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Title: White Riot, 1922 Author: Gilles Dauvé Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: class struggle, communisation, history, insurrection, racism, South Africa Source: Retrieved on 26 April 2018 from http://troploin.fr/node/93 Notes: This is an enlarged version of an essay published in French on the DDT 21 blog: https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=2015.
"It was the old story of the class struggle
but with the colour bar as a complicating factor." (Norman Herd)
"What remains vital for the historian, then, even in stressing the
centrality of race to the dispute, is not to lose sight of that which
became attached to race.
Let us be old-fashioned and call it the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie." (Jeremy Krikler)
On April 18, 1922, Lenin sent a "Top secret" phone message to Zinoviev,
head of the Communist International, asking him to send "several
correspondents from the Comintern to South Africa to collect the most
detailed information and the fullest set of local literature, both legal
and illegal, relating to the recently suppressed workersâ uprising. This
should be done as soon as possible, and not otherwise than with the
maximum precautions because the British are sure [to do everything] to
prevent the slightest possibility of any contact between us and the
insurgents who have not yet been shot or jailed."
A worker insurrection had indeed just happened in the Rand, resulting in
over 200 deaths. This "Red revolt", however, had been a White minersâ
struggle to counter the Chamber of Minesâ move to change the proportion
of Blacks and Whites in the mines, in order to replace Whites with
cheaper Blacks.[1] Furthermore, of the 40 Black casualties, most were
killed by White strikers. So, what were the insurgents targeting? the
bosses? the Blacks? both? When a struggle is explicitly fought in the
name of class and race, what is left of the meaning of both "class" and
"race"?
The southern tip of Africa was the battleground of two settler
colonisations, a Dutch one against an English/British one, competing to
be in the best position to exploit the colonised African population. The
Blacks suffered two rival dominations: from the 16^(th) century onwards,
by the burgers, who originated in the Netherlands, usually farmers (boer
in Dutch); and from the 19^(th) century, by mostly British settlers,
much better integrated in modern capitalism. In the late 19^(th)
century, the discovery of gold and diamonds shifted the centre of
economic and political gravity in South Africa from a traditional rural
world to an industrial urban society. The conflict between Boer settlers
and imperial Britain was the last round in a series of Dutch-British
wars, most of them fought in the 17^(th) century, except that this time
Britain was a "superpower" that ruled most of the world. After two wars,
first in 1880-1881 and then in 1899-1902 (when the British
counter-guerrilla relocated civilians to camps where many internees
died), the Boersâ defeat led in 1910 to the Union of South Africa as a
"dominion" of the British Empire, comprising Cape, Natal, Transvaal and
Orange (the latter, two ex-Dutch republics annexed in 1902).
The 1910 Act of Union meant the prevalence of "British" mining and
commercial interests over the agricultural community of those who called
themselves Afrikaners and were far less adapted to managing an
industrial and financial economy. In other words, the predominance of
the global over the local.
As a reaction, the ex-Boers maintained an entrenched conservatism, with
religious overtones, ingrained racism and strong dislike of "English"
rule, which was perceived as a foreign constraint over "their people".
This estrangement gave birth to a particular Afrikaner nationalism.
Though the Union of South Africa functioned as an independent country,
it was part of a constitutional monarchy under the formal authority of
the British Crown. In the 20^(th) century, many a South African
politician made a career out of exploiting this resentment, and turned
it into a call for a truly sovereign republic. It is significant that
the word boer, as was named the free citizen of the ex-Boer republics,
remained in common usage long after both States had left the historical
stage, as if the inhabitants of these regions kept on defining
themselves by what they used to be, or regarded themselves as: the
pioneers of a rural, patriarchal, protected, civilised White enclave,
amidst an ever-savage Black world of primitive darkness, subdued but
full of destructive power.
Throughout the last century, a lot of South African politics boils down
to the divide between "British" and "Afrikaners", with internecine feuds
within the ruling elites, arrangements and compromises until the
"utopian" racist experience of apartheid, after which the bourgeois were
forced to realise where their interests converged, and an end was put to
apartheid in 1991 (more on that in § 18 and 19).
As in the rest of the world, the struggle between workers and bosses
about the profits/wages distribution implied a confrontation about who
would be employed and in what job, but because of the specifics of that
country, this second issue implied the White/Black difference â i.e.
race discrimination.
One major flashpoint of conflict was the 250-km-long Witwatersrand area
("white watersâ ridge" in Dutch, shortened to Rand), in the Transvaal
state, one of the worldâs richest goldfields, east and west of
Johannesburg. The gold rush made a city spring out of the desert, with
3.000 inhabitants in 1886, 100.000 ten years later, and 250.000 in 1914.
Before World War I, 40% of world gold production came from the Rand, and
in the 1930s one third of the South African public budget depended on
that region. Nearly all places named in this essay are located in the
eastern part of the Rand. The West had less population, less mines, was
less working-class, and played a minor role in the events.
Wage-labour is the buying by a bourgeois of labour power from a
proletarian deprived of any other means of existence, and therefore
"free" to choose between selling it or starving. For what itâs worth,
such freedom, however, is often utterly inaccessible for the
proletarian: in the majority of cases, the labour/capital exchange is
far from being free.
Even leaving aside penal labour (not just Chinese-style labour camps,
also the US convict lease system, which forces wage-labour upon
inmates), there is no free covenant in bond or indentured labour, in
peonage, in the hiring or firing of migrant (documented or undocumented)
workers, in the modern forms of slavery disguised as wage-labour, or
simply in a lot of casualised precarious jobs. In the 17^(th) century,
half of the White immigrants who came as workers or servants to what is
now the United States were bonded to their employers by contract. Later,
the British Empire transported about 2 millions of its Asian subjects
(Indians, mostly) to work in its various overseas possessions as
overexploited labour devoid of rights. In the capitalist past, these
situations were the norm rather than the exception, they still prevail
in many parts on the world, and indeed in some economic sectors of
"modern" countries. True, the owner of capital and the owner of labour
power never meet on equal terms. But in these cases, a specific power
relationship aggravates an already asymmetrical relation.
In South Africa, one of the main factors of inequality was the colour
bar which gave White workers a de facto monopoly over skilled jobs. This
was complemented by the pass, an internal passport. The country was
divided between "native" and white parts, and every adult African had to
carry a pass when outside an African area. Passes doubled as employment
booklets where the (White) employer would mention how long the bearer
had been employed. Failure to show oneâs pass was tantamount to
"vagrancy", and often led to arrest, jail or deportation to a restricted
"native" zone. The combination of the colour bar and the pass denied
Africans the right to live and look for work where they wished.
Passes were more than a blatant form of racism that impinged on
Africansâ and Colouredsâ rights: they helped to control workersâ
mobility and to allocate migrant labour where it was most convenient for
capital. The pass system had a long history in South Africa and was
codified by apartheid in 1948. It was repeatedly resisted and led to
protest, repression and bloodshed, and was only repealed in 1986.
Therefore, in as much as there is such a thing as a free labour market,
in South Africa it only existed for the Whites.
Dutch and British colonialism turned a sizeable part of the African
population into proletarians by dispossessing them of their means of
livelihood, in order to force them to work for the Whites on the land,
in domestic service and in industry. When that was not enough, the
Africans were subjected to such heavy fiscal pressure that they had to
work to get money to pay their taxes. After the abolition by Britain of
the slave trade in 1807 increased the cost of slaves, it started being
more profitable to exploit the local Blacks, and for instance the Cape
colony tried to make it compulsory for the Hottentots (a derogatory
Dutch name for the Khoikhoi people) to toil for White farmers. By the
end of the century, in order to get the best exploitable manpower, the
bourgeois even thought about importing supposedly more reliable
Italians. The option was discarded, and instead the land divided into
lots, each of them run by a village council tasked with collecting a tax
from any native who failed to work for a white employer 3 months out of
12. Besides, the Whites appropriated the best lands, and obliged the
landless Blacks to work for them. This went on until the early decades
of the 20^(th) century: in the Transkei region in 1929, "the people have
just a little land per family, and are taxed just so much, that they can
only subsist by sending their men to the mines." (Edward Roux). South
Africa was developing its own special way to capitalist modernity.
Moreover, the lack of skilled and unskilled labour power resulted in the
extension of "non-free" labour to other groups. Particularly to Indians,
often indentured labour in the sugar plantations as early as the 1860s.
Some of them became servants, railway workers and small farmers, then
shopkeepers started emigrating from India, and eventually the Indian
population overgrew its economic usefulness and threatened the "ethnic"
balance that was the basis of South African colonialism. In 1895, there
were 400.000 Blacks and 80.000 Indians (both groups without a vote) in
Natal, as compared with 40.000 Whites. To force the Indians out of the
country, they were heavily taxed (up to 6 monthsâ wages) and in
Transvaal forbidden to buy land. In 1906, 50.000 Chinese were brought to
the Rand, locked up in compounds, single-sex dormitory-hostels, with
5-year contracts. The Chinese is not as docile as he seems: those
workers were less profitable than predicted, some resorted to petty
crime, the experience was deemed a semi-failure and many of them were
repatriated.
So, by and large, it was the Black population that provided the best
available employment pool for the least skilled jobs, but it did not
prove as pliable as expected. A few examples will suffice here. In 1919,
the South African Native National Congress, a sort of forerunner of the
African National Congress, strove for better wages and organised a
boycott of company stores where goods cost more than in ordinary shops.
Passes were burnt in public (a frequent means of collective African
resistance up to apartheid times). Despite intense involvement, mass
woman participation and dozens of thousands of strikers, the movement
was defeated. The following year, a strike by 40.000 Black miners was
broken for lack of coordination, and because it was handicapped by White
scabs: appeals to solidarity from the International Socialist League
fell on deaf ears (on the ISL, see § 5). White land-grabbing was met
with widespread periodic opposition, which in 1899-1902 escalated into
an African peasantsâ war. Sometimes, as in 1921, revolt spoke a
religious messianic language inspired by the Old Testament. Led by a
neo-prophet, the Blacks regarded themselves as the Hebrews fighting for
their land: their 1921 rising ended in a massacre. A year later, in
Botswana, a rebellion against a tax on dogs was repressed by mass
shootings and air bombings: 100 deaths. In short, a succession of
defeats followed by fresh endeavours to resist and organise.
A crucial feature of those struggles was that they ran on parallel lines
with contemporary White struggles but without links between them. Whites
and Blacks did not share a working-class neighbourhood: whereas most
Black miners were housed in compounds, White miners lived a family life
in a different part of town.
And when they did meet in the workplace, they belonged to separate
worlds. In 1922, in the Rand gold mines, 20.000 Whites supervised and
controlled 180.000 non-European miners. Work was hard for all: White
miners suffered from silicosis, and accidents took a heavy toll among
the Blacks (dozens of thousands of fatalities in the pre-1914 years, yet
Black lives were so expendable that no exact figures were compiled). The
organisation of work was highly specialised and the labour force was run
like an army, so much so that a mine inspector once compared White
workers to NCOs. The master/servant model was valid on the surface as
well as underground: it was not uncommon for White workers to employ
Blacks as home helps. Work hierarchy was racial.[2] Moreover, not only
did the White miner act as a foreman, but his pay was linked to his
(Black) teamâs performance, so it was his interest to pressurise them,
and he did not hesitate to perpetrate violence against his subordinates.
Only much later, in the 1960s, would the Blacks benefit from monetary
incentives.
When visiting South Africa in 1910, the English trade-union leader Tom
Mann observed that "the actual mining is done by the native, supervised
by White man. Because the payment given to Kaffirs is so trifling, they
are plentifully used as labourers and helpers to the White man [who
receives his wages] at the expense of the native Kaffir." [3]
Like in most industrial countries at the time, South African unionism
was structured on a craft basis, which excluded Blacks from (White)
unions since few Africans practised a skilled trade. The skill divide
was a racial one. Paradoxically, when technical progress gnawed at
training and qualifications, instead of automatically equalising the
respective conditions of White and Black workers, it made it more
imperative for Whites to maintain their occupational superiority, so
race inequality became even more of an issue. In the early 1920s, 21.500
Rand White workers received a total of ÂŁ 16 million and 180.000 Blacks ÂŁ
6 million.
However, in the capital/labour confrontation, nothing can ever be taken
for granted, and any competitive advantage gained by one social group at
the expense of another can be jeopardised by a shift in power
relationships - as did happen.
No strict line could be drawn between the advantages the South African
White working class acquired because of the mere fact of being White,
and those it had conquered by its own militancy: class and race factors
blended to produce undeniable vested interests and, in the early 20^(th)
century, White workers never stopped fighting for themselves⊠bearing in
mind this self was White.
In 1907, work intensification (a White miner was now required to
supervise three drilling machines â manned by his Black team - instead
of two), a decrease in piece-rate pay and an increased proportion of
Black labour caused a large strike. The bosses wanted to break the
worker organisation, they refused to negotiate, the strike failed, yet
White unionisation moved forward while management continued to ignore
workersâ grievances.
In 1913, a decision to force underground mechanics to do an extra 3
hours on Saturday afternoon triggered a huge work stoppage. Grass-roots
organisation went beyond the union structure and pressed for a general
strike. The management kept the mines in production by hiring (mostly
Black) scabs. Widespread unrest developed, some strikers called for
civil war and the premises of the Star newspaper â a staunch supporter
of business interests â were burnt down. On July 5, White demonstrators
were fired upon and 20 killed. Realising its inability to control "the
mob", the government agreed to a "neither victory nor defeat"
compromise: the strikers dismissed were reinstated. A little while
later, however, Black miners who laid down tools were heavily repressed,
some of them being given 6-month prison sentences.
The State had learnt its lesson. In January 1914, railway workers came
out on strike with minersâ support: rallying (mainly Afrikaner) small
rural property against organised labour, the government called in 70.000
men from the burger commandos (the same scenario was re-enacted in
1922). The strike was nipped in the bud, miners jailed and "ringleaders"
deported to Europe.
In those three events â 1907, 1913 and 1914 â the race factor was
present but played no decisive part.
After 1914, the lack of manpower due to many White miners being called
up as soldiers gave labour an advantage over management: the workers
were granted two-week paid vacations, a war bonus, the recognition of
the South African Industrial Federation, and a wage rise (pared down by
cost of living increases, though). Yet at the same time, White
prerogatives were being lessened by the hiring of more Blacks. In 1917,
because the proportion of Black miners in semi-skilled jobs was
increasing, the South African Minersâ Union demanded such positions be
reserved for Whites. The following year, a Status Quo Agreement,
approved by a government who wished to avoid social strife in war times,
preserved the situation as it stood: those semi-skilled Blacks that were
employed would not be fired, but no more would be hired. Racial lines
were frozen, yet this was going to prove no more than a reprieve.
