Volume 5 1978 Issue 11

Number 11 Contents January-April 1978 Editorial 1 Editorial Working Group Chris Allen Domestic and Foreign Policies Manfred Bienefeld Lionel Cliffe of a New South Africa Ruth First Thabo Mbeki 6 Erica Flegg Mejid Hussein Duncan Innes Soweto and its Aftermath Mustafa Khogali Archie Mafeje 17 Peter Lawrence Katherine Levine Jitendra Mohan Southern Africa: Imperialism, Gavin Williams Racism and Neo-Colonialism Overseas Editors Jitendra Mohan 31 Cairo: Shahida El Baz Copenhagen: Roger Leys Capital and the State Dar es Salaam: Mahmood Mamdani Trinidad: Robin Cohen in South Africa Stockholm: Bhagavan, Bjorn Beckman Belinda Bozzoli 40 Toronto: Jonathan Barker, John Saul Washington: Meredeth Turshen Class Struggle and the State Contributing Editors Duncan Innes and Martin Plaut 51 Basil Davidson Sam Geza Thomas Hodgkin Foreign Capital and the Charles Kallu-Kalumiya Reconstruction of Zimbabwe Colin Leys Robert van Lierop Colin Stoneman 62 Archie Mafeje Prexy Nesbitt Briefings Claude Meillassoux Ken Post Western Sahara: A War Zone 84 Subscriptions (3 issues) Debate 93 UK Individuals £3.00 After Soweto: A Response Institutions £4.50 Africa (except South Africa) Individuals £2.00/$4.00 Reviews 101 Institutions £4.00/$8.00 Books of the 1976 Revolt Elsewhere Individuals £4.50/$9.00 An Introduction to Political Economy Institutions £7.50/$15.00 Airmail extra £2.25/$4.50 Current Africana: A Bibliography 111 Single copies UK & Africa £1.20 Elsewhere $3.50 Institutions £2.40/$7.00 Airmail-add £0.75/81.50 Subscription to: Review of African Political Economy c/o Onyx Press 27 Clerkenwell Close London EC1R OAT ISSN: 0305 6244 Editorial This number of the Review concentrates on certain areas of Africa where the struggle against imperialism has intensified to the point of open conflict. In particular, the stage reached in both Southern Africa and the Western Sahara is analyzed in some depth. However, a feature of this issue is the diversity of views expressed by those analysing conditions within South Africa itself. The articles by Mbeki, Mafeje, Hirson, Bozzoli, Innes and Plaut, and Mohan all seek in one form or another to come to grips with the problem of the nature of capitalist society in South Africa and, consequently, to throw some light on the nature of the struggle in that country. In his article dealing with social reconstruction in a new South Africa Mbeki advances the view that South Africa is unique among the bourgeois countries in that profit maximisation is the overt, unhidden and principle objective of state policy. The critical role which the state has played within accumulation in South Africa is in fact the theme taken up by Bozzoli and by Innes and Plaut in their critiques of an earlier article on the state in South Africa carried in Review No.7. However, the arguments developed in the articles are different from each other. Bozzoli argues that concepts such as "hegemony" and "fractions of capital" need tobe reformed if they are to be constructively employed analytically, while Innes and Plaut put forward their view that it is the capital relation itself — i.e. the contradiction between capital and labour — which must be made the focal point of the analysis of the role of the state rather than inter-capitalist 'fractional' rivalries. The remaining articles on South Africa all concentrate more exclusively on the current stage of the struggle. Mafeje analyses the social upheavals that began in Soweto in 1976 and attempts an assessment of their implications for the liberation movement in exile, while Hirson embarks upon a critical review of the literature which has sprung up around the Soweto Revolt, at the same time providing an assessment of the Black Consciousness movement. These articles all in one way or another take up issues which are of relevance to the struggle being waged at the moment against the apartheid regime. In so doing, some address themselves directly to questions of revolutionary strategy and to the role of particular movements and organisations. In publishing these comments it should be quite clear that the Review itself is not necessarily lending its support to the views being expressed. As has been stated before, the role envisaged for this Review is not a purely academic one: we are concerned with theory to the 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY extent that it informs political practice and as such the role which we have adopted is clearly political. But we are not a political organisation and we do not promote a single party position. We provide a forum in which various radical political positions of relevance to the struggles in Africa can be expressed and debated. As such it is imperative that the pages of the Review should remain open to the broadest spectrum of radical opinion on Africa and that, in particular, the Review should reflect the views not only of theoreticians outside Africa, but also of cadres active within organisations in Africa. The struggle to develop a revolutionary theory involves a struggle against academicism