, political and social privileges ' Patriots of the State, they become furious enemies of the mass of the people."
The national liberation struggle of the working class and peasantry must be resolutely anti-statist, for the State was necessarily the preserve of a privileged class, and the state system would continually recreate the problem of national oppression: "to exist, a state must become an invader of other states ' it must be ready to occupy a foreign country and hold millions of people in subjection." In short, for a national liberation struggle to realise the interests of the working class and peasantry it had to recognise the class war within the nation, and reject the notion that the State was the representative and instrument of the "nation". The national liberation struggle of oppressed nationalities must be internationalist in character as it must supplant obsessions with cultural difference with universal ideals of human freedom, it must align itself with the international class struggle for "political and economic emancipation from the yoke of the State" and the classes it represents, and it must take place, ultimately, as part of an international revolution: "a social revolution ' is by its very nature international in scope" and the oppressed nationalities "must therefore link their aspirations and forces with the aspirations and forces of all other countries." The "statist path involving the establishment of separate ' States" is "entirely ruinous for the great masses of the people" because it did not abolish class power but simply changed the nationality of the ruling class. Instead, the state system must be abolished and replaced with a coalition of workplace and community structures "directed from the bottom up ' according to the principles of free federation."
As such, Bakunin's conception of the national liberation struggle differs fundamentally from the Leninist approaches discussed above. Whereas both Stalinism and Trotskyism treat the national liberation struggle and the socialist struggle as separate, albeit interrelated, "stages" through which colonial countries must pass, Bakunin argues that national liberation can and should be fused social revolutionary struggle of the exploited classes into a single "stage". Whereas Stalinism and Trotskyism argue that national liberation has a universally "bourgeois-democratic" character, Bakunin insists that there are both bourgeois, on the one hand, and working class and peasant, on the other, agendas in the national liberation struggle that are fundamentally irreconcilable, and hence must assume the form of distinct and competing movements. Hence, national liberation must be differentiated from nationalism, which is the class programme of the bourgeoisie; it is hardly the task of revolutionaries to build classless national liberation fronts or anti-imperialist blocs. Bakunin also denies the linkage of "bourgeois" and "democratic" reforms posited within these Leninist models, as the bourgeoisie is characterised precisely by its opposition to general democratic reforms. Whereas both Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches assume that the national liberation struggle takes place within the borders of the nation state, and takes place through the national State, Bakunin disarticulates popular national liberation from the wielding of national state power, and advocates, instead, statelessness as the precondition for national self-determination. This difference reflects, in turn, the "political socialist" orientation of the Leninist currents, and the libertarian socialist character of Bakuninism.
A detailed history of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist involvement in struggles against racial and national oppression must be left to another paper. For now, examples must suffice. Let us deal first with the reaction to imperialism of the anarchists within the dominant capitalist countries. Opposition to imperialism was a crucial part of anarchist anti-militarist campaigns, which stressed that colonial wars did not serve the interests of workers but rather the purposes of capital. The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in France, for example, devoted a considerable part of its press to exposing the role of French capitalists in North Africa. The first issue of La Bataille Syndicaliste, which appeared on the 27 April 1911, exposed the "Moroccan syndicate": the "veiled men" who dictated to the ministers and diplomats and sought a war that would boost demand for arms, lands, and rail and lead to the imposition of tax on the indigenous people. Another article in the same paper reported approvingly on Moroccan protests against Spanish provocations in the area.
In Spain, the "Tragic Week" began on Monday 26 July 1909 when the union, Solidarad Obrero, which was led by a committee of anarchists and socialists, called a general strike against the call-up of the mainly working class army reservists for the colonial war in Morocco. By Tuesday, workers were in control of Barcelona, the "fiery rose of anarchism," troop trains had been halted, trams overturned, communications cut and barricades erected. By Thursday, fighting broke out with government forces, and over 150 workers were killed in the street fighting. The significance of the Tragic Week was precisely that, as the Trotskyist Trewhela notes, "the proletariat in Europe rebelled and shed its blood against imperialism in Africa." Kedward argues that the reservists were embittered by disastrous previous colonial campaigns in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, but whilst this comment is true, it misses the political significance of the Tragic Week as an anti-imperialist uprising situated within a long tradition of anarchist anti-imperialism in Spain. The "refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco," "one of the most significant" events of modern times, reflected the common perception that the war was fought purely in the interests of the Riff mine-owners, and that conscription was "a deliberate act of class warfare and exploitation from the centre."
One cannot, of course, accept Trewhela’s view that the Tragic Week of 1909 as the "the one occasion ' the only one" where European workers died in a rising against imperialism. In 1911, the newly founded, anarcho-syndicalist, National Confederation of Labour (CNT), successor to Solidarad Obrero, marked its birth with a general strike on the 16 September in support of two demands: defence of the strikers at Bilbao and opposition to the war in Morocco. Again, in 1922, following a disastrous battle against the forces of Abd el-Krim in Morocco in August, a battle in which at least 10,000 Spanish troops died, "the Spanish people were full of indignation and demanded not only an end to the war but also that those responsible for the massacre and the politicians who favoured the operation in Africa be brought to trial", expressing their anger in riots, and in strikes in the industrial regions.
In the Cuban colonial war (1895-1904), the Cuban anarchists and their unions joined the separatist armed forces, and made propaganda amongst the Spanish troops. The Spanish anarchists, likewise, campaigned against the Cuban war amongst peasants, workers, and soldiers in their own country. "All Spanish anarchists disapproved of the war and called on workers to disobey military authority and refuse to fight in Cuba," leading to several mutinies amongst draftees. Opposing bourgeois nationalism and statism, the anarchists sought to give the colonial revolt a social revolutionary character. At its 1892 congress in Cuba, the anarchist Workers' Alliance recommended that the Cuban working class join the ranks of "revolutionary socialism" and take the path of independence, noting that "...it would be absurd for one who aspires to individual freedom to oppose the collective freedom of the people..." When the anarchist Michele Angiolillo assassinated the Spanish President Canovas in 1897 he declared that his act both in revenge for the repression of anarchists in Spain and retribution for Spain’s atrocities in its colonial wars.
In Italy in the 1880s and 1890s "anarchists and former anarchists" "were some of the most outspoken opponents of Italian military adventures in Eritrea and Abyssinia." The Italian anarchist movement followed these struggles with a significant anti-militarist campaign in the early twentieth century, which soon focussed on the Italian invasion of Libya on 19 September 1911. Augusto Masetti, an anarchist soldier who shot a colonel addressing troops departing for Libya whilst shouting "Down with the War! Long Live Anarchy!" became a popular symbol of the campaign; a special issue of the anarchist journal L'Agitatore supporting his action, and proclaiming, "Anarchist revolt shines through the violence of war," led to a roundup of anarchists. Whilst the majority of Socialist Party deputies voted for annexation, the anarchists helped organise demonstrations against the war and a partial general strike and "tried to prevent troop trains leaving the Marches and Liguria for their embarkation points."
The campaign was immensely popular amongst the peasantry and working class and by 1914, the anarchist-dominated front of anti-militarist groups - open to all revolutionaries - had 20,000 members, and worked closely with the Socialist Youth. When Prime Minister Antonio Salandra sent troops against anarchist-led demonstrations against militarism, against special punishment battalions in the army, and for the release of Masetti on the 7 June 1914, he sparked off the "Red Week" of June 1914, a mass uprising ushered in by a general strike led by anarchists and the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI). Ancona was held by rebels for ten days, barricades went up in all the big cities, small towns in the Marches declared themselves self-governing communes, and everywhere the revolt took place "red flags were raised, churches attacked, railways torn up, villas sacked, taxes abolished and prices reduced." The movement collapsed after the Italian Socialist Party’s union wing called off the strike, but it took ten thousand troops to regain control of Ancona. After Italy entered the First World War in May 1915, the USI and the anarchists maintained a consistently anti-war, anti-imperialist position, continuing into 1920, when they launched a mass campaign against the Italian invasion of Albania and against imperialist intervention against the Russian Revolution.
"Syndicalist movements," an authoritative recent survey of research on revolutionary syndicalism notes, "probably belonged to those parts of the international labour movement which were the least sensitive to racism." Revolutionary syndicalism traditionally stressed the need to organise the unskilled and excluded millions of workers ignored and maligned by the craft unions, and to break down racial divisions within the world's working class. From its inception in the United States in 1905, the IWW castigated the American Federation of Labour for discrimination against people of colour, immigrants, and women. It actively organised Asian, black, Hispanic and foreign-born workers, rejected racist immigration restriction laws, and opposed racial discrimination, prejudice and violence, and retains the distinction of being the "only federation in the history of the American labour movement never to charter a single segregated local," maintaining "solidarity and equality regardless of race or colour such as most labour organisations have yet to equal". The IWW united workers across colour lines in the segregated southern States and docklands, and "from the very first ' maintained a definite stand against any kind of discrimination based on race, colour or nationality". In Australia, too, the IWW promoted for "the first time in the labour movement ... a coherent anti-racist view point". The IWW attacked the "White Australia Policy" of the ruling Labour Party as well as other expressions of White chauvinism, and set out to organise all workers – immigrants and Asians included – into "One Big Union" against capitalism.
At a time when the "orthodox" Marxism of the Second International insisted that underdeveloped countries were not ripe for revolution, the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists organised "third world" workers and peasants against national and racial domination. In addition to its role in the anti-colonial struggle, the anarchist-led Cuban labour movement played a central role in overcoming divisions between black, white Cuban, and Spanish-born workers. The Cuban anarchists "successfully incorporated many nonwhites into the labour movement, and mixed Cubans and Spaniards in it", "fostering class consciousness and helping to eradicate the cleavages of race and ethnicity among workers." The Workers Alliance "eroded racial barriers as no union had done before in Cuba" in its efforts to mobilise the "whole popular sector to sustain strikes and demonstrations." Not only did blacks join the union in "significant numbers," but the union also undertook a fight against racial discrimination in the workplace. The first strike of 1889, for example, included the demand that "individuals of the coloured race able to work there." This demand reappeared in subsequent years, as did the demand that blacks and whites have the right to "sit in the same cafes," raised at the 1890 May Day rally in Havana. The anarchist periodical El Producter, founded in 1887, denounced "discrimination against Afro-Cubans by employers, shop owners and the administration specifically." And through campaigns and strikes involving the "mass mobilisation of people of diverse race and ethnicity," anarchist labour in Cuba was able to eliminate "most of the residual methods of disciplining labour from the slavery era" such as "racial discrimination against non-whites and the physical punishment of apprentices and dependientes."