For their part, Black workers were not stunned into mute passivity.
Servitude did not entail servility. Born as a Black dockersâ union, the
Industrial & Commercial Union (ICU) set itself the uphill task in 1919
of organising the whole of non-European labour, and it was to act as an
equivalent of a mass political movement for the Blacks, comparable in
some ways to the African National Congress later (more on the ICU and
the ANC in § 16).
In December 1919, 400 Black dockers in Capetown (where most port workers
were Black) went on strike for better wages, and against the export of
foodstuffs while prices were going up in local shops. Unsupported by
White labour, the movement decayed after a few weeks. At the same time,
in Kimberley, White scabbing smashed a Black driversâ strike. 40.000
Black miners stopped work in February, a mass revolt again broken by
White scabbing, police cordoning off every compound and shooting
Africans (8 were reported dead). The following October, the police fired
on strikers at Port Elisabeth, killing 21 people. Throughout the
country, people of colour stopped work and created unions, some
short-lived, others more successful, yet very few in the mining
industry. Their initiatives, however, remained separate from those of
White labour, which was getting organised in established unions, and had
also already started to shake the unionsâ institutional framework: 1921
was a wildcatting year.
White South Africa loved revelling in the myth of its wide open spaces
(stolen from the Blacks), where (as in the US Western "Big Country")
small farmers lived a supposedly simple independent life, each family on
its own piece of land. In fact, many impoverished Afrikaners were driven
out of the countryside and had to move from farming to mining jobs. On
the other hand, so-called "English" or Anglophone workers had diverse
backgrounds: some came from various parts of the United Kingdom
(Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall after the closure of the tin mines),
others from the Baltic countries, and some were Jews escaping the
pogroms of Eastern Europe. The first decades of the 20^(th) century were
a time of formation of a South African working class where Afrikaner and
"English" origins tended to merge. A labour class gradually got unified
as a White social group (likewise, over the 20^(th) century, as we shall
see in § 19, the South African bourgeoisie finally overcame the
Afrikaner/English divide). South African White unionism was
predominantly craft unionism, and it did the same as craft unions
everywhere: it tried to preserve the condition of skilled labour by
maintaining the scarcity of their particular kind of skill. Restricting
the supply of indispensable (skilled) labour available to the employer
resulted in higher wages for those employed: in this case the colour bar
prevented non-Europeans from competing with Whites.
Politically, what set the tone in South Africa labour was a brand of
socialism both similar to and different from its European
correspondents. Like most parties belonging to the Second International,
the Labour Party (founded in 1910) shared the colonial paternalistic
view that people of colour were yet incapable of self-government and
therefore needed to be guided by Whites on the road to progress and
possibly â one very remote day â to socialism.
"The Labour Party envisaged a rapid growth of the White population, the
eventual elimination of the Coloured as a significant economic class,
and the seclusion of the Natives in their own reserves, where they would
be given education facilities and training in agriculture." (Edward
Roux)
The South African situation produced a party that acted as the
representative and supporter of a White labouring minority that existed
alongside a large Black majority. Consequently, that socialist variant
completed the usual social-democrat programme (socialisation of the
means of production and democratisation of the State) with a persistent
defence of White supremacy and of the legal and factual measures that
implemented it: land and pass laws, taxation without representation,
police bullying, colour bars, opposition to Asian immigration, etc. The
soft left was hard on Blacks.
Since neither Blacks nor Indians were truly welcome in a party that was
not immune from racist remarks, it is no surprise that very few of them
felt like joining it. Such a "White-first" line was not unique.
Australia, the first country in the world with a socialist government in
1910, had a "White labour" policy for decades, but most of its
population were and still are White. South African labourism was slow to
get started, with only 4 MPs in 1910 out of a total of 121. It was to
prosper, however, under the authority of a man who soon became its
leader, Colonel Frederic Creswell, a mining engineer and then manager of
a mine where nearly all manpower was White. Famous for his opposition to
hiring Chinese in the mining industry, Creswell had built a reputation
as "the champion of the White labourer". In sum, an ex-boss was at the
head of a worker party. Social pacifism and racism raised the status of
the Labour Party which fared better in the 1920 elections and obtained
21 MPs (out of 134).
In South Africa as in other immigration countries, unionism and
socialist or anarchist activity were fuelled from outside sources.
Special mention should be made of the influence of revolutionary
syndicalism, a minority yet active current, which regarded unions as the
main instrument of class struggle under capitalism and of the
administration of a post-capitalist world. Revolutionary syndicalists
not only promoted industrial unionism (organising all employed in the
same workplace in one single body) as opposed to craft unionism
(organising them separately according to their different trades)[4], but
they also advocated the reunion of all proletarians irrespective of
origin or skin colour. On this basis, the African Industrial Workers of
the World were founded in 1910, which, like its American IWW model,
aimed at One Big Union gathering all proletarian categories without
national or racial barriers. In the US, with the exception of the United
Mine Workers, "the IWW was the only labour organisation in the second
decade of the 20^(th) century which stood squarely for the organisation
of Negro workers on the basis of total equality." (Philip Foner) Despite
some successes, the African Industrial Workers of the World were
fighting against extreme odds, and they withered after a couple of
years.
Reformism did not go unquestioned, though. From the beginning of the
20^(th) century, radical socialists, libertarians and revolutionary
syndicalists refused to take part in parliamentary elections, and
attacked White supremacy as a divisive way of opposing one part of the
toiling masses to another. The Voice of Labour, the first socialist
mouthpiece in South Africa, born in 1908, had a revolutionary
syndicalist editor from late 1910 to early 1912, who argued that 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."
Otherwise, "if the natives are crushed, the Whites will go down with
them", because the "stress of industrial competition" will compel the
minority of White workers to "accept the same conditions of labour as
their Black brethren."
As a reaction against the Labour Partyâs reformism and its acceptance of
the war in 1914, an International Socialist League was created in 1915,
for a while greatly influenced by industrial unionism. The ISLâs first
conference (1916) declared: "we encourage the organization 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."
At its peak, the League numbered 700 people, predominantly of English
origin, but also Jewish, African, Coloured and Indian, some of whom
lived in the multiracial slum area of Johannesburg. The ISL pressed for
shop-stewards who would remain under rank-and-file control.
The ISL also played a part in the formation of the Industrial Workers of
Africa in 1917, one of the first Black unions on the continent, which
claimed a membership of 800, and was very active in a Johannesburg
municipal workersâ strike in 1918. The IWA managed to organise Black and
Indian labour in various sectors (docks, transport, the garment
industry, catering, printing, tobacco and sugar production), and
launched a number of strikes. It seems few European workers were
involved in those struggles. Despite a constant effort to build up
coordination organs, joint interracial action remained the exception.
In such unfavourable conditions, the militant nucleus of the 1922 revolt
was a small number of radicals who had met and built up trust,
particularly through their wildcatting experience in 1921. One of the
best known of those uncompromising workers was the "popular figure" and
"fiery speaker" (Lucien van der Valt) Percy Fisher. Born in England in
1891, he emigrated to South Africa during the war, became a pitman in
the goldmines, and promoted worker self-organisation while also being on
the council of the South African Industrial Federation. He was one of
the militants condemned by the union for heading an unofficial strike in
1920 and, because or in spite of that, was elected the Mine Workers
Unionâs secretary. When the vote raised controversy owing to alleged
irregularities, Fisher had to resign, and he failed to secure a majority
in a new election. A year later, after he was involved in a second
wildcat strike, the MNU fined and suspended him as well as Harry
Spendiff and other radicals, who together formed in July 1921 a Council
of Action as an independent body calling for "rank-and-file control" of
the unions, via the development of direct action.
After 1918, the price of gold went down, then up - which enabled labour
to get slightly higher wages - then down again: as production and
transport costs were on the increase, capital gains stagnated.
From a bourgeois standpoint, "divide and rule" is always a must. But how
was it to be achieved in South African mines? By preserving the
advantages of the Whites? Or by hiring Blacks to do "White" jobs for
lesser pay? Until then, the first option had been more convenient, but
it now appeared too costly. A leading mine owner was quoted as deriding
the "sentimental colour bar", and he had a point: business and sentiment
do not go hand in hand. As before, profits required low pay for the
Blacks, but also lower pay than before for the Whites.
In the early days of 1922, it was plain to see that the bourgeoisie was
committed to tackling its cost/benefit dilemma by direct confrontation
with the workers, who for their part had not lost their fighting spirit:
a showdown was inevitable.
As 1921 came to a close, the Chamber of Mines made it clear wage cuts
were to be expected. This was to repeat itself in the mining world in
the 1920s, especially in English and Welsh collieries. But it hit the
Rand with the huge difference of the race factor: ending the contracts
of 2.000 Whites opened the possibility of replacing them by Blacks.
Colour was not the bossesâ priority: they were doing their rational best
to exploit both Whites and Blacks by reorganising underground work in
order to lower the wages of "over"-paid Whites.
Increasing the proportion of unskilled or semi-skilled Blacks (or in any
case, less skilled than the Whites) was a synonym for labour
de-skilling, and part of the general trend of the time towards Taylorism
and Scientific Management. English collieries were being "rationalised"
by the introduction of electricity, labour-saving equipment, power
passing into the hands of experts, men turned into machine-driven cogs,
plus cost-cutting measures like the end of free coal for minersâ widows.
Since the beginning of the 20^(th) century, in most industrial
countries, the bourgeoisie had been striving to narrow the margin of
autonomy that allowed skilled labour a degree of control over the work
process. This went together with a growing mass of unskilled workers who
had little or no special qualification and only needed quick on-the-job
training. South African mines were playing their part in the widespread
simplification of work (which was a degradation for skilled workers)
brought about by 20^(th) century mechanisation. In this new
"employability", most tasks could be performed by any worker available
on a free-flowing labour market where the boss would buy the cheapest
labour power.
Except South Africa was the opposite of a "free" labour market. In the
Rand mines, "rationalisation" implied a bossâs endeavour to reduce the
relative autonomy of the Whites who supervised the tasks performed by
Blacks. When he wanted to replace Whites by Blacks who were slightly
less qualified but equally up to the job and (supposedly) much more
docile, the bourgeois was simply asking for the possibility to exercise
his right to hire and fire as benefited his business. In the particular
situation of a racially-divided proletariat, this was a fairly classic
way of managing the capital/labour relation whenever the bourgeois
believes to be in a position of strength. For him, nothing must impair
the freedom of employment, even if in this case it meant crossing the
race line: when Black labour was cheaper than White, it was imperative
for the company to be able to substitute the former for the latter,
decreasing the ratio of White to Black manpower.
A few years later, an utterly reformist yet perceptive British Labour
peer commented: "The mine manager [âŠ] does not see White men and Black
men, he only sees grades of labour â and it is the technique of his
training, from which he cannot depart, to try and reduce his labour
costs by the most economical blending of grades dear and cheap." (Lord
Oliver, Anatomy of African Misery, 1927)
This was not to go down smoothly, because of the resoluteness of a White
working class heartened by the few concessions it had managed to wrest
during the war, then by its capacity in 1921 to engage in wildcat
strikes, the leaders of which had been sanctioned by union officials.
The plan to downgrade or suppress 2.000 White jobs was even more
dramatic as it came after wage cuts and the abandon of paid vacations:
the impoverished White workerâs reaction was as much a defence of labour
against capital as a self-defence of White labour.
On January 1, 1922, an overwhelming majority of White miners (about
12.000 for, 1.300 against) voted to go on strike. Yet from Day One,
outside support was lacking: the strike failed to extend to other
groups. On January 2, in the collieries, Black miners kept on extracting
coal, and in the gold mines the management started recruiting Black
scabs. Few sectors sided with the strike, and neither did railway nor
port workers, sectors of strategic importance in any large class
confrontation. Rank-and-file pressure had pushed the established labour
movement into an action which it did its best to deflect by stalling and
dithering. When things had started to slip, like all seasoned
bureaucrats, the South African Industrial Federation had adapted to the
times and broadened its power basis in order to retain a modicum of
control by creating on December 31 a new decision-making body, the
Augmented Executive. Though it was open to non-unionised workers, this
entity was not meant to gather large forces for the struggle to come:
like the secretary of the SAIF, the leader of the Augmented Executive
accepted the wage cuts.
As for the middle classes, some groups (shopkeepers for example) briefly
gave limited assistance to the strike, but the bulk of the rural world
backed the State. White workers were on their own.
The 1922 rising took on the original form of "commandos". The military
connotation is obvious: strike defence organs morphed into insurrection
combat units. Workers turned a military structure and culture against
State power. Commandos owed much to the Boer war ("commando" was a
tactical unit in the Boer army), and to 1914-18 (the word referred to a
small group of soldiers on a special operation), but they also involved
a complex web of experiences and symbols. They were certainly not the
"Red Army" denounced by the South African press. Neither were they
similar to workersâ militia as we know them, in the Spanish civil war
for example. South African commandos stretched further back.
One of the models was the Voortrekkers, the Boer colonists who embarked
on a migration (trek) from the Cape region to the hinterland, a long and
difficult journey which lasted from 1835 to 1852. A self-organised rural
people took over Zulu territory to cultivate and "civilise" it. Up to
the middle of the 20^(th) century, Afrikaner mythology kept celebrating
how a community of families conquered its freedom by the force of arms
(dispossessing the Blacks in the same process). The Voortrek had strong
religious overtones, as the Boers, like the Hebrews, strenuously marched
towards a "promised land" bestowed on them by Godâs will, providing they
did His bidding (a millenarian dimension also present in Black African
liberation movements, as in Rastafarianism, or here in South Africa: see
§ 2). The Voortrek myth was far from extinct in 1922.
The Boer war (1899-1902) brought this ideology to a dramatic level. The
trekkers had been farmers and frontiersmen: now they had martyrs.
Against the Blacks, the Boers acted as colonialists, but vis-Ă -vis
Britain, they regarded themselves as colonised by an imperialist power.
By calling themselves Afrikaners, and their language Afrikaans, they
thought they were the true legitimate inhabitants of Africa, with more
rights over the country than the Blacks who they thought had forfeited
their rights to it. Though more and more Afrikaners lived in towns and
worked in industry (one Rand miner in two was an Afrikaner in 1922), a
lot of them maintained family and emotional links with the countryside.
It was therefore easy for the insurgents to believe that the rural
descendants of the Boers would take up arms to join them.