and demands an orientation towards concrete questions of contemporary struggles. Here we briefly take up some of the issues of revolutionary strategies raised by Mbeki, Mafeje and Mohan. Mbeki's argument is that South Africa is a capitalist country of a special kind in that the state does not seek to clothe its nakedly repressive function in the trappings of, for instance, bourgeois social democracy. As a result the state relates to the African not as an individual comparable to a white individual, but as a repository of the commodity — labour power. Of the various possible alternatives open to Africans to struggle against these conditions Mbeki argues that 'the only historically justifiable and inevitable alternative is that we cling very firmly to our position as producers, that we hoist the bourgeoisie with its own petard'. The outcome of a struggle waged along these lines will be a free South Africa in which the position of the black producer will be redefined so that the production of wealth will be for the benefit of the producers themselves. According to Mbeki, this redefinition is implied in the theoretical basis of the Freedom Charter, which is the political programme adopted by the African National Congress. This analysis and the particular interpretation given to the Freedom Charter should be seen as an extension of the debate which has been going on for some time both within and beyond the immediate ranks of the liberation movement. At the root of this debate is the question of the specific nature of capitalist society in South Africa. As Mafeje points out in his contribution, it is precisely over the question of 'imperialism/capitalism and the class struggle' that serious differences emerge among the various liberation groups. Mafeje provides some critical reflections on the positions adopted by the different groups on this issue. In his view, while all the groups (ANC, Pan African Congress and the Unity Movement) address the question of national liberation and bourgeois democratic rights, it is only PAC and UMSA which explicitly raise the issue of class struggle and socialism in their official documentation. We find Mafeje's argument with regard to the ANC rather difficult to sustain since he refers only to the Freedom Charter, whereas the ANC's 'Strategy and Tactics' specifically declares that the national struggle ... is happening in a new kind of South Africa; in which there is a large and well-developed working class whose class consciousness and independent expressions of the working people — their political organs and trade unions - are very much part of the liberation front. Thus our nationalism must not be confused with chauvanism or narrow nationalism of a previous epoch. It must not be confused with the classical drive by an elitist group among the oppressed people to gain ascendancy so that they can replace the oppressor in the exploitation of the mass ... This perspective of a speedy progression from formal liberation to genuine and lasting emancipation is made more real by the existence in our country of a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complements national consciousness. Be that as it may, Mafeje's claim that the Freedom Charter adopts the position of struggling towards democratic, and not socialist, goals is clearly accurate. EDITORIAL 3 Similarly, Mafeje criticizes the South African Communist Party's conception of the struggle as being that of a two-stage revolution, the first phase of which is a 'national democratic revolution to destroy white domination'. He is also critical of the Unity Movement's position in that it advocates a single stage from a bourgeois to a socialist revolution at the same time as it actually upholds a bourgeois programme. (Mafeje's critique of PAC is somewhat less clear in that he seems to dismiss it simply on the grounds of having borrowed its formulation wholesale from the Chinese.) But Mafeje himself in discussing the way ahead does not actually reject outright the notion of a two-stage revolution. He speaks of a convergence between the existing organisations and the militants inside South Africa which would probably minimise any divergence between the so- called national democratic demands and a socialist programme (our emphasis). But to minimise a divergence is not to overcome or remove it, particularly at a theoretical level, and consequently we are still left with the question of how precisely to reconcile the national struggle with the class struggle. In his contribution Mohan criticises those who argue that the struggle against imperialism is a struggle 'against capitalism' because they fail to understand the true significance of 'the actual struggles of the African people against colonialism, racism and imperialism'. As far as he is concerned the struggle in Southern Africa is being waged by 'all segments of the oppressed black people' against 'the racist system of settler colonialism' which is in a 'contradictory relationship' with (Western) imperialism.

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