In Mexico, anarchists led Indian peasant risings such as the revolts of Chavez Lopez in 1869 and Francisco Zalacosta in the 1870s. In its later incarnations, such as the Mexican Liberal Party, the revolutionary syndicalist "House of the Workers of the World" (COM) and a local IWW, Mexican anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism continually challenged the political and economic dominance of the United States, and opposed racial discrimination against Mexican workers in foreign-owned enterprises, as well as within the United States. In the 1910s, the local IWW’s focus on "’bread and butter’ issues combined with the promise of future workers’ control struck a responsive chord among workers caught up in a nationalist revolution that sought to regain control from foreigners the nation’s natural resources, productive systems and economic infrastructure".
In Nicaragua, Augustino Cesar Sandino (1895-1934), the leader of the Nicaraguan guerrilla war against the United States’ occupation between 1927-33, remains a national icon. Sandino’s army’s "red and black flag had an anarcho-syndicalist origin, having been introduced into Mexico by Spanish immigrants." His own eclectic politics were framed by a "peculiar brand of anarcho-communism," a "radical anarchist communism" "assimilated ' in Mexico during the Mexican revolution" where he received "a political education in syndicalist ideology, also known as anarchosyndicalism, libertarian socialism, or rational communism."
In Ireland, to cite another case, the revolutionary syndicalists James Connolly and Jim Larkin sought to unite workers across sectarian religious divides in the 1910s, aiming at transforming the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, which they led, into a revolutionary "One Big Union." Socialism was to be brought about through a revolutionary general strike: "they who are building up industrial organisations for the practical purposes of to-day are at the same time preparing the framework of the society of the future ' the principle of democratic control will operate through the workers correctly organised in ' Industrial Unions, and the ' the political, territorial state of capitalist society will have no place or function'"
A firm anti-imperialist, Connolly opposed the nationalist dictum that "labour must wait," and that independent Ireland must be capitalist: what would be the difference in practice, he wrote, if the unemployed were rounded up for the "to the tune of ‘St. Patrick’s Day’" whilst the bailiffs wore wear "green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the road will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic"? In the end, he insisted, "the Irish question is a social question, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself, in the final analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland." Connolly was sceptical of the very ability of the national bourgeoisie to consistently fight against imperialism, writing it off as a sentimental, cowardly, and anti-labour bloc, and he opposed any alliance with this layer: the once-radical middle class have "bowed the knee to Baal, and have a thousand economic strings - binding them to English capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them toward Irish patriotism," and so, "only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland." Connolly was executed in 1916 following his involvement in the Easter Rising,which helped spark the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1922, one of the first successful secessions from the British Empire.
A final example bears mentioning. The anarchist movement emerged in East Asia in the early twentieth century, where it exerted a significant influence in China, Japan and Korea. With the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, opposition to the occupation developed in both Japan and in Korea, and spilled over into China. In Japan, the prominent anarchist Kotoku Shusui was framed and executed in July 1910, in part because his Commoner's Newspaper campaigned against Japanese expansionism.
For the Korean anarchists, the struggle for decolonisation assumed centre-stage in their political activity: they played a prominent part in the 1919 rising against Japanese occupation, and in 1924 formed the Korean Anarchist Federation on the basis of the "Korean Revolution Manifesto" which stated that "we declare that the burglar politics of Japan is the enemy for our nation's existence and that it is our proper right to overthrow the imperialist Japan by a revolutionary means". The Manifesto made it clear that the solution to this national question was not the creation of a "sovereign national State" but in a social revolution by the peasants and the poor against both the colonial government and the local bourgeoisie. Further, the struggle was seen in internationalist terms by the Korean Anarchist Federation, which went on to found an Eastern Anarchist Federation in 1928, spanning China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries, and which called upon "the proletariat of the world, especially the eastern colonies" to unite against "international capitalistic imperialism".
Within Korea itself, the anarchists organised an underground network, the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation, to engage in guerrilla activity, propaganda work and trade union organising. In 1929, the Korean anarchists founded an armed liberated zone, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, which brought together two million guerrillas and Korean peasants on the basis of voluntary farming co-operatives. The Korean People's Association in Manchuria was able to withstand several years of attacks by Japanese forces and Korean Stalinists backed by the Soviet Union before being forced underground. Resistance continued throughout the 1930s despite intense repression, and a number of joint Sino-Korean operations were organised after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
In short, the material above demonstrates that there was an alternative socialist approach to the national question to that developed within the Leninist tradition, and that this approach, indeed, preceded the formalised positions of the Comintern by, in some cases, half a century.
What, then, of South Africa, and, in particular, of the left in pre-CPSA South Africa? As noted above, the dominant interpretation of early socialist history in South Africa remains that developed by the "Communist school", an approach posits that the pre-CPSA left was at once largely Marxist in orientation and incapable of properly answering the national question. Both of these contentions are, however, inaccurate. For, as I have argued elsewhere, the notion that the pre-1921 socialists were generally Marxists is a flawed one. The key socialist groups in the first two decades of the twentieth century were strongly influenced by anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, and, in particular, by the model of the IWW. Thus, the formation of the CPSA in 1921 represents a deep-seated break in socialist thought in South Africa. Rather than the logical culmination of hard labour by the "true socialists" grasping for the light of Leninist doctrine, the formation of the CPSA represented a formal about-face between 1920 and 1921 as the various socialist groups sought to revise their views rapidly in order to secure membership of the Comintern on the basis of the "21 points" of Leninism. (This is not to deny that revolutionary syndicalist influences remained within the early CPSA, as suggested above: however, the formal programme and orientation of the local socialist movement had undoubtedly shifted.)
The pre-1909 socialist organisations tended to be highly eclectic, but included a strong libertarian socialist component. The Social Democratic Federation, the first twentieth-century socialist group in South Africa, was founded in Cape Town in 1904. Its founder and key figure, the controversial Wilfrid Harrison - also founder of the short-lived Pretoria Socialist Society in 1911, as well as the first secretary of the CPSA - was a self-described "Philosophical Anarchist" who addressed crowds in Cape Town on the merits of Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. Within the ranks of this broad left organisation were to be found Marxists but also "anarchists, reform socialists, guild socialists". Harrison was also the founder of the short-lived Pretoria Socialist Society in 1911, and later became the first secretary of the CPSA. The Social Democratic Federation remained a loose propaganda group, based in Cape Town, until its absorption into the CPSA in 1921.
The Voice of Labour, South Africa's first socialist weekly, founded in 1908 in Johannesburg, provided a forum for a range of socialist currents to air their views. These included anarchists, such as Henry Glasse, an Englishman who had settled in Port Elizabeth in the 1880s. The translator of Kropotkin’s The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution and Expropriation into English, Glasse must be considered the pioneer of libertarian socialism in South Africa. Working in apparent isolation, Glasse continued to contribute to Kropotkin’s Freedom in London, gave public lectures on anarchist ideas, and authored several anarchist pamphlets, such as Socialism: the remedy in 1901, and The Superstition of Government in 1902.
From 1910, the views expressed in the Voice of Labour were overwhelmingly those of IWW-style revolutionary syndicalism. This growing interest was at least partly attributable to the interest sparked by the tour of South Africa by the English revolutionary syndicalist Tom Mann between February and April 1910. Mann, who visited Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria, spent his time preaching the "gospel ' of a complete change of society" and the "perfected system industrial organisation to make this possible", urging at all times "the need for economic organisation, and an amalgamation of the unions on the basis of industrial unionism."
It was from amongst the network of socialists associated with the Voice of Labour that the first two revolutionary syndicalist organisations were established in South Africa in 1910. These were the IWW (South African section) founded in June 1910 through the take-over of a smaller "Industrial Workers Union" orientated to unskilled whites, and the Socialist Labour Party, founded circa March 1910, and not to be confused with the South African Labour Party; each of these two groups was aligned to a competing faction of the international IWW movement. Key activists in the local IWW included Andrew Dunbar and Tom Glynn, whilst adherents of the Socialist Labour Party included Ralph Rabb, I. Israelstam, Jock Campbell, John Campbell (no relation), J.M. Gibson, C.B. Tyler, W. Reid and Philip R. Roux (father of communist Eddie Roux, discussed earlier).
Whilst the local Socialist Labour Party was successful in building a cadre of eloquent proponents of its views, its activities remained largely propagandistic in nature, centred on paper sales and talks on Sundays in the Market Square in Johannesburg, and internal education work. The local IWW also held regular open-air Sunday meetings at the Market Square in Johannesburg, but was rather more successful in moving beyond simply propagating the need for "One Big Union". In 1911, the IWW organised two spectacular strikes by Johannesburg tramway workers; it also held meetings Pretoria amongst railway workers, and attracted "some of the Railway Servants Association" to its "Pretoria Local" the same year, a prospect which doubtless alarmed government officials who worried about the impact of IWW methods on the state railways.
Although both organisations were apparently defunct by 1914, all of the prominent revolutionary syndicalists of the pre-war period – with the exception of Tom Glynn (who had left for Australia to edit the IWW paper Direct Action) and Jock Campbell (who announced his retirement from political life at the first annual conference of the ISL in January 1916) – joined with an anti-war group of socialist dissidents from the South African Labour Party to form the ISL in September 1915. These dissidents included W.H. Andrews, S.P. Bunting and David Ivon Jones. Although the ISL is typically presented in the literature as the "first Marxist orientated political organisation in the history of the South African labour movement", led by "revolutionary Marxists", preoccupied with "the teachings of Karl Marx", "applying Marxism to South Africa", and acting as "tireless propagandists" for Marxist ideology, the organisation was, in fact, deeply influenced by the revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW, resolving at its first congress in January 1916:
That we encourage the organisation of the workers on industrial or class lines, irrespective of race, colour or creed, as the most effective means of providing the necessary force for the emancipation of the workers.