These two sources originated in the Boer past: they were complemented by
the experience of 1914-18, when lots of 1922 strikers had been soldiers.
All those models coalesced: resistance to statist/British power, the
people in arms, local mobilisation, self-discipline, traditions and
martyrdom fuelled the imagery of a (White) people self-defence against a
superior yet illegitimate force⊠and against the Blacks.
Such military force believed in its superiority over conventional
troops, because of its grass-roots and community spirit. Strikers
expected dozens of thousands of commando members to come from the
countryside to the mining towns and help redress rightful working class
grievances, in a sort of labour-farmer alliance. Some even dreamt of a
return to the allegedly free Boer Republic, when White domination was
taken for granted and the White community devoid of worker vs. boss
antagonism. This was to be belied by the facts: when Afrikaner rural
commandos came, it was to support law and order.
In reality, most of these so-called armed groups had no adequate combat
weapons, i.e. firearms. They remained quite peaceful until the beginning
of February and most of their members disapproved of a recourse to arms.
In the west of the Rand, the head of two commandos, though an active
participant in the militant strike a year before, refused the
insurrection. In Springs, a town east of Johannesburg, the commando
decided to attack the police only if the police attacked them.
Commandos usually protected private property, on the condition that it
served the movement, and only when in need resorted to requisitions,
sometimes giving receipts. Percy Fisher had looters punished.
There were about a dozen commandos in Johannesburg, and four at its
outer rim. Membership varied from 50 to 500, up to 1.000, but some had
no more than a dozen people. On the whole, out of 20.000 White miners in
the Rand, 10.000 to 15.000 belonged to a commando, but membership was
not a synonym of action, even less of armed action. Apart from miners,
members were also railway workers, unemployed, and a few middle class
people (teachers for example), sometimes forcibly drafted. The majority
were Afrikaner, yet the "cosmopolitan" (Krikler) composition reflected
the diversity of White working class origins. There even existed an
Irish commando (called by different names), small but active, which
attracted non-Irish members. Both English and Afrikaans languages were
in use, and some commando leaders were English. Officers were often
elected and could be dismissed for incompetence or misconduct.
The commandos adopted the occupations and manners of the army that was
opposed to them, but what was a reality for the government troops was
more of an attitude for the strikers. They displayed the whole
paraphernalia of ranks (from private to general), uniforms, insignia,
parades, drills, foot-soldiers, horsemen, cyclists, motorcyclists, music
bands, bugle calls, rationed or distributed food stocks, Red Cross
ambulances and field hospitals (one located in a cinema), coded
messages, intelligence service, despatch riders, etc., most of which
would no doubt have been necessary if the will and the ability to fight
had been present. As this was not the case, barely armed workers played
at being an army. Captured policemen had "prisoner of war" status, and
now and then commando chiefs exchanged a military salute with army
officers.
The commandos pre-existed the insurrection, and initially their task was
not to engage in armed struggle, but to keep up strikersâ morale (in
other words, keep them occupied), to prevent a return to work (by
scaring the scabs away), and to organise self-defence against the
police. Regarding the second task, the commandos were quite up to it: in
January and February, only about 1.000 white miners (5 to 6% of the
White work force) resumed work.
The official leaders of the strike did not publicly endorse commando
violence, but they lived with it as long as it helped them bargain with
the bosses. When the cushioning role was over and some commandos engaged
in insurrection, the union bureaucracy of the SAIF and the NWU
completely dissociated itself from the rebels. However, only very few of
the 10.000-odd commando members became insurgents.
Until late January, except for a number of inflammatory speeches, the
authorities had to admit the situation was quiet. When arms happened to
be displayed during some of the many street marches, it was more a show
of strength than an expression of violence, and the police accepted
rather than repressed demonstrations.
On January 9, power plant personnel went on a short sympathy strike, and
the miners still received popular support from small business and part
of the rural world. Some pits were flooded, though, and on the 18^(th)
the strikers took 40 "prisoners", including 2 policemen.
The State could not let things get out of hand. On February 7, Fisher
and Spendiff were arrested, only to be set free soon afterwards. On the
same day, a train was derailed. Government and business decided to break
the strike. The Chamber of Mines owners offered hardly any concessions
but demanded an immediate return to work. A leading mine owner stated
what the bourgeois wanted: "to get back to the position of being masters
in their own house. The whole world is beginning to realise the
destructive effects of the inconsequent surrender to labour demands."
Predictably, the press was ferociously hostile to the strike. The only
exception was the bilingual (English-Afrikaans) Transvaal Post, launched
on February 13 as a "strike paper" and fairly popular (its editor
claimed daily sales of up to 26.000 copies) until it was banned by
martial law on March 10. The traditionally anti-worker Star "gave the
displacement programme of the mining houses its unequivocal backing and
it nagged the government to come down hard against âincreasing
lawlessnessâ on the Rand" (Norman Herd). To avoid its premises being
burnt down as they had been by the 1913 strikers, The Star turned into a
fortress and created its own armed squad under a colonel on loan from
the authorities, and the staff worked "with service rifles close at
hand".
On both sides positions were hardening. On March 3, a cabdriver who
didnât allow a commando to use his horses had his house dynamited. Two
days later, a former trade unionist and now mayor of Springs, Jack
Cowan, addressing a meeting of strikers, said he had "always recognised
and supported governments", but the situation was completely different:
"Rather than go down in the struggle we are prepared as a last weapon to
have a revolution [âŠ]"
Whereas deliberate damaging of work equipment had been sporadic, it
became frequent, together with sabotage and interruption of maintenance
and servicing tasks. Attacks on police stations started being planned,
and anti-scabbing escalated. On February 12, 10.000 people, including a
woman commando, took to the streets in Johannesburg (its 1914 population
was 250.000, so an equivalent would be 400.000 marchers in London
today). The following day, the government warned it would support "the
freedom to work", i.e. scabbing. Still, no violence occurred for ten
days. On February 21, in Germiston, the cops were driven out of a large
demonstration they were trying to control. The bosses demanded martial
law. At that time, no gunfire was yet reported.
Then, on February 28, allegedly in self-defence, the police shot three
strikers in Boksburg, the very town where the last of the insurgents
were to die two weeks later.
These first 1922 worker casualties signalled a turning point. The most
determined took stock of the situation. How far could they go? How? And
who could be counted upon? They expected some support from the Orange
State, ex-independent republic run by Dutch colonists, annexed by South
Africa in 1900, which had preserved a tradition or rather an image of
autonomy and freedom â for the Whites, that was. A much misguided hope.
As for the union officials, they met with police chiefs and, on March 2,
had a leaflet circulated among the vast crowd gathered for the funeral
of the 28 February victims, calling for peace and quiet. The unions knew
they were being shunted to the side-lines. At the bottom, their
authority was being undermined: "revolutionists" forced the Brakpan
strike committee to vacate the garage it used as HQ. At the top, the
SAIF was trying to defuse the conflict by channelling it into collective
bargaining⊠that the Chamber of Mines refused on the 4^(th), even to the
point of announcing that all deals were off and the SAIF would no longer
be recognised. The bourgeois were done with negotiating wage
settlements. They wanted more than to defeat the strike: their purpose
was to crush labour. The government realised how fraught with danger
this class intransigence was, and started taking contingency measures:
700 more policemen were brought into the area, and volunteers enrolled
as special constables, usually assigned to non-combatant tasks (body and
house search, safety checks, identity control).
On the opposite side, power lines were sabotaged and put out of order,
trains derailed and scabs subjected to ever more pressure. The
proletarians stood at a crossroads. Either, as is very often the case,
the strike would wane until there was a general return to work
punctuated by clashes with the police and inter-proletarian discord. Or
the most resolute strikers would take a leap in the dark.
On March 6, as the authorities were helping a scab move from his home to
the mine where they could better guarantee his safety, a crowd burnt his
furniture in the street. When 300 policemen tried to intervene, they
were blocked and made powerless by the arrival of commandos supplemented
by an influx of several thousand people.
A few hours later, "the joint executives of the striking unions gathered
at the Trades Hall in Johannesburg Trades Hall to discuss the idea of
arranging a vote for their members on the question of continuing or
abandoning the strike. Outside, the most determined working-class crowd
roared its disapproval at the notion of retreat [âŠ] every time the
proposed ballot was mentioned it encountered booing, whereas the idea of
a general strike elicited the most vigorous support. [âŠ] Radicals,
apparently mobilised by the Council of Action and armed with revolvers,
clogged stairways and surrounded the room in which the trade unionists
debated. [âŠ] Evasion of combat was completely unacceptable to the
mobilised strikers." (Krikler)
There was neither a discussion according to standard democratic rules,
nor a voting procedure: the assembled participants decided to launch a
general strike without any ballot being taken.
The SAIF had to follow suit, otherwise it would have been rejected by
the rank-and-file. Joe Thompson, head of the Augmented Executive,
appeared on the balcony of the Trades Hall and announced a general
strike which the union apparatus has no intention of conducting, and
which in any case made a bad start. A few professions stopped work,
shops and businesses were forcibly closed, the town centre was blocked,
railways dynamited and telegraph and telephone cables cut, yet this was
not enough to promote the stimulus and the popular backing indispensable
for a general strike to get off the ground.
On the 7^(th) and the 8^(th), racial attacks took place against Blacks
(this will be dealt with in § 11). After that, the strikers hardly ever
targeted non-Europeans, only the police and army. But the ambiguity (to
put it mildly) that ran deep within the whole movement is apparent in
the way workers were mobilised in the town of Benoni. A meeting was
summoned in order to help the police ward off the threat of an imminent
Black revolt. When everybody was there, the doors were closed and the
real motive made clear: to prepare for an armed rising to defeat the
bosses and the State. Benoni was not the only place where (White)
self-defence against a fictional Black menace was used as a ploy to get
ready for armed (class) struggle.
Whatever the pretext, the contradiction had gone explosive, and the hour
was late for reform. "Who ever heard of a strike without violence?",
Fisher said: "We are out to win this fight, and by God we will, if we
have to burn Johannesburg to the ground."
The Fordsburg Market Building served as headquarters but, as we will
see, Fisher and his comrades were unable to lead or coordinate much. On
March 9, Fisher wrote his will. The die was cast, and the insurrection
started the following morning at 5 a.m. On the same day, martial law was
declared. March 10 would be remembered in South Africa as "Black
Friday".
From the very beginning, institutionalised labour took a firm and
explicit stand against the rising, a position which did not always go
down easily: violent discussions and exchange of blows opposed moderates
and Direct Actionists. Once the insurrection was on its way, the
official labour movement had its moment of truth and openly admitted
what it stood against: "a thing which should never have happened, an
attempt at revolution", in the words of C.J. McCann, secretary of the
Labour Party.
The insurgents took over some of Johannesburgâs working-class suburbs,
Fordsburg and Jeppe, and further east two towns, Benoni and Brakpan.
West and south of the Rand, several police stations were under their
control, cops detained as prisoners, and government reinforcements
repelled. Wherever the rebels had the upper hand, banks, offices and
shops were closed and cafés and hotels only allowed to serve the
insurgents. Food was requisitioned and transported in train carriages to
warehouses for distribution to strikers.
If the plan was to seize Johannesburg, its municipal utilities, police
stations, barracks and means of communication, digging trenches was not
offensive enough, being more adapted to defence, and it did not prevent
army and police from maintaining their hold over the city centre. On the
11^(th), 600 to 800 people tried to capture Johannesburgâs main arms and
ammunition depot, killed 8 soldiers but, despite initial success caused
by the element of surprise, inferior weaponry forced them to withdraw.
It was less an insurrection aiming at a seizure of political power, than
social warfare scattering into armed combats.
The scope and depth of the movement differed a lot between the east and
west of the Rand. Little happened or was even attempted in the western
part. Edward Hippert, chief of a local commando and a union official
known for collaborating with the government in the 1913 and 1914
strikes, procrastinated and made an agreement with the police to sit out
the strike. The insurgentsâ headquarters knew about this desertion but
all they could do was to denounce it publicly. In other localities in
the west, the police kept a low profile, and the strikers filled this
public authority vacuum by installing a "peopleâs" law and order, among
other things preventing thefts and lootings, until the army arrived on
the 13th.
On the contrary, in the eastern Rand, in the first 48 hours, the
movement could believe itself to be on the ascendant, was confident of
its future, and faced an army and police placed everywhere on the
defensive.
In that early phase, the situation was so unstable and central power so
insecure that when Prime Minister Jan Smuts arrived in Johannesburg on
the 11^(th), he was fired upon, bullets struck his car and it is likely
that only the expert driving of his chauffeur saved his life: the head
of State lacked the adequate means to guarantee his own safety. A
tipping point was close. Everything shifted during the night of 11^(th)
to 12^(th) March, with the coming by train of fresh, reliable troops.
Then, in Johannesburg, only partly controlled by the rebels, the police
occupied union offices, seized documents and put union officials under
arrest. The nominal strike leaders offered to negotiate, but the State
was now sure of its victory and demanded an unconditional surrender.
No longer able to attack, the insurgents had to resist with scarce and
uncoordinated forces. In Boksburg, where three strikers had been killed
on February 28, though the local commando had been up to then well
organised and dedicated, it very soon abstained from any action: on
March 10, out of 500 members, 75 turned up. The war veterans showed
little interest. Owing to the shortage of fighters, the rising died down
after a few hours.
In Benoni, which is near Boksburg and where, as we have seen, men had
initially mobilised against an invented "Black peril", the Workersâ Hall
was fortified, protected by sand bags, and its guards tripled, but very
few occupiers had a rifle. In the early hours of the 10^(th), they took
over the town after a little gunfire. Later, however, even in this hot
spot of worker struggle, the passivity of the local majority prevailed
over the fighting spirit of a handful of radicals. One commando was even
unanimous in its refusal to engage in combat.
Brakpanâs mine was one of the very few places where one could speak of
"class hatred" on the part of the insurgents. On March 10, about 20
armed officials and a dozen special police led by the managerâs brother,
present in the mine to prevent the strikers from occupying or sabotaging
it, were attacked by 500 to 800 members of the local commando. When the
defenders ran out of ammunition, they surrendered and were disarmed.
Then the strikers unleashed their violence against the people associated
with the employersâ power, for example against a shift boss (higher up
in the hierarchy than the foreman because he oversaw and disciplined
several work teams, and was therefore likely to be a minerâs hate
figure). He was killed together with seven other policemen or officials.
Fighting lasted four days, March 10 to 13.
The State mobilised all accessible resources, including seven planes
which were ready on the 10^(th), an armoured train, and a tank which
broke down in a street, could not be fixed and never saw any action.
13.000 regular soldiers were brought to the area, bolstered by burger
commandos: the countryside (landed property) was encircling the town
(the working class).
Not forgetting a strong support from middle class people and
professionals. Businessmen and students volunteered as civic guards and
special police. In the 1926 English general strike, the scene was
repeated, with middle class members proud to serve as auxiliary to the
army and police, out of a confirmed taste for law and order, and
distaste for the working class. Actually, they contributed less to
policing than to conservative consensus-building.
Troops were welcome to rest in Parktown, the exclusive respectable
district. Gentlemen loaned their motorcars to ferry soldiers, ladies
helped with refreshment, tea and coffee. A few hundred feet away, others
kept playing tennis. The bourgeois felt at home, basked in the aplomb of
their "right to rule" and were one with their army. Not in complete
unanimity: a teenager was expelled from school for expressing pro-strike
feelings in an essay.
On Saturday 11, the insurrection still held out. In Benoni, snipers
slowed down the soldiersâ progression. But sharpshooters are no match
for artillery and air force. On the 12^(th), the State retook the
initiative. With support from four planes, it broke the encirclement by
the insurgents of a group of besieged soldiers and police. Then more
planes were put into action. Field guns were used against entrenched
workers and suspect buildings. Houses were ruthlessly searched.
Arbitrary arrest and detention became the rule, but at this stage the
distinction between arbitrary and lawful became immaterial.
Counter-insurrection strips the modern State of its civilised veneer.
When the rule of Law is put to the acid test, what matters is who calls
the shots, literally. Jan Smuts reported 1.500 prisoners.
Benoni was only retaken on the morning of the 13th. The final assault
had something of an "anti-climax" (Krikler). Nevertheless, if most parts
of the town had few defenders, an air bomb was necessary to destroy the
Workersâ Hall and kill its occupiers. By the end of the afternoon
everything was over, and the rebellion imploded in confused chaotic
scenes which the press were all too happy to caricature: insurgents on
the loose indulging in the basest instincts, drunkenness, vandalism,
hooliganism, mugging and robbery⊠the bourgeois and their journalists
love portraying the proletarians as a beastly criminal mob.
In Brakpan, until the 13th, the town was divided into two, a larger half
in the hands of the strikers, while the police sheltered behind the
walls of its station and its machineguns. The troopsâ entry met with
little resistance.
The last workersâ stronghold, Fordsburg, refused to capitulate. Planes
dropped leaflets warning the inhabitants to move out in order to save
their lives, and soon thousands of residents thronged the streets, where
they were searched and sorted. Suspects were detained, many of them
released after a short while. A few miles away, from the rooftops of
Johannesburg, people were observing the ultimate battle as if watching a
show. Soldiers moved forward protected by a rain of shells and air
bombs. Late in the afternoon, 29 corpses were to be found in the ruins
of the Tradesâ Hall. Fisher (who had left a letter for his wife Mary)
and Spendiff had chosen suicide.
Sporadic gunfire could still be heard in other districts on the next
day. Armoured vehicles and heavy artillery arrived: they were not needed
any more. Meanwhile, in the western Rand, "the burger forces reclaimed a
kind of no-manâs-land where the strikers had been dominant but not
revolutionary" (Krikler).
On the 17^(th), the unions officially ended the strike.
On March 10, the rising had been able to prostrate the State. Police
forces had found themselves pinned down in the police stations that the
insurgents had neither occupied nor neutralised. So, for the State to
retake the streets, it had to call in the army.
For the next three days, the fighting did not build up a unified front,
but led rather to a series of discontinued battles, in Johannesburg and
in several nearby mining towns, nearly all in the eastern part of the
Rand. More than once, army and police had to retreat to avoid being
encircled. Discipline was not the insurgentsâ strongest point, but their
military experience was equal to that of the governmentâs army, owing to
the presence of World War I veterans on both sides. The strikersâ better
on-the-ground experience gave them a tactical edge over their opponents.
In the beginning, the State was weakened by the mobilisation of poorly
trained soldiers, and it had no specialised repressive corps comparable
to the National Guard for example.
Though the commandos numbered over 10.000 members, only a tiny minority
took part in the armed struggle, with military hardware very inferior to
that of the army. Arms were blatantly lacking: a lot more revolvers than
rifles (and few modern ones of the same quality as those used in the
army); very few machineguns; and no artillery. This was even true in the
places where the movement had been most committed to class action: in
Johannesburg, on the first day of the rising (March 10), a lot of men
only had sticks, and in Brakpan one insurgent out of four carried a
rifle. When they could be used as hand grenades, home-made bombs were
quite effective, though.
Initially, the government was not quite sure it could trust its own
troops, and the rebels harboured hopes that the soldiers would be
reluctant to shoot at fellow workers. Despite some wavering, however,
there was no mutiny, and hardly ever fraternisation. Nothing comparable
with Russia, 1917, or Germany, 1918: in 1922, South African political
power was not bogged down in an endless unwinnable conflict. The troops
brought in to crush the rebellion did not react as "proletarians in
uniform": they acted as soldiers.
As a result, the insurgents fought a military battle, not a social war,
and militarily they were no match. Strikers cut down phone and telegraph
lines: the government had radio communications. The strikers had rifles:
the government had field guns. And from the beginning, it deployed an
air force, with a dozen planes. Resorting to air strikes to defeat
organised labour, bombing a population in other words, was only a
novelty for Whites: people of colour already knew about it, in the
Middle East for example, when in 1920 the RAF had bombed Arab and
Kurdish rebel villages in Mesopotamia:
"Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs
(particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids
on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations'
mandate. [âŠ] An uprising of more than 100.000 armed tribesmen against
the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went
the RAF. [âŠ] The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9.000 Iraqis
killed. [âŠ] Writing in 1921, Wing Commander J. A. Chamier suggested that
the best way to demoralise local people was to concentrate bombing on
the âmost inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is
desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected, the attack
with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and
carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops
and cattle.â " (Jonathan Clancey)
The South African State knew of the virtues of air strikes, which it had
used in 1919 against rebellious Blacks in what is now Namibia, and as
soon as the worker rising started, the government announced it would
have no qualms about using its air force. The insurgents were well aware
of that threat, and some leaders said they had the means to neutralise
it by taking over the airfield and/or destroying the planes on the
ground before they flew. Such optimism was to be contradicted by the
facts, and the air force finally proved "fundamental to the crushing of
the rebellion. What remains striking, however, was the ability of the
commandos to counter, albeit to a limited extent, this new technology of
repression despite their lack of suitable weaponry - above all,
machineguns." (Krikler)
Planes were not invincible (nor are helicopters today). One was disabled
by rifle fire and had to retire. A pilot was killed. Sometimes sniping
prevented the gunner from adjusting his fire. Nevertheless, air bombs
proved a formidable instrument of destruction and terror, bringing down
buildings with no possibility for its occupiers to retaliate, killing
about a dozen non-combatants, half of them children according to the
strikers.
But the true superiority of the State lay in its ability to concentrate
its forces against uncorrelated actions. Once the initial momentum was
gone, every group stayed in the area it had taken over and defended that
particular place on its own. When power slipped from strike committeesâ
control to the commandos, this was indeed a sign of radicalisation, but
it remained at a local level, and "leaders" like Fisher and Spendiff
only led where they happened to be. This is one of the main reasons why
there was no attempt at storming the airfield or the police HQ in
Johannesburg. Union Buildings, the executive branch of government,
though accessible, was left unattacked: contrary to most 19^(th) century
insurgents whose prime targets were ministries and city halls, 1922 Rand
strikers hardly bothered to lay hands on governmental or administrative
centres of power. Their main focus was not political.
Basically, the rising drew its strength from its deep roots in a
community unified by its sharing the same mining jobs and the same
neighbourhood.
In this collective experience, women played an important role. Some
commandos included women and there existed specific woman commandos,
sometimes in uniform. Boksburgâs telephone exchange was briefly occupied
by a womenâs group. They were most efficient in anti-scab action,
especially after mid-February when the government started to protect
those miners who were tempted to go back to work. They also got together
to encourage or force shops and offices to close. But when women took
part in actual fighting, it was in a non-combatant role, as nurses, not
with guns in their hands. Arms remained a menâs issue, and the closer to
insurrection the proletarians went, the more women were driven into the
background. In fact there was no woman labour down the pits, and little
in factories. A typical White male miner would take pride in being the
familyâs breadwinner, so his wife could take care of the home (possibly
helped by a Black servant). Women did leave their homes, took to the
streets, had their share of action against scabs and (less) against
policemen (and sometimes against BlacksâŠ), but this manifested a working
class community as it existed, with unchanged sex roles.
For a short time the insurrection won on its own terrain by its ability
to rapidly mobilise large sections of the population, and by the ties
previously forged by the radical minority involved in past class
actions. It lost when it found itself on the enemyâs terrain, waging a
war it could not win. Of course the government had far more troops and
guns. But its major asset was to fight with a clear agenda: the
perpetuation of a social system that benefited the bourgeois and the
upper middle classes, whereas the proletarians did not put forward any
alternative perspective.
White labour was exploited by White capital, yet at the same time White
capital and White labour were fighting over the division of profits
largely derived from Black labour. Though they were omnipresent on the
surface and down in the mineshaft, nearly 200.000 Blacks were invisible
as workers to 20.000 Whites, who only saw them as Blacks. Black people
were the blind spot of South African society, a colossal yet underground
force that had been subdued but which might rise and savagely destroy
civilised (i.e. White) society. For the White workers, the "Black Peril"
racist fantasy expressed a fear of losing a privileged status based on a
terribly oppressive domination over the Black population.
Rumours were rife. In Langlaagte, police numbers had "recently been
augmented at the very request of the local worker community then
affrighted by a supposed Black peril" (Krikler). In Brakpan, on March
10, the same day when strikersâ violence erupted against people
associated with the bosses (see § 8), there were stories that thousands
of Blacks from the nearest compound, armed with spears, were preparing
to assault the White miners who were about to occupy the mine. Two days
later, when a police station was stormed, the insurgents seized all
firearms except for a revolver left with a policeman for self-defence in
case he was attacked by Blacks.
Oddly enough, while Blacks were by far the vast majority of strike
breakers, they attracted much less animosity and physical violence than
White scabs. Between the beginning of the strike (early January) and the
first racial murders (March 7), there were very few instances of
strikers attacking Black scabs, and no attempts to deter them from going
to work.
This paradox was caused by the fact that White strikers did not perceive
the Blacks as workers like themselves. They dealt with scabs who were
"their own kind" and "othered" those who were not. There is no record of
the Blacks being seriously invited to join in the strike, and the unions
did not ask for Black migrants to be sent back to the regions they came
from. Since the notion of a working class only included White workers,
logically the same applied to scabbing. Blacks were not part of the
working class, so they could neither stand in solidarity with strikers,
nor be "class traitors".
This explains why it was not out of the ordinary for strikers to expect
or force mine officials to go on strike with them as Whites, or to try
and win over policemen to their (White) cause against a non-existent
Black menace: labour identity fused with a race identity that was able
to bring together an all-encompassing inclusive White people, except for
a tiny minority of "money lords" like the mine magnates. It was deemed
impossible for Black labour to act as the enemy of White labour, but it
was possible for Blacks as Blacks to be regarded as a danger to White
people.
On March 7, in Germistonâs New Primrose gold mine, equipment had been
dynamited by the strikers. The next day, the management brought in
groups of Blacks to guard the premises. They had no firearms (contrary
to widespread Whitesâ belief, there were no guns in the compounds or
Black urban districts). A 30-60-strong White commando entered the place:
physical fighting, slight injuries, gun shots, black counter-attackâŠ
then the army walked in and separated the fighters without any human
life lost. The Whites went back to their neighbourhood where rumours
were spreading of an imminent Black assault. 400 commando members,
together with a White crowd, lashed out at the Blacks who had returned
home to their compound. The outcome was eight people killed, one striker
and seven Blacks. Without the intervention of a bossesâ militia, it is
likely there would have been a lot more bloodshed.
On the same date (March 8), and the day before (remember the general
strike broke out on the 6^(th)), in the streets of a mainly African and
Indian district, Whites had attacked Blacks who had no visible
connection to the mines. On the 7^(th), in a suburb, other Whites had
shot at Black passers-by, including women and children. All in all, 20
Blacks were killed on March 7 and 8.
These aggressions and murders took place before the insurrection, did
not happen amidst the heat of combat, were not collateral damage of
civil war, and they did not target enemies of the strike: they lashed
out at adult and underage Blacks who had nothing to do with the police
or the mines, but represented a "Black Peril" against which Whites
thought they were "defending themselves". Over 40 Blacks were killed in
that period, most of them by strikers, with at least some amount of
popular White participation in the murders.
Most of the assaults took place in areas where a number of strikers
lived. The urban geography of the mining region had been changing since
1914. Not all Blacks employed in the mines were then migrants housed in
compounds. A proportion of them would live with their families in
neighbourhoods close to the Whites, sometimes in the same area. It was
the Blacks close to the Whites that came under attack, not Black strike
breakers.
Being a White South African worker meant living the complete opposite of
a Blackâs life: travelling freely in the country, not having to carry a
pass, not being deprived of civil rights, not being outcast, having a
proper waged job, possibly including sick leave benefits and vacation
entitlements which Black labour never could hope to get in those days.
By suppressing paid vacation (see § 6), the bosses were indeed putting
the White worker down to the African level. Colour embodied what the
White was not but could fear to become, a white kaffir, a White brought
down the social ladder to the status of a Black (kaffir was a South
African equivalent for nigger in America).
"Black people had become a fearful mirror. The Whites concerned could
not abide what they saw in that mirror and they proceeded to smash it."
(Krikler)
Whites were conscious of their privileges and ready to defend them. A
few years before, during one of the many anti-pass actions, a White
crowd was seen helping the police to check Blacksâ passes, and White
children took part in the control as if playing a game. White people
(workers included) knew that race discrimination served their interests
(for a while at least, but it was to be a long while). In the same
districts as the murders took place, it was not uncommon for Whites to
shoot at a Black crowd, even at woman and children. The "modern" Rand
was at least as much a powder keg of racial tension as the "backward"
Afrikaner countryside.
Years before, the Industrial Socialist league (different from the
International Socialist League but equally supportive of industrial
unionism), had warned of the consequences of White worker "treachery",
viz. White scabbing against African strikers: the lack of "solidarity of
labour irrespective of colour or race" would raise the "spectre of
racial warfare". Indeed this is what happened on a small scale in 1922.