"The key to social regeneration ' to the new Socialist Commonwealth," argued the organisation’s weekly journal, the International, "is to be found in the organisation of a class conscious proletariat within the Industrial Union." The aim was "the union of all workers along the lines of industry; not only as a force behind their political demands, but [also] as the embryo of that Socialist Commonwealth which ... must take the place of the present barbaric order."
Rather than being run by capitalists, or "dominated by a paternal bureaucracy", the economy had to be "administered ' democratically by the workers themselves ' along the lines of their particular industry." The socialist commonwealth would have "no room for government, as only slaves require to be kept in subjection; no room for laws, as no restriction will be required in a society of social equals; no soldiers or policemen, who are only required to enforce class made rules."
The International Socialist League was contemptuous of the white craft unions: their "craft scabbery" meant they failed to even organise solidarity between white strikers of different crafts and, equally seriously, they were guilty of "complete oblivion to the sufferings of the lower paid [and] unemployed white workers, mainly women" and an "intolerant" attitude "towards the native wage slave." What was required was a "new movement" that would "recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour." Hence, whilst the ISL was the key mover in the founding of the CPSA, there was a radical political discontinuity between the two organisations, reflecting a dramatic shift in the formal political orientation of the ISL from revolutionary syndicalism towards Leninism in the period between 1920 and 1921.
In May 1918, the Social Democratic Federation, which maintained cordial ties with the ISL, split when a group of younger militants, including A.Z. Berman, Manuel Lopes and Joe Pick, left to form the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL). Apparently they felt that the Social Democratic Federation was "too academic and not sufficiently in touch with the immediate ravages of industry, nor sufficiently in the vicinity of the proletariat." The new organisation rented a hall in Ayre Street, District Six the central residential area of the Coloured community - that was capable of seating seated 600 people. The elderly Henry Glasse also wrote as a correspondent for the IndSL's journal, the Bolshevik, which appeared from early 1919. Notwithstanding its name, Bolshevik promoted an even more orthodox revolutionary syndicalism than the International. Whereas the ISL - like the old Socialist Labour Party - was willing to countenance participation in the electoral process, the IndSL followed the line of the defunct local IWW that electoralism was a positive danger to the working class movement:
The interests of the Working Class and of the Employing Class are diametrically opposed. There can be no peace as long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the all the toilers come together on the industrial field, and take and hold what they produce by their labour, through an economic organisation of the working class, without affiliation to any political party.
The objects of the organisation were described in the statement as "The abolition of the wage system and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth based on the principle of self-governing industries, in which the workers will work and control the instruments of production, distribution and exchange for the benefit of the entire community." Its aims were the propagation "by every means in our power" of "the principles of Industrial Unionism" and "advising and assisting the working class in the establishment of such forms of industrial organisation as will enable them not only to improve their present condition but eventually take over complete control of all industries."
If there were "true socialists" in South Africa before the CPSA, then, they were by no means Marxists, and they were even less so a hardy group of "tireless" Leninists-in-the-making. What then of the positions adopted by these pre-CPSA groupings vis-à-vis the national question in South Africa? This section of the paper will demonstrate that the pre-CPSA revolutionary left, as represented by organisations such as the South Africa section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), and the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), argued for a fusion of the struggle against national oppression and the struggle against capitalism and the capitalist State through a revolutionary, non-racial, "One Big Union" that would overcome the racial divisions within the working class, forcibly remove racial laws, and also seize, and place under working class control, the means of production. This line of argument situates the South African revolutionary syndicalists of the 1910s squarely in line with the general anti-racist orientation of the international revolutionary syndicalist movement. This section will also develop a critique of the manner in which the arguments of the "Communist school" that the early left ignored, or even endorsed, national oppression in South Africa, are premised on a misrepresentation of the historical record which is fundamentally incorrect and based on, at best, a misunderstanding and inadequate research on the pre-CPSA period, and, at worst, deliberate falsification.
The Social Democratic Federation, as a broad left group, lacked clear, shared positions on the national question in South Africa. The organisation also tended to follow the abstract and propagandising approach to socialist work favoured by the lucid Harrison, who saw gradualist educational work as the key task of socialists, and criticised the focus of the local IWW on union work as amounting to education "in name only". Indeed, Harrison even suggested on occasion that people of all classes could be convinced of the rationality of socialism. Thus, the main activity of the Social Democratic Federation was propaganda work, much of it in the form of public talks in District Six, the poor white area of Salt River, and at the foot of the Jan van Riebeeck statue, a popular site for street speakers. The Social Democratic Federation had a general, if somewhat abstract, anti-racist politics – its public meetings were conducted in several languages to racially mixed crowds, its relations with the Coloured nationalist African Political Organisation were cordial, and its members regularly sought to have colour bar clauses deleted from trade union constitutions - but there is little to suggest a coherent and programmatic approach to the national question in South Africa.
A rather more comprehensive approach can be found in the writings of the revolutionary syndicalists associated with the Voice of Labour. Despite the sectarianism that dogged relations between the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party, both parties shared agreed key point of agreement between the two revolutionary syndicalist organisations, and that was their opposition to racism in the labour movement.
The Voice of Labour was an eclectic paper. Whilst the founder and first editor of the paper, Archie Crawford, opposed the racism endemic in the white labour movement, a few correspondents were less sanguine. In a heated debate on the "colour question," some correspondents denied the admissibility of blacks to socialist organisations, the franchise, and the "Socialist State". Upbraided by Crawford, they also came under fire from the paper’s anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist correspondents, who strenuously opposed these ideas as anti-working class.
Glasse, who called on the paper to give preference to "direct action ' over ' Parliamentary politics" – which acts to "chill and paralyse natural energy and initiative" praised the paper for its editorial position "in regard to the native and coloured question", arguing that race issues were used to divide workers in the interests of the capitalists: "For a white worker in this South Africa to pretend he can successfully fight his battle independent of the coloured wage slaves - the vast majority - is, to my mind, simply idiocy".
"Proletarian", the revolutionary syndicalist editor of the Voice of Labour who took over from Crawford from late 1910 to early 1912, argued that it was inevitable that the African workers had begun to organise for "mutual protection". Unlike the white craft unionists, "the hitherto unorganised natives" had won "a couple of strikes", precisely because they had, unlike the white craft unionists, "the commonsense to practice working class solidarity". In his view, "Sooner or later they will revolt against wage slavery." In such a situation, the "only logical thing for white slaves to do is to throw in their lot with the black wage slave in a common assault on the capitalist system." "Proletarian" stressed the common interests of both sets of workers: "if the natives are crushed the whites will go down with them", the "stress of industrial competition" compelling the minority of white workers to "accept the same conditions of labour as their black brethren."
On this note, "Proletarian" opposed the introduction of compulsory military service in South Africa in the form of the Defence Bill, which was applicable to whites only, on the grounds that workers should not take up arms against one another. The real point of this "militarist" Bill was to suppress a "native rising". But such a rising was "wholly justified" given the "the cruel exploitation of South African natives by farmers, mining magnates and factory owners." Hence, it should receive the "sympathy and support of every white wage-slave": "no white wage slave will be true to the cause of labour if he lifts a rifle against his black brother." Workers should stand together, and, "if you must fight see that your rifles are aimed at the class which owns all property and robs all races." "Proletarian" went on to condemn the "grotesque" "attitude of superiority" of the "'aristocrats' of labour" to the coloured races.
What did this mean in practical terms? Both the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party advocated the organisation of non-racial revolutionary industrial unions. Jock Campbell of the Socialist Labour Party, an Irishman from the Clydeside in Scotland, has the distinction of being described in the literature as the "first socialist to make propaganda amongst the African workers", advocating "unity among all wage slaves, regardless of colour". Such contacts are likely to have taken place at socialist meetings in the Market Square.
When first incarnated as the Industrial Workers Union, the IWW described itself as a "class-conscious revolutionary organisation embracing all workers regardless of craft, race or colour". As the IWW proper, it sought to "fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black." Glynn retained this outlook after he left for Australia, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the IWW’s case against the "White Australia" policy through Direct Action and public meetings. The local IWW was the only union in pre-1914 South Africa that placed absolutely no racial restrictions on membership. Indeed, not only was it the only union in the period without a colour bar, but it was the first labour union in South African history open to workers of all races. Indeed, it appears to have been the first truly non-racial labour union in the whole of Britain's African empire.
The anti-racism of the local anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists was thus in line with the movement’s opposition to racial and national oppression worldwide. A resolute non-racialism was one of the distinctive contributions of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism to local socialist political culture. The notion of integrated, revolutionary industrial unions developed by the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party would later become the central pillar of ISL and IndSL politics.
A further position developed by these libertarian pioneers, and adopted by their successors, was a strong opposition to black nationalism, characterised as an anti-working class vehicle for the petty bourgeoisie. "Proletarian" was critical of the "small capitalist" nationalists, such as Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, leader from 1905 onwards of the African Political Organisation, which was based amongst the Coloured community. "Proletarian" was scathing towards Abdurahman for his vocal opposition to socialist ideas. It was ironic, noted "Proletarian," that whilst Abdurahman opposed socialism, he was willing to lobby, and work with, the local "Dutch farmers". This was "notwithstanding the fact, of which he is fully aware" that this class was "responsible for the notorious Masters and Servants Act" of 1911, which criminalized strike action and desertion by workers, and was used to suppress unionisation amongst African and Coloured workers. Racial divisions needed to be overcome through working class solidarity, "an organisation of wage-workers, black and white, male and female, young and old" which would proclaim "a universal general strike preparatory to seizing and running the interests of South Africa, for the benefit of workers to the exclusion of parasites."