The strike begun in January was racial in its nature: less racist in the
sense of deliberately anti-Black, than racial because it involved one
race and excluded another, and it can be a short step from racial to
racist. A community closed in on itself only applies Orwellian "common
decency" to its own members. Exclusion is not bound to turn into
assault, but treating a group as fundamentally different from oneâs own,
especially when one benefits from this difference, opens up the
possibility of veering to extreme aggression.
With the benefit of hindsight, it would be too easy to dismiss the
insurrection as a quixotic, "heroic, tragic lunacy", as Yeats wrote of
the 1916 Irish Easter Rising. Yet the insurgents were no lunatics. They
did what they believed had to be done: against overwhelming odds, they
only had a limited time-window and did not want to let the opportunity
slip. Once started, they had to go all the way despite a large
disproportion of forces. Also, they expected some amount of support from
the countryside. Searching for allies, a few commando chiefs took a
short trip to the veld, the Afrikaans word for the vast expanse of land
used for agriculture and cattle breeding. Their hopes were dashed: the
rural folk of the burger commandos turned against the urban worker
commandos.
In 1922 South Africa, what is now sometimes called "whiteness" proved
both its reality, as amply demonstrated in our narrative, and its limit.
Faced with Black proletarians, White proletarians were White. In the
eyes of White landowners and businessmen, they were proletarians, and in
that particular case rebellious proletarians who had to be browbeaten
into submission by whatever means available. The Boers had dispossessed
the Blacks and turned a lot of them into proletarians. Then the lack of
new colonisable land and the growth of agrarian capitalism had the usual
effects of land concentration. Afrikaner small farmers were now the ones
to be dispossessed and proletarianised. Once these Whites became
"have-nots", the "haves" treated them no longer as race brothers, but as
members of a class to be subjugated, forcibly if necessary. Class came
before race.
In matter of fact, the burgers had already sided with law enforcement
before, against the 1913 and 1914 strikers. The veld felt little
sympathy for the poor White (die arme blanken). Though one Rand miner
out of two was an Afrikaner in 1922, he no longer belonged to the
"authentic" Afrikaner people. Even if he had kept some rural
semi-activity, his tiny plot was not enough to create solidarity with
the real landholders:
"Landowners â the social basis of the burger forces â could not, when
the test of arms came â make common cause with a movement that railed
against the rich and in whose ranks ethnos seemed so often to be
subordinate to other solidarities." (Krikler)
Unlike the down-to-earth materialistic wealthy, the miners were
unrealistic idealists when they believed that class and ethnicity always
coincide.
The strikers were often heard singing The Red Flag (written in 1889,
perhaps the most popular worker song in the Rand at the time) which
professed:
This short round-the-world overview had words for European (Russian
included) and American toilers, all White people, and no mention of
Africa or the East.
A picture has remained (in)famous. It shows how demonstrators changed
the illustrious banner "Workers of the World Fight & Unite" by adding
"For a White South Africa!" .
That modified banner has "haunted socialists in South Africa ever since"
(Baruch Hirson). The "White" reference was not a random phrase. The
Transvaal Post, the only "strike paper" which from February 13 until its
banning on March 10 had a wide popular readership (see § 8), advocated
the "supremacy of the White race": its "cardinal issue was the clarion
call for a White South Africa. Therefore it implied the preservation of
the colour bar in the mining industry as the âonly solutionâ to the
strike." (Wessel Visser)
The "White South Africa" slogan racialised class struggle by binding
working class emancipation to the advent of a White South Africa, where
capitalist rule would be replaced by labour rule, White labour that is.
To us, this is a contradiction in terms, because we define class in
relation to another class, not by colour. But this was not so for 20.000
White miners: for them, the Whites were the working class. And quite a
few workers in Britain, in the United States and in Australia would not
have been shocked by such a statement. Worker solidarity indeed, but who
qualifies as a worker? In the White South Africa claimed by many 1922
strikers, the White worker would have been treated as a White, not as a
Black deprived of freedom, livelihood and dignity. Jack Cowanâs call for
"revolution" on March 5 (see § 8) was motivated by the governmentâs
determination "to put the White standard of South Africa in the
background and the Black standard in the foreground". "Black" was
synonymous with degradation and poverty. (White) class identity was
socially constructed in opposition to an inferior Black condition.
Whatever the men and women holding the banner may have had in mind, they
were saying: "We are not Blacks."
The official death toll was 216, of which 76 State forces, 78 "Reds" and
62 "civilians". According to another government report, there were 72
army and police dead, 39 rebels and 42 civilians. This was far from the
massacres caused by the repression of Black revolts mentioned in section
3, or the kill ratio between the casualties of the Versailles troops and
the Communards in 1871, or between the German army and the insurgents in
1919-1920. This was not because of South African State moderation and
restraint, but because the rising only lasted four days and only a few
hundred strikers took part in armed combat. Though labour institutions
lost control, it was a small minority that made the leap from militant
direct action strike to insurrection. The Labour Party and the unions
failed to avert a social explosion, but managed to isolate the
revolutionists from the vast majority of workers who, as a union
representative was right to say, "did not go beyond a strike".
Official statistics acknowledged 24 dead "persons of colour", a figure
well short of the mark: there were at least 40. Other estimates go up to
150 African victims for the whole strike period: whatever the exact
number, very few of them were killed by army or police in the Rand,
January-March 1922.
Defeat in the street and work-place was succeeded by judicial repression
and striker-bashing in the press. On March 15, the Minister for Defence
denounced an attempt at "social revolution by Bolsheviks, international
socialists and communists". It was open season for "Red" hunting, and
the fabrication of plots to assassinate political leaders. The
decomposition of the Benoni resistance (see § 8) provided journalists
with fantastical lurid descriptions of crime, arson and looting. Looting
there was, albeit much less than was reported: most strike committees
strongly opposed it, unlike some burgers who were not immune to the
temptation to help themselves during house searches.
Three special criminal courts were created where people would not be
tried by jury, only by professional judges. There was a total of 4.750
arrests, 844 men and 9 women were charged, and over 650 actually went to
court, about 200 accused of crime and 46 of high treason and murder. 18
received a death sentence, and 4 were executed: one found guilty of
killing a shopkeeper who the rebels thought was assisting the police;
one for the murder of two Africans; and two held responsible for the
shooting of an army officer. Other defendants were fined or given prison
sentences, some quite long (Erasmus Piet, a commando leader, 10 years
for high treason), or even life imprisonment.
All were released after one or two years, mainly because Smuts was
looking for White votes in the forthcoming 1924 election (see next
section). To celebrate their liberation, a meeting was organised in
Johannesburg Town Hall: nearly all those who spoke took up the White
South Africa slogan, and there was hardly any African in the audience.
Thousands of White miners were not re-hired, and it was estimated that
for a while 15.000 Whites stayed out of work or lived on welfare.
Compared to 1914, skilled minersâ real wages were down by one third.
With the huge difference that the Blacksâ lot was worse than theirs, the
White minersâ situation was not dissimilar from the plight of English
and Welsh colliers in the 1920s. As a government body bluntly put it,
the only solution for the mining industry was to get âthe highest
possible production at the lowest possible cost".
Coal miners were subject to the same treatment. In the Highveld, where
the countryâs main collieries were, the price of coal went down at the
same time as the price of gold. There as well, the bosses knew they
stood in a position of strength, cut down wages and refused to
negotiate.
First, a little background on South African politics.
At the time of the rising, the country was led by the South African
Party, headed by Jan Smuts (1870-1950), Prime Minister since Louis
Bothaâs death in 1919. Smuts came from the Afrikaner world and had been
a Boer general during the anti-British war, but as a politician he tried
to reconcile the interests of the Afrikaner and English factions of the
ruling class. He was aiming at the best possible political balance, and
went for the politics that was the least divisive:
"We are going to create a nation, which will be of a composite
character, including Dutch, German, English and Jew, and whatever White
nationality seeks refuge in this land â all can combine. All will be
welcome."
Welcome if they were White, needless to say. Providing labour was White,
Smuts was not averse to granting it a basement in the South African
residence.
The South African Partyâs competitor was the National Party, led by
James Herzog (1866-1942), which was the political expression of the
Afrikaners, both ruling elite and common people, united in their
rejection of the Blacks and mistrust of the English. (Herzog had been an
army general, like Botha and like Smuts; add to this list Colonel
Creswell, Labour Party leader from 1910 to 1929: across the whole
political spectrum, top brass military men were at the head of all big
South African parties.)
The key political divide was between two ways of dealing with the race
question: what to do with the Blacks (and to a lesser extent, with the
Indians and the Coloureds)? How to manage necessary non-European labour
while continuing to treat non-Europeans as social and political
outcasts?
The "Afrikaner" or nationalist line was openly racist and advocated a
full Black and White separation, and the exclusion of Blacks from
political and daily life. The "English" or liberal line was aware of the
impossibility of a thoroughly White South Africa, and advocated granting
some non-Europeans a minimum of civil rights and social mobility. These
orientations rarely existed as two absolutely opposed programmes: they
conflicted yet often intermingled. The evolution was neither linear nor
irreversible: after a time of minor concessions granted to the Africans,
1948 opened the national-racist era. The colonial legacy of the colour
bar had evolved into a piling up of ad hoc measures and rules: apartheid
straightened them out in an overall system that was to last nearly forty
years (see § 18).
That point had not been reached yet in 1922, but the after-shocks of the
rising rumbled on in an unexpected way, as it reopened the rift between
"Afrikaner" and "English" elites.
The ruling class as a whole naturally closed ranks behind Smuts for
having ground labour into submission, but the National Party was
critical of the governmentâs handling of the crisis, and objected to the
"excessive" application of the martial law. With time, when the threat
of "revolution" receded, attitudes and feelings began to shift, and the
unionsâ campaign for the liberation of the jailed strikers received
popular (White) support. After all, they had fought for the well-being
of the Whites, and their dead started to be remembered as martyrs.
Negated in life, they acquired a positive status in death. (Few White
people bothered about the thousands of Blacks killed in the past
decades.) This provided grist for the mill of the Nationalists who
gathered electoral strength. Smuts had restored order and won a social
battle, but he was about to lose politically.
During the strike, a handful of politicians had vainly tried to bring
together Labour and Nationalist MPs in order to form a provisional
government which would proclaim a South African Republic. What had been
muted by the din of falling bombs was to be revived in the ballot box.
1922 found its political solution two years later: the South-African
Party lost power in 1924, replaced by an alliance between the National
Party and the White worker movement via the Labour Party, with
trade-union support. Though in a minority position with only two
ministers, Labour was given the important Ministry of Defence, with
Colonel Croswell in charge. The two partners had been elected on an
allegedly anti-bourgeois "social" agenda, with a "White labour policy"
as its main plank. This cooperation between a workersâ party and a party
which in other times and places could qualify as "far right", received
the critical support of the Communist Party, "an act which most of [its
members] lived to regret" (Edward Roux). Nothing too surprising here:
the CP simply believed that the anti-Black policy of the
Socialist-Nationalist pact was a lesser evil than Smutsâ anti-worker
policy. Besides, to attract Coloured voters in the Cape province, the
National Party had toned down its ingrained racism.
Once in command, the new government laid off thousands of African public
employees. In 1925, racial discrimination in the workplace was embedded
in law. Health benefits for minersâ occupational diseases differed
hugely according to the colour of the skin, and only White workersâ
children were entitled to free schooling.
On the downside, the White working class was far from regaining the
advantages it had lost before 1922 and tried to recapture by strike and
insurrection. The bosses did not go back on what had been the core of
the social battle: the loss of White monopoly over semi-skilled jobs.
These kept being reserved to Whites in the public sector, in the railway
and manufacturing industry, but not in the mines, where wages went down
by 10 to 40%. White workers too could be downwardly mobile.
Shop-stewards were no longer recognised, labour had to go through a
compulsory conciliation procedure before a work stoppage, and there was
a sharp drop in shop-floor and underground militancy.
In 1928, the Labour Party split: a minority remained faithful to its
(not so strange) alliance with a right-wing party, and the majority
started to come closer to the multi-racial Industrial & Commercial
Union. This was the beginning of the long and slow evolution of the
South African White socialists toward a cooperation with non-Europeans,
which after decades of struggle resulted in the demise of apartheid. (We
will return to the ICU in § 16, and to the Labour Partyâs final years in
§ 18.)
As seen in § 5, in the labour movement and in socialist/communist or
anarchist groups, radical elements were fully aware of the racial
inter-proletarian division and its dire consequences for the struggles
of both Whites and Blacks. Percy Fisher was asking for militant action
to double or triple African wages, and Harry Spendiff did not hesitate
to attack worker racism. But in 1922 South Africa, the best intentions
could hardly be followed up on. White miners regarded themselves as the
aggrieved party: they sensed what was rightfully theirs was being taken
away from them. Even those strikers who felt no hostility towards the
Africans and had witnessed their fighting abilities, doubted the Blacks
would ever join the Whites to battle a common enemy. Tellingly, a CP
leaflet once urged White workers to "Leave the Native alone"... In the
best of cases, White revolutionaries could therefore prevent fellow
workers from insulting and assaulting the Blacks: they could rarely
promote inter-racial solidarity, because solidarity is not a matter of
feeling and goodwill, it evolves from the sharing of a collective
experience, and White and Black lives were too different to produce such
a community. Racial estrangement went so deep in South Africa that it
seemed unchangeable and was a permanent source of contradictions. The
CP, for example, favoured at the same time inter-racial solidarity and a
White South Africa.
For years after the event, radicals and far-left activists were uneasy
about the obvious "White" nature of both strike and rising. Without
denying the inequality between Whites and Blacks, some contended that
the lower condition of the Blacks would not benefit from the lowering of
the condition of the Whites: therefore, until the day when White and
Black labour would manage to act together, White workers were justified
to fight for their rights. This was forgetting that these two groups did
not simply exist in parallel: the "better" condition of one was based on
the inferior condition of the other. Worse still, the "parallel
struggles" argument implied that Black proletarians could only play an
inferior part in proletarian emancipation:
"[âŠ] the premise, stated in earlier debates, that the White workers
stood at the forefront of the South African revolution [was] an argument
that was generally accepted and dominated policy in 1922. " (Baruch
Hirson)
In these circumstances, how could Black miners have shown solidarity
with White miners? The African Peopleâs Organisation (founded in 1903 to
defend Coloureds, it later extended its activity to fighting all racial
discriminations) decided not to support a strike which the APO saw as
merely a White peopleâs affair: as in the Boer war, when Whites fight
between themselves, the Blacks have nothing to gain by taking sides.
At the time of the rising, the opening up of certain jobs for the Blacks
did not stop the Whites from having priority over the best work
positions and, after 1924, the "White labour" policy made racial
polarisation worse. True, more Blacks were hired as semi-skilled
manpower, but it was easy to fire them as soon as they were causing
trouble. In the long run, only the bourgeois came out as winners: they
were able to drive and maintain a wedge between Black and White labour.
In real terms, the wage gap between White and Black miners was wider in
the 1960s than before 1914: White labourâs stronger bargaining position
allowed it to be the sole beneficiary of productivity gains.
In the decades that followed, the Trades Union Council succeeded the
South African Industrial Federation and its first secretary was Bill
Andrews, also the CPâs general secretary. The TUC defended White
labourâs continued yet reduced privileges. It sometimes supported
non-European workersâ demands, but this backing stopped short of the
point where these demands would interfere with White peopleâs
employment, status and standard of living.
Much later, in 1965, a renewed bossesâ endeavour to hire more Blacks
caused such an uproar that the plan was shelved after fifteen months,
and the Whites confirmed as foremen. Their superiority, however, could
not be maintained for ever, because the Blacks had the benefit of
numbers and, despite fierce repression, of more and more robust and
durable organisations.
The South African peculiarity was that Black proletarians had to
challenge both the bosses and a racial domination which favoured White
proletarians: therefore, it was necessary for class defence to fight
also against this domination.
In its early days, the Industrial & Commercial Union, which organised
non-European labour, was moving in a similar direction to the American
IWW: the ICU declared itself in favour of One Big Union and held on to
the hope of a general strike that would bring about the emancipation of
all African workers. Later, as in other countries (like the French CGT
evolving even before 1914 from revolutionary syndicalism to reformism),
the ICUâs radicalism lost its cutting edge. It was hostile to wildcat
strikes, preferred conciliation to confrontation, supported some strikes
and disowned others. In 1926, it excluded the communists, and in 1927
its leader declared the ICU was "entirely opposed to revolutionary
methods". In the following years, what had been the largest non-European
labour movement in the inter-war period (up to 200.000 members, as
compared to 30.000 in the â White âTUC) gradually withered, undermined
by accusations of corruption and conflicts between radicals and
advocates of "go carefully" methods, until the organisation split into
much smaller rival unions.
In 1929, there were only 10.000 Rand workers in African unions.
Sometimes â rarely â Blacks would go on a solidarity strike with the
Whites (in the garment industry for example), without much of a
reciprocity. An attempt to merge White and Black laundry unions ended in
failure.
Faced with this near impossibility of common action, Black labour was
led to act and regard itself not just as labour, but equally and
sometimes more as Black. Unions of course never stopped pressing demands
in the workplace, but they also served as a vehicle in the struggle
against White hegemony. It was logical that the two would go together,
since the working world was one of the fulcrums of racial
discrimination. Nothing inevitable in this evolution: it was the White
and Black proletariansâ inability to unite that compelled Black workersâ
resistance to play an essential part in what became a cross-class
national project.
In many other times and places, unions are also more than unions. The
defence of labour often goes beyond the factory and office doors, and
gives birth to a wide range of activities comprising mutual help,
education, health, leisure, and of course politics, to the point where
"political" and "non-political" sometimes merge. The most accomplished
examples were the social-democratic (German and Scandinavian) and
Stalinist (French and Italian) "counter-societies" in the first half of
the 20^(th) century. South Africa greatly differed because labour
organisation was one of the ways for Black women and men to organise as
labour and as Blacks. In the 1950s and 1960s, African unionism could not
but become part of a mass movement fighting for civil rights, for
example boycott and burning of passes. (The pass system was an
essential, and one of the most visible, means of segregation: it created
internal frontiers, with common government practice of "deporting" a
Black rebel back to "his/her" area.)
The African who lived close to the Whites was directly victimised by
racism at work. Whereas an African hairdresser or shop-keeper could make
a living from his trade in a Black neighbourhood (providing he stayed
there), the African qualified to work as an electrician or a teacher was
constrained by racial limits or barriers. For a Black proletarian, the
abolition of apartheid went together with his or her defence as a
worker.
An African National Congress Youth League Manifesto stressed "the
fundamental fact that we are oppressed not as a class but as a people,
as a nation". Against the National Party (firmly in power since 1929)
that embodied a separate national White group, the rise of the ANC was
the advent of a national movement with an inevitably Black character:
its success depended on the mobilisation of a Black (and Indian and
Coloured) trans-class "people".[5] A condition was the formation of an
urban, completely dispossessed ("with no reserves") Black population. As
long as it remained possible for the African worker to go back to the
countryside or be assisted by his rural family, mine or factory work
could be only a temporary phase in his existence. This is why
non-European unions first developed less in mining than in sectors like
transport, garment factories, laundries⊠In 1939, there still was little
labour organisation among the 400.000 Black miners (who lived most of
the time in native areas, were hired on 18-month contracts and housed in
compounds) and one million Black agricultural labourers. It was only in
the 1960s and 1970s that a critical mass of Black proletarians came to
depend solely on being waged for their livelihood. Then began the
extensive unionisation effort that was to provide the ANC with one of
its power bases, complementing the other one, the grassroots strongholds
in the townships (where most of the population â employed or jobless -
was also "without reserves").
At the birth of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in
1985, its general secretary, Cyril Ramaphosa, declared:
"Never before have workers been so powerful, so united and so poised to
make a mark on society. [âŠ] We all agree that the struggle of the
workers on the shop-floor cannot be separated from the wider political
struggle for liberation in this country." (on Ramaphosaâs subsequent
success story, see § 19)
Eventually, the ANC experienced military defeat and social-political
victory. The armed struggle strategy initiated in 1961 (which included
bomb attacks in public places, inevitably labelled "terrorist" acts by
the government and its "Free World" allies) never brought apartheid
down, and in the mid-1980s the ANCâs underground networks were smashed
everywhere except in Botswana. There was no "peopleâs war", but the
movement welling up from below in the townships created an
uncontrollable situation, with a succession of rent strikes, protests
against the lack of public services and against the imposition of the
Afrikaans language, riots, gang warfare, creating large no-go areas for
the police.[6] Township un-governability was not a step to revolution
(as many radicals throughout the world wrongly prophesised), but to
regime change.
In 1957, the ANC had opened its membership (not yet its leadership) to
Whites. The ANC that came to power in the 1994 elections by a large
majority vote (since then, it has retained over 50% of the votes)
reflected the multi-racial South African population.
A particular feature of South African history in the second half of the
20^(th) century was the structuring role of the Communist Party in the
racial emancipation movement. This should not surprise us: like social
democracy in a different way, Stalinism took many forms and contributed
to a variety of historical evolutions.
Up to the 1950s, it was hard to imagine that a party with such an
insignificant membership could ever be a major political player. In
1922, Bill Andrews, general secretary of the CP, had joined the Council
of Action. But the presence of this trade-unionist, ex-Labour MP and
later CP leader for decades, did not signify any influence on the strike
by a party which at the time numbered 300 members in the whole country.
This party could only play a key role if it was no longer dominated by
Whites, in its composition and in its programme. From its foundation in
1921, it had addressed the race question by supporting both the White
workersâ fight to retain their position and Black workersâ demands for
better employment and pay. There was obviously a contradiction here: one
groupâs rights existed at the expense of anotherâs, that is, the
continuation of Blacks having lesser jobs and lower wages than the
Whites. "Equal pay for equal work" is meaningless for a category which
is denied equality in the workplace. In those conditions, the CPâs
(intermittent and fluctuating, and thatâs an understatement) commitment
to anti-racism was more rhetoric than reality.
Even the straightjacketed mind-set of CP members and leaders could not
fail to see the relevance of the race issue. Percy Fisher (himself not a
PC member) once said a South African revolution could only succeed "from
the bottom up", i.e. from the Blacks. In 1919, Ivon Jones, one of the CP
leaders, predicted that in that country "a future Lenin would be an
African", and three years after the Rand rising he wrote:
"We have lost the trade-unionists. [âŠ] As a cold matter of fact, there
is no room for a CP in White South Africa except as the watchdog of the
natives."
Consequently, unless it remained a sect, the party had to take account
of Black demands, which could only mean becoming part of an African men
and womenâs liberation process as people of colour. This was to take
many years. African self-organisation was fragile. Non-European unions
were subject to repression and linked to White unions precariously (if
at all). Besides, they kept their distance from a CP which was more and
more bureaucratised â and soon Stalinised.
Until the mid-1920s, very few Blacks bothered to join a party that
showed little interest in the race issue, and where disparaging comments
about non-Europeans could be heard from rank-and-file and leadership
(admittedly, far less than in the Labour Party).
The coming of the "Africanisation" line in 1928 brought a turnabout. The
party switched from the socialist revolution slogan to that of a
Black-governed "independent native republic" with minority rights for
the non-Blacks. Since South Africa was first of all a colonial country,
the argument went, the priority was to get rid of colonial rule (viz.
White rule over the Blacks), before a second step could overthrow class
(bourgeois) domination. This entailed a lengthy debate on the existence
or non-existence of a Black bourgeoisie. (At the same time, the American
CP was advocating the creation of an independent Black country made of
several US Southern States with a predominantly Black population, there
again with rights for the White minority).
This political shift attracted new Black members, soon half of the
articles in the partyâs main paper were written in Xhosa or Zulu, but
Africanisation alienated some White members, created multiple
dissensions and amounted to little more than sloganeering. The party
lapsed into crisis, some activists were purged, others resigned, and in
1933 there remained about 150 members.
In 1935, the Popular Front line ditched the Native Republic and called
for priority to anti-fascism. During 1939-41, the pendulum swung again:
an anaemic party refused to take sides in what it regarded as an
inter-imperialist conflict, which isolated it even more. In 1941, after
the German invasion of the USSR, the CP switched to a dedicated support
of the war effort and gained an air of respectability, but not much of a
political heft. In the late 1940s, though more and more Blacks joined
the party (but were still a minority in the leadership group), total
membership remained small: 2.000 in 1950 (three-fourths African).
It was only after the banning of the CPSA, its rebirth as the
clandestine South African Communist Party in 1953, and its close links
with the African National Congress, that the CP made considerable
headway in the orbit of the ANC, and played a big part in the Black
resistance until the end of apartheid thirty years later.
Contrary to government propaganda, the ANC was not manipulated by the
SACP (itself being presented as "a Soviet stooge"), but it owed a large
part of its structure and cadres, hence of its strategy, to the CP,
whose 1937 "Programme of Action" the ANC adopted in 1949. The CPâs
influence on the ANC was less due to manoeuvring skills than to its
ability to resonate with Black peopleâs needs and demands: the CP
promised sweeping social and democratic changes. Moreover, its
insistence that the urban Black working class be a leading force in the
struggle was confirmed by the revolts that erupted in the townships.
Instead of White and Black worker unity against capitalism, the CP stood
for a trans-class alliance against White rule, and its "Black
liberation + nation + socialism" combination was in tune with the times.
Government persecution and ANC radicalisation (with the decision to
launch a sabotage campaign and create a paramilitary wing â the Spear of
the Nation, in Xhosa Umkhonto we Sizwe - in 1961) stepped up the rise of
important CP members to power positions in the ANC. Armed groups and
guerrilla warfare bases in neighbouring countries were first organised
through party channels, with help from the USSR. The ANC later became
more self-reliant and, like many anti-colonial movements in those days,
developed its own mix of nationalism and socialism. When unbanned in
1990 it put an end to armed struggle: it had grown into a mass movement
that involved hundreds of thousands of people, complete with civic,
youth, student, community and woman organisations, whereas the SACP had
only 21.000 members. The ANC is by far the leading partner in the
tripartite alliance of the ANC, the SACP and the COSATU that has ruled
the country since 1994. The first Black president of a multi-racial
South Africa, Mandela, whether or not he ever belonged to the CP (he
most likely did), was no Lenin: he pragmatically reconciled South
African races and classes â to a point.
Compared to the rest of the Western world, apartheid looked
anachronistic, as if by a weird time-warp European ultra-racism defeated
in 1945 had resurfaced in power three years later in Africa. No
Ballardian dystopia there, though.
Up until the end of the apartheid period (1948-1991), South African
politics was driven by the Black question, namely the best way to
perpetuate bourgeois rule and White hegemony, interlocked by the
containment of the Blacks in an inferior social and political condition.
This was possible until the pressure of organised Black labour became so
strong it could no longer be systematically kept at the bottom of the
ladder.
There was an underlying contradiction in the South African race
relations system: it employed Black workers where they were more
cost-effective than White ones, but it also had to maintain political
stability, i.e. White supremacy, therefore to provide Whites with better
jobs, higher wages and more social benefits. No simple task, but it was
effectively managed despite social outbursts (1922 was the most
explosive, and the last one), until in 1948 apartheid tried to freeze
the contradiction by assigning compulsory separate locations and
functions to ethnic groups strictly defined by law and enforced by
police. A godsend solution for capitalists who got the best of both
worlds: cheap Black labour, and support from White labour which
preserved its superior status.
A hitherto makeshift aggregation of rulings and statutes (some dating
back to British colonial times) was solidified by apartheid into a
race-tight setup supposedly adapted to the needs of 20^(th) century
capitalism. This all-encompassing system was complete with forced
migration, separate representation (Blacks only voted in their "own"
territories which wielded no effective power), and the race regulation
of residence, labour, land ownership, business and sex (mixed marriages
were prohibited in 1949 and intercourse in 1950). Modernity in
reactionary garb, implemented by a ruling elite acting in the name of
Afrikaners. Sure enough, nationalist ideology was less South African
than Afrikaner, with its mystique of rural rootedness and community, its
own flag, its language (Afrikaans, promoted against the domination of
English), its epic and martyrs: Afrikaners liked to see themselves as a
discriminated people colonised and oppressed by the English. (An
inversion of history since the Afrikaners had been the first colonisers
at the Africansâ expense, but collective myth is often a better
historical catalyst than factual truth.) Apartheid was a political
re-enactment of the Boer wars, this time with an Afrikaner victory and
the recapturing of a lost paradise for a chosen people. The identity
quest wished for even more than isolation from the Blacks: it also cut
off the symbolic ties with the British Crown in 1960 by becoming a fully
independent republic. By a narrow vote (849.000 in favour and 775.000
against, only Whites having a vote), South Africa was no longer a
constitutional monarchy like Canada or Australia. The national
currencyâs name was changed from the South African pound to the rand.