The material, then, demonstrates that local IWW and Socialist Labour Party were pioneers of anti-racist, integrated, trade unionism in South Africa. It is thus ironic that the I.W.W. has been castigated in the literature for ignoring the national question. The Simons make the blanket assertion that all the socialists associated with the Voice of Labour either ignored the national question or pandered to white chauvinism. However, they fail to provide any discussion at all of the IWW and Socialist Labour Party’s positions, but instead rely on insinuating that these organisations shared the views of the small number of racist correspondents who wrote on occasion to the Voice of Labour. As such, they simply ignore the anarchists’ and revolutionary syndicalists’ fierce polemics against these correspondents, and provide a completely misleading picture of the situation. The materials I have presented demonstrate the dishonesty of the Simons’ characterisation, and suggest that their conclusions can at best be described as the result of sloppy research, at worst, as the deliberate conflation of radically different positions.
It is, however, a sad testament to the hegemonic position of the Simons’s analysis – and, hence, of the "Communist school’s" views – that their vacuous analysis is taken at face value, and uncritically reproduced, in other discussions of the local IWW. Katz takes the Simons’ assertions at face value, and makes them a central plank of her critique of the local IWW. Katz adds the assertion that the IWW was opposed to the use of African policemen against white strikers during its 1911 actions on the tramways. Van Duin, drawing on the Simons and on Katz, leaps to the conclusion that the local IWW was influenced by a "European superiority-complex" according to which white workers were driven by "categorical imperative for status inequality". Even van der Linden’s authoritative survey of revolutionary syndicalism does not escape the Simons’ legacy: referring to van Duin, he singles out the local IWW as a possible exception to the general anti-racist record of revolutionary syndicalism.
There is, however, no basis for these characterisations of the local IWW. Even the claim that the local IWW complained about the use of African policemen is without foundation, as a cursory examination of the IWW statement in which this alleged complaint appears reveals. The article, carried in the Voice of Labour, merely mentions in passing that African assistants were used in the crackdown, but makes no complaints at all about the presence of African policemen per se. Instead, it focuses on exposing the police as a whole as an instrument of capitalist violence that, in its clash with IWW strikers, had attacked women and old men, and trampled anyone who got in its way. In short, the criticisms of the IWW’s positions on the national question, initiated by the Simons, and refracted through Katz, van Duin, and van der Linden, must be rejected out of hand. The split between the "white labourite" tradition represented by the South African Labour Party, and the anti-racist socialism of the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists, did not begin with the split in the former which led to the formation of the ISL: it had already taken place by 1910, with the emergence of a revolutionary syndicalist tendency in the South African labour movement.
The ISL was far larger and far better resourced than its predecessors, and developed a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the national question in South Africa. From the start, the ISL situated itself within the anti-racist tradition pioneered by the socialists associated with the Voice of Labour. The fourth issue of the International in 1915 stated unequivocally that
"an internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the native working-class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the Labour Party is that it gives us untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the Native. If the League deal resolutely in consonance with Socialist principles with the native question, it will succeed in shaking South African capitalism to its foundations ' Not until we free the native can we hope to free the white ...
At its January 1916 conference, the ISL adopted a "Petition of Native Rights" which stated, inter alia, "the emancipation of the working-class requires the abolition of all forms of native indenture, compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the native worker to the political and industrial status of the white." Over the next few months, the ISL established its policy "as one of solidarity with Africans as fellow workers in common struggle," and by 1918, it had recruited a range of African, Coloured and Indian members - men such as Thibedi, Bernard Sigamoney, R.K. Moodley, and Johnny Gomas - as well as won the sympathy of activists in nationalist organisations such as the African Political Organisation and the SANNC. In February 1916, for example, the ISL hosted a meeting in Johannesburg on the 1913 Land Act that barred Africans from owning land in nearly 90% of South Africa. The "first coming together in the Transvaal of white socialists and the African National Congress", the meeting characterised the Act as a "barefaced attempt" to drive the African worker "cheap, helpless and unorganised, into the labour market ... ensuring to employers generally and particularly industrial employers, that most coveted plum of modern Imperialism, plentiful cheap labour."
That same month, another ISL public meeting called for increased pay for both whites and Africans on the mines, equal pay for equal work, and the inclusion of the Africans in the Mine Workers Union. In March 1916, ISL trade unionist George Mason argued that socialists must help found African trade unions and merge these with the white unions. The integrated meeting was also told that the Masters and Servants Act could be "repealed by the strength of Trade Unionism." On 8 June 1916, the ISL hosted Robert Grendon of the SANNC at a meeting "with a large number of natives" present, where, to "boisterous approval" it was stated that the trade union colour bar must go. A July 1916 ISL meeting discussed the "barbarities to which the Indians in Natal were treated." On 9 March 1917, the ISL held a public protest meeting against the Native Affairs Administration Bill, which essentially granted the Governor-General the right to rule Africans by decree. A resolution was passed which stated that "This meeting of whites and natives" condemned the Bill as "designed to accelerate the manufacture of cheap labour and to keep the natives more than ever in the position of a serf", and warned that "the passing of this Bill in the teeth of determined opposition on the part of the natives forebodes grave danger to the peace of South Africa." In 1918, the ISL held its May Day celebrations outside the Pilkington Hall in Ferreirastown, a mainly Coloured area, the first time a May Day rally had been "directed to non-European workers."
The ISL critiqued the doctrine of "scientific racism" that argued for inherent biological inequality. African workers were, for the most part, illiterate, but "the founders of the British Trade Union Movement were men who could not read and write." And the African worker was less under the sway of capitalist ideology, his mind was "clear of the prejudices that from childhood cloud the mind of the White." Gibson argued that there were no hard and fast divisions in ability between the races, and called on white workers to "descend from the pedestal of race prejudice" and "cease to have an inflated idea of their own value as a superior race." In 1917, the International ran a series of articles that characterised biological racism as "pure poppycock". "Recent work in the study of the brain has disproven such ‘biology’", wrote S.G. Rich, "Let us not invent biological facts to excuse our remissness in reaching the natives." Scientific findings confirmed the view that "all the fundamental phenomena and capabilities of man are rooted in ... humanity which is Black, White and Brown." For "segregation is a policy of capitalism, not of the labour movement", and it led to disastrous disunity between workers and was nothing more than a cover for the extreme exploitation of African workers (rather than a form of protection for blacks, as the South African Labour Party claimed).
Arguing that the "the Industrial Union" was "the root of all the activities of Labour, whether political, social or otherwise," the ISL championed the view that the revolutionary industrial union was seen as the primary weapon of the working class that would fight for better working conditions, for workers’ control of industry, as well as all the issues – "political, social or otherwise" – which affected the working class. Contrary to the caricatures of "syndicalism" that arose in the 1980s’ debates on the independent union movement – viz., that "syndicalism" was opposed to the involvement of trade unions in political activities – the ISL that the "Industrial Union" was the vehicle of national liberation for Africans. The pass laws, an instrument "splendid for 'profits,' because they make the native labourer cheap and easy to handle," could only be overthrown if the African workers organised industrially:
Once organised, these workers can bust-up any tyrannical law. Unorganised, these laws are iron bands. Organise industrially, they become worth no more than the paper rags they are written on.
The interests of the African workers could only be realised by forming revolutionary, integrated, industrial unions to "fight capitalism of every colour." Black nationalists such as the SANNC offered no solution: their nationalism undermined working class internationalism, and their class agenda was that of the petty bourgeoisie. The SANNC was founded and led by "native attorneys and parsons", the "native property owner", the "cuff and collar men," who failed to identify the link between capitalist exploitation and national oppression. "Labour fakirs of Black South Africa, Black bellwethers for the capitalist class", the SANNC’s leaders had interests and views "completely alien to the great mass of the Native proletariat," and thus failed "to give attention to the one weapon the ruling class fear - the organisation of the native workers." "Many holy men, perhaps the editor of the 'Abantu-Batho' among them, will hold up horrified hands at the thought of the natives organising." Far better that the African workers unite with white workers than place their faith in these middle-class elements. Thus, "We would also warn our native fellow workers against the enemies of their own colour."
The ISL was, at least, willing to concede that the black nationalists were willing to fight racism. As such, they were preferable to the South African Labour Party and white unions: the former was attacked for its racism, its middle-class pretensions and its role in misleading the white workers, the latter for their "complete oblivion to the sufferings of the lower paid [and] unemployed white workers, mainly women" and for their "intolerant" attitude "towards the native wage slave". "Slaves to a higher oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves batten on a lower slave class, the native races." The result was a labour movement so corrupted by racism that it did not recognise the basic principle of workers' solidarity, marred by "craft scabbery" by continuing to work during each other's strikes, and totally unable to deal with the "divide-and-rule" policy of capital. The S.A. Engine Drivers Association on the mines was condemned for "craft scabbery" when they accepted a small raise in return for signing a five year no-strike pledge: "no class conscious Engine Driver should barter away the working-class for an extra one and eight pence." The mechanics’ union was accused of "scabbing on Judas" for making a similar deal because Judas at least "demanded thirty pieces as his price." This was "scab unionism" which turned the "labour aristocrats" against the mass of workers. It was a policy promoted by trade union officials, the "labour fakirs" who betrayed the working class and undermined democracy in their own unions.
If "craft scabbery" and racial exclusion would win gains for small strata of workers - at the cost of the rest of the working class – it could not defend even the skilled workers in the long term. The new period of the "combination of capital" into giant corporations and trusts and powerful employers’ associations rendered the small and scattered craft unions redundant. They had "no earthly hope" of winning, especially since capital was also undermining the basis of craft union power - the skills of the artisan - through mechanisation and dilution. "The vanity of the craft unionists", argued the International, "blinds them to the process which was levelling all, skilled and unskilled, before the great lord of machinery." Unskilled white and African labour would take over the tasks of the craftsman as dilution took place. The craft unions' would pay the price for ignoring "the cries of the most despairing and the claims of the most enslaved" workers, the Africans, because the employers would use cheap African labour to undermine the overall level of wages and working conditions.