The racial utopia of "separate development" divided the country into
advanced and backward zones, reserved the modern economy for the Whites
in areas where only exploitable Blacks were admitted under control as
long they had a work contract, and it kept unemployable "surplus" Blacks
in partitioned areas.
Apartheid turned South Africa into a command economy where labour flows
were administratively monitored and education was tailored to fit
economic needs, Whites having the upper hand, Blacks being specialised
as the underlings, Indians, Coloureds and Asians fitting in between
according to arcane bureaucratic classification. Before the notion
became famous, the National Party was a proponent of "differentialist"
racism, which claims races are neither superior nor inferior: they are
simply incompatible. The South African government boasted about its
ability to "allow the Natives to develop along their own lines" in
Bantustans where Blacks enjoyed "self-determination" within the limits
of their homelands (where actually in the 1950s only one third of the
total African population lived). In patriarchal South African
capitalism, the White behaved as "a father in his own home" and treated
the Black as "a minor", with "fatherly care".
This was the end of White labour as a political force. Until the 1940s,
the Rand White mining community had been a traditional Labour Party
stronghold: after 1948, it switched its allegiance to the National
Party. In 1953, Labour only had 5 MPs (out of 156), and afterwards no
representation in parliament. White workers were entitled to believe
that they had more to gain from a straightforward race identity than
from a class one: "White South Africa" ceased to be equated with a
specific working class selfhood. The Labour Party split and dwindled
until it disappeared after 1960. While Black working class
identification was being fused into the oneness of a Black people, the
White working class lost its distinctiveness as labour and acted as if
it were more White than labour.
Apartheid came into existence at a time when the world was evolving
towards a neo-colonialism that postulated equality between all countries
and races, and gave way to more subtle indirect forms of domination.
Capitalism is a society where social classes meet, not where ethnic
castes are kept apart.
South African apartheid had built a White fortress propped up on racial
walls: censorship, iron-fisted police, covert and overt military
intervention abroad, plus a skilful and often successful "divide and
rule" policy (playing Zulu against Xhosa, for example). If such a system
managed to soldier on over forty years, it was also thanks to the Cold
War: the stability or decomposition of the southern tip of Africa was a
strategic challenge for the USA and the USSR. This became even more so
in the 1970s with the two superpowers engaged in proxy wars on the
African continent (Russian-Cuban intervention brought 35.000 Cubans to
fight in Angola, and 50.000 in 1988). The US backed apartheid as long as
a toppling of African dominoes appeared to be the main risk.
However, what buttressed the regime was also what made it an over-rigid
ethno-stratified structure impervious to self-improvement, ill-adapted
to a capitalist world that needs a minimum of racial inclusivity.
International capital does not care about racism, only about business.
When too many dark social storm clouds gathered in South Africa,
disinvestment started. In the country, "liberal" sections of the
establishment had always been pressing for reforms: they realised race
segregation was one of the least adapted ways of perpetuating
capitalism. Among them was Harry Oppenheimer (1908-2000), diamond mine
owner, one of the richest men in the world, liberal MP from 1948 to
1957, and a major financial backer of successive anti-apartheid
oppositions. As count-duke Olivares advised the Spanish king in the
17^(th) century, "we need to think about bending in order to avoid
breaking". Bending apartheid was impossible. When in the 1980s, large
parts of the country were spiralling towards full scale disorder, an
enlightened elite was forced to admit that apartheid could not be
reversed from within, and that to steer the country out of an explosive
situation, some political deal had to be struck with the Black movement,
namely the ANC.
At last the fabric burst at the seams under the combined pressures of
black labour and township revolt, of international capital, and of
"progressive" South African bourgeois. Contrary to apartheid supportersâ
predictions, instead of generating anarchy and terror, ANC power did its
best to blunt the edge of social strife and put an end to rampant civil
war. By and large, the transition to multi-racialism was peaceful.
In apartheid days, an "English" establishment (men like Oppenheimer)
detained the essential economic and financial power, while an
"Afrikaner" elite controlled the police, the army and the civil service.
Over time, a historically divided ruling class understood where its
common interests stood, and it finally overcame its differences.
Nowadays, political authority is Black, and economic power shared
between Black and White bourgeois. Black businesspersons who previously
found their way barred by the White oligarchy now belong to a
rejuvenated bourgeoisie.
Once in government, the ANC scaled down its reformist zeal. Like
social-democrats the world over, South African left has swung to the
right and does its utmost to curb "extremism".
What the ANC has been able to deliver is the promotion of the African
man or woman from pariah to citizen. Not much more. Riots demonstrate
the gap between civil rights and true emancipation, and new conflicts
are brewing or simmering. Black proletarians used to be treated as
outcasts in their own country: they have now won the right to be
exploited at home, and strike-busting is now done by their "own" police.
In 2016, the proportion of Blacks in the police force (76%) was roughly
the same as in the total population (79%).
In 2012, when 37 Black miners on strike died in a demonstration at the
Lonmin mine in Marikana, they were killed by bullets fired by Black
policemen (and by union officials of the National Union of Mineworkers,
who shot two demonstrators). Cyril Ramaphosa, ex-mine unionist, whom we
left in § 16 as the COSATUâs leader, is now a businessman whose
interests range from Coca-Cola to farming via McDonaldâs, with an
estimated wealth of half a billion dollars: he happened to be a director
in the Lonmin company in 2012. Since then, he has been elected head of
the ANC in 2017, and South Africaâs president in 2018.
Racial inequality used to be a matter of law, enshrined in regulations
and codes. It now results from market forces and profit vs. loss
logic.[7] In 2015, the unemployment rate was four times higher among
Blacks than among Whites. As for skill differentials, a major labour
issue and an important cause of divisiveness, official figures
euphemistically point to "an uneven distribution of progress". Twenty
years after the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance came to power in 1994, the
proportion of skilled labour within each "race group" has gone up by 3%
for Blacks/Africans, 11% for Coloureds, 26% for Indians/Asians and 19%
for Whites.[8] At the time of writing, White farmers own 73% of arable
land, compared with 85% in apartheid days. If statistics are anything to
go by, in 2014-2015 Whites still had the highest average incomes, 1.5
times greater than Indians/Asians and almost 5 times more than Blacks.
Wealth no longer is a White monopoly, but most Blacks are still poor.
"Socialism can only be brought about by all the workers coming together
on the industrial field to take the machinery of production into their
own hands and working it for the good of all." (The International, organ
of the International Socialist League, 1916).
This is a fair summary of the ultimate goal of the 1922 insurgents, if a
successful rising had opened the road to revolution. Likewise, a
Manifesto for the abolition of capitalism that was circulated at the
time defended "the establishment of the control of industry by the
worker, for the worker".
The 1922 rising began with a large-scale work stoppage. Strikers
interrupted the wage labour/capital interrelationship â temporarily,
because everybody knows neither workers nor boss can live in limbo, so
this discontinued relation sooner or later has to be resumed⊠unless the
proletarians initiate an altogether different society, which was not the
case in the Rand, 1922. The insurgents went for the heart of the Stateâs
military power (police stations, barracks, arms depots) and the core of
bossesâ power (the mines, in that case): after taking over these
positions, they made them into strongholds to be defended as a first
step to workersâ or peopleâs power. They occupied the social terrain â
be it pithead or telephone exchange â without changing it, which sooner
or later led them to be besieged and defeated.
Communist insurrection can obviously not afford to leave workplaces and
living quarters in the hands of the bourgeois and their police, but this
is not where the proletariansâ main source of power could be.
Nor is it the main power source for the bourgeoisie: the capitalist
class does not rule because it controls the physical premises of the
mine, the factory, the railway line or the harbour dock, but because it
masters what sets in motion the mine, the factory, the railway or the
dock: the production relationship without which this means of production
remains idle. The Stateâs armed forces â the bourgeoisieâs last defence
against disorder and revolution â is but a consequence of bourgeois
command over means of production which are more than material machinery
and equipment.
What is the bourgeois monopoly over the means of production? The ability
to put into action tools, machines, engines, human beings too, i.e. to
put proletarians to work, and it is this ability which gives the power
to master society as a whole. So, taking hold of the mine, the factory,
land, the office, etc., and not doing away with the capitalist social
relation, is doomed to failure. Because of this social relation, the
mine does not just extract coal: this coal is extracted by a
wage-labourer, then sold for profit, according to norms that impose
systematic working time measurement, cost-effectiveness, production time
minimizing, normalisation, etc. Only by initiating a new way of life and
of production will capitalist production relationships be overthrown.
Otherwise insurrection is merely a disruptive temporary force while the
bourgeois ride out the storm.[9]
Nearly a century has gone by: South Africa is no longer "White". After
having fuelled for a long time the martyrology of a workersâ memory (and
a White memory[10]), 1922 has now been absorbed into a
cultural/historical world heritage. Patrimonialisation, as it is
sometimes called, processes and tames the past, insurrections included.
"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation", Debord wrote in the second sentence of The Society of
the Spectacle. Not quite everything, but a lot, even a rising that
brought a country to the brink of civil war:
"If you are ever looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon,
why not take a drive and recreate a few of the scenes from this
turbulent time [and follow the tour] published in a wonderful booklet,
Some Historic Drives & Walks of Johannesburg" (Kathy Munro, August 8,
2016).
The drive meanders from Barnes Road (where strikers shot a shopkeeper
they believed had assisted the police), to Fordsburg (where the last
fighters died) via Collescoe school (HQ of the Knopkierie commando:
"note bullet holes in the wall").
To the best of our knowledge, the Paris tourist office does not suggest
a guided tour of the various places where the 1871 Communards fought and
were massacred. It appears South Africa has a special need to digest its
past. As the driver travels back in time and has a fleeting thought for
racial segregation, she or he probably wonders how such a monstrosity
could have persisted for so long. In fact, neither Black/White
inequality nor its systematisation were more "abnormal" than other past
and present exploitation systems. At the time, they were necessary to a
"modern" mining industry and to a "patriarchal" Boer rural economy, as
well as to the political balance of the country.
Tielman Roos, a right-wing politician who used to curry support from
White voters, and loved quoting the "Workers of the World, Unite & Fight
for a White South Africa" slogan, declared in 1928 that "Every White man
in South Africa is an aristocrat and people who are rulers and governors
cannot be proletarians."
Demagogic Roos was not the only one to use the word "aristocrats" for
the best paid and best treated part of the working class. "Labour
aristocracy" is a misnomer: it suggests that such divisions as between
the upper and lower proletarian strata reflect the resurgence of
pre-capitalist realities. In reality, traditional societies were based
on birth and origin distinctions that were deemed "natural" in a world
where no human being was equivalent to another.
The racial "privilege" enjoyed by South African Whites had little to do
with the condition of the "privileged-by-birth" groups in Ancien RĂ©gime
France or in Jane Austenâs England. In pre-1789 French society, there
was an unbridgeable gap between a commoner and a member of the nobility:
each of them belonged to a distinct community, with its specific rights
and obligations. Ennoblement was rare, and the impoverished noble did
not become a commoner. In South Africa, on the contrary, a Black miner
did not "turn White", but he could be given a "Whiteâs" job. In spite of
White supremacy, for capitalism to function, Black and White labour had
to be interchangeable. The interchange rarely took place in 1922, but it
had to be possible when required by profitability. The crux of the
conflict was precisely how equivalent a Black worker was to a White one,
and how far the bosses could serve their best interests by lessening
White supremacy. Class determination never abolished colour
determination, but it had priority over it.
The aristocrat lived a world apart from the commoner: the White miner
worked beside a Black miner. Capitalist society creates and recreates
inequalities, according to existing differences due to sex, skin colour,
nationality, religion⊠and remodels them: some are perpetuated, others
scaled down, and it is the contemporary state of things that determines
whether a discriminating factor is brought to the fore, curtailed or
phased out. Capitalism does not do away with former divisions, but
rebuilds them according to its changing needs.
Wage-labour is a great equalizer (two similarly qualified workers are
potentially interchangeable), and a great divider (interchangeability is
governed by push/pull factors and rarely applied in full). In South
Africa, White working class minorities were not totally mistaken when
they regarded racial segregation and a "White" government "as their
protector against exploitation by their employers on one hand and
competition from non-European labour on the other" (Edward Roux). But
what had been true at the beginning of the 20^(th) century no longer
prevailed to the same extent in 1922, and much less so fifty years
later.
Even the "freest" labour mobility (switching professions, or moving from
one country to another) does not abolish differences caused by skin
colour. Two conflicting tendencies coexist: national and/or racial
segregation (State frontiers and/or colour barriers) on the one hand,
the bourgeois freedom to buy the cheapest labour on the other. Business
interests are often quite favourable to immigration: they want border
control whenever they need protective custom tariffs, but they want
frontiers to open up to cheap migrant (even undocumented) labour.
The bourgeois could not live without a State which controls a community
of classes on a certain territory, but he also wishes to be a "citizen
of the world" (kosmopolites) who crosses continents to find the lowest
production costs and the most beneficial taxation. On the contrary,
since proletarian internationalism is usually difficult to put into
practice, the worker often resorts to the (limited) protection given by
a common origin, status, group solidarity or an identity card. And
today, politically, in the European Union as in the United States, part
of the ruling class supports immigration which lowers the cost of
labour, while another part makes use of "ethnic" identity tensions for
electoral purposes.
Nearly one hundred years after the Rand "White riot", it would be naĂŻve
to believe that history has discarded what Bordiga in 1953 called "the
factors of race and nation". Until recently, "race" discourse was
outmoded, non-scientific, ostracized in public and academic speech, and
only avowed racists would dare to use it. Now it appears to be the other
way round: in some quarters, not speaking of "race" means you are aiding
and abetting racism.
It is vital to restore agency to categories (ex-colonial subjects for
instance) belittled or ignored by hitherto mainstream whitewashed
history. The hitch is that this necessary reinterpretation has given
birth to a misleading world-view that translates into objectionable
politics. Class is de-emphasised, the proletarian/bourgeois
contradiction ceases to be fundamental and is replaced by mutually
dependent forms of oppression. Revolutionary change, we are told, will
no longer result from proletarians acting in common, but from the
intersection of subjugated groups, both rivals and allies, each
addressing its specific issue and yet at the same time interweaving with
the others to get rid of all forms of domination.