This process could not be halted by calls for the job colour bar and segregation. "Make no mistake", argued the International, "your puny breakwater – the colour bar" cannot hold back the "big coloured Industrial Army coming in on the tide of their evolution ... demanding that place in the sun to which every single human on this earth is rightfully entitled." Give that, "All segregation schemes are doomed to failure", the white workers had to support the African workers' demands for better conditions and oppose racist laws: "We must either lift the Native up to the White standard [of living], or sink down to his."
Racial prejudice was thus against the interests of all workers – whether skilled whites or unskilled Africans. For the artisans, then, the choice was between being a "closed guild of favoured White workers to police it over the bottom dog, the great mass of the unskilled" or "giving up ' craft and colour vanity" and joining their fellow workers in the struggle for the "control and administration of industry." For the white workers, more generally,
The choice is either to seek an alliance with the middle class or with the bottom dogs of wage- labour. So long as the white worker looks on his fellow wage-slave, the native worker, as an object to be kicked, instead of a work-mate to be linked up industrially to help him fight his industrial battles, so long will the white worker be the fool of imperialist notions and alarums. The one follows the other.
The whole of the fight against capitalism is a fight with the prejudices and capitalist-engendered aversions of the workers. Conquer these and capitalism is conquered. While these remain, it is useless whining about the disunity of labour. The job is to create among workers that feeling of unity with all those who labour for wages, irrespective of what pigment may have been injected by Nature into the labourer’s skin, or what tools he may or may not have learnt to use. That is the only unity.
What was required was a "new movement" that would "recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour." "The man who talks about a Socialism which excludes nine-tenths of the workers is not being honest with himself."
The activities of the ISL from 1916 to 1920 were fundamentally informed by the vision of One Big Union. From 1917 onwards, the organisation’s attention shifted increasingly to "the great mass of the proletariat" which "happens in South Africa to be black, and therefore disenfranchised and socially outcast." In September 1917 the ISL had to vacate its offices in the Trades Hall in Johannesburg when it refused to accept a management order barring Africans from using its facilities. The ISL's public meetings also faced disruption from white thugs. The ISL’s 1917 May Day rally, which included among its speakers Horatio Bud’Mbelle of the SANNC, was broken up by a mob, whilst its weekly public meetings came under regular attack from September that year. In 1918 and 1919, ISL meetings were repeatedly disrupted, often by a veterans' organisation called the "Comrades of the Great War".
Prominent ISL members in the white trade unions, such as Andrews and Mason, sought to reform these bodies on non-racial revolutionary industrial unionist lines, but with little success. In August 1917, a committee involving ISL activists issued a call for a conference to be held on 2 September 1917 "to discuss ways and means of urging the workers to unite and organise industrially so that they may be a in a position to present a united front to the employing class, and eventually to take over the control of the industry." Attended by forty-five workers - significantly, these included three Africans - the conference elected a Manifesto Committee, which included one African, charged with drawing up a manifesto for a general convention on "the creation of a general industrial union embracing all industries ' organising the movement on revolutionary industrial lines." Although the Manifesto Committee's statement was distributed to delegates at the December 1917 conference of the main craft union federation, the South African Industrial Federation, only members of the ISL and several African activists attended the Easter 1918 industrial unionist gathering advertised in the manifesto.
The ISL had more success when it set out to organise its own revolutionary syndicalist unions for African, Coloured and Indian workers. In March 1917, ISL activists helped launch an Indian Workers’ Industrial Union "on the lines of the IWW" in Durban. The union, organised by Gordon Lee of the ISL, and Bernard L.E. Sigamoney and R.K Moodley, attracted workers in catering, the docks, laundry, printing, and tobacco, as well (reportedly) mineworkers and the "sugar slaves" of the plantations. Sigamoney, the most prominent Indian labour activist in Durban in the 1910s, and Moodley, both joined the ISL. Their union, in conjunction with the ISL, organised regular study classes, at which Socialist Labour Party materials featured prominently, and held regular open air meetings where the "the Indian Workers Choir entertained the crowds by singing the Red Flag, the International and many IWW songs."
Noting a "great awakening of industrial solidarity among the Coloured workers" in Kimberley, the ISL sent Sam Barlin to organise a Clothing Workers’ Industrial Union in that town, based amongst the several hundred mainly Coloured clothing workers; it was chaired by a Mr Davis in the chair with Fred Pienaar as secretary, and a substantial number of its members also joined the League itself. By 1919, the new union had won recognition for its shop stewards, and secured a closed shop and the right of union officials to enter shops for inspections, as well as achieving substantial wage increases. The Clothing Workers’ Industrial Union established a section in Johannesburg in June 1919. Barlin also established a Horse Drivers’ Union in Kimberley, again amongst Coloured workers, which struck in late 1919 for a 25 percent wage increase and minimum wage of £2 a month.
Three months after the launching of the Indian Workers’ Industrial Union the ISL advertised a meeting in Johannesburg to "discuss matters of common interest between white and native workers." The meeting, which was attended by 10 white ISL members, and 20 Africans, became the first of a series of weekly study groups which would be transformed into a union called the "Industrial Workers of Africa" in September 1917. This was the first trade union in South African history to organise African workers, and it is of undoubted significance that the union was revolutionary syndicalist in inspiration and aims. Particularly prominent in the study groups was Dunbar, veteran of the defunct local IWW, who, police spies present record, stated that that the ISL wished to "make the natives who are the working-class of South Africa be organised and have rights as a white man."
Dunbar went on to argue that "natives should first of all have political rights so as to avoid pass laws, and then they will be able to strike for the other things." When asked by a student how these aims should be accomplished, he echoed the International in arguing that mass strike action was the key to national liberation. "If the natives in the mines ... [are] ... in a Union, and strike", they will be able to force the Government to concede to their demands. Not only would it be impossible for the State to arrest all the strikers but also the strikers at large would be able to demand the release of all prisoners. Dunbar advocated "mass passive resistance against and non-compliance with the pass laws." He stated, "they can do it only [by] coming together and at the end of the month ... refuse to go and register their pass at the pass office." The Native Affairs Department could obviously "not arrest the whole lot of them" and would be forced to "abolish the pass laws". Once this was accomplished, African workers should launch a general strike across the Witwatersrand for higher wages.
As for the white workers, they "have nothing to do with" the bosses, as "they are all under the capitalist." The solution was
For all the workers black and white to come together in a union and be organised together and fight against the capitalists and take them down from their ruling place and let them come and work together with us ... and not own what other men produce.
The "thing they are trying to do is to make ... both black and white ... get the same wages because they are both workers." If workers were arrested, the strikers should demand their release. "If we strike for everything", Dunbar continued, "we can get everything ... If we can only spread the matter far and wide amongst the natives, we can easily unite."
The study groups were attracting dozens of workers on a regular basis, as well as activists from the SANNC and the African Political Organisation. On 27 September 1917, having developed an African cadre of militants, the study groups were transformed into an African trade union with an all-African organising committee. The first trade union for Africans in South Africa, the new organisation was "not a political organisation but an Industrial Body" aiming at a giant union uniting all workers, although its focus was on Africans. Initially named the "IWW", the union was renamed the "Industrial Workers of Africa" in October.
Its meetings reiterated the ideas that had been put forward in the study groups. Addressing a meeting in May 1918, Reuben Cetiwe of the Industrial Workers of Africa stated "we should go to Compounds and preach our gospel":
We are here for Organisation, so that as soon as all of your fellow workers are organised, then we can see what we can do to abolish the Capitalist-System. We are here for the salvation of the workers. We are here to organise and to fight for our rights and benefits.
The young union’s political outlook was summarised in a leaflet prepared by a committee of two ISL and two Industrial Workers of Africa members in October 1917, and issued in isiZulu and seSotho in a print run of 10,000 copies:
LISTEN, WORKERS, LISTEN!
Workers of the Bantu race:
Why do you live in slavery? Why are you not free as other men are free? Why are you kicked and spat upon by your masters? Why must you carry a pass before you can move anywhere?
Because you are the toilers of the earth. Because the masters want you to labour for their profit. Because they pay the Government and Police to keep you as slaves to toil for them. If it were not for the money they make from your labour, you would not be oppressed..
There is only one way of deliverance for you Bantu workers. Unite as workers. Unite: forget the things which divide you. Let there be no longer any talk of Basuto, Zulu, or Shangaan. You are all labourers; let Labour be your common bond.
The sun has arisen, the day is breaking, for a long time you were asleep while the mill of the rich man was grinding and breaking the sweat of your work for nothing ' Come and listen, to the sweet news, and deliver yourself from the bonds and chains of the capitalist. Unity is strength'
The leaflet was quickly and widely circulated, turning up across the Witwatersrand, in Pretoria, in rural Rustenburg, at Heilbron in the Orange Free State, and even at Cala in the Cape Province.
In late 1917, the Industrial Workers of Africa also began to build links with other organisations. It sought to link the new union with the Indian Workers’ Industrial Union in Durban, and it also held several joint meetings with members of the Transvaal Native Congress, the Transvaal section of the SANNC, and the Transvaal section of the African Political Organisation, led by Talbot Williams. A joint meeting was held with the latter in late 1917 on the question of organising workers of colour, and nine Industrial Workers of Africa members were elected to address an African Political Organisation meeting. There are indications that the meetings had some influence on the African Political Organisation: Williams published a speech in early 1918 that was prefaced by the Preamble of the IWW and provided a scathing attack on the craft unions, and a call for the unity of workers across racial lines in defence of their common interests. The central argument of the speech was need for "the organisation of black labour, upon which the whole commercial and mining industry rests today." The "true worker, the backbone of labour in this country, is the brown and the black man'"
Relations with the TNC were more complex. Formal relations between the Industrial Workers of Africa and the TNC were somewhat stilted. In December 1917, two joint meetings were held between the Industrial Workers of Africa, the African Political Organisation and the TNC. Tension between the Industrial Workers and the TNC was evident at the second meeting between the "horny handed" Industrial Workers of Africa, taking up one side of the hall, and the smaller group of TNC members, "more sedate and middle-class looking," on the other. The "Industrial Workers put in good class war points," commented The International, and "' seemed to have a knack of 'riling' the T.N.C. 'respectables' beyond all patience." At a subsequent Industrial Workers of Africa meeting, held on the 3 January 1918, hostility towards the TNC representatives was again in evidence, as "some of the members seemed to dislike the members of the Congress to join us as workers." One African worker present stated "we must not talk about Congress anymore, as they are the men who organise rich and high people who are the men who suck our blood and sell us."