In a way, this is a return to Third Worldism. In the heyday of
anti-colonialism, from the 1940s to the 1970s, anti-imperialist theory
analysed capitalism as a "centre and periphery" system: like an octopus,
its big (largely parasitic) North American and West-European body
depended on its tentacles exploiting the rest of the world. Colonial or
neo-colonial countries provided the central metropolises with cheap raw
materials, foodstuffs and labour that brought in super- profits. This
allowed the old industrial countries to grant higher wages, improved
living conditions and welfare to the Western workers, causing an overall
softening of a working class more and more "integrated" into capitalism.
If, however, the octopusâs tentacles were cut off by African and Asian
national liberation movements and ex-colonies achieving real
independence (that is, not becoming puppet States), the core of the
system could not maintain the privileged status of its own workers,
whose dormant fighting spirit might hopefully be revived.
"Imperialism" as a neo-Leninist concept has gone out of fashion, but a
new theory has emerged, as if a third world now existed within the old
industrial metropolises: a large portion of the population,
discriminated against because of skin colour or alleged religion, is
presented as a new historical subject beside or in place of "national"
proletarians, made passive by the advantages given by White colour or
native birth rights.
The evolution from past Third Worldism to current race discourse means a
lot more than just replacing a possible revolutionary group by another.
Anti-imperialism was premised on the difference between profits (in
Brussels, say) and super-profits (in a Katanga mine), and the idea of a
value transfer from the periphery to the centre: the Belgian proletarian
could be exploited less because the Congolese proletarian was being
over-exploited. However debatable it was, this thesis referred to value
production, accumulation, investment profitability, labour as a
commodity, etc., in other words capitalism as a mode of production. The
new theorising comes with a complete shift in focus. The emphasis is no
longer on exploitation, but on domination: society is not made of
coexisting conflicting classes, but of subordinate groups and dominant
groups, a major opposition being between colour and "Whiteness".
The Whiteness concept boils down to the notion that a White proletarian
is more of a White person than he is a proletarian (equally, a Black
proletarian is more of a Black person than a proletarian). This defines
the proletarian by his function not in production relationships, but in
domination (race) relationships. The White proletarian is not determined
by his being exploited by a bourgeois (and opposing this exploitation),
but at least as much â and perhaps more â by the predominance he enjoys
because of his skin colour. (Equally, the Black proletarian is described
as determined above all by his inferior status to White people, be they
work colleague or boss). As a consequence, the theory goes, racism will
not be overcome by the common efforts of White and Black proletarians,
but by the White proletarian struggling against his own Whiteness
(providing he is able and willing to do so, which seems difficult), and
by the Black proletarian affirming a colour identity (which we are
repeatedly told is a social construct imposed upon him by centuries of
capitalist history). At the end of the day, whether or not these
theorists continue to talk about classes, class is demoted (perhaps
temporarily) to a minor role, and race promoted to a main terrain of
struggle.[11]
One feels like asking: Is capitalism first and foremost⊠capitalist, or
is it White? Is the phrase "wages of Whiteness" to be taken literally?
Is a White worker paid a wage because he is White, or because he brings
profit to the company he works for? True, he often gets the job because
he is White (or a better job than if he was Black): but is that what
defines capitalism? Hence, what are we supposed to fight against?
It bears repeating that "class analysis" stands up to the test of time.
At the very least, it is validated by South African history, which shows
the relevance of the race (letâs use the word for the moment) factor,
but it also explains why race is not a prime mover: neither in the
1920s, nor later, nor in the demise of apartheid. Whenever class
interests decisively conflicted with race determinants, class proved the
constant, and race a variable.
Skin colour is only one possible divisive cause among many, for instance
man/woman discrimination, place of birth, nationality, religion⊠The
fact is, the exploited and oppressed have more often experienced
disunion than solidarity, and fought between themselves as much as
fought together. In 1845, Marx insisted that "The nationality of the
worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free
slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor
English, nor German, it is capital." But seventeen years later, he wrote
that in the United States "The Irishman sees in the Negro a dangerous
competitor". The ultimate proletarian interest is multi-racial
solidarity: the immediate interest is for a particular proletarian group
to care about its vested interest.
Proletarian disunity is no planned policy on the part of crafty bosses
manipulating rival social or ethnic groups, it results from labour
competing with itself for jobs and better conditions.
The relevant question is how this inevitable division process could be
overcome. As long as proletarians fight for work, especially in todayâs
context of high unemployment, they fight for a place within capitalism,
against the boss, but it can also be against competing proletarians.
Though there are numerous examples of workplace or neighbourhood
conflicts where different â and sometimes previously rival â groups act
together, the proletarians remain divided as long as they fight
primarily as labour.
Our time is not the first deeply fractured and contentious period, but
it forces us to live in an in-between situation. The old worker movement
is on the wane, and so far nothing emerges from it all, with no
revolution in the offing. Disenchantment is setting in and, as "itâs
difficult to live in refusals" (Mihail Sebastian), class blindness is
inevitable. It is tempting to replace (for post-Marxists) or to complete
(for those who hold on to Marx) class by an addition of minorities,
small or large, each of which supposedly could provide "a struggle
front" based on its specific domination.
The Rand "white" riot was over on March 13, 1922. But weâre not finished
with classes... nor with "race".
G.D.
Jeremy Krikler, White Rising. The 1922 Insurrection & Racial Killing in
South Africa, Manchester University Press, 2005. Essential reading. If
you only have time for one book, this is it.
Norman Herd, 1922. The Revolt on the Rand, Blue Crane Books,
Johannesburg, 1966. By an ex-trade-union official turned mainstream
journalist. Descriptive in an anecdotal way.
Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope. A History of the Black Manâs
Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, University of Wisconsin Press,
1966. Only chapter XIV deals with the Rand revolt, but the book spans
more than a century of the race question. A CP cadre until 1936, Roux
hardly mentions the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist currents
which played an important part in the first decades of the 20^(th)
century, including in the International Socialist League.
Lucien van der Valt, Between racial capitalism and revolutionary
socialism: Revolutionary syndicalism, the national question and South
African socialism, 1910-1928, 2001:
http://www.struggle.ws/africa/safrica/history/rev_syn_nat.html
â Anarchism & Syndicalism, South Africa, 2009:
https://lucienvanderwalt.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/van_der_walt_-_anarchism_and_syndicalism__southern_africa.pdf
Enlightening essays.
Stephen Ellis, Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid. The ANC & the
South African Communist Party in Exile, Indiana University Press, 1992.
Ellis was a White journalist, and Sechaba a Black ANC (where he held
"sensitive positions" in the underground) and CP member. Neither hostile
nor apologetic.
Irina Filatova, Communism in South Africa, posted on-line in 2017. A
short but documented synthesis. Useful bibliography.
http://africanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-82
Mia Roth, The Communist Party in South Africa. Racism, Eurocentricity &
Moscow, 1921-1950, Partridge, 2016. Informative, yet "heavily biased"
(Irina Filatova), so not 100% full proof.
Baruch Hirson, The General Strike of 1922. By a Trotskyist South African
activist and historian, critical of the CP, and of ANCâs «Stalinist
methods».
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/supplem/hirson/1922.html
Keith Breckenridge, Fighting for a White South Africa: White Working
Class Racism & the 1922 Rand Revolt, 2007:
https://wiser.wits.ac.za/sites/default/files/Breckenridge - 2007 -
Fighting for a White South Africa White working-c.pdf
John Philips, The South African Wobblies: The Origins of Industrial
Unions in South Africa, 1978:
https://libcom.org/history/south-african-wobblies-origins-industrial-unions-south-africa-john-philips
Adam Tolcher, How does the 1922 Rand Rebellion Reveal the Relative
Importance of Race & Class in South Africa?, 2011:
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=rand-rebellion-race-and-class.pdf&site=15
Helen Bradford, Class Contradictions & Class Alliances: The Social
Nature of the ICU Leadership 1924-29, 1983:
http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/8443/ISS-50.pdf?sequence=1
Wessel Visser, The South African Labour Movement's Responses to
Declarations of Martial Law, 1913-1922, 2003:
http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/157/203
Philip Foner, The IWW & the Black Worker, 1970:
https://libcom.org/files/Foner_PS_-_The_IWW_and_the_Black_Worker.pdf
Peter Alexander, Coal, Control & Class Experience in South Africaâs Rand
Revolt of 1922, 1997:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.512.4227&rep=rep1&type=pdf
David Walsh, Easingtonâs Rebel Army Leader, 2012. Short biography of
Percy Fisher.
http://republic-of-teesside.blogspot.fr/2012/02/percy-fisher-easingtons-rebel-army.html
Jonathan Clancey, "Gas, chemicals, bombs: Britain has used them all
before in Iraq", The Guardian, April 19, 2003.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/iraq.arts
Also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, Norton, 2003. Mass massacre
of civilians by the air force is a constant of colonial or neo-colonial
powers. In the 1910s and 1920s, it was common practice by Italy in
Libya, by France and Spain in Morocco, by Britain in Egypt, the
North-West Frontier (now part of Pakistan), Somaliland, Iraq⊠Todayâs
drones have stepped up the killing techniques.
ANC documents, 1943 to 2001:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/anc/index.htm
For a sunny afternoon in Joâburg: Kathy Munro, Take a drive & see the
sites associated with the 1922 Rand revolt, 2016:
http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/take-drive-and-see-sites-associated-1922-rand-revolt
Statistics South Africa, Employment, Unemployment, Skills & Economic
Growth (1994-2014):
https://www.statssa.gov.za/presentation/Stats%20SA%20presentation%20on%20skills%20and%20unemployment_16%20September.pdf
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, 1983-1996:
https://libcom.org/files/immanuel-wallerstein-historical-capitalism.pdf
Amadeo Bordiga, Factors of race & nation in Marxist theory, 1953:
https://libcom.org/library/factors-race-nation-marxist-theory-amadeo-bordiga
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race & the Making of the
American Working Class, Verso, 1991-2007. As historically stimulating as
conceptually and politically inadequate.
https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/roediger-the-wages-of-whiteness-race-and-the-making-of-the-american-working-class.pdf
Noel Ignatin, Ted Allen, White Blindspot, 1967 and 1976:
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/whiteblindspot.pdf
The "blind spot" concept goes back to W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963): Noel
Ignatiev, "The American blindspot": Reconstruction according to Eric
Foner & W.E.B. Dubois, 1993:
https://libcom.org/files/The%20American%20blindspot,%20Reconstruction.pdf
Marx, Notes on Friedrich List, 1845:
http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1845/03/list.html
Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity &
Non-Western Societies, University of Chicago Press, 2010:
http://abahlali.org/files/Anderson%20-%20Marx%20at%20the%20Margins.pdf
Mihail Sebastian (Romanian writer, 1907-1945), Journal 1935-1944: The
Fascist Years, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. A quote from November 19,
1944. His best-known novel, Two Thousand Years (1934), is set on the
backdrop of anti-Semitism in Romania.
[1] Language is never neutral. ââ "No true account really of Black life
can be held, can be contained, in the American vocabulary. As it is, the
only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the
assumptions on which the vocabulary is based. But they wonât let you do
that." (James Baldwinâs interview, 1987:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/02/24/james-baldwin-the-last-interviews/)
ââ Just to quote a few writers mentioned in this essay. Marx wrote the
word "Negro". So did W.E.B. Du Bois (Negro Slavery, 1935). In 1910, as
we will see in § 2, Tom Mann spoke of the "Kaffir" (a derogatory term
for Blacks). They were using the languages of their times. "Native" was
common in anarchist or communist speech a century ago, with no idea that
it might be offensive. Later, when Edward Roux opposed "negrophobia" to
"negrophilia", he meant those who promote racism against those who fight
racism. For a long time in South Africa, Roux explained in 1963,
"Bantu", "Native" and "African" referred to the same people: in the
1960s, "the only acceptable term becomes African. A means to supersede
the opposition (played upon by the regime) between Zulu and Xhosa
particularly." ââ English capitalises proper names, noun or adjective:
Lutheran ideas (as opposed to traditional ideas). Now, what is a proper
name? Black and white designate more than colours. In this essay, we
have chosen to capitalise Black, White and Coloured whenever we refer to
human groups. In the same way as we would write "Kimâs wearing a green
dress", but "The Greens are having their convention". </verse>
[2] In the 20^(th) century, in most United States auto plants, Blacks
were given the dirtiest, most arduous and most dangerous tasks, under
the supervision of White native-born Americans, or German, British and
northern Europe immigrants. There as well, the skilled/unskilled
differentiating factor was ethnic or racial.
[3] On "Kaffir", see note 1.
[4] In most cases, both types of unions coexist, one often prevailing
over the other. In the US, in 1941, despite the large unionisation drive
of the unskilled in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (as opposed
to the conservative American Federation of Labor), out of a total of
over 8 million union members, only about 3 million were organised in the
CIO.
[5] In 1945, out of a 11.5 million population, 65% were Africans, 22%
Europeans (two-thirds Afrikaners), 10% Coloureds and 3% Indians.
[6] In 1976, the compulsory introduction of Afrikaans in all Black
schools was the spark that ignited the Soweto riots, when hundreds of
people were killed.
[7] As elsewhere, the mining labour force has been downsized. 425.000
people worked in South African gold and uranium mines in 1970: only
240.000 in 1997. As elsewhere, real wages have gone down.
[8] Statistics South Africa (a government department) distinguishes
three labour categories: skilled ("managers, professionals,
technicians"); semi-skilled ("clerks, sales and services, skilled
agriculture, craft, machine operators"); and low-skilled ("elementary,
domestic workers").
[9] Bruno Astarian, Crisis activity & communisation, 2010:
http://www.hicsalta-communisation.com/english/crisis-activity-and-communisation
; G. Dauvé, An A to Z of communisation, 2015:
https://troploin.fr/node/87 - Both texts available in book form:
Everything Must Go! The Abolition of Value, Little Black Cart, 2015.
Also in PDF form:
https://libcom.org/library/everything-must-go-abolition-value-bruno-astarian-gilles-dauv%C3%A9
; AND G. Dauvé, From Crisis to Communisation, Chapter 6, "Creative
insurrection", to be published by PM Press in 2018.
[10] White indeed. The race factor went so deep that it was taken for
granted to the point of being ignored, and not just at the time. In
2.000 Casualties, a book on 1922 published in 1961 by the Trade Union
Council, "The account almost entirely avoids the issue of the colour bar
in outlining the causes of the strike." (Norman Herd, no enemy of the
unions: see bibliography)
[11] Noel Ignatiev (then writing under the name Ignatin) was one of the
forerunners of this theory. He wrote in 1967: "The greatest ideological
barrier to the achievement of working class consciousness, solidarity
and class action, is now, and has been historically White chauvinism."