Nonetheless, the Industrial Workers of Africa had an informal impact on the TNC. Prominent members of the Industrial Workers of Africa were also members of the TNC. Between 1918 and 1920, a left wing emerged in the TNC that aligned itself with African strike and protest movements, and, within this left, Industrial Workers such as Cetiwe, Hamilton Kraai and J.D. Ngojo were all prominent. For a time, this left was able to challenge the dominance of conservative advocates of the traditional SANNC strategy of petitioning, lobbying and sending deputations to the British Crown. The new approach was a sign of the times: the number of trade unionists in South Africa – including Africans – went up ten times between 1915 and 1920, from 10,538 to 135,140; of the 199 strikes recorded by the Union of South Africa Yearbooks record for the period 1906 and 1920, a full 168 took place between 1916 and 1920.
There were strikes by affiliates of the Indian Workers Industrial Union, the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Horse Drivers’ Union in Kimberley in this period. In February 1918, African workers boycotted the concession stores on mines on the East Rand, affecting fifteen mines. The Industrial Workers of Africa’s Listen, Workers, Listen leaflet was widely blamed for the concession stores boycott in the press, and the Prime Minister, Louis Botha, railed in parliament against the socialists "going to the native kraals [homesteads] urging them to combine." Copies of the leaflet had also begun to appear in the municipal compounds of Johannesburg as early as December 1917, and may have contributed to the strike in June 1918 by Johannesburg municipality African labourers. The 152 so-called "bucket boys" - the men who collected sewerage buckets from suburban homes - struck for a wage increase of one-shilling-a-day to two shillings eight pence per day, but were jailed and sentenced to two months hard labour – collecting sewerage buckets under armed guard - under the Masters and Servants Act on 12 June 1918.
The press again blamed the International Socialist League, detecting the influence of the "IWW" which was funded with "German gold". While the ISL had not organised the strike, it did its best to publicise and support the struggles of African, Coloured and Indian workers in this period. It launched a fundraising drive to support striking Coloured building workers in the Transvaal, arranged bail for an imprisoned African strike leader, Selby Msimang, in Bloemfontein, in 1919, and even secured a resolution from a rally of white workers in Johannesburg to the effect "That this meeting of workers protests in the strongest possible manner against the attempt made by the Orange Free State authorities to intimidate the native workers for seeking to better their conditions of life, by arresting and imprisoning their delegates or representatives." "The very crumbs of the banquet table of capitalism," raged the International at the time, were not available to the "native toiler of India or Africa". For under capitalism the "black proletarian’s portion is to slave for the white boss always; to grovel for a below subsistence wage, to die by the thousands in slum, location and kraal; to have no wants, no ambitions, no self-respect."
African workers and communities on the Witwatersrand held a series of mass meetings of African workers in Johannesburg to protest the sentencing of the 152 workers. Initially convened by the TNC (which had not paid attention to the wage issue at its March and May 1918 conferences), the meetings also featured ISL and Industrial Workers of Africa speakers, and showed a distinct revolutionary syndicalist influence. At the first mass rally on the 10 June 1918 at the Ebenezer Hall in Main Street, an Industrial Workers of Africa member, named Mtota, proposed - to general acclaim - a general strike if the municipal workers were not released. T.P. Tinker of the ISL proposed a second mass meeting under the auspices of both the Industrial Workers of Africa and the TNC. A five-person joint Industrial Workers of Africa, ISL and TNC committee was then appointed to investigate the way forward and report to the next meeting. Much of the leadership and organisation of the campaign was at least partly in revolutionary syndicalist hands, a point absent from most accounts, which treat the protests as a purely SANNC/TNC movement.
An audience of one thousand people attended the next rally on Wednesday 19 June, where it heard the recommendation of the joint committee: not only should the jailed workers be released, but all African workers on the Witwatersrand should receive one-shilling-a-day wage increase by 1 July or face a general strike. An alternative proposal from TNC conservatives was shouted down, and Tinker took the floor:
If the natives knew their force, they could destroy Johannesburg in a day or stop the mines in an hour; but to do that they would have to organise and all come out on strike, for which 20,000 men were necessary. Let them go home and organise, and tell the other boys to come out; if they meant to come out on Saturday the 29, they must be quick. The strike was not for one shilling a day but for Africa which they deserved.
However, the strike was called off at the last minute - possibly in recognition of the low level of African worker organisation - although several thousand African miners, who did not receive news of the cancellation in time, struck at three mines, only to be met by armed police and soldiers. They fought back with pick-handles, iron bars and pipes, and axes, but were forced back to work. Government released the jailed workers and promised an enquiry into the grievances of the urban population, but the first general strike movement by Africans had nonetheless been stopped in its tracks.
What is important to note is the role of the ISL and Industrial Workers of Africa in the protests, and the way in which this contrasts in every respect with the accepted wisdom – derived from the "Communist school" – that the pre-CPSA left ignored the national question or pandered to chauvinism. The ISL and the Industrial Workers of Africa intervened from the left in the protests, played an important role in the TNC left itself, and in both cases put revolutionary syndicalist arguments and methods to the fore, transforming the proposition of the International and the 1917 study groups that national liberation rested on "Industrial Unionism" into a material reality within a mass black protest movement. In South Africa, as elsewhere, then, revolutionary syndicalism was at the forefront of the wave of labour unrest of 1916-1921, although the local movement was obviously weaker than its sister organisations who challenged the State power in countries such as Argentine, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain in the same period.
Nonetheless, the local ruling class was equally disinclined to tolerate revolutionary syndicalist activism. The ongoing press campaign against the International Socialist League broke out again in full force, and in July 1918, the authorities arrested and charged five Africans and three whites for "incitement to public violence." According to the Black Folks Who's Who, "For the first time in South Africa, members of the European and Native races, in common cause united, were arrested and charged together for their political activities." The arrestees were hardly the gallery of "Congress leaders" alluded to in much of the literature: they included Bunting, Tinker, and H.C. Hanscombe of the ISL, Cetiwe, Kraai and Ngojo of the TNC left and the Industrial Workers of Africa, and, caught in the middle, TNC moderates Mvabaza and D. Letanka. At the centre of the State’s case was the claim that the ISL and the Industrial Workers were at the centre of labour unrest in 1918.
Although the case collapsed due to lack of evidence, Cetiwe, Kraai and Hanscombe all lost their jobs. The industrial Workers of Africa did not collapse as a result of the trial, as several accounts suggest, but continued to have a "gratifyingly large attendance" at its meetings. In March 1919, members of the Industrial Workers of Africa played a leading role in a campaign against the pass laws initiated by the TNC: as Cetiwe had told the Industrial Workers of Africa in 1918,
These passes are main chains, enchaining us from all our rights. These passes are the chains chaining us in our employers’ yards, so that we cannot go about and see what we can do for ourselves ' It is the very same with a dog '
On Monday 31 March 1919, a crowd marched on the Johannesburg pass offices in Albert Street, with Cetiwe and Kraai in the forefront of the march and forming part of the deputation to the Chief Pass Officer (who listened unsympathetically to their demands). Over 200 Africans appeared in court during the campaign for disturbing the peace or for "inciting" Africans to break their employment contracts, several attempts were made by the large African crowd that gathered outside the court to rescue offenders, and Bunting, who acted on behalf of many defendants, was assaulted by white hooligans during his lunch. Conservative TNC leaders soon had "serious misgivings" about the campaign, and jumped at an offer by the Director of Native Labour to grant one week’s grace in which Africans could obtain duplicate passes and thereby avoid prosecutions. SANNC attention shifted to a delegation sent to represent African grievances at the Versailles peace negotiations; by this time, over 700 Africans had been arrested and sentenced in the anti-pass campaign.
Power in the TNC had shifted fundamentally to the conservatives, and Cetiwe and Kraai left for Cape Town in mid-1919 to establish a branch of the Industrial Workers of Africa in Ndabeni, the city’s main municipal township for Africans. They soon turned their attention to the dockworkers at Table Bay who faced falling real wages and the widespread use of casual labour, and organised their first meeting on the docks on the 10 July 1919 with the aid of the IndSL. Relations with an existing union for Africans and Coloured - the Industrial and Commercial Union led by Clements Kadalie - were initially "evidently somewhat cool," but closer ties developed with the Cape SANNC, the Cape Native Congress (CNC). The IndSL, like the ISL, favoured the Industrial Workers of Africa, even advising workers to join it in preference to the Industrial and Commercial Union. (A.Z. Berman and M. Walt of the IndSL had, nonetheless, helped Kadalie organise the docks earlier in 1919).Despite this bad start, the two unions cooperated in the December 1919 dockworkers’ strike for higher wages and against food exports (several accounts - including Kadalie's own, self-aggrandising, autobiography - excise the role played by the Industrial Workers of Africa from the record).
The strike by 3,000 men, which was marked by daily mass assemblies on the Parade in front of the City Hall, followed by regular evening meetings on Adderley Street, did not win its demands and was called off in controversial circumstances, with some charging that the Industrial Workers of Africa and CNC called off the strike without the support of the strike committee. However, a basis of cooperation had been laid, and in March 1920, the two unions again held a joint rally to demand negotiations over working conditions on the docks.
When, in 1921, Kadalie helped found the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU), becoming president of the new body, the industrial Workers of Africa merged into the new union. There were clear signs of revolutionary syndicalist influence in the ICU. Not only did the new union, which grew to over 100,000 members by 1927, adopt a version of Preamble of the IWW in its constitution, but the vision and language of "One Big Union" and the idea of a cataclysmic general strike that would liberate African labour remained a recurrent theme in ICU propaganda, including Kadalie’s own speeches: "If the natives merely stopped work all the industries would be at a standstill in a minute." It would, however, be a mistake to treat the ICU as a truly revolutionary syndicalist union. The ICU drew upon the revolutionary syndicalist vision, but it lacked the tactics and democratic organisation – and in particular, the solid workplace organisation – needed to actually realise syndicalism’s goals, leading one writer to dub it "millenarian syndicalism." The same black petty bourgeoisie that had earlier dominated the SANNC heavily influenced the ICU, which became increasingly attractive to this layer as the SANNC declined in the 1920s, and contributed directly to the political confusion, personal rivalries, and financial chicanery that ran the ICU aground by 1930.
It was, finally, through the pioneer industrial unions such as the Indian Workers Industrial Union, the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Industrial Workers of Africa in Johannesburg, that the ISL, which emerged amongst militant white workers, began to expand its base into other sectors of the working class. Bernard L.E. Sigamoney and R.K Moodley of the Workers Industrial Union in Durban became prominent members of the ISL. T. William Thibedi, the first African member of the ISL, was involved in the Industrial Workers of Africa, and associated with the ISL from at least mid-1918. Two Industrial Workers of Africa members – presumably Cetiwe and Kraai – were present at the 1919 annual conference of the ISL. The African members of the Solidarity Committee also appear to have been associated with the Industrial Workers of Africa. So too with the three Africans – probably Cetiwe, Kraai and Thibedi – who, along with Sigamoney, attended the 1919 ISL annual conference. In Kimberley, the Clothing Workers Industrial Union provided the route and incentive for 27 Coloured workers, including the organisation’s secretary, Fred Pienaar, and a young militant, Johnny Gomas, to join the ISL. Hence, while ISL appears to have been predominantly based amongst radical white workers, the revolutionary syndicalist movement in South Africa – i.e. the League and the unions with which it was associated – were far more representative of the working class as a whole. Again, this cuts across the conventional wisdom that pre-CPSA socialists failed to address the national question.
The IndSL always remained smaller than the ISL, but also developed a radical politics that linked the struggle for revolutionary industrial unionism to the struggle against national oppression. For the IndSL, socialism demanded for "every worker, white or coloured, ' the full value of what he may produce" and "claims for every man, women or child, white or coloured, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." White worker "treachery" against African strikers – such as white scabbing during the 1920 African mineworkers' – was described as "the limit of treachery to the working class ' craft unionism in excelsis." This class treachery, which aligned white workers with capital, raised the "spectre of racial warfare," and had to be replaced with the principle of "solidarity of labour irrespective of colour or race": "We [white workers] need their assistance to win our industrial fights now; we shall need them when we are establishing the workers councils; we shall need them when we are building up the workers commonwealth." White workers must not stand "with their feet on the native worker but ' shoulder to shoulder with him in their industrial organisations."
The IndSL's vigorous educational work in 1919, the organisation conducted regular classes on "elementary Economics, Sociology, History etc.," a "Socialist Sunday School," a library of left-wing literature, an extensive book-service and written propaganda – was matched only by its dedication in holding outdoor meetings. In February 1920 alone, nineteen such meetings were held, and "attendance was very good indeed" with "lots of literature sold" and the speakers receiving a "most sympathetic hearing." Between May 1919 and May 1920, 135 outdoor meetings were held, as well as 32 lectures in the IndSL's hall in Plein Street and six indoor meetings &guot;such as socials, lectures etc.".
The IndSL sought "direct involvement with the trade union movement in the Cape, and the organising of strikes and industrial unity across colour lines", and directed its propaganda at both white and Coloured artisans, as well as at African labourers in the docks and factories. This work seems to have borne fruit, police informers writing to the Police Commissioner "considerable numbers of coloured and native people have been attending meetings in District Six where the movement is reported to be growing in numbers and importance." Attempts to link up with the Cape section of the African Political Organisation seem to have failed, but the IndSL did attract support from some Coloured trade union leaders. Brown, Gamiet and Kies all addressed a crowd of "between 300 and 400 persons" at the opening of the IndSL’s new Socialist Hall in Plein Street on the 12 January 1919, as did members of the Social Democratic Federation and, bizarrely, two South African Labour Party leaders. The audience, which crowded the hall "to the doors" despite heavy rain, included a large number of "Cape Malays" and "coloured trade unionists."
The IndSL also formed and helped finance a union for workers in the jam and sweet factories in 1918, an industrial union based mainly amongst Coloured workers neglected by the existing unions in the Cape. The union was called the Sweets and Jam Workers Industrial Union, in line with the naming conventions apparently adopted by the South African revolutionary syndicalists. What is evident is that IndSL attempts at union organising were subject to police repression: at a meeting held outside a factory in January 1919 in a subsequent organising drive, for example, a cordon of police "surrounded the workers" and would not allow the speakers to carry on the meeting.
IndSL members were also active in the mainstream trade unions. Berman was treasurer of the Cape Federation of Trade Unions, whilst F. Lopes was President of the Tramway Workers' Union. The efforts of the organisation to influence the Cape Federation of Trade Unions seem to have been substantially more successful than the struggles of the ISL and its "Solidarity Committee" wing within the South African Industrial Federation and its affiliates. At the second annual conference of the Cape unions, held in 1920, IndSL members even helped pass resolutions calling for the emancipation of the working class, and the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. However, no clear strategy towards these goals seems to have been laid down – the result of differences of opinion between reformist and revolutionary elements. However, IndSL members did manage to secure changes in the constitution of the Federation committing it to the "formation of Industrial Unions out of the existing Trade Unions" and the creation of a strong Federation executive to help unite the unions and organise sympathetic strike actions. At the third conference of the Cape Federation of Trade Unions, Berman was able to have resolution passed that the Federation would affiliate to the Comintern’s union wing, the Red International of Labour Unions, and abstain from parliamentary action.
Once More on the Simons and the "Communist school"
How, then, are we to evaluate the claims of the "Communist school" against this backdrop? The Simons, on the one hand, praise the ISL for its "genuine radicalism" and commitment to a "single integrated society embracing all South Africans without distinctions of class and colour." Yet at the same time, the Simons argue that the ISL accepted elements of the mainstream "white labourite" tradition, including segregation and the colour bar! Brian Bunting and Harmel echo this, asserting that, while the ISL had some good points, it was fundamentally conservative and unwilling to reach out to, or consider the concerns of, African workers. Cronin asserts that the ISL maintained that the "the national oppression of the majority of people in our country was not really very worthy of consideration." Conversely, the ISL supposedly focussed its attention almost entirely upon the organised white working class as the "vanguard" of the revolution. Brian Bunting, Cronin and Forman make this claim, echoed in Drew and Ntsebeza. A variant on this argument holds that the ISL saw Africans as a passive group that would be liberated by white socialists and workers. This variant, then, makes the claim that the ISL did not necessarily ignore national oppression, but certainly ignored the African working class.
The line of argument that essentially situates the ISL on the left wing of the "white labourite" tradition is typically wedded to a sub-argument that I will term the "Bunting/Jones myth," which maintains that David Ivon Jones and S.P. Bunting of the ISL stood practically alone in championing an anti-racist policy in the ISL. Roux presents an extreme version of this thesis, attributing to Bunting almost sole responsibility for any ISL work on the area of fighting racial oppression. Legassick repeats this line of argument, relying on the appropriate citations from the Simons and from Roux. Drew, citing Ntsebeza, who also draws on Roux and the Simons, makes a similar claim, insisting that the ISL supported segregation, and that only a "minority" centred on Bunting and Thibedi called for the organisation of black workers. Walshe provides a particularly strong version of this argument. Even Hirson, whose work on the early South African left is nuanced, tends to inflate the role of Jones in the ISL.
The material outlined above demonstrates that the ISL and its revolutionary syndicalist contemporaries developed a detailed and logical approach to the national question, resting upon the centrality of the organised working class, opposed to racial prejudice and national oppression, critiqued segregation, the colour bar, and "scientific racism," pioneered trade unionism amongst African workers, and even forged links with black nationalists. The ISL certainly did not see racism and nationalism as "momentary abstractions" that would "automatically disappear," writing, as noted above, " The whole of the fight against capitalism is a fight with the prejudices and capitalist-engendered aversions of the workers " and that "Conquer these and capitalism is conquered."
Nor did the ISL "ignore" national oppression in its demands, specifically calling for "equal industrial and political status" and equal wages for African and white workers, and demanding the abolition of indenture, the compound system and the pass laws, and publicly protesting a range of racial laws: it was necessary, the ISL argued, to "sweep away" the "chief barriers to efficient working-class solidarity", such as the "denial of equal civil liberty to the natives" and the cheap labour system based on compounds and indentured labour. It was this perspective which informed the ISL's role in fostering black trade unionism, engaging the general strike movement of 1918, and in undertaking solidarity work with black strikers. It is thus absurd to claim, as does Johns, that the ISL was "noticeably inactive in the face of visible non-white discontent on the Witwatersrand" and that "direct approaches to non-whites were mostly limited to Jones and Bunting."
It is absurd to claim that the ISL actually favoured segregation, as suggested by the Simons and to some extent by Drew. The ISL at no point adopted segregation as part of its platform, denied the feasibility of such a proposal, and insisted that this policy violated the interests of both African and white workers. "Even if he could, the native should not be segregated. Even if he should, the native could not be segregated," argued the International of June 1916. Rather than call for "separate paths of development", the ISL affirmed the permanent role of Africans in the industrial workforce, and its model of revolutionary transformation - revolutionary syndicalism - explicitly posited the need to involve African workers in the revolutionary industrial union movement, and assumed that Africans would be involved in the management of the "Industrial Republic". The ISL consistently argued for the formation of revolutionary industrial unions incorporating all workers, and itself founded the first African labour union in South African history.
Of course, the ISL was not a homogenous organisation, but the central premise of the "Bunting/Jones myth" ' viz., that anti-racists formed a minority in the organisation' is patently false: if conservative elements were present in the organisation, they were a distinctly silent group. There is no evidence to support the claim that a majority of the organisation supported mainstream white labour positions, whilst the claim that only Bunting and Jones supported anti-racist policies cannot explain why the ISL as a whole consistently opposed racism over a six year period, nor, indeed, the wide range of activists and activities which helped put this policy into practice. This is not to undermine the contributions made by Bunting and Jones but to suggest that the "Bunting/Jones myth" distorts the overall positions and practice of the ISL, and undermines the role played by activists such as Campbell, Dunbar, Hanscombe, Mason, and Tinker.
It is true that the ISL focussed much of its attention on the organised white working class, as Drew and Ntsebeza argue. However, by no means all of the organisation's efforts were directed at white workers, as this paper has shown; what characterises the ISL is its focus on the working class as a whole, irrespective of colour. That the ISL made a number of appeals to white workers - at the time by far the best organised section of the working class, with a record of militant industrial action, as the ISL explicitly recognised - is hardly an indictment of the organisation. What is more important is the content of ISL appeals to white workers, and this was their constant reiteration of the need to unite with workers across the colour line - - an approach which was maintained despite the evident unpopularity of such calls. To portray the issue as one of either favouring white or black workers is to misunderstand the role of "One Big Union" in ISL politics. In other words, the ISL saw the white workers as a strategic layer, but saw them as incapable of creating a revolution by themselves; attempts to win support in the white working class must not be conflated with a political practice that assumed the irrelevance of the African working class.
How then did the "Communist school" develop such patently false arguments? The Simons method is most revealing. They build their case by, on the one hand, ignoring the plethora of articles in the International that specifically opposed segregation, and by, on the other hand, placing great emphasis on two unrepresentative articles from the early International that were mildly sympathetic to segregation. These two articles - which argued for the "natural social apartness of white and black" and "healthy social segregation"- did not represent official ISL policy nor was there any claim that they did so. On the contrary such views were dismissed and reviled in the paper as a sort of "curio for the next generation ... just the kind of vulgar appeals [sic] made against the abolition of slavery in America", reactionary views that ignored the way that capitalism divided workers through race, thus worsening the conditions of all. "The man who talks about a Socialism which excludes nine-tenths of the workers is not being honest with himself."
In other words, the Simons generalise from unrepresentative articles to develop a misleading characterisation for the entire existence of the ISL (1915-1921) and thereby give these statements an entirely unmerited significance. One could attribute this merely to sloppy research were it not the case that the Simons also demonstrably misquote from, and, on occasion, falsify, the historical record. Simons and Simons also build their "case" by a questionable use of quotations. Earlier I cited a passage from the International in 1915 that called for "the fullest rights" for the African working class to "shake South African capitalism to its foundations." The Simons, however, leave aside the bulk of this passage and fix on the single word "problem". They then use the word "problem" to support the entirely unsupportable claim that the ISL saw the African worker as "a problem, and not a comrade at this stage", and then undertake a logical leap to the position that the organisation supported "white supremacy". That such claims and inferences are directly contradicted by the anti-racist content of the article in question, as well as in the programme of the ISL, passes without comment in Simons and Simons. On the contrary, Simons and Simons construe the ISL's paraphrase of Marx in the same article - "not until we free the native can we hope to free the white " - as a further indictment of the ISL: "the possibility that the African would free himself did not then occur to them." The Simons then forge ahead to characterise that the ISL as "missionary socialists" concerned "primarily to save the White proletariat from itself," a caricature of the ISL argument that racism was against white workers' interests.
The Simons go on to invoke non-existent ISL positions to support their case, baldly claiming that the ISL favoured the colour bar and a white labour policy, alleging that the ISL opposed mixed marriages because of the "immaturity of the blacks" and even claiming that the ISL opposed strikes! This sort of analytical dishonesty and falsification is contradicted by the Simons’ own account. Three pages after we are told of the ISL’s supposed support for the colour bar and white supremacy, we read that the ISL "condemned the colour bar", called for "one big union of all workers, irrespective of race", argued that "Africans would complete the process of wresting control of the productive system from the ruling class", and welcomed the "rumblings of a spontaneous, indigenous class conscious industrial movement." Given this entirely unacceptable methodology, it is to be regretted that the work of Simons and Simons has been so uncritically accepted in the literature as an authoritative source.
The material presented in this paper has suggested the need to move beyond the dichotomy of "national democratic revolution" and "permanent revolution" that dominates discussions of socialist positions on the national question in South Africa. I have demonstrated instead the existence of coherent pre-1921 revolutionary syndicalist position that sought to fuse the struggle against capitalism with the struggle against racism through the organisational aegis of the "One Big Union" that would organise workers regardless of race in a drive to seize the means of production through direct action.
I would like to conclude with two arguments. The first relates to the rationale behind the "Communist school" of South African socialist history's ambivalence towards the pre-1921 socialist movement. The core assumption of the theory of the "national democratic revolution" posits a revolution by stages, which in practice entails the leading role of an anti-colonial national movement in the medium term, and a delinking of the struggle against national oppression from the struggle against capitalism. In other words, it tends to conflate national liberation with nationalism, rather than treat nationalism as a particular response to racial or national oppression. To put the matter differently, only nationalism is envisaged as capable of securing national liberation. Conversely, any other approach, including an anti-racist class struggle based approach, is seen as ipso facto incapable of defeating national oppression. Thus the Simons claim that the long-term struggle of the socialist movement in South Africa to have "the class struggle ' merged with the national liberation struggle" was ' only and could only be ' achieved with the formation of a de facto alliance between the African National Congress and the Communist Party of South Africa.
It is in this conception, I would suggest, that the roots of the ambivalence of writers associated with the Communist Party towards the ISL lie. On the one hand, the ISL has to be recognised as anti-racist, hence the praise it receives; on the other hand, however, the ISL cannot be characterised as anti-racist because this challenges the premise of the theory of the national democratic revolution. Hence, the necessity for a characterisation of positions such as those held by the ISL as inadequate – even if these positions were in fact opposed to racial or national oppression, they are by definition ruled out as inadequate. For a study of the ISL reveals an alternative, class struggle-based approach to the struggle against racial oppression and class exploitation in South Africa: a revolutionary syndicalist strategy which "merged" the struggle against capitalism with the struggle against racism through the aegis of revolutionary industrial unionism.
What this point underlines is a broader argument that nationalists are not the only possible fighters against national oppression. Whilst nationalism has played an important role in a number of anti-colonial struggles, particularly after World War Two, it has not, in fact, been the only (or even the only effective) political response to colonial subjugation or national oppression: anti-imperialist struggles have been led by political forces ranging from anarchism (Ukraine 1918-21), to religious fundamentalism (Iran 1978-9) to Stalinism (China 1947). We cannot, therefore, assume that nationalism is a necessary response to national or racial oppression, but must, instead, seek to explain why nationalist identities and ideologies come to the fore when and if they do so. The distinction between nationalist and socialist (in the broad sense) approaches to a situation of national or racial oppression does not hinge on the issue of whether or not to deal with specific racial and national oppression, but rather, hinges on the issue of the means by which to combat these social injustices. Overall, then, the "merger" of class struggle and national liberation does not require an acceptance of nationalism: that is precisely what the ISL and its contemporaries sought to do in their own fashion.
The second argument, and the one this paper will end on, relates to the basis of revolutionary syndicalist opposition to racism and national oppression. Rather than being "economistic", it seems that revolutionary syndicalism provided a solid ideological basis for the anti-racism of the early socialist groups discussed in this paper. Revolutionary syndicalism, argues Thorpe, was "In conception and intent ' an international movement." Revolutionary syndicalists "conceived of their movement as international just as the working-class was international, and therefore hoped to co-ordinate their struggle across national boundaries against an equally international capitalist system." The centrepiece of the revolutionary syndicalist strategy ' the "One Big Union" of all workers ' that cut across national and racial boundaries, embodied this premise. Applied to South Africa, these ideas clearly implied identification with the struggles of oppressed African workers. Thus, stated Jones in his report for the ISL to the Third International in 1921,
Imbued with the ideas of De Leon - the League proclaimed the fight for Industrial Unionism. Therefore craft unions were declared odious for dividing the workers instead of uniting them, on the larger basis of industry. And as part of this craft disunity the exclusion of the native workers from part or lot in the labour movement was denounced as a crime.
It is in this sense that we must understand an article in the International in early 1916 stating that "Industrial Unionism, organisation along the lines of industry irrespective of race, colour or creed" was a "permanent advance ... in the outlook of the Labour movement" in South Africa:
... the great revolutionary fruit of an otherwise pointless agitation ... It will attempt a change ... in our attitude towards the slave races of South Africa, enlisting their co-operation in the emancipation of labour ... [It] will shift ... adherence from political to industrial organisation as the primary method of wresting power from Capitalism.
Accompanying the shift from "political to industrial organisation as the primary method of wresting power from capitalism" was the removal of a significant obstacle to multi-racial workers' unity: South Africa's racially biased franchise. A focus on building a revolutionary labour movement through electioneering tended as the case of the South African Labour Party showed towards an exclusive focus on the concerns of white workers, and, more specifically, to those issues which this working-class minority found most appealing. However, whereas electioneering helped drive the South African Labour Party to emphasise race as the basis of solidarity, the ISLs shift from a reliance on electoral methods meant that it was, in Jones word's "untrammelled" by the "political fortunes" in its approach to the African worker. The ISL's strategy, then, could base itself on class organisation at the workplace, as opposed to race organisation in the residential area, when making appeals to proletarian unity.